Today's driftglass

Blog post from driftglass:

As I have might have mentioned in a long-ago post, I became a pariah on many a liberal blog where I was once welcome when I took it into my head to start writing that it was possible that one could simultaneously hold these two ideas:

1 - Mr. Greenwald was the source of many important and consequential stories which he developed thanks to being given Edward Snowden's huge cache of stolen documents.

2 - Mr. Greenwald was also a thin-skinned asshole who routinely derailed his own story by injecting his own brand of radical Both Siderism into them. That he spent an entire year hopping from one teevee network to the next pleading his case, all while complaining bitterly that no one would give him a media platform from which to plead his case. That he would routinely lie to make a point or smash an opponent, automatically dismissed anyone who disagreed with him to any degree as a drooling jackbooted Obot who was obviously arguing in bad-faith, and consistently hijacked every terrorist incident anywhere on Earth as proof that Obama Was Worse Than Boosh.
Toxic Radical Both-Siderism - the politics of purity.

Fake lord save us from those who would punish us in the name of mercy and their own twisted version of forgiveness. Fuck 'em.

A Workplace Lesson

There's gotta be a cute Management Bromide to go with this - something like, "Never implement a solution until you've coordinated with your fellow team members..."

I dunno - sometimes I'm just a little obvious.

Today's Pix

The Prophet Zappa

From Joe's Garage, Acts I, II & III (1979):

Eventually it was discovered
That God
Did not want us to be
All the same
This was
BAD NEWS
For the Governments of The World
As it seemed contrary
To the doctrine of
Portion Controlled Servings
Mankind must be made more uniformly
If THE FUTURE
Was going to work
Various ways were sought
To bind us all together
But, alas SAMENESS was unenforceable
It was about this time
That someone
Came up with the idea of TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Based on the principle that
If we were ALL crooks
We could at last be uniform
To some degree
In the eyes of THE LAW
Shrewdly our legislators calculated
That most people were
Too lazy to perform a
REAL CRIME
So new laws were manufactured
Making it possible for anyone
To violate them any time of the day or night,
And
Once we had all broken some kind of law
We'd all be in the same big happy club
Right up there with the President,
The most exalted industrialists,
And the clerical big shots
Of all your favorite religions
TOTAL CRIMINALIZATION
Was the greatest idea of its time
And was vastly popular
Except with those people
Who didn't want to be crooks or outlaws,
So, of course, they had to be TRICKED INTO IT...
Which is one of the reasons why
Music
Was eventually made
Illegal

Garrett Epps, The Atlantic:

If a citizen speaks at a public meeting and says something a politician doesn’t like, can she be arrested, cuffed, and carted off to the hoosegow?

Suppose that, during this fraught encounter, the citizen violates some law—even by accident, even one no one has ever heard of, even one dug up after the fact—does that make her arrest constitutional?

-and-

He was charged with “disorderly conduct” and “resisting arrest without violence,” but the local prosecutor dropped the charges, saying in essence that no reasonable person would believe them. Lozman then brought a federal lawsuit against the city for “First Amendment retaliation.” A federal judge agreed that Lozman had “compelling” evidence that he’d been arrested as punishment for his protected speech. But the judge then threw out the case, reasoning that he actually could have been charged with the obscure state offense of “willfully interrupt[ing] or disturb[ing] any school or any assembly of people met for the worship of God or for any lawful purpose.”

What this meant, the court decided, was that the officer who arrested Lozman would have had “probable cause” (a reasonable basis to believe a crime had been committed) to arrest him if he had known about “assembly of people” statute and wanted to enforce it. The fact that the officer didn’t know about it was irrelevant—and so was the city’s unconstitutional motive. As long as an officer could have arrested Lozman for something, in other words, the retaliatory motive didn’t matter. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed: the existence of probable cause for any offense is an “absolute bar” to a suit for retaliatory arrest, it said.

"You're making trouble, so we'll have you arrested, and we'll charge you with some weird shit later because everybody's guilty of something - all we have to do is smash-fit some bullshit ordnance around what you did".

Today's Tweet

Daddy State Rule #2:
Every boast is an admission of deficiency; often an attempt to take credit where credit has not been earned.

Trump:
My penis is big.
I'm very smart.
I'm not a racist.

Large penised smart men who aren't racists don't need to tell you this every minute.

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) January 15, 2018

 

Today's Today

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

--MLK

Governor Ralph Northam

Northam's inaugural:

Today's Tweet

I'd really like to get me one of those projector thingies. Did I mention I have a birthday coming up?

Sh*thole Projections 1-13-18 #resist https://t.co/uQ7cUXiqhn

— robin bell (@bellvisuals) January 14, 2018

 

It's Not Coincidence

"Shithole countries" comes practically on the eve of MLK Day.

And last year, a day or so ahead of MLK Day, 45* took a shit on John Lewis's head.

Michael Edison Hayden, Crooks & Liars
(Posted with permission from Newsweek)

President Donald Trump’s already infamous “shithole” comment is among several remarks the commander-in-chief has made that have energized white supremacists, rights groups fear.

Trump made the comment Thursday in the context of asking why America should accept more immigrants from Haiti and Africa—instead of places like Norway—while discussing a bipartisan immigration deal with lawmakers. The remark reinvigorated accusations that Trump is a racist, and it was embraced online by white supremacists David Duke and Richard Spencer.
We seem to have an emerging trend here. 45* knows he can't break with tradition completely just yet. He'll issue the annual MLK tribute, even though he has no regard for people of color, but he wants to stay in good stead with Duke and Spencer while seeming not to.

So he shits on Lewis and drops the shithole bomb as a way of sending a nice little wink and a nudge to the crazies: "Don't worry fellas - you know I'm not going to mean anything with this MLK shit, right?"

What Was That, Anyway?

Raw Story

President Donald Trump’s White House was caught completely unprepared for Saturday’s false alarm about a missile attack on Hawaii, said Politico.

The news about the potential attack “sent White House aides scrambling” as they frantically called federal agencies trying to find out what to do and how to respond, raising serious questions about their preparedness for an actual attack — nearly a year into Trump’s presidency.

“President Donald Trump’s Cabinet has yet to test formal plans for how to respond to a domestic missile attack, according to a senior administration official,” wrote Politico’s Eliana Johnson. “John Kelly, while serving as Secretary of Homeland Security through last July, planned to conduct the exercise. But he left his post to become White House chief of staff before it was conducted, and acting secretary Elaine Duke never carried it out.”
The last I heard, it took 38 minutes before Hawaiian officials got their shit together enough to go public and withdraw the warning.

38 minutes.

I get the feeling there was a buncha guys hiding in the basement waiting and checking their watches, until finally one guy says, "I didn't hear a boom - I think there woulda been a boom by now - anybody hear a boom? Anybody?"

So this is where we are now. We have a government run by assholes who apparently think it's OK to make everybody live at the broken end of the bottle all the fucking time.

Working poor - don't get too comfortable with that Medicaid. You're kids are expensive, and we've got better people to spend that money on.

Middle class - don't bitch to us about conditions and wages - we let you work here and pay you just enough to keep you from getting together and coming to our gated communities to fuck us all up.

That false alarm in Hawaii could be real next time - you'll need to trade in your Social Security and Medicare to pay even more for a military that you're required to venerate, but will never ever be used in any way that benefits anyone but multinational rentiers.

What do you mean you don't like it? This is what you voted for, dumbass - it's not like nobody told you this is what we intended to do all along.

Today's Tweet

I don't even...can't even...

Time to start drinking

The scene: three days after nuclear war erupts in the aftermath of a Presidential twitter rant.

Congressman A: This move by the President was very unhelpful.

Senator B: I am deeply disturbed by the President's actions.

Pundit: This is how real Americans use nuclear weapons.

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) January 12, 2018

 

Today's Bit O' Satire

The fucked-up-edness really kicked into high gear when we (ie: conservatives) became convinced that the whole thing should be demystified because all you really needed was some common sense and a regular guy's outlook.

Jonathan Pie

"I went to the best doctor's on the planet, and the cancer came back - twice.  And now it's back again. This time I think I'll hire a plumber instead."

James Baldwin

I remember being aware of Baldwin, but he wasn't a big influencer for me.

I kinda regret missing that opportunity, and I regret not listening better.

Today's Plucky Entrepreneur

Here's a cool little novelty. 

When you squeeze it, a brown gel oozes out ever so slightly.

Imagine thousands of these lining the shelves in the gift shop at The Great Hall of the People in Beijing during 45*'s next visit.

hat tips = FB buds Doug and Bill

Today's Tweet

Chuck Grassley (aka: Senator Death Panel) lies. 

A lot.

1) It's not a leak. She sent it to her press list, from her office & posted it online.
2) She not only had the permission of the witness, it was a request of the witness
3) There is no rule against what she did - committee rule, law or otherwise. https://t.co/tH3EcExJZP

— Lily Adams (@adamslily) January 10, 2018