On the top, the uniform of a Nazis SS officer. On the bottom, the CPAC stage. Do you think this design happened by chance? Could it be any clearer if you have eyes to see?
Today, as I watched clips from the alt-right CPAC Trumper conference there was something about the image I was looking at that evoked an old memory. Something blatantly evil. I couldn’t identify it, but the more I watched the stronger the feeling became. I went looking for it and synchronistically within three searches I found it. As I looked at the image I had found I realized that CPAC had done this deliberately. It was a kind of hidden message, a visual dog whistle that would mean something only to people already a part of the CPAC world, and maybe a few people steeped in history. The Republican Party is now, openly for those who know, explicitly fascist, White Supremacist, and neo-Nazi.
Stephan: A golden Trump, an image straight out of the Bible, but MAGAs apparently have no sense of irony. The Republican Party is getting weirder and weirder.
Social media was ablaze this morning with a video taken at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington of a golden statue in the image of Donald Trump. People right away associated the graven image with the golden calf of the Bible—when Moses took so long bringing Yahweh’s Law down from Mt. Sinai that his brother succumbed to pressure to erect an idol to a competing god. “Mentioned in Exodus 32 and I Kings 12 in the Old Testament, worship of the golden calf is seen as a supreme act of apostasy, the rejection of a faith once confessed,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. “The figure is probably a representation of the Egyptian bull god Apis in the earlier period and of the Canaanite fertility god Baal in the latter.”
Now, there’s more important stuff going on right now. The parliamentarian of the United States Senate, for instance, ruled last night that the provision in the president’s covid relief package that raises the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour cannot pass by way of “reconciliation,” […]
Stephan: If you ever needed proof that Congressional Republicans do not care a whit about the wellbeing of American society, including the people who voted for them, I don't know how they could have made it clearer than they did with this vote. Here is a list of the men and women who voted against the Democratic Covid-19 relief bill, your relief package. In 2022 it should tell you how to vote.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., speaks during his weekly news conference in the Capitol in Washington on Friday, Feb. 26, 2021. Every single member of the GOP House caucus, joined by two Democrats, voted against a sweeping Covid-19 relief package early Saturday morning. Credit: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty
Though House Democrats in the end had the votes to assure final passage of a sweeping Covid-19 relief package overnight—securing approval with a final 219-212 tally—it was the Republican Party membership in total lockstep, joined by two lonely members of the majority party, that voted to deny struggling American families, frontline workers, state governments, local communities, small businesses, and the nation’s schools and public health system nearly $2 trillion in urgent assistance to stabilize the economy, beat back the pandemic, and ensure solid footing for a robust recovery.
The two Democrats who sided with the GOP were Rep. Jared Golden, who represents Maine’s 2nd District, and Rep. Kurt Shrader, who represents Oregon’s 5th District. Direct from the roll call:
Stephan: The other day a Black reader wrote me and asked for something I thought represented White privilege saying if I wrote about it how did I understand it. The next day I saw this story, and as I read it, it struck me as an almost cartoonish example of White privilege. Imagine what would have happened to a Black or Brown man who killed a man in a hit and run, then lied about it. Do you think he would have gotten away with three misdemeanors and face only 90 days in jail like this cretin?
Jason Ravnsborg speaks in Sioux Falls, S.D., on Feb. 23, 2014. South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem is calling for the resignation of the state’s attorney general, who is facing misdemeanor charges for striking and killing a man with his car. Credit: Dirk Lammers/AP
Days after South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg fatally struck a man while driving in September, detectives told the Republican official they had found a pair of broken reading glasses inside his Ford Taurus. They belonged to the man he killed.
That was a problem, detectives said, because Ravnsborg, 44, said he didn’t know he had hit a man until the following day, when he returned to the scene and found the body of Joseph Boever, 55, in a ditch.
“They’re Joe’s glasses, so that means his face came through your windshield,” one of the detectives said in an interview released by the South Dakota Department of Public Safety on Tuesday.
The interviews raise questions about the conduct of the state’s top law enforcement official in the Sept. 12 incident, giving […]
Stephan: More good news from the Biden administration, although it got very little media coverage. Jennifer Granholm is just the person we need as energy secretary. She understands the issues and she has integrity, and the courage and strength to see rational climate change oriented energy policies are put in place and pursued.
Biden’s pick for energy secretary Jennifer Granholm
The Senate voted 64-35 on Thursday to confirm former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm as secretary of the Department of Energy.
Why it matters: Granholm, only the second woman to head the department, will play a key role in President Biden’s efforts to accelerate the U.S. shift to clean energy and help other countries do the same.
Granholm said she hopes to strengthen solar and wind power usage, and to boost the development of clean-energy technologies, like electric vehicles.
The big picture: Granholm served two terms as Michigan’s governor from 2003 to 2011, during which she focused on boosting the auto and manufacturing sectors.
She served as Michigan’s attorney general from 1998 to 2002.
Granholm has also worked as an adviser to Pew Charitable Trusts’ Clean Energy Program.
The bottom line: Granholm’s experience working with the auto industry, especially its venture into electric vehicles, is viewed as an important asset in fulfilling Biden’s climate agenda.
While serving as governor of Michigan, Granholm secured $1.35 billion in federal funding for factories in her auto-focused state to produce electric vehicles,
