Donohue compares Sam Bee’s mean words to police brutality

Bill Donohue

Samantha Bee got into hot water last week when she called Ivanka Trump a “feckless c—t” on her show. Much of the ensuing outrage was ginned up by Right-wing trolls happy for any opportunity to stick it to a Left-wing firebrand, but there was enough genuine offense that both Bee and parent company TBS apologized, and she addressed the issue in full on last night’s show, explaining that her attempt to reclaim the word crossed a line. For most people, that’ll likely be enough.

It wasn’t enough for Bill Donohue, though. Not that it particularly matters what the President of the Catholic League and the country’s top professional whiner not named Todd Starnes thinks, but he went ahead and released a statement on the matter – one that compares a comedian’s use of a bad word to police brutality. No, really:

Bee ended by saying, “If you are worried about the death of civility, don’t sweat it—I’m a comedian.”

This is exactly the problem. A comedian has no more right to obscenely insult people than a cop has a right to randomly beat a person up. Neither should be allowed to take cover hiding behind his status.

I have to ask what Donohue thinks a “right” is. Insulting people is allowed under the law. Law enforcement officers brutalizing random people is not (not that it’s ever stopped them). Nor is Bee trying to hide behind her status as a comedian (and what status would that be? Comedians are criticized and penalized for saying dumb things all the time). She explicitly apologized for what she said, even as she explained why she said it. Compare that to cops, who routinely protect their own and rarely face consequences for even the most egregious misconduct.

Honestly, how can anyone say stuff this dumb and not be laughed out of every room they’re ever in from now on?

He continues with a veiled threat – or what he thinks is a threat, anyway:

We have ways to deal with trespassing cops, but no remedy to deal with trespassing comedians. Save for boycotts. Don’t push us, Bee. There are a lot of activist groups monitoring your next move.

Ooh, yes, Bee had better watch out, or her show may end up just like Jon Stewart’s did when Donohue pitched a fit over his “vagina manger” joke in 2012, wherein a handful of busybodies got one sponsor to quit and then Stewart addressed the nonevent for about ten seconds on the air before everyone forgot about it altogether. Victory!

Bill Donohue and the Catholic League: An impotent one-man-show designed to fool pearl-clutchers into thinking the times haven’t passed them by.

(via Right Wing Watch)

Peterson: Makeup in the workplace is “sexually provocative”

Jordan Peterson

So there’s this college professor from Canada (sorry, everyone, we don’t always produce winners) who’s made a name for himself by giving young men groundbreaking advice like “clean your room” and other things their moms presumably told them for years, and who those same young men now revere as some sort of philosophical luminary. I don’t see it. What I do see, nonstop, is Jordan Peterson saying dumb things that make misogynists giggle. Things like how maybe there should be a rule against women wearing makeup in the workplace because red lips are “sexually provocative”. No, really:

JORDAN PETERSON: Here’s a rule. How about no makeup in the workplace?

VICE: [incredulous] Why would that be a rule?

PETERSON: Why should you wear makeup in the workplace? Isn’t that sexually provocative?

VICE: No!

PETERSON: It’s not?

VICE: No.

PETERSON: Well, what is it then? What’s the purpose of makeup?

VICE: Some people would like to just put on makeup, just to …

PETERSON: Why? Why do you make your lips red? Because they turn red during sexual arousal. That’s why. Why do you put rouge on your cheeks? Same reason. […] How about high heels? […] They’re there to exaggerate sexual attractiveness. That’s what high heels do. They tilt your pelvis forward so your hips stick out. That’s what they do. And they tighten up your calf muscles. They’re sexual display. Now, I’m not saying people shouldn’t use sexual displays in the workplace. I’m not saying that. But I am saying that that is what they’re doing, and that is what they’re doing.

[…]

VICE: Do you feel like a serious woman who doesn’t want sexual harassment in the workplace, do you feel like if she wears makeup in the workplace, is being somewhat hypocritical?

PETERSON: Yeah. I do think that.

As a sidenote: I sought out the unedited interview to see what may have been left out of the version most people saw (and, perhaps futilely, to negate the usual cries of “out of context!”). Turns out all they’re missing is a bit of cross-talk and a lot of pseudo-philosophical meandering. I’d like to bill someone for the minutes of my life I won’t get back.

Back to Peterson. But not for very long, because everything he said is so dumb and wrong there’s only so much one can say about it. There’s certainly a conversation to be had about the origins and nature of the beauty standards society imposes upon the genders, and women especially. But trying to frame lipstick and high heels as “sexual displays” in the workplace – and additionally, the notion that they ought to be proscribed, presumably because they make poor men too horny to work – is the kind of ridiculousness you expect from bad satire, not from someone bandied around as a public intellectual. Lipstick on women is no more sexual or distracting than ties and combed hair are on men, and I have yet to learn of a workplace that’s fallen apart because its male employees spent all their time gawking at their female colleagues’ tight calf muscles.

Honestly, Ed Brayton put it better than anyone:

But let me just ask one question: Isn’t Peterson asking for it? I mean, really, during this interview, he was dressed well, wearing an expensive suit that shows off his wealth. He was wearing a tie that points directly to his penis, in a blatant sexual display. So if a gay man were to sexually harass him, he has no one to blame but himself, by his own “reasoning”[.]

If you can’t differentiate between polishing up your appearance in concordance with cultural norms and sexual signaling, there’s just no helping you. And perhaps you should stay away from women.

Rebeca Watson lays into the clowns in charge of US science policy

Want to hear a joke? The US House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Specifically, the transparent shills and cartoonish buffoons that populate it.

Transcript:

(Click to open/close:) [−]

What’s the dumbest thing a Republican lawmaker can say about climate change? Is it Donald Trump saying that it’s a Chinese conspiracy theory? Is it Representative John Shimkus saying that it doesn’t matter because God already promised us after Noah’s Flood that he wouldn’t destroy the Earth? Or is it Senator James Inhofe telling Rachel Maddow that it can’t be true because combating it would be far too expensive?

Or is it the latest contender, Representative Mo Brooks telling an actual climate scientist that the global sea levels are rising because rocks are falling into the ocean?

Hold on, because it’s about to get so much worse. Brooks had the opportunity to say such a stupid thing because he is on the US House of Representatives Science Space and Technology Committee, which is like me being on a committee focused on NASCAR, Steven Universe fan-fiction and post-Keynesian economics. In other words, shit I know nothing about. (And I know, I know, I’ve been meaning to watch Steven Universe. I’ll get to it.)

The Committee was gathered to talk about how technology can be used to combat climate change, but instead of talking about that very important subject, it turned out to be a third-grade-level lecture for two hours, in which Dr. Philip Duffy of Woods Hole Research Center patiently explained to seventy-year-old men that no, rocks do not make the sea levels rise; and no, the chart that Lamar Smith brought along to prove that climate change was fake was not based on actual science just because it’s in a chart form; and no, Bill Posey, scientists in the 1970s did not think that humans were actually causing the Earth to cool; no that Time Magazine cover is a hoax.

Of all the dumb shit that was said during those two hours, obviously Mo Brooks wins for the dumbest. Here’s a direct quote from him as he attempted to really sell his idea that rocks falling into the ocean are what’s responsible for the sea levels rising:

Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up.

[-grown ass man on a god damn science committee]

Seriously. Mel Brooks is a 64-year-old man and he sounds like an actual child. That is something a child would say in a poorly researched report on what he thinks makes water go up and down. “Now you have less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up.” Jesus Christ.

This is why we’re all gonna die. Yes, the coming nuclear war with North Korea or whoever is not going to be pleasant, but some humans will survive. But no-one will survive the coming temperature increase, and it’s going to happen because the science wing of the government of one of the biggest superpowers in the world today can’t talk about technological solutions to the problem because the people running the committee can’t even get past the fact that it’s happening.

It’s as if our house is on fire and when the firefighters show up, they say, “I’m sorry, but we just don’t believe in fire.” And you’re like, “Wait, you what now?” And they say, “We don’t really have any evidence that fire is real. Like, what is it even? Is it a solid? And if so, then how does my hand pass through it? If it’s a gas, why can I see it? How does it grow if it’s not alive? I read a scientific article on 4chan once that says that fire is a Chinese conspiracy made up to frighten us into staying chilly all winter.” When you’re dealing with someone that willfully stupid, your house is just going to burn down, because by the time you answer all their stupid questions it’s going to be too late.

Remember this, please, as midterms approach: Please, for the sake of the next generation, and for my own sanity’s sake, please vote these man-children out of office before our house burns down.

My idea of the worst possible job is being tasked with distinguishing which Republicans act this way because they’re genuinely stupid from those who act this way because they’re dishonest and corrupt. And that’s not counting the overlap.

Is there one part of the US government that isn’t hopelessly broken?

(via Pharyngula)

Daily Links #125: Oklahoma bans same-sex adoption

• Oklahoma officially allows religious adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex parents. It’s the Christian way.

• The fallout from SESTA/FOSTA continues: Cops realize it’s making their jobs harder, whilst sex traffickers are having a field day. It’s not like anyone predicted this would happen or anything …

• PZ Myers says all I have to say on the “Intellectual Dark Web” of regressives who whinge about how they can’t spout bigotry and play footsie with fascists without suffering social consequences.

• Andrew Shirvell, who rose to fame as the homophobic former Michigan Assistant Attorney General who obsessively harassed a gay college student, has been permanently disbarred.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally: in Creativitas news, I’ve recently revised and updated three of my orchestral songs, “Inhuman Suite”, “Setting Out” and “Softer Dreams”. I plan to revisit some of my older songs – some of which I haven’t touched in the better part of a decade, back when I was just starting to write music – and give them the overhaul they deserve, so stay tuned.

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

Franklin Graham: Trump’s adultery is “nobody’s business”

Franklin Graham

If you’re looking for a reliable source of pure chutzpah, don’t stray far from evangelical Christians. Here’s preacher Franklin Graham explaining that the country has too many problems to focus on Trump’s infidelity and sleeping with a porn star, which isn’t anyone’s business anyway:

I don't have concern, in a sense, because these things happened many years ago – and there's such bigger problems in front of us as a nation that we need to be dealing with than other things in his life a long time ago. I think some of these things – that's for him and his wife to deal with. I think when the country went after President Clinton, the Republicans, that was a great mistake that should never have happened. And I think this thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody's business. And we've got other business at hand that we need to deal with.

Let that sink in a moment. These are the people who try to legislate their way into everyone’s bedrooms, who campaign to prevent men and women from marrying whomever they love regardless of gender, who spend more time talking about gay sex than gay people do, who make every effort to strip away women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, and who heap scorn and sanctimony upon anyone who isn’t in a straight-laced, missionary-and-for-procreation-only marriage even as they continually throw their lot in with politicians with more ex-wives and male-prostitute scandals between them than ideological positions.

Yet suddenly, they’re so very concerned with all these people who criticize the president, the evangelicals’ golden calf, for lying nonstop to the country and possibly committing felonies. Really, they should all just get their noses out of Trump’s private life and mind their own business.

Being an evangelical Christian has all but become synonymous with couching naked bigotry and pathological blue-nosing in rank hypocrisy and slapping on a transparent veneer of piousness to deflect accusations about their total moral bankruptcy. And they didn’t even need atheists’ help to get that reputation; they’ve earned it all on their own.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Fischer: The First Amendment only applies to Christianity

Bryan Fischer

I give you Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association:

The blunt, simple, direct, straightforward answer is that Wiccans do not have First Amendment rights, nor do Muslims, nor do Jews, nor do Native Americans, nor do Rastafarians, nor do any practitioners of any other religion other than Christianity.

Whatever the First Amendment is about, whatever protections it extends in the federal Constitution, those were just for Christianity. Christianity has First Amendment rights under the federal Constitution, no other religion does.

But whatever you do, don’t call them Christian-fascists. That’s just anti-Christian bigotry.

(via Joe.My.God.)

These Proud Boys don’t seem very threatening anymore

I came across this video on Twitter and I was struck at how perfect it works as a representation of the state of affairs in the US:

Proud Boy in Seattle finds a sign he doesn't like during #MayDay & tries with all his might to rip it up. It doesn't work out. [h/t @nategowdy] #MayDaySea pic.twitter.com/Z2P0KhQw0J

— Ash J (@AshAgony) May 2, 2018

An easily offended proto-fascist sees a protest sign he doesn’t like and tries to destroy it, but fails, all the while outnumbered by liberals laughing at him, until he walks off in a huff.

Conservatives really have this “triggered snowflake” thing backwards, don’t they?

He then tries to save face on Facebook. He fails at that, too.

Guys, he's soooo totally not mad about all these people laughing at him. In fact, he thinks we're all stupid for watching the video. And he's not a Proud Boy either! So the joke's on us! pic.twitter.com/IEmInoDdP1

— Ash J (@AshAgony) May 2, 2018

I see hope for the future, folks.

(via @J_Dot_J; retweet by @Popehat)

Daily Links #123: Bill Cosby found guilty

Bill Cosby

• Bill Cosby ^[pictured]: Guilty on all counts of sexual assault. At his age, it’s effectively a life sentence. Good riddance.

• In totally unsurprising news, the Toronto van murderer is affiliated with women-hating incels.

• Here’s an TV show idea: Disgraced accused sexual predator Charlie Rose interviews other disgraced sexual predators like Matt Lauer and Louis CK about #MeToo. I’m sorry to say that’s not a joke.

• Not a repeat: Right-wingers triggered by NRA boycott destroy their own expensive property to own the libs, clearly need more safe spaces.

• Finally, NRA dude is sad that the unarmed hero who stopped the Waffle House shooter didn’t have a gun to shoot the gunman dead with instead.
  (via @fark)

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

Daily Links #121: Trump’s trans military ban blocked yet again

Will you look at that: 500 posts. Do I win something?

• Trump’s trans military ban just keeps getting, er, banned by federal courts.
  (via @fark)

• The Supreme Court just made it a little harder for the Trump administration to deport immigrants.
  (via @Popehat)

• What white people can learn from the Starbucks arrests; or, the importance of recognizing, and fighting against, implicit bias.

• You’d think a professional defender of the Catholic Church’s handling of child-diddling priests would know better than to weigh in on the David Silverman affair. (Yes, of course it’s Bill Donohue.)

• Finally, Ed Brayton presents: Eight Rules for Understanding Our Teenage President.

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

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 #119: SC cops shoot at man 57 times over $100 pot sale

Julian Betton

• South Carolina cops shot at a man ^[pictured] 57 times, hitting him nine times and paralyzing him, during a drug raid over a $100 pot sale. They claimed they’d announced themselves and that he fired at them first, and an “oversight” agency claimed the shooting was justified; his surveillance camera proved they lied about everything. The shooters and prosecutors have now given him a $2.75 million settlement.
  

• Slate exposes the junk science and blatant lies behind Trump’s trans military ban, including the fact that Defense Secretary Mattis was overruled by Mike Pence who, aided by fellow bigots like Tony Perkins, helped sway Trump to ignore the testimony from actual experts who say the ban accomplishes nothing good.
  (via @fark)

• Trump’s EPA continues to attack and lie about science at every turn.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• You know someone has a bad case of Christian persecution complex when they complain that Sweet Jesus ice cream shop’s name is “offensive”.

• Finally, coal baron Bob Murray apparently thought it would be a good idea to send a complaint letter to the judge who dismissed his bogus defamation suit against John Oliver. The ACLU is amused. The judge is not.
  (via @adamsteinbaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

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

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)

Stupid quote of the day: Florida senator defends “thoughts and prayers”

FL State Sen. Kelli Stargel (R)

I thought I’d finished my blogging rounds for the day, but that was before I saw this breathtaking pronouncement from Florida State Sen. Kelli Stargel:

At a Saturday debate on a proposed assault weapons ban in the Florida legislature, Stargel said “it’s not the weapon, it’s the evil from within” that leads people to commit deadly crimes.

“When we say ‘thoughts and prayers,’ it’s frowned upon. And I take real offense at that because thoughts and prayers are really the only thing that’s gonna stop the evil from within the individual who is taking up their arms to do this kind of a massacre,” Stargel said.

I don’t suppose actually taking “their arms” out of their hands and making it harder for the to buy guns in the first place would help any. Better just keep praying to Jebus for a miracle instead.

You know what I “take real offense” at? Pious fools, elected by an equally pious and foolish voter base, who use their pulpit to babble about asking an imaginary sky-being to intervene in the country’s gun violence epidemic in lieu of actually doing anything substantive, such as passing even the most basic laws to make it harder for deranged individuals to buy guns. Those people deserve every ounce of contempt they receive and then some.

Who the fuck keeps sending these nattering kooks to legislative office? Can we just vote out their voters? Seems like that might fix several problems in one go, and possibly save some lives to boot.

(via Joe.My.God.)

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.

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.)

Daily Links #110: Seriously, please sign that petition to prevent censorship of Canada’s Internet

Oy, Canadians! Have you signed that petition to save our Internet from censorship yet? The deadline is tonight.

Once you’ve done that, here’s your news dump.

• US Supreme Court refuses to review a lower court ruling blocking Trump’s attempt to end DACA.

• More good judicial news: A federal court rules that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits anti-LGBTQ workplace discrimination, rebuking the Trump admin. which argued the contrary.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• In reaction to the Larry Nassar sex abuse scandal, Michigan lawmakers want to greatly extend the statute of limitations for sex crime victims. For some reason, the Catholic Church isn’t happy with this.

• Florida Republicans advance two bills to put more guns in classrooms, because when you reject all sensible solutions, cartoonish ones are all that’s left.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally, Ed Brayton at Dispatches From the Culture Wars addresses the terrible, tribalistic defenses of Lawrence Krauss against his sexual harassment allegations. You know it’s bad when the pro-Krauss arguments are the same used by Roy Moore’s supporters.

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

Parkland anger prompts NRA backlash; Fox’s Starnes freaks out

Something peculiar is happening. It’s been over a week since the Parkland shooting, and the anger hasn’t died down. Gun control advocates aren’t going quiet, and the Right’s attempts to pivot the conversation into one about mental illness, or the futility of regulating crime, or anything else that isn’t guns, aren’t working. The survivors of the shooting are still speaking out and generating buzz, and because they’re teenagers, they haven’t run out of steam or been cowed by the swarm of gun-lobby drones and Right-wing tone trolls who unwisely think they can out-smacktalk them on Twitter. It’s reached the point where Republican officials, and even the sitting president (sort of, maybe), are considering tightening up gun laws.

I know. I’m as confused by all this as you are. Americans died in a senseless gun-related slaughter, and people are still talking about guns? When’s that ever happened?

Perhaps the clearest sign that something’s up is how the biggest name in the gun lobby, that wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the NRA, is finally facing some real blowback, to the point where other companies now consider them bad for business and are cutting ties:

United Airlines announced Saturday that it would eliminate a discount program for the National Rifle Association (NRA), following in the footsteps of competitor Delta Airlines and a host of other companies that have cut ties with the gun group in recent days.

[…]

Multiple car rental companies, including National Car Rental, Enterprise and Alamo, announced this week that they would end their discount programs, and car pricing group TrueCar announced it would end its program that allowed NRA members to save an average of nearly $3,400 on new and used cars.

First National Bank of Omaha also announced Thursday it would end its business relationship with the gun group, which included issuing NRA-branded credit cards to members.

Personally, I have reservations over how effective this boycott will prove, as boycotts don’t often produce much in the way of results nowadays (otherwise Rush Limbaugh would have been off the air since the days of slutgate). But it’ll be interesting to watch how it unfolds.

Oh, and there’s another sign that the backlash is working: Gun apologists are losing their minds, and perhaps none more spectacularly than Fox News’s Todd Starnes:

First @Delta objected to freedom of religion. Now, they are opposed to the right to bear arms. How very -- unAmerican.

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 24, 2018

I'm on the phone right now with a @delta @DeltaAssist Diamond Medallion agent asking if NRA members would still be permitted to fly @Delta. She put me on hold to ask a supervisor.

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 24, 2018

Do we have a list of airlines that have not declared war on the Second Amendment?

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 24, 2018

A @Delta agent just got back to me - she said to her knowledge law-abiding gun owners and NRA members are still permitted to fly on their jetliners.

— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 24, 2018

Only in the bizarre alternate reality these idjits inhabit does a company’s announcement that they’re ending discounts for members of one organization translate to “ARE THEY BANNING GUN OWNERS?”. I have no love for Delta, but do spare a thought for the poor phone operators who now have to put up with Starnes and anyone else inspired by him to call and argue about something that never happened.

(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 #108: Krauss accused of sexual misconduct

Lawrence Krauss

• Several women come forward to accuse noted physicist and famous atheist Lawrence Krauss ^[pictured] of sexual misconduct. More at Pharyngula and Friendly Atheist.

• You knew it was only a matter of time before some idiot – this time Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) – blamed the Parkland school shooting on videogames.

• Speaking of idiots who blame games, Trump says there ought to be a rating system for them and movies. This will come as a surprise to the ESRB and the MPAA, which have respectively rated games and movies for decades.

• Quirky corporate Twitter accounts are not your friends.

• Finally, your tweet of the day:

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