Politics Plus

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage.  These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that.  Even though there are many more which I can’t include.  As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I had better start with this story and get it off my chest.  The title is ‘I come from a rich and white family’: White dad denies responsibility for abused 5-year-old black stepson, and there is not too much more about it you need to know.  I am not a big fan of lookism, particularly turned onto people under 50 (Coco Chanel: “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.”)  But this guy is almost 30, and it appears to me that “life” has given him some pretty dead eyes in that face.

The child, a little boy, whose name is (wisely, IMO) not provided, is five years old.  He cannot speak or walk.  He weighed, when taken into the hospital, 24.9 pounds – so low the weight did not register on the growth charts for a five year old.  When found, he was reaching into the carpet for cereal to eat.

His hands and feet were orange and blistered, apparently from chewing at them — an action his mother said let him know he was hungry because he is nonverbal. She also told police she often would not feed the boy for days at a time, and that he was not on his required medication for some developmental issues he has.

There are two other children in the home which the – father? stepfather? what do I call this PoS? – claims are his.  A different source said the other two children are younger, so infidelity doesn’t appear to be a factor.  Not wanting to support “some other guy’s kid,” however, apparently looms large.

Tisiphone, revenge here is definitely appropriate.  But my heart wants you to put on your Eumenides hat and find this child a home where he can receive care and love.  Good luck.  You’ll need it.

Back on the third of April, a group of 31 county sheriffs, representing every county across the border between the US and Mexico, took a meeting and unanimously voted to adopt face (specifically eye) recognition hardware and software as a new enforcement tool.  You see, it can happen that unauthorized immigrants’ “fingerprints can be disfigured through manual labor or self-inflicted wounds.”

Well, we can’t have that, can we.  If an immigrant has worked at manual labor so long and hard that his (or her) fingerprints have become disfigured, or has become so desperae as to attempt to disfigure his or her fingerprints through self-inflicted wounds (not as easy as it sounds, BTW), well, we just have to find another way to kick him or her out.

Didn’t that use to be called “kicking a man when he’s down”?  Oh, wait – law enforcement now does that literally and routinely.

Well, I’m sure that is not the point for the company, Biometric Imformation and Identification Technologies, affectionally nicknamed BI2, which is giving the sheriffs a FREE three-year trial of their stuff.  No, I’m betting it’s much more important that the company will add – “a huge influx” – of biometric information to its existing national iris database.

From the company’s senior vice president (John Leonard, pictured):

The frustration law enforcement has is this: ‘Alright, I got this criminal, the guy raped three kids. He’s back in my community again. I don’t even know who he is, and the federal government has never given me what I need….’

You get all these people that say, ‘Well Trump is going after all these illegals, these immigrants, who have made America great.’ Well there’s a lot of immigrants that have made it great, but there’s a lot of assholes, too.  So BI2 is stepping up to the plate and donating this.

Personally, I think that anyone who believes this will have any impact on immigration, legal or not, might be interested in a bridge that TomCat has for sale.  Alecto, can you – I know it’s a long border – but kind of watch out for the innocents and give them some protection from the abuses this will lead to?

For the third story here (out of SIX I bookmarked on Monday alone), I want to issue some warnings about a group known as the ACRU.  We all know about the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union.  Well, the ACRU is the American Civil Rights Union, designed essentially to oppose everything the ACLU dies or wants to do.  R for Right, L for Left, I suppose.

In June 2014, the five Election Commissioners of Noxubee County, Mississippi, received a letter threatening legal action if they did not purge their election rolls, legal action would be taken.  Because, the ACRU claimed, “there were more people registered than there were voting age citizens on the county.”

Noxubee County could not afford to lawyer up; however, the Board pushed back as best they could.  They ignored the letter.  In November 2015, the threatened lawsuit was filed.  The ACRU was pushing for a consent decree which would agree to remove voters.  After some time, the commissioners were being leaned on to sign that consent decree.  Three caved.  Two didn’t.  As one commissioner said, “We are not gonna get those [voter] cards back.  I promised my voters I would look out for them, and to me, that’s not looking out for them.”

Now the ACRU is pushing the court for a default judgement.

Mother Jones mentions three lawyers who are purging voter rolls.  The first is J. Christian Adams.

[Adams is] a former staff attorney in the Voting Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Adams joined the department in 2005, when high-ranking official Bradley Schlozman was found by the department’s inspector general to be illegally using political ideology to fill the Civil Rights Division with conservative lawyers. Adams, a conservative attorney from South Carolina, was “exhibit A” of Schlozman’s hiring practices.

The other two are Chris Coates and Robert Popper.  Both are bio’ed on the site – the backgrounds are similar.

Much attention has been paid to voter ID laws, which heaven knows are bad enough.  this goes deeper, and is intended simply to prevent anyone not a Republican from voting.  These attorneys speak about “election integrity.”  But in reality, integrity has nothing to do with it.  The battle is just moving from ID card to voter rolls.

Megaera, if this is not grudging, I don’t know what is.  Have at it!

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 at http://www.care2.com/news/member/101612212/4061508

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage.  These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that.  Even though there are many more which I can’t include.  As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I am running late today, and short-handed, since I really needed to ask Tisiphone to do a favor for a friend (who has an ex-spouse who needs to be – explained – the meaning of “restraining order.”)  But – as I point out every week – no one knows the true total number of the Furies, and I need to ask them if any of them are children.  Because what is really needed for the first situation this week is about 400 baby Eumenides, primed to comfort children who need it.

We probably all cringed this week when the murderer of Philando Castile was acquitted of all charges (He is no longer a police officer, but now, what’s to prevent him from becoming one again?), and many of us re-lived that horrible night, particularly since, with the trial over, the dashcam video was now available and shocking.  Castile’s death, happening as it did in front of his girl friend and right before the eyes of her little girl, was devastating even to those of us who follow such killings, and was covered here at Politics Plus as well in all the mainstream media.

What went under the radar then, and which I only realized this week, was that Philando Castile had in life worked as the nutrition services supervisor at J.J. Hill, “a small bastion of diversity, a Montessori school that draws from surrounding progressive neighborhoods.”

It was a few weeks after his death in July 2016 when Sakki Selznick learned that her daughter had been giving imaginary high-fives to Philando Castile.

Castile ― or Mr. Phil, as students at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School would call him ― often greeted students with high-fives while they waited on line to get breakfast in the cafeteria. Now that Mr. Phil was gone, Selznick’s young daughter worried she’d never get one of his famous high-fives again. One evening, she explained, she was thinking about it and she’d started high-fiving the air, hoping Mr. Phil would respond somehow.

A magical high-five didn’t arrive. Through tears, Selznick explained to her daughter that she would not be getting one. 

Ten-year old Miss Selznick is far from alone.  “395 adoring students … have spent the past year mourning Castile, a loss that was felt anew last week with the news that Yanez had been acquitted of any wrongdoing.”

When the students returned to school last fall, they had been visibly changed.  The school has been doing its best to deal with the grief head on.  Teachers got special training, counselors had extended availabilty, visible memorials were created.  But  when adults cannot work through and make sense of a catastrophe. children really cannot be expected to do so.  400 or so baby Eumenides probably cannot resolve this either, but it couldn’t hurt, could it?

As one parent said, “It has been a hard year.  I don’t imagine the next year will be easier.”

Grief like this is immobilizing.  But the right is not immobilized right now.  It is invigorated.  And, while I would hesitate to call anyone on the right “intelligent,” you don’t gain as much power as they have without having something.  Call it low cunning if you will.  Shrewdness works for me.  And I am seeing a trend.  Some one, or some group, possibly not even organized, on the right, is is combining our grief and their projection to use against us.  They don’t need to immobilize us forever.  They just need to immobilize us long enough to destroy us.  From AlterNet –

 You may have mocked claims about the existence of paid protesters as just another lie from the right. As it turns out, at least on this one issue, they’re actually telling the truth. The problem is, the right neglected to mention those paid protesters are part of the right-wing apparatus….  If it seemed incongruous that the “new right”—whose members have declared themselves the defenders of free speech and conservationists of Western culture—claimed to be so outraged by the recent staging of a Shakespeare play, this might explain why. And when the right talks about “paid protesters,” just assume they personally know whence they speak. 

If sending out paid protestors isn’t enough, consider how the right is complaining about left-wing violence – and using that as an excuse to knock a few heads themselves.  From Mother Jones:

“Did anybody get to bash a commie yet?” [Kyle] Chapman asked, addressing a group of “Western chauvinist” street brawlers known as the Proud Boys, who flashed “OK” hand signs as a videographer livestreamed the event for Chapman’s 34,000 Facebook followers. “Well, let me know when the time is right because I’m not going to miss out on any fun.”

Mike Cernovich, who has a lot of monty to spend on paid protesting, made it into this story too –

“These [left/right] labels are changing,” insists internet troll, vlogger, and self-proclaimed “national security reporter” Mike Cernovich, who is among the most prominent pro-Trump voices online and now works for Infowars. “Whether the liberals agree with us or not, we view the left as being the establishment now. The counterculture, the dissident thinking is now coming from the right.”

Of course where there are right wingers there will be money, and money pervades all of this activity.  Chapman is now looking to publish comic books.  Partly because:

“Marvel, DC have really let their readership down because they’ve moved so far to the left,” he told me. “They’ve gone and changed white characters to black characters. They’ve taken straight characters and made ’em gay. It’s not what people wanted. They want superheroes.”

May I digress a little bit here?  I am straight, and so white that I can’t spend more than five minutes in the sun without sunscreen.  But I can recognize a superhero when I see one – and it mostly ain’t white guys.  Anyone who is black or brown or gay or Muslim or any one of a thousand pther things these guys just can’t stand, IS a superhero.  They HAVE to be super heroes just to survive.  To not only survive but to stay positive, to stay away from hate (like the survivors at Mother Emanuel in Charleston) – these are the superest of superheroes.  Anyone who can’t see that is blind.  The blindness may or may not be deliberate.

The Nation also has an article on why political violence is necessarily on the right and of the right.  The Nation has a pretty fierce paywall, and when I see something there I might want to refer to again not in the same month, I “print” it to a pdf or an xps file to save on my computer, so as not to keep spending that same “view” over and over.  I did that with this one.

In the wake of the mass shooting in suburban Virginia last week that left House majority whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) and three others wounded, conservatives have been furiously waving the bloody shirt. With LEFT-WINGHATE filling half the screen, Sean Hannity blamed Democrats, saying they “dehumanize Republicans and paint them as monsters.” Tucker Carlson claimed that “some on the hard left” support political violence because it “could lead to the dissolution of a country they despise.” Others have blamed seemingly anything even vaguely identified with liberalism for inciting the violence—from Madonna to MSNBC to Shakespeare in the Park.

This is all a truly remarkable example of projection. In the wake of the shooting, Erick Erickson wrote a piece titled, “The Violence is Only Getting Started,” as if three innocent people hadn’t been brutally murdered by white supremacists in two separate incidents in just the past month.

All of these articles are strong on what the right is in fact doing.  Unfortunately, they are weak on ideas about how to combat what the right is doing.  Because, unfortunately, just saying “Oh, they’re projecting,” is not going to work.  One either sees that or one doesn’t.  And they don’t.

But maybe Megaera and Alecto can come up with something. And, when she gets back, Tisiphone.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 at http://www.care2.com/news/member/101612212/4059167

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage.  These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that.  Even though there are many more which I can’t include.  As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Let’s start today with Mike Moon, a member of the Missouri House of Representatives since 2013, who too the occasion of a special session being called to consider “nothing but abortion” to make a promotional video showing him – beheading a chicken?!?

I am not making this up.

I should point out that he is from Ash Grove, which is nowhere near Kansas City, ot Saint Louis, or anywhere else civilized.  Nevertheless, he is a legislator, and proud of it.  From the video:

When the governor called for the second special session this year, I was right in the middle of my summer job. But like any good career politician, when I get the call (breaks to behead chicken), I’m going back to work… God gave us man dominion over life. He allows us to raise animals properly and care for them and then process them for food so we can sustain life. And that’s what I’m doing here with this chicken. So we’ve been called back to this special session for the primary purpose of supporting life, protecting the unborn specifically. I think we need to get to the heart of the matter here (pulls out chicken’s heart). So today, I’m filing a bill that will lead to the stopping of abortion in the state of Missouri and I hope you’ll support it.

Robin Marty, writing in Care2 (from which truthout often picks her up, but if they picked up this one I missed it), points out that Moon “is far from the only politician to compare abortion and animal welfare — often to the detriment of the pregnant people wanting a termination.”  I’ll spare you the barf-inducing examples she gives from Alabama, Massachusetts, and Illinois; they are at the link if you are curious.

But she does point out,

While Moon may have been the most explicit of them all when he said directly stated, ”God gave man dominion over life,” he is only saying what so many far-right social conservative lawmakers believe: it is a man’s job to make decisions about “life.”

So thank you to Moon for teaching us a real — albeit extremely graphic — lesson about what is really at the “heart” of the anti-abortion movement: man’s complete and utter control, be it over livestock or women.

Alecto – how old is the patriarchy now?  Endless enough to make you the logical choice to – instruct – him.

In a story a couple of weeks old which was also picked up by a Daily Kos contributor, Wayne Allyn Root, a conservative talk-radio broadcaster, advanced the theory that, in order to  destroy liberal groups before “our lives are erased,” Conservatives should employ Special Forces Operatives “who have killed people.”

This to me takes on an added dimension in view of the latest mass shooting, even though it was #154 this year (or was it #155?)  I can hardly wait to hear what he has to say in his next broadcast.  No, wait – I wish I could wait forever.  After all, he was already saying

We need to hire former CIA or NSA or FBI or Navy Seals that have been involved in counter-insurgency operations all over the world, that have killed people, that understand how to fight; that don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, that bring a gun to a gunfight, preferably a shoulder-fired missile to a gunfight, preferably a nuclear weapon to a gunfight!

It is time to go after the left as viciously as they go after us. These people are mentally insane … and I will tell you right now, they would burn books if they could.

They would love to burn the Bible, because we all know they hate God. And you know they hate the country.

I wonder whether Mr. Root is any relation.  Oh, wait, no, that was “Roof.”  But I am pretty sure the entity Root  worships as God is not who he thinks it is.  Tisiphone?

I have been screaming for a number of years now that our failure to concentrate on electing Democrats to state offices, like Governorships, in and prior to 2010, is one of the factors why we have been so killed by gerrymandering.  Which it is.  But never in my wildest dreams did I foresee a federal administration getting into power before 2020 which would be doing its best to destroy the census, along with all other functions of government.

The census in this country doesn’t just determine how much funding cities and states receive from the federal government, it also determines the boundaries of congressional and state legislative districts. Undercounting marginalized communities directly disenfranchises them and perpetuates the cycle of disempowerment.

From Bloomberg:

The Government Accountability Office has added the 2020 Census to its list of high-risk projects. Costs at the Census Bureau have mounted each decade as the office failed to use new technology, relying on paper forms and hundreds of thousands of human enumerators. In 2010, an aborted effort to use handheld devices cost hundreds of millions of dollars, eroding legislators’ patience with further budget increases. Seven years on, the bureau is struggling to get ready for the next count […]

All this might be surmountable if the bureau had the right leadership and adequate resources. It doesn’t. Its director, John Thompson, announced his resignation last month, and other key positions aren’t staffed. Trump’s budget proposal falls short of what’s needed for next year’s planned test of the new systems — a sort of dress rehearsal crucial to avoiding expensive mistakes in 2020.

We can’t just sit back and let Megaera take care of all this for us, although I do hope she will help with the funding aspect (I would love to see a bunch of Republican budget makers hounded into Hades, wouldn’t you?)  But here’s a comment from someone who knows, and from anyone who is physically able to work on it, here’s what we can do:

just go on-line to Census.gov and watch for positions—starting in 2019. They are experimenting with new ways to cut costs — and have done field tests in several large cities about having an on-line form. I worked as a Field Operations Supervisor in 2010 and now work as a permanent Field Rep for the Bureau of the Census in the Commerce Dept. We collect a lot of data for the Commerce Dept (especially Consumer Spending), The Bureau of Labor Statistics, Housing and Urban Development, The Dept of Justice Crime Statistics, NIH, and keep local demographic data up to date. I can say local gov’ts either hate us or help us—the ones who help get the most accurate data because they know it’s where the funding comes from and explain that to constituents. When I said to one guy who was refusing —“we need to know how many 4 year olds there are in this county”—he asked “why?” I said “we already know the High School is over crowded; if there are more 4 year olds than freshman, we’ve got 10 years to pass bonds, buy land, build the new buildings, and make room.” People just don’t have a clue how this mass collection of data affects their lives.

check out the bls.gov—it will shock you how many professions are “in decline”

check out www.bjs.gov—the data on identity theft and school bullying are shocking

check out wsfrprograms.fws.gov/subpages/nationalsurvey/national_survey.htm–one of the most important sources of information on fish and wildlife recreation in the United States.

check out https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html the most comprehensive national housing survey in the United States.

We do a lot. We are SWORN Federal Employees who take a lifetime oath of confidentiality.

The Repubs would like to eliminate everything we do but for the Constitutionally mandated decennials — kos is right—they will screw with us if they can.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 at http://www.care2.com/news/member/101612212/4058278