This Just In

The Onion's reporting on Marianne Moonglow:

SACRAMENTO, CA—After reviewing responses to her post, Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson deleted a tweet Wednesday that suggested people use their minds to turn Hurricane Dorian away from land, and later told reporters the nation was not yet ready to harness such awesome powers. 

“I wholeheartedly apologize for implying that untrained minds should use mental energy blasts to deter any object, hurricane or otherwise,” said the self-help guru, noting that she had miscalculated the willingness and ability of average citizens to access the part of their brain that allows for weather manipulation, levitation of objects, and telekinesis. “If used with malicious intent, this type of power could, for example, cause the Earth’s rotation to reverse, taking us back in time and potentially ripping apart the space-time continuum. All life on the planet could be wiped out if someone tried to harness a psionic beam while holding a crystal. It is now clear to me that Americans will not be prepared to assume such responsibility for quite some time, perhaps not until my second term.” 

Sources confirmed Williamson’s tweet was replaced by an ad for her latest seminar, “Your Mind, the Weather, and You,” and an offer to use the code “LOVE” at checkout for a discounted ticket price of $199.

Overheard:

Williamson is being forced out of the Democratic primary because liberals are saying mean things about her - which means we're gonna lose the Space Alien Vote. 

Way to go, stoopid libtards.
BTW, be sure to watch for Ms Williamson's next book - anticipated to be a mega-blockbuster - "How To Kick The Self-Help Habit". Pre-order now for only $69.99 at WaldenBooks.

Don't Get Happy

I'll take a nickel for every time somebody's tried to patronize me with something like - 

"Oh, Mike - you're so angry..." 
or 
"Geez, how can you live your life with such hatred in your heart?" 
or 
"Man, you gotta lighten up - you're gonna give yourself a stroke..." 
or
"Don't you just get tired of being so upset about everything all day every day?"

My main question in response is: Why would I not make every possible sacrifice in defense of my country?

No - I'm not tired at all - not even close.

• I will stay angry.
• I will maintain this healthy level of outrage.
• I will not normalize an illegitimate presidency.
• I will not be silent in the face of racism and other attempts to Divide-n-Conquer.
• I will not accede to a president who is corrupt and morally bereft.
• I will not stop defending democracy.
• I will not stop resisting efforts to replace our form of self-government with plutocracy.
• I will not stop telling the Daddy State to fuck off.

hat tip = @ananavarro

Today's Word

Could Get Interesting

The Hill:

Survivors of a mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart have filed a lawsuit against the mega-retailer, claiming the Aug. 3 attack that left 22 people dead could have been prevented.

Jessica and Guillermo Garcia were both shot multiple times while they were shopping with their children, The El Paso Times reported Wednesday.

- and -

In their suit filed against Walmart Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Texas LLC on Aug. 30, the family is not asking for monetary compensation, The El Paso Times reported. Instead, they are demanding to know why Walmart did not have armed security or measures to prevent the shooting.

"I don’t know the answers to this, but I definitely think that if they had armed security there, this would have turned out different,” said Don Coca, father of Jessica Garcia, told the newspaper. “They (Walmart) could have prevented it. There are a lot of things that could have been done differently.”

It also reportedly accuses Walmart officials of gross negligence for failing to have safety measures in place.

“It was the responsibility of Wal-Mart to provide security to the premises due to the capacity of patrons at the premises. Despite the crowd at the premises on the day of the shooting, Wal-Mart failed to provide security guards to protect the patrons at the premises," the lawsuit obtained by the outlet states.

It's a good approach, I think. It starts a process aimed at holding more people more accountable. It broadens the scope by including more of us in analysis of the problem and its solutions.

If WalMart loses this, then we have another way to attack the problems of gun violence - by enlisting the support of the big corporations. 

There are no companies out there looking to lose clients because consumers fear for their safety in public places. Once the cost/benefit calculus tips in favor of regular normal people, things could change at a fairly brisk pace.

It'll also be interesting to see more of the fight that the NRA stupidly picked with WalMart over the retailer's decision to stop selling handguns and certain types of ammo.

Like The Dog He His

That's great, Steve - now do Flint.

BTW - the transcripts of the sworn testimony of more than a couple of immigrant detainees (aka: brown people being held in our concentration camps) very explicitly state that the sinks they referred to were not functional.

As AOC put it - "Apparently some of our members didn't finish the reading assignment."

In my own estimation, it just means Steve King lied. 

But then, Steve King is a White Nationalist Republican Asshole, so pointing out that he's a liar is redundant. Shit - pretty much that whole sentence is redundant.

Sorry about that.

Today's Tweet

Winner

pic.twitter.com/EC07sEndBQ

— MariaC🐾 (@ArgentinaMama) September 5, 2019

New To Me

The Armageddon Update with Christopher Titus

(try to look past the obvious semi-racist glitches)

You May Ask Yourself

...why does it seem like the "conservative movement" is chock full of grifters?

And your answer may well be, "Because conservatives have made it inevitable - and that's been the point all along."

WaPo:

In 2016, an Arizona man called prosecutors in Riverside, Calif., to report that he’d been ripped off. Two men in the Southern California town who claimed to be running a hedge fund had taken $75,000 from him, he said, and then promptly lost it all. The tipster later killed himself.

But his claim helped spark a three-year investigation that has now resulted in a felony charge against both men — one of whom, Jacob Wohl, has since become a headline-generating conservative activist and conspiracy theorist.

Wohl, 21, appeared in court on Wednesday and now faces arraignment in October for one count of illegally selling a security, as first reported by the Daily Beast. He didn’t immediately return a message late Wednesday.

The criminal case is the latest turn in a whiplash career that has seen Wohl transform from a stock-trading wunderkind (later banned from an industry group) to a President Trump-backing Twitter figure (later booted off the platform) to the activist behind botched attempts to smear former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) with fabricated sexual assault claims.
The GOP abandoned all sense of honor quite a while back, and now it's filled with the kind of crooks who always gravitate to the sources of power and money, looking for the opportunity to siphon off some ready cash and live it up at someone else's expense.

But they put the ends before the means - policy over process - party over country.

Their actions over the last 30-40 years show they've lost the thread of democracy, and it has to be plain that it's not simply due to happenstance, but deliberate and by design. Their project is to dismantle our little experiment in self-government in order to replace it with plutocracy.

The more shitty shady characters we see associated with government, the more disgusting the whole thing seems, the more we turn away, the more we leave the work and the decisions to people who just get more vile and repulsive - it's a self-perpetuating cycle and it gets worse and worse until enough of us are frustrated enough to go along with some polished grifter who suggests we just chuck it all and start over.

That's when they call a Constitutional Convention, and rewrite the rules in a way that tailors the thing to the Daddy Staters' dreams of conquest and dominance.

They don't want to take us back to the 1950s. They intend to take us back to the 1750s.

Irredeemable

45*'s never going to admit to telling an outright lie, but It has to clear by now that he's not even capable of admitting anything he does could be either a straight up mistake on his part, or that it's reasonable for people to see some of the weird shit he does - which is almost always followed by a double-down - and conclude he's a bit touched in the head.

(Here's all of Charlie's piece - from behind Esquire's paywall)

Donald Trump's Hurricane Dorian Map Appears to Be Doctored With a Sharpie to Include Alabama

This is just insane.

By Charles P Pierce - Sep 4, 2019

This is beyond belief. Even by this guy's standards for cheap lying, this is off the charts, across the floor, down the storm drain, into the river, and long gone off up the gulfstream.

Remember the other day when the president* said that Hurricane Dorian posed a threat to Alabama, and then the National Weather Service told all the people in Alabama to relax because the president* didn't know what he was talking about, so they all shouldn't run off to the Piggly Wiggly to buy 250 loaves of bread? Whereupon, the president* expressed his annoyance at his own National Weather Service for its role in helping him look foolish? Again. (Maybe it was just their turn.) This resulted in a couple of days of social-media snark directed at the president*s Very Great Brain.

Cut to Wednesday morning in the Oval Office. From NBC News:
The map Trump displayed was the same as a model produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last week showing the hurricane's projected path cutting through central Florida— with one key difference. Where the original projection ended, a smaller, black circle that appeared to be drawn in sharpie was produced to include Alabama in the model.

Sharpie? He either doctored—or had doctored—the map with a freaking Sharpie? I wonder if he did it himself or contracted out the work to the Department Of Embarrassingly Clumsy Fakes, led by Secretary Of Embarrasingly Clumsy Fakes Epstein's Mother.
"I know that Alabama was in the original forecast," Trump told reporters later on Wednesday. "We have a better map... in all cases Alabama was hit... they gave it a 95% chance." Asked about the discrepancies with the original map, Trump said: "I don't know. I don't know."

A Sharpie.

This is just insane.

It's also possibly a federal crime.

Completely insane.

And in the mean time, Republicans all over the place are so busy trying to save their own asses, that it's plain to see that they don't give one empty fuck about the rest of us.

Today's GIF

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