via RightWingWatch - Nick Fuentes
"Catholic Taliban - in a good way"
Jun 27, 2022
Oy
OK, look - keep your hands to yourself.
That said, c'mon, kids - this is what we call "assault" now?
Stop wondering why I call "conservatives" a buncha whiny-butt pussy snowflakes.
Be The Lawn Mower
There are decent Blue people in Red states.
There are Red assholes in Blue States.
Texas Paul - via MeidasTouch
Today's Brian
Stupid GOP policies are about to create a metric fuck ton of "welfare babies", and we're supposed to believe that Republicans are having a Scrooge-On-Christmas-Morning moment, so now they'll open up the government coffers and fund the necessary infrastructure to provide support for all the newly minted poor and brown people they love so much.
Fat fucking chance.
It's another lie. When I listen closely, I hear the coded "cha-ching" language of privatization and the move to funnel public funds into sectarian enterprises.
We didn't raise enough of a stink about GW Bush's "Faith-Based Initiatives" bullshit, and this year, SCOTUS has further paved the way by allowing tax dollars to be paid out to religious schools.
Brian Tyler Cohen
Jun 26, 2022
Ukraine
Meet the new boss.
Weirdly - nobody seems to know this guy's full name.
Putin calls up obese Russian general, 67, as he 'scrapes the barrel' after heavy losses
A desperate Vladimir Putin has "dragged" a retired Soviet-era Russian general out of retirement to help his ailing invasion of Ukraine.
The general coming to Russia’s aid is reportedly a heavy drinking and obese veteran of Russia’s disastrous war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union’s failed invasion of the country in 1979 saw over 15,000 Russian soldiers killed and is considered to have contributed to the communist dictatorship’s collapse. Now General Pavel is back - although Putin likely hopes he won’t be making the same mistakes.
A senior intelligence source last night explained the rationale behind Putin “dragging” the veteran back into combat. They told the Daily Star Sunday: “Putin is now scraping the barrel.
“Most of his best and battle-hardened senior commanders have been killed or injured fighting in Ukraine so he is resorting to sending second rate officers to the front who don’t last very long.
“He is now dragging generals out of retirement and one of those is General Pavel.
“Putin is like a mafia boss who no one can refuse to obey. If a retired general gets a message from Putin saying mother Russia needs you to fight in Ukraine there is not much you can do.
“There is no escape from Russia thanks to the sanctions.”
Pavel was a soldier for over 40 years, becoming a commander of Russia’s special forces 25 years ago. He is understood to have served in Syria just before retiring from active service five years ago.
Up until recently he was living in a Moscow suburb but is understood to have been ordered to return to active service last month. His substantial girth reportedly requires two sets of body armour to cover, and the general had to have his uniform specially made - although some people said that images showing the rotund army man may been edited.
Pavel is also understood to require five meals a day washed down with at least a litre of vodka.
As many as 10 Russian generals are believed to have been killed so far in combat. Meanwhile around 30 senior officers have been lost.
A desperate Vladimir Putin has "dragged" a retired Soviet-era Russian general out of retirement to help his ailing invasion of Ukraine.
The general coming to Russia’s aid is reportedly a heavy drinking and obese veteran of Russia’s disastrous war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union’s failed invasion of the country in 1979 saw over 15,000 Russian soldiers killed and is considered to have contributed to the communist dictatorship’s collapse. Now General Pavel is back - although Putin likely hopes he won’t be making the same mistakes.
A senior intelligence source last night explained the rationale behind Putin “dragging” the veteran back into combat. They told the Daily Star Sunday: “Putin is now scraping the barrel.
“Most of his best and battle-hardened senior commanders have been killed or injured fighting in Ukraine so he is resorting to sending second rate officers to the front who don’t last very long.
“He is now dragging generals out of retirement and one of those is General Pavel.
“Putin is like a mafia boss who no one can refuse to obey. If a retired general gets a message from Putin saying mother Russia needs you to fight in Ukraine there is not much you can do.
“There is no escape from Russia thanks to the sanctions.”
Pavel was a soldier for over 40 years, becoming a commander of Russia’s special forces 25 years ago. He is understood to have served in Syria just before retiring from active service five years ago.
Up until recently he was living in a Moscow suburb but is understood to have been ordered to return to active service last month. His substantial girth reportedly requires two sets of body armour to cover, and the general had to have his uniform specially made - although some people said that images showing the rotund army man may been edited.
Pavel is also understood to require five meals a day washed down with at least a litre of vodka.
As many as 10 Russian generals are believed to have been killed so far in combat. Meanwhile around 30 senior officers have been lost.
Oh, Clarence
We can't be so hide-bound by tradition that we fail to react properly as threats occur.
We have to figure out how to limit the damage that a few individuals can cause because we've allowed too much power to be concentrated in too few hands.
Wanna "get back to a better America"? Work on the Checks-n-Balances thing.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told his law clerks in the '90s that he wanted to serve for 43 years to make liberals' lives 'miserable'
- In a 1993 New York Times article, a former law clerk of Clarence Thomas said he held a grudge against liberals.
- The conservative Supreme Court Justice was resentful of the media coverage of his confirmation hearing.
- "The liberals made my life miserable ... and I'm going to make their lives miserable," NYT reported he said.
Thomas, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 1991 amid contentious confirmation hearings, resented the media coverage surrounding his appointment. Central to the hearings were accusations and testimony about alleged sexual harassment of one of his subordinates, Anita Hill, who accused the justice of repeated, unwanted sexual advances and inappropriate conduct in the workplace.
He was ultimately confirmed in a 52-48 vote.
In a conversation with his law clerks two years following his confirmation, The New York Times reported Thomas expressed his desire to serve on the court until the year 2034.
"The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years," a former clerk remembered Thomas – who was 43 years old when confirmed – saying, according to The New York Times. "And I'm going to make their lives miserable for 43 years."
Thomas, considered the most conservative justice on the court, joined the majority opinion on Friday which overturned federal abortion protections established in Roe v. Wade. In a concurring opinion, Thomas indicated he also believes the Supreme Court should "reconsider" decisions from the cases Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell, which established the federal right to use birth control and legalized same-sex activity and gay marriage, respectively.
COVID-19 Update
Since Jan 1, 2022
New Cases: 32,197,697
New Deaths: 190,399
Deborah Birx was in the typically untenable position that Trump likes to create for people who actually know stuff, and won't go a long with whatever bullshit he's peddling at the moment.
She didn't handle it well, and now she'd like us to know why.
Lay it on me, Debbie baby.
WaPo: (pay wall)
Trump swayed by ‘dangerous ideas’ about coronavirus, Birx tells House panel
Deborah Birx, who was tapped to coordinate the Trump administration’s coronavirus response in February 2020 but quickly lost favor with the president, on Thursday painted a picture of wide-ranging dysfunction that she said misled the public and state officials, hampered coronavirus testing and contributed to unnecessary deaths from the virus.
“People were communicating with the president dangerous ideas … on a daily basis,” such as encouraging former president Donald Trump to advocate for unproven treatments, including hydroxychloroquine, or providing him with misleading data about the virus, Birx told the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis.
Asked about Trump’s repeated claims in 2020 that the virus would simply disappear, Birx implied that the president wrongly believed that if enough Americans were infected, the pandemic would go away.
“I think there were individuals communicating with the White House … who believed that if you infected enough people that you would have herd immunity. There was no evidence [of that] — in fact, there was evidence to the contrary,” Birx testified.
Birx also criticized Scott Atlas, a senior fellow in health-care policy at Stanford University who joined the administration in July 2020 and won Trump’s favor by saying that many infections were inevitable and encouraging a less robust government response. Atlas’s private advice and public comments broke from the recommendations made by Birx and fellow pandemic experts such as Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert.
“It certainly destroyed any cohesion in the response,” Birx said, adding that Atlas and other officials presented data to the president that she believed painted a rosier view of the pandemic than was warranted.
“When you no longer agree on what is actually happening in the country and what needs to be done … then you lose the ability to execute in the maximum efficient and effective way,” Birx said.
Birx also recounted an Oval Office meeting with Atlas and Trump in August 2020 during which the officials discussed a summer surge in coronavirus cases.
“Dr. Atlas took that opportunity to make the point that it didn’t matter what you did, each of these surges would be identical. It didn’t matter if you tested. In fact, testing young people … and asking them to isolate while they were infectious was an infringement of their rights, and it was equivalent to a lockdown,” Birx testified. “These kinds of thoughts, particularly in any infectious disease, are dangerous.”
Birx told the panel’s investigators last year that the looming 2020 election distracted Trump officials from the pandemic, and that more than 130,000 American lives could have been saved with swifter action and better coordinated public health messages after the virus’s first wave.
“We have learned and will remember how politics was prioritized over science,” Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who chairs the panel, said Thursday.
Atlas did not respond to requests for comment. Atlas, who had no expertise in fighting pandemics, has blamed Birx for “harmful lockdowns” in early 2020 that he said caused widespread harm to children and the elderly.
“Dr. Birx cannot be allowed to rewrite history and avoid responsibility for her failures,” Atlas told The Washington Post in a statement last year.
A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Birx’s testimony and new allegations. “She was a very negative voice who didn’t have the right answers,” Trump said in a statement last year about Birx’s prior criticism of the response.
Republicans at the hearing pressed Birx on unresolved questions about where the virus originated, which Birx largely deflected, and complained that Democrats were failing to scrutinize the Biden administration’s pandemic strategy.
“Here we are today, having yet another hearing with a witness to discuss things that happened more than two years ago,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), the panel’s top Republican, asking why Fauci had not testified before the panel for more than a year, and why former Biden White House coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients and current coordinator Ashish Jha had not been summoned to answer questions about the current administration’s response.
Birx separately criticized the ongoing response, saying better communication and more vaccinations were needed to save lives, particularly in rural America.
“We are still losing Americans today at … a very unacceptable rate when we have the tools to prevent it,” Birx said. Close to 300 Americans are dying each day from covid-19, according to The Post’s rolling seven-day average.
Democrats on Thursday released hundreds of pages of interviews with Birx conducted last October, during which she made additional allegations about the pandemic strategy of the Trump White House. Birx said Trump officials frequently asked her to change reports about the state of the pandemic, which she sent to governors’ offices, and she grudgingly went along.
“If the changes weren’t … made, the governors’ reports would not have gone out,” Birx told investigators, declining to identify the officials who demanded changes.
The Democrats this week also released a staff report that faulted Atlas as the author of a “dangerous and discredited herd immunity strategy,” drawing on interviews with Birx and other officials and newly released documents.
The documents included an email sent from Atlas to a Trump health official in March 2020 in which Atlas asserted that the coronavirus outbreak was likely to “cause about 10,000 deaths” and argued that the federal government had overreacted. Atlas did not respond to The Post’s questions about the email.
Birx was the first former Trump official to publicly testify in front of the House panel about the prior administration’s response, and Democrats had originally envisioned their two-year-plus coronavirus probe as an opportunity to spotlight Trump’s pandemic mistakes heading into this year’s elections.
But that strategy has been complicated by the pandemic’s persistence under President Biden and voters’ fading interest in coronavirus as a priority, and the panel’s findings have increasingly been overshadowed by other Democratic priorities. Thursday morning’s hearing was relatively muted, with lawmakers focused on an afternoon House panel investigating Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election.
Birx sat alone at the hearing table, accompanied by her memoir detailing her time as Trump’s coronavirus coordinator. The book had sold 5,938 copies as of June 11, an analyst for NPD BookScan told The Post last week.
“If the changes weren’t … made, the governors’ reports would not have gone out,” Birx told investigators, declining to identify the officials who demanded changes.
The Democrats this week also released a staff report that faulted Atlas as the author of a “dangerous and discredited herd immunity strategy,” drawing on interviews with Birx and other officials and newly released documents.
The documents included an email sent from Atlas to a Trump health official in March 2020 in which Atlas asserted that the coronavirus outbreak was likely to “cause about 10,000 deaths” and argued that the federal government had overreacted. Atlas did not respond to The Post’s questions about the email.
Birx was the first former Trump official to publicly testify in front of the House panel about the prior administration’s response, and Democrats had originally envisioned their two-year-plus coronavirus probe as an opportunity to spotlight Trump’s pandemic mistakes heading into this year’s elections.
But that strategy has been complicated by the pandemic’s persistence under President Biden and voters’ fading interest in coronavirus as a priority, and the panel’s findings have increasingly been overshadowed by other Democratic priorities. Thursday morning’s hearing was relatively muted, with lawmakers focused on an afternoon House panel investigating Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election.
Birx sat alone at the hearing table, accompanied by her memoir detailing her time as Trump’s coronavirus coordinator. The book had sold 5,938 copies as of June 11, an analyst for NPD BookScan told The Post last week.
Today's Wingnut
Can we please stop wondering why these assholes are fucking things up?
IMHO - They're doing it on purpose. They want our current form of government to be unworkable. They're doing whatever they can do to make us believe democracy is the problem, and that if we'd just consent to being ruled by "our betters", then everything will be peachy.
We have to find a way to keep these fucking god-knobbers out of government.
Deposition In 2010 Claims Sen. Lankford Said A 13-Year-Old Could Consent To Sex
U.S. Senator James Lankford is in the center of a controversy after the Associated Press released an article.
The subject, Lankford's views on whether a 13-year-old girl could consent to sex.
His answer during the deposition in 2010 was yes.
Lankford was the youth programming director at the Falls Creek Baptist camp at that time.
A family of a 13-year-old had sued a 15-year-old boy who was accused of having sex with her at the camp.
Lankford is up for reelection this year.
His campaign spokesperson declined to comment.
For fuck's sake - push these people away.
Paging Dr Freud
Mary E Miller (GOP Rep from Illinois) is running against a fellow Republican because somebody in Springfield had the good sense to try to unfuck a hundred years of gerrymandering.
Here she is at a Trump rally yesterday (06-25-2022) telling the crowd that overturning Roe v Wade is a victory for "white life."
And yes, she fumbled a little. But she said what she said, and the crowd cheered it.
So no, Ms Miller doesn't have trouble with her words. Not really. What was in her mind came out through her mouth - just like normal people.
And it was no different than last time (01-10-2021).
"Hitler was right on one thing..."
When they tell you who they are
believe them
Everybody's Got One
Not that I feel a need to go out of my way to shit on somebody's hopefulness, but c'mon, guys - SCOTUS has been scuttling laws aimed at regulating guns for 30 years - and I don't think we have long to wait before there's a lawsuit challenging this new assault on "shall not be infringed" and SCOTUS strikes it down.
There could be, however, a weird Good News / Bad News angle to consider.
If the law is upheld, that could give the liberals a warm and fuzzy feeling, and signal some small chance for even better gun safety laws to follow, but it could also mean that the plutocracy has decided it's time to curtail the rabble's ability to fight back.
Authoritarians love for you to go around waving your big bad substitute penis in the air when it intimidates "the left", but they can't afford to have you well-enough armed to mount an effective resistance once they have a choke hold on power, and you recognize that you've been slickered - again.
WaPo - Opinion: (pay wall)
GOP support for a gun bill offers hope for bigger reforms
Fifteen Republicans in the Senate and 14 in the House joined with congressional Democrats this week to break more than 25 years of inaction on gun safety. That these Republicans, many of whom had ratings of A or A-plus from the National Rifle Association, defied the gun lobby with their support of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act suggests they saw the political peril in doing nothing about the gun violence gripping the country. Indeed, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who voted for the bill, admitted as much when he said he hoped GOP support for the measure “will be viewed favorably by voters” as the party seeks to regain the majority next year.
The public sentiment for gun safety that has steadily built with each mass shooting, finally forcing Republicans to drop their ironclad opposition, offers hope that the legislation, signed into law by President Biden on Saturday, will be the first and not last step in bringing some rationality to the nation’s gun laws.
The 80-page bill, produced by a small group of Republican and Democratic senators in the aftermath of back-to-back mass shootings at a Buffalo grocery store and a Texas school, falls far short of the tough but common-sense measures long sought by gun-control advocates. There are no universal background checks, no ban of large-capacity magazines, no requirements for safe storage of weapons and no action — not even raising the minimum age of purchase — on assault weapons. That, though, does not detract from the significance of what was achieved.
Among the worthwhile reforms: enhanced background checks for younger gun buyers to include juvenile and mental health records; incentives for states to adopt red-flag laws that allow guns to be temporarily confiscated from people deemed dangerous by a judge; tougher penalties on illegal gun purchases; and revision of a federal law intended to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers to close the “boyfriend loophole.” Those measures — along with billions of new federal dollars to expand mental health programs and improve school safety — will save lives.
Credit for the hard work of fashioning a compromise that both sides could agree to goes to Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and John Cornyn (R- Tex.), aided by Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Mr. Murphy had just been elected to the Senate in 2012 when a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in his home state and has been tireless in his pursuit of common-sense gun control despite many setbacks. Mr. Cornyn’s willingness to negotiate — and his refusal to back down even when faced with withering criticism from former president Donald Trump, Fox News and his state GOP party — is equally praiseworthy. So is his forthrightness in standing up to the NRA. “We worked with the NRA, listened to their concerns, but in the end I think they simply — they have a membership and a business model that will not allow them to support any legislation,” Mr. Cornyn said.
Passage of the bill came a day after the Supreme Court expanded gun rights by striking down a New York law limiting the carrying of guns in public. That ill-advised and dangerous ruling may have tempered any celebration over the gun bill, but it can’t squelch the public sentiment that has risen up in support of rational gun-safety laws.
Remember that last bit, and keep it in mind as we have to contemplate the probability that this is all part of the typically cynical machinations of a Republican party that knows the Supreme Court is chock full of "conservatives" who will knock down anything "Progressive" that manages to get through.
In the case of gun regulation, Cornyn can sit back and say, "Well gee whiz, I was willing to humor the dumbass Dems and give their cockamamy scheme a try, but the Supreme Court says it's unconstitutional (just like I knew they would - wink wink) - whaddaya gonna do?"
Ya heard it here first.
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