Charlie Kirk Geopolitics Corner: Will China Bomb Taiwan Because Of Vermont Drag Show?
THANKS DRAG QUEENS LOOK WHAT YOU DID.
Oh shitfuckdamn, the geopolitical crisis starts NOW, and we hate to say it, but it's the drag queens' fault. Which ones? All of them, obviously, but specifically some drag queens in Vermont at a football game. Pantshitting Christian Right weirdos are upset about it, that much is to be expected, but we didn't realize there was going to be maybe World War 3, but HERE WE ARE.
Charlie Kirk explains, in one of those white cisgender male rants that he imagines comes off far tougher than it does in reality, that the drag queens in Vermont are but one way "transgender garbage" is taking over America and will somehow lead to the Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Don't say it doesn't make sense, it's not supposed to make sense, it's supposed to make white men in the exurbs poop their pants while they shoot guns in the air like pew pew pew!
CHARLIE KIRK: At a high school in Vermont, just to kind of show the state of the nation, what are they doing during a high school football game? Oh, they're having a drag show. [...]
This is a report of a local news outlet that a high school, a public high school, has a – this is in Burlington, Vermont, the godless, soulless, Burlington, Vermont – they have a drag show.
They did! It was homecoming, and it was cute and faculty even participated and Charlie Kirk is having a pantshit about that.
So Charlie played the clip of fun people in Vermont having fun and nobody being hurt by it, then came back MAD because he was MAD.
KIRK: Kids on TikTok are saying that they are using "demon" as a pronoun. No joke. It's a new thing, that — and of course, it's not a spiritual war, everybody, nothing to see here ...
Hahahahaha, kids these days. We have no idea what the TikTok trend is. All we can tell you is that if you google "demon" and "TikTok" you will find such notable luminaries as Kirk and also Steven Crowder having a pantshit about it, and literally nobody else. So we are sure it's a very serious issue in American society.
KIRK: Dave Chapelle is now being potentially cancelled for being hilarious.
No it's because he's an asshole. And spoiler, but he's not very funny anymore. There was a time. That time is not now.
KIRK: And it all ties together, all of this. The hyper-sensitivity, the inactivity, the anarcho-tyranny —
Charlie knows words.
KIRK: But don't worry everybody, according to the US State Department it is International Pronoun Day. Everything's great. It is international pronoun day.
We had not heard! But apparently it is and the State Department tweeted about it and you know who's mad about that? Only the worst, most useless people this country ever produced.
Here is where China sees a drag show in Vermont and has such a conniption it bombs Taiwan:
KIRK: Meanwhile, China is testing scientific — no, hypersonic missiles. If I was Xi Jinping and I saw that Netflix employees are walking out over saying gender is a fact, if I were Xi Jinping and I saw drag queen halftime show, I would take Taiwan over lunch.
Good thing Xi Jinping is not dealing with whatever psychosexual issues seem to haunt poor Charlie Kirk!
KIRK: And the State Department says it's International Pronoun Day. This is a real thing — and, oh, Media Matters will love this — the transgender garbage is making America a dangerous place. It allows our enemies an opportunity to take us over.
Hahahahaha OK. You bet. But how, though? How does this give our enemies an opportunity? Is the State Department so busy watching fabulous drag shows and tweeting about pronouns that it has no idea China is doin' missile stuff? Is that the job of the social media person at State, to monitor Chinese missile activity?
How, Charlie? Show your work.
As for Kirk saying "transgender garbage," oh boy, he sure is fishing for a reaction to that one, isn't he? Some outrage? Some evidence he has just owned the libs? What a very big man with very tough words he is!
if you watch the video, you can see how ragey he gets when he's about to say it, but also kind of excited. We imagine his heart-rate accelerated just a bit. And then you can see him kinda gulp and take a breath afterward, like he's telling himself yeah, he just stood up to transgender people who have done nothing to harm him, and yet obviously make him so uncomfortable.
The point is, Charlie Kirk can go fuck himself.
Hey remember that time Tucker Carlson had a personal masculinity crisis over pregnant troops and Black women troops' hairstyles, because he thought the Chinese military was so manly and he wanted us to be just like the big strong masculine hairy Chinese military?
Our point is that these white conservative men get shrinkage over the strangest things, but they are always the same things.
We'd ask a psychologist what they thought about this but it doesn't seem necessary.
OPEN THREAD.
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Trump Argues For Absolute Right Of Presidents To Loot And Pillage In Copyright Lawsuit
Extremely on brand.
Trump's legal team is tryin' it. Again.
Today's WTF-ery comes to us from the copyright infringement suit filed by one Edmond Grant, AKA Eddy Grant, AKA the guy who did not fucking appreciate having his hit song "Electric Avenue" used without permission in one of Trump's ridiculous campaign videos. Trump tweeted out the video on August 12, 2020, and Twitter yanked the video for copyright infringement within a few hours. Then Twitter yanked Trump himself, and not a moment too soon, so we can't provide you with a link to the video in question. But we actually remember this one because the graphics were so embarrassingly crap — like Thomas the Tank Engine circa 1991, only worse.
Here's a still from one of Trump's briefs.
Get it? Get it? GET IT?
See Trump is a BIG CHOO CHOO TRAIN VROOM, and Biden is just a skinny dude manually pumping himself along the tracks.
Which isn't actually the dumbest thing you'll read in this post, believe it or not.
Grant and his publishing company Greenheart Music promptly sued for copyright infringement in a New York federal court on September 20, 2020. Trump then spent a year bellyaching and trying unsuccessfully to get the case dismissed. On September 28, 2021, US District Judge John G. Koeltl refused to grant Trump's motion for dismissal for failure to state a legally cognizable claim.
Trump had argued that the clip had transformed Grant's song by turning it into a work of political commentary, making it a legitimate use under the Fair Use Doctrine, but the court disagreed.
"In this case, the video's overarching political purpose does not automatically render its use of any non-political work transformative," Judge Koeltl wrote.
And that meant that time was up, and Trump was going to finally have to answer the original complaint, which he did in the most Trump-y way possible.
In the section on affirmative defenses, i.e. the part where the defendant says "yeah, well, even if I did, so what, and here is why!" Trump claimed that "Plaintiffs' claims against Defendants are barred, either in whole or in part, by the doctrines of waiver, laches, acquiescence, inequitable conduct and/or unclean hands." Which falls under the category of meh, dumb, but whatever. Obviously Grant didn't waive his rights, or wait too long to file, or do something nefarious to void his own copyright. But, okay, people say a lot of stupid shit in pleadings.
What they don't usually say is this:
Plaintiffs' claims against Donald J. Trump are barred, either in whole or in part, by Presidential absolute immunity.
BISHWAAAAAA?
Did that sorry POS just argue with a straight face that the president is free to steal copyrighted material and no one can do anything about it? There is no such thing as "Presidential absolute immunity" to do crimes. The only people on earth who had the nerve to make such a ridiculous argument got their asses handed to them by the Supreme Court last year in Trump v. Vance. And this wet fart of a man and his shameless lawyers have the nerve to come into a federal court and try this shit again?
FOH.
[Torrent Freak / Grant v. Trump, docket via Court Listener]
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Adam Kinzinger Isn't Your BFF, And Chuck Todd Still Sucks
It's your Sunday show rundown!
The Sunday shows were back at it again this week, looking like news but offering no new information.
Let's jump in.
Adam Kinzinger Is Not Your BFF
Illinois GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger has gotten a lot of praise for being anti-Donald Trump and anti-coup. This has made him a favorite of news shows that pride themselves on their "neutrality."
On CNN's "State Of The Union" this weekend, Kinzinger came to mostly talk about the House's January 6 Committee.
But when Jake Tapper asked why he's voted against voting rights legislation, since he says he cares so much about democracy, Kinzinger reverted to Republican form.
KINZINGER: Look, you can call a bill the Voting Rights Act, and then left-wing Twitter goes nuts about this, by the way, and they can say, you voted against voting rights, without even looking to the details of this. So, the quick details, the Voting Rights Act in the mid-'60s came out with a temporary provision called preclearance, which required certain states to get clearance for any changes to any election system that they did. That went on into perpetuity. It was intended to be temporary. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court threw that provision out and said history changes. We can't keep pretending like it's 1965. And so, for the last eight years, we have not had that provision in.
And that's the problem, because racism isn't actually solved, despite how Republicans like to claim it's so. White supremacists stormed the Capitol in 2021, as Kinzinger might recall, as he's on the committee investigating that. Chief Justice John Roberts has been proven wrong, wrong, wrong, and it's abundantly clear those states still need adult supervision.
But rather than being honest about what's happening, Kinzinger decided to blame "both sides":
KINZINGER: The problem is -- I admonish my side all the time about playing politics. The Democrats have to quit playing politics on some of this too. You can call it the "For the People Act," which was the other one. [...] If we actually went into this as adults with real discussions, I think we can solve stuff. But, instead, we just wait for these Twitter comments of Adam voted against whatever. And then I can put a bill out there, the God and Puppies Act, and see people vote against that, and say they're against God and puppies.
While Kinzinger tried to minimize the need for voting rights legislation while trying to blame both parties, only one party is changing laws, after enough people made it through existing GOP voter suppression barriers to elect President Joe Biden and Democratic senators in Georgia and Arizona.
Adam Kinzinger is proof that (much like Liz Cheney), at heart he is still a Republican.
Chuck Todd Still Sucks
Over on NBC's "Meet The Press," Chuck Todd started the show with some good old conservative talking points:
Good Sunday morning — The inability to fully recover from Covid-19 is both an economic story and a political one.… https://t.co/ktUTtqalbm— Meet the Press (@Meet the Press) 1634475963.0
Ah, it's the old "why haven't you fixed the problems?" argument Republicans keep making while actively making them worse. The difference is that saying it on one of the nation's oldest news shows as a "fact," it makes this lie the veneer of credibility.
Asa Hutchinson Tap Dances
Todd then had on Arkansas GOP Governor Asa Hutchinson who opposes government vaccine mandates, for reasons.
HUTCHINSON: Well, the principal reason is that the whole debate on mandates takes away from the efficacy of the vaccines themselves and our push to increase vaccination rates.
This argument was so bad even Todd caught it.
TODD: After the vaccine mandate was announced and you had companies like Tyson and Walmart in your state, essentially, announce their own vaccine mandates, vaccine acceptance went up 30 percent, you got 46 percent of the state now. Is that not evidence that the mandates [...] have had an impact?
HUTCHINSON: Well, absolutely, it does indicate that. And it's not just there, but our healthcare workers. Many of our hospitals have put in a requirement for vaccines and the rate goes up. So, yes, there is an effectiveness there. And so, let me make it clear that when I say I don't believe we ought to be engaging in mandates, I'm speaking of the government mandates, whether it's a federal government mandate or a state government mandate.
Yes, much like seatbelts lose their effectiveness because they are required by governments, and not by Tyson chicken.
We Think That's Enough Sunday Shows
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