Category: Politics
What a Tangled Tweet We Weave When First We Practice to Get Outraged
A “good job” according to whom? May I ask when exactly was the last time you were in an elementary school and sat through an entire school day with first graders? I ask because my mother makes this same argument frequently, yet has not been in an actual elementary school building since 1976. Her grandchildren were taught at home so she, therefore, has no experience either visiting a school or evaluating a public school education since 1976.
The Indictment
“Senate Republicans are setting a dangerous precedent that threatens the republic itself. I’m not naive enough to think they would hold Democratic presidents to the low standard they’ve applied to Trump, but all future presidents will be able to point to Trump to justify …”
What We Hath Wrought
RIP Amara Renas and all the other unknown women and men and children. May you haunt our collective memory forever.
On Crime and Punishment This Fourth of July
“It’s well worth a challenging read-and-think on everyone’s part at this particular moment in the country and society.”
Beginning of the End Day
“Instead of “Thank you for your service,” try, “We’re sorry you had to expend your blood, sweat, tears and toil to clean up our monumental failings.” Every time you meet one of the dwindling numbers of WWII veterans (and those of all the other magnificent little American wars we’ve fallen into), keep your mouth shut and your brain focused on peace. These “Greatest Generation” folks answered the bell and won the fight. We might not be as blessed next time.”
Paranoia, Fear, Terror and Facebook, et al.
“Insane levels of fear and control and succumbing to terror. We are a nation which is perhaps the most fearful of all countries.”
Corporate Power
“Many states whose sovereignty is threatened are now finally waking up to the danger. But is it perhaps already too late to do anything about the seemingly over-mighty corporations?”
Where Are the Bodies? We Have an App for That.
“The information presented is stark and perhaps unsettling.”
No Slope, No False Equivalency. Just the Same. Damn. Thing.
Immoral, indecent, inhumane. … We are running concentration camps and human beings are dying.
The Wages of Sin, America, is …
“It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialist Philosophy. For if there were such an entity, one would have to try by means of analysis and discussion either to prove its validity or to combat it. …”
Random American Notes
“An American gentleman . . . likewise stuck his hands deep into his pockets, and walked the deck with his nostrils dilated, as already inhaling the air of Freedom which carries death to all tyrants, and can never (under any circumstances worth mentioning) be breathed by slaves.”
Movie Night: Conquest
“The film itself is fairly representative of the period and shows how far ahead of her time Garbo was … that she could shine in spite of rather stilted dialogue, in a non-native language shows just how great an actor she was at the height of her career. It wasn’t bad, and I might have another look under certain conditions, but I probably wouldn’t buy it for the DVD collection, unless Criterion gets hold of it.”
Deadly Chinese Fentanyl is Creating a New Era of Drug Kingpins
“Fentanyl’s potency has « transformed the global trafficking — and policing — of narcotics.”
9 November: Schicksalstag
In the next few days, there will be much remembrance of the events of 100 years ago—the end of World War I. Not as much in the U.S., where World War I is like the Korean War, a largely forgotten conflict, even though 115,516 Americans died between 1917-1918, along with over 320,000 sickened, most in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Beery Originalist Quotables
Here are a few Original Originalist quotes worth Originally quoting, from a few of our first Original Founders:
Of Manifestoes and Buildings and Truman and Stuff
[Edited two days later to fix some typos and unclear, stream-of-consciousness-type unclear phrases.] During the recent effort to rename the
Atomic Poetry
On 1-Jun-1945, six weeks after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, new U.S. President Harry Truman convened a meeting to update
Treading a Careful Path in Post-Castro Cuba
“There is a discrete left-opportunist trend that seeks to throw all developments in Cuba post-1959 into the dustbin and forget about it. This does as little for us as the right-opportunist line; both fail to grasp the full reality of revisionist corrosion and capitalist restoration in Cuba, although one cloaks itself in stultified theory.”
On Shitholes
Every single day is a new low. How low can we go? There is no bottom. So pretty goddamned low. Shithole low.
Shuttling Between Failures
The story is sordid and long, but the details were made clear by Matt Viser’s excellent Globe piece. To wit: Lorenzo sold the Donald the Eastern Shuttle for an overvalued $365 million (if DT had created a brand-new shuttle from the ground up with brand-new planes, not old worn-out 727s, estimates were that he could have done it for $300 million.) Of course, the money was all borrowed. It was 1989; Eastern (and Continental) were already almost dead from Lorenzo’s sledgehammer and the economy was tanking. Pan Am 103 was bombed, the first Gulf War was about to begin. It was incredibly bad judgement to overpay a bunch of other peoples’ money for something that was guaranteed to tank.
They Don’t Like the New ‘America First’ As Much As They Did the Lindbergh Version
So let’s see if I’ve got this. Germany, a country in which there are still many women alive who were raped by invading Russian Red Army soldiers and in which the human products of those rapes are still living, now trust … Russia more than the United States.
Questions. We Got ‘Em.
Why? Because, as reporter Anne Kingston notes, women are “female reproductive vessels” and not human beings. And because Long Dong Silver has always, and will always, get a free pass. And both of these are realities for reasons which surpasseth understanding.
American Carnage: 3-Dec-17
Nazis are just “the normal people next door” and nothing bad should happen to either them or the New York Times for pointing this out, says The New York Times.
American Carnage: 17-Nov-17
The Diddler’s Club What we learned this week: • Al Franken is the latest member of the “People Who Diddled
American Carnage: 10-Nov-17
Peckerwoods! What we learned this week: • Comedian Louis CK and Crusading Crazy Ass Roy Moore were accepted into that
Reg Dwight Gets Hitched
High-profile celebrity civil commitment ceremony: check. Quaint British setting (the same location as Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles’ ceremony in
Mike Cox: Republican Hypocrite
Before I forget, I didn’t fail to notice that the « Fascist Michigan attorney general who is trying to strip faithful