skews13

Today, the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on LGBTQ workplace protections and sanctuary cities was a slap in the face of all those who had placed their bets on Cheeto Jesus to deliver unto them the judicial salvation they feel is owed to them. Conservative writer Varad Mehta: “Trump lost the election today” — 365 people are talking about this ‘The damage is incalculable’. That’s right. A whole bunch of conservatives saw Trump for what he was and didn’t care because he would deliver them the Supreme Court they’d dreamed of for years that would stop all this hippie dippie welfare state nonsense Obummer was determined to foist on their America. Conservative Tool, Erick Erickson: 1,744 people are talking about this From your stupid mouth to Godess’ ears pal! Anyone else need a tissue? Oh — Mark Levin (R-Whine) does: 1,573 people are talking about this Just hang in there homey, the WHAAAAAMBULANCE is on its way. But it gets better. The Supreme Court has also announced what cases they *won’t* be ruling on, many of which include Second Amendment cases. 171 people are talking about this The GOP and conservatives have used the Supreme Court as a rallying cry for voter turnout amongst their base for years. Now, when they are in most need of a new narrative to generate enthusiasm — especially in states where the GOP Senate is most at risk — they have found themselves abandoned by the very institution they sought to control even if it meant putting a traitor in the White House. It’s nice to wake up to good news for a change. It’s even better to wake up and know that for Trump supporters it’s just the opposite. So let us celebrate a great day for equality with a delicious sip of wingnut tears. and I wouldn’t get too comfy in that chair, Brett. Not after November. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/6/15/1953340/--TRUMP-LOST-THE-ELECTION-TODAY-Trumpers-View-Supreme-Court-Rulings-as-Betrayal

Everything was thrown together to fast. Which led to the mass confusion at the start. It should have been scrapped, and redone from scratch. It is first, and foremost, a political discussion forum. But to much off topic BS is allowed, and by both sides, I have been guilty of it myself. So, I suggest we start at the top of the page with the Political Discussion Forums: Politics, Member Debates, Liberals Only, Conservatives Only Politics: Only serious discussion on current political topics allowed here. No off topic posts, or comments, no flaming, or trolling. Post links to interesting articles involving current events, with a paragraph or to, followed by your opinion. This takes the place of the clean debate room. Member Debates: Same rules, with the itenerary of the debate format as laid out now Liberals Only Room: Speaks for itself Conservatives Only Room: Speaks for itself NHB: As is Hell: As is Water Cooler Room. No politics allowed Clubs of the flavor of your choice. One moderator for each room. Club owners are their own moderators Kking chief, cook, and bottle washer Kfools admin There has to be some conservative involvement, or the cons that do participate will constantly whine It puts the cons in the position of not being able to weaponize rules, which equally puts libs in the position of not being able to weaponize rules It puts Kking in a neutral position It leaves kfools out of it No banning of members is allowed with out a courtroom setting, in which all mods are jurors, and have an equal vote Admin makes the final decision And while I'm here, I want teacher back as a mod in one of the rooms. End of rant

' assaulted that women' ? Is English your first language?

You could have said Somalia, where she's from. But you're not that bright so....

To the contrary. The appeals court judges that made the unprecedented request for an explanation from a lower court judge, before a decision had been reached, is judicial malfeasance, and cause for impeachment of those judges.

Anti union Republican policy is to blame for the decay of Detroit, and every other region of the rust belt. Because of Republican anti union, hatred of the American worker, the corporations moved their operations to Mexico, and China. These fucking anti American traitors now have the unmitigated gall to whine and cry because of imports from China, and immigrants coming across the border only to be hired by companies that give donations to Donald Trump.

You believe all of that crap. Don't you?

One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity. Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all. But there comes a tipping point at which it becomes too dangerous to keep up the pretense. Most people left of center would argue (rightly, I believe) that we hit that point long, long ago and the time to re-evaluate journalistic norms and practices should have been decades earlier when the GOP was busy covering up the Iran Contra scandal and promoting the Laffer Curve as serious public policy. Or that any number of catastrophes of conservative public policy and norm erosion since should have sounded the alarms along the way, from the Bush v Gore decision and the Brooks Brothers Riots to the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, to the deregulation-fueled Wall Street crash, birtherism, the Benghazi obsession and the nomination of Donald Trump. Many would point with legitimate outrage to the abdication of responsibility in the face of climate change, yawning inequality, forced family separation policy, children in cages and so much else. But even faced with awful consequences of all these horrors, a defender of traditional journalism might simply chalk them up to policy differences in a democratic society. They would be wrong to do so, but the position would be intellectually defensible in principle. But recently there has been a shift among GOP voters that is different not just in degree of virulence, but also in kind. For a host of different reasons, core Republican voters have begun to reconstitute themselves as a conspiracy theory cult devoted to beliefs that were once relegated to the farthest fringe–fictions that cannot help but end in civil conflict and violence if they fully become canon among conservative voters nationwide. This process arguably began as far back as Glenn Beck’s prominence on Fox News, but it has now blossomed into a grandiose collective paranoid fantasy. Being a Republican now requires believing in a jaw-dropping series of claims that, if true, would almost necessitate anti-democratic revanchism. One has to believe that a cabal of evil scientists is making up climate science in exchange for grant money; that there is rampant, widescale voter impersonation fraud carried out by thousands of elections officials nationwide; that the “Deep State” concocted a scheme to frame Trump for Russian collusion but chose not to use it before the 2016 election; that shadowy forces are driving migrant caravans and diseases across American borders in the service of destroying white Republican America; that the entire news media is engaged in a conspiracy against the Republican Party; that grieving victims of gun violence and their families all across America want to take away guns as a pretext for stomping the boot of “liberal fascism” on conservative faces; and so on. That and much more is just the vanilla Republican belief system at this point (not even touching less explosive academic fictions like “tax cuts pay for themselves” or “the poor will work harder to better themselves if you cut the safety net.”) But things have gotten even worse in the few years short years since the Trump era began. Once a far-fringe conspiracy theory relegated to 8chan and neo-nazi filled knockoffs of Reddit, the QAnon conspiracy theory (which, among other things, posits that a wide swath of prominent Democrats, celebrities and assorted rich people are engaged in pedophilia and adrenochrome harvesting of children, and that the Trump Administration is always just a few weeks away from conducting mass arrests and summary executions–but only once QANON followers have awakened enough of the “normie” public) has become so pervasive that not only do “Q” signs pop up at almost every major conservative rally or protest, but a true believer is now the GOP nominee for Senate in Oregon. When her campaign attempted to backtrack, she doubled down, saying “”My campaign is gonna kill me…How do I say this? Some people think that I follow Q like I follow Jesus. Q is the information and I stand with the information resource.” This conspiracy theory is destroying families, relationships, and the mental health of its adherents. A healthy and normal political party would inoculate itself from it and debunk it quickly. But the GOP is not a healthy or normal political party. It doesn’t stop there. Almost half of Fox News viewers–the core of the GOP–believe that Bill Gates is using the COVID-19 pandemic to microchip them. And Donald Trump has been promoting a series of conspiracy theories on twitter each more outlandish than the last, from old debunked accusations against cable news hosts he dislikes to concocted accusations against former president Barack Obama. Go to any conservative event and you’ll notice a shift from even the raucous detached weirdness of Tea Party rallies. They feel less like political events than cult rallies. Cult experts like Steven Hassan have taken note of this, calling it exactly what it is: a cult built around manufactured realities, shared grievances and us-against-them insular extremism. The increasing dependence of Republican politicians on a shrinking, embattled white evangelical base already given over to faith-based belief systems and racism-tinged “city on a hill” ideology has only exacerbated the phenomenon. It’s long past time for even the venerable pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to start calling this what it is, and stop normalizing it as standard partisanship. It is deeply dangerous in a democracy whose constitution functionally guarantees a two-party system, for one of those two parties to become a conspiracy cult. But that is exactly what has happened. And the first step to fixing it is to call it what it is, no matter how uncomfortable that might be for institutions and journalism professionals who find that sort of language loaded with unprofessional bias. The truth is what it is, even if it requires rethinking the role of a responsible press in an era of white anxiety and mass social-media-fueled disinformation. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/05/23/we-need-to-speak-honestly-about-the-gops-evolution-into-a-conspiracy-cult/

With the changes that have come to the site, and with no real assurances any of this matters, it is difficult to take seriously that any or our efforts are not a waste of time. I was a team member before all of this, and will continue to be, whether or not I am still a moderator. I support your decisions here. But I am ambivalent that any of this will come to fruition. If it does, and I am still moderations, I damn sure am not going to honor rules in any of the rooms of which I had no input. A new team of moderators would have to be able to discuss each rooms rules, one by one, and agree unanimously what stays, what goes, and what would be added or deleted altogether. And that would just be the beginning. We would then have to agree on actions that can be taken by all moderators, from minimum to maximum. There has been way to much ambiguity on both interpretation of, and actions taken concerning the rules as they now are with nothing approaching anything that resembles consistency, and in many cases with favor ability one way or the other. And in other cases wholesale changes altogether. That shit has to end, and a whole new system put in place written in stone. It doesn’t matter who is moderating if the rules are not law, but just a suggestion. Consistency without change or I’m out of it altogether. Let me know when a concrete plan is in place and I’ve got your back.

That ship has already sailed.

What do you call a crisis that kills a hundred thousand Americans? It all depends on who does the dying. At first, it seemed like it was mostly white people infected and/or killed by the coronavirus. As the scale of the coronavirus pandemic dawned on Americans during the month of March, most of the media attention was given to white people like Tom Hanks, while the danger of coronavirus to black people went largely underreported by American media. It was around this time when both the media and the White House decreed it a national emergency. The early cases that made the news and caught everybody’s attention were mainly wealthy white people who’d traveled to the West Coast from Asia and the East Coast from Europe. Trump’s official national emergency declaration came on March 11, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome. The economy crashed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration. Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes. And then came April 7, 2020. I remember that week vividly; it was as if a light switch had been flipped, and I commented on it on the air at the time (and many times since). April 7 was the day that America learned that the majority of the people who were dying from COVID-19 were either elderly, black or Hispanic. Not so many white guys, after all. Exactly one month earlier, on March 7, Trump had played golf at his club in West Palm Beach, met with Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro at Mar-a-Lago, and visited the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. Over the previous week, U.S. deaths had risen from single digits to more than 20. During the following month, all hell broke loose in the United States and around the world. Italy and Spain were melting down, as was the U.S. economy; cases were exploding in New York. The nation was united in the hope that the disease could be stopped dead in its tracks. Then came April 7, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: “Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.” Across the American media landscape, similar headlines appeared at other outlets, and the story was heavily reported on cable news and the network news that night. American conservatives responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?” Rush Limbaugh declared soon after that “with the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component.” And here it was. “The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder—harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody, disproportionate representation.” Claiming that he knew this was coming as if he were some sort of a medical savant, Limbaugh said, “But now these—here’s Fauxcahontas, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris demanding the federal government release daily race and ethnicity data on coronavirus testing, patients, and their health outcomes. So they want a database to prove we are not caring enough about African Americans…” It didn’t take a medical savant, of course. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth. It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a health care system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for more than 400 years. Of course they’re going to die more frequently from coronavirus. But the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously publishing front-page articles about that disparity with regard to COVID-19, both on April 7, echoed across the right-wing media landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display. Tucker Carlson, the only primetime Fox News host who’d previously expressed serious concerns about the death toll, changed his tune the same day, as documented by Media Matters for America. Now, he said, “we can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.” White people were out of work, and black people were most of the casualties, outside of the extremely elderly. And those white people need their jobs back! Brit Hume joined Carlson’s show and, using his gravitas as a “real news guy,” intoned, “The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.” Left unsaid was the issue of whom it was not “quite as dangerous” to, but Limbaugh listeners and Fox viewers are anything but unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white supremacy. More than 12,000 Americans had died from coronavirus by April 7, but once we knew that most of the non-elderly victims were black, things were suddenly very, very different. Now it was time to quit talking about people dying and start talking about white people getting back to work! It took less than a week for Trump to get the memo, presumably through Fox and Stephen Miller. On April 12, he retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the United States back up, and that he’d be announcing a specific plan to do just that “shortly.” On April 13, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published a policy paper titled “Implementing a National Return to Work Plan.” Unspoken but big on the agenda of corporate America was the desire to get the states to rescind their stay-home-from-work orders so that companies could cut their unemployment tax losses. When people file unemployment claims, those claims are ultimately paid for by the companies themselves, and with a high number of claims, a company will see a substantial future increase in their unemployment insurance premiums/taxes. If the “stay home” orders were repealed, workers could no longer, in most states, file for or keep receiving unemployment compensation. On April 14, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and -funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an “economic recovery” program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to “shield” businesses from lawsuits. Three days after that, Freedomworks and the House Freedom Caucus issued a joint statement declaring that “it’s time to re-open the economy.” Freedomworks published their “#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide” encouraging conservatives to show up “n-person” at their state capitols and governors’ mansions, and, for signage, to “Keep it short: ‘I’m essential,’ ‘Let me work,’ ‘Let Me Feed My Family’” and to “Keep them homemade.” One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 18 in New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere. One that drew particularly high levels of media attention, complete with swastikas, Confederate flags and assault rifles, was directed against the governor of Michigan, rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer. When Rachel Maddow began reporting on meatpacking plants that had become epicenters of mass infection, the conservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out that the virus flare wasn’t coming from the “regular folks” of the surrounding community. Although the majority of the meat plant workers were Hispanic and the majority of the surrounding communities were white, her defenders suggested it was just a slip of the tongue. Nonetheless, the conservative meme was now well established. About a third of the people the virus killed were old folks in nursing homes. Which, right-wing commentators said, could be a good thing for the economy because they’re just “useless eaters” who are spending our Medicaid and Social Security money and are on death’s door anyway. For example, Texas’s Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick told Fox News, “Let’s get back to living… And those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.” A conservative town commissioner in Antioch, California, noted that losing “many elderly [people]… would reduce burdens in our defunct Social Security System” and “free up housing.” He added, “We would lose a large portion of the people with immune and other health complications. I know it would be loved ones as well. But that would once again reduce our impact on medical, jobs, and housing.” It came to Trump’s attention that the biggest outbreaks were happening in prisons and meatpacking plants, places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus seen as disposable). Trump’s response to this was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had hesitated to use to order the production of testing or PPE equipment) on April 28 to order the largely Hispanic and black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were dying in meatpacking plants, the elderly were dying in nursing homes. But the death toll among white people, particularly affluent white people who were less likely to be obese, have hypertension or struggle with diabetes, was relatively low. And those who came through the infection were presumed to be immune to subsequent bouts, so we could issue them “COVID Passports” and give them hiring priority. The only thing Republicans had overlooked in their master plan to help out the master race was the very real consequence of Reaganomics across the states of the former Confederacy. Southern states had fought against any sort of state- or federally-funded health care plans since Reconstruction, claiming libertarian ideology while, in fact, their animus was directed at people of color. Caught in those crosshairs, however, just as had been the case prior to the Civil War, were poor whites. Many of the same political and economic factors that put African Americans at risk for the past two centuries were also used against poor whites. In the 1930s when Huey Long was Louisiana’s senator and governor, he explicitly reached out to impoverished white people. As the Encyclopedia Britannica notes, “Always the champion of poor whites, he effected a free-textbook law, launched a massive and very useful program of road and bridge building, expanded state university facilities, and erected a state hospital where free treatment for all was intended. He was opposed to excessive privileges for the rich, and he financed his improvements with increased inheritance and income taxes as well as a severance tax on oil…” Long’s “every man a king” stump speech was particularly intolerable to Louisiana’s wealthy oligarchs, opening as it did with the line, “Is that a right of life, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120 million people?” In 1935 Long was assassinated, and it wasn’t until 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson would try to get any aid to poor Southern whites with Medicaid and food stamps; that, too, was offensive to the conservative white political structure in the South. As a result, poor whites in the South are likely to suffer from the diseases and lack of access to health care that make African Americans throughout the country so vulnerable to COVID-19. And, over the past 40 years, Reaganism has encouraged the spread of deep white poverty from red state to red state. White obesity, diabetes and hypertension are, therefore, overrepresented in poor rural areas as far away as Nebraska and Mississippi. In fact, the Brookings Institution just reported that of the counties where the virus has most recently exploded, 151 of them went for Trump in 2016 (by an average of 12 percent) and only 25 backed Clinton. Today, Trump, Fox and his followers think COVID-19 just kills the elderly, blacks and Hispanics—and they seem comfortable with the needless deaths of people they think are different from themselves. As it spreads into rural white America, however, they’re about to learn otherwise. https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-next-death-wave-from-covid-19-will-be-the-poor-rural-and-white/

Actually, this was Jesus https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5-7&version=NIV

To love thy neighbor as thy love thyself To turn the other cheek To feed the hungry To welcome the immigrant To not be a hypocrite, and pray in the streets, as to be seen by others The Beginning of Knowledge 1 The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel: 2 To know wisdom and instruction, To [a]perceive the words of understanding, 3 To receive the instruction of wisdom, Justice, judgment, and equity; 4 To give prudence to the simple, To the young man knowledge and discretion— 5 A wise man will hear and increase learning, And a man of understanding will [b]attain wise counsel, 6 To understand a proverb and an enigma, The words of the wise and their riddles. 7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, But fools despise wisdom and instruction. Shun Evil Counsel 8 My son, hear the instruction of your father, And do not forsake the law of your mother; 9 For they will be a graceful ornament on your head, And chains about your neck. 10 My son, if sinners entice you, Do not consent. 11 If they say, “Come with us, Let us lie in wait to shed blood; Let us lurk secretly for the innocent without cause; 12 Let us swallow them alive like [c]Sheol, And whole, like those who go down to the Pit; 13 We shall find all kinds of precious [d]possessions, We shall fill our houses with [e]spoil; 14 Cast in your lot among us, Let us all have one purse”— 15 My son, do not walk in the way with them, Keep your foot from their path; 16 For their feet run to evil, And they make haste to shed blood. 17 Surely, in [f]vain the net is spread In the sight of any [g]bird; 18 But they lie in wait for their own blood, They lurk secretly for their own lives. 19 So are the ways of everyone who is greedy for gain; It takes away the life of its owners.

Nah, he's dumber than that.

You're a lot of things A Christian isn't one of them.