Initech

Initech's Journal

October 17, 2017

How Fox News Hijacked Harvey Weinstein And Made It About Clinton

Somehow, the Harvey Weinstein story became a Hillary Clinton story.

Clinton, who received campaign donations from the Hollywood mogul and attended fundraisers hosted by him, was criticized for saying nothing in the days after the New York Times published an account accusing Weinstein of repeated sexual assault and harassment. And then when she did say something, she was accused of not saying enough.

Weinstein has long been associated with Democratic and liberal politics, hosting fundraisers for Clinton and Barack Obama (also called on to release a statement of condemnation); donating $300,000 to the Democratic National Committee, and more to individual legislators; and publicly championing women’s rights. In the days since the Times’s account (and subsequent revelations in the New Yorker), any progressive or Democratic institution that’s been associated with Weinstein has been expected to cut itself loose quickly, entirely, and permanently. And any Hollywood figure who’s expressed progressive opinions has been expected to do the same.

The investigatory zeal is different than it was for Republican Party politicians who were friendly to Roger Ailes. The former Fox News head advised President Trump on the debate even after he was pushed out at Fox News in 2016 amid allegations of widespread sexual harassment. For that matter, a year after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, Donald Trump has never been made anyone’s problem — except Billy Bush’s.

The disparity between these two scenarios suggests something perverse but inescapable about the media’s expectations for politicians’ response to scandals. Public figures who talk about a social problem in the abstract get pressured to repudiate their associates who contribute to it. Public figures who weren’t vocal about the problem to begin with get to stay silent when it’s one of their friends.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/10/17/16482604/weinstein-clinton-ailes-trump

Fucking scumbags! This is why I have Fux News blocked from my DVR.

October 13, 2017

Roy Moore: Justices That Voted For Marriage Equality Should Be Impeached

Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate from Alabama, was the featured speaker at a Values Voter Summit luncheon organized by the American Family Association’s political action arm today. Moore, twice removed from his job as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for defying federal court orders that conflicted with his religious beliefs, was right at home among his people.

Abraham Hamilton, one of several AFA speakers who addressed the group before Moore spoke, quoted George Washington’s farewell address, adding his interpretation:

To put it in modern parlance, George Washington was literally saying anybody who would attack biblical Christianity and biblical morality would be an enemy to the United States of America. That is a message that needs to be heralded loud and proudly in our country today, everywhere but especially in this institution we call the United States Senate.

Hamilton praised Moore for having “demonstrated, at great personal risk, his faithfulness to the word of God first, and secondarily to our Constitution.” Said Hamilton, “I believe he is the tip of the spear in what we need to usher America back into its place in submission to our holy God.”
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/roy-moore-pro-marriage-equality-justices-should-be-impeached/

God fucking damn them! This is why Roy Moore is dangerous. If he gets in the senate there's no telling what kind of damage he can do.

October 12, 2017

Rick Wiles: The World Is Controlled By Avowed Satanic Luciferian Devil Worshipers

During his recent appearance on Greg Hunter’s program, End Times broadcaster Rick Wiles declared that the government, the media and the business world are all controlled by “avowed satanic Luciferian devil worshipers” and asserted that the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas was carried out by a group of demon-possessed killers.

“I know that sounds extreme and bizarre to people,” Wiles said, “but every day that goes by, the more I’m convinced that I’ve been right all these years that there is a deeply embedded satanic cult that has gained control of powerful institutions in this country and other nations. You can’t escape it.”

Wiles said that “there is no other explanation” for what happened in Las Vegas than to admit that “it’s raw evil.”

“It’s raw evil committed by a demon-possessed group of people,” he said. “It wasn’t just one man, there were several people but those people were possessed by demons. No normal person in his or her right mind would slaughter people like that. You have to be possessed by Satan to carry out such an act.”
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/rick-wiles-the-world-is-controlled-by-avowed-satanic-luciferian-devil-worshipers/

Yeah I believe they're called "republicans", Rick!

October 12, 2017

US - South Korean War Plans Reportedly Stolen By North Korea

Hackers in North Korea have allegedly stolen a cache of classified military documents from South Korea, according to a South Korean lawmaker.

Lee Cheol-hee, a member of South Korea's ruling Democratic Party, initially told local media outlets that the documents were taken in a September 2016 hack of the country's Defense Ministry. The ministry would not comment to ABC News, citing national security concerns.

"The way it got hacked was preposterous," Lee told ABC News, confirming what he initially told South Korean media. "It wasn't because North Koreans had advanced hacking skills but was due to negligence on the South Korean part."

He continued, "I don't think the situation is as serious as it may sound but the reason why I alerted this is to push the new administration and the Defense Ministry to quickly find remedies so that this kind of loss don't happen again."

http://abcnews.go.com/International/us-south-korean-war-plans-reportedly-stolen-north/story?id=50390068

October 11, 2017

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #3-17: Wheel Of Corruption: At Worlds End Edition

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #3-17: Wheel Of Corruption: At World’s End Edition

Welcome back to the Top 10 Conservative Idiots! You know there’s a lot going on the world this week and it’s an especially dark time with what happened in Vegas last week. So let’s lighten things up and do some comedy shall we? One thing we got to talk about is one of my favorite bands of all time, the Foo Fighters. Right? Who doesn’t love Dave Grohl? To paraphrase Homer Simpson, “He who is tired of Dave Grohl is tired of life.” Well they had their huge and first ever Cal Jam ’17 at the Glen Helen Pavilion in San Bernardino. I wasn’t there, I was in Denver hanging out with beer lovers and zombies. Yeah that was a weird scene, I will say! Anyway, during one of the last songs the Foos played that night, they played and sang a cover of the Beatles song “Come Together”. And if you’re going to cover something as classic as the Beatles, even a song like Come Together, where the lyrics are just nonsense (come on, even the most hardcore Beatles fan can admit those lyrics are nonsense!), at least get the words right! Can we roll the tape on that?

Yeah. Liam might want to take a page from Southwest and get away for a couple of days. Although I will say I listened to his new solo album “As You Were” and it is great. I highly recommend checking that one out. And here’s why I love the Foo Fighters – Dave said he was OK with it, getting to jam on stage with Liam Gallagher was awesome enough! OK enough of the intro, we got a lot of idiocy to get to this week. But first John Oliver is back and he takes a look at how the Confederacy is still a thing:

So where do we begin this week? Well the first two slots are going to go to Gun Nut Apologists (1, 2) because if there’s one sure thing in this country, is that the gun nuts are going to be out in full force actively defending their death toys. I saw Death Toys at the Troubadour last week - awesome band! In the third slot is going to be Mike Pence (3). Because if you watch and love football like I do, you know that what Mike Pence did something is so jaw-dropping stupid that we can’t even comprehend it. In the fourth slot is of course President Dotard Trump (4). So he’s resorting to attacking members of his own party because reasons. At number 5 is also President Dotard Trump (5) because he can’t stop poking the hornet’s nest known as North Korea. At number 6 we’re going to do a brand new round of “Who’s The Snowflake?” and it involves a new video game coming out called “Wolfenstein: The New Colossus”, and the reaction from actual Nazis is well, they’re the real snowflakes! At number 7 we’re going to talk about Harvey Weinstein (7). Wait, isn’t he a liberal? Yes but considering he’s a member of the Pussy Grabber’s Club, we have to talk about it and you can’t escape it in the news. And number 8 is our favorite segment about all the news that is holy with “Holy Shit”. And man you can’t escape how batshit crazy these people are, especially if their plan to unleash Indiana's horrendous "Religious Freedom" (nothing to do with religion or freedom) laws on the entire country goes through. At number 9 (NEIN!!!!) we’ve got a brand new edition of “People Are Dumb” and there’s a lot of stupidity out there. Plus we're going to switch things up instead of our usual "People Are People" routine and I hope it goes well! Finally this week its’ more of the Top 10 World Tour (10). This time we’re back on the road and we’re hanging out in the Land Of The Rising Sun, Japan! Plus in the spirit of Japan, we’ve got some Japanese rock music for you from one of the biggest bands in Japan, I’m talking about the one the only X Japan! They are touring behind a new documentary about their 35 year career that’s seen them become one of the biggest bands in the world called “We Are X”. Enjoy! And as always don’t forget the key!

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[font size="8"]Gun Nut Apologists
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Come on everybody say it with me. It’s time for the WHEEL OF CORRUPTION!!!! Yayyyyyyyyy!!!

The wheel is back everybody! And of course if we had a bigger budget we’d have our own graphics and theme music. Yes just like last time I’ll talk about whatever the wheel lands on. But remember that if it lands on the Guacamole option that it costs $1.50 extra. So this week we’ve got some all new items on the wheel! They will be:

- Guns
- Abortion
- Crime
- Poverty
- Chance
- 5,000
- Infowars
- Nazis
- Go Directly To Jail
- Buy A Vowel
- North Korea
- Lawsuits
- Whammy
- Donald Trump
- People Are Dumb
- ‘Merica!
- How Is This Still A Thing?
- A Random Tweet
- 10,000
- Community Chest
- Talk Shows
- Clip Without Context
- Something Random In The News
- Fox News
- Polls
- Chance
- 15,000
- Bankrupt
- Golf
- Pirates
- Community Chest
- Florida (Obviously)
- This Fucking Guy
- Beating A Dead Horse
- Holy Shit
- Guacamole ($1.50 Extra)
- Double Whammy
- T-Shirt Cannon
- ? (Mystery Item)
- I Need A Drink
- Lightning Round
- Bonus Spin

Let’s get this going! Spin that shit! Come on no whammy no whammy no whammy no whammy… stop! And it’s a clip without context!

Really – so in one clip Bryan Fischer goes full racist *AND* full batshit crazy. Really, we want violence? You know we’re pacifists, right?

Spin it again! Guns! It’s now time for our new segment:

People always say there’s no such thing as a sure thing. Those people are wrong. There actually is such a thing as a “sure thing”. And that is that every time there’s a mass shooting in America – you can bet that the inevitable shit show that the gun nut apologists are going to put on is nothing short of a jaw-dropping horror. I mean the first round of this is always the Christian right coming out saying that the victims deserved it because, their god is a dick. The second is that Alex Jones will call the shooting a false flag.

And that’s not the first time.

See? It’s a shit show! And then there was Ted Nugent, who offered what could quite possibly be the dumbest thing anyone’s ever said about the shooting:

Right-wing rocker and gun enthusiast Ted Nugent thinks more military-grade weapons on the streets could have stopped the Las Vegas shooting.

In an interview on NRA TV, Nugent said that if he had a rocket launcher he could have stopped Stephen Paddock’s gun massacre.

“If we were allowed to walk around with things like rocket launchers this would have never happened,” said Nugent. “If I had one at the scene, I could have taken him out from the street.”

However, Nugent isn’t the only right-winger to engage in delusional thinking about gun violence. FOX News contributor Erick Erickson claimed that gun violence wasn’t a problem in the United States, even though it claims about 30,000 lives a year.
uspoln.com/2017/10/05/nugent-stopped-vegas-shooting-rocket-launcher/

Oh how cute, the gun nuts think they’re Rambo again. Now really… a rocket launcher? Dude, you might take out the shooter, but you’ll level the hotel in the process! And where are you going to get that kind of fire power? Oh wait, I know what country I live in. And then when it comes to beating dead horses in this debate, the GOP will always find a way to blame everything but the guns. Take a look at what former senator and poster boy for a certain “frothy mixture” Rick Santorum did!

In the wake of the worst mass shooting in American history, there has been renewed interest in increasing gun control regulation. There has also been pushback from conservatives who feel that gun control measures will either not do anything to prevent gun violence or will lead to a slippery slope towards a ban on firearms.

During a panel discussion on CNN’s State of the Union this morning, political commentator and former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum waded into the debate by taking aim at the entertainment industry. After finding consensus with liberals on the banning of bump stocks and modifying semi-automatic weapons to shoot like automatic ones, Santorum then said more attention should be focused on video games and films.

“Violence in television and the video games — there is a mountain of evidence out there, psychological evidence, about what we’re doing to our young people with these video games, violent video games, and you never hear the left trying to go after Hollywood or the gaming market,” Santorum exclaimed. “It is never involved in this discussion. Where is the solution? Here we are. Where is the solution?” https://www.mediaite.com/tv/rick-santorum-on-gun-control-debate-why-arent-we-going-after-violent-video-games-and-films/

Dude, Rick – the solution is staring you right in the face! It’s that big black thing with a trigger on it! And there’s tons of other crazy gun nut justifications this week. I mean they’ll blame everyone and everything for this horrifying shooting but their death toys!

Take, for example, Rush Limbaugh, the king of right-wing media, who argued that American media outlets were purposely downplaying the shooter's link to ISIS. He cited ISIS's own news agency which claimed responsibility for the attack. Limbaugh asserts that ISIS had to create their own news outlet because "the American drive-bys do not want ISIS being credited with this stuff" because to “the American left, there is no such thing as militant Islamic terrorism."

<snip>

A guest on "Fox & Friends" asserted Tuesday that CNN, one of the largest cable-news networks, was partially responsible for the shooting. Forensic Psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner accused CNN of demonizing gun enthusiasts. He didn't explain how that induced Paddock to commit an act of terrorism, but nevertheless, the hosts of "Fox & Friends" failed to push back on him.

<snip>

Infowars host Alex Jones again battled with the truth on Tuesday, when he claimed that liberals orchestrated the attack to kill conservatives at the concert "Bolshevik-style." “Why does the left bring in the very groups that are trying to kill you?” Jones asked. "Now we see the first Islamist attack on a conservative venue. On Monday, Jones blamed everyone from leftists, communists and globalists, to ISIS and antifa for the Las Vegas shooting.
https://www.salon.com/2017/10/03/right-wing-media-blames-isis-democrats-cnn-anthem-protests-for-las-vegas-shooting/

Yeah this is why we can’t have nice things – because of these fucking lunatics. In a mass shooting, you don’t tell the victims to go fuck themselves. But that’s what the right did in Sandy Hook. In Orlando. In San Bernardino. And now in Vegas. In fact The Guardian put together a handy how to in identifying American gun nut insanity.

Some differences of opinion are permissible in conservative media. Not everyone agrees about wars, foreign powers, terror, or drugs. Some are not fans of the current president. Some even risk unconventional “pro-choice” opinions.

But the second amendment – virtually unrestricted access to guns – is sacrosanct. Across the spectrum of rightwing opinion, from libertarians to the Christian right, pretty much everyone agrees that Americans’ unique access to firearms should continue. We can put this down to any number of things, from the country’s history of frontier settler violence to the influence of the NRA. But there it is.

When a massacre happens, rightwing pundits have work to do: they need to convince any waverers that easy access to semi-automatic weapons has nothing to do with mass-casualty shootings. They also need Republican legislators to remain aware that any moves to restrict access to guns will ruin their career.

Accordingly, rightwing pundits have evolved a series of standard responses to mass murder. Today we’ll look at five of them, all of which have been in evidence this week.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/05/las-vegas-mass-shooting-rightwing-pundits

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[font size="8"]Gun Nut Apologists Part 2
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Spin that shit! No whammy no whammy no whammy no whammy... stop!!! Chance!

Sweet! I get $50! I'll take that thank you! Spin it again! And it lands on… guns! Yes, guns again! Because that’s all the right wing talks about. Is their precious, precious guns. But one thing in particular has been gaining a lot of attention – and that is a device called a “bump stock”. Which is basically a device that makes a giant machine gun fire more rounds at a much faster rate.

Senior Republicans in Congress are considering a bill that would ban “bump stocks” — gun accessories the Las Vegas shooter apparently used to turn semi-automatic weapons into more rapid-fire machine guns.

A handful of Republican congressional legislators have shown interest in a bill that would stop shooters from essentially converting semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic ones by using bump stocks. Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed 58 people and wounded more than 500 others Sunday at a Las Vegas music festival, had two bump stocks in his possession, officials told the Associated Press.

“An American concert venue has now become a battlefield,” said California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who introduced the bump stock bill Wednesday. “No one should be able to easily and cheaply modify legal weapons into what are essentially machine guns.”
http://time.com/4970720/bump-stocks-ban-how-work/

Apparently they’re never going to put down their guns because I’m convinced the NRA won’t be satisfied until we’re all dead. There I said it. But guess what? The NRA don’t care!

The National Rifle Association ventured into unfamiliar territory last week when it endorsed new restrictions on a device that accelerated gunfire in the Las Vegas massacre. But leaders of the gun lobby signaled Sunday they may draw a line at writing those restrictions into law.

“If we could legislate morality, we would have done it long ago,” Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president and chief executive, said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Instead, LaPierre said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives should review the matter. “I think you want to tell ATF to do its job. It’s an interpretive issue, and they need to get the job done,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/nra-stops-short-of-supporting-a-legal-ban-on-bump-stocks/2017/10/08/c96c14fe-ac44-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html

And not only does the NRA don’t care, the NRA really don’t care! They already committed Phase 1 of Mass Shooting Justification. The first is spitting on the graves of the victims they’ve created. The second is convincing people guns aren’t the problem and that the evil liberals are to blame. The third is guess what? Obstruction! Bravo NRA! You have officially stopped any progress being made and it will result in another mass shooting! Bravo! Well done! But even the most rabid gun nuts say these things are a bad idea!

RENO, Nevada — Less than a week after a gunman mowed down 58 people halfway across the state, hundreds of firearm admirers filled a convention hall here for a huge gun show on Saturday, perusing tables weighed down with weapons like those used in the worst mass shooting in modern American history.

But even as attendees carted home rifles, scopes and ammunition, most of those interviewed Saturday said they supported a federal ban on bump stocks, a device used by the Las Vegas shooter to transform his semi-automatic rifles into firearms capable of shooting hundreds of bullets a minute.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/07/reno-gun-show-bump-stock-gun-control/

And even the insane amount of gun add ons are pushing the NRA and the ATF to the brink of what’s legal and what isn’t! Aint it a great time to be an American gun nut?

Hundreds of add-on parts that can test the thin line between a legal gun and an illegal gun swamp a tiny office in West Virginia each year.

There, a dozen federal firearms experts are tasked with testing the inventions and splitting hairs over legal definitions in a process that can pit them against well-funded gun industry lawyers, decades-old laws and public safety.

The testing of the devices by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives happens in obscurity, and the agency doesn’t answer many questions about it. But, the ATF system is under scrutiny after the suspect in the worst mass shooting in modern American history is said to have used legal add-ons to make his semiautomatic rifles capable of firing hundreds more rounds per minute.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/06/bump-stocks-and-other-gun-add-ons-testing-limits-atf/740431001/

[font size="8"]Mike Pence
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Let’s spin that shit! Come on no whammy no whammy no whammy no whammy stop!! And it lands on, clip without context!

Yeah because the best way to solve a gun problem is with more guns! Right. You don’t solve a drinking problem by going on an all night bender, Bryan. Spin it again! And it lands on… ‘Merica! Because if there’s one thing that the GOP loves to flaunt is that they’re more American than the next guy. Take for example the controversy that will never die – the stupid fucking anthem protests. I guess people stopped paying attention to Fox News’ lame “war on Christmas” as part of their culture war against people who don’t care about these things. The anthem protests are not going away, and conservatives are already making things worse. Look at our vice president and guy who is more white guy than thou, Mike Pence.

Washington (CNN)Vice President Mike Pence left a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday after some players knelt during the National Anthem, saying he did not want to "dignify" the demonstration.
"I left today's Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem," Pence wrote on Twitter.
The vice president went on to issue a full statement opposing the protest.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/08/politics/vice-president-mike-pence-nfl-protest/index.html

Really? They’re still beating that dead horse? So Mike Pence shows up at what could be Peyton Manning’s last game in a Colts uniform and basically says “fuck you” to the NFL.

INDIANAPOLIS – North Korea and its nukes can wait. The White House has declared war on the NFL. And on the First Amendment.

Two weeks after President Trump decreed that NFL players who kneel during the national anthem should be fired, Vice President Mike Pence walked out of Lucas Oil Stadium on Sunday after about 20 members of the San Francisco 49ers knelt during the anthem. The 49ers were in town to play the Indianapolis Colts.

What, you think he didn’t know the 49ers would kneel on Sunday? Pence knew. The 49ers are the one franchise, the only franchise, that have had at least one player kneel before every game since Colin Kaepernick was the first to do it in the 2016 preseason. Kaepernick played for the 49ers, of course. Last week, following Trump’s unpatriotic assertion that he would fire someone for exercising their First Amendment rights, more than half the San Francisco roster knelt.
http://www.indystar.com/story/sports/columnists/gregg-doyel/2017/10/08/vp-mike-pence-leaves-nfl-protest-49-ers-colts/744478001/

You know Mike, you could have just saved time and money and just given the NFL the finger directly. But this is the Trump administration and we don't have time for rational solutions! Thank you! But here’s where it gets weird – and you know it’s going to. How much did this little “fuck you” to the 49ers cost taxpayers? Never mind that we live in a world where facts don’t matter anymore!

CNN White House reporter Kevin Liptak tweeted that Air Force 2 costs the government $42,936 an hour to fly, and estimated Pence’s trip to Indianapolis took about two and a half hours flying time, each way. That would put the flight’s cost well over $200,000.

And that doesn’t include the costs of a hotel room in Indianapolis,where Pence spent Saturday night, and extra police protection in Indianapolis. Fans at Sunday’s game were asked to show up early due to enhanced security at the stadium.

A number of top Trump administration officials have been investigated for wasteful spending on unnecessary flights, although previous criticism has concerned the use of private flights when comparable commercial flights could have been taken. An investigation into the use of private jets by Tom Price last month led to his resignation as secretary of health and human services.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-much-did-mike-pences-nfl-walkout-cost-taxpayers-2017-10-08

And by the way would you be surprised that President Moron put him up to this? Gee, Donnie, give it a rest already!

WASHINGTON — President Trump reignited his feud with the N.F.L. on Sunday by telling Vice President Mike Pence to walk out of a game in his home state of Indiana after nearly two dozen players from the visiting San Francisco 49ers knelt during the playing of the national anthem.

Mr. Pence lavishly documented his early departure in a series of tweets and an official statement issued by his office. On Twitter, he declared, “I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem.”

While the vice president portrayed his decision as a gesture of patriotic principle, it had the distinct appearance of a well-planned, if costly, political stunt. He doubled back from a trip to the West Coast to take a seat in the stands in Indianapolis, where the 49ers — the team most associated with the N.F.L. protest movement against racial injustice — were suiting up to play the Colts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/08/us/politics/pence-anthem-colts.html

[font size="8"]Donald Trump
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Let’s spin that shit! Come on no whammy no whammy no whammy… stop! Buy A Vowel. All right, I’ll buy a U!

So can I guess? Universal Repeal? That’s wrong? NOOOOOOO!!!! How much did that cost me? $50? Shit!!!

Spin it again! And it lands on Donald Trump. I finally get it! Donald Trump is this guy:

So we already know that the GOP is trying to hijack the narrative on the NFL protests and make it about them. It’s kind of like the Peanuts scenario where Lucy pulls the football from Charlie Brown. Only the Trump administration would spit in Charlie Brown’s face as he’s lying on the ground and kick him in the ribs. But what I’m getting at is Trump is getting extremely desperate. All he wants from his men is their undying loyalty and anyone who doesn't show they're more loyal is not loyal enough! So now he’s attacking members of his own party – especially Senator Corker of Virginia.

WASHINGTON — For nearly nine months, Senate Republicans have watched their new president with a mix of aggravation and alarm. But it took Senator Bob Corker to take those concerns public and confront President Trump with his most serious challenge from within his own party.

In unloading on Mr. Trump, Mr. Corker, a two-term senator from Tennessee, said in public what many of his Republican colleagues say in private — that the president is dangerously erratic and unstable, that he treats his high post like a television show and that he is reckless enough to stumble the country into a nuclear war.

Mr. Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, evidently feels liberated now that he has decided not to run for re-election, while other Republican senators with concerns keep quiet fearing the retaliation of a Twitter-armed president and his allies in the conservative media. But Mr. Corker’s passionate statements reflect growing troubles for a president attempting to govern with a narrow and increasingly disenchanted Republican majority.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/us/politics/corkers-blast-at-trump-has-other-republicans-nodding-in-agreement.html

Hmmm.. yes. Hmmm… yes. Trump is a fucking moron. Mr. Corker is right! But really this falls into more of the “what have we fucking done” category? Because Trump has gone mad with power. Even Kellyanne Conway thought this was ridiculous!

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, on Monday called Sen. Bob Corker's tweet criticizing Trump "incredibly irresponsible."

During an interview on "Fox and Friends," Conway was asked about Corker's tweet on Sunday that referred to the White House as "an adult day care center," with co-host Brian Kilmeade saying it was "a demeaning tweet at the president."

"Well it is, and world leaders see that," Conway replied. "I find tweets like this to be incredibly irresponsible. It adds to the insulting that the mainstream media and the president's detractors ... to their ability and their cover to speak about the president of the United States ... in ways that no president should be talked about."
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/09/trump-bob-corker-tweet-kellyanne-conway-243597

He looks as ridiculous as his oversized ties he wears, doesn’t he? In fact this is so much of an obstruction that Trump is clearly not helping things. But I think Bob might be jumping the gun a bit too soon. Trump isn’t going to be starting World War III. No, that’s Kim Jong Un’s job!

Washington (CNN)Sen. Bob Corker, who engaged in a public feud with President Donald Trump over the weekend, said Trump is setting the country "on the path to World War III."
Trump is a President who is acting "like he's doing 'The Apprentice' or something," the Tennessee Republican said in an interview with The New York Times that was published Sunday night.
"He concerns me," Corker added. "He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation."
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/09/politics/corker-world-war-iii-donald-trump-white-house/index.html

But we’re all not going to die yet. But some good news in all of this madness is that Trump may have cost himself a key policy outlier:

President Trump has his fair share of critics in Congress, but with one Sunday morning tweetstorm, he has risked making a policy rival out of someone who could have counted as an ally for his agenda.

Trump’s Twitter rant against Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) comes just days before Trump is expected to announce that he will not certify Iran is in compliance with the nuclear pact with reached with world powers in 2015, the first in a highly orchestrated series of steps that White House, State Department and congressional officials — primarily Corker, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — have been planning for months.

It also comes as Congress is diving into tax reform, a must-win issue for the GOP if it hopes to check off any bit of its promised agenda in 2017. Corker is one of the Senate’s most committed deficit hawks and outspoken members on tax policy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/trumps-tweetstorm-against-corker-may-cost-him-a-key-policy-ally/2017/10/08/4913257a-ac4b-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html

And by the way Senate Majority Leader and guy who fantasizes about stealing candy from babies, Mitch McConnell, is playing the Good Cop / Bad Cop routine in this whole feud.

McConnell's comments on Monday come as Senate GOP leadership will try to pass its fiscal year 2018 budget next week. The bill includes instructions that will allow Republicans to pass tax reform by a simple majority, avoiding a Democratic filibuster.

But Republicans have a narrow path for passing either the budget or ultimately tax reform. With a 52-seat majority they need the support of at least 50 senators, which would allow Vice President Mike Pence to break a tie.

Corker has emerged as one of the loudest Republican critics in the Senate of leadership's tax blueprint, saying he won't support even a "penny's worth of deficits."
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/354568-mcconnell-defends-corker-amid-trump-feud

[font size="8"]Donald Trump
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We are entering the spin zone! Come on… no whammy no whammy no whammy…s top! ‘Merica! I love this one!

&t=22s

Spin it again! And it lands on North Korea. You know “going rogue” is the biggest cliché in movies. I mean you had “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation”, where Ethan Hunt goes rogue. You had “Batman Vs. Superman” and “The Dark Knight Rises”, where Batman goes rogue. You have “Blade Runner 2049”, where a Blade Runner goes rogue. You have “Jason Bourne” where Jason Bourne went rogue. You have “Spectre” where James Bond went rogue. And you have “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”, where the Rebel Alliance goes rogue to steal the plans to the fucking Death Star. Now Trump has gone rogue!

Washington (CNN)Even by the hyperactive standards of Donald Trump, it was a wild weekend.

While most of the country settled in for a Columbus Day holiday break, Trump orchestrated a cacophony of threats, offered dark warnings of military action and waged bitter political feuds on multiple fronts.

No one, not his estranged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, his chief of staff John Kelly, European leaders, North Korean dictators, Democrats or despairing GOP senators can temper his shock and awe leadership style.

In a torrent of angry tweets, a TV interview with former GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and a back-and-forth with reporters, Trump poked and jabbed, in another mind-scrambling chapter of a reality-show presidency that is threatening to exhaust the nation.

But there was a method in what his critics see as madness: The President is making clear that he and only he is writing his script.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/09/politics/donald-trump-politics-corker-north-korea-iran/index.html

I would suspect that’s what Trump looks like when he’s off camera. “I’m going rogue, OK? Nobody goes rogue better than I do!”. So what does this have to do with North Korea, you might ask? Well…

President Trump took to Twitter early Monday with another warning for Pyongyang strongman Kim Jong Un, slamming more than two decades of U.S. policy toward North Korea that “didn’t work.”

“Our country has been unsuccessfully dealing with North Korea for 25 years, giving billions of dollars & getting nothing. Policy didn’t work!” Trump tweeted Monday morning.

Over the last week, the president has made a series of vague and somewhat cryptic comments with regard to North Korea and other global threats.

“Presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years, agreements made and massive amounts of money paid,” Trump tweeted Saturday. “…hasn’t worked, agreements violated before the ink was dry, making fools of U.S. negotiators. Sorry, but only one thing will work!”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/10/09/trump-warns-kim-jong-un-says-us-policy-toward-north-korea-didnt-work.html

I really don’t want to know what that one thing is! I mean is that one thing dropping a nuclear weapon on Pyongyang? Let’s get real here Trump. But if you think it’s not over – it’s about to get worse. We have to stop this mad man! 2018 may be too late!

One could fairly say President Donald Trump is someone tempting war based on his recent rhetoric toward North Korea.

The president's most recent verbal broadside against the Asian dictatorship occurred on Monday morning.

Before that, Trump had alarmed foreign policy observers over the weekend with a series of tweets that, by denouncing a quarter-century worth of negotiations with the claim that "only one thing will work," seemed to imply the prospect of war.
https://www.salon.com/2017/10/09/how-close-is-donald-trump-to-waging-war-on-north-korea/

We might all actually die. But have no fear, Trump Man will save us from nukes!!!

General James 'Mad dog' Mattis warned it is impossible to tell what the future holds for the crisis, but urged US troops to be prepared for a confrontation with Kim Jong-un.

He said while Trump is committed to finding a diplomatic solution, the US Army must "standy ready" to fight.

General Mattis said: "It is right now a diplomatically led, economic-sanction buttressed effort to try to turn North Korea off this path.

"Now what does the future hold? Neither you nor I can say, so there is one thing the US Army can do.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/864204/World-War-3-North-Korea-news-latest-Donald-Trump-general-army-ready-war

Yeah calm down man. We might all not die just yet. At least Russia and China will save us! But when they’re on the side of reason, who isn’t? I know!

Russia and China have called for restraint on North Korea after US President Donald Trump warned over the weekend that "only one thing will work" in dealing with Pyongyang, hinting that military action was on his mind.

The comments followed an extraordinary interview by Republican senator Bob Corker, who told the New York Times that Trump risks setting the nation "on the path to World War Three".

Corker, who was once considered a vice presidential candidate for Trump, told the newspaper he was alarmed about a president who acts "like he's doing The Apprentice or something" - in a reference to the reality television show that Trump had once hosted.

When asked what Russia made of Trump's comments, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/russia-china-call-for-restraint-after-trump-comment-on-north-korea-20171009-gyxide.html

[font size="8"]Who’s The Snowflake?
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Spin the wheel! Wheel goes round, wheel goes round, wheel goes round. Where does it stop? It stops on… Clip without context!

Because that’s what they want you to think, Dave! You know the truth is out there!

Spin it again! And we’re going to play “Who’s The Snowflake???”!

So normally we have two or 3 entries for this game. But this time we just have one, and that is Nazis. Who might be some of the biggest snowflakes of them all. Now if you play video games, you might have heard that one of gaming’s biggest publishers – Bethesda Interactive – is gearing up to release one of their biggest games in this decade. I’m talking about “Wolfenstein: The New Colossus” which is out on October 27th. Well, the trailer has riled up a certain group of individuals, and see if you can guess:

All told, Bethesda is quite proud of how it's presenting the new Wolfenstein game, and frankly, politics aside, the game's marketing seems perfectly appropriate since Wolfenstein is essentially a game about killing Nazis.

Despite the blowback, Pete Hines, Bethesda's VP for PR and marketing, did not back down from the game's anti-Nazi stance.

The video itself is just a few seconds long, depicting orderly lines of Nazi soldiers (the game's main foe) with the text "Not my America" superimposed on top of it. You could say, fighting Nazis is a staple for the franchise.

"Wolfenstein has been a decidedly anti-Nazi series since the first release more than 20 years ago".

Here's what happened. Bethesda, for those who don't know, has started marketing its new game, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, by directly taking on the apparent rise of neo-Nazism and alt-right in the United States. Drawing clear parallels to current U.S. politics, including Donald Trump's presidential slogan "Make America Great Again", Hines spoke up about the criticisms Bethesda had received in the wake of the trailer's release.
http://expressnewsline.com/2017/10/07/bethesda-calls-reaction-to-wolfenstein-2s-nazi-killing.html

So let’s ask this…. *cue reverb* WHO’S… damn it!! You screwed up the reverb again! Let’s try it again. Take two! WHO’S THE SNOWFLAKE????? Oh that was good! Well, the snowflake in this case is the Nazis, because Bethesda isn’t backing down.

For so many reasons, Wolfenstein II looks to be a fantastic new addition to the classic game series, and as such, publisher Bethesda has pushed its advertising and promotional effort hard. As the company is quickly finding out, however, even if you think an advertising campaign provides a bulletproof message, you're may still to have to deal with backlash, especially if it also pushes the envelope a bit.

In this particular case, Bethesda published a trailer that held back no punches, stating: "Make America Nazi-Free Again." Blunt? Incredibly. Unfortunately, white supremacist and Nazi-related subjects have been prominent in the US news recently, while some people have related President Trump to that current landscape as well. As a result of this, and because the campaign slogan riffs off Donald Trump's original campaign slogan of "Make America Great Again" for his presidential bid, some folks have taken Bethesda's stance with this advertising campaign to be very anti-Trump.
https://hothardware.com/news/bethesda-defends-its-trump-inspired-wolfenstein-ii-nazi-killing-slogan-make-america-nazi-free-again

Can we throw that tweet up there?

https://twitter.com/wolfenstein/status/916075551382585344

Yes – Make America Nazi Free Again! Assuming Steve Bannon doesn’t get to it first! But the feud between Bethesda and neo Nazi Trump trolls isn’t over. Oh no it’s just beginning! Pass the popcorn!

Wolfenstein franchise has always been about killing Nazis and the upcoming Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus will be no different, however, Bethesda’s marketing campaign for the game is being deemed controversial by some and now the studio has come ahead to defend it.

Speaking with Game Industry, Bethesda’s VP of PR and marketing Pete Hines addressed the controversy behind Wolfenstein 2: The Colossus’ anti-Nazi marketing campaign and added that Bethesda doesn’t make games to make political statements.

At the time none of us expected that the game would be seen as a comment on current issues, but here we are. Bethesda doesn’t develop games to make specific statements or incite political discussions. We make games that we think are fun, meaningful, and immersive for a mature audience.

In Wolfenstein’s case, it’s pure coincidence that Nazis are marching in the streets of America this year. And it’s disturbing that the game can be considered a controversial political statement at all.

The controversy more or less started with the game’s recent trailer containing a “make America Nazi-free again” message to which many have made connections with the current political environment while Bethesda’s intentions are only to market the game to a wider audience.
https://segmentnext.com/2017/10/09/wolfenstein-2-new-colossus-defend-market/

But in case you’re wondering who BJ Blazkowicz might be up against, I give you some actual Nazis in our old buddy Milo Yiannopolous. Who got kicked out of a bar after doing this! So… reverb! WHO’S THE SNOWFLAKE???? Ooh that was good!

One night last spring, infamous right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and Dallas' homegrown white nationalist, Richard Spencer, walked into a karaoke bar on Abrams Road in Lake Highlands. They left less than a half-hour later after being kicked out by One Nostalgia Tavern's bartenders. Before they did, someone filmed a video of Yiannopoulos singing "America the Beautiful" as Spencer and his fellow travelers gave a Nazi salute from the crowd.

Last night, the Observer talked to one of the bartenders on duty the night the video was filmed about that night and how it feels to be part of what's now the centerpiece of a Buzzfeed feature exploring the connections between Yiannopoulos' former employer Breitbart and the mishmash of white-nationalist, racist and neo-Nazis sometimes referred to as the alt-right.

"It was around 1 a.m. when [Yiannopoulos, Spencer and friends] came into the bar. It was very odd because they all had the same haircut," Amiti Perry says. "I had no idea who Richard Spencer was. I had no idea that was Milo. In fact, I had no idea that was Milo until today."
http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/interview-with-bartender-who-kicked-milo-yiannopoulos-out-of-karaoke-9948271

[font size="8"]Harvey Weinstein
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Spin that shit! Come on no whammy no whammy no whammy… stop! And it lands on… what? Go directly to jail? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Shit. I guess I have to give this next entry from a jail cell. Spin it again. Lawsuits. So we got to talk about Harvey Weinstein for this entry. Wait, what? Harvey Weinstein is a registered democrat! No!!! This week he became a member of a very exclusive club – the Pussy Grabber’s Club. Which includes such highly regarded members as Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly, pretty much 95% of the male employees at Fox News (+-5% margin of error), Ted Nugent, and our President Donald J. Trump.

So what’s the difference between Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein? Well the biggest difference is that Harvey Weinstein is an uber-wealthy democratic donor and Donald Trump has the “Magic R” next to his name.

Meryl Streep led an increasingly vocal Hollywood chorus condemning the reported sexual misconduct of the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein on Monday, issuing a carefully worded statement released to HuffPost. She decried the behavior as “disgraceful” and “inexcusable,” yet also pleaded ignorance about it, writing, “Not everybody knew.”

Ms. Streep’s statement seemed to have opened the floodgates, with Glenn Close, Kate Winslet and Judi Dench, among others, soon voicing their own dismay and disgust about Mr. Weinstein.

In recent days, after The New York Times released a scathing investigation on Thursday chronicling accusations that Mr. Weinstein had sexually harassed employees and actresses, many people called for reactions from Hollywood’s A-list players, and especially Ms. Streep, a longtime champion of women’s causes who worked with Mr. Weinstein on films like “August: Osage County” and “The Iron Lady,” for which she won an Academy Award.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/movies/dench-close-streep-weinstein.html

Yeah that’s what the mentality was that Weinstein grew up with. But that’s not excusing his behavior now. There’s no excuse for it. And there’s no excuse for Trump’s behavior either.

In the space of four days, Harvey Weinstein went from being one of the most powerful men in Hollywood to taking a leave of absence and then to losing his job, following allegations of sexual harassment or unwanted physical contact from several women over nearly three decades.

"In light of new information about misconduct by Harvey Weinstein that has emerged in the past few days, the directors of The Weinstein Company ... have determined, and have informed Harvey Weinstein, that his employment with The Weinstein Company is terminated, effective immediately," said a statement from the company's board of directors to ABC News on Sunday.
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/harvey-weinstein-days-ended-career-movie-mogul/story?id=50367785

Trump approves but we don’t. So in case you’re keeping score at home – Trump wins because he has the Magic R next to his name and Weinstein doesn’t. Plus white republican men get a “get out of jail free” card if they pray for their forgiveness and salvation!

Academy Award winner George Clooney, who was given his first major big-screen role by Harvey Weinstein, has become the latest—and most high-profile—member of Hollywood to speak out on the alleged sexual-misconduct allegations against his sometime employer.

“It’s indefensible. That’s the only word you can start with,” he says. “Harvey’s admitted to it, and it’s indefensible. I’ve known Harvey for 20 years. He gave me my first big break as an actor in films on From Dusk Till Dawn, he gave me my first big break as a director with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. We’ve had dinners, we’ve been on location together, we’ve had arguments. But I can tell you that I’ve never seen any of this behavior—ever.”

Clooney spoke to me at length about the allegations—as well as charges of Hollywood complicity—during a phone conversation late Monday.

His remarks come in the wake of statements released by Meryl Streep and Dame Judi Dench, two actresses who’ve won Oscars for Weinstein-shepherded films and who took the bullying movie mogul to task for allegedly preying on vulnerable young women for 30 years, resulting in at least eight settlements, according to a bombshell New York Times exposé.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/george-clooney-speaks-out-on-harvey-weinstein-its-disturbing-on-a-whole-lot-of-levels

But he wasn’t the only one who joined the Pussy Grabber’s Club this week. There’s also Andy Signore, who is the creator of the Youtube channel called Screen Junkies that gave us Honest Trailers and other shows. Here’s what happened:

Andy Signore, creator of Screen Junkies and the “Honest Trailers” series, has been fired effective immediately, Defy Media announced Sunday evening. Signore has been accused by several women of sexual harassment, and at least one said he tried to sexually assault her.

Signore’s termination was announced a few hours after the Weinstein Company board ousted Harvey Weinstein for sexual misconduct that reportedly spanned decades. On Friday, one of Signore’s accusers said she came forward with her account of his sexual harassment because several women had publicly detailed Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment.

Defy Media, the company that owns Screen Junkies, said the “scope and magnitude of [Signore’s] inappropriate actions became apparent” with new information that came to light on Friday. Signore could not be reached for comment.
http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/honest-trailers-creator-andy-signore-fired-for-egregious-and-intolerable-sexual-behavior-1202583996/

[font size="8"]Holy Shit
[br] [/font] [br] B

Spin it to win it! Wheel goes round, wheel goes round, where does it stop? And it lands on… wait for it… clip without context!

Probably? Yeah probably like I’ll win the lottery! Keep telling yourself that, Mr. Snyder! Spin it again! And it lands on… Holy Shit! Yes friends! Gather around, friends! Pass the collection plate, friends!!! Yay, during this most troubling of times we once again turn to the holiest among us. But unfortunately we realize that the holiest among us are full of…

Yay, welcome my sons and daughters to this week’s mass. Last week we discussed how the religious right – the godliest among us – the holier than thou arm of the GOP – said that if you get shot when you are out in public that it’s your own fucking fault, because that’s exactly what GAWD would want! Yay, this week the Christian right successfully blurred thy line between the separation of church and state:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions consulted Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group that champions conservative Christian causes, ahead of issuing controversial guidance to government agencies and departments on Friday about how to interpret federal religious liberty protections.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a group whose stated mission is to “keep the doors open for the Gospel by advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family,” hailed Sessions’ announcement, while a number of leading LGBT advocacy groups condemned the move for effectively offering a religious exemption for sexual orientation discrimination.

In a call with reporters, ADF CEO Michael Farris confirmed to ABC News that Sessions met with the group during a series of so-called “listening sessions” convened by the Attorney General, who says he was “seeking suggestions regarding the areas of federal protection for religious liberty most in need of clarification or guidance.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jeff-sessions-consulted-christian-legal-group-religious-freedom/story?id=50336322

Next up, you know that case about the Christian right’s right to discriminate against LGBT couples wishing to revel in thine realm of marriage? Well, turns out they may be full of well, holy shit, as it’s a “license to discriminate!”

The Trump administration’s Friday issuance of “religious freedom” guidance and rollback of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage mandate appalled progressives and many other Americans — but members of the religious right are over the moon.

The “religious freedom” guidance, issued by the Department of Justice, assures federal grantees and contractors, and employees of federal agencies, that they don’t have to serve clients who pose a conflict with their religious beliefs — for instance, by being LGBT, a single parent, or a believer in a different religion. It also allows faith-based organizations to discriminate in employment without losing federal contracts or grants, and shapes the stance the federal government will take in court cases regarding discrimination.

The new Health and Human Services rules allow virtually any nonprofit or for-profit employer to seek an exemption from the ACA contraceptive mandate, which required employers to provide contraceptive coverage in group insurance plans at no cost to the employee. Some faiths oppose all forms of “artificial” contraception, while others believe certain contraceptives, such as the birth control pill, result in early abortions, and refer to the pill as an “abortion pill.” The Obama administration allowed employers with an actual religious affiliation to have their insurers fund the coverage instead of the employer, but that accommodation was not satisfactory to some.
https://www.advocate.com/politics/2017/10/08/religious-right-overjoyed-license-discriminate

Yay, so “religious freedom” really means the freedom to be a colossal dick to LGBT people, and that’s what the religious right are – a bunch of colossal dicks. As evidenced by Trump’s appointment of one of the worst governors in the country:

President Trump's latest appointee is as dreadful as his earlier ones.

Trump has nominated Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback as an ambassador-at-large for religious freedom. Trump has chosen several other religious zealots for contradictory and preposterous posts, like asking foxes to guard the henhouse, as FFRF has observed on other occasions. Brownback's views are similarly antithetical to the office for which he will be nominated.

Brownback has a distorted view of religious freedom — more akin to religious privilege. He has used his power as governor to weaponize religious freedom, changing it from a hallowed protection of the rights of individual conscience into a tool to impose religious beliefs.
https://ffrf.org/news/news-releases/item/30034-kansas-governor-bad-pick-for-religious-freedom-ambassador

I liketh that one, mine brothers and sisters! But when it comes to “religious freedom”, which has nothing to do with religion or freedom – and is in fact the exacteth opposite, the GOP is going all out.

As the Trump administration announced it would roll back the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandates on Friday, the Department of Justice released two memos of its own. The first, titled “Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty,” is a 25-page, 20-point document outlining guidance for how various federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services, should operate to preserve religious liberty as much as possible — even when it conflicts with anti-discrimination laws or other policies. The second, “Implementation of Memorandum on Federal Law Protections for Religious Liberty,” requires the DOJ to adhere to the first.

The guidelines include ensuring the “government may not target religious individuals or entities through discriminatory enforcement of neutral, generally applicable laws.” Those entities include for-profit corporations as well as nonprofits such as churches or synagogues. So for example, according to this guideline, the IRS is required to avoid enforcing the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches and other 501(c)(3) nonprofits from endorsing particular candidates, in circumstances where the amendment would not be enforced against secular nonprofits.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/10/9/16447210/doj-religious-liberty-memo-religious-freedom

Another good one! But this “war on religious freedom” may be as faketh as how the religious right worships thine own self, and not the almighty JAY-SUS!!!

When we cut through the rhetoric surrounding our nation’s heated controversies about the First Amendment we often find that controversy was entirely avoidable. Exhibit A is the infamous HHS mandate issued under the Obama administration that spawned two Supreme Court cases in its short five year existence. The mandate required employers to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives to their employees even if the employers had a religious objection to paying for such devices.

On Friday, the Trump Administration issued new guidelines that are broadly protective of employer’s religious freedom. The news was received with the hysterics, but the real impact is not so extravagant as some would have you believe. In fact, if we ignore the partisan hyperbole and focus on the facts, it becomes undeniable that we can protect both women’s rights and religious freedom.

On a practical level, it’s simply not the case that millions of women will lose access to contraceptives. Professor Helen Alvaré of George Mason University School of law filed an amicus brief that really dug into the numbers at issue in both cases concerning the mandate. According to studies from the Institute of Medicine, 89% of women trying to avoid pregnancy already use contraceptives. The mandate was supposedly targeted at closing the gap for the remaining 11%. But the data indicates that many of those 11% have made a conscious choice to go without contraceptives. According to the CDC, cost is not among the frequently cited reasons women give when they abstain from using contraception. Additionally, because the mandate only affects women who are employed with healthcare benefits, it offered little help at all to poorer women who might actually need help closing gaps in their coverage. This was all confirmed when the Guttmacher Institute released another study showing that three years of the Affordable Care Act had failed to change women’s birth control practices at all.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankmiller/2017/10/07/the-phony-war-over-religious-freedom/#4447165675e2

Yay, that is a loteth to taketh thine in because the religious right beith that batshit crazy. Mass has ended for this week, may you go in peace! That is it this week for Holy Shit!

[font size="8"]People Are Dumb
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Spin it to win it! Come on no whammy no whammy… stop! And it’s another clip without context!

I believe “Jesus wept” was the next verse. Spin it again! And it lands on… People Are Dumb! Hit it!

People are dumb, and they are stupid, because they are dumb. When you’re dumb, you can’t remember anyone’s name… . So by now you know people are people and people are dumb. So this week we’re going to start with the NFL. And specifically my home team – the Los Angeles Chargers who have been at the center of controversy because of their relationship with San Diego. Well, this was an epic fail on Dean Spanos’ part:

Dean Spanos is having a bad few weeks. Awful crowds at the Los Angeles Chargers games at StubHub Center and an 0-3 record have been made worse by a billboard and banners flying over the stadium disparaging him. Well, now the Federal Aviation Administration has reportedly piled onto Spanos’ misery.

FOX 5 in San Diego is reporting Spanos tried to stop the banners being flown above StubHub Center on game days by requesting a temporary flight restriction (TFR). The FAA rejected the request and the reason is delicious. You see, TFRs are only granted for stadiums and arenas that hold 30,000 or more. Spanos’ soccer stadium home only holds 27,000, so the FAA shut down his request.
http://thebiglead.com/2017/09/29/faa-denies-spanos-request-to-block-disparaging-plane-banners/

When you don’t sell out games, you don’t qualify for a no fly zone. Because you’re dumb… you can see banners on planes! And now we go to Pittsburgh for this next story and it’s quite insane. So what do you do when you can’t pay your bar tab? Just call in a bomb threat!

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A Pittsburgh man has been arrested after police say he called in a false bomb threat to try and get out of paying his restaurant bill.

WPXI-TV reports (http://bit.ly/2ycHWuU ) 40-year-old Barry Clapperton faces charges that include threats to use weapons of mass destruction, public drunkenness and false identification to police.

A witness says Clapperton tried to leave multiple times without paying for his meal at Primanti Brothers. Police were called to the scene, and another person paid for Clapperton's bill.

Police say they were about to let the man leave when bomb threat was called in to a nearby restaurant. Authorities say they used a stun gun to subdue Clapperton after he ran from the restaurant.
http://www.mcall.com/news/breaking/mc-nws-man-calls-in-bomb-threat-to-avoid-bar-tab-20171010-story.html

When you get drunk don’t call in a bomb threat, or you are dumb. When you’re dumb, you cant remember the restaurant name… when you’re dumb… Next we go to Baltimore, Maryland where a school was evacuated because of a “strange odor”. Any guesses to what that strange odor was? Anyone?

Students at a Baltimore high school had gotten a whiff of something weird. ... During class Thursday afternoon, students at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School started to smell a “strange odor.”

Some of them began to cough and have trouble breathing, so students and staff members were evacuated from the building, and the fire department was called to investigate the cause. ... “Emergency medical technicians evaluated several staff members and students, some of whom were treated on the scene,” the school said in a statement. “Five members of our community were transported to area hospitals as a precautionary measure.”

Cristo Rey Jesuit High President Bill Heiser said, at first, some thought the smell was from a burned out lightbulb. ... “It was a smell that they certainly weren’t used to,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “It appeared to be getting stronger.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2017/10/06/a-school-was-evacuated-over-a-strange-odor-it-was-pumpkin-spice-air-freshener/

When you can smell it, you get evacuated but it was nothing, because you are dumb. When you’re dumb, pumpkin spice smells strange! Next, we go to the Great White North, Canada for this one and really when you escape from one prison, don’t go to another one!

They scaled the tall barbed wire fence and escaped without trace into the industrial park surrounding the prison in Edmonton, Canada. But within 24 hours, the two fugitives – perhaps keen to again try their luck – were found by police in a nearby “escape room” interactive game.

The two women, Kelsie Laine Marie Mast, 23, and Samantha Faye Toope, 20, were discovered missing from the women’s correctional facility on Monday night during an inmate count. Police soon issued a public warning, describing them as violent offenders with a history of weapons offences.

The following day, as police across the city searched for the women, the pair wandered into the escape room, where customers are locked in a room and must solve a variety of puzzles and challenges to get out.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/05/canada-prison-escapees-caught-escape-room

When you escape from prison, don’t go to another one, or you are dumb. When you’re dumb… you get trapped in a game! When you’re dumb, you cant remember which direction you came! For this next story – time travel! Yes, time travel is apparently a thing! And I mean come on, if you claim you have time travel, can you go back and fix the election please?

CASPER, Wyo. (AP) — Police say a central Wyoming man they arrested for public intoxication claimed he had traveled back in time to warn of an alien invasion.

Casper police say the man they encountered at 10:30 p.m. Monday claimed he was from the year 2048.

KTWO-AM in Casper reports that the man told police that he wanted to warn the people of Casper that aliens will arrive next year, and that they should leave as soon as possible. He asked to speak to the president of the town, about 170 miles (270 kilometers) northwest of Cheyenne.

The man told police he was only able to time travel because aliens filled his body with alcohol. He noted that he was supposed to be transported to the year 2018, not this year.

https://apnews.com/8974e25a82c749619066fc777496350f?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP_Oddities

When you time travel, you get lost in the rain! When you time travel , no one remembers your name! When you time travel, can you stop the election please? Finally this week for “People Are Dumb”, we got to have our old buddy Florida Man and he did not disappoint this week:

A Dunkin’ Donuts patron tried to pay for a cup of coffee with prescription muscle relaxants, according to Florida police who arrested the man on a drug charge.

Richard Bourque, 30, allegedly tried the coffee-for-pills gambit late Monday evening at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Pinellas Park. An employee told police that when she rejected Bourque’s barter offer of “unknown pills,” he walked out with the coffee.

Cops subsequently located Bourque at a nearby McDonald’s. After he reportedly agreed to be searched, a patrolman located eight pills that were later identified as methocarbamol, a drug prescribed for muscle pain and stiffness.
http://thesmokinggun.com/buster/drugs/no-pills-for-dunkin-coffee-740923

When you’re dumb, anything is money! When you’re dumb… you really need some coffee! When you’re dumb… when you’re dumb! That’s it this week for:

[font size="8"]World Tour Destination #17: Japan
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Let’s spin the wheel one final time this week! And it lands on….. T-Shirt cannon! Everyone gets the new Top 10 World Tour t-shirt! Now if I only had the budget to make and sell t-shirts! Spin it again! And it’s time for the World Tour!

Part of our mission statement here at the Top 10 Conservative Idiots is to show you that conservative idiocy isn’t just a problem with America. No, it’s a global problem that is stemming far and wide, and it’s not just America where conservative idiots ruin everything they touch. And if you’re thinking of moving out of the United States just because Donald J. Trump is our current president and our nation is turning to shit, you should know what it is you’re getting into should you decide that you want to leave the country. So if you want a recap of where we’ve been so far, in the last few weeks we’ve discovered that Argentina is the center of a murder mystery, New York has a gambling problem, and my home state of California has a Russia problem. This week we are off to Asia!

No not that Asia. I’m talking about the real Asia. ! Here’s the tour schedule:

[font size="6"]Japan[/font]

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Welcome to Asia everybody! And man it’s good to be back on the road! We are in the capital of Japan, Tokyo! We also visited Osaka and Kyoto while we are in Japan. Japan is the home of some of the largest cities in the world – Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Kyoto. Japan is home of one of the world’s original natural wonders – Mt. Fuji! It’s also home to Japanese baseball, where such revered players as the LA Dodgers’ Yu Darvish came from. Japan is also the home to a very unique style of rock music called Visual Kei. It’s a style that our guests tonight – X Japan – got their unique clothing and visual style that promoted them to being one of Japan’s biggest bands of all time, and eventually earned them world wide popularity – even 20 years after the death of their founding guitarist Hide – who has his own museum in Tokyo. Japan is also the home of some of the best seafood in the world. It’s also the home of the most insane game shows in the entire world. I’d much rather play the feud over this!

Yeah that’s fucking crazy – and that’s some of the tamer Japanese game shows we can show you, there’s some much more extreme ones out there! So what else is Japan the home of? Well, it might not be the home of much of anything if Kim Jong Un gets his way!

Pyongyang’s state-controlled news agency KCNA issued a statement yesterday directly threatening Japan, stating the country’s preparations for a possible war could be “destroyed to pieces”.

The statement read: “Should Japan take the advantages of the US war racket, they can not but be a target of the powerful strike means of the DPRK’s revolutionary armed forces.

“Japan can never be safe if a war breaks out on the Korean peninsula. Everything in Japan mobilised for the war can be destroyed to pieces, to say nothing of the US aggression bases there.

“The Japanese authorities are strongly warned that if they go reckless with the backing of the US they can bring irrevocable misfortune to the Japanese archipelago.”
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/864313/World-War-3-North-Korea-crisis-Japan-Kim-Jong-un-Donald-Trump-Abe

It is so easy to make fun of that guy which might explain why he’s out for world domination. So how is Japan retaliating to this threat?

The hermit kingdom has ramped up fears of World War 3 breaking out in recent weeks by launching two missiles over its neighbour and conducting a sixth nuclear test.

Now Japan has launched a fourth high-precision GPS satellite that could be used to pinpoint potential launch sites set up by the despotic regime and help take out key infrastructure with cruise missiles.

The Michibiki satellite lifted off from Japan’s southern Tanegashima space port aboard an H-2A rocket today, taking just over 28 minutes to reach orbit.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/864605/World-War-3-Japan-North-Korea-GPS-satellites-Donald-Trump

I like that one! Yes – Japan is resorting to a page out of Reagan’s playbook – the Star Wars program, which has nothing to do with the trailer for “The Last Jedi”. Let’s talk about some other news in Japan that does not involve nuclear Armageddon! You know how elections work in Japan? See, we have to pick from 2 candidates. They have to pick from… 1100. Say what????

TOKYO -- Japan's election campaign for the lower house of parliament officially got underway Tuesday, with more than 1,100 candidates, filing applications to contest 465 seats. The election has become a showdown between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, who launched a new national party to battle Abe's ruling coalition.

The vote is scheduled for Oct. 22.

The first snap election since December 2014 comes amid continued tensions with North Korea over its nuclear and missile programs. Among key domestic issues are a possible hike in the consumption tax, nuclear power and contentious constitutional revisions proposed by Abe's government.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan-s-election/Japan-election-starts-with-1-100-candidates-vying-for-seats

It’s no wonder many people don’t vote. I mean could you pick 1 out of 1100 candidates to follow? I know I couldn’t! but then again Japan’s prime minister is bragging about a bromance with Trump.

Shinzo Abe has been described as Donald Trump’s “phone buddy” (paywall) and “loyal sidekick” (paywall).

Few world leaders can claim to have such a close relationship with the US president, so the Japanese prime minister is now banking on their relationship to convince voters that he’s the one to lead them in an increasingly dangerous world.

Abe wants Japanese voters to put one thing front and center when they go to the ballot box on Oct. 22—North Korea. Though his decision to call a snap election is an unpopular one, Abe has warned that the country is in a “national crisis,” and that because regional geopolitical tensions will only become more intense, it wasn’t possible to wait and call an election next year.
https://qz.com/1097652/japans-abe-is-telling-voters-his-bromance-with-trump-can-help-protect-them-from-north-korea/

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha… wait… ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!! Trump will save you? He can barely save himself! Let’s talk about something much lighter in Japan. Is there anything? I don’t even want to get into the Fukushima nuclear meltdown… but if I have to I have to!

TOKYO — A district court in Fukushima, the site of the nuclear meltdowns in 2011 that forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes, ruled on Tuesday that the Japanese government and the electric utility that operated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant must pay damages totaling roughly $4.4 million to about 2,900 people.

The ruling was the largest of about 30 similar lawsuits filed by about 12,000 former and current Fukushima residents, and it was awarded even though the majority of the plaintiffs did not flee the area in the aftermath of the disaster. It was the third case in which a court found the Tokyo Electric Power Company — and the second to find the government — negligent in not preventing the meltdowns set off by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

In the latest case, according to Japanese news reports, the court ruled that the government should have been able to anticipate a large tsunami in the region and should have forced Tokyo Electric — known as Tepco — to take preventive measures to protect its plant from catastrophic damage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/world/asia/japan-fukushima-lawsuit.html

Yeah Mr. Burns must be in charge of this one! But is there really anything fun we can talk about Japan? I did find something! There is one thing Japan does better than anything in the world - school lunches!

When Americans think of the lunch menu at their childhood school cafeterias, they probably imagine a shapeless, tasteless pile of mystery meat—plus some brown mush, to match. But for children in Japan, school lunches are a rich experience where culture, nutrition, and sustainability collide.

'Japan’s standpoint is that school lunches are a part of education, not a break from it,' Masahiro Oji, a government director of school health education in Japan, told the Washington Post.

Fare offered at schools in Japan is affordable, fresh, and made by the students themselves. And Japanese children don’t just eat the food they prepare; they learn about the nutritional and cultural elements of their meals, too. The food is grown locally and includes a balanced menu of rice, vegetables, fish, and soups. As a bonus, each meal costs just $2.50.

'Parents hear their kids talking about what they had for lunch,' Tatsuji Shino, the principal at Umejima Elementary School in Tokyo, told the Washington Post, 'and kids ask them to re-create the meals at home.'
http://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/restaurantsandnews/why-japanese-school-lunches-are-the-best-in-the-world/ar-AAth5qQ?li=BBnb7Kw

OK I did find one good thing about living in Japan! Their politics are insane. But every day life appears to be not. I mean even their baby showers are insane!

TOKUSHIMA – An offbeat baby shower gift evoking one of Japan’s most famous culinary exports is a sales hit.

Orders for “diaper sushi,” which combine white nappies as “rice” and pink bibs as “shrimp” topping, are nonstop for seller Wire Mama, publisher of a child-care information magazine in the city of Tokushima.

Noriyuki Monda, the Wire Mama employee who developed the product, said he first had the idea for diaper sushi 10 years ago after hearing about “diaper cakes” being given as gifts for new mothers overseas. “Naturally, Japanese should make sushi” with diapers, he thought.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/10/10/national/diaper-sushi-baby-shower-hit-japan/

Yeah. Really. That’s a thing that exists. Excuse me a minute…

[font size="6"]The Verdict & Scorecard[/font]

Japan is a great place to visit – there’s so much to see and do in just Tokyo alone, but then you factor in Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, I could go on and on. Be sure to visit before World War III happens! And if you’re thinking of living here, I might wait until the dust settles from the election. They definitely fail if Trump is their BFF. They get low remarks for that.

Tourism: A
Culture: A
Political Spectrum: F
Liberal Appeal: D

Overall: C-

[font size="6"]Next Week[/font]

We’re doing it Gangnam Style as we visit the De-Militarized Zone and North Korea’s much friendlier neighbors – South Korea!

[font size="8"]And Now This:[/font]
[font size="8"]X Japan[/font]

Folks my next guest is touring behind their new documentary movie called “We Are X” which is available everywhere on demand. Playing their all time classic song “Rusty Nail”, give it up for X Japan!

Yeah how about that?

See you next week!

October 9, 2017

Pinpointing The Exact Moment Marge Simpson Should Have Left Homer

True Simpsons fans know the following to be true. A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. If something’s hard to do, it’s not worth doing. You don’t win friends with salad. And Marge should have left Homer a long time ago. But when? Here is a comprehensive analysis of the Simpsons’ marriage timeline, and the definitive moment Marge should have left Homer for good.

Season 1, Episode 4: “There’s No Disgrace Like Home”

Things get dark very, very fast. Homer is embarrassed by his family’s lack of social etiquette, so decides to take them against their will to therapy where he repeatedly electrocutes his wife and children. Even Maggie gets hooked up to an electric chair. It’s abusive and fuuuucked up – but the whole family seems as bad as each other.

<snip>

Season 9, Episode 5: “The Cartridge Family”

After nine seasons of consistently undermining Marge’s hopes of a more independent life, cycles of extreme arguments and weeping apologies, and the constant physical abuse of her son, Homer gets a gun. RUN FOR YOUR LIFE MARGE. This is, in my mind, truly the moment where Marge should have left Homer for good. The preceeding nine seasons show a flawed but essentially loving relationship. However, Homer’s creeping dependency issues and refusal to allow Marge to live a life outside of their family home gives me the willies. Homer has proved himself to be a violent, unstable, controlling, reckless husband – now, he’s a violent, unstable, controlling, reckless husband WITH A GUN. He uses it totally irresponsibly, and lies about his gun ownership – pretending to get rid of it, but hiding it in different places around the home. At the end of the episode, Marge successfully manages to take the gun from Homer, but keeps it herself – truly the actions of a terrorised and fearful wife. THIS IS IT. THIS IS THE TURNING POINT. I’M SORRY MARGE BUT YOU WERE DOOMED FROM HERE ON OUT.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv-radio/2017/10/marge-should-have-left-homer-simpsons

Pretty good stuff here!

October 4, 2017

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #3-16: The Wrong Remains The Same Edition

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #3-16: The Wrong Remains The Same Edition

Welcome back to the Top 10 Conservative Idiots. Man this has been a shitty week. RIP Tom Petty too – I mean man damn. Let’s liven things up with some comedy shall we? You know let’s talk about Halloween – you know that time of year when the hot secretary gets together with the dorky guy from IT dressed like the dragon from Game Of Thrones, only she doesn’t know he’s the dorky guy from IT, just that she’s into dragons. First off – the movie IT. Yeah we love creepy clowns here. But do we really need girls painting their nails in the style of Pennywise The Clown? Yeah that’s a thing that is happening right now, and if you have a family member who is doing this, you might encourage them to seek counseling ASAP, and I do mean ASAP. The other thing is costumes. This is that time of year when girls get to dress as the sexy whatever, and there’s a company called Yandy that is responsible for a good majority of these. I mean do we really need the sexy pregnant reality star? Thank you sound effects guy for that really graphic vomiting sound. I’m not sure we needed that. But my point about sexy costumes – is the ultimate in WTF. I’m of course talking about the Sexy Fake News costume. And it’s not really that sexy either. Thank you 2017! You have officially been proven to be the weirdest year ever! Bravo well done! OK enough of the intro. We need to lighten things up a bit because there is a lot of shit out there. But first Bill Maher is back and he goes full CSI to link Trump to Russia:

The number one slot this week is going to go to Alex Jones, who in the wake of the terrible Las Vegas attack, has some choice theories on why it happened. In the second slot is Bill O’Reilly who also isn’t helping make things better – the GOP loves to rub salt in the wound. You know – as motivation. At number 3 slot is Donald Trump (3) and his reaction to the shooting was well, about what you would expect from Fearless Leader at this point. At number 4 is also Donald Trump – and switching subjects, we’re going to talk about what he did on Saturday before the massacre. Remember when the worst thing we had to worry about was a devastating hurricane? Yeah well Trump made a complete ass of himself at the President’s Cup. At number 5 we’re going to bring back our favorite segment denouncing the religious right – “Holy Shit”. Because in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on US soil, they crazy, and they are bringing the crazy extra hard. At number 6 is the Alt Right – and there’ s a lot of crazy also surrounding the alt right. Mainly our old friend Vox Day has a line of comic books he wants to sell you. At number 7 we’ve got another installment of “How Is This Still A Thing?”. This week – Fake News (7) – how is this still a thing? At number 8 we're going to debut a new segment called "Beating A Dead Horse" because the right loves to beat dead horses until you can't kill them anymore. This week's dead horse is Trump Vs The NFL (8) because he still won’t let that shit slide. I mean really Donald, let it go. In the number 9 (NEIN!!!) slot this week we’re going to bring back “I Need A Drink”. And man do I need a drink this week – holy shit. And I need a drink that’s just perfect for fight night – Steven Segal vs. George Foreman! I need some popcorn and a nice PBR for this one! Finally this week its’ more of the Top 10 World Tour (10). This time I’m coming home, people! We are going to be covering the conservative idiocy in my home state of California! Plus we’ve got some live music for you from one of the biggest bands in the world – California’s Green Day! They just finished their Revolution Radio tour and they are amazing live, and they are stopping by our crappy show! Enjoy! And as always don’t forget the key!

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[font size="8"]Alex Jones
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! I mean… Jesus. How do you try to do comedy in the wake of the terrible tragedy that happened in Vegas this week? You know I had almost considered not doing a Top 10 this week. But then I’m reminded that the original Top 10 was started in response to how poorly the conservative’s response to the terrible tragedy in San Bernardino – which was almost 2 years ago. Then there was the Bataclan in Paris. And then there was Alex Jones who went full crazy in his attempt to tie liberals and Antifa to this horrible tragedy.

ALEX JONES: About 20 minutes ago, ISIS took responsibility for the attacks, and the police have confirmed that he had -- the reported shooter had recently personally threatened them and posted videos threatening them, saying that he had joined ISIS, joined Al Qaeda, and that he was basically a leftist, just like [alleged NSA leaker] Reality Winner, and just like so many others that had converted to Islam, that was so angry about Trump and everything that was happening that he went out and carried out this attack. Now, again, clearly it looks like he had help, but we saw the October 1st event of the 100 years of the Bolshevik Revolution coming up, and I had been predicting starting October 1st that we'd see terror attacks.
https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017/10/02/alex-jones-promotes-hoax-claiming-police-said-las-vegas-gunman-was-leftist-who-was-angry-about-trump/218104

Yeah BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Yeah so they give Hillary a bunch of shit for attempting to politicize this tragedy, but then turn around and praise Alex Jones for doing the same. WTF… it just.. I can’t even fathom how low you have to stoop. But he goes lower:

Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who once claimed that the 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was staged, is now making similarly preposterous claims about the murder of at least 58 people at a country music concert in Las Vegas Sunday night.

Jones used his radio program on Monday to counter assertions made by Nevada law enforcement authorities that the gunman was Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old white male who apparently acted alone and without any political or ideological motive.

Easily shedding the trappings of reality, Jones concocted a customarily lurid and complex tale involving the Islamic State group (ISIS), former Vice President Albert Gore and former CIA official Philip Mudd, among other imagined malefactors. Jones also alluded to “the literal grandchildren of the folks that financed the Bolshevik Revolution out of New York and London,” an elaborate allusion to Jews that none of his devoted fans could have missed.
http://www.newsweek.com/alex-jones-deep-state-behind-las-vegas-attack-676016

Yeah that sounds about right. But how low will Alex go to defend his precious killing machines? How about they bring up past beefs with David Letterman on the subject?

The Las Vegas massacre certainly made for a busy day for free-form bullshit artist and internet beacon of freedom Alex Jones. First he explained that the shootings were part of some kind of ISIS/antifa/communist insurrection. Then he came back a little later in the day in a video to sell some Trucker Speed, explain how Saturday Night Live is a “psy-op,” and talk with Genuine Former CIA Operative Kevin Shipp, whom the CIA once tried to kill for knowing too much, but that’s not really the point here. Jones talks with Shipp about his career in black ops, then says there’s just so much about the shooter and the shooting that just doesn’t add up:

At about the nine-minute mark, Jones notes that O.J. Simpson was released from prison in Nevada just 20 hours before the shooting, so all the media would be in Nevada, and rants about “this whole climate where the Democrats are saying ‘We’re gonna have a revolution, we’re gonna kill Trump supporters, we’re gonna kill Trump.'”
Read more at https://wonkette.com/623777/alex-jones-and-guest-yell-at-david-letterman-for-thing-david-letterman-didnt-say-about-las-vegas#lrDvVIXrtRFkblKO.99

Really? We’re going to kill Trump and his supporters? When did we ever say that? Oh right WE NEVER SAID THAT, YOU JACKASS!!!! And if you’re reading this anonymously, Alex, fuck you too. But it gets worse!

Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist shock jock heading Infowars, claimed that last night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas was “the first Islamic attack on a conservative group” in a larger plot to destroy America.

Today, Jones spent most of his airtime at Infowars imagining various conspiracies that would prove that when alleged gunman Stephen Paddock fired an automatic weapon into a large crowd at a country music concert in Las Vegas, it was an act of liberal violence. Jones doubted the authenticity of official reports of the mass shooting and attempted to tie it into a vague prediction he made on Friday that liberals would use a major attack, along with racial tensions, to destroy conservatives like him “Bolshevik-style.”

“Why does the left bring in the very groups that are trying to kill you?” Jones asked, referring to Muslims.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-jones-las-vegas-shooting-is-first-step-in-bolshevik-style-conspiracy-to-destroy-america/

Where do they get this shit from? Bolshevik revolution? Destroying conservatives? I mean WTF… are they just making things up? Because nobody talks out of their ass more than Alex Jones does!

David Knight, host of a morning program on Alex Jones’ Infowars channel, suggested on Monday that the massacre in Las Vegas could be a false flag operation designed to strip Second Amendment gun rights from Americans.

During his morning broadcast, Knight reported on the breaking news that over 50 had been killed and over 400 injured by a shooter in Vegas.

“As we look at the 100 year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and as we talk about last week,” Knight said. “Talking about multiple groups saying, ‘It’s coming Nov. 4. We have a new civil war that is coming to overthrow the government.’ Talking about how these Antifa communists are training with weapons, etc. So, there was a lot of stuff that was on the horizon.”

But the host said that he suspected legislation in Congress was the true motive behind the massacre.
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/alex-jones-channel-goes-bonkers-over-vegas-false-flag-a-new-civil-war-is-coming-to-overthrow-government/

Dude, Alex. You attempted to justify KILLING CHILDREN. You are the lowest fucking form of scumbag on the earth. What? You can’t move enough Infowars brand Tactical Body Armor? And now you’re trying to play to the most paranoid among us to drive up gun sales. There’s more to life than fucking guns!!! But it didn’t take him long to justify it:

While a Sandy Hook parent squarely blamed Congress for the Las Vegas mass shooting — in which Stephen Paddock killed at least 58 people (with over 515 more injured) — unrepentant Sandy Hook “truther” Alex Jones wasted no time in hatching a new conspiracy theory. Jones, of course, famously claimed that the 2012 Newtown shooting was a “false flag” attack that was orchestrated by the government (with “actors” filling in for grieving parents), and he stayed consistently insane here. As seen in the above InfoWars clip, Jones claims that he predicted (last week) that the Vegas massacre would take place.

Not only that, but Jones accuses “Deep State” Democrats of orchestrating the Vegas mass shooting to launch a new Civil War in the U.S. He believes the event was planned around the 100th year of Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, which was led by Vladimir Lenin against the existing government. Before Jones comes around to mentioning O.J. Simpson (for real), he says this:

“The literal grandchildren of the folks that financed the Bolshevik Revolution out of New York and London are now bragging saying Bolshevik 2 is launching. I told you over and over again that I believe their November 4th launch terror date was a smokescreen for them to begin launching terror attacks in October. They will get successively more intense until you basically come punch-drunk to them, then they’ll launch their main attack.”
http://www.uproxx.com/news/alex-jones-las-vegas-shooting-conspiracy/

Oh and then. It get worse! So much worse! Alex Jones wants to be Donald Trump’s BFF so badly that he has a direct line! Yes, they JUSTIFIED THE MURDER OF CHILDREN!!!! And they talk to Trump directly:

Infowars radio host and conspiracy theory architect Alex Jones cited his relationship with President Trump to support his claims that the mass shooting in Las Vegas yesterday was the result of a liberal conspiracy and that the accused shooter was a “patsy and he was set up.”

Today, Jones hosted right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who claimed to possess an internal memo from the Mandalay Bay hotel, where the shooter booked a suite overlooking the country music concert he planned to attack, announcing it would match employee donations to anti-extremism organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, Human Rights Campaign, and Southern Poverty Law Center following the violent white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That memo, the duo claimed, somehow validated theories that the shooter was connected to militant Islamist and Antifa groups.

Loomer told Jones that she thought the accused shooter, Stephen Paddock, was a “hardcore leftist with Antifa connections who became radicalized through ISIS” and that she believed ISIS’ claim that it was responsible for the mass shooting, despite the FBI’s statement that the attacker had no known ties to foreign groups.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-jones-justifies-las-vegas-conspiracy-theories-i-talk-to-the-president-sometimes/

[font size="8"]Bill O’Reilly
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You know that Led Zeppelin song “The Song Remains The Same”? This is kind of like that, but the wrong remains the same. The worst mass shooting in US history was almost immediately met with opposition from gun nuts. Alex Jones as we already found out is a worthless fucking asshole. And now Bill O’Reilly is definitely not helping things.

Bill O'Reilly, the disgraced former Fox News host who was fired after sexual harassment allegations, penned a blog post on his site about the massacre in Las Vegas that left at least 58 people dead.

"Once again, the big downside of American freedom is on gruesome display," the post on billoreilly.com begins.

"The murderer had a number of deadly weapons in his room and you can count on the gun control debate to ramp up," he wrote. He says he's covered many mass shootings and that gun control will not stop them from happening.

"This is the price of freedom," he wrote. "Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are. The 2nd Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons."
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-las-vegas-shooting-live-updates-bill-o-reilly-calls-mass-shootings-the-1506980448-htmlstory.html

And that price is not only wrong, it’s dead wrong. And I really hate to use the word “dead” here but sometimes it must be used. And guess where O’Reilly

After former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly—ousted from his nightly show earlier this year following allegations of sexual harassment—described the blood-soaked massacre at a Las Vegas music festival on Sunday night that left 59 people dead and hundreds wounded as "the price of freedom," the good people of the nation had a simple response: No, you heartless and mindless idiot.

"Once again," O'Reilly wrote on his personal blog Monday, "the big downside of American freedom is on gruesome display." Later, he argued that mass murder at the hands of people with automatic assault rifles is simply "the price of freedom" because "violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are."

Though a classic construction of right-wing demagoguery, that thinking is betrayed by serious academic research which shows that when strict gun control laws are put in place, these kinds of attacks are incredibly rare compared to what the United States—hostage as it is to the nation's gun industry lobby and the NRA—has been forced to experience in recent decades.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/10/03/no-bill-oreilly-bloody-las-vegas-massacre-not-price-freedom

And Bill O’Reilly is definitely wrong here. As is all the assholes, Trump trolls, fake news, /pol/ posts on your social media feed attempting to justify this horrifying tragedy as not being the fault of the guns. It is the fault of the guns! But that’s not the only thing Gramps O’Reilly is pissed at. What else is the cranky old guy pissed at? Let’s break it down.

Festivus came early this year as Bill O'Reilly returned to Fox News on Tuesday night to make accusations and air grievances.

Appearing on "Hannity," O'Reilly made his first appearance on the conservative news network since multiple sexual-harassment allegations led to his ouster in April.

O'Reilly's time with Sean Hannity, promoted as a way to promote his latest book, "Killing England," primarily devolved into a discussion of things that have upset O'Reilly in the five months since viewers saw him last.

Here, in no particular order, are a few things that grind O'Reilly's gears:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-entertainment-news-updates-bill-o-reilly-returns-to-fox-news-to-1506532345-htmlstory.html

So what is he pissed at? You know they just wont this damn NFL feud go. I mean really in the list of things to worry about I’d place NFL protestors somewhere between McDonalds discontinuing the 2 for $5 menu and stores running out of the SNES Classic. What do you mean I have to pay extra if I want a Big Mac and Chicken Nuggets in the same order????

Kneeling

In generally unsurprising news, O'Reilly is very offended by peaceful protests in the NFL that involve kneeling during the playing of the national anthem.

"It’s a mob mentality. It is an anti-Trump demonstration," O'Reilly said of the protest that Colin Kaepernick ignited during the Obama administration. "That’s what it’s morphed into."

Both Hannity and O'Reilly both invoked the troops in their arguments that protests involviing the the American flag and national anthem are offensive, despite the fact that such speech is protected by the 1st Amendment.

Really Mr. O’Reilly if you have a problem with this:

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/xXRPu5QtqzIleUxiT_DhNA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAwO2lsPXBsYW5l/

But not with this:

You’re part of the problem. Speaking of which he’s also got a beef with racism. Yes racism! Again… not helping!

Racism

Hannity was anxious to hear O'Reilly's thoughts about how the left uses racism as a "wedge issue," and the former host of "The O'Reilly Factor" was more than happy to oblige.

"The media and the entertainers drive it," O'Reilly said in response to Hannity's assertion that accusations of racism are dividing the country along racial lines in a way that is "hurtful to the country."

Wait – let me get this straight! You just denounced NFL protests and then in the same breath denounce “media racism”? GTFO!!! And would you be surprised to learn that he’s got a problem with that damned mainstream media? Yes he does! Hey O’Reilly – I got news for ya – YOU ARE THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA NOW!!! Get over yourself, jackass!

That darn mainstream media

O'Reilly and Hannity both had plenty of scorn to pile onto other purveyors of national news.

"I have never seen any institution in America that is so corrupt, so bitterly ideological, that’s so one-sided," Hannity opined. "All they want to do is destroy this president."

"We’re living in a time with no more journalistic rules, and I can back that up 50 different ways, but I’m not going to bore everybody tonight," O'Reilly responded. "But I will someday."

[font size="8"]Donald Trump
[br] [/font] [br]

Oh hey look everybody! President Squirrel tweeted something again! Or he said something stupid. Either way it’s hard to tell which is which anymore. But his response to the Vegas shooting might be the most Donald J. Trump thing yet.

President Trump said Tuesday that the quick response of law enforcement during the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history was “in many ways, a miracle.”

“Look, we have a tragedy. What happened is, in many ways, a miracle,” Trump said as he departed the White House for a trip to Puerto Rico on Tuesday morning. “The police department, they’ve done such an incredible job. And we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes on. But I do have to say, how quickly the police department was able to get in was really very much of a miracle. They’ve done an amazing job.”

At least 59 people were killed and more than 500 others were injured in Las Vegas late Sunday when Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old retiree who lives in the area, opened fire on an outdoor country music festival from the windows of a 32nd-floor hotel suite. For at least five minutes, and perhaps as long as 15, bullets rained down on the concertgoers and the panicked crowd rushed to escape. As Paddock fired round after round, gun smoke filled the hotel suite and set off a fire alarm, allowing a SWAT team to zero in on Paddock’s position in about 20 minutes. As officers closed in, Paddock killed himself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/10/03/trump-on-response-to-las-vegas-shooting-what-happened-is-in-many-ways-a-miracle/

Even Mr. Erhmantraut agrees! I mean do you know what the word “miracle” entitles? A miracle would have been – NOBODY dies! That would have been a fucking miracle! Oh and of course we shouldn’t talk about guns. Or racism. Or any of the right wing’s trigger issues. These people are the real snowflakes!

“We have a tragedy. What happened in Las Vegas is, in many ways a miracle,” President Donald Trump said outside the White House this morning, before heading to Marine One en route to Puerto Rico.

“The [Vegas] police department has done such an incredible job,” Trump told reporter, adding, “and we will be talking about gun laws as time goes by.” He did not elaborate and returned to his first theme:

“I do have to say how quickly the police department was able to get in was really very much of a miracle. They’ve done an incredible job.”

The gunman who murdered 59 people and wounded another 500+, was “a sick, demented man” with “a lot of problems I guess and we’re looking into him.”
http://deadline.com/2017/10/donald-trump-las-vegas-shooting-miracle-gun-control-talk-1202181078/

Sigh… you guess we’re looking into him? You either know… or you don’t. And just say you don’t know, Trump! It’s not that hard! You don’t know! There, I said it! I mean I don’t know what the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is, but at least I’ll admit it! But then there was Stephen Colbert. Look, we love you Stephen but this ain’t happening.

In the wake of a lone gunman’s slaughter of 59 people in Las Vegas Sunday night, Stephen Colbert opened Monday’s The Late Show challenging President Donald Trump be the president he promised to be, and pass gun control legislation.

“This afternoon the president called [the mass shooting] an act of pure evil. And I think he’s right,” Colbert began. “So what then are we willing to do to combat pure evil?” Colbert wondered.

Addressing Trump, Colbert said, “Doing nothing is cowardice. Doing something will take courage.”

“Now, President Trump, you said you want to be a transformative president, who doesn’t care about the way things have always been done in Washington D.C.” Colbert reminded.

“This is your chance to prove it. And I mean this sincerely. You do not owe the Republicans anything. You know the Republicans tried to stop you from being president. Well, screw ‘em!”
http://deadline.com/2017/10/stephen-colbert-donald-trump-las-vegas-shooting-pass-gun-control-legislation-are-video-1202181010/

Oh and by the way Trump’s latest word salad didn’t go unnoticed. Just like Sarah Palin, he likes his word salad with extra cheese and a double helping of croutons!

Yesterday morning, Donald Trump addressed the nation on the mass shooting in Las Vegas, and managed to stick to the carefully written script on his teleprompter. There were no asides, no tangents, no tantrums, and none of the staples of this president’s approach to communicating with the public.

Many observers exhaled deeply when it was over, relieved that Trump didn’t use mass murder to say something offensive. Some in the media were a bit too effusive in their praise of the remarks, probably because they were pleasantly surprised the president resisted his usual impulses.

The trouble, of course, was that Trump’s speech didn’t sound anything like Trump. The Atlantic’s David Frum, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, explained, “Speeches are watched as well as heard, and the viewer saw a president who wished he were somewhere else because he had been compelled to pretend something so radically false to his own nature.”
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/away-his-teleprompter-trump-causes-more-trouble-himself

[font size="8"]Donald Trump
[br] [/font] [br]

Yeah so this year has just royally sucked hasn’t it? Can we get a do over on 2017? Please god? Do you have a rewind button? Can we go back to the election last year and reelect Hillary Clinton? Damn. That was our planet!!!! Damn you all to hell!! OK I’m stalling enough. Hurricane season has come and gone and of course our president isn’t helping things. You know most of the Caribbean was leveled and it seems like San Juan got the worst of it. And Trump isn’t helping.

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump praised Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló on Tuesday, saying he wasn't "playing politics" -- an apparent swipe at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, with whom he has publicly feuded over the past several days.
"I just want to tell you that right from the beginning this governor was not playing politics," Trump said as he huddled with local and federal officials on the island for a briefing on recovery efforts. "He was giving us the highest grades."
Trump attacked Yulín Cruz on Saturday for criticizing the White House's hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico, accusing her of "poor leadership" and suggesting that the island's residents are not doing enough to help themselves.
www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/politics/donald-trump-san-juan-mayor-carmen-yuln-cruz-puerto-rico-hurricane/index.html

Not playing politics? Dude, you LITERALLY JUST PLAYED POLITICS! Let’s go to the tweet!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/914227642131509248

And:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/914217477495717889

Sorry, Donnie but by calling it “fake news”, you are literally playing politics! I mean do we need to point this out?

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the humanitarian aid response in Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria has "thrown our budget a little out of whack," during a visit to the Caribbean island.

"I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you've thrown our budget a little out of whack, because we've spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico," Trump said.

He quickly added that the money was well spent.

"That's fine, we've saved a lot of lives," he said.

Trump went on to compare the devastation in Puerto Rico to that of Hurricane Katrina in the US, saying relatively few people have lost their lives as a result of the storm and ensuing loss of power, destruction of infrastructure, and widespread flooding.
http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-puerto-rico-budget-out-of-whack-hurricane-katrina-2017-10

You know Mr. President there’s some things you could cut out of the budget – like your ridiculous wall for instance! Or maybe the increased and utterly ridiculous ICE funding! Or the million+ times you’ve attempted to repeal Obamacare! Thank you! But here’s where it gets weird – Trump went to the PGA’s Presidents Cup tournament to dedicate the President’s Cup to the city of Puerto Rico. I swear you need a flow chart for his treatment of Puerto Rico! Unfortunately I don’t have that ready.

The Presidents Cup, a golf tournament started by the PGA Tour in 1994 and won by the United States this weekend for the seventh time in a row, somehow necessitated the appearance of President Trump on Sunday. After the U.S. victory, Trump took the shiny trophy, and dedicated it to Americans in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico affected by hurricanes in recent months.
https://deadspin.com/donald-trump-dedicates-golf-trophy-to-hurricane-victims-1819055020

Well if there is a plus side, the residents of San Juan can use the giant cup to scoop out the raw sewage they are wading through. Thank you. But Trump couldn’t be more dead wrong.

President Trump visited storm-ravaged Puerto Rico on Tuesday to survey damage and talk to residents, while also meeting and briefly praising the San Juan mayor following their feud over the administration's response to Hurricane Maria.

The president, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, participated in a packed briefing on storm recovery shortly after landing at Luis Muñiz Air National Guard Base in San Juan.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who has repeatedly criticized the president’s actions since the storm wreaked havoc on the U.S. territory last month, was seen shaking Trump's hand and joining him for the briefing in a hangar.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/10/03/trump-lands-in-hurricane-ravaged-puerto-rico-as-defends-administration-s-storm-response.html

[font size="8"]Holy Shit
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Yes friends! Gather around, friends! Pass the collection plate, friends!!! Yay, during this most troubling of times we once again turn to the holiest among us. But unfortunately we realize that the holiest among us are full of…

Today, in the most darkest of times, after the most horrifying of mass shootings, we are once again turning to the most godly among us. And we are very much finding out that the godliest among us are also the craziest among us. To start this segment, we have our old friend – the guy who goes out of his way to pretend he’s a coach, Dave Daubenmire. Who offered this batshit craziest of theories about the shooting.

On his “Pass The Salt Live” webcast this morning, Religious Right activist Dave Daubenmire said last night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, in which 50 people were killed and hundreds more were wounded, was just the latest example of “the wrath of God” being unleashed on America for being such a wicked nation.

“In the world of America, where guys climb up on towers in Las Vegas and pick off people at a concert,” he said, “where people indiscriminately kill one another, the wrath of God [is] being revealed. See, the wrath of God being revealed means that the things that the Lord used to prevent, He doesn’t prevent so much any more. He doesn’t prevent them. Maybe He doesn’t cause them, He doesn’t cause a hurricane to come into Houston, but He doesn’t prevent it. That’s for sure.”

“Maybe He doesn’t cause that guy to shoot people, but He doesn’t prevent it,” Daubenmire continued. “We used to have a sense of spiritual covering over us but it’s rapidly disappearing because, even though I stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, the American government is pretty wicked.”
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/dave-daubenmire-vegas-shooting-was-the-wrath-of-god-being-revealed-on-a-wicked-nation/

Yeah BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! These two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other, just like Dave has nothing to do with being an actual coach. I mean come on David, we can tell you're standing in front of an obviously fake blue screen stadium backdrop. Can we rolleth thy tape on that?

But then Dave not only doesn’t back down, he doubles down on his theory and suggests that Stephen Paddock might have been a government controlled assassin:

Religious Right activist Dave Daubenmire used his “Pass The Salt Live” webcast this morning to address the pressing question of whether the person responsible for last weekend’s mass shooting in Las Vegas might have been a victim of government mind control.

Daubenmire said that we all know “about mind control being used to create super soldiers, hidden assassins that are going to emerge” and so people must admit that “this is real.”

“Whether this guy was a mind-controlled assassin, we don’t know that,” Daubenmire said, “but the idea that he was a mind control assassin is not far out. It’s not far out, folks. And if you’re foolish enough to think that this is tinfoil hat stuff and this isn’t going on, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“We know this stuff is real,” he said later in the broadcast as he tried to connect the issue of mind control to Antifa, Barack Obama and George Soros.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/dave-daubenmire-wonders-if-las-vegas-shooter-was-a-government-mind-controlled-assassin/

?w=1400

David, I believe my son, that you have been hitteh in thine head too many times. You know this stuff is real? Do you haveth thine proof? No? Then sit back down! Next up we have Pat Robertson. How is it that we lost Frank Zappa back in 1993 but Pat Robertson is still alive? Jesus must think he’s a real jerk.

On “The 700 Club” today, televangelist Pat Robertson linked last night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas to a disrespect for President Trump, the national anthem and God.

“Violence in the streets, ladies and gentlemen. Why is it happening?” he asked. “The fact that we have disrespect for authority; there is profound disrespect for our president, all across this nation they say terrible things about him. It’s in the news, it’s in other places. There is disrespect now for our national anthem, disrespect for our veterans, disrespect for the institutions of our government, disrespect for the court system. All the way up and down the line, disrespect.”

“Until there is biblical authority,” Robertson continued, “there has to be some controlling authority in our society and there is none. And when there is no vision of God, the people run amok … and we have taken from the American people the vision of God, the whole idea of reward and punishment, an ultimate judge of all our actions, we’ve taken that away. When there is no vision of God, the people run amok.”
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/pat-robertson-blames-vegas-shooting-on-disrespect-for-trump-the-national-anthem-and-god/

Next up we are switching subjects. You know Alabama’s senate candidate Roy Moore? You know he is among the craziest of us. Apparently false religion beith a thing that exists, and he is combating something that apparently is not a problem.

CNN reported recently on a February speech in which Moore suggested that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were God’s judgment on America for having “distanced ourselves” from God, including efforts to “legitimize sodomy” and “legitimize abortion.”

Moore has long warned that God is judging America. In a 2012 speech, Moore said that Satan was behind marriage equality and legal abortion, which is why God “has a controversy with the inhabitants of this land, and until we reject those evils, we shall suffer accordingly”:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/roy-moore-wins-gop-senate-nomination-his-long-history-of-fighting-false-religion-criminal-lifestyle-pre-k-indoctrination/

Yay, what are these people even angry about? Do they even know anymore? They’ve been lied to for so long they don’t know what they’re mad about. I mean really is the right’s argument about gay marriage even valid anymore? Well there’s Bryan Fischer – who believes that the right way to solve a gun problem is guess what? More guns!

American Family Radio’s Bryan Fischer said on his radio show yesterday that the problem at the heart of the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas is that too few people had guns.

Fischer told a caller who wondered if the massacre could have been stopped if armed guests in the Mandalay Bay hotel had burst into the shooter’s room and killed him that “that was a good question to raise.”

While admitting that breaking down a hotel room door in order to confront a heavily armed assailant in the midst of carrying out a massacre “might have been difficult” for an average hotel guest, Fischer said “it certainly would create the possibility if there was somebody next door with a weapon, maybe this thing could have been stopped before 55 people were dead.”

“The problem is not too many guns,” Fischer said, “but too few.”
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/bryan-fischer-on-vegas-shooting-the-problem-is-not-too-many-guns-but-too-few/

Really these people couldn’t be more stupid if they had tried. That comes with the problem of not thinking for thyself. But finally while on the subject of persecution – the right wing are the most paranoid among us, friends! And there is Sandy Rios.

Religious Right radio host Sandy Rios claimed that the term “alt-right” was constructed by liberals to denigrate conservatives, especially those like her who speak out “in the name of Jesus.”

While speaking with pro-Trump Religious Right leader Robert Jeffress this morning, Rios asked for his thoughts about a letter evangelical pastors sent to the White House asking that President Donald Trump take more steps to condemn the white supremacist alt-right movement. Jeffress told Rios he thought the letter was unnecessary.

“Let’s be clear. The president has soundly denounced racism,” Jeffress said, citing Trump’s signing of a joint resolution of Congress that renounced white supremacist and other hate groups. The letter evangelical leaders sent, Jeffress said, “is continuing to pick at a scab that does not need to be picked at.”

Rios said she agreed with Jeffress and that a lot of the “good men on this letter” didn’t fully understand what they had signed.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/sandy-rios-the-term-alt-right-was-constructed-to-denigrate-christians-like-me/

Yes, they just get crazier and crazier! They really are a special kind of stupid, aren’t they? But they need a lesson in how real life religion works as their treatment of our president!

As the Religious Right coalesced behind Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last year, various narratives began to emerge that Trump had found God—or at least “opened himself” to Christianity—thanks to his proximity to conservative evangelical leaders.

George Barna, a conservative Christian pollster who is out with a new book arguing that Christians brought about Trump’s election in what he has called a “major miracle” sent by God, added to this narrative in a recent interview with Virginia talk radio host Rob Schilling, saying that the conservative religious leaders who Trump has surrounded himself with in the White House have brought about a “major change” in “the heart and hopefully the soul of this man who’s now our president.”
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/george-barna-religious-leaders-have-effected-a-major-change-in-trumps-soul/

You can’t really change a soul when that individual had no soul to begin with! Thank you very much for attending! Mass has ended, may you go in peace! That is it for this week, friends! Now sayeth it with thy self:

[font size="8"]The Alt Right
[br] [/font] [br]

So anyone remember back in Idiots #25, I covered the alt right troll-o-sphere led by conservative firebrand and guy named after a holiday new car sales event, Vox Day. Come check out our new Lexus Vox Day specials at your local Lexus dealer! Terms and conditions may apply! Well, Vox is back in the news. It seems he is trying to “trigger” the left with some new comic books.

After spending weeks hyping a new comic book series promising to spark outrage among progressive comic book fans, alt-right activist Theodore Beale—known online as Vox Day—has delivered: A trailer for the “Alt-Hero” comic book series has been released.

Beale managed to raise more than $32,000 overnight after releasing the trailer, meeting what he said was his first fundraising goal toward the creation of the comic series. The fundraising page claims the comic is “intended to challenge and eventually replace the SJW-converged comics of DC and Marvel.” (“SJW” is Alt-Right shorthand for “social justice warrior.”)

Beale told his fans that major comic makers are “methodically, purposefully, absolutely attempting to destroy every value—every American value, every Western value, every Christian value that they can get their hands on” by creating spinoffs of popular comic series that depict classic characters as black, female and Muslim. Beale’s answer to that perceived attack is to fund the creation of a comic series that features “triggering” white characters that smoke cigarettes, wear Confederate flag costumes and combat left-wing protesters.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alt-right-activist-vox-day-is-launching-a-comic-book-series-to-trigger-the-left/

Yes it is. And here's the thing Vox - if you want to be in the comic book industry, take it from the GOAT, Stan Lee - make comics that people actually want to read! Thank you! I mean why the fuck would anyone buy this? He’s only going to be preaching to the choir. And then there’s this douchebag – James Allsup, who offered this batshit crazy theory about the Vegas shooting:

But the bovine excrement is much more pure than that. In fact the bovine excrement is so strong that they think they can take down Canada. You know some psychiatrist out there has to know what makes these morons rage against liberals. I mean there’s something out there isn’t there?

"We Have a Right to Exist," declares the slogan, under a picture of a young white man and woman, on posters found last week on university campuses in New Brunswick, Canada.

The posters—decried as white supremacist hate speech by college authorities—were found on the University of New Brunswick campus in Fredericton, only days after "alt-right" activists defaced a First Nations welcome sign at the nearby St. Thomas University.
http://www.newsweek.com/how-alt-right-groups-are-attempting-spread-white-supremacism-canadian-campuses-675742

Even Grumpy Cat wants you to go away! But now there’s calls on Trump to denounce his hardcore base – the alt right.

Oh oh… the alt right is getting played off by Keyboard Cat! Oh the humanity!!! The alt right’s presence has even caught fire with the evangelical community! They want them to go away!

President Donald Trump needs to be crystal clear in his condemnation of the so-called alt-right, a group of Southern Baptist and other evangelical leaders said in a letter addressed to the commander in chief. The document, first obtained exclusively by CNN and published September 29, urges Trump to “join with many other political and religious leaders to proclaim with one voice that the ‘alt-right’ is racist, evil, and antithetical to a well-ordered, peaceful society.”

The letter—drafted by the Reverend William Dwight McKissic, senior pastor at the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and Keith Whitfield, a professor and dean at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary—comes in the wake of Trump’s varied and widely criticized responses to white nationalist rallies that turned violent in August in Charlottesville, Virginia. The president alternated between blaming both sides for the violence and condemning groups like white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan.

The events in Charlottesville “reminded us of a time years ago when such brazen displays of bigotry and white supremacy were common and were upheld by political leaders,” reads the letter, which is now also available on a site where leaders beyond the original 39 signatories can add their names. “We have overcome much racial injustice, but we fear that without moral clarity and courageous leadership that consistently denounces all forms of racism, we may lose the ground that we have gained toward the racial unity for which so many of us have fought. Our nation remains divided racially and ideologically.”
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-must-proclaim-alt-right-racist-and-evil-evangelical-leaders-urge-letter-675949

You tell ‘em!

[font size="8"]Actual Fake News
[br] [/font] [br]

It’s time once again to ask:

This week: Fake News. How is this still a thing? Ever since Trump pointed out fake news last year, it’s been all over the news. And RIP Tom Petty! So let’s get it out there. And in this entry we will be playing all Tom Petty songs instead of our stupid memes. I mean we live in a world where facts don’t matter anymore. So let’s start with Tom Petty. I mean it really sucks that he died on Monday. But did he die or didn’t he die? Or did he have a heart attack and then was in a coma? Or did he die and then we just weren’t informed of the right time? So many questions! And no answers.

Tom Petty died on Monday night, but inaccurate news of his death made its way around the internet much earlier in the day.

According to Tony Dimitriades, longtime manager of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, the legendary rocker "died peacefully at 8:40 pm PT surrounded by family, his bandmates and friends" after suffering cardiac arrest.

That was hours after some media outlets had already reported on his death -- a mistake that prompted one of Petty's daughters to vent her anger about it on social media.

An Instagram account believed to belong to AnnaKim Violet Petty featured a post with a blistering message to Rolling Stone magazine, which reported Petty had died on Monday afternoon.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/03/media/tom-petty-death-media/index.html

But there’s fake news everywhere folks. I mean it is crazy. Facebook in particular is one of the largest offenders of fake news and they may be single handedly responsible for the downfall of society

When they woke up and glanced at their phones on Monday morning, Americans may have been shocked to learn that the man behind the mass shooting in Las Vegas late on Sunday was an anti-Trump liberal who liked Rachel Maddow and MoveOn.org, that the F.B.I. had already linked him to the Islamic State, and that mainstream news organizations were suppressing that he had recently converted to Islam.

They were shocking, gruesome revelations. They were also entirely false — and widely spread by Google and Facebook.

In Google’s case, trolls from 4Chan, a notoriously toxic online message board with a vocal far-right contingent, had spent the night scheming about how to pin the shooting on liberals. One of their discussion threads, in which they wrongly identified the gunman, was picked up by Google’s “top stories” module, and spent hours at the top of the site’s search results for that man’s name.

In Facebook’s case, an official “safety check” page for the Las Vegas shooting prominently displayed a post from a site called “Alt-Right News.” The post incorrectly identified the shooter and described him as a Trump-hating liberal. In addition, some users saw a story on a “trending topic” page on Facebook for the shooting that was published by Sputnik, a news agency controlled by the Russian government. The story’s headline claimed, incorrectly, that the F.B.I. had linked the shooter with the “Daesh terror group.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/business/las-vegas-shooting-fake-news.html

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/400/1*vBFA717BHuyzmMXsyMyNLQ.jpeg

How is 4chan still a thing? They are fucking insane! And it’s insane that they would stoop to the low of trying to frame someone for a crime they didn’t fucking commit! But Fake News goes further than that – it appears they’ve been driving Trump’s focus on San Juan because he’s so easily manipulated.

"Carmen Yulin Cruz, the Trump-bashing, terrorist-supporting Mayor of San Juan, diverted $20,000 worth of government money to fund a violent protest against the establishment of a Federal Fiscal Board," one site claimed under the headline "BUSTED: Anti-Trump Mayor Of San Juan Spent $20,000 In Public Funds To Bankroll Violent Protest."

"In September of 2016, Cruz admitted that she and the San Juan People’s Assembly had financed the violent protest to the tune of $20,000," the article reads.

But Cruz never funded protests over federal bailout plans for the cash-strapped island. Rather, she allocated San Juan municipal funds to clean up and provide a semblance of order to an encampment set up by protesters outside a federal court in Hato Rey; the local money was not used to encourage protests or exacerbate demonstrations.

"The municipality collects their trash, offers two latrines and brings them ice. That’s all. What’s the crime in picking up trash? What’s illegal about cleaning two latrines? What’s wrong with bringing them ice made by the municipality?" Cruz said at the time. "It is worth noting that at that camp there hasn’t been a single violent incident. In fact, that camp is a living reminder of the violence being perpetrated in our country with an unjust, colonial and abusive law."
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-fake-news-army-puerto-rico-mayor-carmen-yulin-cruz-676923

Yes, it was on Facebook so it must be true! I’m sure you’ve been hearing that line a lot this week. But in fact Fake News has been used so much that not only is it tearing us apart, it’s become its’ own logical fallacy.

On the evening of October 30, 1938, a seventy-six-year-old millworker in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, named Bill Dock heard something terrifying on the radio. Aliens had landed just down the road, a newscaster announced, and were rampaging through the countryside. Dock grabbed his double-barrelled shotgun and went out into the night, prepared to face down the invaders. But, after investigating, as a newspaper later reported, he “didn’t see anybody he thought needed shooting.” In fact, he’d been duped by Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of “The War of the Worlds.” Structured as a breaking-news report that detailed the invasion in real time, the broadcast adhered faithfully to the conventions of news radio, complete with elaborate sound effects and impersonations of government officials, with only a few brief warnings through the program that it was fiction.

The next day, newspapers were full of stories like Dock’s. “Thirty men and women rushed into the West 123rd Street police station,” ready to evacuate, according to the Times. Two people suffered heart attacks from shock, the Washington Post reported. One caller from Pittsburgh claimed that he had barely prevented his wife from taking her own life by swallowing poison. The panic was the biggest story for weeks; a photograph of Bill Dock and his shotgun, taken the next day, by a Daily News reporter, went “the 1930s equivalent of viral,” A. Brad Schwartz writes in his recent history, “Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/04/the-fake-news-fallacy

That’s enough to make you ask – “Fake News”:

[font size="8"]Trump Vs. The NFL
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It’s time to debut our brand new segment:

Remember last week when the worst thing we had to worry about is whether or not NFL players were sitting or standing during the national anthem? Those were good times. Or maybe not . The point of this segment is that there’s no one who’s better at beating dead horses like the GOP. Like the myth that there’s a liberal media out there. Let’s face it – conservatives own most of this country’s newspapers. They own the big 3 TV networks they love to bash and decry as fake news. They own most of this country’s newspapers. They own nearly every local TV station thanks to Sinclair Broadcasting. Nearly 95% of AM radio is conservative leaning talk shows. The American clergy preaches right wing politics. They own Twitter and Facebook. Every political book on every bookshelf is written by a conservative author with the intent of trashing liberals. Fox News is played in more public places than CNN or MSNBC. Even CBS president Les Moonves famously said that Trump isn’t good for the country but he’s good for ratings. Now witness Sean Hannity who continues to beat the dead horse known as the "liberal media" into the ground:

https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/915356118536167424

Yeah BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! I see what Hannity is doing here – he’s channeling his inner Joseph McCarthy. I’ll tell you what Hannity – we can do one better – how about we go after your advertisers and get them to pull their sponsorship of your hate-filled show? Thank you, and I think my audience would agree with me! But the GOP loves to beat dead horses. Like the liberal media and they’ve been peddling that lie for 40 years. And this week – the one dead horse they love to beat is the controversy surrounding NFL anthem protests. But the controversy that will never die, well, is never dying. And Trump trolls are like King Midas only in reverse – everything they touch turns to shit!

The Seattle Seahawks were on the field for the national anthem before their game on Sunday night against the Indianapolis Colts, but a group of six players, led by Michael Bennett and Cliff Avril, sat on the bench for the duration of the song. The rest of the Seahawks were standing, scattered on the sidelines in a far more disorganized grouping than most teams have chosen, while the Colts were on the sidelines with locked arms. Andrew Luck, the injured Colts quarterback, was shown during the NBC broadcast singing along to the song.

Rather than wait in the locker room, like they did during last week’s anthem, the Seahawks decided instead to create a fund with the goal of building a more compassionate and inclusive society, calling it the Players Equality & Justice for All Action Fund.

Here is a quick look at what each team did during the playing of the national anthem on Sunday:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/01/sports/nfl-trump-anthem.html

Yeah I’m using Zoidberg memes because that will make this funny. But it gets crazier than that. Lets’ face it folks – we’re in it for a long four years. And I do mean long. Trump has only been in office… 224 days and I feel like I have already aged four years! But Trump just can’t help himself poking the hornets’ nest!

WASHINGTON — Most Americans say the protests by NFL players during the National Anthem are appropriate, a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds, and they say, by overwhelming margins, that President Trump's heated criticism of them are not.

Two-thirds in the poll of registered voters, by 68%-27%, say Trump's call for NFL owners to fire the players and fans to boycott their games is inappropriate. That includes a third of Republicans as well as nine of 10 Democrats.

By 51%-42%, those surveyed say the players' protests are appropriate.

"They certainly have the right to express whatever they want," says Ryan Doyle, 19, a college student and Democratic-leaning independent from Manhattan Beach, Calif., who was among those surveyed. "It doesn't call for violence; it doesn't call for pain; it doesn't call for any dramatic act."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/02/usa-today-poll-americans-say-trump-wrong-nfl-protests/721809001/

Yeah this thing is turning into as much of a distraction as the squirrels in Up!. I mean really, are we going to go through this shit every single week now? Are we going to make reporters wear the cone of shame so they stop paying attention to this issue? I mean ESPN now has an Anthem Watch! Week4!

President Donald Trump criticized NFL players who lodge pregame protests, saying in a speech in Alabama on Sept. 22 that he wished those players would be released. He also encouraged fans who are offended to walk out of stadiums. Several players and coaches reacted strongly to Trump on social media, and players -- joined by coaches and owners, in some instances -- across the league knelt, locked arms, raised their fists and even refused to come out of the locker room during the national anthem in Week 3. Trump has continued calling for action against those who kneel during the national anthem, while owners this week scrambled to retain control.

Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick started the pregame protest of racial oppression and inequality in the United States last season by sitting during the national anthem before a preseason game, then kneeling during the anthem throughout the season.
http://www.espn.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/250489/what-every-nfl-team-did-during-the-national-anthem-in-week-4

But again Trump can’t stop poking the hornets’ nest. Someone really needs to take Fox News away from him!

President Trump’s ongoing battle with the National Football League over the “take a knee” controversy has raised new questions about possible criminal violations. At a rally in Alabama and then in a series of tweets, Trump suggested fans should boycott the NFL and that team owners should fire players who protest during the national anthem.

Trump’s actions quickly led to claims that his pressure on the NFL might be illegal. Particular attention focused on a relatively obscure law, 18 U.S.C. 227, which makes it a crime for a public official to wrongfully seek to influence an employment decision or practice by any private entity. Critics charged that Trump, by urging NFL owners to fire the protesting players, may have run afoul of this statute.

It is at least clear that this law does apply to the president. But don’t expect special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to add this particular offense to his already hefty playbook of potential charges.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/10/01/trumps-rants-about-the-nfl-arent-criminal-heres-why/

[font size="8"]Steven Segal Vs. George Forman

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It’s now time for:

And man do I need a drink this week! Ah, where you been? Snce we’re going to talk about Russia, I want to change pace and order a Moscow Mule. Ah, that’s a great drink. No mint. But I figured both the latter and the former will make great drinks for fight night. And why am I talking about fighting? Because there’s one brewing. And I start with former actor and guy who looks exactly like his South Park doppleganger, Steven Segal.

Actor Steven Seagal became the subject of online mockery Wednesday after he said on British television that recent kneeling protests at NFL games were both "outrageous" and "disgusting."

Speaking via satellite from Moscow, where he now lives, Seagal told the hosts of Good Morning Britain that he disagreed with the movement started by professional football players who chose to kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality.

His remarks echo those of President Donald Trump, who has called the action "disgraceful" and suggested that athletes who do not stand during the anthem should be fired. Trump's remarks on Twitter calling out athletes by name have reopened a national debate about free speech and race, and pitted the president against some of the country's most influential figures in the world of sports.
http://time.com/4960448/steven-seagal-nfl-protests-comments-reaction/

/revision/latest?cb=20161222114042

But Steven be crazy. In fact he loves Putin so much that he got Russian citizenship through Putin. And this is turning him from a regular actor into a James Bond villain. Or the bad guy in a Steven Segal movie.

Seeing a washed-up star’s name trending on Twitter is a scary thing. That formerly famous person you basically forgot about could be dead—or, worse, ranting to Piers Morgan about his good friend Vladimir Putin.

During Wednesday’s edition of Good Morning Britain, two white men connected via Skype to express their shared disappointment in NFL players who are taking a knee in protest of police brutality and racial inequality. What set this particular interview apart from legions of similarly structured cable news shows were the two players: London sewer monster Piers Morgan, and ’80s action hero Steven Seagal. Even for a Piers Morgan interview—the man has made a career out of getting mad at female celebrities for showing too much cleavage—this exchange is painful.

To summarize: Seagal, speaking live from Russia, squints through a pair of comically small glasses to condemn “Obama-ites” and “the enemies within” America. He goes on to say that, while he believes in free speech, he doesn’t believe in these football players’ “outrageous, disgusting” protest, adding, “I myself have risked my life countless times for the American flag and I don’t understand or agree with this kind of behavior.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-steven-seagal-transformed-into-a-bond-villain

Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Steven Segal has risked his life for the American flag? Has he *watched* Under Siege? Thank you audience! But how do not talk about politics when your BFF is Vladimir Putin? Alex Jones has got to be green (or an even brighter shade of red) with envy!

American movie star and recent Russian citizen Steven Seagal told British television he’s personally acquainted with President Vladimir Putin and talks to him on a wide range of subjects, but not politics.

Seagal, who was awarded Russian citizenship by Putin last November, is one of several late-career celebrities to become naturalized after American boxer Roy Jones Jr. and French actor Gerard Depardieu.

Speaking on a British morning show on Wednesday via satellite from Moscow, Seagal said he’s had many direct dealings with the Russian president.

“Him and I started out becoming friends over the martial arts,” he told the Good Morning Britain show on the ITV television channel.
https://themoscowtimes.com/news/steven-seagal-does-not-talk-about-politics-with-pal-putin-59090

But here’s where it gets weird, and you know its’ going to! *gets out boxing announcer microphone* AND IN THIS CORNER… GEORGE FOREMAN!!! Who wants to challenge Steven Segal to a boxing match!!

Fresh on the heels of Mayweather vs. McGregor, there could be another superfight on the horizon. You asked for it (probably not) but it's coming (probably not) ...I hope you all are ready for George Foreman vs. Steven Seagal.

Foreman -- the former two-time heavyweight championship boxer and guy responsible for the grill that burned Michael Scott's foot -- took to Twitter on Monday to challenge Seagal, the martial arts movie star, to a fight.
https://www.cbssports.com/boxing/news/george-foreman-has-challenged-steven-seagal-to-a-fight-because-why-not/

What do we call this fight? The Fracas In Caracas? The Lost Cow In Moscow? The Fricassee in Tennessee? I could go on and on! So why is this fight happening? And Mr. Foreman wants to fight Segal in Las Vegas, because of course!

Via his Twitter account, boxing great George Foreman has challenged martial arts actor Steven Seagal to an open-rules, hand-to-hand brawl in Las Vegas.

“I use boxing you can use whatever. 10 rounds in Vegas,” the former two time heavyweight boxing champion wrote, attaching a photo of Seagal. “It’s my Jab that still works. Mayweather promotion get the first crack. PPV,” he added, with an apparent nod to the recent big-money pay-per-view fight between boxer Floyd Mayweather and mixed martial artist Conor McGregor.

Even though Aikido black-belt Seagal has offered no public response to the challenge, Foreman doubled down on his enthusiasm for the brawl when asked about it on Twitter.
http://www.newsweek.com/george-foreman-calls-out-steven-seagal-las-vegas-bare-hands-brawl-676513

[font size="8"]World Tour Destination #16: California
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Part of our mission statement here at the Top 10 Conservative Idiots is to show you that conservative idiocy isn’t just a problem with America. No, it’s a global problem that is stemming far and wide, and it’s not just America where conservative idiots ruin everything they touch. And if you’re thinking of moving out of the United States just because Donald J. Trump is our current president and our nation is turning to shit, you should know what it is you’re getting into should you decide that you want to leave the country. We’re past the halfway mark of our tour so far. All of our hosts have been great so far. So if you want a recap of where we’ve been so far, in the last few weeks we’ve discovered that Brazil is still recovering from the Olympics disaster, Argentina is the center of a murder mystery plot, and New York’s got a gambling problem. This week I am headed home for some shore leave! Here’s the tour schedule:

[font size="6"]California[/font]

We need some music for this one!

Yeah that’s my shit! California does know how to party! I am home everybody! I of course talk frequently about my home county of Orange County, California. My state? There is tons to do here, and I do mean tons. We have Los Angeles (my home), San Diego (my home away from home), and San Francisco and the Bay Area (my new home away from home). Also Sacramento, Mendocino, Fresno (Fresno what you sippin????), Victorville (Go Raiders!), and Mammoth and Big Bear Mountains. Well we have the most professional sports teams of any state in the United States! Football? There’s the 49ers, Chargers, Rams, and we still have the Raiders for now. Baseball? There’s the Giants, Angels, Dodgers, Padres, and the A’s. That’s five teams! Soccer? There’s the San Jose Earthquakes, multiple time MLS champion LA Galaxy, and the new Los Angeles Football Club. Hockey? We got the Ducks, Kings, and the Sharks. Basketball? We got the Lakers, Clippers, Kings and the world champion Warriors. I mean come on who doesn’t love Steph Curry? College? There’s USC, UCLA, Stanford, and the university that the Trump trolls love to hate – UC Berkeley. Outdoors? We got it. Some of the best natural parks, skiing and hiking you can find in the world. You want entertainment? We got Hollywood and some of the best concert venues in the country like the Hollywood Bowl and Pantages Theater in LA and the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco and the Shoreline Amphitheater in San Jose. We’re also home to some of the biggest bands in the world too like the Doors, Metallica, System Of A Down, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, No Doubt, Green Day, Primus, Tool, Panic! At The Disco, Weezer, Blink 182, Linkin Park, the Deftones, Incubus, I could go on and on. And you know what? Rather than our usual hilarious memes, we're instead going to use all songs about where else? California! So what else is my state the home of? Well it's the home of the freeway standoff for starters!

A homicide suspect died in a shootout with police Wednesday in the middle of a San Francisco Bay Area freeway as stunned motorists looked on, some recording the scene on their cellphones and sharing it on social media.

Traffic came to a standstill for hours on the busy Interstate 80 that connects San Francisco with several other cities during the standoff between police and the unidentified man who had been chased about 40 miles (65 kilometers) by police.

The morning rush-hour standoff shut down all lanes of I-80 in the suburb of Emeryville. It ended when the suspect got out of a black sports utility vehicle and "officers received gun fire from the suspect," authorities said. Officers fired back at the man, who was wounded and died of his injuries at a hospital.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/09/27/suspect-shot-in-standoff-with-officers-on-california-freeway.html

Yes that’s what I tell myself when I’m on the freeways here. It’s faster they say! Faster!!! You know what else California is the home of? “The big one” – the mythical 10.0 earthquake that’s bound to happen that I’ve been hearing about as long as I’ve been alive. So how much could it cost the state if it actually did happen? These numbers were released last week!

Mexico City's earthquake disaster is a reminder of the serious risk of Southern California's "Big One" striking at any time and causing widespread damage that some estimate could approach upwards of $300 billion.

Experts say Southern California is long overdue for a major earthquake along the 800-mile San Andreas Fault, which could cause extensive damage and loss of life to the nation's second-largest city and the region. It also could be a supply-chain nightmare to U.S. businesses, since the L.A./Long Beach port complex handles more than 30 percent of loaded containers that move through all U.S. ports.

"As a state, California is probably one of the better-prepared places on Earth in terms of preparation for earthquakes," said Mary Comerio, past president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and a University of California-Berkeley professor specializing in disaster recovery and reconstruction. "That said, financially these things are huge hits now."
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/27/major-quake-disaster-in-california-could-cause-300-billion-in-losses.html

Yeah holy shit indeed! But let’s talk about sports for a minute. But you know even in one of the most liberal states in the country, you cant escape Trump and his goons. They really have it in for liberals, and they can’t stand it when liberals are in charge of anything now. This is what 40 years of AM hate radio has wrought us.

President Trump and the Republican Congress sure have it in for blue America. Last week’s immigration arrests targeted sanctuary cities only. The late, unlamented Graham-Cassidy attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act would have decimated health insurance coverage in the preponderantly Democratic-controlled states that accepted the Medicaid expansion, and that did the best job of informing potential beneficiaries of their eligibility.

Now comes the Republicans’ so-called tax reform package, which also takes dead aim at Democratic states. By eliminating the deduction taxpayers can take on their federal forms for their state and local tax (SALT) payments, the GOP proposal socks it to those Americans who reside in states that have enacted progressive taxes to fund such basics as — see above — increasing the accessibility of healthcare.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-meyerson-salt-deduction-20171003-story.html

Bill Maher was right – the republicans are the democrats’ crazy ex girlfriends. And speaking of which, would you be at all surprised to learn that the university that Trump trolls love to hate - UC Berkeley was sued by the free speech police for - wait for it - claiming their free speech rights were violated? Let's take a minute to digest the irony of this one.

The Dhillon Law Group is vowing to update its complaint after a judge dismissed its lawsuit accusing the University of California-Berkeley of denying free speech to conservatives

After riots shut down a Milo Yiannopoulos speech at UC-Berkeley in February, Young America’s Foundation (YAF) and the Berkeley College Republicans (BCRs) invited Ann Coulter and David Horowitz to speak on campus

Those events, too, were subsequently cancelled after administrators imposed numerous obstacles, prompting Harmeet Dhillon, a leader in the California Republican Party and a prominent lawyer, to file a lawsuit in April on behalf of YAF and BCRs, accusing the university of using “unconstitutionally vague” policies to prevent Coulter and Horowitz from speaking, and of infringing on student free speech based on ideological differences.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=9903

And this is especially true in California where we have one of the most batshit insane representatives in Congress representing my county – Orange County.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who has come under scrutiny for his sympathetic views toward Moscow, reportedly met last year with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the same Russian lawyer embroiled in Donald Trump Jr.'s controversial meeting at Trump Tower.

Rohrabacher's meeting came two months before Veselnitskaya's with the president's eldest son. He has also met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who during the 2016 campaign published leaked Democratic emails the intelligence community says were hacked by Russia.

Trump Jr. took the meeting last year in New York after being promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton, though he has denied that any was offered.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/353725-gop-lawmaker-met-with-lawyer-at-center-of-russia-probe

Yes what the fuck. Rohrabacher loves Russia so much that he’s also the target of General Kelly who has blocked Rohrabacher repeatedly from meeting with Trump.

WASHINGTON — California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican known for his fondness of the Russian government and ties to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, said he is unable to even speak to President Donald Trump due to barriers put in place by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Rohrabacher told Business Insider on Tuesday that Kelly and "a coalition of people in the White House" are preventing him from having a conversation with Trump that would entail clearing Assange and the Russian government from allegations they meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
http://www.businessinsider.com/john-kelly-blocking-rep-dana-rohrabacher-from-talking-to-trump-2017-10

Come on you know it’s bad when Putin does it! Let’s move onto something lighter like the NFL – California is still the home of the Raiders for now, but what is the move going to look like?

Oakland Raiders’ fans can’t help themselves.

Their team’s owner can’t wait to whisk his Raiders out of Oakland and into Las Vegas, but do the fans here rise in mutiny, flipping Mark Davis the Marshawn Lynch double-barreled bird?

They do not. They pack the Coliseum for the Raiders’ first home game in one of their last seasons here, and they give their hearts to their boys.

And they are rewarded with a 45-20 thumping of the Jets, and a 2-0 start to the Super Bowl-or-bust season.

Oh, the irony. In giving their hearts and cash to the Raiders, the local fans are proving what Davis is banking on: that Raiders’ fans are so crazy in love with their team that they will overlook any insult to their loyalty and just keep showin’ up, drunk (with love) and disorderly.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/raiders/ostler/article/Raiders-fans-We-love-em-while-we-ve-got-12205041.php

[font size="6"]The Verdict & Scorecard[/font]

California is my home state. I live here. Which is why I wanted to include it on the World Tour. There’s tons of things to do here. If you live here and you are bored, you’re doing it wrong. If you visit here and you’re bored, you’re doing it wrong. But as long as you don’t talk politics with your neighbors you should be good.

Tourism: A
Culture: A
Political Spectrum: C+
Liberal Appeal: A-

Overall: A+

[font size="6"]Next Week[/font]

We’re back on the road and heading to one of the craziest countries in the world. Really, this country out crazies Florida by a nearly 5:1 ratio. I’m of course talking about the land of the rising sun – Japan!

[font size="8"]And Now This:[/font]
[font size="8"]Green Day[/font]

Ladies and gentlemen, my next guest is from Northern California and they are one of the biggest bands in the world. I’m of course talking about Green Day! Playing the title track from their album “Revolution Radio”, give it up for the one, the only Green Day!

Wait they want to stick around for one more? Sure!

Yeah how about that?

Note from Initech – thanks for bearing with us this week, this was a difficult edition to do. I originally had a much different edition planned with the Wheel O’ Corruption but I realized that this wasn’t the right time for the Wheel, and I really didn’t want to do it, but I promise next week’s will be much funnier.

See you next week!

October 3, 2017

RWW: Alex Jones Justifies Las Vegas Conspiracy Theories: I Talk To The President Sometimes

Infowars radio host and conspiracy theory architect Alex Jones cited his relationship with President Trump to support his claims that the mass shooting in Las Vegas yesterday was the result of a liberal conspiracy and that the accused shooter was a “patsy and he was set up.”

Today, Jones hosted right-wing activist Laura Loomer, who claimed to possess an internal memo from the Mandalay Bay hotel, where the shooter booked a suite overlooking the country music concert he planned to attack, announcing it would match employee donations to anti-extremism organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, Human Rights Campaign, and Southern Poverty Law Center following the violent white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That memo, the duo claimed, somehow validated theories that the shooter was connected to militant Islamist and Antifa groups.

Loomer told Jones that she thought the accused shooter, Stephen Paddock, was a “hardcore leftist with Antifa connections who became radicalized through ISIS” and that she believed ISIS’ claim that it was responsible for the mass shooting, despite the FBI’s statement that the attacker had no known ties to foreign groups.

“That’s the only thing we’ve got clear tracks on—the target, the connections, who took credit,” Jones said.

Jones then argued that his ties to Trump and over government figures should be enough to convince skeptics that the sources behind his conspiracy theories are credible.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-jones-justifies-las-vegas-conspiracy-theories-i-talk-to-the-president-sometimes/

This is insanity. What Jones did to Sandy Hook and the Sandy Hook victims was obscene and unforgivable. And now Jones has a direct line to Trump. Fuck!!!!

October 2, 2017

Mother Jones: What's It Like To Survive A Shooting?

As part of our ongoing investigation into gun violence, which costs the nation at least $229 billion a year, we documented the stories of eight survivors. How does the toll add up for a victim of street violence? What does it cost to lose a loved one to suicide, or in a mass shooting? From Brooklyn and Chicago to Cheyenne and Oakland, these are some of the prices paid. (See the rest of our special investigation here.)

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/survivors-of-gun-violence/

There's 8 stories here and none of them are good. Holy shit.

October 2, 2017

Alt Right Conspiracy Theorists Weigh In On Vegas Shooting

YouTube personality and alt-right sympathizer James Allsup, who uses his platforms to cater to white nationalist and white identity politics, reacted alongside other alt-right figures to news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas last night by floating conspiracy theories and attacks on the shooter’s immigrant wife.

Fifty people were killed and hundreds were injured after a gunman, identified as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, fired an automatic assault weapon into a large crowd at a country music concert off the Las Vegas strip. After police identified the shooter as an older white man, Allsup began ginning up possible conspiracy theories.

First, Allsup theorized that the mass shooting was “professional work” and not the act of a “lone wolf” attacker, despite reporting at the time from Las Vegas police:

<snip>

Allsup’s conspiracy theories and immigrant smears align with his allies among the Alt-Right. Matt Colligan, who identifies as “Millennial Matt” online and also attended the Unite the Right rally earlier this year, shared a video in which a man claims gunshots fired at the Las Vegas crowd were “fake”:

<snip>

Vincent Law, writer for white nationalist Richard Spencer’s AltRight.com, questioned whether the shooter’s “love for diversity in his bed” motivated him to carry out the mass shooting:

Did Paddock’s love for diversity in his bed make him a more tolerant and happy person, free of hate? Or did it motivate him to shoot up an overwhelmingly White concert?

As of now, the shooter seems to be a fuckin’ white male with an Indonesian girlfriend who shot down on a crowd of 22,000 country music festival attendees from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. To be more specific, the shooter was a 64-year-old, possibly lefty Boomer with a Muslim girlfriend.

And former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke blamed the “sick, bloodlust, twisted, sadistic, ZioWood Culture” he believes has replaced “our values,” referring here to white people, for the shooting:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alt-right-youtube-star-james-allsup-says-las-vegas-shooting-could-be-a-media-conspiracy/

Fuck these racist pieces of shit and their values.

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