Fun At CPAC

I think this may cause damage to your internal organs, so be advised.

This But That

The Lincoln Project - Talking with your MAGAfolk

...yeah but -

Today's COVIDIOT

Karen is upset with the mask policy, and so she makes all the standardly stoopid arguments that Karen's always make.

I keep trying to embed reddit posts and they keep not working for shit.

Click on the the title of the post and it'll take you to reddit.

Karen gets upset because she's not allowed to shop without a mask, despite being given other safe options. from r/PublicFreakout

There's no practicable difference between this kind of COVIDIOT and the goobers who thought they were onto something special with the whole "sovereign citizen" bullshit.

The Whole Banana

No man in the whole world can change the truth. One can only look for the truth, find it, and serve it. The truth is in all places.

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Sojourner, Jim Wallis  (all of it - cuz I couldn't pare it down and still do it justice):

Two years ago, Sojourners magazine released our February 2018 cover story, asking the question, “Is This a Bonhoeffer Moment?” This week, the board of directors of the International Bonhoeffer Society — an organization dedicated to research and scholarship on the life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer — issued an answer from their discernment.

Here is how the statement, obtained exclusively by Sojourners, begins:

As grateful recipients, and now custodians, of the theological, ethical, and political legacy of the German pastor-theologian and Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we believe all persons of faith and conscience should prayerfully consider whether our democracy can endure a second term under the presidency of Donald Trump. We believe it cannot. In 2017, we issued a statement expressing our grave concerns about the rise in hateful rhetoric and violence, the rise in deep divisions and distrust in our country, and the weakening of respectful public discourse ushered in by the election of Donald Trump. We articulated the need for Christians to engage in honest and courageous theological reflection in the face of the threat posed by his leadership. Over the last three years, the need for such discernment has grown more urgent.

The statement starts where any Christian statement in a time like this should — by evaluating a political regime by the standards of the gospel — how their governance affects those on the margins of society. They say:

A hallmark of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s legacy is his insistence that we see the great events of world history from “the view from below” (1942). That is, he urges us to see from the perspective of those who suffer. The policies of the Trump administration both threaten and disempower the most vulnerable members of our society, including people of color, members of the LGBTQ communities, Muslims and other religious minorities, immigrants, refugees, the poor, the marginally employed, and the unemployed. Moreover, Donald Trump has now taken ill-advised military action that raises the specter of war. One of the greatest lessons learned from the history of the Christian churches during Germany’s Third Reich is that it is crucial to respond to threats to human life, integrity, and community when they first appear, and to continue to challenge them.

The signers of this statement are not megachurch pastors, powerful leaders of religious institutions, or influential figures to whom the media typically pays attention. Rather they identify themselves, “As Bonhoeffer scholars, religious leaders, and confessing Christians,” who have “a special responsibility to name crises and discern responsible actions of resistance and healing.”

And this is the significant and sobering conclusion the Bonhoeffer Society leaders have reached:

We believe that one crucial step in this reckoning is ending Donald Trump’s presidency. We do not make this statement lightly. Bonhoeffer’s writings have been influential for Christians from a wide range of churches and political views, but we feel called to address the grave moral concerns we have outlined here that call every one of us to account. During this new year, debates and discussion will continue to be held concerning the best way for America to move forward. We believe that the United States has the human resources to provide capable and willing leaders, and that together a more just and respectful future can be forged. Acknowledging that all human community and leadership is a mixture of blessing and brokenness, health and dysfunction, we stand with all those who believe this country deserves and needs a constitutional and peaceful change in leadership. And we commit ourselves to listen to the call and obey the commands of Jesus as we enter the year 2020.

My position on the presidency of Donald Trump continues to be that the issues involved take us deeper than legitimate political differences or partisan divides. The issues that the corrupt and immoral leadership of the president has raised are deeply theological and Christological. They are not just differences in political ideology; rather, they are matters of blasphemy and heresy.

A example of the theological offenses committed by President Trump and his white evangelical supporters came at recent rally in Miami, which served as the official launch of “Evangelicals for Trump.”

At King Jesus International Ministry, several prosperity gospel pastors and leaders hosted the president for a political rally and prayed publicly on stage beforehand. After the prosperity pastors laid their hands on Trump in prayer and political support, the president of the United States openly said this: “I really do believe that God is on our side. I believe that. I believe that ... or there would have been no way we could have won, right? People said, how do you win? You don't have the media, you have so many things against you, and we win. So, there has to be something, has to be something."

Apparently, Trump does believe that. And, apparently, so do the “leaders” who were with Trump on stage or are part of the new evangelical coalition.

It is blasphemy for Donald Trump — or any political leader — to suggest that God is on his side or favors his candidacy or political party. That blasphemy must be named for what it is. To imply that Trump won his election because of divine intervention — as some of his court evangelicals have said — is to essentially bestow on Trump the divine right of kings, an idea that is antithetical to the principles upon which the United States was founded and to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It also shows again that Trump thinks of himself as a monarch, as so many of his words and actions prove.

Abraham Lincoln spoke words of wisdom that are as timely today as they have ever been: "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right." Donald Trump and his supporters would like to believe that God is on his (or their) side. But every one of them must now ask, "Are we on God's side?” Are Trump’s statements and policies of racial bigotry and division on God’s side? Are his policies that dehumanize immigrants and separate migrant families at the border on God’s side? Is Trump’s lifelong demeaning, exploiting, and betrayal of women, including his own three wives, on God’s side?

How about his persistent and pathological lying, or using foreign leaders to assist his elections, or blocking other branches of government, thus undermining democracy? Are those behaviors all on God’s side? We must ask Trump’s uncritical “chaplains” whether they support Trump’s blasphemy of saying that God is on his side, or do they have the courage to engage in a public debate with other Christian leaders about the proper relationship of faith and politics in this presidential election campaign.

In the same Miami speech, Trump said: "This election is about the survival of our nation. With your help, your prayers, and your tireless effort to mobilize Christian communities across our land, on Nov. 3, 2020 ... We're going to win another monumental victory for faith and family, God and country, flag and freedom."

It is very alarming to hear Donald Trump speak of his re-election in the absolutist terms of national survival when so many of us firmly believe that his conduct as a candidate, and now as president, undermines the nation's survival as a representative democracy. It's also blasphemous to equate his victory in an election with a victory for God. God's reign and God's kingdom do not depend on the political fortunes of any human being, period.

A friend recently recommended to me a new book by Mary M. Solberg called A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement 1932-1940. In its pages, Solberg has translated (in some cases for the first time) primary sources that reveal how pro-Nazi Protestants in Germany at the time — they called themselves “German Christians” — talked about Adolf Hitler and Nazism. In reviewing how these Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, who called themselves Christian, spoke of Hitler and his place in history, it was impossible to escape how it compares to some of the most servile white evangelical boosters for Donald Trump.

Here’s a sample of what pro-Nazi Protestants wrote at the time:

“God fashioned for himself a man … and gave him the greatest mission in our history: to pull the German people up out of despair and to restore their faith in life” (147); “… Adolf Hitler, with his faith in Germany, as the instrument of our God became the framer of German destiny and the liberator of our people from their spiritual misery and division” (197) …“in the person of the Führer we see the one God has sent, who sets Germany before the Lord of history ...” (346); “… in the pitch-black night of Christian church history, Hitler became like a wonderful transparency for our time, a window through which light fell upon the history of Christianity” (347); “…the Third Reich has grasped the German mission that God has set before us” (373)

Compare this with some of the things we routinely hear from right-wing white evangelical leaders about Donald Trump.

• David Lane, an evangelical leader who organizes pastors, told the Washington Post, “For whatever reason, in my opinion, God raised Donald Trump. Everything he said he’s going to do, he’s done from an evangelical standpoint. None of the other candidates in 2016 would have done what Donald Trump has done.”
• Matt Moore, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, explained it like this: “A lot of evangelicals believe the current culture war is a zero sum game and their side has to win … They see Trump as sort of a Moses figure who is leading them out of the wilderness.”
• Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in a Fox News interview that he told Trump he was the “chosen one.”
• Franklin Graham has suggested Trump’s 2016 victory showed “God’s hand was at work.”
• Ralph Reed is set to release a book in April called For God and Country: The Christian Case for Trump. The book's original title was reportedly Render to God and Trump.
• Robert Jeffress, one of the fiercest and most unequivocal defenders of President Trump, said in 2016: “Mr. Trump, I believe you’re going to be the next president of the United States. And if that happens, it’s because God has a great purpose for you and for our nation.” Jeffress even went so far as to bring a 200-person choir and orchestra to Washington, D.C., to perform a hymn called “Make America Great Again.”

What we are facing now in America is a faith emergency, and that is how we must now respond to it. In their statement, the Bonhoeffer Society board offers the following theological lessons from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that resonate in these times:

• He spoke of God’s freedom and human freedom as “freedom for others” not “freedom from others.” (1932)
• He preached that the gospel is “the good news of the dawning of the new world, the new order … God’s order,” and therefore it is good news for the poor. (1932)
• He warned that leaders become “misleaders” when they are interested only in their own power and neglect their responsibilities to serve those whom they govern. (1933)
• He warned that when a government persecutes its minorities, it has ceased to govern legitimately. (1933)
• He reminded Christians that the church has an “unconditional obligation toward the victims of any societal order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community.” (1933)
• He wrote, “For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. … The hour is late. The world is choking with weapons. … The trumpets of war may blow tomorrow. For what are we waiting?” (1934)
• He believed that Jesus’s commands in the Gospels - like love your neighbor as you love yourself, welcome the stranger, and love your enemies - are to be obeyed in the social and political realm. He wrote: “From the human point of view there are countless possibilities of understanding and interpreting the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus knows only one possibility: simply go and obey.” (1936)
• He wrote, “Behold God become human … God loves human beings. …Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are. … What we find repulsive … namely, real human beings … this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.” (1941)
• He wrote from prison, “… one only learns to have faith by living in the full this-worldliness of life. ...then one takes seriously no longer one’s own sufferings but rather the suffering of God in the world. Then one stays awake with Christ in Gethsemane. And I think this is faith; this is [metanoia/repentance]. And this is how one becomes a human being, a Christian. ... How should one become arrogant over successes or shaken by one’s failures when one shares in God’s suffering in the life of this world?” (1944)
• He wrote from prison, “How do we go about being ‘religionless-worldly’ Christians, how can we be [ecclesia/church], those who are called out, without understanding ourselves religiously as privileged, but instead seeing ourselves as belonging wholly to the world?” (1944)

Read the full statement here.

Bulletin

BREAKING NEWS:
The guy who said he'd have no trouble rushing, unarmed, into a school during an active shooter situation has run away from the NATO summit meeting because someone hurt his feelings.

On Devin Nunes

The Fresno Bee has to be considered a hometown paper for US Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA22).

And the editors at the Bee aren't amused by some of Devin's antics.

To wit:

Devin Nunes must stop suing fake cows and explain $60,000 Europe trip

Read more here: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/article237841409.html#storylink=cpy

Rep. Devin Nunes’ decision to sue anyone who dares to criticize him – including a fictitious cow on Twitter – backfired spectacularly this week. Again.

In a court filing, a lawyer for a former Democratic National Committee employee eviscerated the Tulare Republican’s argument that mockery from Twitter accounts like “Devin Nunes’ Cow” and “Devin Nunes’ mom” constitutes defamation.

“No reasonable person would believe that Devin Nunes’ cow actually has a Twitter account, or that the hyperbole, satire and cow-related jokes it posts are serious facts,” reads the filing in Virginia’s Henrico County Circuit Court, according to a Bee story by Hannah Wiley and Kate Irby. “It is self-evident that cows are domesticated livestock animals and do not have the intelligence, language, or opposable digits needed to operate a Twitter account. Defendant ‘Devin Nunes’ Mom’ likewise posts satirical patronizing, nagging, mothering comments which ostensibly treat Mr. Nunes as a misbehaving child.”

The court brief went viral on social media, increasing public awareness of Nunes’ critics in a way that likely never would have happened without his frivolous lawsuit. It sparked a trend on Twitter, with people desperate for attention begging Nunes to sue them so they might benefit from free press.

“Hey, @DevinNunes, what do I have to say to get you to sue me too,” tweeted former Clinton White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. “You’re corrupt? You met with a bunch of corrupt Ukrainians. You still wet the bed?”

The social media backlash mirrored Nunes’ experience earlier this year, when his decision to sue the Twitter cow increased the parody account’s reach exponentially. “Devin Nunes’ Cow” had 1,000 followers on the social media site before Nunes filed his lawsuit. It now has over 667,000 followers.

Nunes’ lawsuits likely don’t stand a chance in court. Parodying elected officials like Nunes is protected by the First Amendment, and satire as an art form has a long history dating back to ancient times.

But Nunes’ lawsuits are no laughing matter because he’s not just suing fake cows. He filed – and later dropped – a lawsuit against a Dinuba peach farmer for calling him a “fake farmer.”

His lawsuit strategy has also targeted the press. Nunes is suing Esquire Magazine and McClatchy, the parent company of The Fresno Bee, for simply reporting on him truthfully and accurately. He sued Esquire for reporting that Nunes’ family moved its farm to Iowa years ago. He sued The Fresno Bee for accurately reporting that he owned a stake in Alpha Omega winery in a story headlined “A yacht, cocaine, prostitutes: Winery partly owned by Nunes sued after fundraiser event.”

Given the frivolous nature of Nunes’ lawsuits, one can easily draw the conclusion that he’s trying to chill free speech by miring his critics in expensive legal proceedings. If that’s the idea, it’s not working. Twitter accounts continue to mock him and the press continues to report on his increasingly grim situation.

Last week, Nunes threatened to sue CNN and the Daily Beast for reporting that “A lawyer for an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani told CNN that his client is willing to tell Congress about meetings the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee had in Vienna last year with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss digging up dirt on Joe Biden.”

Lev Parnas, a Ukraine-born man arrested while trying to leave the United States in October, said through a lawyer that he is willing to implicate Nunes, who was in Europe during the period in question.

“House travel records show Nunes traveled to Europe from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3. Three congressional aides who have worked for Nunes have matching travel receipts for the same dates, House records show,” according to a story by The Bee’s Andrew Sheeler. “The trip cost $63,525.”

Now, Nunes faces calls for an ethics investigation.

“If he was on a political errand for the president that was using taxpayer funds inappropriately then he should be investigated by the Ethics Committee and should be forced to repay the Treasury the money that was spent for a political activity,” said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee with Nunes.

Given the seriousness of these matters, perhaps it’s time for Nunes to abandon his frivolous lawsuit hobby and direct his lawyers’ attention elsewhere.

And some folks showed up at the courthouse in Virginia to voice their displeasure:

The Arts

Art Education helps us develop critical thinking skills and a sense of shared experience (empathy).

Brian Kasida & Daniel Bowen, Brookings:

Engaging with art is essential to the human experience. Almost as soon as motor skills are developed, children communicate through artistic expression. The arts challenge us with different points of view, compel us to empathize with “others,” and give us the opportunity to reflect on the human condition. Empirical evidence supports these claims: Among adults, arts participation is related to behaviors that contribute to the health of civil society, such as increased civic engagement, greater social tolerance, and reductions in other-regarding behavior. Yet, while we recognize art’s transformative impacts, its place in K-12 education has become increasingly tenuous.

A critical challenge for arts education has been a lack of empirical evidence that demonstrates its educational value. Though few would deny that the arts confer intrinsic benefits, advocating “art for art’s sake” has been insufficient for preserving the arts in schools—despite national surveys showing an overwhelming majority of the public agrees that the arts are a necessary part of a well-rounded education.

Gee - I wonder why "conservatives" are always trying to cut back on what the arts can do for us.

Maybe it's because the problems we love to bitch about - poverty, crime, ignorance, tribalism, the degeneration of civil discourse, etc - can be at least partly attributed to the erosion of the skills we need, but don't get to learn about anymore, because Republicans keep shitting on the arts by cutting the funding.

And maybe those problems are due to deliberate efforts to cause the problems, blame it all on "the other", and then trade on that disinformation to gain ideological advantage and political power.

The GOP Playbook, Page 1:

1. Fuck something up
2. Wait
3. Point at it and say, "Whoa, look - it's fucked up."
4. Run for office by promising to fix it
5. "Fix" it by contracting the solution out to your pals
6. Collect "contributions" from those pals
7. Get re-elected as a "Problem Solver"
8. Start again at #1 above

- and -

We find that a substantial increase in arts educational experiences has remarkable impacts on students’ academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Relative to students assigned to the control group, treatment school students experienced a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an increase of 8 percent of a standard deviation in their compassion for others. In terms of our measure of compassion for others, students who received more arts education experiences are more interested in how other people feel and more likely to want to help people who are treated badly.

When we restrict our analysis to elementary schools, which comprised 86 percent of the sample and were the primary target of the program, we also find that increases in arts learning positively and significantly affect students’ school engagement, college aspirations, and their inclinations to draw upon works of art as a means for empathizing with others. In terms of school engagement, students in the treatment group were more likely to agree that school work is enjoyable, makes them think about things in new ways, and that their school offers programs, classes, and activities that keep them interested in school. We generally did not find evidence to suggest significant impacts on students’ math, reading, or science achievement, attendance, or our other survey outcomes, which we discuss in our full report.

A Fine Rant

Frank Schaeffer

Trump-onomics

It ain't workin' for us.

via Seattle Times:

U.S. farm bankruptcies in September surged 24% to the highest since 2011 amid strains from President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and a year of wild weather.

Growers are also becoming increasingly dependent on trade aid and other federal programs for income, figures showed in a report by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest general farm organization.

The squeeze on farmers underscores the toll China’s retaliatory tariffs have taken on a critical Trump constituency as the president enters a re-election campaign and a fight to stave off impeachment. The figures also highlight the importance of a “phase one” deal the administration is currently negotiating with Beijing to increase agriculture imports in return for a pause in escalating U.S. levies.

Almost 40% of projected farm profit this year will come from trade aid, disaster assistance, federal subsidies and insurance payments, according to the report, based on Department of Agriculture forecasts. That’s $33 billion of a projected $88 billion in income.

The trade war and two straight years of adverse weather rattled farmers already facing commodity price slumps.

Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings in the 12 months ended September rose to 580 from a year earlier. That marked the highest since 676 cases in 2011 under the chapter of the bankruptcy code tailored for farms. The total “remains well below” historical highs in the 1980s, the federation said.

Recent bankruptcies were concentrated in the 13-state Midwestern region, a key battleground in the presidential election where grain, soybean, hog and dairy farms have been hit by trade disputes. More than 40%, or 255 filings, were in the region.

This story was originally published at bloomberg.com. Read it here.

And also too - Newsweek:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman took issue with President Donald Trump's repeated claims that the economy is doing better than ever under his administration.

The economic expert wrote on Twitter Wednesday that the president's promises regarding manufacturing jobs and GDP growth have failed to materialize.

"The meh GDP numbers won't help Trump next year. But what should really scare him is his utter failure to boost manufacturing in swing states," Krugman, who is a columnist for The New York Times and won the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, wrote on Twitter. He shared a graph of manufacturing job levels over time in Wisconsin to emphasize his point.

- snip -

Krugman also explained that Trump has fallen fall short of his promises regarding GDP growth. The economist tweeted an article by The Hill from last year, which highlighted how Trump was promising that GDP growth "could be in the fives," referring to 5 percent growth or higher.

Yeah But

Lots of attempts to "understand" the other side.

And I get that. I really do.

But grownups have to be able to recognize their errors and admit it when they've fucked up.

It's not unreasonable to expect grownups to act like fucking grownups.

They put themselves on that hook, and I ain't lettin' 'em off easy. 

Especially considering the damage they're doing to all of us.

Today's Image Rehab

Further confirmation of how far gone "conservatives" are. When they venerate someone who's done nothing but lie to the press.

You May Ask Yourself

...why does it seem like the "conservative movement" is chock full of grifters?

And your answer may well be, "Because conservatives have made it inevitable - and that's been the point all along."

WaPo:

In 2016, an Arizona man called prosecutors in Riverside, Calif., to report that he’d been ripped off. Two men in the Southern California town who claimed to be running a hedge fund had taken $75,000 from him, he said, and then promptly lost it all. The tipster later killed himself.

But his claim helped spark a three-year investigation that has now resulted in a felony charge against both men — one of whom, Jacob Wohl, has since become a headline-generating conservative activist and conspiracy theorist.

Wohl, 21, appeared in court on Wednesday and now faces arraignment in October for one count of illegally selling a security, as first reported by the Daily Beast. He didn’t immediately return a message late Wednesday.

The criminal case is the latest turn in a whiplash career that has seen Wohl transform from a stock-trading wunderkind (later banned from an industry group) to a President Trump-backing Twitter figure (later booted off the platform) to the activist behind botched attempts to smear former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) with fabricated sexual assault claims.
The GOP abandoned all sense of honor quite a while back, and now it's filled with the kind of crooks who always gravitate to the sources of power and money, looking for the opportunity to siphon off some ready cash and live it up at someone else's expense.

But they put the ends before the means - policy over process - party over country.

Their actions over the last 30-40 years show they've lost the thread of democracy, and it has to be plain that it's not simply due to happenstance, but deliberate and by design. Their project is to dismantle our little experiment in self-government in order to replace it with plutocracy.

The more shitty shady characters we see associated with government, the more disgusting the whole thing seems, the more we turn away, the more we leave the work and the decisions to people who just get more vile and repulsive - it's a self-perpetuating cycle and it gets worse and worse until enough of us are frustrated enough to go along with some polished grifter who suggests we just chuck it all and start over.

That's when they call a Constitutional Convention, and rewrite the rules in a way that tailors the thing to the Daddy Staters' dreams of conquest and dominance.

They don't want to take us back to the 1950s. They intend to take us back to the 1750s.

Another Test

When you test the sentiment of the former by taking the action described in the latter, American "conservatives" are revealed to be hypocrites, or bigoted nativists, or just plain old ordinary whiny-butt pussies.

If Brains Were Gunpowder

Tomi Lahren loves to pretend she can match wits with people when it's obvious she's completely out of her depth as soon as she leaves her safe space at DumFux News.

Eric Swalwell has proposed a full ban on "assault weapons" along with a buy-back program.

Ms Lahren bites back:

Swalwell retorts:

And Tomi takes the bait:

Enter Mr Edward T Hardy, commentator UK/US:

"In other words, gun control reduced mass shootings without hindering legitimate gun ownership."

Even though gun ownership may be up, the restrictions put in place in Australia have seemingly helped reduce the number of gun deaths in that nation.

Following a mass shooting tragedy in 1996 where 35 people were murdered in a single incident, Australian government leaders — which included a coalition of left- and right-leaning lawmakers — sought to make rules concerning gun ownership stricter.

The new set of laws passed in the aftermath of that mass shooting required 28-day waiting periods for anyone wanting to purchase a gun. It also created new licensing requirements for individuals to own weapons, and banned outright automatic and semiautomatic guns.

And yes, it included a gun buyback program, in which the nation bought more than 600,000 guns from owners and destroyed them, The Atlantic reported.

How did it all turn out? The results speak for themselves. From 1996 to 2016, the rate of gun deaths in Australia dropped by more than 63 percent, according to GunPolicy.org.

Much of that drop took place soon after the gun reforms were passed: within two years of the mass shooting and implementation of the new rules, gun deaths were down by 40 percent in 1998.

Whittle Away

For some "conservatives", this could mean they start to turn back to a more mainstream version of their former selves.  Kinda where I used to be - before Willie Horton, and that horrifying clusterfuck at the '92 Republican convention in Houston.

(Yeah, OK - prob'ly not. A guy can dream)

Vox:

Notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claims a “form of psychosis” caused him to believe that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged.

For years Jones, the founder of InfoWars.com, peddled a conspiracy theory about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman brutally killed 20 children and six adults in 2012. Jones has repeatedly claimed the massacre was a “giant hoax” carried out by “crisis actors” in a broad scheme to trample on Second Amendment rights.

In a video released Friday, Jones acknowledged in a sworn deposition stemming from a lawsuit filed by the families of Sandy Hook victims that the school shooting was in fact real. Jones blamed the “trauma of the media and the corporations lying so much” for triggering his extreme distrust in news and information.

In any field - any market at any time in history - there's always been a struggle to be seen and heard. They started calling it "clutter" as Mass Media was coming into its own, and if you want to get your message out, and make it stick so as to make yourself memorable to the consumer, you have to figure out ways of cutting through all that clutter.

In a media universe that exists in cyberspace, the clutter has grown to a level that drowns out all but the loudest voices - or the weirdest - or the most adamant - or the ones that are just plain adamant about their weirdness to the exclusion of everything but the part that might be useful for cutting through the clutter.

Anyway, one by one, the darlings of Wing-Nutopia are showing themselves to be even worse phonies than the "librul media elites" they say they love to hate.

And it's kind of encouraging that the courts are proving again to be the means of making some of these dicks behave less dickishly.

Of course, that means we're right to be worried about what Mitch McConnell is trying to pull - stacking the Judiciary with Daddy Staters who're more than a little sympathetic to shutting us off from our 1st amendment right to petition for redress.

And so it never ends.

There's no such thing as Once-n-For-All, and we have to stay in this fight no matter what.

Breakin' It Down

Ana Kasparian, from The Youngs Turks, doing a fine job telling us what's up with the GOP freak-out over AOC.

BTW, I'm not a TYT fan, but in keeping with my search for "the real shit", I'm going to make note of whatever comes across as "the real shit".

And holy crap, what is it with "conservatives"? This Mr Reagan guy almost has to be a parody inside another parody. There's something about it that seems really off.

But maybe I'm just going with my own need to normalize. One of the main tenets of Daddy State manipulation is that "normal people" want very much for things not to be so shitty, and we end up thinking they can't possibly be so shitty that the rubes are going to take a Mr Reagan seriously.

The Lord Speaks

Conservative Christians are saying Donald Trump was sent to do the lord's work and deliver America into the kingdom of heaven.

That's the best argument in favor of atheism anybody's ever made.

-- god

(hat tip = @thegoodgodabove)

Seems Odd

I guess we file this one under "When You've Lost the..."

Daily Caller - OpEd:

When these radical religious ideologies come from within our government, the phone call, as the horror film says, is coming from inside the house. The White House in this case.

Recall Attorney General Jeff Sessions used Romans 13:1-7 to argue that the Trump administration had the political and biblical right to remove and cage children and parents at the southern border. And that is precisely why when Sanders says that God wanted Trump to be the president — we must resist.

Sanders’ statement is a flagrant breach of the First Amendment’s wall of separation between church and state. So concerned were our nation’s founders about the State imposing or restricting religion that they expressly prohibited the establishment of state religion in order to protect the integrity and free exercise of all religions. Sanders took a sledgehammer to the First Amendment when, as an officer of the state, she declared definitive understanding of the mind of God.

The efforts of certain "conservative" allies to put distance between themselves and 45* seem to be increasing in both numbers and alacrity.

We'll see what we see, but there are signs of a break up.

The Daily Caller per Wikipedia

How Stuff Works

The bots and various other rat-fuckers are hard at it, kids.

Bob Brigham, RawStory:

Conservatives in the United States helped spread a fake video against “manspreading” that resulted in a misogynistic backlash against women.

The video purportedly shows a feminist woman pouring a mix of water and bleach on the crotches of multiple men riding on a subway, who were “manspreading” by widening their legs into the area in front of adjacent seats.

The website EU vs Disinfo reported on Monday that the video features paid actors. The report originated with the Russian language online magazine Bumaga, which interviewed one of the men seen in the video.

Conservatives in the United States spread the video, including The Blaze (founded by conservative radio personality Glenn Beck), The Daily Wire (founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro) and the website Chicks on Right.

“In other words, the video stages extreme feminist activism and manages to provoke extreme anti-feminist reactions,” EU vs Disinfo noted.

Come At Me, Bro

If you're still on board with Cult45, you have no way to troll me effectively, because it's all but certain there's nothing in your opinion that can be identified as factual, or logic-based - which makes it impossible to respect the intellect behind that opinion.

Your MAGA hat, and your big red Xs, and your 4Chan QAnon baloney, and your DumFux News bullet points all demonstrate that you and I are simply not morally compatible.

Say your worst - it's meaningless - it's nothing - it's balloon juice and sail boat fuel.

hat tip = @JohnPavlovitz