Accountability

Remember This Day


Remember this day, March 30, 2023, so that you can tell your grandchildren that this was the moment when justice began to return to America.

_______________________________

From Adam Kinzinger, March 30:

If you take one thing away from this email, let it be this: The indictment of Donald J. Trump doesn’t keep him from running for President; it doesn’t hurt his standing with his MAGA faithful; it doesn’t end the threat to democracy.

Trump, the MAGA movement, and all of their anti-democratic allies are just getting started. Many of them are already sending out breathless fundraising appeals in response to the indictment, ready to cash-in on their leader’s shameless criminality. Rather than disbanding, today’s events will hyperdrive the victim complex that holds the cult together. We are NOT in the clear.

Join the REASONABLE MAJORITY.

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Again and Again


Charlton Heston giving his “cold dead hands” speech at the NRA convention in 2000. Since then over 32,000 more children have cold, dead hands due to gunfire.

Three little children showed up for third grade on Monday. Now they’re dead.

We have a school shooting every 3 days.

We have a mass shooting twice every 3 days.

The biggest cause of death of children under 18 is not auto collisions. It isn’t any disease. It is gunfire.

We have enough firearms in private hands for every man, woman and child to possess 1.3 guns. And yes, that calculation includes newborns and toddlers not even able to lift a gun, as well as our mentally ill and those who see themselves as victims and are permanently pissed off.

Yes, we really are Number 1.

You know the comparisons to all the rest of the developed nations in the world, so you know that we’re number one in all the awful and insane ways.

Our police are the ones who are first to the scene of our massacres. They see the bodies of little kids that are ripped apart by bullets designed for warfare – bullets designed to rip apart as may bodies as possible as fast as possible. They’re the ones who have to risk their own lives to stop gunmen on the hunt for more victims. Sometimes those blue clad bodies are included in the count of the massacred.

We say that Blue Lives Matter, but we keep on creating new crime scenes and sending our men and women in blue to deal with them. If you really care about Blue Lives, ask one of the cops who showed up at Sandy Hook or Parkland and now Nashville about their worst moment ever. Ask them about the ache in their hearts that won’t go away. Ask them about their regular nightmares of little kids with mangled bodies, real visions that haunt them and won’t go away. Ask them about the stupidity of right wing manipulation of the Second Amendment to mean anyone, sane or crazy, is allowed to have as many tools of death as they can afford to buy or steal.

Don’t let anyone get away with telling you that Blue Lives Matter and in the same breath say that it’s okay for their angry brother-in-law to have an arsenal. Don’t let them say that it’s okay for miserable, crazy Uncle Bubba to carry a loaded Glock and wave it at whoever cuts him off in traffic.

And don’t let anyone get away with telling you that we love our kids and our concert goers and our church and temple attendees and our fellows walking down the sidewalk. Don’t let them tell you that we love our students on college campuses and grannies in the supermarket or Walmart or our veterans or any of the nearly 10,000 Americans killed by gunfire so far this year – and it isn’t even April yet. Our behavior says otherwise.

Our behavior says that we love our guns more than we love our kids.
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Question Of the Day

If we actually did love one another, if we actually cared about one another, we’d want to stop this butchery, so what would we be doing to stop it?

Hint: We know what to do. And look here and here, too. And see Peter Frampton’s answer at the bottom of this post.

Confession Of the Day

I’m despairingly sick at heart that our brutal truth allows me to write this post.

And I’m livid once again that instead of sending us gun safety legislation, our cowardly, selfish politicians (fact check: nearly all Republicans) are once again sending us nothing more than thoughts and prayers and a distracting sideshow. They’re doing their verbal dance of death, blaming windows, doors, gays, mental health, insufficient guns and more. They never address the core issue: We have hundreds of millions of guns and easy accessibility to them.

The hard liners proclaim their squishy, gelatinous solutions, saying we need more people to have and carry guns. They declare that bad guys won’t follow our rules, so there’s no point in creating new safety laws. They screech their absolutist Second Amendment nonsense, even as killers are murdering our kids.

Little kids are being put into half-size, soul tormenting caskets. If you ever see one, you’ll never be the same.

Three little children showed up for third grade on Monday. Now they’re dead.

Click the pic

Nicole Hockley is the CEO and founder of Sandy Hook Promise. Her 7-year-old son Dylan was one of the 26 murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012. He would be 18 years old now, ready to walk across the stage and accept his high school diploma. But there won’t be a diploma for Dylan.

The caption above reads, “Gov. Bill Lee is flanked by Republican members of the state legislature Wed., June 2, 2021 during a ceremonial bill signing of his permitless carry legislation. Natalie Allison, The Tennessean.” Click the pic.

Shannon Watts is the founder of Moms Demand Action. She thinks kids should be safe in school and that you should be safe on the street, in a movie theater or in a store.

Regarding our knowing what to do about this horrific murdering of our people, have a look at Peter Frampton’s post.

This cure was no one-off. The same cure worked in Australia in 1995. We know what to do, but we’ve lacked the will to do it. We can change that.

Try this simple 3-step process:

  1. Defeat the Congressional gun lobby babies and the gun coddlers. Replace them with reform candidates dedicated to stopping the carnage. Not reducing it. Stopping it.
  2. Demand that Congress pass the sweeping laws we all know we need. Even the majority of gun owners acknowledge we need them.
  3. Give law enforcement the tools and the funding to enforce our new safety laws.

And be clear that We the People – that’s you and I – must support all of that. Actively.

Now watch this.

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Potpourri v18.0


Silence
This is for those Republicans quietly whining in their closets about right wing extremists: you really should be speaking up.
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You should have voted for a Democrat to be Speaker of the House instead of voting for spineless Kevin McCarthy. You should have been speaking out against Trump’s outrages and those of the alt-right for years, maybe for decades, because you know the difference between right and wrong. Right?
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Your closet whining instead of speaking up probably helped you keep”the base” votes,  I suppose, but at what cost to your integrity, your legacy and our republic? What will you tell your grandchildren?
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From Heather Cox Richardson:
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That today’s Republican leaders have not condemned any of [Trump’s] attempts to cheat speaks volumes about the party. As Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) pointed out [on March 22], when “[Michael] Cohen was arrested, indicted, convicted, and went to prison for participating in an illegal hush money payment scheme to Stormy Daniels, not a single Republican leader complaining now said a thing about what happened to Michael Cohen.” So why the rush to defend Trump in the same case?

From Ella Wheeler Wilcox, author, poet and activist, 1850 – 1919:

To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men.

Democracy

I’m not partisan by nature, but the past 40 years have made me a non-Republican, as that party ran headlong into autocracy mania. Even so-called traditional Republicans have ducked and run from what is actually conservative, leaving Democrats the only ones to vote for if we still want a democracy.

Yoda

I get that keeping our democracy is far too ethereal to be sufficiently motivating to most Americans to get them out to vote. We prefer not to expend the effort to be aware of anything not in our immediate lives. It’s just a human being thing. But here’s the real deal: Keeping our democracy is the only way to preserve what we call our American values. “On that everything depends,” said Yoda.

Accountability

What if we actually believed what so proudly we hail about our virtues, values and beliefs – like accountability?

Last week was the 20th anniversary of George W. Bush’s second faithless war. We lost 4,400 Americans in Iraq. More important, they lost everything. We saw 32,000 of our people wounded. Nobody knows how many of our returning vets committed suicide or are still living on our streets two decades later. And, of course, nobody knows how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed or how many millions are still refugees.

Bush looked for an excuse to invade Iraq as far back as 1999, two years before he took office. He wanted to be seen as a strong “commander in chief.” That would ensure his 2004 re-election, and, of course, that was what was most important. Pay no attention to the dead bodies in his wake.

All that death and suffering was based on Bush’s quicksand foundation of lies, fear mongering and his reprehensible swagger. Here’s just a tiny sampling.

Lies

Lie #1: Saddam was a really bad guy and had to be removed. Actually, it isn’t a lie to say Saddam was a bad guy. What was a lie was that Bush contended that was enough of a reason to topple him. There are a lot of other bad guy leaders in the world, but, oddly enough, we don’t depose them for being bad guys.

Lie #2: Saddam was in cahoots with al Qaeda, the bad guys who attacked us on 9/11. Actually, the al Qaeda group was fanatically religious and Saddam was entirely secular. They hated one another. Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.

Lie #3: The Iraqis will receive us as liberating heroes and will pay us for the war with their oil. Except those Iraqis who were killed or tortured or forced to become refugees – we’re not heroes to them. And their oil was never ours to take.

Lie #4: Waterboarding isn’t torture and torture is legal. No point in elaborating – you already know.

Fear Mongering

Bush told us that Saddam Hussein is “this close” to having weapons of mass destruction (“WMDs”). Actually, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission was continuing its search for WMDs in Iraq before our invasion and had found nothing to indicate that Saddam had any such weapons or was working to acquire them.

From Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: “.  .  . we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Seriously, she said that over-the-top, scare everyone into compliance outrage.

Covert CIA operative Valerie Plame was outed by Dick Cheney because her husband, Amb. Joseph Wilson, unmasked Bush’s and Coliin Powell’s lies about yellow cake and aluminum tubes. That didn’t even momentarily pause the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld march to war. And our almost entirely lapdog Fourth Estate, our press, forgot that it was supposed to be a check on government.

Our Congress bought the lies and fear mongering and voted an Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which Bush was all too eager to use. Congress is only now moving to end that authorization.

Swagger

Bush swaggered across the aircraft carrier flight deck wearing a flight suit, flight helmet under his arm, following his being nothing more than a passenger for the aircraft carrier landing. He stood in front of his false and embarrassing MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner, even as our troops were being blown up by roadside bombs, IEDs and more. The war dragged on for years after that. I guess that mission wasn’t quite accomplished after all.

There weren’t any WMDs. There never were. There never were going to be. The WMDs existed only in the fraud perpetrated on millions of duped people so that Bush could be commander-in-chief in wartime and get re-elected. Plus, Cheney could acquire no bid contracts for Halliburton, but that’s another story. The key story is the death, the wounding and disfigurement and the miserable displacement of millions, all for a fraud.

Two decades later not a single Bush administration liar has been held accountable. Dick Cheney sneers on, without a heart, both figuratively and literally. Bush paints bad portraits of veterans, dogs and world leaders and sells them for ridiculous prices. Condoleeza Rice is the director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Cushy for all, except for an America without accountability.

Here’s the truth about what happened. And watch Rob Reiner’s movie Shock and Awe.

Healthcare Capitalism

Let’s give credit where it’s due: Trump’s childishly named “Operation Warp Speed” worked. We gave vaccine producers the up front money to create new vaccines to protect us from the new, not well understood SARS‑CoV‑2 coronavirus that was killing people at a devastating pace. Indeed, we gave Moderna $12 billion for research and development of their vaccine. That has earned the company over $40 billion over just the past two years. In other words, we paid for the risky up front costs and Moderna has reaped the benefits. Now Moderna has a surprise for us.

Said Senate Health Committee chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT),

“Here is the thank you the taxpayers of this country received from Moderna for that huge investment: They are thanking the taxpayers of America by proposing to quadruple the price.”

The part I loved best is that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), former CEO of a private investment firm, said that Moderna is an example of capitalism at its best.

Moderna has just one successful product, the mRNA coronavirus vaccine, the R & D for which We the People paid. Our government funding of Moderna to produce that vaccine was not a fine example of capitalism.

It was pure socialism!
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Remember: that vaccine socialism was powered by chief socialist, Republican Donald Trump. O’, those evil socialist Republicans!

Debt Ceiling Update

That’s Congress as Dastardly Whiplash, who tied the U.S to the tracks. Click the pic

“Good” Republicans dither while others (the suicidal crazies) continue to threaten to default on and extinguish the full faith and credit of the United States of America. They’ve tied the country to the tracks and we can hear the locomotive coming. It’s just a few months off and the crazies continue to behave as though future spending negotiations have something to do with paying the bills for what Congress itself already bought. Read this explainer to understand that our debts must not only be paid, but that they must not even be questioned. Better yet: send the link to your representative in Congress.

“If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going”

     – Irwin Corey (American Stand-up Comic 1914-2017)

Many thanks to friend and futurist David Houle for the reminder.

A Question From The Future

“Hey Mom and Dad – is it really true that a while back people could be denied health insurance and healthcare just because they had a pre-existing condition? No way, right?”

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Riddle Me That, Batman


Join the Disambiguation Gang right over there ⇒ (scroll down just a bit)

_____________________________________

The Riddler, aka E. Nigma

We human beings are walking contradictions. We say we want to be fit and healthy but we forget the New Year’s resolution and drop the gym membership before January 20 (to get the full membership refund) and we eat stuff that tastes good, but we know it’s bad for us.

We know the climate is warming, causing not just more natural disasters, but far more destructive ones. Check with Uncle Phil who lives in the California mountains to hear what he has to say about that right now – if you can get through to him. Or what Aunt Gloria in Ft. Myers, FL said about the hurricane last September. Or check with anybody in the still not fully rebuilt Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, these 18 years after Katrina, or any farmer who’s watched his crops wither and die in a massive draught. These disasters really are becoming more frequent and more devastating, but we still go out and buy a 17 mpg SUV or a 13 mpg pickup truck. Riddle me that.

Sometimes we’re contradictions in ways that are devastating in immediate and very personal ways.

For example, pro-life people are staunchly against abortion. They offer various rationales for their views, including calling abortion murder, stating their religious justifications and more. Here’s the riddle me part.

These folks are often in favor of capital punishment. That is decidedly not pro-life. You could ask any of the former death row inmates who were released due to the fine work of The Innocence Project. They know a lot about capital punishment from a perspective you don’t have and they’re quite sure that capital punishment isn’t pro-life.

And what about the pro-lifers who don’t want us to support healthcare for poor people, some of whom die for lack of healthcare? Or those who don’t want to provide supplemental food for poor children. Or those who won’t support a first rate education for kids regardless of their home address? This is starting to look very much like these people aren’t pro-life at all and perhaps aren’t even pro-kids. They’re just pro-fetus and don’t demonstrate much caring for kids following their birth. Riddle me that.

And while we’re on the subject of giving birth, how is it pro-life to refuse an abortion to pregnant women whose lives will clearly be in peril if their pregnancy continues? And how is it pro-life to force a 10-year-old girl in Ohio, a victim of rape and incest, to carry a fetus to term, endangering her life? Riddle me those life-of-the-mother contradictions.

Should you take issue with my indictment of pro-life, read Thom Hartmann’s exquisitely clear unmasking of it.

Our military people were ordered to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, this to ensure our fighting forces would be ready when needed, unlike the sailors and ships the Navy had to sideline in 2021. Some refused the order to be vaccinated. Bear in mind that they were required to receive various vaccines upon entering military service, so their objection surely wasn’t about vaccines.

They took an oath freely and without reservation, they affirmed, both to protect and defend the Constitution and to obey orders. And they kept their word, right until the moment when they didn’t. Riddle me that one, too.

Click me for the story

There was a gang of thugs who were going to kidnap and execute the Governor of Michigan because of her mask mandate and the 2021 lock down. They were conspiring to violate a bucketload of laws, all the while calling themselves patriots. That looks a lot like the January 6 insurrectionists carrying Blue Lives Matter flags, the flagpoles of which they used to beat and stab police officers. They proclaimed that they were true patriots, too. Riddle me those cruelties.

How about the mania for book banning and book burning that’s sweeping states with extremist, self-serving governors and legislatures? It’s always done with some excuse about protecting our delicate children from the truth, always with the patina of some invented notion of parents’ rights. But in the end it’s about what a minority of hair-on-fire types want and the ignoring of the truth that the majority wants taught to their kids. Riddle me that, too.

People exercise their rights by parading outside polling places carrying intimidating assault rifles. They scream insanely at school board meetings and threaten peaceful protesters. They repeatedly lie in Congress and claim the right to abuse asylum seekers and kidnap their children and more. Pay no attention to the constitutional rights they deny others. Riddle me that.

That’s very much like the right of state officials to gerrymander fair representation out of existence, and to wipe people off voting roles for the sneakiest, most manipulative of Jim Crow-like reasons. It’s about the right of states to remove polling places and ballot drop boxes in order to make it far more difficult for a select group of citizens to vote. It’s about the right to bollix up the system such that it takes 20 minutes to vote in White areas and 8 hours to vote in Black areas.

It’s always about the freedom and rights of those in the minority but who are in control, as they deny freedom and rights to others. Effectively, they tell us, “Freedom for me, but not for thee.” Riddle me that, Batman.

Oh, and Florida SB1316 requires bloggers who make comments about the governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and others to register with the state. This is a blatant attack on freedom of the press.

That control freak power grab of a bill is not without precedent, as Vladimir Putin passed that same law in Russia in 2014.

That raises the question of why some of our Republican elected officials, self-proclaimed patriots, support dictators Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Duterte and other authoritarian bullies who strip rights and freedom from their people. Why do our homegrown anti-Americans call for us to abandon Ukraine, as it fights for freedom and democracy? Why do these elected officials call themselves patriots, even as they hate our democracy? Riddle me that, too.

Like I said: we’re walking contradictions.

Except when there isn’t a contradiction, as when all that matters is, “It’s all about me and what I want.”

For a fine explainer of our self-contradictory and often cruel crowd, read Ed Gurowitz’s offering, “Woke Is the New Code for Fascism.”

And if you have struggled to understand decades of dirty tricks and the mind numbing cacophony of cruel and self-contradictory absurdities Republicans spout, you must read Prof. Heather Cox Richardson’s explainer here.

Finally

The International Criminal Court has indicted Vladimir Putin for his war crime of kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children. That prompted me to wonder what plans he has for them. Try this awful scenario.

We know that he is sending untrained soldiers to die in his war, using political criminals and other Russian undesirables as his canon fodder. He sends many to fight without weapons.

Now imagine him putting uniforms on older Ukrainian children and sending them unarmed to the front lines, forcing the Ukrainian army to kill their own kids. He’s diabolical enough to do that.

Let’s hope I’m wrong.

_____________________________

PS

In my last post I observed that “woke” is commonly used as a pejorative but there’s no definition of what it means. Turns out I was wrong. Here’s an explainer.

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Banking Crisis and Words


Of course, you thought we had wrung all the stupid out of the banking system back in 2009 following the banking meltdown and the bailout you and I paid for. We passed Dodd-Frank to prevent a repeat performance. We pointed fingers. We threatened prison terms. And nobody was held accountable.

Glass-Steagall had been designed to prevent another Great Depression. That law separated commercial banks from investment banks and was intended to prevent banks from being market speculators – wild-eyed gamblers – with your bank deposits and it worked really well for decades. Then Congress cut off its legs.

Dodd-Frank had been designed to protect us from another crash like the Great Recession, but shortly after its passage Congress once again went on a leg chopping spree.

Then, in his mania to be maniacal with regulations, President Shoot-Our-Foot and his Congress passed a law in 2018 that effectively ended the last vestiges of Dodd-Frank, to the point that all that is left of it is a recipe for spaghetti sauce.

With that protection gone, banks were once again allowed to grab the handle of sketchy investment slot machines in search of huge profits for executives and stockholders. Too bad about your deposits when they lost big.

Here’s a piece that will help you to understand how we create global crisis with our anti-regulation craziness. And here is a comment that was posted to that article:

“JPM” is J.P. Morgan Bank. “Derivatives” are the key evil buggers that caused the 2008 – 2009 crash. They’re also called credit default swaps. Insightful people call them crap. Almost nobody actually understands them.

They are essentially an aggregation of phenomenally risky subprime mortgages. The banksters stuffed a huge number of these risky mortgages into a sack, called that sack an asset and then traded it or pieces of it to other investors and investor banks. They sold lots of those sacks of non-assets and created an entirely unstable house of cards.

it doesn’t require any banking insight to know that committing banking sleight of hand with risky mortgages doesn’t make them any less risky. Just ask anyone at Lehman Brothers or Washington Mutual Bank. Oh, wait: you can’t ask them because they invested in those stinky things and they crashed and burned in the Great Recession.

Nevertheless, that crazy, phony “asset” idiocy is what the banksters did in 2008. They’re gambling big time now, too. Indeed, the big banks are now too bigger to fail than they were in 2008.

That leaves me wondering yet again why Congress seems astonishingly unable to learn from the past or, really, from anything.

  1. It was the financial Wild West in the 1920s and that led to the Great Depression. Congress passed laws which were designed to prevent a crash from happening again (Glass-Steagall). Then they let that Wild West thing happen once more and we got the Great Recession. Congress created Dodd-Frank to prevent that crash from happening again. But later the geniuses in Congress began to chip away at those protections until in 2018 they effectively removed all the safety guardrails, leaving nothing but the aforementioned recipe for spaghetti sauce. What could possibly go wrong?
  2. They authorized George W. Bush’s idiotic land wars in Asia, this in the face of centuries of examples to tell them not to do that because we were certain to fail. And, of course, there was the then-recent example of Russia’s failure there. How could Congress fall for Bush’s lies and authorize those wars?
  3. We had years of the President of the United States inciting division and violence, accompanied by members of Congress doing the same and that led to a bloody insurrection on January 6. Now members of Congress are gaslighting an entire nation, claiming the insurrection wasn’t an insurrection. They say it was just a bunch of tourists visiting the Capitol Building. Those same members of Congress are still inciting. Do you suppose these insurrection stokers think the results will be different the next time? Maybe they think We The People need to purge our nation of the evil of democracy. Or they think that Jefferson’s comment about the blood of patriots means that we should start shooting one another. Oh, wait: we’re already doing that.

This is not Monday morning quarterbacking. All of this was plain to see at the time and it’s still plain to see. None of it requires any special understanding of complex issues. All it requires is a copy of a high school history book, the ability to learn and the clarity that George Santayana was right when he said,

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

And so we are led by our Congress, which apparently hasn’t a history book in their entire building and too many members of Congress refuse to learn. Consequently, we continue to repeat the past.

Now Marjorie Taylor Greene and others are calling for a “national divorce” and “Second Amendment remedies.” Maybe we should try that again, because we only killed 600,000 of our fellow citizens the last time we tried a national divorce. Note that if we express that number as the same percentage of our population today as then, a national divorce would murder more than 6.3 million Americans, or two of every ten people you know. Still want to listen to that woman?

To understand our current banking craziness, please read Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (R-MA) explainer, as well as Paul Krugman’s slightly different take. And here’s a piece to explain some of the global implications of our self-destruction.

Definitions

The far right loonies are all about culture war: Demonization-R-Them. Maybe it’s a power trip, but it sure isn’t an intellectual exercise.

Take, for example, their attack on “woke.” Florida Governor Ron DeSenseless proudly tells anyone standing still for more than two seconds that “Florida is where woke goes to die.” We understand the braggadocio, the chest thumping, but we’re left with a hollow spot where meaning should be.

What is “woke?” Click and watch. You’ll be left where you started, in your present state of not knowing because there is no definition.

What is the “deep state?” Click and watch the first idiot squirm trying to avoid the question and then doing the standard off-topic attacks. We’re left with no clarity at all.

Same question about “elites.” And what does “own the libs” mean. Are they talking about bringing back slavery or is it just another power trip grounded in cruelty?

Does it mean anything when terms don’t mean anything? I think it does, because all these terms are calls to division and hatred and sometimes violence. Words matter, even when they don’t mean anything.

And while we’re checking definitions let’s have a look at the false and idiotic claims of equivalencies.

The alt-right, focus-group-named “Freedom Caucus” is populated by renegades, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Josh Hawley, Louis Gohmert and more. They call for truly awful things, including the aforementioned “national divorce” and “Second Amendment remedies,” insurrection, civil war and more. Truly awful and dangerous stuff.

There is no equivalent on the far left. Nobody, not “the squad” or socialist Bernie Sanders or anyone else is calling for assaulting others or trashing the Constitution. The far left legislators might promote policies some don’t like, but none of them is trying to suppress the rights of others, harm people or do anything anti-American.

Journalists and pundits often look to balance what they say by invoking a “both sides” comment, but most often there isn’t a “both sides.” If you think I missed a real world equivalence, educate all of us in the Comments section below. Otherwise, the terms “both sides” and “equivalent” used in the political arena are meaningless. Don’t fall for them.

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

The Debt Ceiling Question


Once again the Republicans are threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. This is a form of “If I don’t get what I want, I’m going to hold my breath until I turn blue.” If this were one of Trump’s breath holding threats I’d say fine, go turn blue. Please. But it isn’t painless for the rest of us.

The debt ceiling is a relic of dealing with our debts from the World War I years. We had purchased the guns and airplanes and ships and uniforms and were left with quite a stack of bills we had to authorize and pay. Our country has been operating that way ever since. Buy stuff. Authorize payment. Pay for stuff.

The hitch in the system is that Congress, with its impenetrable defense against wisdom, is the body that authorizes payment of our debts. To accomplish payment, a majority of those people must agree to pay for what we already purchased. If they don’t agree to do that, bad things will happen.

It’s just like your credit card bill. You can refuse to write a check to pay for the stuff you bought and which is already in your hands. If you do that, it will be very bad for your credit rating and huge interest charges will smack you upside your wallet. It will work the same way for our country if Congress were to refuse to allow us to pay our bills. Our system really is as stupid and self-defeating as that. Nevertheless, that’s the system.

The debt ceiling has nothing to do with future spending. It is entirely about paying our already incurred bills, just as it was following WW I. That’s a significant point, because everyone to whom we owe money for goods and services already delivered is expecting to be paid. Here are three key points about that:

  1. If we refuse to pay those to whom we owe money, they will not only be very unhappy with us, but they will be most justified in refusing to do business with us again. That will affect all nations. In fact, there will be worldwide economic chaos if we default. See point 3 below.
  2. If the US is no longer trustworthy, anyone still willing to take a chance on us will want a lot more financial up-side to take that risk. In other words, interest rates will soar and everything will cost way more, including everything our country buys and even everything you buy. “Way more” means huge increases in both interest charges on the national debt and the price of goods and services. It won’t be just the few percentage points of our current inflation; it’ll be way more.
  3. If the US is no longer trustworthy, all other countries will scramble to find a country that is, some nation that can be the world economic leader. Which country do you think might be up to that task? Right: China. If we want to make this the Chinese century, US debt default is a most effective way to accomplish that. That would be a major result of our turn blue debt refusal chaos.

I haven’t any facts that indicate that the Chinese are behind Republican threats of debt default, although they could be. On the other hand, I am wondering who else might benefit from a national debt default and might be urging Republican fools onward toward our self-inflicted destruction. That’s

The Debt Ceiling Question
.
Who would benefit from our Congress telling the world that we won’t pay our bills?
.

Mark Felt aka Deep Throat of Watergate fame

A useful way to explain people’s actions was articulated by Watergate’s Deep Throat: “Follow the money.” If we do that with debt default, who, other than the Chinese, might make a killing from that?

Perhaps the super rich would benefit, because they already have so much money (an extra $50 trillion since 1975 and now growing by $2.5 trillion every year) that they can tolerate an economic crash and still have plenty of money to buy up what’s left of the country. Mel Brooks said it clearly: “It’s good to be the king.” And the owner of everything.

That’s just speculation, of course, but a lot of politicians are submerged so deep into the bottomless pockets of extremely wealthy people that they can’t see daylight. The super rich guys could be the ones calling the Republican turn blue debt default dance steps.

Go ahead and do your own speculation. In fact, speculate in the Comments section below to make us all better informed. Remember that we’re talking about our Congress – specifically, the Republicans, because the Democrats aren’t playing this suicidal game – so no answer to the Debt Ceiling Question is too stupid.

NOTE: If the Republicans huff, and they puff, and they blow our house down by stiffing our creditors, we won’t have a house.

Top Stupiditude of the Week
.
The three ring circus that is the Republican controlled House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Epidemic is underway!
.

The job of this committee is to ascertain the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In their quest for the truth the Republicans on the committee are using their most powerful tools: they’re pointing fingers and blaming.

“IT’S CHINA!” “IT’S WUHAN!” “IT’S A WET MARKET BAT CONSPIRACY” “IT’S SOME BIDEN DIRECTED WEAPONIZED GOVERNMENT AGENCY!” “IT’S THE JANUARY 6 COMMISSION!” “IT’S HUNTER BIDEN!”

O’, the fine, self-serving pontifications they’ve put on display!

Not a single member of that august select committee is a doctor or an epidemiologist or a medical researcher or a scientist or an investigator of any kind. They’re just politicians. In an epidemiological investigation or in any medical environment at all, not one of them could find their own ass using a flashlight and both hands. That’s why this committee is the winner of the Stupiditude of the Week Award.

Well, okay, there’s one additional award that must be given.

Donald Trump, Jr., pretender to the throne of Cruelty, Retribution And Powerlust (“CRAP”), weighed in on the insolvency of Silicon Valley Bank with his customary flamboyant inaccuracy. He tweeted,

This is a beautifully layered stupiditude. The first layer is that 16 banks failed during the Trump presidency. Eight of them went insolvent before the pandemic.

The second layer of his stupiditude is his apparent amnesia about the 2018 trashing of the regulations that had been designed to prevent bank insolvencies like that of Silicon Valley Bank. His daddy did that regulation trashing, same as he did the deregulation of the railroads. Think: East Palestine, OH. Doesn’t matter that Junior doesn’t remember. We do.

That leads us to question the motives of Junior (as if we needed prompting). Is he intentionally misleading us or is he just a walking stupiditude? You be the judge. Regardless, he gets a dishonorable mention this week. Same for all weeks.

Just For Fun

Click the pic

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

What’s Going to Happen


I’ve been worrying about politically driven domestic violence for a long time. We have shootings every day and, of course, there was a full-on insurrection on January 6, 2021, where people were badly wounded, some died that day and others died on subsequent days. Many continue to carry scars and debilitating injuries from that attack.

That the seditious coup didn’t work found the thousands leaving the vandalized Capitol Building saying that the assault had been a valuable “dress rehearsal.” Those people haven’t all gone to prison and they haven’t all gone away or changed their minds. They are vipers waiting to attack.

Since the insurrection, the drumbeat of undisguised calls to violence by elected leaders and big mouths with megaphones has been ramped up and it takes many forms.

It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Mean Girls) calling for a “national divorce.”

It’s the proliferation of assault weapon pins, neckties and more in Congress. And it’s Lauren Boebert (R-Hunter/Killer) and many other Republicans refusing to enter the House through the magnetometers.

It’s dictator Victor Orbán speaking at CPAC and calling for the destruction of our Constitutional norms.

It’s the eerie silence of the so-called moderates who have gone AWOL in this hour of our nation’s need.

It’s Tucker the Lying Lunatic, Alex Jones the Evil Bozo and the rest of the foul commenters blasting incendiary idiocy every night and every day, instructing listeners to “Take back our country.” Angry people are listening to these sewer mouths and preparing for “Second Amendment remedies.“

It’s Trump at CPAC declaring himself, “Your retribution” for those who feel they’ve been “wronged or betrayed.”

That last is truly stunning, as it calls on everyone with a perceived grievance – victim-hood lovers – to hit back, to attack the meanies who they think did them wrong. It’s about exactly what Trump said: retribution. Read Sheila Markin’s post for additional clarity on that.

This is about every American who thinks/feels they’ve been wronged either directly or through neglect and disrespect. And there are millions of Americans who are angry just llke that and they want to respond with violence. Plus, they think they are the true patriots. And Trump validates them and their victim-hood, making clear that he will lead them to attack.

This is exacerbated by the liars claiming they didn’t lose their elections (Trump, Kari Lake, Blake Masters and the rest). They claim it’s because of massive voter fraud driven by Democrats, RINOs, the “elites,” the “global cabal” – the grand collusion of bad guys. They claim fraudulently, “I won massively, but I was cheated.” *

That victim-hood and its attendant anger and resentment are stoked by the losers saying not just that their election was stolen, but that they were cheated and that the people who voted for them are victims of the crime, too. “You didn’t get what you wanted – ME! Look what they did to YOU!” they tell their supporters. And that multiplies the anger of already angry people. Worse, the losers who refuse to concede are hailed as courageous heroes, undaunted by the evil ones who cheated them and their voters.

What do you think millions of aggrieved people are going to do with that when their candidates lose the next election?

Self-serving politicians (we see you, Ron DeSantis) exploit these angry people by telling them lies about assaults on their children’s education, the danger to them from the unwashed hordes of illegal immigrants coming to take jobs from real Americans, the unholy LGBTQ poisoning of our country, the assaults on their freedom from mask mandates and lock downs, the lies about vaccines and the money they’re taxed that goes to undeserving freeloaders. That’s what they’re told by those slime ball politicians.

What do you think millions of aggrieved people are going to do with that when their candidates lose the next election?

I believe that we are headed for a prolonged period of greatly worsened domestic violence done by home grown terrorists and efforts by some states to secede from the union.

I hope our law enforcement assets are preparing for a very bad 2024 and 2025, but too many of the people in blue would likely be on the side of the violent ones. I think a lot of people are going to die.

Yes, of course I’m being histrionic and vying for the title of Drama King. Just because it happened in Germany in the 1930s as most people were denying what was in plain sight doesn’t mean it will happen here, even as Trump and MAGAs stomp on our values in plain sight.

And none of that will matter if it turns out that I got this right.

More on Thugocracy

One of the ways violence works is to intimidate people into self-censorship, self-immobilization. It’s what Trump does to silence critics when he brutalizes opponents. Just the threat of his verbal violence and the implication of physical violence by Trump’s vicious followers muzzles people who should be speaking up.

There have been arguments over whether Merrick Garland should investigate, indict and prosecute Trump. “Don’t prosecute,” they say, this in order to avoid violence, which, of course, is a cave-in to thugocracy. You might want to check on how such a cave in worked for Britain and all of Europe following Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s visit to Munich in 1938.

There will be violence regardless of whether Garland prosecutes. That isn’t a happy picture, but we cannot deny that reality and we must never give in to the thugs. Appeasement never works.

If we give in to the thugs, our rights and our safety are permanently gone and so is our democracy.

National Park Service photo Jan 20, 2017. Click the pic

_____________________________

* Recall that following Trump’s 2017 inauguration he and all of his mouthpieces declared repeatedly that he had the greatest attendance for any inauguration. Ever. Period! They continued to say that, even in the face of the National Park Service photographs of the mostly empty National Mall as Trump was speaking.

Half the seats at CPAC were empty as Trump spoke.

Trump did a repeat performance of that lie following his talk at the CPAC convention this month, claiming there was standing room only to hear him. Here’s a pic of that half-empty “SRO” room as he was speaking. That can be considered nothing more than perverse entertainment for people living on Earth 1, but it’s more sinister than that.

Trump is declaring that his refusal of reality continues and he is leading his minions to spout the same “alternative facts,” which is nothing but truth and reality denying craziness. Unless we stop them, they will take over our country on January 20, 2025 and that will be the darkest day in the history of the United States.

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Hatred, Christian Nationalists & The Supreme Court


An Open Letter to Christian Haters

Did you go to Sunday School when you were a kid? Or at least attend a church service now and then? Here’s what you did with that.

They told you the stories and the lessons from long ago, like to be kind to strangers. They said to be generous to others, especially those less fortunate than you. You remember that stuff, right?

Do you remember the day they told you what Jesus said about hatred? I’m pretty sure they said that Jesus instructed, “Don’t hate,” although they wrapped a lot more words around the message. You sat in your chair and you heard the words.

Then you walked out of the building and said to yourself, “No way, man. I’m gonna do whatever I want, whatever makes me feel good and powerful and in control.” Whatever message or teaching or directive Jesus had for you was cast aside, forgotten, crushed under your heel. In that moment you rejected Jesus completely.

And you’ve been living without Jesus ever since.

Oh, you put up a Christmas tree and you do the other performative stuff and claim you’re a Christian, but you don’t follow the rules. You live under only your own rules and who cares about what those ancient guys said? You like to hate others. It makes you feel good.

This nation has been hating non-Whites for over 400 years. Asians are squarely in the center of the bulls eye again and antisemitism is up 34 percent (seven incidents per day), according to the most recent data a year ago. The count of those acts of hatred is almost certainly higher now. So, with all that hatred infecting people, tell me again how this is a Christian nation.

Bible thumpers, holier than thou types, those wearing beatific masks, please don’t even imagine you’re fooling anyone. There is a universe of issues on which you try to paint your non-Semitic image of Jesus, but it’s just your ongoing dishonesty.

When you invade a prayer meeting at a Black church and shoot the people there, when you blast away the congregants in a synagogue, when you make death threats and distribute hate literature, when you make laws that crush your out-group, you’re refusing, denying and even giving the finger to Jesus.

That’s your truth that you hide from. But know this: we see you for what you are. So, don’t tell us you want this to be a Christian Nationalist country, because you wouldn’t be allowed to live there.

The Constitution

Now that I’ve inflamed a lot of people, let’s take this one step further.

The Articles in The Constitution primarily describe how our government is intended to work. The Amendments primarily define the rights we have as citizens. Here’s a link so that you can review all The Amendments to understand your rights. And everyone else’s, too.

What neither the Articles nor the Amendments offers is an opportunity to check a box next to the parts you like and ignore the rest.

So, if you are an ardent believer that the Second Amendment gives you the unlimited right to own and carry whatever guns or other armament you like, you would surely check the box next to that Amendment. But in calling yourself patriotic, a true American, you also have to check the box next to the First Amendment, which gives everyone, even the people you hate, the right of freedom of religion. That precludes the possibility of this becoming a Christian Nationalist nation. This country was never meant to be that. Get over it.

The First Amendment also gives us the right of freedom of speech. That means that the people you hate can say what they like, just as you can. And they can publish what they want, even if it goes against your rigid principles. There are limits to what anyone can say, but the limits have nothing to do with whether you like what they’re saying.

The First Amendment also gives us freedom of the press, the right of peaceful assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. These are for everyone, not just for you. Nobody gets to pick and choose those rights or deny them to anyone else.

We have senators and representatives who rail every day against the Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments. They want to leave some of those imaginary boxes unchecked because it’s inconvenient or annoying that others whom they hate have the same rights as they have. The same goes for millions of ordinary citizens.

Show me the patriotism in that. Show me how demanding that this be a Christian Nationalist country comports with our founding document.

Right. You can’t.

So, Just For You .  .  .
.

Here’s a link to become a card carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Click it and join to protect and defend our Constitution. You’re patriotic and want to protect and defend the Constitution, right?

Question Of The Week

Since we’re talking about hatred, the Supreme Court consistently decides cases in ways that negatively impact Americans. They call themselves conservatives, but I’m wondering what they’re conserving. Think:

Citizens United – gave corporations and rich people the right to distort our elections in their favor and against yours

Dodd v. Jackson Women’s Health – killed abortion rights. And don’t even think of imputing your supposed Christian judgments on that – see the last paragraph below.

Various gun safety laws like Heller and MacDonald – effectively made it easier for haters to kill others

A swamp of voter suppression laws (e.g. closing polling places, eliminating ballot drop boxes, gerrymandering, removing voters’ registrations) and they all seem to be decided in favor of the haters

So, our Question Of The Week is,

Why do the so-called conservatives on the Supreme Court hate Americans?

Supreme Court Fallout

If you’re a woman, they stole your reproductive rights. If you’re a man, they stole those rights from your wife, your sister, your daughter, all the females in your neighborhood, extending from sea to shining sea plus you know where else. Almost as bad, that theft of rights is being imputed into other organizations, driven by far right pressure.

Take Walgreen’s, for instance. They just announced that they will no longer sell Mifepristone, the abortion pill. Not just in states where they’ve been outlawed, but in states where it is still quite legal to sell them. They have allowed themselves to be intimidated by far right big money pressure and they’re caving in.

I’m wondering if enough pressure can be applied the other way by we consumers, who have choices. We can explain to Walgreen’s that those choices include CVS, Rite-Aid and the rest.

Here’s a plea from an activist friend:

We hope you will take five minutes today to contact Walgreen’s headquarters at (800) 925-4733 (press 5 at the prompt) to make clear that those who want to strip away women’s fundamental rights are in the minority.

Women make 85% of all consumer purchases in the US (Forbes), and drive 70-80% of spending among consumers (Entrepreneur, Mar 19, 2021). We demand that our medical decisions be respected. We will not spend our dollars at institutions that do not protect us.

I’ll add that right-to-choose voters poll over the falsely named pro-life voters (the guys who hate abortion but love the death penalty) by 24 percentage points. Seems like we Americans like our rights.

Go call Walgreen’s.

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Bumper Sticker


While taking a road trip recently we were amazed by all the billboards for personal injury attorneys. We saw the same billboard posted three deep. We saw not only repeated cycles of multiple billboards for a single firm, but even two identical billboards stacked one on top of the other.

These advertisements were in the farm fields among the acres of winter wheat. Some were near wind generators. They were in the cities. They were nearly everywhere. Sometimes they were for any kind of injury and sometimes they were for specific injuries, like the attorney who apparently specializes in cases of injury related to over-the-road trucks. Lots of them were for medical injury cases. All of that made me wonder,

What does this endless solicitation for victims say about us?

Are we so clumsy or careless or unlucky that we’re constantly being injured? And if we are, how does that translate to someone else having to pay for our clumsiness, carelessness or injury?

We have over 70 years of Republicans training Americans to be angry and to see themselves as victims of some great global cabal or of the anti-American Democrats or of some supposed coastal elites or of some swamp. We’ve been instructed to see awfulness and grievance-stoking evil behind every tree, disrespect in every word and deed and a violation of our values and principles by anyone who disagrees with us. Our discontent has been validated constantly over those decades to the point that millions of us are now more dedicated to being angry and resentful than to anything else.*

We have a former President to whom this nation has listened for many years and who cannot get a full thought out of his mouth without lies accusing someone of wronging him. Worse, he has taught an entire generation of politicians and ordinary citizens to mimic his invented victimization. Woe be to these hapless victims for the terrible wrongs visited upon them by “others!” (That last is sarcasm.)

Now we the public have ramped up our victim-hood, to the point that nothing can assuage our pain until someone else pays for it and even then we’re still pissy. So, the ambulance chasers keep posting their come-on billboards and we keep them in business, seeking payment for the ills of our lives at the cost of 30% of a settlement, plus expenses.

Clearly, some people wrong others, whether intentionally or accidentally. When that happens, they should be held responsible and made to pay to clean up their mess.

But there isn’t always a bad guy. Sometimes it’s just the embodiment of the bumper sticker:

Next time be more careful.

The Train Derailment

It took a while for Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation, to show up in East Palestine, OH. I don’t know anything about that timing, but a lot of people are pretending to be inside his head and are ascribing fantasy reasons for it. Those fantasy reasons are of absolutely no value, other than that these people have something to whine about, someone to blame and something to use to crank up the anger of listeners. Instead, let’s do some digging into substantive things we can learn.

During the Trump administration when conscious reasoning by governmental officials was a cause for being fired, there was a mania to eliminate government regulations. The mania was based on the evidence-free notion that all regulation is bad.

Trump demanded that any new regulation be counter-balanced by the elimination of three existing regulations. Pick three, any three. Doesn’t matter which ones. Doesn’t matter their relative merit, whether they have anything in common with the proposed new regulation or whose pockets would get lined by removal of the regulations. That ought to work, right?

That brainless adherence to a goose stepping mantra has started to come home to us. The NTSB** will investigate and issue a final report on the cause of that train derailment. I’ll bet the report will include that a key cause was the elimination of railroad safety measures that were part of the regulations that were thrown away during the Trump administration. That’s an easy one to predict, because that actually happened.

I’ll also bet that those regulations that were dumped a few years ago were eliminated at the behest of the railroad industry. Now the people of East Palestine are suffering the consequences of that.

For a better understanding, watch the video of Pete Buttigieg speaking at the crash site, as well as the commentary by Brian Tyler Cohen. I like Cohen’s commentaries, but he’s particularly wound up over this issue and talks quite rapidly. You’ll be rewarded by hanging in there for the full 9:22.

It’s About The Kids – Of All Ages

Click the pic and watch the 59 second sheriff’s video of violence in a Florida high school. This is what we’ve taught our kids to do. Want to work in a school?

First read this from the National Education Association. It details the violence our teachers and school staff face every day. This dysfunction is driven in part by the massive increase in mental health problems in our nation and in school kids in particular. I believe it’s what we’ve created by means of our national pastime of adults behaving like brats on the playground. You know: the role models.

Our national promotion of violence is key. We can throw money at schools for support of student mental health, training for staff and more (although the public doesn’t want to pay for any of that), but if kids are getting messages outside of school that violence is good, justified and right, fixing this is a mountain that cannot be climbed.

We need major cultural change. We need moms & dads, politicians, everyone in any position of leadership to stop acting like a brat. If we stop teaching kids to be violent, they’ll stop being violent and magically, so will the rest of us. If we provide the money required to do what needs to be done, it will get done. This whole thing is a painful exercise in avoiding the obvious, the forehead slap about the things we all know we need. And no, teachers unions aren’t the problem. We are.
.
We’ve been under-funding our schools for decades, possibly forever. But if you think taxes are high, think about the cost we’re already paying with half-way measures to prevent school shootings and mass murders in countless venues. Ask any Sandy Hook mom about that cost. Think about the cost we pay when we let yet another kid slip through the cracks into a hopeless life. Think about the stupid stories we tell ourselves about how great we are, even as millions are suffering and we’re doing nothing about it.
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It doesn’t have to be this way.
Top Stupiditude of the Week

Click the pic for the stupiditude story. Many thanks to Jim Nathan for the pointer.

‘Nuf said.

See Note #5 below

____________________________

* From David Corn’s American Psychosis, page 120:

” .  .  .  the New Right feeds on discontent, anger, insecurity, and resentment, and flourishes on backlash politics.”

Jack’s comment to that: The New Right isn’t new. The Right has been nurturing discontent, anger, insecurity and resentment for well over half a century.

** For a forehead slapping look at self-embarrasing Republicans in the House Oversight and Accountability Committee majority, read Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From An American of February 25. It will make you glad you aren’t a Republican or it will drive you to leave that party, looking for signs of intelligent life elsewhere.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

S**t Spewers Flooding The Zone and A Letter to Kevin


Caution: Those sensitive to nasty words Mom told you not to say should skip to the second section of this post.

Richard Nixon couldn’t remember sending his goon squad to break into the Democratic National  Committee Headquarters at The Watergate to steal opposition documents. Later he couldn’t remember his mob boss style cover up of his crimes. Now, that’s a poor memory. Or a load of Presidential shit.

Later Ronald Reagan told us he couldn’t remember sending his goon squad to sell arms to Iran (a crime). He also couldn’t remember giving the proceeds of those sales to the Contras in Nicaragua (a crime). Apparently, the theory was that the Iranians would be so grateful for getting their hands on American weapons that they would then somehow convince Hezbollah to free the 7 Americans they were holding hostage in Lebanon. That whole thing went on for 5 years and, like Nixon’s, it was a tall pile of Presidential shit.

Once in the Oval Office George H.W. Bush issued presidential pardons to all the Iran-Contra hands-on perps, which was only sensible, since he as Vice President had been the architect of the plan. That pardoning was a fine setting of precedent, too, because it was done again when Trump pardoned convicts Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. And Trump’s reasons for doing that were very much like Bush’s. That’s yet more Presidential shit.

George W. Bush lied us into two wars and into torturing prisoners at black sites. He lied us into mindless tax cuts and off-balance-sheet wars and so much more. He was a master Presidential shit spewer.

Now Sen. Rick Scott (R-Prevarication) says he didn’t really mean that he wanted to “sunset” Social Security and Medicare. However, his policy document says he wants to do exactly that. He’s a really tall shit spewer.

To be fair, though, all of that is a load of shit, but not exactly shit spewing.

It’s over two years later now, but Trump and his brainless acolytes are still saying that the 2020 election was rife with fraud and the accusations come in a torrent, claiming that poor little victim Trump was cheated. Key word: “torrent.”

Steve Bannon counseled Trump in order for him to win the 2016 election and “tear it all down.” He told Trump to “flood the zone with shit.” An ongoing torrent of shit was the key strategy. Bannon said to babble easily disproved “alternative facts” so rapidly that response would be impossible. Trump trained his press secretaries and his advisor Kellyanne Conway to do that very thing. Betcha Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sean Spicer still claim that Trump had the biggest inauguration crowd ever. Period! The far right crazies do the same thing every day. That’s a huge amount of shit spewing.

Please ignore the complete absence of evidence for Trump’s claims of voting fraud or anything else. Pay no attention to the dozens of court cases he filed claiming fraud, all of which he lost, and his multiple illegal power grab attempts that have been unmasked. Irredeemable shit spewing for selfish gain is what these people are about.

Where have you gone, Merrick Garland? We need someone to clean up all the shit spewed in aisle 45.

It’s the same shit spewing when it comes to insane actions, like stocking cabinet positions with obviously incapable, dishonest, sycophantic people. This works quite well to crush the opposition through the sheer volume of the shit they spew. It’s that torrent thing.

Logistics and shipping company owner Louis DeJoy is still the Postmaster General in charge of hobbling the Postal Service. And Bill Barr is now out peddling his revisionist history book, detailing his fantasy about the integrity that he knowingly abandoned decades ago. His is an entire self-promoting career of working to crush our system of checks and balances by spewing shit, like his summary of the Mueller Report. Barr is totally full of shit that he spews with perfect conceit.

See Note #5 below

Mehdi Hassan has written a brilliant piece in an Atlantic essay lifted from his forthcoming book. The essay is focused on how to deal with the shit spewers and is entitled How To Beat Trump In a Debate. Do read his piece, because he will teach you what to do when faced with people for whom

– truth means nothing

– machine gun speed lying is the greatest of skills

– stealing your power is their holy quest.

See Note #5 below

NOTE: Stealing your power is what the shit spewing is all about.
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Consider yourself having been cautioned long ago by the Jefferson Airplane about how to deal with insanity and untruth from shit spewers. Back then the spewers were the ones piling up lies about the war in Viet Nam, which got 58,000 Americans killed, many times that number wounded and nobody knows how many Vietnamese were killed.

Here’s the last stanza of the song White Rabbit:

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the doormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head

We’re living in perilous times, as shit-spewing, self-serving voices of anarchy and authoritarianism are trying to steal from you every day. In a sense, nothing has changed, because the shit spewers today are just like those of generations before, although today’s spewers spew much faster. They’re still trying to steal your power. That’s why you have to feed your head every day, although that isn’t enough now, any more than it was enough in 1967 when that song was released and the parade of body bags was underway.

Here’s Newton’s 7th Law of Motion:*

You must take action or you will be acted upon.
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We have elections coming up – we always do – and some of these are critical, like the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat I told you about.

Did I mention that you must take action or you will be acted upon? Check out The States Project for some of the best actions to deal with the assault on you and your power. This stuff matters if we’re going to stop the shit spewers from stealing from us.

An Open Letter to Speaker Kevin McCarthy – Snail Mailed February 23, 2023
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Many thanks to JN for this – click me

Speaker McCarthy:

it’s widely reported that you have released to Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson over 44,000 hours of U.S. Capitol video records of the January 6, 2021 insurrection. You claimed that in giving Carlson access you were delivering “truth and transparency over partisan games.”

As a most interested citizen of the United States and a political commentator, and in the spirit of truth and transparency over partisan games, I’m requesting that you release all the same materials to me that you gave to Carlson, this for my review and commentary. Speaking Speaker-to-Speaker, you know it’s the transparent thing to do.

I await your reply.

Regards,

.
  • Jack Altschuler
  • Chief Disambiguation Officer and Part-Time Speaker of My House
  • Looking For Help
  • Lots of bad stuff goes on. There are many murders every day. People lie, cheat and steal.
  • What I have not been able to understand is why the murder trial of Alex Murdaugh is being treated as national news, elbowing out everything in its path. There is gavel-to-gavel coverage on CNN, MSNBC, Court TV and other outlets.
  • I remember the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart and the overwhelming coverage that received. Same for the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. The one thing I’ve found in common in those cases is that these were or are about wealthy White families.
  • Somebody please explain the why of the Murdaugh spectacle.

_____________________________

* You’re right: he only had 3. Check it out here.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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