Category Archives: current events

“A war for the minds of our children”

One candidate in the recent Georgia Republican gubernatorial debate steered hard right in her arguments to the Christian voters of Georgia. Charles M. Blow in the NY Times recounts her moral stand for the white children of Georgia:

Another candidate, Kandiss Taylor, an educator herself, went further still. “We not only have C.R.T. and S.E.L. and comprehensive sex education teaching transgender perversion to our children,” she said, referring to critical race theory and social-emotional learning, “we also have anti-white racism that has not been addressed by the current administration. It has taken over our schools, and it’s ruining the students. It’s ruining the environment.”

S.E.L. is a teaching technique that, research suggests, can boost academic performance. But it is a practice that conservatives view with suspicion, thinking it could abet lessons about race and gender. God forbid children should become more emotionally intelligent. Their empathy might grow, and with it a better understanding of others. In that way, I can understand why it would unnerve oppressors.

In her closing comments, Taylor ratcheted up her inflammatory language: “We’re going to ensure that boys aren’t in our girls’ bathrooms and girls aren’t in our boys’ bathrooms, and people aren’t being raped. And we’re going to get rid of kindergarten teachers — men with beards and lipstick and high heels — teaching our children. We’re going to get back to being moral in Georgia.”

As a white woman, and mother of three, Taylor is in the demographic that Republicans are trying to attract. But she is also a near-perfect encapsulation of the party’s fringe.

During the debate, she chastised Kemp for not contesting the 2020 results in Georgia, saying: “Donald Trump won. He won. We have a fraudulent pedophile in the White House because Governor Kemp failed.” The idea that Satan-worshiping pedophiles are running the country is a central belief of QAnon.

The day after the debate, Taylor tweeted a video with a caption that read in part: “I am the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal. Elect me governor of Georgia, and I will bring the Satanic Regime to its knees ….”

As ominous music plays in the background, she shifts from satanic cabals to human sacrifice, saying: “Back in biblical times, human sacrifice was a form of demonic worship. We’re still doing it, in present day, by killing our unborn. It’s the same demons. It’s the same sacrifice. It’s the same sin. It’s just a different time.”

Charles M. Blow “A War for the Minds of our Children”

A short take on Trump’s riot

In June 2020, during ongoing multiracial protests across the country after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, in a show of strongman strength, Trump used force to break up a peaceful protest in Lafayette Square Park. Bill Barr dismissed claims of racism and ordered federal anti-riot forces, including troops from the Bureau of Prisons, to unleash force to disperse a peaceful, crowd of protesters lawfully assembled, seeking a redress of grievances. Arrests were made, though in the end no charges were brought against any protesters.

Afterwards Barr lied repeatedly about the need for and the extent of the force used, denying tear gas was deployed, claiming angrily that pepper spray was not a chemical irritant and manfully refraining from using the n-word in expressing his contempt for millions of idiot Americans pretending there is widespread racism at law in the USA.

Trump had been angry, and no doubt felt humiliated, because the day before, after being rushed to an underground bunker during a night of protest, the lying Press traitorously reported his dash to the bunker. Made him look like a coward, the worst thibg for a strongman to be. This was the night  before he unleashed armored riot troops, many on horseback, to disperse a peaceful protest by his critics.

The day his rush to the bunker was reported, he arranged a conference call with Republican governors. Lambasting them for looking like pussies, he told them that they had to show strength, dominate the streets, that they couldn’t let these black sons of bitches and woke trans anti-fascists win.

Sometime after that photo op in front of the church, Trump had a non scalable fence/wall put up around the White House for his protection from violent mobs of anti-fascists (unAmerican scum!) and BLM terrorist sons of bitches. This barrier protecting Trump from the people was in place on November 3rd 2020, Election Day, and can be seen behind him two months later at his rally at the Ellipse when he stood behind bulletproof glass and exhorted a crowd to go down to the Capitol and strengthen the spines of his vacilating party members to do what must be done to reverse the treacherously stolen election — an election, quite frankly, stolen by Blacks and their pathetic, sick, politically correct enablers, in both parties.

Now, in a way you have to tip yer yarmulke to the bloated orange Hitler admirer, his hunch has so far proved right.

Brazen it out, haters love an angry lie, plus, if your followers are angry enough they will dismiss any mountain of evidence they don’t like. Prosecute your enemies and pardon your friends, Barr was with him every step of the way, before Barr treacherously betrayed him in the days before the permt- free march and his “will be wild” riot jumped off.

Soon enough, after initially condemning his insane acts on January 6th, all of his eager lackeys were once again lined up behind him, to kiss the rings (on his crusty colon) and the Republican party position became that the riot was not a riot at all but “legitimate political discourse”.

The injured Capitol police? “Fuck those traitor cops who wouldn’t let my people into my house to do my urgent business...”

Then of course in stark contrast to the June 2020 photo op, the Trump rioters were allowed to peacefully disperse after ransacking the Capitol building, halting the certification of the duly elected president’s victory, threatening the lives of elected officials and putting dozens of police in the hospital. And, of course, also defecating in the halls of the people’s house, as you do when engaged in legitimate political discourse.

You know just like those Black Lives Matter and antifa terrorist sons of bitches did a million times, and nobody said anything about them!!!! And what about fucking Hunter Biden!

Fortunately for all these criminal conspirators and conspiracy theorists, elected and unelected, the Democratic Party leaders are ultimately beholden to the same large, dark money donors who put every president in the White House. Democracy was an experiment anyway, and who can prove actual intent, ever? Not to mention the First Amendment right to scream fire in a crowded theater, which is second only to the Second Amendment right to take a gun anywhere and shoot anybody you’re afraid of!

USA! USA!!!

Democracy tyrannizes wealthy elites

Here’s a great piece from Dana Milbank in today’s Washington Bezos, called “Supreme Court’s hacks reward Republicans’ betrayal of democracy.”

Worse, this McConnell-packed Roberts court has returned the favor by stacking the deck in favor of minority rule by Republicans. It has blessed partisan gerrymandering, giving Republicans representation in the House disproportionate to their share of the electorate. It has allowed elections to be decided by billionaires and corporations spending unlimited sums of untraceable money. It has kneecapped labor unions, co-signed voter-suppression schemes by Republican-run states and eviscerated the civil rights era Voting Rights Act, to disastrous effect for Black and brown voters.

Now comes this breathtaking assault on the rights of women, a strongly Democratic constituency, eliminating the right tens of millions have firmly relied upon for half a century to control their own bodies.
The five justices have aligned themselves with the 16 percent of Americans who, according to the latest Post-ABC News poll believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and against the 79 percent who believe it should be legal in at least some circumstances. Eighty-two percent of Americans believe abortion should be allowed if a woman’s life is endangered, 79 percent in cases of rape or incest and 67 percent if the child would be born with a life-threatening illness.

https://wapo.st/3sjTCrn

Nice analysis of Alito’s grand slam

“Deeply rooted in this country’s history and traditions” is the standard seething reactionary Samuel Alito sets for what is permissible when the Supreme Court enumerates an unenumerated constitutional right of citizenship. Like a citizen’s unenumerated right not to be forcibly sterilized, for example, enumerated in 1942 by the Supreme Court.

He gets legal support for the argument that abortion was always illegal in this country, and thus deeply rooted, from an English aristocrat, the guy who codified procedures for witch trials in the 17th century, making it easier to execute the female minions of Satan. He cites this English Lord, Sir Matthew Hale, over and over as an unimpeachable legal authority on abortion, unimpeachable as the twice impeached Putin ally who appointed a supermajority from Alito’s judicial fraternity to decide what is deeply rooted in the history and traditions of this country (lynchings and pogroms are two that spring to mind). Hale denounced the Satanic evils of abortion in the 1640s, which is more than good enough legal authority for the Federalist Society Six.

Here’s an excellent discussion of the drive to “repeal the twentieth century” now in full, ugly swing, as a mob of top GOP officials calls for the blood of a partisan leaker of unknown allegiance, for, as many have noted, violating the sacred privacy of the Supreme Court. Talk about your fucking unenumerated rights…

Alito sez

Samuel Alito, joined by four fellow extremists from the Federalist Society, states in his draft opinion that abortion was never mentioned in the Constitution, and therefore, under Originalism, may not be added as an unenumerated privacy right by activist federal judges flexing their judicial muscle, beyond appeal, beyond ethics.

Note that slavery is not mentioned in the Constitution either, except obliquely as “such persons as the states shall see fit to admit” and “three fifths of all other persons”. Nonetheless slavery was vigorously enforced at law under perfectly constitutional federal statutes like the Fugitive Slave Acts and all that followed, up to the present day.

Alito’s probably not too happy about the outcome of the Civil War and all those messy amendments giving rights to people who never had them and more powers to the federal union than the Founding Fathers, in their almost divine wisdom, provided for. His ilk believe that all unenumerated rights, like the right to vote in federal elections, are best left up to the independent state legislatures, under the poison pill doctrine set out as dicta in Bush v. Gore…

Nothing activist about these five activist fucks, though. Ask Ginni Thomas.

From fucking Alito’s draft decision

The right not to undergo forced sterilization, we learn from Alito’s draft, was not recognized as a constitutional right until 1942, though it is an unenumerated right seemingly so fundamental that one would not think it needed to be enumerated.    Alito focused on constitutional rights “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and traditions” such as, one imagines, the presumption that police killing of unarmed citizens is justified, unless that citizen is wealthy, and white, or that the Second Amendment may not be seen as a license to regulate a “well-regulated militia”, or five unelected lifetime appointees, from the same activist judicial fraternity, overruling (by a single vote) enforcement of a law protecting the right to vote that passed the Senate 98-0, because, you know, such things are deeply rooted in this nation’s history and traditions.  

It’s the quietly seething motherfuckers, like Alito, Gorsuch and the Black Klansman, that you have to watch out for. Meanwhile, the party of the five unappealable justices calls for a swift investigation of, and harsh punishment for, whatever unprincipled traitor leaked this secret document. As they obstruct “partisan” “illegitimate” investigation of a riot that stopped all business at the Capitol related to the peaceful transfer of power, the cornerstone of our democracy, because, you know — mobs of angry Blacks and women! Tax and spend! Queers! Commies!

Enough to make you angry enough to vote? Come on, now.

see also

Fair vs. Corrupt

Every child believes deeply in fairness, until the world teaches it otherwise, the kid begins picking a side in every fight and fairness becomes secondary to her team prevailing. Unfairness is universally painful, being treated unfairly hurts everybody it happens to. We all like to think we’re fair, it is a synonym for reasonable, but the fact is that adults can be fair or unfair, recognize the importance of rules to ensure fairness or defy any norm that allows any outcome they don’t want.

A reasonable person listens to a story with an open mind (to the extent possible) and assesses it as likely or unlikely based on experience and knowledge. The purely transactional listener evaluates a story based solely on how well it advances the interests he wants to advance. The mercenary listener is looking for an angle, a simple transaction, not complicated by the merits of the case, the evidence presented or that abstract quality of fairness, only how it increases advantage and enhances the desired bottom line. You have either a fairness based vision of justice, or a might makes right mentality.

You treat everyone as equal under the law or, under might makes right, you treat your friends as above the law, exempt from all legal coercion, and demand that anyone who opposes your desires be subject to the harshest of laws available (and not ruling out extra-judicial forms of discipline, which are always on the table). While you are in charge your friends and supporters don’t have to worry about any law that will stop them from acting on their strong feelings. As long as they are vocally loyal to you, you will protect them, until it is transactionally advantageous to cut them off. Because what the fuck is Fair anyway?

You can weigh the arguments on the actual facts of the case or you can weigh the arguments and frame them cleverly, to reach the desired outcome. The second way is the way of the zealot, the partisan, the political activist, the way of the Federalist Society.

The stench coming off the McConnell/Trump Supreme Court today is a reminder of how crucial nonpartisan elections are for democracy. How it is crucial to elect a few more Democratic senators, to prevent two from vetoing filibuster reform to get election and voting rights laws passed.

Norms, it turns out, don’t restrain zealots and extremists who believe only in power, and in using power to retain power (the updated definition of “conservative”). Laws can ensure a certain measure of justice, but only if they are always enforced. Selective enforcement, and the outcomes of court challenges often hinging on which party has more money to spend on an army of top lawyers, ensures rule by the most corrupt. Which, as any eight year-old will tell you, is completely unfair.