The Dynasty Starts with the Golden Calf

Some kneeled before this monstrosity and prayed, presumably for it to run 

again in 2024, and maybe also to smite the democrats and send them to hell

Images of a man kneeling in prayer before a gold painted statue of the ex-president at the CPAC meeting in Florida yesterday was jarring to say the least. It was another reminder that the fascist GOP is not just fascist. It is also a personality cult that worships a man who tried to overthrow the US government by force on 1/6. The cult leadership seems to be coalescing around the idea of a family dynasty.

Vox comments on the unfolding horror in the fascist GOP:

A recent poll found that Donald Trump Jr. was one of the most popular choices for the 2024 nomination, doing better than Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley combined. On Fox News Thursday night, former GOP House member and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows openly proclaimed that it’s still Trump’s party — either Donald, Donald Jr.’s, or Ivanka’s. 

In the Bible, the Golden Calf story ends with a furious Moses destroying the idol — dumping its ashes into water and forcing the Israelites to drink it as punishment. In theory, the voters in 2020 could have been the party’s Moses, the loss of the White House and the Senate their bitter ashwater. And yet, here they are, still building idols of a false god.

President Ivanka T. What an awful thought. This country and democracy are in deep, deep trouble.

Conservative activists actually believe this thing is cool and inspiring:

the golden star-tipped scepter is an inspiring touch, horror inspiring  

Americans Remain Largely Dissatisfied With U.S. Gun Laws

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• 42% are satisfied with the nation's gun laws, 56% dissatisfied
• 69% of Republicans/leaners, 22% of Democrats/leaners satisfied with gun laws
• 68% of Democrats/leaners want gun laws to be stricter

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Fifty-six percent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with U.S. gun laws and policies, marking the ninth consecutive year of majority-level dissatisfaction since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. At the same time, 42% of U.S. adults express satisfaction with U.S. gun laws.

Gallup has asked Americans about their satisfaction with specific issues, including the nation's gun laws and policies, each January since 2001, except for 2009-2011. In 2001, 38% of the public was satisfied with U.S. gun laws. Satisfaction rose in subsequent surveys, hovering near 50% from 2002 through 2012, but since then, it has generally held near 40%. The highest dissatisfaction, 62%, was recorded one month after the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

The latest findings are from a Jan. 4-15 Gallup poll that preceded President Joe Biden's Feb. 14 call for "commonsense gun law reforms" on the third anniversary of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. His proposed changes include background checks on all gun sales, bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and more accountability for gun manufacturers.

Biden's desired stricter gun measures are very similar to those that Congress failed to pass after the Newtown mass shooting, when Biden was serving as Barack Obama's vice president. That vote in Congress laid bare Republican lawmakers' unwillingness to support new gun restrictions. Since then, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have generally become increasingly likely to express satisfaction with U.S. gun laws, while Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have become less likely to be satisfied. Two exceptions to this occurred in 2014 and 2016, when Republicans' satisfaction fell amid calls for stricter gun laws.

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are now more than three times as likely as Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents to say they are satisfied with the nation's gun laws and policy, 69% vs. 22%. This 47-percentage-point gap in satisfaction is in line with those since 2018. Before that, the average party gap was 22 points.

A follow-up question, asked only of those who said they were dissatisfied with current gun laws, explored what respondents would like to see happen to those laws. Given that dissatisfaction with gun laws is primarily seen among Democrats, it follows that people who are dissatisfied prefer stricter rather than more lenient laws.

As Biden calls for stricter gun laws, 41% of the public is dissatisfied with current gun laws and wants them made stricter; 8% are dissatisfied and want them to be made less strict; and 7% are dissatisfied but want them to remain the same.

While 69% of Republicans say they are satisfied with U.S. gun laws, 68% of Democrats are dissatisfied and want them to be stricter.

Bottom Line

Americans continue to express more dissatisfaction than satisfaction with U.S. gun laws, and partisans remain sharply divided in their views. The public's calls for more gun control have tended to be in reaction to mass shootings, as have lawmakers' attempts to pass stricter gun laws.

After the nation's deadliest mass shooting, in Las Vegas in 2017, the Trump administration banned bump stocks, which make semi-automatic rifles able to fire like machine guns. Trump also indicated that he was open to stricter gun laws after the Parkland, Florida, shooting, but he never took action on that. Likewise, Trump said in 2019 that he would look into changing background checks in the wake of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, but ultimately he declined to push for any changes.

The latest proposal from Biden, however, comes when the U.S. has not seen a mass shooting in recent months. Biden has worked to make the nation's gun laws and policies stricter since he was a U.S. senator and helped pass the Brady bill and the now-expired assault weapons ban. However, he faces an uphill battle in trying to get a bipartisan deal now, given the nation's current political divide and the availability of the legislative filibuster.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/329723/americans-remain-largely-dissatisfied-gun-laws.aspx

 

Why Senate Republicans Fear Native American Deb Haaland

Deb Haaland - democrat, New Mexico

An opinion piece in the Washington Post highlights the intractable, ferocious animosity the GOP has toward democrats, liberals and some things that most Americans support, e.g., protecting national parks. This is more evidence of the depth and breadth of the intolerant, unforgiving culture and political war America the hard core right is openly waging against American government and society. We are hopelessly entangled in this animosity for the foreseeable future. The author, Julian Brave NoiseCat, writes:

Alexander Stuart, the third interior secretary, once declared that the United States’ mission was to “civilize or exterminate” native people. The Interior Department has done much to carry out that terrible mission, with the seizure of tribal lands, forced assimilation of Native American children and much more. So it is impossible to understate the significance — particularly to Native Americans — of the fact that President Biden has nominated a Native American woman, New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, to head the department that manages much of the land and resources taken from native nations and maintains relationships between those nations and the U.S. government.

“The historic nature of my confirmation is not lost on me,” she said. Indeed, we have had many interior secretaries with close ties to powerful men in the C-suite and on Capitol Hill. But we have never had an interior secretary who tended to traditional gardens, cooked for pueblo feast days and stood with the Oceti Sakowin Nation at Standing Rock in defense of tribal treaty rights.

Perhaps as a consequence, Haaland’s nomination has proved particularly contentious, as Republican senators, many from Western states, used the hearing to attack, sometimes with remarkable animosity, what they misleadingly portrayed as her extreme views on fossil fuels and national parks.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the senior Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, shouted over Haaland, accusing the congresswoman of wanting to legalize drugs to replace tax revenue from oil and gas. (Haaland backed legalizing and taxing cannabis as a congresswoman, but never advocated doing so instead of taxing fossil fuels.) Montana Sen. Steve Daines — who, like Barrasso, has received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies — demanded Haaland retract a tweet stating that “Republicans don’t believe in science.” (In 2019, Daines said, “To suggest that [climate change] is human-caused is not a sound scientific conclusion.”)

Utah Sen. Mike Lee expressed his dissatisfaction with the designation of Bears Ears as a national monument, asking whether Haaland thought it was “appropriate for stakeholders, people who have some sort of economic interest in the land or some sort of connection to the land ... to be involved in the national monument designation process.” Lee was apparently unaware that the nominee’s Pueblo relatives are among the tribes that consider Bears Ears a sacred place, tracing their connections to the land to time immemorial.

Haaland appeared unperturbed. We Indians, after all, are well-practiced in the art of accommodating and poking fun at our antagonists; we’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. When Daines asked the secretary-designate why she co-sponsored a bill protecting grizzly bears in perpetuity, Haaland responded with forthright charm: “I imagine, at the time, I was caring about the bears.”

Conservatives have portrayed Haaland as a divisive partisan, but in 2019, she introduced the most bills with bipartisan support of all House freshmen. On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska — a conservative congressman from an oil state — introduced Haaland as a strong nominee and friend who works across the aisle and whose perspective as a native person is needed at Interior. “Anyone who thinks we’re going to call off fossil fuels immediately is smoking pot,” he added — a rebuke to environmentalists, yes, but also to his colleagues in the upper chamber.

What Haaland actually brings — and what the Republican Party seems to consider so dangerous — are experiences and perspectives that have never found representation in the leadership of the executive branch. In fact, Republicans’ depiction of the first Native American ever nominated to the Cabinet as a “radical” threat to a Western “way of life” revealed something about the conservative id: a deep-seated fear that when the dispossessed finally attain a small measure of power, we will turn around and do to them what their governments and ancestors did to us. (emphasis added)

That speaks for itself.

White privilege also gives the radical right 

license to lie and slander

Do Images and Words Matter?

T****'s vision of land management:

a huge pile of coal

Biden's vision of land management:

not a huge pile of coal

The New York Times writes:

Days after President Biden took office, the Bureau of Land Management put a scenic landscape of a winding river at the top of its website, which during the previous administration had featured a photograph of a huge wall of coal.

At the Department of Homeland Security, the phrase “illegal alien” is being replaced with “noncitizen.” The Interior Department now makes sure that mentions of its stakeholders include “Tribal” people (with a capital “T” as preferred by Native Americans, it said). The most unpopular two words in the Trump lexicon — “climate change” — are once again appearing on government websites and in documents; officials at the Environmental Protection Agency have even begun using the hashtag #climatecrisis on Twitter.

And across the government, L.G.B.T.Q. references are popping up everywhere. Visitors to the White House website are now asked whether they want to provide their pronouns when they fill out a contact form: she/her, he/him or they/them.

It is all part of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to rebrand the government after four years of President Donald J. Trump, in part by stripping away the language and imagery that represented his anti-immigration, anti-science and anti-gay rights policies and replacing them with words and pictures that are more inclusive and better match the current president’s sensibilities. 

“Biden is trying to reclaim the vision of America that was there during the Obama administration, a vision that was much more diverse, much more religiously tolerant, much more tolerant of different kinds of gender dispositions and gender presentations,” said Norma Mendoza-Denton, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an author of “Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies.”  

Now, officials in Mr. Biden’s administration are using Mr. Trump’s own tactics to adjust reality again, this time by erasing the words his predecessor used and by explicitly returning to ones that had been banished.  

“The president has been clear to all of us — words matter, tone matters and civility matters,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary. “And bringing the country together, getting back our seat at the global table means turning the page from the actions but also the divisive and far too often xenophobic language of the last administration.”

One can reasonably think that if a republican is elected as president in 2024, 2028 or later, the pictures of coal and incivility will displace what Biden is doing. This political and social war is not over. It's not close to over. The pile of coal vision could very well win and bring the American experiment to an end as fascists gain the upper hand in their desperate, fear-driven escape from freedom into the comforting arms of a dictator.  

Biden's gesture is good and necessary, but it probably won't change many minds.

As attorney general, Jeff Sessions ordered his department to use the term “illegal alien” 

in all communications when describing someone who did not come to the 

United States through legal means.

Credit...

Where Does Reality End and Overreaction, Hyperbole and Lies Begin?

Coup: a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government

Coup attempt: an attempted sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government

Since the 1/6 coup attempt, the MSM has been referring to the event as a riot, an attack, an invasion, an insurrection and the like, but not as a coup attempt. In politics, reality is often or usually a complex and variably fuzzy thing. But by the end of the day, it was clear to me that an actual coup attempt had been intentionally fomented by the ex-president and carried out according to his direct orders. That personal reality seemed to be clearer than most things in politics. The evidence included videos of violence broadcast in real time, and the people involved saying they were there to kill come people in congress, stop validation of an allegedly fraudulent and illegitimate election with an intent to keep the ex-president in power. If that isn't a coup attempt, what is it? That the effort failed, or even was doomed to fail, makes no difference.

One can see that calling it an insurrection would consonant with the House impeachment article. But more fundamentally, at its core, the 1/6 event was an attempt to overthrow the government. Information that has come to light since the 1/6 event generally points to it being a coup attempt. 

Was it an overreaction or hyperbole to see 1/6 as a coup attempt? Was it a lie? Is that true now in light of information that has come to light so far?

The Boogaloo Bois, Boogs or Goons

ProPublica reports on one of the groups that participated in the coup attempt.

Hours after the attack on the Capitol ended, a group calling itself the Last Sons of Liberty posted a brief video to Parler, the social media platform, that appeared to show members of the organization directly participating in the uprising. Footage showed someone with a shaky smartphone charging past the metal barricades surrounding the building. Other clips show rioters physically battling with baton-wielding police on the white marble steps just outside the Capitol.

Before Parler went offline — its operations halted at least temporarily when Amazon refused to continue to host the network — the Last Sons posted numerous statements indicating that group members had joined the mob that swarmed the Capitol and had no regrets about the chaos and violence that unfolded on Jan. 6. The Last Sons also did some quick math: The government had suffered only one fatality, U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, 42, who was reportedly bludgeoned in the head with a fire extinguisher. But the rioters had lost four people, including Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran who was shot by an officer as she tried to storm the building.

In a series of posts, the Last Sons said her death should be “avenged” and appeared to call for the murder of three more cops.

The group is part of the Boogaloo movement — a decentralized, very online successor to the ­­militia movement of the ’80s and ’90s —­ whose adherents are fixated on attacking law enforcement and violently toppling the U.S. government. Researchers say the movement began coalescing online in 2019 as people — mostly young men — angry with what they perceived to be increasing government repression, found each other on Facebook groups and in private chats. In movement vernacular, Boogaloo refers to an inevitable and imminent armed revolt, and members often call themselves Boogaloo Bois, boogs or goons.  

In the weeks since Jan. 6, an array of extremist groups have been named as participants in the Capitol invasion. The Proud Boys. QAnon believers. White nationalists. The Oath Keepers. But the Boogaloo Bois are notable for the depth of their commitment to the overthrow of the U.S. government and the jaw-dropping criminal histories of many members.  

Mike Dunn, a 20-year-old from a small town on Virginia’s rural southern edge, is the commander of the Last Sons. “I really feel we’re looking at the possibility — stronger than any time since, say, the 1860s — of armed insurrection,” Dunn said in an interview with ProPublica and FRONTLINE a few days after the assault on the Capitol. 

“It was a chance to mess with the federal government again,” he said. “They weren’t there for MAGA. They weren’t there for Trump.” Dunn added that he’s “willing to die in the streets” while battling law enforcement or security forces.

Mike Dunn

So, was 1/6 a coup attempt or something else, e.g., a coup attempt and an insurrection? Is it hyperbole to call it that, or a lie? Does it matter what 1/6 is called?

Ted Cruz Loses All Of His Marriott Award Points

Bethesda, Maryland – Marriott International Inc. announced last night that it has revoked the thousands of Marriott Award Points Texas Senator Ted Cruz accrued over the years. The drastic move by the company that has over 30 brands, 7,484 properties, and over 1.4 million rooms is due to Senator Cruz jetting off to Mexico while millions of Texans are suffering from the effects of the recent winter storm.

Marriott Award Points Morality Clause

Marriott CEO Andrew Canard pointed out everyone who participates in the awards program agrees to its terms and conditions. And like many other programs offered by major hotel chains that reward members with free rooms and extra amenities, there is a morality clause.

“If a participant in the program engages in a heinous crime, we can’t be seen offering such an individual perks,”  said Mr. Canard. “It would damage our brand. Unfortunately, Senator Cruz decided to abandon his constituents in their hour of need. We had no choice but to nullify whatever awards he earned.”

Mr. Canard also stated Cruz earned himself as well as his wife a lifetime ban from Marriott. The two join a small list of people who are never welcome at any of the Marriott properties. Even though the entire list isn’t publicly known, it is rumored that former President Donald Trump and Melania will never be allowed to enter a Marriott property again.

Cancel Culture Gone Amok?

Senator Cruz immediately went on social media to decry what he called “The latest attack by the SJW cancel culture on God-fearing Americans.” Even though he publicly apologized for running out on millions of Texans who had no heat, no electricity, and no water during a natural disaster, Cruz believes his inalienable right to be a jerk is being attacked by the hospitality conglomerate.

Under normal circumstances, other conservative lawmakers and pundits would be quick to support a fellow fascist. But Ted Cruz is so unlikeable that no one is backing him up. One anonymous aide to the Texas senator pointed out a hard truth: “When Ted Cruz loses the support of the KKK, you know it’s serious.”

Other organizations are still deciding what to do. There are rumors Chuck E. Cheese will soon revoke all pizza and gaming privileges to Ted and his wife, as well as their children.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/laughingindisbelief/2021/02/ted-cruz-loses-all-of-his-marriott-award-points/