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Noah Dempsey's avatar

Hello everyone, I am Noah Dempsey; one of the student representatives that spoke, I want to thank everyone for your support. I never expected our small interjections to an injustice would reach this many people. To assure a few questions, we are all safe, we are not being forced or pressured off the board. We do have allies both on the board as well as in School Admin. While my fellow representative has chosen to distance herself from this issue following all of the controversy we both still have strong convictions against religion and we both know we did the right thing. I am always available to answer questions or provide insight. There is another board meeting on Valentines days, should anyone with to attend virtually to show support. Once again the deepest thank you to everyone.

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Maltnothops's avatar

Noah, You have my deepest admiration for voicing your convictions and for, as you say, doing the right thing. You and your colleague give me hope for our future, Thank you!

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Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

Hello and welcome, feel free to comment or vent here every time you want.

Mlle Garcia* and you had shown determination and courage. Continue on this path, both of you, and anyone you can inspire, are sorely needed in a world who wants to go backward.

* She is welcome here if she needs a safe place to express herself.

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NOGODZ20's avatar

Thank you for your efforts in stopping creeping theocracy in the public sphere, Noah.

You are more valued than you can possibly know.

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larry parker's avatar

Keep up the good work and best of luck!

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RegularJoe's avatar

Good on ya for standing up for your Rights. It's not always easy, I know from personal experience. Thank you.

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Guerillasurgeon's avatar

Well done mate – congratulations from NZ.

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Bagen Onuts's avatar

You have this old man's deepest respect. Thank you for acting.

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oraxx's avatar

Prayer has never produced a single repeatable result, and works at precisely the same rate as random chance. I have no idea what they think their prayer would have accomplished. The conservative Christians who can never stop trying to force their religion into the public schools tend to be people who value rote conformity above almost everything else, and tend not to grasp the fact rights are not matters of majority rule.

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Sko Hayes's avatar

I always wondered about that. If prayer worked, why do children die? Why do disasters happen? Even when I was little, it meant nothing to me.

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oraxx's avatar

Joseph Campbell wrote about the concept of cultural imprinting. The cultural imprint of Christianity in the western world is enormous. People believe in prayer because they've been conditioned from birth to believe it, and conditioned from birth to never question it.

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Sko Hayes's avatar

Oh yes, it happened to me, Raised Catholic, Sunday School, Communion, Confirmation, the whole 9 yards.

I loathed every minute. My dad and I finally agreed that I could stop going to church when I was 16, and I never looked back.

Funny though, that when all the kids were grown and gone, my dad ALSO stopped going to church...

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Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

My mother was raised catholic*, yet if my paternal grandmother hadn't had a tantrum I wouldn't have been baptized.

* She was not a practicing catholic but not yet an Atheist.

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Sko Hayes's avatar

Yeah, my mom never went to church either.

My dad used to tell us stories of when he was growing up and they were staying at our place at the NJ shore. All the boys would sleep in the attic and on Sunday morning, my grandfather would get everyone up to go to church, even the Jewish kids. No one ever argued with my grandfather!! :D

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Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

DM was raised for a time by her maternal grandparents (1 "catholic*", 1 Atheist). Had she said she wanted to stop going to catechism, their reaction would have been "Okay, whatever you want".

* I already talked about her. She gave the finger to about every rule society and rcc imposed to women, yet she never missed a mass or a catholic holiday.

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Maltnothops's avatar

Raised Missouri Synod Lutheran (motto: We aren’t as crazy as the Wisconsin Synod). Became atheist. Married a Jewish woman and agreed to raise kids Jewish. Was fully on board with honoring that promise. Went to services. Even took the kids to services by myself when my bride couldn’t go. Volunteered at the synagogue (I was Latke Tsar of the Hanukah party for 7 years! My team and I made about 500-700 latkes from scratch year after year.) I was widely regarded as an honorary Member of the Tribe (MOT) by the actual Jews in our synagogue. Kids got bar mitzvahed and announced their atheism within a few years. I had nothin’ to do with it!

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xenubarb's avatar

I was 13 when I told my folks I didn't want to go to church any more. No problem, only I did miss out on eating out after church, but a couple of Jack in the Box tacos and a shake were just fine with me.

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Bill Lawrence's avatar

I hated to go to church, but my parents made me. So I would tell them I wanted to sit with my friends in the balcony. When the service started I would scoot out of the door and head to a nearby drug store, where my .25-cents collection money would buy me a chocolate milk shake.

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xenubarb's avatar

That's doin' it right!

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Sandra Carmen Marrujo's avatar

I was sent to Catholic grammar and h.s., but not for religious reasons, but because my mother believed that the quality of the non-religious education was, at that time, better than the public schools in our area (1950-63). Unfortunately, I had to go through all you did because the SCHOOL required it, even Mass on Sunday - not with family, but with my grade school class. (Mom was Anglican cum Buddhist, dad a lapsed Catholic). It's amazing how many weekends I spent with my non-religious granny, and show up at school on Monday with a note saying I had "attended Mass at St. Ann's, her grandmother's church." NOT

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Sko Hayes's avatar

My Dad enrolled me in Catholic School in 1st grade. I was physically punished by one of the nuns, and my mother had a MELTDOWN, so no more Catholic school (YAY).

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Bill Lawrence's avatar

That's funny. I was down on religion for many years but hung on to the notion of a god until my 8-year-old son announced one day that he didn't believe in God. It made me realize that I didn't either!

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Sko Hayes's avatar

I kind of had it in the back of my mind that I was an atheist, but the moment I realized it, I was in a 12 step rehab for alcoholism, and all that god stuff just had me rolling my eyes.

Actually I thought the whole program was worthless, but it gave me a safe place to get sober.

I remember one of the counselors there was very cool about it, he told me "You can be your own higher power, it doesn't have to be God." and that helped a lot.

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ericc's avatar

I think there's an obvious component of ritual to it. So it's not really about whether it's going to "work" in the "brings about a miracle" sense. It's more territory marking, or Christians think they need this to get into the right frame of mind, or maybe like a tic or habit or OCD they just psychologically feel that something's missing when they don't do it.

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xenubarb's avatar

Exactly. Like dogs pissing on a telephone pole.

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Sko Hayes's avatar

Oh absolutely.

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XJC's avatar

These happened because you didn't pray for them, or if you did, you didn't pray hard enough. Omniscient, omnipotent, merciful Jesus has high standards.

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cdbunch's avatar

Likes to watch people beg and spend all their time praising him. Remind you of a certain orange person.

Any being, deity or mortal that desires worship is not worth of it.

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Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

I hope these two will inspire more students to stand up against bigotry. Kudos to Mlle Garcia to say out loud she is an atheist.

You want to start meetings with a prayer ? Join a religious private school board, it's as simple as that.

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Phil Jackson's avatar

The kids may save us yet.

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Sko Hayes's avatar

Expect the board to try and remove those students forthwith...

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Dee Martinez's avatar

Next ‘discussion’: how to prevent students from participating in school board meetings

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Joe King's avatar

This is why I have hope for the future.

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CozmoTheMagician's avatar

Geesh, KIDS THESE DAYS! Taking all the FUN out of Fundamentalism...

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larry parker's avatar

You got it backwards. They're taking da mentalism out of fun. : )

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Donrox's avatar

Oh hell no! They extinguished the fun long ago, all by themselves!

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Bagen Onuts's avatar

They are mental all right. Mental defectives incapable of empathy.

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xenubarb's avatar

"Vermulm then chimed in to say that pastors had already contacted him asking for the opportunity to pray at their meetings."

Yeah, I just bet they did. Those people will weasel into every crack and crevice to establish themselves, like ticks, on the body politic.

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Kay-El's avatar

I’m betting he contacted the pastors first.

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wreck's avatar

"… maybe during our meetings… we would open in prayer, like after the Pledge. You know, I’d be willing to lead it, and, um, I just think there’s a lot of things, a lot of issues that we as a school district, a community even, you know… we could use some divine intervention."

Maybe you should pray that you could speak in coherent sentences.

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Die Anyway's avatar

Well, him is just a Skool Broad member. He don't need to be no rockit sciencist to do the job.

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Critical Pondering's avatar

"It was strictly a discussion" my a**! We KNOW that if the students hadn't stepped in it would have been pushed through, and months from now Hemant would be posting how the they'd gotten sued for and lost.

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Joan the Dork's avatar

Those kids should get extra credit for saving their school district the cost of losing a lawsuit.

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Troublesh00ter's avatar

When the students are smarter than the school board members, something is both wrong and right. I admire the hell out of Yoshimi and Noah in being willing to speak up and call those members of the board who likely thought that introducing prayer into their meetings was a harmless gesture. That showed a determination and strength and bravery which is more than likely missing from those they were admonishing.

And so the students were teaching those tasked with teaching. Wonder if the board members actually LEARNED anything.

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Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

To be sneakier about forcing christianity on others by invoking a tradition who doesn't exist or go back to the early 18th at the latest ?

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Kiwiwriter47's avatar

If they demand prayers in these meetings, I'm going to call for Jewish and Satanic prayers. After all, too many people think the Jews are Satanic.

We didn't have to recite the Pledge of Allegiance very often in my school, but when we did it, I would recite the German pledge of obedience to Adolf..."I swear by God this Holy Oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, Fuehrer of the German Nation...."

I even did it at our graduation ceremony, which shocked the teachers standing around -- they were all Jewish -- and amused my classmates.

It was my way of showing the teachers and school administrators how much I hated them.

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Runfastandwin's avatar

You are braver than I was. I dropped out on the first day I was 15 3/4 my state's age where that was legally allowed.

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Kiwiwriter47's avatar

My mother and her family have been providing the Crown with Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and civil servants from HM King Charles II (1680) to HM King Charles III (2024).

We have a heritage of fighting on and holding ground, from Blenheim to Burma.

I did the same, and ultimately got my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School for Social Research.

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Kay-El's avatar

Kudos to the kids for not caving into the supposed adults in the room. It would have been easy to stay silent, but they didn’t and their school is better for it.

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Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

Good that they didn’t take action on it and ostensibly listened to the students and FFRF. It’s been some time, about 17 years, since I lived in the area and my hubs worked for the city, but I’m going to guess that the insanely petty local fights are still happening, possibly some of the players are dead now, but probably not all. I will bet that now that the prayers have been put on the table, we will see some of the looney locals flip out that they cannot participate.

The city hall was inundated with records requests, and I mean inundated to the full extent of what that means, so much that they couldn’t possibly provide the records in the legally required timeframe. The person demanding the records did so out of spite simply because he didn’t like the mayor and other city workers. He would park in the handicapped spot in front of the city hall during the public meetings to patronize the bar on the other side of the block (which had a handicapped spot in front of it) so the city board member that required a handicapped spot was put out, every meeting. They posted crap online about the mayor and harassed her over permits for buildings on her property and all sorts of bs. One of the guys doing this was a former Prosser policeman who retired when he got in an accident in his police cruiser with a privately owned vehicle (his) in his own driveway. The other guy owned a trailer park which was at the entrance to the town from the freeway. The trailers on his park were nearly all in a state that should have condemned them, he used trailers he couldn’t rent (because they were crumbling apart and clearly hazards) along the road with spray painted messages against the mayor and other members of the town. He even put a blowup sex doll on top of a trailer claiming it was the mayor. The park was filled with trash, busted toilets bags of garbage and insulation scattered about. It was beyond an eyesore.

So, I’m concerned about the petty tactics the citizens might use to get their way. Honestly, I’ve never seen any town have such issues before or after and I have moved around a lot in my life.

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ericc's avatar

"The city hall was inundated with records requests, and I mean inundated to the full extent of what that means, so much that they couldn’t possibly provide the records in the legally required timeframe...."

Hmmm...not sure how it works at the city level, but at the federal level more requests for the same office or similar info just results in a longer delivery time being declared "reasonable." After all, the government is not obligated to spend more resources on requests just because there are more of them.

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Val Uptuous NotAgain's avatar

At the time the one person working in the records department had a specific timeframe to deliver, like a week or two, and whenever she was unable to deliver he filed legal complaints against the city. He was intentionally requesting too many so he could file complaints, knowing that there was no way to change the timeframe. The rules didn’t change for reasonable accommodation, the timeframe was set.

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ericc's avatar

I think fed FOIA laws have a timer too. But I know that it's pretty easy move it (it just takes the office to write a letter justifying the delay), because I vaguely recall writing one of those justifications myself.

Not that this prevents his filing of complaints, but if I were the civil servant getting all the requests, the very first thing I'd do - before i answered any of them - is work up a labor estimate, hand it to my boss, and tell them "how much of my regular day job do you want me to give up in order to work on this?" Number of hours she's willing to put me on it per day dictates how much time we tell the government lawyers it will take to answer the requests. Then it's THEIR job to get a judge to move the timer to that time.

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Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

𝐘𝐞𝐬, 𝐢𝐭’𝐬 𝐚 𝐅𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐚 𝐩𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐝. 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐥𝐮𝐜𝐤 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭.

Whether Hillsborough has $569 million, or $600 million, or even more in the kitty isn’t the real issue. The number’s the number, and the state’s stonewalling is hardly the most egregious example of government withholding information. Yet the episode reflects how far Florida has sunk from its reputation as the Sunshine State, whose open records and meetings laws were a model for the nation. With many agencies today, across all levels of Florida government, getting a simple question answered can be like pulling teeth. It’s become another wall between taxpayers and the services they fund.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/yes-it-s-a-florida-public-record-good-luck-getting-it/ar-BB1hERwD

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cdbunch's avatar

I'm still not sure why a 'sitting' President should be immune to prosecution of criminal felonies regardless.

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Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

Like judges they are supposed to be able to do their jobs without being coerced by another party, as if swearing an oath make you a machine devoid of bias 🙄

That didn't prevent judges to jump on sarkonzy's corruption cases as soon his immunity dropped.

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Psittacus Ebrius's avatar

He shouldn't be. Period. His lawyers are using every legal maneuver they can think of, kind of like throwing spaghetti and seeing what sticks. His biggest fear is being sent to prison.

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Matri's avatar

Throwing spaghetti or throwing shit?

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Bagen Onuts's avatar

Throwing spaghetti at the wall was used Tuesday evening by Lawrence O.Donnel of MSNBC's "The Last Word,"

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Maltnothops's avatar

My preferred punishment for Trump is house arrest. With no ability to speak publucally or post anything. Actually, my favorite daydream is that he he has a stroke that leaves him able to comprehend but not communicate in any way.

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Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

And he has to wear an orange jumpsuit all the time.

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ericc's avatar

Well, as of today, *past* Presidents certainly aren't.

I expect a sitting president wouldn't be immune for something pretty cut and dried. Trump's "shoot someone on 5th avenue" example. I think instead that federal prosecutors would decide that for anything even resembling a gray area, they should stay away from, lest they become weaponized.

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Matri's avatar

Wow. That, uh, was definitely the English language.

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ericc's avatar

That's what CDbunch asked about. I had to backtrack and edit to get that right.

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Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

I was being facetious. This is what I meant:

ADJECTIVE

in a seated position:

"a sitting position"

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Black Hole and DM mourner's avatar

I don't understand where the District Court for the District of Columbia stand in the chain of appeals available.

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Joan the Dork's avatar

https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-States-Court-of-Appeals

DC is a special case... it's a city, but it isn't technically part of a state, so it gets 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 perks and benefits (like its own Federal Court of Appeals) but not others (like voting representation in Congress). From time to time, there are murmurings about turning DC into a proper state unto itself, but those never really go anywhere.

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cdbunch's avatar

Just like the murmurings about the red-headed stepchild Puerto Rico. I still say they should apply to be a province of Canada, who could certainly use a sub-tropical vacation spot.

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Donrox's avatar

All areas of the USA are under the jurisdiction of federal courts. This is the federal court for the jurisdiction of Washington D.C. The next highest court is the Supremes

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Donrox's avatar

I grew up outside of Detroit. Motown is part of my soundtrack.

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cdbunch's avatar

The District Court is the original federal trial court. All such are called a District court. District in this case does not refer to the District of Columbia.

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Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

Trump could appeal this ruling to the Supreme Court, setting up a second date with the justices, or ask for the federal appeals court to hear the case again but this time by the full, 15-judge D.C. court, in what is known as an en blanc review. The former president signaled he would appeal the decision shortly after its announcement but did not give details as to which route he would take.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-suffers-major-blow-in-fight-with-jack-smith/ar-BB1hS2FV?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=1e5dd857ab7f4acdb432241321ceddda&ei=117

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cdbunch's avatar

SCOTUS, of course. He must have the best. It was only that he wasn't allowed to go straight to SCOTUS, he had to go through the district court and then the court of appelas.

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ericc's avatar

I'd be willing to bet 2-1, 3-1, maybe 10-1 that they turn away this case. With 3 dissents from that decision. :)

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Barry's avatar

Yeah they're not gonna touch that mess.

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Bagen Onuts's avatar

SCROTUS will show it live Thursday at 9AM EST. MSNBC will cover it.

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Joan the Dork's avatar

OT- GQP candidate in Missouri openly campaigns on a platform of burning books... with an ad in which she actually burns books. Books that also happened to 𝘯𝘰𝘵 belong to her: https://www.meidastouch.com/news/gop-candidate-burns-missouri-public-library-books-with-flamethrower

Who even 𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘴 a fucking flamethrower?

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NOGODZ20's avatar

"Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too."

-- Heinrich Heine, 1821

Bet she spares "Mein Kampf" from being burned.

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Matri's avatar

Groomer from the Grooming Others Party accuses people just trying to survive of "grooming". Noises of celebration can be heard coming from Goebbels' grave.

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Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

MAGATs.

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larry parker's avatar

Musk owns one, but it's just for use around the office.

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Daniel Rotter's avatar

I don't believe the jobs of Secretaries of State involve determining what books are and are not allowed in public libraries.

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Zorginipsoundsor's avatar

🤫 Missouri trumpanzees don't know that.

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Matri's avatar

What conservatives don't know can fill entire city blocks of libraries.

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