A small conservative group in Lancaster, Ohio targeted local businesses and institutions that were LGBTQ+ friendly in response to an annual family-friendly pride event that held an outdoor drag show. When the group failed to get the city to penalize drag performers—and ban drag altogether—they then circulated a boycott list. Local business owners, however, were not harmed by the boycott. In fact, they saw a major influx in traffic after people drove from out of town to support the businesses after seeing them on the anti-LGBTQ+ boycott list.
Mike Johnson of Louisiana was reelected today (Jan. 3) to lead the U.S. House of Representatives. During his acceptance remarks a bit later, he read what he called a prayer from Thomas Jefferson. But Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation call it a “spurious quotation,” adding it’s unlikely Jefferson actually wrote or delivered it. Johnson has a history of using fake quotes to advance his belief that the U.S. should be a “Christian nation.”
“I offered one that is quite familiar to historians and probably many of us,” he said about the prayer, which he noted the program described as one Jefferson recited every day during his presidency and each day afterward until he died.
“I wanted to share it with you here at the end of my remarks not as a prayer per se right now but as really a reminder of what our third president and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence thought was so important that it should be a daily recitation,” Johnson added.
We have no evidence that this prayer was written or delivered by Thomas Jefferson. It appears in the 1928 United States Book of Common Prayer, and was first suggested for inclusion in a report published in 1919.
Interestingly, although we can find no evidence that this prayer has a presidential source, it was used by a subsequent president in a public speech. Several months after his 1930 Thanksgiving Day Address as Governor of New York, it was pointed out that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech bore a striking resemblance to the very same prayer discussed above.
Ultimately, it seems unlikely that Jefferson would have composed or delivered a public prayer of this sort. He considered religion a private matter, and when asked to recommend a national day of fasting and prayer, replied, “I consider the government of the US. as interdicted by the constitution from intermedling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.”
As usual, fake historian David Barton is behind this.
Right Wing Watch has relentlessly exposed Barton’s countless lies about about the Founding Fathers, perhaps most notably his claim that the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence are taken virtually verbatim from scripture.
Dear Speaker Johnson, Please don't make stuff up. The prayer that you read in the House Chamber today was not written by Thomas Jefferson and your claim that he recited it "every day" is false. Please use credible sources, not your discredited pal David Barton. See…
This is as good a time as any to pitch Telling Jefferson Lies, a podcast about the bad history produced by David Barton and other Christian nationalists. This incident will be a part of season two coming up. https://t.co/hYYE9Qaa1b
— Warren Throckmorton – Telling Jefferson Lies (@wthrockmorton) January 4, 2025
— Warren Throckmorton – Telling Jefferson Lies (@wthrockmorton) January 4, 2025
To be clear, I object to his false attribution of the prayer to Jefferson – part of the endless Christian nationalist campaign to remake Jefferson into a devout Christian when he was actually an enlightenment era freethinker who thought religion should remain private and out of… https://t.co/OHLBEDt57Y
Sheeeeesh. Thomas Jefferson, whose “Jefferson Bible” removed all the supernatural happenings and “miracles,” from the text, made it clear that he did not believe in the divinity of Christ. He titled his work “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth” and made a copy for himself, although he never published it. Mike Johnson, David Barton, and other Christians who try to impose Christian piety on Thomas Jefferson are very much mistaken, or simply lying. Jefferson was a Deist, not a Christian.
I like that in this video Ben Shapiro tries his uninformed anti-trans ideas on Neil deGrasse Tyson. He learns the hard way between bullying a student and talking on a profession who understands and knows science. Not only does Tyson turn Shapiro’s anti-trans people in sports completely around on him, he asks Shapiro why the issue even matters to him. Trans people are no threat and are not in large numbers so why is Ben beating that fear drum. It is wonderful. Hugs
This is a video from the Letterhack. I like the host’s clam informative delivery. I don’t know how anyone who watches Play Time feel about Cenk and Anna, but I do know how I feel. When this situation first erupted and Anna went ballistic on something that was only used on select medical forms and when criticized about it Cenk acted like a teen boy defending his hot girlfriend and went way over board defending her against anyone even vaguely critical and making threats claiming things that were said that never were. But here is the thing that because they refused to accept any criticism of that they claimed, they were supported by republicans and championed the cause republicans would use to win. From there Cenk and Anna branched into bashing Biden while claiming that crime was soaring echoing the right wing media talking point about crime and homelessness. Cenk then went so far as to attack trans supporters and advocates while trying to cozy up to republicans like tRump. I left TYT when Cenk said that the only way to win nation elections was to drop support for the T in LGBTQ+. He was so adamant in that, just throw them under the bus and when we win we can go back and get them. Yet the years that Cenk was pushing this all the republicans trying to run on trans hate lost. They lost by huge margins. But Cenk and Anna never admitted they were wrong using the time to go further right on other republican issues like housing the unhoused and finding ways to deal with crime. They ignored the real reasons for these problems adopting a hard right republican view of the issues. Anyone who disagreed with them was attacked vigorously.
So here is a video and I am not sure at what point in the saga this was videoed at. All I know is Cenk, Anna, and most of TYT has lost the mantel of “Home of the Progressives” and taken on a more smarmy look. Look this is an important video on supporting the trans community and not on attacking Cenk. But we can not let anyone on the left claim to be the home of the progressive left and then give the haters room to attack trans people. Trans rights, trans people, are far more important today than maybe they ever had been. But if you know your history, congratulation you survived the educational purges, then you know that the Stonewall riots where the LGBTQ+ rose to defend themselves and their rights wouldn’t have happened without the valiant drag queens and trans people who used their high heels as weapons to defend the rights of all the LGBTQ+. We need to keep that in mind knowing we still and will always need them and their courage. Hugs
Cenk Uygur continues to use anti-activist rhetoric when discussing Trans-Rights in dehumanizing ways while neglecting to include facts in his wild opinions about gender affirming care for minors.
“Democracy dies in darkness” is a phrase popularized by Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward who used it in an article about government secrecy. After billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post and Donald Trump assumed the presidency (sic), it became the newspaper’s first slogan in its 140-year history. Today, democracy is dying.
When Bezos purchased the paper, many felt he was saving the Post and journalism. He stood out of the way and allowed his journalists to defend democracy because there is no democracy without journalism.
After Trump lost the 2020 election by being soundly and squarely defeated by Joe Biden, the Post started to get a little flaky. It laid off and bought out prominent journalists. It started running whimsical New Yorker-like cartoons by Edith Pritchett on its opinion page. It hired right-wing Nixon/Reagan lover Michael Ramirez to draw political cartoons for its opinion page. It refused to make an endorsement in the 2024 election. but it still had Ann.
Herblock Award, Pulitzer Prize, and Rueben Award-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes had been freelancing for the Post for years. She was freelancing for the Post when the excellent Tom Toles retired in 2020. The Post promised to hire a full-time cartoonist to replace Toles who had replaced the legendary Herblock. Many felt the Post would hire Ann full-time as she was the most qualified and deserving. But the Post backtracked (lied) and didn’t hire a staffer. Instead, they brought in a freelancer who worked from Canada.
No offense to Michael de Adder, but this is the legendary Washington Post. The person filling Herblock’s spot should be expected to live in Washington, DC, or at the very least, the United States. I believe political cartoons are better if the person drawing them is actually affected by the issues he or she is drawing about. Ann was living in Washington at the time.
For the past few decades, Ann has been one of the best political cartoonists in the world. The Washington Post never fully respected that, and they disrespected her again this week.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, The Post has been flaky. Bezos issued statements before election day about having high expectations from a second Trump administration. Never mind that Donald Trump has attacked the Post, calling it the “Amazon” Washington Post. Never mind that Trump continues to call journalists the “enemy of the American people.” Never mind that Trump calls legitimate news “fake news” while pushing lies over and over again. Never mind that Trump sues journalism outlets for reporting facts about him. Never mind that Trump threatens and wants to do away with the basic tenets of democracy.
After the election, Bezos and other tech billionaires started dumping money into Trump’s “inauguration” fund with many, such as Bezos, making treks to MAGA-Lardo to kiss Trump’s ass.
As the owner of Amazon, which has government contracts, and with the threat of Elon Musk in a position to make cuts to government spending, it’s in Bezos’ financial interest, or so he believes, to play up to Donald Trump. Jeff Bezos had dinner with Trump, probably sitting in the same spot as all the white nationalists who had dinner with Trump at MAGA-Lardo. Trump was launching a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register for a poll while Bezos was sitting at MAGA-Lardo chomping on his Cobb salad.
This week, Ann drew a cartoon that depicted the billionaires groveling to Trump, and among them was Jeff Bezos. Guess what her editor did with that cartoon? He killed it. Guess what Ann did. She quit.
That’s right. Ann Telnaes got up and quit working for the most prominent publication for political cartoonists. In her substack piece, Why I’m Quitting The Washington Post, Ann, who has been with the Post since 2008, writes, “In all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”
Ann called the spiking of the cartoon a “gamechanger,” that was “dangerous for a free press.”
She’s correct. When newspaper owners are afraid of presidents to the point they start killing critical political cartoons, a free press is in danger. Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong both killed editorials endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president over Trump. Why? Because it was bad for business.
Ann’s editor, David Shipley, called her a liar for her “interpretation of events and said in a statement, “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement, “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
As a political cartoonist who’s worked with editors, I smell bullshit. In my experience, editors LOVE it when cartoons coincide with editorials. Now, these are columns but still, they typically like it when they run together or close together. Shipley says one of those columns had already been published and the second is scheduled for publication. Since one of those hasn’t been published yet, then he should have given deference to Ann’s cartoon, that is if he’s not lying. Ann is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Why would he kill her piece for something else?
Shipley said he respects Ann but he clearly doesn’t.
Trump spent his entire campaign promising to weaponize the Justice Department to go after his enemies. Look at his nominees to lead the DOJ. First, it was Matt Gaetz and now it’s Pam Bondi. His pick to lead the FBI is Kash Patel. These are goons.
Ann took a principled stand that will cost her financially. I can’t think of an outlet that would hire her and pay more than the Post. It may have hurt her professionally as I can’t think of an outlet that would hire her and be more prominent than the Post. But she’s established that she’s a badass.
The last time something like this happened was when the Pittsburgh Gazette fired Rob Rogers for refusing to stop criticizing Donald Trump. His replacement was goosestepping Steve Kelley (who was later quietly let go). Someone should tell the Post that Steve’s available, who’s probably already FedEx’ed his resume.
I drew a cartoon in 2015 when Ted Cruz attacked Ann which provoked thousands of death threats and threats of other despicable things I won’t mention here.
I drew a cartoon in 2019 that featured the firing of Rogers. When Rogers was fired, Michael Cavna, who wrote about cartoon issues did a piece about that. He’s not there anymore to write about Ann’s departure.
I drew a cartoon in 2023 about McClatchy laying off three Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonists on the same day.
January 4, 1961 The longest recorded labor strike ended after 33 years: Danish barbers’ assistants had begun their strike in 1938 in Copenhagen.
January 4, 1965 The Free Speech Movement held its first legal rally in Sproul Plaza of the University of California at Berkeley.
January 4, 1974 President Richard Nixon refused to release tape recordings of Oval Office discussions and other documents subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee investigating illegal activities of the president’s re-election committee.
Remember that Mace doesn’t believe in her rhetoric, she just wants the media attention. She wants the adoration she thinks that having people paying attention to her gives to her. She is a child desperately acting out to get the adults to pay attention to her. She is the child who never accepted she was at fault or mistaken but wants to blame everyone else including those pretend causes in her head alone. She was for trans rights, a big supporter of LGBTQ+ equality and inclusion when she felt it gained her media attention. Then when she saw the attention the Libs of TikTok and other haters on social media get, she waited for the opportunity to create enough spectacle for the spotlight to land on her. She tweeted over 500 times in 2 days on the bird site trying to milk the situation for views and clicks, often forgetting to switch to her burner accounts to praise her own stance. But now the drama has died down and no one is looking so she doesn’t care. She has to find the new outrage to pounce on. Maybe she will again throw a fit, and try to get some of the attention she got the first time, but she knows she has to wait, as it would be overwhelmed by current events. No if she still wants it, she will wait until about a couple of months in then claim she couldn’t use a bathroom because it is full of trans women. Hugs
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Josh Fiallo
Evelyn Hockstein / REUTERS
Nancy Mace’s hopes of banning transgender women from sharing a bathroom with her on Capitol Hill appear dashed for now.
The South Carolina Republican’s controversial bathroom ban was not included in the GOP’s House rules package unveiled this week—a surprise omission less than two months after Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly assured Mace it would be included.
The resolution was all the rage in November, with Mace pulling out different theatrics to drum up support for the ban. That included her using a bullhorn to read Miranda rights to sit-in protesters and using anti-transgender slurs to reference them.
Mace admitted her ban was to target the newly-elected Rep. Sarah McBride, a transgender Democrat from Delaware. Mace’s office did not respond to questions texted by the Daily Beast on Friday.
Johnson announced on Nov. 20 that “all single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings […] are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” This suggested he backed Mace’s proposal even if he was not as fervent in his public comments, but it is unclear why the ban didn’t make into the latest rules package.
“We welcome all new members with open arms who are duly elected representatives of the people,” Johnson said the day prior. “I believe it’s a command that we treat all persons with dignity and respect.”
Mace doesn’t appear to have any bad blood over the omission. She posted Friday morning that Johnson still had her vote to remain House Speaker.
“A vote for @SpeakerJohnson is a vote for President Trump’s America First agenda,” she wrote. “After the last few days of chaos we’ve seen in these tumultuous times, we need steady leadership and continuity. We need to stick together and get to work. We don’t have any time to waste.”
Rep. Sarah McBride, a Democrat from Delaware, is the first openly transgender member of Congress. / Bill Clark/Getty Images
While McBride was the resolution’s target, the ban would have applied to any trans person in the Capitol, including staffers and visitors
McBride, the first openly-trans member of Congress, has not commented on the ban’s omission. Back in November, she did not try to go toe-to-toe with Mace on the matter—instead asserting that she would follow whatever the House rules were.
“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms,” she wrote in a statement. “I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.”
I was simply reading this, then saw a bit about Supt. Walters. The news, as humorously presented as Wonkette does, is still sickening as to RWNJ logic, and none of us needs that. However. I did promise to update regarding Walters. So, here’s the link to the article, with the snippet about Walters. -A.
If We Can’t Blame Teachers Unions For Terrorism (Yes, Really!), Then The Terrorists Will Win by Rebecca Schoenkopf
(snip) “For his part, Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma schools chief who has been trying to Jesusify the state’s entire public school system, was pretty sure that these men committed these acts because the US school system taught them to hate America — to hate America so much that, again, they both joined the Army. Like big America-haters often do.
“Walters said:”
‘What a terrible day when we see terrorist attacks on American soil. It’s absolutely tragic and we’ve got to look as a country on how these things happen. We absolutely have to shut down the border, we can’t allow terrorists to come across the border. We also have to take a look at how are these terrorists coming from people that live in America?
‘You have schools that are teaching kids to hate their country, that this country is evil, you have the teachers unions pushing this on our kids, the radical Left wants people to hate this country. They’ve completely destroyed the integrity of the FBI by making them more concerned about DEI than about protecting Americans. It’s a major part of this.
‘And look, this is a real uncomfortable truth, and I know the Left is going to lose their mind, but listen: We cannot allow our schools to be terrorist training camps. We cannot allow our schools to teach our kids to hate this country. We cannot allow our kids to be taught that this is an evil country.
‘That’s why we’re getting back to the basics in Oklahoma, to make sure that our kids love this country, understand American values, understand the role that the Constitution, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence played in American history. Because we want patriots, and that’s going to be the focus of our schools.
“I suppose it’s possible that these men simply forgot that they hated America for several decades and then went on to commit terrorist attacks against the United States after remembering that they learned that Columbus committed genocide and that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves in school — but it does seem a tad unlikely.” (snip)
Scottie's Playtime 