10 IIII 2022: CNN headlines, with commentary

2 people are dead and 10 hospitalized after Iowa nightclub shooting

An overnight shooting in a residential part of Elgin, Illinois, has left six people injured

Hardly a weekend goes by without an overnight mass shooting. 

brought to you by our “gun rights.”

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affeck are engaged again 

How many really care about this hyped soap opera?

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich flips endorsement in House race — and then flips it back.

JLo and Ben are not the only flippers. Newt, still somehow running on the fumes from his speakership that ended thirty-five ago, has flipped to align his choice with Donald Trump’s. Two statesmen agree.

Abortion access under renewed threat in Oklahoma and Missouri

These two state legislatures lead the race in all around stupidity, but there are others striving to catch up.

State Department unable to provide a full account of foreign gifts given to Trump and officials

This is not news, but a confirmation of what was long assumed.

9 IIII 2022: Little Master Josh

Josh Hawley, former resident of Missouri, knows that there is no such thing as bad publicity. After pissing himself at the Jackson hearing, he is now trying another stunt to get the attention he so desperately craves. He will block confirmations of high-level appointments to the Dept. of Defense until his complaints and hurt feelings receive some grown-up attention. He is the poor little rich boy who is trying by bad behavior to get the attention he cannot get otherwise. So Josh runs from house to house ringing doorbells, overturning trash cans, turning on sprinklers, and letting air out of tires. 

I used to assume that ivy-league Josh’s puerile persona was mere playacting for the base, but now I’m thinking his melodramatic immaturity is for real.

8 IIII 2022: Republican childishness and antagonism to history

It’s reported that only one Republican senator, Mr. Romney, remained to applaud the confirmation of justice-elect Jackson, while the rest of the Republicans in attendance stampeded out of the room. The great division in our country has many causes, but downright surly childishness is one of them for sure. These Republicans, whose passage into puberty is indicated only by their prurience, are like a gang of boys whose political philosophy is no more sophisticated than “Us good, them bad.” If the future of our country is in the hands of legislators like this, our prospects are pitiable.

My pessimism is reinforced by Republican-controlled state legislatures that are passing one regressive law after another. The Democratic governor of Kentucky, Mr. Andy Beshear, has had to veto a bill passed by the Republican legislature that would ban from Kentucky’s schools honest study and discussion of the role of race in American history. Several Republican legislatures are passing laws like this that sometimes even use the buzzword “critical race theory,” though they obviously have no idea of what “critical race theory” really is. But whether they name “critical race theory” or only imply it, it is clear that what they intend to keep out of the schools is the truth of America’s atrocity-filled history in race relations, our legalized slaughter, deportation, and confinement of native Indians and virtually unending enslavement of kidnapped Africans. But these legislators are like adults determined to keep the children ignorant of horrific features of family history, though for all their efforts, the truth will come out or, if suppressed, will have its horrible effects.

7 IIII 2022: Naw, couldn’t be.

QAnon raises a lot of questions:

When did the Koch Brothers sell their souls to Satan?

Has Marjorie Taylor Greene finally ended her career in slap-stick?

Why does talk about sex-traffickers make Matt Gaetz perspire?

Do “parental rights” extend to sweating your kids for cash?

Do televangelists broadcast encoded QAnon doctrine?

Is “Q” one of Rudy Giuliani’s nicknames?

Were Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz actually thrown out of Mensa?

6 IIII 2022: Bad little boy

Matt Gaetz put on his grown-up clothes and tried to cut a brave figure at the meeting of the House Armed Services Committee. Had he any dignity, he’d have died of embarrassment, and had his Republicans any shame, they’d have shut down up long ago.

He, like so many of them, loves to scream “socialism!” though they do not really understand the term. They call people and things “woke,” a term of their own devising, that is no more nuanced than their “socialism.”

If others felt as free to fire off generalizations as Gaetz and the GOP, maybe some would apply the term “pedophile” to Mr. Gates and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s neologism, “pro-pedophile,” to his Republican coddlers.

6 IIII 2022: Shameless lies

Report on Huffpost begins

Tom Cotton Says Ketanji Brown Jackson Would Have Defended Nazis at Nuremberg.

What a dimbulb is this sleazy Trumpite Tom Cotton. It is bad enough that he is not ashamed to dabble in smear tactics, but perhaps quite fitting that in the course of smearing another, he displays his own shamelessness and foolishness.

Another headline on Huffpost

Russian Media Campaign Falsely Claims Bucha Deaths Are Fakes

Others too must have been struck by the similarity of Russian use of disinformation and out-and-out lies to the use made of them by Donald Trump and the Trumpist Republicans. “Bucha deaths are fakes” and “Trump won the 2020 election.” Both conscious lies, equally shameless. The Russians might be considered to have pioneered Trump embrace of untruth. Lie, lie, and if you get caught, keep telling the lie.

3 IIII 2022: Russian foreign policy

Shameless deceit, intimidation, vandalism, plunder, slaughter and genocide are not new instruments of Russian foreign policy, rather, they are constants in Russian imperial history, in the czarist empire, communist empire, and oligarchic empire, so much so that one has to ask whether Russia can ever behave otherwise. The recent suppression of Chechnya, invasion of Georgia, and invasion of Ukraine have shown that the Russian Confederation aims to be in fact a revived Russian Empire with its old Cold War borders. 

So, after Ukraine, Putin will go after Moldova, and then parts of Rumania, half of Poland (at least), Hungary (he’s already got it), Finland, the Caucasus nations, and central Asia and will then try to turn any adjacent nations that remain independent into “imperial spheres of influence.” Putin’s program is to bring back the Iron Curtain.

I cannot imagine what could curb Russian rapacity. But we must thwart its aggression with every kind of resource we can bring to bear. China is little better than Russia, and is waiting to see how much Putin can get away with. If we fail now, most of the world will be made up of authoritarian slave states.

Anyone who in any way supports Russia now, even by keeping silent, is complicit in Putin’s drive for a new world of slavery and is a traitor to the United States and to humanity.

27 III 2022: Do you think Ginni didn’t talk it over with Clarence?

Ten years ago, there would have been a broad consensus that Ginni Thomas is crazy. In these times you must do and say things far more bizarre and ridiculous than her emails to be considered insane. But even so, either she is play-acting or she’s a genuine nut-case, and all other indications suggest that she’s a nut, perhaps the Martha Mitchell of our era. 

Is Justice Thomas likely to have been unaffected by her frenzy? How could he not have been affected. So did Justice Thomas have a secret agenda during the recent events before the Court? Has he had a secret agenda as he sat on the Court in silence for years and years? These questions must be answered, or the politicization of the Court will be proven.

24 III 2022: Smell of senate grease paint

I’ve read in a poorly written report about the Senate hearings on the appointment of Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court the following: “Cruz at one point held up the book in question as a kind of vulgar prop (while sitting in front of an enlarged reproduction of one of its pages) — essentially ending the GOP’s promise that Jackson’s confirmation hearings would not devolve into some kind of circus.”

I’ve several comments.

1) Using the term “vulgar” apropos of Ted Cruz is redundant.

2) The expression “GOP’s promise” is a contradiction in terms.

3) That the hearings “would not devolve into some kind of circus” was an impossibility, because the suppurating ambition of Cotton, Cruz, and Hawley, and the presence of Graham, “la Pasionaria” of the GOP, made it inevitable that the hearings would become a four-ring circus.