This is a Rangoon creeper vine that grows beside our garden gate:
Its blooms have a lovely scent, and they are supposed to attract hummingbirds, but I haven’t seen any yet. “Rangoon creeper” sounds like a Bela Lugosi film.
Open thread!
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads
This is a Rangoon creeper vine that grows beside our garden gate:
Its blooms have a lovely scent, and they are supposed to attract hummingbirds, but I haven’t seen any yet. “Rangoon creeper” sounds like a Bela Lugosi film.
Open thread!
by John Cole| 65 Comments
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Pet Rescue
Lovey and Koda seem to be doing quite well together:
Hopefully Geg6 will send some video soon, because I guarantee Lovey is raising a ruckus.
It’s Not the Size of the Dog in the FightPost + Comments (65)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Post-racial America, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Our Failed Media Experiment
Jeb Lund, at Rolling Stone, on “a crossfire with 100% casualties“:
… [Wolf] Blitzer is a man of breathtaking stupidity… His service seems to be offering permanent credulity to power and permanent skepticism to its challengers. He can be induced to parrot talking points by even junior-varsity hacks… If he could reanimate the corpse of someone shot in the back by police to ask one question, it would probably be, “Why did you do this?”
So his interview yesterday with community organizer DeRay McKesson about Monday night’s rioting in Baltimore couldn’t have been more Blitzerian even via the intervention of a force foreign to him, like effort.
Raw Story posted highlights and video, so click over if you want a fuller experience. After asking McKesson about his plan for the day’s protests and ignoring his reply, here are Blitzer’s questions, in order:
1. “You want peaceful protests, right?”
McKesson seems a little stunned, then agrees, then goes on to cite both how police departments have been anything but peaceful and that there had been days of peaceful protests in Baltimore and around the country. Blitzer replies:
2. “But at least 15 police officers have been hurt, 200 arrests, 144 vehicle fires — these are statistics. There’s no excuse for that kind of violence, right?”
McKesson then replies that there is also no excuse for the seven people killed by Baltimore PD in the last year.
3. “We’re not making comparisons. Obviously, we don’t want anybody hurt. But I just want to hear you say that there should be peaceful protests, not violent protests in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King.”
It’s all right there, everything in the Dealing With Aggrieved Minorities Playbook, a script even a Blitzer can read.
First, McKesson, a guy who is not a national black leader, has to explain himself. He’s there, so now he’s the representative — because, connect the dots, while that rioting happened, McKesson was also black at the time — and it’s implied that he has to account for things here. It doesn’t matter that McKesson had fuck-all to do with it and lacked the clout to stop it, let alone any contact with the people responsible; he’s on TV.
Second, there’s the instant begged question that what happened must be disavowed. Blitzer hasn’t the capacity to engage the idea that legitimate grievances might underpin what happened in Baltimore, that fire and rage might be ugly manifestations of a greater truth, that rage might have a fuel from an outside source. It has to be condemned first. That’s the only purpose for this segment. That it will be ended before any greater systemic discussion occurs is almost a given; just get the condemnation on the record, then — oops, will you look at that — we’re out of time, back to the studio.
Third, the moment McKesson can use the language of outrage at violence to impugn a system, Blitzer immediately declares that “we’re not making comparisons.”…
…It’s hard to get exciting and memorable footage of systems. Systems take a lot of time to identify and study, and their scope spans more than a day. They take time and perspective to explain. And they’re not very sexy. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” covered two centuries and required nearly 16,000 words. Techcrunch’s history of redlining and racial exclusion in just the peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area took nearly 12,000. And you can report those only once… A fire is different. A fire can burn for days. A fire is instantly interesting in a way that those stories are not, and a fire has the gift of being in some ways self-explanatory. “Why are we looking at that?” Because it is fire, and we all are Beavis. “Why is the fire there?” Because something was lit on fire.
… We can all understand a thing on fire or a thing destroyed, because we all to some extent own things. There is an immediate calculable worth or sympathy to the destruction of a property, and almost always our attitude toward that property’s purpose is neutral, meaning that its destruction can always be fascinating but can quite often be pitiable as well. We can project the relative worth of our things onto any property and gain a sense of proportion as to what was lost. Moreover, the destruction of a thing can rarely be blamed on the thing itself, making it (usually) morally neutral and the harm brought to it almost always the agency of someone else. This, amongst other reasons, is why we have a “Broken Windows” police policy instead of a “Broken Peoples” policy. We implicitly understand that someone broke a window, and that it is not the window’s fault. Fixing broken windows is good. A broken person can be blamed on just about anything, but in a pinch, we make it easy on ourselves and just blame them. Fixing them is now a moral hazard.
The resultant constant murmur of this kind of opportunistic filming and morally null thinking is basically “property, commerce, property, commerce, property, commerce” running like a dull pop-punk bass line…
by John Cole| 83 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality
This could be really, not good, pretty awful bad for Christie:
David Wildstein, a former ally of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, is set to plead guilty, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, suggesting he may be cooperating with prosecutors probing traffic jams he ordered near the George Washington Bridge.
Wildstein is scheduled to appear as early as Friday in federal court in Newark, where grand jurors heard testimony in secret for months about gridlock over four mornings in Fort Lee, New Jersey, according to the person, who requested anonymity because the matter isn’t public. The plea was originally scheduled for Thursday, the person said. The specific charges were unclear.
A plea by Wildstein, who was a top appointee at the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, would be the first conviction for U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman in an investigation of the September 2013 lane closures. The scandal has hurt Christie’s popularity as the Republican weighs a run for the White House and tests his tough-talking image with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Christie denies knowledge of a plot to close two of the three local-access lanes to the world’s busiest bridge, which is run by the Port Authority. If Wildstein pleads guilty and cooperates with prosecutors, he could give them an inside view of how the plot unfolded.
It was just a few years ago that he looked like someone who really could make a run at the White House, and now the closest it looks like he will get is on vacation. That’s a good thing.
This post is in: Religious Nuts 2
I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer in the evening, nailing myself to a cross all over this land:
“We will not obey.”
That’s the blunt warning a group of prominent religious leaders is sending to the Supreme Court of the United States as they consider same-sex marriage.
“We respectfully warn the Supreme Court not to cross that line,” read a document titled, Pledge in Solidarity to Defend Marriage. “We stand united together in defense of marriage. Make no mistake about our resolve.”
“While there are many things we can endure, redefining marriage is so fundamental to the natural order and the common good that this is the line we must draw and one we cannot and will not cross,” the pledge states.
The signees are a who’s who of religious leaders including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, National Religious Broadcasters president Jerry Johnson, Pastor John Hagee, and Franklin Graham, president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse.
Fine, don’t obey. We’ll just take away your tax exempt status, you wankers.
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Shitty Cops, Sports
Here’s a photo of the Baltimore Orioles playing the Chicago White Sox this afternoon in a game that is closed to the public because of the recent unrest:
The most salient fact is that a young man — about the same age as the baseball players — had his spine snapped for no apparent reason while in police custody. Certainly the most minor repercussion of all is that a bunch of millionaires will play a game without spectators.
But despite the flippancy of my headline above, seeing Camden Yards empty like that makes me really sad. Not about the stupid game. About everything.
Open thread.
[Photo via Buzzfeed]Now They Know How the Rays Feel… (Open Thread)Post + Comments (49)
by Zandar| 72 Comments
This post is in: Austerity Bombing, Republican Venality, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Flash Mob of Hate
Florida Republicans have complete control over the state’s government, and they can’t even get that right.
Florida’s Legislature collapsed into chaos Tuesday as the House unilaterally ended the annual session with more than three days left, leaving dozens of major bills dead and escalating tensions between the House and Senate over their health care stalemate.
The state Senate responded by remaining in session for two more hours and announcing plans to return Wednesday, an attempt to send the message that they are willing to work through the impasse that has bitterly divided Republicans, and frayed emotions.
“Nobody won today,” said Senate President Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, after the Senate adjourned for the day. “Nobody won. Taxpayers lost. It’s an unfortunate turn of events.”
Well, hope nobody was expecting anything important out of these guys.
At the heart of the dispute is the question of whether to expand Medicaid to draw down federal money to provide health care for 850,000 uninsured residents who must otherwise rely on charity care. The federal government is phasing out a program to reimburse hospitals that provide care for low-income or indigent patients, known as the Low Income Pool, or LIP, as it shifts to new programs provided by the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
As part of the budget negotiations, the Senate wants to expand Medicaid and impose new requirements on low-income residents as it phases out LIP funds. The House rejects that idea, arguing that Medicaid is a “broken” program and prefers instead to rely on the federal LIP funds — at least for another year.
The governor, who has sided with the House on the Medicaid debate and called individual senators to his office last week to threaten vetoes of their priorities if he didn’t get his tax cut bill, had little to say Tuesday.
“We understand why the House did what they did. We will see what the Senate does tomorrow,” Scott spokeswoman Jackie Schutz said.
To recap, Florida’s House literally quit their session because the Republicans running the state Senate couldn’t agree on precisely how miserable to make the lives of poor Floridians who need healthcare: either by the Senate plan “expanding” Medicaid and then making qualifying for it next to impossible, or stick with the House plan of using the Low Income Pool that’s phasing out and was only designed as a bandage on a sucking chest wound.
This is the major problem with finishing the state’s budget: how badly to screw over the poors.
Awesome.