On July 3rd, 1974, Rodney Dangerfield made an appearance on the Tonight Show and had fellow guest, Dom DeLuise, laughing the entire time. 2:05 “I live in a tough neighborhood. Just last week, a guy pulled a knife on me. I could see it wasn’t a real professional job… there was butter on it.” 2:30 “I tell ya, in my building there’s nothing but robberies. Everytime I close a window, I hit somebody’s hands.” 4:00 “I went out last week, I tried something new. I tried group sex. Now I have a new problem… I don’t know who to thank.”
If you don’t want to listen to the discussion please listen to the first few minutes as she lists the shootings that happened in just the last few days. Hugs
As we just completed the first weekend of June, 12 people have been killed and another 38 were injured due to mass shootings, compared to the long Memorial Day weekend that left nine dead and 60 injured. If that wasn’t depressing enough, almost 45% of Republican voters believe mass shootings are “inevitable” when living in our ‘free’ society, a stark contrast from 85% of Democrats and 73% of Independents who said mass shootings are preventable responding to the same poll.
“The first weekend of June had a greater number of mass shooting deaths in the United States than the previous three-day weekend, which ended with Memorial Day.
The tally for weekend violence through Sunday night was at least 12 killed and at least 38 injured in mass shootings, defined by the Gun Violence Archive as an incident in which “four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.”
“More than 4 in 10 Republicans think mass shootings are inevitable in a “free society,” according to a new poll by CBS News and YouGov.
The survey results came on the heels of a string of mass shootings across the country that have prompted Congress to once again consider legislation on gun control.
One of the questions in the poll asked respondents if they feel that mass shootings are “unfortunately something we have to accept as part of a free society” or “something we can prevent and stop if we really tried.”
In response, 44% of Republicans said mass shootings are inevitable “as part of a free society.” Meanwhile, 85% of Democrats and 73% of Independents said mass shootings are preventable “if we really tried.””
Florida Sheriff Bob Johnson encourages residents of Santa Rosa Country to shoot first, ask questions later. Johnson says doing so would save taxpayers money. David Shuster breaks it down on Rebel HQ.
A pro-Herschel Walker political action committee called 34N22, run by failed GOP operative Stephen Lawson (AKA Little Stevie Lawson), was caught engaging in possible felony crimes by handing out gas vouchers to voters in their efforts to unseat Raphael Warnock. Ben Meiselas reports.
Republicans can not only not follow the election laws, but they are clearly OK with violating any laws or regulation to
The far right accused Pizza Hut of ‘going woke’ and demanded the company be canceled after they selected a featuring a book about a drag performer in its kids literacy program in the US known as Book It. Texas Paul dissects The GOP’s homophobia and racism.
As I said in a recent post these hyper religious anti-LGBTQ+ should be careful complaining about men with beards reading and talking with children. I again post several pictures of their savior god who is in a dress, wearing a beard, surrounded by children. What is it these people think is happening in public with children and drag performers? It is only dress up. It is not a stip and have sex show. Plus when they do the drag queen story hour again everyone is in public and they are just men in costumes reading to kids. And why do these assholes think they get to tell everyone else what they can do and can not do when it comes to raising their own children. These are the same assholes who claim no one can make them vaccinate their kids, no one has the right to demand their kids wear masks at schools. Yet they feel entitled to tell you what event you can allow your child to attend. Entitled wannabe kings of the world or as I call them big asshole jerks. Hugs
From Texas state Rep. Bryan Slaton:
The events of this past weekend were horrifying and show a disturbing trend in which perverted adults are obsessed with sexualizing young children.
As a father of two young children, I would never take my children to a drag show and I know Speaker Dade Phelan and the rest of my Republican colleagues wouldn’t either.
Protecting our own children isn’t enough, and our responsibility as lawmakers extends to the sexualization that is happening across Texas.
I promised my voters that I would stand up for their values and fight to protect Texas kids.
I was re-elected on that promise and I intend to keep it by authoring legislation to defend kids from being subjected to drag shows and other inappropriate events.
I look forward to working with my colleagues to pass this important legislation.
Slaton, who is fond of making public appearances carrying an assault weapon and wearing a belt of ammunition, first appeared on JMG in March 2021 when he introduced a bill making abortion a death penalty crime for doctors and even women who undergo the procedure.
Earlier this year he introduced a bill requiring genital exams for trans athletes in public schools.
As I reported yesterday, extremists on Saturday mobbed and attempted to enter the Dallas gay bar hosting the event that has enraged the usual haters.
Drag shows are no place for a child.
I would never take my children to a drag show and I know Speaker Dade Phelan and my Republican colleagues wouldn’t either.
Reminds me of the line in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” from Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer’s character): “Isn’t it interesting how fascists always abuse the word ‘freedom?’”
Parents have the FINAL WORD on how they raise their propertymini-mes children!!!!
Unless it’s something the most holy and righteous straight-and-narrow Rethuglicans declare to be perverted and evil, then parents absolutely CANNOT be trusted!!!!
are you going to ban Milton Berle, Flip Wilson (Geraldine), Laugh-in, The Three Stooges, all sorts of 1930s-2000’s Broadway plays, college plays, school plays, and the like to “protect” kids from “drag queens” ?
Your wife is Asian ..guess who plays female roles in Japanese and Chines plays from long ago? Yep — men.
But sure, walk around with police-killing bullets and a weapon of war on your shoulders … and watch the innocents get slaughtered, doing nothing in the legislature, except make it easier to destroy our youth …
The founding fathers hated the idea of a political class ruling the country. For them that was too close to a king and royalty. They never wanted a permanent ruling class in the US instead they wanted a government for the people by THE PEOPLE. She has been in public elected office for 52 years and before her impairment was made public she said she was going to run again. WTF! She is 89 years old. Is there no younger people fit to lead the country, fit to hold those seats? Think of it. She started when she was 36 years old in 1969. Can anyone her age really grasp the differences in the country as it is today, the needs of the people in their 20, 30, and even 40s? Can she of the other nearly 90 year old people in congress relate to culture as the newer generations are living or do they still try to force the people to live in the hey day of their prime, the world they knew when they were 20, 30 or 40 years old? How can someone who was 40 in the 1970’s relate to the modern world of 2022? How can they understand the needs of society today, when the traditions they grew up with were so different? Hugs
In the middle of their deep dive into Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s decades in office and her legacy, New York Magazine drops this observation:
Feinstein, who turns 89 in June, is older than any other sitting member of Congress. Her declining cognitive health has been the subject of recent reporting in both her hometown San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. It seems clear that Feinstein is mentally compromised, even if she’s not all gone. “It’s definitely happening,” said one person who works in California politics. “And it’s definitely not happening all the time.”
Reached by phone two days after 19 children were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in late May, Feinstein spoke in halting tones, sometimes trailing off mid-sentence or offering a non sequitur before suddenly alighting upon the right string of words. She would forget a recently posed question, or the date of a certain piece of legislation, but recall with perfect lucidity events from San Francisco in the 1960s.
Dianne Feinstein fought for gun control, civil rights, and abortion access for half a century. Where did it all go wrong? @rtraister reports https://t.co/fFv1ccDmOh
The Arizona Senate candidate has a unique theory about why there’s a gun violence problem in the United States.
Roger Sollenberger
Political Reporter
Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network/Wikimedia Commons
Tech investor and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters acknowledges that the United States has a gun violence problem. But he also has a theory about why there’s a problem—it’s “Black people, frankly.”
Masters boiled the issue down in an April 11 interview on the Jeff Oravits Show podcast, telling the host that “we do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence.”
“It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” Masters clarified. “And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”
It’s unclear why Masters—who has pushed the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory narrative—felt compelled to single out Black people. Moments earlier in the interview, during a discussion about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Masters told Oravits that “most Americans just, you know, just want to stop obsessing about race all the time,” adding that “the left’s biggest tool in their toolkit is just to divide people on the basis of race, and that’s really messed up.”
Republicans frequently cite urban gang violence, most often in Chicago, in attempts to tap out of the gun control debate. While their redirections are often as misleading as they are cliche, those officials aren’t always as forthright as Masters about the racial undertones.
But Masters, whom the white nationalist website VDARE fêted last year as an “immigration patriot,” was quite clear about his vision of two Americas.
After pinning gun violence on gangs and Black people—and saying, falsely, that Democratic administrations “don’t want to do anything” about gang shootings—the Stanford-educated libertarian went on to complain to Oravits that gun control efforts target “law-abiding people like you and me.”
“When they ban ‘ghost guns’ and pistol braces, that’s all about disarming law-abiding people, like you and me, that’s what it’s about,” Masters said, referencing government efforts to crack down on the surge in privately made, untraceable firearms. “They care that we can’t have guns to defend ourselves.”
Masters—a Bitcoin evangelist who routinely hawks automated surveillance technology developed by his benefactor, billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel—claimed that “it’s pretty rare” for homemade firearms to show up in criminal activity. But his information might be outdated.
Ghost guns aren’t just built and owned by technocrats, to be appreciated as physical instantiations of political theory. They’re also on the rise among criminals, including in gang activity, according to officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, as well as fresh police data VICE published this week, which documents a 90 percent increase in seizures last year.
The day of the Oravits interview, President Joe Biden announced a rule change to address the ghost gun problem. In response, Masters tweeted a photo of his own “ghost” gun kit, claiming that he would be a “felon” under the new rule if he made “another one just like it today.”
That’s not accurate.The Biden administration has not banned those weapons, which don’t have serial numbers and can be 3D-printed at home. The new rule doesn’t make it illegal to build your own gun; it applies to people who sell gun kits. Those sellers are now required to become licensed firearms dealers, run background checks on buyers, and include serial numbers on their kits.
The rule also targets violence in urban areas—a sore point for Masters—where ghost guns are multiplying.
Last year, police seized more than 225 of the weapons in New York City, along with 300 seizures in Baltimore and 455 in Chicago, CBS News reported. And government data shows that law enforcement agencies reported recovering 20,000 suspected ghost guns in criminal investigations last year alone—nearly as many seized over the previous four years combined.
A Masters campaign spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.
Back in the interview, Masters—who has likened federal campaign disclosure laws to Kristallnacht—veered into conspiratorial territory.
Democrats “don’t like the Second Amendment,” he said, because “it frankly blocks a lot of their plans for us”—an unhinged, fact-free statement that liberal officials have cooked up a plot to physically force conservatives to comply with some unarticulated maleficent regime, but have been bayed by fears that a constitutionally endowed populace will shoot them if they try.
Masters also tossed out misleading red meat gripes about crime in West Coast cities Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Masters lived much of his adult life before relocating to Arizona ahead of his Senate bid.
Those cities, he told Oravits, have “legalized crime,” claiming that “you can’t get arrested if you smash someone’s window and take a purse or an iPhone.”
It’s not immediately clear what Masters was referring to, but the riff appears to be a nod at Prop 47, which California voters passed at the state (not city) level nearly eight years ago. The Prop 47 coalition included Democrats along with libertarians like Masters, who wanted to roll back felony punishment for lesser offenses, including property crimes like shoplifting.
Prop 47 didn’t “legalize crime,” but reclassified certain felonies as misdemeanors. But after the recent rise in property crimes such as “smash and grab” robberies, most Californians support tougher sentencing laws, including overhauling parts of Prop 47.
“They talk about crime but I find it crocodile tears,” Masters said, an apparent reference to Democratic outrage over an unending drumroll of domestic massacres. “Because if they were actually tough on crime they would get serious about gang violence.” (Masters himself did not put forward a solution to gang violence in the interview.)
Masters, 35, is a fairly new name in GOP politics, but he has benefited from powerful friends—including his mentor, Thiel, who threw $10 million into a super PAC backing his primary bid.
Thiel’s support went a long way to landing a recent endorsement from former President Donald Trump, who officially blessed Masters on Thursday. It wasn’t a surprise—Trump has a score to settle with Masters’ top opponent, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, who resisted Trump’s pressure to invalidate his state’s 2020 election results.
Masters is fiercely anti-tech while being fiercely pro-tech, backs a national abortion ban, claims Democrats want to “import a million people every year to replace Americans who were born here,” has said that the media and big tech “conspired to manipulate the 2020 election”—which he claims “Trump won”—and calls the gender pay gap a “left-wing narrative.”
(The “new right” crowd also counts another Trump-endorsed Thiel protege: Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance.)
Masters won Trump’s endorsement on Thursday, nine days after an 18-year-old used a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle to slaughter 19 elementary school students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.
“Blake will fight for our totally under-siege Second Amendment, and WIN!” Trump wrote in his announcement. An hour later, Biden called on the country to support an array of gun control measures in a primetime national address.
Rarely are Republicans so explicit about their bullshit counterarguments. But please read this whole report, because there’s more to this guy. What Masters says is false and deranged, frankly
— Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) June 6, 2022
Explosions shook the city of Kyiv on Sunday morning after Russia launched its first attack in the capital in over a month. CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay joins CBS News’ Ali Bauman with more on the attack.
Scottie's Playtime 
