The Day before Yesterday is Too Far in the Past

• 40 years of difference in the prospects of janitorial work.
• Megachurch response.
• Evan Robinson at Group News Blog [Warning: Loads slowly] is running a series documenting the Confederacy:  Part 0; Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.
• Not disgracing the hat.
• Wonkette.  Why weren't we told?

Just a Reminder

Today is the anniversary of Nixon's resignation.

(Almost) The Last Gossip Columnist

No, not Father Guido Sarducci (although I understand that l'Osservatore Romano has an English language edition [subscription] now); Liz Smith, who no longer has a print column but is still alive at this writing.

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

Candle in the Rain

Interesting proposal.  (The big banks will probably shoot it down, just for starters.  And ...entities... will conspire to sabotage the enterprise [no, not the Enterprise.  The business] which will contribute to a certain corporate paranoia.  It's an idea.  If you are old enough you may remember lots of small banks, both savings and commercial, all over the place; over the last 30 or so years, most of these have been either merged or bought up.  There are still credit unions.)

Tangentially

After looking at the contradictory crapola (yes, that is the technical term) about the Ozymandian wall Trump is talking about erecting on the Mexican border (and how it will supposedly be paid for, and labor logistics [which Robin Williams covered in the Weapons of Self-Destruction show when the wall-wannabuilder was Arnold Schwarzenegger], and whether it will be effective [see East Berlin and East Germany], and the impact on our relations with Mexico [which are stiff right now], and what it might look like), I realized that the wall is a combination of Egyptian pyramids and "Well, he made the trains run on time."

(Aside to those who end up working on the wall, if that happens:  I suggest the Penelope option.  It's in the Odyssey, which is a cracking good fantasy adventure [complete with giant] in which the lady uses a novel [then] device to stave off men after her wealth suitors [no spoilers.  go read it].  I suggest adapting the tactic to the situation.  Oh, and form or join a union.)

And then I thought "Wait.  Who said that about Mussolini?  Was that even true?"

Um, no.  Not really.  Short version:  No.

Fascism is lies all the way down.

Stepping Stones for Baby Steps

When I was a teenager, and probably for years before that, the various TV stations showed a lot of the World War II era movies.  The vast majority of them were in black and white, and all of them were explicitly anti-Nazi.  Not all of them targetted the same set of evils that German fascism embraced, but taken together, one could get a picture of the reason that fascism was Bad (yes, that is the technical term).

Many years have passed and "conservatives" and corporations have bought up broadcast media to the point where very few "independent" outlets remain, and I'm willing to bet that a lot of the more firmly anti-Nazi movies aren't shown anymore, even at 3 am.

Casablanca is an exception, but I suspect that it's more marketed and promoted as a "Classic," which, don't get me wrong, it is.  But the other movies, most of which reside title-lessly in my fuzzy memory (the one with the guy's hair in his face all the time, the one with Jimmy Stewart, the one with the street musician playing a Mendelssohn tune he identifies as Wagner to the Gestapo) seldom if ever crop up on the screen these days.  You can get '40s music on cable channels these days; you can't get '40s movies (well, TCM; but TCM is scattershot and includes silent films, lots of stuff from the '30s, '50s, '60s, and occasionally the '70s).

This matters because all these flicks posited a resistance and its costs.

And the costs of resistance were not small.  There were reprisals.  For example, Lidice.

So.  We have to continue to push back against fascism because it only gets worse.

• Hannah Arendt:

  The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.”

  Includes more links to Hannah Arendt's work.
• Washington Monthly (Nancy LeTourneau):

  This is an interesting development (taken from Variety.com):
  
  The White House has shut down its public comment line some time in the past few weeks, instead telling callers, with an automated message, that they should contact the administration via Facebook Messenger instead. There’s only one problem: Neither the new White House administration nor President Donald Trump seem to currently maintain an active Facebook Messenger account.
  
  Beyond that, Sam Stein summarizes how various federal departments are being told to cease communications (taken from Huffington Post.com).
  
  Multiple federal agencies have told their employees to cease communications with members of Congress and the press, sources have told The Huffington Post.
  
  The freeze has startled aides on the Hill and people at those agencies, who worry that it could abruptly upend current operations and stifle work and discussions that routinely take place between branches of government.
  
  Agencies reporting that they have received such messages from the White House so far include:
  
  the Department of Health and Human Services
  the Environmental Protection Agency
  the Department of Agriculture
  the National Institutes of Health
  the Department of Transportation

  Mmmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
  
• [ETA:  More from Crooks and Liars.]
• And the New York Times used the word 'lie' in a headline about Trump.  (Crooks and Liars, with photo of hard copy.)

In Memoriam

Yes, I've fallen behind. Sorry.

• Maggie Roche, of The Roches ("We don't give out our ages and we don't give out our phone numbers.")
• William A. Hilliard, journalist (The Oregonian)
• Roberta Peters, soprano (slideshow)
• Wayne Barrett, investigative reporter (Village Voice)
• Eugene Cernan, last man to walk on the moon
• Dick Gautier, actor
• Antony Armstrong-Jones, aka Lord Snowdon, photographer and royal spouse
• Nat Hentoff, writer (Village Voice, et al.)
• Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, as of May. An appreciation by David Ettlin.
• Clare Hollingworth, broke the story of the German invasion of Poland in September, 1939
• Zhou Youguang, helped to develop Pinyin (Romanized Chinese character conversion)
• William Peter Blatty, writer (The Exorcist, et seq.)
• Bishop Eddie Long, who was mentioned here when his scandal was current. The Root has an article.

Changing of the Guard

• President Obama's accomplishments as listed by Rachel Maddow (video, Crooks and Liars, Karoli Kuns)
• Donald Trump sworn in as President.
• I'm going to the movies.
• Noam Chomsky on "election-rigging."  Everything is coming back to paste the US one in the chops (antique slang), aka Karma turns the wheel of fate some more (in the sense that foreign policy acts from many years ago are bearing poisonous, not-in-our-favor fruits).  Although this sounds an awful lot like victim-blaming, to be honest.  (Actual interview at truthout, summarized at AlterNet.)
• Three from Jesse Curtis (new site!  more scholarship!):
• One of the many acts of resistance will be joining the NAACP.  Here's why.
• Quoting Scott Culpepper:

  Christian scholars are indeed a subversive influence. Critics are right in labeling us a subversive influence if what they mean is that we subvert the subordination of facts to falsehoods calculated to sway popular opinion, the substitution of shallow shibboleths for deeper reflection, and the sacrifice of principle on the profane altar of political expediency. And there will be a greater need for us to keep on subverting these things with all the energy we can muster in the age of Trump.
  
  The times call for renewed conviction, creativity and courage on the part of Christian scholars.

• "Here are some early thoughts on the intersection of rap, whiteness, and evangelicalism.."
• *Ahem*
  

  You can't get hired by McDonald's unless you have some concept of what the job entails. But apparently, you can get a position in Trump's cabinet if you have no idea what your department does.

  Mark Evanier points to a David Remnick essay.
• Driftglass, as usual, says it best.

Water Is Wet

• Have health care?  Need health care?  You might want to consider the ramifications of electing Trump.  

  Republican candidate Trump would repeal "Obamacare" and replace it with a new tax deduction, insurance market changes, and a Medicaid overhaul. Democrat Clinton would increase financial assistance for people with private insurance and expand government coverage as well.
  
  The two approaches would have starkly different results, according to the Commonwealth Fund study released Friday.
  
  The analysis was carried out by the RAND Corporation, a global research organization that uses computer simulation to test the potential effects of health care proposals. Although the New York-based Commonwealth Fund is nonpartisan, it generally supports the goals of increased coverage and access to health care.

  Well, I didn't think I would need health care, either, but one's body proves everyone wrong sooner or later.  As usual, the Republican health plan is "Don't get sick."  (Yes, I stole that years ago.)
• Two essays from Jesse Curtis that probably need to be read together:
  
  1. On how "evangelical" does not mean "Trump supporter," and why. 

     Many Americans know evangelicalism primarily as a political movement. So it may surprise some people to learn that evangelicals are spending far more time and money working on things like poverty, racism, health care, and education than they are in trying to elect Republicans. World Vision, for example, is an evangelical aid organization with a budget that by itself dwarfs all the activities of the "Christian" Right in the United States.
     
     [...]
     
     This is the culminating act of political self-destruction in a 40 year campaign of harmful politics. When I think of the "Christian" Right, I'm inclined to repurpose a line from Frederick Douglass' first autobiography: "between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference..." Indeed. Despite all the good done by evangelicals in local communities, the dominant political expression of American evangelicalism is hateful and selfish, and unworthy to be called Christian.

  2. On racism and denial.

     White Americans desperately want to be innocent of any racial wrongdoing. You notice this pretty quickly when you begin to talk about race. Once you look for it, you'll see how often White people are approaching the whole conversation with one goal: establishing their innocence. "My family didn't own slaves. My grandparents immigrated here in the twentieth century. I worked hard for everything I have. Black people have had the same opportunities." Etc.
     
     These kinds of statements tend to be beside the point, and often plainly false. But truth in a literal sense is not the goal of this kind of rhetoric. We use it to claim that we are good, and that we bear no responsibility for racial injustice. We use it to avoid negative feelings. We want to claim innocence not by doing something, but by creating our own reality with our words.

  They're related.
• Noam Chomsky, taking the long view (excerpt, via AlterNet):

  "We want quick victories," Chomsky pointed out, but went on to explain that even the Civil Rights movement was rooted in a movement that had spread to America nearly 200 years prior.

  (There are interesting typos, such as "writers" for "Riders.")
• ETA:  Department of Oh, And By the Way:

  Bob Schieffer, a CBS news veteran and former presidential debate moderator had a very different idea of what the job of a debate moderator is.
  
  CBS' Face The Nation host John Dickerson asked, "There's been a big question about fact-checking and what the moderator's role should be in that. How do you see that question?"
  
  The only reason there are questions about fact checking is because Trump is against it.
  
  Schieffer replied, "Well -- and I've said and I've thought about this over the years, after doing these things -- the first fact-checkers have to be the candidates themselves. If one candidate makes a mistake, you want to give the other person a chance to call him out on that."
  
  This is very smart from Schieffer, but he didn't stop there.
  
  Schieffer said, "If he or she doesn't, then the moderator steps in and sets the record straight. But if you don't give the candidates themselves that opportunity, you're being unfair to both of them."

  Got that? (John Amato, Crooks and Liars.)  EFTA:  Because the Debate Commission Chief begs to differ:

  Janet Brown, executive director of the commission, which organizes the debates every four years, said [...] "I don't think it's a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica."
  
  Once the fact-checking door is open, "I'm not sure, what is the big fact, and what is a little fact?" [...]
  
  Trump campaign aides have staked out a similar position. Some of them say a pro-fact-checking stance is really an anti-Trump stance.

  Emphasis mine.  And gee, I can't imagine why they'd think that.
  

Happy Labor Day, Last Day of Summer White Wearing day (In Your Dreams), anniversaire, and Robert Reich has an urgent message if you work for a living.  (AlterNet)

Those with great wealth have translated it into political power. And with that power they’ve busted labor unions (to which a third of private-sector workers belonged in the 1950s but now fewer than 7 percent do), halved the taxes they pay (from a top marginal rate of 91 percent in the 1950s to 39 percent today, and from an effective rate of 52 percent then to 18 percent now), cut safety nets, deregulated Wall Street, privatized much of the economy, expanded bankruptcy protection for themselves while narrowing it for you, forced you into mandatory arbitration of employment disputes, expanded their patents and intellectual property, got trade deals that benefited them but squeezed your pay, and concentrated their market power so you pay more for pharmaceuticals, health insurance, airfare, food, internet service, and much else.

This is bad for everyone.

Context is All, or Polly Wanna Cracker NOW

(The way James Nicoll [of the English language quotation] would put it is "Context is for the weak." Unfortunately there are a lot of power-seekers who have decided that context is a stumbling block on the path to power.)

• The report on the Baltimore City Police Department, in case you haven't seen it. Please read the whole thing, even though it's on the long side.  Linked from Walk On, cited next.
• If it's not on video, did it happen? did it happen that way? did it happen within a particular narrative?  (Jesse Curtis, Walk On.)  

  This week the Justice Department released the report of its investigation of the Baltimore Police Department. See Radley Balko's review of the report, or check out German Lopez's summary. Or read the report for yourself. It deserves more attention than it is getting. But it's not going to get that attention because it's 164 pages of text written by government lawyers. It's not bleeding. It's not on video.
  
  And that's a problem for us. We don't know how to deal with systemic failure. When institutions go to rot, responsibility is defused. When something goes wrong, who is to blame?

  Links in original.
• Echolocation.  (Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog.)

  Republicans and Rupert Murdoch never entertained the possibility that someone who actually believed all the nonsense peddled on Fox could win the presidential primaries, even after Sarah Palin became a know-nothing superstar, and even after the Tea Party slipped the leash and started a mini-civil war within the GOP. But here we are, with a nominee who imbibed and believed all that crazy talk is now repeating it.
  
  Trump can't see what harm can come from his rhetoric -- after all, Sean Hannity's been saying the same things for years. [...] Trumpism is Murdochism without the safety valves. And Trump doesn't get that, because he probably thinks the safety-valve stuff is boring. [...]

• Ground troops not on ground.  (Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo.)

  This is classic rookie thinking. Novice candidates (and cheap ones) sometimes believe that the party exists to raise their money and run their campaigns for them. Uh, no. The party assists with GOTV efforts. Candidates run their own campaigns and raise and spend their own money. And if they cannot manage that, how can they be expected to manage anything else?

• Katrina Pierson:  Everything She Knows is Wrong.  (Reading the comments, aside from historical snark [Obama defenestrated Jan Masaryk and then designed the bikini in Paris] and misogyny, yielded her Wikipedia entry [she was apparently Obama without his advantages], which gave me the impression that a biology degree from University of Texas did not require some history along the way.  And she's a Tea Party person; no, I don't get that either.)

Honestly? Honestly!

Morning golf course:

• Some meta:  John Oliver discusses local journalism.  AlterNet. Video.  Summary by Alexandra Rosenmann.
• Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler on the reportage of the emails.

  (In our view, the question seems to be settled about three "marked" emails—settled in a way which reflects poorly on Comey rather than on Clinton.)
  
  We'd like to know if Hillary Clinton really was "extremely careless" with those 110 emails! That said, the Washington Post still seems unable to produce a clear account of the basic things Comey has said. Could a newspaper which seems so unclear on the basic facts help resolve that question?

• The businessman has no clothes.  Digby, Hullabaloo.  Mostly from an article in the New York Times, but I have obituaries to note.  
• Also from Hullabaloo's Tom Sullivan:  Republican Satanic panic Fear of the manufactured issue of voter fraud goes way back.  With charts and numbers.  Voter ID would not prevent the most prevalent form of fraud, by the way.  

  Fraud hucksters are — and/or they think the rest of us are — gullible enough to believe that, unlike Us, each Election Day hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people (you know, Them) go to the polls, not to do their patriotic and civic duty like “real Americans,” no, but to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense, "plus additional state penalties," Berman adds. All so they can a single extra vote to their preferred candidate's total.

• What's wrong with this headline?
  
  OK, not really. Some tweets with the hashtag KatrinaPiersonHistory which are, let's say, less than complimentary to her instruction in history, her recollection of current events, and her employer.
  
  (If I did Twitter, my entry with that hashtag would be "Obama Built the Berlin Wall.")
• Supporters of the Republican presidential candidate speak.  Have a hot shower and lots of soap ready before reading.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid, who goes there so you don't have to.)
• Ahem:

  For a man who claims he's an incredible rich successful and talented businessman, this ad is an embarrassment.
  
  Also striking is that the Clinton campaign can use Trump's own words, in lengthy segments, to highlight his offensive traits and idiotic exploits; Trump on the other hand, has to ham-handedly edit and misrepresent HRC to come up with what amounts to be middle school level production values.

  John Amato, Crooks and Liars.  "Television advertising is such a graphic business."
• Theology, a point of (Yastreblyansky, The Rectification of Names):

  Douthat and the killer (a local kid who knew very well who he was attacking) are working together to craft a narrative of ineluctable conflict, to the death, in opposition to the reality of integration and love that Hamel worked so hard to create and for which he did in effect die.

• Speaking of Douthat (were we?  I forgot), Professor Chaos administers a well-deserved (non-kinky) spanking:

  Yeah, no she doesn't.
  She has already expanded her percentage of the non-racist vote. And the non-misogynist vote. And the I-don't-want-a-president-who-gets-into-Twitter-wars-with-Rosie-O'Donnell vote. And the I-don't-want-a-President-whose-only-experience-is-being-a-businessman-who-has-had-multiple-bankruptcies vote. I think she's going to be fine. But thanks for your fake concern.

In Memoriam

Muhammad Ali.  With video.

Heavyweight champion, poet, resisted draft (Vietnam), converted to Islam.  Fascinating life.  Lived with Parkinson's disease.

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.)

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?

Gory Details

Evan Robinson (Group News Blog) on the labyrinthine ways of the third party campaign, for anyone interested in that obstacle course dance.

Any "third party" candidacy must be seen nearly exclusively in the role of spoiler. Yes, this is a weird year, with Trumpers and Berners showing great enthusiasm among polities that mostly seem unwilling to vote. "Likely voter" models are out the window, or at least deeply in question. Something wild could happen. But the last 100+ years (only 25 or so presidential elections, really, so the sample size is small) says it won't. The most recent President of the US who wasn't either a Republican or a Democrat was ... Millard Fil[l]more (1850-1853), our 13th President who was a Whig.

In Memoriam

In which NYTimes obits are finally used.

• David Stoliar, survivor.
• Yvonne Chouteau, ballerina
• Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence expert

Beans, Hill of

• Thoughts about ISIL/Daesh terrorists.
• One of the links mentioned, with bonus comments rehashing a briefly-mentioned point in the essay.
• One of the links in the above article, which does eventually get to the subject.

Because "Conservatism" Depends on Not Remembering Anything Happening Over a Day Ago

Why the Iranian government doesn't trust the U. S. (Paul Bibeau, Goblinbooks)

6. Our highest-level officials call for the destruction of their government. We know that Iranian officials are targeting US troops and calling for "death to America." But people in the most powerful positions in Washington have spent decades looking for ways to destabilize and topple their government.

(Links in article.)

It's a funny thing. People in positions holding power almost always demand total trust and almost never deserve it. But suggesting caution or skepticism or even out-and-out distrust on the part of the less powerful group or individual toward the more powerful usually yields accusations of impugned honor, whining about hate, or displays of hurt feelings.  And usually the less powerful group or individual backs down until the next reminder that caution, skepticism, and out-and-out distrust are in fact the correct response to the provocations of power.