Your Batshit Crazy, Fox News Watching, Rageholic In-Law who you Hate

by kara on April 10, 2019

Barr. Jesus Christ. A natural born fascist, an Opus Dei Catholic with a profound hatred for democracy and a stupefying willingness to shatter democracy on behalf of a cabal of dark money billionaires, because these Federalist Society types tend to believe the whole Enlightenment was our big mistake.

Can we stop calling Bill Barr “normal” and giving him the benefit of the doubt now? The idea that membership in Opus Dei is in any way compatible with a nominally Enlightenment-inspired constitutional republic is ludicrous on its face. No one with any Opus Dei ties should serve in the US government. Bill Barr is Louie Gohmert with hair. What the hell else does Bill Barr believe? Does he believe the Pizzagate conspiracy theory? Does he believe windmills cause cancer? Does he believe Alex Jones’s boner speed meth pills are real nutritional supplements? Does he believe Glenn Greenwald makes some good points sometimes?

WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE DEALING WITH?

I don’t see how this tide of fascism is stopped in this country. I honest to God believe we’ve passed the point of no return. In any case, Barr is serving the same function at Justice that McConnell is in the Senate and Roberts and his majority on the Court. And there’s no-one in a position to stop them. The icing on this horrid cake is our billionaire press, which might have saved us with some good reporting—there was a point until fairly recently when that would have been enough—but which is obviously, god help us, determined to double down on the horrendous malpractice of 2016 that got us into this hell on earth in the first place. They will blow smoke to keep the Republicans in power in 2020, or die trying.

As it turns out, when a handful of multi billion dollar corporations control the news, and when their executives are profoundly contemptuous of democracy and its institutions, then the consequence is a press that is more outraged by Joe Biden’s wandering hands than by a president who instructs border guards to break the law and lie about it in court, or an Attorney General engaged in reckless obstruction and smears.

The New York Times—which helped to set the tone for the relentless media attack on Secretary Clinton in 2016— is already treating Barr’s demented and dangerous remarks with the same Vaseline-lensed deference the Times showed to Mr. Hitler and his chums some 85 years ago.

Apparently, the very rich old men who are bankrolling this horror show believe they’ve come up with the magic formula to get the fascism without the 50 million dead and the shattered cities: to get the prison camps without the death camps: to get the censorship and the paramilitary toughs maintaining public order, without the murders, rape squads, and other fascist games. Maybe they’re right.

But, yeah, Joe Biden sniffed someone’s hair and put his hands on their shoulders.

 

This Would be a Great Democracy if it Wasn’t for all the Voters.

by kara on January 18, 2019

 

It’s all fun and games until voters start voting.

How do Republicans respond to losing at the ballot? By stripping power from the state’s voters in an all out lame duck assault, that’s how.

Following the 2018 midterms, Republicans in several states decided that the problem with American democracy is that it allows for too much democracy, so to protect states from voters with bad ideas like popular sovereignty, they’re pursuing measures that would make it much harder for voter initiatives to ever get on the ballot. After all, this fall’s elections resulted in a whole bunch of voters stupidly electing Democrats, leaving Republicans to fix that in lame-duck sessions aimed at stripping power from the incoming Dems. And since voters in red states passed initiatives that clearly defied Republican wishes, then for the sake of good government, it’s time to knock that shit off, too.

All in all, Nov. 6 was a pretty good day for Michigan Democrats, who will enter office with a mandate for change after receiving the strong backing of the state’s voters. Democrats swept every one of their elected state executive offices, and voters passed progressive ballot measures by wide margins. Michigan’s Republicans have other plans, though. Just weeks after voters resoundingly rejected the GOP agenda in Michigan, the party brazenly attempted to steal power from incoming Democrats and pass a stunning wave of right-wing legislation during the states’ lame-duck legislative sessions.

Petition gatherers in Michigan collected sufficient signatures to place 3 proposals on the statewide ballot:

    1. to legalize marijuana
    2. to reform partisan gerrymandering
    3.  to expand ballot access 

All three of those proposals were opposed by the GOP, meaning they stood virtually no chance of being enacted by Michigan’s Republican-dominated Legislature (the body is so deeply in the hands of the GOP thanks in large part to an egregiously gerrymandered map). But each of the proposals proved extraordinarily popular among “the people”/Michigan voters. In November, all three were approved by overwhelming majorities.

Stung by the rebukes at the polls, outgoing Republican legislators scurried like rats to enact a bunch of bills meant to limit Democrat’s authority. The Michigan lege also took urgently needed action to make sure mere majorities don’t start thinking they deserve to make laws,

When initiatives to raise the minimum wage and guarantee sick leave got enough signatures to make it onto the ballot, the lege instead passed its own version of the laws, making the initiatives redundant and removing them from the ballot. Then after the election, Republicans in the lame-duck legislature simply gutted those laws by a simple majority. Isn’t that smart? Under Michigan law, overturning an initiative the voters had passed would have required a three-fourths majority, so that two-step trick by the R’s sure did short-circuit that silly “will of the people” nonsense. The founders surely had such ingenious fuckery in mind when they wisely instituted representative democracy, so the people could rest easy that Republicans in carefully gerrymandered districts would do the right thing for Republicans in carefully gerrymandered districts.

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by kara on January 14, 2019

I Think it’s Time to Accept the Fact that Sherman Blew it When he Didn’t Burn Everything Down in The South.

by kara on January 14, 2019

I want to point out that the Deplorables who support the President of the Wall are the same people who fought for slavery even though they themselves were not the patrician plantation owners. THEY FOUGHT TO KEEP BLACKS FOREVER ENSLAVED, and when the treasonous assholes lost, because they are LOSERS, they kept up the idea and thus Jim Crow and the KKK were born. And when that was addressed (although never fixed), they went after women. Because us uppity ladies should be making babies in the kitchen (and mind you, that is exactly what the Nazis wanted, too…they had a second KKK, (kinder, kuchen, and kirchen…children, kitchen, church).  These “people” also corrupted reconstruction (please read Eric Foner’s epic book on Reconstruction). No only was much of the reconstruction efforts in vain due to the efforts of white landowners, but the entire history was corrupted by white historians like those from the Dunning School who argued that blacks were not able to participate in voting or having freedom. It is really quite shocking.

Reading “Frederick Douglass” –  and Douglass himself makes all these exact points before the Civil War even started (SPOILER ALERT – looks like the North may be going to win).

Another in-depth look at the history if racism and how it really began and how it triumphed is “The Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One Drop Rule” by Frank W Sweet. *an interesting historical note: The East India Traders were totally turned on by the caste system of India…which had been started by the Aryans (which the Nazis were too stupid to realize Aryans were from steppes/Northern India) who were a nasty bunch of shits. The explorers/traders/assholes came back and were like “Yay, people darker than us aren’t even totally human and we can exploit and kill them at will”.

And food for thought: ;et’s take back the narrative and start calling the “Evangelicals” what they are – Vengeful Hate Cult – expose them, stop them, and send them PACKING instead of capitulation to them and buying into their bullshit lies and misnomers like “Moral Majority” “Values Voters”, “Good People”, or “Christians.”

We are only go to “win” this battle when we ADMIT and REDRESS the horror of slavery and the horror of hatred toward POC and total equality for ALL.

 

1958 TV Show Had Conman ‘Trump’ Selling Mystical ‘Wall’ To Hysterical Townspeople

by kara on January 10, 2019

reposted from talking points memo

Screenshot/CBS
By 
January 10, 2019 12:40 pm
.

The writer and animator Alex Hirsch on Thursday flagged a quirk of television history with an odd connection to present-day politics: In 1958, CBS aired an episode of the series “Trackdown” called “The End of the World,” in which a confidence man named Trump attempts to sell a western town a “wall” — in the form of supposedly mystical parasols — to protect them from the fake threat of a meteor shower

Snopes did the fact-checking legwork: In the episode, “Dr. Walter Trump, DU MC SSR” — or “Doctor of the Universe, Master of Cometry, Student of Stellar Reactions” — whips a western town into a frenzy by tricking its residents into believing they’ll be wiped out by a meteor shower before the day is done. 

As protection, he sells parasols with drawn-on mystical symbols, calling them a “wall” that can magically repel danger.

Eventually — despite Trump’s threat of a lawsuit — the show’s protagonist, Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman, reveals that Trump is a fraud who’s in cahoots with the town’s sheriff, and midnight passes without any meteor-related deaths. Trump ends up dead, shot by the sheriff in an attempt to cover up the scheme. 

The episode is full of relevant dialogue: “I bet it fits,” Gilman says at one point of the name “Trump.” Elsewhere, a judge warns the ranger: “I live here, I know these people pretty well, and right now there’s nothing in the world that can change their minds [about Trump] — and anybody who tries to could end up getting hurt. They’re not going to listen.”

“Well, what if he starts a panic?” Gilman responds. “It could happen.”

“Well sure, but you might as well try to spit out a forest fire,” the judge says, adding: “It’s funny how a big lie can make us all kids again.”

Later, after the narrator refers to Trump as “the high priest of fraud,” the conman delivers some hauntingly prescient dialogue in a speech to the town.

“I am the only one! Just me! I can build a wall around your homes that nothing will penetrate,” Trump says.

“What do we do?” a someone asks. “How do we save ourselves?”

“You ask: How do you build that wall?” Trump responds. “You ask, and I’m here to tell you.”

Gilman eventually interrupts: “You’re a liar, Trump!” Finally, as the scheme unfolds, fateful words from the ranger: “You’re under arrest, Trump.”

Snopes dug up a full version of the episode on YouTube.

I (Kara) watched it and it. does. not. disappoint. Watch it HERE

Robots that will save the most lives

by kara on November 27, 2018

 1. Driving Robot

2. Firehose Robot

3. Doctor/Nurse/EMT Robot

4. Police Robot

5. Balls and Strikes Robot

6. Invincible Take-All-The-Guns Robot

by kara on November 27, 2018

Republicans: How Was Your Life Under Obama?

by kara on November 23, 2018

 

Could you still ….Watch what you wanted on TV or at the movies? Yep.

Travel anywhere in the world you could afford? Yep.

Enjoy the best selection of foods of any grocery stores in the world? Yep.

Go to any church and worship any god you wanted? Yep.

Watch any weird porn you wanted on the Internet? Yep.

Speak out freely on the internet or in public? Yep.

Buy guns if you wanted them? Yep.

Take a walk in the park when you wanted? Yep.

Get health insurance even though you are old or had a chronic illness? Yep.

What exactly was the problem?

by kara on November 5, 2018

It is time that every decent human being in America understands that Republicans do not consider most of us as human. They simply don’t see us as their equals. It’s time we do the same.

Republicans are evil. We are not; we are the good ones.

Republicans are greedy. We are not; we understand the importance of the common good.

Republicans are racist. We are not.

Republicans are misogynist. We are not.

Republicans are xenophobic. We are not.

Republicans do not read. We do!

Republicans are Nazis. We punch Nazis in the face.

Republicans are sociopaths. We understand and value the concept of community.

Republicans are scared of everything. They are pussies. We are not.

Republicans are chickenhawks. We are not. More Democrats serve in the military than Republicans.

Republicans are hypocrites. We are not. When we say Fuck Ted Cruz we mean it.

Basically, Republicans Want Everyone Except Them To Die.

by kara on September 17, 2018

Conservatives have no clue who is going to mow their yards for them and no clue who is going to swab out their toilets, do their filthy laundry and work on their cars when they break down but they believe that once all of the non-republicans and non-whites are dead, ‘murika will be the perfect Utopia.

That craptastic lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act was the subject of a hearing at a federal courthouse in Fort Worth last week. And holy shitbeans, the judge hearing the case, US District Judge Reed O’Connor, sure sounds like he’s just DYING to get the chance to throw out a major law passed under Barack Obama, possibly in hopes that one day a fine bronze statue will be raised in his honor. It will be a statue of a poor person dying in the street after being ejected from an emergency room.

The lawsuit, brought by oft indicted, slow-eyed Texas AG Ken “I Be The Governor Next?” Paxton and a bunch of other Republican attorneys general, is based on a simple idea that should be so stupid that any judge would throw the case out, ideally while chuckling and imposing a fine for a frivolous lawsuit: Since the Supremes found the individual mandate was constitutional because Congress has the power to tax, the 2017 Tax Cut for Rich Fuckwads — which put the “tax” for not having insurance at “zero” — renders the entire law unconstitutional, because if there’s no tax on the individual mandate, it … can’t be called a tax, and so it is unconstitutional? (I guess?!) Like I said, it is ARE YOU FUCKIN KIDDING ME DUMB. That means no Medicaid expansion, no kids on parents’ insurance until the age of 26, no more exchanges, and especially, no more protections for preexisting conditions.

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