Justice Breyer’s retirement from the Supreme Court reminds conservatives that Biden had pledged to nominate a black woman, and the results are as expected. From the libertarian* (*conservative with crippling social anxieties) Ilya Shapiro:
There are all kinds of hypocrisy involved here -- for example, as noted by Melissa Murray, Amy Coney Barrett, no one’s idea of a legal genius, was transparently pushed to the Court by conservative brain-trusters so there’d be a female on board when they banned abortion. Not to mention the Republican stunt casting of Clarence Thomas.
But hypocrisy is always a bit subtle at least, since of its nature it involves some masking to achieve its effect; their racism is full-blown, out and proud. What we now see is what they are, in fact what they always were, but in their Trump degeneracy they have no need to conceal it.
UPDATE. Also, it's instructive to see what kind of people would rather listen to a weed-and-'roid-addled dumbass than to "On The Beach" or "Live Rust": Who-Moved-My-Cheeseballs and ragequeens. I'm very much a chacun à son goût guy and if someone prefers noise to lovely melodies I'm all for it, but this kind of willful perversity challenges my equanimity.
Been listening to Jimmy Driftwood lately and -- man, he's strange, ain't he?
• Every so often I go among the Twitter morons and waste time talking back. It's interesting to see which subjects draw the dumbest respondents -- in this case, it's the removal of the Teddy-Roosevelt-and-the-lesser-races statue from in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Even the TR Presidential Library in North Dakota, to which the statue is being removed, finds the thing "problematic in its composition," and it always seemed kind of gross to me, but apparently its disassembly, which began this week, has got the MAGA types raging about wokeness and cancelculture and all that bullshit. As usual there were respondents who think statues are the only way to learn history and those who think taking out statues of famous racists is totalitarianism. None of the brethren seemed to grasp that it was not their statue to dispose of, and this is something I've noticed about their hot-button issues concerning statues and movies and advertising and other forms of intellectual property: that to them free speech is based on other people doing things with their own property that they don't like. It's an idea of free speech, in other words, that's not about their own right to express themselves, but anger at how other people do. As you might imagine they really didn't like my suggestion that they make their own Rough Rider statues out of Play-Doh and put them up on their front lawns.
I see Patron Pseud of Anti-Wokeism Jordan Peterson has pulled a BariWeiss -- that is, not having succeeded by obnoxious behavior in getting himself martyred by defenestration, he has quit his academic sinecure while blubbering over the unfairness with which he has been treated, hoping for the same effect. At the Ezra Levant Post the professor explains:
First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions....
By "unacceptable philosophical positions" Peterson seems to mean "status as a public laughing stock." The rest of his lament resembles your average Rod Dreher column: Lots of sweeping and hysterical claims with thin or non-existent documentary evidence, e.g. "there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough... This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades." Peterson also says his colleagues "all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same," which ought to really set the tone for his U of Toronto going-away party (and excite his future Substack readers!). I especially liked this bit denouncing a well-known implicit-bias test, about which I am fully prepared to entertain doubts if they are expressed via coherent analysis, as opposed to whatever this is:
The much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. [Cite please - Ed.] The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II....
Is this guy still on the all-meat-coma diet? He seems to have missed a few OS patches.
You can see how this is meant to work: the casual reader may see the length of the thing and catch some keywords, but be put off by the poor writing and painfully aggrieved tone from reading too much of it, and think, "Well, he has a long list of complaints, some of them must be justified." That's how the whole cancelculture/CRT scam gets over; when it wears out, they'll move on to the next grift.
I used to post here way more often than I do now. That was partly because I was young, dumb, and full of rage. Also I had fewer outlets then, whereas now I have Twitter and the daily newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (subscribe, cheap!).
But every so often I see something that I really worry will be overlooked if I don't say something. (I know, hubris -- but in a good cause!) So in this public forum I would like to call your attention to a detail from Tubby's Saturday lie-fest in Arizona.
In recent weeks many people who should know better have been giving Trump credit for saying nice things about vaccines. It's a hangover from the old bothsider trope: Of course we should encourage Trump to push vaccines! If he wants to take credit and make political capital from it, let him! It's fine if it will get people to vaccinate!
Well, Trump has spoken up for vaccination publicly a few times. I'm sure the moderates and milquetoasts are thrilled, notwithstanding that his yokels booed him for it.
Like the trimmers, I knew when Trump pushed vaccines it would not be out of a suddenly spasm of altruism. But unlike them, I was not deceived that it would cause Republicans to vaccinate, or favor vaccination, or take any other public health precautions against COVID whatsoever,
So de facto Republican policy is, obviously, to make it as easy as possible for COVID to rampage through the country and then complain about how Biden isn't stopping the pandemic. And in Arizona last night, Trump made clear what his yeah-sure vaccine endorsement was all about:
The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.
Claiming liberals are taking vaccines belonging by right to white people and giving them to the dusky hordes -- that's guaranteed to cause something, but it ain't vaccination.
I don't know how many times I have to tell you: This guy is not going to help America even if it appears to be in his interest to do so -- because he finds it much more rewarding to make everything worse. He's not a recalcitrant public servant who has to be prodded to do the right thing; he's a sociopath and a public menace and he really has to be stopped.
About how many bands can you say you're always glad to see them?
• It is, along with everything else, strange to say Terry Teachout has died. As you can see from his About Last Night blog, he was busy as a drama critic for the Wall Street Journal -- as well as a playwright, librettist, and biographer -- when death swooped in and took him. He was no spring chicken, but he was sufficiently buoyant to make you think he was, so his death feels even more untimely than it is. Terry was good at paying attention, which was part of his arsenal as a critic but also his charm as a human being; whether he agreed with you or not, he took account -- generous account -- of what you were saying and doing, and you knew it. I’m very bad at taking advice or criticism, but I didn’t mind it from him, for that reason. And though he was a man of strong (and, I often felt, wrong) beliefs, he had admirable perspective and a very good sense of humor about them. He knew that there was more to life than meets the eye, and I like to think he’s currently following up on that insight.
• The Supreme Court, allegedly a politically neutral body, has decided to kill us slowly in order to make it look less like they’re killing us. No other explanation makes allowing the CMS mandate and killing the OSHA mandate look coherent. I mean, if I were forced to come up with a rationale, I hope I could do better than Neil Gorsuch:
…[OSHA] directs us to 29 U. S. C. § 655(c)(1). In that statutory subsection, Congress authorized OSHA to issue “emergency” regulations upon determining that “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful” and “that such emergency standard[s] [are] necessary to protect employees from such danger[s]”…
The Court rightly applies the major questions doctrine and concludes that this lone statutory subsection does not clearly authorize OSHA’s mandate. See ante, at 5–6. Section 655(c)(1) was not adopted in response to the pandemic, but some 50 years ago at the time of OSHA’s creation. Since then, OSHA has relied on it to issue only comparatively modest rules addressing dangers uniquely prevalent inside the workplace, like asbestos and rare chemicals... As the agency itself explained to a federal court less than two years ago, the statute does “not authorize OSHA to issue sweeping health standards” that affect workers’ lives outside the workplace… Yet that is precisely what the agency seeks to do now—regulate not just what happens inside the workplace but induce individuals to undertake a medical procedure that affects their lives outside the workplace.
If only there were some way workers could “clock out” of the onerous requirement that they be vaccinated against a deadly disease when their shifts end! But they can’t, so undue burden, everyone go get sick and spread it at work for freedom.
If the right wing killed the health care worker vaccine mandate as well, it would have made the death-cultism too obvious, so they got Kavanaugh to take the bullet and vote with the liberals. It was truly gruesome to see, when “Kavanaugh” was trending on Twitter last night, how many of those tweets were from conservatives enraged that he let hospitals require what would seem to any sane person an elementary health precaution. (Jesus, I hope Pete Hegseth doesn’t get any more popular or we’ll soon be waiting on pins and needles for SCOTUS to decide whether hospitals have the right to demand doctors scrub in before surgery.)
The American conservative movement is objectively pro-COVID -- and that goes not only for the lunatics with their crackpot theories and tubes of horse paste, but also for the politicians and conservative justices who flatter those nuts and cause their madness to be enacted in law and practice, in hopes that the continued spread of the disease will sabotage their opponents. Weird way to live!
New York (CNNBusiness) -- Grocery store shelves across America are wiped clean, and they're staying empty as stores struggle to quickly restock everyday necessities such as milk, bread, meat, canned soups and cleaning products.
Disgruntled shoppers have unleashed their frustration on social media over the last several days, posting photos on Twitter of bare shelves at Trader Joe's locations, Giant Foods and Publix stores, among many others.
By “disgruntled shoppers” on “social media” I assume they mean the people working the #BareShelvesBiden tag -- which is as obvious a coordinated campaign as it gets. (Sometimes they use foreign grocery shelves to illustrate their point.)
The other day my wife went to the Eastern Market Trader Joe’s and found many of the shelves empty. There was a note explain the situation, pictured below:
Makes sense. She went to a Whole Foods a mile away and got everything we needed. Also TJ’s was stocked back up the next time she went in.
Temporary shortages during a snowy winter and a freaking pandemic are neither new nor a big deal, and it may seem puzzling at first that operatives are telling Americans who are in absolutely no danger of running out of food or even missing a meal that somewhere in this favored land we’re experiencing Soviet shortages. Wouldn’t they go to their own grocery stores and see the disconnect?
But these days propaganda is often about the Other who are portrayed as suffering or depraved; the message is that you better watch out or else their suffering or depravity will be visited on you. The best example is all those rightwing stories about how crime is out of control in the cities and you can’t walk down the street without getting shot (which I recall was an actual line from one of Trump’s 2016 debate yammerings). Many Americans (and certainly most Republicans) don’t live in cities and have little experience of them, so they may be easily persuaded that urban life is one big prison-yard smorgasbord of violence punctuated by BLM “riots,” and that the evil Democrats who run these hellholes will try to drag you good non-city folk down with them via their drive to “abolish the suburbs.”
The idea is to portray people who live differently from you as not only deprived but depraved, and thus a threat to your way of life -- and that’s why, the reasoning seamlessly goes, we have to keep them from doing “election fraud,” i.e. voting.
I noticed a bunch of liberals objecting on Twitter to this John F. Harris/Politico story, “We Are In a New Civil War … About What Exactly?” Sample:
If this is a 21st century version of 19th century disunion, shouldn’t it be more obvious what the war, at bottom, is all about?...
Only in recent years have we seen foundation-shaking political conflict — both sides believing the other would turn the United States into something unrecognizable — with no obvious and easily summarized root cause. What is the fundamental question that hangs in the balance between the people who hate Trump and what he stands for and the people who love Trump and hate those who hate him? This is less an ideological conflict than a psychological one.
Now, this is Politico so I guess one has to be sensitive to its bothsidesing agenda (“the Trump phenomenon defies explanation,” Harris says -- ha, yeah, if your first acquaintance with the GOP was Romney 2012!) But I take his point to this extent: that all the yap about civil war -- and despite all claims to the contrary, including Harris’, as I have written before “civil war” really is overwhelmingly a rightwing thing -- it’s just ridiculous.
And I’m not calling it ridiculous because I don’t think these guys wouldn’t do it if they could -- on the contrary, as polling and experience show, conservatives are now extremely comfortable with violence against liberals. I call it ridiculous because they have no actual complaint even remotely worth having a civil war over. Here’s the top of an email I got from one of the many rightwing mailing lists to which I subscribe:
Now, I ask you: What normal American would read something like that without wondering: What the fuck is this guy talking about, America is a "dystopian, tyrannical state"?
It’s like when Rod Dreher goes on about “soft totalitarianism” and constantly invokes non-soft totalitarianism when talking about it (e.g., “There is no Stalin of the Social Justice Warriors, but that in no way means they are not dangerous”), but when someone (someone who’s not a mark, I mean) takes him to mean what he seems to mean, he weasels, “do I say that the libs are ‘just like’ the Bolsheviks? No, not at all,” and then explains that the liberalism “seeks domination and conformity not by imposing pain and terror on people, but rather by manipulating their access to status and comfort.” Which sounds like a pretty weak kind of “totalitarianism” in the first place, and when explicated it turns out to mean a bunch of just-so stories about how everyone’s too scared to say trans women are men because they might lose their jobs -- which is 99 44/100% Pure Bullshit -- or that a racist getting kicked off a social media platform for flouting its terms of service is the Coming of the Camps.
The next time one of these nuts tells you about the intolerable tyranny under which Americans live, ask him what he means, specifically. Watch his hands, though.
While some old-time Republicans like Karl Rove have apparently decided they have nothing to lose by truthfully saying the MAGA mob “violently attempted to overturn the election,” those still on the payroll are trying to blow it off. At the Washington Examiner, Byron York scoffs at “Jan. 6 week”:
…the House Democrats who created the [January 6] committee want to use it to get Trump -- either by ensuring that he is legally prohibited from running for president in 2024 or, failing that, by damaging him so much politically that he will lose if he does manage to run.
This is rather like saying, “Having failed to convince the American people that Hitler poses a threat to America, FDR’s Democrats have resorted to war on Germany.” York also suggests that Trump was actually trying to reverse the attack he launched throughout the afternoon by tweeting messages like “No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order” etc., because “at the time perhaps Trump's main mode of communication.”
Cut to QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley looking at his phone mid-pillage, then holding up a hand: “Hang on, guys!” he cries. “Trump says WE are the Party of Law & Order!” Everyone stops smashing down doors, shitting on the floor, and hunting Nancy Pelosi; they rub their chins and murmur, “never thought of it that way before. Could we have misunderstood him when he told us to march on the Capitol and ‘fight like hell’?”
Yeah, you know it’s bullshit. Thereafter York offers legal counsel for the insurrectionist Trump (“Dereliction of duty is not a crime”) and does his best to signal to the goons and mouth-breathers in his readership that he, too, considers the investigation of the attack on Congress a mere political stunt:
You can count on [Democratic lawyer Marc] Elias to follow through. After all, his party reaped enormous political benefits from the dossier caper, and he is always looking for new ways, legitimate or not, to roil the system in favor of Democrats.
This is a little slicker than your buddies on Facebook yelling about false flags, but the intention is the same: to make it look like the attempted overthrow of your government was nothing so serious as to require consequences.
UPDATE. York has more January 6 bullshit today. The gist is that the coup wasn't a big deal because it was unsuccessful. It then devolves to a new mutant strain of bullshit:
It is still not entirely clear why so many House Republicans chose to support the challenges, given that all the states had certified their results...
Some Republicans felt they stood on a precedent already established by Democrats. After all, some House Democrats objected to the certification of Electoral College results in the last three presidential elections won by Republicans...
York does not mention that those scattered and speedily voted-down Democratic objections did not come after a concerted attempt by supporters of the Democratic candidate to nullify the election and murder elected officials.
For those of you wondering why Jesus wouldn’t want you to be vaccinated, the decision lists the various grounds for the plaintiffs’ objections: “(1) opposition to abortion and the use of aborted fetal cell lines in development of the vaccine; (2) belief that modifying one’s body is an af[f]ront to the Creator; (3) direct, divine instruction not to receive the vaccine; and (4) opposition to injecting trace amounts of animal cells into one’s body.”
But I especially like #3, which seems like a really convenient get-out-of-obeying-orders card. Don’t like the duty? “I have received direct, divine instruction not to peel potatoes in the service of Mammon.”
The people celebrating this, you will not be surprised to learn, hate that gay and trans people are allowed to serve, but approve servicemembers blowing off orders to receive just one in a series of mandated vaccinations because that specific vaccine has become a rightwing hate object. It’s really a drag, constantly having to accommodate a relatively small but politically powerful pro-COVID party in this country.
For this final week of 2021, I have only one freebie to offer from my premium newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, but it’s a good one: A New York Times Cletus Safari on Let’s Go Brandon Guy. Since I wrote it I see the LGB guy, the unfortunately named Jared Schmeck, has floated running for office, which absolutely tracks, as does his making the announcement that he will “pray about [running and] see what God has for me” on the radio show of “Christian broadcaster Todd Starnes”; there’s nothing more Modern Christian than building a public career off saying a disguised swear to the President.
(You could be getting this kind of material on a daily basis -- 5x a week! Just like a newspaper! -- with a subscription. It’s super-cheap -- $7/mo., $70/yr. -- and from now through Monday I’ll make it even cheaper for you with this 10% off deal if you sign up via https://edroso.substack.com/newyear. If you want to sample the material first, here’s a good guide.)
OK, that’s enough hard sell! I certainly don’t want to turn into something like Matt Walsh, who’s pushing his own creepy trans-hate children’s book (!) Johnny the Walrus by calling it his “literary treasure,” “magnum opus,” “masterpiece” etc. (and, a quick Google search reveals, by promoting bulk sales to wingnut orgs and pulling the old boo-hoo-they-cancelcultured me bit). Lord knows the rightwing grift is easy and profitable, as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Tabbi have apparently learned, but I’m drawing near enough to St. Peter’s Gate that I have to think about how I’ll explain myself and I don’t want something like that among my ledger entries.
EXCLUSIVE: AOC Spotted in Miami Beach as NYC Reports Record Covid Cases
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was spotted dining in Miami Beach, Fla., on Thursday, according to a tip received by National Review, on the same day that her native New York City reported a record number of Covid-19 cases.
This is also being pushed by trolls with a hashtag. The punchline is that while AOC’s presence in Florida is verified, that of its Governor Ron DeSantis is not -- as COVID infections spike in the Sunshine State, he hasn’t been heard from for more than a week, and his press shop is circulating old photos of him and claiming they're from yesterday. I keep saying it, but it keeps proving true: With conservatives, every accusation is a confession.
With that I bid you a Happy New Year. I hope however you celebrate it doesn’t make you sick (though a hangover is acceptable). I’ve been changing up my holiday songs but I’m sticking another year with the Loudon Wainwright III one up top, because I love it even with the smooth jazz arrangement and because it so speaks to our place and time:
Last year was a fiasco
A real disaster, so full of sorrow
This year will be a great year
I just can’t wait, dear, until tomorrow
Keep a few fingers twined in the kite-strings of hope, friends; in the cold and dark keep the embers alive. See you next year.
Or maybe you’ve had enough of politics. I must admit the first thing I thought of when Biden did a pleasant Christmas call with some guy’s kids and the guy went “Let’s Go Brandon” was: It’s been a long slide to this from Eartha Kitt spoiling Lady Bird Johnson‘s party by honestly answering her question about “juvenile delinquency”:
"Boys I know across the nation feel it doesn't pay to be a good guy," Kitt said. "They figure with a record they don't have to go off to Vietnam. You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take pot and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”
Kitt continued: "Mrs. Johnson, you are a mother too, although you have had daughters and not sons. I am a mother and I know the feeling of having a baby come out of my guts. I have a baby and then you send him off to war. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot. And, Mrs. Johnson, in case you don't understand the lingo that's marijuana."
I understand LGB guy didn’t have the time for anything like that, and that’s too bad, but I’m sure if he had any specific policy he felt strongly about advancing, he could have found a quick way to do that rather than just saying a childishly disguised fuck you. But I’m guessing Let’s Go Brandon is about as advanced as his thinking gets.
I'm seeing a depressing number of people -- probably the same people who keep telling us that unregenerate (but anti-Trump) Republican monsters like Max Boot are our allies now -- giving Tubby credit for "pushing back" on the anti-vaccine rap Candace Owens was dishing out:
During an interview with right-wing provocateur Candace Owens this week, former President Donald Trump actually pushed back on anti-vaccine talking points and encouraged viewers to get their shots. (Yes, you read that correctly.) After Trump boasted of his efforts in facilitating the COVID-19 vaccination, an obsequious Owens replied, “Yet more people have died under COVID this year, by the way, under Joe Biden than under you and more people took the vaccine this year. So people are questioning how—” but the ex-president interrupted her to firmly declare: “Oh no, the vaccines work, but... the ones who get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don’t take the vaccine. But it’s still their choice. And if you take the vaccine, you’re protected... Look, the results of the vaccine are very good, and if you do get it, it’s a very minor form. People aren’t dying when they take the vaccine.”
What the Daily Beast doesn't tell you, and what you only see much further down in other accounts, is that Trump reiterated that he's against vaccine mandates -- which are tied up in the courts and now headed to SCOTUS. He also bitched about masks!
In other words, Trump is still against the closest thing to a magic bullet we've got -- like, we didn't eradicate polio with a do-your-own-thing policy, we made it mandatory for kids to take before they could go to school.
What he's clearly not doing is trying to get his people to vaccinate. You think the kind of hardcore MAGA people who watch Candace Owens videos are going to be swayed by this? We've seen the rubes booing him when he pimps vaccines. They're not going to take it on his say-so. They'll just double up on the horse paste.
In other words, Trump only approved the vaccines because they happened while he was president, and he wants to world to know that if anything causes the pandemic to diminish -- whether it's the new pills or the clearance of the mandates or anything else -- it's to his credit; and if it rages on (and without a serious "big government" intervention, it will), it's not his fault.
When I see centrist types giving him attaboys I have to wonder whether they're simple-minded. I mean, Trump and Owens are con artists. Haven't they been paying attention?
That's right, Tubby's planning a "news conference" to commemorate his goons' attempted murder of Congress on his behalf. Now that's what I call nerve! The apparent idea is counter-programming against what promises to be a solemn observance on Capitol Hill, so I assume there'll be a cash bar and maybe some lounge acts.
(BTW a subscription to REBID makes a wonderful last-minute gift.)
At this point I'm posting these things like a castaway writing on the walls of his cave in case people discover it after he dies:
The push to ban books in Texas schools spreads to public libraries
When the Llano County Library shuts down for thre-e days this week, starting Tuesday, it won’t be for the holidays.
Instead, a group of six librarians in this small Central Texas county will be conducting a “thorough review” of every children’s book in the library, at the behest of the Llano County Commissioners Court. Their mission will be to make sure all of the reading material for younger readers includes subjects that are age-appropriate. A new “young adults plus” section will be added to separate books written for an older teen audience from those geared toward younger readers.
This isn't a school library, by the way -- it's a public library. I'm trying to imagine local busybodies muscling in on the North End branch of the Bridgeport Public Library when I was growing up and forbidding young me to read Esquire magazine or the works of H. Rap Brown and Philip Roth. It makes me feel sorry for the kids in this stupid Bumfuck town, but mostly it makes me damn mad.
Oh, here's the hot part:
[Amy] Garvel, who describes herself as a conservative and has a 9-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter, said she’s been very careful about what content they consume.
“My goal is really to protect the children in our community in general, not just my own children,” said Garvel, 43. “I’m hoping that [the library] sees that we’re not trying to censor books that we’re trying to protect our children. I mean, the library was one of the last places that we could feel safe.”
You miserable fool, "censor" is EXACTLY WHAT YOU'RE DOING. LOOK IT UP IN A DICTIONARY. FORCING LIBRARIES TO WITHDRAW BOOKS FROM CIRCULATION IS LITERAL CENSORSHIP.
I bet Amy Garvel is dead set against "cancel culture" and perhaps even bitches about it while she's rummaging the stacks of the Llano County Library for books to ban.
As a teenager I had three Emerson Lake & Palmer records.
• Well, why not Saturday, huh? Just because it's always been Friday 'Round-The-Horn doesn't mean it always must be. Dream of a better world! In this case I have just been too busy, and not even entirely with holiday stuff -- the Day Job encroaches, as does other stupid shit.
All the more reason for you to subscribe to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, my high-volume and -quality content newsletter, and make it more profitable and possible for me to just dish out bon mots on the regular! REBID delivers five days a week, just like an actually periodical, and though it's on Substack there is no pissing and moaning about how kids picking their own pronouns is why in a couple of years we'll all be speaking Chinese. (You can even give gift subscriptions, perfect for you last-minute shoppers.)
Anyway, Here's this week's free issue, in which celebrity murderer Kyle Rittenhouse again visits the Mar-a-Lago White House in Exile, where Tubby takes precautions to avoid a repeat of the priorincidents. I note with interest that Rittenhouse is getting the full rightwing public relations workup, with so much Fox News coverage that the network is bragging on a "Tucker Carlson Originals" program that "captures never before seen footage" of Rittenhouse, which I assume includes the baby-faced killer walking on the beach with a dog, autographing rifle stocks for adoring fans, and visiting the grave of Charlton Heston.
Also Rittenhouse is a featured attraction at the next Turning Point wingnut convention, which has the rabble excited and some of the Conservatives With Good Taste delivering hilarious demurrers: Here's Baseball Crank/Dan McLaughlin feebly trying to say why cheering a kid wholly famous for shooting two protestors dead in the street from a prominent conservative platform is a bad idea. He compares Rittenhouse favorably to Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, whom he calls a "propaganda-addled zealot," and Greta Thunberg (who McLaughlin, knowing his audience, does not bother to slur). Rittenhouse, on the other hand, he calls "properly acquitted," adding "one can even argue that his motives in being in Kenosha were noble." Apparently hoping that he has bought the readers' good will by showing his preference for a rightwing vigilante over leftwing activists who haven't killed anybody, McLaughlin mourns that Li'l Kyle "has an uphill battle getting a job or into a college right now" and asks his readers to let him "go quietly back to the business of growing up."
Comments are, expectedly, a stitch, with many respondents telling Baseball Head to get stuffed and rooting for Rittenhouse to sue The Media. Still, I'd enjoy the spectacle more if we could be walled off from these people; as it is, it's like watching the inmates grow increasingly agitated in Marat/Sade before storming the audience.
• Got two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for you: First, the true account of how the child-murder-enabling Crumbleys got nabbed; second, an account of the revival of the DLC, with some of America’s most famous middle-of-the-road Democrats trying to figure exactly how to sell out black people and thus win back Trump voters. ([Stage whisper:] It’s satire!)
That DLC one was inspired by an article in The Atlantic that starts “Maybe Bill Clinton got a few things right after all” and just gets worse, with Ronald Brownstein lamenting that, unlike in the late lamented days of Welfare Reform and Mass Incarceration, today “dissenters from the party’s progressive consensus are mostly shouting from the bleachers" instead of at cabinet meetings.
Yes, these guys think Joe Biden is running some kind of rad-lib pogrom; while Brownstein admits Biden “has not embraced all of the vanguard liberal positions that critics such as [Daniel] Shor and [Ruy] Teixeira consider damaging… neither has he publicly confronted and separated himself from the most leftist elements of his party —the way Clinton most famously did during the 1992 campaign when he accused the hip-hop artist Sister Souljah of promoting ‘hatred’ against white people.” Sister Souljah! God, they so badly want Biden to go “What’s the deal with this 1619 project? You know, black people can be racists too. [stage whisper] Hey, Cletus, you see that stimulus payment? I gave you the colored’s share, just remember where you got it!”
• If you’re puzzled by the clothes dryer reference in the DLC bit, it’s a recurring topic among prominent “centrists” like Yglesias and Barro, who seem to think the Whirlpool Front Loader represents the greatness of America and Europeans, being socialists, can only dry their clothes by blowing on them because they gave all their dryer money to immigrants. Fresh from her skein of Operation Rescue tweets, Megan McArdle recently made it worse by suggesting many other people shared this peculiar fantasy:
I have to admit even I didn’t expect her to go on Twitter and brag that she has a maid! I guess it fits the general theme that if you aren’t doing six-figure-income shit you aren’t a serious person. Maybe next week she’ll share a video of two bums fighting over her leftovers from Rose’s Luxury.
Jah Wobble has a remix/redo of this out now, but I say you can't go wrong with the classics.
• The ride down the post-Roe sluice is getting faster. Peggy Noonan has a even-more-than-usually dishonest column about it, with an "aw look at the cute little fetus pics" section and a pretense of sympathy for both sides ("the idealism of many on both sides who were actually trying to make life more just") which is going to seem very quaint when all the baby-killers are marched off to jail and the recalcitrant mothers are penned in birthing barns. I was struck by this passage:
But the court is a political body, because it is a human body that inevitably reflects reigning political currents. Roe too reflected them: Justices wanted a thing to happen in the name of justice for women and found a way to do so by spying previously unseen “penumbras, formed by emanations” (a clause from an earlier case) from the law.
It can be argued that it would increase our faith in our institutions to see that serious objections that lasted half a century, and would have lasted longer, were finally heard.
As is usual with conservatives, Noonan treats "penumbras" as a joke -- can you imagine such a thing in a legal decision! But you know what "earlier case" Noonan is very deliberately not telling you it's from? Griswold v Connecticut, which established a right to privacy and thus to birth control -- which you, I, and they know is their next target.
McArdle's twitter feed is currently indistinguishable from that of your average clinic protestor with a thesaurus, and in the Washington Post today she does her bit for the cause by arguing that no one will give a shit when Roe is overturned except silly liberal knowledge workers:
But it’s also possible that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, and throws the issue back to the states, the subsequent legislative wrangling will reveal that the answers to those questions rest less on gender than values — or lifestyle. Are you a college-educated professional who must time pregnancies exquisitely to optimize a career, or are you a low-wage hourly worker for whom other considerations matter more?
Tee hee "exquisitely," these people I've posited are so effete! And it stands to reason (or Reason, I should say) that your average "low-wage hourly worker" will be delighted to take weeks of unpaid leave (months, if they have a public-facing low-wage job and the boss doesn't like the look) to have a kid they may not want but who cares what they think, it owns the libs, who are effete. I can't wait 'til they're overturning Obergefell and McArdle asks, "How much does it bother low-wage hourly workers whether Adam and Steve are married or civilly-united? Unless the lwhw in question is gay but lol what are the odds?"
I’ve unlocked another newsletter issue -- yes, I know, so generous! (But remember, the vast majority of my brilliant posts are paywalled so the smart play is to subscribe at the current outrageously low rates.)
The topic is the imminent overturn of Roe, either in so many words or as a winked-at matter of fact with states empowered to establish whatever impossible limits on abortion they think are clever. As has been noted elsewhere, this will inevitably lead to a cascade of assaults on other recently-acknowledged rights based on the right to privacy, which conservatives used to honor as “the right to be left alone” but now openly mock because it protects women, gays, and other out-groups. (They've always been shit, but the transformation of the conservative movement by evangelicals cannot be overestimated.)
The good news for the pro-life movement is that public opinion can change relatively quickly. In 1996, only 27 percent of Americans favored same-sex marriage. That share increased to roughly 60 percent by 2015 when the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage to be a constitutional right and sits at 70 percent today. Only 4 percent of Americans favored interracial marriage in 1958; today, 94 percent do.
If we can get them to accept expanded rights, surely we can get them to accept reduced rights! Stands to reason, right?
I’m unlocking a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue on two temporary injunctions issued by Trump-appointed judges to keep Biden from requiring COVID vaccinations for health care workers -- you know, doctors, nurses, radiologists, medical assistants; the people who take care of you when you’re sick and immunologically challenged. Both the suits to which the judges responded and the injunctions themselves are peppered with the kind of wingnut whinges one hears from QAnon quacks and reads on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I feel as if the rightbloggers and talk-radio crackpots I’ve been covering for decades have advanced to the highest rungs of powers, and are ruling as one could have expected -- in the words of Bernard Shaw, like badly-brought-up children given torpedoes to play at earthquakes with.
“There is leverage immediately in the Senate, and we think that House Republicans ought to be backing up any number of Senate Republicans … to use all procedural tools to deny the continuing resolution passage Friday night — unless they restrict use of those funds for vaccine mandates,” Rep. CHIP ROY (R-Texas), a Freedom Caucus member, told Playbook.
Getting as many people as they can sick with COVID and blaming Democrats for it is a key part of current Republican strategy. But they can multi-task, and are also working on spreading the CRT scare (and banning books wherever they get a toe-hold) and psyching up their goons for fascist street action. Their current drive to overturn Roe v Wade (and Griswold and who knows what else) is just a taste of what they intend to do with whatever power they accrue. In short, they are literally nothing but a malignant force in our lives as well as our politics, and must be stopped.
