Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

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

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

This is a big f—–g deal.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

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

… down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

Good luck with your asparagus.

The revolution will be supervised.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

The house always wins.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

We need fewer warriors in public service and more gardeners.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot.

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Excellent Reads: Some Longer Pandemic Stories

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… In many ways, Sturgis is an object lesson in the patchwork U.S. response to a virus that has proved remarkably adept at exploiting such gaps to become resurgent. While some states and localities banned even relatively small groups of people, others, like South Dakota, imposed no restrictions — in this case allowing the largest gathering of people in the United States and perhaps anywhere in the world amid the pandemic and creating huge vulnerabilities as tens of thousands of attendees traveled back home to every state in the nation…

Despite the concerns expressed by health experts ahead of the event, efforts to urge returnees to self-quarantine lacked enforcement clout and were largely unsuccessful, and the work by state and local officials to identify chains of transmission and stop them was inconsistent and uncoordinated.

Those efforts became further complicated when some suspected of having the virus refused to be tested, said Kris Ehresmann, director of infectious-disease epidemiology at the Minnesota Department of Health…

The Aug. 7-16 gathering has drawn intense interest from scientists and health officials, and will likely be studied for years to come because of its singularity. It’s not just that Sturgis went on after the pandemic sidelined most everything else. It also drew people from across the country, all of them converging on one region, packing the small city’s Main Street and the bars and restaurants along it. And in contrast with participants in the Black Lives Matter protests this summer, many Sturgis attendees spent time clustered indoors at bars, restaurants and tattoo parlors, where experts say the virus is most likely to spread, especially among those without masks…

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Excellent Read: Bears vs. Libertarians

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Courtesy of Mr. Pierce, the New Republic reviews Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’ book on “The Town That Went Feral”:

… Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a Pulitzer nominee and George Polk Award winner. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) sees him traversing rural New England as he reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange, episode in recent history. This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.

None of those micro-nations, it should be observed, panned out, and things in New Hampshire don’t bode well either—especially when the humans collide with a newly brazen population of bears, themselves just “working to create their own utopia,” property lines and market logic be damned. The resulting narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling. Sigmund Freud once described the value of civilization, with all its “discontents,” as a compromise product, the best that can be expected from mitigating human vulnerability to “indifferent nature” on one hand and our vulnerability to one another on the other. Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in microcosm, a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of “freedom,” both individual and economic, is in fact a recipe for impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once. In a United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed…

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right…

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Excellent Read: “We’re On to Cincinnati”

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Always worth reading Dave Roth, even in a piece that’s mostly about football (and the NFL’s reaction to the pandemic):

The Friday before last, the anti-government demi-celebrity Ammon Bundy forced the cancelation of a high school football game in Idaho…

…[O]ppressive state tyranny had taken the form of Caldwell High School’s requirement that fans wear masks and social distance. Bundy was livestreaming his stand on Facebook, which meant that while he was yelling “When are you going to stand for freedom, coach?” at the head coach of visiting Emmett High School, the town of Caldwell’s police department reportedly received numerous anonymous threats. “I will not put on a mask!” Bundy responded when parents and fans who had been in attendance confronted him outside. “I have a right not to put on a mask! You guys should be brave enough to do the same thing.” Two of Bundy’s sons play for Emmett, which was up by five touchdowns at the time the game was called. “Bundy was told before the game was stopped that he could cost Emmett a win and potentially a playoff spot,” the Idaho Statesman noted in its story.

Bundy’s exhausting public life is proof that, for some people, this country is an absolute wonderland of public places in which to become upset. But there’s something perfectly apposite about this last gratuitous, thirsty, unreasoning tantrum happening at a football game. No venue, and no tragicomic streaming meltdown, could have better anticipated or mirrored the President and his party belatedly attempting to defeat a rampaging pandemic with old-fashioned smash-mouth football…

When Trump himself finally, preposterously, inevitably got sick, he was at last finally invested in the whole thing. When Trump emerged on what either is or isn’t the other side of his illness, vibrating and fluttering and looking even more like a photographic negative of himself than usual, he brought with him a realization. He had faced Covid and bested it, and in so doing he’d learned that the soaring collective threat of the pandemic was … exactly what he has always thought everything was all along. In proclaiming that Covid was a test of individual will and personal strength, Trump spoke with a liberation and purpose that couldn’t be credited to the various powerful steroids currently bearing him aloft on a storm cloud. He had finally found a way to care about the pandemic, which was to make it about him. He had found a solution that appealed to him, which was to make it about his lifelong fixation on fear and domination in general, and his fear of being dominated in particular. Once he had confirmed that he was in fact immortal and the pandemic was just another binary matter of winners and losers, Trump was free to live as a dumb god…

It makes sense that the NFL, like Trump’s administration, did not so much fail to plan for Covid as make a principled choice to go on misunderstanding it. There are only so many ways to try to pull off a football season in a country that’s being overrun with a pandemic. The NFL attempted zero of those. This was not just because the few options available are difficult and annoying and require massive compromises and collective action, although that surely didn’t make them more appealing. It’s because the very act of doing that work would be an admission of vulnerability; the facile conceit that makes football work is that the people who play and coach are just different, and both less human and somehow superhuman for it. Every other American sports league has had to warp and wrench itself out of order just to have some kind of season. The NFL, being the NFL, was only and always going to do it without changing a thing…

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Discord in the Villages

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Well worth a click, if only for the photos:

Sara Branscome’s golf cart whizzed down the smooth asphalt path that winds through The Villages, the nation’s largest retirement community, an expanse of beautiful homes, shops and entertainment venues that bills itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown.”

Branscome’s cart was festooned with two American flags that flapped in the warm afternoon breeze. A line of oncoming carts bedecked with balloons and patriotic streamers chugged past while honking. Branscome jabbed her left foot on the horn pedal, then gave a thumbs-up.

“This gets you rejuvenated and ready for the next month or so, so we can do this and win. It gives you hope,” the 60-year-old retiree said.

Then she let out a whoop and two surprising words: “Go Biden!”…

Mostly, it seems, older voters have been put off by Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, which affects these voters more acutely than others. They were particularly alarmed by Trump’s performances at daily task force briefings in the spring because his remarks showed an uneven handling of the crisis and inspired little confidence…

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Schadenfreudelicious Read: “The Entire Presidency Is a Superspreading Event”

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Give the public what they want, Donny — a big state funeral. Professional journamalistic assassin remains professional.

Trigger warning to coulrophobiacs: The header illo is fantastic, but it almost freaked me out…

… In the hospital, Trump’s world shrank overnight in a way it hadn’t since he arrived in Washington from New York to be sworn into office nearly four years ago. Contagious and isolated from his family and closest aides, he was accompanied by Dan Scavino, the social-media director who had first been his caddie and had survived at his side longer than anyone who wasn’t blood, and Mark Meadows, his highly emotional chief of staff, who slept in a room nearby, and was attended to by a team of camera-conscious doctors. In this sterilized confinement, he tried to distract himself from his illness. He plotted his escape, planned public-relations stunts, watched TV, and took calls from friends, members of his staff, and Republican lawmakers. But he remained consumed by what the doctors told him about his chances of survival. It wasn’t a sure thing…

Statistically, the coronavirus is more likely to cost Donald Trump the White House than his life, though the threat to the latter isn’t helping the former. A little more than three weeks before the election, potentially contagious and freaking everybody out, Trump faces what looks like the end of his presidency. “He’s mishandled the coronavirus, he’s never been popular, and he’s gonna lose badly. I think it’s pretty simple,” a senior Republican official said. “Of course he was going to say, ‘Oh look, I feel great! Look how badly I beat this puny little virus!’ Meanwhile, it touches every American’s life every day in multiple different ways, and he’s handled it badly and people don’t forget that.” Or, as ex–Trump adviser Sam Nunberg put it, “Everything has just completely gone to shit.”…

“If the president had his way, he’d be back in February,” Newt Gingrich told me. The former Speaker of the House is an opportunist, and in the era of Donald Trump, that means he must be an optimist. In 2016, Gingrich supported Trump’s campaign in the hope that he’d be asked to be the vice-president. Instead, Trump repaid his loyalty not with power or higher status in history but with the cushiest gig in Europe: He made Gingrich the husband of the United States ambassador to the Vatican, based in Rome. Before the pandemic, whenever you’d call the guy, he was in a loud restaurant — “Hi! Yeah?! This is Newt!” — having the time of his life. So one might understand why he’s invested in keeping this whole thing going.

Gingrich grasps better than most how to stick to a message, and he keeps a straight face on Trump’s behalf even as he argues things he knows cannot be true. That voter surveys are skewed by the left-wing media. “I think the election is not quite like the public-opinion polls,” he says. That the president’s illness is a political asset. “It gives him a better understanding of what people are going through,” he says. Or that the president doesn’t mean to imply those killed by the virus were weak when he says he’ll beat it because he’s strong. “I think he’s talking about a national attitude. Should it be ‘Hunker down in the basement’ or ‘Reopen the schools’?” he says. Still, he cannot help but break character to admit the obvious: “If the president had his way, there’d be no virus. There’d be historically high employment among Blacks and Latinos. But you don’t get to pick the circumstances in which you run.”…

A senior White House official told me there has been an ongoing effort to persuade the president not to do any of this, as there always is during his episodes of advanced mania. Asked what the effort looked like this time, with Trump physically removed from most of the people who might try to calm him down, the official said, “Well, for starters, it’s unsuccessful.”…

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Praying for Joe Biden

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Were it up to me, I’d keep Biden well away from the Oval Office Plague Vector — several hundred miles away, at the least. (I’m not crazy that Kamala Harris is still supposed to debate Mike Dense tonight, either, but at least we can be pretty sure Pence isn’t yet infected, if only because he’s not usually allowed anywhere near his Dear Leader.)…

This is good, and rather sweet — Robin Givhan, at the Washington Post, on “Joe Biden’s campaign, summed up in one simple gesture”:

Former vice president Joe Biden was standing on the tarmac Monday chatting with reporters at New Castle County Airport before boarding his campaign plane for Miami. Biden was wearing a mask and so were the journalists, but the plane’s engine was whirring and as he was answering questions about whether he would participate in the upcoming scheduled debate, he began to drift from socially distanced range into normal speaking range. And so, with no fanfare but unmistakable firmness, Jill Biden approached her husband from behind, reminded him of proper spacing and physically moved him several paces back.

Biden apologized for his spatial indiscretion and then carried on with his thoughts about the importance of following the science in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

An entire campaign was summed up in that simple gesture — and by Biden’s response to it…

Biden has not been perfect in his masking and distancing. He’s tugged his mask down during conversations to be clearly understood. And, he’s leaned in a little too far when others have spoken to him. But he has made the effort to be mindful and cautious while his opponent has not only refused to try but has chest-thumped about that refusal.

After his wife stepped in to pull him back into safer territory, Biden said, “I’m sorry.” His words could be read as a statement of regret to the assembled reporters for violating the new rules of social engagement, for perhaps, putting them at risk. But even more, his apology recognized the concerns of his wife. It acknowledged that a small act can have enormous consequences — not just for him but for others as well. His words made clear that he understood that no matter how VIP he might be, he is not an island. And sometimes, causing someone to worry can be as agonizing for them as any physical pain…

In that consequential moment, Biden is flanked by security in their blue suits and their tie clips. They’re standing on alert, but it’s Jill Biden who steps in. She’s the one standing guard against this new threat that may or may not be present, that can’t be sniffed out by a K-9 team or revealed with a metal detector. There’s intimacy in her gesture, which happens so publicly but is shared by only two people. It is a particular sort of public display of affection. And it is a reminder that even within the candidate’s protective bubble there’s an even more secure space…

And keep in mind:

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Excellent (Heartbreaking) Read: “A mentally ill man, a heavily armed teenager and the night Kenosha burned”

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Anti-police-brutality demonstrators were converging on Kenosha from all over Wisconsin for a second night of marches. An armed right-wing group had put out a call for “patriots willing to take up arms and defend [our] City tonight from the evil thugs.”

Joseph Rosenbaum — depressed, homeless and alone — didn’t belong to either side. He had spent most of his adult life in prison for sexual conduct with children when he was 18 and struggled with bipolar disorder. That day, Aug. 25, Rosenbaum was discharged from a Milwaukee hospital following his second suicide attempt in as many months and dumped on the streets of Kenosha.

His confrontation hours later with Kyle Rittenhouse, a heavily armed teenager who had answered the call for “patriots,” kicked off a chain of violence — the deadliest of the summer — that left Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, dead. A third victim, Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, lost a chunk of his right biceps but survived.

Within hours, the three men and the teenager who shot them were assigned roles in the country’s churning partisan drama. On the right, Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz were cast as antifa foot soldiers, bankrolled by shadowy forces and determined to set fires and spread anarchy. On the left, the three shooting victims, all of them White, were celebrated as anti-racist martyrs battling armed vigilantes who had coalesced to support police departments accused of racism and brutality…

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