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Why The Palin ‘Faggot’ Comment Matters

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Editor’s note: See our update:
Bristol Palin: My Son Tripp Said The ‘F’ Word — But Not That ‘F’ Word

On a recent episode of the Lifetime reality series “Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp,” Tripp Palin, all of four-years old, says, “Go away you faggot” to his mom, Bristol Palin, and her sister, Willow Palin.

Who cares, right?

And that’s the problem.

A great many Americans — millions upon millions — actually do care, and see Sarah Palin and the Palin family as American royalty. If America didn’t care, would there even be a Palin reality series? No.

But watch the video.

Tripp Palin says “I hate you guys” and various versions of that several times. Bristol immediately lets Tripp know that’s not acceptable. She even attempts — albeit through laughter — a “God’s watching,” which is the ultimate in poor parenting; making children “behave” because “God’s watching.”

But when Tripp utters a horrific, “Go away you faggot,” Bristol and Willow laugh. Granted, it’s a somewhat embarrassed laugh, but they’re laughing.

(Note, as the slur was bleeped, we are taking the video recorder’s word for it, but Huffington Post had the same take. And, if not “faggot,” then, “fags.” Either way.)

And they don’t chastise or correct Tripp for using an anti-gay slur.

Because everyone thinks it’s funny. Everyone, including the people at Lifetime — who easily could have edited that out.

Calling people “faggot” isn’t funny. It’s not funny when four-year olds do it. it’s not funny when gay people do it. It’s not funny when gay-bashers do it. It’s plainly not funny — and it leads to anti-gay hatred, discrimination, and hate crimes, like yesterday’s where a Nebraska woman had the word “dyke” carved into her skin after three men broke into her home, bound her with zip ties, and set her house on fire.

Bristol Palin is a divorced, unmarried mother of a little boy, who claims to be a role model for her generation — so much so that she thinks she has the right to correct President Obama on his parenting skills. Yet she readily admits, in this video excerpt, that she’s “doing a terrible job disciplining Tripp…I know he’s going to continue to push the boundaries.”

The Huffington Post reminds us:

In 2010, Willow sparked controversy when she fired off at a classmate on Facebook, referring to him “so gay” and “such a faggot.”

Bristol’s chastising of Barack Obama — which, of course, the right wingers supported to the hilt — in the weeks after the President announced his support for same-sex marriage, was unconscionable, flawed, and downright idiotic.

Yet America rallied to her side, called her a victim — as she did herself, calling herself bullied to boot — and embraced her comment that “generally kids do better with mother/father families,” sans any proof, and sans the fact that she is an unmarried mother herself.

What the Palins say matter only because millions of Americans are listening, and accepting, without thought, what they say.

American Royalty is trashy. The Palins are trashy. As John Aravosis notes, “if Sarah Palin, or her unwed mother daughter, are going to lecture gay people about the needs of children, maybe they should start actually parenting their own children. Laughing when your kid utters a bigoted slur is not parenting.”

And laughing when your kid utters a bigoted slur while on national television is paving the way for more anti-gay hatred, bigotry, and violence.

When the slur comes out of the mouth of a four-year old, you can pretty much assume who put it in there in the first place.

UPDATE: Even if Tripp said “fuck” instead of “faggot,” as Bristol Palin now claims, she is still doing a poor job of parenting, and still has zero room to attack the President.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=92rnBF3wJ78%3Fversion%3D3%26hl%3Den_US


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McCarthy Blocks Bipartisan Bill Approved by 77 Senators to Avoid Shutdown as He Moves to Pin the Blame on Democrats

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Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy is saying he will not allow the House to take up a compromise bill supported by a large and bipartisan majority of Senators that would allow the federal government to continue operating past the midnight Saturday deadline.

“I don’t see the support in the House,” for the Senate’s proposed continuing resolution, McCarthy said on Wednesday, according to Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman. He also reports that “this is the most explicit he’s been” in saying “he won’t take it up and pass it as is.”

Chad Pergram, the Senior Congressional Correspondent for Fox News reports, “McCarthy says he won’t allow the House to consider the Senate’s stopgap spending bill to avert a gov’t shutdown for 45 days. 77 bipartisan senators supported the package on a test vote last night.”

Earlier Wednesday, inside the House Republican Conference’s meeting, Sherman reported that Speaker McCarthy “said he told” Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell “that he cannot take up a bill that funds Ukraine and doesn’t fix the border.”

READ MORE: ‘Fire Sale Prices’: Biographer Predicts Trump ‘May Soon Be Personally Bankrupt’ and Could See His Assets ‘Liquidated’

“In other words,” Sherman adds, “if it wasn’t clear, the CR [continuing resolution] the Senate is taking up is dead on arrival in the House.”

Meanwhile, House Republicans, and especially Speaker McCarthy, are attempting to blame the likely shutdown on Democrats. House Democrats, Senate Democrats and most Senate Republicans have been working to avert a shutdown but Speaker McCarthy’s most extreme members have been pushing to shut down the federal government. Political observers say he could keep the government running by putting together a majority of House Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans to pass a continuing resolution, but would likely lose his Speakership as a result.

“A shutdown would furlough millions of federal employees, leave the military without pay, disrupt air travel and cut off vital safety net services, and it would be politically punishing to lawmakers whose job it is to fund government,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday. “The Republican McCarthy, pushed by a hard-right flank that rejects the deal he made with Biden and is demanding steep spending cuts, showed no interest in the Senate’s bipartisan effort — or the additional money for Ukraine.”

“’I think their priorities are bad,’ he said about the Senate effort.”

Political pundit and journalist Bill Kristol, a Republican who became a Democrat in 2020, Wednesday afternoon pinned the expected, coming shutdown on Speaker McCarthy.

READ MORE: ‘Poof’: White House Mocks Stunned Fox News Host as GOP’s Impeachment Case Evaporates on Live Air

“One man, Kevin McCarthy, is responsible for the looming government shutdown, because he won’t bring to the House floor a funding bill supported by a majority of senators from both parties, the administration, and a majority of House members. It’s the Speaker’s Shutdown.”

Wednesday morning, The Washington Post reported, “Facing a potential government shutdown in four days triggered by House Republicans’ inability to unite to pass spending bills, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is trying out a new strategy: shifting the blame.”

“McCarthy is starting to point fingers at Democrats in a bid to pin a shutdown on disagreements over border security. It’s an attempt to rewrite the record of the past several weeks, during which House Republicans have been unable to pass a short-term bill to prevent a shutdown — even one that includes the border security policies his conference overwhelmingly supports.”

 

Image via Shutterstock

 

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‘Fire Sale Prices’: Biographer Predicts Trump ‘May Soon Be Personally Bankrupt’ and Could See His Assets ‘Liquidated’

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Donald Trump, the one-term, twice-impeached ex-president who is running for the White House while facing four criminal indictments that include 91 felony counts across three jurisdictions, “may soon be personally bankrupt,” according to a journalist who has written two books on the man he calls a “self-proclaimed multibillionaire.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, author of “The Making of Donald Trump,” and “The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family,” reported on Tuesday’s decision by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron. The judge ruled Trump had committed fraud for years, by massively inflating the value of his assets. He ordered Trump’s business certificates revoked and his assets dissolved.

“Donald Trump is no longer in business,” Johnston writes at DC Report. “Worse, the self-proclaimed multibillionaire may soon be personally bankrupt as a result, stripped of just about everything because for years he engaged in calculated bank fraud and insurance fraud by inflating the value of his properties, a judge ruled Tuesday.”

READ MORE: Trump Goes on Wild Rant Targeting Judge and Attorney General After Being Found Liable for Fraud

The ex-president’s “gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court-appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much more than his pensions as a one term president and a television performer,” Johnston wrote.

Trump will likely appeal any ruling, but Johnston, who has chronicled Trump for years, says it’s “highly unlikely” an appeals court will reverse Justice Engoron’s decision.

“Barring a highly unlikely reversal by an appeals court, Trump’s business assets eventually will be liquidated since he cannot operate them without a business license. Retired Judge Barbara Jones was appointed to monitor the assets, an arrangement not unlike the court-supervised liquidation of a bankrupt company or the assets of a drug lord,” Johnston writes. “The various properties are likely to be sold at fire sale prices and certainly not for top dollar when liquidation begins, probably after all appeals are exhausted.”

READ MORE: House GOP Shutdown Demands Include Gutting Billions From Dept. of Education, Costing Over 200,000 Teachers Their Jobs

Johnston last year said “that the former president ‘knowingly’ committed dozens of tax crimes over the past several years,” according to Newsweek. Johnston’s comments in December came “shortly after Democratic-led House Ways and Means Committee held a vote to publicly release Trump’s tax return documents,” and “published a report showing that Trump was not properly audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) while he was president. The IRS has a policy requiring that a sitting president is audited each year while in office.”

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Trump Goes on Wild Rant Targeting Judge and Attorney General After Being Found Liable for Fraud

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Donald Trump unleashed a wild rant Wednesday morning, targeting the New York attorney general and the Manhattan Supreme Court judge in the State of New York’s $250 million civil case against him. The judge on Tuesday declared the ex-president had committed fraud for years in building his real estate empire and ordered his business certificates revoked and holdings dissolved.

Trump has been warned to not make public attacks against or attempts to intimidate witnesses or officers of the court, or prejudice jurors in one of the criminal cases he is currently facing. Two weeks ago, after appearing to not heed those warnings, the Special Counsel prosecuting the ex-president for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election asked the judge presiding over that case to limit his speech.

Wednesday morning, Trump called New York Attorney General Letitia James “Racist.” He called Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron “Deranged,” and “Trump Hating,” alleging he had “made up this crazy ‘KILL TRUMP’ decision, assigning insanely low values to properties.” Trump wrote the judge valued his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence at $18 million, and claimed (in all-caps) “it is worth possibly 100 times that amount.”

READ MORE: ‘Poof’: White House Mocks Stunned Fox News Host as GOP’s Impeachment Case Evaporates on Live Air

The judge, however, according to The Hill, “found Trump consistently overvalued Mar-a-Lago, inflating its value on one financial statement by at least 2,300 percent. The ruling pointed to a Palm Beach County Assessor’s appraisal from 2011-2021, which estimated Mar-a-Lago’s value between $18 million and $27.6 million.”

“In his order,” The New York Times reported Tuesday, “Justice Engoron wrote scathingly about Mr. Trump’s defenses, saying that the former president and the other defendants, including his two adult sons and his company, ignored reality when it suited their business needs. ‘In defendants’ world,’ he wrote, ‘rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air.'”

“That is a fantasy world, not the real world,” the judge concluded.

At the end of his diatribe Wednesday, Trump declared: “There is also an IRONCLAD DISCLAIMER CLAUSE!”

READ MORE: ‘Careening’ Toward ‘Risk of Political Violence’: Experts Sound Alarm After Trump Floats Executing His Former General
 

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