Conservative Race Theory, Bi-Parted, Execute Dems, GOP Defund Police, CRT

• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors watches establishment Democrats get slapped around by an angry impatient young Turk until Whoopi Goldberg steps in and knocks him out. tengrain patiently explains why Whoopie is right.
   
• If only Democrats would surrender a little faster to these nice, cooperative Republicans. driftglass does not seem surprised that the same guy who astonishingly accused Obama of excessive partisanship now catalogues Joe Biden’s missed opportunities. Said loss seems to be caused by a lack of empathy with poor beleaguered Republicans, who are so eager to help him.
   
• Frances Langum watches MSNBC news anchor Brian Williams take conservatives at OAN to the woodshed as they advocate the execution of those who voted against Trump.
   
  Brian! You mean we can’t kill the hundreds of thousands of traitors who stole the election by voting for the wrong guy?
   
• News Corpse sees the conservative call for mass executions of Democratic traitors cautiously disowned on the Fox Network. Howard Kurtz seems disturbed by the execution talk because due process. The rigged election has not been conclusively proven and the Traitors have not yet been identified and charged.
   
  Apparently, wiser conservative heads will prevail and the executions will be delayed until after the conservative overthrow!
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson sees Republican politicians unifying behind a few issues in the coming campaign. COVID decline and the economic upswing are no longer to be discussed in polite company. Statues to those who fought and killed to defend slavery are now themselves to be defended. The 2020 election is to be relitigated with vote “audits” by private groups. All abortions are to be outlawed. Teaching in public schools about racism must be limited to how it no longer exists in America. And, of course, immigrants are to be attacked. So elections in 2022 are to be about saving confederate statues, performing election audits, banning abortion, forbidding teaching about racism, and attacking immigrants.
   
  Some of those positions are unpopular with anyone but rabid Republicans. But conservative lawmakers plan to insulate themselves from the popular will through voter suppression and hyper-aggressive gerrymander.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger dives into the data. Most Americans want a more fair economy as long as it isn’t called socialism.
   
  Reminds me of my socialist friend who began nodding as I suggested that most people do not realize that the technical meaning of Socialism is getting your ass kicked in the next national election. To his credit, he laughed.
   
• Republicans have supported police by trying hard to tie Democrats to the absurd Defund the Police slogan adopted by some leftists, and rejected pretty much uniformly by national Democrats. Meanwhile, Democrats have worked to increase police funding, while Republicans have insisted on defunding the police they maintained they were supporting. When he graced the Oval Office, Mr. Trump proposed slashing police funding in every budget he submitted. And, this year, Republicans voted against Biden proposals to send funds to local police departments to support police.
   
  Tommy Christopher watches one of the more entertaining White House press conferences as Fox network personality Peter Doocy tries hard to dominate White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki over the crime issue. After all, Democrats are all about Defund the Police! Jen Psaki responds with a smile. Democrats supported funding and Republicans fought it. Poor Doocy flounders, arguing that nobody told Republicans that money for police could fight crime.
   
  Jen Psaki simply reminds Doocy that actions speak louder than words, then pretty much lets the poor soul tangle himself in his own barbed wire.

• The Palmer Report reviews Republican opposition to any investigation into the deadly violent Jan 6 attack on Congress, and wonders how it can possibly end well for the party.
   
• Iron Knee at Political Irony recounts the spy-on-me controversy. Tucker says he’s being targeted for destruction by America’s National Security forces. GOP Congressional leader Kevin McCarthy demands an investigation into the outrage.
   
  General Michael Hayden, has some experience in the field as Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. General Hayden ofters his informed, considered, analysis of the whole Target-Tucker issue in three entertaining words.
   
• Trump has legal problems, the Jan 6 committee is set to investigate the Capitol attack, and Tucker looks like a goof. Hackwhackers finds prime tweets describing Republican angst during a not-so-good week.
   
• Sometimes it’s the small spark of the little things that add to the sum of human joy. Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged takes in the news of indictments of the Trump organization and the possibility that more personal legal jeopardy is in the offing. She proposes that prolonged anger at all things Trump is a healthy, vital thing.
   
  For myself, I wonder about the organization that runs various Trump Towers. Can police perp walk a building?
   
• Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson watches our onetime White House occupant Trump go all Henry II on Wisconsin Republican leaders. Will no-one rid me of these non-meddlesome RINOs?
   
  So typical of James to provide the actual historically accurate Henry quote that resulted in the assassination of Thomas Becket. James is meticulously accurate, a conservative whose good example I do not mind striving, in that respect, to emulate.
   
  But the grand Trump purge becomes unnecessary, as his targets melt in quivering fear. Sitting next to God, Thomas Becket sadly shakes his head.
   
• Maybe we should stop picking on Trump. He’s just a little out of practice.
   
  Andy Borowitz covers the apology as a Trump spokesperson explains why our former supreme commander simply forgot to strand the rally crowd in a freezing parking lot. Could have happened to anyone. He’ll do better next time.
   
  Besides, below zero temperatures would have been hard, especially this climate-change summer.
   
• So Supreme Court conservatives successfully rule that rich folks have the right to buy elections but you and I only have the right to vote if conservative office-holders say we do. Tactics can now include switching precincts and voiding votes for President if voters are directed to the wrong machines, imposing absurdly complex ID requirements but only on new voters, and closing selected voting locations in minority areas to create extreme lines at those sites remaining.
   
  At The Onion, the Supreme Court waits in line for hours before voting to uphold Arizona restrictions.
   
• CalicoJack in The Psy of Life analyzes this week’s Supreme Court decision eviscerating voting rights. The decision catalyzes, or ought to, pending voting rights legislation now hung up in the US Senate. CalicoJack explains what ordinary citizens can do to advance the cause.
   
• Scotties Toy Box has found a way to curb gun violence. Convince Republican lawmakers they’re considering voting rights. Delay, snarl, close locations, create long lines, and on and on.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, Dorian de Wind takes personally that June brought the national gun violence death toll to a 2021 milestone.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit watches the Cosby proceedings as an obviously guilty individual is freed.
   
  So when should we let a guilty individual go free? In our country, it’s when his rights have been violated, especially when the violation was central to the conviction. Like when he is tricked by a strongly implied promise of immunity into confessing.
   
  Damn stupid original District Attorney. Horrible but necessary miscarriage of justice in letting Bill Cosby go.
   
• FISA courts were the government’s National Security response to terrorist attacks. The sticky part was safeguarding the rights of US citizens while still protecting us from more attacks. Rigid guidelines controlled secret applications by federal law enforcement to secret courts in secret proceedings to obtain secret warrants to secretly spy on individuals who may want to conspire with foreign entities.
   
  Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez studies the studies on how all that has worked out, and finds a large number of not-so-rigid standards. Inaccurate information or omissions, that sort of thing. Julian has some thoughts on whether a bit of adjustment is needed, or if we ought to restructure the whole damn thing.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara wants to decriminalize drug use. Well, good to find a point of agreement.
   
• NOJO looks at radical new climate with devastating temperatures, lower water levels, early wildfire seasons, and suggests the warnings going back so many decades are about what we have already begun feeling. It’s not just the future anymore.
   
• Infidel753 has what seems to me a non-Marxist, free market, Adam Smith sort of call to the masses: Workers of the world, unite!!.
   
• Wait, what? Britney Spears was forced into IUD land? Really?
   
  Imani Gandy explains why the #FreeBritney movement is part of a larger disability rights issue.
   
• The Propaganda Professor continues research into the liberal media, discovering it is pretty much a myth, and speculates on what real liberal media would actually look like.
   
• George Floyd’s street justice life sentence lasted a little under ten minutes. His family was sentenced to a longer lifetime of loss and pain. PZ Myers examines why his killer, Derek Chauvin, was sentenced to 22 years and why the system that handcuffed the judge is rigged, presumably unintentionally, against minorities.
   
  My own observation: We have learned from painful experience that systemic racism simply means that a tilted playing field does not require active racists, or even racist intent.
   
• My longtime friend Darrell Michaels of Unabashedly American, accuses radical leftists (that would be me) of weakening the military with social experiments like allowing women in combat and gays in at all. Now chaplains are not even allowed to tell gays they are inherently evil. And, of course Critical Race Theory is being shoved down everyone’s throat. Everyone knows that CRT is just another way of saying that “America, and by extension, its armed forces are fundamentally racist.”
   
  At last an unambiguous definition.
   
  Critical Race Theory is usually explained with academic argle bargle (Apologies to the late Antonin Scalia). Might as well be written in Sanskrit. Irritates me.
   
  What it seems to come down to is that a history of racism leaves structures, both legal and informal, that result in continuing discrimination. People of good will, those who can be considered racist only by stretching the word to the point of meaninglessness, are still pushed to act in ways that disproportionately affect minorities.
   
  The legal aspect is why it is introduced almost exclusively in law schools, and has been for decades.
   
  Living in Missouri, I’m thinking of a Ferguson city manager, desperate to balance next year’s budget, pushing a police chief to produce more traffic tickets, and a police officer who has just been harangued to ticket more citizens. So he might just go after those without the resources to pursue legal recourse. And a convenient, mostly low-income, rental community just happens to be close by.
   
  But since the descriptions of CRT are so hazy, conservatives helpfully step in to explain it in decisive language. Wrong and dishonest, but possessing the virtue of unmistakable clarity. Then they ascribe it to pretty much anything they don’t like.
   
  That description is usually some variation of Who you callin’ racist?!!
   
  Nobody, my homophobic friend. Go back to sleep.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil is unimpressed with the latest congressional stunt. A Texas Representative got on a flight, diligently following masking rules, and once in the air demonstrating his courageous independence.
   
  Health of other passengers? Well, cough in their faces! If they really believe in the Delta Variant hoax, they can always go home and inject household cleaning products, like the rest of us.
   
• John Scalzi at Whatever discovers the family dog is a criminal.
   
• In MadMikesAmerica, Michael John Scott takes his dog for a pleasant walk, gets interrupted by a jerk on a bike, contemplates outdoor path construction, thinks about the aging process and makes it all interesting. The uneven distribution of writing talent just isn’t fair.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz has the Biblical receipts, chapter and verse, as he suggests that perhaps God ought not to be defined as exclusively male.
   
• In Nan’s Notebook, her religious daughter persists in prayer, while Nan wonders what the point might be at continually repeating a request when the first plea has already been refused.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, a conservative pastor recalls the 1939 scandal over Gone with the Wind. It was quite the deal when Clark Gable pushed away from Vivien Leigh’s urgent pleas with
  Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!
   
  The irate pastor, John MacFarlane, sees that lonely swear word as the small pebble that, over the decades since, has become an avalanche of bad language, bad thoughts, and unholy lives. And he’s damn angry about it.
   
  Bruce Gerencser has a bit of fun with the clerical fury.
   
• At Reductress, Tanya explains that all those mental health exercises stay-at-home workers learned in order to get through the quarantine are no longer needed now that we can stagger in and out of bars.
   
• SilverAppleQueen posts a single photo to explain what happens to her when she tries to write.
   
• Every parent has these moments. @momwino98 has a loud public conversation about bathroom nudity:
  

  @momwino98

  Taking your kids to the bathroom..Fun..🙄##tiktokmom ##bathroom ##fypシ ##kidswillsayanything

  ♬ original sound – @Momwino98

  
   

• The Journal of Improbable Research reviews a new device developed by a New Zealand University that is pretty much guaranteed to get you to lose weight. I can hardly … oh sweet baby Jesus!

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