Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

No one could have predicted…

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

How stupid are these people?

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

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Gun Issues

Stern Grey Dawn Open Thread: Another Judgement Against Alex Jones

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Alex Jones was ordered to liquidate his personal assets Friday, as a bankruptcy judge was still considering forcing him to sell his far-right website InfoWars to begin paying the roughly $1.5 billion in damages he owes for claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.

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— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) Jun 14, 2024 at 4:01 PM

Per the Associated Press, “Alex Jones’ personal assets to be sold to pay $1.5B Sandy Hook debt. Company bankruptcy is dismissed”:

… Judge Christopher Lopez approved converting Jones’ proposed personal bankruptcy reorganization to a liquidation. But Lopez threw out the case of his company, Austin, Texas-based Free Speech Systems, after failed attempts by Jones to reach an agreement with Sandy Hook families on his proposals to reorganize and keep operating the company while paying them millions of dollars.

It wasn’t immediately clear what will happen in the coming weeks to Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent company, which Jones built into a multimillion-dollar moneymaker over the past 25 years by selling dietary supplements and other products. But both Jones and lawyers for the Sandy Hook families said they expect Infowars to cease operating at some point because of the huge debt.

A trustee appointed Friday in Jones’ personal bankruptcy case to oversee the liquidation now has control over his assets, including Infowars, according to lawyers for Sandy Hook families.

Dismissal of Free Speech Systems’ case means the families can now move immediately to collect on the $1.5 billion in state courts in Texas and Connecticut where they won defamation lawsuits against Jones and the company. It’s possible Infowars will continue operating during the collection efforts, which could include selling off the company’s assets.

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Sow the Wind, Reap the Whirlwind

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‘Gun Issues’ Open Thread: Not Enough Time Between Public Tragedies

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Would that President Biden, and the rest of us, had that luxury. There are times I’m very glad to be a volunteer aggregator on a not-quite-ten-thousand-top blog, and not a professional journalist. Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire, on the last ‘Second Amendment’-related tragedy — “The Shooter’s Family Was Begging for Intervention Before She Opened Fire at a Megachurch”:

… Our latest unfortunate public exercise of Second Amendment freedoms took place in Houston, at the headquarters mega-church of Joel Osteen, a prominent teevee huckster Pharisee. (Osteen was the whited sepulcher who refused to open his megachurch so that poor and homeless people would not be left outside to face Hurricane Harvey in 2017.) On Sunday, a 37-year old woman named Genesee Moreno showed up at Lakewood Church with both her seven-year old son and her AR-15 in tow. She set up a firefight with two off-duty cops that ended up with Moreno dead, her son in critical condition with a gunshot wound in the head, and a bystander slightly wounded in the leg. The subsequent investigation has revealed Moreno to be quite insane. From CNN:

“My daughter-in-law when she was taking medication for schizophrenia was a very sweet and loving woman,” Walli Carranza, the mother-in-law of 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno wrote in a Facebook post that Moreno had been put under an order for emotional detention in 2016. She had a mental health history documented by Houston police, said Christopher Hassig, commander of the Houston Police Department’s homicide division. Carranza, the shooter’s mother-in-law, had unsuccessfully petitioned to be declared conservator of Moreno’s son Sam in 2022. She said Sam was wounded in the head when off-duty officers shot and killed Moreno at the church. Moreno should never have been allowed to own firearms, her mother-in-law said. Texas has no red flag law – also known as an extreme risk protection order law – that would allow authorities to take weapons from a person thought to be in crisis.“

…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Gradually, Then All At Once

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An ‘impossible’ shift in the gun-safety argument, and also a refutation of Old people have a death grip on the Democratic party! meme…

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Gradually, Then All At Once

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What’s Wrong With This Lede? What’s Wrong With These People?

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Here’s the first paragraph from the top story on The Washington Post right now.

A man using an AR-15-style weapon shot and killed five people Friday, including an 8-year-old — an angry response to the neighbors’ request that he stop shooting in his yard while their baby was trying to sleep, Texas authorities said Saturday. The gunman then fled, prompting an ongoing manhunt.

What’s wrong with it?

I’ll tell you.  The reporter actually wrote that a mass murder is “an angry response.”

What's Wrong With This Lede? What's Wrong With These People

An angry response would have been if the gunman had shouted “Fuck you!” back at his neighbors.  Slaughtering a kid and four grownups is not angry. It’s many things–deranged, grotesque, evil, and the work not only of the killer himself, but every malign asshole in our recent history that has chosen to defend American gun madness against all comers.  So yeah–that means just about every elected Republican (and a very few Democrats), the Fox News apparatchiks and all the usual suspects.  They are accessories before and after the fact, never (usually) pulling the trigger, but ensuring that someone will.

But I digress.  “Angry”!?  What the fuck is that.

I’m out of words. Over to you. Open thread.

Image: Peter Paul Rubens, Kindermord, after 1611.*

*PS: it depressed the crap out of me that there’s no search time involved in pulling up a depiction of this scene for any post I do on guns. You’d think we’d get the point of the Biblical passage involved by now.  Hah! Sometimes I crack myself up.

PPS: Also too–Texas. It’s time to recognize that GOP led states have installed a state religion. Not Christianity, though they’re trying to impose a twisted version of same on the rest of us.  No. What’s already in place can only be described as Moloch worship.

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Open Thread: Red Staters for Moloch

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Devasting & Disgusting: The Nashville Shooting

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This is Transgender Visibility Week, so I was bouncing around ideas this morning about what to post, but when I checked in on different internet communities where trans news abounds, things are squarely focused on how afraid people are from the backlash of the Nashville shooting that happened Monday.

I don’t think it’s an appropriate thing to focus on an individual shooter’s identity because no person goes out and shoots up a school who just isn’t simply sick in the head first and foremost. Our attention should be focused on the grieving parents, students, and communities who want tangible action against gun violence.

Three nine-year old children are dead: Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney. Three staff members are also dead: Katherine Koonce, 60, the head of The Covenant School; Mike Hill, 61, a custodian at the school; and Cynthia Peak, 61, a substitute teacher.  You can read more about all the victims here.

This is devastating, but now it is getting disgusting as the Right wing, media, and all our usual suspects (MTG, Musk) have latched onto this shooting as an anti-trans Reichstag Fire.

Even before police officials in Tennessee identified the person responsible for murdering three children and three adults in the latest mass school shooting in the U.S., far-right extremists and transphobic people began spreading misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation focused on transgender people and not guns.

Interesting how no one is talking about how the shooter is a “biological female” (eyeroll).

Some facts:

  • According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 130 mass shootings this year, 647 in 2022. In total, they calculate 2,871 mass shootings in the U.S. since 2016. Some of those incidents involved multiple shooters.
  • In that time, 3 of those shooters have been identified as transgender or nonbinary (I’m not counting the Club Q shooter since that has largely been debunked).
  • That’s roughly 0.1% for those of you running the math in your head.
  • Re: Hale. It’s quite unclear whether they are transgender or not, since there are conflicting reports from family and friends. Again, it’s not the damn point. Since the overwhelming percentage of mass shootings are carried out by white cis-men, it reeks that this shooter’s identity is the hot topic du jour.

Multiple members of my family lived in Newtown, CT during the Sandy Hook massacre, and I remember thinking at the time… this will stop, this has to stop. I fully expect that this tragedy will instead be used as a rallying flag for the right to gin up more anti-trans and christo-fascist nonsense, instead of actually doing something to protect children from guns.

Joyful Trans Visibility posts will be forthcoming later this week.

 

EDIT: Thanks @Matt_McIrvin and @SpaceUnit for pointing out my typos. I blame my terrible ADHD.

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