FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I'm very fond of Paul Simon's "Loves Me Like a Rock' with the Dixie Hummingbirds on bkg voc,
But I think I prefer their own version. What about you?

•  How about some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies? Here, a fantasia inspired by the hilariously catastrophic California recall effort (previously covered here at alicublog). Larry Elder, beaten by 26 points in the recall, is proclaiming victory in a Trumpian manner by showing how red the map of California counties is, because it shows... how far ahead of #2 loser Kevin Paffrath he is. Like Newsom, Paffrath's a Democrat, see, so he beat a Democrat, so he won. That's how deep in fantasy Republicans will burrow just to avoid the stink of loserdom -- but that was also shown by the 59% of them who still think Trump won the 2020 election (or, more to the point, think it's either very or somewhat "important" to "believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election" -- a nice distinction that suggests objective reality isn't part of the equation).  

Oh, and here's another one about Peggy Noonan's latest lunacy and why the Never- and Just-the-Tip-Trumpers are really starting to bug me. 

•  If you want to read someone good other than me, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post has a nice one about how the racist "replacement theory" that liberals are flooding America with non-whites to "steal" the country from honky hegemony -- famously expounded by the yahoos at the 2017 Charlottesville protest -- is fast becoming a Republican talking point. Of course the basic idea, which was once the sort of thing only Birchers and Klansmen would express in public forums, has been floating at the top layer of conservative discourse for some time. Witness Stanley Kurtz of National Review who has been raving for years about how Democrats are going to "abolish the suburbs" -- that is, enforce the Fair Housing Act via the federal Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program, which would cause "de facto urbanization of America’s suburbs" -- and if you know your ooga-booga, you know what that means! From a typical 2020 Kurtz rant:

If you force urbanites into suburbs, force suburbanites back into cities, and redistribute suburban tax revenue, then presto! You have effectively abolished the suburbs.

Gasp -- it's base-mixing! Before you know it, young "suburbanites" may be socializing with "urbanites" -- even dating them! In the same essay Kurtz laments that "Republicans have been too clueless or timid to make an issue of the Democrats’ anti-suburban plans." Well, Sargent shows that's changing.