Yesterday, Trinette was by. She took my old printer out of its site, put my new one there instead, and also took out an old (50 years) stereo/tape/AM/FM player which was state-of-the-art in its day. Also, I saw this at DU and found it to be a great relief. I hope you will also.
Yeah. There’s no way I could cover all of this in separate articles – assuming I could find them – and separately, it’s harder to discern a trend. But this from The Root does all that I can’t.
OK, I admit that I picked this article from The F* News because of the title. But it’s also current and important.
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Here’s another multi=purpose article. Some of the full articles it references I have previously shared but most I haven’t. If you only want to look at one of the individual articles, may I suggest “Moving the Window”? The Overton Window is real, and people trying to move it to suit themselves can really be dangerous.
Yesterday, it was brought home to me just how crazy our beloved country is now – it’s been over a month now and I only just learned the Grand Canyon is on fire.
From HuffPost. Shared without comment. I don’t have the vocabulary to do it justice
I could wish I hadn’t seen this in The Root. If you haven’t heard of Prager, it would be because I try to keep all religious stuff – Christian (real and fake), Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Shinto, indigenous faiths, everything out of politics, as it should be. Clearly Prager does not agree.
I just couldn’t leave it at those two travesties when Joyce Vance had this to say. Incidentally, the staffer who writes the Trump**(*) parodies is named Camille Zapata who leads a team of three. They really have him nailed.
Yesterday, I overslept the way I usually do on Mondays. Most Mondays are not as stressful as this Monday was, though. Also yesterday, an email from Just Foreign Policy (which links only to a donation request dressed as a petition) that “Israel just killed 5 journalists in a single strike…. Their names join a devastating list: nearly 270 journalists have now been killed over the course of this war – the deadliest conflict for reporters ever recorded.” I hope no one tells the Mango Monster, or he’ll try to break the record. And one other thing – if you have been worried about me in connection with Colorado’s wildfires and smoke particles, all of them are on the opposite side of the peaks of the Rockies from me. Yes, all of Colorado is at a pretty good altitude, and the prevailing winds go towards me from the fires, but there’s still roughly a 7000 foot (2134 m) barrier between them and me. I have not noticed anything, and I think they are going over my head.
https://thefuckingnews.substack.com/p/senate-hopeful-calls-national-prayer
And Jordan Good, as reported by The F* News, is 100% correct. He is running to unseat Susan Collins, and we (and by we I mean all the sane people in the US) desperately need him and more like him. So I hope his honesty does not hurt him at the ballot box.
joycevance.substack.com/p/when-the-president-becomes-the-police
Joyce Vance runs through the cold, hard realities of he law regarding the Golden Godzilla’s latest power grab in DC. It’s a pity we didn’t listen to voices recommending statehood for DC and Puerto Rico before he .took office. If we ever get even the slimmest trifecta again, that is something that needs doing.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-trial-run?
Robert Reich, on the other hand, runs through what to look for and how to interpret how bad it is and why, depending on the responses to the attempted takeover. The two together appear pretty comprehensive to me.
Oddly, since I normally prefer reading to videos, I think I’d rather listen to Heather Cox Richardson than read her letters/ Even though she says “um” a lot. I think part of that is her enthusiasm. Even when she has warnings to give, it can feel like she’s giving a pep talk. I listened to all 41 ½ minutes of this one, digressions, and ums, and all, and there was little in it that I hadn’t heard or read elsewhere, but I still felt enlightened afterwards. You may feel differently, but here’s the link if you want to try. (If you don’t, ignore it.)
I am absolutely in agreement with Robert Reich here. Eternal vigilance is the price, not only of freedom, but of equity. If they distort it one way, the only way we can restore it is to distort it ourselves. We didn’t get that during reconstruction (any of the reconstructions) – but we need to learn it now.
This is from Wonkette, and not unexpected, I would guess. One old saying which is absolutely true is that “Figures don’t lie. But liars do figure.
Yesterday, my inbox was even crazier than usual. I don’t know why. Federal News appeared to me to be the usual BS. I suppose there might be people who are just now catching on – but yu’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind to be running even the tiniest news outlet and just now be catching on after more than six months of pure hell. in any case, I decided to go with a couple of off the wall stories, neither of which features the Orange Oligarch directly, though both are related to his policies (if you can call them policies and not fantasies – I think the jury is still out on that), along with one terrifying legal analysis, which includes guesswork, but some things are not that hard to guess. Also yesterday, this link was forwarded to me. I guess it’s no weirder that Scalia/Ginsburg = except that I would not be interested in an opera about it.
From The Conversation. Many of my sources from time to time refer to history as a help in understanding the present. This article appears to me to be particularly pertinent. And it happened within the lifetime of many of us, including me. The First Amendment is easy to approve, but not easy to discuss, and figuring out where to draw lines can be very touchy indeed. But I do believe the Warren Court got it right.
Certainly I knew that J. B. Pritzker was a Democratic governor who was working with other Democratic governors to protect citizens and residents from the Marigold Maelstrom. But that was all. this situation in Texas is getting coverage for more of his personality and Wonkette is there for it.
Well, this is scary. It’s not as if we weren’t anticipating it, of course, but I for one hoped it would take a little (or a lot) longer to get to it. But no – it’s here.
Yesterday, The Conversation featured this article. I think Aristotle was on to something. Among other things, it would explain why MAGA (and all “conservatives”) are such whiny bags. Also, Care2, AKA the Petition Site, has a petition up to the Mango Moron which includes straight up telling him he sucks. If you haven’t seen it, I thought you might enjoy it.
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In case you missed it – putting Bove onto a Court of Appeals puts him into a category from which be Supreme Court justices are selected, without needing to acquire the experience which is normally expected of a justice. Sure, the Mango Monster has been stacking the lower courts too – but this is something new.
The Brennan Center is a trustworthy watchdog – yet not a paranoid one. So this needs to be taken seriously (but you know that.) The link is to the home page, and in case another article has taken the to place, the title of the article is “The Trump Administration’s Campaign to Undermine the Next Election.”
This weekend, looking for music, after finding the Rocky Mountain Mike one you saw yesterday, I came across a “Horrible History” song from the BBC. It’s very silly, and IMO not useful as a mnemonic either. But it did remind me of Charles I and his billionaires cavaliers and how he vexed the people so much, including levying taxes without the consent of Congress Parliament, that there was a Civil War – which the people won, and locked him up (they didn’t all agree on all that much, but they did agree that he needed to be locked up), then they tried him for “treason against England by using his power to pursue his personal interest rather than the good of the country,” convicted him, and beheaded him. I might note that the verdict included accountability for the deaths, mostly in the Civil War, of 300,000 people, which was a lot then, but nowhere near the numbers that dictators today can kill. Charles’s defense, incidentally, was that the trial and verdict were illegal (sound familiar?) Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I’m sure it’s no surprise that my email inbox is getting less and less manageable by the day. I don’t subscribe to Jacobin (though I love the name), but I do subscribe to Dose of Democracy who sent me the link, and I thought it was well said.
Yesterday, I got an email that Jeopardy is now on Substack When I said (and it must be over a year ago) that eventually “everyone” would be on Substack, I certainly didn’t imagine that. But here we are. Today marks the end of a difficult month-and-a-half for me, which is uncomfortable every year. Today I am not longer the same age as the Apricot Antichrist. And in three days it will be Barack Obama’s birthday. If you didn’t get an invitation to sign a digital birthday card for him, this link should take care of that.
There are federal agencies, some of which are intended to be “independent” in the sense that they are supposed to decide policy on the basis of expert knowledge, not on any political opinions. And then there are Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), which like every other good thing, are now in danger. There is much more in this memo, but it’s this first section for which I am posting it.
Joyce Vance looks at history (since she is a lawyer, it is legal history and a judge.) This was in my lifetime, so I have memories of it, but I was also more than half a continent away from it and very young, so I didn’t have all these details. I also do not remember newspapers publishing court judgments the way not just Joyce but many communicators do now on the internet. It might have been better if they had done so.
And this is why I subscribe to The Root. Some stories are mainly of interest to people of color – but now and then one of those stories will – or should – be of interest to everyone who is human. It’s a pity Missouri can’t just out all its Republicans in government at every level.
