The rising maelstrom of Republican malevolence

As some folks may have noticed, things aren't improving politically speaking. Unfortunately, things continue to deteriorate. The fever hasn't broken yet. Radical right propaganda continues to thrive in a toxic soil of lies, slanders, irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot motivated reasoning. 

For example, the National Butterfly Center had to close due to repeated threats against this evil organization. The threats are that sex-trafficking is going on amongst the butterflies. False sex-trafficking claims have become a recurring radical right crackpot conspiracy theory. The Washington Post writes:

The National Butterfly Center in South Texas will be closed “for the immediate future” because of baseless attacks stemming from a clash over immigration enforcement at the nearby U.S.-Mexico border, the organization said Wednesday.

The nonprofit center in Mission has endured a firestorm in recent years amid an ongoing lawsuit against the former Trump administration, which sought to build part of a border wall on its property, and the fundraising organization We Build the Wall. Right-wing groups have falsely claimed the butterfly center illegally smuggles people into the United States and facilitates sex trafficking. 

The indefinite closure comes shortly after the center shut down for three days last weekend, citing “credible threats” regarding a nearby border security rally. The We Stand America event in McAllen featured Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, and other Trump administration officials.

The butterfly center said it became aware of the rally on Jan. 21, when a congressional candidate from Virginia demanded to access the Rio Grande from the center’s property to “see the rafts with the illegal crossing.” The center alleged that the candidate and her friend knocked down its executive director, Marianna Trevino-Wright, and tried to run her son over with a car.  

The center alleged that a former Texas official, whom it did not identify, later advised Trevino-Wright to be armed or leave town during the rally because protesters would probably stop at the preserve during a caravan to the border. Later, the center said, someone tore down a state-erected sign marking the preserve’s location.  

At least some participants in the We Stand America rally do appear to have stopped at the butterfly center. Ben Bergquam, of the Stephen K. Bannon-affiliated network Real America’s Voice, recorded himself in front of the preserve’s sign, holding a child’s shoe and a wristband he says belonged to a trafficking victim. Lynz Piper-Loomis, a South Carolina congressional candidate, shared a video of herself and a friend at the center allegingchildren had been trafficked there.  

Although Trevino-Wright said police had increased their presence at the center, she said she doubted that those harassing the preserve would stop.

“There’s no consequences for any of them,” she said, “so it’s just going to get worse.”

Obviously, that congressional candidate from Virginia, a standard-issue Republican crackpot no doubt, was threatened by the existence of other people and merely standing her ground when she tried to run over a boy with her car. Alleging child sex-trafficking is quite popular among Republican crackpots these days. 

In my humble opinion, Republicans alleging sex-trafficking just cannot help but project their secret repressed desires onto others. They need professional medical treatment. 

The butterfly people's problem stem from a 2017 lawsuit the preserve file against the Trump administration in 2017. The lawsuit alleged that federal officials wanted to build a border wall on the center’s property without complying with existing law. 

Safety tip, don't sue the Trump administration for anything. Only sex-traffickers do that.

In other maelstrom of malevolence news, the GOP is still enthusiastic about RINO hunting Republican traitors in the party into irrelevance. The GOP is hoping to push Liz Cheney out of congress. The WaPo writes:

SALT LAKE CITY — Republican leaders forged an agreement this week to potentially fund a challenger to Rep. Liz Cheney in Wyoming, and party members are expected to formally condemn her for her work on the Jan. 6 committee Friday, an unprecedented rebuke of an incumbent member of Congress.

As the party met in Salt Lake City this week, the leaders of the Wyoming GOP privately signed a special letter that would allow the national party to financially support Harriet Hageman, Cheney’s primary challenger. The letter officially recognizes Hageman as the presumptive nominee for the seat.

In response to the party passing the “Rule 11” resolution that could fund Cheney’s challenger, a spokesman for Cheney said: “Wyoming Party Chairman Frank Eathorne and the Republican National Committee are trying to assert their will and take away the voice of the people of Wyoming before a single vote has even been cast.”

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel also worked behind the scenes with David Bossie, a top Trump ally, to author and push a resolution that attacked Cheney’s work on the committee, called her a “destructive” force in the GOP and vowed the party would no longer support her.  

“We’ve had two members engage in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse. This has gone beyond their original intent. They are not sticking up for hard-working Republicans,” McDaniel said in a joint interview with Bossie at a Salt Lake City hotel where the party is holding its winter meeting.

It is worth noting that Cheney really is a destructive force in the GOP. That is because she still stands for democracy and some semblance of truth about the fact that T**** was and still is a mendacious, corrupt anti-democracy tyrant-autocrat. On at least those issues, Cheney stands for the opposite of what the GOP stands for. 

Other recent reporting indicates that at present, Republicans who voted in the 2nd impeachment to impeach the corrupt, anti-democracy tyrant-autocrat are doing better in fund raising than the people the enraged GOP and ex-president have endorsed to replace them for their treasonous vote to defend democracy. Whether that will make any difference remains to be seen. 

Let’s talk about time.

Here’s a common philosophical question I ran across on the internet:

“Is time a construct of man or a rule of nature?”

From Wikipedia:

Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience. Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions. [Emphases mine]

So, in a nutshell, I’d say “time” means/is defined by “change”; change in any way of any thing, no matter how minuscule that change.  Even a change in one atom’s situation can validate/verify the existence of the phenomenon of time.

The phrase “intervals between them [events]” in the Wiki definition is interesting because it implies that, were the/our universe, and all that is it, should ever stop dead in its tracks, time could still exist in theory, awaiting the next interval of some change.  Okay, getting too deep into the weeds/hole here.  I’ll wrap this up. 

So, to you, what is time?  How do you define it? 

A man-made invention to keep track of our place in the universe? A relative scale? A calculation of existence? An ever-flowing river of events? A fourth dimension? The engine that prevents the universe from remaining static? An undefinable phenomenon that morphs depending on an infinite number of factors? A phenomenon/result of consciousness?  A scheme to sell watches? 😁 All of the above?  Other, and then some?  I really don’t care, why do you?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

On election subversion: Some people think the possibility is significant

The following is from the abstract of a draft paper (in peer review), Identifying and Minimizing the Risk of Election Subversion and Stolen Elections in the Contemporary United States:

The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules. The potential mechanisms by which election losers may be declared election winners are: usurpation of voter choices for President by state legislatures purporting to exercise constitutional authority to do so, possibly blessed by a partisan-divided Supreme Court and acquiesced to by Republicans in Congress; fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by law- or norm-breaking election officials; and violent or disruptive private action that prevents voting, interferes with the counting of votes, or interrupts the assumption of power by the actual winning candidate.

Until recently, it would have been absurd to raise the possibility of such election subversion or a stolen election in the United States. Few cases have emerged in at least the last 50 years in the United States of actual election subversion by election officials, leading to an election loser being declared the election winner, despite other unique pathologies of American election administration.

Ironically, the conduct of former President Donald J. Trump in repeatedly and falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen has markedly raised the potential for an actual stolen election in the United States. Millions of Trump’s Republican supporters now believe the false claim of a stolen election, and some Republican elected officials have pursued bogus sham “audits” and taken other steps that undermine voter confidence in the fairness of the election process. Threats of violence and intimidation have led to unprecedented attrition among election administrators, and some exiting officials are being replaced by those who may not have allegiance to the integrity of the election system. Those Republican election officials who stood up to Trump in 2020 and saved the United States from a potential constitutional and political crisis have been censured, stripped of power, and challenged for office by those embracing the “Big Lie.” Together, these actions serve both to delegitimate the election of Democrats including President Joe Biden in 2020 and to open the door to election manipulation in future elections. Elected officials, election officials, and others believing or purporting to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen may seek to justify subverting future election results in response to earlier purported fraud.

The solutions to these problems are both legal and political. Legal changes should include: (1) paper ballot, chain-of-custody, and transparency requirements, including risk-limiting audits of election results; (2) rules limiting the discretion of those who certify the votes, including Congress through reform of the Electoral Count Act; (3) rules limiting the over-politicization of election administration, especially by state legislatures; (4) increased criminal penalties imposed on those who tamper with federal elections or commit violence or intimidation of voters, elected officials, or elected candidates; and (5) rules countering disinformation about elections, particularly disinformation about when, where, and how people vote. In addition, it will be necessary to organize for political action to reenforce rule-of-law norms in elections. This means advocating for laws that deter election subversion and against laws making stolen elections easier; politically opposing would-be election administrators who embrace false claims about stolen elections; and preparing for mass, peaceful protests in the event of attempts to subvert fair election outcomes.

Unrelated: A surprise in a naughty book

On an unrelated note, the following is a 30 sec. video about banning naughty books in public schools that was posted on Tik Tok. That was my first visit to Tik Tok and my first upload here of a video from my computer. I'm just full of technology today. 😜

Is he wearing a MAGA hat?

Any acceptable Republican candidates for Prez and VP out there?

 OVER on my channel, SNOWFLAKE'S, I posted about your Democratic dream pairing for 2024.

However, on here, I am gonna ask a different question.

If you had your druthers, are there a pair of Republicans you could find acceptable if they ran together?

I mean besides Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, though on reflection, I kinda like Adam, he has that Kennedyish presence and appearance.

I may at one time have said Nikki Haley, but since she got into bed with Trump (figuratively speaking), she is out of my good graces.

Then there is a rumor going around that Larry Hogan is considering running. I might find that acceptable, but having a hard time as to a fit for VP for him.

So, after racking my brain thinking if there could be a Republican candidate and VP running in 2024 (not that I will ever vote for Republican, but that is not my question), I think I might have come up with a couple ideas:

How about Liz Cheney and Cindy McCain? Can you imagine the exploding heads?

If Larry Hogan how about him as VP behind Jeff Flake? Possible?

Sorry my imagination on Republicans I could accept is limited, maybe y'all can come up with some names of a pair of half-sane candidates you could find acceptable if they ran as a team in 2024. (not saying you would vote for them, just find acceptable).

ANYONE?

GOP's Coordinated Attack on Free and Fair Elections Moves Forward

Today the NYT published an article, "Campaigning to Oversee Elections while Denying the Last One." They report that nearly two dozen "brazenly partisan" Trump supporters who deny or dispute the results of thed 2020 election are now campaigning for the office of secretary of state across the country-- an office largely devoted to the overseeing of state elections. Secretaries of state play an important role in making  and enforcing state regulations and rules for elections. If they have usually worked outside of the limelight, that changed in 2020 when Trump and his inner circle pressured several of them to overturn the results-- perhaps most famously in the publicly aired phone conversation between Trump and Georgia's Sec of State, Brad Rafensberger, in which Trump pressured Rafensberger for about 30 minutes demanding that he "come up with 11,780 votes"  (the number that would have thrown the election to Trump). Rafensberger, and other Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State in 2020 refused to fabricate results on demand for Trump. But what if the Secretaries of State and local election boards in 2024 in crucial battleground states are Trump-supporting "Big Lie" proponents bent on making sure Trump or his successor candidate wins by hook or crook? This is the prospect we now face if these candidates win, particularly in crucial battleground states like Michigan and Arizona. The NYT writes that while many of the candidates are running in solid red states:

 "several others, who have formed a coalition calling itself the America First slate, are running in states won by Mr. Biden in 2020, including in the crucial battleground states of Michigan, Arizona and Nevada."

and that:

"The [America First] coalition’s members are coordinating talking points and sharing staff members and fund-raising efforts — an unusual degree of cooperation for down-ballot candidates from different states. They are in strong position to win Republican primaries in those battleground states, as well as in somewhat-bluer Colorado and heavily Democratic California."

 The article is long and detailed, so rather than summarizing it here, I'll provide a link. This is an important development in the growing and increasingly well-funded and organized anti-democratic Tumpist movement that now dominates the GOP. Earlier today, Germaine reported an alarming statement made by Trump and his supporters that Pence had the legal right to overturn the election single-handedly on January 6 of last year, but "chose not to exercise" that power.  Clearly the gauntlet has been thrown down, and if Biden and the Dems do not use their narrowing window of opportunity to make sure there is no ambiguity in election laws, there is a real possibility that democratic elections as we know them will end in 2024. If Trump loyalists control election boards, and occupy the offices of Sec. of State in key states in 2024, the results could be disastrous for election integrity and democracy. 

NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/30/us/politics/election-deniers-secretary-of-state.html

 

 

The ex-president admits in writing he wanted to overthrow the 2020 election

From the flogging dead horses files, CNN writes: 

Former President Donald Trump in a statement Sunday said he wanted then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 presidential election, repeating the false claim that Pence had the power to do so and slamming recent bipartisan efforts to reform the Electoral Count Act.

Trump falsely claimed that a bipartisan group of lawmakers working to reform the Electoral Count Act proves his claim that Pence had the power, according to the ECA, to overturn the 2020 election. Though the Act is vague, it is clear the role of the vice president is ceremonial and does not include the power to overturn the result of a presidential election.

"Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!" Trump wrote.

Newsweek reports the same thing. The Huffington Post writes:

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said last week that “We need to clarify: What is the role of the vice president precisely, make it clear that it’s ministerial.”

Critics and legal experts piled onto Trump’s statement. Conservative attorney George Conway said it was already clear from a legal standpoint that the vice president’s role in that setting is merely ceremonial, “but sometimes we want to make laws even clearer so that even semiliterate psychopaths have a chance at understanding them.”

Of course, neo-fascist Republican Party propaganda immediately started spewing poisonous confusion. One neo-fascist dark free speecher lies in her snarky Tweet:

There you have it. A sitting US president publicly admits that he tried to overturn a free and fair election that he clearly lost.  

But sadly, no amount of contrary evidence is going to change the minds of the stolen election crowd. The 2020 election was stolen, Trump says so, and Pence should have overturned it. In their minds, he failed and should be at least be RINO hunted out of the GOP, if not tried for treason and executed. 

Stolen election lies is standard dogma in Republican Party propaganda. That is the party line and they are sticking to it come hell, high water or contrary evidence.

And, some who know the election was not stolen, and claim to be driven by evidence and sound reasoning continue to claim there is no reason for concern about the health or stability of American democracy, the rule of law or civil liberties. Apparently, no amount of evidence will change those minds. 

That's the awesome power of ideology and dogma to disconnects minds from facts and sound reasoning, and replace that uncomfortable reality with a comforting reality based on lies and flawed motivated reasoning.  

I know, I know. I'm flogging a dead horse. The evidence of threat is rock solid, but that is not going to change minds that see the vaporware reality of safe democracy. Those minds need to see it. The real reality is just too psychologically and socially unpleasant (cognitively dissonant, ego-deflating, tribe-cult disloyalty-signaling, etc.) to be acceptable.