He’s losing badly. But from the lofty height of his own self-regard, he is the champion of all. Watch this cringe-worthy video of Kasich pompously lecturing yeshiva students about what’s really important in Judaism.
It’s being called goysplaining — he’s so oblivious that he thinks he can correct Jewish scholars on what they’re actually studying. We can’t let this man become president, because he’d be too infuriating to everyone.
We wuv you so much, Governor McCrory!
The Minnesota GOP is just as backward and ignorant as the GOP in any southern state. They recently tried to pass one of those awful bathroom bill that are the hot new fad among regressives; it got killed, fortunately. But we still got to listen to some prudish whining about safety (because transgender people are dangerous) and privacy (because peering at crotches is standard behavior in the bathroom), and lots of accusations that transgender people are the real bullies here. Watch the parade of bigots here:
They got their dreams of slapping down transgender men and women crushed, so the 35 Republican Minnesotans wrote a letter to McCrory of North Carolina telling him how much they liked him and wanted to follow his ideas.
Digby finds some interesting quotes. Did you know that this presidential election is about masculine vs. feminine values?
Harry Enten: I think it has more to do with society overall. A ridiculously high 68 percent of Trump supporters say society is becoming too soft and feminine. Cruz and Kasich supporters come in with 57 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Now compare those numbers with the Democratic side, where Sanders supporters were slightly less likely than Clinton supporters to say that (28 percent vs. 31 percent).
I don’t even…my first objection has to be the equation of “feminine” and “soft”, which is simply taken for granted in the question. I don’t even know what “feminine” means, or should mean — the women I know have all sorts of personalities, as do the men, and it’s simply silly to assign one stereotypical set of traits, especially an implicitly negative set, to an entire group of people and the entirety of society.
In a country where only 19% of the members of the house of representatives are women, 20% of the senate are women (an all-time high!), a third of the Supreme Court are women, and no woman has ever been president, I fully support the increasing “femininization” of our government until representation is fair and equal.
And then Digby finds another quote from a 2003 article that elevates the stereotyping to a new level of ironic absurdity.
In the House, Dennis Hastert is the Republican speaker, Nancy Pelosi the leader of the Democratic minority. Mr Hastert, a hulking former wrestling coach, is a fairly straightforward conservative: he is against abortion, gay marriage, the Kyoto protocol; for the invasion of Iraq, the death penalty. Ms Pelosi, a tiny bird-like woman, is an unabashed, card-carrying liberal.
So is child molestation one of those masculine qualities we want to increase in society?
I’d also like to know how a high school wrestling coach became a multi-millionaire. Perhaps corruption is also manly?
Robert Lewis Dear, the asshole who shot up a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic and murdered three people, has been flapping his wretched yap again. He’s been talking about how much he admired that other asshole, Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor, and he’s been saying that he was hoping to be welcomed into heaven by a swarm of grateful aborted fetuses. And of course he was influenced by those phony videos from the “Center for Medical Progress” made by sick fuck David Daleiden.
The National Abortion Federation released a report last week documenting what should come as no surprise to anyone: that anti-abortion harassment, threats, intimidation and violence have spiked dramatically since July 2015 when the Center for Medical Progress began releasing deceptively edited videos aimed at discrediting Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donation practices.
Despite the Center for Medical Progress’ videos having been widely discredited, and the indictment of its leader, the group continues to release videos — which federal and state politicians are using to justify invasive government investigations into abortion clinics and further abortion restrictions. This one-two punch of anti-abortion activity almost guarantees that the increased violence against abortion providers NAF documented in 2015 will continue into 2016 and beyond.
Now if you want further evidence of the hypocrisy of the Republican vermin who hate Planned Parenthood, look no further than these telling laws. Samantha Bee has noticed something strange: did you know that food stamps can’t be used to purchase disposable diapers? It’s not just punishing babies (you know, those critters they don’t want aborted, and that will be greeting Robert Dear in heaven by shitting all over his shoes), but it’s also a clever way to shackle parents, especially mothers, to their homes and making it impossible for them to find jobs.
How can you be adamant that all babies must be born, yet so callous and uncaring that you deny their mothers basic supplies for hygiene? If the Republicans were actually sincere about caring for children, you’d think they be all over bills to allow poor people to use their food stamps on something as unglamorous and useful as diapers.
After all, it’s not as if they’d be using them to buy red potatoes or spaghetti sauce.
That’s the other thing: the scum of the Republican party in Wisconsin, which is fast becoming a desolate hellhole of smug selfish bastards under Scott Walker, is now trying to pass a bill to control what things poor people are allowed to buy with their food stamps. Why? I don’t know, except that being Republican means you are compelled to meddle in the lives of others to make them more miserable. It’s a kind of psychopathy, I think.
I had no idea Cara Jennings was running against Governor Scott, or was so powerful and influential that she must be crushed, but I guess she is. Or maybe that public rebuke in a coffee shop was so painful that he had to relieve himself of some bile.
Here’s Rick Scott’s reply to a citizen:
I learned one thing from that ad.
Rick Scott is weak and afraid.
Good.
Remember the long game.
In a few months, the Democratic party will hold a convention and pick a nominee. It will be one of you. Go ahead, imagine that it’s you.
You are then going to turn to the second place finisher and ask them to continue their campaigning and help you defeat the abomination that is going to lurch out of the Republican convention. You want them to agree to do so. Put everything you say now into that future context, please.
I say the same thing to all the Bernie and Hillary supporters.
I would also say something special to Bill: your wife is doing a fine job without you. Stop “helping”.
Governor Rick Scott of Florida mingled briefly among the common people at a Starbucks until he was recognized by Cara Jennings, who told him exactly what she thought of him.
My favorite part is the way he had that robotic grin plastered on his face as he and his sullen entourage fled the coffeeshop without any coffee.
I would definitely watch it, although who you’d pick for judges would be problematic.
This is almost as brilliant as the idea that changed the world.
It’s too much. The sheer volume of the Panama Papers may make its message indigestible — 2.6 terabytes of data? Of accounting data? It’s not exactly the kind of thing I’m going to crack open to read before bedtime.
But this summary of the initial disclosures is helpful.
* Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.
* A $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s best friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin – is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin’s daughter Katerina got married.
* Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt’s former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.
* Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to UK political parties have had offshore assets. The families of at least eight current and former members of China’s supreme ruling body, the politburo, have been found to have hidden wealth offshore.
* Twenty-three individuals who have had sanctions imposed on them for supporting the regimes in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran and Syria have been clients of Mossack Fonseca. Their companies were harboured by the Seychelles, the British Virgin Islands, Panama and other jurisdictions.
* A key member of Fifa’s powerful ethics committee, which is supposed to be spearheading reform at world football’s scandal-hit governing body, acted as a lawyer for individuals and companies recently charged with bribery and corruption.
That’s just the early disclosures as people start wading through it all. There are rumors that some Americans are going to be implicated in the corruption, too…just give them time.
Another factor that may make this fizzle, besides the overwhelming volume, is that nobody is going to be surprised by any of it. Are any of you at all surprised that rich and influential people of the world are also sleazy, rotten, tax cheats?
Jud McMillin has resigned from his position as a Republican representative in the Indiana legislature. I know this bothers you — another promising political career cut short — but the hypocrisy of this one is positively enthralling. Rarely does a politician engage in such furious foot-shooting.
He’s resigning because he sent explicit sex videos recorded on his cell phone to a large number of people. Oh, excuse me, his cell phone was stolen and “his cellphone sent a sexually explicit video to an unknown number of recipients”. This is what the passive voice was intended for by the good Lord Above, people!
This is the second time he’s resigned because of the escape of sexually explicit images of himself from his phone (AI researchers: look into this. It may be a sentient device). He previously resigned from his job as an attorney because he’d been taking advantage of a client who was a victim of domestic violence. How did he get elected to high office after that? I don’t know. Indiana?
A highlight of his legislative record was working to pass a “2015 “religious freedom” law allowing businesses to ban gay customers”. Because, of course, he’s very concerned about public and private morality, since God frowns upon men who touch penises, except of course, when that man is making a masturbation video to send to his mistress. Oh, wait, I just got kneemail from Jesus, and he says Dad disapproves of that, too.
I think this one should count as irony, rather than hypocrisy: he also helped stall a bill to outlaw revenge porn, so any Hoosiers who have copies of his porn video, there’s nothing but your conscience to prevent you from disseminating it wildly. And if you’re the kind of person McMillin counts as a friend, there’s a good chance you don’t have one of those!
But don’t you worry about Jud, he has announced that he is resigning to spend more time with his family. You all know about Republican families, right? The family is a versatile institution that both provides an excuse to sanctimoniously moralize at the public, and acts as a perfect, untouchable refuge when you’re caught violating your own moral code.
