Top 10 Conservative Idiots #2: God Isn't Fixing This Edition

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Last edited Sat Dec 5, 2015, 08:58 PM - Edit history (1)

God Isn't Fixing This Edition

Sigh... Another week and another mass shooting, and a boat load of conservative idiocy to report on. So much that it was damn near impossible to narrow it down to 10. Not even five days after the terror attack in Colorado Springs happened, another one struck a holiday party at a developmentally disabled center in San Bernardino, CA. As someone who has lived in the North Orange County / Inland Empire area his whole life, this one hits way too close to home for comfort. Because there was so much idiocy this week I am bringing this a day early!

Before we begin, a disclaimer about this week: I am not making light of the tragedy in San Bernardino. Not even slightly. What I am doing is what needs to be done - trashing the fucking GOP for not only allowing, but actually enabling and encouraging this type of carnage to happen on American soil. And guess what? The FBI is now investigating it as if it's a bonafied fucking terror attack. Congratulations, NRA! You just enabled ISIS to commit an act of terror on US soil! On my home turf no less! How do you feel about yourselves? Ed note: the NRA will be ripped a new asshole in Idiots #3 next week . Stay tuned!

So what is Congress (1) doing about it? If you answered "deny gun control research to actual medical professionals", you are correct sir/ma'am! Elsewhere, Ann Coulter (2) live tweeted the shootings and blamed it on just about everything but the obvious. Ted Cruz (3) definitely isn't helping make the situation any better. Meanwhile a rather interesting investigative piece published by the Huffington Post uncovers some interesting evidence about Gun Nut Conspiracy Theorists (4) and the results are not what you'd expect. Donald Trump (5) manages to offend the entire Middle East and renders Fox & Friends completely speechless. If you want to turn off the news surrounding the San Bernardino tragedy, Mark Zuckerberg (6), the founder of Facebook generously donated $4.5 billion to charity, but if you guessed that it's his own charity, you are once again correct! As Chris Hardwick would say - points! In the international conservative idiots file, the International Olympic Committee (7) is failing to meet budget for next year's games in Rio and is taking matters into its' own hands. On the lighter side, Fox Business pundit Kennedy Montgomery (8) explains white privilege from the rich white person's perspective (hint: she fails, hard). And the Liberty Counsel (9) has their underwear in a wad over a Wisconsin school's decision to teach kids about gender identity. Finally rounding out the list, Jeb! (10) says that he would have skipped the Paris climate change summit entirely if he were president, despite that his state may be almost entirely underwater in a few years. And we have a bonus idiot: Fox News's "legal analyst" Peter Johnson has a different take on the San Bernardino shootings. Enjoy! And as always don't forget the key!



[font size="8"]Congress[/font]



America - it's now been 5, 0 days without a mass shooting. It's terrible. And like I said - for me this one hits way too close to home for me for comfort. The site is less than an hour away from where I live (well 4 hours if you count Inland Empire traffic ). There have now been over a dozen deadly mass shootings in America this year, and that's not counting the Bataclan attack in Paris. And there are no answers. And especially not from Congress. And if you're wondering exactly what Congress has been up to in regards to these terrible attacks happening in this country? Well now you know. On the day of - the day of - the latest deadly shooting in San Bernardino, Congress denied to the advocacy group Doctors For America, funding for doing research into the underlying cause of gun violence. This is jaw droppingly stupid and just plain fucking evil.

Hours before San Bernardino shooting, doctors urged Congress to lift funding ban on gun violence research

On Wednesday morning, a group of doctors in white coats arrived on Capitol Hill to deliver a petition to Congress. Signed by more than 2,000 physicians around the country, it pleads with lawmakers to lift a restriction that for nearly two decades has essentially blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on gun violence.

Joined by a handful of Democratic lawmakers, the doctors spoke about the need to view gun violence as a public health epidemic and research ways to solve it – as the country would with any disease causing the deaths of thousands of Americans each year.

“It is disappointing that we have made little progress over the past 20 years in finding solutions to gun violence," said Nina Agrawal, a New York physician and member of the advocacy group Doctors for America, according to the group's Twitter feed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/12/02/hours-before-san-bernardino-mass-shooting-doctors-were-on-capitol-hill-petitioning-congress-to-lift-ban-on-gun-violence-research/?postshare=1101449109387978&tid=ss_fb

Since I went to Disneyland last week, I will say this: "It's the circle of deaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaath and it screws us all!!!!!" Yeah! Sing it with me!

And in case you're wondering why your "thoughts and prayers" aren't working, the NY Daily News has an answer for that:





[font size="8"]Ann Coulter[/font]



Ann Coulter has been awfully quiet lately, but on Wednesday resurfaced to offer her usual brand of fire and brimstone hatred, and of course blames Mexican immigrants and pro lifers for this latest shooting in San Bernardino. But instead I'll let Ann Coulter's series of horrifically ugly tweets, with each one exponentially worse than the last (in Lewis Black's words - "exponentially worse means shittier and shittier and shittier&quot , speak for themselves.



http://www.salon.com/2015/12/03/ann_coulter_21st_century_white_american_men_are_the_most_pacific_human_beings_in_world_history/



[font size="8"]Ted Cruz[/font]



Ted Cruz loves him some manly American things like guns, and bacon, and monster trucks, and babes. Doesn't he? In fact he goes so far out of his way to prove he's the more manly candidate than the last that he actually shot this video of him eating bacon off a freshly fired machine gun:

Yes, that's him eating "machine gun bacon". Machine Gun Bacon, by the way I saw them at the Troubadour last week - amazing band. See, Ted, I won't be doing that. You know we have this thing called "e.coli" that appears on undercooked foods that can cause serious stomach poisoning. But that's not why he's on the list this week. On Wednesday - the day of, again - the day of the horrible massacre in San Bernardino, he is announcing that he is going ahead with a planned campaign stop at a shooting range in Iowa. Yes, while Cruz is going out of his way to prove that he's the more manly candidate, he's also one-upping Donald Trump in the quest to be the more insensitive candidate.

Against the backdrop of another national mass shooting, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas plans to appear on Friday at an Iowa shooting range to demonstrate his dedication to the Second Amendment and gun rights.

The event, at CrossRoads Shooting Sports in Johnston, Iowa, will highlight the formation of the campaign’s “Second Amendment Coalition,” to which more than 24,000 people have signed on, according to a campaign spokesman, Rick Tyler.

Mr. Tyler said that the event had been arranged before the shooting on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., and that the campaign had no discussion about rescheduling.

While the shooting has renewed calls among Democrats for stricter gun control measures, Republicans like Mr. Cruz have thus far seen a different lesson in the tragedy.

In a letter co-written by Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Mr. Cruz on Thursday asked top members of the Obama administration to provide detailed information on the immigration histories of the shooting suspects.

http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/04/ted-cruz-to-discuss-gun-rights-at-iowa-shooting-range/

Yes. You read that correctly. Against the backdrop of one of the deadliest shootings in this country since Sandy Hook, Ted Cruz is more concerned with gun rights than he is protecting the citizens of the United States from another gun attack. Hey Ted, I have one thing to say to you:





[font size="8"]Gun Nut Conspiracy Theorists[/font]



The Huffington Post. Come for the articles about the world's most bizarre Japanese penis parade, stay for the hard hitting political journalism. I kid, I kid. But man did they tear gun rights activists a new one with this latest hard hitting journalistic piece and it's a great one that is really worth reading the entire thing through. Here, it talks about the underlying origins of gun nut conspiracy theorists, and how many of them are intelligent, they just get their information from the wrong sources.

Three characteristics come together to motivate belief in conspiracy theories. First: The conspiracy theory has to line up with what the person already believes. Conservatives aren’t going to jump on a conspiracy theory that makes other conservatives look bad, and liberals aren’t going to believe a theory that undermines liberal causes. [br]

Second: Whether we're talking about liberals or conservatives, the people who are likely to believe conspiracy theories are less trusting of authority and other people than the people who dismiss the theories. That's about what you'd expect. A deep distrust of society seems to be correlated with a willingness to believe that what’s being reported isn’t the truth, or a tendency to believe that the government is always hiding something.[br]

Third: People who believe in conspiracy theories are typically more knowledgeable about politics than the average American -- at least, that's true of conservative conspiracy theorists. Among liberals, there didn't seem to be any strong connection between how well-informed a person was about politics and how likely that person was to subscribe to conspiracy theories. The researchers weren’t expecting to find such a clear difference between ideologies.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/conspiracy-theorists-politics_565e0c14e4b072e9d1c3b2e9

No witty comments here. Good stuff and it delves deep into the source of gun nut conspiracy theories.



[font size="8"]Donald Trump[/font]



Never one to back down from controversy, Donald Trump (who will hereby be referred to by his internet nickname "Il Douche&quot , didn't just back down from his controversial, Nazi-esque policies that have won over the minds of crazy, racist uncles across the US. No, he doubled down. This week in a phone call to Fox And Friends, he said that he would not just go after suspected terrorists, he'd target their families as well.

“What about civilian casualties?” Kilmeade asked. “What about the fact that we’re targeting them, and people are very concerned about collateral damage?”[br]

“I would do my best, absolute best,” Trump continued, with full gusto. “I mean, one of the problems that we have, and one of the reasons we’re so ineffective, you know. they’re trying to — they’re using them as shields. It’s a horrible thing, they’re using them as shields. But we’re fighting a very politically correct war.[br]

“And the other thing is, with the terrorists — you have to take out their families. When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives — don’t kid yourself. But they say don’t care about their lives , you have to take out their families.”[br]

At that point, co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck ended this particular part of the discussion, and segued the conversation over to illegal immigration.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/trump-to-fight-terrorists-you-have-to-take-out-their-families/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Memo%20-%202015-12-03&utm_term=MM_frequency_six

Wow, when you've rendered Fox & Friends speechless, it's time to hang it up. On another note, Dër Trumpenfeürher made the cover of a magazine's coveted annual top 10 list, and it's not one you would expect:





[font size="8"]Mark Zuckerberg[/font]



So by now you've heard that the Facebook founder and his wife have welcomed their baby daughter into the world, and that Mark Zuckerberg has generously gave some $4.5 billion, or a rather large and generous chunk of his fortune to charity. But here's what you don't know about that donation or the charity that money went to.

By now you must have heard that Mark Zuckerberg along with his wife Priscilla Chan has pledged to give away 99% of his estimated USD45 billion in Facebook stock to charity. Basically, Mark is giving away enough money to fund one of the world's biggest charities for the next 45 years. Instead, he is funding his own. Here's how: [br]

The vehicle for his beneficence will be the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative LLC, a family-run foundation that he controls and through which he will maintain control of Facebook for "the foreseeable future." [br]

Mark Zuckerberg will transfer ownership of his Facebook stock without paying capital gains taxes. He will also benefit from the possibility that his foundation will live beyond him, with his heirs and their heirs at the helm, untouched by estate taxes. [br]

Which means that unlike a charitable trust, which is compelled to spend its money on charity, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC will be able to spend its money on whatever it wants, including private, profit-generating investment.

http://says.com/my/news/what-no-one-is-telling-you-about-mark-zuckerberg-donating-99-of-his-fortune-to-charity

Yup, if you guessed that Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg's wife, is the founder and CEO of the charity, you are correct! As Chris Hardwick would say - you get points! You see, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. As a billionaire, Zuckerberg is just doing the American republican billionaire deed of donating his billions of dollars to his own tax free shelter. God bless America! USA! USA! USA! USA!





[font size="8"]The International Olympic Committee (IOC)[/font]



After the social, economic, and tourist disaster that was the 2014 World Cup, you'd think the Brazilian government would be smart enough not to accept any more of these disasters. But then again it is the Brazilian government. The government that built airports and stadiums in small towns but was unable to complete them in time for the World Cup, stranding passengers and its entire infrastructure and completely bankrupting most of the towns that hosted world cup games, leaving them with empty stadiums and half assed airports, that nobody asked for and will never be used again. But now along comes the IOC with the 2016 Summer Games in Rio. If you thought FIFA screwed up Brazil for the worst, (1) you're not wrong, and (2) things are about to get worse. It turns out the fiscal disaster that came with hosting the 2014 World Cup, is in turn, about to create another fiscal disaster worse than what FIFA brought with Brazil not properly preparing for the games and with less than a year, and no money, this is what is going to happen.

(Bloomberg) The Brazilian economic crisis has finally hit the 2016 Olympics. Following a new round of cost-cutting by the Rio 2016 organizers, athletes will be asked to pay for the air conditioning in their dorm rooms. Stadium backdrops will be stripped to their bare essentials. Fancy cars and gourmet food for VIPs are out.

"The goal here is to organize games without public funding and to organize games that make sense from an economic point of view," Rio 2016 spokesman Mario Andrada said in an interview.

That economic focus has changed radically in the six years since Rio was awarded the Games – South America’s first. At the time, Brazil’s government pledged $700 million toward any budgetary overrun. Then the economy tanked. Unemployment has soared, and the local currency, the real, has lost one-third of its value against the dollar in the last year.

Now, with costs that ran up to 2 billion reais ($520 million) over budget and the public commitment in doubt, the organizers must stick firmly to the 7.4 billion reais they expect to earn from sponsorships, ticket sales, and a grant from the International Olympic Committee. Final decisions on what to pare back and how much should be finalized by next week, Andrada said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-03/no-frills-rio-olympics-to-athletes-air-conditioning-costs-extra

Yes, things are so bad in Brazil that not only is the country 2 billion (its' own currency) over budget, they might not meet the demands of the IOC by the time that the games are going to happen next summer. And the country is going broke at an alarming rate, and that will force the athletes to pay for their own air conditioning! In Brazil!! During the summer! Ahh!!! John Oliver is going to have a field day with this next year.





[font size="8"]Katie Pavlich and Kennedy Montgomery[/font]



Fox Business Channel. The network that explains overtly complicated financial and economic news using excessive cleavage. This is not the network you want to go to for answers about life's most complicated questions like race relations. No, this is the network you go to have your stock portfolio read by former Hooters waitresses. Enter host Kennedy Montgomery. She was a guest on the O'Reilly Factor along with Katie Pavlich. They got into a discussion about the University of Vermont offering students a retreat off campus to discuss racial issues in America. And then this happened:

[div class="excerpt" ] On Tuesday’s edition of The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly complained to Pavlich and Fox Business host Kennedy Montgomery that the University of Vermont had offered a three day retreat to help students understand the concept of “white privilege.”

“You didn’t give me a trigger warning before you asked me about my whiteness!” Montgomery snarked. “I don’t even know what it means to confront one’s whiteness.”

“I have never cashed in on my white privilege,” she added.

Pavlich chimed in: “To me, especially in the Northeast, confronting my white privilege is going to the tanning salon.”

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/fox-pundit-says-white-privilege-is-racist-i-confront-my-whiteness-by-going-to-the-tanning-salon/

Yes. All complicated issues regarding race in America can be solved by confronting white privilege with going to the tanning salon. I'll let Weird Al handle this one:

[font size="8"]The Liberty Counsel[/font]



If you've never heard of the Liberty Counsel until now, consider yourself lucky. And I'm not just talking about their horribly misguided misspelling of the word "council". They're a Florida (obviously) based lunatic fringe group consisting of a group of lawyers who funnel lawsuits in a concentrated effort to make the lives of educators miserable. In the past they've filed lawsuits against districts over common core adoption and various LGBT rights ordinances. So why are they in the news this time? They're targeting a school in Wisconsin - for wait for it - daring to educate kids about gender identity.

A Wisconsin elementary school has cancelled the reading of a children’s book about a transgender girl after parents threatened to sue claiming that the reading would be a violation of parents rights.

The school’s principal, school psychologist and counselor sent out a note to parents alerting them to the reading of I Am Jazz by Jessica Hershel and Jazz Jennings. The note explained that a student at the school identifies as a girl but has male anatomy and the reading would support that student.

“We believe all students deserve respect and support regardless of their gender identity and expression, and the best way to foster that respect and support is through educating students about the issue of being transgender,” the note read, reports The Cap Times.

The Florida organization Liberty Counsel contacted the school on behalf of several parents threatening to sue and the reading was cancelled.

http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/school-cancels-reading-after-parents-threaten-to-sue/113128

First of all, who are these "several parents"? And why does a legal organization in Florida give a shit about what a school in Wisconsin is doing? I'd be willing to bet some good money that there's *ZERO*parents involved here. Some old fat white douchebags making other people's lives miserable, especially that of the transgendered kid in question. I'd like to tell these people where they can shove their "traditional values" but in the interest of good taste, and to get TTCI to the top of Google, I won't do that.



[font size="8"]Jeb![/font]



Finally, if you've made it this far, if you've managed to come to the end of this week's post without smashing your monitor, laptop or phone/tablet in pure anger, well first of all kudos to you! You are a stronger person than I am, and I am the one writing this shit! It's been a difficult week and we might as well have some fun with it. We end this week by coming to the sinking ship that is the Jeb! campaign. If Jeb! keeps this up, the state of Florida (his former state) might both be literally and figuratively underwater. If Jeb!'s environmental record is anything like his voting record as governor of Florida, he recently sent any chance of winning over environmental activists down the proverbial toilet. After the recent Climate Change Summit in Paris, Jeb! said the following:

..... former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush cited potential economic impacts of environmental regulations as a reason why he would have considered skipping Paris were he currently president.

"I'm not sure I would have gone to the climate summit if I was president today," Bush told reporters in Waterloo, Iowa.

"I worry about the economic impact for our country," Bush said. "I worry that, put aside intentions, that this, these proposals could have an impact on the here and now, on people that are really struggling right now. So I'd be uncertain whether I'd attend a meeting like that, where it seems like the movement is towards policies that would hurt our economy."

http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/01/politics/obama-climate-talks-should-include-legally-binding-mechanism/index.html

The goal of the Paris Climate Change Conference is to at least get a dialogue going about what can be done to help prevent climate change. If Jeb Bush were to become president, and he didn't attend such a summit of world leaders, what kind of message does that send? Well this.

Jeb! can fix it, but he clearly doesn't give a flying fuck!

[font size="8"]Bonus Idiot: Peter Johnson[/font]



I was originally going to save this for next week's edition, but it was too damn good to leave off this week in the wake of the San Bernardino tragedy, so I'm giving you a bonus idiot as an early Christmas present. If you're a regular viewer of Fox & Friends, first of all, you might want to smash your TV or donate it to charity because regularly viewing Fox & Friends has been known to be the catalyst for single handedly dumbing down not only the entire room, but every room surrounding it in a 6 mile radius. Really, the show is that fucking stupid. And they may have reached a new low point for stupidity when Steve Doocy and Peter Johnson, a Fox News legal analyst began discussing the ramifications of the terror attacks in San Bernardino. Peter Johnson had this to say:

STEVE DOOCY: Sure. Well I mean just look at the last 10 days. What have we heard about nonstop over the last week? Global warming, a lot about climate change, things like that. When everybody else was saying, you're in Paris, you should be talking about terror, and he [INAUDIBLE]

JOHNSON: I don't think there's any question that this should be called terror. What kind of terror it is, we need to find out. And I don't want to come to any hasty conclusions at this point. But, if you look at the dots, if you start to connect them in a way that's rational and reasonable, and not political, based on simple things we know about terrorism, simple things we know about criminal justice, then it leads ineluctably and inescapably to that one horrible conclusion, terror. Is it based on politics? Is it based on religion? Is it based on hate? Is it a literal war on Christmas?

http://mediamatters.org/video/2015/12/03/fox-analyst-asks-if-san-bernardino-shooting-is/207209

There you have it. Fox News has been touting the idea of a war on Christmas for so long, they think that the San Bernardino shooting at a holiday party are the first shots fired for a literal war on Christmas. Remember those "This is your brain on drugs" commercials from when you were a kid? Well that picture of the fried egg is your brain after watching Fox & Friends.

See you next week!

Ed Note: I know it's a short time between TTCI, but I couldn't wait to post this one! Especially since the news about the SB tragedy is coming fast and fierce. From here on out I will try to post every Friday around 12:00 - 1:00 PM PST.