Louisiana GOP sacrifices bestiality law on altar of homophobia

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The modern Republican Party.

In Louisiana, a proposal to strengthen the law against bestiality is facing unexpected opposition from conservative lawmakers who see it as an underhanded move to strike the state’s unconstitutional ban on sodomy.

[…]

“This bill was written because the far left wants to undermine our other laws that protect family and traditional values that the people of Louisiana hold dear,” said Sen. Ryan Gatti, a Republican who was one of 10 senators to vote against the bill.

Where to even begin …?

The thing is, they could have made the plausible argument that the state already has a bestiality ban on the books and that the party of Small Government and Fiscal Responsibility and whatnot is opposed to expanding a legal definition that’s already sufficient. They could even have argued – and I’d agree – that it’s a waste of the legislature’s time and taxpayer money to pass laws to cover problems that are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. It would still have been evident what their end goal is, but at least it might have let them save face.

But they just had to stick to their anti-gay guns, even at the cost of being publicly labeled as the party that prefers letting humans have sex with animals over allowing consenting adults of the same gender – and species – to get it on. Particularly given that the anti-sodomy law is blatantly unconstitutional and is one court challenge away from being stuck down anyway.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Fox News’s Hume on media’s treatment of Trump vs. Obama

Brit Hume

Here I am, quite enjoying my little quasi-hiatus, when some dunce on TV says something that just needs to be shared and laughed at. Take it away, Fox News guest Brit Hume:

President Obama enjoyed a certain protected status because he was African-American and because he was a Democrat and a liberal. Those things do not normally apply to Republicans, particularly Republicans so universally loathed among most of our nation's news media as this president is, so he doesn't get the same kind of treatment.

Hey, Hume, you want to know why Republicans are “so universally loathed”? It’s because they just keep saying stupid shit like this. Obama was “protected” in the sense that he had charisma, intelligence, poise and at least basic knowledge of whatever matter was being discussed, all of which your boy Trump famously and flamboyantly lacks.

To be fair, Hume said this on Tucker Carlson’s show, where adhesion to reality (alongside basic sense and decency) isn’t a requirement.

Daily Links #117: Unarmed Black man shot by Sacramento cop

Stephon Clark

• Sacramento, CA: Unarmed black man ^[pictured] shot to death in own backyard after police mistake cell phone for weapon.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Meanwhile, the Minneapolis, MN officer who shot Justine Damond turns himself in on murder charges.
  (via The Watch | The Washington Post)

• Having finally lost their cause to keep their old gerrymandered district map, Pennsylvania Republican officials are now moving to impeach the Democratic justices of the state supreme court who ruled against them.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• New Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner promised big criminal justice reforms. And he’s delivering.

• The 400 residents of Dewey, Delaware must be nothing but hardcore gangbangers, because the town’s 11-officer police force requested, and obtained, 31 military vehicles and other gear through the Pentagon’s 1033 program.

• Finally, just a reminder that nine years later, Sean Hannity still still hasn’t been waterboarded as he promised he would be “for the troops”.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Fox News’s double-standard on US presidents meeting North Korean dictators

Criticizing Fox News for being hypocrites isn’t so much swinging at low-hanging fruit as it is buzzing a chainsaw through them. Still, there’s a supercut making the rounds that throws their total lack of scruples into sharp relief, comparing their scorn and derision over Obama’s willingness to meet with North Korea’s leadership with their gleeful approval over Trump announcing the same plan:

Everything wrong with Fox News in one video pic.twitter.com/MhnApiQ3pG

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) March 16, 2018

Part of me still refuses to believe Fox’s viewership are so gullible and clueless that they can’t recognize the wool being pulled over their eyes. The con is hardly subtle.

(via retweet by @pzmyers)

Fox hosts think CIA black site torture criminal is “hero”

Greg Gutfeld

The reactions are coming in to Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel, a career CIA official who ran a “black site” in Thailand and oversaw the torture of prisoners there, to run the agency. Much of them are rightly condemnatory, but there are those who’ll stop at nothing to defend Trump’s every decision and praise anyone he picks, and you already know I’m talking about Fox News, don’t you. Here’s a representative take:

GREG GUTFELD (CO-HOST): I think she should be proud of what she did. […] She has to make decisions that a lot of her critics don't have to make. She answered the call, and that call forces you to make decisions that could put you in jail. So, the thing is, if you are faced with a potential terror attack that could kill thousands, and they say "But if you do this, you go to jail," -- if you follow that order, you are wrong. If you follow the order that puts you in jail, that makes you a hero.

DANA PERINO (CO-HOST): And they save lives.

GUTFELD: And they save lives, so I think she is a hero. And if she was a TV character, she would be a hero, a woman running a black site, that's -- that's -- that's a great character.

You know, I fully expected Fox News talking heads to defend Haspel in spite of her involvement in torture. I didn’t expect them to praise her because of it. But that’s what blind partisanship does – you don’t just excuse the inexcusable, you claim them as your own and try to spin their monstrosity as a gain, even if that makes you as ghoulish as they are.

Funny of Gutfeld to say that Haspel’s actions could have landed her in prison, though. We all know that government officials don’t get punished by their own when they commit crimes; they’re defended and even promoted. Accountability isn’t a word that exists in the US government’s lexicon.

Daily Links #112: Mississippi Senate passes 15-week abortion ban

Apologies for the lack of posts these last couple days. Been busy learning the ropes in Cities: Skylines, much of which involves dealing with my whiny industrial zones. (WTF does “Not enough services” even mean?)

• Mississippi’s Republican-controlled Senate passes 15-week abortion ban, the worst in the country, that’s explicitly intended to launch a Roe v. Wade challenge. A challenge that could run perilously close to success.

• Andrew Wakefield’s lethal legacy lives on as a measles outbreak spreads across Europe, thanks to antivaccinationists.
  (via @EsotericCD; retweet by @Popehat)

• “Internal NYPD files show that hundreds of officers who committed the most serious offenses — from lying to grand juries to physically attacking innocent people — got to keep their jobs, their pensions, and their tremendous power over New Yorkers' lives.”
  (via @michaelhayes; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Roy Moore claims he’s broke. I hope he finds more money; the more he has, the longer he can keep getting sued by the women he preyed on when they were teens.

• Finally, a follow-up: The FCC’s ethics lawyers must’ve rang, because Ajit Pai has now turned down the NRA’s gun award for killing net neutrality rules.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Kentucky Christian-Right group stalls anti-child-marriage bill

Some remarkably backwards practices are still remarkably commonplace in some parts. For instance, Kentucky still has child marriages, at least in some cases: Kids 17 and younger can marry if they have their parents’ permission (and you know some of those parents are roping them into it), and in particular, a boy can marry any young girl he impregnates. Not only are kids who are too young to figure out birth control also too young to make this sort of decision, it opens the door to kids marrying adults, particularly young girls pushed by their parents into shacking up with the predatory older man who impregnated them.

But that’s changing, or so it was until recently. A new bill would ban marriages for anyone under the age of 17 and force 17-year-olds to get a judge’s permission.

[State Sen. Julie Raque] Adams filed the bill after media reports detailing how Kentucky has the third-highest rate of child marriage in the country — with more than 10,000 children married from 2000 to 2015, according to the Tahirih Justice Center — and the accounts of women like Donna Pollard, who was encouraged by her mother to marry an abusive man who was nearly 31 when she was just 16.

A law to stop impulsive kids from entering wedlock, or more realistically, to ban meddling dinosaurian parents from pushing antiquated social customs on their children. What reasonable people could oppose that?

The religious-conservative Family Foundation of Kentucky are not reasonable people.

Asked Thursday morning who was lobbying against her bill, Adams told Insider Louisville that it was the Family Foundation of Kentucky — one of the more prominent groups in Frankfort advocating for socially conservative causes — who argued that it “diminishes parental rights.”

Adams added that she and other legislators are now working on a compromise bill that she hopes will satisfy the concerns of opponents, but added that the problem is that “many times the parents are the problem,” as abusive ones sometimes send their own kids “into the arms of a predator.” Noting Kentucky’s shameful national ranking on child marriage, Adams added: “This is not kids marrying kids. This is kids marrying adults.”

Any parent who doesn’t see a problem with child brides is not a parent whose rights deserve respect.

The Society For Keeping Kentucky a Punchline has weighed in with an objection. https://t.co/79uqODfzWc

— John Scalzi (@scalzi) March 3, 2018

(via Friendly Atheist & a retweet by @fark)

Alex Jones sued for discrimination and harassment. News at 11

I have some shocking news. You sitting down? Glass of water still on the desk, un-sipped? Here you go:

Two former staffers at InfoWars have accused founder and right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of discrimination and sexual harassment, the Daily Mail reported on Wednesday. Jones allegedly bullied staffers, made anti-Semitic and racist comments, and groped one worker, according to two Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints obtained by the publication.

That’s right: The man who built his company on being a screaming train wreck on camera is actually a terrible person generally, and he fosters a workplace culture that encourages shitty behavior in his staff as well. Who could’ve guessed.

Next they’ll be telling us there are jerks over at Breitbart, too. I don’t know what to believe anymore.

(via Joe.My.God.)

NRA awards rifle to FCC chairman for “courage” in killing net neutrality rules

FCC Chmn. Ajit Pai at CPAC 2018

I believe this is something the kids would call “not The Onion”:

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai received the National Rifle Association's (NRA) “Charlton Heston Courage Under Fire Award” at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.

The NRA-sponsored award was given to Pai in recognition of months of heavy criticism over his successful push to repeal the agency’s net neutrality rules. Pai led the push to repeal the rules, which were overwhelmingly supported by the public, in December.

"Ajit Pai is the most courageous, heroic person that I know,” said Dan Schneider, the executive director of the American Conservative Union, while introducing the FCC chairman.

[…]

Pai’s award is a handmade Kentucky long gun, which will be housed in the NRA’s museum in Fairfax, Va.

He enters a hallowed hall of recipients that includes Mike Pence and Milwaukee’s former cosplaying sheriff David Clarke. I don’t think I need to add anything to that.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Daily Links #107: Texas school district threatens to suspend students who protest gun violence

• Thanks to this Texas school district, colleges may soon see “I got suspended for protesting against kids being shot in school” on applications they receive.
  (via @sarahemclaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

• The Pennsylvania district map saga continues: As predicted, Republicans are suing over the new, non-gerrymandered map released by the State Supreme Court, likely hoping to keep their advantage until after the midterms.

• Aurora, Illinois cop secretly installed surveillance cameras in his ex-wife’s home so that he could spy on her during and after their divorce. The city and police chief both want him fired. The arbitrator and police union argue a suspension is good enough. The only reason he’s not going to jail is because the ex-wife refused to press charges.
  (via @TimCushing; retweet by @Popehat)

• More than half of US states are taking it upon themselves to protect net neutrality.
  (via Techdirt)

• Germany’s speech laws continue to be a raging dumpster fire of censorial stupidity.

• Speaking of terrible laws, Swedish politicians want to set the prison penalty for copyright infringement on par with manslaughter.
  (via Privacy News Online)

• Finally, what’s more predictable: That Twitter would ban thousands of bot accounts, that this would impact the follower counts of far-Right tweeps in particular, or that they’d scream “censorship!” over it?

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Nazi’s speech undermines claims about Charlottesville violence

In the wake of the Charlottesville rally-turned-riot, the alt-Rightists/​White nationalists/​other-names-for-Nazis who participated are on the receiving end of a lawsuit accusing them of planning for the event to turn violent from the beginning. In typical shitlord fashion, their defense so far has been to claim all their racial supremacist rhetoric was really just jokin’ around, and that they just got caught up in the violence like innocent little does.

It’s really too bad for them, then, that one of their leaders was caught on video in the hours before the rally giving a speech calling for the death of “the enemies of the White race” to a cheering crowd of fellow Nazis:

The neo-Nazis gathered in a safe house a few hours after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August. One of their chieftains, Robert “Azzmador” Ray, wanted to say a few words that evening, according to a description of the speech Ray posted online. As the man on the ground for the Daily Stormer, the biggest hate site in the U.S., Ray had been in the middle of the action all day, leading his “Stormers” into battle. Now he wanted to read a fiery speech the site’s publisher, Andrew Anglin, had written for the occasion.

“My brothers,” Ray began, looking at his phone in the dark room. “A day is quickly coming when it is we who will be digging graves.” The neo-Nazis howled their approval. For them, the “Unite the Right” rally had always been more than a protest against the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. It was, as Ray and Anglin put it on the Daily Stormer, a “battle cry” for white nationalism.

“This is our war!” Ray yelled in the safe house. “This has always been our war. And I wouldn’t want it any other way. Death to traitors! Death to the enemies of the white race! Hail victory!”

That sound you just heard was their argument that they never meant for anyone to get hurt going down the drain.

(via @PykeA; retweet by @Popehat)

Every time you think the conservative media can sink no lower

Deplorables gonna be deplorable.

Source: Pat Bagley at The Salt Lake Tribune

Don’t let conservatives pretend it’s only fringe elements who promote this, either. It’s fully mainstream on the Right.

(via @BadAstronomer)