Fired Up

Portia - America's grandma - From Dec 2017

Isaiah 10:

Doom to you who legislate evil,
who make laws that make victims;
Laws that make misery for the poor,
that rob my destitute people of dignity,
Exploiting defenseless widows,
taking advantage of homeless children.
What will you have to say on Judgment Day,
when Doomsday arrives out of the blue?
Who will you get to help you?
What good will your money do you?
A sorry sight you’ll be then, huddled with the prisoners,
or just some corpses stacked in the street.
Even after all this, God is still angry,
his fist still raised, ready to hit them again.

Stay mad

Write It Down

It came into my brainspace today when I was out for a walk.

I don't know what to do with it, so here it is on my little blog, so I don't misplace it.

The Seven Dark Side Dwarfs
Creepy
Smarmy
Moron
Fuckin' Moron (his half-twin)
Shifty
Schmuck
and
Kavanaugh

Oh, Those Optics

“There is nothing independent about her opinion,” Fairstein said. “She is a hired gun giving an opinion for the side that hired her.”

If you're not the right person to question a witness in a Senate committee hearing, then you're not the right person to be a Senator. 

Please, Repubs - stop floating all that bullshit about how open and honest and fair you're trying to be.

Emma Brown and Seung Min Kim, WaPo:

The prosecutor hired by Republican senators to question Christine Blasey Ford has declared that Ford’s allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh are so weak that no “reasonable prosecutor” would pursue the case.

“A ‘he said, she said’ case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that,” Rachel Mitchell, a Repub­lican sex-crimes prosecutor from Arizona, wrote Sunday in a five-page memorandum, highlighting what she described as inconsistencies in Ford’s account and a lack of corroboration from potential witnesses.

Though Senate Republicans said the memo was helpful, legal experts from both political parties and advocates for victims of sexual assault on Monday questioned how Mitchell could reach such a conclusion without a fuller investigation and without the ability to cross-examine witnesses such as Mark Judge, the only other person Ford says was in the room when the alleged incident occurred in the summer of 1982.

“As a former prosecutor myself, I’ve come to no conclusion other than the conclusion that there needs to be more facts to come to a conclusion,” said Douglas Wigdor, an employment lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in sexual assault and harassment cases. Wigdor, a Republican, called the memo “a joke” and “preposterous.”
- and -

Tasha Menacker, chief strategy officer for the Arizona Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence, said she has heard survivors talking in recent days about how their experiences match the experience described by Ford, including an inability to pinpoint when their assault occurred or other such details.

“I’m afraid that survivors in Maricopa County are going to see this and relate to Dr. Ford, and be concerned about whether or not they would be believed,” she said. “Survivors are going to see this and say, ‘I wouldn’t be able to be consistent in my recollections either, remember specific dates either.’ ”

Matthew Long, a defense attorney who once worked for Mitchell as a sex-crimes prosecutor, was quoted as calling her “the best” in a story in a local newspaper last week, before the memo was issued. On Monday, Long said he was surprised to see that she cited Ford’s gaps in memory as evidence of the weakness of her allegation.

“The things that she’s highlighting that say that Dr. Ford is not credible are the very things she has taught me to ignore and not rely on,” he said in an interview. The memo, he said, “demonstrates she’s abandoned what she knows to be true in favor of being a political operative.”

This Just In

The Mash Report - BBC Two

Today's Tweet

Huckleberry ButchMeUp gets a little spookier every day.

"If you don't like me working with President Trump to make this world a better place, I don't give a shit"

As eloquently articulated by the increasingly unstable Lindsey Graham. pic.twitter.com/6oppJ0Td7b

— 💙Koko ✊🏻✊🏾✊🏿💙 (@Kokomothegreat) October 2, 2018

'Course, there's always the possibility that he's playing the opposite game so he can infiltrate the inner sanctum of Cult45 and what the fuck is happening to us?

Today's GIF

Hang on just a minute, guys - I need to get my moose.

Beau Of The Fifth Column

Hillbilly wisdom - yes it's a real thing.

The aggressor backed off, not because he felt threatened, but because he respected Beau's "proprietorship" more than he respected her as a person.

How Great I Art

Hey - I got a mention on Crooks & Liars.

And it drives my traffic in a very nice way.

Thanks, Blue Gal

Today's Daddy State Lesson

Daddy State Awareness, rule 3:

Every prediction of dire consequences is a threat - either they're causing that dire consequence now so they can blame us for problems of their own doing, or they plan on causing it later in order to manipulate us into doing what they want now.

So let's see what they're up to, shall we?

Jeff Stein, WaPo:

Two U.S. Senators — Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.) — are applying for federal money under a $12 billion bailout program set up by the White House to help farmers hurt by trade hostilities, spokespeople from their offices said.

Grassley pressed the Trump administration this spring to relieve farmers who have been pummeled by Chinese tariffs on their exports amid the wider trade war. Tester has also criticized the impact of the tariffs on farmers and called on the administration to help Montana ranchers.

The Agriculture Department confirmed last week it has already sent more than 7,800 bailout checks totaling over $25 million to farmers across the country. The assistance is intended to help farmers survive the trade war with China, which has dramatically widened in scope this month after the U.S. announced it would target another $200 billion in Chinese goods.

And then, a little classic double-speak:

“Sen. Grassley participates in farm programs for which he is legally eligible, including this program, like every other farmer,” said the spokesman, Michael Zona. “Grassley receives no special treatment and is always transparent about his participation. As a family farmer, Sen. Grassley brings firsthand knowledge and experience on behalf of agriculture and rural America to the policymaking tables in Washington.”

How many times have we heard some variation of this:

"The republic will stand...until the populace discover the ability to vote themselves benefits from the public treasury..." ?

Radical Libertarians (people who were once quaintly referred to as "conservatives") have been using that quote as a defensive weapon against us for a long time.

It's part of the overall strategy to delegitimize government at every level - and the very concept of democratic self-governance - to plant the notion that getting together, pooling our resources, and trying to do anything that's best for the most is the "evil of the collective".

They've been teaching huge segments of Americans to be afraid of each other, and to look to "their superiors" for marching orders.

Today's (Un)Quote

Commonly attributed to Louis Brandeis, this is prob'ly more like something he said once in passing, or is otherwise apocryphal.

It's also more than a little possible that the thing is from a speech by Ralph Nader when he was running his vanity project "campaign for president" in 2000.

Whatever - and in keeping with modern cyber-lore theory - it rings true as fuck, so why not post it?

We must make a choice in this country. We may have democracy, or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few - but we may not have both.

Here's another one:

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal - well meaning but without understanding.