Dirt, With Delusions of Grandeur

• God has ethics?

  What a damn mess in Arkansas. It seems that some Republican members of the State House and the State Senate conspired to dump a ton of money on rightwing Christian colleges in the state. For about $600,000 of taxpayer money to tiny Ecclesia College in Springdale, Arkansas, the Republican politicians got about $38,000 each in kickbacks.

  Crooks and Liars, Juanita Jean (I've moved her link, but it's the one she used.)
• If you are shooting people and you are not in the armed services or firing in self-defense and/or they have done you no harm, there is something seriously wrong with your mental functioning, whether or not you are considered clinically mentally ill.
• I keep saying that it's that word "intelligence."  
• Talladega College's marching band will perform at the inaugural parade.

  "We respect and appreciate how our students and alumni feel about our participation in this parade," Hawkins said in a statement Thursday.
  
  "As many of those who chose to participate in the parade have said, we feel the inauguration of a new president is not a political event but a civil ceremony celebrating the transfer of power," Hawkins added.
  
  The announcement followed several days of intense debate on social media.

  I'm hoping the optimistic view is correct.
• Mmmmmmmmmm-hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

  Intelligence agencies have reportedly found substantial evidence that Russia meddled in the US election to help Trump, but Trump has steadfastly continued to cast doubt over the credibility of US intelligence officials on the subject. He is set on Friday to receive a briefing from US intelligence agencies on the Russian hacking.

  Breaking news:

  Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Russia was behind fake news during the presidential election when questioned at a Senate hearing on Thursday.
  
  Democratic Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed asked Clapper, “One of the aspects of this Russian hacking was not just disseminating information they had exploited from computers, but also the allegations of fake news sites, fake news stories that were propagated. Is that an accurate- is that one aspect of this problem?”
  
  “This was a multifaceted campaign,” Clapper replied. “So the hacking was only one part of it, and it also entailed classical propaganda, disinformation, fake news,” he said during the hearing, which is focused on the topic of Russian hacking.

Well, Something Screwy's Going On

• Spocko's Brain:  "This is how we fight."
  

  Adult bullies have lots of tools. The right wing bull[ies] have no problem screaming foul at any action they don’t like and crying to authorities who actually do their job. [...] “Sure I killed people, but nobody expects me to follow the law! But the good guys are supposed to follow the law!” Then, when it’s shown the law was followed, “Okay, he did it legally, but I was tricked, so it’s not fair!”
  
  When the bad guys are out-maneuvered, [...] they go into denial, they demand justice. They present themselves as victims, but [image]
  
  it’s yet another way to try and bend the system to their will.
  
  [...]
  
  In this case part of the win is to let the other lesser Capone-types know they aren’t safe. Then it’s changing laws to make it harder to game the system.
  
  Part of winning is acknowledging the corrupting power of money, and setting up systems to monitor it that aren’t easily captured. This is all part of the fight. It’s not as exciting as epic battles, but it is crucial for future success.
  
  [...] We will win some. We will also lose some. Activists who are taking on powerful interests need powerful friends during the losses and the wins.
  
  I’m encouraged and excited by reading about re-energized activist groups and new ones. We need lots people to understand the system we are in now vs. previous systems.
  
  We need to learn how to fight to make an impact. And we need to be reminded of the importance of persistence. We can never stop fighting until the fight is done.
  
  

  Emphasis added.  Spocko uses Trading Places to illustrate his points, so follow up by reading his post.
• Jurassicpork on political autopsies, the "imploding" Democratic Party, and the recent election.  Not because I agree with him (I don't.  Too much conspiracy theory for my taste), but for the analysis of the article by Todd Purdum at Politico, which conflates "Clintonism" with Democratic Party principles.  (Mention of "Democratic Party principles" invariably reminds me of the Will Rogers quote:  "I'm not a member of any organized political party...  I'm a Democrat.")  Everyone seems to have a pet theory (for example:  Fannie Wolfe at Shakesville cites misogyny.  Avedon's Sideshow cites This Week's Ryan Cooper on Democrats' mishandling of the economy.  And so on).
  
  I'm tempted to say (in my role as satirist and strewer of parentheses) that the results of the late election were due to space aliens and Bigfoot, and no one can prove that wrong.
• Speaking of space aliens, one of the idiot conservative pundits has said that people who refuse to perform at the Trump inaugural are "un-American."  I'm sure that Elton John and Celine Dion are grossly insulted.  Not.  (Also, "un-American" as a Scary Accusation of Horrible Horribleness passed its sell-by date in 1985.)  Is Ted Nugent unavailable or is he just asking too much money?
  
  (Y'know, it does not seem to be enough to win an election and therefore power; right-wingers want love, too.  They won't get any from me; I'm bigoted against bigots.  In case you did not notice.)
• Oh, the ethics thing:  If your first thought on seeing that the Republicans wanted to do away with an independent ethics office was bitter amusement, come sit by me you were not alone.  ETA:  I knew I should have checked with Professor Chaos!

But Driftglass Says It Better!

• "63 Million of My Neighbors Conspired to Take My Kid's Health Insurance Away." Long quote from cnn.com on what repeal would mean.

  Almost all of my 63 million neighbors who conspired to take my kid's health insurance away are the same neighbors who voted to re-elect Bush Administration monsters who lied us into the wrong war, bankrupted the country, pissed away our global reputation and crashed the economy.

• Mr. Dowd has a centipede in his colon and a hornet in his hat. Also he might want to do a bit of research on Presidential farewell addresses (Driftglass gives 5 examples) before waving his racism ignorance in public.

One shouldn't bring Twitter to a nuance fight.

Here's Your Hat, 2016, What's Your Hurry?

Yes, I have noticed that I am posting a lot of obituaries and not much about politics.

I have resolved to correct that.  New Year's Rez:  More snark and satire on politics, some of which will write itself; baseball, because a sport that recapitulates the Odyssey is worth occasional aggravation and can be forgiven its pace; and whatever I feel like.  More essays with reference links and less linkspam (mind you, I do linkspam because the folks I'm linking to say what I'm thinking better, and sometimes I am juxtaposing points of view.  But.  I used to do thinkpieces; it's time I started thinking again).  And I may start using the obits as jumping-off points for discursions.  Maybe.

(Three weeks until we have to start dodging authoritarians.)

Happy New Year!

In Memoriam

 Debbie Reynolds, actress/dancer (and mother of Carrie Fisher)

In Memoriam

• Vera Rubin, astronomer ("dark matter")
• Carrie Fisher, actress/author/screenwriter  (she had a massive heart attack on a plane and died after 3 days in the ICU)
• ETA:  Richard Adams, author (Watership Down et al.) Via   in comments

In Memoriam

• Zsa Zsa Gabor, celebrity and actress
• China Machado, model

Garry Trudeau!

Doonesbury!

Mike drop!

What Is to Be Remembered

• An interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, and opportunities lost.

  Gorbachev, who helped end the Cold War by launching liberal reforms, cutting nuclear stockpiles and allowing Soviet bloc nations in Europe to break free from Moscow's diktat, spoke bitterly about the West's failure to embrace the new era of cooperation he says his policy of "perestroika" offered.
  [...]
  He blasted what he described as Western "triumphalism," saying it remains a key factor in tensions between Russia and the West.

• AlterNet's Ilana Novick summarizes Robert Reich's suspicions of Donald Trump's relationship with Russia.
• Via Body Impolitic:  Zadie Smith, "On Optimism and Despair."
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, "My President Was Black."  Warning:  It is long and thorough.  A taste:

  Throughout Obama’s 2008 campaign and into his presidency, this attitude proved key to his deep support in the black community. African Americans, weary of high achievers who distanced themselves from their black roots, understood that Obama had paid a price for checking “black” on his census form, and for living black, for hosting Common, for brushing dirt off his shoulder during the primaries, for marrying a woman who looked like Michelle Obama. If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television.

  Read it. That is all.
• Zandar on the Kentucky Noseless.

  They're finding out now that the bulk of people on Obamacare were always poor white folk from the hills anyway, and that they're going to be the first people with their heads on the block when the axe comes thundering down. But guess what? I have little sympathy for people who thought they were gladly condemning others to lose their health care in order to benefit themselves. They voted for Trump because he was going to "fire" those people and make white America great again. Trump sold them the dream and they bought the coming nightmare hook line and sinker.
  
  "Trump will take Obamacare from those people who don't deserve it, but never from me and my family."
  
  That'll be on the gravestone of the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
  
  It should be on the gravestones of a lot of Kentuckians over the next four years too.

  Yes, they've spited their faces,and now they all look like Voldemort. /sarcasm mine.
• Why was I humming "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on the way back from the clinic?

In Memoriam

• E. R. Braithwaite, who wrote To Sir, With Love, on which the movie was based.
• Alan Thicke, actor

Threat Level *****BOGGLE*****

Why not?  He's at least as qualified as the rest of the President-elect's nominees for cabinet positions.

The Satirists and Surrealists salute you, Mr. Canseco.

"Wouldn't Hurt a Fly." "Of Course Not, Mrs. Bates."

• They're gunning for Medicare and Social Security and lying about it.  (Zandar Versus the Stupid)

  Republicans aren't stupid enough to cut Social Security, are they? After all, the average Trump voter is on the older end of the scale of the American electorate and the oldest Boomers will be 72 starting next year, with millions retiring over the next four years of the Trump administration. The famous Tip O'Neill political adage that "Social Security is the third rail of American politics, you touch it and die" still has to apply in the Trump era, right?
  
  Funny story about Republicans, to "save" things they like to burn them down.

• Syphilis is returning, and it's drug-resistant.  (ars technica.com, via Andrew Ducker (andrewducker on Lj and Dreamwidth), who scatters many links every day.)

  Researchers studying syphilis have been aware of a growing problem with macrolide resistance, says Stamm. “At first, the macrolide treatment failures were in US patients, but then there were reports of macrolide treatment failures in patients in several other countries.” Macrolide resistance is now a “global public health problem,” she says.
  
  But researchers haven’t known how widespread this resistance is, because a lot of research has been done on strains of syphilis that were obtained from humans (sometimes a long time ago) and then kept in labs, passed down in generations of lab animals. The information from these strains is useful, but it doesn’t tell us much about what strains might be prevalent in the real world or how they might have evolved differently from the strains in lab animals.
  
  [...]
  
  They found that modern syphilis infections fall into two main strains, called Nichols and Street Strain 14 (SS14), that appear to have split from each other sometime between the 1960s and the 1980s. Syphilis research has largely focused on the Nichols strain, but SS14 was actually more common in their samples. “We didn’t expect to see something so widespread,” says Arora. “We expected regional clusters, maybe, but instead we see something that apparently has crossed frontiers and boundaries.”
  
  [...]
  
  Isolates of both strains show up with resistance to azithromycin, but resistance is far more prevalent in SS14. A quarter of the Nichols samples had the genetic pattern that leads to macrolide resistance, but 90 percent of the SS14 samples had it. Together, this evidence suggests that SS14 is a relatively new strain of syphilis that’s far more widespread than we thought and far more resistant to macrolides than we thought.

• The return of The Rude Pundit.  It's rude of course.  Adults at leisure only, 18 and under not admitted.

Rampant! Voter! Fraud! and Other Stories

• Yes!  Rampant voter fraud!  My smelling salts!  My pearls!  My fainting -- wait, 4?

  We combed through the news-aggregation system Nexis to find demonstrated cases of absentee or in-person voter fraud — which is to say, examples of people getting caught casting a ballot that they shouldn't have cast — during this election. This excludes examples of voter registration fraud — the filing of fraudulent information. Those aren't votes cast — and given that organizations often provide incentives for employees to register as many people as possible, registration fraud cases (while still rare) are more common.
  
  Here's what we found: [examples]
  
  [...]
  
  There is simply no evidence that fraudulent ballots played any significant role in the 2016 presidential election whatsoever.

  That's four actual cases and three maybes. Somebody is using an eggbeater on that teapot, trying to create a tempest.
  
• Remember when we used to joke "It's a Russian plot" about seemingly-conspiratorial weirdness? It seems it's not a joke anymore.  Furthermore: 
  • Southern Beale,

    While this is the current headline, let me be blunt: this is not news. I wrote about this over the summer, here. I’m just a dumb housewife in Tennessee but even I can read a damn newspaper. When you read that the Russians hacked everyone, but only the DNC’s emails got sent to WikiLeaks, it’s pretty obvious that they were trying to help one team, and it sure wasn’t Hillary’s. As I wrote then:
    

    […] it’s far more worrisome that Putin is trying to help get Donald Trump elected than that Debbie Wasserman Schultz tried to help elect Hillary Clinton.

    But did we have that conversation? Noooo. We had to get all emo over Debbie Wasserman Schultz. That was super-fun.

    There's more.
  • Zandar

    The White House wanted to make sure everyone was on board with this, but Mitch McConnell said no, as he has for eight years. More importantly this [has] seriously thrown the legitimacy of Trump's win into doubt and Republicans like McConnell would have rather won with Russian help than a fair election.  Remember that.

    and
  • Driftglass

    Our country has been hit by a massive sneak attack by a hostile foreign power: a sneak attack whose very existence was covered up by leaders of the Republican Party.
    
    [...]
    
    The word you are looking for is "treason".

• Joining Anthony Weiner's therapy group: Jefferson Parish's president (Louisiana Republican) Mike Yenni.

  Fox 8’s Lee Zurik asked Yenni what his intent was in exchanging erotic texts with a teen.
  
  “I can’t…I really can’t answer it,” said Yenni. “I mean, it was just…it was a stupid action. It was a stupid action to even get into this form of text messaging. It was something…something that I can’t explain why I did it.”

  via skippy.
• Not the song or the musical group:  New theory about the Bermuda Triangle, with ominous music.

In Memoriam

Appaarently I forgot to post this here Thursday:

• John Glenn.  
• Greg Lake, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (later Emerson, Lake and Powell) and King Crimson

Sorry.

On Background with Splotches

• The Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire; links to articles about it in one place (at least for now, later may require search terms).  No, I wasn't there.  List of confirmed victims.  Map apps will still have the intact building in 3D and street view until the next pass/visit/upload (Mapquest, back in the day, showed pre-9/11 aerial views of WTC for a couple of weeks -- I used to check) happens--Google Maps last scanned that area in 2014.  

Meanwhile, the forces of evil around are assuming their triumph, and we shall call them Fascists because the Devil really hates being called by Its name.

• Hypocrisy and health care.  (Daily Irritant)
• They don't mean you well, that's for sure.  (Indomitable)
• Remember "Kinder, Küche, Kirche?"  Guess who wants to bring it back? (from Echidne of the Snakes)

  I'm not sure if this post makes the point I want to make: The right-wing in this country wants to socialize decisions about conception, about pregnancy and even about giving birth, but once a child is born, everything should be privatized: Almost all responsibility is saddled on the shoulders of the mothers, while the wider conservative society, in general, refuses to budge one inch from its traditional gendered expectations about the role of mothers.

  [Emphases in original]
  
• "Full employment" vs. "inclusive growth" and economic implications thereof. (naked capitalism)
• Unions and Fascist undermining and destruction.  (Booman Tribune)
• The war on libraries. (Wonkette)
• Rising tide of "fake" news and believers thereof.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)

• One of the many reasons that Megan McArdle is a terrible person is that she thinks she can-and, god help us, should-school Ta-Nehisi Coates on race.

  (The Hunting of the Snark)
  
• Robert Reich calls out Trump.  (AlterNet)
• Jerks vandalize football player's home.  (Crooks and Liars, first seen at sfgate.com)

"Flying Fox from the Yard"

• The Daily Banter's Justin Rosario discusses national voter ID.

  It will be nigh impossible to convince Millennials who came of age during the Great Recession that corporations and the 1% are the good guys. They watched corporate greed destroy the lives of millions and watched the rich get even richer from the destruction. Republicans will also be unable to convince them that they should vote Republican because Jesus hates abortion and brown people but loves guns. The usual wedge issues will have lost their potency. Republicans know this.
  
  The only move left to them has been rigging the election through extreme gerrymandering and massive voter suppression. Now that they control the entire government, the next step is to implement Voter ID laws on a federal level, forcing even Democratically controlled states to adopt a law that will reduce the number of eligible voters by millions.

  That to me smacks a little of conspiracy theory (also, someone who thinks Baby Boomers are "reliably conservative" has not met nearly enough of them).
• Variations on the term "crony capitalism."

  The real thing the doctrinaire conservatives get upset about in these contexts certainly has nothing to do with any meanings of the word "crony" in any case. It's the questioning of the miraculous rightness of the Invisible Hand, or less metaphysically the idea that any democratically constituted authority should question the judgment of the "rationally selfish" bourgeois through whose individual decisions the Hand is believed to operate. It's the bourgeois religion, according to which whatever the bourgeois wants is right, however destructive it may seem over the short run.

In Memoriam

• Van Williams, actor (The Green Hornet)
• Margaret Whitton, actress (Major League, et seq.)
• Andrew Sachs, actor (Fawlty Towers)

Smooth Operetta

51 days, folks.  Fifty-one days.

• The Tooth Fairy called.  That last tooth crumbled.  Please leave $1,000 under the pillow.  

  Camerota explained that the false claim that President Obama suggested people go out and commit voter fraud was drummed up on Fox Business Network, with deceptively edited video.

  I understand that there are intelligent, non-foaming Trump supporters out there, but apparently none of them ever cross the path of anyone in any media.
• Driftglass, taking it further:

  The doctored video is there, the doctored transcript is there, and the original transcript is there, and what is abundantly clear is that Fox News' Stuart Varney knowingly perpetrated a massive fraud on his viewers and that if he worked at a reputable news outfit and not Roger Ailes' Wingnut Whorehouse and Vomitorium he would have been shitcanned immediately.

• Why the Republicans want to destroy Social Security/Medicare (and Obamacare), as explained by Lance Mannion.

  Of course there’s nothing at all religious in it except for the self-righteous zeal with which they impose it on the body politic. It’s rank hypocrisy. An excuse to do whatever they want to make and pocket gobs of money they didn’t earn all on their own through their individual enterprise and hard work. It’s canned language they can use to explain away their naked greed and justify their social Darwinism. They’ve done a good job of proselytizing. There’s been no shortage of willing converts. The political media seems to teem with them. There are hardly enough loaves and fishes to feed them. How this all developed is the subject of Kevin Kruse’s indispensable One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, but to sum up quickly here, it was a response to the New Deal, an attempt to counter Franklin Roosevelt’s casting the New Deal in a Christian light.
  
  Ever since, the Republican party has been devoted to preaching their revised version of the gospel in which Jesus commands the storing up of treasures on earth and the parable of the sheep and the goats is inverted, as if he said “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters you do for me and my capricious, vindictive, sky-demon father.”
  
  A Christian nation is one in which the hungry starve, the sick go uncared for, and strangers are turned away, all for their own blessed good.
  
  End of sermon.

  There are links in original.
  
• Via skippy, Chattanooga's experience with municipal gigabit-per-second fiber internet network.

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!

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