Category Archives: current events

when a friend shows you what they are incapable of, believe it

Sometimes, sadly, we hurt people we care about by our actions or inactions.   When we become aware we’ve caused pain to someone we love, the only thing I’ve figured out to do is acknowledge causing the pain, take responsibility for acting badly and sincerely ask for forgiveness.  I don’t know of any other way, though some people buy gifts, take special care of the person they hurt as a way of making it up to them.  Not everybody is capable of taking responsibility for cruel things they do in anger.

Anger itself is partly to blame, it is a famously terrible emotion and as difficult to sit with as grief.  When you’re angry you can only see the thing that makes you angry, in vivid black and white — no gradations of any kind.  When you’re mad you can’t see the harm your anger may be making you inflict.  You let the arrow loose from the bow in an act of righteous anger and it finds its mark, and even if it doesn’t inflict a fatal wound, it can still kill.

If somebody shows you their shock and anger when you ask to discuss something they did that hurt you, believe what they are showing you.  They are not capable of anything beyond that.  Believe them.

Supporting segregation makes you look racist, banning abortion is a moral, conservative Christian duty

Mehdi Hasan lays out the grim history of how determined, organized American reactionaries, realizing segregation was a bad look in the Civil Rights era, galvanized Evangelical Christians behind the religious Catholic doctrine that a fetus, even a one minute old zygote, is a fully formed human life and made opposition to abortion the unifying principle of the extreme right.

Nothing racist about forcing women, even if they’re poor and Black, to carry even a rapist’s seed to term. It’s God’s will, motherfuckers, ask Jesus!

The Scheme to capture the federal courts, part 14

The fourteenth installment of Sheldon Whitehouse’s excellent The Scheme series, outlining very clearly how far right extremists have captured the federal judiciary for preordained political ends, funded with unlimited dark money from undisclosed extremely wealthy reactionaries intent on preserving their privileges at all costs. 

The only shame is that this chillingly true presentation was not made, and widely disseminated, ten years ago, in time for voters and legislators to stop the infernal machinations of dark money funded reactionary zealots, before these fiendishly determined motherfuckers won their long war to turn back the clock and protect their own rights at the expense of everyone else’s.  

The John Birch Society is the current GOP

The John Birch Society was, at the time of its creation in 1958, the lunatic fringe of the far right. Formed by several wealthy right wing businessmen in a rage against the “activist” Supreme Court that unanimously declared segregation of public schools unconstitutional, Birchers believed this communist judicial activism was leading us down a slippery slope toward “forced integration”, integrated labor unions, full rights for women and other abominations of majoritarian tyranny. Movement conservatives steered clear of these rich extremists who saw commies everywhere, pulling the strings, making intolerable outcomes happen — like forcing whites who honestly hated Blacks to send their children to school with… you know. The lunatics who started this paranoiac right-wing interest group (which is still alive today, google these insane funsters) included wealthy fossil fuel baron Fred Koch, admirer of Mr. Hitler and father of American far-right titan and architect of the modern Republican party, Charles Koch. They’ve come a long way since 1958, taking over the Republican party with the vitality of their big ideas, as Heather Cox Richardson explains:

In Michigan, Republican Ryan Kelley, who is running for governor, has openly attacked the idea of democracy. “Socialism—it starts with democracy,” he said. “That’s the ticket for the left. They want to push this idea of democracy, which turns into socialism, which turns into communism in every instance.” Kelley’s distinction between “democracy” and a “constitutional republic” is drawn from the John Birch Society in the 1960s, which used that distinction to oppose the idea of one person, one vote, that supported Black voting.

In turn, the Birchers drew from the arguments of white supremacists during Reconstruction after the Civil War, who warned that Black voters would elect leaders who promised them roads, and schools, and hospitals. These benefits would cost tax dollars that in the postwar South would have to be paid largely by white landowners. Thus, white voters insisted, Black voting would lead to a redistribution of wealth; by 1871, they insisted it was essentially “socialism.”

source

Democracy, a dirty, slippery slope down to providing equal rights and equal protection of the law to everyone. Where does this decadent slide toward socialism end? Socialized medicine, a so-called right to affordable health care in the richest nation in human history? Making billionaires, who made two trillion in pocket change during the pandemic, pay more than 8% tax on that money? Jesus, socialism is un-American, as anti-American as anti-fascism and the millions of unhinged “woke” maniacs protesting when one black guy, with a criminal record, no less, gets accidentally killed by four cops. God save our flawed vessel king! Who are you gullible dummies going to believe, the fake news or Jesus Christ Himself?

Nice presentation on how the right took over the Supreme Court

Spend unlimited amounts of money on non-profit right wing think tanks, create dozens, if not hundreds. The opinions emerging from these think tanks will then be disseminated through the mass media and often dominate public discussion of the issue at hand. Employ the brightest partisan lawyers you can find, to craft court cases to change the law to what you want it to be. Spend millions on learned amicus briefs that give the Supreme Court all the learned arguments and citations they need to overturn any inconvenient precedent. Vet your nominees to the federal bench to ensure loyalty to the judicial principles you inculcate in your judicial fraternity.

When a nominee has an openly partisan history like Kavanaugh’s, hide thousands of pages of compromising legal writings that could be used to question his judicial integrity. When credible accusations about his past behavior and candor are made against him, have the FBI open a five day investigation and make sure all tips that come in, 4,500 we’re told, are routed directly to the lawyer for the White House who is determined to get him appointed – none reach the FBI. Don Fucking McGahn had one job as White House counsel, to get as many Federalist Society judges as he could on the Supreme Court. He pushed Gorsuch and then Kavanaugh. Two for two. Don McGahn, American patriot and hero of authoritarians. This piece is an excellent short course in how the right-wing ecosystem works, how it attains and consolidates power.

Heather on right-wing voter suppression since 2000

The steps to totalitarian control by a small, determined minority are always the same. First, end “majoritarian tyranny” and the “coercive state” by limiting the right to vote to your supporters. It is helpful to control advertising and media prior to elections by spending billions to make sure your supporters vote the right way. The US Supreme Court, by a one vote majority, has approved both of these techniques, ruling that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional and that anonymous donors can spend unlimited amounts to influence electoral outcomes. In each state, we have legislatures, so-called independent state legislatures, that march to the same drumbeat of social control. Here’s the Florida version, going back to 2000.

Good old fashioned invidious disenfranchisement in de land of cotton. Supreme Court Federalist Society majority holds that politics is not de business of de Supreme Court, no suh!