Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Let there be snark.

We’re not going back!

Thanks for reminding me that Van Jones needs to be slapped.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickle?”

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

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You are here: Home / Civil Rights / LGBTQ Rights / LGBTQ Rights Are Human Rights / Monday Morning Open Thread: Keep Fighting (As If We Had A Choice)

Monday Morning Open Thread: Keep Fighting (As If We Had A Choice)

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… The massive Pride Month gathering marked a show of defiance this weekend in a state where librarians have been pulling gay-themed books off the shelves, teachers are no longer allowed to discuss gender identity or sexual orientation and many LGBTQ families feel under attack. Organizers said reservations at the host hotel came in slower than normal. One event — the Taste of Gay Days — was scratched after restaurateurs voiced concerns.

But the show did go on. Rainbow-hued merchandise designed by Disney — including a plush Mickey Mouse waving a Pride flag — flew off the shelves almost as quickly as it could be restocked. Drag queen bingo was held. In the end, all 1,001 rooms at the host hotel were booked, though Gay Days chief executive Joseph Clark said travel warnings from civil rights and equality groups advising against travel to Florida had impacted turnout.

“For some it’s the safety aspect, for others, they don’t want to spend money in a state that doesn’t support them,” Clark said. “My message has been, ‘We need your help here in Florida.’”

Gay Days at Disney began three decades ago to bring together LGBTQ people and families in an environment where they felt included rather than marginalized. While the entertainment giant doesn’t sponsor the event, it has welcomed hundreds of thousands of Gay Days visitors through the years, making it one of the nation’s largest Pride Month events. Travelers dress in red shirts to identify themselves while at the theme parks. There is also an LGBTQ expo, pool parties and a Miss Gay Days pageant contest at other venues nearby.

“The birth of Gay Days was really about being visible at a time when it was dangerous to be visible,” said Brandon Wolf, communications director for Equality Florida. “The same is true now.”…

For the most part, the event looked and felt like it had in years prior — with some exceptions. The “Taste of Gay Days” was scaled back after the “current political climate” sparked concern from a “large group of our restaurant partners,” the organization announced in a Facebook post.

“Though we adamantly tried to recruit additional vendors, it became clear that we would be unable to provide the exceptional experience that our guests have come to expect,” the group wrote.

Events like bingo and pool parties took place outside of Walt Disney World, but inside the Magic Kingdom and Disney’s other theme parks, Gay Days visitors filled lines for rides and souvenir shops — one visitor, dressed in a T-shirt with the words “Don’t Say DeSantis.”…

Rights activists said it’s significant that Disney continues to embrace the event. The company is hosting the annual Out & Equal Workplace Summit, billed as “the largest LGBTQ+ workplace equality event in the world,” in September.

“It says something that Disney has been unwilling to kowtow to DeSantis and his brand of authoritarianism,” said Wolf, the communications director with Equality Florida. “I think that Disney’s refusal to be bullied into submission is a good reminder to others that in this moment, there is no negotiating with people like Ron DeSantis.”…

“We’re being targeted by politicians, but our community is still strong,” Couick said. “We’re here to have fun, but we’re also here to say we’re standing up for ourselves.”

Reader Interactions

189Comments

  1. 1.

    Steeplejack

    Possibly of interest:

    I will be spamming everywhere for her—do you have space in your heart and home for a truly angelic, quiet, loving older dog, esp in the Philly area? My dms are open. Other than being underweight she is perfectly healthy and about 6 years old. Pls reach out!!
    https://t.co/PX2S01oSDj

    — 💫 pro abortion anti cop 💫 (@queenozymandias) May 29, 2023

  2. 2.

    Baud

    NBC News was pitching the idea that the knives were out for Trump in the GOP field, but in all the clips they showed, none of the other candidates dared mention Trump by name.

  4. 4.

    AWOL

    It was good seeing so many NY Mets fascists (Trump crony Keith Hernandez; the putrid and proud reactionary Al Leiter), being inducted into the team’s HOF with the giant Coca-Cola’s gay pride sign in right field.  (I know, it’s just Corporatism.)

     

    In almost every video and every photo they’ll have of the event, a rainbow flag will nullify them and the monsters they befriend and vote for.

  5. 5.

    Geminid

    Maryland Rep. Jaime Raskin was featured in a long article in yesterday’s Washington Post, titled “Jaime Raskin beat cancer twice. Now he turns to his political future.”

    Raskin is deciding whether to enter the primary to succeed retiring Senator Ben Cardin

  7. 7.

    Matt McIrvin

    The egregious dishonesty of the position “we were all fine with gay rights until this moment, but we have to shut it all down because the trans and the drag are going TOO FAR” makes my blood boil. But it seems to be the actual talking point going around.

  8. 8.

    Kay

    Yet another poll showing actual parents of public school students don’t agree with political media and Christopher Rufo/Ron DeSantis:

    The latest NPR/Ipsos polls – one among K-12 teachers and one among the general public, with an oversample of parents of school-aged kids – find that Americans generally trust teachers to make decisions about classroom curriculum, but they are divided on who should be primarily responsible for decisions on what is taught in public schools. For the most part, though, Americans oppose book bans and restrictions on discussions surrounding gender, sexuality, race, or racism in the classroom. In the wake of recent curriculum restrictions and book bans in some states, these NPR/Ipsos polls reveal that problems with teacher shortages in addition to overworked and underpaid educators largely overshadow politicized concerns over what is taught in K-12 schools.

    75% say teachers are trusted professionals who should be trusted to make decisions about classroom curriculum.
    All thru the pandemic and the CRT/gay panic, polls on public schools have been rock steady. They’re nearly identical to polling conducted pre pandemic and pre CRT/gay panic(s).

    Democrats can run pro public education and win. They already are.

  9. 9.

    Jeffro

    @Baud:NBC News was pitching the idea that the knives were out for Trump in the GOP field, but in all the clips they showed, none of the other candidates dared mention Trump by name.

    Yup.  It’s irritating beyond belief.  ASK THEM, snooze media!  Ask the GOP candidates: “If it comes down to you and trump on the final debate stage, what’s your pitch to Republican voters?  Why should they choose you over him?”

    Or, hell, just make them say it: “Candidate X, would you please name all of the other GOP candidates for president this year?”

  15. 15.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Sorry I missed the garden chat yesterday, I went fishing. Wanted to say thanx for all the compliments.

  16. 16.

    Jeffro

    @Kay: I love the “parents still want some say in their child’s education” part.  Are y’all KIDDING me?  Public school students’ parents have plenty of “say”, thank you.

    What they don’t get to do is dictate other kids’ educations by depriving them of accurate history or a well-stocked library.

    Join the 21st century or get back in your caves, MAGA.

  19. 19.

    Baud

    @Jeffro:

    Candidate X, would you please name all of the other GOP candidates for president this year?”

     

    DeSantis, Haley, Scott, Hutchinson, Ramaswamy, and He Who Shall Not Be Named.

  20. 20.

    wenchacha

    Hey, Chuck Todd finally leaving Press the Meat! Kristen Welker replaces him. I hope she does better than Chuck and Tim.

  21. 21.

    Kay

    @rikyrah:

    COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 3 – Proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage increased the turnout of socially conservative voters in many of the 11 states where the measures appeared on the ballot on Tuesday, political analysts say, providing crucial assistance to Republican candidates including President Bush in Ohio and Senator Jim Bunning in Kentucky.
    But the ballot measures also appear to have acted like magnets for thousands of socially conservative voters in rural and suburban communities who might not otherwise have voted, even in this heated campaign, political analysts said. And in tight races, those voters — who historically have leaned heavily Republican — may have tipped the balance.
    In Ohio, for instance, political analysts credit the ballot measure with increasing turnout in Republican bastions in the south and west, while also pushing swing voters in the Appalachian region of the southeast toward Mr. Bush. The president’s extra-strong showing in those areas compensated for an extraordinarily large Democratic turnout in Cleveland and in Columbus, propelling him to a 136,000-vote victory.

  22. 22.

    Jeffro

    @rikyrah: I seriously want to see them pretending not to remember trump’s name.

    “Sure I can name all the other candidates, Jake.  There’s Mr. Ramaswamy, Mr. Hutchinson, Ms. Haley, Mr. Scott, and…and…yeah, I think that’s about it.”

    (Jake lets it pass)

    (Or maybe Jake doesn’t?)

    “Governor DeSantis, I think you’re forgetting one prominent candidate – a certain ex-president who’s leading you in the polls?”

    “Jake, that’s exactly the kind of ‘gotcha’ question I’d expect from you and I’m not going to play that DC insider game…”

     

    I don’t really care what Jake does, as long as he ASKS THE QUESTION.

  25. 25.

    Chris T.

    @Baud:

    NBC News was pitching the idea that the knives were out for Trump in the GOP field, but in all the clips they showed, none of the other candidates dared mention Trump by name.

    They’re stealthy, silent, unnamed knives!

  26. 26.

    Kay

    @Jeffro:

    NPR sort of desperately spinning that 75% result. That’s not even the worst number for Rufo and DeSantis, though. This is:

    When it comes to politicians, though, fewer than one in ten Americans and K-12 parents alike say federal legislators (8% and 7%, respectively) or state legislators (6% and 8%, respectively) should be primarily responsible for what is taught in public schools.

  28. 28.

    Quinerly

    Manchin is sure playing coy. Thoughts about his truly being serious on a third party run?

  29. 29.

    BruceFromOhio

    “I think that Disney’s refusal to be bullied into submission is a good reminder to others that in this moment, there is no negotiating with people like Ron DeSantis.”

    There is no negotiating with people who vote for people like Ron DeSantis, either.

  30. 30.

    sab

    Frank LaRose, Ohio Sec of State, says the August Proposition 1 (to limit voters right to amend the state comstitution) is too about abortion. If Prop 1 passes we will never be able to roll back the six week abortion ban. He likes that.

  31. 31.

    p.a.

    Q#1 for each and every Rethug candidate at every level should be some version of “Is Donald tRump being honest about the 2020 election?”

  32. 32.

    Baud

    Christie is supposed to announce this week. Say what you will about him, but he should be willing go after Trump directly.

  33. 33.

    SFAW

    @wenchacha:

    Hey, Chuck Todd finally leaving Press the Meat!

    The mind is a funny thing.

    When my eyes skimmed over the Ben Smith tweet, I initially read “@chucktodd” as “@chuckhold,” which I thought was an interesting neologism.

  36. 36.

    Kay

    @p.a.:

    In terms of the Presidential though, it’s probably better if they don’t ask it in the primary because Biden’s team will ask it a lot in the general, when they’re stuck with the nominee.

    So CNN and Jake Tapper lobbing softballs at Nikki Haley is actually good for us, this one time.

  37. 37.

    Ken

    @Baud: none of the other candidates dared mention Trump by name.

    Trump as Voldemort, or Hastur? I don’t see it. Especially since merely declaring as a candidate will be enough to draw his ire.

  39. 39.

    SFAW

    @p.a.: ​
     
    And every Rethug politician will answer that one, right after they answer “do gay and trans people have the right to exist without being persecuted for being who they are?”

  41. 41.

    mrmoshpotato

    Want to piss-off the homophobes and anti-trans weirdos??

     

    Remind them that The Rocky Horror Picture Show is owned by 20th Century FOX & 20th Century FOX is now owned by Disney. So Dr. Frank N. Furter, thar Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania, is a Disney Princess.

    LMAO!  Bravo!

  43. 43.

    Kay

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:

    It’s back! It’s actually worse than 2004.

    Look at this slimeball blame trans kids for girls contemplating suicide:

    Abby D. Phillip
    @abbydphillip

    ·11h

    Nikki Haley discussing trans girls in kids sports: “How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker room. And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year.”

     

    Multimillionaire Jake Tapper stands there like a potted plant as she spouts this hatred. She lied thru the whole town hall- another journalistic triumph for the grossly overpaid CNN stars.

  45. 45.

    sab

    @SFAW: Not good. Now he will be NBCs political director. I don’t think it is a demotion

    ETA Sorry you are right and I was wrong. He is leaving both jobs. He will stay on as a political analyst.

  50. 50.

    mrmoshpotato

    The lack of discussion around Trump’s age and his mental health has been absolute journalistic malpractice.

    Shout it from every rooftop, top of every staircase, standing on every chair!

  51. 51.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: People figured out that “parental rights” means “the most tightassed puritan bigot in the district gets to make the decisions about what every parent’s kids learn”.

  53. 53.

    Quinerly

    @JPL:

    Thanks for making me think of my parents…And you know why. BTW, you sound kinda like my mother in later years. She blamed GWB for making her foul mouthed in her 80’s.

  54. 54.

    oatler

    They’re so whole-hog against drag they seem ready to sacrifice money, power and kinship, as if something was flogging them into battle against their will.

  56. 56.

    RaflW

    Since this is a rights open thread, it appears as if Ron DeSantis is using FL taxpayer money to do another immigrant flight stunt(nyt). Given that he’s planning a campaign stop in Sacramento in a couple weeks, isn’t using FL funds to fly immigrants from Texas to Sacramento(voa) trafficking, using FL funds for non-Florida issues, and using taxpayer money for a campaign talking point?

    I don’t know ho much of a case CA A.G. Rob Bonta can bring, but I hope he is as aggressive as the law allows.

  57. 57.

    Kay

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:

    You can tell none of them prep at all on abortion. They don’t push back at all on the lies because they have no earthly idea about the laws around abortion, either pre Dobbs or post Dobbs.

    They have a huge staff. They can’t have the lackeys do some reading and give them bullet points? Itwould take ten minutes.

    It’s womens health and lives so really they just go with their gut, because who really cares?

  59. 59.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I don’t want to forget that this wasn’t just the Right. There was and is a whole cottage industry of supposed “liberals” and “Leftists” who eagerly promoted and cashed in on these panics.

    The NYTimes has two full time CRT/trans/cancel culture panic promoters on the payroll. It wasn’t just Rufo and DeSantis.

  61. 61.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    Why don’t they know the Casey framework? It’s not that hard. Jake Tapper makes 13 million dollars a year. Can he possibly read a newspaper article on pre Dobbs and post Dobbs 10 minutes before hosting a Nikki Haley campaign event?

  63. 63.

    Cameron

    Even some of the local governments in Florida are getting sick of the DeSantis schtick.  As they have in the past, bridges in St. Pete and Sarasota were lit up in rainbow colors at night to celebrate Pride; I think I saw an item that the mayors of both St. Pete and Tampa made formal (and supporting) announcements.

    And all is not lost on the educational front!  After turning New College of Florida into the Theophilus Lee Sawbuck Bible A & M, TPTB gave the school what it’s been yearning for for so long – an official mascot and an athletic department!  Suck it, wokealists!  We’re so out-‘n-proud anti-woke, we’re zombies!  Haw, haw, haw (snort).

  64. 64.

    mrmoshpotato

    @sab:

    Sorry you are right and I was wrong. He is leaving both jobs. He will stay on as a political analyst. 

    Oh goody!  Chuckles can suck at that job too, just like Matthew Dowd did at ABC!

  65. 65.

    Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride

    @Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride: On the other hand, some things are true constants in our system.  Even after another 20 years, I don’t expect to see a Jew get any closer to the White House than our current Second Gentleman.  That far, at least, we’re still a “Christian nation.”

  66. 66.

    Kay

    @sab:

    The sad, remaining shreds of local Ohio news reporters have done a good job on covering this. Especially admirable because they are paid very little compared to cable tv hosts and national “prestige” news, who barely cover womens health, agency and autonomy at all.

  67. 67.

    phdesmond

    from Heather Cox Richardson today:

    Last week [De Santis] told an audience that “the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. We will make woke ideology leave it to the dustbin of history; it’s gone.”

    But DeSantis’s speech was a perversion of the real speech on which he based it. . . .

  68. 68.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    I just finished reading Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, a near future dystopia. A set of laws called PACT (Protecting American Culture and Traditions, I think) has been enacted. Among the punishments for wrong-thinking is having your children removed from a “dangerous” environment. It made me think of Florida defining gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse that calls for child removal.

    In the author’s note at the end, Ng does not mention that law because it came after she wrote the book. Indeed, she says that some of the things she imagined for the book had come to pass by the time she was done. She does talk about indigenous children and family separation at the border.

  69. 69.

    Kay

    @Cameron:

    I would think it is just generally bad for Florida’s image to be grim and sour and hateful like DeSantis and the religious Right. Florida is supposed to be fun and loose and easy.

  71. 71.

    RaflW

    @wenchacha: I’d never heard of Welker (I don’t watch broadcast TV). She at least might bring some shifts in personal experience and perspective…
    “Welker’s father is white and her mother is black. She attended Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia & graduated magna cum laude from Harvard w/ a Bachelor of Arts in American history.”

  72. 72.

    Sanjeevs

    But Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times.

     

    Mr. Musk has said Twitter was on track to post $3 billion in revenue in 2023, down from $5.1 billion in 2021, when it was a public company.

     

    In March, Mr. Musk said the company was worth $20 billion, down more than 50 percent from the $44 billion he paid for it. Last week, the mutual funds giant Fidelity, which owns shares in Twitter, valued the company at $15 billion.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sales-musk.html

    Call me cynical but somehow I doubt that a company with a current run rate of 1 billion a year  in sales  ( and declining rapidly) is going to do 3 billion in sales this year. And Fidelity’s valuation is missing a decimal point.

  74. 74.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    Re recurring panics, remember the panic around Dungeons and Dragons? When my son was maybe 11, he went to a daycamp where one thing you could sign up for was Role Play Gaming. He loved D&D, so I signed him up. The camp called me to warn me that RPG meant D&D. Apparently, some parents didn’t know that and were very concerned, about what I don’t know.

  75. 75.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @mrmoshpotato: Churchill’s “We will fight them on the beaches….” speech.  That speech was on June 4, 1940.  Do we think that someone looked up the date?

  77. 77.

    sab

    @Kay: Plain Dealer has been on fire about it. Akron Beacon Journal not so much, but they are now Gannett owned so I am not surprised.

  78. 78.

    OzarkHillbilly

    Father of teen killed in Alabama mass shooting: ‘America is tearing itself down’

    “These kids didn’t know when they walked into a Sweet 16 party that people were going to shoot. Every shooting is random,” Collins said.

    Collins said he was also pondering the conditions that led to the shooting: “How did we get to this point? How did this happen? These six [people arrested] were young Black people. What happened in their lives and homes? What economic or educational disadvantages did they face? I lost my son, but those six others lost their lives, too. Somewhere along the line something broke. I mourn for all of them.”

    Collins has been in a state of disbelief since his son’s death.

    He is pained by seeing LSU signs, a reminder of the future his son was denied. Most days, he has a hard time eating or sleeping. He tries to take deep breaths when anxiety and grief overwhelms him, but it doesn’t always work. He prays the days will become easier, but he’s not sure they will. “I want my joy back.”

    He had planned a surprise party for Marsiah’s 20th birthday in September. He still wants to do the celebration, even if his son won’t be there.

    Much more at the link.

  79. 79.

    Kay

    You guys should see automakers ramping up on EV’s. I’ve never seen anything like it in Ohio and Michigan. They are going to crush Tesla. Elon Musk is not going to know what hit him.

  81. 81.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @Quinerly: Good that the article opined that “where woke goes to die” reminds of the Pulse massacre and Jim Crow. Who couldn’t come up with “where woke goes to sleep”?

  82. 82.

    Kay

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    My oldest son still plays D and D. He took his little girl to see “Peppa the Pig” (Denmark) a live kids show with a big crowd. He said “she hated it” and sent me a pix of her back retreating up a staicase. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree! He would sit with his arms crossed at kids events when he was a kid. All he was lacking was a watch to check.

  83. 83.

    RaflW

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Was this in the early 80s? I remember my mom expressing some concern that I played D&D with a couple friends occasionally (we did what we called “Monte Hall” adventures, ie completely unserious and involving zonks and ridiculous choices. My best friend’s character was called Slippery Jim diGriz, from the Stainless Steel Rat series of comic SF books by Harry Harrison).

    Anyway, the scare as I recall it was that some small handful of teen boy suicides were allegedly blamed on the kid’s character, built up and run for months or years in extensive, serious game scenarios, having died in the dungeon. Looking back, it’s about as credible as kids deciding to smoke pot because they played a Beatles song backwards.

    Kids killing themselves is awful, and casting about for answers is understandable. But D&D wasn’t it, to my thinking anyway.

  85. 85.

    Soprano2

    @Baud: If the knives were really out for TFG, the Republican poobahs would have had a smoke-filled back room meeting to decide who was the one person to run against him, and then there would only be one person running in opposition to him. Instead, they’re doing the exact same thing they did in 2016, I guess because they can’t help themselves, and TFG will win all of the winner-take-all primaries. Then they’ll all shrug and say “I don’t know how that happened again, we ran all these great candidates!”

  86. 86.

    Kay

    @sab:

    I thought it was great how they caught them all lying. I mean, everyone knew it was about blocking the public will on abortion but it’s important that Republicans get caught admitting it.

    More and more I’m convinced that all cable news is bad. It’s all junk. People say getting news online makes for dispirited Democrats but the biggest handwringers among Democrats locally are older people who watch a lot of cable.

  87. 87.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay: I remember the “labor leftist” commenter on TPM who showed up on every gay-rights thread complaining that “silly lesbian-rights liberals” had ruined everything for the rest of us. And that was a theme in the whole Bernie Sanders movement too, that we could somehow get back the white working-class male vote by cooling it on cultural stuff, this included.

  88. 88.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Kay: My son now plays computer games. Often he’s online with one or more of his friends at the same time, which I think disrupts the idea of video games as isolating.

    @RaflW: Mid-80s. I remember that suicide story too. The panic is the point, really. Some people enjoy being in a panic, and powerful people can use that. Which actually is the point of the Celeste Ng book I just finished.

  89. 89.

    Soprano2

    @Matt McIrvin: Especially because at the same time they totally ignore all of the conservative authority figures nationwide who have been arrested for the exact same thing they say gay/trans people are doing, “grooming” and sexually abusing children! I guess they didn’t read the part of that Bible they thump that talks about removing the mote from your own eye.

  90. 90.

    Kay

    Sherrod is coming out for a campaign event this week- at the UAW hall. I’m making calls to get people there.

  91. 91.

    zhena gogolia

    Here’s my letter to the NYT if I still wrote them:

    I see that you are continuing your “dog bites man” series of front-page articles conveying the important news that President Biden is old. It may not be newsworthy, but it is a master class in ageism and ableism. Your writers would have had a field day with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Just think, you might have helped us lose World War II!

    The analogy is apt, because this is our generation’s struggle against fascism, and you are not on the right side.

    I look forward to your extended series of front-page articles on the age and obvious mental and physical infirmities of the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

  92. 92.

    RaflW

    @Baud: What I will say about Chris Christie is that he is largely unemployable at this point in his career. Running for the WH with his popularity (ha!) has got to be about having something to do for the next year, and being able to raise & spend campaign funds so he can get hotel rooms and 3 squares a day. And, of course, like any has-been politician, he’ll get some screen time. No doubt he craves that.

  93. 93.

    gene108

    @Kay:

    75% say teachers are trusted professionals who should be trusted to make decisions about classroom curriculum.
    All thru the pandemic and the CRT/gay panic, polls on public schools have been rock steady. They’re nearly identical to polling conducted pre pandemic and pre CRT/gay panic(s).

    Pretty much everyone has a K-12 education and pretty much everyone thinks they turned out fine. At some level, if education was as bad as the critics make it out to be, most folks would seriously be regretting their lot in life.

  94. 94.

    Ken

    @Kay:  fewer than one in ten … say … state legislators (6% and 8%, respectively) should be primarily responsible for what is taught in public schools.

    Well, good news then, since the state legislators aren’t taking any responsibility for curriculum at all. They’re just authorizing any person — not even necessarily a parent, or resident of the district — to remove any book or program they don’t like.

  95. 95.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: The D&D moral panic was the basis of an infamous TV movie starring a very young Tom Hanks.

    If I recall correctly, the kid in the actual story turned out to be suicidal for unrelated reasons, possibly having to do with his being gay and subject to homophobia. If anything D&D was an outlet for coping.

  96. 96.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: OMG, I guarantee you that has NOTHING to do with why girls contemplate suicide. He just let that slide completely? Holy cow….

  97. 97.

    Kay

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    which I think disrupts the idea of video games as isolating.

    I like board games and (I think) I am good at them so I get those fantasy games to some extent (whether online or in real life) but the shooting and killing video games turn me off completely.

  98. 98.

    RaflW

    @Soprano2: As I’ve opined before, all the wild accusations about HRC ppl and children in the (nonexistent) basement of the pizza joint, and all the other wild accusations about ‘grooming’ are not so much projection as they are a fog machine that lets the real abusers on the conservative side be blended into a false swirl of ‘there’s so many bad people!’ ‘bah on politics!’ narrative.

    Accusing one’s foes is actually part of setting the stage to have room to do the grooming and abusing themselves, whereas my understanding of projection is that it’s an unintended tell.

  99. 99.

    Kay

    @Soprano2:

    Isn;t it just appalling? What a fucking nasty thing to say. And she’s such a rehearsed phony you know she prepared it and 5 staffers also reviewed it.

    She should get additional training with what to do with her hands. She looks like a crazy person waving her hands around. They have so much trouble approximating “normal person” – she’s as much a weirdo as DeSantis.

  100. 100.

    Soprano2

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Boy, can’t you absolutely see Republicans trying to pass a law like that? They know they are losing the culture war, and they are desperate to make their culture dominant by any means available.

  101. 101.

    sab

    @RaflW: I graduated high school in 1972. By the time I was 30 more of my former high school classmates had died from suicide than automobile accidents. In retrospect, I think most of the suicides I had known were were gay kids afraid to come out. So Haley’s “solution”  certainly won’t help. But of course she doesn’t care.

  102. 102.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Kay: Me too. I used to play adventure games online–the kind where you have to find the key, unlock the room, follow the map, etc. Those were pretty much solo games, as I recall.

  103. 103.

    Jeffro

    @Kay:More and more I’m convinced that all cable news is bad. It’s all junk. People say getting news online makes for dispirited Democrats but the biggest handwringers among Democrats locally are older people who watch a lot of cable.

    There is something about the always-“breaking news” on cable news channels that fries the brain, I think.

    And I’m sure someone, somewhere did the research behind Fox’s couple-a-times-an-hour “breaking news” gong/bell.  Just enough to keep you on the edge of madness.  Hard to employ that critical thinking when watching tv AND getting ‘gonged’ every 20 minutes.

  104. 104.

    BlueGuitarist

    @Kay:

    Democrats: the
    pro-public education
    pro-public health
    pro-public safety
    party

    For freedom and equality, a better economy and environment

  105. 105.

    brendancalling

    I had a show yesterday in downtown Philly, ground zero for Pride celebrations. It was an awesome day. Everyone was out (and out) and about, having a lovely time.

  107. 107.

    Soprano2

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: OMG, we had a murder trial here where a man was charged with killing his wife and children. The case fell apart because the person at a convenience store between here and Lake of the Ozarks who claimed to have seen the man buying gas on the night in question actually didn’t work on that night; the prosecution forgot to do something simple, like check actual payroll records. Anyway, one thing the prosecution tried to do was prove that the defendant was violent because he played a violent character in Dungeons and Dragons! I swear, they should have withdrawn the charges after the massive fuckup on the convenience station employee, to preserve the case for later. The guy was acquitted.

  111. 111.

    cain

    @Kay: ​
     
    Wait till she finds out that there are girls who like girls in the bathroom! We need to eliminate bathrooms and bodily functions they are harming our kids.

  113. 113.

    Matt McIrvin

    @cain: Long before there were panics about trans people in public restrooms there were panics about gay people in public restrooms (and locker rooms, etc.)

  117. 117.

    sab

    @cain: A lot of their side thinks girls shouldn’t have locker rooms or sports at all. It’s unladylike.

  118. 118.

    Soprano2

    @Chris T.: He might have been innocent, I think no one knows except him. After they lost the convenience store employee’s testimony, the prosecution’s case was so weak it was embarrassing. I have been told that they probably didn’t charge all the deaths just so in the future they could charge him again with that one, but I can’t imagine that they could ever get a conviction unless something absolutely incriminating turned up. DNA was useless because the murders happened in his house; evidently they didn’t find DNA from anyone except the family members in the house. It was a gruesome crime because one of the children was under a year old; people were braying for them to charge someone, which is why I think they charged him with such shaky evidence.

  121. 121.

    Redshift

    @RaflW: True, it’s designed to short-circuit debate by making an accusation so horrible that it’s uncomfortable to be defending against it.

    But it’s also a retread of the older appeal to change-phobic conservatives (but I repeat myself), “there weren’t any gay (and now trans) people around when I grew up, so they must be brainwashing kids to make them that way!” It’s ludicrous, but more comfortable to believe than the truth that they were there and forced to live in the closet and you were part of that.

  122. 122.

    Kay

    @cain:

    The first “out” gay kid in our local (very conservative) public high school was a girl. Both her parents were police officers, which I think protected her from rabid, vicious conservative adults :)

    The kids were fine wth it. It was just hateful, narrow adults like Nikki Haley who freaked out.

  124. 124.

    Eunicecycle

    @cain: my daughter says she’s more afraid to send her son to the men’s bathroom by himself than she is of a trans woman in her bathroom. I thought this was a good point.

  125. 125.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Quinerly: Manchin is sure playing coy. Thoughts about his truly being serious on a third party run?

    Less serious than contingent. He has four options in play:

    1. File for re-election and take the chance that Jim Justice forcibly retires his shag-carpet ass;
    2. File for Governor once Justice files for Senate on the grounds it’ll be an easier lift vs a no-name;
    3. Drift off into the sunset with his Maserati lashed to the deck of his houseboat; or
    4. Run for POTUS on some bullshit No-Liables ticket hoping to squeeze some goodies out of the Democratic Party to induce him to pull the plug, claiming (with some justification) that he’s really a good Democrat** and doesn’t want to get in his good friend President Uncle Joe’s way

    IMO he’s gonna wet several statistical-survey fingers & hold them up into the wind before he decides which way to jump…but until he needs to, why not leave all of them up in the air?

    ** All yinz Manchin-haters out there oughta suck it up & admit that we are not likely to see anyone anywhere near as solid a Democrat in that seat for probably the rest of the frackin’ century, epi-pens & all.

  128. 128.

    Soprano2

    @Redshift: It’s a variation of the “people have changed” argument I hear all the time for why things now are supposedly worse than they were in the past, usually when the person was young. I ALWAYS push back against this stupidity, because I am a firm believer that human nature doesn’t change. My main argument is “These things were there and happening, but because we didn’t have the internet and 24-hour cable news they weren’t in your face all the time”. If you look through old newspapers you see lots of stories about crime, for example, but it was something you read about on a sheet of paper that happened far away, not something where there was video and colorful news reporting right away. The only things nationwide that people knew about were big news, like the Lindberg baby kidnapping; people never knew about most of the crime that happened in places where they didn’t live. Now, we see that stuff all the time, so it makes us think it’s a lot worse than it used to be.

  129. 129.

    Jeffro

    Btw for those who have strong stomachs, a certain Mr. Hugh Hewitt has up a truly novel “both sides” take today in the WaPo: you can ignore those on both the far-right* and far-left who are worried about our democracy being in peril.  Why, look at how long that famous “democracy”, the Roman Empire lasted despite all the anti-democratic shenanigans going on!

    (yes, really…he really thinks this is genius)

    *can anyone show me an instance of where the far-right feels we’re on the verge of “losing our democracy”?  Other than toddler-type “am not!  you’re the one who’s anti-democracy!” rubber/glue retorts?

  130. 130.

    rikyrah

    @Quinerly:

    Manchin is sure playing coy. Thoughts about his truly being serious on a third party run?

     

    Hell muthaphuckin’ no. Nobody taking that clown seriously.

  134. 134.

    RaflW

    @phdesmond: From the same HCR post: “The political career of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is the epitome of Orbán’s ‘Christian democracy’ come to the United States. DeSantis has imitated Orbán’s politics, striking at the principles of liberal democracy with attacks on LGBTQ Americans, abortion rights, academic freedom, and the ability of businesses to react to market forces rather than religious imperatives.”

    I don’t have the time right now to compare demographics, but it seems highly likely that Orbán’s country is far less diverse than the US. Hungary also only emerged from the iron curtain in 1989.

    DaSantis can try his awful schtick, but I’m hopeful that, as Kay notes upthread, his push against teachers and curriculum is actually very unpopular.

  137. 137.

    rikyrah

    No lie told

    Sons of Killmonger & Disciple of Dark Brandon (@2Strong2Silence) tweeted at 3:53 PM on Sun, Jun 04, 2023:
    Sitting here watching Captain America: Civil War & that line from Zemo still hits: “An empire destroyed by its enemies can be rebuilt. One that is destroyed from within? Gone forever.” Think about that in 2024 “Earn my vote” folks. https://t.co/OW4409jEVQ
    (https://twitter.com/2Strong2Silence/status/1665461843316428800?t=t4nUSFMaXl_CCn5KVKhn2g&s=03)

  139. 139.

    rikyrah

    Tell the truth Ascot!

    Nothing but the truth, here 

     (@rolandsmartin) tweeted at 9:09 PM on Sun, Jun 04, 2023:
    THIS is why @NikkiHaley is TRASH. She says the “national media” wanted to make the Mother Emanuel Massacre about race. Dylan Roof, A damn white supremacist, shot and killed NINE BLACK PEOPLE at a Bible study. WTF was it other than race? Nikki Haley is ATROCIOUS.
    (https://twitter.com/rolandsmartin/status/1665541432650653696?t=Ii8ACSk5R_lfNvJuoew8FA&s=03)

  140. 140.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @RaflW:

    the scare as I recall it was that some small handful of teen boy suicides were allegedly blamed on the kid’s character

    The scare as I recall it was that the game promoted Satanism.  You could say that in the 80s and not get laughed at.

  142. 142.

    Kay

    CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checks Nikki Haley’s comments on crime during Sunday night’s town hall in Iowa

    Because Jake Tapper, who makes 13 million dollars a year imitating a potted plant, let her lie unchecked for 31 minutes.
    Why do they bother with these “fact checks”? It’s just pure ass covering for their own low quality work. Why can’t they prepare ahead of time? It’s supposedly news at the speed of sound or whatever and they’re hours, days, weeks late– always.
    How many real local reporters could we pay in our states for 13 million dollars?

  143. 143.

    Baud

    @rikyrah:

    She says the “national media” wanted to make the Mother Emanuel Massacre about race

     

    What does she say it was about, and if not race, why did she lead the effort to get rid of the Confederate Flag in South Carolina.

  144. 144.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Soprano2: “Oh! The crime in STL is worse than it’s ever been before!”

    “Sheeeeeit, you should’ve been there in the ’70s and ’80’s.”

  145. 145.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Jeffro: Back when Bill Maher sometimes said sensible things, he pointed out that modern local TV news serves almost no constructive purpose–it was mostly tailored, as he put it, to feed the fears of young parents. (I’m not sure it’s just young parents, of course.)

    Cable news is basically that model extended globally and 24/7.

  149. 149.

    Matt McIrvin

    @rikyrah: What has he got aside from a famous name, and antivaxxerism (which at this point is a hated fringe position among Democrats)?

  151. 151.

    Eolirin

    @Soprano2: People have in fact changed though. They’re less violent, overall.

    Getting rid of lead in gasoline certainly helped.

  153. 153.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:

    Because Jake Tapper, who makes 13 million dollars a year imitating a potted plant, let her lie unchecked for 31 minutes.

     

    Yep. Just phucking sat there.

  155. 155.

    Tony Jay

    @Matt McIrvin:

      And that was a theme in the whole Bernie Sanders movement too, that we could somehow get back the white working-class male vote by cooling it on cultural stuff, this included.

    Funnily enough you get that over here, too, but here it’s promoted by Serious Centrists who scorn all of that divisive race and gender stuff as “Sixth Form/Politics of Protest” stuff that only helps Tories by enraging WWC voters.

    It’s almost like the point is to hammer a wedge in between minority voters and whichever is the largest ‘Party of the Left’ in any given system.

  156. 156.

    Eolirin

    @Kay: They have no incentive to prepare; if they start asking hard questions and get a rep for calling out lies, they won’t be able to get Republicans on their shows.

    And then they won’t be able to bothsides things anymore; if they can only have Democrats on, they’re forced to cater to a liberal audience. That doesn’t pay nearly as well and isn’t in the interests of their owners.

  158. 158.

    Tony Jay

    @Jeffro:

    He thinks the Roman Empire was a democracy?

    Oh, Hugh Hewitt. From the Latin ‘Euitos’, or “Rusty Old Crank”.

  160. 160.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony Jay: I do think the masks have at this point slipped off of a lot of our culturally reactionary “leftists”; they’ve gone all-anti-woke all the time and no longer have a lot of liberal cred.

    We have the kind of “sensible centrist” you’re mentioning too but they don’t really identify as liberal. They’re people like Brooks and Saletan.

  162. 162.

    Miss Bianca

    @RaflW: I remember Joyce Carol Oates, of all people, cashing in on the D & D panic with a book called Mazes and Monsters, which posited, IIRC, kids getting lost in steam tunnels and such. I never read it, it sounded like a pile of hot garbage from the descriptions.

    Yeah, the only times I ever goofed around with D & D we had character names like Rosie the Riveter and Constitutional Amendment, so no – we didn’t take ourselves at all seriously, so I always found the D & D panic completely mystifying.

    But then, I found the Satanic Panic mystifying, and the Gay Panic mystifying, and the Woke Panic mystifying, as well.

  163. 163.

    Ksmiami

    @Kay: in the end, the auto industry is all about maximizing platforms- trad vehicle oems will dominate.

  165. 165.

    glory b

    @Jeffro: Forget storming school board meetings. If they cared, they could just attend a PTA meeting. Remember them? Anyone with concerns could go to one of those.

  167. 167.

    trollhattan

    @Kay: How many real local reporters could we pay in our states for 13 million dollars?

    “All of them, Kay(tie).”

    BBC World Service, bless their global citizen hearts, played extensive clips from this dreck on air.

  168. 168.

    Eolirin

    @Kay: With any luck the EV train will run over the dealerships along with Musk. Breaking the backs of as much of the right’s funding and activist base as possible is going to be necessary for us to make progress in this country.

  170. 170.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Often defense attorneys are given the opportunity to “pitch” the DOJ before a charging decision is made. Trump’s team visiting DOJ likely means that we won’t see charges in the next few days—as their pitch is considered—but could potentially see charges in the next 5 to 15 days.

  171. 171.

    Tony Jay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Unfortunately over here the ‘Sensible Centrists’ are in charge of the Labour Party. I’m pretty sure that David Brooks, should he ever deign to look their way, would pronounce them very acceptable people.

    As for those ‘XtremeLeft’ folks over there, I’m pretty sure that a proper investigation into their communications and finances would turn up a lot of links to the same groups, private and state funded, that undergird the Hard Right. It’s all about splitting and dividing any electoral coalition that can keep the conservatives out of power, the actual angle from which the wedges get hammered in is at best secondary to that aim.

  172. 172.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Tony Jay: Exactly!  Shouting STFU to marginalized groups happens on both sides and across the spectrum of the Left as well.  If I had a nickel for every time I was told to stop bringing up Racial Justice because M4All and the GNDeal were what really mattered…or to stop mentioning Transphobia because it’s a distraction from real women’s issues…this shit happens all the damn time on the Left, and often comes from people who swear they are Leftier-Than-Thou.  Progressives are really not much better than Centrists and Conserva-Dems on this stuff.

  173. 173.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Tony Jay: Arguably, the people running the Democratic Party in the 1990s were the Sensible Centrist wing. It was a reaction to being crushed by Reaganism.

    In 2004, Bush the younger got reelected in part on a cultural-reactionary platform in reaction to the push for same-sex marriage, and riling up the anti-abortion people. So there was a revival at that point of the idea that Democrats needed to back off. But in most ways, that was just about the extreme point of the Democratic Party’s rightward move in the first place.

    But the position has evolved. The party’s attitude is now, correctly, that hot-button issues like abortion and LGBT rights are positives for us, not negatives. Partly because the other side got so extreme and actually won the big prize on abortion.

  174. 174.

    Montanareddog

    @Kay:

     

    Because Jake Tapper, who makes 13 million dollars a year imitating a potted plant, let her lie unchecked for 31 minutes.

    I think Wolf Blitzer has Jake beat on the potted plant front

  175. 175.

    Jeffro

    @Tony Jay:

    “Threats to democracy” are regularly described as an American “crisis,” but this crisis mentality itself is the threat — to common sense. It is a false panic, emanating from both the far right and far left. As great nations go, this republic is relatively young and healthy. But it is burdened by unserious political, academic and media elites who have monetized fear and outrageous rhetoric.

    In that light, let’s consider the fate of another republic, one that endured genuine dangers and finally succumbed to them.

    The Roman Republic is generally agreed to have begun in 509 BC and lasted until 29 BC when Caesar Augustus consolidated all power in the person of the emperor. In that span of nearly half a millennium, there were scores of crises, with the republic’s final century marked by a series of violent breaks from Roman traditions…

    While the [traditions] were not written down, they were understood and valued, but eventually fell to pieces under the crushing ambitions of individuals backed by armies. The evils of the ancient world — including genocide, slavery, absolute patriarchy and sometimes human sacrifice — were all present in the Roman Republic, but the quasi-democratic government was a relatively sturdy institution for that era.

    “Sheer genius!  I swear, the stuff I put out there sometimes, hoo boy!!” – H. Hewitt

  178. 178.

    evodevo

    @Kay: ​
      Yeah…here in KY Toyota just announced a new assembly line for an EV…several hundred new jobs for us…

  179. 179.

    Jeffro

    PS I know we already have “Tacky O” (and now “Walmart Melania”) for Casey DeSantis, but I just saw “Jackie Faux” as well – LOL

  180. 180.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @RaflW: …it seems highly likely that Orbán’s country is far less diverse than the US.

    For half a century after the Ausgleich (1867), the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a maximalist state: Magyars were in charge of Slovaks, Croats, and Romanians (in Transylvania) in addition to their own people. After the Great War, the Treaty of Trianon (1920) turned Hungary into a minimalist state – nothing was left to it except those lands where only Magyars lived (except for the Jews). And its borders have remained pretty much the same ever since. So…yeah, not diverse at all.

  181. 181.

    Soprano2

    @OzarkHillbilly: Here’s the thing – if people say things in the world have changed, I totally agree with that, of course they have. The internet and cell phones and 24 hour cable news and 24 hour cable TV are all things that didn’t exist when I was young. But when I hear “people are different now, parents don’t care as much anymore” or “these immigrants are different than the ones who came here in 19xx” I call bullshit. How do you know how much parents cared when you were a kid? You have a sample size of one! The world is very different for parents now than it was when I was a kid – for one, most kids have two parents who work at jobs outside the home. That’s a huge change that’s happened within my lifetime.

  183. 183.

    Soprano2

    @rikyrah: They are evidently afraid that if they challenge a Republican political candidate it will be seen as “rude” and “partisan”. That’s the only explanation I can come up with. As soon as I heard that Haley said trans girls were the reason so many girls contemplate suicide, I knew that was complete bullshit – Tapper should have known that too!

  184. 184.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: We’re at the point where nostalgic social-media posts are starting to appear in which the “simpler, more innocent time” when “we used to have a real country” is actually in the 21st century. Reminiscences about how there was no teenage mental-health crisis in the year 2004.

  185. 185.

    Matt McIrvin

    …and we just saw that ridiculous video claiming that lawn sprinklers didn’t make rainbows 20 years ago, which would be 2003, so I guess the mysterious rainbow corruption happened after that.

  188. 188.

    Manyakitty

    @evodevo: the same Toyota that continues to fund seditionists and various others in the treason caucus. Talk about giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

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