So Nikki Haley was asked directly, at a New Hampshire town hall, what the cause of the Civil War was. Her answer:
“I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
Pressed to go a little deeper, she answered, again:
“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley replied.
A few years ago, I did a story on black Republicans in Michigan, and one of them spoke movingly of “under the oaks,” the founding of the Republican Party in Jackson, Michigan. It was founded by abolitionists, for crying out loud. When black Detroiter James Craig was doing his get-to-know-me tour before he announced his cursed run for governor, he gave a speech at Under the Oaks park. But Haley, former governor of a southern state, and at least a nominal person of color, can’t bring herself to even speak the word “slavery” in discussing a historical question a fourth-grader could answer. I know, I know — the southern states cling to their war-of-northern-aggression mythos, and love to get misty-eyed over states’ rights and all, but come ON. The “rights of the people” she was tacitly defending was the right to own other human beings.
Ladies and gentlemen, the GOP’s “moderate” wing.
So. The holidays are nearly over; just a few more days until we can drag the tree to the curb and vacuum up what it left behind. I trust you all had a pleasant Christmas? We did, although, as always happens, I ate to the point of gluttony and feel like I have gained 500 pounds and never want to see sugar again. Making a nice vegetable soup later, and will eat as much as I feel.
Short one today, but I’m in the interregnum holiday period where I’m questioning all my choices, and thinking about cleaning a few closets. So this is low on my list.
Carry on. I’m off to the gym for people to point and laugh at the fat lady.
alex said on December 28, 2023 at 11:04 am
Nikki can’t even bring herself to say why she’s running against the Orange Turd, so it’s unsurprising to me that she won’t ruffle the feathers of GOP orthodoxy regarding slavery or anything else. This is exactly the kind of cowardly phoniness that Trump voters hate and that’s why he’s wiping the floor with her. Imagine Trump fielding the same question. He would attack the questioner as a fool and tell the mob in the room to kick his ass.
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Dexter F riend said on December 28, 2023 at 11:15 am
Well HELLO there, as Montague Withnail welcomed Marwood and Withnail to his lavish London digs.
I attended a huge family Christmas party on 12-16 and on 12-18 began a hellish tour de virus. One day had no strength to roll out of bed, one night could not arise from my electric recliner . Freezing days, sweating nights. As I felt a little better, I washed my sheets and everything I wore every day. Friday last, I was put on antibiotics, steroids, vitamins, minerals, Gatorade, and constant drinking of water. Non-Covid19 it was,and the worst for me since 1999 when I got that heller flu. But, after rain, the sun. Now I feel like 90% or so of my former self. This saga, plus the fact I have to use Firefox to access NNC, explains my long absence. Thank you Pilot Joe and David for checking in on me.
Haley is bucking for veep I guess, as Trump is running not only already as the presumptive nominee, but leads Joe by 2% today when you average out the polls.
We made about 30 summer trips to visit Carla Lee’s sister’s family in Charleston, SC over the years and when we toured the sites, always, it was the war of Northern aggression, never slavery…markets, economics, all sorts of explanations. But never slavery. One very popular tourist spot was/is (?) the auction block where all the slaves were sold. Nice, eh?
And now Israel is targeting areas they told Palestinians to shelter with 2,000 anti-personnel bombs , not smart strategical small bombs targeting Hamas. Shocked at October 7, as any human of conscious was, now horrified to see the babies and adults , civilians of Gaza, being wiped out in what I call genocide. Netanyahu says never, never a 2-state solution, and Biden refuses to call for a cease-fire, just please kinda-sorta kill a few less civilians. Now we move on to Ukraine, where repuggs want to quit Zelenskyy and just allow Putin to wait until his boy Trump gets elected and he knows Trump will side with him, Putin.
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Jeff Borden said on December 28, 2023 at 11:26 am
Nimarata is just as grotesque as the other members of her Patty. She’s on record as saying she’ll support tRump if he’s the nominee. She’s a spineless, immoral hack.
Rough holiday for me visiting my sister, who has ALS. It’s progressing quickly and it was painful to see her condition. Her right arm is useless. The drugs she’s on cause her digestion problems. Her husband has his own health issues. It was terribly sad and terrifying in equal measures.
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David C said on December 28, 2023 at 12:33 pm
The Rs are using War of Northern Aggression thinking. I’ve read one of their wingnut welfare recipients say we liberals are making tRumpers mad so the tRumpers will shoot one of us so we can start shooting back so they might as well shoot first. Has a Fort Sumter sound to it, doesn’t it?
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Suzanne said on December 28, 2023 at 1:04 pm
This fall I visited 2 friends who moved from the Midwest to N Carolina. Both of them commented that the people there live in the past. Another friend’s husband got his PhD at UNC in the 1980s and I recall her saying that the war wasn’t over there.
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Heather said on December 28, 2023 at 3:46 pm
Jeff B, I’m so sorry to hear about your sister. My boyfriend’s mother has an ALS-type illness (they don’t seem to be able to identify it exactly) and she’s in a wheelchair and has a feeding tube because she can’t control her muscles enough to eat. She fell on Christmas Eve and his dad had to call the fire department to help pick her up. An old college friend of mine just lost a friend about her age to ALS too. It’s an extremely cruel disease.
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Sherri said on December 28, 2023 at 4:10 pm
Now the response is that it must have been a Democratic plant who asked such a hard question, and unreasonably wanted Nikki Haley to have something to say about slavery, of all things.
The money people in the GOP keep looking for a Trump light, who will protect their money without making them look like complete fools, but there is no Trump light. The GOP voters will accept no substitute, because they want the full racist package. They’re only okay with protecting the rich people’s money as long as they get to feel superior to all those black and brown people, and women. If there’s nobody beneath them, then why should there be anybody above them?
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Jeff Borden said on December 28, 2023 at 4:26 pm
Thanks, Heather.
It is horrible. But we have a dear friend who’s 35 years younger than us (another dog friend) and the mother of an adorable 4-year-old daughter who has ALS, which is even more tragic than my sister. She even participated in a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic, but no progress. ALS doesn’t get as much attention as many other diseases like cancer, diabetes, etc. A breakthrough any time soon seems unlikely.
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Julie Robinson said on December 28, 2023 at 5:55 pm
It’s good that Nikki Haley is showing who she really is, since she was never going to be an acceptable candidate. It’s already happened with DeSantis, and I’m sure Ramaswaney isn’t far behind. It was always gonna be Trump again, awful as that is.
But it’s the least of my problems right now, having spent the afternoon looking for the info our insurance company wants and learning our home maintenance files are a jumbled mess. And our personal agent has left the company, with a replacement who is, as the old saw goes, wet behind the ears. I can see this is going to be a nightmare in several acts.
My heart goes out to all fighting chronic disease. Courage.
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alex said on December 28, 2023 at 9:32 pm
On a brighter note, this country finally grew a pair: Colorado and now Maine.
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Dexter Friend said on December 29, 2023 at 12:03 am
Local Sunoco, filling up the dog van, 3:00 PM. Man of about 60 comes out chomping a chicken leg. He has left his car running and blaring music. He stares me down. He then comes at me spewing chicken and totally incoherently starts cussin’ the goddam Democrats for the high price of gasoline. He sports a Trump cap. I just pump my gasoline, he leaves. Trump is really big here.
The woman in Maine listened to the facts, and by law, she had to declare Trump unfit to run because he lit the candle on J6 then neglected his duty to stop the insurrection for 187 minutes as the VP and Speaker were being hunted down to be hanged and shot. She had no choice by Maine law.
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Jim said on December 29, 2023 at 6:00 am
My tree is in my backyard ; 70 feet high – bought 65 years ago .
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David C said on December 29, 2023 at 6:18 am
Bitching about gas prices seems to be a wingnut reflex. I paid $2.689 a gallon yesterday. Adjusted for inflation, gas has usually run from about $3.00 to $3.50. When I started paying for my own gas in 1977 the chart says it was $0.66 a gallon which is equivalent to $4.15 in 2023. Yet, they probably think those were the good old days of cheap gas. They seem to forget what their salaries were back then.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/Gasoline-(all-types)/price-inflation
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Jeff Gill said on December 29, 2023 at 8:03 am
Paid $2.64 yesterday heading home.
ALS & Parkinson’s & Alzheimer’s are all horrible degenerative diseases; neurological research can’t proceed fast enough. The money went to cancer for a generation, and has paid huge dividends in cure & remission rates. It’s time for neuroscience to have its day. Ohio State is working on it aggressively:
https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/neurological-institute/research/clinical-research
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Bitter Scribe said on December 29, 2023 at 9:19 am
Now she’s blaming Biden for her inability to utter the word “slavery.”
And this woman thinks she’s qualified to be president of the United States?
Pathetic.
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Robert said on December 29, 2023 at 10:08 am
as the lady who beat tRump by over 2M votes said: “they are a basket of deplorables “.
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alex said on December 29, 2023 at 10:55 am
You think Nikki’s tongue-tied about slavery. Imagine how hard she has to work to conceal her joy over the possibility of Trump being disqualified. She’s even more delighted than we are.
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FDChief said on December 29, 2023 at 10:55 am
So…Haley.
First, was there ever any question that she would parrot the wingnut catechism? She’s one of the cult! Hello, duh?
The more trenchant question for the news outfits to ask would be “why would a notionally well-educated politician say something so clearly and obviously a stupid bullshit lie?”
And the reason they don’t is because the clear and obvious answer is “because her target audience – some 40% of the American public – fanatically insists that the stupid thing is real and factual.” Meaning, by inference, that the faction insisting on that is either 1) just that stupid, or 2) a pack of raving cult loonies.
And that can’t be possible, since those loonies vote and buy sneakers and are the lust objects of the news corporations and their sponsors.
I’m forcibly reminded of Lenin’s cynical assessment of capitalism, wherein the plutocrats are so eager to turn a nickel that they would sell the revolution the rope it would use to hang them.
WASF.
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Jeff Borden said on December 29, 2023 at 4:03 pm
An acquaintance has been talking up Nimarata, saying he will not vote for Biden because of his age or tRump for the same reason. He insists there is no difference between the parties, which honestly stunned me. Haley would be every bit as awful, policy-wide, as the Orange King. And she’s lusting to attack Social Security and Medicare.
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LindaG said on December 29, 2023 at 5:37 pm
Anyone complaining about gas prices doesn’t know (or care) how much Europeans pay.
(Didn’t see any monster trucks when I was there last summer.)
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LAMary said on December 29, 2023 at 5:58 pm
Same people were complaining about Bidenomics causing inflation, clearly oblivious to the much worse inflation in the rest of the world post pandemic.
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Sherri said on December 29, 2023 at 10:20 pm
Gas prices here are around $4, because we have a fairly high gas tax (49 cents) and because we have a cap and trade program on carbon emissions, which is currently adding about another 50 cents a gallon. But that is how you deal with the externalities of cars; the gas tax is for roads, and the carbon tax is for transit and green infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the federal gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993. It shouldn’t be a surprise that so many of our bridges, for example, are in terrible shape.
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Suzanne said on December 30, 2023 at 9:30 am
This is a story of a MAGA from Indiana, where the GOP has been in charge so long, we can barely remember when they weren’t. But that was still not enough for this guy.
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/investigations/2023/12/29/indiana-family-moves-to-small-caribbean-island-arrested-on-gun-charges/71804540007/
Speaking of MAGAs, one of the candidates running for my congressional district has campaign ads full of how he will clean up Washington and get rid of wokeness (surprise surprise). His daughter lives on our street and is married to a Haitian black man who is a pastor, and they have 4 biracial children. She’s all on board with dad. How do people like her fail to understand that given enough power, the MAGA train won’t stop at Muslims and illegal immigrants but it will filter down to ALL immigrants and people who are not straight white Christians? I don’t get it.
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David C said on December 30, 2023 at 10:18 am
Sure is funny that all the gun humpers make the mistake of taking a gun along when they know they shouldn’t. If it had been an actual mistake he would have said “oops, sorry” and turned the gun in. Nope, he hides it and tries to get a permit after the fact. Fucking clown.
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alex said on December 30, 2023 at 10:42 am
Suzanne, I’m mortified when I see some of the local political ads. Tim Smith, the Fort Wayne mayoral also-ran from 2019 who lost in one of the biggest landslides ever, is running for Jim Banks’ congressional seat on a platform to “end wokeness and expand freedom,” stop the “far left’s radical socialist agenda” and prevent Biden from “weaponizing the government against conservatives.” He comes across so unsympathetically that his shit-eating grin and soulless eyes make my skin crawl.
The family in the Indy Star story sounds, comically, like something I remember from an Evelyn Waugh satire that I read in college in which some asshole missionaries go to Africa and get their just deserts. I don’t know whether the authorities in Dominica are simply mercilessly corrupt but I’d like to think that their contempt for these douchebags is proportionate with and justified by their arrogance.
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Brandon said on December 30, 2023 at 3:37 pm
…from an Evelyn Waugh satire … in which some … missionaries go to Africa
Could it be Incident in Azania?
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alex said on December 30, 2023 at 4:30 pm
It was Black Mischief, which took place in the fictional country of Azania. It may have been more about colonials than missionaries, but I seem to remember some Christianizers getting cannibalized for all their trouble.
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David C said on December 30, 2023 at 4:42 pm
I used to work with a guy who was always supporting missionaries. He supported one in England and always talked about England being the most unchurched country in Europe. More likely, the missionary was an anglophile who wanted someone else to fund his choice of living.
He also supported a missionary in the UP of Michigan. I said at least the natives won’t put him in a pot and boil him. They’ll make pasties out of him. That went over like a lead balloon.
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Jeff Gill said on December 31, 2023 at 7:57 am
England most unchurched? Not hardly. Czech Republic, Estonia, and Latvia are the top three in Europe. Good beer, too.
Happy New Year, one and all.
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FDChief said on December 31, 2023 at 8:33 am
I think the “godless England” thing is prompted by the stats from the Church of England, which is effectively a vacant lot. IIRC the attendance numbers nationally are something in the low single digit percent?
Which kind of tracks. If you’re a God-pesterer you want to hang somewhere that takes its pestering seriously. The CofE worked so hard to be a nice polite middle-class hobby that Brits who wanted their Bibles banged went elsewhere, and the rest realized that they could find more entertaining ways to spend Sundays.
Kind of makes the end of the whole King’s Great Matter a bit of an anticlimax, tho as someone who sees religious fervor as more trouble than it’s worth I’m just as happy to see a sect go out with a whimper…
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Deborah said on December 31, 2023 at 10:23 am
Happy New Year to all, May this one be the best year ever especially around the beginning of November when Biden is re-elected.
Finally the last holiday party of the season tonight in Abiquiu, a neighbor is having a get together, all of us are oldsters except for one young couple and they’re probably in their early 40s, so the party will probably be over by 9.
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alex said on December 31, 2023 at 10:30 am
Of the god-botherers who decamped to these shores, it’s worth noting that the Quakers have withered away almost into non-existence, yet this sect’s legacy is the concept of gender and racial equality that is widely accepted today. The sects that regarded this as the worst sort of heresy are the ones that have thrived and still fill the pews every Sunday.
My dad, who was born in Hungary and came to this country as a WWII refugee, found it odd that church attendance appeared to be more or less compulsory in American society when he arrived. His family were pillars of the protestant church in Hungary yet they never attended except on Christmas and Easter and that was pretty much the European way. When I was growing up, we didn’t even do that.
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