Constitution vs Anti-Constitution

About this time next year, we'll have a pretty clear idea of how much longer our little experiment in democratic self-government might continue.

Keep in mind, we're always maybe one or two elections away from disaster, but 2024 is looking to be very decisive.

Mission Democracy

 Wisecrack

White Rise

The Atlantic:

Across the United States, Jewish communities are struggling to deal with this new wave of threats. While none of the bomb threats have led to violence, Monday’s calls came around the same time as another attack: Roughly 170 Jewish graves in a Missouri cemetery were desecrated over the weekend, according to The Washington Post. The calls may be a novel form of intimidation, but the context around them is not. American Jews are victims of more reported hate crimes than any other group in the United States, and have been subject to the majority of religiously motivated offenses every year since 1995, when the FBI first started reporting these statistics. The phone calls may not result in violence, but they contribute to an atmosphere of anti-Semitism already well-established in the United States.

You can't draw a line between any one thing 45* has said that goes straight to any given incident.

President Bannon knows that, because he knows about Stochastic Probability, so he knows he and his merry band have a nice fat lot of plausible deniability.

But this is some more of that shit that doesn't happen by accident, even though it really does, even though it doesn't because Bannon never told anybody to do anything.

In the presence of English Barons, Henry II—who is now utterly vexed by Becket's actions—cries out: Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? Believing the King meant for Becket to be murdered, four knights ride to Canterbury Cathedral and kill Becket on December 29, 1170.

Dangerously Silly

From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone

The Bundy militiamen are like a Black September version of an Iron John forest retreat: a bunch of weepy middle-aged guys who dressed up in crisply pressed outdoorswear and took over a bird sanctuary so they could play outlaw for a few days while they "worked on themselves."

They gathered around a bonfire (there really was a bonfire) and presumably engaged in Robert Bly-style mythopoetic healing, getting back to their manly roots by stroking their rifles, wearing camo undies, and complaining about all the wrongs done to them by women/the federal government/wild birds/whoever.
About the camo: yes, the following actually happened. One of the militiamen, Melvin Lee, posted a video on Facebook (these guys are on social media more than most teenagers) where he complained about the popular misconceptions of the movement. "There's nobody in camouflage," said Lee, who was wearing a camouflage jacket. "Well, except for my jacket."

And yes, it did happen that Ritzheimer, who did remember to bring his paperback copy of the Constitution, actually sent out a tweet asking for care packages for things his compadres forgot to pack for their armed dude-seminar. They asked for socks, snacks, energy drinks (!), equipment for cold weather, snow camo, and "gear."

This was after Bundy had told reporters that the group was prepared to stay for "years" and had enough supplies to see them through. "We have food planned and prepared," he said.

The Farce Awakens

"... we're not about fear; we're not about force; we're not about intimidation ..."  

That's why your action is considered an "armed occupation of federal property"?  And you brought all the guns because you have no intention of threatening violence or making a show of force?  

OK.

BTW - Messianic much, Mr Bundy?  

Here's the thing, schmuck - maybe you and the Goober Squad could just go the fuck home and let the good folks in Harney County decide what's best for the good folks in Harney County.  Could we try that?

Out Of Chaos

That'd be lovely wouldn't it?  To wake up one day and hear something like, "Well, would you just look at that - we're all out of chaos today".  OK - sorry about that.  Let's get on with the incoherent rant.

The point is that eventually, patterns emerge from a series of chaotic events.

Weather is a chaotic thing, but over some period of time, we can identify a pattern called Climate.

An individual behaves in different ways day-to-day, but we can see a pattern develop, and we call it Personality.

etc

I've been feeling kinda frazzled the last several years, trying to keep up with all the weirdness that's been coming from "Politics", where it seems like somebody is making a concerted effort to change - fundamentally - the way we approach governing ourselves.

There's more than an ample number of specific examples so I'll skip forward here, and say straight up that the main proponents for these changes wear the "Conservative" label, and that most of them are also tagged with "Republican".  But for me, the two big examples that really stand out are these:

1. "Wall Street" (in the general sense, ie: Banking/Investment/Insurance/etc) came really close to blowing up the whole world.  They bought off politicians, and they bought off the regulators, and they bought off the voters - and when their little scheme imploded, they had the perfect solution - they extorted their way out of it.
2. The National Security Regime.  Don't be fooled into thinking this is all about Big Brother/Big Gubmint.  The massive structure of Security Nation was put together by people who are  zealots about small-government.  Criticizing them for being hypocrites means nothing because growing the government is not what they're doing.  They're busily taking a public-controlled function and turning it into a private enterprise - not accountable to anybody for anything.

The pattern?  Blame The Gubmint, of course.  Same shit, new day.

Blame the government for bailing out Wall Street instead of holding Wall Street accountable for causing the meltdown that left us with a very limited menu of really shitty choices.

Blame (typical no-good rotten traitorous "gov't employee") Edward Snowden for giving away government secrets instead of addressing the fact that those secrets are all pointing at the hundreds of billions of tax dollars being funneled into the pockets of a very short list of shell corporations trying to control the flow of information.  Let 'em argue about Whistle-Blower protections.  Let 'em argue about privacy.  Let 'em argue about a Journalist's Sources.  They can argue about any-fuckin'-thing they wanna argue about, but don't let 'em start thinking they can find out what's going on in time for them to do anything about it.

So I don't have to look at each crazy thing that falls out of some Repub's tater trap (and I don't have to spend any ergs trying to out-insight some Dem either) - all I have to do is look for how this new piece of bullshit lines up with the rest of the bullshit they've been piling up for the last 35 years.  

Focus on the First Thing - the GOP has turned sour; it's a one-trick pony; it needs a diaper change; they never say anything that isn't aimed at trying to make us believe our democracy doesn't work and that we should get rid of it and turn the whole thing over to a board of directors... How the fuck did these guys get to be known as Patriots and Real Muricans in the first place?  

This is a very old game, and we're supposed to be the exception to it.  We gotta get these fucks outa there.

Today's Gaffe

It's well known that a 'gaffe' is when some politician accidentally tells the truth.

At a Dallas County GOP event last month, Bishop John Lawson asked Ken Emanuelson, a Tea Party activist, what the Republican Party was doing for African-American voters. The progressive group Battleground Texas posted audio from the event. "I'm going to be real honest with you," Emanuelson said. "The Republican Party doesn't want black people to vote if they are going to vote 9-to-1 for Democrats." In Emanuelson's view, in other words, the solution to lack of support from African-American voters is to have fewer of them show up at the polls. When the inevitable criticism ensued, Emanuelson backtracked. In a post on his Facebook page, the Tea Party activist acknowledged that he "misspoke" and tried to clarify what he was getting at. "What I meant, and should have said, is that it is not, in my personal opinion, in the interests of the Republican Party to spend its own time and energy working to generally increase the number of Democratic voters at the polls, and at this point in time, nine of every ten African-American voters cast their votes for the Democratic Party."

And Emanualson isn't the first Repub to say something like that.

1) It's not in the best interests of the GOP for everybody who's eligible to vote to go out and vote.
2) The GOP is working very hard in many places to pass laws that effectively keep people - the big majority of whom are likely not going to vote for Repubs - away from the polls.

Here's a slightly different angle:  When everybody who should vote gets to vote, we say yay, democracy - our system is healthy, and it's working the way it's supposed to work.  That's what America's all about.  But that's what the TeaParty Republicans are against; they're saying it's wrong for so many people to vote; they're saying there's too much democracy going on here.  They're saying democracy is bad for the GOP, and so the GOP is opposed to democracy.

It just seems pretty clear, and it's pretty fucked up.

Today's Wingnut

...just happens to be Chief Justice of SCOTUS.  And I'm thinking I may hafta consider changing my name.

From Charlie Pierce:

One of the more signifying moments in Wednesday's oral arguments at the Supreme Court regarding the Voting Rights Act came when Chuef Justice John Roberts asked Solicitor General Ralph Verrilli:

"Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout?" "I do not know that," Verrilli answered.

"Massachusetts," Roberts responded, adding that even Mississippi has a narrower gap.

--snip--

The problem is, Roberts is woefully wrong on those points, according to Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who on Thursday branded Roberts's assertion a slur and made a declaration of his own. "I'm calling him out," Galvin said. Galvin was not alone in his view. Academics and Massachusetts politicians said that Roberts appeared to be misguided. A Supreme Court spokeswoman declined to offer supporting evidence of ­Roberts's view, referring a ­reporter to the court transcript. On Thursday, Galvin tried to set the record straight. "We have one of the highest voter registrations in the country," he said, "so this whole effort to make a cheap-shot point at Massachusetts is deceptive...In the November 2012 election, there was little difference in voter turnout in Boston neighborhoods with high concentrations of white or black voters. In Charlestown, where 80 percent of residents are white, 68 percent of voters cast ballots in November. In Roxbury, the traditional heart of Boston's African-American community, about 64 percent of voters came out to the polls. Galvin and political scientists speculated that Roberts drew his conclusions using US Census Bureau data known as "The Current Population Survey," which collects information on voting and registration every other year. Political scientists say this is one of the few national databases, if not the only one, providing state-by-state voting information.

Read the whole thing and then tell me they're not trying to fuck us with our pants on.