Trump supported HANGING Mike Pence

For those who haven't figured it out yet, Donald J Trump is a psychopathic narcissist. During his insurrection attempt on January 6, 2021 he supported HANGING Mike Pence because Pence would not overturn the election of Biden.  

"...collected testimony that then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows remarked to others that then-President Donald Trump indicated his support for hanging Vice President Mike Pence after rioters who stormed the Capitol on that day started chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" 

He wanted to HANG Mike Pence.

He wanted to HANG MIKE PENCE.

HE WANTED TO HANG MIKE PENCE.

Oh, no, John, he was just --- you know -- joking --- or --- you know --- expressing frustration --- or --- you know, err, ahh ... he lowered my taxes, and he hates immigrants just like me, and ... you know... (who cares?)

HE WANTED TO HANG MIKE PENCE.  

This is a man that 74 million Americans voted for in 2020 even though they had witnessed his depravity for over 5 years on the political public stage.  They cannot say that they didn't know who he was.  They cannot say that they do not know who he is now.  If they vote for him in 2024 there are no excuses.  He is dedicated to overturning democracy in this country and assisting Putin's attempt to destroy democracy in the world.  Trump is a very sick puppy, a psychopath, he disgraces America and all Americans who voted for him.  

Please, never again.

Southern Baptist depravity

 Sexual abuse by high ranking clergy is an old story in the Catholic Church, but the Southern Baptist’s have a long and disgusting record as well:

“I was wrong to call sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention…a crisis. Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse.” The investigation, he says, “uncovers a reality far more evil and systematic than I imagined it could be.” “How many children were raped, how many people were assaulted, how many screams were silenced,” he asked, “while we boasted that no one could reach the world for Jesus like we could.”“That’s more than a crisis,” he said. “It’s even more than just a crime. It’s blasphemy. And anyone who cares about heaven ought to be mad as hell.”

And these are the depraved folks who are trying to force their pretenses of morality on the country, all in the name of one of the gentlest and most compassionate forces in human history. 

These people ‘s assault on women, personally and sexually, is only amplified exponentially by assaulting women’s freedom to shape their own lives by banning abortion, to be followed soon by criminalizing all forms of birth control at a Supreme Court near you soon.  

The First amendment of the Bill of Rights is to guarantee freedom OF religion, and FREEDOM FROM RELIGION. But don’t tell that to The Supreme Court, they could care less, they are on their own unholy mission.

 

There will be no consequences

 A young racist killer attacked and killed 10 people in the grocery store in Buffalo New York. 8 were black. His motivation was responding to the outlandish and false and cancerously toxic “ideology” called the Great Replacement Conspiracy. This vile charge is leveled against Jews who supposedly are trying to replace white supremacists from power with docile brown skinned voters being controlled by “socialists”.

Tucker Carlson leads the Fox News assault on truth and decency with multiple fear mongerings about this nonsense, but it is picked up by Republicans across the Right Wing Echo Chamber.  And violent white supremacists kill as a result. 

There will be no consequences. Tucker’s audience will grow. He will make more money. He will continue his march toward the White House. White Supremacist groups will continue their efforts to turn America into Jim Crow America. 

They will fail. Because America has said no to these folks before (ending slavery and ending the Jim Crow South). And America will slap them down again. 

But their rampage of violence is not going to end soon. Where are the consequences?

Musk to put Trump back on Twitter?

I am not a big fan of Elon Musk.  He has done some amazing things to address climate change with his Tesla vehicles and batteries.  The fossil fuel industry is not going to reform itself, it needs to be shrunken by competition, and good for Musk for building a "better mousetrap".

But I soured on him when he re-opened this California auto plant at the height of the pandemic, resulting in over 400 cases of COVID.  And his reputation for abusing women and employees in his companies is long in the making.

But, good grief, he is buying Twitter and right wing extremists are frothing at the bit, and he has just announced that he will open Twitter back up to Trump, under the rubric of free speech.  But the first thing to know about the 1st Amendment right to free speech is that there is no right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater.  And Trump's only mode of communication is yelling "Fire!" in crowded theaters.  

Trump was banned from Twitter because of his relentless lying about his loss to Biden.  It is the Big Lie.  It kills people and it kills democracy in this country.  Trump used Twitter to call for the insurrectionists to go to DC to try to overturn the election.  He uses every communication tool he can to convince his cult that the election was stolen from him, and millions believe him, amazingly.

Free speech does not protect calls to violence, or organizing coups, or targeting political and personal enemies for attack and violence by your cult followers.

Our democracy is under assault by violent and unprincipled followers of their autocratic leader - Trump, and Trump wannabees.  Do not give modern Hitlers, Goebbels, and Himmlers access to platforms like Twitter, please.

The White Supremacist, Christian Nationalist anti-Civil Rights Movement

 The White Supremacist, Christian Nationalist anti-Civil Rights Movement is about to strike down women's right to choose their lives as the latest example of America's right wing tyranny.  They are a minority in this country but they have captured the Republican Party using The Former Guy as their blunt assault weapon to give them power and protective cover.  It is distressing, but I believe they will lose - once again.  

THE SEQUENCE:

• 1600 - 1800s - slavery, conquest of indigenous peoples, no women's rights
• 1860 - abolitionist leaning Republican Lincoln wins the Presidential Election
• December 20, 1860 - South Carolina leads the succession of the Confederate states from the Union prior to Lincoln's inauguration
• March 21, 1861 - Cornerstone Speech by the new VP of the Confederacy - Alexander Stephens - "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition." 
• 1860 - 1864 - Civil War where the United States defeats the Confederacy
• 1865 - 1869 - Ratification of 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments freeing slaves and defining blacks as citizens with a right to vote
• March 2, 1867 - Reconstruction Act to enforce Constitutional freedoms of blacks
• 1867 - Edward Alfred Pollard of Virginia publishes "The Lost Cause" declaring that the cause of White Supremacy was not defeated by the loss of the Civil War - the war "did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State Rights... And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will cling to, still claim, and still assert them in their rights and views"  (and too many assert these still today)
• Compromise of 1877 - End of Reconstruction - Democrats agree that Republican Hayes can become president if he removes Federal troops from the South which were enforcing the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.
• 1877 - 1965 - Jim Crow laws and brutal crushing punishments of blacks and restrictions of their freedoms and voting rule the South.
• August 18, 1920 - the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote is ratified
• 1965 - Passage of the Voting Rights law allowing blacks to vote unimpeded
• 1968 - Republican President, Richard Nixon, initiates The Southern Strategy to convert the hard core Democratic South to become a hard core Republican South - the anti-Civil Rights movement switches from wearing Democrat hats to wearing Republican hats - and continue their movement
• 1984 - Republican President, Ronald Reagan, decides that even though the business class donates hugely to Republicans, they don't provide enough votes, so he courts Evangelical Christians by promising to pursue ending abortion (he doesn't care, just makes promises, but gets their fervid support)
• 2008 -  Barak Obama, the first black president, is elected president
• 2013 - Republican appointed Supreme Court justices gut the Voting Rights  bill in a 5-4 decision pretending that racism was a thing of the past in America - Southern Republican states immediately institute voting restrictions on black and brown people
• 2016 - Donald Trump has no chance to win the presidency without Evangelical Christians so he lets them give him a list of Supreme Court Justices who are guaranteed to overturn Roe v Wade.  
• 2016 -Trump wins election and appoints three anti-abortion, anti-Civil Rights Supreme Courts Justices - Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett
• 2021 - Republican appointed Supreme Court justices further gutted voting right of black, brown, and red people under the pretense of stopping voter fraud
• 2022 - The Republican appointed Supreme Court justices are about to overturn Roe V Wade which gave women a half a century of freedom to choose abortions and thus freedom to choose their own life  
• 2022 - Some Southern States are already banning teaching the history of racism
• 2022 - Some Southern States are already forbidding teaching about gay men and women's history and existence
• 2022 - Republicans are already banning books by the likes of Faulkner, Harper Lee, JK Rowling, Orwell, Anne Frank, Lewis Carroll

WHAT'S NEXT?  Likely targets of the White Supremacist, Christian Nationalist anti-Civil Rights Movement:

• Banning contraception
• Re-criminalizing gay sex
• Banning same sex marriage
• Banning funding public schools
• Banning black and brown and red and yellow folks from voting
• Banning immigration from all non-white countries

This sequence shows the eventual takeover of the Republican Party, and their attempt to take over the United States of America.  They succeeded in taking over the Republican Party.  I believe these White Supremacist, Christian Nationalists comprise about one third of the country.

I think at the heart of their desperations and fears is the fear of losing their status as being on the top of the hierarchical order.  

Republican politicians and commentators and opinion media czars inflame those fears and blame the tragic condition of the abandoned and forgotten parts of our country - the thousands of once prosperous mining and manufacturing towns in the country - on immigrants, and special privileges for people of color and women. But it is not that whites are being "replaced" by some Jewish or liberal conspiracy to subjugate whites and elevate all others - women and and other races.  

Workers in America, and all the developed world are being replaced by newer technologies, by robots, by computers, by obsolescence.  The most powerful statement of Economics 101 is - with the rise of the automobile, the demand for buggy whips declined dramatically.  That is the economic system in action.  It produces opportunities anew, and tragedies as well, and especially it offers great opportunity for Populist Frauds to rise to power with simplistic slogans and unfillable promises - from Trump, Putin, Orban, etc to the new wannabee tyrants like Cruz and DeSantis.  

I believe they are going to fail at taking over the country.  I refuse to give up hope on America, or on democracy, or on the fundamental goodness of people in this country.  

Vote please.

 

Roe v Wade will be overturned - written by Allito

I recommend that every Democrat running for any office anywhere in America say the words “Roe v Wade” about a thousand times a day. Roe has popular support in this nation and a narrow fanatical few have finally succeeded in trying to put women back in the kitchen and bedroom “where they belong “.

Reports are that Alito has already written the ruling. Fanatics always think that the whole world will rejoice when they force themselves upon the world. If I were a Republican candidate I would be depressed about now. 

Lying up - the fatal flaw of autocracy

There is a fundamental flaw to autocracies, plutocracies, oligarchies, authoritarians, dictators.  The fatal flaw is what Thomas Friedman calls “lying up”.  Nobody wants to tell the frightening authoritarian boss bad news. So they don’t.  Any actual information that is gotten on the lower rungs of the hierarchy gets watered down or just outright changed to happy-face news by the time it gets to the tyrant on top.  The reality remains the reality, but the tyrants do stupid things like Russian invasion of Ukraine and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan based upon bad info from below.  

They have the same problem domestically.  One of the most famous and disastrous dictatorships was the Soviet Union. Production dropped and dropped and dropped.  The internal joke that says it all – “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay.”

 It is not just Communist and Socialist dictatorships that fail due to lies from the bottom, but right wing as well as left wing tyrants become more and more isolated and lied to – Hitler of Germany, Mussolini of Italy, Salazar of Portugal, Papadopoulos of Greece, Batista of Cuba, etc.  It looks like dictators insulate themselves in self-congratulatory information bubbles and fail as a result. 

I certainly hope that will be the case for Russia’s Putin (and America’s Former Guy).

Interestingly, it appears that Putin is to undergo an intestinal cancer surgery.  Here's hoping that he becomes too incapacitated to fight off his overthrow and those who replace him are smart enough to see what a disaster this terrible invasion of Ukraine has been to Russia and call it off - just go ahead and blame Putin and say that he was not of his sound mind because of his disease and the drugs he was under.  Works for me