James Duckett is scheduled for execution in Florida on March 31, 2026 for his alleged 1987 murder of Teresa McAbee.
NOTE: As of 6pm ET on March 27, 2027, a *temporary* stay remains in place as the State seeks to reverse the stay rather than follow the advice of its own expert, who suggests that further DNA evaluation is warranted. Read the press release from FADP here. This stay may be revoked at any time. Please act as if the March 31 execution date will proceed.
Mr. Duckett has maintained his innocence since the day he was arrested. His attorneys argue that the case against him, built entirely on circumstantial evidence, has been undermined by recanted testimony, discredited forensic science, and the possibility of DNA testing that was never presented to the jury who sentenced him to death.
Duckett’s attorneys argue that modern forensic technology — capable of producing answers that were unattainable in the 1980s — now exists, yet the state is pressing forward with an irreversible punishment while key evidence remains inconclusively tested and thus, unresolved. (snip; more on the page, which is the petition page.)
Jeff Tiedrich uses blue language. It’s easily ignored if you don’t care for blue language; this is some great coverage of yesterday.Also, Bluesky posts don’t embed easily on WP, so really, this is better on the page. Just click on the link directly below. It’s also mostly here, but you’ll have to click on the Bluesky posts to see the excellent photos; they didn’t embed.
over eight million of us gathered peacefully coast to coast, to rise up as one and convey a singular message: fuck you, you fucking fuck — you’re not our king.
wait, did I say coast to coast? no, it was the entire world telling Donny Convict to fuck straight off.
(just click the link to see the post on Bluesky. How it works, I guess. -A)
HAPPENING NOW: A HUGE crowd has gathered in London, England for a protest against the far right in coordination with the No Kings day protests in the US
In 1789, furious protesters stormed the Bastille in Paris. This marks the start of the French Revolution that put an end to the highly corrupt, rotten regime of aristocrats and the ultra rich. Yesterday, thousands joined a #NoKings protest at the Bastille.
“I’m so proud of you. you chased out of this state pure evil. you chased them out. you chased out the fun-size fascist Greg Bovino. you chased out that evil Kristi Noem. Kristi Noem is so evil, I’m starting to think that that dog took his own life. just couldn’t take it. ‘is this my future? I need to get out. I’m taking the goat with me.’”
while millions of people were protesting the fucked-up reign of Mad King Donny, CPAC couldn’t even fill one small room. look at this clownfuckingly pathetic display.
it’s as if Sad Trombone became a real political party.
great optics, you guys. bravo. ten out of ten — no notes.
fuck those fucking fucks. let’s go out with a bang. here are some of the best protest signs from around the country.
(Just go see it all. You’ll be sorry if you don’t!)Snip
and finally, once again, our unknown poet laureate from Ellsworth, Maine.
as for Sundowning Grandpa Bugfuck, he was unusually silent — and nowhere to be seen. there were none of his usual protest-day batshit meltdowns on the feed of his crappy app. he couldn’t even be bothered to post AI slop of himself shitting on protesters, as he did last October.
he just spent the day holed up in Motel-a-Lago. according to his official schedule, the lazy fuck didn’t even bother to cheat at golf.
I’ve got a news flash for you, Donny: America is sick of you. aside from your brain-dead cultists who are too fucking stupid to understand what’s going on, nobody voted for this shit.
nobody voted for the historic and stately East Wing to be demolished so that you can replace it with some vulgar Epstein Dance Hall™ — and speaking of your dead pedo bestie, nobody voted for the continuing cover-up of a massive pedophile ring.
nobody voted for off-the-charts corruption and greed.
nobody voted for masked ICE thugs teargassing children, and murdering anyone who looks at them funny. nobody voted for innocent immigrants to be disappeared off the streets and shipped off to far-away slave-labor gulags.
nobody voted for the price of everything continuing to skyrocket — especially when you promised bring all that shit down on Day One.
nobody voted for our allies to be insulted and ignored, or for Ukraine to be thrown to the wolves, or for Greenland to be perpetually harassed, or for Venezuela to become a vassal state.
and nobody voted for an unwinnable clusterfuck of a don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-war in Iran — certainly not one that shut down the Strait of Hormuz, destabilized the entire Middle East, and sent the price crude through the roof.
guess what, Donny: you’re such a loathsome piece of shit that over eight million people took to the streets yesterday to deliver this singular message: fuck you, you fucking fuck — you’re not our king, and you never will be.
Just a question to those who support this regime: Just what the hell is it going to take before reality makes it through whatever brainwashing happened to you?
It has been a joy to deconstruct my religious trauma alongside 32-year-old comedian Taylor Tomlinson. Four years ago, as I was coming out as queer to my family, I found her Netflix special Taylor Tomlinson: Look at You to be a warm welcome into the community of formerly Christian queer kids and purity culture survivors. Dark humor gave all of us a silly sort of grace, a space where we could grieve and grow.
Tomlinson, who was raised in a conservative Christian household in Temecula, Calif., got her start in stand-up through the church comedy circuit. But as she grew up, she began deconstructing how her conservative Christian upbringing was hurting her mental health and sexual development, deciding instead to be a “secular” comic.
Her new Netflix special Prodigal Daughter was filmed inside Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., which welcomed her not despite but rather because of her comedy. On her aptly named “Save Me” tour, Tomlinson builds on a foundation of jokes about toxic Christian culture to call out not just people who weaponize religion as a tool for bigotry but also the people who make fun of those who still believe in God.
“Because if God does exist, he does not exist to make you feel better than other people. He exists to make you better for other people,” she said. “We judge each other’s coping mechanisms. Like, ‘You’re a quitter if you get on antidepressants. You’re stupid if you believe in God. B—-, I’m on mood stabilizers, you’re on Jesus. We’re all trying to get to ‘dead with Daddy.’”
In fact, Tomlinson recognizes the people in her life—her grandparents, aunt, and uncle, himself a pastor—“who are using religion correctly.”
“There are a lot of people who are using religion as a tool for community and connection and compassion and comfort,” she says, “and when I was writing this hour, I was thinking about those people.”
Cheekily, Tomlinson compares her own stand-up specials to her uncle’s Christian services. “We’re both out here on the weekends, changing lives.”
But the comedian is not here to absolve all the sins of Christianity or its effects on her.
“When you grow up in a religious environment, you spend a lot of your young adulthood untangling who you are from who they wanted you to be,” she says. For Tomlinson, this is best represented by her “late” coming out at age 30.
Tomlinson explains that she has so many queer friends who are open and free about their sexualities—the “Samanthas” of the group—but she didn’t see anyone else who, like her, was nervous entering the queer dating scene. “We need more gay prude representation,” she chuckles, making those of us coming out at an older age and experiencing a real queer second adolescence feel less alone.
A second adolescence refers to how many LGBTQ+ people didn’t have the chance to experience the joys of teenage years. Because of rampant queerphobia inside and outside religious communities, we didn’t have access to the romantic and sexual “firsts”—first crush, first kiss, first sexual encounter—that many heterosexual people did because we were told repeatedly that our love and our bodies were shameful and had to be hidden.
While she doesn’t explicitly name “second adolescence,” the significance of coming-of-age as a queer person runs throughout her special.
According to Adam James Cohen, a therapist specializing in helping LGBTQ+ patients, adolescence is critical to developing and cementing a person’s identity and sense of self. For those who missed out on that true identity formation earlier in life, second adolescence offers a mental and physical stage of healing and liberation, often involving people deconstructing their internalized anti-queerness and religious trauma. Sometimes this liberation happens through comedy, sometimes through therapy, or as Tomlinson discusses in her special, sometimes both. During this formational time, adults reckon with the grief of missing adolescence, and make up for lost time.
Second adolescence isn’t just a uniquely queer experience. Many people raised in far-right Chrisitan environments experience a new phase of psychosocial development after they leave their conservative Christian homes. For people raised in purity culture, their second adolescence can be a time of sexual exploration, experimentation, and liberation during and after deconstructing harmful theologies of the body.
For the queer Christian kids like Tomlinson, we were robbed of moments of bodily and social experimentation and generation, so experiencing our second adolescence is like coming home to our bodies, an emotional rebirth or reversion, to put it in Christian terms, of learning and loving to be a queer child and queer teenager again. For trans and nonbinary people undergoing gender affirming medical care, second adolescence can be even more physical, as hormone therapy brings about a second puberty.
And for many of us, this second adolescence is characterized by an eagerness—and joy—to accept and share the possibilities that many never questioned. As Tomlinson joked, “When I started dating women, it was the closest I’d come to feeling religious in a long time because my friend would complain about their boyfriends and husbands and I was like, ‘Have you heard the good news? You don’t have to live like this. There’s a better way.’”
Second adolescence is especially common among people who have a later-in-life realization or acceptance of their LGBTQ+ identity, often called a “queer awakening” or “second coming out,” just like Tomlinson. There is no time limit on coming out or discovering and affirming gender or sexuality, but as Tomlinson jokes in her special, “coming out as bisexual at 30 feels like saying to a waiter, ‘By the way, it’s my birthday.’ They’re like, ‘Cool, sing to yourself. You’re a grown woman.’”
Tomlinson’s special portrays this second adolescence with a humor, grace, and visibility I hadn’t encountered before but am deeply indebted to. Prodigal Daughter, and her comedy as a whole, carries special poignancy for the formerly queer Christian kids coming of age through humor and deconstruction.
Here’s how I repurposed my empty tissue box as a plastic grocery bag dispenser in a few easy steps:
Take a plastic shopping bag and stuff it horizontally into the tissue box with the handles sticking out of the slit on top.
Grab another plastic bag and weave it through the handles of the bag sticking out of the box, then stop once it’s about three-quarters the way through.
Stuff both bags into the box, with the handles of the second bag sticking out again like you had before.
Repeat the process until all of the plastic bags are in the box (I was able to fit about 12 bags in mine!)
Gently pull a bag out of the box when you want to use it, just like a regular Kleenex box! Follow steps 1 through 4 to refill when you have more bags to store.
A few things I ran across before lunch, in one post with links. Ollie and I had a good lunch, got a few things done, then took a nice walk on a cooler day when his thick black fur coat is not too heavy for him to be on a jaunt before 7 AM; it was 2 PM.😃
Back to reality, I saw this Reuters story about Iran hacking US FBI, but it was a subscriber only story (I agree-WTF? Why should profit be made on a story like that, when some of the free articles are such dreck…) But, here is a free one:
The vigilante group Handala Hack Team said that it had successfully gained access to Patel’s personal email account.
Then, I know many of us, if we didn’t yawn, noticed the hypocrisy in wrangling for a law that includes banning mail-in voting while on the way to the post-box. If you’re busy, just click through; the money phrase is right there at the top.
The young woman who is running for my district’s US House seat, Katy Tindell, has a website now! I’ve mentioned her, but couldn’t link because all there was was an Act Blue contribution page. But now, she has her own website.
Every one of our states has at least one candidate like this running. Please choose a campaign anywhere (But work from your home district/state first, if you can,) and sign up. Money’s tight everywhere, but give the candidate some time if you want to see them in office. There are many things that need doing, and campaigns are better off with volunteers helping.
(I don’t care for twangy folk music that would be country&western if it wasn’t U.S. Folk music, but. I have high regard for Woody Guthrie, really like the lyrics of this song, and Bette Midler covers it well, updating lyrics a bit while retaining its folk integrity. Thanks, Ten Bears!)
And along those lines, check this out, and also check in on your own state legislature, because these laws are coming from a national organization. Also, dig “Independence Day”, which is not at all acknowledged in the Bible; it gets more time than even Christmas or Easter. I do not think “Christian” means what they think it means. Emphases within are mine.
TOPEKA — The Kansas Legislature’s negotiators on education bills deleted a Senate-approved change to state law prohibiting school sports practice and competition on Sundays, Wednesday evenings and multiday periods centered on Easter, Christmas and Independence Day.
The effort to expand on Kansas State High School Activities Association rules for scheduling athletic events, currently concentrated on Dec. 25 and July 4, was led by Senate Majority Leader Chase Blasi, R-Wichita. He convinced Senate colleagues to accept his amendment to Senate Bill 515 expanding no-sports days on calendars at public and private schools statewide.
During Senate debate on Blasi’s amendment, questions were raised about his focus on Christian faith traditions. His amendment passed on an unrecorded voice vote of the Senate.
During Senate and House negotiations Monday on SB 515, Wichita Republican Rep. Susan Estes and Wichita Sen. Renee Erickson, who serve as lead negotiators on the Legislature’s education bills, agreed to cast aside Blasi’s broadened moratorium. His amendment was removed from legislation intended to enable homeschool students to join sports at private schools in the way state law permitted them to be part of public school athletics.
Blasi said he was motivated to act on concerns expressed by constituents that school-sponsored sports interrupted periods that ought to be reserved for family or church activities.
Specifically, his amendment would forbid sporting events on Sundays and on Wednesdays at 6 p.m. to midnight from Sept. 1 to April 30. In addition, he sought to apply the prohibition to a four-day window around Easter, but only from 6 p.m. to midnight. A five-day ban at Christmas and a seven-day ban encompassing Independence Day would be part of the new state law.
“This is going to assure we focus on what really keeps communities strong — that is family and faith,” Blasi said.
Sen. Marci Francisco, D-Lawrence, said she was anxious the Legislature was wading into the KSHSAA rulebook without considering family interests in other religious faiths. Blasi’s amendment didn’t address Islam’s Ramadan, Judaism’s Passover or Rosh Hashanah, Hinduism’s Maha Shivavatri or Buddhism’s Bodhi Day.
“Not any religion was considered,” Blasi said. “This was just a response to constituents.”
Francisco wasn’t convinced of the amendment’s merits.
“My constituents would like me to be as inclusive as possible,” she said.
The amendment left on the cutting room floor by the House and Senate conference committee was defended by several other members of the Senate.
Sen. Caryn Tyson, R-Parker, said she was a strong supporter of Blasi’s effort to turn back the clock in Kansas to an era more respectful of faith traditions.
“It’s a sad day that we have to legislate this,” Tyson said. “Years ago, it wasn’t even an issue. It was a standard and acceptable, but here we are.”
Sen. Brad Starnes, R-Riley, said the amendment was crafted to affirm religion as the “bedrock of our country.”
The objective of the amendment was to clear school calendars so students had more time to pursue religious interests, said Sen. Michael Murphy, R-Sylvia.
“As we move away from that, we do so at our peril,” Murphy said. “It’s time we moved back to some of those traditions that served us well.”
The House-Senate conference committee bundled the stripped down SB 515 and Senate Bill 361 into Senate Bill 382. SB 361 allows foreign exchange students to enroll in their host’s public school district. SB 382 deals with administration of state assessments to K-12 students in virtual schools. As of Tuesday, neither the House nor Senate had voted on the the three-bill deal.
Scottie's Playtime 