Author Archives: jason330

About jason330

Jason330 is a deep cover double agent working for the GOP. Don't tell anybody.

Tucker Carlson Tells His Millions of Viewers that Transgender is Not Real

Listen to Tucker Carlson intentionally misgender a Biden administration official and in so doing provide a hateful transgender-denying script to his millions of idiot viewers like Rick Jensen.  

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): Rachel Levine is a biological man who has lived life as a biological man — married, kids, the whole thing, and then, at some point, fairly recently, decided, “I’m a woman, I’m dressing as a woman.” Fine. “But you have to call me a woman or else you’re a hater.” Not fine.

In October, because almost everything that’s happening at this point is almost beyond parody, on the basis of that claim, “I’m a woman,” — of course, not a woman — Joe Biden made Rachel Levine an admiral in something called the public health service. Watch.

[…]

Okay, so you’re not a female. You know, no one wants to attack you for that. That’s totally fine, but when you get up on stage and say something that everyone knows is untrue and then demand that we believe it, you degrade the rest of us. It’s outrageous, actually, and not everyone wants to play along.

So this person is now an admiral. To memorialize the moment, The Babylon Bee made Rachel Levine their “Man of the Year.” It’s a joke. But it’s kind of true. In response to this, Twitter, on which no jokes are allowed, suspended Babylon Bee for “hate speech.” So, per Twitter policy, when a man calls himself a woman, you have to pretend that person is telling the truth.

…

I hope it ends with Twitter being shut down by Congress, but that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon. Has it occurred to you that, you know, some Soros-backed NGO can accuse you of treason against your own country and being a Putin supporter — which is a death penalty offense — and that’s totally fine on Twitter, but if you make fun of Rachel Levine’s ludicrous claim that he’s a woman, then you’re a hater? Like, how does this work? What are the standards here?

 

I wonder what kind of “middle ground” Senator Chris Coons will be able to carve out with people who say “transgender” means men pretending to be women?

If, Senator Coons, instead of accommodating this view – you decide to confront some of this among your “good friends” on the other side of reality, here is a great de-bunking of Tucker’s argument that transgender Americans are pretending.

DL Open Thread Tuesday March 22st 2022

Here we go again.  A very popular progressive is beating a centrist corporate lickspittle.  You know the rest.

A super PAC backing Pennsylvania Senate candidate Conor Lamb is warning prospective donors that he is trailing frontrunner John Fetterman by 30 percentage points in the Democratic primary — and that the public’s perception of his opponent’s ideology must change for Lamb to have a shot….The document highlights the testing of aggressive negative messaging against Fetterman, who is Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, including that he is a “dangerous radical who proudly calls himself a socialist,” “supports far-left policies like a $34 trillion-dollar government takeover of healthcare,” and has “spoken at Defund the Police rallies and wants to release convicted felons back onto our streets.”

On this date in 1917 The United States became the first country  to recognize the newly Tsar-less state of Russia. Tsar Nicholas II (The Deuce!) abdicated on March 2, leaving Russia in the hands of a moderate Provisional Government.  The Americans were eager to keep the Russians fighting in the Capitalist war.  Lenin and the Bolsheviks would soon rise in popularity based on the “We’re done with this fucking war” platform.

This is nothing new for you, but it is nice to read headlines like this now and again.

The Democratic Party’s Biggest Problem Is Its Conservative Wing

 

Several months ago, Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) announced that she won’t be running for re-election. Recently, she explained why in a worshipful interviewwith Rachel Bade at Politico, excerpted in its Playbook newsletter (“Presented by PhRMA”): She’s mad about Democrats criticizing her for not supporting President Biden’s agenda. “I am surprised at how short the memory is. It’s as short as being celebrated for having flipped a seat and then excoriated for taking votes that help you keep that seat,” she said.

This is a crock. Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda is dead because a handful of the party’s most conservative members, including Murphy, killed it. Now the party has nothing of legislative substance to run on, and members in swing districts are looking down the barrel of a possible midterm electoral bloodbath. The culprits are starting to head for the exits, scapegoating everyone but themselves for the consequences of their horrible decisions.

Some smart people disagree with me, but I doubt Judge Jackson is going to win the approval of President Joe Manchin. Neverthe less, this is a timely reminder.  

DO NOT WATCH POLITAINMENT

BY

This is your reminder to never, ever, ever watch politics on television. The Jackson nomination hearings require such an intervention. It’s not some sort of healthy civic activity. It’s sheer politainment, devoid of anything useful. We already know what’s going to happen. Hawley and Tailgunner Ted and Sasse and the other assholes on the Senate Judiciary Committee will pontificate and fascism all they can. Then there will be hours of commentary on said words. Nothing interesting will happen. The entire setup of these hearings as places for senators to show off are devoid of value unless you think watching desperate men make their case to the Republican base has value.

Moreover, it is a shocking waste of your time. In the extremely unlikely event anything interesting actually happens, you can read about it later. You can even watch some hot takes on Youtube. You can do this in about 1% of the time you would spend watching these rituals of ridiculousness.

Since the kind of person who comments on this site is a political junkie, which is the equivalent of a bad drug habit, intervention is necessary. Keep politics as part of your life, but not the pointless television-based kind. Instead of watching these hearings, go volunteer somewhere or engage in other forms of political activity, such as organizing with local social and economic justice groups. This is not to suggest that liberals’ political activity of choice–registering people to vote–has value. It does not, unless you are registering kids or new citizens. As the Trump years and after have taught us, you can get people registered to vote but they are probably going to vote against your values in about the same percentage that previously registered voters will. But if you have an upcoming election in your town, doing some GOTV operations has enormous value.

In conclusion, choose your political activities widely. Avoid those that lead to depression and doomscrolling/doomwatching. Engage in those that actually make a difference. And trust me, watching a Supreme Court nomination hearing does not make a difference unless you want to imagine what Jeffrey Toobin is doing on his computer when others are speaking around him. And I do not want to imagine that.

The Onion (Via Atrios) on the NYT Editorial Board

As usual, The Onion nails it. Also this preamble… just read it.

There Is A Natural Order To Things

Lots of things can be said about the “cancel culture” nonsense from the most privileged people with giant microphone sinecures, but one simple way to see it is as a contest between those who think normal people having some freedom to engage in “punching up” is the important part of any concept of “free speech” (very broadly defined, not just 1A), and those who think that, ACTUALLY, it’s punching down (by them) that’s important.Journalists who think their role is to hold the powerful to account versus those who see their role as holding the public to account.

That “the paper of record” (that fucking newspaper) puts itself in the latter category is not good! America’s actual Finest News Source:

When The Onion’s editorial board convened to discuss the tumultuous events of the previous month, one conclusion became evident: The world stands at a crossroads. Two visions of our collective future stand before us: On one side is a free and enlightened society, dedicated to the principles of openness, tolerance, and debate; the other is built upon ignorance, fear, and the suppression of dissent. Today, the path forward could not be clearer.Simply put, we need mass censorship now.

Our country was founded upon the admirable principles of a moneyed elite spoon-feeding its beliefs to the ignorant and unwashed masses, and yet today that legacy stands in tatters. For too long, our nation has tolerated the mewling and rambling of the confused public. For too long, we have watched the God-given right to suppress free speech slip away. That’s why The Onion now stands united in calling on all governments, domestic and foreign, to immediately muzzle protesters, dissidents, and citizens of all stripes who take part in the blighted pestilence on human affairs known as freedom of expression.

…

Critics may question where the globe’s citizens will find the information they need if not through traditional news sources. Of course, The Onion stands at the ready to act as a mouthpiece of the world’s elite, using its distinguished reportage to parrot whatever the party line happens to be. Genocide, eugenics, incest—no topic is too taboo to find support in our paper so long as it has been approved by a trustworthy establishment. What, indeed, is the purpose of the Fourth Estate if not to shepherd the simple-minded throng into blindly following a single unquestionable narrative? To this ideal, we remain dedicated.

DL Open Thread Monday March 21 2022

With regard to Viet Nam, one of the sickest psychos to ever wield power in the United States, Henry Kissinger, once noted “The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.” By that maxim – Putin is losing in Ukraine.  Lots of “statement” talk in the news as 1/4 of Ukraine’s 44 million people are now refugees.

Hopefully when this is all over Putin will have lost a lot more than the monstrous war he started.

Can Republicans enforce their cruel anti-trans, anti-women’s health care laws across state lines? Whether your answer is yes or no, the Republicans will never stop trying to enforce their cruel anti-trans, anti-women’s health care laws across state lines. There is no middle ground, the is no compromise, there is no meeting in the middle with these people.

A Milford man was shot (presumable in the back) and killed by Dewey Beach Cop While running away.   Now I’m no crime scene expert, but how can a guy running away pose a deadly threat?  Oh wait…he had a gun so I guess the cop was killing him to stop him from committing a mass murder. We’ll see I suppose.

“Handgun Nearby”

One of the officers fired at the man during a foot chase but the man continued running, state police said. The officers later located the man, who was unconscious and with a handgun nearby, according to Pepper. The man was pronounced dead at Beebe Hospital in Dewey Beach.

 

Shocked Stammers

Any single senator could have blocked the daylight saving bill from passing but many didn’t know it was even happening. Sen. Rick Scott, a permanent daylight saving time proponent who signed a similar bill into law when he was governor of Florida, said he would have gone to give a speech on the Senate floor if he had known. Asked to re-create his reaction to the news, Senator Chris Coons  issued a series of shocked stammers that is impossible to phonetically translate.

Coons, as always, is the go-to senator for a quote to fit any DC bubble narrative.

Other senators, it seems, were not told by their staff that the request was happening.

Coons is one of them. He said that he and some other senators reacted to the news by asking Rubio if they’d given everyone a heads up, and were told yes.

“It’s literally an issue my staff and I had never discussed, and they made an assumption that I don’t really care about daylight saving time,” Coons said. “And I don’t know if I do! I’ve never taken five minutes to stop and think about it.”

Coons is a very poplar, well respected Senator who gets invited to all the right prayer breakfast-es.

John Kowalko Beats the Holy Shit out of REV

Heads-up. That headline may be deceptive. I have’t listened yet so I don’t know if Kowalko and REV get into actual fisticuffs.

E167 – Representative Emeritus (w/John Kowalko)

After an update on the episode from last week, State Rep. John Kowalko joins Rob in the bunker to talk about his retirement, how progress is slowed in the state of Delaware, and some stories from his time in the general assembly.

Show Notes:

Zelenskyy Addresses Biden Directly

In words and images, Volodymyr Zelenskyy made an impassioned case for US intervention in Ukraine by means of a “No Fly” zone.

The images of a happy successful Ukraine prior to Putin’s invasion, contrasted with the same views during the invasion with broken and bombed buildings and people were powerful.

The only captions….  “this is a murder” and at the end…”close the sky over Ukraine”

 

DL Open Thread Wednesday March 16 2022

People hate the clock switching nonsense. Now it is gone (in about a year). Huzzah! But did you know we tried this 48 years ago and it didn’t go well?

Amid a U.S. energy crisis in 1973, President Nixon swiftly signed a bill which put the U.S. on daylight saving time for two years, Prerau said. The law went into effect on Jan. 6, 1974.

“When it was passed, most people thought it sounded pretty good,” he said.

The public liked the idea of avoiding the confusion and frustration of changing the clocks by an hour twice a year. But soon Americans realized what permanent daylight saving time meant: Sunrises at 8 a.m. or later in the middle of winter. In some areas, sunrises could be as late as 9:30 a.m., said Prerau.

Soon “the experiment … ran afoul of public opinion,” the New York Times reported in October 1974.

Public approval for the law dropped severely and rapidly: from 79% in December 1973 to 42% in February 1974, the Times reported.

Of all the bad actions by these bad actors, the Republican laws that deputize interested parties into a sort of anti-abortion, anti-trans rights jihad are really unsettling.

Conservative lawmakers across the U.S. have let loose a wave of state legislation attempting to restrict access to abortions and to gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth by allowing lawsuits to be filed against anyone who helps them.

But now there’s a new twist in a broader Republican strategy: Representatives in multiple states are pushing bills that would attempt to limit what residents can and can’t do beyond state lines.

Recently in Missouri, a state representative introduced a measure that would let people sue anyone they suspect of helping a resident get an abortion in another state.

This is old, but sucking up to Seniors is evergreen.

Hensley and Ramone Launch Re-Election Campaigns With Sops to Seniors

Five years ago, when Delaware was having projected revenue shortfalls of some $600 million, lawmakers took the ax to various programs to meet the legal requirement to have a balanced budget.

One was the popular senior school property tax credit that was established in 1999, with residents who lived in their own homes getting a 50 percent rebate or $500, whichever was lower.

But in June 2017, Gov. John Carney’s first year in office, the maximum amount was cut from $500 to $400, where it has remained in the ensuing years.
But now, with a $823 million revenue surplus projected for the fiscal year that starts on July 1, state Rep. Kevin Hensley wants to increase the credit to a max of $750.
A competing bill by Rep. Michael Ramone, a Pike Creek-area Republican, would take the rebate back up to $500.

“By virtue of their lifelong contributions, no group of citizens has collectively paid more taxes than our seniors,” said Hensley, a Republican who represents the rapidly growing Middletown area of southern New Castle County.

DL Open Thread Tuesday The Ides of March 2022

Oh Crap 

BEIJING, March 15 (Reuters) – China posted a steep jump in daily COVID-19 infections on Tuesday, with new cases more than doubling from a day earlier to hit a two-year high, raising concerns about the rising economic costs of its tough measures to contain the disease.

A total of 3,507 domestically transmitted cases with confirmed symptoms were reported on Monday across more than a dozen provinces and municipalities, up from 1,337 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said.

Most of the new cases were in the northeastern province of Jilin.

Though China’s caseload is still tiny by global standards, health experts said the increase in daily infections over the next few weeks would be key to determine whether its “dynamic zero-COVID” approach, of containing each outbreak quickly as it arises, remains effective against the rapidly spreading Omicron variant.

Makers of everything from flash drives to glass for Apple’s iPhone screens are warning of shipment delays as they comply with China’s curbs against the disease, putting further strain on global supply chains.

More like this please. Get them on record. Make Republicans (and Joe Manchin and Chris Coons) vote against it.

Dems push plan to tax oil companies’ profits, send checks to Americans during Russia-Ukraine price spike

Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse are pushing a bill they say will help bring relief from high gas prices to Americans.

The proposal, which comes as Russia’s war on Ukraine delivers a shock to global energy prices, is called the “Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax.” According to Khanna, D-Calif., and Whitehouse, D-R.I., the bill would levy a tax on oil barrels sold by large producers “equal to 50 percent of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the pre-pandemic average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019.”

The money from that tax would be sent to consumers as a quarterly rebate, according to a description of the bill, with a cutoff for single people making $75,000 or more and families making $150,000 or more.

“We’ve seen this script before, and we cannot allow the fossil fuel industry to once again collect a massive windfall by taking advantage of an international crisis,” Whitehouse said. A press release from Whitehouse and Khanna said the increase in gas prices, “is not justified by increases in the cost of domestic production, but is driven by international markets controlled by fossil fuel cartels.”

Speaking of Machin…

Raskin made the mistake of saying that Climate Change is real and something we need to factor into our plans.

DL Open Thread Monday March 14th 2022

Quick Q before we start this week…What’s your spirit flower?  I’m a daffodil.  I know that’s a hackey, obvious flower but I didn’t pick it.  The daffodil picked me.  Anyhoo…I mention that here because we are now just weeks away from my heyday.  Whatever flower you are, (Azalea, Tulip, Poppy, Sunflower, Rose, Orchid, Iris, Peony, Chrysanthemum, Geranium, Lily, Lotus, Dandelion, Hyacinth, Daisy, Crocus?)
enjoy your self.  Take in your beauty. Allow your spirit flower to remind you that life is wondrously beautiful.

Trump brought his shitshow to Florence SC, where he openly mentioned his plans to use his next term of office to create a dictatorship.

“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States. The deep state must and will be brought to heel.” — Trump proposes a drastic expansion of presidential power

Critical reforms!  All the bean counters and generals that who refused to install him as King need to go.

Say what you will about the tenants of Trumpism, but at least it is an ethos.

Remember when we all talked about Texas “turning blue” in a few years?   Eh…not so much.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/texas-voting-law-sb1-primary-election

My annual “Fuck Iowa” post is late this year.

Making Iowa irrelevant

This is the best truism I found all of last week.  The mistake we make when fascism is in the process of taking over a country is to say – they can’t be serious.  They’re serious.

Show me the party of life

https://bluedelaware.com/2022/03/11/bolden-bush-schwartzkopf-and-smith-sink-marijuana-legalization-bill/

Cruelty is the point

Chris Coons is a very popular and relevant politician. I’m an unpopular and irrelevant microbe in comparison. But if I was as popular as say… a Chris Coons, I might try to spend some of my popularity by pointing out that the policies of the Republican Party are designed to inflict pain and suffering for shits and giggles.

This Texas bill is a good example.

As with the coming bans on etopic pregnancies, this really removes any doubt about what abortion criminalization is about. There’s not even a tradeoff between the life of the mother and the potential life of a fetus — no baby is going to be born by forcing a woman to miscarry, but mothers will definitely die. It’s just pure misogynist sadism, which is what it’s always been about.

It doesn’t serve exalted bipartisanship to make waves.

Why Trump (and all Republican Criminals) Don’t Have Anything to Fear in the Courts

With the help and hard work of Senatorial Oligarch, Chris Coons, Trump appointed 54 federal appellate judges in four years.  As a result, we have so many Trump judges on the federal bench now that whenever a conservative person or media outlet loses a case – they can appeal it up and find partisan conservative judge to overrule any decision that doesn’t go their way.

Heck of a job, Coonsie!

 

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/13/how-trump-compares-with-other-recent-presidents-in-appointing-federal-judges/