• Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast (*sob*) officially hangs up her keyboard.

  Everyone tells me they don't know how I'm still standing. I'd love to believe that I'm stronger than most people, but the truth is that I'm no different from anyone else. When life keeps hitting you, you bounce back because you don't have a choice. If you don't think you could, it's because you haven't been hit hard enough yet.
  
  I'm lucky. I've been able to keep my job and work remotely. A year ago I received a promotion and transfer to a new group where my manager is in Germany, where they don't believe in working 80 hour weeks. So my work/life balance has been somewhat better, and now will be even better because I won't be sitting in northern NJ traffic every day. My two little boy kitties, Eli and Sam, were great in the car and have adjusted beautifully to their new home. My sister has welcomed me into her circle and I am signing up for Meetup groups. It is the fresh start that just could not have happened in New Jersey, in a house too full of memories, too many of them about sadness and depression. Mr. B is now free of the emotional burdens that plagued him here and it is time for a young family to move into that house, now dressed up all pretty with a new kitchen, a nice deck, and a completely remodeled upstairs, and make better memories there.
  
  My weekdays will be spent in my home office that gets the morning sun through the trees in my front yard. When the weather gets nice, I can sit and drink iced tea on my screened porch, or take my laptop outside onto the patio. I am about 20 minutes or less from anything I might want to do. My neighbors are friendly, and I have no doubts that I'll be happy here.

   
• Lying liars who lie.
• More lying liars who lie.
• Toy wars.  Because we're all going to need a lot of comic relief this year,

In Memoriam

New York Times obituaries.

• Natalie Cole, unforgettable singer
• Wayne Rogers, actor (M*A*S*H)

Hope in the Bottom of the Box

This year's Jon Swift Memorial Round-Up.

New Year Strikes at Midnight

Driftglass.

Hullabaloo.

Indomitable.

That blasted bell is tolling.

Happy New Year.

Boxing Day Lutefisk Cider with Pickled Herring

• Down With Tyranny dissects the Democrats.

  Jack Fitzpatrick lays out a scenario which-- if we had a remotely competent DCCC that wasn't utterly crippled with conservative notions and self-serving corruption-- would be considered a reasonable case for the Democrats winning back the House. There's no chance anything like that can happen while the recruiting and messaging precepts put in place by Wall Street puppets Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Steve Israel dictate everything the DCCC does.

• Politifact prevarication poll:  Who lies the most.  (Slideshow/gallery.  Featuring two non-candidates and the current and former President, who cannot run for that office again.  Via sfgate.com.)
• Understanding markets, their history, values, and flaws.  (Prof. Richard D. Wolff, guest-posting at naked capitalism.)  A taste:

  Markets were and are just one mechanism for distributing resources and products among people and enterprises. In markets, prices allocate scarce commodities to the highest bidders for them, to those who can pay the most. Markets differ from many other, non-market mechanisms that human beings, past and present, have used for those distributions. Religious authorities, community elders, local or regional state authorities, democratically composed collectives, kinship and gift-based organizations developed different, non-market, price mechanisms for distribution. Because recent history exalted markets hysterically, it is time to expose their mixed and often horrific results.

  There are matters, values, and things that cannot be priced; assigning a monetary value to some things paradoxically cheapens them.
• Has anyone done "A Christmas Carol:  30 Years Later?"  Because that might explain things...

Merry Mary, Marry Murray

Christmas if  you celebrate; Festivus, Yule, Solstice, Kwanzaa, Boxing, any I've missed if you don't.

(Hogmanay is next week.)

Pre-Road Downs

• From the Mary Sue, via Shakesville:  Japanese women want to keep their original names post-wedlock.  At last!
• Hullabaloo is loading so slowly that the graphics give up.  Seriously.
• Trump.
• Guns.
• Combatting terrorism.
• Litmus testing.
• Cracked.com is a time sink.
• ETA:  It turns out that Dr. Grumpy in the House has been active all year but the blogroll entry refuses to update.  Have the gift guide to Star Wars merchandise that gives one pause.

"I Thought the Woo-Woo Crew Came Out at the Full Moon!"

Some of the local bus drivers used to say that they observed strange behavior and were extra cautious during the full moon--and the two weeks on each side.

• Myself, I'd get boots and a sou'wester.  Talk of Republican convention alternatives.
• "Terrible Ideas" from the Daily Irritant, with bonus:

  You know, if Ronald Reagan couldn't make Reaganomics work, what the hell chance do you think you have?

Not an Onion Headline

"Nazi Party Leader:  Trump's Anti-Muslim plan is ill-conceived."

It's at SFGate.com as of this morning.  (Full email communiqué at Buzzfeed.)

No, really.  (The rest of said chairman's statement is "right-wing" jargon that would embarrass the crew at a Tea Party website.)

I'm trying to be an adult, so I'm not going to snark on said chairman's name.

Thrust, Parry, Riposte

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia had Foot Sandwich the other day (Crooks and Liars).  Andy Borowitz (The New Yorker) serves up horseradish, no chaser.

Ever notice that all of Ronald Reagan's "gifts" tend to include rattlesnakes?

Cannot Brain. I Have the Numb

• No, this is not supposed to be a weekly.  
• Now that it is slightly more seemly (Iowa caucuses now being a month away rather than six months out) to yammer about the primary season, have Jill Stein's campaign page.  The Green Party has also posted an article by Maggie Lee from Creative Loafing, which has interesting (at least for now) comments.  If I have to read about the Republican candidates (and my brain has been holding its nose almost to the point of asphyxia) and the Democratic candidates (who are annoying me on a different axis), then I'd like to read someone who is at least not shouting at me.  (You don't want to see my email inbox.  Cue Joel Grey and Liza Minelli singing "Money" on repeat at maximum volume.)
• So this is midpoint of three consecutive days of tragedies:  Yesterday was the anniversary of the murders at École Polytechnique, today we remember Pearl Harbor, and tomorrow we commemorate the death of John Lennon.  Yeah, OK, not a nice guy, but he didn't deserve that.
• We are expecting rain in a couple of days, in time for an appointment.  Of course.  Northwestern England apparently got a cloudbuster sufficient to restore a waterfall.  (Via legionseagle on Dreamwidth.)
• Well!  Back to work!

But the Fairness Doctrine Was Such a Burden!

• Driftglass:

  He [Donald Trump] pays no price because you and your colleagues decided that it was more profitable to spend the last 20 years playing footsie with the American Fascist Party than reporting on what they were really up to. And once they buffaloed you into selling out honest journalism in order to appease them -- into giving up on the truth altogether and playing the Both Sides Do It Russian roulette with your own profession instead -- they owned you. They could name any price and you would meet it, including mainstreaming their madness by pulling out a chair at your Meet the Press table for conspiracy mongering Conservative crackpots.
  
  [...]
  
  As I have written before, periodically we Liberals chase off the Wingnut Eaters of Worlds for a little while. We run them back off into the angry Confederate mud. Back into the gnawing belly of hate radio. Back into the Armageddonist wet dreams of their Christopath spider holes and morally deformed gospels.
  
  And then some secret signal goes out among the Beltway Media. Wagons are circled. Both Siderist myrmidons are deployed in force. Any dirty hippies who would dare point out that the Beltway clowns are once again restarting the nightmare that almost wrecked the country last time are muzzled and cast out.
  
  Then -- surprise! -- the Wingnut Eaters of Worlds come roaring back, twice as loud, twice as well-funded and twice as immune to factual reality.

• Crooks and Liars:

  The guardians of the media may have thought it was a good compromise when they first capitulated, way back in the Age of Reagan: Back off from the facts whenever pressed by the organ players of the Mighty right-wing Wurlitzer, while hinting at the actual truth in vague, arcane fog speak that convinces no one but those who already know. Problem solved!
  
  No better example than the way they treated the fake Planned Parenthood videos that made such a strong impression on one Robert Lewis Dear Jr.
  
  See, they framed the news stories as if the videos were proven fact. It took all of an hour or so for bloggers who are already familiar with this kind of crap to track down the extremist origins of the videos, and to debunk the videos themselves.
  
  Yet media types refused to use the information as anything but a footnote -- if they even bothered to do that.
  
  You can see the problem: Anyone who knows how to doctor a video can inject any crazy story at all into the corporate media, and it spreads like avian flu. So even if media outlets back off and say the story was "wronnng" (a la Fonzie), it's too damn late.

(Yeah, that's probably too much to quote without explicit permission. My apologies.)

 The dirty secret of "Both Sides Do It," by the way, is not that both sides do bad or even evil things. There are no [living] saints in politics. The dirty secret is that the unspoken implication is that both sides do it equally, and that is Not True.  To go full Monty Python:  "Conservatives" lie, distort, proclaim one value that they violate privately, and Make Stuff Up.  "Liberals" might do the same (remember Anthony Weiner?), but exponentially less frequently than "conservatives."  I mean, really.

Quick glimpses of the Dark Side of the Force prominent Republicans responding to the current latest shooting.  (Yes, it's Shakesville.  Deal.)  Side order of Poor Poor Pitiful Us, posted by Southern Beale.

The Actual Icy Decline

• A boot to the head rebuttal to "rational racism," from Indomitable's Chauncey deVega (I've changed the name in the blogroll), because that stuff needs calling out.  A sample:

  While people of color are the prime targets of such policies as “stop and frisk” and racial profiling, it is in fact white people who are far more likely to be both drug users and to be in possession of narcotics at a given moment. This reality signals to a larger social phenomenon: black individuals who commit crimes are representative of their whole communities, crime is racialized, and there is no qualifier of individual intent. All black people are deemed suspicious and guilty because of the deeds of the very few.
  
  In contrast, white people who commit crimes are unique individuals: the criminals who destroyed the global economy, a group of white men, were not taken as representative of the entire white community. There is a long list of crimes such as domestic terrorism, serial murder, child rape, sedition, treason, and financial fraud that are almost exclusively the province of white people. But again, whites as a group are excluded from suspicion or indictment as a “criminal class.”

• American Christianity's blind spots:

  One of the oddest characteristics of much American Christianity is that we don't think of our country as a place where oppression occurs in any serious way. We read in the Bible about oppression and injustice but we don't make the obvious connection. This is in part because so many American Christians are nationalists at heart. Nationalism is not a Christian value, but many have made it an integral part of their faith, bolstered by the false and offensive myth that this country is or ever was a Christian nation. Our failure to apply Christian notions of oppression to an American context also has a lot to do with our Whiteness. But many Christians are so invested in it they don't even know it's important to them. They just think it's "Christianity."
  
  [...]
  
  For Christians, such reasoning is an abdication of our responsibility. This is another oddity of American Christianity: many of us think we can have conventional White American opinions about racial issues and be faithful to Christ at the same time. We're deluding ourselves.

• Robert Kuttner, Huffington Post via AlterNet:

  A lot of the people who stay home would vote for Democrats if they bothered to vote at all. This problem goes far deeper than better techniques for getting out the vote. It reflects a massive decay of civil society, a deep disinterest and contempt for government and politics, one that often seems richly earned.
  
  This is also the soil in which fascism grows. As political scientists have demonstrated for more than a century, it is mass society, in which people are disconnected from the "little platoons" beloved of Edmund Burke and the local associations celebrated by Tocqueville, where a strongman can suddenly seem the solution to people's inchoate frustrations with their own lives and the irrelevance of politics.

I really try not to think poorly of my fellow passengers on Spaceship Earth, but I deeply resent the efforts they make to return everyone to the trees to the eighteenth century.


([ETA:  Is there a DDoS going on at Hullabaloo?  I haven't been able to read the site in two days.])

"'Cause my hair is curly..."

Mr. Scalzi:

Donald Trump: The GOP establishment would like you to believe Trump was their summer fling, who in September didn’t take the hint that it was over, followed the GOP back home, and now drives by its house every hour to peer through the window, and texts at 4am asking if the GOP wants to go to the local Waffle House just to talk.

And the other candidates are dispatched as befits their public personas.

Because when I look at the pronouncements of the front-runners--Zandar picks up Mr. Rubio's statement--Stephen King's novels just leap to mind.  Specifically, the arc of Greg Stillson in The Dead Zone and the statement in IT that Pennywise the clown did not bother disguising itself when at home.

"Well, It's Certainly Uncontaminated By Cheese."

• Blue states turning red (weirdly, the source website (propublica.org) won't open; fortunately Zandar excerpted a chunk).

  The poorest Americans are least likely to vote, and least likely to be organized to vote. Meanwhile, the second lowest quintile of Americans have become sharply Republican. The result, in Southern and Midwestern states, has been catastrophic.

• Driftglass links to the same article in the New York Times.  There are charts.

More Stops. I Blame AlterNet.

• "New Jersey Mayor Risks His Life Delivering Aid to Syria and Unlike Tough Guy Chris Christie, He's Not Scared of 5-Yr-Olds" Ahem!
• Via Salon, "The Shadows of a New American Fascism: Why Our Surging Xenophobia Could Have Some Very Dangerous Consequences"
• Why am I not surprised?  Via Raw Story.
• Janet Allon summarizes some Paul Krugman on the tendency toward panic among conservatives.
• ISIS Wins If You Block Refugees.  Via Raw Story.

I Have 20 Open Tags and I Must Scream Have to Close at least 15 Before Midnight

• I try to post this annually. I usually fail. I'm still a fighting liberal, and Steve Gilliard's fine essay is my credo in this matter.
• Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance.  
• There was a 6 part documentary on the Spanish Civil War that I happened upon via Comrade Misfit, who noted that Franco was still dead 40 years later.
  
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4
  • Part 5
  • Part 6
  Some of this may remind one of Star Wars. This may not be an accident.
• From Mercury Rising:  The New York Times admits error in supporting increased surveillance.  And about time.
• Too much of the bleatings of politicians leads to *headdesking* and the cri de coeur "What is wrong with those people?"  Did none of these people study World War II, if only to play games?  I've long thought that there should be an examination for candidacy at least as rigorous as the citizenship test given to immigrants.  Hello!  At least know what went on in this country prior to 1990!  This may be why "conservatives" want to abridge the study of history.
• Susie Madrak (Crooks & Liars) notes CNN's suspension of a foreign-affairs journalist for alluding to an Emma Lazarus poem.  Yes, that Emma Lazarus poem.
• Driftglass reports on Donald Trump's real face.  
• John Scalzi cites the Cato Institute.
• George Takei (who was interned with his family during WW2) rebukes the mayor of Roanoke, VA, who apparently had never heard of the history of internment in this country.  (I'm afraid I find the word "clueless" too kind.)  By Mike Moffitt, sfgate.com.
• Southern Beale anathematizes her Congressperson.

  Jim Cooper voted “aye” on the “American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act,” AKA the Let’s-punch-Syrian-and-Iraqi-refugees-because-we’re-scared-and-crapping-our-pants-and-also-we’re-ignorant Act.

• Boko Haram. Remember Boko Haram? Boko Haram is worse.
• What's going on with the working class?  

  Here’s a possible explanation that takes us back to economic factors. Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. economy started trending toward greater inequality. The less-educated lost the semi-skilled jobs that they had held in previous decades. The uneducated class became a floating low-skilled labor force, which decreased the marriageability of white working-class men. That impaired family formation. A couple of decades later, the lack of family support started to take a big bite out of the emotional health of working-class whites, causing them to turn to alcohol, drugs and suicide once they reached middle age.

  Warning: It's Bloomberg.  Via skippy the bush kangaroo.
  
• Meanwhile groundwater takes a long time to replace, and we can't drink oil.

In Memoriam

P. F. Sloan, songwriter.

It's an interesting story.

Oh, And...

The other kind of voter fraud.  Note the silence.

A Different Debate

As you recall, I liked Sady Doyle back when she was part of Tiger Beatdown.  It has apparently taken this long (two years!!) to run across her again but Ampersand of Alas! a Blog had a nice mess o' links today and there's Sady Doyle, explaining her reasons for preferring Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, followed by 1kidsentertainment's rebuttal, and Doyle's response.

Thought, analysis, and evaluation.  Be still, my heart.

(The Outrage Hat is put aside because wearing it stiffens my neck, back, and shoulders and cramps my legs and just plain exhausts me.  Later.)

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.

Veterans Armistice Remembrance Day

Batocchio reposts a poem by Wilfred Owen.  (Many people commemorated today with poetry.)

I thank all veterans, particularly those whose countries did not quite consider them human beings, for their service.

Yes! Yes!!!

Workers flood the streets.

The "War" on That Day in December--Other Angles

• Driftglass has the appropriate title for this post, but it's a bit long:

  Then He took the venti, half-whole milk, one quarter 1%, one quarter non-fat, extra hot, split quad shots, no foam latte, with whip, two packets of Splenda, one sugar in the raw, a dollop of vanilla syrup and three sprinkles of cinnamon, and when He had given thanks, He gave it to them, saying...

• Alison Leigh Lilly, "War on Christmas: Starbucks Cups Are Christian Propaganda" [ETA:  via supergee on Dreamwidth]:

  Would a company that hates Jesus roll out their winter holiday-themed cups literally the very morning after the biggest Pagan holy day of the year? I don’t think so!

• Golden Oldie from 2008 which now loads very very slowly if it loads at all but is worth it:  Minstrel Boy at Group News Blog, "Coyote Goes Shopping."

It's not even Thanksgiving yet, and I refuse to deal with that season until then.  So there.

In Memoriam

Allen Toussaint, New Orleans musician/composer/songwriter.  (Not to be confused with Alvin Poussaint, who is still alive.)

In No Particular Order

Because my brain is either howling mad or gone out for pizza.

• Goblinbooks:  Why waiting for haters to die off is going to take a long time.  With bonus unpleasant simile.  Maybe not while you're eating.

  Don't ever think progress just happens. Not here. People fight wars and they lynch whole populations to make sure progress doesn't happen. And they can beat back tolerance, kindness, and enlightenment for a long, long time, before old age and irrelevance claim them.

• In case you thought I was exaggerating the other day,  Republic of T's "Wingnut Week in Review:  'Diva Demands' for the GOP Debate" lists the demands (with snark).  And Dr. Ben Carson (in video) tries to revive old conspiracy theories (and reminds me that I am actually three degrees of separation from President Obama).  How The Onion keeps up is a complete mystery.
• Noam Chomsky at AlterNet.  'Nuff said.
• WiredSister's thoughts on conscientious objection at Noli Irritare Leones.

  When I read about Kim Davis, I am almost irresistibly drawn to sarcasm. That impulse lasts about five minutes, until I remember my own war resister/draft counselor past. And then I want to ask the people who were out there with me, in the same struggle: Aren’t we the people who struggled for the rights of conscience against military service and payment of war taxes? Didn’t some of us go to jail for it? Now, suddenly, conscientious objection is making a comeback. Can’t we just enjoy the new-found fashionability of our earlier commitments? If we are to be serious about the relationship between law and conscience, don’t we have to look at it honestly and without snark? If we can’t do that, don’t we have to accept the possibility that we support the conscientious rights of only those people whose consciences agree with ours, or, worse still, that conscience is merely a childhood disease to be outgrown in adulthood?

• "Heckler's veto" case.  [ETA:  Ken White, Popehat.]

There are other readings, but I've mislaid them.  Besides, this slice of pizza is getting cold.

In Memoriam

• Melissa Mathison, screenwriter (E.T., et al.)
• George Barris, custom (ahem.  "Kustom") car builder (as it says in the obit, the Batmobile).

Making Republicans Look Ridiculous, Not That That is Hard

1. "Ben Carson Whines That 'Secular Progressives' Are Ridiculing His Pyramid Theory." With video.  By Heather at Crooks and Liars.
   
   No, really.
2. "Republicans have demands!"  Professor Chaos at The Daily Irritant, extrapolating from the hissy fit thrown by the Republican National Committee after the most recent debates, in which a few almost-substantial questions were lobbed at the candidates.
   
   A wee bit for flavor:

   How are you going to stop a candidate from making a pledge? One of these guys starts saying "and if I'm elected I pledge to you that I will . . ." and you're going to jump in and say "woah, governor, I thought we agreed? No pledges? Remember? We said no pledges tonight and then after the debate we'll have ice cream, remember? And we said we were going to use our inside voices, and not bother the other nice candidates with our questions? And remember we said that props are for playtime? Not for during the debate? Remember?"

Mrs. Robinson Was Right!

No, not that one.  Sara Robinson, the futurist.

[I went to find the link(s) I needed for this.  That was an hour ago.  We were all more passionate, prolific and better written then, weren't we?  *deepsigh*]

Back in 2009, Sara Robinson wrote a long article posted at Orcinus titled "Fascist America:  Are We There Yet?" setting forth the path toward that political system and how far down it the USA was.

Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.

Today Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith posts a long article called "Mussolini-Style Corporatism, aka Fascism, on the Rise in the US."

The muddying of meaning is a neo-Orwellian device to influence perceptions by redefining core concepts. And a major vector has been by targeting narrow interest groups on their hot-button topics. Thus, if you are an evangelical or otherwise strongly opposed to women having reproductive control, anyone who favors womens’ rights in this area is in your vein of thinking, to the left of you, hence a “liberal”. [...]

Another way of limiting discourse is to relegate certain terms or ideas to what Daniel Hallin called the “sphere of deviance.” Thus, until roughly two years ago, calling an idea “Marxist” in the US was tantamount to deeming it to be the political equivalent of taboo. That shows how powerful the long shadow of the Communist purges of the McCarthy era were, more than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Similarly, even as authoritarianism is rapidly rising in the US and citizens are losing their rights (see a reminder from last weekend, a major New York Times story on how widespread use of arbitration clauses is stripping citizens of access to the court system*), one runs the risk of having one’s hair on fire if one dares suggest that America is moving in a fascist, or perhaps more accurately, a Mussolini-style corporatist direction. Yet we used that very expression, “Mussolini-style corporatism,” to describe the the post-crisis bank bailouts. Former chief economist of the IMF, Simon Johnson, was more stark in his choice of terms, famously calling the rescues a “quiet coup” by financial oligarchs.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmm...  We used to know that fascism was Bad Stuff.  But humans refuse to maintain institutional/historical memory for more than two generations.  Which is good for some things, but not really the smartest thing in governance.  You do understand that the "libertarian paradise" only works well if you're a pirate?

(I'm compressing a few things.  Read the articles.  Thanks!)

(Extra credit:  "None Dare Call It Sedition," Sara Robinson, Orcinus (4/6/2010); "The New Totalitarianism:  How American Corporations Have Made America Like the Soviet Union," Sara Robinson, AlterNet (7/15/2012); "Get The Hell Out and Vote Today," Susie Madrak, Crooks and Liars (11/3/2015).  There are things that have aged out, become arguable, or unconscously biased.  Noticing these things are part of critical thinking.)

In Memoriam

Fred Thompson, actor, Senator, candidate for President.

(Accidental clicking at New York Times.)