A Coupla Memes

Standing Up

It's almost like the Dems are discovering it gets a little easier to stand for something when you can actually stand up, and standing up becomes a little easier when you get some fucking backbone.

Chuck Schumer:

A little more than a week into the Trump presidency, the new Administration has violated our core values, challenged the separation of powers, and tested the very fabric of our Constitution in unprecedented fashion. It is clear that the Supreme Court will be tried in ways that few Courts have been tested since the earliest days of the Republic, when Constitutional questions abounded.

Now more than ever, we need a Supreme Court Justice who is independent, eschews ideology, who will preserve our democracy, protect fundamental rights, and will stand up to a President who has already shown a willingness to bend the Constitution.

The Senate must insist upon 60-votes for any Supreme Court nominee, a bar that was met by each of President Obama’s nominees. The burden is on Judge Neil Gorsuch to prove himself to be within the legal mainstream and, in this new era, willing to vigorously defend the Constitution from abuses of the Executive branch and protect the constitutionally enshrined rights of all Americans.

Given his record, I have very serious doubts about Judge Gorsuch’s ability to meet this standard. Judge Gorsuch has repeatedly sided with corporations over working people, demonstrated a hostility toward women’s rights, and most troubling, hewed to an ideological approach to jurisprudence that makes me skeptical that he can be a strong, independent Justice on the Court.

Make no mistake, Senate Democrats will not simply allow but require an exhaustive, robust, and comprehensive debate on Judge Gorsuch’s fitness to be a Supreme Court Justice.

We've got a 60-Vote Minimum on this shit now - your rules, not mine - and it looks like maybe Judge Gorsuch ain't gonna pass muster.

Black History Month 1 of 7

From Atlanta Black Star - 7 Lies Taught In American Schools

Many African-Americans Fought for Confederacy

A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders in 2010 said that thousands of African-Americans fought for the South during the Civil War — a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery’s role as a cause of the conflict. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, told The Washington Post she found the information about Black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write,” she said. “I am a fairly respected writer.”

Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

It Gets Worse

The EO banning Muslim immigration is being used by the bad guys to boost their efforts to radicalize and recruit more bad guys.  Of course, 45* has said "the world is an angry place" anyway, so it doesn't matter.

So let's go kick the hornet's nest.

NBC News: 

Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham University's Center on National Security, said the girl's death will be a boon to al Qaeda propagandists.

"The perception will be that it's not enough to kill al-Awlaki — that the U.S. had to kill the entire family," she said.

What was it 45* said during the Scampaign® ? 

"The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families," Trump said. 

You kill your way into problems, Don - not out of 'em.

A Question

Hey, TheoCons - how is it you can support a guy who is so obviously not a Christian, and proves it by practically everything he does

while you shit on a guy who so obvious is a Christian and demonstrates it all the fucking time?

Another Tweet

This is your neighborhood. This is your neighborhood after fracking. Any questions? pic.twitter.com/IgAmgUUiRH

— Adam Howard (@1AdamHoward) January 31, 2017

This is a shit storm - by design.  Like driftglass says, it's no different than a Distributed Denial Of Service attack. It's intended to overwhelm the system's built-in defenses.

Today's Quote

"The moderate Republicans are always there when you don't need them."

--Barney Frank

Yeah, But The Democrats

Nothing I hate more than the Both-Sides crap, so this is not that.

But there is definitely room to criticize the Dems - and harshly - when their response to something as shitty as Trump's Muslim Ban is as wishy-washy as some of the weak tea coming from our "leaders".

Jemma Portnoy, WaPo (the whole banana):

ROANOKE, Va. — Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) confirmed Monday that permanent legal residents — green card holders — are subject to President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily banning refugees from entering the United States.

Kaine said he received the clarification during a phone call with officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He plans to go to Dulles International Airport Monday afternoon.

He was also told that, unlike other immigrants, green card holders are allowed to board planes and fly to the United States. Once they arrive they will be questioned and can obtain a waiver allowing them into the country.

Kaine said he doesn’t believe the order should apply to these residents at all.

“The fact that they’re still saying the order applies to them but then there’s a waiver of it, it’s still a little bit odd, so I’m confused about that still, so more work to do,” he said during a tour of a library in downtown Roanoke.

He said the same procedure applies to people given special immigrant status, such as translators who worked with the U.S. military.

Kaine said he was told refu­gee families already approved and working with a resettlement program will be allowed entry at least for the next week or two.

At political event in Blacksburg Sunday night, Kaine said, he learned about a family who fled Syria and have been living in a United Nations refu­gee camp for almost four years.

Catholic Charities expects them to arrive in Roanoke Thursday, but they feared the family would be detained or barred from entering the country.

Kaine said supports intense vetting, but it should not be based on country of origin, but rather individual circumstances.

“I don’t think you should single out certain countries and especially single out people who have been victimized by war crimes,” he said.

"Tsk tsk naughty naughty" will not do here, Senator. Get up on your hind legs and make a ruckus. 

They go low, we go high? Fine, but sometimes those high ideals require a very lowdown fight.

The Wingnuts set the rules a long time ago - bringing their Creeping Authoritarian agenda into very sharp focus in the 90s - and since then, even when the Dems have managed to get in the game, they always seem to insist on playing from behind.

Now, we can have a nice long discussion about how the Dems doing the reactive thing is in keeping with the traditions of Due Process and cool-headed deliberation, but it looks way too much like appeasement now. And let's try to remember that the Daddy State moves very quickly - the fact that they issued the EO without running it through channels shows us how fast this shit unfolds - while a properly-functioning democratic system is intended to take its time.

So it'll have to be, "You come at my knees and I'm gonna take your fuckin' head off".

Because we can either defend our institutions now or see can them fall like dominos.

Today's Tweet

What are the fucking odds? Seriously? I need a statistician for this. pic.twitter.com/FFrz8Rin3R

— Trump vs. the USA (@TomWellborn) January 31, 2017

One From driftglass

A quick look at Donald Trump's first address to the Senate.

driftglass

Dots

Pema Levy at Mother Jones:

By day, Joe Tien is a math professor at Ohio State University, where he studies the spread of infectious diseases. His research maps how a disease like Ebola jumps from village to village and plots the best way to stop its spread. On his own time, Tien has begun putting his skills in network science toward other subjects, including the connection between white nationalists and American politicians.

After the election, Tien and two other mathematicians set out to map the relationship between white nationalists and US senators on social media. The results produced one clear outlier: Based on an analysis of senators' Twitter followers, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), President Donald Trump's nominee to be attorney general, had the most overlap with white nationalist groups and individuals.

"He's the closest of all senators to the white nationalist groups," says Tien.

Sessions has a controversial track record on matters of race, including allegations of racist comments toward black colleagues and the targeted prosecution of civil rights activists. But Tien was still surprised by the outcome of his research. He and his colleagues wrote a short paper on their findings and titled it "The Curious Case of Jefferson Sessions."

I don't know if it's ironic or karmic or what, but there's something spiritually delicious when a douchenozzle like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III gets connected to White Supremacists by a guy who tracks Infectious Diseases.

That's some elegant shit right there.

About That EO

First - whenever I get all huffy and preachy about Press Poodles, I'll try harder to remind myself that Brianna Kielar is among the few exceptions.

Second - here she basically stomps the sawdust outa that schmuck, and points to a few things that I was totally unaware of.

Third - these things never state in clear language just how shitty the intent really is.  And the intent is always clearly shitty.

Anyway, I hadn't realized how insidious this is.  Kielar points out the veil - they needed to hide their shitty Muslim ban behind the upside-down bullshit that they're all about religious freedom, and we don't want good Christians to get fucked over as we go about fucking over the evil Muslims - just trying to make it OK for persecuted religious minorities to escape and blah blah blah.

"We'll need to engage in religious bigotry in order to combat all this religious bigotry."

The reason I call these assholes assholes is because they're assholes and they should be called assholes.

One For The Books

From Benjamin Wittes at LAWFARE:

The malevolence of President Trump’s Executive Order on visas and refugees is mitigated chiefly—and perhaps only—by the astonishing incompetence of its drafting and construction.

NBC is reporting that the document was not reviewed by DHS, the Justice Department, the State Department, or the Department of Defense, and that National Security Council lawyers were prevented from evaluating it. Moreover, the New York Times writes that Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the agencies tasked with carrying out the policy, were only given a briefing call while Trump was actually signing the order itself. Yesterday, the Department of Justice gave a “no comment” when asked whether the Office of Legal Counsel had reviewed Trump’s executive orders—including the order at hand. (OLC normally reviews every executive order.)

This order reads to me, frankly, as though it was not reviewed by competent counsel at all.

Mr Wittes is a Senior Fellow at Brookings, and so he's not exactly Mr Conservative, but he's also not a Leftie Looney and while this is from the guy's blog, I was linked to it from The Brookings Institution's website, where it seems like the use of terms like "malevolence" and "horrific" in reference to a POTUS is a bit unusual.

Something could be up. There's an awful lotta smoke for no fire.

Weaving

I've been trying to get a consistency across my media platforms (and I already don't even like that I just said that, but oh well), and I haven't always posted the same stuff at every site.

So if you really need ya some more Mike (and of course you do - why would you not?), just hit me up some time.

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