News digest

Republicans tone down talk of impeaching Biden

We all know that once they retake the House, Republicans want to impeach, impeach, and impeach some more. Democrats of course, not their own. The NYT writes: 

With Majority in Sight, Republicans Hush Talk of Impeaching Biden

Since the day President Biden took office, Republicans have publicly called for his impeachment, introducing more than a dozen resolutions accusing him and his top officials of high crimes and misdemeanors and running campaign ads and fund-raising appeals vowing to remove the president from office at the first opportunity.

But in the homestretch of a campaign that has brought the party tantalizingly close to winning control of Congress, top Republicans are seeking to downplay the chances that they will impeach Mr. Biden, distancing themselves from a polarizing issue that could alienate voters just as polls show the midterm elections breaking their way.  

“Joe Biden is guilty of committing high crimes and misdemeanors,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote in a recent fund-raising email. “And it’s time for Congress to IMPEACH, CONVICT, and REMOVE Biden from office.”

Ms. Greene has already introduced five articles of impeachment against Mr. Biden, including one the day he took office, when she accused him of abusing his power while serving as vice president to benefit his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.

Those sneaky Repubs. They tone down their crackpot anti-democracy and hyper-radicalism just in time for the elections to deceive as many voters as possible about what they really stand for. Moral cowards.

From the radicalization of politics files

The WaPo writes:

Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her

In 2010, Republicans launched a “Fire Pelosi” project — complete with a bus tour, a #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) engulfed in Hades-style flames — devoted to retaking the House and demoting Pelosi from her perch as speaker.

Eleven years later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joked that if he becomes the next leader of the House, “it will be hard not to hit” Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel.

And this year, Pelosi — who Republicans have long demonized as the face of progressive policies and who was a target of rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — emerged as the top member of Congress maligned in political ads, with Republicans spending nearly $40 million on ads that mention Pelosi in the final stretch of the campaign, according to AdImpact, which tracks television and digital ad spending.  

The years of vilification culminated Friday when Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer during an early-morning break-in at the couple’s home in San Francisco by a man searching for the speaker and shouting “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” according to someone briefed on the assault.

This blind, unwarranted rage, hate and deranged violence is the new normal. The radical right Republican Party and its propaganda Leviathan mostly created it. They get ~90% of the credit if you like it, or ~90% of the blame if you don’t like it. Repubs and the radical right love it. I hate it. 

Tyranny of the minority?

Your friend and mine, Fareed Zakaria, writes in an op-ed for the WaPo:

America is now a tyranny of the minority

 

History and current polling both tell us that the House of Representatives will likely flip over to Republican control in the November midterms. What happens then? Actual governance will come to a standstill. There will be a flurry of investigations on everything from the Justice Department to Hunter Biden to the border crisis. The Jan. 6 committee will almost certainly be disbanded. And it’s not implausible to imagine that President Biden will be impeached.

The primary system American parties use to choose their candidates is extremely unusual; no other major democracy has one quite like it. Primaries ensure that the candidates chosen are selected by slivers of the parties — around 20 percent of all eligible voters. And this selection is not at all representative — these are the most intense, agitated activists, often far more extreme in their views than run-of-the-mill registered Republicans or Democrats. Add to this decades of sophisticated, computer-enabled gerrymandering, and you get extreme candidates who run in safe districts where the only threat to them is a primary candidate who is even more extreme.  

While the problem is far worse and much more dangerous on the Republican side, these pressures also affect Democrats.

It is not an accident that Germany and France have both been run largely by solid centrists in a time of populism. They have chosen to keep to the old system of democracy based on the principle of majority rule. In the United States, and to an extent in Britain, democracy has become minority rule, and the minority holding power is unrepresentative, angry and increasingly radical.

Fareed argues that democracy has become minority rule with an unrepresentative, angry and radical minority holding power. As time passes, it is now almost certain that the minority rule will be even more unrepresentative, angry and radical than it is now. The anger and radicalism have been encouraged and are now freely welling up and manifesting as violent rhetoric and sometimes behavior. 

Two common rural American delusions

Delusion 1 - Democrats hate rural America

A WaPo opinion piece comments: 

There’s a story Republicans tell about the politics of rural America, one aimed at both rural people and the rest of us. It goes like this: Those coastal urban elitist Democrats look down their noses at you, but the GOP has got your back. They hate you; we love you. They ignore you; we’re working for you. Whatever you do, don’t even think about voting for a Democrat.

That story pervades our discussion of the rural-urban divide in U.S. politics. But it’s fundamentally false. The reality is complex, but one thing you absolutely cannot say is that Democrats don’t try to help rural America. In fact, they probably work harder at it than Republicans do.

Let’s talk about just one area that has been of particular interest to Democrats, and to rural people themselves: high-speed internet access, a problem that’s addressed by hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that the Biden administration announced this week.

The problem is straightforward: The less dense an area is, the harder it is for private companies to make a profit providing internet service. Laying a mile of fiber-optic cable to reach a hundred apartment buildings is a lot more efficient than laying a mile of cable to reach one family farm.

The opinion goes on to argue that government is needed to fill the gaps. Lack of high-speed service makes it harder to start and sustain many kinds of businesses, have schools access the information students need, and so forth. Republicans are hell bent on letting regulated free markets fill the gaps. By now, it is clear that regulated free markets refuse to fill gaps unless there is enough profit in it. 

Social conscience is not part of free markets. Only profit is.

The Biden administration has a $759 million plan for new grants and loans to build rural broadband. This money comes from the infrastructure bill, but the other big spending bills President Biden signed, the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, also had a wealth of money and programs specifically targeted to rural areas. If Republican elites were in charge, that plan would not exist. They hate government. People in rural areas would just have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Delusion 2 - All the rural problems are the Democrats’ fault

In 2016, conservative commentator Kevin Williamson wrote his intensely bitter (but in my opinion mostly accurate) analysis about the rural American situation and its radicalization. He references a once-prosperous but now poverty-stricken rural town, Garbutt NY where gypsum was once mined. His National Review article opined:  

[Williamson's friend Michael Brendan Dougherty argues that] Garbutt is Trump Country, and Dougherty, while not a wild-eyed Trumpkin, is generally sympathetic to Trump’s critique of current American economic policy, namely that international trade and immigration are dispossessing the white working class. There is not, in fact, very much evidence for those claims: Immigration does put some downward pressure on wages, but it also puts downward pressure on prices. Native-born low-skilled workers’ money income may have stagnated, but their real income — what they can buy with the money they earn — has continued to improve modestly. The main effect of new immigrants’ wage competition is felt in the wages of earlier immigrants. But the effects of immigration overall are tiny compared with the effects of factors such as health-care expenses.

Dougherty cites the work of the conservative polemicist Sam Francis, one of those old capitalism-hating conservatives who very much embraced the paterfamilias model of government. His analysis, like mine, finds emotional and policy links between the Trump movement and its earlier incarnation, the Pat Buchanan movement.

It is therefore strange to me that Dougherty so fundamentally misdiagnoses the conservative reaction to Trump: “A Trump win,” he writes in another piece, “at least temporarily threatens the conservative movement, because it threatens to expose how inessential its ideas are to holding together the party.” (Dougherty also equates the fundraising engaged in by conservative organizations with the Social Security fraud that sustains his fictional Mike, a characterization that indicates the emotional temperament at work here.) Of course there is careerism in the conservative movement, but to proceed as though it were impossible to imagine that conservatives oppose a man running (knowingly or not) on a Sam Francis platform because we oppose the loopy crackpot racist ideas of Sam Francis is to perform an intellectual disservice.

It is also immoral.

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

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.

If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.

Qs:

1. Is most of rural America mostly in the thrall of delusions, lies and/or slanders, or are the two posited delusions themselves delusions, lies and/or slanders?

2. Is there such a thing as empirically provable facts, true truths and sound reasoning, or is all of that just vaporware nonsense?

3. Is Williamson’s argument that dysfunctional, downscale rural communities deserve to die because they are economically, negative assets economically, morally and/or otherwise defensible? (That is be a hard core capitalist argument -- but there is subtlety in it -- this is not a no-brainer [hint: consider what is destroying respect for democracy and truth, and tearing American society, government and religion apart these days])

How the Catholic church sees the threat to Christianity

 America Magazine, a Jesuit publication, wrote: 

Archbishop Gomez: The church must confront ‘woke’ social justice movements that aim to ‘cancel’ Christian beliefs 

The church needs to understand these movements “as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs,” he said, because “they claim to offer what religion provides.” 

“With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” he said.

“We all know that while there are unique conditions in the United States, similar broad patterns of aggressive secularization have long been at work in Spain and elsewhere in Europe,” he said.

The church needs to understand these movements “as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs,” he said.  

The Catholic Church must proclaim Christ “boldly” in the face of new secular movements that promote “social justice,” and “wokeness” as the answer to all of society’s ills.

There is a lot to criticize in that. For example, where has the infallible Catholic church been for the last few centuries when social injustice and unwokness dominated America, Europe and everywhere else the church was present? Social injustice and unwokness is precisely what drives pleas for social justice and wokness. 

What was the church doing all those centuries? It was defending and actively participating in social injustice and unwokness. One example, by protecting pedophile priests. Other examples of what the Catholic church provided includes (i) support for hyper-aggressive anti-democratic American theocracy, (ii) taking away women’s reproductive rights, (iii) imposing overpopulation with attendant social and environmental harm on an already over populated, environmentally damaged planet. That is just some of the poisonous fun the Catholic church has given us over the centuries.

Who or what is the Catholic church to have one shred of moral authority about what the church, secularism or anything else can or cannot provide? It has zero moral authority. 

The infallible Catholic church failed dismally in multiple ways but still retains its sanctimonious arrogance about being the only source of aid, comfort and support to people. Why doesn’t the church pay for all the children it forced into existence against women’s will? Why doesn’t the church pay for social security, Medicare, Medicaid and other needed social programs? Why doesn’t the church pay taxes instead of adding tens of billions per year to a staggering federal debt of ~$31 trillion? Why did the church actively participate in the abuse, harsh oppression and slaughter of millions of indigenous people, including children, in North and South America?[1]

Why? Why? Why? Inconvenient questions about inconvenient truths come fast and easy. But the infallible church has no answers. 

Who is cancelling whom? Christianity is aggressively canceling secularism, not the other way around. The list below indicates where most political, social and commercial power in America lies. The church needs to keep this in mind before it goes off attacking secular society and secular social or environmental justice movements the church itself did not help much or at all with.  

The point is this: Catholic church elites and policy in America today are focused on (i) accumulating power and wealth, (ii) establishing fundamentalist White Christian Sharia law, and (iii) demolishing secularism, democracy and civil liberties that God disapproves of, e.g., abortion, voting rights, same sex marriage, protection of God-disapproved people and groups from discrimination. God-disapproved people and groups non-White people, non-heterosexuals, etc. There is absolutely no serious threat to Christianity in America. Asserting that is a blatant lie. Secularism arose naturally because the Catholic church and Christianity generally failed to serve people’s needs.

Qs: What is the threat(s) to Christianity in America? Is it social or environmental justice movements, or is the assertion a Christian lie? 

Why can’t a secular movement or effort serve people’s needs? Is God and religion the only way to do good? If so, does that necessarily mean that all atheists and agnostics are bad?

Footnote: 

1. The Catholic church actively participated in the abuse, harsh oppression and slaughter of millions of indigenous people under a God-sanctioned dogma called the Discovery Doctrine. That Doctrine freed priests to sexually and physically abuse and sometimes kill natives, including children, and not feel bad about themselves. After all, it was God’s sacred work. 

Where most power in the US is concentrated with

religious people, mostly Christians, Jews and Mormons

The White House

US Senate

House of Representatives

US military

Federal courts, especially including the all-powerful radical Christian Supreme Court

Federal law enforcement

Federal agencies

Rock solid constitutional law that protects freedom of religion

State governorships

State legislatures

State courts

State law enforcement

State laws that protects freedom of religion

County and city legislatures, law enforcement and courts

Public schools

Religious schools

Banks and financial institutions

Churches, synagogues and temples

Religious businesses

Religious charities

Media outlets, especially radical right sources

The entertainment industry

A few examples of openly religious companies 

Chick-fil-A

Forever 21

Tyson Foods

Alaska Airlines

Marriott (Mormon)

Jet Blue (Mormon)

Interstate Batteries

Hobby Lobby
ServiceMaster (Merry Maids, Terminix, American Home Shield, etc.)

Mary Kay

Tom’s of Maine

Timberland (Jewish)

Carl’s Jr.

Anschutz Entertainment Group (sports teams, oil companies, etc.)

eHarmony

Wendy’s

An initial update on the coming Twitter hyper-hellscape

The AP writes:

Confusion, concern, conspiracies, celebration.

In the hours after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, reaction on the platform ranged from triumph to despair.

While no immediate policy changes had been announced by Friday afternoon, that didn’t stop users from cheering — or criticizing — what they expected to be a quick embrace of Musk’s pledges to cut back on moderation in what he has said is an effort to promote free speech.

Conservative personalities on the site began recirculating long-debunked conspiracy theories, including about COVID-19 and the 2020 election, in a tongue-in-cheek attempt to “test” whether Twitter’s policies on misinformation were still being enforced.

Popular right-wing pundits tweeted buzzwords such as “ivermectin,” and “Trump won” to see whether they’d be penalized for content they suggested would previously have been flagged. Ivermectin, a cheap drug that kills parasites in humans and animals, has been promoted by some Republican lawmakers and conservative talk show hosts as an effective way to treat COVID-19. But health experts have been pushing back, warning there’s scant evidence to support the belief that it works.

Welp, that is exactly what expert Dissident Politics analyses indicated what would happen. DP expects that next, most (~90%) of the crackpottery, lies and slanders will be allowed in the name of free speech. It's dark free speech, but free speech nonetheless.

DP will update the inquiring minds at DP whether Twitter's Chief Twat, Elon Musk, will do squat about all the lies and bullshittery that he unleashed. So far, the betting is that he won't do much about it. Maybe a fig leaf or two will be put on the gaping wounds in truth and civility, but that's probably gonna be about it.

Daily news digest

Rut rho! Conservatism kills people

A group of sociologists at the Department of Sociology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, wrote this in a recently published research paper:

The rise in working-age mortality rates in the United States in recent decades largely reflects stalled declines in cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality alongside rising mortality from alcohol-induced causes, suicide, and drug poisoning; and it has been especially severe in some U.S. states. .... More conservative marijuana policies and more liberal policies on the environment, gun safety, labor, economic taxes, and tobacco taxes in a state were associated with lower mortality in that state. Especially strong associations were observed between certain domains and specific causes of death: between the gun safety domain and suicide mortality among men, between the labor domain and alcohol-induced mortality, and between both the economic tax and tobacco tax domains and CVD mortality. Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.

Factors considered in the research

(Note: All existing firearm safety laws are

likely to be held unconstitutional in view of

a recent radical right Supreme Court ruling) 

There you have it. Those darned sociologists are once again caught red-handed tossing sand in the finely honed gears of morally superior, God-endorsed conservative capitalist politics. (sarcasm)

But rest assured, America’s fire breathing radical right knows well how to respond to inconvenient truth. Radical right ideologues, Christian fundamentalists and brass knuckles capitalists will, as usual, reject the data and attack the researchers. For example, they will claim the data is based on flawed simulations, and/or is a pack of socialist lies from pedophile socialist liars. 

Or, better yet, they will just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. That KYMS propaganda tactic (keep your mouth shut) is 100% effective in preventing FIMPI (foot in mouth public inconvenience). In the face of inconvenient truth, KYMS is the single most effective dark free speech tool the radical right has to minimize its impact on the public. That is why it’s so incredibly common and popular with radical right elites.

Rut roh! Guns kill people

In 1993, researchers studied the question of whether gun ownership was a factor in mortality. The data they generated indicated that gun ownership was a risk factor for mortality. The risk was being shot dead in the home. They wrote in their paper, Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home:

The use of illicit drugs and a history of physical fights in the home are important risk factors for homicide in the home. Rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance. .... Our data indicate that keeping a gun in the home is independently associated with an increase in the risk of homicide in the home. The use of illicit drugs and a history of physical fights in the home are also important risk factors.

The reaction by the NRA, gun nuts, gun makers and the Republican Party was intense. In 1996, congress passed a ban of federal funding for gun violence research. That ban to this day continues to limit research on gun violence. 

The radical right reaction to that research paper exemplifies another popular propaganda tactic that radical right ideologues, Christian fundamentalists and brass knuckles capitalists enjoy using, specifically the BRBCMRIN technique (block research but claim more research is needed). By claiming more research into sources of inconvenient truth, e.g., gun violence, the radical right has discovered it can block and delay effective legislation for at least decades, maybe forever if they get full power. 

BRBCMRIN was and still effectively used by the cigarette industry to ward off second hand smoke regulations. Use of BRBCMRIN by the carbon energy sector has also been highly effective for warding off legislation to deal with climate change. Ronald Reagan was a big fan of BRBCMRIN. He used it to limit federal research into areas the radical right knew would generate inconvenient truth, e.g., climate change research.

So, when radical right flamers attack inconvenient research and data, claiming it is not enough, it is fair and reasonable to tell them they are full of crap. In view of its history of hiding and blocking inconvenient truth, the burden of proof is on the radical right, not anyone or anything else.

Aggressive Christian nationalist theocracy

Alternet writes in an opinion piece:

‘God’s gonna cut you down’: 

How Republicans conspire with churches for power

For Republicans, the purpose of religion is — as it has been for authoritarians since Old Testament days — political and social control. It’s not about spirituality: it’s all about raw, naked, taxpayer-subsidized power and the wealth associated with it.

A Michigan county Republican Party just posted a video showing picture after picture of that state’s Democratic politicians, starting with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who right-wing terrorists have already tried to kidnap and murder.

Under each picture — including a picture of George Soros representing, presumably, the “International Jews” who Republican politicians suggest wield space lasers and secretly are trying to control the world — reads the death threat, in bold, all-caps:

“GOD’S GONNA CUT YOU DOWN!”

The wealthy pastors of at least four Republican-aligned megachurches in Georgia have invited Hershel Walker to campaign, in clear violation of their tax-exempt status.

Across the nation, white evangelical churches brazenly push their parishioners to vote for Republican candidates: they’ve been getting away with breaking the law since the 1980s and don’t show any inclination to stop now.  

Back during Trump’s second impeachment trial, Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and heir to the multimillion-dollar Graham fortune, publicly said that the 10 Republicans voting to impeach Donald Trump in the US House of Representatives were like Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.

“And these ten, from [Trump’s] own party, joined in the feeding frenzy,” he wrote. “It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal.”

Franklin Graham is a multimillionaire in large part because neither he nor his family have to pay any taxes on their family’s business’ income or even pay property taxes on the land and buildings their business owns and in which they live.

In a news article, AlterNet writes:

Former Vice President Mike Pence claimed during a Wednesday appearance on Fox Business that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution does not protect Americans from having other people's faiths forced upon them.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” it states.

In fact, there are no references to a supreme being anywhere in the Constitution, because the Founding Fathers were adamantly opposed to centralized religious power as well as requiring individuals to subscribe to any particular denomination. 

“These lefties want to scrap religion, Mike Pence, and I think it’s a terrible mistake,” Kudlow griped.

“Well, the radical left believes that the freedom of religion is the freedom from religion. But it's nothing the American founders ever thought of or generations of Americans fought to defend,” Pence said.

These are more warnings that the Christian nationalist wing of the Republican Party intends to establish Christian fundamentalism as controlling US law and society. The intent could not much be clearer. Republican Party fundamentalist Christian elites will obliterate secularism, secular education and secular law. That will be replaced with Christian Sharia law. It will be administered by an enraged, vengeful Christian Taliban right out of the Dark Ages. To get what they want, those elites are openly lying and slandering the left. Even worse, they openly break laws. 

Apparently no one in law enforcement is trying to stop this Christian illegality. Christian nationalist reasoning in defense of lawbreaking is that God’s sacred ends justify all means. That includes law breaking. Law enforcement appears to accept that as OK. Most rank and file Republicans seem to be fine with all of this. In view of their open support or silence, essentially all Republican elites accept Christian theocracy and want to replace secular law and society by force.