Richard Cohen of SPLC put photos up side by side. On the left a man with a swastika on his forehead. On the right a man in a white shirt & tie. He said the one on the right is the dangerous one. WE GOT A DANGEROUS EXTREMIST SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE

 

“Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s path in Republican politics began with a yearslong role as the senior attorney and national spokesperson for a group affiliated with the religious right dedicated to dismantling LGBTQ+ freedoms and outlawing abortion.

Johnson worked for that organization, Alliance Defending Freedom, for eight years, from 2002 to 2010, before serving a brief stint as a Louisiana state legislator and then heading to Congress in 2017. He first became a known entity in his state in the late 1990s when he and his wife went on national television as the face of Louisiana’s new marriage covenant laws, which made it harder to get a divorce.

The social conservative causes that have fueled Johnson’s rise, many of which are deeply unpopular with the American public, are already worrisome to Democrats who fear that Johnson — who downplayed the concept of the separation of church and state as recently as April — may try to use the power of the speakership to advance his extreme views.”

MORE AT:

New Speaker Mike Johnson’s Long History With The Religious Right

Come for the Noah's Ark theme park, stay for the relentless efforts to strip women's and LGBTQ+ rights.

By 

Jennifer Bendery

SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER 

Alliance Defending Freedom

Founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian Right, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia; and claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society. ADF also works to develop “religious liberty” legislation and case law that will allow the denial of goods and services to LGBTQ people on the basis of religion. Since the election of President Trump, ADF has become one of the most influential groups informing the administration’s attack on LGBTQ rights.

Founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian Right, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has:

• Supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad
• Defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad
• Contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia
• Claimed that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society

MORE AT:

Alliance Defending Freedom

Turf grass lawns as impervious surfaces AND bringing back “lamb mowers.”

Because turf grass lawns are on ground compacted by construction equipment and because grass roots are about 3 inches not 5 feet as meadow grass.  On turf grass lawns rainwater does not soak into the ground but runs off lawns.  

Turf lawns are an impervious surface adding to flooding downstream of housing subdivisions.

Not only roofs, driveways and sidewalks are impervious surfaces of suburban subdivisions, lawns are also impervious surfaces. The stormwater retention basins of suburban subdivisions handle ordinary rainfall. During the more and more common deluges stormwater retention basins cause attenuation of downstream flooding. 

Changing lawn height regulations to allow meadow grass & shrubs would allow groundwater recharge and less downstream flooding.  

I believe a frequently flooded community in Northern New Jersey tried suing an upstream subdivision but it went nowhere. Until the relationship between lawns and flooding is generally understood by juries,  lawsuits by communities downstream against communities upstream won't work.

The almost normal attenuated flooding of the East Branch Brandywine in Downingtown is caused by housing subdivisions upstream. 

The last time the West Branch Brandywine flooded was August 9, 1942. New housing subdivisions going up in the West Branch Brandywine watershed could bring back flooding of the West Branch Brandywine in Coatesville, PA

"If grass were a crop, it would be the largest in the United States. Turf grass covers an estimated 1.9 percent of the continental United States, according to a 2005 NASAanalysis of satellite images, including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses and similar landscapes. Together, these would represent the largest irrigated crop in the United States, three times bigger than corn.” - Washington Post 

Coatesville Dems Blog

Thursday, September 7, 2023

The business insurance company my daughter works for DOES NOT INSURE WEATHER RELATED INCIDENTS since at least 2006 when weather related property insurance was a problem. Now weather related insurance is a cataclysm

“Every summer, before heading to the beach, we’d have to ensure his grass was cut. We’d push a roaring lawn mower under the scorching Florida sun. The carpet of scratchy St. Augustine grass seemed to grow faster than we could mow it.

If only I had known about the amazing grazing solution pioneered millennia ago. “Lawn mowers” were once synonymous with hoofed livestock — goats, sheep, horses and other herbivores — that foraged grasses, seedlings and what are now called weeds. By constantly mowing and fertilizing, they created open pasture

FROM:

The Washington Post

The surprising benefits of switching to ‘lamb mowers’

Michael J. Coren

October 24, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

"Russia is in a proxy war with the USA in the Middle East & Ukraine. Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, General Mike Flynn & Vladimir Putin are linked. A collaboration of theocrats, fascists and traitors are scripting us into the End Times." Jim Stewartson

Eschatology 

"Eschatology (/ˌɛskəˈtɒlədʒi/ ^ⓘ; from Ancient Greek ἔσχατος (éskhatos) 'last', and -logy) concerns expectations of the end of the present age, human history, or the world itself.^[1] 

The end of the world or end times^[2] is predicted by several world religions (both Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic), which teach that negative world events will reach a climax. Belief that the end of the world is imminent is known as apocalypticism, and over time has been held both by members of mainstream religions and by doomsday cults. In the context of mysticism, the term refers metaphorically to the end of ordinary reality and to reunion with the divine. Various religions treat eschatology as a future event prophesied in sacred texts or in folklore.

Putin

The one person a brutal holy WWIII in the Middle East will benefit is Vladimir Putin.

His military has been shredded and pushed back to a standstill in Ukraine. He knows the 2024 elections in the US are existential to his regime. If the US and NATO hold, his life is over—so he’s trying to cause a conflagration to distract us or cause enough chaos to prevent the 2024 election from happening at all.

America/Mike Flynn

In the United States, the Kremlin’s propagandists are running full steam with the narrative that the war in Israel means we are close to the “End Times.”

QAnon has been transmuted into a christofascist Crusade on Mike Flynn’s radicalization tour.

This weekend, Flynn’s tour was at Trump Doral with his usual propagandists and foreign agents—including disgraced Kremlin QAnon priest Archbishop Carlo Vigano who claims God believes the same QAnon stuff that Mike Flynn and Donald Trump do.

Vigano worked with Steve Bannon and former head of the Knights of Malta, Cardinal Raymond Burke, to create an alt-right fascist training camp in Italy—before the project was canceled.

Flynn, Vigano, Bannon, Erik Prince, and the Order of Malta are all allied in the project to split the Catholic Church in order to destabilize the west to benefit Putin. 

MORE AT:

The Big Setup: “It’s Biblical”

A collaboration of theocrats, fascists and traitors are scripting us into the End Times

Jim Stewartson

Recordings of Australian billionaire, Anthony Pratt may be the key to blowing the Trump Mar-a-Lago obstruction & espionage criminal case wide open.

 Australian billionaire, Anthony Pratt may be the key to convicting Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago obstruction and espionage criminal case in Florida. 

Michael Popok of Legal AF reports on new secret audio recordings obtained by 60 minutes Australia, which once in the hands of Jack Smith and the team of special prosecutors, could blow the case wide open. 

In Coatesville PA city government the manipulation of municipal finance software coding is what I would call sophisticated fraud. Donald Trump’s Trump Organization fraud is just making up numbers & facts.

1. 
   

I asked the Coatesville City Council. “Is it true that Raj from the finance department didn’t show up to work today and that he may be on his way to India. The City Solicitor responded, “That’s a personnel management issue. That can’t be in the public record.” I said, OK but it’s in the public record.” Solicitor, “No”. Me, “Now it is:"

https://app.box.com/s/gcuyzsju9xa1d8kn3ujq

"The DEM’s BLOG written and posted by James Pitcherella, September 20, 2011 titled “Can the FBI, in India,interview people that worked in the USA?” reminded me of so many things that Dharmesh Kalaria (Raj) said to me during the time that I worked in the Finance Department, that I felt that I needed to draft a brief outline of recollections from that time frame.  Raj was employed at the City as the General Ledger Maintenance staffer.  His title was “Programmer Analyst/Senior Accountant”. 

When I began my employment with the City I saw that the General Ledger was in a terrible state of disarray, and I couldn’t understand why.  I asked about Raj’s background and I was told that he had an Accounting Degree and an Advanced Degree in Programming from a university in India.  I asked to see his diploma and a copy was provided to me, however it was not in English."

MORE AT:

Monday, October 1, 2012

REVISED-Raj went back to India; did the City of Coatesville’s money go with him?

Quest Column 

by Stacy Bjorhus

Former Finance Director at city of coatesville

"Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) remained dug in despite revealing that his wife felt compelled to sleep with a loaded gun." This is Trump's Republican Party.

At the University of Pennsylvania Museum photography studio I worked with a man who was a U.S. Army Air Force photographer stationed in the Pacific in World War II. He developed and printed reconnaissance photos on Pacific Islands. They worked & lived in tents. Fox holes & trenches to protect against Japanese Betty Bombers couldn't be dug on the Islands. He just stayed in the darkroom tent during bombings. There was no where to be safe. 

At night Japanese soldiers would slit throats while soldiers were sleeping. He slept with a 45 under his pillow. 

The 45 stayed under his pillow for more than a year after he came home. He couldn't fall asleep without it. 

Democrats and mostly Republicans and their families will have post traumatic stress disorder long after they retire from politics in the Trump era. 

I developed "street smarts" when I walked around Philadelphia with a Nikon F. I carried expensive cameras in dangerous areas in Philly & somehow managed to not be mugged. People said it was how I walked. 

The internet wasn't like it is today when I began writing the Coatesville Dems blog. I  got death threats in person. 

I look both ways carefully when crossing streets. I quickly size up people. When you get death threats it stays with you.

***

"It’s difficult to know whether that was because of intimidation they were getting or anticipating; it’s also possible they simply wanted to unite as a conference and/or got assurances from Jordan. But the problem with threats and intimidation is that the real impact is often unspoken. Nobody wants to broadcast that they gave in or to inflame those who have already demonstrated a willingness to threaten. And until people speak up, you just don’t know.

That said, we do have instances in which Republicans have cited these things having an actual impact on votes. And to hear certain Republicans tell it, they might have played a significant role in the political course of the Republican Party in recent years.

We’ve recapped some of this before, but it’s worth running through again at this moment:

• Retiring Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) in recently published comments recounted how, during Trump’s post-Jan. 6 impeachment, a member of GOP leadership was leaning toward voting to convict him. Then the senator’s colleagues cited their personal safety, even invoking their children, the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins reported in his new book. The senator voted to acquit.
• In announcing his retirement, now-former congressman Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio) cited a deluge of threats after his vote to impeach Trump.
• Now-former congressman Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) suggested that the violence on Jan. 6 also weighed heavily on not just impeachment votes but votes to certify the election, which more than two-thirds of House Republicans opposed. “They knew in their heart of hearts that they should’ve voted to certify, but some had legitimate concerns about the safety of their families,” Meijer said. “They felt that that vote would put their families in danger.”
• Former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said that during Trump’s impeachment “there were members who told me that they were afraid for their own security — afraid, in some instances, for their lives.” She cited how “members of Congress aren’t able to cast votes, or feel that they can’t, because of their own security.”
• The Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania state Senate said of signing a letter backing Trump’s attempt to overturn the results in that state: “If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I’d get my house bombed tonight.”...

The Washington Post

Threats couldn’t save Jim Jordan. But Trump-era intimidation has had an impact.

The holdouts on Jordan’s speaker bid spotlighted a problem that has long lurked beneath the surface

Aaron Blake

October 20, 2023 at 1:59 p.m. EDT

***

"Multiple members who've opposed Rep. Jim Jordan's bid for House speaker on the floor are going public with claims of death threats and other intimidation tactics they've faced as his bid for the gavel has come up short to date.

• Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa): The Iowa Republican flipped to oppose Jordan on the floor Wednesday and said in a statement that "I have received credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls" since doing so. "One thing I cannot stomach, or support is a bully," she added.
• Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.): The New York freshman posted an image of a threatening message he received, pledging to "whip all of the hair out of your fucking head" if they met. "I will not succumb to threats," he vowed. He's opposed Jordan both times on the floor.
• Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.): Opposed twice to Jordan on the floor, Bacon shared images of threatening anonymous texts received by his wife."

MORE AT:

POLITICO

Multiple members are detailing death threats and other intimidation they've faced for opposing Jim Jordan's speakership bid.

Jordan said the threats "are terrible and that should never happen."

Anthony Adragna. 10/19/2023, 8:43am ET