Wide Gates, Broad Ways & Destruction

It was late in the Barr household when Andy poured a generous bourbon over one of those expensive spheres of ice. He liked his water artisanal and his regulations optional.

Democracy's Heavy Load

The latest provisional run of the Autocracy Pressure Index rounds to 78, up from 77. The internal movement is only 0.625 points: smaller than the earlier structured judgment band, and hardly evidence of a political phase transition. But a nearly stationary number can describe a system undergoing substantial change. A bridge does not require increasing traffic to accumulate fatigue.

Applause is not a Receipt

This morning, Jack Smith’s words filled my television screen: “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President TЯ★MP engaged in criminal activity.” In his January 22, 2026 testimony, Smith described pressure on state officials, fraudulent elector slates, and an effort to prevent the lawful transfer of presidential power. Those were the allegations he brought, and he stood by them. With receipts. "TЯ★MP preyed on party loyalty."

Death Star Dashboard

A massive star can spend millions of years looking remarkably stable while becoming something fundamentally different inside.

active Republican Christian terrorist in Washington state

This is fine:

"as of this writing, an alleged practitioner of radical Christian terrorism remains a state legislator in Washington."

You really have to read about Matt Shea to believe it is even real:

"Last year, the chair of the Republican caucus in Washington’s state legislature acknowledged that he had written a manifesto on the 'Biblical Basis for War.' In that document, the lawmaker argued that – as far as Jesus Christ was concerned – American Christians have the right to 'kill all males' who support abortion, same-sex marriage or communism (so long as they first give such infidels the opportunity to renounce their heresies).

The manifesto’s revelation cost its author, Matt Shea, his chairmanship. But Shea insisted that his writings were merely 'a summary of church sermons on Old Testament war that could help place current events in historical context.' And so, the Washington GOP did not call for Shea to resign or expel him from its House caucus. [emphasis mine]"

Although they finally suspended him from the caucus when more information came out, the fact that Republicans in Washington kept a white Christian terrorist in their protective circle tells you all you need to know...notwithstanding my hyperbolic use of #AmericanTaliban.

From April:

"At various points in his strange career, State Representative Matt Shea of Washington’s Spokane Valley has called for a holy war on liberals, advocated for eastern Washington to secede from the union, and spoken to meetings of the John Birch Society. Now, despite a new report that details his participation in a disturbing far-right group chat, Shea, a Republican, is clinging to power. His party seems reluctant to condemn him."

I wrote about Christian theonomy about 13.5 years ago...jeez the more the change, eh?

Sweating the sheets orange

At this point our "so-called 'president'" is in a full-blown panic, likely sweating the sheets orange at night, tossing & turning as he imagines Mueller's noose tightening around his flabby neck.

Traitor Trump

I just looked back eight months ago at the post on the election and thought I should update a few key facts. First, the numbers I used on 11/11/16 were not certified and were inaccurate. While certain takeaways about turnout are still true, the numbers used changed. For example, Hispanics had the lowest turnout of any demographic, just under 50%, which helped elect Traitor Trump.

Traitor? Yes. The last time I wrote, we were all listening to adamant denials of any meetings with any Russians, period. Yesterday we listened to Kushner try to explain why he left four separate Russian meetings off his security clearance forms. Back to the election numbers...

Here is the most important set of numbers:

Proclivity towards lore, legend, myth and BS

Both liberals and conservatives are capable of letting their feeling get in the way of their thinking. That's been known for some time now. But what is less well-known is that the conservative mindset is correlated with a propensity towards paranoia:

conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it). In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology. The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. 

A good summary:

research shows that conservatives have more of a “negativity bias”, which means “they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments.” In other words, they are more fearful and respond more to fear-mongering than liberals. Fox News could have told you that, but it’s always nice to have some scientific evidence.

And that’s what these conservative urban legends are about: Conservatives keeping each other in a heightened state of fear by constantly warning each other about the endless threats to their safety, their identity, their masculinity, their religious holidays, whatever they’re hyped up about today. And using that fear to justify reactionary politics.

At the risk of over-generalizing, it may simply be brain differences that divide us into liberal and conservative camps. People who are psychologically "high strung" -- able to be terrified easily -- may move towards conservatism as a way to manage anxiety. Are right-wingers' stances on the strong military, law enforcement, lots of guns around, etc., all just preferences that arise from fear, not reason?

A crucial insight

Something that maybe eluded me, or at least that I've seen from a different perspective: conservatives of the political and religious stripes simultaneously glorify America / religion while betting on the doom of society that rejects their viewpoints. On the one hand, America is a wonderful place of liberty, by definition, the freedom to pursue happiness in one's own chosen way. On the other hand, America cannot survive the liberal culture and secular "falling away" from religion.

It's an interesting contrast.

As Frank Schaffer says,

The leaders of the new religious right were gleefully betting on American failure. If secular, democratic, diverse and pluralistic America survived, then wouldn’t that prove that we were wrong about God only wanting to bless “Christian America?” If, for instance, crime went down dramatically in New York City, for any other reason than a reformation and revival, wouldn’t that make the prophets of doom look silly? And if the economy was booming without anyone repenting, what did that mean?

Exactly. That's from the religious perspective. I think I've mentioned Schaeffer's "falling away" before.

From the (purely?) political perspective, Sophia McClennen writes,

One of Colbert’s greatest gifts was his ability to expose logical fallacies and faulty reasoning. His second book, “America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t,” epitomized one of the primary flaws in logic to conservative patriotism: How can the United States be the greatest nation ever and also be on the verge of total collapse? Or, as Limbaugh put it in his attack on me: “Meanwhile, we’re losing everything this country’s known for. The culture is rotting away, the culture is corrupting itself away, being perverted away, and all of that’s being celebrated.” Again and again, Colbert showed us that the right had created an almost devotional quality to their version of American exceptionalism, one that could not account for practical realities and one that could not handle any sort of questioning. If you asked about the treatment of Native Americans, then you hated freedom. If you thought that the U.S. should not practice unilateral foreign policy, you were weak. Any time anyone had a different view on these issues they were immediately attacked for “hating” their country. It’s worth pausing to reflect on the very idea of attacking someone for “hating” their country when you disagree politically. How did politics become overrun with hyperbolic emotion? When Colbert began his show, much conservative political discourse had devolved to highly emotional language. There is no question that a degree of affect and emotion is a part of politics regardless of party affiliation, but most scholars of democracy agree that democracy works best when its citizens use reason and judgment to form their decisions.

None of that is exceptionally insightful, but it's a set of points that deserve to be framed and highlighted

The Wake of Destruction Caused by Fundamentalist Capitalism

Monbiot summarizes the effects of our religiously-flavored free-market devotion:

By the mid-1990s, the doctrine of market fundamentalism – also known as neoliberalism – had almost all governments by the throat. Any politicians who tried to protect the weak from the powerful or the natural world from industrial destruction were punished by the corporate media or the markets. This extreme political doctrine – that governments must cease to govern – has made direct, uncomplicated action almost unthinkable. Just as the extent of humankind’s greatest crisis – climate breakdown – became clear, governments willing to address it were everywhere being disciplined or purged. Since then, this doctrine has caused financial crises and economic collapse, the destruction of livelihoods, mountainous debt, insecurity and the devastation of the living planet. It has, as Thomas Piketty demonstrates, replaced enterprise with patrimonial capitalism: neoliberal economies rapidly become dominated by rent and inherited wealth, in which social mobility stalls. But despite these evident failures, despite the fact that the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.

And the problems are going to get worse. When corporations and the rich control so much of our government, the problems affecting the majority of us are ignored for the problems that directly affect the rich and powerful. As more and more cash flows directly from the wealthy to the government, and Republicans work harder to pry open those floodgates a little more each day, it will accelerate the decay.

Florida Physicians' Freedom to Practice Limited

It's amazing to me how selective conservatives are with "regulations" and "state interference"...besides the obvious issues of gay marriage and abortion, the issue of guns makes conservatives, well, confused about how involved government should be in restricting peoples' rights.

On the one hand, they'll complain that government should "stay out of" health care entirely. On the other hand, they'll ask the government to impose restrictions on physicians. Keep in mind that most of Florida (northern, western panhandle, central) is "lower Georgia" with all the attendant Southern GOP mentality.

Follow the money

It's still amazing that people want to use the "they both do it" excuse to blame politicians of both parties for being in the pocket of big-monied interests. The disparity between the parties is amazing, and the fact that the GOP has pushed hard for unlimited, anonymous campaign donations, while Democrats have pushed back with campaign finance reform laws, tells the whole story.

Follow the money, and you'll find the truth.

In financial terms, the Republican Party and its candidates are now more in line with their ties to corporate America and the rich. They have turned increasingly to large contributors — donors who make gigantic donations to “super PACs” and “social welfare” organizations that claim tax exempt status under the 501(c)4 provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. So far, 501(c)4 committees have successfully avoided publicly identifying their donors. No matter how used to all this we’ve all become, the numbers are striking. The amount of money flowing into federal campaigns — for Congress and the presidency — has been growing rapidly, doubling from $3.1 billion in 2000 to $6.3 billion in 2012. While overall spending increased by more than 100 percent from 2000 to 2012, spending by secretive political nonprofits, which do not disclose donors, has exploded 13-fold, from $24.9 million in 2000 to $335.7 million in 2012. Four out of every five dollars, or $269.5 million, raised by tax-exempt groups, most of which claim to be “social welfare organizations,” go to pro-Republican and conservative groups. These political nonprofits have become a key source of indirect support for Republican candidates. As Figure 2 shows, spending by conservative nonprofits has grown from $2.5 million in 2000 to $269.5 million in 2012. Liberal nonprofit spending has gone from $21.9 million in 2000 to $58.5 million in 2012.

Some disturbing trends are already emerging about the inability to regulate coordination between lobbyists, ultra-wealthy donors and campaigns. The influence of this money is more worrisome by the fact that the FEC can't seem to keep up with campaign finance disclosures anymore. A lot of this stuff comes down to common sense. If you vote for the party who is now helping billionaires to buy elections, you're contributing to the problem. Why is there even a "debate" on whether or not the Koch's SuperPAC is corrosive to our democracy?

Toe the party line, or else!

So Dick Metcalf, a dude who makes his living reviewing firearms and writing pieces for gun magazines has suddenly become anathema to gun nuts everywhere. How? He dared to use the word "regulation" in a way that wasn't an accusation. He points out the obvious: that the 2nd Amendment itself says, "A well regulated militia..." He points out more obvious (something I literally learned and understood in middle school civics): that all of our rights are regulated by some extent -- that individual liberty ends when public safety / welfare begins to conflict with it.

And so those of us who have always understood that gun rights can and must be regulated, and that the argument is about specifics, not if...well, we belong in what's called "the reality-based community," while people who literally are single-issue gun rights voters (i.e., nutbags) are not.

Do NOT call the GOP racist!

As Steve Benen summarizes:

North Carolina Republicans started the week offering a spirited defense of a voter-suppression bill that will make it harder for people of color to participate in their own democracy. Then a North Carolina Republican official was forced to resign after referring to “lazy black people that wants the government to give them everything” during an interview for national broadcast. Then North Carolina’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, decided it’d be a good idea to honor the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) – arguably the last proud, unrepentant racist to serve in Congress.

 

And then a Republican state senator in North Carolina thought it’d be hilarious to celebrate Birther humor.

It's all just coincidence. Or something.

Two great articles on partisanship and food stamps

Two great new opinion pieces from the NYT:

1. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/american-bile/
2. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/red-state-pain/

"Derp" - a new word for something I've long known

As you may suspect, derp is not limited to wingnuttian politics. It is quite prominent in religion (esp. American Christianity) as well. Typical signs: bumper-sticker-theology and/or cliches, sloganeering, smugness, frequent visits to the Creation Museum's "Dragon vs. Dinosaur" exhibit.

Gun fallacies

Going to start a running post here on the common "counterpoints" (as if they deserve to be considered valid) to the idea of universal background checks, or any change in gun laws generally. This is a work in progress and I will add new points and commentary over time, then erase this sentence later on...

Although it isn't particularly germane to the discussion, for the record I own two shotguns.

The collapse of the Republican intellectual edifice

Facts haven't been kind to Republican ideology lately. For years, really, the eminent apocalypse upon which they depend has failed to materialize (like Jesus, lol). Chait walks us through the details:

Efficiency of capitalism?

Richard Wolff writes:

Less inequality among and within societies and increased efficiency that benefits everyone with less work and more or different output: these goals require confronting the capitalist system. The particular capitalist way of organizing how goods and services get produced and distributed and who makes the key decisions is the problem. What, how and where to produce and how to use the profits are those key decisions. To serve most people, those decisions must be made by most people. To do that requires converting capitalist into co-operative enterprises where workers become their own collective board of directors. Workers self-directed enterprises would be far less likely to relocate production, far less likely to distribute profits among workers in extremely unequal ways, and far less likely to install technologies with negative impacts on the environment in which they, their families, and their communities live. Democratizing the economy in this way can yield the kinds of economic and social results that capitalism has long promised – but increasingly fails to deliver. 

Indeed. Some more thoughts on this topic.

If you can't beat 'em, rig 'em!

A few months ago I just shook my head as I read about the scheme to apportion electoral votes by heavily-gerrymandered districts. Obviously, Republicans can't win the popular vote in states where the majority of voters don't vote Republican. So instead they want to cut out the majority of voters (living in large cities) entirely. Lol.

...except it's true. Luckily the plan failed in Virginia.

So hey, guys, if you really want an amazing idea, here's one: do away with the Electoral College completely. Scrap it. It is a ridiculous waste of time and money to vote in our modern democracy the way we do and focus ONLY on "swing states". I know I have little incentive to vote, living in a deep red state like I do.

But of course Republicans would never support a measure to elect Executive officials based on popular vote. Since they'd lose even more than they already do now.