JHB
JHB's Journal50 years of radical conservatives working to overthrow the New Deal...
...heck, to overthrow every populist economic and regulatory measure enacted since the late 19th century.
They want the Gilded Age back. And they spent decades pushing hot buttons to get people white-hot mad about single-issues or small clusters of issues so that the people who had their buttons pushed would prioritize those things when voting. And conservative politicians would pay lip service to those issues while working to tear down every measure under government control that pushes against wealthy people using that wealth as leverage to run roughshod over anybody who gets in their way.
They turned the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Salome. Salome is the base, and she grew increasingly pissed that the establishment Herods weren't bringing her the heads she'd asked for.
They turned the Party of Abe into the Party of Ahab. Ahab is the base, who if their chests were cannons they'd shoot their hearts out like cannonballs to trigger the libs.
Trump is the guy who promised them all-you-can-eat White Whale steak dinners for life (and the hagfish will pay for it). And blames the Deep State for the dearth of heads.
Somewhere in the Kremlin: "Watch. This is how it is done." said Mr. P. ...
"From his confidential schedule, right now he is in a meeting with that English hag," he said as he touched a contact on his phone.
"White House switchboard. How may I help you."
"This is Vladimir Putin. I would like to speak to the president. It is a matter of some small urgency, or I would have gone through more standard channels."
"I'm sorry sir, he's in a closed meeting right now. I will see to it he is informed as soon as possible."
"Thank you, my dear. I appreciate your diligence. May you have a good day."
After the disconnection, he slid his chair back and, one by one, swung his legs onto his desk and leaned back. "In about 15 minutes, you will hear the sound of a puppy peeing himself," he said with a smile.
Kenosha disinfo protection: the alleged molotov ain't one
RWers are pointing to a cell phone video from Kenosha to claim the shooter there was acting in self-defense after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at him.
They're either lying directly or heedlessly repeating a lie. As usual.
Here's a copy of the video. At the 9 s mark, at the center of the screen to the right of the bicyclist in the foreground, the first person to his right is the soon-to-be shooter. The second person winds up and throws something at him. It appears bright thanks to reflecting the lights on the building behind them. That's the object that is the alleged Molotov Cocktail.
However, here is the object, mere seconds later, from a different angle and closer than the video above.
No flames, no smoke.
Here's a cleaner view from the alternative angle, from even closer, as the cameraman was moving toward the shooting victim (this is also from a video, but I haven't found a copy I can post here). It isn't anything that was on fire. Nor a puddle of liquid that hadn't caught. The white part sticking up looks like pages, or a wrapper that had come undone; it's too indistinct to make out clearly, but it's an object, not flame or anything. It ain't no molotov.
Destroying USPS has been a Koch/Libertarian project since the '70s
https://truenorthresearch.org/2020/06/charles-koch-targets-the-postal-service-bankrupt-privatization/Lisa Graves June 18, 2020
The Postal Service is the most popular institution in America. So why are some of the people who represent us in Washington, DC, willing to kill the most trusted brand and most popular institution in America?
One man, Charles Koch, has played a singular role.
He has used his vast fortune to fertilize theories that were once at the far fringes of society–like abolishing the Postal Service. And he has amplified his anti-government agenda through special interest groups he has grown.
The truth is that Koch, one of the richest men in America and the world, has been helping to fund and fuel efforts to kill the Postal Service and other public institutions dating back to the 1970s, though few Americans know it. Here is a quick timeline on this:
1970s Charles Koch stakes Robert Poole and Reason magazine and the Reason Foundation as they promote attacks on the Postal Service that endorse a for-profit postal system and “privatization” generally.
1976 Koch stakes the Libertarian Party, which urges the public institutions and programs be eliminated including “the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.”
1977 Koch stakes Ed Crane and co-founds the Cato Institute, which urges that government functions be handled by the “free market.”
1980 David Koch runs of Vice President on a privatization platform, including for the Postal Service. Poole publishes a book subsidized by the Reason Foundation, whose angel investor is Charles Koch, which urges the privatization of local government functions and more.
1980 Charles Koch stakes Richard Fink at George Mason, and Fink urges Ronald Reagan’s “Grace Commission” to privatize government functions; the Commission’s recommendations including outsourcing thousands of Postal Service jobs and Post Offices.
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(skip)
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2020 Americans for Prosperity expressly denounces any funding for the Postal Service, despite the Postal Service performing “essential” work in the pandemic and with the growing need for vote by mail. Americans for Prosperity also begins running digital ads targeting several U.S. Senators to toe the Koch line against the Postal Service. Miller remains on the small board of Koch’s Americans for Prosperity, the longest serving leader of this arm of Koch’s political operation other than David Koch. The total amount Americans for Prosperity is spending on this campaign against the Postal Service is unknown.
More at the link, plus:
Interviews with the researcher:
CounterSpin, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting: https://fair.org/home/a-combination-of-forces-puts-our-postal-service-at-grave-risk/
8 O'Clock Buzz, WORT radio, Madison, WI: https://www.wortfm.org/wait-a-minute-mr-koch-man-the-plot-to-kill-the-publics-postal-service/
18-page briefing by the researcher (PDF available at):
https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/the-billionaire-behind-efforts-to-kill-the-usps/
Shiny new avatar (thanks to cayugafalls for graphics assist)
Edited because original version is now out of context.
Original message:
Just gonna have to use it in the sig line
One thing we have to do is not let them disown Trump
They're going to try to pretend Trump sprung out of nowhere and magically put a spell over the party, as he's repeatedly done to investors. They're going to try to tie him to the Democratic Party instead. They're going to claim they "never really supported him" and so on.
They're going to try to pretend everything was fine and normal back in good ol' 2014, before The Escalator.
Trump is the result of the ascendancy of Movement Conservatives within the Republican Party. They're the faction that rejected the mainline Republican acceptance of the basic framework of the New Deal (though with plenty of complaints about its details). Movement Conservatives considered that "socialism" and were determined to dismantle it, and every other change that came about in the 50s and 60s.
They are the faction that worked hard to undermine, isolate, or just plain wreck moderate Republicans who wouldn't get with their program. They set out to turn the Republicans into an explicitly conservative party, their brand of conservatism. Other factions, like the Rockefeller Republicans, got in the way of that, so they performed political hit jobs to break and eliminate them as a force within the party.
They are the faction that built an entire alternative messaging apparatus -- partisan think tanks, newsletters and magazines, partisan newspapers in influential places, partisan speakers to tour the "rubber chicken circuit" of civic groups and local party chapters, RW talk radio, eventually cable TV networks -- to paste smiley faces on conservative initiatives and politicians, and paste horns, tails, and cloven hooves on Democrats, liberals, the media. Disrupt, push through, and brazen out the kerfluffle that follows, leaving their policies still in place.
They are the faction that gladly invited RW evangelicals to find a home within the Republican Party. Why not? It gave them numbers at the polls, and both groups had their own alternative media, overarching visions of The Way Things Ought To Be, a notion of a golden age in the past that must be restored, a will to fundamentally restructure government according to their liking, to put their people on the courts to enforce that restructuring, and an innate vicious streak that drew them to demonizing their opponents. The last wheezing gasp of fiscal responsibility was rewarded with a torrent of bile, foam, and "traitor" accusations when Bush41 signed a feeble tax increase in the face of the ballooning Reagan-Bush deficits.
And extremism when fighting demons is no vice. They took down everyone within their party who had any interest in pulling the throttle back. Not when they see their big chance to grab all the marbles. So they grabbed with both hands, both under Dubya and then with Trump. He won the 2016 primary with more votes than any Republican in history because when it came to bile, foam, and demonizing, he was a consummate pro and the Republican base that Movement Conservatives had built loved him for it. And he's had lockstep support because 1) Movement Conservatives have successfully trained Republicans in Congress to vote with a uniformity that rivals the old Soviet Politburo, and 2) he's the proverbial "hand that can sign what we put in front of him".
Don't let them cut him loose. He's the result 60 years of "a choice, not an echo," of 40 years of the Reagan Revolution. He's theirs.
The Built That.
The don't get to disown him.
I've eaten at restaurants, gone to a mall and attended concerts. That is life in France.
Consider this a companion to babylonsister's post This was written by an American ex-pat living in Italy
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/30/us-could-learn-frances-response-covid-19/
Opinion by Timothy Searchinger
July 30, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Over the past six weeks, I’ve eaten out at restaurants five times, attended two concerts, visited a large, busy indoor mall three times, had two haircuts, and repeatedly watched school kids run around the schoolyard. But that’s all been responsible behavior — because instead of being locked down in my house in the D.C. area, I’ve been in France, where life and the economy are now carrying on close to normal.
What France, like virtually all of Europe, has shown is that following standard expert recommendations for dealing with covid-19 works. France had a massive outbreak of covid-19 in the spring, almost as soon as anyone realized the novel coronavirus had reached Europe. The deaths began occurring late March and reached more than 24,000 by the end of April — a higher death rate than even the United States at the time.
But while the outbreak occurred primarily in only two parts of France, French President Emmanuel Macron imposed a severe, nationwide lockdown on March 16. And during that lockdown, the government put extensive testing and contact tracing in place. Almost exactly two months later, France mostly reopened. And for the last two and a half months, the country has functioned in a primarily open status with around 500 new cases per day and only about 450 deaths in the last month.
The French lockdown was severe. People were only allowed out, after filling out a form, to take care of elderly relatives or to go grocery shopping. To buffer the economic impact, the government directly paid a portion of salaries for those who could not work. And, voila, it worked.
***
France and the rest of Europe are just showing what grown-up governments in well-off societies do, which makes our U.S. disaster all the more painful to watch (and for me to rejoin next week, alas). And while President Trump obviously is the source of our juvenile response, Congress also passed three emergency bills with trillions of dollars for relief but almost no instructions or resources for reopening.
To get that we need to paint Republicans as the Bad Guys. Publicly and Repeatedly.
Thump the drum about it.
It's what they've done to us. It's how they brought us Trump and all of his failures.
But Trump isn't the first Republican to squeak through an Electoral College victory from a popular vote loss, only to grab with both hands and push a highly-partisan agenda. He's not the first to show open contempt for his Democratic predecessor, ignore warnings of dangers and plans for dealing with them, dismantle the systems put in place to deal with those dangers, only to be caught flatfooted by those very dangers. Twice.
Trump isn't the first Republican to baldly lie to our allies, to rely on relationships built up over decades to say "just trust us on this", only to show there was no special information to trust, only a pet project those Republicans wanted to put in motion.
Trump isn't the first Republican -- by a long shot -- to wildly balloon the deficit via reckless, giveaway tax cuts. There's usually (but not always) a thin benefit for most people, but the lion's share of benefit always goes to those who are already in the economic stratosphere.
Trump isn't the first Republican to push for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in the name of "saving" them. Not-so-coincidentally, Republicans categorically reject any proposal to accomplish that by raising their revenue.
Nobody voted for anyone to kill off the Post Office, but Trump is not the first Republican to try. Its current money shortfall is entirely due to a Republican House and Republican Senate passing a law signed by a Republican president imposing something Republicans have always claimed they hated: an unfunded mandate, a profit-killing, job-killing regulation on this one institution. None of the Republicans who did that, none of the Republicans who have blocked attempts to reform that law, have been named Trump.
Republicans love to wave the flag and make ostentatious displays of piety, but for decades they have consistently made America worse.
Don't Make America Worse Again.
Vote for Democratic Party candidates.
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