Primary day open thread. Update!

This will be my last primary day open thread and thank Odin for that.

Today's offering will be, in the order that their polls close,  New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and finally California.,

New Jersey's polls should be closing right now.

The polls in North Dakota, South Dakota, and New Mexico close in about an hour.

Montana is next in about two hours.

And finally the big Kahuna California will close at about 7:00 PM AK time.

At this point there is of course no real suspense as Hillary is already the presumptive nominee, but it will still be interesting to see how certain states vote and if Sanders is actually able to steal California away from Clinton.

As always I will update this post as polls close and information is available.

Update: Well this doesn't bode well.

Asked by @LesterHoltNBC if his campaign ends tonight, Sanders says he'll keep trying to turn super delegates pic.twitter.com/zf6XLJbpR3

— Sabrina Siddiqui (@SabrinaSiddiqui) June 7, 2016

At some point you are just embarrassing yourself.

Update 2: Donald Trump is speaking right now and reaching out to Bernie Sanders supporters who were victimized by a "rigged system."

Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders supporters: "We welcome you with open arms" https://t.co/oZz0jUmo8i #PrimaryDay https://t.co/HeiM2uj1D1

— CNN (@CNN) June 8, 2016

I bet he really thinks he can get some of them to come over to the dark side too.

And who knows, maybe he's right.

Update 3: Hillary just won New Jersey. Well that's one down.

Update 4: Sanders wins North Dakota. (It is the last caucus state.)

Update 5: In the speech she is giving right now Hillary Clinton just referred to herself as the first female presidential nominee in history.

Oh it is on now!

Update 6: New Mexico has been called for Hillary now as well.

Update 7: Hillary has now won South Dakota.

Update 8:

Speaking is hard for me. But come January, I want to say these two words: "Madam President." #ImWithHer

— Gabrielle Giffords (@GabbyGiffords) June 8, 2016

By the way Hillary is leading in California.

Update 9: Sanders has won Montana with a whole 21 delegates up for grabs.

Police arrest man planning to dognap President Obama's dog Bo.

Courtesy of NBC News:

A North Dakota man was arrested after Washington, D.C., police investigated him on a tip that he traveled to the nation's capital to abduct Bo, one of the Obamas' two dogs, authorities said. 

Scott Stockert was set to appear in D.C. Superior Court on Friday on firearms charges for Wednesday's incident at a Hampton Inn near the Washington Convention Center. 

An officer responding to a tip from the Secret Service tracked down Stockert at the downtown D.C. hotel. He admitted that he had a shotgun and a rifle in his pickup truck, both unloaded, along with ammunition for the weapons, according to a police report. 

It's illegal to possess unregistered firearms in D.C. 

The report said police also found a machete and a billy club.

A machete? Just WTF was this asshole planning to do to this innocent animal?

Look angry political rhetoric, nasty tweets, and unfounded allegations against the First Family are one thing, but people need to leave the pets out of it.

As it turns out this Scott Strockert fellow, believes he is the illegitimate son of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, or Jesus Christ depending on which day of the week it is, so clearly he is not playing with a full deck.

Of course that did not keep him from getting his hands on firearms, and a fucking machete, now did it?

North Dakota father tries to get principal fired after a picture of his son holding his metal penis extender is rejected for the yearbook.

Courtesy of Star Tribune:

The father of a gun-toting North Dakota student is calling for a school principal to be fired after the student’s senior photo was banned from publication in the yearbook. 

In the photo, Josh Renville, a senior at Fargo North High school, is pictured holding “his favorite” rifle and wearing a shirt emblazoned with the stars and stripes. 

His father, Charlie, who called for the firing in a Tuesday post on Facebook, wrote that the image was rejected because “in their words, it promotes violence and breaks federal and state law.” He goes on to question how it is any different than pictures of soldiers during war or images of students who participate in trap or skeet teams. 

The Renvilles submitted the photo for the school yearbook, but it was rejected by the high school.

You know pictures of the military are not typically submitted for a student's yearbook photo, and skeet shooters are actually participating in a school sponsored activity.

The photo of this kid looks like exactly the kind of thing that would cause the school to lockdown and for the SWAT team to be called out.

Nobody is attacking this kid's second amendment right to own a gun. They just don't want to traumatize the rest of the school by including his douchebag picture in the yearbook.

And by the way after seeing this picture I think the school should start patting this kid down before letting his Timothy McVeigh looking ass back in the building.

But that's just me.

North Dakota lawmaker who voted against legal protections for gays, gets outed as hypocrite after it's revealed he sent another man a picture of his penis.

Randy won't be Boehning anybody for awhile.

Courtesy of Inforum:  

North Dakota lawmaker who sent an explicit photo of himself to another man says the exchange being made public is retaliation for a recent vote against expanding gay rights. 

Rep. Randy Boehning, a 52-year-old Republican legislator from Fargo, says a Capitol employee told him a fellow lawmaker vowed to out him as gay if he continued to vote against bills granting gays legal protections against discrimination. 

Boehning refused to identify at this point who he believes is behind the purported political payback for his vote against Senate Bill 2279, the third such bill defeated in the past six years by North Dakota legislators. 

The exchange came to light when Dustin Smith, a 21-year-old Bismarck man with no known connections to the Capitol, contacted The Forum earlier this month, saying he recognized Boehning from a gay dating smartphone app called Grindr. Chatting under the user name Top Man!, Boehning sent Smith sexually suggestive messages and, in the early morning hours of March 12, an unsolicited photo of his penis, according to exchanges reviewed by The Forum. 

"How can you discriminate against the person you're trying to pick up?" Smith said in a recent interview.

Okay literally this kind of thing happens so often that when somebody comes out as especially anti-gay, my first response is "Yep probably gay."

It may not be fair, but there you have it.

And by the way how much better is it that this guy's name is literally "boning."

I mean that's just the cherry on top in my opinion.

Alaska most corrupt state by population. Gee, no kidding.

Courtesy of KTOO:  

Alaska was No. 1 for corruption-related convictions of federal, state and local public employees and elected officials, averaged over the state’s population. When averaged over the number of public employees per state, Alaska ranked seventh. Convictions were counted from 1976 to 2008, based on data from the U.S. Department of Justice. 

The rankings were just one item the researchers fed into their statistical analyses testing for connections between corruption and state spending. 

Four theories were tested: 

1. The more corruption there is, the bigger the budget; 
2. Corruption skews spending toward capital spending, construction and highways; 
3. Corruption skews spending toward salaries, wages and debt financing; 
4. and Corruption skews state spending away from social sectors, such as education, welfare and health. 

Their analyses backed all four theories. The researchers also presented a statistical model that suggests if Alaska had merely “average” corruption, the state could save more than $900 million a year.

To be fair between 2006 and 2008 we were convicting politicians right and left. (Well Right anyway.) However just because the FBI is not throwing them in jail at the same pace certainly does not mean that the corruption is any less than it was before.

It just means our politicians have become better at hiding their criminal activities.  

Of course in some cases the politicians simply quit their jobs half way through to avoid prosecution, which may skew the number of convictions as well.

The rest in the top five of corrupt states were

2) Mississippi
3) Louisiana
4) North Dakota
5) South Dakota

You know why can't Alaska be number one is something good for a change, instead of number one in things like corruption, rape, and alcoholism?

Federal judge overturns the most restrictive abortion law in the country.

Courtesy of BBC News:

A US federal judge has overthrown a North Dakota law banning abortion after the foetus' heartbeat can be detected, as early as six weeks in some cases. 

District Judge Daniel Hovland found the law "invalid and unconstitutional" on Wednesday. 

The North Dakota abortion law was considered the most restrictive in the nation. 

The state attorney general has not yet announced whether he plans to appeal against the decision. 

"The United States Supreme Court has spoken and has unequivocally said no state may deprive a woman of the choice to terminate her pregnancy at a point prior to viability," Judge Hovland wrote in his ruling.

If this law had been allowed to stand it would have essentially outlawed abortions after only eight weeks. That means that many women would lose the option before they even realized they were pregnant.

It is pretty clear that these attacks on woman's right to choose are going to keep on coming until the anti-abortion crowd can get a court case all the way to the Supreme Court.

I believe they feel that if they can get it to the highest court in the land that the Justices will either dramatically undermine Roe vs Wade, or do away with it all together.

I wish I could have confidence that they are wrong in that assessment.

Alaska rated number five among MOST corrupt states. So proud. Update!

Courtesy of Business Insider:

To get a true sense of the most corrupt state, we need to know how many convictions there have been on a population basis. So we went back to Justice Department data cited by Madigan, to see which states saw the greatest number of convictions per 100,000.

I happen to know that Alaska is VERY corrupt, so for Louisiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Kentucky to beat us is REALLY saying something. Especially considering the fact that we actually had a group of politicians who referred to themselves as the Corrupt Bastards Club.

Did anybody else notice that the top eight out of ten are ALL states with Republican Governors? 

I'm sure that's simply a coincidence. Right?

Update: Oops I stand corrected, apparently Kentucky has a Democrat in the Governor's mansion. My bad. 

Neo-Nazi starts buying up property in attempt to build all white racist utopia in North Dakota. Yeah, like anybody's going to notice in North Dakota.

 Courtesy of Hate Watch:

While the economy in North Dakota has boomed in recent years due to the discovery of oil in the miles of shale beneath the state, business in Leith has been in decline for the better part of a century. So when officials in April 2012 noticed that one man was quickly buying up abandoned properties in what had become close to a ghost town high on the Great Plains, it was strange. 

“I didn’t have a clue who the guy was until he showed up. All I know is he bought that house sight unseen, $5,000 cash, and had no idea what it looked like, where it was, other than he knew the directions to get to Leith,” Leith Mayor Ryan Schock, a farmer who has lived here all his life, told Hatewatch. 

That strange man was Paul Craig Cobb, 61, a bearded neo-Nazi who moved into a ramshackle two-story house without running water, and quickly began buying properties around Leith, population 19. According to county tax records that were first obtained by Hatewatch, Cobb has since purchased more than a dozen lots for a few hundred dollars each, mostly from landowners who live elsewhere in the country. 

Cobb’s endgame is clear. Last year, on the white supremacist online forum Vanguard News Network (VNN), he announced his intentions to build an all-white bastion of racists in North Dakota “post haste.” The grandiose plan ends with white supremacists and neo-Nazis taking over the county government, and he has even said he hopes to rename Leith “Cobbsville.” 

Cobb’s plan in Leith is to build a Pioneer Little Europe –– an idea long favored on the racist right as a way to escape what is seen as a multiculturalist agenda at work in larger and more racially diverse cities. First proposed in a 2001 pamphlet by H. Michael Barrett, the vision is to consolidate white residents in existing cities and towns and create all-white enclaves. Northwestern states including Montana, Idaho, and now North Dakota, have historically been considered appealing places to start because of lack of racial diversity. 

According to the most recent U.S. Census data, 90% of the population of North Dakota is white. That increases to 97% in Grant County, where Cobb has settled. 

Already some of the most active white supremacists and neo-Nazi leaders in the country have come calling.

How cute, he's going to name it after himself.  Why, was "Hitler's Asshole" already taken?

Color me confused, but if an area is already 97% white isn't that ALREADY an "all-white bastion?"

You know its people like this that make me regret my skin color. 

Well at least now we know where to send Obama's atheist ACORN army next.