Worth Knowing, Probably Not Quite Threadworthy 10/16

[SVPete]

Catholic Texas Prof Busts Talarico After Absurd Abortion/Bible Claim in Campaign-Ending Moment

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2026/10/14/catholic-texas-voter-shreds-talarico-after-absurd-abortionbible-claim-during-cnn-town-hall-n2208150

We've written before about how two Democrat Senate nominees are testing the waters to see how far their "progressive Christianity" can take them in red states where traditional Christian values on matters of family and faith can be the difference between a winning and losing campaign.
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The other one is Texas Democrat nominee James Talarico, who, as RedState has extensively documented, has been making wacky, supposedly "biblically based" assertions about political matters for years as a state representative. "When I take on the politicians who are serving themselves and not the people, I’m doing it on biblical grounds," Talarico recently (and falsely) proclaimed.

Abortion, though, is one issue that Talarico has previously (and wrongly) asserted the Bible is "silent" on. The absurd statement has been resoundingly debunked, which we reported here, but Talarico continues to make the claim, as we saw during a CNN town hall Wednesday night, which was held in the Lone Star State.

Watch this clip, where not only does the purported Presbyterian seminarian repeat the lie, but he also tries to convince an orthodox Catholic Texas voter to find common ground with him on contraception. The absolute nerve of this guy:
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Survey says... NOPE. And Ms. Hunt, who is also a distinguished theology professor, busted him over it in what, in a fair and just world, should be the beginning of the end of his campaign:

Pro-abortion advocates have been perroting this 1/4-truth for decades, and it has been refuted just as long. In the narrow literal sense, one will not find in Cruden's, Young's, or Strong's Concordances the word "abortion" (I could check, ). Woo-hoo! As this Catholic theology prof pointed out - a prof, or student, from the "Fundamentalist" Dallas Theological Seminary could answer just as astutely - the Bible speaks clearly about murder and about the nature of unborn children. I'm sure Talarico knows this, but hoped no one present would dare contradict his silly lie.

[SVPete]

Judge Rejects John Brennan's DOJ Records Suit

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/john-brennan-cia-doj/2026/10/15/id/1272923/

A federal judge on Thursday rejected a lawsuit from John Brennan that sought to force the Justice Department to preserve investigative records so that the former CIA director can challenge any eventual criminal case against him as a selective and malicious prosecution.

A lawyer for Brennan conceded during arguments last month that the request for a court order was unusual but said it was necessary given what he called the Justice Department's pattern of vindictiveness in its pursuit of Brennan and its recent track record of erasing or failing to preserve communications and records in other matters.

The lawsuit contends that the records being sought would demonstrate that any prosecution of Brennan, who has been investigated for months by the Trump administration Justice Department but not charged, is the product of a political vendetta to punish one of President Donald Trump's perceived adversaries.

But U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb denied Brennan's request, saying his arguments were too speculative and that the former CIA director had not proven that the Justice Department was failing to preserve records that would be relevant to a future malicious prosecution defense.

Because a DU onlurker might be prepared to snark about "Trump Judges", per her W'pedia page, Jia Cobb was appointed by President Otto Penn.

[SVPete]

Today Show Commissars Interrogate Chicken Sandwich Boss About Gay And Trans Stuff

https://thefederalist.com/2026/10/15/today-show-commissars-interrogate-chicken-sandwich-boss-about-gay-and-trans-stuff/

How can you possibly eat a sandwich until you’re completely certain that it’s a gay sandwich? And your waffle fries, are they cool with transgender identity? Would the person frying your lunch give a 12-year-old a prescription for puberty blockers? I tried to order a Whopper yesterday, but the Burger King cashier wouldn’t affirm her commitment to providing surgical neo-vaginas to adolescents with public funding, so I stormed out in a rage. It’s important to have standards.

This very important topic comes to us from NBC News, which questioned Chick-fil-A CEO Andrew Cathy this week about the premise that “they don’t stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”

It’s a question that isn’t a question, asked in word-shaped things that have no meaning. How would that work? How does a bag of sandwiches “stand with” the entire global class of lesbians, say, for example? Do the chicken sandwiches have to engage in some sort of sexual act, or is there just a ritual statement the chicken patty has to recite?

Cathy said in response that he runs a restaurant and the business is happy to sell sandwiches to anyone who wants to come in and order one. It’s like a shoe store manager saying that he’s happy to sell shoes, or a produce guy offering you a bag of carrots, by which I mean that it’s a HUGE CONTROVERSY. Go read this 70-IQ news story as an example: “Cathy emphasized that customers are welcome, but did not directly state the company’s position on LGBTQ rights.”

A couple of days ago a couple of FB Friends (running community) were so POed about Cathy's response, to the point of dropping F-bombs (might have been thinly cloaked to satisfy FB "standards"). One has a son who identifies as "Trans", so she has family commitment to that social ideology.

Of course, Prog Faithful have been attacking and boycotting CfA since 2012, so successfully in the SF Bay Area that the number of Bay Area CfAs went from 0 (zero) to 20 or more. So that is the context of the Today Show's tendentious "question". Within the context of that prejudice, Prog Faithful would find Cathy's bland response that CfA does not care about customers' (or employees', not mentioned in the article but probably in Cathy's response) infuriating.

Progs want companies to identify and support their causes-du-jour, even to companies self-harm (think Kaep, Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light, Jaguar, and Nike). Cathy dared to respond that cooking and selling food is CfA's business, and CfA is focused on that.

CfA does do charity, at the corporate level and each store. CfA's corporate benefactors are probably public, somewhere on the company website. The owner-operator of each store is given a budget from corporate to support local charities. One such donation in the San Jose-Saratoga area I know of was the store provided dinners to an organization that provides safe overnight parking to unhomed persons living in campers and RVs (e.g. at the parking lots of participating churches). The cost to the store was whatever it was - ingredients and cooking employees' wages - but the people benefitted received a fresh hot meal, and the CfA manager and his wife stayed to socialize, not just dump and run (yeah, I was there). Needless to say, even the local skewspaper, the San Jose Murky Skews would not have given a sentence to this or to other local CfA stores' charitable actions.