Blue Country Gazette

Monday, May 23, 2022

ALDOUS J. PENNYFARTHING: Group that sunk Madison Cawthorn's reelection bid sets its sights on Colorado's very own Lauren Boebert

Lauren Boebert waits for returns during a watch party in Grand Junction, Colo., Tuesday, June 30, 2020. Boebert defeated five-term Rep. Scott Tipton in the Republican primary in the 3rd Congressional District. (McKenzie Lange/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP)

Many D.C. politicians are—to paraphrase Winston Churchill—riddles wrapped in mysteries inside an enigma. Not so with Lauren Boebert. She’s twaddle wrapped in bacon inside an Arby’s. The congresswoman tends to wear her emotions on her sleeve, along with about 6 pounds of arrogance—apparently garnered from giving birth to offspring in weird, unsanitary places.

If voters in Colorado’s 3rd District, which Boebert somehow represents, still don’t know enough about the freshman congresswoman to reject her then we need to do something drastic, because her sins are legion. (She’s a horrible boss to her embittered employees, for one thing.)

With that in mind, the same rakish rapscallions who just successfully Moskva’d North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s thankfully brief congressional tenure are now taking aim at Boebert’s weak-ass claim to her seat.

Insider:

The group that posted a viral sexually explicit video of a nude Rep. Madison Cawthorn in bed with another man is now focusing on Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado for its next takedown, Insider has learned.

"I think we're going to go after Lauren Boebert in Colorado in a similar way," David B. Wheeler, a cofounder of the American Muckrakers PAC, told Insider Wednesday. "I think we're going to engage in that race pretty quickly."

The group on Thursday launched fireboebert.com, seeking tips on information, pictures, videos, or documents on Boebert or her associates. The first tweet by @FireBoebert read, "Hi @RepBoebert - Ask @RepCawthorn about us. We look forwarding to getting to know you."

I seriously wonder what they could reveal that would be worse than what’s already out there. What could possibly turn off her base at this point? Finding out she once read a book without pictures?

The website sports a bright red-and-orange “FIRE BOEBERT” logo and includes a reference to Cawthorn’s recent primary loss and Boebert’s upcoming primary. “One fired May 17. The other will be fired on June 28.”

Wheeler says he’s already collected “interesting information” on Boebert, though he admits it’s “certainly not as salacious as some of the Cawthorn stuff.” He told Insider that the information relates to financial matters, though he didn’t provide specifics.

That’s somewhat tantalizing, because Boebert has already found herself in hot water over campaign finance irregularities, having improperly used campaign funds to cover personal rent and utilities. What else might she be hiding?

Be sure to stop by fireboebert.com semi-regularly to find out. And to check out some of the “Bat Shit” messages that Boebert supporters (yes, they really do exist) have been sending the site since its launch.

"Boebert has already found herself in hot water over campaign finance irregularities, having improperly used campaign funds to cover personal rent and utilities."

Sunday, May 22, 2022

McConnell makes it unofficially official: The Republican Party is now the white nationalist party

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky), hold a news conference after the Senate Republican Policy luncheon on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on December 1, 2020. (Photo by Tom Williams / POOL / AFP) (Photo by TOM WILLIAMS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The highest ranking Republican official in U.S. government, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, repeatedly refused to denounce “replacement theory” in a press conference Tuesday afternoon. That puts him in company with New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third in command among House Republicans who seems to be an adherent of the white nationalist conspiracy theory.

The slaughter of 10 Black Americans in Buffalo by a white nationalist terrorist and the reaction to that carnage clarifies a whole hell of a lot about the Republican Party of 2022 and the individual members of it. Especially McConnell, who controls half of the Senate and is the one person with the most power to turn the white supremacist GOP ship around. He won’t do it.

Asked repeatedly Tuesday about his responsibility as a party leader to condemn the theory, he refused, dancing around the question instead by calling the shooter a “deranged young man,” refusing to acknowledge the motivation behind the massacre. The most he would do is condemn generic racism. “Look—racism of any sort is abhorrent in America and ought to be stood up to by everybody, both Republicans, Democrats, all Americans,” McConnell said.

By the way, Stefanik isn’t trying to redeem herself by denouncing white nationalism either. Instead, she says the Buffalo terrorist attack shouldn’t be politicized. “Our nation is heartbroken and sad and of the horrific loss of life in Buffalo. This was an act of pure evil and the criminal should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Stefanik said. “It is not the time to politicize this tragedy. We mourn together as a nation.”

Back to McConnell. Pressed again on the theory and whether he agreed with Stefanick and Fox’s Tucker Carlson—the theory’s main proponent who has apparently succeeded in making it Republican mainstream thought—that Democrats were purposefully trying to steal elections through immigration, he still wouldn’t answer. Instead he condemned the Biden administration’s policy on the U.S.-Mexico border. “What I’m disturbed about with regard to the Southern border is the relative openness of it. This administration has taken a number of steps in the direction of just throwing our border wide open once again and that ought to be addressed,” he said.

That’s what he’s concerned about. Not the fact that Republican Senate candidates across the country are promoting white nationalism and that he is actively endorsing them and working for their takeover of the Senate. Perhaps it’s because he shares something in common with them?

MOSCOW MITCH: "Nothing personal against colored people, but we whites just need a little more space to ourselves."

Saturday, May 21, 2022

SURPRISE: Our Original Founders Were Indigenous Women Who Controlled Their Own Bodies

Harvey Wasserman / Reader Supported News

20 May 22

The real Founders of American society were not the 55 rich white male interlopers who staged a coup d’etat in 1787-9 … and whose misogynist progeny have always wanted to ban abortion.

Our true Original Founders were the Indigenous matriarchs who ran most of America for thousands of years before the first whites set foot here.

For tens of centuries they controlled their pregnancies by herbal means. The idea that any government (tribal or otherwise) could rule a woman’s uterus would evoke disbelief and contempt from men and women alike.

In fact most North American tribes were run by women. The chieftains were commonly male. But they were chosen and could be removed at will by the matriarchs, who ran the homes and gardens, raised the children and made the major decisions about the future of the tribe.

As one Indigenous matriarch has explained, the men were allowed to be chiefs because “it makes them feel important and it gives them something to do.”

There were indeed tribes where men dominated. For many white “Christian” historians, the idea that females ran any society remains impossible to comprehend.

The US Congress denied our First Peoples the right to vote until 1924. In a 1980s hearing on banning peyote, Chief Justice William Rehnquist was heard to say that the First Amendment “does not apply to Native Americans.”

No Indigenous Justice now sits on a Supreme Court hell-bent to colonize the female uterus.

Trump’s MAGA cult wallows in fear of feminism. A score of abuse charges against him remain unresolved. A ban on abortion would force his rape victims to victim to bear his spawn.

From 800 broken treaties to eco-suicidal impositions and more, the Trump/Bannon/Putin/Tucker White Supremacists aim to obliterate our Original Indigenous rights.

But the First US Constitutionalists—-including George Washington, John Adams and Ben Franklin—-gratefully acknowledged their debt to the Indigenous. That legacy was memorialized in a 1987 Congressional Resolution approved while Nancy Reagan sat as our ruling matriarch.

The true cradle of American democracy was the Hodenosaunee nation, spread across what’s now upstate New York.

Called “Iroquois” by the French, these People of the Longhouse pioneered the world’s most advanced democracy, linking the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. Their Confederation, said Franklin, ran “better than the British Parliament.”

Their 113 Codicils—-predecessor to the Bill of Rights—-guaranteed individual rights and freedoms. A woman’s right to choose was everywhere assumed for thousands of years before the whites came.

Those rights permeate our culture. A woman’s power to control her own body is enshrined in our Indigenous Originalism. The Court of the People must finally embrace its righteous power.

"A ban on abortion would force [Trump's] rape victims to victim to bear his spawn."

Harvey Wasserman’s People’s Spiral of US History is available via solartopia@gmail.com and at on-line publishers. He convenes the Green Grassroots Emergency Election Protection zoom Mondays at 5pm ET via www.electionprotection2024.org.

Friday, May 20, 2022

Forced birther tells Congress that fetuses are incinerated to generate electricity for D.C.

ScreenShot2022-05-19at11.56.55AM.png — **Catherine Glenn Foster promotes macabre lies.**

The unpopular movement to take away reproductive rights from more than 50% of the country is driven by a belief that “life” begins at conception. Regardless of your opinions on what “life” means and in what context, and regardless of your beliefs in our constitutional rights as citizens of this country and human beings of the world, one thing we can all agree on is that the need for conservatives in our country to demonize the concepts of abortion in any and all cases has frequently relied on the grotesque.

On Thursday Catherine Glenn Foster, president and CEO of Americans United for Life, spoke a real flurry of lies in support of her organization’s forced birther position during congressional testimony. The singular note that any forced birther hits when discussing abortion is that it’s sort of gross. Surgery in general can be bloody and yucky since it requires doctors to go inside of our bodies to fix things, excise issues, and stitch back together what has been damaged. The problem is that the singular note struck by forced birthers always comes back to this: I believe you are killing babies. This is a problem because, for one, most people don’t see it that way, and for two, get your face out of other people’s uteruses, asshole.

As a result, people like Foster must employ increasingly macabre language, violence-inciting language, to try and make their position seem more robust than it really is. During one section of Foster’s testimony, she claimed an aborted fetus is a “human person from the earliest days, poisoned in the womb, and dismembered. Torn limb from limb ...” Surprisingly, Foster’s organization, which has a presence across the country, doesn’t seem to have done anything about all of those children actually being poisoned by lead water. Oh well. Anyway, Foster then launched into a brand-new, utterly ridiculous lie about “the nature of abortions.”

Foster explains that these abortions become “bodies that are thrown away in medical waste bins,” and then she reveals something that no one in Washington, D.C., or anywhere in the world knew: Washington’s electrical grid is dependent on abortions. What, you say? Am I talking about, you ask? Here’s Foster to explain that fetuses, “in places like Washington, D.C., [are] burned to power the lights of the city’s homes and streets.”

Is that possibly true? Had you heard that made-up fact before? Because it’s completely made up. But you know who else believes that liberal cities use incinerated fetuses to light their homes and streets? The forced birther “activist” who was arrested after a stash of fetuses was discovered in her D.C. home. That’s the same woman whose anti-abortion group is now “claiming” that the group got those five fetuses stored in her home off of a medical truck that had 115 fetuses. Where are the missing fetuses? The forced birther group says they buried all but five, and then I guess decided to hide five fetuses, unburied, in their home? Got it. The story is dubious, to say the least. Isn’t there something in a bible or two about not bearing false witness?

Where did this wild talking point come from? It comes from the same misinformation bubble that led Republican Nebraska state Sen. Bruce Bostelman to announce on the floor of the Nebraska state Senate that elementary school teachers were spending money on kitty litter in order to cater to children who identified as “furries.” They weren’t and they still aren’t.

No one is powering anything with biological waste. As Salon points out, this kind of disinformation is in line with general, soggy, right-wing conspiracy theories. This delusion is like a “a janky version of the Matrix” where our society is being powered by abortions instead of people. One of the most pathetic aspects of these kinds of conspiracy theories is how poorly they are written. At least The Matrix retains some logic within its own fictional universe.

For all of the talk about “religious freedom,” the fact remains that the forced birther position is a religious one that’s not supported by many even older religions, and most Christians don’t hold the views on the matter that evangelicals do. You can try and inaccurately describe surgery and medical procedures all you want, but it doesn’t change what most Americans believe are inalienable human rights.

The problem here is that what these right-wingers want to believe is too good to be true in their estimation. When you only can see monsters, you need to find proof, and fast. Otherwise, after a time, you might realize there’s only one monster—and it stares back at you in your bathroom mirror every morning.

"The fact remains that the forced birther position is a religious one that’s not supported by many even older religions, and most Christians don’t hold the views on the matter that evangelicals do."

Cartoon: The Real Great Replacement

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Thursday, May 19, 2022

ALDOUS J. PENNYFARTHING: This pro-Roe, anti-GOP ad needs to be commandeered by every Democratic candidate in the country

Because brainless, insensate, limpid clumps of soulless cell matter need to stick together, Republicans across the country are now becoming full-on blastocyst boosters in the wake of the draft SCOTUS decision that will likely vaporize Roe v. Wade later this summer, just in time for thousands of prom-goers’ missed periods.

Many of these true believers are so extreme, in fact, they insist on prioritizing the “rights” of fertilized eggs over the welfare of rape and incest victims—including those who are, say, 12 years old and trapped in abusive homes.

And there’s no need to embroider those realities with scary exaggerations as Republicans do with their critical race theory bedtime stories and fever dreams about teachers “grooming” kids by telling them about Liberace. The scuttling of Roe is a clear and present danger to millions of women and girls, and we really need to treat it as such.

So that’s why I was so heartened by the following ad, which exposes—with an appropriately lurid sense of alarm—the real dangers our country currently faces. The ad, which is being run by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s reelection campaign, takes direct aim at her likely Republican opponent, former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt.

Catherine Cortez Masto

@CortezMasto

My opponent clearly doesn’t trust women to make their own health care decisions. I will always defend women’s reproductive rights.

7:00 AM · May 16, 2022

REPORTER: “Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an abortion restriction bill that makes no exception for rape, incest, or human trafficking.”

DESANTIS: “There’s nobody I trust more to join me in this fight than Adam Laxalt.”

REPORTER: “The court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

REPORTER: “Adam Laxalt says it is an historic victory.”

REPORTER: “Mitch McConnell said a Republican-controlled Congress could pass a nationwide abortion ban.”

DESANTIS: “We need his leadership in the United States Senate.”

REPORTER: “No exception for rape, incest, or human trafficking.”

Needless to say, forcing rape and incest victims to give birth to their abusers’ babies is not a popular platform plank. Only 16% of respondents to a Texas poll—fucking Texas, FFS!—think it’s a good idea. Nevertheless, numerous Republicans and other conservatives persist in this lunacy.

It’s well past time we make them pay, don’t you think?

Lady Liberty: America's latest Female Superhero.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Tucker Carlson's "Great Replacement" Theory Comes From an Anti-US Nazi French Thinker Who Considered All Americans Negroes

Tucker Carlson's

The aftermath of the Buffalo shooting. (photo: The National)

readersupportednews.org

Juan Cole / Informed Comment 16 May 22

A hate-filled 18-year-old murdered 10 and wounded 3 African-Americans in Buffalo on Saturday, having penned a rambling screed about replacement theory. The most common version of this whiny idea, imported from the more hysterical fringes of the French Right wing, holds that Jewish capitalists are importing cheap immigrant labor to replace more highly-paid white workers. Notoriously, the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 against the removal of Confederate statues chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

The shooter who killed 11 Jewish Americans at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 espoused the idea of the “great replacement.”

The hateful ideology is shamelessly promoted by Fox Cable News, the CEO of which is Lachlan Murdoch, with the worst offender being the Lord Haw-Haw of the twenty-first century, Tucker Carlson, who exposed his audience to the great replacement excrement 400 times in the past year.

Republican legislators across the US have been putting in laws against the teaching of critical race theory, which helps us understand the hold and the effect of ideas like the great replacement, and which hasn’t killed anyone. They don’t seem to be as eager to legislate against Nazi ideas. (It is a Nazi idea.)

The racist notion of the “great replacement” originated in Europe and had many exponents of various stripes. Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, however, the phrase itself was not coined by Maurice Barres in early twentieth-century France, though he certainly believed in the ideas behind it.

The phrase, and the most extensive elaboration of the theory, originated with the French Nazi Rene Binet (1913-1957), who served during WW II in The Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne, which consisted of French collaborators. You don’t get more fascist than that– the Charlemagne Brigade were the last troops to defend Hitler’s bunker before his suicide, and staged a failed, desperate fight against the Soviet army’s advance into Berlin.

Binet fulminated after the war against “the invasion of Europe by Negroes and Mongols,” by which he meant Americans and Soviets. He saw Americans as an impure mestizo “race” (he was a biological racist). He also launched diatribes against unbridled capitalism and the ways in which Jews were using it to abet the replacement of civilized white Europeans.

So this supposedly far right American nationalist idea actually originated in hatred for Americans and a denigration of their supposed “whiteness” by the European Right, which did not see Russians as “white” either.

It is worth noting that unlike cowardly boot-lickers like Benet, the true patriots were the multi-cultural French. The French Army and then De Gaulle’s Free French Army included thousands of riflemen (Tirailleurs) from Senegal. History.net explains: “During World War II the French recruited 179,000 Tirailleurs; some 40,000 were deployed to Western Europe. Many were sent to bolster the French Maginot Line along its border with Germany and Belgium during the German invasion in 1940—where many were killed or taken prisoner. After the fall of France, others served in the Free French army in Tunisia, Corsica, and Italy, and in the south of France during the liberation.”

I had two uncles who served in WW II, one at the Battle of the Bulge. In my family, we are not in any doubt that it was the Allies who were the good guys. And, yes, the Allies were multi-racial. They included the Tuskegee Airmen, who bombed Nazi targets, The Allies were the diverse American rainbow, and it was their diversity that gave them the strength to prevail.

People like Tucker Carlson are pitifully ignorant of history and so are wielding an anti-American, highly unpatriotic notion for the sake of their television ratings. Ironically, Tucker’s intellectual forebear, Binet, would have considered him a mongrel “Negro.” As defenders of illiberalism and implicitly of hatred of Jews, these useful idiots of the far right are symbolically still deployed around Hitler’s bunker, defending it from the approaching Allies.

If you want to start practicing in case Trump and his Mega MAGAs take over, here is the Maestro himself doing the Nazi salute.