Good riddance to No Labels

After huffing and puffing about how we needed to have a new party that had no ideology, the group No Labels has shut down because they could not find any high profile (or even medium profile) people willing to agree to be their presidential nominee.

The group’s decision not to field a ticket will likely be celebrated by Democrats, who had long warned that No Labels’ effort would have helped boost Donald Trump and harm President Joe Biden.

The group, in its statement, said it will “remain engaged over the next year during what is likely to be the most divisive presidential election of our lifetimes. We will promote dialogue around major policy challenges and call out both sides when they speak and act in bad faith.”

Yeah, well good luck with that. Nobody is likely to pay any attention to the pontifications of people who thought of themselves as more important than ideas.

The whole enterprise was ridiculous. Any political party has to stand for some thing, just like any group of people need to have some common goal that unites them if they are to get together. The idea that people who do not stand for anything would get together around some leader who also does not stand for anything other than being proud of not standing for anything, and that a party platform would somehow emerge from such a group, was an idea of extreme silliness. It has now deservedly been consigned to the dustbin of history.

The person who was the national director of the group says that he will now vote for Joe Biden over serial sex abuser Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Anthony Comstock should be made the face of the Republican party

It has become increasingly clear that there is a Republican war on sex and that Anthony Comstock has become their flag bearer.

Who is this Comstock, you ask? He is a 19th century anti-vice campaigner who “was dedicated to upholding Christian morality [and] opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, and patent medicine”. There is a law named after him that is still on the books that reflects his anti-sex views. The Comstock Law was referred to by the two most extreme members of the US Supreme Court Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas during oral arguments on the legality of women accessing by mail the abortion-terminating drug mifepristone that can be used for abortions.

Rebecca Solnit makes a convincing case that the Republican party has become a full-fledged anti-sex movement that is following in the footsteps of Comstock.
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More on the right wing freakout over Easter and the Transgender Day of Visibility

The Daily Show show had fun at the expense of Faux News and other rightwing news sources losing their minds over the fact that this year, because of a calendar coincidence, Transgender Day of Visibility coincided with Easter. And let’s be clear, these people know better. They are just pretending to be outraged, like a lot of their other ‘outrages’.

Desi Lydic made the important point that what these people object to is not that the visibility day coincides with Easter, they dislike the fact that the transgender community exists at all.

Also, make sure you get to the very funny conversation she has with Michael Kosta that begins at the 6:35 mark.

Lina Khan interviewed by Jon Stewart

I have long said that the appointment of Lina Khan as head of the Federal Trade Commission is the best decision that Joe Biden made. She is smart and aggressive and not afraid to take on the business giants. On Monday’s episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviews her about how the FTC is trying to combat the monopolies that now exist in so many sectors of the economy, thanks to the relaxing of regulatory rules governing mergers that began with Ronald Reagan and have continued since then.

The horror in Gaza keeps getting worse

A state of famine in Gaza, if not already present, is imminent. The government of Israel is deliberately starving to death an entire population of two million people by limiting the amount of food aid to well below the levels necessary to maintain even basic levels of nutrition. The soldiers at the checkpoints for trucks to gain entry into Gaza delay the trucks for inordinate lengths of time and often turn them back for the most trivial of reasons, such as having scissors in medical kits, absurdly claiming that these could be used as weapons. A “clear pattern has emerged” of Israeli obstruction of aid trucks, which suggests that deliberately creating famine conditions is now official policy.
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Trump posts bond, gets a stricter gag order

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has managed to post the reduced $175 million bond set for him by a panel of the appellate court.

According to a court filing, the $175 million bond he and the other defendants posted Monday was provided by Los Angeles-based Knight Insurance Group. The filing didn’t specify which assets Trump used as collateral for the bond.

Knight’s president, Amit Shah, didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking information about the collateral.

Here is some information about the company that paid the bond. It is also not clear what fee the company charged SSAT.

Meanwhile Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing the hush money criminal trial that is due to start in New York City on April 15th, has stiffened the gag order barring SSAT from attacking people after he attacked the judge’s daughter.
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TV review: 3 Body Problem (2024)

My recent two posts on UFOs and the possible existence of life emerging on other planets in the universe generated quite a bit of interest. Those interested in this topic may enjoy the new series just released on Netflix that deals with this. I recently finished watching all eight episodes (each roughly an hour long) of this show.

It deals with a group of five friends who were together at Oxford University and were all the proteges of a physicist Vera Ye who herself was the daughter of an accomplished Chinese physicist Ye Wenjie, whose father, also a physics professor, was murdered by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution for teaching Einstein’s theories. While remaining good friends, the careers of the five have diverged. Two of them (Jin Cheng and Saul Durand) are hotshot physicists, one (Auggie Salazar) is the chief scientific officer of a nanotechnology company. One (Jack Rooney) dropped out to start a snack company that has made him very wealthy, while the fifth (Will Downing) became a physics teacher, feeling that he did not have what it takes to be top-rank research scientist.
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Why we should not have people routinely carrying guns

If you believe the gun fanatics, we are all safer if we carry guns around with us because then if someone starts shooting, then you or others with guns can shoot them first. The problem with that logic is that when people go around carrying guns, they are tempted to use them to resolve conflicts that could have been settled amicably or with at worst a fistfight. The latter, while undesirable, usually does not end up with someone dead or seriously injured unless the beating is carried to an extreme. When there is a crowd, others will usually step in to stop it. But when guns become involved, bystanders will understandably flee the scene or lie low..

We see another example of what can happen when people unnecessarily carry guns around when last night, seven juveniles between the ages of 12 and 17 were shot outside a mall in Indiana because a conflict arose among them.
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Bigots will seize upon anything to advance bigotry

March 31st is the day that has been designated Transgender Day of Visibility and president Biden made an annual proclamation to that effect. The date is an international recognition that has been around since 2009. The White House routinely issues proclamations such as this to recognize various things, and this one was one of 11 that were issued on March 29th.

But this year, March 31st is also Easter Sunday and so bigots have shrilly proclaimed that the date of the visibility day was deliberately chosen by the White House so as to be an insult to Christianity.
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The Trump stock bubble

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seems to be about to receive a huge financial windfall at exactly the moment when he most needed it, when he is facing a multitude of huge fines as a result of losses in sexual assault and fraud cases.

The windfall comes in the form of a merger between his social media company Trump Media & Technology Group (that is behind his social media site Truth Social) and a financial shell company, Digital World Acquisition. That combined company went public and as of Friday, it had a market capitalization of close to $8.4 billion, with SSAT’s share being around $4.9 billion.
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