Ugh, just when the first corn fed, cornfederate legislature was safely in the history books, the Management Council met. Of course, the same dumb ideas that get rejected repeatedly are back up for reconsideration, at least in part.
I hear we want to do the election review again and redo the same bills that just died three weeks ago ... in exchange for 911 funding.
Tara Nethercott.
The corner crossing bill won't be back, which is too bad.
Vote the WFC out and send them back to pre 1964 Alabama where they'll be happy.
I was aware this legislation had been introduced. Frankly, Anti SLAPP provisions are really tricky as they're based, basically, on pre judging a litigants intent.
Forces loyal to Marshal Józef Piłsudski rose up in a coup against Poland's democratically elected government in no small part due to his belief that he uniquely could and should control the country's destiny and his supporters opposition to democracy. The coup would result in a new constitution which was in place at the outbreak of World War Two and at least theoretically in place throughout the war.
The Italian built Norge airship reached the North Pole with Roald Amundsen, pilot Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, Lincoln Ellsworth, Italian engineer Umberto Nobile, Norwegian Navy commander Oscar Wisting and 11 other crew members. It was the first flight over the North Pole.
The British Trades Union Congress called of its general strike. A coal miners strike continued.
I've been saying for awhile, and statements like this really demonstrate it:
It looks like President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches than the Pope.
Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of the 14,000-member First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas on Fox News.
That comment was stupid. But then, he's called Catholicism a cult.
The Catholic Church is an Apostolic Church. It was founded by Christ. John Smyth, an Englishman, founded the Baptists in 1609.
Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus is a Catholic doctrine. There is no salvation outside the Church. None the less, the Church holds that those who did not come to Christ innocently, or those who did not come to the Church innocently, can be saved, which operates again through the Church. You can't be held responsible for what you innocently didn't know.
But what about here?
We're in the death throws of the reformation. Things Smyth could get away with believing in 1609 there's no excuse to believe now, other than invincible ignorance.
Being a pastor of a 14,000 member church puts a pretty heavy burden on you and your soul for remaining ignorant.
Smyth is also a Fox News contributor, which really figures.
As an irony here, although one he will not be capable, right now, of appreciating, Smyth has gone after Mormons, Jews, and Muslims as well. In normal times, he would not have a national television audience. He would have a local Dallas one as Texas is part of the former Confederacy and the Baptist rose in the wake of the Southern defeat in 1865, replacing the Episcopal Church in the South as the dominant religion culturally. Nationally, however, picking on Jews, Muslims, Catholics and Mormons would get you booted off of television.
Religious aspects of this aside, this brings up a political one I've warned about here repeatedly.
Catholics voting for MAGA candidates are voting for a group that not only doesn't regard the Church highly, they don't believe it's a Christian religion at all. People like Lyin' Chuck Gray, Reid Rasner and Megan Degenfelder, who are Catholics who run as MAGA are making a political bargain that will cause them, as it seems to have already for Lyin' Chuck to decide between their faiths, and their political fortunes. Degenfelder has signs up all over which say "Endorsed by President Trump".
They should say "Endorsed by Blasphemous Donald Trump".
And this isn't merely esoteric. We're in the same position now that Catholic Germans were in the 1932 German election (and the Catholics in fact went for Hitler much less than German protestants did). There's really going to be no good "um, well, the other guy . . . " excuse here. The far right Evangelical edge of the Trump coalition isn't even pretending not to hate Catholics much anymore.
And what about Mormons?
Mormons include a heavy MAGA contingent, although the only really devout Mormons I know here locally right now are heavy duty Never Trumpers, and openly so. But then you have guys like Deseret Mike Lee who come pretty close to viewing Trump positively in some sort of creepy religious terms. Deep in the Jello Belt it's always been the case that there was a sort of ignorant conservatism in some quarters, and in the last 16 years, in spite of guys like Mitt Romney, it's really come out.
Trump and Islam is simply laughable as a joke. In the last election Trump drew a fair amount of Islamic support because Muslims were so mad about Joe Biden's support of Israel. Well, they got what the should have expected. The only person Trump loves more than Putin (and of course Trump) is Benjamin Netanyahu and as a result we've supported genocide in Gaza, a war in Lebanon and we helped Israel attack Iran and we can't get out of it. I suspect that most Muslims are voting for the Democrats next go around, just like most Hispanics will be (and in both instances, this really gives the Democrats a chance to evolve away from their sea of blood positions).
And this sort of thing should even be a revelation for Jews of all stripes, although I think they're more awake to what MAGA is than most. The strong Trump support for Netanyahu comes in part because Netanyahu is good at playing Trump, much like Putin is. But it also comes from people like Hegseth or Huckabee, who have a radical Protestant view of Israel and want to bring about the Second Coming of Christ basically by force, which they see current events as an opportunity in which to do so. Put another way, do you really want to get in the car with somebody who wants to drive you to a giant gun fight?
Donald Trump, of course, is sort of beyond all of this. Trump isn't any sort of serious Christian and we don't really know if he has any religious beliefs at all. Most of his life has been spent chasing cash through real estate development and his hobbies have been golf and chasing tail. Christians are just a convenient vehicle for him. If the Sultan of Oman offered him a bigger better airplane tomorrow if he'd convert to Islam, and remind him that Muslims can have more than one wife, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if he signed on. His personal conduct actually squares better with Islam than Christianity, which is after all a religion focused on the poor and duty.
In the end, all of this is going to fall apart.
Christians who aligned with Trump, just like Muslims and Mormons who did, are going to have to pay the cost. It'll be different for each. For Muslims, well their fellows are playing through blood right now. Jews will pay by the backlash that's already started.
For Christians, it'll be different, depending upon where their allegiance lay. For the ignorant members of the American Civil Religion, and for the hardcore Evangelical right, this will be the beginning of an end of an era that started in April 1865, when the South fell and the Evangelical far right stepped into its own. For the Protestant world in general, this will accelerate the death of the Reformation.
For the Catholic and Orthodox Christians who supported Trump, how could you be so blind?
Nonetheless, this will be a good thing for the Catholic and Orthodox. A delusion that started in 1960 that you could be fully American and fully Catholic, or Orthodox, has ended. National Conservatism will end with it.
Henry Mosler's painting "The Lost Cause", depicting an uneducated Southern dupe returning to his destroyed home after having fought for rich Southerners who wanted to keep human beings in barbours slavery.
The biggest political mistake the US has ever made was not engage in radical reconstruction after the American Civil War. To have served in an officer, or frankly even as a volunteer, in the Confederate Army should have been regarded as fully treasonous and never forgiven. Those who did should have been tried and given heavy sentences. Men like Robert E. Lee should never have been allowed to walk the streets as free men again.
Slave holders, no matter how small they were, should have had to compensate their former slaves or their decedents heavily. On the principal that the land belongs to he who works it, a means of transferring agricultural land to the former slaves should have been devised.
This is, I'd note, the second time the country has gone through this Lost Cause crap. The cause of the Southern States during the Civil War ranks right up with that of Nazi Germany as one of the worst causes people have every fought for. The South should have been made to hang its head in shame, as the Germans were after World War Two. And yet, here we go again.
If there's any good thing about any of this is that the rise of the Lost Cause yielded to the Civil Rights Era. Americans thought they'd finally one the promise of the country, although Liberals and Progressives certainly took that claimed victory beyond what it meant and should have mean in other ways. Everyone has been reminded of that, now that the fulfillment of the result of Reagan's Southern Strategy has been afflicted upon the nation in form of the Trump Administration.
The Centennial International Exhibition, the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, commenced in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Events like this use to be huge.
On the opening day Alexander Graham Bell presented a paper on communicating musical sounds by wire (telephone).
I keep finding out that there are Vietnam War movies I've never seen. That's probably because a lot of them aren't that good and are therefore obscure. Still, with a movie as bad as The Green Berets being well known, you'd think you'd have heard of them all.
This one was on cable, and I'd never heard of it, so I watched it.
It's pretty bad.
Filmed in 1988, it's apparently based on an actual memoir, but it sort of comes across as an effort to film something like Platoon, but where all the Americans are admirable and on a much smaller budget.
The basic plot follows a young officer as he tried to gain the trust of his men, a theme that's been filmed a zillion times. In this instance, the young lieutenant is assigned to an impossibly badly designed very tiny defense position out in the bush, whose only purpose is to guard a nearby village.
From the outpost, he leads patrols. He's always steadfast. Three career NCOs help him, the distrusting long time sergeant, the sympathetic Christian African American sergeant, and the battle hardened corporal. Back somewhere is his commanding officer, a rather old and crusty major. Officers occasionally pop in to check on the post. Pretty much 100% of the characters are cartoons. Eventually there's a climatic battle. . . like Platoon.
In terms of material details, the film isn't horrible, but like Platoon it features a CAR 15 in the hands of an NCO. Platoon seems to have created the myth that this was common. The same NCO carriers a very large frame revolver, which actually isn't impossible. All of the enemy combatants seem to be NVA regulars for some reason, although they're indicated to be VC regulars, which doesn't make any sense.
Chicago was referred to as The Windy City for the first known time, in an article by the Cincinnati Enquirer. The headline was:
THAT WINDY CITY. Some Freaks of the Last Chicago Tornado.
Locally at least, Casper Wyoming is sometimes called "Wind City".
Ueno Park in Tokyo was dedicated.
Nikolaus Otto working with Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach started the world’s first internal-combustion engine that efficiently burned fuel directly in a piston chamber.
And at this point it's hard not to view any Trump administration release of anything as more than a mere distraction. War going badly, fuel prices through the roof, airlines dying, and then there's those Epstein files. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if Trump pushed Melania off the White House roof it it distracted for a few days.
To add to these comments, note the typical Republican comment "you decide" as to what they are. More antiscientific crap from the president of a party of cult that has become hostile to science.
The first color feature film, The Black Pirate, was released.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin addressed the British public about the ongoing strike in the UK, the first such emergency radio broadcast of that type in that nation.
The first test of the Mark 6 torpedo exploder was conducted.
The secret device would not receive much in the field testing before World War Two, at which time it was learned that it had extremely dangerous flaws and defects that needed to be fixed immediately, although they were rapidly learned of and corrected early in the war.
Sir David Frederick Attenborough was born, and turns 100 years old today.
Maronite Catholic Jacelyne Khoueiry and six other Lebanese Christian women defended a building in Martyrs' Square in Beirut from an attack by 300 Palestine Liberation Organization fighter.
Khouneiry would go on to command a female Christian unit of 1,500 members before laying down her arms in 1986. She'd go on to found charitable and prolife organizations and participated in a 2012 synod on the Middle East and the 2014 Third Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops. She was appointed to the Pontifical Council for the Laity.
Supposedly the first Christian sermon in the Black Hills was preached at Custer City, South Dakota by Methodist layman Henry Weston Smith.
He would be murdered that following August.
While this was notable, I'm frankly really skeptical that this was the "first". American histories of the settlement of the West tend to pretend that when European Americans first shows up they were the first people of European ancestry to show up, which is very far from true. The Corps of Discovery, for instance, merely re-trod ground that the French Canadians had been hiking for years. Catholic missionaries had been in the region, moreover, for decades by this point.
The Trump Administration breaks down crying and asks for help from adults.
The Trump administration is desperately seeking UN intervention in the war it started as the US is on the verge of a complete defeat in the war with Iran.
Remember the much vaunted and completely absurd Board of Peace that Trump rolled out when he liked to pretend he was a peacemaker? The countries that joined were Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Ask them for help. . .
Go ahead Marco, call them up. . .
Go ahead, have him do it.
Yesterday the Trump Administration rolled back into existence the Presidential Fitness Test which Eisenhower had put into effect in 1956 and Obama did away with in 2012, replacing it with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program. Trump can't have anying Obama. . . like a peace deal with Iran that dealt with nuclear stuff . . anyhow. . .
Secretary of Batshit Crazy Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made a joke about Trump being able to do a fifty mile hike and Trump joked back that he could do it.
Go ahead. Let's see him manage that. . .
Mass Mailings
We've been getting tons of political mass mailings from three candidates. I noted that here:
All three of these candidates essentially have the same message. They love Trump as only Trump loves Trump. They love Trump more than Trump's children love Trump. They love Trump more than Melania, assuming of course that she loves Trump.
Trump retains a hold on the minds of MAGA and the GOP has descended into the Party of Trump. There really aren't real Republicans anymore. As I've noted here already, there's a really good chance that after November the GOP will simply cease to exist.
But is being more Trump, than Trump, a liability in Wyoming? I guess we'll see.
Not that the mailings are all identical. Gray's just asserts his Trumpiness. Rasner, who has a MAGA truckers cap J.B. Welded to his head, takes shots at Gray. Freiss mostly accidentally shows himself to be super rich and not really knowing what, or where, Wyoming actually is.
Anyhow, the mass mailers are so irritating I took a little time to see if I could return them to senders. The USPS Reddit, which isn't an official page, makes it clear that would be pointless. They just throw them away. The topic really irritates mail carriers, as they'd rather you just throw them away yourself. I can see their point.
Apparently a lot of people just throw them on the ground, which really irritates mail carriers also
What do we know about these guys?
It's occurred to me that Wyomingites have been voting for people they know absolutely nothing about.
This isn't true about candidates from other states. We know all about Colorado's BoBo and Alaska's Peltola. Why don't we know more about these people who claim to have all these super duper values that are supposed to reflect the state's?
Take Gray for example Next to nothing about him is publicly known. He could be robbing liquor stores on his off hours and we wouldn't know.
All we know about him is he grew up near Los Angeles and graduated from high school there in 2008, after he went to Wharton, where based on the economic example of Donald Trump, who also graduated from Wharton, must educate its students with Archie cartoons. He spent his summers in Wyoming growing up, and when he graduated from Wharton, he went right to work for his father's radio station where he broadcast political babble. That's pretty darned close to never having had to work in the real world. He rose to his current position by barely beating Tara Nethercott for the Secretary of State by constant hystericaly spewing of lies.
He was a founding member of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus which was heavily funded by out of state and rich carpetbagger money. I know that he's a Catholic, but only because when he lived in Casper I'd see him at Mass on odd occasion. My presumption is that he regularly attended Mass, although I don't know that. He went to a different parish than I do. Frankly, if I'd been a parish priest, I'd have called him out for lying.
He's unmarried at age 36 and nobody is ever mentioned as a love interest. Maybe he has one. For all I know he could be dating AoC. But the question is never asked. It should be, as being unmarried at 36 is frankly odd and we have a right to know if people are personally living up to their declared political values. It's one thing if he's so dedicated to work, or whatever, that he doesn't have time for gals. Maybe he just isn't interested, some percentage of people, a small number, aren't. But if on the other hand he hangs out with the dancers from The Clown's Den every night, and I'm in no way suggesting he is, we ought to be so informed.
Press, you aren't doing your job.
We don't know much about Reid Rasner either, although the fact that he keeps suing people for defamation (and people have said some awful things about him) has revealed a little. In one suit he admitted, if "admission" is the correct word, to being a homosexual. In the suits he's filed he's taken grave exception to being accused of molestation of somebody below 18, or molesting anyone, and I don't blame him a bit for that. I suspect that some people just believe that every homosexual does things like that, which is certainly not the case, but suspecting such a thing is just flat out wrong. The suits therefore make sense, although its really risky for a politician. He's some sort of investment businessman. So all in all, we know a lot more about him than we do Gray, which is really odd. I don't like his politics at all, but the fact that he's been open about these things is really to his credit.
With both of these candidates what we don't know is if their mailing appearance matches anything about them in real life. Chuck likes to wear Western cut wool shirts now, but he looks really uncomfortable appearing that way. His button-down and blue blazer looked a lot more natural. He's been videoed on oilfield locations, where he's never worked, and on a four wheeler, which looks unnatural to him.
Rasner likes to be photographed with firearms. So does Freiss. But do they really use them? Maybe, but do we really know that?
Freiss, I'd note, is another one. His father was a super wealthy carpetbagger and he seems to be the same. Go home, carpetbagger.
Balow, who is the best candidate so far, is from Laramie. As already noted, Gray is a carpetbagger from California. Rasner is from Casper. She was a career educator who took over as Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction after the disastrous Cindy Hill, who brought full blown batshit into that office. Balow held that office and then took the same one in Virginia, where the position is (sensibly) appointed. People have held that against here here, which is really ironic. If that's bad, Brent Bien ought to be exiled to the far side of the moon.
We know a lot more about Hageman, Barrasso, Lummis and Gordon, although I'd even question that to some extent. There's some questions I'd ask Hageman and Barrasso which I think are legitimate, but which just aren't done.
Anyhow, Press, why don't you tell us something about these people? You report on them so little, that it's honestly the case that a triple ax murderer could move into Wyoming.
