After a consistent flow of decisions tearing down the wall of separation between church and state, readers have proposed that the U.S. Supreme Court should henceforth be known as the Supreme Christian Court of the United States. Others call it the Supreme Christian Taliban Court.
In every decision involving religion, the Christian Court makes no effort to balance freedom of religion and the Constitutional prohibition against establishment of religion.
This Court agreed that a baker open to the public may refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple because gay marriage violates his religious beliefs.
This Court requires Maine to fund two evangelical schools in Maine that openly discriminates against those who do not share their beliefs. The state is thus compelled to subsidize discrimination that federal and state law forbid.
This Court supports a school coach’s right to pray in public while he is working and influencing students to follow his lead. Will they next support teachers who are moved to pray in their classrooms?
What next, a revival of school prayer?
This Court, in true Taliban style, allows states to revoke women’s reproductive rights, the decision to control their own bodies.
The Court is drunk with its unchecked power. With a certain majority of 5 hard-core extremists, and the likely vote of a powerless Chief Justice, this Court is set to remake American society, to roll back the rights and freedoms that most Americans take for granted.
Do they want to take us back to 1868, as Justice Thomas wrote, when people of color and women could not vote?
Or do they want to transport us to an imaginary world where father knows best, women know their place, Black people quietly acquiesce to indignities, and everyone is forced to pray the same prayers?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They have perverted the interpretation of the First Amendment establishment clause in the same way they have warped the interpretation of the Second Amendment. The Church Lads & Lady do their Supremacy Dance on the graves of both. Who knows what’s next?
The Indiana AG who is targeting the doctor who performed the abortion for the 10-year-old Ohio rape victim, also, led a 16 state coalition to defend Catholic schools’ rights to fire teachers in same sex marriages.
Judge Scalia, who was a conservative Catholic, said in 2004 that Jews would be better off under a Christian government. He claimed it was Germany’s separation of church and state that initiated the attacks against Jews. In contradiction to his opinion, the Catholic political party, Centre, enabled the law that gave Hitler his dictatorial powers.
The majority on SCOTUS have suspended thinking and legal precedent to take away the freedoms of Americans. What underpins their actions is the same bogus beliefs as Scalia’s.
Linda–
“He [Scalia] claimed it was Germany’s separation of church and state that initiated the attacks against Jews.” I can’t even make sense of that. Do you have a cite where Scalia explained that argument?
It was Scalia’s separation of lips and brain that made him say that.
“Scalia to Synagogue” – Thom Hartmann reported the story at his site. Common Dreams and AP covered the speech, as well.
Found it, thanks Linda. Hartmann on the nose, as always.
Language again. As one who is not a Christian but has tried to live his life as ethically as I can, the members of this lunatic cult should not be allowed with getting away with being portrayed as Christians. Doing so cheapens the term for true believers of a consistent ethical code. This is not a Christian Court. Six of them have no clue about the meaning of the Golden Rule.
We cannot continue the cult to continue to steal and pervert our language.
Good point, Greg.
How can someone call himself a Christian if he doesn’t act Christian?
The same way that a Pope can call himself Catholic when he has shielded pedophiles.
Self Relection
One way mirror
Little help
For finding error
In oneself
Reflection
But maybe a better title would be Genuflection
I’m not a fan of over-generalization in general, especially since I have known and still know many people who are genuine in their faiths and matters of conscience without the (fire-)brand of crusading fanaticism we are seeing too much of today. Maybe it’s even their very quietude keeping them from speaking out against the mob. But it’s still true — silence is commonly taken for assent, and if they do not defend their brand, who will?
I will refrain from the religion discussion, but when you write, “if they do not defend their brand, who will?” you have basically summarized my entire discussion (and maybe to some extent, Linda too) in nine words more effectively than I could in however many words I used to try to convey precisely this. Thanks so much.
Well said, Jon.
But I’m committed to a different tack: doing what I can to wean young people way from this superstition, which can so easily turn for the worse and has done so so often.
Jon.
Agree.
We were gobsmacked by Roe’s overturn because we were misled by a burnished brand that hid Bannon et al’s apocalyptic agenda.
Each American needs to understand that the Catholic product is overtly and covertly antagonistic to women, to gay people, to freedom and is engaged in a massive power grab.
Sure, but the present Supreme Cult is also slaughtering one of the sacred cows of the whole Protestant Reformation, namely, respect for the individual conscience over and above any church hierophancy.
Jon-
Do you think a failure to name the enemy affords them protection?
Bob Shepherd @ 2:40pm– Sorry, I find that, well, reprehensible, if what you mean is you are doing what you can to wean young people away from their personal sense of spirituality. Wean them away from imagining they have any right to impose their sense of spirituality on others via laws, I’m OK with that. But I’m not onboard with adults/ potential role-models with influence over kids in the midst of developing their own concepts, telling them what to think. That’s you pushing your particular understanding of the universe on those just hatching what makes sense for them in this world. It’s fine to challenge them, that’s what teachers do. [I expect that’s what you meant to say, no?]
Jon Awbrey: “silence is commonly taken for assent, and if they do not defend their brand, who will?”
That is profound. It’s the criticism of Dem party “messaging” I so often encounter here as well as in many Dem/ liberal comments to political articles. In “our” [Dems/ liberals] defense— and also those on the liberal side of church congregations/ spiritualism—I think many are still in shock.
Anyone born post-WWII thro those born in the ‘80s have been accustomed to a generally-liberalizing cultural tradition, reflected in laws that have tracked that increasing cultural liberalism. Only sharp, well-educated people have been able to read the tea-leaves since the ‘80s [the disastrous effects of ‘trickle-down’ & neoliberal economic policy; Newt Gingrich; originalist SCOTUS confirmations; Tea Party/ backlash to Obama election; Citizens-United decision & more]. Getting that a huge backlash to liberalism was underway. Trump election/ admin/ the ”Big Lie”/ Jan 6 has been the wake-up call as to how far our democracy has declined in 40+ yrs, but it’s still sinking in for our perhaps 51-52% majority liberals. The bunch of June SCOTUS decisions is icing on the cake, driving the point home.
I worry that many of them still have some lazy faith in our govtl institutions to right the ship, still not having grasped how undermined they have become by now-unfettered capitalism, meaning big $ is the puppet-master.
Now is the time [better late than never] for liberals—and moderates!—to raise their voices against this onslaught before it’s too late.
Sorry, Ginny. The fact is that I mean very much to wean young people away from these frightful religious superstitions. I don’t think them noble or ennobling or worth preserving. Quite the contrary: I think them childish and dangerous. And they prevent actual thinking about the topics that they address.
Religions put forward propositions about the world. It’s my contention that these propositions should not be off limits to discussion, debate, critique, because they have the “religion” label. And if they are stupid propositions, one should simply say so. No, I’m sorry. I don’t believe that virgins give birth or, despite Donald Trump, that there is a character called Satan at work in the world. There is zero evidence for such nonsense, and simply truthfulness requires calling it what it is. In addition, the future of democracy might well depend on how many young people we can win away from such nonsense, especially in a time when the Extreme Court is busy trying to pave the way for fundamentalist Christian madrassas.
You might be surprised to learn, Ginny, that I am neither an atheist nor a theist. But one thing I am almost completely sure of is that the propositions about reality put forward by the ancient religions are childish and downright silly and literally thousands of years backward and not supported by any evidence whatsoever. I also think it abusive to teach children such nonsense.
I do understand that it’s difficult for some people to give up their invisible friends.
“I don’t believe that virgins give birth”
Well, with today’s implantation of embryos a virgin actually can give birth.
But the feat would have been far more impressive 2000 years ago.
And you must admit, it is a good story:
Pregnant daughter to mother: “Mom. I swear on the Holy Bible that I never had sex with that man …Mr. Lewinsky. Or with any other man, for that matter. I’m a virgin through and through and even have the notorized documentation to prove it”
There is a delightful series on cable called “Jane the Virgin.”
It’s a telenovella, a soap opera Hispanic-style. Jane got pregnant because her gynecologist made a mistake and implanted sperm instead of giving her a Pap smear.
SomeDAM:
I know that people are supposed to “show respect” to religious belief–that that’s a widely held position. But I don’t have any respect for it. I have precisely the opposite. It seems to me breathtakingly ironic that religions make claims to truth and characterized dishonesty as a sin and yet are fundamentally dishonest, involving people lying to themselves and others about what they pretend to understand and know. No, you don’t know the truth of this stuff, any more than folks living in ancient Norway knew the truth about Odin and Frigg. Here’s a tell: people are so unsure about this stuff, about what they pretend to believe to be true when it comes to religion, that they have to build walls around it, make it out of bounds, impolite to criticize. Suppose that I were to say to you that Chicago is the greatest city in Indiana. You would feel no compunction about pointing out to me that I’m wrong, that Chicago is in Illinois. But if it’s a religious claim–prayers are answered, you can only be saved by grace, you go to heaven when you die, Christ died and was resurrected after three days, and so on–the claim, no matter how childish, how ludicrous, how like the other crazy things that people used to believe thousands of years ago in a credulous age, must be treated with respect? Why? Because if you treated any of this as you would treat any other claim about the universe, you would dismiss the stuff out of hand.
Here’s the thing: I take the notion that you shouldn’t tell falsehoods seriously. I think that perpetrating falsehood is really damaging, that it undermines people’s ability to think about almost everything. And I think that telling falsehoods to children as part of their training for adulthood is particularly egregious. It’s simply not acceptable.
Enough. Enough. It is far, far past time that we threw over these superstitions from the infancy of our culture before they become, again, one of the primary vehicles for propping up a murderous autocracy, which has been a major function of monotheistic religion since its inception in the ancient city-states.
I am a Christian. I don’t brag about it or lord it over others, I constantly strive to better understand what draws me to it. It is never a process in stasis. I read the Bible not because I believe it is inerrant, but because it is flawed. It is a fascinating document that reveals the ongoing failures and foibles of humanity through human inspired allegory while attempting to provide an avenue for moral living. I do not find that the human construct of religion does this. Most of the dogma presented by fundamentalist ideology in all faiths is not biblical in origin. Abortion is exhibit A in this regard. What fascinates me about Jesus, and the Buddha and other great spiritual thought leaders throughout history for that matter, is not the fealty to orthodoxy but the ongoing contradiction to it. Over a thousand times the Bible exhorts us to care for the poor, yet societies throughout history act to exclude them. Most religions speak of the Golden Rule, but few human institutions live it. The Bible reads that we should love one another and serve aliens that are not of our tribe, yet human organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church, ISIS and every country in history that has promoted a particular religion act out of self preservation to extinguish the other. This is not the result of a belief in God, but the use of ignorance as a blunt force instrument to hold onto power. I live in Chattanooga, Tn, where I frequently hike to views of our valley that show me that I am a minuscule part of something much bigger. When I learned that Einstein declared that mass and energy are constant it all made since to me. When I see the new pictures coming back from the Webb Telescope it simply reinforces this idea. I don’t think that my beliefs are based on a false mythology and I certainly don’t prescribe to the Monty Python imagery of an old man with a deep voice directing our fate. My belief is driven by the same motivation for scientific inquiry. I don’t ever expect to understand an ultimate truth, but I do find myself as that pesky fly in God’s ointment.
Thank you, Paul. I do not mean to disparage the world’s wisdom literature taken as wisdom literature. I’ve spent a lot of my life studying it and would not have done so if I didn’t think that there was value in it. But there is a difference in valuing world mythologies and actually believing in them.
Bethree
Rhetorically, without teachers similar to Bob, who will tell girls like the one who became Josh Duggar’s wife that they have agency and it’s not lesser than that of men? Who will tell girls like Amy Coney Barrett and boys like Alito, that they don’t have a right to take away freedoms because of their belief in pronouncements from an amorphism?
The U.S. doesn’t have its major religions practicing an apolitical existence, therefore your comments are like a version of the program West Wing set in current times with misplaced 1770’s circa paraphenalia strewn all over.
“her gynecologist made a mistake and implanted sperm instead of giving her a Pap smear.”
Presumably, that would be a “Pop smear”
[image: image.png]
*Torquemada’s Spawn **+ 3 or The T3 Court*
The new power brokers (or imposers) forget they put their hand on Bible as they violate their oath and abuse the Constitution.
The pure Constitutionalists twist and mispresent terms to suit their versions of America and need for control. They forget the colonists were pursuing religious freedom and separation of church and taxes and latch on to the term “Christian” from every pre-1850 document.
It’s a good thing they don’t read Dewey (or for that matter, read)
“A little colony, the members of which are probably mostly known to one another in advance, settle in what is almost, or quite, a wilderness. From belief in its benefits and by tradition, CHIEFLY RELIGIOUS, they wish their children to know at least how to read, write, and figure.”
They argue, even Jefferson had slaves
To feel better, in Texas they’ll be called involuntary tourists or whatever they use to feel better).
We no longer have the “Three-fifths” clause to determine population and representation.
Instead they gerrymander in the most unsubtle racist ways possible to maximize white representation
We no longer have internment camps.
We have overcrowded, predominantly black, guilty until proven innocent (by some one-shop liberal freedom project, not the courts) prisons.
Their version of “We the people” is literal 1787: straight white men superior to women who feigned regulation, taxation, and inclusion
They do not want government to control them or what they can say or do.
And since “We” did not include women, the government can tell women what they can and cannot do with their bodies.
They accept “the common good” as long as their right-wing, every which way phobic state is used as what is “common”
Please register to vote, help those who need picture i.d. get one, and vote. The State races are more critical than ever before.
We have to stop the Repugnicans at the ballot box this November. Otherwise, we are doomed.
Yeah, I like to tell my evangelical right wing brethren that if their concept of heaven and hell is true, Dante has described a seventh level of hell they could soon be attending. Not that I’m judgmental or anything.
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote a wonderful story about fallen angels who were sent to earth as punishment when they committed transgressions in heaven. Earth was hell.
Wait, What.
Your argument is as compelling as it is valid.
Always a cheerful moment when I visit Diane’s blog. The Comet strike can not come soon enough. Perhaps a small one on the next Christian Values Summit or CPAC . With the Royal Inquisitors in attendance. But at this point the larger one may be an improvement . At least we could end Global Warming .
Hate to be technically picky, but wouldn’t a comet strike accelerate global warming? At least for what’s left? Or if it were a block of ice, would it create instant cooling or would the heat from the speed of it offset it? Now my whole weekend will be spoiled research the calculations on this. Or writing a draft of a Kung Fu script.
Not sure Greg much like a volcano spewing ash into the air. debris sent into the atmosphere from the impact might block sun light causing cooling. But what the hell , I was a Social Anthropology major so what do I know about Physics .
Note that Maine didn’t sit back and wait. It passed a law that for a private school to accept state funding as is described in this case, they also have to accept state regulations. Don’t expect Maine’s religious school to apply for that funding any time soon.
Checkmate, SCOTUS!
Good for Maine. It will be interesting to see if the Maine evangelicals schools go to the SCOTUS to defend their right to discriminate.
If I am not mistaken in my Originalist Interpretation of the Constitution, the right to Discriminate subsumed by the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
After all, being forced to have your kid share a class with LQBTQ kids is pretty cruel and usual if you are a Conservative and the Framers would almost certainly have thought so as well.
LGBTQ
That’s awesome, Steve!
Maine is unusual for a state with a rural, white population. In rankings, fewer of its residents are latched to religion.
that’s not being Christian. How do I know? Because the bible tells me so.
Depends on the version! Bet yours was’t the bootleg version where Jesus mows down Satan with his AR-15 while on the back of a tyrannosaurus Rex during the Rapture. 😇
The Prince of Piece
Turning the other heat
Prince of Peacekeeper also works
Wouldn’t a Rapture on the back of T-Rex technically be known as the RexTure?
Seriously, if God is all powerful, why didn’t She dispose of Satan long ago?
And if She kept Satan around simply to tempt mankind, isn’t that pretty perverse of her?
The answer to your question can be found in the movie Bedazzled starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Satan was God’s favorite who went bad.
It took almost two decades for the Federal Government to get its act together to back Brown V. Board. why don’t we just follow the conservative lead and ignore this Supreme Courts Puritan Impulse. Oh yeah, reasonable people practice the rule of law while Republicans see it as malleable.
Expanding the supreme court is the only way to restore “balance” and rational judicial action. Yet all the “leaders” of the Dem Party oppose it: Biden, Pelosi, Newsom, et al. Why?
Because they are archaisms.
Yes, Lauren and Bob
“Crusading Court” is more to the point.
But I like Bob’s moniker “The Extreme Court”
CourtUS InterruptUS
Which also happens to be the preferred method of birth control of their main man (The Pope)
Well, maybe not literally . Maybe not.
great headline- it’s irreverent like SCOTUS
All of this is just so much about losers having figured out how to be winners, if only in their own eyes.
In this sense, the extremist SCOTUS losers using the Constitution are no different from the loser that mowed down 19 children and two teachers using an AR-15-style killing machine.
What should we have expected when competition has been the nation’s religion since forever? At some point, the time-delayed effects must arise, just as they are now, and doing so with a vengeance.
Actually pretty close to true for the entire Right Wing .
The Extreme Court
(Hat tip Bob)
Crusading Court
With Papal theme
Will lead to mort
And mort extreme
I forget which wag on Diane’s blog first used that phrase, but I thought it perfect and have adopted it. I would appreciate it if the one who coined it would step forward. Alas, not mine, though I do lay claim for inventing a long, long list of noms de guerre for Glorious Leader Donald Trump.
I’ve used it before. I think is got it from a response on some social media somewhere.
I remembered. I picked this up first from Jon Awbrey.
Could be. I don’t keep track of those things very well as much as I like to properly attribute things to the right person.
I try to remember when it’s a particularly good one. Sometimes, there is independent creation. But sometimes I will create a name for Glorious Leader Who Shines More Orange Than Does the Sun and then will start seeing it used across social media, and that is gratifying as well. Almost all coinage ends up going unacknowledged. That’s how language usually works, isn’t it?
Yep, it sure is!
Until someone comes along and claims ownership, demands payments, etc. . . .
Might have been you I stole it from, Duane! I thought it was Jon.
King Ordure’s Court
(The knights of the Brown Table)
Led by Sure Liesalot
That would be pretty much any one of the Majority.
The Quest for the Wholey Betrayal
LOL. On a roll, SomeDAM!
Better bring a shrubbery…
Sure Lies A Lot- Quite clever.
Perhaps take a cue from the court’s mentors from the Massachusetts Bay Colony and call it the Council of Supreme Magistrates, aka The Extreme Court. Those stovepipe puritan/pilgrim hats would also be quite appropriate for the court majority, with a nice bonnet for the good Christian lady Con-ey.
The Puritan hats with the buckles would be quite striking with the traditional Supreme Court robes! And really signal where this court stands.
Magisteriums
These Theocrats Broadcast On YouTube and claim to believe Jesus-God told them to take over the GOPee and destroy Democracy. Money and Power is their true religion.
Find a pdf of the Watchman Decree here. It begins:
WHEREAS • we, the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth • we have been given legal power from heaven and now exercise our authority • we are God’s ambassadors and spokespeople over the earth • through the power of God, we are the world influencers • because of our covenant with God, we are equipped and delegated by Him to destroy every attempted advance of the enemy,
There is much more, of course. Four minutes’ worth of decreeing and declaring, including a reference to Seven Mountains Dominionism. We’ve been following this movement here for over a decade. They fill stadiums.
And they fill elected offices. Here in North Carolina, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson recites from the Christian nationalist gospel. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is fluent in it. E.C. Sykes was Executive Director of Faith and Religious Liberty for Ted Cruz for President and member of the Council for National Policy.
It is a “little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” and listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Sykes returned to North Carolina after 20 years and ran unsuccessfully in 2020 for secretary of state against incumbent Democrat Elaine Marshall. He is running for state senate in 2022.
Digbysblog.net
That’s kinda what Lauren Boebert said a week or so ago. These people are scary…
Yet, not one of them sits on SCOTUS, unless dominionism/seven mountains is under the Catholic umbrella.
My preferred reference to them these days is SCROTUS.
Good one.
Absurdity plus religion usually makes a good comedic lesson.
God’s bitch sacrificing his son- just a test.
Thanks for the link.
Warning: read this only if you are actually willing to do the minimal work necessary to understand the revolution that the Extreme Court of the United States is effecting right now. I can happen here, folks. It is happening. And this court is preparing the way. What it is up to is equivalent to the German Enabling Act of 1932. I think all of this extreme and frightening.
Let me be as clear about this as I can be. My reading of what the Extreme Court has been up to is NOT that it means to do away with the doctrine of stare decisis, though you will read many pieces in the popular media that claim that this is so. No. What this court means to establish, with Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health and West Virginia v. EPA, in this term, and with Moore v. Harper in the next term a new set of precedents designed to fulfil the conservative goals of a) shrinking the federal government down to a size at which it can be drowned in a bathtub and b) turning over power to state governments, many of which will be de facto theocracies under the new legal order.
Dobbs provides a template or boilerplate for eliminating a) whole bodies of federal law and regulation related to unenumerated rights and b) the primary functions of agencies and departments that do that regulation and enforcement.
WV v. EPA is a template or boilerplate for eliminating government agencies or departments (or parts of these) that promulgate regulations pursuant to Congressional legislation on the basis of an argument that Congress can’t turn such decision-making over to Executive Branch agencies or departments because the Constitution insists that these are legislative matters. So, for example, the WV. V. EPA, the court ruled that the EPA, being an administrative agency, cannot regulate emissions because that’s a legislative not administrative function under the Constitution. The idea, again, is to shrink the power and authority of the federal administrative state in full knowledge the fact that Congress, being divided, will not step into these various roles (will not, for example, agree on laws with real teach related to matters like climate change or food safety). And again, the effect of that will be, with the federal executive and legislature and courts all out of the picture, to turn all this power back to the states.
And, finally, Moore v. Harper will enable the court to rule that the feds cannot pass legislation to protect voting rights because determination of how voting is to be conducted is entirely up to state legislatures under this extremist reading of the Constitution. Again, the effect will be to eliminate federal power and agencies/departments and turn this all over to the states. This is really important to Republicans going forward because the only way that they can hold onto power is by restricting voting rights, and the troglodytes on the Extreme Court want to ensure that Republican state legislators can do that.
All this is revolutionary and is meant to be. It’s the fulfillment of a dream that conservatives in America have had for a long, long time. They have long believed in state’s rights, in the federal government being a monster not envisioned by the founders. This Extreme Court is simply making good on that.
And, btw, as with the various parallel attempted coups undertaken by Trump and his team (there were several of these), this has all been discussed on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast (or whatever he is calling his show). He recently devoted much of a program to this very topic: the ways in which work is underway to completely “dismantle the administrative state.”
Conservatives have been making these arguments for a very, very long time. Now, finally, after a century of making these arguments about the federal government being illegitimate, they finally have a supermajority on the court that agrees with them. They see the current program to shrink and drown the federal government as returning government in the U.S. to its original principles after a long period in which it veered off into weirdness never conceived of by the founders. THAT’S the argument that, for example, the conservative legal scholar James Q. Wilson spent much of his life making.
Know your enemy, folks. And don’t underestimate him or it.
In short, this court is in the process of establishing precedents that amount to a legal revolution that they believe returns U.S. government to something like what was envisioned by the founders–primarily independent state governments in loose federation. So, the Extreme Court will claim to be reaffirming precedents, but ones from long, long ago, before the courts derailed and created a huge federal government that can have its hands in everything, from marriage law to regulation of tobacco and wetlands.
Those of you old enough to remember the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s will understand what I mean when I say that this could most appropriately be designated The Nullification Court.
The Original Sin, according to Conservatives, was the expansion of federal government via generous interpretation of the Interstate Commerce clause, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.
This court plans to reduce, dramatically, the scope and power of the federal government and place power over many matters back into the hands of state governments, many of which will function as mini theocratic states with the court’s imprimatur and blessing.
This is the disaster that Trump has wrought. But it’s too complicated for Americans to follow. They are too busy thinking about the next Spiderman movie or Cardi B release. So, the fascist revolution will happen here while no one was paying any attention.
It is a relief to come to this blog and find so many other commenters who also bother to pay attention and to find out what is actually happening, who are aware of the threat to democracy. Alas, not typically the case here in the good ole USA.
I am not so sure that Republican Party’s goal is to shrink the Federal Government, but to make it so bloated that it collapses on itself. The result of three mammoth federal tax cuts over three Republican administrations was not meant to stop deficit spending, which was record setting during said administrations, but to make government coffers ripe for a multitude of grifters, I.E. corporations. The purpose for support of the clown car Trump Administration and the Extreme Court is not to bring down the administrative state but to turn on the monetary faucet that will go to the well healed. Remember, Bannon was originally indicted for grifting the masses. That’s what these folk, from televangelists to Trump, are all about. Keep the money flowing and build an ineffective, but active, government that keeps the rest of us from doing anything about it.
Wisely observed, Paul. These are conflicting goals in conservativism. Theoretically, they are all about shrinking federal government but practically they are all about the grift.
I used this a couple of times but it looks too obvious to be original(ist). A cursory search turns up old coinages in one of Biden’s remarks and maybe in the future (present?) documentary film we all know as Idiocracy, though I didn’t have time to watch the whole clip.
By now I think it’s in the Public Demean.
The Public Demean. LOL. People often invent these phrases independently, an example of convergent evolution in response to identical environmental conditions.
Chances are that pretty much everything that is said today has beensaid before.
Probably by Mark Twain or Albert Einstein, who said most of the clever stuff.
At least according to Google
For example, Einstein said that Insanity is saying the same things over and over and each time expecting that it is the first time they have been said.
And Mark Twain said “better to not say anything than to claim one has coined a new term that has been used thousands of times before”
Nothing New ithe DictionDictionary
There’s nothing novel
Said today
And Twitter’s awful
Old that way
But people think
They’ve coined a term
Like Satan’s Rink
And Heaven’s Worm
About liberals moving to Florida- “We’ll chain and muzzle you.” That report quoting Joe Mullins was from a FlaglerLive.com exposé posted, 3-29-2021. The same month, the Director of Florida Voice for the Unborn, Andrew Shirvell, wrote in a post, “Thank you, pro-life Flagler County Commissioner, Joe Mullins, for attending the (3-5-2021) demonstration at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church.” The FlaglerLive.com article concluded with a Mullins quote, “Since I have been in office I have promoted a conservative prayer community, a Christian community…to such an extreme.”
Mullins is in the news today for getting another speeding ticket, one ticket was while he was driving a Mercedes and the most recent incident, a Ferrari. He told the officer that an arrest would be a career-ending move for the patrolman. Mullins described himself as running the County.
It is past time to step up and acknowledge the connection between the church a GOP politician courts and his comfort level in abuse of power.
Of course, the echo chamber of national news posts yet one more incomplete report, Yahoo News, 7-9-2022, Elizabeth Diaz, “The Far Right Christian Quest for Power: We Are Seeing Them Emboldened,” The article fails to identify the conservative Catholics, those who made the egregious decisions from the SCOTUS bench that the article chronicles.