“Well, what I lurned [sic] is that I never, ever want to be in a situation where the only person with a gun is the one who’s outta their mind, crazy, intent on killing people,” missing link cosplayer who always forgets to take off her costume Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Ga.) says about something on Fox, as Hungary’s tourism ambassador listens looking constipated. “It was the worst thing that could’a happened to any of us and it was terrifying.”
So to summarize: Marge doesn’t want to be in a situation where she’s the only person with a gun. For once, I agree with her.
“Sandy Cortez {Democratic New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] tweeting at me but she hasn’t taken up my offer to actually meet and work together and of course we saw Beto acting like a total jerk and tried to use the death of these children as a prop to advance his political candidacy,” The Rube from Rifle, Mean Girl Lauren Boebert claims. “When 9/11 happened, we didn’t ban planes. We secured the cockpits.”
Let’s go over some things: She doesn’t know what a prop is. Beto was holding the Texas state officials accountable when they refused to take questions from the media or the public. But most importantly, “we” didn’t just reinforce cockpits after 9/11: we prevented some people from flying with a “No Fly” list. We put everyone who wanted to fly through strict screening processes. We tightened security to the point that if you even *joked* about doing something evil, you were prevented from flying. And finally, we don’t let anyone who goes to a Walmart to fly a damn airplane.
Five hundred union workers will be back at the Chevron refinery next week after the United Steelworkers local came to an agreement to end a nine week strike with the energy company, pending the members’ vote to ratify, Reuters reports.
The workers sought a pay increase and improved health benefits from the company, which reported $6.2 billion in profit for the first quarter of 2022. The workers wanted a 5% additional pay increase to cover the additional health care costs shifted to workers.
The strike did not impact the gas output at the refinery, which processes a quarter million barrels of oil daily; plant managers, supervisors and 50 scabs who crossed the picket line kept the refinery operational.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Ga.) has spent more campaign money on security in 2022 than any other candidate for federal or state office, election financial disclosure records show, according to the New York Times.
Greene spent more than $180,000 on a personal security detail since January, according to the report, on top of spending $92,000 of donor money to buy herself a luxury GMC Yukon Denali SUV for use by her campaign.
An ardent supporter of gun rights, it’s unknown why Greene needs such extensive security if she’s armed as she claims to be in campaign videos. Early this week, Greene trolled a campaign office of a Democratic Congressional candidate, during which she had three large white men with her who may have been her security detail. The video, shot in her home in Rome, Georgia, showed three men escorting Greene down an otherwise deserted street.
Only about half of the native-born Russians will remember the chronic shortages of products during the Soviet era, but younger generations are now getting their first taste of it as foreign products have disappeared from store shelves, the Washington Post reports.
With Russia products like cars and clothes being notoriously poorly manufactured, Russians with the wherewithal and means gravitate to foreign-made goods from countries like Germany, Japan and the United States. Now, those products can’t be found.
The shortages are also impacting industry. Airlines cannot get spare parts for their planes, many of which are from European manufacturers. Communications companies can’t get replacement parts for cell phone towers and signal amplifiers.
Apparently unsettled by the free market controlling insurance prices, Republican Florida Governor and sleestak Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would socialize the risk of private insurers by giving them a $2 billion reinsurance fund, the Associated Press reports.
Florida property insurance rates have skyrockets because Florida has a lot of problems with hurricanes that cannot be redirected by a Sharpie on a map. Other factors include building collapses and sink holes that routinely occur in the state.
To make it more business friendly, DeSantis is making Florida taxpayers financially back private insurance companies who will still be able to reap profits even if they have significant outlays for their policyholders. The reinsurance fund would limit the liability of the private corporations while increasing the risk for taxpayers.
The last tweets from the respective Parties. [Narrator: The GOP has not made a single mention of the Ulvade massacre on its Twitter feed, fewer even than the NRA (1).]
Congress needs to pass universal background checks, ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and confirm Steve Dettelbach as head of the ATF.
“… is a person willing [wielding?] that weapon, y’know Cain killed Abel, y’know, and ahhhh, y’know that’s a problem that we have, and I said what we need ta do is look into how we can stop those things, y’know you talk about doing a disinformation, what about gettin’ a department that can look at young men that’s lookin’ at, ah, women that lookin’ at, ah, just social media. What about doin’ that? Lookin’ inta thinks like that and we can stop that that way. But they wanna jus continue talking about taking away your Constitutional rights and I-I think there are more things we need to look into. This has been happenin’ for years and the way we stop it by puttin’ money inta the mental health field, by puttin’ money inta other departments rather dan departments that wanna take away your rights.”
The GOP is not sending their best. They’re sending their spousal abusers. They’re sending their mentally ill, their brain damaged. They’re sending people who have no idea about Constitutional rights. And with that, I present Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for the United States Senate from Georgia, who wants to expand government surveillance of internet users… because “small government conservatives” don’t care about the “First Amendment” and want to create a “Deep State” which will monitor everyone’s browser histories.
US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Quintana Roo) couldn’t respond to questions from Sky News reporter Mark Stone, who pressed the sentient wombat about why mass shootings are largely an event that happens regularly in the United States, and instead retreated to straight MAGA talking points about immigrants (which the GOP doesn’t like) coming to America, proclaiming America to be the “safest” country in the world. Instead of answering the reporters’ questions, Cruz retreats, claiming the reporters are following their own “political agenda.”
Note Cruz continues to complain about Democratic policies to prevent gun violence without detailing any specific policy proposals of his own.
Cruz’s assertion that the United States is the safest country on the globe is objectively not true, with the gun death rate in the US (12.2/100,000) higher than countries like Mexico (11.5), the Philippines (7.72) and Costa Rica (7.59), nations derided by Republicans as “shit hole countries.” According to a ranking by US News & World Report, the United States ranks 38th in safety, behind nations like Singapore, Thailand and the UAE.
Joe Garcia, husband of Irma Garcia, one of the Robb Elementary school teachers killed by a man suffering from a mental illness or listened to too much rap music or played too many violent video games, died Thursday of a fatal heart attack, KABB’s Ernie Zuniga reports. The 41 year old Joe was married to Irma for 24 years. They were high school sweethearts and had four children together.
“There are things we need to be talking about, but we have to look at the whole picture of mental health, these violent video games, isolation coming out of the pandemic, so many factors lead into this,” GOP chairwoman and person ashamed of her family surname Ronna (not Romney) McDaniel proclaims on her Party’s second-tier propaganda network. “Let’s let the investigation take place. We know the Democrats have already jumped ahead and tried to make this a political issue while our whole nation is mourning. It would’ve been nice if Joe Biden used that moment to lead a nation in mourning and bring us together instead of once again trying to divide.”
For the record, Joe Biden is voicing the concerns of 90% of the American people who support universal background checks which Republicans, for political purposes only, oppose. Also, her Party has opposed “red flag” legislation that prevents people with mental health problems from possessing weapons, a common-sense measure to protect people. Oh, and let’s not even get into the fact that Republican leaders–including the entire Republican cabal that runs Texas–have cut health care funding, including access to mental health care, in the name of the fictional “rugged individualism.”
Congresswoman and restaurant patron poisoner Lauren Boebert (Q-Colo) is oblivious to her hypocrisy. The child who appeared in a Zoom call with unsecured weapons displayed behind her because… guns… now seems very upset that a person wasn’t prosecuted for possession of a gun, which is a law that Boebert wouldn’t pass because she believes everyone should have free and easy access to weapons because…. 2nd Amendment. As she hypocritically and retroactively whines about this individual not being prosecuted for something she doesn’t think is a crime, she also puts the entire responsibility for stopping gun violence on the opposition party.
And for the record, I use the moniker “child” when referring to Boebert because she dismissively called a survivor of the Parkland massacre a “child” when he went to Washington to lobby for gun control.
Election officials in Michigan are “confident” that the five Republican gubernatorial candidates caught submitting fake ballot access signature petitions, including polling frontrunners former Detroit police Chief James Craig and self-funding businessman Perry Johnson – who already sank millions into the campaign, and are pretty much fucked no matter how much the MAGA party wants to whine over rules against election cheating being applied to them, the Detroit News reports.
“Disqualifying two of the highest polling candidates in this primary, as well as three others who have expended significant resources in their campaigns is disenfranchising to Republican voters who ultimately should be the decision-makers,” said Michigan GOP Chief of Staff Paul Cordes to the four member State Board of Canvassers on Thursday, basically telling the canvassers that the fake signatures should count anyway and these rules are stupid and gay.
“There is nothing to suggest that there are valid signatures in there,” said Michigan Elections Bureau director Jonathan Brater. Naturally the five candidates are going to take state elections officials to court, but their chances of overturning the board’s decision are shaky at best, as state law puts the burden of proof on them to show the tens of thousands of fake signatures on the petitions are real. “They have the ultimate responsibility,” said election lawyer John Pirich.
Ordered by a court, the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office released a list of 305 Baltimore City police officers it deemed to be unreliable witnesses because of previous incidents of lying or obfuscating during trials, even though the prosecutors continued to use their testimony in criminal trials, the Baltimore Sun reports.
The list, representing more than 10% of the 2,900 sworn officers and civilian employees of the department, tripled the number that were on a list called the “Do Not Call” list when it was first disclosed in October 2021. On the new version of the list, the vast majority of officers listed were still on active duty.
The Baltimore Police Department has suffered from pervasive internal corruption for decades, leading to a tense relationship with the residents of the city, particularly the Black community who has been the target of many of the corrupt officers. The current HBO series “We Own This City” dramatizes the corruption of the notorious Gun Trace Task Force, which had a years-long campaign of corruption, drug dealing and death, which likely played a direct role in the city’s response to the murder of Freddie Gray in 2015.
Right wing Colorado governor candidate Greg Lopez, already famous for his proposal to create a state-level electoral college for counties and being “pro-life” despite his 1993 arrest for assaulting his pregnant wife, now has made an even more “maybe they’ll accept me as ‘almost white’ even though I’m pretty tan” statement to MAGA voters by pledging to exclude Jews, Muslims, and atheists from his search for a running mate on his gubernatorial ticket, OnlySky.media reports.
When asked at a debate last weekend if he would pick a Muslim, Jew, or atheist to be his Lieutenant Governor running mate, Lopez said “Choosing your lieutenant governor is one of the most serious decisions that a governor makes out of the chute – a candidate. So I’m looking for someone that not only believes in my Lord and Savior the way I do, but also that… should something happen to me – because, really, that’s why you’re selecting the lieutenant governor – is that if something should happen to me, and I’m not able to fulfill my term, that they are able to carry on the agenda,” as if he couldn’t simply keep it to himself and then pick a Christian if he wins the nomination to take on incumbent gay Jewish liberal Governor Jared Polis.
Having stopped pretending Antifa is a terrorist threat, House and Senate Republicans have decided that domestic terrorism is actually kind of part of their party’s platform, Connecticut Dem Senator Chris Murphy has concluded after the Senate GOP fucked off on making a bill increasing enforcement of homegrown extremists happen, despite it being passed unanimously by the House GOP two years ago. When “Antifa” scares were all the rage in MAGA Land.
“This is a party that is falling apart at the seams, if their path forward is to make it easier for white supremacists to get away with crimes in this country,” Murphy told Politico about Republicans. “This is a super anodyne, inoffensive, apolitical piece of legislation that just seeks to be more coordinated in taking down violent white supremacists. I mean, if we can’t find consensus on fighting white supremacists, what can we find consensus on?” he added.
Make Australia Great Again fans, bummed out by their crushing losses in Saturday’s elections, are coping with the defeat by denying reality altogether and launching an “election integrity” crusade to look for “voter fraud”, just like their American pals, ISD Global reports. The story goes pretty deep into the weeds of Aussie election bureaucracy – or at least what right wingers there think how it’s supposed to run – because just like their American compatriots, they became instant experts on all the vagaries of ballots and tabulation after they lost an election. Then there’s the made up shit, like the “kinematic artifacts” and “carbon isotopes” plus the classic “bamboo ballots” that the Aussie bogans haven’t come up with yet, but will no doubt make it into their mythology sooner or later.
Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Dean Knudson, one-third of the Republican side of the six-member panel who was set to become its chief commissioner, abruptly quit his post Wednesday after taking a lot of shit from MAGA activists for not buying into the “Stop the Steal” mania that’s all the rage among state Republicans, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports. Knudson, who had been one of the panel’s chief architects while serving in the state Assembly prior to its establishment in 2016, will stay on until Assembly Speaker Robin Vos – another “RINO” who was loudly booed at the state GOP convention last weekend for saying the 2020 election could not be decertified in the state and then only somewhat narrowly survived a no-confidence vote from the party’s rank and file – chooses a successor. Another Republican commissioner, Bob Spindell – a total “Stop the Steal” asshole who signed on as a fake Trump 2020 elector – could end up becoming the lead commissioner, though some expect Vos to go with an outside pick.
