You Said a Mouthful

• Melissa McEwan on the Republican Party:
  

  Republicans' primary problem with women is, and will always be, this: They think that we're stupid. They think that there's some way they can trick us into not caring or not noticing that their policies are crap.

  This can also be corroborated at Margaret and Helen.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid spots Rand Paul airing his inner fool in Guatemala.

  Remember when the Dixie Chicks were blackballed for suggesting as Americans that George W. Bush's foreign policy on Iraq was wrong? Eleven years later, it's now 100% acceptable for a sitting US senator to go abroad and openly attack the President, with the head of state of a foreign nation in attendance.

  Gee. Ya think?
• Batocchio last week was on fire, and I'm only quoting one paragraph because otherwise I'd end up quoting the entire post, and the one before, and the one before.

  Pushing for gay rights, including marriage and protection from getting fired for one's sexual orientation, isn’t about seeking elevated status, but mere equality. This is a crucial distinction. Yes, the push for gay rights makes social conservatives upset, and yes, it entails a change from decades ago. It is not, however, an assault on their freedom, which has not changed, only a diminishing of their privilege, which they took for granted. Cultural norms have shifted and no longer support what they view(ed) as the natural order. The same thing happened with slavery and women's suffrage and Jim Crow laws – things changed, and frankly, progressed. To quote another old post that can apply to bigotry or cultural narcissism in general, "of course people of faith have a role in the public square, they just shouldn't have a privileged role. They can propose public policies, but they don't automatically get to have their way by citing their religion. They don't automatically get to win."

• Comrade Misfit points up an interesting statistic. Yes, I am thinking about the Michael Brown killing and the police riot in Ferguson. Yes, there is rage. Later.

The People Who Disagree With Edwin Starr

Actually, with the songwriters of "War."  But you know what I mean.

The Slacktivist reminds us of the reasons "some people have earned the right not to be listened to".  (Thank you, Mr. Fallows.)

P.S.  Invariably the people in favor of war will not have to fight it.  I think that disqualifies them right there.

In Memoriam

Richard Attenborough, actor and director.

Tango In The Night

1. I am fine.  Shaken but fine.  (I'm not in Napa County.)
2. As I look at the news from last week, I am reminded that humans (I include myself here) fail consistently in the "Love one another." requirement.  Which is really why we can't have nice things.

In Memoriam

• Don Pardo, announcer.
• B.K.S. Iyengar, teacher and practitioner of yoga

In Memoriam

Lauren Bacall, actress and legend.

In Memoriam

Robin Williams, actor and comic.

"Drop That Fountain Pen, You're Under Arrest."

Video on bank regulation or lack of same, at Naked Capitalism.  Some of which is comprehensible.

Born on this Date

That would be Stan Freberg.

(Mentioned back here.)

In Memoriam

• Steve Post, New York radio personality.
• Manny Roth, club owner. 

And This Cost How Much Again?

Two years of investigating Benghazi have yielded no administration wrongdoing.

Thompson said the report "confirms that no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order (to U.S. forces) was given."

That conflicts with accusations of administration wrongdoing voiced by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista (San Diego County), whose House Government Oversight and Reform Committee has held hearings on the Benghazi attack.

My, what a surprise. Not.

Via Driftglass, who noticed that:

While there were the usual flood of wingnut-driven Benghaaazi hair-on-fire "news" stories choking the internet over the weekend, so far as I could find, there was nothing related to this story (other than this SFGate article) when I searched for news about "House Intelligence Committee" or "Mike Thompson".

The story came out on Friday afternoon, incidentally. But still.

Whoops!

I missed my anniversary!

Six years!  Break out the Cold Duck!

And Hair Will Grow on your Palms

Why the arguments against same-sex marriage make no sense anymore.

What coherent justifications for anti-gay policies could possibly exist in a post-Lawrence landscape?

The answer, it turns out, is that there are none—none, at least, that aren’t driven by animus. A review of the failed attempts here is instructive. At various points, conservatives argued that every child deserves a mom and a dad; that gay people simply make inferior parents; that marriage isn’t marriage without penile-vaginal penetration; that legalizing gay marriage would lower birth rates; and, best of all, that somehow, allowing gay people to get married would cause more straight people to have children out of wedlock.

Are you snickering? So were the judges who had the pleasure of hearing these arguments spelled out in court.

Slate, via News From ME.

In Memoriam

• Margot Adler, journalist and writer (also the founder of WBAI's Hour of the Wolf, for which I used to get myself conscious at 5 AM and switch on the radio.  I met her a few times).
• James Shigeta, actor.
• Bel Kaufman, Up the Down Staircase.

Having Learned Nothing from Jaws...

A clip from The Strain, via Spocko's Brain (and no, that was not intentional).

The Ongoing

Power may be in inverse relation to empathy.

Not a surprise.  Feminist Philosophers, via I think one of the links at Wiscon38Fail (it hasn't gotten a proper Fail Name yet, and I do not want to use the "accused"'s name as the Fail Name).

Heads'-Up/Uh-Oh!

Ebola patient on the loose.  This is not a good time to visit West Africa.

Strange Juxtapositions

(Is the Dread Dormammu running HYDRA?  It would explain so much.)

• Vagabond Scholar on the ongoing adversarial relationship of civility and bullshit.

  For example, maybe you sincerely believes that someone calling Dick Cheney a "war criminal" is distasteful, because, uh… he hasn't been formally convicted as such. Or it sounds harsh. Okay, but you should be more outraged by what Cheney actually did, his role in constructing a a torture program and his dishonesty in selling a war of choice. Don't agree with all of that? Fine. But the defining feature of civility trolls, the smarm patrol, the bullshitters, is that they're trying to shut honest discussion down. They don't want to investigate. They don't want accountability (not for their team, anyway). For example, there's a reason torture apologists steadfastly ignore all the accounts and mountains of data proving their claims false. Pick another issue if you like; the same dynamics often play out.

• Paul Krugman discusses why conservatives are upset about California.  (AlterNet's Janet Allon, on Mr. Krugman's column.)
• Remember the psychological profiles of conservatives ten years ago that caused some hoo-hah?  More evidence.

  The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

  (From Mother Jones, via AlterNet.)
  

The Irony Patrol

• Terrorist Plots R Us, or the FBI is Out There.  Via Comrade Misfit.  Entrapment does not make law enforcement look good, y'know; it's a cheesy TV scriptwriter kludge when a proper plot is in  Writers'-Block-Land.
• "George Harrison memorial tree killed by beetles."  Without an "a."

In Memoriam

James Garner, actor.

Sometimes Twitter's Succinctness is the Point

The LOLGOP Twitter account makes an observation.  (Via wouldyoueva on Live Journal, who retweeted a different observation.)

Nauseating

Nauseating.  (I can't even type it.  It's akin to poisoning children.)

This Is the Sort of Slime the Supreme Court Unleashed

To paraphrase Southern Beale:  "Yes, Georgia law enforcement people!  Do tell me how getting-out-the-vote efforts and absentee ballots constitute voter fraud when performed by African-Americans!  I'm all ears."

Via Fred Clark (Slacktivist).

In Memoriam

• Charlie Haden, jazz musician
• Lorin Maazel, conductor and prodigy
• Nadine Gordimer, novelist
• Tommy Ramone, last of The Ramones

The Footie

Apparently, conservatives fear, loathe, and disapprove of soccer. Cerberus (Sadly, No!) takes one down. Profanely, of course.

You see, young people don’t seem to have the same dumbass nativist hangups as the Klan-wannabes who seem to have our country in a death-lock, so thus are less likely to abandon a totally awesome sport the whole world plays simply because it isn’t an American exclusive that feeds into our notions of American Exceptionalism. And that’s bad, because that means they’ll be less likely to support bombing random brown people and self-defeating nonsense justified only by a strange idea that America is “different” and thus not bound by the laws of time and space.

And I'm pretty sure there's some incorrectness in there.

[partial crosspost]  See also link here.

96

96

In Memoriam

• Meshach Taylor, actor
• Frank Cashen, baseball executive
• Frank M. Robinson, author, activist, editor, scholar.

In the Matter of That Supreme Court Decision

Iron Tongue of Midnight said it best.

(The decision, if you missed the news this morning.  The summarized dissent.)

Better make sure you're not employed by Christian Scientists or Jehovah's Witnesses or really strict Muslims or ultra-Orthodox Jews.  Or any corporation professing any religious belief.  Lest, you know, you get bitten somewhere you weren't expecting.

On the Value of Kotter, et al.

• One of the mysteries of life is the variety of international readers of this blog.  Not long ago, Indonesians made up a sizable chunk of my readership; currently I'm having an influx of South Africans.  Is it something I said?
• I may have mentioned a while back that I have a thing about teaching, possibly because I believe in education (yes, I'm one of those) and because I mostly was dealt excellent teachers (a few crummy ones, too, whose names are mercifully forgotten) and because I was smart, which is not to say that I liked school, but that is another story altogether.  Because my communication skills are non-existent (what works for me is writing and polishing sentences, which is very difficult in real space and time unless both parties have iPads), I bailed on an educational career, but that doesn't mean that meta doesn't interest me.  Anyway.  Lance Mannion has a thought or two on teachers (his son is graduating from high school) that resonated:

  Every era has its own peculiar insanities. One of ours is a sudden vituperative disrespect for teachers bordering on out and out hatred. All over the country there are concerted efforts to put teachers back in their place as mere employees, and temp workers at that, grateful for whatever pittance the local school board deigns to pay them. Several cohorts of teacher-bashers are behind this, for different but overlapping reasons. […] But they really don’t value talent.
  
  They don’t appear to even know what it is.
  
  What they value is productivity.
  
  That’s another way of saying they value making a maximum amount money at a minimal cost.
  
  Teachers are anything but “productive” in that way.
  
  And it’s clear that these reformers think teachers aren’t productive because they are lazy, not intelligent, without talent, and not incentivized to work harder and become productive by money---that is, by the fear of not having it, not by the real prospect of earning more of it. […]

• 100 years ago, the precipitating event for World War I happened (I thought I'd linked to an article seen in the Smithsonian magazine, but apparently not.  Damn).

*Innocent Look*

• Shenanigans in Mississippi.  (From Republic of T, with lots of links.)  Bonus Nina Simone video and a week of bad conservative behavior in review.  (One of the people accused of conspiring to photograph the wife [who is in a hospice and has dementia] of one of the candidates was found dead [and may have committed suicide].)
• Also from Republic of T:  When is Congress going to focus on employment?  Rather than bashing the unemployed, that is.
• Getting the wrong lessons from Vietnam and the Cold War and applying them to Iraq.  Obsidian Wings' Doctor Science explains how that happened.