Disambiguation from the political and social musings of Jack Altschuler

Democracy

The Canary plus The Good Old Days


This Is a Get Smarter Opportunity

We are sometimes given a gift – a chance to see into the future, if only we will look at what is before us. That’s what we have right now.

You’ve heard of the many democracy, freedom and rights abuses Ron DeSantis and his rubber stamp Republican Florida legislature have inflicted on the citizens of Florida. He has sucked up to as many White supremacist grievances, fears and hatreds as he could in order to get extremists to support his bid to become an authoritarian president.

His assaults represent far worse than oppression of Floridians: DeSantis and his extremists are normalizing fascism.

DeSantis’ actions leave us with an obvious clarity about what he would do to our entire country were he to get his hands on the reins of power. That is why I believe that

Florida is the canary in the fascist infested coal mine.
.

If you’re skeptical about this, read Thom Hartmann’s take. You won’t be skeptical anymore.

You don’t have to be a Floridian to be worried about this, because we see similar things happening elsewhere. That’s why I’m encouraging you to get smart about this, wherever you are.

My friends Jim and Karen Nathan have co-founded Floridians For Democracy, a group dedicated to protecting democracy in Florida and, by extension, where you live. It is to that end that they are inviting you to two informative Zoom sessions:

    • “White Supremacist Activities in Florida: A brave sheriff and a state representative“
    • Jun 7, 2023, 7:00PM EDT. Co-Sponsored by SWFL Voices for Racial Justice
    • and Concerned Citizens of Lower Lee County
    • “Saving Democracy” with Author David Pepper
    •                                                          June 15, 2023, 5:30PM EDT. Co-Sponsored by Floridians for Democracy and SWFL Voices for Racial Justice

Here’s a link to full program descriptions and the Zoom link to each session. Note that these sessions come to you without cost and they are not fundraisers. They are education that is offered because you need to know.

Make no mistake: this is not just about DeSantis attacking minorities or even just about Florida. This is about all the anti-democracy bullies all over America stealing education from our children, cheating Americans of their voting rights, reducing women to second class citizens, refusing gun safety and all the rest.

This matters to you because one day DeSantis and the bullies will be coming for you and you’re going to hate it when they crash through your door.

The Good Old Days

As the default/budget bill was being readied for a vote in the House last Wednesday, Ron DeSantis was pontifi-whining about it, stupidly saying that we’re going to go bankrupt. Other idiot extremist Republicans were saying similarly stupid, apocalyptic things.

They all long so dearly for the good old days when fiscally responsible Republicans were in charge and they never added to our national debt. That made me wonder which days those were, so I dug around and the chart below is the product of that digging.

The numbers represent the total each president added to our national debt over the course of their administrations. Harding and Coolidge delivered surpluses. All the rest gave us more debt.

Most notably, each administration added billions of dollars of debt until Reagan came along and ratcheted that up to trillions. He put six times more debt on the U.S. than his Democratic predecessor did. In fact, he added just shy of twice the debt of all preceding presidents combined!

You can blame his supply side economics for much of that. He truly was Saint Ronny the Reverse Robin Hood, patron saint of giveaways to the rich. Republicans still genuflect at the sound of his fiscally larcenous name.

Simple fact: In large measure our national debt is a function of both low and lowered taxes matched with increased spending. Somehow such debt, while a big DUH! to the rest of us, is not easily understood by supply-siders, who believe Tooth-Fairy-like that we will have increased revenue by means of decreased revenue.
.

George W. Bush dramatically lowered taxes while starting two “off balance sheet” wars. I still don’t know what that term means. He doubled our national debt over all previous presidents combined, including Reagan! Oddly, that failed to impress voters.

The debt Dubya left for us is hardly a surprise, given his wars and his tax cuts. What is surprising is how Trump managed to increase our national debt in one term even more than Dubya did in two terms.

The Dubya and Trump tax cuts for the rich cost the U.S. nearly $10 trillion and included tax breaks for yachts and private jets.* We’re left with the glow of enhancing the lives of rich people and with the bill they left for us.

Someone please tell me which are the Republicans’ good old days when they were in charge, were fiscally responsible and didn’t add to our national debt.

Take a look at the chart and see if the “tax and spend” label that Republicans like to staple to the chests of Democrats makes sense to you. Or the Republican claims of fiscal responsibility. Or the moronic belief in supply-side economics. If any of that makes sense to you, you will immediately be sent to a 3rd grade remedial math class to see if you can keep up with 8-year-olds doing flash cards.

Source: The Balance

________________________________

* It’s heartwarming to know that the new budget just squeezed out of the Congress cuts $21 billion in funding from the IRS. That was a critical thing for Republicans. Two points about that:

  1. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that hobbling the ability to go after tax cheats will result in $40 billion in lost revenue, resulting in an increase to the debt of $19 billion.
  2. Gotta answer this question: Why was it so important for the Republicans to inhibit the IRS from chasing down rich tax crooks? Hint: Can you say “donors” boys and girls?
  • 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.

    Click me

    JA


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

Thugocracy


In a stunning cave-in to thugs, Target, the retail department store, chickened out and pulled some of its LGBTQ-friendly merchandise from its shelves. The company has been offering such things for 10 years, typically in June, which is Pride Month. But stores have received threats of violence from LGBTQ haters, which puts both employees and customers at risk.

In a PR scrubbed statement, company spokeswoman Kayla Castañeda said, “Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior.” That is to say, they surrendered to the thugs. This all came shortly after Brian Cornell, CEO of Target, had bragged about company actions regarding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

I’ll say it differently: Target self-censored not because of law, but because of fear. Score one for the thugs.

We all understand the decision to pull merchandise that extremists apparently think warrants threats of violence. Both such threats and even violence itself are not uncommon experiences in the LGBTQ world. And make no mistake: threats of violence are themselves violence. But, Houston, we have a problem, because the thugs have figured out how to get their way using violence. And it’s worse than that.

Leaders in politics, religion, punditry and those performing public temper tantrums have instructed Americans to fear and hate LGBTQ people. People like Ron DeSantis, governor of the hate state of Florida, uses words like “indoctrinate” to make parents afraid of the existence of people who are different from them. With all that stoking of passions of hatred it’s little wonder that extremists have amped up both their violence and their threats of violence.

After all, we have politicians publicly encouraging the extremists to hatred and violence. Ask Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss about that. All they did was to be election workers and they were besieged with threats from the haters. The thugs banged on their doors, parked their lookout cars in front of their houses for hours in stakeouts and did even more to intimidate these women, to the point where they could no longer keep their jobs or even feel safe shopping for groceries. The thugs threatened them because Republican politicians lied, claiming a stolen election. Now those women live in fear all the time because the street thugs were incited by the Republican political thugs to threaten violence against innocent people.

Thugocracy. That’s what we have and as far as I can tell, nobody has a fix for this unless the inciters can be redirected or muzzled. But that’s a First Amendment problem that the haters deftly use to continue to stoke hatred.

And all the while they tell us they’re Christians. They hate and threaten and do violence just the way Jesus taught them, right?

No, not right! Jesus didn’t give any such instruction.

These false Christians do the kind of thing that Bill Maher warns us about. Some of the very worst atrocities in history have been religious wars or violence justified and incited by religion. Think: 9/11; The Crusades; our violence against indigenous people; hundreds of years of slavery.

Self-justification using religion is just the thing to justify getting one’s way and now it’s being used against LGBTQ people and Target by today’s thugs. If fascism comes to America – thugocracy – these guys will make great Storm Troopers.

If this progresses, expect lots of murders and your own self-censoring, as  you succumb to thugs, just as Target has done. Today’s nearly bare library shelves in some Republican controlled states have been made that way by self-appointed, ego-puffing guardians of extremist, delusional versions of correctness. The shelves will be restocked with new publications that have been scrubbed of anything that isn’t strictly White and Christian. The new books will contain nothing that even hints at actual history.

Just understand that this thugocracy business is real. It is vexing and it will not go away until we as a society demand that it go away and some strong and determined people strand up for truth, justice and the professed American way. You know: values, like democracy, human rights – all that messy stuff that makes our way of life possible. It’s quite unlike thugocracy.

Thugocracy Is The Official Platform

Thugocracy is the formally sanctioned, enthusiastically practiced, democracy crushing policy of the Republican Party. It smells a lot like fascism. See the next section of this post for more.

Their so-called negotiations with President Biden were in actuality designed to ensure that we will become the world’s biggest driver of economic and political pandemonium and its biggest economic cheat. Republicans tried to make this more likely by proposing to dump all the pain of budget cuts on low income Americans, which is now Republican dogma.

David Corn of Mother Jones, reports of their proposal that:

“The GOP position literally was this: We will allow the US government to pay its bills—which includes those run up by the Trump administration and a Republican Congress—and avoid an economic calamity, if you stick it to Americans who need help.”

But that’s just a bleeding heart liberal saying that, right? Not so fast.

Matt Gaetz, (R-Sex Trafficking Accusations) openly described Republican “negotiations” as hostage taking. And the budget proposal Republicans have offered refuses tax increases for the wealthy, cuts the ability of the IRS to go after high wealth tax cheats and it cuts programs for poor and middle class Americans.

And it is all done under the watchful eye of 20 ultra-extremists (not conservatives), any one of whom can bring down McCarthy’s speakership and all of whom want to bring down our government and our democracy.

That’s thugocracy in action by a Republican minority that has been given enormous leverage by a public minority of haters and grievance whiners.

Can you spot the thugs in this picture?

The Must Read of These Fraught Times
Thugs are working their fascist best to crush all you hold dear.
.

History Professor Heather Cox Richardson has found a way to get the message through to all of us. Her clear explanation is sourced from a U.S. government War Department pamphlet distributed to our troops in 1945, Army Times, Orientation Fact Sheet 64. It is titled:

FASCISM! [emphasis original]
.

Click me

There is chaos all around us, including the ongoing assaults on our freedoms and our rights and the minority control by thugs who refuse what We the People want. What do you suppose that’s really about?

Read Prof. Richardson’s piece quoting the original publication. If you would like to read the full, original 8-page pamphlet just the way our fighting men and women did when they risked their lives in 1945 to save our lives, you can find it here.

Course Note

To pass today’s course in citizenship and save our democracy for your children and grandchildren, you must know this material!

There will be a test.

  • 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.

    Click me

    JA


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

Cut The Crap – Part Two


Debt Ceiling Crisis Averted – This Time

Reports last night said that President Biden and the Republican hostage takers had come to an agreement such that the world economy will not crash next week. I’m glad, of course, that the sky will not fall, but I find it abhorrent that extortion has been rewarded. Again.

I would have been far happier to learn that the President was invoking the 14th Amendment, which would retire forever our foolish requirement to secure permission to pay our bills.

Immigration Crap

It isn’t about Title 42. It isn’t about Biden. It isn’t even about Trump. It’s entirely about Congress.

Dubya tried to get things inched along toward immigration reform, but Congress killed that. Reagan did a little, but it was a spit in the ocean of what was needed.

It’s Congress’ job to create immigration laws and rules and it has steadfastly refused for decades to do anything to make things better. Indeed, Congress can’t even deal with our Dreamers in any way other than to make them political pawns. That has allowed a huge train wreck of a mess to pile up and has stifled our national growth.

One hundred years ago the United States’ most hated immigrants were the Irish and the Italians. Plus the Chinese. And always Jews. Really, anyone who wasn’t both White enough and Protestant. Now the favorite whipping boys and girls are Hispanics from – gasp! – across the Rio Grande River. They’re – what are the words? – not like us. Most of them aren’t either White or Protestant. They are so easily Evangelically objectionable.

Sadly, immigration memory is short enough for most Americans to forget the hard, hard path of their own families and why their forebears came here. That makes it difficult for therm to empathize with those seeking something better for their children or fleeing death in their home countries.

There’s only one way to fix this: Congress has to do its job and

CUT THE CRAP!

Speaking of Immigration, Here’s A Crazy Idea

It’s so easy to claim the stupid and hateful replacement theory as a powerful tool of bigotry, but try this on for size.

We have an enormous shortage of labor in the U.S. and a tiny 3.5% unemployment rate. At the same time, we have an enormous number of people wanting to enter the U.S. to work. Maybe there are ways to fix this craziness.

What if we allowed immigrants to enter our country? We’ll give them green cards and let them work. What if we set them up with Social Security numbers and they were to pay taxes, just like you do?

We can hire immigrants for laborer jobs to aid in the projects that are the rebuilding of our infrastructure. They can build parks in blighted urban areas, build and renovate housing, plant trees in our tens of thousands of acres of burned forests and more. We’ve done this before. It was call the WPA and CCC, the CWA and NIRA and other agencies that put Americans – and immigrants – to work building America.

And under a formula to be determined (perhaps the one that allowed your ancestors to become citizens of the U.S.), we’ll give them a path to citizenship.

Maybe some of these new immigrants will start business. Maybe you’ll find a terrific job there. When we peal back the layers of fear and protectiveness and hatred, this is the story of America.

You get the idea. In doing such things we don’t just improve our physical existence. We also restore our national soul by ending the cruelty we condone and restoring the American Dream. And we gain new, patriotic Americans.

Too many believe that everything is a zero-sum game, where one person beginning a climb to a better existence means someone else is knocked down. But that just isn’t what happens. That’s never been what happens. Immigrants help to build our economy. All we need is the national will to face reality and for Congress to do its job and

CUT THE CRAP!

THE Major Case

There is grave danger in Raleigh.

Harper v. Moore is the North Carolina case now being decided by the Supreme Court. The substance of this anti-democracy case is whether states have the right for their legislatures to override the will of the people.

If the Supreme Court gives the green light, the Republican super-majority North Carolina legislature (not it’s Democratic governor) will be able to completely ignore its citizens. It will have the power to stuff all the ballots voters cast into a dumpster, set it on fire and send its own hand-picked, extremist slate of electors for president to be counted in Congress on January 6.

Yes, really.

This is as corrupt as Vladimir Putin’s elections. Instead of counting ballots he just makes up his winning percentage.

Effectively, that’s what the North Carolina far right extremist legislators want to be able to do. That paved road to dictatorship could have the blessing of the Supreme Court via its six far right extremist, lied-to-the-Senate-Judiciary-Committee justices.

Did I mention “anti-democracy?”

Here’s a short summary of the case from Wikipedia:

Moore v. Harper is an ongoing United States Supreme Court case related to the independent state legislature theory (ISL), arising from the redistricting of North Carolina‘s districts by the North Carolina legislature following the 2020 census, which the state courts found to be too artificial and partisan, and an extreme case of gerrymandering in favor of the Republican Party.[1][2]

It’s so hard to imagine that the Republican North Carolina legislature might do something so outrageous, so undemocratic, so despotic.

NOT!

It’s easy to imagine that because it’s what they always do.

Have a look at what conservative federal judge Michael Luttig has to say about this.

Now imagine that not only North Carolina, but all the Republican controlled states, tripping on the hallucinatory drug of authoritarianism, did the same thing.

The Court’s decision is expected soon. So, “Hey, Supreme Court:

CUT THE CRAP!”

BTW

There is a lot of criticism and hand wringing over Biden’s 40-something percent job approval rating. To put that into perspective, at this point in his first term, Ronald Reagan had an approval rating of just 35%. Trump’s approval rating never got out of the 40s.

Read of the Week

Of course you’re sick of hearing about the debt ceiling and the certainty of economic and democratic doomsday if we default via the fecklessness* of the insane Republicans in the House. They and this stupid, self-inflicted crisis over whether we’ll pay the bills we’ve already run up should never have happened. It began as lies and continues now in a master class of greed and deceit.

Read Thom Hartmann’s excellent explainer The Debt Ceiling is just “Two Santas” in Drag. You’ll see how We The People have been terminally duped by self-serving Republican dishonesty. Then let me know how you feel about it.

Quote of the Week

“It’s important to remember that the global autocratic movement is not solely about creating a traditional religious society; it is about destroying democracy to concentrate wealth and power in a small group of men, usually white men, who will dominate the rest of us.”

  • Prof. Heather Cox Richardson,
  • Letters From an American, May 21, 2023
  • You can find Cut The Crap – Part One here.
  • _________________________________
  • * feckless | ˈfekləs | adjective
  • lacking initiative or strength of character; irresponsible
    • – Apple dictionary
  • 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.

    Click me

    JA


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

Cut The Crap – Part One


Broken News

In a stunning display of muscular, applause sucking fantasies, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) announced that he is a candidate to become his party’s nominee for President of the United States.

He dutifully blamed President Biden for all problems, stopping just short of blaming Biden for mosquito bites. As significant, he claimed credit for everything that has gone well, including the things that most or all Republicans voted against, like the infrastructure projects they tried to kill, then went home and bragged to constituents about how they had brought home the bacon for them.

Cut the crap, Tim.

More Broken News

THIS PICTURE IS A FAKE

The May 22 AI generated picture of a FAKE bombing of the Pentagon (to the left) isn’t even a good fake, but it was good enough for Bloomberg News to pick it up. It went viral on Twitter and elsewhere and first responders had to show up before it was announced that this is a completely FAKE picture. There was no fire or harm done to the Pentagon or to any personnel.

The technology to produce fakes is only going to get better and we stand to be fooled so often that we’ll learn to distrust news reports, government – everything. That leaves us with this core question:

Who stands to benefit from the undermining of public trust?
.

Post your answer in the Comments section below.

Pig Troughs and Justice

We’re being played for chumps by industry and by political toadies who are in the pocket of Big Money. Here’s the key to what needs to be done for We The People.

Reverse the Citizens United decision – the one that reinforced the Boston v. Bellotti decision that legalized political bribery*. And while we’re at it, impeach Chief Justice John Roberts for

– lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee in his  confirmation hearing, saying that he believes in stare decisis (honoring past Supreme Court decisions, like Roe). Same for Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito and Coney Barrett

– lying to that same committee, saying (or implying) that Roe is settled law. Same for Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito and Coney Barrett – probably Thomas, too.

– and most egregiously, for causing the lawyers to return to the court following the CU decision on the case that was presented to the court. This time Roberts directed the attorneys to argue rights for corporations, something that was not in contest in the Citizens United case. That debasement of our system of justice and the Court’s decision on it gave corporations the same rights as people like you, including the right to give huge sums of black money to PACs that distort our election system in favor of rich guys.

In his dissent from this nefarious decision, Justice Souter said that in addressing an issue that was not raised by the litigants, “ . . . the majority changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.” Souter was right. This is a prime example of right wing manipulation of our laws and institutions for the purpose of destroying our democracy.

For all their wailing about spending, Republicans don’t want to touch programs that line the pockets of their big money donors. Instead, they want our poor and disadvantaged to carry the load. Here’s what that means.

McCarthy and his hollow-headed, far right extremists have figured out that the American people like Social Security and Medicare A LOT and that cutting those programs would be political suicide, so they want to cut other stuff instead, like veterans medical benefits and

” .  .  .  public health; food safety inspections; air traffic control operations; the administration of Medicare and Social Security; housing and other assistance for families with low incomes; education and job training; and scientific and medical research, to name just a few.” – Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

They want to cut everything that helps actual people.

Kevin McCarthy and his co-conspirators are trying to bring down the government of the United States in every way possible. Right now they are attempting extortion using the debt ceiling approval process to get budget concessions like those listed above. “After all,” they say, “spending is directly linked to our national debt.” That’s like saying that we can’t send a rocket to the moon because there’s that gravity thing on Earth. Moronic.

If Republicans were serious about wanting to trim spending they could have done so with their congressional majorities during the Trump or the George W. Bush years. In fact. with the support of his congresses, Dubya piled up more debt than all previous administrations combined. Don’t forget there were those two “off balance sheet” wars.

Both Dubya and Trump increased spending every year while cutting taxes for the ultra rich and thereby ballooning our national debt.

So, no, the Republicans aren’t serious about dealing with spending or debt. They just want to bludgeon Democrats by cutting programs that help people in order to prove how tough they are. They want to brag about their phantom fiscal responsibility and crash our government and our democracy so that they can take over in a fascist putsch. You know: fusing industry with government in a despotic rule over We the People.

Cut the crap, Republicans.

Because these industry representatives (meaning senators and representatives in the pockets of Big Money) will not cut the crap, we’ll have to dump them and replace them with people who will cut the crap. Repeal and replace is the phrase the Republicans like to use about Obamacare, so let’s use it for what We The People want – to repeal and replace these Republican industry toadies.

The replacements will be the same people who will create sensible gun safety legislation, will restore abortion rights, will refuse to abandon our most vulnerable, will honor and keep faith with our military .  .  . you know the list. It’s all the stuff that the vast majority of We The People want. We’ll only get it when we dump the bad guys who are doing the crap – delivering minority controlled tyranny – and replace them with those who will serve We The People.

BTWs

In case you were thinking Biden would get rolled by right wing extremist Republicans who want to hold our nation hostage, take a look at this, posted last Sunday.

And here’s a love tweet for Kevin McCarthy, who still hasn’t replied to my request for all those January 6 videos he sent to Tucker Carlson.

 Watch for Cut The Crap – Part two this Wednesday, May 24.

____________________________________

* From Thom Hartmann:

“The following year Richard Nixon put [Justice Lewis] Powell on the Supreme Court, where he personally authored the 1978 Boston v. Bellotti decision that claimed corporations are persons with rights under the Bill of Rights and corporate money in politics wasn’t bribery or corruption (as it had been under the law since the founding of the republic) but merely an exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech. Money wasn’t money: it was speech.”

And that “speech” is way louder with orders of magnitude more money powering it. Citizens United took that farther and wider and has effectively silenced you.

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.

    Click me

    JA


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

Potpourri v19.0


E. Jean Carroll’s Civil Suit

against Donald Trump for battery and defamation is nearly over. She presented her case and then Trump called no witnesses. The closest he came to testifying was in his deposition, played for the jury, where he defended himself by claiming that Carroll was not his type. That got me to thinking.

In his deposition he viewed a photograph and announced that the woman in the picture with him was his second wife, Marla Maples. He married her, so it’s safe to assume Marla Maples was his type. What’s interesting about that is that the woman in the picture isn’t Marla Maples. It’s E. Jean Carroll, who apparently looked to Trump just like his former wife. Apparently, Carroll actually was his type.

But if Carroll wasn’t his type, as he claimed, exactly what is the type of woman he likes to rape?

Four Proud Boys Were Convicted

of seditious conspiracy last Thursday. One key element of the conviction was that the leader of this group, Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, was found guilty even though he wasn’t on the grounds of the National Mall or in the Capitol Building at the time of the insurrection. That speaks hopefully for charges to come against the prime conspirator, who also wasn’t in the Capitol Building during the insurrection.

For now, we’re left with some pertinent questions. First, are the Proud Boys still proud, now that it’s clear that they were dumb enough to let Trump use them as his pawns? Second, will they still be tough guys after 20 years in federal prison? Third, when it all goes down on Trump and they shave his comb-over and put him in a cheap, orange jumpsuit, will the Secret Service still have to protect him?

This is the third successful trial for seditious conspiracy prosecuted by Merrick Garland’s Justice Department. This stuff moves painfully slowly and, of course, we’re looking for indictments of Trump, Meadows, Stone, Cruz, Eastman, Navarro, Flynn, Bannon, Giuliani, Powell and the rest of Trump’s band of co-conspirators, both in and out of office. Jack Smith won’t want to run afoul of the 2024 primary activities, so I don’t think we’ll have to wait much longer for indictments of the bad guys. So, stand back and stand by.

Various Republican Controlled States

are loosening child labor laws. Let’s see if we can figure out why.,

There has been a shortage of labor throughout our economy for years and that impacts our entire supply chain down to the service at your favorite restaurant. We’ve turned off the immigration spigot, so where will new workers come from?

We have cleverly decided that it’s a good idea for 10-year-olds to work the French fry machines at McDonalds. We have children in dangerous areas of industrial plants and lots more. And oh, BTW, making money may dissuade kids from completing their education.

Congress has refused to address comprehensive immigration reform for four decades and we are massively short of workers, so businesses have turned to the only people available. Our cowardly legislators would rather eliminate protections for kids than clean up our broken immigration system. They’d rather send our children to work than send them to school.

Ron DeSantis Is Protecting

not just Floridians, but all Americans from Chinese nationals buying real estate in Florida.

According to Ron’s plan, citizens of Russia, Iran and North Korea can buy real estate in Florida. So can Colombian drug lords, Guatemalan sex traffickers, convicted domestic American terrorists and mass murderers. Seditionists are welcome to gobble up land in Florida, as are mercenaries from the Wagner group, who are raping and killing innocent civilians in Ukraine every day in the name of Mother Russia.

But Chinese nationals can’t buy land in Florida, this for obvious reasons. Be sure to enlighten us about what those obvious reasons are in the Comments section below, because they just aren’t all that obvious to me.

The List of Justice Clarence Thomas’ “Indiscretions”

grows longer nearly every day.

Friday we were treated to the news that the extreme conservative Supreme Court justice whisperer Leonard Leo had funneled money to Ginni Thomas via intermediary Kellyanne Conway. Conway was then a pollster and later Trump’s “alternative facts” hyper-blabber. The money danced fairly-like to Ginni in roughly $25,000 increments and there is no indication that she earned it by doing anything of value. That leaves us wondering why that money got deposited into Ginni’s account and why it was passed to her in chameleon-like fashion.

And, of course, there was yet another Harlan Crow episode of generosity, as we learned that the child Clarence and Ginni were raising was sent to private schools paid for by Crow, this to the tune of something like $160,000. Now really, who doesn’t pay for somebody else’s kid’s private school? And Justice Thomas didn’t report either of those income streams, as required by both the law and basic judicial ethics.

Clearly, all the money and money equivalents lavished upon the justice and his extremist, tear-down-our-democracy wife may be legal and proper, however much verbal dancing that might require to convince us of such a thing. But this stuff, along with Justice Alito’s and Chief Justice Roberts’ relationships with money look suspicious and all of this is driving our trust in this critical institution ever downward.

If overthrowing the government is the goal, one of the sure ways to motivate the people to do that is to convince them of the corruption inherent in it.

Allen, Texas, a Northern Suburb of Dallas

is now known to us much as Uvalde, El Paso and Sutherland Springs are known.

A bunch of people were gunned down yesterday and at least 8 died and 7 more were injured at the Allen Premium Outlet Mall, shot by a bad guy with a gun. He was at last stopped by a cop, a good guy with a gun. We’re sure to hear about that from the gun crazies over the next few days and isn’t it just great that good guys have guns?

But the thing about the good guys with guns is that they are always way too late to stop the bad guys from killing innocents. Given Governor Abbott and his supplicant legislature, surely there were a lot of good guys with concealed carry guns in that Texas mall yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, most of them likely had little or no training in using a gun. How much help were those vigilantes? For an answer, ask the grieving families of the victims.

The governor, US senators and a few more with way more testosterone than sense have sent prayers. But think about it: thoughts and prayers are always a miserable confession that we waited too long to do what needed to be done. And we all know what needs to be done.

Columbine changed nothing. Neither did Highland Park. The same for Sandy Hook and Parkland and Uvalde and the Pulse Night Club and the Harvest music festival in Las Vegas and the Tree of Life Synagogue and now Allen, Texas. Prayers were sent for all, but the victims remain dead and their families and friends are traumatized for life with a pain that will never stop.

We can rally and protest and demand, but the Republican politicians are either crazed by a false interpretation of the Second Amendment or they’re in the pocket of the National Rifle Association or both. They will never do anything to protect We the People from murder.

If the legislators won’t change, then it’s up to us to change the legislators. We suffer two mass shootings every three days, so dumping those puffed up cowards can’t happen fast enough.

Think about that the next time you go to the mall or a movie theater or a house of worship or a music festival or send your kids to school. Will you make it home alive? Will your kids?

Quotes Of The Day

Only in America can a once-in-three-generations King’s coronation plus the Kentucky Derby be upstaged by — what else? — a mass shooting. – MSA

Everyone has a right to own a gun, but it must be a musket. – DE

.  .  .  the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. – Heather Cox Richardson

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.

I’m So Old


I’m so old that I remember when passing the debt ceiling was just a box that Congress checked each year to ensure the full faith and credit of the United States. There was no conflating future spending with payment for past spending. There was no threatening of our economy. We just paid our bills.

I remember when abandoning world leadership, as well as abandoning our allies, was unthinkable, when Republicans insisted on muscular foreign policy and would never advocate for Russia or China.

And I remember when foreign autocrats, dictators and bullies were scorned and it wouldn’t even occur to a red, white and blue American to praise or emulate them, much less invite these thugs to deliver a keynote address.

I’m so old that I remember when promoting child labor or child marriage or defending statutory rape were unthinkable.

I distinctly recall a time when one country invading another nation’s territory, threatening its sovereignty and committing war crimes were universally abhorred, especially by Republicans, who would never condone, much less praise such actions.

I remember clearly when lying about voting fraud and election results were bad things and when actively promoting such lies was seen as treachery.

I remember a time when making death threats against fellow citizens was unacceptable.

I’m so old that I remember when there were profiles in courage to write about in books. And books were good things that only evil despots banned and burned.

I’m so old that I remember a time when having more rights was a good thing and something to defend and protect.

I remember when Supreme Court justices were held in the highest esteem by the entire country, this because they earned that esteem.

I’m so old that I remember when a president of the United States would never deny the reality of a deadly pandemic for months, then prescribe treatments that had absolutely no efficacy and some which would kill patients immediately. No president would accuse and ridicule our dedicated public health experts or reduce testing in order to make his numbers look better, all leading to over a million dead Americans.

There was even a time when a politician accused of crimes and about to be indicted for several more couldn’t possibly collect endorsements for his candidacy for the next election for president. And the notion of running for the presidency from a prison cell would have been universally considered absurd.

I distinctly recall when a mass shooting was murder, as were shooting someone who rang the wrong doorbell or who got into the wrong car or who pulled into the wrong driveway. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone then that such shootings were someone exercising Second Amendment rights or that “stand your ground” meant that it’s okay to just blast away. Back then private citizens possessing weapons of war was unthinkable.

I remember when both major political parties had clearly stated policies and program ideas to implement those policies and they negotiated to find a way forward. It was all based on agreed upon facts and observable reality. How quaint.

I remember when the American people weren’t so disgusted with politics that 41% refused to declare a party affiliation.

Click me for the story

I’m so old that I remember when committing business records fraud, making illegal campaign contributions, stealing government records, some highly classified, leaking top secret documents to adversaries, committing rape, defamation and numerous episodes of adultery, inciting a mob to riot against our nation in an act of sedition, soliciting vote count fraud and committing tax fraud were universally believed to be illegal and worthy of prosecution. Except for adultery, which is a civil violation.

I must be really old.

Quote of the Week
  • “Clarence Thomas has got to fall back. He is the definition of a cuck, which, if you don’t know, is someone who lets another guy pay for his mom’s house.
  • “Or, I know a lot of people are, like, isn’t a cuck a guy who watches his wife screw America? Either way, he’s gotta go.
  • “And I don’t think there will be justice on the Supreme Court until Clarence Thomas steps down and is replaced by Anita Hill.”
  • – Jena Friedman on The Beat with Ari Melber, April 28, 2023
Betcha you laughed at that last one.
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.

NO! v3.0


Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox

I wanted this case to go to trial to see Carlson, Hannity, Murdoch and the rest humiliated on the witness stand for their lies and their traitorous exhortations to sedition. That comes from the same driver as putting wrongdoers into the stocks in the town square in colonial days.

That isn’t just for the schadenfreude.* It’s for metering full punishment and sending a strong message to other liars. It’s a righting of the teeter-totter of fairness and justice over lying and cheating. It’s a re-dedication to right over wrong.

I’m not alone in that disappointment, yet there’s still a possibility. We may get the full meal deal as a result of the pending Smartmatic defamation lawsuit and the individual defamation lawsuits in queue against Fox and its larcenous mouthpieces. One can hope.

Shed no tears for Tucker Carlson for his departure from Fox. He will find a new White supremacist platform from which to spout his hatred and his lies. Let’s hope that he is penalized severely by the pending defamation lawsuits. Again, one can hope.

While We’re At It

Self-promoting blowhard Mike Lindell, the pillow pushing attention addict, just got his ears pinned back. According to the Washington Post, in August 2021,

[Lindell] claimed he had data showing Chinese interference [in the 2020 election] and said he would pay $5 million to anyone who could prove the material was not from the previous year’s U.S. election.

He called the challenge “Prove Mike Wrong.”

And somebody did just that. Then the guy applied to collect his $5 million. Oddly enough, Lindell didn’t keep his word and instead refused to pay, so the application to collect went to arbitration, per Lindell’s contest rules. Lindell lost and has to pay the $5 million. That’s the ear pinning.

WaPo reports further,

Lindell also faces a $1.3 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems and a defamation lawsuit from one of Dominion’s former executives.

That’s two separate defamation lawsuits walking up to Lindell’s front door and ringing his bell. It’s looking like this is going to be a very difficult year for Mike Lindell. O’ happy day!

While it doesn’t always happen on the timetable we’d prefer, what goes around often does come around. Watch for this same sentence following each of the guilty verdicts against Trump.

It’s a good thing when our justice system says “NO!” to liars and cheaters.

But We Need a Lot More Than That

In a stunning piece by Josh Dawsey and Amy Gardner in the Washington Post, they detail a presentation at a Republican donor retreat by Cleta Mitchell. She is a lawyer, a fundraiser and she was neck deep in Trump’s 2020 election steal BS.

She told Republican donors that they have to eliminate early voting, vote by mail, early voter registration, and most clearly, she says the party must restrict access to the vote for young voters.

That’s what today’s Republican Party stands for – repression of opponents. Not policies that help We The People or which strengthen our country. Not new ways to meet our challenges or move us toward a more perfect union. All they have is bullying, violence and repression of opponents.

The Republicans are losing old White voters at a fast rate and soon the oppressors will be overwhelmed by Millennials and Gen-Zs, a fact which led to that exhortation for repression. Indeed, the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat 11-point election victory is evidence that our Millennials and Gen-Zs are the people we’ve been waiting for. That’s why the Republicans need to stomp on their rights and why we need to stop them from doing that.

It will take a lot of muscle to stop the oppressors and to protect our fragile democracy – our rule by all the people, not just old White guys.

Signing petitions is nice and protesting in the streets can be helpful and can feel empowering, but

ALL OF THE POWER COMES FROM THE VOTING BOOTH!
.

It’s long past time for tens of millions more of our voices to be heard from that powerful place saying, “NO!” Mark your calendar to do that on November 5, 2024.

A Little List of “NO!s”

Rachel Maddow’s A-Block story last Monday was about right wing broadcasters beginning with Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. He had what was far and away the largest broadcast audience ever. He spewed antisemitism, anti-democracy, calls to violence and at last the embrace of fascism. Then his plug was pulled.

Modern day right wing broadcasters have included Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones and yet more spewers. Each was at the top, right until they weren’t. Tucker Carlson is the latest right winger to fly high and then crash. Maddow’s report got me to thinking.

Other than their dedication to themselves, what these men have in common is a fountain of hatred. They stoked fear and hatred of the “other” and they fomented hatred in their audiences.

Sad but true: Fox News will have no difficulty finding a suitable White supremacist to replace Carlson and who will continue the hatred broadcasts that feed the fire in their audience and keep advertisers buying airtime.

That leads to Number 1 on our

Little List of “NO!”s
.
  1. “NO!” to the haters and the discriminators – you know who they are
  2. “NO!” to the liars and cheaters – you know who they are, too
  3. “NO!” to attacks on abortion services
  4. “NO!” to debt ceiling hostage taking extortionists
  5. “NO!” to cuts to SNAP (food stamps) and to Medicaid and to other programs that help our poor
  6. “NO!” to cuts to veterans’ benefits
  7. “NO!” to gerrymandering
  8. “NO!” to de-funding fighting the fentanyl/opioid crisis
  9. “NO!” to all voting suppression actions
  10. “NO!” to all who oppose gun safety improvement
  11. “NO!” to systemic wealth inequity practices
  12. “NO!” to fascism and autocracy
  13. “NO!” to school vouchers
  14. “NO!” to attacks on our democracy
  15. “NO!” to glorification of the Confederacy
  16. “NO!” to the NRA and its cowardly army of sycophants in Congress and statehouses
  17. “NO!” to the book burners and the enemies of education, learning, knowledge, truth and reality
  18. “NO!” to suppressing the teaching of the full American history
  19. “NO!” to Trump and Trump wannabees. I can’t believe it’s necessary to write that.
  20. “NO!” to judges blocking our federal agencies from doing what we created them to do, like protecting our air and water and vetting our medications
  21. “NO!” to attacks on citizen-led ballot measures like the one proposed by democracy thieves in Ohio right now
  22. “NO!” to global warming and climate crisis deniers
  23. “NO!” to those who opposed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, three sweeping laws that include investments in transportation and clean energy and that aim to promote American manufacturing of things like memory chips and electric vehicle components, and laws protecting same-sex marriage and cancelling student debt.

Fun Game: List all the Republican policies that deal with our challenges and help us to be a better country.

Okay. See if you can list just one.

Put your additions to this “NO!” list in the Comments section below.

___________________________

  • * schadenfreude – noun: pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune
  •      Apple Dictionary, v2.3.0 (284)
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.

Nixon Resigns – Then and Today


After the flood of lying, cheating, whining, denying, abandoning of his criminally loyal co-conspirators and all the rest of the cover up deceit, we at last learned for certain that Nixon had lied when he declared, “I am not a crook.” His “opening of China” might have been a good thing in itself and it might have been useful to make him look like he was a world statesman, but he lied. He lied about everything, especially the crook part.

It took a lot to get to that camel-load collapse to resignation, the final straw of which was the Supreme Court deciding against his hording of evidence. He was begging and pleading that the subpoena for his secret tapes be quashed because of some imagined presidential right to keep the incriminating materials out of the hands of Congress. “Nope,” the Justices unanimously said. The president has no privilege when the items in question are part of a criminal cover up.

Poof! Nixon’s protection from the disclosure of his wrongdoing dissolved with just a few signatures. All of it, except for the magically missing 18 minutes of recording that his ever faithful secretary, Rose Mary Woods, erased via gymnastic contortions. Choose your own description of what key evidence disappeared through her supposed abuse of her transcription device.

But with that Supreme Court decision it just wasn’t tenable for Republicans to stand by their felon, so Sen. Barry Goldwater and a few more Republican senators paid a visit to the Oval Office. They made it clear that they would vote to convict Nixon in an impeachment trial. The headline above is what happened next. Nixon got out of Dodge just ahead of the jury.

We can imagine that those senators were imbued with fine, upstanding moral convictions. It may be that they saw their duty to the Constitution and to their constituents and uprightly insisted upon honoring that duty.

And we can also look at the pragmatics of the situation and recognize that the vast majority of Americans were sick of the demoralizing spectacle of inane presidential excuses and the plodding pace of Congress in the face of his obvious criminality. We wanted Nixon gone.

Failure of the senators to make that happen by continuing to support Nixon was just not a good re-election strategy for Republican legislators who craved re-election, so they were forced to tell Nixon the truth: they would dump him in a public vote. I suspect that the dumping was less an exercise in doing the right thing and more an exercise in self-preservation. Voters have a way of making the path to lose an election quite clear.

Here’s the connective tissue to today.

We have over 6 years of elected Republicans succumbing to a plague of self-deception. It’s a near certainty that most of them know better, but they refuse to speak out against Trump and extremism, and they do so for practical reasons.

We’ve seen that those who did speak out lost their primary races to radical candidates, so staying mum about Trump or any extremist is a fine primary election strategy for Republicans with Wimpy Spine Syndrome. After all, it’s the extremist voters who show up in Republican primaries. Moral rectitude has no place there, it seems.

It was the voters, We The People, who at last forced the stalwart Nixon supporters to do the right thing 50 years ago.

And it is the voters, We The People, who, conversely, haven’t turned out to vote in big enough numbers to defeat the crazies and to ensure that our rights, our democracy and our Constitution are protected and defended. It is our failure to vote that has kept a minority of extremists in power over all of us.

Yes, it’s pleasing to blame and castigate Trump and his wild-eyed, angry sycophants worshiping at the Shrine of Hatred, but we are the ones who put them in a place to harm us all. The remedy for this terrible disease is as plain to see as it can be.

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.

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.

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