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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Meme Dump

Why Is It ...

… that rightwingnuts tell me that if I don’t like Jason Aldean’s gun-toting ambiguously racist filmed on a lynching site video and song, then I don’t need to watch it or listen to it?  But if I same the same thing to them about books—if you don’t like certain books, don’t read them—they don’t understand the hypocrisy?

… that Tori Spelling and the five children she shares with her soon-to-be-ex Dean McDermott appear to be living at a $100-a-night motel in the Los Angeles area? Is it because she’s filming another reality show, Tori Does Skid Row?

… a federal judge has refused to allow Florida’s drag ban to go back into effect after an earlier ruling placed a temporary injunction against it?  Is it because the judge knows that drag is art and as such is protected as Free Speech? Go see a drag show, Florida, it’ll take your mind off the fascist you elected governor.

… that Large Marge is all over Twitter saying she will never stop fighting to protect kids, but says not one single word about the so-called men of faith who are raping children in churches? Is it because in church child rape is acceptable to the GOP?

… that the state of Florida wants to teach children that enslaved people benefited from slavery because they learned a trade?

… Miranda Lambert pitched a fit when people took selfies while she sang? I mean, she got her coins and, no disrespect, it’s Miranda Lambert. Does anyone really wanna hear her sing?

... that some days I realize I'm surrounded by idiots, and other days I realize that it's not just some days?

... that the GOP wants so-called pornography, in the form of LGBTQ+ literature, removed from libraries, but cheer when Large Marge shows pornographic, private images in Congress?

I Didn't Say It ... The Las Vegas Shootings: A Country Singer, Six Talk Show Hosts and One Asshat Speak

Jason Aldean, performing onstage in Vegas when the shooting broke out, reflecting on the state of America:

“Over the last 24 hrs I have gone through lots of emotions. Fear, Anger, Heartache, Compassion and many others. I truly don’t understand why a person would want to take the life of another. Something has changed in this country and in this world lately that is scary to see. This world is becoming the kind of place i am afraid to raise my children in. At the end of the day we aren’t Democrats or Republicans, Whites or Blacks, Men or Women. We are all humans and we are all Americans and its time to start acting like it and stand together as ONE! That is the only way we will ever get this Country to be better than it has ever been, but we have a long way to go and we have to start now. My heart aches for the Victims and their families of this Senseless act. I am so sorry for the hurt and pain everyone is feeling right now and there are no words i can say to take that pain away. Just know you all are in my heart and my prayers as we all go through this together. Time to come together and stop the hate!”

Stop the hate.

And stop the lunatics in Congress, suckling at the teat of the NRA, by voting them out of office.

If you don’t do that then you don’t care about gun deaths in America.

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Jimmy Kimmel, on the shooting in Las Vegas—his hometown:

“Here we are again, in the aftermath of another terrible, inexplicably shocking and painful tragedy … And, of course, we pray for the victims, and for their families and friends and we wonder ‘why.’ And, as a result of that this morning, we have children are without parents and fathers are without sons, mothers without daughters. We lost two police officers, we lost a nurse from Tennessee, a special ed teacher from a local school here in Manhattan Beach. It’s the kind of thing that it makes you want to throw up or give up. It’s too much to process all these devastated families who now have to live with this pain forever because one person with a violent and insane voice in his head managed to stockpile a collection of high-powered rifles. And use them to shoot people ... Of course, there was something we can do about it. There are a lot of things we can do about it. But we don’t. Which is interesting, because when someone with a beard attacks us, we tap phones, we invoke travel bans, we build walls. We take every possible precaution to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But when an American buys a gun and kills other Americans, then there’s nothing we can do about that. Because the Second Amendment. Our forefathers wanted us to have AK47s, is the argument ... We’ll pray for Las Vegas, some of us will get motivated, some of us won’t get motivated, bills will be written, bills will be watered down, bills will fail, the NRA will smother it all with money, and, over time, we’ll get distracted and move on to the next thing. And then it’ll happen again, and again….Senator Majority leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and a number of other lawmakers – who won’t do anything about this because the NRA has their balls in a money clip – also sent their thoughts and prayers today…So, with all due respect: Your thoughts and your prayers are insufficient…By the way, the House of Representatives will be voting on a piece of legislation this week. It’s a bill to legalize the sale of silencers. For guns. This is what they’re working on.”

Word. So, since Congress won’t do anything it’s up to We The People

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Stephen Colbert, not accepting gun violence as “new normal”:

“This afternoon the president called [the mass shooting] an act of pure evil. And I think he’s right … So what then are we willing to do to combat pure evil? … Now, President _____, you said you want to be a transformative president, who doesn’t care about the way things have always been done in Washington D.C….This is your chance to prove it. And I mean this sincerely. You do not owe the Republicans anything. You know the Republicans tried to stop you from being president. Well, screw ‘em!”

Look, _____ won’t do anything because gun-toting-Bible-thumping loons are his base.

Aagin, We The People have got to do this.

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Conan O’Brien, on yet another mass shooting in America:

“Now, today, when I came into work, my head writer was standing in my office with a sheaf of papers. And he said, ‘Here are the remarks you made after the Sandy Hook shootings and the Pulse nightclub attacks in Orlando. You might want to look at them to see what you might want to say tonight.’ And that, that struck me. How could there be a file of mass shooting remarks for a late night host? When did that become normal? When did this become a ritual? And what does it say about us that it has? “Now I am not the most political of our comics. I never have been. But I will repeat what I said not long ago after Orlando. I don’t think it should be so easy for one demented person to kill so many people so quickly. The sounds of those automatic weapons last night are grotesquely out of place in a civilized society. It makes no sense to me, as a reasonable human being and a father. And what’s more, we’re all tired of hearing reporters—let alone comics—discuss mass carnage in the most affluent and influential country in the history of the world. Something needs to change. It really does.”

People say comics shouldn’t discuss such things but that’s just sweeping all those dead bodies under a rug and then putting the couch over it.

That needs to stop.

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Seth Meyers, asking Congress to admit they’ll do nothing about the gun violence and be honest:

“It always seems like the worst displays of humanity in this country are immediately followed by the best. And then sadly that is followed by no action at all and then it repeats itself. Are there no steps we can take to prevent gun violence or is this just how it is and how it’s going to continue to be? Because when you say, which you always say, ‘Now it’s not the time to talk about it,’ what you really mean is ‘There is never a time to talk about it. And it would be such more honest if you would just admit is that your plan is to never talk about it and never take any action. Is that the best plan D.C. has to prevent gun violence? When there’s a shooting, we just pray for a miracle? Because maybe that is it. But if you’re not willing to do anything, just be honest and tell us, ‘This is how it is, this is how it will continue to be.’”

Thoughts and prayers have never stopped bullets from flying.

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James Corden, speaking as a newcomer to America:

“Last night was the biggest mass shooting in United States history. That’s a record that’s been set twice since the two-and-a-half years that I’ve been living in America ... Now I come from a place where we don’t have shootings at this frequency so it’s hard for me to fathom, but it should be hard for everyone to fathom. Gun violence should not be a staple of American life. Some say it’s too early to talk about gun control. For those victims last night, it’s far too late … Forgive me, as I’m just a foreigner here and some of you may feel I have no place to say this, but how does every other developed country do a better job of preventing these attacks? We can’t be surprised that gun crime will always occur when there is such wide availability of guns.”

You have a right to say what you want; we all do. But, for those of us who live here anbd vote we need to speak at the ballot box and vote the NRA-ass-kissers out of office.

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Trevor Noah, on “thoughts and prayers” and inaction:

“What’s been particularly heartbreaking is other than the lives lost, is how I feel like people are becoming more accustomed to this type of news, every single time. I almost know how it’s going to play out. We’re shocked. We’re sad. Thoughts and prayers. Then, almost on cue, people are going to come out saying, ‘Whenever you do, when speaking about the shootings, don’t talk about guns.’ This is not the time to be talking about guns? … And also, if you say after a mass shooting is never the time, then you’ll never have the conversation, because there’s a mass shooting in America almost every single day. So when is the time? “We seem to do everything to avoid talking about guns. I’ve never been to a country where people are as afraid to speak about guns. Every time there’s a shooting, you gotta look at something else. Is it Muslims? Is it their religion, is that what it is? Is it blacks? It’s the blacks. It’s the black-on-black crime. Is it mentally ill people? Is it white nationalists? Every time, it’s a different question. And now, after this incident in Las Vegas, we’re asking a new question: Is it hotels? So just to keep track of the arguments: mass shooting, mass shooting, mass shooting, mass shooting, mass shooting, mass shooting — we have to take care of this hotel check-in issue.”

I saw on Twitter the other day a Tweet about nuclear weapons; and how nukes don’t kill people, people kill people.

Now, doesn’t that sound as dumbas guns don’t kill people?

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Bill O’Reilly, former Fox News host and sexual harasser, on the shooting:

“The murderer had a number of deadly weapons in his room and you can count on the gun control debate to ramp up. But having covered scores of gun-related crimes over the years, I can tell you that government restrictions will not stop psychopaths from harming people. They will find a way. Public safety demands logical gun laws but the issue is so polarizing and emotional that little will be accomplished as there is no common ground. The NRA and its supporters want easy access to weapons, while the left wants them banned. This is the price of freedom. Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are. The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons.”

Wait. So, because we have freedoms we should understand that one of our freedoms is the right to be shot dead in the street? Bill, you are the dumbest fuck of all dumb-fucks.

And the left doesn’t want guns banned; I haven’t heard one politician on the left demand a ban; we want sensible gun control while the NRA and the GOP want anyone and everyone to have access to as many guns as they want.

Siddown you fucking has-been, your opinions are useless and unwanted.

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