News bits: Gigantic hypocrisy; Capitalism’s ‘social conscience’; Thoughts on American religious civil war

The AP reports about radicalized Republican Party shenanigans and hypocrisy from the Gigantic Hypocrisy & Double Standards Files:

Florida Republican Party suspends chairman and 

demands his resignation amid rape investigation

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The Republican Party of Florida suspended Chairman Christian Ziegler and demanded his resignation during an emergency meeting Sunday, adding to calls by Gov. Ron DeSantis and other top officials for him to step down as police investigate a rape accusation against him.

Ziegler is accused of raping a woman with whom he and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, had a prior consensual sexual relationship, according to police records.

“Christian Ziegler has engaged in conduct that renders him unfit for the office,” the party's motion to censure Ziegler said, according to a document posted on the social media platform X by Lee County GOP Chairman Michael Thomason. 

Christian Ziegler has not been charged with a crime and says he is innocent, contending the encounter was consensual.

I know, I know. Waddabout the George Santos saga, which went on for months long after it was clear that he was a crook, liar and traitor? It was only after the stench of his lies and crimes was too much to stand any more that some House Republicans voted to boot his sorry ass out of congress. 

And, an ever bigger waddabout is DJT and all of his sexual predation, treason and crimes. Waddabout that? Unlike Ziegler, DJT has been charged with a slew of felonies in four different indictments. 

Where’s the valiant Republican patriot elites in Florida in dealing with DJT? The answer is that there are no valiant Republican patriots among GOP party elites in Florida. The double standards that GOP elites engage in are evidence of deep moral and democratic rot. The party has converted from a generally reasonable party to a mendacious, kleptocratic, authoritarian monster, even worse than The Kraken.

Right: The Kraken

Left: The Stinker Slanderman

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This report is about bid'ness as usual in the Great State of Texas, land of unfettered free markets running patriotic, free, wild, 🍑 (butt naked) and maximally profitable across the vast TX landscape:

Texas power plants have no responsibility to 

provide electricity in emergencies, judges rule

Almost three years since the deadly Texas blackout of 2021, a panel of judges from the First Court of Appeals in Houston has ruled that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the crisis. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.

The decision seems likely to protect the companies from lawsuits filed against them after the blackout. It leaves the families of those who died unsure where next to seek justice.  

The state has said almost 250 people died in the winter storm and blackout, but some analysts call that a serious undercount.  

After years of legal process, a three-judge panel convened to decide on the merits of those lawsuits.

This week, Chief Justice Terry Adams issued the unanimous opinion of that panel that “Texas does not currently recognize a legal duty owed by wholesale power generators to retail customers to provide continuous electricity to the electric grid, and ultimately to the retail customers.”

The opinion states that big power generators “are now statutorily precluded by the legislature from having any direct relationship with retail customers of electricity.”

In other words, the TX legislature passed a law that shields electricity providers from any responsibility (“direct relationship” = legal liability) to provide power to customers. Think that was accidental? If so, it would be a false belief. Getting legal liability shields for capitalists is a holy grail because it is worth so damn much money. Those lobbyists put that a legal liability shield in the law for a damn good reason, to protect wealthy capitalists when they fuck up and kill people (or make a species go extinct, or pollute a river or drinking water source, or poison people, or etc.).

Think about it. The estates of at least 250 dead people suing the power company for freezing them to death could bankrupt the company if there was liability for freezing them to death. Now we can't have that kind of chaos, could we? Course not (also: core snot).

For those who still haven’t noticed, free markets running patriotic (well OK, not really patriotic), free, wild, 🍑 and maximally profitable tend to be ones that shield themselves from responsibility and liability for various human, environmental, social and pro-democracy governmental harms and damages. This wonderful lawsuit legal result exemplifies how those free, 🍑 markets work: Trickle wealth and power up to the elites, trickle responsibility for damage, including human deaths, down to individuals, the environment and society.

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Religion Dispatches reports about some interesting poll data in an article entitled AMERICA APPEARS TO BE HEADING FOR A RELIGIOUS CIVIL WAR:

Civil war is coming to America. At least that’s the view sizable numbers of Americans have expressed to pollsters in recent years. A 2022 Economist/YouGov poll found that 43% of respondents think it’s likely a civil war will break out over the next decade. Fewer Americans believed civil war would not occur within 10 years than those who believed it would. The poll affirmed the findings of a 2021 national survey by pollster John Zogby who found a plurality of Americans (46%) believed a future civil war was likely.

Political scientist Barbara Walter has identified two specific factors that predict the likelihood of civil war occurrence. Alarmingly, both variables are present in the United States today and are quickly pushing the country to the brink.

The first is “anocracy,” a political science term for countries that mix democratic and autocratic features. These countries are neither democracies nor autocracies, but instead lie somewhere in the middle. Anocracies are prone to conflict because they lack the strong institutions and political channels of robust democracies for citizens to work through; at the same time, they either don’t possess or choose not to use authoritarian tools of repression to undercut violence a priori. And, according to the Polity Project, the United States is today an anocracy.

The second factor identified by Dr. Walter involves the calcification of identity politics among those who had once been politically dominant but now find themselves in decline.

Citizens organizing themselves into an identity-based faction in this way has historically been a warning sign that large scale political violence may be in the offing. People can compromise if the issue at stake is economic or territorial in nature. Land can be divided; money can be reallocated. But how does one compromise on the core issue of identity?

The MAGA hat on Jesus:

Blasphemy?

Although the identity fault lines in America are myriad, arguably, the most important cleavage involves race and religion, a cleft created largely by (mostly White) conservative Christians who fear that the country is renouncing its Christian foundations.  

Whereas religious violence is commonly believed to be a “weapon of the weak” fueled by minority grievances, it is more often a “weapon of the strong” wielded against marginalized and oppressed minority communities. Dr. Walter finds the same when studying the causes of civil war.

Well now, that sucks.

Q:  Does that suck?

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