Toddlers and the dark harbinger of chaos

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos wrote, as another budget shutdown deadline comes in about a week:

House majorities are famous for taking what's known as "messaging votes" on bills that stand no chance of becoming law because they either can't clear the Senate or will ultimately get vetoed—or both. The idea for the majority party is to use the votes as a way of signaling to voters all the important and popular policies they would prioritize if they had greater control of the government. Importantly, those votes are also designed to work to the advantage of the most vulnerable members of their caucus. In other words, the majority’s messaging bills boost its members’ reelection chances and, therefore, the prospect of maintaining the majority. Unless, of course, the majority is held by an anti-democratic party living in a fantasy bubble where its members believe their deeply unpopular beliefs should rule the masses regardless of what the masses want. In other words, those messaging bills help the majority’s incumbents unless you're in the Republican Party—then your leaders schedule a bunch of messaging votes that Democrats can weaponize against you.

The bills that can be weaponized include: * Cutting the Department of Education budget that could cut funding for 108K teachers and aides. * Adding to the must pass farm bill a ban on mail-order abortion pills. * Cutting the budget for the FBI and Department of Justice, cutting 30K officers. * A big cut to the Amtrak subsidy – Republicans in the Northeast rail corridor are against this one.

Republicans are sending a message all right—one that Democrats are happy to spread.

At the start of this week Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about the nasty guy’s “ominous plan.” The Washington Post reports he is creating a list of enemies, people he wants investigated or prosecuted as soon as he returns to power. The list includes his cronies while in office who refused to help overturn the 2020 election, such as former AG Bill Barr. Also on the list are people at the DoJ and FBI who have helped in investigations into his criminal acts. The plans also include invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against any protests to his return to power. This is all a part of a broader “Project 2025” being assembled by far right think tanks preparing for a nasty guy dictatorship. The plans include both “punishment” and “revenge,” common themes in his speeches.

All of this is terrifying, and it’s only made more so by how the media is playing up any poll suggesting that Trump can win that second term while playing down the message that he is spreading to his supporters. Coverage of Trump’s threats, growing lies, and statements that are increasingly divorced from reality is spotty at best. Coverage of anything that suggests Trump is winning, that voters are dissatisfied with Biden, or that Democrats are in trouble gets guaranteed front-page treatment.

Last week Joan McCarter of Kos reported the new Speaker Johnson made a Freudian slip (which implies it was unintentional, but I suspect it wasn’t, though it is telling). As part of a fundraising letter Johnson wrote, “I refuse to put people over politics.” A Texas Tribune article posted on Kos began:

For nearly four decades, Texas activist David Barton has barnstormed statehouses and pulpits across the nation, arguing that the separation between church and state is a myth and that America should be run as a Christian nation. Now, he’s closer to power than perhaps ever before.

That power is Johnson, who hold similar beliefs. Barton starts with the First Amendment clause, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” From that he makes claims that most of the Founding Fathers were evangelical Christians (they were not). According to him that clause really reads, “Congress shall make no law establishing one Christian denomination as the national denomination.” But they didn’t intend to include other religions. Toss in the old claim that a society’s ills (school shootings, drug use, gay people) are due to abandoning Judeo-Christian virtues (though they seem to want to skip the “Judeo” part). Barton’s claims can be summarized as: Government can’t control the church. The church (meaning my church) can and is supposed to control the government.

Barton, a self-styled “amateur historian,” has for years been debunked and ridiculed by actual historians and scholars, who note that he has no formal training and that his work is filled with selective quotes, mischaracterizations and inaccuracies — critiques that Barton has claimed are mere attacks on his faith. He has been accused of whitewashing the Founding Fathers — particularly, their slave owning — to fit his narrative of a God-ordained nation. He has acknowledged using unconfirmed quotes from historical figures. And Barton’s 2012 book, “The Jefferson Lies,” was so widely panned by Christian academics that it prompted a separate book to debunk all of his inaccuracies, and was later pulled by its Christian publisher because “the basic truths just were not there.” Despite that, Barton has remained a fixture in conservative Christian circles and Republican Party politics.

And his presence in those circles gives evangelicals a good reason to donate to Barton’s super PAC. The article then went on to list the various ways Johnson has been a part of this effort. A week ago Stephen Colbert quoted something Johnson wrote. “Experts project that homosexual marriage is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” Then he asked Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to reply. Buttigieg talked about life with toddlers. He ended with:

Everything about that is chaos. But nothing about that is dark. That's … the love of God is in that house.

Ten days ago Meteor Blades of Kos discussed a report in The Guardian that shows in 2022 banks financed $150 billion in new fossil fuel projects. Since 2016 that amount has been $1.8 trillion. From that report we get the term “carbon bombs.”

The carbon bombs—425 extraction projects that can each pump more than one gigaton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—cumulatively hold enough coal, oil and gas to burn through the rapidly dwindling carbon budget four times over.

The top ten of these banks included four in the US, three in China, and three in Europe. Blades wrote:

In 2021, the International Energy Agency reported that keeping to 1.5° C means that there can be no more expansion of fossil fuel extraction. A study published last month in Nature—Global fossil fuel reduction pathways under different climate mitigation strategies and ambitions—found that reaching that goal requires that the supply of coal must fall by 99%, oil by 70%, and gas by 84% by 2050. That is most definitely not the trajectory we are on. A year ago, scientists calculated that the Earth’s carbon budget—the maximum amount of carbon emissions that can be allowed without exceeding the 1.5° C goal—was about 500 gigatons. But this week in a study—Assessing the size and uncertainty of remaining carbon budgets—published at Nature Climate Change, that maximum was recalculated at 250 gigatons. Alone, the identified carbon bomb projects could release more than 1,000 gigatons over their lifetime.

With the Oppenheimer movie recently released and interest in his work in developing the nuclear bomb still high SemDem of the Kos community wrote about an aspect of the story not told by the movie, the fate of the Hispano people and Natives in the area. Some Natives were evicted from their land with less than 24 hours notice under eminent domain laws. Those few who were compensated were given about a fifth of what was given the white landowners. Most had nowhere to go. Some were hired by the laboratory that evicted them. They were tasked with handling the poisonous beryllium without the protective gear given to white workers. Some found the pretty trinitite that the test bomb created by fusing sand and, not knowing it was radioactive, made jewelry from it and wore it. Many, including those who weren’t evacuated, were sickened and died from the exposure. Uranium mining became a big industry in the Navajo Nation. But the workers weren’t told of the dangers. And today the abandoned mines still contaminate Navajo water sources and Native land is used for dumping toxic waste. There is a Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, but Natives were exempted from it. RECA was given a two year extension in 2022 and will expire in 2024. There is a bill in Congress to expand and extend RECA. It has passed the Senate, but the House doesn’t seem interested.

The least our leaders can do is acknowledge the severe health conditions and the suffering that is still happening as the result of purposely exposing people to dangerous levels of radiation. Being left out of the latest Hollywood summer blockbuster is one thing, but I can’t excuse them being ignored any longer by our government.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos noted today is the 34th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. I was living in Cologne when I heard the news. I had already planned a trip to Berlin, so I was there five days after the wall opened – the West Berlin residents had somewhat recovered from the party weekend. Though Easterners could pass freely, I as a Westerner still had to go through passport control to visit the East, which I did for a day. I still have a few aluminum coins. I want back 18 months later. The Wall was gone and I could buy a small bag with chunks of the Wall. And even I could pass freely from West to East and back.