Star Wars Day – May the 4th be With You.

…to anyone who celebrates it.

Its Trump’s Party

Trump’s pick in the the highest profile race of the day, the Ohio Senate GOP primary, (JD Vance) won the nomination largely due to Trump’s endorsement power.

Trump did not endorse in the Ohio governor’s race, where Republican Gov. Mike DeWine — one of the first prominent Republicans to acknowledge President Joe Biden’s victory — fended off a stiff primary challenge.

Trump bypassed the Indiana Senate race as well, where Sen. Todd Young — who said Trump bears responsibility for the January 6 attacks — won renomination. Trump also didn’t back Rep. David Joyce, the incumbent in Ohio’s 14th District, who issued a statement last year denying that the 2020 election was stolen.

In a race that the media will use to show that the Democrats need to “turn to the center”  

Rep. Shontel Brown of Ohio beats Nina Turner in Democratic primary rematch

CLEVELAND — Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, won a rematch Tuesday against Nina Turner, a progressive activist and former state senator who is known nationally for her work on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Democratic presidential campaigns, NBC News projects.

Brown was leading 65.3 percent to 34.7 percent, with 62 percent of precincts reporting, at 11:01 p.m. ET.

Brown beat Turner by 5.5 percentage points in a crowded special primary last summer and then easily won the vacant seat in Ohio’s overwhelmingly Democratic 11th Congressional District in the general election.

Read this to learn about how big money found a nominally issues-based super PAC, and poured in millions of dollars into the race to take down the most progressive candidate in a congressional, with ads that have nothing to do with that particular issue.

A woman shouldn’t be able to unilaterally deny a rapist the blessing of fatherhood.  Right?

If you watch Tucker Carlson you may be aware of Biden’s diabolical plan to force Putin into a war in Ukraine in order to punish him for “stealing Hillary Clinton’s coronation.”

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST):  We know the war in Ukraine is not about saving democracy. Please. We know it’s not about protecting the sacred borders of a sovereign country. We know the Biden administration doesn’t care about those principles because they run our country, and we see how they act.

And we know for dead certain — that the war in Ukraine is not about helping the Ukraine people, those poor people. Many more Ukrainian civilians will die, certainly, thanks to the Biden administration’s policies.

If you wanted to save Ukraine, its people, its infrastructure, its nation, you would push for a settlement now. You would have done it two months ago, but they’re not doing that. They’ve rejected it out of hand, so that’s not their goal, saving Ukraine, saving human lives.

…

So we arm Ukraine so we can fight Russia. Now, how many Americans, whatever you think of Putin — probably not much, justifiably — probably don’t have a lot of interest in moving to Russia, but how many Americans then or now want to, quote, “fight Russia?” A very small group. But Adam Schiff said it out loud at the time in the House of Representatives.

We don’t arm Ukraine so we can help the Ukrainians, they are merely unfortunate pawns in all of this. We arm Ukraine so that we can punish Russia. Why? For stealing Hillary Clinton’s coronation.

This obliterates all other news. I don’t have much to say about it other than to point out that some argued that the court wouldn’t do this because it would risk “stirring up” Dem voters. Those people are idiots. It is the Democrats who don’t act for fear of “stirring up” Republican voters.

Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v Wade  decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey– that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes

High up on the long list of things that I don’t get is –  why Delaware Democrats allow Delaware Republicans to run away from Trump, run away from McConnell and run way from basic GOP policies.

I like Zelenskyy. He is always on message, “Great. Thanks. Send More.”

Pelosi Goes to Kyiv

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi praised Ukrainians’ “ferocity” and promised military and financial support after leading a top-level meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv over the weekend.

Pelosi, the most senior American lawmaker to visit Ukraine since Russia’s war began more than two months ago, told reporters in Poland on Sunday that the U.S. congressional delegation she led was proud to convey to Zelenskyy “the message of unity from the Congress of the United States, a message of appreciation from the American people for his leadership and admiration for the people of Ukraine for their courage.”

Hundreds of US Cities Composting Their Food Waste Gives Farmers A+ Soil and Cuts Tons of Emissions

Last week, new water restrictions issued for millions of residents of Southern California highlighted the need to make agriculture more efficient—and a new statewide composting mandate is providing the solution.

California leads the nation in food production, which requires a lot of water, and now because they became the second state in the nation after Vermont to make large-scale composting required by law means we can have our produce ‘cake’ and eat it, too.

Compost Awareness Week, which begins today, may sound superficial, but we need to know that farms can grow up to 40 percent more food in times of drought when they use compost—and when citizens dump their coffee grounds and banana peels into a bin for pick up, they are feeding the soil, while guarding against water shortages.

City composting programs produce thousands of truckloads of finished compost that go onto farms, orchards, and vineyards, creating a natural sponge that attracts and retains moisture. Not only that, the recycling loop is combatting global warming.

Food waste makes up nearly 20% of the stuff in our landfills. When that food decomposes, it releases methane; tens of times more potent than carbon dioxide, it’s one of the main greenhouse gasses fueling the climate crisis, and landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions in the U.S.

X

The ultra left’s anti-anti-Putin stance is just stupid.

What If I Told You Russia, Not America, Invaded Ukraine? My wildest Putin conspiracy theory: He’s been behind the war all along.

This week, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters that one American goal in arming Ukraine was to weaken Russia. The anti-anti-Russia coalition of commentators on the right, and elements of the far left, cried out in vindication.

The key thing to understand about anti-anti-Russia thinkers is that their worldview treats the war in Ukraine as if it is being waged by the United States. Absent this premise, their arguments are unintelligible. But if you read them with the assumption that Washington has masterminded the conflict, everything clicks into place.

Anti-anti-Russians had already arrived at the conclusion that Ukraine’s war was an American plot to undermine Russia. “Is the purpose of the arms shipments to strengthen Ukraine’s hand in reaching a negotiated settlement to the conflict — a process from which the Biden administration and allied governments have so far held themselves aloof?” posited the leftist Branko Marcetic last week. “Or is it, as some U.S. and British officials have suggested, to turn Ukraine into an Afghanistan-like quagmire for Russia, weakening it and perhaps even triggering regime change, while sending a message to China in the process?”

Boebert (who assembled her four young children in front of a Christmas tree and had them pose with AR-15s for social media likes) is sick of being lumped in with Greene because Greene is  cR@Zy!!

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert reportedly almost came to blows over Greene’s appearance at a white nationalist event in February, to the point that someone had to step in between them to de-escalate the confrontation. Three people close to the Freedom Caucus confirmed the spat to Politico, which took place during a meeting of the caucus’ board of directors.

My cousin twice removed, Adrian Scott, was a screenwriter and  one of the Hollywood Ten. He was blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  He was a lefty.

I never knew him and wasn’t around for it, but I imagine that the thing that made the “Red Scare” scary was that you didn’t know when the finger of accusation was going to point at you and blow up your life.   That must be what it is like to be a teacher nowadays.

A Media Matters review of Raichik’s Twitter account found that Libs of TikTok has tagged or named at least 222 schools, education organizations, or school system employees in 2022, often directing users to harass an individual school district or teacher. In the last week alone, the account has targeted a school district, a middle school, and four teachers for teaching students about identity, sexuality, or other so-called “propaganda.”

The competent Trump.  That’s the brand DeSantis is trying to build.

These similarities reflect a certain ideological convergence between the post-Trump Republican Party and Fidesz: a belief in the central importance of cultural war and the need to wage it using state power.

Broadly speaking, both Orbán and DeSantis characterize themselves as standing for ordinary citizens against a corrupt and immoral left-wing cosmopolitan elite. These factions are so powerful, in their telling, that aggressive steps must be taken to defeat their influence and defend traditional values. University professors, the LGBTQ community, “woke” corporations, undocumented immigrants, opposition political parties — these are not merely rivals or constituents in a democratic political system, but threats to a traditional way of life.

In such an existential struggle, the old norms of tolerance and limited government need to be adjusted, tailored to a world where the left controls the commanding heights of culture. Since the left can’t be beaten in that realm, government must be seized and wielded in service of a right-wing cultural agenda.

These ideas are not exclusive to these two political figures: They are widely shared among far-right thinkers and parties across the Western world. You can find versions of them in factions ranging from Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

In the United States, Trump was supposed to be the avatar of this far-right thinking — which, in this country, is broadly associated with a loose group of intellectuals and writers called “the New Right.” But it turned out he was too self-absorbed and haphazard to successfully implement a New Right agenda. Trump’s most notable legislative achievement? A tax cut written by old-school, pro-business conservatives.

DeSantis is actually walking the New Right walk. His policy agenda has been described as “competent Trumpism,” but that’s a bit misleading. Trumpism was never a coherent intellectual doctrine, because the person whose name it bore did not have a coherent ideology. What DeSantis is doing is taking far-right ideas and making them into policy reality.

All that said – DeSantis is lacking the charisma needed to win a fair national election.  But Republicans have covered that base.   The next presidential election isn’t going to be called “fair” by anybody.

I hate being able to see the future with such clarity.  But Joe listens to too many sober centrist moderates.  (That’s generous, maybe the sober centrist moderate he is listening to Joe Biden’s internal monologue?  Who knows.)

Anyway, he could forgive student debt and let the Republicans & Coons have their conniption fit.  They’ll have their conniption fit no matter what.

Just don’t fuck it up by means testing and forcing everybody into some complicated tax rebate scheme bullshit to get the money.

As I type that I know (100%) he is going to fuck it up.

This is a very loose transcript.  Coons managed to restrain his usual warmongery.  Although he doesn’t think Biden is being Kennedy-esque enough in the face of Putins threats to use nukes.   

_________________________________

Morning Joe Panel Guy:  You’ve talked about the need to restore deterrence.

Coons: We need to restore deterrence capabilities of NATO, and we need to punish Putin.  It is not enough for the Ukrainians to fight the Russians to a stand still.  We need to provide them with the resources to win the conflict.   …the resources both humanitarian and military resources.   There was strong BIPARTISAN participation

…The administration intends tp provide the resources nesscicary for Ukraine to win as Ukraine defines winning.   I’m very concerned about  the status of Georgia, Moldova, the Baltic States and our eastern flank critical NATO allies.  We need to providing supplies to sustain the eastern flank of NATO.   Our core allies are in position to talk about suctions…gas… we need to make it hurt economically and militarily.  We need to show the unity of the west.  That’s going to require the American people to sustain their focus in this.  (Boilerplate praise for Biden)

JoeScar:  You talk about hurting Putin economically militarily… (quoting NYT) “Russia reminding the world of their nuclear arsenal. If Putin faces any more humiliating losses…”    What do you say to Americans that don’t want a nuclear war?

Coons:  (Kendy faced the Cuban Missile Crisis) If Putin can intimidate us and keep us from supporting another country through threats.  Then we are in a different place.   If N Korea and China can use nuclear  capabilities to bully their way into regional’s dominance then the order of the world security order will come apart.  (More boilerplate praise for Biden) but…frankly that conflict has started.

Leader of Belarus Opposition Party:   Lukashenko is illegitimate.  People are residing this regime.  Lukashenko is an accomplice in this war.  86% of our people don’t want out participation int he war.    We have had two victories,  one, Belarus didn’t invade and 2 we have no safe space for Russian troops.   … Lukashenko ordered Belarus soldiers to invade but soldiers refused to invade.

Barnacle:  (to Coons) What is your sense of Putin trying to ensnare US into a wider war?

Coons:  This is Ukrains war.  I agree that Putin want to make this into a Russia vs US or Russia vs NATO war and we need to keep fighting that this is the sovigern nation of Ukraine defending itself from an unjustified attack.

With the Sober, Moderate, Centrist Democratic Party offering NOTHING to working class voters beyond complicated, means tested tax credits, of course they’ll go for the anti-NAFTA nationalist.