red v blue states

Here's a good one from Allen Clifton re red vs blue states. I'm not surprised that the GOP wants to eliminate the Department of Education. They would prefer that people don't even bother with "education." Take some vocational education, instead, because we'll still need plumbers and electricians. Reading books (usually) makes you smarter (Rush Limbaugh and similar books excepted). How are they gonna control you if you are well-educated? Rich people, like Elon Musk for instance, like Texas because there is no income tax, and if you're rich, Texas will fall all over itself to make you wanna move here. Tax abatements, tax incentives, tax cuts, all for the wealthy. California already got sick of Musk's shit and basically booted him out.

Here are a couple of facts conservatives need to understand about “red states” and why some of their brags — such as “it’s more affordable” and “more people, especially rich people and big businesses, are moving here” — aren’t necessarily the flex they think they are.

For starters, many “red states” are more affordable because most people don’t want to live there. There’s a reason there’s a direct correlation between population density and the cost of living. I live in Texas, and in major cities like Houston, Dallas, and Austin, it’s a lot more expensive to live there than it is in Brady or Abilene — because more people live in those major cities.

Trust me, if Mobile, Alabama, had the same population density as, say, Los Angeles or New York City, it would be a heck of a lot more expensive to live there.

It’s also more affordable because most “red states” are poorer, have shorter life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates, much lower wages, and tend to rank near the bottom when it comes to quality of education.

Which, again, is a big part of the reason fewer people live there — thus making it more affordable.

As for this big brag that a lot of businesses and rich people are leaving “blue states” to come to “red states,” yeah — they’re doing it to exploit tax breaks that ultimately in the long run make life worse for the vast majority of people living there.

When states like Texas or Florida give massive tax breaks to businesses to move there, who do you think ultimately ends up paying more?

Regular citizens, via higher property taxes, sales taxes, and other local taxes.

When rich people come to a “red state” to claim a “home,” even though they’re probably rarely ever there, so they don’t have to pay state income taxes in places like California or New York, who do you think that screws over?

All the regular people in the state who are now likely paying more because rich people are essentially using these “red states” as tax havens to save themselves a lot of money while driving up prices for everyone else.

Do you think these billionaires really want to live in these red states? If so, why didn’t they start their businesses there instead of in states like California, New York, Washington, and other “blue states”?

Notice it wasn’t until they made it big and built their wealth empires that they found their way to these “red states” to protect their money.

And again, the ordinary citizens of those states are the ones who get screwed.

Are “blue states” perfect? Of course not. No place is. They all need work.

But these rich people and big businesses aren’t leaving states run by Democrats because they genuinely want to move to Republican-run states. They’re going there because the GOP is doing at the local level what it’s been doing at the national level: passing legislation that benefits the top 1% at the expense of everyone else.

For example, look at recent pushes in states like Texas and Florida to eliminate property taxes. Sounds great, right?

Except when you discover that, at least here in Texas, the plan to offset that lost revenue is by increasing sales taxes. So the rich get massive tax breaks on their multi-million-dollar homes, while these states replace that revenue with a regressive consumption tax that will almost always lead to the vast majority of people shouldering more of the tax burden.

Always remember this: any tax system based heavily on consumption taxes (typically sales taxes) is highly regressive and favors the rich while placing a larger burden on the other 99% of people.

That said, this boasting I see from Republicans and citizens of states run by the GOP because they’ve seen population increases — especially from wealthy individuals and big businesses relocating there — isn’t the flex they think it is.

That just tells me your state and local governments are selling out the citizens who actually live in these places by passing tax policies and legislation that benefit the wealthy and big businesses at the expense of everyone else.

Allen Clifton on Facebook

James Hodge

If Facebook's algorithms are supposed to be steering us one way or another, I have to say I like the way it has been steering me. So far, at least. I keep getting new writers in my feed that are not MAGA. This one below is from James Hodge, a comedian, who appeared on my feed recently. If Facebook is trying to turn me into a conservative, it sure as hell ain't working.

This one from Hodge gives you some tips on how to deal with MAGA dolts.

James Hodge

When MAGA responds to obviously terrible things you point out Trump is doing they:

1: hit you with a ridiculous strawman argument.

They take your argument and replace it with something you never said and then they argue against that. Don’t get dragged into their stupidity. Stick to your point and ignore their nonsense.

Criticizing Trump for his failures in Iran doesn’t mean you think Iran should have nuclear weapons. You never said it and a nuclear armed Iran can be avoided without a war, but they have to invent it because they can’t intelligently argue against your actual point. When they create strawman claims it’s because they can’t process and refute your actual argument. They aren’t trying to be right. They just want to convince themselves you’re wrong.

2: whataboutism

You point out Trump is causing hyper-inflation with his horrible tariff policies and foreign military interventions.

They go, what about Joe Biden’s inflation? Joe Biden screwed up the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

They can’t defend Trump on the merits of his actions so they just rant about something Biden or Obama or Hillary Clinton supposedly did. It’s not an argument against your point. It’s just a defense mechanism. Ignore it. Argue your point. Don’t let them change the subject. A whataboutism is a weak person admitting they can’t actually argue against the point you are making.

3: ad hominem attack

You point out the GOP controlled Senate is giving Trump a billion dollars of tax payer money to spend on a ballroom he said a few months ago wouldn’t use any tax payer dollars and they say you have Trump Derangement Syndrome and you hate America. This is another accidental confession on their part that they can’t actually argue against your point. Now it’s just them saying, you’re crazy so they can climb down their cognitive dissonance hole and protect their stupid faith in trump’s idiocy. If they can convince themselves you have no credibility they can ignore your point. You’re just a crazy lib who wants to let (insert nonsense social issue here) so you hate Trump and have gone crazy. Again this is just another way they are confessing they can’t actually refute your point.

4: slippery slope

You say ICE agents shouldn’t be murdering people.

They say if ICE isn’t given free reign to do whatever they want America will be overrun by illegal aliens. This is nonsense. They’re predicting a future easily avoidable without doing whatever horrible thing Trump and Stephen miller are letting happen this week. They’re just trying to creat fear because they can’t refute your actual argument. They need fear because fear is the fastest way to shut off reason and replace it with a fight or flight instinct.

In conclusion:

These people aren’t smart. They’re just repeating the same nonsense they see all day from Newsmax, Fox News and right wing social media influencers. They don’t even know what they are doing. It’s just the way their mind has been brainwashed to deal with irrefutable arguments the same way they’ve been trained to do by right wing media.

Original.

Michael Jochum

Michael Jochum on the randomness of life.

The Butterfly Effect Wears Combat Boots

Riders of Justice snuck up on me this afternoon. I took a little time away from the relentless churn of the world and landed in a film I somehow missed, despite the fact that Mads Mikkelsen is one of my favorite actors working today. I’ve seen damn near everything he’s done. The man has that rare ability to say more with silence than most actors can with three pages of dialogue. Riders of Justice appears, on the surface, to be a revenge film. A soldier loses his wife in what appears to be a random train bombing, and the machinery of vengeance begins to turn. But like all worthwhile art, it’s not actually about what it first appears to be about.

It’s about grief, coincidence, fate, trauma, and the stories we tell ourselves so the chaos makes sense. What struck me most was not the violence, though there’s plenty of that, nor even the dark humor, which is beautifully Danish in its deadpan brutality. It was the strange, accidental therapy taking place between these fully realized, broken human beings. None of them set out to heal one another. None of them would describe what they’re doing as healing. And yet, that’s exactly what unfolds. A soldier shattered by loss. A statistician obsessed with patterns. Damaged men trying to make mathematical sense out of emotional catastrophe. Human beings doing what human beings do when reality becomes unbearable: trying to impose order on disorder.

And isn’t that what we all do? The film toys with the idea that nothing is random. That every event is preceded by another event, and another before that, a vast interconnected web of causality stretching backward into infinity. A dropped sandwich. A changed seat. A delayed train. A conversation. A decision. One microscopic shift, and an entirely different life emerges. The butterfly effect wearing combat boots.

As someone who has spent years studying yogic philosophy, consciousness, and the strange dance between ego and awareness, that landed hard with me. Not because I think life is pre-written in some rigid cosmic screenplay where free will is merely decorative, but because the film asks a far more interesting question: how much control do we really have, and what do we do when we realize it may be less than we imagined? The ego hates that question. The ego wants authorship. Control. Blame. Credit. Villains. Heroes. Certainty. But life rarely offers certainty. It offers circumstance.

Which, naturally, dragged me right back to where my mind so often goes these days: America. Because if you look at our current political reality through that same lens, Donald Trump stops being the entire story and becomes merely one grotesque expression of a much longer chain reaction. A symptom, not the disease. A consequence, not the cause. The billionaire class didn’t accidentally discover Donald Trump like archaeologists unearthing some golden orange relic. They recognized utility. A television personality with no ideology beyond self-worship. A man infinitely malleable because he believes in nothing except his own reflection. Perfect clay for oligarchic hands.

But if it hadn’t been Trump? It would have been someone else. That’s the unsettling part. Because this didn’t begin on an escalator in 2015. It began decades earlier, in boardrooms and think tanks, in deregulation schemes, media consolidation, union busting, religious extremism fused with political opportunism, and a long, patient cultivation of grievance as political fuel. Trump is not the architect. He’s the loudest billboard.

And yet, that doesn’t mean surrender. Because if life takes us in strange and often brutal directions, the one variable still left to us is response. We may not control the storm, but we absolutely control whether we become monsters inside it. That’s what Riders of Justice ultimately got right. Life will hand us absurdity. Tragedy. Coincidence. Apparent injustice. Loss so random it feels cosmically insulting. The question is never whether suffering arrives. It will. The question is what story we build around it. Do we weaponize our pain? Do we invent enemies? Do we retreat deeper into ego, certainty, vengeance? Or do we allow even the strangest companions along the road to help us become something less broken?

That’s the real work. Not avoiding life’s peculiar detours. Learning how to travel them without losing our humanity.

—Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.

racism

U.S. conservatives think they have achieved a long-sought-after goal: the disenfranchisement of black voters. It's pretty damn sad that, 150 years after slavery was abolished in this country, and 50+ years after the Voting Rights Act passed, conservatives are still trying to keep blacks down. The hatred of blacks continues unabated, unless they happen to be outstanding athletes, then conservatives love them. But any important job blacks hold, however, the right considers only because of DEI. And now all southern, conservative states are rushing to carve up any Congressional districts that were created to give blacks at least SOME representation. As soon as the recent SCOTUS decision eviscerating the remaining threads of the VRA was announced, the urge to redistrict became irresistible. But no, that's not racism, right? We will see what happens come this November and the midterms.

Here's another new voice taking on this issue: Rod Winterrowd

The Quiet Erasure

by Rod Winterrowd

While America has watched in horror as ICE agents smash car windows, and pull mothers to the streets and try to meet Stephen Miller’s 3000 arrests per day quota by showing up in courthouses to illegally arrest law abiding asylum seekers as they go through the legal procedure, something equally chilling has been unfolding with far less fanfare. Polls suggest that nearly 80% of Americans have been disturbed by what they’ve seen under this administration’s immigration enforcement. But there is another story, quieter, more methodical, and in many ways more permanent that has received a fraction of the attention it deserves.

Over the past sixteen months, the legal architecture that took sixty years, a civil war’s worth of moral courage, and the blood of actual martyrs to construct has been dismantled, piece by piece. Not with tanks or fire hoses — the images we associate with that struggle, but with executive orders, two-sentence emails, and General Services Administration memos that most Americans will never read.

This is not a partisan argument. These are documented facts. And they deserve to be named, numbered, and understood by every American who believes that the promise of this country belongs to all of us.

Here is what has happened to our Black brothers and sisters since January 20, 2025.

1. The Return of Segregated Workplaces-When President Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 in 1965 (the year I was born into an Age of Enlightenment) he wasn’t creating a new idea, he was burying an old one. Before that order, federal contractors could screen Black employees behind partitions so white workers wouldn’t have to look at them. They could maintain separate bathrooms, separate dining rooms, separate drinking fountains. The order didn’t just prohibit discrimination in hiring, it explicitly banned segregated facilities from any workplace receiving a federal contract.

On January 20, 2025, that order was revoked. A subsequent General Services Administration memo quietly removed Clause 52.222-21 from the Federal Acquisition Regulation — the specific language that had prohibited contractors from maintaining segregated workplaces, dining areas, waiting rooms, and drinking fountains. It received almost no coverage. As NYU constitutional law professor Melissa Murray observed, the change is symbolic but, she added, “incredibly meaningful in its symbolism.” The provisions were the legal foundation of integrated American workplaces. They are gone.

2. The Door to Your Home, Left Unguarded-The Fair Housing Act of 1968, another Johnson-era landmark was built on a simple premise: no American should be denied a home because of the color of their skin. It is worth pausing on one particular detail of history before describing what has been done to it. In the early 1970s, the Justice Department sued Donald Trump and his father Fred Trump for systematically refusing to rent apartments in their Queens buildings to Black applicants. Rental agents reportedly noted a “C” for “colored” — on the applications of Black prospective tenants. The Trumps denied wrongdoing, then settled, then were taken back to court for failing to comply with the settlement’s terms. They lost. That is the personal history of the man who has now dismantled the legal infrastructure designed to prevent exactly that.

In 2025, HUD Secretary Scott Turner terminated the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which had required any state receiving federal funding to demonstrate it was actively working to implement fair housing. Then HUD abandoned disparate impact enforcement entirely, dismissing major investigations into systemic housing discrimination, terminating hundreds of employees in its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, and citing the resulting staff reductions as the reason it could no longer investigate complaints. The watchdog was defunded, and then told it had no one left to watch.

3. The Chairman, Dismissed General Charles Q. Brown Jr. — CQ Brown was the second Black American in history to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, following Colin Powell. He was a decorated combat pilot with over forty years of service. He was fired by President Trump on February 22, 2025, less than two years into a four-year term, with no cause given. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously suggested publicly that Brown had gotten his position because he was Black. No replacement of comparable experience or stature was named. The message to every Black man and woman serving in uniform was unmistakable.

4. The Email That Began With “Carla”- Dr. Carla Hayden was the 14th Librarian of Congress. She was the first woman and the first African American to hold the post. Under her leadership, the Library was modernized, digitized, and opened to audiences who had never before felt it belonged to them. She had testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee just two days before she was fired. The termination came via email, sent at 6:56 in the evening. It began with the word “Carla”, just her first name followed by two sentences informing her that her position was terminated effective immediately. She later said her first instinct was to wonder whether it was even real.

She was with her mother when it arrived.

5. The Ballot, Erased - In April 2026, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais that effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the last major federal protection against racially discriminatory electoral maps. It was the final guardrail. Within days, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency and suspended an active congressional primary election in which thousands of citizens had already cast absentee ballots. His stated goal: to allow the legislature to redraw maps eliminating the state’s majority-Black congressional districts.

The ruling has since triggered redistricting efforts in Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, all aimed, in the words of civil rights organizations, at wiping out Black political power at every level, from Congress to school boards. This is not a Southern problem. It is an American one. And it is spreading.

6. The Recession Nobody Named - In 2024, Black unemployment stood at approximately 6.1%. By December 2025 it had risen to 7.5%. By the first quarter of 2026, it reached 7.6%. Over the same period, white unemployment barely moved…up 0.2%. Black women ended 2025 with an unemployment rate comparable to what white women experienced during the worst moments of the Great Recession. The primary driver was the mass elimination of federal jobs, the sector that for generations has offered Black Americans a pathway to the middle class, with stable wages, benefits, and pensions. Since January 2025, the federal workforce has lost 277,000 positions. Black workers, who made up nearly 19% of federal employees while representing 13% of the overall workforce, absorbed a disproportionate share of those losses.

Economists have begun using a phrase that should stop every American cold: a Black recession inside an economy that, by most official measures, is still described as ‘healthy’,  if you’re able to pay your bills.

7. The Organization That Dismantled the Klan, Indicted for Funding It - The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 with a singular mission: to use civil litigation to destroy white supremacist organizations. It worked. Through decades of lawsuits, the SPLC bankrupted Klan chapters and drove neo-Nazi organizations into financial ruin. To do that work, it used paid informants — people who infiltrated these groups and reported on planned violence, sharing what they learned with the FBI.

On April 21, 2026, the Trump Justice Department indicted the SPLC on federal fraud charges, alleging it had secretly funded the very extremism it claimed to fight. Legal experts across the ideological spectrum have called the case deeply flawed, noting that the SPLC’s mission has been publicly stated for fifty years, making it nearly impossible to argue that any donor was defrauded. The FBI itself worked directly with the SPLC’s informants for decades. The SPLC says its program saved lives, and that it shared a 45-page event alert with federal law enforcement ahead of the Charlottesville rally.

The organization that helped bring down the Ku Klux Klan is now being prosecuted by an administration that has simultaneously removed the prohibition on segregated federal workplaces, gutted fair housing enforcement, fired the nation’s top Black military officer, dismissed the first Black Librarian of Congress, and overseen a Supreme Court decision that has set in motion the erasure of Black representation from the ballot box.

Make of that what you will.

The question every American should be asking is simple: if these actions were being taken against any other group, any other community would we still call it coincidence?

We are celebrating the 250th anniversary of a democracy built on the promise that all men are created equal. That promise has never been perfectly kept. But it has, until now, always been the direction we were traveling.

The clock is being turned back. 2026 is looking more like Jim Crow or worse, reconstruction as we approach the anniversary of our great country.

And most of America isn’t watching.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Rod Winterrowd’s Facebook