I Didn't Say It ...

Dylan Mulvaney, social media  personality who detailed her gender transition in 2022, and was blasted by rightwingnuts after her Bud Light social media partnership, accepting the Streamy Award for “Breakout Creator”:

“532 days ago, I made a coming out video that turned into my ‘Days of Girlhood’ series and my life has been changed for the better, but on the flip side, there’s also been an extreme amount of transphobia and hate, and I know that my community is feeling it and I now know that even our allies are feeling it. I look around this room and I see so many amazing allies that have platforms, and I think allyship right now needs to look differently. And you need to support trans people publicly and proudly. I think the trans community and the creator community actually have something in common. And it’s that people often underestimate us. But I know that we can stay optimistic about the future of trans-ness in general … It just means a lot to me, but I also think that the fact a trans person can win an award like this in such a scary time of transphobia—it makes me feel like there’s hope. I love you so much, thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m gonna go have a beer!”

That’s how it’s done: stand up, speak up, live up … loud. And we all need to do it for our trans brothers and sisters, our bisexual brothers and sisters, everyone in the LGBTQ+ family.

Stand together and stand strong.

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Chris Christie, GOP presidential candidate, blasting DeFascist and Inmate # P01135809 on Anti-Trans Laws

“We’re having a lot of arguments in this country about transgender issues, and there are some—including [Governor DeSantis]—who believe that he should decide what can happen in your family, with your children and not. I don’t want him deciding what happens inside my family. We have this group now, folks like Ron DeSantis and [Inmate # P01135809] and Vivek Ramaswamy who believe in big government conservatism and if there’s something going on in this country they don’t personally like, they want the government to pass a law to stop it. Sorry, no one knows or loves my four children more than me and my wife. I think that applies to every parent out there, and I want parents and families to make those decisions.”

It should bother everyone that the party of smaller government wants to tell you how to raise your kids, what your kids can say, what they can read or learn or study.

Now, I am not a fan of Chris Christie but when his is the voice of reason in a political party that should say something about the out of touch nature of the GOP..

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Nikki Haley, playing the age card on Fox News:

“It’s sad. No one should feel good about seeing that any more than we should feel good about seeing Dianne Feinstein, any more than we should feel good about a lot of what’s happening or seeing Joe Biden’s decline. What I will say is, right now the Senate is the most privileged nursing home in the country. I mean, Mitch McConnell has done some great things and he deserves credit. But you have to know when to leave.”

Funny, but does anyone notice how she never mentions Inmate # P01135809 who, at age 77, is only four years younger than Biden? And does anyone else think she doesn’t mention the inmate’s age because, should he get the nomination, she’ll once again praise him in the hopes of getting the VP spot.

Pandering ageist bitch; she’s so transparent.

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Jeanine Pirro, Fox News ranting., boxed wine guzzling loon, saying the quiet part out loud in a resurfaced 2016 rant:

“Whether or not you like Hillary Rodham Clinton, or [Inmate # P01135809] doesn’t matter. There is only one person you can vote for. We cannot have a country led by a president subject to ongoing criminal investigations, potential indictment, and never-ending hearings. We cannot have a president under that level of scrutiny that inevitably leads to even more questions and more investigations. And irrespective of what happens to her, whether she’s indicted or even guilty, it doesn’t matter. Her guilt is a moot point. She cannot take the Oval Office. How is the world is going to look at the United States, when a woman under federal criminal investigation, who has lied repeatedly to the American people, is elected?”

Oops. Jeanine really should lay off the sauce because in vino veritas, and her 2016 truth fills the bill today more than 7 years ago because Hillary was never indicted, arrested, fingerprinted, mug shot; not once, not ninety-one times.

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Ncuti Gatwa, Barbie and Doctor Who actor, coming out:

“I’ve experienced racism my whole life, and while I always believed in myself, always knew [racists] were stupid and uneducated, I guess it did misinform my view of how the world works. It makes you think everyone has that opinion and you’ll constantly have to fight through life—then you learn that you don’t: you can find a tribe, you can find your people. I remember being at Manchester Pride, going through the streets with all my boys, shaking my cha-chas, living it up, when I saw this woman who looked exactly like my auntie. She wasn’t—but I knew she was Rwandan [and] I had never met another queer Rwandan person before. I thought I was the only one in the world.”

You aren’t the only one, Ncuti Gatwa, and you aren’t the last one either. We are everywhere, and every time one of us comes out, it strengthens all of us, so Welcome Out.

Gatwa has never publicly disclosed his sexuality before but in an Elle magazine profile he mentioned being distracted by one of his co-stars in director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie:

“There was a time when I was talking to Greta and I turned around and Ryan Gosling was looking at me and his eyes were so blue that I just… fell over. I just drowned in his eyes.”

I could say the same about Ncuti; he’s a cute little nugget.

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Vacation: I Didn't Say It

Nancy Pelosi, on Kevin McCarthy reportedly promising Thing 45 he’d try to expunge the traitor’s two impeachments:

“This is about being afraid. As I’ve said before, [Thing 45] is the puppeteer and what does he do all of the time but shine the light on the strings. These people look pathetic. Kevin is playing politics. It is not even clear if he constitutionally can expunge those things. If he wants to put his members on the spot, his members in difficult races on spot, that is a decision he has to make. But this is not responsible.”

It’s all so McCarthy doesn’t rile the wingnut base who may vote to remove him from his leadership position, and be clear, many Republicans in the House are not going to vote to expunge the impeachments.

As for the Senate? Never gonna happen.

It’s Kevin McCarthy’s desperation.

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Chris Christie, on government overreach regarding transgender Americans:

“I don’t think anything can replace parents when you’re talking about major decisions that are needed to be made for our children. And I ... want all parents out there to think about something. How many other decisions do you want the government making for you in your home regarding your kids? I don’t want any of those decisions made by the government. Parents are the ones who love their children the most, who care about their children the most, who understand their children the most. And parents should be the ones making these decisions. I’ll tell you, it’s more of a parent’s decision than it’s a governor’s decision, for goodness sakes … you really think that Sarah Huckabee Sanders should be making this decision for children in Arkansas? ... I don’t think she would ever allow the government to substitute her judgment as a mother for their judgment. And that’s what I’m saying ... I want those decisions to be made by parents, not by the government.”

I don’t care for Christie, but he’s spot on about these GOP governors and such, legislating what parents can and cannot for their own children.

The GOP calls itself the party of family values, as long as there are no trans kids in the family. They paint themselves as the party of small government, then try to come into your home and tell you what you can and cannot do for your own children.

It’s hypocrisy and bigotry and hate masked by the GOP as family values.

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Jack Schlossberg, Carolina Kennedy’s on and JFK’s grandson, on his Cousin Robert’s special brand of crazy:

“President John F. Kennedy is my grandfather, and his legacy is important. It’s about a lot more than Camelot and conspiracy theories. It’s about public service and courage. It’s about civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and landing a man on the moon. Joe Biden shares my father’s vision for America, that we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. And he is in the middle of becoming the greatest progressive president we’ve ever had. Under Biden, we’ve added 13 million jobs, unemployment is at its lowest in 60 years. Biden passed the largest investment in infrastructure since the New Deal and the largest investment in green energy ever. He’s appointed more federal judges than any president since my grandfather. He ended our longest war. He ended the COVID pandemic, and he ended [Thing 45]. These are the issues that matter. And if my cousin, Bobby Kennedy Jr., cared about any of them, he would support Joe Biden too. Instead, he’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame. I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is his candidacy is an embarrassment. Let’s not be distracted again by somebody’s vanity project. I’m excited to vote for Joe Biden in my state’s primary, and again in the general election. And I hope you will too.”

Also keep in mind that the majority of donations to RFK Jr.’s campaign are coming from the right; don’t be fooled by Fox News suggesting Kennedy is the future of the Democratic party because if he was, they’d be attacking him instead of Biden.

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Nikki Haley, flip-flopping again on Thing 45’s run for the White House:

“We have to move forward. We’ve got to quit living in the past, and I don’t want there to be all of this division over the fact that we have a president serving years in jail over a documents trial. None of us want to be talking about indictments. I don’t even know if it’s the third, fourth, or fifth indictment right now, but what I can tell you is, it’s a distraction, and frankly, the media is talking about it nonstop. But when I do these town halls, the American public is not talking to me about that. They want to know what’s going to happen, how we’re going to go and change government for the better. They’re worried about the future for their kids and I think we owe it to them to be answering that, not how Trump’s going to defend himself.”

This is the exact opposite of what she said a few weeks back, which was slightly different than what she said a few days before that.

This woman cannot form an opinion and stick to it; she’s sooooo transparent.

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Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation, calling out House Republicans’ obsession with restricting the rights of LGBTQ+ people while there are more pressing problems in this country:

“When I’m out in Wheeling, West Virginia, or Pittsburgh at the airport or anywhere else, the questions are not about beer bottles or drag queens. The questions are about making sure that we can deliver these transportation assets that people can count on. If it is socialism, then it seems to be socialism that these Republicans love when it’s coming their way. It is maddening sometimes to look at the split screen on cable TV, and I’m trying to make sure people are aware of the literally tens of thousands of good projects we’ve already supported around the country. We need to do two things and it should not be hard to do: one is to safeguard vulnerable groups as a matter of policy, which is something we believe in as administration and is the right thing to do, and another is to keep doing the work of taking care of the basics.”

The Basics? According to the GOP that's voting to remove funding for several community centers from a Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development funding bill; Republicans struck out the earmarks for three LGBTQ+ community projects out of a list of over 3000 similar, non-LGBTQ+ projects receiving similar funding, all the while claiming they are not targeting LGBTQ+ people.

And the GOP has attacked LGBTQ+ people in amendments to larger bills, too, including an air travel bill and a military funding bill. GOP presidential candidates have made LGBTQ+ issues—specifically attacks on transgender children’s rights—central to their campaigns and many GOP-controlled state legislatures passed legislation attacking transgender kids’ rights.

Think of all the problems we face in this country and yet the GOP only has one goal: punish the LGBTQ+ community. Vote them all out.

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I Didn't Say It

Hozier, Irish singer-songwriter and longtime LGBTQ+ ally, taking a stand for the transgender community:

“If you believe in a free and open society, part of that is respecting and supporting your fellow citizens’ rights to be who they are. For me, it’s a question of decency and showing up. It’s a very simple question of human decency when you treat someone with respect, you treat them with respect whether that’s their pronoun, their name—it’s so simple. It really is. These things aren’t that complicated, you know? I think it’s grimly predictable at a time we’re in a cost-of-living crisis, this massive crisis of inequality, a rental crisis, housing crisis,” he said. “At a time where there are already huge, huge questions to be asked about how our society is functioning and what we want out of an economy that really isn’t working for everyday folks … there are media companies who love picking soft targets, and rather than having conversations about the actual, serious, difficult questions of our time and our collective predicament, will just take less than one percent of the population and decide the most pressing thing is to talk about them in an existential way. I don’t know who might need to hear this today but you are loved, you are seen and you deserve to be happy and respected for who you are and the God given life you live.”

This isn’t the first time Hozier has spoken out in support of the LGBTQ+ community; his Grammy-nominated 2013 debut single “Take Me to Church” blasted religious dogma and shame around sexuality. And after Tennessee became the first state to ban drag performances, Hozier performed with Sheryl Crow, Maren Morris, and others at the “Love Rising” concert benefiting Tennessee Equality Project, Inclusion Tennessee, and Out Memphis.

Bravo. But on the flip side …

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Jason Aldean, doubling down on his faux outrage and fake patriotism:

“So, all you weirdos out there who escaped your small town? I see you. I know what you went through. And I hope you have found a place where you feel at home and comfortable enough to be yourself. You were never a weirdo. There was never anything wrong with you. You are not depraved. Sometimes we’re just born where we don’t belong. And someone creating an idyllic and violent fantasy of “community” of the place you had to leave behind doesn’t change that one bit.”

Sometimes we’re born where we don’t belong? Fuck all the way off you asshat. In America anyone and everyone should belong where they choose to live and if you think your stance makes you patriotic you need to get a goddamned dictionary. Or just shut the fuck up.

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Chris Christie, on Ron DeSantis and Florida’s new Slavery Wasn’t So Bad education plan:

“First of all, ‘I didn’t do it and I’m not involved in it’ are not the words of leadership. You know, look, Governor DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed, and now he doesn’t want to take responsibility for whatever is done in the aftermath of it. And from listening and watching his comments, he’s obviously uncomfortable. The fact is that [he] starts these things for political advantage. I’m talking about governors micromanaging curriculum in schools. And the fact is that, you know, if this was such a big issue for Governor DeSantis, he had four years to do this. He only started to focus on this when he decided he wanted to run for president and tried to get to the right of [Thing 45]. So I think people see this as politically manipulative. We’re dividing our country into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces, and politicians are pitting them against each other to create conflict.”

What the hell is happening in the world where I agree with Chris Christie? But he’s right, DeSantis signed the bill but now acts like he had nothing to do with it, and that’s a chickenshit move. Which is what he is, and what he would be if he ever gets into the White House.

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Jesse Watters, taking over for Tucker Carlson as the most prolific POS on FOX, on Florida’s Slavery Wasn’t So Bad Laws:

“The curriculum includes how Black slaves were able to use their experience in some cases to make their brutally hard lives better. The course examines the various duties and trades performed by slaves like agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation. ‘Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.’ That’s the section everyone’s freaking out about. No one is arguing slaves benefited from slavery. No one is saying that. It’s not true. They’re teaching how Black people developed skills during slavery in some instances that could be applied for their own personal benefit. We can’t have an honest conversation with the likes of Kamala Harris or the likes of MSNBC. They don’t want an honest conversation. Why is Kamala Harris so dishonest about how Black history is taught? Is she ignorant and hasn’t read the curriculum? Is she just being handed talking points by staff? Or does she not want African-American history taught this way? Does she not want students to learn how resilient and capable Black Americans were during slavery and afterwards? What is Kamala Harris hiding?”

Let’s try this, Jesse. You live the life of a slave in the 1860s, okay?

We’ll start with you being chased by strangers and then captured and thrown onto a ship, chained in the bowels where you will spend months crossing an ocean lying in yours, and your fellow slaves,’ excrement; you will hardly be fed, and in fact many of you will die before you reach America. But you reach it, and you are poked and prodded and sold; your name is changed; you are separated from your family. You are put to work on a plantation where you toil from sunup to sundown seven days a week, every single day of the year. You are often starving; you are often beaten by the master for any reason while working in the fields. You sleep twenty or more in one room, often on a bare wooden floor. You cannot marry, you cannot learn to read, and any children you have are taken from you and sold off to who knows where. But then the Civil War happens and you’re suddenly freed and you can be a sharecropper on some white man’s land using the skills you learned on the plantation and you think that’s a positive thing?

Kindly fuck all the way off you self-entitled soulless fool.

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Brian Kilmeade, Fox News host, on Jason Aldean’s inflammatory, racist, hate-filled song:

“I looked at some of the lyrics, because in country music you can actually understand them. He’s taking it from the news. This is happening. This is so outrageous. There’s lawlessness everywhere. He’s trying to say, ‘In a small town—we’ve given up supporting the cops—we elect our own sheriffs, we take care of our own, and if you come in my house, you’re going to get shot.’ That’s called the American dream.”

I must have missed that dream of shooting people; just like I missed the dream where if you’re different from lily white faux-christian gun-toting conservatives then you don’t belong in their towns.

And you should be careful, Brian, because with the plucked eyebrows, and the tinge of blush on the cheeks, along with a hint of gloss on the lips, you’d be run out of Jason Aldean’s small town.

And don’t forget: small towns murdered Emmett Till and Matthew Shepard just for being different.

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Kamala Harris, Vice President, criticizing Florida “extremists” for backing educational guidelines to teach “revisionist history” about slavery being “good” for slave:

“Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worst examples of … depriving people of humanity in our world. How is it that anyone could suggest that, in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization? They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not stand for it.”

It's insanity.

Racist, revisionist, insanity.

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I Didn't Say It

Kamala Harris, Vice-President, taking  a stand against Florida’s “Don't Say Gay” law:

“I hate bullies. I can't stand it when so-called powerful people intentionally try to strike fear in innocent people. You look in Florida, [the] ‘don't say gay' bill and what this has meant for LGBTQ teachers who are now afraid. I'm looking at some 20-something-year-old teacher in Florida who has dedicated [themselves] to one of the most noble professions, which is teaching our children their God-given capacity, and that teacher who is in a loving relationship or marriage is afraid to put up a photograph of their family for fear that if the student in their classroom asks, ‘Who is that?' [that] it will raise a conversation about a same-sex relationship, and they could lose their job. Outrageous! We just have to make sure that this moment is motivating people to act and not motivating people to be afraid.”

Motivate people to speak up and stand up and vote these bigots from office, because once they come for the LGBTQ+ community and win because people were too worried or afraid to do something, they’ll come for the rest of you.

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Don Bacon, Nebraska’s GOP Representative, on Thing 45 and his treasonous acts:

“We don’t have a right to take top-secret information to our home. I’ve dealt with top secrets since I was 22 years old, in the military for 30 years now, and now in Congress. You don’t show our attack plans on Iran to people who are not cleared, or pick documents that talk about our nuclear technology or where our intelligence resources are located throughout the world. And that’s what happened there. And when the government asks for them back, you give them back. And if you deny having them, but then you have them, those are crimes.”

Simple. Direct. Truthful.

And from a  Republican who has the balls to stand up the MAGAts.

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Chris Christie, GOP candidate for President, responding to Thing 45 calling him fat—and, yes, this is what passes for politics in America in 2023:

“What? Like he’s some Adonis? Please. I don’t know what his point is. You know what it is? It’s like a child. It’s a bully in the schoolyard who teases you and makes fun of you. But here’s my message to him: I don’t care what he says about me. I don’t care what he thinks about me. And he should take a look in the mirror every once in a while. Maybe he’d drop the weight thing off of his list of criticisms.”

I think you both should look in a mirror and quite being a couple of whiny bitches and really tell the American people why you should be president.

And it’s not because the other guy is fatter than you.

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Newt Gingrich, Fox contributor, playing up the GOP lie of stolen elections:

“I think it’s probably almost impossible under current law to ensure an accurate election. And I think the only Republican strategy in the long run is to pick issues and win by margins so big that they can still win if you have a very close election. Democrats have a passion for stealing them. When you have the local union, which takes care of people in a nursing home going in to vote, the people who literally don’t cognitively know what they’re doing, that union is going to vote every single one of them for a Democrat no matter what their personal beliefs were. In states dominated by Democrats like New York, Illinois, California, you just have to assume that the machine will steal as much as it can.”

I think that with the GOP trying to circumvent people of color from voting—just see the latest rulings on voting in Louisiana and Alabama by the Supreme Court— Newt might be right, but he fails to see that it’s his own party that’s suppressing votes and making elections seem unfair.

But that’s Newt.

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Adam Kinzinger, former Representative and CNN commentator, on the recent coup attempt in Russia:

“I think you have to start thinking through every worst-case scenario. So obviously Putin out of the picture, I think generally it would be great for the world, but you think about the instability in Russia that will inevitably come from that. Even if this whole supposed coup fails, there will be some instability in Russia, which has nuclear weapons. There’s concern about proliferation if the Russian republic falls apart into even more pieces. I think on the other hand too, this is extremely good for the war in Ukraine because even if as Prigozhin is marching on Moscow, even if that fails, Wagner is out of the fight and they were a significant part of this effort against Ukraine, not to mention that all around the world Wagner protects Russian interests, whether it’s in Africa, Libya, and other places. This is a massive blow to the Russian republic, and a massive blow to their military effort, and I will also say it’s a massive blow to the people here in the United States, like say Tucker Carlson, who have been parroting Putin talking points, to have Prigozhin, the head of Wagner himself, say those have been lies. There have been a lot of people parroting those Putin lies, and the head of Wagner even just said those are lies.”

Tucker Carlson would switch gears and say he’s never been pro-Putin because once a liar …

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The Funny Papers

Lalo Alcaraz, Adam Zyglis, Mike Luckovich, Dave Whamond, Ann Telnaes, Michael de Adder, Liam Simonelli, Nick Anderson, Jack Ohamn, MacLeod

Meme Dump

The Funny Papers

Darrin Bell, Tim Campbell, Nick Anderson, Deb Milbrath, John Cole, JD Crowe, Drew Sheneman, Kevin Siers, Kevin Kallaugher, Bill Bramhall, Bill Day, Lalo Alcaraz, Liam Simonelli, Dennis Goris