;)
November 27, 2022
Afternoon Update:
Lily Kuo of the Washington Post: "Protests erupted in cities and on campuses across China this weekend as frustrated and outraged citizens took to the streets in a stunning wave of demonstrations against the government's 'zero covid' policy and the leaders enforcing it. Residents in Shanghai, China's most populous city, came together Saturday night and early Sunday, calling for the end of pandemic lockdowns and chanting, 'We want freedom!' and 'Unlock Xinjiang, unlock all of China!' according to witnesses at the event. In even more extraordinary scenes of public anger aimed at the government's top leader, a group of protesters there chanted, 'Xi Jinping, step down!' and 'Communist Party, step down!'"
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The Dumbest Damned "Modern Democracy" on Earth. Mike McIntire of the New York Times: "Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense -- increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one's voice and, just as often, quieting someone else's.... In June, armed demonstrations around the United States amounted to nearly one a day. A group led by a former Republican state legislator protested a gay pride event in a public park in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Men with guns interrupted a Juneteenth festival in Franklin, Tenn., handing out fliers claiming that white people were being replaced.... Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home. The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger. A partisan divide -- with Democrats largely eschewing firearms and Republicans embracing them -- has warped civic discourse. Deploying the Second Amendment in service of the First has become a way to buttress a policy argument, a sort of silent, if intimidating, bullhorn."
Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post: "As the White House pushes public agencies and big business to slash greenhouse gas emissions, it is leaning on the Postal Service to step up the pace to meet President Biden's directive to ensure all new government-owned vehicles are EVs by 2035. And, after a hard-won $3 billion infusion from Congress to jump-start its transition, the first of the agency's 34,000 zero-emission mail trucks will begin rolling out next year. Most of those funds, according to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, will remedy a massive and widely underappreciated challenge in the green migration: the arduous and costly build-out of EV infrastructure, from gargantuan new buildings to thousands of charging stations.... The agency is set to purchase 85,000 mail trucks, a mix of custom-built Next Generation Delivery Vehicles from a defense contractor in Wisconsin, as well as models from mainstream automakers. Nearly 40 percent of them, roughly 34,000 trucks, will be electric, far fewer than the Biden administration wanted but four times more than the agency initially planned.... The fleet decision was particularly fraught."
Beyond the Beltway
Fake Voter Fraud Squads with Nothing to Do. Gary Fields, et al., of the AP: "State-level law enforcement units created after the 2020 presidential election to investigate voter fraud are looking into scattered complaints more than two weeks after the midterms but have provided no indication of systemic problems. That's just what election experts had expected and led critics to suggest that the new units were more about politics than rooting out widespread abuses. Most election-related fraud cases already are investigated and prosecuted at the local level." MB: These "law enforcement agencies" are so Soviet.
Georgia Senate Race. Dylan Wells of the Washington Post: "Georgia voters flocked to the polls Saturday to cast their ballots in the Senate runoff, taking advantage of an extra day of voting brought about by a lawsuit filed by Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D), who is defending his seat against Republican Herschel Walker. In more than two dozen counties across the state, thousands of voters from both parties came out to vote, some waiting for hours in lines stretching around the block for the chance to cast their ballot early for the Dec. 6 runoff. The secretary of state's office reported that at least 70,000 people voted Saturday."
Way Beyond
Ukraine, et al.
The Washington Post's live briefings of developments Sunday in Russia's war on Ukraine are here: "In what he called 'a very busy diplomatic day,' President Volodymyr Zelensky solidified his Grain from Ukraine initiative, hosted world leaders in a summit on food security, and elicited European nations' support for Ukraine to join NATO and the European Union.... The [grain] effort comes in addition to the Black Sea Grain Initiative, through which shipments have gone to various countries. Other countries, including the United States, have agreed to help with the new program, sending Ukraine about $150 million, Zelensky said in his daily address.... Weather is slowing front line operations in Ukraine, according to the Institute for the Study of War think tank, but a consistent ground freeze expected in early December would allow Russian and Ukrainian forces to pick up where they left off."
Catherine Belton & Robyn Dixon of the Washington Post: "For months, [Vladimir] Putin claimed that the economic blitzkrieg' against Russia had failed, but Western sanctions imposed over the invasion of Ukraine are digging ever deeper into Russia's economy, exacerbating equipment shortages for its army and hampering its ability to launch any new ground offensive or build new missiles, economists and Russian business executives said. Recent figures show the situation has worsened considerably since the summer when, buoyed by a steady stream of oil and gas revenue, the Russian economy seemed to stabilize. Figures released by the Finance Ministry last week show a key economic indicator -- tax revenue from the non-oil and gas sector -- fell 20 percent in October.... The Western ban on technology imports is affecting most sectors of the economy, while the Kremlin's forced mobilization of more than 300,000 Russian conscripts to serve in Ukraine, combined with the departure of at least as many abroad fleeing the draft, has dealt a further blow, economists said. In addition, Putin's own restrictions on gas supplies to Europe, followed by the unexplained explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, has led to a sharp drop in gas production...."
Taiwan. Huizhong Wu of the AP: "Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen resigned as head of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party following local election losses on Saturday in which voters chose the opposition Nationalist party in several major races across the self-ruled island. Concerns about threats from rival China, which claims Taiwan as its territory, took a backseat to more local issues in the elections.... Tsai offered her resignation on Saturday evening, a tradition after a major loss, in a short speech in which she also thanked supporters."
News Ledes
AP: "Search teams have recovered seven dead, including a 3-week-old infant and a pair of young siblings, buried in mud and debris that hurtled down a mountainside and through a densely populated port city on the resort island of Ischia, officials said Sunday."
New York Times: "Irene Cara, the Academy Award-winning singer who performed the electric title tracks in two aspirational self-expression movies of the 1980s, 'Flashdance' and 'Fame,' has died. She was 63."
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Reader Comments (8)
In their never ending effort to drown democracy, look for the Party of Traitors in Georgia to restrict early voting to three hours a day for two days before any election should Warnock hold off the well funded challenge by a nodding idiot who doesn’t even live there.
Lonely are the brave
In almost all of the images I’ve seen of traitors parading around armed like an invasion force at polling places, these gun toting heroes are masked. Perhaps it’s an effort to look tough and mean and scary, but hiding one’s identity when doing something clearly reprehensible in public is a sign of fear and cowardice.
And if this were nothing but “good people” enjoying their Second Amendment rights, they wouldn’t do it en masse, identities hidden under masks, scarfs, hats, body armor and dark glasses in obvious attempts at political coercion and bullying.
But that’s the Party of Traitors. Decency isn’t for them, it’s for those they hate. They’re just not man enough to show their faces while employing tactics they must believe relieve them from having to make reasoned and passionate arguments for their political positions. Waving guns around is their way of cowardly avoiding the sort of civil public discourse modeled by the founders upon whom they expend so much fake respect.
Can’t put two words together to back up your bullshit? Lock and load. And don’t forget your Halloween masks.
The truly brave Americans are those unfazed by such puerile but clearly dangerous flourishes of craven tendentiousness.
Regarding early voting restrictions remember that The Former Guy has called for a total ban on early and absentee voting and use only paper ballots, to be hand counted.
The less votes to count, the better to screw you by!
Don't know if the local paper will go for this sermon, but this next week I intend to find out:
"I can’t remember when I learned there is no Santa Claus. There’s a picture somewhere of the little boy I was, sitting in that jolly fellow’s lap. I’m guessing I had just told him what I wanted for Christmas, that I’d been a good boy, and he’d assured me I could count on him. I sure looked happy.
Maybe I began to doubt the Santa story when he gave me a present that looked suspiciously like something I’d seen in my father’s store, or maybe that present’s wrapping paper had the same too obvious origin.
Whatever prompted it or whenever it came, I don’t think the moment was accompanied by any trauma of shattered belief. For me, it was apparently time for Santa to go the way of the tooth fairy.
Looking back on it now, that seems a good way to divide my life. There was that Belief in Santa part (B. S.) and the many years since. Painful or not, shedding Santa was an essential stage in growing up.
That’s why I don’t understand the adults who still believe things that are manifestly untrue: the Q-Anon adherents who believe a deceased John Kennedy, Jr. will restore Trump to the presidency (independent.co.uk); the sixty percent of Republicans who still believe the 2020 election was rigged (nbcnews.com); and the nearly same percentage who think the Jan 6 Capitol riot was an exercise in patriotism (mediaite.com).
Now Republicans, who narrowly won a House majority after promising to do something about inflation, crime, and immigration, have prioritized an investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop (washingtonpost.com).
They apparently believe Hunter Biden’s laptop contains instructions for controlling inflation, diminishing crime, and modernizing our dysfunctional immigration policies.
But if they believe that, House Republicans are stuck at the B. S. (Belief in Santa) stage of development."
BTW, That Kari Lake lady is a true Pretender acolyte. Per the emails she's sending my way she continues to fund-raise on claims of a stolen election which she's already lost...Will the marks never, never learn?
WHAT KEVIN SAID:
Maureen's brother Kevin gives us his thoughts on various and sundry and the only thing they agree on is their stance on Trump. If I had been sitting with this family on Thanksgiving I'd have had trouble digesting the turkey while having to listen to the one sitting at the table.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/opinion/its-time-again-for-my-brother-kevin.html
Bobby Lee,
Fewer votes is the goal and has been for years.
A new series sponsored by WNYC’s On the Media is currently covering the rise of religious/hate/right-wing radio, paying particular interest to a huge network of Christian hate speech stations, Salem Broadcasting.
The founders of Salem at one point hooked up with a Republican religious activist named Paul Weyrich. In 1980, Weyrich founded the CNP, the secretive Council for National Policy, a group which at the time brought together big money interests on the right, mainstream Republicans, and far-right extremists.
Weyrich routinely inveighed against democracy, imposing his ideas on this group that so-called “goo-goos”, those who wanted good government, which meant getting as many voters to the polls as possible, were anathema to their cause of wresting political control from the “wrong people”:
“I don't want everybody to vote! Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Don’t miss the retooling of history in that statement, the foregrounding of the notion that those who get the most votes, ie winners in a truly fair democratic contest, never get to govern. He’s setting the groundwork for giving the anti-democracy crowd a jury-rigged historical foundation for their schemes.
So who belongs to this group?
“Ginni Thomas, Mike Pence, Morton Blackwell who runs the conservative activist training hub the Leadership Institute, and Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked with Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election results. And… Salem co-founders Stuart Epperson and Edward Atsinger.”
Still think Clarence Thomas believes in democracy?
Other members include Ms. Alternative Facts, Kellyanne Conway, and Burn it All Down Steve Bannon, and traitor extraordinaire, Charlie Kirk.
Of course hate radio had a problem back in the day, a little thing called the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine required at least a modicum of that thing the traitors despise, fairness to those who don’t agree with them. But St. Ronald of Reagan took care of that for them by killing the Fairness Doctrine.
At the point, the truly gifted haters and liars were let off the leash.
Fast forward to Trump, to election denial, to the Supreme Court killing the Voting Rights Act, to voter suppression, to intimidation, to masked gunmen threatening voters, to an attempted coup to take over the government, to incessant attacks on LGBTQ and minority communities leading directly to mass murders and assaults, to making sure not every vote counts.
Only the “right” votes count.
Weyrich’s and Salem’s lessons have become enshrined as official Republican policy.
And here we are in 2022.
Ken: I have always been interested in when children come to the conclusion that there ain't no jolly gift giving Santa. With my own children I let them come to that conclusion themselves and when they had asked I'd ask them another question. My younger son left Santa in the lurch pretty early but had a hard time giving up the Easter bunny. My grandson came to the conclusion quite early on that it was all a lie by saying that reindeers can't fly and "Daddy locks the door at night and we don't have a fireplace." I discovered the ruse when I received a postcard in the mail from Santa saying I better be good or else. I recognized my mother's writing but I never let her know that I knew --a pretty powerful tool to carry at such a young age.
Given all this discovery about Santa -–letting go of one who represents the bringing of presents can be continued later by religious beliefs but we are now witnessing a resurgence of crackpot theories and people actually believing JFK will descend from the heavens and save us from ourselves. These are people who never asked the right questions because they felt secure in their own need for their own answers.
Just read an AP both sides story about the run off in Georgia. Like so many MSM fables, it seems to suggest that both candidates, Warnock and Walker, are pretty equal and each have good points about the other. This is like saying that a Jeopardy champion should be considered in the same vein as a second grader who failed at coloring.
Incredibly, Walker, who can barely construct a three word declarative sentence (“I am here”) without fucking it up (“I are here”) ridicules Warnock, who has Master of philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees as a stuttering Scooby Doo dog, much to the delight of his traitor supporters.
It’s even worse that Walker, who is nothing but an idiot bobble head rubber stamp for the far right on issues he knows absolutely nothing about, paints Warnock as a Biden puppet. Not sure he can even spell puppet.
But it’s the fact that Walker is portrayed as a reasonable guy with good points to make that pisses me off the most. He’s a brain damaged moron backed by traitors.
But this is where we are now.
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-herschel-walker-sports-religion-georgia-9ba48d67d6c4d18c9a11e5dc852bba9f