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NPR: The Insurrectionists and Their Current Statuses - Jon Ryan Schaffer has turned and is now going to rat out his insurrectionist buddies. Should be interesting and fun to watch.
Veterans for Responsible Leadership
Code Pink: Don't Let BlackRock Run the Whitehouse
Guardian: Senate and House Results 2020
USA Today: Mass Killings in US: Database
Highlights:
5/4/22
Socialist Alternative: Why I'm Never Voting for a Democrat Again - From the article: "I’ve seen the unhinged misogynistic psychopaths on the right like Alito and Kavanaugh (whose appointments to the Court the Democrats rolled over for) who want women to be submissive incubators of the next generation of workers to exploit. But then I turn around and see the “good cop” blue politicians say that giving the psychopaths free rein is essential to our thriving democracy. When you show me Republicans and Democrats, I see criminals and their accomplices. Pinning hopes on the Democrats, after watching Biden campaign on codifying Roe and then sitting idly as this attack plays out, feels like a hostage situation."
5/28/21
Guardian: Republicans Are Trying To Rewrite The History of the Capital Attack. Don't Let Them -
"Do you remember how, just a few short months ago, supporters of Donald Trump staged a violent insurrection? How they stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of last November’s presidential election, looting and vandalizing the seat of American democracy? The fact that they carried firearms, explosives and handcuffs, some wanting to kill Vice-President Mike Pence, and others to run the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, over with a car? And how the whole thing was incited by the former president, Donald Trump, who told the mob beforehand to “fight like hell”?"
Inciting a mob to cause an insurrection is the textbook definition of Sedition, and it is punishable by death.
3/4/21
New Yorker: The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind -
"Cultivating the life of the mind, however, has been an important current throughout much of Christianity’s history, a recognition that intellectual pursuits can glorify God.
During the Middle Ages, monasteries became centers of learning and gave rise to the first European universities.
The writings of Thomas Aquinas, which blended Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology, set out a framework for reconciling scientific knowledge with scriptural truths.
Martin Luther, who led the Protestant Reformation, was an early advocate of universal education and argued that educating needy youth was vital “in order that a city might enjoy temporal peace and prosperity.”
The Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards grappled with metaphysics and epistemology in his writings and sermons.
The English Puritans who settled throughout New England had a deep scholarly tradition, which led to the founding of Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. Puritan clergy were expected to be paragons of both learning and piety.
In the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis and Reinhold Niebuhr enjoyed popular acclaim as Christian public intellectuals. T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden are among the writers whose theologically orthodox Christianity served as a focal point of their art.
American Christianity took a decisive shift, however, toward religious “enthusiasm” during revivals that swept the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, a period that came to be known as the First Great Awakening. Believers’ direct connection to God became the primary focus. Ministers who believed in the importance of learning and rationality in religion found themselves increasingly under threat.
The style of the most popular and influential pastors tend to correlate with shallowness: charisma trumps expertise; scientific authority is often viewed with suspicion. So it is of little surprise that American evangelicals have become vulnerable to demagoguery and misinformation.
a “resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it.”
anti-intellectualism
“The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter,”
The church found itself increasingly at odds with advances in science
2/15/21
Reuters: Fact Check: Courts Have Dismissed Multiple Lawsuits of Alledged Electoral Fraud Presented by Trump Campaign - "Courts dismissed more than 50 lawsuits of alleged electoral fraud and irregularities presented by Trump and allies. U.S. election security officials have said the election was “the most secure in American history”.
1/14/21
ProPublica: Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It Will Weigh Down the Economy for Years - $8Trillion increase in the national debt during his administration, mostly from his tax cut for the rich.
9/2/20
New Yorker: American Christianity’s White-Supremacy Problem - In a 2019 nationwide survey, eighty-six per cent of white evangelical Protestants and seventy per cent of both white mainline Protestants and white Catholics said that the “Confederate flag is more a symbol of Southern pride than of racism”;
nearly two-thirds of white Christians over all said that killings of African-American men by the police are isolated incidents rather than part of a broader pattern of mistreatment;
and more than six in ten white Christians disagreed with the statement that “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.”
“the more racist attitudes a person holds, the more likely he or she is to identify as a white Christian.” The correlation is just as pronounced among white evangelical Protestants as it is among white mainline Protestants and white Catholics—and stands in stark contrast to the attitudes of religiously unaffiliated whites."
81% of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump.
61% of white Catholics voted for Trump.
57% of white mainline Protestants voted for Trump.
Mark Galli: "“Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency,” he wrote. “If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?”
#Evangelical
7/27/20
Guardian: American White Supremist Murders: 329; Anti-Fascists: 1
7/16/19
Reuters: Retired US Justice John Paul Stevens Dead - Stevens wrote the most eloquent dissent on the Citizens United decision. Here is a great article outlining how Justice Roberts held the case over to the next session (almost unheard of) while he completely changed the scope and meaning of the case to accomplish his predetermined end. He turned decades of Supreme Court precedent on its head and put the lie to his confirmation testimony that he would respect stare decisis.
There is no better example of the judicial branch creating new law from the bench. As a result there is no limit to the amount of money that corporations, and even foreign people/corporations, can give to their hand-picked candidates, and the will of the majority of tax payers is now meaningless. When you send a letter to your congressman, his staff opens the letter, turns it upside down and if a check for at least $10,000 doesn’t fall out, it goes in the trash.
Also see Stevens’ solutions for how to fix the problem, written 4 years after the case was decided.
Democracy is dead.
Capitalism killed it.
Citizens United was the final nail in the coffin.
May he rest in peace. There will never be another like Justice Stevens.
5/10/18
Democracy-NOW: Jeremy Scahill: Obama Paved Way for Haspel to Head the CIA by Failing to Hold Torturers Accountable - By now it’s clear that both Bush and Obama approved torture, and rendition, with a lot of help from John Brennan and Here, Here Here and James Comey. Then Obama made sure the Senate torture report got delayed and then got ‘lost’ so no one would ever be held accountable, and Here. As this article points out Gina Haspel was the operative that actually did the deleting. Then Obama signed the 2014 NDAA which allows the president to indefinitely detain anyone in the world for any reason, or no reason. The only person ever convicted of any torture related item was the guy who revealed it. Rethuglicans and Democraps are equally to blame. Combine this with universal surveillance, and Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, and Here, and you’ve got yourself a nice tight little corporate police state.
8/16/17
WashPo: Who Are the Antifa? and Democracy-NOW - In 1919 when Hitler attended his first meeting of the German Workers Party, it had only 54 members. Interesting to think what might have (not) happened if antifa had shown up and wiped them all out on the spot. But he transformed it into the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party.
By the end of 1920, it had 3,000 members and Hitler was subsequently declared its “Fuhrer.” By 1925 the party had 27,000 members, and by 1929, 108,000 just as the Great Depression began.
The Weimar democracy under Hindenburg was unable to stabilize the country which by 1930 had over 30% unemployment. In the elections of that year, the Nazis gained 18% of the vote, making it the second largest party in Germany. During the Nazi Brown Shirts (the SA Nazi ‘storm troopers’) sometimes violent demonstrations, the police often stood down and let riots ensue. Two years later Hitler won 37% of the vote and effectively took over parliamentary control of the government, annexing the Sudetenland in 1938 and invading Poland in 1939, which precipitated the Second World War.
At every step of the way, most Germans who even knew of the existence of the German Workers Party laughed it off as a small group of crazy extremists that had absolutely no chance to gain any power in their parliamentarian government. And at every step of the way most Germans were surprised and horrified by the respective election results. Remind you of anyone?
8/2/16
Truthdig: Don’t Fall For It: The Nader Myth and Your 2016 Vote - Hopefully, we can lay this old canard in its rightful place: a complete fable. 90,000 Florida voters of all persuasions (not just Democrats) voted for Nader in 2000. Over 300,000 registered Democrats voted for Bush. 191,000 self-described liberals voted for Bush. A final count of all the votes showed that Gore actually won Florida. The Supreme Court stopped the recount and appointed Bush. If Gore had won his home state, Florida would not even have mattered.
10/3/12
Democracy-NOW!: How The Dems and Rethugs Stole Control of Presidential Debates from the League of Women Voters and Why - Synopsis: The ‘Debate Commission’ is now co-chaired by two insider lobbyists (one R, one D) and completely controlled by the two parties to make sure only they are included, only soft-ball questions are asked and the audience is hand picked. It’s basically an illusion designed to make us think we have a choice. Brought to you by Bud-Light.
History:
1980: The League of Women Voters defied the Democratic Party and allowed independent presidential candidate John Anderson into the Carter/Reagan debate whereupon Carter refused to appear. 55 million Americans watched Anderson debate Reagan.
1984: The Reagan and Mondale campaigns vetoed 80 moderators proposed by the League, because the two parties wanted only softball questions. The League stood up to the two parties and the public backed them. The Dems and Reps were forced to take the moderators appointed by the League.
1988: Bush I vs. Dukakis: The two parties drafted a secret ‘debate contract’ which they passed on to the League. The League refused to implement the contract, made it public and called it a fraud and an attempt to hoodwink the public.
League of Women Voters Refuses to “Help Perpetrate a Fraud” - "The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."
The two parties then created the “Commission on Presidential Debates,” implemented the contract and created their own debates supplanting the League. The Commission is funded by Anheuser-Busch and other large corporations. The two parties meet behind closed doors to dictate the terms of debate, the composition of the audience, and the soft-ball questions to be used. The two co-chairs of the Commission are former Republican and Democratic Party Chairmen respectively.
7/26/12
Salon: Protectors of Wall Street - Starts with a great example of how impossible it would be for the Democratic party ever to be ‘changed from the inside’ showing how the Democratic leadership squelches the rank and file every time they try to put some fairness in the legislative process, and how ridiculous it is to think that the Democratic Party can be reformed from within. Then does an in-depth review of the new book “Bailout” by the former TARP IG and all of the issues surrounding its supporters and the egregious conduct of the government personnel who should have made Wall Street accountable, but instead made sure the big banks got everything they wanted at every step in the process and even up to today. Socialism for the rich. Everyone else is on their own.
5/14/12
New Yorker: Money Unlimited: How Chief Justice Roberts Orchestrated the Citizens United Decision
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