Month: January 2021

About Bloody Time

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Following the insurrection at the Capitol, police departments across the country are finally looking into the unsavory extracurricular activities of some of their members. 

I’ve been saying for a long time that police are objectively racist and pro-fascist, maybe now some of the tens of thousands of police forces, and the civilians who nominally are in charge of these institutions, will actually start policing the police:

Police officers and at least one police chief from departments across the United States are facing termination, suspension or other discipline for their proximity to or alleged involvement in a chaotic gathering in Washington on Wednesday that ended in a riot at the U.S. Capitol and left five people dead.

Departments in California, Washington state, and Texas are among those that have announced investigations into their officers based on tips, social media posts and other evidence, though more officers could be identified as evidence emerges in the coming days.

The probes come after an especially fraught year for U.S. policing that saw massive civil rights protests against police violence. They are likely to raise questions about free speech, the expansion of surveillance and public trust in law enforcement, while legal experts warn the scrutiny could have unintended consequences.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Tweet of the Day

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People who broke into the Capitol Wednesday are now learning they are on No-Fly lists pending the full investigation. They are not happy about this. pic.twitter.com/5GfHo1eVU8

— Ray [REDACTED] (@RayRedacted) January 10, 2021

People who stormed the Capitol are surprised that they are on No-Fly lists.

It never mattered when leopards ate OTHER people’s faces.

No Longer Afraid of the Trumpster Fire

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Lmaooooo this the wildest ban in history. His phone just a brick pic.twitter.com/vnpb79Npb5

— KB24 Forever 17x CHAMPS 7x DODGERS CHAMPS (@KarateSkool) January 9, 2021

Yes, he has been banned from shopify

Social media sites have begun falling all over themselves to ban Donald Trump. 

Twitter has now permanently banned Donald Trump, Facebook and Instagram have banned him as well, Reddit has shut down it’s largest Trump Group, Shopify has taken done Trump merchandise vendors, and (rather ironically) TikTok has banned Trump.

While I do find this rather heartening on one level, I find it worrying on another.

Specifically, we are privatizing the arbiters of acceptable speech.

The limits to speech have gone from, “Shouting fire in a crowded theater,” to, “Whatever worries Mark Zuckerberg.”

Threat of the Day

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Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.

—Randall LaneForbes, Chief Content Officer and Editor at Forbes Magazine

He is talking about Trump’s PR flacks, Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kayleigh McEnany.

I would add other personnel who served as as part of the axis of lying, Elaine Chao, Steve Mnuchin, Betsy Devos, Mike Pompeo, etc. to people who should not be allowed to return to polite to society, much less cash in.

Nostra Dumbass

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The Onion, from 2000: 

Serbia Deploys Peacekeeping Forces To U.S.

11/15/00 3:00PM


BELGRADE–Serbian president Vojislav Kostunica deployed more than 30,000 peacekeeping troops to the U.S. Monday, pledging full support to the troubled North American nation as it struggles to establish democracy.

“We must do all we can to support free elections in America and allow democracy to gain a foothold there,” Kostunica said. “The U.S. is a major player in the Western Hemisphere and its continued stability is vital to Serbian interests in that region.”

Kostunica urged Al Gore, the U.S. opposition-party leader who is refusing to recognize the nation’s Nov. 7 election results, to “let the democratic process take its course.”

………

Though Kostunica has pledged to work with U.S. leaders, he did not rule out the possibility of economic sanctions if the crisis is not resolved soon.

 Note the highlighted date.

The Onion has been predicting the future for 32 years now.

Tweet of the Day

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'Due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, this year the United States were forced to organise the coup d'état at home.'

[This is from @fdecollibus and r/t by the Italian extraordinaire satirical collective @spinozait, translated into English by yours truly] https://t.co/bB5hfdnWMW

— Paolo Sandro (@PaoloSandro2) January 6, 2021

This tweet is so grim, and so cynical, and so funny, that I initially thought it was Russian.

Not Good

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What a Dead Cat Bounce Looks Like

Though initial unemployment claims fell slightly last week, by 3000, to 787000, the monthly jobs report shows non-farm employment falling for the first time since April.

The earlier stimulus efforts that propelled the economy have ended, and gravity has reasserted itself:

The U.S. economy shed 140,000 jobs in December — the first month of decline since the earliest months of the pandemic, as the recovery makes a U-turn after months of surging infections and delayed congressional action.

The unemployment rate stayed level at 6.7 percent.

The report, the last of President Trump’s time in office, showed the havoc that the pandemic continues to wreak on the economy as the country struggles to control the level of infections.

Employment in leisure and hospitality industries declined by 498,000, the majority of that at restaurants, bars and other food service establishments, which have struggled amid limitations from cold weather and a new round of restrictions across the country.

Employment in another tourism-related category — amusements, gambling and recreation — fell by 92,000. Government employment declined by 42,000. These declines offset modest gains in other sectors, such as professional and business services, retail and construction.

………

“It’s a damaged labor market,” said Augustine Faucher, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group. “But it is a labor market that is poised for recovery, given the fact that we are seeing the vaccine. With support from the federal government and support from the Federal Reserve, it could see a strong rebound over the next few years.”

Too many blither idiots (I’m talking to you, Larry Summers) are more concerned about hippie punching than they are about fixing things.

Why the Resignations?

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Call me a cynic, but I think that the reason that so many Trump administration cabinet member have chosen to resign is that they don’t want to be on the record making a decision about removing Donald Trump under the provisions of the 25th Amendment of the Constitution.

They think that participating in that would be disastrous for their future careers.

I know that you are probably thinking, “Future careers, surely you jest,” but let me show you Richard M. Nixon’s “last” press conference, which he gave in 1962:


Much like a bad penny, these folks will be back.

Breaking Things on the Way Out

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The Trump administration just authorized Tennessee to have its Medicaid funded through block grants.

Block grants is how Bill Clinton’s evil Welfare “Reform” worked, and the states took the money and spent it on things like romance lessions. 

The Trump administration wants to take a sledge hammer to Medicaid, and indirectly Obamacare, because they can.

Giants Used to Walk Among Us

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Neil Sheehan, who covered the Vietnam war almost from the beginning, got Daniel Ellsberg to leak him the Pentagon Papers, and then wrote a searing book on the Vietnam war, A Bright and Shining Lie, has died at age 84:

Neil Sheehan, the Vietnam War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who obtained the Pentagon Papers for The New York Times, leading the government for the first time in American history to get a judge to block publication of an article on grounds of national security, died on Thursday at his home in Washington. He was 84.

………

Mr. Sheehan, who covered the war from 1962 to 1966 for United Press International and The Times, was also the author of “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam,” which won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer in 1989. Reviewing it in the Times, Ronald Steel wrote, “If there is one book that captures the Vietnam War in the sheer Homeric scale of its passion and folly, this book is it.”

Intense and driven, Mr. Sheehan arrived in Vietnam at age 25, a believer in the American mission. He left, four years later, disillusioned and anguished. He later spent what he described as a grim and monastic 16 years on “A Bright Shining Lie,” in the hope that the book would move Americans finally to come to grips with the war.

“I simply cannot help worrying that, in the process of waging this war, we are corrupting ourselves,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1966. “I wonder, when I look at the bombed-out peasant hamlets, the orphans begging and stealing on the streets of Saigon and the women and children with napalm burns lying on the hospital cots, whether the United States or any nation has the right to inflict this suffering and degradation on another people for its own ends.”

Mr. Sheehan’s readiness to entertain the notion that Americans might have committed war crimes prompted Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had turned against the war, to leak the Pentagon Papers, a secret government history of American decision-making on Vietnam, to him in 1971. The papers revealed that successive administrations had expanded U.S. involvement in the war and intensified attacks on North Vietnam while obscuring their doubts about the likelihood of success.

You don’t find reporters like this at the Times any more, or at the mainstream media.

It’s all stenography now.

Depressing as Hell, But True

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Silly. Joe Manchin is now the chair of every committee. https://t.co/HbtdYGTu7F

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 6, 2021

Matt Stoller is right.

Because of the one vote margin in the Senate, Joe Manchin’s ego, and the needs of his campaign donors, will be driving the Senate Agenda.

The Dems should call him out early and often.  

Better to call his bluff, and have an excuse for nothing getting done, than to acquiesce, and suffer the consequences of bad policy and worse politics.

I Hope that this is a Fuck You to Mitch McConnell

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When I heard that Joe Biden intends to nominate Merrick Garland as US Attorney General, my first reaction was that this is a MASTERFUL “Fuck You” directed at Mitch McConnell.

Just to remind you of recent history, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia choked on his own bile in early 2016, Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a well respected, and rather moderate, appellate court judge to replace him.

Mitch McConnell not only refused to allow a vote in Garland, he instructed members of the Republican Caucus not even to meet with him.

It’s how that lunatic Gorsuch ended up on the court.

In nominating Garland for AG, Biden has a chance to replace him with a younger judge (Garland is 68).

Additionally, Garland someone who has been thoroughly vetted on multiple occasions, and has served extensively at the Justice Department, being a US Attorney, an assistant to the AG, and Deputy Assistant AG.

One thing that is pretty clear about him, he won’t take any crap from Mitch McConnell:

President-elect Joe Biden plans to nominate federal judge Merrick B. Garland, a Democratic casualty of the bitter partisan divide in Washington, to be the next attorney general, tasked with restoring the Justice Department’s independence and credibility, according to people familiar with the decision.

Garland, 68, serves on the federal appeals court in the District. He is best known for being nominated to the Supreme Court in 2016 by President Barack Obama — a nomination that went nowhere because Senate Republicans refused to give him a hearing. The opening on the high court was eventually filled the following year by President Trump’s choice, Neil M. Gorsuch.

………

Many Democrats still think of Garland as a living example of Republican double-standards when it comes to the courts and the law, though some Biden advisers have come to view him as well-suited to restore norms of nonpolitical decision-making at the Justice Department, given his track record as a judge and a former senior official at the department, according to people familiar with the decision. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because Biden’s selection has not been formally announced yet.

The Republicans said that it was too close to the election (9 months), and then pushed through  Amy Coney Barret in 6 weeks to beat the election.

Everything I’ve seen indicates that he probably won’t go after the blatant corruption and self-dealing of McConnell and his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, but nobody’s perfect.

Announcing “Say Fuck” January

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Given the events of the past 48 hours or so, I am suspending my policy of %$#ing out dirty words on my blog for the month of January.

My writing is rather profane, but I %$# shit out because I don’t want to offend someone whose children are reading this.

Occasionally, when quoting someone, as when then VP Biden called the passage of Obamacare a, “Big Fucking Deal,” I quote people, and occasionally, I miss the obscenities in a quote, Twitter embeds are not editable, and sometimes, I just fuck up and let it through.

So, fuck and shit, and the rest of the “Anglo Saxon Lexicon” will be on display for the rest of this month.

That being said, I still won’t be using the “C-word” for reasons best illustrated in the Harley Quinn animated series first episode.

Also, I will not be using the word, “Slut”, except in an illustrative manner, (as I just did) because I find it almost as offensive as the “C-word”.

As to the comments, my policy is to eschew moderation, except in the cases where the content is clearly spam, though if someone were to start dropping the “N-word” in the comments, this might change.

So Warnock and Ossoff Have Won

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Giving the Democrats control of the US Senate.

I’m with Howie Klein on this, “If Ossoff & Warnock Win, The Dems Better Deliver For Working People Or It’s Curtains For The Party.”

The reason that the Democrats lost the House, and the Senate, a dozen or so governorships,  over 1000 state reps, etc. during Obama’s time as President, and the reason that his anointed successor lost to an inverted traffic cone in 2016, and the reason that they under-performed in 2020, is that when given power, they did nothing but suck up to the traditional power centers.

Biden’s promise that, “Nothing will fundamentally change,” is a recipe for disaster, and fascism.

12 Hours: What You Get for Suggesting that Megan McCain Have Carnal Knowledge of a Cactus, or for Calling On Your Supporters to Storm the Capitol

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As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy. https://t.co/k6OkjNG3bM

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

Future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

We’ll continue to evaluate the situation in real time, including examining activity on the ground and statements made off Twitter. We will keep the public informed, including if further escalation in our enforcement approach is necessary.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) January 7, 2021

Following a particularly moronic statement in which Meghan McCain insisted that mockery of her by a Jewish cartoonist was antisemitic, my son replied to her on Twitter that she should, “Go F%$# yourself with a cactus.”

Twitter gave him a 12 hour time out.

It now appears that for calling for a violent insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States, Twitter will also give you a 12 hour time out.

Needless to say, Charlie is considering how best to use that rather perverse juxtaposition of Twitter’s enforcement of its, “Civil Integrity Policy,” as a bit for his standup.

On the bright side, with the pandemic, he’ll have plenty of time to polish the bit.

On the dark side, Covid-19 is why he’ll have plenty of time to polish the bit.

I’m actually a bit jealous about his getting the suspension, it’s been a goal of mine.

I have not managed to do this yet, I have a self-imposed rule that I can’t post something just to get banned.  I must post something that I would normally posts.

I even changed my Twitter handle to, “Jack Dorsey Is Objectively Pro-Nazi (M.G. Saroff),” in an attempt to get the elusive ban.

Much to my surprise, and to the surprise of those who know and love me, it appears that my normal behavior is not sufficient to get me banned from Twitter.

(Update)

Facebook gave the Trumpster Fire a time out as well.