Liz Cheney's warning, Lindsey Graham's bullshit response...

 Liz Cheney recently said that, with the 2024 election coming up and the possibility of another Trump presidency, America would be "sleepwalking into dictatorship." That is as true an assessment of where America is right now as I have ever heard. A second Trump administration would be all about revenge, and destruction of institutions that preserve democracy. If you're foolish enough to think that Democrats are weaponizing the government, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Lindsey Graham was asked about Liz Cheney's statement, and he responded with his own spiel of highly dangerous statements.

He said that the "continuation of the Biden presidency would be a disaster," and jabbered on with nonsense about "broken borders," saying that the only person who could fix the borders is Donald Trump. One problem that we have in America now is that Republicans spew crazy, scary statements that are not in the least true: Democrats are for open borders; the economy is the worst it's been in American history. These are outright lies, but they scare the credulous, low information citizen.

Scary lies are part of the Trump playbook. He claims that, in the less than four years of Biden's presidency, Washington DC has deteriorated beyond recognition. That claim is not only ridiculous (and impossible), but very rich from the man whose final days in office left the Capitol building with property damage and shit-smeared walls.

But, back to Graham's bullshit. He blames the situations in both Ukraine and Israel on Biden's weakness. "Hamas is afraid of Trump." I doubt it. If Hamas is not afraid of Israel's ultra-right-wing government, I doubt they even give Trump a second thought. And Putin, far from being afraid of Trump, used him as a sock puppet. If Trump had been in office when Putin invaded Ukraine, we would have supplied no weapons to Ukraine, because Trump would have sided with Putin.

Graham's final statement on the matter was that, after a second Biden term, "We won't recognize America, and the world will truly be on fire."

Lindsey, I don't recognize America now, and that's the problem. Today's Republicans care nothing for democracy, and embrace authoritarianism. And authoritarian governments, from Russia to the former government of Bolsonaro's Brazil, and now joined by the Netherlands and Argentina, are the ones who have set the world on fire and have no interest in putting the fire out.

I think Democrats now know that abortion is a winning issue.

There was a scare a few days back when some polls indicated that Biden's support among young voters was eroding badly. Heck, I was scared. I don't know if I should have been, but I was scared. I was going to write an urgent blog about how the 2024 election wasn't about whether Biden is too old, or whether he's boring, or whether he's not far enough to the left. The point is that a Republican president on January 20, 2025, whether it's the Former Guy, or one of his current primary opponents, is the next step toward the end of democracy in America. Anyhow, I was afraid that some low-information voters might stay home because they didn't understand the stakes.

This week's off-year elections heartened me. It's plain that the draconian abortion laws in red states, and the threat of a national law banning abortion, scared Democrats (and some Republican women, too, I shouldn't wonder) to death. I say that guaranteeing women's reproductive freedom in the United States is not only obviously a worthy goal, but that it will bring Democrats to the polls in 2024.

That second paragraph is really all I had to say on the subject, and you could stop there, or you could continue to listening to me babbling a little bit longer. Many opponents to abortion think it's murder, and while I disagree, I can see that most of them are probably sincere in advancing that argument. What really has flabbergasted me is the accompanying attack on birth control. I can see no merit to that position at all, and I really think that it's motivated by religious dogma that seeks to keep women subservient to men. God forbid that women should be free to run their own sex lives.

I know that politicians on the right, including and especially Rick Santorum, would argue that birth control is unnatural and goes against the will of God. Well, Rick, as I've said before, human flight is "unnatural," too, but it doesn't keep our Catholics and evangelicals out of airplanes.

While I'm at it, if anything is unnatural, it is sexual abstinence. Young humans are designed to want to fuck like bunnies. And while I agree that care should be taken about whom one has sex with, and when one should start, the availability of reliable birth control solutions will prevent a lot of the unhappiness that often results from unwanted pregnancy. But I imagine that, for some, the issue is not their children's happiness, but their control over their children's lives.

A Dominionist is now Speaker of the House of Representatives

As Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson (R-LA) is dangerously close to being in the White House, and maybe even more dangerous in his new position. So, what's my problem with the man?

As a lawyer, he has worked for reversing Lawrence v. Texas (a decision that keeps the government out of your bedroom); supported sodomy laws (that would put the government in your bedroom to make sure you're not a homosexual); and defended the Ark Encounter theme park when they lost tax breaks because they made belief in Young Earth creationism a condition for employment.

The organization he founded was called Freedom Guard, but you can see from his legal work that his definition of freedom is quite narrow, and actually makes people less free.

He voted to overturn the 2020 election results, and against a national commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection. So much for supporting free elections and the Constitution.

He was Donald Trump's choice for Speaker.

His remarks on becoming Speaker included: "I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority." A belief in being ordained by God might lead a politician to think that anything he happens to want to do is OK, because God told them to.

He believed, and repeated, Trump's cockamamie conspiracy theory that Dominion voting machines were rigged, and that they came from Hugo Chavez's Venezuela. Never mind that Hugo Chavez had been dead since 2013.

He supports a national abortion ban. A fetus has more rights than the woman carrying it.

He is on the same page as Trump on the subject of windmills: living too near a wind turbine could cause "depression and cognitive dysfunction." Notice the use of scientific-sounding words by a person who is against science. He gets lots of donations from the oil and gas industry in return.

He has added the teaching of evolution to the long list of causes for school shootings, a long list that does not include easy access to guns.

He favors the reintroduction of prayer in public schools.

His beliefs on church and state separation have been influenced by pseudo-historian David Barton. He has said that the "word of God is, of course, the ultimate source of all truth," and claims that the United States is the only nation founded upon a "religious statement of faith." Which is untrue in two ways: first, there are surely many countries in history (and currently) that were founded on religious grounds; second, the United States is not one of them. Indeed, Mr. Johnson's freedom to worship as an evangelical is a direct consequence of the Constitution's not mentioning Christianity as a founding principle. The evangelicals of the time, fearing persecution by the Anglicans of Virginia and the Puritans of Massachusetts, voted with the Deists to not establish any religion as the official one.

Read this and remember: The only guarantee of religious freedom is the separation of church and state.

Christian nationalism is a killer of freedom, and a suffocator of scientific understanding. There are way too many Christian nationalists in government, and Mike Johnson is too near the top.

Running for President in the first place was Trump's biggest mistake.

Trump's little racket might have gone on indefinitely had he not exposed who he is on the world stage. Back in 2016, it was plain to me that, as President, Trump would fail spectacularly in front of everyone. What didn't occur to me was just how messy it would be.

I couldn't have predicted how many people Trump could hurt in four years, between COVID and January 6. I also would never have guessed that so many people would continue to believe in him after the mess he made of everything. But faith is a stubborn thing, and people will lie to themselves and others in order not to lose it. Perhaps there will be a Church of Trump after his death.

Now his life of fraud has caught up to him in New York, and he and his company may well be banned from ever doing business in New York again. His famed business acumen should, by now, be exposed as just as big a lie as his claim about the crowd size at his inauguration and his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Letitia James's lawsuit against him has succeeded, and the legal walls are closing in on him in various criminal cases.

He never should have entered the bright light that shines on every politician.

Republican lies, ongoing...

 My first school had two classrooms, which accommodated our town's first and second grade. I lived about a block from the school and, just like the other kids, I walked. Every morning before the school day began, we kids gathered in the playground and played. Every morning, one boy or another would claim, "I was the first one here today!" That claim was always followed by a chorus of other boys, all swearing that they had arrived first. I was puzzled by this. Not having gotten to the playground first, I could never know the true answer. But I had a solution.

One day, I resolved to be the first arrival; then I could settle the question once and for all. I set off very early to make sure I'd be the winner. After a few other kids had arrived, I announced, "I was the first one here this morning!" The usual chorus of other boys followed. Truth, apparently, was not the point. It was the boast that was important. Perhaps the loudest voice set the narrative, but of course, the narrative was useless where the truth was concerned. The only kids who knew the truth would be the first and second kids to arrive.

Maybe a lot of those other kids are now members of the Republican Party. I don't know, but I'm betting.

Anyhow, that prologue is my lead-in to Republican reactions to Donald Trump's third indictment, the big one: Trump's alleged efforts to hold onto power after he lost the 2020 election.

Now, much of the 2020 election drama took place in full view of everyone, but that doesn't seem to keep politicians from lying about it, or members of the Republican "base" from believing the lies.

Representative Elise Stefanik has hitched her wagon to Trump and the MAGA cause in a big way.

"Today is yet another dark day in America as Joe Biden continues to weaponize his corrupt Department of Justice against his leading political opponent."

Anyone paying attention is aware that the House Republicans are really trying to make something out of the Hunter Biden scandal. A scandal it is, but it's nowhere near big enough to provide a counter-narrative to Trump's attempts to nullify a free and fair election. And that's before you mention his other two indictments (so far). But, as with Hillary Clinton's emails, they're trying their best to make the scandal look bigger than it is, and bigger than Trump's. It's like comparing a spilled garbage can to a toxic waste dump. But they still attempt to present the two scandals as of equal importance. Elise Stefanik again:

"It's no coincidence that the day after a federal judge throws out Hunter Biden's corrupt, sweetheart plea bargain, Biden's weaponized [Department of Justice] continues its witch hunt against President Trump."

Yes, turn your attention to the real danger to our republic. Let's not be distracted by this trivial indictment. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hammers home the same two pieces of the narrative: the indictment's timing was deliberately to distract us from the real Scandal of the Century, Hunter Biden's business deals; and Joe Biden's supposed use of the Department of Justice to neutralize his nearest political opponent.

"And just yesterday a new poll showed President Trump is without a doubt Biden's leading political opponent. Everybody in America could see what was going to come next: DOJ's attempt to distract from the news and attack the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, President Trump."

Well, you guys can continue to call him President Trump if you like. I prefer "the former guy."

And speaking of the former guy, he had things to say about the latest indictment after he had pleaded not guilty. Some of them were doozies. Nobody can out-lie TFG.

"This is a very sad day for America. And it was also very sad driving through Washington, DC, seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti."

I hadn't known that there was no graffiti in Washington, DC, while Trump was in office. You learn something new every day. I had noticed that the Capitol building sustained some damage on January 6, 2021.

"This is not the place that I left. It's a very sad thing to see it."

And it's an amazement to us all just how fast a city can disintegrate. But, Donnie, DC is already a better place since your departure. Your rioters damaged the Capitol building, so the damaged DC is, arguably, the place that you left. And to the extent that the Capitol has been repaired, and the feces scrubbed from the walls, DC is a better place than the place you left. And closing your tacky hotel improved the neighborhood, too.

Speaking of that hotel, there was graffiti on it while you were in office. It said, "No justice, no peace," and "Black lives matter." I'll admit that it was our side who made those particular graffiti, but I'm not ashamed of it. 

 

 

 

Core dump

I have not written anything in this blog since March. It's certainly not true that there's nothing to write about. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all that's happening in our world. Today, I feel compelled to babble about the current situation at some length. It might be a bit rambling.

We live in a precarious juncture of history. We seem on the brink of (or in the middle of?) a scientific revolution, with many mysterious questions about to be answered, many seemingly intractable problems solved, and amazing technological changes on the way. On the other hand, the planet itself seems on the verge of disaster. There's the tension: the promise of a golden age threatened by increased danger to life on Earth.

I came across a tiny item of scientific discovery in the current issue of Harper's, on the "Findings" page: "Engineers developed a material made of protein nanowires that harvests electricity from humidity in the air." Whether this engineering feat will prove to matter in our lives is unknown, at least to me, but the sentence blew my mind. We seem to be making astonishing discoveries in several fields simultaneously. The recent advances in genetic engineering (I'm not afraid of GMOs in principle) promise to be the key to treatment of diseases once thought incurable. Genetic engineering can also improve the nutrition value of various foods faster than traditional breeding methods. Technological advances in physics and astronomy promise to answer questions about the origin of the universe, the building blocks of matter, and maybe the origin of life itself.

Of course, we have the minus side. Climate change has proved to be real, and to be happening much faster than predicted. One indicator of the danger life on Earth is in is the decrease in the numbers of insects and birds. We have all heard of the collapse of honeybee populations, but there are similar declines in other species that many people are unaware of because they're of no obvious use to humans. We are experiencing the loss of coral reefs, the melting of glaciers, the worsening of storms, and the lengthening of the fire season. All of these things, and others, are contributing to the misery of more and more people and animals. Sea level rise endangers coastal settlements. Stronger storms and bigger fires increasingly endanger life and property. Soaring high temperatures are causing suffering and, sometimes, death. And we've all seen that polar bears don't have enough ice to rest on and hunt from.

So, I come finally to my point. In this time that promises both an explosion of discovery and an approaching doom, we (or some of us) know that a great effort must be expended to slow the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere if we want to be around to make these other breakthroughs. We know how to decrease the burning of fossil fuels, and have already begun to make the necessary changes.

But there is resistance.

At this critical juncture in history, our political life is increasingly under the control of the wrong people. Government is being starved of the revenue necessary to protect life and health from the depredations of corporations. So corporations contribute to the campaigns of candidates who will continue to cut taxes that could be used for the good of the general population, as well as enforce the regulations that are meant to make the corporations better citizens.

And that's not the worst of it.

So many of the politicians finding their way into office these days are purely destructive. Right now, they are banning books that they say will cause discomfort to their lily white, heterosexual children. They seem to forget (or maybe they just don't care) about the gross discomfort suffered by slaves and their descendants, and by people who were born any way they don't consider normal. So their children grow up with false ideas about history.

The people I'm talking about mostly profess to be Christians, and say they feel discriminated against for their beliefs. What is truly discriminating against them is reality. As we learn more about the way the world and the universe work, science chips away at their worldview. They want that worldview protected and are determined to resist the forces that threaten it. Their method of resistance is to deny that things that have been proven are true, and to claim that beliefs that are increasingly untenable are actually the truth. They know that they cannot prove their case through rational argument, so they seek to strike down rational argument itself. They insist that our government be ruled by God, as their political views are. If reality is not to their liking, they deny reality; and they insist that everyone believe as they do.

So, here we are in a time when we need to be guided by serious minds, and we are increasingly met with resistance from fascists and religious fundamentalists.

I don't pretend to know which way we're headed. It looks bad at the moment but, as Rebecca Solnit tells us, we cannot know the future, and there could be pleasant surprises tomorrow.

A very short plea: Ban assault rifles.

Grownups are supposed to know that the world is not a black and white place. The freedoms our Constitution guarantees are not absolute--they all have limits that are dictated by common sense.

The example that best illustrates this to me is the guarantee of freedom of speech, granted by the First Amendment. The cliche that applies is that you are not allowed to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, if there is no fire. You are also liable to punishment for slander and libel.

It is long past time for Second Amendment absolutists to realize that common sense shows that an unlimited right to own all firearms is responsible for a death toll that is worse than a compromise on certain weapons, background checks, and responsible licensing.

It is time for our absolutist politicians to grow up and face reality. 

Lie to me.

A long, long time ago, I asked why, if a person had to lie to advance their cause, they wouldn't change sides. After all, lying takes some effort, especially some of the elaborate hoaxes done by the misnamed "Project Veritas." These people are lying, and they know they're lying.

Some light was recently shed on this question by the revelations from Dominion Voting Systems' defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham all passed on the unfounded allegation that Dominion's machines were changing Trump votes to Biden votes.

When certain of Fox employees actually told the truth on the air, Tucker Carlson, among others, was livid. "Please get her fired!" was his response when Fox White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich fact checked one of Donald Trump's tweets.

The reason for this apoplexy was that Fox was losing viewers, viewers Carlson, et al, have long been fleecing for big money. How do we know these talking heads are lying? Because their behind-the-scenes emails have been revealed in Dominion's complaint.

In one of the most twisted statements you're likely to hear from somebody who lies for a living, Tucker Carlson wrote, "Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we've lost with our audience?" "Credibility" and "trust" were lost because some Fox News personnel told the truth. Let that roll around in your head for a few seconds. You have to lie to be credible.

Why are the lies necessary? When Fox was the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, protesters came out to shout, "Fox sucks! Fox sucks!" Such viewers are Fox's bread and butter. They beg to be lied to, and Fox is happy to oblige, and take the suckers' money.

So, perhaps the answer to my original question is that there are so many people who prefer the pretty lie to the sometimes painful truth. Organizations like Fox News and Project Veritas lie to them because it's to their material advantage. Because some people demand to be lied to.