This is a clip from Boston Legal. Obviously I do not own any of the rights to Boston Legal, I simply own the DVD set to season 3. However, I believe it is both a tribute to the show and a good sales pitch towards purchasing a copy of this show to introduce herein a clip that demolishes the absurd religious views on homosexuality. In this clip, Alan Shore presents his case as to why the man he represents has been scammed out of $40k by a religious organization that intended to “cure” his SSAD (“same sex attraction disorder”, aka homosexuality). Brilliant and appropriate for this moment in time.
Hey everyone. I know I am late to the party as they say on a lot of posts, but as I work my way through the backlog of fellow posters whose content I love, Jill again made a post I want to share. Even if everyone already seen it, the cartoons are so spot on, Jill’s post deserves another viewing. Hugs
Thank you, Ali, for the link, just sorry it took me so long to post it. Hugs
I am waiting for the screaming comments about kids getting life changing surgeries, about kids / minors having body parts chopped off when they are too young to understand it. So before you get stupid and write that comment, read the entire story. Then think about the fact that kids as young as 13 and 14 years old get charged as adults in the US. Kids / minors as young as 12 get married in many states in the US, a very life changing even they are too young to understand. Kids / minors are being forced to carry pregnancies to term no matter how young (one was only ten), giving birth to children while they are children if they survive the ordeal which is a life-changing event / surgery that they are way too young to begin to understand or consent to. Plus breast surgery is common for young females in the US with girls 16 or younger getting reductions or enlargements as gifts from parents, and a popular surgery for minors is rhinoplasty. Yes kids / minors getting nose trims. The point is that many surgeries happen for kids, especially wealthy and or white kids. Look up the stats before you start screaming about kids being mutilated. Even more important is the saving of lives that transitioning does for trans kids, those studies are real, well documented, and are available for the haters to see anytime they could put their hate aside long enough to read them. Hugs
Top surgery, otherwise known as chest feminization or chest masculinization, is a gender-affirming procedure that changes the looks of a trans person’s chest. For female-to-male top surgery, breast tissue is removed to give a more masculine appearance for transgender males and non-binary people who are assigned female at birth.
This procedure, along with all forms of gender-affirming care, is surrounded by stigma and misinformation, especially when it comes to minors. Many parents fear that a teen could make a severe, irreversible decision regarding their gender presentation, given that adolescence is a time when the whole subject of identity is in flux.
It’s partially fears like this that have resulted in gender-affirming care receiving a wave of backlash in America, even being labeled as a form of child abuse.
However, a mom by the name of Janna, who recently helped her 17-year-old son receive top surgery, sees it as a form of love.
“Why would I ever allow my 17-year-old to have top surgery? Why would I do that? That’s insane. That’s crazy. It’s child abuse,” says Janna in a clip posted to TikTok.
Her reasoning is really quite simple—and something that almost every parent can relate to in one way or another.
“You look at the really, really happy kid who walked out of the doctor’s office today, feeling really great about himself for the first time in I don’t even know how long.”
Janna then put the spotlight on her son Cody and asked what it felt like when he saw his chest for the first time.
Getting instantly teary, Cody replied, “Normal…It finally feels right for the first time.”
Janna’s video is captioned “Cody’s heart is so full right now.”
Janna, who regularly advocates for trans rights, has previously explained in another TikTok that Cody didn’t undergo any surgery until just before his 18th birthday, and that was only after “a lot of meetings” with doctors, therapists and both of his parents since coming out at the age of 15.
And prior to his procedure, Janna encouraged Cody to explore through a “social transition,” rather than a medical one. This basically means experimenting with other forms of gender presentation—changing their name, pronouns, wardrobe, etc.—that feel more fitting to their authentic identity before undergoing any surgeries.
Bottom line: “We are not just sending these kids to surgeons to have body parts removed. That doesn’t happen,” Janna stated.
When parents support their kids throughout their journey, “one of two things is going to happen,” she added. “They’re going to come out as trans when they’re old enough to really make that decision, or they’re going to say, ‘Yeah, I’m not really a boy.'”
“Either way,” she continued, “their relationship with you will not be tarnished because they know that my mom loved me no matter what my decisions were.”
Like every other turbulent and confusing chapter of teenage-hood, the waters are so much easier to navigate (for both the parent and the child) when there is compassion. Sometimes allowing kids to be who they really are is the best gift a parent can provide.
This is long, and maybe too long for most people. It took me three days to watch it all. But it is even handed, it is informative, it is well documented, and it is truly how I and so many feel. I loved TYT, but about the time Cenk decided to run for office and gave a lot of control over the company / show to Anna, I noticed a shift / change in both hosts and the company direction. Cenk became very bitter and anti-democratic party, while Anna became overly more assertive on every show. When Cenk came back so bitter from being what he felt was unfairly treated by the democrats but others felt was him trying to claim a position without doing the work others had done before him Anna started talking over him, interrupting him, not letting him finish his sentences. But at the same time if he tried to interrupt her she got very vocal about it and wouldn’t tolerate it. She was now in charge and she wanted the world to know it. It showed how she felt about her position, she had the authority and say, so don’t disagree with her. That was very off-putting for me a long time viewer and supporter of the show. But then Cenk’s constant vitriol against the Democratic Party started to interfere with his reporting on Biden. Right from the start he wanted Biden to do the impossible and when he did not Cenk couldn’t even give him credit for what he did get accomplish. Cenk being a bombastic fighter spent two years demanding Joe Biden attack and call out Joe Manchin and pushed for the most virulent attacks on him. Which would have lost the democrats the control of the Senate and stopped any left leaning judge appointments. Then Cenk got more bitter towards Biden and other progressive members of congress who did not throw the disruptive bombs he wanted to destroy the party, so he openly attacked the very groups he started along with attacking all progressives. What crossed the line for me what his attacks on Biden and openly trying to promote primary challengers to him talking up fringe candidates, knowing historically any time a sitting president was primaried they lost, giving the other party the win. He did not care, his bitter anger was more important to him. He kept up his now constant attempts to tear down Biden to the point he is doing the work of a republican challenger for president. I wrote that when I canceled my long time membership, that Cenk was doing the work of the Republican Party in tearing down and maligning Biden. This hard right turn of Anna’s and Cenk’s weirdly not even willing to listen to any criticism of her was the last straw for me. He is not even really addressing the issue that Anna made as the start of this problem, and keeps misrepresenting it. If Anna wants to be called woman that is great, if trans women demand to be called women that is great and everyone would do as they ask. But there are transmen with parts that medical people need to address and that are on medical forms / question forms. It was pointed out so often that no one in conversation referred to Anna as a “birthing person” but she still took offense to the term even existing. She was demanding a medical term to be inclusive not exist because she felt it diminished her as a female. Total right wing maga fundamentalist thinking. This is entirely a case of two people drinking their own Kool-Aid on their own importance and getting called out for it. Their egos have gotten in the way of the work they were doing. I can no longer support them as they are, and I hope people will watch this well researched and documented video. Hugs
Cenk Uyger, Ana Kasparian, and The Young Turks have had a history of scandals and controversies throughout the existence of the network. I want to talk about that history, as well as the events leading up to their recent meltdowns on the podcast circuit and Twitter.
Atlanta-area prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia are in possession of text messages and emails directly connecting members of Donald Trump’s legal team to the early January 2021 voting system breach in Coffee County, sources tell CNN.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is expected to seek charges against more than a dozen individuals when her team presents its case before a grand jury next week. Several individuals involved in the voting systems breach in Coffee County are among those who may face charges in the sprawling criminal probe.
Investigators in the Georgia criminal probe have long suspected the breach was not an organic effort sprung from sympathetic Trump supporters in rural and heavily Republican Coffee County – a county Trump won by nearly 70% of the vote. They have gathered evidence indicating it was a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software, according to people familiar with the situation.
Trump allies attempted to access voting systems after the 2020 election as part of the broader push to produce evidence that could back up the former president’s baseless claims of widespread fraud.
While Trump’s January 2021 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and effort to put forward fake slates of electors have long been considered key pillars of Willis’ criminal probe, the voting system breach in Coffee County quietly emerged as an area of focus for investigators roughly one year ago. Since then, new evidence has slowly been uncovered about the role of Trump’s attorneys, the operatives they hired and how the breach, as well as others like it in other key states, factored into broader plans for overturning the election.
Together, the text messages and other court documents show how Trump lawyers and a group of hired operatives sought to access Coffee County’s voting systems in the days before January 6, 2021, as the former president’s allies continued a desperate hunt for any evidence of widespread fraud they could use to delay certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
Last year, a former Trump official testified under oath to the House January 6 select committee that plans to access voting systems in Georgia were discussed in meetings at the White House, including during an Oval Office meeting on December 18, 2020, that included Trump.
Six days before pro-Trump operatives gained unauthorized access to voting systems, the local elections official who allegedly helped facilitate the breach sent a “written invitation” to attorneys working for Trump, according to text messages obtained by CNN.
But if they can prosecute Donald Trump for taking numerous direct actions to try stay in office after losing an election, they can prosecute anyone for taking numerous direct actions to try stay in office after losing an election. And this would be very dangerous because [picks up phone that is not ringing or vibrating] whoops gotta take this bye!
WATCH: “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”🤔😳
Desantis/FLORIDA’s Ed Dept approved Prager U indoctrination videos to be taught (Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens as narrators) which teach kids slavery was better than the alternative: https://t.co/cJWcVLiiUWpic.twitter.com/Hng5fsg8r8
Florida’s latest curriculum—featuring cartoon Christopher Columbus explaining, “being taken as a slave is better than being killed!” and telling time-traveling kids that slavery was “no big deal.”
This is the kind of propaganda DeSantis and his friends at PragerU are teaching… pic.twitter.com/wPY8USFzhQ
Weird. Why are these white supremacist fascists upset about being identified as white supremacist fascists. No white fascist pride? Patriot Front members sue activist who infiltrated, identified them. Kudos to the activist who infiltrated them! https://t.co/fZq3PxFkpv
Ali sent us the link and as she mentions the state is trying to have it both ways, the fetus is a person from conception for forcing the pregnant person to carry even dead or dying fetuses to term, pay the costs for all the medical care along with funeral / burial costs as added punishment. But when it comes to hardship for the state, costing the state money, or putting requirements on republicans they claim that personhood from conception is stupid and not legally recognized. Hugs
DALLAS (AP) — The state of Texas is questioning the legal rights of an “unborn child” in arguing against a lawsuit brought by a prison guard who says she had a stillborn baby because prison officials refused to let her leave work for more than two hours after she began feeling intense pains similar to contractions.
The argument from the Texas attorney general’s office appears to be in tension with positions it has previously taken in defending abortion restrictions, contending all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court that “unborn children” should be recognized as people with legal rights.
It also contrasts with statements by Texas’ Republican leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who has touted the state’s abortion ban as protecting “every unborn child with a heartbeat.”
The state attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to questions about its argument in a court filing that an “unborn child” may not have rights under the U.S. Constitution. In March, lawyers for the state argued that the guard’s suit “conflates” how a fetus is treated under state law and the Constitution.
“Just because several statutes define an individual to include an unborn child does not mean that the Fourteenth Amendment does the same,” they wrote in legal filing that noted that the guard lost her baby before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion established under its landmark Roe v. Wade decision.
That claim came in response to a federal lawsuit brought last year by Salia Issa, who alleges that hospital staff told her they could have saved her baby had she arrived sooner. Issa was seven months’ pregnant in 2021, when she reported for work at a state prison in the West Texas city of Abilene and began having a pregnancy emergency.
Her attorney, Ross Brennan, did not immediately offer any comment. He wrote in a court filing that the state’s argument is “nothing more than an attempt to say — without explicitly saying — that an unborn child at seven months gestation is not a person.”
While working at the prison, Issa began feeling pains “similar to a contraction” but when she asked to be relived from her post to go to the hospital her supervisors refused and accused her of lying, according to the complaint she filed along with her husband. It says the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s policy states that a corrections officer can be fired for leaving their post before being relived by another guard.
Issa was eventually relieved and drove herself to the hospital, where she underwent emergency surgery, the suit says.
Issa, whose suit was first reported by The Texas Tribune, is seeking monetary damages to cover her medical bills, pain and suffering, and other things, including the funeral expenses of the unborn child. The state attorney general’s office and prison system have asked a judge to dismiss the case.
Laura Hermer, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, described Texas’ legal posture as “seeking to have their cake and eat it too.”
“This would not be the first time that the state has sought to claim to support the right to life of all fetuses, yet to act quite differently when it comes to protecting the health and safety of such fetuses other than in the very narrow area of prohibiting abortions,” Hermer said.
Last week, U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower recommended that the case be allowed to proceed, in part, without addressing the arguments over the rights of the fetus.
Could this be called leaving the scene of a crime? Hit and run? Remember his campaign is using state employees with no reimbursement, meaning the taxpayer is paying for his travel and costs. Also the new laws in Florida prevent the news or the public from knowing DeathSantis travel or who is paying for it. Hugs
“If this ain’t a full-blown (expletive) disaster,” a Chattanooga police officer can be heard saying as he surveyed the wrecked vehicles in DeSantis’s motorcade. The video, which was provided to News 6 by the Chattanooga Police Department through a public record request, shows three of the four wrecked SUVs.
The vehicle that was carrying DeSantis at the time of the crash, a white GMC Yukon, had been driven away from the crash site before the first Chattanooga police officer with a body-worn video camera arrived at the scene about 24 minutes after the collision, records show.
“(DeSantis) already left the scene. They got him out of here as soon as it happened,” the police officer said to an unidentified person over the phone. “At least we didn’t kill anybody,” a Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent escorting the governor said, according to a conversation captured on police video.
I will stick with DeathSentence, because of what he did to the people in the State of Florida with Covid, when he HID the Death Tallies and became an Anti-vaxxer…. including passing LAWS in the State, so people did not have to get vaccinated to keep their jobs!
“If this ain’t a full-blown (expletive) disaster,” the officer said. It was unclear if she was referring to the wrecked vehicles or to the DeSantis campaign in general.
Two possible exceptions might be if someone was injured and they were taking them to the nearest hospital or the Tennessee highway police who were there authorized them to leave (the THP isn’t saying according to the article).
I will however note that if this was a presidential motorcade or foreign head of state/government or someone under Secret Service protection, they would likely have hightailed it out of there in case this was step one of an ambush. They would contact the local police and make arrangements for necessary interviews.
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – A dog that ran onto a Tennessee interstate is believed to be responsible for triggering a chain-reaction vehicle crash that damaged four SUVs being used to carry Governor Ron DeSantis to a presidential campaign event last week, according to police video obtained by News 6.
Federal authorities sent a subpoena to the Jefferson County School District in June.
Then-Florida Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran, left, motions back to Gov. Ron DeSantis at a news conference at St. Petersburg Collegiate High School on March 15, 2022, in St. Petersburg. [ DIRK SHADD | Times ]
TALLAHASSEE — A federal grand jury is investigating allegations of bid-rigging involving Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Department of Education, charter school operators and the control of a small North Florida school district.
Federal authorities issued a subpoena to the Jefferson County School District in June seeking communications between district officials, charter school lobbyists and former top officials in DeSantis’ education department.
It also seeks records relating to the department’s attempt to steer a multimillion-dollar contract to a politically connected company with ties to DeSantis’ former education commissioner, Richard Corcoran. The contract would have been funded by federal coronavirus relief dollars.
The subpoena, obtained by the Times/Herald in a public records request, was issued by a federal prosecutor in Gainesville. The subpoena requests the records be sent to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General in Pembroke Pines.
A spokesperson for the federaleducation department’s Office of Inspector General said the office does not confirm or deny investigative activity.
The federal inquiry comes a year and a half after the Times/Herald reported on the bid-rigging allegations involving Jefferson County’s school district, which became the first, and only, district to be privatized by the state.
Control of the small three-school district near Tallahassee was turned over to private charter school operator Somerset Academy Inc. in 2017. The five-year contract was scheduled to end in 2022, when the school board would resume control.
But under Corcoran’s leadership, the Department of Education decided in 2021 it would hire consultants for up to three years to help the district’s transition, and it would use $4 million in federal coronavirus relief dollars assigned to the district to pay for it.
School district officials were against the plan, arguing that its annual budget was only $8.5 million, so it couldn’t afford to spend $4 million on consultants. When thestate Department of Education solicited offers to help the district, bidding was open for only a week. Only one qualified company responded: MGT Consulting, led by Trey Traviesa, a former GOP state representative from Tampa with ties to Corcoran.
Procurements are supposed to be free of favoritism. But the Times/Herald found that on Nov. 1, 2021, a week before the procurement was announced, top education officials were already meeting with Traviesa, top charter school lobbyists and Jefferson County officials about the procurement.
MGT was ultimately never hired. The Department of Education restarted the bidding after two senior department officials — former K-12 chancellor Jacob Oliva and former Vice Chancellor for Strategic Development Melissa Ramsey — and a member of the State Board of Education created their own company and filed a competing bid. Ultimately, the plan to spend the money on consultants was dropped.
Oliva is now Arkansas’ Department of Education secretary.
The Florida Department of Education’s inspector general investigated Ramsey and Oliva’s bidfor potential conflicts of interest but never addressed any apparent irregularities with MGT’s bid.
The federalsubpoena, dated June 12, does not mention Corcoran. But it names Oliva, Ramsey and Suzanne Pridgeon, the state Department of Education’s deputy commissioner for finance and operations.
The subpoena also requests text messages, emails and other communications between Traviesa, MGT Consulting, Jefferson County schoolssuperintendent Eydie Tricquet, representatives of Somerset Academy Inc. and Ralph Arza, a prominent charter school lobbyist and longtime Corcoran ally. At the time that Somerset was operating the district’s schools, Arza had four relatives working for the company in Jefferson County.
The subpoena seeks records relating to the procurement, along with records of the Nov. 1 meeting and other meetings in 2021 between Arza, school district officials and Department of Education officials.
The Florida Department of Education and DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to emails sent Friday afternoon seeking comment. After the Times/Herald reported the allegations last year, the governor’s office said Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel would review how the Department of Education and its inspector general handled the bid for the multimillion-dollar contract. The state has never produced the results.
Corcoran declined to comment. He is now serving as interim president of New College of Florida, a public liberal arts school in Sarasota County that DeSantis and political appointees are trying to turn into a beacon of conservatism.
