Nothing Doing, Only The Decline of America

 The COPD kicked in yesterday - too much humidity in the kitchen. I came home, piddled for about an hour and pretty much slept away for 12 hours.

The Senate's Republicans committed suicide yesterday; Lisa Murkowski made herself the post child for decadence, cowardice, and corruption:

Some will hope that this means a Democrat tidal ave next year when the MAGA troops realized they just old themselves out.

I doubt it. The Old Bolsheviks blamed themselves for being in Stalin's show trials. MAGA will be told this new law will make America Great. What the MAGA voters never ask is if MAGA's leaders include them in their vision of America.

When the SS slaughtered the SA, the Nazi party kept moving on towards the Final Solution. MAGA hates, and it is hate that occupies their minds. Hurt those who MAGA hates, MAGA will follow. What if MAGA followers die from poor medical care or starvation, or lose their jobs or their homes, so long as gays, trans people, immigrants, and minorities, and Democrats suffer?

Samuel Alito Takes Pride in Gay-Bashing (The Nation)

There was a time in this country when such threadbare legal arguments would fail in a court of law—and these parents did, in fact, lose when their case went before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. But we live in a theocracy run by the six unelected law priests at the Supreme Court. Writing for the majority, Sam Alito found that the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion allows these religious parents to change the public school curriculum for their children. He ruled that parents are entitled to be notified in advance about any text that might offend their religious sensibilities, and that after receiving such notice, they must be allowed to pull their kids out of the lesson.

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Alito’s opinion is flatly homophobic. There is no other way to put it. Alito is hysterically concerned about pronouns, repeatedly uses “scare quotes” around the acronym LGBTQ+, and consistently mischaracterizes the books at issue. As part of his supporting evidence, Alito includes pictures from the books in his opinion—pictures that, to the normal eye, merely show LGBTQ people existing. But Alito includes them as evidence of the deeply subversive nature of these books.

I agree with David Klion's State of Exception (The Drift) because I never saw any break between the Moral Majority that sprang to life with Reagan or the sociopathic Grover Norquist or John Yoo's fetish of the unitary executive and MAGA.

Many of Trump’s abuses are novel — no president has ever asserted such broad powers with so little legal or circumstantial justification, not to mention so little buy-in from the public and, especially, from the establishment. But Trump perceives, perhaps more clearly than Bush and his supporters ever did, that the post-9/11 state of exception never definitively ended. With its black sites, warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detentions, and extrajudicial assassinations, the War on Terror under Bush, Obama, and Biden provided a template for a more authoritarian approach to American governance that has never been properly dismantled — and that now, under Trump, is being fully exploited.

Then there is our support of Ukraine against dictatorial Putin as signaling our decadence and decline: Ukraine Can Still Win: Western Half Measures Have Prolonged the War, but Decisive Action Now Could End It (Foreign Affairs)

Well, enough of venting my spleen. Two days ago, I managed to get the correct ink for my printer. I have letters - real letters - to write. I have a shambles of an apartment to repair.

At least Muncie is trying: Muncie commission approves money to begin demolishing part of Muncie Mall (Indiana Public Radio)

Amazing And Fascinating Finds From "Archaeology World" That Might Make You Explore History More (Bored Panda) - probably too late for Americans to become historically literate, but that's my contribution to the effort.

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