DL Open Thread: Saturday, April 23, 2022

Sorry for the late start. We’ve been binge-watching Justified, and we’re in the final season, which is Breaking Bad-good.  Sometimes, we can’t stop ’til we’ve seen the next episode.  Final two episodes tonight…I’m guessing the body count increases.

Dems Can’t Ignore Culture Wars Any Longer.  Jamelle Bouie speaks the truth:

Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.”

The Red Scare is, in this view, less a sudden outburst of reactionary hysteria than a political project aimed directly at dismantling the New Deal order and ousting those who helped bring it into being, both inside and outside the federal government.

I think that this perspective is a useful one to have in mind as conservatives pursue yet another witch hunt against those they perceive as enemies of American society, using whatever state power they happen to have at their disposal. Both the crusade against “critical race theory” and the slanderous campaign against L.G.B.T.Q. educators and education are as much about undermining key public goods (and stigmatizing the people who support them) as they are about generating enthusiasm for the upcoming midterm elections.

To be clear, this isn’t some secret. Christopher Rufo, a right-wing provocateur who helped instigate both the panics against “critical race theory” and against L.G.B.T.Q. educators in schools, has openly said that he hopes to destroy public education in the United States.

It’s not subtle.

These are not distractions to ignore; they are battles to be won. The culture war is here, whether Democrats like it or not. The only alternative to fighting it is losing it.

That’s enough fair use.  This piece is right on point. Read it. Share it.  Consultants wring their hands in 3-2-1.

GOP Megadonor Charged In Scheme To Run Repairman Off The Road In Search For ‘Secret Ballots’:

Conservative activist Steven Hotze on Wednesday was indicted on two felony charges related to his alleged involvement in an air conditioning repairman being held at gunpoint in 2020 during a bizarre search for fraudulent mail ballots that did not exist, according to his attorney, Gary Polland.

The charges stem from Hotze’s hiring of more than a dozen private investigators to look for voter fraud in Harris County ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

One of the investigators, former Houston police captain Mark Aguirre, was arrested in December 2020 and charged with aggravated assault. Prosecutors said Aguirre used his vehicle to run an air conditioning repairman off the road before dawn on Oct. 19, 2020.

Aguirre then detained the repairman at gunpoint and ordered an associate to search his truck, according to court filings. When a Houston police officer happened upon the scene and stopped to investigate, Aguirre said the truck contained 750,000 fraudulent mail ballots prepared by Democrats.

The truck contained only air conditioning parts and equipment. Hotze’s investigators have not produced any credible evidence to support allegations that Democrats orchestrated a wide-ranging mail ballot scheme in Harris County during that election.

Sometimes the stories write themselves.

Ohio MAGAt’s Try To Make Up Their Alleged Minds.  This Senate race is every bit as pathetic as you’d expect.  Will ‘Because Trump told me to’ be enough to get Vance across the finish line?  Will D’s fight back (rhetorical question)?

How ‘Good Fire’ Helps Restore Land.  Underutilized and misunderstood:

A growing movement of scientists, land management agencies, conservation organizations, and Indigenous groups is working to return fire to marshes like this one and to fire-adapted forests and grasslands throughout the United States. In the eastern U.S., where wildfires burn far less land than in the West, fire’s century-long absence has upended ecosystems. Forests once dominated by fire-adapted trees like oaks, hickories, and pines have been taken over by species that support far less wildlife. And overcrowded trees growing in woods without regular fire have stifled understory biodiversity, while raising the risk of damaging blazes.

But fire promoters face stiff challenges. Relatively few people today are trained and qualified to burn. And everything from weather to government regulations to public hostility to fire conspires to keep fire off the land. A long-held view of fire as unnatural and threatening—amplified by dramatic images of climate change-fueled megafires in the western U.S. and elsewhere—is proving hard to overcome.

Advocates say that view is misguided. Prescribed fire, they say, is a critical solution to address a panoply of stark and growing challenges: biodiversity loss, wildfire risk, climate change, threats to human health, and more. Ecologists say fire is a creative force that has long produced food for wildlife and humans and has helped maintain a balance allowing multitudes of species to thrive. “Fire,” says Landau, “is as natural as rain.”

Indigenous people who inhabited this continent for millennia were sophisticated fire masters, using it to promote food-bearing plants, clear hunting and travel paths, create farming plots, control pests and diseases, and much more. From the oak woodlands of California to the undulating prairies of the Midwest to the vast pine savannas of the South — name the ecosystem, it was probably shaped by fire.

But as Native people were pushed out, and as forests and other landscapes were integrated into global markets, fire came to be seen as a destructive force that could wipe out valuable resources, such as timber. Fire suppression also became wrapped up in the effort to suppress Native culture.

Is it safe to assume that references to Indigenous people and Indigenous practices have been removed from Florida textbooks?  Or, more likely, all textbooks?

Environmental Groups Try To Force Governmental Agency To Do Its Job–Cleaning Up The Delaware River.  Agency is charged to do it–but it refuses to.  Gee, wonder how many of those polluters donate to our congressional delegation.  My guess? All of them.

What do you want to talk about?