Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Bark louder, little dog.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Second rate reporter says what?

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

We still have time to mess this up!

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

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Religious Nuts

James Dobson, Still Dead

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If you can't say anything nice about the death of James Dobson, say it to me.

— Cake or Death (@johngcole.bsky.social) August 21, 2025 at 9:00 PM

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Congratulations to James Dobson for achieving the highest level of unwoke

— Ian Boudreau (@ianboudreau.com) August 21, 2025 at 6:08 PM

So we can’t say nothing good happened this week…

James Dobson is dead, was a monster: defector.com/james-dobson…

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— Defector (@defector.com) August 22, 2025 at 6:46 PM

Albert Burneko, at Defector:

James Dobson was a nasty dude. He liked to beat children and dogs with a belt and to rain misery and punishment on the vulnerable; we know all of this about him because he said as much in public, repeatedly, over a long and rancid public life. He enlisted a whole bunch of Ideology—patriarchy, social conservatism, utterly fake upside-down Christianity—in service of those basic motivations, not only to justify his own appetite for and personal acts of sadism and domination, but to cast punishment and predation as far out into the world as he could manage. He studied psychology and the Bible so that he could borrow their authority and instrumentalize them to do widespread cruelty more effectively. He was oriented to evil, at vast scale, by continual lifelong choice. It was his calling, and he made it his job.

What a guy like James Dobson does, and what James Dobson did for his whole adult life, is offer people—white men primarily, but not exclusively—a rhetorical framework for doing evil and feeling good about it. Stand right here and look exactly there, he said, and psychology says it’s OK for you to beat your children, that when they cry for more than two minutes of the beating, it is because they are bad and not because you are hurting them; you should beat them harder for crying until they stop. Stand right here and look exactly there, and tradition says your wife should have no will of her own. Stand right here and look exactly there, and love of country says society should press its boot onto the poor and marginalized and crush them until they die. Didn’t you always hate them? Sure you did. Religion says right here that you are right to. He blew softly on a stupid and seething population’s resentments, its will to power, its lust to punish those who complicate their desires by having lives of their own, and watched those appetites stick up like the hairs on your arm, or glow like charcoal in a fire. It feels good. He tempts you with the promise that every cruel, fearful, punitive impulse you have aligns with The Way Things Are Supposed To Be, and that it is even your grim duty is to indulge them. In this respect, James Dobson was very much like Satan.

In American society, there is a lot of money and power in the business of being very much like Satan. Dobson became one of the most important figures in American conservatism in the 1970s; through his organization Focus on the Family, which he ran for nearly 30 years, Dobson exerted huge influence over the tides of American right-wing evangelical Protestantism as the latter exploded into perhaps the most powerful force in the country’s religious life and politics. The Family Policy Alliance, which he founded in 2004, only made formal the vast lobbying power Dobson and his media machine already exerted within Republican politics. In this way Dobson warred against virtually every concerted movement in his lifetime working toward making this country kinder, more just, more equitable, or more merciful. He also fought against efforts to protect the environment and responsibly steward the world’s natural resources, because he was a nasty guy motivated by the thrill of doing evil with impunity and for no other reason whatsoever…

James Dobson won’t see your posts celebrating his death. But you know who will? Everybody that ever loved him or respected him.
So please keep posting

— Neon Genesis Jordan Peterson (@hamantaschendog.bsky.social) August 21, 2025 at 10:09 AM

Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire — “A Leader of the Religious Right Just Died. His Terrible Legacy Still Looms over Modern Politics.”:

Some tasty food for worms was delivered on Thursday. One of the most truly horrible humans ever inflicted on this country has ceased to be, and all say, “Amen” and “about goddamn time.” …

… [Dobson] was a leader of the “religious right” whose every public action showed that he understood the message of the Gospels as well as I understand quantum mechanics. He was a bigot and a homophobe who encouraged more bigotry and more homophobia and weaponized it for the political advantage of American conservatism and its primary vehicle, the Republican party.

This is one of those moments when I ask all of our new Never Trump allies: Where were you people when this monster was running things?…

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Christian Nationalism

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One of the more infuriating things about people in the mainstream starting to wake up to the fact that the Republicans are overtly all about Christian nationalists is remembering all the times I argued with people and they ignored me- “Trust me they don’t just want to stop at 16 weeks they want to end it for everyone and ending abortion is just the beginning” and get met with “no they don’t just a few crazy ones.” As Americans become less religious the ones who are religious have become louder and more crazy. And I am just tired of their stranglehold on public policy.

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I’m So Old

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After having seen several interviews with this Johnson fellow out of Louisiana, I have a couple of thoughts.

First, he has that slimy hyper religious sheen that a lot of the hucksters who are religious in the sense that they cherrypick the bible to justify who they are currently hating on. The whole Tony Perkins patina if you will. And when you see these guys, there’s a scandal in there somewhere whether it is a dead girl or a live boy.

Second, I think the more interviews he does, the better he is for Democrats.

Third, I’m so old I remember when Markos was getting yelled at for calling these guys the American taliban or when everyone got chided for calling them Christianists and that not all Republicans, and here we are in the year of our lord 2023 and they’ve up and had every single elected Republican in the House voted for a live one right there in front of us all.

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Does Not Compute (Open Thread)

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There’s a column by Ruy Teixeira in today’s WaPo that has a scary title: “The evidence mounts: Hispanic voters are drifting toward the GOP.” (Gift link here.) Teixeira was a controversial hire for The Post. The paper foolishly (in my opinion) dumped Radley Balko, who does original investigative work that challenges assumptions (gift link here), and hired “think piece” people like Teixeira along with National Review benchwarmers Jim Geraghty and Ramesh Ponnuru earlier this year. Bad move, IMO.

But I digress. If you care to, you can read Teixeira’s column and make up your own mind about it. My opinion is that while the Hispanic electorate’s right turn in Florida has been a disaster for the state, we can’t necessarily draw wider lessons from the experience here. Florida is still quirky in the sense that it’s been a serial outlier of Team Red success lately.

Also, maybe it’s as pointless to analyze the Hispanic vote for clues to party fortunes as it is to evaluate votes by gender, e.g., women’s voting patterns, and for the same reason: the groups aren’t monoliths. There are baseline factors that political analysts need to know. But it’s not all that helpful to harp on metrics or subset statistics drawn from the behavior of a gigantic group of human beings as if it’s super meaningful. Too many other factors come into play, e.g., region, religion, class, education, marital status, etc.

If you chart Latino votes in presidential elections over time, support for Dems and Repubs fluctuates. Analysts in Florida are understandably trying to get a handle on it, and there was a piece about that in yesterday’s Tampa Bay Times: “Florida’s Latino evangelicals back DeSantis amid fear of new law.”

The law in question is a crackdown on undocumented workers which requires, among other things, emergency room patients to disclose their immigration status. But this paragraph from an evangelical group spokesperson attempting to explain evangelical support for DeSantis stopped me cold:

“We want a country that provides freedom and opportunity for everyone. We want leaders who will inspire the best in us, not pander to our fears and prejudices.”

Having been raised among evangelical Christians, I think that person has it exactly ass-backwards — there’s nothing the evangelicals I know enjoy more than having their fears and prejudices stoked, which is why they watch Fox News and support politicians like DeSantis and Trump.

I don’t know if that’s true of Latino evangelicals. Maybe a message from Democrats emphasizing personal freedom and minding your own damn businesses might resonate with them. I think it would definitely resonate outside evangelical circles.

Open thread.

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Dead, But Not Soon Enough

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Pat Robertson is dead, decades too late for it to be of any good, but at least we can still rejoice that the earth is a little bit better today than it was yesterday:

Pat Robertson, a Baptist minister with a passion for politics who marshaled Christian conservatives into a powerful constituency that helped Republicans capture both houses of Congress in 1994, died on Thursday at his home in Virginia Beach, Va. He was 93.

His death was announced by the Christian Broadcasting Network, which Mr. Robertson founded in 1960.

Mr. Robertson built an entrepreneurial empire based on his Christian faith, encompassing a university, a law school, a cable channel with broad reach, and more. A product of a family with politics in its veins, he also waged a serious though unsuccessful campaign for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, resigning as a Baptist minister as he began the run in the face of criticism about mixing church and state.

The loss did not dampen his political fervor; he went on to found the Christian Coalition, which stoked the conservative faith-based political resurgence of the 1990s and beyond.

It’s hard to really calculate just how much damage he and his movement have done to this nation, but Robertson is up there with a handful of non-elected individuals such as Art Laffer, Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh, the Koch brothers, and Leonard Leo, to name a few, whose actions have dramatically altered this nation for the worse, to the point of almost no recovery. I don’t believe in heaven and hell, but in the event I am wrong, I hope he spends eternity on his knees in broken glass wearing a spiked ball gag while being brutally pegged sans lube with a strap on worn by Rush Limbaugh, himself a scumbag who won’t even have the decency to give a proper reach around. Fuck him and the rest of the freaks like him.

As always, if you can’t say anything nice, put it in the comments so I can enjoy them.

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These Creepy Motherfuckers

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Again, it was never about just abortion:

The Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, appears to have thwarted an attempt to stop law enforcement obtaining menstrual histories of women in the state.

A bill passed in the Democratic-led state senate, and supported by half the chamber’s Republicans, would have banned search warrants for menstrual data stored in tracking apps on mobile phones or other electronic devices.

Advocates feared private health information could be used in prosecutions for abortion law violations, after a US supreme court ruling last summer overturned federal protections for the procedure.

But Youngkin, who has pushed for a 15-week abortion ban to mirror similar measures in several Republican-controlled states, essentially killed the bill through a procedural move in a subcommittee of the Republican-controlled House.

It is and always has been about control and keeping women as second class citizens to the fucking christofascists.

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Onward Christian Soldiers II

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I don’t know if this is a Florida quirk, or maybe it’s a thing in all states where Democrats don’t control the state government: our local daily newspapers sometimes scold the state and/or national Democratic Party and urge it to fix things to save us all from Republicans. I’ve written about it here before when the Tampa Bay Times did this, with some justification, as I wrote at the time.

This week, it’s the Miami Herald‘s editorial board, which is begging the party to figure out how to stop Republicans from consolidating the support of religious people and replacing democracy with a white Christian nationalist theocracy. The op-ed starts off by affirming that the U.S. is a secular nation and criticizing DeSantis’s use of Christian nationalism as a political weapon, then urges Dems to do more to counter that GOP strategy by appealing to moderate religious folks. Some excerpts:

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that, at the same time the GOP ramps up its rhetoric on religious and culture wars, the party makes gains with Hispanic and non-white voters in places like Miami-Dade…Yes, Democrats appear in some church pulpits to rally their base during election season, and high-profile politicians like President Biden, who’s Catholic, have been open about their faith. But given the onslaught of religious talk in Florida — and the use of government to promote one conservative religious view — Democrats must find a better way to acknowledge the importance of religion and spirituality in people’s lives without crossing the line into proselytizing…

DeSantis and other conservative leaders are trying to erode the separation of church and state, a concept Thomas Jefferson wrote of in an 1802 letter and cited in landmark court rulings. Florida taxpayers are now paying for training sessions for public school teachers that deny the Founding Fathers wanted that separation. The Founding Fathers had very nuanced views about religion, as the Herald Editorial Board previously explained.

DeSantis is not alone in this. The majority-conservative U.S. Supreme Court chipped away at that wall of separation with a series of recent rulings. With Evangelicals proving to be such an important and faithful voting bloc for Trump, there’s incentive for our ambitious and savvy governor to continue to court them.

Whereas the governor’s Christian nationalist shtick only separates us, the Democrats need to counter it more boldly and bring back into their tent voters who feel that, on the issues of religion and faith, the party has nothing to say to them.

After reading it twice, I’m still not sure exactly what they want Democrats to do. Almost 90% of the people in Congress are Christians, which is far more than Christianity’s share of the general public. Every single president ever elected at least claimed to be a Christian, and I can’t recall either party ever nominating a presidential candidate who didn’t identify as a Christian.

Do you think either party would nominate an out atheist or agnostic for president? I’d like to think the Dems would, but I don’t know, even though about a quarter of Americans are unaffiliated. Based on this, my guess is that anyone who thinks the Democratic Party is hostile to religion is already a Republican and unlikely to be lured to the Dems by more professions of a candidate’s faith or acknowledgement of religion’s role in daily life.

In my opinion, the appropriate thing to say on the issue is that religious liberty means not imposing one group’s views on everyone else, and this is something most Democratic candidates already say. So do our founding documents, for what it’s worth, which is apparently nothing to the Republican religious fanatics on the Supreme Court.

One fruitful angle Dems here in Florida could perhaps exploit is the evangelical griftopia DeSantis and the Republican statehouse have built, where they funnel public education money to outfits like Michigan’s extreme right-wing Hillsdale College for charter schools and teacher training. Given a chance, Florida Republicans will shovel even more taxpayer dollars to hard-right “crisis pregnancy center” outfits as they impose more restrictions on reproductive health.

Anyhoo, the Herald may be barking up the wrong tree here. DeSantis is open about who and what he is, and Democrats are offering an alternative for voters who want to get off the autocracy expressway. It’s up to voters to take that exit. Or not.

Open thread.

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