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Immediately after the January 6th insurrection, various Democratic congresspeople expressed their very real concerns that they were afraid of certain Republican members of Congress. Like, those Democrats were genuinely afraid that some GOP representatives and senators had aided and abetted the Capitol terrorists, and that those Republicans were still planning to harm Democrats. The shortlist of potentially murderous Republicans was pretty obvious to most, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was on top. She’s a QAnon conspiracist with a history of “liking” social media posts which threatened violence against Democrats.

As that story took hold this week, another story about Rep. Greene came out – she was one of the wingnuts filming herself stalking and harassing survivors of the Parkland shooting. She’s one of those reprehensible “false flag” conspiracists who believe that “the government did Parkland and Sandy Hook so they could take away our guns.” Those dumbf–ks also believe that the children who died in those shootings didn’t really exist, and that the traumatized parents are just “actors.” I sh-t you not. There is still a “cottage industry” of gun nuts who stalk and harass Parkland and Sandy Hook survivors and the parents of murdered children. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of those gun nuts.

Video of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg before she was elected to Congress went viral Wednesday amid an uproar over newly reported comments she made in 2018 and 2019. In the video from March 2019, Greene follows Hogg as he walks toward the US Capitol. She can be heard making false and baseless claims as she asks him a series of questions related to gun rights and how he was able to meet with senators. Hogg continues to walk without addressing Greene.

“He’s a coward,” Greene says at the end of the video as Hogg walks away, claiming his activism was funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is often the subject of far-right conspiracy theories, and other liberals. “He can’t say one word because he can’t defend his stance.” Greene — who has previously called Hogg “#littleHitler” — said in a written statement to CNN that the video was taken while she was in Washington, “going from office to office in the Senate to oppose the radical gun control agenda that David Hogg was pushing.”

[From CNN]

What’s f–king bonkers about the Greene video is that SHE MADE IT HERSELF and she posted it online. And somehow it never cropped up during her congressional campaign? Jesus. After one of the Parkland parents posted the video IDing Greene, David Hogg tweeted his statement, and he’ll be doing interviews today. There’s also a movement to flat-out expel Greene from Congress. Republicans are fighting it.

.@mtgreenee, is this you harassing @davidhogg111 weeks after the Parkland shooting, that my daughter was killed in & he was in? Calling him a coward for ignoring your insanity. I will answer all of your questions in person. Get ready to record again.pic.twitter.com/aQjL74x7kh

— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) January 27, 2021

1/2 As we fight for peace we also face massive amounts of death threats and armed intimidation simply for not wanting our friends to die anymore.

This is not the country we should be and it’s not the country we have to be.

— David Hogg (He / Him) (@davidhogg111) January 28, 2021

I didn’t realize there was also video of @mtgreenee following us 10 min before the outside interaction too pic.twitter.com/tRzH9VraqR

— David Hogg (He / Him) (@davidhogg111) January 28, 2021

BTW part of the reason we were so calm with @mtgreenee harassing us was because we have been through similar stuff so many times before it’s just this time it was on video- and they’re in Congress now.

What you see in that video is about 0.1% of what we go through in a year.

— David Hogg (He / Him) (@davidhogg111) January 28, 2021

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Whenever a royal figure appears on the cover of People Magazine, seemingly out of nowhere, I wonder what’s going on behind-the-scenes and why that royal needed a hit of sugary People Mag PR. It happens all the time with the Duchess of Cambridge, who in recent years has gone to People Mag to take a “mulligan” on whatever negative story is out there at the time. So it’s very strange to see Queen Elizabeth doing the same. QEII had a horrendous 2020 – she went into lockdown too late, then she refused to say much in the way of public support during the pandemic. She wandered around maskless, she made people give her a birthday parade and she also forced her 99-year-old husband to travel to Scotland and change his living situation several times for no good reason. It was a mess and it was all so bloody unnecessary. So, it’s time for a soft-focus piece on how the Queen loves to… laugh?

Queen Elizabeth is known for her stoic nature, but there is an unexpected side to the monarch. The Queen “is much livelier in private than what the public sees,” royal biographer Sally Bedell Smith, author of Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch, tells PEOPLE in one of this week’s cover stories.

The author quotes a source at the Queen’s country estate in Norfolk, Sandringham, once saying, “‘You can hear her laugh throughout that big house.’ She has a big laugh!”

The Queen, 94, can also be surprisingly self-deprecating. Not long after Prince Charles’ 1981 wedding to Princess Diana, a rerun of the ceremony was playing on TV during a party in London that the monarch was attending. Spotting herself on the screen, “The Queen said, ‘Oh, there’s my Miss Piggy face,’?” Bedell Smith recalls. “She has the ability to laugh at herself.”

And while Queen Elizabeth’s portraits are often serious and unemotional, she knows how to have some fun too. During a shoot celebrating her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the Queen told photographer Barry Jeffrey to “just keep the camera rolling!” as she broke from the norm. The Queen proceeded to strike a “series of poses, slipping her hands in and out of her pockets and placing them onto her hips, mimicking the stances of a professional model,” recalled her dress maker and close confidante Angela Kelly.

They stood “in disbelief. The Queen was a natural,” Kelly marveled. “Barry and I felt we were experiencing something really special: a moment never to be repeated.”

When the Queen wants to relax, she turns to her beloved animals: her last living dorgi (a crossbred corgi and dachshund), Candy, and her stable of Fell ponies, a distinct English breed.

“She goes into a peaceful mode when she is with horses,” says her close friend and equine adviser Monty Roberts.

[From People]

Interesting that Angela Kelly is quoted. Kelly ran around last year, claiming that Meghan and Harry had cursed her out after she pulled some tiara shenanigans. She was the central source for the entire “Meghan’s tiara drama” story. Then, to get the final word, Angela ran to Richard Kay at the Mail, pushed stories about how close she is with QEII and basically made them sound like late-in-life lovers, like she’s the sole gatekeeper to the Queen. It was unhinged. As for this People cover and the effort to make the Queen sound like a normal person… please. This is the same petty, grumpy a–hole who denied a veteran of war the opportunity to have a wreath laid at the Cenotaph. Liz of House Petty is reprehensible.

Oh, and in another cover story excerpt, “sources” claim that the pandemic is “the only slight rest she’s ever had in her whole life.” Are you f–king kidding me? The woman goes to Balmoral EVERY YEAR for two (sometimes three) months so she can “have a vacation.” She did that in 2020 again, and forced all of her workers to quarantine for weeks away from their families, just so she could have a few months sitting on her royal arse at a different palatial estate.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.

Dakota Johnson is doing promotional rounds for her film, Our Friend. It also stars Jason Segel and Casey Affleck and is about a dying wife being cared for by her husband and their best friend. I’m not quite sold on it yet. But I do like Dakota, primarily because she is unflinchingly honest in interviews. This trait is even more entertaining because Dakota makes a habit of lying in her everyday life and then confessing to those lies in her interviews. We’ve only just recovered from learning that her love of limes is a blatant untruth, made up on the spot simply to be entertaining. And now there’s this: Dakota impersonates other famous people to get restaurant reservations. She did, at least, before her own name got her a table. While on The Drew Barrymore Show, Drew asked Dakota about pretending to be George Clooney to get tables. And I guess he heard about it – and didn’t care.

Did you or did you not used to make reservations at restaurants under the name George Clooney as to get the best table?

No, it wasn’t even to get the best table. It was just to get a reservation. But I did that.

But you met him, and he was (okay with it)

Yeah, weirdly. I had not met him yet, obviously, and he was like, “I’ve heard about what you’ve done.” I was like, “Oh my god.“ But he was cool with it.

[From YouTube via DListed]

I asked the same thing Allison at DListed asked: was being the legacy of Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffin and Don Johnson really not enough to get a table in LA? Sheesh, tough crowd. It probably takes that kind of pedigree to have the guts to impersonate George Clooney’s party, though, so it counted for something. When Jimmy Fallon asked Dakota about this on The Tonight Show in 2019, he wanted to know what happened once she showed up at the joint sans George. She said she’d tell them George was on his way or meeting them later and they’d buy it every time. I can tell you from first-hand experience this is a blatant double standard. Most fancy pants places that require you to pretend to be Clooney to get a reservation won’t seat you until your whole party is present, and they will cancel your @ss if the others aren’t there within 15 minutes of the reserved time. But I guess if the outstanding person has an impressive IMDb page attached to their name, it’s a different set of rules.

How did George find out it was Dakota using his name? It must be a legacy hotline thing, information just gets around. I love that he was fine with it. This is just a great story all around.

I’ve included the Fun Facts with Dakota Johnson segment below because it’s cute. Drew asks her about learning how to be a cowgirl in Colorado from her dad. They also speak about the curated lists her production company, TeaTime, posts. Jimmy Fallon also asked her about those when she was on his show. I’ve only just now learned about them, they’re really good. They post them for music, films, books – you can check them out on their Instagram page.

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Photo credit: YouTube, Getty and Avalon

Our good brother Tyler Perry is making headlines again but this time it is not for feeding thousands of Atlantans during a pandemic. Instead, Tyler looks to educate the Black community about the Coronavirus vaccine in hopes to dispel suspicion. Due to a history of horrible and unethical government-backed medical experiments (read: Henrietta Lacks, Tuskegee Experiment and Dr. J. Marion Sims), many Black people have a healthy suspicion of the medical industry and the government. At the moment Black people are falling behind white people in getting vaccinated against covid which is a cause for concern since Black people are disproportionately affected.

Tyler appeared on CBS’s This Morning to promote COVID-19 Vaccine and the Black Community: A Tyler Perry Special in collaboration with BET. Tyler received the vaccine live while talking to doctors. Below are more details via People:

With a new informative BET project titled COVID-19 Vaccine and the Black Community: A Tyler Perry Special, the filmmaker, 51, receives the coronavirus vaccine on-camera and ask doctors questions in order to help de-stigmatize vaccinations amid the ongoing pandemic. Perry admitted during a recent CBS This Morning appearance that he was skeptical at first and that he understands the skepticism in the Black community.

“If you look at our history in this country, with the Tuskegee experiment, Henrietta Lacks and things like that, it raises flags for us as African American people. So I understand why there’s a healthy skepticism about the vaccine,” he said.

Perry said prior to learning more about the technology that produced the vaccines so quickly, he “didn’t really feel like he could trust it.” But he explained, “Once I got all the information, found out the research, I was very, very happy.”

Opting for the Pfizer vaccine, Perry said he had no reactions to the first dose earlier this month, and after the follow-up second round he had on Monday, Perry said he “woke up with some aches and pains, but I took some Advil about an hour ago and I feel fine now.”

Despite slight aches and pains, Perry assured that he has no regrets in taking the vaccines, given the alternative.

“Here’s what you don’t understand: the problem with this COVID-19 virus is you never know how it’s going to affect you,” he said. “I’ve had people die that I know, people who have had long-term health issues that I know. So you’re making the choice of getting the vaccine … and reducing your chances of ending up in the ICU by 100 percent.”

“I think it’s important for people to know that if you take your chances with COVID, you never know how it’s going to affect you, and it could affect your long-term health,” said Perry.

[From People]

Like I have said before, I personally do not like Tyler’s movies but I love him, specifically his philanthropy. Ironically, Tyler has proven to leads by example and be a voice of reason in the Black community. I applaud Tyler for going after some Black churches and leaders for helping spread disinformation as it was the Black church (chitlin’ circuit) that supported his first movie efforts. I have spoken to many Black people who said their pastor claimed the vaccine is unsafe. I believe that Tyler has the clout to address these issues. With being so high profile, many Black people would listen to and take Tyler seriously and I like that he is using this to educate folks. Many of my friends and I wanted to wait until the vaccine went through more cycles of research before getting vaccinated. However, when I found out from Kizzmekia Corbett, a Black scientist who helped develop the vaccine, that the vaccine had been in research for over a decade, I decided that it was safe. I am now on a waiting list in my county. My other friends are as well and one has gotten her first dose.

I do hope that Perry’s project with BET is effective at getting Black people motivated to get vaccinated. The tide has to turn at some point. I want to see my family, friends, and community (who overwhelmingly work on the frontlines), healthy and sticking around longer. I personally want to start traveling again. Anyhow, if you haven’t gotten vaccinated I encourage you to research your options and get on a list if you can. I hope that the majority of the U.S. and the world are vaccinated by the end of the summer so that we can get back to a normal-ish life and our death toll began to level out. Nothing will go back to the way it was. We are different and we have all suffered lost this last year, so many people have died unnecessarily because of poor governing. I also feel we must grieve our former lives. After we grieve, we must embrace our new normal.

COVID-19 Vaccine and the Black Community airs tonight at 9pm ET/PT on BET.

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With the COVID vaccines here, optimism grows. With new vaccines in the works and the distribution getting fast-tracked, projections of when we might be able to start hanging out again are being cautiously moved forward. Now, the Center for Disease Control says they have enough data to suggest that our kids can go back to in-person classrooms. According to new evidence, the CDC said students going back in the classroom has done little to spread the disease, as long as they maintain all the COVID precautions such as washing hands, social distancing and wearing masks.

Evidence shows that K-12 schools can safely resume in-person instruction in the U.S., as long as steps are taken to continue reducing the spread of COVID-19, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

As students returned to school across the nation — and the globe — for the fall semester “there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission,” of COVID-19, researchers for the CDC wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

According to the report, a study of COVID-19 transmission among people ages 0 to 18 in Mississippi found that attending gatherings and social functions outside one’s home, as well as having visitors inside the home, was associated with increased risk of infection.

However, in-person school attendance was not.

“Accumulating data now suggest a path forward to maintain or return primarily or fully to in-person instructional delivery,” the researchers said.

That path would include taking steps to reduce transmission of COVID-19 in schools, including wearing masks and maintaining social distancing, as well as limiting activities such as indoor sports and other extracurricular activities.

[From People]

I want to be excited about this. However, reading the article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, their US samples are from rural Wisconsin, 11 school districts in North Carolina with 90,000 students and staff and one unspecified part of Mississippi. There are over 730,000 students alone in the single Los Angeles school district. Over 1M in New York’s, so the samples used in the evidence are a concern to me. Plus, the article relies heavily on the communities in which the school reside adhering to strict COVID precautions. Meaning everyone should be wearing masks and social distancing. No one should be gathering in homes or in large numbers unnecessarily. All outside interaction should remain limited. I wish I could rely on my community to do that, but they have yet to prove they can. Our school district, which is right outside LA unified, reopened to a hybrid in-person learning for K-2 for two months, I think, before all students were pulled back home. We just received another email they were going to try that again after Gov Newsom inexplicably reopened the state. Yes, we have seen a small dip in cases, but still have no hospital beds and are rationing resources. EMTs and ICU triage cases based on chances of survival. So all of this sounds like too much of a gamble to me.

The focus of the People article and the JAMA article seems to be the mental health of the students. It’s a valid concern. In CA, we haven’t gotten to Tier 1b on the vaccine process yet, which means out teachers haven’t been vaccinated. I absolutely agree that the current at-home school conditions and resources has put a giant mental strain on students. But based on these articles, there’s too much assumption to feel confident that sending them back to the classrooms will alleviate stress and not just create new ones. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep working towards getting kids back in school. And communities that have shown no growth in new cases and proper guideline adherence should allow kids in classrooms. But I think even if I asked my socially starved children their preference right now, they’d be freaked out given the horror show we’ve been witness to over the last six months.

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Halsey has grown up a lot after her confessional early interviews. It happened gradually in recent years. She talked about her endo struggles. She mourned a miscarriage. She spoke in detail about her own mental health struggles, and told people to stop making jokes about Kanye West’s manic episode. She stopped self-medicating with booze and everything else. She wasn’t so confessional about her love life. The drama absolutely went down to a manageable level. And now Halsey is expecting her first child. Congrats!

Halsey announced her pregnancy – where else – on social media. She posted some lovely photos on Instagram with the comment “surprise!” The father is Alev Aydin, a Turkish 37-year-old screenwriter who is LA-based, just like Halsey. According to People’s source, Alev and Halsey “have been dating for several months. Halsey has been low-key about their relationship. They were spending a lot of time at her house in the fall though, and it was obvious that she was happy.” Hm… did she get pregnant really quickly when they first started dating? But Halsey’s fans also figured out that she and Alev were dating as far back as last June. So it does seem like this was a real relationship before she got knocked up. I guess! Alev was commenting on Halsey’s social media too, writing “Heart so full, I love you, sweetness.”

Anyway, congrats to the two of them, soon to be three of them. I have my fingers crossed for them!

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Photos courtesy of Instagram.

This Dakota Johnson story kills me: she uses George Clooney’s name to get reservations, LOLOLOL. And when they met he confronted her about it… and was cool with it. Because that is exactly the kind of sh-t he would pull on someone. So if I’m Dakota, I would be expecting a prank-revenge. Also, can we…

My favourite true but not-cool-to-say observation about the inauguration last week was that it was kind of boring, in the most blissfully relieving way – and the exception that proved the rule was the instantaneous and universal reaction to poet laureate Amanda Gorman; everyone fell in love with her…

There’s a rumour going around that Cardi B and Channing Tatum will star in a remake of The Bodyguard. DeuxMoi posted it (via Dlisted) and according to their source, it’s “based on a real story of Cardi having to change security while on tour, due to gun laws and her main security being possibly felo…

Lindsay Lohan has gone viral before (remember the dance?) and she has again on TikTok. Here’s the recap: Lindsay got a request on Cameo from a woman named Alana, who was nervous about coming out to her parents so she wanted Lindsay to do it for her. Lindsay made a video for Alana, encouraging her to…