Friday, February 5, 2021
Greene A Liar With 199 Republicans Who Support Her QAnon conspiracy lies
July 2020 QAnon Beliefs confirmed 2 years after she claimed she stopped believing... she's a Trump Liar and 199 Republicans support her lies...
Superbowl Halftime Show PG Rating
The Weeknd promises a ‘PG’ halftime show First Canadian Solo Artist In 55 Years
Scarborough superstar shows his humble side at pre-Super Bowl event Abel Makkonen Tesfaye (born February 16, 1990), known professionally as the Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, and record producer.
- Toronto Star
- NICK KREWEN
PERRY KNOTTS THE ASSOCIATED PRESSDon’t worry about the little ones when it comes to watching the Super Bowl halftime show starring Scarborough R&B superstar The Weeknd.
During a Thursday morning news conference held at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla. — the site of Sunday’s Super Bowl LV between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the 12-minute spectacular The Weeknd will headline midway through the big game — the multiple Grammy and Juno Award winner promised to deliver a clean show.
The Weeknd, a.k.a. Abel Tesfaye, says his performance won’t feature any of the adultthemed gore and violent imagery shown in the promotional videos for the singles from his latest smash album, “After Hours.”
“I definitely want to be respectful to the viewers at home,” Tesfaye said during the 15-minute virtual conference attended by the Star.
“I will still incorporate some of the storyline — it’s a very cohesive storyline I’ve been telling throughout this era and throughout this year, so the story will continue.
“But we’ll definitely keep it PG for the families, definitely. I’ll try my best.”
Arguably one the world’s biggest music stars at the moment — “After Hours” and the single “Blinding Lights” have broken all kinds of chart records — Tesfaye, who has sold more than 75 million albums around the world, says in light of the pandemic certain safety considerations had to be considered when planning his performance.
It will be a different show visually than perhaps he had initially planned, encompassing different parts of the stadium, including the stands.
“Due to the COVID and for the safety of the players and the workers, we built the stage within the stadium and we’re also using the field as well, but we wanted to do something that we’ve kind of never done before.
“So we built the stage within the stadium, but I’m not going to tell you anything else, because you’ll have to watch on Sunday.”
He played equally coy in terms of revealing any additional details of the performance, which is expected to be viewed by over 100 million people, but he did express surprise at a Toronto Star question about being the first solo Canadian artist to headline a Super Bowl halftime show.
“Really? I didn’t know that. I had no idea, but it’s an honour, yeah, a blessing.”
(Shania Twain performed at the 2003 Super Bowl with Sting and No Doubt, and Dan Aykroyd performed at the 1997 event with the Blues Brothers.)
Tesfaye also revealed that his favourite halftime show was the appearance of Diana Ross in 1996.
“She’s just so glamorous and the show just makes me smile, and she has a great exit with the helicopter, where it lands in the middle of the field, she grabs onto it and flies out into the clouds,” he recalled. “I wish I could have done that; I wish I’d thought of it.”
An off-camera host joked that there was still enough time to plan it.
“I don’t think I have enough money to do it, to be honest,” Tesfaye quipped.
Sunday’s halftime show, coproduced by Roc Nation, caps a busy period of activity for the R&B superstar, aside from the months of rehearsal and a production in which he reportedly invested $7 million (U.S.) of his own money.
On Wednesday, he announced expanded dates for his bumped-to-2022 “After Hours” tour (now 104 concerts kicking off in Vancouver Jan. 14 to 15; Toronto dates are Feb. 1 to 2, and April 10 to 11 at Scotiabank Arena) and on Friday, he is releasing “Highlights,” a compilation of 17 songs he’s curated for Sunday’s performance.
He also found time to donate 150 meals to front-line workers in Tampa Bay and to honour Black-owned restaurants in the area. When asked about the gestures, Tesfaye said, “I see that people are struggling and I just want to help.
“I’ve been in that position myself and I know what it feels like. I never really had money growing up, so giving away isn’t hard for me; it’s very easy. It means nothing.”
When asked what he would advise the 17-year-old Abel who left home and moved into a Parkdale apartment with his friend, Tesfaye said, “Don’t quit. Just don’t quit. And there were times when it was easy to quit, but I told him, just keep going. He was pretty hard-headed.”
Greene Given The Boot By USA House Democrats
Democratic-led House draws line, kicks Greene off panels
Representative punished over alleged support of conspiracies
- Toronto Star
- ALAN FRAM AND BRIAN SLODYSKO
WASHINGTON—A fiercely divided U.S. House of Representatives tossed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene off both her committees Thursday, an unprecedented punishment that Democrats said she’d earned by spreading hateful and violent conspiracy theories.
Underscoring the political vise her inflammatory commentary has clamped her party into, nearly all Republicans voted against the Democratic move but none defended her lengthy history of outrageous social media posts.
Yet in a riveting moment, the freshman Republican from a deep-red corner of Georgia took to the House floor on her own behalf. She offered a mixture of backpedaling and finger-pointing as she wore a dark mask emblazoned with the words “FREE SPEECH.”
The chamber’s near party-line 230-199 vote was the latest instance of conspiracy theories becoming pitched political battlefields, an increasingly familiar occurrence during Donald Trump’s presidency. He faces Senate trial next week for his House impeachment for inciting insurrection after a mob he fueled with his false narrative of a stolen election attacked the Capitol.
Thursday’s fight also underscored the uproar and political complexities that Greene — a master of provoking Democrats, promoting herself and raising campaign money — has prompted since becoming a House candidate last year.
Addressing her colleagues, Greene tried to dissociate herself from her “words of the past.” Contradicting past social media posts, she said she believes the 9/11 attacks and mass school shootings were real and no longer believes QAnon conspiracy theories, which include lies about Democratic-run pedophile rings.
But she didn’t explicitly apologize for online remarks she’s made on other subjects, as when she mulled about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s being assassinated or that Jewish-controlled space rays caused wildfires. She portrayed herself as the victim of unscrupulous “big media companies.”
News organizations “can take teeny, tiny pieces of words that I’ve said, that you have said, any of us, and can portray us as someone that we’re not,” she said. She added that “we’re in a real big problem” if the House punished her but tolerated “members that condone riots that have hurt American people” — a clear reference to last summer’s social justice protests that in some instances became violent.
Greene was on the education and labour, and budget panels. Democrats were especially aghast about her assignment to the education panel, considering the past doubt she cast on school shootings in Florida and Connecticut.
Democrats and researchers said there was no apparent precedent for the full House removing a lawmaker from a committee, a step usually taken by their party leaders.
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Monday, February 1, 2021
Shameless GOP won’t reset moral compass
Shameless GOP won’t reset moral compass
- Toronto Star
- Rosie DiManno Twitter: @rdimanno
ERIN SCHAFF THE NEW YORK TIMES FILE PHOTOIt’s almost comical, were it not so damning, that at least some of the maddened Trump Tribe have turned on Fearless Leader — IT’S ALL HIS FAULT! — as the Republican Party, in reeling disarray, still trembles in its shoes and bends the knee.
White House minority leader Kevin McCarthy crawled to Donald Trump’s side at Mar-aLago last week, genuflecting, executing a screeching U-turn — he’d previously declared that Trump “bears responsibility for the violence that resulted in the death of five people, including a Capitol police officer” — the most, uh, flamboyant of the marauders was proclaiming to anyone who’d listen that, damn straight, he’d be willing to testify at Trump’s second impeachment trial, scheduled to begin next Monday.
Must be easier to see the light from behind bars.
Jacob Chansley, a vocal QAnon proponent from Arizona, a.k.a. Jake Angeli, popularly known by his pseudonym, the Q Shaman, is the weirdo who strode into the Senate chamber during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol by a bloodthirsty mob. Shirtless, his chest covered with pagan tattoos, wearing a fur headdress with horns, wielding a six-foot spear.
In a terrific and exhaustive first-person narrative for The New Yorker last week, Luke Mogelson — a journalist who was present throughout the siege, eyewitness to events except for the 20 minutes when he was incapacitated by pepper spray — wrote about watching Chansley climb onto the dais minutes earlier vacated by Vice-President Mike Pence.
“I’m going to take a seat in this chair, because Mike Pence is a f---ing traitor,” Chansley announced. Then handed his cellphone to another Trump supporter. “I’m not one to usually take pictures of myself, but in this case I think I’ll make an exception.”
With a police officer looking on, not intervening, Chansley leaned his spear against Pence’s desk, as Mogelson recounts it, found a pen and paper and scrawled a message: “IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME/ JUSTICE IS COMING!”
As Chansley departed, another group entered the chamber, recognizable as Proud Boys by their black-and-yellow plaid shirts, grunting “Uhuru!,” a Proud Boys battle cry.
Q Shaman, who turned himself in after granting a series of media interviews, has not made bail. Transferred from Phoenix to the District of Columbia, he’s facing six charges, including violent entry of a restricted building and disorderly conduct. He’d long been a fixture at Trump rallies.
His lawyer had called upon Trump to pardon “peaceful followers” who’d simply accepted the president’s invitation to, well, storm the Capitol and take back the country. The lawyer claims his client had been “horrendously smitten” by Trump but now feels let down. “He felt like he was betrayed by the president,” said Albert Watkins.
On Friday, Chansley — hornless and reportedly on a hunger strike — pleaded not guilty to federal charges. The judge, in rejecting bail, took a dim view of the lawyer’s beseeching before the court. “He’s a longstanding and committed follower of the Shaman faith,” argued Watkins. “This is his attire. It is something that he wears and has worn not just at Trump’s rallies but over the course of his adult life. You have to get to know the man behind the horns and the fur.”
So Q Shaman, ready to drop a dime on Trump as riot inciter in chief, has experienced an epiphany whilst incarcerated. It will be interesting to see how many more defendants — some 150 thus far charged by the FBI — turn stoolie on the disgraced president. Clearly this will be the primary line of defence for the accused thugs; that they were inspired by Trump and obeyed a presidential order. That doesn’t augur well for Trump, attempting to detach himself from the blood-drenched insurrection.
(In a dramatic turn Sunday, Trump’s entire legal team jumped ship, as first reported by CNN. Nobody wants to be snagged, reputationally, in the impeachment trial. It’s unclear whether Trump, who’s never turned a deaf ear to the siren song of a public pulpit, will actually appear in his own defence.)
Meanwhile the GOP is doubling down on exculpating Trump, so fearful that he still has the party by the throat and, eyeing next year’s primaries — Republicans hope to re-take the House — terrified his devoted base will turn on them.
No epiphany here. No reset of the party’s moral compass. No shame, evidently. Even though, under Trump, Republicans lost the House, the Senate and a presidential election. Demagogic populism may have seized the party at its misanthropic grassroots but it won’t bring the GOP a national mandate again, especially without a galvanizing Trump at the helm. McCarthy couldn’t even bring himself to severely admonish loony Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the freshman congresswoman from Georgia and QAnon devotee, as more of her archived hallucinatory social media content has surfaced in recent days.
She “liked” a Twitter post that said a “bullet to the back would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and replied to a supporter who’d asked how they could “hang” former president Barack Obama.
One video shows Greene — conspiracy theorist, she insists shooting massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Florida were staged events designed to help Democrats promote gun control — harassing students who’d survived the latter, trailing them on the street.
Hillary Clinton tweeted: “This woman should be on a watch list. Not in Congress.”
Instead, she was appointed to a congressional committee on education. You can’t make this stuff up.
Greene boasted on the weekend that she’s spoken to Trump and has his full support. “I had a GREAT call with my all time favorite POTUS, President Trump!” she tweeted. “The blood thirsty media and the socialists hate America. Democrats are attacking me now just like they always attack President Trump.’ ”
The thing is, such deranged cranks aren’t anomalies or aberrations. They’re duly elected politicians, a distinct thread of the Republican fabric, while colleagues apparently prefer playing footsie with fanatics to rescuing the party from white supremacists, anti-Semites and neo-Nazis.
Nor are the violent provocateurs necessarily lone outliers on the fringe, such as Q Shaman.
Some of the Capitol infiltrators were clearly there in a command and control capacity. They herded the horde. They had plastic cuff ties, wore communication wires and purportedly had much worse malice on the mind.
Which is why the FBI investigation is focused on farright militias and extremist groups such as the Proud Boys, founded by a Canadian in 2016 as an out-there crew protesting political correctness and perceived shackling of masculinity. Recall that, in a September presidential debate with Joe Biden, Trump called on the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
Video and court filings describe how several groups of men, Proud Boys among them, appeared to “engage in concerted action,” coalescing as they moved toward the Capitol and overwhelmed police. At least half a dozen Proud Boys, who have a history of violently confronting left-wing antifascist activists, have been charged, including one of its top-ranking leaders, Joseph Biggs, a U.S. army veteran.
On Friday, an indictment charged Proud Boys member Dominic Pezzola, from Rochester, N.Y., with conspiracy — a far more serious offence — alleging in court documents that his actions showed “planning, determination and coordination.” A search of the exMarine’s home uncovered a thumb drive containing hundreds of pdfs, with titles such as “Advanced Improvised Explosives” and “The Ultimate DIY Machine Pistol.” Pezzola fired up a celebratory cigar in the Senate chamber and bragged in footage shared on social media that he and his companions could “take this mother--- over,” if they wanted.
Another Proud Boy organizer, Eddie Block, of Madera, Calif., livestreamed an hour-long video of the Capitol assault on YouTube, the throng bullhornurged to take the democracy citadel.
Ironically, the FBI has also disclosed that Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was actually a past informant for federal and law enforcement, a gobsmacking story broken last week by Reuters.
Tarrio, according to a courtroom transcript obtained by the news agency, was described by the federal prosecutor and his own layer as an undercover agent whose skulking — in exchange for a reduced sentence on a fraud charge — contributed to resolving numerous cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling.
Provocateur and collaborator. Tarrio wasn’t in Washington on Jan. 6. He’d been arrested by D.C. police two days earlier, charged with possessing two high-capacity rifle magazines and burning a Black Lives Matter banner at a December pro-Trump demonstration. He was ordered to leave the city pending a court date in June. The white nationalist lives in Miami.
Wonder what his Proud Boys foot soldiers think of the big rat now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)