Clear and Present Danger

If you’re a corporate marketing officer concerned over what’s happening with Target, let me make something abundantly clear: You will never appease anti-LGBTQ extremists. But moreover, there’s a colder truth at play here: They don’t want to be appeased, they want to be angry.

Corporations need to understand something about these people: their objective is not really to gain any ground but to find an outlet for their rage at the world changing around them. They are starving for outrage and will feast on any scrap. They would rather be perpetually angry than be mollified. They are furious that anyone would ask them to learn about others.  And deep down, they know LGBTQ people are never going away. The closet has been permanently opened.

These people long for an America that always catered to those who look and act like them—that is: white, heterosexual, traditional families. They use religion as a shield for their bigotry. They don’t really care about what Christ taught; he’s just a convenient vehicle.

But that America is long gone, and it’s never coming back. We are witnessing the very long and painful last gasp of that world. And boy, are they furious. Enraged. They’ve had to keep quiet about it for so long, but in the past several years, the quiet part became very loud.

They are angry, and beneath that, they are very, very scared. They will claim they’re not scared. But they’re terrified. None of this works without fear. Fear of what? Uncertainty over their place in a changing society that increasingly doesn’t defer to them.

Donald Trump is a cornered and frightened rat.  His entire life has been a lie.  He has never been held responsible for a thing — his father bailed him out when his businesses failed; he backstabbed his siblings to get the bulk of his father’s $400 million estate; he used bankruptcy seven times to escape business failures; and when American banks refused to support him any longer, he turned to dirty money from Russia.  But now his bluster and threats are not working as prosecutors with the power of state and federal governments behind them are closing in on him.

The “stable genius” of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump, is once again demonstrating the stability that has become the hallmark of his abhorrent personality, or lack thereof. When he isn’t throwing temper tantrums for perceived insults, he is whining about not being sufficiently praised for things he never did. And he is, after all, the most fabulous whiner, in his own words.

On Monday morning Trump took to his floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, to lash out at the Department of Justice and other legal entities for having the audacity to hold him accountable for committing a multitude of crimes. How dare they try to administer justice against America’s foremost political cult leader who has never done anything wrong? He simply will not stand for it, and woe be to anyone who attempts it.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Trump’s lawyers met with the DOJ to beg that he not be indicted. But judging by Trump’s postings, that didn’t go very well. In a series of frenzied outbursts Trump revealed both his fate and fear. He began by raging that . . .

“Reports are the Marxist Special Prosecutor, DOJ, & FBI, want to Indict me on the BOXES HOAX, despite all of the wrongdoing that they have done for SEVEN YEARS, including SPYING ON MY CAMPAIGN. Biden Crimes go unpunished, including that he had Boxes in Chinatown, in his garage by the ‘Corvette,’ & 1,850  Boxes in Delaware that he won’t allow anyone to see. That is real OBSTRUCTION! They seek retribution for Republicans looking into Biden’s CRIMES! I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”

Needless to say, there is virtually nothing in that rant that approaches reality. Obviously, special counsel Jack Smith is not a Marxist. Nor are the investigators at the DOJ and the FBI. They never spied on Trump’s campaign. Biden has never been shown to have committed any crimes. And the only one who blatantly obstructed justice is Trump.

Nevertheless, Trump went on to yammer incoherently about the prospect of his being indicted while Biden is not…

“HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP – THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”

Trump is pathetically reaching back to his moldy oldies about the Clintons and regurgitating his vacuous sloganeering about “witch hunts” and “election interference.” However, the most preposterous part of his spiel is his claim that Biden “HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED.” Trump has been saying this for months, despite it being demonstrably false.

For the record, Trump is freaking out about 1,850 boxes of senatorial and vice-presidential materials that Biden donated to the University of Delaware in 2012. So to begin with, these are not things that are in Biden’s possession now, nor have they been for the past decade. What’s more, as reported by CNN, the documents in those boxes “did not have classified markings.”. And the recent search was conducted “with the consent and cooperation of the president’s legal team.”

So, unlike Trump’s brazen lies and defiance of subpoenas demanding the return of the classified materials that he stole, there was no obstruction of justice on Biden’s part. Yet it is Trump who is inflaming hostilities and inciting violence in order to prod his cult disciples into fighting this battle for him and to install him as America’s first dictator.

Trump is using the prospect of warranted indictments as an inducement to start a civil war. It won’t work. but it could still produce some painful consequences for the nation if he is permitted to get away with it. So the sooner he is indicted, convicted, and incarcerated, the better.

https://www.ksl.com/article/50657730/davis-district-pulls-bible-from-elementaries-junior-highs-due-to-vulgarity-or-violence

FARMINGTON — The Bible has been removed from all elementary and middle school libraries throughout the Davis School District after someone challenged its contents.

A committee tasked with reviewing books that fall under review for sexual content last week determined that the Bible will be retained at district high schools, but removed from all elementary and middle schools, Christopher Williams, Davis School District’s director of communication, told KSL.com.

In lieu of the initial ruling — which came last week — a new appeal to the ruling was filed Wednesday, asking for the district to retain the Bible in all district schools, meaning the religious book will again be reviewed by a committee.

Review committees for the district are made up of an odd number of people and each committee includes a facilitator selected by the district’s teaching and learning director, at least one administrator working in a district department or school, a licensed teacher who is teaching English language arts or another relevant subject in a district school, a librarian who works in a district school and a minimum of four parents with students enrolled in a district school, according to district policy.

The Duggars, stars of TLC’s 19 Kids & Counting, were superficially presented as an eccentric real-life version of the characters from Cheaper by the Dozen. Yet beneath that façade, they were always religious zealots who adhered to an extreme brand of patriarchal Christianity that opposed abortion, disapproved of LGBTQ+ rights, and manipulated women through scripture that encouraged them to be incessantly pregnant. Prime Video’s four-part Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets is a brutal takedown of the Arkansas clan, led by testimony from two of its own.

It’s also, however, an exposé about the Duggars’ role as chief promoters of a sexist evangelical crusade designed to denigrate, dominate, and disempower its female members, as well as to spread its message all the way to the corridors of U.S. political power. As such, it’s additionally a damning indictment of TLC and its parent company, Warner Discovery, which helped spotlight a regressive and deeply misogynistic movement.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trumps-turnberry-golf-course-banned-by-british-open-report?ref=home

Trump’s Turnberry Golf Course Banned by British Open: Report
BLACKLISTED
Erik Uebelacker
Breaking News Intern
Published May. 31, 2023 11:42AM ET

Donald Trump said this month that “everybody wants to see the Open Championship” played at his Turnberry gold resort in Scotland—everybody but the Open organizers themselves, apparently. According to The Telegraph, Trump was told after the 2021 Capitol riot that he was unlikely to get another Open held at one of his courses for the foreseeable future. A source at R&A, the golf body that organizes the Open Championship, also known as the British Open, told the publication that they haven’t budged on that decision. “We have no plans to stage any of our championships there in the foreseeable future and will not return until we are convinced that the focus will be on the championship, the players and the course itself.” Another source said Trump would “have to sell” the course “before anything changes.”

The so-called “Freedom caucus” — that group of supposedly ideologically committed, failed seditionists who command a sizable portion of the House Republican majority — are throwing a hissy fit right now in reaction to the deal struck by their elected Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and President Biden, in which McCarthy managed to extort some concessions from the White House in exchange for magnanimously allowing the nation to meet its obligations and pay the bills that Congress has incurred on behalf of the American public for the last few years.

Those bills, which would have been considerably easier to pay without the massive tax giveaway Republicans passed in 2017 as a reward to their billionaire corporate donors, have come due, and like all deadbeats, these same House Republicans want to skip out on them. The only problem is that by doing so they would tank the entire U.S. economy, along with the rest of the world that depends on the Full Faith and Credit of the United States government.

But contrary to its pretentious title, the “Freedom Caucus” has nothing to do with “freedom,” unless it refers to the freedom to destroy everyone else’s lives so they can retain power. That was made perfectly clear in a statement made on Tuesday by Caucus member, Republican Dan Bishop of North Carolina. Bishop specifically complained about the provision of the Biden-McCarthy deal that extends the ability of this country to pay its bills for two years, effectively preventing the issue from being re-animated by House Republicans in the months prior to the 2024 elections. This is the part of the deal that most infuriates the “Freedom Caucus.” Because they intended to tank the economy in 2024 to help the prospects of their presumed nominee, Donald Trump, who, it is assumed, would rise at that time from his golden toilet bowl to howl about the how President Biden destroyed the economy.

It’s really impossible to explain this statement any other way. As reported by Prem Thakker for The New Republic:

One Republican congressman outright admitted his frustration that, if the debt ceiling gets resolved, the Republican presidential nominee won’t be able to run in 2024 on the chaos that would come if the country defaults.

“And what does the device of two years do?” North Carolina Representative Dan Bishop posed incredulously on Tuesday, flanked by far-right colleagues like Lauren Boebert and Byron Donalds. “It removes the issue from the national conversation during the presidential election to come. How could you more successfully kneecap any Republican president than to take that issue out of his or her hands?”

The reason this statement is so revealing is that Donald Trump, as the assumed Republican presidential nominee, would have absolutely no input or say on whether the debt ceiling was to be lifted in 2024. He would still be a candidate, restricted to spewing his venom at rallies. The debt ceiling issue in 2024 would still be resolved by the Republican House majority and President Biden. What Rep. Bishop is saying here is that he and his caucus members intended to tank the economy on purpose, in order to bolster Trump’s chances at winning in 2024. And they’re furious now because under the Biden-McCarthy deal they will be unable to do that.

As Thakker writes:

Their intransigence apparently was not just about cutting as much as they could, but also about carrying water for the eventual nominee— which for most far-right members like Bishop means Donald Trump.

That’s what they care about: getting Trump back into office. Not the “deficit,” not the “debt,” not the economy, and certainly not the millions of job losses and complete stock market collapse that would ensue with a default. They don’t give a damn about what a ravaged economy would mean for tens of millions of Americans (including, notably, the ones who voted them into office).

Note Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert’s head nodding in agreement as Bishop speaks:

that's right! pic.twitter.com/kmy83gEzWZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 30, 2023

That’s what all this sideshow is about.  Bishop was just stupid enough to say it out loud.

Micki Witthoeft, 58, was spotted by The Daily Beast being taken into custody just after 6:45 p.m.

Zachary Petrizzo
Politics Reporter
Updated May. 30, 2023 10:26PM ET / Published May. 30, 2023 7:27PM ET

The mother of Ashli Babbitt, Micki Witthoeft, was arrested Tuesday evening after striking a counter-protester at a right-wing event outside of the Washington, D.C. jail where many of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendants are being held.

Witthoeft, 58, was spotted by The Daily Beast being taken into custody just after 6:45 p.m. She was surrounded by officers and handcuffed before being walked into a waiting police van.

The arrest comes just one day after Witthoeft’s alleged violent outburst was caught on film and later reported to police. A senior law enforcement official confirmed to The Daily Beast that the arrest was related to the earlier assault.

“58-year-old Michelle Witthoeft, of Spring Valley, CA, was arrested and charged with Simple Assault and Destruction of Property,” Hugh Carew, a D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Public Information Office, told The Daily Beast after publication.

Lock her up, throw away the key.

It’s interesting that American “conservative” ideology — including the Republican Party — has pretty much decayed into the behavior of toddlers — 2- or 3-year-olds.

• Angry at Michelle Obama for recommending they eat vegetables.
• Mad that vaccinations are ouchy.
• Furious about being told to share.
• Angry at being told to be polite to others.
• Absolutely obsessed with genitalia.
• When they don’t get their way, they pitch a fit — throw themselves in the floor, kick, pound the floor with their fists, scream, cry.