Yesterday on the Stephanie Miller show, a guy called in who claimed he was a life-long Union member and Democratic organizer, said he was an old white guy, the type of guy who is the backbone of the Dem party, who went on to say how all his neighbors were turning away from the Democratic party because of social issues. When pressed on which social issues, he said transgenderism and slave reparations for black people. Stephanie got rid of him pretty quickly, assuming, probably correctly, that he was astroturf-- a fake paid caller for the GOP. I mean, there is no serious proposal for slave reparations anywhere. Like the transgender scare, it's clearly a GOP-promoted scare campaign.

Assuming he is fake, and being pushed to call liberal radio programs to spread this message about social issues, what do you think was the point? To scare Dems away from supporting these issues? Just to scare Dems that they are losing voters? Like that is going to chance anyone's mind? And in this vein, why do we regularly see stupid stories about Democrats changing to voting Republican en masse, which I just refuse to believe given the awfulness of the current GOP and all their scandals.

It's also so dumb (which yes of course it is dumb, but that is the conservative way) to blame issues like transgender and LGBTQ on the Dem party, when it's a broader social issue and the only people politicizing this are fucking Republicans. And of course we know it's all just about scaring the conservative base and to distract them from the massive rip-off the GOP conducts on the government on the behalf of corporations and the super-rich.

That Townhall showed how truly awful his supporters are.

Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing terrorist who killed 168 people in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, cared about one issue above all others: guns. To him, guns were synonymous with freedom, and any government attempt to regulate them meant incipient tyranny.

...

Reading Toobin’s book, it’s startling to realize how much McVeigh’s cause has advanced in the decades since his 2001 execution. McVeigh, who was a member of the K.K.K. and harbored a deep resentment of women, hoped that blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building would inspire an army of followers to make war on the government. This didn’t happen immediately, although, as the historian Kathleen Belew has written, there was a wave of militia and white supremacist violence in the bombing’s aftermath. But today, an often-inchoate movement of people who share many of McVeigh’s views is waging what increasingly looks like a low-level insurgency against the rest of us.

Not all mass shootings are ideologically motivated — far from it. But when there is an ideology involved, it’s usually a far-right one. “All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds,” said a February report from the Anti-Defamation League. Sixty percent of these deaths came from two mass shootings, in Buffalo and Colorado Springs.

....
It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for a society allowing itself to be terrorized in the way we have. The normalization of both right-wing terrorism and periodic mass shootings by deranged loners is possible only because McVeigh’s views have been mainstreamed.

what a chilling reality

he puts out so many massive lies and ridiculous things in one minutes and just blabbers on, he is simply IMPOSSIBLE to fact check and yet he undoubtedly will fool a lot of people who don't know he is lying, don't know the details and will fall for his soft aw-shucks style of taking. I cannot take it, it drives me utterly insane to hear his lies and ridiculous statements.

I've seen a fair amount of Trump on Hal Sparks lately and I just can only handle a few minutes of it, even with Hal stopping it regularly and calling him out on his BS. Even Hal can't keep up with all the BS!

On rightwing media, he sounds just like every other dumb and dishonest pundit they put on, so it's nothing new. But no wonder it rots viewers brains.

Anyway, this dude is a danger.

https://twitter.com/HalSparks/status/1653882740012642304

Great piece
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/11/opinion/columnists/tennessee-house-nashville-shooting.html

I also keep my eyes on the South because the Republican strategy of disenfranchisement is a state-by-state strategy. It looks like judicial rule where they cannot win. Where they cannot win by judicial rule, they will rule by procedural theft. Where they cannot persuade voters to vote for them, they will persuade the candidate they voted for to become one of them. This Republican strategy of winning by losing can work in any state, but it is most brutally efficient in states where we consider nonwhite voters — especially Black voters — inherently illegitimate.

The South is not exceptionally racist. The South is quintessentially American in its racism. The distinction is clear in how, of the three representatives in question, Tennessee expelled the two Black men but the third, a white woman, held on to her seat. The strategies of disenfranchisement are clearest where the racial animus is strongest.

And so I watch the South to keep my eyes on the central casting of the American democratic imagination and to know where the script our country is writing is going. We are obsessed with the protagonist Trump. If he can overcome his legal troubles. If he can maintain his hold on the G.O.P.

I believe he will. I believe that he can. The only thing that can derail Trump is Trump. The story of avarice consuming a bottomless ego is almost biblical. But it’s not the story that we will look back on as the one that shaped our lives. That story is about historical forces, not character actors.

It discusses the Nashville shooting and the expulsions of the Justins. Also mentions Tricia Cotham switching parties in North Carolina, giving the GOP super majority control of the leg. Just disgraceful.

"The first footnote in the Kacsmaryk opinion staying the FDA's approval of mifepristone.

If you think the Dobbs "state-by-state" settlement is a lasting one, you're delusional. The endgoal is--and always has been--fetal personhood and the abolition of legal abortion in the U.S."

https://twitter.com/ProfMMurray/status/1644706213475614722?s=20

great stuff as usual

https://twitter.com/halsparks/status/1643014425048403968

1) the climate crisis and the urgent need to decarbonize the economy (see the latest IPCC report)

2) Republicans holding trump above the law and threatening law enforcement

3) the Trump/DeSantis/GOP war on women, black people and LGBTQ


WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE???

https://twitter.com/IAmPoliticsGirl/status/1627021496165228545

https://twitter.com/IAmPoliticsGirl/status/1627021496165228545

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