WTF Friday: Guns, Germs and Steely Dan Flynn

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Above: New friends of Congressman Randy Weber (R-Caucasus)

It’s only been a week since we’ve brought back this accursed round-up, and things keep getting bleaker. The Texas Observer’s offices were annexed to the People’s Republic of Kory at some point during the night, and a certain gun rights activist has demanded that we not use his name, on pain of Facebook tirade and/or death. We will carry on, but we are also cowards. Long live ████ ██████ !

1) Everyone knows that it’s fun to be a woman on the Internet. Case in point: Matt Beebe, a friendly Empower Texans fellow-traveler who tweets a lot and has run a series of not-too-successful primary challenges to noted tyrant House Speaker Joe Straus.

To clarify, Beebe is not a woman on the Internet, but he knows some. Last week, we talked a bit about AgendaWise’s super-strange treatment of women under the pink dome. (Spoiler alert: They’re “political concubines.”) Beebe had some thoughts about the “myth of female empowerment,” and he tweeted them at Texas Monthly’s Erica Grieder, with a helpful illustration:

This is weird, you say? Open your mind. Let he who has never sent a woman an unsolicited Reddit pic of a woman getting peed on cast the first stone.

Naturally, Beebe got mad when Grieder didn’t take the pee-picture in the manner in which it was intended. These ladies get hysterical at the drop of a hat, amirite?

2) Dan Flynn knows, presumably, that children are our future, but adults are our present and he’s an adult, living in the present, and have you seen children lately? Those dudes are terrifying.

So he’s got a bill to allow teachers to defend themselves or school property with deadly force. To explain himself, he pointed an Observer reporter to a YouTube video entitled, partially, “Black Student Slams Teacher.”

When you get old enough, I imagine the whole world looks like this:


3)
You might have thought state Rep. Steve Toth would stop Tothing when he lost his seat after a failed bid for the Senate. You would be wrong. He’s as Tothy as ever: He can’t help it.

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There’s a service called Poetweet which composes rhyming poems from portions of your tweets. Here’s a Rondel from Steve Toth:

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4)
Randy Weber, the able-minded Texas congressman who gained immortality for calling Barack Obama a “socialistic dictator” and “Kommandant-in-chief” before last year’s State of the Union address and who recently compared the president unfavorably to “Adolph Hitler,” (sic) normally has trouble stringing two syntactically correct sentences together. But now he plays an important role on the House Committee on Foreign Relations. So he’s branching out.

Last week, the Washington Times published a special section in the paper entitled “Azerbaijan: A Quarter Century Since Restoring Independence, A Thriving U.S. Ally.” It looked like part of the newspaper, but it was paid for by “friends” of the little Caucasus state, a dictatorship with unresolved borders and lot of oil that has been cracking down on journalists and dissidents. In the section, Weber gave us some of his carefully thought-out thoughts, in an op-ed titled “Why Azerbaijan matters to the United States.

Why would a relatively stable country at the intersection of the Middle East, Europe and Asia, with a strong economy and burgeoning energy supply, matter to the United States? It’s a great question with a relatively easy answer.

Woah! Tell us more, Randy!

Now, more than ever, we must strengthen our current relationships with allies new and old. Azerbaijan has continually shown their willingness to cooperate with our government to foster a healthier, more stable Middle East and Eurasia. It is imperative for the future of our national security that we continue down a path of collaboration and show that we will be a strong and strategic partner to Azerbaijan for years to come.

All hail Azerbaijan! When cleansing fires come, Azerbaijan will stand strong. Azerbaijan best country #1. Someday, Great Leader Ilham Heydar oglu Aliyev will wipe Armenian scum from earth and connect Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic with Azerbaijan motherland, and a thousand years of peace will follow, as was foretold.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the junkets, congressman.

CAKE: The UT-Austin chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas is celebrating Ronald Reagan’s birthday by providing welfare cake to passersby on campus. Get it while you can!