The Books of Bokonon

  Senator Chris Murphy to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem: "Your dept is out of control. You are spending like you don't have a budget. You're on the verge of running out of money for the fiscal year... You are ignoring the immigration laws of this nation... and routinely violating the rights of immigrants" by u/xamo76 in RealTwitterAccounts It's a sight to behold. Noem looks completely blank while Sen. Murphy gives her the pointed lecture of her failure to do her job. From the looks of her, the lights are on but nobody's home.

I'd say this video about sums it up:   This video is from earlier in the week, but it will remain relevant for a long time to come.

If Lawrence is soon to be off the air (his contract ends in June), he is going to go down swinging. Here is his take on Trump and the GOP's cowardice:

I've been meaning to getting back to this video series. This lesson is very valuable:

As the late great Yogi Berra once said, "it's deja vu all over again." It is the beginning of the 119th Congress and the House side of Capitol Hill has had a bit of a rough start, for the second Congressional session in a row. Mike Johnson, who became Speaker in the middle of last session, ran to remain Speaker, and he was arguably in a much better position than his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was at this same point as the 118th Congressional Session started. Johnson had - at least to start - far fewer initial holdouts after he initially failed to get the nomination during the first vote for Speaker. The saving grace for Johnson was that some GOP members on the House floor changed their votes, thus belatedly giving Johnson the Speaker's gavel. There was plenty of drama on the floor for a while, and the GOP looked like there was a struggle to simply get their act together, so not a great start. At least we'll avoid the seemingly countless votes for the Speaker...

According to the scripture found in the Books of Bokonon , a Pool-pah is defined as a "shit storm" or "the wrath of God." Either will do as far as I am concerned as we witness the latest round of House GOP incompetence (with a significant assist from Trump and shadow president Musk). As of now, we are staring down yet another government shutdown, and I will have to double check the calendar for the last day that the debt ceiling needs to be raised, but also the debt ceiling being breached, thus tanking the global economy. We have some real stable geniuses running this circus.  Here's the sitch: The US House of Representatives has a GOP majority this session that is wafer thin (currently 221 GOP - 214 Dem). It will be an even thinner majority come January when the new Congressional Session starts (220 GOP - 215 Dem, with some seats already vacated thus further narrowing the majority). Any House Speaker, regardless of who he or she is, will have to accept that mos...

The title comes from an opening line from Gil Scott-Heron's song B-Movie . Over the course of his spoken word performance, accompanied by a wonderful late-1970s/early 1980s funk groove, Gil Scott-Heron broke it down that there was no way that a guy who got maybe around a quarter of all potential eligible voters, and that it boiled down to half of the eligible American voters didn't vote in the first place, whether due to apathy, dislike for any candidate on the ballot for President that year, or any of a number of structural barriers to voting (persons with disabilities, or who work and have no early voting options, etc). Reagan managed to win over 25% of the eligible voters and the rest who bothered to cast a vote did so for Carter or Anderson in 1980. So the case that Ronald Reagan did not have a mandate for his first term is very defensible.  So why go back into some funk and R&B history? Because we have a bigger problem now, and that bigger problem also does not have a ...

So Trump's prospective "border czar" is threatening the Denver mayor with arrest over the mayor's resistance to mass deportations . As an expert on authoritarianism (minor in comparison to Altemeyer or Duckitt, but I do have a few peer review publications to show for it) and an amateur history buff, I don't see how this standoff ends well. Trump's fascist tendencies are on full display - this time by one of his henchmen. Either the federal government goes forward with its mass imprisonment of undocumented residents (and anyone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time) and the Denver mayor goes to jail, or the mass deportation happens and the mayor folds like so many others who were supposed to be our bulwarks of democracy.  The US has devolved to the point that a plurality of its citizens don't seem to be bothered with electing a convicted felon as their president and can't be bothered to care who gets hurt in the process. The US ha...

Whatever the hell that was in Madison Square Garden on Sunday was a dumpster fire. But before anyone gets too much time to sanewash the stank off of that Trump rally, our late night comedians are here to break things down. Let's start with Jon Stewart: . And now it's time for A Closer Look: Let's include Jimmy Kimmel's take: And finally, Stephen Colbert weighs in:

  This ABC news story is so obvious it almost doesn't bear much in the way of comment other than I could see this coming a mile away. Of course, a subset of voters understand that Trump is a fascist and will vote for him anyway. If you read through many of the justifications for casting a vote for Trump, their statements look like they could have been taken from a right-wing authoritarianism questionnaire (whether one developed by Altemeyer, Duckitt and colleagues, or Funke). And there is a reason for that: the folks who are knowingly voting for a fascist are in all likelihood psychologically authoritarian in their worldview. I'll give you a snippet from a book chapter I had published earlier this year ( here is a non-paywalled version of the chapter ) that describes the three facets of authoritarianism as initially defined by Altemeyer and subsequent authoritarianism theorists and researchers: Conventionalism is defined as a tendency to go along with the prevailing societal ...

I'll let Dr. Timothy Snyder explain:

It just feels wrong that we have a candidate representing one of the two major US parties (in this case the GOP) regularly uses fascist rhetoric at public events and has eyewitnesses who can attest that Trump has praised Adolf Hitler. Yes, that Adolf Hitler. You know, the one that many of our ancestors went to war roughly eight decades ago to defeat (along with other fascist powers aligned with the Nazis). It not only feels wrong but it is wrong.  So where is the media coverage? It's there, kinda sorta. But the reaction among the media pundits seems to be along the lines of "meh." So we're left with late night talk show hosts to fill the void. Thankfully they do the hard work of reporting the facts and showing how tremendously fucked up the situation really is. It's no game. This is real life and folks need to wake up pronto.  Here's Seth Meyers working tirelessly again to wake up a nation sleepwalking its way to fascism: Are you tired of the dumpster fire tha...

On the blogosphere, on social media, and among the relatively more responsible media outlets, the message is loud and clear: Donald Trump tried to rule like a fascist the last time he was in the White House, led a self-coup in January 6th 2021, and has used the rhetoric of dictators throughout his current campaign. Unlike Republican presidential candidates of the past, Trump has embraced right-wing extremism, full stop. It's not even up for debate if one can grasp it. One of the tragedies that repeatedly occurs when a nation devolves from a democracy to a dictatorship is that so many live with this delusion that the dictator and his thugs will never come after them. And then they find out they aren't so safe either. That is a possible future for us in the United States. That this is even a realistic possible future is one that keeps me up at night.   With that in mind, here is a quick roundup of articles and blog posts to consider. Trump: "I need the kind of generals Hitle...

I just can't make this stuff up, y'all.  Elon Musk has been setting up fake Kamala Harris websites and has been sending texts to people directing them to those fake sites . The latter may well put Musk in some legal hot water.   This is an actual Associated Press headline, and one I never expected to read: Trump kicks off a Pennsylvania rally by talking about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia . Otherwise it was the usual boilerplate Trump appearance featuring profanity and deranged grievances. That's all he has to offer. Montana GOP Senate Hopeful Accused Firefighters Of 'Milking' Infernos For Extra Pay and Montana park ranger says Senate candidate Tim Sheehy lied about combat wound . This Tim Sheehy fellow is a piece of work. Montanans would be better off sticking with their incumbent Senator, Jon Tester, who seems like a decent guy who has worked to deliver for his state since he first became a Senator in the mid aughts.  I'm sure there is something I have missed.

I wanted to follow up on a previous post about the authoritarian turn that the GOP has taken this century. Both of the following graphics I obtained from a working paper (no longer online, regrettably) by V-Dem in 2020. I seriously doubt the trends have changed. The Guardian had a good summary of the findings. For our purposes I am using the term authoritarianism and illiberalism as synonyms.  This first figure shows two dimensions: economic left/right and illiberalism (authoritarianism). Both dimensions start at 0 and end at 1. A party espousing economic conservatism would appear closer to 1 on the economic dimension. A party espousing authoritarian approach to governing will be closer to 1 on the Illiberalism dimension. Notice that Venezuela's ruling party actually scores a perfect 1 on illiberalism. The GOP appears in orange print and the Democratic Party appears in blue print. Other governing political parties appear in gray, and we get a baseline idea of where autocracies te...

Note: This post comes from my academic blog and was published a little over three years ago. I am making some minor edits to account for the year we live in, but am otherwise leaving it unchanged in terms of content, given that I would still arrive at the same conclusions based on V-Dem's data analyses described in the following paragraphs.  The data tell the tale. The mass media and still too many of the US intelligentsia refer to the Republican Party (GOP) as conservative, and its politicians and followers as conservatives. I would argue that the party leadership, its politicians, and its activist base abandoned conservatism a long time ago, and took a much more authoritarian turn. And before anyone tries to get too far into the weeds here, I published some research roughly nine years ago (and I am far from alone I suspect) distinguishing at least some very substantial facets of conservatism from authoritarianism. That there are actual conservatives in the US who want n...

Never mind that Russia's Putin regime invaded Ukraine in 2014 and illegally annexed Crimea as it fought a low-scale war in the Donbas that had been on-going prior to 2022. Never mind that the same Russian regime ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and have been engaging in human rights abuses ever since. In Trump's deranged and demented mind, somehow it was the president of the invaded country who allegedly started the war with Russia . Yeah, it makes no sense and is completely divorced from reality. But that's Trump for you. It's also a harbinger of what to expect if Trump is reinstalled in the White House. Trump will cede Ukrainian territory to Putin against the will of the duly elected Ukrainian government and the will of the Ukrainian people. Bet on it. Then again, it would be in character for Trump to blame the abused spouse for being beaten (or worse) or the rape survivor for allowing the rape to happen. That's what you get from a former ...

The Florida governor dictator has been working like madness to kill a ballot initiative that has already been given the go-ahead and which is already on actual ballots, weeks before election day. He is desperate to keep that 6-week abortion ban in place. It's the same ban Trump supports. The tactics Desantis uses are disturbing and anti-democratic: sending secret police to ballot initiative signatories, threatening media outlets that run ads in favor of the initiative, and even cooking up an excuse to invalidate any votes for the initiative. Read more here . What we are witnessing in Florida as is the case in other GOP dominated parts of the US is best understood as follows: GOP politicians don't care about the give and take that comes with governing. They want raw power to rule, period.

There is a channel I follow on Telegram called Military & Strategic, and is typically signed by a blogger who refers to himself or herself as The Analyst. The primary topic is the on-going Russo-Ukraine war, but US politics gets mentioned from time to time, which is very pertinent to the Ukrainian cause. Here is one of The Analyst's most recent posts , which deals with the prospects for the Harris/Walz campaign's success in November: GROWING CONFIDENCE IN A DEMOCRATIC VICTORY We all know how important the coming election is in the US. We are quite literally faced with a fork in the road - one side takes us down a dark and dangerous path towards a semi-fascist autocracy and the other is the real America that despite its many flaws is a decent and honest democrat at its core. It’s a truly shocking difference in possible futures. However I am ever more certain that Kamala Harris will win the presidency. I am growing more certain that the Democrats will regain the House, and ju...

This headline from David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo says it all: What It Looks Like When One Side Rejects Democracy . I read what he had to say, and I will admit it hits hard. Unfortunately, what he has to say is reality, and it's far from clear how many of us (me included) truly grasp the weight of the moment. What is clear to me is that something is fundamentally broken when it comes to our politics right now, and we have already lost so much that we once took for granted. Let me share with you what he has to say: The last few weeks have been a particularly strange stretch in a campaign year that is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. The country is poised at a great fork in the road, with a historically significant decision to be made between democracy or authoritarianism, pluralism or cultism, the rule of law or Trumpian retribution. Yet the national political conversation, the news coverage of it, the pace of daily events doesn’t seem to be rising to the momentousness of...