Seduced by “power over”, when Christ taught us “service of”

Brian Beutler posted a thread with a link to an article in Off Message. The link’s title and subtitle:

How to Undo the Great Lie of 2024 Trump’s second election wasn’t a verdict for all time, but the coming midterms might be one.

I didn’t follow the link to the article. Beutler wrote in his thread:

MAGA got a huge return on gaslighting the elite into treating Trump's less than 2 percent popular vote plurality as a permanent repudiation of liberalism. The midterms represent an opportunity to propound an inverse but true narrative of American rejection of MAGA. But Dems have to frame it that way first. Republicans will send mixed messages if they lose, because Trump will deflect all responsibility for their poor performance. But they will be unified behind the idea that Democrats didn't win a mandate, because they always unify behind that idea. Meanwhile, in their affordability myopia, Democrats are likely to help Republicans along by attributing their own political success to Trump's narrow failure to reduce prices, giving him a pass on all the most repellent aspects of his presidency. If Democrats don't tell a grand story of Americans rising against fascism, the public will hear a different, false one. Republicans will say what the election was about, and what the results mean. And, once again, many people will believe them.

Drew Sheneman posted a cartoon on Daily Kos showing a crocodile labeled “Corporations” with a small bird in its mouth labeled “Dems.” The bird says,

Democratic Socialists will never understand our deeply symbiotic relationship. Now say ‘Ahh’ so I can pick the scraps from your teeth.

And that quite succinctly summarizes the problem I have with Democrats. Jon Paul Sydnor of the Street Prophets community group on Kos wrote a month ago:

If your church’s leaders are trying to control you, then leave. Many churches are systems of control that cause great pain. Today, some therapists are specializing in Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), trying to heal the psychic scars produced by churches that castigate questioning members and hold the threat of hell over all. The leaders of these churches have abandoned their call, having been seduced by the lure of power over, when Christ taught us service of.

The purpose of the church is to share the love of God with the world. The church is where love is enacted as consistently as possible. Yes, it fails to love perfectly. Sometimes it harms instead of heals. But very few (perhaps no other) organizations discuss love at all. Love risks betrayal, but the alternative is self-seclusion, which denies life. The church may not (can’t) love a person completely back to health, but it can make a start. Unless the church is broken and won’t admit it. And many don’t. Sydnor told a few stories about his father, a pastor. At one church he wanted to stop a “girlie” show that was part of the county fair. The show wasn’t risque, it was degrading. But it brought in a lot of money and a leading elder in the church supported it. The pastor was told not to rock the boat. He became disillusioned and left the ministry. After a dozen years working to prevent juvenile delinquency he returned to the ministry. A family left a nearby church to try his church. The daughter had Down’s syndrome and the other church wouldn’t let her be in the Christmas pageant. This pastor named her to be Mary, the central role, in their pageant to the great joy of the congregation.

That was one of the best Christmas Eve services ever. It was an imperfect church with an imperfect congregation and imperfect pastor, but they worked hard to love like God. And sometimes they hit the mark perfectly, creating the little miracles that sustain us.

In the comments of today’s pundit roundup for Kos is a tweet from Team Talarico, the campaign to elect Democrat James Talarico to the US Senate from Texas. In it Talarico is shown saying:

Scripture tells us that you can’t love God and hate other people. You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and oppress the poor. Matthew 25 tells us Christians exactly how we’re going to be judged — by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick...

The rest is cut off from the text of the tweet, though includes clothing the naked, offering hospitality to the stranger, and visiting those in prison. I see Matthew 25 as a core of the message Jesus is trying to teach us. In response to Talarico’s message Aaron Baer tweeted:

This is genuinely one of the most evil interpretations of Scripture I've ever seen. Lord protect your Church and our nation from this wolf.

And to that Kos user Rambler797 added:

Wut? (these people don’t know their own book)

Commenter The Idiot went looking for who Aaron Baer is: the president of the “Center for Christian Virtue.” It has turned the Bible upside down. That organization has completely inverted the Christian message and has accumulated the power and platform to override the love of God, then use the threat of God to spread hate. Vile. I went to Baer’s tweet, and of course it is on X. I was able to see a couple of the comments, all X would allow me to see before demanding I sign in. From Braden Bellack:

When someone posts something like this and then doesn’t respond to any of the comments or try to defend what they’ve said, it’s called rage bait. That’s all this is.

Think Prague posted a cartoon showing St. Peter at the gate of Heaven facing a man in a MAGA hat.

St. Peter: So, tell me... did you welcome the foreigner? Help the poor? Feed the hungry? Care for the sick?... you know, all the things Jesus commanded? Man: Listen here LibTard.

Do they keep Trump wrapped around their necks?

I’m a fan of the film music programs on WRCJ, the Detroit public radio station for classical and jazz music. So I’ve heard music by film composer Max Steiner. I heard of a recommended biography of him and eventually bought it and just now finished reading it. The book is Music by Max Steiner, the Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer by Steven C. Smith. Steiner was born in Vienna in 1888 to a musical and entrepreneurial family – his grandfather owned a theater and convinced Johann Strauss to try writing operettas. One result is Die Fledermaus. Steiner made big strides in music while young. When Vienna wasn’t working out he went to London, then Broadway, where he served as a conductor of musicals. Shortly after movies added sound he went to Hollywood. At the time movies with sound tended to have generic music that did little more than set the mood. Steiner revolutionized all that. He wrote music specific to the movie – themes for the major characters with the way they are combined and varied as a way to tell more of the story than dialogue can (an idea from opera composer Richard Wagner). He pioneered the click-track to synchronize the music to the film. A lot (maybe most) of the film composers working in the last 90 years are doing things the way Steiner did them. A big difference is modern composers write on computer and Steiner wrote with pencil and paper. Alas, many film producers put their composers through a tough schedule – limited time to write the music and record it. Yes, there are teams of orchestrators, the people who take the main guy’s basic outlines and turn them into performable sheet music. But the days are still long. Steiner would composer much of the day and lead a recording session much of the night. And while he was thick in the midst of one movie a producer frequently said, Max, you’re the only one who can rescue this film and we need it done quickly. Steiner’s first big success is King Kong, released in 1933. It decisively showed a score written specifically for a movie can make a huge difference in how the action and characters are perceived. In this case the stop-action motion of the great ape looked silly without Steiner’s pounding score. But Steiner could also turn the viewer’s opinion towards a bit of sympathy for the beast. His other famous scores are Gone With The Wind of 1939 and Casablanca of 1942. He continued to write for films into the mid 1960s. While the book is fascinating (to me), it is also long – 400 pages. I didn’t think I needed to know that much detail about the movies he scored – and the book doesn’t cover every movie. Another issue I have with the book is the basic problem of describing music with words. It would say Steiner used this particular melodic fragment to mean this with this effect on the movie. For some of the scores I could find the some of the music on YouTube, but that rarely showed the music with the scene described in the book – unless I wanted to watch the whole movie (and GWTW is about 4 hours long – I saw it decades ago and once was enough). The book also described Steiner’s personal life. The royalty organization ASCAP wouldn’t handle movie music (that changed in the 1960s), so Steiner seemed perpetually poor, even though the studios paid him well. Enjoying gambling and not being a good manager of money contributed to that. His intense hours meant he went through four wives and his son didn’t get what he needed most – a dad he could talk to. I enjoyed the book and learned about composing for movies. But I would recommend it only to those with a great love of music for film. The Republican midterm convention – sorry, nasty guy rally – ended yesterday. Of course, I avoided it. Also of course, some of his worst statements end up in the news, even on NPR. Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the item that got the most airtime. The nasty guy said if Republicans kept the House and Senate he would send every adult $5,000. So vote Republican. Yeah, there are all kinds of problems with that promise. Congress has to approve the money and enough members likely won’t, if it ever came for a vote. The total cost would be well over $1 trillion (I’ve heard up to $1.3 trillion). So much money dumped into the economy would boost inflation. And the national debt. And the big problems: Bribing voters is illegal. But that doesn’t stop him. He has made promises of payouts before and rarely followed through. And voters are noticing. So don’t let this promise influence your vote. Kos of Kos discussed what might happen after the election.

President Donald Trump may have lost his ability to punish Republicans in primaries. But he hasn’t lost his ability to punish them in general elections. That’s the extraordinary dynamic now taking shape: Trump is herding his party toward an electoral catastrophe, yet increasingly lacks the political leverage to keep Republicans from eventually turning on him. ... So, Republicans will have a decision to make: Do they keep Trump wrapped around their neck heading into 2028, or do they rip off the Band-Aid, join Democrats in impeaching him, and spend the next several years hoping America forgets their complicity in the Trump disaster? I’m going to sit way out on this limb and predict that this is exactly what will happen, and that we will have a President JD Vance before 2028.

The Houthis of Yemen are threatening to close the southern end of the Red Sea, requiring ships between Asia and Europe to take the long way around Africa. The nasty guy claims the Iranians are just waiting for the midterms to be over before caving to his demands. More likely they’ll settle with the next president. Both of these closures will continue to raise prices and perhaps lead to a big energy mess.

Trump took a promising Biden economy and trashed it for no reason at all. All of it has been entirely, and unnecessarily, his fault. And Republicans have enabled him every step of the way. At some point, Republicans will have to decide: When do they cut their losses and begin rebuilding in a post-MAGA world? If it’s between a raving lunatic in the White House, and JD Vance, it doesn’t seem like a tough call.

Democrats probably won’t try to impeach without a path to actual conviction. Republicans may give them that. I’ve heard elsewhere that impeachment can’t be off the table. If the nasty guy, terrible as he is, isn’t impeached, we’ll have worse. Alas, a candidate for worse is the current vice nasty. In contrast to the way Democrats are acting right now... MaryAEnglish of the Kos community wrote about the far right German party AfD doing way too well in a state election and the comments by Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who called it as he saw it. The AfD has been using the term “remigration” and Merz properly called it ethnic cleansing. Then he said:

If those working in Germany have to leave the country again because you are championing ‘remigration’, then the skilled trades in Germany will no longer be able to function: not a single care home will remain open, not a single hospital in Germany will remain operational, and not a single restaurant in Germany will be able to stay in business.

Now if Democrats would be so bold.

The user manual for the machine protecting the gun industry

March for Our Lives is the youth led organization created by survivors of the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Their purpose is to reduce gun violence in America. They’ve had some wins and, thanks to the current Supreme Court, some losses. They have now put together a description of The Machine, a User Manual for the Gun Industry. It begins by saying:

The gun industry is not an accident. It is a system — built over decades by corporations, lobbyists, lawyers, and politicians — that manufactures profit from weapons and protects itself from accountability. This is its user manual.

They begin with the lobbying organizations. We’re familiar with the National Rifle Association, but that organization is waning due to scandals. They have been superseded by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR), and the Gun Owners of America (GOA). They are well assisted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that creates model legislation and pushes it out to member state legislators. Next up are the manufacturers. Smith & Wesson (founded 1852); Sturm, Ruger & Co.; Sig Sauer, maker of handguns; Glock; Daniel Defense, who made the rifle used in the Uvalde shooting; and Remington (founded in 1816). There is a legal architecture, mostly created by the Supreme Court. The Heller Decision of 2008 established the individual right to bear arms, which dismantled handgun bans. The Bruen Decision of 2022 required gun laws to match the 1791 tradition. No, not a misprint. And the PLCAA, a law passed in 2005 that protects gun manufacturers and dealers from liability. They are funded by dark money wielded by the NRA Political Victory Fund, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, and the Safari Club International. A section shows how The Machine is interconnected through money, messaging, and legislation. A section shows how The Machine operates. I mentioned the PLCAA, the liability shield. There are preemption laws that prevent cities and counties from passing regulations stricter than their state laws. At least 40 states have such laws at the urging of ALEC. There are Stand Your Ground laws that expand the legal justification for lethal force and caused gun deaths to rise. These are not applied equally – when a white perpetrator kills a black victim 36% of the time it is ruled justified, but when a black perpetrator kills a white victim only 3% are ruled justified. The Tiahrt Amendment, renewed annually, prevents the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) from releasing data to identify gun dealers who supply the crime gun market. Studies have shown 5% of dealers supply 90% of crime guns. The Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade Show – SHOT Show, the largest trade show for guns. 50,000 industry professionals attend. It is not open to the public. It is a way for the industry to discuss messaging, strategy, regulations, litigation trends, and political priorities. The 1996 Dickey Amendment to the federal spending bills bans the CDC from doing gun violence research. Now for a bit of good news. “Every machine has failure points. Here's where to apply pressure right now.” Much of this is at the state level and is geared towards: Restoring the ban on bump stocks. Regulating ghost guns (guns that cannot be traced). Repealing PLCAA. Passing safe storage laws to prevent children from accessing guns. Passing universal background checks. Restoring dealer accountability. Passing red flag laws that take guns away from people found to pose a risk to themselves or others. Funding gun violence research. This last section suggests ways to get involved, usually by telling your state legislators and members of Congress what changes you support. There is a way to list the legislation that is active in your state. Something a bit lighter. In the comments of today’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos are more memes playing off the nasty guy’s lie that he was carried by strong firemen out of the World Trade Center site after the 9/11 attack. My favorite shows him being carried out by Obama and Biden – both wearing tan suits. Marty Schladen, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos discussed why 720,000 people stopped working for work over the last two years. A big reason is a large number of them have been deported.

Eric Pachman used government data to determine that 2.1 million foreign-born, working-age men have left the country since the start of Trump’s second term. Eighty-eight percent of them were working when they left the country, according to the analysis. “Over the past two years foreign-born men’s labor force shrank by 1.4 million,” the report on Pachman’s website, Data 4 the People, says. “But in a normal pair of summers it would have grown by about 360,000 — so measured against trend, the swing is 1.8 million.”