"The violence escalated quickly after the 2:24 tweet."
Thursday, July 21, 2022
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Biden Tests Positive for COVID
President Biden, who is fully vaccinated and twice boosted, was “experiencing very mild symptoms,” according to the White House. The virus is surging across much of the country because of new, immune-evasive variants.
Biden Twitter. Nice.
"I Was Wrong About"...--NYT
The New York Times has done an amazing thing: they have tasked their columnists with writing confession. So, Paul Krugman's is, I Was Wrong About Inflation; David Brooks' is, I Was Wrong About Capitalism (I've read Dave's twice and am not sure which wrong he is confessing about); Thomas Friedman's is on Chinese Censorship, Bret Stephens' on Trump Voters, and Michelle Goldberg was wrong about Al Franken.
Of course some are more confessional than others but the exercise is sui generis in bringing humility to the sometimes hubristic, of prompting reflection, and in establishing some accountability. How often have you read a Nobel Economics laureate confess error in his field?
Maybe the greatest compliment I ever received was from a girlfriend who told another person "He always admits when he's wrong." It's compliment to these columnists and to the Times to do this.
It recurs to me as I read my daughter's great gift on the Civil War that as
America was born of violent, revolutionary struggle; as we made "a more
perfect union" in the forge of violent revolutionary struggle not 90
years later; as Black equality before the law was only won 100 years after
that in both peaceful and sometimes violent protests, that we are a
violent, revolutionary people lol and that the Heller gun case of 2008,
the Catastrophe of 11/8/16, the reactionary coup d'etat of 1/6/20, the
Dobbs abortion case of 2022 and the plausibility of the fascist
reclaiming the presidency in 2024 are the latest moments in America's
continuing violent, revolutionary struggle.
[Trump] has continued to prioritize his lies that he won the last election as he aims to influence the next one, signaling to his supporters that undermining the 2020 election should be the predominant issue for the party.
What’s his campaign message going to be? This is an opening for any primary opponents and for the Democratic nominee in the general. Should be an interesting party platform for all Americans when he gets the Grand Old Phascist nomination.
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
Still Crazy!
Trump Urged a Powerful
Legislator to Overturn
His 2020 Defeat in
Wisconsin in July 9, 2022
Phone Call
Trump called Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, on July 9 and pushed him to support a resolution to retract the state’s 10 electoral votes for President Biden.
...the former illegitimate president remains undaunted by congressional and criminal investigations into his election meddling.
Trump’s advisers said the former illegitimate president saw an opening to press the Republican official, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, after a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling [on July 8, 2022] prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voters returning absentee ballots.
So this ex post facto law proposal is confirmed by Trump's team.
Since drop boxes were used during the 2020 election, Trump argued, the state should be able to invalidate the results of that election. He pushed Vos to support a resolution that would retract the state’s 10 electoral votes cast for Biden. Trump’s advisers said the phone call took place on July 9 — the day after the court issued its opinion.
There is no mechanism in Wisconsin law to rescind the state’s electoral votes, nor does the United States Constitution allow for a state’s presidential election to be overturned after Congress has accepted the results. Still, Trump has persisted.
Vos has repeatedly told Trump and his allies that decertifying the former illegitimate president’s loss would violate the state’s Constitution. Trump “has a different opinion,” Vos told a television station in Milwaukee, WISN-TV, which first reported the phone call on Tuesday.
The call is only the latest indication that Trump remains fixated on nullifying the 2020 presidential contest 18 months after Mr. Biden replaced him in the White House. He has continued to prioritize his lies that he won the last election as he aims to influence the next one, signaling to his supporters that undermining the 2020 election should be the predominant issue for the party.
...
Trump has never stopped looking for ways to undo the results of the 2020 election, and his desire to keep talking about his false claims of widespread fraud has intensified as investigations into his conduct have become more focused.
I got an email today from Martindale-Hubbell, the lawyers information site: "Congratulations on your 40th Anniversary." My goodness, forty years. What a wonderful life I have had in the law.
On my fortieth anniversary as a lawyer I share a story of this rewarding life. I represented a client 10-12 years ago. A series of very serious crack-related cases. The first time I visited him in jail he impressed me with his intelligence and goodness. I told him then, first meeting, "You are going to succeed in life." I visited him every couple of weeks for a minimum of an hour each time. We grew very close and kept in close contact even when he went to prison on the charges. He has been out about a year and immediately gave me his new contact info and details about his new life. He immediately got a job, I cautioned him to expect a lot of rejection because of his record, but anybody who meets him is impressed with him, as I was. The other day I received a text from him,
"My first car! I'm so excited," under a photo of the car.
Then a photo of him and his beautiful girlfriend. I was elated for him and very proud of him. I sent him my congratulations. He responded:
"Thank you Benjamin! Always remember you were the first to believe in me and because you did was the beginning of believing in myself!" Always know I'm here if you need me! Have a good night! Love you!"
One person can make a difference in another life and you don't have to have specialized training to do it. Sometimes all it takes is believing in them.
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
leshia Evans Didn't Back Down: Stoic Courage Confronting Overwhelming Force, July 9, 2016
A nurse from Pennsylvania, Ms. Evans came to Baton Rouge, LA. to march in protest of the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
It Was a Massive Conspiracy and S.S. Was In On It; It's a Coverup and S.S. Did It
Secret Service cannot recover texts; no new details for Jan. 6 committee
The result is that potentially valuable evidence — the real-time communications and reactions of agents who interacted directly with Trump or helped coordinate his plans before and during Jan. 6 — is unlikely to ever be recovered, two people familiar with the Secret Service communications system said.
The most moving, poignant, protest dirge of all time.
That's a real tear on her right cheek. I had not noticed previously.
Demi Lovato at the Billboard Music Awards, Oct. 14, 2020.
I fucking bawled AGAYNE listening to that almost two years later!
The most startling thing I have read in Catton
Jefferson Davis, as humane a man as ever lived, had said that emancipation must mean extermination of slaves...*
Catton has a dry, subtle sense of humor occasionally...but he's serious here. "As humane a man as ever lived"--Jeff Davis, slave owner! Jeff-Emancipation=extermination-Davis! Slavery defender and protector Jeff Davis: "as humane a man as ever lived"! I can't get over it, no matter how many times I read and re-read it. I even looked up the definition to see if there was some arcane meaning I had never heard of. No. I tried to think of another word if humane was a misprint: "urbane"? That could be. I could see Davis being described as "urbane". The context is still bizarre but not as bizarre as "humane" makes it. HuMONGous misprint if that's what it is.
*Never Call Retreat, Parting of the Red Sea Waves, "The Land of Cotton," 72.
Monday, July 18, 2022
"BA.5, a highly transmissible variant, is dominating a surge of new infections."
Covid-19 is surging around the United States again in what experts consider the most transmissible variant of the pandemic yet.
Q: What's another name for Democrat?
A: pussy-ass motherfucker.
Dems lean toward taking Manchin's small-ball deal
Many in his party are ready to accept a healthcare-only bill, now that the centrist has said he wants to wait longer on climate and tax talks.
I have a suggestion for my fellow D's: Why don’t they try something less difficult than convincing Manchin or stripping him of committee chairs and kicking him out of the caucus--so mean! Why not lobby for Kamala Harris to resign, for Biden then to appoint Manchin as new veep, and then for Biden to resign so that Manchin can be president?
Why did the Civil War last so long?
...after the beginning of 1863...[for] the leaders of the Southern nation...It was no longer possible to hope that the war's current might yet be reversed...-Catton, Never Call Retreat, In the Rapids, "The Paralysis of Command," 49.
Stephens, the Confederacy's vice president, wrote at this time that he could not see the war lasting as much as a "twelvemonth" longer. But it did. It lasted two "twelvemonths" and four more months on top of that!
The move by Pence to endorse Robson is rightly understood then not as simply a rejection of a Trump-backed pick, but an attempt to affirm that the 2020 election was, in fact, free and fair. Pence and Trump are scheduled to hold dueling rallies on behalf of their preferred candidates in the state on Friday.
That's an interesting take, and reasonably could be a correct one. This is the AZ governor's race. Trump endorsed another person. And as Noodles says Pence did the same thing in Georgia, endorsing and campaigning with Brian Kemp against Trump-backed former senator David Perdue. Kemp won by 52 points. Now, that's not going to happen in Hairy Boner. The evidence that outsiders endorsements in local races matter is exceedingly thin historically. Local voters decide on local issues and local candidates, not on those favored by national leaders, and Kari Lake, Trump's gal in AZ, is still the favorite. But maybe history is bunk these days. It was Trump who injected himself first in the Georgia races and in Arizona, the states that most infuriated him in 2020. Trump's attacks on Georgia's Republicans did contribute to Kemp's astounding margin, to Brad Raffensperger's eighteen-point demolition of Trump's candidate, sitting congressman Jody Hice, and to the elections of Democrats Ralph Warnock and Jon Ossof as United States senators. Clearly (to me) Trump's meddling had a boomerang effect (and his endorsement of former employee Herschel Walker against Warnock this year will boomerang) in Georgia.
It reasonably may be so that the Arizona governor's race is "rightly understood" as local voters taking umbrage at Trump's proven lies that they let their votes for president be "stolen."
Stone's River
[United Major General William S.] Rosencrans seemed to be galloping along the lines all day long...his overcoat all streaked with blood--a shell had taken off the head of his chief of staff, riding beside him, and the general had been spattered. ...
...
For the enlisted men of the two armies, New Year's Eve [1862] was not at all happy. The rain began again, the gloomy thickets dripped in the cold dark, and the fields where so many thousands of wounded men lay were deep with mud. Confederates who wandered across the ground they had won saw hideous things. Here a soldier leaned against a tree, an overturned coffee mill between his spread legs; a Minie ball had struck him while he was getting breakfast and he had bled to death. By a path leading to a spring sprawled another dead Federal, still gripping the bail of an oaken bucket. A Confederate had been cut entirely in two by a shell; another soldier had been killed by the windage of a near miss and lay contorted, his face blackened, not a wound on his body; farther on there were two men who had been killed by the same cannon ball, which had passed through their chests, removing their hearts and leaving "a hole big enough to put your arm through." One Rebel remembered seeing a blue-coated soldier whose skull had been broken open like a melon, his intact brain lying on the ground near his body. A Texas soldier wrote that "the seens on the battle field was aufle" and asserted that "the hogs got a holt of some of the Yankey dead before the night was over." A man from Louisiana saw horrors when the moon broke through the rain clouds: "The earth was burdened with the Yankee dead. They were crossed and piled over each other, nearly all of them lying on their backs, with their faces so gastly turned up to the moon."-Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat, In the Rapids, "In the Mists at Stone's River," 44-45.
...
For the enlisted men of the two armies, New Year's Eve [1862] was not at all happy. The rain began again, the gloomy thickets dripped in the cold dark, and the fields where so many thousands of wounded men lay were deep with mud. Confederates who wandered across the ground they had won saw hideous things. Here a soldier leaned against a tree, an overturned coffee mill between his spread legs; a Minie ball had struck him while he was getting breakfast and he had bled to death. By a path leading to a spring sprawled another dead Federal, still gripping the bail of an oaken bucket. A Confederate had been cut entirely in two by a shell; another soldier had been killed by the windage of a near miss and lay contorted, his face blackened, not a wound on his body; farther on there were two men who had been killed by the same cannon ball, which had passed through their chests, removing their hearts and leaving "a hole big enough to put your arm through." One Rebel remembered seeing a blue-coated soldier whose skull had been broken open like a melon, his intact brain lying on the ground near his body. A Texas soldier wrote that "the seens on the battle field was aufle" and asserted that "the hogs got a holt of some of the Yankey dead before the night was over." A man from Louisiana saw horrors when the moon broke through the rain clouds: "The earth was burdened with the Yankee dead. They were crossed and piled over each other, nearly all of them lying on their backs, with their faces so gastly turned up to the moon."-Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat, In the Rapids, "In the Mists at Stone's River," 44-45.
Know what the #1 hit song of all time is?
Fauci Retiring in Year and a Half
After more than five decades of federal service under seven presidents,
Anthony Fauci says he’s leaving by the end of President Joe Biden’s term.
There’s an obvious logic to your fundamental argument in favor of a steady-state economy, which is that the economy, like everything else on the planet, is subject to physical limitations and the laws of thermodynamics and as such can’t be expected to grow forever. ...
That's right, like the law of thermodynamics. That's the law that perpetual motion machines violate. So this just hit us, "Hey, you know a continuously growing economy...Einstein would not approve."?
This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession With Growth Must End
It's the legend of the shark, no? Keep moving or die. I have often wondered how a continuously growing economy does not violate, like a perpetual motion machine, fundamental laws of the universe. What is there that always grows?
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