“A good time was had by all.” John Buss, @repeat1968
The contrast between weekend events could not have been more glaring. All over the country, in cities big and small, as well as rural areas, people turned out for the No Kings event. Then, there was a very boring, sparsely attended military parade in Washington, D.C. Another contrast was the protest, which was peaceful except for a few Police officers who couldn’t seem to control themselves. Then, there were the political assassinations in Minnesota, where the suspect has all the components of today’s Republican Party and MAGA Domestic Terrorism. Minnesota Law Enforcement caught up to him last night, and his resume is replete with activities you’d expect of a lone wolf shooter’s wet dreams.
This is from the AP this morning. “Friends say Minnesota shooting suspect was deeply religious and conservative.” I think those two words don’t mean what they’re supposed to imply. The Pope is deeply religious without the need to kill and hate people who disagree with him. I’m not even sure how to define conservatism anymore, but it seems to be ever-evolving as we march backward to fascism. This man was a monster and could’ve been profiled as such if anyone was paying attention. I guess it’s easier for Republicans to demonize folks by color, ethnic background, religions not of their choosing, and women who won’t be enslaved. His actions and words should have caught attention much earlier.
The man accused of assassinating the top Democrat in the Minnesota House held deeply religious and politically conservative views, telling a congregation in Africa two years ago that the U.S. was in a “bad place” where most churches didn’t oppose abortion.
Vance Luther Boelter, 57, was captured late Sunday following a two-day manhunt authorities described as the largest in the state’s history. Boelter is accused of impersonating a police officer and gunning down former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their home outside Minneapolis. Democratic Gov. Tim Walz described the shooting as “a politically motivated assassination.”
Sen. John Hoffman, also a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, were shot earlier by the same gunman at their home nearby but survived.
Friends and former colleagues interviewed by AP described Boelter as a devout Christian who attended an evangelical church and went to campaign rallies for President Donald Trump. Records show Boelter registered to vote as a Republican while living in Oklahoma in 2004 before moving to Minnesota where voters don’t list party affiliation.
Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon
Lisa Leur, writing in this Morning’s New York Times, also states the sad facts. “Like School Shootings, Political Violence Is Becoming Almost Routine. Threats and violent acts have become part of the political landscape, still shocking but somehow not so surprising.” All of this has sent me back to 1992 when my toddler and I were stalked by them and continually harassed. They’ve been bombing clinics and horse barns and murdering health care workers. Timothy McVeigh would thrive in this environment. His type of people are just out in the open now. (“Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was spotted Saturday at a No Kings protest near the Torch of Friendship in downtown Miami.“) The continual escalation of this has not been difficult to predict. The FBI, prior to Yam Tits, continually warned Congress of the issue. The Republicans charged them with being politically motivated. They have evolved a completely useless definition of law and order these days.
“Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America,” the president said.
And yet the expanding club of survivors of political violence seemed to stand as evidence to the contrary.
In the past three months alone, a man set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s residence while Mr. Shapiro and his family were asleep inside; another man gunned down a pair of workers from the Israeli Embassy outside an event in Washington; protesters calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colo., were set on fire; and the Republican Party headquarters in New Mexico and a Tesla dealership near Albuquerque were firebombed.
And those were just the incidents that resulted in death or destruction.
Against that backdrop, it might have been shocking, but it was not really so surprising, when on Saturday morning, a Democratic state representative in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, Mark, were assassinated in their home, and a Democratic state senator, John A. Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, were shot and wounded.
Slowly but surely, political violence has moved from the fringes to an inescapable reality. Violent threats and even assassinations, attempted or successful, have become part of the political landscape — a steady undercurrent of American life.
For months now, Representative Greg Landsman, Democrat of Ohio, has been haunted by the thought that he could be shot and killed. Every time he campaigns at a crowded event, he said, he imagines himself bleeding on the ground.
“It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said of the nightmarish vision. “It’s just me on the ground.”
The image underscores a duality of political violence in America today. Like school shootings, it is both sickening and becoming almost routine, another fact of living in an anxious and dangerously polarized country.
Catching actual criminals is not on the radar with this administration. In fact, they’re doubling down on their anti-immigrant antics despite recent polls showing it highly unpopular. “New poll: Trump and deportations unpopular with voters, Dems up 8 in House vote. More: 60% see ethics/corruption problems in Trump administration, and the “Abundance Agenda” is popular (except zoning reform).” This is from the substack of G. Elliot Morris. However, the White House is not watching those polls. The AP has this report today. “Trump directs ICE to expand deportations in Democratic-run cities, undeterred by protests.” My guess is that he was pissed by the lack of interest in his parade and wants more cities to experience the chaos that he brought L.A. with marines and National Guard interference. This is reported by Aamer Madhani.
President Donald Trump on Sunday directed federal immigration officials to prioritize deportations from Democratic-run cities, a move that comes after large protests erupted in Los Angeles and other major cities against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Trump in a social media posting called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
He added that to reach the goal officials ”must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”
Trump’s declaration comes after weeks of increased enforcement, and after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and main architect of Trump’s immigration policies, said ICE officers would target at least 3,000 arrests a day, up from about 650 a day during the first five months of Trump’s second term.
At the same time, the Trump administration has directed immigration officers to pause arrests at farms, restaurants and hotels, after Trump expressed alarm about the impact aggressive enforcement is having on those industries, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
This seems to verify that Yam Tits’ policy depends on who he talks to last. Also, the police in most large cities are bad enough. Why up the stakes with military with no crowd control training?
Protests over federal immigration enforcement raids have been flaring up around the country.
Opponents of Trump’s immigration policies took to the streets as part of the “no kings” demonstrations Saturday that came as Trump held a massive parade in Washington for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army.
Saturday’s protests were mostly peaceful.
But police in Los Angeles used tear gas and crowd-control munitions to clear out protesters after the event ended.
Officers in Portland, Oregon, also fired tear gas and projectiles to disperse a crowd that protested in front of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building well into the evening.
This term has already been a lesson on why Trump basically runs every business to bankruptcy and begging to renegotiate the terms of his debt. Trump’s pet projects are massively expensive and have never been funded by Congress. As I mentioned last week, ICE is running out of funds. This is from AXIOS as reported by Britanny Gibson. “ICE’s cash crisis deepens amid immigration crackdown.”
President Trump‘s immigration crackdown is burning through cash so quickly that the agency charged with arresting, detaining and removing unauthorized immigrants could run out of money next month.
Why it matters: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is already $1 billion over budget by one estimate, with more than three months left in the fiscal year. That’s alarmed lawmakers in both parties — and raised the possibility of Trump clawing funds from agencies to feed ICE.
- Lawmakers say ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is at risk of violating U.S. law if it continues to spend at its current pace.
- That’s added urgency to calls for Congress to pass Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which could direct an extra $75 billion or so to ICE over the next five years.
- It’s also led some lawmakers to accuse DHS and ICE of wasting money. “Trump’s DHS is spending like drunken sailors,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the DHS appropriations subcommittee.
Zoom in: ICE’s funding crisis is being fueled by Trump’s team demanding that agents arrest 3,000 immigrants a day — an unprecedented pace ICE is still trying to reach.
- Its detention facilities — about 41,000 beds — are far past capacity as DHS continues to seek more detention space in the U.S. and abroad.
The intrigue: If Trump’s big bill isn’t passed soon, he could use his authority to declare a national emergency to redirect money to ICE from elsewhere in the government — similar to what he did in 2020 to divert nearly $4 billion in Pentagon funds to his border wall project.
“I have a feeling they’re going to grant themselves an exception apportionment, use the life and safety exception, and just keep burning money,” a former federal budget official told Axios.
“You could imagine a new emergency declaration that pertains to interior enforcement that would trigger the same kind of emergency personnel mobilization statutes,” said Chris Marisola, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and a former lawyer for the Defense Department.
“These statutory authorities authorizing the president to declare emergencies” … unlock “a whole host of other authorities for these departments and agencies [that] are often written incredibly broadly and invest a lot of discretion in the president,” Marisola added.
Everything he wants is a national emergency to this guy. He’s a toddler. Give him a blankie and a Nuk! I suppose we’re going to the courts some more for lessons in the U.S. Constitution.
One of the big stories that’s never in the mainstream news is that researchers are looking for other places to carry on their work, and Europe is happily recruiting them. France is making a big effort to attract the kinds of minds that used to flee to the U.S. for freedom, knowledge, and research funding. This is turning into something more than just a brain drain. It’s blowing up our entire Brain Trust, which is the number one thing we’ve excelled at in the world. We fund innovation and encourage it. Well, not anymore.
Nature, one of the two premier science research publishers in this country, has an intriguing article about the search to move researchers out of the United States. “Some US researchers want to leave the country. Can Europe take them? As the Trump administration steps up attacks on US universities and scientific institutions, the European Union is campaigning hard to attract scientists from the United States. But how many can the bloc take?”
In early May, European politicians and university leaders gathered in Paris at Sorbonne University to deliver a message to US researchers affected by cuts made by the administration of US President Donald Trump: move here instead.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, and French President Emmanuel Macron announced a 2-year funding package worth €500 million (US$571 million) to support researchers who want to move to the continent, as part of a scheme named Choose Europe.
Although von der Leyen didn’t name the United States or its president explicitly at the 5 May gathering, she said that parts of the world were questioning “free and open research”, describing that attitude as a “gigantic miscalculation”.
In April, the French government announced that money from the country’s €54-billion France 2030 strategic investment initiative had been set aside to fund international researchers who would like to work in France. Macron confirmed at the Sorbonne meeting that the separate €100-million cash boost would fund half of the costs of scientific projects involving international researchers moving to France.
We’ve already discussed how many US professors have left for Canada. Here’s an interview from the pair we featured earlier. This is especially true of those who specialize in research around democratic backsliding and fascist takeovers in formerly democratic countries. This new Interview from The Guardian. It’s authored by Jonathan Freedland. “Why a professor of fascism left the US: ‘The lesson of 1933 is – you get out’.” If only I could. I’ve even searched for universities in France.
She finds the whole idea absurd. To Prof Marci Shore, the notion that the Guardian, or anyone else, should want to interview her about the future of the US is ridiculous. She’s an academic specialising in the history and culture of eastern Europe and describes herself as a “Slavicist”, yet here she is, suddenly besieged by international journalists keen to ask about the country in which she insists she has no expertise: her own. “It’s kind of baffling,” she says.
In fact, the explanation is simple enough. Last month, Shore, together with her husband and fellow scholar of European history, Timothy Snyder, and the academic Jason Stanley, made news around the world when they announced that they were moving from Yale University in the US to the University of Toronto in Canada. It was not the move itself so much as their motive that garnered attention. As the headline of a short video op-ed the trio made for the New York Times put it, “We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the US”.
Starkly, Shore invoked the ultimate warning from history. “The lesson of 1933 is: you get out sooner rather than later.” She seemed to be saying that what had happened then, in Germany, could happen now, in Donald Trump’s America – and that anyone tempted to accuse her of hyperbole or alarmism was making a mistake. “My colleagues and friends, they were walking around and saying, ‘We have checks and balances. So let’s inhale, checks and balances, exhale, checks and balances.’ I thought, my God, we’re like people on the Titanic saying, ‘Our ship can’t sink. We’ve got the best ship. We’ve got the strongest ship. We’ve got the biggest ship.’ And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Since Shore, Snyder and Stanley announced their plans, the empirical evidence has rather moved in their favour. Whether it was the sight of tanks transported into Washington DC ahead of the military parade that marked Trump’s birthday last Saturday or the deployment of the national guard to crush protests in Los Angeles, alongside marines readied for the same task,recent days have brought the kind of developments that could serve as a dramatist’s shorthand for the slide towards fascism.
“It’s all almost too stereotypical,” Shore reflects. “A 1930s-style military parade as a performative assertion of the Führerprinzip,” she says, referring to the doctrine established by Adolf Hitler, locating all power in the dictator. “As for Los Angeles, my historian’s intuition is that sending in the national guard is a provocation that will be used to foment violence and justify martial law. The Russian word of the day here could be provokatsiia.”
Let’s read about a different angle.
The introduction to Chaplin’s speech is written on the SubStack of Oliver Marcus Malloy. Since many Holocaust survivors compare Trump’s pogroms to Hitler, it’s a good chance to see this classic movie again.
The Great Dictator (1940), directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin, is a satirical comedy that mocks Adolf Hitler and fascism.
Chaplin plays dual roles: a ruthless dictator named Adenoid Hynkel and a kind-hearted Jewish barber, who looks just like the dictator.
As Hynkel plots world domination, the barber, mistaken for the dictator, delivers a powerful speech advocating peace and unity.
The film blends slapstick humor with poignant political commentary, offering a timeless critique of tyranny and intolerance.
Meanwhile, Trump’s foreign policy continues to threaten world stability as everyone considers him and the United States as useless fools these days.
So yes, Reuters reports that Russia has entered the hot war between Iran and Israel, initiated by Israel. “Russia urges Israeli restraint, says Iran has right to defend itself.” Also reported by Reuters is this headline. “Russia says US has cancelled next round of talks on easing tensions,”
Russia said on Monday that the United States had cancelled the next round of talks between the two countries, an apparent setback in a process launched by presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to improve bilateral ties.
In a statement, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova did not say if Washington had given any reason for the break in the talks, which began after Trump returned to the White House in January.
We cannot afford a bimbo for President who drifts from one policy approach to another. It’s fucking dangerous to the country and to our allies. I usually have a strict no video of Yam Tits and defintely not with him speaking rule, but I’m putting this up. It’s short, at least. Trump is in Canada today for the G7 meetings. You can see the enthusiasm in the Canadian PM’s face as Trump announces he’s a “tariff guy.” He thinks the PM’s ideas on the economy are complete,x so they’re going to look at both. The PM of Canada is a fucking economist you moron!
Here are some links to follow the G7 summit.
From the BBC: “Trump says expelling Russia from G7 was a ‘mistake’ as he meets Carney.”
From NBC: Live updates: “Trump meets with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at G7 summit amid trade tensions. The president said he expected to reach new trade agreements at the summit.”
From Fortune: “G7 summit in Canada won’t release a joint statement as world leaders focus on not riling a Trump they disagree with.”
From AP News: “G7 leaders want to contain the Israel-Iran conflict, as Trump calls for talks between the countries.”
I guess we’re not the only ones who desperately want to get rid of him for good. I can only imagine what the footage will look like during the news this evening.
So, it’s continually raining here. There was a crack of lightning last night that made the sky white, and the sound was so loud that Temple, while scrambling to hide under my desk, fell out of bed. I’ve had to lift her back up to the bed several times now. We’re going to the vet this afternoon for her annual. I think she’s just a little store. She’s walking around the house.
The Rooster has a girlfriend in a house 3 doors down from me. She’s caged him in the backyard and fenced in with a thick horizontal wood fence, but he sits at the same spot every morning just to be close to her.
The outdoor kitty still comes for breakfast. I’m not sure if she’s bringing friends, but an entire cup of food disappears pretty quickly.
I’m still here in New Orleans. I didn’t make it to the protest yesterday, but here’s the one in the Marigny neighborhood, which is next to mine. Have a good week!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Good Day, Sky Dancers!I never wanted a week to end so much in my life as this one. I’m not one for TV viewing because reality shows are not my thing. There are very few movies and series that grab my attention, too. This time of year, it’s good to have the weather channel. You already know I’m a news junkie, but the news is more like a staged reality show than about actual events that matter. It also is getting too far into the Beltway gossip zone to be of any real use. The media is on a few stories like flies on rice. I searched for something beyond the Beltway jive talk today.
Today, Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put to rest a story at the Washington Post yesterday. I would like to think this will stop all the headlines out there speculating when and if President Biden will give up his bid for his second term.
The other big story was the Republican National Convention, which looked more like a North Shore Klan rally than a convention. The self-proclaimed ‘David Duke without the Baggage,’ Congressman Steven Scalise, even got a speaking spot. I questioned my affiliation with the Republican Party after the 1992 speech by Pat Buchannan. After that, I registered as an Independent for quite a while.
[17] Mr. Clinton, however, has a different agenda.
[18] At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no place for him at the podium at Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.
[19] Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: “Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” And so they do.
[20] Bill Clinton says he supports school choice – but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools need not apply.
[21] Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.
[22] Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
[23] This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
[24] The President of the United States is also America’s commander-in-chief. He’s the man we authorize to send fathers and sons and brothers and friends into battle.
[25] George Bush was 17-years-old when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school graduation, he walked down to the recruiting office, and he signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war. And Mr. Clinton? And Bill Clinton? When Bill Clinton’s time came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.
That time I got to see both President HW Bush and President Bill Clinton together presenting aid to the city’s Universities on the Campus at UNO. I was sitting nearly up front and even had a nice chat with a secret service woman. Where did those days go? (December 7,2005)
Needless to say, I voted for Bill Clinton even though I had previously supported Bush against Reagan when he pulled that stunt about Welfare Queens. If you haven’t read Josh Levin’s book ‘The Queen’, you should. Here’s an interview with him from PBS by Hari Sreenivasan from June 2019. Reagan used a criminal who was an outlier to slur an entire group of women, as detailed in “The True Story Behind the ‘Welfare Queen’ Stereotype.”
Hari Sreenivasan:
Josh there’s this “welfare queen” moniker that’s been used really to demonize entire groups of people. You go through this entire book and take a dive not just into that phrase but really that it’s based on a real person. She was an outlier while at the same time becoming an icon for a whole category.
Josh Levin:
Yeah that’s exactly right. Her name was Linda Taylor and she was identified by the Chicago Tribune in 1974 as a person who had committed welfare fraud while driving fancy cars, including a Cadillac. And very quickly after that she was given the nickname the welfare queen. And it was a nickname and a stereotype that really very quickly blew up.
Hari Sreenivasan:
You know it was a Chicago paper that gave her that nickname but it’s really Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail that makes that phrase such a household idea. How did it get from the Chicago paper into his speeches?
Josh Levin:
One of his advisers had found a wire story about it and Reagan was looking for kind of outrageous stories about welfare because welfare reform had been one of his big accomplishments as governor of California. And it was also something that voters were outraged about in the mid 1970s increased welfare spending at a time when the economy was really poor. And this idea that there were welfare cheats out there was something that created outrage.
Ronald Reagan Campaign Speech, 1976: In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veterans husbands. Her tax-free cash income, alone, has been running $150,000 a year.
Josh Levin:
He didn’t say the phrase “welfare queen” in his speeches he would talk about how there was this woman in Chicago who’d stolen as much as one hundred fifty thousand dollars in welfare money in a single year, which was an exaggerated sum. But there was such baggage attached to welfare at that point that I think the electorate really understood what he was saying and really knew what he was talking about. Welfare has been an effective talking point for a whole generation of politicians.
Me and the nuns at Congo Square protesting the caging of children and Donald’s family separation policy. (July 2,2017)
Now we have promises to deport and look up and one that is painted with the brush of ‘illegal immigrant with brown skin.’ They’re also developing a scheme of citizenship that would deprive citizenship for all kinds of folks that would actually include Melania if the law passed. This is from the page of America’s Voice.
Selected immigration components of Project 2025 are below:
Mass Detention and Family Separation: Project 2025 paves the way for mass family separation by eliminating important benefits for unaccompanied children and transfers the care of unaccompanied minors from Health and Human Services to DHS to allow for large scale detention of young children. The proposal recommends weakening standards for migrant detention, calling for mass detention in temporary structures such as tents.
Attacks on Dreamers and Parents of US Citizens: Project 2025 calls for the elimination of family-based immigration and DACA.
Raid Schools Hospitals and Religious Zones: Project 2025 removes prohibitions on ICE acting in ‘sensitive zones’ thus allowing raids on schools, hospitals, and religious institutions.
Suspending Due Process: Project 2025 removes legal processes allowing immigrants a day in court by expanding the use of expedited deportations to the ‘fullest extent’ throughout the country. It also gives DHS the authority to declare a ‘mass migration event’ and enact anything to avert it (e.g. scrapping all Title 8 requirements and automatically expelling migrants). The proposal further undermines due legal processes by allowing immediate expulsion of migrants in the case of ‘loss of operational control’ or USCIS backlogs which is caused by consistent underfunding from Republican officials. Project 2025 would create a show-me-your-papers style mandate and require ICE to remove, arrest, and detain immigration violators anywhere in the country and without warrant, if possible. The plan authorizes local law enforcement to participate in border security actions and penalizes jurisdictions that do not comply. The project also plans to remove oversight authorities from ICE and classify all USCIS operations.
Use of the Military: Project 2025 encourages the use of the US military to crack down on peaceful migrants arriving at the border. The proposal also considers engaging in war with drug cartels in Mexico.
Attacks Legal Immigration: Project 2025 seeks to restrict legal immigration by barring certain groups or nationalities from accessing work and student visas, eliminates DACA, family-based immigration, TPS, and visas for victims of crime, reduces asylum and discounts gang and domestic violence as grounds.
Yup, I am photobombing my friends at the Women’s March (Jan.23, 2013). All the Donald Cult probably thinks I doth protest too much.
These kinds of things happen when White Christian Nationalists take over a party and embrace a criminal, narcissistic, lying, and authoritarian leader. We’ve gone from a B-movie Actor to a Reality Show Actor who sure does a good job at Crisis Acting, too. I’ll rely on JJ to outline the absolute misogyny demanded by Project 2025. My point is that the RNC this year was basically the showboat for Project 2025. It was a festival of the Donald Cult wreaking racism, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism. Plus, the Vice Presidential nominee is a self-loathing hillbilly. His book is all about blaming poor people in Appalachia for the systemic problems they face. This is from Aja Romano, who is writing for VOX. “Revisiting Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made J.D. Vance. The bestseller proves Trump’s VP pick has abiding disdain for absolutely everyone.”
At one time, liberal and conservative centrists alike hailed Vance’s bestselling 2016 memoir of making it out of rural, poverty-stricken Appalachia, transforming himself from a tempestuous teen into a successful Yale law school grad.
Yet years on, Vance has undergone a transformation of a different sort, remolding himself from a fairly moderate professed conservative who once compared Trump to Hitler and wrote with disdain about the outer edges of the party into a would-be authoritarian.
That’s not to say Vance doesn’t have some nuanced and even appealing positions. His populist economic instincts are a running theme of Elegy, and today he makes deals across the aisle with Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But to understand his larger worldview, you have to look past his economic ideas to his social ideas — and to what Vance actually displays about himself throughout the book.
Perhaps readers in 2016 were eager to look past the book’s highly loaded subtext and overt classism, as the promise of a sympathetic conservative who could unlock Trumplandia for liberals was just too appealing. It also seems likely that readers loved the book because it confirmed all of the negative stereotypes they already held about country hicks. As a read on Vance himself, though, in the context of his subsequent embrace of Trump and far-right ideology, Hillbilly Elegy paints a portrait of a man obsessed with status — and brimming with contempt for just about everyone he meets.
Another one about J.D. This is from the Independent. “I’m from the same place as JD Vance, and there’s nothing to celebrate now that he’s Trump’s VP. We are both Appalachians, with eerily similar working-class backgrounds which JD Vance wrote about in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. Yet, says Skylar Baker-Jordan, our views — and our reactions to this attempted assassination — couldn’t be more different.”
Like so many millions of my fellow citizens, I watched in horror on Saturday as a would-be assassin came perilously close to murdering former president Donald Trump. This was not just an attack on him and those innocent people simply exercising their First Amendment right to attend a political rally. It was not just an attack on the Republican Party.
It was an attack on the very fabric of American democracy.
Political violence has become a norm in our divided and beleaguered nation. From the 2011 attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to the 2017 shooting of Republican Steve Scalise to the attack last year on Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, to this weekend’s horrific attack which left one of our fellow citizens dead, we are increasingly solving our differences not with ballots and votes, but bullets and violence.
Neither side in this cold civil war, now cataclysmically close to boiling point, can claim the moral high ground. Would that someone told my fellow Appalachian, JD Vance.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the junior senator from Ohio tweeted last night following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.
So the man they’re hailing as being just a good old boy is really just another elite enthralled by bigger elites. That’s what reality television has done with political reality. It’s made an entire group of people believe that a staged, scripted, false narrative wrapped up in a box with reality printed on it must be true. Let me show you some data rather than speculation. This is from Newsweek. This was published two days ago. The data comes before that awful RNC ho-down. “Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning Election Are Declining.” This comes from who once was a candidate and has worked campaign since High School. Don’t trust polls too far away from Election Day!
According to the tracker, Biden is favored to win in 534 out of 1,000 of FiveThirtyEight’s simulations of how the election could go, while Trump wins in 462. The poll also shows that the simulations indicate that Biden is on track for a three-point win.
The polling website said its forecast is based on a combination of polls and campaign “fundamentals,” such as economic conditions, state partisanship and incumbency.
It comes after a Presidential Voting Intention poll of 3,601 swing state voters by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, found that Trump’s margins over President Joe Biden have narrowed since June in two key states: Florida and North Carolina.
Trump previously defeated Biden in both states in 2020, while he held a six-point lead over Biden in Florida in a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll from that June.
This craziness at The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign. No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.”
However, he now only leads the current president by four points in Florida. The poll shows that 45 percent of participants plan to vote for Trump, compared to Biden’s 41 percent.
It is not the only recent poll to give Trump only a four-point lead in Florida. A June Fox News survey gave Trump 50 percent of the vote, compared to 46 percent for Biden.
You would think a few folks would be reading them just to notice the trend. But, nope. Not with a big dose of Potomac Fever going on. So this one from The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign, No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.” Notice how we get two for one here.
Donald Trump‘s campaign will attack the Democrats for conducting a “coup” if Joe Biden quits the presidential race, the GOP campaign co-chair told The Daily Beast on Thursday.
The former president’s campaign for president will try to throw the charge leveled at him over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection back in Democrats’ faces, Chris LaCivita told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“Here’s what’s fascinating about it,” LaCivita said as he mingled on the convention floor in Milwaukee. “You are watching a coup. Literally. In front of your eyes.”
LaCivita, the architect with Susie Wiles of Trump’s 2024 campaign, offered the first insight into how Republicans will deal with a new Democratic candidate as Biden appeared increasingly likely to accede to calls to step aside.
The attack as a “coup plotter” will be matched with a playbook that continues to attack Biden’s record especially if Biden is succeeded by his vice president, Kamala Harris.
The campaign will run the same strategy if Harris takes over, he said. Biden has already given Republicans too much fodder, he acknowledged. They will also demand that Biden step down as president if he won’t run. That would give them extra ammunition to attack Harris as a sitting president who benefited from a “coup.”
“It’s Joe Biden,” he added, even if the nominee will not, in fact, be Joe Biden, should he step aside.
And AOC says the quiet part out loud. We knew this. “AOC goes live on Instagram saying many who want Joe Biden to drop out of race also want to remove Kamala. ‘A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,’ congresswoman says.” This is from the Independent.
New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Instagram Live early on Friday morning to share her thoughts on Joe Biden’s floundering re-election campaign – and warning that many of those who want the President to drop out of the race, also want Vice President Kamala Harris off the ticket too.
“If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave … that they will support, Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” she told viewers.
She slammed her colleagues for giving anonymous quotes to the press, calling it “bull****” and urged those resigned to a loss to Donald Trump to give up their seats.
“My community does not have the option to lose,” she said.
“If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record, but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations,” the congresswoman said.
One last story that really shows what the ramping up of Wipipo privilege has done to our society. This is from CNN. “‘Treated like a convict’: NFL legend Terrell Davis describes getting handcuffed on a plane near his kids after asking for ice.” This story is reported by Holly Yan.
Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.
“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.
Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.
“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.
We should really be careful. It is getting ugly out there. But, if there is a protest of anything here in Orleans Parish, I will be there. I will also vote. I will also drag my neighbors to the voting booth if I have to.
We shall overcome.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Nothing reminds me of the worst stuff to come out of the 80s than Disco. Nothing says cultural appropriation like three white guys from the Isle of Man morphing funk and black slang into a song that’s all about themselves!!!!!! But it’s a good message to the pols and media that won’t settle down and do their damned jobs!
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
So what does a Florida-based Dotard Ex-President have in common with a Massachusetts-based Computer Geeky Junior Airman? They both have a need to share Top-Secret Documents to impress their friends.
The biggest difference is that the Geek was frog-marched into court and arrested for posting them on Discord. He was charged under the Espionage Act. The Dotard is still at large, and likely so are some Top Secret Documents. We know he flaunted them around The Donny Dotard Clubhouse, but what other things happened with them? There are so many questions about our classified documents processes now that we’re an international embarrassment.
There’s other news too. Ron DeSantis quietly–and in the dead of night– signed a six-week ban on abortion in Florida. Florida used to have abortion access making the South a death zone for fertile women. Attorney General Garland has asked the Supreme Court to block the order by the Texas Grand Inquisitor on the status of mifepristone. Regulatory chaos is likely to result in the FDA and could spread to other agencies, given the implications of the judge’s lunatic rationale. It’s the one day you can be happy there is such a thing as Big Pharma. The manufacturer of the pill has also filed for an immediate stay. We’re on Supreme Court Watch now. If they do nothing, the chaos will start at midnight with this decision and the conflicting one from Washington State. All of these restrictions are highly unpopular with voters.
Oh, and have I mentioned Uncle Clarence Thomas sold his mother’s house to his billionaire buddy without reporting it, so he broke the law? She still lives in the house, and her new landlord takes care of the place.
Welcome to the Neoconfederacy of Dunces or, as JJ mentioned yesterday, the Dawning of the Age of Idiocracy.
This one comes pretty directly out of some weirdo world. This is from Hans Nichols, writing for AXIOS. “Conservatives plot text warnings on “woke” products.” Yes, this does seem like a direct assault on the first amendment rights of businesses granted by Scalia et al. not that long ago.
A conservative group is offering a new service that texts “Woke Alerts” straight to the phones of grocery shoppers who want to know which brands are accused of taking political positions that are offensive to the right.
So, you can see that we have so much to write about this week that we’re torn between leaving something uncovered or quoting so much we run up the word counts. And, of course, JJ shows us that the political cartoon crowd has a lot of fodder.
So, there are a lot of links up top. Let me just highlight a few things.
Here is more detail on the Supreme Court Watch for the ruling on mifepristone. This is from NBC News.” The Justice Department and the drugmaker are asking the Supreme Court to block the abortion pill ruling. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories want to freeze a court decision that curbs access to the abortion pill mifepristone.”
The Biden administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to block part of a court decision that prevents pregnant women from obtaining the key abortion drug mifepristone by mail.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the Food and Drug Administration, urged the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to put on hold the entirety of a decision issued by Texas-based U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk that handed a sweeping victory to abortion opponents.
“This application concerns unprecedented lower court orders countermanding FDA’s scientific judgment and unleashing regulatory chaos by suspending the existing FDA-approved conditions of use for mifepristone,” Prelogar wrote in court papers.
Danco Laboratories, which makes Mifeprex, the brand version of the pill, filed a similar request on Friday.
Danco said it would be “irreparably harmed” if the decision goes into effect because it “will be unable to both conduct its business nationwide and comply with its legal obligations.”
This is the latest set of witnesses to discuss Trump’s Classified Documents theft. This is from the New York Times. “Witnesses Asked About Trump’s Handling of Map With Classified Information. The map is just one element of the Justice Department’s inquiry into former President Donald Trump’s possession of sensitive documents and whether he obstructed justice in seeking to hold onto them.”
Federal investigators are asking witnesses whether former President Donald J. Trump showed off to aides and visitors a map he took with him when he left office that contains sensitive intelligence information, four people with knowledge of the matter said.
The map has been just one focus of the broad Justice Department investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he departed the White House.
The nature of the map and the information it contained is not clear. But investigators have questioned a number of witnesses about it, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, as the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department’s Trump-focused inquiries, Jack Smith, examines the former president’s handling of classified material after leaving office and weighs charges that could include obstruction of justice.
One person briefed on the matter said investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing the map while aboard a plane. Another said that, based on the questions they were asking, investigators appeared to believe that Mr. Trump showed the map to at least one adviser after leaving office.
A third person with knowledge of the investigation said the map might also have been shown to a journalist writing a book. The Washington Post has previously reported that investigators have asked about Mr. Trump showing classified material, including maps, to political donors.
The question of whether Mr. Trump was displaying sensitive material in his possession after he lost the presidency and left office is crucial as investigators try to reconstruct what Mr. Trump was doing with boxes of documents that went with him to his Florida residence and private club, Mar-a-Lago.
Among the topics investigators have been focused on is precisely when Mr. Trump was at the club last year. In particular, they were interested in whether he remained at Mar-a-Lago to look at boxes of material that were still stored there before Justice Department counterintelligence officials seeking their return came to visit in early June, according to two people familiar with the questions.
Hannah Knowles writes on “How DeSantis backed a six-week abortion ban — while barely talking about it. The Florida governor went from signing a 15-week ban last year to signing a six-week ban late at night on Thursday.”
The governor’s quiet embrace of the six-week ban reflects his team’s political calculations heading into 2024, as he gears up for a presidential primary where hard-line activists and voters wield influence. It underlines the continued pressure in the GOP for politicians to embrace tighter laws — even as numerous Republicans, including some DeSantis allies, worry that abortion bans have helped sink their candidates in critical general elections. And it highlights DeSantis’s longtime reluctance to make abortion a signature part of his public profile, though he has enacted major changes to laws on the procedure.
“The numbers show that Florida is a destination” for abortion, said Chad Davis, a candidate for the state House who worked for ex-state senator Kelli Stargel, the sponsor of the 15-week ban. “That’s an embarrassment to him.”
DeSantis has generally avoided talking about abortion, even as he tours the country touting other legislation he’s signed. Rather than roll out the six-week bill as a major agenda item, he gave vague endorsements: “I’m willing to sign great life legislation,” he told one reporter who put him on the spot. A six-week ban has proved divisive in his orbit, with some donors strongly opposed and other Republicans eager to simply move on.
President Biden has put out a statement on the arrest of the Leaker and his plans to review the classified documents processes. Not let’s see hin do something about getting White Christian Nationalists out of the Military.
I’ll leave you with this from the High Priestess of QAnon.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
The Super Flower Blood Moon eclipse of 2022 over my house last night.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
I gaze through my Twitter feed which is loaded with all these photos of wipipo and their small army of indoctrinated children looking like they’re all about to head to The Aluminium Warehouse Church of the Almighty Dollar to get their sanctimony on or to everyone’s favorite store, movie theatre, or place of actual worship to slaughter the rest of us.
I’m trolling my stupid Senator again because he doesn’t seem to have any concept of being moral even though he throws bible verses on his feed day after day. Sometimes he sounds almost normal and then, he goes down the MAGA rabbit hole and sounds like a monster.
I am just sick of all the gun violence and white national terrorist violence and murder. I know I keep writing about it but folks like my one semi-cogent Senator are just fixated on all the wrong problems. For one, why do kids have access to dangerous weapons of war? For another, at what point do we start looking at Terrorist Manifestos and “news” broadcasts domestically and say this isn’t free speech, it is violent insurrection talking?
https://twitter.com/Jeannineyyyy/status/1525868372784717824
This is your basic child abuse. They look like a cult! And this is what their children grow up to do:
And this is your basic horrid policy. Let’s kill a lot of people by linking these two things together! And of course, let’s ignore gun violence even if you’re a doctor and every doctor’s organization calls it a Public Health Crisis.
Please read that thread from Sherrilyn Iffel. It’s enlightening. Please read this one too!!!
I’ve been caught in several shootouts in my neighborhood recently. The abandoned Naval Base is full of methheads and heroin addicts who come from the rural areas to the city. There are gunshots at least once a day. There have been at least 4 deaths there this month that are known around here from there. The police seem absolutely unable to do anything. Our crime wave is due to the long-ignored Opioid crisis. Why don’t we see some action there?
I grew up in a small Iowa town with a lot of people that had guns specifically for hunting. All I ever saw was the meat my dad would bring home when his friends shared their bounty. I have lived in this neighborhood for over 20 years and it was labeled as dangerous when I moved here. Well, the demographics have changed and the violence is appalling now. I’ll let you read between the lines. They are getting these ideas from one Party, from their Preachers, and from the likes of Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
Congressman Adam Schiff said it out loud. Fox News, Republicans, and white nationalist xtians are killing us and our democracy. There is no other way to look at this. They are after the rights of women, religious minorities, or the nonreligious, and they are after people of color and the GLBTQ community. It’s their way or we go to prison or they just turn their maladjusted little men on us with their tactical gear and semi-automatic weapons. OR, they let big Pharma loose to turn those little men into monsters.
And they send monsters to serve at the State and Federal levels who want the process to be rigged in their favor. Otherwise, they quit or go on Fox to howl like hyenas.
The number of proposed laws catering to one very small part of the Christian belief community is astounding. I just wished that a number of people heard those of us that experienced it from the 1980s forward and actually believed what we were saying. I was under attack as not being a ‘real’ Christian because I was a social justice Methodist at the time. One of my great grandfathers was a circuit rider in the Kansas/Oklahoma area doing just about the same thing as me so it’s a long tradition in my family.
Oh, and here are some pictures of my new Kitty Cristal who was rescued from the middle of neutral ground and is now happily installed on my bed. I’m hoping to distract you from all this distress with her as much as she is doing for me.
Democrats are generally disinclined to discuss religion, much less debate it.
They like to point out that Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin were famously atheist, Thomas Jefferson and dozens of other high-profile people in the founding generation were deists (a close cousin to atheists and certainly not Christians), and that in two different places the Constitution explicitly rejects religion interfering with government or vice versa.
But it’s time to discuss religion whether we like it or not, because it’s no longer knocking on our door: Sam Alito just sent it into the house with a no-knock warrant and stun grenades that threaten to catch the place on fire.
Alito’s Dobbs v. Jackson draft opinion rests on two main premises.
The first is that the Supreme Court has no business recognizing a “right” that isn’t rooted in the nation’s “history and tradition.”
This right-wing canard has been around for years, and has been used to argue against pretty much ever form of modernity from integrated public schools to, more recently, same-sex marriage. It’s a convenient pole around which you can twist pretty much any argument you want, because American history and tradition have been all over the map during the past roughly 240 years.
For example, Alito could just as easily have pointed out that there were no federal or state laws regulating abortion at all at the founding of our republic, and they didn’t really start showing up until the 1800s as physicians were clamoring for licensure to lock midwives out of birth-related medical practice (which included abortion).
The year Virginia got an abortion-regulating law, for example, was the same year — 1847 — that the American Medical Association was founded. Ben Franklin had been dead more than a half-century and not a single signer of the Declaration of Independence was still alive.
She sure sleeps better than I do!!
Read on. We’re in the dawning of the Age of DisReason and Religious tyranny. It’s back to the Middle Ages. We also know they are a well-armed bunch of Crusaders that have been whipped up into a frenzy by the Republican Party and Fox News. They also have plenty of playgrounds out on the Internet. They’ve been stacking courts since the Reagan years and look out!
And now, we have a fringe theory guiding yet another set of their reactionary movement. This is from the New York Times: “A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P. Replacement theory, espoused by the suspect in the Buffalo massacre, has been embraced by some right-wing politicians and commentators.”
Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States.
The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.
And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”
Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.
But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.
By his own account, the Buffalo suspect, Payton S. Gendron, followed a lonelier path to radicalization, immersing himself in replacement theory and other kinds of racist and antisemitic content easily found on internet forums, and casting Black Americans, like Hispanic immigrants, as “replacers” of white Americans. Yet in recent months, versions of the same ideas, sanded down and shorn of explicitly anti-Black and antisemitic themes, have become commonplace in the Republican Party — spoken aloud at congressional hearings, echoed in Republican campaign advertisements and embraced by a growing array of right-wing candidates and media personalities.
My Dog Temple has a new buddy.
We’ve always had ugly racist, anti-semite, white nationalist movements lurking about but now they’re weaponizing the first and second amendment against the majority. And of course, some Republicans are calling it a “false flag” operation which means this ugly ass young man was really a liberal. This Senator is a white nationalist. From HuffPo: “State Senator Who Backs White Nationalism Suggests Buffalo Shooting Was False Flag. Arizona GOP Sen. Wendy Rogers promoted a deranged conspiracy theory after 10 people were killed in what authorities say was a
A Republican state lawmaker with ties to white nationalists suggested the racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket was staged by government agents.
“Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers wrote on Telegram. The first-term lawmaker has built a national profile among far-right extremists with incendiary rhetoric, diehard support for former President Donald Trump and an embrace of white nationalism.Authorities said an 18-year-old white gunman traveled several hours on Saturday to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, where he opened fire outside at a supermarket. Thirteen people were shot; 10 died. Most were Black. The accused killer left a manifesto riddled with racist views and references to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that white Americans are being replaced by people of color, according to The New York Times.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been at war with campaign finance laws for more than a dozen years, stretching at least as far back as its decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010). On Monday, the Court’s six Republican appointees escalated this war.
The Court’s decision in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate is a boon to wealthy candidates. It strikes down an anti-bribery law that limited the amount of money candidates could raise after an election in order to repay loans they made to their own campaign.
Federal law permits candidates to loan money to their campaigns. In 2001, however, Congress prohibited campaigns from repaying more than $250,000 of these loans using funds raised after the election. They can repay as much as they want from campaign donations received before the election (although a federal regulation required them to do so “within 20 days of the election”).
The idea is that, if already-elected officials can solicit donations to repay what is effectively their own personal debt, lobbyists and others seeking to influence lawmakers can put money directly into the elected official’s pocket — and campaign donations that personally enrich a lawmaker are particularly likely to lead to corrupt bargains. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) manufactured a case to try to overturn that $250,000 limit, and now, the Court has sided with him.
Indeed, now that this limit on loan repayments has been struck down, lawmakers with sufficiently creative accountants may be able to use such loans to give themselves a steady income stream from campaign donors.
According to the Los Angeles Times, for example, Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) made a $150,000 loan to her campaign at 18 percent interest in 1998 — before the 2001 law was enacted. Though Napolitano did eventually reduce the interest rate on this loan to 10 percent, the high-interest loan allowed her to make a considerable profit from donors.
Okay, there’s more about this shit but I can’t do it. Maybe BB will pick up on some of it tomorrow.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today!!
And love and snuggles from all of us at the kathouse! Here’s Ted Cruz with the Last Word today.
Jerry W Ward
Mid Century Abstract Expressionist Clown Diva
1960
Hi Sky Dancers!
I really was looking for something meaty to post about today but there seems to be mostly about the slide of the Republican Party into abject delusion and insanity. Last night, on Brian Williams, I had to look twice at the sight of Rudy Guiliani basically being a hype man for the My Pillow psycho. Guiliani evidently has a youtube channel and last night’s performance of abject fellating of a man that could help him with his legal bills was eye-opening. I thought it resembled that old Dan Ackroyd SNL character.
This is from Newsweek: “Rudy Giuliani Features MyPillow Ads as Mike Lindell Says Donald Trump Will Be President in August’.
Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for Republican former President Donald Trump, is running advertisements for MyPillow on his YouTube show. Meanwhile, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has publicly said that Trump will return to the White House in August despite losing the 2020 election.
“I’m been sleeping on MyPillows for some time. I love them. They’re simply the very best pillows ever made,” Giuliani said in the most recent episode of his YouTube show, Rudy Giuliani’s Common Sense. The 53-minute episode asked whether UFOs are real, in reference to a forthcoming Pentagon report on UFOs.
Giuliani continued the ad by stating that he “just found out” that MyPillow also offers other non-pillow products. When mentioning their slippers, he brandished a pair at the camera.
GEORGES ROUAULT (1871-1958) Clown de profil
BB talked about some of this craziness yesterday. I think he’s doing his usual signalling to the hounds of hell to give him another coup attempt in August. This is Amanda Marcotte’s take:”How do we report on Trump’s dastardly schemes without amplifying his lies and incitement? Trump’s blog failed, so he’s inciting followers through media leaks. Does that make journalists his accomplices?”
It is likely no coincidence that right around that time, stories based on claims by anonymous sources “close to Trump” (which often means Trump himself) started to tick up. It began when New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, a longtime outlet for Trump “leaks”, tweeted that Trump has been telling people close to him that he believes he’ll reinstated as president in August. This tweet echoed a conspiracy theory from the QAnon and Q-adjacent world, and coincided with an uptick in far-right chatter about how the American right should look to Myanmar’s February military coup for inspiration.
After Haberman’s tweet, the Washington Post strengthened this narrative with a story about how Trump is “increasingly consumed with the notion that ballot reviews pushed by his supporters around the country could prove that he won” and is peddling the idea that such “audits” — which are deliberately messy and nonsensical affairs — “could result in his return to the White House this year.” The Daily Beast confirmed that “the ex-president had begun increasingly quizzing confidants about a potential August return to power.” This reporting gave Fox News all the excuse they needed to amplify the message. Even though that came in the form of Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, denying the reporting, the end result was another round of news stories reinforcing the basic concepts: August is the month. A violent coup. Trump’s miraculous reinstatement.
This is entirely too similar to the way Trump got the message out to his followers to stage a revolt on Jan. 6, through winking and nudging. So far, the big difference is that no exact date and location, as far as I can tell, has been established for a MAGA uprising.
As much as liberals resist the idea that Trump has any wits at all, what he’s doing is not exactly mysterious. He wants to get this particular message out, vaguely claiming that a glorious revolution will restore him to power later this year, and he’s using the mainstream press to do it. To make things worse, he’s exploiting the liberal desire to point at him and laugh to spread the message further. Every time a liberal shares one of these stories and calls Trump and his followers “delusional” for thinking that some extra-constitutional return to power is possible, they help spread the word — while also reminding Trump supporters how “owned” liberals would be if there really were a “storm” that swept Trump back into the White House in August.
Is it to avoid this too?
But the nutter parade continues with the ever-shrinking numbers of screeching, hateful, white nationalist evangelical Christians. This is good news. Their numbers are shrinking. This is from NPR: “How Is The GOP Adjusting To A Less Religious America?” My days in that party got limited the minute they come in riding the tails of Ronnie Raygun and Pat Rob’em all Robertson. Talk about another grift operation. No wonder they grabbed onto Mister Two Corinthians.
The Clown by Auguste Renoir, 1868
In fact, the U.S. recently passed a religious milestone: For the first time, a majority of Americans are not church members, Gallup found this spring.
Over the last decade, the share of Republicans who are church members fell from 75% to 65%, according to Gallup. That’s a solid majority but also a sizable fall.
The key bloc of white evangelicals is also shrinking as a share of the population, while the share of religiously unaffiliated Americans grows.
This makes religion one key part of a looming, long-term demographic challenge for Republicans, says Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.
“Republicans clearly have a stronger hold among the religiously affiliated, especially evangelical Protestants. And consequently, any decline in evangelical Protestant affiliation is not good news for the GOP,” he said.
The upshot, to Ayres, is that a party still deeply entwined with conservative Christianity and, particularly, white evangelicals will eventually have to win over more Christian conservatives — for example, among the growing Hispanic electorate — or make gains among substantially less-religious groups, like young voters.
Already, they’re directly inserting themselves in the Israeli ousting of Bibi. This is from All Israel News. “Will Christians support new Israeli government? Many will. But one prominent Evangelical has declared war on Naftali Bennett, sent scathing letter denouncing him with profanity – ‘I will fight you every step of the way'”. They just can’t seem to stick to clothing and feeding the poor and homeless.
The apparently imminent demise of the Netanyahu government is coming as a shock to the 60 million pro-Israel Evangelical Christians in the United States.
In recent days, I have received many concerned emails and text messages from Evangelical leaders asking me what is happening, why, and what the implications of this political earthquake are likely to be.
By and large, Evangelicals have come to love and respect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest serving premier in the history of modern Israel.
By contrast, most have never heard of Naftali Bennett, the right-wing former chief of staff to Netanyahu and former defense minister in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, who now appears poised to replace Netanyahu as the nation’s next prime minister.
Most have not heard of Yair Lapid, the centrist former finance minister and incoming foreign minister, either.
But they will soon.
To be clear, it is far too early to be sure that Bennett and Lapid and their colleagues will actually be sworn into office.
They have many opponents, who are working feverishly to derail their nascent new government.
But if they do come to power, one key question is whether Bennett and Lapid can quickly build relationships and trust with American Evangelicals – and Evangelicals worldwide – who are among the most important strategic allies that the State of Israel has.
There’s also one less congregation in Tennessee. This former California TV star–who I never heard of–and his now late wife preached fat people could not get into heaven because of the sin of gluttony. Their schtick was a diet. I think if you see the pictures you’ll see this poor woman had body dysmorphia. These kinds of things really confuse me. Guess where they were going?
Clown tragique
Georges Rouault
Date: 1911
Style: Expressi
You have to wonder what the discussions these days are between George and brother Jeb Bush on this. From WAPO: “George P. Bush is running for attorney general in Texas — and courting Trump.” Trump was brutal during the first primary and “low energy Jeb” took a lot of hits.
George P. Bush’s campaign video does not mention the Republican political dynasty that preceded him. Not his father, the former governor of Florida. Nor his uncle, the 43rd president of the United States. Nor his grandfather, the 41st.
The video does pay homage to former president Donald Trump.
“Under the leadership of President Trump our country was strong and vibrant again, but because of the failed leadership of liberal ideas, our country is suffering,” said George P. Bush, who this week launched a 2022 bid to become Texas attorney general. The state land commissioner is channeling and courting Trump despite the 45th president’s past attacks on elder members of the Bush family — a sign of Trump’s still-strong hold on a transformed GOP.
Scholars of Texas politics said the Bush name can still be a plus in the state, but also saw Trump’s endorsement as a big prize in the GOP primary for attorney general, where George P. Bush will face incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton is staunchly pro-Trump and last year.
Okay, enough of this! Hopefully, you’ll see me on Monday with something newsy and less sleazy! Have a great weekend! I’m still feral but going to get my eyes checked this afternoon. My post-vaccine life means catching up with doctor appointments, etc. Have you dressed up and gone out into civil society yet?
Oh, wait, one more idiot before I go.
Evidently, you pay $19.99 to Direct Message him and he may or may not answer. Cocaine is a helluva drug. It’s also not cheap and neither are lawyers. So, we’ve got the grift going. Enjoy the laugh!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
And now, not going down the “Send in the Clowns” road!
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Memeorandum Crooks and Liars Democracy NOW The UK Guardian
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Sky Dancing 
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