Top 10 Idiots

Top 10 Idiots's Journal

December 1, 2019

Preview For This Week's Top 10 Conservative Idiots

Well yeah, you eat 40 pizzas in 30 days it's definitely not going to start tasting that good. That shit's going to start coming out of your pores! I don't think I've seen a case of the meat sweats that badly since I attempted the 2 for 1 Tuesdays challenge at Buffalo Wild Wings. Needless to say I don't see that happening ever again!

**audience laughs and applauds**

This week's Top 10 is live from Stanford University! Trump sets up a fake university sting operation, Melania gets booed promoting anti-bullying, Trump goes to Afghanistan for a photo op, we check in with our friends across the pond, Papa John gives a greasy interview, and Sascha Cohen claims that Facebook has gone full Nazi. Plus in our weekly investigative piece, Top 10 Investigates, as stores are opening earlier and earlier for the retail's "Black Friday", we find out what it's like to actually work on Thanksgiving. And in our weekly visit to the Holy Church Of The Top 10 in "Holy Shit", is the president the chosen one? Our resident pastor has some thoughts on Rick Perry's insane interview. We also have a new People Are Dumb, because of course they are! And in our 2020 voters' guide "Keeping Up With The Candidates", is Pete Buttigieg a racist? After some claims are made in an insane op ed, we get to the bottom of it to find out what's up! Plus we have some live music from the legendary Pixies!

Top 10 Conservative Idiots: Wed at 2:00 PM /shameless self promotion

November 27, 2019

Top 10 Conservative Idiots Best Of #12: Thanksgiving Edition

Top 10 Conservative Idiots Best Of #12: Thanksgiving Edition

Welcome back to the Top 10 Conservative Idiots! Oh hello! I know, right? I can’t believe how fast this year is going. You know we are tidying up our mobile set while we prepare to go to Stanford for the home stretch. We have just three Top 10s left in the year before we cast aside this insane year that was 2019. And those dates are 12/4 at Stanford University, 12/11 at USC, and 12/18 at UCLA, which is also where we held the final for our 3rd annual Stupidest State contest. What can you expect for season 8? Well you can expect a whole lot of conservative idiocy plus all of our usual favorite segments and some new ones that will pop up. And since this is a year when we will hopefully elect the successor to @realDonaldTrump, the mud and feces (probably) will be flinging, and it will be coming very fast and very furious. Conservative idiocy will be amped up way past 10 and it will be on stage for the entire world to see. We will also be continuing our college tour for a bit into the better part of season 8, but season 9 we will be going international! Yes, you can expect us to go back to London and we will also be hitting Europe, Canada and we will be doing a show in Tijuana! Yes, Tijuana! No, there won’t be any donkey sex involved, sorry, Kevin Smith fans. But there will be plenty of insanity along the way. With that in mind, drum roll, here are the Top 10 season 8 tour dates!

- 1/8/20 – Syracuse, NY – Syracuse University (rescheduled from 8/28/19)
- 1/15/20 – Amherst, MA – University Of Massachusetts
- 1/22/20 – Washington, DC – Georgetown University
- 1/29/20 – Coral Gables, FL – University Of Florida, Miami
- 2/5/20 – Tallahassee, FL – Florida State University
- 2/12/20 - Nashville, TN – Vanderbilt University (Valentine’s Day Special!)
- 2/19/20 – Ann Arbor, MI – University Of Michigan
- 2/26/20 – Madison, WI – University Of Wisconsin
- 3/4/20 – Witchita, KS – Witchita State University (Stupidest State Selection Sunday)
- 3/11/20 – Dark
- 3/18/20 – Norman, OK – University Of Oklahoma (Stupidest State Round 1 Week 1)
- 3/25/20 – Albuquerque, NM – University Of New Mexico (Stupidest State Round 1 Week 2)
- 4/1/20 – Phoenix, AZ – University Of Arizona (Stupidest State Round 1 Week 3)
- 4/8/20 – Denver, CO – University Of Colorado (Stupidest State Round 1 Week 4)
- 4/15/20 – DARK (Best Of)
- 4/22/20 – Chico, CA – Chico State University (Stupidest State Round 2 Week 1)
- 4/29/20 – Corvallis, OR – Oregon State University (Stupidest State Round 2 Week 2)
- 5/6/20 – Seattle, WA – University Of Washington (Stupidest State Round 2 Week 3)
- 5/13/20 – Riverside, CA – University Of California, Riverside (Stupidest State Round 2 Week 4)
- 5/20/20 – San Diego, CA – University Of California, San Diego (Stupidest State Final Four)
- 5/27/20 – Irvine, CA – University Of California, Irvine (Stupidest State Championship)

There you have it, that is our completed tour schedule for season 8! Season 9 tour dates including our international dates (this is an election year, we have to get out!), will be unveiled in a future best of edition. OK that’s enough of the intro, we have a lot of idiocy to get to. But first we have to play the John Oliver segment from a couple of months ago where he discussed compounding pharmacies:

&t=45s

So we have a lot for our Best Of Edition. In the first slot from Idiots #7-12 while the entire world is asking why Mitch McConell won’t pass any sensible laws regarding gun control, Trump (1) goes ahead and declares war on vaping because – wait for it – people might die from it. In the second slot, from Idiots #7-6, we finally learn the truth that the Seth Rich conspiracy theory (2) peddled by Fox News and the right wing smear machine was indeed a gigantic steaming load of BS. In the third slot, from Idiots #7-13, Mike Pence (3) took a whole motorcade to an island off the coast of Northern Michigan where cars haven’t been allowed since the invention of the car. What a snowflake! For the #4 slot this week, from idiots #7-18, Trump (4) celebrated Halloween in the most Donald Trump way possible – by building a wall in the White House, while he got booed at the World Series. In slot #5, from Idiots #7-11, our weekly investigative piece, Top 10 Investigates, takes a trip to Eastern Michigan where they are turning a local high school into a mass-shooting proof fortress, because that’s where we are at since we can’t do anything about enacting sensible gun legislation. Taking the 6th slot this week, in our weekly visit to the Holy Church Of The Top 10 in “Holy Shit”, the apocalypse is imminent and our resident pastor weighs in on some recent apocalypse theories and has a few of his own! In the #7 slot this week from Idiots #7-15, “Beating A Dead Horse” takes a look at China’s ridiculous international censorship over content production including their feud with the creators of South Park, and the NBA. In the 8th slot this week from Idiots #7-10, after threatening his employees who were attempting to unionize, we profile the owner and CEO of Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy (8) in a new “This Fucking Guy”. At the number 9 (NEIN!!!) slot this week, from Idiots #7-17, we have one of our favorite “People Are Dumb” segments ever which includes one of the most insane Florida Man stories we’ve ever heard. Finally this week from our cancelled Idiots #7-2, is Part 2 of our “What’s Up With Texas” docuseries that takes a look at when we visited the Texas border town of Laredo to find out what whether or not they support Trump’s ridiculous wall or not. And to cap it all off, some live music from the time we had country music’s anti-hero Sturgill Simpson stop by! Enjoy! And as always don’t forget the key!

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[font size="8"]Donald Trump
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From: Idiots #7-12

Let’s talk about vaping. Or more importantly let’s talk about Vaping Death. Yeah it sounds like a Metallica song doesn’t it? Because Trump’s newly declared war on vaping is so insane that it almost sounds fucking metal. There’s plenty of reasons why vaping and excessive vaping is horrible but we don’t have that kind of time! Before we get into Trump’s ban, I want to talk about this lawsuit that emerged against the vaping compaul Juul, because this exposes the inherent dangers and risks of using vaping products.

A teenager who says vaping gave him lungs “like a 70-year-old” is suing a leading e-cigarettes company.

Adam Hergenreder, an 18-year-old from Illinois, has accused Juul of marketing e-cigarettes to young people with the message that vaping could boost their social status

He underwent hospital treatment at the end of August for nausea and laboured breathing after using e-cigarettes for more than 18 months.

"I'm 18 years old. My lungs are like a 70-year-old's," he told CBS while in hospital. “My lungs will never be the same."

In a statement on Friday, Juul said it had “never marketed to youth” and argued its products were meant to help adult smokers quit traditional cigarettes.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/vaping-teenager-sues-juul-e-cigarettes-lung-damage-adam-hergenreder-a9105211.html

Yeah it’s kind of like Patty & Selma but may be even worse. And of course like just about everything that Trump does, it’s not helping things. As we’ve seen time and time again, bans don’t work. Which means that every time you attempt to ban something there’s products that will appear on the black market which will be way worse than what you could buy previously. File this one under “you’re not helping!”.

President Trump's proposed ban of electronic cigarettes with anything but a tobacco flavor could kill a big part of the vape store business, but it may have a limited effect on curbing use by young people who can already flavor their own cartridges with readily available and attractive dessert tastes, industry experts say.

Trump's move came after new data showed teen vaping increased even as the availability of more kid-friendly flavors decreased. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb last year proposed restricting flavored e-liquids to vape stores that are age-restricted, but Trump's move would go much further.

The announcement came amid an outcry over the mounting death toll and hundreds of serious lung illnesses linked to vaping. Nearly all of the now-public cases involved young men who vaped both nicotine and THC oil.

On Sunday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a ban on the sale of flavored electronic cigarettes in the state through an emergency executive action.

Gottlieb told USA TODAY on Thursday that the deaths and illnesses and teen vaping concerns have been "conflated" and calls them "separate actions and separate public health concerns." On CNBC Monday, Gottlieb called for a "federal reckoning" and regulation of cannabis because of its link to most of the reported lung illnesses and deaths.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/09/14/trump-proposal-ban-vaping-flavors-amid-lung-illness-limited-impact-experts-say/2309607001/

And of course for those of you keeping score at home, there’s more reason to believe that Trump’s ban on vaping isn’t actually helping things. For one thing, many adults use vaping as a way of helping them quit actual cigarettes. But of course this is the Trump administration that we’re talking about here, facts don’t matter. Only outrage does!

Removing flavors is bad for adult smokers. There is little question that some adults will switch back to their Marlboros and Kools if their preferred flavors are no longer available. Surveys of adult smokers show the vast attraction of switching from cigarettes to a vaping device that uses nontobacco flavor.

As for youths, everyone agrees they should not vape. However, one of the biggest concerns — namely, that teen vaping leads to teen smoking through a so-called gateway effect — is greatly overstated.

Meticulous data analyses show that vaping is more of a “gateway” out of a smoking addiction for teens than it is a passage into a new habit for those who have never smoked. Support for this observation comes from the fact that teen smoking remains on a decades-long downhill slide.

Even if vaping is not a conduit to smoking, teen vaping is going in the wrong direction: Between 2018 and 2019 it rose by a third, from 20.8% to 27.5%. (At least, however, the trend may be slowing as the increase from 2017 to 2018 was steeper at 78%, from 11.7 to 20.8%).

In response, Acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Ned Sharpless said in a news release that if there is further “migration to tobacco-flavored products by kids, we will take additional steps to address youth use of these products.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/09/13/dont-nontobacco-e-cigarettes-adults-more-danger-kids-column/2299006001/

Well, yeah they do call them cigarettes. But what is Trump talking about with a total ban? There’s no evidence to support a ban, and you have a greater chance of dying from a gunshot wound than you do from vaping so why does that matter? Oh and if you guessed that Trump most likely didn’t even read the CDC report and grossly misinterpreted results, you are correct!

(CNN)The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday there are 380 confirmed and probable cases of lung disease associated with vaping across 36 states and the US Virgin Islands. Six deaths have been confirmed in six states: California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, and Oregon.

That's a smaller number of illnesses than the agency had previously stated because it has updated the way it reports cases of lung disease associated with e-cigarette use. It's now reporting confirmed and probable cases, rather than possible cases or cases under investigation.
Last week, the CDC had reported that there are more than 450 possible cases of vaping-related lung disease across 33 states and the US Virgin Islands.

There are hundreds more cases under investigation around the country, according to a CNN analysis of numbers reported by state health departments this week.

The states and territory with confirmed cases are Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, West Virginia and the US Virgin Islands.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/13/health/lung-disease-vaping-cdc-new-numbers-bn/index.html

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[font size="8"]Seth Rich: Origins Of A Conspiracy Theory
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From: Idiots #7-6

We’re going to do something a bit different for this entry. It turns out that… conspiracy theories are bullshit! If you’re shocked by this revelation, you’re in the wrong place, people. Yeah I love that one guy in the back who yells out “WOOOOOOOOOO!!!”. And one conspiracy theory that was being peddled by… *drum roll* Russian meme makers!!! Yes, Seth Rich was a Russian hit job! It was such pure, unbridled, unfiltered bullshit that even Fox News *AND* Alex Jones were forced to apologize for how much bullshit it was (see: Top 10 #3-8 ), and whew, it was quite the steaming pile. But you know what? It worked! It set out to do exactly what it was designed to do – turn the populace against the DNC. And the right wing media bought it hook, like and sinker.

In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

The purported details in the SVR account seemed improbable on their face: that Rich, a data director in the DNC’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.

Yet in a graphic example of how fake news infects the internet, those precise details popped up the same day on an obscure website, whatdoesitmean.com, that is a frequent vehicle for Russian propaganda. The website’s article, which attributed its claims to “Russian intelligence,” was the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy.
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-the-true-origins-of-the-seth-rich-conspiracy-a-yahoo-news-investigation-100000831.html

Damn right, Bill Nye!!! And it’s a huge, steaming load of bullshit! And come on, we should know better that anything cooked up in the festering boil of the internet known as 4chan is going to be a huge, steaming load. So how did it go from the bottom of the barrel of the internet all the way to mass media and eventually the White House? Well let’s follow the shit train shall we? Worst train ever, by the way.

#HisNameWasSethRich and, no, he did not leak stolen DNC info to Wikileaks. A new report shows how Russian military intelligence fueled a conspiracy around the unsolved 2016 murder of the Democratic National Committee staffer, fooling right-wing talk show hosts, journalists, former NSA and CIA officials — to the point that Donald Trump ordered the head of CIA to investigate it.

The report, by investigative British journalist Duncan Campbell, was published on Monday by Computer Weekly, a professional IT online magazine. Campbell asserts that Russian military intelligence, the GRU, manipulated metadata in DNC files that it stole and then released to the public. The GRU’s goal in doing so: to give the false impression that the files were not hacked but copied from one computer to another by a DNC insider — Seth Rich — and then given to Wikileaks. The con job was good enough to persuade William Binney, a former technical director at the NSA, to conclude last year that the DNC files weren’t hacked at all, just stolen from the inside. Binney’s name and credibility helped to propel the conspiracy onto Sean Hannity’s show and then to the President and the head of the CIA.

To understand how the Seth Rich conspiracy made its way from the backwaters of 4Chan to Langley, you have to go back to June 2016. Cybersecurity company Crowdstrike had just reported that the DNC had been hacked and the culprit was likely Russian intelligence.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/08/how-russian-hackers-amplified-seth-rich-conspiracy-until-it-reached-donald-trump-and-cia/150263/

Damn right! So this plot to frame the DNC for a crime it didn’t commit started in the bottom of the barrel of the internet and made its’ way all the way to the fucking CIA! Think of it like the guy who starts out bombing at the Chuckle Hut every night and then somehow makes his way to working full arenas despite saying only a few marginally funny observations. Oh wait, you don’t have to, that guy is Sebastian Manascalo. You know, this guy. So think of Seth Rich as the Sebastian Manascalo of conspiracy theories.

There’s been a lot of pointing and laughing at Hannity and Fox News in the past 24 hours. And it’s deserved. Hannity peddled this conspiracy for almost a year after Rich’s death, though eventually retired the gimmick — reluctantly — some time after Fox News retracted a story on the theory after sourcing fell apart.

But to say Fox News got tricked by Russian trolls, like this GQ headline serves up, is just wrong. Or, at least, it misses the point. Hannity didn’t have the rug pulled out from under him by some foreign trickster hiding behind a screen in a Moscow. He openly peddled a conspiracy without anything to base it on, and does so regularly. This is the world he lives in and the language he speaks.

Look no further than the recently released text exchanges between Hannity and Paul Manafort, which were made public by a federal court during the trial of Trump’s former campaign chairman (of which I read all 56 pages, because I’m a masochist with too much time on his hands).

Here’s one literal word salad the Fox News host threw Manafort’s way: “HRC, E-mails, Obstruction, Destroying emails, bleach bit, devices no sim cards, Uranium one, Ukraine interference… Intel Leaks Unmasking Potus conversations leaked. My God.”
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/enterthefray/la-ol-seth-rich-conspiracy-fox-news-20190710-story.html

That’s about putting it mildly. There’s a lot speculating that this theory of pre-meditated murder was the inspiration for tipping the election in favor of Donald Trump. But as we’ve seen, the bullshit meter is in fact a sliding scale. With one extreme end of the bullshit meter being Pizzagate, and the other extreme end being an actual pile of bullshit. Seth Rich is… somewhere in the middle.

It was one of the first prominent “fake news” conspiracy theories to metastasize from Internet rumor all the way to the White House: In the summer of 2016, stories began to circulate in various online forums that Seth Rich, a fairly low-level Democratic National Committee staffer who died in July of that year, wasn’t the victim of a botched robbery at all, but had actually been assassinated by a contract killer working for Hillary Clinton. Rich, the theory went, was actually the secret source who had leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks—a theory that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared to lend credence to when he offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the identity of Rich’s killer or killers. “Our sources take risks,” he said, even though the DNC emails were actually given to WikiLeaks days after Rich’s death.

As Reddit users, denizens of 4chan forums and even Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity spread versions of this theory, suspicion arose that there were shadowy forces trying to promote the loony-sounding conspiracy. But it wasn’t clear who exactly these forces were, or what their intentions might be. On Tuesday, Yahoo News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff announced that he had tracked down the original source of the theory: A fake report concocted by the Russian intelligence agency SVR (short for Sluzhba vneshney razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii), a unit of the former KGB. The phony “bulletin,” designed to look like an authentic intelligence report, was released just three days after Rich’s death, Isikoff writes.

The idea that the Rich conspiracy theory was distributed by agents acting on behalf of the Russian government is not a new one. When information started to come out about the activities of the so-called Internet Research Agency during the 2016 election—which engaged in a sustained campaign of disinformation and outright propaganda on Facebook and other platforms—the Seth Rich assassination theory turned out to be one of the many pieces of fakery the IRA distributed as a way of destabilizing the Clinton campaign. But the agency was a privately run, arm’s-length entity (albeit one run by a close associate of Russian president Vladimir Putin). Until Isikoff’s report, it was not clear that this conspiracy theory originated from the highest levels of Russian intelligence itself.
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/seth-rich-conspiracy-theory.php

[font size="8"]Mike Pence
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From: Idiots #7-13

So this next entry is for the Michiganders in the crowd. Do we have any people from Michigan in the audience here? Yeah I love the one guy in the back who yells “WOOOOOOOOO!!!”. Well, speaking of putting a tail pipe in a place where it is extremely uncomfortable to do so, Mike Pence can join Trump in participating in that activity. Great Photoshop there. What happened for him to deserve that? Well, the super tiny island in Michigan’s Lake Huron is home to Mackinac Island. And it’s pretty well known that vehicles haven’t been allowed on the island since the 1800s. But once again, in an episode of conservatives just being plain douchebags, Vice President Snowflake drove an 8 SUV motorcade through it, proving once again that bad guys drive black SUVs.

Vice President Mike Pence choppered onto a historic Michigan island that has always banned autos in favor of bicycles and horses and was shuttled to a campaign speech in a parade of eight official cars.

Tweeted one Michigander of the grand, gasoline-powered arrival at Mackinac Island’s famous Grand Hotel this weekend:

Most tourists reach the island by ferry, although small aircraft do come in and out, and the island does house a few emergency vehicles at all times. Secret Service for President Gerald Ford had a car waiting in case of an emergency when he and first lady Betty Ford visited in 1975, but the couple used the common mode of getting around during their visit, a horse-drawn carriage.

Pence was on the island to speak to the Michigan Republican Leadership Conference and had alerted officials there to his transportation plans, according to reports.

Michigan was a key state in the 2016 presidential election and is considered a major target for 2020. Pence has visited Michigan 10 times since 2017, the Detroit Free Press said. According to the Michigan Republican Party, Pence is the first sitting vice president to speak at the biennial conference, which has been hosted on the island — home to well-heeled summer people, retirees and fudge-seeking, tandem bike-riding tourists — for more than 60 years.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/michigans-historic-mackinac-island-bans-cars-the-pence-motorcade-used-8-2019-09-22

Yeah BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Is nothing sacred to these motherfuckers? It’s almost like they try to come up with the wrong answer to everything? Hmm, let’s drive a car through a place where cars haven’t been allowed for 100 years! Yeah seriously, fail. And the residents of Mackinac Island are pissed and rightfully so. Are they trying to lose Michigan? This could probably do it.

Mackinac Island (pronounced "Mackinaw&quot

draws nearly a million visitors each year and is regarded as one of the most precious natural resources in Michigan. Just 450 people live on the small destination, and they get around by bike.

"Bikes are just our way of life," Mary McGuire Slevin, the executive director of the Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau, told the sustainable-business news site TriplePundit. "They are like a part of our bodies, we don't even think about it. When I see a tourist go out for a bike ride around the circumference of the island, you can just tell the difference when they come pedaling back into town — they are more relaxed and have a big smile on their face."

Even Gerald Ford, the only president from Michigan, traveled by horse-drawn carriage when he visited Mackinac in 1975.

So when Pence broke with tradition over the weekend, controversy ensued. Several current and former Michigan residents reached out to Business Insider over email to share their thoughts.

&quot

This is) a true gem that has been assaulted in plain sight," Skaneateles, New York resident Bitsy Jennings Govern, who grew up in Michigan, told Business Insider.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mike-pence-car-free-mackinac-island-michiganders-react2019-9

Yeah probably. But seriously, Pence crossed a line that shouldn’t have been crossed here. It’s like nothing is scared to these guys. Yeah sure, the powers that be on Mackinac Island have bent the rules before but nothing like this. At least when Gerald Ford visited the island, he had the good sense to leave his car behind when he realized that it might have been a bad idea.

The U.S. Secret Service had an automobile smuggled onto Mackinac Island when President Gerald Ford visited in 1975 — but the car was kept hidden and was never used, says a former longtime Mackinac Island official.

Dennis Cawthorne, a Lansing lobbyist and Mackinac Island resident who served for more than 20 years as chairman of the Mackinac Island State Park Commission, said Ford and his wife, first lady Betty Ford, rode a horse-drawn carriage during their Mackinac visit.

What wasn't widely known at the time, Cawthorne said, was that the Secret Service insisted that a vehicle be quietly brought to the island, so it would be available in case of an emergency.

Cawthorne disclosed the backstory to the Ford visit amid a controversy over whether Vice President Mike Pence will observe the century-old Mackinac Island ban on motorized vehicles when he visits Saturday to address the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/09/20/mike-pence-mackinac-island-motorized-vehicle/2386562001/

There literally is a Simpsons GIF for everything. By the way, my mom is from Michigan. I’ve been to Mackinac Island, I’ve eaten and stayed at the Grand Hotel. This is what one might call, a sacrilege. I mean seriously, he fucked up. And if you want to see why cars have been banned on the island, take a look at this photo gallery.

Michiganders are furious over Vice President Mike Pence's motorcade on the historic Mackinac Island — and for good reason.

As a native Michigander, Mackinac Island holds a special place in my heart. The quaint town barred vehicles in 1898 over health concerns for the horses that live on the island. Natives tend to bike everywhere, or travel by horse-drawn carriage.

Today, the vehicle ban adds to the "old-school" feel of the area, along with its Victorian architecture and the presence of horse-drawn carriages.

Here are 12 photos that show exactly why Michiganders are so furious with Pence driving on Mackinac Island:
https://www.businessinsider.com/mackinac-island-photos-before-mike-pence-motorcade-2019-9

[font size="8"]Donald Trump
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Is there anything that @realDonaldTrump doesn’t make weird or creepy? Let’s show what happened when kids trick-or-treating stopped by Trump and Melania for a visit:

https://twitter.com/loganclarkhall/status/1189209790502834176

They can’t even hand out Halloween candy right! And if this whole thing can’t get any worse, take a look at how Trump celebrated Halloween. It seems like he literally turns everything he touches to shit, and makes it about himself. Because he can’t stop placating his ego, he’s resorting to having children do his work for him. Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen Barron lately? Oh I’m kidding. Really, sir, that’s the joke you choose to walk out on? OK fine. But really we shouldn’t be subjecting our children to this monster, if anything he should be kept very far away from kids after this stunt:

A Halloween party on Oct. 25 at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building featured candy, paper airplanes and — concerning for some attendees — a station where children were encouraged to help “Build the Wall” with their own personalized bricks.

Photos of the children’s mural with the paper wall were provided to Yahoo News.

The party, which took place inside the office building used by White House staff, included the families of executive-branch employees and VIP guests inside and outside government. Even though many of the attendees were members of President Trump’s administration, not everyone thought the Halloween game was a treat.

“Horrified. We were horrified,” said a person who was there and requested anonymity to avoid professional retaliation.

The Eisenhower Executive Office Building stands across from the White House and houses a large portion of the West Wing support staff and is home to the vice president’s ceremonial office. The “Build the Wall” mural was on the first floor, outside the speechwriter’s office and next to the office of digital strategy and featured red paper bricks, each bearing the name of a child.
https://news.yahoo.com/children-were-told-to-build-the-wall-at-white-house-halloween-party-153024720.html

Oh come on, this is the Donald J. Trump administration - if you're expecting someone who's kind, compassionate, and caring, you're in the wrong White House! But you know what? Let’s show the wall that kids built:

Now… don’t boo! I know that’s going to be your first instinct. But really don’t do it. Because rather than boo the wall, it’s time to start laughing at it. Because on Monday, Trump made the insane claim that the rebar being used to put up his see-through wall on the Mexican border was “impenetrable”. And which I never want to hear Trump use the word “penetrate” ever again. But that said, this happened:

President Donald Trump promised that a wall on the border would radically change undocumented immigration and customs enforcement. But it turns out newly built sections of the president’s wall aren’t as sturdy as he promised: Smugglers have been using a commercial saw to cut through it, according to the Washington Post.

Smuggling people and goods into the US is a profitable industry for criminal organizations, which is why they are motivated to innovate when it comes to breaching barriers. Of late, smugglers have reportedly been cutting through the wall — which is made of steel bollards that are partially filled with concrete — to make gaps large enough for people and goods to pass through.

To do so, smugglers are reportedly using a reciprocating saw that can be bought for as little as $100. The tool can cut through the wall’s steel and concrete in minutes when fitted with the appropriate blades, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have said.

After cutting the steel bollards, smugglers have taken to returning them to their original positions in hope of reusing the passage without being detected by border officials.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/2/20945336/trump-border-wall-smugglers-saw-us-mexico

I’m pretty sure that was Trump’s original intent with the wall! But in reality all it takes to cut through it is a $99 circular saw at Home Depot. Is that in the same section where they sell tiki torches? Anyway switching gears, congratulations to the Washington Nationals on winning their first World Series in franchise history. Houston Astros, you had a good run and you can rest assured that you don’t have to eat cheeseburgers with Trump . Because this happened:

Will someone please get the U.S. Marine Band off the internet?

The country's premier musicians have taken their skills down a notch, performing the world's most annoying jingle Baby Shark for the Washington Nationals during the team's White House visit. And that's far from the most unexpected stunt that happened when the World Series winners graced the South Lawn on Monday.

Not every National chose to head to the White House, giving either personal or political reasons for skipping the celebration with President Trump. But Kurt Suzuki was more than happy to be there. When Trump asked him to come up and say a few words, the catcher put on a MAGA hat, threw up his hands in a Trump-like manner, and unexpectedly participated in a Titanic reenactment with the president.

Paired with Ryan Zimmerman's thank you to Trump for "continuing to make America the greatest country to live in the world," the fan base that had booed Trump at a Nationals home game wasn't too happy. But politics aside, the most disturbing yet unfortunately memorable part of the event happened when the Marine Band broke out its rendition of Baby Shark. Kathryn Krawczyk
https://theweek.com/speedreads/876306/lot-weird-things-happened-nationals-white-house-visit

Great use of the Marine Corps Marching Band by the way. I mean come on, you have the Marine Corps Marching Band playing fucking Baby Shark. Did Trump think that song was about him? Donny Trump do do do do do do, Donny Trump do do do do do, Donny Trump! That is kind of catchy. But there is some good news, while Kurt Suzuki and Ryan Zimmerman were wearing MAGA hats and trading high fives with Trump, there were a lot of Nationals players who declined to visit:

The Washington Nationals celebrated winning the World Series with a trip to the White House, and while several players felt the love, others didn't attend.

From the 25-man World Series roster, there were seven Nats players missing from the celebration: Anthony Rendon, Sean Doolittle, Victor Robles, Michael Taylor, Joe Ross, Javy Guerra and Wander Suero.

Reasons were not given for the absence of most of the players, though Doolittle cited "divisive rhetoric" from the administration in his explanation to the Washington Post; Guerra said he was preparing for his wedding on Saturday.

Manager Davey Martinez, General Manager Mike Rizzo and the Lerner family were all in attendance, though no one from the Lerner family stood up with the team.

President Trump shared a moment with Kurt Suzuki, when he highlighted the catcher's game-ending, three-run home run against the Mets back in September. Suzuki approached the podium, put on a 'Make America Great Again' hat, and President Trump gave him a hug.
https://www.wusa9.com/article/sports/mlb/some-nationals-players-didnt-attend-white-house-celebration/65-9fdf47ec-deff-4268-9bab-cd95ff359b59

[font size="8"]Top 10 Investigates: Inside Fruitport High
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From: Idiots #7-11

It’s time to investigate beyond the headlines! This is Top 10 Investigates!

Mass shootings are at an all time high. There have been over 200 this year and we’re only in the 9th month of the calendar year 2019. As such, mass shooting hysteria has been at an all time high. Which makes sense – nobody wants to die needlessly. And since banning guns flat out, or voluntarily disarming in this country is taboo subject matter, thanks to those in the National Rifle Association, new extremes are being taken to prevent what should normally be something that people shouldn’t have to worry about, but thanks to mass shootings America is resorting to extreme measures in the name of protection and safety. One such is the controversial $50 million building that will become Michigan’s Fruitport High School. It’s being designed with mass shootings in mind.

Curved hallways, protective "wing walls," impact-resistant windows, doors that lock with a touch of a smartphone.

These are some of the design elements Fruitport High School in western Michigan's Muskegon County will implement in its new building, set to open summer 2021.

Fruitport Community Schools Superintendent Bob Szymoniak said the measures, which were supplemented by a $404,707 grant from Michigan State Police, can potentially save lives in an active shooter situation.

"So often, we feel like we’re going to be hapless victims – that there’s nothing that we can do until after it (a shooting) happens," he said. "But what I’m learning is there’s a lot we can do on the front end."
Illustrations of concrete wing walls in the new Fruitport High School building. The walls are designed to allow for students to take cover and to cut down the line of sight of an active shooter.

Szymoniak said the idea to design the new building with non-traditional safety measures came after a group of parents in the community advocated for a new high school building to replace the one built in the 1950s. It was agreed that a new facility will be built around the old one, and to do this, the hallways had to be curved.
https://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2019/09/06/fruitport-high-school-michigan-active-shooters/2213687001/

So, since banning guns is out of the question, constructing a $50 million school that resembles something of a correctional facility is just one of many possibilities. But is it really safe? Is having all this extra technology really going to help in the long run or is just a temporary solution to an even greater problem? Well the greater problem is guns but it’s much more complicated than that.

Engineers in World War I dug through the earth to build serpentine trenches borne from horrifically clear logic.

If enemy soldiers ever breached it, the zigzagging pattern would prevent them from shooting in a straight line down the length of the trench — leaving only a relative few exposed to gunfire or shrapnel.

That concept has been reinvigorated a century later, in a sense, for a western Michigan high school, to dampen the killing potential of a mass shooter.

A $48 million major construction project at Fruitport High School will add curved hallways to reduce a gunman’s range, jutting barriers to provide cover and egress, and meticulously spaced classrooms that can lock on demand and hide students in the corner, out of a killer’s sight.

“If I go to FPH and I want to be an active shooter, I’m going in knowing I have reduced sightlines,” Fruitport Superintendent Bob Szymoniak told The Washington Post about the curved hallways. “It has reduced his ability to do harm.”

The major overhaul of an existing building was driven by the ubiquity of mass shootings in the United States, Szymoniak said, citing the El Paso killings at a Walmart this month, along with notorious school shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/08/22/new-high-school-will-have-sleek-classrooms-places-hide-mass-shooter/

Let’s examine the keyword in that sentence there – “reduced”. That does not mean “completely eliminated”. There’s no guarantee that a school designed to prevent mass shootings would actually do so, especially if you give away the floor plans via the Washington Post article! It’s almost like they’re inviting it. But really what kind of generation are we creating when we can expect more of this and are actually inviting it?

The K-12 team at TowerPinkster is aiming to physically slow down school shooters through its $48-million renovation and addition to Fruitport High School in Western Michigan. The 189,822-square-foot project recently garnered national headlines because of its push to enhance safety within the 64-year-old institution, which previously featured narrow corridors and cramped gathering spaces.

TowerPinkster, an architecture, engineering, and interiors firm with expertise in educational spaces, worked with the National Institute of Crime Prevention to learn the most effective ways to secure the school’s campus, which is slated to reopen in 2021. By building on 143,879 square feet of new space that connects to the older structure, the design team was able to create a two-story, curved academic wing designed to reduce the sightlines of a potentially armed attacker. Each teaching space was conceived with “shadow zones” along the door-side walls where students and faculty can hide without being seen. Shatter-proof safety film was specified to cover the few windows that do look into the classrooms. In addition, cement block “wing walls” were added to stick out next to all doors and act as further barriers.

Currently under construction, this build-out is the fourth attempt to update the school since its opening in 1963. TowerPinkster has envisioned a new set of offices, an auditorium, media center, woodshop, cafeteria, and common area for Fruitport HS as well. The entry experience is also changing. Located at the opposite end of the classroom corridors, and looking directly at the parking lot, a staff member at reception would be able to see anyone walking into the school at any given time. They would also have the ability to lock down all classrooms, the vestibule door to the office, and the office door to the school using a three-button system.
https://archpaper.com/2019/08/fruitport-high-school-towerpinkster-renovation/

And good luck remembering how that three button system works in a time of crisis like a mass shooting, where you might have literally a few seconds to think on your feet. It’s really scary to think that this is the new normal. That there’s nothing we can actually do about guns or mass shootings but to instead design ridiculously expensive buildings to prevent a few less casualties.

Amid reports indicating shootings are becoming more common at U.S. high schools, Bob Szymoniak says it's time to start designing school infrastructure to maximize the safety of students and staff.

Szymoniak is a school superintendent in west Michigan, where a $48-million US construction project is underway at Fruitport High School. The building is specially designed to make it harder for a potential shooter to get at their targets — and it's a type of school design that architects in other areas of the U.S. are starting to experiment with.

According to the Washington Post, more than 228,000 students have been exposed to gun violence since the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in 1999.

Classes will begin at Fruitport High School on Sept. 3, but the construction is not expected to be finished until 2021.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.5261253/the-new-norm-high-school-designed-to-protect-students-in-potential-mass-shooting-1.5260035

That’s it for Top 10 Investigates. Good day.

[font size="8"]Holy Shit
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From: Idiots #7-16

Gather around my fair brothers and sisters of Oregon State! It’s time to take a seat in the pew and pass the collection plate, for the Holy Church Of The Top 10 has convened and it’s time to remind you that the holiest among us are the most full of:

My fair congregation! Please, be seated! For the end of the world is upon us! Now, now, I should have lead you into it. But this is not that kind of church and this isn’t that kind of sermon. But if you listen to our brothers and sisters on the right, you would think that the world is going to systematically collapse and that we’re all going to die at any minute. Oh wait, we’re not gonna die. We’re going to get… raptured, at least half of us will get snapped up by the LAWRD JAYSUS. Wait, is he Thanos? Yeah I get those two stories confused. Now look, every religion has their own end of the world theories, even ours does! The difference is we don’t try to sell you $200,000 doomsday shelters.

Tucked into the the rolling Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, in a corner of the state brimming with churches and crosses in front yards, there is a hidden camp next to a quiet lake.

This private campsite is where over a thousand doomsday preppers gathered one weekend in late September for their annual Prepper Camp, a mash-up of a wilderness survival course-meets-summer camp for people who love guns, getting off grid, and God. The New York Times has referred to it as a "survivalist's Burning Man."

The group is made up mostly of gray-haired retirees and couples toting kids for a weekend away from home. They are nearly all white, staunchly conservative, and eager to share what they've learned about organic farming, raising livestock, tying ropes, fermenting cabbage, and filtering drinking water in the wild.

Yet this backwoods crowd makes it known that when the end of life as we know it arrives, whether by hurricane, flood, nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP), or exploding civil warfare, they won't be so friendly anymore. That's when they'll take to their predetermined secret locales, shoot would-be intruders, and do whatever it takes to protect their families and their stockpiled food.
https://www.insider.com/who-are-doomsday-preppers-preparing-for-the-apocalypse-2019-10

Oh wait, that was Terminator 3. So in North Carolina they are busy preparing for the apocalypse. But what are they preparing for? It’s not like there’s going to be a planet-destroying doomsday event any time soon. By the way if you want to see an actual doomsday cult in action, look no further than what happened at one of the hotels owned by the unholy, ungodly Dark One!

Last year’s American Priority conference held at a Marriott in Washington, D.C., was not very well attended, according to Politico. The conference’s organizer Alex Phillips said that security at the D.C. hotel was not as tight as the organizers would have liked.

“We didn’t find the area very hospitable and friendly to what we were trying to do,” said Phillips in an interview.

This year the group migrated south to the Trump property in Miami, which has been more receptive to its message, Phillips said. Of the hotels American Priority considered, Trump Doral was among the cheaper bids, he said.

This year’s preliminary agenda features a topic called “Is America in a Great Awakening?” — a slogan associated with the Internet conspiracy theory called QAnon, which alleges Trump is working with former special counsel Robert Mueller to take down a ring of “deep state” actors.

Phillips said the topic on the group’s website is a reference to a Trump speech in which the president called for a “great reawakening.”

QAnon was repeatedly referenced at the group’s 2018 event. Phillips likened followers of QAnon to people who are devoted to checking their horoscopes.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/tourism-cruises/article233307232.html

That’s not how this works! And if you support the Dark One at this point after everything that we’ve been through in the last 3 years, you are clearly ignorant as to how this works! Thank you, I will take that one! And by the way recent signs of the end of the world point to… a math equation. That’s right – it’s a doomsday equation that has sent the believers of the apocalypse trying to find out what it means. But really, don’t ask the guy who created it how it works!

Despite wild claims from the Daily Express, the world isn't going to come to an end today (April 23).

Quoting conspiracy theorist David Meade, the Express said a passage in the Bible, Revelations 12:1-2, "suggests the end of the world is imminent, with Earth set to be destroyed on April 23."

Right in the middle of the NBA playoffs? How rude.

The Bible passage (which of course doesn't specify April 23 as Doomsday), also signals the start of the Rapture and the second coming of Jesus Christ, Meade said.

He also said the position of the planets and constellations is another harbinger of doom, but Space.com said Meade's predicted sky arrangement is totally wrong.

The wild theory mentions the planet Nibiru, aka Planet X, will appear on April 23. Meade claims it will then pass the Earth in October, causing the start of the Rapture with huge volcanoes and volcanic eruptions due to its gravitational force.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/04/13/no-world-isnt-ending-later-month-we-hope/515516002/

Well, of course the Daily Express is where one turns to for quality conspiracy theory based journalism, and what is it about the ultra radical right wing and conspiracy theories? We might have to do a deep dive on that subject in a future edition. But really when it comes to predicting the apocalypse or doomsday theories, just don’t. Save your brain waves for something more productive!

Score another accomplishment for the Trump administration: An increase in Doomsday Preppers. In your face, those of you who say he can’t get anything done.

The Washington Post recently featured a West Virginia survivalist camp where 100 people have already bought memberships so they will be able to ride out any of a number of horrific disasters. Sort of like an apocalypse timeshare.

They say they are prepared for the worst — famine, disease, chemical warfare, the New York Yankees winning the World Series.

Fortitude Ranch has won the endorsement of David Jones, whom the Post calls a “celebrity prepper” (which strikes me as being like a “celebrity hermit”) for his podcasts and television appearances. Like others, he worries that “the veneer of civilization is very thin.” Funny. He says that like it’s a bad thing.

Drew Miller, who runs the camp, says in an emergency, it can hold up to 500 people crammed together in buried culverts, feeding off of a stock of canned and dried foodstuffs.
https://www.heraldmailmedia.com/opinion/tim_rowland/betting-on-doomsday/article_960d22f2-fe58-5345-96cd-dee7f788c618.html

There you have it folks, the Dark One has sparked an increase in people who are preparing for the end of days! As predicted in our Good Book and every other Good Book out there! Mass has ended, may you go in peace! That’s it this week for:

[font size="8"]Beating A Dead Horse: Support For Hong Kong
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From: Idiots #7-15

In what may be the most insane and direct case of life imitating art, one of my favorite shows, South Park, called out China on its’ censorship and got banned for it. So the question on the table here is, how far is too far when life imitates art? And what the hell is China doing? Both of those are perfectly good questions. Unless you’re living under a rock, you know that the people of Hong Kong are rising up and protesting non stop against the brutal Jianping regime. And that’s having people’s opinions on a particularly touchy subject like this. In fact the subject of whether or not you should be allowed to support China has been such a tricky subject that the Jianping regime has gone into some serious damage control on the subject.

As political tensions between Hong Kong protesters and the Chinese government grow, the animated comedy South Park once again finds itself at the heart of the conflict.

In the wake of reports that China has outright banned all South Park content from the Internet, protesters have found other ways of disseminating the episode "Band in China." As spotted by The Hollywood Reporter, protesters in Hong Kong's Sham Shui Po district screened the episode to an impromptu but very appreciative crowd.

While it's unknown who exactly organized the screening, THR writes, "the screening inspired considerable discussion on the online forums favored by the protest movement though. Many praised South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone as 'prophets,' and rare Western media figures willing to show 'strong backbone' in response to the Chinese government's efforts to stifle international free speech."

Word that China has completely banned South Park content first surfaced last week following the original airing of "Band in China." The episode repeatedly criticizes the Chinese government's crackdown on free speech, including referencing a current Internet meme comparing Chinese President Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh and showing Mickey Mouse censoring his fellow Disney and Marvel characters at China's behest. The series continued to reference the China controversy in its most recent episode, "Shots!!!"
https://nordic.ign.com/south-park-14213562/30083/news/south-park-band-in-china-episode-screened-in-hong-kong-streets-after-china-banned-series

By the way here’s what is awesome about Matt Stone and Trey Parker – the twisted minds behind South Park – is that they troll. And they troll pretty damn good. In fact if you want to see how you should apologize to a brutal dictator who has a fragile ego like Xi Jianping, just look no further than how they actually apologized.

The creators of "South Park" have issued an "apology" to China after the show's most recent episode mocked the country's censorship and Hollywood's reliance on its theatrical market for movies.

The official "South Park" Twitter account on Monday tweeted the comedic statement below:

OFFICIAL APOLOGY TO CHINA FROM TREY PARKER AND MATT STONE.

"Like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy. Xi doesn't look just like Winnie the Pooh at all. Tune into our 300th episode this Wednesday at 10! Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn's sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?"

The statement came after The Hollywood Reporter on Monday reported "South Park" has been banned from the Chinese internet and that videos, mentions, and discussion forums for the Comedy Central animated series had been removed or shut down.
https://www.businessinsider.com/south-park-creators-issue-mock-apology-to-china-after-ban-2019-10

Now here’s the thing. You don’t fuck with a dictator with a fragile ego like Xi Jianping. In fact we probably got the Top 10 banned from China as we were putting this edition together! And you know what? I don’t give a shit! And you want to know how fragile an ego Jianping has? Just look at what he did to DJ Zedd for simply liking a tweet about last week’s episode!

Zedd, a high-profile DJ and music producer, has been permanently banned from China for liking a tweet from “South Park’s” official account.

On Friday, Zedd tweeted about the ban, and CNBC verified the claim with his publicist on Saturday.

“This is true, yes, but we don’t have anymore info to give you at this time,” Adam Guest, senior entertainment publicist at U.K.-based SATELLITE414 agency, told CNBC. It’s unclear at the moment whether this means that Zedd has a travel ban to China. As of Saturday, his music was still available on Chinese music streaming site QQ Music.

“South Park” stirred up controversy in the world’s second-largest economy with an episode called “Band in China” which pokes fun at the country’s strict censorship regime and ridicules American firms doing business there.

Beijing responded by heavily censoring content related to “South Park” on search engines like Baidu and other online services.

The tweet that Zedd liked on Twitter was one celebrating “South Park’s” 300th episode.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/12/dj-zedd-banned-in-china-for-liking-a-south-park-tweet.html

Holy shit! If you’re a celebrity, you can now get banned from China for simply liking a tweet relating to the most recent South Park episode! Which is why we also liked that tweet! In fact we followed the official South Park feed! Now if you’re Xi Jianping, how do you react to South Park? Well, you delete the whole fucking show from your country. It’s not enough to ban South Park, he wants every single mention of South Park ever banned.

South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker hit back at China after the government scrubbed the show from the Chinese internet.
The episode, "Band in China" is a critique of how Hollywood shapes its content to avoid offending Chinese government censors.
"South Park" has never been afraid to be offensive, which is why the show now virtually no longer exists in China. Every clip, any online discussion from Chinese streaming services, social media and even fan pages have been deleted by the government, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Stone and Parker issued an apology on Monday after China's crackdown -- well, kind of.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/07/us/south-park-apology-chinese-internet-trnd/index.html

And by the way, South Park wasn’t the only one who got this kind of insane treatment and censorship from the Jianping regime. Look at what they did to the Houston Rockets. It’s not enough to just ban that person, they’re banning the whole team and the league. The Jianping regime is doing some serious damage control right now and we may all get fucked!

Basketball fans attend a match between the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers at Shenzhen, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Saturday. Photo: APBasketball fans attend a match between the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers at Shenzhen, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Saturday. Photo: AP
Basketball fans attend a match between the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and Los Angeles Lakers at Shenzhen, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Saturday. Photo: AP

Live broadcasts of the National Basketball Association’s preseason games have resumed in China – except for matches with the Houston Rockets – as Beijing cools its rhetoric on a controversial tweet by the team’s general manager in support of anti-government protesters in Hong Kong.

Tencent, the NBA’s exclusive digital partner in China, streamed two games live with commentators – Chicago Bulls vs Toronto Raptors and Maccabi Haifa vs Minnesota Timberwolves – on Monday morning after skipping live broadcasts of two exhibition games in China last week.

Games featuring the Houston Rockets, who are next on court on Wednesday, have been taken off the schedule. Tencent last week offered subscribers who chose the Houston Rockets as their preferred games to change to another team or be refunded.

Monday’s live broadcast came days after Tencent’s announcement that it would not broadcast two of the exhibition games in China, which took place last Thursday and Saturday, after league commissioner Adam Silver said the NBA supported Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s right to exercise free speech.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3032849/nba-games-return-china-screens-houston-rockets-not-included

[font size="8"]Dave Portnoy
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From: Idiots #7-10

This week’s This Fucking Guy is the CEO of a company that you may have heard of called Barstool Sports, and that’s Dave Portnoy. You know Barstool – the company that’s been fueling toxic masculinity and sports bro culture since 2016. And of course you know that as the year that Trump took over and everything went to shit. Which has made Dave Portnoy lots and lots of money. If you’re the CEO of a company like that, you might want to follow the first rule of social media and that’s don’t be a dick. Also, don’t say anything you will regret later. But Dave Portnoy pulled his best Trump impression last week, said something ridiculously stupid on social media, and may have jeopardized his empire in the process. So how did it happen?

David Rosenfeld, a labor lawyer and self-styled “paid troublemaker,” saw the tweets as good old-fashioned union busting. He went to work. His mission: extract an apology from the man who had threatened to fire “on the spot” any employee who so much as discussed unionizing at his company.

But Rosenfeld’s opponent, David Portnoy, the architect and provocateur in chief of the polemical and fratty media company Barstool Sports, was aggressively unapologetic. Rosenfeld is hoping the National Labor Relations Board, which is now investigating charges against Portnoy and Barstool, will change that.

On Tuesday, Portnoy posted his threat to Twitter, responding to a man offering assistance to Barstool employees who may be considering organizing.

“If you work for @barstoolsports and DM this man I will fire you on the spot,” Portnoy wrote.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the country, condemned Portnoy’s comments, warning him they likely violated the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, the landmark law laying out workers’ rights and encouraging collective bargaining.

Portnoy was unfazed – gleefully defiant, even. Responding on Twitter to a user who wrote “I hope they unionize,” Portnoy said, “Me too. Just so I can crush it and reassert my dominance.”
https://www.boston.com/news/national-news/2019/08/17/barstool-sports-founder-railed-against-unions-now-his-threats-are-under-investigation

Dude seriously, you’re the CEO of a company that thinks women flashing their boobs on camera is funny, not the dictator of a third world country. Seriously, Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duterte get to exert their dominance. You toss the beads out to women at the tailgate party at the Super Bowl. And the last thing that you want to do is attract the attention of the Feds. I mean you’re already number one on Roger Gooddell’s shit list, and if you’re on that list, who’s not on it? Well this might be strike 2 if things get worse for the brand.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on Tuesday criticized Dave Portnoy, the founder of sports blog Barstool Sports, after he threatened to fire any employee that was seeking advice on how to start a union.

In a tweet Monday, Portnoy criticized employees at The Ringer, a sports and culture website, for trying to unionize. Portnoy linked to an article he previously wrote in 2015 when Gawker writers tried to unionize.

"I hope and I pray that Barstool employees try to unionize," he wrote in the 2015 post. "I can’t tell you how much I want them to unionize. Just so I can smash their little union to smithereens. Nothing would please me more than to break it into a million little pieces."

Rafi Letzter, a staff writer for Live Science, replied to Portnoy's tweet on Tuesday, saying his inbox is open to Barstool writers who want advice on starting a union.

"If you work for @barstoolsports and DM this man I will fire you on the spot," Portnoy replied to the tweet.

Under the National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for companies to fire or discipline employees for being involved with or trying to create a union.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/08/13/aoc-slams-barstool-sports-founders-threat-fire-unionizing-workers/2003902001/

Shit, Dave, I could have told you that and I’m no expert on labor! You know we give Boston sports fans a hard time and well they kind of deserve it because the rest of the world has to put up with them. But egregious labor law violations aren’t the only thing troubling Barstool Sports. As I said they’re a site that is fueling toxic masculinity across the web and around the globe. And this definitely isn’t hurting things.

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy is punching back at his critics.

The sports and culture blog has been under scrutiny lately by press coverage describing it as promoting sexual harassment and a trolling culture.

In July, The Washington Post reported that Portnoy disparaged a female employee's appearance on his radio show. Then in September, The Daily Beast published a story titled, "Inside Barstool Sports' Culture of Online Hate: 'They Treat Sexual Harassment and Cyberbullying as a Game.'" The next day, New York Magazine published a story titled, "What Fresh Hell Is Barstool Sports?"

All three pieces detail how Portnoy's Barstool makes a business out of harassing women and others who criticize the site, enlists its fans to do the same, and refuses to back down.

As Portnoy told it, Barstool is just defending itself against a small group of passionate "keyboard warriors" with "moral superiority" who use social media to attack him and would love to see Barstool go out of business.

"We never throw the first punch," Portnoy told Business Insider. "I really don't turn the other cheek. So when I feel like I'm being attacked, I don't back down. The easiest thing to say is, 'I'm sorry.' We don't do that."
https://www.businessinsider.com/barstool-sports-dave-portnoy-responds-to-accusations-of-toxicity-and-misogyny-2018-12

If you think that egregious labor laws violations, toxic masculinity and some hardcore sexism would be enough to sink Barstool, think again! They take online hate to a whole new level. Wonder why your son or grandson turned out to be a Nazi who spends most of his days owning the n00bs? Well check his browser history – if you see Barstool Sports come up and he’s got a Steam account, you might want to sit down for a little chat.

The other week, Dave Portnoy, the founder and chief of content of the sports blog Barstool Sports, did what he and fans of his site always do: ratcheted up an online spat to a fever pitch, transforming their collective rage at a perceived enemy into content. Even if it meant leaning into the type of social-media harassment and misogyny that Barstool is infamous for.

This particular roiling conflict dates back to October 2017, when ESPN announced it would be bringing in two Barstool personalities, Eric “PFT Commenter” Sollenberger and Dan “Big Cat” Katz, as hosts of a televised version of their wildly popular Barstool podcast, Pardon My Take. Sam Ponder, the host of ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown, was less than thrilled.

She tweeted out screenshots of a 2014 Barstool blog post in which Portnoy called her a “BIBLE THUMPING FREAK” whose primary job requirement was to “make men hard.” In a podcast that same week, Portnoy went on a rant while Katz egged him on, calling Ponder a “fucking slut” who should “sex it up and be slutty” instead of talking about being a working mother. ESPN canceled the TV show, Barstool Van Talk, after one episode, thanks in part to an internal pushback by more than a few ESPN employees, according to Sports Illustrated.

On Sept. 11, Ponder added a new allegation: Portnoy had said in a video that her daughter should have been aborted. Further, she claimed to have never wanted the network to pull the plug and was willing to make an appearance on their now-canceled show. Portnoy vehemently denies ever having made the abortion comment—though he and Katz admit they made disparaging remarks about Ponder’s daughter—and both Katz and Sollenberger insist Ponder had no interest in speaking with them and very much wanted their show gone.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-barstool-sports-culture-of-online-hate-they-treat-sexual-harassment-and-cyberbullying-as-a-game

And to think that ESPN almost gave this guy two hours a day to say whatever he wanted! And if he hates women and anyone else that much, imagine what he’d do to his employees! That’s Dave Portnoy, this week’s:

[font size="8"]People Are Dumb
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From: Idiots #7-17

Hit it!

Of course you know by now that people are people and people are dumb. And this segment incorporates all walks of stupid – dumb criminals, dumb lawyers, dumb politicians, dumb students, you name it! And I also love these stories because they are all completely crazy and there’s enough of them that we could do these until the end of time! I want to start with this story out of Iowa – and yeah if you’re a guy you should *NEVER* expose your junk in public, no matter what the circumstances. But I love the excuse here – even though it’s not a good one, is that this guy who did the dirty deed claims that he saw it in a porno movie!

An Iowa man charged with exposing himself to a woman at a variety store told cops that he “had seen someone do it in a pornographic film” and thought the victim, who was accompanied by her minor son, might “respond to it sexually,” according to a court filing.

Nicholas Sheehy, 23, was arrested Friday afternoon at the Dollar General in Ottumwa, a city about 85 miles southeast of Des Moines. Sheehy, an Ottumwa resident, was charged with indecent exposure, a serious misdemeanor.

When confronted by police, Sheehy “admitted that he ‘whipped it out’ referring to his penis,” a criminal complaint alleges. “The defendant stated that he had seen someone do it in a pornographic film and believed that the female patron may respond to it sexually.”

Instead, the woman contacted cops, who reported that Sheehy “admitted that he exposed himself for sexual gratification.”
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/dollar-general-creep-639524

Next up – we go to *ANOTHER* story out of Iowa. Man, Iowa is bringing the crazy extra hard lately aren’t they? Well I mean there’s not much to do there so you got to get creative. But when you start turning to crime, a fresh coat of paint is definitely not the way that you want to hide the crime, and well, he got caught red handed. Or is it green handed? I’m not sure.

Police said a Dubuque man stole a trailer from a business and painted it black to keep anyone from recognizing it while he used it.

Malik J. Patterson, 20, of 17262 John Deere Road, No. 11, was arrested Wednesday morning on warrants charging second-degree theft and obstructing prosecution.

Police on Sept. 4 responded to Bicycle World, 1072 Central Ave., to investigate a report of a theft.

Business owner Parrish C. Marugg said he left the shop Sept. 3 and left his trailer, valued at $2,000, in the parking lot, according to court documents. When he returned the following morning, it was gone.
https://www.telegraphherald.com/news/tri-state/article_582e5118-2cd5-5d7d-b5b4-d79b9395264a.html?utm_source=thonline&utm_medium=click_source&utm_campaign=homepage_top_news_card_more_stories

That is a good question! Next up – we go to Las Vegas! I am really surprised that this doesn’t happen more often because people tend to go crazy when they start losing money at casinos. Maybe not so much on the Vegas Strip, but there’s plenty of off strip action happening all around the gambling paradise known as Vegas. But if you start losing money, it’s your own damn fault. Don’t blame the casino for it!

Police say a woman who was angered when she was kicked out of a Las Vegas-area casino intentionally drove her motorhome into the building, injuring a custodian.

North Las Vegas Police spokesman Eric Leavitt says the 50-year-old woman was ejected from the Cannery casino Friday morning and drove her Winnebago motorhome into the building.

Leavitt says the woman hit a 66-year-old custodial worker who was outside the building. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports the worker was critically injured but is expected to survive.

Leavitt told KVVU-TV that the woman kept hitting the gas and her vehicle was stuck in the building’s entrance. Employees had to remove the woman to get her to stop.
https://kwwl.com/news/national-news-from-the-associated-press/2019/10/25/woman-drives-motorhome-into-casino-after-shes-kicked-out/

Next up we go to Minneapolis! Yeah the meth industry attracts some extremely strange people to it, not to mention some incredibly armed and extremely dangerous people to it. But last week we brought you that story about When Standing Your Ground Goes Wrong. Well, do 18th century cannons fall under the controversial Stand Your Ground law?

A Dassel couple is facing weapons and drug charges after authorities seized more than 50 grams of methamphetamine and more than a dozen weapons from their home, including a functioning cannon.

Bret Bruce Wakefield, 59, and Ramona Jean Wakefield, 56, are facing one count each of first-degree sale of a controlled substance, first-degree possession of a controlled substance and firearm possession.

According to the complaint, CEE-VI Drug and Gang Task Force agents served a search warrant Monday at the couple’s home on the 17000 block of Highway 15 South. Upon arrival, they immediately located the couple and had them detained while completing their sweep of the residence.

With a broader search of the property, agents recovered 12 firearms and a functioning cannon.
https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2019/10/22/dassel-couple-found-in-possession-of-drugs-weapons-including-working-cannon/

Next up - we cant get out of here without talking about America’s most penis shaped state, the great state of Florida. The Sunshine State always brings it every week, and we do want to thank the @Florida_Man Twitter account for keeping us up to date on these stories. While I do love Florida Man stories, I also love Doomsday Prepper stories, and none is more prepper than this, but really don’t build your doomsday shelter from stolen parts! That never ends well!

A Florida man preparing for the end of the world is under investigation for stealing vehicles and building a "doomsday bunker" in his backyard.

They found the trailer at the man's home, where he had apparently been stockpiling stolen vehicles and burying them in the backyard to create an underground shelter.

Though the man reportedly told police he did not have a prediction for when the world would end, chances are he wouldn't have survived the end times in his makeshift shelter even if he had gotten away with building it.

"A trailer is not structurally sound," Craig Holland, the city's development-services director, told the Orlando Sentinel. "I don't think it would have protected him from much."
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/florida-man-stole-trailers-food-truck-planned-bury-doomsday-bunker-police-article-1.1157841

That is a good point sir! And by the way that was a weird Google Image search! Finally this week this might be one of my favorite Florida Man stories in a while. Yeah so Florida Man was caught inside a Target store defiling stuffed animals, and… Olaf from Frozen. This is real! This happened! I laughed so hard when I first saw this story and well I had to include it. And the sad thing is they had to put Olaf out to pasture after this. And I’ll never hear “Let It Go” in the same way ever again!

A Florida Man yesterday sexually assaulted a pair of “large stuffed animal toys” inside a Target store, according to police who arrested the fiend on a criminal mischief charge.

As detailed in a criminal complaint, Cody Christopher Meader, 20, entered the retailer around 2 PM Tuesday and approached a display of merchandise featuring characters from the Disney film “Frozen.”

Meader, seen at right, selected a “large Olaf stuffed animal” and proceeded to place it on the floor of the Target in Pinellas Park. He then began to “dry hump” the cinematic snowman “until he ejaculated on the merchandise,” a cop reported.

Meader returned the soiled Olaf back to the display before entering the toy department, where he “selected a large unicorn stuffed animal and began to ‘dry hump’ this item.”
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/bizarre/olaf-targeted-642935

That’s it this week for:

[font size="8"]What’s Up With Texas Pt 2: Visiting The Border
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This segment was originally supposed to air in Top 10 #7-2, but since that edition was cancelled at the last minute, we’re airing it now. Enjoy!

Texas has the 2nd most electoral votes in the country after California. This is due to the states’ sheer size and massive population. But the reason why we’re touring Texas is because for the first time since Eisenhower, Texas has a very real possibility of turning blue for the first time in over 60 years. So what could that do to the electorate? Well, it could make Florida’s votes irrelevant for one thing. So we decided to do this docuseries to tour the great state of Texas to find out what’s up? What makes this state so great? In Part 1 of our docuseries, we went to El Paso to hang out with the Beto O’Rourke campaign and we toured a facility that was housing immigrants. Yeah I.C.E. confiscated our cameras, unfortunately. But we’ve found towns and cities along the Texas border the border issue can be like a fine wine – tricky, convoluted but it can also unite people or divide them.

Most security experts agree that fencing is important to keeping order at the border, but, they emphasize, it is only one of many tools.

“A fence, standing alone, is not a strategy for controlling the border against illegal migration,” said Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under former President George W. Bush.

Bonner and other immigration experts say fencing is not meant to keep people out of the U.S. Instead, it is intended to slow undocumented immigrants down enough so that Border Patrol agents can apprehend them before they get to U.S. cities and blend into the larger population.

That’s why various types of fencing are used on different parts of the border, depending on a number of factors including terrain and proximity to cities.

Near urban areas, two layers of barriers can be particularly effective because Border Patrol agents can closely monitor the area and pick up migrants before they can cross the second fence.

Using the Pentagon funds, the Trump administration plans to build 55 new miles of secondary fencing, mostly near the border towns of Yuma, Arizona, and El Centro, California.

“In an area where once someone crosses, they disappear fast, [secondary fencing] is a huge tactical advantage,” said Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation.

Some of the pedestrian fencing that currently exists on the border was made from Vietnam-era helicopter landing mats, which is easier to cut, climb over or dig under than the “bollard style” 30-foot-tall steel fencing the Trump administration is using to replace it.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/trump-administration-is-promising-a-new-border-wall-the-reality-is-less-clear

Well let’s hope it doesn’t come to that! But let’s keep in mind the harsh reality of Trump’s proposed wall, and that is before we go into the heart of it, let’s show you just how insignificant the wall being proposed in El Centro is:

That’s pretty tiny compared to how large the border between the US and Mexico really is. With that in mind, we took a trip down the border in Texas. Our first stop took us to the city of Juarez, a town so close to the border that it shares roads and municipal utilities with the city of El Paso. And of course what we found there is way different than what the news media would have you believe.

Down a bumpy neighborhood road in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico – a crime-ridden city in the state of Chihuahua with more than 1 million people – sits a migrant shelter for women who’ve been trapped in Mexico under the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.

Under this policy, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials have been illegally sending certain asylum-seekers back to Mexico to await their immigration court hearings. When returned to Mexico, migrants generally find shelter in flimsy tents or are forced to sleep on the streets of overcrowded and unsafe border towns like Juárez, which lies across the bridge from El Paso, Texas.

Here, the few women who’ve found shelter in a house hidden from the outside world consider themselves lucky. Tens of thousands of migrants have not found safe or stable housing. Unlike most asylum-seekers sent back to Mexico, these women have a roof over their heads. There’s room to sleep. They’ve found safety in a shelter run by another woman who cares for and feeds them and their children. They thank God for these small blessings.

But the blessings do little to undo the impact the harsh policy has on their lives.
https://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/11/19/no-way-out-tales-border

Unfortunately there’s no wall or door for many of these refugees from Mexico and South America under this administration. So while touring Laredo – which we were heavily advised against, we managed to go down there, which was also heavily advised against. And that was just for the Texas side. But apparently the Trump administration wants to give you a border wall whether you want it or not. And that’s just the beginning of a long and very strange fight.

When David Acevedo attended a meeting with officials from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers in Webb County last month, he thought he would come away with more information about the Trump administration’s border security plans.

But Acevedo, whose family owns 180 acres of land near the Rio Grande in south Laredo, said the meeting only produced more questions about how the administration was going to move forward with plans it had for the swath of land that’s been in his family for generations.

“They didn’t tell us that they were doing a physical barrier,” he said. “They said, ‘It may be a wall, it may be that we just need lights, we’re going to put lighting up, it may be we just need a road.’”

The only thing he knew for sure was the administration wanted access to his land to conduct surveys and site samples for border security purposes. And in a letter dated Oct. 15, the government asked him to grant access for 18 months.

The government’s actions in Webb County are similar to the sporadic but hurried moves the administration is taking in the Rio Grande Valley as it fast-tracks construction of a border barrier ahead of the 2020 election. The administration moved ahead recently with construction of new barriers in the Rio Grande Valley, and NBC news reported last week that the administration is preparing court filings to seize more land in the area before the end of the month — without first telling landowners how much it will offer for their land.
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/11/21/texans-fight-government-plan-seize-land-border-wall/

I believe that’s what the Trump administrations’ intentions are with the wall, but apparently you can just paint over it and run really fast. But while our journey along the border was a long and frustrating one, with many times we got stopped with “Who are you?” and “What are you doing here?”, we did manage to talk to some actual freedom fighters. These people are actually fighting the drug cartels who are bringing the crime and drugs that Trump has talked so famously about. Yes, apparently the towns of Gary, Indiana, and the town of Laredo are now one.

One family is fighting a brutal battle against illegal drugs and cartels. Two brothers, separated by more than 1,300 miles, have one mission: find and stop deadly narcotics from hitting the streets.

Joe Garza is a Customs and Border Protection officer in Laredo, Texas. His brother Javier Garza is a Gary police corporal.

"I'm proud of what I do," said Javier Garza. "I'm proud of what he does. It's in our hearts."

Joe is with his team fighting drugs, guns, and people trafficking at the border with Mexico in Laredo. His younger brother Javier fights that same fight on the streets of Gary, Indiana. It's not an easy tas

"The amount of traffic we have for the port of Laredo is huge," Joe Garza said. "I mean it's huge. There's no way we can check everyone. But it something we're trying our best to stop."

There are four major bridges into Laredo from Mexico. Ten thousand people come by foot over the gateway to the America's Bridge every day. The other three bridges funnel thousands of vehicles to and from the border.
https://abc7chicago.com/from-gary-to-texas-brothers-battle-mexican-cartels-shipping-drugs-across-border/5681100/

[font size="4"]Next Week:[/font]

For part 3 of our “What’s Up With Texas” docuseries, we’re going to Austin, the capital of Texas and music capital of the US, to hopefully score an interview with Gov. Abbott, but we’ll probably get told to fuck right off. And we’re OK with that.

[font size="8"]And Now This:[/font]
[font size="8”]Sturgill Simpson[/font]

Ladies and gentlemen my next guest is country music’s anti-hero! His latest album is called “Sound And Fury”. Playing his song “Make Art, Not Friends”, give it up for Sturgill Simpson!
https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5d8d0e675d366d000838d1eb/1:1/w_320/sturgill_soundandfury.jpg

The Top 10 returns with a brand new edition live from Stanford next week, and our countdown to blowing up this crazy year that was 2019 commences! See you next week!

Credits

Host: Initech
Top 10 Conservative Idiots Recorded In Front Of Live Audience At: University Of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV
Special Thanks To: UNLV
Holy Shit Gospel Choir: Fremont St. Baptist Church Choir, Las Vegas, NV
Images: All images copyright belongs to respective copyright holders.
Videos: All videos copyright belongs to respective copyright holders
Articles: All article content copyright belongs to respective copyright holders
Writing: Top 10 Writing Department
Graphics: Top 10 Graphics Department
Research: Top 10 Research Department
Lighting & Stage Props: Top 10 Lighting Department
Legal: Top 10 Legal Department
Advertising: Top 10 Advertising Department
HR: Top 10 Human Resources Department
Initech’s Wardrobe Provided By: JAB Inc.
Wheel Of Corruption By: Studio 1 Stage Props, Burbank, CA
Sturgill Simpson Appears Courtesy Of: Elektra Records
Management: Initech Productions, CCC Management
Follow The Top 10 On Twitter at: @10Idiots
New! Follow The Holy Church Of The Top 10 On Twitter: @churchoftop10
Questions? Comments? Complaints? Hate mail? E-mail The Top 10 at: Top10ConIdiots@gmail.com

Initech Productions: Yes, We Got The Memo

November 20, 2019

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #7-20: Wheel Of Corruption Presents Hobbs & Shaw Edition

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #7-20: Wheel Of Corruption Presents Hobbs & Shaw Edition

Welcome back to the Top 10 Conservative Idiots! What’s up UC Berkeley? How you guys doing? You doing fucking good? Great! Can you believe that we have just 3 Top 10s left in 2019? And we will wrap everything up with a nice neat bow on it for our 2019 Year In Review edition on December 18th. But first we’ve got a lot of Top 10 news which will be unveiled on our… Best Of on the 27th. But since Christmas and New Year’s both fall on a Wednesday there will be no Best Of editions like we normally do, maybe a rerun or two. Do we have time for the thing? Of course we do, it’s my show. I make the rules, damn it! I mean despite what my producer says. So we’re beginning the home stretch of the regular NFL season and it’s time to talk playoffs. Do you have your Super Bowl plans yet? Well if you don’t and you’ve got some coin to blow, head over to Miami where our good friend Rob Gronkowski is throwing his first ever Gronk Beach Party! So let’s go over the options – the cheap tickets will run you $149 and can go anywhere to $499 plus you get open bar. Which is not too bad. Then you can throw in the meet & greet with Rob himself for $499. Oh sure I’ll take two! Now here’s where it gets weird, because of course you knew it was going to. so the VIP section ranges anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000. Like you can party at the Tiki Touchdown Table for $7500, or the Shake Your Tight End Table for $10K, or the Gronk Spike Table for $20K, or the Party Like A Gronk Star table for $30K, or you can get the whole “Ship” package for a mere $100K. Hey the alternative could be Trump’s party and you all know how excited they were to be there last year. I mean just look. OK that’s enough of the intro, but first John Oliver is back for the season finale and he reminds everyone why you shouldn’t fuck with the Census:

Hey everyone the famous Wheel Of Corruption is back for the last time this season!! Yay!!! Where do we begin this week? In the first slot this week is of course the guy who we currently call “president” and that’s Donald J. Trump. The impeachment hearings are not going well for him, especially on day 1 with Jim Jordan making a complete ass of himself. In the second slot this week is the White House (2) which is an absolute dumpster fire and they are not taking the impeachment trial very well. It will either be them or Trump but more likely Trump. Taking the 3rd slot this week is Stephen Miller and after Ilhan Omar puts in a request to the ACLU, the rumors are true and worse than we thought – Stephen Miller is indeed a white supremacist! For the 4th slot this week is Facebook (4). They are going hard trying to pass pro-conservative propaganda on controversial SCOTUS justice Brett Kavanaugh and silencing liberal voices on the subject. At slot #5 this week is our weekly investigative piece Top 10 Investigates (5) and this week the Center For Disease Control has issued a warning about bacteria-resistant superbugs that could possibly kill you! *cue horror music* At slot #6 this week is our weekly visit to the Holy Church Of The Top 10 in “Holy Shit” (6) and this week our resident pastor is on the ground in Houston as Kanye West takes his Sunday Sermon concept to Joel Osteen’s controversial Lakewood Church – and – wait for it – it’s being televised! Shocker, I know. In the 7th slot this week is “Beating A Dead Horse” (7) – was the CEO of Uber right to make his statement about the gruesome murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoogi? We’ll let you be the judge! At the #8 seed this week is a new edition of “NO!” – the State Of North Dakota is declaring war on a very serious meth problem in their state, but does anyone really want to be remembered as the face of crystal meth addiction? NO! In the number 9 (NEIN!!!) slot this week is a new People Are Dumb, because of course they are! And finally this week our 2020 voters’ guide “Keeping Up With The Candidates” (10) – with many candidates dropping out of the race at this point, why the hell is Michael Bloomberg just now announcing a run? We don’t need it, and billionaires are not your friends! Plus the palate cleanser this week for putting up with my bullshit – we have some live music from the legendary Alter Bridge! Buy their new album “Walk The Sky” or you’re no friend of this program! Enjoy! And as always don’t forget the key!

[div style="padding: 20px; background-color: #ffffff; border-radius: 10px; box-shadow: 0px 2px 4px 1px #aaa;"][div style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-weight: bold; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999; padding-bottom: 8px;"]

[font size="8"]Impeachment Trial Update
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Hey everyone say it with me: It’s time for the WHEEL OF CORRUPTION! YAY!!!!!

Of course you know the rules by now – I spin the wheel and we have to talk about whatever it lands on. Of course if it lands on the guacamole option, you know that it costs $1.50 extra. So here’s what is on the wheel this week:

- Guns
- Abortion
- Crime
- Poverty
- Elections
- Buy A Vowel
- Sex
- Clip Without Context
- Death
- Greed
- Spying
- Walls
- Food
- Elections
- The Border
- Donald Trump
- Clip Without Context
- Chance
- 5,000
- Bankrupt
- Community Chest
- Top 10 Investigates
- A Random Tweet
- Something Random In The News
- ‘Merica!
- Golf
- 10,000
- Morally Bankrupt
- Guacamole
- Clip Without Context
- Talk Shows
- Holy Shit
- Beating A Dead Horse
- This Fucking Guy
- How Is This Still A Thing?
- Intermission
- 15,000
- People Are Dumb
- Keeping Up With The Candidates
- I Need A Drink
- Infowars
- Go Directly To Jail
- T-Shirt Cannon
- Lightning Round
- Bonus Spin

This is the last Wheel Of Corruption edition for this season. But it will be back for next year! OK let’s get this party started! Spin that shit! And hey it’s A Random Tweet!

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1196159184431177729?s=20

To which I respond: “Where’s your sanity?”. Oh wait, he has none. Spin it again! And it lands on Donald Trump! Folks, I don’t need to remind you of how absolutely batshit crazy the impeachment trial is going, and the fact that Trump and his enablers like Steve Scalise and Alex Jones are trying to intimidate people means that the Dems are really getting under their skin. See, impeachment isn’t an instant fix like so many are clamoring for. Instead it’s a long burn, slow boiling process and there’s many layers to it, and it will take a long time before the dust settles. But one thing is certain is that the republicans haven’t read past the keyword “inquiry”.

Pelosi also defined the president's bribe: "The bribe is to grant or withhold military assistance in return for a public statement of a fake investigation into the elections. That's bribery."

Bribery, she noted, is "in the Constitution attached to the impeachment proceeding."

On Wednesday, testimony from a career diplomat at the first public hearings of the impeachment inquiry opened new questions about what the president knew about the campaign to pressure Ukraine and when he knew it.

Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, relayed an account by a member of his staff, who said he overheard the president asking about "the investigations" one day after the now-infamous July 25 call between Mr. Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, then the newly elected president of Ukraine.

Taylor testified that the staffer recently told him about a phone call he overheard between Mr. Trump and U.S. Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland in July, one day after Mr. Trump urged the Ukrainian president to "look into" the Bidens.
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-news/impeachment-hearings-testimony-bill-taylor-george-kent-ukraine-today-2019-11-14/

Yes, we can now add bribery to the growing list of crimes against Trump! As of right now it’s probably better to list the crimes he hasn’t committed. And really guys, can you shut up about George Soros already? Sheesh, that dead horse has been played out for the last 3 years. Even Trump used the 90 year old billionaire that conservatives think is a real life boogeyman. Give it a rest already!

Republicans and Donald Trump have sought to smear key witnesses in the impeachment inquiry against the president as having dual or mixed loyalties to the US, due to being born abroad.

The move has sparked condemnation as a bigoted tactic that has maligned career US diplomats and officials as being potentially disloyal to their adopted country due to not being born in America.

The attacks have focused on the Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, the National Security Council Ukraine expert Alexander Vindman, and the former White House Russia security expert Fiona Hill.

Trump called the Canadian-born Yovanovitch “bad news”. The British-born Hill told congressional investigators that accusations against Yovanovitch related to a “mishmash of conspiracy theories … an idea of an association between her and George Soros”.

Hill also said far-right conspiracy theories that she herself was a “Soros mole in the White House, of colluding with all kinds of enemies of the President, and, you know, of various improprieties” resurfaced after her deposition before the House intelligence committee was announced.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/17/trump-impeachment-inquiry-witnesses-vindman-yovanovitch

Very wrong, Cartman, I know hippies who drive BMWs. But seriously you can now add “witness intimidation via Twitter” to the growing list of impeachable offenses that Trump has committed, even on live TV. Really, there’s no bottom. There’s no line they won’t cross, except of course for touching the 2nd amendment, that’s the infallible word of god don’t you know. And even the actual former ambassador to the Ukraine thinks Trump is full of shit:

Ukrainian officials arrived at the White House on July 10 expecting something approaching normal. They were in Washington for a scheduled meeting with then-National Security Adviser John Bolton with a plan to propose a new path for U.S.-Ukrainian relations under the umbrella of energy and security cooperation. All seemed to go well—until U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland stepped in. “That’s when things really went off the rails,” one person in the room said.

It’s been widely noted in testimonies by multiple House impeachment witnesses that Sondland interrupted the conversation between Bolton and the Ukrainians when he suggested that the Kyiv officials open investigations into Hunter Biden and the gas company he worked for if they wanted President Volodymyr Zelensky to land a White House meeting with Donald Trump.

Bolton immediately cut the get-together short, witnesses said, in an attempt to save what had until then been a normal meeting. But what’s been less clear—until now—is what happened moments later, when Sondland guided the Ukrainians into the White House’s Ward Room. Three individuals familiar with the conversation described what happened next.

Sondland continued to not just relay, but demanded ferociously, that the Ukrainians open the Biden investigations, saying it was the only chance for Washington and Kyiv to develop any further meaningful relationship, two individuals with knowledge of Sondland’s overtures said.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/impeachment-hearings-when-gordon-sondland-stepped-in-things-went-really-off-the-rails

So that happened. This administration is so incompetent that calling them a “dumpster fire” is definitely understating the situation. And instead since this administration is so reactionary, the appropriate thing to do is to just sweep it under the rug. No really, the White House is in full “move along, nothing to see here, please disperse” territory.

President Trump's public schedule next week is designed to keep him distracted from the televised hearings — and to counterprogram Week 2 of those hearings.

The big picture: Trump's schedule for the coming week shows him governing, promoting U.S. jobs and highlighting the arts and pop culture.

On Tuesday, as Democrats question Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, Trump will be meeting with his Cabinet.
On Wednesday, as Democrats grill Trump megadonor turned EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, Trump will he visiting Apple's manufacturing plant in Texas.
And on Thursday, after Democrats question Fiona Hill, Trump will be presenting the national medals of arts and humanities.

The bottom line: Trump, who'll cap the week by welcoming college athletes, will have built-in opportunities to address the cameras at all of these events. If he shows discipline, he can convey that he is carrying out the range of duties of the presidency while Democrats are focused on impeachment. But if last week is any guide, that's a big if.
https://www.axios.com/trump-public-schedule-impeachment-hearings-10abcd73-b26c-4618-b264-82ad86a3566f.html

[font size="8"]Roger Stone
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Let’s give the wheel a good strong spin shall we? And it lands on… wait for it… oh hey it’s one of our patented clips without context!

Dude, seriously, you're on trial for colluding with Russia. You probably should at least switch to a booze that isn't, I don't know, made in Russia! Go with Beefeater Gin, it not only makes for a better martini, it also makes you look less guilty! Spin it again! And it lands on… crime! Folks, this is seriously one of the best things to happen this year, but Roger Stone is GUILTY!!!!! Oh that felt good to say that, he is guilty as shit! And that means that last week when we reported on Alex Jones’ attempt to harass the jurors (see: Idiots #7-19 ) didn’t fucking work. Thanks for playing, tell them what they’ve won, Johnny!

Roger Stone is guilty, and now his future might rest in Donald Trump’s hands.

A federal jury on Friday found the longtime Republican provocateur guilty on all charges for thwarting a House investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, opening up a political pandora’s box for a president already facing pressure from his conservative base to issue a pardon.

Stone’s fate was sealed after a trial that spanned just over a week, which concluded with unanimous guilty verdicts against Stone on five felony counts of lying to investigators, one count of obstructing a congressional probe and one count of witness tampering.

Stone stood and braced himself with his fingers on the counsel table as the seven guilty verdicts were read. He showed no visible reaction, but he put on his glasses to look at the jurors as the nine women and three men were then polled individually at the defense’s request to confirm their agreement with the verdicts.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/15/roger-stone-found-guilty-of-lying-to-congress-witness-tampering-071124

Damn right he’s guilty! Roger Stone can now go peddle his conspiracy theories to the wall of a jail cell and any other prisoners who might be listening. But what happens when a fellow conspiracy theorist joins the fray? Well you can expect the shit storm that’s already been brewing to become a Category 5, though their BFF Trump will definitely say that no such thing exists.

Roger Stone is precisely why 7.8% of Americans suffer from coulrophobia, or fear of clowns. You can add 100% of the jury in this case. Stone has insisted that what he does in politics is “performance art. Sometimes for its own sake.” However, this performance art seemed to work for not only its own sake, but for the sake of Stone, and ultimately Trump.

The most damaging was Stone’s warning to Randy Credico, who was called as a witness to speak to any effort of Stone's to obtain hacked emails from WikiLeaks. Referencing a character in “The Godfather: Part II," Stone told Credico to “Practice your Frank Pentangeli.” In the movie, Frank "Frankie Five Angels" Pentangeli committed suicide after lying to Congress to protect the mob.

The statement was vintage Stone: reckless, alarming, and, yes, entertaining. The problem with being a performance artist is when your performance is suggesting a criminal act.

Jones said that Stone was certain of his own demise before the verdict was returned. It was not hard to predict. Not only did Stone decline to testify but his team put forward a defense as opaque and convoluted as Stone himself.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/11/15/roger-stone-guilty-convicted-donald-trump-pardon-column/4204359002/

Seriously, this is like a Scorsese movie except everyone involved is an idiot. So if the president’s fixer is found guilty of crimes relating to the president, what does this mean? Well if you can guess that Trump is literally saying everything wrong about this trial that he possibly can, well, you win today’s “pretend to be shocked” award.

NBC News’ report added that Stone is scheduled to be sentenced in February, and he faces up to 20 years in prison.

Though Donald Trump was obviously not on trial in this case, the president was hardly on the periphery of the proceedings. Roger Stone is a longtime Trump ally who briefly worked for the future president’s campaign operation in 2015. Indeed, much of the case centered on Trump and Stone’s interactions between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign.

Both Steve Bannon and Rick Gates – two top officials from Trump’s political operation – testified in the trial, and prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky explicitly made the case that Stone’s crimes were motivated by his belief that “the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.”

And speaking of the Republican president, Trump responded to Stone’s conviction in a decidedly Trumpian way.

“So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come,” the president tweeted. “Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie?”

Trump added, “A double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country?”
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/following-roger-stones-conviction-trump-says-all-the-wrong-things

Seriously Trump wouldn’t know what a double standard is if it jumped up and bit him on the ass. These are rich old conservative white men here. They are the standard! But you know one person who we haven’t touched on in a while is our old Wikileaks friend Julian Assange, who has left the confines of the comfy Ecuadorian embassy in London (which he abused) and hasn’t been seen or heard from since, but he could be dragged back into the fray.

President Trump's friend and political adviser Roger Stone is set to go on trial Tuesday in a proceeding that could reveal just how close Trump world got to the Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Jury selection is scheduled to commence following months of unusual public silence from Stone, who has been gagged by the judge in his case following a flap this year over his posts on social media.

Stone pleaded not guilty in January after a grand jury in Washington, D.C., returned an indictment with one count of obstructing a proceeding, five counts of making false statements to Congress and one count of witness tampering — because prosecutors allege that he tried to persuade another witness to lie to Congress too.

Neither Stone nor any other Trump insider has been charged with colluding with Russia's interference in the 2016 election; former Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there wasn't enough evidence to bring a case of conspiracy.
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/05/776121411/roger-stone-trump-friend-and-alleged-tie-to-wikileaks-faces-trial-in-washington

[font size="8"]Stephen Miller
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Let’s spin the wheel and see where it lands shall we? Come on no whammy no whammy no whammy no whammy… stop!!! Oh it’s one of our patented clips without context!

I’m pretty sure that Congress is the one who started impeachment of Trump. But if you’re hearing demonic voices suggesting this, I suggest you go see a psychiatrist ASAP. Spin it again! And it lands on… racism! So racism is one of the cornerstones of the Donald J. Trump presidency, and there’s no one in the administration more racist than Stephen Miller. Don’t boo yet. Because New York Congresswoman and future star of the eventual telenovela made of this whole insane show, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a favorite target of Trump, put in an inquiry with the Southern Poverty Law Center about just how racist Stephen Miller is. And the results are not only not at all shocking, but way more horrifying than you could ever possibly imagine!

A cache of emails revealed this week in which White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, in the run-up to the 2016 election, shared articles and websites affiliated with white nationalism has disturbed officials working in the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department, who called the emails “sickening” and “proof” that Miller has been steering a racist immigration policy under President Trump.

The emails sent from Miller to editors of the far-right website Breitbart and obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center show Miller sharing a story from the white nationalist site VDare, pushing for Breitbart to write about a novel popular among white nationalists, and linking to a report detailing second-generation Muslims with the subject line “Huge Surge in US newborns named 'Mohammed.’”

The civil rights nonprofit said that after reviewing 900 emails, it was “unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.” In one such email chain, the SPLC said Miller directed Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh, who supplied the emails to the group, to aggregate information from American Renaissance, a white supremacist journal, for a story on crimes committed by nonwhite people.

“It’s sickening to know that someone with these viewpoints held a position of trust for a United States Senator," said one DHS official, referring to former senator and attorney general Jeff Sessions, "and now in the White House. Not that it wasn’t clear before — these emails just confirm what we all know. I’m disgusted that my venerable agency has turned into his personal tool for hate.”
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/stephen-miller-emails-dhs-officials-react-racism

I’m pretty sure that’s actual footage of Stephen Miller when he found out. But he really doesn’t look that far off from Hannibal Lecter. You know what? Forget about Hillary’s emails, I want to see Stephen Miller’s emails. After all, he’s going full Hitler, and you never, ever go full Hitler. So really just how racist is Stephen Miller? Well he’s pretty damn racist if you ask us!

White House adviser Stephen Miller on Sunday pushed back against those who believe President Donald Trump is a racist or is engaging in racist rhetoric, arguing the liberals use that label to censor their opponents.

"Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace listed several of Trump's statements that have been decried as racist, including his recent suggestion that four congresswomen of color "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came," his unsubstantiated claims that former President Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, his campaign announcement in which he said Mexicans "are rapists," his call for a "complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States," and his assertion that there were good people on "both sides" of a clash between white nationalists and counterprotesters at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"Why shouldn't someone see all of that as racist?" Wallace asked Miller.

"I think the term 'racist,' Chris, has become a label that is too often deployed by the left, Democrats in this country simply to try to silence and punish and suppress people they disagree with, speech that they don't want to hear," Miller said.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/21/chris-wallace-stephen-miller-trump-racism/1790299001/

Damn straight! Just how racist was it? Yes…. .HOW RACIST WAS IT??? You know what? Let us know in the comments how racist that was. What’s really scary about this is that this guy is in the White House making policies. And don’t get me started on how someone is actually agreeing to marry this complete psychopath. However, if Trump has his back, well, just remember that you can always judge a person by the company they keep!

When the Southern Poverty Law Center’s blog Hatewatch revealed on Tuesday that Stephen Miller had pushed racist—and explicitly white-nationalist—content over and over again in 2015 and 2016, President Donald Trump’s senior policy adviser didn’t need any reassurances from his boss or his colleagues that his job was safe. Practically everyone in the building already knew it.

“Stephen is not going anywhere,” a senior White House official said on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after the story started going viral. “The president has his back.”

Since then, six other senior Trump administration officials with knowledge of Miller’s standing with the president and top staffers have all individually told The Daily Beast that the story did not endanger Miller’s position, or change Trump’s favorable view of him. Two of them literally laughed at the mere suggestion that the Hatewatch exposé could have toppled or hobbled the top Trump adviser.

Katie McHugh, a disgraced former Breitbart staffer who provided Hatewatch with the trove of emails, told the blog that Miller had personally flagged for her in July 2015 an American Renaissance “article about crime statistics and race.” American Renaissance is a white-supremacist website beloved by fascists and alt-right adherents. McHugh added, “I responded in the affirmative because I had read it. Many of us [on the far-right] had read it. I remember being struck by the way he called it ‘AmRen,’ the nickname.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-can-push-racist-crap-but-the-president-has-his-back

Just a little bit? He’s a full blown white nationalist, and Trump has his back! Yes, I will repeat that – Trump has his back! While there’s been many, many firings in the Trump administration, the fact that Stephen Miller still has a job is astonishing. This guy is making policy. He is directly advising Trump on immigration policies. You don’t want a racist in charge of immigration policies. That’s where we get… well, you know.

Miller was appointed senior policy adviser to the Trump campaign in January 2016 and later joined President Donald Trump’s transition team. He currently advises the president on immigration policy and is credited with spearheading Trump’s hard-line efforts on border security.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., tweeted a petition demanding Miller’s resignation.

“Stephen Miller must resign. Now,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Each day we allow a white nationalist to be in charge of US immigration policy is a day where thousands of children & families lives are in danger.”

Other Democratic politicians made similar statements. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., said Miller needs to step down. Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro called Miller and Trump “a shame to our nation.” Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., tweeted that Trump should fire Miller immediately.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/democrats-call-stephen-miller-resign-after-leak-xenophobic-emails-n1081941

[font size="8"]Brett Kavanaugh
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Let’s give the wheel a good strong spin shall we? And it lands on… wait for it… NO!!!! A whammy!!!!

Spin it again. Sex! Once again, the most controversial justice sitting on the SCOTUS is no longer Clarence Thomas. Instead it’s Brett Kavanaugh. And in an instance of what one might consider to be extremely poor timing, Facebook – yeah you know that website that you use to hurl insults at your ex and find out which of your relatives has been posting angry diatribes against the government – bet you didn’t know it was Aunt Carol, did you? How could you, Aunt Carol? Facebook is owned by some predominantly right wing people. Led of course by Jessie Eisenberg impersonator Mark Zuckerberg. And I only assume that casting was because he shares the word “berg” in their last name. I’m getting carried away here. Facebook is courting Brett Kavanaugh by sponsoring the group he’s most commonly associated with – the Federalist Society. And it’s generating a lot of controversy. I mean a lot.

After hearing that Facebook is sponsoring a dinner Thursday night hosted by right-wing judicial advocacy group the Federalist Society honoring Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, progressive advocacy group Demand Justice launched an ad campaign targeted at the company's employees in Menlo Park, California.

Facebook is listed as a "Gold Circle" sponsor of the Antonin Scalia Memorial Dinner. Kavanaugh is set to speak at the event, an arrangement which Demand Justice said makes Facebook complicit in "the rehabbing of Brett Kavanaugh's reputation" after Christine Blasey Ford testified under oath in 2018 that the judge sexually assaulted her when they were in high school.

While today Kavanaugh enjoys a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, Demand Justice senior counsel Katie O'Connor said in a statement, "Dr. Blasey Ford remains unable to resume a normal life after bravely coming forward last year. You can claim to respect survivors of sexual assault or you can pay for a celebration of Brett Kavanaugh, but you can't do both."

Targeted web ads will reach Facebook employees on LinkedIn and cell phone banner ads will display on phones near Facebook's headquarters.
https://www.salon.com/2019/11/17/ad-campaign-condemns-facebooks-sponsorship-of-federalist-society-dinner-honoring-brett-kavanaugh_partner/

Yeah this is the real life equivalent of a guy making a poorly timed joke about a tragedy and the room turns silent, and he follows it up with “too soon?”. It’s no secret that Mark Zuckerberg has predominately conservative leanings, yet he gets grilled every day by Congress about the bizarre concept of “shadow banning” like he’s some sort of conservative boogeyman. And don’t get me started on that. So Kavanaugh gets a lifetime to SCOTUS while Dr. Ford is living in hiding and getting death threats every day. Makes sense. Makes even more sense when Elizabeth Warren is slamming this nonsense.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has continued in her rebukes of Facebook after the firm sponsored a conservative event where Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh spoke.

The presidential hopeful accused the tech giant of trying to charm Republican lawmakers—even accusing it of corruption—while the firm undergoes four separate government antitrust investigations.

Legislators and lawmakers at state and federal level have continued to examine Facebook's role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the company's head of mergers and acquisitions faced questions about its role in the $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in Capitol Hill this week.

Warren's comments came as reports spread that Facebook was a "gold circle" sponsor of the Federalist Society's annual Antonin Scalia memorial dinner in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.

"Facebook is spending millions lobbying the government as they face antitrust scrutiny," she said. "They're going on a charm offensive with Republican lawmakers. Now, they're sponsoring a din
https://www.newsweek.com/elizabeth-warren-facebook-federalist-society-brett-kavanaugh-corruption-1472004

Yeah seriously too soon. And the Trump train is a train you don’t want to be on. Trump Airlines went out of business and the SS Trumptanic has crashed into the iceberg. Speaking of which, this could be the iceberg for Facebook. Even Zuckerberg’s own employees are divided on this subject. Even after all the shit that the Trump admin has put us through, they still continue to divide us.

Facebook is sponsoring an event at which US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is speaking — a move that risks employee unrest, and that has sparked immediate protests from activist groups.

On Thursday, political newsletter Popular Information reported that Facebook will be a "gold sponsor" for an upcoming convention by conservative law group The Federalist Society, at which Kavanaugh will appear as the keynote speaker on Thursday.

After being nominated by President Trump, Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in October 2018 following a bitter political battle and multiple allegations of sexual misconduct were made against him, which he denied. The fight inflamed Facebook's largely-liberal employee base after Joel Kaplan, Facebook's VP of global public policy, appeared in the audience at the hearing in support of Kavanaugh. Kaplan previously worked at the White House under the George W. Bush administration, and he and Kavanaugh are personal friends.

Some employees were outraged, calling his appearance "inappropriate."
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-sponsors-federalist-society-event-brett-kavanaugh-speaker-2019-11

Yes it is sir and thank you for pointing that out. It is totally inappropriate. But thankfully at least we have advertising on our side. I mean it’s really sad when that’s your last line of defense, because let’s face it, nobody pays attention to the ads anymore. But even the ads are being critical of Brett Kavanaugh, at least somebody is!

An advocacy group is targeting Facebook employees with ads on LinkedIn, objecting to the company’s support of an event honoring Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh. The group, Demand Justice, has a clear message for employees: “Tell Facebook: stop funding the fight to normalize Brett Kavanaugh.”

Facebook is the only tech company listed as a “Gold Circle” sponsor for a Federalist Society event to be held in Washington, DC. On November 14th, Kavanaugh will give a speech at the Antonin Scalia memorial dinner as part of the group’s annual convention.

Other tech companies, such as Google, have sponsored Federalist Society events in the past, but Facebook has a complicated history with Kavanaugh. Last year, a company executive sat behind the then-Supreme Court nominee as he testified before Congress, attempting to rebut the allegations that he had sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when they were both in high school. Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, said he had known Kavanaugh for more than 20 years and considered the man a close friend.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/14/20963865/facebook-ads-brett-kavanaugh-federalist-society-employees

[font size="8"]Top 10 Investigates: Bacteria Resistant Super Bugs
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Now entering the spin cycle! No whammy no whammy no whammy no whammy… stop! Ah it’s another clip without context!

To which I say I don’t think Tom has seen a single episode of Gossip Girl! Spin it again! Hey it’s time for Top 10 Investigates! It’s time to investigate beyond the headlines. This is Top 10 Investigates!

The biggest threat to your personal safety isn’t Al-Qaeda or ISIS. It’s not terrorism. The biggest threat to your safety is germs. And recently these viruses have grown, mutated and evolved to the point where they are resistant to anti-bacteria agents. Because there’s not enough things that can kill you, we need more of them. The Center For Disease Control calls this phenomenon a “super bug”. And we can’t be the only ones afraid when the virus sounds like it could take on Mecha Godzilla. So just how deadly is the latest strain of superbugs that are infecting the masses? They are a lot deadlier than you might think, and something that you should be afraid of. Very afraid of.

A drug-resistant fungus infection called "a serious global health threat" by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been confirmed in Georgia for the first time. New federal health data was released this week about a dangerous, drug-resistant fungal infection that's risen in 14 states, including Georgia, over the past seven months. Cases of "Candida auris" are a sometimes fatal fungal infection that is emerging globally, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As of late October, one confirmed cases of the infection have been confirmed in Georgia.

New York has confirmed 388 cases of Candida auris infection, followed by 227 cases in Illinois and 137 cases in New Jersey. Nationwide, more than 800 cases have been confirmed, along with 30 probable cases.

A CDC report released on Wednesday placed Candida auris among five "superbugs" that are considered "urgent threats" to the United States, killing someone in the United States every 15 minutes. The same report says more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result.
https://patch.com/georgia/atlanta/deadly-superbug-case-confirmed-georgia-cdc

Yes, holy shit indeed. This could be a serious problem in the long run especially if there’s no drugs that can be developed prior to an outbreak of the disease. But it gets worse. Oh it gets so much worse. In fact the super bugs could kill as many as 35,000 people per year if not treated properly. And it’s not some post apocalyptic, head for the basement bunker level of fear mongering. This is something that you should prepare for now.

A new report has revealed that drug-resistant “superbugs” are deadlier than originally thought.

The new antibiotic resistance threats report comes from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and highlights the increased threat of these drug-resistant infections. According to the report, nearly 2.8 million people suffer infections from these “superbugs” every year.

Of those, 35,000 people die from these stronger infections.

The report was formulated by looking at bacteria and fungi, finding 21 different infections and categorizing them as “urgent threats,” “serious threats,” “concerning threats,” and “watch list.” However, it does not include parasites or viruses like influenza or HIV.

The results of the 2019 report are also higher than in the previous AR threat report published in 2013. It was found at the time that around 2 million people suffered from drug-resistant infections, with nearly 23,000 dying from said infections.

“Germs continue to spread and develop new types of resistance, and progress may be undermined by some community-associated infections that are on the rise,” the report says. “While the development of new treatments is one of these key actions, such investments must be coupled with dedicated efforts toward preventing infections in the first place, slowing the development of resistance through better antibiotic use, and stopping the spread of resistance when it does develop to protect American lives now and in the future.”
https://www.ibtimes.com/superbugs-rise-new-cdc-report-finds-threat-has-increased-previous-report-2013-2865723

Yes it is terrifying. Cue the horror music. In fact you might be asking “how deadly is this new strain of bacteria” that is infecting more than you can count? Well… HOW DEADLY IS IT? It is so deadly that it kills someone every 15 minutes. And you were expecting a punchline there, weren’t you? Well, unfortunately we got nothing. And it’s very difficult to put into words the seriousness of this potentially deadly problem.

Every 15 minutes, someone in the United States dies of a superbug that has learned to outsmart even our most sophisticated antibiotics, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That’s about 35,000 deaths each year from drug-resistant infections, according to the landmark report.

The report places five drug-resistant superbugs on the CDC’s “urgent threat” list — two more germs than were on the CDC’s list in 2013, the last time the agency issued a report on antibiotic resistance.

Genetic research shows germs have become especially adept at teaching each other how to outwit antibiotics.

“Some miracle drugs no longer perform miracles,” according to the report.

The report also notes that while superbug infections in hospitals are down, some infections caught elsewhere — anywhere in the community — have increased.
https://fox59.com/2019/11/16/cdc-drug-resistant-superbug-kills-someone-every-15-minutes/

That’s probably live footage of tests that they had in the lab when detecting this new killer strain of super bugs and there’s some good news. Is that while the CDC is stating that the infections may set medicine back a century or more, the good news is that less people are dying from it. And by less, we mean that’s the operative keyword there. There’s still people dying from these diseases but you’re less likely to now.

Drug-resistant “superbug” infections have been called a developing nightmare that could set medicine back a century, making conquered germs once again untreatable.

So there’s some surprising news in a report released Wednesday: U.S. superbug deaths appear to be going down.

About 36,000 Americans died from drug-resistant infections in 2017, down 18% from an estimated 44,000 in 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated. The decline is mainly attributed to an intense effort in hospitals to control the spread of particularly dangerous infections.

“We are pushing back in a battle we were losing,” said Michael Kirsch, a pharmacist at AdventHealth Tampa, a Florida hospital that has seen lower superbug infection rates. “I would not by any means declare success.”

Indeed, though deaths are going down, nonfatal infections grew nationally from 2.6 million in 2013 to 2.8 million in 2017. Some worrisome new germs are emerging. And superbugs are appearing much more often outside of hospitals, the report says.
https://www.wsfa.com/2019/11/13/us-superbug-infections-rising-deaths-are-falling/

That’s it this week for Top 10 Investigates. Good day.

[font size="8"]Holy Shit
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Let’s give the wheel a good strong spin shall we? And it lands on… no whammy no whammy no whammy… stop ! Intermission! I’ll just sit here and amuse myself with my phone. Go, play the music!

OK we’re back! Spin it again! Oh hey it’s time for Holy Shit!

Gather around my fair brothers and sisters of UC Berkeley! It’s time to take a seat in the pew and pass the collection plate, for the Holy Church Of The Top 10 has convened and it’s time to remind you that the holiest among us are the most full of:

My fair congregation! So we went to Houston over the weekend. I know we were just there, but we had to go back. Why? Well apparently Kanye is dabbling into the world of televangelism by meeting with prosperity gospel preacher Joel Osteen and his stadium filling Lakewood Church. Yes, we have talked a lot about Kanye’s journey into religion. But in the interest of being fair – we’re wondering if he’s doing it because he’s actually a man of GAWD or is it because his GAWD happens to be the almighty dollar? Well Ye definitely has a lot of studying to do before he is to be called a man of GAWD because he clearly doesn’t get the message.

Kanye West is opening up about his faith.

The Jesus Is King rapper, 42, stopped by pastor Joel Osteen‘s Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, on Sunday, where he spoke a little about his spiritual journey.

“I know that God’s been calling me for a long time and the devil’s been distracting me for a long time,” he said while standing with the pastor in Osteen’s megachurch.

“When I was in my lowest points, God was there with me and sending me visions and inspiring me, and I remember sitting in the hospital at UCLA after having a mental breakdown and there’s documentation of me drawing a church and [wanting to] start a church in the middle of Calabasas,” he added, referring to his 2016 hospitalization during his Saint Pablo tour.

West, who has spoken at length in recent months about his faith, went on to share despite “all of that arrogance and cockiness that y’all have seen from me” in the past, “God is now using him.”

“Because every time I stand up, I feel that I’m standing up and drawing a line in the sand and saying, ‘I’m here in service to God and no weapon formed against me shall prosper,’ ” he said.
https://people.com/music/kanye-west-calls-himself-greatest-artist-that-god-has-ever-created/

Yes, Ye, it’s pretty bad when JAYSUS does it! And I mean come on can you really call yourself a man of GAWD if you appear before a certified huckster like Joel Osteen? I mean come on it’s in the Good Book – well at least our Good Book anyway! JAYSUS doesn’t want your big sermon or rock opera, he just wants you to praise him. Can I get an amen??? And would anyone be surprised that there were long lines and the show started late? I am not.

The “greatest artist that God has ever created” — that would be Kanye West’s new, self-given title — brought his Sunday Service Experience to Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church on Sunday night.

After a morning chat with Osteen and his megachurch congregation — during which the rapper declared himself the “greatest artist...” — West returned with his gospel for a performance, which was also livestreamed, like every service is, on Facebook, YouTube, the church’s website and on Joel Osteen’s SiriusXM’s radio channel. While it started late, due to long entrance lines, he West did complete the show, which doesn’t always happen, and it was largely enjoyed.

The lines to get in were “ridiculous.” West appeared at the 11 a.m. service with Osteen for a conversation about faith and his fabulousness, at which wife Kim Kardashian was front and center. While he then had hours before his Sunday Service Experience performance was scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. that night, people began lining up right away in hopes of getting a good general admission seat to the show, leading to some chaos. There was a lot of griping about the lines on social media, and local news station KTRK said the issue had to do with the extra entry security, including each person going through a metal detector. Some concertgoers, still in line when the show started, streamed the show on their phones as they waited.

People rushed the venue to grab seats. Once inside, people raced to their seats, creating even more of a frenzy. We know that while the tickets were free, many were snatched up and resold — some for $300 each — and people clearly wanted to get their money’s worth.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/kanye-wests-sunday-service-at-joel-osteens-megachurch-has-a-chaotic-start-strong-finish-164910651.html

Yes, even the good LAWRD thinks this is ridiculous. Well I will give Ye the benefit of the doubt here in that his music is bringing people together. I mean who thought that dueling Texas reps from different parties would be sitting right next to each other front row center at Lakewood last Sunday? I mean that is something that the good LAWRD JAYSUS would actually want!

Who says bipartisanship doesn’t exist?

Texas Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Sheila Jackson Lee proved us wrong at Kanye West’s highly talked about Sunday Service at Lakewood Church in Houston, per Crenshaw’s Instagram.

[California ice cream shop milks D.C. impeachment hearings]

Crenshaw, a Republican, and Jackson Lee, a Democrat, appear next to each other in the front row — or close enough to feel any sweat (or holy water) that could fling from Kanye and his gospel choir.

Crenshaw shared videos on Instagram from his evening. Kanye’s wife Kim Kardashian West and daughter North briefly appear in one video, moving swiftly past the congressman to the side of the stage.

Ahead of the artist’s Sunday performance, he and his choir sang for inmates at two Houston jails, prompting praise from Crenshaw and Texas governor Greg Abbott.
https://www.rollcall.com/news/hoh/reps-dan-crenshaw-sheila-jackson-lee-front-row-kanye-wests-sunday-service

No sir, JAYSUS is the best! But that said I still don’t think that Ye quite gets the message that JAYSUS is trying to convey. No, we don’t need him running for president. And no, we definitely don’t need him changing his name to Christian Genius Billionaire. I mean really, if you have to tell me you’re all 3 of those things, especially in your own name, then my friend, you aren’t any of those things!

Kanye West was recently named one of the world's wealthiest hip hop artists by Forbes, with the publication estimating his net worth at $240 million. West, however, wants you to know he's not a millionaire — he's a billionaire. The rapper floated the idea of legally changing his name to "Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West," just so everyone knows it.

"Martin Luther King didn't get killed because he had a dream; he had something else he was gong to talk about. He talked about black empowerment, economic empowerment," West said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, according to The Hollywood Reporter (THR). "When I did Forbes, I showed them a $890 million receipt and they still didn't say 'billionaire.'"

"They don't want us to know that we can buy land; they don't want us to have the 100 percent ownership [that] I have at Yeezy," West continued, referring his fashion line, which Forbes did estimate would top $1.5 billion this year. "When people say it's crass to call yourself a billionaire, I say I might legally change my name to Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West for a year until y'all understand exactly what it is… It will be on the license plate."

If West does stick with the name change, we could be seeing "Christian Genius Billionaire Kanye West" on the 2024 presidential ballot. The Chicago native also addressed that prospect during the Fast Company talk. "When I run for president in 2024 —" he started, before laughter from the audience interrupted him. "What y'all laughing at? We would create so many jobs!"
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kanye-west-christian-genius-billionaire-wants-to-change-name-run-for-president-of-the-united-states-after-jesus-is-king/

Yes sir, this is fame! But no, I do not want to see a president calling himself “Christian Genius Billionaire” Kanye West. Even JAYSUS would be smiting him! Can I get an amen? Mass has ended, may you go in peace! That’s it this week for:

[font size="8"]Beating A Dead Horse: Uber Vs Khashoogi
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Hey everyone let’s give the wheel a good strong spin shall we? And it lands on… wait for it… oh hey it’s another one of our patented clips without context!

I’d be willing to go out on a limb here and say that these two have probably never actually read Dante’s Inferno, because I’m pretty sure that we’re living in hell now. Thank you! spin it again! Oh hey it’s time for Beating A Dead Horse!

You know we live in an unusual time where people will often times, shall we say, barf their brain, like what our president currently does on his Twitter feed. Except that the difference between your average citizen and @realDonaldTrump is, Trump says the most vicious shit imaginable and he does not apologize for any of it. Now here’s the thing – this is the year 2019 here. We have access to this thing called “social media”. And when you say something that might be misconstrued in a certain context, well, people get mad. Then you add social media, and people get really mad. Take for instance, Uber CEO, and I hope I’m pronouncing this correctly – Dara Khosrowshahi, or as Deadpool says I’m not even gonna attempt that. We’re all still trying to figure out how the gruesome state-sanctioned murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoogi was allowed to happen, and here’s one of those situations where you should probably think before you speak.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is being criticized for calling the murder of a Washington Post columnist "a mistake" and comparing it to the death of a pedestrian struck by one of the company's autonomous vehicles.

Khosrowshahi later said he regretted his comments, made during an interview with Axios on HBO. He tweeted Monday that there's no forgiving or forgetting what happened to the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and he was wrong to call it a mistake.

Critics say Khosrowshahi is downplaying Khashoggi's grisly murder to placate one of the company's biggest investors.

Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, known as The Public Investment Fund, holds about $1.9 billion worth of Uber stock, making it the company's fifth largest stakeholder. Its managing director, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, sits on Uber's board.

Officials with the U.S. and the United Nations suspect that Saudi Arabia's Prince Mohammed bin Salman played a role in Khashoggi's slaying. Prince Mohammed has said he takes full responsibility but denied ordering the killing, calling the slaying "a mistake" in an interview in September.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/uber-ceo-walks-back-saudi-170058996.html

Holy shit, indeed, sir! And yeah damn right it was a mistake. I mean do you see how much money Uber pulls in a year? You know how many customers you could lose with that kind of comment? Here’s the thing – the state-sanctioned murder of Jamal Khashoogi was not just a “mistake”. A mistake is drunk dialing Uber after a concert and coming home and discovering that your bill was $200 thanks to the surcharges, that is a fucking mistake! Believe me I’ve been there. No, this was a colossal fuck up, a state sanctioned murder and a total conspiracy to cover up exactly how horrifying it was. Just… what the fuck!

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is under fire for calling the murder of a Washington Post columnist a "mistake," despite his attempts to curb the damage from his comments.

Khosrowshahi, who also compared the slaying of Jamal Khashoggi to the death of a pedestrian hit by one of his company's autonomous vehicles, on Monday said he regretted the comments, made during an interview with Axios on HBO. He tweeted that there's no forgiving or forgetting what happened to the murdered journalist and he was wrong to call it a mistake.

Still, #BoycottUber began to trend Monday on Twitter, with some critics taking to social media to bash Khosrowshahi's words while suggesting that they were meant to downplay Khashoggi's grisly murder in order to mollify one of the company's largest investors.

Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, known as the Public Investment Fund, holds about $1.9 billion worth of Uber stock, making it the company's fifth largest stakeholder. Its managing director, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, sits on Uber's board.

"This is what happens when you're a greedy CEO and a murderous regime is your 5th largest shareholder," said one Twitter user in urging a boycott of the ride-hailing company.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boycott-uber-2019-faces-boycott-threats-after-ceo-calls-jamal-khashoggis-murder-a-mistake/

Actually, Kanye, yes, we are serious. And I love that the first response to something like this is always to boycott, because we’ve seen time and time again on this program just how well that works out. Because this is 2019 and everyone is looking for the quick fix which is, just go away. Here’s the thing though, you can’t make the government of the wealthiest, most powerful and most evil countries on earth simply disappear. Unless that is…

I mean seriously you know your country is evil when your capital city has a building in their skyline that looks like the Eye Of Sauron!

Well getting back on topic, those words could have egregious consequences for Uber:

"I said something in the moment I don't believe. Our investors have long known my views here & I'm sorry I wasn’t as clear on Axios."

Khashoggi's killing sparked a global uproar, tarnishing the image of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The CIA and some Western governments have said they believe the crown prince ordered Khashoggi's killing. Prince Mohammed has denied that but said he bore ultimate responsibility as the country's de facto leader.

Asked about the CIA's assessment of the crown prince's involvement, Khosrowshahi said: "I didn't read that part of the CIA report ... but I think from a Saudi perspective, they're just like any other shareholder."

Saudi sovereign wealth fund PIF acquired a 5% stake in Uber in 2016 worth $3.5 billion. Its chairman sits on the board.
https://news.yahoo.com/uber-ceo-says-wrong-call-165633499.html

Yeah seriously. I mean he wasn’t clear? That was a mistake. The state sanctioned murder of Khashoogi wasn’t a mistake. By the way in case you’re wondering what Uber’s real intentions were, the reason why Mr. I’m not even gonna attempt that, is in charge of Uber, it’s because their CEO decided to bail and profited very handsomely from Saudi investments following Khashoogi’s murder.

Uber co-founder’s newest startup received $400 million from Saudia Arabia’s PIF 11 months ago.
PIF’s investment in Uber is over $1 billion in the red since the IPO.
The report comes just over a year since the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Despite Uber’s poor showing, Saudi Arabia’s appetite for investing in U.S. startups shows no signs of waning with the country now adding a kitchen rental startup to its portfolio. This is despite the negative press the country received following the murder of Washington Post columnist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) invested $400 million in CloudKitchens in January. This makes the kitchen rental startup, which was formed by Uber founder Travis Kalanick, the earliest beneficiary of the cash-flush fund following the Khashoggi killing.

The startup is currently valued at around $5 billion. PIF’s investment in CloudKitchens now exceeds what Kalanick himself has put in ($300 million).
https://www.ccn.com/uber-founder-cut-400-million-deal-with-saudi-arabia-after-khashoggi-chopping/

[font size="8"]No: The Face Of Meth Addiction
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Let’s spin the wheel shall we? And it lands on… wait for it… Donald Trump.

Damn you auto correct!!! That happened. When I see Trump misspelling a word trending on Twitter, the first thing I can think of is that joke from the Simpsons where Homer tries to dial his phone only to hear “The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, press 1 now.” Spin it again! And it lands on… NO!

Meth is a hell of a drug. And – shocker – people can get addicted to it very easily. But does anyone want to be remembered as the face of meth addiction? That’s what the state of South Dakota is doing betting on an advertising campaign to bring awareness to the problem. Of course like most anti-drug awareness campaigns it only has the reverse effect in that it’s going to raise people’s self awareness of the drug itself. What? You mean we can inhale smoke that tastes like vanilla ice cream? Cool! And in case you’re wondering what I’m getting at, before we get into the meat of the story, let’s check out what happened when Florida Man’s brother, Arkansas Man, attempted to break into the meth business. And unlike Walter White, these guys didn’t exactly fail upwards.

Terry David Bateman, 45, and Bradley Allen Rowland, 40, both associate professors of chemistry at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, were taken into custody Friday afternoon, the sheriff's department said in a news release. They face charges of manufacturing methamphetamine and using drug paraphernalia.

A university science center was closed October 8 after someone reported a chemical odor, Tina Hall, the university's associate vice president of marketing and communications, said in a statement.

The building was reopened October 29 after the on-call environmental service completed remediation work that included air filtering systems and temporarily removed some windows to help ventilation, Hall said.

Hall would not elaborate on what was found following the report of a chemical odor, nor would she confirm whether the professors were suspected of making meth inside the school.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/16/us/arkansas-professors-arrested-meth/index.html

Come on, they haven’t seen Breaking Bad? I wonder which one of them is the one who knocks? But seriously these are the kind of people who inspired this campaign and why we need it. However, the ads aren’t exactly what one would call “flattering”. Let’s show one.

Oh not the football team come on, man! And kids, wouldn’t you know that meth isn’t exactly what one would call a “performance enhancer”? If anything it’s a performance hinder. But here’s how much that campaign is backfiring.

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem unveiled her state's new anti-drug campaign on Monday, but many are criticizing the program's name, "Meth. We're On It."

The Argus Leader reported that the state spent $449,000 on the program, which includes television advertising, billboards, posters and a website.

Noem released a video today where she introduces the campaign. In it, she says "South Dakota's meth crisis is growing at an alarming rate. It impacts every community in our state, and it threatens the success of the next generation" and asks South Dakotans to call a toll-free number to report meth-related behavior or people who need help getting off the drug."

The new campaign is only a part of Noem's attempt to address South Dakota's drug program. When she presented her state budget in January, the governor carved out $4.6 million towards anti-methamphetamine efforts.
https://www.newsweek.com/meth-were-it-south-dakota-campaign-1472505

Whoa, whoa, whoa. OK it’s cool. But really while drugs are a serious problem in the rural areas, is this something that we really need right now? When it comes to drugs, the biggest drugs circulating in the rural areas are meth and fentanyl. While most call fentanyl the deadliest drug in the world, it’s actually the meth that kills more. Both by use, and by collateral. I mean we’ve all seen Breaking Bad, right?

Fentanyl remains the deadliest drug in the United States. But in some areas of the country, methamphetamine kills more people.

A new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics found that fentanyl is the drug most commonly identified in fatal overdoses. In 2017, fentanyl was associated with 38.9% of all drug overdose deaths, an increase from 2016, when it was associated with 29% of all fatal overdoses. This is the second year that CDC analyzed fatal overdoses in this way.

In 2017, heroin was associated with 22.8% of all fatal overdoses. Cocaine, a stimulant, was involved in 21.3% and methamphetamine, also a stimulant, was involved in 13.3%.

Other drugs linked to overdose deaths were benzodiazepines; diphenhydramine, an antihistamine; and gabapentin, an anticonvulsant.
https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2019/10/25/fentanyl-is-the-deadliest-drug-in-the-us-but-in-some-places-meth-kills-more/

OK we get it, dude! Chill! But you got to hand it to social media though. Even though there’s some who feel they should be the face of meth, at least Twitter is showing that they at least have a sense of compassion. Which is weird because I usually get called a pedophile. Hey, this is 2019 for you, everyone is a pedophile or a boomer. OK boomer. Ah I’m rambling again.

"The mission of the campaign is to raise awareness – to get people talking about how they can be part of the solution and not just the problem," Noem told the Argus Leader Monday afternoon. "It is working."

South Dakota's meth crisis is "growing at an alarming rate" and affects every community in the state, Noem said in the campaign's public service announcement.

"This is our problem, and together, we need to get on it," Noem said.

Noem called the new campaign a "bold, innovative effort like the nation has never before seen."

In the coming weeks, South Dakotans will see the campaign in various media from TV to billboards to radio spots. The goal is to reach everyone in the state and educate them on signs of addiction, resources available to fight addiction and strategies to engage communities in recovery, Noem said.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/19/meth-were-it-south-dakota-campaign-working-kristi-noem-says/4236383002/

[font size="8"]People Are Dumb
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You are now entering the spin cycle! And it lands on… no whammy no whammy no whammy no whammy stop! Oh hey it’s another Clip Without Context!

Uh who are the enemies of humans, Pat, other humans? That’s about it really. Spin it again! it’s time for People Are Dumb! Hit it!

Of course you know by now that people are people and people are dumb. It’s been a while since we have done this feature. And there’s no shortage of idiots. I love this feature because I feel like you could take any one of these stories and interchange it with another story and you could create your own Mad Libs article based on it. “Florida Man Who Believes Earth Is Dumb Makes A Stupid Meth Rocket”. That might be a real headline, you don’t know! As Deadpool said, all great stories start with a gruesome murder, and what could be more gruesome than killing someone and then covering them with chili? I mean you got to feel bad for the chili in this case:

Jacob Stanton, 26, always claimed that he had been with victim Jacob Giarrusso the day of the murder, but had been dropped off at home and didn’t know who killed his friend.

The jury found that Stanton flew into a rage at Giarrusso’s grandmother’s house Nov, 18, 2017, in Salina, cracked his friend’s skull with a blunt object and then stabbed him numerous times, the kitchen knife blade breaking off in Giarrusso’s back.

Stanton then loaded his friend’s body into a car, along with other bloody items from the scene, and haphazardly threw grandmother’s chili -- which she left simmering in the kitchen -- across the bloody living room floor. He then drove the car to an apartment complex off Morgan Road and left it there.

It’s unclear why Stanton and Giarrusso, longtime friends who apparently did drugs together, ended up at odds.
https://www.syracuse.com/crime/2019/11/man-guilty-of-murdering-buddy-stuffing-him-in-trunk-and-covering-scene-with-chili.html

Oh poor Kevin, all he wanted was for his coworkers to get to know each other in the pot. Next up we go to France. And yes cue Weird Al here but this one is a total head scratcher. Or maybe not – I mean what are the odds that a guy who is an expert on the brutal French dictator Napoleon would wind up emulating his hero? Let’s just hope that trend doesn’t continue!

A well-known Russian historian has confessed to murdering his lover - a former student - his lawyer says, after he was found in a river with a backpack containing a woman's arms.

Oleg Sokolov, 63, was drunk and fell into the river as he tried to dispose of body parts, local media said.

Police then found the decapitated body of Anastasia Yeshchenko, 24, at his home.

Prof Sokolov is a Napoleon expert who has received France's Légion d'Honneur.

"He has admitted his guilt," his lawyer Alexander Pochuyev told AFP, adding that he regretted what he had done and was now cooperating.

Prof Sokolov reportedly told police that he killed his lover during an argument and then sawed off her head, arms and legs.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50365124

Next up - fast food. OK people what is it about the Popeye’s chicken sandwich? It’s a fucking piece of breaded chicken on a bun with some sauce and some pickles. Anyone can make it. Well in Wisconsin there were people who did, and I get workplace tensions. Nobody understands it more than I do, but there’s no need to fight! Don’t lay down fisticuffs over crappy fast food!

Seven workers are out of a job after a brawl at a Popeyes was caught on camera.

"It was just out of control. That was the first thing that went through my head, like this is out of control,” Richard Fourté said.

A quick trip to Popeyes turned into anything but quick for Fourté on Wednesday night. Trying to avoid the long line at the drive-thru, Fourté went inside.

"I said to myself, ‘Wow, there's a lot of people working here,’" he said.

A lot of people soon turned into a lot of chaos.

"I heard one of them yell, ‘It's a fight!’ They ran to the back by the grills, okay. Now, there was a fight back there. I didn't get that one on tape,” Fourté said.
https://www.wave3.com/2019/11/16/seven-popeyes-employees-were-fired-after-brawl-inside-restaurant/

Next up – we go to the State of Florida. The Sunshine State. America’s most penis-shaped state. What are they up to this week? Well we go to the city of Port Charlotte. And this is yet another one of those instances where you give an idiot a gun, don’t be surprised if they do something stupid with it.

A woman was shot by a homeowner after breaking into a house on Strasburg Drive in Port Charlotte, according to deputies.

Jessica Gutzler, 40, broke into the home around 7 p.m. then started fighting the homeowner, Robert Lafata.

During the fight, Lafata said he shot Gutzler in her butt.

He said Gutzler used to date one of his female friends.

Gutzler then ran away, but later called 911 asking for medical assistance.

Deputies found her near Strasburg Drive and Seaton Avenue, then took her to a to Lee Memorial as a trauma alert.

She was treated, released and booked by the Lee County Sheriff's Office on the out-of-county warrant from Charlotte.
https://www.nbc-2.com/story/41324669/florida-woman-breaks-into-port-charlotte-home-gets-shot-in-butt

Ah thank you minions! Finally this week, don’t you think for a minute that I’m not going to get out of here without mentioning Fartgate. Yes, this is definitely People Are Dumb fodder especially when you consider all the conspiracy theories that have arisen from the 11 second clip. Let’s roll it first.

https://twitter.com/seankent/status/1196621899146702848

Yup, that appears to be a fart. And let’s face it no matter who you are, we can all appreciate a good fart joke! And I love that they had to say that it wasn’t them. He who smelt it dealt it!

There is so much that divides us. Science has somehow become partisan; truth itself is up for debate; America is split down the middle when it comes to deciding whether or not literally asking a foreign leader to interfere in an election is an impeachable offense.

But there is one thing we can all agree on: Farts are funny.

And on Monday night, Twitter users from every point on the political spectrum were delighted to find themselves engrossed in #fartgate.

During a live cross on MSNBC's Hardball, where host Chris Matthews was discussing the latest impeachment hearing developments with Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic congressman and briefly a presidential candidate who made so little impact on the race that I typed his name as Tim even though I've been watching this video of him for the last 45 minutes.

As Swalwell was mid-sentence, there was a noise.
https://mashable.com/article/eric-swalwell-chris-matthews-fartgate-memes/

That’s it this week for:

[font size="8"]Keeping Up With The Candidates Ep. 15: Bloomberg WTF

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Let's spin the wheel one last time this week! Actually for the year since we only have 3 Top 10s left after this! And it lands on... Ph it's another clip without context!

No matter how many times I see that it's still funny. Spin it again! And hey it's time for Keeping Up With The Candidates!

Welcome back to our 2020 voters’ guide to the 2020 mother of all elections to end all elections that will decide the fate of the United States once and for all! Or maybe not. It will once again divide us and reassure that your creepy uncle voted for Trump again. In the last few weeks we’ve covered the 2019 election results which are very surprising, Georgia’s massive and terrifying voter purge, Beto O’Rourke’s controversial gun buyback program, and the Tulsi Gabbard SNAFU. This week – while the crowd in the candidates is thinning like the hair on your creepy uncle’s head, one guy has decided to throw his hat into the ring and that’s former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

If Michael Bloomberg is looking for evidence that a late entrant can win a presidential nomination, all he has to do is look back. About seven decades.

It happened in 1952, when Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson—after repeatedly refusing President Harry Truman's requests to jump into the race as Truman's Democratic successor—waited until the convention began to declare himself a candidate. Stevenson gave an acclaimed welcoming speech to delegates in Chicago, changed his mind, and won the nomination on the third ballot.

Bloomberg's surprise late entry into the 2020 race is a familiar story: The candidate who casts himself in the role of The Savior Who Is Waiting in the Wings is a quadrennial feature of presidential campaigns. For decades, Democrats and Republicans alike have persisted in looking beyond the field of those desperate few who have spent months, if not years, racking up frequent flier miles; eating indigestible food; begging for money; and crowding into coffee shops, union halls and living rooms trying to build a constituency. Right around this time of the cycle, these voters and pundits and party operatives reliably hit the panic button, certain that somewhere above the fray stands a candidate free of the now-obvious flaws that burden the rest of the field. It’s a yearning that invites comparison to the Groucho Marx quip about refusing to join any club that would have him as a member: “I refuse to support any candidate who overtly is seeking my vote.”

There’s one pesky fact about these late-entry candidacies: They never succeed. Only once have they even materially affected the outcome of a fight for the nomination.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/11/11/michael-bloomberg-2020-history-229913

That is a good question sir. Apparently nobody does because they are too focused on winning the election, and no one cares about a new candidate this late in the game! Even the biggest contenders of the 2020 election – Warren, Biden, and Sanders are all scoffing at this incredibly lame and very poorly timed move.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was campaigning with one of his key surrogates — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — in Iowa, told supporters, “You’re not going to buy this election by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on media in California.”

Ocasio-Cortez later told reporters, “They’ve got class solidarity. The billionaires are looking out for each other. They’re willing to transcend difference and background and even politics.”

And Sanders echoed that sentiment, saying, “Jeff Bezos, worth $150 billion, supporting Mike Bloomberg, whose worth only $50 billion, that’s real class solidarity.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has called for taxing assets over $1 billion at 6 percent, also skewered Bloomberg following reports of the call, writing on Twitter, “One billionaire calls another billionaire and asks him to run for president—I’m shocked!” She also linked to a wealth calculator showing how much billionaires would pay under her proposed wealth tax (there’s a button where visitors can choose to be Bloomberg, among others).
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/10/20957773/bloomberg-run-president-trump-sanders-warrent-poll

Thank you! You and me both! And there’s no way anyone is going to touch California, my state is pretty much a solid lock on the democratic candidate and that’s probably why the GOP hates us so much. So with that in mind, let’s talk about why Bloomberg shouldn’t be president. What is it with billionaires being creepy sex perverts? Bloomberg is a sex pervert, Epstein was a sex pervert, Trump is a sex pervert, Steve Wynn is a sex pervert, I could go on and on.

Now that Michael Bloomberg has entered the Democratic presidential primary, it’s worth imagining the 2020 general election that could come to pass: the Republican who said into a hot mic that he liked to grab women “by the pussy” versus the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Democrat who reportedly admitted he’d said, of multiple female employees, “I’d do her.”

Read Bloomberg’s collected comments about women and you’ll marvel at how presidential they sound by the standards of the 45th president. Like Donald Trump, the former New York City mayor has made repeated remarks about the physical appearance and sexual desirability of women in his workplace. Like Trump, Bloomberg has allegedly complained about employees getting pregnant. Like Trump, he’s bragged about his sexual escapades and dismissed women who’ve accused him of harassment as money-grubbing liars.

The “I’d do her” admission comes from a deposition in a sexual harassment suit filed by Sekiko Sakai Garrison, one of four women who filed harassment or discrimination suits against Bloomberg LP, the company founded by the former mayor, in 1996 and 1997. Garrison alleged that, when she told Bloomberg she was pregnant, he replied, “Kill it!” and grumbled that she was the 16th pregnant employee at the company. She also said Bloomberg and other company leaders made unwanted sexual overtures and engaged in regular sexual commentary about the women they worked with. After Garrison got engaged, she said, Bloomberg asked her of her fiancé, “What, is he that good in bed, or did your father pay him off to get rid of you?”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/11/michael-bloomberg-democratic-campaign-sexism.html

Good question, I know I don’t! And here’s why it might be doomed from the start. Michael Bloomberg may have stepped in it big time, and like diving on a giant pile of coins Scrooge McDuck style, he doesn’t know how to test the waters before diving in head first. And it’s going to spell disaster. It will be more Peter Griffin than Scrooge McDuck.

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire media mogul and former New York mayor, is preparing to join the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, The New York Times reported Thursday.

This comes eight months after the politically moderate, former Republican announced he would forgo a run for president in 2020.

Bloomberg wrote in a March 2019 op-ed that he'd rather spend the next 18 months working on issues like climate change and gun control than spend his time and money on a primary bid he said would be challenging.

"I've come to realize that I'm less interested in talking than doing," he wrote. "And I have concluded that, for now, the best way for me to help our country is by rolling up my sleeves and continuing to get work done."

Many Democrats believe Bloomberg's virtually unlimited campaign cash, loyal staffers, and philanthropic record would make him a formidable presidential candidate.
https://www.businessinsider.com/michael-bloomberg-reasons-he-didnt-run-for-president-2019-2

[font size="4"]Next Week:[/font]

We’re going to South Bend, Indiana where we’re going to hang with a surprising front runner of the campaign so far - Pete Buttigieg!

[font size="8"]And Now This:[/font]
[font size="8”]Alter Bridge[/font]

Ladies and gentlemen, returning to the show, my next guest is an awesome band out of Orlando, their latest album is called “Walk The Sky”. You can see them on tour this February. Playing their song “Pay No Mind”, give it up for Alter Bridge!

Thank you UC Berkeley! This was fun! We are off next week, we’ll be running a best of which will have our much talked about but will finally be seen Pt. 2 of our What’s Up With Texas docuseries plus we’re announcing our tour dates for season 8! We’re back on 12/4 with a new edition live from Stanford University! See you in two weeks! Happy Thanksgiving!

Credits

Host: Initech
Top 10 Conservative Idiots Recorded In Front Of Live Audience At: UC Berkeley Student Commons, Berkeley, CA
Special Thanks To: UC Berkeley
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Initech Productions: Yes, We Got The Memo

November 13, 2019

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #7-19: No Country For Old Snowflakes Edition

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #7-19: No Country For Old Snowflakes Edition

Welcome back to the Top 10 Conservative Idiots! What’s up Boise State? How are you guys doing? You doing fucking good? Great! We have just four more shows left here in this bizarre year that was 2019, and our university tour couldn’t have been more awesome. In fact we’re going to continue it for a part of next year. We will announce the dates and details in our Thanksgiving best of! Now do we have time for the thing? Of course we do! So I do love talking about music, and this week the Drake Curse which we have previously discussed may have reared its’ ugly head again. It was at the 2nd annual Camp Flog Gnaw festival at Dodger Stadium. What happened was headliner Frank Ocean bailed and couldn’t be at the show. So they brought out Drake and basically all hell broke loose. The festival organizers didn’t let the crowd know that Mr. Ocean couldn’t be there, and the people who paid to see him were not exactly what one would call having any of it. Oh yeah they booed and heckled him off stage. Can we show that video clip for a minute? Ha ha, I love the one guy who yells out “NO!”. But the guy who started the festival, Tyler The Creator, isn’t having any of it either. And this was the 2nd time they have done this festival. I can guess they won’t be back for a third? So Drake got booed and Trump Jr got heckled off stage by his own supporters. Ah, 2019 is a great year to be alive! OK that’s enough of the intro, we have a lot of idiocy to get to. But first John Oliver celebrates the dropping of his lawsuit from Bob Murray in the most John Oliver way possible!

&t=29s

Where do we begin this week? Well the election has come and gone and there’s no bigger sore loser than Kentucky’s now former governor Matt Bevin (1). Did he lose or is he going to try to steal the election from winner Andy Beshear? We will find out! In the second slot this week, is Alex Jones. Remember when Sean Hannity committed multiple felonies on the air last year? Well Alex Jones (2) is saying "hold my beer!". In the third slot this week, after Trump is taking on a viral challenge, we're going to tell you just how cringy it is by taking a look at the best (worst) winners of the #MAGACHALLENGE (3) so far and why it might single-handedly derail the first lady's #BeBest campaign! In the fourth slot this week, is Donald J. Trump (4). He went to the Alabama - LSU game and everywhere he goes, chaos is almost always guaranteed to follow, and we will also introduce you to his new BFF who is fighting for - wait for it - good and evil! Oh the irony! Taking the 5th slot this week is our weekly investigative piece, Top 10 Investigates (5), and is your airplane water safe to drink? After an alarming study was published, you might want to think twice before asking your flight attendant for that extra cup of water. At slot #6 is our weekly visit to the Holy Church Of The Top 10 in “Holy Shit” (6) and this week the Dark One’s spiritual advisor Paula White has become an official White House employee, and our resident pastor is here to remind you why that is terrifying! In slot #7 is our segment “Unpopular Opinions” (7) – and this might be one of the creepiest stories in a while as you don’t want to know why rapper T.I. accompanies his daughter on her annual visit to the OB-GYN. Taking the 8th slot is a new "How Is This Still A Thing" (8) and this week after a series of colossal disasters, we're going to find out why gender reveal parties are still a thing. In slot #9 (NEIN!!!) this week is “I Need A Drink” and we’re going to get drunk and talk about cell phones - so the band Tool is cracking down on cell phones in their shows, and if you use one, you might just be a tool yourself. Finally this week in our 2020 voters’ guide “Keeping Up With The Candidates”, the 2019 elections yielded some surprising and shocking results and we will go over some of the juicier ones! Plus we have some live music from one of the hottest bands in the world right now, the legendary The 1975! Enjoy! And as always don’t forget the key!

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[font size="8"]Matt Bevin
[br] [/font] [br]

Hey everyone! Great news! Kentucky finally gave one of the worst governors in the country, and one of the worst in the states’ history his much deserved pink slip! I think we can all agree that he had it coming. We previously profiled former Gov. Bevin in Idiots #4-16 in our segment “People Who Somehow Got Elected”. And he definitely doesn’t disappoint in that area because he has gone ultra hard Christian nationalist right, and his policies definitely reflect that. But now that California has elected its’ first democratic governor in several decades what does that mean for now outgoing governor Matt Bevin? Oh that’s right, he’s refusing to accept the loss!

by Gov. Matt Bevin. Jeff Faughender, Louisville Courier Journal

Conservative political activist Frank Simon, a longtime supporter of Gov. Matt Bevin, is sending robocalls asking Kentuckians to report suspicious activity or voter fraud to the State Board of Elections before Nov. 14 — the day of Bevin's requested recanvass.

Bevin finished 5,189 votes behind Democrat Andy Beshear in Tuesday's gubernatorial election but has refused to concede the race, requesting a recanvass of the vote, which is essentially a review of the vote totals in each county.

The governor has also made allegations of widespread voting irregularities and fraud on Election Day, but he hasn't provided any evidence to back up those claims.

According to a voicemail of the robocall sent to a Republican in Western Kentucky, Simon identifies himself and says, "If you or anyone you know has information regarding suspicious activity at polling locations, please report suspected voter fraud to the state department of elections by calling 502-573-7100."

He also asked that those calls to the State Board of Elections phone number take place by Nov. 13 — the day before each county board of elections conducts the recanvass.
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/elections/kentucky/2019/11/08/kentucky-governor-race-activists-robocall-seeks-voter-fraud-reports-before-recanvass/2528098001/

Yes the GOP is resorting to their age old tactic of accusing their opponent of – wait for it – if you had “voter fraud” on your Bingo card, you are the winner! Tell them what fabulous prizes they won, Johnny!!! So what does this mean for the Kentucky governor? Well aside from the obvious that Matt Bevin got “Art Of The Deal’d”, there’s plenty of reasons why you should be popping the champagne and celebrating. But then again let’s not blame Bevin’s loss on him, let’s blame it on oh yeah teachers!

A notable Kentucky politician has weighed in on the apparent defeat of Republican incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin to Democratic challenger Andy Beshear in last week's gubernatorial election.

Appearing on "Meet the Press" Sunday, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul said that the "teachers' anger came out" in the election and swung the election in favor of Beshear.

The Kentucky senator was referring to Bevin'slongstanding dispute with teachers across the commonwealth, which was sparked by the governor's overhaul of the pension system.

"I think the teachers were very unhappy," Paul said. &quot

Bevin) tried to fix the pension, but got crossways with the teachers. And I think the teachers' anger came out."

'I knew he was in big trouble': An inside look at 24 crazy hours in Bevin vs. Beshear

Paul said that Bevin "was trying to do the right thing" with pension overhaul. But the governor's lack of popularity with teachers runs much deeper than policy differences. Bevin repeatedly criticized educators who opposed his efforts and said teachers' decision to protest en masse at the state Capitol one day in April 2018 led to children being sexually assaulted or otherwise harmed.
https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/rand-paul/2019/11/11/rand-paul-teachers-anger-cost-bevin-kentucky-governor-election/2560458001/

Really. Rand? Really? He was trying to do the right thing? Then why do teachers hate his guts? Maybe you might want to take a look at yourself in the mirror. The people are turning on the republicans, everything since 2016 has been an absolute disaster. But that said, we’re going to take a look at what a recount could specifically entitle for Kentucky.

Bevin said he "wanted the process to be followed" under law before he made a concession, referring to unspecified "irregularities" that were "corroborated."

The first step in that process under Kentucky law, when it comes to election results that are contested, should be as familiar to Bevin as anyone else in the state, as he won a razor-thin victory in the Republican gubernatorial primary of 2015 by margin of just 83 votes over now Rep. James Comer.

The first step under Kentucky law is a recanvass of the vote, which is a review of the vote totals by each county clerk — counting absentee votes and checking printouts to make sure the numbers they transmitted to the State Board of Elections were correct.

State law allows for a recanvassing if a county clerk or a county board of elections notices a discrepancy, or if a candidate makes a written request to the secretary of state.

Comer requested a recanvass of the vote totals in that 2015 race, but the results were unchanged. He declined to request the next possible step in the process under Kentucky law — a formal recount that includes a physical examination of the ballots.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/11/05/bevin-beshear-recount-what-happens-next-in-kentucky-governor-race/4174894002/

Yeah so rather than going quietly, Bevin is choosing a much more opposite and extremely scary direction – that is, he’s not going quietly. And is instead choosing to potentially waste a ton of time and a ton of tax payer money just because he’s a conservative snowflake. This is where we’re at in 2019. And if this is any indication of what’s going to happen in 2020, our presidential election could potentially go this way no matter how unpopular Trump is! Shit, the last time this happened, it was in 1899 and the governor was killed, and Kentucky nearly descended into chaos. Yeah we can’t let Bevin get away with this.

Trailing in the vote tally for Kentucky's governorship by about 5,000 votes, incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin decided last week to play what's becoming a familiar card: He questioned the election's legitimacy.

"What we know is that there really are a number of significant irregularities," Bevin said Wednesday in front of the governor's mansion, "the specifics of which we're in the process of getting affidavits [about] — and other information that will help us to get a better understanding of what did or did not happen."

Bevin declined to take questions from reporters or give more specifics, other than saying that "we know there have been thousands of absentee ballots that were illegally counted."

No Kentucky election official, including Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, has corroborated that claim in the days since Bevin made it.

Critics and elections specialists are calling for Bevin to provide evidence of the dramatic claim or retract it.

"Gov. Bevin really needs to put up or shut up. Give us the evidence, or stop making these claims of voter fraud that have no evidence behind them," said Josh Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/777300611/skeptics-urge-bevin-to-show-proof-of-fraud-claims-warning-of-corrosive-effects

[font size="8"]Alex Jones
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Remember last year when Sean Hannity committed what might be one of the biggest news fails of the decade? He might have committed multiple felonies while on the air talking about his BFF Trump, and then cut away to a “sovereign citizen” in a shootout with Phoenix police (see: [link:https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210729356 | Idiots #5-1) . Well, last week, Alex Jones saw that and said “hold my beer”. Because now that Trump is facing an impeachment inquiry and investigation, Alex Jones is doing everything in his power to stop it. Oh yeah and he also has very little power since he got banned from social media and Youtube. But here’s what happened.

InfoWars conspiracy theorist and Roger Stone ally Alex Jones stepped up his attacks on the jury at Stone’s trial on Tuesday, broadcasting the name and face of a woman he claimed was a juror at the trial and calling her a “minion” of anti-Trump forces.

“We’ve got her name, and we’re going to release it,” Jones said on his InfoWars broadcast, before revealing a woman’s name and putting her face on the screen behind him.

Later in the broadcast, Jones and his attorney were joined by a person dressed as the Grim Reaper and wielding a sickle. Stone hosted a show broadcast on InfoWars until recently, and Jones and his employees have frequently attacked the judge in Stone’s case, Judge Amy Berman Jackson.

Jones’ attacks on the jury were based on reporting that the first potential juror in the case was a former Obama administration employee in the Office of Management and Budget whose husband works for the Department of Justice. But in his rush to attack the potential juror as a deep-state plant, Jones appears to have gotten the wrong person.

During his broadcast, Jones didn’t show a picture of the actual potential juror, who, despite his claims, didn’t make it onto the jury anyway. Instead, he showed a picture of another former OMB staffer who appears to be totally unrelated to the Stone trial.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/alex-jones-goes-on-tirade-against-roger-stone-jurors

Yeah that is batshit fucking crazy! Alex Jones was literally trying to out one of the jurors on the Roger Stone trial while on the air. Do these people not knowing what they are doing? Oh wait, they are trying to do everything wrong at this point. What Alex Jones did is jury tampering and possible intimidation, and both of those are serious crimes. He could possibly be going away for a long time. And in case you had this on the Bingo card – they blamed Obama for it! Really guys? Your schtick is getting old now.

A little crazy? Get two batshit insane conspiracy theorists in a room and this is the kind of thing that you come up with! Yeah let’s tamper a jury and then blame the previous president for it. I mean really, Alex Jones is a few minutes short of a news cycle. And by the way in case you’re wondering how the judge is responding to all of this, he’s responding about as well as the judge in My Cousin Vinnie.

Stone is known for his brash style and crass language. So it really shouldn’t be a surprise that his trial is already full of expletives and hissed threats.

The curse words came quickly as the government prosecutors started making their case, quoting extensively from Stone’s text messages and emails.

There was this Aug. 16, 2016, email Stone sent to Bannon about the prospect of more damaging documents released about the Clinton campaign, which Zelinsky read aloud in court: “I have an idea ... to save Trump’s ass.”

There was also this Oct. 3, 2016, text message exchange that an FBI agent on the witness stand helped narrate, illustrating Stone’s attempt to calm down Randy Credico, the therapy dog-toting liberal talk show host who thought Stone was using him to advance a false narrative.

“No one is using your name stop being an asshole,” Stone wrote in one message. Later on in the same exchange, Credico replied with a reference to a character from the Godfather movies, calling Hillary Clinton “a scary serious and dangerous person who will kill without conscious the same way Luca Brasi did.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/06/takeaways-roger-stone-court-067133

[font size="8"]MAGA Challenge
[br] [/font] [br]

As you all know right now, first lady Melania Trump has been on a sort of anti-bullying crusade that they have dubbed, in true Trump fashion “Be Best”. And as you can guess, in true Trump fashion, Be Best has had the reverse effect – people are getting meaner and nastier. But here’s my whole thing – you can’t run an anti-bullying program when you’re the biggest bully on the planet. That is what I would call the very definition of “hypocrisy”. Oh and it gets worse – so a Soundcloud rapper started a hashtag called the “MAGA Challenge”. By Trump retweeting this and inviting the winners to the White House, he single handedly killed his anti-bullying initiative. But then again that’s par for the course at this point.

In September, Bryson Gray, a rapper who performs under the name B. Surius, created the "#MAGAChallenge" to advertise his song "Black Not Democrat." The online campaign received President Donald Trump's seal of approval Friday, when he retweeted Gray's post along with an announcement that winners of the #MAGAChallenge will be invited to meet with him at the White House.

With the MAGA Challenge, Gray joins a long list of other would-be internet influencers who have tried to recreate the viral success of internet fads such as the Mannequin Challenge and the "In My Feelings" Challenge to spread their own content. As of November 8, the post has been retweeted more than 6,000 times.

The clip Gray posted to announce the challenge in September featured Gray wearing an oversized Make America Great Again hat and lip-syncing lyrics like "Why these white liberals try to tell me who I am?" and "I said I wasn't a Democrat; I lost a few friends."

To participate in the challenge, Gray told Trump supporters to rap over the beat and share their enthusiasm for the president. "I want y'all to your own rap to it too then tag me! Let's make liberals cry!" Gray captioned the post.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-shares-viral-magachallenge-inviting-winners-white-house-1470719

And that folks, is a lesson on how you can single handedly kill an entire First Lady campaign. Be best! But what are the ramifications of Trump placating to his base by promoting something that goes against what he’s supposed to stand for? Well, considering Trump doesn’t do much standing to begin with, there is going to be some serious problems with this. Don’t worry we’ll get to the best (or worst) in a minute.

President Trump is reportedly already in talks with Apprentice producer Mark Burnett to develop a post-presidency version of the show, but he’s not waiting until he leaves the White House to indulge his inner (outer) reality show host.

On Friday, Trump tweeted plans to announce winners of the #MAGACHALLENGE — a social media trend in which pro-Trump rappers film themselves spitting their affection for the president — and invite them to the White House to perform, effectively opening a fresh portal to hell by promoting what is soon to become one of the most cursed hashtags in Twitter’s history to his 66.6 million followers.

The #MAGACHALLENGE began with the September 14th tweet Trump quoted in his announcement, in which amateur rapper and noted Trump fan Bryson Gray calls for the president’s supporters to rhyme over his beat and “make liberals cry.” The hashtag blew up, with countless fans awkwardly rapping about their allegiance to Trump and hatred of liberals and the media. “I think the MAGA challenge is doing what everybody expected Kanye West to do for the [Trump] campaign,” Gray told the Daily Dot last month, adding that it is “easing the tensions in the culture and helping get the word out about Trump,” while proving “not all Trump voters and GOP are stick ups.”

Here’s one potential way to spend the next 7 minutes and 50 seconds of your life. You will not get that time back.

Even Isaiah Washington, the former Grey’s Anatomy actor who was fired for assaulting a coworker and using a homophobic slur, chimed in with what under an extremely loose definition of the term could be called “bars.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-magachallenge-rap-contest-910041/

By the way I’m not at all shocked that Isiah Washington is a MAGA supporter. Not at all. And I’d post a few videos from the MAGA challenge but we don’t want to support these people or give them any recognition. Ah fuck it, one tweet.

https://twitter.com/mjfree/status/1193614539218014209

OK maybe one more.

https://twitter.com/PaulLidicul/status/1193451916811894784

Because the garter belt really adds some class doesn’t it? And come on, how is it possible that rappers not named Kanye are in on this? I mean come on people, you’re on Soundcloud! You most likely recorded these videos in between serving angry customers lattes! I could do this all day. I’ve got time.

The post Trump’s #MAGAChallenge is absolute cringe appeared first on Consequence of Sound.

Already in talks for The Apprentice: White House, America’s reality show president is now encouraging his loyal followers to participate in the #MAGACHALLENGE.

The challenge was initially launched back in September by a pro-Trump rapper named Bryson Gray, who encouraged fellow MAGA thumpers to post rap videos in dedication to their supreme leader. “I want y’all to your own rap to it too then tag me!” Gray tweeted. “Lets make liberals cry!”

On Friday, Trump amplified the challenge by announcing that he’d be inviting the winners to perform at the White House.

As one might expect, the resulting videos are proving to be peak cringe. (Note: We’re still waiting for Kanye’s entry.)
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/trump-magachallenge-absolute-cringe-210458183.html

That is a good question sir! I mean this couldn’t possibly come at a worse time, especially when Trump is facing an impeachment trial and he got booed twice. Although if you’re really thinking of participating in the MAGA Challenge with the promise of a White House invitation, you might as well save the effort, because chances are good that Trump will stiff you on the win. Because this is not at all shocking, and you’ll be the one who winds up crying in the end!

On October 22, an email from Donald J. Trump’s campaign to its subscribers read, “I just saw the most recent list of Patriots who have contributed to win a trip to meet me in Chicago on October 28th, and I noticed you STILL haven’t entered,” then followed up the next day with an email that said, “We’d hate for you to miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have lunch with President Trump himself at his FAVORITE hotel in Chicago.” This, like 14 other promotions by the campaign since 2018, promised one lucky winner travel, accommodations, and a meal if they signed up for the contest (some posts screenshot in the newsletter suggested that campaign donations increase odds of winning).

And yet, in nearly two years of these promotions, there’s yet to be evidence that any of these promised meals actually happened. This according to the newsletter Popular Information and sleuth Judd Legum, the founder of ThinkProgress and former research director in 2008 for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He asked the Washington Post’s pool reporter, who was traveling with the president at the time, whether the president had made a stop to lunch with the winning contestant in Chicago. She asked the campaign and the White House, but did not receive an answer. Popular Information asked a campaign spokesperson as well and did not receive an answer.

Which means, you know, who knows! It’s possible the president went to these meals quietly. Maybe Trump grabbed a nice dinner at some little hole in the wall before he boarded his whirlybird and took to the sky. Trump must be over having his photo taken by now. You can almost hear him yell, “Can’t I get lunch with some random person in peace!” Yes, he seems like the type to really know when it’s time to stop mugging for the camera and focus on quality time. But campaigns demand these kinds of wholesome photo ops; even though Trump surely didn’t want a picture, a picture would have to be shared.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/11/donald-trump-meet-and-greet-contest

[font size="8"]Donald J. Trump
[br] [/font] [br]

Donald Trump is a man who needs an audience. He went to the World Series hoping for applause and admiration, and to steal the spotlight from the Nationals and Astros. Strike one! Then he went to UFC 244, hoping to earn admiration and applause. Strike two! What a snowflake at that. Come on, Trump, this isn’t no country for old snowflakes! So when your ego’s taken a massive hit like that, where do you go? I know – go to places where people love you. They still love you in Alabama, right? I mean they’re the state where Roy Moore is going up against Jeff Sessions. Yes, I did say Roy Moore, because he won’t go away. So what happened at the Alabama – LSU game? Oh wait, we have to tell you about the SNAFU from the Alabama Student Union first.

Alabama will not punish students who boo President Donald Trump at Saturday's game against LSU at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

In a statement Wednesday afternoon, the university's Student Government Association said an earlier message that threatened to revoke seating at future games for "organizations that engage in disruptive behavior" had been taken out of context.

"The SGA strongly affirms its belief in free speech and the rights of all students to express their opinions," the statement said. "Today’s report erroneously assigned a political context to a message meant only to remind students about heightened security and the consequences of altercations or other behaviors unbecoming of a University of Alabama student."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/sec/2019/11/04/donald-trump-attending-alabama-lsu-game-in-tuscaloosa/4159424002/

Yeah so the Alabama SGA threatened to revoke certain privileges for students who were going to protest Trump’s visit. I mean come on, Alabama! You should know that you don’t have to threaten frat boys – they’re a large part of Trump’s base! They only appointed one to SCOTUS last year! But that said wherever Trump goes, chaos is sure to follow. Just look at what happened to the world famous “Baby Trump” balloon.

Hoyt Deau Hutchinson, the Alabama man accused of slashing a Baby Trump balloon in Tuscaloosa last weekend, defended his actions during a Monday morning call to the “Rick & Bubba Show.”

Hutchinson is charged with felony first degree criminal mischief in relation to the slashing of the Trump balloon that was in town for the Alabama/LSU game and a presidential appearance by Donald Trump.

In his call to the syndicated program, Hutchinson, 32, said he drove past the Baby Trump balloon on Saturday and yelled at the protesters.

“I got so fired up when I rolled by the balloon and I rolled down the window and I said something to them and I figured they saw me. I figured only way I was going to get close enough to that balloon was to blend in. (I) went and bought me an Alabama shirt and walked up like I was walking to the game and like I was going to take a picture with (the Trump balloon).

“I was so fired up. I was shaking I was so mad,” he said.

When host Rick Burgess asked what his motivation for slashing the balloon, Hutchinson replied:

“I’m not young but I’m not old. I’m sort of middle aged. I feel like a lot of people my age don’t keep up with the news and politics the way they should. I watch the news every night. I watch Fox News every night. Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are my favorite two anchors.
https://www.al.com/news/2019/11/hoyt-hutchinson-alabama-baby-trump-balloon-stabber-calls-radio-show-says-it-was-good-vs-evil.html

Yeah BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Oh come on, Hutchinson, admit it – your motivation was dolla, dolla bills y’all! What a snowflake by the way. And if you think you’re on the “good side” of good vs evil, I would really advise that you don’t know what “good” or “evil” means. Because stabbing the Baby Trump balloon is the very definition of evil. And in case you weren’t surprised at all what Mr. Hutchinson’s motivation for doing this was, let’s all remember that Go Fund Me exists.

Supporters of Hoyt Hutchinson, an Alabama man who has gained widespread attention after he was charged in connection with the knifing of a “Baby Trump” balloon used to protest the president’s recent appearance in Alabama, have raised thousands of dollars to help him pay legal fees.

A GoFundMe created Saturday that asks for donations to help Hutchinson “pay legal fees and restitutions” for the balloon has so far raised more than $30,000. The goal for that fundraising page was initially set at $6,000.

Another GoFundMe that aimed to “FREE HOYT” shortly after his arrest raised more than $12,000 during the same period.

Hutchinson captured headlines Saturday after he was arrested and charged with felony first degree criminal mischief for allegedly stabbing a “Baby Trump” balloon that was being used by demonstrators in Tuscaloosa to protest Trump’s appearance at a college football game.

According to AL.com, a group of protesters had inflated the balloon for a demonstration at Monnish Park, which is located near the Alabama-LSU football game at Bryant-Denny Stadium that Trump was attending. The balloon was reportedly stabbed shortly before the game started.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/469816-people-raise-thousands-for-man-who-allegedly-stabbed-trump-baby

And boo to Go Fund Me too! The guy is a crook. And I mean really, considering that there’s evidence that Trump has to wear real diapers, that depiction of him as a baby isn’t really that far off. But there is some good news. And I mean besides that Alabama lost to LSU. That Go Fund Me has declared the money raised for this douchebag to be invalid, which means that he potentially lost out on thousands of dollars.

Fundraising efforts for Hoyt Hutchinson, the Alabama man who faces charges in connection to the stabbing of a Baby Trump balloon in Tuscaloosa last weekend, have topped $40,000.

The GoFundMe, started by Hutchinson, had raised $42,039 as of Monday night. Donations - ranging from $5 to $25 – came from 1,800 people, blowing away the original goal of $6,000. Any money that wasn’t used for legal fees would go towards Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign, Hutchinson said.

In a post on the page, Hutchinson said the page had been reported by “sympathizers” and he expected GoFundMe to issue refunds to donors and instead directed people to a Cash App address. GoFundMe confirmed to AL.com, however, that Hutchinson’s page was active and they were awaiting banking information to continue the processing.

The Facebook page of the People’s Motorcade, the organization that rents out the Baby Trump balloons, contains a link on how to report GoFundMe fraud. The link was posted Nov. 10, the day after the slashing.
https://www.al.com/news/2019/11/fundraiser-for-hoyt-hutchinson-alabama-man-who-stabbed-baby-trump-balloon-tops-42000.html

And by the way in case you’re wondering how the Roger Stone trial is going, it has been a colossal disaster from day one. In fact he’s taking this shit show on tour and even going so far as to sell his own merchandise to cover the nearly $3 million legal defense fund. This whole thing, calling it a “clown show” isn’t exactly making light of the situation. And you also got to feel sorry for clowns too, that’s unfair to them. Except maybe the Joker, because Roger Stone would make a great one.

Stone often brings merchandise, including T-shirts (“Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong) and autographed rocks (called “Roger Stones”), to his events. On Monday, he came only with a carton of one of his books, “Stone’s Rules How to Win at Politics, Business, and Style.” He sold most of them.

The Oktoberfest party, at the Josef & Joseph jewelry, watch and clock store on Federal Highway in Oakland Park, was sponsored by the Florida Atlantic Conservative Team, founded and run by three former officers of the Broward Republican Party.

It wasn’t a typical political event, although Stone offered some of his typically blunt political rhetoric during a nine-minute speech in which he praised Trump and assailed Trump critic Mitt Romney as a rat and a loser.

The famously opinionated political operative was quiet about one thing: his own case.

He’s under a strict gag order from the judge who will preside over his trial, and he declined to talk about the charges of witness tampering, obstruction and false statements about his interactions related to the release of stolen Democratic Party emails by WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. The charges were originally brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The trial is scheduled to begin Nov. 5.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-ne-roger-stone-trial-soon-legal-defense-20191029-mlnhduy2srdzzmwxohnlv4k4my-story.html

[font size="8"]Top 10 Investigates: Airplane Water
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Hey everyone it’s time to investigate beyond the headlines! This is Top 10 Investigates!

People say that cleanliness is right next to godliness. But when you’re traveling it’s hard to be both, and it’s especially hard to be both. Made even worse by the fact that a new study has shown how horrendously unclean airplanes really are. And if you’re frightened by that, you should be even more frightened by what you’re consuming while you’re onboard a flight. If you think that the water or food that you consume is safe, you might want to think twice before you consume food, water, or even wash your hands on your next flight. Of course there’s no alternative when you’re 30,000 feet in the air.

A study released in September found that the quality of drinking water on most American-based airlines is such that it is not even suitable for washing one’s hands, let alone drinking. Out of 11 major and 12 regional airlines, only four were deemed to have relatively safe and clean water.

Crazy Facts About Airplane Food

The Airline Water Study, a joint endeavor by Diet Detective and the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center, ranks the airlines, giving them a “Water Health Score” between 0 and 5, with 5 being the best score. An airline with a score of 3 or more is deemed to have water that is relatively safe and clean.

Of the major airlines in the United States, Alaska Airlines and Allegiant Airlines each scored 3.3, while Hawaiian Airlines received a score of 3.1. The only regional airline to pass standards was Maryland-based Piedmont Airlines, which scored 4.33. The major airlines with the worst scores were JetBlue and Spirit Airlines, each of which scored 1.

The Water Health Score was based on 10 different criteria, including positive E. coli and coliform water sample reports, fleet size, airline cooperation in answering water-quality questions and violations of the Aircraft Drinking Water Rule (ADWR), a federal regulation implemented in 2011 to ensure that airlines provide their flight crew and passengers with safe and reliable drinking water.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/airplane-water-bad-shouldn-t-212658498.html

Sadly Peter’s boomerang might be a safer alternative than what lurks in your airline’s potable water supply. And if you think that’s bad even the flight attendants don’t drink the tap water on planes. Of course it is tap water. You most likely bring that $7 bottle that you bought at the airport convenience store. But when the flight attendants know something we don’t, that is something to definitely be made aware of.

For the last decade, Dr. Charles Platkin has studied airline food. But he moved from solids to liquids by first examining a sample of coffee brewed on airplanes.

What he found wasn’t good, so to him, it made sense to keep looking.

“It was kind of natural for me to look at this,” Platkin, the director of the Hunter College New York City Food Policy Center, told Healthline. “When I peeled back the first layer, it didn’t smell so good.”

His most recent bout of sniffing around included how well most commercial airlines were adhering to a law known as the Aircraft Drinking Water Rule (ADWR).

As Platkin explains in his Airline Water Study 2019, ADWR has required all airlines to provide passengers and flight crew with safe drinking water since it was implemented in 2011.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-safe-is-the-water-coffee-tea-on-your-favorite-airline

Actually the martini is probably the cleanest thing on that flight. Oh but it gets worse, it’s not just a few airlines or single airplanes here and there. It’s every airplane that you’ve ever been on that has this level of dirtiness. Of course we’re not at all surprised that Spirit Airlines ranked among the worst for cleanliness since they’re pretty much the worst for just about everything.

While air travel is convenient, there's never any promise it will be particularly clean. Security checkpoint bins and airplane tray tables are notorious for harboring germs. In addition to being careful of what you touch, you need to be cautious about what you drink.

Air travelers have been warned in the past about the questionable water quality of major airlines. Owing to inconsistent water transport issues, storage methods, and lackadaisical monitoring, several studies and investigations—including a 2004 report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—have found bacterial contamination and even insect eggs lurking in liquid served to passengers in the form of coffee and tea.

Unfortunately, the problem doesn’t appear to be getting any better. A new study on the quality of airline tap water conducted by the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center found E. coli, coliform bacteria, and other unpleasantries across 11 commercial and 12 regional carriers.

The study ranked airlines according to water quality tests, and whether airlines were forthcoming in disclosing how they handle water transportation and storage for in-flight plumbing, using a scale of 1 to 5. While some airlines, like Alaska and Allegiant, scored well at 3.3, others (including JetBlue, Spirit, Delta, and United) ranked poorly in terms of delivering healthy, clean water, which is often sourced from local municipalities.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/602408/airplane-water-quality-getting-worse

Spirit Airlines: You’re here because there were no other flights available! But when you think about the quality of the food on the airline, it makes sense why the water on the airline might have something to do with how bad the food is. But before you order that cup of coffee or tea, or anything made with ice for that matter, you should consider that it was really surprising which airlines came out on top and which were the worst.

The ADWR, which went into effect in Oct. 2011, demands that airlines provide safe drinking water and requires them to routinely disinfect and flush aircraft water tanks, as well as test water samples for coliform bacteria. When airlines find coliform in water samples, they must test it again to determine if it contains E. coli and, if it does, shut off public access to the water system within 24 hours and disinfect and flush it out.

The Food Policy Center executive director and Diet Detective founder Charles Platkin believe the 24-hour requirement is too lax.

“Why not immediately? Pun intended, this just feels like a watered down version of what should be a regulation for airlines,” he told HuffPost.

While the study found that ADWR violations have decreased in recent years across all airlines, there’s a chance that this is due to a lack of enforcement by the EPA, which hasn’t issued many civil penalties in that time period.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/airline-water-quality_l_5d8152f7e4b03ec1bc96639b

That’s it this week for Top 10 Investigates. Good day.

[font size="8"]Holy Shit
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Gather around my fair brothers and sisters of Houston! It’s time to take a seat in the pew and pass the collection plate, for the Holy Church Of The Top 10 has convened and it’s time to remind you that the holiest among us are the most full of:

My fair congregation! This week we’re going to talk about how my fellow brothers and sisters on the right have somehow managed to infiltrate the White House. Despite the fact that we’re supposed to have separation of church and state. Which is something that I am a big fan and proponent of – which is why you’ll never see me running for office. I respect boundaries. But there are some people who do not respect boundaries. You know what? before we get into it let’s roll the tape!

Yes, my friends, that is Paula White. The woman who acts as a spiritual advisor to the most unholy Dark One, whose name shall not be spoken in my church, is now in the White House!

A former White House adviser on faith affairs accused Paula White, the controversial pastor appointed to lead President Donald Trump's new faith office, of trying to profit financially from the role.

The Trump administration recently revealed that White, the current president's spiritual adviser and a wealthy televangelist preacher of the prosperity gospel, will head the Faith and Opportunity Initiative at the White House, founded by executive order last year.

White, who headed Trump's evangelical advisory committee, caught attention in 2018 when she told people to donate their first paycheck of the year to her ministries as a "first fruit" offering or face God's wrath.

Last week, White, whose church is based in Florida, suggested during a prayer for Trump that opponents of the president "operate in sorcery and witchcraft." suggested during a prayer for Trump that opponents of the president "operate in sorcery and witchcraft."

According to CNN, a White House spokesman said White, who is also known by her married name White-Cain, is a part-time special government employee and "permitted to maintain separate employment" to her official role.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-pastor-paula-white-cain-obama-faith-adviser-1471155

Yes, the devil walks among us, but I shall not say his name! In fact like a movie I was watching if you say his name 3 times, he might appear in front of you to do your unholy deeds! And by the way in case you’re wondering if Ms. White has toned down her increasingly hostile rhetoric, you will definitely not be surprised. Because I’m sure that this is exactly what our LAWRD JAYSUS would have in mind!

President Donald Trump has added Florida televangelist Paula White to his administration. She will be an adviser to the president’s Faith and Opportunity Initiative in the White House’s Office of Public Liaison.

The New York Times calls the 53-year-old White “a quintessentially Trump figure: a television preacher, married three times, who lives in a mansion [and believes] that God wants followers to find wealth and health -- commonly called the prosperity gospel.”

Her beliefs have made her controversial even in religious circles. The Rev. William J. Barber II, a protestant minister who is also president of the NAACP’s North Carolina state chapter, called her message “a false gospel.”

“It is an attempt,” he said, “to interpret the gospel to be primarily about personal wealth and personal power, which is contrary to the theology of Jesus where the good news was always focused on caring for the poor, the least of these, the stranger, the sick.”
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2019/11/paula-white-donald-trumps-new-white-house-adviser-ratchets-up-fake-news-rhetoric-denouncing-demonic-networks.html

No it’s just Paula White. Though she could be a DAYMON!!! I mean just… where do we find these people, exactly? Really because the kind of gospel that Ms. White preaches, well, I am not exactly sure that she’s even read the Bible! Or at the very least our Good Book because it says nothing about what she preaches!

It was "Power Night" at the City of Destiny church on Sunday and Pastor Paula White was urging her congregation to pony up.

"I want you to hear from God. God already spoke to me what I'm going to write out. You're going to write your checks to Paula White Ministries," White preached. "If God tells you to give $12.99, do it. Whatever the Holy Spirit speaks to you. If you need to give by credit card, do so."
White regularly urges those in her pews to donate to her ministry, promising that God will bless them with wealth and "visions" in return. She sometimes warns her followers that their "dream will die" if they don't.

This time, the televangelist was doing it as a newly minted White House official.

White, President Donald Trump's longtime spiritual adviser, joined the White House staff last week to lead the Faith and Opportunity Initiative, a division of the Office of Public Liaison. Her role will primarily be to solicit input from religious groups on White House initiatives and to maintain Trump's strong ties to the religious leaders who support him.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/07/politics/paula-white-televangelist-white-house/index.html

Well except for the fact that this is a church where we do judge people! And we look for content of quality and character, of which Paula White doesn’t have any of those things! But really you might as well hire Joel Osteen. Or shit even Kanye West at this point? What? I’ve told you that we are allowed to swear in my church! Go ahead, let it out! And by the way in case you’re wondering why the Dark One selected Ms. White, well, let’s take a look at where she stands.

President Donald Trump's personal spiritual adviser, Paula White, launched a prayer effort alongside other evangelical Christian leaders on Tuesday, offering a prayer condemning the president's opponents, accusing them of being aligned with evil spirits and using sorcery.

The White House officially announced last week that White would spearhead the president's Faith and Opportunity Initiative. Trump and the wealthy televangelist have been friends for years ,and she has been a key religious supporter, rallying her Christian base to back the president.

Alongside fellow Christian leaders Cindy Jacobs, Dave Kabul and Dutch Sheets, White has launched the One Voice Prayer Movement, starting the initiative on Tuesday with a prayer for Trump. "Lord, we ask you to deliver our president from any snare, any setup of the enemy, according to Ephesians 6:12. Any persons [or] entities that are aligned against the president will be exposed and dealt with and overturned by the superior blood of Jesus," she said during her prayer in a conference call with other Christian leaders.

"Whether it's the spirit of Leviathan, a spirit of Jezebel, Abaddon, whether it's the spirit of Belial, we come against the strongmen, especially Jezebel, that which would operate in sorcery and witchcraft, that which would operate in hidden things, veiled things, that which would operate in deception," she continued. "We come against it according to your word."
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-spiritual-adviser-paula-white-prays-against-presidents-opponents-suggests-they-operate-1470197

Yeah probably! With friends like Paula White, who needs enemies? Well that’s it for this week, mass has ended, may you go in peace! That’s it this week for:

[font size="8"]Unpopular Opinions!: T.I.’s Purity Tests
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OK I think before we go any further, we need a Parental Advisory warning on this entry:

Now that we got that out of the way, we got to talk about the seriously creepy situation involving T.I. and his daughter. I didn’t want to do this next entry, in fact I almost threw down fisticuffs with my producer on it. But we’re doing it anyways, because that’s how we roll! You know normally we’d reserve this kind of thing for “How Is This Still A Thing” but I just want to take this opportunity to trash these old school assholes who can’t handle a woman’s sexual identity. Really, it says more about him than it does about her. And in 2019 do we really need this kind of old school fire and brimstone kind of fucked up relationship badgery between father and daughter? Easy answer is a simple “Hell no!”. I mean T.I. might as well wear a “Dads Against Daughters Dating” shirt.

Ladies Like Us podcast hosts Nazanin Mandi and Nadia Moham have posted a public apology after rapper T.I.'s shocking comments about his teenage daughter's virginity prompted plenty of backlash.

On a recent episode of the podcast, the 39-year-old rapper told Mandi and Moham that he has "yearly trips to the gynecologist" with his 18-year-old daughter, Deyjah, "to check her hymen." The podcast episode has since been deleted. Mandi -- who's married to singer Miguel -- and Moham have received criticism online for laughing during T.I.'s comments, and in an apology posted on Instagram on Thursday, they explained it was a "knee jerk reaction."

"To everyone confused, angry and hurt by the recent episode of Ladies Like Us, we want to apologize for our knee jerk reaction to the uncomfortable topic," the statement reads. "We were completely caught off guard/shocked and looking back, we should have reacted much differently in the moment. The comments that were made and the reaction that followed are not in any way a reflection of our personal views on the topic. We support and love Women and feel that their bodies are theirs to do as they wish."

"There was absolutely no ill intent towards any party involved & feel deeply awful about the entire incident," the statement continues. "We are not perfect, take full accountability of our lack of action & are continuously learning along the way. We know an apology doesn't make this go away but we welcome the discussion -- that's what our podcast is about."
https://www.etonline.com/tis-shocking-comments-about-daughters-virginity-lead-podcast-hosts-to-apologize-and-delete-episode

Sorry Ladies Like Us podcast, whatever that is, but you just opened up a whole can of worms that will probably never be closed! See here’s the thing with DADD crowd is they are some angry and controlling motherfuckers. Which is why they want control of their daughters’ hymens, whatever that is. I’m a guy, I don’t have a hymen. But as insane and controversial as T.I.’s comment was, it has shed a light on a subject that is a global problem, and a very disturbing one at that. See, here’s one of those situations where it’s best to just let kids be kids, then when they grow up they can find out how fucked up the world is!

But while T.I.’s comments were certainly solid outrage-bait, they also pointed out to a more disturbing reality: virginity testing is widespread around the globe, and has historically been used as justification to punish, torture, or even murder young women.

Virginity testing usually takes the form of a two-finger test, which involves a physician inserting two fingers into a woman’s vagina to check whether her hymen is intact. Although an intact hymen is by no means a reliable indicator of virginity, as T.I. himself pointed out, it is viewed as such in various cultures around the world, such as in India, Turkey, Egypt, and South Africa. Although the test is most frequently associated with determining a woman’s eligibility for marriage, it has been used for other purposes as well; in Indonesia, for instance, the test is used to determine female applicants’ suitability for the police force.

The penalty for “failing” a virginity test can be steep. In Afghanistan, for instance, where premarital sex is a crime, until 2018 the law stated that women and girls could be incarcerated for up to three months for failing virginity tests. In some extreme cases, young women who have failed virginity tests have taken their own lives or been murdered by their own family members for violating their family’s honor.

While most coverage of virginity testing is with reference to the practice in other countries, as T.I.’s comments underscore, it would be misleading to suggest that virginity testing is just something that happens outside the United States. Even though physicians have decried the test as unethical, as Marie Claire pointed out in a 2019 investigation there is no federal or state legislation banning it, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) has not issued any official guidelines with reference to the practice because it is neither medically indicated nor a valid medical procedure. “A ‘virginity exam’ does not exist,” Maura Quinlan, M.D., an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University and legislative chair for the Illinois section of ACOG, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s a myth that any type of medical exam can prove if a woman is a virgin.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/ti-gynecologist-virginity-test-908990/

That is a good point sir! This is beyond messed up – people (mainly women) can be jailed, assaulted, or even killed for this shit. For T.I. to bring this up on a podcast of all places sheds light on a subject that he probably should have kept to himself. And by the way the people that do this evil practice of “virginity testing” – are shady as shit! Why I never would have guessed!

In addition to being unethical and harmful, the tests are also based on flawed science: The state of a woman’s hymen isn’t a definitive indicator of whether or not she’s had intercourse. As Planned Parenthood notes on its website, some people are born with hymens that are naturally open, or it often tears or wears away as women age.

“The misconceptions that these tests have anything to do with virginity are unfortunately widespread, and our society continues to spread these myths as if they were based on scientific facts,” Brittany McBride, the senior program manager of Sexuality Education at Advocates for Youth, told the Cut. “This misconception that virginity can be tested is truly archaic and sexist and shames people with vulvas. Virginity is a concept that is completely personal and private — it is not a benchmark one is able to meet or not meet.”

Unsurprisingly, the tests can take a steep psychological toll: In a 2017 report from the National Institutes of Health, women who were subjected to them described them as painful and dehumanizing; one sexual-assault victim who was forced to undergo the procedure went so far as to equate it with “torture.”

In 2015, Laurence B. McCullough, an adjunct professor of ethics in obstetrics and gynecology at Weill Cornell Medical College, urged medical professionals to lead the effort to ban virginity testing, calling the policy “incompatible with professional obstetric and gynecological ethics.” As journalist Sophia Jones writes in Marie Claire, “When doctors legitimize virginity by conducting fake tests for it, they arguably uphold one of the oldest lies used to control women: that whether or not a woman has had sexual intercourse determines worth.”
https://www.thecut.com/2019/11/t-i-checking-daughters-hymen-is-abusive-virginity-testing.html

[font size="8"]How Is This Still A Thing: Gender Reveal Parties
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It’s time once again to ask:

This week: Gender Reveal Parties. How are they still a thing? The gender reveal party started way back in 2008 when a blogger posted about having a gender reveal party for their kid and, like a bad weed it just started spreading from there. With predictably disastrous results. You might remember when a gender reveal party started a hundred acre fire in Arizona last year. Well in case you think destroying 100 acres of brush was the worst thing to happen at a gender reveal party, well, it’s got worse. A whole lot worse. And in case you’re wondering whether or not you should go to your friends’ gender reveal party where a homemade explosive device might be used, just tell them “no” and send a gift.

Gender-reveal parties often involve plenty of ridiculousness, from dyeing lasagna unnatural colors to using animals like alligators and hippos to announce an unborn baby’s sex. While this fairly new concept has received criticism for various reasons, it can also pose a risk, as these parties often involve explosives. Unfortunately for a family in rural Iowa, a gender-reveal party turned lethal after a woman died from an explosion caused by the celebration.

According to NBC News, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office received a 911 call at around 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 26, that a woman was seriously injured after flying debris from an explosion that was part of a gender-reveal announcement had struck her. Deputies arrived at the home — located in Knoxville, around 40 miles southeast of Des Moines — but the woman was pronounced dead at the scene. There are no further details from the incident, such as what caused the explosion, and whether it involved Tannerite, a legal explosive commonly used for gender reveals.

When the concept of these parties was first introduced, they were a lot more simple, like baking a blue or pink cake that would reveal the baby’s sex once it was cut into. Over the years they evolved into more outrageous stunts that included over-the-top props and pyrotechnics. In Arizona in 2017, a gender-reveal party involving Tannerite caused a massive 47,000-acre wildfire, and in July of this year, Australian police charged a man with reckless driving after his vehicle caught fire during a gender reveal.
https://www.thecut.com/2019/10/gender-reveal-explosion-woman-died.html

Yes be afraid – because the next gender reveal party you go to might result in… *cue horror music * DEATH!! So if your gender reveal party doesn’t immediately kill you, there’s plenty of ways that it could go way south. But if you read beyond the headlines, which we encourage you to do here, that wasn’t just a mere explosive meant to reveal the baby’s gender. No, it was a pipe bomb. That’s right – they made a pipe bomb.

Authorities say an Iowa family’s attempt at a gender reveal party went horribly wrong when a homemade device that was meant to discharge coloured powder instead exploded like a pipe bomb, killing a 56-year-old woman.

The Marion County Sheriff’s office said Pamela Kreimeyer died instantly when debris struck her head Saturday before flying another 132 meters (432 feet), and landing in a nearby field in rural Knoxville, about 56km (35 miles) southeast of Des Moines.

Kreimeyer was 14 meters from the device when it exploded.

Family members had been experimenting with explosives in the hopes of posting a colourful announcement on social media, authorities said. They welded a metal cylinder to a stand and packed it with gunpowder that they thought would send the coloured baby powder aloft. But authorities say tape covering the top of the cylinder caused it to detonate like a pipe bomb.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/29/homemade-pipe-bomb-caused-accidental-death-at-gender-reveal-party

As if a homemade pipe bomb at a gender reveal party couldn’t be any scarier, take a look at what happened at a gender reveal party in Texas. You know the old saying how everything is bigger in Texas, and gender reveal parties are no exception. Just look at what happened when a crop dusting plane dropped a huge steaming load of gender reveal fluid onto a farm for a gender reveal party which could be among one of the biggest disasters to date.

A gender reveal party outside the town of Turkey, Texas went horribly wrong when an airplane hired by the celebrating couple stalled mid-stunt, causing it to crash and land upside down in dramatic fashion.

According to an official accident report filed by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the pilot accidentally flew the aircraft too slowly as he was attempting to unload nearly 350 gallons of pink-colored water for the reveal. (It's a girl, yay!) The low airspeed resulted in an aerodynamic stall, causing the plane to tumble in the air and crash, landing upside down on what looks to be a crop field. As a result of the impact, the plane sustained considerable damage to its right wing and fuselage, according to the NTSB. Judging by the photo released, however, it looks a lot worse than that.

Thankfully, the 49-year-old pilot Raj L. Horan of Plainview, Texas survived and sustained only minor injuries. The NTSB also noted that the plane was likely overloaded with the 350 gallons worth of pink water and an additional passenger, which likely contributed to the crash.

The Air Tractor AT602 single-engine turboprop plane used and operated by Horan Spraying LLC. is a single-seat aircraft designed to house only one occupant: the pilot. The additional passenger also luckily survived the incident with only minor injuries. It's unclear at this time if the pilot is facing any charges or if he will be able to keep his pilot's license.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/30928/crop-duster-airplane-crashes-during-gender-reveal-party-gone-horribly-wrong

Yes, everyone should be very afraid. But with gender reveal parties, and especially gender reveal parties, comes age old stereotypes about gender. So why even have them at all when children don’t learn the concept of male and female until the age of 5? Well there’s plenty of theories that could suggest why having a gender reveal party can be a bad thing in this day and age.

In the past decade, gender-reveal parties have exploded from a mere parenting trend to becoming the new normal. But now that more of the population is rejecting the idea of gender norms, a pink or blue-themed party feels archaic. One of the trend’s trailblazers is even having second thoughts about her role in perpetuating it.

When Jenna Karvunidis was pregnant with her first child in 2008, she blogged about revealing the baby’s gender to her friends and family with a pink cake. It was “a milestone,” she tells The Guardian. “I had had several miscarriages. It was like, ‘Oh yay, I’m finally at a point in my pregnancy where I know if it’s a boy or a girl’ rather than ‘Let’s saddle this kid with a whole identity,’” she said, adding that she doesn’t think most people were really questioning that way of thinking back then. Word of her party’s theme spread, and she began noticing more would-be parents throwing gender-reveal parties of their own.

By 2019, the trend seemsed to have reached its breaking point due to over-the-top, embarrassing, and even dangerous consequences that ranged from disgusting-looking food to a 47,000-acre forest fire. Karvunidis says she started to feel guilty. “Then I started to realize that nonbinary people and trans people were feeling affected by this, and I started to feel bad that I had released something bad into the world,” she said. Her daughter, who had been the motivation for her party 11 years ago, doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes herself, opting for suits and blazers rather than dresses. “I’m letting her lead me,” Karvunidis said. “She has her opinions about there being many genders and she is informing me about things. She was biologically born a female and she is still ‘she’ and ‘her’ and says she’s a girl, but she is still doing things her way.”
https://www.thecut.com/2019/07/gender-reveal-party-inventor-feels-bad.html

So even the creator of the gender reveal party thinks it’s a bad idea. Combine that with car crashes, wildfires, pipe bombs, and plane crashes, and that’s enough to make you ask – gender reveal parties:

[font size="8"]I Need A Drink
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Hey everyone I don’t know about you but I could really use a drink!

So of course by now the idea behind this segment is that we have a few cocktails, get drunk and talk about anything, literally anything in the news, as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with politics. And there’s a lot of dark shit in the world right now so we just get drunk and laugh at what is going on in the world. Tell me bartender, what goes well with a story about cell phones? The Tool Cocktail? Do I dare ask what’s in that? So it’s apparently just Maynard’s wine and a few glasses of tears. Then I will take my usual Jack Daniels mixed with Jack Daniels. I call it the Double Jack. But what we are talking about is that Tool, the band, has decided to put the kibosh on people using their cell phones during their shows. That means you. I’m talking to you. No go on, finish your tweet. Find a funny GIF to go with it. Good.

If you get kicked out of a Tool show for shooting video on your cellphone, well, that's on you. The band is giving fans / psychedelic warriors ample heads up that this behavior is not permissible and will lead to an ejection with no chance of re-entry.

Maynard James Keenan has been outspoken in the past about his disdain for fans not living in the moment and soaking in the show. In his view, the use of a phone, and shooting keepsake videos in particular, only serves to "demystify" the experience. That's why Tool have implemented a "no camera policy" on their current tour supporting the recently released Fear Inoculum album.

One Reddit user, "nielmot," shared an email from the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse venue in Cleveland, Ohio, which outlined the policy in full, informing fans of the consequences of using their phone during the show.

It reads:

We respectfully request that you please watch and listen to the show, not your phone. You will be ejected from the show without the opportunity to return and without a refund if you violate this simple request and elect to take photos during the performance. In the event of a personal emergency, phone use may occur on the concourse away from the performance area.

Read More: Tool Warn Fans of Ejection From Show Over Cellphone Use | https://loudwire.com/tool-warn-ejection-show-cellphone-use/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

Yes so if you use a phone at a Tool show, well, not only are you a tool yourself, but you can get ejected from the venue. Do not pass go, do not collect $200! But this isn’t the first time that bands have argued about phone usage. I mean seriously you’re paying all this money to go out. And then you buy drinks and food and probably an overpriced t-shirt or two. So why the hell are you looking at your screen? Just don’t!

One of the most famous Tool fan pages on social media, ToolPusciferApc posted a recent announcement of Tool and shared their latest decision about their well-known mobile phone prohibition.

As you will read the announcement below, Tool will not allow the audience to use their mobiles for their upcoming two shows which will be held at Pepsi Center on October 15 and 16.

Here is the caption of the photo:

“Attention everyone attending the @toolmusic shows at the @pepsicenter in Denver.

The no phone policy will be enforced. @adamjones_tv #MaynardJamesKeenan #DannyCarey
#JustinChancellor #FearInoculum #Tool #ToolBand #ToolArmy #NoPhones”

Here is what’s written on the photo:

“For guests attending TOOL events this Tuesday and/ or Wednesday nights, please note that using your cellphone in any manner during the performance is strictly prohibited. Per the tour request, guests who fail to abide by the following cellphone restrictions will be immediately dismissed from the arena:
https://metalheadzone.com/tool-announce-a-crucial-smartphone-decision-for-upcoming-show/

Oh yeah. Go, finish your tweet. Me? I’m going to finish my drink and get another one! But Maynard first started ejecting fans during the last A Perfect Circle tour last year, which by all accounts, didn’t sell very well. Many stadiums were left half empty, which really sucks for both them and the venue. Because why go out at all if you’re just going to stare at your device all the time? Hey you! I’m talking to you!

While the music of Tool and A Perfect Circle may be different, their attitudes towards cellphone usage at concerts is very much the same, as evidenced by the former's current North American tour.

Ahead of last night's performance (November 6) at Cleveland's Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, attendees were sent an email outlining a prohibitive photo policy for the evening.

The email reads, "We respectfully request that you please watch and listen to the show, not your phone. You will be ejected from the show without the opportunity to return and without a refund if you violate this simple request and elect to take photos during the performance. In the event of a personal emergency, phone use may occur on the concourse away from the performance area."

Sharing the email on Reddit, user nilemot wrote, "'No cameras' is printed on the tickets, posted at every spot possible at the venues, posted by the fern, now I got a email reminding me no cameras. When is [frontman Maynard James Keenan] going to call me with a reminder?"
http://exclaim.ca/music/article/no_you_arent_allowed_to_use_your_phone_at_a_tool_show

Go ahead check your e-mail. It’s fine. I will wait. But Tool isn’t the only band who has a notoriety for people using their phones at concerts. Another one – and a good friend of the show – Jack White – is also a notorious phone hater. And if you use phones while seeing the Raconteurs this year then you should be prepared to face the consequences. Really, just leave your phone in your car and spare the trouble.

If you were lucky enough to get a ticket to the sold-out Raconteurs concert at the Rapids Theatre in Niagara Falls on Aug. 16, here's your reminder to leave your cellphone behind.

“We think you'll enjoy looking up from your gadgets for a little while and experience music and our shared love of it IN PERSON," a band statement from earlier in the tour read.

Here's what that means. If you bring your cellphone or any other photo- or video-capturing gadget (including that smartwatch on your wrist) into the Rapids Theatre, it will be secured in a Yondr pouch. You'll keep the phone with you but you won't be able to unlock the pouch, which is just a bit larger than the phone. If you have an emergency or need to use the phone, you can go to a designated area where it will be unlocked and then returned to the pouch when you are done.

If you don't want to put your phone in the pouch, then leave it in your car – you will not be able to bring it inside.
https://buffalonews.com/2019/08/15/what-the-no-cellphone-policy-means-at-the-raconteurs-show-at-rapids-theatre/

[font size="8"]Keeping Up With The Candidates Ep. 14
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Welcome back to our 2020 voters’ guide Keeping Up With The Candidates! While our news may be a week behind, we have approximately 367 days until the next election so we have got to get ready, people!! And this guide is a handy way to keep information about all the candidates, news, and issues relating to the 2020 mother of all elections in one place! Last week we discussed the extremely frightening voter purge taking place in Georgia. No, wrong purge, damn it! This week, we’re going to go over some of the results of the 2019 interim election which the blue wave struck again! And in the least likely of places. We already saw how Kentucky kicked Matt Bevin to the curb. Now it did the same in Virginia!

Democrats won control of Virginia's General Assembly on Tuesday, returning the party to full power over the legislature and governorship for the first time since 1993.

Democrats, who had been slightly favored to win both chambers, flipped six seats and lost none of their own in the House and took a slim majority in the Senate.

"I'm here to officially declare today, Nov. 5, 2019, that Virginia is officially blue," Gov. Ralph Northam said to supporters in Richmond.

The election wins now clear the way for Democrats to pass a wide array of liberal policies, including gun control measures, increases to the minimum wage and ratification the Equal Rights Amendment.

"It wouldn't really be an exaggeration to say that we could have the most progressive regime we've had in Virginia's government history," said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball, which provides nonpartisan analysis on elections through University of Virginia's Center for Politics.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/06/virginia-election-results-democrats-win-power-liberal-policies/4163840002/

That’s right – after decades of red state disasters, Virginia is finally turning blue! How about that, who wants a nice mug of conservative tears? I know I do! Mmmmmmmmmmm… man that felt good to drink that. Or maybe not. So what does this mean in the long run? We’re seeing a lot of previously short run elections finally coming around and flipping the right way. But allow me to drop the proverbial turd in the punch bowl here, republicans are blaming the election on – wait for it – voter fraud!

As Kentucky's Republican governor trailed by thousands of votes in his re-election bid and Democrats took the reins of the Virginia Statehouse, social media posts offered an unsubstantiated explanation for the Election Day results: voter fraud.

The messages seized on small-scale voting issues or pushed inaccurate reports to call into question all the election results.

Thousands of dead people voted, some claimed. So many Virginia voters were turned away or given misprinted ballots that the results were suspect, a conservative pundit speculated. One Twitter user suggested that the entire state of Kentucky had purchased new voting machines that led to sweeping errors.

The online responses provide a glimpse into the type of misinformation that could cloud next year's presidential race and might intensify if the election is close, said Charles Stewart III, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied public confidence in elections.
https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2019-11-12/social-posts-blame-election-results-on-unsubstantiated-fraud

Yeah so that’s the reason why we can’t have nice things. Conservatives can’t play nice anymore, and is there any wonder why they’re losing on such a grand scale? Elections that were previously unflappable are now being flipped. But now we got to go to Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Yes, it’s near Philadelphia, a city with a notorious police horse punching problem. But Philly is overwhelmingly liberal and this happened.

The political forces that shaped last year’s midterm elections showed no signs of abating Tuesday, as voters turned on Republicans and establishment Democrats alike in races from Philadelphia and Scranton to the suburbs of Delaware and Chester Counties.

Outside Pennsylvania, voter unrest with President Donald Trump and the Republican Party he has taken over helped deliver victories for Democrats in Kentucky, where they narrowly took the governorship, and Virginia, where they seized complete control of the state government for the first time in more than a quarter-century.

Locally, Democrats will hold all five seats on the Delaware County Council, a Republican stronghold since the Civil War, and also assumed a majority on the legislative body in Chester County. In Bucks County, Democrats captured the Board of Commissioners for the first time since 1983.

And in Philadelphia, a third-party insurgent candidate weakened an already marginalized GOP by securing one of the at-large City Council seats reserved for minority parties — a seat Republicans have held for decades.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania-2019-election-results-20191106.html

Well it is very niiiiice, sir! I mean this is absolutely historic. Now I can’t really find any turd to throw in the punchbowl here. Instead I’m here to tell you what the elections mean for the upcoming 2020 election. And I’m not going to get into Mississippi, who elected Tate Reeves. I’ll save that for another edition. But here’s what the results could mean going forward.

In many ways, the election results last week, specifically the races in Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, have noteworthy implications for Republicans and Democrats going into 2020. However, both parties must be wary before drawing absolute conclusions from these results.

In Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear appears to have defeated unpopular Republican Governor Matt Bevin, who still refuses to concede, by a thin margin of 5,000 votes. In many ways, this victory is indeed significant, particularly because Bevin ran a national campaign and consistently linked himself to President Trump. Not only did Trump make several statements of support for Bevin, but he also held an eleventh hour rally with the Kentucky governor in an effort to ensure this reelection.

However, given that Bevin is profoundly unpopular among the residents of Kentucky, Democrats need to proceed with caution and refrain from using this race as a bellwether for the electability and political weight of Trump. As governor of Kentucky, Bevin commissioned some wildly unfavorable policies. Earlier this year, he backed a reform that cut pensions for new teachers and funding for education, which resulted in massive teacher protests that closed down every public school across the state.

Further, Bevin also sought to add premiums, copayments, and work requirements to the state Medicaid program, all while threatening to cancel the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which sought to expand health care to 400,000 individuals in Kentucky. Moreover, Republicans scored some wins in Kentucky, succeeding at flipping the attorney general and secretary of state positions.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/469745-what-the-latest-election-results-signify-for-both-parties-in-2020

[font size="4"]Next Week:[/font]

While most candidates are jumping ship, we’re going to talk about why Michael Bloomberg is entering the race this late in the game and what consequences that could have for already established candidates.

[font size="8"]And Now This:[/font]
[font size="8”]The 1975[/font]

Ladies and gentlemen, my next guest is touring in support of their album “A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships”, they also have a brand new album coming on Feb. 20th called “Notes On A Conditional Form”. You can see them at the KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas concert at Honda Center on December 8th. Playing their song “TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME”, give it up for the 1975!

Thank you Boise State! We are off to UC Berkeley next! Just four shows remaining for the rest of the year! See you next week!

Credits

Host: Initech
Top 10 Conservative Idiots Recorded In Front Of Live Audience At: Houston Improv, Houston, TX
Special Thanks To: Improv Group
Holy Shit Gospel Choir: UCLA Choir Club, Westwood, CA
Images: All images copyright belongs to respective copyright holders.
Videos: All videos copyright belongs to respective copyright holders
Articles: All article content copyright belongs to respective copyright holders
Writing: Top 10 Writing Department
Graphics: Top 10 Graphics Department
Research: Top 10 Research Department
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HR: Top 10 Human Resources Department
Initech’s Wardrobe Provided By: JAB Inc.
Wheel Of Corruption By: Studio 1 Stage Props, Burbank, CA
Greta Van Fleet Appear Courtesy Of: Republic Records
Management: Initech Productions, CCC Management
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Questions? Comments? Complaints? Hate mail? E-mail The Top 10 at: Top10ConIdiots@gmail.com

Initech Productions: Yes, We Got The Memo

November 6, 2019

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #7-18: Do The Soviet Style Edition

Top 10 Conservative Idiots #7-18: Do The Soviet Style Edition

Welcome back to the Top 10 Conservative Idiots! What’s up Gonzaga University? How you guys doing? You doing fucking good? Great! We are in the home stretch people. Just six more Top 10s before we sign off for this insane year that was 2019. And our college tour has been a great success so far! I know we keep meaning to do a best of – which we will for Thanksgiving, we will announce all the details for season 8! Plus we’re going international! Yes, we did that World Tour back in season 3, but we did it at the confines from our home theater at the UCB Theater Franklin St. But we are actually going to England and Canada later next year. We also have the 4th iteration of our Stupidest State contest to look forward to! OK do we have time for the thing? OK boomer. So we have to talk about Bill Murray. We were originally going to do a whole I Need A Drink on this but we couldn’t find enough articles. But anyway I love when people who play versions of themselves do exactly what you’d expect them to do. So Bill Murray, you know him as the legendary star of Ghostbusters, was at the Atlanta Airport and eating at the PF Changs in Terminal A. And then on his way out he grabbed an application and applied for a job. Oh could you imagine Bill Murray waiting on your table? Just be like “Yeah I’ll have the Kung Pow Chicken and could you also throw in a batch of green slime?”. And my favorite part of this story is that the corporate office of P.F. Chang’s was like “OK Bill Murray, when do you start”? I so badly want to fly out of Atlanta if that happens. OK boomer. OK that’s enough of the intro, we have a lot of idiocy to get to. First though, John Oliver is back and he delves into why our voting system is the current nightmare that it is:

Well the impeachment trial is coming full swing everybody so strap in because it’s going to get really ugly. In the top spot this week is Steve Scalise (1). Because he, like many members of the Trump GOP cult, apparently has absolutely no understanding or comprehension of how the United States Constitution works and actually said the impeachment proceedings were “Soviet Style”. Nyet! In the second slot this week is “We’re All Gonna Die”. Keep denying climate change, assholes, because California is going up in flames while the Gulf Coast is drowning. No, we don’t want to die because of this shit. In the third slot this week is the guy who we currently call president, Donald J. Trump (3). And Stupid Watergate II is in full effect as Giuliani creates a huge cybersecurity fail, while Trump is crying afoul at a “witch hunt”. In the number 4 slot this week is also Donald J. Trump (4). We have to talk about two Trump related items – the Nationals visiting the White House, and his epic Halloween border wall fail. In the fifth slot this week is our weekly investigative piece Top 10 Investigates (5) and one of the most popular menu items at Costco is their $4.99 rotisserie chicken. But to keep their costs low, Costco is resorting to some ridiculous and extremely frightening extremes. You might want to think twice before consuming that bird. Taking the sixth slot this week, is our weekly visit to the Holy Church Of The Top 10 in “Holy Shit”, and Halloween has come and gone, but is it a holiday to practice some witchcraft? Our resident pastor is going to detail the battle for your soul, courtesy of your local ultra far right church. Speaking of Halloween, in the 7th slot is “Beating A Dead Horse” (7) – airlines are censoring the content on their in flight entertainment screens, but it is driving the producers of that content absolutely crazy. At number 8, representative Katie Hill was a victim of a conservative hit job, and as such we’re going to ask “Revenge Porn – How Is This Still A Thing?”. In the number 9 (NEIN!!) slot this week we have yet another installment of People Are Dumb (9) because of course they are! Finally this week it’s a special “Keeping Up With The Candidates” (10) – Georgia is reportedly stated to purge some 300,000 voters from participating in the 2020 election. If you’re not frightened by this, we will tell you why you should be! And the palate cleanser after all this, we have some fresh new music from the man, the myth, the legend that is Beck! Pre-order his new album “Hyperspace” or you are no friend of this program! Enjoy! And as always don’t forget the key!

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[font size="8"]Steve Scalise
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Steve Scalise. You might remember him from that incident where he got shot by a crazy person while he was at batting practice for a Congressional softball game (see: Idiots #3-3 ). Since the shooting, Steve Scalise has made absolutely no question about where he stands politically. And that is, he’s a hardcore member of the Trump Cult. Which is not a good gamble these days. Trump’s popularity is slipping very handily. But that hasn’t stopped Scalise from showing people where he stands. And since the Trump Cult has been known to systematically rot many a brain, you tend to say batshit crazy stuff like this.

What do you expect from a guy who's currently suing a Twitter Cow?

But the real piece de resistance came courtesy of Steve Scalise, who brought along a poster to show just how unhappy he is with proceedings.

Exactly how does Steve Scalise think leadership changes occurred in the Soviet Union? Leon Trotsky did not get impeached, though it wouldn't have been the worst thing to get a guy like Stalin out of the driver's seat.

Based on the cutout, it would seem the "Soviet-style" proceedings occurred in the "37 days" that Democrats have been interviewing witnesses behind closed doors. This is nonsense: we are still at the investigation stage. The accused does not get to send his lawyer along with the cops when they interview a witness. (That's not to mention that some of what's under discussion may be classified. People testify behind closed doors at the Capitol all the time.) When hearings begin in the House, it will be more like a grand-jury equivalent—meaning the defense still does not get to send a lawyer or question witnesses. The president will get his due process when the trial is held in the Senate, assuming the House votes to send it there. In the meantime, House Republicans are present for all of this and are undoubtedly running defense for him throughout.

But Scalise made clear his "Soviet-style" label also applies to the rules the Democrats put up for a vote, which allow committee chairs like Adam Schiff to veto the Republicans' inevitably batshit witnesses. Republicans have long sought to disrupt public hearings with made-for-TV crapola. It's not hard to imagine Republicans calling for Strzok and Page, or Bruce and Nellie Ohr, or any of the other characters from the Trump Conspiracy Cinematic Universe. Ideally, the Republicans would call witnesses relevant to the inquiry in a good-faith effort to get to the bottom of whether the president committed gross misconduct, but Nancy Pelosi was not born yesterday. She knows they might just as easily call Cap'n Crunch.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a29654276/steve-scalise-soviet-style-impeachment-democrats-trump/

Uh… Mr. Scalise, you are aware that we have this thing called the Constitution of the United States and that the Democrats are following the impeachment guidelines as outlined in the Constitution exactly according to procedure? Oh but let’s not let your overdose of Covfefe cloud your judgement or anything. That is a hell of a drug and it tends to rot many a mind. But he’s not the only one overdosing on the Trump train lately.

Colorado’s House delegation split along partisan lines, as the state’s four Democrats voted to authorize the next stage of an impeachment inquiry over objections by the three Republicans.

“The House’s impeachment inquiry has exposed the truth and uncovered significant evidence that the president abused his power,” said Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Lafayette, in remarks on the House floor minutes before the vote.

Added Neguse: “To honor the oath to defend the Constitution that each of us took, we must move forward with this impeachment inquiry; for, as Thomas Jefferson once said hundreds of years ago, a sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principal, the sustaining energy of a free government.”

Before casting his “no” vote, U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, railed against what he called “a Soviet-style kangaroo court, a star chamber,” in an appearance on KVOR AM 740.

“They just hate Donald Trump. They want to undo the election,” Lamborn said, referring to his Democratic colleagues.
https://gazette.com/news/rep-doug-lamborn-calls-impeachment-inquiry-a-soviet-style-kangaroo/article_e663fe9c-fc32-11e9-9bad-c78292667259.html

Nyet!! We do hate Donald Trump, but the election was 3 fucking years ago! We’re not trying to undo anything, we’re trying to prevent further abuses of power, which is what Trump has been doing since the election. The Republicans want to hand him a blank check to do whatever the hell he wants, but it doesn’t work that way. The GOP derangement for democrats is getting completely out of control, and expect the violent rhetoric to increase before the election. But then we’ll still have to put up with bullshit like this:

America will read exactly what two of the “three amigos” overseeing President Trump’s Ukraine policy told Congressional impeachment investigators.

The explosive testimony of Kurt Volker, Trump’s former special representative for Ukraine negotiations, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, will likely inflict new damage on Trump’s ever-shifting impeachment defense as the full transcripts confirm details revealed after they testified last month.

Sondland’s testimony is likely to be particularly closely scrutinized because he made the dubious claim that he knew little or nothing about presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani ran a parallel campaign to bully Ukraine into opening bogus Trump-friendly investigations into Democrats.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Cal.), chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Monday to expect the transcripts to be made public the following day.

Impeachment witnesses have described Volker and Sondland, along with Energy Secretary Rick Perry, as the main officials implementing Trump’s Ukraine policy.
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-trump-ukraine-impeachment-transcript-20191105-2ewd52ba3bdsjkwotldjmlfr4u-story.html

Hey everyone! If this impeachment proceedings seem like they’re “Soviet Style” could it be because Russia is involved? Let’s do the Soviet style!! Is that a dance or a punk rock song? Who knows! The thing is, once a talking point gets introduced into the conservative echo chamber, it’s like an ants’ nest – no matter how much bug spray you use to get rid of it, you’ll still find ants several weeks later! But they are at least running out of defenses for this mad man, and it’s starting to show:

It is a quirk of our current highly polarized political environment that a party can plausibly claim its opponents are acting in a partisan fashion by insisting upon doing so itself. It takes two to tango, but refusing to tango takes only one. And if Democrats and Republicans aren’t dancing together, then any action becomes a partisan action—and can be denounced as such.

And so it was last week that, confronted with a decision by the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives to authorize procedures for the public phase of consideration of the president’s impeachment, House Republicans voted as a bloc against the measure and thereby enabled themselves to decry the vote as partisan. The criticism was, of course, accurate. Unlike the House votes to authorize the impeachment inquiries of Presidents Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton, this vote came very nearly along perfect party lines—with two Democratic House members joining the Republicans and only a single former Republican, the now party-less Justin Amash, voting with the Democrats.

But the argument also elides the source of the partisanship. What is notable about the vote is not that Democrats, looking at the information available to the House, want to consider impeaching President Donald Trump. It is rather that Republicans, looking at the very same information, uniformly do not want even to consider it—that they purport to be outraged not by the president’s behavior but by the processes through which whistle-blowers complain about that behavior, by the means Democrats employ to consider such complaints, and by the expectation that a president will act on behalf of some vision of the public interest rather than putting national-policy tools at the service of his own personal and political interests.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/partisanship-isnt-enough-save-trump-impeachment/601330/

[font size="8"]We’re All Gonna Die
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Hey everyone guess what? We’re all gonna die!! Woooooooooooooo!!! Wooooooooooooooooo!!! Wooooo. Woo. Yeah I know I say it every time that we do this segment, but this time we really might, especially that my home state of California is on fire. And we have a maniacal man bay who hates my state in charge of the White House. And boy does Trump hate us. If you’re following the news, the fire departments run by the federal government have been doing a bang up job of being super fast to respond to the fires this year and Gov. Newsome has been praising them big time. But we have a man child who has been convinced that it’s poor forest management that was to blame for the fires. But can we tell him that’s not a thing?

Just days after Gov. Gavin Newsom praised the federal government for its response to catastrophic wildfires and power outages affecting millions, President Donald Trump on Sunday slammed the California Democrat — and threatened to cut off future federal funding to the fire-battered state.

Trump, in a spate of postings on Twitter, lambasted what he called Newsom’s “terrible job” regarding the state’s forest management practices, saying the governor should stop listening to environmentalist “bosses” and “clean” the forest floors. He also slammed Newsom for state water-management practices, suggesting that California must open up what he called “ridiculously closed water lanes.”

Saying Newsom had repeatedly requested federal funds, Trump threatened to cut him off.

“Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing—and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more,” the president tweeted.

He then tweaked Newsom’s leadership: “Get your act together Governor.”

The governor responded a short time later.

“We’re successfully waging war against thousands of fires started across the state in the last few weeks due to extreme weather created by climate change while Trump is conducting a full on assault against the antidotes,” he told POLITICO in a statement.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/03/trump-federal-aid-california-newsom-065045

Yeah BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! Let’s point out the irony here – the guy who does not have his act together at all and fires people like it’s a bodily function is telling someone else to get their act together on something he knows nothing about? What an asshole. But are we all gonna die from this? Well just wait until next year’s Santa Ana winds hit, they will get even nastier!

Just last week California Gov. Gavin Newsom lauded President Donald Trump as a "partner" in California's efforts to fight wildfires.

“Every request we made of the Trump administration has been granted, and I just want to thank them again for moving expeditiously as they have to support our efforts here," Newsom said Wednesday.

That was then, this is now.

“We’re successfully waging war against thousands of fires started across the state in the last few weeks due to extreme weather created by climate change while Trump is conducting a full on assault against the antidotes," Newsom said Sunday.

What changed appears to be a series of tweets earlier Sunday by the president, kicked off with this: "The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must 'clean' his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/04/trump-california-wildfires-newsom-lauded-him-once-now-they-clash/4154014002/

Oh calm down man, we’re not gonna die just yet! But let’s not let facts get in the way of our outrage because that’s how the news in 2019 works, damn it! Because if Trump had bothered to Google it, he would have stumbled upon this report from the San Francisco Chronicle – an actual journalist outlet, which said that poor forest management is true. But guess what? Not all of it is California’s fault!

“A century of mismanaging Sierra Nevada forests has brought an unprecedented environmental catastrophe that impacts all Californians.” That’s not a tweet from President Trump, but the opening line of a February report by California’s Little Hoover Commission investigating fire danger in the state.

“The immediate crisis is visible to anyone who has traveled recently in the Sierra Nevada, especially in its southern range where mountainsides are brown with dying and dead forests,” Commission Chairman Pedro Nava wrote in the cover letter for “Fire on the Mountain,” an 82-page report on the tinderbox nature of the state’s forests.

The report outlines factors that have led to the current forest crisis, including years of poor or nonexistent management policies, and the recent drought and a beetle infestation that killed an estimated 129 million trees across the state — trees that could go up in flames.

“The obstacles to progress are daunting and tremendously complex,” the report said.

Still, Nava was a bit taken aback by Trump’s Nov. 10 tweet blaming the state’s “gross mismanagement” for the fires.

“My first reaction is that he really needs better advisers — obviously they left a lot of things out,” Nava told us.

For example, the U.S. government owns nearly 60 percent of the forests that cover one-third of California and for the past 100 years federal policy has been to put out forest fires as quickly as possible rather than let nature take its course.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Trump-s-claim-of-poor-California-forest-13400503.php

No, no nobody is dying yet. But take a look at what the guy in the article said that Trump needs better advisers. Well guess what? He is his own adviser! Well besides when he watches Fox News late at night after Sean Hannity whispers sweet nothings into his ear on the phone, we’ll let you know that rage-watching Fox News that late is not good for your mental health! I mean would you be shocked to learn that he’s wrong on the subject? I’m not!

In 2018, a fire ripped through the town of Paradise, California, killing 85 people. It was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history.

Liabilities from wildfires started by its powerlines bankrupted Pacific Gas & Electric, which cut off power to nearly one million homes and businesses last month to prevent wind from triggering and fanning fires.

Many blame climate change.“The reason these wildfires have worsened is because of climate change,” said Leonardo DiCaprio.“This is what climate change looks like,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

On Sunday, after President Donald Trump tweeted, “The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management,” Newsom tweeted back, “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.”

But can the increase in fires in California really be blamed on climate change?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/04/why-everything-they-say-about-california-fires--including-that-climate-matters-most--is-wrong/#50e95c264cb6

[font size="8"]Stupid Watergate II
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It’s like Watergate but we have idiots in charge. Holy crap this thing continues to get stranger and stranger and stranger. We already covered Steve Scalise’s bizarre comparison of the trial to something “Soviet Style” (whatever that is). But that said there’s three key figures who are really needed further explanation with their involvement in Stupid Watergate. And that is Jim Jordan – who remember in the Ohio State scandal, Roger Stone, and Rudy Giuliani. Both of these guys are people who I wouldn’t want running an Etch A Sketch. But before we get into the Jim Jordan mess, let’s take a look at what happened when Roger Stone went before a jury.

Jury selection in the trial of Roger Stone, the longtime confidant and adviser to President Donald Trump, got off to a bizarre start on Tuesday as Stone left the proceedings due to what he said was food poisoning shortly after an observer was taken out of the courtroom on a stretcher after appearing to have a seizure.

The selection of the jury continued without Stone present, but because of the earlier delay stemming from the separate medical emergency, it is unlikely jury selection will be completed Tuesday. More than 80 prospective jurors arrived at federal district court in Washington, D.C., to potentially take part in the trial.

Stone, 67, is accused of lying to Congress and pressuring another person to do the same. Stone's case stems from former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Stone, a close friend of Trump's for more than three decades who briefly served as an adviser to his 2016 presidential campaign, has claimed innocence. He was repeatedly admonished by Judge Amy Berman Jackson this year to stop making public comments about his case that could influence a prospective jury, and was barred from using social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/roger-stone-leaves-jury-selection-his-trial-because-food-poisoning-n1076711

Maybe that was a little too graphic but I can assure you that his food poisoning probably went down something like that. But what a bunch of crybabies. Now for those of you playing at home, we have to talk about Rudy Giuliani’s involvement in this clusterfuck. Of course we’ve talked about Giuliani and his goons many times in the last few weeks but now the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fall into place, and it’s quite the tangled web they weave.

Lev Parnas, the indicted Rudy Giuliani associate who helped the Trump team search for dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine, is now willing to comply with the House impeachment inquiry, his lawyer told Reuters.

Parnas helped Giuliani find dirt on Biden in Ukraine and lobbied a former Republican congressman to press President Donald Trump to oust an ambassador whom Giuliani believed was interfering with their efforts. He was later indicted along with fellow Giuliani pal Igor Fruman on campaign finance charges after prosecutors alleged that illegally funneled foreign donations into U.S. elections to gain influence, including a $325,000 contribution to a pro-Trump super PAC. Both men have pleaded not guilty.

After the indictment, the pair hired attorney John Dowd, who previously worked on Trump’s defense team in the Mueller probe. Claiming that the intention of Democrats was "to harass, intimidate and embarrass my clients," Dowd sent a letter to lawmakers saying that the two would not cooperate with their “overly broad and unduly burdensome” requests for information in the impeachment inquiry.

While Fruman will reportedly retain Dowd amid plans to keep stonewalling the investigation, Parnas apparently had a change of heart. He has fired Dowd, and his new attorney, Joseph Bondy, told Reuters that he was willing to comply with the investigation.
https://www.salon.com/2019/11/05/giuliani-henchman-fires-former-trump-lawyer-and-agrees-to-comply-with-impeachment-inquiry-after-snub/

This whole thing is certifiably insane. Now we got to talk about Jim Jordan’s involvement. See, the events of this whole thing – let’s compare it to a nice, hearty plate of spaghetti and meatballs. You’re not going to serve it without simmering the meatballs in the sauce for several hours. Because if you serve the meat before it’s cooked you’re gonna have a bad time. Even worse if you switch chefs in the middle of cooking it.

House Republican leadership is looking to load up the House Intelligence Committee with some of President Donald Trump’s top defenders, including Rep. Jim Jordan, as the panel has become ground zero for impeachment.

“If Democrats are going to turn Intel into the impeachment committee, I am going to make adjustments to that committee accordingly, for a short period of time,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told POLITICO.

Democrats have put the House Intelligence Committee solely in charge of the open hearings that could start as soon as next week even though a trio of committees have been conducting closed-door interviews with impeachment witnesses. That means some of Trump’s best attack dogs, like Jordan of Ohio, will be effectively sidelined when Democrats take their impeachment probe public.

But House Republicans want to temporarily add some of the president’s allies to the Intel panel, arguing that those members have been sitting in on all the depositions and could be well equipped to cross examine witnesses and defend Trump.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/05/house-republicans-jordan-intel-impeachment-065970

Yeah so they could switch Devin Nunes with Jim Jordan to carry out the rest of the conservatives’ side of the investigation. Now going back to our spaghetti and meatballs analogy – the meatballs (inquiries) are being warmed in the oven (Congress) as we speak. You don’t want to serve them prematurely. You want them to take the time to simmer. And pair with a fine wine which has taken time to ferment. But do you really want this guy serving your finely prepared dish? I know I don’t!

Ohio Republican Congressman Jim Jordan tried to attack House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) for preventing certain questions from being asked during the current impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump but managed to admit — out loud — that he was trying to out the whistleblower, among others.

On Tuesday, Jordan spoke to reporters as Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was giving closed-door testimony in the impeachment inquiry, and said that Schiff of “has prevented the witness from answering certain questions we have during the deposition.”

He added that “Their witness has their counsel there, their lawyer there, they don’t need Adam Schiff being chairman and lawyer. But that’s an effect what happens today.”

Jordan then addressed the reason for Schiff’s objections, saying “The Democrats run out here and say ‘Oh, the Republicans are trying to figure out who the whistleblower is. We’re trying to figure out who a witness list is.”

But then seconds later, while deriding Schiff for his “sensitivity” to protecting the identity of the whistleblower, Jordan explicitly named the whistleblower among the names he would like to obtain.
https://www.mediaite.com/news/watch-jim-jordan-admits-hes-trying-to-out-whistleblower-while-denying-hes-trying-to-out-whistleblower/

[font size="8"]Top 10 Investigates: The High Cost Of $4.99 Chicken
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It’s time to investigate beyond the headlines. This is Top 10 Investigates!

One of Costco’s most popular and coveted food items is that $4.99 rotisserie chicken that they sell at the end of the display case. It retails for $4.99 but in order to meet that price point, there’s a lot that goes into that bird that you are consuming. But in order to continue to meet that coveted $4.99 price point, there’s a lot of very frightening genetic engineering that goes into it. In fact, Costco has gone to such extremes to meet that price point that there’s many, many trade-offs that are met before that bird hits the stores and you buy it and eat it.

At the back of Costco’s stores, past the televisions, jewelry, jumbo-sized ketchup jugs and tubs of mixed nuts, is one of the retailer’s most prized items: The rotisserie chicken that costs just $4.99.

Cheap Kirkland Signature rotisserie chickens aren’t only a quick way for families to get dinner on the table. For Costco, the chickens are a lure, pulling customers into stores and getting them to browse the aisles, adding sometimes hundreds of dollars worth of items to their shopping carts before they pick up that bird.

The chickens have become almost a cult item. 91 million were sold last year, double the number from a decade earlier. They have their own Facebook page with nearly 13,000 followers.

So Costco is willing to go to extreme lengths to keep its chickens at $4.99. For the past few years, it’s been recruiting farmers for this moment: The official opening of a sprawling, $450 million poultry complex of its very own in Nebraska.

It’s a highly unusual move for one of the world’s largest retailers. Costco will control the production process from farm to store, making key decisions down to the grain chickens eat and the type of eggs hatched. Costco has even put its socially-conscious corporate reputation on the line, fending off local critics who have rallied against the Nebraska operation.
https://www.wbtw.com/news/what-you-need-to-know-about-costcos-4-99-rotisserie-chickens/

Well you may regret buying that $4.99 bird later on. In fact it’s becoming a huge problem according to medical experts. But here’s what you may not want out of that chicken. Despite that it only costs you a $5 note, it’s also making you fat. Yes, that bird has genes that activate obesity in chickens in order to get as much meat on the bone as possible, and still allows Costco to meet the price point and their all-important profit margins.

Aside from its potential damage to the environment, the expanded production of Costco’s $4.99 chicken may also put more people at risk of health problems. CAFO-raised chickens have high levels of antibiotics and are exposed to bacterial contamination linked to drug-resistant urinary tract infection (UTI), according to Mercola.

CAFO chickens have also been associated with the obesity epidemic in the U.S. A report in 2012 showed that majority of commercially-available chickens contain the “obese gene.”

Chickens get such gene when they are forced to gain weight quickly for production. This increases the amount of potentially harmful fats in the food products consumed by people.

Another study suggested that CAFO chickens contain more fat and higher omega-6 while having lower amounts of protein and omega-3 fats.

Aside from health and environmental impacts, experts also raised concerns with chicken production’s unfair contract agreements. Robert Taylor, a professor of agricultural economics at Auburn University, said majority of American chicken farmers have a contract that “essentially makes the farmer an indentured servant” or “chicken house janitor.”
https://www.medicaldaily.com/costcos-499-chicken-becoming-big-problem-445136

Apparently not. Because while that massive chicken farm in Nebraska has legal and health issues associated with it, there’s also some shocking numbers involving trade. Costco’s chicken is having a significant impact on trade as well as all of the other violations that have arisen because they are attempting to take control of their chicken supply. But by doing so, it has a significant economic impact on the global economy.

That’s why Costco is seizing control of its chicken supply chain. Costco believes it can slash costs by bringing production in house, saving up to 35 cents per bird.

It has already done the same with hot dogs.
Costco now produces 285 million hot dogs at a plant in California.

Costco sold kosher hot dogs at food courts until 2009, but suppliers started to run low on beef. So it brought production in-house and switched to its own Kirkland Signature-brand hot dogs. Costco now produces 285 million hot dogs at a plant in California.

Costco picked Nebraska for the poultry plant because the area had grain, water and labor available. Those are the three biggest costs involved with chicken production.

Although Nebraska is not known for chicken production, corn prices have fallen in recent years, leading to interest from farmers looking for new opportunities. The United States’ trade war with China has also taken a toll on farmers.
https://whnt.com/2019/10/12/costco-builds-giant-poultry-complex-to-keep-its-rotisserie-chickens-at-4-99/

So with all that research should you pull the trigger on that $4.99 chicken when you see it on the shelves at your local Costco? Well there’s plenty of reasons for but there’s also plenty of reasons against. Just like the arguments for making your own food, Costco’s chicken along with many of their food items, is made to sell at a price point. And we’ve already covered the extreme lengths they go to in order to obtain that price point. And that comes with more stricter corporate regulations which as we’ve seen don’t really exist.

The arrival of a Costco chicken processing plant in Fremont, Nebraska, spurred the introduction of the state’s first industrial chicken farms in 2018. With the plant set to begin operations after Labor Day, some residents are pushing for stronger — or any — oversight of large poultry farms in the state.

Lancaster County, home to the state’s capital of Lincoln, has been the site of the most recent debate about how chicken farms are regulated. Last October and again in July, the county’s commissioners considered a moratorium on new poultry farms, prompted by residents’ concerns about water and air pollution.

Both times, the commissioners decided against the moratorium. But the county is now considering zoning changes that could address concerns about the minimal oversight chicken farms in Nebraska receive and how little is required of farmers before they being operations that can house tens of thousands of birds. A 10-member working group has been meeting regularly to debate and draft those changes, though there is no specific deadline for their recommendations.

Meanwhile, soon-to-be neighbors of one of the largest chicken farms ever in Nebraska are deeply concerned about their prospects if the farms continue to spread across the ag-friendly state.
https://thefern.org/ag_insider/with-costco-chicken-plant-set-to-open-nebraskans-want-more-oversight-of-poultry-farms/

That’s it this week for Top 10 Investigates. Good day.

[font size="8"]Holy Shit
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Gather around my fair brothers and sisters of Oregon State! It’s time to take a seat in the pew and pass the collection plate, for the Holy Church Of The Top 10 has convened and it’s time to remind you that the holiest among us are the most full of:

My fair congregation! You know my favorite time of year has already come and gone and that is the annual tradition known as All Hallows Eve. Of course with that tradition, our brothers and sisters on the right can get a little, shall we say, batshit fucking crazy about the issue. Yes, sir, we are allowed to swear in my church! As long as it’s not at the LAWRD almighty, I am totally OK with that. As you should never take the LAWRD’s name in vain. So the question that I have for you on the table today is – is Halloween just an innocent party to honor all things spooky? Or is satanic witchcraft being practiced? I mean come on, this is the year 2019 here, and we’re still talking about witches? I mean these people. So we here at the Holy Church Of The Top 10 like to educate as well as entertain.

It’s tradition: As Americans dress up to celebrate Halloween, religious right figures warn that what seems like harmless fun is actually a dangerous participation in demonic activity and Satan worship. This year’s warnings seem a little higher-strung than usual given the ongoing religious right panic about President Donald Trump being targeted by witchcraft.

In recent days, the Trump-supporting media platform Charisma has repeatedly pitched “Why Christians Shouldn’t Celebrate Halloween,” a new ebook with nine “teachings” about Halloween. “The demonic realm is alive and active,” it begins.

The ebook’s author Katherine DeGraw writes that people often recognize that “evil forces” drive actions like mass shootings. “However, when it comes to the pagan celebration of Halloween, we somehow do not see it as having the same demonic and evil impact as those other tragedies,” she writes. “The effects of Halloween and human sacrifices are just as real. However, authorities—and the news media—simply don’t report them.”

She urged Christians to be on the “counteroffensive” against the “demonic realm” that is conjuring up “curses, spells, vexes and other evil practices” in the month before Halloween to “destroy Christians, uproot prophetic destinies and come against the plans of God.”
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/witchcraft-panic-fuels-trump-allies-war-on-halloween/

Always the ones you least suspect doesn’t it seem that way? Well so every Halloween there’s always this controversy. It’s always people like this that have to ruin it for everybody else isn’t it? And here’s the possible worst thing you can give to children on Halloween, maybe besides pennies. Take a look at Ken Ham, who wants to give children a reminder that they are going to HEYLL!!! Dude, don’t screw with children like that!

It seems like Halloween is continually becoming more controversial and difficult to enjoy with each passing year. Now we’ve not only had parents petitioning to change the date of Halloween, but it looks like creationist Ken Ham is suggesting people scare children on Halloween by threatening them with “eternal damnation.”

“One way you can make the most of this once-a-year opportunity is by giving gospel tracts to children and/or their parents, along with candy and treats,” he wrote on his website.

This includes items you can purchase through Ham’s own store, including fake $1 million dollar bills that he claims are “worth far more than a million dollars,” because they contain images of dinosaurs or Noah’s Ark bursting through the front. And, better yet, are the messages written on the back.

“Have you ever lied, stolen or used God’s name in vain?” a message on the back of one of the bills reads. “If so, you’ve broken God’s law. The penalty for your crimes against God is death and eternal hell because God is holy and just.”

The bills, which he intends for kids, even warn against things like lust which he compares to adultery. “God sees you as guilty of sin,” one of the bills read. “The penalty of sin is death and eternity in hell.”

And of course, creationist Ken Ham also has several other items available through his site that he suggests buying to pass around for Halloween. A lot of it is in an effort to promote what he calls reverse trick-or-treating. And of course, the purpose of that is to stop what he calls the “evils of modern-day Halloween.” Right.
https://www.screengeek.net/2019/10/22/halloween-creationist-kids-warning/

Well we pretty much all are, Mr. Devil! But apparently if you are a supporter of the almighty, unholy Dark One, whose name shall not be spoken in my church, the line between your support of the Dark One and hatred for his detractors, and SAYTAN all run together! That’s what happens when you sit in front of Fox News for 24 hours a day.

Donald Trump’s supporters are commemorating Halloween in a magical way: by claiming that Democrats are targeting him with witchcraft.

Anti-LGBTQ activist Michael Brown says “the spirit of Jezebel” is executing a “Satanic plot” to destroy America and Trump using feminism, LGBTQ rights, abortion, witchcraft and sex trafficking of kids — and that’s just the tip of the black-magical iceberg.

Related: Are witches & gays corrupting upstanding politicians in DC?

On his web show The MC Files, right-wing conspiracy theorist Chris McDonald said, “[Democratic] Rep. Adam Schiff is a pedophile and a Satanist who practices human sacrifice.” How does he know this? Because he “senses such a dark, demonic power on Schiff whenever he hears his speak.”

The group Intercessors for America recently urged its followers to pray for Trump to protect him from “occultic activity.” Just how deep is this witchy plot against the president, you ask? Let them explain:

“Spells and hexes. Curses and binding. Witches, warlocks, occultists, and resisters of President Trump are focusing their negative energy and spiritual power toward President Trump right now. Monthly rituals have been taking place since the beginning of his presidency. Now, all who call on the name of the enemy are actively ramping up their efforts and coordination in this heightened time of occult activity for a week of binding beginning the evening of October 25.
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2019/10/trump-supporters-using-halloween-accuse-democrats-witchcraft-satanism/

?

That’s apparently what witchcraft is like in the year of our LAWRD 2019! And by the way, should you agree with the Dark One and that the accusations against him are the greatest witch hunt in modern history, let me lecture you on what an actual witch hunt is like. And remember we went through this in the 1600s, and we don’t want it coming back!

On a summer morning in 1692, Bridget Bishop, who was accused of being a witch, was hanged from an oak tree in Salem, Massachusetts, then dumped into a shallow grave. The thrice-married Bridget, 60, was decried for possessing dark powers by her stepchildren after her second husband’s death, in what may have been a bid to seize his property. She beat that earlier charge — but during the Salem witch panic, her luck ran out.

Out of the 16 falsely accused women of Salem and nearby villages who were either hanged or died in rat-infested dungeons awaiting execution, at least 13 were past their childbearing years, Jackie Rosenhek notes in “Mad with Menopause.”

In patriarchal societies — including our own — post-reproductive women have often been scapegoated as threats and burdens. But many scholars now believe that these women’s presence is not only a defining characteristic of the human species, but the very thing that enabled us to flourish. (One theory is known as the “grandmother hypothesis.”)

Scientists know of only five species in which females outlive the reproductive stage. Humans are special in this regard, along with killer whales — where older females ensure the species’ survival by guiding their pods to food sources. Until the last few decades, many researchers assumed that in humans, this trait was a useless quirk or the “unintended” result of some other adaptation.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/halloween-remember-witch-hunts-were-created-patriarchy-terrified-older-women-ncna1074236

There it is, folks! Halloween isn’t a celebration of demons and zombies, or a witch hunt! It’s just some mild and harmless fun! Of course our brothers and sisters on the right choose to ruin that fun. Mass has ended, may you go in peace! That’s it this week for:

[font size="8"]Beating A Dead Horse: Offensive In Flight Entertainment
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Let’s talk some censorship. Come on everyone wants to be able to speak what they want to without consequences. Hell it’s a right guaranteed to us by the 1st Amendment in the Bill Of Rights. But there are some who won’t have any of it. There’s some out there that could say they hate the mere idea of freedom of speech. Those people are generally Christian conservatives. Now , that said we all get bored on airplanes, right? And airlines have come up with ways to give you some in flight entertainment which includes watching in flight movies on a tiny monitor built into your seat. So censorship and airlines – what do they have in common? Well Delta is editing the gay out of two of the gayest movies of the year on its’ flights. The first is “Booksmart” – about two high school over achievers who try to relive the fun they’ve lost in 4 years into one night. The second is of course “Rocketman” – the true story of how Elton John rose to become one of modern rock music’s most iconic figures. So how do these two movies fare with airline travelers?

Delta Air Lines is reviewing the process that allowed a lesbian sex scene to be cut from the film "Booksmart" after Olivia Wilde called out the censorship on flights.

Wilde, who made her directorial debut with "Booksmart," spoke out on the issue over the weekend while on the red carpet at the Academy's Governors Awards. In a Twitter thread Wednesday, Wilde said she learned the censorship went far beyond the sex scene and that airlines use third-party vendors to edit entertainment.

"I finally had the chance to watch an edited version of Booksmart on a flight to see exactly what had been censored," Wilde wrote. "Turns out some airlines work with a third party company that edits the movie based on what they deem inappropriate. Which, in our case, is ... female sexuality?"

The 35-year-old actor and director said the edited version of the film also cut the words "vagina" and "genitals," a female masturbation scene, an animated sequence where the main characters turned into naked dolls, and a scene where the two teenage girls watched porn.

"What message is this sending to viewers and especially to women? That their bodies are obscene? That their sexuality is shameful?" Wilde said.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/delta-investigate-after-olivia-wilde-slammed-flight-censorship-booksmart-n1074926

Oh come on it’s OK if Maude Lebowski says it! So Booksmart is one side of the censorship coin after they removed all of the gay references and even went as far as to remove any references to female body parts, because you don’t know who is going to watch these movies! But here’s where it gets weird, this wasn’t Delta who was editing the third party content of these flicks. It was a third party!

A spokesperson for Delta airlines is denying reports that the airline asked for scenes to be cut out of Olivia Wilde’s acclaimed directorial debut Booksmart after several customers complained.

The issue was first brought up on Twitter when Wilde responded to a fan in shock after they said a lesbian kiss featuring one of the main characters was edited out of the airline cut of the film. While Wilde and the fan don’t mention Delta, several other users noted the same changes while watching the comedy on the airline.

In a statement to PEOPLE, a spokesperson for Delta explained that the airline hires a third-party editing company to provide its own edit of the movie along with the unedited version. If anything in the unedited version does not meet Delta’s guidelines, then Delta runs the third party’s edit regardless of whether parts of the film that don’t violate Delta’s guidelines have already been edited out.

“Delta’s content parameters do not in any way ask for the removal of homosexual content from the film,” Delta’s statement read. “We value diversity and inclusion as core to our culture and our mission and will review our processes to ensure edited video content doesn’t conflict with these values.”
https://people.com/movies/delta-says-it-didnt-demand-booksmarts-homosexual-content-be-cut-after-olivia-wilde-complains/

It’s people like that why we’re subjected to this nonsense. So Olivia Wilde herself got involved with Delta to help bring LGBT to light within the airline. But the censorship didn’t stop with Booksmart, apparently the Elton John biopic Rocketman got into the censorship mix. Oh man I hope whoever Delta hired hasn’t seen Bohemian Rhapsody yet because I can imagine the airline edit of that movie would only be about… 3 minutes long.

Delta Airlines have reportedly censored gay references out of the Elton John biopic Rocketman, and it's only the latest of many instances where critics allege airlines have made questionable anti-gay edits to in-flight entertainment.

Reports of changes to the 2019 film emerged after Entertainment Weekly digital director Shana Krochmal tweeted Wednesday about noticing the changes while on a Delta flight. Several other passengers have weighed in online to add that they have also noticed the edits.

"On @Delta today discovered that #Rocketman is stripped of almost every gay reference or scene that @eltonofficial fought to keep in the film's mainstream release, including a simple chaste kiss," tweeted Krochmal.

Airlines typically edit in-flight entertainment for content, but specifically editing out gay references that aren't otherwise explicit or objectionable appears to suggest that the airlines believe being gay is somehow wrong, indecent or an otherwise unsuitable concept for a wide range of people to be exposed to.

Rocketman is a musical biopic about the life of musician Elton John, and a central part of the film deals with the singer's sexuality and his coming to terms with being gay. In the airline-edited version of the film, comments suggest that while gay references were largely removed, scenes of violence and swear words were apparently left in.
https://www.newsweek.com/elton-john-biopic-rocketman-latest-film-passengers-claim-delta-removed-gay-references-1469092

I love that Family Guy clip – is that the first ever meta parody? I mean Willian Shatner singing Rocket Man was enough, but then Stewie goes and parodies the video of William Shatner singing Rocket Man is too much! But there is some good news on this front – it appears that Delta has learned its’ lesson and will bring back the full unedited versions of these movies for all to enjoy. Now to find out who did it so we can unleash the internet outrage machine on them! But you want to watch these movies unedited and uncensored? Just bring your own device and watch it that way!

Delta Air Lines will restore same-sex love scenes to its in-flight versions of the 2019 movies Booksmart and Rocketman, the company confirmed to BuzzFeed News.

The airline said that it was provided an "edited" version of each film, but only realized this week that those versions omitted key same-sex love scenes involving its lead characters.

“We are working to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Delta said in a statement.

The news broke after Booksmart director Olivia Wilde retweeted a viewer who complained that the hookup scene between one of the film's leads, Kaitlyn Dever, and actor Diana Silvers (Ma) had been cut from the film.

Two days later, an Entertainment Weekly editor tweeted that “almost every gay reference” had been cut from Delta's in-flight version of the Elton John biopic Rocketman, including a love scene between stars Taron Egerton and Richard Madden.

Delta says it never intended for these scenes to be cut, and a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the airline is working directly with the films' respective studios on new edits that will restore the love scenes in question.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adambvary/delta-booksmart-rocketman-same-sex-love-scenes

[font size="8"]How Is This Still A Thing: Revenge Porn
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Time once again to ask:

This week – revenge porn. How is this still a thing? This week after California representative Katie Hill was forced to resign after some, not kosher photos of her surfaced, the topic quickly turned to why Ms. Hill was forced to resign: Revenge Porn. This wasn’t just a mere hit job, this was a carefully orchestrated takedown initiated by a group calling itself Red State. So the question that has turned to now is – was Rep. Hill held to a higher standard than her male counterparts? Well let’s ask Al Franken just how well that worked out. What? Too soon? Well the line between Katie Hill and the concept of revenge porn is a very fine one to toe.

Democratic Rep. Katie Hill of California, who announced her plans to resign from her congressional seat earlier this week, gave her final speech on the floor of the House of Representatives on Thursday, where she apologized to her supporters but said the forces that led her to leave Congress are larger than she is.

"I will never shirk my responsibility for this sudden ending to my time here," Hill said, "but I have to say more because this is bigger than me."

She went on to say, "I am leaving now because of a double standard. I am leaving because I no longer want to be used as a bargaining chip. I am leaving because I didn't want to be peddled by papers and blogs and websites, used by shameless operatives for the dirtiest gutter politics that I've ever seen."

Earlier this month, a conservative blog released intimate photos of Hill alleging she and her husband had a separate relationship with an unnamed female campaign staffer. That report included three photos of the congresswoman, including an explicit photo.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/31/politics/katie-hill-final-speech-resignation/index.html

Yes, while we have Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court and Donald Trump in the White House, Katie Hill was forced to resign, because, reasons. But let’s not overlook the main fact why she resigned – because of something called “revenge porn”. Katie Hill wasn’t the only victim of revenge porn shaming, let’s take a look at a similar story happening in Minneapolis.

A former intimate partner of Minnesota State Senator Scott Dibble distributed graphic photos of him to colleagues, just three weeks after former congresswoman Katie Hill went through a similar situation with photos that were dubbed "revenge porn."

Both Hill and Dibble's photographs fit into the category of what is colloquially called "revenge porn" and what experts call "nonconsensual pornography." This means explicit images of a person that may or may not have been taken consensually, but that are released to the public without the victim's approval.

In what was a surprise statement, Dibble said a "former friend" had been harassing him after a "brief intimate and consensual relationship with this person," reports the StarTribune.

"When I attempted to end the relationship, I was threatened with embarrassment as this individual attempted to coerce me into continuing the relationship," Dibble said.

"My resistance to his threats was met this morning with a communication that was sent to my colleagues with what had been private photos, videos, and text messages."

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Caucus spokesperson, Ellen Anderson, confirmed that an unknown number of lawmakers received emails with attachments of the sexually explicit materials.
https://www.newsweek.com/minnesota-state-senator-second-elected-official-21-days-who-says-theyre-victim-revenge-porn-1469345

No we are definitely not amused by this. When you combine Katie Hill and Al Franken, you get a scenario in which anyone can be implicated in a scandal at any time if you have the pictures to prove it, and you may also get disproven for it. You know you could also solve this by – maybe – don’t take pictures of anything suspect!!! Because if you do it could almost certainly get you into trouble.

On Thursday afternoon, Katie Hill made her final floor speech to Congress, drawing her brief career as the representative from California’s 25th Congressional District to a close. Once seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party, Hill had been in the news recently for her personal life, with rumors, which she denied, that she had had an inappropriate relationship with a congressional staffer, while admitting that she did have one with a campaign staffer. A conservative blog and a British tabloid also leaked naked photos of her online, without her knowledge or permission.

As a freshman representative, Hill entered Congress as part of the most diverse class this country has ever seen. As one of 117 women elected to office in 2018, and one of the few openly queer women to ever hold national office, Hill offered a radically different idea of what American government could look like — and a radically different voice than many of those that had come before her. The attacks that ended her career were a painful reminder of just how vulnerable the change that many of us have been celebrating truly is.

For years, feminist activists have been sounding the alarm about nonconsensually publicized nude photos, also known as “revenge porn,” arguing that women are uniquely at risk of being targeted for public humiliation — and far more likely than men to suffer grave and punitive consequences after experiencing this sort of abuse.

With Hill’s resignation, that tragic prophecy has come true: The only other member of Congress who has publicly been the target of revenge porn was Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and he stayed in office after the news broke but retired at the end of his term, more than a year later. Yet a woman has been driven from office.

And Hill is not the first female politician whose sexuality people have tried to weaponize against her. In January of this year, Hill’s colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was the target of a fake nude photo scandal, which luckily had relatively little impact.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/katie-hill-resigned-because-revenge-porn-smear-s-success-puts-ncna1075126

That is a good question. Why would anyone do this if you could get in serious trouble and it could have job-costing consequences? It’s no joke that conservatives are going after democratically elected women hard. OK that was a poor choice of words. But at least one state is taking measures to combat this horrendous practice. Yup, you guessed it, California. Hopefully they won’t be the last either.

Now former Rep. Katie Hill is quitting Congress —but she isn’t going down without a fight.

“I am leaving because I didn’t want to be peddled by papers and blogs and websites, used by shameless operatives for the dirtiest gutter politics that I’ve ever seen and (by) the right-wing media to drive clicks and expand their audience by distributing intimate photos of me—taken without my knowledge, let alone my consent—for the sexual entertainment of millions,” the San Fernando Valley lawmaker said in her final speech on the House floor.

Hill resigned after details of her sexual relationship with a campaign staffer—and a humiliating montage of corroborating photos—were posted online. Although she has apologized for her “inappropriate” relationship with the campaign aide, she is also taking aim at the conservative political blog RedState and the British tabloid the Daily Mail, which first published the photos. (She denies having an affair with a congressional employee, first reported by RedState.)

Hill’s legal team sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Daily Mail, citing California’s so-called revenge porn laws, which make it a crime to share private, sexual images without a person’s permission. Sympathetic commentators and advocates for victims of cyber exploitation have also characterized the reporting as “revenge porn.”
https://www.dailynews.com/2019/11/03/and-now-the-legal-battle-can-katie-hill-really-triumph-in-anti-revenge-porn-crusade/

So only one state has the laws to combat this nonsense, and that’s the state that Katie Hill was representing in Congress. That’s enough to make you ask – Revenge Porn:

[font size="8"]People Are Dumb
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Hit it!

Of course you know by now that people are people and people are dumb. And I love these stories because they are all spectacular and all insane. And I’m glad that I am not involved in any of them, because I probably could be. Well, maybe not. Week after week stupid people never cease to amaze me with the seemingly bottomless pit of stupidity that seem to just get exponentially dumber. I want to start with this story out of Georgia. Remember way back in the 1st season of Idiots (see: Idiots #45 ) when creepy clowns were everywhere? You know what if you’re going to commit a robbery maybe don’t commit one dressed as the creepiest clown of all time – Pennywise!

A Georgia man who dressed up for Halloween as the demonic Pennywise was arrested last night after cops responding to a call about a creepy clown approaching motorists discovered that the costumed reveler was the subject of an outstanding arrest warrant.

Police in Conyers, an Atlanta suburb, received a call Thursday evening about an individual dressed in a clown costume and holding a red balloon (the calling card of Pennywise, who terrifies children in Stephen King’s “It” and the movie adaptations of the horror novel).

Around 7:15 PM, an officer contacted Jason Maugham, 39, who was standing on a Conyers street corner. As seen in the above screen grab, the officer's encounter with Maugham was recorded by a police body cam.

When the officer ran Maugham’s name through a Georgia Crime Information Center database, an outstanding warrant came back indicating that the laborer was wanted in a neighboring county for failure to pay child support.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/evil-clowns/creepy-clown-collared-385920

OK that’s creepy. Next up – dumb advertising. You know the sandwich chain Chik-Fil-A, which is famous for being closed on Sundays. Well, they had a promotion that backfired on them big time. The promotion was originally meant to promote National Sandwich Day, for which competitor Popeye’s was set to relaunch their famous chicken sandwich. But as many were quick to point out – National Sandwich Day was – wait for it – Sunday.

Chick-fil-A fans firmly have it ingrained in their minds – and stomachs – that the chicken chain is closed on Sundays.

But the Atlanta-based fast-food chain apparently forgot when it sent an email to some of its loyalty members this week.

"Calling all sandwich lovers," the email that also promoted the Chick-fil-A One program said, "Some prefer it grilled, others fancy the original. No matter which Chick-fil-A sandwich you love, order yours on November 3 for National Sandwich Day."

This year, the made-up food holiday held annually on Nov. 3 falls on a Sunday, which also happens to be the day that rival Popeyes' chicken sandwich – the one that prompted this summer's Chicken Sandwich War – returns to restaurants.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/food/2019/10/31/chick-fil-mistakenly-promotes-national-sandwich-day-apologizes/4116358002/

Next up – we have a pair of Jesus related stories in the People Are Dumb files. First up – we go to the Texas city of San Antonio. Where a drunken argument got someone crucified. Well, not quite literally, but a crucifix was definitely used as a weapon. And a very strange choice of weapon at that.

A local woman is in police custody after attacking her mother with a religious object.

According to a report from News 4 San Antonio, Christian Lydia Martinez came home drunk during the weekend and began arguing with her mother. The argument escalated to the point that Martinez grabbed a heavy, 10-inch crucifix off the wall and struck her mother several times over the head with it.

Martinez reportedly hit her mother so hard that the victim suffered a fractured skull. The suspect fled the scene when she saw that her mother was bleeding, Telemundo San Antonio reports.

The victim was taken to a hospital for treatment and is expected to make a full recovery.

Martinez, 25, has since been charged with aggravated assault. Her bail has been set at $30,000.
https://www.sacurrent.com/the-daily/archives/2019/10/28/drunk-san-antonio-woman-attacks-mother-with-crucifix-during-argument

Yeah I can imagine the fight went down something like that. Next up – another incident involving religious symbols in the state famously known as the Sunshine State. You know it’s funny, I’ve read the Bible, I did not know that there was a passage where Jesus told his disciples to shoot first and ask questions later. I did not know that passage existed.

The Leon County Sheriff's Office says it arrested a 31-year-old man after a debate about the Bible with his brother escalated into a fight where gunshots were fired into the ground.

The incident on Wax Myrtle Drive happened on Sunday around 11:18 p.m., according to the arrest affidavit.

Michael Dean was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without the intent to kill, use of a firearm during a felony, criminal mischief property damage and harming a public servant or family member.

When deputies first arrived on scene, Dean's brother told them they drank several alcoholic beverages on the front porch and were in a heated debate about the Bible, the affidavit said. The brother then told deputies Dean choked him, but he broke out of it and a fight started.
https://www.wctv.tv/content/news/LCSO-Brothers-bible-debate-leads-to-fight-shots-fired-at-ground--564041171.html

&t=109s

Ah!!!! That’s the kind of thing that will haunt your dreams. Finally this week – we go to the city of New Smyrna Beach. Sigh… look, here my whole thing. If you have access to the internet for *ANY* length of time in 2019, you have to have heard of the phrase “jump the shark”. It’s defined as the moment where something happens in your favorite TV show that is so ridiculous it turns from good to crap almost instantly. And from here on out, you could say that Florida Man quite literally jumped the shark.

Florida headlines jumped the shark Sunday afternoon when a 27-year-old man was attacked by a shark that he accidentally jumped on in New Smyrna Beach, according to Volusia County Beach Safety.

The unidentified man was surfing and decided to jump off his board and into the water, said Av Jenkins, deputy chief of operations. The bad timing coincided with a shark that just happen to be swimming near by.

The surfer sustained minor lacerations and was treated on scene, Jenkins said.

The man drove himself back to Orlando after the incident.

Read more: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/breaking-news/os-ne-new-smyrna-shark-bite-surfer-jump-20191028-d7hv3vg7h5cxbpy6pttmzgnygq-story.html

That’s it this week for:

[font size="8"]Keeping Up With The Candidates Ep. 13: The Purge
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Welcome back to Keeping Up With The Candidates! This is our 13th week doing this and so far we’ve looked at the candidates, the issues, and everything else you need to get ready for the mother of all elections to end all elections 2020: The Quest For Curly’s Gold. Yes, we are pulling that reference out of our filing cabinet! But this week we’re going to talk about another film from another genre, and one that’s that much more horrifying: The Purge. And never mind that the actual slogan for The Purge: Election Year is also “Keep America Great”.

That’s real! That happened! And you know what’s even weirder? Is that if you live in Georgia, they are about to take your voting rights back to the stone ages. If Americans cared more about their voting privileges than they did about their guns, this would be an entirely different place! I mean this is 300,000 people we’re talking about here. That’s literally the size of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Georgia, a state where allegations of voter suppression dominated discussion of last year’s governor race, will conduct another purge of its voter rolls, the secretary of state’s office announced Monday.

This newest purge targets those who have not voted for several years—ostensibly because they have moved out of state—and could cause 330,000 voter registrations to be canceled.

Elections officials have justified it as a measure to clean up the rolls and simplify the election process. The state is obligated under a new state law to notify voters before their registrations are canceled. Officials said that the state would mail out the notifications early in November to an inactive voter’s last known address, and those voters would need to respond within 30 days (by returning the included form, re-registering online, or mailing in a separate paper registration form) or be removed from the rolls in December

Those who are “inactive” under this purge did not vote or update their registrations in the past five years. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, those who did vote but had their mail from county election offices returned as undeliverable could also be included in the category.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/georgia-election-purge-voter-rolls.html

No it’s not that kind of Purge. #SurviveTheElection. That said since this is the second time Georgia has attempted a massive voter purge in last year’s elections? Well it affected it a whole shitload, which is why you should be utterly terrified that they’re attempting to do it again. What happens when you show up to vote on the day of the election and you get turned away from the polls? It could happen to anyone at any time.

On Election Day 2018, James Baiye II drove to Lucerne Baptist Church in the same suburban Atlanta neighborhood where he’d been registered to vote for most of his adult life. He dropped his brother and elderly mother at the front door, parked the car and got in line. Though he’d been registered for years, the 31-year-old African American hadn’t been a frequent voter. He’d spent a few years playing football at a junior college in North Carolina. In 2012, Baiye says, he requested an absentee ballot, but there’s no record of it in the state’s voter file. In fact, he hadn’t cast an in-person ballot since 2008, when Barack Obama first ran for president.

This year was different. He’d become excited about candidacy of Stacey Abrams, the Democrat who was vying to become Georgia’s first African-American governor, and the nation’s first-ever black woman to lead a U.S. state. It wasn’t Abrams’ race that swayed Baiye, he said, but rather her pledge to run the government differently. “A lot of being there for the people,” he said. “I just wanted to see her succeed.”

But when Baiye finally reached the front of the line, there was a problem. Poll workers couldn’t find his name on their list of registered voters. This was puzzling: Baiye is a citizen, he wasn’t a felon, and he hadn’t moved.

What Baiye didn’t know was he’d been caught up in one of the most hotly debated campaign issues in Georgia. It turned out that a year earlier Baiye had been removed from the voter rolls in a purge led by the office of Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was running for governor against Abrams.
https://www.wabe.org/how-a-massive-voter-purge-in-georgia-affected-the-2018-election/

No that’s the wrong Purge again damn it!!! This is why you need to register and vote, vote damn it like your life depends on it! If you don’t vote in the current election you could lose your right to vote in the next election. And that thought is fucking terrifying. Want to know how we get such incompetent politicians in charge? It’s because you don’t vote!

Georgia Election Officials could soon remove more than 300,000 inactive registered voters from the state’s voter rolls. Now, political officials here in our area say about 6,000 of those people are in Richmond County alone.

A new state law requires voters to receive a notice before they can be purge from the voter registry. However, some, including the Richmond County Democratic Party and the local NAACP, say people shouldn’t lose their right to vote just because they haven’t exercised that right recently. They said they fear the purging process will be prone to mistakes and held a news conference to inform folks about how to keep their voting status active.

“When you’re talking about 6,000 people right here from Augusta, that can affect any district. That can affect any election in Augusta from mayor down to dog catcher. So, it’s important that we understand that in this state 300,000 people are getting ready to lose their right to vote,” said Richmond County Democratic Party Chairman Jordan Johnson.

“If people have a question about whether or not they’re still registered, if they’ve got purged, we can help with that. You can come down, you can look on the website or we can get you re-registered,” said New Georgia Project of Augusta Office Manager Joy Johnson.
https://www.wfxg.com/2019/10/31/georgia-election-officials-remove-voters-states-voter-rolls/

Still the wrong purge, damn it!!! That’s the Purge: Anarchy. We’re talking about the Purge: 2020 Election, because it’s only 365 days away. That’s right – we have less than a fucking year to get ready and we have to be ready because there is going to be a barrage of anti-Democrat propaganda coming down the pike. Think it was bad in 2016? Hoo boy, what’s coming next year will make 2016 seem like chump change by comparison. But for now – register to vote and actually go out there and do it!

As Georgia election officials prepare to erase 313,243 registrations, several groups say they’re concerned that legitimate voters will be swept up in the purge.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia identified 70 people Monday who it says voted in November 2018 but are targeted for cancellation.

The ACLU based its findings on voting records from a month after the 2018 election, but a more recent state voting list obtained last month by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows that no voters who have cast ballots since September 2016 will be canceled.

“The voter registration of one Georgia citizen canceled in error is one citizen too many,” said Andrea Young, the executive director for the ACLU of Georgia. “We call on the secretary of state to stop removing citizens from the voter rolls and focus on serving the citizens of Georgia by ensuring access to the ballot and free and fair elections.”
https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/georgia-purge-list-scrutinized-for-voter-registration-removals/WCDFmhn9P9oFgnVKHAQHoJ/#

God damn it.

[font size="4"]Next Week:[/font]

We’re going to talk about Beto’s unfortunate exit and who the current front runner is.

[font size="8"]And Now This:[/font]
[font size="8”]Beck[/font]

Ladies and gentlemen, my next guest needs no introduction! He is one of the best singer – songwriters in the country. His latest album is called “Hyperspace”. You can see him live at the KROQ Acoustic Christmas show playing Dec 7th at Honda Center. Playing his song “Saw Lighting”, give it up for Beck!

Thank you Gonzaga! This was fun! We’re off to Boise State next! See you next week!

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Top 10 Conservative Idiots Recorded In Front Of Live Audience At: Gonzaga University Student Center, Spokane, WA
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About Top 10 Idiots

This is the official DU account for the new format Top 10 Conservative Idiots separate from the host account Initech. The new format Top 10 will launch June 13th, 2018 and all posts related to the Top 10 (promos, etc) will be posted from this account only. The Top 10 is posted once a week on Thursdays at 2:00 PM. There is a full archive of all past, present and future Top 10 editions that can be found here: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218599098\ Announcements for our current season schedule are posted in our Best Of editions that appear at the end of each season. Updates are posted regularly on the official Top 10 Mastodon account and the official Holy Shit Mastodon account. The Mastodon accounts are used to announce what's going to be in next week's edition, new content, advertising our segments, and so on. This account will post official Top 10 editions, and any related content including our spinoff series: Holy Shit The Sunday Sermons. If you wish to contact the Top 10 you may do so here: E-mail (all questions, concerns, suggestions, and hate mail welcome): Top10ConIdiots@gmail.com Follow the Top 10 on Mastodon: Top10ConIdiots@mstdn.party Follow The Holy Church Of The Top 10 on Mastodon: ChurchOfTop10@mstdn.party **This account will ONLY be used to post official Idiots editions, promos, and things related to the Top 10. No other posts will come from this account** Top 10 Wiki: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100211322508