The man of the people who panics over stock prices An interesting article in Politico this weekend about recent events in which some left writers and thinkers extolled the virtues of Tucker Carlson because he claims to be a populist, anti-globalist. In my view, even if one were to overlook his blatant racism, misogyny and general adherence to batshit far right nonsense, you really shouldn’t overlook this when you’re taking the position that he’s a populist: “Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” That was in response to a reporter acknowledging the results of the 2020 election. His concerns were not about the working people of America. Or this. After he was fired by MSNBC: Mr. Carlson eventually snagged a pundit contract at Fox and an unpaid fellowship at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank. But his days as a TV star seemed at an end. With four school-age children, the Carlsons sold their $4 million Washington home, and he had what he later described as a kind of meltdown.
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Gun culture is killing us It was another bloody weekend in America’s sick and twisted shooting gallery. A man dressed in full tactical gear and carrying an assault rifle got out of his car at a shopping mall in Allen Texas and started randomly shooting people on the sidewalk. A police officer who was coincidentally on the scene for another call took down the shooter after he had shot 16 people, killing at least 8 and possibly more. (Several people are reportedly still in critical condition.) This is seen as a huge success story among the gun fetishists because it shows that a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun with only a dozen and half casualties. It’s what we call “good news” these days. Last week we had two other major shooting incidents before this one. One, in Atlanta, caused the whole downtown area to be shut down for hours after a man shot five women in a doctor’s office and then disappeared into the labyrinth of office buildings.
“Seizing political control of the schools is not a campaign slogan. It’s a plan to turn power into more power” The right has been attacking public education as long as anyone can remember. It’s usually about unions or dumbing down and losing to the Chinese or something like that. But as Jonathan Chait writes in this excellent article about what’s actually happening in today’s right wing assault on education, they have now decided that academic freedom is for losers — they are convinced that it’s time to completely take over American education and indoctrinate children into right wing ideology. The article is long so I’d recommend that you read it in full if you can but suffice to say that Chait makes many good points about the historical antecedents of various attempts to dominate education and points out that there are excesses on the left as well as right.
I think we’ve all had our eyes opened about the dangers of letting this extremist GOP take over state houses. They’re building a farm team for national politics and it’s scary as hell. Just take a look at Florida if you want to feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Howie Klein sent this out to Blue America members this morning. And In The Process Help Your Favorite Candidate Win $1,000 From Blue America We’ll get into the contest in a second; I just want to make sure that you know that the Virginia legislative elections are this year, 2023, not next year like most elections. We’re trying to flip the House of Delegates blue and expand the narrow Democratic lead in the state Senate. Blue America has identified 5 crucial progressive races for this contest, 2 for Senate seats and 3 for House seats.
This exhortation for women to have as many babies as they can possibly have is a huge part of the Great Replacement Theory. And don’t ever kid yourself — by that they mean the great “dark” Replacement Theory. It’s white women who they want breeding like rabbits. (See: Viktor Orban) This is the intersection of racism, xenophobia and misogyny. Anti-birth control and abortion as a way of forcing the white majority to have very large families so as not to be “out-bred” by the people of color. It’s really not all that complicated. Here is an example of how that idea is being mainstreamed: The Deseret News is under fire for promoting an op-ed that praised Tucker Carlson’s views, even after The New York Times unveiled what appears to be a racist text message he sent after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
ABC obtained recordings of DeSantis’ debate prep in 2018. DeSantis. It’s clear he hasn’t improved in the last five years. The man is, as we’ve seen, unlikable and thin-skinned. It’s interesting though, that he’s always been very concerned about not “pissing off” Trump voters. He’s not alone, of course. Every Republican office holder is almost incontinent at the mere idea of such a thing. Anyway, here was Ron DeSantis getting ready to debate Andrew Gillum in 2018. Note that the two Florida Republicans helping him have already endorsed Donald Trump: During his first bid for statewide office in 2018, Ron DeSantis was grappling with a key issue that he could soon face again during his potential 2024 bid for the White House: how to not alienate Donald Trump’s base. “Is there any issue upon which you disagree with President Trump?” DeSantis was asked by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz in footage exclusively obtained by ABC News of the team’s mock debate sessions during DeSantis’ 2018 run for governor.
The GOP policy on gun violence WTH???? IN THE WAKE of yet another mass shooting — this time at a mall in Allen, Texas, where a gunman killed at least eight people — a Fox News guest recommended that Americans who fear they may be a victim of the next shooting should “be polite and professional, but plan to kill everyone you meet.” Alex Coker, a television host and former police officer, was quoting a line that General James Mattis reportedly told troops in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. But Coker now thinks that this kind of mindset is healthy for people in America. “What do you say to folks who live in neighborhoods maybe like Allen, Texas, where they don’t think crime will ever hit them, and they don’t need to prepare? What would you tell them?” host Lawrence Jones asked Coker on Saturday night’s episode of Lawrence Jones Cross Country. “Run away like your life depends on it. You need to be physically fit, and run fast,” Coker said. “So move move, move. Second thing is to barricade. Try to put something between you and that gunman.
Despite being an American with no interest in living under a monarchy, I confess that I spent some time watching that astonishing medieval ritual of the coronation yesterday. It’s fascinating, although I resent the fact that the commentary was almost all blabbing about Harry and the balcony and almost none of it was devoted to discussing the historical context of the ceremony and explaining what it all meant, which I would have been interested to know. However, all of that is basically an entertainment pageant and as fun as it is to watch, there’s something much more important happening in Britain as this piece by David Frum points out: If you walked into a British supermarket this past winter, you were likely to see bare shelves in the salad aisle. Customers might have been limited to purchasing lettuce and tomatoes, if there were any lettuce or tomatoes to be found in the first place. Ask the grocers, and you’d hear technical explanations for the scarcity. High energy prices raised costs at British greenhouses; imports from warmer countries were curtailed by bad weather in Southern Europe.
I’m not entirely sure what Abbott was talking about when he claimed that California has more gun deaths (recent mass shootings? total deaths?) but perhaps he doesn’t realize that California has a much bigger population than Texas. The statistical difference in gun deaths between California and Texas is quite large. California’s death rate per capita is 9 per 100,000. Texas’ is 15.6. California has the 8th lowest rate of gun deaths in the country. Texas has the 25th. As for he general point that both blue states and red states have gun violence, it’s absolutely true. But it’s the red states that really get the bang for the buck: A new study published in Journal of the American Medical Association’s Surgery found that firearm deaths are more likely in small rural towns than in major urban cities, adding to research that contradicts common belief that Democratic blue areas have higher incidences of gun-related deaths than do Republican red districts.
“the price of freedom”? “For years now, after one massacre or another,” writes Heather Cox Richardson this mourning, “I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority.” A minority that, like Bill O’Reilly, considers daily slaughter “the price of freedom.” None of that was normal until about the time Ronald Reagan and Movement Conservatism arrived in full. Fueled by National Rifle Association money, the right twisted the Second Amendment into an “unfettered right to own and carry weapons.” They’ve turned America into a place Old West residents of Tombstone and Dodge City would not recognize. At least eight dead and nine injured at a suburban Dallas, Texas outlet mall (Washington Post): Six of the eight people killed were found dead at the scene. At least nine people injured in the shootingwere taken to hospitals by the local fire department, Allen Fire Chief Jon Boyd said.