This is what tRump and maga are, gang thugs enforcing their ideas of right and wrong with violence regardless of other people’s rights. This is what the party of tRump is, violence to any who they disagree with. This is brownshirt stuff from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. This is domestic terrorism, the use of violence and harming others to achieve a political goal / gain. This stuff was going away as unacceptable in the US, and now it is back thanks to tRump and his people. Hugs. Scottie
Blaze Pizza’s 96 California pizzerias are known for build-your-own pies rapidly fired in 800-degree ovens, along with Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James’ corporate investments. Last week, its Roseville location made headlines for an uglier reason.
A delivery driver walked into the Highland Reserve Marketplace restaurant about 10:15 p.m. Sept. 19, saw a Pride flag hung by employees inside and tore it down to the ground, according to the Roseville Police Department.
When a manager and employees confronted the man, he reportedly uttered a homophobic slur and left. He then returned with two other men, at least one of them wearing mixed martial arts gloves, and kicked off a brawl with two employees that multiple passersby caught on video.
Read the full article. Police are calling it a hate crime and the attackers remain at large. One of the employees was hospitalized due to his injuries.
I love Ethel’s videos and I have learned a lot about trans people from her. She often does videos with herself in them but also sometimes does them with the drawn figures. She has been very open with her transitioning journey, and I have followed her since she was a teen before she transitioned. Her videos are remarkable for the detail and receipts she brings to them. She does a lot of research, especially on trans women in sports issues. She documents everything for the viewers to check in the about section and encourages fact checking her.
In this video she sets up the fact that the anti-trans activist that falsely made claims about the WPATH files has a history of lying to try to push their issues. I love watching her videos and if you are interested in trans issues and ways to debunk what the trans haters say, she is worth looking at her back work. Her take down of the entire WPATH Cass report was wonderful and showed how totally false and misleading the report was. The Cass report has now been totally debunked now in part to Ethel’s work. Hugs. Scottie
Today’s video returns to the #WPATHFiles which alleged malpractice by medical institutions who support the scientific legitimacy of gender affirming care, exposing the Files’ fatal flaws and its publisher’s sordid history of forging evidence. Hi, welcome to Essence of Thought with me, Ethel Thurston, as your host.
He feels entitled to take anything he wants without paying for it. He also believes it is better to just due and ignore anyone else’s rights. He is the great cult leader. Hugs. Scottie
Walters has ordered daily bible lessons for Oklahoma’s public school students in all grades. Several dozen school districts are currently defying that edict.
Earlier this month, local outlets exposed Walters for spending state money to fund a national tour of far-right events to “promote himself on the national stage.”
Walters is widely expected to run for governor. Current governor and fellow Christian nationalist Kevin Stitt is term-limited.
Last month around two dozen GOP state lawmakers signed a letter calling for an impeachment probe into Walters for refusing to disclose his spending.
Walters has hired a raft of far-right figures, including Chaya Rachik and Dennis Prager, to help him “turn students to Jesus.” Raichik is reportedly helping overhaul public school libraries.
Imagine all the good that those millions of dollars could be used for. It could be used to pay Oklahoma’s hardworking teachers or provide additional supplies and resources for its struggling schools.
Instead, it’s being used to promote Walters’ Christian nationalist agenda. https://t.co/DE20Pw1846
Please remember the people who first led Israel in the beginning were also terrorist. Many in the Israeli government in the early decades of Israel’s existence were also labeled terrorist. One person’s terrorist is another person’s avowed wonderful member of government. It has been leaked that members of Israel’s government wants to annex another sovereign country’s land and make it Israel’s property. Just like they have in the West bank, and Gaza. In fact some have talked about trying to take part of Egypt. This is because religious fanatics are running the country now and they claim their god gave them the entire area so they simply have the right to take it. And no one can stop them as long as Biden stays in the mind set of the 1950 / 60s/ 70s, because Biden won’t let anyone else strike Israel back to show them their god did not give them permission to take others lands. Bibi has given the middle finger to every US president and he is desperate to get tRump to win by dragging the US into a war in the Middle East. That is his plan to help tRump and hurt Harris. And they bombed an entire area of occupied apartments in Beirut, which is another war crime they committed. Hugs. Scottie
A marketing director of a well-known Swiss brand, said, “When you look at all of them, they scream Chinese-made watch. None of them is worth the asking price. Those blue screws on the tourbillon cage are a dead giveaway that it was partly made in China. You won’t find blue screws on a tourbillon made in Switzerland. And you can pick up a Chinese tourbillon for $100.”
Trump's "Vastly Overpriced" $100,000 "Swiss Watch" Is Probably Made in China, Experts Say https://t.co/neyxxt5J0U
Milei has cut support for welfare programs, soup kitchens, and other efforts to aid the needy.
Milei’s biggest cheerleader is Elon Musk, who has vowed to bring similar policies as the leader of Trump’s supposed “Department Of Government Efficiency.”
Of note, the planned department’s acronym just happens to be the same as a cryptocurrency often promoted by Musk.
Earlier this year Musk posted the below porn-adjacent image in celebration of Milei.
Not only did Hawley vote against the project, the report below notes that in 2019 Trump defunded all such military projects to divert the money to his border wall.
“We can VERIFY: No, Hawley did not secure $100 million for Fort Leonard Wood's military housing.”
Lying about supporting military families? While even voting AGAINST supporting them? That amounts to nothing more than stolen valor.https://t.co/jWt78m2qd4
The party who has people arrested, charged, and found guilty of voter fraud is the Republican Party. Every accusation from them is a confession of their own actions. They are setting it up to challenge the voters will and overturn the vote in that state. Hugs. Scottie
Hancock said that he learned during the trial that Rittenhouse had allegedly used racial slurs in messages sent to his friends and appeared to be looking for an opportunity to use a weapon. “There was a history of things he was doing prior to Kenosha, specifically patrolling the street for months with guns and borrowing people’s security uniforms, doing whatever he could to try to get into some kind of a gunfight,” Hancock claimed.
‘Patrolling the streets for months’: Kyle Rittenhouse confidants reveal new details the jury never knew https://t.co/zDg2esDw0t
The party maybe have evolved into the kind of anti-migrant, anti-Islam populist force that has taken hold across much of Europe, but it began as a political refuge for former Nazis. Not only has the FPÖ not disavowed that past, it embraces it — at least in private — with the leading party figures regularly getting to trouble for paying quiet tribute to their Nazi forebears.
Abrasive and provocative, far-right leader Herbert Kickl has one of the lowest approval ratings among Austria's top politicians, yet he is the frontrunner in Sunday’s parliamentary election, which has at times felt like a referendum on him https://t.co/NAPLJKizYypic.twitter.com/IUoS0CaQoV
As I often remind the haters, almost all of the children in the foster care and adoption system are there due to abuse and abandonment by the heterosexual parents.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the federal government over its requirement that states provide LGBTQ+ affirming placement for foster care youth. https://t.co/Al87Q9y6L7
Former Sen. Kassebaum-Baker made one brief statement about the changing Republican and political climate when she retired; that’s pretty much what she said: that it was changing. She retired, as did Bob Dole, with the first wave of Tea Partiers (though a couple of years apart.) Since then, she’s been even more discreet, mostly concentrating on land and habitat conservation. This endorsement is a Big Deal. (I’ll copy it in here so you don’t have to take your computer to the carwash to get the stupid off.)
EXCLUSIVE:Three more Republicans are crossing the aisle to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House.
Former U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, R-Kan., former Kansas state senator and Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger and Deanell Reece Tacha, a retired federal judge, condemned the current state of the GOP in a statement shared with Fox News Digital Thursday.
“This election presents a stark choice that is not easy for any of us. The Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bob Dole, Frank Carlson, Jan Meyers, and generations of Kansas leaders does not exist within the current Republican Party,” the former officials wrote.
“But, it requires Republicans speaking out and putting country over party when those values are at stake.”
They added that the race between Harris and former President Trump presented a “stark choice,” but not an easy one.
“No candidate is perfect, and we do not pretend that we subscribe to all the policy positions taken either by the national parties or any individual candidates,” they wrote.
“However, we fervently believe that we must do our part to try to build a brighter future, which is why we will be voting for Kamala Harris and [Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz] in this election. We believe they most closely align with the aspirations of Kansans and reflect our rich history of working together ‘to the stars through difficulty.’”
All three have backed Democrats in recent elections, however.
Kassebaum, who now goes by Nancy Kassebaum Baker, served in the U.S. Senate from December 1978 through January 1997.
She was the first woman elected to represent Kansas in the chamber, and her career included a stint as chair of the Senate Labor Committee.
Tacha was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit by former President Reagan in 1985 and served as chief judge from 2001 until 2008.
Praeger served as the Kansas Insurance commissioner from 2003 to 2015.
Harris’ campaign has made a point of courting Republicans in a bid to widen her appeal and cast Trump as an extreme and polarizing choice.
A majority of Republicans, particularly those still in elected office, do support Trump.
The vice president has scored support from several notable GOP figures, however. Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Trump administration aides Stephanie Grisham and Olivia Troye have all publicly stated support for Harris.
Troye is one of several people who headlined a Republicans for Harris event Thursday alongside former representatives Barbara Comstock, R-Va., and Denver Riggleman, R-Va.
A new Marist College poll found Harris and Trump neck and neck in three critical states.
(Snip-skipping blah-blah race tied crap to the final graf, which is satisfying:)
The Trump campaign said of the Harris endorsement, “Nobody knows who these people are, and nobody cares.”
Over 10,000 books have been banned across the entire United States over the past school year. The trend has seen a particularly strong increase in states with a strong Republican presence, according to the free-speech nonprofit PEN America.
This is a major increase compared to the 2022-2023 year, which saw a total of 3,362 books banned across the country.
The books were accused of having “obscene” material. One of them was a children’s picture book about gay penguins.
Florida and Iowa are leading in the total number of bans, with over 8,000 recorded between the two states. This number is largely due to the increasingly strict laws on book bans.
The banned books include Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie; the famous work on anti-Black racism Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 by W.E.B. DuBois; Alex Haley’s book about the lived experience of slaves, Roots: The Saga of an American Family; and James Baldwin’s autobiography Go Tell It On the Mountain.
Iowa’s bans stem from Senate File 496, a law restricting LGBTQ+ books from grade seven and below along with total bans on books deemed to contain sexual content. Florida’s House Bill 1069, backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), resulted in a similar ban, albeit a much more strict one.
PEN America cites other laws from Utah, Tennessee, and South Carolina as contributing to these increase in banned books as well.
Individual school districts have also had a hand in banning many books. The Elkhorn Area School District in Wisconsin, for example, banned over 300 books over a several month period.
PEN America says that the types of books banned “includes books featuring romance, books about women’s sexual experiences, and books about rape or sexual abuse as well as continued attacks on books with LGBTQ+ characters or themes, or books about race or racism and featuring characters of color.”
The organization also emphasizes that these numbers are an undercount of the actual amount of banned books since many book bans go unreported. Additionally, the organization says schools have also implemented “soft” book bans, including policies that cause greater hesitancy to check out books from libraries, restrictions on who can check out restricted books out, book fair cancellations, and the removal of classroom collections.
Six major book publishers are currently suing the Floridian government after hundreds of their books were pulled from libraries, cutting severely into their profits and discriminating against their authors.
A Florida school district recently agreed to re-shelve 36 books to settle a lawsuit concerning multiple banned books, including And Tango Makes Three, an often banned children’s book about a gay penguin couple raising a chick.
Iowa’s book ban was recently brought back into law when a permanent injunction against the ban was overturned by an appeals court.
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Sep 23, 2024 Orion Rummler Originally published by The 19th
In 2020, the Supreme Court found that gay and transgender workers are protected from workplace discrimination in the landmark case Bostock v. Clayton County. Despite those federal protections, LGBTQ+ people across the country — especially transgender and nonbinary people — continue to face rampant discrimination at work and don’t feel safe being out, according to research from the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law.
In a 2023 study of 1,902 LGBTQ+ adults in the workforce, released in August, 17 percent said they had experienced discrimination or harassment on the job in the past year. Trans and nonbinary employees were more than twice as likely as cisgender queer employees to face discrimination and harassment: Twenty-two percent of trans and nonbinary people experienced discrimination in the past year, and 26 percent experienced harassment.
“You would hope things have gotten better,” said Brad Sears, founding executive director of the Williams Institute and coauthor of the report.
Sears believes the high rate of recent discrimination is an indication that change has been slow after Bostock, even after the Biden administration implemented additional nondiscrimination policies. Shortly after Biden was inaugurated in 2021, he issued an executive order based on Bostock that mandated the protection of gay and transgender Americans in the workplace, as well as in schools and doctor’s offices. And as of this spring, extra protections were put in place to guard against employers who consistently misgender employees or deny them access to sex-segregated spaces.
Still, the study found that many LGBTQ+ Americans are not out in the workplace to avoid facing discrimination and harassment. Nearly half of LGBTQ+ employees said that they are not open about their identity to their current supervisor, and one-fifth are not out to any of their coworkers. Staying in the closet actually did protect them: LGBTQ+ employees who were out to at least a few coworkers, or just their supervisor, were three times as likely to report discrimination as employees who were not out.
“A lot of people, even if they are out, they’re kind of downplaying their identities in the workplace,” Sears said. “Maybe they use a different voice or different mannerisms at work, or they don’t dress exactly how they would otherwise dress when they’re not at work, or they use a bathroom that they would prefer not to be using at work.”
To avoid discrimination, transgender and nonbinary people are significantly more likely to hide their identities than cisgender queer people. In a new breakout analysis of the Williams Institute’s survey, the experiences of nonbinary people are found to be especially fraught.
Nonbinary people in the study described being ostracized and subjected to violence, harassment or threatsat work due to their physical appearance either not being “feminine” enough or “masculine” enough. Their gender expression made them a target and was used as a justification for their treatment by their bosses, coworkers and customers. Frequently, nonbinary people said they were passed over for raises and promotions, called slurs, and forced to work alone.
The nonbinary people surveyed were largely young, urban, and racially and ethnically diverse. To the survey authors, such data is a call for employers to take action — especially If they want to retain young employees.
About 87 percent of nonbinary adults in the workforce are under 35 years old, compared with 71 percent of transgender adults and 51 percent of cisgender queer adults, according to the study. That research aligns with other findings from KFF that Americans under 35 are more likely to identify as nonbinary than older Americans, and research from the Pew Research Center that found adults under 30 are more likely than older adults to be out as trans or nonbinary.
About 3 in 5 nonbinary people have experienced discrimination or harassment at work at some point in their lives, like being fired, not hired, not promoted, or verbally, sexually or physically harassed.
About 1 in 5 nonbinary people reported physical harassment at work because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, with some survey respondents reporting being “assaulted,” “attacked” and “strangled.”
For some, unfair treatment looked like having their hours reduced, being isolated from other employees or customers, or being excluded from company events or socializing.
“Oftentimes, I was passed up for a promotion because I wasn’t ‘manly’ enough, and they doubted my ability to lead a team,” a Latinx nonbinary person from California said in the survey. A Latinx nonbinary participant from Colorado shared: “A co-worker strangled me at a counter and said he was trying to ‘give a girl a massage.’” In Connecticut, a Black nonbinary person said they heard their manager talking “disparagingly” about them to the rest of their bosses because of their gender expression.
One in 4 nonbinary employees said they are currently experiencing adverse treatment at their job because of their LGBTQ+ identity. For many nonbinary people, the worst experiences of discrimination and harassment that they face at work are linked to their multiple marginalized identities. In particular, they were targeted for their disability or being bisexual in addition to being nonbinary.
This research shows that company-level policies, as well as state and federal nondiscrimination regulations, need to be specific so that they protect nonbinary employees, Sears said.
The Williams Institute plans to release more breakout analyses from its survey, including reports on the experiences of transgender, Black, Latinx and Asian-American employees. Breaking down the unique experiences of each demographic is key to understanding and addressing the issues that they’re facing at work, Sears said — for example, nonbinary people face rigid and gendered expectations at work, while bisexual women face high rates of sexual harassment.
“LGBTQ+ people are not monolithic. They’re different, they have intersecting identities … and those are leading to differences that are important in the workplace,” he said.
These companies are bankrolling a multi-million dollar effort to elect Mark Robinson governor of North Carolina by Judd Legum
Maybe we here don’t patronize any of these entities anyway, but it’sworth tossing the info out whenever a discussion comes up, if it’s peaceful enough to do so. The entire piece is not much longer than this, but I wanted to put the details here rather than stuff we’ve seen already, in case everyone else is as busy as I am. Not complaining. Anyway, here’s the tea:
None of this prevented the Republican Governors Association (RGA) from throwing its support behind Robinson. In a post on X on March 5, the day Robinson won the Republican nomination, RGA chairman Governor Bill Lee (R-TN) congratulated Robinson and said the organization “look[s] forward to supporting him in the general election.”
The RGA has followed through. Data from AdImpact, a company that monitors political ad spending, obtained by Popular Information, reveals that the RGA, an affiliated PAC, and an affiliated non-profit have spent more than $17.3 million since June 11, 2024 on ads in support of Robinson. The money has financed over 20,000 ads across North Carolina supporting Robinson’s candidacy. The actual expenditure by the RGA is far higher, as the $17.3 million does not include the cost of producing the ads, polling, or any other activities taken on behalf of Robinson. (snip)
During this election cycle, for example, DoorDash has donated $625,000 to the RGA. This money has been used to support Robinson and other Republican gubernatorial candidates. DoorDash’s support of Robinson, who has repeatedly maligned LGBTQ people with crude rhetoric, through the RGA, is not consistent with the company’s carefully crafted public image.
The company regularly features LGBTQ-owned restaurants that deliver using DoorDash. On June 1, 2024, the company posted a blog post celebrating Pride Month. DoorDash said that it would spend the month “celebrating the diversity and vibrancy within the LGBTQ+ community by emphasizing how race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other aspects intersect to form unique individual identities.” The blog post claimed that DoorDash, “will continue to prioritize investing in and advancing opportunities for historically underrepresented people.”
On June 4, 2024, the RGA received a $250,000 contribution from DoorDash. These funds, along with other large corporate contributions, helped finance the RGA’s ad blitz in support of Robinson that started later in June. (snip)
Top corporate contributors to the RGA this cycle include Google ($585,000), Walmart ($570,000), CVS ($550,000), Microsoft ($550,000), Travelers Insurance ($460,000), Amazon ($450,000), Deloitte ($400,000), Charter Communications ($385,000), Oracle ($325,000), Pfizer ($300,000), Coca-Cola ($250,000), The Motion Picture Association ($250,000), and Wells Fargo ($250,000).
Popular Information contacted each of these companies and asked if they had any concerns that their contributions to the RGA were being used to support a candidate like Robinson.
Wells Fargo declined to comment. The other companies did not respond. (snip)
Photo: Shutterstock
