The person who represents the district in which I reside is a Republican, Heather Somers, who may be familiar to some as the person who ran as Foley’s running mate in 2014. Heather is well known in this area. She’s from Groton. She had no discernible effect on the election in 2014, and she has only managed to win her state Senate seat in 2018 by winning in the areas in which she is least well known, as she lost to our candidate, Bob Statchen, in both Groton and Stonington. Heather has only the best interests of her constituents at heart. For instance, she feels strongly that voters should not have the right to vote simply handed to them on a silver platter. Yes, she actually said that. Apparently, in Heather’s book, you have to struggle for your right to vote, which is, when you think about it, totally in line with the Republican playbook.
She’s a good politician, though, in that she’s quite capable of making pronouncements from both sides of her mouth, but those who pay attention know that push doesn’t even have to come to shove for her to cast reliable right wing votes. Still, she has managed to take in the New London Day on a regular basis, but the Day, like many both siderist institutions, actually leans right, and they just can’t resist her glib BS.
Bob Statchen is running against her again, but he’s a bit handicapped by the fact that he’s in the National Guard and is currently barred from politicking, as he’s on active duty fighting the pandemic. Meanwhile, Heather continues to cover herself with glory. While hundreds of her constituents have been demonstrating in favor of Black Lives Matter, Heather has revealed herself to be totally clueless. Check this out:
I well remember while I was studying for my theology degree at Our Lady of Sorrows Grammar School in Hartford, that certain actions of the Lord did not sit that well with us, such as the fact that unbaptized babies who died at birth were barred from Heaven because a man and a woman ate an apple many years ago. It just didn’t seem fair. Also, when I later attempted to actually read the whole Bible, it seemed that God was a bit cruel when he suggested that one of his chosen talk all the members of another tribe into getting circumcised in order to appease said chosen for an offense committed by a single tribe member, only to further suggest that the chosen folks should massacre the entire tribe while the men were recovering from what must have been a painful procedure back in those days.
Still, it never occurred to me to give poor Satan the benefit of the doubt, and consider that we might all have been better off if he’d manage to kick God out of the top spot. I think PZ Myers at Pharyngula is right, and there’s a “notable lack of specific crimes attributed” to Satan, while God, assuming the Bible is in fact the word of God, practically brags about his.
Shame on anyone reading this who is not a devotee of Crooks & Liars, and has therefore already read the post and watched the video I’m posting here, but for anyone who hasn’t seen it, it is, in my opinion, must see.
Fox News’ coverage of the Seattle protests has taken another hit after the news organisation quoted a Reddit Monty Python joke as real for its viewers.
Martha MacCallum, host of Fox News’ The Story, was covering Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) for her viewers, which included claims from the cable news channel that there were leadership problems within the organisation.
To illustrate this point, Fox News shared a screenshot of a Reddit post entitled “I didn’t vote for Raz”. Raz Simone, a rapper, is the alleged unofficial leader of CHAZ.
The post includes a video of the Fox folks, interspersed with cuts from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The scene was hilarious in the first place, but this makes it even better.
Which brings me to another subject. It is easy for me to see how hilarious this Monty Python sketch is. You can watch the entire scene from the movie at the Crooks & Liars post at the link. Yet my wife just doesn’t “get it”. It’s one of life’s mysteries. Females don’t get the Three Stooges either. It must be some sort of genetic thing.
A few days ago Joe Biden allowed as he was worried that Trump would steal the election, though he was fairly sure that if Trump refused to leave the White House, the military would not back him up.
Nonetheless, the legitimate fear exists that Trump will refuse to accept defeat. It would seem that it would be a no-brainer that Democrats should be confronting every Republican candidate with this question or some more clever variant thereof: will you oppose Donald Trump if he refuses to accept the results of the November election?
We’ve recently seen Republicans ducking questions about Trump’s tweets, etc. My guess is that they’d duck this question too, and if they do, those evasions should be used against them.
The New London Day has called on Roseanne Kotowski to resign from the Groton Representative Town Meeting, and State Rep. Craig Fishbein to resign as well, since like Roseanne, he has outed himself as a racist. I’ve written about Roseanne here and here. To briefly recap her story: she sent an email to Groton Town Councilors about an upcoming BLM demonstration here in Groton that fairly reeked of racism, though it was not, to give Roseanne credit, explicitly racist. Still, the dog whistles were so loud even the Day heard them, so they’ve called for her resignation.
Which brings me to the main point of this little post. It really is past time for the media to stop pretending that 1968 never happened. That was the year Nixon adopted the Southern Strategy, the idea being to move into the racist space the Democrats had left open when they passed the Civil Rights Act. At first the rules were that the dog whistles should be ever so ambiguous, such that the message got through but there was still room for plausible deniability. That’s changed over the years, to the point where the dog whistles are clearly audible to the most human of ears, yet the media, including the Day, continues to insist on pretending that appeals to racism is not the underlying political strategy of the GOP, but merely a problem with those, like Roseanne and Fishbein, who whistle the loudest. It is no coincidence that Republicans who do not whistle have become nearly extinct in the party, for those that didn’t play the game were slowly but surely sent to the sidelines.
It is patently obvious that in order to get white people, especially those in the hinterlands, to vote against their own interests, it is necessary for the party of the elite to get those white people to believe that their problems are caused by a group of people who are worse off than they. Dylan sang about the strategy in the early 60s, when it was used by Southern Democrats. Now it belongs to the Republicans and is practiced nationwide, and it’s time that the media acknowledged that fact. It’s history. There’s no doubt about it.
Why is the left so bad at messaging? Case in point, the calls to Defund the Police. Any idiot who gave that phrase even one second of thought would come to the obvious conclusion that not only is it a stupid idea on the merits (defund translates to no funding, not lower funding), but would also know that it wouldn’t play well with a huge percentage of people. What’s truly irritating is that the people who are proposing that we “defund the police” are, for the most part, not actually proposing that we “defund the police”, but that we look more carefully at police budgets and transfer some of the excess to other uses, like schools. Already, the Republicans are seizing on the phrase, since it’s so easy to misrepresent the intent of those that are using it. My wife just got polled by Republican oriented Rasmussen, and they are push polling with the phrase. Give the Republicans credit for the one thing they’re able to do: use language to their advantage. They would never have floated a phrase like that.
So, that’s the rant. Here’s the modest proposal. How about something that sends a message that would make it a bit harder for Republicans to mine votes from it. Something like: Rethink the police. I’m not proud. If someone comes up with something better, I’m all for it. Nothing could be worse than the phrase we’re stuck with at the moment.
The world is a dangerous place, which is why civilians have depended time and time again on the police force to keep themselves safe. However, in these dark times, it seems police who choose to break the law are in grave danger of facing repercussions for their offenses. As pressure mounts to charge officers with the crimes they have committed, it is vital to keep one glaring issue in mind: if we fill our jails with cops who have broken the law, where will we imprison the people who do not want cops to break the law?
America is the leader of the free world when it comes to incarcerating citizens. We simply could not have achieved this magnificent feat without the help of the police, especially the ones with no regard for the law. Unfortunately, not everyone thinks the disastrous campaign of mass incarceration is worthy of praise. Dangerous propaganda videos of police breaking the law have circulated widely online, radicalizing a large portion of the general population into denouncing this behavior. The amount of people who oppose cops breaking the law is growing by the minute. In fact, there might even be more people who don’t want cops to break the law than available jail cells. That is why it is so crucial we do not waste precious jail space on cops who have committed a crime.
I seem to recall that folks like Pat Robertson were claiming that things like Hurricane Katrina were messages from god punishing us for being nice to gay people, which always seemed like a fairly cryptic way to send that message, considering that the people being punished were sort of randomly chosen.
On the other hand, it would seem this message is fairly straightforward:
This same jackass who threatened to sue Kentucky’s Governor to keep their church services open now has the gall to say he feels “terrible” about the outbreak that has decimated his congregation.
…
The church whose pastor joined Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron in threatening to sue Gov. Andy Beshear in April if the governor didn’t rescind an executive order preventing churches from holding in-person services has had a coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.
Clays Mills Baptist Church, just outside of Nicholasville in Jessamine County, has had 17 parishioners test positive for the virus. The ages of those infected range from children to the elderly, according to the Herald-Leader, the first news outlet to report the story.
The church began in-person services on May 10.
Pastor Jeff Fugate told the newspaper on Friday that he felt “terrible” about the outbreak. “I care more about the health of my people than anyone,” he said.
At least two of the people who have recently tested positive are members of Fugate’s family.
As Randy has the Lord say, “My ways are mysterious, sometimes even to myself”, but this message seems fairly direct. Odds are, though, that Fugate will find someway to blame it on the gays or the liberals.
I wrote a couple of days ago I wrote about a local Republican, Roseanne Kotowski, who wanted to forbid a Black Lives Matter demonstration here in Groton because it would cost too much, in addition to the mess the participants would make even if they didn’t throw a brick through every window they passed. I’m pleased to report that Roseanne can rest easy. I attended the demonstration today. The park from which the march started was left clean as a whistle, the stashes of bricks that people had hidden were apparently too well hidden, and the cops were dominant, in the sense that they stood by and watched us pass while they held up traffic for the two plus mile trek from the starting off point to the City of Groton Municipal Building.
It was a far bigger crowd than I had expected. One of the panels of this collage gives a bit of an idea. I’d say there were a thousand people at the very least.
The incredible thing about this demonstration is that it was organized by students from Fitch, who had to overcome their inexperience at this sort of thing, the limitations imposed by the ongoing pandemic and the fact that they are not physically going to school.
Some of our party faithful were in attendance. Starting at the top and moving clockwise:
Stonington Democrats Gene Pfeiffer and Lisa Coleman (not office holders but hard working volunteers); Groton Mayor Patrice Granatosky, State Representative Joe de la Cruz, and Groton Town Councilor Aundre Bumgardner. They were not the only elected officials in attendance, they were the ones I corralled into having their pictures taken.
The crowd was mostly young, though there were a fair number of us geezers in attendance. Here’s hoping they all vote.
