Jesse Dayton

Jesse Dayton, another musician from Texas, has opinions he doesn't mind sharing. A lot of good musicians from Texas shy away from politics. And that can be a good thing, especially when you learn some of your faves are fucking right-wingers. Jesse Dayton isn't one of those. If you see him coming through your town, check him out. His mix of Texas blues, outlaw country and punkabilly is quite entertaining. (I would post a video here for you to listen to, but Blogger seems to have removed that functionality. Drip drip drip. See the link below)

TALAFREAKO AIN'T THE PROBLEM, WILLFUL IGNORANCE IS:

Do you know how stupid Ken Paxton and his overlords in Washington DC think you are? They think my Labrador has a higher emotional intelligence than you do. Resorting to name calling like this is some Junior High football game? Pffft. 30 years of corruption in Texas that only takes 3 seconds to Google "is there systemic corruption in Texas politics?" Please know they're selling the entire state of Texas off to fake conservative billionaire yankees who went to Harvard and Yale and privately laugh at how dumb they think you are. They're pretending that trans bathrooms are more important than Data Centers destroying all of your drinking water, because you're letting them do it. 2 years in and they're still blaming sky high gas prices on Biden, who is oblivious and struggling with dementia. Coercing you with fear slogans from the 1980s about "communism" while these health insurance companies rape your savings over a hip replacement. Ordinary hardworking Americans getting gunned down every single day, while they distract you by flooding your algorithm zone and blaming it all on the oldest and easiest targets "illegal immigrants". Not sure if I'm more shocked that they still get away with using this tired ass fear-based playbook, or that in 2026 with literally a f-n computer in your pocket you can Google anything with, that you're still taking the bait?

What's it going to take for you to figure out you're the mark at their poker table? What's it going to take for you to regain a healthy suspicion of ALL politicians, and not be the schmuck at the strip club who thinks the dancer has fallen in love with you? Greg Abbott and Trump are trying to get precious mineral/oil rights to Big Bend National Park w/ a "wall" and Abbott just sold a massive plot of Texas land half the size of Manhattan to Elon Musk to build a chip manufacturing facility and you guessed it, ding-ding-ding, a Data Center. 

I don't care if you're conservative, liberal, white, black, brown, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, atheist, gay, straight, city slicker, country good ol boy, whatever...if you make less than $220,000 a year in Texas you're getting raw dogged in your poop chute by these criminals in Texas politics. And you're letting them change the narrative from affordable healthcare plan, a solid living wage w/ benefits and safe schools that kids won't get shot down like dogs in, so you can spend all your time getting "revenge" on f-n 000.02 percent of trans people. By the way, what's with the 24/7 fascination with other peoples sex lives? What's with letting Abbott criminalize marijuana? What's with legislating women's bodies? You're supposed to be AGAINST Big Government but you couldn't be any less libertarian while continually blurring the lines between Church and State. Christ, if you're gonna be a real conservative, go back and read Barry Goldwater's book on conservatism, cuz right now it sounds like you hate freedom and wanna throw out the Constitution so these wack job Christian Nationalist can take over your government.

If you wanna do something truly conspiratorial, one thing outside the box before you die in 10, 20, 30 years...vote for James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa and watch things change for the better after 30 years of the exact same corrupt BS. Imagine a politician that's so crooked that the only platform he's running his campaign on is your willful ignorance. The polls are open...go vote. Good luck Texas, you'll need it. onward, JD

Jesse Dayton

I Hate Guns

The title of this piece below from 2015 is "I Hate Guns." Guns are far too prevalent and easy to get in this country. But why does the U.S. have far higher numbers of mass shootings than any other country?  

Data from the Rockefeller Institute of Government Global Mass Shooting Factsheet. 

# of mass shooting incidents from 2000-2020. (frankly these numbers look too low, especially for the US)

• United States: 121 incidents
• Russia: 24 incidents
• France: 8 incidents
• Germany: 6 incidents
• Serbia: 6 incidents
• Israel: 5 incidents
• Canada: 4 incidents
• Turkey: 4 incidents
• Austria: 3 incidents
• Czech Republic: 3 incidents

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Time to trot this out again. First published in 2015, eleven years ago. Was among the most read commentaries in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that year and reprinted and reread in media across the country. I have reprinted it many times since as the situation that prompted it repeated itself with mind numbing regularity and inevitability.

Pardon my French, but what the fuck is wrong with this country?

Here's the post. You'll be seeing it again.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I HATE GUNS

Okay. I have nothing to lose, so I'm going to go all the way out to the edge on this gun issue.

In 2005 I watched as my friends at Red Lake were traumatized, killed, and besieged by reporters, then forgotten after a confused and alienated kid drove a car into the front of the school where I had worked, before pulling out an arsenal of guns and killing 7 people.

I am, as I write this, on a plane back to my home in Portland, 180 miles north of the mass murder site in the town of Roseburg, where I used to buy car parts when I lived in the Oregon woods many years ago, and where I have stopped and let my dog play in the dog park as we drove south through the magical Oregon country side.

I shop at the Clackamas mall where one more confused white kid brought out a gun and killed three people for no reason that any of us can fathom, or should have to fathom.

And all the politicians, no matter how pained and grieved, are dancing around the issue of guns with vague platitudes about the need for mental health services, background checks, the necessity of enlisting the support of responsible gun owners, and on and on.

But, let's cut to the chase: it's guns, pure and simple. Guns.

So, let's go to it.

What is it about guns that so obsesses Americans? Yes, I know all about the second amendment and how it supposedly protects our rights. I know all about the perceived slippery slope into governmental control of our lives. I know about beard boys in Idaho wearing camouflage and facepaint and crawling through the woods to hold out against an upcoming takeover by a fascist and totalitarian government, and about frightened fathers and mothers keeping guns in their houses in cities and suburbs to protect against intruders. I know about all of this.

But forget all of that. Tell me about guns.

There are otherwise perfectly normal human beings in northern Minnesota where I lived who can barely feed their families but have 25 rifles, pistols, and semi-automatic weapons in their closets.

Why? You don't have 25 refrigerators, or 25 pipe wrenches, or 25 anything other than perhaps baseball caps and pairs of shoes, and those things are questionable enough in themselves. So, what is it about a gun? Is it some feeling of power? Is there some crypto-sexual thrill in holding it? Shooting it? Stroking it?

I know I'm being a bit demeaning, but, damn it, I simply can't understand. And, frankly, I don't want to. I am sick of hearing arguments for these cruel and lethal objects. They scare me, they disgust me, and it makes me ashamed that such an adolescent and selfish obsession can be one of the few sacrosanct things in our country.

What drives it? Why are we like this?

Sometimes I think it is part of this culture of fear that comes with our out-of-control capitalist society where every advertisement is based on fear and perceived deficiency, and a gun is just the physical embodiment of a sense of control.

Sometimes I think it has a subterranean racism at its heart, where fear of the terrifying black man at your door drives white people to want to have the fantasy of a protective weapon at hand.

Sometimes I think it is the residual frontier ethic. But the Canadians have every bit as strong a frontier ethic, and they don't share this cultural mental illness.

And, yes, that's what it is — a cultural mental illness, fomented and fanned by an armament industry that needs, or, at least, wants, every man, woman, and child to be packing a weapon in the name of freedom or security or whatever abstraction they can sell us.

But, my God, children are dying, and they are dying from guns. No amount of counseling or monitoring or background checks is going to stop this. People will get guns like teenagers get beer, and no amount of laws will stop it.

Consider the sheriff in Roseburg. He stated quite forthrightly that he would not enforce any federal gun laws, nor would he allow his deputies to do so. And now he is looking in the faces of the mothers and fathers and husbands and wives of the dead. How can he sleep at night? Is he at least a little conflicted?

Sadly, probably not. To him, it wasn't a gun that killed all those people. It was a person. And the fact that it was a gun in the hand of that person, just as it was a gun in the hand of the killer at Red Lake and the killers at Columbine and the killer at the Aurora movie theater and the killer in every other mass murder in America doesn't register with him or people like him. It is a mind-boggling disconnect that simply beggars the imagination.

So, what will stop it? One and only one thing: getting rid of guns on our streets. And this is no easy task. It cannot be done by fiat, it cannot be done in one legislative swoop. It can only be done by changing hearts and minds, and that takes time.

There needs to be incremental change – make it illegal to own handguns and semi-automatics for starters, then begin confiscating them as they come in contact with the legal system. Stop the manufacture, or, at least, the sale of them. Then get beneath this and start to educate our children to the reality that compassion will eventually trump fear, and there is nothing magical or mystical about a piece of metal (or, sadly, plastic) that can kill at a distance. In fact, it is simply sick to look at them as problem solvers.

So, go ahead, unfriend me, refuse to buy my books, write me enraged emails filled with the tired old tropes.

But, for the love of Jesus and Mary and Buddha and things that go bump in the night, take a look in the mirror and ask why this piece of metal that is essentially a killing machine is so damn important to you.

Red Lake. Clackamas Mall. Columbine. Sandy Hook. Roseburg. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

And you will be shocked and you will be surprised and you will say, "This was such a nice quiet community. Things like this aren't supposed to happen here."

Well, sorry. They aren't supposed to happen in your particular "here," but they will. And if you prevaricate and trot out tired old bromides and talk about abstractions while another child gets its face blown off by a gun, the blood is on your hands.

Guns are an American sickness, and it is a sickness that must be cured.

Kent Nerburn (author of this piece)

Melinda Fulton

Yet another column from a regular, everyday American. This one is from Melinda Fulton concerning the term "patriot."

I don’t care how many flags you fly off your truck. I don’t care how many hats you own, how many bumper stickers you’ve slapped on your tailgate, or how loud you sing the anthem at the ballgame.

Your “patriotism” means nothing when you cheer for a dictator.

Patriotism isn’t a costume. It isn’t merch. You can’t buy it at a rally booth for $45 and wear it like armor against every hard question. Real love of country is loyalty to an idea that’s bigger than any one man: no one is above the law, power answers to the people, and nobody gets a crown in America. Not ever.

You want to talk about the founders? They fought a war so this country would never have to bow to a king again. They wrote a Constitution full of checks and balances because they understood something you seem to have forgotten. Power corrupts, and anyone who demands total loyalty doesn’t deserve any.

So when you defend a leader who mocks the courts, attacks the free press, treats elections as legitimate only when he wins, and wants punishment for anyone who disagrees with him, don’t call it patriotism. 

That’s surrender. You’ve traded the republic for a personality cult and wrapped it in red, white, and blue so you don’t have to look at what you’ve done.

Plenty of people in this country’s history paid for freedom with everything they had. Soldiers who never came home. Organizers who were beaten on bridges. Voters who stood in line for hours so their voices would count. Journalists who told the truth when it was dangerous. They didn’t sacrifice so you could hand it all to one man because he says what you want to hear.

The flag doesn’t belong to you because you wave it the hardest. It belongs to everyone who believes in what it’s supposed to stand for. And it was never supposed to stand for obedience.

A patriot asks questions. A patriot holds leaders accountable, especially the ones they voted for. A patriot knows that loving your country sometimes means telling it the truth, even when that’s uncomfortable.

A patriot would never cheer as the guardrails come down one by one.

What you’re doing is worship, and America was never meant to have an idol.

So keep the hats. Keep the flags. Keep the slogans. None of it changes the facts. When the moment came to choose between the Constitution and a strongman, you chose the strongman.

History has a name for people who did that, and it has never been “patriot.”

Melinda Fulton

the stupidest people

It's hard to believe that Trump is still going on and on about children going to school being grabbed and having a sex change operation, and returning home same day as a different sex. Only the stupids of MAGA could believe this. Only they would. They are so deep in the cult they can no longer separate lies from truth, or fake from reality. Can you imagine the media obsession if Biden acted like this? Making up shit and then repeating it over and over and over? Goebbels was onto something but he disregarded the maxim: You can fool some of the people all the time (MAGA), and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. It works for stupid people.

The fact that Donald Trump keeps saying this is absolute insanity, and anyone who actually believes it is either completely nuts or literally one of the dumbest people to have ever lived.

This has never happened and will never happen anywhere — it’s pure lunacy.

To stand there and claim students are going to school, being sent to hospitals for several days without their parents’ permission, and being given transgender surgery is batsh*t crazy.

Just a few questions…

Who’s paying for this?

What doctors are performing these surgeries on children without any parental permission?

How are these students literally being kidnapped from their parents without any police reports being filed about missing children?

Who’s transporting these children to and from the hospitals?

Why would underpaid and overworked public school officials be doing any of this?

Where are all the parents of the children this has supposedly been done to?

Do you see how incredibly stupid all of this is?

Yet this is something Trump has claimed many times, especially over the last few weeks during these dumb rallies.

I’ll say it again: anyone who actually believes this needs serious help because they’re either crazy or legitimately so stupid that I’m not sure how they function day to day without supervision.

And it’s just another example of Donald Trump not simply lying — but literally just making up the most outrageous nonsense, fully expecting his supporters to be stupid enough to believe it.

No one disrespects MAGA folks more than Donald Trump because no one who respected the people who supported them would repeatedly say something so obviously and completely idiotic, fully expecting them to blindly believe it.

Allen Clifton

Douglas Wood

As Trump decays into dementia before our eyes, we have the chance to send a very loud and clear signal with our overwhelming vote. Take a friend to vote with you, but be sure they will vote blue too. The United States of America, as we know it and knew it, is on the line. Don't let the bastards get you down. 

Here's a good one from another real American, Douglas Wood. 

BUT THIS AIN'T POLITICS: You see, I never write about politics. Well, almost never. 'But Doug,' you say, 'you wrote about this, and this, and that, and Trump (The Creature) and Hegseth or Johnson, or the Republican (FPA) Congress or ICE or... ' Well, yeah. But that ain't politics. And we have to make the distinction. This next election is not about politics. It's about the SURVIVAL OF politics in this nation.

People may vote for a Republican candidate--for Senator, for Congressman-or-woman, for Governor, or whatever... because they have ALWAYS voted Republican. Or their parents always voted Republican. Or their great Grand-pap; or their neighbors or community have always voted 'R'. Or just out of habit. None of that matters now. If it ever did. Let's be blunt. If you or someone you know votes Republican now, you are voting FOR a violent insurrection at the nation's Capitol. For the overturning of an election. For election-denial as a party platform. For violence against Capitol police, hitting them with baseball bats and clubs and spearing them with flagsticks. For the attempted lynching of a Vice President. No, you say? You didn't personally do any of that? Well, if you vote 'R' you are voting for the President and party that did. That encouraged all of it. That called for it, set it up, and then--and THEN--pardoned all of the traitors/insurrectionists involved in it. And who further--as a Congress and Senate, did nothing--absolutely nothing--to stand against it. To hold ANYONE accountable. To make amends. Who--literally--just went on vacation. On command.

To be clear, if you vote for a Republican--for any position in this election—you are voting for the hiding/protecting/pardoning/shielding of child sexual abusers (see Epstein files); for the warrantless searches of homes and families; for the kidnapping/confiscation of children, the ripping apart of families, for masked beatings and shootings, for the construction and filling of concentration camps. For the destruction and raping of once-protected wild areas; for copper-sulfide mining on the doorstep of a water-based wilderness; for election-denial, the removing of voting rights, the threatened illegal intimidation of voters and voting officials; for a policy of 'cheat like hell' in the election. And for 'Let them take out Los Angeles and San Diego.' (Direct Trump quotes.) For the protection/elevation/adulation of a deeply corrupt, amoral, multiple-time convicted felon/sexual abuser. Who, by the way, demands ABSOLUTE and unquestioned loyalty. You are voting for......

Well. This his has already become too long a list. I apologize. Not much fun to write or to read. Suffice to say that, you see, I don't write about politics. But THIS ain't politics. This is, has been, and will be a direct assault on the American political system itself. A system of free and fair elections. A system of rule of law, not personality. Not corruption or intimidation. Or fascism. If we want to HAVE a political system in this country, and continue a legacy and tradition of government answerable to the people--of the people, by the people, and for the people--then we must vote. In great numbers. With great purpose and understanding, and maybe not a little courage. And not a single vote--anywhere--for any candidate--should be cast for the Fascist Party of America. Formerly the Republican Party. For it is not the Republican Party of your parents or grandparents. That's just gone. And that's the truth.

And depending on the results this upcoming election, a lot more than that could be gone. Let's make sure that does not happen. Let's make sure we can even HAVE such a thing as politics in the future. Something we can argue about. Something I could even write about.

Douglas Wood

John Pavlovitz

I remember that during President Obama's terms, he would have hecklers now and then at his speeches. He would tell the crowd to calm down and relax and let the heckler talk. After all, this is America. Free speech and all that. Contrast Obama's response to Trump's. Trump insults the hecklers and encourages his followers to "knock the hell" out of them. And they try to. Trump is a cancer on the body of America. And he's getting more and more malignant all the time. He needs to be reined in before he goes nuts and drops some nukes on someone.

Trump Supporters Have Failed The Human Test

by John Pavlovitz

Today, an alarming video surfaced of a woman being assaulted at a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, for wearing a shirt that said, “Release The Epstein Files’ while heckling the President as a fascist.

The video shows a group of large, grown men violently pushing the woman around, one punching her, wrapping her in a headlock, attempting to rip off her shirt, and knocking her down.

Around the woman, hundreds of adults—presumably teachers, parents, police officers, and business owners film the assault on their phones, laugh to one another, shout slurs at her, move away from the melee, or join the salivating crowd's chants of “USA! USA!” 

A legion of self-identified patriots, alleged protectors of women, and professed followers of Jesus do everything but move in to protect one woman from the brutality of several men, a woman truly advocating for vulnerable women and children. 

To a person, they refuse to stop the vicious attack of a mindless mob, mainly because they are part of it.

Meanwhile, from the platform, their beloved spray-painted, barely literate predator cult leader, a sitting U.S. President no less, ridicules the woman as “fat”, “very fat,” and “low class”.

Police finally intervene, not to protect the woman from being beaten by a group of men, but to escort her out. 

No charges against them. 
No accountability for their thuggery.
No justice for the laws they broke.

This should sound familiar. It’s what created him and this putrid national mess in the first place.

This rally isn’t an aberration; it’s a microcosm.

This is what MAGA is. 
This is the depravity this movement foments.
This is what these people are.
Every single person in that arena, just like every single person who still supports him, is morally broken, all of them.

The people at his rallies, the people who voted for him, the people who are preparing to step into a voting booth in a few weeks and put a legislative hedge of protection around him, the people we know who align with him—are defective human beings.

His supporters are men and women who lack the same kind of decency the rest of us feel obligated to; otherwise, they would have long ago jettisoned him.

They have had to make so many ethical and theological exceptions to remain tethered to him that they are no longer capable of empathy or courage or elemental kindness when it is needed. 

Once you make the initial deal with this kind of devil, the soul transaction is complete and binding.

You cannot be partially associated with a career criminal. 
You cannot marginally approve of a rapist.
You cannot conditionally cheer on a vile, belligerent serial liar.

This is a pass-fail test of your capacity for basic human goodness—and over and over again, these people have failed miserably, completely, and joyfully.

I am a person of compassion.

I believe in seeing the complexities in people, in realizing they are not two-dimensional caricatures or shorthand stereotypes, in believing that they cannot easily be summed up in broad strokes.

Like many people, I’ve spent the better part of a decade giving people the benefit of the doubt, trying to separate their political affiliations from their humanity, and dismissing every screaming red flag as something else.

I’ve labored through ten years dismissing their reprehensible actions as a byproduct of theological programming, family indoctrination, and political brainwashing.

I’ve tried to convince myself that they were basically good people, duped by charlatans and led astray by professional liars.

But it’s become impossible to rationalize away or make excuses for anyone who, at this point, would attend his rallies, sing his praises, boost his propaganda, vote for his enablers, or stay silent in the face of his prolific, barbaric violence.

With every human rights atrocity they shrug off, with every violent diatribe they dismiss as humorous, with every Constitutional crisis they justify, they sink deeper into a cavern of inhumanity that can never truly crawl out of.

The people throughout this country who stand with this toxic human filth are no different than the violent mob in that arena.

Just like this seething, jeering crowd applauding the assault of one woman whose worth and safety they had no regard for, they too are participating in, silently watching, or cheering it all on. 

We all need to stop trying to convince ourselves they have been fooled or manipulated by him, and admit that in far too many ways, they are him.

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