#dominionist

[thecapitolradar]

Let's talk about Texas A & M.

Their administrators don't, er, believe in psychiatry, even though the school offers degrees in psychiatry.

Solution? Hire, er, professors who are dangerously incompetent in the science of psychiatry. So committed are they to tanking the discipline of psychiatry that they don't even teach students to test patients' serotonin levels before they prescribe meds for anxiety and depression.

Texas A & M is so all-fired pleased with itself that they're about to take things a step farther, and change their name to Texas Dominionist University. This came straight from the mouth of the school's president, Mark Welsh.

Here's a quick refresher on what dominionists believe:

[lenbryant]

Dominionist Speaker of the House? What could go wrong?

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Pirates of the Legislation

* * * *

It’s worse than we thought. Alito must resign.

May 22, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

MAY 23, 2024

Yesterday, we learned that Justice Alito flew an insurrectionist flag over his residence for three days between the January 6 insurrection and Joe Biden’s inauguration. Standing alone, that lapse of ethics and shocking display of disloyalty to the Constitution required recusal and an impeachment investigation, at the very least.

Today, the NYTimes reported that Justice Alito flew a “Pine Tree” flag a.k.a. an “Appeal to Heaven” flag over his beach house. Per the Times, the Pine Tree flag

is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.

In other words, the Pine Tree flag represents a MAGA trifecta: Support for Trump, insurrection, and Christian nationalism. See NYTimes, Another Provocative Flag Was Flown at Another Alito Home. (This article is accessible to all.) The photos showing the Pine Tree flag over the Alito beach house were taken over three months in 2023.

Justice Alito’s credibility is compromised beyond repair. Every day he serves as a sitting Supreme Court justice, he further erodes the court's rapidly diminishing credibility.

Contrary to the original story about the “Stop the Steal” flag where Alito blamed his wife, the justice has refused to provide a response to the Times. The Supreme Court’s press relations office also refused comment.

Out of loyalty to the Constitution, regard for the Court, and respect for the American people, Alito should resign. Anything less will perpetuate the open wound on the Court’s legitimacy.

There is also a role for Justice Roberts and the associate justices in addressing Alito’s ethical violations.

Roberts should call for investigation by the Judicial Conference. He should assure the American people that the Court is, in fact, “calling balls and strikes” for democracy rather than serving as a cheerleader for the partisan and religious agenda of the MAGA movement.

The associate justices should declare in their opinions, concurrences, and dissents that Justice Alito’s continued consideration of matters relating to Trump is a violation of the Supreme Court Code of Ethics.

Democrats in the Senate must also lead on this issue. To date, leadership in the Senate and on the Judiciary Committee have responded with a collective yawn. That is a perplexing response that reflects the insular politics of cynicism that infects Congress. Enough!  

The stories about Alito’s flags are not “gotcha” journalism run amok. Alito is signaling his partisan allegiance and Christian nationalism. As I wrote yesterday, we should take him at his word. If we do not, he will continue to vote for outcomes and write opinions that are antithetical to the liberties guaranteed in the Constitution.

Apart from demanding that the Court, Congress, and the media work to secure Alito’s resignation or impeachment, what can we do?

Re-elect Joe Biden.

On Wednesday, the Biden Administration announced that it had reached the milestone of appointing 200 federal judges. See WhiteHouse.gov, Statement from President Joe Biden on Confirming 200 Federal Judges. In his announcement, President Biden noted that 64% of his appointments were women and that 62% were to people color.

Amidst the disturbing revelations of Alito’s insurrectionist allegiance, President Biden wrote the following about his 200 judicial appointments:

Judges matter. These men and women have the power to uphold basic rights or to roll them back.

They hear cases that decide whether women have the freedom to make their own reproductive healthcare decisions; whether Americans have the freedom to cast their ballots; whether workers have the freedom to unionize and make a living wage for their families; and whether children have the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water.

There are many issues that compel us to vote for Joe Biden. Reforming the Supreme Court just moved up in urgency and importance. We must adopt an enforceable code of ethics and enlarge the Court—both of which can be accomplished with majority votes in Congress and the signature of the president. Elect Joe Biden to reform the Court.

[Robert B. Hubbell newsletter]

[vashti-lives]

In 2016 Trump told reporters he thought abortion should be illegal and doctors who give abortions should be in jail. Today in my state abortion is illegal and if you have an ectopic pregnancy the biggest hospital in the biggest city in my state will life flight you to a tiny hospital 60 miles away across the boarder to a neighboring state because they’re afraid if they treat this life threatening condition they will go to jail. The shit Trump says is not just bluster.

Gonna need yall to stop putting Biden is Just As Bad propaganda on my dash. Had to unfollow someone because I don’t want to a start a fight with them over it, but I’m about to bite the next person who puts that shit in front of me.

If you don’t like Biden, vote in your god damn local and mid term elections for third party or further left candidates so that we get better democratic candidates for future elections. But this one is already fucking decided, and I’m NOT ending up under a Trump led dictatorship because yall value protecting your personal sense of moral purity over the collective good. Whether it offends your personal morals to vote for Biden is IRRELEVANT in the face of the alternative.

This isn’t a lesser of two evils situation. One guy sucks. The other guy is LITERALLY PLANNING TO OVERTHROW OUR DEMOCRACY AND INSTALL HIMSELF AS A PUTIN STYLE DICTATOR.

PLEASE look up Project 2025 and stop acting like abstaining is some kind of personal ethical decision!

[bills-bible-basics]

BEWARE OF DOMINIONISM -- a Bill's Bible Basics article #Dominionism #BibleStudy #Article This #BillsBibleBasics 1-part article by #BillKochman can be read at: https://www.billkochman.com/Articles/beware-of-dominionism.html https://www.billkochman.com/Blog/index.php/beware-of-dominionism-a-bills-bible-basics-article/?feed_id=214636&BEWARE%20OF%20DOMINIONISM%20--%20a%20Bill%27s%20Bible%20Basics%20article

[readingsquotes]

...Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, billionaires who have made their fortunes in the oil industry. Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think tanks, media organizations, political action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on. Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.”

Like the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.

Texas, which has few limits on campaign spending, is home to a formidable army of donors. Lately Dunn has outspent them all. Since 2000, he and his wife have given more than $29 million to candidates and PACs in Texas. Wilks and his wife, who have donated to many of the same PACs as Dunn, have given $16 million. Last year, Dunn and his associated entities provided two-thirds of the donations to the state Republican Party.

The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025.

....

History will prove,” [Rogers] wrote, “that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is ‘bought’ by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a theocracy.”

...

With its high concentration of movement leaders, conservative pastors and far-right megadonors, Texas has become the country’s foremost laboratory for Christian nationalist policy, and many of its experiments have been bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks.

...

“We have a three-party system in Texas, and they all loathe each other,” Vinny Minchillo, a Republican-aligned consultant in Plano, said. “You have the Democrats, the more traditional moderate Republicans and the official state GOP, a dysfunctional organization which has been pretty much completely overtaken by the Dunn and Wilks side of things.” Once ridiculed as unserious fanatics by the conservative establishment, Dunn and Wilks are now its kingmakers.

[margieargie]

From what I understand, the Second Coming and the beginning of the reign of Christ on Earth began in 1981 or 1982.

[superbdonutpoetry]

Circular Prophecy, Fulfilment & Dispensational Boundaries

AD 70 was when the prophesied judgment of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in accordance with the following circular prophecy occurred: Luke 21:5-6And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts, he said, as for these things which ye behold, the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown…

[thecapitolradar]

Wait, current special counsel, Robert Hur, was a U.S. attorney appointed by Donald Trump?

No wonder Vice President Harris says the Hur report is politically motivated. The remarks about Biden's acuity would have had more credibility if religious nut, Hur, had enlisted a politically independent psychiatrist to make them.

But, as with the legitimate concerns about Trump's mental health back in 2016, voters must consider what *they* see and hear when deciding who can bring a safe and sane approach to running our country.

Choose wisely.

[cynicalclassicist]

These evangelicals cheering on Trump really are pretty scary people.

🤮

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Steve Brodner

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 22, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 23, 2024

Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) called out his Republican colleagues on the floor of the House today for offering “stunts instead of solutions, extremism over bipartisanship.” It’s a shame, he said, because the Republicans’ narrow majority “could have given us a chance to work together in a bipartisan way.” Instead, Republicans have caved to their most extreme members, who have been “skipping their real jobs to take day trips up to New York to try to undermine Donald Trump's criminal trial.” 

McGovern suggested that perhaps they were trying “to distract from the fact that their candidate for president has been indicted more times than he's been elected” and “is on trial for covering up hush money payments to a porn star for political gain not to mention three other criminal felony prosecutions.” 

Representative Jerry Carl (R-AL), the temporary chair at the time, rebuked McGovern, who noted that the fact that the former president is in a court of law is the truth. Just last week, McGovern pointed out, a Republican member of the House was not admonished when he complained about “the former president of the United States being hauled into court day after day with a sham trial.” 

Carl reminded McGovern that members “must avoid personalities in debates.”

McGovern replied: “[A]t some point, it's time for this body to recognize that there is no precedent for this situation. We have a presumptive nominee for president facing 88 felony counts, and we're being prevented from even acknowledging it. These are not alternative facts. These are real facts. A candidate for president of the United States is on trial for sending a hush money payment to a porn star to avoid a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign and then fraudulently disguising those payments in violation of the law. He's also charged with conspiring to overturn the election. He's also charged with stealing classified information, and a jury has already found him liable for rape in a civil court. And yet, in this Republican-controlled house, it's okay to talk about the trial, but you have to call it a sham.”

Representative Erin Houchin (R-IN) demanded McGovern’s words be stricken from the record. The chair agreed to do so, saying that “it is a breach of order to refer to the candidate in terms personally offensive, whether by actually accusing or merely insulting.” Republicans banned McGovern from speaking on the floor for the rest of the day. McGovern observed: “You can only talk about the trial on the House Floor if you're using it to defend Donald Trump.”

It was curious timing for extremists to silence a Massachusetts lawmaker. 

In 1836, Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives passed a resolution to table, or put aside without action or discussion, all petitions relating to slavery. Repeatedly thereafter, former president John Quincy Adams, now representing Massachusetts in the House, rose to read a petition and was silenced. But the First Amendment protects the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances—King George III had pointedly rejected the colonists’ 1775 Olive Branch Petition trying to avoid war, and the framers of the new government wanted to be clear that people had a right to be heard—and people in the North increasingly understood the silencing of those who were determined to stop debate over slavery as an attack on their constitutional rights. 

The House got rid of the “gag rule” in 1844, but just twelve years later, on May 22, 1856—exactly 168 years ago today—South Carolina representative Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate after Sumner criticized southern enslavers, particularly Brooks’s relative South Carolina senator Andrew Butler. 

The gist of Sumner’s speech was that a small minority of men were trying to impose their will on the majority of the American people by forcing enslavement on the territory of Kansas, much as enslavers like Butler forced themselves on the women they enslaved. Sumner’s speech was insulting, but beating him into a welter of blood while he sat at his Senate desk for representing his constituents suggested that enslavers would tolerate no dissent.

Jodi Kantor, Aric Toler, and Julie Tate tonight broke the story in the New York Times that the upside-down U.S. flag associated with the January 6 insurrectionists was not the only anti-American flag Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito displayed. In at least July and September 2023, over his beach house in New Jersey there flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag like the one carried by January 6 rioters. This banner is also known as the “Pine Tree flag,” but it is not the same one currently under consideration to become Maine’s state flag. 

This flag represents the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. As Ishaan Jhaveri of Columbia University’s Tow Center in the Graduate School of Journalism explained in 2021, in the days of the American Revolution, the flag “was meant to symbolize the right of armed revolution in the face of tyranny.”  

But in 2013 the flag was the symbol of a group working to put Christians into public office to create a government based on their ideology. In 2015, those trying to stop the Supreme Court from legalizing gay marriage flew the flag; in 2016, supporters of the militias that occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge did so, too. In 2017 the flag was behind Trump when he spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and in 2020, those opposed to Covid shutdowns carried it. 

More recently, the January 6 rioters carried it, and so have neo-Nazis. It is the same flag that House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) displays outside of his congressional office. Scholar of religion Bradley Onishi noted: “It’s a flag symbolizing Christian revolution. It’s used by extremists.”

These extremists appear to have turned to Trump, who is, as McGovern pointed out, facing 88 felony counts and is currently on trial for paying off a sex partner in order to prevent voters from hearing about their encounter and then violating the law to hide the payments, because they believe he will crash through the laws and bureaucracy that are designed to protect the democratic institutions that would stop them from seizing power. 

And now it turns out that a flag representing the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, that the people should engage in armed revolution against tyranny, and that the United States should be a nation based in Christian theology has been flying over the home of Justice Alito, who is supposed to be defending the United States Constitution impartially. Alito wrote the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.

Election columnist Laura Bassett of The Cut wrote: “The [A]lito flag story does not teach me anything new about his politics but it does reveal how confident he is that nobody can do anything about him.” 

There is indeed a sense of power and entitlement coming from MAGA Republicans as they impose new limits on their fellow Americans and call those constraints freedom. Lori Rozsa of the Washington Post today noted that Florida governor Ron DeSantis is rewriting the history of the summer of 1964, made famous as Black and white organizers fanned out in Mississippi to register Black Americans to vote, by launching his own, new “Freedom Summer.” From May 27 through September 2, bridges in the state are prohibited from displaying rainbow colors for Pride Month in June, orange for National Gun Awareness Month, or yellow for Women’s Equality Day. The only colors they can display are red, white, and blue. 

“Thanks to the leadership of Gov[ernor] Ron DeSantis,” Florida Department of Transportation secretary Jared Perdue wrote on X, “Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[hezigler]

Far-right Christian dominionists infiltrate schools, civic offices in Texas

[athelind]

Funny how these fuckwits suddenly stop believing that "God is the one that raises up those in authority" when those in authority are Democrats or progressives.

Ahh Hell No.....

[bills-bible-basics]

BEWARE OF DOMINIONISM -- a Bill's Bible Basics article #Dominionism #BibleStudy #Article This #BillsBibleBasics 1-part article by #BillKochman can be read at: https://www.billkochman.com/Articles/beware-of-dominionism.html https://www.billkochman.com/Blog/index.php/beware-of-dominionism-a-bills-bible-basics-article/?feed_id=200074&BEWARE%20OF%20DOMINIONISM%20--%20a%20Bill%27s%20Bible%20Basics%20article