Tag: government

GOP Rep from Arizona asks about furries on Twitter; becomes one hours later thanks to Brony artist

stable86:

horsenews:

A Republican State Representative from Arizona may have set an internet record; going from total obliviousness to full blown furry in under 24 hours. Kelly Townsend, a Representative for Arizona’s 16th District since 2013 became entangled in a twitter debate regarding socialism and public education (Arizona public school teachers have been striking recently), when a twitter user named @andreuswolf called her out for getting “logically destroyed by a furry”.

In what may go down as the defining moment of her political career, Townsend decided to ask
“please educate me as to what a furry is.”.

The fun began immediately.

This request was immediately answered with a deluge of furry pornography, photos of fursuits, links to furry websites, and pictures of dildos, being tweeted to the elected official.

Her lack of understanding was only worsened by a followup tweet, in which she interpreted the response as a threat of some kind.
Dictionary.com attempted to join the fray by providing a real answer.
Eventually, after several hours of non-stop fur-posts, she seemed to understand the fetish world that she had just provoked, and instead of recoiling in terror (as one would expect an elected official to do), she seemed to embrace it (or, got a hip young social media person to take the reins). She asked for her own fursona (after making a shrekpost).
She stipulated that it must be a lioness.

She seemed to be enjoying herself.
Which, here is where the pony-world gets involved (the only reason we would post this on the Horse News site). A horsefan delivered in glorious full-color.

ChocoPony tweeted her new fursona to her, which she even offered to pay for.
The story doesn’t end there, as shortly after receiving her new furry artwork, it became the profile picture for her election campaign page on Facebook.
Not even lying.
Even gave credit for the art.

These are real things that happened.

fascinating

GOP Rep from Arizona asks about furries on Twitter; becomes one hours later thanks to Brony artist

Trump’s FCC Is About to Destroy Net Neutrality, and a Democratic Commissioner Is Calling Foul

princessbubblegumandjustice:

nunyabizni:

my-very-own-opinion:

writscrib:

This is something that is very important to pay attention to, and if you are an American I implore you to do everything that you can! Contact your representatives, research your ISPs, and keep a vigilant eye on this! The FCC is likely to make this ruling close to Thanksgiving in an attempt to squeak it by without anyone noticing.

Net neutrality is the reason why you can visit any website confidently. It’s why you don’t have to pay a premium to be able to access YouTube. It’s why you don’t have the internet bundled into different packages like TV is.

If they remove net neutrality protections, then there is no benefit to the consumer. Put simply, your ISP could choose to charge you more in order to visit specific sites, and not every town in the United States has the option to switch to a new ISP because some ISPs hold a monopoly in some areas.

This is what the internet looks like without net neutrality:

@nunyabizni. Could you spread this?

Yikes, yeah.

They’re trying to fatigue public resistance by trying to repeal net neutrality as often as possible. We have to stay vigilant. Motivate yourself by assuming no one else is calling/writing. Don’t assume other people will do it.

Trump’s FCC Is About to Destroy Net Neutrality, and a Democratic Commissioner Is Calling Foul

Why do you seem to bash trump sometimes and then support him? #TRUMP2020

libertarirynn:

libertarian-lady:

libertarirynn:

I have never supported Trump. I just don’t support bullshit stories and exaggerations about him. He does enough stupid shit, no need to make things up.

Refuting falsehoods is not the same thing as supporting him, damn

Thank

Like it’s actually the fact that I don’t support him which makes me so determined that he is called out for the specific things he does and not the nonsense he doesn’t.

attackoftheskydancers:

brakehagev2:

haha sick one! anyway, am I going to lose my health insurance in a few months

Guys. I get it, this isn’t ensuring you a living wage or banning AHCA.

But the courts have used Trump’s tweets to strike down the travel ban. This is important, even if it has a dumb name meant to needle him. His tweets are official correspondence, meaning they can illuminate his legislative intent, meaning they need to be on record. This can save lives. Using his tweets in court has saved lives. You can care about this AND your health insurance.

Source: brakehagev2

quinewave:

friendly-neighborhood-patriarch:

low-key-lyesmith:

boganprincess:

low-key-lyesmith:

People seem to whine a lot about the electoral college mostly because their candidate didn’t win and you know when someone loses you need to blame someone or something else not the fact that they are morons.

As European I didn’t understand what electoral college is (even if the EU parliament works on sort of similar principle). Took me few days and acual elections to understand but here is the thing: 

The US is made of bunch of states many of them with different culture, not dramatically different, but there IS difference. Cali and Texas for example are massive states. IF the US president was elected by popular vote, you don’t need much of the other states to have a winner. You just make sure you appeal to the people of California and Texas, maybe bunch of smaller states to make the numbers and you can ignore the other 40 for example. 

You can hate Trump all you want. You can say he is racist or whatever, I am  not arguing over that. But the only reason Hillary won the popular vote is because she won in few big states who have population larger than others. If you are all about fairness and right, tell me is it fair for 3 or 4 states to decide to governance of the other 47? Look at the map. You have about 20 states that voted Clinton, one of them (MN) pretty close to a Trump win. 20 states are NOT half of the US, they are less than a half. She has more votes because she won big population hubs like CA, MA, IL and whatever else I’m missing.

You can hate the electoral college all you want because your candidate lost but try to be honest for 1 second and admit it: IF Clinton had won, but Trump would have won the popular vote, none of you would have cared and you would say: Yes it’s good we have the electoral college. 

but.. why does it matter where the voters live? why would it matter if a few states determined it if those were the states with the most people?

a few states determine it as if tbfh.

I don’t see why it matters that 20 states isn’t a majority if they still have more people than the other 30. To me, people should matter, not states.

sorry, I guess it’s just hard for me to understand why people shouldn’t be equal. 1 person = 1 vote just makes the most sense to me, I don’t understand why you’d think it’s a good thing for someone’s individual vote to carry more or less weight based on where they live.

Okay Imagine you live in Village A with population 100 people. Your village is small, you live out of farmland. Your problems are mostly related to your crop and your cattle. Your income depends hugely on farming. This year you are hoping that the government will increase the subsidiary they give to you so you can buy more cattle or maybe plant an extra field which will increase your income. The country you live in (it;s imaginary country we are not talking about the US yet) has few other villages like yours. Each one of them with about 100 people, each one of them has similar issues, not the same but similar. In that country there is one big city. City B. That city has a population of 1000 people, which is twice as big as the population of all the villages combined. The city has city problems. High crime, traffic not enough housing. None of them related to your cow or crop problems BUT the city does consume your cow and crop. However, the city does not realize you have an issue because theyhave more important issues at hand. Like who broke into their home. You don’t have the issue of crime, but you worry that next year you won’t make enough money to feed your family. 

Presidential elections comes. Candidate A runs a campaign that tries to make everyone as happy as possible. It;s not possible to please everybody, but in their campaign they have a bit for the Village, a bit for the City. Candidate B focuses their campaign ONLY on the city and say how they will fight crime rate, and build more housing etc. Candidate B doesn’t give a shit about the villages, because there is not enough votes in them. All the villages vote for A bcause even if A will do 50% of what they want 50% is better than 0%. All the cities vote for B because their problems are more important for them than some village’s problems. B wins because the city has larger population. What the electoral college does is forcing a candidate to create a platform that appears to the village AND the city. By doing so it ensures (not always successfully) that a candidate will have in mind that people from different regions have their different needs met. 

You still with me? Okay let’s go to the US.

That is map (not divided by states) where Hilary and Trump won. If you split it by state you will see that she didn’t win the WHOLE of California or Washington. She won because she won the big cities. Her platform was created to attract the big population hubs. EXACTLY the reason why the electoral collage was created. The US is a massive country and you might not realize it but there is a big difference between East, West, North, South and the Middle. And by difference I don’t mean some are hillbillies the others are hipsters or whatever. These places have different problems. Some of them don’t have jobs, some of them don’t have schools. If a candidate wins the elections by popular vite it means only these blue areas want them to be their president. The USA is not a democracy. That’s what people mistake. A country as big CANNOT be a democracy simply because it won’t function for so long. A democracy will allow handful of big states to rule over majority of smaller states. Take for example the EU. That is what the EU is. One big state (Germany) telling everybody else what to do. The Euro is falling, the economy of many country is on edge, there is demographic crisis in smaller countries. Because Germany (Merkel) governs the WHOLE EU as if they are all Germany. And they are not. They have different culture, they have different economies and even different values. That’s why the EU is crashing. Because the EU reached a point where one State tells everyone else what to do regardless of how they feel. 

!!!!

Solid explanation

tuhmblr-logic:

Friendly reminder it’s going to do you a lot of good to vote during the congressional elections. They’re just as important as the presidential election if not more. Whichever party makes up the majority of the senate and the house greatly influences whether the proposals of each candidate become a thing or not.

redactivist:

Corporate Media Has Complete Collapse Over Hillary [x]

[Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp]

June 10, 2016:

“The corporate media keeps telling us to now celebrate
this grand moment in history. Okay. First, I only need to celebrate if the
candidate is a good person, who stands for… Oh. I don’t know… anything! Hey! Here’s
the first female corporate election fraud Presidential nominee! Brought to you
by the good people of Goldman Sachs and Monsanto!
Ah, well. Break out the champagne!

 Secondly, she’s not the first woman to be a
Presidential nominee. Jill Stein was the nominee, for the Green Party, just
last election cycle and there are many others! So yeah, “Anybody who isn’t
celebrating Hillary is a misogynist.” Meanwhile, you’re bulldozing over
history, to knock other women out of the way. 

Sorry ladies, you weren’t on a corporatist party platform, so you don’t count! Out of the way, Victoria Woodhull,
who was a presidential nominee in 1872. You mean nothing, in your sepia photos.
You’re no Hillary!” – Lee Camp

Source: redactivist

hnetu:

jaanfe:

artielu:

kata-speaks:

swanjolras:

endquestionmark:

swanjolras:

okay jesus fuck this conversation has gone far enough so:

hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!

what are you going to do if he loses?

because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:

  • bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton
  • the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed
  • while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)
  • the republican party wins the presidential election.

(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)

so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?

i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you to not put all your hopes in one basket.

you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game? 

they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.

i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.

because i honest-to-god believe this country will not survive another four, eight, twelve years of a republican administration.

#remember ralph nader? #I FUCKING WELL REMEMBER RALPH NADER #WE’RE NOT DOING THAT AGAIN. (via swanjolras)

my hand to god i have seen so many posts on my dash that have been both heartbreakingly optimistic and absolutely mind-bogglingly uninformed (and naive, but that comes with time; information comes with googling the way the government of your own country works. fun fact: not all primaries are open primaries! i know! this is inconsistent! it is also the world that we live in and i don’t think we’re going to get around to redesigning the electoral system before november 2016. just saying) and, like every election year, i have sat down and thought, albeit briefly, about this possibility:

  • the republican party wins the presidential election.

that is not a possibility that i can or will accept. i know we like to mythologize our figures here and put them on can-do-no-wrong pedestals, but, for god’s sake, to paraphrase: can we live in the real fucking world here, please? by all means, know that we can do better. by all means, know that we should. but here are some facts:

  • the us electoral system is not going to change by november 2016.
  • the notes on your tumblr post about bernie sanders’ ideology are not going to translate to votes.
  • those votes are not as big a percentage of the voting population as you think they are.
  • even if they were, bernie sanders is not going to be able to wave a magic wand and:
    • turn those ideas into policies
    • get those policies signed into law
    • get those laws implemented
    • they aren’t going to be perfect anyway.
  • can you imagine the reactionary voting in the election immediately following that anyway.

this is not how politics works. you don’t vote a politician into office and then stand back and watch the world fix itself! you don’t get to do that. it takes work and it takes time and it takes, sometimes, the willingness to accept and keep pushing through lowered expectations. i’m happy for your optimism and i’m happy for your energy. we need those! don’t lose them. do, however, remember that there is context to this, because we live, again, in the real fucking world.

#i have read posts calling hillary clinton problematic.#i fully expect an edit of bernie sanders in a flower crown to cross my dash sooner or later.#real. world. (via endquestionmark)

THIS.

FUCKING THIS.

FUCKING EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS.

And this has an embarrassingly low number of notes.

I know how a lot of people here feel about Hilary. If I had my druthers, I would MUCH rather have Bernie Sanders as president because his politics so closely align with my own. Like, stunningly close. A-breath-of-fresh-air close.

But consider these words from an ancient, jaded, 34 year old fuck who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000…

NONE OF US agreed with Gore. I mean, not really, at least. He was Republican-lite. First off, his wife Tipper was a friggin’ censorship Nazi, Gore was a Southern Baptist who was mum on gay rights, and while he gave lip service to climate change, please note that An Inconvenient Truth had not been produced or filmed, and there wasn’t much in the way of supporting the Kyoto protocols in his platform. He supported the limited military action in Iraq, supported NAFTA, and supported driving our production overseas. There wasn’t much to his platform other than “less scary alternative to Bush”. In other words, he was problematic as hell.

Then there was Ralph Nader, a consumer rights advocate, a proponent of gay marriage before it became a mainstream cause to champion, against NAFTA, spoke out against the military industrial complex, was pro-union, and anti-corporate.

And I voted for him. Proudly. In the general election. My reasoning was that nearly everyone I knew was voting for him (and everyone I knew were fellow college age leftists) so if enough of us got together and enough of us wanted that change to happen, then it would, right?

“Well, we’re talking about the primaries,” I can already hear you say. And yes, we are. But consider this: if Bernie ends up not winning the primaries, and no one turns out to the polls to vote for Hilary so they can “make a statement” or because she’s “problematic”, or turns out and votes Green or some other third Party for those same reasons, then history will repeat itself with disastrous consequences.

Here’s what happened on election night, November 7, 2000:

We waited.  We watched Gore lose in battleground state after battleground state by just about the same number of votes that went to Ralph fucking Nader. Bush took all the dip shits who thought he’d be a swell feller to have a beer with. And then Florida and the recount and the Republican Party-led coup that stormed the voting recount, triggered the Supreme Court ruling and handed George W. Bush control of the country.

The first thing Bush did was reverse each and every executive order Clinton had put in place over the protestations of a crybaby Republican Congress, and most of those executive orders were designed to protect the middle class from corporate America and protect our budget surplus from the military industrial complex. Then Bush instituted legalized class warfare: the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and still do to this day.

Then 9/11 happened.

If you’re 22 right now, then in 2001 you were 8 years old. In 2001, I was 20. I watched friends of mine who had joined the military because there were few other opportunities for them after high school get shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan and get their limbs blown off by IUDs. There are people I knew, people I ate lunch with every day, who are FUCKING DEAD right now.

This country was an unchecked fascist dictatorship for six years. Don’t believe me? Here’s the dictionary definition of fascism. And here’s what happened during the Bush regime.

Torture. Suppression of the press. Siphoning the nation’s wealth to the upper 1%, creating our current aristocracy. Investments made by principle members of the Bush regime in for-profit military-industrial corporations that were tasked with murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Sunsetting the assault weapons ban. The Defense of Marriage Act. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The loss of an entire city and fucking nothing done about it as people were drowning and starving to death in New Orleans. No Child Left UnTested Behind. A color coded number system on every day of the news telling Americans how frightened they needed to be that day that hilariously enough coincided with how far Bush dipped in the polls that week. He dipped, we went up to terror threat: orange. His poll numbers went back up. Like clockwork.

Between 2001 and 2005 us leftists who thought that there was no different than center-left Democrats and right wing Republicans got hit by a giant clue by four and watched the fucking Republicans dismantle our safety, economic security, and our entire way of life. No, the centrists are not the same. THE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ARE NOT THE SAME. One faction sort of listens to us. The other doesn’t give a shit about us and actively promotes policies designed to kill and silence us.

…

So for all the “problematic” that you imagine a Hilary Clinton presidency could be, I want you to imagine a Republican presidency (pick one) in which they want people like us fucking dead as pawns in their war games or fucking dying because they’ve stripped away the Affordable Healthcare Act.

So please Support Bernie Sanders. Support him because if enough leftists make their voices known through his candidacy, then NO MATTER WHAT it will influence the DNC platform next summer. Support him because we’re all passionate about returning America to a thriving, working democracy and flushing out the corporate lobbyist corruption that has held our entire government hostage for a decade.

But if he doesn’t win the primaries then you need to support Hilary Clinton. And I’m not kidding, I’m not being hyperbolic.  If the Republicans win, then you need to start preparing yourself for life under a fascist state.

Hint: it will help if you’re fundamentalist Christian, wealthy, white, straight, male, and cisgender. 

Otherwise, you’re fucked.

All of this. Read it. I also lived through the Nader debacle. Vote for Bernie in the primaries if you agree with him. I like a lot of his politics too. But then you MUST SHOW UP FOR HILLARY IN THE GENERAL ELECTION OR WE WILL END UP WITH A THIRD PRESIDENT BUSH.

Three Supreme Court Justices are very old and may die in the next Presidential term.

www.rockthevote.com

#RockTheVote

Read it. Every word.