Department of Damn, I Miss All the Good Stuff!

Damn, I miss all the good stuff!

But, honestly, I hate crowds and rallies.

Two Memorial Day Links and Something That Won't Happen

• Untold and practically secret history relating to Memorial (Decoration) Day (in my childhood, there were still adults who referred to Decoration Day).  (Sarah Lazare, AlterNet)
• Dr. Grumpy, in his naval historian hat, summarizes the Battle of Jutland (100 years ago) and highlights a hero.  With video.
• Democrat suggests dumping Trump.

  Trump is not merely a Republican dilemma, but an American tragedy. Ideally, conservatives would acknowledge their role in enabling his candidacy, in moving the boundaries of acceptable rhetoric so far from reason that he can lie indiscriminately without fear of correction by journalists anxious for their next story. But more immediately, Republicans must find ways to defend their principles without capitulation to a vulgarian seemingly without principles of any sort. Trump deserves more than defeat by my party. He and his enthusiasts and enablers must be publicly, popularly shamed by all citizens who see him as a political cancer.

Imagine My Surprise

• Candidate Trump exposes the Dirty Secret (it was no secret, but it was definitely dirty) of Republican racism.
• Jesse Curtis:

  To be clear, Trump is not, at this stage, leading a fascist movement. Nor, in my judgment, is he ever likely to. But what is genuinely terrifying about Trump's emergence is that it shows the safeguards we thought our political system had built up are not there at all. Trump is so far beyond the pale, so manifestly unfit to exercise power, that the level of support he garners can be used to measure the health of our political system. The patient is more sick than we realized.

• Tomorrow is both designated and actual Memorial Day; remember those who fell fighting for this country.
• And have some Prince. 

More Straws in the Typhoon

• The problems with the TSA and why the presidential candidates don't discuss them.

  Ironically, the only people not talking about the crisis are presumptive presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That's because neither flies commercial and neither rubs elbows with poor schleps like us.
  
  The problem when everyone except presidential candidates is talking? There's a lot of hokum being served up, regurgitated by instant experts and presented to a tired, impatient nation as a panacea for long security lines.

  Joe Brancatelli, The Business Journals.  [ETA:  See also Southern Beale's post on the subject.]
  
• Last clown standing, or the weakness of Mr. T.  Lance Mannion:

  The political press has been expecting him to make the pivot. They’ve been predicting he’ll make it any time now. They’re not so secretly begging him to make it. They need him to start acting and sounding like a “normal” Republican candidate for President---and keep in mind the political press still believes the GOP is the party of responsible, grown-up moderates and a “normal” Republican is a center-rightists whose only real concern is keeping rich people’s taxes low, as if that’s not such a bad thing---they need him to act and sound “presidential” in order to give them an excuse to cover him as if he is. Sure, they love the clown act because it’s ratings and clickbaiting gold. But they also know it’s offensive, despicable, and disgusting and may cost him the election. I don’t think the press on the whole wants him to win. What they want is for him not to blow it too soon. They want it to be a horserace to the very end. They don’t want him falling down at the first turn. They want to be able to cover the campaign in a way that allows them to treat both him and Hillary as the same. They want to be able to criticize her without it looking trivial and fatuous in comparison to all the things they should be criticizing him for.

• What the media apparently doesn't understand about the email situation.  Crooks and Liars' shelleyp reports.
• ETA:  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

  It does also go on to show one meme regarding this issue is true - our children would be safer in a bathroom with a transgender person than they would be with a Republican.

  capper, Crooks and Liars.

Soundtrack.

The Presidential Thing

Hillary presses the flesh in Oakland at early morning meeting with local leaders.

Bernie is coming to Oakland on Monday.

Donald says there's no drought.  (As if he'd know!)

California's primary is June 7.

Speaking of metaphors, Chauncey DeVega fleshes out his wrestling analogy.

Haystacks, Calhoun

There is no theme.  There are only links.  Tabs have to be closed.  It's all the wrong Ring cycle.

• Robert Reich (AlterNet) advises Ms. Clinton and Mr. Sanders to kiss and make up face some hard realities about their respective campaigns.
• Karoli Kuns (Crooks and Liars) on the Benghazi time-wasting probes and Trey Gowdy.
• Is America sliding into fascism?  (Robert Kagan, Washington Post)

  This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how. Today, there is Putinism, which also has nothing to do with belief or policy but is about the tough man who single-handedly defends his people against all threats, foreign and domestic.
  
  To understand how such movements take over a democracy, one only has to watch the Republican Party today.
  
  [...]
  
  What these people do not or will not see is that, once in power, Trump will owe them and their party nothing. He will have ridden to power despite the party, catapulted into the White House by a mass following devoted only to him.

  Read the whole thing. Really.  Although you may want to read this post by Yastreblyansky afterward.
  
• A little lawsuit in Wisconsin.  (capper, Crooks and Liars)
• The self-stinging scorpion strikes again.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars) (Southern Beale is also on the case.)
• Steve M. (No More Mr. Nice Blog, although I first saw the article at Crooks and Liars) on John ("Torture Fan") Yoo's approval of Donald Trump's Supreme Court possibilities.  (Warning:  Not for anyone with a working imagination.)
• Anti-biotic resistant bacteria are here.  Well, in the United States.

  Even more alarming, the MCR-1 gene can transfer resistance to other bacterium through small bits of DNA called plasmids, meaning the gene can pass between species of bacterium as opposed to remaining contained to one species.
  
  “The fear is that this could spread to other bacteria and create the bacterium that would be resistant to everything,” Dr. Beth Bell, director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told ABC News.

  (Elizabeth Preza, AlterNet)
• Taking on Megan McArdle's state of denial, in this corner, Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark).
• Pruning Shears:

  The right wing commentariat has responded to all of this by literally ignoring it. [...] He’s unelectable, they say. Boorish, immodest, not a conservative, doesn’t support traditionally conservative principals, and so on. All true, but irrelevant. They’re basically saying they’re mad at the voters, which, who cares? Work that out with your therapist, not your audience.
  
  What’s relevant is what they literally cannot bring themselves to look at how a Republican party that prioritizes their ideals could nominate Donald Trump. I understand why they can’t bear to grapple with it, because the answer is a very unhappy one for them: The party, as represented by its base, does not actually prioritize any of those things. Perhaps it hasn’t for a long time; Donald Trump is just the first to test the hypothesis.

"Willkomen, Bienvenue, Welcome..."

Mathematical Elimination Nomination

Donald Trump has clinched.  Schedule for playoffs not yet set.

Chauncey DeVega (Indomitable) and Karoli Kuns (Crooks & Liars) remind us of how short Mr. Trump falls in the presidential department.

In Memoriam

• Mell Lazarus, cartoonist.  (NYTimes obit.)
• Donald W. Duncan, Vietnam anti-war activist and former Green Beret, whose obituary appeared 7 years after his death.  (NYTimes Insider story)

  We decided to pursue the obituary, the seven years notwithstanding. The thinking was, If we would have written about Mr. Duncan immediately after he died — and we would have, had we known — then we should apply the same standard now. His death, in a sense, was still news, and his story still deserved to be told. What’s more, in an odd way, the very obscurity of his death added an unexpected, even poignant, element.

War on (Some) Drugs (and Some People)

• Down With Tyranny! on getting medical marijuana to veterans' hospitals.
• Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone on the way the United States avoids ending the drug war.

In Memoriam

• Jim Ray Hart, SF Giants 3rd baseman
• Alan Young, actor (Mister Ed)

In Memoriam

Morley Safer made the news twice this week:

1. Morley Safer to retire from 60 Minutes on Sunday, May 15.
2. Morley Safer, veteran journalist, dies. 

Thoughts on Them

No, not the movie, although giant ants will show up later.

I was enjoying my morning open-eye with some nutritionally incorrect belly-filler when I ran across Driftglass's post, "Today in Republican Detachment Disorder:  Michael Gerson," which contains a quotation from the said Mr. Gerson:

Conservatives latched on to the GOP as an instrument to express their ideals. Now loyalty to party is causing many to abandon their ideals. Conservatism is not misogyny. Conservatism is not nativism and protectionism. Conservatism is not religious bigotry and conspiracy theories. Conservatism is not anti-intellectual and anti-science.

(Original here.)

As it was for some of Drifty's commenters, so for me:  Oh, really?  Really?  Oh, Mr. Gerson, you need to get out more.  (Ideally, that sentence would have a link to conservatives being misogynist, nativist, protectionist, bigoted, conspiracy-mongering, and pig-ignorant, but Breitbart.com and nationalreview.com get enough traffic.)  Seriously, that's what conservatives are known for.  The people on the left espousing that sort of thing are few, and I can't think of any examples outside of Josef Stalin, who has been dead and discredited even by hard-core Marxists for the last 60+ years.

Technically, I should be a conservative.  I'd prefer not being socked with change first thing in the morning, I like the people in charge to have ethics/morals, I remember a Golden Age (your Golden Age may vary).  There are times when I get the sense that humans have a propensity, nay, a bent, for stupid behavior only curbable by laws (and punishment), other humans, and operant conditioning.

Difference is that I don't think people are incurable.  I suspect they'd prefer to be; change is hard and many people don't have even the desire.  Most of us do not throw our feces at strangers now except on the Internet because we were trained not to do that.  Many of us have not figured that women are people (and that includes a not inconsiderable number of women).  We have developed more sophisticated methods of murder and more sophisticated ways of saving life.  We are nowhere near the Kingdom of God.

So.  My actual beef with the conservative tendency is personal, too, but mostly I am not interested in returning to the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth century.  I don't need the hypocrisy, the misogyny, the bigotry, or the twisted anti-Communism (the usual disclaimer:  I grew up with virulent anti-Communism.  It was an American Thing in the '50s and '60s.  I still don't want to live under a Communist regime.  And I'm still down with the idea that, say, the gap between rich and poor does not need to be the size of the Grand Canyon.  Deal.), and conservatives don't really seem to have anything to add to the modern discourse except the word "No."  (But they'll still use modern communication devices.  Go figure.)

I'm willing to let them go off to palisaded enclaves where they can mumble among themselves, but they seem to want to run my life.

No.

Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark) calls out Ross Douthat, who wrote an apologia column in the New York Times (link for documentation purposes only) which both she and Yastreblyansky have well and truly horsewhipped in the last several days.  She's had enough, though, and is now expressing her opinion of the scribblings of Mr. Douthat pungently.  One might say Rudely. Warning:  Adult language is used:

In the end, the only thing conservatives have to sell is racism.

Conservatives tried to pretend they were selling firm morals, but since they were lying the truth was eventually revealed.

[...]

Actually, no. Douthat is trying to switch the dialogue away from conservative racism by trolling liberals. Liberals owe bigots nothing and should offer bigots nothing. That is painfully obvious but that would be the end of Douthat's career, which is based on religious, racial, and class bigotry. But mostly racism. So Douthat must find a way to convince liberals to give racists respect and a place at the table of public opinion, instead of telling them to fuck off as they should.

Seriously.  I joke about reactionaries wanting to restore the Bourbons in France, but you have to remember that their idea of Eutopia (spelling deliberate) is a monarchy in which they are nobles and all others are peasantry.  And we have enough high fantasy novels as it is.

(There was other stuff, but this got long.  There should be footnotes [squeaky voice:  "No, not footnotes!"] but most of the assertions are easily checked with Google or older posts here and too many other blogs to mention.  There's iced tea [unsweetened] in the fridge.)

Range

• Clayton Kershaw taking on the mantle of Sandy Koufax.  (Faith and Fear in Flushing.)
• Shifting operating costs to government.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid.)
• Permaculture:  Not just sustainable gardening.  (naked capitalism.)
• Uncertainty as valuable mindset.  (walk on.)

  It might seem strange to think of uncertainty as a skill to be cultivated, but it is precisely that. Abiding in uncertainty is uncomfortable. It strips us of our easy assumptions and continually confronts us with the possibility that we may be wrong. It is much easier to be certain.

• What bigots can teach us, or what comes between Brooke Shields and her Calvins.  (Yes, that's an obscure old reference to advertising.  Try Google.) (The Rectification of Names.)
• In Memoriam:  Madeleine LeBeau, the last living cast member of Casablanca.

Why do I get the impression that the people screaming about perverts in bathrooms want in fact to be perverts in bathrooms?  (See fourth paragraph.)  (I stopped into Bloomie's this afternoon, and there was a single-stall outhouse restroom next to the ladies' loo.  Although some people will complain about that.)

"Authenticity," *ahem*, Hypocrisy, and Horror

Not necessarily in that order.  Besides, lunch is hinting at me.

• Lance Mannion on what "authenticity" means in Politician Land.

  As I mentioned, the point of “authenticity”, to the extent there is a point beyond giving lazy and bored journalists something easy and amusing to write about, is that an authentic politician is one who shows how well she’s at home in the company of regular folks, that she is to some “authentic” degree herself just like regular folks. Hillary’s reviews on this score are generally poor. The critics regularly find her performances lacking in that kind of authenticity.
  
  But there are millions of women and girls not just in the United States but around the world who believe she’s been authentic in her commitment since she was in college to making their lives better, that she has worked authentically and with passion and success on their behalf, and they love her for it and will vote for her with the enthusiasm the reviewers agree she doesn’t inspire. Millions of men will too. Many of them white working class men. Hard to believe, I know. But it’s true. There are working class white men who love and admire her and going by what the pundits and analysts seem to think working class white men are the most regular folks of all the regular folks.
  
  But that doesn’t make her regular folks. She’s not regular folks. None of them are. They didn’t get where they are and achieve what they’ve achieved by being regular folks. In fact, a good deal of their success is due to their having determined early in life to distinguish themselves from regular folk. They didn’t think of themselves as regular folk. They hoped and worked for a life for themselves better than that.

• "Mandatory for thee but not for me."  The Rude Pundit, being less rude than usual.
• Ralph Nader being strange.  No More Mister Nice Blog with bonus Life of Brian video clip.
• Trump.  (Yastreblyansky, The Rectification of Names)

  On the minimum wage and taxes, he hasn't "moved to the left" either so much as danced around them, changing his positions several times per week, sometimes even per day.
  
  [...]
  
  And then explains everything he's said is only a "suggestion". So it's really just stupidity, and clickbaiting. We really need to get over the idea that there's a parallel between liberal or progressive or whatever on the one hand and conservative on the other. Where the progressive starts with the idea of a problem that needs to be solved, and some people that need some help, and a concept of looking for an appropriate relief through policy, the conservative starts with this sense of aggrieved identity and loss, nostalgia for a time when good people like "us" had power over bad people like "them", and a desire to "take our country back" in which the idea of any particular policy can be no more than a rationalization.

• More from Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark) on income inequality, Megan McArdle vs. Noah Smith debating.
• Climate change effect.  (Lawyers, Guns & Money)
• Arranged marriage conference and the rationale for "underage" betrothal.

  So, let’s review. Young people should marry before age 20. Girls should have breasts, but not be 12. So probably like at least 15. The betrothal, which happens before the official legal marriage, is binding. This way parents can betroth children who may not yet be legally able to marry in their state. The matches should be arranged by the fathers, and ideally the teenage boy’s father should pay a “bride price” to the teenage girl’s family. The young people in question are expected to accept the matches their parents arrange for them, period and full stop, and there is no reason to consult them in the process—it is their duty to accept the arrangement.

• And a little more avoidable fail in Kentucky.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)

I had better water my stock and boil scramble an egg

Dobladillos

Two from Driftglass:

• "Stop Sucking at Journalism"
• "Not Just a River in Egypt"

No, thanks, I'm watching Roman Holiday.

Inefficient Coefficients

• Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark) on income inequality and Megan McArdle's attempt to justify it.  Tiny taste:

  Please remember that McArdle is just parroting what she hears; she has few thoughts of her own. This is what your betters say about you as you take the bus to your under--paid jobs. You're inferior.
  [...]
  The government can spend money if it will help the rich but not the poor. They don't deserve it anyway, do they?
  
  So their taxes can be used to do drug research so Pharma can make higher profits for people rich enough to own drug companies and drug stock. The government can write laws that separate productivity from wages to further enrich the rich. It can write and enforce laws to protect the rich's property. It can enforce only regulations that keep the rich alive and healthy. But doing anything to benefit the poor will destroy the country.

• Turns out the West Fertilizer explosion in Texas was not an accident.

  It's bad enough that all the safety precautions that should have prevented the explosion were ignored or never in place due to Texas ignoring the issue of worker safety. But for this to be a deliberate fire to cause the explosion? That's hideous.

  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
• Cerberus at Sadly, No! whales on Rod Dreher gibbering on transgender people.

  But what’s amazing isn’t that Rod Dreher is more full of shit than Donald Trump at a [coprophilia] conference. It’s how even the made-up bullshit story of “a friend of mine knew a guy who heard from an email chain” type myth-making still can’t manage to think of a genuinely concerning thing the demonic trans people are doing to provoke such a frightened response.
  
  And that’s kind of amazing right now. Bigots are so convinced that everyone is just as terrified by the mere concept of a woman who was assigned male at birth as they are, that they mumble in confusion when anyone tries to ask them what exactly people are supposed to be afraid of when faced with the prospect that trans people may go to school or stand in line or poop in a toilet. Like a human being. Like, seriously, creepers, stop peeping on people in the bathrooms. It’s gross.

Bonus video palate cleanser:  David Axelrod in conversation with Jon Stewart.  Via News From me.  With the question-and-answer period.

In Memoriam

William Schallert, actor and union president; if you watched TV anytime in the past 60 years, you've seen him.

Two-Fer

• Comrade Misfit points out a statistic.  (Not exactly, but it's as accurate as anything from Breitbart.com.)  
• Rep. Alan Grayson schools Rep. Dana Rohrabacher in one sentence.  (With video.  Crooks and Liars.)

Purple Iridescent Nail Polish, Please

Southern Beale reported this morning on a Gizmodo article alleging that news "curators" at Facebook had blocked news of interest to conservatives.  (SFGate.com had the story.) She said (after posting that day's newsfeed):

Forget the liberal or conservative bias part here. Does anyone see any actual news in this thing? Good lord, it’s like People magazine: celebrity news and human interest BS. It’s always been this way. Every time I bother to notice my newsfeed, which is rarely, it’s some Kardashian bullshit or something about a waterskiing squirrel. Not even joking here. It’s not news, people!

Doctor Science (Obsidian Wings) had a different reaction:

The trouble with the conservative news sites the Trending curators are discriminating against isn't that they're conservative, it's that they're bad: too much of their "news" is actually deceptive propaganda.

Here's an example. I went over to Breitbart.com this morning, looked at the front page, and picked out the item with the most comments. This story would probably be showing up as Trending on Facebook, if that list wasn't curated: Paul Ryan Says U.S. Must Admit Muslim Migrants, Sends Kids to Private School that Screens Them Out.

This article, credited to Julia Hahn, is both deceptive and poisonous.

It's deceptive because takes some actual facts, twists the way they're described, then puts them together with unrelated facts to be as inflamatory as possible.

[emphasis in original]

A Gritty Pearl...

Yastreblyansky (The Rectification of Names) gets sarcastic about David Brooks' attempt to reform education to "conservative" ends.  Someone had to do it.

But the good news is that there are more grits than just the narrow, joyless kind; sure, hard work is unpleasant, grinding, arduous. But you'll get a better score if you put some moral purpose into it!

[...]

I want hyphens in "hard-working" if you're going to put them in "risk-taking". But I digress. Brooks's solution to the serious issue of the GPA system, "one of the more destructive elements in American education", is that it's all up to the kids: they just need to have some moral purpose, be hopeful, and go for the high-grade longing, because that cheap longing isn't going to get you anywhere, frankly.

(...is Michael, LL.D.]

Post-Game Show

• Zandar Versus The Stupid on prognostication failure on the part of paid pundits.

  You see, what all these super-smart white guys missed, or more likely refused to see, is the seething racism that has driven the GOP in the Age of Obama. What Trump offered was, simply, vengeance against those people who elected Obama in 2008.
  
  Deport the Muslims, deport the Mexicans, get the jobs back, stick it to China, build the wall, all this was done to make white guys feel like they should be back on top again, where they belong. It's not "nationalism", Trump absolutely wants America to be the top dog again in the military world, and has time and again talked about using force all the way up to nuclear weapons to deal with ISIS. Likewise, it's not "populism" either as he all but ignored the hot button Republican social wedge issues like gay marriage, abortion, and transphobia.

• Southern Beale's mea culpa.
• Steven Rosenfeld at AlterNet discusses what and whom Mr. Trump appeals to.

  But it’s not just dread. Trump supporters have an anger and a desire to assign blame and to get even, noted Tufecki, who has been tracking their views and sentiments by studying their social media posts and attending their campaign rallies. She wrote about this in a March column for the New York Times, where she described a self-reinforcing bubble. “Many of the Trump supporters whom I’ve been following say that they no longer trust any big institutions, whether political parties or media outlets,” she said. “Instead, they share personal stories that support their common narrative, which mixes falsehoods and facts—often ignored by these powerful institutions they now loathe—with the politics of racial resentment.”

   
• Lance Mannion partially corroborates.
• Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark) works over a Megan McCardle article on regulations and businesses.

  We can plainly see McArdle doesn't believe the government has the right to regulate businesses. How dare they take charge of ensuring businesses give lunch breaks to their employees? That right should only belong to the man who promised to "improve... expense levels." Employees are one of, if not the, largest expenses of a company and we are well accustomed to seeing minimum wage employees forced to work at will and whim, work overtime without additional pay, and work at lunch time and break time. Like Ross Douthat, if something doesn't fit McArdle's worldview she ignores it.

• Mark Evanier on a possible Republican cunning plan.
• Terrance (Republic of T) rounds up Republican dismay.

Pent-up disgruntlement.  Who'd'a thunk?

Scraping Off My Shoes

Sorry.  That's what this post is.

• Stupid. (Sarah P, Crooks and Liars)

  I wonder how the local and state law enforcement feel about this recommendation. Their law enforcement officers have now been put on notice that if they pull a firearm on a potential law breaking citizen, that Michelle Fiore has advised them to pull their firearm and point it back at said law enforcement.
  
  [...]
  
  Unless you are black or Hispanic. Or a child. Or holding a bb gun. Like, Tamir Rice, Andy Lopez, Dedric Colvin, or Jamar Nicholson.
  
  Oh wait, those were kids holding fake guns. And they were not aiming at police. So they SHOULD have aimed at police or not? Because in all these cases, these kids were playing with toys, albeit decent replicas, and were shot or killed for just playing.

• Pecunium, Better Than Salt Money, on the foreign policy qualifications of Mr. Trump.

  He’s no dove. He’s not a hawk. He’s a toddler, who wants you to think it’s reasonable to give him a sawed-off shotgun, with a hair trigger.

• Mr. Cruz emits gibberish.  (John Amato, Crooks and Liars)
• In memoriam:  Imre Kertész. Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor.