Another Shooting:
Mass Murder, SCOTUS Cold Draft, Putin Invasive Stall, Pro-Life Until
When jumping out of your car to pitch a fit at the drive-through window, while harassing an underpaid employee, be sure to put your car in park. pic.twitter.com/XaRCUHWXWG
— 🥀_Imposter_🕸️ (@Imposter_Edits) May 15, 2022
- Max’s Dad, usually pithy and entertaining in his rants, becomes angry and eloquent as he contemplates more mass murders by white supremacists.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit does not think targeting guns or even assault rifles will end racially motivated mass murders. She does have a suggestion.
- Frances Langum covers the coverage as CNN’s Jim Acosta calls out Tucker Carlson for his deadly Replacement Theory nonsense.
- CalicoJack in The Psy of Life explains how social language norms influence behavior and how that applies as conservatives toe-dip, and sometimes wade, into white supremacy, and how it then leads to race based mass murder.
- In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson examines the great Replacement Theory, variations of which are becoming popular among Republicans, conservative television personalities, white supremacist groups, and racist mass murdering shooters, and traces it back to reconstruction days in the South circa 1870.
- In Hackwhackers it’s cartoon time, and a few takes on modern white supremacy.
- Ten years ago, John Scalzi figured out a way to write about white privilege in a way that would effectively communicate the concept to resistant white males. It didn’t work, and John is pretty sure why.
- Pro-life Republicans are now going after the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged takes a look at the message behind the message as Cultural Conservatives attack those getting nutrition as undeserving layabouts and then lapse into a variation on Replacement Theory rhetoric.
- By US and International law, refugees have to be treated humanely. Our policy has been to investigate thoroughly whether they are truly refugees, which is to say they have a legitimate fear of persecution. This has been the law for over 40 years. While being investigated, they have to be fed and sheltered.
Scotties Playtime covers a new controversy as Republicans, presumably pro-life conservatives, are calling Democrats pedo grifters for providing enough baby formula to keep immigrant babies from starving. After all, the baby formula is for babies already in America in programs the same conservatives are trying to eliminate.
- Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger knows the polls, he has the data, and he tells us how Americans regard the US Supreme Court.
One way to say it might be minimum high esteem.
- Dave Columbo has a few newsworthy opinions on abortion rights and the Supreme Court draft rationale for overturning them:
@davecolumbo It’s been a pretty rough week. #news #democrats #democratsoftiktok #democrat #politics #politicaltiktok #roe #roevwade #fy #fyp #foryou ♬ original sound – Dave Columbo - Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara regards with some skepticism those who insist on the right of individuals to make their own abortion decisions, if they also want indoor masking mandates at public facilities during a pandemic. He calls us on our hypocrisy.
I dunno, Michael. When my neighbor stands next to me at the checkout during a widespread contagion, it can affect me, my family, my friends, and others in deadly ways. When my neighbor decides whether she will have children it does not affect any of the rest of us.
Not everything that is my concern is my business. Some things are.
- Nojo contemplates how to be happy in these desperate times, and settles for an evening with a Ukrainian friend.
- Infidel753 sees a few dim, but brightening, signs of hope as Putin loses his war of aggression. Infidel has a habit of accurate analysis in these areas.
- Green Eagle knows that most analysts see only two ways for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to end. One is Russian defeat that Putin will not tolerate. The other is escalation to a nuclear nightmare. Green Eagle sees a possible path to a third alternative.
- After @momwino98 became @whiskeywhistle98, I was afraid this might be lost. Fortunately she thought to preserve it:
@whiskeywhistle98 #answer to @spidermark790 an oldie but a goodie!! 😂 #humor #trumpispathetic #tiktokmom #foryourpage #fyp #trend #obama #yikes ♬ original sound – @Whiskeywhistle98- - The Palmer Report has been covering the legal contest between Donald Trump and NY’s Attorney General in her investigation of corporate and bank fraud. At issue was whether Trump would surrender financial documents that are under subpoena. Now it looks like Donald has caved and given up the documents.
- Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez has an idea of the source of right wing politics:
The primary function of modern right wing politics is giving people who are angry and bitter because they’re losers a series of fictions they can pretend to themselves are the source of their rage. https://t.co/qCwpqTUOuL
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) May 20, 2022
I’m dead serious about this. A truly frightening amount of our politics now seems to be about manufacturing socially acceptable public pretexts for rage people are already harboring for essentially personal reasons.
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) May 20, 2022
Continue reading “Mass Murder, SCOTUS Cold Draft, Putin Invasive Stall, Pro-Life Until”
SCOTUS, Abortion Decisions, Ukraine, GOP Humor, Susan Collins, Jan 6
Duck runs a marathon and gets a medal pic.twitter.com/Dvas1Ofoqf
— Moon Dragon (@frozenaesthetic) May 6, 2022
- Green Eagle detects a parallel between the political strategy that led to the disastrous prohibition era and current thinking in contemporary conservativism.
Green Eagle is reasonably tuning out opinions about the right to make personal abortion decisions, on the reasonable grounds that opinions on both sides are totally predictable.
I dunno. Let’s give it a try.
Analysts keep telling us the prospective Supreme Court decision attacks the 14th Amendment. It doesn’t.
My wife and I met and got married a little more than 20 years ago. If we had married here as teenagers, the marriage would have been annulled and we both would have been put in prison for violating Missouri Criminal Code, Section 563.240, specifically outlawing interracial marriage.
That law was overturned as violating the 9th Amendment, which says rights not mentioned in the Constitution are emphatically protected by the Constitution. The 14th Amendment simply applies that protection to state, as well as federal, laws.
The new leaked decision attacks the 9th Amendment. It says that protection, the protection that allows us to stay married, only applies to rights “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition”.
That means the 9th Amendment no longer means what the 9th Amendment says it means.
That is why conservatives can now attack other rights in addition to abortion decisions, rights that may not have been “deeply rooted” at the time. Like gay rights, same sex marriage, birth control.
And interracial marriage.
- Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo of Rewire News Group talk on podcast about fallout from the impending, already leaked, SCOTUS decision eliminating abortion rights, and how some lawmakers regard the new SCOTUS ruling as a start, not an end of their campaign to restrict that and other rights.
- SilverAppleQueen suggests that the right to make a personal abortion decision has been abridged for decades. There is a difference between freedom to make an individual decision and freedom to purchase an abortion.
- Nan’s Notebook contrasts the availability of male enhancement pills with the new law on who can make abortion decisions. She reaches an inevitable conclusion.
- In Happiness Between Tails da-AL discusses the about-to-be law moving the right to make abortion decisions from each woman to each state legislature, and reveals a very personal story.
- Andy Borowitz has the details as Senator Susan Collins calls 911 after checking her mail and discovering an anonymous copy of the Constitution. Took her a while to figure out what it was.
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz is pro-choice. He mourns for those women who oppose allowing other women to make their own abortion decisions.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit suggests, persuasively, one reason so many Russian generals are killed in Ukraine.
Continue reading “SCOTUS, Abortion Decisions, Ukraine, GOP Humor, Susan Collins, Jan 6”
New Alex Conspiracy: QAnon is a Conspiracy Within a Lib Conspiracy
The current state of contemporary conservatism: A house of mirrors.
More twists than a pretzel from the conspiracy theory mind of Alex Jones.
The new Alex conspiracy theory is that QAnon,
with all their conspiracy theories about evil liberal conspiracies,
is itself an evil conspiracy
within an evil liberal conspiracy.https://t.co/B1CpG1G8kA— Burr Deming (@BurrLand01) May 11, 2022
Aging Process
Burr phones in with apologies.
He is out today with tests for an age related condition, tests that are going longer than expected.
He does not see much advantage to the aging process,
and does not recommend it to others.
Despite advancing years, he assures us he will remain cheerfully immature.
He promises to be back next week.
Supreme Court and Rights:
This Has Gotten Personal
It is startling, perhaps even stunning, that a Supreme Court decision was leaked weeks ahead of its official release. Certainly an investigation will be launched. The leaker may yet be found.
We ought to be more shocked by the substance of the prospective decision.
The initial target, of course, is women.
I have long regarded the abortion debate to be valid on an individual level. Sometimes I think abortion is right, sometimes I’m against it.
But the decision has to be individual. As a practical matter, abortion bans involve the crushing of personal independence. It is not, and should not be, my decision, the decision of religious absolutists, or the decision of government.
The reasoning of the draft opinion, the opinion that has been leaked, goes beyond today’s outrage.
Beginning half a century ago, protection of a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy was based on the 9th and 14th Amendments. This new draft says that right is not covered because abortion was not part of America’s traditional rights.
The same interpretation of the 9th and 14th Amendments, before and since, protected voting rights for minorities, birth control, gay rights, same-sex marriage, and more. Saying that this legal basis is not valid, and was never valid, abolishes those legal protections.
The new draft decision should shock the conscience of anyone, no matter their circumstance.
I confess it does get even more personal for some of us.
Had my wife and I met and gotten married when we were decades younger, we would have been in violation of Missouri Criminal Code Section 563.240 specifically outlawing interracial marriage.
We would have been arrested and sent to prison. Both of us.
The protection of our rights, those of other couples, gay people, people who practice birth control, and women who do not wish to relinquish control of their bodies, is based on clear logic. The Constitution explicitly protects what are called unenumerated rights.
The Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
For seven and a half decades, this was used to protect citizens from potential federal abuse of rights that were not specifically named. The fourteenth amendment extended that protection to state laws as well.
The Fourteenth Amendment includes this language:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.
The draft that the United States Supreme Court is due to officially announce in a few weeks includes this about unenumerated rights covered by those two amendments:
…any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”
We should find within ourselves a righteous and furious anger that the conservative Republican agenda has succeeded in targeting women.
We should find within ourselves more than a vague concern that it will not end there.
Ukraine Aid, French Landslide, White Nationalism, Books, Gays, Manly Men
That refueling with gas is working well for Ukrainian farmers who are ready with tractors.
— Burr Deming (@BurrLand01) April 25, 2022
- PZ Myers has a suggestion on who could have played Putin in a movie about the invasion of Ukraine. If only the perfect player was alive.
- Infidel753 speculates intelligently on what Putin really wants: a world based on past, way past, international ethics.
- At The Moderate Voice Anthony Stahelski believes the unexpected hardship experienced by Putin’s Russia, and the unexpected world unity in opposition, serves as a warning to other dictators. He suggests we expand on that unity with even bolder action.
- This week President Biden got the legislation he asked Congress to give him providing lots more aid to Ukraine. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit names the 10 members who voted against Ukraine. Procedure had to be followed first. 220 Republicans voted against having aid to Ukraine come to a vote at all. They were against helping Ukraine right before they were for it.
- The Palmer Report explains why the landslide election of Emmanuel Macron in the election for President of France, beating Putin’s candidate, may be good news for our own President Biden.
- In Hackwhackers we get a peek under the ideological hood of White Nationalism and how it has become the prototype for the Republican future.
- In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson sees a traditional pattern of democratic vs autocratic governance creating opportunities for two right-wing, antidemocratic ideologies competing for control of the Republican party.
- Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson seems impatient with conservative extremism:
Want to understand why @TomTiffanyWI has given up on democracy? His votes to overturn the election after the riots of January 6? Supporting the Texas lawsuit to throw out Wisconsin's votes? His statements against Afghan refugees coming to Wisconsin? It's all here, and it's scary. https://t.co/GBTSHmpsgd
— James Wigderson (@jwigderson) April 26, 2022
- Nojo points out the good news. All the conservative book banning won’t work. There are too many alternate sources of knowledge.
The bad news about book banning comes from the good news. Conservatives won’t stop there because they can’t.
- The Propaganda Professor has what amounts to case studies. “Left leaning” media has become complicit in spreading right wing agitprop, mostly because those on the right side of the political spectrum have become expert at spinning issues out of non-issues.
- A while back, the Department of Homeland Security noticed that a lot of Putin disinformation was coming into social media from Russian hirelings pretending to be Americans. Sometimes the purpose was to get Americans to hate each other. Sometimes it was to get Americans to do crazy unhealthy things based on made up stories about Covid, vaccines, and bogus cures (Drink your own urine!!). Often the purpose was to spread Russian anti-American propaganda. It had all become a threat to US Security.
That wasn’t the only use of disinformation. Border traffickers were broadcasting bogus stories to get more and more immigrants to flee violence in their home countries and come to the United States.
So Homeland Security established the Disinformation Governance Board to expose the lies with documented truth. It became the source of warnings about Russian disinformation before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The this-is-what-the-Russian-trolls-are-about-to-say announcements, just hours before Russian media said them, turned out to be extremely effective in rallying the entire world.
Naturally, some American conservatives became outraged. Still are.
They charge censorship. It isn’t.
A few on the more extreme edge anticipate conservatives being persecuted or imprisoned for their thoughts.
For example our own Missouri Senator Josh Hawley:
Homeland Security has decided to make policing Americans’ speech its top priority.
Sheeesh!
Frances Langum notices one aspect that has the Fox Network especially worked up. Brian Kilmeade is mad as hell because the first Executive Director of the Board took the job while pregnant. How dare they put a pregnant woman in charge!
Continue reading “Ukraine Aid, French Landslide, White Nationalism, Books, Gays, Manly Men”
Emanuel Macron Wins in France
(with a bit of snark)
Based on reports, looks like it was by even more of a tsunami than the crushing majority by which Biden beat Trump.
— Burr Deming (@BurrLand01) April 25, 2022
Iron Beam, Ukraine, War Humor, Putin, DeSantis v Mickey v Math, Debates
It’s Wednesday…
And on Wednesdays we’re ferocious! 🥰
🔊🎶
in/omeupetzinho pic.twitter.com/g6cmVz1epm— Jess 🌻 (@jessi_asli) April 20, 2022
- Infidel753 explains new weapon technology, a cheaper, smaller, quicker, more effective version of Israel’s Iron Dome, named Iron Beam. It might protect entire populations from missiles.
It will probably not be perfected in time to help Ukraine. But it might eventually provide something the world has not experienced since the early years of the Eisenhower administration: national safety from nuclear attack.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit applies her own military background and suggests one major reason Russian combat tactics have been so ineffective in Ukraine.
- Nojo has an affinity with Ukrainian humor.
- Robert Levine of The Moderate Voice does not know how Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will end, but he can take an informed look at some possibilities.
- Julian Sanchez sees Putin borrowing from the Governor of Florida:
I see Putin is finally standing up to Critical Ukraine Theory. https://t.co/szEkG08334
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) April 23, 2022
- Tommy Christopher brings us the laughter as President Biden pokes a bit of fun at Republicans going after Mickey Mouse.
- We can imagine a couple of bystanders spotting a well known figure standing next to a cardboard cutout. In Hackwhackers the couple see DeSantis with Mickey Mouse, point out the inherent silliness of the controversy, and get an unexpected response. It is the first in a series of cartoons illustrating rationality in reaction to Florida conservatives.
- Iron Knee at Political Irony notes that Governor DeSantis has gone full bore against textbooks containing subversive ideas: like American history and …well… math.
Continue reading “Iron Beam, Ukraine, War Humor, Putin, DeSantis v Mickey v Math, Debates”
Work Schedules
I know this is specifically for law students, but I'm increasingly alarmed by advice like this that boils down to "live to work"
What is the point, then, of existing if all we are meant to do is work? Why does "being alive" depend on working constantly? What's the point? pic.twitter.com/Z0dkVdntXm
— Jenn Tristan, off-brand Baba Yaga 🇺🇦 (@JennTristanD20) August 18, 2021
2/
What you NEED to do includes things like read a book, go to a movie, play with the kids, go out with your spouse, walk in the park.Do those 1st.
There will be enough time left to do what you WANT to do.
Like become professionally successful.
— Burr Deming (@BurrLand01) August 19, 2021