One major political party in the US now believes that violence is OK. I find it hard to beleive, based on history, that this will have a peadeful ending.

Notorious fascist brawler and Proud Boy Alan Swinney found guilty on 11 of 12 charges related to attacks in Portland during fascist rallies. Multiple felony convictions seems likely to bring a long prison sentence for the out of town fascist that made a habit of touring the country to assault people.

https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/202...f-firearm.html

Excellent! I hope he spends a long time in prison.

The Black groups in the prison are just going to love him....

It's really saying something that he managed to attract this kind of law enforcement woes, given the undeniable leniency that local cops grant to right wing agitators in the area. Plenty of other fascists have no problem getting away with broad daylight assaults on the regular, but Swinney was determined to put himself in the spotlight in a way that was impossible to ignore.

The public backlash against Swinney was so intense that Portland cops and the justice system finally had to do something about it.

It's a comon practice. One you have a list of suckers the list is sold on.

I didn't know what the word "peadeful" meant, so I asked a search engine, which found these images.

Visualize whirled peas.

WV introduces legislation to require all graduating high school students to swear a loyalty oath:

https://legiscan.com/WV/text/SB495/2022

Oh, good lord. I'd be pissed if my representative wasted time proposing such idiotic nonsense.
How ironic when Trump has violated his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States", multiple times.

An ex-Tea Party Trumper warns us all.
https://www.salon.com/2022/02/11/joe...-country-down/

This can only end in massive bloodshed.

That is true. After seeing interviews with MAGA rally attendees, there is no doubt that many MAGAites are past the point of being reasoned with at all. They're so far down that hole that there's no rescue possible.

The idiots blocking the bridge to Canada are some pieces of work too.

Surveillance footage shows 2 men trying to set an apartment building on fire near trucker protests They taped the doors shut,

Fox News has been very supportive of these truckers and idiots like Tucker, Hannity, and
Laura Ingraham are right there with their pile o' bovine feces.

Right. Just like Jan. 6 was a "typical tourist tour" and "peaceful".

Lara Trump and the standard "MAH FREEEEEEDOMS" go to:
Tucker:
Oh, I dunno, Tuck. I seem to remember you having a hissy fit over Black Lives Matter.

Loyalty oaths, forever stupid, never out of date it seems. There was a move in NY State to require it of college students and faculty back in the 60's. It fizzled, of course, because it was insanely stupid then too. Hey, peace loving harmless Quaker, gonna sign the oath? Of course not. Hey, disloyal commie saboteur, gonna sign the oath? Of course.

I was watching the news (a rare event, but the Olympicx...) and one of the truckers was saying "without me you wouldn't have anything you own." One of the approximately 10 percent of truckers, blocking the international bridge and causing massive layoffs of manufacturers, doing his bit to increase inflation and shortage, and yeah - he's the flexing sinew of prosperity.

It's time to do some arresting, I think. You or I couldn't park in the middle of a bridge and just say "Nah, I don't feel like moving. " Take away their commercial licenses. Tell them move your truck, or you'll be arrested and your truck will be confiscated. That's what they would do if ordinary people did it. I think these people have clout the same way people are famous for being famous. They have impunity because they act as if they do. The conservative base will huff and puff and the usual commentators will lie and say their usual stupid things, but they won't pay their fines or give them jobs if shippers tell them to get lost.

A Canadian judge earlier today ordered the protesters to vacate the Ambassador Bridge but so far, little has changed.

Whenever there's a liberal/left protest that even gets a little bit rowdy, the State sends out a battalion of Terminators to ruthlessly break it up through extraordinary and gleeful violence.

A tiny fringe of right wingers will explicitly engage in tactics meant to cause maximal societal damage and suddenly the State is a helpless little baby that can barely lift its rattle.

It's wild how openly the cops are communicating their political preferences in the exercise of their duties.

To be probably more fair than one should be, let us not forget that the current protestors are also proven to be irrational and violent, bolstered by the knowledge that they are privileged and the presumption that they are popular. A lot of this is LARPing, but if I were a cop I'd be more scared of them than of the usual demonstrators, even though many are operating on overconfident bluff, if only because their stupidity makes them at least briefly dangerous.

Even using the generous estimates for crowd size, these Canadian "convoy" protests were pretty small and certainly well within a manageable scale for police should they want to get off their sympathetic asses to do anything about them. This was demonstrated when finally there was the decision made to start making arrests and the blockades evaporated.

But the cops are on their side, this isn't like when cops happily drive through a BLM protest hitting people with their truck as per police procedure. It does not matter what the judges say, the cops won't do it.

Agreeing with above two posts. Yes, the protesters are not as dangerous as they'd like to be, and once the cops start being cops instead of a support group, a thing that should never have happened in the first place is ended. But I would still note that in a world where these protestors are the minions of an ex president who openly advocates the assassination of those who disagree with him, and where death threats and public lies are becoming normalized, it's no surprise if the cops were a bit diffident. We can always, when we try and when we do it right, get rid of a hornet's nest. But we still have to remember that it's full of hornets.

The Ambassador Bridge is fully open. According to the Detroit News:

I want to emphasize to all liberals: READ THIS INTERVIEW. Then get armed and ready to defend yourselves. This is not going to end well. It's going to end in massive bloodshed.

The problem with loyalty oaths, of course, is that someone who actully is working for the overthrow of the government would sign one without a second thought.

And believe it proves their loyalty to the rightful (white, male, Christian) government.

Whenever I read about these spate of loyalty oaths for some reason or another, it reminds me of this.

I don't know if it was accurate, but I remember reading a claim that "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s partly out of a belief that Communists would literally be unable to say the phrase due to their Godless atheism, exposing themselves. Kind of like how it was believed that witches couldn't recite the Lord's Prayer during the various witch trials.

That may have been a part of it, but part was also just the kind of mentality that Eisenhower represented and that his followers have amplified, that the US being a Christian country, it's time to start eroding secularism.

It's the kind of bland, vanilla, Reader's Digest world view that characterizes the Eisenhowever era, which is also, after all, the era in which Richard Nixon became a powerful national figure, and Joe McCarthy, whom Ike seemed unable to condemn, too, just as supposedly reasonable Republicans now are unwilling to take the chance of alienating the the worst of their fair weather friends.

I also secretly suspect, though it could just as easily be an act of stupidity, that the placement of "under God," ruining the cadence of the phrase it interrupts, deprives it not only of its secularism, but its explicitly anti-Confederate implication. "One nation indivisible" says one thing explicitly about union. "One nation, under God, indivisible" makes it part of a list, and not at the top either.

When I was quite little, I had a little 78 RPM phonograph, and a "Little Golden Record" of the pledge, which I knew by heart. Oh how pissed off I was when it got changed. My parents were pretty far to the left anyway, and so of course they hated it and expounded on it, but I added to that the sense that they'd spoiled the line!

They are like Huck Finn's father in Huckleberry Finn..only way to reform them is with a shotgun.

Ironically enough, J Edgar Hoover though the loyalthy oaths were silly..though he did not say so in public, because a dedicated Communist would think nothing of perjuring himself by taking an oath.

OMG! Trump is a COMMUNIST? :p :rolleyes:

Texas Governor and AG threatening to criminally prosecute the parents of trans children for child abuse:

https://www.advocate.com/politics/20...argets-parents

In their continuing race to the bottom of the heap, the RNC recently released a photo which celebrates their eight favorite Republican presidents.

One of them was Trump and one of them was Nixon.

https://news.yahoo.com/republicans-m...ycsrp_catchall

Republican Party's Weird Salute To GOP Presidents Quickly Flies Off The Rails

The Republican National Committee tried to honor its favorite presidents on Presidents Day.

It didn’t go well.

The official GOP account tweeted a meme mocking President Joe Biden while celebrating Richard M. Nixon and Donald Trump, among others:

...

I hate it when Republicans claim Lincoln. He'd be disgusted with today's GOP as would all of those pictured except Trump and Nixon.

Looks as though Trump's fascist buddy/patron has started a war.

Trump and his cronies can't decide if this is 'genius' and 'savvy' or all Biden's fault.

Of course, this would never have happened if Trump were still president...or so Trump claims. Because Putin was just so scared and in awe of Trump. :rolleyes:

JUST IN: Trump just called into Fox attacking President Biden and falsely saying that American troops just conducted an “amphibious attack” in Ukraine. Laura Ingraham shut him down: “No. That was the Russians.”

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) February 24, 2022

The call-in would be funny if it weren't so sad. First the two reinforce each other's claim that Putin would have been satisfied with just those two eastern areas of Ukraine, but he saw how weak Biden is so just decided 'to go for it'. Trump then proceeded to claim that this never would have happened except for a 'rigged' election, blame Biden for inflation and for the "millions of people pouring in on a monthly basis, far more than 3 million people coming from 129 different countries. We have no idea what's happening and they're destroying our country."
:crazy:

This is what he said about the amphibious attack:

Trump says, "you told me about the amphibious attack by Americans. You shouldn't be saying that ... they should do that secretly."

"You shouldn't be saying that, because you and everybody else shouldn't know about," Trump continued. "They should do that secretly, not be doing that through the great Laura Ingraham."

"No, those are the Russians," Ingraham replied.

"Oh, I thought you said that we were sending people in," Trump said. "That'll be next."

Then he immediately tried to distract from his gaffe by claiming to we need to secure out own southern border blah blah blah.

Last night at a fundraising event at Mar a Lago, Trump again praised Putin:

Poor Kim Jong-un must be very jealous now that Trump has dumped him and is in love with Vladimir.