Rest in Power, Sheila Jackson Lee

 

The time is now to unite behind the President and get to work beating Donald Trump — one last time. https://t.co/d84qoX5n5h

— Sheila Jackson Lee (@SJacksonLee) July 19, 2024

What an admirable career of fighting for others! In that spirit, let's get right, unite, and fight.

Deep in the Dark Heart of Texas

 

BREAKING: Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardons Daniel Perry for killing BLM protester Garrett Foster pic.twitter.com/lSn3WafPE4

— BNO News (@BNONews) May 16, 2024

I could just blog about how TX Gov.  Greg Abbott is a signifying sociopathic fascist who is pardoning a racist and pedophile murderer to send a chilling message to his state about his values, but I need to point out that he is not just following through on a political promise, but that the Texas Pardon and Parole Board recommended it. 

Let me repeat that: this was not without the consent of other people who sit in judgment over who gets pardons or parole, but with their express approval. Greg Abbott isn't a brand-new baby governor trying to feel out the ethos of his state--he is a monster who has figured out that many people will clap for a particular kind of monster. 

In Texas, anyway. 

Don't Know Much About History

 

WATCH >> Ron DeSantis defends new curriculum that will teach children how slaves *benefited* from slavery.

"They're probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into, into doing things later in life." pic.twitter.com/Ls1wyk3tr4

— Ammar Moussa (@ammarmufasa) July 22, 2023

They parlayed: only AFTER SLAVERY ENDED WHICH WAS NOT A GUARANTEE! Generations of unpaid skilled workers labored under the yoke of slavery incapable of seeking other opportunities because they were not treated as people, but property, with little post-slavery option outside of running for it and possible death or recapture. In the meanwhile, they were denied literacy, they were in a segregated church, they had their families sold away from them, they were heritable to other members of their owners' families.  (No, stop everything and read about slave law.)

And they could be abused to within an inch of their lives or past it including sexual abuse. They were used in medical experiments. They were believed to be less capable of pain, a belief that persists in medical practice sometimes even today. They made a straight face in front of white people to preserve their dignity before God and others. 

Reality is What Red State Governors Can Get Away With

 

NEW AUDIO: Brian Kemp says he is open to banning contraceptionhttps://t.co/8SVPoL2uT0

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) September 15, 2022

I noted in my comments regarding Sen. Graham's 15 week abortion ban proposal that it is always reasonable to define Republicans as being just as extremist as they tell us they are--and here is another proof.

Gov. Kemp., who isn't the biggest fan of democracy, doesn't care that a lot of women do use birth control or at least feel like this is a good option for women to have.  If the Dobbs decision means he can ban birth control, despite the needs or desires of the women of his state, he feels like this is okay--because once you start culling the voter rolls of voters you don't think are with you, you stop giving a fuck about whether you are aligned with the voters' needs or concerns. You just side with the right-wing ideologues who brought you. 

Georgians, check your voter registration. If you are not on the rolls, you have until October 11.  Your governor does not care about your choices and wants to take them away. 

I hate governors who want to take rights away. This is why I am dead-set against Doug Mastriano in my neck of the woods, who is the same or worse. He scoffs at "my body, my choice", too. And I will live with my body my whole life, but I won't live comfortably if I didn't fight against someone who wanted to make choices for everyone else without considering their whole life experience and reality. Or rather, just keep government out of it. 

It's not their right. And they should not be in a position to pretend it is. 

UPDATE: Because we are not ever finished with radical Republican, woman-hating ideas, I have two related stories to add. First, there's a Michigan candidate for Attorney General who thinks Plan B should be treated like fentanyl. Yes, Plan B, the "morning after pill"--which is an emergency contraceptive. If life starts at conception, preventing conception would be, um, not taking a life. Don't worry, though, because the gentleman would do this having no idea how any of that works. He is just really certain that if you were the recipient of unexpected penis, you need to deal with unexpected fetus. And carry it all the way through. Why yes! He is a Republican. (My beloved friends and acquaintances let's don't ever have GOP AG's. They really are the worst.)

The other vicious nightmare of a potential Republican future is criminal penalties for abortion patients. They want to imprison people who terminate pregnancies, or worse.  Probably the death penalty. After all, if you want to say abortion is murder, what better way to signify that you are "pro-life" than to put someone to death for ending a pregnancy? And I can easily imagine people on death row for miscarriages, because why wouldn't someone with their head up their ass about the "miracle of life" add miscarriage of justice to the tragedy of potential life lost? 

The SCOTUS Dobbs decision has legitimized the logic of the clinic-bombers into law. To my mind, the vagaries of human sexual intercourse and development of human embryos are such that the law should back the whole hell off of trying to codify what is collectively right and leave a space for pregnant individuals to be respectfully treated as unique private persons with their own moral, physical, mental, economic realities. There was a lot of wisdom in the Roe decision, and today's partisan court totally lost the plot. 

Highly Visible and Easily Defined

 

Take a look at this SOB, won't you?

Rep. Good: Thank you Person Speaker. I say Person Speaker because I’m not a biologist… pic.twitter.com/0sWkfpBgTQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 31, 2022

This is following on the peculiar trolling of the Ketanji Brown Jackson judicial hearing, in which she was asked to define what a woman is by the notable public intellectual (sinkhole) Marsha Blackburn. Rep. Good is being exceptionally foolish--if he understands very well what a woman is, he doesn't need to be a biologist to say so--isn't that supposed to be his point? And in any event, Speaker Pelosi has always gone by she/her pronouns. All he ever needed to do to be sure was ask. 

 Now, I offer an answer to the question of "What is a woman?" that you can all use if you like, free of charge: A woman is the term commonly understood to mean an adult female human, although the definitions of "female" may be disputed in terms of genetics, anatomy, socialization, politics or law. But under the Constitution in the US, all human beings are entitled to the protection of the law, without respect to gender. And I hope that helps. 

Fox Mushroom Farm Has Really Been Spreading That Fertilizer

 

The things you will see on Fox News! (I have called them the mushroom farm which is terribly unfair to actual mushroom farmers and I still like my analogy.)  Apparently, Barr's appointed US counsel in charge of making the Russia investigation look like it wasn't great (despite the multi-volume Senate intelligence report on same) has filed a thing that isn't actually shocking--someone related to the Clinton campaign mentioned to a government agency that a thing they noticed should be looked into, and they never explicitly pointed out that they might be tangentially associated with that campaign, which was over at the time of their being asked. The thing was DNS traffic, and my god, anyone hyping it should have to spell out what they think analyzing DNS traffic means. Because it is actually really boring, and not actually spying or wiretapping. 

The October 2016 news story was so dull I called it "too good to be true" at the time and I'm an obsessive re: Trump/Russia. That's how not a big deal it was. But that doesn't stop the premier propaganda cable news network from bolstering Trump's claims that pointing out a fairly nerdy and easily dismissible propinquity regarding Trump Tower and a Russian bank based on web traffic should result in the electric chair. 

Like, look up things that are publicly available and render an unfavorable conclusion and apparently, that is way too much for our society to bear. That is what this mishigas is about. Someone noticed something in the Trump milieux and not realizing His Nibs was sacrosanct, mentioned it. This got enlarged to supposedly spying on the Trump Administration, and no--the period involving White House traffic was the Obama Administration. Like, maybe Obama can get wee-weed up about it, if he was the type. But I think not. And this is in no way analogous to Trump being "wiretapped!" 

Newt Gingrich is Saying What Republicans Think

 

I was just mentioning that Newt Gingrich is a huge part of the reason why you have to treat Republicans as potentially hostile, but Jonathan Chait explained Gingrich's influence on today's GOP more fully in response to Newt explaining to a fish-jawed Bartiromo that in the event of Republicans taking the House back, the January 6th Committee would be going to jail.

Jail? Is investigating a presidential administration's response and responsibilities regarding a terror attack (because the riot that day was, indeed, domestic terror), then why did nothing happen to House Benghazi investigators? Could it be that no random statute exists preventing Congress from investigating matters of government that concerns them? 

Gingrich knows that. He's also just trying to inflame public opinion against the committee and try to stop them from continuing their duty because he's partisan trash. He's creating that old "permission structure".  Republicans can have their riots, whether of the Brooks Brothers kind or the more army/navy surplus style one, but Democrats are barred from complaint. Democrats should be locked up.  Hillary Clinton, Ilhan Omar, Gretchen Whitmer, any of them.

But in lieu of jailing people for assisting the January 6th Committee, there is possibly, firing them: 

The top staff investigator on the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been fired by the state’s new Republican attorney general from his position as the top lawyer for the University of Virginia, from which he was on leave while working on the congressional inquiry. 

The office of the Virginia attorney general, Jason S. Miyares, said the firing of the investigator, Timothy J. Heaphy, was not related to the Jan. 6 investigation, but the move prompted an outcry from Democrats in the state, who accused him of taking the highly unusual action as a partisan move to further former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to undermine the committee’s work.

See, Virginia just came under new management, and now they are clearly doing things differently there.  Like, banning mask mandates (even though masks apparently help!) and setting up a hotline to snitch on teachers who might be teaching thoughtcrimes.  So why wouldn't the Virginia AG get rid of a troublesome lawyer? It's probably what Ron DeSantis would have done in his fiefdom state. DeSantis has created a climate of fear, and it really shows. 

Republicans talk a fun game about free speech, but hate being talked about. They still want to be McCarthyites and treat dissenters (even Republicans who disagree with them, who are RINOS) as somehow "un-American".  

I won't call Republicans un-American, though. Staging coups and voter suppression are as American as Red Scares and cherry pie. I am just saying they are wrong and there is never any good reason to support Republicans ever. Their policies are bad and their tactics are bad, and I can't even chicken and egg which part came first. 

This isn't a case of Newt Gingrich losing it--this is who he is and what he represents.  And others of his party in the "comment section" of life say worse all the time. 

Here's What You Voted For, Virginia

 

His administration first off banned mask mandates in schools and vaccine mandates for state employees and banned CRT (let's get real: he banned Black History) and totally fired the parole board, the Conviction Integrity Unit and staff working on human trafficking. I'm genuinely not sure that Virginia exactly voted for all that, but it was the stuff Youngkin decided to do first off. 

Also his wife's dress is the worst. I am so sorry to bring this up, but it is unflattering in every possible way. Maybe she spent a lot on it, but it is colorful in a bad way, and demure in a bad way, and frowsy in every way. This is not to blame her for any of her husband's policies, but she is married to him and she did choose that dress. And Virginia did vote for Youngkin and these half-assed culture war positions are what they will now have to deal with, because some people thought good effective Republicans who weren't culture war weirdos was still a thing. 

It is not. All Republican politicians should be regarded as potential culture war weirdos. Because if you fall for their promises, you will be stuck in photos (history) wearing them like a bad frowsy regrettable frock. It's just not that easy to tear off a stupid and out of touch governor with bad ideas in the way one tears off an ugly dress that looks like chintz curtains with minimal tailoring, except for unnecessary flourishes.

I don't know why I went so hard on that dress. But it all applies to ever voting for a Republican. And if you stick up for the dress on that regular middle-aged woman who could look so much smarter and actually has, I will hiss at you with great vehemence. It's grandmother's parlor upholstery.  I am for liberating Suzanne from all relevant disasters as a feminist and my support starts with saying no to this Calvinist one room church get-up. I am for liberating the US from wannabe famous signifying politicians, so Glenn is on the shitlist. 

Make of any of that what you will. 

Strangely Blogged 2021: Year in Review

 

I haven't been doing year in review posts or top fives or whatever for a few years because it felt weird to gather my personal best and show it off, but I guess I'm over that? So anyway, here's a year in review from me because this was some kind of year, all right. 

January: Little Noted but Long Remembered  : Just post 1/6, angry and patriotic. 

February: Unraveled Bolero: Just who was that man the GOP was bound to sell their country and themselves out for? 

March: While They Were in the Nursery: Where I dress-down Republicans for championing lazy culture war bullshit over effective policies because they are puerile. 

April: Let Them Know, Joe! : I'm encouraged that the Biden Administration understands the stakes and will do good things.

May: The Republican War on History: I take a look at why CRT is being attacked by the GOP and it is not good. 

June: TWGB: The Once and Future President: This is who the GOP are putting all their chips on? Seriously?

July: The Fall of Icarus:  Where I consider that mythology tells us something about our climate change and COVID-19 denialists.

August: Denial and Co-Dependency in Afghanistan:  I sum up recent Afghanistan War history and why the war must be over, and how the Biden Administration can only do the best they can with the cards dealt.

September: It's the Public Health, Stupid: In which I note that GOP COVID-19 policies are stupid ulture-war signifying and deadly

September Bonus:  Dolchstoß-Legende and Trump's Lost Cause : In which I notice that Trump and his followers are a little too interest in the ideas of Civil War and a Lost Cause.

October: Die Fahn Hoch: Obvious fascists are being obvious (basically, whenever I title a blogpost in German, I think my observations are grim, sadly).

November: Autumn of Our Discontent: We are living in an absurd timeline and people believe increasingly desperate and bizarre things.

December: The Big Lie and The Big Liars Telling It: How can anyone democratically support a party that just doesn't believe in democracy anymore? 

Anyway, that's my year. in review. Here's to a better New Year--even if I'm skeptical and even a little paranoid about that (but would my readers expect less?).

Where's Your Dr. Seuss, Now?

 

Texas school district pulls 400 books from libraries after state GOP lawmaker's inquiry https://t.co/YFZ3PoP9VI pic.twitter.com/gn68pUEnTi

— The Hill (@thehill) December 7, 2021

Before I freak entirely out:

Many of the books on Krause's list center around abortion, teen pregnancy, sex education, LGBTQ narratives, the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-racism. Some of the popular titles on the list are "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" by William Styron, "The Cider House Rules" by John Irving, and "We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy" and "Between the World and Me," by Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

"Most of those are appropriate and will stay on our library shelves as is, however, some may contain content that needs further review to ensure the books are accessible based on age appropriateness," Aubrey Chancellor, executive director of communications for the school district, said in a statement obtained by NBC. "For us, this is not about politics or censorship, but rather about ensuring that parents choose what is appropriate for their minor children."

Look, I feel like it's thought-policing the kiddos to limit their choices based on what adults think is age-appropriate because I can not begin to tell you what my hyperlexic reading list was about when I was like, 10 or 11, and my dad gave me a dollar to not read Pearl S. Buck's Pavilion of Women when I already had reread it a few times. (This logically drew me to want to read D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and other verboten authors--and I still don't know exactly what made my dad find that one fraught because it isn't exactly a well-known title and I don't know if he skimmed it and went "whoa!" or what. My baby brain never saw the "Whoa!" bit.) 

The Driest Eye

 I'm obviously not the intended audience for Kyle Rittenhouse's time on the stand, because in my universe, I would never have entertained the idea that putting him on the stand would necessarily elicit sympathy, so it would have been best avoided. But it certainly happened, and somehow, news stories got written with "burst into tears" or the like in them. 

But I don't see any tears here. He looks like he swallowed a hot chip the wrong way. He looks like he tried for a snot bubble and it came up dry. He even looked over to see if anyone was responding to his "breakdown". And I feel very mean for saying this, and you know what? My eyes are dry, too. 

This kid was in a state that was not his, with a gun he had no right to carry, claiming he was offering medical aid which he wasn't qualified to render, in a place where he knew there was physical conflict which meant possible physical threat, but was scared even though carrying that gun. He chose all the things that put him in this circumstance, and his heavily and genuinely weeping mother helped.

The judge appears to be in Rittenhouse's corner. The farce was capped off by us hearing the ringtone of "God Bless the USA". And he also might have been doing some holiday catalog shopping during the trial. That's how much this guy seems to have already decided how the case should go. He doesn't see the people Rittenhouse slew as "victims"--they are the wrong kind of people to be calling "victims". Implying some people are, well. You know. Fine to kill. 

I wish this opinion was a bit more rare, but I see Supreme Court Justice Alito wondering why people shouldn't be armed on the "crime-ridden" city subways, because obviously, shit is just looking to go down in these big cities. Whoa.  We got us a Bernie Goetz fan here. A guy who doesn't miss an opportunity to watch "Death Wish" am I right? (This is a whole part and parcel of our national gun-toting religion.)

See, my problem with this scenario is when the so-called "law and order" people start waxing heroic about vigilantism and extrajudicial violence, when they are supposed to uphold the Constitution which is actually very much about due process and not--that sort of thing. This is why I wonder with a sinking heart how the nearly all-white jury will look at the killers of Ahmaud Arbery. Will they suppose this was a case of a fouled-up citizens arrest? Once again, we have people, with guns, making decisions they had no authority to make, that even duly constituted authorities can get entirely and regrettably wrong. 

I mean, consider this: in a political system built on a framework holding the innocence of the accused as a value until proven guilty, the fatal result of the Charlottesville free-for-all is that "poor" James Fields' fault lay in being the first to ram a car into protesters before elected officials tried to legalize such a thing. Regardless of those people's rights to do....anything at all, Express their First Amendment rights to speak freely or peaceably assemble.  

And so we get to the conservative/fascist problem: the idea that the the law protects some, but the others can have order. At any price. When do we universally acknowledge the price of order is too high if it comes with violent oppression and valorizes privileged lawlessness? 

Not a minute too soon, if you asked me. 

So Charlie Kirk's Doing Prophecy Now?

Charlie Kirk warns "God will not honor the challenge and the outright rebellion to his authority here on earth," adding "There will be justice for what they did to this country and it's coming very soon" pic.twitter.com/IgUx4GN2sP

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) October 28, 2021

Seeing TPUSA's Charlie Kirk threatening about what his big, omniscient and all-powerful sky-friend is going to do while standing in front of a backdrop that reads, "Exposing Critical Racism Tour", reminds me that the way of life in the antebellum period that included slavery was considered a part of God's order and that peculiar institution was defended in the pulpit. And the segregation and degradation of Black people in the US was maintained by white Christian churches. 

Slaveholders were very afraid of "rebellion" amongst their human assets. There is reason to believe that the 2nd Amendment was inspired by fears of slave rebellion. Politicians have used theology as a tool to justify codifying unjust and racially discriminatory laws. And one theory regarding the historical study of how racism was codified into our laws is...critical race theory. Which Charlie Kirk, who has no degree in anything but grifting, is currently on tour being mad about, since it is the well-paid astroturf big concern thing of the moment. 

And now, Charlie Kirk wants to tell us that "they" (Commies, George Soros, Democrats, shitlibs, whoever) will get justice because God says so. And maybe that's a a suggestion was to what God thinks should happen next--? That could might happen eventually wink wink nudge nudge?

It always strikes me as funny that people who say they've read the Bible will go ahead and bear false witness and take the Lord's name in vain on the regular. Like they never considered what "false witness" and "taking the Lord's name in vain" really meant. But "lying about what actually happened" is a good way to say "false witness", and "taking the Lord's name in vain" is a not-very opaque way of saying "God is not your imaginary hype man". Deciding to just say something you think out loud and saying Jesus is your +1 on that is kind of blasphemous, right? Same with false prophecy.

How Not to Lose

 

A lot of digital ink has been spilled this week over Nina Turner's loss to Shontel Brown and what it means regarding progressive and "establishment" Democrats, but I'm going to just say that this primary had a lot to do with some critical errors on the part of the candidate with all the name recognition and quite a lot of money and doesn't really say anything about the direction of the party. It says something about how to campaign and be part of a team. 

Nina Turner is unquestionably part of a team. The Squad and many "name" progressives supported her. But politics is local and parties are national. And somehow, Turner failed to sort out how to manage either the local politics or the national politics. She got told to stop running a negative campaign against her rival by local clergy. She left tv money on the table despite her fundraising from small-dollar donors. And she had already pissed off Hillary Clinton voters by supporting Jill Stein in 2016 and Joe Biden supporters by scatologically deriding his candidacy in 2020. She also ran afoul of the CBC by calling Rep. James Clyburn "stupid".  

Which made her opponent look pleasant and trustable in comparison. It isn't deep. People saw her grievances, and lost sight of what she could do for them, and her campaign didn't turn that impression around. 

But keeping in mind that tomorrow....exists, how Turner has chosen to lose is also very puzzling, because the faults that lost her the race are how she's going to stick her impression. Like, just what were her comments about "evil money" supposed to mean when she also had some really good fundraising? And if she wants to talk about corporate money, well, okay then, let's do that. And why is she saying that her loss is about how the establishment does progressive candidates specifically dirty when she earned her retaliation by specifically pissing on the establishment in the first place? It feels to me like she could have gotten backing with her name recognition if she didn't start off on the entirely wrong foot. 

Also, now that we are are well past the 2020 Democratic primary, I'm just going to say it--Bernie Sanders has questionable taste.  Regardless of whether any fundraising has fossil fuel money behind it, Brown's priorities per her website generally support the Green New Deal, and she says she would be a vote for Medicare for All if it ever came to the floor.  That's not a candidate who is not progressive, that's a candidate who is, but just doesn't have Turner's progressive connections. Which reminds me that Sanders  also had David Sirota, who was a great communicator that blocked a shit-ton of liberals on Twitter and also seems to hate the MSM, as one of his press folks and had Shaun King as a surrogate. It isn't necessary or helpful to defend Turner's primary loss as having a damn thing to do with corporate money when there is a general election to be won, no matter how much of a guaranteed D district it is. 

Sometimes a personality just isn't a fit for a job. And taking a loss without any grace, and by deriding the process as being at fault instead of showing any introspection, basically pulling a Trump, isn't a great look or demonstrating that any lessons were learned. This is how not to lose. It isn't winning, because it precludes the possibility of figuring out how to win. It doesn't help anybody, 

I'm not saying Turner is a very bad candidate, just that she wasn't the best candidate for right there and then, and needs to see a direction away from that loss that is positive and meaningful. Her initial response was anything but. 

Party Like it's 1959

 

You know, being lectured about whether it's cool to say "Jim Crow" or not about present voter suppression laws passed/proposed by Republicans is mighty Rich (Lowry), but the funny old thing about invoking Godwin is he isn't exactly right about what Godwin said (which was only that in online discussions, a comparison to Nazis will eventually come up--not that one has lost by so invoking, although it usually is over-the-top) and sometimes you have to call a fascist a fascist. But having another National Review writer argue that suppressing votes is good, actually is just--

Well, it's tradition, obviously. Of a long-standing sort. 

It's really hard to be sympathetic to cries that calling voter suppression laws what they are instead of the GOP's present sleight-of-tongue "voter integrity" are unfair when if we consider what voting can mean to a community in terms of allocation of resources--as our present argument regarding what constitutes infrastructure and who needs it, and as the previous arguments about, for example, the ACA, indicate, demographics do say a lot about what policies are proposed, what laws are enforced, what resources are allocated, and who benefits. It certainly isn't an argument about who is a "better" voter. Or at least, a better educated one. 

It's been about race, and we know this very good and well by now. Take the recent NYT story about what motivated the January 6 rioters. It only said something we already knew about Trump supporters in general: they are mad white people mad about white stuff. 

The GOP in the post-Trump era is just McCarthyism and anti-civil rights shit interspersed with pro-nuclear family circa-1950s and pro-religion stuff. Witness the Trump campaign's evangelical lawyer (who doesn't seem to know "Do not bear false witness" is one of Moses' top ten) calling Sen. Raphael Warnock a false Christian for saying that the resurrection alone is not the sole message of Christianity. As a Catholic adjacent atheist, I was raised to understand "faith without works is dead" and remain, culturally Christian as a Matthew moralist--I hold that you have to werk for your salvation, honey. 

But calling a Black pastor a non-Christian isn't just an echo of denying President Obama his Christian faith as a way of rejecting fellowship with him in mere racism, It's like denying him his Christianity because he's a Commie, the same way the hard-right once denied MLK his faith. Just as the Right today wants to label every little thing to the left "socialist". And use, as a donation-begging scam, the fear of being a traitor to encourage people to subscribe to more funding of this bullshit--otherwise you are a DEFECTOR!  (The term we used to use for people from behind the Iron Curtain who came here to the "free world" or vice versa.)

They aren't a 2021 party--they are regressive and backwards. And suppressive. And yeah, kind of racist. 

Whistling Dixie Past the GOP's Graveyard

 

Looking at the above picture where a handful of very white dudes watch another white dude sign Georgia's new voter suppression law into effect, I sit and wonder: did they realize you can dam a river and still not stop a flood? That bottlenecking a force can sometimes give it terrific direction? Did they sign a new lease on life for a party that just lost two US Senate seats in the state in an election we've been assured had no widespread fraud--or did they sign a death warrant for the national party?

I'm not going to go into the optics of signing this bill under a landscape painting of tree-lined Brickhouse Road which once was the site of an infamous plantation, but for a moment consider the image of Rep. Park Cannon, led away and jailed for knocking on the door where this act was taking place. 

She, an elected representative of the people of her district of that state, was just trying to see the business that was happening in her state. She was arrested for the "good trouble" she took--which even wouldn't be so troublesome if those men in that picture above didn't know full well and good the disapprobation they deserved from history for what they had just done. They were doing something wrong there, and blamed people who had the eyes to see it. 

They aren't making a mistake--as I've noted before on this blog, what is happening in Georgia and elsewhere is very deliberate. We aren't born yesterday, but even if we were, we could do math and recognize that Georgia has a problem with voter equity, and decided to double-down on an inequitable system. To do what? To maintain the status quo where the GOP is in power. (Attention to Tom Cotton, et als, this is actually the textbook example of some critically race-based shit happening. So, FYI--you are a bunny with a pancake on your head. People in power passing laws to stay in power--whether for race-based reasons or not, is like the law of inertia, as in, totally observable and endlessly reproduced.) But that is to say, they aren't making a mistake as to their immediate goals--trying to limit the votes of people they deem unlikely to vote for them.

They are making a mistake as to what the spirit of democracy and the rights of the citizens of their state entails. They are boldly making the statement of the autocrat: if the people don't support me, I'll just find a better people. The other guys--they can be unpeopled--in practice if not in fact. What is said of books might apply: where they burn voter registrations, they could....

But we all have eyes to see, ears to hear, or minds to understand. So we know, for example, that Mitch McConnell is dead wrong when he says there is nothing racial about the history of the filibuster. We need to end the filibuster for this, maybe not the last leg, but a big leg of our journey towards achieving a more perfect nation, with freedom and justice for all.  We need to undo it to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, because Shelby vs. Holder was flat out wrong. It is true that the US South isn't uniquely racist--if you mean that Wisconsin and Pennsylvania Republicans wouldn't do exactly what Georgia is doing right now. The point isn't geographical: it's that as a creedal nation, we hold one person, one vote to be important, without regard to circumstance except age and citizenship. 

This image above, shows that these men with their voter suppression bill might have known they were being iconic. But they are not in control of what this icon means. I say it means they are afraid that people will understand what they do and hope so desperately no one is looking they would even arrest their colleagues. I say that because that is what happened. They arrested their Black, female colleague because she was looking. But we all can see. We see you. We see you, Georgia. 

Better than what they did is possible and will be done because the people united will not be defeated. And people who incur hours long lines and deny food and water are showing their inhumanity and contempt of human rights. And that can't help but be seen for what it is. You reap what you have sown and people will show up to assist. 

 

Flying at Dusk

 

Chris Hayes on "The 1776 Report:"

It "reads like a sophomore year term paper by Stephen Miller, using images of Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln while defending America's founding on slavery." https://t.co/BYdQCTHpxP

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) January 19, 2021

Let me start first with a joke: 

What is the difference between a cat and the 1776 Project?

A cat will cover its turds with sand. The 1776  Project covers the sands of time with its turds.

I'm not an historian, but the job of history is viewing facts in context, not propaganda. The short work, about a quarter of it plagiarized according to a professor who ran the thing through turnitin.com, seems to be the rejoinder to every Twitter thread conservative pundits lost to actual historians written in the key of "my mother says you're all just jealous." Re-centering white narratives via an apologetics to counter a factual narrative that does not center them and releasing the wad of centrifuged Bircherism on MLK Day feels like the twilight activity of furtive loners with damp hands rather than a dry-eyed reassessment of good historical practices.

If I sound snarky, it's because this project, along with the peculiar "National Garden of American Heroes" nonsense (it's a long list of names leading me to believe the statuary will, perforce, be a collection of action figures in a very big case) is symbolism over substance coming from the sort of people who would take an oath to the flag over an oath to the Constitution. It's re-soldering the heads of decapitated bronzes to mend hurt feelings. The problem with American history isn't slavery or inequality, it demands--it's the people who point out there are problems! 

When I see folks who seem to believe that there's too many books and not enough statues, I get the impression they will burn the former while putting up the latter. The demand for enshrining men and events so as not to get a better look at them is to convert them into a kind of national religion that won't stand for blasphemers. I have never liked the smell of that sort of thing.

I myself don't want to burn the 1776 Project, except to torch it figuratively, hence the snark. I just want to put out there that the Midases who are gilding all these statues have asses' ears. 

As a side note: this is more or less what students in some places are getting right now, anyway.

Wanton Endangerment

When Louisville called for a curfew and started to prepare for protests, it was pretty clear that there was an understanding that the decision reached by the grand jury regarding indictment of one of the officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor for charges not related directly to her slaying would be, to put it simply, inadequate.

The system in Louisville was ready to prepare for protests, but it is questionable whether the case was fully pursued in establishing how procedure so completely broke down that a young woman was shot dead in her own bed. Managing protests, and finding them more agreeable than performing the basic duty of the full pursuit of justice is a form of wanton endangerment because of the harm it does to the justice system itself by rendering it less credible and more broken with every failure and needless loss of life. And it harms the public by allowing such failures to continue.

Governor Beshear has called for AG Cameron to release an accounting of the evidence so that the public can know for themselves whether this seems just. I'm hung up on that--there are reasons we try people for indictment in grand jury courts, not in public, but knowing what Cameron's office had to work with and how they did it would be instructive, because it is quite possible that a certain minimal result was desired, and certainly a minimal result was obtained. There are valid reasons why prosecutors might take on no more case than they think they can try and win, but here, I just can't help but think there is something incredibly wrong with a result that has people beset upon in their home, possibly not even hearing or being cognizant of any announcement that these were law enforcement, and not being protected by the law.

I highly question the use of a no-knock warrant in the first place, because it seems to me that this would have been better handled in broad daylight. I question how clearly law enforcement announced themselves, and whether the barrage of bullets in response to a shot fired by her partner, Kenneth Walker, was even at that point a reasonable level of force. And I always wonder why, after this kind of force is applied by police, the call for medical assistance never comes quick enough.

I don't know everything, but I know that when people have been marching for justice on behalf of black lives for the past six months looking for some sign that it is understood that they do matter, this doesn't feel like it. And I deeply sympathize with people who feel that results like this mean they too, are just endangered by a system that isn't here to serve and protect them, but operates on the basis of political will and racial bias. Wantonly.

A wanton system is not law and order. A system that assumes people are innocent until proven guilty, and does not treat people as a suspect class because of biased reasoning is the fulfilment of our constitution, it's what all Americans should be entitled to, and it isn't exactly what we have right now. But we should aspire to that, because without it, we do not have peace. We have a breach of faith.

And no, the protesters did not start that. They protest because they want that faith restored, and because they believe justice is a thing that can be achieved. They want faith in a system that has not protected them, and they want it from a system where rubber bullets and tear gas can be fired at them. They love the America they want to believe in and see someday, and keep getting this bullshit. But they still want this American experiment to work.

(And the only price we'd all pay is we get accountable government, which actually is not a price so much as something we all should want anyway.)

They are better institutionalists and patriots than a lot of flag-kissing gun-toters out there could ever hope to be.

Farewell, Justice

Ruth Bader Ginsburg later in life acquired the nickname "Notorious RBG" (which had to be explained to her as being a take-off on the deceased rapper, Christopher Wallace, AKA Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G.) because she was gangster in her dissents. In her dissent to Shelby vs. Holder, she lit up the premise of the decision, rephrasing MLK Jr.'s comment that the arc of the universe was long but inclined towards justice with the addendum that there must be a steadfast commitment to do the bending. In other words, it inclined towards justice because good people worked to do that. And had to keep doing that work. (And she was right, and that decision was wrong.)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg did that work. When she was one of the very few female law students at Harvard in the 1950's, the Dean asked her what she was doing there, taking a man's place. That same man, Erwin Griswold, later described her work on gender equality by comparing her to Thurgood Marshall. She was a champion of equal protection under the law.

Her business was justice: even when dealing, as she did for decades, with the disease of cancer that took her mother from her when she was still young, and her husband after many years. She kept her spirit and her drive to do the right thing up to the end.

I don't care to blog right now about her replacement, because there are some people who in reality are not replaceable. She supported the rights of people whose marginalization made their rights subject to being disappeared. Her belief in equality under the law for everyone made her a champion for the disabled and for minorities, for women and LGBT people. She stood in the gap for folks to keep the idea of equality alive. She wanted the feet of government off the necks of people living their lives.  Her career and her life need to speak for themselves, without the spotlight of electoral politics for the moment coloring her magnificent career.

She was a person so deserving of the title "Justice". May her memory be a blessing.

What Year is This, Again? Suburban Housewives?

Trump tweeted to an interesting demographic--"Suburban Housewives of America" to let them know that Joe Biden would kill their American dream of a little single home with a white picket fence and 2.5 children playing ball in the yard with their dog, Rusty, by letting the poor urban folks move into their neighborhoods and go to their schools and I don't even know what next!

Anyway, he linked to an article by Betsy McCaughey, and regardless of what year it is, she's the worst. But she does get to the nut of what all this is about, all right:

The president won the suburbs in 2016, but polls show Trump trailing in the suburbs largely because of opposition from women. They need to focus on what’s at stake for their families.

Sure, he might botch a pandemic response, kill millions of jobs, sue to end the ACA which would separate millions of American from health care (which we know McCaughey has concerned herself with like a busy little bee in her time, yes?), and has sent camo-wearing paramilitary forces to, for now, Portland to teargas moms, but he won't ever, ever....have apartment buildings put somewhere near your vague geographic vicinity, which is what I am sure this is actually all about.

Because the American Dream, is why.

Tom Cotton: Literally or Seriously?

On Fox & Friends, Sen. Tom Cotton compares protesters to the Confederacy: "These insurrectionists in the streets of Portland are little different from the insurrectionists who seceded from the union in 1861 in South Carolina, and tried to take over Fort Sumter." pic.twitter.com/7ylYh3N1dB

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) July 21, 2020

Um, so, should we be raising statues to the Portland protesters then?

Ha--I kid, but you knew that. It's kind of hard to tell when Sen. Cotton is kidding and it's kind of hard to take someone saying that seriously. It's just goddamn stupid. They aren't trying to secede from the US, they want the US actually support the rights enumerated in the Constitution. His comment could be considered a kind of hyperbole, but it's only hyperbole if that isn't how the person saying it seems to think and talk all the time.

This is why I hold that the best way to treat Cotton (see here, and here, and here, and here) as a dangerous fuckwit. Treat the culture war like Confederate secessionists, and then what? Have a new civil war? (There's imagery Trump uses a lot, also.) It's obscene.