Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

A TTKP platform reveals a mountain of dirty laundry; Going woke about Christian nationalism

The intercept reports about unpopular and damaging TTKP (Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party) policy proposals that are revealed in a 180-page austerity manifesto entitled Fiscal Sanity to Save America
HOUSE REPUBLICANS WANT TO BAN 
UNIVERSAL FREE SCHOOL LUNCHES

The Republican Study Committees annual budget also calls to permanently defund UNRWA and eliminate the National Labor Relations Board

ON WEDNESDAY, THE Republican Study Committee, of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members, released its 2025 budget entitled “Fiscal Sanity to Save America.” Tucked away in the 180-page austerity manifesto is a block of text concerned with a crucial priority for the party: ensuring children aren’t being fed at school.

Eight states offer all students, regardless of household income, free school meals — and more states are trending in the direction. But while people across the country move to feed school children, congressional Republicans are looking to stop the cause.

The budget — co-signed by more than 170 House Republicans — calls to eliminate “the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) from the School Lunch Program.” The CEP, the Republicans note, “allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”

This year, the Biden administration further expanded the CEP, allowing another estimated 3,000 school districts to serve students breakfast and lunch at no cost.

Instead of universality, the RSC suggests sending block grants for child nutrition programs to states, to give them “needed flexibility” to “promote the efficient allocation of funds to those who need it most,” while avoiding “widespread fraud.”

Republicans however view the universal version of the policy as fundamentally wasteful. The “school lunch and breakfast programs are subject to widespread fraud and abuse,” reads the RSC’s proposed yearly budget, quoting a report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The Cato report blames people who may “improperly” redeem free lunches, even if they are technically above the income cutoff levels. The “fraudulence” the think tank is concerned about is not some shadowy cabals of teachers systematically stealing from the school lunch money pot: It’s students who are being fed, even if their parents technically make too much to benefit from the program. In other words, Republicans’ opposition to the program is based on the assumption that people being “wrongly” fed at school is tantamount to abusive waste.

“If the program is designed to offer free meals to all students,” FitzSimons said, “that question about fraud really disappears if you’re allowed to serve every single child.”
Regarding global warming, the manifesto actually uses the words “climate” and “environment” indicating a major shift that at least acknowledges the existence of a disputed issue. Nonetheless, none of those mentions has anything to do with addressing climate change or protecting the environment. The manifesto opposes a carbon tax and proposed (i) giving oil and gas companies deductions for labor and safety costs and increasing oil, and gas projects on federal lands, and (ii) defunding the Environmental Protection Agency.

The TTKP intends to undercut or block a slew of gun regulations such as “defunding the constitutionally dubious red flag provisions in the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act” (gutting gun safety laws). More bullets will be flying free and wild in American society. 

Other radical TTKP budget priorities include (i) eliminating all future funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees and getting rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau  (gutting consumer’s protections); (ii) reducing funding for the famously under-supported Occupational Safety and Health Administration (gutting worker’s protections); and (iii) eliminating the National Labor Relations Board (gutting worker’s protections).

No wonder the TTKP has been reluctant to publish a document like this. Most of its policy goals are opposed by most Americans, including most pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties citizens.

I am just a happy guy gutting school lunches and 
gun safety laws while promoting more global warming!!
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Mother Jones has apparently gone woke about Christian nationalism, unless it already was woke and I missed it:
It’s a Good Time to Start Worrying About Christian Nationalism

In response to rising concern among liberals and others about the spread of Christian nationalism, conservative voices have been pressing a counterattack, claiming all this fretting is just lefty hysteria from secularists who are not willing to acknowledge the role of Christianity in American society and who want to brand all politically active Christians as extremists. Last year, the far-right Heritage Foundation published an article declaring that Christian nationalism is a term “mostly used as a smear against conservative Christians who defend the role of religion in American public life” and that the “lack of standard definition allows critics to bundle evils like white supremacy and racism with standard conservative views on marriage, family, and politics.”

By now, you’ve heard of Project 2025, the enterprise established by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing outfits to both set a radical-right agenda for a possible second Trump term and recruit Dear Leader loyalists for government posts in that administration. As I’ve noted, this venture has cooked up plans and measures with an authoritarian bent. It also has been preparing to inject Christian nationalist ideas into a Trump 2.0 presidency.

The anti-anti-Christian nationalists’ effort to cast libs as the-sky-is-falling worrywarts is either naive or a purposeful effort to deflect attention from this threat to civil society. And though it usually is best to avoid dependence on one data point, allow me to zero in on a single tweet that appeared recently to highlight the danger.

Following President Joe Biden’s recent State of the Union speech, William E. Wolfe, a midlevel official at the Pentagon and the State Department during the Trump administration and a Christian nationalism advocate, tweeted out his response. Here it is in full:

My response to the #SOTU:

We need to see the deeper spiritual realities at play. This ain’t just a political fight, it’s a spiritual war. Heaven and Hell are real. Demons exist.

And there are two main demons being worshipped in America right now:

1) Molech, who demands child sacrifice (abortion)

2) Baphomet, whose demonic goat-like representation is gender-bending (LGBTQIA+) The “Equality Act” and “Reproductive Rights” aren’t just “policies” that the radical Left/Democrats support

They are sacraments, acts of worship to their demon gods

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Ephesians 6:12

It’s time for Christians to call on America to repent of our idol worship of demons and return to the One True Living God and His Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ

Maybe God raise up more idol smashers for our days yet. 
This tweet illustrates a basic component of Christian nationalism: spiritual warfare. That’s the notion that all that transpires in our world is a manifestation of the mammoth and eternal clash between God and Satan. The tussle over abortion is not an argument between fellow citizens with conflicting views on bodily autonomy or the question of when life begins; it is a battle between Jesus and Lucifer. Consequently, those who support reproductive freedom are demons or, at the least, in league with or controlled by demons. 
Wolfe sees the political opposition to Trump, Christian fundamentalism, and conservatism as literally a satanic force. How then can he and his comrades expect to have civil discourse with it?

Ah, Molech and Baphomet. They’re sneaky stinkers. We gotta watch out for ’em. 👀

Not really. We gotta watch out for freak TTKP Christian nationalists. 

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