A Florida candidate running to become the state’s next agriculture commissioner says banking giant Wells Fargo shut down her campaign account because she supports medical marijuana.
Democrat Nikki Fried said Monday that the banking giant started asking questions about her platform a month after she joined the statewide race: Does she advocate more access to medical marijuana? Would she accept contributions from medical marijuana lobbyists?
Fried responded in July that she herself had lobbied for medical marijuana companies and had received contributions from lobbyists. Then, just weeks before the Aug. 28 primary, Wells Fargo said in a letter that it was shutting down her account based on a review of its banking risks.

 Wells Fargo Closes Account of Florida Ag Commissioner Candidate Over Medical Marijuana Support

Now they are bitching. When it was applied to Gun stores and manufacturers, they applauded and congratulated themselves for their smartness.

Payback is a resentful wench.

Seen at a local Miami-Dade School.

At least it is nor Broward Sheriff Office.

State of Pennsylvania came men who are a masters at the art of pandering.  The seek to use to ways of bullshit-fu to do battle with his enemies on the podium of oral combat to claim victory over the lands known as Pennsylvania Congressional Districts.

Trump Won Pennsylvania. Democrats Want the State (and His Voters) Back.

PA-18 is in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.  Pittsburgh is a steel town.  The whole Western Pennsylvania region is home to several US steel makers.

Say what you want about Trump and his tariffs.  I don’t think that they were the best of ideas, but they have caused a boom in the US steel industry.

*For the record, China was engaged in commodity dumping of steel.  I agree with fighting Chinese commodity dumping.  There are way to combat commodity dumping without tariffs that can cause a backlash in other markets.

So overcoming the Trump success in the heart of the American steel industry is going to be tough.  Especially as Democrats getting national attention are cheering on socialism and other radical ideas.

The rules are workable enough in the right hands, in the right corner of a right-leaning region of a state like this one.

Avoid the jacket-and-tie look, so voters — wary enough of Democrats — do not think they are looking at a Jehovah’s Witness. “That happened,” recalled Representative Conor Lamb, now in a polo shirt.

No, they don’t think you look like a Jehovah’s Witness.  They think you look like one of the Wall Street/DC crew that shows nothing but hate and contempt for Americans who don’t have maids.

Pivot to safe subjects. After a local here loudly mocked the idea of “Russian collusion” with President Trump to a peer, Mr. Lamb, 34, moved in to introduce himself, telling the man (who said he was Russian) about falling in love with Russian cuisine when he was in the Marines.

How about not believing an insane conspiracy theory that America was hoodwinked by Putin not to ordain Hillary Clinton to the position that she felt entitled to?  Not “just don’t talk about it” but “understand what really happened and not what the DNC says happened to avoid doing some honest soul searching.”

And if all else fails — and it will, often — there is always prayer.

“I was reading a little Isaiah this morning,” Mr. Lamb said at a town festival recently, approaching Paul Strano, 69, whose hat read, “F.B.I.: Firm Believer In Jesus.” The two bowed their heads.

This guy is a blaspheming charlatan.  It’s one thing to not address religion if you have good policies.  It’s something much worse and more offensive to fake it to the faithful for the votes.

The challenge is real: Unemployment in the state is below 5 percent, and Mr. Trump’s approval rating, while underwater over all in Pennsylvania, remains high among the Republicans who populate districts like Mr. Lamb’s. But in candidates like him and others across the state, national Democratic officials believe they have found a model, with a curious signature feature: Democrats in no rush to remind certain audiences that they are Democrats.

So they are going to hide the fact that they are elitist snobs who hate working class white people and independent thinking minorities?  They aren’t going to change their views, they are just going to reserve letting the hate pour out of them until they get to the fancy rooms of the DNC offices in DC.

The balance is delicate. Mr. Lamb speaks of labor rights and economic fairness, in the Democratic tradition, but stakes out more conservative ground on social issues like guns.

How?

He begs off questions about national politics, but makes clear that he wants to see Nancy Pelosi replaced as the leader of House Democrats. He observes that “heroin kills both Democrats and Republicans,” the only mention of the D-word on his campaign website’s home page.

Does he plan on doing anything about the southern border where much of the heroin comes in from?

Mr. Cartwright’s Republican opponent in the area is John Chrin, a former investment banker who has pumped more than $1.3 million into his campaign. Mr. Cartwright is seen as the favorite, but he is one of a small number of incumbent House Democrats nationwide whose races are viewed as competitive. A recent ad from Mr. Chrin’s campaign accuses Mr. Cartwright of supporting so-called sanctuary cities and “protecting criminals,” while also voting in lock step with Ms. Pelosi.

But the congressman has strained to avoid such typecasting as a liberal shill. Among other flourishes, he has been eager to share word of a new hobby with prospective voters: deer hunting.

“My job is to get to know people and learn about their passions,” he said in the interview.

There is another upside. “It helps me talk to Republican members of Congress, too,” Mr. Cartwright said. “It’s a nice way to say, ‘You know, I don’t hate you.’”

Let that sink in.  A Democrat Congressman is going to become a Fudd to show the working class people of North East Pennsylvania that he doesn’t hate them.  That is more condescending than if he did nothing at all.

Mad dad used to say “Never trust a Democrat with a shotgun in an orange vest.”  He was right, of course.  The Dems always promise you that they aren’t going to take away your deer rifle or duck gun.  It’s just your AR, handguns, magazines over 10 rounds, and right to carry concealed they want to take away.  Then whey have have that, they’ll take away your “military sniper rifle” because the USMC M24 is built on the same Remington 700 action as the ADL you bag buck with.

But you know what would say “I don’t hate you” better than a photo op with a dead dear?

How about if these schmucks went on MSNBC and CNN and Real Time and all the other shows and said:

“Hillary Clinton was wrong.  These people are not racists and bigots and deplorables.  They are hard working salt-of-the-earth Americans who have lived in these towns, working in the same industries for generations.  They economy has moved on them, and watching a community your family has lived in for a century slowly die around you is frightening and disheartening.  We did a bad job supporting these people and we did a worse job listening to them and understanding their needs.  We need to stop insulting them, belittling them, and condescending to them and instead represent them and fight for them.”

Except that it might be a little hard to come down that from from the ivory tower.

Instead, they are going to pander and lie and bullshit.

The amazing thing to me is that the New York Times published this.  I guess they just assumed no one in those regions of Pennsylvania reads the NYT to see that these Democrats are the same in the inside, they’ve just learned not to look down their nose when they talk to you.

New York Magazine did a full lifestyle interview piece with David Hogg.

It is clearly intended to be a glowing puff piece, but it revealed a few scary truths about this kid.

I started reading this article with the intent of fisking it but it is incredibly long.  Therefore I’m going to skip through a lot of the literary fellatio and focus on the critical details I noticed.

At 2:30 on February 14, David Hogg was not yet a spokesperson for radicalized young America or a renowned media savant or a resistance fighter or, to some, the encapsulation of everything terrifying about where the country is going, but a high-school senior crouched in a dark classroom while a gunman with an AR-15 ranged beyond the walls of his hiding place, slaughtering 17 people in six minutes.

Savant: “a person of learning; especially : one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature).”

Hogg is not a media savant.  He is a kid that is attracted to fame and has figured out the more off the wall shit he says, the more airtime he gets.  It’s not nuance and intellect he’s known for.  He’s the anti-gun firebrand equivalent of the YouTube star eating cereal out of the bathtub she’s sitting in.

Like so many young men in so many foxholes before him, Hogg discovered in himself a powerful drive not to leave this Earth without making a mark.

Fuck you, New York Magazine.  He wasn’t in a foxhole.  He was in another building on the far side of campus.  This is some monumental bullshit.

“We really only remember a few hundred people, if that many, out of the billions that have ever lived,” he told me at his house in a gated community in Parkland, ten days after the shooting. “Is that what I was destined to become?”

Jesus… the ego of that kid to think that maybe he was destined to be one of the select few of the billions of living people that he’s going to be a remembered name.  A school shooting happens and it’s his destiny to ride that to fame.

After the shooting, he had met up with his father but then driven himself home. That’s when he lost it, alone in the car, screaming “Fuck!” again and again at the top of his lungs and hammering his fists on the dashboard. By the time he got to his house, he was calm enough to send his video to the Sun-Sentinel, the newspaper where he worked as an intern. “I had the exclusive for about six hours,” he told me.

Who the fuck thinks like that?  “Seventeen of my friends were killed, people are traumatized, but I got the exclusive!”  That’s the kind of thinking that makes people hate the reporters.  That is a near sociopath lack of empathy.  Your friends are lying, bleeding in a hallway and you can grab one thing and rush towards the sounds of moaning, what is it?  If you chose “a camera” over “something to stop the bleeding” you are a piece of shit.

Hogg understood that he was living in a historical moment. Later that evening, he shouldered past his father, who was blocking the door, and biked back to school, where he offered his eyewitness account to the first television producer he saw. The segment with Laura Ingraham aired live at 10:05 on Fox. It is remarkable to watch — Hogg with his stoic poise, his David Byrne cheekbones and wide-set stare, his grave expression and small impatient nods of understanding, narrating the day’s atrocities. But it’s most memorable for its final moments, when he refuses to allow Ingraham to offer her condolences or to get off the air. “Can I say one more thing to the audience? I don’t want this just to be another mass shooting. I don’t want this to be something that people forget.” 

I understand some people handle stress better than others.  This kid experienced a tragedy and was stoic?  He also remembered to get out his political message on the very same day?

More and more the evidence is building that this kid is a sociopath.  When tragedy is going on all around him and people are crying and wailing, he’s comely thinking how this is his destiny, he has to get the exclusive, and he prepares his talking points.

Hogg was so obviously an asset, a connoisseur of news cycles and sound bites, with the ability to hoover up facts and figures like his idol John Oliver and then spew them in angry torrents before the cameras. When Anderson Cooper asked Hogg if banning bump stocks was a good idea, his answer was succinct: “Absolutely, but that should have been done after 50 people were slaughtered in Las Vegas.”

Holy shit, he’s been preparing to be a bottom feeder his whole life.

Also, what did bump stocks have to do with Parkland.

Hogg was good on TV — great, even — and in the marathon of coverage that followed the Parkland shooting, he honed his persona. Angry, edgy, righteous, relentless, he was the warrior who would take anyone on and refused to be knocked off message.

That’s actually pretty creepy.  He is a profiteer in the currency of fame.  Tragedy struck and with laser like focus, he zeroed in on how to maximize his fame.

The White House called to invite him to the president’s “listening session” on guns, and he hung up on them. He told this to Bill Maher on his HBO show, physically leaning across his friend Kasky and into Maher’s face to make his point. “I ended on this message with them: We don’t need to listen to President Trump. President Trump needs to listen to the screams of the children and the screams of this nation.”

This made him look like an incredible asshole.  This was only a shining star moment for people with TDS.

The sun was setting on Huntington Beach Pier in Orange County, California, last month, where Hogg and his classmates were visiting on week five of their tour. Several hundred people had gathered there for a vigil for the victims of gun violence: little girls wearing French braids and heart-shaped sunglasses, older lefties with weather-beaten faces wearing Obama T-shirts. Hogg was the last person to speak. Wearing a black MARCH FOR OUR LIVES hoodie, he first addressed the problem of police violence against unarmed people of color. Then, with relish, he raised the subject of Dana Rohrabacher, the local congressman in the midst of a surprisingly close race and entangled in Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “I tweeted today that I can smell fear, and I think I can smell an indictment, too!” He concluded with the words “Your hope, your vote,” before turning to lead a short march to the beach.

He knows virtually nothing about life outside of high school.  Yet he feels the need to opine on all things Left Wing.  He knows what keeps him in the spotlight and what gets him airtime.

As the procession moved down the boardwalk along Huntington Beach, where a Democrat has not won a House election in 42 years, cyclists and runners and parents pushing strollers stopped and stared at the young man who, having turned 18, looked more than capable of achieving what he told me recently he has decided he now plans to do: run for Congress when he’s 25.

Oh fuck.  A kid who knows nothing and is famous for being angry at all the people who did nothing to hurt him while defending those who put his life in danger is about the worst possible person to have in Congress.

A lot of what has catapulted Hogg to this elevated and precarious place is his wonkishness: his dexterity on social media and cable news, his appetite for the nitty-gritty of policy disputes. He is aware of the way his particular talents mesh with how his generation thinks. “It’s like when your old-ass parent is like, ‘I don’t know how to send an iMessage,’ and you’re just like, ‘Give me the fucking phone,’ ” he told a young journalist two weeks after the shooting.

That wasn’t wonkishness, that was awful.  It made him look even more like an egotistical asshole.

He’s discovered the power of escalation, how calamity can be turned into rage can be turned into provocation. He told one journalist, “The pathetic fuckers that want to keep killing our children, they could have blood from children spattered all over their faces and they wouldn’t take action because they all still see those dollar signs.” At one point, I asked him whether he worries, using that language, about riling up NRA members enough that they threaten his life and his mother’s. “If somebody is stupid enough to try anything on us, that will make the movement even stronger,” he said.

The kind of escalation that further drives the divide in America.  That’s what he’s all about.  Also, no one in the NRA is going to hurt this kid, but you can tell he would love to me a martyr.

Hogg frequently uses the word narcissistic in reference to himself.

Why does this not surprise me.  This is not endearing by the way, like he’s pointing out some personal quirk.

He showed up at Stoneman Douglas in the middle of ninth grade, acting like he already knew everything. He rejected the girls who liked him and looked down on those who didn’t. “He always was an attempter,” says Deitsch, who was running the TV-production club. “He would attempt to be great. He would come into TV production like he was the president, and I’d be like, ‘Sir, I’m in charge here.’ ”

He’s a narcissistic bully.

Hogg is adjusting to sudden fame in all the ways you might expect — he wears it uncomfortably sometimes, then other times it’s as if he has practiced for it his whole life. (“He’s like, ‘I’m not a celebrity,’ ” his mother told me, “and I’m like, ‘Shut up. You’re a fucking rock star.’ ”) After the panel, the line to see him, hug him, and take photos with him snaked almost to the back of the room, and he was clearly enjoying himself. I saw, in every place we went, teenage girls hovering just outside his circle. “I think he’s really cool, obviously,” a 15-year-old named Sami Shanman told me one night, as she waited to interview him for a teen-news website. “For me, it’s the way he speaks. He’s the one I’ve seen the most hate on. But he’s also one of the strongest in the movement. He is so strong and not going to give up.”

He basks in the glory of his fame.  He lives for it.  It wasn’t thrust upon him, he sought it out.

At one point this summer, I asked him if he was ever tempted by all the attention from girls his age. “No,” he answered. “They think they know me, but they only know the me that I choose to put out there. Emma and Delaney, and the people in our group — they know me. I may be a teenage boy and a walking hormone, but I just care about everybody.” Later that evening in Orange County, at a bonfire on the beach, Hogg was talking to half a dozen girls who were looking for advice on how to organize anti-gun movements at their schools. He talked about the way women get shafted at work and in culture. “Promise me you won’t take anybody’s shit,” he said. It was as teen-earnest as a John Hughes movie. Then he looked around at the blackness, the beach, the waves. “Beaches are a place for a mass shooting,” he said. “I hate to bring that up.”

He is a god damned zealot.  This is the kind of devotion you see only in holy orders or maybe Kamikazes.  A normal teenage boy would be trying to dip his wick into girls on a beach at a bonfire.  Here he is scaring the shit out of them about the potential for a mass shooting that – as far as my Google search has revealed – has not happened.

If he believes he is destined for fame (and presumably fortune) for his anti gun and Left Wing polemics, he’s not going to let something like teenage in flagrante distract him from his holy crusade.

In the past five months, Hogg has developed political opinions on just about everything. He is against charter schools and for universal health care. He is obsessed with Mueller’s investigation and especially the indictment of Maria Butina, the alleged Russian spy who infiltrated the NRA.

He loves radical conspiracy theories.

He believes that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “a future president of the United States.”

That doesn’t surprise me either.  She’s also a know nothing crazy eye zealot.

Also, socialists are why I am a believer in the Second Amendment.

He is interested in the idea of placing age limits on politicians. “The reason Republicans are successful right now is because they’re empowering young people,” he told me, pointing out that Paul Ryan was 45 when he became Speaker of the House. “Older Democrats just won’t move the fuck off the plate and let us take control. Nancy Pelosi is old.” I am old enough to be Hogg’s mother, and pushed back on the idea that age equals ineptitude. Later, he posted a survey on Twitter. “I had an interesting conversation today when the question of congressional age limits came up. Do you think there should be an age limit on congressmen, congresswomen, and congressthem?” Of more than 33,000 votes, 59 percent said yes.

This is borderline evil.  I’m fine on term limits, but age limits are not much different than saying someone of a certain race can’t get elected.

More immediately, Hogg needs to figure out college. He has declined an offer of admission at UC Irvine, where he might have otherwise gone, but applying to schools again this fall isn’t very appealing — he knows he tests poorly, and he doesn’t like to write.

More evidence of sociopathy.

We finished talking, and he left to take the stage, where I watched him heed the advice he regularly gives to teenage fans who ask what they can do if they’re not old enough to vote. “The most important thing about being young is your face,” he tells them. “Get in people’s faces.”

What I got out of this amazingly long article is that David Hogg is a calculating psychopath.  When disaster hit he used it to springboard into fame.  He’s crafted a persona designed to keep him in the media spotlight.  He preaches his message, bereft of facts as it is, with religious devotion.

This is not some normal teenage activist who will mature and get away from the indiscretions of youth.  This kid is a monster who will fight for every scrap of ego feeding adulation he can get as a true believer of his message.

The great thing about Gun Culture is that nobody is spared from the Humor.

And there might be a touch of reality involved.

I saw this excerpt from the Healthline website being passed around in the interwebs.

Although they are being stupidly serious, my brain brought back a hilarious scene from Mel Brook’s High Anxiety. Unfortunately I could not find a clip of that particular part so I need to set up the joke: Dr Thorndyke is giving a speech at a medical convention and as such the terms used are plain and maybe not the best around polite company. A doctor arrives late towing 2 young girls and apologizes for not finding a babysitter. The rest is comedy gold:

Dr. Thorndyke, you mentioned in your address that penis envy should be deemed an antiquated psychiatric concept. Could you expand on that?

THORNDYKE: Of course. Let’s remember that the term “penis envy” was created in a predominantly male atmosphere…

MAN: Excuse me. Sorry I’m late. Forgive me for bringing the kids. I couldn’t get a sitter.

THORNDYKE: Please, have a seat. As I was saying, in a world of predominantly male-oriented psychology, it was only natural to arrive at the term, pee… (looks at the kids) Pee…”Peepee envy. ”

-Are you saying there’s absolutely no validity to…peepee envy?

-It has no more validity than if a man envied a woman’s…balloons.

-Dr. Thorndyke, do you feel that the trauma of toilet training has a bearing on the sexual future of the adolescent?

-Toilet training. That’s a vast area. Let’s be more specific. Are we talking about number one or cocky-doody?

-For argument’s sake, let’s say cocky-doody.

THORNDYKE: I’d say professionally, cocky-doody has very little to do with the future sexual development of the adolescent.

-Thank you.

-You’re welcome. Let me backtrack for a second. The female erogenous zone.

-You mean the balloons?

-No. Lower, much lower. Where the babies come out. The woowoo.

-The woowoo?

THORNDYKE: Yes. The woowoo. Perhaps the most significant
psychological feminine component known to mankind.

(Cheers and whistles)

A joke in a movie from 1977 is now on its way to become political dogma in the human anatomy.

Mel Brooks is a frigging genius!

“Do you know the difference between a crisis and a catastrophe?” Hastings said, according to video of the remarks on YouTube.
Quoting the joke’s author, he answered, “A crisis is if Donald Trump falls into the Potomac River and can’t swim,” while “a catastrophe is anybody saves his ass.”

Alcee Hastings is possibly the most corrupt Democrat in Florida. He was impeached for bribery and perjury, yet he gets elected over and over. He only beats Debbie Wasserman because he has been at the game longer.

Put his name on the same joke and be ready to have the NAACP and the BLM protesting in front of your house calling you all kinds of names.