This Might Not Be Radical Enough

Via PZ Myers at Pharyngula:




Ramen

Both Sides

From Wonkette commenter Rocky:

Both Sides

From Wonkette commenter Rocky:

When Outreach is Foolish and Dangerous

The world has changed.  The old ways don't work any more. Bipartisanship is as outmoded as handwritten thank-you notes.  They still exist, but they are inefficient and counter-productive.

Batocchio at Hullabloo:

It wouldn't be right to abandon political outreach completely, but it's wise to identify who can actually be reached and who's a lost cause, at least in the short run. It's folly to expect conservative and Republican leaders to develop a conscience. It's dangerous to believe that their donors, who have invested in a long game of increased and hoarded power, want a democracy and a fair system. It's madness to think that rank-and-file conservatives and Republicans will abandon spite or party loyalty. And it's wishful thinking that mainstream corporate media outlets will abandon bothsiderism bullshit and other shallow analysis, no matter how much it hurts the nation. For now and the foreseeable future, the key thing to do about American conservatives and the Republican Party is to vigorously oppose them. It's up to the rest of us who care about good policy and responsible governance to talk, learn from each other, support each other and mobilize.

Repugs Rejecting Democracy

And getting rid of Benedict Donald won't stop it.

 

Krugman on the endgame:

So how do people who think and behave this way respond when the public rejects their agenda? They attempt to use their power to overrule the democratic process. When Democrats threaten to win elections, they rig the voting process, as they did in Georgia.

When Democrats win despite election rigging, they strip the offices Democrats win of power, as they did in Wisconsin. When Democratic policies prevail despite all of that, they use apparatchik-stuffed courts to strike down legislation on the flimsiest of grounds.

As David Frum, the author of “Trumpocracy,” warned a year ago: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That’s happening as we speak.

So Pelosi was right about Reed O’Connor’s ruling being a symptom of a “monstrous endgame,” but the game in question isn’t just about perpetuating the assault on health care, it’s about assaulting democracy in general. And the current state of the endgame is probably just the beginning; the worst, I fear, is yet to come.

GOP delenda est.

Truth About the War on Christmas

From El Jefe at Juanita's place:  

Rising seas are 500 miles east and 700 feet down, but Global Warming will destroy Kentucky, too

Everywhere on the planet, humanity's days are numbered and the number is few.  Kentucky's distance and elevation from the ocean is not going to save us.

It's all here in Chapter 19 of the official U.S. Government report the Pumpkin Traitor tried to hide on Friday. 


Regarding the Southeast, including Kentucky, the report reads:

While all regional residents and communities are potentially at risk for some impacts, some communities or populations are at greater risk due to their locations, services available, and economic situations. In fact, a recent economic study using a higher scenario (RCP8.5)¹¹ suggests that the southern and midwestern populations are likely to suffer the largest losses from projected climate changes in the United States.

Yep, Governor I Got Mine Fuck You, by stripping Kentucky's treasury, education system and support programs thus keeping us poor, sick and stupid, is making our suffering from global warming even worse than the coasts.

Bevin Admin to Give Tax Dollars to For-Profit Charter Scam-Schools

Because  all charter "schools" are scams.  Whether White Supremacy Apartheid charters, christian Dominionism Madrassa charters, Skimming Top Students Away From Public Schools charters, Killing Public Education For Fun and Profit charters or just plain old-fashioned Sucking Tax Dollars Into Private Pockets charters, they are all scams.

And Bevin will strip the public treasury bare to make all his billionaire buddies rich.

From the Herald:

Kentucky Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis said Friday that he will ask the 2019 General Assembly to create a funding mechanism or process for charter schools, but that doesn’t mean that he is asking for extra money.

Of course not.  He'll take the money away from public schools, then use the resulting failure of unfunded public schools to justify making all schools charters.

“It’s simply a mechanism that shows how dollars — already appropriated public schools dollars — would follow a kid to a public charter school if their parents decide to enroll them in a public charter school,” he said.

At a meeting in Frankfort of the newly configured Kentucky Charter Schools Advisory Council, Lewis said he would advocate for anything else the state could do to raise achievement and close achievement gaps.

“It’s my job as Commissioner of Education to do everything that I can to move achievement ... to close achievement gaps ... and high quality public charter schools are one of the tools ... particularly with low income kids, kids of color, that’s what the research shows us.”

That is a blatant lie.  Many studies have shown that the handful of exceptional charter schools - non-religious and non-profit - at best do no worse educating students than do public schools.  Far more commonly, religious charters teach nothing but religion and for-profit charters teach nothing at all because all the funding goes to make the rich owners richer.

The General Assembly passed a law in 2017 to allow public charter schools in Kentucky for the first time. But none have opened.

Those who want to open charters in Northern Kentucky, Louisville and Richmond have said they are hesitant to file applications with their local school board as the law requires because there’s no current funding process for dollars to flow into charter schools, in state law. 

Northern Kentucky, home of Catholic freakazoids and John-Bircher-style conservatives.  I wouldn't put a dog I hated into the kind of charters NKY is likely to come up with.

And it turns out that charter schools make all schools worse because they fail to address the real root of poor schools:  poverty and racism.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

You don’t say! You mean the problem with American education is poverty? Kids living through domestic violence? Kids lacking nutrition? Who fucking knew! Glad Gates spent $700 million discovering that the only way to fix education is to fix poverty and racism. It’s not like he could have discovered that before he spent the money by just asking people. Or, I don’t know, watching Season 4 of The Wire. Speaking of which, I love how David Simon went after charter schools scammers long before it was cool to do so, back when they were supported by internet liberals, not only in The Wire, but in Treme, even as it was a relatively minor theme in Season 2.

But then those solutions don’t fit the profiteers behind charter schools or the privatizers who hate public goods. No money to be made fighting poverty!

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article221407295.html#storylink=cpy

Make Every Repug Candidate Pay For Kavanaugh

Rapey McLiarFace is now the raping, lying face of the republican party.  His despicable performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the screaming hysteria of repug fanatics spouting ludicrous conspiracies have laid bare the true nature of their party: despising and degrading women in order to promote and protect privileged, rich, straight, conservative, freakazoid white men.

 

To repugs, either you are one of them, or you are scum to be assaulted and kicked into the trash.

 

Which side are you on?

 

29 Days.

VOTE

The Repug Skeleton Key

Albert Burneko at The Concourse:

It’s a bit late for anyone not to have figured this out yet, but the skeleton key to understanding American conservatism is this: At bottom, it lacks absolutely any moral or ideological underpinning beyond the reactionary protection of moneyed white men—of their station, their wealth and power, and their egos. Its supposed ideas and abstractions are just a framework for spasmodic lashing-out against anything that can be interpreted as a threat to rich white dudes. It likes supply-side economics because the supply side is made of rich white dudes. It likes tax cuts because the taxes are mostly cut for rich white dudes. It likes cops and soldiers because cops and soldiers uphold a social order with rich white dudes at the top. It likes “traditional family values” because social, economic, and sexual dominion over women are the most traditional family values of all. It likes “Make America Great Again” because rich white dudes used to roll through society and over everyone else with even greater impunity than they do now. All of these things are just proxies for reiterating, over and over and over, forever, the power and security and primacy of rich white dudes.

The New Confederacy

If even after the blatantly anti-constitutional decisions of the Gorsuch Supreme Court this June you still think elections don't matter, think again.

Scott LeMeiux at LGM:

This is a flatly neoconfederate Court, refusing to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments to stop racial discrimination but willing to use them to stop integration. 

 
One of the many things that’s at stake in presidential elections is whether the Constitution’s mist critical provisions will be meaningfully enforced. If you’re wondering when I’ll stop passionately arguing against people who see elections as fora for atomistic consumer expression, the answer is “never.”

And Brett Kavanagh is going to make it exponentially worse, and for generations to come.

VOTE on Nov. 6. Vote early, vote often.  Take your family, take your friends, take your neighbors, take your dogs.  Issue non-violent threats to every Democrat you know who is not planning to vote (i.e., no more sex for you, no more homegrown tomatoes, no more using the pool, no more sharing high-speed wifi - you get the idea.)

Supreme Court Just Protecting White Supremacy

What have the conservatives on the Supreme Court unleashed with their stripping Muslims and non-white voters of their civil and human rights?  The same thing that always happens when the government winks at white/christian supremacy: anti-minority violence.

Think Progress:

Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940) should have been an easy case.

Unlike many modern religious liberty cases, where religious conservatives demand the power to limit the rights of others, Gobitis involved two children who were expelled from a public school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The two youths were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they believed that “such a gesture of respect for the flag was forbidden by command of Scripture.”

As a matter of law, the Gobitis children should have prevailed. Generally, the First Amendment does not permit the government to force individuals to speak against their will. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” the Supreme Court later held in a similar case, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

And yet, Gobitis now stands as the paradigmatic example of how the Supreme Court can turn its back on a vulnerable group — and unleash the wolves of authoritarianism in the process.

A society committed to “ultimate values of civilization,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, “may, in self-protection, utilize the educational process for inculcating those almost unconscious feelings which bind men together in a comprehending loyalty, whatever may be their lesser differences and difficulties.”

“National unity,” Frankfurter added, “is the basis of national security.”

The Gobitis decision was not a sweeping denial of the shared humanity of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It did not strip Witnesses of all their rights to seek protection from the law, or declare them to be enemies of American society. Yet it may as well have done so, because the public reaction to the decision was swift and harsh.

Gobitis came down in June of 1940. By the next September, according to the ACLU, more than a thousand Jehovah’s Witnesses were assaulted in 236 different incidents nationwide.

Solicitor General Francis Biddle warned that “self-constituted bands of mob patrioteers are roaming about the country, setting upon these people, beating them, driving them out of their homes.”

A lawyer who belonged to the faith lamented that hundreds of his fellow Witnesses were “beaten, kidnapped, tarred and feathered, throttled in castor oil, tied together an chased through the streets, castrated, maimed, hanged, shot, and otherwise consigned to mayhem.”

In one of these incidents, which is recounted in historian Shawn Francis Peters’ book Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution, Witnesses in a small Pennsylvania town were harassed, arrested on frivolous charges, set upon by mobs of fifty men or more, beaten, kicked, and dragged through the streets, then held and questioned by police for hours before they could seek medical treatment for their injuries.

In another incident, which took place just days after the Gobitis decision, vigilantes burned a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ place of worship in Maine, then rioted for days.

SNIP

One again, in other words, a Supreme Court decision making a relatively narrow incursion on minority rights fostered a much larger attack on those rights. State lawmakers’ reaction to Crawford was neither as violent as the aftermath of Gobitis and Brown II nor as transparently lawless. But Crawford may provide the biggest warning of all about what could happen in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim Ban decision.

The story of Gobitis was a story of authoritarian elements within the general populace viewing a Supreme Court decision as a license to lash out at a disfavored minority group. The story of Crawford, by contrast, is the story of anti-democratic elements who wield the official power of the government deciding to push the envelope after the Supreme Court signaled that they were likely to get away with it.

Trump v. Hawaii is a case about an authoritarian, anti-democratic president. And it is a case about a racist, who does not feel bound by the Constitution, and who likes to lash out at vulnerable immigrants.

There’s no telling what he may do if the Supreme Court emboldens him further.

A Giant Mirror

Noah at Down with Tyranny:



Very very rarely, a church sign gets it right, and without pleas to invisible sky wizards.

They Never Learn

Down With Tyranny:

The Merry Christmas Atheist

Rude Pundit nails it:

As desperately as conservatives want this "Merry Christmas" thing to be, well, a thing, it's not. Every Jew and Muslim and Hindu I've ever met has no fuckin' problem with "Merry Christmas." A few dicks might, but a few dicks will always be dickish. And some of those dicks exploit minor dickishness in order to show that they are major dicks. 

Trump taking credit for "bringing Christmas back...bigger and better" is like standing in a rainstorm in a boat in the middle of a reservoir that was always full and declaring you have ended a drought. As much of a liar as you are, there will always be people who believe there was a drought and that you made it rain. But then again, that's how we got religions.

Real, confident atheists don't think it's offensive to say, "Merry Christmas." We think it's adorable.

Repug To-Do List

It's nothing new; they've been working this for decades.  And it's not just Congress.  While you're not looking, the repugs in the state legislature and your county commission are beavering away at every law, regulation, program and policy that helps anyone who is not already obscenely rich.

Noah at Down with Tyranny:

The Tories Are Winning

We should never have let the motherfucking traitors back into the country.

Digby:

It is a personality type committed to maintaining the "natural" order.

 

America was very good to New World royalty. They invested in a political party. They're preparing to close on a country.

The Orange Menace Is a Bog-Standard Republican

He is them and they are him. Don't be fooled into thinking he's some kind of anomaly.

Charlie Pierce:

The bumbling cruelty of the Trump administration* in response to the disaster in Puerto Rico is not an isolated accident of history. It’s a clumsier manifestation of the way conservative Republican politicians respond to all situations: They draw on their theological devotion to a series of conjuring words while people struggle to get drinking water and to clean the mold out of their houses. One storm follows another, and the answer is always the same. Magical thinking, ideological gobbledegook, and penurious inhumanity. One storm follows the other.

Pierce has written many times about how the republican party first started eating the monkey brains when Reagan was elected, and that now the prion disease has taken over.

From the Washington Monthly, James Bruno on the results:

Our political leadership is clearly wanting with both Congress and the president out-competing themselves for utter fecklessness. John Adams saw this in his day: “If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle.” With such conditions, he warned, “remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Segregation From Reality

This has been a Southern/Confederate speciality literally for centuries. Facts and reality too painful to face? Just ignore them and cling to the myth. 

Political Animal:

David Roberts’s analysis of the American right’s self-segregation from reality, though written before the Moore news broke, nevertheless explains why Moore will likely win in a landslide:

The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.

The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.

But the right’s institutions are not of the same kind as the ones they seek to displace. Mainstream scientists and journalists see themselves as beholden to values and standards that transcend party or faction. They try to separate truth from tribal interests and have developed various guild rules and procedures to help do that. They see themselves as neutral arbiters, even if they do not always uphold that ideal in practice.

The pretense for the conservative revolution was that mainstream institutions had failed in their role as neutral arbiters — that they had been taken over by the left, become agents of the left in referee’s clothing, as it were.

SNIP 

Moore win would be the least surprising development in modern American politics. There are millions of Americans, in Alabama and elsewhere, who walked away from facts, truth and reason decades ago. They will never come back. They are wedded to the vision of a permanent 1950s where women, African-Americans, members of the LGBTQ community and anyone who isn’t a straight white Christian male knows their place and knows their role. They regarding voting Democratic as a sin, not what Moore allegedly did to those young women. There is no bottom to the American right, no limits to its loathsomeness, no cap on its cruelty. When it comes to viciousness and venality, it’s fair to say that right-wingers just can’t get enough–and only want Moore.

Force Them to Pay

Rude Pundit:

Conservative beliefs are utterly delusional and fly in the face of all facts and all aspects of human behavior. We know that gun control works because it works everywhere gun laws are strict. We know that limiting access to abortion and birth control ends up harming women. We know that use of a private email server isn't a major crime. We know that football players protesting by kneeling during the National Anthem is protected speech. But conservatives have to keep the rubes at bay. The only way to reconcile the abject, fucked-up hypocrisy that conservatives live with is that they know. They just don't fucking care because there has been no cost to not caring since 2008 (and much longer in some congressional districts).

And so nothing will be done when it comes to guns in the wake of Las Vegas (and Orlando and Newtown and...). Until they are forced to pay for their hypocrisy, for the complete and utter fraud they have perpetrated (including the support for Trump), nothing is going to ever happen.