Today, news broke that a number of pro-Trump House Republicans, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), are organizing the “America First Caucus,” which calls for “a degree of ideological flexibility, a certain intellectual boldness… to follow in President Trump’s footsteps, and potentially step on some toes and sacrifice sacred cows for the good of the American nation.”
When I was in elementary school, every morning at the beginning of classes we, in a part of the U.S. where the student body appeared to be drawn from the United Nations, would stand at attention and, with hand over heart recite the pledge of allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." In none of this pledge do I see a reference to "Anglo-Saxon" nor do I remember many in my classes who would fit this description, including the Japanese American students whose fathers fought with the 442 Regiment across Europe, while their grandparents and mothers were held in interment camps, the black descendents of slaves, and the Hispanic students whose ancestors were here long before there was a USA. Yet, we were all loyal and good citizens. As a child, I thought that this was America. Now many among us tell us it was not and is not. Whatever happened to "e pluribus unum" and "with liberty and justice for all"?
I'd say that the inmates have taken over the asylum, but that's maligning people with mental illness. It will be interesting to see if Republicans such as Liz Cheney can rescue something from the wreck of the GOP.
Methinks we may be seeing the emergence of a third party. The Republican Party may be tearing itself apart. The "America First Caucus" is but one step away from the "America First Party". (I would not be surprised to see the Stars and Bars as their ensign.) The Mitch McConnell/Lindsey Graham wing of the party may no longer be able to go along to get along for the sake of the judges and their own political future. They may have to choose between the AFP, led by the likes of Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or, God help them, even Ted Cruz, and the Lincoln Brigade.
I see this as good news for Democrats, and hope they are wise enough to not interfere as the opposition is committing suicide.
The guiding "principles" of the America First Caucus read like a list long neglected illnesses in someone at risk of imminent death. That they include "ideological flexibility" is a lie, and there is no "intellectual boldness" in unearthing long discredited racist dogma.
In a certain sense, however, the America First Caucus exhibits refreshing honesty. Here on the Left we all imagined things really were this bad on the Right. Now it is established fact. A clear line has been drawn that will make life quite difficult for people like Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Joe Manchin and a few others. Whatever is left of the old quasi-moderate GOP will now have to chose sides.
This is a gift horse if there ever was one. 2022 is still in play.
"America First Caucus" Wow. So put that in your pipe and smoke it....Tastes like Facism. Smells like Facism. Effectively, Facism. Love the bit about the architecture. Hitler and Mussolini couldn't agree more. While we're at it how about getting rid of those foreign sounding words and names.
This new caucus is soliciting contributions but they will accept only Confederate dollars.
Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher, was thinking more about pre-World War II Europe than about the American South when he wrote, "Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling." Yet the same observation would have held in the Birmingham of the 1850s as in Barcelona in the 1930s. The elite slaveowners that Prof Richardson describes made it illegal for half their population to learn to read. They curtailed travel by requiring that people of color have a pass to travel even to the next plantation. By refusing to support a public education system, they perpetuated a culture of isolation and regression, euphemistically described as protection of their "Southern way of life." A lack of reading and the impossibility of travel continue to give such frauds as the America First Caucus caves to thrive in.
"It was a political equation that worked with a wink and a nod until former president Trump put the racism and sexism openly on the table and encouraged his supporters to turn against their opponents. They have now embraced open white supremacy."
If the DOJ doesn't move quickly to put 45 and all the seditionists in Congress behind bars, they will continue to feed this country with the bigotry that fuels their socio-political ideologies. I fear for our youth, our BIPOC communities, and our future. This move towards a printed manifesto is exceedingly unsettling!
The flag will be at half staff tomorrow honoring the victims of the tragedy in Indianapolis, Indiana. Why don't we leave the flag a half staff every time gun related deaths go over a hundred in a day? Then the flags could be at half staff all the time. Putting the flags at half staff for gun violence is now meaningless tokenism. A meaningful way to comfort the families is to pass gun-control laws.
Have been reading 'The Betrayal of the Negro From Rutherford B Hayes to Woodrow Wilson ' written by Rayford Logan, then Chairman of Department of History at Howard University. The thesis of the book is determining whether America, in reconstructing the Union, met the Frederick Douglas test. Douglas queried whether 'American justice, American liberty, American civilization, American law, and American Christianity could be made to include and protect alike and forever all American citizens in the rights which have been guarenteed them by the organic and fundamental laws of the land.' For Logan, this is how the incorporation of freedman and enslaved peoples into the Union was to be judged, and he judged it a failure, the nadir of bkackness in America after the election of 1876. Today's America First manifesto is intangibly indistinguishable from the southern states adamant determination to restore white supremacy after 1876.He writes, 'so determined were most white Southerners to maintain there own way of life that they resorted to fraud, intimidation and murder." Given the events of January 6, this criteria has been met, and the manifesto is but the coming out party of the 21st century version.
One final point. The is a chapter entitled 'The Supreme Court and The Negro' where Logan lay's out the history of USSC cases that culminate in Plessy v. Ferguson (1893), the cornerstone for the separate but equal doctrine. His book was published in 1965. As Logan noted, in 1965 Plessy was still the law of the land; the United States had been without a federal civil rights law protecting African American rights for 72 years. 72. So, when Arizona entered the Union in 1912, Plessy was 19 years old.. When Alaska and Hawaii entered in 1958, Plessy was 65 years old.To date, nothing I have ever read regarding our suppression of black America has given me a chill like that simple declaration proving showed how white supremacy was a living and breathing perpetuation of white supremacy into which black Americans were, and still are, born.
The whole book is remarkable. but the chapter on the USSC is worth reading alone.
The pdf looks like six individuals wrote the various pieces and then pulled it into one document. If wanting a document properly formatted, edited, in one voice, and with a narrative makes me a liberal elite - then fine. I’m a liberal elite. The talk of fixing the education system is laughable. Do the authors not even know what they are referring to? And how our education system and outcomes are far FAR beneath those around the world?
Tom Nichols is right. We right now have a little bit over 18 months to be able to produce "wins" that a majority of Americans see as wins, and reasons to vote to keep a Democratic majority in both House and Senate. So what are "progressives" coming up with? They introduce a bill that can too easily be described as "court packing," a bill that has ZERO CHANCE of passage in the next 18 months, and if it did pass would bring out every single non-Democrat in the country voting for a Republican. The bill is not popular, the idea does not have a majority support by the country, and all it will accomplish is to energize the other side. So of course the braindead "socialites" who confuse that word with "socialist" of the Democratic Party, are out supporting it to "take a stand and show who we are." (the proper word for them is "social lite")
There's a time and a place for everything. The time and place for a bill like this is not when you have a 1 vote majority in the Senate and a 3-vote majority in the House.
Presumably Representative Taylor Greene and her associates do realise that what they call the Anglo Saxon political tradition includes respect for legal judgements, allowing elected representatives to conduct their business without coercion and ensuring a fully functioning system of universal suffrage?
Apparently, we are at the 100th day since the January 6 insurrection. I see a local AZ Congressperson (Gosar) doubles down along with other conservative heroes, on this insurrection, to concretize their extremist views in a nice, tidy package of tawdriness.
100th day. Today also brings news that the founder of the extremist group Oath Keepers has decided to work with the feds to uncover evidence of wrong doing by all sorts of devious right wing militia members. We have to keep in mind that this investigation, with the full integrity of a functioning Department of Justice, may also reveal the involvement of Republican members of Congress who may have abided insurgents by offering tours of the Capitol on January 5, 2021.
I hope this 100th night may bring our distressed country a bit deeper rest until dawn.
Courtesy of the Caucasus, the Chechen American Tsarnaev brothers lived less than a mile from me, and blew up the Marathon around the corner from my classroom. Two years earlier, Tamerlan murdered three men down the street from my weekly volleyball game in Waltham.
In late spring 2013, one block away in Copley Square, the class paid respects at the temporary memorial to bombing victims and survivors. I see nothing in these Caucasian terrorists to indicate superiority of any kind.
April 16, 2021
When I was in elementary school, every morning at the beginning of classes we, in a part of the U.S. where the student body appeared to be drawn from the United Nations, would stand at attention and, with hand over heart recite the pledge of allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." In none of this pledge do I see a reference to "Anglo-Saxon" nor do I remember many in my classes who would fit this description, including the Japanese American students whose fathers fought with the 442 Regiment across Europe, while their grandparents and mothers were held in interment camps, the black descendents of slaves, and the Hispanic students whose ancestors were here long before there was a USA. Yet, we were all loyal and good citizens. As a child, I thought that this was America. Now many among us tell us it was not and is not. Whatever happened to "e pluribus unum" and "with liberty and justice for all"?
I'd say that the inmates have taken over the asylum, but that's maligning people with mental illness. It will be interesting to see if Republicans such as Liz Cheney can rescue something from the wreck of the GOP.
Methinks we may be seeing the emergence of a third party. The Republican Party may be tearing itself apart. The "America First Caucus" is but one step away from the "America First Party". (I would not be surprised to see the Stars and Bars as their ensign.) The Mitch McConnell/Lindsey Graham wing of the party may no longer be able to go along to get along for the sake of the judges and their own political future. They may have to choose between the AFP, led by the likes of Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or, God help them, even Ted Cruz, and the Lincoln Brigade.
I see this as good news for Democrats, and hope they are wise enough to not interfere as the opposition is committing suicide.
The guiding "principles" of the America First Caucus read like a list long neglected illnesses in someone at risk of imminent death. That they include "ideological flexibility" is a lie, and there is no "intellectual boldness" in unearthing long discredited racist dogma.
In a certain sense, however, the America First Caucus exhibits refreshing honesty. Here on the Left we all imagined things really were this bad on the Right. Now it is established fact. A clear line has been drawn that will make life quite difficult for people like Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Joe Manchin and a few others. Whatever is left of the old quasi-moderate GOP will now have to chose sides.
This is a gift horse if there ever was one. 2022 is still in play.
"America First Caucus" Wow. So put that in your pipe and smoke it....Tastes like Facism. Smells like Facism. Effectively, Facism. Love the bit about the architecture. Hitler and Mussolini couldn't agree more. While we're at it how about getting rid of those foreign sounding words and names.
This new caucus is soliciting contributions but they will accept only Confederate dollars.
Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher, was thinking more about pre-World War II Europe than about the American South when he wrote, "Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling." Yet the same observation would have held in the Birmingham of the 1850s as in Barcelona in the 1930s. The elite slaveowners that Prof Richardson describes made it illegal for half their population to learn to read. They curtailed travel by requiring that people of color have a pass to travel even to the next plantation. By refusing to support a public education system, they perpetuated a culture of isolation and regression, euphemistically described as protection of their "Southern way of life." A lack of reading and the impossibility of travel continue to give such frauds as the America First Caucus caves to thrive in.
"It was a political equation that worked with a wink and a nod until former president Trump put the racism and sexism openly on the table and encouraged his supporters to turn against their opponents. They have now embraced open white supremacy."
If the DOJ doesn't move quickly to put 45 and all the seditionists in Congress behind bars, they will continue to feed this country with the bigotry that fuels their socio-political ideologies. I fear for our youth, our BIPOC communities, and our future. This move towards a printed manifesto is exceedingly unsettling!
This Boomer needed a little more help with a tweet getting "ratioed."
"When a reply to a tweet gets more likes than the tweet it was replying to, usually indicating the unpopularity or stupidity of the original tweet:
'Damn you got 12 likes and his reply got 271 likes? He totally ratioed you bro'"
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ratioed
The flag will be at half staff tomorrow honoring the victims of the tragedy in Indianapolis, Indiana. Why don't we leave the flag a half staff every time gun related deaths go over a hundred in a day? Then the flags could be at half staff all the time. Putting the flags at half staff for gun violence is now meaningless tokenism. A meaningful way to comfort the families is to pass gun-control laws.
Have been reading 'The Betrayal of the Negro From Rutherford B Hayes to Woodrow Wilson ' written by Rayford Logan, then Chairman of Department of History at Howard University. The thesis of the book is determining whether America, in reconstructing the Union, met the Frederick Douglas test. Douglas queried whether 'American justice, American liberty, American civilization, American law, and American Christianity could be made to include and protect alike and forever all American citizens in the rights which have been guarenteed them by the organic and fundamental laws of the land.' For Logan, this is how the incorporation of freedman and enslaved peoples into the Union was to be judged, and he judged it a failure, the nadir of bkackness in America after the election of 1876. Today's America First manifesto is intangibly indistinguishable from the southern states adamant determination to restore white supremacy after 1876.He writes, 'so determined were most white Southerners to maintain there own way of life that they resorted to fraud, intimidation and murder." Given the events of January 6, this criteria has been met, and the manifesto is but the coming out party of the 21st century version.
One final point. The is a chapter entitled 'The Supreme Court and The Negro' where Logan lay's out the history of USSC cases that culminate in Plessy v. Ferguson (1893), the cornerstone for the separate but equal doctrine. His book was published in 1965. As Logan noted, in 1965 Plessy was still the law of the land; the United States had been without a federal civil rights law protecting African American rights for 72 years. 72. So, when Arizona entered the Union in 1912, Plessy was 19 years old.. When Alaska and Hawaii entered in 1958, Plessy was 65 years old.To date, nothing I have ever read regarding our suppression of black America has given me a chill like that simple declaration proving showed how white supremacy was a living and breathing perpetuation of white supremacy into which black Americans were, and still are, born.
The whole book is remarkable. but the chapter on the USSC is worth reading alone.
This gambit is sick, dangerous and thoroughly revolting. One thing it is NOT, however, is surprising. America is in deep, deep trouble.
The pdf looks like six individuals wrote the various pieces and then pulled it into one document. If wanting a document properly formatted, edited, in one voice, and with a narrative makes me a liberal elite - then fine. I’m a liberal elite. The talk of fixing the education system is laughable. Do the authors not even know what they are referring to? And how our education system and outcomes are far FAR beneath those around the world?
Tom Nichols is right. We right now have a little bit over 18 months to be able to produce "wins" that a majority of Americans see as wins, and reasons to vote to keep a Democratic majority in both House and Senate. So what are "progressives" coming up with? They introduce a bill that can too easily be described as "court packing," a bill that has ZERO CHANCE of passage in the next 18 months, and if it did pass would bring out every single non-Democrat in the country voting for a Republican. The bill is not popular, the idea does not have a majority support by the country, and all it will accomplish is to energize the other side. So of course the braindead "socialites" who confuse that word with "socialist" of the Democratic Party, are out supporting it to "take a stand and show who we are." (the proper word for them is "social lite")
There's a time and a place for everything. The time and place for a bill like this is not when you have a 1 vote majority in the Senate and a 3-vote majority in the House.
Presumably Representative Taylor Greene and her associates do realise that what they call the Anglo Saxon political tradition includes respect for legal judgements, allowing elected representatives to conduct their business without coercion and ensuring a fully functioning system of universal suffrage?
100 days.
Apparently, we are at the 100th day since the January 6 insurrection. I see a local AZ Congressperson (Gosar) doubles down along with other conservative heroes, on this insurrection, to concretize their extremist views in a nice, tidy package of tawdriness.
100th day. Today also brings news that the founder of the extremist group Oath Keepers has decided to work with the feds to uncover evidence of wrong doing by all sorts of devious right wing militia members. We have to keep in mind that this investigation, with the full integrity of a functioning Department of Justice, may also reveal the involvement of Republican members of Congress who may have abided insurgents by offering tours of the Capitol on January 5, 2021.
I hope this 100th night may bring our distressed country a bit deeper rest until dawn.
Courtesy of the Caucasus, the Chechen American Tsarnaev brothers lived less than a mile from me, and blew up the Marathon around the corner from my classroom. Two years earlier, Tamerlan murdered three men down the street from my weekly volleyball game in Waltham.
In late spring 2013, one block away in Copley Square, the class paid respects at the temporary memorial to bombing victims and survivors. I see nothing in these Caucasian terrorists to indicate superiority of any kind.