Rights

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! v2.0


We Americans routinely let tragedy happen to school children, as at the Covenant School in Nashville and at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde and now at a Dadeville, AL sweet 16 party. Children are powerless to stop the murdering, so they count on we adults, we good people, to speak up and say “NO!“

This truly is a political issue, because stopping the murders will require our national collective will. Those who say we shouldn’t “politicize” our mass shootings are effectively saying we shouldn’t prevent the next ones. The result of that is that the mass shootings continue to happen and more children die.

Our politicians are dedicated first and foremost to self-preservation, which to them means staying in office. Some may have a strong moral backbone, but too many do not. That leads directly to “thoughts and prayers” and “This is not the time” and “We must not politicize this” and all the other miserable, spineless, self-serving blather of (mostly) Republicans beholden to the gun industry and Second Amendment extremists. And they get away with it because too many good people fail to speak up in the voting booth to say “NO!“ and vote out of office those who refuse to take action to protect our kids.

We aren’t the only country with wretched politicians, but we’re the only country with politicians who allow the murder of little kids to effectively be our national policy.
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Read that last sentence again.

Following their horrific trauma, the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School survivors declared “Never Again,” but the echo of their call to action fades until the next slaughter. Too many of we good people have allowed that declaration to be just words.

We’re 113 days into the year and already we have had 169 mass shootings, including murders of little school children and teens. That’s 1.5 mass shootings per day and that doesn’t include drive-bys, gun suicides and the rest. We kill about 45,000 of our citizens with guns every year. “Never Again” has devolved into “Ever Again and Again,” because nothing substantive has changed to alter our course.*

How is it that we don’t seem to get it? I’m wondering seriously whether to mobilize this nation against gun violence it will be necessary for us to be shown photographs and videos of the bodies of murdered little school children, pictures that show how savagely, brutally ripped apart their bodies are from bullets designed for war. Maybe the words “We had to do a DNA test to determine who that kid was” will mean more to us once we see with our own eyes why that was so wickedly true.**

Here’s a note to the millions of good people who don’t vote:

You’re letting this carnage happen.
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The same comment goes to those who vote for politicians who puff themselves up with their man badge AR-15s, as though that attests to their being true Americans or courageous or some pitiful version of Don’t Tread On Me. Meanwhile, they refuse to do anything to protect our children.

Do you think that it’s just a handful of Americans who are affected by gun violence, maybe just the ones you hear about on TV? See the chart and comments at bottom of this post and be sure to click through and read the linked report. You don’t have to be ripped apart by a bullet to be affected by gun violence.

Far too many of us have already been maimed by injuries that will not heal, like Trayvon Martin’s mom. And the Sandy Hook and Parkland and Uvalde and Sugarland and Covenant School moms and dads. And the people who loved all the drive-by victims, the innocents like that little girl doing a puzzle on her living room floor who was killed by a random bullet from a random gun fired by a random thug just because he could get a gun. It’s all the people who live with the pain and the horror for which there are no words. They are forever affected by gun violence.

We the majority don’t get what we want on this and so many other issues. Some of them are deadly, like gun violence. And maternal mortality. And immigration cruelty. And death  by poverty. That is entirely because the extremist minority votes and too many of we good people have refused to speak up with our votes.

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

Quote of the Week

Watch for “NO!” v3.0 this Wednesday, April 26.

_________________________________

* Even as Republicans like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) love to have accusatory tirades over violence and murders in blue big cities, 21 of the 22 states with the highest rates of gun deaths are red states. Jordan’s district in Ohio has a murder rate far higher than that of New York City.

The state with the lowest rate of gun deaths is blue Massachusetts, which also has the strictest gun laws. Do you suppose there’s a message in that, some guideline for what we good people can do to protect our kids and ourselves? See this post.

** From this New York Times Magazine piece:

After each new mass shooting, the question, the debate, returns. Would seeing the crime-scene photos have an effect on the gun crisis in the same way images of Emmett Till’s body in an open coffin had on the civil rights movement?

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.

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.

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.

Injustice


I’ve been asked to be a guest on a political podcast program. In preparation for the preparatory phone call (yes, I did mean that alliteration) the host’s questionnaire asked what my area of focus is and I had a hard time declaring that. I had never thought of self-defining in that way. Still, it was a worthy question, so I’ve been thinking about it.

Regular readers will have realized long ago that I wade in on many different political and social topics, like Republicans trying to destroy our democracy (they are) and ordinary citizens voting against their own interests (they aren’t – at least not consciously). Looking for a theme among so much variety has been a bit daunting, but I’ve had a breakthrough. It came via a recent Twitter post – more on that in a minute.

What I realized is that most of the posts that I offer, much of the passion and sometimes outrage in my gut, is in reaction to injustice – cruelty to people who deserve none of that,

like the War on Drugs, which was and is actually a war on poor Black men;

like the kaleidoscope of voting rights destruction laws and the perps who crush others’ rights;

like unjust, stupid and illegal wars, like Dubya’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which accomplished little more than getting a lot of people killed, displacing millions and causing yet greater chaos and cruelty.

That last was the trigger to my clarity, because I read Daniel Ellsberg’s Twitter letter last weekend and the dots started looking like a picture. Here’s why.

l graduated from college In 1968 and instantly lost my 2-S deferment, setting me up for a letter from Lyndon Johnson instructing me to show up for a pre-induction physical. Through a slightly engineered quirk, I became a 1-Y, which was likely life saving, as LBJ had ramped up our presence in Vietnam to 549,500 men. A total of 2,594,000 men were destined to become canon fodder in that hopeless war. I could have been one of them, pointlessly slogging through rice paddies with a bulls eye on my back.
.
In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg copied the Pentagon Papers and they were published first in The New York Times, then in The Washington Post and other newspapers. They revealed the ongoing years of lies that kept the Vietnam death parade going.
.
I don’t know if it’s measurable, but my notion is that his actions helped to end that war sooner. Perhaps some men slightly younger than me were never called to their pre-induction physicals because of Ellsberg’s courage.
.
He’s now nearly 92 and has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Here’s a link to his Twitter letter about it all, including the Pentagon Papers, his lifelong crusade to prevent nuclear war, his cancer and more. In the process of reading his letter, especially his comments about the Pentagon Papers, I came to realize that he was fighting against cruel injustice back then and, really, has been ever since.
.
That’s when those aforementioned dots crystalized into a vivid picture. It’s the injustice and the lies of the powerful that trigger me. That’s what I’ll tell that podcast host is my focus.
.
I’m no Daniel Ellsberg. I don’t know that I would have had his courage to stand up to the liars in and around government in that critical moment. The connection is simply about the clarity that came to me thanks to Ellsberg’s words and actions.
.
I urge you to click through and read Ellsberg’s letter. It’s about a life well lived in service to others. Those others include all the boys who didn’t have to go to Vietnam to die for the injustice of cruel and lethal lies.
.
Late Addition: Walgreen’s Update

From STAT:

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state would no longer do business with Walgreens in response to the pharmacy chain’s plans to stop dispensing abortion pills in 20 states. Walgreens now appears to have backtracked, saying in a recent statement it “plans to dispense Mifepristone in any jurisdiction where it is legally permissible to do so.”

That’s a turnaround, as Walgreen’s previously appeared to have caved in to threats from 20 Republican state attorneys general to sue the company for doing something legal.

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.

Guns, then Nikki Haley


Guns

After I had delivered a leadership workshop to an executive group we went to lunch at an upscale suburban restaurant not far from the meeting venue. I sat across a small table from a guy who had a pistol in a holster clipped to his belt. I’m not a gun guy and I felt profoundly at risk, but I tried to be cool about it.

“Why do you carry a gun?” I asked. You could reasonably expect him to have said that he carries it in case a bad guy shows up or an argument became dangerously heated or in case he sees a crime in progress. None of that is what he said.

He said – and I’m quoting him – “Because I can.” As in: because it’s legal; because the Second Amendment says he can. He was letting me know he has rights.

In fact, everyone I’ve encountered who is carrying an easily spotted gun and to whom I’ve posed my question has answered the same way. “Because I can.” It’s always said with some degree of chip-on-the-shoulder and with bravado bordering on defensiveness.

I can push a broom in a crosswalk on 5th Avenue – that’s legal – but the right to do so hardly explains why I would do such a thing. Same for the gun carrying business.

So, I leaned into my questioning of the guy across the table from me at that restaurant, acknowledging he does have a right to carry and asking why he would do so. I then got a series of statements that can be collected in a bucket labeled, “In case something happens.” But I don’t think that’s much more than a small part of his truth.

I think his truth is that carrying a pistol makes him feel strong and powerful and in control. While wearing his pistol he can wear his “Don’t even think of messing with me” tough guy attitude with ease.

He’s prepared to be a hero – the good guy with a gun who will stop bad guys with guns. He’ll be the protector of grannies wheeling their shopping carts across the suburban parking lot. He’s ready for a return to the Wild West when people believed that a good old fashioned shoot out solved all problems. Bummer he wasn’t on the Michigan State University campus that night to confront the murderer. Pay no attention to the kids who would have been killed in the cross fire.

That’s just one of the problems – the price we pay – for that guy carrying in order to feel strong and powerful and in control. Even if he really is a good guy – and I’m pretty sure he is – there are plenty of others who carry a gun for less honorable reasons than protecting those grannies and those students.

They carry firearms and always say, “Because I can,” as though saying so makes it sensible for them to have a killing machine strapped to themselves. But every choice has consequences. One of the choices we’ve made is to let people do that. One of the consequences of that choice played out in East Lansing, Michigan last week.

Nikki Haley

To her cheering attendees, rah-rah sign wavers and applause line clappers at the kickoff rally for her presidential candidacy race on February 15, Nikki Haley said of Republicans,

“We’ve lost the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections. Our cause is right, but we have failed to win the confidence of a majority of Americans.”

She was right about all of that – except for the four words about Republicans’ cause. The American voting public keeps telling them that their cause is wrong, not right, but Republicans act as though they’re deaf. Or perhaps they just don’t care about We the People.

Consistently, over 92% of the American public wants universal background checks on all sales of firearms. Half of all Americans want assault weapons, high capacity magazines and more to be outlawed. But Republicans block such legislation from coming to a vote or they vote against it. Republicans never ask Gen-Zs what it’s like to go to school feeling like they have a bulls eye on their backs. It wouldn’t matter if they did ask, because the Republicans aren’t listening to the answers. They’re completely wrong on this.

61% of Americans want abortion to be legal, yet Republicans continue to wave their holier-than-thou flag and oppose We The People. They’re completely wrong on this.

63% of Americans want universal medical insurance – single payer, Medicare for all, just like in all the other first world countries – but Republicans block legislation or vote against it every time. They’re completely wrong on this.

85% of the American public wants Social Security but Republicans launch sneaky back stabs to kill it, using dishonest, patriotic sounding names. But a theft of people’s security through Republican treachery remains just that. They’re completely wrong on this.

Haley is flat out – let’s call her “mistaken.” Republicans have failed to win the confidence of a majority of Americans and they keep losing the popular vote because their cause is wrong. And only gerrymandering, the theft of voting rights and the existence of the archaic, anti-democratic Electoral College allow them to win any elections at all.

Quotes Making The Point

“Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party; he revealed it. Ms. Haley, for all her talents, embodies the moral failure of the party in its drive to win at any cost, a drive so ruthless and insistent that it has transformed the G.O.P. into an autocratic movement.” [emphasis mine]

Also,

“There is a great future behind Nikki Haley.”

“Haley, like [Lindsay] Graham, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, and so many others, sees principles as disposable, making her yet another example of why the GOP cannot be trusted with power. Haley knows how to say the right things about how the violence of January 6 was bad, but to this day she refuses to hold Trump accountable, and so there is no way to know if she or any other candidate will withstand the antidemocratic demands of Republican primary voters. For Republicans in elected office, the GOP base is now so hostile to our democratic institutions that loyalty to the Constitution has become an unaffordable political luxury.” [emphasis mine]

  • Tom Nichols, The Pointless Nikki Haley Campaign
  • The Atlantic Daily, February 15, 2023

“‘Absolute Hypocrisy’: GOP Unveils Bill to Make Trump Tax Cuts Permanent While Howling About Debt”

  • Jake Johnson, CommonDreams.org 
  • February 16, 2023
  • Addendum

  • From NewsMax – click the pic

    On Friday, February 17 Governor Mike DeWine (R-OH) signed his political death warrant. He’s term limited by Ohio law for the post of governor, but whatever other political posts he might be interested in, they are now permanently closed to him.

  • He spoke in a monotone from the state capitol in Columbus about the massive train derailment that occurred in East Palestine, OH two weeks earlier, one of well over 1,000 derailments we experience each year. His message to residents was largely a pat on the hand, saying that it’s safe to breathe the air in town and it’s safe to drink water from the municipal water supply and its 5 wells.
  • That didn’t go down well for the residents of the town who were witnesses to thousands of dead fish in the Ohio River, or with some of their fellow citizens with significant skin rashes and respiratory irritation, or with people suffering from strange diseases that somehow coincidentally showed up immediately after the train crash. It wasn’t reassuring for citizens who use private water wells and who were terrified for the safety of their little kids. Nobody felt safer about the long term carcinogenic effects of the burning vinyl chloride that spewed black clouds over their town.
  • Note that DeWine did not drink a big glass of water from the East Palestine municipal water supply during his address to Ohioans. He appeared to do that 4 days later. There has been no reporting on his health following that drink.
  • His presentation came across as a limp-wristed cave in to the Norfolk Southern Railroad.
  • I have been a fan of this moderate Republican for a while, but that relationship is over. I’m on the side of the people of East Palestine, OH.

______________________________

  • 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.

The Best We Can Do


Disarming the Monterey Park shooter – Click me

Monterey Park, CA

After hearing an interview with Brandon Tsay, the man who disarmed the Monterrey Park shooter, Shannon Watts, Founder of Moms Demand Action, said,

“We are asking everyday civilians to stand up to gunmen because our lawmakers are too cowardly to stand up to gun makers.” *

You know in your bones that she’s right.

Here Are The Totals:  January 1 – 28**

Click me

.
  • All gun deaths                 3,244 – 116 per day
  • Mass shootings                   43 – 3 every 2 days
  • Children killed                    128***
  • Children injured                  297***

Those aren’t just numbers; they’re people. Like granny. Like your kids. Like you.

Is this the best we can do? Really?

Speaking of Violence

You know that Tyre Nichols was beaten by 5 Memphis cops and that he later died from that attack. You may have watched the videos that were released Friday evening. You may be tempted to share your horror with others by inviting them to watch the video.

Before you do, read this from Bear Bellinger of Indivisible. In part, he writes,

“Sharing the video is sensationalizing violence while minimizing the pain that it imparts on Black bodies. Share solutions. Share actions. Share outrage. Do. Not. Share. The. Video.“

So, hold on to your horror, your sadness, your rage. Your feeling that way and more proves that you are a human being with empathy, but that’s not enough.

“We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”– MLK

Is this the best we can do? Really?

It Ain’t Over

Here’s a graph of total Covid deaths since the first, then-mysterious one in February 2020.

Click me

As you can see, we’re continuing to raise the death count, now at the rate of 543 dead bodies per day – and the rate is increasing. Weirdly, the pile up of bodies has faded into national background noise, as we seem to have forgotten the over 1.1 million already dead – roughly equivalent to everyone in Dallas, TX – the nearly 104 million total cases reported (likely, there are many more) and all the suffering. The point of showing you the graph is to help you realize that this isn’t over. The war isn’t won. Not all the boys are coming home.

  • I’m over 70 and my age alone makes me a pretty good target for any variant of this virus. And it found me. I hunkered down with Paxlovid and got better. Then Covid came back, laughing at me for my foolish belief that I had beaten it. I think it’s gone now.
  • I didn’t like having Covid, but the point is that I’m still here and able to say so.
  • Thank you, vaccine people!
  • Fie on vaccine conspiracy crazies!
  • The majority of us took one or two vaccines, but only about 16% of Americans have taken the bivalent vaccine for protection from the primary variants that are stalking us right now. You need to get it into your head that you need to get the updated booster into your arm. Not tomorrow; today, if you want to avoid being one of the 543 tomorrow.
  • Did I mention that only 16% of us have protection against the new viruses that are trying to take us down?
  • Is this the best we can do? Really?
  • Congress
  • Fifteenth ballot winner for Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy (R-Hypocrisy), is convening a new select committee, which means he gets to select its members. It is the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (“HSS-WTF“).
  • Per Heather Cox Richardson,

“Yesterday in The Bulwark, Jill Lawrence explained that the true goal of the committee is ‘shoveling paranoia and distortion into the news stream’ to make right-wing voters distrust the government even more than they already do. David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida who left the party in 2018, told Lawrence: ‘It’s a drug they’re going to put out on the street for conservative media and conservative voters.'”

No surprise there. No surprise, either, that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Rabies) will chair the WTF committee to ensure it is a circus of hateful delusion. It’s just what he does.

Plus, McCarthy has evicted Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) from the Intelligence Committee and plans to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the Foreign Affairs Committee. He falsely claimed that Schiff and Swalwell had lied to the American people and that allowing either of them on that committee would compromise national security. As for Omar, Republicans need to punish her because, as is quite obvious, she is a woman, is of color and is a Muslim. He didn’t say that part out loud.

So, he’s packing the Intelligence Committee with far right extremists who tried to overthrow our government on January 6. All this is a matter of integrity to McCarthy, he told us. Seriously, he said that.

I figure that removing Schiff and Swalwell and replacing them with brain-free extremists will significantly lower the overall intelligence of the Intelligence Committee. My recommendation is to have low expectations of it.

As for the Foreign Affairs Committee, clearly, we wouldn’t want anyone with foreign experience to have a seat there. Good thing they ditched Omar.

That’s where the Republican majority is focused, even as we face a debt ceiling debacle.

Is this the best we can do? Really?

Education

Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and 2024 presidential wannabe, is doing his best to keep kids in his state ignorant and to polarize his citizens. He recently removed AP (Advanced Placement) African-American studies from the high school electives offerings, claiming it is not education, but “indoctrination.” That was his word choice.

It’s interesting that De Santis doesn’t consider AP French to be indoctrination. Neither does he claim AP European History or AP American History or AP World History or AP U.S. Government and Politics or AP Spanish or any other AP course to be indoctrination. It’s only indoctrination if it’s about Blacks. Stoking culture wars in a “one up, all others down” society: does it get any better than that for any self-serving extremist?

This is his latest move to promote ignorance in Florida, following his book banning and the threat of 3rd degree felony charges against teachers or librarians who so much as whisper words suggesting anyone or anything that is not straight – the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law. This has led to a new state motto flapping above the capitol building in Tallahassee:

IGNORANCE R US

.

In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

  • “1984”, George Orwell
  • Many thanks to my lifelong friend, Frank Levy, for the quote.

Is this the best we can do? Really?

Finally, a Chuckle

Of course you remember Hurricane Ian that devastated Ft. Myers, FL last September and threatened states all the way to North Carolina. I pinged friends there to see if they were OK – they were – and they sent the pic of Mar-a-Lago to the right.

Ian, was that the best you could do? Really?

_______________________________

  • * The only thing that stops a cowardly, bad lawmaker with a vote is a good lawmaker with a vote.
  • Elect good lawmakers.

** Source: www.GunViolenceArchive.org

*** Firearms are the Leading Cause of Death for Children in the United States, But Rank No Higher Than Fifth in Other Industrialized Nations – Kaiser Family Foundation

______________________________

  • 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.

The Through-Line


Last Sunday’s post dealt with the goal of extremist Republicans: destruction. They want to destroy democracy and replace it with autocracy – fascism. They want to destroy the Constitution and replace it with some tool of absolute power only for themselves. They want to destroy facts and truth and replace them with propaganda and self-serving fictions – “alternative facts” – which, as you know, are lies wearing an enemy uniform.

And they don’t care who gets hurt. That was perfectly captured by Trump’s soon-to-be-indicted lawyer, John Eastman, who, at the rally of insurrection on January 6, 2021, proudly declared, “We’re kicking ass and taking names!” I guess that works happily for the kickers, but not so much for the kick-ees. The bad news is that you are intended by the extremists to be one of the kick-ees.

This post is my promised through-line offering to help to explain this behavior, why the self-righteous extremists would want destruction.

I believe this is driven by a primitive, tribal fear of “others.” It is intentionally exclusionary of those not of “our clan.” It is a defense against anything different, anything that might upset what is familiar and feels safe. It is existential tribal warfare.

We pick up a major thread of this to use as example: our 400-year habit of persecuting Blacks. They are different, as White supremacists will have you know. We have bounced around hating many “others” over the centuries, too, including indigenous people (happily misnamed “Indians”), Asians, Irish, Italians, Jews, Catholics and more – really any group that isn’t Anglo-Saxon Protestant and even some who are. The problem now is that Whites are losing their place as our majority racial group and – gasp! – some of those other people have already secured some rights for themselves. Even women! If this is a zero sum game as so many believe, what’s a frightened White supremacist to do?

My stab at understanding this is aided by the pages of Andy Borowitz’s Profiles in Ignorance (see Fine Print #5 below):

“In 2020, Stuart Stevens, who worked on both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns, published It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. Stevens points out what few Republicans have acknowledged: the views that people find abhorrent in Trump make him not the antithesis of Reagan but his rightful successor. “What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to whites and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect?” Stevens asks.

“You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a white grievance party .  .  . Today, in the age of Donald Trump, the most openly racist president since Andrew Johnson or his hero Andrew Jackson (to the extent a know-nothing narcissist is capable of having a hero), many Republicans who find Trump repulsive or at least consider him abrasive and uncouth hark back to Reagan as the standard compared with whom Trump is woefully inadequate .  .  .

But in the area of race, there is a direct line from the more genteel prejudice of Ronald Reagan to the white nationalism of Donald Trump.”

“As for Reagan’s ‘civility and personal grace,’ as Peter Wehner put it, which Reagan, exactly, was he describing? The one who used racist dog whistles like ‘states’ rights’ and ‘welfare queen’? The one who said, of student protesters, ‘If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with’? The one who wished that California’s hungry would contract botulism? The one who permitted his press secretary to turn AIDS into a joke? The one who called African leaders cannibals and monkeys? The Party of Reagan seems pretty recognizable to me [now].”

The through-line also picks up grievances against government. “Government is the problem,” declared Reagan at all campaign stops and at his first inaugural. It moves that line through Trump’s efforts to undermine all government, leading the way to today’s Republican Rabid Rabies Caucus. They amplify America’s original sin in order to appeal to White voters. They pick at the scabs of both real and imagined grievances, giving people something to use to justify their tribal fear-turned-to-anger-turned-to-hatred.

It didn’t start with Reagan. He was hundreds of years too late to have begun that. What he did do is to pick up the ball that Richard Nixon had carried (his “Southern Strategy”) and run way downfield with it. That was “Saint Ronny,” as the myopic, “O’ for the good old days” folks call him, but there was nothing saintly about him.

Pogo was right

Be clear that this post looks mostly at the issue of race being used to polarize our citizens. The important part is that this and more were used to lead to a violent attempt to end our democracy, commit murders and subjugate our people. Worse, some of our elected officials participated in this attempted coup to destroy our country. Here’s a list of the 147 Congressional dishonorables who violated their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. They instead chose to surrender their honor and integrity to a would-be tyrant in order to serve their petty selfishness. And they’re still doing that.

History is full of examples of self-serving dishonorables who stoke fear and hatred in order to seize power for themselves. Our challenge today is that many of our dishonorables are still in positions of power and influence. They stoke amygdala stimulated fear and hatred of “others” – that primitive tribal thing – and seek to crush E Pluribus Unum.

That is the through-line.

I’m not sure that John Lewis was right when he declared powerfully, “We’re better than this.”

But we could be.

Finally, this Great Trampling of Rights is well underway by these tribal terrorists. That’s what all the destruction is about. If a right is to endure, there must be a mechanism to ensure it against these assaults. So, here’s a question for us and for our rights:

What is a right without a remedy?

It seems to me that the remedy is up to us.

  • __________________________
  • 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.


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    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.
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    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
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