The Ballz

Apparently, Sen Booker's been taking his meds regularly.

John Cornyn: If you tell people the truth about Brett Kavanaugh, we'll beat you up.

Cory Booker: Here I am, assholes - come and get me.

The Hill: (The headline's a little misleading - though marked "confidential", Grassley OK'd the release)

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on Thursday released emails from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's time as a White House counsel, escalating a heated fight over his documents.

Booker released approximately 12 pages of emails tied to discussions Kavanaugh had on racial inequality including one email thread titled "racial profiling."

The documents are marked "committee confidential," meaning they are not supposed to be discussed or released publicly.

But the move comes after Booker said during a heated debate on Kavanaugh's third day before the Judiciary Committee that he would release the email thread.

"I am right now, before your process is finished, I am going to release the email about racial profiling, and I understand the penalty comes with potential ousting from the Senate," Booker said at the hearing.
And Kamala Harris is someone the GOP needs to be wary of - kinda like the way Al Capone needed to be wary of Elliot Ness.

She's fierce in a very good way. And she's a bitch in exactly the way men talk admiringly about a '67 GT500, or a P-51 - she's powerful and responsive and she'll fuck you up if you make a mistake. 

She is to be respected.

I think maybe it's time to put away all the conventional wisdom bullshit about how the Dems are always wishy-washy and fumbling around looking for excuses to beg Republicans for mercy.

Let's look at the NTY Op-Ed piece (the "Lodestar" thing); and at Susan Collins waffling on every fucking thing that staggers by; and at Lindsey Graham (aka: Huckleberry ButchMeUp - thanks, Charlie Pierce), who goes around in circles so fast he's about to disappear up his own asshole. I look at these clowns and it has to be very clear that it's the GOP that needs more than a little backbone.

And I'm no longer willing to entertain the notion of, "Well gee, the Democrats can't seem to take advantage of their openings, so they must be just as bad as those other guys".

Bullshit. You might as well call me a shitty parent for loving my kid even though he crashed the new Toyota - I'm still gonna love him and worry first that he's OK - then we can talk about how he fucked up my car, how pissed off I am about it, and what has to happen next.

Fire And Fury

Of course I have to weigh in on this thing - because I don't know much about the book, or about the vignettes Mr Wolff writes about, so I must have a solid opinion about all of it. This is USAmerica, Inc - ya know. 

And it's the (I hope) pinnacle of the Era Of Style Over Substance; Ratings Over Reality, as embodied by 45* and his "administration".

It makes no difference to 45* what we're saying, as long as he's at the center of it.

Michelle Goldberg, WaPo:

One of the more alarming anecdotes in “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff’s incendiary new book about Donald Trump’s White House, involves the firing of James Comey, former director of the F.B.I. It’s not Trump’s motives that are scary; Wolff reports that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were “increasingly panicked” and “frenzied” about what Comey would find if he looked into the family finances, which is incriminating but unsurprising. The terrifying part is how, in Wolff’s telling, Trump sneaked around his aides, some of whom thought they’d contained him.

“For most of the day, almost no one would know that he had decided to take matters into his own hands,” Wolff writes. “In presidential annals, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.” Now imagine Trump taking the same approach toward ordering the bombing of North Korea.

-and-

According to Wolff, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, called Trump an “idiot.” (So did the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, though he used an obscenity first.) Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, compares his boss’s intelligence to excrement. The national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, thinks he’s a “dope.” It has already been reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron,” which he has pointedly refused to deny.

And yet these people continue to either prop up or defend this sick travesty of a presidency. Wolff takes a few stabs at the motives of Trump insiders. Ivanka Trump apparently nurtured the ghastly dream of following her father into the presidency. Others, Wolff writes, told themselves that they could help protect America from the president they serve: The “mess that might do serious damage to the nation, and, by association, to your own brand, might be transcended if you were seen as the person, by dint of competence and professional behavior, taking control of it.”
That last bit - the part that says basically - "I'll save our democracy by usurping the power of the presidency".

It never fails - there's always some dick who thinks the way you help a democratic system is to cut back on the whole democracy thing.

Today's Quote

Yes - in a system of self-government - in a free society - you get to sit on your ass while everybody else does the work. And then you get to bitch about what a rotten system it's become.

But don't bring that shit to me. Not unless you're willing to take the chance that I'm about to (rhetorically of course) stomp you into a greasy stain on the rug with it.

Show up or shut up.

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

Intrigue At The Palace

Vox:

On Friday, January 6, FBI Director James Comey met with President-elect Donald Trump. His task was awkward; he needed to inform Trump that the FBI’s counterterrorism unit was investigating claims that Russia had embarrassing blackmail material on the billionaire real estate developer.

Something in Trump’s reaction disturbed Comey. “I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo,” he recalls in testimony prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee. The compulsion to record the conversation was fierce and immediate; Comey didn’t even wait to get back to his hotel. “I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting.” From then on, Comey began documenting all his meetings with Trump. “This had not been my practice in the past,” he says.

On January 27, Comey again found himself in a strange situation with the president, caught by surprise when a dinner invitation that originally included his family turned into Comey having dinner with Trump, alone, in the White House’s Green Room. Trump immediately asked if Comey wanted to remain in his job, and said many other people would want it — a request Comey found strange, as Trump had already asked him to stay on as FBI director, and Comey had already accepted.

“My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship,” Comey says. Trump would soon make that perfectly clear. “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,” the president told his FBI director.

In subsequent meetings, Trump would ask Comey to “lift the cloud” Russia was casting over his presidency, to announce publicly that Trump was not being investigated, and to squelch the investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s activities. In their final conversation, Trump asked for Comey’s cooperation, saying, “I have been very loyal to you, very loyal; we had that thing you know.” Comey says he did not know what “that thing” was. Shortly thereafter, Comey was fired.

Everybody's expecting a big show today when Comey testifies, but the smart money seems to be on Big-Nothing-Burger.  Why does the guy telegraph his moves by releasing a kind of script before he shows up?  He doesn't think anybody's going to confine themselves just to the points he outlined, does he?  But then again, it's not likely for him to drop the big one in open session. But then again again, this guy has pulled some pretty horrendous shit in the not too distant past.  

And wouldn't it be nice if one of the Press Poodles could manage to ask the question - Is any of this to be considered "usual and customary"?

So anyway, we see what we see today. And what we do know to be "usual and customary" is that we can count on the Poodles to sell us gigundous piles of car insurance and boner pills. This is USAmerica Inc - it's what we do.

Manage the expectations, and keep pushing Congress to do something honorable.

Signaling Hope

WaPo:

This year, federal courts have been litigating a steady stream of gerrymandering claims. And most of the electoral maps the courts have knocked down were drawn by Republicans.

That’s good news for Democrats: They have an opportunity in several states to draw more favorable congressional and state legislative maps ahead of 2018 elections. And every seat counts, given the 2020 Census is right around the corner, which brings with it the opportunity in many states to draw new district maps.

Some Republican legislatures are paying the price for capturing 21 chambers in the 2010 elections, the last time electoral maps were being drawn. Monday, North Carolina became the third GOP-controlled state legislature in a row to get its map-drawing skills declared illegal by the Supreme Court.

But Not Here

We get lazy sometimes.  We start to think "we shouldn't need that kind of reminder - not here in America".

Obviously, we do need it. And we need it precisely because this is America.

Today's Charlie

Charlie Pierce at Esquire Magazine:

It doesn't matter how many people climb into the Republican clown car or how close Bernie Sanders is polling in Iowa. The deep-seated rot that has been injected quite deliberately into our elections is the story from which all others flow. The primary and fundamental debate must be between those who profit from the corruption, those who simply accept it and opt out, and those people who want to reverse the slow suicide of democratic government. God help us all if the latter group doesn't win.

At the risk of being just the tiniest bit too fucking obvious, the results of an election literally mean nothing if the process itself is crooked.

In whatever despotic shithole you can name - Saddams' Iraq or Pol Pot's Kampuchea or Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, et cetera ad nauseam - the election returns are always lopsided wins for the strong-arming dickhead du jour.

Cutting to the chase here - if I can manufacture a landslide, I can manufacture a horse race.  

So I have to ask myself, in a country where ⅔ of the voters are clearly in favor of 3 or 4 or 5 top issues, and when it's also fairly clear that generally the candidate of one party agrees with them and the candidate from the other party doesn't - how do we keep getting these down-to-the-wire-by-a-nose "victories"?

Seems more than a little curious to me.

Today's Deep Thought

Once upon a time we decided we'd do a little governmentin' to get Dow Chemical and Standard Oil and Honeywell (et al) to stop dumping all their shit into the water, and to stop filling the skies with lead and mercury and sulfur (et al) - we needed Gubmint to help defend us against Big Bidness.

(remember now - Dick Nixon put the EPA together, but it was Johnson's idea because he loved working with the windows open on a spring day in DC, but he couldn't stand the stench of the Potomac wafting in on the breeze)

Anyway, then we decided that was just too restrictive and job-kill-y, so we wanted Big Bidness to defend us against Big Gubmint, and we got all Animal Instinct-y and Free Market-y, and gee - looks like we're kinda back to where we started.  'Cept that now, it seems we'll be fighting to the death to decide whether Big Bidness or Big Gubmint will defend us against an evermore hostile environment.

Good luck, kids.  

BTW - I'm in the market for some old aluminum cookware, hoping to push my Alzheimer's onset up by a decade or two so I don't hafta watch this shit happen.

Deadly Rhetoric

Via Mock Paper Scissors:

(tengrain asks for citations to back up the claims of "propaganda", but of course, "conservatives" just get really upset when you press for things like evidence, so yeah - good luck widdat)

“We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police. The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion: The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.” --Mr 9/11, Rudy Giuliani

But even if I grant the assertion of "4 months of propaganda", how could that come anywhere close to the years of toxic anti-government slagging coming from the Radical Right?

"Government's not the solution, government's the problem."

"...drown it in a bathtub."

and on

and on

and on

And that's nuthin' compared with the deafening silence coming from the Ammosexuals at the moment.

Wanna talk about all those cuts in funding for Mental Health now?

Then this from TMZ:

I'm getting one of my lousy feelings that the Press Poodles will spend most of their time and energy spinning this into another episode of "Both Sides".  They'll report the controversy as if all things are equal, and we'll end up staying paralyzed in the middle.

Big fuckin' problems.  But the really big one boils down to this:  We can't go on being further and further isolated from our government when we were set up to be self-governing.  It astounds me to think of how much we bitch about "nobody taking responsibility for anything" when we sit on our thumbs and do nothing but bitch about how shitty everything is.

Today's Dots

Here's another guy with a dash cam and a fair understanding of his rights under the US Constitution:



The problem here tho' is that the driver didn't demand Probable Cause.  No matter what the cop says about roadblocks, the dragnet is extralegal.  The cops have no authority to presume everybody's guilty (IMHO just so they can sift thru the population looking to collect a few bucks in fines because their budget's pretty tight again this year)  None zero zip zilch nada.

The 2nd trooper yells about how driving's a privilege not a right, and that you're required to have your license and proof of insurance etc.  But that's a dodge on his part.  His in-your-face tactics are meant to intimidate in order to coerce your "voluntary" cooperation and deflect from the fact that his actions are outside the fucking lines.  Anyway, the cops couldn't demonstrate why they suspected that particular driver of violating the law.  Detention by law enforcement without probable cause is illegal.


OK, so how 'bout this one:



Somebody sees this guy walking down the street with his gun, and the cop shows up to "check him out".  The rationale is that the cop just needs to make sure the gun's not stolen, but again, there's no reasonable expectation on the part of anybody that any laws have been broken.  If Citizen Hung-Like-A-Hamster wants to press the issue, then he has no obligation to provide any information to the officer.  He could've refused to allow the cop to record the serial number of his weapon, and he didn't have to give his name.

Connecting the dots - suddenly, we have the hippie-dippy ACLU groupies making common cause with the Ammosexuals and the Peter Pan Libertarians.  Strange bedfellows indeed.

Where's The Line?

Finally - somebody gets it enough to say it.  There's a line; and the conversation we have to start insisting on having is all about trying to figure out where the line should be drawn.



There are some things that fit well into a Binary Decision Matrix.  For some things, it really is a question of Either/Or.  Nobody has to convince anybody these things are all bad and should be absolutely and forever illegal - things like Rape, Murder, Reality TV shows.  You know what I'm talkin' about.

But for most of the big ones - Guns, Abortion, Taxation, etc etc etc - the ones that generate all the heat and practically no light, there's lotsa room between one extreme and the other;  the place where that horrible-est of all horrible-ness; the thing called COMPROMISE hasta happen.

C'mon, guys.  We need to stop feeding the Trolls of the Manufactured Controversy Industry and figure some of this shit out.

Thoughts On The Side

“It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.” --Judith Herman, MD - Trauma and Recovery

Mike Brown gets buried in more ways than one.

We jump up and down on it for a while, but then somebody blows up a building or there's a bus crash or another jack-wad celebrity gets caught nanny-humping, and suddenly we're heading back for the group rate on self-lobotomy at the National Center For Social Amnesia.

Maybe we can get some things done that need to get done in places like Ferguson once some of the glare fades away, but don't count on it.  

If it turns out that Holder and his merry band of FBI careerists find anything that substantively exonerates Darren Wilson, we're right back in some very deep shit.

But if they scorch Wilson, & / or if they confirm what looks to be a pretty obvious pattern of abuse and corruption in Ferguson, we're likely to hear a very loud chorus of Obama The Race Hustler on an endless loop.

Mainly tho', why does it seem like somebody's always pushing us pretty hard to get back to an "equilibrium" that ends up sounding like "Both Sides", and feeling like Paralysis?

Let's Try Something Else

Retribution and punishment.  That's what is seems we're all about now.

Mom Danielle Wolf was grocery shopping at a Kroger store in North Augusta, South Carolina when she was arrested for disorderly conduct after cursing in the presence of her two daughters, WJBF News Channel 6 reports.

--and--

Ms. Richardson, 28, was arrested after an officer saw the kids playing in the park with no adult supervision, parked her patrol car, and saw the kids waving her over. What then, Bay News 9?

Maybe the cops involved in those incidents could've just done a little mediating and defusing and admonishing; or maybe they could've concentrated a little more on the whole "To Serve" part of the customary motto that's supposed to be kind of a guiding principle for Law Enforcement.

But peace-making isn't what's cool now.  It isn't sexy like blowin' shit up.  When you've trained an entire generation to be soldiers (a shitload of rookie cops are coming straight outa the US Military these days), and you've reduced everything to the binary - "you're either with us or you're against us" - when it's always and only either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white - what you end up with is the mindset that wearing the uniform makes you the hero, and that means everybody else is the bad guy.

So the default position is Shoot-First-And-Fuck-You-And-Your-Questions, which doesn't leave a lot of room for anybody who wants to do the real work involved in keeping the shit from hitting fan in the first place, which is what makes it way too extraordinary when real cops like Ron Johnson come along who understand what the job is supposed to be all about, with the first tenet being that a fellow American is not the fucking enemy.

Prevention is always more cost-effective than remedy.  It costs us a lot less to provide food, clothing, housing and a decent education for a kid in the first 18 years of his life than it does to hunt him down, arrest him, put him on trial and to keep him in jail for the next 3 or 5 or 10 years.  And the costs of grinding him up in the "Justice System" are only the direct costs; the ones we can easily see and identify.  There are plenty of other costs associated with whatever his "crimes" happened to be that we usually don't even acknowledge - the Opportunity Costs of lost productivity, insurance, emergency response, recovery and rehab and on and on and on.

What's been going on in Ferguson is a really great example of all those hidden costs kinda poppin' up all at once.

And the question is: why do the people of Ferguson have to pay that price for us, instead of Wall Street and General Dynamics and Corrections Corp of America?

Today's Quote

The Amazing Mr Madison:

The original compact is the one implied or presumed, but nowhere reduced to writing, by which a people agree to form one society. The next is a compact, here for the first time reduced to writing, by which the people in their social state agree to a Govt. over them. These two compacts may be considered as blended in the Constitution of the U. S., which recognises a union or society of States, and makes it the basis of the Govt. formed by the parties to it. It is the nature & essence of a compact that it is equally obligatory on the parties to it, and of course that no one of them can be liberated therefrom without the consent of the others, or such a violation or abuse of it by the others, as will amount to a dissolution of the compact.
-- James Madison to Nicholas Trist, February 15, 1830.

hat tip = Charlie Pierce

Whenever I hear "conservatives" bitching about Da Gumbint; or how we should be able to just blow it all up; or how they intend to ignore the parts of the law they find inconvenient; or that their sense of entitlement means they get to do whatever they want while everybody else has to accommodate their childish self-indulgence; whenever I hear that kinda shit, I can only assume they have no real understanding of what it means to make a commitment, and then to live up to it.

No soul and no honor.

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Dot, Meet Dot

Not to get too magical-mystical here, but when we're talking about the FISA Court and USA PATRIOT Act and the shenanigans at NSA and the FBI, etc - I think I have to go along with Mark Udall; mostly anyway - and Obama too btw.  There has to be a balance, which (imo) we've let get away from us in a pretty big way.

Balance is kinda the key to the whole self-governance thingie.  We have to continue to develop better ways to catch the bad guys after the fact - and better yet, prevent the bad guys from doin' the dirt in the first place - without making it more probable that some tin-plated martinet will abuse the power, and turn it to his own ends.  (Thank you, Capt Obvious)

Here's 5 minutes of Udall on NPR, talking about what he and Ron Wyden are proposing:



Almost at the very end, Udall makes a point that kinda blew up in my brain.  He said (paraphrasing), "...privacy is the ultimate form of freedom".

If I make a not-entirely-silly leap, I can say Privacy = Anonymity; and in a still not-so-silly way, Anonymity = Invisibility; and Invisibility is very much the be-all and end-all of the super powers.

On the one hand, if nobody can see you, then nobody can fuck with you.  This is mostly a very good thing for individuals.

But on the other hand, if you can't be seen, then you can't be held to account for anything you do.  This is always a very bad thing for societies.

So, balance.  Aye, there's the rub.

hat tip = Little Green Footballs