DL Open Thread Monday March 28th 2022
The GOP’s anti-trans one-upmanship festival of hate is unfolding at breakneck speed.
Robert Foster, a former GOP house representative in Mississippi and failed gubernatorial candidate there, has a new message he hopes will open doors for him: kill trans people and their supporters.
“Some of y’all still want to try and find political compromise with those that want to groom our school aged children and pretend men are women, etc,” he wrote on Twitter. “I think they need to be lined up against wall before a firing squad to be sent to an early judgment.”
The Mississippi Free Press contacted him; he doubled down:
“I said what I said,” he wrote, adding to what he had tweeted. “The law should be changed so that anyone trying to sexually groom children and/or advocating to put men pretending to be women in locker rooms and bathrooms with young women should receive the death penalty by firing squad.”
…here’s the headline to Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Ginni Thomas’s dozens of tweets to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, imploring him to “stop the steal:”
Legal Scholars Are Shocked By Ginni Thomas’s “Stop the Steal” Texts
…people like NYU law prof Stephen Gillers are shocked enough by these texts that they’re now arguing that Clarence Thomas is legally and ethically required to recuse himself from SCOTUS cases involving the Trump administration’s attempts to overturn the election.
The larger point here is one that the elite media in this country are constitutionally incapable of ever grasping, which is that what once upon a time was the paranoid fringe of the Republican party is now the very core of that institution.
That’s why these people are somehow going to manage to be surprised when Donald Trump is the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, when this outcome is in fact practically certain, short of some extremely prejudicial medical event in the interim. They’ll also be surprised when Trump spends the entire campaign claiming the election is going to be rigged against him, and they’ll be surprised again when these claims have very negative social effects in the wake of the election, which Trump may well “win” via massive Republican state legislative skullduggery, even though Joe Biden gets ten million more votes or whatever.
Everybody in the media is mad a Joe Biden for being impolitic. For example Fox News views Biden’s “gaffe” as far worse than Putins invasion of Ukraine.
Biden’s ‘regime change’ speech worsens Russia-Ukraine crisis, disappoints allies
Biden to propose minimum tax on households worth over $100 million
LOS ANGELES — Thousands of central and Southern California grocery workers have voted to authorize their union to call a strike against several major supermarket chains as contract negotiations are set to resume this week.
About 47,000 workers at hundreds of Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons and Pavilions voted starting last week and the results were announced Sunday.
The possible walkout would involve grocery clerks, meat cutters, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians represented by seven locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
Pee Pee Township is one of the fourteen townships of Pike County, Ohio. The township takes its name from Pee Pee Creek; which was so named when an early settler inscribed his initials P. P. on a tree along its banks.
That’s where Briana DeSanctis is now, having crossed into Ohio a week or so ago. I got out of the habit of following her progress when she took some time off to allow her shin splints to heel. DeSanctis is endeavoring to be the first solo woman hiker to hike the 5,057 mile American Discovery Trail this from Cape Henlopen Delaware to Point Reyes National Seashore in California.
At some point Biden has to articulate the conditions for removing sanctions on Russia. Otherwise he won’t be able to maintain sanctions long-term. I think removing Putin has to be an unstated condition for removing sanctions.
Our history in the Regime Change business is pretty horrible. Since 1950, has there been one that ever worked over the long term? Iran, Guatemala, Syria, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cuba, Congo-Leopoldville, Laos, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Iraq, Indonesia (again), Cambodia, Chile, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Angola, East Timor, Argentina, Afghanistan, Chad, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama
It’s so sad and a reflection on the level of moral and intellectual development ln this nation that a political party can win with candidates who have no governing agenda and offer only white resentment and bitterness.
Rethugs have established themselves as the Party of Hate. It is the driving force behind every one of their policies. Governor Disease of Florida is showing us what an authoritarian party can do.