Nikki Haley Mean Girls That Nice Bud Light Trans Lady Dylan Mulvaney, For Votes
Dylan Mulvaney is not actually running for president, although she's probably polling higher than Haley.
Dylan Mulvaney is a 26-year-old actress and TikTok influencer who exists in the world as a trans woman. This infuriates joyless bigots, who staged boycotts and shot up beer cans after Bud Light featured her in an online promotion. Actual sitting US senators Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn literally launched a federal investigation into the Bud Light sponsorship and demanded that a private company sever all ties with Mulvaney.
SERIOUSLY LOOK AT THIS SHIT: Ted Cruz Investigating Bud Light For Felony Nice To Trans Lady
Yet, that is almost polite bullying compared to doomed presidential candidate Nikki Haley's repulsive attacks on a private citizen who's done nothing to anyone.
Haley visited New Hampshire Wednesday and spoke at Saint Anselm College's Politics & Eggs program, which is billed as an opportunity for New Hampshire and New England business leaders to meet with major party presidential candidates. Haley didn't bring any eggs nor even any relevant political discussion. Instead, Haley delivered her version of a humorless Dave Chappelle rant.
"Everybody knows about Dylan Mulvaney? Bud Light, right?" Haley asked the audience. "Make no mistake. That is a guy, dressed up like a girl, making fun of women. Women don't act like that. Yet, everybody's wondering why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year?"
PREVIOUSLY:
‘America, It’s Bad. I’m Nikki Haley.’
Yeah, So Nikki Haley Has Pretty Much Always Sucked
\u201cTeen girls didn't contemplate suicide because of the existence of trans people, Nikki Haley.\n\nThis is the kind of rhetoric you use when you want to justify violence against a group of people.\u201d— Ashton Pittman (@Ashton Pittman) 1684939379
This is so much hateful garbage: Dylan Mulvaney is not spoofing women. She is a woman. She's just living her life. She's not the one acting with malicious intent for her own personal gain. That's Nikki Haley.
I think Judy Blume is a better judge of character than someone who worked for Donald Trump.
Claiming that teenage girls contemplate suicide simply because trans women — and specifically Dylan Mulvaney — exist is the most horrible thing anyone could say. It's beneath contempt. In reality, a third of transgender girls contemplate suicide as a direct result of the same bile that Haley unleashed here.
However, this wasn't a CPAC crowd. The audience remained silent while Haley smeared a fellow American. This is not what swing state voters in New Hampshire wanted to hear. Haley said, "Everybody knows about Dylan Mulvaney?" as if that's a given, but normal people who don't mainline the Daily Wire aren't that interested in a trans woman with a cool TikTok account. They probably don't even know what the fuck a TikTok is. When Dan Quayle criticized fictional character Murphy Brown — for choosing to carry her accidental pregnancy to term! — that show had more than 30 million viewers on CBS. Dylan Mulvaney has more than 10 million Tik Tok followers, and very few of them are the Republican primary electorate.
Drag legend RuPaul has had major advertising deals without supposedly "serious" candidates for president targeting him, and it's not as if right-wing bigots see a distinction between drag queens and trans women, although some idiots have compared drag to Blackface.
Earlier, Haley had said that trans women playing women's sports was "the women's issue of our time." That's just absurd. A little under two percent of Americans are trans (or nonbinary), and it's not as if they are all sports prodigies or even want to play sports. Meanwhile, 100 percent of Americans with uteruses have lost their constitutional right to choose whether to have an abortion. That's probably more relevant. Haley was the former governor of South Carolina, which just passed a six-week abortion ban that is guaranteed to get women killed. Oh, and Haley later committed to signing a federal abortion ban. Yet Haley is raising a lynch mob against Dylan Mulvaney, who isn't even running for president.
Fortunately for Haley, the New Hampshire audience responded well to her rote line about "wokeness" in the military. Maybe she just needs to workshop her anti-trans routine before her next Netflix special.
[Newsweek]
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And That's The Story Of How I Became The Mother Of Kaydon Boebert
Stay in school, kids.
Because it is one of the days what has occurred since December 19, 1986, there are people in America talking about how Lauren Opal Boebert might not be a particularly bright person. (That's when she was bornt.)
She was talking in a House hearing yesterday about prescription drug prices. We guess she doesn't want them lowered.
\u201cRep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO): \u201cI left a prescription at a pharmacy once. I went to get birth control \u2026 The price was very, very high ... And I said, 'It\u2019s cheaper to have a kid.' And I left it there, and now I have my third son.\u201d\u201d— The Recount (@The Recount) 1684860826
“I left a prescription at a pharmacy once. Um, I went to get, um, birth control. And, um, I was there at the counter, went to pay for it, and um, the price was very, very high. I said wow, is this a three-, six-month prescription? No ma’am, this is one month. And I said it’s cheaper to have a kid. And I left it there, and now I have my third son, Kaydon Boebert, um and so I'm actually, it actually turned out to be a really great thing!"
Um.
OK.
So, you can get birth control for free under Obamacare in many cases, but she's talking about her third child, who according to our quick research was born in 2009 in the front seat of Jayson Boebert's F250, the year before Obamacare passed. (Shit you not.) That one fact might make a person think Lauren Boebert would support lowering the price of prescription drugs, but she's a fuckin' idiot and a heartless piece of shit Republican, so maybe not.
But, we have another quibble. And granted, math is the toughest.
For the year that child was born, and for a family with an income level over about $100K per year, the average cost of raising a child from birth to 18 is about $369,000. According to the internet, at least as of 2020, Boebert's kids went to private school. So that's more.
We are just saying that if the pharmacist quoted Boebert over $369,000 for her birth control scrip, she could have checked with a different pharmacy before saying "OH FIDDLESTICKS!" and giving up on her quest.
Unless she made up this story, do you all think that could be a possibility?
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has another quibble:
\u201cAnd then she voted against the right to contraception so she could double this problem and give it to the next person\u201d— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) 1684863756
So does Jezebel editor Laura Bassett, who tweeted to remind us that Boebert is "a 36-year-old grandmother who’s currently divorcing her sex pest husband, voted against the right to contraception without government interference and is trying to defund Planned Parenthood, which gives low- and no-cost birth control to the uninsured."
We guess people have a few quibbles with Boebert on this one.
In summary and in conclusion, here is America's Greatest Mathlete telling Steve Bannon that Democrats "maybe [...] just made the whole thing up" about America defaulting on its debt on June 1 if the debt ceiling isn't raised. "Produce the documents and show us the real information," said Boebert, like a person who thinks there is just a single "document" out there full of the "real information" that's being withheld about Debt Ceiling, What Is THAT?*
\u201cLauren Boebert suggested the threat of debt limit default is made up.\n\nBoebert: \u201cLet\u2019s produce the documents and show us real information, and if you can\u2019t well maybe you just made the whole thing up and we\u2019re not going to default on June 1st.\u201d\u201d— PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 (@PatriotTakes \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8) 1684889213
Maybe it is the same document that says if you don't pay the pharmacist $369,000 for birth control, in nine months you will give birth to Jayden Go-Gurt or whatever.
Such a document could exist, you don't know.
*Here is what the debt ceiling is. There are in fact many documents on the internet about it.
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Target Gives The Terrorists What They Want
Do not obey the terrorists.
The news today is that terrorists are threatening Target because it's selling some clothes they don't like, and Target is caving to their demands. That's it, distilled to its simplest form.
To get more specific, garbage human conservative MAGA supporters, some of whom buy into QAnon conspiracy theories, but also others who are just Matt Walsh types, are making very real threats of violence against Target stores, because of the Pride merchandise they've been selling. This is part of their full-on Nazi war against all LGBTQ+ people, but especially kids.
And Target, citing genuine fear for its people, is acceding to some of the terrorists' demands, removing certain unspecified apparel items from its shelves.
As with everything white fascist Christian conservatives believe, this all started with easily debunked lies, lies they might not believe if they were capable of occasionally stopping and asking themselves questions like "Really? Is my brain broken right now? What is goddamn wrong with me?"
Where it started, where it's going, etc.
Justin Baragona at the Daily Beast explains that MAGA trash and their media organs started going wild the past few days with claims that Target was selling "tuck-friendly" swimsuits for toddlers. You know how toddlers are.
This is not true. Target has swimsuits like that for adults, as part of its Pride line, as the Associated Press explains in an article that's accessible to anybody who can read or who can flag down a policeman or a grownup to read it to them. They have extra fabric in the crotch, it says. Let's start a war.
And that's what the squealing pigs are doing, spreading their bullshit online and threatening Target stores in person. And Target is unfortunately giving in, apparently moving some Pride displays to different sections of its stores, and announcing changes to its merchandise:
“For more than a decade, Target has offered an assortment of products aimed at celebrating Pride Month,” a spokesperson for Target told The Daily Beast.
“Since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and wellbeing while at work. Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior.”
Target said that despite the removal of Pride-positive merchandise, “our focus now is on moving forward with our continuing commitment to the LGBTQIA+ community and standing with them as we celebrate Pride Month and throughout the year.”
Cool. Totally normal.
Apparently it started a couple weeks ago, with a bullshit tweet from whatever loser freaks run the "Gays Against Groomers" Twitter account, which seemingly exists solely to defame, hurt, and incite violence against LGBTQ+ people. (It's like LibsOfTikTok, but obviously its name implies more internalized self-hatred.) The tweet featured the voice of any generic white woman who's ever asked to speak to the manager at Chili's, walking around a section of Target that had clothes for Pride month and complaining.
"They are indoctrinating and grooming them with LGBTQ ideology. It is highly inappropriate and disturbing,” they wrote. The tweet encouraged likeminded fascists to give Target the "Bud Light" treatment. What cool lives these people lead. And they wonder why literally no human of value wants to be anything like them.
Then the complaints about the "tuck-friendly" swimsuits came before the lies about "tuck-friendly" swimsuits for kids came and now here we are. They've even gotten a good old-fashioned Satanic panic going about some designer who contributed to the Pride line.
Surprise, Matt Walsh has helped spread the lies about the swimsuits, because he spends all his days directing his hate toward transgender children, because he has a preternatural obsession with things like this, and he's just a liar:
\u201cWhat @Target is doing is far worse than anything Bud Light did. They are selling chest binders & "tuck-friendly" bathing suits for children. \n\nTarget is calling our bluff. But just like any other company, they need our business. We did it with Bud Light. Now it's Target's turn.\u201d— The Matt Walsh Show (@The Matt Walsh Show) 1684265400
Baragona summarizes how the MAGA Nazis' lies spread into the regular media:
[C]onservative pundits and personalities soon followed suit with their own deceptive videos and images, prompting the Murdoch-owned New York Post to report that “Target’s ‘tuck-friendly’ swimwear for kids sparks outcry.”
Fox News’ digital site soon followed up by noting that consumers were “creeped out” by the swimwear, though the article did not specifically claim the bathing suits were for children. The network later reported that Target held an “emergency” meeting to avoid another “Bud Light situation.”
And then Newsmax, which reported on "tucking bathing suits for little girls." And more:
“Target now with what are called tucking bathing suits for little boys who want to look like little girls in swimsuits,” Newsmax anchor Rob Schmitt said on Friday night, adding: “I maintain we will look back on this moment in this country and we will just shake our heads at the idiocy that we let take control. It is astonishing.”
And on Monday night, alongside an on-air graphic blaring “Target’s ‘Tuck-Friendly’ Swimwear For Kids Sparks Outcry,” Newsmax host Eric Bolling insisted that the store was offering “underwear for kids to tuck or not to tuck.”
Charlie Kirk called Target CEO Brian Cornell a "groomer pervert" and a "very sick person" and said he "really has like a fetish for going after children," and we really hope that guy sues Charlie Kirk until his fucking head spins.
\u201cThis is where the conservative movement is now.\n\nCharlie Kirk calls on Republican attorneys general to launch a "criminal investigation" into Target CEO Brian Cornell, calling him a "pervert groomer" and "very sick person" who "really has like a fetish for going after children."\u201d— Justin Baragona (@Justin Baragona) 1684865676
And then there's what's happened in stores, because the fascist monkeys are just following their leaders. The Wall Street Journal reports that "people have confronted workers in stores, knocked down Pride merchandise displays and put threatening posts on social media with video from inside stores," as we've already alluded to in this post.
Apparently in the South they've moved the displays away from the fronts of some stores because workers are worried about their safety.
This is America right now. And this is fucking terrorism.
Target told the Wall Street Journal through its spox that it knows some people won't be happy with it acceding to some of these people's demands. “We have a longstanding commitment to the LGBTQ community, and we stand firm in that,” they said, “but the reality is that the safety situation has become untenable.”
Literally the definition of terrorism is instilling fear in order to force the political/societal changes you want. And because America has the stupidest terrorists with the most pointless lives in human history, America's terrorists are losing control of their bowels because they don't like the clothes at Target.
It makes sense when you consider that they're also losing control of their bowels because a beer company was nice to a transgender person one time for five minutes and losing control of their bowels at Disney because Mickey Mouse doesn't want LGBTQ+ kids to kill themselves.
But on that note, we need to remind ourselves that these Nazi Christian terrorists are pathetic cowards. Most of us who are adults of a certain age have heard for many years that you don't negotiate with terrorists, and you don't obey them.
Yes, absolutely, you have to protect innocent people's safety, so please no one think we're attacking Target here. We love you, Target.
But you also can and should loudly tell these people to go fuck themselves, like the LA Dodgers just did — belatedly — in response to extremists mad at them because they're allowing some funny drag queens who dress like nuns to be part of their Pride Night. Because the truth is, if you give these garbage humans an inch, they will absolutely take a mile, and then they'll demand more. Likewise, if you force them to cry it out, that's what will happen.
Remember that they are having these conniption fits because they can't win a fair election to save their lives. This is happening because every normal person in America fucking hates them and doesn't want to be around them and definitely doesn't want these white Christian groomer freaks around their kids. (Fundamentalist Christians and other white fascist Christian types are the real groomers. We talk about it a lot. All of this is projection.)
This is happening because their voting power is dying of old age and it's being replaced by young voters who hate them so much they cannot even verbalize it.
They know it. Otherwise Republican lawyers and professional election suppressors wouldn't be giving presentations on how to keep young people from the voting booth. They know they repel normal people.
So.
You can't cancel Pride. In fact, that's the last thing you should do, as Michelangelo Signorile argues here. You can't cancel drag shows. You don't refuse to market to or partner with one demographic simply because a bunch of inbred MAGA people are spreading blood libels about them.
As Timothy Snyder explains in On Tyranny, you "do not obey in advance," and that counts for authoritarian movements that are actively plotting to steal this country from the majority of decent people who inhabit it.
These fucking losers aren't being exactly subtle about their goals:
\u201cThe goal is to make \u201cpride\u201d toxic for brands. If they decide to shove this garbage in our face, they should know that they\u2019ll pay a price. It won\u2019t be worth whatever they think they\u2019ll gain. First Bud Light and now Target. Our campaign is making progress. Let\u2019s keep it going.\u201d— Matt Walsh (@Matt Walsh) 1684927673
These people need to be told to get bent every time they open their mouths. They need to be reminded that their little hate movements will be nothing more than skidmarks in the history books within a couple decades.
And yes, that includes by corporations like Target. Let the fascist Nazi crybabies babies cry it the fuck out. We promise your stock prices won't dip for very long. By next year the morons will have moved on to being upset because there's a new Barbie doll they don't know how to masturbate to.
Besides, everybody knows these goobers don't go to Target anyway. They go to Walmart.
Eat shit, motherfuckerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrs.
The end.
[Daily Beast / Wall Street Journal]
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Oregon Republicans Go Full Ferris Bueller To Block Democratic Bills
Here's why we think this is bad but also good if Democrats do it.
Oregon Republicans can’t prevent Democrats from passing sensible legislation addressing the climate crisis, upholding abortion rights, and defending the LGBTQ community. However, they can flee the state and deny Democrats the quorum necessary to conduct business. Oregon is one of the few states that requires at least two thirds of legislators present to do much of anything, even order a pizza.
This was a common practice during previous legislative sessions, enough so that voters last year overwhelmingly approved Measure 113, which disqualifies lawmakers from serving another term if they have 10 unexcused absences in a single session (presumably attending the funeral for Sloane Peterson's grandmother doesn’t count).
Republican state senators called Measure 113's bluff and recently walked off the job in protest against Democratic-led bills that would protect and expand access to reproductive and gender-affirming health care. They're also protesting popular gun regulations.
All but two Republicans bailed on the May 3 legislative session. Minority Leader Tim Knopp said this was because Democrats broke an apparent chamber rule against excessive fancy talk.
"When the majority of bill summaries written demand a post-graduate degree to understand what the bills do, we disenfranchise Oregonians across the state and violate the law in the process," he said.
Majority Leader Kate Lieber, presumably suppressing a giggle fit, said the content of the bills offended Republicans more than their language. "It is no coincidence that Republicans are employing these embarrassing antics as the Senate is about to vote on bills that protect reproductive health freedom and establish common sense gun safety laws," she said
Republicans have denounced the wide-reaching Democratic bill as too extreme but in fact the bills are extremely good. There are new protections for people who identify as a different gender than they were assigned at birth. It also expands the covered treatments under insurance to include facial feminization surgery and laser hair removal. These aren't simple cosmetic surgeries but have a significant positive impact on mental health.
By Thursday, 10 state senators had exceeded the maximum unexcused absences and are officially ineligible for re-election. They are Republicans Daniel Bonham, Lynn Findley, Bill Hansell, Cedric Hayden, Dennis Linthicum, Tim Knopp, Art Robinson, Kim Thatcher, and Suzanne Weber, plus former Republican turned independent Brian Boquist. It's possible they might sue over Measure 113's constitutionality, but ultimately they are willing to end their political careers to oppose the bills. This is admirable if still evil.
The walkout endangers several other bills, and since there’s no punitive difference between missing 10 days or the remaining 40 in the session, they could block almost anything from passing for the foreseeable future. The measure doesn’t force expulsion, just prevents them from serving another term, and their replacements could similarly derail the legislature.
People with “both sides” brain will focus on the tactics and not the motivation. That’s like saying shooting a serial killer is no different from the serial killer shooting you. (Unless you’re a serial killer who's shooting yourself, but we don’t have time for metaphysics.)
PREVIOUSLY:
Texas Dems Taking Surprise Field Trip To DC To Show 'Em How Democracy Works
Nebraska Dem Just Gonna Filibuster Eeeeeeeeverything
A couple years ago, Texas Democrats staged a walkout to block passage of a Republican voter suppression bill, and in Nebraska, Democratic badass women have filibustered Republicans' anti-trans legislation. (The hateful bill, unfortunately, passed on Friday.)
However, there's nothing hypocritical about deriding Oregon Republicans and celebrating Nebraska Democrats. You use the tools available to stop bad bills that hurt people. Using those same tools to block bills that help people is not in the same league.
[OPB]
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