Many more Americans believe that mass shootings result from inadequate mental health care than those who think lax gun laws are to blame, according to a new poll from ABC News and the Washington Post.
I love traveling abroad and getting fast food. I'm serious. Even just walking in and looking at a menu is fascinating. It can tell you so much about a places culture and people.
My top-of-the-head answer though is pretty basic, but its Queso Ruffles from Mexico. Holy crap they are SO, SO GOOD.
I’ll usually be the first to tell you that you should dive into real local cuisine when you travel to another country. It’s one of the most important aspects of a culture. But I’ll also be the first to tell you that you should totally hit up fast food chains in other countries. They’re awesome! If you have, what’s…
Scott Beigel, 35; Alaina Petty, 14; Peter Wang, 15; and Martin Duque, 13
Before we get too wrapped up in the important work of pushing for changes to our stupid, stupid gun laws, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves what the ready availability of deadly, military-grade weapons has gotten us: seventeen graves, seventeen grieving families, a high school whose name will now be associated with blood and pain and loss, and only secondarily with an environmental crusader. There’s absolutely important political work to be done, since it was the political work of the NRA and the Republican party that led to an environment where there are more guns than there are Americans. Here are four out of seventeen out of thirty-three thousand reminders a year of why we need to do something about guns:
Three of the students killed last Wednesday, Alaina Petty, 14, Martin Duque, 13, and Peter Wang, 15, were all members of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School’s Junior ROTC program. Peter Wang had planned on making a career of the military: His lifelong goal was to attend the Army’s military academy at West Point. Wang was wearing his JROTC uniform — and holding a door open for others to go through — when he was shot to death. To honor the slain JROTC kids, the Army Cadet Command awarded all three the JROTC Heroism Medal, awarded to the family of each at their funerals.
An online White House petition asking that Wang be given a military funeral with full honors received more than the 100,000 signatures needed to be considered by the White House; Florida Gov. Rick Scott directed the Florida National Guard to attend the funerals of all three kids.
In addition to the JROTC medal, Peter Wang was also granted postumous admittance to West Point, which named him a member of the US Military Academy’s class of 2025:
A statement from West Point said the posthumous appointment
was an appropriate way for USMA to honor this brave young man […] West Point has given posthumous offers of admissions in very rare instances for those candidates or potential candidates whose actions exemplified the tenets of duty, honor and country.
Peter Wang was buried yesterday wearing his JROTC uniform, with the Heroism Medal pinned to it; a Cadet Command spokesperson said a copy of the medal was also given to his family to remember him by. The criteria for awarding the medal specify it go to cadets who perform acts of bravery that are “so exceptional and outstanding that it clearly sets the individual apart from fellow students or from other persons in similar circumstances[.]” That fits, and you don’t have to be “pro-military” or a HOOAH type to tear up.
Scott Beigel was a geography teacher at Stoneman Douglas. He died after unlocking his classroom to shelter students fleeing the attacker. Beigel had waved kids into his classroom, and after getting all the kids in one group inside, was getting ready to come inside and lock the door behind him when he was shot to death. One of his students, Kelsey Friend, said she believed the gunman hadn’t bothered looking into the room after seeing Beigel’s body by the door. In an interview on CNN, Friend said, “Mr. Beigel was my hero and he still will forever be my hero. I will never forget the actions that he took for me and for fellow students in the classroom.”
At his funeral Sunday, his fiancée, Gwen Gossler, said Beigel had told her, while they watched TV coverage of one of America’s many, many school shootings, how he wanted to be remembered if he ever died in a school shooting. Yes, of course, that’s something teachers think about. It’s something we all have to think about, thanks, NRA:
“Promise me if this ever happens to me, you will tell them the truth—tell them what a jerk I am, don’t talk about the hero stuff,” Gossler said [….] “OK, Scott, I did what you asked. Now I can tell the truth. You are an amazingly special person. You are my first love and my soulmate.”
In addition to his teaching duties, Beigel coached Stoneman Douglas High’s cross country team, so Parkland, Florida, organized a run in his honor yesterday. In their story on the memorial event, CNN reports Beigel had also talked to his mother about school shootings; she said he’d get “intensely angry” at the media for focusing too much on the lives lost, and not on how senseless slaughters could actually be stopped.
So it sounds to us like if we really want to honor Scott Beigel, his coworkers, and the students who died a week ago, we have a hell of a lot of work to do.
Literally track every single purchase/transaction, down to the penny. I keep a detailed spreadsheet that I update every few days just tracking every checking, savings, and credit transaction in one place. I have been doing this since 2013. It has made it so much easier to budget, save up for certain things, and to just have the peace of mind that I know exactly what my money is doing.
Most of us could be better at managing our money. This isn’t meant to shame or guilt anyone—it’s simply a fact. There are so many temptations every day, so many different financial products beckoning us and so little money to go around. Effectively managing what we have can often be an uphill battle.
A few hours after the final body count of the latest school shooting was tallied, it came out: Nikolas Cruz, the shooter, had been known to “harass” women, known to abuse his ex-girlfriend, and was kicked out of school for getting into a fight with his ex-girlfriend.
Before long he was being cheered on by the sociopaths over on incels.me, 4chan’s R9K board, and Reddit’s new incel community r/braincels.
This is what happens now. I wrote this article when Elliot Rodger shot up Isla Vista, and I wrote it again when Christopher Harper-Mercer shot up Umpqua Community College. Twice. Each time it happens the same way: Some man with clear issues with women goes on a murder spree, and each time he is cheered as a hero on misogynistic forums.
We know now that Cruz was a Trump supporter who often wore a MAGA hat, that he was known to say horrible things about Muslims, that he attended paramilitary training with Republic of Florida, a white supremacist group hoping to create a “white ethnostate” in Florida. (UPDATE: While the white supremacist in charge of a Tallahassee group confirmed Cruz’s participation to the AP and ADL, his statement is now being seriously questioned, and law enforcement has found no linkage between the two.) He was given a gun, though not the one he eventually used to murder 17 children at his old school, by someone in that group. Also, according to someone in that group, he was “having trouble with a girl” and that his choice to go on a killing spree on Valentine’s Day was not a coincidence.
We know now that he publicly fantasized about killing Antifa:
We know now that he was a “fan” of Elliot Rodger.
Cruz was full of hate and resentment. Hate for non-white people, hate for “Antifa,” hate for the people at his school, hate for women. Hate, likely, for anyone he saw as getting in the way of what he thought he was entitled to.
In my previous work on the subject of misogynistic mass shooters, I’ve focused largely on the fact that these men feel they are entitled to women — ideally virginal supermodels — and lash out at the world, violently, because they don’t get them. In 2014, I wrote:
Elliot Rodger was the product of a culture that teaches male entitlement. Men are entitled to women, to sex, to jobs, to money — and if they don’t get them, then women are to blame. He felt entitled to all these things and was livid over not getting them. You don’t see women committing crimes like this because we are not taught to feel entitled to these things.
I still believe this is true. I believe it applies, as well, to angry whites who feel that people of color are to blame for their not getting the things they believe they are entitled to.
But the thing is — it has always been true — and yet we didn’t have quite so many mass murders. We need to ask ourselves what has changed?
That guns, particularly assault rifles, are more easily available now is certainly a contributing factor, but there are also cultural and social factors that we need to start addressing.
In the 1970s, if you thought Ted Bundy was a hero for murdering all those women, you kept that to yourself. You couldn’t just casually say, “Wow, that guy had a POINT!” to someone or else people would think you were nuts. You couldn’t go on a YouTube video and post about how great he was. Today, people who feel that way can find each other, they can commiserate without being judged. They can talk online about how much they would really like to murder a bunch of women. They get to cherish their resentments, nurture them and watch them grow.
Like a cult leader going from prophet to messiah to Literal Jesus, the insular nature of these groups creates a need for constant escalation. Someone may stop by one of these forums because they are having a bad day, because they feel slighted in some way, or because their crush wouldn’t go out with them and they feel bad, and eventually get so sucked into these communities that instead of dealing with these common life events in a healthy way, they start one-upping each other to the point where they fantasize about murdering people. They start out being “I’m not a racist but…” types and end up dreaming about a white ethnostate and praising Hitler. They lose touch with reality.
Socialization is not innate, it is learned — and the fact that more of it is being learned on the internet these days rather than in-person has consequences. It’s easier to see other people as NPCs who don’t feel the same way you do, it’s easier to dismiss their humanity when most of your interaction with them is on social media, where most people are pretending to have a fabulous and perfect life. Even when they’re not putting on that facade, even if they’re angsty as hell, it’s still just words on a page.
It’s also just words on a page when you’re just sitting around trolling people, or trying to purposely hurt people, when you spend hours in misogynistic and racist forums dehumanizing women and men you think are better looking than you are and have more dates, dehumanizing people of other races and religion. It creates a certain kind of solipsism, a feeling that only your own feelings are real, that other people’s emotions and inner lives are no more real than those of people on television shows. That makes misogyny easier, it makes racism easier, it makes violence easier.
It doesn’t help that, in some sections of the internet, there is a culture in which cruelty is currency. This is part of the reason why Trump won — because people like Cruz delighted in his cruelty. He is cheered on these same toxic forums for his ability to “troll” people and “trigger the libs.” Trump was the nail in the coffin of basic human decency actually meaning something. Trump won because too many people have become inured to cruelty.
We need to consider the fact that maybe some things need to be taught that didn’t used to need to be taught. Instincts that were once perhaps tempered by things as simple as “hanging out” with other people are no longer being tempered. Those who are socially inept don’t get the practice they need to overcome it, they don’t learn how to relate to people, to read body language and facial expressions. Young men don’t learn how to relate to or talk to women like actual human beings. They don’t learn how to be masculine, or how to express their anger or emotions, in a healthy way.
This is part of what we talk about when we talk about “toxic masculinity.” Contrary to what conservatives and anti-feminists think, this is not feminists saying “being a man is bad and toxic! BOO MEN!” No one is saying that. (Okay, very few people are saying that.) What we are saying is that a lot of the attributes we ascribe to masculinity are unhealthy and, quite frankly, just as bad for men as they are for women. Statistically, men are vastly less likely to seek therapy for mental issues than are women, largely because doing so is perceived as weak and unmanly. Men are expected to be violent, to be sexual conquistadors, to not have emotions other than anger. A woman rejecting them, breaking up with them, is not just a heartbreak, but a perceived threat to their masculinity, to their very identity.
Ease of access to guns, toxic masculinity, white resentment and a lack of in-person socialization are a deadly combination. In Italy, where femicide and domestic violence has become an extremely serious problem, some schools have started implementing what amounts, essentially, to “don’t kill your girlfriend” classes — in which young men are taught, through role-playing and texts, how to handle romantic conflict without resorting to violence. Perhaps something similar needs to be implemented in our own schools. Maybe we actually do need “classes” where young men can talk and role-play and learn healthy ways of responding to their own anger and resentment, healthy ways of interacting with people in real life.
It may sound like a too touchy-feely response to the horror of mass shootings, to the poison of misogyny and racism, but something has to be done. Quite frankly, we clearly need to teach them how to live in and adjust to a world where being a white man doesn’t afford them the privilege it once did. If that’s not a thing that can “work” then we need to figure out something else. Because whatever we’re doing now, it’s clearly not working.
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attended a party at Mar-a-Lago on Friday just hours after visiting first responders and wounded survivors of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting that killed 17 people.
"No way to prevent this," says only nation where this regularly happens
Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz has become the latest mass killer who was able to carry out his sick slaughter due in part to law enforcement's failure to heed warnings of disturbing behavior and because of lapses in the background check process.
Can run for president in 2036 if we are doing our math correctly
A good thing — but it’s a REALLY good thing — has come out of our latest gun terror massacre in Florida. The kids, the ones who actually survived the shooting, are not down with a bunch of dumb thoughts and prayers from NRA-funded politicians whose political careers depend on not doing anything to stop gun terror massacres. Never have we ever seen a young generation so accurately and boldly call out (many of) their elders for being absolutely full of shit.
We had a post this morning about a lot of the kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, but we feel Emma Gonzalez deserves her own post. Did you watch the viral video of Gonzalez, age 18, a high school kid, literally calling “BS” on all the grown-up Republicans with their gun blood money? Did you watch her tell them YOUR TIME IS FUCKIN’ UP? If you haven’t, you have stumbled onto the correct internet news post!
Here’s that video, followed by our favorite Gonzalez quotes, delivered at a rally this weekend in Florida against gun violence:
“We are going to be the last mass shooting!.” (Your mouth to God’s ears, but we don’t mean that in a thoughts ‘n’ prayers way.)
“There has been one tweet that I would like to call attention to: ‘So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!’ WE DID. Time and time again. Since he was in middle school. It was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter.”
“We know that there are [those] claiming that there are mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist. But we need to pay attention to the fact that this isn’t just a mental health issue. He wouldn’t have harmed that many students WITH A KNIFE!“
“And how about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the shooter’s fault? The fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the first place? Those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic?”
“If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy, and how it should never have happened, and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association. But hey, you wanna know something? It doesn’t matter because I ALREADY KNOW! Thirty million dollars! And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to … $5,800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you don’t do anything to prevent this from … continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up, and the number that they are worth with go down. And we will be worthless to you! To any politician who is taking donations from the NRA, SHAME ON YOU.”
“In February of 2017, one year ago, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to certain people with mental illnesses. […] I don’t need to be a psychologist to know that repealing that regulation was a really DUMB idea. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the sole sponsor on this bill that stops the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated to be mentally ill, and now he’s stating for the record, ‘Well, it’s a shame that the FBI isn’t doing background checks on these mentally ill people!’ WELL DUH! You took that opportunity away LAST YEAR!”
“The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us, and us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call BS. […] Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA, telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS! They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence, we call BS! They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun, we call BS! They say guns are just tools like knives, and are just as dangerous as cars, we call BS! They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred, we call BS! That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works, we call BS! If you agree, REGISTER TO VOTE, CALL YOUR LOCAL CONGRESSPEOPLE, GIVE THEM A PIECE OF YOUR MIND …”
AND SO FORTH. Have we convinced you to watch the video and to support Emma Gonzalez in her presidential run in 2036? She will be running against Ivanka Trump, probably, and it will be hilarious.
In response to Gonzalez’s video and those of other students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Trump has decided he guesses he supports strengthening background checks, he guesses, if he gets around to it. We are not as polite as Emma Gonzalez, so instead of calling “BS,” we say, “Go fuck yourself, Trump, we will believe it when we see it.”
Gonzalez had some final thoughts about Trump and his rage-tweeting about how it’s the FBI’s fault the shooting happened, because they were too busy investigating NO COLLUSION, NO RUSSIAN COLLUSION, which she shared on MSNBC this weekend:
I think the best way to deal with this is to ignore him. I think we can all agree that the things that President Trump tweets is nothing that will have a lasting impact — unless it’s a negative lasting impact — on the people around us.
At this point especially, the things that he mentions when he brings up talk of the FBI, he’s trying to blame somebody. And we can’t let him do that. So, the best thing for us to do is to ignore him and to continue fighting our fight, the fight that he refuses to acknowledge. The fact that he refused to even tweet the word “gun” in any of his tweets. And yet, he insists on tweeting, and he insists on blaming the Democrats for something that he did wrong …
Just listening to old Mr. Rogers songs and crying at work
Mister Rogers is trending on all the social media today, but before you panic and start worrying that it is for something you would rather not ever know about Mister Rogers, let us tell you that he is actually trending because it is the 50th anniversary of the day Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood first aired.
And while he does (or did) think your body is fancy, he thinks so in a wholesome way.
Which is good. Because I think at this point we are all pretty much down to him and Levar Burton as the only people we would be truly surprised or heartbroken to find that out about at this point. Mr. Rogers was the greatest, and I only just found out right now that they stopped rerunning Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood back in 2001, which in retrospect seems like a bad idea. In addition to making people feel OK about themselves “just the way they are,” Mr. Rogers had a particularly soothing voice that sort of made everything seem like it was going to be OK. The ritual aspect of the show was calming — he takes off his shoes, he puts his cardigan on, he feeds the fish, and he just sort of talks to you like you are there. There was something that was nice about that, about the show’s deliberateness, something I think was good for children.
Although Fred Rogers has long since passed, he has a lot going on these days. The United States Postal Office recently announced that they would be releasing an official Mister Rogers (and King Friday!) stamp on March 23 of this year.
Also, America’s other favorite good guy, Tom Hanks, has been cast as Mr. Rogers in an upcoming biopic, You Are My Friend, which tells the story of “a cynical journalist” assigned to write an article on Rogers, and gets platonically manic-pixie-dream-girled by the kindly children’s show host. It is probably the kind of thing we all need right now.
Also what you need right now? YOUR OPEN THREAD! And also to tip us! But first, allow me to play you out with some video treats.
First, this confusingly sexy rendition of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” by Miss Roberta Flack.
And also this classic Mr. Rogers crayon video, which I still have weird dreams about all of the time.
Emma Gonzalez, a student at the Parkland, Florida, high school where 17 people were left dead after a mass shooting, speaks to hundreds of people who gathered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to support gun control.
A Republican running for a Maryland legislative seat raffled off an AR-15 assault weapon at a Saturday night fundraiser celebrating the Second Amendment — only days after the same type of weapon was used to kill 17 people at a Florida high school.
President Donald Trump described Oprah Winfrey as "very insecure" and accused her of "biased and slanted" after an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" that addressed his presidency.
by Ryan Shattuck on The Onion, shared by Timothy Burke to Deadspin
PARKLAND, FL—In the hours following a violent rampage in Florida in which a lone attacker killed 17 individuals and seriously injured over a dozen others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Wednesday that there was no way to prevent the massacre…
The best boy. He is WeRateDogs' 3rd 15/10 dog ever though I think he is at least 100/10.
Lightness aside, I've met the K9 Comfort Dogs a few times now at O'Hare Airport during the holidays and they really are the sweetest, most comforting animals. They do a wonderful service to people who are suffering - going to Las Vegas, Orlando, and now Florida whenever these horrible events happen. I'm grateful for them. They are sweet, and soft, and very comforting.
Golden retriever Jacob, aged four, a specially trained “comfort dog”, could be seen lying in the shade, surrounded by a group of children and wearing a harness that simply said "please pet me". Jacob is one of 19 dogs currently in Parkland supporting friends, family and loved ones as they grieve those lost when Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. The dogs are part of a group of 130 golden retrievers, K9 Comfort Dogs, run by Lutheran Church Charities, which specially trains dogs to act as therapy animals in disaster situations.
I've seen so much more vehement response to this shooting. People are fed up.
Regardless of where you land on its artistic merits, it’s hard to deny that the central image of Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-contender Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri—the three bright, red, accusatory billboards that lend the film its name—is an affecting one. Earlier this week, the signs’ impact was co-opted in…
I love the practical armor. Instead of the typical female superhero stomach-baring, butt-showing, completely impractical clothing, these badass women warriors have armor that actually would help protect them in battle. Incredible.
The movie leaves us with powerful, complicated questions: What might the strongest of us built had we remained in Africa?
A few weeks ago, the contours of an immigration compromise looked clear: Republicans would let the “Dreamers” stay. Democrats would let Trump build his wall. Both sides would swallow something their bases found distasteful in order to get the thing their bases cared about most.
Since then, Trump has blown up the deal. He announced on Wednesday that he would legalize the “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, only if Democrats funded his wall and ended the visa lottery and “chain migration.” He would support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only if Congress brought the number of legal immigrants down.
There’s an irony here, which was pointed out to me by CATO Institute immigration analyst David Bier. Until recently, Republican politicians drew a bright line between illegal immigration, which they claimed to hate, and legal immigration, which they claimed to love. Florida Senator Marco Rubio launched his presidential campaign at the Freedom Tower, Miami’s Ellis Island. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who in 2013 proposed a five-fold increase in the number of H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, declared in April 2015 that, “There is no stronger advocate for legal immigration in the U.S. Senate than I am.” Mitt Romney promised in 2007 that, “We’re going to end illegal immigration to protect legal immigration.”
Trump has turned that distinction on its head. He’s willing to legalize the “Dreamers”—who came to the United States illegally—so long as the number of legal immigrants goes down. He has not only blurred the GOP’s long-held moral distinction between legal and illegal immigration. In some ways, he’s actually flipped it—taking a harder line on people who enter the U.S. with documentation than those who don’t.
What explains this? Trump’s great hidden advantage during the 2016 Republican presidential primary was his lack of support from the GOP political and donor class. This allowed him to jettison positions—in support of free trade, in support of the Iraq War, in support of cutting Medicare and Social Security—that enjoyed support among Republican elites but little support among Republican voters. He did the same on immigration, where the “legal good, illegal bad” distinction turned out to be much more popular among the party’s leaders than among its grassroots. Cribbing from Ann Coulter’s book, Adios America, Trump replaced the legal-illegal distinction with one that turned out to have more resonance on the activist right: The distinction between white Christian immigrants and non-white, and non-Christian ones.
The words “illegal immigration” do not appear in Trump’s presidential announcement speech. Instead, Trump focused on immigrants’ country of origin. “When Mexico sends its people,” he declared, “they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists … It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably—probably—from the Middle East.”
Trump, who often says bluntly what other Republicans say in code, probably realized that “illegal immigrant” was, for many voters, already a euphemism for Latino or Mexican-immigrants. In their book White Backlash, the political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal cite a poll showing that 61 percent of Americans believe that most Latino immigrants are undocumented even though only about a quarter are. “When Americans talk about undocumented immigrants, Latinos or immigrants in general,” they note, “the images in their heads are likely to be the same.”
What really drove Republican opinion about immigration, Trump realized, was not primarily the fear that the United States was becoming a country of law-breakers. (Republicans, after all, were not outraged about the lack of prosecution of tax cheats.) It was the fear that the United States—which was becoming less white and had just elected a president of Kenyan descent—was becoming a third-world country.
When the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution asked Americans in 2016 their views of immigration from different parts of the world, it found that Republicans were only three points more likely than Democrats to want to reduce immigration from “predominantly Christian countries” and only seven points more likely to want to reduce immigration from Europe. By contrast, they were 33 points more likely to support reducing immigration from Mexico and Central America and 41 points more likely to support reducing immigration from “predominantly Muslim countries.” What really drives Republican views about immigrants, in other words, is less their legal status than their nation of origin, their religion, and their race.
Trump grasped that during the campaign, and in coalition with a bevy of current and former Southern Senators—Jeff Sessions, David Perdue and Tom Cotton—he has used it to turn the GOP into a party devoted to slashing legal immigration. On Thursday, when presented with a bill that traded the legalization of Dreamers for more border security but did not reduce legal immigration, only eight Republican Senators voted yes. However, 37 voted for a bill that legalized the “Dreamers,” added more border security, and substantially reduced legal immigration.
But there’s another reason Trump has succeeded in erasing the “legal good, illegal bad” distinction that for years governed GOP immigration debate. He’s made Republicans less concerned with legality in general. In 2012, the GOP—which was then-outraged by executive orders that supposedly displayed President Barack Obama’s contempt for the constitutional limits of his office—titled the immigration section of its platform, “The Rule of Law: Legal Immigration.” The seven paragraph-section used variations of the word “law” 14 times.
That emphasis is harder now. In his ongoing battles with the FBI, Justice Department, judiciary, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Trump has convinced many Republicans that the “rule of law” is often a cloak for the partisan biases of the “deep state.” As a result, Republicans are now 22 points less likely to hold a positive opinion of the FBI than they were in 2015.
What really matters for many Republicans in Trump’s standoff with Mueller and the FBI is not who has the law on their side, since the bureaucracy can twist the law to its own advantage. What really matters is who enjoys the backing of “the people,” the authentic America that resides outside the swamp, a construct that definitely does not include the imagined beneficiaries of “chain migration” and the “visa lottery.”
In the Trump era, Republicans now justify their immigration views less by reference to law than by reference to tribe. Which, not coincidentally, is how they justify Trump’s presidency itself.
Thank you, sweet baby jesus, for the AV Club using this classic Onion photograph of the cool kid from high school still rocking the phat pair of JNCOs
Congratulations are in order, we guess; when called, at last, to our final judgment, and asked to give an accounting of our deeds, at least we’ll all be able to say that we outlasted JNCOs in the end. This is per SFGate, which reports that Los Angeles clothing mainstay JNCO Jeans is closing, and that the company will…
An emotional video of one woman's first unobstructed breath after a lung transplant went viral last October, and now she hopes her story will inspire others to become organ donors.
I've seen this a lot after Florida. People have stopped trying to be polite. The mantra "now is not the time to talk about this/lets not politicize this" is more hollow now than ever. People are saying fuck that. They're talking about it, forcing people to face the reality of what an AR does to a child's body.
The debate over whether it’s appropriate to “politicize” the deaths of Americans in mass shootings is by now as customary a part of post-massacre fallout as vigils and Congress deciding, after judicious deliberation, that no one should limit the access that mentally disturbed loners have to lethal weapons. Bringing a darkly original perspective to the now-familiar back-and-forth is a site launched in fall 2017 called Politicize My Death, which is exactly what it sounds like: A list, open for anyone to sign, of individuals who’ve given pre-approval for their stories to be used by gun control advocates in the event that they’re killed in gun violence.
A Washington grand jury issued an indictment on Friday against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies accused of interfering in the 2016 presidential election to support the campaign of President Donald Trump. This was the first indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that directly accused specific Russians of meddling in the U.S. election.
Sorry, Chubbs is too busy to win Westminster Dog Show this year. But he will be your expert on these very bad cats instead.
Chubbs knows it is very hard for everybody not Chubbs.
Being you is hard. Much worse than being Chubbs. Here is a picture of Chubbs for you.
I am Chubbs. Chubbs got rescued from shelter. Nobody paid people money for Chubbs. Chubbs is priceless. So I know more than people and cats. But Chubbs will help you.
Chubbs will help everybody know Westminster Dog Show. Even though Chubbs too busy to be in show. Very busy. Don’t call @Chubbsfeed to be in show. Chubbs can’t come. I’m very busy computer typing.
Here is the Chubbs Westminster Dog Show rankings by Chubbs:
15. Balinese Cat
Too much smiling. Smart cats don’t smile. Balinese should be smart cats. What you doing? Stop smiling now. Very bad cat. Should lose points.
14. Tiger
More smiling. Not good for judge score. Tiger stripe too big. Only one face stripe. Bad tiger.
13. A cat bed
How this bed get here? Chubbs has bed. But I will take this one to help.
12. Russian Blue Cat
WHY HIS FACE MELTING?? HELP MISTER BOB.
10. Sphinx Cat
This is first hairless sphinx cat to grow hair! Is miracle. Judges will like.
9. Caracal Cat
Caracal ears broken. Were pointy. Cat is very very sick. Chubbs know doctor for him.
7. Jaguar
Jaguars very good at trees. But this one too clumsy climbing. Very bad jaguar for show. Might be worst jaguar. Chubbs knows lots of better jaguars.
Even Chubbs can climb onto people tree.
6. Simba the Lion
Don’t hold Chubbs like this. Simba The Lion should bite. Now.
4. Persian Cat
This is a BIG Persian cat! Biggest Persian cat ever maybe. Big points for big cat always. Big are beautiful.
This cat can run fast. That nice. But Chubbs can do tricks. Don’t forget Chubbs just because I too busy to win show.
Rocky the Mountain Lion is the Nuggets’ mascot and the night before Valentine’s Day he was horny AF and tried to cheat on his mascot wife — or something. Look, I don’t get the fiction the Nuggets were going for, but feast your eyes on this:
Rocky goes above-and-beyond attempting to make fan his valentine, gets caught by Mrs. Rocky with their kid in the stroller #WeirdNBApic.twitter.com/ZIf6yREvOm
Only way we can really break down this madness is step by step.
Rocky spots a woman he’s interested in.
Rocky offers her a stuffed animal.
She rejects his advances.
Rocky refuses to take no for an answer, like an ass.
Rocky offers her a larger stuffed animal.
She rejects his advances.
Rocky gets angry and storms off.
Rocky returns with a GIANT stuffed animal and smothers her.
Mrs. Rocky notices what her husband is doing.
Rocky insists it’s not what it looks like.
Mrs. Rocky yells at him, and hits him.
They walk out, as Rocky is pushing his child in a stroller.
WHAT IS THE STORY HERE?!
Inside the Rocky the Mountain Lion metaverse, we’re led to believe he’s a horrible, horny dad who abandoned his child and wasted his family’s mascot income on stuffed animals for a woman who had no interest in him.
What is a stuffed animal to a mascot? Is it like a fetus? A bizarre effigy? All I know for sure is Rocky was a not a good father or husband the day before Valentine’s Day. They deserve better.
Super tired of people saying that even TALKING about gun control is worse than kids being shot up at school
The alleged shooter in a massacre at a Florida high school was known to school officials after having been permanently kicked off of campus, it was reported on Wednesday. Nikolas Cruz had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School before he allegedly returned to that campus on Wednesday and murdered at least 17 people, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told reporters.
Barstool Radio’s newest Sirius XM talk show, Dialed-In with Dallas Braden, hit a bump in its second episode today when co-host Patrick Connor (who also has a show on KNBR) called 17-year-old snowboarding gold medalist Chloe Kim a “little hot piece of ass.”
This is amazing. How did her people/PR let her do this interview?
Louise Linton, bless her, has not done an incredible job endearing herself to the American public, a largely self-imposed conundrum that she grapples with in a profile for Ellewritten by Carrie Battan. “I’m just a regular girl, and I’m not perfect, but I’m trying my best,” Linton tells Elle. “Maybe I should wear that…
If they were good doctors, they'd be doctors, not politicians
In September of last year, American Medical Association CEO James Madara wrote a letter to Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, urging them to abandon the efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It wasn’t his first such letter.
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