Birds and Flowers

From 1982, a set of stamps illustrating each state’s bird and flower. A gift from a friend whose father was a stamp collector. (Click on image to get larger version.)

Montana’s, in case you were wondering during the special election: Western Meadowlark and bitterroot. In the election to fill the seat vacated by the new Secretary of Looting (formerly Interior), the Democrat got $650,000 in out-of-state funding, while the plutocrat who won got $5,600,000 in out-of-state funding. Over $5 million of that was for negative campaigning, aimed against the Democrat. (Montana’s population is just over a million.)

The night before the election, the new U.S. Representative from Montana assaulted a reporter who was working on revealing his investments in Russia. Then, of course, he lied about it, only admitting the truth the morning after. Lying is now the primary strategy of the Republican Party. Tragically, their audience of morons, suckers, and authoritarian-minded fools lap the bullshit up.

Gianforte also had the support of Sinclair Broadcasting, a corporation that makes no bones about backing Trump in its quest for oligarchy: Sinclair’s local “news” didn’t cover the assault. Sinclair owns 173 TV stations around the country, particularly in the South and Midwest, making it the nation’s second largest TV station owner. Do they own in your neck of the woods?

The first act of resistance should be cutting the cable television cord. An added benefit of this: you’ll no longer be funding Fox News, and that will make the bloated corpse of Roger Ailes fester even more!

Though Trump is a incompetent clown, he functions as plutocratic authoritarianism’s great entertainer. His arrogant ignorance sucks up all the oxygen in the room, Wizard of Oz-style, as the stake is driven ever deeper into the heart of American democracy. This is why the GOP is on a rampage: they believe that money can crush us.

I am not sanguine about the prospects until all of us on the side of justice and truth realizes that every penny we spend is political.