CSotD: Progress is our most important product
Skip to comments
Since it's Sunday, we'll lead off with Tom Toles' cartoon.
Trump has spoken out of both sides of his mouth on the immigrant ban, insisting that it's not anti-Muslim but then adding that Christian refugees will get special treatment (I'm confident he has no idea that there are also Yazidis in the mix, much less what they are).
However, as Toles suggests, Jesus isn't the Messiah he's intent on promoting. Not that it's easy to tell what he actually has in mind.
I don't know what it would be like to play poker with Trump: Would he suddenly blurt out what he had in his hand? But I do think it's a good thing he's a teetotaller, because most people wouldn't accidentally say drunk the things he says sober.
As far as promoting religion goes, besides his announced plan to ban Muslims and his yes-but-no-but-yes explanations of the immigration order, he has also announced his plan to "destroy totally" the Johnson Amendment, which bans churches with tax-exempt status from active political campaigning.
Which has virtually never been enforced in terms of preaching and of encouraging people to be politically active on the favored side of particular issues.
It has, however, prevented churches from contributing money to candidates, less through enforcement than through the churches understanding that such blatant disregard for the law would attract enforcement.
So it's reasonable to think that he's working towards a goal of allowing churches to act as dark money conduits for candidates, given that 501c3 tax-exempt organizations are not required to list their donors.
However, churches are not the only 501c3 organizations,so dig deeper: Remember when a bunch of Tea Party organizers tried to register as bogus 501c3s, only they unwittingly put up a flag for the IRS by using identical terms in their applications?
If the IRS wanted to find applications for these phony "charities," all they had to do with perform a search for words like "liberty" and "freedom" in their filings.
Well, except that using a simple search function to identify potentially fraudulent applications turned out to be a horrible, terrible thing to do.
The point is, "totally destroying the Johnson Amendment" would do less to encourage churches to donate than it would to unleash a flood of untraceable money from "charities" with no religious underpinnings at all and no fig leaf of charitable mission beyond being charitable to favored candidates.
If we were back in the days of Bush/Cheney, I'd assume it was a case of the actual architect of the plan knowing what he was doing and the fool at the microphones blithely and sincerely uttering the nonsense that makes it sound credible.
But, while I'm aware a lot of people think Bannon is playing the puppetmaster, and I'm sure he'd love the results, I can't tell when Trump is playing a purposeful game and when he's genuinely just saying stupid things. It makes me reluctant to ascribe motives to anything he does.
Anyone who has spent time on the seedier side of life will tell you that it is hard, and dangerous, to fight a drunk, in part because he's impervious to pain and in part because he makes moves that you can't possibly anticipate.
And Trump fights like that stone sober.
Meanwhile, Candorville takes on the flip side of the spineless GOP, which is the over-thinking, over-accommodating, ever-vacillating Democrats.
This doesn't trigger a rant because I've got nothing to add.
The Road Ahead
Andy Warner's got an interesting "explainer" cartoon up at the Nib, this one about self-driving 18-wheelers.
It's quite extensive and very interesting and a little chilling, and I pulled out this particular segment because it doesn't surprise me in the least that Uber would be involved.
I guess they're gonna skip right past hiring scabs and put the drivers out of work directly.
I continue to be flabbergasted by people who would grab an Uber to go to a rally and chant slogans about how Trump doesn't get it.
But then a lot of cab drivers are immigrants, so they're on their own. Never mind the rightwingers on this one: People who would never make jokes about black people or Jews will happily tred on immigrant cab drivers.
However, I also find it interesting that Budweiser would help pioneer putting truck drivers out of work.
That, for sure, seems like a slap in the face to their core constituency, but, then again, their core constituency has decided the bosses are good and the unions are bad and I can't figure them out. Maybe Bud knows best.
Besides, as the people Warner interviewed explain, it won't actually cost jobs and it's perfectly safe. So that satisfies all possible objections.
Except perhaps why we don't upgrade the rail system and go back to using trains instead of unleashing these behemoths on the public highways?
Ah well. If you step out in front of one of these trucks, it will stop.
But don't step out in front of progress.
Never mind. Trump's gonna bring back the coal mines!
Comments
Comments are closed.