Not necessarily a bad thing Like many of you, I’m still catching up with people and places not visited since the pandemic hit in early 2020. Daily rituals have filled the gap, pecking along here on a schedule being one of them. Daily walks being another. The expression “even keel” comes to mind. Memorial Day rituals are back on in full, finally, and perusing all the local events this weekend, I may when finished here scratch out a list of events to stop by. “Keep Asheville Weird,” the bumper sticker says, but even normal weird feels good. Brian Klaas argues that rituals contribute to social, not just personal, stability. They are “a potent force, sometimes enlisted for good, other times not,” but for that not to be ignored: How about some pro-democracy rituals? Here’s the problem: the political right and authoritarian movements have perfected the art of the ritual. They have tapped into this ancient wisdom, harnessed it, used it to mobilize their members and fasten them together. And it works.
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All the way to Idaho NPR: The U.S. Supreme Court Court on Thursday significantly curtailed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the nation’s wetlands and waterways. It was the court’s second decision in a year limiting the ability of the agency to enact anti-pollution regulations and combat climate change. The challenge to the regulations was brought by Michael and Chantell Sackett, who bought property to build their dream house about 500 feet away from Idaho’s Scenic Priest Lake, a 19-mile stretch of clear water that is fed by mountain streams and bordered by state and national parkland. Three days after the Sacketts started excavating their property, the EPA stopped work on the project because the couple had failed to get a permit for disturbing the wetlands on their land. Now a conservative Supreme Court majority has used the Sackett’s case to roll back longstanding rules adopted to carry out the 51-year-old Clean Water Act. Heather Cox Richardson: This decision will remove federal protection from half of the currently protected wetlands in the U.S, an area larger than California.
No. Just no. You’ve likely seen the videos I will not link to here. Jerks throwing “manly” public tantrums is the latest in ice-bucket challenges for right-wing assholes. They’ve succeeded in intimidating capitulation from retailers rather than the summary execution now endorsed by MAGAs experiencing social discomfort. Greg Sargent writes: It is sometimes said that corporate America is a battleground in the culture wars. This has taken on ugly new meaning in the case of Target, which just announced that it will pull some LBGTQ-friendly merchandise from shelves after experiencing threats that affected its employees’ “sense of safety.” Target’s surrender — which came after concerted attacks from MAGA media personalities — points to a bigger story: The anti-woke right is increasingly wielding heavy-handed tactics — including state power and violent threats — to block corporations from making their own decisions about how to adapt to social change. Though the right is losing this battle at large, it is innovating and having some success.
All those people coming into our country to work are destroying the nation Meanwhile: Lawmakers in several states are embracing legislation to let children work in more hazardous occupations, longer hours on school nights and in expanded roles including serving alcohol in bars and restaurants as young as 14. The efforts to significantly roll back labor rules are largely led by Republican lawmakers to address worker shortages and in some cases run afoul of federal regulations. I’ve always wondered what the Republicans would come up with to fill a labor shortage since they hate foreigners. I assumed they would go to prisoner slave labor. We have millions behind bars, after all. I have to say that I didn’t think rolling back child labor laws was on the menu. Maybe this is why they are so bent on destroying the education system. This way the children will have more time to work their low paying jobs.
I want to send this to every voter in America. They simply don’t know what this is about. Here it is.
You may think that battle is over, but they don’t I know you are dying to hear more about today’s right wing worldview so I thought I would share this article from a 2022 Claremont Fellow and Federalist writer entitled: Pride Month — formerly known as June — is right around the corner, and with that comes the annual rainbow lighting of the White House, heaping of praise upon people like the Nashville shooter, and the continued denigration of religious institutions by American corporations. In this instance, and countless others, the public and private sectors work hand in glove to advance both an ideological and political agenda. When, recently, Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance said that “[t]here is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the United States of America,” he was describing situations like this, in which state and corporate entities move in lockstep towards common, predetermined goals with such strength and vigor that dissent becomes impossible.
And as political strategy “[T]he American right wing is trying to create a Hobbesian state of nature where violence and fear of death is everywhere and the rule of law is increasingly meaningless,” writes Chauncey DeVega, Salon’s senior politics writer. Who needs random squads of brownshirts when everyone, everywhere is armed, anxious, and primed to go to guns at the slightest provocation? That’s “primed” in the psychological sense. As a political tactic. DeVega walks readers through how German legal philosopher and political theorist Carl Schmidt’s views of “sovereign authority.” Per the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Legal norms, Schmitt argues, cannot be applied to a chaos.” Thus the need for a sovereign. In post-Weimar Germany, read “dictator,” who might rule this “state of exception.” That’s not unlike the book of Revelation’s return of Jesus at Armageddon. It’s something that makes Christian nationalists and a self-described “Leninist” like Steve Bannon shiver with antici … pation.
He’s just a more boring version of exactly the same thing Everyone says, “oh, at least he won’t try to overthrow the government.” Do we know that? Take a look at this: During an interview on The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show, DeSantis was asked if he would consider pardons for Trump and other Jan. 6 defendants “What I’m going to do is I’m going to do on day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases who people are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons,” DeSantis promised. “Now some of these cases, some people may have a technical violation of the law, but if there are three other people who did the same thing, but just in a context like BLM and they don’t get prosecuted at all, that is uneven application of justice.” “We’re going to find examples where we have governments [have] been weaponized against disfavored groups, and we will apply relief as appropriate,” he added. Sexton pressed the candidate about a pardon for Trump.
I know that’s hard to believe but here it is It’s a fact: An analysis of the President’s first 30,000 words uttered in office found Mr Trump speaks at a third- to seventh-grade reading level – lower than any other President since 1929. Mr Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is “significantly more simple, and less diverse” than any President since Herbert Hoover, the analysis found. The comparison is based on interviews, speeches and press conferences for every president dating back to 1929, compiled by online database Factba.se. Analysts at Factba.se studied the “off-script” remarks of all 15 men – essentially, everything but their prepared speeches – to compare and contrast their speaking skills. The most explosive claims from a new book about Trump’s white house Analysts ran the records through eight different tests for vocabulary complexity, diversity, and comprehension level. In every single test, Mr Trump scored the lowest. Mr Trump averaged significantly fewer syllables per word than the last 14 Presidents, and used significantly fewer unique words.