Kitchen Sink Omelet

I like how people say if I can't respect the 45, then respect the office of the POTUS. I respond, "Why? You elected Trump as president, knowing full well he was unfit, and you didn't care. How is that respecting the office?"

From Indivisible.org, how big data is being used for voter suppression--and how inept the oppressors are with sensitive information: On October 23, a story broke in Mother Jones, ProPublica, and Think Progress that caused a big stir in voting rights circles. A group of citizens in Illinois ha d discovered some smoking-gun evidence that the problematic Interstate Crosscheck program had some major security issues—and that key people knew about them. WHAT DID YOU GUYS DISCOVER? COULD YOU WALK US THROUGH THE SECURITY PROBLEMS YOU FOUND? Within the past two weeks we discovered massive security failures in the Crosscheck program and in how the Illinois State Board of Elections (SBE) handles voter data.   We sent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to Illinois and other states for information about the program. We were startled by what we got back. For starters, we received multiple usernames and passwords that election officials use to log in to voter data and Cross...

So much criticism of Liberalism posits that the idea of social and cultural progress at the expense of tradition is balloon-juice at best, hedonism at worst. At the heart of this critique is the (often unspoken) catechism "we have to live in the real world" usually expressed in historical anecdotes carefully chosen to prop up this restricted viewpoint. How telling is this look to the past--the history of economic/cultural repression justified by "that's just how things are" to keep us frozen in an eternal profit-loss margin continually favoring a fortunate wealthy few, a trade of a few shekels for the souls of the American people, using historical merit to maintain this obvious lie. Since the historical evidence is overwhelmingly against this worldview, such support from the past must be treated as an article of faith. Anyone who uses this faith to justify the violent treatment of people based on color, gender, status or income is someone who has a vested inter...

It never ceases to amaze me how Conservatives condemn socialism, yet the conservative answer to every issue, political, social and cultural, is to beat us all over the head with the economy and ram it down our throats. Money is the go-to weapon, the default stance of the GOP. Money must flow from our hands into the hands of ultra-conservatives. In order to keep the money flowing into their coffers, conservatives must lie, cheat, steal and wage wars, with overt applause from their closet fascitti supporters--all the while sneering at Liberals for being "unrealistic."

In case we haven't figured it out yet, the NRA wants to kill us all. After the recent shooting in a Colorado Wal-Mart, police then reviewed the store videos to see what the killer did while in the store. But the police discovered several people in the Wal-Mart drew their own guns at the sound of gunshots. So the police had to track each gun handler one by one to determine who was the true killer; wasting valuable time and effort to conduct their investigation. This result is  deliberate; this is what our paranoid NRA is after, a cloud of confusion to frustrate all efforts to prosecute killers who use firearms of any kind to slaughter women and/or people of color. The more guns in use, the more difficult it is to bring murderers to justice. If everyone is armed, all can act with impunity. For the NRA, any gun is a ticket marked "get out of jail free." No longer subject to the rule of law – justice and due process superseded by a sacrosanct 2nd amendment – potential killers...

Shorter Watson: We're not addressing the underlying issues resulting in juvenile gun deaths.

A quick reference chart on how to prepare for GOP shock and awe.

xkcd: Emoji Movie

Existence Proof by xkcd:

Amazing cosplay by Alyson Tabbitha . My favorite: Vincent Valentine from Final Fantasy VII:

Does the potter make his own tools? (I suspect so?) From Colossal

Ophelia Benson's sharp eyes spotted this gem of information : ProPublica: A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook’s censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions. For instance, Higgins’ incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific sub-group of Muslims — those that are “radicalized” — while Delgado’s post was deleted for attacking whites in general. Ophelia: "Who ya gonna suck up to? Established power, or rebels? The question answers itself, doesn’t it." A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook’s censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions. For instance, Higgins’ incitemen...

It's as plain as a pikestaff.

I flat-out cannot understand how a person can stare at the bottom line of a spreadsheet and come to the conclusion that denying healthcare for millions of people is a good thing. Such thinking is alien to any humanistic outlook, revealing the mindset of someone inhuman, a true monster. Worse, proponents of this cruel and needless process attempt to cloak it in a twisted form of reason, whipping up mass hysteria among their supporters, fed on mythology and bigotry, who call it patriotism. All concealing the stark fact that someone in power sentenced many, many people to die, all for the sake of ideological revenge against a nation that dared elect a man of color into the White House.

I was afraid this would happen. Trumpism, the re-invented psychosis of the conservative mindset, isn't just to nullify/negate what Obama has accomplished as president. Trumpism is erasure : once more a man of color will be eradicated from the history books. Churchill's bust returned to the Oval Office; Trump's inauguration cake an exact copy of Obama's; Bannon's inauguration speech a replica of Reagan's speech. The clock hands are madly spinning backwards as the ancient dinosaurs of the GOP drag all of us back to a time that never existed, in a mad effort to regain the youthful supremacy they believed they once had.