All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[WestPhillyPunisher]

To be honest I I am with WPP and Username. I dont blame companies for staying quiet and not inviting a whole can of worms. I dont care about what a video game company has to say on the subject or really any political issue. Im not expecting Nintendo to do a PSA supporting womans rights with Mario, or Master Chief yelling about Roe V Wade.

If I were the Ceos of these companies and I was upset I would make my voice heard through political donations and candidates. Most of the public doesnt pay attention to that and it gets something done and keeps the company mostly free of backlash.

Qpublicans on the Hill, Faux News, bible thumpers and right wing loons are just itching to jump on big gun companies with both feet if they publicly support Roe. Not only would that be unpalatable from a PR angle, CEO’s and shareholders wouldn’t want to deal with the potential risk of backlash affecting the bottom line. Short and sweet, it just isn’t worth the trouble, so keeping mum is the right course to take.

[Malvolio]

To be honest I I am with WPP and Username. I dont blame companies for staying quiet and not inviting a whole can of worms. I dont care about what a video game company has to say on the subject or really any political issue. Im not expecting Nintendo to do a PSA supporting womans rights with Mario, or Master Chief yelling about Roe V Wade.

If I were the Ceos of these companies and I was upset I would make my voice heard through political donations and candidates. Most of the public doesnt pay attention to that and it gets something done and keeps the company mostly free of backlash.

I agree. Donating to pro-choice candidates will do a lot more good than any empty statement on social media.

[jetengine]

I agree. Donating to pro-choice candidates will do a lot more good than any empty statement on social media.

This.

Mario saying he wants Peach to have an abortion is pretty empty when they can instead just fund pro choice people

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Got an alert that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is on hold because of a problem with fake accounts. Make of that what you will.

[Zauriel]

Probably not, although I am sure there are some rabble rousers who'd want it back. Of interesting note, however, is that in the region the language is Karelian (also called Karjala), a Finnish related language (or three) that even uses a Latin alphabet rather than a Cyrillic one. And we know how Russia loves to use the excuse of protecting people who speak thier language....
.

If the Finns are able to recover Karelia from Russia, they would not dare to forcibly expel Karelia Russian residents from their homes. It would be viewed as cruel and inhumane as the Russians expelling Karelian Finns from their homes decades ago. Integrating thousands of Russians into Finland is equally troublesome. If Karelian Finns want to move back to Karelia, they will have to live with the Russians as their new neighbors. Russians speak different language than the Finns, so they would have to rely on translators for communications.

Timeghost History's WWII series includes the Winter War, which is quite enlightening as to why the Finns would ally with the Nazis (they described themselves as Co-Belligerents) for the Continuation War. Basically, the West was pretty crappy with how they handled things. The British talked about sending forces, but they were really planning on seizing the iron mines in Sweden with the bulk of the force and were going to send a mere token unit on to Finland.
.

Yes, when Soviet Union invaded Finland and the West was unable to lend them a hand, the Finns felt utterly. betrayed. Hence they turned to the despotic Nazis.

[Catlady in training]

Finland allied with the Axis Powers to fight the Soviet Union in order to regain Karelia which the Soviets took from the Finns a few years before WWII.

After losing the war with Russia and nearly losing their independence, Finland proclaimed their neutrality.

So Finland now wants to join the NATO for preservation of their territory and independence. Are they also interested in trying to take back Karelia which has been inhabited by four generations of Russian residents?

Is there any reason to think that? Sounds like a very far stretch to me, but I am not familiar with their relations.

[Tendrin]

Therre is zero way that Finland will aggressively attempt to pursue Karelia.

[worstblogever]

It was on this day in 2015 that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Nan Hayworth, the former U.S. House Representative who served New York’s 19th District for one term from 2011-2013. During her Tea Party campaign, she was noted for stammering and getting nervous and stammering whenever asked complicated policy questions about Social Security, and once in her 2012 campaign, fled from a constituent who asked if she supported minimum wage increases, only answering that she would make sure we “grow the economy”. While in office, she voted against all women’s issues, including supporting the Hyde Amendment, voting to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, but during her 2012 campaign, she tried claiming she “voted with Obama”, which was patently false. Hayworth was also frequently plagued by her tendency to hire idiots in key campaign staff positions, including their eventual admission that they broke election laws to gain enough signatures to put her on the 2010 ballot in the first place. She also had her 2012 re-election campaign spokesman talk about committing acid attacks against female Democratic Senators (right out of the Taliban playbook), and for whatever reason, Hayworth and her campaign tried defending his remarks for a time. She also had the revelation that her campaign manager, Karl Brabenec make the news for being revealed to have hosted a Young Republicans event in 2003 where he promised attendees “liquor and sex to go around all evening”, and that female attendees should “wear as little clothing as possible”. At least Hayworth didn’t defend that. After losing in both 2012 and 2014 to Patrick Maloney, Hayworth has apparently given up on running for office, and only cameos on Fox News every now and again these days.

It was on this date in 2016 that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled Drew Turiano, a Tea Party Republican from Montana who was a 2014 candidate for Congress to represent the state’s “At Large” District, and in 2012, thought about running for governor, but instead, chose to be a candidate for Montana Secretary of State. He didn’t fare well in that race, finishing fourth with 6.7% of the vote. Now, in that first election, what slipped by most of the media was the fact that Turiano had sent out mailers regarding immigration where he claimed that not just undocumented immigrants were “rapists, murders, and thieves”, but he didn’t seem to make the distinction and thought that legal immigrants were part of the problem, too, and called for an end to ALL immigration. As Turiano was prepping for his Congressional run in 2013, he gave a delightful interview with a local TV station, and gave some interesting opinions regarding immigration policy. Like say, to bring back “Operation Wetback”. It would be four months until anyone in the Montana Republican Party or Montana Tea Party batted an eye, and they actually let him file as a candidate again, as he went around the state campaigning on what they eventually even deemed as “racist views”. In February 2014, even prior to registering as a candidate, Turiano posted on his campaign website that he supported states’ rights to nullify or reject any federal law or judicial mandate, citing Roe v. Wade and Obamacare as prime examples, and his belief that President Barack Obama should be impeached. Which, even without the support of the Montana GOP, he went ahead and spent money to rent six billboards to call for Obama’s impeachment. Drew Turiano ended up finishing a distant fifth in the GOP Primary, getting but 1.7% of the voter. The Montana GOP have abandoned him as a candidate for his overt racism, which by today’s Republican standards, is ironic, considering Donald Trump has almost the same ideas on immigration as Turiano. We cannot say with certainty where his eyebrows are, but we hope he finds them

[worstblogever]

Therre is zero way that Finland will aggressively attempt to pursue Karelia.

Really, at this point, you could sit and wait for Russia to implode upon itself under its current rule and have the citizens opt for Finland instead. They might be able to get food that way.

[worstblogever]

It was on this date in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, as well as 2021, that “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” had its original profile to discuss Tommy Benton, a member of the Georgia House of Representatives who has held office since 2004, and has not faced a Democratic challenger for his seat since 2006. There was some doubt if he was going to be re-elected to a seventh term in 2016, though, after the uproar he caused (more on that in a second), but he lucked out the same way most state legislators do when nobody failed to register to run against him before the deadline to enter the race, and he was allowed to run unopposed. Which is a real shame, considering that only a few weeks before the deadline for other candidates to register to challenge him, he decided, during an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution to discuss his support of Confederate landmarks, whose removal he considered “cultural terrorism” that the topic turned to the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia, where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915. At that point, Benton decided to pontificate on the positive things that the Ku Klux Klan did for this country:

”The Klan was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order. It made a lot of people straighten up. I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were.”

Benton was just warming up, as he continued on, comparing a Democratic colleague, Vincent Fort, who sponsored a bill to remove Confederate monuments to ISIS:

“That’s no better than what ISIS is doing, destroying museums and monuments,” he said. “I feel very strongly about this. I think it has gone far enough. There is some idea out there that certain parts of history out there don’t matter anymore and that’s a bunch of bunk.”

This came, of course, on the heels of Benton having sponsored his own opposing bill to preserve Confederate monuments, as well as one to celebrate General Robert E. Lee’s birthday, as well as Confederate Memorial Day. Oh, and he sponsored a third bill that would revert street names that honored Confederate war heroes back to their original names, which would turn Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Blvd. back into Gordon Road, named after former Confederate officer John B. Gordon, an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. (Benton certainly is “all in” on a failed rebellion over slavery from a century and a half ago, that’s for sure.)

Over Benton’s career, there are more than a few conservative votes, and a few that would seem to fit into the mindset of a guy who likes to look on the bright side of the KKK, what with his support for stricter Voter ID laws that disproportionately suppress the votes of minorities, the time he sponsored multiple unconstitutional bills to make English the official language of the state of Georgia, as well as his support of Georgia’s disastrous anti-immigrant bill, HB 87, which ended up decimating the population of immigrant farmers in the state enough that crops were left to rot in the fields, unpicked, to the cost of $140 million in lost revenue for the industry. He also voted for a monument of the Ten Commandments to be built at the state capitol building (which have been overturned as violations of the First Amendment in previous rulings like in the Roy Moore case in Alabama), and the failed conservative policy to drug test welfare recipients.

Since we last profiled Tommy Benton, his deep affection for the Confederacy again reared its ugly head, this time when he sent out a campaign mailer that denied that the Civil War started over slavery. If Benton would pull his head out of his ***, he would know that five Confederate states, GEORGIA AMONG THEM, literally wrote letters to the Union stating, plainly, that they were fighting a war against the federal government because they refused to keep slaves. Did we forget to mention that Tommy Benton once called for people arrested on marijuana charges to be sentenced to caning, or perhaps executed? Because in an e-mail with a constituent back in 2009, that happened. (He also threatened to have the person arrested for disagreeing with him, not for nothing.)

So… yeah, Benton is full of s***, and we’re glad that the Georgia GOP stripped him of all of his placements on Committees in the legislature for being a deranged bigot. Benton was not only re-elected in 2018, but then Georgia GOP shrugged off his past offensive statements, and placed him back in a leadership role on the Retirement Committee in the George state legislature. Because of course supporting the Klan should only be a temporary setback in your political career, or so modern Republicans seem content to believe.

In August of 2020, Benton furthered his descent into white nationalism, giving a radio interview where he praised Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, and disparaged the late Georgia Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis, only weeks after his death:

"Now, the other person that they're talking about replacing his statue with, I have never read of a significant piece of legislation that was passed with his name on it. His only claim to fame was he got conked on the head at the [Edmund] Pettus Bridge ... and he has milked that for 50 years."

Tommy Benton re-election in 2020, with 80% of the vote, only weeks after his revolting comments. Not shockingly, Benton was one of many Georgia Republicans who voted for their restrictive voter suppression bill after the 2020 election where Georgia flipped blue, looking to further denigrate John Lewis’ legacy.

We have great news, though, this vile excuse for a legislator, who has no business holding any office outside of a Klan chapter, is not running for re-election in 2022.

We would like to wish him our finest, “Good riddance, f*** off, and keep f***ing off into the sunset” salutes at this time.

[Kirby101]

I agree. Donating to pro-choice candidates will do a lot more good than any empty statement on social media.

And the flip side too, Stop giving money to anti-abortion candidates.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Got an alert that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is on hold because of a problem with fake accounts. Make of that what you will.

Here's his Tweet.
"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users"

Looks like he was given incorrect information on the number of spambots
or
Since he was looking for money to help him fund his buyout, maybe he couldn't find it
or
He was trolling all this time?

[Zelena]

So Finland now wants to join the NATO for preservation of their territory and independence. Are they also interested in trying to take back Karelia which has been inhabited by four generations of Russian residents?

Is there any reason to think that? Sounds like a very far stretch to me, but I am not familiar with their relations.

It feels also far-fetched to me: why would the NATO (or even Finland) engage in such adventure?

[Kirby101]

Finland won't do this, but isn't this the exact same excuse that Russia used to take Crimea?

[seismic-2]

So Finland now wants to join the NATO for preservation of their territory and independence. Are they also interested in trying to take back Karelia which has been inhabited by four generations of Russian residents?

Even if they are interested in regaining lost territory, joining NATO won't be of any help in that quest. NATO has a mutual defense pact, not a mutual pact for assistance in incursion into other countries.