There is an old saw that goes; there is your side, my side, and the truth is in the middle. The liberal perspective advocates a humanitarian view, finding a way to feed, house, and clothe people fleeing inevitable death by gang violence, drought, and starvation. The more conservative view is...
Ideology
Most of us have heard the tale of the frog in boiling water. If you try to put a frog in boiling water, it will hop out, but if you place it in the water and heat it slowly, it will sit and cook to death. The Republican party has...
Voting for the current crop of Republicans is like brushing your teeth with the water running. It is a waste of resources, has no purpose, but all your friends do it. Nothing was more symbolic than the displays of blubbering pique by Congressmen Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan. The House...
The tens of tens who showed up in Washington, DC Saturday had a face, former Trump staffer Matt Braynard. Braynard, who presents himself as one of the many “voter fraud experts,” investigating the presidential election, was front and center Saturday afternoon in the Justice for J6 huddle. Braynard, who once...
The media should set an example for public discourse. No, I do not mean shaping a monolith of Democratic or Republican philosophy, we have that now. Two questions need to be asked of a guest before any interview with a public official or passing the sweet potatoes at the Thanksgiving...
Let me start by saying no one—for or against—is in favor of abortion. Subjecting a woman and her partner to outside scrutiny from what is the most anguished-filled decision of their lives, is no business of any of ours to decide for any woman. One of the few tenets left...
Fear of a Red Hat: as much as Liz Cheney is toast, more troubling is Elise Stefanik’s Führereid, because Trump is too stupid to see that he’s blazing an even tighter path to obscurity. As Greg Sargent observes, there is an increased likelihood of another attempt at stealing an election, further...
Yesterday was a very busy day for me so I’m playing catch up today. Received this e-mail yesterday from former Air Force Pilot and U.S. Senate candidate, Amy McGrath (D. KY) on behalf of her new organization, Democratic Majority Action PAC: RoJo The Traitor Since I told you about my...
Apparently the spree killer in Indianapolis was also a “Brony”, a follower of My Little Pony as reported by the Wall Street Journal. We are in our pandemic (l)anguish, even more confused by a sad shape for online culture. Not unlike the infantile imagery used by Boogaloo Boys, racism and sexism filter into...
We’re now at that strange nexus where Brian Kilmeade’s attempt to pin Prince Phil’s death on the granddaughter-in-law fits other anti-semitic and racist tropes fronted by Fox News. This because of counting artifacts in threes. “The New York Time’s (NYT) Upshot examined the statistical prevalence of celebrity deaths in threesomes. How did they do...
You’d think that a scholar in psychology, however flawed, would understand projection, and that fascism is more than making trains run on time, even when they didn’t. Hail Hydra, because parody is meta-criticism and perhaps we’ll see some plagiarism lawfare over self-help brand infringement. Apparently Jordan Peterson got offended that...
Is US progressive politics, especially in cultural issues, incapable of attracting majority support. Not so much in terms of the usual self-fulfilling marginalization, but there are absolute limits to the mutability of moderate ideologies in order to build working majorities. In these conditions, it seems almost certain that tit-for-tat will...
Like Martin Luther objecting to Pope Leo X selling indulgences to raise money for a variety of excesses, the environmental costs of carbon markets far exceed the benefits. Austerity would have denied us Renaissance art which is less at risk in an age of non-fungible tokens. Today the consequences for the planet...
The Atlanta spree killings are unfortunately a story with structural similarity to events elsewhere. How do we know that Robert Long wasn’t on his way to Mar-a-Lago when the cops performed a PIT maneuver on him after he killed eight people. Darn hypotheticals of the culture wars. Mar-a-Lago as spa resort...
Letting a cabal like Council for National Policies choose the tropes: “Buy Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head because it’s the end of an era. It is the end of freedom in America”. Because of course you learn gender roles from potatoes, your ideology from conservative lobbying groups, and then there’s...
Insurrection part Deux may be coming, but it’s a distraction from an emerging Raw Story report about Russian mobsters and Trump that includes money laundering in Kazakhstan. This doesn’t even touch the tax fraud prosecution. Thank jeebus CPAC is over and that concentrated hate and stupidity is over for another year. Even...
Ron Johnson and a core number of GOP senators does the bidding of Russia for what seems to be the reasons that Kevin McCarthy attributed to Dana Rohrabacher and Donald Trump: Putin pays them. Russia seemed to be on Riley Williams’s mind when she indicated that she wanted to sell...
Recovering memory and historical revisionism in sex work might be the sad product of many repressive regimes. What becomes worse is the complicity of academic institutions in white-washing crimes against humanity. Harvard is no stranger to items like Alan (buddy of Jeff Epstein) Dershowitz’s attempt to move the statutory rape...
Ted Cruz tried to slither around the coverage of his holiday in Cancun, including an interview on Hannity to offset a series of lies once social media caught him at the airport. #TedFled because he’s really not all about the accountability or even patriotism considering his role in the insurrection. Cruz's...
Texas is the coalmine canary of failures in the GQP’s industrial policy. The “clusterfuzzle” appears to be only in Texas: perhaps they skimmed on costs and failed in winterizing their plants. The structural failure comes from the anti-federal, deregulatory policy of the Texas grid which reveals itself in the disinformation...
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that...
The Washington Post did a version of the NY Times profiles of Trumpists, albeit those who were involved in the 6 January insurrection, and there does seem to be a class struggle, not quite like one would expect. The participation of people with middle- and upper-middle-class positions fits with research...
Let real wages (of $15+/hour) grow faster than labor productivity for some years, undoing the wage repression of the last decades. We have been misled by neoliberal economics for now many decades, it’s time to turn many things around in what is becoming a second-rated US economy, recently crippled by the...
Received this e-mail today from the Pennsylvania Democratic Party: Pennsylvania Supreme Court candidate, Superior Court Justice Maria McLaughlin (D. PA) Pennsylvania's Vote By Mail request form is now available for the 2021 elections! With key local offices on the ballot, Democrats need to vote with the same great fervor as...
Living, working, and surviving as a black man in a national community that sees you as an inferior, from time to time the question is asked, ‘ do you think there will be a second civil war?’ In my lifetime, I remember the question being asked when my great-granny clutched...
Desperate disinformation failed miserably as so many Trumpists were obsessed with selfie declarations of their assault on the Capitol yesterday. Because they wanted trophies and attention-seeking recognition, many familiar “alt-right” white supremacists revealed themselves, as well as some public officials and even at least one police chief. x There is no...
The neoliberals’ “free market” is not going to sequester enough carbon to save the environment. Even Warren Buffett isn’t willing to take a bet on surviving an impending climate crisis catastrophe, because “the rents are too high”. Existential threats have a critical reality, about which ruthless criticism is entailed. Even...
We’re now at the end of the road where Trump imagines that he can affect future architectural style in federal buildings. And of course he wants an airport named after him. x counteroffer: Trump can have a rest stop toilet on the New Jersey Turnpike— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) December 21,...
“A 22-year-old self-proclaimed member of the “Boogaloo Bois” movement pleaded guilty on Wednesday to trying to sell weapon parts to Hamas after traveling to Minneapolis amid this summer’s George Floyd protests.” What’s curious is that for these Boogaloo Bois, while domestic terrorism remained the goal, the path had that Iran-Contra...
There’s an agitated Trump up late tweeting more conspiracy nonsense as the Electoral College has voted and the sedition attempt has failed with the so-called longshot of a Congressional maneuver on 6 January the last gasp available. What remains is grift and unhingery. x It’s 1:15 am, Eastern Time. https://t.co/mAbK0tsIhO— Reed Galen...
The Jewish Action group Twitter account, shared an image of Senator Kelly Loeffler with a former leader of the KKK. Chester Doles, a fourth-generation Klansman, now leads the National Alliance and Hammerskins. He introduced the nation to the American Patriots USA in 2019. International Business Times writes: Kelly Loeffler claims she had...
Back in April, President Trump issued a hollow order that meatpacking plants remain open, with safety restrictions to be fashioned by the plants’ owners. Even though the Covid-19 virus was ravaging its employees, places like Tyson Foods threatened them with firings if they dared put their health above a slab of...
The post-presidential Trumpian revisionist history continues because the grift continues, portending an attempt to attach itself to other pseudo-grievances that have persisted because of cultural and regional divisions. Trump will fundraise off a 2024 reelection myth the instant he concedes(sic), with the goal of establishing some permanent media presence. Check-out this...