The Washington Post has an update on Brian Talbert, a gay man denied entry to the Charlotte Pride Parade because he voted for Donald Trump: Talbert — a 47-year-old North Carolina native — said he was one of about 50 people who attended the first pride parade in Charlotte in 1994. He recalled that Christian demonstrators threw rocks and bottles at the marchers and that someone spit in his face. More than two decades later, he said, the discrimination continues — but this time it’s being directed at him by the gay community. Talbert said he feels betrayed because it shouldn’t matter who you vote for. “I want them to realize that they’re doing the exact same thing they say bigoted people are doing to them — they’re the oppressors now,” he said. “It’s disgusting, and every gay person in America should feel ashamed.” Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Politics
One Thing I Can’t Tolerate is Intolerance: Gays for Trump Edition
Well, so much for acceptance and tolerance . . . The banned group is called Gays for Trump. Brian Talbert, a member of the group, said, “It was going to be fun. We wanted to be energetic. We wanted to show that we weren’t the racist, bigot, misogynistic . . . We wanted to show that we are Americans, love our country and our president. We wanted to be there to celebrate gay pride. Everything fell into place except being able to celebrate who I am.” Where that strategy fails is that showing Trump supporters are not anti-gay, racist, bigots, misogynists, etc., is not part of the mainstream gay agenda. Quite the opposite. The agenda is to keep that stereotype alive and keep those labels in play. “For a group of people to claim to want tolerance, acceptance, and give it to every single person you can imagine to give… Read more →
Big Losers
I saw this headline on an AP story today — Poor and disabled big losers in Trump budget. The story includes a photo of the budget (see below), so I think it’s safe to say that the AP writer didn’t read the entire thing before announcing who the “big losers” are. He’s just flogging his own agenda. (See also Harvard Study Says Media Are Very Biased Against Donald Trump) “Trump’s plan for the budget year beginning Oct. 1 makes deep cuts in safety net programs . . .” the story says. What’s the difference between a “cut” and a “deep cut”? The latter sounds mean and scary. Why not just say something factual like “10 percent cut” or “50 percent cut” and let readers put their own characterization on it? “Safety net programs” is also a loaded expression. “Trump’s budget would cut the food stamp program by $191 billion over… Read more →
Harvard Study Says Media Are Very Biased Against Donald Trump
According to a Harvard University study, the mainstream media are very biased against Donald Trump. Here’s a chart from the study, showing that the tone of some news outlets is negative in as many as 98% of reports: I’ve noticed that even our local news station is about 90-10 negative on Trump coverage. We have to look at the way the media handled Trump before he was elected. How many newspapers in the entire country endorsed Trump for president? I don’t think the number is zero but it has to be very close to zero. Some newspapers — The Washington Post and New York Times come to mind — were virulently anti-Trump on the editorial page, which bled over into the news coverage. Every news network except Fox was anti-Trump, the only positive news being that he was most definitely not going to be elected. Well, actually it was that… Read more →
Why Should Men (or Women) Have to Pay for Prenatal Coverage?
Illinois rep asks why men should have to pay for prenatal coverage — LA Times Evidently the LAT thinks this a hopelessly stupid question, but why? ObamaCare requires that all health plans cover pregnancy and childbirth, even though pregnancy and childbirth insurance is expensive and many people (including women) don’t need or want it. Why is a man or woman not afforded the option to buy a less expensive health plan without pregnancy and childbirth coverage? Why is that not an option? Even though the LAT frames the issue as a stupid question asked by a stupid white male, why should women in their 50s or 60s or 70s be paying for pregnancy and childbirth insurance? Or women of any age if they don’t want it? Why is this law forcing people to pay for expensive things that they don’t need or want? Read more →
Nothing Can Bring You Peace But Yourself
A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” Read more →
One Thing We Can All Agree Upon
I don’t know if the Trump inauguration was the most watched inauguration in history but I know it was watched by more people than the Hillary Clinton inauguration . . . Read more →
One Thing I Think We Can All Agree Upon
Thank God Almighty this woman is not going to be the next president of the United States. Even if you don’t like Trump, even if you don’t believe in God, thank God Almighty this woman is not going to be the next president of the United States. Read more →
Strong Opinions on Betsy DeVos
I’m seeing on Facebook that a lot of people have strong (negative) opinions today about Betsy DeVos, who has been nominated as Secretary of Education, despite the fact that 99.9 percent of them had never heard of Betsy DeVos until about five minutes ago. Why do people suddenly have a strong opinion about someone they’ve never heard of? How is this possible? Because they’ve been instructed to have a strong opinion about Betsy DeVos in order to be consistent with the image that they have of themselves and the groups they want to fit in with. BTW I have no opinion about Betsy DeVos at the moment because I had never heard of her until about five minutes ago . . . Read more →
That Was Then, This Is Now
That was then: Top Republicans must reject the ridiculous notion that a national election can be ‘rigged.’ — New York Times editorial, Oct. 18, 2016 This is now: [President-elect] Trump should be leading the call for a thorough investigation, since it would be the only way to remove this darkening cloud from his presidency. Failing to resolve the questions about Russia would feed suspicion among millions of Americans that a dominant theme of his candidacy turned out to be true: The election was indeed rigged. — New York Times editorial, Dec. 11, 2016 Read more →
What Would You Charge for an EpiPen?
I don’t mean hypothetically, I mean I literally want to buy an EpiPen from you right now. My kid got stung by a bee, his face is swelling up like a balloon and his lungs are about to shut down. I see a lot of people are mad at Mylan for charging $600 for EpiPens but they don’t seem to be mad at everyone else in the world who won’t sell them an EpiPen at all. Not to mention, $600 for a life-saving treatment seems like a pretty good bargain to me. Hillary Clinton has called for reducing the price of EpiPens. Hillary Clinton has never lifted a finger in a productive enterprise in her life. She will not sell you an EpiPen at any price. If the amoral profiteers at Mylan have an obligation to sell cheap EpiPens, why doesn’t Hillary Clinton? Why don’t you? Read more →
On-Again, Off-Again Respect for Grieving Parents
Hey, remember when the first night of the Republican convention featured Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, one of the Americans slain in Benghazi? Remember how her speech was called a “cynical exploitation of grief”? Or the “unabashed exploitation of private people’s grief” or “the weaponization of grief”? Remember how she “ruined the evening”? How it was, “a spectacle so offensive, it was hard to even comprehend”? How some liberal commentators said, “Mrs. Smith was really most interested in drinking blood rather than healing”? How her speech represented an “early dip into the gutter”? Remember how a GQ writer publicly expressed a desire to beat her to death? — National Review Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of
Is anyone else sick of paying for an ever-expanding army of bureaucrats to meddle in their lives? Or is it just me? Read more →
Jill Stein on Leaked DNC Emails
The leaked DNC emails are the smoking gun that the Democratic establishment was rigging the game against Bernie the whole time. Instead of running the process impartially and letting the voters decide, top Democratic officials were doing all they could to ensure a Clinton victory, including collusion with journalists to present a pro-Clinton, anti-Sanders narrative. You want to affirm a corrupt party that just dragged you across the coals? You expect your supporters, who have a vision and who voted for integrity, to follow you into this shithole? Is there no respect here for his campaign and for himself? Are they just going to pretend it didn’t happen? I think it would be very hard for a self-respecting Sanders supporter, in light of these revelations, to take the beating and humiliate themselves and disrespect themselves, to go into the campaign and support the predator who destroyed them. How is Hillary… Read more →
In Politics, An Honest Man Does Not Get Rich
I have been unable to save much money in my life. I have been in politics, and in politics an honest man does not get rich. — Sam Rayburn That’s not true, there are LOTS of rich politicians. Oh wait . . . [Sam Rayburn was one of the most powerful American politicians of the 20th century. He served as the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives for 17 years, the longest tenure in U.S. history. His savings at his death totaled $ 15,000.] Read more →
Boy, Were We Wrong!
When the country elected Barack Obama president in 2008, those of us who disagreed with many of his policy ideas were nonetheless consoled by the fact that his victory illustrated that America had moved well beyond institutional racism. Certainly the fact that Obama had succeeded in both a hard-fought Democratic primary and a general election meant that the country was ready to move past the intense focus on race in our national politics. Boy, were we wrong! — Steven Malanga Read more →
Bernie Sanders is Wrong About Everything But He’s Raised the Intellectual Climate
Socialism has been discredited about as thoroughly as possible, but one thing I greatly admire about Bernie Sanders is this: He’s never made a political issue of the fact that he’s Jewish. He doesn’t say “It’s high time we had a Jewish president.” He doesn’t say “If you’re Jewish, you should vote for me because I’m Jewish.” And most importantly, he doesn’t dismiss criticism or critics as anti-Semitic. And because he doesn’t do any of the above, I don’t see his supporters or the media doing it either. It would be easy for him to do those things because it’s what people expect. Political discourse in America consists mainly of people calling each other racists, sexists, homophobes and bigots. It’s hard to complete a sentence without someone taking offense to a trigger word, a microaggression or a dog whistle. Abraham Lincoln once said this: If you have ever studied geometry,… Read more →
The One Thing I Can’t Tolerate is Intolerance: Herschel Walker Edition
NFL great Herschel Walker was one of the early Trump supporters out of the gate but now he says he is losing speaking gigs by anti-Trumpers who are blackballing him. — Breitbart Maybe I’m not paying attention but I can’t remember any people with left-leaning views being blackballed from public discourse. At the risk of being super obvious, tolerance and freedom of speech don’t mean anything if you’re not willing to extend them to everybody — people you applaud as well as people you detest. Read more →
George Orwell: “I Told You So”
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Associated Press review of the official calendar Hillary Clinton kept as secretary of state identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded or omitted the names of those she met. — Associated Press Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said that Clinton “has always made an effort to be transparent since entering public life.” In addition to the unrecorded meetings with donors, this effort at transparency includes setting up a private email server to use as Secretary of State, and giving speeches at $200,000 per to Wall Street banks and investment firms, foreign governments and other special interest groups under a contract that prevents anyone from releasing a transcript of what she said. Merrill went on to say, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Read more →
Why Gun Control Can’t Be Solved
On average, Democrats use guns for shooting the innocent. We call that crime. On average, Republicans use guns for sporting purposes and self-defense. . . . So it seems to me that gun control can’t be solved because Democrats are using guns to kill each other – and want it to stop – whereas Republicans are using guns to defend against Democrats. . . . Democrats are unlikely to talk Republicans out of gun ownership because it comes off as “Put down your gun so I can shoot you.” — Scott Adams Good points. The NRA gets a bad rap in some circles but you never hear of an NRA member going out and shooting random people. Meanwhile, Democratic constituencies are shooting each other like the Olympic Games of murder, which for some reason leads their representatives in Congress to insist that Republicans should have to give up on… Read more →