The redneck Christmas parade

 

Crowds at a ‘redneck Christmas parade’ come up with one solution for their troubles: Trump

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/08/politics/louisiana-red-neck-christmas-parade-trump/index.html

West Monroe, Louisiana

CNN

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Bryan Baker stuck a roll of toilet paper on a paint roller that he’d attached to a leaf blower, and switched the leaf blower on. A stream of white paper shot into the air and fluttered delicately to the ground. It was Baker’s twist on a tradition of the Bawcomville Redneck Christmas Parade, where marchers throw toilet paper – as well as toothbrushes, ramen noodles, beads, and candy – at spectators along the road in West Monroe, Louisiana.

The parade route went past people living in an RV and a tent, abandoned stores, a pawn shop, and a couple Dollar Generals. More than 30% of Bawcomville residents live below the poverty line, and the surrounding Ouachita Parish was deemed a persistent poverty county in a 2022 report by the Congressional Research Service. A 2015 documentary called “The Other Side,” which follows a man addicted to meth, was filmed in Bawcomville. The area is well-known locally as a poor community in need of better housing, and there’s a derogatory definition of a resident on Urban Dictionary (“characterized by having at least two broke-down vehicles on their front lawn…”).

West Monroe residents told CNN the economic strife they see every day affects how they plan to vote next year.

Jane Temple said she couldn’t wait for the general election for Trump to get back in and fix the economy. “We’re counting on him,” she said. “I think he cares. I may be wrong, but I think he does.” She said Trump wasn’t perfect but added, “For the most part, when he was in office, even with everything going on, he accomplished a lot.” As for Biden, Temple said: “I don’t think that he has a clue.”

William Thompson owns a convenience store in the area. Working there, he’d seen a lot of people struggle with meth and fentanyl. “I blame Biden for that, too,” he said. Given the chance, he will be voting for Trump in 2024, he said, “because he’s the only president in my knowledge who’s given back to the people and helps the people.”

“If he’s in jail, I’d vote for him,” Thompson said.

Christian nationalist agenda and tactics of deceit

National Association of Christian Lawmakers

MSNBC reports:

At the Museum of the Bible on Tuesday night, just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, House Speaker Mike Johnson evaded scrutiny by reporters. He was there to receive the American Patriot Award for Christian Honor and Courage at a gala hosted by the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, a small Christian nationalist nonprofit group based in Conway, Arkansas. While reporters were allowed to watch other portions of the gala, they were not permitted to watch Johnson’s keynote.

Or so Johnson thought. According to Rolling Stone magazine, the speaker was “perhaps unaware that the event was being recorded for the NACL Facebook page.” The video is no longer available, but Rolling Stone reports that Johnson thanked the organization for not letting journalists in. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said, “since media is not here.” God had spoken to him throughout Republicans’ weekslong effort to find a new Speaker, Johnson said. Eventually, God revealed to Johnson that he would be a Moses-like figure leading the GOP and the country through a “Red Sea moment.”

The attempt to hide these remarks from the public came the same week that Johnson announced that, in releasing security footage of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Republicans would blur out the faces of rioters “because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ.” He is clearly telling Americans that he and his extremist friends want to carry out their assault on our Constitution in secret and without accountability.

At the NACL, Johnson knew he had a receptive audience. The group’s founder and president, Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator, recently fretted to a reporter that “with all the troubles facing our country, with Democrats and leftists that are advocating cutting penises off of little boys and breasts off of little girls, we have reached a level of debauchery and immorality that is at biblical proportions.” He has called LGBTQ people a “cult” that promotes “unholiness, unrighteousness and immorality in our nation.” He has expressed hope that in 2024, Americans “will re-elect Jesus to be on the throne here again in our country.” Rapert believes fetuses have constitutional rights, and that abortion is worse than slavery and the Holocaust. As a state senator, he sought to amend the U.S. Constitution to obliterate the rights of LGBTQ people through a statement that marriage “is between a man and a woman.”

To most Americans, these views are extreme. In Johnson’s world, they are unremarkable. They are at the core of the “biblical worldview” that he and Rapert share as the singular lodestar of American government.

A keynote speech by the speaker of the House is a huge get for the NACL. Relative to other Christian nationalist organizations, the NACL, founded in 2019, is new and small potatoes. One might think that the speaker, who is trying to keep the truculent GOP caucus together as they resist even basic functions of governing, might have more pressing matters on his plate. But Johnson’s top priority, above all else, is holding the sprawling army of Christian nationalist agitators — from his friends inside the Beltway to every corner of red America — in a tight embrace. And the NACL will exponentially increase its exposure through Johnson, who in his short time as speaker has done much to raise public awareness about the wide-ranging network of Christian nationalist organizations, radio programs, books and conferences that most people outside of his insular evangelical world have never heard of.

At this point, the goals and tactics that ARRCN (authoritarian radical right Christian nationalist) elites routinely employ are clear and undeniable. Like global warming and the human role in it, there is no rational basis left for denial.

• The elites who drive the ARRCN wealth and power movement ruthlessly deceives, lies and slanders using unwarranted opacity, omission of facts, faux history and other outright lies to minimize the fact that what theocratic ARRCN elites want is unpopular with most Americans, amounting to a heartless, bigoted, profoundly corrupt minority running some form of a theocratic-plutocratic dictatorship.

• The elites intend to (i) force all Americans to life by Christian Sharia laws that allow open discrimination against groups that God deems unworthy, and (ii) obliterate tolerant secularism and replace our secular Constitution with a deeply kleptocratic Christian Sharia version of the Constitution, thereby forcing the US back to a modern version of a theocratic-plutocratic Dark Ages dictatorship. 

For ARRCN elites, the Biblical commandment to not lie is simply null and void.

NACL elites praying for the fall of democracy and the rise of 

intolerant, kleptocratic theocracy under Christian Sharia law

Hm. Some NACL elites doing the Nazi salute??

Or is that a Christian God tribute thing?

Thank you, AGAIN, science and technology…

CRISPR, the gene editing tool

“Regulators on Friday approved two new gene therapies for sickle cell disease that doctors hope can cure the painful, inherited blood disorder that afflicts mostly Black people in the U.S.

The Food and Drug Administration said the one-time treatments can be used for patients 12 and older with severe forms of the disease. One, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, is the first approved therapy based on CRISPR, the gene editing tool that won its inventors the Nobel Prize in 2020. The other is made by Bluebird Bio and works differently.”

[Google for more info and links.]

An example of how humanity could function; constructive, rather than destructive.

No questions today, but feel free to comment.

To serve or not to serve, that is the question.

I understand that Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing the “election interference and conspiracy” case against Donald Trump, has already initiated the jury selection process in next year's D.C. trial of DJT (i.e., questionnaires are currently being mailed out to potential jurists).

Got a lot of questions for you today:

1. So, if you were presented with the opportunity, would you agree to be on a jury prosecuting DJT? 
2. Do you think you could be unbiased?  Or, do you have too much emotional DJT baggage? In other words, have you already made up your mind as to his guilt, regarding all the various and sundry indictments?  Or rather, 
3. To be on the case, while believing he is already guilty, would you see yourself/cast yourself in the role of a “Never Trumper” counterpart, to negate against a MAGA Trump-loving advocate coming in predisposed to Trump's innocence, like you would be coming in predisposed to his guilt?  A kind of "compromising of your integrity" with a heroic "fighting fire with fire" bent, in the name of "keeping democracy alive?"  (Remember, it only takes one “not-guilty” to let him off the hook.)  (Wordy question, sorry about that.)
4. Would a politically "low-info person," for whom politics and voting is more an inconvenience in their life rather than a staple of it, make for a good juror in a political case? IOW, someone who doesn’t follow/is not tainted with too much nasty politics under their belt?
5. Here's a toughie.  So, what would you consider the “qualified person” to handle such an historic challenge? Must they be a “professional” type, with a lot of higher education and/or tech skills?  Profile (demographic) your ideal of what would make “the perfect juror” in these DJT cases. 

News bits: Republicans and racism; GOP is killing Ukraine; How dictators and kleptocrats see idiocy

New research undercuts Republican views of racism

Republicans are more likely to say White people experience racism than Black people. That’s not true.

There were obvious effects [of the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement]. One was that people became much more likely to point to discrimination as the central cause of economic differences between White and Black Americans. Another is that this shift occurred only among Democrats and independents; among Republicans, there was no change. Instead, the rhetoric from Republican leaders rejected the idea that there existed systemic racism in the country. Suggesting that it did was cast as unpatriotic and ahistoric.

This is another instance of ARR (authoritarian radical right) dark free speech deceiving millions of people, leading them to false beliefs. ARR elites know full well what the real racism situation in the US is. But because the fact of racism directed against non-Whites is an inconvenient truth, it gets denied and distorted into a big, immoral lie. When the ARR kills truth, there is not a shred of shame, or a twinge of moral qualm.

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Congressional ARR Republicans appear to be willing to kill Ukraine. The kleptocratic dictator Putin loves it and them. The WaPo writes:

Senate Republicans block procedural vote 

for Ukraine aid package

Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a procedural vote to advance a national security bill that includes billions of dollars in Ukraine aid because it includes no changes to border security policy. Every Senate Republican voted against advancing the resolution.  

Schumer said Democrats were willing to debate a Republican counteroffer, but he had urged his colleagues on the other side of the aisle to vote with Democrats to begin debate on the existing proposal and to bring the counteroffer as an amendment to advance talks. The Republicans’ last proposal, Schumer noted, was “far away from what anyone could accept on our side.”

Once again, the importance of immigration and border control becomes a major issue. As long as the situation remains about like it is now, this could be an issue necessary to put DJT in the White House in 2024. Immigration policy is a major weakness that could easily kill both the Dems and democracy. And, at the same time, immigration could give Ukraine to Putin. Once that happens, the mass murder will be on a scale with what Hitler and the Nazis did. 

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The Hill reports:

Bannon calls Hannity an ‘idiot’ for asking Trump 

if he would be ‘dictator’

“Sean Hannity actually thought he was helping Trump,” with the question, Bannon said on a recent episode of his “War Room” podcast. “Even to ask that question shows you’re an idiot. And we don’t have time for idiots bro. This is a war and we don’t have time for sunshine patriots and this nonsense.”

As we all recall, Steve Bannon coined the phrase “flood the zone with shit” to describe how ARR dictators and kleptocrats should fight the dark free speech war against democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law and inconvenient truth. Just overwhelm political opposition and inconvenient truth with divisive lies, slanders, crackpottery and demagoguery. It works.

One has to wonder if DJT might pick Bannon as his VP. Bannon is an excellent fit by his vulgar temperament and tactics, his support of dictatorship and corruption, his shameless mendacity and complete moral bankruptcy and his proven track record of criminality and kleptocracy.

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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism Files:  The AP reports about Amazon’s planned brass knuckles capitalist propaganda tactics for southern California:

Amazon’s internal plans to advance its interests in 

California are laid bare in leaked memo

An internal Amazon memo has provided a stark look at the company’s carefully laid out plans to grow its influence in Southern California through a plethora of efforts that include burnishing its reputation through charity work and pushing back against “labor agitation” from the Teamsters and other groups.

The eight-page document — titled “community engagement plan” for 2024 — provides a rare glimpse into how one of American’s biggest companies executes on its public relations [propaganda or dark free speech] objectives and attempts to curtail reputational harm stemming from criticisms of its business. It also illustrates how Amazon aims to methodically court local politicians and community groups in order to push its interests in a region where it could be hampered by local moratoriums on warehouse development, and it is facing resistance from environmental and labor activists.

The memo was leaked to the nonprofit labor organization Warehouse Worker Resource Center and posted online this week. The Associated Press independently verified its authenticity.  

In the memo outlining Amazon’s goals for next year, the company says it plans to “earn the trust” of community groups and nonprofits, such as the San Bernardino Valley College Foundation, Children’s Fund, and Feeding America, to push back against state bills “that will continue to threaten the region’s economy, and Amazon’s interests.” The two bills cited include a state legislation that, if passed, would prohibit companies from building large warehouses within 1,000 feet (300 meters) of private homes, apartments, schools, daycares and other facilities.

 

Note the campaign contribution tactic to “cultivate” politicians:

“Perris Mayor Marty Vargas is an influential elected leader that we have cultivated through PPE donations to support the region, touring him and his team, and ongoing engagement.  He also influences the governing body of the San Bernardino regional air-hub (KSBD).” 

IE means Inland Empire

IE = San Bernardino and Riverside counties (in red)

San Diego county, bottom left (yellow), 

pop. ~3.3 million

GOP propaganda, lies and secrecy tactics

Context

CNN: 

House Speaker Johnson wants to blur January 6 footage to protect Capitol rioters

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that before publicly releasing footage of the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, the faces of the mob will be blurred to protect them from the Justice Department.

“We’re going through a methodical process of releasing them as quickly as we can,” Johnson said. “As you know, we have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems.”

That is an example of the ARRRP (authoritarian radical right Republican Party) openly manipulating evidence to try to protect the criminals and traitors who participated in DJT’s 1/6 coup attempt.

Propaganda and secrecy tactics

A WaPo analysis discussed tactics that ARRRP politicians are using to deceive the American people while trying to hide their attacks on democracy and political opposition: 

Giuliani had handed over to the New York Post material purportedly obtained from a laptop that had belonged to Joe Biden’s son Hunter and was asked about doing so by the New York Times.

He turned to the right-wing tabloid because he didn’t want the information in his possession to be vetted for authenticity or offered in a broader context. He wanted it presented in a way that would do the most damage to Joe Biden. As he put it to a radio interviewer in the same period, “even if it isn’t accurate, the American people are entitled to know it.” [this is the crux of the analysis here, i.e., the American people are “entitled” to hear lies presented as truths]

For years — and particularly since Trump reshaped the standard of acceptability for unfounded allegations — the right-wing media has operated as a bubble, a self-contained universe of argument and evidence where claims are reinforced far more often than they are undercut. (One of the central rhetorical tenets of that universe, of course, is that it’s traditional media outlets that have a blinkered, limited understanding of the world — which is true, in the sense that we are constrained by the boundaries of reality.)

Consider House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) announcement Tuesday that the release of footage captured by security cameras at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, would blur the faces of those shown. This wasn’t a new declaration; he’d made this point previously. But this time, Johnson framed the move as being centered on ensuring that those inside the Capitol wouldn’t be “retaliated against and be charged” by the Justice Department.

This doesn’t make much sense. The Justice Department’s had the video for years and used it to charge various actors. Instead, as Johnson spokesman (and former White House communications staffer and former Fox News executive) Raj Shah clarified, the real goal was to “prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any nongovernmental actors.” In other words, to prevent groups like Sedition Hunters from developing new leads on participants in the riot that occurred that day and which has, on multiple occasions, helped the Justice Department build cases against rioters.  

Johnson seemingly wants to release the footage because the Republican base has called for it, believing that the footage will allow them to construct an argument that the riot was a function not of Trump supporters but government actors or leftists. It will allow them to do that, of course, since the bar for “proving” this untrue thing is so low. (We’ve already seen them try it.) But Johnson wants the evidence this footage constitutes to be used only in a context that’s helpful to his base, not harmful. So it gets blurred.

A different lens on this effort to control evidence and rhetoric comes from Johnson’s allies who are leading the Republican effort to build a case for impeaching President Biden. As with the Capitol riot, there is already a broadly accepted belief on the right: namely, that Biden is a corrupt actor who benefited from his son’s business deals. .... people like House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) are trying to backfill evidence in support of that belief. At a news conference Tuesday, Comer again tried to present this debunked argument as though it was still viable.

“This week, we revealed how Hunter Biden’s corporate entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden,” Comer said. “Owasco PC is under investigation by the Justice Department for tax evasion and other serious crimes. Chinese and other foreign entities funneled millions of dollars into Hunter’s Owasco PC, and some of this money landed in Joe Biden’s bank account.”

By extension, if a criminal has a subscription to this newspaper, I am culpable for his activity when The Post pays me my salary.

“These direct monthly payments to Joe Biden,” Comer continued, “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s shady business schemes.”

Again, the “benefit” was “being repaid money he was owed.” The “knew about” and “participated in” claims, meanwhile, remain unproven. But they are treated as factual by Comer and by the right-wing media ecosystem, because they are the tenets of the conclusion to which they’ve all seemingly already agreed.

The news conference ended with Comer and his colleagues taking no questions. Comer would not be forced to defend his exaggerations and misinformation. Instead, he joined right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast where he simply reiterated those same claims. 

Johnson and his colleagues are rapidly approaching a difficult point in their impeachment push, though. At some point, they will need to decide whether to file articles of impeachment against Biden. It’s clear that a lot of Republicans are worried about what happens with the unstoppable force of demand for impeachment reaches the immovable object of reality. I guess we’ll see.

Meanwhile, the New York Post continues to do what Giuliani had hoped for back in 2020, presenting right-wing claims without doing anything to try to contradict them. The paper’s front page on Tuesday morning, after Comer’s claims about the payments to Biden had been debunked, declared that “[a]fter being paid by foreign companies, Hunter’s law firm gave Joe Biden monthly fees.”

Reality kept out of the bubble for another 24 hours, at least.

The lengths that the ARRRP will go to “prove” their lies and slanders are truths has crossed into the realm of fabricating evidence and protecting traitors. There’s no rational doubt about that. That has been the case for some time now, at least a few years. This kind of lying to the public by manipulating evidence is now a standard authoritarian radical right and ARRRP dark free speech tactic. The tactic, along with everything else morally and otherwise rotten in the ARRRP, arguably crosses a line from some ill-defined authoritarianism and makes the authoritarian radicals a modern American version of old-fashioned fascism.

Note added: 

Daily Beast reports that Johnson changed his initial reason for blurring the 1/6 traitor’s faces and now says he did it for the reason the WaPo analysis asserts: 

Mike Johnson’s Office Walks Back Reason 

For Blurring Insurrectionists' Faces 

After saying faces were blurred in security footage to shield alleged Jan. 6 rioters from prosecution, a spokesperson confirmed the DOJ already has access to the unedited clips.

Raj Shah, a spokesperson for Johnson, wrote in a statement that his boss was mistaken on the reasoning for the blurred faces, insisting that the decision to conceal identities was to protect rioters from harassment by the public—not from prosecution by the DOJ, who already has the raw footage.

“Faces are to be blurred from public viewing room footage to prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors,” he said.