Broken News

The GOP – The Gun Obsessed Party

May 26, 2022

The GOP has two core beliefs: 1) there is never a bad time to give more tax cuts to the wealthiest among us, and 2) WE NEED MORE GUNS IN THE HANDS OF MORE PEOPLE.*

Well, to be fair there is one more thing that almost slipped my mind: 3) make it harder for people, especially people of color, to vote.

Oh, and lest we forget: 5) an almost fanatical devotion to Donald Tmurp.

They are like a modern-day Spanish Inquisition:

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

* This is trotted out most predictably and most vigorously immediately after every mass shooting. And this despite polls consistently showing that at least 80% of Americans support background checks, more than 60% support banning assault-style weapons and more than 60% support banning high-capacity ammunition magazines. But not banning books. The Ratpublican Party (and Joe Manchin) support forcing women to give birth against their will and having those children shot to death in order to protect guns (mainly gun manufacturers).

This has been a Paying Attention™ Special Broken News report.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled mayhem.

Ban The Books NOW

Thought For The Night

In Case Anyone Asks You, Black Lives Still Matter

May 25, 2022

In all the horror, I almost forgot. It was two years ago today that George Floyd was brutally murdered in broad daylight, with people watching, pleading for the slow-motion murder to stop. Since then, everything has gotten (not the least bit) better.

This has been your Paying Attention™ Thought For The Night.

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Thought For The Day

Blame It On The Gun

May 25, 2022

Deadliest School Shooting In A Decade. Twenty-one (for now) dead. Nineteen children, two adults. Cut down by a teenager with an assault-style weapon, who first shot his grandmother. In Texas. America is currently averaging more than one mass shooting per day in 2022. USA! USA! USA! We’re #1.

Seeing as we are always told it is too soon to talk about gun control right after each daily mass shooting here in Second Amendment Land, many people are starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe the NRA is behind all these murders.

First, it keeps their precious guns in the news – in case anyone might be forgetting how awash we are in firearms. Second, there can never be a good time to do anything to stem the bloodbath.

And since it is becoming ever more clear that anyone who does not traffic in some conspiracy theory or other will soon find themselves shunned, here is one more: the NRA is paying people all over this country to perpetrate one heinous killing spree after another in order to ensure there is never a good time to talk, or especially to do anything about guns in America.

Just as the NRA pays off politicians to keep the guns flowing throughout the land, and buys Supreme Court justices to misinterpret the Constitution in service of protecting guns from people, why would they hesitate for one moment to pay people to commit mass murder in order to keep saying it's too soon to talk about gun control? I'm just asking questions.

Just so we’re clear, the 21 dead are not crisis actors. They are dead people. Killed by the NRA. Even if they did not pay this child to murder all these innocent people, which I assure you they did, they are still responsible. And reprehensible.

This has been your Paying Attention™ Thought For The Day.

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Schmuck For The Year

Springtime For Cawthorn

May 24, 2022

Hitler fanboy and psychotic post-teen now-ex-Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) somehow managed to be too fucked up for Tmrup’s Ratpublican Party. Despite the enthusiastic endorsement from disgraced, twice-impeached, two-time-popular-vote-losing, one-term, seditious, ex-president and failed blogger Donald Tmurp himself, Cawthorn was primaried right out of his House seat. A seat he should have never been permitted to occupy, but then that’s not a disqualifying factor for Ratpublicans anymore.

Too bad for the young lad. No more invites to Ratpublican cocaine orgies. But look on the bright side little guy, you can spend all the time you want at Hitler's mountain retreat. Maybe you can run for dog catcher...or get caught by one.

Not everyone is on a Führer name basis with the head Nazi
Was he hoping to see his Führer’s ghost…
or old (really old) Adolph himself…or maybe Elvis?
What else is on this little twerp’s bucket list?

After conceding defeat – Wait, what!? – rather than bidding us all a fond farewell, the little shit threatened America with, “The time for gentile politics as usual has come to an end. It's time for the rise of the new right, it's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command.” I will agree though that I too have had enough of gentile politics.

Sure, he meant “genteel” politics, and someone, I guess his mom eventually fixed it for him. At least he didn’t threaten us with “marshall law” or the “gazpacho police” of Marge Taylor Groane.

Now Cawthorn can pursue his hobbies – taking firearms to the airport and driving too fast with a revoked license. Or he can just go back to Hitler’s Eagles Nest retreat and retire...and maybe take a page from his cherished Führer and leave us the fuck alone.

Springtime for Hitler

This has been your Paying Attention™ Schmuck For The Day Year.

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Schmuck For The Day

One of these dipshits preparing to march on the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021 

is Doug Mastriano (all these dumb-ass white fuckers look alike to me)

From God’s Lips To My Fingertips

May 23, 2022

Besides living in a state of constant angst I also live in a state of Pennsylvania. Apparent human-swine hybrid and current Ratpublican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania is planning to shoot America in the face if he defeats his Democratic opponent – current District Attorney Josh Shapiro. A fervent 2020 election denier, State Sen. Mastriano planned to replace the state’s electors who by law were charged with certifying Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for Joe Biden with fake electors who would support Tmrup’s attempted coup. Mastriano was also an in-person insurrectionist who claimed – contrary to hard evidence – that he left the Capitol when things turned violent. And Mastriano is no Donny-come-lately. His fever dreams of crazy conspiracies go way back.  

Adding to his already eww-inspiring resume Mastriano, currently under investigation by the January 6 Select Committee, continues to ignore a legal subpoena to come before the committee to explain his actions in relation to the insurrection. Including why he lied about his exact whereabouts on that fateful day. Nevertheless, Mastriano crushed the competition in his party’s recent primary for governor in the Keystone State.

During his acceptance screech Mastriano promised to do his best to support the corona virus, lynch Critical Race Theory, work tirelessly to curtail voting rights and LGBTQ+ rights, and make bathrooms great again. One would be wise to assume that given the go-ahead by the Extreme Court, Mastriano would not hesitate to outlaw all abortions in the state, and then contraceptives, and then a woman’s right to say “No.” 

Another Fair-Weather Religious Fanatic 

Mastriano not only denies the results of the 2020 election, he is already loudly and proudly preemptively denying any future presidential election (and, one assumes, any other election occurring in his vicinity) that does not satisfy his whims should he become king of Pennsylvania. And apparently, he will gladly ignore the fact that God handed Democrats any victory by willing voters to elect Democrats. Because after all, how could anyone vote for a Democrat unless God ordained that they do so. How is it that radical religious fanatics like Mastriano can so easily ignore when God disagrees with them? How can they prove that God is on their side? When will they just STFU? Does God need to literally smite them down permanently to get her point across? 

Doug Mastriano believes that God has ordained him to keep Democrats from ever getting the Keystone State's electoral votes. Period. It is not his intention to accomplish this by getting more votes for Ratpublicans. He seems unwilling to waste his time with such unpredictable pursuits, preferring instead to simply, for lack of a better word – cheat, which as noted he already attempted to do in 2020.  

Taking a poison page out of fellow-authoritarian Vladimir Putin’s pitiable playbook, Mastriano accused his Jewish opponent in the upcoming gubernatorial race of - without using the word - being a Nazi. He warned his supporters that the “future of Pennsylvania under Josh Shapiro is an oppressive regime not unlike East Germany where your freedom will be snatched away.” This from someone who has vowed to interfere with any electoral outcome he does not like. Mastriano, a Christian nationalist and far-right conspiracy theorist who continues promoting the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from disgraced, twice-impeached, two-time-popular-vote-losing, one-term, seditious, ex-president and failed blogger Donald Tmurp in Pennsylvania. 

Mastriano, who served as an intelligence analyst in East Germany, clearly learned how to manipulate through propaganda. He also believed that God ordered up a dust storm - in the Iraqi desert, where dust storms are as common as racists in the Ratpublican base - to aid his victory against Saddam Hussein's army during Desert Storm because his wife was home praying her little ass off.  

 

This has been your Paying Attention™ Schmuck For The Day.

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Schmuck For The Day

Don’t kid yourself, he still sucks

Best Freudian Slip Ever 
            or
The Great Gaffesbee

May 21, 2022 

Hey, remember this asshole? Unindicted war criminal George WTF Bush. Ex-worst president in American history: 

How do you think we feel? 

And The Dummy Goes To…

George WTF Bush for his long-awaited, albeit accidental admission: “Russian elections are rigged.* The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” In one moment, he soiled himself and quickly corrected his moment of truth, saying, “I mean Ukraine.” And that was with Bush having his script right in front of him.

We can take a modicum of satisfaction that there's some small thing rattling around between his ears that knows he's a war criminal. We can only hope it haunts him.

Good to see he hasn’t lost a bit of his unmatched oratory prowess 

Evil Dick and his dummy George

*Says the man who lost the popular vote, then had the Supreme Court stop the counting of votes in Florida where his brother was governor, and finally appoint him as 43^rd president.

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Is Being Stupid A Choice?

Cloudy With A Chance Of Morons

May 19, 2022

Apparently not everyone is aware of the existence of the internet. All the world’s information instantly available everywhere, all the time. You don’t even need a computer per se. Just a phone. Nonetheless, a much-too-large percentage of people remain painfully – to us, not seemingly to them – unaware of non-alternative facts about far too many things. Common wisdom holds that being so stunningly ignorant is easy. I disagree. Go figure. It seems to me that being so consistently unaware takes incredible discipline, focus and an almost fanatical devotion to maintaining a coma-like level of obliviousness.

Being stupid is hard work and a full-time occupation. And the pay is for shit. Yet there are millions and millions of devoted experts at being mind-blowingly senseless.

Which begs the question: if ignorance is bliss, why are these treacherous cretins so violently pissed off all the time?

Speaking of the availability of information, a recent study at the behest of Interior Secretary – and first Native American cabinet secretary in this nation’s history – Deb Haaland, exposed the heinous goings-on at Indian boarding schools. You know, the “schools” that kidnapped Indian children, cut off their hair (which to native people is practically sacred), canceled their original names, beat their native languages out of them and did everything possible – including torturing, sexually assaulting and murdering them – to keep them from being themselves, and in many cases from ever seeing their people and their families again.

Eugene McDaniels - The Parasite (For Buffy)

It is long past time for this country to acknowledge that the genocide our predecessors perpetrated upon this land’s original inhabitants made Adolf Hitler look like Mother Teresa. Despite modeling his concentration camps and extermination policies on the American reservation and extermination policies enacted against native peoples, Hitler was thankfully unable to sustain his genocide long enough to match the sheer numbers of those from whom he drew his murderous inspiration.

Tmurp’s “very fine people”: What, no pitchforks?

Secretary Haaland is calling for a Truth and Reconciliation commission. Good luck with that. Truth and reconciliation are two very foreign concepts in America. And we don’t take too kindly to no foreigners ‘round here neither.

From the fact that their Drear Leader lost the 2020 election bigly, to the fact that price-gouging corporations are more responsible for the current inflation rate, to the obvious effects of the ongoing, unrelenting climate crisis, to the fact that they themselves are in many cases flaming racists, misogynists and neo-fascists, and to the fact that this nation was built on genocide and slavery, many of our fellow citizens are aggressively and irredeemably anti-reality.

Being stupid is a full-time occupation. And America is dangerously close to full employment.

I. Mangrey reporting.

If He Only Had Some Balls

Shooting His Mouth Off?
That Phrase Does Not Mean What He Thinks It Means
At Least Not To Me

May 17, 2022

For some reason cowardly liar Fucker Carlson seems obsessed with what he calls a masculinity crisis. Methinks he doth protest too much. The only real masculinity crisis is Carlson himself. Not that masculinity is an objectively flawless quality, far from it, but there is nothing particularly masculine about the Swanson frozen foods trust fund baby who tries to pass himself off as a man of the people, or even a wuss of the people, no matter how hard he tries to pretend he’s a tough guy.

Fucker’s got it all:

No heart, no brain, no balls, and

he’s a whiny little brat

But Wait, There’s More…

Carlson has also made a name for himself hawking so-called “Great Replacement Theory.” The very theory the recent (Wish I could say ‘most recent,’ but that can never really be said about mass shootings in America, at least not without a reasonable guarantee of being proven wrong within a day or so when the next batch takes its place) mass shooter used to justify his racist/terrorist rampage in a Buffalo, NY grocery store. The same conspiracy behind the Charlottesville, VA torch bearing racists’ chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and “You will not replace us!” while protesting in favor of keeping the Confederacy alive, and then being called “very fine people” by then-racist-president Donald Tmurp. The very same despicable conspiracy theory Fucker has been blathering on about over and over again during what MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has called Carlson’s “White Power Hour.”

Fragile, bigoted, hateful and murderous white guys are all to happy to believe that there is a movement afoot to replace white people with non-white people in a number of overly-white countries, not the least of which is our own homeland – you know, the one we stole from this land’s original inhabitants. And who the fuck was it brought all those involuntary “immigrants” over here – before there even was an America – in the first place? If you really need someone to blame, Fucker, just look in your mirror.

New Yorker Magazine staff writer and dean of Columbia University School of Journalism Jelani Cobb had this to say about replacement theory:

“The idea that somehow African Americans are party to replacing anyone is ironic. If we’re going to be realistic about this, the population of this country is between one and two percent Native American. They were one hundred percent of the population of North America at the time of contact. If there is anyone who has the language about replacement, it is in fact what white Europeans did to the indigenous population of these lands. That’s the great replacement we have to grapple with in this country.”

They say that long COVID can result in brain damage that is similar to the deterioration that occurs with advanced aging – stealing some 20 years of mental competence, or a 10-point drop in IQ. This is nowhere near the brain damage and precipitous drop in IQ associated with watching the brain-eating-bacterial-bullshit that is Fucker Carlson’s nightly assault on humanity.

 

Bruce Cockburn - Stolen Land - 1994

I. Mangrey regurgitating. Carlsons will not replace us.                                                          

                                                                                                            

Perjury for Beginners (And Supreme Court Nominees)

And Injustice For All

May 15, 2022

The following blatant lies were uttered under oath during the Senate confirmation hearings of five currently (unde)serving members of the United States Supreme Court, each of whom was nominated specifically for their radical religious belief and deeply held desire and promise to overturn Roe v. Wade and subjugate women:

Clarence Thomas^ǂ 1991: I have not made a decision one way or the other.

Sam Alito 2006: Roe vs. Wade is an important decision of the Supreme Court that was decided in 1973, so it’s been on the books for a long time.

Neil Gorsuch* 2017: I will tell you that Roe vs. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the United States Supreme Court. It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992, and in several other cases.

Brett Kavanaugh^ǂ 2018: I said it was settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court entitled to respect under principles under stare decicis

Amy Clowney Barrett** 2020: Roe vs. Wade clearly held that the Constitution protected a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. Casey upheld that central holding and spelled out in greater detail the test that the Court uses to consider the legality of abortion regulations

This is how human rights and democracies die.

Many People Are Saying That Mud Is Transparent

Just so we’re clear, the people who disparage science at every turn, who think that maybe drinking disinfectant might kill a virus, suddenly claim that science tells them when life begins and gives them the right to decide what women should be permitted to do with their own bodies.

These nimrods caterwaul at every opportunity insisting that climate science is unsettled because 3% of the world’s climate “scientists” are not convinced of the most obvious fact in human history: that human beings’ reckless addiction to technology, particularly internal combustion, factory farming and now the mining of bitcoin, is implicated in the accelerating collapse of the environment.

I look forward to someone with more time on their hands and better resources coming up with the percentage of biologists who believe that life begins at bend-over-whether-you-want-to-or-not. Or even at conception.

George Carlin: FM & AM - Birth Control

* seat stolen from a rightful Obama nominee

** seat stolen from a rightful Biden nominee

ǂ credibly accused of sexual harassment

I. Mangrey reporting.

Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves