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 biology, 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.
To loyal followers of this forum, let's have some fun, shall we?
What's the difference between God and a Republican? God knows He's not a Republican.
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it.
Q: How many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? A: Three. One to hire a Mexican guy and two to deport him when he's done.
What do Republicans and porn stars have in common? They are experts in switching positions in front of a camera.
If ignorance is bliss, why aren’t there more more happy Republicans?
Q: Why do Republicans avoid living on the West Coast? A: They're scared to live that close to the edge of the Earth.
What is the difference between a Republican ass-kisser and a brown-noser? Depth perception.
Funeral: A Republican died and a friend went around collecting for a fund for his funeral. A woman was asked to donate ten dollars. "Ten dollars?" she said. "It only takes ten dollars to bury a Republican? Here's a hundred - go bury 10 of them!"
Genie: A Conservative found a magic genie's lamp and rubbed it. The genie said, "I will grant you one wish." He said, "I wish I were smarter". So the genie made him a Liberal.
Q: Why did the Republican cross the road? A: There was a black guy on the first side.
Gadzooks!! Shades of cryptocurrency collapse. The Guardian writes about a newly discovered scam by pro-pollution forces to deceive us:
The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading provider and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation.
The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.
The analysis raises questions over the credits bought by a number of internationally renowned companies – some of them have labelled their products “carbon neutral”, or have told their consumers they can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without making the climate crisis worse.
The article goes on to point out that Verra routinely lies about the degree of deforestation in its projects so that it can claim success when a deforestation impact is found. For example, in 32 projects where it was possible to compare Verra’s claims with data, baseline scenarios of forest loss were overstated by about 400%. About 94% of Verra’s claimed deforestation effects are non-existent.
Not surprisingly, Verra strongly denies this and points to errors in the analysis. The predictable bickering has commenced. This is how standard capitalist propaganda efforts work. The capitalists always attack inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning, and then present faux facts, truths and reasoning that supports the pro-pollution status quo. That is just business as usual.
Maybe if polluting businesses, e.g., ExxonMobil, had not been lying about climate change for decades and quietly blocking government efforts to act by corrupting government, then the polluters might deserve some credibility here. But in view of their pro-pollution for profit track record, they deserve no credibility at all.
Once again, the morality of capitalism, profits above all else, are there for everyone to see. At the rate we are going, the climate and tens of thousands of species, maybe including humans, are going to bite the dust. If we do off ourselves in a fit of self-annihilation, let’s mostly blame (~95%) the Republican Party, ExxonMobil and other pro-pollution and pro-climate change forces.
“Speaker Kevin McCarthy yesterday admitted to having direct knowledge of George Santos’s web of lies intended to dupe his voters into electing him, confirming reporting by the New York Times that House Republican leadership was aware of Mr. Santos’s fraudulent campaign while it was happening due to internal research that exposed his lies.
“Unfortunately, Speaker McCarthy’s confirmation of his knowledge of Mr. Santos’s deceit was itself deceptive and sparse, and he has still not explained what his response was to learning about the results of a ‘vulnerability study’ described in the Times about fabrications related to Mr. Santos’s educational background, his work for a Ponzi scheme, multiple evictions and a suspended driver’s license.
“Without further explanation, the public has no choice but to believe that Mr. McCarthy and his super PAC were complicit in concealing Mr. Santos’s lies in order to flip a seat in a win-at-all-costs effort to gain power.
This is more evidence of the blatant moral rot and anti-democracy fascism among Republican Party elites and leadership. When voters vote on the basis of deceit, their power to vote on the basis of truth has been taken away. That is authoritarianism (fascism IMO), not democracy.
For context, consider this:
“When political representatives or entire governments arrogate to themselves the right to lie, they take power from the public that would not have been given up voluntarily. .... But such cases [that justify lying] are so rare that they hardly exist for practical purposes. .... The consequences of spreading deception, alienation and lack of trust could not have been documented for us more concretely than they have in the past decades. We have had a very vivid illustration of how lies undermine our political system. .... Those in government and other positions of trust should be held to the highest standards. Their lies are not ennobled by their positions; quite the contrary. .... only those deceptive practices which can be openly debated and consented to in advance are justifiable in a democracy.”
“[Johnson repeatedly told the American people] ‘the first responsibility, the only real issue in this campaign, the only thing you ought to be concerned about at all, is: Who can best keep the peace?’ The stratagem succeeded; the election was won; the war escalated. .... President Johnson thus denied the electorate of any chance to give or refuse consent to the escalation of the war in Vietnam. Believing they had voted for the candidate of peace, American citizens were, within months, deeply embroiled in one of the cruelest wars in their history. Deception of this kind strikes at the very essence of democratic government.” -- Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 1999
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Prominent fascist Kevin McCarthy puts prominent fascist coup attempt supporter MTG on the House Homeland Security committee:The Independent writes:
The news broke on Tuesday as committee assignments for the 118th Congress were released following the marathon vote to confirm Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. Ms Greene notably did not join anti-McCarthy rebels on the right in an attempt to block his bid in what many speculated was a bid for his favour.
She will now have access to potentially sensitive classified information, a significant change of fortune for the Georgia congresswoman who was stripped of her committee memberships during the last Congress after a Facebook account in her name was found to have “liked” comments endorsing violence against Democrats including Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker.
This is more evidence of the blatant moral rot and anti-democracy fascism among Republican Party elites and leadership. The Foxes are now guarding the henhouse.
Nothing can go wrong now. /s
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Republican National Committee complaint about social media censorship is rejected:Ars Technica writes:
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has rejected a Republican National Committee (RNC) complaint claiming that Google violated US law by using Gmail's spam filter on Republican campaign emails. Republicans had claimed Gmail's spam filtering amounted to "illegal in-kind contributions made by Google to Biden For President and other Democrat candidates."
But an FEC decision last week, which Google provided to Ars today, said the commission found "no reason to believe" that Google made prohibited in-kind corporate contributions. The FEC, an independent agency of the US government, also found no evidence that the Biden for President campaign committee knowingly accepted illegal in-kind contributions in the form of spam filtering preference.
The FEC told Google in a letter that it has "closed its file in this matter" and that documents related to the case will be placed on the public record within 30 days.
This is more evidence of the blatant moral rot and anti-democracy fascism among Republican Party elites and leadership.
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Capitalism doing politics the old-fashioned way -- make the workers unknowingly pay to keep their wages low:The NYT writes:
How Restaurant Workers Help Pay for Lobbying
to Keep Their Wages Low
The National Restaurant Association uses mandatory $15 food-safety classes to turn waiters and cooks into unwitting funders of its battle against minimum wage increases
For many cooks, waiters and bartenders, it is an annoying entrance fee to the food-service business: Before starting a new job, they pay around $15 to a company called ServSafe for an online class in food safety.
That course is basic, with lessons like “bathe daily” and “strawberries aren’t supposed to be white and fuzzy, that’s mold.” In four of the largest states, this kind of training is required by law, and it is taken by workers nationwide.
But in taking the class, the workers — largely unbeknown to them — are also helping to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign to keep their own wages from increasing.
The company they are paying, ServSafe, doubles as a fund-raising arm of the National Restaurant Association — the largest lobbying group for the food-service industry, claiming to represent more than 500,000 restaurant businesses. The association has spent decades fighting increases to the minimum wage at the federal and state levels, as well as the subminimum wage paid to tipped workers like waiters.
Make ’em pay to lobby against themselves!!
Capitalism, it sure is inventive, feisty and deceitful!
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.
