A Pennsylvania woman was murdered after she rejected the romantic overtures of a man she encountered at a Pittsburgh bar. Janese Talton-Jackson, the 29 year-old mother of three children, was at Cliff’s Bar as closing time neared on January 22. A man, identified by police as Charles McKinney, approached Talton-Jackson and asked her out on a date, according to CBS Pittsburgh. She rejected the man’s advances and he then followed her outside and eventually shot her in the chest. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
First - I'm sorry Mr Finicum is dead. I think that's what he wanted - he said as much - but I'm hoping Mrs Finicum and all the little Finicums find good ways to get past it. Meanwhile, we might have some fun watching as these militia rubes fall to squabbling internally due to the rumors (aka: bullshit) and false reports about how Finicum was killed.
These nuts maintain a diet rich in paranoid conspiracy and an awful lot of 'em are absolutely determined to believe anything they're told as long as it fits the framing of "Gubmint always bad - Camo Goobers always good." Makes me wonder what happens now that "two of their own", Mark McConnell and Melvin Lee, are saying 'calm down' and 'let's be sensible' and 'what you've heard about the feds murdering Lavoy isn't true', etc.
If their own guys are seen as failing the "purity test" (which of course was never clearly defined, because it can't actually be defined because who the fuck died and made you the fuckin' pope?), factional splits get real big real quick, and they get to runnin' in tighter and tighter circles chasing each other's tails, and before ya know it, they disappear up each other's assholes. (sounds like a certain political party don't it?)
It's nice to think the rest of these Y'all-Qaeda cells will just disintegrate and reabsorb. And some of that should happen - there are some people in this "movement" who can think, and generally, when those people are shown that some of the folks in positions of leadership are very obviously bug-fucking crazy, they tend to split. And if they really can think for themselves, they'll know the fight's over; they lost; and they were on the wrong side anyway.
There's also some probability that the remaining Goober Leaders are trying to figure how best to use Finicum's death.
"See? The Gubmint is big and dangerous. If we're gonna win this thing, we have to fight smart. Lavoy Finicum didn't fight smart. Lavoy Finicum is fuckin' dead now."
Lotsa moves left to play out. This shit ain't over.
A man's worth is popularly determined by his intellect. And his intellect - unfortunately - is thought to be proportional to the distance between the front and back covers of his autobiography. --me (with a nod to Ambrose Bierce)
Joe seems like a fun date. I'm sure he'll be the belle o' the ball in the county lockup.
Now, here's Harney County Judge Steve Grasty.
My guess is that Steve is wondering (like a lot of us are wondering) how the fuck we got from the pretty good kinda moderate conservatism of John Lindsay and Nellie Rockefeller in the 60s and 70s to this rabid, slaverin'-dog, kill-'em-all-let-god-sort-'em-out, radical bullshit. Didn't just happen last night; not gonna un-happen by tomorrow.
For me, the lights came on in 1992, listening to Pat Buchanan at the GOP convention in Houston. I'd been feeling a little antsy about my preferences for Repubs for a few years, but that speech made a very loud, very uncomfortable noise in my head, and I just kinda knew I'd been wrong for too long, and it was time for a rethink.
A gun-store owner and his son were killed in a shootout with two customers after an argument over a $25 firearm repair fee, police told NBC station WDSU. The patrons were also taken to hospital with serious injuries following Saturday's incident at the store near Picayune, Mississippi, which is 130 miles south of Jackson.
The only thing that stops a law-abiding citizen with a gun - I can't make the joke work, even for me.
And I can't get cute with, "Well, as long as they're killing each other, I'll call that an improvement".
Fuck that, and fuck me for thinking it.
We've been trying hard to tell you for a long time. It's up to you now, ammosexuals. Those were your guys. Get off your ass and do something about it. Step up or step aside.
John Fowler, National Review Publisher, telling us basically that the GOP "establishment" has become the new Surrender Monkeys.
But BTW - "GOP Establishment"? Is that even still a thing? And yes, of course it is, even though they've been striving all these many long years to trick people into thinking there isn't really an "establishment" because that goes against all of that rugged individualism bullshit they've been peddling for those same many long years.
"The Big-Daddy Conservatives" have inveighed against Central Planning forever (working feverishly to make sure the rubes ignore the fact that the strategy comes from a committee at GOP HQ), but now that their party has broken up into a thousand little independent franchising operations, they're all clutching their pearls tight enough to choke a RINO (buh-dum-chssh - sorry).
Anyway, if any of these jokers had ever really bothered to read Ayn Rand, they'd know that the main tenet of Objectivsm is that while a contradiction can exist, it can't prevail. Which means they'd understand that what's happening to the GOP now is what they've actually been saying should happen.
They've wanted everybody standing alone. If we're all separated from each other, we can't very well act in concert with each other, and that way, the people who're already in power get to stay in power, and the rest of us get to pay rent to them.
But then, here comes Trump-o-mania. I can't think of a clearer example of the almost instinctual inclination of people to get together and push back once they realize they're being fucked over. Why, it's almost like they're - dare I say it? - Unionizing.
What I think is going on now is that the old GOP bosses are finding it a lot more difficult to co-opt the Trumpkins like they co-opted the TeaBaggers. The more the GOP tries to play nice and get the rubes to come home, the harder Trump pushes them towards the extreme. Whatever else he is or appears to be, the guy's no dummy. He knows how to hijack a proxy fight at a stockholders' meeting.
And yes, there are some very close parallels with The Bernie Mensches. But don't be stoopid enough to think I'm joining the Both-Siders. If you can't tell the difference between Bernie and Trump, you need to put down the spray paint and go outside for a while.
So - common cause, anyone? Bernie makes a lot of sense for the Trumpkins - all the good stuff about truth-telling and fair deals and solid American values, but without the brown shirts and protester beatings.
So which way do we go on this one? Blue Lives Matter? Khaki Lives Matter? Support The Troops? Save Our Vets? One faction of Uber-Patriots fighting against other factions of Uber-Patriots, and all of a sudden, it's like we don't even have a fucking country anymore.
