Blog Betty (Thomas Friedman is a Great Man was an online novel): I'm guessing Elvis Presley wasn't available?

Thursday, January 05, 2023

I'm guessing Elvis Presley wasn't available?

BULLY BOY PRESS & CEDRIC'S BIG MIX & THOMAS FRIEDMAN IS A GREAT MAN & ANN'S MEGA DUB -- THE KOOL AID TABLE

AS THE COMMON ILLS NOTED, 2022 WAS THE YEAR OF WTF. AND IN A LINGERING MOMENT AT THE START OF 2023, WE LOOK AT ONE MORE WTF MOMENT. DONALD TRUMP WANTS THE WHITE HOUSE IN 2024. AND HE KNOWS JUST HOW TO GET IT . . . WITH A RUNNING MATE THE PUBLIC LOVES!

LAUREN BOEBERT? PLEASE, WE SAID SOMEONE THE COUNTRY LOVED. THAT LEAVES OUT PRETTY MUCH EVERYONE DONALD HANGS WITH.

HE HAD TO DIG DEEP FOR THE RIGHT CANDIDATE . . . SO DEEP, HE WENT INTO A GRAVE.

YES, PREPARE TO SCRATCH YOUR HEAD, THE TRUMPETS ARE ANNOUNCING THAT DONALD WILL WIN BACK THE WHITE HOUSE IN 2024 BY MAKING . . . HIS RUNNING MATE . . . JFK JR!!!!

WE SPOKE WITH MOTHER TUCKER CARLSON ABOUT THIS CHOICE.

AFTER PUTTING AWAY HIS 1ST EDITIONS OF BLUE BOY, MOTHER TUCKER TURNED HIS ATTENTION TO US AND SAID, "YES, J.F.K. JR."

DOESN'T THE CHOICE SEEM A LITTLE CRAZY?

"ARE YOU CALLING THE KENNEDY FAMILY CRAZY? YOU'RE THE LEFTISTS, NOT ME. I'M JUST A SIMPLE MAN SITTING IN MY STAINED TIGHTY WHITIES, ASKING THE WORLD TO JOIN ME IN HATING LGBTQ PEOPLE. WHAT'S YOUR EXCUSE?"

WELL, MOTHER TUCKER, WE RESPONDED, JFK JR. HAS BEEN DEAD FOR SOME TIME.

"MY DONALD HAS THAT ALL WORKED OUT. MY DONALD KNOWS THE INS AND OUTS OF POLITICS. MY DONALD IS COMMITTED TO FIGHTING THE LGBTQS AND TO DRY HUMPING THE RED, WHITE AND BLUES. MY DONALD KNOWS WHAT HE'S DOING. AND IF MY DONALD SAYS HE CAN BRING JFK JR. BACK FROM THE DEAD, YOU BETTER BELIEVE HE CAN DO IT."

WE STUDIED MOTHER TUCKER'S FACE AND HE GRUNTED AND SCRUNCHED UP HIS FACE.

YES? - WE ASKED THINKING HE WAS TRYING TO RELEASE SOME WISDOM OR SHARED SECRET.

NO, HE EXPLAINED, "I WAS JUST MAKING STOOL IN MY UNDERWEAR. IT MOTIVATES ME AND KEEPS ME FOCUSED. I FIND IF I SQUEEZE ONE OUT RIGHT BEFORE A BUMPER, I'M EVEN MORE FOCUSED WHEN WE COME BACK."

FROM THE TCI WIRE:

Trudy Ring (THE ADVOCATE) reports:

The New York Times has brought on an anti-LGBTQ+ columnist, David French, a former National Review editor who was once an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom.

The Times announced French’s hiring Tuesday, calling him “an expert on the law, faith and politics.” But GLAAD is pointing to his “deep history of anti-LGBTQ activism.” GLAAD also notes that he joins the Times after the paper ended its relationship with acclaimed trans writer Jenny Boylan last year and brought on another anti-LGBTQ+ columnist, Pamela Paul.

And here is the statement from GLAAD:

January 4, 2023

Today, GLAAD, the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) media advocacy organization, is responding to the New York Times’ recent announcement of their hiring of anti-LGBTQ attorney and writer David French as a columnist.

GLAAD President & CEO Sarah Kate Ellis responded on Twitter and below:

“It is appalling that The New York Times hired and is now boasting about bringing on David French, a writer and attorney with a deep history of anti-LGBTQ activism. After more than a year of inaccurate, misleading LGBTQ coverage in the Times opinion and news pages, the Times started 2023 by announcing a second anti-transgender opinion columnist, without a single known trans voice represented on staff. A cursory search for French turns up numerous anti-LGBTQ articles and his record as an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group that actively spreads misinformation about LGBTQ people and pushes baseless legislation and lawsuits to legalize discrimination, including just last month at the Supreme Court. The Times left out these facts in its glowing announcement of French’s hiring, and also forgot to mention his work as a co-signer on the 2017 Nashville Statement, which erased LGBTQ voices of faith and falsely stated ‘that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism.’ The Times had the gall to claim French as a ‘faith’ expert despite this known history.

The Times’ opinion section continues to platform non-LGBTQ voices speaking up inaccurately and harmfully about LGBTQ people and issues. This is damaging to the paper’s credibility. The Times opinion section editors’ love letter to French yesterday shows a willful disregard of LGBTQ community voices and the concerns so many have shared about their inaccurate, exclusionary, often ridiculous pieces. Last year, the Times ended popular trans writer Jenny Boylan’s column, leaving the opinion section with no trans columnists and a known lack of transgender representation on its overall staff. Who was brought on after Boylan? Pamela Paul, who has devoted columns to anti-transgender and anti-LGBTQ disinformation, and David French. This reflects a growing trend on the news and opinion pages of misguided, inaccurate, and disingenuous ‘both sides’ fearmongering and bad faith ‘just asking questions’ coverage. The Times started 2023 by bragging about hiring another anti-trans writer, so LGBTQ leaders, organizations, and allies should make a 2023 resolution not to stay silent as the Times platforms lies, bias, fringe theories, and dangerous inaccuracies.”

Examples of French’s anti-LGBTQ activism:

French served as attorney for SPLC-designated hate group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who are best known for attacking the rights of transgender students, fighting in court to remove LGBTQ rights not to be discriminated against, and working internationally to criminalize being gay. French has a history of expressing his outward disdain for transgender people. In the past, he lamented “transgender entitlement” and once described a young transgender woman as a “man” who is “on the verge of mutilating himself.” (from Media Matters)
French was a co-signer on the “Nashville Statement”
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/religion/2017/08/30/what-nashville-statement-and-why-people-talking-it/616064001/ and
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/nashville-mayor-barry-attacks-basic-christian-belief/
Column written by French attempting to refute existence of transgender people
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/05/obamas-transgender-proclamation-broad-dangerous/
French was called out for saying that lifting the ban on trans military service will result in “thought control”
https://www.mediamatters.org/alliance-defending-freedom/national-reviews-david-french-lifting-ban-transgender-military-service
French recently made news for his late-in-life change of heart to support marriage equality, explaining it about a month ago. He has not disavowed his legal activism for ADF, and in fact has defended the group, which continues to attack and spread disinformation about LGBTQ people around the globe.

Examples of NYT Columnist Pamela Paul’s anti-LGBTQ work:

Pamela Paul, who is not LGBTQ, has devoted her first columns to inaccurately opining about LGBTQ issues, including falsely and incredulously claiming erasure of the word and identity, “gay” in the LGBTQ movement:
https://t.co/kwGsPyz2FE
Paul was New York Times Books Editor when writer Jesse Singal, who is not transgender or LGBTQ but who has built a career inaccurately writing about trans issues and targeting trans people, reviewed and supported his friend’s inaccurate anti-transgender book:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/books/review/trans-helen-joyce.html
Paul repeated Singal’s false and harmful exclusionary innuendo about transgender women and safety in one of her first opinion columns: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/03/opinion/the-far-right-and-far-left-agree-on-one-thing-women-dont-count.html
Paul has been accused of silencing voices supportive of transgender youth:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cfl5b7QLz4r/

Recent examples of inaccurate news coverage of LGBTQ people and youth, and their consequences:

The state of Texas used Emily Bazelon’s June 15 report in The New York Times Magazine to further target families of trans youth in court documents over their private, evidence-based healthcare decisions. Every major medical association supports gender affirming care as best practices care that is safe and lifesaving and has widespread consensus of the medical and scientific communities.
The World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare (WPATH), the world’s leading medical and research authority on transgender healthcare, criticized the Times’ November 2022 article “They Paused Puberty, But Is There a Cost?” as “furthering the atmosphere of misinformation” about healthcare for trans youth, noting its inaccurate narratives, interpretations and non-expert voices. WPATH noted the Times elevated false and inflammatory notions about medications that have been used safely in non-LGBTQ populations for decades without an explicit statement about how the benefits of the treatment far outweigh potential risks.
Writer Michael Powell elevated anti-transgender voices to falsely assert, in a piece about one successful transgender athlete, that transgender athletes are a threat to women’s sports. Powell’s other pieces have been used to support Pamela Paul’s inaccurate opinion essays falsely claiming “women” are being erased by the inclusion of trans people in discussions about abortion access.

###

About GLAAD: GLAAD rewrites the script for LGBTQ acceptance. As a dynamic media force, GLAAD tackles tough issues to shape the narrative and provoke dialogue that leads to cultural change. GLAAD protects all that has been accomplished and creates a world where everyone can live the life they love. For more information, please visit www.glaad.org or connect with GLAAD on Facebook and Twitter.

THE NEW YORK TIMES itself has a lengthy history of homophobia. Most recently, they ran their factually incorrect piece on transgender persons. It's amazing that the staff managed to clutch the pearls over the publication of a column by a US senator and get an editor fired over it but they never feel the need to question the repeated and ongoing homophobia of the paper. More to the point, NYT, in the digital age, goes out of its way to market itself as some sort of left outpost left fighting in the wilderness and so many idiots believe it and think NYT is anything but an elitist, corporatist paper. This goes to the reality of what a cesspool it actually is.

It's 2023, there is a war going on against LGBTQ+ people and THE NEW YORK TIMES' response? To hire yet another homophobe columnist. They are pouring gasoline on top of a raging fire. Mary Harris (SLATE) notes:

In the past year, there’s been a sharp uptick in anti-LGBTQ incidents around the country. One group estimates that there’s been a 12-fold increase in demonstrations and political violence targeted at the queer community, just since 2000. In fact, the very same people in the audience watching the Respect for Marriage Act get signed? They were fighting off harassment the moment they got home.

“I spoke to a drag artist by the name of Marti G. Cummings. They’re a nonbinary performer here in New York City, and they were invited to the White House ceremony. And the night after the signing, Tucker Carlson ran a segment about this and included references to Marti Cummings, saying that they have an unusual interest in children,” Mack says. “Marti Cummings told me that to them, Tucker Carlson knows what he’s doing. To frame drag artists as this predatory threat to children is something that felt very shocking to me in March. But now, I’m not shocked at all. That focus on children is not a coincidence. It is entirely related to the events that we saw in the pandemic and the political strategy that sections of the right developed.”

On Wednesday’s episode of What Next, we try to make sense of this bifurcated moment for the queer community by examining the common thread linking conservative activism around COVID to anti-gay demonstrations in the street. My conversation with David Mack has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: Back when a shooter opened fire in a Colorado Springs gay nightclub, in November, BuzzFeed’s David Mack wrote an article lamenting the fact that this kind of violence seemed inevitable. Mack was hurting as he wrote this—he’s gay himself; he felt at risk. But he also felt like he should have seen this violence coming.

To him, it didn’t begin with gay people at all. Instead, it began with concerns around COVID and schools. Because protecting children seemed to resonate. Over the past year, he says he’s watched this political message metastasize.

David Mack: It’s funny. In November 2021, I was in Grand Junction, Colorado, for a school board race, of all things. I’d chosen to go there for a few reasons. It’s a bit of a hotbed for election denialism. It was having this school board race that was suddenly very partisan. And it’s also an overwhelmingly white area where suddenly “critical race theory” was this big subject of debate. One of the candidates told me that she’d knocked on a door and someone had told her that they blamed “critical race theory” for turning their child bisexual.

Whoa. Quite a leap there.

It certainly was. But it spoke perfectly to this wonderful boogeyman that the right had created. Most people I spoke to, even the candidates themselves, couldn’t really define what CRT was. It became this wonderful catchall for anything that could possibly influence young minds to hate America or to make them less American. And to make them less conservative is where it naturally led.

Protecting the presumed innocence of children is what connects all this. Whether conservative parents were talking about “critical race theory” or LGBTQ issues, the idea was the same: to avoid “corrupting the minds of young people.”

And to be clear, I’m not the one marrying these things. In Ohio, one of the bills that was put forward to legislate against “critical race theory” also included, in the very same bill, language that mirrored restrictions on sexual teachings, on sexual orientation, and on gender identity that you saw famously in the “don’t say gay” bill in Florida.

Do you think it is a top-down strategy? Or do you think it’s more like something was successful and then it spread and morphed?

Certainly people at the highest levels of the Republican Party are aware of this strategy and are using this strategy. You saw Glenn Youngkin in Virginia run in 2021 on a campaign about giving parents more control over the curriculum and listening to parents when it comes to schools. And they’re clearly recognizing schools and classrooms are a winning issue. Steve Bannon famously said last year the path to retake the country runs through school board elections.

These attacks are not happening by chance. It is an organized effort and it needs to be stopped. Silence isn't going to stop it. Playing footsie with that Mother Tucker Carlson -- the way Glenn Greenwald does -- is not an answer. This nonsense needs to be called out and called out loudly.

RECOMMENDED:

Ann's "Worst films of 2022," Stan's "10 Worst films of 2022," "2022: The year of bad 'documentaries' (Ava and C.I.)," Isaiah's "2023 arrives, 2022 be gone," Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "THE PEW loses it," C.I.'s "2022: The Year of WTF," Kat's "2022 in music," Ruth's "Ruth's Report: Networks and Streaming," Martha and Shirley's "2022 in Books (Martha & Shirley)," Stan's "2022 in film (Ann and Stan)" and Ann's "2022 in film (Ann and Stan)" Trina's "Labor story of 2022," Mike's "Idiot of 2022," Marcia's "The Most Disgusting Person of 2022" and Elaine's "What album am I looking forward to most in 2023?."