June 1, 2022: Well, problem solved! If we want to stop all the shootings in America, Fox News host Laura Ingraham has a solution of “paramount importance.”
That solution? Better parents (less permissive) and less pot, which together put kids “on a highway to hell.” She also blames all kinds of Democratic social policies – but you can just skip to the 5:50 mark on the tape (provided below) if you want to catch the gist.
Bah, restrictions on the sale of AR-15s and background checks!
How silly.
Next time you see a kid smoking a joint, run for cover. So. Guns. Not the issue. High potency weed is the issue.
(She
seems not to notice that most gun violence is committed by persons sometimes
known as “adults.” And even if it’s true, and high potency marijuana use makes
teens more prone to violent behavior, wouldn’t that be a perfect argument for
raising the age to purchase an AR-15, or banning gun sales to anyone with a
prior drug conviction, including misdemeanors???)
 |
After the Parkland, Florida school massacre, Trump said Republicans were afraid of the N.R.A. He was right. (They still are.) |
At an N.R.A. convention a liberal journalist found one attendee who insisted hammers killed more Americans every year than guns – and told the journalist to google it. He did. Handguns, to keep it simple, were used to commit 8,029 homicides vs. 393 which resulted from use of blunt objects, including hammers, in one year. Rifles, shotguns, and other unspecified guns killed another 5,634 Americans. At least so the reporter said.
I didn’t know what source he used. So I checked myself. According to the F.B.I. blunt objects aren’t even close to the weapon of choice of the homicidally inclined. From 2015 to 2019, firearms were used in more than 51,000 murders in the U.S.
Blunt objects lagged at 2,230.
 |
The judge who had to identify all the dead kids at Robb Elementary School breaks down. |
Did we say, “problem solved?” Well, not solved!!! Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has identified a problem bigger than rampant gun violence. In an hour long post on social media she warned her loyal followers that in just a few generations straight people will be… extinct!!!
The problem is inclusive sex education – where teachers try to tell LGBTQ kids that they aren’t a threat to all humanity. Greene isn’t buying. These “trans terrorists” have to be stopped!
You bastards! You want straight people to be extinct????
“They just want you to think that all of a sudden the entire population is steadily turning gay or turning trans,” Rep. Greene insisted. “Just generation, generation ... probably in about four or five generations no-one will be straight anymore. Everyone will be either gay, or trans, or nonconforming or whatever list of fifty of sixty options which there are.”
No idea what those 50-60 options might be; but
if “complete fool” is one, Greene should definitely claim that one herself.
___
6/2/22: Nowhere in American are Americans safe from gun violence. On Fox News, the emphasis is always gun violence in “Democratic cities.” Thursday, a man pulls into the Cornerstone Church parking lot, outside Ames, Iowa. He opens fire, killing two young women, 22-year-old Eden Montang, and 21-year-old Vivian Flores, one of whom with which he had been romantically involved.
It was, said one police official, a “targeted act of violence.”
Then the killer shot himself.
In news
of a similar kind, police in Berkeley, California arrest a 16-year-old, after
they are tipped off that the juvenile is recruiting others for a mass shooting at his high school. He’s thinking of adding
a bombing for good measure. A search of his home turns up knifes, bomb parts,
and, of course, assault rifles.
___
6/4/22: The evidence continues to accumulate. Climate change is upon us. Detailed analysis of satellite images shows that snow cover in the Alps has declined by an average of 10% since 1984. Vegetation above the tree line has increased by 77%.
USA
Today explains:
“The scale of the change has turned out to
be absolutely massive in the Alps,” Sabine Rumpf, lead author of the study
and assistant professor at the University of Basel, said in a press release.
The researchers in Switzerland, the
Netherlands and Finland identified the rise in vegetation as a
phenomenon called “greening,” a consequence of climate change that has
previously been documented in the Arctic.
 |
Greenland melting raises the sea level. |
___
6/5/22: On Sunday, Pastor
Dillon Awes decided it was time to deliver a healing message from Jesus to his
flock. That message: The government should execute every gay person. All of
them. “They should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the
head! That’s what God teaches,” Pastor Awes stormed, while thumping his podium.
“That’s what the Bible says.”
This worries Mr.
Blogger for many reasons, in part because recently he was reading about a young
Dutch man who became “radicalized” by Nazi propaganda in the years leading up
to World War II. The story was about how he took photos of Dutch Jews being
rounded up and sent to the death camps – and how he approved.
One should, of
course, note that gays were also sent to camps like Dachau, and Auschwitz, and
brutal medical experiments were carried out by Nazi doctors to see if they
could be cured of their homosexuality.
___
6/6/22: CNN
has a good story about drought and climate change in California,
focusing on the fate of one farmer. Gary Biggs hasn’t been able to draw water
out of his well for more than a decade. It’s a result of over-pumping for
agriculture and the decline in rainfall across the state.
Now, the eight-acre farm in West Goshen,
California, which Biggs passed down to his son, Ryan, in the 1970s, is parched
and fallow. His son and granddaughter carry in water from sources to drink and
shower. They go to town to wash their clothes, Biggs says.
In recent years, the family has gone from
relying on water from cisterns provided by government programs, which they say
tastes terrible, to hauling water containers to and from neighbors' homes –
neighbors who are willing to share what they have left.
Biggs, 72, still remembers when the family
property had a thriving orchard. When he was a teenager, he planted pecan and
orange trees, while his father grew alfalfa and raised cows and sheep.
“Now, it’s all dirt,” Biggs, a lifelong
California resident, told CNN. “Central California is dying. We’re becoming a
wasteland. A hot and dry wasteland.”
“And God forbid, I don’t know how long this
drought is gonna go on,” he added. “Believe it or not climate change is here,
and California is a poster child for it.”
One man’s view. Not definitive.
But the
evidence accumulates. (See the following: 1/30/22, 2/3/22, 2/15/22, 2/16/22,
3/26/22, 5/28/22 and 6/4/22)
___
6/8/22: Stories of serious voter fraud are hard to come by, but today, I thought I had one. And it was a Democrat involved!!!
This
paragraph sounded promising, if you loved Donald Trump like blueberry muffins,
and wanted to prove the 2020 election was stolen:
Guillermina
Fuentes, 66, could get probation for running what Arizona attorney general's
office investigators said was a sophisticated operation using her status as a
well-known Democratic operative in the border city of San Luis to persuade
voters to let her gather and in some cases fill out their ballots.
Then I read on. Prosecutors couldn’t prove that Fuentes filled out a ballot for one (1) voter, or that she forged signatures for four (4) ballots she turned in illegally, for non-family members.
Not the big voter fraud story I had been looking for, lo these many post-2020-election months.
Fuentes could be sent to jail for two years if convicted on the remaining charges against her; but her crime pales by comparison with, say, a politician who pressured another politician to find “11,780 votes” that the former needed to win an election.
As, for
example, Donald J. Trump.
___
6/9/22: You might think that any reasonable American politician, running for office, would know enough to avoid giving Adolf Hitler a shoutout. You would be giving Carl Paladino too much credit.
Paladino has been on this blogger’s radar before, when his main blog was about teaching, and he dubbed Paladino America’s “Worst School Board Member of the Year,” after he said First Lady Michele Obama should go back to Africa, live in a cave, and maybe enjoy sex with gorillas.
Now we learn that in a radio interview, Paladino, who wants to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, on the GOP ticket, was asked how he thought Republicans in New York State could stir up voter enthusiasm. We shall insert the word: STOP, every time Paladino should have had the sense to seal his lips. Otherwise, this paragraph comes from HuffPost.
He
replied: “I was thinking the other day about – somebody
had mentioned on the radio Adolf Hitler and how he aroused the crowds [STOP],”
Paladino responded, chuckling a little bit [STOP] as he said the Nazi
dictator’s name. “And he would get up there screaming these epithets [STOP!!!] and
these people were just – they were hypnotized by him [FOR GOD’S SAKE, STOP!].
That’s, I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today [NO, NO, NO.
STOP IT, STOP!!]. We need somebody inspirational [HOLY SHIT, STOP, YOU DAMN FOOL!]”
 |
Inspirational - like Trump? |
*
Suppose you watched the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, and you were not high on meth, or a member of the Trump cult – who didn’t get to D.C. on time to join the attack.
Would you think President Trump deserved plenty of blame?
It turns out then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos did. She admitted today that in the wake of the attack she
had conversations with other cabinet members and Vice President Pence. Topic
for discussion: Invoking the 25th Amendment, and removing Trump from office.
___
6/10/22: Data points keep piling up. Climate change has arrived. The only question will be how profoundly life on earth will change.
Scorching temperatures in the Southwest set all-time daily highs on Friday. A sampling: Austin, Texas hits 103, Las Vegas 109. The high in Phoenix touches 113. Death Valley, always the hottest place on earth, hits 123° on June 10, the earliest temperature that high ever registered.
To show how hot it really was, a Phoenix man grilled hamburgers, and then baked a
cake, using the dashboard of his car.
___
6/11/22: An astute Twitter used posted the following vote totals on four recent votes in the U.S. House of Representatives:
Another Twitter account posted a clip of Rep. Lauren Boebert enjoying herself at a right-wing event. She’s offering up a prayer – you know, like a good Christian would. “I want you to know, I do pray for the president,” she says. “Psalm 109:8 says, ‘May his days be few, and another take his office.’” The crowd hoots and applauds. They might as well start chanting, Al Qaeda style, “Death to Biden!”
Boebert smiles broadly, and raises her eyebrows, then shouts, “Hallelujah.” She smiles again. “Glory to God,” she says. Then she laughs and smiles and walks away from the lectern, enjoying her spot in the limelight.
Since we’re on the subject topic of right-wing nuts, how about another shoutout to Mike Lindell, brought to us by Ron Filipkowski, via Twitter. Poor Mr. MyPillow has been insisting for the last year-and-a-half that:
A. President Trump really won the 2020 election.
B. That it might be fun to clinch that victory by sending in the U.S. military to clear a path of anyone who said he lost.
C. And insisting repeatedly since Biden was inaugurated that new evidence would turn up, Biden would be ousted from the White House soon, and Trump would be reinstated in an orange glow of glory.
Now, he’s saying it once more. He’s got a movie coming out on the 16th or 17th of July, and “its gonna change everything,” he says in an interview on Lindell TV. (Yes, he has his own channel.) It’s going to be big. “All the influencers,” and “thousands of podcasters” will pick up the story. “This is going to be the voice of the world.”
Mike
promises he’s even going to “invite people from overseas,” as well. Finally, he
concludes,
After those two days, if there’s any
politician that’s left in the United States that says there was no election
crime and that they are really in love with those [voting] machines, they can
sit behind those melted down prison bars, made from those machines, right next
to Brad Raffensperger, we can build a whole big old new prison for them, all
the people that were a part of the election crime of 2020.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (August 1, 2022): July 16 and 17 pass, and the entire month of July, in fact.
Nothing happens.
Lindell is forced to punt again.
___
6/12/22: Members of the Trump Cult refuse to admit it. Gov. Asa Hutchinson, of Arkansas, however, is not a cult member. Appearing on Fox News, he warns his entire party. “Republicans need to do a lot of soul-searching as to what is the right thing here and what is the right thing for our democracy in the future,” he said, “and not simply adhere to the basic instincts of some of our base.”
Trump, he continued, was “politically, morally” responsible for the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6.
“The King Lear of Mar-a-Lago.”
The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, also attacks Ex-President Blubber, while hoping readers miss a main point. Murdoch’s editors are tasked with throwing mud at Democrats every day. But this time, they make clear – they’d really prefer to ditch the crazy old guy they loved and slobbered over for four years.
Now, they label Trump “the King Lear of Mar-a-Lago.”
The Post is hoping you won’t notice how many moving parts there were to the Trump plot to steal the 2020 election. They want you to think the January 6 Commission “is a Democratic campaign ad, a thinly veiled partisan exercise” conducted merely “to bolster a failed Joe Biden presidency.”
That’s not even close to the truth. What Murdoch hopes readers will ignore is clear. Had Trump and his scuzzy minions managed to carry their plot to fruition, there would have been no Joe Biden presidency to fault. The will of the American people would have been subverted.
(The editors do at least admit Biden won – which a parade of witness from inside the Trump administration make clear they knew.)
What the editors, no doubt at Murdoch’s urging, really want readers to do is get ready to jettison the orange ball of flab who used to be president, while not noticing how morally bankrupt the Republican Party became in following his lead. (See: 7/23/22.) They don’t want you to think about the various U.S. senators and the more-than-half of GOP members of the U.S. House of Representatives who supported the lie of the “stolen election.” They ignore the danger that still exists – a danger they helped create. That is: A huge percentage of the GOP base still believes the 2020 election was stolen.
The Post editorial reads, in part:
The Jan. 6 Commission is a
Democratic campaign ad, a thinly veiled partisan exercise – aired in primetime,
with the cooperation of a liberal press – to bolster a failed Joe Biden
presidency.
But rather than
ignore it or look to the future, Donald Trump, the King Lear of Mar-a-Lago,
decided to tweet – er, Truth – yet another statement confirming that he refuses
to accept reality. “January 6th was not simply a protest,” he wrote, “it
represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America
Great Again.”
It wasn’t, of
course. It was a national shame. One that neither Democrats nor Trump can stop
obsessing over. It’s time for Republicans to move on.
…Trump has
become a prisoner of his own ego. He can’t admit his tweeting and narcissism
turned off millions. He won’t stop insisting that 2020 was “stolen” even though
he’s offered no proof that it’s true.
Respected
officials like former Attorney General Bill Barr call his rants “nonsense.”
This isn’t just about Liz Cheney. Mitch McConnell, Betsy DeVos, Mark Meadows –
they all knew Trump was delusional. His own daughter and son-in-law testified
it was bull.
Trump’s
response? He insults Barr, and dismisses Ivanka as
“checked out.” He clings to more fantastical theories, such as Dinesh D’Souza’s
debunked “2,000 Mules,” even as recounts in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin
confirm Trump lost.
Meanwhile,
reports that Trump was pleased that
the Jan. 6 crowd chanted for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged – a truly
reprehensible sentiment – makes him unworthy for the office. Trump can’t look
past 2020. Let him remain there.
Look forward!
The 2024 field is rich. You have Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley … the list goes on. All
candidates who embrace conservative policies without the preoccupations of the
Don.
Consider: Even
if Trump, at 78, managed to win the presidency in 2024, who would work for him,
now that he’s betrayed every competent person on his former staff?
The motivations
of the Democrats are purely political, but that doesn’t make the events of
January 6 right. The best argument Trump’s people can cling to is that the Capitol
building wasn’t properly secured. The committee would look far less partisan by
scrutinizing these claims. But what’s the logic? You knew Trump was going to
incite a mob, so you should have brought in more troops? Trump himself doesn’t
deny that he wished the rioters had succeeded in overturning the election.
Donald Trump
lost in 2020. … We need a fresh start.
Tune out the
Jan. 6 hearings and binge-watch the new season of “Stranger Things.” Unsubscribe
from Trump’s daily emails begging for money. Then pick your favorite from a new
crop of conservatives. Look to 2022, and 2024, and a new era. Let’s make
America sane again.
Since this humble blogger was already convinced that Trump was a prisoner of his own ego, and so indicated in a post for October 25, 2017, he might quibble with the editorial. Why did it take Rupert Murdoch and his editors so long to figure it out? Why did it take five years for them to realize the need to “make America sane again?” Donald Trump was nuts from the very start.
Still, baby steps.
The editors at the New York Post are beginning to face up
to reality.
POSTSCRIPT: Defections from the Church of Mar-a-Lago continue as it becomes increasingly clear the fat priest has been molesting altar boys.
Rep. Dan Bacon of Nebraska tells Chuck Todd on ABC that he won’t be supporting Trump in 2024. He says voters liked Republican policies in 2020, which helped the party gain seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But they were also tired of Trump’s “name calling, the Twitter.”
“We have to also learn the lesson, ‘Why did we lose [the presidency] in 2020?’ It was the comportment and the temperament, and yes, a democracy respects elections. And our president should have respected the conclusion,” Bacon said.
As for Trump’s failure to act on January 6, Congressman Bacon admitted, “I think it was negligence. He should’ve done better.”
Was it criminal, his host wondered?
“I’m not
a lawyer or judge,” Bacon replied. “I thought it was wrong.”
___
6/13/22: If you’re watching the January 6 hearings, you know testimony has been brutal in regard to Ex-President Blubber, Donald J. Trump himself. A paraded of former cabinet members, acting cabinet members, White House aides and White House lawyers, as well as Republican state officials, have all painted a damning picture of the Orange God of Mar-a-Lago.
That means it’s time for Brian Kilmeade of Fox News to come to the former president’s defense. That’s part of Kilmeade’s job description. But there’s no wiggle room left to question the avalanche of evidence that has been revealed. Kilmeade must resort to playing tricks with the English language.
He tweets: “I don’t care what you think of the #capitalriot and who is to blame these hearings need a
counter opinion, its an infomercial for what dems think – when I watch the tape
of these interviews I just wonder what else they say that didn’t tell with
their story”
An astute observer of the language, or even a reasonably intelligent human being, would point out that the witnesses are almost universally Republicans, telling us what they think about what happened, not what Democrats think. And any witness would be free, if misquoted, or if words were taken out of context, to go on Fox News, and say that was so.
Not a single witness, so far, has.
And
Kilmeade knows that.
___
6/14/22: All kinds of interesting details have emerged from the work of the House Select Committee on January. 6.
Did you remember that Kimberly Guilfoyle spoke at the January 6, 2021 “Stop the Steal” rally, before the mob formed and marched to the Capitol Building? And then mayhem ensued! You are to be forgiven, if you missed it, because Ms. Guilfoyle, girlfriend of Don Jr., spent only three minutes on stage, introducing Jr., who then spoke. For her services, we now learn Turning Point Action, a conservative pro-Donald Trump Sr. organization, forked out the cash.
Would you willing speak to a large audience of MAGA fans for three minutes, for $500. This blogger would. What about $500 per minute. This blogger definitely would. If you are particularly introverted, what would it take? Maybe $5,000 per minute? That would shake most people loose.
Guilfoyle pocketed four times that sum: $20,000 per minute, $60,000 in all.
Look. This blogger knows. Hunter Biden should never have been able to trade on his name and land a spot on the board of Burisma, a company in Ukraine. I get that. Hunter’s laptop and all.
Guilfoyle, though – she was cashing in at the expense of Trump fans who had pitched in with donations to Turning Point Action. All the money donated was supposed to go to pay for legal challenges to stop that awful steal. Instead, Don Jr.’s main squeeze pocketed sixty grand!
You’d
think Fox News and Newsmax would be justly outraged.
___
6/16/22: The party of “family values” gets smacked in the face yet again. And you almost have to wonder! Does a party led by Donald J. Trump really have any “family values” at all?
If you haven’t been following the sad story of Herschel Walker, endorsed by Trump for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia, you may not realize. Mr. Walker has difficulty stringing together words in coherent sentences.
Or even coherent phrases.
It’s almost as if his only qualification for office is his success as a football player in college and the NFL.
Throw in the fact that when he’s busy butchering grammar and syntax, he’s also often lying, and you have the perfect candidate for Donald Trump to endorse. Like his fanboy Don, Herschel brings the hypocrisy whenever he can. For example, Mr. Walker has talked a great deal about the tragedy of “fatherless homes” in the African American community “because the fatherless home is a major, major problem.” Like many conservatives, he blames the rise of broken homes on Democratic social programs. If elected, the former NFL star will rush off to Washington D.C. and pass legislation to end welfare, and force poor women to have babies, and make it fun to buy guns.
Sadly,
it turns out Walker has done his own work to add to the “fatherless homes” problem. He has
one son by one woman, a 10-year-old who he does not live with at all – and a
second son, 13, by another woman, who he also does not live with at all. He
does have a son, 22, by a third woman and that son is helping with his
campaign. As a Hypocrites Bonus, Walker also fathered a daughter when he was
20, and still in college, by a fourth woman. So, as we’ve said: Trump’s kind of
guy.
___
6/19/22: Firearms sales in the U.S. have skyrocketed since 2000, with background checks increasing from 8.5 million that year, to 38.9 million in 2021.
Yay! Now we’re all so much safer.
*
Or maybe not. On Sunday, Rep.
Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans willing to serve on the January 6
Committee, says he received a letter in the mail that threatened to execute
him, his wife, and their newborn.
“There is violence in the future, I’m going to tell you,” Kinzinger said on ABC’s This Week. “And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.”
Kinzinger’s an Iraq vet. (See:
6/20/22.)
Also not safe: LGBTQ persons in Texas. As noted by ABC, the Texas Republican Party has a new party platform out and ready to roll with heading into the midterms. That platform states that “homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice.”
As a party, Texas Republicans also want it known: “We oppose all efforts to validate transgender identity.” The platform makes clear GOP opposition “to various medical treatments for transgender people who are 21 and younger including so-called ‘puberty blockers,’ hormone therapy and surgery.”
I don’t know.
It sounds to me as if what the Texans really want to say was, “Go out and beat up a queer person today.”
They just don’t want their bigotry to be quite so obvious.
As a bona fide heterosexual of 73 years good standing this hard working blogger will only say, I will tend to what goes on in my own bedroom. Assuming any sex involved is between consenting adults, you may tend to yours.
___
6/20/22: Eric Greitens, Republican candidate for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Missouri, is out with a new campaign add which will make you want to vote for him. Or run to the store to buy body armor, depending.
In a new video he announces: “I’m Eric Greitens, Navy SEAL, and today we’re going RINO hunting.”
Greitens, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, forgets he’s back in America. In his ad, he walks down a sidewalk in Somewhere, U.S.A., large pump action-style rifle in hand. We next see him standing in front of the door to a house. He’s backed up by what appears to be a tactical squad. Greitens explains: “The RINO feeds on corruption and is marked by the stripes of cowardice.” The other members of the tactical unit smash open the door, and someone throws a smoke grenade.
“Join the MAGA
crew,” Greitens says, after boldly stepping inside. “Get a RINO hunting permit.
There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit and it doesn’t expire until we save
our country.”
With this permit, you could even shoot Adam Kinzinger’s kid, I think he means to say. (See: 6/19/22.)
When I try to watch the video myself, on Twitter,
it turns out I’d have to donate $25 to the Greitens campaign for the pleasure.
Twitter also posts notice: “The following media includes potentially sensitive
content.”
CNN provides part of the video
for free.
___
6/20/22: If you missed the “big news” in Trumpistan this weekend, President Biden took a tumble while riding a bike!
The MAGA crowd couldn’t have been any more thrilled if, while pedaling, the earth had opened up and swallowed “Sleepy Joe,” dropping him straight into the fiery pits of Hell. (Considering many of those same folks believe in QAnon, they wouldn’t have been surprised if that occurred.)
Let me start by laying down my main points for today.
1. There’s a much, much bigger story shaping up in the news – and can I just mention, before we go into that, that I doubt Ex-President Blubber could even climb aboard a bike?
2. Okay. Sorry. I got distracted. The big story is all the people who worked for Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, who are testifying under oath, that they knew Trump lost the 2020 election.
3. They told him so.
4. And he still plotted to try to steal the election for himself.
5.
Last, but not least, I’m shocked Trump fans don’t
realize. What’s the most strenuous activity we’ve seen Ex-President Blubber
engaged in in the last six years? The man considers tooling around in a golf
cart a workout.
I feel bad saying this, of course, but sometimes the members of the MAGA crowd can be proudly ignorant of what’s going on. So here’s a rule of thumb. If ten Democrats criticize Republicans, you can tune at least seven out. Same for the reverse. It’s what all politicians do.
If the people who worked with a boss, or members of a person’s family agree, or court evidence shows that “Individual 1” is a terrible boss, family member, or criminal, you need to take note.
Let’s
remind everyone what Vice President Pence said last February, about the idea,
floated by then-President Trump, that he could just flip the electoral votes on
January 6, and gift Trump the win.
____________________
“Frankly there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence
____________________
We might also remember that Trump’s first Secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis, called Trump “a threat to the Constitution.”
His last Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, went with labeling the president “a threat to democracy.”
And in the recent Select Committee on January 6 hearings, Judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative all his life, warned that the ex-president remains “a clear and present danger to American democracy.” He describes the former president as a man willing to overturn or ignore, “fundamental truth,” “profound truth,” American “ground truth.”
If you
pay attention, and you can cast aside your preconceptions, you listen to what
these kinds of people say, and you start to understand how dangerous Donald J.
Trump has always been.
*
For perspective, in terms of bicycling, falling off your bike is what we riders do. I’ve ridden across the USA twice.
I’m 73, and I’d like to do it again. I was pedaling last week, did 46 miles one day, and took a spill when I stopped at a light. Foot got caught, clipped to my pedal.
Nobody ever killed American democracy but tumbling off a bicycle.
 |
The blogger, at Monticello, during a ride across the USA in 2007. |
___
6/21/22: Remember former Rep. Steven King of Iowa, the Republican who lost his seat in Congress after one too many racist comments?
If you’re going to tweet about abortion, you should try really hard to not sound like a racist. Mr. King just couldn’t manage to do it.
___
6/22/22: We keep learning more and more about Team Trump’s efforts to ensure he got a second term – despite the minor inconvenience of having lost the vote by seven million. Two days after the election, before it was even called, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas tweeted this:
In fact, no “censorship mongers” or “fake stream media reporters” or anyone else was being arrested. There was no significant ballot fraud then – now has any been revealed since. There were no “barges off GITMO.”
And civilians would never “face military tribunals for sedition.” You’d think the wife of a Supreme Court justice would know the law.
Mrs. Thomas,
to put it plainly, is a right-wing kook.
___
6/23/22: How bad are the January 6 hearings making Ex-President Blubber look? If you’re a Fox News aficionado, not bad at all. They aren’t even airing them.
For those Americans who care about free elections, however, they are providing riveting testimony.
Former Ohio Governor John Kasich, a Republican, tweets out this response today:
Based on what we've seen in the #January6th Committee, it’s clear to me that as
President, Donald Trump tried to overturn the election result. It is both
breathtaking and chilling.
Never in my lifetime would I have imagined a
President of the United States doing this.
I am
happy to report that his tweet also piled up more than 60,000 “likes,”
including my own.
*
Speaking of “looking bad,” former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark had his home raided today.
Or, as a loyal associate explained, “more than a dozen DOJ law enforcement officials searched Jeff Clark’s house in a pre-dawn raid, put him in the streets in his pjs, and took his electronic devices.”
You could complain about how this doesn’t happen
very often, as did friends of Mr. Clark – but it does happen when you are part
of an attempt to steal a presidential election, as the former assistant
attorney general allegedly was.
NOTE TO TRUMP FANS: Clark was trying to steal the
election for your boy, President Blubber.
 |
Top of the morning, Mr. Clark! |
___
6/24/22: The U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, overturns Roe v. Wade, on a 6-3 vote. Books will be written about this decision. So we will keep this post short.
As NPR explains:
Writing for
the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling
and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be
overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally
weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.”
“A relentless freedom from doubt.”
I wonder,
personally. Chief Justice John Roberts concurred in the decision, but made it
clear he would have upheld only the Mississippi law, which banned
abortions after the 15-week mark.
Knowing this
decision would create a firestorm, NPR continued, Roberts warned that the
ruling would cause “a serious jolt to the legal system,” adding that both the
majority and the three dissenters displayed “a relentless freedom from doubt on
the legal issue that I cannot share.”
The NPR
summary is better than anything I can do, and for once, I don’t feel much like
mocking the majority opinion. I would, were I more in the mood, note that Alito
and four of the other five justices in the majority, who are Catholic, appear
to have let their personal religious views shape their judicial decision – as,
in fact, many radical-right conservatives insist they should have done. And
that despite the fact, that for centuries Catholics took pleasure in
slaughtering Christians of other sects, and vice versa, because assorted
followers of Jesus Christ differed on matters of dogma. For example, on the
proper timing of baptism.
Raised
Catholic, myself, I still remember the teachings of the church, some more
fondly than others, though I no longer practice. We were taught that a baby
born, but dying before baptism, would end up in “limbo,” not hell, but not
heaven, either – a place of happiness in the suburbs, so to speak. That
concept, I find, while writing this post was removed from church teachings in 2007.
And, of
course, if that baby grew up to be a teen, and used the phrase, “God damn you,”
and then was struck by lightning, that teen would have to endure fiery torment in Hell, for all eternity.
Whereas, if
Hitler had had a chance to sincerely repent for his sins before he died, and did so, he would be forgiven, and would
pass “Go,” and find a place in heaven.
But I
digress.
Back to
Justice Alito and NPR:
Writing for the majority, he said
forthrightly that abortion is a matter to be decided by states and the voters
in the states. “We hold,” he wrote, that “the Constitution does not confer a
right to abortion.” As to what standard the courts should apply in the event
that a state regulation is challenged, Alito said any state regulation of
abortion is presumptively valid and “must be sustained if there is a rational
basis on which the legislature could have thought” it was serving “legitimate
state interests,” including “respect for and preservation of prenatal life at
all stages of development.” In addition, he noted, states are entitled to
regulate abortion to eliminate “gruesome and barbaric” medical procedures; to “preserve
the integrity of the medical profession”; and to prevent discrimination on the
basis of race, sex, or disability, including barring abortion in cases of fetal
abnormality.
The translation of all that is that states are
completely free to ban abortions for any reason.
*
Is human life located in the sperm? Or egg? Or
both?
One might
wonder now, what “legitimate state interest” exists in requiring mothers (to
cite one example) to carry to full term pregnancies, where profound birth defects mean a baby will be born, only to die within
hours, or days at best – such as babies born without brains.
Several
states have already moved to ban abortion starting from the moment of fertilization,
giving zygotes standing as “children,” when in fact, a zygote is only a
fertilized egg. So that a skeptic might wonder. Shouldn’t sperm be protected
under some new law? If human life begins at conception, was it located in the
sperm? Or in the egg? Or half in each?
As NPR noted,
Alito’s ruling was 78 pages long, with a 30-page appendix. Shouldn’t he have
answered that thorny question?
Several
experts on the workings of the court have already pointed out that Justice
Alito cited Lord Matthew Hale, a 17th century English jurist, eight times in support of his opinion. Alito wanted to make clear that at the time the
Constitution was written none of the Founding Fathers would have favored abortion.
And as you may know, according to people on the right, we may never challenge what
the Founders believed. Because they knew everything there was important to know
in 1787, such as the workings of DNA, the medical requirements related to in
vitro fertilization, and how to handle ectopic pregnancies. Indeed, according
to Justice Alito, they had rested their thinking on the fine work of previous
legal experts, who we may also not question. That would include Lord Hale, born
in 1609, ten years before English law began to formulate a defense of the right
to own slaves in the Thirteen Colonies.
Hale, dead
these many centuries (he drifted off to heaven in 1676) might not have been the
person most of us would have chosen to cite in defense of any current ruling –
but Alito was undaunted. And did.
So, if it was
good enough for Lord Hale – who also believed in witchcraft – and all the Founding Fathers – who couldn’t
even agree with each other – and James Madison, the “Father of the
Constitution,” who thought owning slaves was legit – well, there was the end of
the matter.
Abortion would
be forbidden.
In cases of
rape and incest, in all cases, abortion could be banned because six members of
the current Supreme Court, now claimed that seven members of the Supreme Court
who joined the majority in Roe v. Wade in 1973, were judicial numbskulls
– and why did anyone ever believe what they said?
Yet, in 2022,
we are expected to put our full faith in Alito and the majority of the court,
because he could cite the settled wisdom of Lord Matthew Hale, who thought
witches were real.
FUN FACT
–WITCHES: If we are going to rely on
legal voices from the past, why not bring back witch trials?
You know the
right-wingers would have slapped the “witch” label on Hillary Clinton if they
could have, and execution would have followed.
In 1662, Lord
Hale presided over the trial of Amy
Denny and Rose Cullender, accused of just such a crime. Hale, like Alito now,
was secure in his legal wisdom and assured the jury with these words: “That
there were such creatures as witches he made no doubt at all; for first, the
scriptures had affirmed so much. Secondly, the wisdom of all nations had
provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of
such a crime.”
The jury
convicted Denny and Cullender, and Judge Hale sentenced them to hang, as he had
sentenced another witch to die four years previously, giving Hale an
undefeated, 3-0 record, against witchcraft.
Judge Alito
is a fan.
___
6/25/22: Sen. Susan Collins is working hard to convince a few Republicans to go along with a bill to cap the price of life-saving insulin at $35 per month.
As it stands, the high cost of insulin leads to 1 in 4 diabetics rationing its use, putting health at risk for type-2 diabetics, and life at risk for type-1’s.
Republicans running for office in November don’t want to sign on to the bill because:
1. They get massive campaign donations from the big pharmaceutical companies.
2. They are all in on free enterprise, up to and including price gouging by said Big Pharma.
3. They really like being lawmakers because there are plenty of perks, the pay is good, and when they leave office, they can make fortunes working as lobbyists.
4. For example, lobbyists for Big Pharma.
5.
They think the government will get stuck paying
the bills.
Hey,
said Sen. Ted Cruz, “Why don’t we forget the cost of insulin and give billionaires
another huge tax cut.”
POSTSCRIPT: Not all politicians, parties and presidents are alike. The Biden administration has announced that student debt for 200,000 individuals will be wiped from the books. Total: $6 billion.
These students had attended colleges and universities that the Department of Education found had engaged in “substantial misconduct.”
When Trump was in the White House, and Betsy DeVos was running the Department, help had been denied:
Those who
applied for relief – some as long as seven years ago – will have their loans
wiped out if they attended one of more than 150 schools named in the class-action
settlement, nearly all of which are
for-profit colleges and vocational programs. The deal reverses 128,000 denial notices – which a federal judge called
“disturbingly Kafkaesque” – that were sent to relief applicants during the
Trump administration.
___
6/26/22: Thank the gods for tax cuts for the super wealthy! Last year, Andrew Jassy, who took over at Amazon, after Jeff Bezos stepped down, earned $213 million in compensation. That would be equal to pay and compensation earned by 6,474 ordinary workers at the company.
Because Mr. Jassy worked 6,474 times harder and put in 6,474 times more hours! And he wasn’t even the top paid executive in the country.
That honor went to Jeff Green at The Trade Desk, who – if stock options pan out – received the equivalent of more than $800 million.
In one year.
Six
other company honchos made more than Jassy. We know they all needed those Trump
tax cuts, or their kids would have had to go without shoes.
___
6/27/22: Lightning doesn’t strike twice in today’s GOP. It strikes every time there’s an election.
Once again, a Republican has claimed voter fraud in a fraud-free election. This time the man with the bogus complaint is Rep. Phil Lyman, a Utah lawmaker, who called fraud in the GOP primary. This time, there were “reports” in Wasatch County that a machine changed voters’ choices and…oh…the hell with it.
Lt. Deidre M. Henderson (also a Republican) explained that the problem was “small font size” and every voter had three chances to verify their choice.
Meanwhile, the search for the Loch Ness monster
continues and Bigfoot hasn’t stuck his foot in a bear trap yet.
___
6/28/22: Here’s a good test. Read a story about a crooked politician, without knowing to which party they belong. Form your opinion of their conduct before you learn on which side of the aisle they’re found.
Sometimes you may already know. Nancy Pelosi. Democrat. Donald J. Trump. Republican.
Here’s an item from the Daily Beast to prove the point. First, you must do your best to think logically. You can’t be blinded by partisanship. Second, don’t forget the import of a free press. You, sitting at home, and this blogger, are not going to catch crooks in government. We want the free press to help – and we want the free press to notify us when others catch the crooks.
So, what
do you think:
Missouri
state Rep. Tricia Derges was convicted Tuesday by a jury on 22 charges,
including committing wire fraud, prescribing illegal medications, and lying to
federal investigators, the Springfield
News-Leader reports. Derges, who is a licensed assistant
physician and founded several clinics in the state, was found guilty of giving
her patients an acellular amniotic fluid treatment she claimed was a stem cell
injection. “This is an elected official who stole money from the public, a
purported humanitarian who cheated and lied to her patients, and a medical
professional who illegally distributed drugs. She violated her position of
trust to selfishly enrich herself at the expense of others,” U.S. Attorney
Teresa Moore said in a statement. The jury also voted to have law enforcement
seize almost $300,000 in federal pandemic aid back from Derges, which she
requested for a clinic that had already received funding.
Derges is definitely not anyone we want holding political office, let alone treating us in her office.
I had to read the entire story in the Springfield News-Leader, to discover that Derges has lost most of her medical licenses (and will surely lose them all). That she is out on bail, but had to surrender her passport. And that she got her doctor’s license at a school in the Caribbean (often a bad sign).
She’s a Republican – which doesn’t matter. You always want these people booted out of office.
For
example: P. J. Sittenfeld. Read about a feloniously-inclined Democrat, and you’ll see what I
mean.
*
You should probably test my ideas out and watch the January 6 hearings. We know Donald J. Trump is.
Tuesday, he lost his sh*t, after former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified against him.
Under oath.
The former president, who avoids testifying in court, like soldiers try to avoid stepping on landmines, blew up.
“Her Fake story
that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House Limousine in order
to steer it to the Capitol Building is ‘sick’ and fraudulent,” he yelped on
Truth Social, his media platform. “Her story of me throwing food is also
false…and why would SHE have to clean it up, I hardly knew who she was?” Donald also labeled Hutchinson a “total phony,”
a “leaker” and someone who “is bad news!”
He even gave handwriting and body language analysis a shot. “Bad handwriting, that of a Whacko?” he continued raging. “Her body language is that of a total bull…. artist. Fantasy Land!”
Finally, he howled: “There is no cross examination of this so-called witness. This is a Kangaroo Court!”
Ex-President Blubber also had a chance to do an interview on
Newsmax, his new favorite TV channel, where he can say whatever he likes and
never have to answer any hard questions.
Again, he decided to attack Hutchinson. “She’s
living in fantasy land,” he said again. She’s a social climber…I think it’s
just a shame that this is happening to our country.”
Only it wasn’t happening to “our country.” Witnesses were testifying about Trump’s failure to act on January 6, and his lies about a stolen election, lies which he repeats to this day.
The Newsmax host didn’t bring that up.
POSTSCRIPT: How bad for the former president has testimony been at the January 6 hearings?
Today,
Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s old White House Chief of Staff, tweeted:
[Rep. Liz] Cheney’s closing is stunning: they think they have
evidence of witness tampering and obstruction of justice. There is an old
maxim: it’s never the crime, it’s always the coverup. Things went very badly
for the former President today. My guess is that it will get worse from here[.]
He also felt a need to add this, in regard to Hutchinson: “I know her. I don’t think she is lying.”
Former White House Deputy
Press Secretary Sarah Matthews also came to her colleague’s defense. Sarah
Matthews tweeted that anyone “downplaying
Cassidy Hutchinson’s role or her access in the West Wing either doesn’t
understand how the Trump [White House] worked or is attempting to discredit her
because they’re scared of how damning this testimony is.”
___
6/29/22: You might be worried about climate change or toxic chemicals in your drinking water. The U.S. Supreme Court is not. It’s 1789, all over again, when air pollution was defined as “horse manure,” and climate change meant driving a wagon from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. Yesterday the court ruled, in a 6-3 decision, that new E.P.A. regulations designed to curtail carbon dioxide emissions may not take effect.
Congress, the six troglodyte justices ruled, must pass new laws to attack the problem. Federal agencies, like the E.P.A. may not make up regulations as needs arise.
Congress! Yay! Congress will do it!
Congress hasn’t had an approval rating above 36.8% since January 16, 2009, and on June 28, stood at 21%.
If we wait for Congress to act, we’ll all end up broiling like chickens on a supermarket rotisserie.
So, how
did we get here? How did we reach the point where six conservative justices can
peer into the past and cite the Founding Fathers, who knew nothing at all about
climate change, in support?
In 1971, a lawyer who had represented the
tobacco industry named Lewis F. Powell Jr. – whom President Richard M. Nixon
would soon put on the Supreme Court – wrote a confidential memo for the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” It
is seen as an early call to action by corporate America and its ideological
allies.
Mr. Powell acknowledged that “the needs and
complexities of a vast urban society require types of regulation and control
that were quite unnecessary in earlier times.” But he declared that the United
States had “moved very far indeed toward some aspects of state socialism” and
that “business and the enterprise system are in deep trouble, and the hour is
late.”
His memo set out a blueprint to fund a
movement to turn public opinion against regulation by equating “economic
freedom” for business with individual freedom. In line with that vision,
wealthy elites financed a program to build political influence, including steering
funding to organizations that develop and promote conservative policies like
the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
The Titans of Free Enterprise, men like David and Charles Koch, began to fight back. David ran as vice presidential candidate on the Libertarian Party ticket. The ticket had no chance, but David and Charles have been donating hundreds of millions of dollars to candidates and causes of their choice ever since. There has never been a government regulation they liked. If Wendy’s began putting rat meat in hamburgers, the Koch brothers would call that free enterprise.
And this conservative court wouldn’t let the Food and Drug Administration do anything about it unless Congress moved first.
In
reading about this decision, I learned that Anne Gorsuch Buford, mother of
current 1780s fan, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, once ran the E.P.A. under President
Reagan. Those were heyday years for Big Business. James G. Watt, as Secretary
of the Interior, had decided that if oil companies wanted to drill, or lumber
companies to cut, or coal-fired plants to burn, it was none of his business to
stop them from doing whatever they wanted. “We
will mine more, drill more, cut more timber,” he promised.
The Titans did as they pleased – and even got their taxes dramatically reduced. The billions piled up for the Koch brothers. Today, Charles is worth $60 billion. David has passed on to the Great Unknown, proving “you can’t take it with you.” But, even after funeral expenses, he managed to leave his wife Julia and family a little pocket money – to be specific, $60 billion more.
Now, with Trump judges in control, almost all
of them nominated with the approval of the Federalist Society, the Society’s
deregulatory agenda is playing out. In recent years, “Skepticism about the
administrative state,” The New York Times writes, has been “a key
criterion in picking judges.”
The ruling on
Thursday involved the E.P.A.’s primary mission: to curb pollution of harmful
substances, which the court previously ruled included carbon dioxide
emissions. Moreover, the text of the Clean Air Act empowers the agency to devise the “best system of emission
reduction.” Even so, the majority ruled that the agency lacked authorization
for its Clean Power Plan.
Justice Elena Kagan was one of three members of
the court to dissent.
“The current
court is textualist only when being so suits it,” she wrote. “When that method
would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions
doctrine’ magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards. Today, one of those
broader goals makes itself clear: Prevent agencies from doing important work,
even though that is what Congress directed.”
The E.P.A.
will not be allowed to implement new rules to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Congress (yay) will have to pass legislation (yay), and the Koch brothers and
their kind will live happily ever after (YAY!!!!!).
“If you don’t
have regulations, then the only people who will benefit will be those who, with
no rules, will make more money,” said Marietta Robinson, a
former Obama
appointee on the Consumer Product
Safety Commission who teaches about administrative agencies at George
Washington University’s law school. “But it will be to the great detriment to
the rest of us.”
*
Just one day earlier, intense heat – the kind scientists insist we can expect to see more and more often, as a result of climate change – blistered large parts of Europe. Rome registered its all-time hottest temperature: 105° F. Across Italy, all-time records for June were toppled. Along the northern coast of Norway all kinds of all-time highs were being recorded, as well as all-time June records in Finland, Slovenia, and Croatia. Hundreds more record highs were set across Japan. Temperatures in Iran and Turkmenistan also set June records.
Just eight days earlier, record highs were set in Western
Europe. Mediterranean waters were ten degrees hotter than normal, reducing the
relief from sea breezes. In France, multiple all-time high temperatures were
recorded. The Basque region of Spain also hit a new record high. New all-time
records for June were set in Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and the Czech
Republic. Hot and dry weather also led to major forest fires in Spain and
France.
*
If you don’t already know, Herschel Walker is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Georgia. He’s endorsed by Donald J. Trump.
And he’s just as clueless, when it comes to climate change, as the Orange God of Mar-a-Lago.
Recently, Mr. Walker was asked to comment on the subject and offered this response – which is not a parody: “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air,” the former NFL star explained. “So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we got to clean that back up.”
For real.
 |
Senate candidate Walker with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. |
___
6/30/22: Alex Holder, the British film maker given access to interview and film President Trump and his family members, both before and after the January 6 attack, verifies what most non-cult members have already deduced. After he lost the November 2020 election it became impossible to have “a rational conversation” with Loser Don (as this blogger likes to call him).
Trump was “utterly irrational,” Holder says. “It’s very scary when people start to believe their own lies and when you can’t have a rational conversation with them – that’s when things become very dangerous,” he added.
There’s good news, however, for Mr. Trump. Holder describes the former president as living in “cloud cuckoo land.” He believes his own stolen election-lies. “Donald Trump is not a rational player. I mean, he just isn’t,” the film maker explains.
How is that “good
news?” If Trump gets indicted, his lawyer can claim he’s innocent by way of
insanity.
*
We’ve all heard the old saw: “Government is not
the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” as President Ronald
Reagan once intoned.
That’s not right, however. Sometimes it is the
solution. In Pike County, Ohio, you might say it’s both. From 1954 to 2001, a
diffusion plant in the town of Piketon produced uranium for nuclear bombs. For
some inexplicable reason, “surrounding communities experienced higher than normal cancer rates, as the Columbus Dispatch
reports.
But, hey, we had lots of good bombs! So:
Solution, right?
Unfortunately, it soon became clear that if
the diffusion plant wasn’t cleaned up, Pike County might become a place no one
except zombies wanted to inhabit. For example, Zahn’s Corners Middle School,
less than two miles downwind of the former plant, had to be closed in 2020,
“after radioactive material was found in nearby air and soil.” Local school
leaders explained – in an explanation that was probably unnecessary – that they
were “not willing to take the risk with the children and put them back in that
building.”
So: school board – solution!
Now, the Energy and Water Appropriations
Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill, which, if
passed by the full House and Senate, will allocate $5.5 million for programs to
help Piketon residents with training and education, on how to deal with lingering
radiation problems.
Solution?
Maybe.
This blogger lives in Ohio – but had never
heard about the problems in Pike County before. A little extra digging led to a
story from July 2021, which focused on a $2 billion cleanup effort, funded by
the federal government, to clean up the glow-in-the-dark radioactive mess
caused by a previous iteration of the federal government. And of course,
cleanup was a problem. Plans called for a 250-acre landfill to be dug and
prepared for burial of radioactive waste – including siding removed from
buildings where the old plant used to be.
As one Cincinnati news station explained:
Neighbors, like Josh and Elizbeth Lamerson,
who live a half-mile from [the proposed dump site], are trying to stop it.
“Would you want to come here? Would you want
to build a business that has a radioactive, hazardous, toxic solid waste
landfill just down the road?” Lamerson asks.
The answer for many in Pike County who now
place signs in their yards is, “No!”
The science surrounding the issue is
complex, but even cleanup efforts are causing radiation to spread. “It’s
scary,” agreed Dr. Michael Ketterer, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and
Biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, who has been studying the data.
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