Monday Open Thread

18 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

1. Read, listen and share with fellow Pagans and Evagelicals alike. Tim Alberta explains the corruption of social media influenced US churchianity that Trump used to move his con through to the country vs Queens and Manhatten.  

    

   Ep. 560 — Tim Alberta

   Journalist Tim Alberta grew up in the evangelical church and has watched with both concern and interest as some factions of the faith have changed over the years. Following the death of his pastor father, Tim decided to take a closer look at American evangelicalism. He published the book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism” in December 2023. Tim joined David to talk about his new book, the profitability and politicization of the evangelical movement, the Moral Majority and the history of evangelical victimization, Donald Trump’s threat to religious freedom, and the real Nikki Haley.

   https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/axe-files/episodes/e5a9c25c-4c24-11ee-9764-2f92523696f4

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   1. I wonder if there was ever a time when filthy rich businessmen and greedy, ambitious politicians DIDN'T consort with the prevalent Church of their time.

      Money and power…a match made in Heaven. Right, Joel?

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      1. You got me thinking about a couple of Netflix series:  The Medici and the Borgias. 

         The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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         1. "Same as it ever was." 

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         2. Well, as somene who studied the intersection of churches and state and business (and looked at a few other countries in order to understand from a different perspective), my conclusion is that there is ALWAYS an intersection.  The only questions that need to be answered are

            • WHICH of the three will be the driving, agenda-setting leader of the troika, and
            • will there be multiple coalitions fighting be the troika in charge. 

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         3. duplicate? why does the comment post twice?

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2. Giuliani Illegally Hacked Hunter Biden's Hard Drive. Emptywheel.

   There were dick pics on the laptop (I’m using artistic license in my choice of dick pics).

   There were emails, including emails hosted by Google and emails tied to Hunter Biden’s iCloud account. But the laptop also included on it the means to get into Hunter’s iCloud account and at least some of his Google accounts.

   There were other digital keys on the laptop and probably enough bank data to get into financial accounts.

   And there was the contents of an iPhone, stored in encrypted form. As I’ve described, I first went down this rabbit hole — the entire Hunter Biden rabbit hole — when I read Gary Shapley’s description that the FBI needed a password to access some of the content, the content from the phone, on what was an actual laptop. That’s when I realized that anyone who accessed the encrypted contents of that phone without a warrant might be at risk for CFAA charges.

   Several of the people who’ve been offering up Hunter Biden data confess, openly, that they broke the encryption on that phone.

   In other words, no matter how all that stuff got put onto Hunter’s laptop, and no matter how it got brought to John Paul Mac Isaac’s shop, and no matter whether JPMI was perfectly in his legal rights to take possession of the laptop itself — all things that are very much contested — the laptop included the means to get into other data, data hosted in the cloud, to which neither JPMI nor anyone else had authorized access.

   And then the blind computer repair man, after having chosen to copy that hard drive that, contrary to his claims was a removable hard drive, by cutting and pasting it and reading it along the way, packaged that all up on a hard drive and sent it, without Hunter’s consent, to the then-President’s lawyer.

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3. I know, I know, a poll one year eleven months ten months (ballots in Colorado drop in October) out are meaningless ….

   CNN Polls: Trump leads Biden in Michigan and Georgia as broad majorities hold negative views of the current president | CNN Politics

   But they do show a trend line.

   If we are stuck with Biden, maybe we need to be looking closer at the tea leaves. Biden is losing by less in Georgia than in Michigan. Maybe it's time to go all in with the Sunbelt strategy and kiss goodbye to the Rust Belt states. Target Georgia, North Carolina and Texas instead of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

   Texas is probably still a long shot but no one is ever going to be able to satisfy those blue-color rednecks in MI, WI and PA like Trump and MAGA can.

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   1. I think the only hope is for Biden to step down.

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      1. But the longer he waits for doing that, the bigger the mess.

         If he were to drop out now, Kamala Harris would be a natural frontrunner to replace him.

         But I cannot imagine she would get a coronation. Her friend, Gavin Newsom, would find himself in an awkward position.

         Gretchen Witmer, J.P. Printzker, Elizabeth Warren, and every else down to Stacy Abrams would be looking at a run.

         How would that work with some of the primary filing deadlines having passed?

         And if Biden decided to drop out in the late spring after delegate selection had occurred, wouldn't that lock the nomination up for Harris since there would be a lot of Biden-pledged delegates who would presumably support the candidate he endorsed.

         In fact, maybe he's thinking of doing just that. That woiuldn't bother me but I can see a lot of "Process Democrats" who would lose their shit over such a backroom, Machiavellian move.

         While it would thwart a messy nomination fight, some would burn the place down all the same.

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         1. News Flash!! Newsom supports Biden and Harris!

            So much for the "awkwardness" of a Newsom /Harris endorsement.

            It is laughable to what extent "moderate Dems" will contort themselves into pretzels trying to find any reason not to endorse Biden's obvious succssor, Kamala Harris. She's got admin experience as Veep and CA AG; she's Law and Order to the core; she's young enough and old enough not to trigger people's age prejudices. She's progressive on reproductive and worker's rights, climate change and a host of other issues. She's charismatic, connects with voters,  and is a heckuva speaker, even on relatively dry topics.

            But she is ( gasp!) female, and not white. So establishment Dems keep on standing on tiptoe, craning over the Veep's head for an "electable" candidate.

            Cue the usual grasping at straws for logical arguments, and consequent name-calling from the usual suspects. Yawn.

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            1. Admit it, La Pomposa. You'd still rather have Bernie Sanders than Kamala Harris as a candidate, wouldn't you?

               As for Gavin Newsom's endorsement of Biden-Harris, what politician hasn't cited a change in circumstances to revisit a prior commitment or endorsement.

               As for Kamala Harris' vast executive experiences as VEEP and CA AG, well, if you want to see a vice president in action, I suggest you catch Julia Louis-Dreyfus in VEEP on Showtime. She was placed in charge of something or another, and at the last minute, the White House pulled the plug on what she was working on.

               I'm not sure Biden can pull the plug on Harris' pet project – the "crisis at the border" – so she can crow about her successes on that project.

               As for running an AG Office, well even Taller Coffman was able to do that in Colorado. Is she POTUS material? 

               Gretchen Whitmer has more serious executive experience along with a track record of winning in a difficult to win state. She also has two X chromosomes  identifies as a woman which should check off one of the boxes on your checklist. I suggest she go for a DNA test and with any luck she'll discover that one or more of her great, great-grandparents was/were Native American Indigenous People which should allow you to check off another one of the boxes on your checklist.

                

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               1. Gosh, thanks for proving my point…again.

                  Cue the usual grasping at straws for logical arguments, and consequent name-calling from the usual suspects. Yawn

                  We can always tell when you got nothing….you become abusive and nasty. Reminds me of someone, someone in politics.

                  And you didn't even forget your trademark bad fortune-telling and prognostication, which, BTW, is dead wrong…as usual. To spell it out in simple words for you, no….Bernie Sanders should not run for President in 2024. Happy now?

                  I don't have anything against Witmer, although I suspect that the same dynamic would come into play against her. But the Veep job is supposed to be preparation for the top job. 15 former VPs became POTUS.  Harris would be better.

                  One further point of information: TV sitcoms are fictional. They are not intended to inform presidential primaries. Make a note of it.

                   

                   

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                  1. Mama I agree with you… If it ain't gonna be Joe Biden Kamala should run in his place….

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                  2. 15 former VEEPs have gone on to become POTUS.

                     That's true. But usually it happens by death or resignation. A grand total of two – Martin van Buren and George H.W. Bush – got elected president directly from serving as VEEP.

                     When Richard Nixon wao running for president in 1960 as the then-incumbent VEEP, a reporter asked Ike at a press conference if he could name one significant matter that Nixon had done recently, to which Ike said, "Off the top of my head, I can't but if you give me a week or two, I can come up with something." Hopefully, Biden would have a better answer if he gets the question.

                     Biden did task Harris with addressing the so-called border crisis so we know she has had that portfolio and she can claim credit there.

                     And no one is disputing all the tie-breaking votes she's cast over the past three years.

                     But Harris also has the problem of polling worse than Biden is polling. Can you imagine the debate between Trump and Harris? If Harris is lucky, she's have Cornel West, Jill Stein and RFK, Jr. on stage to help deflect some of Trump's venom.

                     But yes, with Harris, at least California's electoral votes will remain safely in the Democratic column. That is something.

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4. More interesting takes on recent Anti-Semitism Posturing. Josh Marshall at TPM.

   The whole article is worth reading.

   XXX These episodes are good reminders that lots of things can be true at once. There is a wave of antisemitism in the country right now. It’s an issue on campuses. I do not think the three presidents’ restrained, bureaucratic responses to Stefanik’s question signaled any tolerance of antisemitism, let alone for the genocide of Jews. But their inability to answer clearly was tied, in part, to a blindness to antisemitism in the social justice framework regnant at many universities. But what we’re seeing right now is not about antisemitism. This is an openly political attack on elite higher education, one of the easiest gambits in the right-wing populist playbook. It abuses and cheapens a serious issue to use it as a cudgel to score political and culture war points. These people do not give two fucks about antisemitism. Or if they do, they must not think it’s a big problem at the moment or they wouldn’t be playing games with it like this.

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   1. +20

      That was my first reaction, too…Stefanik cares about anti-Semitism? Whoda thunk it? She is one of Musk's strongest defenders when he was accused of anti-Semitism.

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5. And now from the “at least these aren’t Colorado Republicans” page. A big scandal in Florida Republican circles, the Chair, Christian Ziegler, is looking at a rape charge from a woman who has in the past been part of a threesmoe with his wife Bridget. Bridget Ziegler is a board member of the Sarasota School Board and the co-founder of Moms for Liberty. Moms is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups for their anti-lgbtq agenda and known for taking over school boards to push their hate. All while Bridget herself is involved sexually with a woman.

   I’d post a link to the multiple news stories about this hypocritical pair but Colorado Pols wants me to first prove that I’m a human.

    

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