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.
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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.
The New York Times has taken some well deserved shit for running an Op-Ed by Tom Cotton, in which the fascist Senator from Arkansas argued for more fascism, i.e., that we should unleash the armed forces on protestors with whom he disagrees. The Times defended itself initially on the grounds that it has an obligation to provide “both sides” of policy questions, though, like all other media, “both sides” seems to have a pronounced right-wing shift. (Senator Brian Schatz tweeted that the Times has refused to run several Op-Eds he submitted, none of which suggested making war on Americans.
Besides being a loathsome argument on the merits, Cotton’s piece was, predictably, full of typical Republican lies and half truths, and the Times is now partly walking its decision back, saying, in essence, that it didn’t bother to fact check the piece before publishing it. Odd that, considering that lying is the default Republican modus operandi, and one should assume anything emitted by a Republican Senator is filled with mendacity. It would probably have made more sense, and taken less time, for them to examine it to see if there was any truth in it.
Is it possible that the Times will now truly change its ways? Too bad, because I was going to suggest that in the interests of presenting both sides of important questions, that they consider giving Texas GOP chairs Jim Kaelin and Cynthia Brehm space on the Op-Ed page to give us the other side of the George Floyd story: that the entire event was in fact staged to make Trump look bad, or, perhaps, to yet another Texas GOP chair, Sue Piner, who “shared a post on Sunday that included an image of liberal billionaire George Soros and text that said, ‘I pay white cops to murder black people. And then I pay black people to riot because race wars keep the sheep in line.’”
These are views that deserve to be heard as much as those of a United States Senator who proposes that we make war on those American people with whom he disagrees. Well, if the Times truly is going to start fact checking Op-Eds from rightwing figures, those folks from Texas may just have to settle for the New London Day.
My spouse just forwarded this Facebook post from Aundre Bumgardner. As I’m not sure how to embed a Facebook post, I just took a screenshot.
Aundre is a former Republican state representative, who has come over from the dark side and is now a Democratic Town Councilor here in Groton. Roseanne is a Republican member of the Representative Town Meeting. Within living memory, even within the memory of someone born less that 20 years ago, the Groton Republicans were, by and large, a fairly moderate and responsible group, but those folks have slowly but surely been pushed to the sidelines by folks like Roseanne, who is, shall we say, a bit on the extreme edge.
When I first read this I toyed with the idea of answering each question in turn, but the absurdity sort of speaks for itself. As a bit of a side note, I just returned a few hours ago from a demonstration in Mystic, the fourth of five (all peaceful so far) being held in downtown Mystic on each day this week. There were at least a hundred of us, and since we were on the Stonington side of the river we were policed by two officers from the Stonington force, who spent most of their time chatting with the organizers and posing for pictures, except for a brief period when one of the officers had to gently intervene when an aggressive fellow in a Trump shirt got a bit too close for comfort to some of the demonstrators.
What struck me about Roseanne’s questions is her use of the word “dominant” in question four. It reminded me of Gail Collins’ column, entitled “Trump’s Magic Word”, in this morning’s New York Times, in which she notes the use of that word or its variants by the chicken in chief:
Have you noticed how almost every other word out of Donald Trump’s mouth lately seems to be some variation on “dominate?”
“If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time,” he told America’s governors. “They’re going to run all over you. You’ll look like a bunch of jerks.”
This, of course, was in that telephone rant about protesters. There is something about crowds of people willing to take to the streets to denounce racism that seems to make the president feel, um, unmanly.
“I will not allow angry mobs to dominate,” he told the country during his visit to the space launch.
Minneapolis authorities, he contended, were “weak and pathetic” until events spiraled out of control and the National Guard moved in. (“Domination … it’s a beautiful thing to watch.”)
Tweeting on the same subject, Trump reported: “Great job done by all. Overwhelming force. Domination. Likewise, Minneapolis was great. (thank you President Trump!)”
With Trump it’s yet another sign of his basic insecurity, his inner knowledge that while he’s an accomplished scam artist, he’s a failure at everything else and a physical coward to boot. But it’s interesting that Roseanne, and most likely a lot of other Trumpers, have picked up on it, since it has some fairly obvious fascistic implications.
You don’t need a degree in psychology to realize that when police show up at a demonstration looking like jackbooted thugs, as Roseanne urges they should, they are more likely to provoke a reaction than if they show up like the two cops from Stonington did. But, of course, that’s the whole point, as it serves to justify the police brutality that the folks like Roseanne find so reassuring. (Lest there be any doubt, as I’m sure there isn’t, Roseanne is white.) The fact is that mainstream Republicans these days are reflexively fascist.
Though I won’t be responding to each of Roseanne’s questions, I will respond to the last of them. No, Roseanne, you can’t tell people with whom you disagree that they can’t demonstrate because the town can’t afford it. We can’t afford the costs of the willfully misinterpreted Second Amendment, but I’m sure that you wouldn’t want to keep your right wing thugs from displaying their firepower. You see, the First Amendment actually does quite specifically say that people have the right to peacefully assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. They still have that right, even if they disagree with a Republican president, though the present Supreme Court may soon have other ideas.
Of course, Roseanne knows very well that there won’t be any rioting or brick throwing during Sunday’s demonstration, though she sure would like there to be. It just bothers her that the demonstration is likely to draw a huge number of people, while she’d be lucky to get a handful if she tried to organize a Black Lives Don’t Matter rally. Maybe she should move to Alabama, where she’d have better luck with that.
Abraham Lincoln was mostly right when he remarked that you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people, all of the time. In truth you can never fool all of the people even sometimes, but more importantly, as Abe surely knew, all a politician or political party must do to thrive is fool most of the people most of the time.
This brings me to the genius, who has never been able to fool most of the people at any time, and who is where he is only because he fooled some of the people in just the right places. He has always been a scam artist, but that required only that he fool some of the people some of the time. All he needed to do was fool the right people. It’s been his modus operandi for a long time, and he’s wedded to it. It’s why he does things like tear gas people to clear a path for a photo op in front of a church. It never occurs to him that while that sort of thing will assure that he continues to fool some of the people enough of the time, it will lessen his chances of fooling most of the people at any time.
Nate Silver notes that Trump now has the highest disapproval rating of any president ever.
In my own humble opinion he has now reached the point with most of the people that they will not believe a word he says, ever. If he walked on water most of the people would believe he was conning them.
Joe Biden may not be inspiring, but most of the people feel comfortable with him, particularly given their choices.
Which means, if these were normal times, that we could be pretty sure that Biden will win the election. And he will, provided we are allowed to have an election. Based on the genius’s recent actions, and those of his attorney general, I’d give even odds that they will steal the next election, either by cancelling it, or by blatantly and openly fixing it, in the well founded belief that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court will do anything about it. The last few days have given us an indication of what would happen if most of the people were to rise up against that.
It is an unfortunate fact of American life that the rather tepid enforcement of our antitrust laws has now completely evaporated. Remember when Microsoft was sued or making it hard to change the default browser in Windows. IOs makes it impossible, but no one does anything about it.
This past week, Mark Zuckerberg chastised Jack Dorsey of Twitter for putting a note on one of Donald Trump’s sensationalistic tweets that threatened Minneapolis protesters that “we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter decided the tweet glorified violence, a violation of Twitter Terms of Service, and forced the reader to lift a screen to read it.
“If anyone, including a politician, is saying things that can cause, that is calling for violence or could risk imminent physical harm…we will take that content down,” Zuckerberg had testified to Congress in response to a question by Congresswoman Alexandria Octavio Cortez (D-NY) last October. Yet, in response to a tweet invoking violence by Trump, posted on his personal account this week, Zuckerberg asserted that it was “free expression” and did not violate Facebook’s Terms of Service. He allowed the same posting to not be flagged on Facebook or Instagram.
Zuckerberg also asserted “I don’t think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth,” to CNBC’s Andew Ross Sorkin in a May 28 interview.
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However, Zuckerberg is misleading the press and the public in implying that Facebook doesn’t “fact check” content. In fact, Zuckerberg has boasted that Facebook has set up a “Check Your Fact” division to police the Internet for “fake news.” The “Check Your Fact” program includes a “panel” of “independent” fact checkers who have enormous powers to “flag links on the social network as false, demoting their ranking in the News Feed as well as the visibility of the entire outlet that posted it.”
And one of those fact checkers, among other right-wing panel members, is none other than Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller.
BuzzFlash discovered this after I posted a Politico article on BuzzFlash Nation on Facebook the morning of Saturday, February 29, the day of the South Carolina Democratic Primary. Trump had held a campaign rally in Charleston the night before, aimed at stealing headlines from the Dems. The article header can be seen in the image at the top of this page, and the lower portion of the Politico article Facebook image also indicated that Trump presented the concern about a potential Coronavirus catastrophe (this was around the time that he was still claiming that it would “disappear” like “magic”) as a Democratic “hoax.” “Trump rallies his base to treat Coronavirus as a ‘hoax,’” Politico wrote, and that is what he did at that time.
In the afternoon, I was posting articles on BuzzFlash Nation on Facebook and scrolled down the page only to find that the Politico article that appeared eminently sound had been declared “False Information” and had a screen over it, as if it were “fake news.” I went to the Politico Facebook page, scrolled down, and found that indeed the same “False Information” screen was placed over the article summary and headline link on the Politico Facebook page. When I clicked open the screen, I found the message below:
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When I clicked open the screen, I ultimately found a written “opinion” on how a Daily Caller staffer had “determined” that the Politico story was “False Information,” which appeared to be a partisan screed to make Trump appear to be serious about the Coronavirus, a hard case to make, particularly at that time. Heck, just a week or so ago, Trump’s dimwitted son, Eric, implausibly claimed that indeed the Coronavirus was a “hoax” and would disappear after the Democrats lost the November election.
The article goes on to demonstrate that Zuckerberg’s fact checkers have a pronounced right wing slant and makes the case, which is surely true, that he will enable the spread of Republican lies in the coming election. Facebook is a monopoly and should be broken up, just as Ma Bell was, for it is capable of far more damage than was the phone company at the time of its breakup. It will be a tough job, because even if the Democrats take over and Biden appoints an attorney general interested in taking Zuckerberg down, the Supreme Court will no doubt step in and explain that over 100 years of precedent is just so wrong, and anti-trust laws are unconstitutional when applied to Republican enablers.
