Dear Jim Bakker, Go Fuck Yourself.

Jim Bakker, a fan of the fanatical Jan Porter and her ‘heartbeat’ bill, has somehow come to the conclusion that there were two scientists who would have cured cancer, but they were aborted by evil wenches who had the unthinkable, autonomy. Naturally, Jehovah was the one who decided to “send” these two scientists, rather than doing something straightforward, like simply eliminating all cancers, which would be rather amazing, as it would require our cells to behave differently across our various lifetimes. Or Jehovah could have simply dropped a bit of super-duper brilliance on any of the current scientists researching cancer. Lots of choice there, to say the least.

Jim Bakker claimed that God has sent two scientists to earth who would have found the cure for cancer, but they were both aborted before that ever happened.

Bakker was interviewing extremist Religious Right activist Janet Porter and former Rep. Tom DeLay about their efforts to get Congress to pass Porter’s “Heartbeat Bill,” a radical piece of legislation that Porter brags will outlaw abortion “before the mother even knows she’s pregnant” and will be “the foot in the door” to eventually completely outlawing abortion. Bakker declared that Porter’s bill is “the most important thing going on in the world right now.”

Janet Porter is a dangerous fanatic, whose life desire is to stomp on women, ensure they will never have bodily autonomy, and she has no problem with women dying, she considers that suitable punishment for any women who dares to think her life is her own, and that she has the right to make her own medical decisions in privacy. If we actually had a government, rather than a regime, she might not be so worrying, but considering the regime currently in power, there’s a great deal to dread.

“This program could be an important cog to stop abortion in this country,” he added. “The thing we have done in America, we have killed our babies. We have killed the future of America. I told you the other day about a story, someone said they asked God, ‘Why haven’t we had a cure for cancer?’ And He said back, ‘I gave you two scientists that had the cure and both of them were aborted.’”

Oh FFS, the effing helicopter story. This is the stupid christian’s answer to anything and everything. I have seen and read so many fucking versions of that idiocy over the years, I’d like to cheerfully strangle the idiot who started it. Most christians think that’s just brilliant, which tells you a lot about most christians. As for a “cure for cancer”, there’s no such thing, and it’s not likely there ever will be. That’s because cancer is not one disease, it’s hundreds of diseases. Even within a category of a specific cancer, there are different types of that specific cancer. Cancers are born of cell mutations, and there have to be a number of different mutations before anything turns into cancer. Cell mutations often happen which don’t turn into cancer. Some cancers are easier to treat than others, and have a high remission rate. Research into cancer is constant, and it’s a never-ending race against time. A great deal of progress has been made, and a great many people are able to live their lives out, rather than die an untimely death.

For there to be ‘a cure’ for all cancers, that would qualify as a miracle, because no one treatment is effective against all cancers, that’s why current cancer treatments are targeted. So, Jehovah’s “two scientists” wouldn’t have been able to do shit where cancer is concerned. Once again, the sheer weakness and ineffectiveness of the christian god is what stands out. What’s the fucking point of being a god, if you go to the trouble to imbue a couple of blastocysts with miracle performance, but you couldn’t choose people who not only truly wanted a child, but had the necessary circumstances to have that child, and see that it gets a good education to boot? Or you know, wiggle a godly pinky finger and take care of the cancer business yourself?

To a christian, it doesn’t matter what the fuck happens in any given situation, their nasty, pointless god always gets the credit, especially when credit belongs to the people who make a life and death difference to someone.

As someone struggling with cancer treatment, this fucking attitude is infuriating, to say the least. A great many people over the years have helped to make brilliant leaps in treatment, and if I make it through treatment and come out clean on the other end, any gratitude I may have will belong to them, not the ugly ass god of christians. It is very christian to decide to use something like cancer to try to force the regressive oppression of women though, because cancer is still the big fucking scary, and too many christians are stupid and gullible enough to buy such awful dreck as some sort of skillful reasoning.

RWW has the story.

Sunday Facepalm: Deep State, Witches & Warlocks, Oh My!

Frank Amedia and his Potus Shield clown circus are back at it, just praying their little red noses off. If you aren’t familiar with Mr. Amedia, you can pretty much find out all you care to know in his recounting a miracle he performed: the resurrection of an ant. Today, they are all trembling over the “deep state”, witches, warlocks, and the antichrist.

“I think we need to be wise to understand that this presidency is going to be taken to the edge of destruction by evil forces, by deep state forces, by a conspiracy that has already been named,” Amedia warned. “We know it’s coming. We need to withstand against that. We need to be the watchmen that say, ‘Don’t take your eyes off, the storm is coming.’”

“We prayed for the Lord to just stir up that storm,” he continued. “Stir up that storm of that president. We declare right now, in Jesus’ name, stir it up. Stir him up like a tornado, don’t let him stop. Let everything fly out that needs to fly out, let everything be exposed, don’t let anything be put back into a place that could come back and linger again.”

That’s a veritable treasure chest of filthy jokes, just waiting to be made. Speaking for myself, I don’t want to see anything flying out of the Tiny Tyrant, and I most emphatically don’t want to see anything exposed. :shudder: Okay, now that my mind has jumped out of the gutter, as far as exposure goes, the Tiny Tyrant and his crew of incompetent cronies are doing a fine job of that themselves. No assistance is required.

Amedia, Mark Gonzales of the U.S. Hispanic Action Network, and Bishop Harry Jackson then initiated a spiritual warfare prayer against Trump’s enemies and critics, with Jackson taking specific aim at the “witches and warlocks” who have cursed the president.

“We lift up witches and warlocks who have been a part of this assignment,” Jackson said, “as they have gathered in numbers almost immeasurable to curse this specific president. We cancel, we bind their authority, we bind their curses, we lift up your word that says you shall not revile the gods and neither shall you bring a curse upon the rule of God’s people. We declare those assignments null and void and we claim the souls of many of the witches and warlocks.”

The Gods? Hmmm. Anyroad, I think we need a serious rule here. This is the 21st century, and people with views that are the same as those prevalent during the inquisition and witch trials? They have no place in a modern society. What they do need is a nice re-created 13th century village, lots of land surrounding, where they could play at witch hunting all they liked, and they could leave the rest of us in the current century alone.

The whole regressive mess is at RWW.

“Clock Activated. Red Castle. Green Castle.”

Oh, all the conspiracy theorists are having themselves a little meme war, which they think will set the stage for a video which will take down all those nefarious liberal elites, who are busy with demonic activity, and doing horrible things to children, all this stuff they just know is true, but there’s never even the slightest scintilla of evidence. They are now positive that “the storm” is going to break.

Conspiracy theorists tapped in to “The Storm” have declared today to be the day in which they “post a continuous barrage of memes” in order to prepare the nation for the release of a video that they believe will serve as the “nail in many coffins” for liberal politicians who are involved in a massive alleged pedophile cult.

The Storm is a conspiracy theory that has captured the imaginations of “Pizzagate” truthers who believe that the highest ranking liberal political and business leaders are engaged in a secret satanic pedophile ring dedicated to trafficking and abusing children. At the helm of The Storm sits an anonymous poster on 4chan and then 8chan message boards known only as “Q.” Many followers of The Storm believe “Q” to be a high-ranking government official whom President Trump has ordered to leave cryptic clues—dubbed “crumbs” by conspiracy theorists—about supposed behind-the-scene efforts to unravel the alleged pedophile ring. An archive site of QAnon posts has documented nearly 1,000 cryptic messages since late October of last year.

Since the theory began in October, hordes of people have been engaged with it. YouTube videos about “QAnon” regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. The most dedicated participants in the conspiracy theory, including Infowars Washington bureau chief Jerome Corsi, spend hours per day in Discord chat rooms attempting to decode posts written by “Q.”

I don’t know who is behind the whole Q business, and I can’t say I much care, but they must be laughing their ass off on how easy it is to manipulate these people. You can read and see more of the full conspiratorial stew at RWW.

Talking About Obama’s Birth Certificate. Again.

Joe Arpaio, screengrab. Just look at all those old white men.

Joe Arpaio. Apparently, still grieving over not being sheriff anymore, so he’s running for senate in Arizona. Here’s a bit of what he had to say to people about his pro-Trump platform:

In a speech to a small group at the event, which was posted on YouTube by the channel Tru Conservative TV, Arpaio recalled introducing Trump at a campaign rally in 2015 where he spoke about his and Trump’s shared interest in cracking down on immigration and in investigating Obama’s birth certificate.

“I talked about another thing that made a little news,” Arpaio said. “I don’t talk about it anymore—until I become the U.S. senator…but that’s something to do with a document. If I ask you guys—I’m a nothing now, but if I was still the sheriff I could ask for your birth certificate.”

“So I’m kind of dropping that right now,” he said, “but I’m going to tell you something: 100 percent we proved that’s a fake document. One hundred.”

For someone who is not talking about “it”, you seem to be spending time talking about it. Unbelievable, all these old, white, conservative christians are like a terribly scratched record, it’s all skip, screech, bumpity bump bump.

No, you did not 100 percent prove the birth certificate to be fake. You couldn’t get anywhere at all with that, even though you put years into your “investigation”. Well, I suppose focusing on such nonsense is better than Mr. Arpaio attempting to address current affairs.

The full story, with links and video is at RWW.

Sunday Facepalm: AFSS.

Remember Space Force? Oh, AFSS: Amerikka First Space Strategy! Yeah. The Fucking Idiot thinks he’s on to something here.

The White House on Friday unveiled President Donald Trump’s “America First” space strategy, only 10 days after the commander in chief called for a Space Force to militarize low Earth orbit.

“The Trump administration’s National Space Strategy prioritizes American interests first and foremost, ensuring a strategy that will make America strong, competitive, and great,” the plan claims.

The plan officially includes Trump’s promised focus on militarization of space.

I haven’t yet gone and inspected the great plan. Haven’t had enough tea yet. There might not be enough tea for this one. Oh yes, screw science or trying to fix anything here on the planet, the most important thing ever is a dick waving contest in space. I’m imagining the Tiny Tyrant at his desk with a coke and greasy fries, playing with Lego’s Star Wars.

“Trump’s National Space Strategy recognizes that our competitors and adversaries have turned space into a warfighting (sic) domain. While the United States would prefer that the space domain remain free of conflict, we will prepare to meet and overcome any challenges that arise,” the space strategy reads. “Under the President’s new strategy, the United States will seek to deter, counter, and defeat threats in the space domain that are hostile to the national interests of the United States and our allies.”

“Warfighting”, because I guess war isn’t descriptive or clear enough. You want “space domain” to remain conflict free? Easy, stay out of it. Plenty to do planetside, y’know. What fucking threats? Has the empire shown up? Space invaders from Mars? We have plenty of war threats right here on good old Terra Firma. I’d like to see those avoided, but that’s no doubt a forlorn hope.

Space wars are one of the four pillars of the new America First space strategy.

Space Wars! First thing, you’re gonna have to rebrand, you would not believe the amount of things with the name Space Wars attached. Don’t want to get lost in the shuffle or anything.

“Strengthen deterrence and warfighting (sic) options: We will strengthen U.S. and allied options to deter potential adversaries from extending conflict into space and, if deterrence fails, to counter threats used by adversaries for hostile purposes,” the plan directs.

This would be bafflegab for “Donny really really wants to play with nukes!”, right? I have to wonder if making for real light sabers is part of the plan somewhere…

Via Raw Story.

A Wee Bit Late.

In his latest video, Lance Wallnau has a prayer:

“The left needs to shut up and Father, we just pray in Jesus’ name that your hand will be on this president and on his marriage and on his wife, that their ears will be deaf to the salacious, cruel accusations and toxic utterances that are coming at them from all directions. And I pray for a swift and speedy blocking of this subject from entering into the middle of the national narrative.”

You need to keep up, Lance. Rather late in the day to ask Jehovah to stomp all over Ms. Daniels. As for being salacious, cruel, and toxic, it seems the Tiny Tyrant has all those covered, with more to spare. It really takes a special kind of man to go out and cheat on his wife while pregnant, and after giving birth to yet another heir. That’s a particular cruelty, one which will reside in Ms. Tiny Tyrant’s head forever.

As for the national narrative, when has the Tiny Tyrant’s salacious, cruel, and toxic behaviour not been a part of it? Donny is guilty of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and cheating all over the damn place. That’s all on him. The man is a walking scandal of criminal activity. I can’t speak for all The Left™, but this little part of it is not going to shut up, so I’m afraid yet another prayer has fallen on deaf ears. The only reason the lunatic fringe wants this all hushed up is that you can’t stand people looking at your hypocrisy, supporting an adulterer in spite of your so-called morals and family values. Oh, that spotlight is hot, isn’t it? Unfortunately for you, right wing asshole christians are more likely to be lapping up every bit of, um, exposure given to Ms. Daniels, more than the average person. Fundamentalist christians have a fatal attraction to porn, and the more they yell about it, the more they are watching and listening. Repression never works the way it’s supposed to, and you’d think you idiots would figure that one out, but no. Even remonstrations use clickbait titles: Don’t watch super-whore Stormy’s interview!, knowing that ‘super-whore’ is a magnet to christians. So, it would be you fucking idiots feeding the frenzy you’re upset about.  If I were a god, I wouldn’t pay attention to you either.

That’s not all that Lance has been praying about:

Wallnau warned that if “the midterm elections prove that the fury and froth and madness stirred up by propaganda by the left” is effective enough to shift control of Congress, then this nation will never have peace or unity because “there is a corrupt root so strongly embedded” in the Democrats.

“I’m telling you now,” Wallnau declared, “the spirit of darkness wants to neutralize this presidency in September [sic] of 2018, but we decree and declare that there is a turning over of the tables for the sake of Jacob my servant, Israel my chosen, for that reason this man was given a title a honor as president. Though he did not know God fully when he started, he knows that there is a God of Israel right now. Father, we pray, though you have been a God who hides himself, that you will now reveal your arm and foil even the false signs of false prognosticators, counselors, coordinators and schemers working within the political apparatus, the media apparatus, the television, the entertainment, the grassroots organizing, even to dry up the resources of those who are using their wealth as a mechanism to choke the future of the United States.”

Y’know, it wasn’t that long ago we had democracy. Eight years of it. And while it wasn’t as good as it could have been (as with all things), it was pretty good. Made a lot of progress, and there wasn’t so much as a whiff of scandal of any kind. No porn stars, no hush money, no cheating, no sexual assault, no harassment, no mass amounts of criminal activity.  I’d be absolutely thrilled to have that again, and I’m hardly alone in that one.

Though you have been a God who hides himself“, oh yes, for thousands of years! Actually, since this god was dreamed up and cobbled together. Nice of you to sort of admit it, Lance.

The full thing is at RWW.

Gosh, How Responsible!

Dennis Alexander. SOURCE: KSBW.

More students get hurt, by someone who is oh so responsible with guns, you betcha.

A teacher who also serves as a reserve police officer accidentally fired a gun inside a Seaside High School classroom Tuesday, police said, and three students were injured.

Dennis Alexander was teaching a course about gun safety for his Administration of Justice class when his gun went off at 1:20 p.m. Alexander was pointing his gun at the ceiling when it fired. Pieces of the ceiling fell to the ground.

A news release from the Seaside Police Department said no one suffered “serious injuries.” One 17-year-old boy suffered moderate injuries when fragments from the bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and lodged into his neck, the student’s father, Fermin Gonzales, told KSBW.

The teacher had just told the class that he wanted to make sure his gun wasn’t loaded, when the gun fired, according to Gonzales. “It’s the craziest thing. It could have been very bad,” Gonzales said. The teacher was about to use the gun for a demonstration about how to disarm someone, according to Gonzales.

Everyone in the classroom was stunned, and the teacher, who is a reserve officer for the Sand City Police Department, apologized.

But no one at the school checked to make sure that all of the students were uninjured, Gonzales said. The school day resumed as normal, and Seaside Police Department officers launched an investigation. The 17-year-old boy’s parents were shocked when he returned home with blood on his shirt and bullet fragments in his neck. The student’s parents rushed him to a hospital for X-rays. “He’s shaken up, but he’s going to be OK,” Gonzales told KSBW. “I’m just pretty upset that no one told us anything and we had to call the police ourselves to report it.”

Alexander was placed on administrative leave from his teaching position at Seaside High School, and he was also placed on administrative leave at the Sand City Police Department.

There you have it. A cop. A teacher. And a gun in school ends up hurting students, go figure. One of these days, I’m going to eyeroll so hard my spine’s gonna pop out. The full story is here.

Space Force!!1!

Spaceballs.

The fucking moron has decided the military is not bloated enough, no. We need…SPACE FORCE!

Donald Trump addressed Marines at Miramar Air Station in San Diego on Tuesday.

In addition to touting record-breaking military spending and promising a raise to the military he also laid out plans for a space army.

“We should have a new force called the Space Force. It’s like the Army and the Navy, but for space, because we’re spending a lot of money on space,” he said. “I said maybe we need a new force, I was not really serious, then I said ‘what a great idea.’ Maybe we’ll have to do that.”

“My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea,” he said.

Right. As if funneling yet more money into the military machine that is Amerikka isn’t bad enough, the Tiny Tyrant has come up with Spaceballs, because that’s what it would be, if we’re going to pretend this would actually go anywhere. Thankfully, it won’t, but fuck knows just how much money will be blown on such idiocy. I’ll bet NASA just can’t wait for a phone call from the Tiny Tyrant and his genius ideas for Space Force. Ah well, let the mockery begin! You can see some select responses at Raw Story.

Angel Armies vs Deep State. Or Something.

Dutch Sheets speaks at his Turnaround: Appeal to Heaven event at the Trump International Hotel in February 2018. (Screenshot via livestream).

Dutch Sheets speaks at his Turnaround: Appeal to Heaven event at the Trump International Hotel in February 2018. (Screenshot via livestream).

Oh, all the self-styled prophets are “prophesying” and praying. RWW has the full coverage, which is quite lengthy, here are some highlights:

A new era in American and human history began at the end of last week, according to self-described apostles and prophets who gathered on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. … Sheets said he had never seen such intense spiritual warfare over the nation, saying the battle was not about Trump but about “whether the devastation caused by 50 years of anti-Christian activity will be reversed or, God forbid, continue.” He said then, “The antichrist forces are almost rabid in their anger over the potential loss of progress.”

[…]

Now, according to conference leaders, it’s time for the church to move from pleading with God to ruling with him—and with Trump, who one speaker described as “the father of this nation.” A speaker from Northern Ireland, Rose Sambrook of Rhema Restoration Ministries, proudly claimed Trump as one of her own. “Your president is a Celt,” she said. “That’s why he’s wild!”  She said Trump has the “seeds of revival” in his DNA because his great aunts prayed for five months for revival to come to the island of Lewis decades ago.

[…]

Jacobs told attendees God had spoken to her at a Miami gathering of thousands of pastors from 60 nations, giving her the word “basta!”—Spanish for “enough!” “We’re here to say ‘basta’” she shouted at the Trump hotel, adding, “Enough of God’s people being attacked! Enough of the photographers and the bakers having to close their shops! Enough of our loss of our religious freedoms! Basta!”

Ummm, I thought everyone was supposed to hate immigrants and speak nothin’ but Amerikkan.

Tim Sheets, Dutch’s brother and apparently an expert on angels, led a prayer on Friday night that God would break “the collusion of hell in our government”:

And Lord, I hear you say tonight, ‘Disregard the fake collusion, and come against the real collusion, and the real colluder.’ We bind the kingdom of darkness and we ask that the strategy of our king and his angel princes that assist us now, would come against the collusion of darkness into our government, that would come against the collusion of darkness into our media, and in the name of Jesus we declare, this Ekklesia declares tonight, that the collusion of hell in its diabolical schemes, to those that are bent in iniquity, will be bound in Jesus name.

[…]

Dutch Sheets also prayed that Trump “would accomplish everything Almighty God sent you into that house to do, regardless of who likes it or who doesn’t.” He also predicted that Trump will have “a visitation from heaven” that gives him “an intimate knowledge of Jesus Christ.” Sheets had a warning for those who resist Trump or who want to turn the nation away from its Judeo-Christian roots:

You will fail! … The Ekklesia will take you out. The outpouring of Holy Spirit will take you out. Angels will take you out. You are no match for any of the above. You are no match for father, son, Holy Ghost, or his family or his angel armies. You are no match for his word. You are no match for his prophetic decrees …. So we push you back. And we say your finest hour has come and gone, and the church now rises to the place that he has called us to walk in …. We now rise up and I call that new order into the earth.

Gad, I’m queasy all over. I really have no problem with people who want to roll the clock back a couple of eras, but you can’t be doing it in the middle of an established society. Please, do some real estate shopping and go set up your little kingdom, far from the rest of us. It’s what Jehovah wants. Really.

RWW has the full story and video, all of which require a rather strong stomach.

Trump’s CPAC…

Activists watch President Donald Trump address CPAC 2018. (Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch).

Activists watch President Donald Trump address CPAC 2018. (Jared Holt for Right Wing Watch).

If you’re curious about the latest happenings in the Lunatic Fringe, Right Wing Watch has all the details, and they aren’t pretty.

This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference was—to borrow a phrase—“low-energy.” Except, that is, when it came to praising President Trump. CPAC has historically been a measure of what people and ideas are allowed into the conservative movement’s big tent. This year, the ideology that seemed to matter most was love of Trump.

Trump’s influence on the larger conservative movement was apparent on stage at CPAC, but it played out also in the surrounding circus at the Gaylord convention center in National Harbor, Maryland, where white nationalists rubbed elbows with “New Right” internet celebrities and far-right European politicians, many of them echoing Trump’s talking points.

On the conference’s schedule, more traditional conservative fare about the joys of capitalism and national security threats was mixed in with sessions dedicated to aggrandizing Trump.

There’s a long article about all the comings and goings, who’s there and what they’re up to, along with all the nonsense being spewed at RWW.

Electromagnetic Witchcraft & Techno Demons, Oh My!

Full Court Batshit.

Today, we have full on bugfuck for you, courtesy of one Pat Holliday, of the Miracle Internet Church, chatting with conspiracy fantasist Sheila Zilinsky.

“The government had a plan called Blue Beam back in the ’80s where they were going to fake a rapture of the church through blue beams and being able to shoot holographs up into the sky,” Holliday said, insisting that this was evidence of the “electronic magnetic witchcraft” that controls the world through everything from satanism and astrology to holistic medicine and sports.

Sigh. Y’know, it’s quite easy to spot a hologram and expose it, so just what would the fucking point be? I’m sure you’d be surprised just how much a whole lot of people wish you would get whisked off somewhere. Anywhere but here. Best be careful about including sports in all that nonsense, that’s damn near a religion in itself here in Amerikka.

“Did you know that the witchcraft powers in America had total control under the NFL over Obama?” Holliday asserted. “What Trump is doing and has done is he has disconnected the NFL from the powers of the former government.”

Oh, that’s why you included sports. Just had to get a snipe in at people of colour being damn tired and deciding to not fucking take it anymore. Sweet of you. Unfortunately for you, the NFL is not disconnected from great swathes of the population, including most in government. Amerikkans love their sportsball.

“Trump is doing a lot of things,” she said, including saving the world from certain calamity. Claiming that there is an “educated and refined witch or a wizard that is pulling the strings” over America, Holliday asserted that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have resulted in a world war that would have killed nearly the entire human population.

Oh FFS, now we’re living in a simplistic Harry Potter plot? Can’t you come up with something better than that? Think. Try to be original, and that’s a tough call, given all the speculative fiction floating about. Ever so nice that educated and refined are now code words for evil. You obscurantist idiots might love your lack of education, but I embrace mine and keep on learning every day. That you fear learning so much is all the more reason to love it.

“If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency of the United States of America, we may not even be here talking to you,” Holliday said, “because they did have a World War III planned where they were going to destroy 90 percent of the people. What they wanted to do was take control over the world by going down into their underground cities, we would all be dead and then, when it was time, they could come out of their underground cities and rule the world with Satan. That was their plan and they were almost there, but God has intervened.”

Pardon me asking, but where’s the thrill in dominating a decimated population? Sounds like a bad plan to me, more like the idiotic plan you would come up with, Ms. Holliday. You all really need to shut up, you’re doing a great deal of damage by breathing such profound stupidity into the air. We have enough climate problems.

The whole thing is at RWW, with a Soundcloud.

Sunday Facepalm: All Ya Need Is Nice.

thirddrawerdown.com.

Star Parker, yet another conservative idiot, has decided on her defense of guns in the wake of the last school shooting. Those darn students weren’t nice enough to the shooter! We don’t need gun control or any sort of reform, no. What we need is niceness! We are all responsible for every dude walking around with a growing grudge, a tantrum, and a gun. You betcha. As to blaming the students:

“Well, not necessarily one individual student, but we can call for gun control if we want to as a nation, we can call for more federal laws if we want to as a nation, but usually when you’re faced with tragedy, you first check yourself,” Parker said. “We have forgotten how to just look inwardly. We’ve become such a nation of victims that we’ve forgotten to say, ‘Wait a minute, what could I have done?’”

[…]

“Well, perhaps said ‘hello,’ perhaps said ‘I’m sorry to hear your dad died,’” Parker said. “This is a very small community of people we’re talking about. This is not the responsibility of Washington, D.C., or the NRA. This is the responsibility of people that are closest to someone to be able to look them in the eye as an individual. So the challenge of this whole nation of victims is that now it’s not about us anymore, it’s about somebody else, our problems are somebody else’s fault. Well, no, actually, this is a very small community, someone must have saw his sadness, someone must have known his dad died.”

Ms. Parker didn’t listen to the students talking. Ms. Parker certainly didn’t listen to Ms. Emma Gonzalez, who pointed out, strongly, that they knew that kid. They knew what he was like. They knew his desire for violence, his propensity for cruelty. They did speak out, they tried to tell people, they tried to warn people, but no one listened well enough to what they had to say, and now a lot of kids are dead. Sometimes, reaching out to a person can make all the difference in the world, but simply being ‘nice’ isn’t enough to reach anyone. If you’re going to extend ‘nice’, it needs to go further than that; and there are people you can’t reach in any way. The shooter in this case was primed to go off for years, but it was ignored by everyone except the students. The students wanted to know why people like his neighbours ignored him wandering around with a fucking gun. How about you answer that one, Ms. Parker? I would have loved to see you walk up to a kid wandering about with a gun and be ‘nice’ to him.

[…]

“Well, they expelled him probably because he was acting out,” she said, “and he was acting out probably because he didn’t have any friends—you know, whoever sat next to him in class, they’d better not be the ones who are protesting out there today.”

They expelled him because he was a danger to others, you fucking idiot. Sitting next to someone in class does not make you friends, and friendship is not a one way street. Christ, I loathe conservatives.

The whole mess and video is at RWW. In other, depressing news, the Dominionists of the Theocalypse have descended on CPAC, all of them staying at the Trump Hotel to sing their praises to the Tiny Tyrant. You can read the whole sorry thing here.

The Proud Party of Homer Simpson.

Ted Cruz pronounced that when it comes to protecting gun rights (and making sure rethuglican pockets are full of filthy NRA dollars), the republican party is proudly the party of Homer Simpson. This is an accidental honesty so full of irony, there won’t be a good irony meter left anywhere in Amerikka. Of all the characters you might wish to never identify with, it would be Homer. The perfect characterisation of a dumbfuck who manages to stumble by, somehow.

Conservative commentator Ben Domenech said that the current debate over gun rights was aptly summed up by an episode of “The Simpsons” in which Lisa asserted that the Second Amendment is “just a remnant from revolutionary days [and] has no meaning today,” while Homer insisted that the Constitution guarantees him a right to own a gun because otherwise “the king of England could just walk in here any time he wants and start shoving you around.”

There hasn’t been a king in England for quite a long time now, just in case that’s news to you fucking idiots, and I’m pretty sure the queen has no interest in shoving all you fucking idiots around. To continue taking this all too seriously, is whipping out a gun a reasonable response to a verbal ‘shoving around’? No, it isn’t. Guns are not a solution, they are the problem, writ large.

“I think the Democrats are the party of Lisa Simpson,” Cruz responded, “and Republicans are happily the party of Homer and Bart and Maggie and Marge.”

Uh huh. Did you actually watch the episode, Mr. Cruz? Because Marge and the kids moved out because Homer wouldn’t give up the gun. They were vehemently opposed. Leave it to a rethuglican to get an episode of The Simpsons wrong.

There’s video at RWW.