In Memoriam

• Pauline Oliveros, experimental music composer
• Fritz Weaver, actor

In Memoriam

Ron Glass, actor (Barney Miller and Firefly).  (Tributes.)

In Memoriam

Florence Henderson, actress

Happy Thanksgiving

• I'll be eating this year.  You?
• It's that word "intelligence." 
• The traditional recording of "Alice's Restaurant," complementing a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat.

In Memoriam

•  Ralph Branca, pitcher.
•  Sharon Jones, singer

It's Around Here Somewhere, Yes?

My sanity, that is.

• Via a comment at Making Light:

  Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today.
  
  Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget.
  
  Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.
  
  Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.
  
  [...]
  
  And the plight is beyond party politics: it is not a matter of having a president-elect whom many dislike, but having a president-elect whose explicit goal is to destroy the nation.

  "We're Heading Into Dark Times," Sarah Kendzior, the Correspondent. There's a lot more.  Read the whole thing.
• Two from Driftglass:  
• Unheeded warning from an old Twilight Zone.  Someone [ETA: Driftglass!] had a clip from "The Monsters Are Coming to Due on Maple Street," but I purged history yesterday.  Many people in the '50s--you know, the Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best '50s that "conservatives" think was the ideal time--had, within living memory, seen the endgame of Fascism/Naziism/Right-wing tendencies up close and personal.  There is a reason that it became possible to pass civil rights legislation in the '50s and '60s.  
• Lamenting people cutting off their noses to spite their faces health care, up to a point.

  It saddens me too.
  
  And then I remember that these people also voted to take away my family's health insurance, and my sadness alloys into something else.
  
  If you're holding my family hostage, I'm suddenly a whole lot less interested in your sad back-story that I otherwise might have been.

  Featuring a long quote from Charles Pierce article at Esquire.
• Sarah Lazare, AlterNet, on what the alt-right (ie the Nazis) wants.  Hint:  Not fresh flowers with breakfast every morning.
• More warnings from the Daily Beast.
• The Rude Pundit is taking a breather.
• Forsetti's Justice (tumblr):

  When someone doesn’t trust you and isn’t open to anything not already accepted as true in their belief system, there really isn’t much, if anything you can do. This is why I think the whole, “Democrats have to understand and find common ground with rural America,” is misguided and a complete waste of time. When a three-thousand-year-old book that was written by uneducated, pre-scientific people, subject to translation innumerable times, edited with political and economic pressures from Popes and kings, is given higher intellectual authority than facts arrived at from a rigorous, self-critical, constantly re-evaluating system that can and does correct mistakes, no amount of understanding, no amount of respect, no amount of evidence is going to change their minds, assuage their fears.
  
  Do you know what does change the beliefs of fundamentalists, sometimes? When something becomes personal. Many a fundamentalist have changed their minds about the LGBT community once their loved ones started coming out of the closet.

  It's harsh, but he escaped that environment.
• A doctor fights back.
• Down With Tyranny:

  Meanwhile, between his apparently crazy, Adderall-fueled critiques of the wildly popular Broadway play Hamilton and the weekly TV show Saturday Night Live, Trump's actually managed to get the media's and public's attention off the $25 million settlement he was forced to pay to get out from under 3 of his Trump University fraud lawsuits. [Emphasis added.]

  You may see the word "kakistocracy" bandied about a lot in the next year.
  
• Speaking of election rigging...  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
• ETA:  Susie Bright's call to arms.

  Your condemnations about yesterday do nothing for tomorrow’s opportunities.
  
  None of that matters now.
  
  Connect with friends and family... and strangers, in small and big ways.
  
  Don’t make an isolating personal decisions in the next three months.
  
  This period is going to evolve A LOT in the coming weeks. —No divorces, no disappearing acts, no evictions, no sudden vices, no cutting someone out of your will, no ultimatums… just put a pause on it. You can always return to it in 2017. Right now, ride the wave.

Speaking of Post-Mortems...

The Mahablog:

Because most non-college-educated voters don’t know that Republicans plan to privatize Social Security. Most don’t know that Republicans want to privatize Medicare. Most don’t understand what how the loss of organized labor has hurt all working people.

And that’s because nobody bleeping tells them.

Indeed, if you were to walk up to a standard red state voter and tell him that Republicans are planning to gut Medicare and Social Security, they probably wouldn’t believe you. Republicans like to tell voters that they are the ones who are going to protect Social Security and Medicare from those goofy liberals. However, somehow, they’ve got it in their heads that the Democrats are the party in thrall to Wall Street and the Republicans aren’t.

[Emphasis added.]

So let me repeat those items.  Just in case:

• Republicans plan to privatize Social Security. And I don't see them hiring a lot of old people when the [privatized] accounts crash the next time the stock markets have the vapors. Social Security was enacted during the Depression for a reason.
• Republicans want to privatize Medicare. Because it is now considered uncivilized to put frail elderly folks out on ice floes, and besides, there aren't enough ice floes, what with unmentionable climate change/global warming.
• The loss of organized labor has hurt all working people. Strong unions and labor law were the best friends the workers ever had; corporations are weasels. (If they can be persons, they can be weasels.)

Pass it on!

Between Here and the Night of the Long Knives

So many post-mortems.  So much blame and guilt.  So much sniping.

It took me a week to get around to buying my Booze of Choice for a Ceremonial Drunk (it's in some of Larry Niven's stories about asteroid miners), not that I can have a real Ceremonial Drunk because medications, but less than half of one of those plastic cocktail glasses had to suffice.  Tasty, though.  Prosit.

Yes, of course I was stunned.  I mailed my ballot in a week early so that procrastination would not insure arriving at the (lovely) polling place at 7:30 pm.  I stayed away from the computer all day.

Well.  Everyone was warned.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but Donald Trump won the Electoral College.

Yes, mucho mad scrambling and protesting and acts by creepazoids as well as acts of faith and beauty.  Best analysis is probably at Avedon's Sideshow.  (Aren't all politicians beholden to "Wall Street," or is that just my cynicism?)  I was thinking that this would be a good time to read up on Mussolini and Italian fascism because there are historical parallels.  (Mussolini's full history is instructive for obvious reasons, but I was particularly interested in his climb to power.)

• Mark Morford shares "Five things you can do right now..."  (Actually six things, but we'll let that go.) Although one of his suggestions is to move to a swing state, and, um, no.
• Another suggestion is to support real journalism.  Driftglass has something to say on that score.

  But now that Trump is threatening their privileges and their traditions -- which I agree are very important -- well that is a bridge too fucking far.
  
  Sorry, but no. You were supposed to be our sword in the darkness. You were supposed to be democracy's watcher on the walls. You were supposed to be our shield that guards the land of the free.
  
  And every time you offered us frauds and madmen and gibbering Both Siderists because ratings, you betrayed us. And every time you stayed silent while your colleagues offered up frauds and madmen and gibbering Both Siderists -- every time you sat across the desk from a monster and looked him in the eye and bit your tongue and refused to say the word "monster" because your employer would be displeased -- you deserted your post too.

• And Ken White at Popehat discusses libel laws and Trump.
• The Rude One, of course, got Rude.  In fact, quite Rude.  Really, really, really Rude.  (Read at home.)
• Via Body Impolitic, a crowd-sourced survival guide for folks who may be targeted or who need good information.
• Chauncey DeVega (Indomitable) touches on European reactions and buries American "exceptionalism" (that vampire is hard to kill, though).
• And Professor Chaos (The Daily Irritant) apportions blame and raises an eyebrow (metaphorically).
• Ted Rall on the *ahem* anti-intellectual bent in the United States.
• Echidne of the Snakes.
• Driftglass hosts video (postsed by Elle magazine) on Black Women and the 2016 Elections.  Yes, it's an hour long.  Watch anyway.

There is a lot more out there.

In Memoriam

• Robert Vaughn, actor (Illya Kuryakin was my guy, but Napoleon Solo was not half bad)
• Aileen Mehle, gossip columnist (as Suzy Knickerbocker)

I'm not sure the Cubs winning the World Series makes up for the ugliness of this year.

In Memoriam

Leonard Cohen, poet, songwriter, singer.

"First, we take Manhattan..."

REM

Mr. Trump claims that African-American voters will vote for him tomorrow.

Or on YouTube.

I think that tomorrow after I read the comics, I'm going to disconnect until the evening.

One Day More!

Thank you, Lieutenant Gerard!*

• Vagabond Scholar:

  Step one is defeating Trump, but efforts can't stop there. I'm always in favor of outreach and discussion, but it's important to acknowledge that they might not work – some people will never be persuadable – especially if they're primarily driven by spite. We can't count on 'cooler heads to prevail' or 'the better angels of their nature' to hold sway for everyone. The conservative base hates many of their fellow Americans and will not be dissuaded. So while we're trying to convince the crowd charmed by the season's latest bigot or snake oil salesman to reconsider, it's essential to get out the vote in case such outreach fails. Voting is crucial, and sustained activism is even more so.

• Mr. Trump argues that a woman cannot be president, because that's never happened before.
  
  Of course, there is precedent for having a crook in office... (Shareblue, Melissa McEwan, via Shakesville)
• I really need to do a roundup about the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock; meanwhile, have some pictures.  (Swiped from skippy the bush kangaroo)
• ugh at Obsidian Wings:

  so, too, vote suppression is a long term GOP project that pre-dates and will post-date Trump. It may swing the Senate election in North Carolina, where according to the elections project twitter account it's the only southern state where African-American early voting declined.... UPDATE: Massive non-evidence of voter fraud!

• Ilana Novick, AlterNet, summarizing Paul Krugman:

  Fox, Breitbart, and their ilk may have been outwardly spreading lies, but, as Krugman notes, the mainstream media "simply refused to report on policy issues, a refusal that clearly favored the candidate who lies about these issues all the time, and has no coherent proposals to offer."
  [...]
  First, Clinton, against all possible odds, has run an excellent campaign, one whose relentless attacks would have felled lesser candidates in days. Second, if she does win, it will be "thanks to Americans who stood up for our nation’s principles—who waited for hours on voting lines contrived to discourage them, who paid attention to the true stakes in this election rather than letting themselves be distracted by fake scandals and media noise."

  Oddly, one pageview in the last day came via Dr. Krugman's NYTimes blog.  I assume that was an accident.
  
• Roleplay, unacknowledged .  (Lance Mannion, too much to quote.  Well, maybe a nibble:  "Every answer she tried sounded like an evasion, because it was---she was evading saying 'Fuck off. I can't explain it. I wasn't paying that much attention to the details back then because it didn't occur to me I'd have to explain why I was doing what my predecessors did as a matter of course to a howling pack of shallow-minded, self-important, clueless hacks!'----but also because it wasn’t accepted or reported as an answer. It was just another excuse for another story about how there were still 'questions.'")
• "Who discovered America?" Who is to blame for Trump? Conservative gibbering as reported by Yastreblyansky.  Smaller families.  Hah!
• Zandar Versus The Stupid:

  One of the big fights here in Cincinnati is over the Brent Spence bridge, which carries I-71/75 traffic across the Ohio River and is one of the busiest trucking bridges in the country. Republicans really, really want to turn it into a private toll bridge because it would be a massive profit generator for whoever got the bid. Voters really, really want to throw out whoever votes for such a plan in either northern Kentucky or southwest Ohio.
  
  Trump vowed to fix the bridge with this plan on Friday at his rally in Ohio.
  

  Trump did not announce how he planned to replace the Brent Spence or what he would do to cover those costs.

• ThinkProgress:

  In other words, if it’s discrimination on the basis of race to treat an employee differently because of the race of their partner, then it should be discrimination on the basis of sex to treat an employee differently because of the sex of their partner. “Only because the Court finds the sex stereotyping rationale sufficiently compelling and dispositive, does it not examine fully the ‘association’ line of cases and how they would apply here,” Bissoon wrote.

ETA: And don't forget to vote tomorrow!

---

*Yes, I know, The Fugitive.  Les Misérables has entertaining descendants.

In Memoriam

• Janet Reno, former Attorney General of the United States.
• Vaino Spencer, California judge.
• Kay Starr, singer

Totally Fiction

Unspecified "conservatives" are hanging around the watering hole down the street from one of the unspecified "news" rumor mills, telling each other monumental fish stories and the one about the stereotype and the caricature meeting in the bar.

One (called Z for purposes of story) slaps forehead and says:  "I've got it!  The other candidate is just as sleazy as our candidate, but no one seems to be able to prove anything!  We need to distribute fake evidence to all the media!  That'll work!"

A second one, Y, says:  "How about that the other candidate will confiscate your guns?"

X set down a stein of beer and said:  "No, that's been tried.  Can we say that the other candidate advocates taxing bullets out of existence?"

Y:  "That's outrageous!  How dare--"

Z:  "No, no.  Something that can pass as proof, at least until the election is over.  Forged passports or something!  Fake evidence!"

A lightbulb flashes above X, who leaps up and runs from the bar.  This leaves Z and Y to stick X with the bar bill because personal responsibility.  As they shrug into their coats, X returns with a box.  "Here!"

Y and Z:  "What?"

X:  "What you want!  Made in a non-union sweatshop in North Korea!  Not bulletproof!  Only sold on the Internet!"

Y and Z:  "What???"

X:  "Fake Kevlar vest!"

Late-Breaking Info

Via the inestimable rydra-wong at dreamwidth:  The ACLU has posted a guide/FAQ about voter rights and intimidation, with a link to a printable .pdf, which may be a useful reference when you go to the polls.

Contact the Election Protection Hotline (866-OUR-VOTE), the Department of Justice Voting Rights Hotline (800-253-3931), or an attorney if you believe that your rights have been violated.

And here's a graphic:

Driftglass Nails It and Other Other Matters

• The alternate universe we don't inhabit:

  Wow! You know, I am kinda digging this "Sane Donald Trump" fella.
  
  And yet my admiration for this wholly fiction candidate invented by a blithering liar to lead a wholly fictional Republican Party that is somehow, suddenly not overflowing with bigots and imbeciles is somewhat tempered by the fact that these character traits -- giving the GOP leadership more benefits of the doubt than they deserve by a factor of 1000, offering the country hope instead of fear, proposing a humane and comprehensive immigration policy, trying to fix our trade problems and prepare our people for the realities of tomorrow, standing up to the Republican obsession with shredding the social safety net and an overall reverence for the democratic process -- all sound remarkably like this guy:
  
  [photo of President Obama with children]
  
  You know, the guy you and the rest of the actual Republican Party and it's actual candidate have spent the last eight years trying to obstruct, slander, sabotage and in every other way nail to a cross with a belt-fed bullshit gun?

  Ask me again why I'd rather read Driftglass than Mr. Brooks, Mr. Douthat, or Ms. Noonan, and I may explain, if I can stop laughing long enough.
  
• Rude but fair.

  Republicans are scared shitless of the realities of democracy. We see that in their almost comically racist attempts at suppressing voter turnout through bullshit i.d. laws. We see that when they make the filibuster a regular part of legislative action so that they have eliminated the ability of a simple majority to pass anything in the Senate. We saw it back in the Bill Clinton presidency when they sought to eject him from office for the limpest of reasons. We saw it in the constant attempts to strip Barack Obama of legitimacy.
  
  What all this has done is make the nutzoids and dumbshits that make up the GOP voter coalition completely mistrust that democracy works. If everything the opposition does is a cataclysmic event ready to bring on an apocalyptic nightmare of zombies, terrorists, and government health care, then obviously you'd believe that elections are rigged and evil agents are trying to steal your lovely country from your innocent hands. Donald Trump has succeeded in working his followers into a fever pitch by promising them shit that he couldn't do even if he was elected and telling them that if he loses, it's only because bankers or someone are working against him. What the fuck are they gonna think about democracy if their Trump godhead doesn't ascend to his White House iron throne?

• BooMan Tribune:

  Maybe he only intended to irritate people. Maybe he’s one of those morons who thinks if some black person somewhere uses the n-word or the NAACP doesn’t abandon “colored” it gives him permission to throw those words in black people’s faces while explaining his motives for screwing them.
  
  The important thing, I think, isn’t any meaning that’s conveyed in the actual words. It just makes conservatives feel good when they insult and denigrate their opponents. It makes the base feel good when they see a politician laying into their enemies. “Heh, heh, he called them ‘colored.’ They hate that.”

It'll be a long time before I trust "conservatives" or Republicans to collect my garbage, let alone have any kind of power. And speaking of garbage:

• Somewhere, someone is having a fantod about this story, but it is made clear that this guy signs up for huge amounts of overtime.  And frankly, the janitors should be making this much money as a matter of course.  They are far more valuable to the "system" than directors.
  

In Memoriam

Don Marshall, actor.

Other Matters

• Chauncey DeVega scoops Washington Post; Washington Post adds interviews.
• A take on the Dakota Access Pipeline you may otherwise miss.  Not favorable to the Obama Administration.  (Jerri-Lynn Scofield, naked capitalism)
• Trumpery.  (Paul Bibeau, Goblinbooks)

  But it's ok. It's nothing. In less than a week, if you keep this up... you'll be able to send a SEAL team after people you don't like. You'll be able to make people you don't like disappear. With a phone call. Isn't that worth a little crap-eating? Isn't it? Making nice with the female reporters and taking them seriously? Keep it up. Just a little longer.

• Troglodytes.  (Paul Bibeau, Goblinbooks)

  The scandal that should have taken down Donald Trump right at the beginning is the one that requires no investigation. You know the facts already. He and his supporters are bigots - against so many different kinds of people it's hard to keep track of them. They don't believe in the equal rights guaranteed by the American Constitution. They don't share the values we claim to support.
  
  The reason that scandal did not take him down is that too many people in this country agree with them

NB

I got tired of the blue.  I'll probably change it again in the near future.

108

= 3³ x 4

Cubs win the World Series.  Apocalypse does not happen.

"Too Much of Nothing"

I remembered the existence of the song not on Dylan's account but because a fragment bubbled up from deep memory as I was about to brew the coffee:  "Too much nothing can make a fellow mean."  So I proceeded to bring up the Peter Paul & Mary version, which is slightly softer than I remember; maybe I listened to it on maximum volume back then.

• Some people went to jail after the Malheur Refuge standoff.  (My inner dragon/basilisk suggests that the third strike for the Bundys should be their entire ranch getting swallowed by the earth with maybe a little lava.  My inner dragon/basilisk is Not Nice.)  Spocko's Brain is cautiously optimistic.
• Indomitable is not.

  Thursday’s acquittal of the Bundy militants, by an all-white jury, is a de facto endorsement of political violence by conservatives and other members of the American right-wing against the United States government. This decision comes at a very perilous moment in American life.
  
  The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have categorized the so-called sovereign citizen and broader Christian right-wing militia movement (of which the Bundy militants are part of) as being a greater threat to America’s domestic security than Islamic terrorists.

   
• I do in fact remember Waco, and I had heard about Ruby Ridge 20 or so years ago.  There are supposedly guidelines now...
• Echidne of the Snakes:

  But wait! There's more: In this job interview for one of the most important jobs on the globe one candidate's utter lack of relevant expertise is entirely ignored. It doesn't matter. The other candidate's relevant expertise is regarded as a disadvantage, because it makes her an insider.

• That'senoughfornow.