Republicans Are Scrambling

 

BABBLE ON AND ON

Jason Linkins

Republicans Are Scrambling to Invent Facts for Their Alternate Reality 

The GOP’s big project isn’t creating jobs or beating inflation, it’s trying to make their weird and ever expanding canon of lore and grievances make sense

-The New Republic

It Seems

 It seems that I am an increasing victim of the Information Age, or, as Brother Gates once termed it, the "Information Highway." It's not that I wish to get off the road, just that I have to fashion my own way of moving down the highway. I grew up with the belief that you could "look it up." The answer is in a book somewhere. Just find the right book and look it up. Yes, I Google and even occasionally use Wikipedia (though I don't automatically believe anything I read there), but I still trust only respected scholars and peer reviewed material. I am firmly on the side earned expertise and the respected scholar over the so-called wisdom of the crowd. Oh, the snobbery of it all! The trick is to use digital tools with discretion.

Everyone Knows That Tucker Carlson is a Liar

 Everyone knows that Tucker Carlson is a liar. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. His audience definitely knows it. Watching him get away with telling big ol' whoppers every night is part of the thrill they get in watching him. Carlson's lawyers know it. In a 2020 lawsuit, the Fox News legal team argued in court that Carlson cannot be held liable for slander, because his audience doesn't actually believe the stuff he says. Instead, they argued, it's "non-literal commentary." (Up there with Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" in the pantheon of Republican euphemisms for "lies.") If there was a person left in America under the mistaken impression that Carlson is anything but a proud liar, they were disabused of that notion by leaked texts showing Carlson demanding a reporter be fired for correctly stating that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

-Amanda Marcofte in Salon.com

Evil Genius at Work

 One can see the evil genius here at work. The process of shifting government funds out of public schools and into private religious organizations will happen slowly, and most people won't feel too worried about it so long as they believe they have a "choice" to put their kids in a secular institution. So when the plan finally comes to fruition and public schools collapse from defunding, most of the public will be caught flat-footed. The surface debate is over dress codes, but the larger agenda here is deeply radical.

-Amanda Marcotte in Salon.com

Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird- Notes

 Last time around for this venerable classic.  I'm guessing from a faulty memory that this is my fourth time reading it.

The book comes to mind naturally after reading Wayne Flynt's book on Harper Lee.

I decide to note the humor in the book this time around,

The author mentions on page one the events leading to Jem breaking his leg.  Where to start?  Nelle cleverly mentions General Lee cleaning Alabama of the Creek Indians.  Though tragic and genocidal, I see the humor.

Life in Maycomb is like life in the small northwest town of  Winfield in the 50's and 60's where I grew up.

"People moved slowly then.  They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about eveeything.  A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer.  There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County,  But it was time of vague optimism for some of the people:<aycomb County had recently been told that it nothing to fear but fear itself."

"I'm Charles Baker Harris," he said.  "I can read."

"I guess I thought you'd like to know I can read  You got anything needs readin' I can do it."

"See what you've done!" he said.  "Hasn't snowed in Maycomb since Appomattox.  It's bad children like you makes the seasons change."  P. 74

"I'll make him a Lane cake."  P. 83

Dill informs Scout by mail that he will not be returning to Maycomb.

"With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable.  I stayed miserable for two days."  P. 132

Scout reminded Cal that she need not worry about them going to church with her: they had not done anything in church in years.

But Calpurnia evidently remembered a rainy Sunday when we were both fatherless and teacherless. Left to its own devices, the class tied Eunice Ann Simpson to a chair and placed her in the furnace room. We forgot her, trooped upstairs to church, and were listening quietly to the sermon when a dreadful banging issued from the radiator pipes, persisting until someone investigated and brought forth Eunice Ann saying she didn't want to play Shadrach anymore---Jem Finch said she wouldn't get burnt if she had enough faith, but it was hot down there. "  p. 133

Calpurnia's church was First Purchase African M.E. Church.  Negroes worshipped in it on Sundays and white men gambled in it on weekdays.  P. 134

  

The New Confederacy

 

So what is the world that Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republicans want to (re)create in the 21st century?

The Confederacy.

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America's native form of fascism, the Confederacy offered a white supremacist terror and surveillance society where white "Christian" men rule over all others uncontested and ordained by "God's" will. The 21st-century Confederacy, like the original, would also be a plutocracy where the white rich and monied classes would control society without restrictions or limits. Black people, other non-whites, women, gays and lesbians, and any people deemed the Other and "inferior" to "real Americans" would have their human and civil rights taken away.

The neo-confederate ideology is rooted in a fantasy-lie of what is known as the Lost Cause where the evils of the American slaveocracy and its horrible violence and the South's traitorous secession to defend that ignoble institution is imagined as something good and noble and whose defenders were heroic instead of as agents of an antihuman white supremacist terror regime.

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At its foundation, Greene's endorsement of a "national divorce" and second Civil War is a threat of white supremacist violence –the first civil war killed some 750,000 Americans – against Black people and others who would be targeted for death, re-enslavement, and misery on a massive scale.

-Chauncey Devega in Salon.com

The Poet Says

 The poet says that April is the cruelest month. Maybe so, but March isn't bad on the cruelty scale. We deal with alternating winter and spring days in March, but I never get used to it. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds says Emerson, but the Boston Brahmin never lived in the South as far as I know.

Cold winter rain today. Rain can be literal or metaphorical. Both seem in order today. John Fogerty asks, "Who'll stop the rain?" My guess is we're out of luck for today.

One good thing about March at least. Hope is the thing with feathers says the other poet. What on earth does that mean? For Lent I'm giving up hope. No, not really, just a little early spring humor. Ha, ha.