Retire, Breyer: another September 2021 US Politics thread

October 2

https://womensmarch.com/mobilize?fbclid=IwAR2tb1MCgj24bBo8HTszVw0ih2YDP8hx_VVimiB2QZL852GOYCktpp9R9_M

that kid is a gd hero

Jim Jordan’s office denied this but Lordy there are tapes. https://t.co/Nimukavt8w

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) September 3, 2021

well not hearing from him for ~8 months was pretty nice. at least he won't have twitter, at least for awhile (?). verdict is still out on if the ban is permanent, right

We all know that D.J. Trump, Sr. is a man of his word. I can't imagine that he would ever mislead Jim Jordan by blurting out whatever vagrant intentions he had wandering through his head, as if it were a settled fact.

I'm sure they'll reverse it as soon as he announces with some mush-mouthed statement about how it is "news worthy" or whatever. Fuck, I'm not ready for him to be omnipresent again.

I really don't understand why people don't think he'll run. Of course he fucking will, it's a guaranteed gravy train for milking his legions of slack-jawed enablers.

too kind

if he gets COVID again somehow, can someone stab him with a huge syringe that says REGENERON but it's really like, a liquid form of Raid roach killer

I mean, c'mon, even if he were 100%, bulletproof barred from serving as prez again he would still run, insisting it's all a big lie and he would still froth to packed arenas with folks more than happy to fork over more money.

“I have been and continue to be a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade, number one,” Biden said Friday morning."

good, good, that's #1, yes...

“And the most pernicious thing about the Texas law, it sort of creates a vigilante system where people get rewards to go out and to …”

ok, yes, say it!!

He did not finish the thought.

aaah. shoot.

He added that “it’s almost un-American, what we’re talking about"

using logic, i determine that it is therefore American, what we're talking about.

i think i'll do one of my bi-weekly depresso rageouts real quick. i'll just be honest.

on one hand, when someone commits an act of terror and it's a muslim, i do not expect the "muslim world" to condemn the attack, or for individuals to do so. i get that concept. it's not fair.

here's where i'm just a big fucking hypocrite, and one of the reasons i hate myself: when white evangelicals in america repeatedly go out of their way to ruin everyone else's lives, and they're totally full of shit, and they lie, and they try to convert young gay people to "straightness", and they fill small children's heads with real imagery of eternal damnation and screaming and burning alive, and they describe the smells and the wailing, and the agony of begging to be let out, the darkness, the heat, the ice, the cold, the flaying, the skin peeling off, the rest of the family watching sadly (but not too sadly) from heaven, that gay people have a disease, pushing their 14th century views on conception and abortion on everyone else, demanding and pushing for Christian Theocracy at every opportunity, eagerly agreeing that yes they are a one issue voter, it's abortion, and it really doesn't matter what else is happening:

i want every other Christian who is NOT like that to stand up and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, YOU FUCKING COWARDS. WHAT CHRISTIAN HEAVEN DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO? FUCK YOU

all of this stuff - "this stuff" - is being done with the approval of white evangelicals. They fucking LOVE GOP officials!!!

it's the GOP's only constituency!!

well, everything i said is 100% true and very reasonable, no holes in that one. time to go get high and pretend like i'm not on this planet

i'd like to see some statements from hypothetical "cool christian churches" that they are NOT OK with white evangelicalism and what it stands for. Or rather, i'd like to see some of them "take the lead" in fighting back against this bullshit! i guess they're worried about starting a Christian civil war, Reformation II, but maybe they need to have a fucking internal war

say what you want about john brown but he was that guy

One very big solid that my parents did for us was not dragging us into organized religion. It's made me feel weird and out of place any number of times over the years of living in the Religious States of America but it's a weird and out of place that I can handle.

xp

exactly

all the john browns that i know today aren't christian

why

if i ever have children (i won't, i don't think) i will definitely take them to church. i'll take them to a crazy ass church like i grew up in. i want them to see that. when they're old enough, and with a parent with them that actually cares about their wellbeing (me). then i'll take them to a catholic church, and a synagogue. then a unitarian church. then a methodist, then a baptist. a black evangelical church. then back to the white evangelical church, one more time. it should be obvious by then what's wrong

one of those churches will be passing out literature about zionism and trying to create the conditions for the apocalypse in israel so that they can all finally go to heaven

hello child, the one i'm not trying to fuck up, answer me one thing kid: "which one of these churches seems to HATE everyone else that's not like them?"

fuck cowardly christians, especially the ones that consume their sense of persecution like it's manna

/rageout

here's where i'm just a big fucking hypocrite

I don't think you're a hypocrite, I think it's different because it's the community you personally grew up in and you very naturally have some feeling of responsibility for it that you don't have for other groups of people. It's not a community you're part of anymore, but it's still part of you.

I don't think it really matters to the "true believers" if other believers speak out against them, for example, the Pope says people should get vaccinated but a lot of conservative Catholics still go on claiming that the vaccine has tissue from aborted fetuses in it and they say that Joe Biden shouldn't be allowed to receive communion because of his views on abortion. You would think that the freaking pope would be considered an authority on what is and isn't acceptable Catholic behavior, but no, they're convinced that the one true God is speaking to them through Russian bots on Facebook and that the pope has somehow been mislead.

I started out as a Methodist (Protestant). Their view was more pragmatic. The people there occasionally drank, smoked, didn't believe in biblical inerrancy, and acted very human. Yeah, many were pro-life, but a lot (including my own folks) weren't. There was more room for individuality - nowadays, you can find plenty of similar churches who are pro-LGBTQ, even possibly pro-gay marriage. Not everyone IN the church would be cool with it, but you're more likely to run into someone there who speaks up and says "come on, this is fucked up". They taught us that flawed folk could be forgiven and get to Heaven.

When we left and started going to a Young Earther, Fundie church in high school, the differences were stark. They did NOT believe the fun little Methodist belief that you could get to Heaven by just recanting on your deathbed. they treated it like the Good Place, you had to do good works and would like get points for it or something and that VERY FEW people would get into Heaven. Even if you begged forgiveness and tried to turn your life around - they were very much like the US penal system.

and yet, despite these odds, none of them ever thought THEY were in jeopardy of missing out on Heaven. Even though they would say out loud that few people would make it there, including Christ-fearing believers, they mostly meant, like, Catholics, or people within their church that were secretly having sex before marriage. It's not *them*. same with all the conservatives who aren't afraid of COVID cos they think the people who die from it are 'weak', and ergo, it won't be them.

but they were often pants-shittingly afraid of pissing off their bigoted, despotic God, and since they believed in some kind of mystical unknowable points-system, and they're convinced God hates abortion and gay people, they always want to be visibly seen as supporting pro-life and anti-LGBTQ causes. Almost like they have to be performatively hateful - it's not enough to just BELIEVE gays and abortion are bad.

but nobody is a monolith, not even in churches like that. unlike the Methodist church, which was more casual, with families coming and going, a lot of people in this fundie church were like, lifers. Generations that had all gone to church together for years and years, often in that same building, children who'd been indoctrinated and given no agency of their own since birth. MOST of them were home-schooled a religious-themed curriculum.

by the time any of these fuckers encountered an alternative thought, they'd already been programmed for years and years. Not common for them to start questioning their beliefs the moment they got challenged because they never really had their beliefs challenged before, because they grew up in a bubble. so they never had to think critically about it. and the shit other people say starts to make sense, particularly pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ beliefs.

that cognitive dissonance is often overwhelming, so they get rid of it by doubling down. they're afraid that even thinking it's ok to be pro-choice = eternal damnation, so saying out loud THAT WHAT'S HAPPENING IN TEXAS IS BAD doesn't even come into question. they can't. even if they think the mechanism for enforcing it is fucked up despite supporting pro-life legislation - they won't say that, because it'll hurt their point total and keep them out of Heaven.

it's like a vice grip on your behavior. I didn't really have that problem because I grew up in a more liberal Protestant church, so when I realized how crazypants everybody was there, it was easy for me to peace out. but if you grew up in a Fundie environment your entire life - these fuckers are programmed to think that even TREATING GAY PEOPLE WITH DIGNITY or quietly accepting abortion are eternal life-threatening beliefs. that's why they support stores refusing to serve gay people, even though obviously Jesus wouldn't support refusing service to people based on something like that. they think they have to outright AVOID gay people and have no transactional relationship with them, lest their point total be harmed. they can't just allow abortion to happen, they have to attend rallies, post about it 24/7, full-throated support it. even if they secretly are questioning these approaches.

this is obviously a great oversimplification but I can pretty much guarantee you if I was attending my same Young Earth church right now, in 2021, precisely ZERO people would be objecting to the Texas legislation, and we'd probably be taught how it was a major victory for our faith. and any minority opinion would get dogpiled (it was definitely a thing - I was usually that opinion).

I have a lot of Christian friends who are pro-gay, pro-transgender, pro-choice, but they tend to belong to more liberal-minded sects like the Unitarian church, or Methodist branches. But the crazypants sects (ie Southern Baptists, Fundies, etc) literally view this as an assault on their SimHeaven video game score and just won't back the fuck down. and the mechanism doesn't matter. they won't even speak up about murders of abortion clinics. like, they'll give lip service to "thou shalt not kill", but they'll mention abortion is murder and that while the people who murdered them were wrong, the abortion providers were equally wrong.

so glad I left that life behind.

(btw don't think I'm letting Protestant sects off the hook, I realize the KKK emerged from Protestantism)

i'd like to see some statements from hypothetical "cool christian churches" that they are NOT OK with white evangelicalism and what it stands for.

You would think that the freaking pope would be considered an authority on what is and isn't acceptable Catholic behavior

PINO

i determine that it is therefore American, what we're talking about.

oh, it's absolutely American. violent oppression has always been acceptable to a large swath of Americans. "American" is not a synonym for "admirable".

it’s almost un-admirable, what we’re talking about

actually, maybe this is a more focused question for Christians who are not fundamentalists:

would you support a Christian theocracy in America?

(by the way, you may get an opportunity to put this question to the literal test, depending on how the next few years go)

The church I was baptized in, the United Church of Christ, explicitly supports pretty much everything white right-wing churches are against.

see also: Unitarian Universalists

i guess i just see the "cool churches" (unitarians, churches with pride flags) and the "cool christians" (bill mckibben) as exceptions. of course they're there. there are 205 MILLION christians in the USA, somehow. it doesn't surprise me that there are millions of cool christians, including a handful that take that coolness and extend it to action, or to speaking up, or taking a stand against fundamentalists (this is the part which never happens - it almost always takes the form of an expression of what the cool christians believe IN, rather than a rebuke of what other Christians are actually doing in real life that harms so many people every single day). it would be absurd if there were 205 Christians and every single one of them fucking sucked. Instead, there over 100 million that DO fucking suck, and they dominate the religion in this country

*fundamentalists work for centuries to convert earth's lower atmosphere into mustard gas*

*cool christians* : we believe in oxygen!

sorry. i'm just so, so disappointed in "people", which i suspect is just a sub-form of being disappointed in myself

I don't remember who the comedian was, but I remember years ago seeing some standup say, "I was raised Catholic, which means I'm an atheist now." That's kinda true for me, except it wasn't even really an act of conscious rejection. I was raised Catholic - baptism, First Communion, confirmation, Sunday school, CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) retreats, three or four years as an altar boy (did you know people tip the altar boys at their weddings? I got $100 one time), two years in a Catholic all-boys' high school, but somehow when I turned 18 it all slid right off me. I stopped going to church, and my mom just...accepted it. She'd given it a shot, it hadn't taken, done. To this day she's super active in the church where she lives, doing readings and helping out with charity work (she's a Meals On Wheels driver, does United Way gift drives, does people's taxes for free a few months out of the year, blah blah blah), but she never asks me if I go, and the reactionary side of Catholic politics has completely passed her by. She's never said the word "abortion" to me in her life.

(FTR, I served as an altar boy on several occasions under Theodore McCarrick, the former cardinal who's been defrocked and is currently on trial for bad sex stuff, back when he was the bishop in Newark. Another priest I knew, who served in my local parish, left the priesthood and moved to Las Vegas at some point — and a few years ago, someone he had molested showed up at his house and shot him. Neither of these dudes ever did anything to me. I guess I wasn't their type.)

the realization that "people" on the whole are actually bad, untrustworthy, susceptible to misinformation to the point that it seems like they actually crave it, and so fucking selfish all the time. it may be obvious and known for a long time -- i've seen the intro to fellowship of the ring, i understand how "humans" work -- but i didn't understand the degree of it until trump, and then especially with covid. i get so angry because at one point i was very much an Idealist, and i guess i'm dumb enough to think that it's still a good thing. but when believing in "people" goes away, so does everything else. the thought of public service becomes a joke. public health becomes a joke. climate change, the possibility of every doing anything about it - lol, are you kidding, after a year and a half of covid? we have ZERO chance. everything just goes away when faith in humanity goes away. ironically, i think this is part of what probably drives people to religion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ppyMUlXfM

omg, the last 30 seconds of that clip just legit put me in a good mood lol

i mean, i had this in my clipboard for real:

]i send this thought-prayer out to whatever deity or deities can handle my arrogant, selfish request:

when i die, i want to be OBLITERATED. just fucking END IT. show some mercy. your earthly experiment was a spectacular failure.

but the sunset and will smith, combined with that music...maybe there is something worth living for :P

re: liberal or at least non insane churches/christians, Sojourners was a thing for a while and I followed them on FB, I have no idea how much clout the organization has or whether it has any media presence, it doesn't seem to.

I like Fr. James Martin a lot (Jesuit priest and author), who is as liberal as a priest can get. He gets a shit ton of flack but he always speaks out against nonsense.

I guess I just try to keep in mind that the terrible people seem more pervasive because they are a very LOUD minority. If I thought the scales had tipped in the other direction I'd probably just be pretty much done with everything.

xp
if any of non-fundamentalist churches have any real national clout, it is news to me. fundies are the harlem globetrotters, the others are the washington generals

terrible people seem more pervasive because they are a very LOUD minority

it's always been true and never more so than now that loudest voices win out every time

evangelicals make up the plurality of christians in the United States. none of the denominations are a strict "50%+ majority"

i would guess that in the next 20 years, fundamentalists will be the GOP, and the rest of the denominations will be the Democrats, or the United Christian Party, or whatever. people like me who are deeply disappointed and resentful of the christian god will probably be dead at that point

that's the thing about tacit, silent Christians - i know that when push comes to shove, they'll side with god and the GOP

i cannot defend anything i am saying, but i am guided by a voice from within. must be satan

Being Majority Leader means having to listen when your members say, "If I vote the way you want, I'll lose my election."

But in Sinema's case, it's like, "If I vote the way you want, I'll damage my idiosyncratic brand that really should be making me more popular with op-ed writers, don't you think?"

Why doesn't Schumer call her into his office and say "Get in line or I'll support a primary challenger against you"?

Because she’d laugh at him. She knows they won’t gut a centrist incumbent.

I think regardless of what she does, there's a good chance she'll be primaried and lose. Possibly the only thing that might save her is getting in line with the rest of her colleagues.

The primary challenge campaign is already starting to rev up.

Dem voters in AZ are reporting that they're receiving tons of pro-Sinema mailers--probably Koch funded

She will absolutely face a progressive primary challenger. That's different from party leadership/donors/etc. going after her (ie the idea of a Schumer threat), it will be the eternal spiel about moderate electability and we can't risk a ewww progressive losing to a Republican in November etc. etc. etc..

This remains the party that let Joe Lieberman keep his committee chair and break Obama's legs after he appeared onstage at the RNC.

Meanwhile much of her state will be uninhabitable sometime in the next two decades.

― I'm a sovereign jazz citizen (the table is the table), Thursday, September 30, 2021 11:12 AM (fifty-five minutes ago)

^^extremely relevant point^^

if Sinema wanted to maximize her leverage and bend the entire bill to her will, imagine how cool it would be if she were doing it to help protect the people she represents?

Why doesn't Schumer call her into his office and say "Get in line or I'll support a primary challenger against you"?

i'm assuming that some version of this happened, but Sinema just didn't understand what he was saying at all. she's not too smart

This is exactly it. is KS not saying “give me x and y for my state and we can get this done”?

Any Progressive challenger is going to be deemed too far left by the people Chuck works for

This is exactly it. is KS not saying “give me x and y for my state and we can get this done”?

Schumer: just tell us what you want. what do you want!? is there anything we can do, specifically for your state, or even just you, to make this work? what do you want?!

Sinema: do u like fud

is KS not saying “give me x and y for my state and we can get this done”?

The only demands she’s made appear to be “no tax increases of any kind for any reason.”

As opposed to Manchin, who wants to raise taxes but only to pay down the national debt, creating the dumbest catch 22 possible.

KS is not a serious person. She conned ppl into thinking she was. Jig is up.

Schumer staring across the desk at Sinema

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions

— Matt Gaetz is a p*do (@totallynotahoax) September 27, 2021

She deleted lmao pic.twitter.com/hjA6qiVMja

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) September 30, 2021

what a fraud

People these days are just making zero effort to hide the fact that they're bought and paid for.

Why would they hide it? What are the consequences? She gets primaried? So what, she'll have a cushy next job lined up for doing someone's bidding now.

We passed the Havana Syndrome act to pay spooks who've been annoyed by crickets

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/havana-syndrome-jason-crickets

yes, but how did they control the crickets?

Why doesn't Schumer call her into his office and say "Get in line or I'll support a primary challenger against you"?

I know the answer is, "because he's Chuck Schumer," but I wish there was a more satisfying answer than that.

But the JASON scientists left open the possibility of some other nefarious attack. “It cannot be ruled out that while the perceived sounds, while not harmful, are introduced by an adversary as deception so as to mask an entirely unrelated mode of causing illness,” the report concludes in its executive summary.

Of course!

He’s a one-man improv troupe, yes anding bullshit forever.

Manchin says reconciliation bill must include controversial Hyde Amendment https://t.co/rQ7txDay5m pic.twitter.com/CYGtbBDi4d

— The Hill (@thehill) September 30, 2021

looooool the hyde amendment, wonderful

what a remarkably depressing phrase to see uttered by a democrat in 2021, holy shit

like, the material effect is awful enough, but that is some significant PSI damage

is he about to switch parties? the fuck is this

In other Democratic embarrassment news

NEW: Harris’ office is calling up prominent pro-Israel groups and leaders for damage control after she was confronted by — and did not push back on — a student who said Israel was commiting ethnic genocide https://t.co/UMPhSz6Q3d

w/ @AlexThomp

— Sam Stein (@samstein) September 30, 2021

West Virginians are kayaking to Joe Manchin's yacht and demanding he explain why he's stopping the reconciliation bill from advancingpic.twitter.com/Q09OC1aEHo

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) October 1, 2021

Have they considered sinking it?

Sinking* Almost Heaven for October thread title.

*Not Really

Diabolus ex Manchinima: the yacht ride to hell.

On Sinema at the Sinema: October 2021 US Politics thread