Friday Homestead Dispatch

Unofficial Vagient Weasels

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. But your dishonor will remain.”
– Liz Cheney

“Trump ruined it. As soon as Trump was president, it just ended the humor of it. He was the nail in the coffin. He’s the first person that had accidental bad taste that wasn’t funny. Usually, accidental bad taste is what camp originally meant. But today people try too hard. And I think that never works. Because true camp is innocent, it doesn’t do things on purpose. It takes itself very seriously.”
– John Waters on the ruination of Bad Taste

1.
As a targeted audience member in good standing on Facebook I’m so glad an ad pooped (sic…meant to type popped but far more appropriate) up featuring an alternative to AARP, the Stepford Wives Club, seemingly. The Association of Mature American Citizens is looking for gullible Americans to join up and swallow the corporate pill.

Sample issues:

– Critical Race Theory: What You Need to Know about this State-Sanctioned Racism and What You Can Do to Stop It.

– Student Movement Chief: There’s a Deliberate Plan to ‘Separate Children From Their Parents’. (This from Charlie Kirk, the guy who has called for Texas to create a "citizen force" and have them deport Haitians, began the "Exposing Critical Racism Tour" of a number of campuses and off-campus venues to "fight racist theories on America's college campuses,” has spread falsehoods about voter fraud and the COVID-19 pandemic, and said on his podcast that Democrats wanted Americans to live where "there is no cultural identity, where you live in sexual anarchy, where private property is a thing of the past, and the ruling class controls everything." I wrote extensively on him back in December)

– Elon Musk, defender of free speech, says he has a “super bad feeling” about Biden’s economy. Who doesn’t?

– Ron DeSantis: Advocate of Freedom. While liberal mayors were stripping Americans of their rights during the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Ron DeSantis’ popularity skyrocketed when he refused to take part in the tyranny and put Florida on lockdown. Before the pandemic, he was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and an ally of Donald Trump.

You get the idea. All this for only $16/year, or $500 for a lifetime membership. Hmmmm, that’s 31+ years right there, and this is for mature citizens? …and the comments to the ad are priceless…

2.
I dig Jeff Tweedy’s work along with the how the band Wilco interprets his songs. In an interview on Scott Simon’s Weekend Edition last Saturday, Tweedy said about Wilco being a long-lived band, A certain amount of it has to be chocked up to luck. And then there's just a chemistry and compatibility. We don't have control over very much in this world. But as a band and as an ensemble or a collective of people committed to making art together, we get to kind of ensure a certain amount of faith that the world is gonna unfold into something that surprises us. And hopefully provides some respite from things that we don't have control over.

3.
Remember when we had record turnouts for the midterms two years after Drumph was elected? We have to do that again. NO REALLY, we have to do that again. I can’t repeat enough that the GOP of the last fifty years is a 24/7 opposition and character assassination operation that then takes advantage of its success at these endeavors to elect candidates who then pretend they're interested in governing, just to continue the cycle of opposition and character assassination operations. And the lying and rampant racism attached to the party is now out in the open–no apologies.

The Washington Post, among many others, reported that Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, who was endorsed last week by former President Donald Trump in Arizona's GOP primary, admits that the country is facing a problem with gun violence but blamed the issue on "Black people, frankly. And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”

Then Representative Louie Gohmert says, “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you.” Uhhhh…..

States’ rights is the goal for these folks, as in, if you remove Federal laws, state legislatures can do what they wish without federal interference. That’s part and partial why stacking the Supreme Court with right wing fanatics was, to me, the first and foremost reason to vote for Hilary. If/when the federal government can no longer protect equality among all its citizens, it will just be too bad for anyone who is not white and, in most cases, wealthy.

Nobody pays attention to history, but this is what happened after the Civil War when, as Heather Cox Richardson wrote, southern states took away the vote of the Black voters they insisted were trying to redistribute wealth from hardworking white taxpayers into public works projects to benefit the states’ poorer inhabitants. With Black voters cut out of the system, state legislatures enacted harshly discriminatory laws, and law enforcement looked the other way when white people violated the rights of Black and Brown citizens.

She goes on to say, Now, the Republicans, at this point to a person, are echoing the pre–Civil War Democrats to say that democracy means that states should be able to do what they wish without interference from the federal government. So, for example, Texas—and now other states—should be able to ban abortion regardless of the fact that abortion is a constitutional right. States should be able to stop public school teachers from covering certain “divisive” topics: Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked an apparently nonplussed Judge Jackson, “Is it your personal hidden agenda to incorporate Critical Race Theory into our legal system?” And states should be able to restrict the vote, much as southern states did after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and as 19 Republican-dominated states have done since the 2020 election.

I know I may be preaching to the choir but my goal is to make it very clear that this is happening NOW. And just to add some icing to the cake, Masters knocked a 73-year old Dem. protester to the ground last Saturday in Green Valley, right after receiving a right hook from one of the Trumpster womenfolk. To be fair to the Republicans, he was wearing a "Jail Trump" hat and a "Black Lives Matter" t-shirt, certainly cause for violence.

4.
Speaking of authoritarians, Russian President Vladimir Putin recently compared himself to Peter the Great, drawing parallels between the conquering monarch’s founding of St. Petersburg and his government’s annexation of territory that belongs to Ukraine. Pyotr Alekséyevich did some not-so-great stuff, like having his eldest son Alexei tortured to death for allegedly conspiring against him. I wonder if Donald Jr. should start worrying…

5.
Despite the red-flag laws having broad public support, these gray/white men in suits (pictured below) have voiced sharp objections to any federal effort to promote said laws meant to keep guns away from individuals found to be at risk of committing murder or attempting suicide. Even Republi…er, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin said it was “a no-brainer to me” to include a red-flag provision. The Washington Post reported that Democrats said that controlling gun violence was more important by a nearly 90-point margin. Among Republicans, though, more than two-thirds said protecting gun ownership was more important — a higher level of support than even among gun owners themselves.

Do you really want these tired, stodgy suits representing you?

6.
I was glued to the tube last night watching the hearings. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) summed it up with “It’s actually a pretty simple story of a president who lost, who couldn’t stand losing, who cared nothing about the constitution and was determined to hold on to power and who incited a mob when everything else failed.”

Both of Bennie Thompson’s (chair of the House Select Committee, D-MS) and Liz Cheney’s (vice chair, R-WY) opening statements were clear, concise, and to the point. And, along with compelling video footage and the in-person testimony of videographer Nick Quested and Officer Caroline Edwards, it was made clear that what happened that day was much more than a ‘dust up’ and that the folks who invaded the Capital building weren’t just tourists or “peaceful people… great people.” Love was not in the air as the former president has claimed. To read further on the evening, read Heather Cox Richardson’s wrap-up and Amy Goodman’s work here.

And now…it’s ‘time’ to check your watch. It’s later than you think.