De Santis At Gitmo

Click here for an article at WaPo by Michael Kranish, entitled "De Santis's pivotal service at Guantanamo during a violent year," subtitled "'Hey, you can actually force-feed,' Ron DeSantis said he advised, endorsing a practice detainee lawyers described as torture."

Homer Simpson, Mathematician

 Here's a question on Quora:

What is the most obscure reference you noticed in a movie or television show?

There have been millions dotted through every episode of the Simpsons right from the start. One of the things that drew many people in as fans was spotting obscure references that they knew even if most other people missed it - a feeling of ‘that was for me!’

For specifics, I am going to refer to the book ‘The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets’ which explains how many of the writers were maths graduates and so inserted many a maths joke. This was one of the most obvious examples:

Read the solution after the jump:

Darkness And Oppression Behind The Development Of The Bomb

Click here for an excellent article at Wired Magazine by Ngofeen Mputubwele, titled "The Dark History Oppenheimer Didn't Show," subtitled " Coming from the Congo, I knew where the essential ingredient for the atomic bombs was mined, even if everyone else seemed to ignore it."

 It's about the plight of the oppressed Congolese workers who mined the uranium necessary for the development of the bomb, but it's also a short history of the Congo -- and it's not a pretty one.

Presidential Concessions Used To Be The Norm

Click here for a mashup of presidential concession speeches -- and then Trump.

Scary NASA Map

Click here for a truly frighening map, from NASA, of the wildfire situation in British Columbia.

Fortunately, the map is nowhere near an accurate depiction; each individual flame on the map is huge compared to the actual size of the fire represented. If you zoom in, the picture is much less frightening -- but it's still bad. 2023 is a tough fire year for B.C. 

And Kelowna is truly in terrible shape.

Red vs. Blue

This is a response to a question on Quora by William Weir. I haven't checked these, but they seem right, and they're all easy to check. (If you dispute any of these, let me know!)

• Over the last fifty years, every Republican President has seen a recession, while we have had only one recession begin under a Democrat, a short six-month recession under Carter.
• Over the last forty years every Republican President has created a deficit at least double the previous record. Over that same time, every Democratic President (including already Biden) has cut the deficit by half or more.
• The last three Democratic Presidents (including Biden) have all seen unemployment effectively cut in half. The last two Republicans both saw it effectively double.
• Over the last fifty years, despite holding the Presidency for only 22 years compared to Republicans holding it 28, stock market return has been just over 100% under Republicans and just shy of 1,000% under Democrats. Over 42 million jobs have been created under Democrats compared to only 24 million under Republicans. Income growth averaged 2.2% under Democrats compared to 0.6% under Republicans. GDP growth averaged 4.1% under Democrats compared to 2.7% under Republicans
• Going back to Truman, four of the five Presidents who have seen the largest increase in domestic oil production were Democrats (with Trump scoring the number five spot and Obama placing first). Only six Presidents over that time have seen domestic oil production fall, and five of them were Republicans.
• Since 1980, The abortion rate held steady under Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43. It fell under both Clinton and Obama, and under Trump rose for the first time since the 1970’s.
• Since the Nixon Administration, 338 members of Presidential administrations have been indicted on criminal charges. Three of these were in Democratic administrations, 335 were in Republican administrations.
• In the last century, only two Presidents have lost jobs during their administrations, both Republicans (Hoover and Trump)
• Over the last 80 years, five of the six Presidents with the highest job creation were Democrats, with only Reagan making the list. (Current rankings are Clinton, Reagan, Biden, Obama, Johnson, and Carter, with Biden likely to move into second place before the end of his first term.)
• Ten of the eleven safest states in the Union are blue or lean blue with Utah the only red state. Fifteen of the sixteen least safe states are red, with Georgia being the only non-red state in that mix (and until recently we would have considered Georgia a red state). (Scores based on a combination of personal safety, road safety, financial safety, and emergency preparedness.)
• Four of the five states with the highest poverty rate are deep red (New Mexico being the only blue state). Four of the five states with the lowest poverty rates are blue or lean blue, with Utah the only red state.
• The five states with the best education are all blue. Four of the five states with the worst education are deep red, with New Mexico the only blue state.
• Four of the five states with the highest incarceration rates are deep red, with Delaware the only blue state. Four of the five with the lowest incarceration rates are blue or lean blue with North Dakota the only red state.
• The ten states with a the best healthcare are all blue. The five states with the worst healthcare are all red. In fact ten of the bottom eleven are all red with Georgia being the only exception.
• Eight of the ten states who pay the highest Federal income tax per capita are blue. (That’s per capita, so population isn’t a factor.) Eight of the ten states who rely most on Federal funding are red.
• The five states with the highest covid death rates were all red. Three of the five with the lowest death rates are blue with Alaska and Utah the only exception.

 

Bob Rankin Article -- Add A Second LIne To Your Phone

Click here for a Bob Rankin article entitled "[CLEVER] Add a Second Line to Your Smartphone."

Florida's Road To Autocracy Under Ron DeSantis

Click here for an article in Mother Jones entitled "Ron DeSantis Is All In -- on Creating an American Autocracy," by Pema Levi. The subtitle is "His plan to outflank Trump would scale up the calculated system of repression he designed in Florida."

It's a long article. It details the first time that DeSantis fired a democratically elected county prosecutor, Andrew Warren (he's fired another one recently).  

DeSantis has proven his “willingness to routinely use the machinery of the state to punish rivals,” explains Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky. “That’s authoritarianism at its core. That’s what authoritarians do.”

Levi says: 

To stifle dissent, in 2021 DeSantis signed a law that would ramp up penalties for rioting but that civil rights groups warned would ensnare peaceful protesters; this spring he pushed legislation to unleash speech-­chilling lawsuits against news outlets.

It tells how DeSantis won a squeaker of an election in 2018 -- winning by 32,000 votes out of over 8,000,000 votes cast -- "by sucking up to Trump on Fox News and securing his primary endorsement."

DeSantis has taken steps to capture State agencies:

One way DeSantis has created space to operate is by hollowing out state government, filling key posts with donors and loyalists—the academic term is “autocratic capture”—perhaps most notably on the state Board of Medicine, which has supported his agenda to put new limits on gender-affirming care. An analysis by the Democratic super-PAC American Bridge 21st Century found that over his first term, DeSantis installed 75 percent more donors in senior government roles than his predecessor, Republican Rick Scott, did in the same span. Such power grabs are “a cornerstone of authoritarianism,” explains Ben-Ghiat, and “create a climate where you can more efficiently transform everything.”

There's a lot here -- it's a long article -- but it's worth reading at a time when Florida's democracy is being lost as the state slides into autocracy.

Update On The Corruption Of Clarence Thomas

Click here for an article listing a bunch of the lavish gifts of travel, private aircraft, and luxury resorts which are the life of Clarence Thomas. The article is at ProPublica, titled  "Clarence Thomas' 38 Vacations: The Other Billionaires Who Have Treated the Supreme Court Justice to Luxury Travel, by Brett Murphy and Alex Mierieski.

Like clockwork, Thomas’ leisure activities have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence. Their gifts include:

At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

Billionaires Tony Novelly, Wayne Huizenga, David Sokol,  and Harlan Crow are all right-wing Republicans, and all met Thomas (surprise, surprise!) after his appointment to the Supreme Court.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous! There are detailed descriptions of the opulence Thomas's Supreme Court position has brought him. (Justice Elena Kagan turned down an offered gift of bagels and lox from old high school friends at a reunion because of the appearance of possible impropriety -- what a sucker!)

"The job (on SCOTUS) is not worth doing for what they pay," says Clarence Thomas

Click here for an article at MSNBC.com, by James Downie, entitled "Enough is enough. Clarence Thomas must resign -- or be impeached." 

A quote from the article: 

“The job is not worth doing for what they pay,” Clarence Thomas said in a 2001 speech. “But it is worth doing for the principle.” (The link is to another article at The Washington Post detailing a litany of offenses by Thomas over the years.)

The article is headed with a picture of far-right activist Ginni Thomas. After Trump lost the election on November 3, 2020, this is the text of an email message she sent to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows two days later, on November 5:

"Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc.) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming daya, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition."
 

"Trump's Introduction Of Violence, The Threat Of Violence, And Targeted Harassment Into The Dynamics Of Our Political System"

 Great short article from The Atlantic today focuses on the remarkable jury instructions from Judge Lewis Kaplan in the Trump/Jean Carroll civil litigation: "The Judge Who Understood How Trump Operates."

The judge’s advice sounded less like a legal requirement than like the words of a parent to an older teenager, imparted without any ability to enforce. Kaplan apparently did not give a specific reason for his statement. But he didn’t need to. Everyone knows how things can unfold for people who challenge Trump, and jurors who find against him in court are highly vulnerable to whatever he might do.

Trump’s political legacy is often measured by his policy impact: restrictions on immigration, lower taxes for the rich, conservative Supreme Court justices who deliver on a stridently right-wing agenda. Those changes are significant, but are also largely answerable through the same political process, voting, that made Trump only a one-term president.

Trump’s real, enduring legacy is his successful introduction of violence, the threat of violence, and targeted harassment into the dynamics of our political system, as if they were all just a natural extension of democratic disagreement.

The January 6 insurrection is the most obvious example. Regardless of whether he directed the exact violence on Capitol Hill that day—which delayed, and came dangerously close to denying, the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president—Trump welcomed it. For weeks before, he encouraged a legal strategy of fake electors and promoted false allegations of voter fraud. His plans to remain in office could best be executed if Congress were hindered in performing its constitutional duty.

Violence was part of the scheme, because it could buy him time to interrupt the proceedings, sow confusion, and perhaps intimidate Trump's noncompliant vice president, Mike Pence, into fleeing the Capitol.

But the specter of violence was hardly new. From a presidential-campaign announcement that portrayed the U.S. as a victim of Mexican aggression, to a dark inauguration speech that described “American carnage,” to his use of social media to direct outrage toward elected officials and reporters who dared to get in his way, Trump understood how to whip some of his followers into a frenzy.

Trump may seem irrational at times, but he is also a sophisticated student of incitement. His verbal technique promotes violence while allowing him plausible deniability.

---

“Be there, will be wild!” he said on Twitter in the run-up to the January 6 riot. His language is intended to make its targets, including not only elected officials and judges but often just civil servants or average citizens, feel uncomfortable, defensive, vulnerable.

Concerns for jurors’ safety are commonplace in criminal trials involving mob figures. Kaplan was presiding over a civil trial. Yet even before the verdict, Trump was using his media platform, Truth Social, to attack the proceedings as a witch hunt. “The greatest witch hunt of all time,” he declared after the verdict. Hunt is an evocative term; it suggests that you are either predator or prey.

Without overtly saying so, the judge was telling the jurors in the civil case: Don’t be prey. To allow yourself to be identified might gain you 15 minutes of fame, but the downside could be a whole lot worse.

(Ironically, Kaplan was speaking in easily deciphered code, much as Trump does.)

Kaplan surely knows that the Manhattan judge who will oversee a criminal trial against Trump has faced threats. Trump has already promised to appeal Carroll’s victory, so perhaps Kaplan was speaking obliquely to avoid some future challenge to his objectivity. But Kaplan wasn’t being paranoid; he was acting pragmatically and cautiously, and he asked the same of the jurors.

“If you’re one who elects to speak to others and to identify yourselves to others, I direct you not to identify anyone else who sat on this jury,” Kaplan said from the bench. ”Each of you owes that to the other, whatever you decided for yourself.”

The jurors have one more public duty: They have a continuing responsibility to protect others and, by extension, the sanctity of a jury trial protected by our Constitution. Because that, like many other processes that enshrine our democracy, is under threat.

Ari's Outrage

Ari Fleischer, W's press secretary, says on Fox News that Republicans should retaliate for what they see as unjustified persecution of Donald Trump: 

Here's what I hope happens, Sean. I hope conservative prosecutors in rural areas of America indict Bill Clinton, indict Hillary Clinton, indict Hunter Biden.

He doesn't elaborate as to just what terrible crimes they should be indicted for. Who cares? Just indict them!

"Paid What They're Worth"? I Don't Think So.

This is a video (4 minutes, 24 seconds) attached to a tweet (or is that an X?) by Robert Reich, Clinton's Secretary of Labor. I like this quote, near the end, about inherited wealth:

The biggest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history will occur over the next 25 years, as the richest 1.5% of Americans hand down some $36 TRILLION to their children and grandchildren. This doesn't make those heirs superior: It makes them lucky.

The idea that everyone is "paid what they're worth" has proven to be a cruelly effective way to put the blame on workers for not getting ahead — while giving the rich and powerful cover to rig the game for their own benefit.

Don't buy it. pic.twitter.com/kckQuOjZ2w https://t.co/yN0omnYZ6p

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) July 25, 2023

Frightening

Frank Luntz, Republican pollster: "This is the most alarming political ad I've seen this year."

Here’s a reaction, Frank. This is horrific, a set of despicable lies that will incite violence. What Russians produced it? And who helped them from inside this country? https://t.co/SWMtJjVdNI

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) July 25, 2023

Politics Girl - "Amazingly Inspirational Woman"

 

Amazingly inspirational woman who is reminding us to do better https://t.co/rhjNYULe5X

— Teresa Szczepaniak (@Teresa_LS) July 23, 2023

Ocoee Massacre (Orlando, FL), 1920

Click here for the Wikipedia article on "Ocoee massacre."

I had never heard of it until today. I caught a snippet of a TV news clip a couple of days ago that mentioned another massacre similar to the Tulsa massacre of 1921 (Black Wall Street) -- which I had never heard of until about six months ago. 

The Ocoee massacre was a mass racial violence event that saw a white mob attack numerous African-American residents in the northern parts of, Ocoee, Florida [a suburb of Orlando]. The massacre took place on November 2, 1920, the day of the U.S. presidential electiion. 

By most estimates, a total of 30–35 black people were killed in the violence. Most African American-owned buildings and residences in northern Ocoee were burned to the ground. Other African Americans living in southern Ocoee were later killed or driven out of town by the threat of further violence being used against them. Thus, Ocoee essentially became an all-white or "sundown" town. The massacre has been described as the "single bloodiest day in modern American political history".

The attack was intended to prevent black citizens from voting. Black people had essentially been disenfranchised in Florida since the beginning of the 20th century. In Ocoee and across the state, various black organizations had been conducting voter registration drives for a year.

In November 1920, Mose Norman, a prosperous African-American farmer, tried to vote but was turned away twice on Election Day. Norman was among those working on the voter drive. A white mob surrounded the home of Julius "July" Perry, where Norman was thought to have taken refuge. After Perry drove away the white mob with gunshots, killing two men and wounding one who tried to break into his house, the mob called for reinforcements from Orlando and Orange County. The mob laid waste to the African-American community in northern Ocoee and eventually killed Perry. They took his body to Orlando and hanged him from a lightpost to intimidate other black people. Norman escaped, never to be found. Hundreds of other African Americans fled the town, leaving behind their homes and possessions.

"Most of the people living in Ocoee don't even know that this happened there", said Pamela Schwartz, chief curator of the Orange County Regional History Center, which sponsored an exhibit on it. For almost a century, many descendants of survivors were not aware of the massacre that occurred in their hometown.

Then there's the incident of National Guard troops opening fire on students demonstrating on a university campus in 1968 -- 3 killed, 28 injured. 

Did you just assume I was referring to Kent State? No, that was 4 killed, 9 injured, and it happened in 1970. Surely the whole world knows about Kent State, when the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating, an incident immortalized in this picture:

 

And in Neil Young's song, Ohio:

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio

Tulsa, Ocoee, Orangeburg -- these things aren't well publicized, are they? I wonder why that is?

Republican Values

I originally said this as a joke, but on reflection, I came to believe it's true:

The core of Republican economic policy is this: The poor have too much money and the rich have too little.

It's Robin Hood in reverse.

Here's Jon Stewart with something along the same lines:

Who else thinks Jon Stewart would be an outstanding Senator? Drop a 🩵 and RT if you agree! pic.twitter.com/GLmtV00dEb

— Rob Bon Vivant🌊 (@77SunnyAndClear) July 22, 2023

And here's the body of a tweet later the same day from Robert Reich:

Why is it that when progressive policies that help the bottom 90 percent are proposed, the question always seems to be, "How will you pay for it?" But when the top 1 percent ask for bailouts, tax cuts, and subsidies, the question always seems to be, "How much do you need?"

Quora Question Answered: The Fall Of The GOP

 This is a question posed on Quora:

How do you explain the high proportion of Republicans that are utterly devoid ethics, morals, decency and lack perceptible dignity and integrity? They seem to have an abundance of liars and fraudsters. E.g., Lindsey Graham asking for dead bodies!

 And here's the answer:

The rot started a long time ago. This didn’t start with Fatso45. Not at all.

In fact, Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Republican who once ran for president, predicted what we are seeing now

[1]

:

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”

It started back in 1964, after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and the parties divided along racial politics. One side endeavored to expand rights for people, the other side, stuck in tradition, did not. And the people who were against change like women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights, and were for the Vietnam war led a campaign against those who wanted that change.

Damn. He really nailed it, didn’t he?

That’s when we started to see all the talk about people on the left being communists, immoral, unAmerican, etc. That’s when the right started all the talk about feminism being immoral as women started coming into the workforce and Roe became the law of the land, allowing women to exercise control over their reproductive systems and sex lives by being able to obtain abortions legally for the first time along with legal and widely available birth control. When we saw all the talk about blacks being criminals and taking jobs from whites with the advent of affirmative action. When nonwhite immigrants were accused of taking jobs from the white man or after 9/11, being terrorists. When we saw war protesters, many of whom were young draft age white men who refused to go to war, left the country to avoid it, protested it, dressed weird, listened to rock and roll, and stopped going to church/taking up nonChristian beliefs like Buddhism and Hari Khrisna as immoral and anti-American. But the Republican party had enough people running the party and government who were housebroken enough to contain the worst actors to the fringes of the party and to moderate the opposition to the forces of change.

But the fringe wasn’t going to stay there. Oh, no. Not when you think your cause is righteous. and destruction is imminent if you lose.

It took off with right wing radio in the 80s and 90s, most notably by Rush Limbaugh. They started spewing caustic, racist, sexist talk designed to gin up the working class white population, mostly men. Together with people like Newt Gingrich in the House, the right started to talk about their opponents on the left as enemies of America. Evangelical Christians also saw these changes as a moral threat to America’s soul as well, particularly the changes to women’s rights, increasing acceptance of sex outside of marriage, and gay rights, and joined hands with the fringe element to become a key voting bloc called the “Moral Majority”. The Moral Majority gave people like Gingrich a moral shield to what he was doing—when Clinton was impeached by the House he led, Gingrich’s affair with his now wife, Callista, that was going on at the same time was essentially ignored by that same group of Christians who condemned Clinton for his affair. All Gingrich had to do was say he was a practicing Catholic, quote some Bible to them, and that was all those Christians needed to hear—all was forgiven as long as he could take out the hated Clinton and stop the Democratic agenda.

The left was painted by people like Limbaugh as well as the Moral Majority and their representatives in Congress as being a mortal threat to America and that they had to be stopped before judgement rained down on this country. Limbaugh in particular became the poster boy for the right, even acting as a kingmaker in political circles—if you pissed him off, you literally could lose your political career, and if you wanted one, you have to sound just like him and if you could, be a regular guest on his show. Sound familiar?

Then Fox News added to the chorus being sung by the right regarding the left being anti America and pushed the narrative that the mainstream media was being run by leftists who were out to get “traditional America” and could not be trusted. With Fox pushing the right wing narrative against women’s rights, minority rights, and more and more, LGBTQ rights, and the growing belief among the conservative base that all other media could not be trusted, Fox became the go-to network for the right, with all of the stars in the right wing political universe making appearances on their shows. Other right wing talk shows sprung up as well to reinforce/establish the right wing media universe and world view.

All of this talk rested increasingly on twisting the truth and reducing the arguments to simplistic, belligerent “us vs. them” scaremongering talk and bumper sticker policy that was easy for the Republican base to understand and for politicians to campaign with. And as time went on and the right wing media became more entrenched and widespread, twisting the truth evolved into outright lies about the Democrats and their agendas and beliefs as well as war talk. And that talk angered and frightened a greater proportion of the mostly white, rural, churchgoing/traditional values crowd who lapped it all up. Those hosts were speaking to everything they believed, and they started voting for people who were willing to reinforce their beliefs about a new America that was out to get them—an America that was made up of nonwhite, nonChristian/atheist, and women who didn’t want to marry young (or at all), birth baby after baby and stay at home (and thanks to Roe, they didn’t have to anymore). An America that if taken over by Democrats, would kill them and drive America to the very gates of hell if we, the righteous, don’t stop them.

Well, when you start talking about your opponents as being a threat to you and your country, and you have leaders who twist the truth or outright lie about them, and you are frightened that your country will be harshly judged by God if you don’t get things back the way they were before 1964, you start getting the mindset that it is “all hands on deck”—whatever it is you have to do to stop your country going down the drain, you do. Whoever is on your side is your friend, and we aren’t going to care what kind of person you really are because you believe like I do. And if the people leading you into battle are ginning you up on lies and twisted versions of the truth and a dark view of America under your opponent’s rule, and you therefore support them because you think they are the last wall between you and destruction, well, you are already on the road to hell. You’re not going to really care too much about what those people who are leading you are really doing and saying as long as they are fighting by your side for your very soul.

But up until the advent of the Tea Party in the late 2000s, the Republican establishment and apparatus were still able to keep the housebroken members in the top offices and to put a lid on the crazy. People like Mitt Romney, John Boehner, John McCain, George H. W. Bush were still in control at the highest levels of government, and they tamed/tamped down/ostracized a lot of the more feral members. But the Tea Party managed to send a significant number of these feral Congressional members to the House to the point where they made up a major part of the Republican caucus and could no longer be stuffed in a box. They made Speaker Boehner’s life hell, hell to the point where he and Paul Ryan, his successor, just couldn’t govern their caucus. Both Boehner and Ryan eventually ended up resigning as Speaker and left politics altogether. In all likelihood they knew that what they were seeing was the likely future of their party, and they refused to continue to deal with it.

The firewall just couldn’t hold for much longer. With each election the base was becoming more and more radical, more and more wanting to push back against the changes they saw, ginned up by all the forces I’ve talked about above. And eventually the dam broke—with John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s losses to Barack Obama, a black man with a funny name running the country, the right wing sphere went into overdrive, casting Obama as a Muslim and not as American as they were because he had a Kenyan father and blaming McCain’s and Romney’s losses on them not being real Republicans—a RINO.

After that loss in 2012, it was on. The base, after eight years of Obama, and getting drunk on right wing lies, doomsday talk, and racist talk about Obama from Fox, right wing media, Republican politicians, and conservative Christian leaders, did not want any more McCains or Romneys—they wanted fighters, brawlers.

Enter Fatso45.

He was as crude and direct spoken as they were. He talked in simplistic language and made threats to people. He called Democrats and other establishment Republicans names and he said all the stuff they were thinking about women, immigrants, minorities and gay people. He sucked up to the Christian right with his talk about appointing judges. And he was a rich man, a household name, with a pretty wife so he must know what he is talking about. He sounded like Rush Limbaugh, someone they had long supported and loved. The fact that he was a crooked businessman, had been married three times and had cheated on all of his wives didn’t matter.

By the time Fatso came on board, the base was ready to take whoever would beat back “the left”. And you know the rest—it’s been turtles all the way down since. The base looked the other way or cheered outright when Fatso started crapping like a diarrhetic Christmas goose all over the law and the Constitution and what most people would consider decent behavior—all the stuff they would have lynched Obama for had he done even a tenth of what Fatso did.

Since the housebroken people have now largely been drummed out of visible politics on the Republican side there are no more adults in the party to check this stuff. Those that used to be considered traditional Republicans like Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell, and Mitt Romney are keeping quiet—they don’t want to lose their seats or invite threats or harassment from the base like Liz Cheney did. It’s a feral, feces throwing, free for all over there with the radical members holding people like Kevin McCarthy hostage—McCarthy is now doing the two step with ferals like Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Geatz, Paul Gosar, and others in order to become Speaker. Anyone who wants to run for office, even a clown like Santos who literally lied his way into office and will be seated as a Congressional member while McCarthy, the putative Speaker, looks the other way has a place in today’s Republican party.

It’s sad that there is nobody in the Republican world that is just willing to just say, “STOP!”. The Republican congressional leaders are leaving it largely to non-Republicans to do a job they should be doing—exposing this rot and cleaning it up. But not only are these leaders refusing to do that, they condemn anyone, Democrats or Republicans who aren’t down with Fatso and his crowd who try to insert some saneness and standards back into the equation.

But as I’ve shown, it’s not like we didn’t see this coming. Our buddy who we started this off with, Goldwater in the 60s saw it coming. It just took a while. Would that the Republican party heeded his words:

“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. ”

So, the upshot is, the TLDR is,

For at least 60 years, the Republican party was primed to accept any soldier they could find who would advance their goals: to wipe out the Democrat/progressive portion of the country and restore America to what it was pre-1964 when white, straight, Christian men had all power in all corners of American life and everyone else had to shut up and salute. When you are at war, you take any body you can, and that is what the Republican party is down to now: If you are on our side and will help us fight, we don’t care what you are and when you do something you shouldn’t do or you are outright criminal, we are going to defend you or just look the other way if we can’t defend you because we need you for battle.

Simple Photo Editor

I got this from Bob Rankin: 

Click here for Pixlr, a free photo editor. 

Anxiety!

I can open this, but maybe it's because I have an Instagram account; I hope others can too.

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