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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • While the decision to stop publishing the six books was made by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, right-wing outlets like Fox News mischaracterized it as a book ban.

    Unsurprisingly, it has actually been Republican-backed laws like Tennessee’s that have resulted in the banning of Dr. Seuss books from schools.

    And that’s the way it works pretty much without exception - private individuals and businesses and such make independent decisions and the Republicans scream that they’re being oppressed, then they pass laws in the name of freedom.

    Even with as insane as the Republican agenda is, and as deluded as their supporters necessarily must be, that particular aspect of it really stands out to me. It’s just so perfectly Orwellian.


  • Setting aside the anti-health and anti-sanity aspects of this, the thing that gets me is that Republicans somehow continue to believe that they’re the party of freedom when everything they do involves ever more regulation.

    They frame things as if the Democrats are oppressing people and the Republicans are fighting for their freedom, but the exact opposite is actually true - the way that things actually work, consistently, is that Democrats want to give people the freedom to do things and Republicans are fighting to destroy those freedoms. Their reaction to every single thing they encounter is to pass a law against it, which is literally the exact opposite of freedom.

    Now granted - most of their positions are insane, so it’s not as if rationality should be expected, but this just seems to be something so simple and so obvious that they can’t possibly miss it. Yet somehow they do.










  • Seriously, WHAT is THE DEAL with conservative disinformationists scattering ALL-CAPS WORDS throughout EVERYTHING they WRITE?

    My THEORY is that it’s MEANT as a SUBSTITUTE for LOGIC and REASON - that in LIEU of saying things that are ACTUALLY logical, reasonable or true, they JUST say things really LOUDLY.

    It MUST be TRUE because it’s so EMPHATIC, right?

    And it PROBABLY triggers a PAVLOVIAN response in the DUNDERHEADS who READ it. “LOOK at all the CAPS! This is MY kind of TRUTHINESS!”

    It’s just… WEIRD. And sort of PATHETIC.


  • Of course he is.

    It’s really a very simple calculus - any deal is going to include a timeline for Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and if Netanyahu signs off on a deal that includes a withdrawal from Gaza, the hard right assholes are going to turn on him. And if the hard right assholes turn on him, he’s not going to be able to hold onto the office. And if he doesn’t hold onto the office, he’s likely going to jail, because he’s not just a psychopathic piece of shit, but a grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit.

    And that’s really the whole deal right there - tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of people are dying and millions of people are displaced all so that one grotesquely corrupt psychopathic piece of shit can evade justice.





  • I’m regularly struck by the literal insanity of politics, but this whole deal with Israel is a particularly notable example.

    The fact of the matter is that we have no idea what Harris’s actual opinion of the situation is. Regardless of what it might actually be, she has to support Israel, which at this point means supporting a government of literal murderous psychopaths who are simultaneously carrying out a genocide in Gaza and a violent incremental illegal land grab in the West Bank while also brazenly trying to provoke, and drag the US into, a war with Lebanon or Syria or Yemen or Iran. And why does she have to support all of that patent evil? Because if she doesn’t, AIPAC will spend millions and millions of dollars trying to destroy her, like they already destroyed Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, for daring to have principles.

    And what’s the likely net result of that? To elect a Republican, which is to say, a member of the party of actual antisemites.

    They accuse Democrats of being antisemites merely for calling genocide genocide, and meanwhile, the actual antisemites - the people who comtinue to hold to the notion of Jews as evil, money-grubbing vermin who are conspiring to take over the world, are Republicans, even including Republicans in high office, like “Jewish space lasers” Marjorie Taylor Greene.

    Think about how insane that is - a politician has to publicly support a genocidal regime or face being called an antisemite and having an Israeli advocacy group spend millions and millions of dollars to destroy her and instead elect the candidate from the party of actual Jew-hating antisemites.

    And as if that isn’t enough, we have Jill Stein in the middle of it all, who, with zero chance of actually winning, is free to take the position that any rational person should take, and the position that the majority of the Democratic base takes - that genocide is genocide and is rightly condemned. And that then introduces the risk that she’ll draw off enough Democratic voters, merely by taking the position held by the majority, so the position that the Democratic candidate should take, that it will hand the election to the Republican - the candidate of the party of actual antisemites.

    The whole thing is bludgeoningly insane. I don’t think anyone could’ve created such a grotesquely dysfunctional and actuslly counter-productive system if they’d deliberately set out to do it.

    And yet that’s the world we live in - the world we’re forced to live in - a world warped by the literal insanity of a wealthy and powerful few.

    It boggles my mind.



  • I’m having another of those “Damn - I’m still not cynical enough” moments at the thought that anyone would actually believe that Trump could do a better job than anyone else at anything having anything at all to do with the economy.

    It’d make sense if the measure of an effective president was their skill at lying, filing false financial reports, dodging creditors and filing bankruptcy - then Trump would clearly be unequalled. But since it’s not…?


  • Only “near” historic low?

    Since we already have at least two overtly corrupt justices whose entire defense consists essentially of “nobody has the authority to do anything about it so fuck you,” and the highlights of their last session include ruling that bribery is entirely legal just so long as the check is postdated and that presidents are completely and totally immune from even being investigated over anything that is in any way connected to anything that might by any stretch of the most fevered imagination be considered an "official act " I have to wonder what it will take to actually hit rock bottom.

    I have no doubt that, since they have no integrity, no ethics and no regard for either law or the well-being of the country, we’ll see.