Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive science, social behavior, morality and history.
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.
Politico reported that a leaked document with a preliminary vote indicates that the court will vote to overturn Roe and leave abortion to the states. As Christian fundamentalist as this decision is, it could be a lot worse. The Christian nationalists on the court could have voted for a nationwide ban on abortion. That's what the CNs really want, as discussed here yesterday, but the politics of it are just too much Christianity too soon for where this tyranny of the minority wants to force America to go.
One can reasonably believe, ~98% likelihood in my opinion, the document was leaked to soften the blow when Roe goes away and the states with trigger laws impose immediate near-total or total bans on abortions. According to Wikipedia, the thirteen states with trigger laws are Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. Those laws would automatically ban abortion in the first and second trimesters if Roe v. Wade were overturned. In other words, the Republican CN Supreme Court is now fully engaged in playing politics and using propaganda techniques to advance an agenda that the CN minority knows most Americans oppose.
The CN movement will slowly wear us down, which is exactly what it has been doing for decades. That is the strategy. The tactics are constant, divisive, ruthless dark free speech. Democracy, the rule of law, truth, reason, civil liberties are all eroding away before our eyes. Unless voters wake up and oppose this by voting Republicans out of office, America will become a fundamentalist Christian neo-fascist kleptocracy.
Right now, it looks to me like the Christian fundamentalists are winning their no-compromise, take no prisoners culture war. The 2022 and 2024 elections will probably shed enough light for assessing whether democracy will fall to the neo-fascist Christian-capitalist kleptocrats.
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Alito writes in the document, labeled the “Opinion of the Court,” referring to a second decision that reaffirmed Roe. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
The release of the 98-page document is unprecedented in the court’s modern history: Early drafts of opinions have virtually never leaked before the final decision is announced, and never in such a consequential case. And early drafts of opinions often change by the time the decision from the court is announced.
The fact that the leak is unprecedented is some of the evidence I rely on[1] to conclude that this is very likely the US Supreme Court playing politics to advance a social, political and legal agenda that most Americans oppose. This was an intentional leak for Republican and Christian nationalist political advantage. This is the face of the American tyranny of the minority that is attacking and destroying democracy.
Question: Will this wake lots of minds up to see the Christian-Republican Party threat, or are nearly all the minds that can wake up already woke?
Footnote:
1. Other evidence includes the fact that the Republican Party has fully politicized federal judges by requiring them too be, among some other bad things, Christian fundamentalist, anti-abortion, laissez-faire capitalist, and anti-civil liberties, especially anti-voting rights, anti-abortion, anti-same-sex marriage and anti-church-state separation.
There are many theories of modern democracy, but in practice the
indicator on which almost all people and organizations agree is free and
fair elections. That's why Donald Trump has hand-picked
election-deniers-- people who deny that Biden won in 2020-- to run in
Republican primaries for positions including Sec of State, AG and Governor-- positions that
are crucial to the proper administration and overseeing of elections. Last week, two of
these hand-picked loyalists were selected at a Republican convention in
Michigan to run on the Republican ticket there in November. Michigan,
of course, is one of the battleground states Trump lost in 2020. At a
recent rally, Trump said of his picks-- Matthew DePerno for attorney general and Kristina Karamo for secretary of state:
Secretaries of State oversee the administration of elections and the
certification of results in most states. They can also play a major role in the
interpretation and implementation of election laws in ways that either make it easier or harder
to vote. In Georgia, Trump endorsed Jody Hice to unseat his nemesis,
Republican Brad Rafensberger, who famously stuck to non-partisan
principles refusing to cave in to Trump's demand that he "find 12,000
votes" to overturn the Biden win there. Trump intends to replace any
such principled officials (many of whom have left their former jobs in
fear or exhaustion anyway) with loyalists who would do his bidding
wherever possible. Hice entered the race in March, and already has
raised $1.6 million to the incumbent Rafensberger's $600,000. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democracy-is-on-the-ballot-in-these-11-secretary-of-state-and-attorney-general-elections/
In Arizona, Trump has endorsed the once-obscure, now well-known (at
least in "America First" circles) troublemaker, Mark Finchem. Finchem
is a member of the Right Wing extremist militant group, Oathkeepers, has
ties to Q-anon, and was scheduled to speak at the 1/6 Stop The Steal,
rally. It is chilling to think that such a man could be charged with
overseeing the next Presidential election. These are not isolated cases,
but part of Trump's plan to eliminate any and all officials that might
stand between him and a victory should he run in 2024. Even if he
doesn't run, he wants to leave in place a pathway to the White House for
other Trumpists that do so with (or even without) his support.
When,
in 2020-2021, Trumpists waged war against the faceless and usually
taken-for-granted officials who work to insure that our votes are
counted properly, many were relieved that non-partisan principles and
protocols prevailed over Trump's attempts to intimidate these officials
whether they were Republicans or Democrats. Some in the media have said
that "American Democracy was tested, and it passed," because courts
dismissed absurd cases and Secretaries of State, AGs and others held to
principles. For example, in a now famous phone call, Trump intimidates
Georgia's Republican Sec. of State, Brad Rafensberger, going as far as
to threaten him with a criminal investigation if he does not "find the votes" needed to deliver a Trump win. Rafensberger stood up to Trump.
But
it is the existence of these once obscure officials that Trump has
since done as much as possible to weaken or take down, replacing them
with sycophants. Remarkably, though we hear about "Democracy vs.
Authoritarianism" everyday in the news now, nobody is paying much
attention to the frontline between them right here at home.
We
often remember Trump's attempt to overturn election results in terms of
the violent insurrection of 1/6. But even that insurrection was
ancillary to the real goal that day: to intimidate VP Mike Pence to
invoke powers he does not have to change the outcome of the election, as
per the legal memo of John Eastman https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066248-eastman-memo.
The path to overthrowing the legitimate government of the US (the
elected Biden administration) was always two-tracked. It was a)
legalistic and b) populist, with each track feeding into and
reinforcing the other. The goal was to use elected or appointed
officials to subvert the election. But in order to get 2/3 of the
Republican House members to vote (hours after 1/6) to overturn the
election results, they must first fear the wrath of their "base." Not
only must they fear losing future elections, but also fear for their
safety. The disturbing drone of death threats during 2020 made by
anonymous Trump supporters to government officials, and the sight of
gallows erected for Mike Pence on that day were never denounced by
Trump. When asked to repudiate The Proud Boys in a television debate,
Trump instead addressed them the way a military commander might, "Stand
back and stand by." Thuggish intimidation was something of a specialty
for Trump. But so are his attempts to use legal and political positions
designed to serve democracy to subvert it instead.
This
fact is preserved for all to see in the above-referenced call to
Rafensberger. It is preserved in the amicus brief signed by 17
Republican-leaning states in a lawsuit brought forward by Texas that was
designed to nullify election results in four other states where Trump
lost. 17 states. That's more than a third of all states in the union
endorsing an effort to disenfranchise voters in those states by
ostensibly legal means. It was disgracefully preserved, of
course, in the record of votes recorded several hours after the
Insurrection of 1/6. There 139 of 221 Republicans in the House voted to
overturn the election, while 8 of 51 Republican Senators did the same.
That's two-thirds of the Republican House! https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-TRUMP/LAWMAKERS/xegpbedzdvq/ They know that most Republican voters (over 70% in most recent surveys) believe that Trump was the "real" winner in 2020.
It's
hard to imagine a situation like this going unaddressed by the
Administration that actually won--i.e. The Biden Administration, and the
Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. We speak of "red
lines" in wars, but is there no red line drawn to prevent all this from
ever happening again? Far from it. Biden has yet to mention Trump by
name, and despite a vocal minority of the country complaining about
these things on social media, all the momentum going forward belongs to
the would-be usurpers of our electoral system-- the pivot of US
democracy.
A few voices have emerged urging Americans to take
this more seriously, but the scale of the response is small and comes
late in the game. Still, no effort to thwart Trump's plan to eviscerate
democracy from within the system is wasted effort. Amy McGrath, who lost
a challenge to Mitch McConnell in 2020, started a PAC called SOS
devoted to solving this problem last month. Here's the video that
launched the PAC followed by a link for those inclined to contribute.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has.” -- Attributed to cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead
The Christian nationalist political and social movement is directed and controlled by a small group of wealthy and powerful but thoughtful and committed individuals who are hell-bent on changing the secular world into a religious world. Tyranny of the minority is possible in America today. -- Political theorist Germaine
The next frontier for the antiabortion movement: A nationwide ban
Advocates and some GOP lawmakers have started mobilizing around potential federal legislation to outlaw abortion after six weeks of pregnancy
Leading antiabortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.
The effort, activists say, is designed to bring a fight that has been playing out largely in the courts and state legislatures to the national political stage — rallying conservatives around the issue in the midterms and pressuring potential 2024 GOP presidential candidates to take a stand.
The discussions reflect what activists describe as an emerging consensus in some corners of the antiabortion movement to push for hard-line measures that will truly end a practice they see as murder while rejecting any proposals seen as half-measures.
Activists say their confidence stems from progress on two fronts: At the Supreme Court, a conservative majority appears ready to weaken or overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that has protected abortion rights for nearly 50 years. And activists argue that in Texas, Republicans have paid no apparent political price for banning abortion after cardiac activity is detected, around six weeks of pregnancy.
While a number of states have recently approved laws to ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy — the limit established in the Mississippi legislation at the heart of the case pending before the high court — some activists and Republican lawmakers now say those laws are not ambitious enough for the next phase of the antiabortion movement. Instead, they now see the six-week limit — which they call “heartbeat” legislation — as the preferred strategy because it would prevent far more abortions.
“This is a whole new ballgame,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life Action, one of the country’s biggest antiabortion groups, said in an interview. “The 50 years of standing at the Supreme Court’s door waiting for something to happen is over.”
Assuming the Republican Christian nationalist nationwide abortion ban passes, most women will usually be forced to be much more careful about birth control or be forced to carry a pregnancy to birth. One can reasonably think that in that case, women caught in an abortion will be prosecuted and jailed, maybe executed for 1st degree murder in some states.
Women who have a spontaneous abortion or miscarriage will be grilled by religious zealot Christian inquisitors. Some of those women, especially non-Whites and non-Christians, will be wrongly prosecuted. Some will be wrongly jailed or executed.
The elites vs the rank and file
My estimate is that nearly all (~99% ?) CN elites, e.g., elected Republican politicians, professional Republican propagandists like Faux News and major GOP donors know exactly what they are doing and what they want. By contrast, probably no more than about 30% of the rank and file fully understand what it is they support. The CN movement is deeply mendacious, deceptive and opaque about its real goals.
Once the Republican CN total abortion ban passes, some of the woke rank and file will come to regret their own role in this. Most will rationalize it in the name of God or whatever excuses the GOP and CN propagandists will provide for them to believe.
I have pointed out here many times that a key goal of Christian nationalism (CN) is to get rid of all, 100%, of taxpayer-funded secular public education. The CN goal includes replacing it with taxpayer-funded Christian education. CN is a no-compromise (authoritarian) Christian fundamentalist political and social movement.
The CN social-political movement is acutely aware that young minds need to be trapped and enslaved in servitude to the loving, righteous God to push back on the evils and horrors of secularism and pluralism in society, government and law. Evils and horrors of secularism and pluralism is exactly how the CN movement sees this “problem” in its holy war on all Americans, including dissenting Christians, non-heterosexuals, atheists, people of non-Christian religions, non-White people, women and non-European ethnic groups.
Nearly a dozen parents and students, with help from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, filed a high-profile federal lawsuit today over a Christian revival in a West Virginia school that prompted a recent student walkout.
More than 100 students, led by Huntington High School senior Max Nibert, staged a dramatic walkout on Feb. 9 to protest some students being forced to attend an evangelical Christian revival at the school on Feb. 2. The walkout, with students chanting “Separate the church and state” and “My faith, my choice,” was covered not only nationally by the Washington Post, NPR and CNN but also internationally.
The legal complaint in the case, Mays v. Cabell County Board of Education, notes, “For years, school system employees have violated the constitutional rights of students by promoting and advancing the Christian religion, as well as by coercing students into participating in Christian religious activity.” The lawsuit charges that two Huntington High School teachers during homeroom on Feb. 2 escorted their entire classes to the revival. Students, including a Jewish student who asked to leave but was not permitted to do so, were instructed to bow their heads in prayer and raise up their hands and were warned they needed to make a decision to follow Jesus or face eternal torment. Adult volunteers from a local church went into the crowd to pray with students. Plaintiff students observed teachers and administrators praying with church volunteers. Huntington High Principal Daniel Gleason was present at the assembly along with assistant principals.
Evangelist Nik Walker, who runs Nik Walker Ministries and had been leading revivals in Huntington for weeks, even prayed to thank God for the fact “that you are not going to let these students leave without . . . knowing you.”
FFRF has written several legal complaint letters over adult proselytizing, prayer and religious practices aimed at students within Cabell County Schools, which have been ignored.
Huntington East Middle School held separate Nik Walker Ministries assemblies on Feb. 1. It is FFRF’s understanding that a staff member requested the events and that some students attending those assemblies did not do so voluntarily. It seems parents were not informed in advance.
The lawsuit contends, “At the behest of adult evangelists, Huntington High School held an assembly for students that sought to convert students to evangelical Christianity. Some students were forced to attend. Regardless of whether attendance is mandatory or voluntary, the defendants violate the First Amendment by permitting, coordinating and encouraging students to attend an adult-led worship service and revival at their school during the school day. Parents and students bring this suit to stop these practices.”
Note the scare tactic, accept and submit to Jesus or face eternal torment. That propaganda tactic is no different from the scare tactics that radical right propaganda outlets like Faux News routinely employ to scare, enrage and foment hate among conservatives and Republicans. The same kind of apocalyptic rhetoric flows from both CN propagandists and neo-fascist sources like Faux.
In the coming years, this lawsuit and more like it will probably be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. It is too early for the court to rule as the six Republican CN judges would like by forcing Christianity on all students right now. Instead, they are likely to give the CN movement small, incremental power increases over time. That will slowly drain the vitality from secularism and pluralism. Assuming it ever happens, it will probably years before American society will accept mandatory Christian indoctrination for public school students. Society still moving away from radical fundamentalist Christianity, so the CN movement needs to, and is actively trying to, squelch and reverse that natural social progression.
To be clear, the ultimate goal is to impose Christian sharia on society, government and law. The CN movement does not recognize any separation between church and state. The separation is openly rejected and attacked. The CN movement urgently wants and believes it fully deserves control of our tax dollars to glorify God and fulfill his commands.
A core CN myth (lie) is that America was founded by God as a White Christian nation to rule over all other nations. In that Christian nation, White heterosexual Christian men rule over all others who are subordinate. If one can wrap their mind around that idea, one can start to get a feel for the kind of all-encompassing threat to democracy, the rule of law, truth, rationality, science, secularism, pluralism and civil liberties that the CN movement actually is.
If an end amounting to an American theocracy ever comes about, this could be the beginning of that end.
A massive drought-starved reservoir on the Colorado River has become so depleted that Las Vegas now is pumping water from deeper within Lake Mead where other states downstream don’t have access.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority announced this week that its Low Lake Level Pumping Station is operational, and released photos of the uppermost intake visible at 1,050 feet (320 meters) above sea level at the lake behind Hoover Dam.
“While this emphasizes the seriousness of the drought conditions, we have been preparing for this for more than a decade,” said Bronson Mack, water authority spokesman. The low-level intake allows Las Vegas “to maintain access to its primary water supply in Lake Mead, even if water levels continue to decline due to ongoing drought and climate change conditions,” he said.
The move to begin using what had been seen as an in-case-we-need-it hedge against taps running dry comes as water managers in several states that rely on the Colorado River take new steps to conserve water amid what has become perpetual drought.
“We don’t have enough water supplies right now to meet normal demand. The water is not there,” Metropolitan Water District of Southern California spokesperson Rebecca Kimitch said this week. The agency told some 6 million people in sprawling Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties to cut their outdoor watering to one day a week, effective June 1, or face stiff fines.
The surface level of another massive Colorado River reservoir, Lake Powell, dipped below a critical threshold in March — raising concerns about whether Glen Canyon Dam can continue generating power for some 5 million customers across the U.S. West.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell upstream are the largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S., part of a system that provides water to more than 40 million people, tribes, agriculture and industry in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and across the southern border in Mexico.
In Arizona, falling Colorado River levels have prompted an emphasis on conservation and raised fears of reduced water deliveries to desert areas that include metro Phoenix, Tucson, tribal lands and farms.
At Lake Mead, the new pumps are fed by an intake drilled nearer to the bottom of the lake and completed in 2020 to ensure the ability to continue to draw water for Las Vegas, its casinos, suburbs and 2.4 million residents and 40 million tourists per year.
The “third straw” draws drinking water at 895 feet (272.8 meters) above sea level — below a point at which water would not be released downstream from Hoover Dam.
“Without the third intake, Southern Nevada would be shutting its doors,” said Pat Mulroy, former longtime chief of the Las Vegas-based water authority, who is now a consultant. “That’s pretty obvious, since the first straw is out of the water.”
Once the lakes are drained, most of the American Southwest will revert to dust. The underground aquafers are dropping, so that source of water is going away too.
Maybe some coastal areas can survive if they can build enough desalination plants soon enough. In California, starting construction usually requires a lead time of about 12-15 years for environmental reviews, bureaucratic red tape and bumbling, and lawsuits. The lawsuits are filed by NIMBYS, eco-freaks who oppose everything and all other malcontents with a complaint(s) and money to pursue it in court. Congress has been broken and gridlocked by the neo-fascist Republicans, so it is not able to help. Given that state of affairs, it’s not clear if there is enough time to avoid major catastrophe.
After years in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime time. And his new show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News’s evening lineup just months after Donald J. Trump’s upset victory shattered the boundaries of conventional politics.
Newly planted in Fox’s newly vacated 8 p.m. time slot — previously held by the disgraced star Bill O’Reilly — Mr. Carlson told friends and co-workers that he needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, but without imitating Mr. Hannity. He didn’t want to get sucked into apologizing for Mr. Trump every day, he told one colleague, because the fickle, undisciplined new president would constantly need apologizing for.
The solution would not just propel Mr. Carlson toward the summit of cable news. It would ultimately thrust him to the forefront of the nationalist forces reshaping American conservatism. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host and his producers decided, would embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump. The show would grasp the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition — while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president himself. For years, as his television career sputtered, Mr. Carlson had adopted increasingly catastrophic views of immigration and the country’s shifting demographics. Now, as Mr. Trump took unvarnished nativism from the right-wing fringe to the Oval Office, Mr. Carlson made it the centerpiece of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
He began seeking out stories, one friend observed, that were sometimes “really weird” and often inaccurate but tapped into viewers’ fears of a trampled-on American culture. He inveighed against Macy’s new line of hijabs, and devoted a segment to “Gypsy” refugees in a Pennsylvania town who Mr. Carlson said had left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human feces.” (It was not true: Local officials ultimately documented a single instance of a refugee child who had pulled down his pants outside because he couldn’t make it back home in time.) He cataloged, and magnified, overlooked instances of what he cast as growing discrimination against white Americans. Stories about the threat of immigration had long been a feature of Fox. But Mr. Carlson dialed up the intensity, expertly weaving tropes borrowed from the far right into a narrative that would come to define “Tucker Carlson Tonight”: falling birthrates among the native-born, big-city crime, lax immigration policies designed to forcibly alter American society — all engineered or encouraged by a “ruling class” desperate to censor public discussion of its own failures.
Mr. Carlson’s darkening arc foreshadowed a transformation beginning to sweep through Fox itself. As Mr. Trump fought to build a border wall and keep Muslims out of the United States, Fox’s journalists and right-wing commentators would clash repeatedly over what many longtime staff members saw as a creeping invasion of the news divisions by allies and functionaries of the higher-rated, pro-Trump prime-time hosts. Mr. Carlson would be both instigator and beneficiary of Fox’s civil war. He forged a relationship with Lachlan Murdoch, the Murdoch family’s heir apparent, who would become his most public supporter at Fox. And while Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, the reality is less high-minded. From the beginning, Mr. Carlson’s on-air provocations have been part of a painstaking, data-driven campaign to build and hold Fox’s audience, according to former Fox executives and employees — an experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Mr. Murdoch’s profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.
The network’s leadership takes a broader view of Fox’s financial and ratings success. A spokeswoman for the network provided the following statement: “Fox News Media has grown through strategic innovation, redirecting investments in journalism to encompass more than 50 percent of the budget while expanding our footprint beyond one legacy linear network to eight thriving platforms. As a result, we’ve doubled our audience, achieved unrivaled results, and have become the destination that more Democrats and independents choose for their news coverage, while our competitors have lost dramatic levels of viewership. We couldn’t be prouder of our entire team, whose commitment to excellence in journalism and opinion has led Fox News Media to all-time ratings records and delivered the best in class to our viewers.”
Here Faux News exemplifies the neo-fascist elite focus on entertainment, power and profit over inconvenient truth, sound reason and service to the public interest. The tactics are clear, deploy irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot reasoning wrapped in thick clouds of deceit, blatant lies and sleazy slanders.
For Faux, “strategic innovation” is moving toward entertaining propaganda, lies and deceit posing as honest news. It is a winning strategy.
A final thought. The NYT commented that Carlson refused to comment for the article. That is standard practice for the radical right and lying grifters. The KYMS tactic (keep your mouth shut) is highly effective in not alienating the base while maintaining the shield of plausible deniability.
