If the Repubs continue to go it alone (against the polling) on a variety of issues they've decided they need to pursue based on their arrogant assumption they can continue bamboozling the rubes, then they lose the broader popular support they have to have. Especially if they keep fuckin' up the Healthcare thing. If they decide to negotiate with the Dems, then they're in danger of the hardcore base assuming they've caved, and they'll lose primaries to more radical candidates, who're more likely to lose in the general. Which makes me think they were really counting on not having to pay a political price for all their fuckery, which makes me think we have to keep pushing back hard against GOP Voter Suppression efforts in the next 15 months or so.
Here's the visual from the Rachel Maddow thing I posted yesterday - worth repeating a few times.
Watch for it starting at about 6:50 - Rachel lays out the probability that the GOP will use the very heavy layers of guilt as a shield. DumFux news has already started putting up the "Don Jr is the real victim here" defense.
Cult45* is employing a variation on a basic tactic of the Daddy State: Accusation = Confession. It can work the other way as well. You can use your confession as a weapon against your opponent - turning it into an accusation. The shitty part is that the rubes will buy it. The really shitty part is that the Press Poodles will give the rubes reason to think it's legit by covering it in that Both-Sides bullshit way. The really really shitty part is that this is fucking dangerous. And the really reallyreally shitty part is that this is prob'ly not as dangerous as it gets. Fake Lord have mercy.
Of course it's not just the south, but down here, these guys are thick as flies on cow shit.
And we're not gonna get it fixed in 1 or 2 elections - it's a long hard road just to get back to where we can see something that looks like Regular Order on the horizon.
Ol' Doc Maddow's podcast (audio only) at Stitcher:
She's careful to remind us that even with all that smoke, there's no real fire yet. Which plays to 45*'s default M.O. He operates at the margins; always looking for the grey areas; the loopiest of loopholes - "If it doesn't specifically say I can't do it, then that's what I'm gonna do".
And that works against us as a 4th-n-5th-Amendment-Kinda-Joint - which is what works to the advantage of the 45*s and the Putins of the world. And the rubes will never bail on those guys, because they just wanna think, for once in their whole miserable existence, they're in on the real deal - the inside; the right sight; the winning side.
In 1972, the movie smash of the year was The Godfather - a story of the good guy criminals versus the bad guy everybody else.
We hear it everywhere - "HyperPartisanship" and "The polarizing effect of everything having become over-politicized".
But the piece cited below points out how we're not "over-politicized" at all - just the opposite.
This is all about freezing as many of us in the middle as possible by doing whatever it takes to get a majority of us to react with, "Politics is fucked up - leave me out of it - I don't want anything to do with it cuz both sides are just as bad" and blah blah blah.
Billions of dollars are spent every year on advertising - commercial or political or the 24/7 GOP Pimpworks known as DumFux News. The people making the decisions to spend those billions are not stoopid people, and they don't spend that kinda money on something that doesn't work.
The reality of Trump’s election may be the most momentous development of the age because of its enormity and the shock it has produced. The whole world is watching, pondering how such a dreadful event could have happened. How have we arrived here? What forces have allowed education, if not reason itself, to be undermined as crucial public and political resources, capable of producing the formative culture and critical citizens that could have prevented such a catastrophe from happening in an alleged democracy? We get a glimpse of this failure of education, public values and civic literacy in the willingness and success of the Trump administration to empty language of any meaning, a practice that constitutes a flight from historical memory, ethics, justice and social responsibility.
--and--
Truth is now viewed as a liability and ignorance a virtue. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of alleged common sense, literacy is regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data and science is confused with pseudo-science. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two-thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and a majority of Republicans in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughing stock of the world. Politicians endlessly lie, knowing that the public can be easily seduced by exhortations, emotional outbursts and sensationalism, all of which mimic the fatuous spectacle of celebrity culture and reality TV. Image-selling now entails lying on principle, making it easier for politics to dissolve into entertainment, pathology and a unique brand of criminality.
--and--
The corruption of both the truth and politics is abetted by the fact that much of the American public has become habituated to overstimulation and lives in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. Experience no longer has the time to crystallize into mature and informed thought. Opinion now trumps reason and evidence-based arguments. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Popular culture revels in the spectacles of shock and violence. Defunded and corporatized, many institutions of public and higher education have been all too willing to make the culture of business the business of education, and this transformation has corrupted their mission.
--and--
I am pointing to a more lethal form of manufactured illiteracy that has become a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges captures this demagogic attack on thoughtfulness in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idioms of mass culture.” Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence, unbridled self-interest and the never-ending whirlwind of consumption.
--and--
This updated form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.” On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the political and economic forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives. At the same time, illiteracy bonds people: It offers the pretense of a community bound by a willful denial of facts and its celebration of ignorance.
I try. Lord knows how I try. I try to maintain a certain equilibrium about all of my fellow citizens. We're all in this great democratic experiment together, after all. I think we have an obligation as a self-governing democratic republic to make government work best for all our people. I believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, and in the political commons to which we all have a right and in which we all have a stake. Economic anxiety in de-industrialized America is very real and it is a real danger to all of what we can achieve together. It is now, and it was in 1980, when I drove from Youngstown to Toledo to Flint to Grand Rapids as we wound into the election that brought us Ronald Reagan.
(So, by the way, is the intractable poverty of people, working class and otherwise, who are not white.)
So, I try. Lord knows how I try.
But what am I supposed to do when so many of my fellow citizens guzzle snake oil by the gallon and call it champagne?
I think what hangs us up the most is that we're all clinging rather desperately to the Presumption of Regularity. We need something that looks and feels more like normal. So we project that need onto an awful lot of what's going on. Especially with 45* making such forceful and deliberate efforts to vacate the norm.
Add it all up and we're danger-close to a charge of False Consciousness, but what else we got?
There're 4 individual dudes on this planet who have amassed a combined fortune greater than the combined fortunes of 4 BILLION other people on this planet. But yeah - the world's problems are all about the lady in front of you at the grocery store buying ramen noodles and peanut butter with her SNAP card.
Wiles asserted that “devil-worshiping, Luciferian, demon-possessed maniacs” have formed a “criminal cabal [that is] running this nation and much of the world” that allows them to engage in “child trafficking, child molestation, child rape, [and] child murder.”
Gotta wonder - why is the Great and Powerful Donald of Oz unable to mount an effective resistance to this evil cabal? Why would 45* fire Flynn for knowing the truth, when he (45*) could use it to seal the deal on prosecuting Hillary? And what's keeping Flynn from speaking this truth now? What about god's noble warriors of a GOP that's been in control of Congress for 6 years? They're all powerless against these devil-worshipers? I also wonder about the morality of someone who just takes this crap at face value, and seems not to care whether it's true or not. But I think always testing for truth ends up being a threat to their faith. They've been trained not to question certain things. They already accept the big absurdity on faith (and they pay handsomely for that), so why not look for other opportunities to trade fairy tales for tribute? My favorite political fantasy right now is that somebody out of office takes one of these greasy slugs to court. Not to spank 'em or collapse their phony little fiefdoms financially (although that'd be one very enjoyable side effect), but to force them out into the open and expose them as the lying sacks of shit they are by requiring them to present the "evidence" they're basing these crazy-fuck ideas on as they peddle their huge steaming piles of bullshit to the rubes. Of course, you can't do that because of the whole Free Speech thing and 200 years of precedent allowing anybody to say anything about a public figure with near-absolute impunity. So what can you say about a system that protects even the lowest and shittiest of the muck divers? You say, "I give them the benefit of law for my own safety's sake". And then you say "God bless America" But still - y'know?
Wanna see the real difference between them and us? They actually believe this shit (or say they do so what's difference?):
And we know better:
I won't be able to reconcile myself with, or pair up with, or find commonality with anybody who insists on being ignorant - especially at a time when there actually are vast resources they can use to find out about stuff.
Gary, who graduated high school with a smokin' 2.0 GPA, is complaining loudly about how Majeed (a Neurologist) wants to steal his job. Ever notice how a lotta these job-stealing immigrants are coming from countries where they help kids with the cost of college and shit? I wonder if that might work here. hat tip = Vicki W-E
Trump loves to bash "the elitists", but he'll be installed as the 45th POTUS on the strength of a majority of the 538 Electoral College votes - even though he got his ass kicked by more than 2 1/2 million votes of the actual populace.
Tell me again - how is this putz in any way "Representative Of The People"?
My inclination right now is to tell Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon (eg) - and everybody else who sat on their asses complaining about Hillary instead of chopping the wood and carrying the water - my first inclination is tell y'all to fuck off.
Show the fuck up or shut the fuck up.
I'm nowhere near as calm or as gracious as either Hillary (or Kate pretending to be Hillary).
It may be a while before I'm at all pleasant to be around. And I'm not begging your indulgence here. I'm not asking anybody for anything - not your patience, not your understanding, nothin'. Ya pays your money and ya takes your chances.
I'll try to suck it up; rub some dirt on it; walk it off and get back in there. Just know that if you say anything that sounds like "Told-Ya-So" or the fantasy bullshit about Bernie and unicorns and rainbows and free puppies, I'm likely to tell you to take a flying fuck at a rollin' donut.
Large percentages of American voters believe in angels and talking snakes. They think Creationism isn't much different from Evolution. Half or more of the US population can't name the 3 branches of government. 40% can't identify North America on a map. And about a third don't know that the Earth orbits the sun.
They were convinced Hillary would abolish the 2nd amendment, outlaw Christianity and convert the US to Sharia law by importing millions of Muslims from Syria to slaughter her Christian enemies. And just because she could, she'd go ahead and suspend the rest of the Constitution because Presidents don't really need that shit anyway. (I'm not making any of that up, btw - that's all from actual conversations with actual rubes over the last several months - and there's plenty more where that came from)
I think I finally get what driftglass has been saying for quite a while.
Get over the idea that a well-reasoned argument will bring the "conservatives" over to your side. You can tell 'em your Democrat or that other Democrat or this Socialist or that Independent thinks just like they do, and that if they could just listen for a minute, maybe we could make some common cause and blah blah fucking blah.
"Conservatives" have become Informationally Isolated. Guess what happens when part of a species is totally isolated from the rest of that species?
In a small simplistic nutshell, here's what it comes down to, Lefties: - You Are The Liberal Elite as far as the rubes are concerned. You can make as much noise as you want. You can stomp and stumble and trash the jungle, but there it is - they believe you're no different from Hillary, so You.Are.The.Liberal.Elite.
You wanna tell everybody what they can eat and what kinda exercise they hafta do and what cars they can drive and what light bulbs they're allowed to own and on and on and on.
It doesn't matter that you're not trying to dictate anything to them - it doesn't matter that all you wanna do is convince them to give it a shot and see for themselves...what did I just say?!
They don't fucking care what's true - they only care about what they believe
Here's the kicker - as far as I'm concerned, you just handed it all over to them because you were too busy breathing your own farts, and so you didn't show up.
I'll keep hoping the really shitty parts of this nightmare don't materialize, but now the GOP is one simple-majority vote away from changing the filibuster rule in the Senate - and then the game is fucking over. The Republic dies. And if that's how it works out, then all we're doing right now is arguing over who gets to do what with the corpse.
'Course, I'm sure you'll have a grand old time finally getting your chance to lie down in front of that tank.
Like I said, I keep hoping - and if there's any chance down the road, I suspect I'll be right back chopping wood and carrying water again, but yeah - not gonna be very pleasant for a while.
The Dems are nearing the end of what looks like a coupla high school knuckleheads in a slap fight after 5th period out in the teacher's parking lot. Meanwhile, over at the cross-town rival's joint, the GOP seems to be having a hard time pretending there's not a full-blown meltdown going on.
Carly Fiorina came to us packaged as the perfect Lady Repub because she was the darling of the CEO Class for having "saved" Hewlett-Packard and blah blah blah, but gosh, it seems HP has decided not to be a sponsor for the Republican Convention. So, is Carly using her influence to keep HP away because she's grudging on Trump, or is she (& her GOP buddies) such poison to HP that they just can't stand the blow-back if they throw in? Either way, oops. (don't look for Coke or Microsoft either - oops and oops again)
There's a growing list of big-name Repubs who've declined invitations to Cleveland because they have to rinse out a few things and wash their hair. eg: John Kasich and Rob Portman - arguably the top 2 GOP guys in Ohio (you know, Ohio - the state HOSTING THE CONVENTION) - both have said they're not sure if they're gonna make it to Cleveland next month. 4 out of the last 5 GOP nominees won't be there. Wanna talk Rand Paul, Rick Snyder, Jeb Bush? Trump doesn't.
Glenn Beck has been suspended from his broadcasting spot on SiriusXM because he agreed with a guy he had on his show who all but said we might need a patriot to step up and assassinate Donald Trump.
Bloody Bill Kristol has burned through his list of people he's pushing hard to get up a 3rd party challenge for Trump - and he's down to like #5 on the list; a guy nobody's ever heard of - nobody outside of the Wingnut Welfare System anyway.
The Evangelicals are split - or maybe that should be "have split".
It's usually hard to tell where the US military stands on this stuff because they have to play it close enough to the vest that they don't do much thinking out loud and in public, but there's been a handful of comments telling me they're not looking forward to having to answer to complete bozos like the NeoCons again, and some of them (some big-deal retirees anyway) have very publicly expressed outrage in response to Trump's declarations of bringing back torture and saying the military will just have to suck it up and do whatever he says or else - nyah.
And oh yeah - Trump's campaign is broke. They don't have any money to put anything in place for a ground game; they can't buy ad time; they can't do much of anything until after he gets the nomination. The only thing he can do is keep blathering about whatever pops into to his little vacumm-packed skull and hope the Press Poodles keep lapping it up.
Ain't this fun? Anybody can be Da Preznint - don't take but some common sense and a little straight talk and hard work, and ... holy fuck, how did we get this fuckin' stoopid?
So there's this new study out of Yale, published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science that says Climate Change Denial is all about a Cash-For-Comments system used to manufacture an "opposing view". And what that allows is for the political operators to separate voters along imaginary ideological fault lines, which makes it easier to keep us bitching at each other rather than voting to send the Coin-Operated Politicians back home so they can open that shoe store their mom always wanted them to have - which would be a much closer career match for their skill sets while still meaning most of them would be vastly over-employed.
Ideological polarization around environmental issues—especially climate change—have increased in the last 20 years. This polarization has led to public uncertainty, and in some cases, policy stalemate. Much attention has been given to understanding individual attitudes, but much less to the larger organizational and financial roots of polarization. This gap is due to prior difficulties in gathering and analyzing quantitative data about these complex and furtive processes. This paper uses comprehensive text and network data to show how corporate funding influences the production and actual thematic content of polarization efforts. It highlights the important influence of private funding in public knowledge and politics, and provides researchers a methodological model for future studies that blend large-scale textual discourse with social networks.
Like I said - that's not something we didn't know. But I'll take it as a positive sign anyway, because while it's not likely to convince the hard core rubes, it's one more bullet point that rebuts the Both-Sides crap and might be useful convincing the Hipster-ish I'm-Too-Cool-To-Vote crowd to get up off their suspended-adolescence butts and realize they've got skin in this game whether they like it (or whether they even realize it) or not. hat tip = truthout
Police charged 45-year-old Scott Lattin with making a false report after arresting him at his home in Whitney, Texas. While the suspect denied the accusation during a brief on-camera interview, his arrest warrant stated that he admitted to damaging the truck for “insurance reasons.”
Lattin organized the fundraiser after claiming last week that vandals spray-painted “Black Lives Matter” across his truck as well as “F*ck the police” because he had decorated the vehicle with the phrase “Police Lives Matter” in support of Harris County Deputy Darren Goforth, who was shot and killed at a gas station last month. Both authorities and conservatives have attempted to connect Goforth’s death with the movement, seemingly without any evidence.
So that's kinda where we are? The point where the rubes are convinced that Kim Davis isn't the one going against the law - it's the cops and the judges, and everybody else who's not willing to accept their Brand-X Knock-off Sharia? Now, you can go ahead and try to make the Both Sides argument by saying 'the libruls' think the cops and the judges in Ferguson (eg) are the bad guys, and so yeah, it all evens out. Sadly, that sounds plausible because we've internalized that kind of paralysis. We've allowed the Opinion Pimps and their Press Poodles and their Coin-Operated Politicians to use our sense of fairness against us for political gain. The very thing that's at the core of our strength as the Exceptional Nation is now turned against us and becomes our greatest weakness. Oh dear, what're we to do? How will we ever figure this out and get a handle on what's real and what isn't? Chill, Sparky. Here's the thing that we just can't quite get each other to remember about the shit we were supposed to learn in 9th grade Civics class. You know - way back when school was a place where ya learned a coupla things about how to know what the fuck is goin' on? Yeah that. Anyway, the question is: who's following the guiding principles of the US Constitution?
everybody's supposed to be treated the same
we're gonna be a nation of laws, not men
nobody gets to take their religion and turn it into law
All of which is intended to help us keep our personal shit separate from our government shit; by giving us a kind of simple bench mark for when we need to figure out what's best for the most while maintaining Equal Protection for as many of us as possible.
The cops in Ferguson failed to fulfill their obligations under their oath by engaging in selective enforcement of the law, and then they allowed it to degenerate into an extortion racket, which is crazy stoopid understandable because if you're not willing to see that the first part is pretty fucked up, then how ya gonna not go full-on-rat-bastard-straight-outa-The-Godfather-crooked-cop? Seems like a logical progression. As an agent of government, Davis failed to live up to her oath as well. She refused to hold up her end of the deal. That's against the law. Denying US citizens their rights under the constitution is illegal, and it doesn't matter that your imaginary friend told you to do it, because that's fucking illegal too. So, if ya wanna try to make that Both Sides argument here, then what you're doing is called False Equivalence/False Dichotomy, and I'm callin' bullshit on that.
It occurs to me that seeing all those Islamist martyrs blowing themselves up and crashing various modes of transportation into various symbols of Western Colonialism or whatever, Americans are feeling a bit challenged.
"We own this fuckin' joint and nobody ever out-maniacs America. USA! USA!"
But we'll do it our own way, thanks and fuck you very much.
Like the equally discriminatory Memories Pizza, in Indiana, which has earned over $800,000 in sympathy donations so far, Stutzman’s own GoFundMe campaign has pulled in nearly $90,000.
According to The Seattle Times, almost half of the money Stutzman has gained so far has been picked up in the last few days, though. It seems her campaign, created back in February, may be getting a fresh insurgence of support on the coattails of the Memories Pizza success.
It’s always interesting to see in the dirty, sell-anything world of capitalism when Jesus and morals win, isn’t it? Yes, you too can hate and get paid!
Stutzman was fined by the Benton County Superior Court last month for refusing service to a same-sex couple two years ago, claiming her Southern Baptist beliefs prohibited her from doing so. She is the owner of Arlene’s Flowers and Gifts.
So what’s the moral of this story, and is it anything remotely “Christian?”
So in light of this "hot new fashion trend" of good Christian entrepreneurs lining up to make a show of their eagerness to become martyrs to the noble cause of TheoCommercialist Bigotry, I tho't Mencken's quote from about 90 years ago might be timely.
“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” --HL Mencken, Chicago Tribune 1926
One of the favorite themes of all three of the Book Religions is the one about being Persecuted For Your Faith. And it doesn't matter that you're a totally dominant majority of your country's population. If there's any chance for you to reaffirm one of the big deal tenets of your religion, you jump on it. It also doesn't matter if you have to make up some shit about your current circumstances to get everything to fit, because religion is all about making shit up to begin with. I guess I'm a little surprised that anybody- including me - is at all surprised by any of this.
I've been reading Charlie Pierce for years, and he often makes reference to "Obvious Political Anagram, Reince Priebus". I've always wondered, but I never looked very far trying to find out about it. I swear to Zalmoxis that I didn't know this until today, when I Googled it and found a Facebook page explaining it all*:
Reince Priebus = Rube's Epic Rein
No wonder they keep re-electing the guy.
*Ed Note: I can't guarantee this is what Mr Pierce has in mind, but - you know - holy crap.
