This is the time of year when states that use a caucus system, like Minnesota, will have caucus training. Flawed as it is, it’s part of the package, and if you want to be politically effective, it’s perfectly normal to learn how to do it. We’ve never had a complaint about training people, and it’s bizarre to think that someone would complain about learning basic civic duties.

But then, this is a rather white part of the state. Caucusing while brown would be a whole different story…at least as far as Republicans are concerned.

Warnings from GOP legislators that Muslim voters plan to “infiltrate” Republican caucuses appear to have galvanized Muslim efforts to get out and caucus. But Muslim leaders say the rhetoric has extended well beyond the content that the two Republican representatives have shared.

It started with a Facebook post that said a “Macalester professor from Bangladesh” led a recent caucus training at a mosque. Dave Sina, chairman of the 4th Congressional District GOP, wrote that the training “encourages them to infiltrate them all, Republican, Democratic as well as Green and independent.” The post went on to say that “the easiest is the Republican, because they don’t show up.”

As the article points out, this is training to participate in elections, which has rather different implications than infiltrate. They are proposing entirely legal activities which are in fact encouraged by society. I watched the introduction to this training video on facebook, and while I’m not at all a fan of ISAIAH, a group that tries to encourage non-partisan political partisan by faith groups, everything the speakers say is exactly correct, fair, and just. (I’m not a fan because of sour grapes — I’d like to see more secular training).

But read the comments. People are freaking out. She talks about how to “build political POWER”! The Muslims are going to take over! They’re TAKING OVER! We’re DOOOOOOOOOMED! You can almost hear the shrieks of horror at the idea that minority citizens of the state might actually get out and vote.

By the way, it’s true that Republican caucuses are small. At the last one, the Republicans just held it at someone’s house; the Democrats took over a big meeting room at the big bar in town, and had volunteers at stations to help guide the mobs of people who showed up to their positions and to explain the procedures. It was standing room only.

Suddenly, Trey Gowdy has announced his imminent retirement. Seems like an awful lot of establishment Republicans are fleeing congress — perhaps they’ve seen the writing on the wall? Or, more likely, they’ve gotten a whiff of the money in lobbying and media?

ABC News is hiring corrupt failure and Trumpian butt-sniffer Chris Christie. If that blowhard can prosper in the media, anyone can.

You now have another reason to skip the state of the union address — the commercials.

President Trump is seeking to parlay his first State of the Union address on Tuesday into cash for his reelection campaign by offering supporters a chance to see their name flashed on the screen during a broadcast of the speech.

In a fundraising solicitation on Monday, Trump offered those willing to pay at least $35 the opportunity to see their name displayed during a live streaming of the address on his campaign website.

This guy really is a cheap huckster, isn’t he?

There’s been another school shooting — heck, we get them about every other day now, so there may be another one tomorrow — and once again, the rationalizations begin to flow, but nothing is done. The Republican governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevins, trots out the usual litany of excuses. He says it is a “cultural problem”, and that’s the end of where I agree with him.

“We have become desensitized to death, we have become desensitized to killing, we have become desensitized to empathy for our fellow man and it’s coming at an extraordinary price and we have got to look at the root causes of this,” Bevin told The Associated Press.

“We can’t celebrate death in video games, celebrate death in TV shows, celebrate death in movies, celebrate death in musical lyrics and remove any sense of morality and sense of higher authority and then expect that things like this are not going to happen,” he added.

Uh, you know — American video games, TV, movies, and music are international now. We sell that stuff everywhere. American entertainment is popular world-wide, and other countries are also producing similar cultural phenomena, yet they are not experiencing these spasms of internal violence. Other countries in Europe and Asia have lower belief in a “higher authority” — America is weirdly religious — and their kids aren’t murdering each other to the same extent. Have you ever considered looking at the empirical evidence rather than worshiping your own freaky biases?

What is unusual in America is the Cult of the Gun, as promoted by the NRA. We also have these strange far right super-“patriots” — in quotes because their patriotism seems to consist of regarding their personal, selfish greed as their highest authority, and believe their duty is to arm themselves to the gills in order to destroy the American government. We’ve militarized our police to the point that “peacekeeping” is an exercise in firepower. I’d also point out that we’re told it is our moral duty to use armed force to murder citizens of other nations to force them to comply, which creates a disturbing conflict in our citizenry about the value of human life.

Of course, Matt Bevins knows that if he criticized the NRA or right-wing militias, he’d probably get shot.

George W. Bush’s popularity ratings are climbing. This should not be — he was a bad president, and we don’t want another one like him. At least Saturday Night Live is explicit about this worrying trend.

If only they hadn’t made him seem sweet; a bumbling nice guy who just dragged us into pointless wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and that are still spinning on.

The same thing happened to Ronald Reagan. Remember Reagan? Avuncular old Ronnie, barely aware of what was going on, yet still corrupt as fuck and seeding the corruption — “supply side economics”, pandering to the religious right, secret wars, dismissing broad swathes of the American public as expendable and better off dead (neglect of the AIDS crisis is just one of his legacies) — that still poisons the Republican party. He got mocked on SNL, too, but even now he’s revered as a Republican saint.

We seem to be trapped in a process of normalization, where instead of aspiring to be better, we dust off hideous relics from the past and pretend they weren’t so bad. Next election, the GOP will nominate some shabby antiquated Reagan impersonator and try to sell us on flawed old memories of past ‘glories’, sweeping the ignominies of the last buffoon under the rug, and trying to sell us on the claim that the current crop of abominations aren’t the product of official Republican policies — but that their new candidate, who will be some greasy selfish flack, is a return to tried and true standard conservatism. They’ll fail. They’ll be worse than the last one.

Meanwhile, the Democrats will look incredulously on the idiot the Republicans nominate, and think all they need to do is prop up someone marginally better to win.

The first Republican president I remember is Nixon. Every single one since has been wretched. Yet they keep getting elected. We’ll never learn.

There are circumstances where saying “I’m sorry” is appropriate. You bumped into someone on the sidewalk, you say it, it means something because you’re expressing regret at an accident, you didn’t mean to do it, you don’t want to ever do it again. We can believe it.

But there’s another kind of sorry, the one where you’ve done something intentionally, repeatedly, and would have kept doing it if someone hadn’t stopped you — your primary regret was that you were caught. Yet we treat these kinds of cases as if they were similar to the “oops, excuse me, I didn’t mean to step on your toes” sort of case. We still expect an apology — a completely meaningless, pointless apology.

Like the Larry Nassar story. The judge seems to get it.

The former sports doctor who admitted molesting some of the nation’s top gymnasts for years was sentenced Wednesday to 40 to 175 years in prison as the judge declared: “I just signed your death warrant.”

The sentence capped a remarkable seven-day hearing in which scores of Larry Nassar’s victims were able to confront him face to face in a Michigan courtroom.

Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said Nassar’s “decision to assault was precise, calculated, manipulative, devious, despicable.”

“It is my honor and privilege to sentence you. You do not deserve to walk outside a prison ever again. You have done nothing to control those urges and anywhere you walk, destruction will occur to those most vulnerable,” Aquilina said.

Yes. What he did was intentional and malicious and repeated hundreds of times. Why would anyone trust any sign of remorse? His ‘apology’ is garbage.

Nassar turned to the courtroom gallery to make a brief statement, saying that the accounts of more than 150 victims had “shaken me to my core.” He said “no words” can describe how sorry he is for his crimes.

“I will carry your words with me for the rest of my days” he said as many of his accusers wept.

This is the same guy who wanted to be excused from listening to the victims’ statements, because they hurt his feelings. The same guy who submitted a letter objecting to the women’s accusations.

“Those patients that are now speaking out are the same ones that praised and came back over and over,” Nassar wrote. “The media convinced them that everything I did was wrong and bad. They feel I broke their trust. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

This is a whole different category of actions from the accident or error that warrants an apology; this was a purposeful action to do harm to children and teenagers for his own slimy gratification. You can’t say “I’m sorry” to that. There’s no point to it. You’re dealing with a damaged human with bad motivations and no social constraints. An apology here is an excuse told by a psychopath to escape punishment and be set free to commit his crimes some more.

There are a whole bunch of greedy psychopaths who deserve justice in this affair. Charles Pierce hits it just right.

Is there anything about the modern Olympic Games that isn’t corrupt? The people who run them make up a claque of international bagmen, shaking down whole countries and bankrupting cities as though the entire world was their goodie bag. There are drugs and bribery, and there was Sochi, which was a monument to both of them. And now there’s this incredible crime spree that took place right under the noses of the Olympic officials. Back in the day, East Germany had its steroid-peddling doctors. The U.S.A. had Larry Nassar. Two-tie, all tie.

NBC should refuse to pay a dime toward its rights fees until everyone involved in this catastrophe is unemployed. If they so choose, American gymnasts should be allowed to compete in 2020 under the Olympic flag or, perhaps, under the flags of the nations from which their parents emigrated. Their country failed them as surely as did the sporting organizations that purport to represent it. No punishment is too harsh for the inhabitants of this universe of ghouls and gargoyles to which these brave young women were condemned. Burn it all down. Salt the earth so it never rises again.

It would be comical to ask this hierarchy of criminal exploiters to apologize for the institutional child slavery and abuse ring they assembled. They knew what they were doing. They wanted to take advantage of these girls and young women, they built the structures that condoned their abuses, they profited heavily from them. No apology is permissable. They must have it all torn away from them, they must be stripped of their rotten gains, they must never be allowed anywhere near athletics ever again.

I’m too cynical to believe any of that will happen, though. Nassar is getting what he deserves, everyone else will walk away with their wallets stuffed.

Why is Paul Ryan smiling? Because he got paid.

House Speaker Paul Ryan collected nearly $500,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Koch and his wife after helping usher through a massive tax reform law. According to a recent campaign finance report filed Thursday, Koch and his wife Elizabeth each donated $247,7000 to Ryan’s joint fundraising committee… The Republican tax overhaul plan passed in December benefited Koch Industries, as it cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, among other cuts. The legislation then got a boost from the Kochs’ multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to highlight its benefits. And 13 days after it passed, Charles and Elizabeth Koch made the near $500,000 donation to Team Ryan, which raises money for the congressman, the National Republican Congressional Committee and a political action committee run by Ryan. On the same day, Charles and Elizabeth Koch also each donated $237,000 to the NRCC.

There’s a word for this: corruption. Ryan is a bought and paid for stooge for billionaires, and he has received his quid pro quo. It’s gotten so bad they don’t even try to hide it any more.

There is a culture of corruption in too many police departments. Case in point: New York police (and who knows who else) hands out ‘get out of jail free’ cards to their officers. Pulled over for a speeding ticket? Wave one of these and the policeman is likely to just wave you on.

The city’s police-officers union is cracking down on the number of “get out of jail free” courtesy cards distributed to cops to give to family and friends.

Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association boss Pat Lynch slashed the maximum number of cards that could be issued to current cops from 30 to 20, and to retirees from 20 to 10, sources told The Post.

The cards are often used to wiggle out of minor trouble such as speeding tickets, the theory being that presenting one suggests you know someone in the NYPD.

The rank and file is livid.

“They are treating active members like s–t, and retired members even worse than s–t,” griped an NYPD cop who retired on disability. “All the cops I spoke to were . . . very disappointed they couldn’t hand them out as Christmas gifts.”

“Cracking down” means reducing the number by a third, not getting rid of this unethical practice altogether. And clearly the cops are treating these as a privilege to be taken for granted — they deserve these special exemptions. I guess there’s one law for the friends and family of the police, and a different, harsher law for the rest of us.

Tammy Duckworth addresses the Republicans.

I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft-dodger. And I have a message for Cadet Bone Spurs: If you cared about our military, you’d stop baiting Kim Jong Un into a war that could put 85,000 American troops and millions of innocent civilians in danger.

It’s a good speech. I do have concerns that it takes praising the military, rather than the lives of children or ordinary working people, to rouse some rudimentary sense of shame in the electorate.

Over at the Miami Herald, there is an article about “Twenty life lessons to be learned from the Stormy Daniels/Donald Trump affair, as illuminated by the Wall Street Journal, Slate.com and, fittingly, InTouch Weekly magazine”. The author is…Carl Hiaasen. I read it, and it suddenly sunk in that this situation is exactly what would happen in a Hiaasen novel: bumbling, incompetent crooks, corruption at all levels of government, and now I expect a resolution that does not involve the wheels of justice grinding towards certainty, but chance and chaos terminating a series of coincidences.

I also think that maybe there is something to that “whole universe is a simulation” nonsense, if we’re willing to admit that it is coded as a tragic comic-opera spiced with absurdity.