Potential Grizzlies.

Waving Grizzly gif on Twitter.

Waving Grizzly gif on Twitter.

Betsy DeVos’s hearing veered straight into the absurd, citing potential grizzlies:

However, nothing quite caught the flavor of how poorly her hearing went than her response to Sen. Chis Murphy (D-CT) who asked her, “Do you think guns have any place in or around schools?”

After saying the availability of guns should be “best left to locales and states to decide,” Devos replied to further questioning on guns on campus by adding, “I will refer back to Senator Enzi (R-WY) and the school he was talking about in Wyoming … I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies.”

Ms. DeVos is not only singularly lacking any qualification to head up the Department of Education, she’s not exactly stellar in the thinking department. She did note she had a bleeding heart:

If the question is around gun violence and the results of that, please know that my heart bleeds and is broken for those families that have lost any individual due to gun violence.”

Buuuuuuut…potential grizzlies, man! I’m hearing Cheech & Chong in my head. The twittersphere erupted over the potential grizzly bears.

Mo Gaffney

@mogaffney

So DeVos won’t say guns don’t belong in schools. Except says yes when grizzlies are near. How many grizzly adjacent schools r there?

*

Adam B. @AllThingsBooks

“We need guns in schools because of grizzly bears.” You know what else stops bears? Doors.

*

Sarcasticsapien @Sarcasticsapien

I’m confused. Betsy DeVos wants to bring God into schools but also guns because I guess God isn’t powerful enough to stop grizzly bears.

*

Gary @mrgaryhuang

I must REALLY live in a liberal bubble. I didn’t think grizzly bears were even remotely a problem in public schools.

More Tweets at Raw Story.  Also covering this story, Think Progress.

Conservative Outrage Over A Coin.

American Liberty 225th Anniversary gold coin (US Mint).

American Liberty 225th Anniversary gold coin (US Mint).

Oh my, the mint has decided to be inclusive looking on some gold coins that most people won’t ever see. Well, I guess it’s the thought that counts, but that thought has brought out all the conservative anger. Messing with Lady Liberty, oh noes! Lady Liberty is not black, she’s white! I confess to never having seen the statue in person, but she’s always looked rather green to me.

The U.S. Mint is unveiling a commemorative $100 gold coin that depicts Liberty as a black woman — and conservatives are predictably freaking out.

The 2017 American Liberty 225th Anniversary Gold Coin, which will be released April 6, shows the year of the mint’s founding, 1792, and the woman’s head in profile, reported the Associated Press.

The mint said the coins were intended to reflect “the cultural and ethnic diversity of the United States,” and others in a series of 24-karat gold coins will feature designs representing Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and Indian-Americans.

Not only were unthinking cons upset about it, but it was an excuse for them to spew bigotry.

DeplorableTony Armas @Tarmas55

@AP The discrimination of white people by the @obama administration continues

The discrimination of white people? I don’t think that means what you think it means. Nope.

Chad Groves @ChadGroves10

@AP doubt lady liberty talks at top volume in movie theatres

Been a long time since I’ve been in a movie theatre, but I’d rather put up with a person of colour who is a talker, than a short tempered white person who decides to open fire with a gun. Aren’t stereotypes fun?

WALLTOWN NEWS @DennisKeithRic2

@AP I’m surprised that it’s not a MUSLIM.

How do you know if the person on the coin isn’t a Muslim person? We haven’t reached the point where belief shows up in fluorescent ink on our skin, y’know.

David S Handler @davidradiowntp

@AP this administration doing everything to change history,including changing Lady Liberty from what the French sent us. Pathetic racism!

You mean the mint has made duplicate Lady of Liberty statues to reflect diversity, and will be switching them out at intervals? Wow!

Drg @drg9766

@AP i wouldnt pay a dime for it. This proves that the Obama’s are racist.

The grammar, painful it is. No, no, this doesn’t prove racism on the part of Barak and Michele Obama. It does heavily point to racism on your part, though.

William Moore @williamfytylga

@AP take a close look at the Statue of Liberty. Obviously lady liberty is a white European. This is ridiculous!

There have been a great many observations made about the Statue of Liberty over the years. This is a remarkably stupid one. Obviously Lady Liberty is a green French woman.

Via Raw Story.

The Smart Businessman Shall Save Us!

pin

The GOP continues their plan to shred the Affordable Care Act, and toss it out the window, along with the health of most people here in uStates. They have not come up with any plan that is remotely effective, or which will not throw everything into absolute chaos. Physicians are quite alarmed, and have said as much, not that it seems to be having much impact.

People in general are quite alarmed over the so-called healthcare plans which have been fronted so far, but even that is not enough to alarm Trumpoids, who insist on staying stupid:

That said, some of these voters also said they didn’t think Trump and the GOP would really go through with enacting such plans.

“When told Mr. Trump might embrace a plan that included these elements, and particularly very high deductibles, they expressed disbelief,” writes the Times. “They were also worried about what they called ‘chaos’ if there was a gap between repealing and replacing Obamacare. But most did not think that, as one participant put it, ‘a smart businessman like Trump would let that happen.’”

Oh for fuck’s sake, what is it going to take for these people to wake the fuck up? Smart businessman? Please. This is the asshole who refuses to divulge his taxes, most likely because he does not have the money he claims he does, and he has a very long string of failures trailing behind him, like a filthy, mile long strip of toilet paper. Trump is a fraud, that’s what he’s good at, not business. You think he’s going to come to the rescue on healthcare? You should be trembling in fear, because there won’t be any healthcare. If you have health issues, see to them now.

Via Raw Story.

Facebook, Oh Facebook XV.

allen-shooting-300x225

A days-old argument between two groups of people that escalated on Facebook led to a shooting Allen Tuesday night.

The Allen Police Department said that disagreement was between nine people from South Dallas and seven from Allen.

Sergeant John Felty said the Dallas group drove to a home on Hawthorne Drive near South Jupiter Road in Allen for a confrontation. He said it was about to end peacefully when someone fired shots.

“Well I can’t imagine what would be so important that it would end like this. It is a tragedy,” he said.

Four people were shot and taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Officers detained eight of the nine from Dallas and the other, who police believe fired the shots, is in custody.

“The good news is… if there is any good news in this… is that the people that are responsible for this are detained or in custody,” he said.

The fact that the shooting stemmed from a Facebook argument was not lost on authorities.

“We’ve had social media disagreements for quite some time but never to this degree where it turns into a shooting,” said Fenty.

Oh good. Great Americans are going to drag their guns out over FB arguments now. If this shit continues, there won’t be all that many people left to worry about, will there? I know how infuriating people can be, who doesn’t know that? Even so, grabbing a gun is not a good idea because someone on the internet pissed you off. If we start killing people on that basis, there really won’t be anyone left.

Via WBAP.

The Deploraball.

Skinheads enact Nazi salutes (Shutterstock).

Skinheads enact Nazi salutes (Shutterstock).

Awwww, look, all the little nazis want to have a ball (I keep picturing them in Southern Belle type ball gowns), but they are fighting amongst themselves so much, it’s interfering with all their happy ball plans.

Alt-right leader Mike Cernovich, who is organizing the Deploraball, started a massive fight this week after he told popular alt-right Twitter personality @bakedalaska that he couldn’t attend the party if he was going to do Nazi salutes of the kind that white nationalist Richard Spencer encouraged during his talk at the National Policy Institute conference earlier this month.

@bakedalaska quickly took his grievances with Cernovich online to his 131,000 followers.

Let’s call these racist assholes what they are, shall we? White supremacist nazis. Well, wannabe nazis. Some of them don’t want to be overt however, they want to be undercover nazis. You can see the relevant tweets at the link.

@bakedalaska’s fan base quickly rallied to his side — and one of them even showed his support by burning a copy of Cernovich’s book in protest.

The neo-Nazis at The Daily Stormer quickly got involved and declared that Cernovich was a member of the “cuck/kike contingent of the Trump movement” who had “banned… heroes such as Richard Spencer and Sam Hyde” from attending the inauguration ball, while still inviting “Alt-Light figures attempting to kike-over the Alt-Right by making it non-racist and accepting of Jews.”

Tsk. I’m sure all of us rabid hordes of attacking parasites we now call activist progressives are about to dissolve into tears over the infighting. Yep, any second now, I’m sure.

Via Raw Story.

Atheists Want to Abort Baby Jesus, Oh My!

21637046-mmmain

Oh, is it possible for us atheists to be more evil? According to some, yes. The luridly purple (and highly inaccurate) prose of Christian fanatics know no bounds, and now includes the utter horror of atheists attempting to abort a birthed baby from thousands of years ago. Right, that just makes all kinds of sense! The actual problem? Oh, the usual – evil atheists and satanists are allowed to put up their own seasonal displays, messages, and billboards, quelle horreur!

The haters of all-things-Christmas, some of whom claim to be “freedom” lovers, are busy again this December trying to legally abort the baby in the manger.

If they could pull this off, it would be the ultimate late-term abortion, since that baby was born 2,000 years ago and lives eternally as the King of Kings.

Oh FFS. The idiocy is simply too much to bear.

The atheist-Satan alliance is becoming more visible than ever. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League noted in a recent press release that atheists and Satanists have the same goals: they hate Christianity.

Most satanists are atheists, who happily use satanism to smack fanatical Christians by means of using their own twisted logic. As for actual Satanists? They’re Christians too, and should be embraced by Christians, after all, you wouldn’t have a religion at all without your scapegoat, would you? It’s rather silly, the bad rap Lucifer gets, given that almost all of the vicious, bloodthirsty killing in the bible is the direct action of Yahweh. (If you haven’t read Drunk With Blood: God’s Killings in the Bible, by Steve Wells, I highly recommend it.)

no_estimates

So, if you’re actually going to believe all that silly shit, looks like Christians are on the wrong side. Nothing new there. I just can’t continue quoting the idiotic column, but it is a goldmine of paranoid idiocy, so if you’re in the mood, here it is.

Bacon, it’s not Kryptonite.

A couple of weeks back an anti-Muslim Facebook group called the Aussie Infidels told its followers to send Christmas cards “smeared in bacon fat” to the local Muslim association.

A couple of weeks back an anti-Muslim Facebook group called the Aussie Infidels told its followers to send Christmas cards "smeared in bacon fat" to the local Muslim association.
The Lakemba mosque has issued a statement not to wish anyone a Merry Christmas. Anyone who would like to send a Christmas card smeared in bacon fat to Lakemba, here the address:
Lebanese Moslem Association
71-75 Wangee Road
Lakemba
NSW 2195

It’s unclear what provoked the status. There are no recent public statements from the Lakemba mosque or the Lebanese Muslim Association about Christmas.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1155407184575696&set=a.353875768062179.1073741827.328911403891949&type=3

People are having a wonderful, humor filled time, happily mocking the idiots who couldn’t think of a single thing to do this solstice, other than to try and spread hate and fear. You can see a whole lot of the responses at BuzzFeed.

Many thanks to Intransitive for this one, cheered my day!

Presidential Apprentice.

CREDIT: Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP.

CREDIT: Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP.

The presidency isn’t enough for Donald Trump.

While in the Oval Office, he’ll moonlight as an executive producer for Celebrity Apprentice, the NBC show he starred on for more than a decade.

It is not merely a ceremonial role. Trump will be paid at least five-figures per episode, Variety reports.

The arrangement is an unprecedented, ongoing financial entanglement between NBC, which also operates one of the nation’s leading news organizations, and a sitting president. Trump will be paid by MGM, which produces the show.

In June 2015, after Trump made bigoted remarks about immigrants, NBC publicly severed its financial relationship with him and said he would no longer be participating in The Apprentice.

He would never be back on Celebrity Apprentice, as long as I’m here,” NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt said.

That, apparently, is all in the past.

The unusual arrangement also raises questions about the role Mark Burnett, the creator of The Apprentice, played in bottling up footage that could have damaged Trump’s presidential campaign.

[…]

A source told BuzzFeed that Burnett “is pro-Trump and has made clear to his teams that he will sue anyone who leaks.”

Burnett denied the allegations. He also released a statement denying he was even a Trump supporter.

[…]

Burnett’s conduct after the campaign suggests he was being less than candid. In addition to keeping Trump on as a paid executive producer, Burnett is also reportedly helping Trump plan his inaugural festivities.

According to the New York Times, Burnett suggested “a parade up Fifth Avenue, a helicopter ride to Washington from New York that could hold the attention of millions of people expected to watch from around the world.”

The Times described Burnett as one of Trump’s two “oldest friends.”

Asked about the arrangement spokesperson Hope Hicks said that Trump had “a big stake in the show.” Trump has previously described himself holding 50 percent ownership.

Trump’s decision to maintain a paid position with Celebrity Apprentice reflects his overall disregard for conflicts of interest that could impact his presidency.

Think Progress has the full story. It’s going to be short attention span government, won’t that be fun?

Oh, it’s a cosmic impulse to conquer.

Richard Spencer (Facebook).

Richard Spencer (Facebook).

Tim Wise has a good, in depth article up about the current crop of wannabe nazis, and how they can’t always manage to talk the talk, let alone walk the walk. So far, their de facto leader, Richard Spencer seems to be more concerned with polishing up the image of the “new identitarians” in an attempt to make them look all spiffy and intellectual. Just a bit here:

So again the question: how do white nationalists propose to bring such a thing about without violence?

The question was asked of Spencer recently, on at least two occasions. First by a Washington Post reporter and then during the Q&A session following his public presentation at Texas A&M University this week. And in both instances he tried to dodge the implications of his position. Though reluctant to offer many specifics about how one might attain a “white ethno-state” in America, he was ultimately forced to concede to the reporter from the Post, however dispassionately, that bringing his vision to fruition may require actions that would be “horribly bloody and terrible.” Then, at A&M, asked the same question by a black guy who demanded to know what white nationalists would seek to do with him, and how they planned to make it happen, a clearly nervous Spencer — not well-practiced when it comes to staring down a black man daring him to start some shit — was reduced to saying, “I’m not making you leave…You’re a citizen…you’re here.” In other words, he wouldn’t have to go anywhere: a statement that will come as quite a surprise to the Nazi shock troops who need and have come to expect from Richard a more unapologetic approach. Simply put, and using the terminology favored by the movement of which Spencer is such an integral part, he got cucked, hard. In the end, he went from being a brash and bloviating mini-Hitler, ranting to the audience about how “this is our Goddamned country!” to a feeble and frightened child or pathetic internet troll—a persona all too common to the movement and far more ubiquitous than the muscular brownshirt types they would like us to envision. Edward Norton in American History X they are not.

But make no mistake, ethnic cleansing and the violent removal of non-whites is exactly what they desire, no matter how unwilling they are to say so in the presence of black and brown peoples, like the ones upon whom they would need to make war, or simply away from the safe and breezy confines of a national media interview. In their private spaces or writings they acknowledge it, the way David Duke did in his autobiography, where he wrote that America must become an all white nation “no matter the cost or whatever sacrifices it takes,” that it will be necessary for “whites to prevail in a revolutionary physical struggle” over people of color and Jews, that whites must be “Aryan warriors,” and that “before the battle is over, many of us will find a heroic death… a physical revolution may be required…” Their entire worldview is about domination and subordination, and we know this because of something else Spencer has been saying recently, in interviews as well as speeches: the one at the National Policy Institute conference in DC, right after the presidential election, and the one at Texas A&M. Specifically, he has been quite adamant in proclaiming that whites are a people defined by a cosmic impulse to conquer.

Aha! So now we know what’s wrong with a lot of white people, they just have this cosmic imperative to be genocidal maniacs. How else could they possibly feel superior to everyone else?

Although Spencer insists he is not a supremacist because he doesn’t seek to rule over anyone else, the intellectual hard-on you can see him popping every time he professes the conquering impulse of whiteness — and his own admission that he gets literal wood reading about Napoleon — betrays his real sympathies all too visibly. But the inconsistency here — professing to believe in white conquest of others but not domination of them — is hardly the most internally inconsistent part of his worldview.

This can be most seriously filed under shit I did not need to know. Does anyone need to know that? Why in the fuckety fuck would anyone disclose such a thing? Eeeuw. Please, wannabe nazi or no, I don’t want to know a damn thing about your wank material. I will now declare this an excellent time to get myself back to other work for a while.

Tim Wise’s full article is highly recommended, have a read!

Trumpgrets.

cys7csaxgaaxewz

It seems that reality is slowly sinking in to some of those who voted for Trump, who now find themselves bewildered, angry, and sorrow-filled over the great tough dude they voted for. So much so, a tumblr has been started, compiling all the regrets. A great many of them have to do with Trump’s lack of action on the imprison/kill Clinton business. These people really thought he meant that isht.

tumblr_ohhkupvv6g1vms0a7o1_1280

@realDonaldTrump PLEASE SHUT UP. Can’t you just ignore and zip it until you take office? The more you speak the more I regret my choice.

https://trumpgrets.tumblr.com/ * #Trumpgrets.

A Fake News Story About Fake News.

Screenshots.

Screenshots.

Well, let us all congratulate mainstream media, shall we? After all, they’ve learned such a lesson about fake news, and what a problem it is, and they reported on it and everything! Goodness, they even wrote non-flattering items about facebook, oh my! All that sudden integrity lasted about a week, as noted by Think Progress:

It lasted about a week. As a story on Friday illustrated, alleged hackers needn’t have much bothered getting out of bed, as the media is still more than equal to the task of spreading fake news on its own. This time it came in the form of a report that CNN had accidentally broadcast 30 minutes of hardcore transgender pornography on Thanksgiving night in place of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown.”

If you were hoping to concoct a viral hoax, you couldn’t do much better than this one. It had a little bit of everything: sex, a largely disliked subject screwing up in the form of CNN, the delightfully discordant holiday angle, and ready-made punchlines riffing off the title. Add in the fact that it was a slow post-Thanksgiving Friday, with many newsrooms understaffed and weekend editors desperate for something to drive traffic, and it’s easy to see why this particular story spread so quickly to dozens of major news sites throughout the entire world in a matter of hours. But it didn’t make it any less maddening, and downright depressing, to watch as it happened in real time.

[Read more…]

Joy in Comments.

James Charles.

James Charles.

It’s a good way to start a day when you can take joy in comments, where you get to see people standing up against bigotry, fear and hate. Cover Girl recently featured their first male model, James Charles.

When 17-year-old James Charles was named the first male ambassador for CoverGirl this month, the company’s message was simple: “All of our CoverGirls are role models and boundary-breakers, fearlessly expressing themselves, standing up for what they believe and redefining what it means to be beautiful,” the makeup brand said in a press release. “James Charles is no exception.”

Mr. Charles is gorgeous, and no doubt has quite the career in front of him. There always has to be someone though, who just has to have a near heart attack about it all. In this case, a mother of a six year old, who wrote a long, hand-wringing screed on the awful at Homeschool Base. Outside of a bible thumper or two, the comments were filled with people who made one excellent point after another, many of them pointing out that answering the question of “why doesn’t daddy wear make-up?” being the easiest ever: “because he doesn’t want to.” Generally speaking, most children don’t have trouble happily accepting such things, and then they won’t be concerned about who wears cosmetics, because some people like to, and some people don’t. Of course, that wasn’t the problem troubled mom was worried about. It’s danced all around, but of course, the main worry is “oh god, what if my 6 year old son wants to try make-up?” To which, my answer would be “let him.” On with the screed!

Mommy, why doesn’t daddy wear makeup?

This is the question my 6-year-old asked me on Friday afternoon. We were watching Countdown to Christmas on ABC, and a commercial came up in between watching Toy Story.

A commercial for mascara.

[Read more…]

Temper, Temper! (Continuation 10).

racist-teacher

That lovely screed was written by a pre-Kindergarten teacher. Make that former pre-kindergarten teacher.

The Democrat & Chronicle reports that the Children’s School of Rochester has fired substitute teacher Cassandra Elizabeth Sutton after discovering that she wrote on Facebook that she “caught a n*gger” who was allegedly “armed and hiding behind the shed in my neighbor’s back yard.”

[…]

“She was immediately terminated as soon as we saw the posting,” Children’s School of Rochester Principal Jay Piper told the Democrat & Chronicle. “We pride ourselves on our diversity. They were very offensive and hurtful remarks.”

TES Staffing, a staffing agency that connected Sutton with the school, also said that it would no longer employ Sutton after her racist rant.

[Read more…]