Here We Go Again
CNN just had Donald Trump on for an hour in front of a hand-picked audience of his fans. He was rude to the moderator, lied his head off, and then just for fun he defamed the woman who had just the day before won a multimillion-dollar defamation suit against him. The jury found that he had raped her and then lied about her, and now she is thinking about suing him again for lying about her on CNN. Everybody -- I mean everybody -- is hoping she does.
Why did CNN put him on? They can pretend this is normal. He is going to be a candidate for the Republican nomination and the country needs to hear blah blah blah. In previous elections all the networks, including CNN, gave him billions of dollars' worth of free air time, and guess what -- here we go again.
Of course the problem is, at root, the fact that a modern corporation like CNN only cares about its investors. It doesn't care about its customers, except insofar as the investors use audience share to decide whether to invest. It doesn't care about its employees, making them go through with these awful things. And the corporation does not, in particular, care about the future of the USA. They had hoped to get good ratings with this show, and they were pretty good for that time slot, but Trump's audience was significantly smaller than Biden's last town hall. This one didn't really pay off for them.
Here's what makes sense to me. What about we elect somebody who KNOWS HOW TO RUN A COUNTRY? Sorry to shout, not sorry. There are things that need to be done, and maybe I'm weird about this but we need somebody who knows how to run things, even if it is just a mumbling old man and not an orange reality-TV actor. Like -- remember? -- back in June, 2017, Trump announced his infrastructure plan. A trillion dollars, he said. Then Comey testified in Congress, some terrorists attacked London, the so-called "travel ban" became consumed in controversy and the infrastructure train ran off the tracks. Trump declared the week of June 5, 2017 to be "infrastructure week." Also the week of August 14, 2017. Also October 9, same year. Also the week of February 12, 2018. Oh and don't forget March 26, 2018. Followed by infrastructure week on April 29, 2019.
The result was, literally colorful firebrand that he is, he could not do this straightforward thing that everybody in both parties knew needed to be done. He could not negotiate a bill through Congress and sign it. There was no infrastructure bill, even though it was an extremely high priority and Trump's party had majorities in both houses of Congress.
In contrast, in his second year in office Joe Biden signed a $1.2 Trillion infrastructure bill in April 2022 that included (quoting from Forbes here:
- Roads and bridges: Headlining the 2,702-page bill’s spending, roughly $110 billion of new funds would go toward improving the nation's roads and bridges, and investments in other major transportation programs.
- Public transit: The package also includes the largest-ever federal investment in public transit, allotting $39 billion to modernize systems, improve access for the elderly and people with disabilities, and repair more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 railcars and thousands of miles of train tracks.
- Amtrak: The legislation marks the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak 50 years ago, with $66 billion earmarked for high-speed rail, safety improvements, Amtrak grants and modernization of the rail route connecting Washington, D.C., to Boston.
- Broadband internet: Tacking on to billions authorized by last year’s American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure bill includes $65 billion to bolster the country's broadband infrastructure and help ensure that every American has access to high-speed internet, with one in four households expected to be eligible for a $30-per-month subsidy to pay for internet access.
- Electric grid and energy: Though many clean-energy measures were cut from the bill to satisfy spending-weary lawmakers, a $108 billion investment will help upgrade the nation’s electricity grid, with thousands of miles of new transmission lines and funds for environmentally friendly smart-grid technology.
- Electric cars, buses and ferries: In addition to $7.5 billion for the nation’s first network of electric-vehicle chargers along highway corridors, lawmakers have shored up $5 billion for zero-emission buses (including thousands of electric school buses) and $2.5 billion for ferries.
- Clean drinking water: Following high-profile water-supply crises plaguing cities like Flint, Michigan, the legislation includes a provision for $55 billion to replace all the nation's lead pipes and service lines, representing the largest investment in clean drinking water ever.
- Great rivers and lakes: Among the bill's more than $50 billion for water infrastructure improvements, about $1 billion is slated to go toward the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a sweeping clean-up measure targeting toxic hot spots—or areas of heavy industrial pollution—around the Great Lakes region, and $17 billion will be allocated to ports and waterways.
- Airports: More than $25 billion has been allocated to help modernize America's airports—funds the Airports Council International says will help tackle more than $115 billion worth of project backlogs.
- Road safety: The deal invests $11 billion in transportation safety programs, including a new program to help states and localities reduce crashes and fatalities in their communities, particularly among cyclists and pedestrians.
- Normal funding: In addition to the $550 billion in new investments, the package also includes roughly $650 billion in previously authorized funding for roads and other infrastructure, including nearly $300 billion for the Highway Trust Fund and $90 billion for public transit over the next five years.
And that's just one bill of many.
So, you see what I'm saying. Why would you vote for a guy who is not only an indicted criminal with many more charges coming including probably espionage, a serial and unapologetic rapist ("unfortunately or fortunately"), a liar, and who does not have the skills to put together a White House staff and get any legislation passed and signed? Why would you vote for that? Is it because he says mean things about liberals? Is that what you're looking for in a CEO for the United States of America?
Hang on to your horses, people. Our billionaires -- and why don't we call them oligarchs? -- want Trump in the White House because they know how to get him to do what they want: give him money, easy. Our oligarchs can spend the money on the media to get people to believe anything. So the sensible people of this country are going to have to grip the arms of their chairs, grit their teeth, and hold on until we go to the polls, and hopefully they haven't had the sense bled out of them by then.
posted by JimK at 8:03 AM
200 Comments:
The guy who usually posts the jobs reports didn't this time... I wonder why.
April 2023 Jobs Report: Good News for Almost Everyone
Unemployment remains low and hiring eases as more workers enter the labor force.
Nick Bunker May 5, 2023
Key points:
Employers added 253,000 jobs and unemployment declined to 3.4% in April, according to the latest report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Not only was unemployment low, but more workers are entering the labor force. The participation rate for workers ages 25 to 54 is the highest since March 2008, a few months before Bush crashed the economy.
Payroll growth is declining, but the current pace of job gains is still more than strong enough to keep the unemployment rate low.
There’s good news for every audience in this jobs report. Workers will be happy that unemployment remains low, and those out of work are still able to find jobs quickly. Employers will be pleased that labor force participation continues to grow, particularly for prime-age workers. And policymakers at the Federal Reserve will be comforted by the gradual cooldown in the pace of hiring. The US labor market is on a smooth trajectory, but turmoil in the financial market could cause turbulence.
This labor market continues to work for workers. Unemployment is very low, but the continued progress in enticing people into the workforce is perhaps more encouraging. The labor force participation rate for workers ages 25 to 54 hit a level previously seen in March 2008, and the last time the employment rate for these workers was this high was May 2001. The number of workers who were unemployed because they had recently lost a job dropped in April, reversing a concerning rise seen in recent months.
Payroll job gains continued to moderate, with the three-month moving average ticking down to 222,000 in April, less than half of what it was a year ago. The slowing job gains might concern some people, but this rate of growth is well above the level needed to keep the unemployment rate steady. Furthermore, the slowdown in hiring will encourage monetary policymakers that the labor market continues to shift into a better balance.
No jobs report is perfect. The continued decline in temporary-help-services employment may start tripping some traditional recession alarm bells, but given the rapid pace of hiring in recent years, it may simply be another sign of moderation. Workers, employers, and policymakers should be encouraged about the current state of affairs, but it’s unclear how much longer it can endure.
George Takei on Mastodon:
Title 42 ended, but because the Biden Administration planned ahead and is actually competent, we didn’t see a crush of migrants streaming across the border.
The media, probably: “Border crossings are surprisingly lower. Here’s how that’s bad for the White House.”
While people change and learn throughout life, experts recognize that certain formative periods, known as developmental windows, are crucial for acquiring particular skills. For example, using vocalizations and words to interact with people in the first few years of life is critical for children's language learning.
A recent study by an international team from UCLA, Romania and Israel suggests there may be a developmental window for reasoning skills as well—the first 25 years of life—and that a person's social, political and economic environment strongly influences how they acquire these skills. Their findings are published in the journal PLOS One.
The researchers found that following the collapse of Romania's authoritarian communist regime in 1989, the rapid increase in education and technology use and the transition from a single, government-controlled source of information to diverse sources had a strong effect on the way people, particularly younger generations, thought about and determined truthfulness, a process known as "epistemic thinking."
Epistemic thinking runs the gamut from absolutist thinking, the belief that only one claim can be right, to multiplist thinking, the belief that more than one claim could be right—it's just a matter of opinion. Finally, evaluativist thinking posits that assertions can be evaluated in terms of both logic and evidence.
"Whether we are monitoring various news sources or scrolling through a busy Twitter feed, we are constantly encountering diverse viewpoints about topics ranging from politics to films," said the study's first author, Amalia Ionescu, a doctoral student in psychology at UCLA. "Some of these topics carry infinitely more weight than others, but ultimately, we are using the same sort of mechanism when deciding how to make sense of contrasting viewpoints."
In the U.S., developmental psychology research has shown that children typically think in absolutist terms, then progress to multiplist thinking and sometimes, particularly with a relatively high level of education and exposure to various experiences and points of view, emerge as evaluativist adults. The study authors hypothesized that in a society ruled by an authoritarian government, with strict control over information, limited education and little exposure to the outside world, absolutist thinking would be more prevalent. Conversely, in an open, democratic society, there would likely be a higher occurrence of evaluativist thinking.
To test this, they focused on Romania, which in the late 1940s became communist and aligned itself with the Soviet Union. Beginning in 1965, under the authoritarian leadership of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania became increasingly repressive and isolated. After Ceaușescu was overthrown in 1989, the country quickly moved toward democracy, embraced a market economy and joined the European Union. Today, Romanians have a developing education system and open access to technology, social media, consumer goods and travel.
How, the researchers asked, may this transition have affected Romanians' epistemic thinking? Focusing on three age cohorts—those born after the democratic revolution (18–30 years old), those who spent their late adolescence and early adulthood under the authoritarian regime (45–59) and those who spent at least 45 years under the authoritarian regime (75 and older)—the authors presented respondents with scenarios in which two characters had contrasting views. They then asked the respondents: Which character is right? Or are both of them right? Why?
They found that there was a greater occurrence of absolutist thinking among those who had experienced the transition to democracy in middle age rather than at an earlier period of life.
The vast majority of those 75 or older tended to read or listen to the news and instantly take it as truth, "possibly because for most of their lives, they had only one TV program to watch, and all books, news, movies and music were under communist censorship," said co-author Raluca Furdui, a master's student at Romania's West University of Timișoara. "They learned to respect the authority of the teachers in schools, and some never even had the chance to go to high school.
"In contrast," Furdui said, "we, the youngest generation in our study—currently between 18 and 30—were challenged by our teachers to express our opinions, think critically and check information."
The researchers found that evaluativism was most common among this youngest generation, which also had the highest education levels. Lower levels of both formal education and social media use predicted higher levels of absolutist thinking and lower levels of evaluativism.
The study authors concluded that the developmental window for epistemic thinking is open during the first 25 years of life, after which it slowly closes, and a person's epistemic thinking style will change little later in adulthood.
"We found that the social environment produced by a combination of democracy and a market economy more frequently led people to abandon the assumption that there is one right answer and to evaluate multiple possibilities—when one was born into this environment or when it was experienced in the first 25 years of life" rather than in middle age or beyond, said co-author Patricia Greenfield, a UCLA distinguished professor of psychology. "We found that there is indeed a sensitive developmental period for acquiring cultural ways of thinking."
The 'open information' pendulum can swing the opposite way too
The authors also said they believe their findings can help explain why unfettered access to information, social media and a plethora of personal opinions can sometimes lead in the opposite direction—toward absolutist thinking and authoritarian politics.
"Along with the rise of the internet and social media, there has been, in the United States, a rise in the importance of personal opinion, along with a decline in the importance of agreed-upon facts," Greenfield said.
And while the trend toward increasing sources of information and opinions in Romania has been associated with the democratization and opening up of society, in the U.S., the indiscriminate application of the principle that everyone has a right to their own opinion has led to information silos and absolutist thinking.
"In Romania, the transition from authoritarianism to democracy was related to a decline in absolute thinking and a rise in evaluation as a form of thought," said co-author Michael Weinstock, an associate professor of education at Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev. "But based on our research, one would predict that that the opposite change in the environment—towards more authoritarianism—would lead to the opposite direction of change towards more absolutist thinking."
Changes in the authoritarian direction happened in the U.S. under the Trump administration, the study authors said, and have recently been happening in other countries around the world.
"Why would you vote for a guy who is not only an indicted criminal with many more charges coming including probably espionage, a serial and unapologetic rapist ("unfortunately or fortunately"), a liar, and who does not have the skills to put together a White House staff and get any legislation passed and signed? Why would you vote for that? Is it because he says mean things about liberals? Is that what you're looking for in a CEO for the United States of America?"
I agree that no sane individual would for this guy at this point.
Still, a few facts:
"an indicted criminal"
he hasn't been convicted of anything
"a serial and unapologetic rapist"
in the most compelling case, a jury in a civil case, which has a lower threshold of proof than a criminal trial, did not find him guilty of rape
let's all hope (and pray), Dems and GOP alike, that Republicans are able to nominate an alternative
Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
Pray all you want, like I'm sure you do after school shootings. It won't do a damn thing.
If you don't want him to be the Republican nominee, you'll have to convince other conservatives not to vote for him. Democrats are doing everything the can to convince everyone he's not a viable candidate - at the very least - and are trying to hold him accountable for his numerous crimes. Republicans had two great opportunities to do that at his impeachments, but they thought he would still be useful for them, regardless of the damage he did to our country.
You can spend your time trying to spread your BS here, where no one buys it but yourself; or you can spread some truth to your right-wing colleagues and hope they learn something.
"Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation."
but, tellingly, not rape - even though civil trials have lower standards of evidence
"Pray all you want, like I'm sure you do after school shootings. It won't do a damn thing."
interesting you would say that when also claiming to teach facts
fact is, there were no public school shootings back when there was a daily prayer in public schools
now, no prayer
and many school shootings every year
ever wonder why?
"If you don't want him to be the Republican nominee, you'll have to convince other conservatives not to vote for him."
frankly, I have since the beginning
I have always advocated for another candidate
he may have been the lesser of evils when the other choice was Hillary and Joe but, with the Supreme Court back to defending the Constitution, that no longer applies
"Democrats are doing everything the can to convince everyone he's not a viable candidate - at the very least - and are trying to hold him accountable for his numerous crimes"
another failure of fact
Democrats are doing everything "the" can to assure he's the candidate
they know Biden won't win agin' any other
"Republicans had two great opportunities to do that at his impeachments,"
he actually didn't do anything meriting impeachment
that doesn't mean he should be President
Dems should stop playing games and present a serious case
After five years, Durham did not uncover "the crime of the century," as Trump called it. He charged three people. Two were found innocent in court and one pled guilty to avoid a prison sentence. The report included Durham's opinion critical of the FBI (that far-left radical liberal organization) but he did not find anybody breaking any law.
"fact is, there were no public school shootings back when there was a daily prayer in public schools
now, no prayer
and many school shootings every year
ever wonder why?"
Wow, with that kind of reasoning skill, people are going to wonder what your favorite flavor of crayon is.
First of all, there has never really been a period of no school shootings in the US:
https://www.k12academics.com/school-shootings/history-school-shootings-united-states
They did take a noticeable uptick though after Ronnie Raygun took office, and started the country down a road toward a Christian Nationalist state that we still haven't recovered from. "Freedom," "guns," and "the bible" have become intertwined in a sick nationalist fervor that has decided anyone who doesn't side with them is godless and communist, and out to destroy America - especially the gays.
Putin himself couldn't have come up with a better strategy to divide Americans against each other, and the Republican party uses it as their main platform to whip up their voters.
"he actually didn't do anything meriting impeachment"
It's that kind of apologist thinking that allows dictators to gain a foothold in the first place. Instead of banning books, Republicans should be reading more of them - especially those regarding history and the rise of Hitler to understand how he used patriotic, nationalist and religious rhetoric, along with a small cabal of violent and fervent followers to destroy Europe's biggest democracy in the 1930's.
You do know that some of the Jan 6 thugs were convicted of seditious conspiracy, right? And that some of those folks were meeting with Roger Stone - Rumpie's political mentor in the hours before the insurrection, right? Or were you too busy munching on crayons?
Did you even hear about the fake elector scheme? Or what's going on in Georgia with that?
"Dems should stop playing games and present a serious case"
Funny you should say that on the same day we get news that John Durham's HUGE investigation for Bill Barr and Donnie Trump came out as a big nothing burger with NO ONE new to charge with a crime. The 2 people he previously tried to indict were unanimously acquitted.
So much for trying to paint Obama and Hilary as wild, renegade politicians out to stick it to the Republican savior.
And after years of bleating about Hunter's laptop, you guys still haven't managed to find anything to arrest a Biden for. Plenty of grist for your conspiracy theories though.
CNN's ratings now are worse than NewsMax, whatever that is. Their sharp right turn is really working for them.
I am sitting in a hipster coffee shop reading the morning paper, and I can't believe my eyes. They're saying right here that America's Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, is a creep and a drunk and a crook. Is that possible?
"Wow, with that kind of reasoning skill, people are going to wonder what your favorite flavor of crayon is."
well, it's not just correlation, cause-and-effect are also easy to see
"First of all, there has never really been a period of no school shootings in the US"
I should have said "mass random shootings in pre-college public schools", which is where there was once daily prayer
"It's that kind of apologist thinking that allows dictators to gain a foothold in the first place"
apologist?
Dems couldn't even decide on plausible charges for the first impeachment, the second contained no proof
perhaps you should read the articles of impeachment
"Instead of banning books, Republicans should be reading more of them"
can you show us an instance of Republicans banning books?
usually, the liberal fringe means by this, determining appropriate reading material in public schools for minors
in which case, liberals have endless lists of things they don't think chidren should be exposed to
you don't mind being a hypocrite, do you?.
"the same day we get news that John Durham's HUGE investigation...
So much for trying to paint Obama and Hilary as wild, renegade politicians...you guys still haven't managed to find anything to arrest a Biden for"
the creation of the Russian hoax and Hunter selling access to his father while VP are serious matters even if they aren't prosecutable
Durham showed the first occurred
as for Hunter, multiple criminal investigations are ongoing
Durham was supposed to uncover a covert "deep state" attempt by the FBI to overthrow Trump. He got one tiny conviction, for a guy who changed a line in an email, otherwise everyone he charged was found innocent. All he could do in the end was criticize the FBI and complain -- his opinion is like everybody else's. His investigation was a failure, no conspiracy was found, no one was charged. He had to shoot his mouth off to fend off embarrassment. That's what ya got.
"Dems couldn't even decide on plausible charges for the first impeachment, the second contained no proof"
And yet Mitch McConnell said this about the 2nd one:
"There's no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president," he said, "and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth."
"He did not do his job. He didn't take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed and order restored. No. Instead, according to public reports, he watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded," he said. "Even after it was clear to any reasonable observer that Vice President Pence was in serious danger."
If anyone else had put the Vice President in enough danger that he and his family had to go running away surrounded by a bunch of Secret Service agents, they would have been sent to federal prison.
As you say, "well, it's not just correlation, cause-and-effect are also easy to see."
If prayer can somehow magically reduce school shootings, then Rumpie is certainly capable of telling enough lies to whip up a bunch of conservative idiots to storm the Capitol. Even Mitch could see that.
And the seditious conspirators said as much, under oath, in their self-defense before their convictions.
I've NEVER heard a school shooter claim the lack of praying in schools caused him to go on a murder spree.
Obviously, you have a very tenuous grasp on "cause and effect."
If you've got a couple hours, read this: Links between Trump associates and Russian officials
In contrast, special counsel Robert Mueller’s team indicted or got guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies.
"Durham was supposed to uncover a covert "deep state" attempt by the FBI to overthrow Trump."
He was actually supposed to uncover a covert "deep state" attempt to nullify the results of the 2016 election by making false claims and hindering the work of the Trump administration.
That, he did.
The FBI lacked "actual evidence" to investigate Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and relied too heavily on tips provided by Trump's political opponents to fuel the probe, U.S. Special Counsel John Durham concluded in a report released on Monday.
"All he could do in the end was criticize the FBI"
It's what he criticized them for that is the issue. Using such techniques, the deep state could nullify any election they don't like and control the country. We actually need legislation to address the issues uncovered by Durham.
"-- his opinion is like everybody else's"
sure, just like anybody who interviewed witnesses and subpoenaed evidenced.
"special counsel Robert Mueller’s team indicted or got guilty pleas from 34 people and three companies"
as prosecutorial abuse to pressure witnesses to give testimony that didn't lead anywhere
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in March 2019, concluded there was no evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
In his new 306-page report, Durham concluded that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement did not possess any "actual evidence" of collusion between Trump's campaign and Russia prior to launching Crossfire Hurricane.
He also accused the bureau of treating the 2016 Trump probe differently from other politically sensitive investigations, including several involving Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
For instance, he said Clinton and other officials received defensive briefings about being the possible targets of foreign interference, whereas Trump received no such briefing before the FBI opened probes into four members of his campaign.
"The Department and the FBI failed to uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report," Durham wrote
"If prayer can somehow magically reduce school shootings"
nothing magical about it
focusing on a moral Creator tends to reduce immoral behavior
"I've NEVER heard a school shooter claim the lack of praying in schools caused him to go on a murder spree."
ever hear them talk about God at all?
if they took God seriously, they would never kill
Durham didn't find anything. He didn't approve of the way the FBI did its work, and in fact the FBI has already addressed those shortcomings. None of this was new or required years of investigation.
In the end, one chump -- an Assistant General Counsel in the National Security and Cyber Law Branch of the FBI’s Office of General Counsel -- at the FBI got in trouble for changing an email address on FISA application so he could work it through the bureaucracy faster. Then when he was asked about it, he lied. He was given probabtion and disbarred for a year.
Other than that, nothing. Durham wasted everybody's money and time for absolutely nothing. No convictions at all regarding the "crime of the century."
Threats of violence against the LGBTQIA+ community are on the rise and intensifying, according to a new briefing by the Department of Homeland Security.
The DHS document, distributed to government and law enforcement agencies on May 11, said that domestic violence extremists and people who commit hate crimes have increased threats of violence against the LGBTQIA+ community within the last year.
“These issues include actions linked to drag-themed events, gender-affirming care, and LGBTQIA+ curricula in schools," DHS said.
DHS said that the issues inspiring threats and calls of violence against the LGBTQIA+ community could lead to a rise of potential attacks against larger targets, such as public spaces and healthcare sites that may be linked to the community.
DHS analysts also cite social media chatter celebrating the recent mass shooting at a Nashville church school.
“High-profile attacks against schools and faith-based institutions like the recent shooting in Nashville have historically served as inspiration for individuals to conduct copycat attacks," DHS said.
In recent months, politicians in Tennessee, Florida and other Republican-run states have introduced legislation that critics say targets the LGBTQIA+ community.
In March 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education bill, dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" bill by detractors.
The bill banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Last month, the Florida Board of Education expanded those restrictions to include all grades. In March, Tennessee became the first state to restrict public drag performances.
HB 9 and SB 3, signed by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, make "a person who engages in an adult cabaret performance on public property" -- or where it can be viewed by minors -- a criminal offense.
Last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law, saying it was vaguely written and overly broad, according to AP.
At least 14 states have passed laws or policies that restrict gender-affirming care for people under the age of legal majority, which is the threshold for legal adulthood.
According to DHS, about 20% of all hate crimes reported throughout the country in 2021 were motivated by bias linked to sexual orientation and gender, citing the FBI's hate crime statistics.
The Republicans finally have proof, real proof that Joe Biden and the entire Biden Crime Family have been taking millions of dollars in bribes from China and also Romania, or maybe it's the other way around. They had a big press conference last week to tell us how big this is, but delayed offering any actual evidence.
No, wait, just a minute, this just in: 'We can't track down the informant': James Comer says he lost top witness in Biden investigation. They had an informant, but he has disappeared. There were a couple of whistleblowers but now: MTG Confirms Nearly ALL the GOP’s Biden Corruption Informants Are ‘Missing’. "The GOP has lost contact with nearly all of the “whistleblowers” in their ongoing investigation into Joe Biden, Marjorie Taylor Greene confirmed Monday..."
How did a little mouse know this was going to happen?
Today is the Anniversary of the Brown v. Board 1954 decision.
The 1954 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision remains a celebration of justice and inclusion.
This landmark case serves as a reminder of the hard work required to create a country where everyone can thrive and the important role that our federal courts play.
Federal judges - from the Supreme Court to district courts - must work for all of us, not just the wealthy and powerful.
The new face of the Republican Party, Ron DeSantis, ought to win the presidential nomination for this clever anti-woke maneuver. Ron DeSantis Is Giving Away Florida Pension Money to Wall Street Donors
"Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been putting huge sums of state retirement money into underperforming private equity firms that have donated to his campaign efforts."
Man, that is poster-child Republicanism right there. To beat that you'd almost have to have a son-in-law taking billions of dollars from a foreign country after you shared classified US information with them, or something.
"Our review found that had the state pension fund instead been invested in a simple, low-cost index fund, compared to its present mix of holdings, teachers, police officers, and other state employees would have about $10 billion more in their retirement funds."
Little Mouses are squeaking about this one. After Jan. 6, reports emerged of Trump supporters’ efforts to gain access to voting systems and software in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Colorado. Many assumed these incidents were unconnected, and new information was still coming in as the January 6th Committee was winding up its work, so the topic did not receive much attention. But a recent report shows that that the schemes went all the way to the top, to Trump himself, who was president at the time. Also, new evidence uncovered by plaintiffs in a Georgia lawsuit indicates that these incidents were part of the broader scheme to falsely cast doubt on, and overturn, the 2020 election.
Caitlyn Jenner has said the number of people openly identifying as transgender is "skyrocketing" at a "disturbing" rate, blaming "indoctrination" and an "oversaturation of the topic."
Jenner, who ran in a 2021 race to replace California's Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, remains a committed Republican.
The 1976 Olympic gold medalist, who came out as transgender in 2015, has been an outspoken critic of transgender women competing in sports against other women.
Jenner stepped efforts in April by announcing the launch of an initiative called Fairness First. The political action committee describes itself as "a big tent movement, non-partisan in nature, with the intention of protecting women and girls in sport—especially in light of recent events with radical gender ideology."
The National Archives is set to hand over 16 records to Special Counsel Jack Smith showing Trump and his close presidential advisers had knowledge of correct declassification process while in office.
The search warrant explicitly stated the DOJ was investigating "items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 793, 2071 , or 1519." 18 U.S. Code § 793 is from the Espionage Chapter of Title 18.
18 U.S. Code Chapter 37 - ESPIONAGE”
Every single House Republican voted today to protect disgusting indicted con artist fraudster George Santos from expulsion.
Let's see ya defend that. The Republican is incapable of telling the truth, and the rest are backing him up.
Us mouses were giggling over our cheese breakfast today, looking at the headlines in the Drudge Report:
"DeSantis signs bills targeting drag shows, use of bathrooms and pronouns, MORE...
Plans to officially enter presidential race next week..."
Minnie says to me and the kids, and the other mouses and their kids, and their kids and their kids -- we have a big family -- "Mick, is it possible that the Republicans are so fuckin' dumb, they think a president's job is monitoring drag queens and pronouns?"
I said, "Min, honey, I think they're even dumber than that -- they think that talking about drag shows and bathrooms makes 'em look smart. Otherwise, they don't got nuthin."
Rising number of Americans are switching religions
Nearly a quarter of Americans say they used to follow a different religious tradition or denomination than the one they practice now — a percentage that keeps growing, a new survey says.
Why it matters: The jump in religion-switching comes as many Americans say they no longer believe in their initial religion's teachings — or, in many cases, disagree with a religion's stance against LGBTQ+ people.
More Americans also are turning away from Christianity and are seeing themselves as unaffiliated with any religion or as religious "nones," even as some conservative Republicans seek to inject more religion into schools and public life.
By the numbers: The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute survey of people across the country found that a quarter of Americans (24%) say they've changed religious traditions or denominations over their lifetime or recently.
That's a 50% jump from 2021, when 16% said they had switched, the survey found.
People who are members of other non-Christian religions (38%) or religiously unaffiliated (37%) were the most likely to say that they had switched from a different religious tradition.
About one in four Protestants of color (28%), white evangelical Protestants (25%), and Hispanic Protestants (24%) say they previously practiced or followed another religious tradition.
The intrigue: The survey found that the Catholic Church [known for its anti-abortion stance] had lost the highest percentage of followers (39%) to the group without a religious affiliation.
Non-evangelical Protestants (28%) lost the second-most members.
Between the lines: A 2022 survey by PRRI's American Values Atlas found that only 64% of Americans identify as Christian — and the percentage has been dropping.
That PRRI survey says nearly 27% of the general public is now unaffiliated with any religion — the fastest-growing segment.
Zoom in: Among those who switched, 56% said they changed because they stopped believing in the religion's teachings.
About 30% said negative religious teachings about or treatment of LGBTQ+ people forced them to change.
Only 17% said they switched because their church or congregation became too political.
Yes, but: Most churchgoers (56%) do not believe their current church is more divided by politics than it was five years ago, the study found.
Only 13% say that their church is more politically divided.
White non-evangelical Protestants (17%) and Catholics (17%) are the most likely to indicate that their churches are more divided by politics.
What they're saying: "There's essentially kind of a paradox happening. On the one hand, there is more religious churning. There are also more people in America who are becoming less religious, " PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman told Axios.
"Among Americans who still go to church on a regular basis, they still seem to be pretty happy with what's happening in their churches."
Bottom line: Members of Gen Z — now ages 11 to 26 — are switching and shunning religion faster as young adults than other Americans. That's expected to continue.
Methodology: The Health of Congregations Survey was conducted Aug. 9-30 by PRRI. The poll is based on a representative sample of 5,872 adults (age 18 and older) living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia who are part of Ipsos' Knowledge Panel®.
The margin of sampling error is ±1.86 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, for results based on the entire sample.
"Rising number of Americans are switching religions"
they have a right to
the Constitution, that TTFers are not fond of, guarantees freedom of religion
"Nearly a quarter of Americans say they used to follow a different religious tradition or denomination than the one they practice now "
which would tend to make religion stronger
because this means people in religious groups are true believers rather than just taking the path of east resistance
"Why it matters: The jump in religion-switching comes as many Americans say they no longer believe in their initial religion's teachings"
which would tend to make religion stronger
because this means people in religious groups are true believers rather than just taking the path of east resistance
"— or, in many cases, disagree with a religion's stance against LGBTQ+ people"
really? how many cases?
if you only pay attention to the media-entertainment-liberal complex, you'd think America is obsessed with homosexuality
it isn't
"More Americans also are turning away from Christianity and are seeing themselves as unaffiliated with any religion or as religious "nones,""
which would tend to make religion stronger
because this means people in religious groups are true believers rather than just taking the path of east resistance
"even as some conservative Republicans seek to inject more religion into schools and public life."
the Constitution, that TTFers are not fond of, guarantees freedom of religion
Americans should be free to inject more religion into schools and public life
Somebody is a little unclear about how this "whistleblower" thing works. It's not usually a paid position.
REPORTER: Today's hearing is about how the FBI is politicized, but do you think it's appropriate for some of these whistleblowers to be paid by one of Trump's former advisers?
JIM JORDAN: They got a family! How are they supposed to feed their family?
The doomsday scenario some feared post Title 42 has not yet come. Remember, millions of immigrants were said to be massed to swarm over the border into this country. Senators' speeches were already written: "Biden wants to open the borders and let anybody come into this country." Talking points were lying on office printers across Washington DC.
Why have the numbers gone down?
"We hear a lot of rumors...some people are being deported. We really don’t know exactly what is going on."
Hee-hee. Maybe the OG knows what he's doing. Pass the cheese, please.
Mike Pence tells Fox "I like Walt Disney, not Woke Disney."
Silence falls over the mouse family as they gaze in awe at the television. Grandpa Mouse breaks the silence. "Wow, this guy is one tough hombre. What's the name again -- Pants? Tents? What'd they say?"
"It's Pence, Grandpa," a Little Mouse says. "He's the one they wanted to hang, remember?"
Grandpa ruminates. "Hang? Oh yeah. Well, this Dyke Pants guy really means business," he says. "He's a heavy hitter, no doubt. A serious politician. I like him."
The Air Force, having the usual percentage of LGBT people in it, issued a memo calling for observance of Pride Month. For instance, one base, Robins Air Force Base in Georgia announced a "Pride Game Night" on June 10, a Unity in Diversity Color Run on June 16, and a panel discussion titled "Our History, Our time!" on June 28th. Their advertisement states "ALL ARE WELCOME!!"
In response, Republican Congressman Chip Roy told Fox News, "If DOD doesn’t put a stop to these kinds of divisive -- and frankly embarrassing -- DOD events, Republicans should pull support for this year's [National Defense Authorization Act]."
On one hand, the military budget for the year; on the other, some games, a run, a lecture. By Republican logic it makes sense to throw out our entire national defense if it hurts the gays.
Why are they so interested in gay people, anyway? We're too little to donate to campaigns, but most mellow Little Mouses agree that Republicans should take a "wider stance" on the topic.
Reading here in the Mousington Post:
"As the laws in this country become more extreme and non-evidence based, the United States is becoming more of a pariah on the global stage" in terms of access to safe abortions using methods recommended by experts, said [research scientist] Moore. "Countries that may have previously [looked] to the United States as a role model are now looking at the United States askance and saying, 'We can do better than that. This is what not what we know to be good for reproductive health.'"
"...decisions like those in Uganda and the United States fall outside the direction of a clear global trend."
Republicans believe we can learn a lot from Uganda. Great place, they say, a real model for the future of a Christian America.
George Santos
Al Franken
That is all.
Divisive (pronunciation undetermined). adj. Any situation or event where straight white Christian men are not the center of attention.
Gym Jordan's proceedings were intended to embarrass the bureau, but they only revealed the FBI’s accusers and their allies to be corrupt fools. Jordan hid transcripts from committee members, downplayed the fact that some of his witnesses have been paid by a member of Donald Trump’s team, and pretended his so-called "whistleblowers" don’t have serious credibility problems.
A Little Mouse predicted that. Very smart, those Little Mouses. Gym Jordan, not so much.
Luckily Grandpa Mouse can't figure out how Twitter works. If he had, he could have seen what the Libertarian Party's official account tweeted this afternoon. They are in favor of child labor and opposed to education.
"In the workplace, a child will learn valuable skills they can’t apply elsewhere. At public schools, they learn to hate their parents and the very things that make them free."
Grandpa would agree with that. He would say, "Golldang kids need to get a job." Grandpa Mouse did not go to school. Starting as a kid, he worked a hard job with no pension plan, no health plan, no sick days. He says, "It was good enough for us, it's good enough for these squeaky tail-whippers today."
Marjorie Taylor Green and other Republicans are desperately *hoping* for a surge in migrants after Title 42. Now that it hasn't happened, they're simply pretending it has.
They would also like to destroy the country's economy and blame it on Biden. We shouldn't have to put up with this.
Hello everyone,
I'm just briefly stopping by to post a small discrete section of what I've been writing:
A Zygote or Fetus Is Not a Person
Many anti-choice people will insist that a pregnancy at any stage is a "person" or "human". This is manifestly untrue. Let's take a zygote, for example.
When we think of what a person is we think of certain features, abilities, and characteristics. A person can move, think, feel pain, feel pleasurable sensations, eat, laugh, love, hate, and make plans for the future (even if the future is only the next few seconds). By that universally accepted standard a zygote is in no way a person - it can do none of that, it is capable of nothing we think of a person being able to do. Now I hear some of you angrily insisting a zygote is human and I'll grant you that it's human in the same sense that one of my fingernail clippings is human - it originates from a human, it is of a human, it is human matter, but it is NOT a human being, it is NOT a person. A zygote merits no more consideration than a mosquito biting you does, the destruction of a zygote is no more immoral than the destruction of a mosquito or amoeba, it feels no pain, it has no awareness, it is in no practical sense a person.
So, at what point does a pregnancy become a person? A pregnancy exists on a continuum, at one end definitely not a person and at the other end definitely a person. Appropriate concern for the living cells in a pregnancy that will become a person also varies on a continuum, from being of a zygote of no concern to a fetus on the verge of birth being a great concern. At any intermediate stage of development the living cells of a pregnancy are of more or less concern depending on how much of a person it is. Experts say a fetus isn't capable of feeling pain until 35 weeks. I've had people argue that a zygote can feel pain because "If it's alive it can feel pain!" but there's no truth to that. If that were true we should be concerned about causing plants pain when we harvest and eat them - precious few people feel that way. No, to feel pain one needs certain features and abilities, nerves to sense and transmit the pain signal and a brain developed enough to perceive it. A zygote or first trimester fetus has none of that, it is incapable of feeling pain. The ability to feel pain is a benchmark for how much concern we as people should have for a fetus, a fetus capable of feeling pain being of greater concern than one that does not.
At the beginning of the continuum on the way to becoming a person the abortion of a zygote by the morning after pill is of no ethical concern to a reasonable person. As the fetus develops we have increasing concern for it and as it nears birth a medically unnecessary abortion becomes completely unethical.
A popular lie amongst Republicans is that healthy fetuses are being aborted a day or two before natural birth would take place or even after natural birth takes place (which is murder). The truth is third trimester abortions are very, very rare and the circumstances that lead to one are such that any reasonable person would agree an abortion is the most ethical choice. No woman in the third trimester of pregnancy wants to have an abortion. Pregnancies that develop to this point are virtually always wanted pregnancies, or at least one where the woman has decided to give birth. The only time an abortion is performed in a third trimester is when there is something seriously wrong with the fetus or pregnancy. The fetus has died or is severely deformed and sure to die shortly after birth or there are serious complications with the pregnancy such that continuing it will likely kill the mother and/or the fetus. No woman is having a third trimester abortion as a means of birth control and anyone who would lie about this to get your vote would be harmful in a position of power or authority.
Throughout recorded history, and in virtually every society, the social and legal convention has always been that a pregnancy does not become a person until live birth. There are myriad legal and practical reasons for this and there is no good argument for changing this universal convention. There's no ethical reason for so-called "personhood" laws that absurdly define a zygote a as person, the entire purpose of such laws is to punish and discourage women who have sex without wanting to get pregnant.
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's inquiry produced more than two dozen criminal cases, including against a half-dozen Trump associate. Though it did not charge any Trump aide with working with Russia to tip the election, it did find that Russia interfered on Trump's behalf and that the campaign welcomed, rather than discouraged, the help.
After four years of searching, Durham found practically nothing with which to rewrite history. His investigation yielded one conviction but also two acquittals, and even that one conviction wasn’t his success. It was due to a separate 2019 investigation by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.
Most important of all, in terms of the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, was that none of the three cases undid core findings by Mueller that Russia had interfered with the 2016 election in sweeping fashion. That Donald Trump welcomed, rather than discouraged, the help of Russian saboteurs is an indisputable, inalienable fact that will go with him to his grave.
Meanwhile, us Little Mouses are going to pour some nice cool Black-Eyed Susans and watch the Preakness on our little tiny TV. We're hoping it doesn't rain.
Wow, Giuliani's lawyer quit on him this week. So did Trump's. Now, so did Santos'.
Why don't attorneys want to work with Republicans?
Special counsel John Durham’s report on the Russia collusion fiasco deserves more attention than it is getting, and its critics are dismissing it for one big reason: The 306 pages describe the great failure of original special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mr. Mueller was named special counsel in May 2017, after Democrats and media claimed Donald Trump fired FBI director Jim Comey to stop the bureau’s investigation into the Russia collusion tale. Mr. Mueller hunted for evidence that Mr. Trump was a Russian mole but couldn’t find it. Now the Durham report makes clear that the Mueller team failed to investigate how the collusion probe began as a dirty trick by the Clinton campaign and how the FBI went along for the ride.
The report includes evidence that those engaged in the FBI’s initial Crossfire Hurricane probe and Democratic attorneys used their positions on the Mueller investigating team to cover up the FBI mess. Among Mr. Mueller’s initial hires were FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI analyst Brian Auten and FBI lawyer Lisa Page—all at the epicenter of the Crossfire fiasco.
Of Mr. Mueller’s 18 attorneys, several worked in the Obama Justice Department during the Crossfire probe, including Andrew Weissmann—a highly partisan Democrat who attended Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election night party. They had a strong incentive to hide the truth.
One telling example: The Durham report documents the Mueller team’s handling of Charles Dolan, a Democrat who was a source for at least one of the false allegations about Mr. Trump and Russia. The FBI Crossfire team was told in September 2016 by Christopher Steele that Mr. Dolan had information related to the infamous dossier, yet the team never followed up. Agents on Mr. Mueller’s team later realized Mr. Dolan’s importance and pushed to interview him, but they were blocked.
One agent told Durham investigators that he was confident Mr. Auten told him to “hold off” interviewing Mr. Dolan. (Mr. Auten said he didn’t recall.) The agent also recalled a meeting at which Mr. Weissmann was present when the agent raised the Dolan information but received “very little feedback.” Another agent and an analyst also pushed the Dolan news in a briefing that included Mr. Auten and Jeannie Rhee (an attorney who once worked for the Clinton Foundation) and tried to open a case. Mr. Auten instructed the analyst to “cease all research and analysis related to Dolan.”
The report says the analyst told the Durham team that she believed the decision to block a probe of Mr. Dolan “was politically motivated,” as it “ran counter to the narrative that the Mueller Special Counsel investigators were cultivating given that Dolan was a former Democratic political operative.”
The analyst also relayed that at various times “Rhee opined, in sum, that there was no longer a need to investigate the [dossier], because the reports were not within the scope of the Mueller Special Counsel mandate.” Mr. Auten says the Mueller leadership in September 2017 told the team to “cease work on attempting to corroborate the [dossier].”
In an understatement for the ages, the Durham report notes that this “directive” was “somewhat surprising given that Director Mueller’s broad mandate was to investigate, among other things, Russian election interference in the 2016 presidential election.” This refers to the Durham finding that the Russians may have compromised Mr. Steele’s sources before he even started writing his dossier.
All of this suggests that the Mueller probe was as much a cover-up as an attempt to find evidence of collusion. And it vindicates the view we expressed in October 2017 that Mr. Mueller, as a former FBI director, should have resigned as special counsel because he lacked the proper distance from the bureau.
At the time any skepticism about the Mueller probe, or the Russia collusion narrative, was denounced as an apology for Mr. Trump. The Durham report shows how wrong the rest of the press corps was. The Durham probe would never have been necessary if Mr. Mueller and his team had done an honest job
Former White House lawyer Ty Cobb believes the "feds are coming fast" for Donald Trump, predicting that the investigation into the former president's alleged mishandling of classified documents will land him in prison.
Cobb, a former U.S. assistant attorney and member of the Trump legal team between July 2017 and May 2018, said on Thursday that a plethora of evidence exists to convict the former president.
Mrs. Mouse thinks he'll probably get away with everything, since there are different laws in this country for the rich and powerful and for us Little Mouses. As a good, patriotic, Constitution-loving American Mouse, I have the feeling Mister Trump is going to spend a long time time in prison. Especially when that espionage charge comes down on him.
That's what they charged the Rosenbergs with, isn't it? Life in prison for Trump might not be real long.
It's a pretty safe bet that Georgia versus Donald Trump will be coming our way in August. But don’t forget the other 15 or more defendants that the special grand jury recommended indicting, including Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows. It’s going to be a yuge criminal case. The Republican Party trying to steal an election, that's a big deal.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, threatened to investigate Bill and Hillary Clinton, saying "They not only didn't investigate her like they did President Trump, they gave her campaign a defensive briefing. They should have done the same for President Trump because they literally had no evidence."
Yeah well they did have enough evidence to indict or convict nearly three dozen people and three companies associated with Trump, including Russians who were working with his campaign.
And remember, fun fact: Hillary did not have any classified material in her famous emails. None.
Daniel Penny, who held a homeless man in a chokehold on a New York subway until his death, said the accusations against his character are "a little bit comical" because he loves "all people."
Wow, you sometimes hear somebody say they are in a "suffocating relationship." Wait till they meet this wonderful murderer. And his fine-tuned sense of humor.
20% of patients are unhappy with their knee replacements. In comparison, a review of 27 studies involving 8,000 teens and adults who had transgender surgeries found that only 1% of trans people regret transitioning. Meanwhile the rate of regret for other medical procedures and even having kids is much much higher. Banning gender-affirming care is intellectually dishonest and makes no sense. The cruety is the point.
The NAACP, long an advocate for Black Americans, joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization, and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group, in issuing travel advisories for the Sunshine State, where tourism is one of the state’s largest job sectors.
The warning approved Saturday by the NAACP’s board of directors tells tourists that, before traveling to Florida, they should understand the state of Florida “devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”
“Taken in their totality, Florida’s slate of laws and policies targeting basic freedoms and rights pose a serious risk to the health and safety of those traveling to the state,” Equality Florida’s advisory said.
Travel advisories for an entire state. "Florida man" used to be a joke, now it's serious.
"https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/22/exclusive-leaked-policy-exposes-fox-news-stances-on-woke-ideology/">Leaked Policy Exposes Fox News Stances on Woke Ideology
Fox News employees are allowed to use bathrooms and dress in alignment with their gender identity, nd they must also be addressed by their preferred name and pronouns in the workplace, according to policies outlined in the company handbook, which has been leaked. Fox also offers to help employees come up with a “Workplace Transition Plan” to ease their gender transition at work.
They want to have a nice workplace but don't want anybody else to.
The Hill has an interesting little article here based on the General Social Survey.
Does God exist? Only half of Americans say a definite yes
Mainline Protestantism, the backbone of faith in many American communities, is "collapsing," said a recent article on the decline of Baptists, Methodists and other denominations.
Between hating gays and women's health and loving guns, people are abandoning this miserable lifestyle.
Since the 1970s, the share of Americans who identify with Protestant denominations has declined from nearly 1 in 3 to around 1 in 10.
The share of Americans who identify as white evangelical Protestants has dwindled from 23 percent to 14 percent since 2006. The share of mainline white Protestants has fallen from 18 percent to 14 percent. White Catholics have declined from 16 percent of the population to 13 percent.
Maybe the fascism we are seeing today is just the frantic spasms of a dying phase of history, trying to stay alive.
Nearly three-quarters of people believe in life after death, NORC data show. That number has remained relatively stable over the decades.
Only 7 percent of people do not believe in God.
“Belief is very stubborn in America today,” said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who studies faith.
"Maybe the fascism we are seeing today is just the frantic spasms of a dying phase of history, trying to stay alive."
or, perhaps, it's merely a delusion that lunatic fringe radicals have conjured because they can't face the fact that they have never convinced Americans to join them
On Friday night, Fox News' Laura Ingraham did something nearly unheard of on the propaganda-masquerading-as-news network: She admitted that a story Fox had been hyping was wrong.
For a week, Fox News and other right-wing outlets had been heavily hyping claims that "homeless veterans" were being forced out of a hotel in upstate New York to make room for Central American refugees. Due to diligent reporting from local reporters at the Mid Hudson News, however, the story quickly unraveled. The hotel denied the claims and had receipts to refute the right-wing narrative. By the end of the week, the Mid Hudson News had a group of homeless men ready to talk about how Sharon Toney-Finch, the source of this tale and the head of a veteran advocacy group, had recruited them to pretend they were the displaced veterans. The whole thing was a hoax.
"Turns out the group behind the claim made it up," Ingraham said, in a rare moment of honesty. However, she swiftly returned to the comfier space of mendacity, saying, "We have no clue as to why anyone would do such a thing."
This, of course, is total nonsense. Ingraham knows exactly why someone would fake such a story: Because it works. Whether Toney-Finch's goals were money, fame, or politics, she appears to have correctly surmised that a surefire way to get wall-to-wall coverage in right-wing media is to roll out some B.S. story that validates the bigoted beliefs of their audience. Indeed, history shows that hoaxes and fake stories like this don't just routinely take off in right-wing media, but often gain enough momentum to launch into the mainstream media, giving the lies more traction and validation across the political spectrum. That's what happened with "Clinton's emails," a nothingburger story that nonetheless shaped voter opinions, because mainstream journalists kept asking then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to explain herself, without ever telling audiences there was nothing to explain.
The pattern plays out the same way again and again: Right-wing operatives claim to have a "whistleblower" or "undercover footage" or some other evidence of a "scandal." The right-wing media cover it breathlessly, and the mainstream media, afraid of being left behind, soon amplify the false story. Eventually, the lies get debunked, but only after the story has lodged into the public imagination. Typically, the debunkings are much quieter, as well, which means most Americans who heard the original hoax never hear the truth.
It's a strategy that was used to sell the Iraq War, by hyping false claims that Saddam Hussein was concealing weapons of mass destruction. "Benghazi". "Planned Parenthood sells fetal parts." Claims that the now-destroyed anti-poverty organization ACORN was covering up for sex traffickers. Same story over and over: Right wing hoaxes, fueled by mainstream coverage, spread rapidly. Even the Satanic panic of the 80s fits the mold. Stories of Satanic ritual abuse were first floated by deceptive conservative sources, only to flow into the mainstream press that didn't look too closely at people's false claims. The truth eventually comes out with these kinds of stories, but it's usually too late to stop the damage.
Will it work? On one hand, there's still a strong desire in the mainstream media to prove they're not "biased" by giving Fox News and Republicans the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, there's other signs that the Beltway press has generally become better at debunking Republican lies before giving them airtime.
For instance, both Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have been trying for over a year to use their House committee chairs to spread disinformation. They use all the usual propaganda techniques, such as false claims to have "whistleblowers" or reliance on untrustworthy sources. But rather than credulously quoting Republican claims without contextualizing them, the press has been doing a much better job of focusing coverage on the lack of credibility — or the lack of existence — of these supposed "witnesses". Jordan in particular seems frustrated that it's a lot harder that it used to be to get the press to parrot his lies uncritically.
Unfortunately, disinformation has a lot more channels to go through than it used to. Obviously, social media is the biggest purveyor of GOP lies, helping outright nonsense spread faster than even Fox News could dream of. Plus, there's a number of alternative media bad actors, like Joe Rogan, who are only happy to do the "tell the big lie, and then quietly admit it wasn't true" game on topics like whether schools offer litter boxes to kids who "identify as cats."
Still, it cannot be understated how important it is to have mainstream media validating right wing nonsense. It's why Trump was so eager to go on CNN to tell lies, even though Fox News has a much larger audience. The veneer of Beltway acceptance goes a long way towards reassuring people who want to buy into conspiracy theories that they aren't "crazy" or "fringe." There was a time when a preposterous story like the "homeless vets displaced by migrants" hoax could have exploded across mainstream media before anyone bothered to check if it was true. That the press turned its nose up to this right wing bait is a hopeful sign of progress.
hypocrite n. definition:
Video: Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend Brian Glenn in drag.
Glenn: "I may keep the pantyhose on. It does feel kind of good actually."
UPDATE: Investigators have seized a Nazi flag from the scene where a driver was detained after a truck crashed into security barriers near the White House, officials say.
Miami-Dade K-8 elementary students are prohibited from reading the poem The Hills We Climb, which was recited by poet Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, following a parent's complaint.
So -- that's where we're headed if we don't stop it at home. Maryland could end up just like Florida.
Luckily all the Little Mousies have most of the poem memorized. They can take our cheese, but they can't take our poetry!
Former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton said “people have the right to consider” his age as a factor to re-elect him to another term in office.
During an appearance at the Financial Times Weekend Festival in Washington, D.C., Clinton, who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2016, was asked by Financial Times editor Edward Luce about the moment when Biden almost fell walking down the stairs during the Group of Seven (G-7) summit in Hiroshima, Japan.
“Every time that happens, your heart is in your mouth, because these things could be consequential. Is that a concern?” Luce asked Clinton.
“Well, I mean, it’s a concern for anyone. Clinton responded. “his age is an issue. And people have every right to consider it.”
Clinton also said that she believes that Biden is determined to run for another term in office.
Clinton’s remarks come nearly a month after Biden announced that he plans to run for reelection in 2024 amid weeks of speculation. Biden has faced questions about his age and whether he is up for a full campaign season and a second term as president
After MTG spoke at Nick Fuentes' America First Political Action Conference event in 2022, Fuentes showered her with praise. Now Fuentes claims that he was just using her because "women do not belong in politics. I all along never accepted Marjorie Green as a congresswoman."
Sure, now that we know her boyfriend is a drag queen.
Little Mouses don't care what you wear, we don't like MTG because she's mean and dumb.
More than 450 Catholic clergy in Illinois sexually abused nearly 2,000 children since 1950, the state’s attorney general found in an investigation released Tuesday, revealing that the problem was far worse than the church had let on.
Attorney General Kwame Raoul said at a news conference that investigators found that 451 Catholic clergy abused 1,997 children in Illinois between 1950 and 2019, though he acknowledged that the statute of limitations has expired in many cases and that those abusers “will never see justice in a legal sense.”
Us Little Mouses have a couple of drag queens, there are a fair number of gay and trans Little Mouses, but we like to raise our Little Ones in innocence and safety. We don't have any need here for Christian clergy. So many of them are groomers.
"More than 450 Catholic clergy in Illinois sexually abused nearly 2,000 children since 1950"
almost all were homosexuals who found the priesthood a convenient place to hide because the celibacy vow gave them a plausible reason to not seem interested in girls
Rightwing goons have been threatening retail employees selling Pride merchandise. Target has decided to give them what they want.
"Since introducing this year's collection, we've experienced threats impacting our team members' sense of safety and well-being while at work," Target said in a statement Tuesday. "Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior."
Target wouldn't say which items it was removing but among the ones that had attracted the most attention were "tuck friendly" women's swimsuits that allow trans women who have not had gender-affirming operations to conceal their private parts.
How much would it cost to provide store security with, say, baseball bats?
Not a big surprise that Target corporate leadership sides with the nazis on this one. Violence works, at least at Target.
Wanda Sykes: "Until a drag queen walks into a school and beats eight kids to death with a copy of 'To Kill A Mockingbird', I think you’re focusing on the wrong shit."
This is an appeal to rational people. Republicans won't understand it. Us Little Mouses are just glad we outnumber them.
The House Ethics Committee ended its two-year investigation into Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., over allegations that he had ties to a suspected Chinese intelligence operative. Republicans were sure that Democrats are just as bad as them, and planned to embarrass the Democratic Congressman. Turns out even they could not find anything at all to accuse him of.
In a letter to Swalwell dated Monday, the committee said it will take no further action in the probe that began in April 2021 into “allegations raised in the complaint that you may have violated House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct in connection with your interactions with Ms. Christine Fang,” the suspected Chinese spy.
It was supposed to be a historic moment for Twitter: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would smoothly kick off his presidential candidacy on the social media platform.
An uninterrupted conversation between DeSantis and Twitter CEO Elon Musk would be live-streamed on Twitter Spaces to mark the event. Musk owns Twitter and they have been talking about him running as Rhonda Santis's vice presidential candidate.
But instead, the live audio event was beset with technical malfunctions. After some 20 minutes of crashing and echoing and chaos, it abruptly ended.
Many on Twitter had a one-word description for it: "disaster."
Hey did you see the entire House of Representatives break out in extended laughter when Marjorie Taylor Green -- the dumb one with the drag-queen boyfriend -- pounded the gavel and told them to observe decorum.
We let the Little Mouses watch the news today so they could see that. It was just so funny, and the Little Ones squeak when they giggle and it was so cute. Watch that video, Congress can't stop laughing at her, it's so absurd. Ironic is the word.
CNN's Trump town hall was a hilarious and predictable journalistic and political disaster that brought CNN mockery on the day of the event. It was also a business failure as well: A paltry 3.1 million viewers tuned in.
This shouldn’t have been a surprise—Trump simply does not have the drawing power he once had and the public is clearly sick of him. But more than that, CNN's ratings last week were the worst the network has posted since June 2015 -- a momentous month in American politics, given Trump’s now infamous escalator ride. The network averaged just 429,000 total daily viewers from Monday-Friday, less than half of those of MSNBC and Fox News.
Little Mouses certainly do not want to see Trump, rightwing apologists, and spineless bothsiderism on our little tiny television set. We want to make the world a better place, not some kind of authoritarian dystopia.
Did you see that Rhonda Santis video that came out this week? Very impressive, fighter jets screaming overhead as Rhonda looks dreamily off into the great future. Real presidential imagery.
But wait. This just in:
The super PAC supporting Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign altered footage to include the sound and sight of fighter jets flying over the Florida governor in its video promoting his campaign launch. Real video of DeSantis' speech on Nov. 5, 2022, in Port St. Lucie shows there wasn't a military flyover or jet sounds during the event.
Huh, imagine that. Fake news.
Oh-oh, there's blood in the water. The rightwingers are turning on each other.
Alan Dershowitz says he was mistakenly listed as the lead attorney in Kari Lake’s suit against the Arizona secretary of state and supervisors of two Arizona counties.
"I do not like Miss Lake," Dershowitz told U.S. District Judge John Tuchi. "I would never have voted for her. I would never in a million years be part of any campaign to influence or affect the election."
Stephen K. Bannon, a longtime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, is scheduled to stand trial in May of next year for what prosecutors say was his role in defrauding Americans who paid money toward the construction of a southern border wall, a judge said Thursday.
The Little Mouses laugh and laugh when Republicans complain about jail conditions. They want to lock everybody else up, and then it's like, "Yuck, it's dirty in here." "Ooh these guards are mean to me." "I never get to do anything." "I gotta poop in a hole in the floor like an ordinary criminal." Grandma Mouse surprised us all at dinner yesterday when she said, "If they don't like it they shouldn't break the fucking law. Please pass the cheese, sweetie." She doesn't usually talk like that. Uncle Musculus suggested that they should de-louse Steve Bannon before his trial, which we all thought seemed like a good idea.
The Florida mom who got Amanda Gorman's poem banned apologizes for promoting “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Her Facebook account features a flood of political posts reflecting right-wing ideologies including the antisemitic Protocols. Miami Against Fascism also shared video of the woman, Daily Salinas, with the Proud Boys.
Salinas challenged the Gorman poem, which she says she hasn’t read in its entirety, on the grounds that it contains "indirect hate messages." Asked why she wanted a list of books removed, Salinas said she had just been expressing her "opinion" that they did not "support the curriculum" but declined to elaborate. She said she had only read parts of the books. "They have to read for me because I’m not an expert," she said. "I'm not a reader. I’m not a book person. I’m a mom involved in my children’s education."
Little Mouses, in case you don't know, have little tiny books. But we actually read them. Luckily we hve good strong eyes and can see the little tiny letters. We don't tell other people that they can't read stuff, because I hate to say it mouses seem to be much smarter than humans.
A Texas House Committee investigating criminal Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton have voted unanimously to recommend his impeachment and removal from office for bribery, abuse of office and ethics violations. The House General Investigating committee found that Paxton had repeatedly broken state laws, including misuse of official information, abuse of official capacity and retaliation.
Paxton tweeted the allegations against him were based on "hearsay and gossip, parroting long-disproven claims" and being championed by "RINOs" -- Republicans in name only.
They've been investigating the guy for seven years. Even his list of past crimes is long. And there he is, at the top of the criminal justice food chain, judging and prosecuting other people. Texas voters were aware of the allegations against Paxton, and re-elected him this past November anyway. Guess thats just how they are down there.
This just in, Ken Paxton's articles of impeachment:
Disregard of official duty: 7
Misapplication of public resources: 1
Const'l bribery: 2
Obstruction of justice: 2
False stments in offcl records: 3
Conspiracy, attempted: 1
Misappropriation of public rsrcs: 1
Dereliction of duty: 1
Unfitness for ofc: 1
Abuse of public trust: 1
Now there's a God-fearing, Constitution-loving Republican for ya! What do you wanna bet he gets elected again? They love this stuff, I mean this guy is really owning the libs.
Here’s Ronna McDaniel on Fox News saying that a possible debt default “bodes very well” for the Republican presidential field
The Washington Post: "Prosecutors in addition have gathered evidence indicating that Trump at times kept classified documents in his office in a place where they were visible and sometimes showed them to others, these people said."
Birdies in the trees are tweeting that old song "Espionage Act." It was a hit in the 1950s by a husband-and-wife group called The Rosenbergs.
"Target Corp. has seen its market cap drop by billions of dollars in the aftermath of the outcry over its Pride clothing line as the retailer finds itself mired in its own Bud Light moment.
The company’s market capitalization has lost as much as $9 billion since May 17 amid a backlash over its Pride 2023 apparel line for children and adults, which included some items created by a Satanist-inspired British designer Abprallen.
At the end of trading Wednesday, the market cap was $66.05 billion, representing a drop of 11% for a loss of $8.24 billion from $74.29 billion on May 17."
Target sold clothes made by a satanic homosexual sympathizer
now, they will go the way of Bud Light
up next, the LA Dodgers
remember when gays boycotted Chik-Fil-A?
their sale went up!
ain't that America sumpin' to see!
GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel:
"You look at this debt ceiling crisis. You look at us about to default, and you see that president refused to come to the table with Republicans. This is a president that is failing the American people. So I think that bodes very well for the Republican field."
All the Little Mouses I know are hoping that America succeeds and prospers, so they will drop a lot of cheese where we can find it. We don't want Republicans to run things because they want the economy to fail. Then what do we do -- eat trash off the street? Puh-leeze.
President Joe Biden said today: "Defaulting on the debt—including trillions incurred under Donald Trump—could mean seniors missing Social Security checks and millions of jobs lost.
It sounds like the head of the Republican Party thinks that’s a price worth paying to elect Republicans."
Hopefully has already thought of a way to undermine their plan to destroy the American and world economy. Biden mumbles a little, but I don't think those Republicans have a chance against Dark Brandon.
The tally of people infected with the coronavirus after attending a high-profile CDC conference in April has risen to at least 181.
About 70% of participants who responded to a CDC survey said they did not wear masks at the event.
Us Little Mouses have a saying that dates all the way back to the Velveeta Age: "Ignorance is not irony." Of all people, these doctors and epidemiologist-types should have known to wear masks. Cheese, I mean jeez.
Tina Turner live from Edmonton (1982 @ Devil's Lake Ranch)
While all the other GOP presidential candidates were busy campaigning on Thursday, USA Today reported that Trump was kicking back at Trump National Golf Course in Virginia, which will soon host a tournament on the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour — the third at a property owned by the former president just this year. (Two more will be scheduled at Trump properties in New Jersey and Florida.) Last year, Trump — in typically obtuse style — even scheduled a tournament at the New Jersey club on Sept. 11, drawing outrage from the families of 9/11 victims. Trump said he didn't know what they were talking about and defended Saudi Arabia, telling ESPN that "nobody has gotten to the bottom of 9/11."
It's unclear how much money has actually changed hands, but Trump admits that he's been paid a fee, which he calls "peanuts," by the sponsoring Public Investment Fund, the same Saudi government entity that "invested" in Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's business to the tune of $2 billion just a couple of months after he left the White House. (That's a deal that makes Hunter Biden's alleged transgressions look like kids gambling for nickels in the lunchroom.) These tournaments generally bring in millions to the clubs that host them so those are some pretty big peanuts.
According to USA Today, a reporter asked Trump whether his resorts have gotten these tournaments because of his favorable policies toward Saudi Arabia as president. He flippantly replied, "Not at all." Apparently, his defense of the Saudi government's assassination and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi wasn't significant. They just love him, and his golf courses.
Trump extolled the virtues of the LIV Golf tour (a rival to the long-dominant PGA), telling reporters, "They have unlimited money, and they love it. And it's been great publicity for Saudi Arabia. They've been great for golf. The Saudis have been fantastic for golf. And ... inside their country, they're going to do some great courses." Indeed, he has signed at least one development deal to license a golf and hotel complex in the Gulf state of Oman, financed by a Saudi firm.
LIV Golf is a key part of the Saudi regime's program of "sportswashing," meaning as a nation's attempt to use massive investment in sports to cover up for its human rights abuses. (The Saudi fund also took control of the English soccer club Newcastle United in a controversial 2021 deal.) Even aside from the Khashoggi atrocity, many of those horrors happened during Trump's term, as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took control of the ruling family by force, rounding up more than 400 members of the Saudi elite and torturing them.
Trump, as you may recall, was very impressed.
JUST IN: President Trump meets with Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman at G-20 in Japan, calls him "a friend of mine" and says that he's done "really a spectacular job" and that it's a "great honor" to meet with him.
"It's like a revolution in a very positive way," he said. That's the kind of support from a U.S. president that lots of money can buy.
Trump has huge investments in his golf course empire, which has suffered because of his Big Lie and the ripple effects of Jan. 6. The PGA tour pulled out of hosting its championship at Trump's club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and the British Open definitely isn't coming back to Turnberry, Trump's Scottish resort. LIV is the only game in town for Trump these days.
There is some evidence suggesting that special counsel Jack Smith may be looking into Trump's connections to LIV Golf in connection with the Mar-a-Lago case. The New York Times reported this a couple of weeks ago:
One of the previously unreported subpoenas to the Trump Organization sought records pertaining to Mr. Trump's dealings with a Saudi-backed professional golf venture known as LIV Golf, which is holding tournaments at some of Mr. Trump's golf resorts.
Just this week, the Times also reported that the subpoena also asked for the Trump Organization's real estate licensing and development deals in China, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Oman since 2017, when Trump became president. Most of the D.C. punditocracy has dismissed this as nothing more than Smith "dotting his I's and crossing his T's" before he makes his case. Maybe they're right. But at least someone is finally taking a look at what exactly was going on while Trump was running his business out of the Oval Office.
It's never been easy to separate Trump's financial motivations from his massive ego. He's excessively subject to flattery and that's often enough to gain his support. But his relationship with the Saudis clearly has a major financial component, as does Jared Kushner's, and all of that seems to be tied to their time in the White House.
If Trump were just retiring to his golf resorts and taking advantage of all the contacts he made while president, it might be reasonable just to let it go in the interest of never having to think about him again. But he's the clear frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination and he's openly helping the Saudi regime "sportswash" its human rights record while taking unknown millions from it.
Let's hope that unlike Robert Mueller, who refused to exceed his mandate and look at Trump's finances, Jack Smith sees this for the blatant corruption it is. Otherwise, we're just accepting that it's perfectly OK for presidents and presidential candidates to do big favors for autocratic foreign governments in exchange for money. Are we really that far gone?
45-year-old Christopher Fourcade, Director of Children's Ministries First Christian Church of Norman Oklahoma, was booked into the Cleveland County Detention Center on four complaints of lewd acts with a child and two complaints of possession of child pornography. There is no mention in the news articles about him being a drag queen.
It's a chicken-and-egg thing. Do these monsters become "youth pastors" so they can molest children, or do they learn on the job?
Patriot Front paraded through Washington DC last week in their nearly-matching khakis and masks covering their faces. And what are their beliefs? Well, they're nazis for one. But other stuff is coming out. Like, in Utah a Patriot Front guy pleaded guilty in a Utah court last month to nine felony counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and a misdemeanor count of dealing in material harmful to a minor. They found pictures on his cell phone and he admitted sending pictures of his penis to a young girl.
Jared Boyce was among 31 men associated with Patriot Front arrested last year near a gay pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and the child pornography case appears to be an outgrowth of what happened there.
Patriot Front is opposed to being gay, but they are okay with having sex with children. That's backwards from us Little Mouses and also backwards from normal human beings.
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."
― Voltaire
Letter to Damilaville, 1767
We were watching the news on our little tiny TV here inside the church walls, and then we talked about it over some nice cheddar.
We all agree. 1. The Republicans want to destroy the world economy so they can make the Democratic president look bad. And 2.President Biden is a smart guy, he sees what they're doing and he has played this politics game for a long, long time. All the mouses are confident he has something up his sleeve that will rescue the economy without sacrificing old people, poor people, and sick people so that billionaires can make more money. He's not going to let that happen.
On her "Jesus, Guns, and Babies" podcast, Kandiss Taylor, Georgia GOP District Chair, discussed biblical evidence that the Earth is actually flat. "The people that defend the globe don't know anything about the globe," said [podcast guest David] Weiss. "If they knew a tenth of what Matt [Long, podcast guest] and I know about the globe they would be Flat Earthers."
"All the globes, everywhere" Taylor said later in the discussion. "I turn on the TV, there's globes in the background ... Everywhere there's globes. You see them all the time, it's constant. My children will be like 'Mama, globe, globe, globe, globe' — they're everywhere. That's what they do, to brainwash," she added. "For me if it's not a conspiracy. If it is real, why are you pushing so hard everywhere I go? Every store, you buy a globe, there's globes everywhere. Every movie, every TV show, news media — why? More and more I'm like, it doesn't make sense."
We mouses need to remember that humans are still evolving. Maybe someday they will attain the intellectual aptitude of an actual mouse.
Police in Waco, Texas, arrested the former pastor at Baylor University on charges that he allowed a sex offender he called his “spiritual mentor” to sexually abuse two young relatives, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported. One of the victims was eleven years old at the time. Christopher Hundl, 38, was charged Tuesday with continuous sexual abuse of a child, which is a first-degree felony, and later released on $50,000 bond. Baylor University has reported that Hundl resigned from his position as minister for the Baylor chapter of Chi Alpha, a worldwide Christian ministry sponsored by the Assembly of God Church. Chi Alpha has been suspended from the university and is under investigation.
Us mouses almost didn't notice this story, it happens so often. This religious organization seems to set up pedophiles with children -- says they had a hot-tub party with little kids. Luckily they know they are forgiven for their sins, and won't have to feel bad about any of this.
Punchbowl News journalist Max Cohen asked Kevin McCarthy how he would describe his interactions with Biden during negotiations.
“Very professional, very smart. Very tough at the same time,” McCarthy said.
Here's how his own team feels about the Republicans' next presidential candidate.
Republican Opinions on Trump
Kilmeade: insane
Priebus: an idiot
McMaster: dope
Mnuchin: an idiot
Kelly: unhinged & an idiot
Mattis: 5th grader
Christie: a child
Coulter: a moron
Barr: detached from reality
DeSantis: a moron
Bolton: a Putin-loving moron
Tillerson: a fucking moron
John Fredericks is a conservative radio talk show host in Virginia. Here's his calm and level-headed assessment of the budget deal.
"Sell-Out! This is the biggest, worst most despicable sell-out of our base in Republican history. WE GOT NOTHING! WTF was the point of the bill we passed? It was a con-job. They think we are freaking stupid because we work for a living. Now they'll pass it with RINO and DEM votes! And they gave Biden a 2-year blank check! We need a GOP political revolt. Vacate McCarthy ASAP. Primary every Republican who votes for this in '24 with all we've got. We've been lied to, misled and played like dumb-shits. Their SPIN is pathetic. We're done with this."
Poor baby. They wanted to destroy the world's economy, but that mean Dark Brandon wouldn't let them. Here buddy, have a piece of cheese, 'll make ya feel better. It's a nice Swiss, 2017 vintage, slightly tangy with hints of mold. We found it under the sink last week.
Florida Republican Governor Rhonda Santis vowed during a Monday interview with Fox & Friends to "destroy leftism" if she defeats President Joe Biden in next year's presidential election. She said, "Everyone knows if I'm the nominee, I will beat Biden, uh, and I will serve two terms and I will be able to, uh, destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history."
Sadly us mouses had our tiny TV turned off and missed that show. I wonder if she explained, finally, what "woke" means. We had thought "woke" was a good thing, but I guess Ms. Santis is planning to destroy it, whatever it is.
Report: McCarthy’s work requirement proposal and his gripes about dependency come straight from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a conservative think tank that recently made headlines for helping secretly draft several state bills to roll back child labor laws.
McCarthy told Fox News Tuesday morning. "In this family we may have a child, able-bodied, not married, no kids, but he's sitting on the couch collecting welfare."
"We're gonna put work requirements on that individual, so he's going to have work requirements, he's gonna get a job, and he's gonna make the life easier," McCarthy said.
Mama Mouse found a rag that we wad up and sit on to watch out little tiny TV. We call it our "couch," and it's pretty nice. We'd rather have our kids sitting on the couch watching cartoons (Mickey Mouse, Mighty Mouse, Speedy Gonzalez, not Tom but Jerry...) than have them working in a slaughterhouse somewhere. Republicans are weird.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump are reportedly being scammed out of thousands of dollars through the sale of commemorative "Trump Bucks" that fraudsters say can be exchanged for real cash.
Several companies are allegedly using advertising tactics including creating AI-generated videos of Trump and other figures like Elon Musk to claim the worthless "Trump Bucks" will make them rich, according to a new report from NBC News.
Some of the people who bought the Trump memorabilia have attempted to exchange it for real US dollars at banks, and told NBC News that bank employees are reporting it as a growing issue. Several companies have been identified for marketing and selling the false currency, NBC News reported, including a number of businesses seemingly based in Colorado with names like Patriots Dynasty, Patriots Future, and USA Patriots.
"President Trump wants you to finally open your eyes and believe in his power for a better tomorrow!" reads a banner message on one of the sites advertising a "TRB Black Card," which sells as a single card for $90 or packs of up to 10 cards for $500.
The card promises buyers will be able to "live the American Dream, live the life you were promised and get the things you always wanted without thinking twice!"
A TikTok cited by NBC News features either an AI-generated or real person doing an impression of Trump in a fake appearance on Fox News promoting the products. Another video posted to Twitter features a fake audio clip of Musk playing over a video of the billionaire speaking at an event, claiming he has spent "one million" on the memorabilia and is going to "cash out" his Trump items to become "the richest person on the planet again."
One ad for the "Trump Bucks" — featuring a seemingly AI-generated voice identified as "John" — states "most people believe that the presidential election interfered with the course of history" and identifies Trump as "the great leader."
The ad also says the bills are "not legal tender," but seconds later says the TRB membership card will actually allow them to use the bills as tender and deposit them in banks like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase, or use them at popular retailers like Costco, Walmart, and Home Depot.
Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Walmart and Home Depot all told NBC News they don't accept "Trump Bucks," and a Bank of America spokesperson said the company has heard from employees about several people trying to exchange the worthless bills for significantly larger amounts of cash than they spent to buy them.
Impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a news interview that if he hadn’t stopped 2.5 million mail-in ballots during the presidential election, Biden would have won Texas & Trump would have lost the state.
This probably means he rigged the election so Beto O'Rourke lost, too.
Does anybody think that's how an election is supposed to work? Two and a half million people's votes didn't get counted but it's okay, the Republican won.
BTW this isn't a "confession." The guy is bragging. He wants to make sure he gets credit for this.
Two and a half million votes ain't nuthin to squeak at.
This just make me choke on my cheese.
Tara Reade, who accused Biden of sexual assault and had claims debunked, has just announced that she has defected to Russia, in a press conference with convicted Russian spy Maria Butina.
Watch for a rumor suggesting this is a double-dip backflip extra-underhanded triple-blind false flag operation, where Biden is trying to make this woman look bad while he continues operating his crime syndicate.
Or maybe this is what it seems to be: she has been working for Russia to undermine the president they don't like.
Occam's Razor, anyone?
Today, we remember Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider who was senselessly murdered by anti-abortion extremists on May 31st, 2009 while serving as an usher at his church. One of the very few physicians performing later abortion care at that time and already the victim of a previous assassination attempt, Dr. Tiller dedicated nearly forty years of his life as the only provider in Wichita, Kansas and living up to his motto: trust women.
Dr. Tiller’s murder serves both as a reminder of the violent and dangerous reality of the anti-abortion movement, and the courage of abortion providers who show up to work day in and day out, despite the danger they face. We will never forget the compassionate example he set.
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.” And if “we want to make certain that fascism does not come to America, we must make certain that it does not thrive anywhere in the world.”
Seventy-eight years after the publication of “FASCISM!” with its program for recognizing that political system and stopping it from taking over the United States, President Joe Biden today at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, honored those who gave their lives fighting to preserve democracy. “On this day, we come together again to reflect, to remember, but above all, to recommit to the future our fallen heroes fought for, …a future grounded in freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, opportunity, and…justice.”
“[T]he truest memorial to their lives,” the president said, is to act “every day to ensure that our democracy endures, our Constitution endures, and the soul of our nation and our decency endures.”
https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up
Bud Light apparently went too far after influencer Dylan Mulvaney, who is transgender, posted an Instagram video promoting a March Madness contest. Target apparently went too far by selling shirts with rainbows. And now, conservatives are setting their brain-poisoned sights on … Chick-fil-A, for the crime of having an HR department.
Italian American political commentator Joey Mannarino—who says his pronouns are Shut/Up—was at the forefront of whipping up the outrage on Monday:
Joey Mannarino
@JoeyMannarinoUS
·
Follow
We have a problem.
Chick-Fil-A just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
This is bad. Very bad.
I don’t want to have to boycott.
Are we going to have to boycott?
9:55 PM · May 29, 2023
“It’s only a matter of time until they start putting tranny semen in the frosted lemonade at this point,” Mannarino continued, making up a very odd scenario. Mannarino tweeted his fears while linking to Chick-fil-A’s diversity, equity, and inclusion page, where the company highlights its efforts to create a culture of belonging, invest in scholarship funds, and fight hunger.
Mannarino later posted a video—sporting sunglasses on a nice-looking balcony in Miami—insisting that he is “not mad.” (after all, he says, “I’m chilling, drinking a glass of wine on a nice afternoon”). But he went on to claim that DEI programs are the real racism, and that it’s not crazy for him to say Chick-fil-A will put “tranny semen in the frosted lemonade” because Bud Light is already apparently doing that.
Mannarino’s posts have incited an uproar among far-right online users, from noted conspiracy-peddler Stew Peters to self-proclaimed “moderate” Tim Pool.
A basic fact-check first: the company has not “just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” The current vice president has in fact served in the role since November 2021.
The real humor, of course, is the idea of conservatives boycotting one of the more historically culturally conservative chains in America. As of 2012, Chick-fil-A had donated over $5 million to viciously anti-LGTBQ groups. At the time, as the company faced backlash for the revelations, Republicans like Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee even led vapid counter-protesting efforts, like “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, to reward the company for not supporting same-sex marriage.
And even while the company eventually promised in 2019 to stop donating to anti-LGBTQ groups, the company owner, Dan Cathy, hasn’t. Cathy is a major donor to a far-right organization that bankrolled efforts to kill the Equality Act, which would have banned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Despite all that, online conservatives have whipped themselves up into a frenzy at the idea of a company embracing the notion of different kinds of people feeling equal and included.
Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, Friday, June 2 on Prime Video.
Duggar family secrets are spilled in a four-part docuseries looking at the controversial reality TV family and their ties to the embattled Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP).
Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets digs into the radical religious organization — a fundamentalist ministry which has long guided Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar's conservative faith. The Duggars's Christian beliefs — which include male superiority, no birth control, large families, homeschooling kids, conservative dress, female obedience and more — were the focus of their TLC shows, network staples for two decades. Both on-screen and off, the 19 Kids and Counting family promoted and attended IBLP events, even speaking at them. Since the mid-2010s, the Duggars and IBLP have been rocked by scandal. This docuseries looks at how the two are entwined.
Jill Duggar Dillard — a victim of childhood sexual abuse by her brother Josh Duggar, who was sent for "treatment" at an IBLP facility (he's now in prison after his 2022 child porn conviction) — goes on the record against the family in the doc alongside her husband Derick Dillard. Jim Bob's sister, Deanna Jordan, and niece, Amy Duggar King, also appear. They provide insight into the family while ex-IBLP survivors speak to the ministry's abusive practices under founder Bill Gothard, who resigned in 2014 after being accused of sexual harassment and molestation by over 30 women, including some minors.
Olivia Crist, who directed the project, tells Yahoo Entertainment, "It wasn't until I really started digging into the research of the insidious organization behind the family, the IBLP, that [I] started to kind of go down the rabbit hole of this cult."
Executive producer Blye Pagon Faust adds, "The story here is so much bigger than the Duggars."...
Gothard created IBLP's principles, which center around an "umbrella of authority," where the male is the leader of the family and is to be obeyed. Women, who are matched with a husband through their father, have as many kids as they can, teach them obedience, homeschool the kids and run the house (but have no part of the family finances). Females dress conservatively, under the direction of the father. TV, music (unless it's Christian), drinking, dating and dancing are discouraged. Females are discouraged from pursuing higher education while males are raised to be leaders, including in politics, to spread IBLP beliefs. Sexuality is to be repressed and ignored until marriage. Once married, women are not to resist their husband's need for physical intimacy.
“Gothard turned every father into a cult leader and every home into an island," Josh Pease, a pastor and journalist, said in the doc.
Gothard — who declined to comment for the series and previously denied sexual harassment and abuse allegations against him — created an entire IBLP offshoot for homeschooling called Advanced Training Institute (ATI), which the Duggar children — and thousands of other kids — followed. The program, sunsetted in 2021, centered on "Wisdom Booklets." Children were taught to not ask questions and follow patriarchal standards. Sex education wasn't taught, nor was evolution. One "lesson" shown was for kids to identify examples of lustful outfits worn by women. Kids were also taught to exhibit modesty in the home because "nakedness arouses insatiable lusts" in males.
In the doc, many talked about how they had no real education when they were done. Others claimed knowledge of sex abuse within family units like Josh molesting four of his sisters and another unidentified person...
Greeting cards that say “I’m happy that you’re queer"? Who could possibly be offended by that?
A bunch of people.
As we have seen recently, in boycotts against corporations such as Anheuser-Busch InBev and Target, there is a concerted effort to avoid businesses that celebrate homosexuality. Anheuser-Busch found itself in trlouble when transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney promoted Bud Light on their social media feeds during March Madness.
Target ticked off America with its annual Pride Month display of merchandise.
Bud Light sales have plummeted; the company backtracked, saying it never “intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.”
Target has removed LBGTQ items from shelves. In some stores, the retailer said, Pride displays were relocated from the front to the back. Its stock has taken a hit.
A rapper has dropped a music video claiming that “Target is targeting our kids.”
“You know they cutting these kids,” raps Forgiato Blow, “they leaving trannies with scars.”
In liberal North Hollywood, parents at Saticoy Elementary School made waves last week when they urged families to “keep your children home and innocent” rather than subject them to a Gay Pride and Rainbow Day Assembly on Friday.
According to the Associated Press, nearly 500 bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year to stop public schools from imposing homosexual ideology on kids. At least 17 states have passed laws that protects children from eupemistically-named "gender-affirming care" for "transgender" minors.
It wasn’t very long ago that companies were being viciously attacked by groups like GLAAD for donating money to pro-family politicians.
We should all be grateful to Anheuser-Busch.
Some corporations had to show how woke marketing could cost an iconic American brand dearly in terms of its image, its sales, and its market capitalization.
Through its special beer can produced for trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, Anheuser-Busch, in effect, volunteered for duty.
The CEO of General Motors didn’t really say in the 1950s that what’s good for GM is good for the country.
Still, to paraphrase the famous misquotation of auto executive Charles Wilson, what’s terrible for Bud Light sales is good for America.
With every viral anti-Bud Light video and 12-pack moldering on a store shelf or in a warehouse, the message is being sent to other corporations that gratuitous forays into the culture war are risky.
Target has directly learned the same lesson with its “pride” apparel and removed some clothes and made associated displays less prominent.
Coupled with the ongoing contention over Disney, whose image has taken a big hit among Republicans, the flare-ups raise the prospect that we’ve entered a new era of conservative consumer power.
There’s no doubt the rise of social media has made it possible to spread the word quickly about controversies, and conservatives are newly attuned to how corporations can trespass against their values and interests.
That said, the recent boycott successes are not necessarily replicable.
Bud Light proved uniquely vulnerable.
Its brand was an All-American product, the go-to beer for barbecues, hunting trips, and ball games — as easily enjoyed and uncontroversial as a flyover on the Fourth of July.
Why should a beer company, especially an unpretentious, mass-market beer company, be associating itself with a gay man who has decided he’s a woman and prances around like a teenager?
What is it about Dylan Mulvaney that says “beer” or “Middle America”?
Mulvaney made it worse by creating indelible imagery, dressing like Holly Golightly from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” in one video with a bunch of Bud Light and relaxing in a bathtub in another.
What’s transpired is more than a boycott; Bud Light has become a national joke.
Its signature blue-and-white cans and bottles now stand for ineptitude and out-of-touch marketing.
Picking up a six-pack shows that you aren’t in on the joke.
The advantage of Bud Light was that it was widely known and readily available; the problem is that its competitors are just as readily available.
Once someone stops to think about it for a minute, it’s as easy to pick up the Coors Light or something else right next to the Bud Light on the shelf or in the fridge.
Sure enough, as of April 15, Bud Light’s US retail store sales dropped 17% and sales of Coors Light and Miller Lite each grew 17%, according to the Wall Street Journal.
As for Target, even if it doesn’t get hit as hard as Anheuser-Busch, it is a low-margin business that can’t afford unnecessary consumer turbulence.
On the other end of the spectrum are difficult-to-boycott entities like the Los Angeles Dodgers, who embraced an anti-Catholic gay activist group.
The offended Dodgers fan may strenuously object but can’t just up and start rooting for the Los Angeles Angels.
The best outcome of all this would be if corporations realize that there’s a potential cost to going along with the woke cultural tide and resolve to stick to the 50-yard line of American national life.
No one is going to care if a boutique brand based somewhere in Blue America associates itself with every new progressive fad.
It’s the companies that are firmly in the mainstream that shouldn’t needlessly alienate people or take sides in contentions that have nothing to do with their core business.
Bud Light is an ongoing warning of the hazards.
Surely it’s not the future old Adolphus Busch imagined for his company, but it’s useful all the same.
My friends and I are bracing for the annual rainbow onslaught poised to swamp families coast to coast this June. This year’s storm looks like a Category 5; it’s already blowing the doors off the nearby Target and wreaking havoc on the Bud Light warehouse.
As bad as it is out in corporate land, it’s worse in the public schools, where it’s harder to see — almost like they’re trying to keep it secret! Many schools have even moved their pride events up to May so that no child is freed for summer vacation without being forced to take their required rainbow pill.
I was shocked to learn this week that not only are newborns not allowed to opt out of transgender indoctrination, but kids with Down syndrome aren’t either!
Incredibly, the Los Angeles Unified School District is doing just that. I don’t know why I’m surprised; LAUSD has never met a bad idea it didn’t immediately adopt and force on its kids.
This week, a friend of mine sent out an email account of her shocking experience at her local public elementary school’s morning assembly. She is an educated woman, a scholar, and an artist, and her older children are linguists and classical musicians. Somehow, in the heart of Los Angeles, she has raised a Catholic family of devout and artistic children.
Her youngest is 9 and was born with Down syndrome. He is enrolled in a classroom for children like him with developmental disabilities. But his intellectual limitations end at the door to his special classroom; in the school at large, he is subject to the same gender indoctrination the other 5- to 13-year-olds are forced to undergo. Not even a child with Down syndrome is free from learning about the wonders of becoming transgender. After all, this is vital knowledge for everyone 5 and up, no matter their disabilities!
Here is her account. Some names have been changed to protect her from the mob:
Once a month, there is a school-wide assembly to which parents are invited and then a coffee with the principal. I made a point of attending both this morning. I was eager to be part of the Friday morning with my son.
Assembly began with a Pledge of Allegiance and a greeting by the student council. Then, five students and a staff member came to the microphone bearing various incarnations of the “pride” flag and reminded everyone that June was pride month.
Taking turns, the speakers explained exactly what each of the letters of LGBTQ stood for, described the history of the flag, demonstrated various types of flags, and stated that the celebration was all about being kind to others and accepting where everyone came from. All the children there are between 5 and 13. There was applause after every speaker. At the end, the staff member, who I assumed was a school psychologist, said that she was there to listen to anyone who needed someone to listen to their story. In other words, come out to her behind your parent’s back.
Standing next to my son, I wondered how I could reasonably respond to the terrible outrage I had just witnessed. I know the LGBTQ agenda had infested the public primary school, but until now had not seen my son exposed to it. In Leo’s classroom for Moderate Intellectual Ability, the curriculum is completely different from common core. I see his work that comes home; some of it approaches activist preparation but without a clear agenda. Most is about identifying numbers, letters, colors, and so forth.
After the assembly, I went to the room where the coffee with the principal would take place. There were various points he addressed, then he asked if there were any questions, comments, or concerns. After a pause, I raised my hand.
I found myself saying more or less the following:
“Yes, I do have a concern. I have a son here at the school with a moderate intellectual disability. One of the things that I have to work on with my son is self-control. I think most parents work on self-control with their children at one point or another and worry about how their children will control their impulses. For example, when they are angry, we want them to use self-control, and in the classroom, we want them to raise their hand before speaking. When they start to enter adolescence, our children have to learn to control something new: their sexual impulses.”
The principal was nodding his head as I spoke. When I mentioned “sexual impulses,” he nodded even more and said “Mmmm.”
I continued.
“So I was really alarmed at the assembly this morning. At the assembly, there was a group of people whose message was about not controlling sexual impulses. It is one thing to spread the message about kindness. Everyone needs to be kind. But it is another thing to tacitly spread the message that it is OK to experiment with sexual impulses, that students could experiment with their sexual impulses which could lead to damage to their bodies, their minds, their psychology. Especially for my son, who will have great difficulty mastering control over his impulses and has a very low understanding, I think it is unfair to expose him to this. I request that in the future, I be notified in advance so that I can remove my son so that he is not exposed to this message.”
There were some hisses among the parents.
I had tried to do the best I could. I wanted my message to sound reasonable to the audience I was addressing. I couldn’t speak up for every child, but I could speak up for one: my son, Leo.
After I finished, he said, “Yes, every parent has a voice and a choice. After the meeting, please give me your son’s name so we can make sure he is not a part of that in the future.”
Wow. I was amazed.
Here is part of the email I sent to the principal:
“Personally, I do not know of any parent who would willingly encourage their child to enter a lifestyle that even potentially leads to disease, low self-esteem, and diminished self-worth. The best parents I know encourage their children to rise early, go to bed on time, have healthy, non-sexual friendships, disregard excess worries about sexuality during adolescence, and redirect the focus towards academics, sports, healthy hobbies, life goals, and self-discipline. The LGBTQ agenda, on the other hand, encourages young people to dwell on themselves, especially their budding sexuality, and experiment with life-altering and dangerous activity. Because their agenda is dangerous, I respectfully request that I be informed when the LGBTQ message is promoted at school.“
I ask for your prayers, as you may be confident of mine, in this strange, dysfunctional, dangerous, and diabolical struggle.
What an email! I encourage you to copy and paste her heroic words and send those to your own principal.
According to Greatschools.org, the elementary school in question is 50 percent Hispanic, 25 percent white, and 15 percent Filipino. The historically Catholic Hispanic demographic is not going to protect their own children — they are applauding it instead, or choosing to go along with it.
No one is coming to stop this. Your only option is to do what my friend is doing: opt out. Let your own school know you will not allow your child to take part.
In North Hollywood, also part of LAUSD, the brave parents at Saticoy Elementary are planning a boycott of the upcoming June 2 pride day school assembly. Their Instagram account encourages parents to “keep your kids home and innocent.” Other posts on the account read “Parents: We are taking back control!”
Another friend, this one who sends her daughter to an elite private all-girls school in Manhattan, has taken a similar approach. She, nearly alone among the parents, refuses to let them force her 10-year-old daughter to write her pronouns whenever she writes her name. She has to opt her daughter out of the rainbow activities.
Why? Because almost 10 percent of the eighth-grade class of girls already identifies as trans or queer, and the numbers are increasing each year. There is also a young girl at the school who identifies as a cat and walks on all fours. This is permitted. Annual tuition is $61,000 a year.
No child will be left behind as the golden rainbow horde ravages every school in America.
Opting out is your only choice — and the only hope for your kids.
Critics have hit out at Disney for inappropriately allowing a male to wear a dress. The company has made efforts to be more "progressive" in recent years - but it has upset fans who think it has gone too far with woke changes. The viral clip shows the Disney male employee dressed up as a 'Fairy Godmother's apprentice' and wearing matching eyeshadow. 'So, my name is Nick, I am one of the fairy godmother’s apprentices,' he says while welcoming a little girl to the store. I’m here to shop you around and make all your selections for the day.'
A Kansas woman was asked to leave the restroom at a Wichita library while accompanying her autistic adult son, just weeks after the state enacted a law that could ban individuals from using restrooms and other facilities that don't align with their sex assigned at birth. Karen Wild said she makes a trip to the central branch of the Wichita Public Library every week and has done so for years. This allows her to meet up with Wild's mother, who lives 45 minutes away and helps take care of her son, Ellis Dunville, who is autistic, has a seizure disorder and is cannot speak. Never once in that time, she said, have any library staff or patrons objected to her bringing her son into the women's restroom.
Don't tell anybody, but our cousins, the Little Mouses down the street, live in a Republican's closet, and at night they poop in his slippers. Serves them right for making stupid rules like this.
"What’s transpired is more than a boycott; Bud Light has become a national joke.
Its signature blue-and-white cans and bottles now stand for ineptitude and out-of-touch marketing.
Picking up a six-pack shows that you aren’t in on the joke."
No; what this really shows is how easily the conservative base is distracted from real issues by a perpetual stream of new culture war propaganda designed to keep them from noticing that the corporate elite keep pushing them ever closer to economic serfdom.
A few years ago it was "The War on Christmas" (TM), Starbucks having secular designs on their holiday coffee cups, and people no longer saying "Merry Christmas."
There never really was a War on Christmas, those boycotts of Starbucks didn't really go anywhere, and they still make coffee cups with snowflakes but no baby Jesus on them.
In a few years nobody will know who Dylan was or remember exactly why Kid Rock completely lost his sh*t and blew up cases of innocent beer with his AR-15 like he was an angry 18-year old firing lead and retribution back at his school bullies.
People will be swilling Bud Light the same as they ever did and conservatives will move on to other culture / race / sexual minority wars as soon as the old one stops angering their base - they have to keep their base angry to keep them showing up at the polls.
In the mean time, corporations will keep inflating their prices, gouging their customers, and paying the bulk of their employees starvation wages while they pay their Republican propagandists to blame Democrats and all the minorities they hate, and vote them in some more tax cuts, telling them yet again it will "create more jobs."
Don't you ever get tired of being played the fool?
It's stupid shi*t like this that has allowed the Republican party to ignore the terrible damage Trump has done to America and their even own party, excusing him for a multitude of anti-democratic sins simply because they are so enamored with how he "owns the libs."
Trump never owned the libs.
He owned most of the Republican party, and it's still in his possession.
It is no longer a conservative party, although with Mitch stacking the courts he has made some "conservative" wins, the party is now a cult of personality with a self-absorbed psychopath at the helm.
Whatever conservatives may win out of this fiasco, the rest of America will suffer for it.
Hoo boy, glad we don't live in Virginia. Their Republican governor is going to pretend that the expected "border surge" actually happened, and is sending 100 Virginia National Guard troops down to Texas. Mumbling "fentanyl ... uh ... human trafficking ... mmm ... migrants ... uh ... Democrats ... failure, yeah that's the ticket," Youngkin ignored the fact that President Biden's plan for managing border crossings after the termination of Title 42 has been perfectly successful.
As state Sen. Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) said, “This is Youngkin’s latest entry in the Republican presidential beauty pageant.”
Pretty good way to put it. The Republicans know that their voters are not paying attention to the actual situation at the border, they can tell them anything and they'll believe it.
Leaders in Spokane’s faith community condemned a local pastor after he called for the killing of parents of transgender children in a video sermon last month that Spokane police are investigating for potential criminality.
In an April 23 video that has since been removed titled “In Defense of Children,” Sure Foundation Baptist Church Pastor Jason Graber called for executing the parents of transgender children.
“They need to be convicted in trial and immediately shot in the back of the head, and then we can string them up above a bridge so the public can see the consequences of that kind of wickedness,” Graber said in the video. “There should be no excuse to not put these people to death.”
Graber’s words went viral, albeit briefly, over the weekend.
The threats were met with widespread condemnation from dozens of religious leaders from the Faith Leaders and Leaders of Conscience of Eastern Washington who co-authored a letter that described Graber’s language “as an incitement to violence and terrorism.”
“We denounce those who call for the terrorizing and killing of any human being in the name of faith,” the letter said. “Repentance is a Christian practice, and we strongly recommend that Jason Graber, as a Christian, repent for his words of terrorism, hate and violence and return to a humble walk with his God.”
Despite the threatening language, the language was not necessarily criminal, Spokane Police Department spokeswoman Julie Humphreys said.
“We had a number of citizens reach out to us and brought to it our attention,” Humphreys said. “At this point, we don’t see any evidence of a criminal violation. It appears that speech is protected under the Constitution.”
Graber, originally from Bend, Oregon, leads the Sure Foundation Baptist Church’s Spokane location at 307 W. Francis Ave.
According to its own website, Sure Foundation Baptist Church is an independent and explicitly anti-LGBTQ church that does not allow gay people in its attendance. The church adheres to strict beliefs around the Bible and believes in going back to “the old paths.”
First founded in Vancouver, Washington, in 2016 as a satellite church of Verity Baptist Church, of Sacramento, California, Sure Foundation later became independent in 2018 under the leadership of Pastor Aaron Thompson. The church is connected to the New Independent Fundamental Baptist movement, which is described as a “loose network of approximately 30+ independent churches” that share similar anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ beliefs, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Sure Foundation Baptist Church’s YouTube page includes various online sermons, some of which mock Jewish beliefs.
The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the church as a hate group with chapters in Washington and Hawaii in 2021.
It’s not clear how big the church’s Spokane following is, although it describes itself as a “small but growing family of like minded believers.”
It’s not the first time Graber has made anti-LGBTQ threats. In another video that’s since been removed, Graber called for the public execution of gay people with either stones or rifles and urged preachers to send gay people “back into the closet where they belong.”
Pastor Thompson was criticized in the Columbian newspaper in Vancouver for anti-LGBTQ comments after the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs in 2022.
Hate crimes occur when someone causes physical injury to someone, damages property or makes threats that cause a person or group to fear for their safety or property based on their race, color, faith, nationality, gender sexual orientation, disability or other identities.
Deciding when something is a “hate crime” can be difficult, Humphreys said.
“If they named somebody, then that crosses over to a true threat to somebody,” Humphreys said. “It’s shocking to everybody because the words are so hateful, but it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily criminal words.”
This difference is central to our First Amendment rights, said Gonzaga professor Kristine Hoover, former leader of the university’s Center for Hate Studies.
“The struggle of silencing anyone’s voice is a problem,” she said. “At the same time, there are also consequences for the speech we choose to use. In my opinion, this is the work we are called to do as engaged citizens in our community. We cannot turn a blind eye to this.”
Veradale United Church of Christ Rev. Gen Heywood, who co-authored the letter condemning Graber, said that she and other religious leaders stand with the parents of transgender children, some of whom attend her church.
While Graber may not be suspected of a criminal act, Heywood sees his language as “connected to the continuing rise of violence, or suggested violence,” against the LGBTQ community.
“Further, as people of many faiths and organizations of conscience, we ask every citizen to step back from any ideology that uses violence and intimidation, and to prayerfully consider what constitutes responsible public speech,” Heywood and her co-authors wrote.
A Pennsylvania restaurant owner who screamed death threats directed at then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi while storming the U.S. Capitol was sentenced on Tuesday to more than two years in prison.
Pauline Bauer was near Pelosi’s office suite on Jan. 6, 2021, when she yelled at police officers to bring out the California Democrat so the mob of Donald Trump supporters could hang her.
n January, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden convicted Bauer of riot-related charges after hearing trial testimony without a jury. The judge sentenced her to two years and three months of imprisonment, giving her credit for the several months she already has served in jail, court records show.
Prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of six years and six months for Bauer, 55, of Kane, Pennsylvania.
Bauer was part of the mob that forced police officers on the East Plaza to retreat. After forcing her way into the Capitol, she accosted officers who were trying to secure the Rotunda, shoving one of them, and yelled at police to “bring them out or we’re coming in,” according to federal prosecutors.
“They’re criminals. They need to hang,” she screamed. “Bring Nancy Pelosi out here now. We want to hang (her). Bring her out.”
Other rioters shouted threats against Pelosi while they roamed through the Capitol.
“Bauer’s threat to hang Speaker Pelosi was real, imminent, and placed the Speaker of the House in danger,” prosecutor James Peterson wrote in a court filing.
Bauer traveled from her north Pennsylvania home to attend then-President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 6. She had attended a “Stop the Steal” rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a day earlier.
She came to Washington with at least five other people who have been charged in the Capitol riot, including co-defendant William Blauser, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge. Last year, McFadden ordered Blauser to pay a $500 fine but didn’t sentence him to any term of incarceration or probation.
McFadden convicted Bauer of all five counts in her indictment, including a felony charge that she obstructed the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress that certified President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.
Defense attorney Komron Jon Maknoon said Bauer never intended to interfere with the process of certifying the Electoral College vote. She “genuinely regrets her past actions” and doesn’t pose a threat to the public, her lawyer said.
“The international spotlight showcasing her at her worst has deeply affected her,” Maknoon wrote.
Prosecutors said Bauer lied during her trial testimony, giving a bogus explanation for her confrontation with police and claiming she didn’t remember threatening Pelosi.
Bauer has used “sovereign citizen” extremist rhetoric and filed “nonsense” court documents while defending herself, prosecutors said.
More than a year before the trial, McFadden ordered Bauer to be jailed for several months for violating conditions of her release. She had claimed the court has no authority over her and told the judge that she doesn’t want “any lawyering from the bench.”
During an interview in 2021, Bauer said her arrest on Capitol riot charges led to a mixed reaction from neighbors in Kane, a small town on the edge of the 517,000-acre Allegheny National Forest.
“A lot of people say that they’re proud of me for standing up for my rights,” she told The Associated Press.
Bauer said her restaurant, Bob’s Trading Post, was thriving before the COVID-19 pandemic. She became known in her hometown as an outspoken critic of lockdown measures that cost her business.
More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes for their conduct on Jan. 6. More than 500 of them have been sentenced, with over half receiving terms of imprisonment ranging from one week to 18 years.
Defense Department leaders have stepped in to stop a drag show scheduled for Thursday at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, according to two defense officials and a U.S. official.
The show, which was in celebration of Pride Month, was approved by Air Force leaders, but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, told the Air Force it is not Pentagon policy to fund drag shows on bases and the show should be canceled.
Drag shows and events on military bases have become a politically contentious issue in recent months, with politicians and pundits arguing the military should not be spending taxpayer money on them.
At a House Armed Services Committee hearing on March 29, congressmen angrily questioned Austin and Milley about drag queen story hours on bases around the world, including in Montana, Nevada, Virginia and Germany.
“Drag queen story hours is not something that the department funds,” Austin told the committee.
Milley chimed in, asking to see the flyers for the events Gaetz was referring to and saying he was not aware of such events and does not support their being held on military bases.
“I’d like to take a look at those, because I don’t agree with those,” Milley said.
When Milley was informed about the event this week, he was visibly angry about the decision to host the event on base, a U.S. official and a defense official said.
'Not a suitable use of DOD resources'
“Consistent with Secretary Austin’s congressional testimony, the Air Force will not host drag events at its installations or facilities. Commanders have been directed to cancel these events,” an Air Force official said when asked about the Nellis event.
“Per DoD Joint Ethics Regulation (JER), certain criteria must be met for persons or organizations acting in non-Federal capacity to use DoD facilities and equipment. As Secretary Austin has said, the DOD will not host drag events at U.S. military installations or facilities. Hosting these types of events in federally funded facilities is not a suitable use of DOD resources,” deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a statement.
The Nellis drag show was scheduled for Thursday, but the base commander was informed in the past few days that it must be canceled, the officials said.
“I can confirm the Nellis commander informed the private organization that the drag event would have to be canceled,” a source familiar with the matter said.
Nellis AFB hosted a Pride Month drag show in June 2021, named “Drag-u-Nellis.” A spokesperson for the base said in a statement that it was intended to promote inclusivity and diversity.
On May 23, the House Armed Services Committee sent a letter about the issue to Austin and Milley, detailing six other cases of drag shows or events on bases or approved by the U.S. military. The letter asked the Pentagon leaders to provide information about the events and to say whether any punitive action has or will be taken against anyone who used taxpayer money on them.
While interviewing Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo expressed astonishment that Biden seemingly came out on top in his negotiations with House Republicans on a deal to raise the nation's debt ceiling.
"Well, I mean, look, we're all talking about Joe Biden's mental capacity, it seems, every day," she said. "Are you saying you think Joe Biden outsmarted Kevin McCarthy?"
Us Little Mouses got a good chuckle out of that one. "We're all talking about something that does not exist. Are you saying you think this thing exists?" In Mouse World we have a thing we call logic. If you have a valid and true premise, you can infer a valid and true conclusion from it. Never mind, humans aren't ready for that yet.
You know, wokesters suggest that if someone has a mental problem, thinking they are a gender other than they are, the solution is to give them surgery to make their delusion a reality. How about the very strange folks that think they're mice. What kind of surgery would work? Maybe they should just dress up like oversized mice in the Nutcracker and go to the zoo to visit the big cats.
"Monty Python" star and British comedy legend John Cleese has lashed out at the press in recent days for allegedly reporting that he will be removing a politically incorrect scene from future adaptations of his movie "Life of Brian" to avoiding offending the trans community.
In recent statements on Twitter, Cleese claimed that a reporter had "misreported me" when claiming the entertainer was planning to cut the famous "Loretta" scene for an upcoming stage adaptation of the satire film.
He corrected the reports, declaring he has "no intention" of removing it.
The scene in question features a male character from the 1979 British comedy telling his associates that he wants to be woman named "Loretta" and demands the right to bear a child. Flabbergasted, Cleese’s character in the film tells the man that the notion is ridiculous.
"I want to be a woman… It’s my right as a man," the character claims in a scene obviously played for laughs. He adds, "I want to have babies… It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them." After Cleese’s protest, the character snaps, "Don’t you oppress me!"
Cleese said, "So here you have something there's never been a complaint about in 40 years, that I've heard of, and now all of a sudden we can't do it because it'll offend people. What is one supposed to make of that?"
Nobody said they were offended by that line or anything in the play. A reporter wrote, incorrectly, that part of the script was being removed but it wasn't. As far as we know, nobody asked for it to be removed.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) had an awkward moment during a committee hearing on Wednesday when he outright rejected reality during a combative exchange on children’s education.
Mullin was ticked over a children’s book on racism called “Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race” and said it’s better to teach children the lyrics to “Jesus Loves Me” instead.
He interrupted and spoke over the panelists as they tried to answer his question during the hearing held by the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
One panelist’s attempt to reply led to a memorable exchange.
“First, it is important that we teach Jesus, and Jesus is what we teach,” said Cheryl Morman, president of the Virginia Alliance for Family Child Care Associations. “But the reality is―”
She was cut off by Mullin, but Sanders interjected.
“Could she answer the question, please,” Sanders said.
Mullin was unswayed.
“No, I don’t want reality,” he blurted out.
The room erupted in laughter.
“Got it on tape,” someone said amid the laughter.
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Tens of thousands of LGBTQ+ people are flocking to central Florida this weekend to go on theme park rides, mingle with costumed performers, dance at all-night parties and lounge poolside at hotels during Gay Days, a decades-long tradition.
Even though Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers have championed a slew of anti-LGBTQ+ laws — spurring the most prominent gay rights group in the U.S. and other civil rights organizations to issue warnings the Sunshine State may no longer be safe — Gay Days organizers are still encouraging visitors from around the world to come to one of Florida’s largest gay and lesbian celebrations.
They say a large turnout will send a message that LGBTQ+ people are not going away in Florida, which is continually one of the most popular states for tourists to visit. If the hoped-for 150,000 or more visitors come to the half-week of pool parties, drag bingo and thrill rides at Orlando’s theme parks and hotels, then “that’s the point,” said Joseph Clark, CEO of Gay Days Inc.
“Right now is not the time to run. It’s not the time to go away,” Clark said. “It’s time to show we are here, we are queer and we aren’t going anywhere.”
Unlike most of the country, which celebrates Pride in June, Orlando holds its Pride in October. Gay Days is a bonus celebration.
It’s not lost on the organizers that the highlight of the weekend will be a Saturday meetup of LGBTQ+ visitors at the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, where the first Gay Days started as a single-day celebration in 1991. Traditionally, participants wear red shirts to identify themselves, and they meet for the afternoon parade in front of Cinderella’s Castle.
"Nobody said they were offended by that line or anything in the play. As far as we know, nobody asked for it to be removed."
And, by "we", you mean YOU
everyone ese knows that gay actors on Broadway want the scene cut
here's what Cleese said:
"we'd had a table reading of the latest draft in NYC a year ago ... all the actors — several of them Tony winners — had advised me strongly to cut the Loretta scene"
-------
"It’s not lost on the organizers that the highlight of the weekend will be a Saturday meetup of LGBTQ+ visitors at the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, where the first Gay Days started as a single-day celebration in 1991. Traditionally, participants wear red shirts to identify themselves, and they meet for the afternoon parade in front of Cinderella’s Castle."
btw, Disney's embrace of homosexuality and transgenderism hasn't gone well for them
Florida has stripped them of the special privileges they had
now, they are treated by the state in the same way as Universal and SeaWorld
shares in Disney are way down
across America, corporations are discussing how to distance themselves from gay causes and avoid the fate of Disney, Target, and Bud Light!!!!
Copies of the King James Bible are being removed from library shelves at elementary and junior high school facilities in Davis County, Utah, after a complaint that the scriptures feature material inappropriate for younger children. The request for the Bible’s review included 49 pages of Biblical verses that could be deemed inappropriate under the law, including instances of murder, sex, and incest.
Us mouses think the whole book-banning idea is dumb, and it was bound to backfire on the bubba-humans, who don't actually read anyway. Mouses like books, we like to read them and eat them. I have never really liked eating the Bible though because the pages are so thin.
Attorney Lin Wood, one of the most visible conspiracy theorists behind efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, has been found in contempt for violating an order keeping him from disparaging his former law partners.
His former partners sued Wood for breach of contract, claiming that their relationship with Wood spanning roughly half a decade started deteriorating as Wood began to exhibit "erratic, hostile, abusive, and threatening" behavior. Grunberg claims that Wood assaulted him in an elevator. At Thursday's hearing, attorney Milinda Brown denounced Wood's "antisemitic" comments, and the lawsuit quotes Wood calling Grunberg a "Chilean Jewish f—ing crook." Other recordings quoted in the lawsuit show Wood comparing himself to Biblical figures and claiming: "I might actually be Christ coming back for a second time in the form of an imperfect man, elevating Christ’s consciousness."
Honestly, now and then we get mouses like that. They eat dirt and run around in circles, or they go out and attack the cat or bite a human. They don't last long. When a human is like that, the other humans take care of them, and sometimes they even elect them into public office and put them in the newspapers.
"Us mouses"
alas, species reassignment surgery has yet to be perfected, so this sad "person" will just have to continue to suffer
"think the whole book-banning idea is dumb,"
when the lunatic fringe uses the term "book-banning" to the effort to avoid exposing children to material not appropriate for their age, they are being so disingenuous that it is literally deceit
we all know that there endless lists of things radical leftists don't want children, or anyone else, exposed to
"and it was bound to backfire on the bubba-humans, who don't actually read anyway"
hate to have to disabuse you but the average redneck couldn't care less what kids are exposed to
they certainly aren't concerned about the Bible
While DOJ's investigation of Trump has broadened to include many potential crimes, so has the investigation in the state of Georgia. AG Fani Willis appears to be looking into RICO charges against Trump -- RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations -- and is interviewing witnesses in several other states.
Willis is looking into the Trump campaign’s expenditure of more than $1 million on two firms to study whether electoral fraud occurred in the 2020 election. The work was carried out in the final weeks of 2020, and the campaign never released the findings because the firms, Simpatico Software Systems and Berkeley Research Group, disputed many of Trump’s theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election.
In recent days, Willis’s office has asked both firms for information, not only about Georgia but about other states as well. Trump contested the 2020 election results in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Those Republicans, I tell you. The truth just isn't good enough for them. It's like they tell you it's Roquefort and you get home and find out it's Velveeta, you know what I'm saying?
Current Drudge headlines:
STOCKS SOAR!
END OF BEAR
STRONG JOBS
We've got a good strong president who actually knows how to run things.
For weeks now, Rep. James Comer and Sen. Chuck Grassley have been attempting to force the FBI to hand them a document known as an FD-1023 form. Officials at the FBI have been very clear in explaining to Comer and Grassley that the form is “used by FBI agents to record unverified reporting from a confidential human source.” They are not made public because the claims are unverified, and it would be unfair to either the person being accused, or the accuser, to make the information public.
We know that the FD-1023 form being sought by Grassley and Comer is a product of Rudy Giuliani’s extended effort to smear President Joe Biden by soliciting false statements from a collection of scam artists, Russian agents, and sycophants who have admitted making false claims to curry favor with Giuliani and Donald Trump.
Everything Guiliani has claimed about Biden’s actions in Ukraine is a documented lie. Two of the men he worked with have been convicted on charges of fraud and violations of campaign finance law. Giuliani’s “star witness” recanted after he was confronted with his lies. And Giuliani has been reduced to telling fairy tales about how George Soros is trying to murder him.
The only purpose in publicly revealing the contents of this form is to continue Giuliani’s effort to smear Biden with false accusations. And that’s exactly what Grassley admitted on Fox News.
Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
Chuck Grassley on Fox News: "We are not interested in whether the allegations against Vice President Biden are accurate or not."
[video]
9:14 AM · Jun 1, 2023
The whole use of the word “unclassified” in Grassley and Comer’s communications around this form is deceptive. There is a great deal of information that is not classified, but isn’t released to the public. In the case of investigations by the FBI, or by police at any level, that often applies to information connected to ongoing investigations, or to claims that were made that proved to be false.
That’s because when a law enforcement organization releases a false or unsupported claim, they understand that it makes them party to that claim and gives the assertion, no matter how ludicrous, the veneer of something “official.” Grassley and Comer understand that, too. That’s the whole game.
Walmart: Gay Pride Apparel
After Columbine in 1999, the National Rifle Association in very well-publicized meetings now, thanks to sleuthing and digging by reporters at NPR, we now have tapes of the meetings where they literally said, are we going to be part of the solution here? Or maybe we can use these things to drum up hate and fear in our members? We might even be able to use them to drive membership. And they chose the latter. They perfected that system for about seven or eight years, getting their feet underneath them. They figured out it can drive politics. And then an explosion hit. That explosion was the future Black president leading in the polls in 2007. And then Barack Obama won in 2008. So you have this sort of uncapping of hate and conspiracy, much of it racially driven, that the NRA was tapping into. Prior to 2007, people in the United States never purchased more than 7 million guns in a single year. By the time Barack Obama left office, the United States was purchasing almost 17 million guns a year. And so I think it's impossible to discount the degree to which Obama's presidency lit this whole thing on fire.
When Trump was elected, there was what was called in the industry the "Trump Slump," meaning since a Republican was elected, the fear of Obama was gone, and Hillary Clinton didn't get elected. The sort of fear and conspiracy subsided, and sales stagnated for a little while because the industry and gun owners believed that the threat had passed. But with Trump, we experienced a whole new, never seen before level of fear, racism, hatred and conspiracy that culminated in 2020. In that year, you had George Floyd, COVID lockdowns, Black Lives Matter, Antifa protests and Kyle Rittenhouse. I mean, it's the most tumultuous year any of us can remember with the most hatred and conspiracy and nastiness. None of us can remember a year like that. In that year, the United States consumers bought almost 23 million guns in a single year, more than three times as much as before Barack Obama took office.
The industry 15 years ago would not even allow the AR-15 to be used or displayed at its own trade shows. I mean, they were locked up in a corner. You had to have military or police credentials to even go in there. Now, they're spread around like crazy, and the marketing campaigns are so aimed at young men that in some ways, it's not shocking that Uvalde or Buffalo or [the July 4 shooting at a parade in the Chicago suburb of] Highland Park, all three heinous crimes, all three committed with AR-15s, all by very young men.
Fifteen, twenty years ago, the industry named guns like the Smith & Wesson 629 or the Remington 870 because you had [industry] attorneys that knew that even the names of guns could be important. They could encourage people to do irresponsible things. And so you'd never wanted to even name things that might encourage bad things to happen. Now we have a gun called the Wilson Urban Super Sniper. I mean, what are you supposed to do with that? We now have a gun called the Ultimate Arms Warmonger. What are you supposed to do with that? We now have an AR-15 company called Rooftop Arms, as in when you don't get what you want, you vote from the rooftops. And what happened in Highland Park? A kid got up and killed people from a rooftop. You see the old self-imposed responsibility; those old norms of behavior have been just completely trashed.
So we can, as a society, demand reinstatement of those norms. Those have nothing to do with laws. They don't require legislation. They don't require two-thirds of the vote in the Senate. We can demand that. And we may have to.
Justin Cooper, chief of operations at Rooftop Arms, told ProPublica the business name stems from the origins of founders and is in no way related to "voting from the rooftops," past events or political causes, or views.
ProPublica contacted Remington Arms and Bushmaster for comment but didn't receive a response.
Our founding fathers did not create the right to bear arms to allow citizens to become urban snipers or warmongers.
Late Friday night, a federal judge declared Tennessee's anti-drag Adult Entertainment Act to be unconstitutional following a two-day trial last month.
Us mouses cannot understand why some humans would want to make something as fun as a drag show illegal. That's crazy. Are you afraid your sons will wanna play dress-up, is that it? Still crazy.
Well anyway it's not illegal in Tennessee now, so there.
It’s not going to work
4. Charted: Growing global acceptance
Share of residents who say their area is a good place for gays and lesbians to live
50% globally
80% in USA
Well, it WAS a good place for them to live. It’s downright deadly for trans people right now. But the attacks on Pride show exactly what these people are up to...
The share of people worldwide who say their area is a good place for gay or lesbian people to live doubled from 25% to 50% over 10 years, Axios’ Alice Feng writes from a Gallup poll.
Zoom in: The countries with the highest percentage were Norway (92%), Sweden (91%) and the Netherlands (90%).
The U.S. ranks 15th with 80%.
Countries with the largest increases since 2012 were Nepal (+63 percentage points), India (+42) and Bangladesh (+35).
There is no putting this genie back in the bottle.
"We're here because it's Gay Days, it's that simple. Disney welcomes everybody. Maybe the governor of Florida doesn't, but Disney does." Disney World's massive Pride Month gathering marked a show of defiance this weekend in a state where librarians have been pulling gay-themed books off the shelves, teachers are no longer allowed to discuss gender identity or sexual orientation and many LGBTQ families feel under attack.
Gay Days at Disney began three decades ago to bring together LGBTQ people and families in an environment where they felt included rather than marginalized. Disney World has welcomed hundreds of thousands of Gay Days visitors through the years, making it one of the nation's largest Pride Month events.
The Little Mouses got a kick out of the "Don't Say DeSantis" t-shirts. The question is, can love conquer all, really? Maybe it can, in the long run.
The debt ceiling increase bill passed the House with more Democrats (165) than Republicans (149) voting yes.
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2023243
If you are old enough, cast your mind back to the 1984 Democratic National Convention held in San Francisco.
This writer covered it as a young reporter, taking in the flamboyant gay-pride parade on Market Street the day the convention opened, the centerpiece of which was the contingent from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
The group, then led by Sister Boom-Boom, were notable for their economical use of leather to cover up their physiques, alongside their deliberate mockery of the Catholic Church.
Democrats of 1984 tried to keep the Bay Area gay scene under wraps, but today, the Democratic Party has gone all-in on no-limits gender self-expression, to the point that the Biden administration pointedly avoids using the term “woman” in any official policy documents.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Dodgers, once owned by a conservative Catholic family, have publicly embraced the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and much of corporate America has gone “woke.”
A popular slogan on the right is “Get woke, go broke,” but until the last few weeks, there was meager evidence in support of this proposition.
Then came the Bud Light debacle, in which Anheuser-Busch sought to leverage the sensation of the trans celebrity “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney with a specially labeled can produced just for Mulvaney, which Mulvaney embraced to the hilt on Instagram and elsewhere.
A spontaneous boycott of Bud Light, previously America’s best-selling brand, has cut sales by more than a quarter since this misbegotten stunt, and the loss of market share appears to have staying power.
Anheuser-Busch stock slumped 15% and Bud Light cans sit unsold on store shelves despite deep price discounts, while sales of competitor brands such as Coors Light and Miller Lite have jumped.
Barron’s reports that several analysts think the shift away from Bud Light may be enduring, possibly making the micro-targeted Mulvaney promotion the single greatest brand-killing marketing blunder since the Ayds diet plan in the 1980s.
Someone in Target’s marketing department apparently decided to say, “Hold my Bud Light,” and emulate this consumer-alienating strategy.
One notable offering of the stores’ Pride Month product line is “tuck-friendly” one-piece “women’s” swimsuits for fully equipped men who wish to dress like women.
Another spontaneous consumer boycott has taken wing, and Target’s stock price fell for 10 days in a row, losing 15% while the rest of the market started to rally, its worst Wall Street performance in 23 years.
Late in the week, J.P. Morgan downgraded Target’s stock.
The blowback against gender fluidity is not limited to consumers.
Several Major League Baseball stars have issued public criticism of the Dodgers, and there has been a mounting backlash against anatomical males competing in women’s sporting events.
This moment seems different: A line has been crossed, and “normies,” for lack of a better term for traditional middle-class Americans, are saying, “Enough.”
The long-term trend in American social life for decades now has been expanding the boundaries for individual expression and self-definition.
Americans have generally been tolerant, if sometimes slow to move, toward what were once considered “deviant” traits - like homosexuality.
It is worth noting that by the time of the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage, public opinion had come to support the idea, after having been strongly opposed just 20 years ago.
But the current push on behalf of gender fluidity differs fundamentally from previous “liberation” movements, as it requires a wholesale denial of human nature itself and demands conformity to this radical view.
Far from merely wanting to be tolerated or left alone, the new transgender movement insists on transgressing every institutional and social boundary, from bathrooms to sports to the elementary school classroom.
Trans activists have destroyed the meaning of Pride.
Americans have largely been tolerant of individuals previously described as “cross-dressers,” but what explains the adamant insistence on performing “drag queen” exhibitions for children?
Why the ferocious suppression of dissident voices in the medical community about aggressive medical interventions to children whose brains and personalities we know are far from fully developed?
It should be noted that what is euphemistically called “gender-affirming care” has been severely restricted in Europe recently.
With opinion polls finding majorities of Americans opposed to the premises of gender fluidity, consider the current moment the Revolt of the Normies.
For American institutions that have indulged this extremism, perhaps we should say that Pride Month goeth before the fall.
Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst.
How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?
They don't see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues.
Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events.
They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.
Certainly, former President Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.
In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.
Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.
How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?
Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them.
They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.
They focus on nominating more conservative judges, not packing the court itself. They work to take back the Senate, not to end the filibuster or bring in two new states with four new senators.
Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.
They shrug and concede that universities, teachers, government unions, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, entertainment, and professional sports are hopelessly activist and left-wing.
The environmental, social, governance (ESG), diversity, equity, and inclusion, and LGBQT+ agendas were unfathomable acronyms to Middle America and thus mostly ignored.
So conservatives often slept through the woke revolution.
Yet suddenly they realize their apathy allowed the country to descend into something the nation's founders never imagined or intended, and antithetical to what most knew as America just a couple of decades ago.
So conservatives are awakening from their slumber. And they are discovering that they too can boycott, agitate -- and roar.
The woke Target corporation in just a few days has suffered a more than $10 billion loss in its stock value. Millions of shoppers shunned its 2,000 stores after the chain showcased its "pride" apparel. The displays featured "tuck pieces" -- veritable codpieces -- that are intended to facilitate "women's" male genitalia.
Anheuser-Busch came up with the bright idea that it would highlight Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender performance activist, to hawk its Bud Light brand. But beer seemed incidental to the self-absorbed Mulvaney's fixation on promoting transgenderism. So Bud Light-drinking, red-state America got turned off by Mulvaney's in-your-face-advocacy.
An ensuing informal boycott cost the company nearly $16 billion in lost stock value. Hundreds of millions of dollars of unsellable light beer stagnated. Stores can't even give it away. Meanwhile, Bud Light's competitors coped with meeting record Memorial Day consumer demand.
Ditto the defiantly woke Disney Corporation.
The now politically activist entertainment corporation insisted on pushing woke agendas down the throats of its family-centered audience.
The result? Its online entertainment services are bleeding millions of subscribers. Disney stock has lost $16 billion in value. Its overpriced theme parks no longer count on continual increased attendance.
Sometimes traditionalists prefer simply to drop out rather than boycott wokeism. One result is that the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards now have a fraction of their previous televised audience.
In 1998 -- when the United States had a population of 275 million -- the NBA finals earned on average 29 million television viewers. This year the NBA bragged its finals averaged a pathetic 4 million viewers in a contemporary America of 335 million.
The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team reinvited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence -- a self-identified performance art "queer" group -- to headline the team's "pride night."
The all-male "sisters" usually put on anti-Catholic pornographic skits that mock Jesus Christ and sexualize Christian rituals.
That Dodger indulgence is not going over well with its fan base, especially the city's millions of Catholic Latinos.
The woke Left still enjoys enormous advantages over the Right. The bicoastal elite has far more money, controls all the major American institutions, and dominates the dissemination of knowledge through the media and Silicon Valley.
But the Left does not enjoy majority public support. And now it has managed the impossible -- to goad the normally comatose conservative dragon to awaken.
And it is just starting to breathe fire.
Jesus had two dads.
A former GOP candidate in New Mexico has been indicted on federal charges in connection to a spate of shootings at Democratic officials’ homes after he lost his 2022 midterm election bid, court documents show.
Solomon Peña, 40, is charged with conspiracy, interference with federally protected activities and several firearms charges, including the use of a machine gun, according to a grand jury indictment unsealed Wednesday.
After his defeat in a November run for the New Mexico House of Representatives, prosecutors accuse Peña of going to the homes of at least three Bernalillo County commissioners and urging them not to certify the election results, claiming there had been election fraud, the US Department of Justice said in a news release.
“Following the Bernalillo County board of commissioners’ certification of the vote, Peña allegedly hired others to conduct the shootings and carried out at least one of the shootings himself. At least three of the shootings occurred while children and other relatives of the victims were at home,” the release said.
Though victims’ names were withheld in the indictment, Albuquerque police have said Democratic officials whose homes were shot at included Bernalillo County Commissioner Adriann Barboa, newly installed state House Speaker Javier Martinez, and state Sen. Linda Lopez, among others.
If convicted on all charges, Peña faces a mandatory minimum of 60 years in prison, according to the DOJ.
eña also faces several conspiracy and firearms charges in New Mexico, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
As of Wednesday, he had not yet appeared in court to face the federal charges. Peña was still detained without bond at the Bernalillo County Jail Wednesday evening, online records show.
After Peña was arrested in January, a district court judge ruled that that he must remain in jail as he awaits trial, arguing that Peña poses a threat to the shooting targets and their families.
After DeSantis all but purges immigrants, other Republicans are begging to get them back.
This lays bare why congress has been entirely unable to solve the "immigration problem" for the past fifty years.
Businesses WANT cheap labor around so they can exploit them and deport them if they start asking for crazy things like livable wages, or decent working conditions.
But for Republicans, blaming immigrants for taking away American jobs is their perennial base motivator, at least when it isn't overwhelmed with outright hatred of immigrants.
But it's not the base that pay's for congressional campaigns, it's big business, and they don't want their cheap labor to disappear, so it better for them to leave the problem perpetually unsolved.
Shortly after 700 immigrants got arrested at meat packing plants a few years ago, legislation was written to criminalize those hiring these illegal workers. It would have stopped the draw for millions of immigrants overnight. It never made it to a vote.
============
Florida Republicans on Monday met with migrants to urge them not to leave the state in the wake of a new anti-immigration law that is sparking boycotts of the state.
An analysis determined that the law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) "limits social services for undocumented immigrants, allocates millions more tax dollars to expand DeSantis' migrant relocation program, invalidates driver's licenses issued to undocumented people by other states, and requires hospitals that get Medicaid dollars to ask for a patient's immigration status."
On Monday, state Reps. Alina Garcia (R) and Rick Roth (R) spoke at an event advising migrants of the impacts of SB1718.
Video of the event was obtained by Thomas Kennedy of the Democratic National Committee.
"This bill is 100% supposed to scare you," Roth told the group. "I'm a farmer, and the farmers are mad as hell. We are losing employees. They are already starting to move to Georgia and other states."
"It's urgent that you talk to all of your people and convince them that you have resources, state representatives, and other people that can explain the bill to you," he continued.
Garcia said she agreed with Roth.
"This is a bill basically to scare people from coming to the state of Florida," she insisted. "I think that it's done its purpose. This bill really doesn't have any teeth."
=======
Video on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/tomaskenn/status/1665727928167014403?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1665727928167014403%7Ctwgr%5E6fde1ab31fe1474d54d32099917d46ca9bfd5ec2%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawstory.com%2Fr%2Fentryeditor%2F2660960292advanced
In a statement blaming Florida for the transfer of migrants from Texas to California on board a charter flight, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the state is "investigating the circumstances by which these individuals were brought to California."
"We are also evaluating potential criminal or civil action against those who transported or arranged for the transport of these vulnerable immigrants," Bonta said. "While this is still under investigation, we can confirm these individuals were in possession of documentation purporting to be from the government of the State of Florida."
So ... Florida is guilty of kidnapping, and California is thinking about charging them. Us mouses do not have anything that corresponds to that. Mousenapping almost never happens, unless somebody gets stuck in a suitcase or something. Humans have good places, like California, and bad ones, like Florida, which seems to be like a mass mental illness facility with alligators and pythons and "palmetto bugs" (aka huge cockroaches) yuck. We also don't have that. A mouse is a mouse, wherever they live.
Remember when Republicans used to love to use the term "job-killing" for all the Democrats' projects? Like, when they were trying to repeal Obamacare in 2011, John Boehner used the phrase "job-killing" to describe the law seven times in a press conference that lasted less than 14 minutes -- once every 2 minutes. He also used the phrases "destroy jobs" and "destroying jobs" once each when talking about the law. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Republicans named their bill to repeal the health care law: "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act."
They liked the phrase because it sounded bad to people. Democrats killing jobs booo, yay Republicans. Those Republicans did not have any idea about how to increase jobs, they just wanted their uninformed voters that think that Democrats were job-killers.
The truth, not that it matters to them, is quite different. As of today, Biden's record:
Over 1.5 million jobs have been created in the United States in the first five months of 2023.
The unemployment rate has been under 4% for 16 consecutive months, a stretch unseen since the 1960s.
The number of jobs created since January 2021 is more than double the combined total from Donald Trump’s first three years in the White House.
Ok, I’ll admit it: I like Target.
I don’t know if it’s just because it’s a better aesthetic experience compared to the cavernous warehouse that is Walmart. Maybe it’s the Starbucks. Or that I know I can grab a package of socks and be out of there in 4 minutes flat?
Women especially seem to love it. So much so that it has become an inescapable meme. They luxuriate in its aisles, finding reasons to stay just a little bit longer. You can see the average mom floating through Chip and Joanna’s home goods, absent-mindedly touching candles and bowls.
Let’s be honest, it’s happened to us all. Before we know it the cart is full. They’ve done their research and their store set up works some kind of bizarre magic on us. We had come for bananas and baby wipes, but we’re leaving with a new wardrobe for each of our kids, a coffee maker we don’t need, and a pair of $20 sunglasses to replace the ones we left at the park.
As a millennial, Target has become a sort of second home. And for those of us with kids it has come over the years to represent the daily details of family life.
From melatonin gummies to televisions. Deodorant to home decor.
But now, conservatives find themselves in a predicament regarding where they spend their money these days. Pretty much every corporation have gone the way of the woke agenda. And most of us have been able to roll our eyes at the rainbow displays and just get on with life.
But then Target crossed a line that made many parents wake up. They brazenly reached for our kids with trans ideology.
Last year it was chest binders for girls. This year it is female styled “tuck-friendly” bathing suits for men and pride onesies for babies.
And it was recently revealed that Target has been donating millions of dollars to the radical K-12 trans activists GLSEN, who among other things, lobby school boards to allow children to transition without informing parents.
So I have a question for Target.
Why did you have to bring my kids into pride month? Why did you have to put these displays targeting children right at the entrance of your store?
And your vehement support for trans ideology is also a line too far. Because it denies the basic tenets of God’s created order. The truth that we are created either male or female, and that gender cannot be separated from our biology.
We let down our guard and you took advantage of it. You know how strong your brand is, and you thought you were untouchable. But we’re showing you that you’re not an invincible force who can do what you want to our families.
As I am writing this article, Target has seen a $12 billion drop in their market capitalization in just two weeks after families decided to boycott their store.
While it’s nearly impossible to keep all of our money from going to woke corporations, there is a time for strategic boycotts that send a message — one that makes an example out of companies who are blatantly pushing gender confusion and sexual expression on the most vulnerable people in society, children.
Target has been unrepentant about this and I believe it’s time for us to show them real consequences. (They agreed to pare down the pride sections a bit, but only by falsely blaming conservatives for threats of violence. In fact the only threats of violence on their stores have been by LGBTQ+ activists.)
We must not let up.
Pulling our support from companies on principal is important and we should each follow our convictions on that. But this boycott is different. It is a strategic blow to an evil agenda that is coming for our families. A window of opportunity that finally
reached critical mass when enough people got fed up and are making the nation notice.
We can spend our money wherever we like and we have the power to send shock waves through corporate America. Especially in a financial climate like this, where Fortune 500 companies are nervous.
Let’s send a message to other corporations like Target who may be planning similar antics. And the message is clear: “Don’t mess with children.”
"It is a strategic blow to an evil agenda that is coming for our families."
No Anon, it's just another in a looooonng string of anti-LGBT attacks that goes back decades.
Every time the LGBT community makes even a slight advance in civil rights and public acceptance, a small horde of salivating religious wing nuts comes out to condemn anyone and everyone involved with the LGBT folks as out to sexually assault children.
I can only guess this is perhaps because so many of them were assaulted as children by members of their churches.
It never occurs to these idiots that other families have LGBT children, and they happen to know from an early age - if for no other reason than their children's religious school mates who keep harassing and assaulting them for being "faggots" and "queers."
These children have every right to feel as accepted and welcome in their schools and where they shop as their straight classmates do.
You are not "protecting" anyone from "evil."
Instead, you are deliberately demonizing and denigrating innocent LGBT children and their parents because they won't conform to your uncontrollable, authoritarian urges to force everyone to live only within your approved lifestyle standards.
This is not Afghanistan. Americans aren't likely to let religious police harangue and beat them until they conform to the religious dictates of your supreme leader.
The LGBT may suffer short-term setbacks. But we haven't made the gains we have over the past 3 decades by giving up, going home, and being quiet.
Of course, that only pisses the right wing nuts off even worse, and if Kid Rock as any indication, they could be about to blow their tops and start shooting people until they get their way.
LGBT people aren't going to stop coming out of the closet, getting married, and wearing the clothes they like.
The anger and vitriol that conservatives regularly flame the LGBT community with seems to only be getting hotter. They are unlikely to be able to step back and dial it down before one of them snaps and goes on an anti-LGBT murder spree.
It will be a tragedy. But it will only serve to help explain to the vast majority of Americans why the LGBT community needs protection from the religious right, and not the other way around.
This is very odd, states investigating each other. But good.
The Bexar County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office says it has completed its investigation into the transport of 49 migrants from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard last September by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration and filed criminal charges with the local district attorney.
A statement from the sheriff’s office says it has filed several counts of unlawful restraint, both misdemeanors and felonies. The office didn’t name any individual suspects and didn’t specify when the investigation was turned over to the Bexar County district attorney.
“At this time, the case is being reviewed by the DA’s office. Once an update is available, it will be provided to the public,” the statement said. In a separate statement from the sheriff’s office, spokesperson Johnny Garcia said the case was turned over to the DA’s office “recently,” adding, “At this time we are not naming the suspects involved in the case.”
Just a little something in the Washington Post: The FBI and Justice Department under then-Attorney General William P. Barr reviewed allegations from a confidential informant about Joe Biden and his family, and they determined there were no grounds for further investigative steps.
It hadn't really occurred to us mouses that Muslims were going to try to force MCPS to teach Islamic beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity in the public school, that's kind of a new twist -- is this the start of Sharia Law in Montgomery County? Same as with other religions, they have the right to their beliefs and no right to force them on anyone else. Fact: there are gay and trans people. Schools should teach the facts.
If you don't believe in being gay then you have every right to try not to be. It's sad but it's your problem, not ours. In our church wall, us Little Mouses are what we are. We wouldn't think of telling somebody to pretend to be something they aren't.
Saying gender identity is real, a federal judge temporarily blocked portions of a new Florida law that bans transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers, ruling Tuesday that the state has no rational basis for denying patients treatment.
Judge Robert Hinkle issued a preliminary injunction, saying three transgender children can continue receiving treatment. The lawsuit challenges the law Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed shortly before he announced a run for president.
“The elephant in the room should be noted at the outset. Gender identity is real. The record makes this clear,” Hinkle said, adding that even a witness for the state agreed.
This seems like an important point. It's not something made-up, it's not Satan playing tricks, it's not a teen fad, gender identity is real and people know who they are, even if Rhonda Santis doesn't believe them.
"Every time the LGBT community makes even a slight advance in civil rights and public acceptance"
LGBTsters already have the same civil rights as everyone else
and no one is entitled to "public acceptance"
any member of the public is free to their opinion, even if that opinion is that homosexuality is immoral
the confusion is that when LGBTsters say "civil rights", they mean that acceptance of their lifestyle should imposed on everyone else
"children's religious school mates who keep harassing and assaulting them for being "faggots" and "queers.""
religious people generally don't do that
it's done by the same bullies who are always looking to lift their poor self-esteem by attacking others
"they won't conform to your uncontrollable, authoritarian urges to force everyone to live only within your approved lifestyle standards"
you mean the standards of every society on the planet before the last decade or so?
This is not Afghanistan. Americans aren't likely to let religious police harangue and beat them until they conform to the religious dictates of your supreme leader.
"They are unlikely to be able to step back and dial it down before one of them snaps"
frankly, you the one who seems on the verge of snapping
meanwhile, here's another example of how over-indulgence of homosexuality is hurting efforts to help the poor:
A Southern California church and its preschool have asked a U.S. District Court to block a cutoff of funds from a federal food aid program in a dispute over the Biden administration’s gender rules, which they say violate their religious beliefs.
Attorneys for the Church of Compassion and the Dayspring Christian Learning Center in El Cajon say officials at the California Department of Social Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture removed the school from participation in the Child and Adult Food Care Program. The federal program provides $3,500 to $4,500 a month to help feed impoverished students attending the school’s preschool and day care programs.
The Biden administration’s interpretation of the word “sex” in Title IX, the federal ban on discrimination in education, includes sexual orientation and gender identity, which was never intended by legislators. Officials cut off food aid funding to the school and the church, which do not adhere to the administration’s interpretation.
Attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the plaintiffs, said the school had received funding “for nearly 20 years” without any trouble.
The lawsuit claims that the Biden administration’s rules violate the First Amendment, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed an executive order to protect gender affirming health care in our state, building on the administration’s dedication to safeguard the rights of LGBTQIA+ individuals. The order will protect those seeking, receiving, or providing gender affirming care in Maryland from attempts at legal punishment by other states.
“In the State of Maryland, nobody should have to justify their own humanity,” said Gov. Moore. “This order is focused on ensuring Maryland is a safe place for gender affirming care, especially as other states take misguided and hateful steps to make gender affirming care cause for legal retribution. In Maryland, we are going to lead on this issue.”
In our church wall, we never have to justify our mouseanity, either. We is what we is, and we don't go around telling other mouses they have to be what we want them to be.
"Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed an executive order"
sounds like he thinks the state legislature would never pass something so ridiculous.
"In Maryland, we are going to lead on this issue.”
we don't live in a dictatorship. Wes
That was a real smart idea at CNN to swing hard to the right. And the Trump town hall was a huge success... oh wait.
Actually CNN has become unwatchable. Panels of smirking bothsiderists talking about our future as if it were a board game.
Is anybody looking for an experienced CEO, currently unemployed?
House conservatives Tuesday blew up an effort by GOP leadership to advance several bills in a dramatic confrontation on the House floor, a revolt against the debt limit deal cut by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden just days earlier.
Eleven Republicans -- most of whom are members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus -- joined Democrats in voting against a rule to advance four bills related to gas stoves and regulatory reform, enough opposition to tank the rule and block the legislation from advancing to the floor.
To us, the interesting thing is how the human media are using the word "conservative" to mean "out-and-out racists," as compared to "dog-whistle racists," which are now considered centrist Republicans. It used to be that the entire Republican Party that we see today would have been off the charts, on the looney end of any political scale. Now delusion, fear, and victimhood define the party -- where some are even more delusional, fearful, and self-pitying, and are called, now, "conservatives."
Florida Republicans passed a bill criminalizing the transport of undocumented people into Florida, requiring hospitals to ask about immigration status on intake forms, invalidating out of state driver's licenses or other forms of government ID issued to undocumented people, and preventing local governments from issuing identification cards to undocumented people.
"This bill is 100 percent supposed to scare you," said state representative Rick Roth. “I'm a farmer, and the farmers are mad as hell. We are losing employees. They’re already starting to move to Georgia and other states. It's urgent that you talk to all your people and convince them that you have resources, state representatives, and other people that can explain the bill to you," he added, essentially begging Florida's labor force to not leave the state that cares little for them.
"This is more of a political bill than it is policy. It does give more police state powers going forward to deal with immigration, but still this is mainly a political bill," Roth concluded incoherently.
Yeah, police state, that's the bright side.
Listening through the vents, us Little Mouses are hearing talk that Donald Trump could be indicted as soon as tomorrow, and that the special counsel is planning to charge him with espionage, among other things.
Just to be clear, espionage is a capital offense.
This week, the LGBTQ "rights" group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ Americans, the first time the organization has ever done so.
Despite immense progress on special privileges for gay, lesbian, and trans in the United States, we are in the midst of an expansive backlash among the American people to those special privileges.
In the first quarter of 2023 alone, 417 bills have been introduced in state legislatures to halt the imposition of gay and trans normalization. Sixteen states now have laws either fully banning or tightly restricting gender-affirming care for minors. States are outlawing teaching about gender identity to young kids; activists are removing books form school libraries that normalize same-sex couples.
Florida, for example, recently legally limited gender affirming care that youths can access, while making it more difficult for adults to receive such care. And some states are allowing state agencies to investigate parents who facilitate gender-affirming care for their kids for potential child abuse.
He was among the most popular proponents of the theory that vaccines cause autism, which helped fuel the rise to the modern anti-vaccine movement. He was also one of the small group of people responsible for spreading the majority of doubts about the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. Beyond vaccines, he says that 5G networking technology will be used to control our behavior, blames the U.S. and Ukraine for provoking Russia’s invasion, accuses George W. Bush of stealing the 2004 presidential election, calls for people who deny climate change to be jailed, suggests antidepressants are causing school shootings, and insinuates that both his father and uncle were murdered by U.S. intelligence agencies.
His name is Robert F Kennedy and 20% of Democrats think he should be President
"His name is Robert F Kennedy and 20% of Democrats think he should be President"
that's not the scariest part
if you add in people who say they would consider Kennedy, he gets 64%
that's right, 64% of Democrats either favor Kennedy, or would "consider" him
and it's probably even higher if you just poll TTFsters
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Love like Florida would ban it !!
"if you add in people who say they would consider Kennedy, he gets 64%"
I always knew that Dems who say they "believe in science" are just a bunch of happy horse crap
liberals only "believe in science" when they can exploit it for propaganda purposes
guys who want to be girls are girls despite the empirical evidence that they aren't
babies aren't life until they're born, no matter what studies show
and now 64% say they would consider RF Kennedy for President
pretty clear how important science is to MOST Democraps
"Attacks on trans people are nothing new"
no
it's brand-new
it's a STATE OF EMERGENCY!!!!!!!!!
ROFL!!!!!!!
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not a serious person. He may have been many years ago, before his anti-vaccine obsession totally colonized his brain. But, as often happens when people adopt one conspiracy theory, they often start believing in others. As psychology researchers at the University of Kent wrote in 2022, an individual's "subscription to conspiracy beliefs is initially inadvertent, accelerates recursively, then becomes difficult to escape." Kennedy's tumble down the rabbit hole is a tragic example. As investigative journalist Judd Legum chronicled on Twitter, Kennedy now also buys into election lies, myths about the 5G network, and, sadly, conspiracy theories about the assassination of his own father. He's also falsely accused the staff of Salon and other publications of working for the CIA.
Conspiracy theories also pull people to the right, and Kennedy is no exception. Once a Democratic stalwart, he's now a big time Republican donor who frequents right-wing media spaces from Fox News to Infowars. Unfortunately, what was once just a sad story of a man who lost his mind has now become a serious threat to democracy as Kennedy has declared himself a presidential candidate vying for the Democratic nomination.
There's no danger he'll beat President Joe Biden for the nomination, of course. Even with his famous name, Kennedy is only pulling 20% support among Democratic primary voters, a number that's sure to decline when people realize Kennedy rejects everything his famous father stood for. The main concern most Democrats cite is a fear that Kennedy will run as an independent, making him a spoiler. It's not a small fear as both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Al Gore in 2000 lost just enough votes to vanity candidates Ralph Nader and Jill Stein that it threw the elections to Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively.
But the poison from con men candidates runs even deeper than their ability to draw a small-but-crucial number of votes during close elections. Fake candidates like Kennedy or Marianne Williamson — a woo peddler who is "running" as a Democrat to bolster her brand — encourage a kind of anti-politics that is poisonous to democracy. They discourage people from seeing elections as part of a larger strategy of coalition-building to create structural change. Instead, they bait people into a consumerist model of politics, where your vote is treated more as an individualistic form of self-expression than an attempt to build power to improve the world.
That has a special allure to the kinds of people who are already prone to cults and conspiracy thinking. To make it worse, phony campaigns lure more people into that conspiratorial worldview. They offer a flattering narrative to people who follow them, telling them they are unique and privy to knowledge that eludes the common person. Everyone likes to believe they're an iconoclast. Following an "outsider" candidate who peddles wild conspiracy theories is more interesting than backing a normal candidate who lives in the boring, fact-based world.
People like Kennedy aren't just recruiting more people into anti-science and conspiratorial thinking. Such thinking is also, crucially, anti-democratic. People are encouraged to believe the system is "rigged" and everyone outside their little cult of conspiracists is out to get them. That paranoia and cynicism make good faith participation in democracy impossible. It's exactly why fascists like Steve Bannon are hyping Kennedy's campaign. It's not just that Kennedy is a potential spoiler. It's that his campaign is about recruiting people into anti-democratic conspiracy thoughts.
There's always been cranks and narcissists who run for office to get attention for themselves or their B.S. causes. Now, however, the situation is likely worse than ever because campaign finance regulation has been thoroughly decimated in the past decade and a half. That makes it much easier for vanity candidates to run, especially with the backing of nefarious actors who benefit from screwing with democratic systems. For some, it can even make it easier to line their own pockets through the use of "political action committees" that are basically slush funds.
"We do not have a clear picture of who is pumping significant money into our elections," Stephen Spaulding, the vice president of policy at Common Cause, told Salon. Especially after the disastrous 2013 Supreme Court decision dismantling much campaign finance law, he explained, there's "a universe of money influencing our elections that are coming from somewhere in large amounts, but we don't know where it's coming from."
We don't know if Kennedy or other candidates like him have dark money backing or how much — and that's a big part of the problem. He certainly has an ugly history of connections to far-right dark money. He was connected to the QAnon-linked Reawaken America tour, which promotes disinformation and fascist politics through a network of far-right activists who benefit heavily from a transparency-free political donation system. He also filmed a video for an anti-vaccine, pro-January 6 super PAC, run by Charlene Bollinger, an anti-vaxxer who draws in huge sums of money through shady and often mysterious business practices. We also know that Kennedy is backed by Wall Street trader Mark Gorton, who has given to Kennedy's anti-vaccination group. But how much other money is flowing from Gorton, Bollinger or other such sources to back Kennedy's campaign is hard to measure, due to the deregulated campaign finance system.
The free flow of money in politics is inarguably a draw for con artists, as demonstrated by the often funny but always disturbing story of Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y. Santos has been exposed as a con artist who seems to have run for office in no small part to lure Republican donors into giving him money he spent on luxuries and designer clothes. Most political grifters, such as Donald Trump, know well enough to launder the ill-gotten money through PACs and other deregulated campaign systems. Santos, however, has been indicted on charges of simply taking money directly from donors for himself. But the campaign finance system has been so degraded by Republican deregulation schemes that it's quite likely Santos would have escaped justice if his unlikely win hadn't drawn press scrutiny that eventually exposed him.
Indeed, there are strong signs that Trump ran for president initially planning to be one of those go-nowhere campaigns that's more about making money than a serious bid for office. Trump is a notoriously bad businessman, and his tax returns suggest he's gone as much as a billion dollars in debt, after burning through nearly a billion granted him by his father and the show "The Apprentice." Trump had long mused publicly about his desire to tap into the world of dark money to reline his empty pockets. In office, his corruption far outpaced toothless political finance laws, as he used his hotels and other properties as blatant bribe-gathering operations. The grift has not slowed down one bit. Donors think they're giving to Trump's presidential campaign, for instance, but mostly that money has been going to pay his legal bills.
While cautioning there's no legal way to distinguish real candidates from people who are in it for the grift, Spaulding did agree that campaign finance reform could make it less appealing to run for office merely as a brand-building or money-gathering exercise. He highlighted the DISCLOSE Act that Democrats support, but Republicans have filibustered to death in the Senate. The act would make dark money giving much more difficult, making it hard for candidates, both those sincerely running and those with ulterior motives, to enjoy the backing of wealthy interests who don't want their involvement known. He also called for the federal government to take more proactive steps to enforce laws that do exist, so people like Santos can be snagged before they get too far into the process — or even get elected.
There's no one fix for con man candidates, of course. Still, it might be harder for people like Kennedy or Williamson to present as sincere candidates to gullible people — if they were forced to be more upfront about where their financial support is coming from. Conspiracy theorists and cultists trick people by pretending to be righteous warriors against a corrupt mainstream. It's a lot harder of a story to weave if your own corruption is front and center.
Fox News really has a scoop on this one. BREAKING!!!!!
"President Biden has joined far-left 'Squad' member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in linking the ongoing Canadian wildfires pouring smoke into the U.S. to the 'climate crisis.'
Earlier in the day, Ocasio-Cortez used the wildfires, as well as record-high temperatures in Puerto Rico, to push her signature Green New Deal, saying the world is 'unprepared' for the 'climate crisis.'"
Farther down, they published this explanation:
"It's unclear exactly how the fires originated, however parts of Canada have been experiencing drought conditions and unusually high temperatures, creating a ripe environment for wildfires to spark."
Yeah this really unclear. Like every other place on earth, Canada is been having unusually high temperatures. Radical leftists blame this on the Democrat hoax "climate crisis," but the cause is not known.
"Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not a serious person."
seriousness is the least of the issues with him
and, yet, one-fifth of Democraps want him to be President
and 64% of Democraps are willing to consider him
the Dem Party is not a serious party
"There's no danger he'll beat President Joe Biden for the nomination, of course."
oh, at this point you can't say that
not when 64% of Dems are willing to consider him
but been if he doesn't win, this kind of large chunk challenge to an incumbent always changes the party in the White House
Eugene McCarthy sunk LBJ
Ronald Reagan sunk Gerald Ford
Ted Kennedy sunk Jimmy Carter
Pat Buchanan sunk George HW Bush
add that historical fact to Biden's declining support among black and Hispanic voters
and Biden's abysmal approval ratings
and, it's clear to see, there's no real danger Biden will be President for more than a couple of weeks in January 2025
More Americans consider themselves to be conservative on social issues than at any point in the past decade, according to a new poll.
The Gallup survey released Thursday showed 38 percent of respondents said they are conservative or very conservative on social issues, an increase from the 33 percent who said so last year. The percentage who now say they are liberal or very liberal on these issues dropped from 33 percent last year to 29 percent.
That's right: conservatives beat liberals by 9 points.
Gallup had not found as many identifying as social conservatives since 2012, which it said was a time when respondents consistently identified more as conservative than liberal on social issues.
Pollsters also noted increases in the percentage across most age groups. The group of 30 to 49 saw the biggest rise, jumping 13 points from 22 percent in 2021 to 35 percent in 2023.
The percentage of those aged 50 to 64 who said they are socially conservative increased 11 points in that time, from 35 percent to 46 percent, while the percentage for people 18 to 29 rose 6 points from 24 percent to 30 percent.
The overall percentage identifying as moderate remained roughly steady this year at 31 percent.
The results come as numerous states have pushed forward various initiatives on social issues in the past year, including abortion bans following the overturn of Roe v. Wade and bans on sexual reassignment surgery for youth.
Looks like the despicable day of anti-family forces is nearing nightfall
The school voucher system enacted by Arizona Republican lawmakers is going to cost the state's taxpayers $900 million this coming school year -- 60% more than what lawmakers put into the budget just a month ago.
Three out of every four of the students who have applied for the new universal vouchers already were going to private schools on their parents' dime. Now their tuition will be borne by taxpayers. The burst of parents seeking to shift the costs of their children’s private school tuition to the state is not a surprise to lawmakers. They were told earlier this year by their own budget staffers that would happen. That was the point, wasn't it?
Typical Republican grift to help the rich. Now their kids can continue going to private schools but they don't have to pay for it. That was the plan all along.
In a letter to members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, leaders encouraged them to reconsider voting solely on political lines – and to give the merits of the individual getting their support serious consideration, The Salt Lake City Tribune reported on Wednesday.
“Citizens of the United States have the privilege and duty of electing officeholders and influencing public policy," the letter from the church leadership began. "Participation in the political process affects their communities and nation today and in the future. We urge Latter-day Saints to be active citizens by registering, exercising their right to vote, and engaging in civic affairs, always demonstrating Christlike love and civility in public discourse."
The letter urges members to be "informed about the issues and candidates" and examine them within the context of the gospels.
"Some principles compatible with the gospel may be found in various political parties, and members should seek candidates who best embody those principles," the letter continues. "Members should also study candidates carefully and vote for those who have demonstrated integrity, compassion, and service to others, regardless of party affiliation.
"Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy and inconsistent with revealed standards (See Doctrine and Covenants 98:10)."
Salt Lake Tribune columnist Gordon Monson said it was a message directed straight at Trump, among others.
"Are you listening, Donald Trump? Ron DeSantis?" he wrote.
He went on: "Think about who Trump is in so much of his public and private life — a liar, or, for those who shrink away at that term, a massive distorter of the truth, a man who comports himself in a manner far outside what is taught to Latter-day Saints, a man being investigated for a fistful of crimes, an individual who paid off an adult film star with whom he had an affair to keep her silent, a man who was recorded saying women allow powerful men to molest them, a president who claimed after his election defeat, against all evidence and court decisions to the contrary, that the 2020 vote was a fraud, that the election was stolen from him, and on and on and on. And I haven’t even used the word “insurrection.”
The LDS letter goes on to say that the church is neutral on parties and issues, despite posting "information" about specific issues that impact their "mission, teachings, or operations of the church or that church leaders believe are essential to preserving democracy."
The report questioned if the shift came due to the change after church President Ezra Taft Benson, a far-right extreme political conservative who died in 1994. The followers of his philosophy have voted GOP for decades, even if the candidates were woefully unqualified or if they didn't support democracy or the Constitution.
"In recent times, church officials essentially have said that the Republican Party is not the church’s party. Democrats and others are welcome, too. But that message apparently hasn’t been sent with quite enough oomph," Monson said. He called it a "welcomed shot across the bow of political extremism, the bow of the dominant Republican Party in Utah, and the bow of Republicans on the national scene — Democrats, too — politicians of less-than-stellar character who have made a habit of conquering, or attempting to conquer, the voting public by dividing it via their extremism."
He explained the importance of the message – that being a Democrat was generally scorned in the state: "you're a freaking traitor. A vote for the other is a vote to destroy America. A vote for a Republican is automatic for the good of the people, even if that Republican is morally corrupt."
It seems, Monson explained, the church is telling it's membership that they shouldn't be "voting for bums, crooks and criminals solely because they are of one party."
Monson closed by writing that he has hope it will influence the Utah loyalists casting their ballots for Trump but consider the morality of their decision.
He said it's clear a man like Trump is "not whom modern church leaders want their flock supporting."
The full column is in the Salt Lake City Tribune.
Chris Christie isn’t holding back on the Trump family anymore, calling them out for “breathtaking” corruption during his official presidential campaign launch.
Christie had been a major supporter of Donald Trump since dropping out of the 2016 election, even running his 2020 reelection campaign. But apparently, Trump’s refusal to accept the election results was a bridge too far, and Christie has since pivoted sharply.
“The grift from this family is breathtaking,” Christie said during his Tuesday night launch event, a town hall in New Hampshire. “It’s breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House, and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis.”
Christie was referring to a $2 billion investment made by a sovereign wealth fund, which Kushner used to start his private equity firm A Fin Management LLC in 2021. The fund is chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. And Trump and Kushner looked the other way after his murder.
“You think it’s ’cuz he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s ’cuz he was sitting next to the president of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis?” Christie asked the crowd, referring to Jared Kushner. “That’s your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.”
Washington Post print edition, page A5: House adjourns as GOP infighting creates a bill impasse
Hakeem Jeffries: "This week puts into clear focus the choices that the American people have. On the one side, Democrats team, reasonable team, normal and team get stuff done. On the other side, Republicans team chaos, team dysfunction and team extreme."
At least one side is able to get stuff done. The other side is just against everything, including each other.
An Overland Park, Kansas, Catholic school teacher was sentenced after pleading guilty to more than two dozen crimes against children. As part of a plea deal, a Johnson County judge sentenced Joseph Heidesch to more than five years in prison. He cannot request probation.
In December, Heidesch pleaded guilty to one felony count of sexual exploitation of a child and 25 counts of breach of privacy as part of the plea deal. Prosecutors charged Heidesch in October 2021, for secretly recording video of more than 100 girls at St. Thomas Aquinas.
A Little Mouse just asked me, is this a human who teaches other humans about right and wrong? Yes, I had to say. The human children were getting a "religious education" from him.
Dozens of heat records have fallen in Siberia, as temperatures climbed above 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the far-left Democrat hoax "climate crisis."
Despite only being early June, records are tumbling across parts of Siberia as extreme heat pushes into unusually high latitudes.
Radicals like AOC and Biden, as well as Barack Hussein Obama, are pushing a leftist "green new deal" to destroy our American way of life and make the weather better in Siberia. And also Canada.
Jay Johnston, a longtime actor and comedy writer, was arrested by the FBI on Wednesday and charged in connection with the deadly Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Johnston, 54, faces felony charges for obstructing officers responding to civil disorder, as well as several other misdemeanors, including unlawful trespassing and attempting to disrupt government business, according to a federal warrant filed Monday.
Johnston voiced the character “Jimmy Pesto Sr.” in Bob’s Burgers and played “Officer Taylor” in Arrested Development. The Chicago native also made cameos in television series like Better Call Saul, Modern Family, Parks & Recreation, and more. Johnston was nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards in 1998 and 1999 as a writer for Mr. Show with Bob and David.
The Daily Beast reported in late 2021 that the top staff behind Bob’s Burgers had “banned” Johnston from reappearing on the show in response to his alleged role in the U.S. Capitol attack.
More than 1,000 people have been arrested and charged with federal crimes for their alleged roles in the attack, according to The Associated Press. More than 500 people have been sentenced. The AP reports many of the people found guilty have received sentences ranging from an imprisonment ranging from one week to 18 years.
In the federal warrant, an FBI special agent investigating the attack says evidence shows Johnston booked a round-trip flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. the week of the riot. The actor arrived in the nation’s capitol on January 4 and left on Jan. 7, a day after the violence, during which five people died.
Using security footage from the attack, federal investigators allegedly tracked Johnston’s activity throughout the melee.
Johnston is allegedly seen in footage entering the U.S. Capitol building’s west tunnel “assist[ing] at least three other rioters by pouring water on the rioters' faces." He then “made his way further toward the police line and assisted other rioters in handing up U.S. Capitol Police shields,” the federal warrant alleges.
“Johnston then participated with other rioters in a group assault on the officers defending” the U.S. Capitol, according to the FBI agent. The warrant includes still images of Johnston holding the shield. Video shows Johnston “pushing along with other rioters” who attempted to break through the police line protecting the entrance to the building, the warrant alleges.
Remember when all the Republicans' whistleblowers disappeared? Well they got their evidence anyway. According to Chad Pergram of Fox News, the committee has reported "the document does not say Joe Biden received any payments."
House Oversight Committee Republicans accused President Biden of taking a bribe from Burisma, but the document that they are using as evidence doesn’t say that Biden took a bribe from anybody.
Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that the informant said that the owner of Burisma said that he had proof that a payment was made to Joe Biden, but the document doesn’t say that Biden took any payments.
The claims that Republicans are making are based on Russian disinformation that was fed to Rudy Giuliani as part of the Russian effort to interfere in the 2020 election for Trump. The whole story that they are pushing in 2023 was debunked in 2020.
Oh really? We're stunned. Pass the cheese, please.
because of an excess of ash particulates in the air from Canadian wildfires caused by poor forest management, the Pride event planned for the White House lawn has been cancelled
that's damn shame
gays should protest in Quebec!!!!!!!!!
and, to think, we already have a L?BGTQ state of emergency going on....
LOL!
The fashion for transgenderism has brought with it a new euphemism: “gender-affirming care,” which means surgical and pharmacological interventions designed to make the body look and feel more like that of the opposite sex. Gender-affirming care for children involves the use of “puberty blockers”: one of five powerful synthetic drugs that block the natural production of sex hormones.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved those medications to treat prostate cancer, endometriosis, certain types of infertility and a rare childhood disease caused by a genetic mutation. But it has never approved them for gender dysphoria, the clinical term for the belief that one’s body is the wrong sex.
Thus the drugs, led by AbbVie’s Lupron, are prescribed to minors “off label.” (They are also used off-label for chemical castration of repeat sex offenders.) Off-label dispensing is legal; some half of all prescriptions in the U.S. are for off-label uses. But off-label use circumvents the FDA’s authority to examine drug safety and efficacy, especially when the patients are children. Some U.S. states have eliminated the need for parental consent for teens as young as 15 to start puberty blockers.
Proponents of puberty blockers contend there is little downside. The Department of Health and Human Services claims puberty blockers are “reversible.” It omits the evidence that “by impeding the usual process of sexual orientation and gender identity development,” these drugs “effectively ‘lock in’ children and young people to a treatment pathway,” according to a report by Britain’s National Health Service, which cites studies finding that 96% to 98% of minors prescribed puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones.
Gender advocates also falsely contend that puberty blockers for children and teens have been “used safely since the late 1980s,” as a recent Scientific American article put it. That ignores substantial evidence of harmful long-term side effects.
The Center for Investigative Reporting revealed in 2017 that the FDA had received more than 10,000 adverse event reports from women who were given Lupron off-label as children to help them grow taller. They reported thinning and brittle bones, teeth that shed enamel or cracked, degenerative spinal disks, painful joints, radical mood swings, seizures, migraines and suicidal thoughts. Some developed fibromyalgia. There were reports of fertility problems and cognitive issues.
The FDA in 2016 ordered AbbVie to add a warning that children on Lupron might develop new or intensified psychiatric problems. Transgender children are at least three times as likely as the general population to have anxiety, depression and neurodevelopmental disorders. Last year, the FDA added another warning for children about the risk of brain swelling and vision loss.
The lack of research demonstrating that benefits outweigh the risks has resulted in some noteworthy pushback in the U.S. and abroad. Republican legislatures in a dozen states have curtailed or banned gender-affirming care for minors. Finland, citing concerns about side effects, in 2020 cut back puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors. Sweden followed suit in 2022 and Norway this year. Britain’s National Health Service shuttered the country’s largest youth gender clinic after 35 clinicians resigned over three years, complaining they were pressured to overdiagnose gay, mentally ill, and autistic teens and prescribe medications that made their conditions worse.
Still, the U.S. and most European countries embrace a standard of care that pushes youngsters toward “gender-affirming” treatments. It circumvents “watchful waiting” and talk therapy and diagnoses many children as gender dysphoric when they may simply be going through a phase.
Gender-affirming care for children is undoubtedly a flashpoint in America’s culture wars. It is also a human experiment on children and teens, the most vulnerable patients. Ignoring the long-term dangers posed by unrestricted off-label dispensing of powerful puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, combined with the large overdiagnosis of minors as gender dysphoric, borders on child abuse.
Well that scuttlebutt we heard through the vent was true.
Trump indictment live updates: Charges include violation of Espionage Act
He was the best candidate the Republicans had for President, too, the ultimate example of what they stand for. I have heard he can still run from president from prison. I wonder if he will.
We will be watching to see if Rhonda Santis can top this.
"Trump indictment live updates: Charges include violation of Espionage Act"
in contrast to the laughable indictment of Trump in New York, this case actually has some legal basis behind it
the trouble is, when this goes to trial, discussion will go why he was trying to retain certain documents
he was actually retaining evidence he feared would be destroyed by the Biden administration concerning the Russian hoax created by Hillary
as Hillary has never been charged with defrauding the government and misleading Congress, despite her obvious complicity, it will be difficult to field a 12-man jury in Florida that will unanimously convict Trump
remember, the Obama administration destroyed evidence in Hillary's classified records scandal
Keep spinning bogus conspiracy theories!
Meanwhile, in the RW, facts include:
Special counsel has obtained a tape of Trump discussing a classified document he kept after leaving office
Trump acknowledged on the tape recording, made in 2021, that the planning document he took was related to Iran and that it was classified
"The possibility of prison if Trump’s convicted"
neither of his two current indictments will result in convictions
the NY case is ridiculous
if you can't find out why on Google, let me know
the Federal case is not absurd but there are many complications and a lot of uncharted territory
a jury will never unanimously agree
and hard to see how he's convicted when Hillay walked free
the Georgia case, however, whenever it comes down, is actually pretty serious and he may be guilty of those charges
we'll see
innocent until proven guilty but threatening local officials if they won't falsify voting records is despicable conduct
During a House Oversight Committee hearing on sustainable investing, Vermont Democratic Representative Becca Balint strongly criticized Mandy Gunasekara, a former Trump administration official, for bringing up transgender issues.
The discussion revolved around the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment strategy and Gunasekara's baseless assertion that it promotes gender transitions for children. Republican critics of ESG have long argued against its principles, which incorporate a company's approach to climate change and social issues.
Balint expressed her frustration and questioned the credibility of Gunasekara's claims, leading to a heated exchange.
After Balint questioned whether Gunasekara genuinely believes "that garbage" in response to the latter's assertion that ESG promoted gender transitions for children at the House Oversight Committee meeting, Gunasekara insisted "it's a matter of fact."
Balint then asked her the following:
“So you believe investing strategies are actually ... weaponized to support and promote gender transition for children? It is that essentially what you’re saying, or do you just use it as another opportunity to beat up on children?”
Gunasekara responded:
“I’m not the one beating up on children. It’s the people who are promoting gender transitions in children that are potentially harming them.”
It was then that Balint shut her down, noting that she had just heard from parents of trans children who live in states that have banned gender-affirming care for minors:
“They literally said, ‘When you leave this room, could you please—the next time you’re in a room with someone bringing up, yet again, our children and our families as some kind of bogeyman, that you actually stand up for us?’ I didn’t know I would have such an opportunity!”
“It feels like every single hearing that I am in, whether it is in Oversight, or whether it is in Budget, or whether it is in a subcommittee, somehow the witnesses find a way to bring in trans children into whatever conversation we’re trying to have here."
Gunasekawa's appearance before the House Oversight Committee came as GOP officials in legislatures around the country persist in their efforts to impede gender-affirming care within their respective states.
Many Republicans' use of transphobia as a political tool shows they are willing to resort to lies and hate speech to win elections and throw meat to their base.
Meanwhile, claims that ESG investment strategies amount to "woke politics" have continued to be heard from Republicans who similarly attacked Transportation Pete Buttigieg earlier this year after he released a plan that in part reserved grant money for “projects that address equity and environmental justice, particularly for communities that have experienced decades of underinvestment and are most impacted by climate change, pollution, and environmental hazards.”
"gender-affirming care for minors"
This is typical word-bending by the lunatic fringe, falsely contending that puberty blockers for children and teens have been “used safely since the late 1980s,” as a recent Scientific American article put it. That ignores substantial evidence of harmful long-term side effects.
A paid informant told the FBI that an executive from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma has documents proving he bribed President Biden with $5 million while he was vice president.
The “trusted” and “highly credible” FBI informant said Burisma paid the bribe between 2015 and 2016 to solicit then-Vice President Biden’s help in thwarting a Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating the company, The Washington Times has confirmed.
Burisma paid an additional $5 million to Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who served on Burisma’s board at the time and received a $1 million annual salary at the energy company. The scheme was concealed using multiple bank accounts, according to the informant.
We just watched the short press conference announcing the unsealing of the indictments. Grandma Mouse leaned back on her recliner (it is a soft bit of sponge we found for her on the kitchen floor) when it ended and said, "That Jack Smith is not somebody I'd want to fuck with."
Right Grandma, I was thinking that, too.
Us Little Mouses don't like Jonathan Turley. He's a Fox TV lawyer and is the kind of partisan loyalist who always twists the facts to make the Republican side look good. But today even he had to say the unsealed indictment against former president Donald Trump is "extremely damning."
He said, "It is an extremely damning indictment. You know, there are indictments that are sometimes called narrative or speaking indictments. These are indictments that are really meant to make a point as to the depth of the evidence. There are some indictments that are just bare bones — this is not. The special counsel knew that there would be a lot of people who were going to allege that the Department of Justice was acting in a biased or politically motivated way. This is clearly an indictment that was drafted to answer those questions. It’s overwhelming in details. And, you know, the Trump team should not fool itself, these are hits below the waterline."
Plus, not a real good sign for Trump that some of his best lawyers just resigned. I mean, can you imagine trying to represent that guy? I think we are safe in our church wall, but there is going to be some turbulence out there for the next few months or more.
There's my thanks for the Moonie Rag's "confirmation" of "the bribe".
Oh, except father down in that Moonie Rag article quoted above, Moonie Rag writer said "In response to these allegations, the GOP-led panel plans a round of subpoenas in the coming days that will seek new financial documents from Biden family associates, sources told The Times."
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf
After rightwinger Charlie Kirk encouraged GOP candidates to pause their campaigns to support Trump, Anne Coulter tweeted "That's nothing! I'm calling on EVERY REPUBLICAN TO COMMIT SUICIDE in solidarity with Trump. Otherwise, we don't have a country, folks."
I hate to mention it, but Jim Jones was a greater leader than Donald Trump, and he's got the numbers to prove it.
Trump, who claimed kneeling Black athletes disrespected the military, illegally shared classified military secrets with his guests.
A federal court on Tuesday temporarily blocked a Florida law that prohibits sex-change procedures on children under 18. The opinion leans heavily on medical and scientific rationales to argue that it is unconstitutional to ban the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery on teenagers.
Twenty states maintain age restrictions on sex-change procedures, and the problem they face is explaining to judges that American medical associations aren’t following the best available evidence. This is known to European health authorities and has been reported in such prestigious publications as the British Medical Journal. But American judges need some way to evaluate conflicting scientific authorities—especially as institutions responsible for ensuring that medical professionals have access to high-quality research aren’t functioning as they should.
A case in point: Springer, an academic publishing giant, has decided to retract an article that appeared last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The retraction is expected to take effect June 12.
The article’s authors are listed as Michael Bailey, a well-respected scientist, with dozens of publications to his name, and Suzanna Diaz, who writes under a pseudonym to protect the privacy of her daughter, who suffers from gender dysphoria.
Their paper is based on survey responses from more than 1,600 parents who reported that their children, who were previously comfortable in their bodies, suddenly declared a transgender identity after extensive exposure to social media and peer influence. Mr. Bailey’s and Ms. Diaz’s sin was to analyze rapid onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD. Gender activists hate any suggestion that transgender identities are anything but innate and immutable. Even mentioning the possibility that trans identity is socially influenced or a phase threatens their claims that children can know early in life they have a permanent transgender identity and therefore that they should have broad access to permanent body-modifying and sterilizing procedures.
Within days of publication, a group of activists wrote a public letter condemning the article and calling for the termination of the journal’s editor. Among the letter’s signatories is Marci Bowers, a prominent genital surgeon and president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an advocacy organization that promotes sex changes for minors.
Nearly 2,000 researchers and academics signed a counter letter in support of the article. Springer nonetheless decided to retract the paper. Springer initially asserted that the study needed approval from an institutional review board. But it quickly abandoned that rationale, which was false.
The publisher now maintains that the retraction is due to improper participant consent. While the respondents consented to the publication of the survey’s results, Springer insists they didn’t specifically agree to publication in a scholarly or peer-reviewed journal. That’s a strange and retrospective requirement, especially considering that Springer and other major publishers have published thousands of survey papers without this type of consent.
Anyone familiar with the controversy over transgender medicine knows what is going on. Activists put pressure on Springer to retract an article with conclusions they didn’t like, and Springer caved in. We’ve become accustomed to seeing these capitulations in academia, media and the corporate world, but it is especially disturbing to see in a respected medical journal.
Rather than appreciate the long-term risk to itself and the scientific community from doing the bidding of activists, Springer has instead agreed to evaluate and retract all survey papers that lack the newly required consent. If Springer follows through on its promise, hundreds of authors who chose to publish in Springer’s journals may have their research retracted.
The publications that support what they call “gender-affirming care” rely heavily on surveys. The U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015, for instance, has generated several influential papers. As it happens, the USTS didn’t inform participants that their answers would be published in peer-reviewed journals.
This kind of double standard runs through gender-medicine research. Papers advocating “gender transition” are readily accepted by leading scientific journals despite having grave methodological flaws and biases. Work that questions gender-transition orthodoxy stands almost no chance of being published in the best-known journals. Every now and then, an errant research paper slips past the censors, but should it prove significant enough to threaten the settled science narrative, retribution is swift and merciless. The researcher Lisa Littman learned this lesson in 2018, when she was widely attacked after publishing on the topic. Mr. Bailey and Ms. Diaz are learning it now.
The idea is to manufacture the appearance of scientific consensus where there is none. The pseudo-consensus then allows such American medical associations as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society to recommend body-altering procedures for children.
While many Americans have heard news about the wave of states passing legislation that curbs sex changes for the young, few realize that an equally fierce, and arguably far more important, battle is raging: the battle for the integrity of the scientific process. It is a fight for the ability to have censorship-free scientific debate as a means to advance human knowledge.
"The 49 page indictment every American should read"
For the first time in U.S. history, the prosecutorial power of the federal government has been used against a former President who is also running against the sitting President. This is far graver than the previous indictment by a rogue New York prosecutor, and it will roil the 2024 election and U.S. politics for years to come.
Special counsel Jack Smith announced the indictment in a brief statement on Friday. But no one should be fooled: This is Attorney General Merrick Garland’s responsibility. Mr. Garland appointed Mr. Smith to provide political cover, but Mr. Garland, who reports to Mr. Biden, has the authority to overrule a special counsel’s recommendation. Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.
***
Thirty-one of the counts are for violating the ancient and seldom-enforced Espionage Act for the “willful retention of national defense information.”
But it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.
This doesn’t fit the spirit or letter of the PRA, which was written by Congress to recognize that such documents had previously been the property of former Presidents. If the Espionage Act means Presidents can’t retain any classified documents, then the PRA is all but meaningless. This will be a key part of Mr. Trump’s defense.
In the court of public opinion, the first question will be about two standards of justice. Mr. Biden had old classified files stored in his Delaware garage next to his sports car. When that news came out, he didn’t sound too apologetic. “My Corvette’s in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” Mr. Biden said. AG Garland appointed another special counsel, Robert Hur, to investigate, but Justice isn’t going to indict Mr. Biden.
As for willful, how about the basement email server that Hillary Clinton used as Secretary of State? FBI director James Comey said in 2016 that she and her colleagues “were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” According to him, 113 emails included information that was classified when it was sent or received. Eight were Top Secret. About 2,000 others were later “upclassified” to Confidential. This was the statement Mr. Comey ended by declaring Mrs. Clinton free and clear, since “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
This is the inescapable political context of this week’s indictment. The special counsel could have finished his investigation with a report detailing the extent of Mr. Trump’s recklessness and explained what secrets it could have exposed. Instead the Justice Department has taken a perilous path.
The charges are a destructive intervention into the 2024 election, and the potential trial will hang over the race. They also make it more likely that the election will be a referendum on Mr. Trump, rather than on Mr. Biden’s economy and agenda or a GOP alternative. This may be exactly what Democrats intend with their charges.
It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent. That seal has now been broken. It didn’t need to be. However cavalier he was with classified files, Mr. Trump did not accept a bribe or betray secrets to Russia. The FBI recovered the missing documents when it raided Mar-a-Lago, so presumably there are no more secret attack plans for Mr. Trump to show off.
The greatest irony of the age of Trump is that for all his violating of democratic norms, his frenzied opponents have done and are doing their own considerable damage to democracy.
It was either the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr or Hall of Fame New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra (or, quite possibly, neither of them) who coined the phrase: “Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.”
Nonetheless, let's venture our best estimations of what major news events will or won’t take place in 2024.
Donald Trump will return to the White House
Political scientist Jay DeSart does state-by-state predictions of outcomes based on prior voting habits of the state and the national polling average in October of the year prior to the election. The model predicts a healthy Trump victory (297 electoral votes to 241), with the median forecast seeing Biden lose Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin but hang on to Michigan.
This, of course, assumes Trump will be on the ballot, and the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling disqualifying him puts that in some doubt. But I don’t think much doubt. The likely outcome here is that the Supreme Court rules on whether Trump’s participation in the January 6, 2021, insurrection disqualifies him from the ballot, and I cannot envision the Court ruling against Trump, both because of its partisan leanings and out of fear of Trump supporter backlash delegitimizing the Court.
Republicans will recapture the Senate
The 2024 Senate map is absolutely brutal for Democrats. They are defending 23 seats to only 11 held by Republicans, and only two of the latter (in Florida and Texas) are remotely competitive. Democrats don’t stand much of a chance of regaining the seats they lost six years ago in deep-red Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota, and challenging Sens. Rick Scott (R-FL) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) will be expensive and difficult. Florida is trending Republican, and Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office in three decades.
Democrats, by contrast, are without a doubt losing a seat (the one Joe Manchin is vacating in West Virginia), and the Cook Political Report lists three others as tossups: the reelection bids of Jon Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and the three-way race between independent Krysten Sinema, Democrat Ruben Gallego, and an as yet undetermined Republican in Arizona. Tester and Brown are both in states that Trump won in 2020 by wide margins, and both won very narrowly six years ago.
Democrats have a 51-49 majority right now, and the loss of West Virginia will narrow that to 50-50. So for Republicans to regain control, they either need to win the presidency (letting Donald Trump’s vice president break the 50-50 tie) or beat either Tester, Brown, or Gallego/Sinema. That’s before considering the several seats where Democrats are narrowly favored (in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan) but could still be vulnerable.
Simply put: There are many, many ways for Republicans to retake the Senate. Everything has to go right simultaneously for Democrats to keep it. That makes for high odds of Republican capture.
Female Olympians would never win a gold medal again if they had to compete against transgender athletes, World Athletics president Seb Coe has said.
Lord Coe suggested in a new interview the gap is so large that females competing at the Olympics wouldn't stand a chance against trans women.
The president of the sports governing body says the matter is 'very clear cut'.
Speaking on the Up Front podcast, Lord Coe, 67, said: 'The decision to ban transgender athletes ultimately was based on one very simple proposition - I am elected to protect the female category and if I don't do that no woman will ever win another medal again.'
Bombshell new Jeffrey Epstein documents claim Bill Clinton 'likes them young,' as the former president and other big names once again find themselves embroiled in the appalling sex scandal.
One May 2016 document released Wednesday night - a request for permission from the judge to take more depositions - includes detail of testimony already taken by Johanna Sjoberg, who was recruited at the age of 20 to work as a massage therapist.
Sjoberg was recruited on a college campus, had no massage training, and said she was forced to perform sex acts on Epstein.
Sjoberg told the lawyers in 2016 that Epstein told her 'Clinton likes them young, referring to girls'.
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