Poker Polka

• A little bouquet from Goblinbooks:
  
  • "Pranking" the babysitter
  • Indefinite subject
    
  • Supression, not sopresata
• Scat rude.  (The Rude Pundit.  Being Rude.)
• Traditional music of the season.

In Memoriam

New York Times obits:

• Tammy Grimes, actress (mostly stage)
• James Galanos, designer

Les citations

• We begin with Oliver Willis:

  If you are faced with bigotry and racism and hate, and you bend yourself into a pretzel-like shape in order to excuse it, you aren’t much better than the bigot in question. Racism and hatred must always be challenged, always be opposed. It isn’t just a “point of view,” it is a cancer on public discourse that must be exposed to blinding light and stamped out.

• Badtux talks about election fraud as practiced in Louisiana. Notice anything?

  This is how you steal elections. This is how we did it in Louisiana, this is how it was done in Chicago back in the day. You don’t do it by registering Daffy Duck, because Daffy Duck’s voter registration card would get returned as “addressee unknown” and he’d be struck from the rolls. You aren’t going to do it by hiring tens of thousands of people to show up and impersonate dead or moved voters — how are you going to recruit tens of thousands of people without tipping your hand that you’re doing something ridiculously illegal? Have you ever even *tried* hiring that many people within a few weeks’ time while keeping it secret? That’s insane!
  
  No, you’re not going to do it that way. You’re going to do it by methods that require the involvement of relatively few people, but which can amount to tens of thousands of votes. Specifically, you’re going to do it by ways that suppress the vote for your opponent (rigging the machines, intimidation / cuts in hours / etc. at polling places in precincts that support your opponent) and by voting the nursing homes (absentee ballot fraud) to inflate your own vote. You’re not going to do bullshit like registering illegals and trotting thousands of people past polling places doing voter impersonation. It’s too damned easy to get caught that way, because how the fuck can you keep something secret if thousands of people (as versus dozens of people) know about it? And if you don’t keep it secret, you go to jail. Crap, I don’t know any politician who wants to be elected enough that he’d take this almost 100% chance of exchanging his suit and power tie for prison stripes!
  
  So why are Republicans so fixated on the vote fixing methods that *won’t* work? Well, it’s because they get to do #3 (and to a certain extent #4) in a different way if they float this bullshit about “voter impersonation” and “illegals voting”. In short, Republicans have invented this “voter impersonation” and “registration fraud” bullshit in order to rig votes the good ole’ fashioned Louisiana way — by depressing the vote of opponents to their rule via intimidation and via striking people off the voting rolls who’ve been voting since before I was born half a century ago.

  I got this via a comment at Just An Earth Bound Misfit, I, who was highlighting a Des Moines Register article (Warning:  Music plays on opening) on someone who'd voted twice because she was convinced the polls were rigged.  Meanwhile, there were two women in Florida (!) practicing their own version of fakery.  Ineptly, I might add.
  
• Yes, that is Beethoven's 9th in the background.  
• Happy Hallowe'en to those who celebrate.  And to those who don't, take that stick out.

In Memoriam

• Sheri S. Tepper, sf author.  (John Scalzi notes her passing.) 
• John Zacherle, TV horror host (and later dj), sometimes called the Cool Ghoul.

...And That's the Line. Right There.

Paging Mr. Mussolini...Mr. Benito Mussolini, to the green courtesy phone, please...Mr. Mussolini...Paging Dr. Duvalier....Dr. François Duvalier, to the red courtesy phone, please...Dr. Duvalier...Paging, um, Chairman Mao...Chairman Mao Zedong, to the orange courtesy phone, please...Chairman Mao...

Call your respective offices, please.  You have an aspirant.

ETA: Video.  (Mock, Paper, Scissors)


[ETA:  Sure, he may be joking.  And I may be King Charles III.]

"Traveling Eternity Road, What Will You Find There?"

First let me say that tracking the game yesterday at the MLB site is weird.  I'm not watching on Fux and I'm not a subscriber to MLB.tv, so I followed along on their graphic representation of the game, which was ...

(I got into baseball as a child--I have told that story before--through listening to it on the radio.  There are certain disadvantages to that method, one of which is that I don't know what a split-finger four-seam lightly tongued fastball looks like.  Although Bugs Bunny was sort of a tutorial.)

... silent.

On the radio and TV, the audience gets both the play-by-play and incidental chatter meant to fill the silences and gaps between action impart the lore of this storied game.  In the graphic representation, none of that happens.  Totally mit out sound.  There's an image of a batter in the batter's box (right or left, with the uniforms facing the correct way) against a backdrop of stadium.  The strike zone is indicated by a rectangle divided into 9 parts approximating the width of home plate and the length between knees and midchest.  Trajectory of incoming balls (there must be a device recording this stuff behind home plate) is shown graphically.

And that's it.  There's other information--batting order, strikes and balls, strikeouts, walks, doubles, scoring, the usual statistics.  But silent.

I have to check that out again this evening.

Oh, and Cleveland won the first game.  6-0.

---

And now for sewer-side:

• Meta family structure and political/moral value beliefs.  Doug Muder, from 2005, and still prescient.
• Echidne of the Snakes warns of the threat of the alt-right.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid on a deliberately-engineered glitch in Obamacare.  (The Republican governors' non-expansion of Medicaid, that is, not the fact that healthy people aren't getting health insurance as much as unhealthy people are.)

  Republican governors refusing to take money set aside to soften the blow for consumers through expanded Medicaid and health insurance companies bailing out of the single-plan market have largely succeeded in damaging the system in enough states to put the burden on shifting costs to premiums[...]

• Two-fer:
  
  • Yastreblyansky:

    That's really about it. I can't understand why he skips the obvious solution, which is monarchy. If you have a king then he can appoint all 30 or 40 of the nation's true conservatives to run the legal and governmental and cultural and intellectual establishments and the lack of votes isn't a problem, which completely eliminates the other problem, of meritocracy, in which liberals keep winning out just because they do better in their exams. Monarchy, and a judicious use of prison torture and capital punishment. And it's very alt-right, which is so fashionable just now.

  • Driftglass:

    Today was the day it began to dawn on H. Pecksniff Rosencrantz "Ross" Douthat III that he and every other card-carrying member of the professional Conservative Brain Caste really really suck at their job:
    
    [...]
    
    What Mr. Douthat is trying gently suggest is that if Dubya hadn't lied American into the wrong war and hadn't fucked that war up something something New American Century!
    
    What Mr. Douthat is desperately trying not to say is "Holy shit, the Left really was right about us smug little assholes all along!"
    
    [...]
    
    For the record, it has taken less than the gestation period of the average porcupine for Donald J. Trump (and that vengeful bitch Karma) to force both of the New York Times' highly-paid professional Conservative Public Intellectuals into clenched-teeth admissions that they have have never really had the slightest fucking clue as to what was going on inside the Conservative movement, the Republican party or America in general[.]

    (See the post for the Douthat quotes, or go to the New York Times [linked in post] to get the full experience.)
    
  • ETA:  Now three-fer:  Susan of Texas (Hunting of the Snark):

    The purpose of academia is to gain knowledge and pass it on to our young. Bureaucracies exist to run the business of governing, the entertainment industry exists to make money, and the legal establishment exists to create, maintain, and enforce a code of law. None of these organizations owe conservatives a living. If these organizations are meritocracies, moreover, then the cream will rise and the dregs will fall. The same conservative philosophies that glorify individual achievement and success through hard work and discipline should make whining for more power, money, and jobs a humiliating task. Sadly, however, Douthat is forced to admit that competence has a liberal bias.
    
    Since, as Douthat admits, the conservative elite don't have enough brain or artistic power to succeed in lucrative and/or prestigious profession[s], they must depend on their base's power to get jobs. But once again, an impediment stands in their way. After yanking around, lying to, and ignoring their followers, the followers no longer trust their elite.

    (Ahem. It's called "reaping what one sows."  A conservative value.)
• The ballot ( I vote absentee; there's usually a 50-50 chance I won't be here in November) for federal, state, and county offices and various propositions is four pages long, and the pages are approximately 11 x 17.
• Conspiracy satire, from Paul Bibeau.

  It makes the Trumpkins crazy. The worst thing for a conspiracy theorist is to discover an actual fact. They go insane over it. It's like chumming the water around a few dozen tiger sharks. You give them a little bit of detail, and what happens? They're out there on Twitter and Facebook trying to convince their friends and family that every time John Podesta had a conference call it was so he could help the Fed put tracking chips in your Lucky Charms. They sound angry and unhinged, and the fact that their niece with the big H on her profile doesn't care makes them even more angry and unhinged. Nothing sells a seventh Clinton term like Trumpkins frothing and ripping their hair out.

• Pernicious is the word; more on voter suppression with loud cries over non-existent fraud.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
• Bringing the day the Hollywood Walk of Fame is enclosed to a depth of 4 inches of plastic and requires airline-travel levels of security to visit closer:  Vandal destroys Trump's Walk of Fame star.  More details from Oliver Willis.

• And as we all know perfectly well, The Gingrich Rules can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom where they were forged.

  Driftglass. Because...
  

Musings

1. Since this is the last day to register to vote in California (deadline date is on all the buses!), it's time to revisit the smelly carcass of canard that is Fear of Voters.
   
   • It is possible that Republicans don't realize that there are more city-dwellers than suburbanites and rural people.  (David Atkins, "Political Animal," Washington Monthly)

     More people live in cities than live outside of them. And we vote. Legally. Usually for Democrats. And exurban Republicans tend to dramatically underestimate just how many of us there are.

   • Reposting the link to the Brennan Center for Justice's report on voter fraud, posted in 2007.
     
   • "Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth" updates the Brennan Center's report (downloadable PDF available).  One example:

     Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a longtime proponent of voter suppression efforts, argued before state lawmakers that his office needed special power to prosecute voter fraud, because he knew of 100 such cases in his state. After being granted these powers, he has brought six such cases, of which only four have been successful. The secretary has also testified about his review of 84 million votes cast in 22 states, which yielded 14 instances of fraud referred for prosecution, which amounts to a 0.00000017 percent fraud rate.

2. People stretching really hard to hear what they want to hear.
3. Racism and xenophobia poison everything. (Brian Ross, The Huffington Post.  Small amount of handwavium in evidence.)

Impossible Dream

So.  The Cubs face the Cleveland Indians on Tuesday.

Gedanken

Yeah, the mechanism is creaky, but it still works.

• Jake Tapper was interviewing Curt Schilling (whom I respect as a pitcher, much as I do Jim Bunning, but whose politics I despise, much as I do Jim Bunning's, but Bunning is retired and Schilling never pitched a perfect game.  I have standards) when the latter got ... weirdly anti-Semitic and tried to lasso Mr. Tapper into playing that game.  He wants to run against Elizabeth Warren. Mostly the voters in Massachusetts have better sense than to elect him, but he was a hero of the Red Sox curse-breakers.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars.  See also the update.)
• Yastreblyansky takes a whack at Mr. Brooks (following Driftglass's thorough evisceration of a Brooks column, linked in both posts) and points out that Mr. B. is trying to legitimize Mr. "No Sex, Just Lies on Videotape" O'Keefe, apparently in the name of "repairing moral capital." And this is where I have to say that when I hear conservatives talk about morals or morality, I (a) make sure my wallet is in a safe place and (b) start scanning the media for the incoming scandal, because there's always a brewing incoming scandal.  
• I like the idea of balancing the budget; I have, however, noticed that the people who are supposed to bear the belt-tightening are never legislators, millionaires, billionaires, or large and/or multinational businesses.  Also, when taxes were "lowered," fees for the services formerly covered by taxes were imposed.  Also, remember inflation, the bugaboo of the '70s?  It never really went away.  It just slowed down.  Somewhat.  
• Speaking of economics, naked capitalism has an article by Lynn Parramore on what economists fail to understand about race.  (A lot, apparently.)

  Asked if there have been improvements in the way academic economics tackle issues of inequality since his student days in the 1970s, Darity does not have particularly good news:
  
  “Actually, I think it’s shifted even further to the right so that alternative approaches are even more marginalized now,” he says. “The ideological content of economics is masked somewhat by the high degree of technical requirements. So in some respects I think economics is even less open than it was when I was first exposed to the field.”

  "Stratification economics" looks at this situation.
• When I see the term "intellectual elite" in the first paragraph of an article, I reach for my revolver tend to suspect the point of view of the rest of the article, and this is a piece that raises all sorts of red flags ("red" flags, get it?), but being reminded of the long history of the populist tendency in the United States and the dangers thereof (yes, I said "thereof."  The pearls are in the next room) is useful.  (Anis Shivani, AlterNet)

  Whether or not Trump is a neo-fascist is less interesting than tracing his similarities to European right-wing populists like Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider, Umberto Bossi, Gianfranco Fini, and others. It can’t be denied that every extreme right-wing movement has a tendency to slip into overt fascism at times, as when entire populations are targeted for exclusion and punishment. But to understand Trumpism we are better off searching for familiar strains in American populism, from Father Coughlin to George Wallace, from Huey Long to Pat Buchanan. I mention Long, the populist governor of Louisiana during the Great Depression, because there are elements of Trump’s critique that have something of the redistributive element as well, though Coughlin’s charismatic media presence, Wallace’s appeal to white supremacy and Buchanan’s America First xenophobia and protectionism are clearer markers of Trumpism’s homegrown origins.
  
  [...]
  
  Trumpism and allied movements cannot take on globalization without also taking on multiculturalism. The neo-populists see no way around neoliberal globalization except through overcoming multiculturalism. They see those unfairly benefiting from the multicultural model as being the cause of their misery, their perpetual uncertainty in the new economy, because there is no telling when their jobs might be permanently lost due to lower wages in other countries or because of unfair competition from immigrants who ought to have less of a rightful claim than natives. Whether it’s called France for the French, Germany for the Germans, or Make America Great Again, the idea is the same.

  It is an unwritten rule that invoking -isms is a hallmark of stuff trying to sound profound.
• "Why the Media is Botching the Election." (Brian Beutler, New Republic.  Say no more.  I can say no more.)

• The dark carnival that is the Trump Campaign continues to limp onto the ash heap of history by butt-scooting it's crackpot theories and racist demagoguery all over the hallowed ground of Gettysburg. I'm not sure which Trump brain-wizard decided that the sight of a doomed racist cause making a suicidal charge into the teeth of overwhelming force was the very best metaphor on which to begin the final chapter of the campaign of their unhinged orange fire demon, but I hope they got their money up front.

  Driftglass. Who is running his annual fundraiser. SEND HIM SOME MONEY!
  
• ETA:  [Yes!  I know!] Bruce Springsteen does not care for Trump.  (Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, at AlterNet)

Probably more than you want on a Saturday afternoon. Take your time.

Clean-up on Aisle i

Richard Eskow (ourfuture.com) on the third debate and what was wrong with the debates this time.

But moments like these are just that: moments, without much meaning. They’re flash photos, jump cuts, shooting stars in an attention-deficit media universe. They’re never fully explored or explained, just left to linger as afterimages on instant replay.

Clinton and Trump had three ninety-minute debates. That’s four and half hours altogether.

Four and a half hours with no detailed discussion of economic inequality.

Four and a half hours with no in-depth talk about long-term unemployment, under-employment, or stagnant wages.

And so on.  Reposted in Crooks and Liars.

Background Reading: Presidential Debate Division

Right here:

If you’re finding this title a little offensive, wait until you read the true story that inspired it. And if you’re wondering why our Presidential Debates are the opposite of everything you’d like them to be, well, this story will provide you with the exact, irrefutable answer… but you’re not going to like it.

Memo Salazar, Medium (via cyberwulf's comment at SVKA Refugees) "No Girls Allowed."

The Neverending Story

• Perhaps Republicans believe senior citizens will all go out and get janitorial jobs.  (Down With Tyranny.)

  Bernie [Sanders] pointed out that the 0.3% increase announced yesterday amounts to an average of $4/month for the typical Social Security recipient. "Seniors and disabled veterans need more help than a few extra dollars in their monthly checks," he said. "These are the people who built this country-- our parents, our grandparents and our soldiers. At a time when senior poverty is going up and more than two-thirds of the elderly population rely on Social Security for more than half of their income, we must do everything we can to expand Social Security. Seniors and disabled veterans deserve a fair cost-of-living adjustment to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs and health care. Unfortunately, the increase announced today doesn’t come close to doing that."

• Crooked Timber is going to moderated comments.  
• The Rude One dismisses Gary Johnson (and barely bothers with Jill Stein).
• Metaphor at Southern Beale.
• The verdict at Balloon Juice.  
• ETA:  Driftglass leaps in.

"I can't stop talking 'bout love."

Triple Threat

• Via Mark Evanier, who excerpts 2 paragraphs to make a point, an interview with Senator Bernie Sanders in the New Republic.
• Senator Elizabeth Warren beats on Trump's lack of qualification for office like the traditional rented mule lambastes Mr. Trump's unfitness for office.  She may have Curt Schilling running against her in 2018.
• Guess who has endorsed Trump?  (Chauncey DeVega sounds the alarm.)

  Will Donald Trump, the Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate, and his basket of human deplorables reign? Or will the American people send them back into the shadows and the dustbin of history? 

  The American people will again have to decide what type of people they want to be and the country they want to have.

*Ahem*

Different conspiracy.

Enough of that.  In other news, Chuck Berry, whose 90th birthday was yesterday, is releasing a new album, his first in 35+ years.

And I missed Banned Books Week, so have a belated link to Vagabond Scholar, who didn't.

There's a Reason I Call It Republican Satanic Panic

Giuliani's "conspiracy theory" of voter fraud.

No, I don't know.  Maybe he thought he was talking to the Jake Tapper of The Onion.  I am reluctant to perform Net psychoanalysis just because someone says something stupid.  Also, I'd have to charge for that service.  Although that would end cash-flow problems for all time, wouldn't it?

Also, if someone is paying folks to vote as dead people, where's my money?

Obvious Riposte

Trump to SNL:  "Time to retire the boring and unfunny show."

Proper SNL comeback:  "You first."

Laughable Menace

• Ominous threat?  Michele Bachmann prophesizes on what a Trump defeat would do.  (David, Crooks and Liars) With audio.  Be right back after my shower.
• Bob Dylan!
• Wins Nobel Prize for Literature!
• Yastreblyansky on his first taste of Dylan (with YouTube audio)
• Driftglass with video for "Things Have Changed."
• This is where I confess to have memorized many of his songs, internalized a few, and generally tried to be honest while living outside the law.  And I still resonate to "Masters of War" and "Visions of Johanna" and that song I can hear but the title escapes me and "Tiny Montgomery Says Hello."
• Guess the party of this candidate.  Just from the headline.

In Memoriam

• King Bhumibol, King of Thailand
• Dario Fo, playwright (and Nobel Prize for literature, practically on the same day this year's winner was announced)
• Patricia Barry, actress
• Richard 'Specs' Simmons, saloonkeeper bar owner
• Modern Times Books 
• Thomas Ford, actor

No, Really?

Not just non-whites, non-rich, women, people whose ancestors only go back three generations, religious minorities, sexual minorities, and Methodists folks with college degrees.

If Republicans are wondering why blacks, women, Hispanics, Asians, and pretty much every non-white-male group in America seems to hate them, this is why. If you want to oppose diversity mandates, that's one thing. There are ways to do it. But to blithely claim that the whole idea is nonsense because no board of directors in America would ever choose a board member for any reason other than pure merit?

And yes, he's only taking a small piece of the problem.

Via skippy, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones.

*Ahem*

• "...a lot of that was done for the purpose of entertainment."   (Video, Crooks and Liars) The purpose of entertainment, he said.  Someone should have explained to him that This Was Burlesque (brief video) closed many years ago, although the burlesque style is being revived in San Francisco.
• Why I love Margaret and Helen.

  Now they are celebrating that Mike Pence can walk and chew gum at the same time. Bless his heart but Pence was so tied in knots that I’m pretty sure he no longer knows whether to check his ass or scratch his watch at this point. He spent the whole night claiming that Donald Trump didn’t say what we all have heard him say. If we learned anything at all from that debate it’s that Tim Kaine really likes being Hillary’s running mate and Mike Pence has never met Donald Trump.

• Why I love Margaret and Helen.

  [HELEN] This man is a misogynist, yes, but that one word falls way short when you consider he also made fun of a disabled person and attacked the grieving parents of a soldier killed in battle only to then accept someone else’s Purple Heart and joke how easy it was to get. I didn’t make any of this up, honey. This man is a…
  
  I still can’t find the word.
  
  [...]
  
  [MARGARET] I believe the word you are looking for is Asshat.

• Comprehensive fiskings of the Other NYTimes conservative columnist by driftglass and Yastreblyansky.  Really.  As RJ sometimes said, set down any beverages before reading.
• I hope it is clear that I will not vote for Trump, right?  No one reading this blog should have the idea that I approve of anything right-wing; I am of the "left" by virtue of being everything the "right" hates, especially the part about having a (currently) working brain.

FYI

Deleting your Yahoo account, if that's what you want to do.

(No, I've never had one.  I might have been allergic to their advertising.)

Speaking of Fossilized Mouse Excreta...

• Out-there voter fraud claim.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars)  Mind you, this is an "organization" that has been screaming about Republican Satanic panic "voter fraud" for years.  With audio.
• Paging The Onion...  Please call your office.  Crooks and Liars has scooped you...no, wait, that's real.  Never mind.

  Alex Jones melted down on his talk show Tuesday morning after learning that Wikileaks' Julian Assange, who boasted about the release of big news today, had actually no damaging documents to release against Hillary Clinton.

   With (slighly edited) video.
• An actual political spoof with video.  (Alexandra Rosenman, AlterNet)
• Yahoo(!) has been snooping on you.

I had several tabs of thought-provoking (that is, juicy) articles open, but the ISP went into Reset mode or something.  Sorry about that.

• Trump's taxes you know about already (although apparently according to his (former) accountant, there's worse), and Colbert gets scathing (video).  (AlterNet)
• Let's just say that Chauncey DeVega is less than complimentary about Mr. Trump.

P.S. 2800th post! Whooooopie!