Make 'Em Pay

House Speaker Mike Johnson is no friend of American democracy.

"Leadership"

The Republican Conference in the US House of Representatives is what you get when you allow the radical libertarian anti-government hyper-individualist "philosophy" to run itself out to the logical extreme.

It's the Geejy Bird up close and personal.

Yo, Mitch - You In There, Buddy?

Sorry not sorry.

People who predate the invention of sliced bread and chocolate chip cookies should be knitting, or playing golf, or trying their hand at pottery. Or maybe they should be shopping around for a good hospice - but they should not be in charge of a country with a net worth of $125 Trillion.

Ukraine

President Zelensky awarded US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi the Order of Princess Olga for “significant personal contribution" to strengthening Ukrainian-American cooperation and "supporting sovereign, independent and democratic Ukraine.”

She showed up

In a war zone

Wearing heels

At 82

No bone spurs

Today's Cultural Trend

Failures of leadership are made manifest in the grieving of everyday people.

LA Times:

When Pamela Caddell died of COVID-19 last month, there was no funeral — her family knew that, as a former nurse, she wouldn’t want anyone else to be exposed to the disease.

But there was still something her husband, Richard, wanted to say — needed to say — so he sat down in his empty house to write her obituary.

After honoring her decades in medicine and listing her surviving relatives, he included a plea to anyone who picked up the Courier & Press in Evansville, Ind.

“Pam died of Covid-19,” Richard wrote. “It was her fervent wish that everyone take this horrible disease seriously. This was her last wish to all people.”

Richard may not have known it, but the obituary for his wife belongs to a growing genre that dates to the summer. At the time, President Trump and his Republican allies were pushing to keep businesses open and downplaying the possibility of a deadly second wave of infections.

Now with a third wave overwhelming hospitals across the country, Americans are increasingly turning their private grief into public calls for action as the COVID-19 death toll grows by thousands each day.

Unlike Trump, the mourners do not have tens of millions of Twitter followers, nor do television cameras hang on their every word. Instead they’re buying obituaries in local newspapers, sometimes for several hundred dollars. There have been some efforts to turn the obituaries into a more coordinated activist campaign, but for many it’s a decision they reach on their own, a reflection of their own frustration, anger and pain.

“A lot of people knew my wife,” Richard said. “Her message was to take it seriously. Everybody. Take it seriously. And there’s a lot of people that I’m afraid that they don’t. They listen to the wrong person.”

Among the many things I will never forgive "conservatives" for is that they used "Culture Of Life" as a political weapon, only to turn this country into a Culture Of Death kinda place.

A Statement Of Faith

There has to be a shift in our cultural morality.

I was horrified and deeply saddened by the footage of the last moments in the life of George Floyd. Like so many before him, Mr. Floyd’s death was the preventable product of a system that too often treats Black Americans as targets for suspicion, oppression, and violence.

Over the past three days I have found myself thinking of the many young men that I have been fortunate to coach and get to know in my career. Each of them is a child of a loving Father in Heaven, full of their own power and potential to make a positive impact on the world around them — just like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others were before their deaths.

I am fortunate and privileged, humbled, and honored, to lead young men of all races, all faiths, and all beliefs in a shared pursuit of excellence on the field of play, in the classroom, and in life after college. I have no way of fully understanding the fear, pain, and anger members of the Black community at UVA and all over the world are feeling right now. But that doesn’t absolve me, or anyone else, from our responsibility to be honest about the world around us and to use our influence to drive positive change. I pray that God will bless the memory of George Floyd and so many others and that we will not waste another moment to build a society where every person enjoys the same right to life, liberty, and happiness as citizens of this nation.

Bronco Mendenhall

Head Coach

UVa Football

Rot At The Top

Can we stop pretending Trump is fit to be president?

WaPo OpEd:

At various times over the past three and a half years, many of us have asked what would happen if President Trump truly went over the edge or if his behavior became so frightening that his unfitness for the most powerful position on Earth could no longer be denied.

But the human capacity for denial is apparently almost infinite. Let’s review what our president has been up to in the past few days:

• With the death toll from covid-19 about to top 100,000, Trump has offered almost nothing in the way of tributes to the dead, sympathy for their families, or acknowledgement of our national mourning. By all accounts he is barely bothering to manage his administration’s response to the pandemic, preferring to focus on cheerleading for an economic recovery he says is on its way, even as he feeds conspiracy theories about the death toll being inflated. This weekend, he went golfing.
• In a Twitter spasm on Saturday and Sunday, Trump retweeted mockery of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s weight and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) looks, along with a tweet calling Hillary Clinton a “skank.”
• Eager to start a new culture war flare-up, he urged churches to open and gather parishioners in a room to breathe the same air, threatening that he would “override” governors whose shutdown orders still forbade such gatherings. The president has no such power.
• He all but accused talk show host Joe Scarborough of murdering a young woman who died in 2001 in the then-congressman’s district office, bringing untold torture to her family from the conspiracy theorists who will respond to his accusation.
• He has repeatedly insisted that the upcoming election is being “rigged” because states run by both Republicans and Democrats are making it easier to vote by mail, seeking to delegitimize a vote that has yet to occur, despite the substantial evidence that mail voting advantages neither party.

The truth is that Trump is not much more despicable of a human being than he has always been; it’s just that standard Trumpian behavior becomes more horrifying when it occurs during an ongoing national crisis. It is reality that changed around him, and he was incapable of responding to it.

We all know this. In public, Republicans may say that the real villain in the pandemic is China, or that all those deaths — and the tens of thousands yet to come — were inevitable, or that it is essential to get the economy moving. But they know as well as the rest of us do what a catastrophic failure Trump has been.They must own the moral choice they now make. In 2016, they said Trump would grow serious and sober once he was faced with the awesome responsibilities of the office. There was little reason at the time to think it would happen, but it was at least possible.

No one can say that now. Not only do we know who Trump is, we know who he will always be. And we know that reelecting him will be disastrous in a hundred ways.

If you gave many Republicans in Washington truth serum, they’d say, “Of course he’s unfit to be president. Of course he’s corrupt, of course he’s incompetent, of course he’s the most dishonest person ever to step into the Oval Office. But I can live with that, because him being reelected means Republicans keep power, we get more conservative judges and we get all the policies we favor.”That is the choice they’re making. We all know it, even if they’ll never say it out loud.

I’m not sure how I’d feel or what I’d do if was faced with a similar choice as a liberal, because it’s impossible to imagine a liberal version of Trump becoming the nominee of the Democratic Party — or even what a liberal version of Trump would look like. But we can see how Democrats grappled recently with their own questions about former vice president Joe Biden and the compromises they might have to make about him.

When a woman named Tara Reade alleged that Biden had sexually assaulted her in the early 1990s when she worked in his Senate office, the response among those who wish to see Trump defeated in November was complicated, to say the least. Some criticized Biden, some questioned Reade’s story and some remained agnostic pending further information.

And some, showing a forthrightness Republicans have not been willing to muster, said that even if they came to believe Reade’s story was true, they’d still vote for Biden, not just because Trump has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct by no fewer than two dozen women, but also because even if Biden turned out to be guilty, it would still be unfortunate but necessary to choose him over the most dangerously unfit president in American history.

In the days since, so many questions have been raised about Reade’s story that she has few defenders left; her own lawyer dropped her as a client. That has left Democrats breathing a sigh of relief, as they seem to have been excused from making a painful but necessary choice. Nevertheless, they grappled, candidly and publicly, with what it would mean for them if Reade were telling the truth.

The Republicans who support Trump have seldom done that, perhaps because there is no way to do so without acknowledging how morally indefensible that support has been. And as we approach another election, they’ll tell themselves that Trump isn’t as bad as he looks, or that Joe Biden is a monster, or that all that matters is winning.In the future, when we look back on this dark period, we should resist the temptation to focus solely on Trump himself. To do so would be to excuse those who know exactly what he is but pretend they can work to keep him in office and remain unsullied. They cannot, and their moral culpability becomes clearer every day.

Admitting The Obvious

It seems some of our Press Poodles really are starting to catch up with Driftglass.

Washington Monthly:

One of the challenges in analyzing modern American politics is accurately describing the Republican Party without seeming unserious and hyperbolic. Major publications are understandably in the habit of presenting both sides of the partisan divide as being inherently worthy of respect and equal consideration, both as a way of shielding themselves from accusations of bias and as a way of maintaining their own sense of journalistic integrity.

Unfortunately, the modern Republican Party’s abdication of seriousness, good faith and reality-based communications or policy-making has stretched even the most open-minded analyst’s capacity for forced balance. Donald Trump’s own inability to string together coherent or consistent thoughts has led to a bizarre normalization of his statements in the traditional media, as journalists unconsciously try to fit his rambling, spontaneous utterances into a conventional framework. This has come at the cost of Americans seeing the full truth of the crisis of leadership in the Oval Office for what it is. For instance, it was ironically salutary for the American public to witness Donald Trump’s bizarre pandemic press conferences where he oddly attacked reporters for asking innocuous questions and recommended researching bleach and sunlight injections, because they got to see Trump raw as he truly is, without the normalization filter. Republicans have long argued that the “mainstream media filter” gives them a bad shake, but the reality is the opposite: sure, it’s not as good as being boosted by Fox News’ overt propaganda, but it does them a greater service than letting the public see them unfiltered at all.

But there comes a tipping point at which it becomes too dangerous to keep up the pretense. Most people left of center would argue (rightly, I believe) that we hit that point long, long ago and the time to re-evaluate journalistic norms and practices should have been decades earlier when the GOP was busy covering up the Iran Contra scandal and promoting the Laffer Curve as serious public policy. Or that any number of catastrophes of conservative public policy and norm erosion since should have sounded the alarms along the way, from the Bush v Gore decision and the Brooks Brothers Riots to the lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, to the deregulation-fueled Wall Street crash, birtherism, the Benghazi obsession and the nomination of Donald Trump. Many would point with legitimate outrage to the abdication of responsibility in the face of climate change, yawning inequality, forced family separation policy, children in cages and so much else.
Media Bias Check:

Once Upon A Time

...in a land quickly fading from our memory, there was a real president. But we grew stoopid and lazy, and 61,000,000 of us got snookered into believing that a guy who had never succeeded at anything but being a game show host was a good choice to lead the biggest baddest bestest country on Earth.

And here we are.

Today In Leadership

From a few days ago, this is NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, thanking the Army Corps of Engineers for building their work in getting some new facilities up and running, and then delivering what's been sorely lacking from a "president" who worries only about his TV ratings and the money he can put in his own fucking pockets.

But I digress -

On Herding Cats

So here we are at the beginning of another election cycle.

Not crazy about Warren? Cool.
Think Beto just don't cut? Fine.
Sick to death of all the Biden memes? OK.
Bernie's 2 years past his freshness date? Awesome.

I'm not asking you to keep it all under your hat. I'm not telling you to sit down and shut up.

You should stand up and you should speak up.

But don't lose your shit just because I like somebody who you're convinced is a DINO, and the new Darling Of The Wall Street Crowd, and nothing more or less than the embodiment of the Evil Duopoly and blah blah blah.

Get the fuck over yourself.

Everybody running for the Dem nomination is a better choice than the Flaming Racist Daddy State Asshole currently steering the entire world directly into the sun.

EVERY FUCKING ONE OF 'EM

What's Wrong With Congress

Ryan Costello (R-PA06) went on All In last night and couldn't manage to say much of anything except that it all makes him sad.

MSNBC - Pressure building to expel Steve King
(MSNBC sucks green weenies when it comes to embedding their video)

BTW - I'm not interested in bashing the Dem for "soft-peddling" on this. Boyle made his point even though I'd like to hear it made in much sharper terms.

Costello (and Repubs in general) refuse to confront the problem. They speak in neutral terms - like Costello saying it's up to the people to vote Steve King out. He says the voters need to send King the message that they're not with him.

Here's the thing, Mr Costello - you have to put your money where your mouth is. You have to stand up in public, and in Congress, and tell King straight out: "I won't be voting with you on anything. I won't support or endorse or co-sponsor anything you propose. Ever. And Mr Speaker, until you do something about Mr King, I won't be voting with the Republican caucus on much of anything either."

Stop blaming his asshole constituents for a problem they refuse to solve when you refuse even to help them identify the problem as a problem.

You're a leader - so fucking lead already.

Robin DiAngelis - On White Supremacy  and why being nice isn't going to end racism:

About That Macron Dude

Mr Macron:

Emmanuel Marcon just delivered the State of the Union Trump should have. Watch. pic.twitter.com/gfP9Tsso9t

— Millennial Politics (@MillenPolitics) April 26, 2018

 

I have to push back on one tiny point - we're not killing the planet.

What we're doing is making it far more probable that the planet will end up killing us.

It's not all that complicated.

They're Not All Assholes

Good to remind myself once in a while that there are people in positions of power who get it - people who understand that this month's numbers mean diddly-shit if there's nothing left to work with in order to get next month's numbers. And that if you just leave it to the next guy to worry about that, then you're setting us all up for the kind of disaster we're starting to experience now.

Fortune Magazine's list of 50 great leaders for 2018:

16. Isabelle Kocher, CEO, Engie

In just two years, Kocher has pulled Engie, the energy giant formerly known as GDF Suez, into the future. The legacy oil and gas company now focuses on renewables and decarbonization; it has sold $15 billion worth of “dirty” assets and reinvested in cleaner ones. Kocher, the only woman CEO among France’s CAC 40 companies, recently boosted Engie’s dividend and reported its return to profitability after a two-year absence.


Eating your seed crop and fouling the nest are really bad ideas - even when you do it inadvertently, or for reasons you think are currently justifiable.

24. Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries

In less than two years, India’s richest man has brought mobile data to the masses—and completely upended the country’s telecom market. Since Ambani, chief of the $47 billion conglomerate Reliance Industries, launched Jio—the first mobile network in the world to be entirely IP-based—in September 2016, the company has signed up a staggering 168 million subscribers. The secret? Offering dirt-cheap data and free calls (and plowing billions of dollars into the infrastructure that transmits them). The effect, dubbed “Jio-fication,” has driven India’s higher-price carriers to drop costs (if not run them out of business), and it fueled a 1,100% rise in India’s monthly data

Combining a disrupting innovation with a socially conscientious plan for implementation is what we used to do here in USAmerica Inc - before we put the bean-counters in charge and started insisting we could smash-fit everything into a 12-column ledger.

25. Mick CornettFormer mayor, Oklahoma City

If you’re a fiscally conservative mayor in a fiscally conservative city, how do you persuade voters to pay more for public works? Cornett proposed tying new spending to small sales taxes—and requiring that the taxes expire once the projects were paid for. During his 14-year tenure, his so-called MAPS plans helped Oklahoma City pay for school revitalization, public transit, and downtown improvements. Cornett left office in April on a high note and is seeking the GOP nod for governor.

Pay-as-you-go without the punishing Calvinist bullshit, which is always just the thinly-disguised Kick-'Em-When-They're-Down approach that the GOP normally takes.

BTW - it has escaped no one's notice that Donald Trump is not on this list.

Not Even Two Years Ago

10 March 2018

To the students of Parkland —

We wanted to let you know how inspired we have been by the resilience, resolve and solidarity that you have all shown in the wake of unspeakable tragedy.

Not only have you supported and comforted each other, but you’ve helped awaken the conscience of the nation, and challenged decision-makers to make the safety of our children the country’s top priority.

Throughout our history, young people like you have led the way in making America better. There may be setbacks; you may sometimes feel like progress is too slow in coming. But we have no doubt you are going to make an enormous difference in the days and years to come, and we will be there for you.

Barack Obama     Michelle Obama
I miss the fuck outa those two.

Danica Roem

First time an out Trans Woman got elected to any state legislature - here's a tweet thread from Danica Roem:

Since the election, I've repeatedly heard these Republican talking points about why they lost, basically making Democratic voters out to be too dumb to vote Republican and caring too much about identity politics. At risk of giving them good ideas, let me break this down.

I spent 10 months detailing my plan to fix #Route28: how much it would cost ($300M), how to pay for it (reallocating 28-66 funds), what it would look like (replace traffic lights with overpasses) & how I would get it done (local+state). Y'all hit me on "transgenderism."

At the state level, y'all made a pediatrician who volunteers at a children's hospice out to be a member of MS-13 and campaigned throughout the state on Confederate statues and fiscally reckless tax cuts your own state senators called BS. And you wonder why you lost?

Here in Manassas, @carterforva and I talked relentlessly about jobs. Roads. Schools. Health care. Equality. I know this because Lee and I saw each other on the stump constantly. And y'all went after us for and "teaching transgenderism to kindergartners" and "socialism."

When you spend an entire year just trying to make people afraid of people in their community and you apply this asinine labels as if you're trying to make people afraid of an ideology or an idea, then you're neglecting the very basics of governing to divide our communities.

Look at the BS the Democrats in PWC had to put up with from y'all this year. Racism. Xenophobia. Transphobia. When I went on offense in my TV ad, I had a first-person testimonial from someone in PWC who your policies left uninsured. You hit me for my band and my gender.

Bottom line: Knock off the divisive BS and actually campaign on boring stuff like infrastructure because it's the boring stuff that the people pay you with their tax dollars to work on so they don't have to focus on it. That's literally your job. Try doing it.

One more thing: Stop believing your own headlines. I knew beyond a shred of doubt we would win this race when y'all actually, sincerely thought based on a POS robo poll that 27% of Dems wouldn't vote for me if they knew I'm trans. 1) Wrong. 2) Stop attacking trans people.

And I understand how so many people could get pretty confused as to what leadership looks like and sounds like - in case you were at all unclear on that, you just read a pretty good little primer.

The View From Out There

It's politics, remember, so they don't tell us the whole truth.

But sometimes they tell some of the truth because - surprise surprise - it's in everybody's best interest to do it, and the Politcos not only recognize that, they manage to do the right thing (surprise surprise again).

This piece is chock-full of little slices of Scary-as-Fuck.

Buzzfeed, Alberto Nardelli:

The current standoff is a dramatic illustration of the grave international concerns over Trump.

On one level, the officials said, he is something of a laughing stock among Europeans at international gatherings. One revealed that a small group of diplomats play a version of word bingo whenever the president speaks because they consider his vocabulary to be so limited. “Everything is ‘great’, ‘very, very great’, ‘amazing’,” the diplomat said.

--snip--

Another diplomat said it had proved impossible to discuss serious international issues, such as Libya, with Trump. And seven months into his presidency, the European officials say they are still struggling to figure out who else they can engage with in the US administration.

Describing a meeting between their boss and the president as “basically useless,” they said: “He [Trump] just bombed us with questions: ‘How many people do you have? What’s your GDP? How much oil does [that country] produce? How many barrels a day? How much of it is yours?’”

“He’s not the kind of person you can have a discussion about how to deal with [Fayez] al-Sarraj [the prime minister of Libya]," the official added. "So you look for people around him, and that is where it’s a problem: The constant upheaval, it’s unclear who has influence, who is close to the president."

A number of European officials compared Trump with Italian former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi – but said the similarities end at their inappropriate jokes during meetings.

“Berlusconi wasn’t ignorant. And behind him he had officials and a whole government structure you could engage with,” one diplomat said.

The officials revealed that at international meetings, Trump has openly mocked his own aides, contradicting and arguing with them in front of other leaders. That has compounded the impression of an administration in chaos. “We can hear everything, it’s weird,” one diplomat said.

Officials also expressed concerns over the status of the State Department, and the lack of seasoned diplomats and experts within the White House. One diplomat suggested that US counterparts have privately lamented to Europeans about the number of roles in the administration that have yet to be filled resulting in a lack of clear positions on many policy areas.

“The White House lacks crucial expertise,” one said. “The State Department and others are isolated. You have the generals, the National Security Council, and then a void. There aren’t enough diplomats, experts etc. in the White House. [Secretary of state Rex] Tillerson has a small team. Does Trump listen to [James] Mattis [secretary of defence], [H.R.] McMaster [national security adviser], to the experts?”

We'll Miss It When It's Gone

Via Crooks & Liars

"But it's the unscripted Trump that's real. A man who barks out bile at 140 characters, who wastes his precious days as president at war with the west's institutions..."

Choose Well

Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool.
To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen.
To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

--Octavia Butler, Parable Of The Talents

Mr Khan

This guy is a giant-killer. God love him.

“He is a black soul, and this is totally unfit for the leadership of this country,” Khan said in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union.” “The love and affection that we have received affirms that our grief ― that our experience in this country has been correct and positive. The world is receiving us like we have never seen. They have seen the blackness of his character, of his soul.”