and If Their GUNS Kill Children... No Problem! They'll Just Breed Some Spares!
It's Obvious That Republicans Are Totally Into HATE... Well, Hate Won't Make America Great!
and they REALLY Hate TRUTH... Because Facts Make them Look Bad... Because... They ARE BAD!
and Now Going to Prison for their EVIL DEEDS.
A man in a hot-air balloon was lost, so he shouted to a woman on the ground below, "Excuse me. I promised a friend I would meet him, but I don't know where I am."
"You're at 31 degrees, 14.57 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude," she replied.
"You must be a Democrat," the man shouted back.
"I am. How did you know?" said the woman.
"Because everything you told me is technically correct, but the information is useless, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've been no help," the man replied.
"You must be a Republican," answered the woman.
"Yes. How did you know?" he said.
"Because," the woman replied, "you've risen to where you are due to a lot of hot air, you made a promise you couldn't keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow now you think it's my fault."
Trump's a Life Long Criminal...
and We're Gonna Arrest Him Three More Times!
We are being hit with a massive campaign to deny climate change. They have really upped their game since the early George W. Bush years when they started denying everything and tearing down the proof that was established, in the same way as Trump tore apart the science community, taking down many useful websites and destroying much of what our tax dollars meant for, as in to ensure that our science was legit. Funny thing is, no one complains about that. They don't complain about anything except the sanctioned stuff. You'd think that most of the truth must be off limits.
~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~
“You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can’t lead to a good conclusion.”
~ Julian Assange
'The truth will set you free' is an aphorism we’ve all heard so many times it’s lost a lot of its meaning and doesn’t sound especially profound when we hear it again, but it really does contain the answer to humanity’s most difficult problems. A truth-based relationship with reality is the only way to move into peace and harmony, whether you’re talking about the inner peace and harmoniousness of an individual or the peace and harmony of our entire species.
For the individual, you can’t generally come to inner peace and a harmonious way of moving in the world until you’ve done a lot of inner work and gotten extremely real with yourself about your experiences, your relationships, your ways of thinking about things, your behavior patterns, and your motivations. The deepest levels of peace and freedom open up when we have transformative insights into the truth of our very nature: the nature of consciousness, mind, and self.
It doesn’t come from trying to be a nicer person, from praying to the right god or espousing the right belief system. True and lasting peace and freedom comes from a penetrating realization of what is already the case. It comes from knowing what’s true.
This is a bit counter-intuitive, because our minds and our culture tell us that we get peace and happiness from getting what we want — the right accomplishments, the right job, the right belongings, the right romantic partner, the right circumstances. But none of those things will ever take us where we’re really trying to get to. Only the truth will.
And it’s exactly the same for a group of people, and for humanity as a whole.
Real widespread change can only come from knowledge of the truth — that’s why those who don’t want widespread change pour so much energy into keeping people from knowing what’s true. That’s why there’s such a frenzied push for more internet censorship and for the government to get more involved in regulating speech. That’s why our civilization is saturated with propaganda. And that’s why Julian Assange is in prison.
Real change will only occur when a sufficient number of people realize that we live in a profoundly unjust society held together by violence and lies, where our very existence is being imperiled by nuclear brinkmanship and environmental destruction. Because only then will enough people begin mobilizing to use the power of our numbers to force the changes we need.
Again, this is somewhat counter-intuitive, because we’ve been told all our lives by our schools and our media that we get change by voting for political candidates we like. But our electoral systems are stacked against change, and the candidates are controlled by interests who seek to keep things more or less the way they are. This means change can only be arrived at by widespread forceful rejection of the entire system, and widespread forceful rejection of the entire system can only come through truth.
So the truth will set us free, but those who don’t want our freedom are doing everything they can to obstruct, obfuscate and distort the truth. The good news is that there are a whole lot of us, and (for now at least) we do have the ability to share the truth about what’s going on with each other. And the more people understand what’s going on, the more people there are to help share the truth with others.
The first step is spreading awareness of the fact that our civilization is saturated in propaganda, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening. Helping people to understand that they’ve been lied to their whole lives about their nation, their government, their society and their world will help shake them free from their propaganda blinders, so that they can begin to figure out what’s true.
By working toward a collective understanding of what’s real in this way, humanity can come into a truth-based relationship with reality, one freshly opened pair of eyelids at a time. And, just as a truth-based relationship with reality inevitably brings peace and harmony to the life of the individual, a truth-based relationship with reality will bring peace and harmony to the life of our entire species.
Truth is its own reward. It’s not always pleasant when you get it, and it might not be obvious at first that it’s helping to move things in a positive direction, but every step toward health and harmony begins with truth. The more opportunities we have to experience this fact in our own lives, the more obvious it becomes.
~~~~~~ (~);-} ~~~~~~
Heather Said:
June 15, 2023 (Thursday)
Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.
I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.
This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”
Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.”
It is?
Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.
Grover Norquist, one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”
Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States.
The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.
When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people.
The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.
That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.
So why is there a growing debt?
Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.
Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent.
“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”
When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.
June 24, 2023 (Saturday)
Yesterday, forces from the private mercenary Wagner Group crossed from Ukraine back into Russia and took control of the city of Rostov-on-Don, a key staging area for the Russian war against Ukraine. As the mercenaries moved toward Moscow in the early hours of Saturday (EDT), Russian president Vladimir Putin called them and their leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, traitors. This morning, they were bearing down on Moscow when they suddenly stopped 125 miles (200 km) from the Russian capital. This afternoon the Russian government announced that Belarus president Aleksandr Lukashenko had brokered a deal with Prigozhin to end the mutiny: Prigozhin would go to Belarus, the criminal case against him for the uprising would be dropped, the Wagner fighters who did not participate in the march could sign on as soldiers for the Russian Ministry of Defense, and those who did participate would not be prosecuted.
Prigozhin said he turned around to avoid bloodshed.
U.S. observers don’t appear to know what to make of this development yet, although I have not read anyone who thinks this is the end of it (among other things, Putin has not been seen today). What is crystal clear, though, is that the ability of Prigozhin’s forces to move apparently effortlessly hundreds of miles through Russia toward Moscow without any significant resistance illustrates that Putin’s hold over Russia is no longer secure. This, along with the fact that the Wagner Group, which was a key fighting force for Russia, is now split and demoralized, is good news for Ukraine.
In the U.S. the same two-day period that covered Prigozhin’s escapade in Russia covered the anniversaries of two historic events. Yesterday was the 51st anniversary of what we know as “Title 9,” or more accurately Title IX, for the part of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 that prohibited any school or education program that receives federal funding from discriminating based on sex. This measure updated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and while people today tend to associate Title IX with sports, it actually covers all discrimination, including sexual assault and sexual harrassment. Republican president Richard Nixon signed the measure into law on June 23, 1972 (six days after the Watergate break-in, if anyone is counting).
Fifty years and one day later, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a woman's constitutional right to abortion. That is, a year ago today, for the first time in our history, rather than expanding our recognition of constitutional rights, the court explicitly took a constitutional right away from the American people.
The voyage from Title IX to Dobbs began about the same time Nixon signed the Education Amendments Act. In 1972, Gallup polls showed that 64% of Americans, including 68% of Republicans, agreed that abortion should be between a woman and her doctor—a belief that would underpin Roe v. Wade the next year—but Nixon and his people worried that he would lose the fall election. Nixon advisor Patrick Buchanan urged the president to pivot against abortion to woo antiabortion Catholics, who tended to vote for Democrats.
As right-wing activists like Phyllis Schlafly used the idea of abortion as shorthand for women calling for civil rights, Republicans began to attract voters opposed to abortion and the expansion of civil rights. In his campaign and presidency, Ronald Reagan actively courted right-wing evangelicals, and from then on, Republican politicians spurred evangelicals to the polls by promising to cut back abortion rights.
But while Republican-confirmed judges chipped away at Roe v. Wade, the decision itself seemed secure because of the concept of “settled law,” under which jurists try not to create legal uncertainty by abruptly overturning law that has been in place for a long time (or, if they do, to be very clear and public about why).
So Republicans could turn out voters by promising to get rid of Roe v. Wade while also being certain that it would stay in place. By 2016 those antiabortion voters made up the base of the Republican Party. (It is quite possible that then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to permit President Barack Obama to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court because he knew that evangelicals would be far more likely to turn out if there were a Supreme Court seat in the balance.)
But then Trump got the chance to put three justices on the court, and the equation changed. Although each promised during their Senate confirmation hearings to respect settled law, the court struck down Roe v. Wade on the principle that the federal expansion of civil rights under the Fourteenth Amendment incorrectly took power from the states and gave it to the federal government. In the Dobbs majority decision, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level.
Fourteen Republican-dominated states promptly banned abortion. Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas banned abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest; Mississippi banned it with an exception for rape but not incest; and North Dakota banned it except for a six-week window for rape or incest. West Virginia also has a ban with exceptions for rape and incest. In Wisconsin a law from 1849 went back into effect after Dobbs; it bans abortion unless a woman would die without one. Texas and Idaho allow private citizens to sue abortion providers. Other states have imposed new limits on abortion.
But antiabortion forces also tried to enforce their will federally. In April, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that the Food and Drug Administration should not have approved mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug, more than 20 years ago. That decision would take effect nationally. It is being appealed.
When the federal government arranged to pay for transportation out of antiabortion states for service members needing reproductive health care, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) put a blanket hold on all military appointments—250 so far—until that policy is rescinded. For the first time in its history, the Marine Corps will not have a confirmed commandant after July 10. In the next few months, five members of the joint chiefs of staff, including General Mark Milley, its chair, are required by law to leave their positions. Tuberville says he will not back down.
On June 20, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), chair of the House Republican conference, called for a federal abortion ban at 15 weeks, saying that the right to life “is fundamental to human rights and the American dream” and calling out the justices who decided Roe v. Wade as “radical judges who frankly took the voice away from the American people…. The people are the most important voices” on abortion, she said.
But, in fact, a majority of Americans supported abortion rights even before Dobbs, and those numbers have gone up since the decision, especially as untreated miscarriages have brought patients close to death before they could get medical care and girls as young as ten have had to cross state lines to obtain healthcare. Sixty-eight percent of OB-GYNs recently polled by KFF said Dobbs has made it harder to manage emergencies; 64% say it has increased patient deaths. A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows that 80% of Americans—65% of Republicans and 83% of independents—oppose a nationwide ban on abortion while only 14% support one. Fifty-three percent of Americans want federal protection of abortion; 39% oppose it.
In politics, it seems the dog has caught the car. The end of Roe v. Wade has energized those in favor of abortion rights, with Democrat-dominated states protecting reproductive rights and the administration using executive power to protect them where it can. Republicans are now running away from the issue: the ad-tracking firm AdImpact found that only 1% of Republican ads in House races in 2022 mentioned abortion.
At the same time, antiabortion activists achieved their goal and stand to be less energized. This desperate need to whip up enthusiasm among their base is likely behind the Republicans’ sudden focus on transgender children. Right-wing media has linked the two in part thanks to the highly visible work of the American College of Pediatricians, which, despite its name, is a political action group of about 700 people, only 60% of whom have medical degrees. (They broke off from the 67,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics in 2002 after that medical organization backed same-sex parents.) They are prominent voices against both abortion and gender-affirming health care.
In Nebraska in May, a single law combined a ban on abortion after 12 weeks and on gender-affirming care for minors. “This bill is simply about protecting innocent life,” Republican state senator Tom Briese said.
Vice President Kamala Harris has made protecting reproductive rights central, traveling around the country to talk with people about abortion rights and pressing the administration to do more to protect them. At a rally in Washington, D.C., on Friday, she articulated the message of fifty years ago: “We stand for the freedom of every American, including the freedom of every person everywhere to make decisions—about their own body, their own health care and their own doctor,” she said. “So we fight for reproductive rights and legislation that restores the protections of Roe v. Wade. And here’s the thing. The majority of Americans are with us, they agree.”
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