Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

The willow is too close to the house.

Well, except the wingnuts. fuck those guys!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Reality always wins in the end.

The revolution will be supervised.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Women: they get shit done

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

This blog will pay for itself.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

There’s some extremely good trouble headed their way.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

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The War On Women

Late Night #PizzaGaetz Open Thread: Alexandra Petri Makes An Excellent Point

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Back when I was in high school, my slightly younger brothers and their Boy Scout friends used to attempt to gross me out with stories about ‘fun’ camping trips where they (allegedly) tortured small animals, and each other. None of these mostly-harmless younglings would admit to being responsible when I confronted them individually, but when you got more than two of them in one room, Mark Twain’s theory of mob behavior ruled. BUT THAT WAS FIFTY YEARS AGO, MEN!

There are several details of the Matt Gaetz story that keep sticking in my head, but the one that sticks in it most is the report that the Florida Republican used to wander around and show his colleagues nude photos of people he had slept with. There’s a kind of grim weirdness to the idea of these interactions (which Gaetz denies) — a very “I Read On eHow.com That Men Bond Over Conquests” bewilderment. The callousness and the violation involved are enough of a sock to the gut. But the fact that this was allegedly known about him is what keeps getting to me. The fact that this, or something in this neighborhood of bad, occasioned senior staff from then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s (R-Wis.) office to have a talk with Gaetz about professional behavior.

Over all of this I keep hearing the uncomfortable laughter of Billy Bush. I keep coming back to the fact that it takes two to make a locker room…

To me, this is something you do, ideally, zero times. You never experience the impulse to do it, and you lead a pleasant life. You travel. You eat lunchmeat sandwiches. Maybe you do a marathon, or climb something. You lead a blithe existence for many decades, you die in your bed in your mid-nineties surrounded by your cherished relatives, and in all that time, you never walk up to a colleague on the floor of the House of Representatives and out of nowhere present him with a nude photograph of someone you claim to have had sex with.

But if you can’t do it zero times, then ideally it happens only once. It happens only once, because the moment you do it, the person you show it to responds the way a person should respond. You produce your photograph to your colleague, and your colleague looks at you and says, “Never show that to anyone, ever again. Go home and rethink your life. I do not feel closer to you. If anything, I want to have you removed forcibly from my presence by strong gentlemen whose biceps are tattooed with ‘MOM.’ The fact that you thought this would make us closer makes me question every decision in my life that has led me to this point. Leave now and never come back.”…

… I am not writing this for Matt Gaetz. I am talking to the person who was on the receiving end. The person who was presented with this behavior and had a choice of how to respond. I am talking to the person without whose chuckle or back-slap this situation would, perhaps, have been just a little less bad.

This is a plea for those small awkward no’s. The moment will inevitably come for you to offer one. And when I think of how much difference could be made by just one person, one guy in a locker room, or around a campfire, or even on the floor of Congress, saying, uncomfortably, “What?” or “Why would you show someone that?” — sometimes I want to chew glass. It is a small favor to ask. But it could reshape this whole place, if it happened enough.

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Breaking: Mass Shooting Apparently Targeting Asian-Americans In Atlanta; Suspect In Custody

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Amid a recent spike in anti-Asian-American hate crimes and acts of violence, many of which have been directed at older Asian-American women or Asian women residing in the US, we now have a mass shooting in Atlanta that, from the initial reporting on the casualties appears to be targeted against Asian-Americans.

From KIRO Channel 7:

ATLANTA — At least eight people were killed Tuesday after shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area, authorities said.

Update 8:52 p.m. EDT March 18: Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock, the suspected gunman in the Cherokee County massage parlor shooting, was caught following a chase in Crisp County, WSB reported. Crisp County is located about 175 miles south of Acworth.

Officials in Cherokee County have updated the death toll to four, bringing the overall total from all three shootings to eight.

Original report: At a news conference, Atlanta police Chief Rodney Bryant confirmed that the four victims at the northeast Atlanta spas were women and appeared to be Asian.

“It appears that they were Asian,” Bryant told reporters.

Bryant told reporters that police originally responded to a robbery call at the Gold Massage Spa.

Unlike past mass shootings, this one is not currently getting wall to wall breaking news coverage on CNN and MSNBC. They’re showing the regularly scheduled episodes of Chris Cuomo’s and Rachel Maddow’s nightly shows respectively.

While we do not yet have more information on the other four victims, as in if they are also Asian-American or Asian, my guess is that because the shooter was targeting massage parlors, we’re likely to find out that at least some of the other victims are also Asian-American or Asian.

I want to make four important points here as the reporting on this mass shooting develops:

  1. The Asian-American and Asian communities in the US are not monolithic. The identifying language – Asian-American and Asian – covers a tremendous diversity in ethnicities and, as a result, obscures almost as much as it reveals.
  2. Whether it is because Asian-Americans and Asians residing in America are considered to be a successful ethnic group or immigrant group by Americans who are not of Asian descent or for some other reason, attacks on these communities – from hate crimes to domestic terrorism – seem to get underreported. This is, itself, not that unusual. Until everyone was carrying their own camera and video recording device in their phones, crimes against Black Americans, as well as Latinx and Hispanic Americans was also under reported by the news media.
  3. I fully expect that this attack, because it involved massage parlors, is going to get rolled into the breathless news media obsessions and narratives, promoted by law enforcement, that these women were victims of human trafficking and/or were sex workers. So both victims and had it coming at the same time. We saw this bullshit narrative* in the south Florida arrests a couple of years back that snared New England Patriot’s owner Bob Kraft. And we saw it again in Tampa during this year’s Super Bowl. It is important to remember that Kraft was let off the hook regarding preliminary charges, but the Asian and Asian-American women involved with the spas that were raided in the stings all got charged for sex crimes.
  4. I will NOT BE SURPRISED to find out that the shooter was motivated by some bizarre conspiracy theory, related to QAnon or not, about human trafficking for the sex trade and his attack was motivated by that, as well as the recent attempts by conservatives to ramp up the negative rhetoric regarding the Peoples Republic of China in general and in regards to the origins of COVID-19 in specific.

If I see any updates, I’ll add them below.

Update at 10:05 EDT

CBS News has some additional details that, I think, are going to confirm my worst assumptions regarding this being specifically targeted at Asian-Americans:

Police said it was too early in the investigation to identify potential motives.

A shooting at Young’s Asian Massage in Cherokee County left three people dead and two wounded, according to the Cherokee County Sheriff’s office. The two wounded people were taken to the hospital, where one later died.

Later, three people were shot and killed at Gold Spa on Piedmont Road in Atlanta, according to Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant. While officers were responding to the scene at Gold Spa, they received another call for a shooting across the street at Aromatherapy Spa, where they found another person who had been shot and killed, Bryant said.

Bryant said all four victims from the Piedmont Road shootings were female.

Cherokee County Police identified Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock as a suspect in the Young’s Asian Massage shooting. Long was taken in to custody Tuesday night in Crisp County, Georgia, according to Cherokee County sheriff’s Office Director of Communications and Community Relations Captain Jay Baker.

Updated at 10:27 PM EDT

Apparently Trump went hard into the slur during his interview on Fox earlier this evening.

Open thread!

* I am not denying the reality that women, as well as some men, and children are trafficked for sex. As well as for other work. Nor am I denying the reality that a lot of the women working in these spas are, in fact, actual victims as they are being forced to do sex work to pay off the debt accumulated to get to the US. But there is a difference between the reality and the breathless, something must be done narrative that law enforcement and tough on crime politicians push and that the news media seems to have a gigantic sweet tooth for.

Also, sex work should be decriminalized. Flat stop.

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Senior Military Leaders – Officers and Senior Enlisted – Have Decided To Very Publicly Smack Tucker Carlson Around

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Like every guy else on this site who has served in a uniform, as a DOD or Service civilian, or in the US intelligence community, we’ve all served with women. And not just in support positions regardless of what the official designators were. In the wars we’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 20 and 18 years respectively, no matter where we put the phase lines on the map, there were no defined lines that indicated where the fighting would and wouldn’t be. Women Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines, despite being designated in combat support roles for almost the entirety of these wars, often saw as much combat as their male counterparts. Every convoy of supplies, every Civil Affairs Team-Alpha mission, every Medical or Veterinary Operation could, at any moment, go from being a support or enabling mission to a combat one.

Similarly, women working within the US intelligence community, as well as in other agencies within the Interagency that deployed forward also often served in harm’s way. And lots of them – those working for the State Department, USAID, USDA, US Department of Energy, etc – went forward despite knowing they, like their male colleagues from these agencies, would NOT be authorized to be armed despite being deployed in a war zone! And yet they went. And the civil service women from the Interagency all went because they volunteered as part of what was referred to as the “civilian surge” to better enable and enhance the US military’s ability to successfully conduct Phase IV Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I fought hard to have two women on my small team of cultural analysts – one a former student I’d recruited and the other a former Army intelligence NCO. I got my former student and was glad to have one woman on the team*. Why? Because we were deployed in a high context communicating, near-far relationship, honor-shame society that was also Muslim. This meant that women, and being able to talk to them, to have them talk to us and tell us what they needed – as women in general and as mothers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc in specific – was largely impossible without a woman on the team!

I once did a ride along on a MedOps with one of our Civil Affairs Teams-Alpha (CAT-A) and my former student did not come along. And we didn’t have a female medic or interpreter with us either. It took over half the day before anyone without a Y chromosome would come talk to us. Eventually someone sent a five year old girl to ask for something figuring that that was somehow not improper. Once we were able to get her what she needed for her mother, that broke the ice and the Civil Affairs medic was suddenly swamped by women. The first thing that was decided at the post mission after action review was that from now on a female CA Soldier, a female medic, and a female interpreter would be on the list of required personnel for these missions.

In Afghanistan they actually built all women teams – known as Lioness Teams – to go do this type of work with Afghan women. There was some discussion of doing this within our brigade, leading to the cringeworthy suggestion that since we were the Iron Brigade they should be called the Iron Maidens, but it was ultimately decided to simply ensure women were on all the essential missions because we didn’t have any female personnel who had gone through the specialty Lioness Team training. Here’s the link to a great, though infuriatingly sad, documentary on the Lioness Teams done by Frontline at PBS.

So I’m very glad to see a number of senior military leaders – officers and senior enlisted – visibly and vocally push back against Carlson’s offensive stupidity. Here’s a sampling I came across without even looking. If the WordPress formatting isn’t showing you the full, embedded tweet with the video, just click on the links to see and hear for yourselves.

Command Sergeant Major Michael Grinston, the 16th Sergeant Major of the Army:

US Training and Doctrine Command Deputy Commanding General LTG Ted Martin:

US Space Command Senior Enlisted Advisor/Command NCO:

GEN Paul Funk, Jr; Commanding General Training and Doctrine Command (who has also been using his social media feed to retweet and amplify other’s similar statements):

Major General Pat Donahoe, Commanding General Maneuver Center of Excellent and Ft. Benning:

MG John R. Evans, Commanding General US Army Cadet Command:

MG Dennis LeMaster, Commanding General US Army Medical Center of Excellence:

 

Statement made by GEN James McConville, US Army Chief of Staff:

I found these without really looking and I’m sure there are more out there. The US military is not perfect when it comes to dealing with women who are Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, or Marines, but the responses of the senior leadership to Carlson’s stupid agitprop is encouraging and reassuring. I would also suggest that this open support is possible because of who is president. The senior uniformed leadership knows that if they publicly push back on Carlson’s stupidity that they won’t be called out on it by any of the political loyalty officers that Trump had appointed to senior positions in the White House, at the DOD, and at the Services.

Open thread!

* Of the women who served in the US Army Human Terrain System, two lost their lives during their deployments as a result of enemy action. Both of these were peers of mine – they were also the field social scientists, read research and analytical directors and technical leads, for their teams. Nicole Suveges was blown up in Sadr City in Iraq in late June 2008, we had been emailing just the day before about an HR issue of all things. Paula Lloyd, who I did not know, died in early January 2009. She had served through the rank of Staff Sergeant in the US Army before going on to get her advanced degrees. Paula was attacked in early November 2008 by an Afghan local who doused her with gasoline that had been concealed in a container used for cooking oil and lit on fire while accompanying and assisting an Army patrol in Afghanistan. She ultimately died of her burn wounds two months later.

My former student, one of the best ones I ever had, came through her deployment successfully.

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Referring to Fox & Friends As A Blonde With Two Boobs On a Sofa Was Not Meant To Be Taken Literally!

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Life imitates snark!

But does it separate?

My work here is done…

Open thread!

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Y’all…

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I thought surely it was from a parody account, but nope, it’s real.*

Y'all...

 

I’m a professionally trained word-having person, but I find myself utterly bereft of verbiage.

Also, I just read that the Third Lady is going to speak at the RNC event at the White House, and there’s no contemporary convention speeches from Michelle Obama to plagiarize, so Melania’s probably speechless too.

Open thread.

*After-market graffiti courtesy of MS Paint!

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A Woman In Portland

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What are the rules of engagement for a mob of highly-equipped men, with layers of protective clothing, against a woman wearing no clothes?

That was the situation in Portland on July 18. The woman was as unidentifiable as the men, wearing only a mask and a knit cap. She appeared, danced, and then sat to expose her vulva to the men. Photo showing nudity after the fold.

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‘The Russia Bitch’

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It’s been 500 years or so since the impeachment, but remember Fiona Hill, formerly of the National Security Council? There’s a fascinating piece by Adam Entous in The New Yorker: “What Fiona Hill Learned in the White House.” If you were intrigued by Hill’s testimony, wondered about her background or are curious about how a no-nonsense public servant like Hill ended up working for Trump and Bolton, it’s worth a read.

Hill doesn’t seem to buy into the theory that Trump does Putin’s bidding because he (Trump) is compromised in any direct sense. She appears to believe Trump is a credulous ignoramus who is impressed by autocratic power and unaware of how the presidency functions. He follows his instincts — unleavened by knowledge of history or geopolitical considerations — and thus treats U.S. foreign policy decisions as personal transactions for his own gain. None of that surprised me.

Neither did my biggest takeaway from the article: that Trump is every bit as egregious a sexist pig as I imagined. But I’m seething over that aspect of his misrule anew after reading the article. Hill tells a story about her first day on the job, when she accompanied then-Secretary of State Tillerson and National Security Advisor McMaster to the Oval Office to debrief Trump after a call with Putin.

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