Vicious fascist Republican attacks are tearing democracy to pieces

Fascist Republican Party (FRP) hate and anti-democratic poison is oozing deeper and deeper into American society. American democracy, elections and the rule of law are all under a deadly serious attack. The Hill writes:

The toxic acrimony of national politics is seeping down to the local level — and the consequences look ever more ominous.

In recent weeks, school board meetings across the country have descended into screaming matches, often over mask mandates.

Meanwhile, election workers are still reckoning with the forces unleashed in last year’s presidential election — and the fear in some states that new laws mean they could be sued or harassed by partisans in the future.

In many places there is fear — fear for the safety of the low- and mid-level officials who do the unglamorous work that keeps democracy knitted together; and fear for what happens if they decide it’s just not worth it.

Monica Furey Peloso is the president of the board of education for Cheyenne Mountain School District in Colorado.

On Monday, a meeting open to the public became disruptive after anti-mask advocates — many of whom Peloso believes do not live in her district — turned up to harangue the board members for requiring masks for all students.

After the public comment period was over, the board went to a small meeting room to conduct the rest of their business. Irate crowd-members gathered in a courtyard outside, Peloso said.

“A lot of people were chanting and banging on the windows and the door of that little room,” Peloso told this column. “A lot of the people who were facing in at us weren’t even from our district, which was really frustrating.”

The week before, roughly 1,600 miles away, a meeting of the Spotsylvania County School Board in Virginia had to be abandoned — after 13 minutes, according to the local newspaper, The Free Lance-Star — after the crowd became “unruly.”

The school board chair in that case, Dawn Shelley, told this column via email that the behavior she is witnessing from adults is “teaching their children that they can do whatever they want, no matter the consequences. I am worried for our country.”

Shelley also expressed concern that school boards and other local institutions will become less representative of their communities and instead will be taken over by political zealots.

“My concern is not that people won't step up to the plate,” she said. “My concern is that people who don't care, are power hungry, or have a personal agenda will be the ones getting their names on ballots.

Disruptive scenes have been reported across the nation as the politicization of the pandemic deepens.

Eleven people were charged for disrupting a school board meeting in Salt Lake City in May; an aspiring Republican politician in Pennsylvania said within the past two weeks that he intended “going in with 20 strong men” to oust his local board; a meeting in Michigan descended into uproar after one parent responded to a comment about mask mandates with a Nazi salute.

But the anger and incivility isn’t just being seen around school boards — and it can’t be wholly attributed to the prolonged stresses of the pandemic either.

American politics has been becoming more venomous for at least a couple of decades. The factors driving that are numerous and complex. They include the self-reinforcing power of social media, the decline of community institutions, and the willingness of cable news outlets to stoke outrage for ratings.

Then there is former President Trump, both a symptom and an accelerant of the nation’s polarization.

Trump climbed to power by harnessing populist anger at political and media elites. He lost that power only after fomenting a violent uprising, which resulted in him becoming the first president in history to be twice impeached.

The currents that tug at American public life don’t begin and end with Trump — and their negative impact isn’t felt only by his nationally-known targets like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Rural Ware County in southeast Georgia briefly became a flashpoint in the wake of the 2020 election when Trump allies alleged voting machines had “switched” votes from Trump to President Biden.

In fact, the 37 votes at issue had been miscounted due to human error. The mistake had been spotted and swiftly resolved.

But the supervisor of elections in the county, Carlos Nelson, is still living with the consequences. His office’s efforts to recruit new election workers for future elections are struggling. He told this column the county is at about 60 percent of where it should be in terms of staffing.

He also related how people who worked on the county’s elections in 2020 had told him about being harassed in grocery stores or while otherwise going about their business.

“People were making snide remarks — ‘we know y’all stealing votes’ and that kind of stuff,” he said.

Those experiences are all the more frustrating given that the workers in question are hardly signing up for glamor or lavish remuneration.

“When a poll worker works from 6 o’clock a.m to 8 o’clock p.m., and you get $125 a day, you are only doing it because of civic duty, because they want to be involved in the process. They are not doing it for the money,” said Nelson.

State-level politicians are also feeling the strain.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson rose to national prominence for reasons she would have preferred to avoid last December.

A mob gathered outside Benson's home on a Saturday evening, chanting through megaphones in protest about the state’s election result. Some of the protestors were armed. Benson was inside with her four-year-old son, the family having just finished putting up Christmas decorations.

In a phone interview Friday, Benson said she was still on the receiving end of some unpleasant exchanges.

“The encounters have changed in type, I would say. They have shifted back online; it has diminished a bit in rancor. But at the same time the constant state of apprehension has remained,” she said.

Benson serves in a state where there are also ongoing criminal proceedings against a group of men who allegedly plotted to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). One defendant who pleaded guilty in that case was sentenced to more than six years in prison late last month.

In Benson's own situation, the stress of the current political moment takes a toll.

“It has created, really, a sense of a new normal where you are consistently on-edge and consistently aware of the simmering threats,” Benson said. “Sometimes they are more flagrant, sometimes they are more in front of you than others — but there is always a constant recognition of threats.”

Benson asserted that, even in the worst days, she did not wonder whether the costs had become just too high to serve in public office, however. She recalled that she had begun her career working on voting rights in Montgomery, Ala. — and she viewed the attempt to overturn the 2020 election in a similar light.

But as Benson looks at events in other states, not just her own, she wonders where the country is headed. She expresses optimism — but she is blunt about the price to be paid if well-intentioned people turn away in the face of intimidation.

She said that only days ago she addressed a group of election clerks and that “70 percent of my remarks were probably just me saying ‘Thank you.’”

The work was so important, she added, “because if people give up and walk away and don’t stand on the frontlines — whether it’s a bridge in Selma or whether it’s working an election — our democracy will wither on the vine.”

This is more evidence of a sustained FRP attack on democracy, elections, the rule of law, civil liberties and manners and respect. FRP hate is fomented by an endless torrent of well-funded, intentionally divisive lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot motivated reasoning. Poll data from July indicates support for democracy is declining among Republicans and their conception of patriotism has morphed into support for the FRP's 1/6 coup attempt.

 

Poll data from last January indicates that significant numbers of Americans are worried about domestic threats to our way of life and democracy. 

Questions: Is it unreasonable to believe that American democracy is under gravely seriously attack from the FRP, and/or from some somewhere else? Are American extremists on the left more threatening than extremists on the right?

Adverse climate change impacts on some rural towns

Context

One of the factors that led to our ex-president, Lyin' Donnie, to win the Electoral College in 2016 was a sense of fear and unease in many rural areas. Voter concern was about the long-standing stagnant job and wage situation. Changes in agriculture practices including efficient megafarms slowly decreased the number of farm jobs and who much income they generated. Some small rural towns slowly withered away.

In the 1970s, the Soviet government did an economic analysis and concluded that some small rural towns and villages would be economically viable for the foreseeable future, while others would not. The USSR kept supporting economically viable rural areas and left the rest to slowly wither away and eventually disappear. In forest areas, villages slowly returned to a natural state and wolves roamed around in what was left of dying villages as their populations slowly dropped to zero. A 2013 New York Times article, The Russia Left Behind, described dying villages and towns on the road from Moscow to St. Petersburg (discussed here in 2019). 

Eight miles west of the M10 [Moscow to St. Petersburg highway] lies 

the village of Pochinok, Russia, one of hundreds of disappearing settlements. 

The wilderness is closing in around Nina and Vladimir Kolesnikova and their children.

Ludmila and her grandson Maxim at her sister Nina’s house in Pochinok. 

Nina’s family is the last in her village in an area where 

towns are becoming villages and villages are becoming forest.

At that time I became aware of adverse economic influences on rural areas. Ever since, the concept has stuck with me. More recently, a 2016 essay by Kevin Williamson published in The Nation launched a scathing attack on economically dying rural areas in America. Last March I discussed Williamson's essay here, which included this blistering condemnation of people whining about rural decline and what to do about it:

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Williamson was clearly saying, get a U-Haul, get out of town and go where economic opportunity lies because your economic situation is not tenable. Williamson got a major blast of criticism for his bluntness, but his logic still seems worthy of consideration.

Similar rural decline is being seen in some rural areas of Canada.

The climate change angle

Today, the New York Times raised another issue relevant to the matter of adverse economic forces in some rural areas. The NYT writes:

FAIR BLUFF, N.C. — It’s been almost five years since Hurricane Matthew flooded this small town on the coastal plain of North Carolina. But somehow, the damage keeps getting worse.

The storm submerged Main Street in four feet of water, destroyed the town hall, the police and fire departments, and flooded almost a quarter of its homes. After two weeks underwater, the roads buckled. The school and grocery store shut, then didn’t reopen. When Hurricane Florence submerged the same ground two years later, in 2018, there was little left to destroy.

Climate shocks are pushing small rural communities like Fair Bluff, many of which were already struggling economically, to the brink of insolvency. Rather than bouncing back, places hit repeatedly by hurricanes, floods and wildfires are unraveling: residents and employers leave, the tax base shrinks and it becomes even harder to fund basic services.

Damage in downtown Fair Bluff, NC. The town cannot 

afford to buy ruined buildings and tear them down.

That downward spiral now threatens low-income communities in the path this week of Hurricane Ida and those hit by the recent flooding in Tennessee — hamlets regularly pummeled by storms that are growing more frequent and destructive because of climate change.

Their gradual collapse means more than just the loss of identity, history and community. The damage can haunt those who leave, since they often can’t sell their old homes at a price that allows them to buy something comparable in a safer place. And it threatens to disrupt neighboring towns and cities as the new arrivals push up demand for housing.

The federal government has struggled to respond, often taking years to provide disaster funds. And those programs sometimes work at cross purposes, paying some people to rebuild while paying their neighbors to leave.

Fair Bluff is small-town idyllic, nestled among fields of corn and tobacco near the South Carolina border, shielded from the Lumber River by a narrow bank of tupelo gum, river birch and bald cypress trees. But its main road offers a sobering glimpse of what climate change could mean for communities that can’t defend themselves.

On a recent afternoon, the sidewalks were empty and the storefronts abandoned, their interiors smashed up and littered with trash, doors ajar. The roof of one building had collapsed, a battered American flag stuck in the debris; inside other buildings were ransacked shelves, plastic containers full of Christmas decorations, an upside-down tricycle. Speakers on a Methodist church played recorded hymns for no one.

Some stores were strewn with cleaning supplies and half-full garbage bags, as if shopkeepers had first tried to fix the flood damage before giving up.

“If you look at what the folks here called downtown, really the only business that came back was the U.S. Post Office,” said Mr. Leonard, who splits his time between Fair Bluff and four other towns, none of which can afford a full-time employee on their own.

Stephen Potter, the Seven Springs, NC, mayor. “Long-term, we’re not going 

to be able to stay financially solvent on just our tax base alone,” he said. “Now, what happens when we have another catastrophic flood? I don’t know. I really don’t want to be the mayor that presides over the death of Seven Springs.” 

The NYT article goes on to describe other small towns that climate change, e.g., repeated floods, has made barely economically viable or unviable. Once a town gets too small, it no longer has a tax base sufficient to maintain itself. So, it slowly spirals into non-existence as residents die or move away and businesses go out of business.

Questions: Should the federal government intervene to try to save economically unviable towns, or is that too much like Sisyphus trying to push a boulder up a hill but never able to do it? In other words, can one ever successfully fight against economic forces that are implacably arrayed against success? Should the US do what the Russians started doing decades ago?

The fascist shadow docket attack on democracy and the rule of law

Yikes! Much unrighteous truth suppressing is going on

so presumably that will be followed by much smiting

in some form of another, e.g., lightening bolts maybe?

(Hm, seems there's a lot of versions of Romans 1:18)

The fascist Republican Party (FRP) has ramped up its attacks on democracy and the rule of law, in part by avoiding accountability using a legal tactic called the shadow docket. This is a legal tactic that FRP courts use to side step normal due process, attention to decisions and especially legal reasoning they want to keep hidden from the American people. The recent Supreme Court 'decision' on the devastating Texas anti-abortion law (discussed here yesterday) was an example.

The New York Times writes: 

A process intended to help the court deal with emergency petitions and routine matters has grown into a backdoor way of making major policy decisions.

Most of the time, the Supreme Court appears to the public like a cautiously deliberative body. Before issuing major rulings, the justices pore over extensive written briefs, grill lawyers in oral arguments and then take months to draft opinions explaining their reasoning, which they release at precisely calibrated moments.

Then there is the “shadow docket.”

With increasing frequency, the court is taking up weighty matters in a rushed way, considering emergency petitions that often yield late-night decisions issued with minimal or no written opinions. Such orders have reshaped the legal landscape in recent years on high-profile matters like changes to immigration enforcement, disputes over election rules, and public-health orders barring religious gatherings and evictions during the pandemic.

The latest and perhaps most powerful example came just before midnight on Wednesday, when the court ruled 5 to 4 to leave in place a novel Texas law that bars most abortions in the state — a momentous development in the decades-long judicial battle over abortion rights.

The court spent less than three days dealing with the case. There were no oral arguments before the justices. The majority opinion was unsigned and one paragraph long. In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the case illustrated “just how far the court’s ‘shadow-docket’ decisions may depart” from the usual judicial process and said use of the shadow docket “every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend.”

Unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend. That sounds like how the FRP has to operate because it has lost too much public support. Demographic and social changes run against the modern FRP. It cannot operate on the basis of real facts, true truths and sound reasoning. If it did so, it would lose significant power and relevance. Instead, the FRP has no choice but to operate on the basis of divisive, polarizing lies, falsehoods, irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot motivated reasoning, i.e., dark free speech.

Other examples of shadow docket action[1] for the FRP include striking down a California Covid-based restriction on in-home gatherings on the ground that it interfered with religious practice in violation of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause. This trend started before the ex-president was elected. For example, in February 2016 the Supreme Court blocked an important Obama-era environmental rule without any hearing arguments or issuing a formal opinion. A recent FRP shadow docket decision lifted the federal ban on COVID-related evictions.

During the ex-president's time in office his administration was granted shadow docker relief over 35 times on various issues that the FRP wanted to be kept as quiet and unexplained as possible. So far the Biden administration has asked for shadow docket relief once, but that was denied. In that case, the court rejected the Biden administration’s plea for a reprieve from a district-court order requiring it to reinstate a Trump-era immigration policy called the “remain in Mexico” policy. That policy requires asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while waiting for a decision on their asylum claims.

Questions: Is it reasonable to believe that the FRP, specifically the six radical Christian nationalist fundamentalists on the Supreme Court, will use this means to hide truth from the American people? Is it reasonable to expect that the current Supreme Court will generally be hostile to Biden administration shadow docket requests, while remaining generally open to pleads from the FRP?

Footnote: 

1. An influential law journal article from January of 2015 commented about opacity and some "lightening bolts" that emanate from the shadow docket:

The 2013 Supreme Court Term provides an occasion to look beyond the Court’s merits cases to the Court’s shadow docket — a range of orders and summary decisions that defy its normal procedural regularity. 

I make two claims: First, many of the orders lack the transparency that we have come to appreciate in its merits cases. Some of those orders merit more explanation, and should make us skeptical of proposals to depersonalize the Court. 

Second, I address summary reversal orders in particular. As a general matter, the summary reversal has become a regular part of the Supreme Court’s practice. But the selection of cases for summary reversal remains a mystery. This mystery makes it difficult to tell whether the Court’s selections are fair.  

I catalogue the Roberts Court’s summary reversals and suggest that they can be grouped into two main categories — a majority that are designed to enforce the Court’s supremacy over recalcitrant lower courts, and a minority that are more akin to ad hoc exercises of prerogative, or “lightning bolts.” The majority, the supremacy-enforcing ones, could be rendered fairer through identification of areas where lower-court willfulness currently goes unaddressed. We may simply be stuck with the lightning bolts.

God: Take that, you fibber and hider of truth

Fibber & hider: Ouch! Cut that out! That one stung!

God: My mistake, sorry. In future I'll stick to blasting 

Democrats and deep state lizard people. Forgive me.

Fibber & hider: OK, fine. But just be damn sure it doesn't happen again 

you careless boob.

More fascist Republican lies and deceit: Keeping Americans disinformed, polarized and divided

Good thing that Jesus saves -- we need saving

The fascist Republican Party (FRP) continues to rely heavily on lies and deceit to emotionally manipulate people into false beliefs, and irrational distrust and intolerance. Lies and deceit about the end of the Afghanistan war is being used ruthlessly. The Washington Post writes in an article,
GOP douses Afghanistan withdrawal with misinformation:

The Afghanistan withdrawal has gone poorly enough for the Biden administration, and it did itself no favors with its faulty predictions about how it would be carried out.

But even in the midst of the worst stretch of the Biden presidency thus far, the lure of misinformation has proved irresistible to its GOP critics.

They’ve trafficked repeatedly in recent days in false, misleading or unproved allegations involving the Taliban hanging someone from an American helicopter, President Biden skipping a ceremony for 13 Americans killed last week, military dogs being left behind, and $80 billion in military equipment being left for use by the Taliban. With the assistance of some high-profile conservatives and even congressional Republicans, these reports have proliferated on social media.  

The process really kicked into gear over the weekend when conservatives accused Biden of skipping the ceremony at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

The problem was that when the allegation was lodged, the plane bearing the service members’ remains had yet to land. And when the ceremony began the next day, Biden was there. But the likes of Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, former Trump administration acting director of national intelligence Ric Grenell, a California GOP congressional candidate and others promoted the claim that Biden had been absent. They have since deleted their tweets.

Note that they have since deleted their Tweets. That is called lies of omission. Hide the truth and the lie goes away. That is a standard FRP tactic when a lie(s) is too blatant to stand on its own.

In a related article, A legal setback for Donald Trump Jr. on false claims — as he spreads more of them, the WaPo writes:

It was a telling moment in the GOP’s continual descent into a post-truth party in the Donald Trump era. Even though multiple fact-checkers debunked a claim that the Taliban hanged a man from a U.S. helicopter left behind in Afghanistan, many Republicans who promoted the claim refused to back off it. And Donald Trump Jr. ultimately went so far as to replace the banner on his Twitter page with a mock Biden campaign logo featuring an illustration of the supposed helicopter hanging.

The same day, though, this same strategy landed Trump Jr. some legal problems — and earned him a rebuke from a judge.

For the past two years, a GOP Senate candidate in West Virginia has been suing Trump Jr. for defamation. At issue is Trump Jr. claiming during the 2018 campaign that Don Blankenship, whom Trump and his allies opposed in the primary, was a “felon.” Blankenship was charged with felonies related to an explosion at a mine he ran, but he was convicted only on a misdemeanor count.

Trump Jr.’s lawyers sought to have the case dismissed, but U.S. District Judge John Copenhaver Jr. rejected that Wednesday and said the case could move forward. 

The reason? It’s because he believed there was substantial evidence that Trump Jr. might have known the claim to be false and said it anyway.

Given the mess that the withdrawal from Afghanistan turned out to be, there are plenty of things that the FRP could use against Biden and the Dems without resort to dark free speech (lies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation, partisan motivated reasoning, etc.). Nonetheless, merely attacking Biden's misfortune with truth is not good enough for the FRP cause. The FRP feels a need to keep painting false realities that make a bad reality appear to be worse, so it does just that.  

What cause does the FRP fight hard and dirty for? Attacking democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties, while advancing demagogic fascism, radical Christian nationalist fundamentalist theocracy and plutocratic kleptocracy. That is the FRP cause. 

Questions: 

Is the FRP cause really mostly anti-democratic or not? If not, why such heavy reliance on dark free speech, the forever tactic of choice for all or nearly all demagogues, tyrants, theocrats and kleptocrats? 

Because minds don't change, is it pointless or even counter productive to keep pointing out FRP lies and deceit and arguing that the dark free speech is in service to some form of an anti-democratic kleptocratic tyranny-plutocracy-theocracy? 

Are those brass knuckles in that 

righteous glove of discipline?

Abortion update: The Supreme Court chooses to let states gut access to abortions, leaving Roe nominally intact

Their bodies just got banned on real hard

Another civil liberty bites the dust, thanks to the

fascist Republican Party

The Supreme Court to leave standing the Texas law that guts abortion rights. The New York Times writes:

The law, which prohibits most abortions after six weeks and went into effect on Wednesday, was drafted by Texas lawmakers with the goal of frustrating efforts to challenge it in federal court.

The Supreme Court refused just before midnight on Wednesday to block a Texas law prohibiting most abortions, less than a day after it took effect and became the most restrictive abortion measure in the nation.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the court’s three liberal members in dissent.

The majority opinion was unsigned and consisted of a single long paragraph. It said the abortion providers who had challenged the law in an emergency application to the court had not made their case in the face of “complex and novel” procedural questions. The majority stressed that it was not ruling on the constitutionality of the Texas law and did not mean to limit “procedurally proper challenges” to it.

NPR reported this morning that as of today, abortion providers in Texas were turning patients away. The Texas law backed by fascist Texas Republican legislature forces women outside the time limit will be forced to either carry to term and bear a child she does not want, or leave the state to gat an abortion.  

Other fascist Republican state legislatures will no doubt rush to copy and pass the Texas law in their states. If that scenario turns out to come true, then the good news is that abortions will still be legal in states that do not oppose abortions. It seem likely from the way the decision is worded that abortion provider will try to make a better case. That seems futile, but time will tell. Those Christian nationalist judges are hell-bent on getting rid of abortion come hell or high water.

It is a puzzle as to why Roberts voted as he did. My guess is that he wants to pretend to be a judge, instead of a radical Christian nationalist politician who wears a black robe as his work uniform. In his dissent, Roberts wrote that he would have blocked the law while appeals moved through the courts. He wrote this: “The statutory scheme before the court is not only unusual, but unprecedented. The legislature has imposed a prohibition on abortions after roughly six weeks, and then essentially delegated enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large. The desired consequence appears to be to insulate the state from responsibility for implementing and enforcing the regulatory regime.”

The law allows for Texas citizens to report on violations of the law. Yehaw! Here come them law and order snitches! Rat 'em out!

Note: The Supreme Court will hear a challenge to an anti-abortion law from Mississippi this term. That decision will probably come down by June 30, 2022. If the court decides to get rid of Roe v. Wade and make abortions illegal in all states, that is the case where Roe kill decision will come from.

Question: Why would anyone want to live in Texas, low taxes, great climate, deregulated electricity, no abortions and/or something(s) else?

Words and Phrases that, are like, you know, tiresome!

 Like, whatever!

Then there are all those "Commies, Fascists, Socialists" and other political terms that are SO evident on the internet and in political conversations, it is like, well umm, you know, like - tiresome.

Personally man, whatever just ruffles my feathers. And saying "man" is like, SO 70s man.

What about you? Got any words or phrases you like excommunicated from every day lexicon?

Like Biden always saying "Look....."?

Or "SO?"

or "Thoughts and Prayers?"

or "No worries?"

or how about "I know, right?"

or calling everyone you disagree with a "SNOWFLAKE?"

SO - MAN (and Ladies) - Like, pick your medicine, or whatever floats your boat, or tickles your fancy, or makes you see "red", and give us a list of words AND phrases that need to be exterminated.