Trump loyalist and Republican gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach doing an ISIS impression during today's parade pic.twitter.com/mDWJ83bc0l
— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) June 2, 2018
Sure, voter suppression and quasi-legal intimidation have worked well for Kobach in the past, when it came to ensuring that only the Right people — his clan! — got to vote. But if he has to escalate to actual armed intimidation, well, he is happy to oblige his biggest fans. Just look at that shit-eatin’ grin!
What a maroon. https://t.co/g1xvBGtfrW
— Schooley (@Rschooley) June 3, 2018
From the Kansas City Star:
Kris Kobach made his way through a parade in Johnson County Saturday morning, waving from an American flag colored jeep with a large gun mounted in back.
The city of Shawnee later issued an apology for Kobach’s display.
The sight of Kobach, a Republican candidate for Kansas governor, in the vehicle at the Old Shawnee Days parade stunned some onlookers and quickly sparked criticism on social media.
“It was pretty shocking,” said pastor Johnny Lewis of Shawnee Community Christian Church. “There were audible gasps from the folks we were sitting by.”
Lewis said he respects the views of people on both sides of the Second Amendment debate, but found the display inappropriate in a crowd filled with kids at a time when many of them, like his 6-year-old daughter, are scared that they might be victims of a school shooting…
Kobach’s campaign was quick to defend the candidate’s decision to wave at the crowd standing next to what appeared to be a .50 caliber machine gun.
“The gun is a replica,” Kobach spokeswoman Danedri Herbert said in a text message…
Repub gun safety: Always use a (realistic) replica weapon when engaged in public interaction with your potential voters!
Plus, to fire it they'd have to be standing on the bumper or be completely out of contact with the vehicle. Dumb asses and/or poseurs https://t.co/ndsSkuhA6z
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) June 3, 2018
Kris Kobach on parade with a gun that reflects his politics. Unchanged since 1918. pic.twitter.com/RmzUS0gaX6
— zeddy (@Zeddary) June 3, 2018
Mary G
Glad to see people are pushing back on him. It’s not even a legal gun, isn’t it?
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
What message is this intended to send, exactly? Domestic terrorist indeed.
trollhattan
Jesus wept.
Hey, Kansas: You barely survived* Brownback. Now you’re tripling-down with this mega grifter? Don’t. Do. It.
*Remains to be seen whether they actually pull through. These things take time to clarify.
OTOH I’m objectively pro-Dan Helmer.
Neldob
Yech! Gack! Arg! Who are the clod’s opponents? I would like to send a likely contender some money.
Mnemosyne
Someone in Houle’s comments disputes this and says that the gun is properly mounted. You know, so Kobach can fire .50 caliber rounds into the parade crowd whenever the whim takes him. ?
pamelabrown53
If any of you jackals have traveled to countries with young males sporting what looks like machine guns (they’re purportedly protecting the “tourists) then you may have experienced spine-tingling “creepy”. I don’t want my day-to-day life having that experience normalized.
P.S. This is basically a test comment. Mozilla Firefox won’t load Balloon Juice without incessant buffering which cannot be refreshed. First comment on Google Chrome.
Ruckus
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Not being of the same persuasion as KK, that of a complete racist asshole and economic moron, I’d say it’s pretty obvious what his intent is.
I’m going with “Vote for me or next time it will be a real gun. With bullets.”
YMMV
Celebrity Bowling
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in Kansas City, we shall fight on the two-lane county roads and over-passes, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the strip malls, we shall defend our suburbs, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the golf courses, we shall fight in the drive-thrus, we shall fight in the parking lots and in the left turn lanes, we shall fight in the Stuckey’s; we shall never surrender,
My apologies to Winston Churchill .
Ruckus
It’s back!
Somebody had to do it.
And it wasn’t me!
debbie
What an ass.
Ruckus
Dana,
They could have dropped the tailgate of the jeep, and stood on that. It’s what people with machine guns in Toyota’s do.
I’m not looking but I wonder if there is a kit to mount a machine gun in the back of a jeep or do you have to mfg your own?
zhena gogolia
Oh, Gawd, I’ve been to that church.
Mnemosyne
I really hope this backfires (recoils?) on Kobach. IIRC, he lost the last time he tried to run for statewide office, so this is most likely a bid for out-of-state donations so he can continue living the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed while pretending to campaign.
Ruckus
@debbie:
True, but he’s is continuing to push the envelop to not leave any doubt at all.
I think he’s succeeded.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
He does pretend to be human so pretending to campaign would be right up his alley.
CliosFanBoy
gives a new meaning to “Rat Patrol” doesn’t it/?
Another Scott
@Ruckus: You don’t really wonder, do you?
E.g.
Because, of course, why not???!!
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
CliosFanBoy
@Celebrity Bowling: Kansas City is not actually in Kansas….
MattF
Maybe it’s not widely known, but Kobach is an unapologetic fascist.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
I may be stupid but I’m not that stupid.
Someone has to get in on the ground floor of having actual military weapons mounted on civilian vehicles. There’s money to be made. And if money is your god then what better thing to worship to, than a death symbol?
Yutsano
I’m going to be looksist: Jesu Christe he’s getting fat.
oldgold
Today for the umpteenth time His Lowness misspelled counsel. This time rather than his usual ‘council,’ tRumpelthinskin spelled it ‘councel.’
The Hoarsewisperer as he/she so often does, nailed it.
@HoarseWisperer
While so many us hoped there would be an end to this long, brutal stalemate, Trump’s war with the word “counsel” rages on. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1003326698228764672 …
Without a liberal dose of humor each day, we have no chance of surviving this grim assault on our sanity.
Mnemosyne
@Another Scott:
“Non-military customers” = drug cartels. Great.
JCJ
@CliosFanBoy:
Well, Kansas City, Missouri isn’t. On the other hand Kansas City, Kansas might be…
Mike in NC
I hope Kobach’s middle name is something like Keith or Kevin. That way his campaign bumper sticker could read “I (Heart) KKK”.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Jesús Marimba… If Kansas doesn’t choose a Democrat over this clown this year, well, I guess there isn’t any hope at all left for that place.
SFAW
If there were such a thing as a Wise and Just God, there would be a mass-extinction event that would take out all the RWNJs, including KKKobach.
Fuck the tumbrels, I’m rooting for divine intervention. (Although a parade of tumbrels would probably be more satisfying.)
mark
I live in Washington State. Washington is an open carry state. I’m over 60 years of age. In all of my life I have never seen a good guy with a gun out patrolling in public.
Also, the history of the country shows that the white people with power are the tyrannical government. Gun’s are used to oppress minorities, not other white people.
Brachiator
All this talk about the proper way to mount a large gun is so sexual, and just underscores how much the gun nuts love their weapons.
Glad there was some pushback, but Republicans won’t listen. For them, happiness is a warm gun. Bang bang shoot shoot.
Elmo
Kris Kobach, man of the people, standing up against the effete Ivy League elitists who look down on plain Middle America farm folk.
Sorry! I forgot this detail – Kris Kobach (Harvard ‘88).
Another Scott
@Ruckus: Yup. Chasing the almighty dollar wherever it leads.
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
(“I knew it was a rhetorical question! ;-)”)
Ruckus
@CliosFanBoy:
There is a Kansas City in Kansas
There is a bigger Kansas City in Missouri.
The one in Missouri is 3 times the population of the one in Kansas, but the one in Kansas is still the third largest city in Kansas.
CliosFanBoy
isn’t that like being the third largest tree in North Dakota or the 3d tallest mountain in Florida? :)
Aleta
He should have been surrounded and taken down; that replica could have been real. He’s unstable and he’s got a court record, though he’s appealing.
Ruckus
@Mike in NC:
It isn’t. His middle initial is W. He can’t do anything correct. I wrote right the first time but that’s all he can do is right. As in RWA. For those who think I fucked this up, that’s Right Wing Asshole.
MomSense
I just can’t understand the inner workings of a person who would find that Kobach display appealing.
Ruckus
@CliosFanBoy:
Yes, yes it is.
Brachiator
@Elmo:
Holee shite. Dude went to Harvard, Oxford and then Yale Law School. An elitist trifecta.
He appears to believe that only white Protestants should govern, and that democracy is actually weakened by the participation of non-whites.
Jeffro
It’d be great to ‘trigger’ the wingnuts with something similar, only even more over the top…a monster jeep or SUV with a fake howitzer mounted on top, with “Republican Lie Detector” stenciled on the barrel. (Maybe “gerrymander THIS!” ?) Crewed by a trio of Occupy hippies or something. Just sit back and see them try and figure out which part to bash first.
The Pale Scot
@Mnemosyne: Rat Patrol! I guess you could fire a .5 backwards as you are running away
The .5 gun on jeep was for anti-aircraft purposes, normally a .3 gun could be carried and fired forward, if you were stationary. That is if blowing your drivers head off as you careen along a bumpy way was a concern.
Edit: And Clio and other’s I’m sure beat me to it, Let continue reading and find out
tamiasmin
“The gun is a replica,” Kobach spokeswoman Danedri Herbert said in a text message…
Replica is an odd word choice to defend this display. A replica is an exact copy of an original. DNA, for eample, replicates itself. So does Danedri mean that it was a working weapon?
Ruckus
@MomSense:
That’s because you weren’t born with a tiny little dick.
It’s a shame that men carry with them their entire lives. They grew up, their dicks don’t. And all those pictures online of men whose dicks did grow up, while they didn’t, doesn’t help the situation at all.
rikyrah
@Celebrity Bowling:
I love it?
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Appears?
It’s always easy to know what people like KK are, just remember RWA. Right Wing Asshole.
ETA I’m officially changing RWNJ to RWA. A nut job is just a nut, but an asshole is always an asshole.
CliosFanBoy
@Ruckus: A W is just a deceptive K…
Raoul
When 6 year old kids are scared that they’ll get shot at school, we’ve failed as a nation. Now, that ‘we’ is pointed most definitely at the fucking GOP, who are insane. But this has got to change. Starting this coming November.
Kay
Oh, good. I hope they keep this up. Point a giant fake weapon at 6 year olds in a parade, because you can.
That’ll show those chicken shit 1st graders who’s boss! What? The snowflakes will melt if some loony points a weapon at them? They should man up and be as tough as coddled, soft conservative lawyers – they fight with paper.
The risk of eye strain and paper cuts is real. We call them battlefield injuries.
pamelabrown53
@Brachiator: #38.
Obviously Kochach felt the interloper in “trifecta elite education” ( Harvard, Oxford and Yale). It’s his payback for not dealing with his own feelings of inadequacy. The irony is that instead of hurting the “elites”, he’s hurting everyone but.
Raoul
@pamelabrown53: Um, unfortunately, we can’t avoid it.
I traveled to Phoenix in 2012, when Arpaio was at his peak. Several thousand of us traveled to his tent jail by yellow bus, to protest. We were welcomed by 2A jackasses with assault style rifles standing on the sidewalks.
Or just go grocery shopping. We don’t need to visit other countries to be around this nonsense daily.
gbbalto
Was out in KCKS area a couple of months ago. Kobach’s billboards had the slogan “Consistent Conservative.” Have to admit he is consistent…
The Pale Scot
@Jeffro: @tamiasmin: The Merry Prankster’s schoolbus with a electric balloon blower
Ruckus
@SFAW:
You’re a Monty Python fan aren’t you?
Ruckus
@CliosFanBoy:
LOLLOL, thanks!
lamh36
So this reporter tweeted 4 days ago that he saw Melania. Folks have been asking him bout it so he’s been tweeting responses, but I’m sorry I don’t believe dude actually saw Melania, I just don’t trust Chump co not to use body doubles, oh and he dropped Kristin Welker from MSNBC’s name as the other reporter who saw her, but I didn’t see where Kristen Welker confirmed that?
https://twitter.com/eamonjavers/status/1001789353197260800?s=21
https://twitter.com/eamonjavers/status/1003301714794110977?s=21
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
Someone should have called the Kansas State Police and reported a nut in a Jeep with a machine gun.?
The Pale Scot
@MomSense:
If that person is 12 yrs old and grew up on a diet of Sgt Rock and the Howling Commandos Comic books…. Just insert what ever current violent media for comic book
WereBear
@MomSense: You haven’t been soaking in Faux News for years. That’s Spock-with-a-beard alternate universe.
oatler.
The cops have a record shooting black people who have toy guns, why wouldn’t they open fire on this…oh, wait.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Raoul:
I used to have a carry permit and packed a gun at times, usually when going out late or if I was carrying a large sum (to me) of money.
That said, I never felt the need to open carry at all, much less open carry an AR or AK as if I were patrolling Baghdad in 2004.
That guy’s a few fries short of a Happy Meal™, and probably shouldn’t be allowed to pack a water pistol, much less a rifle.?
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
RE: Kobach and white supremacy.
I meant that he studied under a professor at Harvard who believed it and wrote a scholarly paper on the subject. From the Wiki
Kobach has been a birther as well as an anti-immigrant bigot. It’s sad that anyone supports this guy. I’m so glad I don’t live in that state.
The Other Chuck
@tamiasmin: Pretty sure most people have accepted a non-computer definition of “replica”.
Of course, anyone want to lay odds on how far down the street anyone less blindingly white than KK would get with such a replica?
NotMax
@The Pale Scot
Head scratcher, still.
Some years back, plans were afoot for a Sgt. Rock movie, with…
wait
for
it
…Arnold Schwarzenegger cast as Sgt. Franklin John Rock.
Brachiator
@pamelabrown53:
He was so inadequate that he graduated Harvard summa cum laude and first in his department.
He was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to attend Oxford and was an editor of the Yale Law Review.
But I’m sure he sells himself to Kansas locals as a man of the people. And he bashed Obama as an out of touch Kenya born elitist.
And he loves his guns.
Mike in NC
Note the Under Armor logo on his blue polo shirt. Around here, for some reason the gun nuts all love that brand.
raven
@Ruckus: My niece’s HS graduation was at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium Friday.
Barbara
It’s like taking a large dog to a park where you know a lot of kids are afraid of dogs, most dogs in their life being kept for protection. It ruins their time playing in a park. I know someone who found that to be an amusing pasttime. I told him I thought it was mean, stupid and beneath him.
Steeplejack
@pamelabrown53:
Are you using the desktop or mobile version of the site? Which OS? (For some reason I presume Windows.)
If you’re using the desktop version of the site under Windows, you probably need to install Adblock Plus. If you have it installed, you need to manually edit it to block the reviled Connatix autoplay ad, which is likely the cause of a lot of your buffering.
Instructions here. Might need to adapt them somewhat if you are using a different browser and/or ad blocker.
WereBear
I don’t know about the “beneath him” part. Since scaring kids is pretty low.
Raoul
@CliosFanBoy: Kansas City, KS is an oddity. It was such a basketcase that it merged with Wyandotte County. Total population of the county is about 163K. Meanwhile, a lot of the white flight folks from both Kansas Cities migrated to Johnson County (where the ammo-moron Kobach had his little tiny parade float). Population now about 580K.
My now long gone grandparents were among the KCMO white-flighters, I’m sorry to say. Thankfully my cousins who are still around Johnson County all despise Brownback and the devolved, wretched KS G.O.P.
JaneE
I take Kobach’s ride as proof positive the GOP just wants to kill Americans.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@pamelabrown53:
I have. But they were cops in Charles DeGaulle Airport, so I was fine with it. Other things I’ve seen / had happen to me in CDG make me feel like the cops there are pretty good, on their toes and competent. Very different vibe from TSA, which is usually accurately described as “security theater”.
pamelabrown53
@Brachiator:
I’m not getting your point. IMHO it matters not the accolades he received from the institutions. Somehow, he hated his educational milieu and projected his hate onto those institutions and students.. While I have no way of verifying, my speculation is an overwhelming desire to fuck with them. More pathological than plain old hypocrisy.
Ruckus
@raven:
Great!
That’s about 4 blocks from where I’m sitting in my room right now. About 6 blocks from your Rose Parade seats.
Where is she going next? Haavard?
pamelabrown53
@Steeplejack:
Thanks. Desktop. Will download “Adblock Plus”. Truth be told, I just may need a new laptop. Old, trusty but OLD. It’s just I’ve read so many comments from others about problems with this site. Unfortunately, all the problems seem to pertain to this site.
Ruckus
@Barbara:
It was mean and stupid.
If he found it amusing and kept doing it, it wasn’t beneath him. It was exactly him.
Ruckus
@pamelabrown53:
How old?
Some of the really old stuff still works, after a fashion, but so many changes have been made in the last 6-8 yrs that a lot of things on the internet do not get along with old. And it is possible that you have some small glitch somewhere that is not obviously apparent but just chokes on something new. A lot of new sites expect you to have a lot of memory but depending on the age you might not have enough, it won’t be as fast as todays and it won’t handle the incoming fast or well enough and you get issues. As well the sites keep adding autoplay stuff, like the video of people walking down the street, just below Cole’s twitter feed. It isn’t much but if your computer is overloaded, that’s one more thing that does it.
Brachiator
@pamelabrown53:
Isn’t it simpler to believe that he is a bigot and racist who believes that institutions should only be for white people? And that he appeals to dopes who believe the same thing?
He found a professor and mentor who believed that. And I’ve known people who believe that elite institutions should exclude anyone who is not WASP.
For Kobach, anyone who is not white is the interloper.
I guess he could be a high achieving fraud, but where is the evidence of that, and how would that be significant?
pamelabrown53
@Ruckus: #78.
Thanks for replying. I believe my laptop (a Toshiba) was purchased a little more than 5 years ago. While my spose replaces all her gear every couple of years, I’m reluctant to just spend the money. Hell, my car is 13 years old and I’ve kept it running beautifully. However, my computer skills are so lagging that I’m not sure what is the best path forward.
pamelabrown53
@Brachiator:
Possibly. Maybe I’m indulging in psychological naval gazing instead of considering the law of parsimony.
WereBear
@pamelabrown53: The roads have not changed much in 13 years. In the last five, the Internet, has.
Brachiator
@pamelabrown53:
Ha! OK.
BTW, there are quite a few evangelicals who believe that parsimony should be outlawed. ;)
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Autoplay crap is the bane of the Internets. One ad appearing here had an x to de-select it, but if you choose the x you immediately got redirected. Elsewhere, I ran into a site that asked you to allow notifications. The pop up box ignored you if you selected “no thanks.” But crap like this and sites that are memory hogs don’t care if they ruin your Internet experience.
Rant off.
NotMax
@pamelabrown53
Whatever floats yer boat, so to speak..
;)
No Drought No More
Sure, it’s a theme.
Moreover, it’s a theme that evolves, in the sense that a sick torturer has recently been chosen above all others to run the CIA. Chosen by sick people, and goddamn them all for disgracing this country in doing so, too. The senate democrats that supported her nomination are worse than sick. It doesn’t matter, at all, what good they might do in their their lives. They turned in their cards as decent human beings with that vote, and should be ran out of the party. Fuck ALL the sick bastards, but especially them.
Lest We Forget: fifteen years ago, the theme was “Big Lie War”. Just how those in power then that supported that infamous war crime sleep at night nowadays is beyond me. Still, not a peep of genuine remorse has yet to be uttered by any single one of them. To the best of my knowledge, not a single one of them has yet to publicly acknowledge the Bush-Cheney plot to war as being such. To some of them, to will always remain, conveniently enough, an honest “mistake” committed by honest people. To the others it will remain a point of continuing pride that the war came because they launched it.
“Take what you have gathered from coincidence”.
opiejeanne
@CliosFanBoy: Yes, Kansas City spills over from the Missouri side into Kansas.
Mnemosyne
@pamelabrown53:
That’s because his real aim is to show the elites that he is too one of them, because he’s just as dedicated to hurting the poor and helpless as they are.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Found a great use for Safari. If you go to Safari preferences, websites, auto play, you can click on Never Auto Play anything. And what do you know, it works!
I used to use FF exclusively and then a couple or three upgrades ago they fucked the pooch and it is now almost useless. Chrome isn’t all that bad but I find that it doesn’t handle display issues all that well. OK it sucks. For example if you open a couple of tabs from the same site it will zoom in or out both of them when you only want one zoomed. But Safari has been great so far, I’ve been using it for 3-4 months now. Yes I have go look for some things, like that auto play thing but it’s there and as I said, it works.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Is there an Android version?
Or are you talking about desktop?
I’ve been moving from Firefox to Brave for mobile. So far, so good, although I like Firefox for other features.
Ruckus
@pamelabrown53:
5-6 yrs ago is a lifetime in computers. Especially if it was a model that had been around for a while prior to you buying. I had a rather nice company laptop but in 3 yrs it was way out of date. These days that timeline has been stretched because electronics are getting to the limits of what we know how to do physically and economically and we made a huge amount of changes/improvements in the last 20 yrs. But over the last few years software has gotten bigger/slower at about the same rate as computers have gotten faster/more memory/more faster storage. Not all that long ago we didn’t need really fast computer communications because the computer couldn’t handle it. My ex landlord was a secure IP provider for cities/county governments and they told me that they were amazed at the speed improvements in server/communications that when the bought the building they had intended to build 2 server rooms but by the time they got the first one finished speeds/storage space had doubled and all they had to do was exchange their servers and not spend a dime building out the second room.
IOW it may be your computer. Your car can be kept running for longer because while the technology has improved, it hasn’t obsoleted everything before it. But at some point it won’t be economically worth fixing your car, you’ll have to buy another.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Mac desktop. I use Android phone and use FF on private window to avoid the ads, and Chrome for everything else. But the phone is maybe 5% of my internet time so I’m not so worried about finding the perfect solutions for my issues. Just workable ones.
I’ve heard about this Brave browser, I’ll have to check it out.
The Other Chuck
@Steeplejack: I recommend Ghostery, which identifies the various ad networks and allows you to block them with a single click. Connatix is one of them it identifies. You can always run it with another adblocker, though I’ve found little need to.
Celebrity Bowling
@rikyrah:
Occasionally I get a little wood on the ball.
It was worth it for the discussion of the two Kansas City’s in question.