Justin's Political Corner
Pete Santilli is the kind of person we normally wouldn’t cover here – an unhinged Internet ranter who exists somewhere to the crazier side of Alex Jones. Santilli’s broadcast – on which he details conspiracy theories on everything from 9/11 to Sandy Hook — doesn’t even have Jones’ audience: he describes himself as “a radio talkshow host ready to take my show to national syndication; that is, of course, if the FCC regulated AM/FM radio stations can handle my truth & honesty.”
But in the past couple of months, Santilli has attracted two major gun activists to his show: National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent, who used the opportunity to call President Obama a Nazi, and Gun Owners of America director Larry Pratt, who worked with Santilli to flesh out his theory that President Obama is raising a private army to overpower the U.S. military. Pratt, in particular, is taken remarkably seriously among the GOP – he has been partially credited with taking down a background checks measure in the Senate last month.
So, we started paying attention to Santilli, and we learned pretty quickly what Nugent and Pratt felt perfectly comfortable associating themselves with. On his show last week, Santilli went on a disgusting, violent rant in which he called for the entire Bush family and President Obama to be “tried, convicted and shot” for “treason” (and in George H.W. Bush’s case “involvement with his cronies in the John F. Kennedy assassination”) and for Hillary Clinton to be “tried, convicted and shot in the vagina.”
He then went on to describe in graphic detail how he personally wanted to “pull the trigger” on Clinton – who he repeatedly referred to with a sexual slur – and watch her slowly die in revenge for what he believes was the faking of SEAL Team Six’s Bin Laden raid.ow about Hillary Clinton? That frickin’ assbag has not only been involved in drug trafficking out of Mena, Arkansas, okay? Not only that; and all these people try to have this plausible deniability thing, yeah sure, they’re removed, they’re just a bunch of politicians. Well, guess where they got all of the money to acquire the power that they have?
This ‘C U Next Tuesday,’ Hillary Clinton, has been involved in the killings of American troops. Namely, the mysterious suicide of the emotionally unstable Navy SEAL commander who just so happened to be involved in all of her dealings in the Middle East, okay. And he just mysteriously got suicided along with everyone else associated with the Clinton family. Miss Hillary Clinton needs to be convicted, she needs to be tried, convicted and shot in the vagina. I wanna pull the trigger. That ‘C U Next Tuesday’ has killed human beings that are in our ranks of our service.
I want to remind you that in Benghazi, Miss Hillary ‘the fricken’ biggest vagina on the face of the planet’ told troops to stand down and to not go in and interfere with the operation that they set up because they’re moving arms; Barack Obama is moving drugs through the CIA out of Afghanistan and Barack Obama needs to be tried, convicted, and shot for crimes against the United States of America. And if anybody has a problem with that, then you are an enemy of our state...
I want to shoot [Clinton] right in the vagina and I don’t want her to die right away; I want her to feel the pain and I want to look her in the eyes and I want to say ‘on behalf of all Americans that you’ve killed, on behalf of the Navy SEALS,’ … the families of Navy SEAL Team Six who were involved in the fake hunt down of this Obama bin Laden thing, that whole fake scenario - because these Navy SEALS know the truth, they killed them all - on behalf of all of those people, I’m supporting our troops by saying we need to try, convict, and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina.
The full clip:
h/t: Right Wing Watch
University of Arizona student tells women who dress like “whores”: “You deserve rape.”
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Dean Saxton, a junior, is notorious for giving inflammatory sermons in the middle of campus.
According to the Daily Wildcat, the Dean of Students received “stacks of written complaints, emails and multiple phone calls regarding Saxton’s sermon about women.” Many students directly confronted Saxton, even trying to pull down his sign. Saxton embraced the attention on his Twitter account, posting a screenshot of an article about the Take Back the Night with the comment, “The whores are out.” In other sermons, Saxton has cursed people who are gay, have pre-marital sex, masturbate or have lustful thoughts. His Twitter account is rife with anti-Muslim sentiment, as well; last month he tweeted, “There will come a time when the sword will be put to the heathen.”
However hateful his speech may be, university attorneys told angry students that Saxton is exercising his right to free speech, and has yet to violate the student code of conduct.
While Saxton’s language is more incendiary than the norm, victim-blaming is very much a mainstream habit. The string of recently publicized rapes of high school and college students have exposed how communities shame victims rather than condemn the perpetrators. Dartmouth College is currently dealing with a similar backlash to anti-sexual violence protesters, who received rape and death threats amid a slew of misogynistic and ignorant comments posted online.
University of Arizona, while hardly condoning Saxton’s extremist display, has struggled with its own rape culture.
Steve Kush, executive director of the Bernalillo County Republican Party in New Mexico, took to Twitter on Tuesday to verbally abuse a 19-year-old Working America volunteer who testified in favor of raising the minimum wage. Bernalillo County, the largest county in New Mexico, was considering a proposal to increase the county minimum wage from $7.50 to $8.50.
Rather than listen to the 19-year-old woman’s testimony, Kush mocked her on social media, calling her a “radical bitch”:
As other advocates spoke on Tuesday, Kush was on Facebook, deploying a variety of sexist and offensive insults. He joked that Chelsey Evans, director of the New Mexico branch, “was hot enough to almost make me register democrat.”
Bob Cornelius, the former executive director of the Bernalillo County GOP, replied that Evans was using the boots to “walk Central,” a local street known for prostitution. Cornelius later deleted the comment and apologized. According to Evans, Kush has not yet offered an apology.
ProgressNow New Mexico called for Kush’s resignation, pointing out that a state run by a prominent Republican woman, Gov. Susana Martinez, should not be tolerating “misogynistic statements towards working women time and again.”
Also during the meeting, Kush called the Democrats the “Gestapo” multiple times. Despite the slew of hateful comments made by Kush over social media, the county passed the proposal to raise the minimum wage from $7.50 to $8.50 by 3-2 on Tuesday night.
H/T: Think Progress
Former South Carolina Governor and current Republican nominee for Congress Mark Sanford has his work cut out for him if he wants to win the special election on May 7th, his first attempt at staging a political comeback after being forced to resign his governorship following a very public affair. But that didn’t stop one local county party chairman from adding another: the looks of the female Democratic nominee.
Sanford is running against Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a successful South Carolinian businesswoman who easily won her Democratic Party primary last month. But rather than challenging Colbert Busch on policy or credentials, Republicans seem focused on her physical appearance:
“Everybody is really concerned because she’s not a bad-looking lady, she is a good speaker and she’s got some money,” said Jerry Hallman, chairman of the Beaufort County Republican Party. “In politics, those things are important.”
This is not the first time a female candidate for office has been dismissed as little more than a pretty face with a nice speaking voice, but in the case of Colbert-Busch, who is the older sister of Comedy Central personality Stephen Colbert, she has been subjected to an unusual amount of sexist coverage by all corners of the media.
Whether intentional or not, every one of these headlines poses a problem: they continue to define Colbert-Busch not based on her own successes but by the successes of her famous brother. In doing so, it allows readers — and, more importantly, voters — to do the same. Which of course isn’t fair to Colbert-Busch, who has the right to be judged on her own merits.
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A female developer was fired after tweeting about a group of men she said were making sexual comments at a computer programming conference, fueling an already vigorous debate about gender equality and culture in Silicon Valley.
Adria Richards wrote on her blog at http://butyoureagirl.com that she was seated in a ballroom at the Santa Clara conference Sunday when the men behind her started talking about “big dongles.”
A dongle is a device that plugs into a computer, but Richards tweeted that the men made the comment in a sexual way.
After hearing their remarks, Richards turned around, took a photo of two men and posted it on Twitter with their alleged comments.
Conference organizers said they were concerned by the tweet and quickly met with Richards and the men, who immediately apologized.
“We pulled all the individuals aside. We got all sides of the story. They said she was right, and they were very apologetic,” said Jesse Noller, who chaired the conference, PyCon 2013, for people working on Python programming language.
Richards worked for SendGrid, a technology company with offices in Orange County and Colorado. CEO Jim Franklin wrote on the company’s website that SendGrid agreed with Richards’ right to report the incident to Pycon staff, but not the way she reported it.
“Her decision to tweet the comments and photographs of the people who made the comments crossed the line,” Franklin wrote in a blog post on the site. “Publicly shaming the offenders — and bystanders — was not the appropriate way to handle the situation.”
Franklin said Richards put the company’s business in danger, divided the developer community and could no longer be effective at the company.
One of the men in the photo Richards posted has also been let go from his job at San Francisco-based mobile game company PlayHaven.
“PlayHaven had an employee who was identified as making inappropriate comments at PyCon, and as a company that is dedicated to gender equality and values honorable behavior, we conducted a thorough investigation. The result of this investigation led to the unfortunate outcome of having to let this employee go,” PlayHaven CEO Andy Yang said in a blog posting.
The company did not release the name of the fired employee but said a second man in the photo “is still with the company and a valued employee.”
“We believe in the importance of discussing sensitive topics such as gender and conduct, and we hope to move forward with a civil dialogue based on the facts,” Yang said.
On Friday, thousands of tweets, blogs and online comments swirled about the incident, some supporting Richards and the “call-out cultures,” others belittling her or asking what she might have done differently.
Telle Whitney, who heads the Anita Borg Institute, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit working to advance women in computer science and engineering roles, said Friday “that racist or sexist comments have no place in today’s work environment and are counterproductive to fostering a diverse, productive and innovative workforce.”
“Events such as these make it more difficult for our industry to attract, recruit and retain women in technology, which is extremely important given the growing global demand for technology workers,” she said.
Richards, reached Friday by The Associated Press, said she couldn’t comment. But she confirmed her blog and tweets, along with the report that she was fired.
“Have you ever had a group of men sitting right behind you making joke that caused you to feel uncomfortable? Well, that just happened this week but instead of shrinking down in my seat, I did something about it … ,” Richards wrote in her blog post about the incident.
She said she was spurred in part by a photo of a young girl on the stage at the time, and the thought that the men seated behind her would make it impossible for the girl to learn programming.
The men were not identified by name.
Richards said she also had confronted a man earlier after he told her what she thought was a sexist joke at the conference.
h/t: TPM
The best description I can think of for CNN’s coverage of the verdict in the Steubenville rape trial: freakishly distorted and reprehensible.
The thing is, I don’t believe these reporters actually are sympathizing with the rapists over their victim; I think it’s more cynical and base than that. Dramatic displays of emotion are what CNN is after, because they’re good for CNN’s bottom line. In their marketing calculations, emotional outbursts draw viewers and sell advertisements. They seek out these kinds of scenes — and in this case, since the victim’s identity is kept secret, the only emotional outbursts they could show were the rapists’. So they exploited those moments to the best of their ability.
And in the process, caused great harm to their reputation. CNN continued with this bullshit even after a storm erupted on social media, condemning their coverage. The sheer contempt they showed for their audience, and for the victim of this terrible crime, was breathtaking.
And one more point: the sentences these two kids got were absurdly, offensively light in view of their crime.
A panel at the Conservative Political Action Committee on Republican minority outreach exploded into controversy on Friday afternoon, after an audience member defended slavery as good for African-Americans.
The exchange occurred after an audience member from North Carolina, 30-year-old Scott Terry, asked whether Republicans could endorse races remaining separate but equal. After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?”
After the exchange, Terry muttered under his breath, “why can’t we just have segregation?” noting the Constitution’s protections for freedom of association.
ThinkProgress spoke with Terry, who sported a Rick Santorum sticker and attended CPAC with a friend who wore a Confederate Flag-emblazoned t-shirt, about his views after the panel. Terry maintained that white people have been “systematically disenfranchised” by federal legislation.
When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.
At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”
(via CPAC Women’s Panel Fights ‘Sexist’ Obamacare and ‘Liberal Indoctrination Camps’ | Right Wing Watch)
At a conference which literally banned a gay group from participating, blogger Crystal Wright during CPAC’s panel on women’s issues called on right-wing activists to “come out of the closet” as conservatives and fight the liberal elites.
Following Wright’s bold declaration, author Kate Obenshain said that the entire education system, “pre-school all the way to college to post-graduate work,” is one big “liberal indoctrination camp” that convinces women to reject marriage in order to go about life “determined to find evidence of sexism everywhere they turn.”
Naturally, columnist Katie Kieffer later called Obamacare “sexist” because it expands access to birth control, which she believes lets men get women pregnant or give women STDs without feeling any responsibility. “Obamacare is sexist because it puts guys off the hook,” Kieffer explained, “all he has to do is say, oh that’s not my fault you should have been using Obama’s free birth control.”
According to FOX Business no women are “just right.”
And there is no other option, because this is Fox’s world (and we’re just living too aggressively or too feebly in it).
Typical Fake “Out-of” Business Network bullshit.
Screenshot from the 03.13.2013 edition of FBN’s The Willis Report.
It’s a sign of how anxious the right wing is about the possibility that Ashley Judd might run for Senate against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that the attacks on her have geared up before she’s even formally entered the race. There’s the American Crossroads ad trying to frame her as out of touch with a series of relatively anodyne and contextless quotations. And now, the Daily Caller, which has been trying to frame Judd’s feminist beliefs as fringe, has launched the stupidest salvo against her at all: arguing that Judd, because she has done nude scenes for her work as an actress, “has—literally—nothing left to show us.” In an exceptionally gross piece, Taylor Bigler, the Caller’s Entertainment Editor (Entertainment, in Caller parlance, apparently means surfing Mr. Skin and publishing clickbait trash gossip) writes:
We are used to knowing just about everything there is to know about serious political candidates. But will Judd be the first potential senator who has — literally — nothing left to show us? The actress has bared her breasts in several films and has had some raunchy sex scenes in others. According to MrSkin.com, which bills itself as “the largest free nude celebrity movie archive,” Judd has flashed just about everything on-screen. It seems like she was particularly liberal with nudity early on in her career…Judd did a lesbian sex scene in 2002′s Oscar-nominated “Frida” and has nine other films categorized as “sexy” by Mr. Skin, meaning that there is at least one racy scene in those films.
It may come as a surprise to the Daily Caller, but actresses don’t generally take their clothes off on-screen as an expression of some sort of groovy seventies lifestyle, or as a way to have sex with people who are not their spouses or partners. Rather, getting asked to take off some or all of your clothes is, for a lot of actors, a frequent requirement of the job, and something that until recently, tended to be asked of women more frequently than men.
Attacking Judd for her nude scenes is part and parcel of the right’s current strategy to discredit promising female advocates. Like Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on Sandra Fluke, the Caller’s attempts to impugn Judd as an exhibitionist are an attempt to make her seem less serious by impugning her sexual chastity (that this tactic remains in the playbook is a whole other world of crazy). But the evidence is even more specious and pathetic here. Fluke, who became engaged shortly after enduring nationally-broadcast attacks on her character, stumped for birth control access in the real world. Judd took her clothes off as part of fiction. The Daily Caller may not know the difference, but voters do. And Judd, who already knows a thing or two about the insanity of media scrutiny, is getting a real, and sadly valuable education in what you have to be willing to take if you want to be active in American public life as a woman.
#UniteBlue GREAT and balanced separation of equalist men’s rights activism and the nutjob side of the cause.
We don’t need MRA’s, we need equalists.
The term “Men’s Rights Advocate” and its shorthand, MRA, loom large in many feminist circles. The term is far less familiar to the general population and on its face, the connotations of “Men’s Rights Advocate” seem positive and wholly defensible. After all, patriarchy may bestow privilege upon men and boys (duh) but it also foists on them a variety of problems and sexist expectations worthy of an advocate’s attention. Unfortunately, the term does not honestly represent the modern project of men’s rights advocacy. While today’s MRAs (not necessarily cut from the same cloth as earlier iterations) rail against the sexism men and boys face, their chosen culprit is not patriarchy but feminism.
Men are not denied custody of their children because a sexist society and family law system deem child-rearing a woman’s domain. It’s feminists trying to make sure women take all the kids!!! Women don’t have an easier time getting laid [sometimes against their will, it bears noting] because men and boys are socially instructed by a patriarchal, heterosexist, cissexist culture to view them first and foremost as sexual objects. It’s those pesky feminists encouraging women to lord their sexual dominance over lonely men, muhahahahaha [evil feminist laugh]!!! Girls don’t perform better in the school system because social cues encourage them to be obedient and polite, while boys are encouraged to roughhouse and interrupt. It’s a teaching system brainwashed by feminists to ensure women’s supremacy!!!!
[…]
These men and organizations are not so much concerned with reclaiming men’s rights as they are with preserving men’s power and privilege. So we thought let’s call a spade a spade, scrap the “Men’s Rights Advocate” handle and call them Men’s Power Advocates.
MPAs: they’re a thing.
[x]Cool.
