Showing posts with label california. Show all posts
Showing posts with label california. Show all posts

Thursday, November 15, 2018

The Blue Wave Was Real


Yes indeed, there was a Blue Wave during election 2018 and some of the races are still ongoing. There were some disappoints to be sure: Ted Cruz beat out Dem rock star Beto O'Rourke for senate in Texas; insidious Marsha Blackburn summoned both Trump and Pence to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for a huge last minute rally to help her blast Democratic moderate Phil Bredesen; and somehow racist Steve King hung on in western Iowa while the rest of the state turned solid blue. Due in part to election day chaos, Dems Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams are barely hanging onto governor races in Florida and Georgia respectively while recounts and lawsuits are ongoing.

But in spite of those blips, there WAS a Blue Wave. The House of Representatives will now be have Dem Leadership on every committee and they are ready to investigate Trump and all his cronies in depth. TThe Blue Wave was great for women and minorities, sending a diverse group of House newbies to Washington to speak for the people starting in January. Dems have turned nearly every New England state blue from their state legislatures up, with only Republican Senator Collins hanging on in Maine. Some blue states are almost solid blue now, such as California, which ousted many Republicans at every level. And there were wild cards - a seat pickup in Oklahoma, and a vote in Idaho to expand Medicaid.



















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Monday, July 6, 2015

Fox News Tries to Rescue Trump From Himself

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Previous Related Posts:
Trump Dump: "Who's Doing the Raping?" Latinos, Of Course!
Macy's to Trump: You're Fired
NBC Shows Trump the Door
Trump Dumped by Univision
Trump Announces Another Failed Presidential Run

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Donald Trump is in trouble financially as businesses run from his empire, and he keeps doubling down on his remarks about these horrible Mexicans invading our country. His pals at Fox News are trying to pull him out of his deep hole, and especially Bill O'Reilly, who attempted to white-splain what Trump shoulda-woulda-coulda said if he hadn't been so stupidly blunt.

But here's the Catch-22 for Fox: If Trump wasn't so damn blunt about his racism towards Mexican immigrants, he wouldn't be at the top of the GOP contenders. Hate is all he has to give, and is oh-so-willing to give it to the world.

Today Trump made a new statement defending himself, saying his words were "distorted" by reporters and others who understand how to turn on a TV or search for a transcript.

Then he pointed out that Mexicans are bringing us diseases, in a flashback to last summer's Murrieta Madness as white people screamed at immigrant children on the border. That was exactly a year ago on the 4th of July - coincidence? I think not.

From Raw Story
“I have lost a lot during this presidential run defending the people of the United States,” Trump said. “I have always heard that it is very hard for a successful person to run for president.”
Trump said in his statement that some in the news media had begun to “totally distort” what he had said over the past week, and that “many fabulous people come in from Mexico and our country is better for it.”
However, he said, the United States has become “a dumping ground for Mexico” with illegal border-crossers smuggling illicit drugs and carrying “tremendous infectious disease.”
Trump said the recent killing of a woman in San Francisco by a illegal immigrant from Mexico with a criminal record proves him right.
“This is merely one of thousands of similar incidents throughout the United States. In other words, the worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government,” he said.

From this weekend, the Tweet about Jeb Bush's Wife, which was saved before Trump's people deleted it. Stay classy!



And even after that tweet was gone, he continued to taunt Bush about the Mexican border:





He also directed criticism at fellow candidate Rick Perry, once Governor of Texas:





Trump has seized upon the death of a woman, Kathryn Steinle, in San Francisco, CA, to "prove" his talking points because an illegal immigrant has been arrested. He also used the opportunity to taunt candidate Marco Rubio, a child of Cuban immigrants himself.

From CNN
"There's tremendous crime and illegal immigration is just incredible. As far as Rubio, he's very weak on immigration," he said in the phone interview. "You know, I have great relations with Mexico and I love the Mexican people, and the spirit of the Mexican people. These are people just pouring across the border."









Fox News pundits jumped on the bandwagon about the death of Kathryn Steinle while trying to help Trump stay in as a Presidential contender. Good luck with that.













From Bill O'Reilly's "Memo" Transcript:
For decades Mexico City has allowed organized crime to brutalize its own people and Americans, as well.
Some of the drug organizations have branched out into people smuggling, charging money to get desperate migrants across the border.
In the process many, perhaps most, migrant women are sexually molested, and that was the rape situation Donald Trump mentioned.
But it's not ordinary Mexicans doing the raping. It's the gangsters, and Trump should have made that clear.

. . . Fifty-nine percent of Mexican residents and illegal aliens have less than a high school education.
Only four percent have a college degree.
Sixty-eight percent are poor or near poor.
Fifty-seven percent receive means-tested welfare of some kind.
Fifty-six percent do not have health insurance. Many of those will receive Obamacare subsidies.
So, Trump's analysis is correct. The majority of Mexicans coming to the USA are not achievers in the economic sense.

. . . Last Wednesday Kate was walking with her father in San Francisco when she was shot dead on the street for absolutely no reason at all.
Police say 45-year-old Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal alien from Mexico, murdered Kate.
Apparently Sanchez has seven felony convictions and had been deported five times.
Yet he was still walking around the streets of San Francisco.
That's because Mayor Ed Lee and the eleven members of the San Francisco City Supervisors refuse to cooperate with the federal government on criminal aliens.

The Constitution demands that the federal government protect Americans from foreign intruders.
Obviously, that responsibility is not being met. And if you point that out as Trump did, you are a racist, a piñata for the open-border crowd to bash.


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Monday, February 2, 2015

Measles Epidemic Pits Anti-Vaxx Parents Against Public Health

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No parent enjoys taking their infants and toddlers in for vaccinations. My husband hates needles, which meant that I was the one who always had to take our kids to the health department for shots against Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) or Diptheria(whooping cough) and Tetanus (DpTt) shots. I would go in with a happy smiling baby, come out with a screaming, cranky baby who would then run a fever for several days as the antibodies from the shots built up immunity in the blood.

No parent enjoys taking a little lamb in for shots, but I always reminded myself that children once died from things like Measles and Whooping Cough. Vaccines are a miracle. The kids in the U.S. are lucky to have nearly free vaccines for the asking.

Except when parents don't ask and don't care, and don't take the steps to get their children vaccinated. And when there's an actual "Anti-Vaxx" movement, then many more children are at risk. And now it is causing a dangerous epidemic that started, of all places, in Disneyland!

From Time Magazine
Somewhere in Orange County, Mary Poppins and Ariel the mermaid may be running a fever. The same could be true for her coworkers—any of the other 23,000 people (OK, or characters) who punch in for work at Disneyland every day. And the same could be true too for any one of the estimated 16 million people who will pour into the theme park this year.

The reason? Measles. The cause? This may not come entirely as a surprise: the anti-vaccine crowd.

. . . The outbreak has spread to five other states—which is to be expected when the place that is ground zero for any infection attracts visitors from all over the world. Of the first 20 Disneyland victims, 15 were unvaccinated. Concern about the infections has gotten so great that California State epidemiologist Gil Chavez warned the public that anyone who has not had the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine should avoid all California theme parks “for the time being.”



Schools were once the frontline against epidemics, either becoming makeshift clinics for vaccinations, or by insisting that parents have their children vaccinated before they could attend school. But thanks to the Anti-Vaxxers, some systems began to allow parents to opt-out of the requirement for religious or personal reasons. In politically red states, the Anti-Vaxx movement has been helped along by a GOP that appears to hate any type of mass health care, and who like to pander to far-right Libertarians and Homeschool parents.





How did the Anti-Vaxx movement get started? Mostly because there are "clusters" of autistic children around the country and no one has proven scientifically why that is happening. One scientist decided to "prove" that it was the vaccination mixtures causing autism. And since autism remains vastly more frightening to parents who have never actually seen what measles can do to child, they bought the idea hook, line and sinker.



From Forbes
...The wave began with a 1998 paper published in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield, claiming that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism. Wakefield’s work was later shown to be fraudulent, and his claims about the vaccine “dishonest and irresponsible.” After lengthy investigations, the paper was retracted and Wakefield lost his medical license. Despite this very public repudiation, Wakefield has stuck to his claims, though, and has spent much of the past 15 years speaking (or perhaps “preaching” would be a better term) to anti-vaccine groups, to whom he is a kind of folk hero.
It’s not just Wakefield, though. Anti-vaccine messages have been broadcast aggressively by the group Generation Rescue, led by former Playboy playmate and MTV host Jenny McCarthy, and by Age of Autism, a group dedicated to the proposition that vaccines cause autism. (Age of Autism is doing it again right now.) And just last summer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published a new book further promoting the long-discredited claim that thimerosal causes autism.

Who are these parents?

From Washington Post
. . . the anti-vaccination movement is fueled by an over-privileged group of rich people grouped together who swear they won't put any chemicals in their kids (food or vaccines or whatever else), either because it's trendy to be all-natural or they don't understand or accept the science of vaccinations. Their science denying has been propelled further by celebrities, like Jenny McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and actress Mayim Bialik, who is also a neuroscientist and even plays one on TV.

Of the 34 patients in the current measles outbreak whose vaccination status is known, only five were fully vaccinated, according to the Los Angeles Times. And the worst of the outbreak is centered in Orange County, ground zero for the anti-vaccination movement that's put children at risk over junk science.
























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Friday, July 4, 2014

Murrieta, California ~ Anti-Immigrant Mob Screams at Bus Full of Children

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*Sigh* ~ Happy Fourth of July!

From the Los Angeles Times
A crowd of 200 to 300 people in downtown Murrieta surrounded three buses carrying immigrant detainees Tuesday afternoon, causing the buses to turn around before they reached a Border Patrol station in the Riverside County city.
Waving Americans flags and protest signs, the crowd refused to give way when the buses arrived with some 140 detainees from Texas, which has seen a flood of Central American immigrants cross the border in recent weeks without legal permission.





























Day 2 - The Fourth of July


















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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

The Isla Vista Shooting ~ Misogyny and Gun Lust (Just Like GOP)

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The Isla Vista, California, shooting was shocking not just for the senseless killing of six young people, but for the chilling motive of the equally young murderer, Elliot Rodger. In his "Manifesto," Rodger explains his vendetta against all the women who ever ignored or rejected him, as well as his anger at his three "irritating" roommates, all Asians, whom he stabbed to death. Rodger's egomania and Narcissism is evident in both his videos and his writing, and his hatred of women is creepy and maniacal.

It would be easy to just label him a mentally-ill Sociopath like many of the other shooters and just move along. But Elliot Rodger's attitudes are all-too-familiar for anyone who has followed politics since 2008. He basically shares many of the same values of the macho NRA and GOP: the #BundyRanch NRA neanderthals who gladly used women and children as human shields; the #OpenCarry movement that is pushing "Guns Everywhere" bills and invading meetings by the group Moms Demand Action; as well as the #TeaParty of Paul Ryan and Bob McDonnell who want to probe pregnant women with 9-inch wands and force them to have babies with rapists.

Heck, if Rodger hadn't burned out early, he could have been their next leader!









From New Republic
It’s time to call misogynist extremism by its name.
On Friday night, a young man went on a massacre in Santa Barbara that left six other people dead and seven injured. In the hours before the massacre, the suspect, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, had uploaded a video to YouTube titled “Retribution.” In this, and in a 140-page manifesto published online, Rodger claimed that he was going to prove himself the ultimate “alpha male” and take revenge on all the “sluts” who had sexually rejected him:
"Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day in which I will have my revenge ... you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one, the true alpha male.”

Transcript of Elliot Rodger's Last Video via San Jose Mercury News
You girls have never been attracted to me. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime, because ... I don't know what you don't see in me. I'm the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.

I will punish all of you for it. (laughs) On the day of retribution I'm going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB. And I will slaughter every spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut I see inside there. All those girls I've desired so much, they would have all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them (scoffs) while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes. I'll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.

You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true alpha male. (laughs) Yes. After I've annihilated every single girl in the sorority house, I will take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there. All those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasures while I've had to rot in loneliness for all these years. They've all looked down upon me every time I tried to go out and join them, they've all treated me like a mouse.

. . . You've forced me to suffer all my life and now I'll force you all to suffer. I've waited a long time for this. I'll give you exactly what you deserve. All of you. All you girls who rejected me and looked down upon me and you know, treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men. And all of you men, for living a better life than me, all of you sexually active men, I hate you. I hate all of you. I can't wait to give you exactly what you deserve Utter annihilation. (laughs).








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SC Wingnut Todd Kincannon













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Joe the Plumber



Samuel "Joe The Plumber" Wurzelbacher Open Letter to Parents of Isla Vista Victims
I’m not talking here about the three tragic murders Rodger committed by stabbing before his driving and shooting spree; I speak now only to the families of the gunshot victims in Santa Barbara:
It’s a tragedy.
I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now. But:

As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.

Richard Martinez, whose son (Christopher) was among the murdered, choked back tears at a news conference, blaming politicians the next day: “The talk about gun rights. What about Chris’ right to live?” Martinez said – and much more.
There are no critical words for a grieving father. He can say whatever he wants and blame whoever he’d like – it’s okay by me. You can’t take a step in his shoes – at least I can’t.

But the words and images of Mr. Martinez blaming “the proliferation of guns”, lobbyists, politicians, etc.; will be exploited by gun-grab extremists as are all tragedies involving gun violence and the mentally ill by the anti-Second Amendment Left.












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Sunday, March 31, 2013

Holy Chavez! #GOP Hopped Up Over Google's Easter Doodle

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Google honored Cesar Chávez with a doodle Sunday on the 86th anniversary of his birthday, drawing nationwide attention to the Latino civil rights leader and sparking a backlash among those upset with the company for taking a pass on Easter.
. . . President Barack Obama proclaimed March 31 as Cesar Chávez Day in 2011.
But the decision to honor Chávez infuriated many religious people and conservative publications who wondered by Google didn’t honor Easter instead. Conservative blog Twitchy blasted Google for featuring the image of Chávez and praised Bing for posting an image of Easter eggs.
~ Huffington Post

Google has commented on the online backlash its doodle has stoked in conservative quarters.
In a statement emailed to the Guardian, the internet giant acknowledged that there had been a "lot of angry user emails" but only a couple of press inquiries.
A spokeswoman said: "We enjoy celebrating holidays at Google but, as you may imagine, it's difficult for us to choose which events to highlight on our site. Sometimes for a given date we feature an historical event or influential figure that we haven't in the past."
~ Guardian UK


Hugo Chavez? No, Cesar - Why Didn't You Google It?






















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Google Should Stick to Christianity, or at least, Pagan Easter Eggs





















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