NO KIDDING

An actual Democratic presidential candidate.

SERIOUSLY

The woman's a Democratic candidate for president.

Flipper's down.

THIS WOMAN IS A DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

I say nominate her.

THIS IS STRANGE

Seems that the Young People^TM don't care for the LGBTQ468WHODOWEAPPRECIATE community as much as they once did.

It’s disappointing news for the LGBTQ community as Pride month is celebrated across the US.

An alarming new statistic from the annual Accelerating Acceptance report finds that young Americans —  generally regarded as the most socially tolerant generation — are less comfortable with LGBTQ people than in previous years.

The survey, produced by the Harris Poll in partnership with Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), found that Americans aged 18 to 34 who say they are comfortable interacting with queer people fell from 53% in 2017 to 45% in 2018 — even among those whom the report considers “allies” to the LGBTQ community.

This was the only age group to show a decline in overall acceptance. Women had a sharper decline, falling from 64% to 52%, compared to the 5% decrease among men, from 40 to 35%.

Can't for the life of me figure out why.  It just might have something to do with the fact that most people don't enjoy having their faces regularly shoved into an ideology.

Just a thought.

FRIENDLY REMINDER

Remember this the next time anyone declares that women's soccer, well...matters.

I THINK HE'S GOT IT

By George, he's got it.

SUHLEBBRIDEEZ

Yeppers.  Nothing means more to us in Flyover Country than the approval of Famous People.

Alyssa Milano arrived ahead of Wednesday night’s first Democratic presidential primary debate — and Sen. Bernie Sanders is aggressively seeking her endorsement, The Post has learned.

Sanders has personally phoned Milano in a bid to win her backing, a source close to the “Charmed” actress said.

“Of all the Democratic candidates, the one pounding down her door the hardest is Bernie Sanders,” the source said.

Milano recently said she was “playing the field” of the 20-plus Democratic contenders, despite her friendship with the front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden.

DROPPING THE MASK

CNN won't even pretend anymore.

It's hard today not to marvel at the casual cruelty of the Plessy decision. How could the court accept the transparent lie that blacks lived in separate but equal worlds with whites? And how could they give Constitutional sanction to a blatant display of racism?

You don't have to study history to answer those questions. Watch what happens this week when the US Supreme Court issues its decision on whether the Trump administration can add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census, some legal scholars and historians say.

"If they accept the census question, they are following the same pattern that the late-19th-century and 20th-century court made that was clearly intended to cement white rule," says Lawrence Goldstone, author of "Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903."

MAXIM

The term  "legitimate scholars." doesn't mitigate stupidity.

PANDER BEAR (ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION EDITION)

There's not a leftist issue in the world that Dances-with-Ethnicity won't back.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Fake Indian-Mass.), a top tier 2020 candidate, on Tuesday joined fellow candidate Julián Castro in a call to decriminalize illegal border crossings.

Warren has yet to release a comprehensive immigration reform plan, but confirmed in a statement to HuffPost that she agrees with Castro, a former Housing and Urban Development Secretary.

“We should not be criminalizing mamas and babies trying to flee violence at home or trying to build a better future. We must pass comprehensive immigration reform that is in line with our values, creates a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants including our DREAMers, and protects our borders," Warren said in a statement to HuffPost.

Content edited slightly.

BEHIND THE SCENES

Backstage with the Bernie Sanders campaign.

PANDER BEAR

I paid off my student loans, Stalinist.  So unless your "plan" includes sending me a six-figure check or picking up my current credit card debt (because why should one kind of debt have a priority over any other kind of debt) or both, you can kiss my ass, old man.

Two days before the first Democratic presidential debates, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday will unveil legislation canceling all $1.6 trillion of student debt held by about 45 million Americans.

Sanders will announce the legislation along with its House sponsors, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, CNN reported.

“In a generation hard hit by the Wall Street crash of 2008, it forgives all student debt and ends the absurdity of sentencing an entire generation to a lifetime of debt for the ‘crime’ of getting a college education,” Sanders said in remarks prepared for delivery at a news conference.

UPDATE: Bernie?

ALBERT

A lot of people around here were upset and even angry when Albert Pujols left the Cardinals and signed with the Los Angeles Angels after the 2011 season.  I, however, was never one of those people.  After all, Albert's got a wife and kids to think about.  And due to the salary cap, there was no way in the world that the Cardinals could possibly have paid him what the Angels were willing to pay him and still remained a competitive baseball team.

And it's not like the guy never produced.  He won three Most Valuable Player awards while he was here.  He should have gotten a lot more but MLB kept giving them to Steroid Boy up in Frisco.  The Birds won two rings in five years (2006 and 2011) and might have won a third (2004) had the Red Sox not gotten hot at exactly the right time.

Albert didn't owe us jack.

There were the individual moments, the kind you watch, murmur "Damn" to yourself and then thank God that the most dominant player in the game plays for your team.  Three home runs in one World Series game against the Rangers, for example.  And the greatest of them all, which happened during the 2005 NLCS against the Houston Astros.

The game was in Houston and Houston was about to win the game, take the series and go on to the World Series.  The Astros closer, a guy named Brad Lidge, then the single most dominant closer in the game, was on the mound and the 'Stros fans were, quite naturally, yelling at the top of their lungs.  Their boys were going to do it.

Up comes Pujols.  After a few pitches, Albert, with that beautiful swing of his, gets hold of one and hits it about as far as you can hit any pitch.  Home run.  Or it will be called that way whenever it comes back down to Earth.  But that wasn't the most impressive thing about that home run.  What stunned me was not how high and far it traveled but the way, as Albert quietly circled the bases, that Astro fans, who had been screaming just a moment before, fell completely silent.

Lidge was never the same pitcher after that.  Houston went on to win the NLCS, by the way.  But they had to win it in St. Louis.

Nobody here is mad at Pujols anymore, if they ever really were.  If I'm not mistaken, the guy still lives around here.  He was back in town with the Angels over the weekend and got a very nice reception.  So we still love the guy; to me, he'll always be a member of my family who just happened to take a job out of town.

This is only one reason why.

NOW I'M DONE

Yum.  Give me a crack at this and you can go ahead and kill me.

PANDER BEAR

An outstanding question.  Why should only student loan debt be forgiven?

While you’re at it why don’t you cancel mortgage debt and credit card debt and auto loan debt too ... psh, why should anyone have to pay back what they borrow? OH, and make sure you write a check to those who already paid their loans off.

REFOCUSING

You're famous for being famous.  You've personally made millions and millions of dollars merely for appearing on a reality television program with your mom and your sisters and you have paparazzi in the hundreds fighting for the chance to photograph you wherever you go.  But if one day you suddenly decide to take whatever blessings you've received and whatever societal influence you have and do something genuinely meaningful with them, I can only applaud you.

President Trump and reality TV star Kim Kardashian West announced programs aimed at helping former prisoners become gainfully employed.

At an event in the East Room of the White House on Thursday afternoon, the president said his administration was taking steps to encourage businesses to hire former inmates.

“The unemployment rate for former inmates is up to five times higher than the national average. My administration has set an ambitious goal: We want to cut the unemployment rate for these individuals to single digits within five years. And we think there’s a really good chance of doing it,” said Trump.

At the event, Kardashian West announced the creation of a rideshare partnership aimed at helping former inmates afford transportation to and from job interviews and places of employment.

“I’m so happy to announce today that we have a rideshare partnership where formerly incarcerated people will be gifted gift cards so that they can get rides to and from job interviews, to and from jobs, family members, and that is so important — so needed,” she explained.

“I think the ultimate goal is everyone wants the community to be safe. And the more opportunity that we have and that they have, and the support that we help give them, the safer everyone will be.”

YOU WANT US TO DO WHAT??

Personally associate with a bunch of...good gawd...FARMERS??

Members of the American Federation of Government Employees turned their backs on Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue on Thursday, apparently over plans to relocate them from Washington to the Kansas City area.

Perdue announced Thursday that two of the Department of Agriculture’s research agencies, the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, will be relocated to be closer to major farming regions, according to Politico.

BLUES WIN

[Stares blankly]

Holy crap, they actually pulled it off.

UPDATE: Here's the local write-up.

UPDATE: It's now Thursday morning and I still don't get it.

UPDATE: I know somebody who's going to be buying a new car.

UPDATE: Backstory.  The St. Louis Blues were never supposed to have existed at all.

In 1967, when the NHL expanded from six teams to twelve, the Blues were the last of the new six.  In fact, that franchise was supposed to have gone to Baltimore.  Only reason it didn't was the Wirtz family who owned the Chicago Black Hawks.

The Hawks ran a Central Hockey League farm team called the St. Louis Braves (when I was a kid, I loved listening to those guys on the radio) and also owned the St. Louis Arena which was a dump.  Truth to tell, it basically remained a dump until the day it was knocked down.

So whichever Wirtz was running the show then approached a local insurance executive and Democratic Party power broker named Sid Salomon Jr. with a proposition.  Take the Arena off my hands and I'll get you into the NHL. 

Salomon Jr. was initially skeptical but his son, Sid III, seems to have talked him into it.  And the rest is history.

UPDATE: Worst to first.  SI's write-up.

The Game 7 victory marked the city’s first Cup since the Blues’ inception in 1967, and it came as the conclusion to something like the perfect sports story. The team was the worst in the NHL on the morning of Jan. 3, a date that’s loomed large in St. Louis’s consciousness this spring—since the 11-game winning streak in January and February that vaulted the team up the standings, since it found itself improbably the No. 3 seed in the Central Division at the start of the playoffs. It’s been a sprint all spring, from worst to first for this team that was so recently left for dead.

UPDATE: The Blues flew this very sick little girl and devoted Blues fan into Boston to watch the final with her heroes.  Aftermath.

UPDATE: First title for the Raptors, first title for the Blues.  Same season.  Makes you think.

KIDDIE PORN

The Democratic Party outreach continues.

In addition to blackface, infanticide, and alleged sexual assault, the Democratic Party in Virginia can now add “sex with minors” to the list of questionable hobbies they’ll allow politicians to dabble in.

On Tuesday night, Joe Morrissey, a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates, won the Democratic primary for state senate. It was less than four years ago when Morrissey, who was in his fifties at the time, was jailed for having sex with a 17-year-old secretary at his law firm. According to statements from a prosecutor, Morrissey had sex with the girl multiple times in his law office and possessed a nude picture of her that he texted to a friend.

Morrissey was indicted for felony charges of indecent liberties with a minor and possession and distribution of child pornography. He denied the charges, but ended up pleading guilty to a misdemeanor in 2015. After serving jail time that year, he continued to deny sexual contact with the teenager, then denied paternity of a baby she delivered months later. Fast-forward a few more months, and Morrissey admitted on the radio that he was the father of the child, and the former secretary is now his wife.

Morrissey won Tuesday’s primary by 14 points...

RIP VAN ACOSTA

CNN pretentious jackass Jim Acosta, who has a new book coming out wondering where the hell his damned Congressional Medal of Honor is, has a warning for conservatives.

Explaining why he wrote his new book, The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America, Acosta told Anderson Cooper, "What I wanted to do is sort of take the big-picture view on this and say, 'Is this the kind of country we want to hand off to the next generation, where we’re now comfortable from here on out saying that the press is the enemy of the people?'"

"And to our friends in conservative media, Anderson, I say this: It is no guarantee that you get to stay in power forever," he continued. "And so, another administration could come in and do the very same thing to them and say, 'Well, Donald Trump did it. Guess what, we’re going to do it to you, too.'"

But cut Jimmy some slack.  The poor guy's only recently awakened from an eight-year coma.

If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.

 

Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.

 

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.

 

Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

LIGHT OF DAY

There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed.

"There was this boy," says Werner Christukat. "He came walking over the hill. A small blond boy with a bicycle and he wanted to go past me and into the village. I can still picture it exactly. I stopped him and wanted to chase him away, but then the junior squad leader came up and started yelling at me…"

The events described by Christukat took place almost 70 years ago, but he has never forgotten them. Yet ever since Nazi hunters paid him a visit last year, he has been combing through his memory for additional images: during the day when he sits in his sunroom in his knitted vest surrounded by pictures of his grandchildren; at night when he wanders sleeplessly through his dark home.

Christukat's unit -- the 3rd company of the 1st battalion of the SS mechanized infantry division "Der Führer" -- marched into the southwestern French village of Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944. Soldiers herded all of the villagers together. They shot the men to death in barns and locked the women and children in the village church, set off explosives, threw hand grenades inside and burned the church to the ground. They incinerated the entire village, including all 642 people they found there; 181 men, 254 women and 207 children according to the indictment. Many of them were burned alive. Charred remains of mothers clutching babies were found, as were elementary school pupils embracing in death.

THE MOST MILLENIAL THING EVER

Hold a job with a six-figure salary for less than six months.  Demand a raise.

CRYSTAL NIGHT

Those who do not remember the past...

British Jews have spoken of their fear after a pro-Palestine group supported by Jeremy Corbyn forced Jewish-owned shops to close by staging aggressive rallies outside them.

 

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), of which Mr Corbyn is patron, targeted shops selling Israeli products in Brighton, London and Manchester, forcing two businesses to fold.

 

Earlier this month, it organised a rally in London which saw ‘open anti-Semitism from attendees’, according to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. A statement from the Labour leader was read out to the crowd. 

 

It comes as Labour became the only party after the BNP to be formally investigated for racism by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC).

TEACHER! TEACHER! I KNOW!

Because the US has finally decided to stop pretending.

DUH

We've known that for a couple of decades now.  You spent years covering for his sorry ass and you're still married to him.

"Look, we just elected someone who admitted sexual assault to the presidency. So there's a lot of other issues that are swirling around these kinds of behaviors that need to be addressed," Clinton said when asked if she had heard rumors of Weinstein's behavior before the bombshell reports.

PARTICIPATION TROPHIES

Give it up for the stupidest idea ever conceived.  Until the next one.

One of gym classes’ most common games is being used as a tool of “oppression,” according to a team of Canadian researchers.

 

Dodgeball in phys-ed classes teaches students to dehumanize and harm their peers, professors from three Canadian universities said in a presentation this week at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Vancouver. A paper on the subject is set to appear in the journal European Physical Education Review.

 

“When you’re setting up the environment for students to learn, and you introduce the idea that it’s okay to slam the ball at whomever you like, even if it’s with a soft ball, the intention is there,” Joy Butler, a professor who studies pedagogy and curriculum development at University of British Columbia, said in a phone interview.

 

“When students think it’s okay because they’re being told it’s okay to do that, what do they learn? People say [dodgeball] is being used as an outlet for aggression or catharsis. I suspect that this is where they’re learning that."

MORDOR

Anyone stupid enough to believe that Islam can ever be coexisted with needs to read this now.

ONE TO WATCH

I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't at all happy when, after only two years on the job, Missouri attorney general Josh Hawley decided to run for the US Senate.  But as his Christianity Today piece demonstrates, I was WAY off.  Hawley may just be the most formidable intellect in the Senate and definitely someone to keep an eye on in 2024.  Some highlights.

For decades now our politics and culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom. It is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community, a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free choice.

 

It is a philosophy that has defined our age, though it is far from new. In fact, its most influential proponent lived 1,700 years ago: a British monk who eventually settled in Rome named Pelagius. So thoroughly have his teachings informed our recent past and precipitated our present crisis that we might refer to this era as the Age of Pelagius.

 

But here is the irony. Though the Pelagian vision celebrates the individual, it leads to hierarchy. Though it preaches merit, it produces elitism. Though it proclaims liberty, it destroys the life that makes liberty possible.

 

Pelagius was born sometime between A.D. 350 and 360 in Britain, possibly Wales. Highly educated, unusually gifted, a scholar of both Latin and Greek, he made his way to Italy and then to Rome. There he became famous for his teaching on Paul’s letters.

 

Pelagius held that the individual possessed a powerful capacity for achievement. In fact, Pelagius believed individuals could achieve their own salvation. It was just a matter of them living up to the perfection of which they were inherently capable. As Pelagius himself put it, “Since perfection is possible for man, it is obligatory.” The key was will and effort. If individuals worked hard enough and deployed their talents wisely enough, they could indeed be perfect.

 

This idea famously drew the ire of Augustine of Hippo, better known as Saint Augustine, who responded that we humans are not achievement machines. We are fragile. We are fallible. We suffer weakness and need. And we all stand in need of God’s grace.

 

But Pelagius was not satisfied. He took his stand on an idea of human freedom. He responded that God gave individuals free choice. And he insisted that this free choice was more powerful than any limitation Augustine identified.

 

Augustine said that human nature was a permanent thing, but Pelagius didn’t think so. Pelagius said that individuals could use their free choice to adopt their own purposes, to fix their own destinies—to create themselves, if you like.

 

That’s why a disciple of Pelagius named Julian of Eclanum said freedom of choice is that by which man is “emancipated from God.”

 

Now as you might expect with followers who say things like that, Pelagius was condemned as a heretic by the Council of Ephesus in 431.

 

But his philosophy lived on in late-20th-century America. And if you listen closely today, you can hear it almost everywhere—in our fiction and our film, in our school curricula and self-help books. It even features prominently in our law.

 

Perhaps the most eloquent contemporary statement of Pelagian freedom appears in an opinion from the United States Supreme Court, in a passage written by former Justice Anthony Kennedy. In 1992, in a case called Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, he wrote this: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

 

Read the rest of it.

SHAOLIN MASTERS, MAYBE

ROLL TIDE

Thy money perish with thee.

Political principle is hard enough to stick to when there’s not an eight-figure payday on the table. Imagine how hard it is when there is. The number in the headline actually undersells U of A’s sacrifice here, in fact: The $21.5 million was part of a larger $26.5 million pledge that’ll now go unfulfilled. And it came from the school’s single largest donor, Hugh Culverhouse Jr., which means the university has likely lost a substantial future donor stream as well.

The tiff appears — I stress, appears [Allah?  It is.  There's no "appearance" about it. - Ed]— to stem from Culverhouse’s call last week for a boycott of the state and its institutions, including the law school that bore his name, over its new abortion law. “I don’t want anybody to go to that law school, especially women, until the state gets its act together,” he said on May 29, adding “When you say sweet home Alabama, you can kiss my ass. There isn’t anything sweet about it until this absolute abomination is done with.”

SLOW-MOTION SUICIDE

Actually, Soley, "journalism" is killing itself.  Has been for at least a few decades now.

TIME TO GET THE CONFEDERATE FLAG BACK OUT

LORD?  If this story turns out to be legitimate, You can go ahead and send in that giant meteor/asteroid to smash into and completely destroy the Earth whenever the mood strikes You.  Because You know that I don't have a dog in this hunt anymore.

A disturbing video has surfaced on social media over the weekend that depicts two men wearing white lab coats playing with what appears to be aborted babies

The two men, whose faces cannot be seen in the video, each pick up a body and begin to make them “dance” together as if they were dolls.

“It is obvious these babies’ bodies are not models or dolls,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “This kind of sick gallows humor is revolting to most people and shows a gross disregard for human life.”

Once the bodies are tossed back into a metal pan, evidence that these are actually aborted babies becomes apparent.

THIS IS INTERESTING

There are places in the world where cowardice is a crime.

ILLINOIS GOES FULL NAZI

Never EVER go full Nazi.

The Illinois state senate, dominated by Democratic lawmakers, is prepared to pass the radical Reproductive Health Act (RHA), establishing abortion as a “fundamental right” and rolling back state-level restrictions on the procedure. On Tuesday, the bill passed the Illinois house on a 64–50 vote.

The RHA repeals the state’s ban on medically unnecessary partial-birth-abortion procedures (which also are banned under federal law) and mandates that all health-insurance companies cover abortion procedures, at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason. It also repeals the state’s Abortion Performance Refusal Act, which protects doctors and hospitals with moral objections to performing or participating in abortions. The RHA offers no religious or conscience-based exemptions for any such individuals or institutions.

Oh and that, "that's a human being in there" crap?  Not until we want it to be it's not.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, the RHA goes so far as to explicitly dehumanize unborn human beings in the quest to equate the right to kill the unborn with the right to make personal health-care choices, asserting that “a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent rights under the laws of this State.” This language, more than anything else in the legislation, exposes the depraved final goal of the abortion-rights movement.

Fat Boy's going to sign it.

Democratic governor J. B. Pritzker said in a statement after the bill passed the House on Tuesday that he will sign the legislation. “With reproductive healthcare under attack across the country, we must do everything in our power to protect women’s rights in Illinois,” Pritzker said. “Today was a major step forward for every woman in this state and I look forward continuing my work as an ally by signing the Reproductive Healthcare Act into law.”

I'm sure you do, lardass.

BEEN THERE

There are WAY worse ways to die than heart attacks.

BEEN KNOWN TO HAPPEN, DAVE

The first dog I ever fell passionately in love with was also named Sadie and she wasn't even mine.  She was a golden Lab mix, I guess you'd call it, and she belonged to some folks I used to house-sit for whenever they needed to leave town.

I still miss Sadie.  I miss her a lot.

Dogs'll do that to you.  Nothing you can do about it.

KEN?

While He was on this Earth, my Lord and Savior went about totally on foot with the occasional boat trip mixed in.  The Apostle Paul did the same and changed the entire world.  So I'm having a hard time figuring out why a "man of God" needs one private jet.

Never mind three.

ALTERNATE HEADLINE

Majority of Americans want Scott v. Sanford Roe v. Wade altered or abandoned.

Nearly half of Americans surveyed in a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released exclusively to The Hill say the Supreme Court should affirm the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade, though slightly more expect the justices to modify the landmark 1973 ruling.

Forty-six percent of respondents said the high court should uphold the ruling in Roe if the issue comes before the justices, while 36 percent said the Supreme Court should modify the 46-year-old ruling. Eighteen percent wanted the ruling to be overturned altogether.