I am very thankful for Carl. He looks for dirty things all over the internet so we don’t have to.

 

Hudson mayor thinks ice fishing leads to prostitution! Put your poles away boys!*

*Same guy who thinks creative writing classes are child pornography. pic.twitter.com/9N0R2tVri6

— Amanda Weinstein (@ProfWeinstein) February 9, 2022

Honey, if it’s too cold to fish, it’s too cold to take your pecker for a ride on the nickel train.

I love the part where he’s sincerely taken back that everybody isn’t following his line of thinking.

 

“Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see.” — John Lennon

The time of death is fairly easy to report. The patient had been clinging to life on life support, but finally decided to pull its own plug when the RNC decided to censure Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. That by itself was horrific news for any fan of democracy.

Mind you, the simple act of censuring a politician is almost completely symbolic. It can be loosely defined as an expression of official disapproval. So, what exactly are they disapproving? Kinzinger and Cheney were the lone Republicans to participate in the House January 6th committee.

It wasn’t for lack of effort. One thing Democrats are always guilty of doing is reaching out in the interest of fairness. In a process that took nearly three months, they tried to get more Republicans on board. It was never going to happen. Republicans can only say no at this point. They’ve somehow regressed into the mind of a two year old.

Mind you, the commission itself is not the cause of death. There are dozens of plausible reasons for not participating. Often, these things become more political than useful. The death officially came when the RNC declared that January 6th was legitimate political discourse.

This is not one of those play on words. I’ve heard these before on the other side. I’ve had people tell me the Democrats are dead in terms of electoral politics. They said this back in the Bush administration. Ironically, Bush have been the only Republican politicians to win a popular vote in the presidential elections since 1988.

Yet, this isn’t some dramatic postmortem that will turn out the other way. Conservatism is not dead. It is alive and well. Patriotism certainly isn’t dead. There are still more than enough people that love their country. The zombie version of the party has managed to rig enough elections to send the undead in the halls of Congress for generations to come. The bodies will be there, but something will definitely be lacking.

Cities perform autopsies when the cause of death is undetermined or material to a criminal case. Countries should do the same when one of the major political parties dies. We should pour over all of the relevant information to determine if a homicide has occurred. It would either be a homicide or a suicide depending on your point of view.

The outlook on that largely depends on whether you believe the forces that took over the party were ever conservative in the first place. They said they were. They still insist they are. Yet, all of the available evidence suggests that they have abandoned every principle they held dear. That is ultimately the cause of death. It was essentially self immolation.

Believing things that are plainly untrue is a sign of mental illness or denial on a galactic level. When you force fealty to that delusion you cease to be a party. You become a cult. The Republican party isn’t a democratic party anymore. It’s a death cult dedicated to the rule of one man minus the law. Democracies don’t die in a blaze of glory. They atrophy when people honor the man over the mission.

Okay, I’m sorry but this is going to take a while to tell because it has a lot of pieces.

I’m gonna start with this.  Ginni Thomas, the wife of Clarence Thomas is just one teeter or totter (either one) away from being of questionable brain balance.  She sent a letter to Rick DeSantis’ scheduling people and wanted them to know right off the bat how important she is.

She wanted  DeSantis to join one of her secret rightwing groups.

Emails we obtained, reported on by @politico, suggest that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is in regular contact with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

In a June 2021, Ginni Thomas said DeSantis should be familiar with her because “my husband has been in contact with him[.]” pic.twitter.com/R8Sj3thLgC

— American Oversight (@weareoversight) February 4, 2022

Now, it’s all pretty damn silly but right up there in the first paragraph she drops a bomb. This is in June, 2021. She writes, “my husband has been in contact with him too various things of late.”

Kaboom! In trying to make herself look important, she made her husband look, I dunno, like an idiot. What the hell has a supreme court justice been doing chatting with a Governor – a highly political one, at that – “about various things.”

They begin and end the meeting with a prayer, and try to break no less than 5 or 6 of the commandments in between.

Twice she mentions a Cone of Silence. I like to consider myself a well educated and fairly worldly woman, but I had no idea what a cone of silence is. I have been to a meeting or two where they say “what’s said here, stays here,” but there was nothing about a damn cone.

I can work the Google. So I did and the very first thing #1 you get is that it’s a device from the 1960’s comedy Get Smart.  And if you go to Wikipedia, you get more.

If you’re nostalgic, You Tube comes to the rescue. Or, here ya go.

 

 

Oh Ginni Thomas, the meetings are on Zoom, which is the exact opposite of Cone of Silence. Some 9th grader will have full transcripts of the meeting on TicToc in 48 hours, less if she doesn’t have homework.

 

The story of the day is the continuing saga of Joe Rogan and the cheap calls of censorship on the other side. Yogi Berra originally coined the phrase Deja vu all over again. He was good for the zany one-liner. Right wing media and other social media commenters are caught in a loop.

The online dictionary defines censorship as the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, or news that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. I’ve said this a few times in these parts, but the first amendment guarantees no one access to a platform. So, people lobbying Spotify or applying pressure to Spotify has no bearing on whether Congress passes a law to ban Joe Rogan’s speech.

Now, the social media warriors have unleashed the hounds of war on Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. That’s their right. As you might suspect, they have played on the fact that Young’s audience trends on the older side of the ledger. Some of them are quite humorous, so I’ve reluctantly tipped my cap to some of their attempts of humor. Again, it is an example of people exercising their free speech to counteract others exercising their free speech.

Spotify chose to pull episodes of Rogan’s podcast. It started off with 70 and then it was pushed to 110 as the article above suggests. By the time you read this it could be more. These episodes were pulled based on liberal use of the “n” word during those episodes. There could become a point where his place is just too toxic to keep around.

Again, I will keep repeating myself until people get it through their thick skulls. You do not have a right to a platform. No really, you do not have a right to a platform. You can say what you want to say. You can record it so other people can hear it. Spotify and other platforms have the right to say no. Of course, this wouldn’t be so maddening if many of the same people that were up in arms about Joe Rogan were also not the ones in favor of banning books from school libraries across the country. The irony is palpable. Some day someone needs to explain the difference to me.

In this instance, a student in Grandbury ISD said it far better than I could. She told the school board that no government has ever banned books from public consumption and ever been seen in history as the good guys. At first blush, it would appear that banning a book from a school library and pressuring a platform to drop a podcast are the same thing. If you squint hard enough and close one eye it is exactly the same thing.

Except that isn’t reality. Rogan’s podcasts have been available on a number of different platforms. So, if Spotify were to drop Rogan you could easily see another platform adding him. People that want to find Rogan on their virtual radio dial will find him. No amount of snark, feaux outrage, or false equivalencies will ever change that fact. You do not have the right to a platform. School libraries aren’t really platforms. They aren’t making money off of your kid. They are there for their enrichment and therein lies the difference.

We live in a world of shoulds. It has been common for a people to mix up their coulds and their shoulds. Can Spotify pull Joe Rogan’s podcasts? Of course they can. Can your local school library decide not to carry certain books? That one is a little harder, but the answer is yes. The question is whether they should do those things. That’s the only question that matters.

The National Butterfly Center, located in Mission Texas is (was) the North American Butterfly Association’s (NABA) “flagship facility and a primary focus of its efforts aimed at educating the public about the value of biodiversity, the beauty of the natural world, the wonder of butterflies, particularly, and the powerful role they play in maintaining healthy ecosystems and sustainable food resources.”  The NABA was founded in 1993 to study and preserve the butterfly populations that migrate between North and South America, and hold butterfly counts and other conservation programs to protect these delicate creatures.

Why am I writing about a butterfly sanctuary?  Because it was forced to close indefinitely in late January after suffering years of harassment by QAnon followers and other rightwing nutjobs who believe that the sanctuary is not really a butterfly center, but actually a hub for child sex trafficking.  Remember PizzaGate where some idiot shot up a pizza shop believing bullshit that it was being used by cannibalistic Democrats led by Hillary Clinton for child sex trafficking? Well, the same thing has been going on now for 4 years at the butterfly center after rightwing grifter and pal of Steve Bannon, Brian Kolfage, unleashed a barrage of false accusations in retaliation for the center filing suit to stop TFG’s construction of his border wall right through the sanctuary.  Kolfage, who, along with Bannon, is under federal indictment for fraud over their “We Build the Wall” project that duped a whole lot of gullible people out of about $20 million.  Kolfage is well known for releasing nonsense and wild conspiracy theories into the rightwing Noise Machine to attack his perceived enemies.  He’s been banned from social media for all kinds of things including spreading conspiracy theories and creating fake accounts, but his followers do most of his dirty work now for him.

One of those followers is a fringe candidate for Congress from Virginia, Kimberly Lowe, who is apparently so far out there that she was even uninvited to the anti-immigration “We Stand America” rally recently in South Texas, but she took the opportunity while there to “investigate illegal immigration and sex trafficking” at the butterfly center with her friend who was apparently posing as a Secret Service agent.  It went about as you’d expect, with a physical altercation between the center’s director, Marianna Treviño Wright, Lowe, and her friend.  Lowe had demanded to see where the “smuggling” was going on, and, well, you can guess the rest.  The center had planned to close for the duration of the rally, but is now closed indefinitely due to the danger posed to the center and its staff by nutjobs.

It’s easy to stand back and shake your head at the nonsense that proliferates on social media, but this stuff is so corrosive that it’s actually endangering lives and has poisoned all reason, threatening the very foundation of our system of government. It’s especially bad in Texas and other red states where this nonsense has infiltrated once mainstream conservatism and goofy conspiracy theories are now repeated by elected leaders.  Since the base is now crazy, and gerrymandering has cemented it in, I don’t see a path for a return to any kind of reason.

 

Yesterday, even as Mike Pence FINALLY told the truth about Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, the RNC officially censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the January 6th Committee that they claimed was “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.  Liz Cheney fired back with a Tweet:

This was January 6th.
This is not “legitimate political discourse.” pic.twitter.com/lKgbVyVcJr

— Rep. Liz Cheney (@RepLizCheney) February 4, 2022

TFG is cementing his grip on the RNC for 2024.  With weaklings like Pence finally finding their backbone, though, maybe it won’t be as easy as he thinks it is.