Two Items, One Obit

• I just want to give Rob Reiner a hug for saying what needs to be said about Michael Flynn, the Trump White House, and treason[.]

  Frances Langum, Crooks and Liars.  Video with transcript of Reiner's portion.
  
• Conservative cruelty.

  Political messaging is critical: America should be a true “we the people” democracy that meets the needs of all people and not just those of the rich and the powerful. The Democratic Party must improve the way it communicates this vision to the American people.

  Chauncey DeVega, Salon.  I thought I'd posted this last month.  Uh-uh.
• In memoriam:  Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, successful Texas attorney (evil at least once, though)

Three Things and Two Obits

• In Memoriam:
• Shobha Nehru, married into Indian political family (this begs to be a movie)
• Florence Finch, war hero
• The Rude Pundit writing about everyday people in Reno, NV.  Not at all rude.

  Why am I telling you these stories from a town you'll never visit, a place you probably haven't thought of more than once or twice in your life? [...]
  
  Because we live in a mean time. We are living through a coarsening of our country that will haunt us for the rest of our lives, even if this damned presidency were to end today, just 100 days in. That's the nuclear bomb that has gone off. One split second and we will suffer its corrosive effects for years.

• Chauncey DeVega's podcast features Timothy Snyder on resisting authoritarianism.
• Booman quotes Rev. William Barber on the history of Jim Crow.

Wonder Whether There's a Baseball Game On Tonight

• Why one should closely read the list of job qualifications and duties before applying for a job.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars; commentary on Reuters article)
• The Simpsons do the President's First Hundred Days (with video).
• Also Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars:  Speculations on an apparently slow news day.  (As a vulgar groundling:  If I were Chelsea Clinton, I would change my handle to "Still Not Running," but she has more class.)
• BradCast with summary:  Why war?

In Memoriam

Jonathan Demme, director

In Memoriam

• Robert Taylor, useful computer ideas
• Harry Huskey, computer pioneer
• Sylvia Moy, Motown songwriter
• Robert M. Pirsig, author
• Cuba Gooding, Sr., singer
• Erin Moran, actress

All NY Times obituaries.

This Is Who They Are

Masks off.

• Trump and Sessions. (Indomitable, Chauncey DeVega)

  Given his naked embrace of racism and bigotry, there was an undercurrent of menace and malice in Trump’s first statement all along. And the answer to the second question was always, “a hell of a lot.” Trump’s presidency is still in its infancy. But in that short amount of time he has repeatedly demonstrated his hostility toward African-Americans, Latinos, First Nations people and Muslims. Their sense of safety, security, happiness, health and freedom are of no concern to him.
  
  Trump’s attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama, has taken up that crusade with enthusiasm.
  
  [...]
  
  Trump’s efforts to destroy the social safety net by repealing the Affordable Care Act and gutting programs that help the poor, children and the elderly will disproportionately impact black and brown Americans. In addition, Trump and Sessions are committed to expanding the “prison-industrial complex” and rolling back the modest efforts made by former President Barack Obama to curb some of its worst abuses, for example, by ending the federal government’s use of private prisons.

• Fox News executives. (Crooks and Liars, David)

  According to Sherman's sources, attorneys for the victims have sent a letter to Fox News detailing additional allegations that Slater forced black women to arm wrestle white women.

  Excerpted from New York Magazine, full article.
• "Culture of cruelty:"  Philosopher Henry Giroux interviewed by Chauncey DeVega at Salon.

  What do you think will happen in America in the future?
  
  I think that what we’re going to discover is that no society can exist when there’s no social fabric to bring people together. The emotional quotient has been so lowered, the bar is so low now that the only thing that people respond to addressing their problems through questions of violence and idiocy. That’s a lethal combination. It’ll be interesting to see how people talk about this issue in the future. Hopefully, it will be in ways that enable them to understand how the very notion of agency itself was destroyed, commercialized, commodified and turned into something that was weaponized.

• Fascism as right-wing anti-capitalism. (Aeon, Sheri Berman)

Today

March for Science.

And if I (who does not do political action stuff on days ending in 'y') can do this, so can you.

Stand or walk or roll in support of research, facts, and understanding the physical world.  Because right now the folks in power value ignorance and stupidity and want everyone to be as ignorant and stupid.  And this is becoming a rant.

So Now They're Trying Stealth Speed

Because affordable health care (and the Affordable Care Act by extension) is Bad, from that point of view.  (Washington Post, by way of Shakesville.  I think*.)

The fresh pressure from the White House to pass a revision was met with skepticism by some Capitol Hill Republicans and their aides, who were recently humiliated when their bill failed to reach the House floor for a vote and who worry now that little has changed to suggest a new revision would fare any better.

The effort reflects Trump’s sense of urgency to score a victory on Obamacare replacement and move on to other legislative objectives, notably tax restructuring.

*(Memory not as bad as I thought.)

We Really Are All In This Together

Lance Mannion "apologizes" for hiking your health insurance premiums, except not really.

And that’s what I’m getting at, the moral failure in the thinking behind “Why should healthy people pay the medical bills for sick people?” which should be read as “Why should I pay for your medical care?”

Basically, this is a reiteration of the Republican creed: I got mine. You get yours.

The health care debate isn’t a debate over money, except that money is the be-all and end-all for many Republicans. Nor is it a debate over what is the purpose of the federal government, which, according to Republicans is to protect wealth and property and see to it the wealthy and the propertied get to have things their own way, particularly when it comes to increasing their own wealth and acquiring more property, so it does come back down to money, at least for them.

It’s a debate about what people are for. Why are we here? Why are any of us here?

Always a good time to quote Dr Vonnegut, the novelist’s son. “We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

A Little Something

Pointed political statement for pointed political statements, via Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I.

*innocent look*

• Deportation priorities have changed.  (The Rectification of Names)

  Unless he's thinking in retroactionary terms that the malign influence of the Obama presidency stretches backwards, into the past. The virulence of the MS-13 organization in particular has to with the way it was nourished by US criminal justice policy, which was to deal with the problem by outsourcing it, deporting members in huge numbers to their home countries, especially El Salvador and Honduras, where they overwhelmed weak local governments, taking over the streets and recruiting new members and systematizing the smuggling of people back to the US, and participating alongside the Sinaloa Cartel in the Mexican drug war. A Trump-like policy over most of the past 30 years has made them ever stronger.

• The gig economy and why it should be regulated (naked capitalism):

  The lack of protections for workers, the casual nature of the work and the elements of direction and control exerted by the platforms all point to a need to regulate the gig economy. Self-regulation by the platforms, as is currently the case, cannot ensure better working conditions and can jeopardise the sustainability of well-intended platforms in what is a global race to the bottom. Moreover, unless authorities step in and recognise that workers should not be denied protection just because they work for platforms, platforms will continue to have an advantage over traditional industries, risking a deterioration of working conditions that extends beyond platform-based work.

• How Western civilization could collapse. (BBC Future)

  According to Joseph Tainter, a professor of environment and society at Utah State University and author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, one of the most important lessons from Rome’s fall is that complexity has a cost. As stated in the laws of thermodynamics, it takes energy to maintain any system in a complex, ordered state – and human society is no exception. By the 3rd Century, Rome was increasingly adding new things – an army double the size, a cavalry, subdivided provinces that each needed their own bureaucracies, courts and defences – just to maintain its status quo and keep from sliding backwards. Eventually, it could no longer afford to prop up those heightened complexities. It was fiscal weakness, not war, that did the Empire in.

Incoming!

• It has been discovered that old people spend money.  Who'da'thunk?  (naked capitalism repost)
• The Rude Pundit being Rude.  No, really.  A tale of two Republicans.  Rude.  NSFW.  Read at home.
• Texas apparently can't let go.  Really, can they build that wall they want so much around their state? OK, that was mean; I know several Texans for whom the 21st century is just fine.  And I know that the media like to play up the "Lookittha weirdos!" angle everywhere.  But, y'know, same-sex, interracial, interfaith, inter-sportsfan, inter-collegiate-rivalry marriages are legal in this country, and maybe yon clerks who wanna get huffy should get other jobs.  They are Not the Gatekeepers of Relationships.  Failing that, they should have to state their position in advance and co-hire someone who does not have religious objections.

Another Rebuke to Texas

"Because I told you befo--ore, You Can't Do That."

It amounted to the second finding of intentional discrimination in Texas election laws in as many months — a separate court in March ruled that Republicans racially gerrymandered several congressional districts when drawing voting maps in 2011, the same year the voter ID rules were passed.

[...]

The Texas law requires voters to show one of seven forms of identification at the ballot box. That list includes concealed handgun licenses — but not college student IDs — and Texas was forced under court order last year to weaken the law for the November elections.

Mercy and Subsequence

I stopped by a website of quackery early this morning; fortunately I'm not gullible (at least in that direction), so I just had a good laugh and avoided clicking on anything.

• I hadn't heard of "lunch-shaming" before, but it sounds straight out of Dickens.  Have I mentioned that to "conservatives," "Dickensian" (as long as not applied to them and theirs) is a term of approbation?  New Mexico has made the practice illegal.

  The reason shaming happens, it seems, is that many schools carry lunch debt forward and cannot be reimbursed with federal dollars for it. As a result, they come up with ways to shame children into paying debts for which they have no means to do so.
  
  This bill is a step forward, but it needs to be adopted in every state. No child should go hungry in this country. No child should be shamed for wanting to eat. And the idea that a child should have a hot meal tossed rather than be allowed to eat it just defies all understanding at all.

   (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars)
• Follow-up:  Alabama Governor Robert Bentley resigns before impeachment and is booked on lesser charges.  (Crooks and Liars; see updates)  AL.com has more details.

Oh, And...

Remember the Alabama Voter ID/DMV office closing story?  Because it turns out that there's more there than met the eye.  Zandar reports:

So yeah, the Governor's mistress very much wanted to keep black people in Alabama from being able to vote, and wanted to do so in a way that "protected" her lover. Nice lady, huh. Meanwhile, the impeachment proceedings against Bentley continue, and the former state AG? He's now Senator Luther Strange, Jeff Sessions's replacement.

Full article Zandar is citing, with more links.

ETA (4/9):  Bentley's been a bad, bad boy, even by Alabama standards.

De-Evolved

• The switch that flips when The Leader does something military.  (ETA:  Nicole Belle, Crooks and Liars,)

  Why, you'd almost have to believe that the media collectively gets hard-ons for the kabuki theater of pre-cleared military strikes. Shocking!
  
  Do they never get tired of being useful tools of a corrupt administration? Did they not learn this lesson after Iraq? What the hell is wrong with them?

  Barbara W. Tuchman noted this phenomenon in the last chapter of The Proud Tower.  Also, see Sappho (Noli Irritare Leones) for a further take.
• In memoriam: Tim Pigott-Smith, actor

In Memoriam

• Gilbert Baker, the Rainbow Flag
• Katy Feeney, baseball executive
• Don Rickles, "Mr. Warmth," comic

"Standing at the Crossroads, Believe I'm Sinking Down"

• Missed Opening Day this year.  Oh well.  But at least they're breaking even.  So far...
• Via skippy:  Device weirdness.  (Ian Bogost, The Atlantic)

  Technology’s role has begun to shift, from serving human users to pushing them out of the way so that the technologized world can service its own ends. And so, with increasing frequency, technology will exist not to serve human goals, but to facilitate its own expansion.
  
  This might seem like a crazy thing to say. What other purpose do toilets serve than to speed away human waste? No matter its ostensible function, precarious technology separates human actors from the accomplishment of their actions. They acclimate people to the idea that devices are not really there for them, but as means to accomplish those devices own, secret goals.
  
  This truth has been obvious for some time. Facebook and Google, so the saying goes, make their users into their products—the real customer is the advertiser or data speculator preying on the information generated by the companies’ free services. But things are bound to get even weirder than that.

• What Bernie Sanders and others get "wrong" (Chauncey DeVega, Indomitable):

  Chasing the largely mythical “white working-class voters whose loyalties went from “Obama to Trump” will not win future elections. The white working-class voters they covet are solidly Republican.
  
  Alienating people of color and women by embracing Trump’s base of human deplorables will not strengthen the Democratic Party. It will only drive away those voters who are the Democratic Party’s most reliable supporters.
  
  Sanders has unintentionally exemplified the way that both white liberals and white conservatives are heavily influenced by the white racial frame. As such, both sides of the ideological divide are desperate to see the best in their fellow white Americans, despite the latter’s racist behavior.

• Echidne of the Snakes:  Patriarchy makes its move.

  Well, Bernie Sanders is still in politics. Donald Trump ran for president three times. Newt Gingrich is still mouthing on television. And so on. But there is something very different about presumed female ambition. As an aside, there is no evidence at all that Hillary Clinton would consider running again. She has simply given a few speeches, but that is too ghastly for words.

• Body Impolitic:  Police/Jail Violence

  This series [Undisclosed podcast], now five episodes in, is very painful to listen to. When I want to turn it off, I remind myself that Freddie Gray didn’t get to turn it off, and neither did his family, friends, and neighbors. Nor do they still. Besides, if you can hear anything through the pain, it is also fascinating.

• On the Republican dislike of poor people (The Hunting of the Snark):

  When you don't, all your complaints about the new system don't mean anything. You wanted the system broken. You demanded its failure. You fought tooth-and-nail to kill it. You don't get to just walk away from that and shrug your shoulders and go back to your well-paid career rat-fucking the poor. You are responsible for your actions.
  
  And make no mistake: [Megan] McArdle doesn't care about the people who need insurance. She doesn't want the Republicans' greed and incompetence to ruin Republican political success.
  
  [...]
  
  McArdle gives the reasons why she is against the Republicans' plans, which are mixed in with her usual lies and deceit about Obamacare and too tedious to discuss. Then she tells us that she simply can't understand why Republicans decided to pull down Obamacare without having a replacement.
  
  [...]
  
  She should have thought of that when she was predicting that Obamacare would destroy health care and must be stopped immediately. She watched Republicans do nothing viable to replace Obamacare with a functioning market yet for seven years yet she yelped constantly to kill it. Now she shakes her head and fumes that her political party will be hurt by their and her actions.
  
  [...]
  
  After eight (or more?) years of Republicans rat-fucking Obamacare, McArdle became convinced that it was damaged enough to die on its own and she is not best pleased that her ego or career might be dinged by a loss of Republican power. The sick, dead and suffering are beside the point.

• ETA: Lance Mannion: They want people to die.

  They want people to die. I’ve preached this sermon before, and I know I’m preaching to the choir. But it’s the unholy truth. They want people to die. That’s the explanation for this. The AHCA was---is still---wildly unpopular and one of the reasons is it would take away guaranteed coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. But that’s the part the Freedom Caucus wants to bring back. They want people with cancer to die of it. Poor people, first, but not just poor people. Anybody who isn’t rich enough to pay top dollar for tests, treatment, operations, and medicine. They---we---should all die if we aren’t smart enough, strong enough, virtuous enough to not ever get sick.
  
  Their religion requires human sacrifice. They pray by offering other people’s suffering to their wicked demon of a god. It’s how they feel virtuous. By being tough. Cruel. Impulses to kindness, charity, common decency are signs of weakness, failures to be tough enough to carry out God’s will.

• Yastreblyansky:

  You start the unmasking procedure not because of the identity of the person, which you don't know, but because of their behavior, which makes you want to know it. Flynn, Stone, Manafort, and Page were just Male X when whoever it was got interested in them, their identities hidden by the NSA rules; they were unmasked because somebody at some agency, NSC or elsewhere, needed to find out who it was that was doing the stuff they were doing.
  
  I should add that what the story as it's unfolding really shows, in addition to the willed psychopathic incoherence of rightwing storytelling, is further evidence that the techies of NSA who collect the material do indeed follow the rules of minimizing and masking the identities of US persons with excruciating rigor. Whatever bad eggs at FBI and CIA may end up doing with them.

• Colorblind Christians:

  It will be a bleak future for American democracy if the poles of political debate range from racist/incompetent populism to technocratic liberalism to leftism. There must be a place for thoughtful conservatism. Do you believe in the value of reasoned debate and the vigorous airing of dissenting opinions? Then support conservatives of integrity.

  Yes, I did observe the date.
• Still trying to destroy health care. (Zandar Versus The Stupid)  Keep up the vigilance!

Do Not Go Cashless into That Good Night

Why cash is good and trying to do away with it is wrong (note who benefits from pure digital transactions).

A taste:

If we are going to refer to bank payments as ‘cashless’, we should then refer to cash payments as ‘bankless’. Because that’s what cash is, and right now it is the only thing standing between us and a completely privatised money system.

As in the case of previous privatisations, we’ll hear suited TV pundits arguing that if the digital payments companies don’t work for people they will be outcompeted by better private systems. Yeah right. When did you last see a credible competitor to the likes of Mastercard and Visa? They preside over huge network systems, subject to intense network effects. It’s in no shopkeeper’s interest to use a competitor to Visa when it’s so utterly dominant already.

Brett Scott, Aeon