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.
On Jan. 8, 2023, I posted about a string of shootings in New Mexico that were all directed toward Democrats. Homes and offices were shot at, but no one was injured or murdered. At the time I speculated that it was probably a radical right Republican. I wrote:
The shootings could be by one or more individuals or groups. It could be by a single insane person. The shootings could be by an enraged communist who thinks that Democrats are tyrants. Or it could be a rabid Christian nationalist who thinks that .... But, relevant political circumstances here include normalization of violence, intolerant extremism and publicly expressed hate of liberals and Democrats by some of America’s fascist radical right. The first thought that comes to mind is that the shootings are politically motivated by a Republican fascist or Christofascist.
“That loathing [of liberals] clouded my judgment. I was like, ‘I dislike these people so much. What they’re doing is so wrong. It is helping so few people and hurting so many. It’s so immoral on every level that I just want it to be repudiated.’ And I wanted that so much, not because I like the Republicans — I really dislike them more than I ever have [he is a liar on this point] — but I dislike the other side more. I did learn that, like, I have no freaking idea what goes on in American politics.[he is a liar on this point -- he knows exactly what is going on]”
One can reasonably ask if it is irrational, unfair, wrong and/or unwise to immediately jump to the conclusion that one or more fascist Republicans are responsible for this violence.
I got some criticism for speculating that a radical right Republican was most likely the culprit. Well, looks like they caught the guy who done it. Guess what? It was a radical right Republican who done it. The WaPo writes:
A former Republican candidate for the New Mexico House was arrested Monday for allegedly orchestrating a series of drive-by shootings targeting Democratic state officials this winter, Albuquerque police said.
Solomon Peña, who lost the November election to incumbent Rep. Miguel P. Garcia (D), paid four other men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislators, the Albuquerque police acting commander, Kyle Hartsock, said Monday at a news conference.
After losing the election in November, Peña allegedly visited the homes of three county commissioners and a state senator, said Gilbert Gallegos, a spokesperson for Albuquerque police. Peña complained about his loss, claimed it was rigged and argued at length with one of the officials.
It looks like my speculation was correct. Does or should that make any difference in assessing whether it was OK to speculate before an alleged culprit was caught? Or, is my speculation still unreasonable because the arrested person is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law? Waddabout the court of public opinion, i.e., should it shut up until a court of law has spoken? What if the court of law never takes a case up, e.g., like never nailing Trump and other Republican elites for their crimes?
Mormon nationalism is a lot like Christian nationalism:Newsweek reports:
A video of an African American woman detailing her experiences of racism within the Mormon church has begun to circulate online. The woman, introduced as Channel Achenbach was on the Mormon Stories Podcast in November last year, though the video was uploaded in 2023. In the video, she explained how she was told she was not permitted to marry a white man as her “seed was cursed.” She was also told that she must only marry a Black man to prevent her children from being “cursed.”
She said: "[The leaders] said 'You know what, we think it is best you get married. ‘You are older, you have served the mission, you are a great candidate for marriage but you need to find a Black man’. I remember I kept asking ‘where am I supposed to find a Black man’? They said ‘It doesn't matter, you find a Black man, you convert him or go to an area where there are predominately Black men.’
On the podcast, she continued: [I said] ‘say it, I need you to say it. So Black people and white people aren't supposed to mix’? They were like ‘no they're not.’ I said ‘is there a reason’? They said ‘yes, because your seed is cursed. If your seed mixes with their seed then your children, your husband won't be cursed, but your children will be. Do you want that for your family’?
Speaking about the story, Achenbach sarcastically said: “Two Black people, we're just going to stay cursed. So you want me to find a Black man so I could be cursed with him and so our kids can be cursed, got it.”
Mormonism is a non-Christian religion that is closer to a radical Ponzi-scheme type cult like Scientology than most what Christian sects used to be. What Christianity is like now isn’t clear to me any more. Maybe most are a lot like this nowadays.
Us dumb taxpayers support the greedy Mormon church (MC) with the same tax breaks that all official religions in the US are entitled to. In essence, taxpayers are financially supporting Mormon racism.
For context, the MC demands a minimum of 10% of all pre-tax earnings. Some people pay more. A 2012 analysis indicated that the MC took in about $6 billion/year in the US. It owned about $35 billion worth of temples and meeting houses worldwide. The MC also controlled farms, ranches, shopping malls and other commercial ventures worth billions more. In 2019, a whistleblower told the IRS that the MC had amassed a secret fund worth $100 billion that was supposed to be for charity. Instead of doing charity, MC elites just amassed the cash for the sake of secretly owning $100 billion and occasionally using it to enrich themselves.
So, why are taxpayers forced by law to financially support the corrupt, racist MC cult? This is why:
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A criticism of neoliberalism:Although the meaning of the term is debated and arguably fuzzy, the rise of neoliberalism in the Democratic Party tends is often attributed significantly or mostly to Bill Clinton. The version of this ideology discussed here is basically mostly pro-corporation and anti-consumer. Not surprisingly, neoliberals usually spin the narrative as neoliberalism being pro-consumer by virtue of being pro-corporate. It’s the debunked horse and sparrow economic argument (trickle down). This 11 minute video gets into the details of how neoliberalism works in real time. The neoliberal Democrat here is Pete Buttigieg and the benefitted corporations are the airlines, especially Southwest.
The video starts by ripping Faux News for trying but failing to make Buttigieg look sleazy and corrupt. On the bright side, Faux did succeed in making itself look sleazy and corrupt. But the point being made is that Buttigieg is an intelligent, smooth, sophisticated debater. He easily made Faux look like the divisive disinformation and misinformation source of garbage it usually is.
But then the video turns to Buttigieg’s neoliberalism. That is where some serious disappointment arises. It is in the working of brass knuckles capitalist ideology like this that make the Democrats look too much like Republicans.
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What the 1/6 Committee did not want to talk about: The role of social media in fostering radical right domestic terrorism:The WaPo writes about an important topic the 1/6 Committee investigated but was allegedly too scared to discuss in its final report:
What the Jan. 6 probe found out about social media, but didn’t report
The House committee investigating the riot avoided detailed discussion in its report for fear of offending Republicans and tech companies, sources say
The Jan. 6 committee spent months gathering stunning new details on how social media companies failed to address the online extremism and calls for violence that preceded the Capitol riot.
The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee, according to a draft viewed by The Washington Post. But in the end, committee leaders declined to delve into those topics in detail in their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel’s sensitive deliberations.
Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.
Confronting that evidence would have forced the committee to examine how conservative commentators helped amplify the Trump messaging that ultimately contributed to the Capitol attack, the people said — a course that some committee members considered both politically risky and inviting opposition from some of the world’s most powerful tech companies, two of the people said.
Context & questions
So, here we have Merrick Garland and the DoJ too scared of Trump and Republicans to do what they should have done long ago. We have the 1/6 Committee too scared of Trump, Republicans and big tech companies to have informed us of what they found about social media and its important role in supporting domestic terrorism. We have neoliberalism, i.e., brass knuckles capitalism, poisoning politics as exemplified by what it caused Pete Buttigieg to not do in his job to protect corporations over consumers. We have poisonous, racist, theocratic religions being supported each year with tax breaks worth at least tens of billions of dollars.
The question is, who or what is standing up for democracy, inconvenient truth, transparency and the public interest?
1) Not most of the elites who run the Catholic, evangelical or Mormon churches or Republican Party elites, politicians and propagandists. They are all pro-lies and deceit, anti-democracy, anti-inconvenient truth, anti-climate science, and/or racist. What about most of their rank and file? What about Judaism and Islam? Where do they stand?
2) Not most big corporations. They are ruthlessly greedy, anti-inconvenient truth, anti-climate science, anti-democracy and pro-lies and deceit.
3) The Democratic Party appears to be mostly wobbly and ambiguous.Apparently, wobbly and ambiguous is about the best we have going for the public interest at present. That is not good enough, or is it?
4) Or, is that 1, 2, 3 assessment of reality over-wrought, mostly or completely false, delusional and/or deranged?
So why has the Republican Party repeatedly turned on itself in a way the Democratic Party hasn’t? There’s no one explanation, so here are three.
Money vs. media (roughly, brass knuckles capitalism vs. angry White Christian nationalist populism): For decades, the Republican Party has been an awkward alliance between a donor class that wants deregulation and corporate tax breaks and entitlement cuts and guest workers and an ethnonationalist grass roots that resents the way the country is diversifying, urbanizing, liberalizing and secularizing. The Republican Party, as an organization, mediates between these two wings, choosing candidates and policies and messages that keep the coalition from blowing apart.
At least, it did. “One way I’ve been thinking about the Republican Party is that it’s outsourced most of its traditional party functions,” Nicole Hemmer, author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” told me. “It outsourced funding to PACS. It outsourced media to the right-wing media.”
Between 2002 and 2014, for example, the share of resources controlled by the Republican Party campaign committees went from 53 percent of the money .... to 30 percent.
What rose in their place were groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Heritage Action network and the American Legislative Exchange Council — sophisticated, well-financed organizations that began to act as a shadow Republican Party and dragged the G.O.P.’s agenda further toward the wishes of its corporate class.
What were the hallmark Republican economic policies in this era? Social Security privatization. Repeated tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Free trade deals. Repealing Obamacare. Cutting Medicaid. Privatizing Medicare. TARP. Deep spending cuts. “Elected Republicans were following agendas that just weren’t popular, not even with their own voters,” Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, told me.
But what really eroded the party’s legitimacy with its own voters was that the attention to the corporate agenda was paired with inattention, and sometimes opposition, to the ethnonationalist agenda. This was particularly true on immigration, where the George W. Bush administration tried, and failed, to pass a major reform bill in 2007. In 2013, a key group of Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to make another run at it only to see their bill killed by Republicans in the House. There’s a reason immigration was Trump’s driving issue in 2016: It was the point of maximum divergence between the Republican Party’s elite and its grass roots.
The failure of Bush’s 2007 immigration bill is worth revisiting, because it reveals the pincer the Republican Party was caught in even before the Tea Party’s rise. The bill itself was a priority for the Chamber of Commerce wing of the party. The revolt against that bill was centered in talk radio, which was able to channel the fury of grass-roots conservatives into a force capable of turning Republican officeholders against a Republican president.
Klein discusses two other points that have led to the GOP split.
Virulent anti-institutionalism and climate science denial: Decades ago, most Republicans had faith in corporations and the military. But now Fox News routinely vilifies the “extremely woke” military. The powerful American Conservative Union insists that any Republican seeking leadership in congress must promise to support “a new shared strategy to reprimand corporations that have gone woke.” Woke means anti-climate science and anti-secularism and social tolerance, e.g., anti-LGBQT and anti-CRT. Republicans have lost many of the professional, college-educated voters that used to constitute about half the party. Those people are gone and so is their knowledge, experience and respect for institutions. Now the GOP is anti-institutional but is itself an institution. Klein comments: “And so the logic of anti-institutional politics inevitably consumes it, too, particularly when it [Republican anti-institutionalists] is in the majority.”
Finding and vilifying an enemy, opens up to extremism: A GOP elite commentator described the GOP like this to Klein: “It’s not the Democratic Party.” In other words, GOP unity is now centered on attacking the Democratic Party and liberalism. Not having political goals other than ruling with power leave the GOP open to extremism. Republican extremism relies on exercising power in anti-democratic, anti-liberal ways. That is fully compatible with the current mainstream GOP mindset. Anti-communism used to be a major unifying issue in the GOP. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, that anti-big government sentiment ‘logically’ morphed into anti-American government sentiment. Really and truly, the GOP needs an enemy to hold itself together.
So, when I say things like the Republican Party hates government, Democrats, democracy, inconvenient truth and liberalism, there is a lot of evidence and reasoning to support that. The same holds when I say that Republican corporate elites are significantly different from populist the rank and file. Commenting on what he saw as a poor outcome of the 2022 elections, Tucker Carlson recently articulated the mainstream extremist Republican rank and file sentiment that Klein sees:
“That loathing [of liberals] clouded my judgment. I was like, ‘I dislike these people so much. What they’re doing is so wrong. It is helping so few people and hurting so many. It’s so immoral on every level that I just want it to be repudiated.’ And I wanted that so much, not because I like the Republicans — I really dislike them more than I ever have — but I dislike the other side more,” he added, saying, “I did learn that, like, I have no freaking idea what goes on in American politics.”
Carlson being the elite, sophisticated fascist liar that he is, he knows exactly what goes in in American politics. He is prominent in helping to lead it.
Lest we forget, Comey really screwed Clinton’s candidacy and gave us Trump: Comey publicly announced two FBI investigations into Clinton’s unsecured e-mail server in 2016. The second announcement that new documents had been found. That happened on Oct. 28, just a few days before the election. On Nov. 7, one day before the election, Comey announced there was nothing new and ended the investigation.
So, while Comey crapped all over Clinton's election twice at critical times, once when people were already involved in early voting, he never announced that Trump was also under a criminal investigation about Trump’s Russia-related crimes.
So, why treat Clinton like garbage and leave Trump untouched by the same kind of damaging revelations? The FBI and Comey chose not to announce any FBI investigation into Trump and his sleaze in 2016 because the crimes and stakes were far higher to the FBI. Raw Story writes:
But one thing is certain: when voters went to the polls on Election Day, they did so under the false narrative that only one of the candidates had been the subject of a criminal investigation. In fact, in July 2016, around the same time that Comey originally declined to bring charges against Clinton, the FBI began investigating the Trump campaign’s connection to Russian operatives actively trying to influence the U.S. election.
.... the FBI declined to inform the U.S. public about ties between Trump and the Russian government for fear of exposing informants and “[jeopardizing] a long-running, ultra-sensitive operation targeting mobsters tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin — and to Trump.”
A two month-long investigation by the publication revealed that FBI agents likely feared exposing an ongoing operation against “an organized crime network headquartered in the former Soviet Union.” This Russian mob “is one of the Bureau’s top priorities,” spans several decades, and is intricately linked with associates of Trump and businesses the president owns.
There we have it, with Trump the FBI acted to protect the FBI’s priority, but in the case of Hillary, Comey claims to have wanted to protect the public. That trashed Hillary’s campaign for president. Comey did not want to see a bad Hillary elected without public knowledge of all her possible horrible crimes. But at the same time, he did not care enough to let the public know about Trump's far worse possible treason and crimes.
Opinions will differ on this, but in my sincere opinion, Comey should be jailed for the rest of his rotten, Republican partisan hack life. His decisions were not rationally coherent or defensible. He acted as a partisan hack working for the Republican Party by publicly attacking Hillary but not Trump. In view of information like this, one can reasonably conclude like I did long ago that Trump never was a legitimate president. For four years, America had an illegitimate president and all of his official acts in office were illegitimate.
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Republican Christofascist attacks on the LGBQT community continue: A central dogma of Christian nationalism is hate of the LGBQT community. Christian nationalist leaders and elites want unfettered power to discriminate and oppress this group who sacred God condemns to hell forever. LGBTQ Nation writes about how this enraged hate movement wrapped in sanctimonious Christianty is lashing out in Arizona:
Republicans say they’ll sue Arizona’s governor
because she protected LGBTQ+ people
They promise to obstruct her “in every step of the process” because she banned job discrimination against some LGBTQ+ workers
Arizona Republicans have voiced plans to sue newly elected Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs after she signed an executive order protecting LGBTQ+ state employees from discrimination.
Vitriol over the order (and others) is coming from the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus. The Caucus Chairman, Republican state Rep. Jake Hoffman – a 2020 election denier – recently told reporters the group will work to obstruct Hobbs “in every step of the process” if she “continues to utilize executive orders.”
“If Katie Hobbs wants to legislate, she needs to get her butt out of the Governor’s Office and run for the legislature and come back and join us and do that job,” he said, according to the Arizona Mirror.
Hoffman called Hobbs’ executive orders “illegal” and said she was using them to advance her “radical woke agenda.” He did not, however, provide details about the timeline of the Freedom Caucus’s lawsuit or who would file it.
Once again, the seething rage, hate, bigotry and intolerance of the Christian nationalist movement is right out in the open. This savagery is what the elites demand. No one can honestly deny the hate and bigotry that animates anti-democratic American Christian nationalism.
As usual, a question or two come to mind. What responsibility, if any, do Arizona voters and non-voters, (or any other voters or non-voters in America) have in empowering bigoted Republican Christian Sharia theocracy? And, is protecting rights of LGBQT people radical wokeness or radical Christian Sharia bigotry? Does the saying, hate the sin, love the sinner have any remaining validity for the Christian nationalist movement?
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According to the ex-president, it was very sexy for the woman he raped: An unsealed transcript shows how Trump saw it while he was raping E. Jean Carroll. Get a load of this slime:
Trump: “She fainted with great emotion. She actually indicated that she loved it. Okay? She loved it until commercial break. In fact, I think she said it was sexy, didn’t she? She said it was very sexy to be raped. Didn’t she say that?”
Question: So sir, I just want to confirm. It’s your testimony that E. Jean Carroll said that she loved being sexually assaulted by you?
Trump: Well, based on her interview with Anderson Cooper, I believe that’s what took place. ....
Honestly folks, who can make this stuff up? It has to be true. Right?
One can only wonder what “until commercial break” means. Once again, my ignorance is showing. I suspect it’s something nasty or creepy. But I am not among the cognoscenti when it comes to topics like commercial breaks during rape. Are there any experts in the house?
Given his apparent admission of sexual assault and rape, I think the chances of Trump being found liable are about 0.1%. After all, Trump’s victim liked it. That’s not rape. It’s . . . . . whatever it is between consenting adults before commercial breaks, whatever they are.
Personally, if you are going to wag your finger at other people, you better make sure you have your own shit in order.
So, this steady barrage of document finds on Biden properties is going to hurt and may hurt big time. AS SOON AS the Trump document scandal arose, I would have had my people scour every inch of my properties and lawyer's offices to make sure nothing would come back to bite me. Instead, Biden gloated about the scandal surrounding Trump, and now is eating crow.
My humble opinion aside, there is absolutely NO equivalency, as Biden is co-operating where as Trump was obstructing. That may end up being Biden's saving grace.
Still, excuses are excuses. Not "knowing" about those documents is not going to fly. Doesn't the buck stop at the top?
Here is a more positive spin on the document story (and yes I take some of the following as "spin")
Why I Am Not Worried About The Biden Document "Scandal" And You Shouldn't Be Either
First, most people don’t care about this. Yes, Twitter is having a meltdown, but as we learn in election after election after election, Twitter is not the real world.
From the author of the article:
Second, I know an awful lot about Biden. I wrote an entire 100 part series about why he should be our president before the election of 2020. I read every book there was to read about him and read every interview. The man is clean. I have a really hard time believing that he stole those documents on purpose and/or has or had some nefarious purpose for them.
Fifth, this shows that Democrats walk the walk. If there is something that needs to be investigated — whether it is on our side or theirs — it should be investigated.
Sixth, we aren’t near an election and stories have a very very short life.
Do you feel better? I hope so.
Again, a little too rosy a picture in the comments by the author of the article, but hey, some valid points as well.
Do you think the author has got it right, or will this end up hurting Biden more than we want to admit?
ExxonMobile is the foremost giant carbon energy company among brass knuckles capitalists and their ruthless propaganda. The Journal Science published an analysis of what ExxonMobile publicly claimed, what it actually knew and how accurate its knowledge was. Not surprisingly, ExxonMobile lied repeatedly for decades too the public and government. The article blandly comments, as reputable scientists usually do:
For decades, some members of the fossil fuel industry tried to convince the public that a causative link between fossil fuel use and climate warming could not be made because the models used to project warming were too uncertain.
Climate projections by the fossil fuel industry have never been assessed. On the basis of company records, we quantitatively evaluated all available global warming projections documented by—and in many cases modeled by—Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003. We find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming that is consistent with subsequent observations. Their projections were also consistent with, and at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models. Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp also correctly rejected the prospect of a coming ice age, accurately predicted when human-caused global warming would first be detected, and reasonably estimated the “carbon budget” for holding warming below 2°C. On each of these points, however, the company’s public statements about climate science contradicted its own scientific data.
Many of the uncovered fossil fuel industry documents include explicit projections of the amount of warming expected to occur over time in response to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. Yet, these numerical and graphical data have received little attention. Indeed, no one has systematically reviewed climate modeling projections by any fossil fuel interest. What exactly did oil and gas companies know, and how accurate did their knowledge prove to be?
Our results show that in private and academic circles since the late 1970s and early 1980s, ExxonMobil predicted global warming correctly and skillfully. Using established statistical techniques, we find that 63 to 83% of the climate projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists were accurate in predicting subsequent global warming. ExxonMobil’s average projected warming was 0.20° ± 0.04°C per decade, which is, within uncertainty, the same as that of independent academic and government projections published between 1970 and 2007. The average “skill score” and level of uncertainty of ExxonMobil’s climate models (67 to 75% and ±21%, respectively) were also similar to those of the independent models.
Moreover, we show that ExxonMobil scientists correctly dismissed the possibility of a coming ice age in favor of a “carbon dioxide induced ‘super-interglacial’”; accurately predicted that human-caused global warming would first be detectable in the year 2000 ± 5; and reasonably estimated how much CO2 would lead to dangerous warming.
Historically observed temperature change (red) and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (blue) over time, compared against global warming projections reported by ExxonMobil scientists.
(A) “Proprietary” 1982 Exxon-modeled projections. (B) Summary of projections in seven internal company memos and five peer-reviewed publications between 1977 and 2003 (gray lines). (C) A 1977 internally reported graph of the global warming “effect of CO2 on an interglacial scale.” (A) and (B) display averaged historical temperature observations, whereas the historical temperature record in (C) is a smoothed Earth system model simulation of the last 150,000 years.
Egad!!We have been fibbed to by ExxonMobile (as commented on here before). Worse, most Republican elites still claim to believe and/or actually believe, the lies are truths and truths are lies!
