A bunch of Texas Republicans voted against emergency funding for victims of Hurricane Sandy out there on that pesky godless elitist East Coast.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, a storm that hit New Jersey and New York in 2012, eight Texas Republicans voted against increasing flood insurance, and 23 voted against emergency funding for victims.

Both measures ultimately passed the House and Senate before being signed into law by President Obama. But the history of votes against flood insurance benefiting other needy states could come back to haunt Texas members of Congress should they have to apply for federal funding themselves after Hurricane Harvey. Projected damages from the storm could reach nearly $40 billion.

They can just have … Read the rest

From a year ago:

Tony Perkins, president of the anti-gay religious lobbying group the Family Research Council, had his home destroyed by the massive flooding ravaging Southern Louisiana this week.

Although no one wants to celebrate a person losing their home, the destruction of Perkins’ house isn’t without irony, considering that he’s claimed in the past that natural disasters are God’s way of punishing an increasingly gay-friendly world.

So he asked himself what God was punishing him for, right?

Perkins was careful to point out that this particular flood wasn’t because of the gays, but rather an “incredible, encouraging spiritual exercise to take you to the next level in your walk with an almighty and gracious God

The mayor of Phoenix responds.

Joe Arpaio illegally targeted and terrorized Latino families. Our community voted him out of power. Donald Trump can't change that. pic.twitter.com/WZXjmXd76G

— Greg Stanton (@gregstantonaz) August 26, 2017

… Read the rest

Ah, the poor snowflakes of the far right don’t want to be wading through a sea of dog poop tomorrow. They’ve canceled the rally.

A right-wing group on Friday canceled a “freedom rally” it had planned for Saturday near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, removing one major source of feared violence for city leaders, though others remained.

The group, known as Patriot Prayer, instead planned a news conference at a park in the city on Saturday to explain what its leader Joey Gibson called the failure of police and elected officials to keep the group safe.

Safe from dog poop.

Earlier in the day, hundreds of people rallied raucously and danced against hate at City Hall. They

The grand old party.

… Read the rest

Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist who wrote a rather disorganized book about Hitler nearly 20 years ago, has a lot of scorn for Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem…but he also has a mistaken idea of its contents. Maybe if he’d read it more attentively he’d have less contempt for it.

I’d been asked to write an introduction to a fiftieth-anniversary edition of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a longtime bestseller first published in 1961, a book that had shaped my and subsequent generations’ picture of Hitler and the war for some time thereafter. I don’t think I would have reread it if I hadn’t been asked by its publishers to contribute an introduction, but I

Some far-right “activists” are holding a march tomorrow in San Francisco. The tricksters of San Francisco are responding with dog shit.

Hundreds of San Franciscans plan to prepare Crissy Field, the picturesque beach in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge where rightwing protest group Patriot Prayer will gather, with a generous carpeting of excrement.

“I just had this image of alt-right people stomping around in the poop,” Tuffy Tuffington said of the epiphany he had while walking Bob and Chuck, his two Patterdale terriers, and trying to think of the best way to respond to rightwing extremists in the wake of Charlottesville. “It seemed like a little bit of civil disobedience where we didn’t have to engage with