The genocide of US LGBT+ folks is in progress

Conservatives know that the political climate is not right just yet to start mass arresting or massacring LGBT folks (stages 8 and 9 of genocide). But by passing laws to strip away their rights and to literally silence their voices and act like they don't merit being treated like human beings, pretty much every Republican-dominated state is at least at stage 6.

For years, many decent people have pooh-poohed warnings that the country was going in this direction. "Overreaction," "Exaggeration," "Don't be hysterical"...

The problem is that decent people tend to lack the imagination of sociopaths. They assume that almost everyone is as decent as them and that the aberrents are too few and disparate to engage in anything worse than the odd individual act of depravity.

When sociopathy is normalized and they become numerous enough to seize power structures, a nightmare is what follows. And we are headed in that direction, mark my words.

(Pseudo-)Christian theocrats, funded by US extremists, are already doing a test run in Africa.

Republicans want to eradicate LGBT people and they're not hiding it

Many Americans who should have known better were slow to pick up on the warning signs of fascism, which have been obvious for years.

Whenever signs of rising fascism were signaled, centrists, who controlled with an iron grip both the Democratic Party until recently and the punditocracy, would often dismiss such concerns with Godwin's Law, issue warnings about "unhelpful exaggeration", mouth pieties about "civility" and, most pernicious of all, engage in morally repugnant both sides-ism.

Now, it is crystal clear that much of the right wants nothing less than the eradication of LGBT people. The "mainstream" (whatever that means these days) of the right will deny say, couching their bigotry and oppression under the vile deceit of protecting children. But some of their ilk - here's an example - drops the pretense and utters right-wing's vicious intentions out loud.

It's long past time we believe them.

People's fundamental humanity is well beyond the privilege of "agree to disagree."

Fascism is destroying us from the bottom up

 When I saw this PBS article about the Republicans' normalization of violent rhetoric, it reminded me of how broad the GOP's war on decency is.

The most evil part of this is who it targets.

They no longer limit themselves to presidents and governors and other high ranking politicians who, frankly, expect quite a bit of nastiness as part of the job but accept it as the price of their ambition.

Fascist/Trumpist rhetoric is increasingly targeting ordinary people doing fairly low-profile jobs: elections bureaucrats, teachers, public health workers, (unpaid) school board members. 

 

It's a no-holds barred war to destroy our country from the grassroots by targeting the very people who make our communities function.

The only Republican ideology is nihilism

The idiocy of one puppet attacking another is too absurd to bother commenting on itself.

But the nuclear war against efforts to overcome COVID and finally bring our society back to something approaching normal is a perfect illustration of the destructiveness of the Trumpism. They were lying when they said #AllLivesMatter.

 

It is a further illustration is that their only concern is to sabotage these efforts to undermine the recovery and harm Democrats chances of retaining Congress in 2022. Their governors are working quite effectively to this end.

To put their own jobs ahead of the greater good is not entirely new in politics. But to do so on a literally life or death matter that is harming their own base far more than the opposition's shows that their approach is not only vile and inhumane but stupid and self-defeating.

It's no surprise that the three or four vaguely reasonable Republican governors out there want nothing to do with the national death cult (who, of course, wants to cancel them for the disobedience).

The former Republican Party's only ideology is nihilism. They have literally nothing offer except rage. They can't even bring themselves to denounce violence or threats of violence. Even as their own supporters die in the meantime.

The pathogen is gone but the poison remains

Most Americans have breathed a sigh of relief that Trump's reign is finally over, that the Confederate coup attempts failed and that Biden got through day one without being assassinated.

But don't you dare say that you want things to go back to how they used to be. Because "how it used to be" is the conditions that led to Trump and, more dangerously, Trumpism in the first place.

Trump did not change us. He caused many to reveal who they really were. He goaded people to remove the mask. The tinder was there; he just lit the match and kept adding kindling.

He did not invent white supremacy and other forms of bigotry. He did not invent misogyny. He did not invent cult behavior. He did not invent nihilism. He did not invent contempt for the scientific method and for the environment. He merely exploited those things which already existed. They will remain even after he's hopefully thrown in prison or, at the very least, banned from all future public office.

We need to be better people as individuals. And we need a better system, better public policies as a country. Both need to be more human and more humane. Either by itself is not good enough.

Medicare for All - getting what we're already paying for via our taxes - and right-sizing our military - making it serve primarily as the national self-defense unit our Founding Fathers intended - are two good starts.

But whether it's these two specific policies or others. Our tax money should be used to help people - primarily American citizens. I've no problem with the current small percentage being used to help refugees or other foreigners in need.

Our tax money should not be subsidize corporations. And it should never be used to harm foreigners in far away lands who've committed no sin against the United States and her people.

Trumpism came about because people felt the political system was fundamentally broken and that Trump would be the Lord and Savior who could fix it all. They were catastrophically wrong in their prescription but spot on in their diagnosis. We must implement a better remedy.

The Nazis failed in their first attempt to seize power. But the sclerotic, out of touch mainstream parties of Weimar Germany never learned the lesson. The Nazis did not fail the second time.

We cannot "go back to the way things were" because we are certain to get another Trumpist monster. And the next one may be smarter and more disciplined. And then we truly will be screwed.

The fundamental divide in America is not between left and right

I'm coming to believe that the fundamental divide in this country is not between left and right. It's between those who accept the need for credible public institutions and those who don't. 

"Accepting the need for" does not mean "automatically and mindlessly trust." Those who accept this need try to repair failing (or sabotaged) institutions. Those who don't accept this need add to the breakdown in social cohesion.

It has nothing to do with education or intelligence. I see many smart, educated people parroting the nihilistic rage. They know what public institutions are saying very well. They just knee-jerk disbelieve the institutions unthinkingly. My recent essay on the difference between skepticism vs cynicism is instructive here. Because many of them are smart, they are good at making their disbelief sound just pseudo-intellectual enough.

It's not just the fascists and Trump cultists. Many on the harder left are no different and it's causing a real breach between those who want to re-fortify sabotaged institutions and those who want to burn everything down and replace it with who knows what and who knows how..

I'm not sure how to resolve this breach. Once you reject the notion of anything public or common, even a set of facts (upon which opinions and strategies can be based), I'm not sure where you can go from there. 

Even Republican governors are targeted by Trump

It's bad enough the Trump regime has been failing miserably to help governors desperately trying to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. 

As many governors have rightly pointed out, given the knowledge of how the pandemic was spreading in Asia and Europe, FEMA should've prepared a national stockpile before the outbreak started him rather than having states bid on the open market against each other and FEMA and other countries.

 But even when responsible governors do manage to obtain supplies that the federal government should be doing, there's the fear that the Trump regime will steal them. 

The Republican governor of Massachusetts complained that the feds seized a plane load of masks that his state had bought and paid for. No word on if the Trump regime reimbursed the taxpayers of the Bay State they swindled. 

The Republican governor of Maryland has ordered the National Guard and state police to protect his state's supply of COVID19 tests. His assertion of states rights in the face of an intentionally sabotaged federal government will no doubt enrage the PO(TU)S.

Are Democrats really stupid enough to delay the impeachment trial?

Let's be clear. Impeachment is a political act. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a political act. The Republican impeachments of Democrats Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson were political acts. In those two cases, all votes to remove the president from office came from Republican senators.

That impeachment is a political process is what the authors of the Constitution intended. That's why impeachment and its resulting trial are conducted by politicians, not judges.

But it's hard to imagine the Democrats would be so incredibly stupid to follow this advice (I almost am hestitant to say it because they tend to take such things as a dare). The guaranteed

Republican response is fairly simple: "Democrats claim that Trump's presidency is a mortal threat to our republic but are indefinitely delaying the trial that might remove this supposedly mortal threat from office. This proves that impeachment was just a sham designed to embarrass him" (as though he doesn't do that to himself on an hourly basis). Trumpists couldn't hope for a better script, one that, for once, is actually truthful.

We all know the Senate is going to acquit him no matter what. Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham have already promised publicly that the Senate jury will not conduct a fair trial. And they're not going to vote on any of the countless bills the House has sent them.

But Democrats still have to go through the motions of trying to remove Trump, otherwise what was the point? It wouldn't be any different than the pointless "censure" that they gave to Bill Clinton.

This cockamemie idea is neither good for the country nor good politics.

The Trump regime is not 1984. It's much more clever than that

In terms of obscenity, this photo of President Trump with an infant survivor of the El Paso massacre is fairly minor in the whole scheme of Donald Trump's moral crimes - to say nothing of his legal crimes. But it's emblematic of his sociopathic regime. (You can't called it an administration because governance is not its point)

Trump may not be particularly smart in the intellectual sense but his instincts for advancing his own personal self-interest is nothing short of malevolent genius. Long before he entered politics, he was a great con man.

The malevolent genius of his regime is its full scale assault on the senses. It's one moral outrage to disgust honest, decent Americans after another. You're not even done reeling/raging about one scandal and another pops up.

The children in cages meant we stopped talking about the avalanche of impeachable offenses. The gun massacres meant we stopped talking about children in cages. The Epstein death meant we stopped talking about violence. The ICE raids is Mississippi meant we stopped talking bout the Epstein death. The green card rule changes meant we stopped talking about the ICE raids. Declare open season on the bald eagle and other endangered speices and we stopped talking about the green rule changes. Pervert the Statue of Liberty Poem and we stopped talking about the attack on endangered species.

This would be enough for two years to stagger a normal nation. In America, this is just the last 10 days.

In a column for The Guardian in 2017, Aldous Huxley's son pointed out that Trump's regime was not Orwell's 1984. It was his father's Brave New World.

I'm not quite sure how an opposition candidate breaks through against this relentless, overbearing obscenity but  I'm certain Trump is hoping he gets a corporate centrist help his con job along.

During the last round of GOP primaries, Trump bragged that he could stand in the middle of Manhattan and shoot someone and he wouldn't lose any voters.

That might be the only thing he's ever said that we ought to have believed.

Not implementing Medicare for All is absurd

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara.   

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed implementing a single-payer style Medicare for All system to replace our completely dysfunctional sick care system. This was denounced by Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan as "absurd."

In 2018, all health care spending is expected to total $3.5 trillion.

By 2026, such spending is expected to skyrocket to $5.7 trillion.

Sanders' plan is projected to cost $32.6 trillion over 10 years, or an average of $3.26 trillion a year.

So Medicare for All would insure far more people than the current system (everyone) for far less money. To not implement such a program is what would be absurd.

Unless you own stock in the private health insurance industry.

Trumpism is a cult

Not everyone who voted for Donald Trump adheres to his cult, but Trumpism has clearly become a cult.


During last year's presidential campaign, I often noted that Donald Trump's appeal reminded me very much of the sort of naked tribalism westerners associate with the so-called 'third world.' South African comedian Trevor Noah went so far as to describe Trump as America's first African president.

His presidency has shown this to be completely accurate.

A Guardian piece interviewed a number of Trump supporters at one of his recent virulent rallies. He is much better at campaigning than at governing.

One woman praised him for being "anti-left, anti-PC, anti-stupid."

She's no 'deplorable', easy for snobs to look their nose down at. She is a senator in the Arizona state legislature.

But her comment perfectly encapsulates Trumpism.

She does not state one positive (in her mind) accomplishment that Trump has made since becoming president. Not one promise kept.

In her eyes, and the eyes of many Trump loyalists, his best quality is how much he hates the left. How much he hates the  "politically correct." How much he hates the media.

His emphasis on hating other Americans is not a flaw, in their eyes, but his greatest virtue. If you press them, it seems to be his only virtue.

This is why they are impervious to any kind of logical argument.

They claimed to oppose Hillary because she was investigated by the FBI but when Trump is investigated by the same, it's a conspiracy. They claimed to be furious at Hillary's handling of emails but ignored Vice-President Pence's similar infractions. They denounced "crooked Hillary" but have no problem with Trump turning the presidency into an extension of his family business (very much like a stereotypical African dictator). They cheered his insistence that he would make Mexico pay for the border wall but are silent when he threatens to shut down the government if the (US) Congress refuses to fund it.

And can you imagine the rage they would launch at any "liberal" with such deep ties to regime hostile to the US? At any "liberal" who defended symbols of anti-US sentiment (Confederate statues)? At any "liberal" who attacked Gold Star families?

The reason for these apparent inconsistencies is simple. All the claims above were not sincere. They were poses. They were pretexts invented to justify what was really a vote for a worldview, far more than a vote for a particular candidate.

That is why that when, he can't deliver on his promises, it never due to any fault of his own. It's the fault of the evil media. Or the powerless Democrats. Or of venal Republicans who don't obey his orders completely.

They could only vote for him for president. They really want to install him as emperor.

Donald Trump is part of their tribe and what he actually does is fairly irrelevant to his most rabid supporters.

Partisan politics has always had a certain tribal aspect to it. But there's always been the pretense of a certain ideological basis. Trump has resorted to naked cult appeal.

This is why his poll numbers are collapsing. In a recent poll, 61% of Americans said they had low or no confidence in Trump. Only 49% of Americans voted for Hillary. Clearly, even many who voted for him are starting to see through his scam.

In a story about the 1982 New York Democratic gubernatorial primary, a Village Voice article noted: "For too many people in our tightening political economy, the family ties and values he loves have been broken or twisted so that they bear no fruit in good health or fresh opportunities. And as openness and hope become overwhelmed by fear and hatred in enough people's lives - openness curldes to bitterness and hope shrivels to a craving for revenge - hard-pressed voters turn to leaders with a streak of malevolence resembling their own - leaders who reassure them perversely by showing them where they can extract vengeance for their own diminished lives."

It is even more true today than in 1982.

What a racket: Crooked Donald and the family presidency

Donald Trump used a lot of rhetoric during the presidential campaign that resonated with people for reasons other than bigotry. Nearly all of his actions have betrayed that.

He talked about “draining the swamp” and taking on Wall Street, which he quickly betrayed by appointing a cabinet almost entirely madeup of Wall Street fat cats and other oligarchs.

He talked about reviving American manufacturing. Now he’s going after an American retailer for dropping his daughter’s failing line ofmerchandise which is… made in China.

The real purpose of Trump’s presidency is simple: to be an extension of his and his family’s businesses.

He bellowed non-stop about “crooked Hillary” but what he’s doing is worse. Far worse

It started with him violating the Constitution since the moment he swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend that Constitution.

It was followed quickly using the White House website topimp his wife’s jewelry line.

He hired his son-in-law to be his unaccountable taxpayer-paid advisor.

Now, he’s using his taxpayer-paid spokestools to defend hisdaughter’s private business interests.

All this and he’s only been in the job for three weeks.

Any one of these things might excusable.

But put them all together and you who is acting like some two-bit banana republic dictator.

Then again, we’ve devolved into a political culture where big business has successfully bought politicians to advance their corporate interests at the expense of the public. I guess Trump is just skipping the middle man. Maybe that’s where Betsy DeVos got the idea from.

Why the 'spoiler' and 'wasted vote' smears are so resented

"The reality of Washington, D.C., today is that we have one party, the Republican Party, completely dominated by big money and right wing folks. And you have another party, the Democratic Party, too much controlled by corporate money...” –Sen. Bernie Sanders. This is presumably why he himself is not a registered Democrat. This is definitely why I am not one.

A lot of mainstream Democrats and Republicans do not understand why phrases like 'spoiler' and 'wasted vote' are so resented by smaller party and independent voters. The reason is simple: it profoundly offends our notions of fair play and of what democracy is supposed to be about.

I think voting is supposed to be an expression of your values and priorities. If you vote this way, you, by definition, cannot spoil democracy because this IS democracy. If you honestly believe that a Democrat or Republican better corresponds with your values and priorities than a smaller party opponent, then by all means vote for him or her.

Somebody saying, "[Democrat/Republican] is the best choice because of positions on x, y and z and is superior to [smaller party candidate] because of a, b and c" is not only fair game but exactly how democracy is supposed to work.

Whereas, somebody saying, "Vote for [smaller party candidate] is a wasted vote" or "... is only running to feed his ego" is offensive. It's saying that ideas are irrelevant to how one should vote.

(Incidentally, you don't subject yourself to the grind and expense of an electoral campaign as a smaller party candidate with no money because of the glory. It's a fairly absurd implication)

In the last Congressional race in my area, nearly 20,000 citizens voted for the Green Party candidate Matt Funiciello. Everyone did so because they thought he reflected their values and beliefs better than his Democratic and Republican opponents. If you want to those citizens and told them to their face that they only cast their votes that way to 'spoil' the race, I suspect you'd get some unpleasant reactions.

Smaller party members are going against so-called conventional wisdom simply by joining a smaller party. Most do so because they still think elections should be governed by ideas, not polls, analysis, speculation and punditry. Telling them otherwise is usually going to be counterproductive. Make the case based on ideas or don't bother.

The 'two-party system' is a Stockholm Syndrome

The so-called two party system is so corrupt that even the body charged with regulating the minimal campaign finance rules has given up hope of forcing the two parties and their candidates of respecting the law. 


It still mystifies me why this system, which is a myth perpetuated by the corporate media and academics, has such a hold on the voters it works so hard to stick it to.

 

Low wages costs everyone money

A recent study by the University of California-Berkeley has two interesting revelations.

-3/4 of all people receiving public assistance belong to a working family

-And that public assistance to these working families costs taxpayers $153 billion a year

That means when employers pay terrible wages to their workers that they cannot live on, we the taxpayers make up the difference.

And this did not merely happen out of nowhere.

Democrats have spent the last 25 years selling out to corporate interests. Republicans, for their part, represented those interests long before that.

With both  major parties owned by the One Percent, it's inevitable that people who worked for a living would get screwed.

Now you know why I'm a Green. Big Money has two parties representing it. Don't working people deserve at least one?

For Congress: junk food or a healthy option?

The Republican Congressional primary for New York's 21st district was described by a local media pooh-bah as a choice between Coke (a DC political hack) and Pepsi (a Wall Street insider). They were virtually identical on most issues of substance, with main "issue" separating the two seemed to be who was a "real" Northern New Yorker. 

Meanwhile RC Cola (the Democratic candidate, a film maker from Manhattan), who's been virtually invisible since his candidacy launch, made a rare intervention. Though of course it was by press release, as per usual and featured some fairly insignificant ideas, also as per usual.

I realize that bashing Congress is a useful populist strategy for a candidate, especially one as empty as RC Cola. But his proposals, while not objectionable in the least, will have an impact that's virtually nil. Depriving Congressmen of a few luxuries does not actually help the American people in any remotely meaningful way. If this is the best he can offer, he should be ignored.

Anyone interested in a substantive candidate with a serious progressive agenda, should check out Matt Funiciello. 

Funiciello's candidacy is so significant that even the National Republican Campaign Committee has taken notice. The NRCC claimed that RC Cola's main concern was people not confusing him with Funiciello. 

Funciello's big ideas are single payer health insurance for all Americans and ending corporate control of govenrment. RC Cola's big ideas are getting rid of the Congressional barber shop and gym. The idea that anyone might confuse the two is laughable.

It's no longer Republican obstructionism: it's sabotage

It was interesting to see US Senate Democrats virtually eliminate the filibuster for presidential nominations. This was after Republicans elevated the filibuster from a last resort to a weekly tactic. Fully half of all filibusters of presidential nominees IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC have occurred during the Obama administration.

I’d prefer they go back to the filibuster as it was before, in all cases: where you had to physically keep talking to slow a bill down. This whole nonsense of saying, “No we don’t want to vote on it” and making the threshold a 60% supermajority is nonsense. The purpose of the filibuster was to slow down the most extreme things, not everything the temper tantrum throwing minority doesn’t like. I’m sure the Democrats thought long and hard about doing this because they will no doubt be the minority in the chamber at some point in the future. That they resorted to this shows Senate Republicans have no interest in governing. 

What’s being blocked here is not new “big government” programs or whatever. It’s nominees for judgeships and agencies that acts of Congress have ALREADY SPECIFICALLY AUTHORIZED. 

Bear in mind, Senate Republicans aren’t voting down these nominees, which would be a legitimate response to a nominee they may not like. They are refusing to allow these nominees to even get voted on one way or the other.

They’re not even refusing votes on these appointees based on any individual qualities the specific appointees have. It’s a mindless, blanket rejection of any appointee Pres. Obama wants for the sole reason that Pres. Obama wants him/her. No other reason.

I know some might say we shouldn’t care because Democrats are just as corporatist are Republicans and that’s certainly true. But this is another part of the right-wing’s 30+ year campaign. It's no longer mere opposition or obstructionism. It's outright sabotage. The right's objective is to sabotage nearly all government functions, even the judiciary, and then claim it as proof that the government undermined by their sabotage “can’t” work. They don't have the guts or the popular support to outright repeal what they don't like. So they engage in a series of behind-the-scenes death by 1000 cuts attacks that ordinary voters don't pay attention to. It's clever. It's working. And we can't let it.

 

If you don’t like a program, repeal it. If you don’t like a nominee, vote him/her down. That’s how adults act in a republican democracy.

Millionaires lead GOP crusade against health insurance for working people

I never voted for Barack Obama and my criticisms of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") are on the record, but GOP attempts to hold the economy hostage to defund it and ram through other parts of their fringe agenda are despicable.

The Republican strategy is essentially this: get a bunch of guys with taxpayer-subsidized health insurance, most of whom are millionaires. Anoint them to be your spokesperson on why people who have to work for a living shouldn't necessarily have access to health insurance.

Let me know how that works out politically.