Glenn Kirschner – In his recent post, Donald Trump admits to not one but two crimes. Can indictments be far off?
Ring of Fire – Crazed Capitol Rioters Head To Prison
Robert Reich – Does Elon Musk Have a Right to Destroy Twitter?
Real Subtitles? What can you do when your country is out of hamburgers?
Puppy Born Without Front Legs Brings Life To Senior Dogs
Beau – Let’s talk about Arizona, water, and a new market….
Yesterday, we did indeed have snow as predicted, but the sun was out a couple of hours before is was supposed to slow down to a trickle. (the prediction also suggested it would continue to trickle throug the night, which it may – or may not.) It was also Giving Tuesday, so my inbox was about twice its usual size. And one more notable thng – the Senate passed the law upholding same-sex marriage 61-36 At this link you can see the 12 Republicans who voted yes, and I guarantee some will surprise you. Now, this doesn’t mean some (*)hole state will not challenge the law, but it does make it harder.
Cartoon – 3
Short Takes –
Mother Jones – How Did a State Known for Its War on Immigrants Approve In-State Tuition for Undocumented Students?
Quote – Proposition 300, [passed in 2006, was] a successful ballot measure that made university students in Arizona who were not US citizens or permanent residents and those lacking legal status ineligible for in-state tuition and federal and state financial aid…. Sixteen years later, that could change. The majority of voters in Arizona during the recent midterm elections were in favor of Proposition 308, a ballot measure that repealed provisions from Proposition 300 and opened the way for any high school graduate, regardless of immigration status, living in Arizona for at least two years, to access in-state tuition rates at state universities and community colleges.
Click through for analysis. It makes sense to me. If you don’t like a groups of people, at least in part because they are uneducated, then educate them. but then, I’m a flaming liberal.
Crooks & Liars – Russian Mothers ‘Rewarded’ With A Set Of Towels For Fallen Sons
Quote – On the occasion of Mother’s Day, one of the leaders of the Kursk region in Russia made a grotesque gesture, presenting a set of towels to mothers who lost their sons on the Ukrainian front. Outrageous news came to light in the Russian media: one of the district leaders of the Kursk region, Sergey Korostyev, gave a set of towels to mothers who lost their sons on the Ukrainian front, reports the Russian newspaper Vesma.
Click through for story and sources. Mothers Day in Russia is celebrated on the last Sunday in November. I don’t know about the “Dollar store” part. I expect the government is hurting for funding.
Food For Thought
Glenn Kirschner – Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Thanksgiving Day court filing that destroys Trump’s legal argument
Farron Balanced – Court Filing Reveals Lawyer’s Anger Over Matt Gaetz Not Being Indicted
Robert Reich – How a Billionaire Bought a Senate Seat in Ohio
Brent Terhune – Elon’s Saving Twitter
Security Guard Brings Home A Pregnant Stray Cat
Beau – Let’s talk about ignoring Trump tantrums….
Yesterday, the weather prediction was for snow today – and very cold – with a high below 32°F. Since I start shivering and my teeth chatter at 72°F, I’ll be staying in (not that I don’t anyway.) I also received confirmation to visit Virgil Sunday (and snow is NOT predicted for Sunday.) Also too, I learned that last Saturday was the 100th birthday og Charles M. Schulz. Here’s a link to a page of cartoons, which starts with political ones, but also includes more birthday tributes to the creator of “Peanuts” than you would probably think possible (and one or two are conspicuous, to me at least, by their absence.)
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
Axios – World’s largest active volcano starts to erupt in Hawaii
Quote – Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano — located on the Big Island — began erupting late Sunday night, the U.S. Geological Survey said…. “Based on past events, the early stages of a Mauna Loa eruption can be very dynamic and the location and advance of lava flows can change rapidly,” USGS said…. Webcams for the volcano can be found at https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mauna-loa/webcams
Click through for developing story. It appers when that say “largest,” they are talking about its perceived height, not the amount of damage it can do world wide. The latter would probably be Krakatoa. And the danger isn’t lava, but volcanic ash particles released into the air, whoch can block sunlight for years, sort of like a “nuclear winter.” Look up the year 536 CE (or “Worst year to be alive.”) Also, I don’t remember the year, but it wasn’t that long ago, when an eruption caused enough particles in the air over Europe that planes couldn’t fly for weeks. You may remember that too.
Wonkette – Buffalo Gunman Pleads Guilty To Hate Crimes, Will Spend Rest Of Life In Prison
Quote – This theory, whether it’s been called that or not, has been around for decades. Most people will date it back to the work of French crackpot Renaud Camus’s 2011 essay “Le Grand Remplacement,” in which he claimed that white citizens of European countries were being replaced by Black and Middle Eastern immigrants, or back to the “White Genocide” nonsense of 1990s white supremacists, but it’s always been there. A major feature of early 1900s antisemitism and racism in the United States was that Jewish people were supporting Black civil rights struggles because they wanted to replace WASPs with Black people and then take over the world.
Click through for more information. Today’s FFT summarizes my thoughts on this pretty well (it ain’t just Mexicans).
Food For Thought
Glenn Kirschner – Donald Trump’s attack on wife of Special Counsel Jack Smith is a sign of Trump’s desperation
Ukrainian Canadian Congress – Holodomor Information Video 2022 (It was on Saturday the 26th. Better, I hope, late than never)
Ring of Fire – Matt Gaetz Goes On Thanksgiving Rampage Against Everyone And Everything
Real Subtitles? Wartime infomercial.
Tropical Bird Walks Into Family’s House
Beau – Let’s talk about Trump, Evangelicals, and numbers….
Yesterday, I finished knitting a sweater, finished knitting a collar extention onto a sweatshirt, started a new sweater – and took a fairly deep dive into Joyce Vance’s newsletter, which was in the category of “The Week Ahead” – she doesn’t do one of those every weekend, but she often does. For this coming eeek, she is anticipating the circus (not her term, my interpretatin only) than can be expected in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals pursuant to Jack Smith’s demolition of Judge Cannon. It’s long and nerdy (she says so herself), and I’ll not try to boil it down further here, but I do provide a link. I do hope she is 100% correct – and I feel there is a good chance of it. ALso, I did a few December cartoons – just enough to take me several days past my next visit to Virgil (this Sunday).
Cartoon – 28 Blackbeard loaded
Short Takes –
Democratic Underground (multigraincracker) – Her mother was also her uncle, DNA test.
Quote – The mother had XY chromosomes in her blood and saliva, but her hair and cheek cells had XX chromosomes. Parts of the daughter’s genome matched each kind of her mother’s mismatched DNA. The daughter had inherited some DNA from her mother which originally belonged to her mother’s fraternal twin brother, who was never born. That makes the mother a chimera, the result of an embryo that had absorbed and incorporated cells from a twin who had vanished before anyone knew he had existed.
Click through for article, and don’t neglest the comments, which include more links to other anomalies. We are constantly learning so much more about genetics – and all of it makes the arrogance of people who insist there are two sexes, period, more outrageous.
Mother Jones – Hundreds of New York Women Are About to Sue Alleged Rapists (and Enablers) Under a Revolutionary New Law
Quote – Now, Carroll and thousands of other sexual assault survivors in New York state are getting a new chance to seek legal accountability against people who harmed them years or decades ago. Under the Adult Survivors Act, New Yorkers who were sexually assaulted as adults but who have run out of time to seek accountability in court will have a one-year “lookback window” to sue their abusers, as well as institutions that were negligent in responding to the assault.
Click through for details. To me, in a kind of rarefied way, this is analogous to the Federal statute of limitations’ exception for availability. But here, its society’s contempt for and distrust of women which conctitutes the unavailability.
DNYUX (also the NY Times, which is paywalled) – At Protests, Guns Are Doing the Talking
Quote – Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense — increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s…. Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home. The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger.
Click through for more – examples and analysis. This is what happens when people (I’m looking at you, SCOTUS) are allowed to conflate speech with something which isn’t speech at all.
Food For Thought
(Just till after the runoff)
Glenn Kirschner – Kevin McCarthy’s latest legislative thuggery: tells DHS Secretary Mayorkas, “resign or be impeached”
Meidas Touch – Herschel Walker’s former coach shakes up Georgia Senate race with HUGE announcement
Farron Balanced – Republicans Fear Trump Has Taken Their Party Hostage
Armageddon Update – I Give You The Bird!
Cat Who Spent 18 Years As His Dad’s Only Child Gets A Human Brother
Beau – Let’s talk about the Klamath River running free….
Yesterday, the radio opera was another comic one – +Falstaff” by Verdi (based on Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”) “The Merry Wives” is said to have been written because Queen Elizabeth I told Shakespeare she wanted to see “Sir John in love.” That seems odd to me, because a total jerk in love is still a total jerk, and an unmarried queen must see hundreds, if not thousands, of those. But maybe she meant she wanted them to be able to see themselves – that would at least fit with the way Falstaff acts and how the women react. But I kind of doubt that most jerks are self-aware enough to recognize themselves when they see them. Oh well, at least the rest of us can happily mock them. (Shakespeare, and Verdi in turn, were clearly aware that for Falstaff and his ilk, “in love” actually means “kind of in heat and definitely looking for a mark to grift.”) After beig subjected to various minor indignties (e.g., crawling into a laundry basket to hide because “the husband” is arriving, and then being thrown into the river), at the end, by which time it appears the whole town is in on the joke, he does get the bejeesus scared out of him and then is totally embarrassed – which all depends on the audience being aware that in Shakespeare’s day “fairies” were thought to be real and malevolent supernatural beings, and not tiny, but the size of humans. Much of the final scene is like something out of Margaret Murray (author of “God of the Witches”). But it does end with everyone happy.
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Short Takes –
Mother Jones – “Alito Was Using Phrases We Had Invented as Bumper-Sticker Slogans in a Supreme Court Decision”
Quote – By all rights, Rob should have pushed all my buttons. He was born and raised a secular Jew but accepted Jesus as a teenager. And he embraced his new faith with an extremism that we have seen among the religious right: he became an evangelical minister and one of the key architects of the anti-abortion movement, not only in protests across the country, but in the White House, the halls of Congress and, yes, the Supreme Court. He and his organization were responsible for some of the most provocative language and actions in the campaign against Roe vs. Wade. All sorts of other fundamentalist positions, such as opposition to gay marriage, came along with him. Shortly before we met, he had changed profoundly.
Click through for full interview with Rev. Rob Schenk – it’s from July but is of current interest in light of recent news about Alito.
The Daily Beast – The Complicated Relationship Between Kevin McCarthy and Hakeem Jeffries
Quote – It’s a new era of leadership in the House of Representatives, but the problems will be the same—maybe even worse. On the right, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is set—maybe—to ascend to the role of speaker. On the left, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is virtually guaranteed to become the minority leader for House Democrats. The move would make two fiftysomething men, both long been rumored for the top spots, the heads of their respective sides of the House chamber. Just don’t expect them to be chummy about it.
Click through for article. I’m not saying McCarthy will be the SPeaker, but I’m not saying he won’t. The Speaker must be elected by the full House, not just his/her party, although if there’s party unity, it might as well be just his/her party. The thing is, there isn’t party unity on the right. House Democrats therefore are a wild card.
PolitiZoom – A Clarification On My “Trump Is A Legal Imbecile” Article Yesterday
Quote – Here it is. In the federal statute of limitations, there’s a waiver clause for a little something called availability of a subject or target. Here’s how it works. Let’s just say I rob a bank and clean the place out. It doesn’t take long before you’re hot on my heels. Not wanting to go to the Crossbar Hilton, I cop the next flight to Bolivia. God knows I’ve got enough lucre to survive comfortably until the statute of limitations runs out. Except no, that’s where the waiver kicks in.
Click through for details. Though he refers to an earlier article, this one stands alone, since it is about the federal Statute of Limitations, and an analogous provision in New York. So it’s pertinent to the Daniels case, and possibly also E. Jean Carroll.
Food For Thought
