Are they unable to find candidates without misogynistic traits?

I’ve avoided discussing Graham Platner here all this time. I could tell early in his rise that his campaign was going to be an ugly mess that was going to tempt a lot of good people to support him. Bernie Sanders endorsed him!

Right away, I thought “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t sport a Nazi tattoo?”

Then there were the old internet posts, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t have a history of internet bigotry?”

Then we got the accounts of crude drunken behavior on dates, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t treat women with disrespect?”

Now the latest damning accusation has emerged, prompting Platner to finally drop out, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who haven’t raped someone?”

So I was useless on this issue, because I was too busy backing away from this growing clusterfuck. Rebecca Watson has a more forthright response.

Let’s learn to more quickly recognize disqualifying characteristics in our candidates, OK? How about if we don’t make excuses for them anymore?

Schrodinger’s McConnell

Mitch McConnell has been MIA for a few weeks. Credible sources say he’s been in the hospital since 14 June, “recovering”.

Laura Loomer says he is “brain dead” and never coming back.

Who are you going to believe? I think we’ve caught Loomer in a lie. McConnell is a Republican, if you’re going to say he’s brain dead, I’m going to ask, “how can you tell?”

I refuse to celebrate Christian Nationalist holidays

These gomers make it so hard to celebrate Independence Day

It’s Independence Day, which means most Americans are thinking about hot dogs and fireworks, neither of which interest me, and the Christian Nationalists are all reading that one line in the Declaration of Independence that represents the totality of their perspective: “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Forget the Constitution and forget that the bulk of the Declaration was an enumeration of the offenses of the British king, which the current American president is trying to repeat. The Discovery Institute is going all out on that line, with John West writing a whole book, Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul on their obsession. Wait…the Bible? I thought the Discovery Institute was scientific and secular!

Anyway Charles Thaxton and Stephen Meyer have written an op-ed plugging that theme. It’s terrible, muddled and sloppy, exactly what I expect for the DI.

It’s trying to argue that there are two perspectives, one God-centered that enables human dignity, and the other is scientific, which…they avoid specifying. It’s just not giving God credit, and therefore it’s implied that respect for human dignity will be somehow diminished. It’s an argument based on potential consequences which they don’t support with evidence.

Yet we in the U.S. and other Western countries, with our own familiar materialist scientific view of man, have created a curious situation. The orthodoxies of Judaism and Christianity contend that man has dignity because he has been created in the image and glory of God. If the orthodox view is false, as is widely assumed in the academic and legal professions, then one must wonder how long it will be until we in the West reason correctly from a strictly scientific perception of human nature.

The religious perspective has done a poor job of supporting the value of human lives — Christian orthodoxies are all about an afterlife, and has been used to justify slavery. That half of their argument is unsupported, and they don’t bother to support it — just assume that religious beliefs are good. The other half, that science is going to diminish us, is even weaker: they don’t have evidence, we are expected to wonder how long it will be until a strictly scientific perception of human nature leads to some inevitable outcome, which we should assume will be dire.

I’m amazed at how frothy and vague their argument is. It’s the Discovery Institute, though, so they think handwaving at Darwin and Marx is sufficient to prove their thesis.

We might well remember that neither the edifice of Western technical sophistication nor the “science” of Marx, or of Darwin, can provide any firm ground for asserting these rights. Instead, productive proclamations of human rights depend upon a shared conviction that man’s dignity is inherent — safe from any political expedient — as our Western religious heritage once asserted, and as the Declaration of Independence still does

The Declaration of Independence is a 250 year old document that tried, successfully, to justify a separation from a colonial power. I don’t care if it “asserts” an 18th century view on the relationship between humanity and an imaginary god. I have a belief in man’s dignity based on an evolving humanism, not the words of a slave-holder.

Public, and especially political, references to this heritage doubtless offend the sensibilities of a secular age. Nevertheless, if the traditional understanding of man is correct, if it is not only doctrinal but factual, then governments can derive human rights from a dignity that actually exists. But if the traditional view is false and the modern scientific view prevails, then there is no dignity and human rights are a delusion, around the world and in the West as well.

Weird. So if you derive human rights from your fantasies about an invisible superman, then that actually exists. But if don’t believe in this god (and don’t forget, it has to be their specific Christian god), then human rights are a delusion. You know, humanists aren’t the ones arguing for the violation of human rights, that seems to be the domain of sectarian and racist ideologies. Thaxton and Meyer can try to wrap themselves in the thin thread of a single line in an old document, but it still leaves them naked.

The clowns rise to the top

Imagine that Donald Trump offered me a prestigious and profitable position in his administration (that’s not going to happen). I’m on the edge of retirement, and would love to have a nice comfortable position for my twilight years, so maybe you think I’d be tempted. I would not. I am not going to trash my own integrity to get some advantage. That would be the last thing I’d ever consider, and would feel a deep shame if I were to accept it, because everything Trump touches turns to crap.

In other words, I’m not Avi Loeb.

A polarizing Harvard astronomer known for splashy theories about alien visits has been tapped by the Trump administration to lead a team of outside scientists to study the national security risks posed by UFOs.

Avi Loeb, a cosmologist who studied black holes and served as head of Harvard’s astronomy department until 2020, was recently appointed to helm a new scientific advisory council tasked with investigating the origins of mysterious orbs and other objects reported by military personnel in recent years.

Loeb has made a career of pushing patently nonsensical bullshit. That’s not just my opinion, the scientific community in general thinks he’s a con artist.

His theories have won praise in UFO circles but often put him in conflict with academic peers. Other astronomers accuse him of making exotic claims with little evidence. Some chafe at his habit of skipping the peer review process and bringing claims directly to the public.

Steve Desch, an Arizona State University astrophysicist who has challenged some of Loeb’s theories, said Loeb uses flawed methods to reach wild conclusions about alien life — all while shunning a more established branch of science searching for life beyond Earth.

Loeb’s role on the administration’s new panel casts doubt on the entire endeavor, Desch said.

“I don’t know what’s going to come of this, but we’re not going to get any closer to answering these questions with him in charge,” Desch said.

Loeb has been artificially propped up by the grifter administration. Let’s hope he comes crashing down hard in a few years, and learns regret.

Confirming the terrible quality of this panel, Michael Shermer has also been appointed to it.

From vanity to insanity

We’re deep in the insanity phase of the progression, and it’s obvious. A report has been released that exposes the way Trump hijacked the 250th anniversary celebration for his own personal profit and to promote an ugly ideology, much beloved of the right wing, but contrary to to history of the US.

Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology, according to a congressional investigation released on Thursday.

The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).

The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.

“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects.”

I remember the 200th anniversary celebration. You may recall that Gerald Ford was the president then, but he didn’t issue bicentennial coins with his face on them, or hire a religious organization to lead the event, or appear prominently in any of the celebrations that were going on — it was generally non-partisan. It was also a weird political era, since we’d just chased Nixon out of office in 1974 for his criminal chicanery. May I suggest that we do something similar to celebrate the semiquincentennial? That would be a lovely tradition to continue.

As we’ve come to expect from the Trump crime family, it was all about the money, funneling it into their personal pockets. This is an outrageous level of corruption.

The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.

The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

There is one phrase you hear repeated over and over again, from TPUSA and PragerU and the White House: our rights are not given to us by the government, but by God. I always thought those rights were derived from the people, but that slogan is being pushed everywhere in the Freedom250 propaganda train.

The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.

A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.

Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the Revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.

For a thorough breakdown of all the ways Freedom250 is lying to us, and in particular an analysis of the “Freedom Trucks” that PragerU was paid $14 million to deliver, I recommend the following video. That $14 million was stolen from public libraries and museums. It’s 45 minutes long, well worth it for the righteous anger and disgust it will generate.

It ends with a call to action: visit the American Library Association for things you can do to save our libraries and the propagation of a truer history.

Also, fuck Dennis Prager, Erica Kirk, and every member of the Trump family.

I am so pessimistic

Yesterday, the Supreme Court affirmed birthright citizenship. Good. Let’s celebrate. Except, this was a decision that should have been a no-brainer — it’s explicitly written in the Constitution, and there’s no ambiguity at all — and the Court had a 5-4 split, with Clarence Thomas writing a 90 page dissent. This was a case that barely broke through to a just decision.

On the same day, the Court unanimously ruled against transgender rights. You can pretty much be certain that it will rule against principles of democracy and inclusion whenever it gets the opportunity.

The only optimistic news I’ve seen is that Mitch McConnell, one of the architects of the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court, may be dying.

Several reputable news media outlets reported that the 84-year-old — who is among the oldest sitting senators in government, as of this writing — was admitted to a hospital on June 14. At the time of publication, his condition was unknown, leading to rumors about whether or not he was alive.

People online claimed the senator was either dead or close to death and that his staff were hiding it from the public. One post stated: “Is there a law that requires the Senate to disclose the death of a Senator within a certain number of days? #WhereIsMitch”

So maybe a slow, miserable death…but not too painful, since his mind is probably mostly gone. We’ve got time to get some champagne and caviar before his demise! The most generous thing I can say is that I wish he’d retired to the happy bosom of his family and a life of relaxation a decade or two ago. As it is, he overstayed his tenure, and to what end? The poisoning of his beloved Republican party.

The Temu State Fair

It’s the great American humiliation: Donald Trump wanted to put on an ambitious demonstration of America’s success over the past 250 years, but all he could do was put up some cheesy cardboard cutouts and hire some third-rate musicians (many of whom bailed out when they learned how they were being used), and now nobody is showing up. It was all a grift, where he undermined a sincere bipartisan effort to celebrate American history, and instead he substituted this phony demonstration and sucked $126 million out of the budget.

Donald Trump and his allies have seized control of the bipartisan 250th anniversary celebration and substituted it with a Trumpified series of events, at the public’s expense. Our analysis of federal contracts and corporate sponsorship deals related to the 250th anniversary reveals that:

  • The Trump administration has awarded nearly $103 million in federal contracts and grants for the 250th anniversary celebrations to a network of politicized entities under the control of Trump administration officials and political allies.
  • The recipients include entities controlled or influenced by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, as well as Chris LaCivita (Trump’s former campaign manager) and Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s former presidential campaign finance director.
  • These grants represent the vast majority (about 80%) of the nearly $126 million in federal contracts awarded since October 2025 to fund this summer’s 250th-anniversary celebrations, which have devolved into a celebration of Trump himself.
  • Private funding has also flooded the anniversary celebration, often from corporations with regulatory issues before the Trump administration. As of June 11, 20 corporate sponsors are funding the Trump administration’s preferred anniversary organization, Freedom 250, compared with the 62 sponsoring the original, bipartisan celebration, dubbed America 250 (12 companies sponsor both).

For example, take a closer look at Trump’s Arch, sitting in the middle of an empty grassy field. It looks cheap. It’s badly assembled. It’s fate after this affair is to be chopped up and burned in a landfill (foreshadowing the fate of our country.)

I’m confident that Trump initiated this abomination with the goal of being “classy”…but he has such poor taste and lacks focus and is so incompetent at the execution that all we get is this embarrassing shitshow to join the reflecting pool debacle, the defeat in an Iran war that shouldn’t have happened, and all the corruption surrounding this presidency.

You call that a fair?

I have never attended the Minnesota State Fair, which is a real shame. It has a tremendous reputation, and every year I hear raves about the weird food, the entertainment, the fun atmosphere. I’m afraid, though, that the huge crowds intimidate me. I’d struggle to get parking, would have to deal with the congestion, and it’s a 3 hour drive each way to get there.

The Great American State Fair in Washington DC has no such problem.

Photos and video of the small crowds, a lack of seating and near empty food booths were widely mocked on social media, while the Daily Beast called the event “virtually deserted” and The Atlantic noted in a headline: “The Great American State Fair isn’t very great.”

Maybe I should go? Except I don’t think there’s much to see.

The Great American State Fair is underway at the National Mall to mark the United States’ 250th birthday. But not everything is off to such a great start.

The event has quickly faced problems including power outages, melting ice cream – and a lack of representation from states that declined to send delegations.

While organizers assured visitors all parts of the nation would be represented, at least 10 states and territories refused to participate, with many citing the price tag to send staff to the 16-day event as their reason for opting out.

As usual, everything Trump touches turns to shit.

We don’t think enough about what comes after

Trump is obviously sick and grossly impaired, as everything he touches turns into a disaster and he flails about while incapable of fixing his own catastrophes. I wake up every day hoping that this is the day he finally drops dead or is so brain damaged that he has to be institutionalized, but I don’t know what happens next…President JD Vance? Republicans panicking and getting more extreme in locking in their power? Screaming mobs of MAGA fanatics? Maybe we should hope he lives a few more years in declining effectiveness and then we have a clean transition to an elected, and hopefully Democratic, majority.

There may also be some real advantages to imprisoning the Trump administration in a lame duck presidency for a few more years.

We might have a vision of what comes after in New York: the Democratic Socialists swept the primaries, led by Mamdani’s endorsements.

The mayor-turned-kingmaker had said it was a question of electing “better Democrats” who would “put working people back at the heart of politics”. All three victors are expected to win their safely blue districts, which would send three Mamdani allies into Congress next January.

The outcome was also a recognition of some wider trends in US politics: socialism is no longer a dirty word, criticism of Israel is no longer taboo and dissatisfaction with Democratic leaders in the Donald Trump era runs deep. Voters are thirsty for energy, fight and fresh ideas.

They ask: if Republicans can draw up a Project 2025 and pursue it ruthlessly, why can’t Democrats come up with a Project 2029 that promises universal healthcare, supreme court reform, massive climate investments, a war on the oligarchs and a clear-eyed approach to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu?

That’s a vision I could support. Much better than prayer.

Did you know you can join the DSA right now? I predict there is going to be an enrollment surge.

I’ve got to avoid Ed Zitron in the morning

I don’t think I can take much more of this. As someone on the edge of retirement, I have to hear the Republicans scheming to kill social security, which is bad enough, but here’s Ed Zitron predicting the complete obliteration of retirement funds thanks to the imminent detonation of the AI bubble.

Unfortunately, it all makes sense. Our economy seems to be dedicated to pumping up the fortunes of about a dozen people, and I’m not one of them.