If this is God’s idea of Christian behavior, God sucks:
I say we buck up for an all expense paid trip for his family to an Arizona shooting range, complete with complimentary Uzi and nine year old.
This post is in: Gay Rights are Human Rights, Religious Nuts 2, Assholes
If this is God’s idea of Christian behavior, God sucks:
I say we buck up for an all expense paid trip for his family to an Arizona shooting range, complete with complimentary Uzi and nine year old.
This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Election 2014, Kochsuckers, Local Races 2018 and earlier
Front page of the Courier Journal has Mitch McConnell's promises to the Koch brothers in their secret mtg http://t.co/XzDErYDAmg #kysen
— Justin Barasky (@JustinBarasky) August 28, 2014
The backstory, as described by Mr. Charles P. Pierce:
Charles and David Koch — America’s favorite political porn merchants and the Mitchell Brothers of the Citizens United era — are having a week for themselves. Really, it’s like watching a really good episode of that HBO series about the Nevada brothel. First, yesterday, noted ‘ho Mike (Payola) Allen, one of the founding geniuses of Tiger Beat On The Potomac, went on liberal MSNBC and had a giddy old time with Squint and the Meat Puppet about that silly Harry Reid and all that noise he’s been making about the fact that the Kochs are well on their way to strip-mining American democracy…
Central to the ads that TBOTP helpfully collected for us all was an invitation-only hootenanny held by the Kochs last June to which a veritable All Star team of prospective conservative political porn stars showed up to demonstrate their facility with the money shot, and I do mean money shot. And nobody auditioned for his close-up more enthusiastically than did Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader of the United States Senate. The Nation got a hold of an audiotape of Mitch’s audition and, boy howdy, this guy has the potential to be the Ron Jeremy of the Koch grindhouse…
Dear Democrats: Here’s the thing. A full 74 percent of Americans polled favored raising the minimum wage. Mitch McConnell just spit in their eye to curry favor with two Americans. A full 69 percent of Americans polled favored extending unemployment benefits. But none of them are named Charles Koch or David Koch, so Mitch McConnell believes they don’t count….
More at the link, of course.
Not coincidentally, I suspect, this week New York has a feature piece on Alison Grimes, and the NYTimes lapdances gives McConnell a sympathetic spread…
This post is in: Open Threads
As expected, the Feds in the form of CMS and HHS approved with some conditions the Healthy PA this is not really Medicaid Expansion, Medicaid Expansion waiver this afternoon. I have a game in a couple of minutes so here are the highlights.
More later
by Betty Cracker| 167 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Sports
It’s almost here! It’s almost here! Englishman Stephen Fry’s impression of American college football:
Of the spectacle (not necessarily the game), Fry says:
“I really don’t know if anything sums up America better. It’s simultaneously preposterous, incredibly laughable, impressive, charming, ridiculous, expensive, overpopulated, wonderful…America.”
H/T: Valued commenter (and faithful Jawja Dawg) Raven.
PS: GO GATORS!
by Elon James White| 21 Comments
This post is in: This Week In Blackness
Just when you thought reality television couldn’t get any more problematic, Lifetime introduces their new makeover show Girlfriend Intervention. The thinking behind the show? “Trapped inside every white girl is a strong black woman ready to bust out.”
Are you a black woman? You might find this offensive. Are you a white woman? You might find this offensive. Are you neither? You might be thinking at this point that you’re lucky to be left out of the entire thing. (Be aware, though, that no one is safe. Near the end of the first episode, Thomas exaggeratedly compliments the hotness of the made-over white woman by yelling, “Muy caliente, salsa picante mucho!”)
So it’s a team of black women making over white women with a healthy dose of shaming and some very problematic racial politics. Nice work, network television.
Team Blackness also discussed a clothing store that tried to sell a Holocaust T-shirt; more disrespect from Ferguson cops, this time directly on Michael Brown’s memorial; and how New York TV stations cover more crime committed by black people.
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by DougJ| 43 Comments
This post is in: Readership Capture
DC Area Balloon Juice meetups: one tonight, the second this Tuesday night, September 2nd
Please come drink and maybe dine with us at Murphy’s Irish Pub in Old Town Alexandria, in honor of the visiting Mr. and Mrs. efgoldman. They’ll arrive 7:30 to 8:00p; I will try to be there closer to 7:00 p with a Tunch clipboard or some Balloon Juice indicator. Second floor. And it’s $14.95 steak night, through 9 pm tonight.
Murphy’s Alexandria • 713 King Street, Alexandria, VA 22314 • 703.548-1717
http://murphyspub.com/murphys/alexandria/
We will meet again this coming Tuesday, in honor of the visiting Siubhan Duinne. Same place, time TBD.
RE Transport: car is good; plenty of on-street free parking after 6 or 7 p. (Check the meters.) FYI, Murphy’s is pretty close to Christ Church; you can park behind it and walk to Murphy’s …
Accessible via King Street Metro station (blue and yellow? line; there’s a shuttle bus OR you can hoof it, if you’re so inclined.)
Apologies for the short notice.
And we must do a DC city meetup at some point. Apologies to those for whom Old Town Alexandria is too far a trek. Someone else should take the lead on organizing it — you’ll get more notice, for one!
This post is in: The War On Women, Vagina Outrage, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue
By these people, I mean (some) male gamers:
Earlier this week, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian posted the latest in a series of crowdfunded videos called Tropes vs. Women, devoted to aggregating and analyzing games that portray women as damsels in distress, ornamental eye candy, incidental victims, and other archetypes that tend to be written in service of and subordinate to male players and characters….
…Since the project launched on Kickstarter way back in 2012, the gaming community has been treated to an incessant, deeply paranoid campaign against Tropes vs. Women generally and Sarkeesian personally….now, she’s apparently spent the night with friends after contacting law enforcement about “some very scary threats” against her and her family. She’s published a page of extremely violent sexual threats from the person who apparently drove her to call the police; in it, the user mentions the location of her apartment and threatens to kill her parents, who the user names and claims to be able to find.
Sarkeesian has tweeted out that she’s safe. The good news is that some very prominent people in and around gaming and tech have weighed in on her project. The bad news is that such public encouragement may be making Sarkeesian even more of a target:
In this case, the vitriol might have been compounded by the support her latest video received from popular developers and media figures. Joss Whedon and William Gibson, among others, mentioned it, and Tim Schafer of Double Fine — known for Psychonauts and the Kickstarter-funded Broken Age — spent several hours fielding responses after urging everyone in game development to watch it “from start to finish.”
I started to write here about how this is a test of the gamer community, and the need to shame and shun and all that, but we know. We do. Take it as read.
And, of course, it ain’t just gamers, though it’s pretty damn obvious at this point that tech in general has a dude-bro problem. I’ve recently been engaged in efforts to respond to gender bias and sexual harassment on my own patch, science writing, so I know better than to suggest that this is an isolated pathology. The hate and genuine danger may vary by degree, but it’s hardly confined to one corner of contemporary life.
IOW: if this is a test, it’s a test that we’re all are taking. Judge for yourself whether, when or if we manage to pass it.
Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Tarquin and Lucretia, before 1579.