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A Must (not) read

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Apparently, writing tell all books about the disaster that was the Former Guy is quite the cottage industry. Latest practitioner is Stephanie Grisham, herself a disaster as press secretary, at which job she held precisely 0 press conferences in the course of about nine months at the job, leaving only in the middle of an insurrection.

Naturally, none of the “revelations” in these books come as a surprise to anyone who was paying the least bit of attention. Case in point:

Little is known about what happened in the 90-minute conversation between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Osaka, Japan, two years ago. But as journalists were quickly ushered out of the room at the 2019 Group of 20 Summit, Stephanie Grisham once again found herself with a close-up view of the action.

She saw Trump lean toward Putin that day and tell him: “Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave, we’ll talk. You understand.”

Who would have thunk it? And how, one might ask, does one justify enabling this sort of behavior by saying nothing until it’s time to cash in.

Grisham also lets us in on the fact that Trump is a total asshole who abuses his staff and can’t stand it when his lawyers tell him that it’s illegal even when he does it.

I’ve always wondered who buys these books. The MAGA folks obviously won’t, and I certainly wouldn’t give her a dime to tell me what I already know, and I doubt that any of the people I know on this side of the political divide feel differently.

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A tale of bumbling fraudsters

Monday, September 27, 2021

Well, honestly, this is something I did not see coming. It seems the “auditors” in Arizona have determined that Joe Biden did in fact win the electoral votes of that state, and that, in fact, he got 360 more votes than the official tally gave him. I should add that while I used the term “in fact” in the previous sentence, there is absolutely no reason to believe the Cyber Ninja count is more accurate than the original count, but one can’t help feeling a bit of Schadenfreude, as both Cyber Ninja and the former guy both take substantial hits. The Orange One had to take down a statement from his website in which he related that “everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!”.

Well, now we know, and the shocker is that both the “auditors” and the corrupt Republicans in Arizona were unable to manufacture even a laughable argument in support of their attempt to steal the election.

Here’s the puzzler: Why did they do this in the first place? Had they simply bowed to reality the Arizona Republicans would have had some of the MAGA types mad at them for doing nothing, but that ire would quickly have dissipated. Now, having needlessly raised the hopes of those of little brain, who will continue to believe what they want to believe, and what Fox, OANN, and the other purveyors of lies encourage them to believe, they have set themselves up for retribution at the polls at the hands of MAGAs who will sit on those hands on Election Day. As for Cyber Ninja, why should any of the other state legislators seeking to follow Arizona’s lead hire them to “audit” their states, when they know they can’t be trusted to manufacture a specious argument that their states electoral votes were stolen? That was the whole point of the Arizona “audit” after all, as it’s the point of all the other proposed “audits”. Besides, so far as Cyber Ninja is concerned, there can be little doubt that the wrath of the Orange One shall soon descend upon it.

Endnote, so to speak: I wrote the above a few days ago when I first heard the news, but didn’t post it right away for a variety of reasons. In the meantime I have been not at all surprised at how little attention has been focused on this story. Again, we must imagine what we would be hearing had the Democrats done such a thing, bearing in mind that after all, they did have at least one election stolen from them, eons ago in 2000.

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Not the Onion

Monday, September 20, 2021

A fairly frequent occurrence. As I scroll through the unread folder on my RSS reader, I come upon a post whose title is both totally absurd, and given the current state of this nation, weirdly believable. Often, but not always, it turns out to be the Onion. And while that is a sure sign that you should not believe that the article is to be taken seriously, you can usually imagine that someone, somewhere, could write something eerily similar and really mean it. As I said, it’s not always the Onion, but until today, I never saw reality out-Onion the Onion.

For today, while reading a post at Hullabaloo, I read this:

Any Onion writer would be proud of this, but this is NOT THE ONION! It comes direct from Steve Bannon’s old site. Yet if I had read it on the Onion, I would have considered it typical fare. But…someone actually believes this stuff.

As the writer at Hullabaloo accurately points out, the second and third words “organized left” is an oxymoron, but that’s the least insane element of the post. There is, I guess, a kernel of truth here. Millions of Americans, their brains deadened by exposure to Breitbart, Fox, et. al., really do believe they are owning the libs by getting themselves killed. But as to the rest, isn’t it amazing that someone with this “sincere belief” can get a job as a writer, never mind string two words together? Then again, he or she could consider applying at the Onion. The writers there all have to dig deep to come up with new material, but this person would only have to write what they “sincerely believe”.

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Picking nits

Thursday, September 16, 2021

I agree with the thrust of this Op-ed in the Washington Post (behind a paywall, for the most part), the gist of which I read over at Lawyers, Guns and Money. The authors, Leana Wen and Sam Wang, argue that there is no distinction between drunk driving and going out in public unvaccinated.

If you decide to remain unvaccinated and are still going out, unmasked and unconstrained, to restaurants, gyms, bars and concerts, that no longer affects only you — similar to if you decide to get behind the wheel of a car while impaired. Your right to remain unvaccinated stops when you interact with those who did not choose to become exposed to a potentially deadly disease.

I do have a nit to pick, as there is one difference between the two situations. The victims of a drunk driver are, except in extremely unusual circumstances, just that: victims. At this point, the direct “victims” of the unvaccinated are themselves unvaccinated, so they are aiding and abetting the criminal act of any particular unvaccinated person you might want to identify. There are exceptions of course: kids who cannot be vaccinated yet, and the rare person for whom, due to a medical condition, a vaccine is contraindicated.

In other words, the unvaccinated are, at this point, largely killing each other, so their victims are a bit like sober people who deliberately choose to step in front of the car the drunk is driving. It’s important to point out that most of these victims, did, in fact, “choose to become exposed to a potentially deadly disease”. The innocent victims are largely secondary: those who are denied medical services because ERs and ICUs are filled to capacity with the unvaccinated.

Somewhat related point: I’ve started a collection of articles about right wing radio types, right wing preachers, and other COVIDIOTS who have gone to meet their maker (who doesn’t exist, by the way). It’s nice to see them shuffle off this mortal coil. Here’s the latest and few have deserved it more.

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Yet another modest proposal

Sunday, September 12, 2021

Just read this post in which it is related that Joe Manchin sort of denied that he has regular meetings with oil lobbyists, as AOC has charged.

The likelihood is that he was lying, or to be kind, stretching the truth farther than Gumby ever attempted to stretch.

Lobbyists have to register. Wouldn’t it make sense to require them to report each and every meeting they have with an elected official? I assume if they communicate in writing those writings are subject to FOIA, which is why unrecorded meetings serve their interests better.

Speaking of Joe Manchin, I saw a rundown of the Sunday shows somewhere this morning (can’t recall where) and noticed that Manchin was on three of them. The Sunday shows are dominated by Republicans as it is, be the incumbent administration Democratic or Republican. To be fair, Bernie was on two shows, but those were the only Democratic names I recognized, and one of them has to have quotation marks around the word “Democratic” when one refers to him.

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It was 20 years ago today…

Saturday, September 11, 2021

Anyone who lived through it will never forget where they were when they first heard the news, or what they were doing. I remember that my office shut down because as what had happened sunk in, people sort of went into a state of shock and just left.

It was, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his recent column, a great opportunity for Bush and the Republicans to use the occasion to take actions in no way related to the attack:

The Republican Party wasn’t yet full-on authoritarian, but it was willing to do whatever it took to get what it wanted, and disdainful of the legitimacy of its opposition. That is, we were well along on the road to the Jan. 6 putsch — and toward a G.O.P. that has, in effect, endorsed that putsch and seems all too likely to try one again.

It’s now a matter of public record that the immediate response of Bush administration officials to 9/11 was to use it as an excuse for an unrelated project, the invasion of Iraq. “Sweep it all up, things related and not,” said Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, to his aides while the Pentagon was still burning.

Some of us saw it even then, but of course no one listened to us. We had, after all, just witnessed the Russians being humiliated when they tried to install a puppet government in Afghanistan, but somehow we (or a lot of us) convinced ourselves that somehow we could pull it off, ironically against the very people we had recruited, trained and supported to fight the Russians. If ever there was proof of the adage that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, it is the American experience in Afghanistan. We didn’t have to enter the Afghanistan quicksand as a response to 9-11, we chose to do so.

Joe BIden helped get us into it, or at least was not vocal about keeping us out, but give him credit for having the guts to get us out, knowing as he must have known that he’d face unrelenting criticism from a mass media that insists there was some better way to go about disentangling ourselves from a twenty year disaster, despite the fact that no one was ever able to verbalize one, particularly because, as none of them bothered to emphasize, Trump had already made any other course of action impossible.

So, we have something to sort of celebrate on the twentieth anniversary. We are no longer in the business of propping up that particular puppet government, and are no longer wasting American lives and killing Afghani civilians as we pursue the chimera of a democratic and secular Afghanistan. Unfortuantely, it took so long to do so that we are now faced with the fact that a democratic and secular United States may also be a chimera.

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A curmudgeon curmudgeons

Friday, September 10, 2021

Is it just me? Am I the only one infuriated by this sort of thing?

Today, yet again I read about a anti-vax idiot responsible for the death of someone who could not protect themself:

Another infuriating story about the unvaccinated harming those around them. Or at least this is what this looks like. Little Kali Cook was just four years old. She hadn’t been in preschool since September 1, because her unvaccinated mother had contracted COVID. Just hours after being diagnosed, Kali died. It’s quite possible that we’re not getting the full story here about how sick Kali really was leading up to her tragic and entirely preventable death.

Kali’s Mom had tested positive and proceeded to take what looks like fairly tepid steps to protect her family:

“I got tested for COVID and became positive. I tried to quarantine myself from them. We have a two-story home. They were upstairs and I was downstairs,” Harwood said.

The child died within hours of developing symptoms. She died at home as the family didn’t (bother?) to take her to the hospital.

But as Bob Dylan said in an entirely different context, “take the rag, away from your face, now’s not the time for your tearsoutrage”. (Okay, I’ve changed the words a bit.)

What does “the family” do as soon as the four year old daughter dies, and please bear in mind that there’s nothing that can be done for her now:

A GoFundMe page has been set up by her family.

I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve seen this pattern, COVIDIOTS making money off their own stupidity. Who exactly are the people who feel compelled to reward this woman for endangering her children by 1) not getting vaccinated in the first place, and 2) not taking adequate steps to protect them when she contracted the disease. Eventually, GoFundMe got around to shutting down Kyle Rittenhouse’s fundraising page and one would think they might take a look at the fundraising antics of the people who insist on endangering all of us, including their own kids.

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An easy prediction

Friday, September 3, 2021

According to the Boston Globe, experts are mixed about the ultimate fate of Roe v. Wade. Generally, speaking, that’s the treatment the latest travesty is getting from the media. It’s strange how often experts can’t see the obvious.

There are two possible fates for Roe.

The Court may outright reverse itself, and even go so far as to declare that every sperm is sacred.

But that’s not likely. The court will do as it has signaled. It will not outright reverse Roe, it will simply give a green light to every restrictive law passed by every red state. It has been obvious for some time that is where we’ve been heading. The effect, of course, will be the same in every state that chooses to outlaw abortion.

At least Susan Collins will be able to say that she was right: that Kavanaugh did not vote to reverse Roe. Voting to gut it is just not the same, after all.

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Dying for the cause

Sunday, August 29, 2021

We were up in Vermont this weekend, and while I was there, I thought that if I could overcome my laziness, when I got home I might try to make a list of all the talk radio types (all of whom are right wing, of course) who have died of COVID. Seems it’s already been done, though this list may not be all inclusive.

I freely admit to taking some guilt free pleasure in such developments, but I have to give these guys credit that they actually appear to have believed the bullshit they were spewing. Most grifters know perfectly well that the point is to put one over on the rubes. Is there anyone who would bet against the proposition that Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson are both vaccinated? It’s a bit of a mystery as to why they feel compelled to kill their audience, but I guess it’s all about ratings and money. So, unfortunately, we really can’t look forward to one of their type spending his last days on a ventilator.

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Democrats being meanies!

Friday, August 27, 2021

I was well and truly shocked by this:

Texas’s Speaker of the House warned representatives in the Texas State House on Thursday night not to use the word “racism” when debating the Republicans’ voter suppression bill..

Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, started debate on the bill by saying “the chair would appreciate members not using the word ‘racism’ this afternoon,” according to the Houston Chronicle. He insisted that it was a matter of respect.

It appears that some people are hinting that the Texas Republicans are racist, just because their voter suppression bill is racist!

Now, if you’re not a right thinking individual, you are probably thinking: But they are racist.

If you are thinking that, it just shows how little you understand about Republicans. It’s not that they are personally racist. It’s just that they can’t win unless they exploit racism. Now, back in the olden days, a certain Republican advised the nation to watch what they did, and not what the said, because even back then they were saying some stuff that, while pretty tame by today’s standards, was nonetheless a fairly loud dog whistle. (But, to give Nixon his due, his civil rights record looks great compared to today’s R’s, though that’s still not saying much.) Well, things have changed a bit, because nowadays, as the Texas Republicans are saying, we should pay no attention to what they do or what they say. Just because they talk like racists and they act like racists doesn’t mean they are racists. It just means they can’t find any other way of getting the Foxaholics to vote against their own interests and put them into office so they can serve the interests of the rich while screwing everyone else. If that means screwing people of color even more than they screw white people, well, that’s just an unfortunate by-product of the only electoral strategy that works for them. After all, they’ve tried their best to demonize other groups, like gays, trans folks, and immigrants, but while going after those folks may work for a while, the effect tends to fizzle out, like it did with gays. In this country, racism has staying power, so how can you blame the definitely not-racist Texas Republicans for talking and acting like racists? How else can they win?

And, as I’m sure the Texas Republicans would point out, it’s not like they ever call Democrats nasty names. Sure, they may call everyone in the Democratic Party except Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema a “socialist”, and they may do all they can to make that a dirty word, but they would tell you themselves that being called a socialist is nowhere near as bad as being called a racist, even if you aren’t a socialist and even if you are a racist. It hurts their feelings.

It pains me to report that Texas Democrats don’t seem to care whether they hurt the Republican’s feelings or not. This is hardly what we’ve come to expect from Democrats, who normally are all too willing to see things from the Republican’s point of view. These people should really have a little sit-down with Joe Manchin:

Democrats expressed frustration and anger over Phelan’s attempted ban on discussing racism in the chamber. “Wow. The Speaker just asked us to not use the word ‘racism’ during debate today,” wrote Democratic Rep. Erin Zwiener on Twitter. “SB 1 will harm the freedom to vote for all Texans, but it will disproportionately impact people of color. That’s racist, no matter how you dress it up. Period.”

“One Republican has already filed an amendment to put the ‘Souls to the Polls’ provision that would limit black churches voting on Sunday morning back in the bill. It’s racist,” Zwiener continued. “Coddling R legislators who are uncomfortable about how this bill hurts people of color is not our job.”

How are Texas legislators going to come up with a bipartisan plan to suppress the vote if Democrats keep calling Republicans racists?

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