Kavanaugh

Here are several things re that train wreck... some funny stuff at the end!


"It is possible that his accusers might have mistook him for someone else... and the mysteriously disappearing gambling debts may be innocuous, not mafia connected. But there is one absolute inarguable fact from last week's hearing. The bilious, voice-cracking rage and openly partisan expressions of hate toward half of the voting populace were not behaviors of a mature jurist and adult. The simple and politically defensible thing for Susan Collins to say is: "Go back to the bench/bullpen and send us a conservative grownup." -David Brin

This by Albert Burneko:

the skeleton key to understanding American conservatism is this: At bottom, it lacks absolutely any moral or ideological underpinning beyond the reactionary protection of moneyed white men—of their station, their wealth and power, and their egos. Its supposed ideas and abstractions are just a framework for spasmodic lashing-out against anything that can be interpreted as a threat to rich white dudes. It likes supply-side economics because the supply side is made of rich white dudes. It likes tax cuts because the taxes are mostly cut for rich white dudes. It likes cops and soldiers because cops and soldiers uphold a social order with rich white dudes at the top. It likes “traditional family values” because social, economic, and sexual dominion over women are the most traditional family values of all. It likes “Make America Great Again” because rich white dudes used to roll through society and over everyone else with even greater impunity than they do now. All of these things are just proxies for reiterating, over and over and over, forever, the power and security and primacy of rich white dudes.

Something else to think about:

What we do know suggests the likelihood that Kavanaugh, both as Associate White House Counsel under George Bush from 2001 to 2003 and then as his White House Staff Secretary from 2003 to 2006, had significant involvement in the Bush Administration’s torture policies. We need to continue to demand to see Bush White House files to “pin down specifics of any Kavanaugh involvement in detainee policy discussions.” (See the Chicago Tribune article by Michael Kranish, “Kavanaugh’s role in Bush-era torture debate now an issue in his Supreme Court nomination,” July 18, 2018.)

This terrific picture from Boing Boing (is that guy on the left asleep???

And this from Andy Borowitz:

Obama said that it was “a little comforting” to know that he was not the only person Kavanaugh neglected to blame in his remarks. “I just got off the phone with George Soros, and he is bummed as well,” Obama said.

And finally, Randy Rainbow!!!!

Puzzled

Here is what I do not understand.

They have a list of nominees. He can't be the only judge they've got who will rule like they want. Why doesn't Trump pull Kavanaugh or he recuse himself - not admitting anything, just to avoid tainting the court with speculation or until there is an investigative result. 

If they did, they could look reasonable. And then, well, he could nominate someone else, they could do their "thorough background check", and vote on him, all before the midterms (though really, they have till January). McConnell could easily call a special session, right? 

Why is "this man right now" their hill to die on? Can't they see what it looks like? It's like they just can't stand being opposed army all, even rightly, like they just can't admit to even a possible mistake. Or like they really think they're entitled to whatever they want.

Even if what they want repels much of the country.

It's not a good look.

The "Resistance"

Bolling notes* "the author claims to be part of the "Resistance."  The term seems a bit grandiose for someone who is enabling a deranged narcissist under the thumb of a foreign enemy, who is scapegoating and destroying the lives of the most vulnerable in our society, just so that the author's goals of gutting environmental regulations and ballooning the deficit to give tax breaks to the wealthy aren't jeopardized."

For the newsletter, with comics AND commentaries, check out the Inner Hive.

Stolen valor

Look. She deserves respect for her real accomplishments, which are many (see here). And she's not the one exaggerating them. But being in the military while a war is going on doesn't mean you served in the war. I was in freaking Germany but I have a Vietnam service medal (aka "everybody button"), because it's VIETNAM WAR ERA, as it plainly says right there in the photo. She was only stationed in the US and Okinawa (the latter in the 1950s). She was never in Korea OR Vietnam.

Why don't conservatives understand that this is "stolen valor" just as much as buying a Silver Star on Ebay?

Averages

Something to keep in mind when people start talking about average incomes or tax refunds or whatever: if by "average" they mean "mean", it's worse than useless.

Say you have 100 people making $20,000. If you add one person making $2 million, your "average income" is $39,603 - yet almost everyone makes only just over half that. (If you have 2 rich guys, the average jumps to $58,283, well over twice what almost everyone actually makes.)

And if your one rich guy makes $20 million, it's $217,821. If he makes $500 million it's $4,970,297 - the average income is now twice what all but 1 person COMBINED actually make.

Happy Labor Day, part 3

Happy Labor Day, part 2

This year we in the US celebrate Labor Day today.

By Hammer and Hand all Arts do stand.

Robert Reich's Top 10 + 2 Labor Songs

Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts. Molly Ivins

Labor Day differs in every essential from other holidays of the year in any country. All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflict and battles of man’s prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race or nation. Samuel Gompers

If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool. Abraham Lincoln

Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. Ronald Reagan

With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men. Clarence Darrow

The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pay tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership - the American worker. US Department of Labor

Happy Labor Day, part 1

Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital, producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and, with their capital, hire or buy another few to labor for them.

of course he's not

Of course he's not in favor of "surrendering to words". Because if it doesn't offend a White Guy, it can't possibly offend anybody.


Fair disclosure: (1) I know this poster; he's very conservative and proud of it.  (2) I grew up saying that. I've tried not to for quite a while now.

Silence is one thing, refusing to affirm is another

Here's the thing, Tennessee Legislature.

You can just be quiet about it, and tell yourself and your constituents that, hey, hating Nazis is the default position, of course we do, we don't have to say so. And as long as nobody brings it up, you can get away with that.

BUT.

Once somebody does bring it up, the game changes. If somebody says, I think we should announce publicly that we hate Nazis, and your response is dead silence and refusing to advance the resolution? Now you're saying "We won't say we hate Nazis."

Now you're saying "We don't hate Nazis."

You're saying you actively refuse to “strongly denounce and oppose the totalitarian impulses, violent terrorism, xenophobic biases, and bigoted ideologies that are promoted” by the groups.

Is that really what you want to say?


Source: The Tennessean, March 14, 2018

What they missed

The brilliant Alexandra Petri writes a column covering what the kids missed in school when they walked out.

("I have seen a number of Sage Folks on the Internet complaining that students across the nation walked out Wednesday to protest gun violence instead of remaining in class and learning important things. How dare they! Don’t worry: I have you covered for the 17 minutes of walkout, and beyond. Here is what you missed. ")

Here's what they missed if it was their period for American History:

U.S. HISTORY
The people on the Internet think you would have been discussing the Second Amendment today, but if it has taken you until March to get to the Second Amendment, something is very wrong in your class. You are supposed to be on America’s role in World War II, but you are a little behind, and so today Mr. Z is discussing the bonus marchers. You will erroneously learn about a time when people who believed in something showed up in a certain place and made their demands known. This is not how it works in real life, adults will tell you.

(Source link)

Nice layout choice. I mean it.

Nice juxtaposition, isn't it? Good work by the layout guys.

Story 1 is about how "Major utilities have found evidence of ground-water contamination at coal-burning power plants across the US where landfills and man-made ponds have been used for decades as dumping grounds for coal ash" and story 2 is about "The Trump administration ... roll [ing] back regulations ... over how utilities dispose of the ash".

Clearly what we need is less Federal oversight.



(Here are links: Story 1 and Story 2.)

James Baldwin at Cambridge, 1965

I can't figure how to put the video itself here. But go watch it, it's short and it's powerful.  

The Guardian says: "At the start of Black History Month, we take a look at a seminal speech by writer, essayist, poet and civil rights activist, James Baldwin. Attending Cambridge University Union in 1965, Baldwin debates whether the ‘American dream’ has been achieved at the expense of African-Americans."

I add, take a look at 1:20 - William F Buckley doesn't like what he's hearing, at all.

Alexa watches out for us

From a friend's Facebook wall, names removed.

Burn it all down

This article, by Charles P. Pierce, is intense and devastating. It's also in Sports Illustrated. That means it will reach more people who need to read it than it would have in something like Vanity Fair, Harper's, or Teen Vogue. Aly Raisman's statement alone should be read by every athletics fan in the country.

A couple of quotes from the article to whet your appetite:

"Burn it all down. That is the calm and reasoned conclusion to which I have come as one horror story after another unspooled in the courtroom. Nobody employed in the upper echelons at USA Gymnastics, or at the United States Olympic Committee, or at Michigan State University should still have a job."

"The courthouse is supposed to be the great leveler. It is supposed to be the place where all the monsters are called to final account as fairly as possible. It is supposed to be where flaming vengeance is cooled into steely justice. It is the secular equivalent of the passage from the Gospel of Luke in which Jesus tells the assembled that, “For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” God knows, it doesn’t always work out that way in our courthouses. The thumbs on the scales of justice weigh heaviest on the poor and the brown. But it is by god working out in the courtroom in Lansing, Michigan over which Judge Rosemarie Aquilina presides."
 
And "the school’s gymnastics coach tried to coerce her athletes into signing a card to support Nassar when the first charges began to come down. This is unfathomable to me. I believe it also would be unfathomable to Vlad the Impaler."

And then this: "Twenty-three years ago, a gifted journalist named Joan Ryan tried to warn us that gymnastics and figure skating – two sports that attained wild success through athletes who barely were old enough to go to high school – were warping young lives in dangerous ways, and that they were ideal hunting grounds for predators like Larry Nassar and pocket fascists like the Karolyis. That book, Little Girls In Pretty Boxes, was named by Sports Illustrated as one of the top 100 sports books of all time, and the revelations therein prompted USA gymnastics to put together a handbook for parents to alert them to the signs of eating disorders, abusive coaches, and other delights of the sporting life. By then, Larry Nassar was already climbing the ladder of that organization, so we can see how well that all worked out."

It is a win

Look.

We got CHIP funded for six years. The goddamn GOP couldn't figure out for half a year how to fund CHIP. All they could do was flail around and threaten poor children with death. Then, in two days, they funded it.

Dreamers? DACA? Did not get voted on.

Yes, that vote basically got kicked down the road for another three weeks. It's entirely possible that McConnell was lying when he promised a vote. It's more than probable that the weasel Paul Ryan and other House Republicans will do all they can - which is a lot - to sabotage DACA.

But you know what? That's where we were last week. Except now we have CHIP.

In three weeks, McConnell's name is on the shutdown. And CHIP is off the table.

It's a win.

It's not everything, but we were never going to get everything. And we lost nothing.

Take it. Get ready for Round Two.

MLK

Dual - not dueling - holidays

From the president of Ukraine:

For the first time we will mark Christmas by the Gregorian calendar as a state holiday - together with the majority of the whole Christian community, along with Europe.

Ukraine is unique in its religious tolerance and respect for religious sentiments. We are Orthodox, Greco-Catholics, Roman Catholics. We are the whole variety of Protestant churches. We are Muslims and Jews. All together we are Ukrainians.

I wish you a warm Christmas, merry holidays, and a life that is happy and long!

Christ is born!

Juneteenth

The Hidden History of Juneteenth tells a story that this week shows us we still need to hear: Juneteenth and what it really was.

Not just that white, rebel Texans hid the news of Emancipation.But that

Ending slavery was not simply a matter of issuing pronouncements. It was a matter of forcing rebels to obey the law. To a very real extent, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment amounted to promissory notes of freedom. The real on-the-ground work of ending slavery and defending the rudiments of liberty was done by the freedpeople in collaboration with and often backed by the force of the US Army.

Granger’s proclamation may not have brought news of emancipation but it did carry this crucial promise of force. Within weeks, fifty thousand U.S. troops flooded into the state in a late-arriving occupation. These soldiers were needed because planters would not give up on slavery. In October 1865, months after the June orders, white Texans in some regions “still claim and control [slaves] as property, and in two or three instances recently bought and sold them,” according to one report. To sustain slavery, some planters systematically murdered rebellious African-Americans to try to frighten the rest into submission. A report by the Texas constitutional convention claimed that between 1865 and 1868, white Texans killed almost 400 black people; black Texans, the report claimed, killed 10 whites. Other planters hoped to hold onto slavery in one form or another until they could overturn the Emancipation Proclamation in court.

Against this resistance, the Army turned to force. In a largely forgotten or misunderstood occupation, the Army spread more than 40 outposts across Texas to teach rebels “the idea of law as an irresistible power to which all must bow.” Freedpeople, as Haywood’s quote reminds us, did not need the Army to teach them about freedom; they needed the Army to teach planters the futility of trying to sustain slavery.

So depressed. And so angry.

I didn't really think Clinton would soar to the landslide rebuke of Trumpism that this country needed, but I did think that she would win comfortably. Guess I was wrong.

I always knew there were a lot of people in this country that yearn for an authoritarian leader to fix all their problems, and for Others to blame those problems on. I know that my father was right when he said there was a strong streak of fascism in America. And I knew that there was a lot of hate out there.

But I was wrong when I thought that Americans would, on the whole, reject those things.

Instead, last night hate won. Fear won. Tribalism won. But mostly, hate won.

As a country, we licensed hate. We licensed white supremacy. We licensed racism as an institution. We licensed patriarchy. We licensed nationalism.

Those are dangerous things, and we let them loose.

Now we have to fight them. Yes, Trump is the president. But as the last eight years have clearly shown, the president doesn't get to have his way unopposed.

Yes, the Republicans have the Congress, both houses, and they will likely get not just one Supreme Court Justice. That makes the fight harder - and more important. We have to fight for the civil rights, if not the very lives, of our LGBT+ brothers and sisters. We have to fight for the civil rights and absolutely for the lives of our siblings of color. We have to fight for women's rights, and women's health. We have to fight for the environment, for the planet itself. And we have to fight against those who would force their theocratic bonds on anyone who doesn't accept them already.

It won't be easy. But the fight is worth waging.

There are three things on the plus side. One is that, well, at least it wasn't Ted Cruz. Another is that Trump really has no coherent ideology and made hardly any specific policy proposals. That means that the door is open for him to do what he said last night, be president for all Americans. And sure, the first is a simple counterfactual, and the second is possibly (probably) wishful thinking, with not a hard fact to stand up next to it. The third is neither. It's this: We are all in it together.

Sure, that's a platitude. And we don't have to look very far back to see how much even the notion offends people - see the brouhaha over Starbuck's well-intentioned "we're all connected" cup.

And what we're in is a mess, unquestionably.

But. If they kill the ACA, the people who voted for them will suffer along with the rest of us: losing their insurance; seeing their premiums really skyrocket, with no subsidies to take up the slack; having their children become uninsured; being classified as uninsurable due to pre-existing conditions. When wages go down, they too will take hits. When the stock market crashes, their funds will be decimated too. When schools get worse, their kids will be in trouble. When jobs migrate overseas, their job will go too. When white nationalists kill cops, their neighborhoods will also grow less safe. They or their wives, daughters, and sisters will suffer along with us and ours. If NATO is broken, they'll suffer the resulting international uncertainty along with us.

And when their problems do not go away, they will find it hard to blame someone else (though they'll try).

At the bottom of this page is a quote that's been there since Bush beat Gore. It stayed up during Obama's terms because it seemed somewhat applicable still. Now it is, more than ever:

You cannot leave. You cannot drop the armor now. Why? Because you are needed, more than ever. You are mandatory to keep the energy flowing, the karmic vibrator buzzing, to keep the progressive and lucid half of the nation breathing and healthy and awake and ever reaching out to the half that's wallowing in fear and violence and homophobia and sexual dread, hoping to find harmony instead of cacophony, common ground instead of civil war, some sort of a shared love of a country so messy and internationally disrespected and openly confused its own president can't even speak the language.
After all, you don't hand over all your children the first time the flying monkeys bang on your door...
It's far from over. The tunnel is just a little darker -- and longer -- than we imagined.
—Mark Morford