3 Things

...about Joe Arpaio

First, (yes, I'll say it again): 
When I hear "Joe", I think "Sheriff". 
And when I hear Arpaio, I think "Nottingham".

Second, always remember that a pardon is an absolute affirmation of guilt.

Third, this, from the archives at Phoenix New Times:

Taxpayers spent $1,102,528.50 this year to settle another of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's lawsuits, New Times has learned through a public records request. The suit was brought by a man whom Arpaio framed in 1999 in a staged murder plot against the sheriff.

The payout, nine years after the wrongful arrest, is an indicaton that the aging lawman's publicity-driven, unsavory antics may keep costing taxpayers big money well into the future. The county is already struggling with a huge budget deficit, and the excessive costs of Arpaio's operation isn't helping matters.

In 2004, victim James Saville’s family sued Arpaio for $10 million, after Saville was found not guilty of attempting to kill the sheriff. The county recently settled with Saville for an undisclosed amount. It only had to pay the above amount out of public coffers; its insurance policy covered the rest.

Before you wish that you could collect $1 million by getting framed for Arpaio's murder, consider that Saville spent four years in county jail, awaiting trial as a result of the made-up crime.

A 4th thing is that pardoning Arpaio is a lot of things, but it includes a slap at the Federal Courts. 45* can't resist an opportunity for payback. Federal courts were mean to him and he used his "friend" to take a shot at them.

- rounding out the Arpaio legacy -

Joe Arpaio's 10 Grossest Publicity Stunts, Courtesy of His Departing Puppeteer

Pick One

Of course, both of these can't be true at the same time, but that's how 45* rolls - and it would seem that's how the rubes want it.

If Senate Republicans don't get rid of the Filibuster Rule and go to a 51% majority, few bills will be passed. 8 Dems control the Senate!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2017

11 minutes later:

Few, if any, Administrations have done more in just 7 months than the Trump A. Bills passed, regulations killed, border, military, ISIS, SC!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2017

11 minutes.

"Those mean ol' Dems won't let me get anything done, and meanwhile I'm doing more than anybody else ever did before".

Etch-A-Sketching in real time.

Gaslighting on an industrial scale.

Another quick reminder from St Ayn of Rand:

Contradiction can exist, but it cannot prevail.

White Like Me

This guy reversed the old experiment (Black Like Me), by creating an online persona so he could step into the shoes of an Alt-Right knuckle-dragger.

WaPo interview with Theo Wilson:

After engaging in endless sparring matches in the comments section, Wilson began to notice something curious: His trolls seemed to speak a language unto themselves, one replete with the same twisted facts and false history. It was as if they had all passed through some “dimensional doorway,” arriving from an alternative universe where history, politics and commonly accepted facts had been turned inside out.

There was the idea that slavery was a form of charity that benefited enslaved Africans; that freed blacks owned more slaves than whites before the Civil War; that people of color make up the majority of those receiving aid from America's safety-net programs; and that investor and philanthropist George Soros is funding protest movements like Black Lives Matter.

You mention that in their forums they're also seeking “answers” to questions. What are they trying to resolve?

In today's America, they're struggling to understand why they'll have less opportunity than their father's generation. They also want answers to basic questions about race in America, such as: What's the point of multiculturalism? Why can only black people say the “N” word? How is racism not over when LeBron James and Oprah have huge bank accounts? How is affirmative action anything other than reverse racism? Why shouldn't I be proud to be white if someone else is proud to be black?

You mention that they also have some “fair points.” What are they?

I think it’s a fair point that leftists are widely tolerant of all kinds of people, but are often quite hateful to those who honestly hold conservative values. There are people who actually believe in God with all their heart. There are people who cannot cognitively resolve a guy kissing a guy. It doesn’t mean they’re seconds away from a hate crime. There is a legitimate human need to want to hold on to tradition in any culture.
Mr Wilson at Tedx Talks

Today's Tweet

Special Racist Asshole Edition:

Russell Walker files lawsuit demanding Confederate flags be returned to courtroom, invokes "Martin Luther Coon." pic.twitter.com/5yIDjvZcV7

— Jeffrey Guterman (@JeffreyGuterman) August 24, 2017

The Past Ain't Even The Past Yet

This makes me think she had some real points to make - a lot like the points black folks are still trying to make - but all I really remember about Angela Davis was the feeling that I was supposed to be wary of her - and that whole merry band of "black radicals" out there in California.

Trying to sort through it is complicated, and I have to continue looking back to learn a bit more from that weirdest of weird times we call the 60s, when I was very much just a knuckleheaded teenager, trying to make sense of what I thought I was learning about the world - especially the parts concerning Race Relations and Power and the Politics of Change here in USAmerica Inc - as the world's problems were getting bigger even as the world itself was getting smaller in what seemed like one big fuckin' hurry.

Way too much of "the news" - one of the things I was trying to learn from - way back in the golden age of "honest broadcast journalism" - turned out to be about as slanted and warped back then as I see it now when I consider how the Dis-Infotainment Industry has really kicked it into high gear.

I guess I could ask, "What chance does anybody have?".

But then I'd have to tell you not to bother watching this (even if you've got the 2 hours and 45 minutes to spare):

Now try this one on for size: You can't believe anybody, so you'll have to believe me.

"Post-Truth" is bullshit. I may not have more than a couple of dime's worth of neurons to rub together, but I'm not going along with anybody who tries to tell me there's no way we can ever know what's real and what's not.

12 people have walked on the moon for fuck's sake - and we got them all back so they could tell us about it. We can figure this shit out.

Keith

The list goes on.  And oh yeah - we can call 'em The RepubliKlan Party now. Thanks, Keith.

The View From Out There

An irrelevant freak show

A Little Diversion

Cuz ya can't do the "look what that fuckin' idiot did today" all day every day.

News To Me

The best thing I've come across in a long time.

From HuffPo (hey - even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while):

A native Virginian, a railroad magnate, a slaveholder, and an ardent secessionist, Mahone served in the Confederate army throughout the war. He was one of the Army of Northern Virginia’s most able commanders, distinguishing himself particularly in the summer of 1864 at the Battle of the Crater outside Petersburg. After the war, Robert E. Lee recalled that, when contemplating a successor, he thought that Mahone “had developed the highest qualities for organization and command.”

How did such a high-ranking Confederate commander wind up missing in action in a Charleston gift shop? Not, I think, by accident.

By now, Americans interested in the Confederate monument removal project have had it drilled into them that the monuments were erected decades after the end of the Civil War as testimonies to white supremacy in all its various manifestations: segregation, disenfranchisement, lynching, peonage, and second-class citizenship across the board. But the monuments were not merely commemorative. They were designed to conceal a past that their designers wanted to suppress. That past was the period after Reconstruction and before Jim Crow, years in which African Americans in the former Confederacy exercised political power, ran for public office, published newspapers, marched as militias, ran businesses, organized voluntary associations, built schools and churches: a time, in other words, when they participated as full members of society.

Maj Gen William Mahone, CSA

Today's Quote

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements Of Style.  The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now - while they're happy.

--Dorothy Parker

Bamboozle Me, Baby

Ben Carson went to Phoenix - and the obvious reason was to be exploited as "my African-American".

WaPo, Philip Bump:

And, as simply as that, a law was likely broken.

There are a lot of ways in which the federal government could be used to reward political friends and allies, of course, appointments being just one example. But the power of the government can also be leveraged to political advantage. Imagine a candidate who appeared at a campaign rally to be endorsed by the heads of each branch of the armed forces, for example. That would carry a lot of weight.

In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Hatch Act into law, a measure meant to preserve the impartiality of public servants. “The law’s purposes,” the Office of Special Counsel’s website explains, “are to ensure that federal programs are administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation.​​​​”
Add it to the list. 45* cares nothing about these little-people rules.

Obeying the law?
Ethics? 
Honorability? 

That shit's for suckers - which is exactly why I call 'em rubes. They support 45* because he embodies their fantasies of having the power to live outside the norms, ignoring the simple fact that those norms - those rules - are there to protect them from Daddy State assholes like 45*.

Today's Tweet

The big bamboozle

To recap: Trump is threatening a government shutdown unless his fellow Republicans fund border wall he promised voters Mexico would pay for.

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) August 23, 2017

Keith

The number of contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russians has been underestimated - there were dozens.

Whoa

Tim Johnson, McClatchy DC

The Pentagon won’t yet say how the USS John S. McCain was rammed by an oil tanker near Singapore, but red flags are flying as the Navy’s decades-old reliance on electronic guidance systems increasing looks like another target of cyberattack.

The incident – the fourth involving a Seventh Fleet warship this year – occurred near the Strait of Malacca, a crowded 1.7-mile-wide waterway that connects the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and accounts for roughly 25 percent of global shipping.

“When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar,” said Jeff Stutzman, chief intelligence officer at Wapack Labs, a New Boston, New Hampshire, cyber intelligence service.

“There’s something more than just human error going on because there would have been a lot of humans to be checks and balances,” said Stutzman, a former information warfare specialist in the Navy.

So allow me to reiterate: 45* keeps making all kinds of stoopid noise about beefing up the US Military's ability to wage war in MeatSpace, when the fight is going on in CyberSpace.

Today's Pix