The voters of Ohio smelled a rat and resoundingly rejected a ballot measure that would have required referenda to get 60% approval, rather than a simple majority, to pass -- a change clearly intended to thwart an upcoming bid to protect abortion in the state.
Issue 1, an Ohio ballot measure to raise the threshold required to pass a constitutional amendment, failed on Tuesday in a tough defeat for conservatives who sought to make it more difficult for special-interest groups to influence the state constitution.
Don't know if you can really call them "special interests" when most of the voters agree with them. The word "abortion" does not appear in Brittany Bernstein's story until the 13th paragraph. That girl is getting a bonus!
My favorite rightwinger post on the subject so far is this one from Pat Brown, "pro-family policy" wonk and (natch) CNN contributor:
I believe this translates as "the voters are against us -- quick, to the SCOTUSmobile!"
I know, they're fascist lunatics and seek to rule without the consent of the people, but let me at least enjoy their momentary discomfiture.
The headline is from a wonderful old Willy Murphy cartoon which, alas, I cannot find online; but I could as well have used Groucho Marx or any one of number of shyster double-talk comedians to represent the latest lawyerly conservative defenses of Tubby against his indictment for trying (as we all fucking saw) to overturn the 2020 election.
But there's plenty more where that came from, by other conservatives who portray Trump as an innocent victim being persecuted for his Free Speech, e.g. "Jack Smith’s dangerous criminalization of dissent" at the rightwing pennysaver Washington Examiner. "Smith has plenty of evidence that Trump was told he was wrong but scant evidence that Trump believed what he was told," the editors plead, as if Trump's many documented and witnessed attempts to foist fake ballots on the Electoral College, and, in the last ditch, try to murder Congress were OK because he was rilly sincere about it.
The "not a criminal, merely a dangerous lunatic" defense may comfort MAGA choads but it ain't fooling normal people, which is why Trump and his patsies are screaming to get his trial moved from DC, where his crimes were committed, to some dismal holler whose citizens might consider it their solemn duty to nullify on behalf of white supremacy. It's no crazier nor more desperate than anything else they've tried -- and they're only going to get crazier and more desperate, and quickly, so we all better watch out.
Over at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, our two freebies are DeSantis-centric. (Face it, the guy's just hot copy!) There’s the funny one, imagining what his strategy sessions must be, given not only his own fash politics but the congenial home he gave to the Nazi-riffic edgelord Nate Hochman. (You’d think Hochman having bylines in the New York Times and National Review would be a tip-off, but there is none so blind etc.)
There’s also the more serious one about DeSantis’ “Slavery: A Land of Contrasts” curriculum. It’s pretty clear to everyone what he and his racist buddies are up to, so I spent some time on the conservative propagandists who thought it was a good idea to pull the “me or your lying eyes” bit over it.
Today there was also a good opportunity for a REBID flashback: for not the first, nor the second, but the third time, the Wall Street Journal has given Supreme Court Justice/corrupt old hack Sam Alito space in the paper to cry that people misunderstand him just because he takes gifts from people who have business before his court – indeed, the first of the two journalistic cat’s-paws in this instance (the second being the longtime rightwing operative who got Alito in the first time, James Taranto) is David Rivkin, who himself has a case on the SCOTUS docket. Talk about balls!
Anyway, the routine is predictable – people who find his frequent Journal blowjobs improper “are really after ideologically congenial rulings,” though if that were the case it would seem more efficient to bribe rather than criticize the guy. Also Alito sometimes rules slightly differently than Clarence Thomas – and his jurisprudence is distinguished by “an emphasis on historical context,” i.e. homos can’t get married. All Alito’s findings that comport with the Federalist Society wish-list are explained as a product of his intellectual discipline, and those that don’t comport with it – just kidding, none of them don’t!
The authors rub their hands over the prospect of overturning Chevron, which they call “increasingly disputed” because Leonard Leo wants it dead, and Alito, nervy to the last, compares resistance to himself and his fellow SCOTUS wingnuts to the resistance to the Warren Court over Brown v. Board of Education – which would be your tip-off, if you hadn’t already figured it out, that Sam Shady isn’t trying to convince anyone – he’s just trying to show you how far beyond giving a shit he is that he’s been caught red-handed.
Anyway, as we used to say back in the day, I caught his act.
I will also add something I wrote elsewhere about the artist who recently left us:
Sinead O’Connor... was magnificent and died too young, but she lived and worked the way she wanted to, or rather the way her muse required, and you can’t say that about many. Whether that was worth all the hardships is not for me to say. What I will say is that she was done dirty after she ripped up that asshole pope’s picture — I always hated that son of a bitch — and I am pleased to see people acknowledging at this moment that she was right, and I bet the message carries better now that more people are educated about the savagery we’re all up against – or, to use the simple term, woke. There was a lot wrong with the 90s, and the general reflexive contempt for the weak and those who defended them was the worst of it. It took me a long time to get it myself.
Yeah, I've done a few posts this week and already dished out the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies therein. (There are other unlocked items at the website, by the way, and even if it's been a few weeks or months or years they're still good readin' because, like whatshisname said, literature is news that stays news. OK?) But I figured I'd make an appearance because it's Friday and I'm sentimental!
You may have heard that the Michigan AG did what more Democratic motherfuckers should do and indicted a bunch of local Republican operatives -- including a former Michigan GOP co-chair and a Republican national committeewoman -- who tried to submit fake electors in the 2020 presidential election as part of Tubby's criminal scheme. Good. These idiots seemed to think they were going to get away with it and here's hoping the Finding Out stage of the proceedings will be instructive to them as well as to other crooks, current and would-be:
Funny sidebar: A lot of the rightwingers are complaining, not because they don't think the AG has them dead to rights (well, some pretend to think that, but they're too ridic), but because they suggest the culprits are too old to be indicted. "Michigan Charges 16 Elderly 'Fake Electors' With Felonies," says Fake Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge; "The average age of these legitimate electors is 70-years-old. They could face up to 94 years in prison," cries a typical choad. The average age of the indictees is 69; Donald Trump is 77.
Florida’s public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills, part of new African American history standards approved Wednesday that were blasted by a state teachers' union as a “step backward.”
The Florida State Board of Education’s new standards includes controversial language about how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to a 216-page document about the state’s 2023 standards in social studies, posted by the Florida Department of Education.
Other language that has drawn the ire of some educators and education advocates includes teaching about how Black people were also perpetrators of violence during race massacres.
One is tempted to laugh because it's so insane -- as are the conservatives defending it, like the rightwing pennysaver Washington Examiner, sticking up for Florida's requirement that, when teaching about racist pogroms like the Tulsa massacre, schools must assert that black people share some of the blame:
When discussing incidents of racial violence, such as the four mentioned, the state wants teachers to include any known details about violence committed by both groups. Are we supposed to believe that whites were never among the casualties? Again, these are just relevant, neutral pieces of information.
Also, did you know that in World War II, Jews sometimes fought back against the Nazis? Our kids aren't getting the whole story here. And at Newsbusters:
It is just a fact that many of the skills, especially agricultural skills, that these people acquired while working on plantations probably benefitted them immensely when they gained emancipation and were able to work their own land and earn money for themselves.
See, it wasn't all bad! And wait until we tell you how slaves were fed and clothed. Shoot, my boss doesn't do that for me!
But laughter is insufficient; even apart from sympathy for the poor Floridians who will have to live with this nonsense, we should consider that this is what conservatives want for all of us -- not just this inversion of historical fact, but the normalization and promotion of slavery. (They will be helped in this by bothsider prestige press headlines, like Reuters' "Florida introduces new guidelines on teaching Black history, critics give poor grade" -- wow, wonder what the hubbub is about; guess people just like to complain!) We all know how prices on housing, food, and other necessities are getting jacked up, how earnings are becoming increasingly insufficient, and how the corporations that sell these goods and services get ever richer; the endgame for this is a slave state, and don't think for a second they're sentimental about preserving any illusion of freedom for you. They just have to lay the groundwork first by removing slavery's stigma by teaching in schools that it wasn't so bad.
This is obviously inspired by the Jason Aldean song that has all the fash swooning. Country music has degenerated over the past few decades (I know some of you keep up with it and have contemporary faves, feel free to drop in comments) but man, this shit is a ground-zero nadir. The music is just barrel-bottom sludge. As for the (ugly and stupid) lyrics and video, you can't argue (as Aldean has disingenuously tried) that they're about anything other than hatred of outsiders -- the guy doesn't even bother to stick in some (lazy, maudlin) tributes to his own country way of life until after he's stoked a ton of rube-rage with the sort of clips of urban violence that dumb racists like to vomit into Twitter. So it's obviously not a hymn to small towns -- it's about violent, unreasoning hatred of cities and the sort of people who live in them (hint hint), and pre-emptive threats of violence to make the weak-minded feel strong and brave.
Yeah, there was no 'Round-the-Horn last week -- apologies, the new-house stuff is still an enormous pain, as is trying to figure out where things are both in and around it. Yesterday I spent 45 minutes on a bus to Marshall's downtown in search of socks and underwear. Thanks to the new American retail "Wait Till Everything Runs Out to Restock" strategy, I got three pair of socks and counted myself lucky.
(Also had occasion to revisit the comically insufficient Baltimore Metro. On my first trip I couldn't figure out how to use the CharmPass on my iPhone -- I waved it at the gate readers to no avail -- and there were no attendants to assist me, so I just walked in and rode; at the exit gate I found an MDOT MTA employee and asked her how to use the CharmPass; she said, "You just show it to us." Apparently they don't have any way to connect this digital pass to their system. Maybe they'll figure that out by the time the Red Line gets done.)
But don't worry, there's some stuff at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down for non-subscribers -- like today's thing about RFK Jr.'s peculiar theories on how the COVID virus was weaponized to attack "Caucasians and black people" but leave "Ashkenazi Jews and Asians" alone.
I said this should be the end of the crackpot Kennedy's ridiculous campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but the sad fact is, even though he has no chance in hell even as a spoiler, the prestige press and Republican ratfuckers have too much at stake to let it go. So we're still getting stories about him as if he's viable. For example, some Washington Post editor gave Philip Bump's pretty good story about the consequences of Kennedy's mouth-fart the headline "Democratic Party rushes to disown Robert F. Kennedy Jr." -- as if the real news is that Democrats were abandoning the erstwhile RFK Jr. juggernaut instead of (as Bump's story shows) mainly ignoring it.
And Rupert Murdoch's New York Post just goes on as if there's something else to discuss: "RFK Jr. shrugs off Biden family corruption allegations: Won't be a 'spear tip to my campaign,'" they report. Yeah, bold strategy, guy; more likely we'll just hear how Fauci mixed the COVID cauldron with Hillary's broomstick. Because RFK Jr. has nothing else - he's the anti-vaxxer candidate for people who are too misogynist to vote for Marianne Williamson, and all his other positions, such as his anti-Ukraine yak, are nothing you can't get from J.D. Vance or indeed from your average GOP chucklefuck -- pseudo-populism meant to sway the weak-minded.
Last week I skipped ‘Round-the-Horn – AGAIN. Apologies. The move that never ends formally finished with the clearance of our last effects from our previous home, but the house remains unsettled as the missus applies the Klotski method to her goods and chattels, plus we still have in-laws aboard. Leisure is at a premium. And they told me old age would be mainly a matter of finding ways to fill my time!
But though I come late I also come laden with free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions. For one, there is the resumption of Sam Alito’s Wall Street Journal column, answering the complaints the thin-skinned old bastard, in my imagining, could not help but notice after the shit decisions he and his fellow wingnuts lately foisted on America. I expect to see him on Joe Rogan one of these days, sputtering over the loss of respect SCOTUS has suffered, and how unfair it is, when all he and his mates have done is rule so that, were the 18th-Century slaveholding plantocrats who founded this nation to come back from the dead, they would feel right at home.
On to other outrages. I’ve been telling you people for years that David French is a fraud, a rightwing religious maniac whose winsome NeverTrumper act has fooled many centrists including the ones who hire columnists for the New York Times, and his latest column runs true to form. He inveigles non-MAGA readers by agreeing once again that Trump is no good, but then goes on about how his deluded fans feel not merely “rage” but also “joy” at Trump's events, in his presence, and even gazing upon the insane videos and memes that celebrate him as a buff avenging American Messiah. The dread-and-circuses “give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging,” French says.
This may seem to some of you like a clever angle – we talk about how crazy they are, but let’s bothsides this, can’t we just admit that they’re also full of joy! (And let’s not refer to it as “mania” or a “mood swing” because that would be Very Bias. Also, these are French’s neighbors and friends back in old Tennessee, so it would also be impolite.)
But as usual with French this is just a sneaky way to pitch liberals on giving in to the obnoxious ideas that he and the Trumpkins actually share (i.e. most of them, stripped of the unpleasant frankness of MAGA viciousness), and ends with something resembling a plea for understanding and more:
During the Trump years, I’ve received countless email messages from distraught readers that echo a similar theme: My father (or mother or uncle or cousin) is lost to MAGA. They can seem normal, but they’re not, at least not any longer. It’s hard for me to know what to say in response, but one thing is clear: You can’t replace something with nothing. And until we fully understand what that “something” is — and that it includes not only passionate anger but also very real joy and a deep sense of belonging — then our efforts to persuade are doomed to fail.
What “something” are we supposed to offer these people? The lives of one of our more vulnerable minorities? A do-over in states where he loses next time? Furthermore, why should we offer them anything? They advocate terror, treason, and bigotry. They represent a third of the country and demand violent reprisals against the other two-thirds. Fuck those guys. They want to kill me. There's nothing to discuss.
Ghana 1973. Wild! Lots of good music coming out of there still but the hints of garage rock here especially send me.
Here we go, folks, a couple of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, and a reminder that a paid subscription (which is absurdly inexpensive) gets you five of these every week. First freebie is about a flight to the sun aboard the Icarus, the billionaires who burned up in it, and whether this is classic American heroism or the fault of Joe Biden. Ha ha, bet you caught on to what it’s really about!
The OceanGate deathtrap submarine story is so shot through with stupidity that it was hard to choose among variants to satirize. There was, for example, the attempt to turn a crack by the CEO (a libertarian who thought safety rules were for littlebrains, and who perished in the sub-standard sub) about 50ish white guys into proof that the billionaires were killed by multiculturalism. Some exponents were cagey about it -- the end of the Free Beacon story’s URL is “ocean-gate-missing-titanic-submarine-diversity-woke” though the words “diversity” and “woke” appear nowhere in the story – while morons just said out loud stuff like “wokeness killed the people on that submarine.”
But ultimately the big laugh here is on libertarianism. It’s one thing when those guys simply tell their usual billionaire-approved story -- that “liberty” is the one true God, who chooses whether you deserve to be rich or poor, and whose judgment is unquestionable, so you peons shut up and shovel while we eat ortolans. But it’s another thing entirely when libertarians get high on their own supply and fantasize themselves immune to the consequences of their own actions. So long as they enjoy the protection of the powerful, like Sam Alito blubbering that reporters told mean (true) stories about him, even as the world recoils the malefactor may get off scot free; but the laws of nature are harder to bend. I do endorse more of these masters of the universe doing explorers-club stunts – maybe Elon Musk can send a few of them to Mars.
Speaking of Musk, the other freebie is about the latest instance of celebrity anti-vaxx buffoons demanding an actual scientist debate them. It was interesting to see so many guys on Twitter laboriously simulating Maximum Reasonableness – “it would absolutely advance knowledge to go on [the Joe Rogan podcast]” – and then you look at their feeds and they’re obviously goons. I don’t they’re trying to fool us into thinking they’re reasonable, exactly; I think it’s more like they believe reasonableness is merely a pose (the way they think common decency is a pose, hence the “virtue signaling” insult), so if they affect the manner of a reasonable person/sea-lion it makes them just as reasonable as we are -- which is to say not really but faking it just as well as anyone else can. Modern conservatism is utterly post-truth, and to its adherents all values are fake except loyalty to the cause.
Not that there isn’t plenty other folly to fool with. I think the Trump indictment has caused actual brain injuries to some of our top prestige press pundits. There’s Peggy Noonan, for example, declaring that hardcore MAGA disciples who have stuck with Tubby through crappy policies injurious to themselves, an attempted insurrection, and two impeachments will turn on him now because he stole government documents:
It is said Mr. Trump’s base never wavers and always rallies, and historically this has been true. When he’s accused of being a trickster in business they don’t care—it’s extraneous to presidential leadership. They don’t care if he’s an abusive predator of women—again, extraneous, old news. But endangering our national security, including our nuclear secrets? That is another matter.
What’s really loopy about this, besides the self-evident, is that Noonan begins the column by quoting herself at great length (so great that I assume she revived from a fugue state only a few hours before deadline and had to fill the page with whatever was handy) to the effect that Trump’s rise among the rabble “is not due to his supporters’ anger at government. It is a gesture of contempt for government, for the men and women in Congress, the White House, the agencies.” [Emphasis hers.]
Maybe Noonan has a different definition of contempt than I do, or maybe she thinks the Trumpkins’ contempt has limits based on – well, what, exactly? Respect for the Constitution, from which they only know two amendments, neither of which they understand? Respect for the rule of law, when they watched Trump’s goon squad try to murder the Electoral College and all their sympathy was with the thwarted assassins? Maybe she doesn’t realize that no native-born American under 60 has ever had a social studies or citizenship class that might inculcate some strong beliefs about the country they live in, and that the people she expects to suddenly swell with patriotic pride and cry “hitherto thou shalt come, but no further!” actually prefer Vladimir Putin to the elected President of the United States.
Yet someone has actually topped Noonan; Small-handed Times trimmer David Brooks, who in a bizarre “I Won’t Let Donald Trump Invade My Brain” column that actually begins, “I try to be a reasonable person. I try to be someone who looks out on the world with trusting eyes” – right off the bat, a self-contradiction! – brags that now that he realizes Donald Trump is not one of those trustworthy people (a realization to which he seems have come during the 2020 campaign!), he refuses to follow that revelation to anything resembling a logical conclusion:
One wonders: What is the Times paying him for, then? Brooks tells us that if he allowed himself to pay close attention and learn the lesson of Trump, that would force him into a worldview in which “people are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing.” But this is just a childish cover for what the true lesson of Trump’s malevolence is: That it’s not all people, but a specific group of people – including not only Trump’s diehard voters but also the Republican officials and electeds who continue to excuse and defend him – who are indeed “basically selfish,” devoted to raw power and winning at all costs. This description certainly doesn’t apply to the gutless Dick Durbin Democrats, who actually rather resemble Brooks as he describes himself – which of course is the problem with them. God, between the pols and the pundits no wonder we're fucked.
If you follow alicublog’s Friday ‘Round-the-Horn sessions, you may have noticed I didn’t manage one last week. Apologies; I was moving house, and interstate, and with a spouse who, unlike me, hangs onto every goddamn thing.
So it was agony, and it’s not over, which brings us to our first Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie of the week, about that very thing. But if that’s too personal-essay for you, here’s another freebie – which is personal too, in that it’s based on my own actual dealings with what I’m sure is a new frontier in AI horseshit, but, you know, full of complaints about the state of the nation, as the public has come to expect under the Roy Edroso byline.
Not sure how much this will move you now that Tubby’s under federal indictment. Like many of us I’m cynical about these things – after “Mueller Time” (not to mention “Fitzmas”) how can you not be? It’s times like these that make one sympathetic, if not forgiving, toward the crazies whose whole politics is conspiracy-based – I mean how hard can it be to nail this crook, anyway, unless The System is not so interested in justice as it is in titrating tension-and-release with these slow-moving prosecutions toward some nefarious, Bilderbergian end? Best to stay cool and see how Aileen Cannonfucks it up.
Far greater entertainment value can be had from that daft bint Peggy Noonan, who squints at the carnage that is national politics and says, you know what, maybe a third party candidate can win it all in ’24! This is of course the sort of bullshit that got Trump elected in 2016 and Bush the Lesser elected in 2000, but Noonan doesn’t mention Jill Stein or Ralph Nader (nor the crackpot RFK Jr.) – though she does fawn over the No Labels fraudsters, and Ross Perot is her beau ideal:
Perot was a business visionary, the founder of a great company, Electronic Data Systems. He was public-spirited and blunt-talking. In June 1992 he was leading both George Bush and Bill Clinton. But his campaign was hapless and gaffe-filled, and he was unpredictable.
That’s putting it mildly; Perot was a Musk of the machine age, an ego freak who thought himself a world-beater. To this day I suspect he was in it just to fuck Bush over some obscure Texas beef, and so he did. Noonan marvels Perot got 19% of the vote even though voters “thought he might be a little nuts” – which to a normally observant person would suggest a comparison with the berserker Trump, rather than a smoldering, decades-old hunger for a third party candidate, but that’s a road Republican Peg doesn’t want to go on. So she weakly essays:
… I can quite imagine a competent third party now getting 35% of the vote to the other guys’ 32% and 33%, say. What would happen then? Most likely, no candidate would receive a sufficient Electoral College vote. The election would go to the House, causing uncertainty that would at some point be resolved.
“would at some point be resolved” ho ho ho – I guess Noonan scared herself there, but gamely tries to wrench the fantasy back into focus:
It would be real edge-of-the-seat stuff in a nation that already has too much edge-of-the-seat stuff, but also seems to like it.
A short while ago America elected the ancient trimmer Joe Biden because it was sick of Trumpian whoop-de-doo, and the only reason Noonan is pretending that didn’t happen is because her party’s prescription for victory is to act like trans people in beer ads constitute a screaming emergency requiring drastic measures like Mystery President. She knows as well as you do that RFK Jr. and No Labels are just cons to siphon off enough votes to put the Republicans back in power. But she made her bones peddling the Reagan fantasy, which was no less ridiculous until it happened, and I suppose she figures lightning can strike twice.
What was once a somber tribute of our fallen men is now, whee, a three-day holiday weekend! This strange dichotomy plays on my mind and I write about it now and then; here’s the latest iteration. Whatever it means to you, I hope you get to enjoy it.
Also unlocked from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (my premium site, and subscriptions make a lovely gift!) is another dispatch from Bolt Upright and Received Opinion, celebrating the Republican Vice-Presidential I Mean Presidential Candidates of Color. As I’ve said many times, the as yet unannounced Rep. Byron Donalds is only national-profile GOP POC who’d be an asset to the inevitable Trump ticket – he’s as evil as Scott, Haley, and Ramaswamy, but unlike them competently emulates normal human behavior. Scott in particular is a beaming, slow-witted goofus – exactly the sort of person Trump would hate too much to entertain – so naturally Peggy Noonan thinks he’s swell:
“He is a breath of fresh air,” former Sen. Rob Portman told me by phone.
And he should know!
…[Scott is] from South Carolina, a frisky conservative state, and watched his fellow senator, Lindsey Graham, be batted about for independence on various issues and early opposition to Mr. Trump. It left Mr. Scott cautious.
Or “cowardly.” That works, too. Noonan on DeSantis is even worse:
On transgender issues, it is hard to resist a destructive ideology while maintaining, in public ways, respect and affection for those who are wrong. And who don’t necessarily want your respect and affection. But you have to try anyway. Because it’s right and nice, and we’re human beings, and people can see good faith, sometimes in time and often reluctantly. And because it keeps those you’re opposing from arguing, persuasively, that you’re just playing a culture-war card and they’re only road kill on your highway to victory.
Maybe I’m not giving the old bat enough credit – maybe she knows full well that DeSantis is definitely not going for “right and nice,” nor “human being” nor “good faith.” He has never said a good word about LGBTQ people and never will, because he believes that what the Republican base has been missing is overt permission to hate those people and slur them out loud. That’s what the whole trans thing was about, and why it segued so quickly and smoothly to attacks on drag queens (who are not by and large trans) and why MAGA shitheads are now smashing up Gay Pride displays at Target. Like smart people have long been saying, they were never going to stop with trans people.
So it’s possible Noonan is trying to be ironic. Haha, who’m I kidding? Her real kung fu is describing the lives of trans people as a “destructive ideology” while insisting Republicans act nice to them. There’s the Riefenstahl of Reaganism in action.
Ugggh been a long hard week, my friends, let’s keep it short. First, let me hand around the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – you already saw The Good Samurderer and Other Republican Bible Stories earlier this week, so how about the latest from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is almost as ridiculous in my imagining as she is real life? See, I’m obliged as one of America’s few remaining satirists – a profession going the way of cigar-factory lectors and human graphic artists -- to try and make the Georgia Congresswoman funny, but the laughs would curdle quick if I gave my Margie the mendacity of the real thing:
If you’re looking for a real point to this exchange [between Greene and Rep. Jamaal Bowman], you’re unlikely to find any. Both of them were playing for the cameras, repeatedly smiling as they made a minor scene.
But the next day, Greene’s comments about the exchange with Bowman suggested that something terrible had happened. At a news conference, she said Bowman was “yelling, shouting, raising his voice, he was aggressive, his physical mannerisms are aggressive,” and she added that “I feel threatened by him.”
I mean, most of us haven’t seen Ooga-Booga like that since Emmett Till. Greene further covered herself with glory this week by introducing what she describes as her “first set” of impeachment articles against President Joe Biden, though she has actually brought Biden impeachment resolutions before the House no fewer than five times before, and has at present such articles posted against four (count ‘em four) cabinet officials.
Make no mistake, Speaker McCarthy isn’t letting this fool run riot because he’s naturally indulgent – he knows that the diseased rump of the GOP identifies more with her than with him, and he has to keep them on track or the whole racket explodes into dust like a disintegrated mummy. They’re all working to keep it together as hard as they can until all their voter-suppression, gerrymandering, and plain vote-rigging finally put them beyond the will of the voters for keeps.
Many other people have noticed what an insane reversal that is. But it’s to be expected nowadays: First, notwithstanding I know some righteous Christians, the kind you see on TV and in the news – and the many Republican pedophiles chronicled by @antifaoperative and others, and of course holy-rolling propagandists like Erick Erickson – are mostly vicious bastards. When put in a position to be actual Good Samaritans by an influx of immigrants escaping poverty and prosecution, these Christians instead gleefully ship the confused refugees up north and then laugh at the chaos it causes. (At the same time, they constantly holler, over the clatter of their collection plates, that they’re the ones being persecuted.) I tell ya, if I see a crucifix or a Jesus fish on a guy, he’s not getting anywhere near my loved ones or my wallet.
Also, the prestige press colludes with the idea that killing a guy for yelling on the subway is a rational response – for example, by referring to the Strangler’s actions as “restraining” rather than killing, as if the guy were still alive laughing about how he got away with it like on a cop show. As I’ve said before, many times on the subway I’ve seen tense situations defused by normal common-sense conflict resolution, and none of these ended in death. But for your average suburbanite, who goes from McMansion to SUV to office park and back without ever encountering another human being, let alone a homeless one, it's easy to imagine that the only way to deal with an obstreperous street guy is to kill him. You see these choads online going HE WAS THREATENING and bragging about their gun collections, and you wonder what kind of fucked-up padded existence they live.
UPDATE. Speaking of fake Christians, David French is at the Times to tell us all how dangerous the subway is and how you gotta understand why Penny felt like he had to kill Neely and then EIGHT GRAFS DOWN:
There is no evidence that Neely assaulted anyone...
Nonetheless "The best way to resolve these problems isn’t through jury trials of those, like Penny, who take it upon themselves to intervene" blah blah blah horseshit. These fucking people.
Yeah, I know, the Supremes' vocals are phenomenal, but it's also cool just hearing it like this.
Hell of a week, huh? I didn’t watch Tubby on TV – I already knew that he’s full of shit and that CNN is likewise, so what was I going to learn from it? How former Tucker Carlson employee Kaitlan Collins was going to mask her collaboration as incompetence? I understand J-schools frown on this approach, but for me a simple “I caught your act” will suffice. You’ll notice not even the rightwing press is talking about it as if Trump articulated any meaningful point or policy – it was all boo-yah theater reviews of his “characteristically spectacular” style etc.
Who needs it? And who the fuck does Anderson Cooper think he's fooling? This was no learning experience. Again, the whole shtick is just meant to keep the Republican rump excited – which doesn’t deliver a majority, but with gerrymandering, voter suppression, and bills like the one in Texas that allows the GOP to throw out Democratic Houston’s votes on a whim, the plan is to rule without one.
At The Federalist Jonathan S. Tobin laments that “someone who isn’t a ‘person of color’ is always going to be assumed to be in the wrong in any violent confrontation today,” refers to Penny as “the veteran who restrained the homeless man” -- rather hoping you'll miss, I suppose, that his “restraint” killed the guy -- and portrays the once-common argument that vigilante murder is not acceptable as an attempt by socialists to turn the dead homeless guy “the new George Floyd” and rekindle what Tobin describes as “the ‘mostly peaceful’ riots that shook the nation.” (No such thing has happened.) These guys really are, as my essay has it, killer nerds, desk jockeys baying for vicarious blood.
• What a week, eh? It seems like the well of rightwing judiciary corruption stories is inexhaustible. The latest -- with the direct involvement of Federalist Society kingpin/nation-wrecker Leonard Leo, Trump lie diffuser Kellyanne Conway, and Clarence Thomas’ insurrectionist wife – is a humdinger:
Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.
Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”
The “landmark voting rights” case was Shelby County v. Holder, the one in which Leo’s SCOTUS toadies shanked the Voting Rights Act. (It’s also worth mentioning Conway, Thomas, and Leo are all members of one of those DC fascist affinity groups to which such people flock.)
Man, they’re just crooks, right? And of course we’ve got the usual fash fluffers sputtering “how dare you” at anyone who dares to notice this crime spree.
This was grist for my mill in one of this week’s two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies: A scene in which some leading influence peddlers and their clients meet up at a billionaire mansion to conduct business with a longtime alicublog figure of fun.
• The other free issue is a meditation on the latest object of rightwing hero worship: The man who murdered an obstreperous subway hustler in cold blood. Just when you think conservatives have bottomed out morally, they manage to saw through the floorboards and find another sub-basement.
The Twitter creeps are vile enough, but the paper-trained pundits of the right who’ve gotten in on this are even worse. Abe Greenwald at Commentary may be the current nadir: He jerks off at length about how his pet murderer was a manly Marine, dammit (“courage is their defining trait… there aren’t many like them”) and fantasizes about having a Subway Strangler floor show of his own:
I’ve been on a few trains where “something was happening,” and if a Marine had suddenly appeared and taken matters into his own hands, I’d have bought him a steak dinner.
Eeeeyikes. The murderer, meanwhile, is alleged to be huddling with a prominent Republican lawyer politician-lawyer (anti-Bragg, just the way Trump likes 'em!), and the crew is preparing for Bernie Goetz redux for some electoral juice -- not in New York City, where such people are justly despised, but in the boondocks and Bumfucks where New York is hated and feared as the Land of Ooga Booga. Of course this ain’t 1984 and George Floyd is much fresher in the minds of potential jurors. Maybe the creeps' model will be Kyle Rittenhouse, with lots of burble about Big Scary Cities and Standing Your Ground.
Conservatives excluded from 2023 commencement invites
Conservative speakers, already a rarity on college campuses in recent years, may be even more of an anomaly this spring as the nation’s universities hold commencement ceremonies featuring an array of educators, entertainers and politicians drawn from the left — and essentially devoid of anyone from the right.
Whether you’re a respected scholar, a Supreme Court justice or even a former president, the message from most of the country’s colleges is clear: No conservatives allowed.
Boo hoo, the mean college students won’t pay to listen to us bitch about uppity minorities and how no one wants to work!
This is a return to form for conservatives – in fact it goes back to the days when they were retooling their “political correctness” shtick into “cancel culture” crybullying. I wrote about it for the Village Voice in 2014, when they were outraged that students didn’t want to be regaled by war criminal Condoleezza Rice. In the same column I found conservatives yelling because they weren’t getting the Hugo Award nominations to which they felt themselves entitled, and also this eerie harbinger of Wingnut Shtick To Come:
For example, last week New Hampshire father William Baer was arrested for disrupting a school board meeting. He complained about the assignment of Jodi Picoult’s YA novel 19 Minutes in his teen daughter’s class because it had a sex scene in it. As the video shows, after Baer had finished his allotted two minutes, he refused to shut up, so the board called the cops, who took him away…
Some people might think the board overreacted; others may think they did right to keep Baer’s heckler’s veto from stomping everyone else’s right to speak. Rightbloggers, however, thought the board had infringed on an important Constitutional right: The right to take over a public meeting if you feel really strongly about it, and are right-wing.
This was, of course, before they invented “Moms for Liberty” to hide their totalitarian agenda behind apron strings. But the basic grift is the same.
It’s the weekend – let’s be re-creative! One of the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down entries from this week that I’m unlocking is an open call for your favorite cover versions of songs – especially ones that go the extra mile to get something new out of the originals. I already posted my top pick (The Residents’ eerie “Viva Las Vegas”) but I have to admit the prize could as easily go to the tune up top here, Erasure doing “Take a Chance On Me.” It’s so breezy, so sweet, so gay! But your choices are at least as valid, let’s hear ‘em.
(Lagniappe: Here’s one of my White House scenes with Kavanaugh from the reign of the former guy. Lotta laughs if your sense of humor tends toward the mordant. You ought to subscribe.)
Speaking the shitshow that is the current SCOTUS, Jamelle Bouie is very good this week on how it’s rotting from the head. Polls show the rest of the country has some idea how bad it is, too. I can imagine Roberts putting a tail on Alito to make sure he doesn’t fuck up the mifepristone case like he probably did Dobbs, but I don’t see the trajectory turning around anytime soon and there’ll be plenty of opportunities (like Moore v. Harper) for them to speed the decline. Pack that shit already.
UPDATE. No sooner do I mention how fucked up the SCOTUS cons are when...
He’s certain about the motive: “It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft . . . from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside—as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”
How brave he and his fellow wingnuts were to resist! But as the previously cited poll results show, that's not how Mr. and Mrs. America see it -- they find the Supremes, rather than their critics, untrustworthy. Rather than reason with these commoners -- ha ha I know; like they read the Wall Street Journal! -- Alito rages how unfair it all is:
“We’re being bombarded with this,” Justice Alito says, “and then those who are attacking us say, ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’ Well, yeah, what do you expect when you’re—day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”
Alito cries about how no one defends him and his buddies -- even the bar associations (“if anything, they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks”) -- how he has to be "driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force," and how hard he has to work on his decisions, etc. Surely he doesn't sound like an old autocrat who need not answer to any authority and who is hated by the people he purports to serve, eh?
For me, a good cover makes you hear the original differently. I never much liked this song before I heard this version.
I’m outta the hospital and back on my bullshit! As proof, have some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies. First one’s about how other Republican officials might try to copy Ron “Three Fingers” DeSantis’ B-movie goon act. (I mentioned this a few days ago but what the hell, it’s news if it’s news to you.) I see Fingers has been having a hard week; apparently some donors (and voters!) notice his charmlessness and lunatic policies could be a liability in the general election. There is one super-rich guy pledging, hilariously, he would “go without food” to make this chunkhead President – increasingly this is becoming the age of the single rightwing billionaire patron, as shown by dedicated contributors to such as Rod Dreher and the Marble Freedom Trust – but it looks as if the closer we get to actual vote-counting time, the less people want a candidate who basically acts out neo-Nazi pamphlets in his governance. Once again, it seems Supercrook will be the GOP’s champion in the brief vote-show before the next insurrection attempt.
Speaking of big donors, the second freebie is mostly a monologue delivered by Clarence Thomas’ charming wife, explaining to the rabble why Supreme Court Justices of a certain political inclination aren’t bound by laws and norms to which we may, in our childishness, have expected them to attend. It has been grimly funny to see such frauds as Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks, Charles Murray and David French all rushing to defend Thomas’ Sugar Nazi as one hell of a guy who, on that basis, should be able to buy whatever unanswerable public official he wants. But they and the recalcitrant Thomas are part of the same imperturbable ruling class ethic: When the going gets tough, just act as if what the peons think doesn’t matter. It’s worked so far!
Only other thing I really wanted to mention is Elmo’s blue-check purge. As expected, it’s already making it hard to identify real government agencies and public services from fakes. This doesn’t matter to Elmo and his incel army, who continue to portray the mass decertification as some sort of populist victory. But too little attention is paid to the real purpose behind it.
Once upon a time Twitter was a good place to find, talk to, and sometimes yell at, people whose expertise and experience, attested to by Twitter, were valuable and meaningful. It was as close to a public forum with such people as most of us ever got.
Now it doesn’t matter whether you actually are, for example, an internationally-known forestry expert, or whether you’re just some guy who paid eight dollars so he can pretend he is one. In fact the phony may have an advantage over the real if he’s a Friend of Elmo – that is, the sort of right-wing troll he favors and amplifies. Where once a user’s achievements were significant, now all that matters is volume – how much one’s signal is boosted by the corrupt owner, and how many bots you can afford to muscle-up your tweets. This destroys Twitter as a resource, but promotes it as a propaganda tool – an alternative universe where the worst ideas are promoted, not because so many people even on the platform believe them, but because shitheels can rig it so it seems like they do. If these people lose again in 2024, count on them to say it’s impossible because Catturd2 has more followers than Biden got votes.
Hey guys, just letting you know I’m out of the hospital. My gratitude to the folks at the NIH Clinical Center for once again taking such good care of me. It just makes me more fond than ever of big government, and more contemptuous of jail-Fauci science-is-witchcraft Republicans like Rod Dreher and Ross Douthat.
Healing is happening, though more slowly than it did when I was a pup. But dammit, I can still type! So far I’ve answered muster on all this week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues – here’s a freebie, about the exciting new trend of Republican officials acting like mob bosses, insofar as their social disabilities allow. As I’ve said in the past, Ron DeSantis suffers especially in this regard:
The problem with DeSantis is, he may be too much of an obvious goon to translate as leader material beyond the borders of his corrupt bastion of Florida Men. He reminds me of minor gangsters in old movies as played by Sheldon Leonard and Mike Mazurki, except Leonard and Mazurki had presence and even charm — DeSantis is more like Rondo Hatton. It’s telling that he so consciously copies Trump’s body language; on the one hand it shows the requisite shamelessness, but on the other it also suggests a lack of inner resources. Once Trump’s out of the way — and he will need to be, for anyone else to advance — the new champion will have to have some style and swagger of his own, and if DeSantis can’t achieve that he’ll go down the way the minor Warner Brothers hoods did.
Meanwhile I see at the Wall Street Journal that Barton Swaim has chivalrously rushed to the defense of Clarence Thomas’ Sugar Nazi, Harlan Crow. Swaim starts (under a gentle drawing of Crow clearly meant to make him look like a more charming Noah Cross) by tut-tutting the “political left” for what Swaim portrays as its penchant for “delegitimation”:
The habits of delegitimation have become so familiar that it’s easy to forget how antidemocratic they are: political correctness and, more recently, cancel culture; the invention of “phobias”—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia—to characterize dissent as mental illness…
If you’re wondering how liberals got away with suggesting conservatives were stirring up fear and loathing of gays, Muslims, and trans people, you may have just awakened from a 20-year coma.
…the wanton attribution of racism, misogyny, fascism and white supremacy; and of course the easy insinuation that any political figure of whom one disapproves is guilty of crimes.
Lately, of course, most accusations of Republican criminality are focused on Donald Trump, an obvious and widely-acknowledged crook. (By the way, somewhere Hillary “Lock Her Up” Clinton is laughing her ass off.) Swaim does mention Trump, but as a victim: He “rose to power by treating his adversaries exactly as they treated him, and indeed as they had treated George W. Bush: as de facto illegitimate.” More sinned against than sinning!
Swaim then travels to Crow’s estate for a tour and whattaya know, Crow’s got MLK and Lincoln memorabilia too, and he’s pals with Cornel West – see, it’s not just Nazis! Over sandwiches Crow tells Swaim how moderate he is – “I’m kind of a traditional George Bush type Republican… I’m moderately pro-choice—a first-trimester guy… So when people say I want to influence people on the court, I would say that if I were trying to do that, which I’m not, I’m not doing a very good job.” So Thomas and Crow can agree to disagree that people who aren’t them can have their rights taken away. It’s not like there’s anything important at stake. Just keep it civil, without delegitimation!
Finally, I see Texas has gotten so gun crazy they’re mowing down cheerleaders, which in the Lone Star you would have thought were a protected species. What’s next, oil tycoons?
Lord, what a week. First there was Tubby going to court – the inspiration for one of my renowned satirical fantasia and the first of two (2!) Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week.
(By the way, as I have told my paid subscribers, I’ll be off the clock next week, so there will probably be no ‘Round-the-Horn on the 14th and certainly no freebies before the week to follow. All the more reason to subscribe and get these treats on the regular. It’s cheap!)
Funny as the embittered and indicted Trump is, I must say his defenders are even funnier – none more so than the Just-the-Tip Trumpers who weep over What Their Movement Has Become under the rule of Tubby but have nonetheless and predictably rushed to defend him from the indignity of criminal charges. (Michael Powell: "Trump's behavior Immoral? Sleazy? [David French] says Yes and Yes. But..." lol)
Yes, Trump Was Extorted Let’s acknowledge what Stormy Daniels did.
This hed and dek, and the whole ridiculous thing, posits Tubby as victim, which is hilarious, so as a propagandist must when tasked with peddling absurdities Lowry denies he’s doing what he’s clearly doing, and right out of the gate:
It’s not as though he was the innocent victim, but when Donald Trump and his legal team say that Stormy Daniels extorted him, they are right.
From one perspective, this is another perversity of the case — Stormy Daniels engaged in a kind of extortion, and yet Trump is the one the authorities have tried their utmost to nail to the wall.
He should be indicting her! Lowry then lists a bunch of other similarly victimized men who were called to stand and deliver merely because they had paid for sex in violation of their marriage vows – and, really, who among us hasn’t been there, fellow conservatives? Lowry includes among Trump’s fellow victims former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, which has to be a first at National Review.
Eventually:
It takes two to tango — the women made the demands, and Trump paid up because it was worth it to him to make these stories go away.
Again, he was no victim, but the women who cashed in were no victims, or saints, either.
I’m sure the conservative audience Lowry accurately envisions would see any man-woman conflict, such as a rape accusation, as something in which the man may look like the sole guilty party – BUT!
The other REBID item on the arm is today’s, about the pile-up of rightwing outrages including the expulsion of those two Tennessee reps by Republican assholes and why it may all come out alright. Dare to dream!
UPDATE: Speaking of rightwing outrages and Just-the-Tip Types, I see the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel is nervous that the loony abortion bans feral Republicans are shoving through their state legislatures is costing them votes:
Conservatives cheered mightily last year when the Supreme Court returned abortion to the states with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And rightly so. Yet that was a legal victory. The political question is something else entirely, and it’s the left cheering now. In race after race, state after state, Democrats are pummeling conservative candidates on abortion, drowning out every other topic, stoking fearful centrists, suburbanites and women to turn out and elect them to office.
Even with the smell of the coffee strong in her nose, Strassel spins: It's about the Democrats' "pummeling," not the voters rebelling. Also, overturning Roe was wonderful, Strassel says, but they're not selling it right:
The GOP’s problem is muddle and inaction. Fearful of getting crosswise with the pro-life right, Republicans have failed to land on a consensus position.
LOL, bullshit: It's not "muddle and inaction," it's the gleeful misogynistic id of the conservative movement reveling in its victory over bitches. Why would they act all sober and compromising when the Wingnut SCOTUS gave them the keys to the kingdom? Strassel misses that, while her constituents believe in the same terrible things she does, unlike her they aren't obliged to try and make it look good for the manicured readers of the WSJ. They do lie, but not to cover their tracks -- they lie because, and for the same reason, their idol Trump lies: Contradicting reality makes them feel powerful. They're not gonna pretend to care about what people they despise think because they believe themselves beyond the reach of voter consent. It's up to her enemies to show them they are not.
Happy Tubby Got Fingered Day! As I mention in today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – released to general population as a commemorative gift – this indictment is no guarantee of justice; we haven’t even seen the full indictment yet, nor do we know what’s coming down the judicial pipe, and one never knows what a jury will do. But it has shown, in a small way at least, that this alleged untouchable, the princeling of the putzes, is not utterly beyond the law.
Which of course has the Trumpkins fully flipping out. Along with what you’ll find in the REBID piece, you’ve got U.S. Senator Rand Paul calling for D.A. Alvin Bragg’s arrest, and many other rightwingers, ranging from the Speaker of the House to the lowliest, tiniest-faced propagandists, calling for retaliatory prosecutions with no legal justification. Which just shows how strong their position is! You can find others on the internet crying that this indictment means America is a dictatorship, and soon the True Sons of Liberty will rise up and take down the Dusky Soros Hordes. In other words, Insurrection Attempt II – This Time It’s Hilarious!
Even worse are the sober-sided Just-the-Tip Trumper types, like the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who call the indictment “a sad day for America,” sob sob, and insist that in such a case “the evidence should… be solid enough that a reasonable voter would find it persuasive,” which (though IANAL) seems to be a brand new standard for felony prosecutions. Eventually they get to a slightly more manicured version of the bald threats made by the goon squad:
Once a former President and current candidate is indicted, some local Republican prosecutor will look to make a name for himself by doing the same to a Democrat. U.S. democracy will be further abused and battered. Mr. Bragg, the provincial progressive, is unleashing forces that all of us may come to regret.
UPDATE. I neglected to mention Erick Erickson's lulu. He advances the same tropes as the rest of them – the indictment “will help Trump immensely,” and “the case is so, so thin that Trump is very likely to get acquitted” (again, the indictment is as yet sealed) – and adds some nonsense of his own: For example, that “independents who don’t care for [Trump] but do not hate him could swing decisively and sympathetically in his direction just as a recession is breaking out. Alvin Bragg could very well have gotten Trump re-elected.” Apparently Erickson had a choice between polling data and his own ass and chose his ass.
Most remarkably, Erickson also goes out of his way to insult D.A. Alvin Bragg -- and the grand jury:
Alvin Bragg represents a wing of the Democrat Party that is on the short bus of the party. He’s not very bright. I suspect the grand jurors are just rabid progressives, too, and they are all in the wing of “let’s put the SOB behind bars.” They hate him. They call him vulgarities instead of the President. They just want him in prison, and they’ll do anything to get him there.
They are not smart enough to consider the ramifications and too blinded by rage against Trump to care.
In a later post Erickson calls Bragg “a dim-witted county district attorney.” I’m sure Erickson’s constituents enjoy hearing the black lawyer and the New York City jurors (whom they probably imagine as the Central Park Five padded out with skels from Death Wish) called stupid, and that's why he's laying it on so thick. I wonder what he’ll do, though, as the wheels of justice slowly grind and he is obliged to up the ante. Maybe he’ll call in the AI that says racial slurs!
