Today's Cult 45* Fuckup

I know, I know - I could put up several of these every day.

This gets a special place because Tim Scott is the only black guy in the US Senate, and that makes him kinda important if a schmuck with a reputation as a White Supremacist Asshole happens to occupy the Oval Office.

Now, Sen Scott went to the WH to vent a little bit on 45*'s crappy efforts to handle the Charlottesville thing properly.

NYT:

Tim Scott, the lone black Republican in the Senate, delivered a pointed history lesson on America’s 300-year legacy of racism to President Trump on Wednesday in response to what he called Mr. Trump’s “sterile” response to the riots in Charlottesville, Va., last month.

The president invited Mr. Scott, a conservative from South Carolina who had expressed disgust with Mr. Trump’s equivocal reaction to the white supremacist protests that left one woman dead, to the Oval Office for what Mr. Trump’s staff described as a demonstration of the president’s commitment to “positive race relations.”

When a reporter asked the senator after the meeting if the president had expressed regret, a pained look flashed on Mr. Scott’s face. He paused for a few seconds and replied, “He certainly tried to explain what he was trying to convey.”
It had nothing to do with "positive race relations". This was Cult45 wanting a chance to do a little White-splainin'.

Knowing what we know about 45*'s delicate sensibilities - and his burning need for retribution at any cost - I'm thinking the payback for the Senator daring to lecture POTUS (notice I deliberately avoided reference to "bein' all uppity and shit") it prob'ly seemed like a good idea to fuck up the caption on Scott's big Photo Op. 

Remember - this thing comes out of a Communications Shop brimming with people who aren't on the short list for the NAACP awards.

Just sayin'.

Irreducibly Subjective

That's what Sam's main point is regarding "Consciousness". Everything after that main point usually makes my brain hurt - about the same as There's No Such Thing As Free Will, so yeah - ow, dammit.

Keith

The latest POTUS Pivot that wasn't - gotta stop falling for that shit, guys.

Dumbass Charlie Rose

You may have discerned by now that I'm not a Charlie Rose fan.  My list of candidates for Worst Fucking Interviewer Ever is relatively short to begin with, but there's a long-running tie for the top spot between Chris Matthews and Charlie Rose.

Anyway, Mr Pierce at Esquire takes a look at that 2-man circle jerk on 60 Minutes:

How in the world could Rose have this guy on and not even mention the Mercers, the wingnut billionaire power couple without whose bankroll Bannon would be just another Alex Jones hawking brain pills and chemtrail remover? How could he let Bannon, who made his pile at Goldman Sachs and then made another pile in Hollywood, use the phrase “limousine liberals” without picking up a banana from the fruit bowl and throwing it at him? And how in the name of god could he hear Bannon say this without then picking up the phone and calling his bosses at 60 Minutes and telling them they by god better not send him out to interview anymore of these basket cases without a HazMat suit.

STEVE BANNON: --don't-- don't give me-- this is the thing of the leftists. Charlie, that's beneath you. America's built on our sys-- on our citizens. Look at the 19th century. What built America's called the American system, from Hamilton to Polk to Henry Clay to Lincoln to the Roosevelts. A system of protection of our manufacturing, financial system that lends to manufacturers, OK, and the control of our borders. Economic nationalism is what this country was built on. The American system. Right?

If there’s one thing the 19th century is known for, boy, it’s how we controlled our borders. That’s why all those Irish fleeing the Famine ended up in Madagascar. Yeesh.

Today's Fuckery

Charlie Pierce, Esquire:

Manchester NH -- The entire Charlatans Cotillion that took place on the campus of St. Anselm’s College on Tuesday ended with a barefaced obvious lie from a barefaced obvious liar, which is entirely in keeping with the hearing held here by the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, a body that is nearly as nauseating as it is ridiculous.

While the hearing was going on, the Campaign Legal Center released a copy of an internal Heritage Foundation email that it had obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. It was addressed to Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. The name of the sender was blacked out, but the content of the email took the committee’s entire threadbare claim to any legitimacy at all and fed bloody gobbets of that claim to the wolverines.
- snip -

This, of course, is the commission led by vice chairman Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas, a guy who’s based his entire political career on knuckling immigrants and inventing tales of voter fraud, even as he keeps getting swatted upside his head in various courts. The commission is larded with people like Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams and Ken Blackwell, all of whom have been enthusiastic pitchmen for the voter-fraud mythology ever since they slimed into the public eye. What we got on Tuesday was a visit to a fantastical world so detached from actual reality that the Hubble couldn’t pick it up, a universe of non-fact and ideological incest so round and complete that it was like wandering into something from Gulliver's Travels.

It's obvious to anybody carrying around a living thinking brain in his skull that the Voter Fraud thing is an attempt to suppress Dem votes by dog-whistling the message to the rubes that POC have to be pushed back into the shadows, so the noble white man can retain his rightful place defending the honor of the womenfolk and - goddamit I get tired of this shit.

Also obvious: the play right now is for the Repubs in congress to stall as long as they possibly can, in the hope that enough Dem voters can be fucked outa their franchise by Kris Kobach, while the state-level Repubs continue wiring the districts under the protection of a SCOTUS that seems to be going along with it all.

Think Progress:

In a victory for Republicans, all the Republican members of the Supreme Court joined a pair of orders handed down Tuesday, staying a lower court decision which struck down two Republican-drawn districts. All four of the Court’s Democrats would have denied the stay.

Tuesday evening’s orders are the latest development in a long, winding challenge to Texas’ gerrymandered maps. You can read a summary of the many twists and turns in this case, as well as the legal issues before the Supreme Court, here.

The crux of the case is that, last month, a three-judge panel of federal judges held that two Texas congressional districts were illegally drawn — the first because it was intentionally drawn to dilute Hispanic votes, the second because it was drawn with too much reliance on race.

And the theft of Garland's seat on the court comes into sharper focus.

Today's Really Scary Shit

Some fun new terminology:

1. "Massive Predictive Crisis" (not sure I wanna know - sounds pretty bad)
2. "Large Charismatic Animals" (ya mean like The Rock and Rob Gronkowski?)
3. "Mass Extinction Event" (aka: Cross Check and the 2018 mid-terms)

So anyway:

"It's the little things that run the world."

Today's Pix

Color Me Skeptical

Reuters (Houston):

The U.S. Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency are working with Texas state regulators to clean up oil and chemicals spilled from a dozen industrial facilities after flooding from Hurricane Harvey, authorities said.

The spills came from oil refineries, fuel terminals and other businesses, but EPA spokeswoman Terri White said it was not possible to provide an estimate for the amounts spilled.

"Initial reports were based on observation," White said. "Some spills were already being cleaned up by the time EPA or other officials arrived to assess them and others had already migrated offsite."

(Gotta love that passive voice bullshit - inviting the inference that a spill is no longer a problem because it's "migrated offsite")

Refineries owned by Valero Energy Corp in Houston, Motiva Inc in Port Arthur, and Exxon Mobile Corp in Baytown, were among the facilities that had reported spills, according to White. Representatives for those companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The piece kinda rambles on with plenty of Company SpokesPimps telling us everything's peachy, but it mostly translates to: "We've made billions at the expense of everything and everybody, and now that the storm's gone, we need to notify the tax payers to get this shit cleaned up so we can get back to making more billions and externalizing more of the costs".

BTW - the humanitarian crises that are coming into focus in places like USVI and the Florida keys could get turned into some very effective cover: "We really can't worry about the feel-good niceties of protecting Snail Darters and Spotted Owls when real Americans are suffering blah blah blah".

Also: We should be hearing about a whole suite of Mystery-Maladies for years. Some folks will make the obvious connection with all that Ethyl-Methyl-Death that "escaped" into the water, and then "migrated offsite", but the American Chemistry Council will have their dis-information campaign in place very soon, and the Plausible Deniability is likely to be thick enough to choke a fuckin' hippo.

This shit doesn't stop until we put a stop to it.

Go get 'em, Press Poodles.

Trump's Kattrina only worse: Houston’s Floodwaters Are Tainted With Toxins, Testing Shows https://t.co/WhL2edOUdF

— Maurice Ross (@MauriceMichael) September 12, 2017

Today's STFU

This one from BET:

Dear Famous Liberals Who Refused To Vote For Hillary Clinton,

It’s time to call bullshit on your so-called social-political revolution — one that only a person of extreme privilege has the luxury to champion. Susan Sarandon, let’s start with you. I know you were “so excited and encouraged by the idea that maybe if everything is falling apart so obviously,” we would come together as a people. But spare me your sympathies now that Judgment Day has come.

But here’s what your privilege didn’t allow you to see: we had already come together. You were just too consumed with your own righteousness to see it.

Where, pray tell, was your hashtag outrage when we were screaming at the top of our lungs that we needed your vote to secure our rights and protect our lives? Oh wait, you were screaming over us that they — Hillary and Trump — were one in the same.

So, in case you're still complaining about the "evil duopoly", and how the parties are exactly the same etc, keep this in mind: pimping the fracas internal to the Dems goes a long way to making all that true.

"Take our party back" - now why does that sound so familiar?

That Cruz Thing

Yes, the senator's twitter wrangler hit 'like' on a porn site's tweet.

And yes, Cruz is unlikely to know much about his social media operation.

And yes, it looks like he kinda Anthony-Weiner-ed his own bad self.

But please please please - stop tweeting and posting about Ted Cruz's "staff" - I'm easily nauseated these days.

the internet is fucking blessed pic.twitter.com/QRuh6hOC6j

— anime you ok? (@gokunaruto67) September 12, 2017

the woman from teds video and his wife Heidi haha pic.twitter.com/qB9n2b5Z4B

— mr. understood (@EMlNEMOBAMA) September 12, 2017

It's always fun trying to rub their noses in it, but this has been going on for decades, and none of it has moved most "conservatives" off their positions - so, as usual...

Today's Today

So, no, I'm not laughing at the tragedy. I'm laughing at the sometimes absurd reactions to the tragedy.

Reactions like the inevitable commercialization of every-fucking-thing no matter what, here in USAmerica Inc.

There's also the point that it seems like we feel a need to sanctify certain events. And I think that leads us to concentrate on aspects of the event that we can relate to (3,000 dead on 9/11), at the expense of other - arguably greater - lessons that get pushed into the background; lessons that would make the next 9/11 less likely.

Clowns And Jokers

We've got real trouble when the White House staffer who's in charge of Social Media can't quite figure out how to Fact Check something before he retweets it.

scavino deleted the tweet, but i filmed it pic.twitter.com/MTXsc0dlKA

— David Mack (@davidmackau) September 10, 2017

Whenever anybody with WH Credentials picks up a phone, everybody everywhere takes the call. Should be really easy to find out if the story is valid or not. That shit made it out to millions of people whose lives could depend on their government getting good information to them.

So, a question: Is the guy just a standard-issue deliberately-ignorant fuckwad, or are we seeing further evidence that Cult45 isn't really running the show?

It's a wonderment.

Today's Tweet

Changing seasons

I love autumn; when the air starts to cool & the leaves start to change & my summertime sadness starts to transform into pumpkin spice ennui

— Frankie (@phranqueigh) September 10, 2017

Fake Lord Save Us

And then hurricane Irma was turned away and it spun harmlessly into the Gulf of Mexico.

Just kidding, because - well, you know:

• Nothing fails like prayer, or...
• ...these knuckleheads were doing it wrong, or...
• ...your god is just as much a dick as a fast-growing majority of us have suspected for quite a while

Today's Tweet

Guts.  And BTW, it can't have escaped our notice that the (slim) majority of the Veterans serving in elected office lately are Democrats.

Things change.

Just broke my leg rowing — I blame my hardcore pace. Luckily, it no longer hurts to break a leg! pic.twitter.com/slTWGx6sMD

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) September 7, 2017