Month: July 2024

The Silicon Valley Would-Be Vice President

This guy was writing on Substack, but was one of the ones who really left when Nazis were not invited to go elsewhere. He is generous enough to invite readers to follow him to where he writes now, and even provides a free piece fairly often. This one came today. He’s pretty spot on.

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JD Vance is an obvious, bald-faced opportunist. It makes sense that Trump would pick him as his Vice Presidential candidate; they probably understand each other quite well.

It can’t have hurt that a bevy of tech billionaires told Trump to pick him, and it’s not unreasonable to assume they gated funding on that choice. Elon Musk has pledged to give $45 million a month to a PAC newly formed to back Trump; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, former Yammer founder David Sacks, and VC Chamath Palihapitiya have also raised money for the group. Eponymous Andreessen-Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pledged donations and Keith Rabois has also reportedly pledged a comparatively paltry $1 million. (The Winkelvoss twins are also donors, but I wouldn’t exactly call them Silicon Valley insiders.)

Andreessen explained why, saying that the future of America is at stake:

Biden’s proposal to tax unrealized capital gains is what Andreessen called “the final straw” that forced him to switch from supporting the current president to voting for Trump. If the unrealized capital gains tax goes into effect, startups may have to pay taxes on valuation increases. (Private companies’ appreciation is not liquid. However, the U.S. government collects tax in dollars.)

One could argue, of course, that the future of America is at stake. As The 19th reported about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s suggested plan for a next Trump administration whose authors include over 140 people who were a part of the last one:

Much of Project 2025 relates to gender, sexuality and race, aiming to end most all of the federal government’s efforts to achieve equity and even collect data that could be used to track outcomes across the public and private sectors.

The other sweeping changes it proposes include firing civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists, removing the Department of Education, gutting our already-insufficient climate change protections, reinstating the military draft, conducting sweeping immigration raids and mass deportations, and condemning more people to death sentences while making them swift enough to avoid retrial.

All this despite being on shaky legal ground:

Some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are divided about whether Trump can politicize the civil workforce to fire them at will, for example. And the plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally iffy.

Trump has lately distanced himself from the plan in public, but privately said something quite different at a Heritage Foundation dinner:

“This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do, and what your movement will do, when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

For his part, Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, said out loud on Steve Bannon’s podcast:

We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.

JD Vance is walking this line too. My employer, ProPublica, recently reported that he, among other things, believes that the Devil is real, and that he had some unpleasant things to say about trans people:

He said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and “point out the obvious,” including that “there are real biological, cultural, religious, spiritual distinctions between men and women.” He added, “I think that’s what the whole transgender thing is about, is like fundamentally denying basic reality.”

So, yes, all things considered, it feels a bit like America is in the balance.

What’s particularly bald about involvement from the Silicon Valley crowd is that they are, according to them, overlooking all of this and concentrating solely on their business interests. If policies like a tax on unrealized capital gains or tighter anti-trust actions are enacted, those investors may have to re-think some of their investment strategies.

For what it’s worth, those taxes are only applicable for individuals with a net worth of over $100M, with payments at an automatic minimum tax rate treated as prepayments against future realized gains. The effect could actually be to encourage startups to go public and realize their value sooner, which wouldn’t be a terrible thing for the ecosystem (but might limit the heights private valuations can reach). Given that people with that level of worth don’t usually make taxable income, this new levied tax on investment gains makes sense as a way to encourage the very wealthy to pay the same sorts of tax rates as the rest of us — but, clearly, Musk, Thiel, et al feel differently. (Invasive thought: where’s Sacks and Palihapitiya’s podcast co-host Jason Calacanis on this? Is he a sympathizer or just an enabler?)

Do tighter regulations and a new minimum tax for the wealthy risk the future of America, though? Maybe they have a different definition of America than I do. If, to them, it’s a place where you can make a bunch of money without oversight or accountability, then I can see how they might be upset. If, on the other hand, America is a place where immigrants are welcome and everyone can succeed, and where everyone has the freedom to be themselves, all built on a bedrock of infrastructure and support, then one might choose to take a different view. The tax proposal at hand is hardly socialism; it’s more like a correction. Even if you accept their premise, single-issue voting when the other issues include mass deportations and gutting public education is myopically self-serving, leave alone the barren inhumanity of leaving vulnerable communities out to dry.

Responses by prominent Republican supporters to the inclusion of a Sikh prayer in Punjabi in the Republican National Convention — one line reading, “in your grace and through your benevolence, we experience peace and happiness” — lay bare what the unhinged Christian nationalist contingent believes in:

Andrew Torba, CEO of the far-right social media platform Gab, ranted to his 400,000 followers on X, “Last night you saw why Christian Nationalism must be exclusively and explicitly Christian. No tolerance for pagan false gods and the synagogue of Satan.” Republican Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers seemed to agree. “Christians in the Republican party nodding silently along to a prayer to a demon god is shameful,” he posted.

From my perspective, there are no upsides to a Trump win. Even if you accept the idea that Project 2025 has nothing to do with him (which, as I’ve discussed, is laughable), his own self-published Agenda 47 for his next administration is similarly horrible, and includes provisions like sending the National Guard into cities, destroying climate crisis mitigations, mass deportations, and removing federal funding for any educational institution that dares to teach the history of race in America. It also includes a version of Project 2025’s call to fire civil servants who are seen as disloyal. JD Vance wants to end no-fault divorce(ironically, given his running mate), trapping people in abusive relationships. The effects on the judicial system from his first administration will be felt for generations; a second administration will be similarly seismic. He will gut support for vulnerable communities. I have friends who will directly suffer as a result of his Presidency; he will create an America that I do not want to bring my son up in.

Silicon Valley is supposed to invent the future. That’s what’s so inspiring about it: for generations, it’s created new ways of sharing and working that have allowed people to communicate and work together wherever they are. These new moves make it clearer than ever that a portion of it has never believed in that manifesto; that it is there solely to establish itself as a new set of power-brokers, trying to remake the world in their own image. The rest of us need to oppose them with our full voices and everything we can muster.

The Silicon Valley Would-Be Vice President

Ben (the writer) says, “I’m writing about the intersection of the internet, media, and society. Sign up to my newsletter to receive every post and a weekly digest of the most important stories from around the web.”

It’s OK to Break the Law

The presumptive major party nominee for president has been convicted of a felony. He and his party don’t believe it should apply to him. That same individual nominee for the most powerful office in the world has committed fraud, stealing from his charity. He as committed fraud and cheated students hoping to learn to be a entrepreneur, solidly implanting the understanding that real business acumen comes only be defrauding the customer. This same presumptive major party nominee for president has been shown to have allowed himself to be bribed by governments of the world, and the party has shown itself to be ok with that. The same individual has removed secret documents from the government, refused to return them despite repeated requests, then claimed victimhood when those secret documents were recovered despite his obstruction and treason. His party is ok with that.

This same party wants to make America great again, and sees that nominee as the man for the job.

Come to find out, the presumptive nominee of the other major party is old.

13 DANGEROUS Old Car Features That No Longer Exist!

Explore the dangers of old car features in this captivating YouTube video titled “13 DANGEROUS Old Car Features That No Longer Exist!” From the 1950s to the 1980s in the USA, discover the safety hazards that were once common in vehicles. Watch now to learn about these obsolete features and how car safety has evolved over the years.

Fact-checking night 1 of the Republican National Convention

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/07/15/politics/fact-check-night-one-republican-national-convention

The Republican National Convention kicked off Monday night in Milwaukee.

Here are some of the most noteworthy falsehoods from night one of the RNC.

Trump makes false claims about election fraud in RNC video

The Republican National Convention played a video in which former President Donald Trump urged Republicans to use “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats,” including voting by mail. 20788998 58:01 Trump relentlessly disparaged mail-in voting during the 2020 election, falsely claiming it was rife with fraud, and he has continued to sharply criticize it during the current campaign

But Trump’s comments in the convention video also included some of his regular false claims about elections. After claiming he would “once and for all secure our elections” as president, Trump again insinuated the 2020 election was not secure, saying, “We never want what happened in 2020 to happen again.” 20788998 57:44 And he said, “Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly, it’s the only thing they do well.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are nonsense – slightly vaguer versions of his usual lies that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen and that Democrats are serial election cheaters. The 2020 election was highly secure; Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232; there is no evidence of voter fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state; and there is no basis for claiming that election cheating is the only thing at which Trump’s opponents excel.

The Trump administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a post-election November 2020 statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

 From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Sen. Blackburn claims Biden administration hired 85,000 new IRS agents

Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee claimed in her speech Monday that the Biden administration has hired 85,000 new Internal Revenue Service agents to “harass hardworking Americans.”

Facts First: This claim is false. 

The Inflation Reduction Act – which Congress passed in 2022 without any Republican votes – provided an about $80 billion, 10-year investment to the IRS. The agency plans to hire tens of thousands of IRS employees with that money – but only some will be IRS agents who conduct audits and investigations. Many people will be hired for non-agent roles, such as customer service representatives. And a significant number of the hires are expected to fill the vacant posts left by retirements and other attrition, not take newly created positions.

The 85,000 figure comes from a 2021 Treasury Department report that estimated the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees – not solely enforcement agents – over the course of a decade with a nearly $80 billion investment.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco 

Sen. Katie Britt on Americans working two jobs

Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama suggested in her speech on Monday that during President Joe Biden’s term, Americans are having to take on two jobs to deal with the cost of living.

“With President Trump, the tough choice was which job offer to accept, now it’s which second job to take just to pay the bills,” she said.

Facts First:  The number of workers who hold multiple jobs as a percentage of total employment has never gone above the highest level under Trump, according to Labor Department data.

While it’s true that the annual inflation rate reached its highest level in more than four decades under Biden (in June 2022, though it has since declined), Americans aren’t necessarily taking on two jobs more than usual to deal with it. In fact, the number of Americans holding multiple jobs as a share of all employed workers was below levels seen before the Covid-19 pandemic throughout 2021 and 2022. It has increased over the past several months, reaching 5.2% in June. The share of workers with multiple jobs hasn’t gone above 5.3% since the Great Recession.

From CNN’s Bryan Mena 

North Carolina gubernatorial candidate’s economic claims

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, now running for governor, made a series of economic claims in his speech. One about the Biden era was misleading, while another about the Trump era touted pre-pandemic statistics without acknowledging that when Trump left office the economy was in much worse shape.

Robinson said that under Biden’s administration, “grocery prices have skyrocketed, and gas has nearly doubled.”

Facts First: It is true that grocery prices have jumped by over 20% since Biden was sworn in, but gas prices aren’t double what they were when he took office.

The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.52 on Monday, according to AAA. When Biden was inaugurated, the national average was $2.39.

Robinson also claimed that while Trump was president, unemployment was “at a historic low.” That was certainly true prior to the pandemic. For instance, in February 2020, the nation’s unemployment rate was at 3.5%, the lowest since the late 1960s.
By comparison, the average monthly unemployment rate over the past decade was 4.8%.
But when Trump left office, it was at 6.4%, far from historic lows.

From CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s misleading claim about Biden-era job growth

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia claimed of Democrats: “They claim that our economy is thriving, yet hundreds of thousands of American-born workers lost their jobs these past few years.”

Facts First: This is misleading at best. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that the number of American-born workers with jobs has grown significantly during President Joe Biden’s administration. About 130.9 million American-born workers were employed in June, an increase of nearly 4.7 million since June 2021, shortly after Biden took office. (This data is not seasonally adjusted, so we have to look at the same month in each year for an accurate comparison. In January 2021, the month Biden was sworn in, about 123 million American-born workers were employed.)

There is always churn in the labor market, so it’s certainly possible that hundreds of thousands of individual American-born workers lost their jobs during this period – but contrary to Greene’s insinuation, there have been far greater gains than losses under Biden for American-born workers as a group.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Tami Luhby 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Transgender Day of Visibility

Greene said while attacking Democrats in her convention speech that “the establishment in Washington” held Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter this year.

“They promised normalcy and gave us Transgender Visibility Day on Easter Sunday,” the Georgia Republican said.

Facts first: This claim needs context. Transgender Day of Visibility has been held annually on March 31 since it was started in 2009 as a day of awareness to celebrate the successes of transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the first day of spring and can change year to year. The holiday happened to fall on March 31 in 2024.

Responding to Republicans criticizing President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in an April 1 briefing said she was “surprised by the misinformation” surrounding Easter and Transgender Day of Visibility falling on the same day.

“Every year, for the past several years, on March 31, Transgender Day of Visibility is marked. And as we know — for folks who understand the calendar and how it works, Easter falls on different Sundays every year. And this year, it happened to coincide with Transgender Visibility Day.  And so, that is the simple fact,” she said.

From CNN’s Jack Forrest 

RNC video falsely claims Trump signed largest tax cuts ever

A video played at the Republican National Convention featured a narrator making the claim that Trump “gave us the largest tax cuts in history.”

Facts First: This is false. Analyses have found that Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was not the largest in history, either in percentage of gross domestic product or inflation-adjusted dollars.

The act made numerous permanent and temporary changes to the tax code, including reducing both corporate and individual income tax rates.

In a report released in June, the federal government’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office looked at the size of past tax cuts enacted between 1981 and 2023. It found that two other tax cut bills have been bigger – former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 package and legislation signed by former President Barack Obama that extended earlier tax cuts enacted during former President George W. Bush’s administration.

The CBO measured the sizes of tax cuts by looking at the revenue effects of the bills as a percentage of gross domestic product – in other words, how much federal revenue the bill cuts as a portion of the economy – over five years. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut and Obama’s 2012 tax cut extension were 3.5% and 1.7% of GDP, respectively.

Trump’s 2017 tax cut, by contrast, was estimated to be about 1% of GDP.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit, found in 2017 that the framework for the Trump tax cuts would be the fourth largest since 1940 in inflation-adjusted dollars and the eighth largest since 1918 as a percentage of gross domestic product.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Republican chair falsely claims Middle East was ‘at peace’ four years ago

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said in his speech on Monday: “Four years ago, Europe and the Middle East were at peace.”

Facts First: Whatley’s claim is false. Whatever the merits of the Abraham Accords that Trump’s administration helped to negotiate, in which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel (Morocco and Sudan followed), there was still lots of unresolved armed conflict around the Middle East four years ago in mid-2020 and when Trump left office in early 2021.

The list notably included the civil war in Yemen; the civil war in Syria; and the conflicts between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, between Israel and Hezbollah on its border with Lebanon, between Israel and Syria, and what former State Department official Aaron David Millercalled “the war between the wars between Israel and Iran on air, land and sea.” Also, the US, its allies and civilians continued to be attacked in an unstable Iraq.

“It’s a highly inaccurate statement,” Miller, who worked on Mideast peace negotiations while in government and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said last fall, when Trump himself made a similar claim about having achieved peace in the Middle East.

Dana El Kurd, senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC think tank, also called that claim “false” when Trump made it. She said in a November email: “The Abraham Accords did not achieve peace in the Middle East. In fact, violence escalated in Israel-Palestine in the aftermath of the Accords (using any metric you can think of – death tolls, settlement violence, etc).”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

RNC video attacks Biden with two-year-old gas price figure

The Republican National Convention featured a video attacking Biden over the price of gas. But the video misleadingly deployed out-of-date figures as if they were current.

A narrator claimed: “When President Trump left office, gas cost only $2.20. Under Biden and Harris, gas skyrocketed to the highest price in history, over five bucks a gallon.” Later in the video, a young man said, “Within my first year of driving, I’m having to deal with an average of $5.03 across the nation,” and a woman said, “It’s impossible to pay $5.03. We need to care about our people better than that.”

Facts First: These claims about Biden-era gas prices are two years out of date. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.52 on Monday, according to the AAA. The national average did, under Biden, hit a record high of more than $5 per gallon – about $5.02, according to AAA data – but that happened in June 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a global spike in oil prices. The RNC videos offered no indication that the national average has since fallen substantially.

Also, the national average on the day Trump left office in January 2021 was about $2.39 per gallon, not $2.20, though it was lower than $2.20 in some states.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

RNC video doesn’t mention Trump was president during one of the years Americans’ incomes dropped

A video played during the Republican National Convention, which attacked Biden’s handling of the economy, featured a narrator saying, “The Wall Street Journal has reported today that Americans’ incomes have gone down three straight years.”

Facts First: This needs context. The RNC video left out an inconvenient fact from the Wall Street Journal report that was published in 2023: one of the three straight years in which inflation-adjusted median household income went down was 2020, when Trump was president. The Covid-19 pandemic played a major role in the decline, but the ad failed to explain that not all of the three years were under Biden.

Real median household income fell from $78,250 in 2019 to $76,660 in 2020 (all under Trump), then edged down to $76,330 in 2021 (mostly under Biden) and fell more substantially to $74,580 in 2022 (all under Biden). Figures for 2023 and 2024-to-date are not available.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

RNC video cites outdated inflation figure

Attacking Biden’s handling of the economy, the Republican National Convention featured a video in which a narrator said, “America has reached the highest inflation in 40 years.”

Facts First: This claim is two years out of date. The year-over-year inflation rate in June 2022, about 9.1%, was indeed the highest since late 1981, between 40 and 41 years prior. But inflation has declined sharply since that Biden-era peak, and the most recent available rate, for June 2024, was about 3.0% – a rate that, the Biden presidency aside, was exceeded as recently as 2011.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

View on CNN
 
 
 

To follow up on reports about OK public schools-

It’s dated a few days ago, but it only made my phone stream today. I don’t usually read a lot of hard news on the phone; I like my desktop. Anyway. This looks like fun, especially reading that final comment from the OSDE office. 😈

Report: Norman Public Schools will not follow Walters’ attempted Bible mandate

by: Spencer Humphrey/KFOR

Posted: Jul 13, 2024 / 06:36 AM CDT

Updated: Jul 12, 2024 / 10:17 PM CDT

NORMAN, Okla. (KFOR) — Norman Public Schools will not require its teachers to teach from the Bible, despite a recent memorandum from State Superintendent Ryan Walters attempting to require them to do so, according to comments made by the district’s superintendent in a recent report.

In a report published by the Norman Transcript on Friday, Norman Public Schools (NPS) Superintendent Nick Migliorino is quoted saying NPS will not follow guidance laid out in a recent memo from State Superintendent Ryan Walters, in which Walters told districts teachers would be required to incorporate the Bible into their lessons.

OKLAHOMA NEWS: Oklahoma teacher and local reverend express concerns about Ryan Walters’ Bible mandate

“Effective immediately, all Oklahoma schools are required to incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support into the curriculum across specified grade levels,” the June 27 memorandum from Walters said.

Migliorino told the Norman Transcript, NPS does not plan to follow that memorandum.

“I’m just going to cut to the chase on that. Norman Public Schools is not going to have Bibles in our classrooms, and we are not going to require our teachers to teach from the Bible,” Migliorino told the Transcript. “The standards are clear and our curriculum is very clear. And we’re not going to deviate from that. I don’t know. I’m just going to be direct on that one.”

Migliorino went on to tell the newspaper NPS will continue to follow the legal standards already in place regarding usage of the Bible in school.

OKLAHOMA NEWS: Several religious leaders tell Supt. Walters to keep religion out of classrooms

He said that means Norman schools will continue to have copies of the Bible available for students to read or for teachers to incorporate into lessons if they choose, but they will not make it a requirement.

“We’re gonna follow the law, we’re going to provide a great opportunity for our students, we’re going to do right by our students and right by our teachers, and we’re not going to have Bibles in our classrooms,” he told the Transcript.

“It’s comforting that Norman Public Schools wants to follow the law and wants to follow protocols and isn’t going to follow a rogue executive edict from a state superintendent that doesn’t respect the law,” State Senator Mary Boren (D-Norman) told News 4 on Friday.

Boren said Walters likes to talk a big game — but it’s just that.

OKLAHOMA NEWS: Walters chooses Project 2025 co-author, other conservative activists to draft social studies curriculum for Oklahoma public schools

“He doesn’t even have executive power. I mean, he doesn’t, he doesn’t get to do an executive order that has legal impact on local school districts,” Boren said. “Legally, even though he can print all the paper he wants to, it doesn’t have the backing of the Constitution, doesn’t have the backing of state statute.”

A spokesperson for Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond told News 4 in June that state law “already explicitly allows Bibles in the classroom and enables teachers to use them in instruction” if they choose, but it does not require teachers to use them.

News 4 reached out to the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) Friday to get Walters’ response to Migliorino’s comments asserting NPS will not require teachers to teach the Bible.

“Oh yes they will,” is all OSDE spokesperson Dan Isett told News 4 in response.

https://kfor.com/news/report-norman-public-schools-will-not-follow-walters-attempted-bible-mandate/

Why you shouldn’t vote for Trump, according to JD Vance

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/7/16/2254701/-Why-you-shouldn-t-vote-for-Trump-according-to-JD-Vance?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_4&pm_medium=web

I want thank PERSONNELENTE whose  post I got the link from.  Link below.   I hate the infighting from Democrats tearing Biden apart.  He is old, but he has great ideas.   The time to get someone else was back a year or more ago.  Plus all these drop Biden people can not agree on who should replace him.  If they try to pass over Harris then it is an automatic win tRump.   We have to remember who we are facing, it is tRump we must defeat, not Biden.  Hugs.  Scottie

Some Thoughts On Trump

Kaili Joy Gray, author

by Kaili Joy Gray
Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday, July 16, 2024 at 11:58:07a EDT
 
CINCINNATI, OH - MAY 3: Republican U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance speaks to supporters after winning the primary, at an election night event at Duke Energy Convention Center on May 3, 2022 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Vance, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, narrowly won over former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, according to published reports. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate
 

Donald Trump announced Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate on Monday. The following article is composed of direct quotes from Vance about Trump, given in interviews, op-eds, tweets, and text messages.

I’m a “never Trump” guy. I never liked him.1

 

I don’t know who I’m gonna vote for. I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains.2 I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd.3

Trump instead offers a political high, a promise to “Make America Great Again” without a single good idea regarding how.4 [His] promises are the needle in America’s collective vein. … Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.5 Whether he wins or not, people are going to wake up and realize these problems are still there.6

Without some recognition that some of these problems in our community are not the fault of other people, they’re not going to be solved by a Mexican border wall or better trade deals with China. Without some recognition along those lines, I don’t believe these problems are ever truly going to get better.7

 

And if you think, as I do, that Donald Trump doesn’t necessarily have a good message either, that’s maybe not the best approach to politics. It’s not how you win these folks over. And if you’re worried about them being racist now, when you push them away and push them to somebody like Trump, you’re only going to make the problem worse.8

But I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire [Republican] Party has only itself to blame. We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect. … I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?9

The other big problem I have with Trump is that he has dragged down our entire political conversation.10 [He] is changing the way people think about other groups of people in a very negative way.11 [T]here is definitely an element of [his] support that has its basis in racism or xenophobia.12

A lot of people think Trump is just the first to appeal to the racism and xenophobia that were already there, but I think he’s making the problem worse.13 There are people who are drawn to Trump because he says racially insensitive things.14 [He] still hasn’t apologized for suggesting that a disproportionate share of Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals.15

People listen to what their political leaders are telling them, and my view is both that Trump is tapping into some racially ugly attitudes, but also that he is leading people to racially ugly attitudes. … [He] is exploiting something but he’s also leading the white working class to a very dark place.16 His rallies may be cathartic, as he screams and yells at conjured enemies, but he offers no solutions. His entire candidacy is an exercise in pointing the finger at someone else. In pointing that finger so repeatedly and enthusiastically, Donald Trump has debased our entire political culture.17

I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.18 [He] makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us.19

Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.20

 

Andrew Mangan contributed research to this piece.

 

 When Hatred of the Left Becomes Love for Putin

AZspot

“What’s more, the grievance and resentment at the heart of Trumpist nationalism in America is in some ways quite similar to the mentality of Putinist nationalism in Russia: One obsesses over losing the culture war and being disrespected by the “elites”; the other, over losing the Cold War and being disrespected by the West. Perhaps this explains other similarities in the two mindsets, from the penchant for provocation and in-your-face defiance of norms to the affinity for conspiracy theories. Too many American rightists look at the Putin regime and see kindred spirits.”

Reading comics over lunch

This is me and Corky. She’s got a grudge because she’s on a food strike and is hungry, and I gather from that that she believes I’m not dressing up her food well enough. This being the 3d day of her strike, she gets straight food and nothing else until she eats it. And she will, but she won’t like me until after she eats.

Foolish Mortals by Tom Horacek for July 18, 2024

Foolish Mortals Comic Strip for July 18, 2024

https://www.gocomics.com/foolish-mortals/2024/07/18

Ohio and Oklahoma: Two States Where Public Education Is Being Undermined by Far-Right Ideologues

Ohio and Oklahoma: Two States Where Public Education Is Being Undermined by Far-Right Ideologues

Thanks to politicians are poody heads   for the link.  Their link below.  Destroying public education has been a goal of the right for a long time.  They want to make it for profit and use it for public indoctrination in both right wing ideology and in the Christian religion.   The one thing they don’t want to use school for is an educated public.  The well off do not send their kids to public school.  They want the public school to educate workers to follow orders and not to think for themselves.  Hugs.  Scottie 

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Ohio Senate President, Matt Huffman has been trying to hide behind the gerrymandered power of the Ohio GOP to avoid being deposed in court about the lobbyists he talked with privately as the Ohio Senate was getting ready to insert an especially lavish, last minute expansion of EdChoice vouchers into the state budget bill in June of 2023.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Laura Hancock explains: “A judge can’t force Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman to answer lawyers’ questions about which private school lobbyists he speaks to outside of legislative chambers, the Republican has argued before the Ohio Supreme Court.” Huffman doesn’t want to comply with a subpoena to testify in the case of the Vouchers Hurt Ohio, brought by 200 school districts to demonstrate that private school tuition vouchers violate the provisions of the Ohio Constitution. Hancock continues, referring to the step Huffman took to discourage school districts from joining the lawsuit: “Huffman’s battle has lasted over a year, and even included a request from Huffman during last year’s state budget season that every school district provide the legislature and Ohio Auditor Keith Faber the amount of money they’re spending on the litigation…. Huffman believes that a portion of the Ohio Constitution that privileges lawmakers’ speech and debate from questioning applies not just to speech and debate on the Senate floor but to all discussion on bills…”

And the gerrymandered legislature’s attempt to wield power isn’t limited to trying to avoid testifying in court about the voucher expansion.  Marilou Johanek just penned another bombshell Ohio Capital Journal column about the debate last week as the legislature finished up work for the summer and autumn:  “Nobody, but showboating extremists in the Ohio legislature, gives a damn about which school bathroom is used by a minuscule number of transgender students… Same goes for the nonsense cooked up in the Ohio Senate to wield an authoritarian hammer over the state’s highly regarded colleges and universities. It’s a kneejerk response to a long-running Fox News narrative about leftist indoctrination ruining higher ed.  The MAGA Republican fever dream to own campus libs by censoring them lives in the Senate bill stalled in the Ohio House that nobody—except gerrymandered ideologues—wants or needs…. It doesn’t improve life for students or faculty and threatens to make it worse with tyrannical rule over great academic institutions.”

The best one can say is both of these bills have been passed by only one chamber and can’t be acted on again until the legislature reconvenes for a lame duck session right after the November election.

But Ohio’s GOP dictatorship pales compared what’s happening this month in Oklahoma—the state where, The Oklahoman‘s Murray Evans reports, “Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters sent a letter to state school districts… ordering them to incorporate the Bible ‘as an instructional support into the curriculum’ for grades 5 through 12, citing its importance as a historical document.  ‘Adherence to this mandate is compulsory,’  Walters’ letter read…. ‘Immediate and strict compliance is expected.’…. Walters announcement came two days after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that a contract between the Statewide Virtual School Charter Board and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation’s first religious-based charter school, violated both the state and U.S. Constitutions and state law.”

Evans provides evidence that Walter’s new order does not seem to represent the will of the voters. In 2016, they rejected “by more than 200,000 votes,” a state constitutional amendment to remove Section 5, Article 2 of the Oklahoma Constitution, “which states, ‘No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.’”

It is hard to understand why Oklahoma’s state school superintendent is prioritizing mandating the insertion of Bible teaching into the public schools when, as in Ohio, needed school funding and other immediate issues for the state’s public schools are apparent. For years, for example, we have read about teachers leaving Oklahoma for nearby Texas, where teachers’ salaries are higher. In the most recent in a series of reports tracking teachers’ salaries, the Economic Policy Institute showed that in Oklahoma, the disparity between the salaries of teachers and other comparably trained professionals is forth largest in the nation. The only states where teachers’ salaries are more inadequate are Colorado, Arizona, and Virginia.

The President and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rachel Laser released the following statement about Ryan Walter’s act to command Bible teaching in all of Oklahoma’s public schools: “Public schools are not Sunday schools… This is textbook Christian Nationalism. Walters is abusing the power of his public office to impose his religious beliefs on everyone else’s children…  Christian Nationalists and their lawmaker allies want to replace school counselors with religious chaplains, allow teachers and coaches to pray with students, teach Creationism in science classes, and ban books and censor curricula that feature LGBTQ+ people and racial and religious minorities.”

Two sociologists, Philip S. Gorski at Yale University and Samuel L. Perry at the University of Oklahoma, define the mythology of white Christian nationalism in their excellent book, The Flag and the Cross: “White Christian nationalism is a ‘deep story’ about America’s past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is, but also what it it should be…  America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on ‘Christian principles.’ The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from ‘un-American’ influences both inside and outside our borders.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 3-4)

Gorski and Perry conclude: “White Christian nationalism is our term for the ethno-traditionalism among many white Americans that conflates racial, religious, and national identity (the deep story) and pines for cultural and political power that demographic and cultural shifts have increasingly threatened…. (T)he term Christian in white Christian nationalism is often far more akin to a dog whistle that calls out to an aggrieved tribe than a description of the content of one’s faith.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 44)

In an opinion piece for CNN, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, Amanda Tyler succinctly defines how Christian nationalists like Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters, “threaten the careful balance worked out over more than half a century by the courts, presidential administrations from both parties and a diverse set of interest groups about how best to recognize the religious freedom rights of students, teachers and administrators in our pluralistic public schools.  These recent developments are… just the latest examples of a concerted strategy to inject the political ideology of Christian nationalism into public education. Christian nationalism, which merges Christian and American identities, relies on a false narrative of the U.S. as a ‘Christian nation’—a country founded by Christians and for Christians. Such mythology betrays our history and constitutional framework, which created a separation between the institutions of religion and government so that all religions could flourish without the state’s control.”

 
 

Tenacious D’s Trump shocker

So, I enjoy Jack Black’s talent, however he applies it; he’s multi-talented. I’ve read headlines this week, and yesterday afternoon during a jog, I decided to read one of the stories about something the band Tenacious D said post-the Don shooting. I’m going to put it in here, just for general comment. I’ll add mine at the bottom. If you click through to the page, there are a couple of vids, and a photo or 2 I didn’t copy.

Tenacious D’s Trump shocker upends a career of perfectly judged musical comedy

Dave Simpson

Jack Black and Kyle Gass’s duo are on hiatus after an off-colour comment about the Trump shooting – a rare misstep after years of arena-filling antics

Is this the end of Jack Black’s spoof rock band Tenacious D? It could be, after his bandmate Kyle Gass’s comments on Sunday led his more famous partner to cancel their world tour and announce “all future creative plans are on hold”.

The band were midway through a show in Sydney when Black suggested his bandmate make a wish for his birthday. “Don’t miss Trump next time,” Gass responded, apparently referring to the attempted assassination of the former US president the day before. Both have long been critical of Trump, but Black seems to have quickly realised the joke had crossed a line. “I would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence in any form,” he later said in a statement, claiming to have been “blindsided” by the comment.

For his part, the equally mortified Gass wrote: “The line I improvised Sunday night in Sydney was highly inappropriate, dangerous and a terrible mistake. I don’t condone violence in any kind, in any form, against anyone. What happened [the shooting] was a tragedy, and I’m incredibly sorry for my severe lack of judgement.”

If this is indeed the end, it’s a sad and sorry demise for a partnership which always seemed to know exactly where to draw the line. Their shows may long have been littered with F-bombs, references to sexual deviancy, drug abuse, inflatable Satans and a parody of a power ballad titled Fuck Her Gently, but it’s always been in good fun and there’s never been anything actively, properly outrageous. Equally, as Gass’s comment about improvisation suggests, what makes this howler so out of character is that their stage routines are usually meticulously scripted with the same precision they bring to the visuals (giant robots, dragons and all) and the music.

Anyone who’s seen a Tenacious D show will know that they weren’t just a great spoof rock band, but a fantastic rock band in themselves. Partly, this was because, like This Is Spinal Tap, Black and Gass had a deep knowledge and indeed affection for the subject they were sending up.

Their gigantic rubber demon was based on 80s rocker Dio’s real-life 18ft dragon, Denzil. Their “sound crew solo” drily went “check, 1-2”. From Black’s operatic metal vocal to their exquisite guitar duelling, the musicianship has always been impeccable and while their songwriting wasn’t always as good, their best epic anthems could almost have been lost rock classics themselves (had they not been full of lyrics about beasts and farting). The masterful Tribute retold the meet-the-devil-at-the-crossroads myth so well they created the “greatest song in the world”, promptly forgetting how it went (hence the “tribute”). Such masterly, knowing tomfoolery enjoyed the respect of “real-life” peers from Beck to Pearl Jam. Dave Grohl was certainly in on the joke when the oft-called “nicest guy in rock” agreed to star as Satan in the video for Tribute, and then also the 2006 Tenacious D film The Pick of Destiny.

At the heart of their art was a deep, decades-long friendship between Black and Gass, which produced such wonderful chemistry onstage. Having met as struggling actors who formed the group in 1994 as a joke, before films such as High Fidelity or School of Rock turned Black into a superstar, their bond was strong enough to survive Black’s career upturn. The actor-singer once knowingly compared the duo to “Simon and Garfunkel and Black Sabbath mixed together” and indeed, just as Art Garfunkel’s voice needed Paul Simon’s songs and vice versa, Black’s comic timing benefited hugely from the classically trained Gass’s formidable abilities as a musician and comedic foil.

two men with guitars performing
Tenacious D performing at the AO Arena in Manchester in May. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Their fortunes certainly waxed and waned – The Pick of Destiny flopped at the box office – but 2012 album Rize of the Fenix hit the US and UK Top 10 and this latest tour returned them to arenas around the world. On their recent British dates, audiences chanted “D!” and sang along with every word. One of the funniest bits was a sketch in which Gass dramatically “left the band”, leading Black to respond with a heartfelt ballad titled Dude (I Totally Miss You). Only time will tell whether the seemingly now genuinely estranged pair will get the band back together.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jul/16/jack-black-tenacious-d-kyle-gass-trump?CMP=share_btn_url

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So, first, I can easily see how this comment could escape a person’s head in that particular moment, aloud, before the person could get ahold of it. I’m not certain, though, because I’m not a popular performer, whether the additional exhilaration of performing would make it easier or more difficult to get ahold of a phrase than, say, me in a conversation with people who may or may not disagree with me. Obviously, as anti-gun as I am, it’s not something I’m going to say, and I don’t recall it occurring to me at the time of the shooting, even in the dark-humored part of me that does exist. But I’m not seeing why this is so bad for this band, really. They ought to do a few fundraisers for gun control/mass shooting locations/things like that, I think, but I’m not sure this is go-away-and-never-show-their-faces-again bad, especially since it was a single sentence, not a tirade, and there was an ASAP apology that seems sincere. Others’s mileage may vary, so let’s talk.