Month: May 2022

Good luck with this one

Another Viktor Orban acolyte. There are more of them than we want to contemplate. And we’d better wake up to what it means:

Going beyond even the GOP’s own platform, Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance told a Catholic magazine last year that pornography should be banned because it’s stopping Americans from getting married and starting families.

“I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families, and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other,” Vance said in a newly unearthed interview with Crisis Magazine from August 2021.

The writer spoke with Vance at a gathering for young conservatives where Vance was a keynote speaker. She wrote that after asking him “his thoughts on porn and birth control and their effects on familial decline, Vance admitted he wants to outright ban pornography.”

Vance’s campaign didn’t provide a comment about his more recent thoughts on porn, and how they would factor into his priorities as a senator.

In 2016, the GOP, in its own official platform, declared porn “a public health crisis,” but stopped short of calling for it to be outlawed completely.

Vance, who wrote in his memoir about witnessing firsthand poverty and addiction and their impact on families in Ohio, has made conserving “traditional families” and ending abortion main planks of his conservative platform.

In his statement on the Uvalde school shooting, Vance cited the absence of strong family values — and not the lack of gun control — to explain why a gunman would murder 19 children and two teachers.

“We need to address the culture of fatherlessness and drug addiction in our country, focus on the importance of family so that our next generation is guided and empowered with strong support systems,” Vance said.

The “Hillbilly Elegy” author’s attitude on porn may be a throwback to the social conservatism that defined the 1970s with President Richard Nixon’s “War on Porn.” Those in favor of restricting access to porn now cite the nation’s declining birth rate, the potential to promote sex trafficking and the “common good.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who endorsed Vance, hasn’t explicitly called for a porn ban. But at last year’s National Conservative Conference, Hawley argued that porn and masturbation were creating a national crisis for men.

“Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games,” Hawley said.

There are lots of issues surrounding porn that can be discussed in good faith. But this is what they are about:

Last year, Vance said the country was run by left-leaning “childless cat ladies,” a swipe at Vice President Kamala Harris, who is a stepmother, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has since adopted twins with his husband.

White, patriarchal, Christian nationalism anyone? Sound good? That’s where the right is going. Trump is just a transitional figure toward that goal. Hawley, DeSantis, Mastriano, Vance and a whole bunch of others gathered right behind him are on the move.

Don’t sleep on this. It’s a global phenomenon and the US is right in the middle of it.

It’s what they love about him

This makes me want to cry. One of the most vulnerable, isolated and terrified populations in the country is being targeting by a rich, powerful monster and his gleeful following:

Trump spoke for over 90 minutes at the Ford Wyoming Center in Casper on Saturday. It was ostensibly a speech in support of HARRIET HAGEMAN, his hand-picked candidate to take out Rep. LIZ CHENEY (R-Wyo.) in what Trump described here as “the most important election” of 2022 — and one that comes after a string of embarrassing primary defeats for Trump’s picks in Nebraska, Idaho, Georgia and North Carolina.

Trump meandered into issues far afield from the Wyoming race. In fact, if you haven’t tuned in lately, little has changed at a Trump rally. The former president appears to have put put on some weight, but he still looks younger than his 75 years, and the familiar mix of exaggerations, lies, sometimes hilarious mockery, dark conspiracies, personal grievances, perplexing asides, stream of consciousness riffs — all delivered in his uniform of a blue suit and long red tie — remains unchanged.

How much the event benefited Hageman was unclear. The parking lot was filled with license plates from Idaho, South Dakota, Montana, Colorado and Utah. On the security lines and in the hall, fans costumed in red ties, bedazzled MAGA dresses and at least one Trump-inspired catsuit traded notes on how many Trump rallies they’ve attended across the country.

Numerous non-Wyoming MAGA celebrities, such as Rep. LAUREN BOEBERT (R-Colo.), who appeared before Trump, repeatedly pronounced Hageman’s name incorrectly.

As his recent losses make clear, Trump seems to understand now that people come to see him, and may ignore whatever candidate he’s hawking that day. “What’s more fun than a Trump rally?” he asked. The crowd cheered.

After an hour of Trump delivering many familiar hits — on Russia, impeachment, Jan. 6, the 2020 election, how he told NATO members he would not defend them if they didn’t “pay,” trade with China, CHUCK TODD’S alleged lack of sleep, the relative merits of the journalists CHRIS WALLACE and his father MIKE, his conversations with the Taliban, the Durham investigation, and how, “sadly,” White House physician-turned-congressional candidate RONNY JACKSON knows Trump’s body better than MELANIA does — Trump turned his attention to a newer obsession.

“No teacher should ever be allowed to teach transgender to our children without parental consent,” he said, just as some of the MAGA faithful started to trickle out. “Can you imagine?”

On the perimeter of the arena, some attendees headed for their cars stopped and began listening again on an outside monitor. Trump briefly got distracted when he caught a glimpse of himself on a video screen and noticed his hair was thinning in the back.

But he then returned to the subject.

“We will save our kids and we will also keep men the hell out of women’s sports. Is that OK?” he said, using what’s become a common GOP refrain. He continued with an animated tale about a female swimmer about to start a race who turned and noticed a new opponent, a “huge person who was a guy recently.”

Trump paused for effect and then reflected on the fraught nature of his commentary. “See? I’m politically correct, I said ‘recently,’ They can’t get me,” he said. “You have to be very careful, this is a hornet’s nest.”

He continued. He said the trans woman set a new record that would stand until “some guy comes along and breaks it again.” He pantomimed his way through a story mocking trans women in weightlifting competitions. He imagined himself as a women’s basketball team coach recruiting players, such as LEBRON JAMES: “Did you ever have any thoughts, LeBron, about one day becoming a woman?”

He congratulated himself. “Everybody’s afraid of not being politically correct,” he said. “I’m the only one that talks about it.”

These long riffs mocking trans athletes were received with thunderous applause. The only other objects of derision that tickled the crowd with similar enthusiasm were mentions of undocumented immigrants or Cheney and the appearance of House Minority Leader KEVIN MCCARTHY, who was booed when he showed up in a video at the rally…

Trump is like a standup comedian. He uses rallies, especially in the offseason, to work on material. He tests the reaction among his diehard fans and watches the mainstream media’s coverage. He then rewrites the lines, calibrating them for maximum effect inside the arena and minimal blowback outside of it. You can tell he believes he’s onto something with his mocking of trans people.

This is correct. He takes the temperature of his cult, notes what issue get their blood pumping and then he runs with it. Sadly, it appears that vilifying transgender people really gets them excited and so he’s unleashing the wingnut beast against them.

“It’s straight outta the playbook”

I guess we’ve always known that many of the gun nuts were also just … nuts. But the QAnon-style lunacy is thriving among those who worship guns:

Here, amid acres of guns and tactical gear inside a cavernous convention hall, the proximate cause of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was not a rifle, but mental illness, shadowy forces of evil or, as one man in a “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirt put it, the “destruction of our children” by the teachings of the left.

In Uvalde, a makeshift memorial of white wooden crosses had gone up for the 19 children and two adults slain. But at the NRA meeting in Houston, less than 300 miles away, the shooting had been reduced to a sling stone in the broader culture wars. The slaughter, it was universally agreed, was a tragedy. But gun owners saw themselves as set upon, too.

The Second Amendment, former President Donald Trump said, was “totally under siege.” Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, said the “real goal” of many politicians on the left “is disarming America.” Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota who, like Cruz, may run for president in 2024, warned, “Now is not the time to cave to the woke culture.”

“It’s not a gun control problem. It’s a demon control problem,” said Joe Chambers, who had traveled to the conference from Porter, Texas.

His wife, Ana, gestured to the TV cameras and demonstrators outside: “This is all propaganda,” she said. “They’ll use anything to make us look bad.”

On Friday, as the NRA opened its Memorial Day weekend conference, Trump said that if he runs for president again in 2024 and wins, he will adopt a more militaristic approach to public safety, pledging to “crack down on violent crime like never before.”…

“Why did it happen three days ago?” asked Jim Hollis, a lifetime NRA benefactor from St. Louis. “I’m not sure that there are not forces someplace that somehow find troubled people and nurture and develop them and push them for their own agendas.”

Hollis, who asserted the shooter in Uvalde “could have walked in there with a baseball bat and possibly killed as many kids,” feared the “the attack on gun rights” was “strengthening” after Uvalde.

“There are people who thought they could use this Uvalde situation to dampen this [meeting],” he said.

Said another man, who declined to give his name, at the conference: “It’s straight out of a playbook.”

Delusional, whiny, malicious, violent and dumb. The definition of the MAGA right.

Here is one of their leaders making the case as no one else can:

The AR-15 isn’t the issue because he could’ve done the “exact same thing” with a bat, bomb or machete. He says gun owners are unfairly “stigmatatized,” and the real problem is that “crazy teachers are indoctrinating kids.”

And these people have the gall to constantly lecture the anti-automatic weapon activists for not “understanding guns.” Yet they think that there’s no difference in lethal force between a baseball bat and a semi-automatic weapon.

Another one:

That’s Marge Greene passing on a far-right lie that the shooter was trans. The truly is a malevolent monster.

As I said, delusional, whiny, malicious, violent and dumb. That’s Ultra-MAGA and they wear it proudly.

“gun fetish run amok”

“It’s hard to get 88 percent of Americans to agree the world is round,” columnist Jennifer Rubin tells MSNBC. Yet that many want something done to stop the “gun fetish run amok” in this country.

The “constitutional bias in favor of [political] minorities” plus the devolution of the Republican Party into an extremist, white-nationalist cult leaves 88 percent of us paying for the upkeep of a government that no longer responds to the will of the majority.

“When legislation on nearly every critical issue can be thwarted by an extreme minority, we have ‘democracy’ in name only,” Jennifer Rubin wrote last week.

Rubin makes some recommendations for the Democratic Party, prefaced with a huge IF:

If the Democratic Party — the only party that still supports democratic values and at least tries to solve problems — can muster the discipline and the will, it can run in 2022 and 2024 on ending the stranglehold of unhinged, minority rule. It must electrify its supporters, pledge to tame if not eliminate the filibuster and make clear that, without Democratic victories, we would face an America few would hope to bequeath their children. The Republican obsession with controlling women, unlimited gun ownership, white grievance and other deadly ideologies must be identified, denounced and defeated. Democrats should be clear about the choices: white nationalism or tolerance; gun massacres or reasonable gun restrictions; control of women’s bodies or respect for women’s autonomy.

Democrats should not rule out solutions that are immediately available. Remember, Republicans spent decades creating a Supreme Court that would destroy decades of precedent and impose its partisan will on the rest of the country. Democrats must seed the political ground not only for this election cycle but for the future. Constitutional amendments may be far-fetched now, but Democrats can initiate the debate on them. They can also move on other structural fixes, such as campaign finance reforms and limitations on lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.

In what country is this normal? In what country is this tragedy acceptable? The cost of freedom?

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

“Don’t think it’s not going to happen to you. Stay safe!”

World and national events have redirected our attentions to other threats recently. COVID does not care. It is still with us. A celebrity reminded me in a tweet that popped up first thing:

Breakthrough infections by COVID variants may not as readily result in death for the vaccinated and boosted, but can still produce lingering effects. “Long COVID” symptoms that can last weeks to months beyond initial infection is especially pernicious. Nature reports that long COVID risk falls only slightly after vaccination. There is no diagnostic test for it nor a standard definition of the mysterious ailment (Seattle Times):

Nearly 18 months after getting COVID-19 and spending weeks in the hospital, Terry Bell struggles with hanging up his shirts and pants after doing the laundry.

Lifting his clothes, raising his arms, arranging items in his closet leave Bell short of breath and often trigger severe fatigue. He walks with a cane, only short distances. He’s 50 pounds lighter than when the virus struck.

Bell, 70, is among millions of older adults who have grappled with long COVID — a population that has received little attention even though research suggests older adults are more likely to develop the poorly understood condition than younger or middle-aged adults.

Axios:

Driving the news: A Department of Veterans Affairs study of almost 34,000 vaccinated people who had breakthrough infections in 2021 found the shots only cut the likelihood of long COVID by about 15%.

• • Researchers examining patients for up to six months after testing positive didn’t find a difference in the severity or range of symptoms between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
  • The risk of long COVID is higher in people with breakthrough infections than in people with seasonal influenza.
  • The study in Nature Medicine is believed to be the most comprehensive effort to get at how likely people with breakthrough infections will develop long COVID and comes after the U.S. logged 83.8 million cases.
  • The research didn’t cover the Omicron wave, and experts say it’s still unclear if the high contagious variant is as likely to cause long COVID as earlier strains.

What they’re saying: “We’re literally solely reliant, now almost exclusively, on the vaccine to protect us and to protect the public,” lead author Ziyad Al-Aly of the VA St. Louis Health Care System told Nature. “Now we’re saying it’s only going to protect you 15%. You remain vulnerable, and extraordinarily so.”

CBS: “Long COVID” or “post-COVID” symptoms affect 1 in 4 seniors who survived infection, study finds

As many as one in four seniors and one in five adults under 65 experienced “long COVID” or “post-COVID” symptoms after surviving a coronavirus infection, a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. 

The study — published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report — is the latest to try and quantify how many of the millions of Americans who have now tested positive for the virus are facing long-term issues caused by their infection.

NBC: Brain fog, other long Covid symptoms can last more than a year, study finds

Most neurological symptoms persisted after an average of 15 months, the study found. While most patients did report improvements in their cognitive function and fatigue, the symptoms had not gone away completely and still affected their quality of life.

“A lot of those patients still have difficulties with their cognition that prevent them from working like they used to,” said a study co-leader, Dr. Igor Koralnik, the chief of neuro-infectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine, who oversees the Neuro COVID-19 Clinic.

The study also found that some symptoms, including heart rate and blood pressure variation, as well as gastrointestinal problems, increased over time, while loss of taste and smell tended to improve. Covid vaccination did not alleviate symptoms, but it also did not make long Covid any worse. 

Don’t know about you, but I’m rather attached to my cognitive function. Not really keen on having it impaired. Except for fun.

Stay safe out there.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

Furtively, speaking in a whisper, a fourth-grade girl dialed the police. Around her, in Room 112 at Robb Elementary School, were the motionless bodies of her classmates and scores of spent bullet casings fired by a gunman who had already been inside the school for half an hour.

She whispered to a 911 operator, just after noon, that she was in the classroom with the gunman. She called back again. And again. “Please send the police now,” she begged.

But they were already there, waiting in a school hallway just outside. And they had been there for more than an hour.

The survivors will never be the same:

Noah Orona still had not cried.

The 10-year-old’s father, Oscar, couldn’t understand it. Just hours earlier, a stranger with a rifle had walked into the boy’s fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School and opened fire, slaughtering his teachers and classmates in front of him. One round struck Noah in the shoulder blade, carving a 10-inch gash through his back before popping out and spraying his right arm with shrapnel. He’d laid amid the blood and bodies of his dead friends for an hour, maybe more, waiting for help to come.

But there he was, resting in his hospital bed, his brown eyes vacant, his voice muted.

“I think my clothes are ruined,” Noah lamented.

It was okay, his dad assured him. He would get new clothes.

“I don’t think I’m going to get to go back to school,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” his father insisted, squeezing his son’s left hand.

“I lost my glasses,” the boy continued. “I’m sorry.”

The children and adults who die in school shootings dominate headlines and consume the public’s attention. Body counts become synonymous with each event, dictating where they rank in the catalogue of these singularly American horrors: 10 at Santa Fe High, 13 at Columbine High, 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary. And now, added to the list is 21 at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex.

Those tallies, however, do not begin to capture the true scope of this epidemic in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of children’s lives have been profoundly changed by school shootings. There are the more than 360 kids and adults, including Noah, who have been injured on K-12 campuses since 1999, according to a Washington Post database. And then there are the children who suffer no physical wounds at all, but are still haunted for years by what they saw or heard or lost.

No one understands that better than Samantha Haviland, who for years directed counseling services for Denver Public Schools. One day in 2008, she sat on the floor of a school library’s back room, the lights off, the door locked. Crouched all around her were teenagers pretending that someone with a gun was trying to murder them.

No one there knew that Haviland, then a counselor in her mid-20s, had survived Columbine nine years earlier.

On that day, April 20, 1999, Haviland ran from gunfire and heard some of it, too, but she didn’t get shot or see a bullet strike anyone else. The shock and grief solidified her plan to become a counselor, though Haviland didn’t get counseling herself for years.

The nightmares — always of being chased — lingered for years, but she didn’t think she deserved help, not when classmates had died, been maimed or had witnessed the carnage firsthand. She would be okay.

But now there she was, a decade later, sitting in the darkness, practicing once again to escape what so many of her friends had not. Then she heard footsteps and saw the shadow of an administrator checking the locks. Her chest began to throb, and suddenly, Haviland knew she wasn’t okay.

On Tuesday, Haviland did all she could to avoid the details of what had happened in Texas. She didn’t want to know. Years of therapy had helped, but the passage of time was no cure. On Wednesday, she turned 40.

This could be prevented. America just refuses to do it.

It’s good to see the Republicans being candid for once. They want to kill protesters. And if anyone tries to take down an inanimate object like a statue, gun toting “patriots” are called upon to shoot them.

This is the dream scenario. Little Kyle Rittenhouse showed the way. And if some innocent schoolchildren have to get mowed down in the process, it’s just the price that has to be paid to own the libs.

Just … ugh

I just ruined my day by watching Trump’s speech at the NRA from last night. It was terrible, as usual:

Donald Trump kicked off his appearance at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention on Friday by awkwardly reading the names of the 21 people slaughtered with an AR-15-style rifle in Uvalde a few days earlier. The NRA played a recording of a bell clanging as the former president strained to pronounce the names of the victims.

The speech didn’t get any less offensive from there.

Trump echoed Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits by bashing Democrats for “virtue cycling” in the wake the massacre, blaming the shooting on everything but guns, and proposing a series of impractical solutions to the epidemic of mass shootings in America. The list of solutions did not include gun reform, of course, which Trump claimed would have done nothing to stop the shooter in Uvalde — despite the shooter having bought two assault rifles just after his 18th birthday earlier this month.

Trump did propose ensuring classroom doors are lockable from the inside as a way to cut down on school shootings. This might not do the trick, however, as Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said in a press conference on Friday that the shooter locked himself in adjoining classrooms before opening fire on children.

Trump cycled through many of the other fixes conservatives have floated this week, including “drastically changing our approve to mental health” and doing whatever it takes to “harden our schools.” He then said teachers should be carrying guns, to loud applause. “There is no sign more inviting to a mass killer than a sign that declares a gun free zone,” he said, to more applause.

Speaking of teachers, Trump put some of the blame on school administrators for “making excuses” and not “confronting bad behavior head on and quickly.”

Trump continued to argue that if Congress can send money to Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion, “we should be able to do whatever it takes to keep our children safe.” His message came down, as it always does, to his loss to President Biden in 2020. He lamented what’s happened to Ukraine, and said it would have never happened if the election wasn’t “rigged.” He offered a particularly grim vision of what America might be like should he retake the White House in 2024. “If I ever run for president and win . . . I would crack down on violent crime like never before,” he said, noting how he sent federal forces to break up Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer of 2020.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that despite the enormity of what happened in Uvalde on Tuesday, Trump’s speech at the NRA’s annual convention was not much different than any of his other speeches. He spent a few minutes waxing idiotic on the news of the week — in this case 21 people including 19 children being slaughtered — before fuming about the 2020 election.

He even did a little dance at the end.

At least “Macho Man” wasn’t playing.

He could have backed out of this. He’s a former president. It would have been easy for him to just say “out of respect for the families, bla, blah, blah.” But he wouldn’t care about that in any case and right now I think he’s feeling the need to shore up his base:

He’s a little bit worried.

About that exceptionalism

From LeMonde:

Carnage at an American school, the endless distress of families, a solemn speech from the president, then nothing, until the next one. Americans know this cycle of despair by heart since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012. The one in Parkland, in 2018, changed nothing despite the exceptional activism of students who had escaped. They believed it was possible to bring a country sick of its violence back to its senses and remind elected officials of their responsibilities, but they failed. If there is any American exceptionalism, it is to tolerate the fact that schools in the United States are regularly transformed into bloody shooting ranges.

The unbearable happened this time in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, and took the lives of 19 students and two teachers of an elementary school just two days before vacation. The 18-year-old alleged perpetrator was killed by law enforcement. This tragedy came 10 days after a racially-motivated mass shooting at a New York state supermarket and another at a California church. In each case, the determination of the alleged killers was not met with any legal safeguards that would have complicated access to the firearms used.

Indeed, America is killing itself and the Republican Party is looking the other way, ideologically complicit in one tragedy after another. Decades of brainwashing have meant that its elected representatives no longer need even the iron grip of the main gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, which is riddled with crises, to oppose the slightest legislation that would provide a framework for this particularly lucrative market. The defense of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, understood in its most absolutist sense, has become a quasi-sacred duty that now escapes any questioning. The families of victims must be content with the prayers of elected officials, who are not stingy with them.More on this topic US is flooded with guns

Thus, the state that was the scene of the last bloodbath after eight other mass shootings in 13 years found nothing better, just a year ago, than to abolish gun permits for people aged 21 or older. “It’s time” for Texas to align itself with the most lenient states in this area, argued the governor of this solid conservative bastion, Greg Abbott.

More and more guns: This is the only Republican credo. Americans bought nearly 20 million guns in 2021, the second-largest amount in American history. They also had more than 20,000 gun deaths, not counting suicides, which are even more numerous, and 693 shootings resulted in four or more injuries. Republicans are clearly unable to establish a causal link between the two phenomena. One despairs to imagine them expending the same energy to prevent killings, the perpetrators of which are overwhelmingly men, as they expend selflessly to prevent women from having control over their own bodies.

The dictatorship of the minority had already wielded its power after the Sandy Hook massacre when the Senate wanted to pass background checks for gun buyers, a common sense measure supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans. Elected officials representing 118 million of their fellow citizens were able to defeat those nominated by 194 million. There is every reason to believe that the same would be true today in this country trapped in this madness.

The dictatorship of the minority is literally killing us.