Tuesday, February 27, 2018

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The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams.

1,000

A bit of an artificial milestone since it doesn't take into account my posts at Blogspot under a previous title, but we live in an era where people are crazy enough to post about far less, so...

Stand back: it's the Fightin' Cheeto and his fists of fat!

There's not too many ways you can describe this, except to say that if you can't accept it as evidence of President Unintelligible's persistent delusions of grandeur there probably isn't anything else you'd accept, either.

Unsurprisingly, PU still remains a gold mine of late-night comedy material.

Monday, February 5, 2018

Primary season in Illinois: where the nuts get harvested early

It's not the fault of the entire 3rd Congressional district, really; they weren't the ones who adequately failed to housetrain Art Jones or his Adolph Hilter-worshipping political instincts, but if you're going to blame someone for putting him in a position to snap up the Republican nomination in that district I suppose it's whoever wasn't paying attention to assorted unpleasant facts like these before letting him run as an uncontested primary candidate:

Arthur Jones, a 70-year-old retired insurance agent, told the Chicago Sun-Times he once led the American Nazi Party and heads up a group called the America First Committee, which excludes Jewish members. On Jones’ campaign website, under a section titled, “The ‘Holocaust’ racket,” he insists the murder of 6 million Jews was the “biggest blackest lie in history” and that the Holocaust amounted to “propaganda, whose purpose is designed to bleed, blackmail, extort and terrorize, the enemies of organized world Jewry.”

Jones is running unopposed in a highly Democratic district that includes a part of Chicago and is expected to be easily defeated in the general election.

According to his website, Jones is campaigning to, among other things, “bring our troops home NOW to defend our borders”; to end “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants and sanctuary cities; to make English the official language; and to fight an agenda he believes, that the federal government has to “change” neighborhoods “found to be too White, too Christian, or too straight.”

The Chicago Tribune reported that he opposes interracial marriage and school integration and was unsure when asked whether black people or Latinos should have the right to vote.


Ah, well. We don't have Andy Martin to kick around anymore, so we end up with Jones instead.

In other local electoral news, someone actually came up with a way to make Bruce Rauner look practically warm and fuzzy in comparison:

The latest example of this phenomenon comes from Illinois, where Republican state Rep. Jeanne Ives is challenging incumbent Gov. Bruce Rauner for the gubernatorial nomination. Like Trump against Jeb Bush, Corey Stewart against Ed Gillespie in Virginia, and Roy Moore against Luther Strange in Alabama, Ives hopes to upset a more established Republican by fanning anger and prejudice.

“Thank you for signing legislation that lets me use the girl’s bathroom,” says a deep-voiced male actor wearing a dress, in a new ad released by Ives’ campaign. The ad attacks the incumbent governor for purportedly backing liberal policies and uses a procession of conservative boogeymen to mockingly “thank” Rauner for his aid. A black woman in a Chicago Teachers Union shirt thanks Rauner for a “bailout” of teacher pensions, a white woman in a pink hat thanks him for “making all Illinois families pay for my abortions,” and a man dressed as antifa thanks the governor for making “Illinois a sanctuary state for illegal immigrant criminals.”

State Republican leaders condemned the ad. “There is no place in the Illinois Republican Party for rhetoric that attacks our fellow Illinoisans based on their race, gender or humanity,” said party chairman Tim Schneider in a statement. A Republican candidate for attorney general, Erika Harold, called on Ives to “immediately” take the ad off the air.

But Ives still has considerable conservative support for her message. A member of the Illinois GOP central committee, John McGlasson, called it “a clear, unambiguous message about what Rauner stands for,” and Politico notes that a former Rauner ally, Republican strategist Dan Proft, has jumped ship to Ives’ campaign. It’s unclear how Republican voters will respond to Ives’ message, but the 2016 presidential primary provides clues: 39 percent of Illinois Republicans backed Donald Trump for the nomination, beating out Ted Cruz by 8 percentage points, and swamping both John Kasich and Marco Rubio.


So if you're from here, don't make the mistake of assuming that the racist and xenophobic yahoos are just running amok in places like Alabama, Texas, or South Carolina; there are plenty of them up here as well. They just don't run the entire political operation here like they do in those aforementioned states.

Yet.

Newspaper of (W)rec(k)ord

 If you're a member of a conrunning organization, you know you're in serious trouble when the  Guardian  -  an internationally known...