For at least the second time in less than a year, there’s a mini-controversy on the Twitters about the term “Lady G” getting thrown around to disparage Lindsey Graham, where some people call it a “homophobic” insult – as if Graham is already openly gay, rather than the “bachelor” he is now.

https://twitter.com/davidmweissman/status/1376226561100283905

You’d think that maybe Graham would reply and say “I’m not gay, you fucking asshole”, but I guess he’s happy with his sexuality being an open secret than having to address it directly.

To Weissman’s point: Being gay is not a character flaw. Two mutually consenting adults spending time together is a beautiful thing no matter who they are. One fascist scumbag taking his personal shit out on the American people is a very ugly thing however, and his closet homosexuality is a weakness to be exploited against him, especially as a prominent member of a party historically (and often still currently) deeply hostile to the rights of non-heterosexual Americans. It is not and never should be off-limits to point that out about Lindsey Graham. There are better ways to do than reducing it down to one nickname however (and yeah, I’ve been guilty of it too, if not here then on my comments on The Hill, but I will do my best to stop).

Scholastic Books, the publisher of the popular “Captain Underpants” series, has pulled a book by the same author Dav Pilkey, for perpetuating passive racial stereotypes, USA Today reports.

Pilkey’s 2010 book, “The Adventures of Ook and Gluk,” was supposed to lead to a spinoff series for Captain Underpants readers. Pilkey used a gimmick of listing the two main characters from the Underpants series as the author and illustrator, using the book to clear up some “science facts” related to a story.

The author said he created the book to “showcase diversity, equality and non-violent conflict resolution” using “principles found in Chinese philosophy” but had recently been alerted that it “also contains harmful racial stereotypes and passively racist imagery.”

An unexploded Civil War-era cannonball was detonated by a state law enforcement bomb squad after it was given to a Frederick, Maryland homeowner by a family member who found it near the Monocacy Battlefield, NBC News reports.

Authorities took it to the Beaver Creek Quarry in Hagerstown where bomb technicians conducted “an emergency disposal,” according to the Maryland state fire marshal.

“As proven today, the finding of military ordnance from the Civil War is not uncommon in Maryland, and these devices pose the same threat as the day they were initially manufactured,” the fire marshal’s office said.

Full story at TMZ.

Heavy rains produced flash floods in middle Tennessee, killing four people and causing public service agencies to rescues scores in Nashville, Brentwood, Franklin and their surrounding areas, the Associated Press reports.

“Major flash flooding is occurring with numerous roads, interstates, and homes flooded with water rescues ongoing!” the National Weather Service tweeted after nearly six inches of water fell on the region Saturday. “Please stay home and do not travel!”

A portion of Interstate 40 was temporarily shut down as high water left a section unpassable, stranding one care on the highway; the driver was able to get out of the car and travel to safety.  In other areas, authorities had to make swift water rescues, including in Williamson County where 34 people needed to be rescued and 18 homes were evacuated.

Washington Post: “The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials – often referred to as ‘vaccine passports’ – that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen. The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies – from cruise lines to sports teams – saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again.”

“The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of announcing updates in coming days, said one official. The White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative, instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials made this month. ‘Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,’ Zients said at a March 12 briefing.”

“The former president is obsessed with defeating him next year. He’s getting mauled by his own state party. Last week alone, a Republican congressman announced he’d challenge in the primary and the state legislature voted to strip his office of some official powers. By most accounts, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger doesn’t have a prayer of being reelected. ‘He’s toast,’ said Jay Williams, a Georgia-based Republican strategist. ‘I don’t know that there’s a single elected official who would put their neck out for Brad Raffensperger right now.'”

“Not everyone in state political circles is convinced Raffensperger’s political plight is so grim. Some still see a path to reelection, despite the serious resistance within his own party. Either way, as the GOP forges its post-Trump era identity, Raffensperger’s reelection campaign is emerging as one of the earliest and most contentious test cases for the direction of the party. At issue is more than just whether critics of the former president can succeed in the party. It’s whether a Republican who rejects the lie that the last election was stolen has any chance of winning another one. The answer in Georgia, so far, is that it will be exceedingly difficult – if not flat-out impossible” – Politico.

AP: “Two additional tugboats sped Sunday to Egypt’s Suez Canal to aid efforts to free a skyscraper-sized container ship wedged for days across the crucial waterway, even as major shippers increasingly divert their boats out of fear the vessel may take even longer to free. The massive Ever Given, a Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned ship that carries cargo between Asia and Europe, got stuck Tuesday in a single-lane stretch of the canal. In the time since, authorities have been unable to remove the vessel and traffic through the canal – valued at over $9 billion a day – has been halted, further disrupting a global shipping network already strained by the coronavirus pandemic.”

“The Dutch-flagged Alp Guard and the Italian-flagged Carlo Magno, called in to help tugboats already there, reached the Red Sea near the city of Suez early Sunday, satellite data from MarineTraffic.com showed. The tugboats will nudge the 400-meter-long (quarter-mile-long) Ever Given as dredgers continue to vacuum up sand from underneath the vessel and mud caked to its port side, said Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, which manages the Ever Given. Workers planned to make two attempts Sunday to free the vessel coinciding with high tides, a top pilot with the canal authority said. ‘Sunday is very critical,’ the pilot said. ‘It will determine the next step, which highly likely involves at least the partial offloading of the vessel.’ Taking containers off the ship likely would add even more days to the canal’s closure, something authorities have been desperately trying to avoid. It also would require a crane and other equipment that have yet to arrive. The pilot spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to brief journalists.”

A man who ran for governor of Idaho in the 2014 and 2018 elections is now the prime suspect in the 1984 murder of a 14-year-old girl in Colorado, CBS News reports.

Steven Pankey, who ran for the Constitution Party’s nomination in 2014 and the Republican’s nomination in 2018, has been charged with the murder of 14-year-old Jonelle Matthews, who disappeared just days before Christmas in 1984.  Her body was discovered in June 2019 by workers installing a pipeline.

During questioning by police, Pankey volunteered information on details about when Matthews died, even though he claimed to have never met her.  He also included himself in a list of suspects for police to consider, again, while claiming he didn’t know the girl.

Former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney countered his former boss’s claims that the January 6th domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol were “zero threat” and “hugging and kissing” police, claims Donald Trump made on Fox News earlier this week.

Appearing on CNN’s “Newsroom,” Mulvany called Trump’s claims “manifestly false,” noting that the attackers killed one police officer and injured 140 more.  Two other police officers took their own lives in the aftermath of the attack.

“I was surprised to hear the President say that. Clearly there were people who were behaving themselves, and then there were people who absolutely were not, but to come out and say that everyone was fine and there was no risk, that’s just manifestly false — people died, other people were severely injured,” Mulvaney said. “It’s not right to say there was no risk, I don’t know how you can say that when people were killed.”

https://youtu.be/2Hn6SEB9ELY

Fox News demoness and woman who talks like she’s always wearing headphone Jeanine Pirro needs to tawk with comedienne and co-host of The View Joy Behar for some reason. And she’s really insistent about it.

Viewer caution: Pirro’s voice may crack windows, disturb dogs and cause the undead to rise.

Baltimore City will no longer prosecute people arrested for drug possession, prostitution and other low-level criminal offenses, a continuation of a program undertaken during the pandemic to reduce the amount of people in city jail and curb the spread of the coronavirus, CNN reports.

“Today, America’s war on drug users is over in the city of Baltimore. We leave behind the era of tough-on-crime prosecution and zero tolerance policing and no longer default to the status quo to criminalize mostly people of color for addiction, said Mosby in an official press release.

The program deals with minor crimes as a public health or social service issues, thereby reducing the number of people in jail.  Since the program was adopted, violent crimes are down 20% and property crimes are down 36%. 

“Sen. Susan Collins avoided censure from her state party on Saturday, escaping the fate of other Republicans who voted to convict former President Donald Trump in his most recent impeachment trial. A 41-19 majority of the Maine Republican Party voted against censuring the moderate fifth-term Republican, according to a release from her office. ‘Today’s decision is a testament to the Republican Party’s ‘big tent’ philosophy that respects different views but unites around core principles,’ Collins wrote in a statement. ‘Our party has been most successful when it has embraced this approach to advance our shared goals of providing tax relief to families and small business job creators, pursuing fiscal responsibility and government accountability, promoting personal responsibility, protecting constitutional rights, and ensuring a strong national defense'” – Politico.

Yesterday, I introduced a Bill declaring ANTIFA a domestic terrorist organization.

Even the Obama administration classified ANTIFA efforts as “domestic terrorist violence.”

Now the Biden administration is pretending that ANTIFA is a myth.

It’s time to hold ANTIFA accountable.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) March 27, 2021

“As Myanmar’s military celebrated the annual Armed Forces Day holiday with a parade Saturday in the country’s capital, soldiers and police elsewhere reportedly killed dozens of people as they suppressed protests in the deadliest bloodletting since last month’s coup. The online news site Myanmar Now reported late Saturday that the death toll had reached 114. A count issued by an independent researcher in Yangon who has been compiling near-real time death tolls put the total at 107, spread over more than two dozen cities and towns. Both numbers are higher than all estimates for the previous high on March 14, which ranged in counts from 74 to 90.”

“Figures collected by the researcher, who asked not to be named for his security, have generally tallied with the counts issued at the end of each day by the Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, which documents deaths and arrests and is widely seen as a definitive source. The Associated Press is unable to independently confirm the death tolls. The killings quickly drew international condemnation, with multiple diplomatic missions to Myanmar releasing statements that mentioned the killing of civilians Saturday, including children. ‘This 76th Myanmar armed forces day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour,’ the European Union’s delegation to Myanmar tweeted. ‘The killing of unarmed civilians, including children, are indefensible acts'” – AP.

Everyone participate and spread this around. Let’s get #CancelDisneyPlus trending on Twitter, cancel your subscription and tell them you won’t be back until they move Marvel productions out of Georgia, or the state walks back its bullshit voter suppression laws under Disney’s threat to do so.

CNN: “The US may finally be getting a handle on the coronavirus pandemic, but for so many Americans, it’s too late, and that disconnect is raising fresh questions about why the US couldn’t have done more earlier. Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under the Trump administration, reveals her chilling conclusion in a new CNN documentary that the number of coronavirus deaths could have been ‘decreased substantially’ if cities and states across the country had aggressively applied the lessons of the first surge toward mitigation last spring, potentially preventing the surges that followed. It is a bracing retrospective from one of the top doctors who was tasked with halting the pandemic, and it comes at a time when many grieving families are still trying to understand how one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world was unable to prevent the loss of nearly 550,000 lives.”

“CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta asked six of the doctors who ran point on the pandemic response, including Birx, to provide their insights on what the US could have done differently in the new documentary, ‘COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out,’ which airs Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN. The doctors all painfully dissected the country’s missteps that led to the enormous loss of life. But Birx saw it most starkly, stating that the vast majority of America’s deaths could have been prevented, a painful interpretation of the last year for a nation still trying to come to terms with the ongoing loss of life. In recent weeks, the news has been dominated by positive signs, like the rapidly accelerating pace of vaccinations and the fact that 71% of Americans 65 and older already having received one shot. The nation seems to be breathing a collective sigh of relief that the United States is no longer staggering through the frantic triage mode that characterized most of the last year, even if the data isn’t all trending in the right direction.”

We deserve better than you as our Secretary of State. https://t.co/8pzY3MkiAn

— Amy Kremer (@AmyKremer) March 27, 2021