The Rich Are Different: Buying Access to the President.

Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File.

Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. CREDIT: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File.

It’s a very old saying, the rich are different. It’s true, they are, by virtue of money, and the power money purchases. If they are different as people, it’s because money allows them to be arrogant, compassion free, unethical assholes without consequence. No, not every rich person on the planet is a truly shitty person, but they are rare birds in the flock of the rich. Rich people are accustomed to getting their way, using the time-honored method of greasing palms and opening doors with wedges of cash and promises. Now that we have someone in the white house who wouldn’t know an ethical behaviour if it bit him on the balls, the slime trail of the rich is visible from space.

According to a New York Times piece published on Saturday, Trump’s son Eric told the newspaper that Mar-a-Lago admits about 20 to 40 new members each year. Considering that Mar-a-Lago raised its initiation fees to $200,0000 after Trump’s presidential inauguration, that’s up to $8 million dollars coming in from new members per year. And that doesn’t include taxes or the $14,000 charge for each member’s annual dues.

Trump and his closest advisers have repeatedly denied there’s anything improper about Trump’s members-only club in Palm Beach. They say it doesn’t amount to paying for access to President Trump because the club is social, not political. And they argue the powerful people who pay for membership have other avenues of communicating with the president.

That’s an argument? I fail to see it.

“He has not and will not be discussing policy with club members,” White House spokesperson Holly Hicks said in a statement provided to the New York Times.

But reporting from the Times and from Politico suggests otherwise.

Real estate executive Bruce Toll told the New York Times that he does occasionally discuss national policy issues — specifically, Trump’s plans to increase spending on infrastructure projects — when he sees Trump at Mar-a-Lago. According to Toll, Trump sometimes receives advice from other club members about what he should do policy-wise.

Developer Richard LeFrak, a close friend of Trump’s, recounted a discussion at Mar-a-Lago last weekend during which Trump asked him for help with the proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico. Trump was unhappy with the projected cost of the wall, wanted to come up with a way to build it more cheaply, and suggested that the head of the Department of Homeland Security would give LeFrak a call to talk about it.

And according to an audio tape obtained by Politico from one of Trump’s New Jersey clubs that was also published on Saturday, Trump has asked his club members for their guidance selecting his cabinet appointees.

“We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?” Trump said to a member, according to the tape.

[…]

This weekend, Trump is planning to use Mar-a-Lago to meet with potential candidates he’s considering to fill the National Security Adviser position recently vacated by Michael Flynn.

Of course, it’s not unusual for world leaders to surround themselves with rich and powerful people. But it is unique to be able to pay $200,000 for entry into a private club where multiple sources close to the president have confirmed he’s at his most relaxed and ready to mingle.

Applications to Mar-a-Lago have surged since Trump won the presidency.

Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have demanded more information about who holds a membership at Mar-a-Lago and how closely they have been vetted. The urgency increased after last weekend, when Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe discussed a potential North Korea crisis in full view of the diners and waiters at his club.

Trump has spent the past three weekends at Mar-a-Lago even though he promised during the campaign that he would “rarely leave the White House.”

The system of government in the States has always been susceptible to corruption, it’s not the most well thought out system. I would say that no sitting president has ever been as open to corruption, and so willing to embrace it in full view of the public at large as the Tiny Tyrant. Donny isn’t capable of governing, he isn’t even capable of running a proper business, and hates being in the white house, acting as president. No, he only feels capable when he’s immersed in the foul cronyism of the monied, who he can slither over to for ‘advice’ on how to president, as he is utterly bankrupt when it comes to the little things, like intelligence, planning, and knowledge.

Via Think Progress.

Sunday Facepalm.

Religious Right bootstomper Carol Swain is quite upset about that dreaded gay thing. Specifically, her life is just being ruined, ruined I say, because some people might think she and a friend might be gay, oh no! I can’t even work up a response to this. Who the fuck cares? I’d assume people who actually know her know that she’s a bigoted piece of goods, along with her being hetero or whatever. Why would she care if strangers might have a random, passing thought about her? Not that I expect that happens much.

Last week, Religious Right activist and college professor Carol Swain spoke at the Family Research Council about her latest book, “Abduction: How Liberalism Steals Our Children’s Hearts and Minds,” where she complained that she cannot even go out in public with her female friends without worrying that people might think that they are gay.

[…]

Even now, as an adult, Swain complained that when she goes out in public with her female friends, “we have to wonder, do people think we’re gay?”

“We don’t care,” she said, “but just the fact that we live in a culture where you can’t have close relationships between men and women with women without wondering whether someone is going to think there is more to it, that is not the way society is supposed to operate.”

Oh yes, you do care. You care very much. After all, you have to have something to keep the edge of your unspeakable bigotry nice and sharp. You have to find yet another way to try and get small minded people panicky, so they’ll fork over money…to you. Convenient, that. I’m happily and visibly bisexual, and I don’t care if people think I’m hetero, nor do I care if they think I’m gay. Haven’t you heard, Carol? Love, it makes the world go ’round. You should try it sometime. Go ahead, go out with a friend, and hold her hand! It feels nice, especially when you don’t care what people think.

In Ms. Swain’s book, she opines about how when she was a little girl, she never had any thoughts about whether or not she might marry her best friend, and thinks openness and acceptance are just fucking everything up. That’s not the case, Ms. Swain. You didn’t think about marrying your best friend because she was a girl, and you were hetero. Other girls had a boy for a best friend, and if they were hetero, they may well have thought about marrying their best friend. Other girls thought about marrying their best girlfriend because they were not hetero. And so on. Y’see, everyone isn’t hetero, and you don’t get to use your personal experience to extrapolate a justification for oppression, bigotry and hatred.

Via RWW.

“Generals, dictators, we have everything,”

President Donald Trump, living alone inside the White House, often hungers for friendly interaction as he adjusts to the difficult work of governance. At his clubs, he finds what’s missing.

That showed last November at a cocktail and dinner reception celebrating longtime members of his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club. Deep into the process of meeting potential Cabinet nominees, the president-elect invited partygoers to stop by the next day to join the excitement.

“We’re doing a lot of interviews tomorrow — generals, dictators, we have everything,” Trump told the crowd, according to an audio tape of his closed-press remarks obtained by POLITICO from a source in the room. “You may wanna come around. It’ll be fun. We’re really working tomorrow. We have meetings every 15, 20 minutes with different people that will form our government.”

For Trump, the “Winter White House” of Mar-a-Lago offers him more than a warm and gilded setting outside of Washington, D.C. — it puts the isolated president back in the mix with his club family, where friends said he feels most like himself.

“So, this is my real group,” Trump said at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, on November 18, according to the audio tape. “These are the people that came here in the beginning, when nobody knew what this monster was gonna turn out to be, right?”

He added: “I see all of you. I recognize, like 100 percent of you, just about.”

[…]

Turning to a longtime club member that night, he said: “We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?”

The supportive crowd ate it up as the relaxed Trump, in his element, gave them a close-up view of how he was setting up the government. “You are the special people,” he told the crowd of about 100 members, who mingled around a sushi station served by a waiter wearing a camouflage “Make America Great Again” cap.

Politico has the full story on this, and it should upset the hell outta people. It upsets me, and it’s fucking infuriating. The only thing that matters to Trump is being the center of attention, and that attention is best when people are paying obscene amounts of money to be one of the Tiny Tyrant’s “friends.” The special people – filthy rich lickspittles. Obviously, the rest of us don’t matter in the flaky crust of Trump’s manufactured reality.

Devil-Worshiping, Luciferian, Demon-Possessed Maniacs!

Belzebuth ou Belzebub ou Beelzebuth, J.A.S. Collin de Plancy. Dictionnaire Infernal. Paris : E. Plon, 1863. Prince of demons, the first in power and crimes after Satan. Cornell University Library.

Belzebuth ou Belzebub ou Beelzebuth, J.A.S. Collin de Plancy. Dictionnaire Infernal. Paris : E. Plon, 1863.
Prince of demons, the first in power and crimes after Satan. Cornell University Library.

Rick Wiles has come completely unglued, not that he had far to go in that regard. He’s now floating in Alex Jones territory, doing all he can to keep the pizza place conspiracy alive, although I don’t know why. I’ve lived through two major Satanic Panics, where nationwide devil worship was posited, a massive conspiracy of murder, rape, and sacrifices, oh my! None of this shit actually happened, but plenty of people were happy to believe it, at the behest of those who found it a good way to make money. Books were written, it was on news shows, the whole thing. I guess I get to live through a third one, if these idiotic christian fanatics get their way. I’ll just go with the assumption that this latest is yet another way for these professional liars to fill their coffers. Mr. Wiles and his cohorts should remember that in their chosen mythology, there’s the demon Mammon.

Mammon

Mammon, J.A.S. Collin de Plancy. Dictionnaire Infernal. Paris : E. Plon, 1863.

Wiles also can’t shut up about Ms. Clinton:

Claiming that a tweet from Clinton mocking the conspiracy theory was itself proof that the conspiracy is real, Wiles declared that Christians have no idea how many of their elected leaders are part of a “demonic system” that kidnaps children “to be raped, molested and then murdered.”

Our elected leaders, you say. Okay, why not have a close look at our elected leaders? We can start with the current administration. Plenty of material there without all the demonic pizza.

“Hillary Clinton is telling up front what this is all about,” he said. “She’s bragging it’s about Pizzagate. She’s telling them, ‘We took you down, you dared talk about our filthy child molestation and we took you down.’ That’s what she’s saying.” (Flynn’s son has avidly promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, causing him to lose his job in the administration’s transition team, and Flynn himself has also embraced many wildconspiracytheories, including one linking Clinton to “sex crimes [with] children.”)

I’m pretty sure what Ms. Clinton said amounted to “Oh, bullshit!”

Wiles asserted that “devil-worshiping, Luciferian, demon-possessed maniacs” have formed a “criminal cabal [that is] running this nation and much of the world” that allows them to engage in “child trafficking, child molestation, child rape, [and] child murder.”

The Catholic Church is rife with people who molest and rape children. Child trafficking, child molestation, child rape, and child murder is most often done by people who believe in a god, often the christian god. The person who started raping me when I was a child characterized themselves as a good christian. Lots of “good christians” tied up in those activities. Christians are major consumers of porn. I think you should look to your own houses, they are taking on the stink of the Augean Stables.

When the truth is finally revealed, Wiles warned, “there will be mass vomiting in the society when the people find out what these demon-possessed rulers have been doing for decades with children.”

Oh, there’s plenty of vomiting already taking place over the way theists deal with children. Religion allows for some of the very worst child abuse, such as refusing to provide your child with medical care. Or deciding they are demon possessed, and using that as an excuse to beat the shit out of them. Or denying them an education. Or finding some way to justify sexually abusing them. Or filling their heads with visions of eternal anguish and torment at the hands of a psychopathic god.

“Many of the key officials, elected and appointed, and in corporate board rooms and in Hollywood and in New York City, they are part of a global child molestation ring,” said Wiles, who insisted that Clinton is now “relishing in the fact that they brought down General Flynn because he knows what they are and what they’re doing.”

So Hollywood and New York City are the latter day Sodom and Gomorrah? Trump’s from New York, perhaps you ought to cool it with the east coast blame, eh? The Tiny Tyrant might not like that. The only thing that brought down General Flynn was General Flynn. Like everyone else in the current administration, he was in over his head, lacked the requisite experience, and embodied the Peter Principle.

Via RWW.

Religious Freedom, A License to Discriminate.

Vice President Mike Pence speaking at the Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club Meeting in December. CREDIT: AP Photo/Cliff Owen.

Vice President Mike Pence speaking at the Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club Meeting in December. CREDIT: AP Photo/Cliff Owen.

It’s no secret that the constant rethug push for “religious freedom” is nothing more than ugly bigotry, and a way of oppressing already marginalized peoples. They are finally coming out and admitting as much.

The Heritage Foundation has been called “a driving force” behind the Trump White House due to its many close ties with the administration. This week, Heritage issued a new report drawing a strict line in opposition to any kind of nondiscrimination protection for LGBT people, citing “religious freedom” as such a vital right that any LGBT law would be a burden, regardless of whether it offered even the broadest of religious exemptions.

Heritage’s new report, “How to Think About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policies and Religious Freedom,” takes the position that laws that protect LGBT people from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations would be “unjustified.” To arrive at this conclusion, author Ryan T. Anderson undermines the legitimacy of LGBT identities and dismisses the reality of discrimination that LGBT people experience, shrugging off the consequences of that discrimination.

Anderson’s approach is to simply redefine terms in a way that suits Heritage’s anti-LGBT agenda. Wedding vendors that have been penalized for not serving same-sex couples, for example, weren’t “discriminating” against people because of their sexual orientation, but they simply refused service “because they judged in conscience that they could not endorse certain morally relevant conduct.” This is an argument that courts have roundly rejected, because only gay and bi people would enter a same-sex marriage, so it’s de facto discrimination based on sexual orientation, but the report simply denies that it’s “discrimination” or even “mistreatment” at all.

The Heritage Report also insists that sexual orientation and gender identity are not comparable to traits like race and sex because they are “subjective identities,” and thus not “verifiable.” They can only be defined, the report claims, based on “actions,” such as same-sex weddings or gender confirmation surgeries — not identities that people experience at every moment of their lives. This is nothing short of erasure of the LGBT human experience, diminishing it only to “actions” that religious conservatives can reject as “immoral.” It is in no way an accurate representation of how LGBT people experience their identities — and certainly runs contrary to everything psychology has learned about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Crucial to the report’s thesis is to downplay the extent that LGBT people even experience discrimination. This contradicts numerous studies that have shown rates of discrimination that cannot be characterized by mere anecdotes. The recent massive U.S. Trans Survey, for example, found that nearly 1 in 5 transgender people have lost a job just for being transgender. And statistics like those do not even count the invisible discrimination that takes place; studies like résumé tests are showing that many LGBT people are discriminated against without even knowing it.

[…]

Heritage has drawn a new line in the sand by saying that its opposition to LGBT protections is uncompromising and that it is not even open to considering exemptions. It’s nothing short of an admission to what LGBT advocates have been arguing all along: that conservatives are simply using “religious freedom” as a pretext for allowing discrimination against LGBT people.

[…]

Republicans are expected to re-introduce the “First Amendment Defense Act” any day now, which will create a special license to discriminate solely for those who oppose LGBT equality. And President Trump has promised to sign it.

Think Progress has the full story.

*Spits*

19-6

© C. Ford.

North Dakota legislators have been pushing a raft of draconian bills through to make any protesting impossible to do, if you’re actually outside your abode. The worst of them is one which would allow drivers to ‘accidentally’ hit a protester without penalty. Thankfully, it didn’t pass, but the shit-filled asshole who authored it still wants it to be enacted, because:

Republican state Representative Keith Kempenich told local media that he sponsored the bill after his mother-in-law was caught in a protest while driving.

Kempenich defended the bill Monday before a vote, saying current laws had failed to protect citizens, and that the much publicized bill was mischaracterized by the media.

“I’d like to see this bill passed forward. I think that it shows that we are willing to stand up for the citizens of this state,” he said.

How about you say what you mean, you piece of shit? You want that bill to pass because you think us nasty Indians ought to be killed. We sure as hell obviously aren’t citizens of this state in your colonial, genocidal eyes. Fuck you, Kempenich.

Via Raw Story.

It’s Only 3 Million Per Weekend.

President Trump and his wife Melania Trump arrive on Air Force One at the Palm Beach International Airport on February 10. CREDIT: MPI10 / MediaPunch/IPX.

President Trump and his wife Melania Trump arrive on Air Force One at the Palm Beach International Airport on February 10. CREDIT: MPI10 / MediaPunch/IPX.

On February 17, President Trump will head to his $200,000-per-membership Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach for the third consecutive weekend, according to the Palm Beach Post.

Each trip reportedly costs taxpayers upward of $3 million.

Trump’s reluctance to spend a weekend in Washington stands in contrast to what he promised during the campaign, when he said he’d “rarely leave the White House.”

“I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done,” Trump told a reporter in 2015. “I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off… You don’t have time to take time off.”

Three million. More than that actually, but even a flat three million, for a fucking weekend? This totals to over 9 million for a month in office. Repubs howled with outrage if the Obama family even mentioned the word vacation, but this flagrant misuse of funds meets with silence? That’s bad enough, but given Trump’s penchant for being seen unpresidenting and making himself a massive security leak, shouldn’t someone in the capital tell Donny no? As there seems to be no effort at all in impeaching the tiny tyrant, someone will have to step up and explain to his idiotness that no, the presidency is not a reality show.

Earlier Saturday, Trump played golf with Abe — marking the second time he hit the links since his January 20 inauguration. Trump repeatedly criticized President Obama for golfing during his presidency:

If the hypocrisy of republicans were a noise, everyone on the planet would be stone deaf. Disgusting. Think Progress has the full story.

Women: what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’

Host-parasite-coevolution-theory-of-sexual-reproduction

Oklahoma legislators are trying to ban abortion, nothing new there. One of the bills wants any woman seeking a termination to first have permission from whoever did the impregnating. Rep. Justin Humphrey wrote HB 1441, and he expanded on his reasoning:

At first, Humphrey said that the original intention of the bill was to ensure that fathers are involved in supporting a child from conception. “I was wanting fathers to have to pay child support at the beginning,” he said, but that specific language was excised from the bill.

Ultimately, he said, his intent was to let men have a say. “I believe one of the breakdowns in our society is that we have excluded the man out of all of these types of decisions,” he said. “I understand that they feel like that is their body,” he said of women. “I feel like it is a separate — what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’ And you know when you enter into a relationship you’re going to be that host and so, you know, if you pre-know that then take all precautions and don’t get pregnant,” he explained. “So that’s where I’m at. I’m like, hey, your body is your body and be responsible with it. But after you’re irresponsible then don’t claim, well, I can just go and do this with another body, when you’re the host and you invited that in.”

Let that sink in a bit. If you’re capable of getting pregnant and live in Oklahoma, you might want to get out, screaming all the way. Why is it, that women bear all the responsibility for “pre-knowing” something? Don’t men also “pre-know” they are wandering about with a loaded penis? Also, you dimwitted dipshit of a person, you can use contraceptives, correctly, and still end up pregnant. This is known as shit happens. Jesus Fuck.

The Intercept has the story.

Hopper vs Calhoun.

Grace Hopper. Photo: Kay Peterson/Archives Center, National Museum.

Grace Hopper. Photo: Kay Peterson/Archives Center, National Museum.

Grace Hopper won out at Yale University, replacing Calhoun, and at least one person is all manner upsetty about it.

Yale University announced it would change the name of Calhoun College to instead honor Grace Murray Hopper, who was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer during World War II and also helped develop the Mark II and Mark III computers. The school had originally been named for John C. Calhoun, who held several high-profile positions in government, including vice president, senator, and secretary of state. Calhoun called slavery a “positive good.”

So who’s upset? Geraldo Rivera, who apparently had some sort of position there. Oh, he was an associate fellow, whatever that means.

On Sunday, media personality Geraldo Rivera announced he had stepped down from his role as an associate fellow at Yale, following the university’s decision to rename a college that had once been dedicated to a staunch slavery supporter. … Rivera described the university’s decision to cease honoring a champion of slavery and instead recognize a female computer scientist as “intolerant” and “lame.”

Does anyone care what Mr. Rivera thinks? I certainly don’t, and I’m very happy to hear that Yale has done the right thing here. Think Progress has the full story.

The Power Must Not Be Questioned!

Stephen Miller, policy adviser to President-elect Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower in New York, Monday, Jan. 9, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

Stephen Miller, policy adviser to President-elect Donald Trump arrives at Trump Tower in New York, Monday, Jan. 9, 2017. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

As most everyone is aware, Stephen Miller did the media dance all of Sunday, spreading bullshit far and wide. It’s no secret that the Tiny Dictator is displeased with Spicer, and tweeted happily about Miller’s performances. Those performances should disturb the hell out of everyone with a brain and the ability to use it.

Senior White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller raised plenty of eyebrows on Sunday as the perused the talk-show circuit talking about cases of voter fraud (that don’t exist) and Steve Bannon’s lack of involvement in drafting executive orders (which, according to most reports, is the exact opposite of the truth).

But perhaps his most alarming statement was in reference to the federal judges in Washington rejecting President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.

“I think that it’s been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many cases a supreme branch of government,” Miller told John Dickerson of CBS News, as first noted by Will Saletan of Slate. “The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media, and the whole world will soon see, as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”

Emphasis mine. This is the boot stomp of authoritarianism, the herald of a regime which wants no dissent whatsoever, from anyone. What’s even more frightening is the amount of people willing to go along with it. Elsewhere I wrote: I think there’s a place for the very worst truth of all: it does not take much to normalise the most monstrous of behaviours, and it takes very little indeed to make people willingly join in said behaviours. The time and place is now.

Think Progress has the full story.

Bringing Back the Specter of Illegitimacy.

Shutterstock.

Shutterstock.

I well remember the stigma of single parenthood back in the 1960s and 1970s. It was still a heavy stigma, and people had little regard or concern for single women raising a child/children. It was still considered to be highly shameful. Women who had the courage to be open single parents without made up stories about being widowed or what have you brought down societal scorn, but it’s thanks to those parents who had such courage that much of that stigma receded, although never completely eradicated. It took many generations to stop the open contempt of children deemed bastards. It really should not be needed to say that fostering judgmental biases which can impact children in the worst way is wrong, but it seems someone needs to inform Tennessee republicans that hanging “bastard” on a child is not at all okay.

A bill filed by a Tennessee Republican aims to make children born through artificial insemination illegitimate.

WMC reported that state House Representative Terry Lynn Weaver is sponsoring HB 1406 to repeal Tennessee current statute, TCA 68-3-306, which declares that children born through artificial insemination are the “legitimate” child of the mother’s husband.

The text of the new bill says it immediately “repeals statute that deems a child born to a married woman as a result of artificial insemination, with consent of the married woman’s husband, to be the legitimate child of the husband and wife.”

Last year, Weaver was one of 53 GOP lawmakers who got involved in a same-sex marriage divorce that dealt with the custody of a child born through artificial insemination. Weaver and the other lawmakers asserted that the lesbian wife of the child’s mother should not be considered a “legitimate” parent under the current statute.

Amazing, isn’t it, what republicans waste their time on. They could be doing good, but no, they find it much more important to fuck over parents and children. :snarl:

Via Raw Story.

Jeers, Sneers and Pants On Fire.

A person shouts to Rep. Jason Chaffetz during his town hall meeting at Brighton High School on Thursday. CREDIT: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer.

A person shouts to Rep. Jason Chaffetz during his town hall meeting at Brighton High School on Thursday. CREDIT: AP Photo/Rick Bowmer.

The GOP is getting desperate in the face of their constituents, who will not stop protesting, showing up, and demanding answers. The reek of cowardly ordure emanating from repubs is overwhelming at this point, and they are saying the first thing that pops into their vacuous heads in an attempt to make everyone shut up and go away, including the resurrection of the infamous lie about death panels. Yep. There are two stories here, we’ll start with Utah, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) says paid protesters were among the thousand-plus people who gave him a raucous, negative reception at a town hall in Salt Lake City on Thursday. The crowd chanted “shame!” and “do your job.”

It was “more of a paid attempt to bully and intimidate” than a reflection of the feelings of his constituents, Chaffetz told the Deseret News. … But reporters who were at the event and interviewed attendees say they found no evidence anybody was paid to be there.

No, they wouldn’t, because the “paid protesters” nonsense is nothing more than a lie, and attempt to justify stupid and harmful actions along with evading questions about said actions.

Utah state Rep. Marie Poulson (D-Cottonwood Heights) represents the area around the high school where the town hall was held. She told the Deseret News she believes almost all the protesters were local.

“I’ve heard some of my colleagues (at the Utah Legislature) say here today that they had shipped in liberals to give him a bad time,” she said. “I serve that area and I listen to their frustrations.”

Poulson said she’s heard from many people frustrated that Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, has so far seemed unwilling to investigate President Trump’s conflicts of interests.

“I had so many get back to me and say, ‘We’ve been so upset by what Rep. Chaffetz is doing. We want him to investigate equally, with as much zeal as he did in the past, with this current administration,’” Poulson said, referring to Chaffetz’s dogged investigation into the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi incident that occurred under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s watch.

A whole lot of people are wondering what happened to all that violating the constitution, and why no one seems to be concerned about it, let alone doing something about it. The constitution has indeed been violated, to pieces, and the response from the rethugs? ****crickets****

Last Monday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said “protesting has become a profession now.”

No, it hasn’t. People still have their day jobs, if they are fortunate enough to be employed. All the protests are a sign of just how bad you are fucking up, and people are tired. They are also mad as hell, and not willing to take it anymore.

“They have every right to do that, don’t get me wrong, but I think that we need to call it what it is. It’s not these organic uprisings that we’ve seen through the last several decades — the Tea Party was a very organic movement — this has become a very paid, astroturf-type movement,” Spicer added, providing no evidence for his claims.

The Tea Party was organic because…? Oh right, delusional right wingers, who spent years flinging their shit all over the place in an effort to unseat a legally elected president. And yet, in the case of an illegally elected president, one who is an inexperienced, incompetent megalomaniac bent on destruction, the current grassroots movement is astroturf. Right. That is one of the stupidest things I have heard in a while, and that’s saying something, given the news every day.

Full story at Think Progress. Moving on to Rep. Gus Bilirakis and Bill Akins — chair of Pasco County, Florida’s Republican Party, who tried the “death panels!” defense, which did not work in any way.

[Read more…]

Sunday Facepalm.

1200px-Michelangelo,_Creation_of_the_Sun,_Moon,_and_Plants_01

Oh, how the mighty hath fallen. Going by the old testament, or the apocrypha, which was cut in the final edit, Jehovah was very much what one could call an interventionist god, even if that isn’t terribly accurate. Jehovah got bored a lot, and had many temper tantrums or warped whims, so any situation it bothered to intervene in was one it had caused in the first place. According to Todd Starnes, Jehovah has once again been busy with intervention:

“I would not discount the power of what Franklin Graham did,” Starnes said. “He did not endorse, but what he did do in 2016 was stage massive prayer gatherings at every single state capital in the country. And I believe that we experienced divine intervention last November and I believe that God was giving us a second chance. So we’ve been given a second chance and Christians, we’ve got to stand up and we’ve got to get it right.”

Huh. That’s not much in the godly intervention stakes, is it? Especially when the reality of the whole sorry mess is right there, plain to see. But no, it must be Jehovah, must! Well, even if you believed such nonsense, it’s quite the sad and sorry show for the god who ran rampant and drenched in blood in the old days. As the Tiny Dictator would say, Loser!

Going by Lance Wallnau, Jehovah is up to a slightly more impressive intervention, by making Trump an exorcist.

Wallnau said he knows the real reason that millions of people marched against the new president the day after the inauguration: Upon taking office, Trump evicted an evil spirit of witchcraft from the White House, causing that demonic spirit to go out into the general population.

“What I believe is happening is there was a deliverance of the nation from the spirit of witchcraft in the Oval Office,” he said. “The spirit of witchcraft was in the Oval Office, it was about to intensify to a higher level demon principality, and God came along with a wrecking ball [Trump] and shocked everyone, the church cried out for mercy and bam—God knocked that spirit out, and what you’re looking at is the manifestation of an enraged demon through the spirit.”

I have to admit, viewing Trump as a wrecking ball is accurate enough, just not in the way Wallnau meant.

Pat Buchanan is leaving Jehovah on the sidelines, perhaps realizing there’s no point to waiting on supposedly divine intervention, and is busy railing for Trump to break the judiciary for all the horrors they have inflicted on the States:

When politicians don black robes and seize powers they do not have, they should be called out for what they are – usurpers and petty tyrants. And if there is a cause upon which the populist right should unite, it is that elected representatives and executives make the laws and rule the nation. Not judges, and not justices.

Indeed, one of the mightiest forces that has birthed the new populism that imperils the establishment is that unelected justices like Warren and Brennan, and their progeny on the bench, have remade our country without the consent of the governed – and with never having been smacked down by Congress or the president.

Consider. Secularist justices de-Christianized our country. They invented new rights for vicious criminals as though criminal justice were a game. They tore our country apart with idiotic busing orders to achieve racial balance in public schools. They turned over centuries of tradition and hundreds of state, local and federal laws to discover that the rights to an abortion and same-sex marriage were there in Madison’s Constitution all along. We just couldn’t see them.

Goodness. No fuzziness about that agenda, mean, brutal, misogynistic, enshrined with bigotry.

Meanwhile, Trump’s White House should use the arrogant and incompetent conduct of these federal judges to make the case not only for creating a new Supreme Court, but for Congress to start using Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution – to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and to reclaim its stolen powers.

A clipping of the court’s wings is long overdue.

Okay, I’m in facepalm overload at this point. I hate to say, but Trump probably will try something like this, and there’s no god to help us if he does.