ANTI MASKERS MOUNTAIN LIONS AND TODDLERS

 

General Update & Some Uplifting Thoughts

Do you need a cup of coffee and a pat on the back? 

Attaboy! . . . pat, pat . . . Keep it up! ☕☕

Out in the heartland: The news about American politics is so consistently bad now that it's not clear what to say or do. Many folks at pro-Trump sites are vicious, rigidly but enthusiastically incoherent and reality-untethered most of the time. That makes trying to reach out to them pointless and unpleasant. If there was at least some evidence of some open minds quietly lurking about, it would be useful to stay engaged. Since there is not much evidence if that, I'll give that outreach effort a rest for a while. It was no fun, that's for sure.

Hypocrites on parade: In general, GOP cynicism and hypocrisy are off the charts. For example, the Ginsberg replacement process will take place, regardless of what GOP senators have said in the past.[1] Empty GOP words are just plain empty. And, hypocrisy is hypocrisy. That is a reminder that neither lies nor hypocrisy are illegal. It all just dark free speech -- fun, legal and effective. At one time lies and hypocrisy came with at least a little blowback, but those principled halcyon days are behind us, for at least the next decade or two.

We break it, we remove it: The president continues to break and politicize government functions. At the moment, he is finishing NOAA and the CDC[2] off by crushing their competence into non-existence with his crackpot political hack replacements. This is part of a long-held GOP dream to get rid of the federal government. First they break government functions, then they complain that the government functions are broken, and finally they dismantle most of what they broke and drown the remnants in a bathtub full of GOP lies, corruption and radical conservative hypocrisy. That process is finally proceeding nicely from their point of view. For the most part, or completely, the GOP base apparently loves it.

Eroding democracy: For me, the most disturbing recent finding has been that WaPo article a couple of days ago showing that American democracy is succumbing to a rising authoritarianism and we may have passed a point of no return (my discussion on that is here). That was a real bummer. Well, at least now when I assert that America is seriously moving toward some sort of a corrupt demagogic-Christian theocratic dictatorship, I can now respond to people who tell me I'm full of baloney (or something worse) with some data. That data supports what I believed I had been seeing since shortly after the president took power in January of 2017. What I saw included erosion of nice things like democracy, the rule of law and at least some trust in professional news reporting. Faux News & Cruel Entertainment is now the accepted information source for most conservatives and the GOP.

Hm. Did I overlook anything? Think . . . . think . . . . oh, yeah!

Hey gang, I've got an idea -- let's divert some more money to the pentagon!: There's this uplifting blurb in the WaPo this morning: "Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor  Shortly after Congress passed the Cares Act, the Pentagon began directing pandemic-related money to defense contractors."

No wonder America's federal COVID-19 response has been so amazingly awful. There never was any serious attempt to respond. This news about diverting SARS-CoV-2 money to the pentagon for jet engine parts and whatnot ought to increase the president's approval rating a point or two. 

Footnotes: 

1. For example, there's this gem in the NYT today: "Senator Lindsey Graham said he would refuse to confirm a Republican’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year. Now he is rushing to deliver President Trump’s third justice." 

2. WaPo writes this today: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday removed language from its website that said the novel coronavirus spreads via airborne transmission, the latest example of the agency backtracking from its own guidance. The agency said the guidance, which went up on Friday and largely went without notice until late Sunday, should not have been posted because it was an early draft." 

Yeah right, early draft. What a lie. Trump just doesn't want that information to reach the public because he thinks it makes him look like the cruel, grossly incompetent president that he actually is.

The State of American Democracy: Very Bad, Maybe Irreparably Damaged

Mapping the death of American democracy

An article in the Washington Post describes indicators of the state of democracy in the US. The data indicates that the US is accelerating its move into a corrupt authoritarianism. The extent of erosion of democracy may now have passed a point of reversibility. The WaPo writes:

“Three years into the Trump administration, American democracy has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy, according to a project that tracks the health of representative government in nations around the world.

The project, called V-Dem, or Varieties of Democracy, is an effort to precisely quantify global democracy at the country level based on hundreds indicators assessed annually by thousands of individual experts. It’s one of several ongoing projects by political scientists that have registered a weakening of democratic values in the United States in recent years.

V-Dem’s findings are bracing: The United States is undergoing “substantial autocratization” — defined as the loss of democratic traits — that has accelerated precipitously under President Trump. This is particularly alarming in light of what the group’s historic data show: Only 1 in 5 democracies that start down this path are able to reverse the damage before succumbing to full-blown autocracy.

“The United States is not unique” in its decline, said Staffan I. Lindberg, a political scientist at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg and a founding director of the project. “Everything we see in terms of decline on these indicators is exactly the pattern of decline” seen in other autocratizing nations, like Turkey and Hungary, both of which ceased to be classified as democracies in recent years.

Each year, the V-Dem project asks its experts to rate their respective nations on hundreds of measures of democracy, such as the presence of legislative checks on executive power, freedom of personal expression, the civility of political discourse, free and open elections, and executive branch corruption, among others.

The United States is backsliding on all of those measures. ‘Executive respect for the Constitution is now at the lowest level since 1865,’ said Michael Coppedge, a Notre Dame political scientist and one of the project’s chief investigators. ‘Corruption in the executive branch is basically the worst since Harding.’

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, said that “experts rate U.S. democracy as getting worse on average,” but there are considerable differences in “how they characterize the severity of the decline we’ve experienced and what they expect in the future.”

Nyhan says he is most concerned about Trump’s repeated attacks on the integrity of U.S. elections. Trump recently said that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged,” for instance, and habitually casts vote-by-mail efforts as inherently fraudulent. Both beliefs are false.”

 

“Dictator drift” -- dictators attack foundations of democracy

such as the integrity of elections 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg has Died

Everyone is reporting that Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died. Now the radical conservative Leviathan comes alive and rises in its rage and self-righteous vengeance.

The hypocrite Moscow Mitch McConnell said in May of 2019 that he would replace any supreme court dead supreme court justice even during the 2020 election. He could not care less about his hypocrisy over what happened after Scalia died in early 2012. I've said it many times before, and I say it again: Hypocrisy does not faze hard core republican partisans in the slightest. Actually, hypocrisy doesn't faze many hard core republican partisans in the slightest, republican or not. For those folks and presumably most Trump supporters, this is about winning, not truth, consistency, facts or reason. This is about power and wealth.

I take zero pleasure in having predicted this outcome years ago. RBG was obviously very sick and I knew she would not survive any republican administration. She was obviously sick years ago and now she has died. Years ago in 2011 and 2012 people pleaded with her to resign, but she refused. 

Now, there is going to be a rock solid 6-3 radical conservative white male Christian theocratic majority on the supreme court for the next 25-30 years.That will be the case even if the Federalist society tells Trump to appoint a woman or any non-white Christian of any or no gender. We are past that now. Now self-righteous conservative rage, hate and vengeance will ooze out of the federal courts. 

Roe v. Wade is toast. Toast. Women living in red states are going to have to go to states that still allow abortions if they want one. 

Will this focus the democratic opposition? Maybe. Maybe not. But even if it does, I would not bet on democrats doing anything significant, including using their control of the House.

Democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law are now going to see the wrath of republican hate and vengeance.