;)
April 17, 2022
Afternoon Update:
As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it? -- Boss Tweed, 1870s
There's an expression that the vote counters are more important than the candidate, and you could use that expression here. -- Donald Trump, April 2022
Boss Trump. Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times: "Working from a large wooden desk reminiscent of the one he used in the Oval Office, [Donald] Trump has transformed Mar-a-Lago's old bridal suite into a shadow G.O.P. headquarters, amassing more than $120 million -- a war chest more than double that of the Republican National Committee itself.... Mr. Trump has ... aggressively pursuing an agenda of vengeance against Republicans who have wronged him, endorsing more than 140 candidates nationwide and turning the 2022 primaries into a stress test of his continued sway. Inspiring fear, hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving not merely as a power broker but as something closer to the head of a 19th-century political machine.... An entire political economy now surrounds Mr. Trump, with Trump properties reaping huge fees: Federal candidates and committees alone have paid nearly $1.3 million to hold events at Mar-a-Lago, records show.... Yet ... Mr. Trump can be downright stingy."
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An Easter Story. Joanna Moorhead of the Guardian: "... when cutting-edge carbon-14 tests found that the Shroud of Turin was a forgery, it seemed like the final chapter for a relic that had been revered for centuries as the cloth in which Christ's body had been wrapped when he supposedly rose from the dead at the first Easter almost 2,000 years ago. But one man -- David Rolfe ... -- wasn't prepared to give up on it. He was convinced the carbon dating, carried out in 1988 under the direction of the British Museum and Oxford University, had been flawed. And now he claims he has the evidence to prove it. This week sees the release of a new film, Who Can He Be?, in which Rolfe argues that, far from the shroud being a definite dud, new discoveries in the past few years have again opened the question of its authenticity. So convinced is Rolfe that he's issuing a challenge worth $1m to the British Museum. 'If ... they believe the shroud is a medieval forgery, I call on them to repeat the exercise, and create something similar today,' he says." ~~~
~~~ Marie: My husband was a reasonable, educated man, not given to superstition. He was not a practicing Christian. But he was born in & grew up in Torino, and he would not be convinced that the Shroud was a 14th-century fabrication. Our childhood beliefs die hard.
Putin's War Crimes, Ctd.
The New York Times' live updates of developments Sunday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here: "The port city of Mariupol was on the cusp of falling on Sunday, a significant advance for Russian forces in their bid to capture Ukraine's southeastern coast.... Russia said on Saturday that its forces had surrounded a remaining group of Ukrainian fighters who were holed up in a Mariupol steel plant.... President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine appeared to acknowledge the impending takeover, saying that Ukrainian troops controlled only a small part of Mariupol and faced much larger Russian numbers.... 'Russia is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there,' Mr. Zelensky said in his overnight address.... The United Nations warned on Saturday that closures of ports on the Black Sea, which normally export grain feeding 400 million people, could trigger a global food catastrophe yielding starvation, mass migration and political instability. Germany's energy minister has called on citizens to cut back their energy consumption, by drawing curtains and lowering their home temperatures, as part of a national effort to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels." ~~~
~~~ The Washington Post's live updates for Sunday are here: "... officials in the capital Kyiv and the western city of Lviv reported explosions Saturday. Moscow has withdrawn its forces from those regions to focus on eastern Ukraine, but airstrikes have continued. Russian forces were continuing to gather around the eastern city of Izyum, farther inland from Mariupol, where significant gains have not materialized from small attacks, according to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, which said it was unclear whether the forces there were simply yet to be bolstered or if they were 'setting conditions for a larger-scale, better-coordinated offensive' soon.... Another Russian general, Maj. Gen. Vladimir Frolov of the 8th Army, died in battle in Ukraine, the governor of St. Petersburg said.... Washington Post journalists who spent seven days on the ground in Bucha documented how for nearly a month in March, the Ukrainian city's streets became a theater of Russian sadism amid mounting frustration over the Kremlin's battlefield losses." ~~~
~~~ The Guardian's live updates for Sunday are here. The Guardian has a summary report here.
Karen DeYoung & Michael Birnbaum of the Washington Post: "Nearly two months into Vladimir Putin's brutal assault on Ukraine, the Biden administration and its European allies have begun planning for a far different world, in which they no longer try to coexist and cooperate with Russia, but actively seek to isolate and weaken it as a matter of long-term strategy. At NATO and the European Union, and at the State Department, the Pentagon and allied ministries, blueprints are being drawn up to enshrine new policies across virtually every aspect of the West's posture toward Moscow, from defense and finance to trade and international diplomacy. Outrage is most immediately directed at Putin himself, who President Biden said last month 'can't remain in power.' While 'we don't say regime change,' said a senior E.U. diplomat, 'it is difficult to imagine a stable scenario with Putin acting the way he is.'"
David Stern, et al., of the Washington Post: "Deadly attacks rocked numerous cities and leveled buildings across Ukraine on Saturday, serving as ominous signals of how close destruction remains even in areas where Russian forces have recently pulled out. Russia moved ever closer to controlling the already-devastated port city of Mariupol as its invasion of Ukraine continued into its eighth week. In Russian-occupied Kherson, satellite imagery that showed the digging of hundreds of fresh grave plots held haunting symbolism of the fate of civilians there." MB: We seem to be moving from war crimes to genocide to annihilation.
Bob Brigham of the Raw Story: "[Investigative] journalist Jane Mayer [of the New Yorker] has a bombshell new report on a dark money group that [built] a 'slime machine' attacking President Joe Biden's nominees. Mayer broke down how Republicans attacked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as 'pro-pedophile' with QAnon adjacent attacks. She wrote 'the fierce campaign against her was concerning, in part because it was spearheaded by a new conservative dark-money group that was created in 2020: the American Accountability Foundation.... Rather than attack a single candidate or nominee, the A.A.F. aims to thwart the entire Biden slate. The obstructionism, like the Republican blockade of Biden's legislative agenda in Congress, is the end in itself. The group hosts a Web site, bidennoms.com, that displays the photographs of Administration nominees it has targeted, as though they were hunting trophies,' Mayer [wrote].... The organization is led by [Ted Jones,] a former top staffer to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). [Mayer wrote,] 'When I asked Jones for an interview, through the A.A.F.'s online portal, he replied, 'Ms. Meyers ... Go pound sand.'" ~~~
~~~ Marie: Technically, Tom, you ignorant slimeball, I don't believe women can "pound sand." Mayer's story, which is firewalled, is here. Tom Sullivan, in Hullabaloo, publishes some more bits from Mayer's report, including how "that Vanderbilt- and Oxford-educated, faux-hayseed Sen. [John] Kennedy (R-La.)" availed himself of A.A.F.'s services to slime Saule Omarova, President Biden's nominee for Comptroller of the Currency. Omarova withdrew from consideration after Kennedy repeatedly accused her of being a Russian communist.
Beyond the Beltway
Alabama Gubernatorial Race. Kyle Whitmire of AL.com: "Alabama gubernatorial candidate Tim James has attacked an LGBTQ-friendly charter school for hosting a drag show, calling it 'vile' and 'evil.' Only when he was a student at Baylor School, he was part of a drag show, too," as a photo from his high school yearbook shows. James himself was not in drag in the photo, but he stood with some of his teammates who were. In general, Whitmire isn't much of a fan of James. He writes, "Until now, James has struggled against a public perception that he's not that bright. In a failed 2010 campaign for governor, he ran strange commercials in which he meandered from room to room in a house saying kinda racist things about how immigrants should speak English in between unusually long pauses. It was the pauses that turned the ads into a target for viral online parodies.... If you wrote a fictionalized version of Alabama politics, James is the sort of character a lazy writer might come up with."
Florida. Abigail Weinberg of Mother Jones: "Florida has a new addition to the long, absurd list of topics it considers too 'woke' to tolerate: math textbooks. When vetting math books for K -- 12 classes, the state education commissioner rejected 41 percent of submissions because of 'references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,' the state announced yesterday in a press release titled, 'Florida Rejects Publishers' Attempts to Indoctrinate Students.' The press release does not provide any examples of the offending material, but it does say that 54 of 132 submitted textbooks were rejected, including 71 percent of materials proposed for grades K-5." ~~~
~~~ Marie's PS: Apparently the dictionary is another book that is too "woke" for people in Florida's Department of Education to consult, causing them to put out a press release that confuses "tenants" with "tenets."
Kansas. Andrew Bahl of the Topeka Capital-Journal: "Gov. Laura Kelly [D] vetoed Friday a so-called 'parents' bill of rights,' designed to increase the ability for parents to inspect and review curriculum used in classrooms. The measure has been fiercely opposed by educators as overly burdensome, though the proposal that hit Kelly's desk, Senate Bill 58, was less restrictive than other options that were considered in the Legislature. Still, Kelly previously called the bill a 'teacher demoralization act' and said in her veto message that it was 'about politics, not parents.' She added the bill would cause division when Democrats and Republicans should be working to ensure the state's schools are fully funded.... Kansas' bill would have required school districts develop policies allowing parents to be informed of what is being taught in their child's classroom and letting them examine lesson plans, examinations, textbooks and other course materials.... Parents could also object to activities or materials that violate 'their firmly held beliefs, values or principles' and withdraw their student from participating in those areas."
Oklahoma. A Man with No Shame. Felicia Sonmez of the Washington Post: "Scott Pruitt, who led the Environmental Protection Agency until resigning amid a series of ethics scandals in 2018, is launching a Senate bid in Oklahoma. Pruitt, 53, is running to fill the unexpired term of Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who announced in February that he will step down next year. Inhofe handily won reelection in 2020, meaning that whoever wins the November special election for his seat will serve until 2027."
Texas. Rotten Tomatoes. Alicia Wallace & Vanessa Yurkevich of CNN: "A weeklong protest by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott against President Biden's recent immigration policy reached a resolution on Friday, but the gridlock it created has resulted in hundreds of millions of lost dollars and delays in shipments of everything from avocados to automobile parts that will have a longer-term impact.... Abbott's [protest], which Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller [R] criticized as 'political theater,' ultimately created a logjam of trucks between the US and its largest goods trading partner. Vegetable producers say their produce is spoiling in idling trucks and they are losing hundreds of millions of dollars.... What used to be a routine border crossing turned into a 30-hour wait for some trucks. Meanwhile, the fruits and vegetables in those trucks spoiled, leaving some produce department shelves sparse or empty in advance of the holiday weekend, [Dante L. Galeazzi, CEO ... of the Texas International Produce Association,] said.... Losses to fruit and vegetable producers are estimated to be more than $240 million, said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas. Consumers will also pay a price as producers look to recoup some of their losses and supplies run low." ~~~
~~~ Marie: How about dumping those rotten tomatoes at the Texas state capitol and tossing a few at Greg Abbott.
News Ledes
Unsafe Anywhere. Another Saturday Night in Second-Amendment USA. Washington Post: "A shooting early Sunday at a house party in Pittsburgh left two people dead and at least eight injured, city officials said, the latest in a string of high-profile incidents of gun violence that have unfolded across the country in recent days. Police said they responded just after 12:30 a.m. to a property in Pittsburgh's East Allegheny neighborhood, where about 200 people had been attending a party at a house that had been rented via Airbnb. More than 90 rounds were fired inside the house, prompting some partygoers to jump out of windows, Pittsburgh Police Chief Scott E. Schubert said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon." ~~~
~~~ AP: "Authorities in South Carolina say they are investigating shooting at a nightclub in Hampton County early Sunday that left at least nine people injured. It was the second mass shooting in the state over the Easter holiday weekend, and the third in the nation. The South Carolina shootings and one in Pittsburgh that left two minors dead early Sunday at least 31 people injured."
A New York Times report (which is oddly mistitled) provides a moment-by-moment, account of the shooting in the subway train.
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Reader Comments (17)
A dark money attack group called the “Accountability” foundation.
Heh-heh.
Who says confederates have no sense of humor?
Wait…math is now too “woke”?
But not division and subtraction, I’m guessing. They’re what these assholes do best, divide and take away.
Not for nothin’, but the concept of woke is, at its heart, the qualities of respect, understanding, and heightened intelligence.
Those are bad things?
Oh, wait. We’re talking right-wingers. Never mind.
Florida already has a teacher shortage and I'm sure that the problem will now only get worse.
Teachers are poorly paid, overburdened, and disrespected. Damn if I see why they put up with it.
@ Bobby Lee - The FL teacher shortage is a feature, not a bug, of the GQP war on knowledge. An educated electorate is their worst nightmare.
Akhilleus,
The GOP went full Orwellian a long time ago... with .everything from the names they slap on legislation ( the Healthy Forests Act, more properly the Cut 'em Down Act) to Project Veritas (whose mission was always to mislead and fabricate).
And since the opposite of "woke" is "asleep" can't fault the R's for not much liking "woke." They are sound asleep and don't want to be disturbed. Sleep and its dreams provide their preferred state. They like it that way and will do anything they can to ignore or shut off the alarm clock of reality.
Yeah, it's nuts, but none of this is unrelated to Marie's Easter story.
Happy Easter to all here who have risen.
And I was wondering about the word–-EASTER–-according to a google search it probably comes from––-
"Given the symbolism of new life and rebirth, it was only natural to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus at this time of the year. The naming of the celebration as "Easter" seems to go back to the name of a pre-Christian goddess in England, Eostre, who was celebrated at beginning of spring.
I rather like that–--female fecundity –--however I prefer the appearance of all those daffodils and forthesia that have been resurrected. But Jesus still reigns supreme in the myth of popping back to life and as long as I live I imagine it will be thus.
And on this Sunday morning after reading Jane Mayer's piece on the American Accountability Foundation I wept–-not for long, mind you, but knowing what this despicable group has done to so many "very fine people" makes me furious, frustrated and sick! Mayer has exposed so much that has gone awry in this country and yet it takes sometimes years to recognize her reports or do anything about it.
But a glimmer of sunshine this morning: On the front steps a basket of colored eggs from all our bunnies who live on our land with a wee note thanking us for letting them frolic free. Them rabbits know a good thing when they got it. The mister was not impressed: they sneak in his gardens nibbling on his leafy greens. Seems almost everything has its downsides, don't it?
But as Ak says––"Happy Easter to all those that have risen."
OR--as my D.C. friend just texted me:
... as Christians everywhere take a short break from killing each other, and perform acts of ritual cannibalism to celebrate Jesus becoming a Zombie.
PD,
I believe the “all who have risen” line belongs to Ken, but I’m never unhappy about being credited for a pithy comment or two.
Speaking of Easter, or Eostre, why is it that all these mythic characters, the Easter Bunny, Santa, the Sandman, etc. are guys? The bunny brings eggs, gee cryin’ out loud, which is doubly weird because men don’t reproduce and mammals don’t lay eggs. I guess there’s the tooth fairy, but what kind of job is that? Trading coin of the realm for decayed enamel? I guess inequality extends even unto fantasy worlds.
On the lexical side, Easter reminds us of one of the coolest, but least used words in the English language: rotogravure, best pronounced by rolling the R and pausing before “gravure”, as in
On the avenue, Fifth Avenue
The photographers will snap you
And you’ll find that you’re (best pronounced yure)
In the (ready?) Rrrrrroto-gravure.
Thanks to Irving Berlin.
The two most popular songs celebrating Christian holidays in America were written by a Russian Jew. Funny, innit?
That should be 'Hoppy Easter.' Fortunately one of our neighbors
got rid of all the rabbits in the neighborhood. Thankfully they never
invited us to partake of a dinner stew. So if we have no rabbits how
do we celebrate Easter?
I'm sitting on the front porch waiting for Betsy to bring baskets
of golden eggs to all of her neighbors. Might be a long wait. She
keeps buying up parts of the town, or her kids companies do, so she
may be on a tight budget.
That family doesn't give Christmas gifts like I used to get as a kid;
excited to get that chemistry set, oh boy!
They give things like auto dealerships, factories, hotels, etc.
I feel so deprived (not).
@Akhilleus: Yeah but -- neither is in any way a religious song. No mention of Jesus or even brotherly love, just superficial stuff about treetops glistening & people showing off their finery. So Berlin gets the last laugh; it turns out the two greatest Christian "religious" holidays are not about faith or "Christian values" at all. I don't know if that's the message Berlin meant to send, but that's what I hear.
@Rocky Girl: another feature of the Florida war on teachers seems to be the aim to eliminate the public school system and go to charter schools.
Yeah, the war on public education deepens. In PA the schools are not equally funded. And school districts have to fund students going to charters. And the people running charters, except the state zoom schools, universally grab all the money for themselves. More than one director is serving time...
Happy EasterPassoverRamadan! The sun just came out, and time to take a walk. The bunny brought me jam, French salt, and a sparkley Cubs hat. Happy pause-for-a-holiday, except in Ukraine, home of the most beautiful eggs... Sad and horrible.
Jeanne,
One way to view our history might be to trace the war on virtually everything public that has been fought since our beginnings.
It began early with the mechanisms put in place to privatize public property. Over time most of the East and Midwest, which began a public domain (once it was stolen from the Indians), was privatized, often in a manner that made land speculators very rich. The climate in the West left large swathes of it public, but many remain unhappy with that arrangement. Witness the Sage Brush Rebellion and its sequels. Then there were the railroads that were subsidized by immense land, mineral and timber grants along their right of ways, once again making a few folks very wealthy.
The post office is still under siege and there are many instances of private companies exacting tolls on what were public roads. We have private contractors providing what should be public services, prisons prominent among them. Private health insurance in general and the private health insurance sweeteners that made the ACA possible are cases in point. Medicare Advantage programs are more than a foot in the door of the Medicare revenue stream. How about 401 K plans for retirement instead of an expanded, enhanced, and realistic Social Security program? Private, too.
Capitalists just can't stand all that tax money locked away from them. They want it, too. They can't help themselves. It's who they are. The public good is for them a contradiction in terms. The only good is theirs.
Public schools are a natural target, but they are only one of many. The privatizers want it all.
Ken: sorry I attributed that Easter "risen' thingy to Ak–-I unfortunately cannot blame it on my youth but can blame it on my eyesight.
Your latest comments above signify the problems of those who get with those that don't. I still maintain one of the mainstays of our democracy is our highway system: Red means stop–-green means go–- stop signs mean "stop" and lanes are there for a reason. And EVERYONE needs to follow this system. I cannot think of anything else that is that clear cut.
Another example -- one that makes my fly fisherman husband crazy -- is the very vigorous movement to privatizing streams, of all things. We have history in Alaska where streambeds are explicitly public. Cutting off access to fish is unAmerican!
And then there's the question of beaches, for heaven's sake. All should be public.At least until sea level rise when the shoreline mega mansions are no more--
@NJC: I agree. But what do you think about "public" beaches that are open only to residents? On some Cape Cod beaches, you have to have a town sticker on your car to use the beach, and I expect that's true elsewhere. In other places, beaches are open to anyone in the public, but they're out-of-the-way, and parking fees are high.
Presumably, municipalities (or counties or states) have to maintain the beaches, and limiting them to locals and/or charging fees to use them would seem justified.
And what about lakes? There are hundreds, or maybe thousands of lakes in the U.S. that have no public access whatsoever. They are surrounded by private land/lots where ownership is to the shore or beyond. The lake I live on has a public park abutting it, but the park and the lake are supposed to be for residents only, though I've never seen the cops come and check. I suppose if some of those "Massachusetts Democrats" whom Trump said are bussed in to vote in New Hampshire threw a party on "my" lake, the cops would get rid of them.