While the decision to stop publishing the six books was made by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, right-wing outlets like Fox News mischaracterized it as a book ban.

Unsurprisingly, it has actually been Republican-backed laws like Tennessee’s that have resulted in the banning of Dr. Seuss books from schools.

And that’s the way it works pretty much without exception - private individuals and businesses and such make independent decisions and the Republicans scream that they’re being oppressed, then they pass laws in the name of freedom.

Even with as insane as the Republican agenda is, and as deluded as their supporters necessarily must be, that particular aspect of it really stands out to me. It’s just so perfectly Orwellian.

Setting aside the anti-health and anti-sanity aspects of this, the thing that gets me is that Republicans somehow continue to believe that they’re the party of freedom when everything they do involves ever more regulation.

They frame things as if the Democrats are oppressing people and the Republicans are fighting for their freedom, but the exact opposite is actually true - the way that things actually work, consistently, is that Democrats want to give people the freedom to do things and Republicans are fighting to destroy those freedoms. Their reaction to every single thing they encounter is to pass a law against it, which is literally the exact opposite of freedom.

Now granted - most of their positions are insane, so it’s not as if rationality should be expected, but this just seems to be something so simple and so obvious that they can’t possibly miss it. Yet somehow they do.

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Any ideology that bans books is self-evidently intellectually and philosophically bankrupt.

Gee whiz - who’d’ve thought that the woman who married a rich guy who looks (and notoriously smells) like a gigantic ambulatory drain clog would be so mercenary.

There actually is a statistical correlation between conservative, anti-trans political affiliation and a preference for transgender porn, and Texas leads the nation in searches for transgender porn.

Source

Israel is a rogue state.

“I think she’s beautiful — very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually — unusually beautiful!"

I don’t think it’s with her popularity that the creepy old serial sex abuser is preoccupied…

I’m regularly struck by the literal insanity of politics, but this whole deal with Israel is a particularly notable example.

The fact of the matter is that we have no idea what Harris’s actual opinion of the situation is. Regardless of what it might actually be, she has to support Israel, which at this point means supporting a government of literal murderous psychopaths who are simultaneously carrying out a genocide in Gaza and a violent incremental illegal land grab in the West Bank while also brazenly trying to provoke, and drag the US into, a war with Lebanon or Syria or Yemen or Iran. And why does she have to support all of that patent evil? Because if she doesn’t, AIPAC will spend millions and millions of dollars trying to destroy her, like they already destroyed Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, for daring to have principles.

And what’s the likely net result of that? To elect a Republican, which is to say, a member of the party of actual antisemites.

They accuse Democrats of being antisemites merely for calling genocide genocide, and meanwhile, the actual antisemites - the people who comtinue to hold to the notion of Jews as evil, money-grubbing vermin who are conspiring to take over the world, are Republicans, even including Republicans in high office, like “Jewish space lasers” Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Think about how insane that is - a politician has to publicly support a genocidal regime or face being called an antisemite and having an Israeli advocacy group spend millions and millions of dollars to destroy her and instead elect the candidate from the party of actual Jew-hating antisemites.

And as if that isn’t enough, we have Jill Stein in the middle of it all, who, with zero chance of actually winning, is free to take the position that any rational person should take, and the position that the majority of the Democratic base takes - that genocide is genocide and is rightly condemned. And that then introduces the risk that she’ll draw off enough Democratic voters, merely by taking the position held by the majority, so the position that the Democratic candidate should take, that it will hand the election to the Republican - the candidate of the party of actual antisemites.

The whole thing is bludgeoningly insane. I don’t think anyone could’ve created such a grotesquely dysfunctional and actuslly counter-productive system if they’d deliberately set out to do it.

And yet that’s the world we live in - the world we’re forced to live in - a world warped by the literal insanity of a wealthy and powerful few.

It boggles my mind.

Coward.

I’m having another of those “Damn - I’m still not cynical enough” moments at the thought that anyone would actually believe that Trump could do a better job than anyone else at anything having anything at all to do with the economy.

It’d make sense if the measure of an effective president was their skill at lying, filing false financial reports, dodging creditors and filing bankruptcy - then Trump would clearly be unequalled. But since it’s not…?

Only “near” historic low?

Since we already have at least two overtly corrupt justices whose entire defense consists essentially of “nobody has the authority to do anything about it so fuck you,” and the highlights of their last session include ruling that bribery is entirely legal just so long as the check is postdated and that presidents are completely and totally immune from even being investigated over anything that is in any way connected to anything that might by any stretch of the most fevered imagination be considered an "official act " I have to wonder what it will take to actually hit rock bottom.

I have no doubt that, since they have no integrity, no ethics and no regard for either law or the well-being of the country, we’ll see.

As always, all one needs to do is pretend that Trump is an unusually tall and bald five-year-old, and what he says and does makes perfect sense.

I’m fully aware that the DNC is under no legal mandate to operate legitimately or honestly.

And that’s rather obviously entirely irrelevant.

In point of fact, if the legal standing of their actions is the only thing that matters, as you imply, then the entire notion that Russia willfully acted to harm them collapses. How could Russia harm them by leaking details of things that are not illegal and therefore (purportedly) entirely acceptable?

If, on the other hand, we stick with the way that things have been presented by the DNC itself - that Russia willfully acted to bring them harm - then rather obviously even they are taking the position that the legal status of their actions is irrelevant.

Go ahead and pick either one - I don’t care. Either there was nothing wrong with their actions, in which case they could not be harmed by having the details of their actions leaked, or they were harmed by the the leak of the details of their actions, in which case their actions were self-evidently judged to be wrong, and the legal standing of them is irrelevant.

That’s pretty much what it seems to amount to.

All of the focus has been astroturfed onto the fact that the leaks came from Russian sources, and away from the content of the leaks. The clear (though of course unstated) implication is that the wrong isn’t the DNC’s corruption, but Russia’s self-serving exposure of that corruption.

I’ve never bought this spin.

Certainly Russia had a hand in getting the leaks to Wikileaks, and certainly because they had an obvious vested interest in the US electing Putin’s sycophant Trump.

But I’ve never seen or heard of any specific evidence that any of it was “disinformation” - just the repeated unsubstantiated claim that it was. It appears to be exactly what it looks like - a detailed record of the DNC’s overtly fraudulent maneuvering to torpedo the Sanders campaign in order to ensure the nomination of Clinton, or more precisely, to torpedo the campaign of a sincere progressive who would likely threaten the ongoing flow of big donor soft money in order to ensure the nomination of a transparently corrupt neo-lib who could be counted upon to serve establishment interests and keep the soft money flowing. And notably, early on that was how the DNC treated it themselves, even going so far as to issue a public apology to the Sanders campaign “for the inexcusable remarks made over email” that did not reflect the DNC’s “steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process.”

So what it actually all boils down to was that the DNC really was acting in a manner contrary to the public good, driven by their own greed and corruption, and the fact that Russia had a hand in exposing that in order to serve their own interests doesn’t alter that fact.

No matter how one slices it, the bulk of the blame for the whole thing rests squarely on the DNC. Yes - it served Russian interests to reveal the information, but had the DNC simply been operating in a legitimate, honest and neutral way, instead of self-servingly and dishonestly, there would’ve been nothing to reveal.

So basically the US government is a gigantic Trump - rising up in self-righteous fury at the very idea that anyone might dare to charge them for the crimes they’ve brazenly committed.

I think the significant part there though is that it’s what the US government did almost 200 years ago. Not that that excuses it, but it was a much more primitive and ignorant world then, and at least some of it can be ascribed to that primitiveness and ignorance.

Doing the same thing in the modern world though - that’s just pure, unmitigated evil.

As intended.

Israel’s strategy with the West Bank is masterful. Wholly and completely evil, but masterful.

Either the Palestinians just accept their lot, in which case Israel incrementally takes their land through their “settler” proxies, or the Palestinians (entirely justifiably) try to fight back, in which case the IDF goes in and kills a bunch of them, and Israel takes their land anyway.

It’s fucking despicable, but it works, and if one is devoid of morality, empathy or simple human decency, that’s all that matters.