What Republicans do

[Eric the Green]

How do I know Brett Kavanaugh is the man in the middle? Other experts identify him as this, and during this week filled with reactionary decisions, there was also one liberal-leaning decision and Biden victory when the Court overturned the immigrant remain in Mexico policy, and it was Kavanaugh who joined Roberts and the three liberals to make this decision.

Jason Greene said that we are the only country with such a small supreme court. This surprised me, because the politicians and pundits usually say we should not expand the Court because the next congress and administration might be Republican and add even more justices, and there'd be no end to this.

I disagree. This Supreme Court is a national disgrace and a national emergency. Their decisions are putting lives and the whole world at risk. The Republican Party that created this Court is an anomaly. There won't be another like it. If the Court is restored to a 7-6 moderate-to-liberal majority, and no longer consists of Republican Party hacks, it will make fair and just decisions and politicians will not support appointing 2 or 3 more reactionaries to give them a majority again. And if the current anomalous Republican Party is voted out nationwide, enough so that Republican senators can't join with the two DINOs in upholding the filibuster, the chances are that this Party will not return, because the schemes they are now carrying out to restrict and distort elections will be over, and the people will see sane government restored. A Court of 13 justices may lean a bit left or right in the future, but never again will it cause destruction and authoritarian rule. Especially if we also impose term limits on them. I would prefer this limit to be retroactive so we can dispense with Uncle Thomas, but we don't know if future reforms, if they happen, will go that far. Thomas may retire by then too.

I thought the threat of court packing and term limits might make the Court a bit more circumspect about making the sorts of extreme regressive decisions that they are now mostly making (except that one, above). So far, they don't feel the threat, and we don't know if they ever would in sufficient manner to shift their decisions.

[Eric the Green]

https://youtu.be/WnNhULrpW70?t=767





The United States of America is an exceptional nation, indeed. It has become by far the worst developed nation in the world.

This is increasingly being driven home to me. One point was made for me on Amanpour and Company today by Jamal Greene. He is no radical, especially on the gun issue. But he pointed out that the United States is the only country in the world except Iceland with lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court, and that we also have a very small Court compared to all other nations, with cases heard by all the justices all the time, so that in controversial cases one or two people "in the middle" makes the decision. Today, that is Brett Kavanaugh, as I mentioned above. How do you like having this crying pervert as our monarch who decides everything for us? So we have people with lifetime appointments who can retire whenever their Party can choose their replacement, acting in judgment of all policy as if they were the monarchs of the United States. I didn't realize that this institution, among many others of our systems (juries, the presidency, you name it), is so out of date and archaic. We now have a Supreme Court that enacts the platform of the Republican Party by fiat without regard or concern with balancing the needs of competing interests that is supposed to be their sworn function and duty.

Our leader, our decider:



What Jamal did not also point out is that we are also the only country with a Second Amendment, which was recently decided to be an individual right, not a provision for a well-regulated militia, which most people have forgotten was the correct interpretation of the 2nd for decades. The result of this individual "right to keep and bear arms (that) shall not be infringed", decreed and recently expanded by our reactionary Court, is that we no longer live in a safe society, but are subject to threat from any other citizen who might carry a gun, including vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse who got away with murder of two wonderful protesters against a black man being maimed for life by 7 shots from a racist policeman at point blank range just because he was getting into his car. And the police have too often been given the right to decide who lives or dies based on no reason other than their whim or fear, and the decision is very likely to be based on the race of the policeman's victim. So we are the most violent and unjust developed country by far, and more violent than most developing countries too-- THE most violent ones being countries that we export our guns to and import dangerous drugs from violent, deadly cartels within those countries.

We have announced to the world that we are the champion of individual human rights, and many looked to us and came here to what they saw as a land of opportunity and liberty. We are no longer that, because we are taking rights away, like women's right to choose pregnancy or not, and reserving them for those who are rich men or who are Christians. Our monarchical Court has decided that we have no right to protect ourselves though our government agency from greedy industrial barons who are causing global warming or hurting consumers and workers. It tells us congress must decide specifically what to regulate, but it upholds gerrymandering where the politicians running for congress themselves CHOOSE their voters instead of the other way around. It protects the right of the wealthy to buy elections, and defines this as free speech. It restricts the right to vote, especially by people of color. It tells the CDC that it can't mandate health measures, so that crazy anti-vax nonsense allows deadly disease to spread. Our congress enacts policies that sharply reduce taxes on the wealthy, enabling concentration of wealth, and our Court upholds the neoliberal, Bannonite project of dismantling the entire administrative, regulatory state, leaving the people at the mercy of the greedy business bosses with no recourse. The result is that we have the most unequal society in the developed world by far, and the worst level of social, health and economic problems and deficiencies in the developed world by far. The Dobbs v Jackson decision revoking Roe v Wade will endanger women even more in a country with the world's worst maternal mortality rate and among the worst women's life expectancy. The Court has decided that even though Trump was voted out of his ill-begotten office, which he had been voted into by a minority of the people, that it will carry out all his policies by fiat, and keep those policies in place indefinitely through their lifetime appointments or up until their Republican-Party-enabled times of retirement.



Are the people going to accept this last-place position of the USA in the developed world, the worst by any measure, and a monarchy by any reckoning? Are young people of the USA going to just be cynical and accept an unsafe, unequal, deregulated, unjust, undemocratic society, and vote for more of the same and worse just because they blame Biden for high gas prices? Especially when those prices are really mainly the result enabling the "free" market to price gouge us and do anything they want to us to boost their profits? Isn't it time to rise up and junk this deadly, unjust society, throw the Republican Trumpers OUT of office for good from all three branches of government, enact the democratic voting rights that the Democrats in congress have already proposed and passed in the House, reform the Supreme Court so that it is larger and has term limits for justices, enact the needed reforms of the police that have been proposed by the Democrats, restore a humane and workable immigration policy as was proposed in congress through bipartisan cooperation over a decade ago but defeated by extremist House Republicans, bypass the filibuster and Joe Manchin when necessary so these and other needed changes can be made, such as climate change energy transition and economic renewal of the middle class, before we become a feudal state in a world environment collapsing beyond repair?

Those who only watch only Fox News and Fucker Carlson, ARE the brainwashed ones. Trump gave a big boost to the war on truth. Those who participate in this war by swallowing conspiracy theories help us to become a society that no longer has any consensus on truth or fact or ability to determine it through good public education and critical thinking, but just depends on whatever you choose to believe that suits your political or cultural agenda, whether right or left or somewhere in between.

[pbrower2a]

I see a merger of unrestrained greed befitting Calvinist theology and a populist contempt for rational processes. Such makes the fascism of the Trump-era different from other expressions of fascism in other lands. Germany was not Calvinist; Japan was in no way Christian; Italy was Catholic. People brought up in a Calvinist tradition (like Trump, nominally a Presbyterian and hence connected to a Calvinist heritage) usually take a look at the stuff about God blessing the successful as a sign of His Favor. One looks at such an assumption and recognizes by that that a highly-successful gangster has the Blessing of God and a destitute toiler does not. I refuse to see slaves, children with incurable diseases or Jews that the demonic Nazis damned to mass murder as cursed of God.

OK, I don't see Divine Meddling as an explanation of much in our world unless we have a God Who is little more than an expre4ssion of random chance. We all have a choice between Good and Evil, and it is generally wisest to choose Good.

It used to be that the Mountain South was largely Presbyterian as a pattern of settlement from late colonial times. Over time, the economic reality of the Mountain South (there was no easy way in which to make a living) muted the Calvinist assumption that personal wealth shows the Blessing of God. American Presbyterians seemed to look the other way about any nexus between personal success and the Will of God until they got mobile. Then they created a big chunk of what is now the Southern Baptist Convention, which wholly endorses such a nexus. .Of course if one believes in that nexus and finds oneself below average in economic attainment, then what can one do? One can get very resentful toward minorities doing well. That is much of the populist appeal of Donald Trump.

The "new" part of the Southern Baptist heritage carries on the anti-intellectualism of the old Mountain South. This is where Fundamentalism demanded Biblical Inerrancy as a test of the validity of one's faith. One believes in the Genesis account of Creation or one risks eternal damnation.

With this comes an acceptance of pure plutocracy -- that those who own the assets are uniquely qualified to rule over Humanity. I'm not convinced that any social class has any particular virtue. The poor are often poor because they have such faults as limited intelligence, mental illness, or poor impulse control, or that they have made very bad decisions in life (like teen pregnancy). The rich can get away with extreme vices and are able to impose destructive tendencies upon politics because they can buy the political process and the mass culture. The middle class can get complacent about economic realities so long as things go well... while ignoring that their mass consumption may be devouring resources and soling the environment.

We are in a dilemma -- don't think, because if you do you will come to recognize how nasty things really are. But if you don't think, you have no idea that things could be going very bad very fast.

[pbrower2a]

"(Representative) Alexandria Ocasio Cortez should thank her accuser", says none other than Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently shared footage of a right-wing heckler sexually harassing her outside the Capitol. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) thinks she should be grateful for it.
In the clip, the white man, Alex Stein, yelled lewd and racially-charged comments at Ocasio-Cortez as she walked up the steps to the Capitol.

But Greene called his actions “quite the compliment.” She even had Stein on her podcast.
“I think women should be confident,” Greene said. “And if a man gives you a compliment, a woman can say ‘thank you.’”

Patriot Takes, an account that monitors right-wing media, posted part of the podcast interview:

Quote:Marjorie Taylor Greene had the man who sexually harassed AOC on her podcast and called his “big booty Latina” comments, “quite the compliment.”

Marjorie implied AOC should have said, “thank you.” pic.twitter.com/n5Lquqz4eO
— PatriotTakes ?? (@patriottakes) July 15, 2022

Ocasio-Cortez described the incident as “deeply disgusting” on Twitter, where she also posted the footage:

[Eric the Green]

I think the best reply to this guy is George Carlin's first sentence in this video

[Eric the Green]

How the Republicans fell into the hole of Trumpism, from a former Republican activist.

[pbrower2a]

Republicans need to ditch Donald Trump the person, the ideology, and the attitude. This 4T will soon be over, and Americans will have a taste for the politics of the Mature Reactive (Washington, J. Adams, Grant, Cleveland, Truman, Eisenhower, Obama) that exercises cautious pragmatism. Obama showed the style during a 4T, and it is effective in a Crisis. The style is better for defusing danger than for finishing it off, but sometimes defusing a bad situation is best. Putting an end to the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression may have saved much grief in America... and elsewhere. If you wish to know what an "immature Reactive" is, then think of the fellow that Germany ended up with because the Great Depression overpowered the shaky institutions of the Weimar Republic. Think also of most of Hitler's henchmen in Germany and most of the puppet leaders in the Nazi Empire, Stalin's brutal enforcers and post-WWII puppets, and Capone-era gangsters. Most are egocentric, intellectually-hollow, amoral figures clinging onto early resentments into and through midlife. Adding Heinrich Himmler (Reichsfuhrer of the SS) and propaganda chief Josef Goebbels who committed suicide rather than face Allied retribution, Otto Pohl (head of the economic office of the concentration camps and of a slavery that makes all other slavery look gentle by contrast) -- he was not caught until the Nuremberg Trials were well underway but ended up dying for his monstrous crimes, the Minister of (In)justice Otto Thierack (suicide), and "hanging judge" Roland Freisler (killed in an air raid) who among other things participated with 'legal' advice for the Wannsee Conference that decided how Jews would be exterminated, and nine of twelve men convicted of major war crimes at the main Nuremberg tribunal and sentenced to death by hanging you have a general illustration of one manifestation of the Immature Reactive at its worst.

The Mature Reactive is conventional, cautious, and pragmatic. That is Obama, and that is the sort of leader that America usually gets during a 1T. It may not be as visionary as the Idealist dream of a Lincoln or FDR, but is adequately moral.

I have described the assassination of Osama bin Laden as an "underworld hit" in style. That is all that would have worked, and even if Obama seems to have the temperament of a rackets-busting prosecutor or no-nonsense (Do the crime and do the time!) judge, he could learn something from Chicago gangsters that he despised and use it against the worst terrorist of all time.

[pbrower2a]

(07-15-2022, 06:32 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I think the best reply to this guy is George Carlin's first sentence in this video

Excellent!

I can understand how the fellow who made those vile remarks about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  could say such things. He is not the sort of man I would want to have sex with if I were a woman. I would want to be appreciated for something other than T&A. He said nothing about "T", to be sure.

I thought that no response was really necessary. Marjorie Taylor-Greene is a vile person, and she cannot understand why a smart woman would appreciate crude references to her derriere. Marjorie Taylor-Greene has a huge gap in her moral compass.

[Eric the Green]

A few Republicans no longer recognize the conservatism in their conservative Party. Like Tom Nichols. What shall we do if the Supreme Court decides that state legislatures can decide who wins a state in the general election?

[pbrower2a]

Oh boy -- a threat that Trump's supporters will riot if something icky happens to him in the legal process.

POLITICS
Lindsey Graham Warns Of 'Riots In Streets' If Trump Is Charged Over Classified Docs
“Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law," Graham said on Fox News. "It's all about getting him."
[/url]


By 
[url=https://www.huffpost.com/author/mary-s-papenfuss]Mary Papenfuss
Aug 29, 2022, 04:57 AM EDT|Updated 4 hours ago

Staunch Donald Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) ominously warned Sunday of “riots in the streets” if the former president is hit with charges for taking classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago home when he moved out of the White House.

“If there’s a prosecution of Donald Trump for mishandling classified information, after the [Hillary] Clinton debacle … there’ll be riots in the streets,” Graham said on Fox News’ “Sunday Night in America,” hosted by former South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy ®.

Graham was referring to Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state — a practice reportedly employed by both Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to conduct official business when they were White House senior advisers in the Trump administration.

A three-year investigation into some 30,000 recovered messages sent to and from Clinton on the server concluded that there was no “persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”

In Trump’s case, after officials tried for several months to retrieve U.S. documents from him, FBI agents this month confiscated several boxes of material stashed at Mar-a-Lago, including classified documents and even highly sensitive top-secret information.

Quote:Graham says there will be riots in the streets if Trump is prosecuted pic.twitter.com/oE6MyuqjeA
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 28, 2022

Trump was captured in a recorded phone call telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes for him after the 2020 presidential election to change his loss into a victory. “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break,” Trump pleaded.

Graham is currently battling a subpoena to appear before the grand jury in that probe. The probe, launched by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, has been expanded to look into the alleged involvement of a Trump ally in the suspected breach of voting equipment in the state.

Graham insisted to Gowdy that Trump is treated with a “double standard.”

“Most Republicans, including me, believe when it comes to Trump, there is no law. It’s all about getting him,” Graham told Gowdy.

Critics on Twitter were outraged by yet another threat of violence during investigations into suspected crimes.

Quote:This is a threat. The Senate should censure him.
— Civis Mundus (@CivisMundusSum) August 28, 2022

Quote:So you are saying Republicans are very violent people who do not believe in law and order?

Nice threat, Lindsey. And very revealing of your consciousness of guilt.

The truth is most Americans will celebrate just like we did when we kicked Trump’s ass to the curb. https://t.co/Y00vKCyvfz
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) August 28, 2022

Quote:pic.twitter.com/MttQWqgqg5
— jeepgirl (@Jeep_TJ_Girl) August 28, 2022

Quote:But I was repeatedly told only “Antifa” and “BLM” do riots on the streets.
— ?? LDT Major Michael (@Merv515) August 28, 2022

Quote:If this is their best defense for violating the espionage act then they know he’s guilty AF.
— Kevin ☕️? (@KevinSixx13) August 28, 2022

Quote:Worth mentioning that he said it again at the end of the interview after he was asked about his subpoena and saying “I love the law”
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 28, 2022

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lindsey-g...44a2f82df7

(My comments will be in the next post).

[pbrower2a]

I hope that Republicans on the whole can get dispirited over something that should be extremely distressing. People get very long prison terms for the theft and abuse of classified documents. Trump, should he be convicted and sentenced. will not be the first. The punishments are severe, as sentences for John Walker, Andrew Phillip Hansson, and Aldrich Ames show. Imprisonment is typically in ADX Florence, a Hell of sensory deprivation. Human contact is minimal. One gets food delivered through a slot. There is practically no contact even with fellow prisoners. Lights are on at all times, so the distinction between even day and night is meaningless. There is no TV to pass the time, although it is available for religious services (even that cannot be denied) and some "educational" programs, whatever those are. Reading or writing material? Lots of luck. You may have your religious holy book, but the complete works of William Shakespeare will not qualify. Freedom of religion is an absolute right even in the penal system.

I would commit suicide if facing a life sentence there. The only reason to not do so is the belief that one ends up in an even worse Hell for casting away the alleged gift of life even with pancreatic cancer or a sentence of a living death.

Democrats got the message early that Donald Trump is an idol with clay feet. More and more people are getting that message. This man has hurt his supporters with disgrace and personal ruin, which is rare for political leaders except with their most intimate and corrupt cronies.

This is not a time sympathetic to riots. Demonstrations happen often, and on occasion rioters use the demonstrations as pretexts for riots -- and get arrested for such. Say what you want about Black Lives Matter, but it makes clear that its focus is on police brutality and not on legitimate functions of law enforcement, including the suppression of crime. Black Lives Matters demonstrations can be assumed to be fully infiltrated by police, and those who bring video cameras to document police brutality have often ended up getting video of looting, assaults, and property damage; that video is often turned over to police or prosecutors. Excessive force by police is crime, of course, but so are looting, assaults, and property damage. The people who take videos of someone destroying a police car who came to protest excessive force by a police officer are ethically consistent in the position "do the crime and do the time".

America has very conservative attitudes toward crime of any kind. If you don't believe me, then just consider the last two-term President. He may have been a liberal on economic and cultural matters, but he cut no slack on crime. At some point Barack Obama found that in even the worst slums, crime was the result of people of bad character by local standards and not a response to economic hardship and deprivation. The worst neighborhoods might concentrate sociopathic and psychopathic types because such people who, if they do not latch onto the licit part of American economic life, become extreme losers. Salesclerks and domestic servants who make low, if legitimate, pay can be good and decent people. Muggers and dope dealers are not good people. Someone like Obama could learn the difference, which is good for survival -- and doing real good for people who follow the rules and still get treated badly. (Maybe we simply need to quit treating people who do the nastiest and lowest-paying licit work badly). In contrast to Trump, Obama is a law-and-order man without hypocrisy and without using the words as an insult to those who disagree with him.

I see America becoming even more hostile to offenders in the next few decades. I would not be surprised to see the Japanese model of incarceration for non-trivial offenders become the norm. Japan treats violent criminals like China treats political dissidents -- with mind control. Japan gets away with this because nobody can see a violent crime as a political offense. Rape, commit a robbery, molest a child, beat a spouse, deal drugs, steal a car, or set a fire and you will face a prison term that forces one to change one's core beliefs. The Japanese penal system is so harsh that the US Armed Forces warn Americans that the American military penal system is soft by contrast. The Japanese penal system changes the offender, so there is practically no recidivism. Bad habits can be difficult to break, but they are worth breaking.

I see support for Donald Trump eroding quickly. I question whether many people will do anything more than lone-wolf assaults upon established authority. Many people disillusioned with Trump will talk people out of doing something that can get a penal term. The longest penal terms ever issued for participate in the Capitol Putsch are beginning to be meted out, and the longest yet asked for is about seventeen years for someone who used a flagpole with a US Marine Corps banner as a weapon.