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The Math Demands It!

Lighten up, Francis.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

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

Not all heroes wear capes.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

I personally stopped the public option…

Also, too.

This blog is Obama’s Katrina.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

Word salad with all caps

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Wetsuit optional.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

This is how realignments happen…

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Surprise, Bitches!

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Well, that’s how I was planning to make an entrance. Thanks for ruining it for me, John! *packs away the feather boa*
Some of you know me (in the internet way), some of you don’t (that’s fine). I’ve been a scurrilous member of the Balloonitariat for an unreasonably long amount of time that it’s best I don’t mention for fear of wondering what the heck was I thinking, loitering on internet corners that much instead of becoming a rich tech sociopath and undermining democracy for funsies.

That, by the way, is what I’m wondering about beloved blog host, JC, who must have been on some industrial grade crack to let me have the keys to this place. Ah, well. Too late now! On to the briefest of synopsis on me, your newest blog chew toy.

I am a Kingstonian, born in Jamaica, raised in the wilds of the Queens suburbs of NYC. Which makes me fussy and cynical. Skip ahead a couple of decades – whoa, the things you guys are missing out on. Like, wtf, Georgia? I studied photography & printmaking, becoming one of the first people using computer art, process cameras and silkscreening/photolitho and multiplate monoprints way back in the 1800’s or whenever. I put myself through college by working overnights in print shops and started up as a designer.

Things fall apart, as they do and suddenly I wind up in San Francisco. I was not granted a bikini and blond hair upon landing, which was surprise 1 & it was fucking cold, surprise 2. Started the design and production thing and that went on very well for a while until the economy went ass over teakettle under George “I only seem less horrible now, but I’m still horrible” W. Bush. So tits up everything went and hello, here I am in northernly NorCal that’s not quite so north I have snow, but northern enough that I wear sweaters.

I’m in a relationship with 2 weird cats who were rescued from a local parking lot as little feral kittens. They’re very pretty, a touch headstrong, but loving. Fun fact, I’m convinced all cats are really Japanese so mine tend to have Japanese names.

I woke up like this
Good morning to Hime fans & Hime fans only!
Odo is severely unimpressed
The handsome, majestically floofy Odoriki demonstrates floof in repose for his students.

I’m under/unemployed at the moment, which means I spend a lot of time either looking for voiceover work, or hunting for design or video work. I’m the lead in a sci-fi audiodrama podcast, Ostium and seem to be accruing more podcast roles at a fast clip.

Right now, I’m participating in Script Dash, the screenwriter version of NaNoWriMo. So I won’t be very visible here unless I’m mad, bored while televising a local gov meeting or avoiding writing my script. Mostly, I’ll try to keep threads from getting musty, maybe say something useful or amusing and be boringly analytical. That’s all I got for now because I’m determined to log 10 pages tonight so I’m caught up auditioning for next month’s work while applying for work. Here’s an open thread, have at it. No nudity in the comments please. But if your boss says it’s ok at work, go for it.

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Update on Very Fine People on Both Sides- I Did NAZI This Coming

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The least surprising news ever:

In the run-up to the 2016 election, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage, according to leaked emails reviewed by Hatewatch.

The emails, which Miller sent to the conservative website Breitbart News in 2015 and 2016, showcase the extremist, anti-immigrant ideology that undergirds the policies he has helped create as an architect of Donald Trump’s presidency. These policies include reportedly setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, an executive order effectively banning immigration from five Muslim-majority countries and a policy of family separation at refugee resettlement facilities that the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General said is causing “intense trauma” in children.

These garbage people just love each other. That Katie McHugh is a piece of work- she’s since left the alt-right movement, allegedly.

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Kristallnacht 81 Years Later

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Tonight is the 81st anniversary of the NAZI pogrom of November 1938 known as Kristallnacht.

I’m not sure 81 years on what there is left to say. Especially that I didn’t say in a post memorializing this day last year and the year before and the year before that and the year before that… Or in the posts I’ve done on the Red Summer or any other number of atrocities.

Perhaps we just need to pay attention because the revanchist, neo-fascist, and neo-nationalist descendants of the NAZIs and the other fascists that set the conditions for and carried out the atrocities on Kristallnacht and the even worse atrocities during the Holocaust proper still need to be combatted. They need to be exposed whenever possible. Dragged out into the sunlight for all to see and, should it come to it, once again physically combatted until they are defeated on the battlefield as they were during WW II.

Just this past week a neo-NAZI was arrested for trying to blow up a synagogue in Pueblo, Colorado. A young African American man had to stand his ground in Georgia in the face of a racist attack from a now deceased white man.* And we learned that the President and his racist, white supremacist administration have actually separated an additional 1,500 migrant children from their parents and that number may still be an undercount. I’m sure there are more examples of the revanchist, racist, and fascist throughline that runs from Kristallnacht in 1938 to the President, his administration, his surrogates, his supporters, and the tyrants and dictators that he so idealizes with just a few minutes more searching, but I don’t think I need to belabor the point.

Also, the Auschwitz Memorial is trying to get 750,000 followers by the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 2020. So if you’re on Twitter, give them a follow!

Open thread.

* I’m actually surprised it has taken this long for a person of color to have to use force/lethal force to defend him or herself from a white racist’s attack. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the courts, given that Georgia is a stand your ground state, but the person who stood his ground this time is African American. As I’ve written here many times in comments, I expected this to happen. And I expect that once white people realize that the old maxim that “G-d made man, Samuel Colt made all men equal” doesn’t just apply to white people, they’ll freak out. I’m honestly not sure what the nature of that freak out will be. It might be a response similar to that of then Governor Reagan’s to Black Panther’s openly carrying unarmed long guns in the California state capitol building by signing gun control legislation. Or it may be more similar to the Tulsa Race Riot, the Red Summer, and the response to Forest Joe’s slave revolt in the 1820s among others. But if people of color exercise their statutory rights to self defense, and they are both justified in doing so and do so in response to attacks on their persons and property by racist whites, there will be a backlash. And we all need to be prepared for it.

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Excellent Read: “My Education in the Patriarchy”

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Wrong time of day to run this, but there’s too damned much breaking news around. A reminder that Gary Wills remains an excellent political commentor as well as an astute writer… and that the New York Review of Books deserves to be more widely read:

In 1962, I began teaching ancient Greek in the graduate school of the Johns Hopkins University. I was twenty-seven and looked younger, and some of my graduate students were almost as old and looked older, so I tried to adopt the manner of a Hopkins “Herr Doktor Professor,” hoping that would give me some authority in the classroom. In my first course, which was on Homer’s Iliad, an argumentative student kept up a disagreement on one Homeric point. When I could not convince her of my position, I huffily quoted Dr. Johnson to her: “I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”

When I told my wife, Natalie, about that day’s class, she was shocked. I had used my position to humiliate a student who was just trying to get to the truth. When I told her the student was a woman (the sole woman student I had amid that hostile university atmosphere of 1962—undergraduate “co-eds” would not be admitted to Hopkins for another eight years), Natalie was distressed. I was not only humiliating a student but bullying her. She asked how I would feel if that happened to our then one-year-old daughter, Lydia, when she went to college. After being put in my place by Natalie, I tried to stay there (it is very helpful to marry someone smarter than yourself).

Even after that correction, I was ill-equipped to cope with the presence of women in a university. There were none in my classes when I was a graduate student at Yale, where they would not be admitted as undergraduates until six years after I got my doctorate. The fact that there was a woman in my graduate class at Hopkins was an oddity, as it would have been at many of the major universities in America…

But our day at Hopkins was not much better than Gildersleeve’s. Though I kept the respect instilled by my wife for the one woman in my class, I did not appreciate the effort that student had had to make just to get there. I learned a little about that at my first faculty meeting to allot fellowship money to applicants for the department. When the résumé came up of a woman who clearly merited admission, our archaeologist, John Young, said that no fellowship money should be given to her. “That is just throwing away money that should be saved for those who will advance the profession. Why give money to a woman who, as soon as she becomes pregnant, will drop the profession and start taking care of her babies?” Young was no shining star of the classics world himself, and I would find over the years that some of the people most intent on showing that women could not meet high standards had barely met those standards themselves, if at all. Yet I did not argue with Young. Since I knew that the head of our small department was with him on this, I went along with the policy. No woman received any money over the six years I was in the department.

I knew that opposing the admission of women to protect the standards of the classics profession was a phony argument. I had come to Hopkins from the inaugural year of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, where I was part of the first class of six junior fellows (young scholars of promise given time off from teaching to develop their research). There were three fellows from America and three from abroad—one from Germany, one from England, one from Italy. The Italian, and our lone woman, was Anna Morpurgo. She was the youngest and clearly the brightest of us. She knew more languages than we did and knew them better…

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Sure, I’d Vote for A Woman, BUT…

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A reminder: Annie Linskey was brought up from the minors (in this case, the Boston Globe) because she wants to do to Elizabeth Warren what Amy Chozick did to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 cycle.

Every word Linskey writes should be scrutinized from that angle, including ‘and’ and ‘the’. (The Matt Viser co-credit can be ignored, as can Viser himself.)

Over the past few days, two of the leading male candidates in the Democratic presidential primary race — Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg — have escalated separate lines of attack as they attempt to counter the field’s most prominent woman: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is antagonistic and angry.

She also is an uncompromising elitist, they argue, suggesting that if she were the nominee, it would harm the party in the must-win states in the upper Midwest.

The new attacks, marking a more vigorous phase of the race, get at something far beyond her policy positions, and into one of the most fraught areas for a female candidate: Is she likable?

Pushing that argument is treacherous given that many Democrats remain upset over what they view as sexist treatment of Hillary Clinton, the party’s last nominee. Warren’s allies view the language being used against her as constructed to be particularly devastating for female candidate and beyond the policy divisions between her and her rivals.

Women’s activism — driven in part by Clinton’s loss — has fueled social and political movements, evident in the #MeToo campaign and in election results during the 2018 midterms and on Tuesday night. But it also comes as Democrats worry about turning off voters — many of them white, working class, and male — in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin….

It’s not me, but Some People Say… Thank heavens, Mike Bloomberg is about to parachute into Alabama and save us from the Mean Mommy!

Don’t just take my word — listen to Boston professional reporter, Mr. Charles P. Pierce:

… This kind of thing makes me crazy. An opponent launches a new “line of attack.” It is then described in detail, just so everybody gets the point. Then the reporters make no real value judgments as to whether the “line of attack” is a crock of beans or not—which, in this case, it plainly is.

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Pence Administration Declares War on Orphans

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…and refugees, the sick, the elderly, the homeless… but only if they’re LGBT or the wrong kind of Christian, of course. These people aren’t complete monsters.

Daniel Reynolds at The Advocate writes:

The Department of Health and Human Services announced a new rule Friday that would allow adoption agencies and other programs that receive HHS grants to reject same-sex couples and rainbow families on the basis of religious freedom, reports the Washington Blade. Other programs that stand to be affected include elder services, Head Start, refugee resettlement, HIV services, and programs for runaway and homeless youth.

The proposed regulation would nullify an Obama-era policy that prohibited federally funded agencies from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity…

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council — deemed an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — praised the new regulation.

“Thanks to President Trump, charities will be free to care for needy children and operate according to their religious beliefs and [lies about LGBT parents redacted],” Perkins said.

[…] “The Trump-Pence White House has proposed a horrific federal regulation that would permit discrimination across the entire spectrum of HHS programs receiving federal funding,” added Human Rights Campaign President Alphonso David.

We knew this was coming. These dipshits are convinced that this country, in which a supermajority of the population and elected officials shares their religion, is coming for their faith. And they hated that Obama policy. What liberals are really coming for, of course, is their ‘right’ to take government money while discriminating against people for the circumstances of their birth. They’re more than welcome to hang up a “no fags allowed” sign on their church. Nobody’s trying to take that away.

Now, even for a fairly privileged fellow like me, this is going to affect my behavior. I try not to travel to deeply conservative areas as a matter of conscience and personal safety, and this policy makes such places even more dangerous for me. What if I get hit by a bus and the only hospital won’t treat me? Or more likely, what if they won’t let my husband visit or make decisions? But for the more marginalized members of the community, this is going to be much more significant. Catholic hospitals are already denying procedures to trans folks that they’ll happily perform on cis folks. This policy makes it official.

Anyway, this will probably become another “Mexico City policy” that Republican and Democratic administrations keep reversing each other on, until the culture warriors die out, so forever. That’ll be fun.

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How To Start A Revolution

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Remember Lauren Duca? A decade ago in Trump years (2016), she wrote a viral Teen Vogue article, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America”

Over a million people read the essay in under 24 hours (and one of them was Dan Rather, who shared the essay on Facebook that afternoon). As a friend put it at the time, “It’s like you decided to write about politics, and a hole opened in the center of the Earth.”

Her first post to Pancake Brains is heartwrenching. I honestly don’t know how she’s still standing, but I’m grateful she is and is still reminding us our democracy is at risk. As you can guess, she’s targeting empowering young people to stand up and take back their country and change the world.

How To Start A Revolution by Lauren Duca

Teen Vogue award-winning columnist Lauren Duca shares a smart and funny guide for challenging the status quo in a much-needed reminder that young people are the ones who will change the world.

In other news, enough tricksters stopped by that I am out of candy, but mostly because I encouraged a group of middle school boys to stop back by before they headed home and be rewarded with my leftovers as the clock struck 8. They were also rewarded with a Bixby and Scout visit. I had to work tonight while juggling Halloween, so they had to hang out in the back of the house because I could not also juggle them. I released the hounds just in time for the one last group of costumed revelers.

Open thread

 

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Kamala Harris Took the Lead This Weekend

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Rep. Shirley Chisholm, one of my earliest political idols, said “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” After Friday’s HBCU Trump debacle, Senator Harris took her chair, and changed the conversation.

… In the hours after Harris initially announced she wouldn’t be present at the forum, talks began between her campaign, Mayor Benjamin and Benedict College to create an end result that didn’t include the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center with a breakthrough happening overnight, a Harris campaign aide said.

“People were figuring out a solution where the group honoring President Trump wasn’t involved and students had access to speeches and the ability to ask questions,” the aide said.

Another aide said Harris, the only graduate of a historically black college in the 2020 field, wouldn’t stand for the 20/20 Bipartisan Justice Center “disrespecting” the legacy of HBCUs and their history rooted in protest, justice and equality.

“When it became clear Donald Trump would receive an award after decades of celebrating mass incarceration, pushing the death penalty for innocent Black Americans, rolling back police accountability measures and racist behavior that puts people’s lives at risk, and then learned all but ten Benedict students are excluded from participating, I cannot in good faith be complicit in papering over his record,” Harris said in a statement Friday…

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Open Thread: Oval Office Occupant Finds Some African-Americans to Speak Over

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Per the NYTimes, “In Criminal Justice Speech, Trump Belittles Obama’s Efforts for Black People”:

… Opening a three-day forum on criminal justice that will later feature his Democratic rivals, Mr. Trump promoted the bipartisan criminal justice overhaul he signed last year and invited to the stage several people who were released from prison as a result of the new law or his own commutation decisions.

Last year’s overhaul, the First Step Act, was an example of the power of bipartisanship, he said, praising the Republicans and Democrats who worked on it for their efforts “to restore hope and optimism where they’re really needed the most and where there was very little.”

But as his hourlong speech went on, his message of harmony gave way to his trademark partisan attacks on Democrats…

He recalled the 2016 speech in which he urged black voters to support him because “what the hell do you have to lose,” repeating the line multiple times and saying his administration had kept its promise to those voters.

And he described how his administration had helped historically black colleges and universities and suggested that voters “check out the last administration and see what they did for you.”

“Not too much,” he said…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Memories Made Visible

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… [A] city commission voted on Monday to erect a monument depicting three pioneers in the fight for women’s rights: Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth.

The likeness of Truth, an escaped slave and abolitionist, was belatedly added to the sculpture in response to criticism that African American suffragists were initially excluded.

“This statue conveys the power of women working together to bring about revolutionary change in our society,” said Pam Elam, president of the monumental women not-for-profit of volunteer advocates, historians and community leaders, which has gained key support from the Manhattan borough president, Gale Brewer.

The organization’s statue fund privately raised $1.5m to create and maintain the new monument and for an associated educational program.

The work will be dedicated in August 2020 on the Mall, an elegant park promenade lined with American elm trees. Next year marks 100 years since American women won the right to vote…

[The 19th Amendment was passed in 1919, but not ratified until August 1920.]

***********

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Depravity Open Thread: “Lynching” Is Not A Word to Use Lightly

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I’d like to believe the Oval Office Occupant will be tonguelashed persuaded into ‘walking back’ his latest outbreak of self-pity before this posts. But even should that happen, he’ll no doubt walk back the walkback before the end of the week…

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Rest in Power, Rep. Elijah Cummings

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State Sanctioned Terrorism

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I don’t know what else to call this:

This was not the case for a black Pennsylvania family. As KYW Newsradio reports, one family is questioning why the Chester Police Department arrested them—twice—for allegedly “loitering” in their own yard.

The chain of police buffoonery kicked off on Oct. 1, when Officer Pasquale Storace III arrested Rachel Briggs’ sons and nephew for playing in her front yard; Storace, who is white, charged the young men with “loitering.”

According to Briggs, the boys were thrown in jail, forcing their families to scramble to raise money for their bail. When they were freed the next day, family members were on hand to welcome them back—right back on Briggs’ front lawn.

Some of the arrests were caught on video. As police arrest two of the family members, family members scream and beg for an explanation.

“They maced my son. He got asthma,” Briggs says later, as her son sits in the cop car. “My son can’t breathe, sir.”

Obviously, we don’t know all the facts in this case, but do we really need to? Even if they were being loud and boisterous enough to cause their (presumably) white neighbor to call the police, they clearly were not loitering, as they were on their own property. They weren’t drunk, on drugs, armed, or anything. They were in their yard. And the cops came and arrested them. Two days in a row.

Hopefully soon, they will receive a multimillion dollar settlement from the town, and can move out of that shithole.

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Excellent Read: “Nancy Pelosi, Political Grandmaster”

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There’s a famous Mark Twain quote: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

It always comes to mind when some Very Woke twitter analyst with a goldfish memory switches overnight from WHY WON’T PELOSI DO SOMETHING !!!RIGHT NOW!!! to WOOO SPEAKER & SHORTLY INTERIM PRESIDENT PELOSI IN!THE!HAWSE!!!. (Except, of course, those analysts usually switch right back to their first position, sometimes before I can finish reading down the thread.)

Abigail Tracy, in Vanity Fair, on “Nancy Pelosi, super Speaker, on Trump’s unfitness, the decision to impeach, and “weaving” her fractious caucus”:

Lost in the wilderness of the Trump era, Democrats looked long and hard for a champion: Robert Mueller, the media, even Michael Avenatti. But when the party retook the House in November and Nancy Pelosi began her historic second term as speaker, no one doubted the search was over. She’d been a GOP target and, some centrists thought, an electoral liability given her San Francisco roots. But now no one doubted that she was the indispensable Democrat, cheerfully jousting with AOC and “the Squad,” mediating the hoary conflict between the party’s left and its center (she describes herself as “a weaver,” which is a nice word for how she sometimes has to operate), winning with substance (her party’s focus on health care) and imagery (the famous Max Mara red coat, the donning of the sunglasses after her triumphant border wall meeting with Trump and Senator Chuck Schumer), and holding fire on impeachment until precisely the right moment. The Speaker talks to Abigail Tracy about the road to impeachment, how the Democrats won in 2018, why Trump is unique among presidents she’s known, and the work to be done after Trump is gone.

Tell me about the moment you reached the decision to go down the impeachment path.

I take a lot of guidance from the vision of our founders, and our founders fought very hard for our democracy, for our country, for our Constitution. In the dark days of revolution, Thomas Paine said, “The times have found us.” We believe that the times have found us to keep the republic from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And that would be those who say things like, “Article II says I can do whatever I want.” That’s not a republic, that’s a monarchy. That’s not what we have…

Some members in your caucus credit excitement from the base and a desire for a check on President Trump to your victory in the midterms in 2018. Others argue it was the messaging around issues like health care. What is your diagnosis?

Oh, it was health care. We had a very disciplined campaign in terms of a purpose. “For the people” was our agenda. We were going to lower health care costs by lowering costs of prescription drugs and preserving [protections for] preexisting conditions. Two, we were going to increase paychecks by building infrastructure in a green way. Three, we were going to have cleaner government by reducing the role of big dark money in politics and ending voter suppression others inserted in the bill. And the issue of health security, it’s just very dominant. People have determined it is “the issue” and this is the difference between Democrats and Republicans…

It is hard not to notice that he has rarely used a nickname for you.

Who cares? I don’t care if he has a nickname, maybe that’s why he didn’t do it.

I treat him with respect. I respect the office he holds. Sometimes I think I respect the office he holds more than he respects the office he holds. I try not to ask him to do something that isn’t in his interest. And it is in his interest to lower the cost of health care, to protect children, to build the infrastructure of America…

Have you been at all surprised by the behavior of the broader Republican party in the Trump era?

No. I’m not surprised. I mean, their oath of office is clearly to Donald Trump and not to the Constitution of the United States. Forgetting his personal grotesqueness, there is nothing he is about, in terms of the issues, that they haven’t been there longer and worse. Name any issue— climate, a woman’s right to choose, fairness in our economy, gun safety, how we treat immigrants. Any issue you can name, they have always been there and worse than he is. He is like their JFK. He is their guy…

Much has been made about a perceived conflict between the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic caucus this Congress. Has anything really changed?

No. No, it’s been the same forever. We’ve always had a big tent, we’ve always had different elements of the party. I myself am a San Francisco liberal and I’m proud of that. Republicans bought 137,000 ads describing me as such during the 2018 campaign. It didn’t work for them. We won 40 seats in the most gerrymandered, voter-suppressed districts you can name.

We’ve always had our exuberances, but we’ve always had our common ground. And as I say, “Our diversity is our strength, our unity is our power,” and that’s what President Trump fears most…

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Some Good News to End This Week!

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The Federal courts have worked diligently to make America great again and provided us with three items of good news to end this most infrastructure of weeks.

1:

2:

3:

Let’s all hope that next Infrastructure Week is as productive as this one.

Open thread!

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