Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Just a few bad apples.

This is how realignments happen…

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

Mission Accomplished!

This Blog Goes to 11…

I personally stopped the public option…

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

‘Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Yes we did.

Shocking, but not surprising.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

We have all the best words.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Also, too.

Word salad with all caps

The revolution will be supervised.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

Our job is not to persuade Republicans but to defeat them.

No one could have predicted…

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

Wetsuit optional.

Good luck with your asparagus.

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Repubs in Disarray! Open Thread: “Conservatives” Suspect Justice Gorsuch Has Some Gay Friends

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It is, of course, the fault of Title VII, which struck down the sacred traditionalist concept of ‘girl cooties’. Once normal hardworking bosses were forbidden to keep out the ladyfolk, sooner or later the ‘deviants’ were bound to start whining for a loophole to protect them, as well!

(I give it 36 hours, at most, before they remember that LBJ originally ‘rammed Title VII down their throats’ to protect… African-Americans. The equal-protection-against-sexual-discrimination line had only been added to the original law in an attempt to make the whole concept ridiculous — imagine letting a woman into the boardroom, har har har!)

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Give the People What They Want

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Sidebar from a professional art historian:

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Trump signed a piece of paper

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Trump signed a piece of paper that didn’t mean shit a while ago. CNN’s account of the Sharpie action notes that by signing an executive order on “police reform,” Trump is taking “his first concrete steps on Tuesday to address growing national outcry over police brutality.”

Yeah, right. It’s a bullshit feint at “reform” because Trump doesn’t give a shit about changing a broken system, but he does very much want to be reelected. To his surprise, the unrest isn’t helping him like it helped Nixon in 1968 — no matter how many times a day Trump tweets “LAW & ORDER” and “SILENT MAJORITY.” That’s because, unlike Nixon, Trump is the incumbent.

He’s also mind-bogglingly stupid. Here’s a quote from the idiotic signing ceremony that shows how unserious/dumb/deluded/inarticulate Trump is on the topic:

If “the really good and great police officers” wanted to get rid of the shitty cops, they’d speak up instead of ignoring or covering up for psychopathic colleagues. Until that starts happening a lot more frequently, it’s not unreasonable for the public to assume all cops are okay with the status quo. More from CNN:

Trump said Americans “demand law and order” and hailed the efforts of law enforcement to quell violence during protests against police brutality earlier this month.

“Without police, there is chaos,” Trump said.

There was a lot of chaos WITH police last week. In Tampa, they repeatedly chased, tear-gassed and fired projectiles at peaceful protesters and needlessly arrested people. In Bethel, Ohio, local cops stood by while violent, gun-toting pro-Trump creeps assaulted peaceful protesters right under their noses. In New Mexico, cops referred to armed right-wing agitators who menaced protesters as “heavily armed friendlies.”

Trump signed a piece of paper today. It didn’t mean shit. Nothing will change at the federal level until Trump and his GOP enablers are out of power. But the real fight will happen at the local level, if it happens at all. And it will take more than paper and a Sharpie to fix this mess. Open thread.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Onward & Upward

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Somewhat overlooked yesterday in the celebration of the protection of LBGTQ rights under Title VII, but also important:


(Full details here.)

They may give it a catchy name, but it’s just doubling down on the BS:

… Trump wants to run as the candidate of “law and order.” But one reason Trump 2020 is not analogous to Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign — based on the same theme — is that Nixon wasn’t president while he exploited fear of violence in American cities during that volatile year. Nixon was campaigning against a chaos for which voters could not conceivably hold him responsible.

Trump, however, leads a nation roiled by protests and bursts of looting and violence. Trump’s aides say he needs to paint a picture of what a Biden presidency would look like. So, naturally, he grabs onto what he considers the most unappealing excesses of the left and tries to brand Biden with these images…

The Biden campaign’s response: “As he exacerbates crisis after crisis, Trump has stepped on his own message so much that he no longer even has one,” said Andrew Bates, Biden’s director of rapid response.

“Any politician who tear-gasses Americans peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights for a cynical photo-op, who defiles the Department of Justice by treating it as an extension of his re-election campaign, and who has leached untold millions off of taxpayers into his own pocket while still refusing to show them his own tax returns has no business saying that he stands for either ‘law’ or ‘order.'”…

On Planet Trump, Daddy needs a dopamine hit:

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On today’s court ruling

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I wrote the excerpt below on the day that gay marriage became legal across all of America:

I don’t know much about how my kids will turn out when they get older.  I know a few things though.

I know my daughter will be a massive dork ….  I know she will be a goof ball with a massive amount of empathy and a strongly developed sense of fairness.  I know that when she is adult, her possibility space will be massive.

I know even less about my son’s adulthood as his personality is still developing.

I won’t be surprised if his primary interaction mechanism is as the smart ass class clown persona as he has already developped a good sense of timing for the prat-fall.  I think he’ll be reasonably atheletic when he can breathe.  His possibility space at 18 will also be much larger than my self-imposed limited possibility space when I was eighteen.

I have no clue who they will love, I have no clue who will make their motor turn on…

Their possibility space just widened a little bit this morning.  Being their dad, that makes my day.

 

I just needed to repeat this for today. My kids’ possibility space just got bigger today.

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Monday Evening Open Thread: Tough Times for the ‘Elite’ GOP Racists

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Used to be, a Canadian-born striver with a thirst for legitimacy had no trouble making a name for themselves as an “intellectual” alternative to the sweaty mouthbreathers yawping about ‘mah granpappy’ and ‘Heritage Not Hate’. But there’s so many Repubs scrabbling for a share of the ever-diminishing Open Racist voting demographic, even the high-profile bigots have to commit themselves to weird celebrity stunts.

Backstory: Ron Perlman has been taunting Matt ‘Floriduh Rep’ Gaetz, after Gaetz got a little too publicly assertive about his fealty to the Squatter-in-Chief’s latest sportsball grievance. Cruz was impelled to jump into the argument, presumably because his earlier ‘challenges to the conventional orthodoxy’ weren’t getting much traction:

“Let’s you and him fight!!!”

Let. Us. Savor.

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Oñate Monument Comes Down

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Don Juan de Oñate is one of the early explorers/ conquerers of New Mexico. He was one of the most brutal. Wikipedia:

Today Oñate is known for the 1599 Acoma Massacre. Following a dispute that led to the death of thirteen Spaniards at the hands of the Ácoma, including Oñate’s nephew, Juan de Zaldívar, Oñate ordered a brutal retaliation against Acoma Pueblo. The Pueblo was destroyed. Around 800-1000 Ácoma were killed.

Of the 500 or so survivors, at a trial at Ohkay Owingeh, Oñate sentenced most to twenty years of forced “personal servitude” and additionally mandated that all men over the age of twenty-five have a foot cut off.[3] He was eventually banished from New Mexico and exiled from Mexico City for five years, convicted by the Spanish government of using “excessive force” against the Acoma people.

In the past, Native American protesters have cut off the feet of the statue of Oñate at a state park just outside Española. Today, Rio Arriba County is removing the statue.

Update: A little more to the story. It was this statue that had its foot cut off, though.

Further Update: A man was shot during a protest against an Onate statue in Albuquerque tonight. Surprising amount of detail in this New York Times article.

Open Thread!

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Happy surprise

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6-3 decision Gorusch writing joined by Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayer, and Kagan.

The new HHS rule that rolled back quite a few protections for LBTG-Q folks that got finalized last Friday will be under significant legal pressure now.

Open thread.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Moving Along, Briskly

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Annnnd…

More than 95,000 signatures so far. I know, it’s Change.org, but I managed to get my ‘signature’ approved after (only) two website fails & an approval glitch…

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It’s All So Unneccessary

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Another black man was killed by police in Atlanta yesterday- apparently drunk in his car and passed out in line at the Wendy’s. Cops were called, they talked for a while, a struggle ensued, he was tazed, ran, and they shot him in the back:

A 27-year-old man was shot and killed by police in Atlanta, Georgia, on Friday after resisting arrest, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI). The GBI said it was asked by the Atlanta Police Department to investigate the incident.

A press release from the agency said Atlanta police were called to a Wendy’s drive-thru late Friday night after receiving a complaint that the driver of a vehicle in the drive-thru had fallen asleep, forcing customers to drive around him. When police arrived around 10:30 p.m. they performed a sobriety test on the man, later identified as Rayshard Brooks.

According to police, Brooks failed the test and then resisted arrest. He allegedly struggled with officers outside the fast-food restaurant.

“A field sobriety test was performed on the male subject. After failing the test, the officers attempted to place the male subject into custody,” reads the press release. “During the arrest, the male subject resisted and a struggle ensued. The officer deployed a Taser.”

Brooks was allegedly shot after he took an officer’s taser. The officer who fired the fatal shot has not been identified.

Why? Why not just let him run away? You have his fucking name. You have his fucking car and license plate. You were arresting him for being drunk and asleep- it’s not like he was on a murder spree. Just call more cops, follow him, and get him when he sobers up or passes out again. What the fuck is there to be gained from this?

The same with Breonna Taylor. The entire reason the cops broke down her door was because she and her boyfriend were under surveillance because GUYS DOWN THE HALL were suspected of selling drugs. Breonna and her boyfriend sometimes accepted packages for them, AS NEIGHBORS FUCKING DO, so they got pulled into the dragnet. If they had them under surveillance, then they had to know WHEN they went to work and WHEN they would not be there, so they could go search the apartment either when they were not there and apprehend them in the broad daylight on their way to work. There literally was no fucking reason to do a no-knock raid and come in guns blasting other than that the VIOLENCE IS THE FUCKING POINT.

Qualified immunity has got to go, and the police have got to be retrained and priorities have to be set straight.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Life During Revanchist Wartime

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Trump has switched his Big Reopening Rally from Juneteenth to the next day, Saturday, “out of respect”. Rude twitter peasants are suggesting there just wasn’t the expected demand for the available tickets, the theory being more people would be able to show up on a weekend. Some tweeters are also suggesting they’ve applied for those tickets with the intent to leave the seats empty (with the hoped-for effect on the Oval Office Squatter’s temper).

Campaign manager Brad Parscale is talking up sales bigly, which I assume means he understands that his cushy job is gonzo unless a miracle happens, and two (no, three!) hundred thousand MAGAts can be conjured up, possibly from the graveyards. Well, QAnon is very excited about the event, so…

As another sf writer (Ray Bradbury) once said, I was not predicting the future…

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: The ‘President’ Went to Dallas…

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… Because he had a $10 million private fundraiser scheduled at the home of “the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, one of the nation’s largest pipeline companies” — and he certainly wasn’t gonna pay for the flight down there himself.

So far so anodyne, according to the Dallas News:

At a discussion in Dallas on race and policing, President Donald Trump recommitted himself Thursday to a policy that police should “dominate the streets,” a stance that has alarmed minority advocates fighting to tamp down the use of force after a police killing in Minneapolis.

The White House took heat for excluding the county’s three top law enforcement officials, who are all black, from an event that at times felt much like a campaign rally, albeit far smaller than usual for Trump…

The president drew cheers time and again from hundreds of supporters at Gateway Church as he forcefully rejected complaints about widespread police brutality and mocked “radical efforts to defund, dismantle and disband the police.”

“You always have a bad apple. No matter where you go you have bad apples, and there are not too many of them … in the police department,” he said. “What happens late at night when you make that call to 911 and there’s nobody there? What do you? What are you doing, whether you’re white or black or anybody else? … There is no opportunity without safety.”…

Hundreds of guests attended the event at Gateway Church’s campus in North Dallas, in one of the city’s more affluent areas.

Gateway is a conservative evangelical megachurch, one of the nation’s largest, with half a dozen campuses in the area and a mostly white congregation. A senior White House official rejected the suggestion that it was a strange choice for a conversation on “disparities” and “underserved communities.”

“Everyone cares about these communities. And this is about bringing people together from all walks,” the official said.

Outside the church, police barricades separated several hundred Black Lives Matter supporters from a few dozen Trump supporters. Shouts and vitriolic insults crossed the divide in both directions…

The (more than usually) scary part was the tangle of words emerging from the Squatter-in-Chief:

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Friday Evening Open Thread: When We Pass An Improved National Vote-By-Mail Act…

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… Should we name it after Medgar Evers?

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Friday Morning Open Thread: Reason to Go On

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Moar Hyperbole and A Half!

Real novelty value, 2020 has it…

Proud to be a Democrat:

And finally… On the one hand, yes *roll eyes* We’ll let The Gays in our club, now that we know they’ll waste tons of money throwing a really big party.

On the other hand… Spousal Unit & I thought we were only getting married because his dad really really wanted us to, enough that he offered to pay for everything, and we kinda owed him for helping with the down payment on the house we’d already bought. But it turned out to be a pretty good party, in retrospect, and even after fifteen years together (sixteen years cohabiting), it still felt special the morning after. So, mazel tov, wedding dreamers!

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