It Pisses Them Off That We Were Right About Regulations and That We Actually Do Give a Shit About East Palestine

Two things can be true at once. We can believe that the people in East Palestine, Ohio, are a bunch of fucking idiots who vote against their own interests repeatedly, electing horrible motherfuckers who don't give a happy monkey fuck about their health or safety, but, man, they sure hate Black people and migrants, so they got your vote. And we can also believe that they should get all the help they desperately need to recover from the toxic chemicals that were spilled and burned when a Norfolk Southern train derailed in their town. 

You can hear the nematodes of the right spout off about how Democrats and the "left" ignored the disaster because, as Fox "news" Tucker "You can tell I'm lying because I'm breathing" Carlson put it on February 15, "East Palestine is a poor, white town that voted for Trump. So honestly, who cares? No one in the Biden administration did care and that's an atrocity." And you can wonder, "The fuck are they talking about?" It's a fucking lie. The train derailed on February 3. By February 4, the National Transportation Safety Board was already investigating it. By early morning on February 4, the Environmental Protection Agency was already there to monitor air and water and help where it could. (Seriously: the derailment happened at 9 p.m. on the 3rd. By 2 a.m., the EPA was there.) The Department of Transportation was there, and FEMA was in contact with Ohio officials about what it could offer. 

Now, I'm no big-time professional con artist pretending to be a journalist, but I'm pretty sure that both the NTSB and the EPA are part of the Biden administration. I'm pretty sure the DOT and FEMA are, too. I'm pretty sure that means the Biden administration did care and that no atrocity occurred. No, President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg didn't rush there, but that's not really an accurate measure of the care the area received.

And if the motherfuckers in conservative media and in politics want to racialize this, let's fuckin' go.  You know what Tucker Carlson didn't berate the government about? The Flint water crisis, but Black people were the main victims, so fuck 'em, right? You know what they don't talk about on Fox "news" or, indeed, much of anywhere? The continuing effects of toxic chemicals in places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana, which is such a fucking tragedy of high cancer rates in a region of primarily Black Americans that the United Nations has declared it "environmental racism." 

Or how about this: In November 2019,  there was a huge explosion at a petrochemical plant in Port Neches, Texas. It was one of several such events at chemical plants in the area in 2019. This one caused an evacuation of a half-mile radius and the force of the explosion blew out windows on residences, with others downwind of the place told to shelter in place (and close their windows, if they still had windows). It was one week after the Trump administration had shitcanned a rule on warning people when there were toxic chemicals being stored near them. The rollbacks of a bunch of regulations almost immediately affected the health of people living near these facilities, especially in Texas. Not a fucking peep out of right-wing media because it was all Black and brown people who were affected. 

What? You want train derailments? How about the one near Barstow, Georgia, in 2019, where hydrochloric acid was spilled? It's a majority Black town and needed evacuating, but no one demanded that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao or President Trump visit to comfort people. 

Yeah, so, sure, please racialize these things.

Let's acknowledge a few things, too. The Obama administration could have supported tougher rules on what's labeled as hazardous on trains. The Trump administration shouldn't have repealed an Obama-era regulation on updating brake systems on trains carrying hazardous materials. In fact, the East Palestine fucking over might have been averted only if both of those sentences were in effect because the train wasn't labeled "hazardous," so it didn't need the updated brakes. Even as the pathetic hate junkies of the right try to spin political gold out of this environmental disaster hay, they are being cornered into admitting that maybe some fucking regulations are necessary.

What really pisses them off is that the Biden administration, and, indeed, most Democrats and people on the left do give a fuck about the people of East Palestine. It's like they can't comprehend that idea that we might fucking hate their politics but still not want them to be poisoned to death. Left-wing media (real left-wing media, not what the right bullshits about being liberal) has been all over the story, including Mother Jones and Democracy Now!. The right-wing nutzoids can't get their tiny little brains to believe that the federal government might actually be doing what it's supposed to do because it's being led by a Democrat and thus must be degraded no matter how competent it might be. Are there people on the left being total dicks about this (and not just semi-dicks, like me)? Sure. There always will be.

What also complicates shit is that the Republican governor of Ohio and man who looks like he's spent too much time staring through a hole in the guest shower at the mansion, Mike DeWine, as well as all the Republican officials in the state, are declaring that the air and water are fine, just like the EPA. But I suppose they'll just be called "RINOs" or some such shit because they don't toe the Tucker line.

Here's the thing, though, fellow aghast and amused libs. We should do our best to welcome the right-wingers who have newly discovered that we need, you know, government to protect people when it comes to shit like this. Welcome to the party, motherfuckers.

By the way, about a third of the people in Columbiana County, where East Palestine is, are on Medicaid, including a bunch on there because Ohio accepted the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, you know, Obamacare. 

If you're in the area and feeling sick and getting medical attention that you need because you're covered, thank a Democrat, not Tucker Carlson.

(Note: I'm gonna bet they almost all vote for Trump or DeSantis or whoever in 2024, no matter if the Biden administration gets them all new houses, new jobs, and all the pussy or dick they could want.)

Pregnancy Is Used as a Form of Legal Torture in Parts of the United States

There's a level of cruelty built into the anti-choice laws passed just prior to and then in the wake of the corrupt Supreme Court majority shit-canning the Roe v. Wade decision. I mean, proponents of the savage legislation behave as if this is some kind of benign law, that women will either travel somewhere to get an abortion (thus allowing, say, Louisianians to wash their hands of the whole procedure) or that women will suck it up and give birth and everything will be peachy fuckin' keen the entire time. 

But we know, we fucking well know, with the experience of the entirety of human history, that pregnancy is not a smooth trip from fucking to birth. It's absurd to even have state that. It's fucking absurd to have to say that pregnant people's bodies change in ways that are often permanent, and that's if everything goes fine. It's fucking absurd to have to say that even a minor issue with a pregnancy can cause all kinds of permanent shit to the pregnant person, starting with an episiotomy or bladder issues and moving up through death. And a c-section is fucking surgery. Going through that when you want the pregnancy is one thing. Going through it when you don't? What kind of fucking monsters would do that to someone? But obvious shit apparently has to be said all the goddamn time now because the only way you can pass the laws outlawing nearly all abortions at 15 weeks or 6 weeks or any time. You either have to ignore the obvious shit or you get off on torturing pregnant people. And I'm seriously thinking it's the latter in Florida and Texas and all the other states that pretend to give a fuck about the fetus. 

And I'm saying "pretend to give a fuck about the fetus" because you can't say you care about the fetus when it's going to die horribly within a couple of hours of being born after suffering in the womb. That's the case for Deborah Dorbert, whose fetus is suffering from Potter syndrome, which leads to multiple underdeveloped organs: "Babies with Potter syndrome often die before they are born when their umbilical cords become trapped between their bodies and the wall of their mother’s uterus. Those that survive the birth process typically suffocate within minutes or a matter of hours." Fucking nightmare, right? At 24 weeks, the Dorberts decided they wanted to go through with an abortion because they didn't want the fetus to suffer. But Dorbert is in Florida, and there's an almost total ban after 15 weeks and Deborah's doctors, all of whom have given the same diagnosis, are afraid they will run afoul of the harshly punitive law that could destroy their careers or put them in prison. And the Dorberts can't afford to go to another state, which would mean South or North Carolina at this point, to get the procedure done. Instead, Deborah is going to have to carry her fetus to term and give birth to a child that will desperately gasp for air for a little while and die. 

If you think your god wants that to happen, your god is a dick and no one should give a shit what you or your god wants.

On and on the cases go. Amanda Eid in Texas almost died because she couldn't get an abortion for a fetus when her water broke at 18 weeks until she was too sick to function. The same thing happened to Texan Elizabeth Weller. In Idaho, Carmen Broesder documented on TikTok how a hospital's ER rejected helping her remove the fetus that she was miscarrying over the course of 19 days. She also nearly died. In Ohio, Beth Long's fetus had its organs growing outside its body, but because she works for the state and Ohio bars the state health insurance from covering abortions with just a few exceptions, she would need to pay for the complicated termination of her pregnancy. It took the Longs weeks to make arrangements to go out of state for a less expensive procedure, which made the abortion that much more difficult. Anabely Lopes, a woman from Florida denied an abortion even though her fetus was going to die, was Debbie Wasserman Schultz's guest at the State of the Union, where President Biden should have said a hell of a lot more about this horror show Republicans have brought on. But on and on it still goes.

The trauma that these pregnant people already suffer is magnified because the medical system and the doctors they trust are unable to give them the care they know is needed. It's fucking horrific. The state is adding trauma on top of trauma. And that's for pregnancies that are wanted, that are planned, where families are preparing for a new child.  It's another kind of torture.

And the assholes who passed the laws that are destroying pregnant people body and mind are the ones who should be prosecuted, not the caregivers trying to help patients while being forced to watch their backs and certainly not the pregnant people, whether they want to be pregnant or not. Abortion isn't cruel. Stopping people who want or need an abortion is cruel. And it's become a tool of torture and control for the savage anti-choicers.

(Note: I used "women" at the beginning because that's the binary way those who wrote the laws view procreation. But trans men and nonbinary people can get pregnant, too, as can young girls. So, yeah, "pregnant people" is way more accurate unless talking about a specific person.)

Republicans Are Utterly Devoid of Ideas (Except the Ones They Take from Democrats)

This one ends with a twist, one I'll admit I didn't see coming until I did like 15 seconds of research.

The Republican response to President Biden's quite sane and unexpectedly lively State of the Union speech was honestly just fucking odd, and not just because it was delivered by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a tone best described as "a Little Rock barista's worst nightmare." What was legit fucking strange is how utterly devoid of ideas it was. I mean, sure, yeah, all these speeches, the State of the Union and the response, are at best fantasies where the speakers list a bunch of shit that will almost surely never happen. But, at the bare minimum, we can say that they are aspirational. There were almost no aspirations to do a goddamned thing in Sanders' 14-minute whine about shit that, truly, has nothing to do with making people's lives better.

Half the response was basically a Libs of TikTok reply thread on Twitter: "The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left, the choice is between normal or crazy. It is time for a new generation of Republican leadership. Upon taking office just a few weeks ago, I signed executive orders to ban CRT, racism and indoctrination in our schools. Eliminate the use of derogatory term Latinx in our government, repealed COVID orders and said never again to authoritarian mandates and shutdowns." Somehow, banning critical race theory (which she never says is "CRT," thus demonstrating that she's only speaking to right-wing fucknuts) never put food on someone's table or helped children out of poverty.

The other half was another blow job for Donald Trump, who was Sanders' boss for a couple of years. Apparently, everything was just chocolate and orgasms before Joe Biden came along: "President Biden inherited the fastest economic recovery on record. The most secured border in history, cheap abundant homegrown energy, fast rising wages, a rebuilt military and a world that was stable and at peace. But over the last two years, Democrats destroyed it all." I mean, I'm not sure what the measures of any of these things are, but, you know, shit was fucked up when Trump left office. And Trump inherited Obama's economy, which was doing just fine. That's how this shit works. 

You will not be surprised that Sanders ended with a version of a Trump "Dear Sir" story, with a trip where members of the military in Iraq lost their shit and cheered when Trump walked in on a surprise visit. And then a soldier gave her one of his patches because "you have a tough job."  By the way, Biden recently signed the biggest military budget in U.S. history, and while that's ridiculous and harmful to other needs in this country, it sure as fuck doesn't seem to indicate that Democrats are "destroying" the military.

In every facet of their alleged leadership, Republicans fail to offer anything in the way of ideas or bills to actually help Americans. This void of an agenda continued last week with the utterly buffoonish hearings on the "weaponization of government" and on the Twitter files. No, really, they had hearings about this dumb shit that no one outside of Tucker Carlson's fever-brained hatemongers and Elon Musk's taint cleaners gives the remotest fuck about. Seriously, it's like complaining that someone has taken their dick out on the top of Mt. Everest and we better pass laws against dicks and mountains because of it. Actually, that would have more of a purpose than these hearings did.

Of course, Democrats spanked Republicans' voluminous asses red. Of course, none of it mattered. Sure, you can look at Rep. Jimmy Gomez, a Democrat from California, absolutely incinerate Republican goat eater Marjorie Taylor Greene, and get a little cream in your jeans from it. But that's all it's good for. No one in the conservative fascist bubble will hear about it on Newsmax or Fox. They'll hear that Hunter Biden was accused of evil shit. They'll hear that Twitter execs who were fired by Weird Elon are pedophiles. Nothing pierces the dome of fucknuttery.

But I promised you a twist, so lemme give it to you. It means we gotta go back to Sarah Sanders. 

Yeah, her speech was basically Truth Social posts strung together into another American Carnage rant. But there was one policy proposal in it. Sanders huckabeed, "Tomorrow, I will unveil an education package that will be the most far reaching, bold, conservative education reform in the country. My plan empowers parents with real choices, improves literacy and career readiness, and helps put a good teacher in every classroom by increasing their starting salary from one of the lowest to one of the highest in the nation."

When Sanders did reveal her plan for education, it included the usual harmful bullshit on what teachers can teach and an expansion of funding vouchers for students to use state funds to pay for private schools (or, you know, "school choice"). But Sanders is also proposing to raise the starting salary for public school teachers by around a third, to $50,000 a year. What's fascinating about this is that just last year, Republicans in the Arkansas legislature refused to even allow a vote on a raise to $42,000, which Democrats were trying to get passed. Then, even more recently, a Democratic legislator tried to get a pay hike to $50k passed as a stand alone bill, but Sanders wanted it as part of a bigger education package. So Sanders' big idea comes from Democrats in her state.

And Sanders' plan goes even further: there's student loan forgiveness and 12 weeks paid maternity leave in there for teachers, as well as performance bonuses. It includes an expansion of literacy programs and a grant to parents to hire tutors for their kids. I'm not totally praising Sanders here - Republican governors have been pushing for higher pay for teachers as a way to get educators to stop protesting and to triangulate on a popular issue and take it away from Democrats (even if their Republican legislatures refuse to go along). Teachers aren't stupid: they know their silence is being bought, but, goddamn, it might be nice not to have to sell plasma to get by. And, certainly, it's kind of ludicrous that Sanders wants to pour money into public education while allowing for money to be taken away from the same schools through the bullshit "school choice" vouchers. 

Actual governing requires more than simply making sure you get that next Tucker hit or praise from Ben fuckin' Shapiro. Letting the lies flow freely keeps the rubes donating. But the real work of improving the lives of your constituents? That shit take effort. Sanders could have filled her speech with stuff from her education plan. Instead, it was easier just to call Democrats anti-American indoctrinators and pretend that's leadership. It's certainly all House Republicans have to offer.

C'mon, Drag Queens, Let's Go Fuck With Some Churches

Tell you what: I wanna gather a whole buncha drag queens from different places around the country, from Tennessee and Oklahoma and Florida and Kansas and every state where knuckle-dragging Nazi and Christian extremist fucknuts are shutting down events and protesting them and getting shit canceled, all because someone in drag is involved. And while the fucknuts say they are protecting children, it doesn't even matter anymore if the events allow children to be present. They're after the drag performers because they say drag is grooming kids for...I don't fuckin' know, man...fabulousness? The fucknuts say that this is about sexualizing children and confusing them and making them gay or some such bullshit that really comes down to "I'm an ignoramus and everyone should listen to me because I'm too stupid to learn different shit."

All the drag performers should protest outside places of worship where a church leader has actually been arrested for sex crimes. Because, lemme tell you, there are a fuckton more child-fucking and rapist preachers and priests and pastors than drag queens. But the Proud Boys and the Jesus Fellaters don't get on the sidewalk outside those churches and scream about grooming and God hating them. Or maybe it's just not really about the sexual assault and pedophilia and it's just about hating LGBTQ people. (It's totally just about the hate.)

You wanna go on this, you masturbation-denying freaks who are so backed up with jizz that you can't see straight? Then let's go:

C'mon, drag queens. Let's go fuck with the Pleasant Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Fairfield, Illinois. Yeah, their former pastor, the uncomfortably-named Garrett Biggerstaff, was arrested last month on two counts of grooming children for sexual activity. He'd been at it for a while, literally an alleged groomer.  So let's line up outside with signs that say, "Wake up! This is child abuse!" and "Groomers" with a big red X through it. (Real signs outside drag events, in case you were wondering.)

Or maybe we should head to Jamestown, North Dakota, where a Catholic priest, Neil Pfifer, has been arrested for sexually assaulting someone he was supposedly providing mental health services for. Oh, and "an investigation uncovered accusations of crimes in other jurisdictions." Yup. Another priest just moved around because he kept raping his parishioners. Every single person who ever attended a service led by Pfifer was safer with a group of drag queens, as we all would be all the time. So let's show up in our best bustiers and heels and Spanx and ask everyone who goes in if they're ok having given money to house and feed a rapist. 

We could go all around the country doing this, a tour of strong motherfuckers in drag daring the liars and fanatics and fascists to tell us we're wrong. If they confront us, we'll ask them if they're ok with the middle school teacher at the First Apostolic Church in Maryville, Tennessee, who was arrested for sexually assaulting a minor; or with the youth pastor at Harbor Baptist Church in Hainesville, NJ, who pretended to be a teenage girl online in order to get young teen boys to send sexual photos of themselves; or the pastor at Ridge Church in Black Mountain, North Carolina; or the pastor in Florida; or the one in Ohio; or just about anywhere in the country. The list is fucking endless and awful.

Yeah, c'mon, bad ass drag queens. You wanna really highlight who is harming the kids? Who is raping and sexually assaulting and molesting and grooming? Let's fuck shit up outside all these houses of worship and then sashay away.