As a reminder, Trump has publicly floated Loomer to be his next White House press secretary and he has reposted hundreds of her tweets on Truth Social.
Molson Coors joins Ford, Harley Davidson, Lowes, Tractor Supply, John Deere, and the maker of Jack Daniel’s in retreating from diversity and pro-LGBTQ programs.
Coors beer, once the subject of a nationwide boycott by gay bars over its founder’s anti-LGBTQ stance, has been prominent at Pride events in recent years. Last year, for example, Coors Light was the main sponsor of Denver Pride despite attacks by the cult.
In 2015, when the company was called MillerCoors, its chairman and then-US Senate candidate Pete Coors, dropped out of a speaking gig at the convention of Legatus, the ex-gay and pro-ex-gay torture Catholic group, after widespread criticism.
The company’s current brands include Coors, Coors Light, Blue Moon, Icehouse, Miller, Miller Light, Keystone, Molson, and dozens of others.
Maybe others here enjoyed Sergio Mendes’s talent, too.
Sérgio Mendes, Brazilian Bossa Nova Musician, Dies of Long Covid at 83
The two time Grammy winner died on Thursday, Sept. 5, in a Los Angeles hospital
By Charna Flam Published on September 6, 2024 06:40 PM EDT
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Sérgio Mendes in Beverly Hills in May 2018. Photo: Chrissy Hampton/Getty
Sérgio Mendes, the Brazilian-born musician who brought bossa nova music to a global audience in the 1960s, died on Thursday, Sept. 5, in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 83.
The renowned musician’s family announced his death in a statement on his social media channels. His family said that his death was caused by effects of long Covid.
“His wife and musical partner for the past 54 years, Gracinha Leporace Mendes, was by his side, as were his loving children,” the statement read. “Mendes last performed in November 2023 to sold out and wildly enthusiastic houses in Paris, London and Barcelona.”
Throughout his six-decade career, Mendes recorded more than 35 albums, but he is best known for popularizing Brazilian music on a global stage beginning in the 1960s, starting with his composition of “Mas Que Nada.”
“It was completely different from anything, and definitely completely different from rock ’n’ roll,” the Latin music scholar Leila Cobo said in the 2020 HBO documentary Sergio Mendes in the Key of Joy. “But that speaks to how certain Sérgio was of that sound. He didn’t try to imitate what was going on.” (snip-MORE)
Barbara Gittings was a lover of books. She realized, from a young age, that she also loved girls. So when, in 1949, she left Wilmington, Delaware to attend Northwestern University, she did what any bookish young lesbian would do: research homosexuality in the school’s library. What Gittings found was not comforting. The vast majority of sources were written by medical professionals and described homosexuality as an illness or a perversion. She became so consumed with spending time in various Chicago libraries that she neglected her coursework and flunked out of school. But as a result of the discouraging information she found, an activist was born. With passion, determination, and what she would come to refer to as “gay gumption,” Gittings would spend the rest of her life working, in various ways, to correct those lies she found in the pages of books and scientific journals on the library shelves.
Gittings moved to Philadelphia in 1950 and supported herself with part-time clerical work. She continued to read everything she could find on homosexuality and, as part of her search, discovered Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach, originally published in 1951. Gittings was particularly impressed with Cory’s arguments that gays and lesbians constituted a large unrecognized minority who deserved civil rights and his attempts to cultivate empathy in his readers by outlining the difficulties faced by American homosexuals. She wrote to Cory’s publisher and discovered he lived in New York City. The two met on several occasions, and Cory informed Gittings of a newly-formed gay organization in Los Angeles: the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950 by Harry Hay.
In the summer of 1956, when she was on vacation from her office job, Gittings boarded a plane to Los Angeles and visited the office of ONE, Inc., a homophile organization who had amicably split from the Mattachine Society in 1952. The members of ONE, Inc. informed her of the existence of a San Francisco-based organization for lesbians, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), founded in 1955 by lesbian partners Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon.
Gittings once again boarded a plane, this time bound for San Francisco. The DOB were, fatefully, having a meeting that very evening in a member’s apartment. The meeting was the first time in her life Gittings would interact with a group of lesbians outside of a bar setting. Two years later, in 1958, Gittings officially joined the DOB and was tapped by Martin and Lyon to start an East Coast chapter of the organization based in New York City. With her co-founder, Marion Glass, Gittings built the chapter into the largest in the country.
In 1963, Gittings, whose enthusiasm and knowledge of literature left an impression on Martin and Lyon, was tapped to be the editor of The Ladder, the DOB’s national magazine for gay women. Gittings transformed The Ladder from what was essentially a newsletter to a national magazine respected within gay circles. With the help of her partner, Kay “Tobin” Lahusen, whom she met in 1961 at a DOB picnic in Rhode Island, Gittings replaced the amateurish illustrations that typically adorned the cover of The Ladder with photographs taken by Lahusen of actual lesbians who appeared confident and happy.
Gittings began to take The Ladder in an increasingly militant direction, reporting on protests, questioning the merits of various activist strategies such as picketing, and engaging in debates with so-called “experts,” arguing that homosexuality was a social and cultural problem, not a psychological problem. The activist bent of The Ladder under Gittings’ editorship alarmed the West Coast leadership of the DOB. When Gittings, amidst her many activities on behalf of gay rights, was late with the August 1966 issue, Martin and Lyon used her tardiness as an excuse to oust her as editor.
Gittings would also find a kindred spirit in Frank Kameny, who she credited as the first person to articulate a fully coherent philosophy of gay rights. She and Lahusen partnered with Mattachine Washington, of which Kameny was a co-founder, working alongside other lesbians and gay men to directly challenge the federal government. Gittings participated in the first picket of the White House for homosexual rights on April 17th of 1965.
Gittings worked with Kameny and other activists to lobby the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality as a diagnostic category from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). At the APA’s 1972 conference, held in Dallas, Texas, Gittings, Kameny, and Lahusen created a display entitled “Gay, Proud, and Healthy: The Homosexual Community Speaks.” The exhibit, which featured photographs of gay couples taken by Lahusen, was adorned with the word “LOVE” in bold letters and portrayed gay people as healthy and happy, not as patients who were tormented and in need of a cure. In December of 1973, the APA board of trustees voted to pass a resolution to remove homosexuality from the DSM, effectively declassifying it as a mental illness.
Gittings was a lifelong bibliophile, and though she recognized the importance of taking on the federal government and institutions such as the APA, she never lost sight of the “lies in the libraries” she discovered as a college freshman and the importance of gay representation. In 1970, she joined the American Library Association’s (ALA) newly-formed Task Force on Gay Liberation (TFGL). The TFGL, whose mission was to provide support for gay librarians within the profession and increase gay representation in libraries, was glad to have a veteran activist like Gittings join their ranks.
With the help of Israel Fishman, the first coordinator of the TFGL, Gittings organized a gay kissing booth — titled “Hug-a-Homosexual: Free Kisses” — for the 1971 ALA conference in Dallas, Texas. While the group could have created a nice display featuring gay books, periodicals, and their bibliography, they instead decided to make their presence known by showing gay love live. The publicity was better than Gittings and the TFGL could have imagined, and continued to spark discussions within the ALA over the next year.
In 1999, in honor of her contributions to create more visibility for gays and lesbians in libraries and in the profession, Gittings was awarded a lifetime membership at the annual ALA conference, held that year in New Orleans, Louisiana. The ALA also named an award after Gittings as part of their Stonewall Book Awards, sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT), the contemporary iteration of the TFGL. The Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award is given annually for works of fiction that exhibit “exceptional merit relating to the LGBT experience.”
Barbara Gittings died on February 18th, 2007 at the age of 74 after a long battle with breast cancer. In a 1999 interview with American Libraries magazine, she summarized her career as a gay activist with the wit and wisdom she was known for:
“As a teenager, I had to struggle alone to learn about myself and what it meant to be gay. Now for 48 years I’ve had the satisfaction of working with other gay people all across the country to get the bigots off our backs, to oil the closet door hinges, to change prejudiced hearts and minds, and to show that gay love is good for us and for the rest of the world too. It’s hard work — but it’s vital, and it’s gratifying, and it’s often fun!”
Since 2016, I’ve felt sort of hyperaware about the potentiality of Russian disinfo because obviously, WikiLeaks and the IRA. Per the Senate Intelligence Committee, in multiple volumes, this was anything but a hoax. The claim Trump didn’t welcome it and appreciate it is more than answered by his campaign’s silence about it and even attempted cover-up. Money was funneled through Facebook and Twitter ads and RW-pressure groups like NRA. I joke that we are still living in 2016 because we are still finding out how that election was, well, weird.
I deleted a post about how weird it was that Benny Johnson was a dupe to launder Russian talking points in the Tenet exploit because I realized that his basic dopiness and right-wing credulity is a whole fucking bigger mood than I was handling at the moment. We get that RW dopey incendiaries are out here–and they are pretty well-funded domestically as it is. Like, you pick a random concern-trolling “Liberty” “Freedom” “Heritage” or “Family”-labelled group from the last 100 years, and it was probably founded by some freaky Christian billionaire bigot family like the DeVos, Wilkes, Prince, Mellon, Coors, Koch, Busch, etc. The family-tree of theocratic and Bircher-light think tankitude has been incestuous and generously endowed since forever.
But where there is money and batshit, you have a real problem–people who love the hell out of money and don’t care what degree of batshit they spew. If you wanted useful idiots for foreign actors, this is one way you could open up a path for useful idiots to wrongfully mobilize people by playing on their fears and so on. Propaganda is cheap and effective. Even when we try to sanction the fuck out of the players to try and make it prohibitively costly to shit in the US litterbox–someone will try it.
Part of the reason why is we have a great big permission-structure to lie on the GOP side of things. We talk about it, but I don’t think we talk about it as much as we need to. The media is in part at fault, but also, money has generated a whole right-wing puke funnel, just feeding viewers like baby birds. And the results of the propaganda: fear and anger–short circuit logical critical thinking pathways. Well-fed ducklings become sitting ducks.
The internet influencer thing though, is even more perverse. There’s no reason to believe these people are anything but cons. I’ve thought of it as the “Triumph of the Swill”, because it’s propaganda without even artistry or competence. It relies on people being poorly educated or getting hopped-up on the idea that contrarianism is “independent thinking”–because you are a super genius of rare qualities, you can see through Big Atmosphere’s lies since Joseph Priestly and reject climate change, or see where that shill Jenner was headed with his vaccination/germ theory nonsense. You have clearly beat the mentality of Darwin and Le Compte de Buffon regarding that evolution jazz, too.
Conspiracy theories proliferate and why not? Anything might be true once anything can be called false.
Why not DARVO Russia and Ukraine? Why not introduce a little Holocaust denial? Why not suggest civil wars are actually good and healthy, or that secession could be beneficial to a large US State?
Harmful, wrongheaded views can be pimped out to attractive or engaging morons, who speak down to controversy-curious people without the tools to resist. They’ll even have you believing education itself is a problem and suggest you do away with it.
I think it’s good it’s being addressed, but the right wing is super-great at trying to say their free speech right are denied whenever they get told to stop being shills for utter bullshit. I get the feeling the pool of people who have been Russian-cash injected and super-bullshit charged will widen. And yes to people maybe being made examples of, because the shit has to stop.
But we clearly have a problem with toxic “elements” in our political environment. Some remediation feels like a good thing. Geting people to realize and care that one side has been enabling foreign propaganda to influence us and to recognize it as a national security threat is very important–that we haven’t been screaming about it enough since 2016 feels like a failure.
Also the Feds need to do Posobiec and Flynn. because I can’t believe those asses aren’t being handled from elsewhere.
(Now that things have calmed down media-wise, and there is solid information, here’s a post. I’m glad to see the parent and gun owner held accountable; for this, and always. I am never in favor of charging a minor as an adult, though there should be consequences laced heavily with rehabilitation. But the parent and gun owner should be fully responsible because they’re actual adults, and the parents (some child shooters will not have parents, so this goes to the caregiver.) Gun owners should always know that their guns are secure, and tell law enforcement when they’re not secure. Others’s mileage with these things may vary, and you’re welcome to chime in!)
Colin Gray faces four involuntary manslaughter, two second-degree murder and eight cruelty to children counts
The father of the teen suspected in the Georgia school shooting has been arrested, the Georgia bureau of investigation has said.
Colin Gray, 54, was arrested by the bureau in connection to the shooting at Apalachee high school. Colin is the father of Colt Gray, the 14-year-old who is suspected of fatally shooting two students and two teachers with an assault-style rifle at the high school on Wednesday.
He is charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the Georgia bureau said.
“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, director of the Georgia bureau of investigations, told reporters on Thursday evening.
“What are we facing? Heartbreak. A young person brought a gun into a school, committed an evil act and took lives, and injured people not just physically but mentally,” said the Barrow county sheriff, Jud Smith, during the news conference.
The teenager has been charged as an adult in the deaths of the school students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and educators Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53, Hosey said.
At least nine other people – seven students and two teachers – were taken to hospitals with injuries and all are expected to make a full recovery, Smith said.
Colin Gray is being held at the Barrow county detention center.
More than a year ago, the alleged shooter was interviewed by Georgia police after they received tips about online posts threatening a school shooting. Police did not have enough probable cause to arrest him then, according to the Georgia bureau of investigation.
In that 2023 inquiry, the father said he had hunting guns in the house but that his son did not have unsupervised access to them, and the son denied making the threats online, the FBI said.
Georgia state and Barrow county investigators say the younger Gray used an “AR platform style weapon”, or semiautomatic rifle, to carry out the attack in which two teachers and two 14-year-old students were killed.
It remained unclear how the shooter obtained the weapon.
Investigators have yet to comment on what may have motivated the first US campus mass shooting since the start of the school year.
Jackson county sheriff’s investigators closed the case after being unable to substantiate that either Gray was connected to the Discord account where the threats were made, and did not find grounds to seek the needed court order to confiscate the family’s guns, according to police reports released by the sheriff’s office on Thursday.
“This case was worked, and at the time the boy was 13, and it wasn’t enough to substantiate,” Janis Mangum, the Jackson county sheriff, said in an interview. “If we get a judge’s order or we charge somebody, we take firearms for safekeeping.”
The younger Gray was taken into custody shortly after the shooting and was being held without bond at the Gainesville regional youth detention center, Glenn Allen, the Georgia department of juvenile justice communications director, said on Thursday.
His arraignment is set for Friday morning before a Georgia superior court judge in Barrow county by video camera.
While parents are not usually held criminally liable if their child shoots someone, recent high-profile events are evidence that they could face charges in the future. In November 2023, Deja Taylor of Virginia was sentenced to 21 months on two federal charges after her then six-year-old son shot his teacher in January.
The elder Gray’s arrest also comes months after the unprecedented conviction of the parents of a Michigan high school student who shot and killed four students on 30 November. In February, Jennifer Crumbley was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. The next month, her husband, James Crumbley, was convicted on the same charges. The pair was sentenced to serve at least 10 years in prison.
“I didn’t really think about what precedent it was setting,” Karen McDonald, the prosecutor for Oakland county who brought the case against the Crumbleys, told CNN on Thursday. “If nothing else I would’ve hoped that the highly publicized details of this case would steer parents and make them think twice.”
“It’s enraging that this could still happen when it’s so easily preventable,” she continued.
This article was amended on 6 September 2024. An early version said Deja Taylor was sentenced to 21 years, not 21 months.
I’m just an ordinary Catholic, but I’m thinking that Jesus probably wouldn’t come down for a man found liable by a jury for sexual assault.
And since Jesus invented the laws of the universe, including math, He would certify that Trump lost California. And GA, NV, AZ, WI, MI, PA. https://t.co/NVfVyr1bVh
One of two staffers involved in the altercation at Arlington National Cemetery is a deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump’s reelection bid, NPR has learned. The former president insisted this week the incident did not happen, highlighting a growing disconnect between the messaging of the candidate and his campaign. NPR is identifying both staffers after the campaign’s conflicting responses to the incident last week outside Section 60 of the cemetery, where many casualties of Iraq and Afghanistan are buried.
The two staffers, according to a source with knowledge of the incident, are deputy campaign manager Justin Caporale and Michel Picard, a member of Trump’s advance team.
Caporale is a one time aide to former first lady Melania Trump who left the White House to work for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before returning to the Trump campaign. He was also listed as the on-site contact and project manager for the Women for America First rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 where Trump urged the crowd to “stop the steal” before some of them stormed the U.S. Capitol.
After Trump participated in a wreath laying ceremony on the third anniversary of the deadly bombing at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. service members, Trump visited Section 60 at the invitation of some family members and friends of the fallen soldiers.
ANC rules, that had been made clear to the Trump campaign in advance, say that only an official Arlington photographer can take pictures or film in Section 60. When an ANC employee tried to enforce the rules, she was verbally abused by the two Trump campaign operatives, according to a source with knowledge of the incident. Picard then pushed her out of the way according to two Pentagon officials. (snip-More)
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