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February 18, 2023 12:19 AM UTC

Presidents Day Weekend 2023 Open Thread

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  • by: Colorado Pols

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50 thoughts on “Presidents Day Weekend 2023 Open Thread”

    1. I went looking for ANY news on the "WORLD WIDE RALLY FOR FREEDOM" — and couldn't find anything, even on the organizers' website.

      May be time for another study of cognitive dissonance & what happens when prophecy fails. 

      Festinger, Riecken and Schachter used the study to test their theories on how people might be expected to behave when faced with a specific type of dissonance, arising from a failed prophecy.

      1. It is…I have no idea which globalist is occupying the center of that trio! 

        Ms. Dooley was one of the original founders of the Tea Party (at the onset I thought they had some reasonable ideas…and then they started snorting the Kochaine).  She is great on renewable energy issues (oddly so, given the Koch position on fossil fuels) but she's fallen down the rabbit hole on just about every other issue.  

        1. The comment about globalism is laughable. My initial reaction is to ask someone expressing anti-globalism sentiment if they eat bananas. If they reply yes, my response is to tell them that you're a globalist because that crop isn't grown in the USA in commercial quantities. 

          A lesser known example is to ask someone if they buy table grapes in the winter. Same issue since our winter grapes come mostly from Chile. Side note; Chile is a beautiful country and well worth a visit or two.

          1. Of course it is. Everyone living outside of a cave is a globalist. That's because people are morons, CHB.

            How many times have I seen those big ass trucks with "Buy American" bumper stickers on the back parked at Walmart and whose owners are inside buying cheap imported products from Honduras China, or Vietnam.

          2. Thank you for proving you're not going down the MAGA hole.

            "Globalism" is an important codeword on the Ron Pau – Steve Bannon – Fascist propaganda network. It recalls the anti-semitic, Jewish-cabal history that blames all the world's problems on a conspiracy of shady bankers controlling things.

  5. Mainstream Republicans have ALWAYS opposed Social Security, and always ran up deficits. Pay attention to what the DO, not what they SAY. From HC-R.

    Republicans have always been extremists. Social Security is very, very popular. I’m not sure why nobody calls for the GOP to “move to the center”

    Remembering the demon Ronald Wilson Reagan, the jovial fascist? (yes, six letters in every name.)

    Cutting Social Security is a centerpiece of the ideology the party adopted in the 1980s: that the government in place since 1933 was stunting the economy and should be privatized as much as possible. 

    In place of using the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Reagan Republicans promised that cutting taxes and regulation would free up capital, which investors would then plow into new businesses, creating new jobs and moving everybody upward. Americans could have low taxes and services both, they promised, for “supply-side economics” would create such economic growth that lower tax rates would still produce high enough revenues to keep the debt low and maintain services. 

    But constructing an economy that favored the “supply side” rather than the “demand side”—those ordinary Americans who would spend more money in their daily lives—did not, in fact, produce great economic growth or produce tax revenues high enough to keep paying expenses. In January 1981, President Ronald Reagan called the federal deficit, then almost $74 billion, “out of control.” Within two years, he had increased it to $208 billion. The debt, too, nearly tripled during Reagan’s term, from $930 billion to $2.6 trillion. The Republican solution was to cut taxes and slash the government even further.

    Since the 1990s, Republicans have had an ideological problem: voters don’t actually like their economic vision, which has cut services and neglected infrastructure even as it has dramatically moved wealth upward. So to keep voters behind them, Republicans hammered on social and cultural issues, portraying those who liked the active government as godless socialists who were catering to minorities and women. “There is a religious war going on in this country,” Republican Pat Buchanan told the Republican National Convention in 1992. “It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

    1. HC-R has no mercy. She is really tearing apart CHB's Party. More on Republican values and beliefs:

      A generation later, that culture war has joined with the economic vision of the older party to create a new ideology. More than half of Republicans now reject the idea of a democracy based in the rule of law and instead support Christian nationalism, insisting that the United States is a Christian nation and that our society and our laws should be based in evangelical Christian values. Forty percent of the strongest adherents of Christian nationalism think “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” while 22% of sympathizers agree with that position. 

      Scott released his 11-point plan because, he said, “Americans deserve to know what we will do when given the chance,” and his plan reflected the new Republicans. Sunsetting laws and tax cuts were only part of the plan. He promised to cut government jobs by 25% over the next five years, “sell off all non-essential government assets, buildings and land, and use the proceeds to pay down our national debt,” get rid of all federal programs that local governments can take over, cut taxes, “grow America’s economy,” and “stop Socialism.” 

      But it also reflected the turn toward Christian nationalism, centering Christianity and “Judeo-Christian values” by investing in religious schools, adoption agencies, and social services and calling for an end to abortion, gender-affirming care, and diversity training. It explicitly puts religion above the law, saying “Americans will not be required to go against their core values and beliefs in order to conform to culture or government.” 

      The document warned that “[a]n infestation of old, corrupt Washington insiders and immature radical socialists is tearing America apart. Their bizarre policies are intentionally destroying our values, our culture, and the beliefs that hold us together as a nation.” “Is this the beginning of the end of America?” it asks. “Only if we allow it to be.”

      1. I've sat silent on this issue for a while now as I grapple with these issues every holiday, family dinner or trip to the local coffee shop.  I'm rarely silent to family and friends on where and why I stand with Democrats, or why today's party is no longer the party I recognize.  As a 30-year member of the GOP before I had had enough of Musty's God Gunz and Gheys agenda, I'm still thought of as a traitor by many family members.  I can argue with data and statistics (or why rural America even exists in its present form) all day but the bias is baked in.  Of those occupying my parent's generation, most simply won't admit the current state of the party, although a few of them will quietly say they wouldn't vote for Trump again.  I'm more worried about those in my own generation.  I have little faith they will do anything but dig deeper and build more fortified bunkers.  I fear we're going to be dealing with this phenomenon for the rest of my days.

        On many levels I get CHB and admire his optimism the party can be recovered.  I truly hope we find a way to have a functioning, two-party system once again.  But, at least in Colorado, the days of the Bud Moellenbergs and Bev Bledsoes are gone and we'll likely suffer a succession of clown car flame throwers to represent us under the Dome until at the current party achieves minor party status. 

        1. Thanks Michael. It's surely difficult to live in the Fox News morass (but see below). Almost everyone in my family and extended family are solidly in the reality-based mentality.

          Page Two.

          I've definitely been in the camp that Fox News created the Fox Bubble, which I guess is just a metastisism of the Father Coughlin, Paul Harvey, 24-hour religious-right radio that has always covered the rural parts of the country.

          The tail wagging the dog.

          But, as Mike Littwin points out today, the biggest surprise from the Fox News revelations is that Fox was afraid of brand damage and loss of its base of viewers to Newsmax. 

          1. I heard someone yesterday refer to it as the “Fox Feedback Loop”. You’re right: they’re terrified of their viewers (and their stock price as NewsMax eats into their audience). 

      2. “HC-R has no mercy…..” You don’t mention that Rick Scott has been back-pedaling fast on his “plan” for America, particularly on the part about SS and Medicare. Scott managed to “grift away” much of the RNC Senatorial Campaign Committee’s money last year when he was chair. It’s also well known that his former company “grifted away” well over $1 billion from Medicare when he was CEO.

        Senator Scott is up for re-election next year. If you Dems can actually find a competent candidate, who can run a campaign better than your usual Inside-the-Beltway “consultants,” this seat might be winnable. He certainly won’t have much, if any, support from Mitch McConnell’s PACs.

    2. “demon Ronald Wilson Reagan……”

      Guess who signed more wilderness bills into law than any other president? Ronald Wilson Reagan.

      Guess which president signed the US onto the Montreal Protocols international treaty in 1987 that was designed to begin reducing the hole in the atmosphere’s ozone layer: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

      Guess which future president, in 1966, signed among the first stringent air quality regs in the US when he was Governor of California: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

      2. The first thing I remember about Reagan is his attempt to call out the national guard to shoot demonstrators and hippies at the University of California. What kind of a jovial Fascist spews such hatred?!

        The other thing I remember is the Iran-Contra scandal:

        One of the biggest foreign policy scandals of the last half-century was the Iran-Contra affair, in which the Reagan Administration, prodded by CIA Director William Casey and NSC Advisor Oliver North, secretly arranged for an arms-for-hostage deal with one of its bitterest enemies in the Middle East. Put simply, Israel would sell weapons from the U.S. to Iran, which had been designated a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1984 and the subject of an arms embargo, in exchange for the release of American hostages held by Hezbollah, Iran’s ally, in Lebanon.

        North and Casey then doubled down, funneling the profits from the arms sales into yet another illegal venture, a secret plan to support the Contras, the militants in Nicaragua which opposed the communist Sandinistas. This was in direct contravention of the Boland Amendments, which Congress had passed from 1982-84, specifically prohibiting U.S. support of the Contras.

        I hasten to call out this summary on two things:
        (1) Note the loaded word "militants" attached to the contras instead of the more accurate Argentine military trained death squads supporting the dictator Somoza.
        (2) Calling the popular Sandanista resistance "communist". Basically the entire country of Nicaragua was rising up in a popular rebellion against a sadistic dictator, and the US came down on the side of the sadistic dictator. The US could have bypassed all the "communist" influence if it had sided with the people rather than Somoza… but that is a longer history than Ronald Reagan.

        Scales of Justice?

        When someone is so immoral and antagonistic to the rule-of-law, I don't have any patience with white-washing Reagan's immorality because he supported some environmental laws.

        1. “whitewashing Reagan’s immorality…..”

          How do you feel about Bill Clinton’s “immorality?”

          FWIW, I voted for Reagan in ’84 and for Clinton in ’96. 

          As history has proven, the Sandinista “dictator,” Daniel Ortega, really is that.

          1. Let's see, Reagan's Iran-Contra vs Clinton's fucking around. Which hurt more people, hmm? 

            As for Ortega, if we had supported the Sandinistas and not mined Nicaraguan harbors, etc. etc., I suppose there is some possibility that he wouldn't have turned into a tyrant. But then again, power corrupts, so maybe not. Point is, we'll never know. 

            1. And in order to undermine the democratically elected Nicaraguan government, the contras needed more money.

              So they started selling crack in black neighborhoods in L.A. And the CIA knew all about it.  
              Dick Cheney , Reagan’s greatest defender, never turned over all documents from investigating Iran-Contra, nor from his time  as VP and “Bush’s Brain”.. And young Ken Buck got his start in politics sanitizng the iran contra scandal. Nothing to see here, move along. 

                1. I will readily admit, CHB, that Nicaragua, like most of socialist and communist countries, has installed a “President for life”, i,e. a Dictator.   They also tend to repress dissent  and human rights.
                  When I was an actual socialist, we used to debate why that was. We agreed that it starts with resisting the corporate interests that liked the old exploitation, but what then?. The women tended to identify support for patriarchy as a key component of a slide into autocracy. This was not a popular viewpoint with radical leftist men. Anti-racists identified white supremacy as the culprit.

                  Whether the morphing from socialist revolution into autocracy would happen without CIA and corporate interference we may never know. But it’s why I’m a Democratic socialist, not a Marxist seeking to install a “dictatorship of the proletariat” which tends to become just another dictatorship. 

                   

            2. "we'll never know……." Lots of "what if-s" are around.

              Back in 1943-44, the US ran guns to Ho Chi Minh to help him resist the Japanese. But then we put the French back into their Indochina colony…….

    3. A large portion of the GOP has opposed social security as far back as Alf Landon in 1936.

      But after Alf Landon got his clock cleaned, the GOP decided they had to at least tolerate social security which was what made the GOP electable again (think Dewey and Ike).

      When they started beating the abolish-social-security drum again in 1964, they got their asses handed to them again. Which in turn led to Nixon who put down the drum and left social security alone.

      Park Hill, it must be nice to look at the world as purely black and white while ignoring the fact that it really comes in all sorts of shades and colors. (Or out of respect for today's woke culture – as purely one hue and purely an opposite hue.)

       

    4. “Remembering the demon Ronald Wilson Reagan”

      He did broker a grand bargain with Democrats which raised the retirement age and kept the program solvent into the early 21st century.

      I did not vote for Reagan nor did I like him but give the devil his due. He didn’t take anyone’s social security away.

       

  6. At least this idiot didn't do anything truly heinous like try to teach the young 'uns that racism exists.

    Stories like this are are for morons who believe "America" and "shithole country" are mutually exclusive terms. Trouble is, the morons who need to learn that simply don't learn lessons. Ever.

    2. The "national divorce" thing got settled in rather ghastly fashion, but hey, watching the red states try to make a go of it without all that blue state cash would be entertaining in a way (though the entertainment would be tempered by knowledge that decent folk ended up trapped in the new red state shithole country).

      1. Blue states pay more than their fair share. Here are the receipts | Column

        Other metrics also show that blue states outperform the red states. Per capita GDP is 29 percent higher in Democratic-led states. In 2020, Donald Trump carried 2,497 counties across the country that together generate 29 percent of the country’s GDP, according to the Brookings Institution. President Joe Biden won just 477 counties, but together they generate 71 percent of GDP.

        Some conservatives are so aggrieved by liberalism that they would rather have their own country by breaking up the United States. Before we entertain such a notion, let’s begin an experiment. For the next five years let each state get back the same amount it sends to the federal government. No more or no less.

        2. “Blue states pay more than their fair share“

          Which is one of the reasons why I too think that a divorce is a smart move. Why should we keep subsidizing stupidity?  

          I wonder how they would act as a sovereign nation. Would they be a constitutional republic, a theocracy, a kleptocracy, or a monarchy? I imagine only white men would be allowed to vote. If they really want to honor the Founders, they should add a property ownership requirement to the franchise. That way, none of the white trash trailer park renters would be able to vote.

          Would they send the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers out into the world as state-sponsored terrorists like al Queda or ISIS? Would they seek financial support from the United Blue States of America once they realized that they cannot support themselves?

          Lincoln should have told Jefferson Davis, “Don’t let the door smack you on the ass on your way out!”

          2. “blue states pay more than their fair share…….”

            So do blue areas within states. I recall my postings here when the far righties were talking about parts of NE Colorado seceding to join Wyoming or setting up their own state. My thought was: happy to see you leave. You owe the rest of the state a minimum of $1 billion, payable upon departure, for all the amenities the Front Range taxpayers bought for you. Starting with UNC in Greeley, Sterling Community College, and moving on to all the roads, bridges, and school buildings we all bought for you.

  8. We are in SUCH good company:

    Guns have been intercepted literally from Burbank, California, to Bangor, Maine. But it tends to happen more at bigger airports in areas with laws more friendly to carrying a gun, Pekoske said. The top 10 list for gun interceptions in 2022 includes Dallas, Austin and Houston in Texas; three airports in Florida; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta; Phoenix; and Denver.

    And we did it without involving (so far as we know) any elected Republicans.

    1. The Times-Call says there was no agenda item regarding his termination, yet there was a motion, a second, and a 4-2 vote to do so.

      That process almost certainly violates Colorado's open meeting law.

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