Today's Must Read

It seems the good citizens of Spokane Valley, in Washington State, elected a real "patriot" to the state legislature. It turns out he's not such a paragon:

The House Republican Caucus has expelled Matt Shea after an investigation revealed that he "participated in an act of domestic terrorism against the United States."

Shea represents Washington’s 4th District, which encapsulates the area surrounding Spokane Valley. He has since taken to social media to call the investigation a "sham." He wrote on Facebook the people behind the investigation do not "share the same political views". He also announced on Saturday to "look forward to a couple huge announcements early next week."

On Facebook he wrote:

Like we are seeing with our President this is a sham investigation meant to silence those of us who stand up against attempts to disarm and destroy our great country. I will not back down, I will not give in, I will not resign. Stand strong fellow Patriots. Thank you to everyone for the massive outpouring of support prayers! I will continue to defend the constitution against tyranny and fight to protect our God given unalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the ability to defend the same.

Remember Cliven Bundy, who refused the pay grazing fees for using public land -- our land -- for his cattle? He claimed it was his right because it was his land. Well, Shea was involved in that mess up to his neck, including the armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

And of course, he's a "Christian" -- he has even called for the execution of non-Christian males. (Why males? I have no idea.)

Somehow, Shea and those like him -- basically, the whole "armed militia" movement -- have got it in their heads that they are "patriots" by participating in armed rebellion against the lawful government. It's worth reading the whole article to get a good take on just how far out there these loons are.

And of course, they love Donald Trump.

Via Joe.My.God.

We Don't Need No Edjicashun!

For some reason, the right really hates education. The irony here, of course, is that the Founders, to whom the right appeals on the slightest pretext, counted on an educated populace to make the country work. (While the Constitution does not specifically mention public education, which is left to the states, the Fourteenth Amendment does guarantee equal access to public education regardless of race, religion, sex, etc.)

However, the right has determined that education is the root of all evil, especially higher education:

Tennessee State Sen. Kerry Roberts, a safe-seat Republican who can’t tell the difference between the Bible and the Constitution, says we should eliminate higher education — just get rid of the whole damn thing — because it’s a “breeding ground” for liberals. . . .

… If there’s one thing that we can do to save America today, it is to get rid of our institutions of higher education right now, and cut the liberal breeding ground off! Good grief! The stupid stuff that our kids are being taught is absolutely ridiculous, and this is a woman who’s a product of higher education. She’s learned all of this stuff that flies in the face of what we stand for as a country!

And here we are as legislators paying for this garbage to be taught to our children, and we’re not doing anything about it. And all these red states across America, we let it exist, and it’s absolutely unbelievable. And this is the price that we pay: the murder of over half a million innocent lives every year, with people sitting there, justifying it to their last breath.

Yes, this was a response to a discussion of abortion rights. Of course.

But then, why have public schools at all? From Todd Starnes, he of the incisive intellect (snicker):

We’re on the verge of a civil war. How bad is it? It’s pretty bad. Especially when you look at the issues that divide us. And look at the polling data. My concern is not what happens over the next two years, it’s what’s happening over the next 10 years.

You see, our public school system is being used as the engine to drive this social change. When you look at the polling data, it’s all there.

Get it? Society changes, and it's all the fault of public schools.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating, get this from the Texas GOP platform a few years ago:

The Texas GOP’s declarative position against critical thinking in public schools, or any schools, for that matter, is now an official part of their political platform. It is public record in the Republican Party of Texas 2012 platform. With regard to critical thinking, the Republican Party of Texas document states: “Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

How biblical.

Image du Jour

From commenter Jean-Marc in Canada at Joe.My.God.:

In case you're wondering, it's referencing this story.

Today's Must-Read: Into the Abyss

America under the Trump regime is going to start looking like the worst parts of Central America. Two posts at Hullabaloo only point up how morally bankrupt the right has become.

First, this post by Tom Sullivan on the regime's not-in-good-faith attempts to obey court orders to reunite the families it has torn apart:

The court-imposed deadline is less than a week away for the Trump administration to reunite migrant families it forcibly separated a the border as part of its "zero tolerance" approach to refugees. The administration missed a deadline last week for reuniting children under five with their parents. Of the more than twenty-five hundred children in government detention, only 450 between the ages of 5 and 17 have reunited with their parents ahead of the July 26 deadline.

The Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security that found it easy to take children from their parents' arms at U.S.-Mexico border stations find it much more difficult to reunite them. DHS personnel admitted weeks ago that records linking parents and their children have disappeared and in some case destroyed (a DHS spokesperson disputes this). HHS requested volunteers to help pore through case records to match children with their parents.

As you read through, it becomes more and more obvious that Trump's minions have no intention of rectifying this atrocity.

And now there are calls to assassinate "leftists", which is to say, anyone who objects to Trump's policies or his methods.

Here on Hullabaloo, Tom Sullivan recently posted a tweet informing us that Trump supporter Michael Scheuer, an ex-CIA spook, bestselling author and world-class paranoid approvingly mentioned the growing interest on the right in assassinating those opposed to Trump:

As this week’s end, it seems likely that it is quite near time for killing those involved in the multiple and clearly delineated attempts to stage a coup d’état against the legitimately elected [sic] Trump government and thereby kill our republic. 

Finally, this week saw a significant and quickening advance toward the moment when those millions of well-armed citizens who voted for Trump, and who have been abused or wounded by Democrats, their Antifa-thugs, and their thug-civil servants for exercising their franchise to elect Trump, cannot be, in good conscience, patient for much longer.

Fortunately, they have in hand a long and very precise list of the names and photographs...

That's right. Scheur even provided a list of people who it is "quite near time to kill."

This would sound to me like paranoid ravings, except that Trump supporters are already showing up armed at protests -- and let's not forget Charlottesville. Or for that matter, our monthly mass shootings.

Today's Must-Read: Remember Joe McCarthy?

Digby gives a good overview of the Nunes memo shenanigans and coming attractions. This part summarizes the attitudes of the hard-core Nunes adherents quite nicely:

It's true that a few others have joined that chorus, signaling that at least a handful of Republicans don't want to be associated with the notion that this memo "vindicates" the president. (Notably, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not among them.)

Chairman Nunes is undeterred. Axios reported on Sunday:

The House Intelligence chair and his team have told members and associates they've found other examples of politically motivated "wrongdoing" across various agencies, including the FBI, the broader Justice Department, and the State Department . . . Republicans close to Nunes say there could be as many as five additional memos or reports of "wrongdoing."

One wonders if Nunes has any knowledge of that time in 1950 when a senator named Joseph McCarthy pulled out a "list" he claimed had the names of 200 people in the State Department whom he accused of politically motivated wrongdoing. It didn't end well.

I'm sure there will be more memos forthcoming -- Trump's gotten so much mileage out of this one that it makes no sense to stop. And of course, there will be more rebuttals, which Fox News and the base will ignore and the New York Times will find some excuse to discount.

At any rate, read the whole thing -- it's deja vu all over again.

Today's Must-Read: Well, They Did It (Update)

Republicans managed to pass the most unpopular piece of legislation since Reganomics last night with no public hearings, no analysis, none of the regular procedural things that we've come to expect from a functional legislature. From Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo, who starts off with this tweet from Sen. Jon Tester (D-WY) which pretty much says it all:

Sen. Jon Tester didn't cuss. But the Montana Democrat might have after receiving the 500-page GOP tax bill hours before vote-a-rama and final passage last night (with no debate) about 2 a.m. Friday afternoon, Claire McCaskill (D-MO) tweeted a list of Manager's Amendments she'd received from a lobbyist rather than from her Republican colleagues. "None of us have seen this list, but lobbyists have it."

I was just handed a 479-page tax bill a few hours before the vote. One page literally has hand scribbled policy changes on it that can’t be read. This is Washington, D.C. at its worst. Montanans deserve so much better. pic.twitter.com/q6lTpXoXS0

— Senator Jon Tester (@SenatorTester) December 2, 2017

Sullivan details some of the horrors included in the bill (I don't think anyone has a grasp of the full enormity of this monster).

The only answer is vote Democratic -- maybe the next Congress can reverse this -- after they've impeached Trump and Pence and inaugurated Nancy Pelosi as president.

Update: Paul Krugman weighs in on just what a travesty this whole thing has been:

And there’s a world of difference between normal political spin — yes, all politicians try to emphasize the good aspects of their policies — and the outright lies that have marked every aspect of the selling of this thing.

Mnuchin said his department had a study showing great effects on growth; that was a lie. Donald Trump says the bill is “not good for me”; that’s a lie. Senator John Cornyn said, “This is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses”; that was a lie. Senator Bob Corker said he wouldn’t support a plan “adding one penny to the deficit”; that was a lie.

In other words, this whole process involves a level of bad faith we haven’t seen in U.S. politics since the days when defenders of slavery physically assaulted their political foes on the Senate floor.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

(Via Bark Bark Woof Woof)

Today's Must-Read: The Right's War on America

Specifically, the free press. This piece by Brian Beutler is a pretty damning analysis:

Republican Greg Gianforte defeated Democrat Rob Quist in a special election Thursday for Montana’s lone congressional seat, a six-point victory that should horrify you because he won with the full support of the GOP after body-slamming and punching an American reporter—and many of our political institutions, especially the media, are too paralyzed to impose a meaningful consequence on him or his enablers.

Gianforte, a true coward, didn’t admit any wrongdoing until his victory speech, at which point the risks of playacting decency pertained to his criminal case—the police have charged him with assault—rather than the election. “When you make a mistake, you have to own up to it,” Gianforte said. “That’s the Montana way.” I suspect some Montanans would object to the notion that you only apologize once it’s politically safe to do so.

For it was already beyond dispute on Wednesday night, thanks to audio of the attack and a witness account from a Fox News reporter, that Gianforte had attacked the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs. That’s when the process of public accountability began. In a healthier political culture, the condemnation would have been nearly unanimous, and the context of the incident would not have been a matter of controversy. What we witnessed instead was a political media — confronted with a one-sided assault on its most basic freedom — rendered by its own constructs largely incapable of identifying the threat with any precision.

That last sentence is particularly telling: the "free press" has been more than complicit in its own destruction. There are a number of contributing factors -- the corporate takeover of media outlets, leading to an emphasis on ratings rather than journalism (because in the corporate world, it's all about profits), the rise of Fox News (the propaganda arm of the Republican party), the transformation of the Republican party itself into the party of neo-fascist authoritarianism, the reluctance of reporters (or their editors) to offend those in power for fear of losing "access", the emphasis on "balance" and the resulting validation of bullshit by presenting advocates of positions that are, on analysis, grossly un-American as though they had legitimate arguments -- leading to the end result that we're seeing now: through its unwillingness to call out those such as Donald Trump (who called the press "an enemy of the American people" and got away with it), the press has rendered itself impotent, completely incapable (with a very few exceptions) of performing its essential and most basic function.

And so we wind up with something like Donald Trump in the White House, and candidates for public office winning elections after committing very public crimes.

Via Digby.

Addendum: From Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo, a take on why goons like Gianforte get away with it:

As this morning's headlines attest, Republican Greg Gianforte won yesterday's special congressional election in Montana. One of the noteworthy and little-noticed effects of his assault on Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs was, according to NBC, Gianforte raised $100,000 overnight online. One supporter told CNN the assault charge against Gianforte left her only "more ready to support Greg."

That's your modern "conservative". Read the rest, and then pour yourself a good stiff drink.

You've Probably Noticed

That posting has been rather light and sporadic lately. Real life is demanding a great deal of my time.

And the news, focused as it is on The Hairpiece, is -- well, I'm fed up.

It's Called a "Freudian Slip"

Ben Carson strikes again:

At Carson’s confirmation hearing for secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Warren noted that President-elect Donald Trump will be uniquely positioned to benefit from HUD contracts due to his real estate business. During a press conference a day earlier, Trump had revealed a controversial plan to allow his sons to run his business instead of putting his assets in a blind trust as other presidents have done.

“My concern is that among the billions of dollars that you will be responsible for handing out in grants in loans,” Warren said to Carson. “Can you just assure us that not one dollar will go to benefit either the president-elect or his family?”

“It will not be my intention to do anything to benefit any American,” Carson declared boldly. “It’s for all Americans.”

Sounds like the Trump administration in a nutshell.

Dallas (Updated)

I know I haven't really commented all that much about the Dallas shooting: after wading through all the conflicting accounts, updates, second guesses, etc,. etc., etc. (which I'm sure you've been following anyway), my head was swimming. (Well, there was also trying to sort out the prokaryotes for the Saturday Science post, which you'll notice has been delayed -- until I figure out the relationships and hypothetical histories of the Archaea and Bacteria.)

At any rate, I think this sums up my reaction:

Update: I think it's time to highlight something the president said about the whole gun issue, via Digby:

And so we have to talk about [guns]. And as I've said before there is a way to talk about it that is consistent with our constitution and the 2nd Amendment. The problem is that even mention of it somehow evokes this kind of polarization. And you're right when it comes to this issue of gun safety there is polarization between a very intense minority and a majority of Americans who think we could be doing better when it comes to gun safety.

(Emphasis added.)

Another case of the tail wagging the dog. The gun freaks and other right-wingers are, of course, blaming everyone but guns, from Ben Carson (remember him?) accusing the president of "politicizing" the issue (and of course, thanks to that asshole Wayne LaPierre and his gun manufacturers' lobby, it is a political issue -- even most gun owners favor restrictions on gun ownership) to Fox News blaming the president for "hating cops" and Black Lives Matter for engaging in a peaceful demonstration -- well, you get the picture. (At this point, I'm ambivalent about BLM, mostly because of the hold-up they pulled at Toronto Pride, but that was a local chapter and in the case of Dallas, BLM is blameless.)

So, in less than a month we have two major mass shootings, but it's not because guns are readily available to any crazy person with a grudge against someone, whether real or imagined. Couldn't possibly be that.

This seems like an appropriate coda:

And This Is a Surprise?

Gee -- the Republicans in the Senate are blocking a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United:

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a vote on a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings dating back to 1976 that invalidated restrictions on money in politics.

The party line vote was 54 in favor, 42 against, falling short of the 60 votes needed to defeat a filibuster and proceed to a final vote.

I'm actually surprised that there were no Democrats joining the Republicans on this one, but they probably figured they were safe. Oh, and Ted "Obama Will Censor SNL" Cruz didn't bother to show up for the vote.

And the Through the Looking Glass Award goes to Mitch McConnell:

"I have to say it’s a little disconcerting to see the Democrat-led Senate focusing on things like reducing free speech protections for the American people," he said before the vote. "This is what they chose to make their top legislative priority this week. Taking an eraser to the First Amendment."

There you have it: in the Republican lexicon, corporations are "the American people." What does that make the rest of us?

On Ferguson: Today's Must Watch

John Oliver rips everyone involved in militarizing the police a new one.