.@POTUS: “Every other nation you can define by their ethnicity, their geography, their religion, except America. America was born out of an idea.” pic.twitter.com/FAHxv7KsIW
— The Hill (@thehill) May 28, 2021
President Biden: "Democracy is more than a form of government. It's a way of being. It's a way of seeing the world. Democracy means the rule of the people. The rule of the people, not the rule of monarchs. Not the rule of the monied. Not the rule of the mighty."
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 31, 2021
Biden offers defense of democracy in Memorial Day Remarks https://t.co/boU1Ck2R1S
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 1, 2021
… [O]n Monday, families [at Arlington National Cemetary] gathered mask-free beside graves, spread out blankets, and placed mementos and flowers beside them. A group of women sang Tibetan chants beside a grave. Families chatted as small children played around them. Some people just stood and bowed their heads.
“This year, it’s like, ‘Oh, wow, we’re back,’ ” Davis said, beaming. “Now it’s lots of hugs. It definitely is a different feeling.”
Earlier that morning, President Biden had been at the cemetery and delivered a rousing defense of democracy and a plea for unity, saying “democracy is more than a form of government — it is a way of being.”
“Democracy itself is in peril,” the president said.
Speaking for roughly 20 minutes, Biden said the American soldiers buried around him, and around the world, gave their lives to uphold the U.S. Constitution and the country’s form of government.
“Democracy must be defended at all costs,” Biden said. “Democracy, that’s the soul of America. And I believe it’s a soul worth fighting for. And so do you. A soul worth dying for.”
“The soul of America is animated by the perennial battle between our worst instincts, which we’ve seen of late, and our better angels.”
He urged patriotism, saying there is a struggle “between ‘me first’ and ‘we the people.’ ”…
No less important, moving forward:
President Biden has called on the American people "to reflect on the deep roots of racial terror in our Nation and recommit to the work of rooting out systemic racism across our country."
Read the proclamation here. https://t.co/YXsPPJsaQB
— CNN (@CNN) May 31, 2021
Gonna be much more on the Tulsa Massacre, later today…
On The Road – frosty – Hot Springs National Park
lowtechcyclist
Damn. Do we have to?
Tony Jay
I’m going to drop a rant about British politics. Please scroll past like your life depends on it if need be.
Ps – Hi Raven.
SiubhanDuinne
@Tony Jay:
Ah, a little wedding gift for your PM?
Baud
I’m relieved that this is not about me, for once.
Baud
Queue the “why isn’t Biden talking about the threat to democracy” tweets on Twitter.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
Both sides are the same. Show the neoliberal centrist warmongers that you WILL withhold support if you don’t get what you want – your vote is yours, and has to be earned!
Tony Jay
LETTER TO AMERICA PART GOOGLEPLEX
“And I don’t have a decent bone in me,
What you get, is just what you see. Yeah”
On Wednesday, 26th of May, in a glorified broom-closet nestled deep within the hallowed corridors of Mrs Windsor’s School of Griftcraft and Drivelry, a most unusual event took place that could (should, and in the past most certainly would) have catastrophic consequences for the Boozy Bunter of Downing Street. Before the disbelieving eyes and placid, sheeplike faces of the members of the joint Parliamentary select committees on Health and Science, Dominic Cummings, who though physically resembling an unhappily divorced Geography teacher with chronic IBS who has been sleeping in his car for the last six months was, in fact, one of the most influential figures behind the transfiguration of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from a shop-soiled but still pretty recognisable western democracy into a widely ostracised shipping-hazard wracked with self-loathing, cultural resentment and tabloid-driven pebble-headedness, sat before them and, over the course of seven hours of questioning proceeded to explain that, quite contrary to the fairytale of plucky derring-do in the face of unexpected tragedy being fed to the Great British Public over the last year and a half by the Great British News Media, the all-conquering Conservative Government he himself had personally worked so very hard to propel into power when he was Clown Prince Flobalob’s Chief Political Advisor was, in fact, a law-breaking gaggle of grossly incompetent buffoons and slithery self-promoters who, when not flat out lying to the Press and the Public about the nature and scale of their colossal failures, were just as busy flat out lying to each other about their entirely fictional successes, all while being overseen with careless ineptitude and solipsistic greed by a delusional, egomaniacal and utterly out of his depth skidmark of a man to whom politics is nothing more serious than a wag’s lark and whose only interest in ‘policy’ is to ask if she’s as much of a goer as Polly A and Polly B.
My, that was a long sentence. Here’s a short one.
As to what Cummings actually said, well, it went on for quite a long time and included tons of “Oh, if only I’d had the courage to speak up more about my fully-justified concerns” and barrel-loads of “I take full responsibility for my part in other people’s horrendous mistakes”, but the main meat and gravy of it breaks down like this.
When Covid was first beep-beeping on the radar as an imminent threat, Johnson’s Government followed his lead in being utterly dismissive and supremely unconcerned, with Flobalob himself dragging his three-second attention span away from the comprehensive disaster his shitty Brexit deal was about to inflict on the British economy to sneeringly put it on a par with swine-flu. It’s already common knowledge that the lazy waster didn’t even attend the first five emergency COBRA meetings of the Civil Contingency Committee where Covid was discussed, so nicknamed because it used to meet in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms in Whitehall, and not, as you might imagine, because it stands for “Chieftains of Britain, Rally Around”, “Crumbs! Our Bacon’s Really…Aaaarrrrggghhh” or “Cowardly Old Boris Runs Away”, or because all the meetings are chaired by a gigantic snake (though it is, his name is Roger and other than his undying loyalty to Thulsa Doom he’s a really great guy with a lot to offer a girl) but Cummings also confirmed through photographic evidence that the main strategy being discussed behind the doors of Downing St through January to early March was specifically based around getting a form of ‘herd immunity’ done by shielding the very vulnerable and letting the virus rip through the general population so that, by early Autumn, the survivors would have enough antibodies for Johnson to declare Mission Accomplished. Old Tummy Num-Num was only very reluctantly dragged into taking calls for a Lockdown strategy seriously when faced with a solid wall of expert opinion telling him that following his favoured strategy meant half a million people dead and a completely overwhelmed NHS, and even then he huffed and puffed and dragged his feet for weeks until eventually getting bounced into announcing a national Lockdown by the general public, who were way ahead of the Government in common sense and were already keeping their children home from school and working from home where possible. This deliberate delay in imposing sensible restrictions cost us tens of thousands of extra lives and allowed the virus to get down to some serious mutation in the infected population, which we (and the wider world) would be paying for with the Rise of the Variants.
Major venom was spat in the eye of Matt Hancock, a third-rate pastiche of a man so ethically challenged that deputy ticket-clipper at the annual Cleric and Choirboy Secret Ball would be a step up from his current role as Minister for Health. Already right in the middle of a growing scandal revolving around the purchasing and provision of PPE from a range of shady front-companies (established PPE producer? Sorry, we can’t take your call right now. Dog shampoo supplier owned by a Tory donor? Here’s a multi-million pound contract to produce face-masks) Hancock now has to explain why, according to Cummings, he was telling his Cabinet colleagues back in March 2020 that no one would be sent from hospital to a care-home without first being tested for Covid, when in reality he was ordering entire hospital wards emptied ASAP without any testing whatsoever in order to make room for the expected waves of infections. Somewhere in the region of 30,000 care-home inhabitants died because of Hancock’s decision. Elderly people, terrified and alone, choking to death while the staff, themselves denied any kind of adequate PPE or medical equipment, could do nothing to help them.
He denies all of it, of course. He is, after all, a Minister in a Tory Government, responsibility and accountability are for the little people, not for the likes of him, but he’s clearly very rattled. Ostentatiously sporting his Union Jack themed facemask and tearfully declaring how his first thought every single morning is how he can save lives (Ed – Resign?) but he doesn’t really have to worry, yet. Cummings also said that he’d pressed for Hancock to be fired over a dozen times, only to be told that he was being kept in his post because “he’s the kind of guy you sack after an inquiry”. Johnson can’t fire him now because it would look too much like he was validating Cummings’ claims, and if he – did – fire him he’d only have to install someone equally as inept and spineless. So, Britain stumbles on with a Health Secretary of proven incompetence that no one has any faith in and everybody expects to go at the next reshuffle, but at least Flobalob doesn’t have to break the unwritten rule of his regime and actually hold one of his underlings accountable for failure. That would cut the golden cord that ties his Cabinet to him, the promise that everyone gets to eat whatever they want, and no one has to foot the bill.
Priorities, you see, they got ‘em. Eton Rules.
That’s not all Hancock is on the hook for, though. Cummings’ testimony confirms that the PPE situation was far more of a crock than anyone was willing to admit. Decades of Tory cuts to its budgets and supply chains had left the NHS without anything like the necessary stocks to cope with an emergency, and when that needed to change right the fuck now, Ministers and senior Civil Service appointees were criminally slow in fast-tracking the immediate purchase of everything the country lacked. Indeed, it’s worse than that. As mentioned previously it’s an open secret that the only fast-tracking the Government did around PPE was exploiting the emergency to hand out multi-million (even multi-billion) pound contracts to anyone and everyone with a personal, familial or business connection to Tory Ministers and/or their donors while simultaneously blanking the many already established suppliers of PPE, ventilators, etc who were banging on the door offering whatever was needed but who lacked the necessary connections. Effectively the Tories were acting like Third-World warlords looting aid-money to buy themselves expensive cars and swimming pools while their people starved. NHS staff were wearing plastic bin-bags and scavenging whatever they could from friends and family and the Government’s response was to put pressure on Hospital Trusts to make talking about it on social media a sackable offense while ostentatiously being filmed doing a ‘Clap for Carers’ every Thursday at 8pm. Because that’s the kind of people we have running our country.
There’s also the matter of Johnson’s response to the need for a 2nd Lockdown after the premature reopening of society over the summer of 2020 had led to yet another surge in infections (viruses, how dooz dey work?) and panicked howling by all the experts that it had to be closed down by September at the latest to avoid another massive spike in Covid deaths. Britain eventually went back into a limited semi-Lockdown in October, much to Johnson’s behind the scenes fury. He’s quoted as whining that “Only 80 year-olds are dying of it”, so why hurt the economy just for those wasters? There’s also the previously floated quote about “letting the bodies pile-up” rather than impose a 3rd Lockdown no matter how bad it got over winter. The salient point here is that the malicious fucktard denied ever saying this, and he did it officially while speaking to Parliament. If Cummings has the evidence he says he does, lying to Parliament is a resignation offence. Not that I expect Johnson to do any such thing. He’s already done it repeatedly and gotten away with it because of the complete collapse of any institutional resistance to the Rule of “Go on then, make me”, but I look forward to the rhetorical gymnastics the News Media will go thorough explaining why the Prime Minister lying to the country is actually politics as usual and in fact a sign of strength.
You know, at some point this Government are going to float the idea of a referendum on bringing back hanging in order to blue-up the nether-veins of their reactionary Base, and though I’d normally be dead set against it, when I think about the deliberate carnage these walking advertisements for assault and battery have caused just by being shitty people in service to even shittier people a tiny wee part of me always whispers “Wouldn’t he/she look good swinging from a beam?” and I feel dirty, because the answer is “Oh, hell yes. With the families of their victims hanging from their feet.” You all should be perfectly familiar with that sensation after four years of Trump smearing his underlings all over the national furniture. Their very existence makes us worse people by virtue of the reactions they endanger. But I digress.
That any of the above came as much of a surprise to Mr and Mrs G. B. Public is testimony to the sheer scale of the propaganda effort being sold to British customers as ‘News’, as it is to the sheer audacity of the Infotainment outlets packaging deliberate misinformation as ‘News’, and to the delusional willingness of millions of my fellow countrypeeps to believe whatever convenient myths they’re offered rather than credit the evidence of their own eyes, just as long as those myths comfort their nagging sensation of itchy guilt and come wrapped up in the bright colours and familiar sounds of ‘News’. Everyone already knew this and yet people still voted for them, cry the talking-heads, so by virtue Rule 538.4a of the Mini-Machiavelli 4 Modern Maestros guidebook it’s obviously not important and going on about it is just losertalk. Which would be a good and valuable point to make, if it wasn’t a pile of disingenuous nonsense and neither good, nor valuable, or even really a point at all. Everyone didn’t ‘know’ this. Some people had been saying things like it, yes, often loudly and frequently, with tons of real-time evidence to back up their claims, but without the enormous national megaphone accorded to the architects of pro-Tory misinformation their warnings have had all the bandwidth of a fart in a bath and had been routinely dismissed as either partisan sniping or unproven conspiracy theorising, or both, and in any case definitely not the kind of opinion the forelock-tugging flagstraddlers of Lesser Brexitannia would either want or need to be exposed to. Coming from such a senior figure within the Conservative Government, a man who only a year ago we were being told was so integral to everything the Government was trying to do that he was basically the Hand to Flobalob Johnson’s flatulent King, and to paraphrase the corporate motto of the World’s Greatest Soccerball Team, ‘This Means More’.
Now, let’s be very clear here. Dominic Cummings is a genuinely nasty bastard with a Ripper’s trail of carnage soaking his ledger and, should he one day be found hanging from a pedestrian footbridge with a bound and gagged Nigel Farage stuffed up his arse, the tracks of my tears would be drier than a Martian wadi. He’s a professional liar with clear links to the murky techno-anarchist fraternity of bomb-throwing dataminers financially fluffed into being by American billionaires, Russian kleptogarchs, Australian hatevendors and various Middle-Eastern ‘interests’ with cash to stash and boycotts to swerve, his stated aim of blowing up the entire British Civil Service so that it can be replaced with a eugenically-selected caste of creative/destructive megaminds wielding dictatorial powers in order to ‘get shit done’ sounds no different to me than any other misanthropic loser’s Statement of Aims and translates easily to “In this post-Apocalyptic dystopia of my creation all of my fiery dreams of intercourse will come true!” and according to the people who track such things it was his ‘family trip’ to Barnard Castle during the first Lockdown, combined with the obvious lies he told about it and the concerted Human Shield thrown up around him by Johnson and All Tories Everywhere (oh yes, a year ago it was an unpatriotic sin to doubt the ethereal honesty of St Dominic of Cummings) that more than anything else shattered the Public’s faith in Lockdown being a “We’re all in it together” national effort. That said, and in full knowledge that his transparently obvious motivation on Wednesday was to present himself as the only sensible guy in all of the rooms where the deaths from Covid of tens of thousands of innocent people were being dismissed as the price of doing business, and that his cosy closeness to certain Tory aspirants to Flobalob Johnson’s shaky throne (Rishi Sunak, I’m looking right at you) means that a good portion of his invective has to be seen as brush-clearing for the next round of Tory Party reconstruction, at the end of the day he was in all of those rooms and he was there as Johnson’s eyes, ears and rending jaws. When the Prime Minister’s former chief political advisor goes in front of a pair of Parliamentary committees to answer questions about the Government’s response to Covid and basically calls it a complete failure that they should all fall on their swords for…. yeah, that’s the kind of thing that gets things moving.
Will it? Ha-ha-haaaaaaaa (wipes eyes) no, no it won’t.
First, a brief shuffle backwards across the kelp-streaked stones of yesterweek to lay out where we were before Cummings began his extended roast. It was a busy time, and as usual in Lesser Brexitannia, that’s not a good thing. Following the conclusion of local and regional elections in which they deliberately equated the successes of the NHS Vaccination program with voting Tory to ‘Get
BrexitCovid Done’, the Government had ‘suddenly’ noticed that the spread of the so-called ‘Indian Variant’ of Covid (Modi-Johnston Variant sounds more apt to me) in places like Bolton and Bedford might blow a huge, gaping hole in their plans to end all Lockdown restrictions on the 21st of June. As usual the Media did a comprehensive job of dead-batting any suggestion that Johnson’s deliberate refusal to offend Modi and/or imperil a potential UK/India Trade Deal by red-listing arrivals from India back when it might have done some good had made the spread of the M-J variant pretty much inevitable, but again as usual, the virus and its mutations do not give a monkey’s chuff how they are given time and opportunity to do what they do, they just do it. Now scientists are warning that a Third Wave of infection is already here and the Government’s obsession with repeating the deadly mistakes of last Summer, with its vast transfer of wealth and infection under the label of “Eat Out to Help Out” (Credit – Rishi “I’m only light brown” Sunak) is looking more and more strained. Those with suspicious minds are, of course, of the opinion that Flobalob is hoping that vaccination will keep the numbers of dead low enough for him to keep on lifting restrictions and benefit politically from being The Man Who Saved Our Summer. That bilious twatwaffle simply cannot learn, because he’s never had to. A lifetime of selfish entitlement and consequence-free jollygagging behind a screen of elite protection has led him to the pinnacle of political life and all the grift he can imagine. What’s to learn?Case in point, a few weeks ago the Tories released a report from its Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities that met with pretty universal mockery and bitch-slap anger from everyone with a functioning soul. The question asked was about institutional racism and its effects on Black British society, the answer its collection of British Diamonds and Silks came up with was that the former didn’t exist and the latter should stop whining about it and just accept that being a cesspit of drug use and broken homes was entirely its own fault and nothing to do with… Whipeepl? Honkoids? Crackerwhackers? Whatever Ebonics jibber-jabber ‘Those People’ have to use because they can’t hack it in proper school. To back up their ‘findings’ they relied on misquoting experts, lying about the input of stakeholders and mangling the hell out of the findings the majority of the Commission’s members thought they’d reached. Did you know that slavery in Jamaica and other British colonies in the region wasn’t so bad because it introduced those savages to western ideas that allowed them (the opportunity, which they mostly failed to grasp, natch) to make something of themselves once, y’know, the Masters had gotten all snowflakey and outgrown the need for ‘staff with benefits’? Indeed, and I am not even joking here, ‘slavery’ is such a loaded word, better to call it the “Caribbean Experience”.
Caribbean fucking Experience? Please, insert your own WTF historical analogies here. I’ve already used up ‘Auschwitz Adventure’ and ‘Wounded Knee Wonderland’, but I’m sure there’s a wide range of disbelief you can mine along the same face-palming lines.
Thing is, that was a few weeks ago, but we don’t hear bugger all about it now.
You may also have heard that the BBC was entirely responsible for driving Saint Diana of the Tilted Shoulder Simper to her untimely death by pumping her full of some exotic truth-serum and recording her blathering on about relatively unimportant topics. What were they? Betrayed by her husband? Hounded by the Media? Ostracised by the Royal Family? Never mind all that, the thing to bear in mind in all this is the fact that BBC reporter Martin Bashir forged some paperwork in order to get a meeting with Britain’s Blonde Martyr and outpitch the BBC’s rivals to an interview with her, and that’s the only reason she died, and it didn’t happen 26 years ago (because that would be a silly thing to get riled up about now, what with a pandemic and Brexit and all that), it only happened yesterday, and so the Government has no choice but to seriously consider changes to the BBC’s charter to ensure that it can’t murder any more beloved royals. The fact that the Director General and Chairman of the BBC are Tory placemen and the Corporation has been turned into a neutered spokesgimp for Number 10’s Communications whip-snappers should make it easier for these necessary changes to take place without any unsightly verbiage about “political interference” or “hang on, wasn’t it the pro-Tory Press that was calling her a vapid slut” polluting the national airwaves. Yes, there have been suggestions that all of this is just a transparently bullshit excuse to rip the BBC apart and sell it off to the likes of Murdoch, but those journalists will soon learn that there are narratives and there are Narratives, and there will always be a need for someone to cover the weather report in Scunthorpe, pour encourages les outres.
Thing is, that was a few weeks ago, but we don’t hear bugger all about it now.
There was just a report released about Islamophobia in the Tory Party. It should have been a full-on Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation like the one that was launched into claims of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, but the not-at-all Government-controlled leadership of the EHRC decided that, since the Tories had said they’d hold their own investigation, there wasn’t any need to embarrass the good, wholesome folks of the Conservative Party by making them bathe in the same water as that awful do-gooder Jeremy Corbyn (spit). After all, there was a convenient meme out there that the very fact that the EHRC was investigating the Labour Party was damning enough to require that horrible person’s immediate resignation, so it would just be rude to expose the Tory Party to that kind of inference, I mean, how would it effect the mood at future dinner parties if you were the person who had put a friend of Orban on the same level as a lifetime campaigner against any form of racism? Terribly, that’s how! Especially if the friend of Orban had brought the right kind of wine to go with the fish course and had children in the same fee-paying school as your brats go to. Again, priorities. A cynical person would perhaps agree with the former head of the EHRC and say that, as an institution, it is far, far too obedient to the whims of the people that oversee it, but this is Britain, and interrogating the wrong people can get you put on the non-official naughty shelf quicker than you can say “I’d like a move to regional news, please. Behind the scenes if possible, thanks”.
What did the report conclude? Well, this may astonish you, but it didn’t find the Tory Party to be institutionally Islamophobic. It said (paraphrasing) that Johnson had said and written a ton of things that ‘seemed’ Islamophobic before he became PM, but that was no reason to think that he would or should continue to spout nasty things now that he had he was PM, even though ‘some people’ might suggest that he only won the Tory Party leadership race in 2019 because he had a reputation as a racist POS. It went on to conclude that, though the Tory Party triggered every theoretical land-mine in regards to complaints about Islamophobia, how it dealt with it, recorded it, and how its Muslim members felt about all of the above, the person filing the report felt that the Tory Party had just made a few mistakes that might lead someone to believe it might be totally Islamophobic, but it wasn’t, honest.
Comparisons with the EHRC report into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party should not, we’re told, be seen as a mirror image of this piss-take of a report into virulent Islamophobia amongst Tories, because that’s a violation of the Narrative, and that’s just not allowed. The fact that the Tory Party’s senior Muslim figures say it’s a blatant whitewash that will only encourage Islamophobia would be something deserving of media coverage, but as Tories they should already understand that ‘those people’ are always whining about perceived slights and are best ignored for the good of social cohesion. After all, it’s not like they’re anonymous Labour staffers with long and sordid histories of working hand in glove with the Israeli Embassy’s propaganda arm to make false accusations of anti-Semitism. Now those people, they had credibility. And how hard would it be to endlessly fap about the likelihood of Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak (who Cummings was extra protective of in his testimony) becoming Tory Party leader and the next PM if our News Media had to acknowledge that the Tory Party membership are about as likely to elect a brown to reign over them as the GQP are to select Liz Cheney as their 2024 candidate? Heaven forfend, that way lies reality, and reality don’t get you no promotion in today’s Infotainment business.
Anyway, that was a few days ago, but we don’t hear bugger all about it now.
You see where I’m going with this? Cummings’ testimony should, in an vaguely rational world, lead to a journalistic feeding frenzy as newspapers and 24 Hour News outlets scramble to dig out the truth and expose it for their viewers to goggle over. But this is Lesser Brexitannia, and that simply isn’t how we do things over here. There’s a decent article in, of all places, the Guardian by ‘brown issues correspondent’ Nesrine Malik which lays out the problem very clearly. To paraphrase, Johnson and the Tories are getting away with everything not because they’re political geniuses or because the Public agrees with them, but because the people whose job it is to oppose them and/or tell the Public what is really going on are either complicit, cowardly or just plain old lazy, and until that changes nothing else will change, except to get worse. Again, I’m sure none of this sounds exactly foreign to you. Britain is following along the same weighted arc of madness that gave America Trump and the GQP, we’re just doing it wrapped in a Union Jack and smelling of stale tea.
I could go on (Ed – Please don’t, we have lives) but won’t (Ed – Thank you, Jeebus!) I’ve barely even mentioned Brexit but that continues to be the radioactive gift that keeps on giving. The planned Trade Deal with Australia looks set to do to British farmers what it’s already done to British fishermen, truckers and Eurovision entrants. Kids showing support for the Palestinian cause are being labelled as ‘radicalised anti-Semites’ and punished by their schools. EU visitors to the UK are being treated like criminals and thrown into detention for talking funny. The scandal over Johnson refurbishing Downing Street to look like an explosion in a stereotype factory and lying about where the money came from has been resolved by the simple expedient of Johnson appointing an underling to ‘investigate’ the issue, with said underling returning a verdict that clears Johnson of any wrongdoing on the grounds that he just assumed that he’d somehow paid the £200,000 bill that a donor picked up and didn’t think to check, like, haven’t we all done that? The Labour Party are even more useless and incompetent than they were last week. On the plus side….. uh, it’s sunny. So there’s that.
Nah. We’re fucked. Keep on working hard to fix your democracy, Americanoids, because if you don’t, you could be like us. Only with bigger servings.
Patricia Kayden
I love my President but the U.S. isn’t the only multiracial, multiethnic, diversely religious democracy. See Canada, for example.
Tony Jay
@SiubhanDuinne:
If it doesn’t have cash value he’s not interested.
debbie
Sadly, we need to redefine what freedom means. Someone let the idiots redefine it to mean selfishness and disregard for others, and we need to take that back from them.
Geminid
Rabbit rabbit!
Berliner2
Pretty much every country in Africa cannot be defined by ethnicity, geography or religion, and they were also born out of an idea. The idea of European expansion and white settler colonialism. Just like the US, acually.
Anne Laurie
@Tony Jay: Would you mind my front-paging this, later this week?
(Probably broken into chunks, because FYWP — F*vk You, WordPress!)
Baud
Hmm. MJ says Schumer isn’t going to push for the Voting Rights Act because he’s putting all his energy into HR 1, the massive reform bill. I wonder what his thinking is.
RandomMonster
@Anne Laurie: So comments can accommodate lengthy text, but the front page not so much.
Tony Jay
@Anne Laurie:
Of course you can. Sorry for breaking FY WordPress. 8-)
Baud
raven
@Tony Jay: Hey Brah, what’s up?
Kay
They’re doing a good job covering this. There’s two parts to the changes in election law – two categories of changes- and people won’t understand the new threat (‘make it easier to overturn election results’) unless it’s presented as two categories.
Restoring the voting rights act can help with Part One, but the VRA wasn’t designed for Part Two and I don’t know what will work there, but denying them a quorum certainly brought a lot of attention to it.
It should always be covered as “new restrictions on voting” AND “make it easier to overturn election results” – two separate and different attacks. The second is new.
Tony Jay
@RandomMonster:
She can just edit out all the swearwords and childish name-calling, what’s left would probably fit on a postage stamp.
raven
@Tony Jay: I have a friend with UK-USA dual citizenship and she loves it when I send her your stuff!
Viva BrisVegas
I like Biden, but this is pandering bullcrap. For those of us outside of the US, what are we supposed to make of a Defense of Democracy via a call to American Exceptionalism?
You want a melting pot, look at Australia. You want to talk about individual freedoms, look at the Scandinavian countries. You want to talk about religious freedoms, look at Canada. You want to talk about the idea that gave birth to America, look to these countries plus a couple of dozen others that have spent blood, sweat and tears over decades or centuries for this same idea of freedom. An idea which considerably predates the US, and on which the US does not own copyright.
None of these nations are defined by their ethnicity, their geography, or their religion. They are defined by their pursuit of individual freedoms, tempered by civic responsibility, through democratic processes.
Biden may mean well but if he wants to bring the rest of us along with him, a specious claim to the superiority of American democracy when we have the example of the Trump Republican Party before us is not the way to go about it.
If Biden wants to call the US “first among equals” we’ll go along, but “best amongst lessers” is a bit much to take.
Baud
News you can use.
Anne Laurie
Take WaterGirl’s word, if not mine: Quite a few lengthy comments have to be fished out of the spam filter.
You could say FYWP encourages pithiness… but watch out for the lisp!
Tony Jay
@raven:
Oh, the usual. Working from home = Hardly working. Ranting about British nonsense. Looking forward to the European Football Championships in mid-June. Hopefully Randinho will be back with dedicated threads to celebrate England going out in the Quarter-Finals again. How’s things over there?
(I thought I was going to get in first and wanted to embrace the tradition of celebrating that by invoking your quite legitimate disapproval of the ‘FIRST!!’ habit. I’m afraid it’s going to become a ‘thing’)
How cool. Hopefully this one won’t depress her too much.
raven
@Tony Jay: I’ve decided to stop my jihad on that stupid shit. I wish I could understand the crazy structure of “football”! Amir tried to help me with it years ago but it’s mind boggling to be. . . all these championships!!!
My friends dad was Army Air Corps in WW2 and he met and married her mom there.
MomSense
Back to life back to reality ?
On the bus to work this morning a little sleepy and missing camp and falling asleep to the loons ’ cries. We had such a nice time even though it was cold and cloudy with some rain – just in time for the grilling. We ate so much food that my son taught us the Japanese expression that means “lonely mouth full stomach” which is going to be added to heavy rotation since I think we are all going back to camp next weekend.
Kay
It won’t survive a constitutional challenge even if it makes it into a state law, but this is how insane these people are.
The whole bill is packed with references to every Right wing ‘voter fraud’ conspiracy theory of the last 30 years. That’s all mainstream on the Right now.
Spanky
@Baud:
I suspect it means he knows where his caucus is on this, sadly.
Spanky
@raven:
Participation trophies.
JPL
@Viva BrisVegas: We do have the second amendment, which makes us exceptional.
Baud
@Kay:
Freedom isn’t free, Kay.
debbie
@Kay:
Should I feel as confident as I do that lawsuits will prevent these atrocities from becoming laws?
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
Can we count on that any more? Push it all the way to Trump’s Supreme Court and they might say some surprising things.
Low Key Swagger
@Viva BrisVegas: I’m not one for touting the U.S. as better than every other country, but being POTUS kind of requires a little pandering to this crowd. A little.
rikyrah
@Tony Jay:
Yeah????
I hope that it’s FrontPaged
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone???
Kay
@debbie:
No. I don’t know what stops the parts of the laws that rewrite the state codes to make it easier to overturn elections. That’s a threat and it’s new.
If Texas wants to turn their entire election administration and review over to three Trumpist state legislators they can change their state code and do that.
But they probably can’t charge people for traveling in groups to a polling place. That won’t survive review.
Tony Jay
@raven:
Ah, Football’s easy. It’s 22 men trying to do something notable they can feature on their Instagram accounts. Unlike Rugby Union, which is 30 men looking forward to taking a bath together just like at school, or Rugby League, which is 26 men eager to get modelling contracts.
Seriously, though, this will be the first major tournament since England introduced VAR (Video Assisted Refereeing) and the first since Brexit. The high-pitched squealing and faux-patriotic whining when we get dumped out should be of major entertainment value.
Matt McIrvin
@Viva BrisVegas: This kind of talk has always struck me as a type of, not so much American exceptionalism, as Western exceptionalism that treats the entire world as consisting of the United States + European states that coalesced out of the heyday of ethnic nationalism and whose story of themselves says things like “nos ancêtres les Gaulois”. But there are a lot of countries out there.
The same kind of thing comes up in critiques of the US too–the discussions that assume that everyone else in the world has parliamentary government, an expansive welfare state and a month of vacation in August.
MomSense
@Viva BrisVegas:
We have 200+ years of believing in an American mythology. If that mythology can motivate the believers to defend our democracy, my skeptical eyes will look past it.
His job is to cultivate our better angels and truth and shame don’t do a great job of that with the people he needs to reach.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Not to belabor the obvious:
As an old buddy of mine was fond of saying, “You can fuck with your employees, but your employees can fuck you.”
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Tony Jay: Phew! Only got through the first couple of chapters so far, but it sounds like you’re starting to get a lot of what we call “throwing each other under the bus”?
To any positive effect?
debbie
@Kay:
Should they engineer GOP wins, these clowns may regret the easier-to-overturn changes. It’s not like we don’t know how to dispute outcomes.
MomSense
@Matt McIrvin: Speaking of, I think we are supposed to get some decisions today.
??
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I think you’re right about the importance of covering the assault on democracy as occurring on two fronts. The second, newer threat is so dire.
They shouldn’t have to, but in emergency situations, Democrats have proved capable of overcoming restrictions meant to limit ballot access. To cite one example, Wisconsin Dems heroically put themselves at great and unnecessary risk during the initial surge of the pandemic to defeat a Trump-endorsed state supreme court nominee who would have gone along with all sorts of schemes to undermine democracy.
But voters have no recourse if officials can overturn elections. Texas Dems, in denying the quorum, sent a clear message to the feds on this: we need your help!
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
I don’t see anything for it but the threat of some kind of mass civic unrest, be it nonviolent or otherwise. At some point the fear of God needs to be put into these people.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
If a ban on traveling to polling places survives review it’s game over anyway. It won’t though.
It comes out of the “white van” voter fraud theory on the Right. The white van theory is the racist belief that vans full of black people pull up to polling places and vote illegally. I suspect it came out of a real thing that happens- church vans- and one Right winger saw it and forever more every election we were going to hear about the white vans.
Their base must be whipped up into an absolute frenzy if these long-held conspiracy theories about voting are now making it into state laws. We are going to have refusals to accept results in 2022.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
The Texas lege breaking quorum led the radio news here, which I think is “ABC” (they buy the national part of the news) so good job Texas Democrats!
We need a lot of coverage.
OzarkHillbilly
Followed by refusals to accept refusals.
hueyplong
@Kay: “ABC radio news” in this part of the sticks was very Trump friendly.
Tony Jay
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Read on, we get to that around Volume XXXL
Spoilers On (Nah. This is Brexit-Town, Jake)
Geminid
@Kay: One good thing is that these new election techniques will be practiced first in 2022. Democrats will at least see what we are up against, and practice ways to counter.
I suspect the 2024 election will be winner-take-all. Either the Republicans will steal it by hook or crook, or the Democrats will dominate the rest of the decade fair and square..
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kay: My retirement community takes vans full of unrelated people to the polls every election day. I’d laugh if I didn’t want to cry
Tony Jay
@rikyrah:
Anne-Laurie’s on it.
Why should the morning crew be the only ones to suffer? 8-)
Spanky
@Tony Jay:
Is that a number, or a size?
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
Not to be depressing but I prefer to be prepared- I hate surprises- the refusals will be different this time because they’re prepping for them with state laws, so you’ll see things like removing urban boards of elections and sending administrative decisions to far Right Republican appointees.
The Texas law (which didn’t pass- yay Democrats) would allow an election to be overturned based solely upon a partisan state level review of “possible registered voters” in a given jurisdiction- so a bullshit, invented stats claim is enough to throw out results. This is all brand new.
Kathleen
@Kay: I wonder if any reporter has asked a Rethug touting need to protect voting because “corruption” why shouldn’t votes for them be overturned as well. If system is that corrupt they can’t be legit office holders.
Kay
@Geminid:
Okay so maybe three parts. 1. classic voter suppression, 2. state laws that make it easier to overturn elections and 3. new criminal laws that apply to local election officials and poll workers.
Number three could be kind of the sleeper here. I could see them arresting a bunch of local election officials and poll workers in majority/minority jurisdictions because now they have a pretext to do so which would (obviously) create a huge backlash.
Tony Jay
@Spanky:
You’ve seen our Prime Minister, right?
Kay
@Kathleen:
Wood County Ohio is a predominantly white and fairly high income “swing” county in Ohio. It borders Toledo. Every Presidential election where the Democrat wins the county there are numerous and increasingly insane claims of fraud from the Right. If the Republican wins the county (as Trump did in both 16 and 20) there are no fraud claims. None.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: The problem is, it’s 2022 that will be winner-take-all. If they get a 2010-sized majority then, there will be no way to counter in 2024 through normal political means. So we’ll have to go outside that, try to make some kind of red-white-blue revolution.
rikyrah
David Charns (@davidcharns) tweeted at 2:56 PM on Mon, May 31, 2021:
Nevada Senate passes AB126, which moves Nevada from a caucus to primary state. #8NN
(https://twitter.com/davidcharns/status/1399454674705551360?s=02)
Baud
@rikyrah:
?
Lapassionara
@Kathleen: That is my thought. All congressional reps are on the ballot every two years. If it is a presidential election year, then they are on with a contest for president. If the presidential vote is challenged as fraudulent, then doesn’t that invalidate the entire election?
Kay
Well, my youngest graduated high school Sunday and I turn over my school committee duties at the end of June.
I feel both free and completely unmoored, which I suppose are the same thing.
germy
‘I Must Have ADHD,’ Thinks Woman Struggling to Stare at Excel Spreadsheets for Eight Hours
Soprano2
I listened to Texas state rep Travis Clardy lie on NPR this morning. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/01/1002018197/texas-governor-vows-action-after-democrats-walk-out-over-voting-bill That part of the bill that highly restricts Sunday voting? That was a mistake, it wasn’t what they really meant to do. So either he was lying, or they were going to pass a bill with a restriction that they didn’t really mean to pass. Either lying or incompetent, take your pick.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Wow, congrats! “Free” and “unmoored” are synonyms for sure! :)
Soprano2
@Kay: I posted a link below to a Texas state rep just lying and lying about their voter suppression/overturn elections law on Morning Edition today. Now there are “hundreds and hundreds of cases of fraud in voting, and troubling stories about ballot harvesting”, which is of course the new right wing boogie man. I believe he also claimed that the bill actually wouldn’t allow a court to invalidate an election without actually counting the ballots, even though that’s what the text of the law plainly says it allows!
eclare
@germy: That article is so true!
VOR
@Kay: a lot of Republicans do not believe any Democrat can be legitimately elected. If the Democrat wins, it must have been fraud. Either Democrat voters aren’t Real Americans or they must have cheated. It’s really that simple.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Soprano2: The talker certainly does want to stop some people from voting, but s/he may also not know what’s in the bill. As TFG demonstrated, some of these people are astonishingly lazy about actually doing their jobs.
rikyrah
Talking to actual workers helps??
Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) tweeted at 10:47 PM on Mon, May 31, 2021:
interesting piece
GOP gov’s shrieked that unemployment $$ benefits had to be turned off bc biz couldn’t find workers. most of the biz were restaurants/bars
but what if people just don’t want to work at restaurants/bars? https://t.co/5qoiRGrPpk
(https://twitter.com/EricBoehlert/status/1399573380525957124?s=02)
Soprano2
@Dorothy A. Winsor: If you’re talking about the rep, he most certainly knows what’s in the bill. The interviewer knew some stuff, because she quoted things to him from the bill verbatim, and he denied that they mean what they clearly mean, and that even though the last election was perfectly fine people don’t have confidence in elections anymore so they have to make these changes. He said it was all a misunderstanding, that the press is covering it wrong and doesn’t understand what the provisions actually mean. That thing cutting voting hours on Sunday, for example, was supposed to increase them, but somehow it instead got in there to reduce them, I think he’s not quite sure how that happened. *rolleyes* It’s amazing how terrified they are of black and brown people in cities voting – instead of trying to win those votes, they’ve decided those people shouldn’t be voting at all.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Congratulations!!
What is the next step for your youngest?
Mo Salad
@Tony Jay:And with Gareth deciding to leave Trent off of the squad, that dumping will be well deserved.
OzarkHillbilly
It will in special session. Which isn’t to say that what DEMs did was pointless, what they did drove the point home.
eclare
@germy: I passed that article along to several friends, got lots of laughs!
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
My daughter was really nice about it. I think she could tell I was rattled. I have just been herding them for so long. He took off immediately with friends, camping in Michigan so, you know, moving on. He’s really suffered thru the pandemic- a completely social being denied other people- so it’s good to see him out and about again. He’s pursuing engineering but I don’t think it will stick like it did with my oldest. I just can’t picture him in that profession. He’ll go immediately to sales :)
H.E.Wolf
It appears that the Voting Rights Act of the 116th Congress (HR4/S4), which passed the House but was not brought to a vote in the Senate, has been superseded by HR1/S1.
HR1/S1’s title is the “For The People” Act. It is indeed a massive voting-rights reform bill.
Status updates can be found here, for current sessions:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/hr1
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1
Tony Jay
@Mo Salad:
Personally, I’d be happy for Liverpool’s players to stay well away from Southgate’s mediocre militia. We always seem to pick up injuries on International duty and, as seems obvious, we’re not welcome on the ‘Kool Kidz’ table anyway, so fuck ‘em.
I’ll still watch the games, though, because I’m nasty.
Kay
Sound familiar? Just like their voting laws.
We now run the country based on the ravings of Right wing grifters and television news personalities.
They’re running the CRT panic exactly like they ran the voter fraud panic.
Are the anti-cancel culture intellectuals embarrassed that their crusade was picked up and immediately weaponized by the Right? Our “intellectuals” are fucking morons if they didn’t see that coming.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Kay:
Oh, oh, I think I know the answer! “Teach the Controversy”, and everything will be just fine!
Cameron
@Kay: It is depressing how they reveal that they actually don’t understand the words and phrases they’re attacking. “Social distancing” = “socialism.” “Critical race theory” = ‘Stalinist/Maoist self-criticism.” As the great American Donald Rumsfeld observed, “Absence of absence does not mean evidence of evidence.” Or some such shit.
Ruckus
@Soprano2:
C – both of the above.
Ken
If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.
Patricia Kayden
@JPL: Exceptional at killing people, sadly.
Kay
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
They’re sending Trumpist mobs into public schools to battle the imaginary teaching of “critical race theory”
Have any of these people ever been inside a public school? Their delusion that public schools are some revolutionary vanguard is just laughable.
Patricia Kayden
@Kay: Create a huge backlash which Republicans wouldn’t care about. There have been backlashes against their voter suppression tactics already and they just don’t care.
Kay
@Patricia Kayden:
I don’t care about them. The backlash is us. There’s already been one, to a certain extent. It wasn’t true ten years ago but it is true now- voter suppression drives our voters to the polls.
rikyrah
MVP’S interview this morning
https://youtu.be/0ktYo-cmjIw
Betty Cracker
@Kay: An empty nest is a huge adjustment! It hit me harder than I thought it would at first. But we’ve had such a good time over the last few years, despite the world going to shit around us.
Just Chuck
@Kay: They’re not big on education in general, at least not stuff based on facts.
Kelly
Via Greg Sargent, 100 pointy headed intellectuals are concerned about Republican efforts to prevent
voter fraudvoting. Signees include folks from the very liberal Hoover Institution. Criminey there’s even Hoover Institute folk that think the R’s have gone all authoritarian.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/01/frantic-warning-100-leading-experts-our-democracy-is-grave-danger/
https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/statements/statement-of-concern/
Geminid
@Patricia Kayden: These laws are like gerrymandering- except for the most partisan, people despise them. And in more and more states, Republicans have no path to victory without carrying the independent vote. So I think the backlash from these laws will hurt Republicans, how much I can’t say.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Meanwhile, in empty-headed entertainment news, we discovered a new baking show this weekend.
Joel McHale was the guest on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” and was talking about a show he hosts called “Crime Scene Kitchen”. The bizarre premise is that teams of bakers go into a kitchen where something was made, then based on the forensic evidence deduce what it was, and then they have 2 hours to make it. Just to be extra evil, there are items in the kitchen which were NOT used (e.g. raspberries), potentially fooling them into making the wrong dessert.
The US failed at doing a version of the Great British Bake Off because we’re terrible people (at least those of us on TV), but this crazy format works somehow.
Kay
@Just Chuck:
I feel like they’re extending that, from their objections to elite liberal colleges to just “education” in general.
I can assure them public school history instruction is just as rigorously middle of the road and sanitized as it’s always been.
sdhays
@Baud: Did you drink decaf this morning? Clearly, it means that Schumer is selling us out and stabbing us in the back.
// (In case it’s not obvious)
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Patricia Kayden:
@Kay:
I hope so (backlash). Do you get any reading that there’s a backlash from their killing the 1/6 Commission?
Kay
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
If they start removing or overriding urban area election officials or arresting AA poll workers for imagined “crimes” there will be backlash.
The Texas law has penalties for mistakes in absentee balloting. They’re creating a legal pretext to arrest people for brand new “election crimes”.
Ken
The textbooks still have to get past that Texas committee, don’t they?
Dorothy A. Winsor
Of TV, when they fear some character has lost their mind, one of the questions they ask is “Who is the current president?” In TV-land, a whole lot of people would be judged out of their minds.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@sdhays: My coffee must be too weak cause it took me several minutes and a lot of scrolling to figure out MJ was the Morning Joseph Program
@Kelly: good luck to them breaking through Joe Manchin’s harder-than-granite skull to his Cult-of-the-Senate-addled brain.
and then on to whatever the fuck is going on with Sinema
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Goddammit – suffering behind a string of Microsoft updates. I avoid the fuckers like a plague, and then the goddamned thing locks up until I restart, then sucks it’s thumb for a number of minutes before generously restarting.
I just want something that starts running immediately when I turn it on, and resent the fuck out of having to continue to support programmers on annual subscription software for tweaks and upgrades that don’t do anything for me.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: We started watching The Kominsky Method on Netflix. Excellent show with Kirk Douglas. Manages to be both serious and funny
Kelly
seconded
zhena gogolia
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
ME TOO! I keep saying “remind me later,” but I was just thinking I really have to do the damn things.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Like why is the first thing up a boot of Teams? Ever since that started, it’s made the whole goddamned thing unstable, with lots of “not responding” messages. Click a calendar icon in outlook, and it says “preparing your outlook view” instead of just popping the calendar.
Auntie Anne
@Tony Jay: ??????
I think I need a smoke after that one!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I really enjoyed the first season. I kept meaning to get around to the second and now I see they’ve dropped the third. I’ve always been kind of ambivalent about Michael Douglas, but I like the relationship between him and Alan Arkin.
Ken
Those I don’t mind so much, but the ones that completely rearrange a UI for no apparent reason really irritate me. And I loathe any update that replaces my settings with new defaults. I picked that shade of green for my screen background, I do not want it replaced with an abstract pattern in neon red and purple.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
catclub
@Matt McIrvin: I was just thinking the law will be enforced for howmany? elections before it is overturned, by slow moving courts.
The Thin Black Duke
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I think you mean Michael Douglas.
Tony Jay
@Auntie Anne:
Those things’ll kill ya, kid.
I mean Conservatives.
catclub
@Kay:
 
selective enforcement, here we come. All the old white lady republicans who make those mistakes will be judged to have already suffered enough.
catclub
@Ken:
this.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Dorothy A. Winsor: We’ve seen 4-5 of those. Agree, it’s really good.
It bugs me a little (a lot) that actors I think of as the younger generation like Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, Billy Crystal, as not just old but damned old. I guess it’s like going to your high school reunion and puzzling about how your classmates got to be so old.
(I try not to think about the fact that 2022 would be my 50th high school reunion)
Kelly
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I picked up the notion somewhere that Manchin is part of a overall scheme to make it clear that Democrats reached across the aisle and their hand of friendship was slapped back. Yeah, I know, but it helps me sleep.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@zhena gogolia:
I eliminated the instability by shutting off Teams in the task manager (which was also acting wonky until I shut down Teams). While some of my courts do their virtual appearances over Teams, most are on Zoom. I think I’m gonna get rid of Teams unless I absolutely have to use it.
Soprano2
It’s an obviously coordinated effort, because that suddenly started here too, out of the blue. They’re at school board meetings arguing that the school’s diversity program is just CRT “disguised”, and that the school is teaching white kids to hate themselves, crap like that. “How dare you imply that there is any kind of hierarchy in the U.S.? We’re all judged by what we do, not by the race or gender or sexual orientation or religion we are!” they bellow. They want a complete end to any kind of diversity training or discussion of race and its role in society. It’s constantly amazing to me how sensitive the feelings of the “fuck your feelings” crowd really are.
James E Powell
@debbie:
Sadly, selfishness & IGMFY are the very core of our consumer culture.
Geminid
@Soprano2: They feel like they are being pissed on. I guess you could call them yellow snowflakes.
Betty Cracker
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I uninstalled Teams for the same reason, and I have lots of calls on Teams. I just use the browser app when I have to do a Teams meeting or call in when that doesn’t work. Otherwise, Teams makes the whole fucking operating system unstable. I know what they’re doing (turning conferencing software into a data scraper to sell more products), which makes the whole thing that much more infuriating.
Jay
@Tony Jay: thank you Tony,
got up this am, 2nd shot booked, news that Saint Joseph’s Church was vandalized, (T’kumloops First Nation) with pro genocide shit, two days after the mass grave was found,
appreciate the anger, the bitterness, just don’t have the vocabulary to post in kind.
zhena gogolia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
That’s not recent, is it? I remember seeing it a long time ago.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@catclub:
So what? There’s a helluva lot of people that live in Texas cities and blue areas. There will be huge backlash, the kind Republicans can’t simply ignore
Dorothy A. Winsor
@The Thin Black Duke: Good point!
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: It’s definitely a coordinated effort. Our shitty governor here in FL yammers about it constantly and banned CRT in public schools (where it’s not being taught). The gasbags on Fox News must plug those same talking points on the hour, judging from the reaction of the retired curmudgeons who dominate our local paper’s “letter to the editor” section. People who haven’t had a child in school in 50 years are sure CRT is going to turn our current crop of school-age kids into Marxist social justice warriors.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@zhena gogolia: it’s trending today…. I don’t get twitter
James E Powell
@Kelly:
I picked up the notion somewhere that Manchin is part of a overall scheme to make it clear that Democrats reached across the aisle and their hand of friendship was slapped back.
I’ve read this in a few places. It’s one of those n-dimensional chess arguments that I think is total bullshit. Nobody needs to have it clear that Democrats reached across the aisle and were slapped back. Nobody.
The only people that promote the idea that Ds need to reach out to Rs are Rs on The Shows. They only bring it up to lie and say that Ds never reached out to them.
Soprano2
I like that, yellow snowflakes. Their feelings are extremely hurt if anyone asks any questions about anything regarding race or our racial past. It’s as if they believe they are being personally blamed for what happened in the past.
karen marie
@Tony Jay: I’d like this broken down into sections and put up as proper posts. It’s brilliantly done but overlong to take in as an ignorant but interested yank.
Kelly
Chromebook does that.
Last fall I returned to the Windows herd after Google dropped support for my perfectly good laser printer. I was due for a new laptop and a bit peeved so I bought a Windows machine that works with my printer. Slow to wake up compared to my Chromebook and I kinda miss the way my Chromebook and Android phone worked together with Google apps.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I keep seeing CRT and thinking “I can’t believe there are still schools that haven’t switched to LCD monitors.”
catclub
I hope you are right. Was there huge backlash when texas said cities cannot do progressive things that the GOP state disapproves of?
and of the helluva lot of people in cities… Like adlai said, we need a majority.
Steeplejack (phone)
Report from the GQP underbrush (thread):
Baud
@Kelly:
Chromebook requires an internet connection, right? You couldn’t use it on a plane.
Geminid
@James E Powell: Independents might care.
zhena gogolia
@Baud:
Haha, the first computer I used had a CRT. The mainframe was a block away.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Geminid: Yup, the people DougJ calls tote-baggers. Educated, upscale white (mostly) suburbanites (culturally) who don’t like trump, are open to voting for Dems, but read David Brooks and like to tell themselves they’re very very thoughtful and non-partisan.
zhena gogolia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yeah, it happened during TFG’s first impeachment. I have no problem with it getting circulated again!
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
AKA people with Republican friends and colleagues.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Baud:
I think you can use a Chromebook on a plane, just like a cell phone in “airplane mode.” You could work on documents or spreadsheets, view a movie, etc. (assuming they were saved on the Chromebook).
(I have not used my Chromebook on an airplane, but I have used it in places where I did not have an Internet connection.)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@catclub:
Being denied a say in your government so blatant would piss a lot of people off. And besides, tens of millions is more than enough
Kelly
@Baud: You can use Google’s office apps offline but most chromebooks have tiny onboard storage so you need to plan ahead. I’m retired and don’t need to work when traveling. Chromebooks work best online.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: I think of the woman who told Tweety during an MSNBC town hall in 2012 that she was a “social liberal, and a fiscal conservative” with an air of self-satisfaction that suggested she had just revealed a Great Truth to the unwashed masses. Then she said, of course, she was voting for Romney. It’s an idea of wisdom so deeply ingrained in a certain social stratum that Liz Lemon’s meathead ex-boyfried on 30 Rock referred to himself as a “fiscal liberal and a social conservative”.
Baud
@Steeplejack (phone): @Kelly:
Thanks.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yeah, I can’t recall ever hearing of those people voting their social liberalism.
Steeplejack (phone)
Just, you know, fightin’ a bear in the backyard.
Kelly
@Baud: and my Windows laptop just rebooted for no apparent reason
Tony Jay
@Jay:
Hey, we all just need to talk to these people. Eventually they’ll say something we agree with./s
Truth is, they did say something I immediately agreed with. It was “Fuck Your Feelings”, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. Whatever they ‘feel’, whatever complex stew of emotions they’re expressing when they do horrible, cowardly things like you describe, I don’t care. Fuck them. They’re scum because they choose to be and I’ll deal with them on those terms.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Kelly:
I have used USB drives to expand my Chromebook’s storage.
Tony Jay
@karen marie:
I think the estimable Anne-Laurie is on it.
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Political taxonomists could find 3 or 4 kinds of Democrats commenting on this forum. Looking at voters in general, I expect they could find 4 or 5 kinds of independents.
But however you characterize independents, we would not have four Democratic Senators from Arizona and Colorado if they had not carried the independent vote. In Arizona registered Democrats only caught up with registered Independents last fall, at about 31% each. Registered Republicans were still ahead by about 4 points. And in Colorado, registered “non-affiliated” voters are the largest group..
Cameron
@Soprano2: The wingnut argument in any discussion of race is pure Bill O’Reilly: “Shut up shut up shut up!” Haw, haw, haw – pwned again, libtards!
Kelly
@Steeplejack (phone): Same
James E Powell
Raging about “critical race theory” has replaced raging about Obamacare as the Republican public equivalent for the N word.
smith
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “social liberal, and a fiscal conservative” = “my heart bleeds for the lower orders, but don’t ask me to pay taxes to give them a hand” = Republican vote. Every time.
Cameron
@Geminid: https://youtu.be/TLIppgE45wM
Geminid
@James E Powell: “Woke” is the new Black.
Just Chuck
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Surprised that wasn’t a “Bluff the Listener” story.
Jay
@Tony Jay:
yup, on my fuck farm, we had a drought, so the crops failed, so I have no fucks left to give.
if anybody wants to pitch in to contribute to the good work these people are doing in regards to education, truth and reconciliation, here’s the link.
https://reconciliationcanada.ca/get-involved/donate/
Just Chuck
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Most of those updates are security. Windows is still pretty crap about requiring reboots though. My Ubuntu box updates almost every single day, but it’s almost completely transparent (for apps installed as snaps, it’s totally transparent). I have had it badly misbehave before when it replaced system libs and didn’t reboot, so one reason Windows reboots for the updates is just an over-abundance of caution (mandatory file locking doesn’t help either).
gene108
@debbie:
We need to take back what patriotism means, too.
I feel large significant portion of liberals always focuses on the negatives, like “if America’s so great, why did we _____________. ”
The “blank” could be anything from the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 to drone strikes to our healthcare system. Our side talks more about the “blank”, than about what they like about living here.
germy
Some white guy was having a bad day:
Geminid
@Baud: Electorates change somewhat from federal to state elections. But there was a substantial cohort of voters in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Vermont who voted for Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, and voted for Republican governors in between. This might be the group you speculate about.
Cameron
@germy: “He is a veritable Napoleon of crime, Watson!”
Kathleen
@Kay: Shocking. //s I still think they should be pinned down to explain how they know ballots for them are valid and the Democratic ones aren’t. Pin them down.
Kathleen
@Lapassionara: Thank you. I wonder if their effery could be challenged in court by claiming their wins were not legitimate.
Kathleen
@germy: That really is my job and it can get crazy. I maintain all Microsoft Office products are possessed but I don’t want to go Full Metal MGT. Here anyway.
Kathleen
@Betty Cracker: My daughter moved out the year before she got married so I had a year to adjust to empty nest and thought I handled it well. Then she got married and I had to take 3 days off from work because I couldn’t stop crying. What triggered me was finding her shot records from grade school and realizing I needed to hand them over to her because she was a grown up.
Soprano2
@Cameron: You forgot “You’re the real racist!! I don’t even know that race exists!”
Kathleen
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Not only for they not add value they create annoying ” features” that make me stabby. I’ve spent afternoons screaming and swearing at my work laptop.
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
Coming late to the thread. Really enjoyed your post. A couple of things.
I saw a clip where Dominic Cummings noted that Boris Johnson was an idiot for hiring someone like him to be an advisor. I would think that this would pretty much undercut anything else he had to say.
Otherwise, who found any of these “revelations” to be surprising? No one, except maybe those fools whose noses are deeply up the ass of UK right wing media.
Strange how Cummings holds himself apart from all this, when in fact he and his own henchmen closely monitored (and maybe censored) the information coming from the science advisory boards.
From what I gather, Cummings slapped Boris around, and Matt Hancock, but had little to say about Michael Gove and other Conservative Party Princes of Darkness.
Overall, the best putdown of this farce came from a recent broadcast of the satirical program, Have I Got News For You, which pithily noted that it was only after he was fired and kicked to the curb that Cummings discovered any of Boris Johnson’s inadequacies.
Ultimately, a lot of this reminds me of the Trump appointees who have their “come to Jesus moment” about the Orange Beast’s failings only after they have quit or been fired. And sadly, nothing that Cummings has said seems to have had any impact on Johnson’s popularity.
Also, I get the impression that the British system of governance is so slow and bound by tradition that nothing could be done about Johnson until a public inquiry had been started, which might happen sometime after the year 2075.
ETA:
I thought that the cheekiest conclusion was the commission’s assertion that non-white people had not risen to the top because of the class system, and nothing could be done about that because, well, breeding tells.
Cacti
Billy Crystal is the youngest of the group, at a sprightly 73. lol
Soprano2
Boy, you’re singing my song, based on my life in a red part of a red state. Joe Biden made a completely normal comment on Memorial Day about America being uniquely about an idea, and instead of saying “Yeah, we’re about democracy which is now under threat, we need to defend it” or “We’re about the melting pot, we need to lean into that” or any positive comment about our country, I see liberals criticizing and quibbling about his statement and talking about all the terrible things we’ve done in the past which mean we should never say that. C’mon, guys, in a Memorial Day speech Biden isn’t going to qualify things with all those “buts”. It sounds to the average person who doesn’t follow politics all that much like you’re saying America sucks and you can’t stand the idea of it. You probably don’t want to hear that, but it’s the truth.
Kathleen
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Yes! I’m logging onto 4 different systems to get thru to VPN and I keep having to click off of Skype and Teams and all of the sign ins for Microsoft. It’s like swatting annoying flies. Then I get all signed on only to get the notice that I have a Chrome or Adobe or patch update. GRRRR. First World problems though. I’m so lucky to have had this job and ability to work from home
Brachiator
@Baud:
As previously noted, you can work offline. Some Chromebook models offer good value, especially those models which periodically go on sale. Some models also have pretty good storage.
Cameron
@Soprano2: I believe in chess that’s called the “Reverse Trumpian.” ETA: AFAIK, it is the only move with which one can self-checkmate.
germy
@Brachiator:
Can I plug headphones into a chromebook so I can listen to youtube music while I work?
Also, I didn’t know there were so many brands of chromebook. For some reason, I thought there was only one manufacturer. Sort of like Apple with the macbooks.
Kathleen
.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kathleen: I see this all the time with Photoshop, one person’s annoying feature is something another person can’t live without.
What I see with Photoshop/Lightroom is photographers who will spend $10-15k on cameras and lens and then turn around and complain about Adobe wanting $120/year for Photoshop and Lightroom.
Gravenstone
@RandomMonster: Front page can accommodate lengthy posts just fine. It’s the user base that tends to surliness when things slip much past a couple paragraphs “above the fold”.
germy
@Kathleen:
I have a habit of doing the math to figure out peoples’ ages during various times of my life.
I think I first got this habit after reading an essay by James Thurber when he was old and irritable. Life magazine sent someone to interview him, and the reporter knew nothing about Thurber’s work. Thurber calculated that the man had been six years old when Thurber’s first book was published.
So I find myself doing this, too. “Ted Cruz was ten years old when x thing happened in my life” etc.
I annoy myself with this habit.
Kathleen
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I have friends that looked at me with horror in 2009 when I said Republicans want to kill us all.
WhatsMyNym
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Well to be honest Adobe’s products are worth it if you use them enough (plenty of free/cheaper alternates out there). Microsoft Office’s (or what ever they call it now) updates have been a nightmare from day one, especially if you have to support other users.
Gravenstone
why for this post when I hit Clear
WG, I’m finding new ways to break the blog again….
Kathleen
@germy: I ‘ve moved from “I’m old enough to be your mother” to “I’m old enough to be your grandmother”. And this applies to some coworkers and bosses I’ve had. Beyond that I can’t ponder the age thing too much!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@WhatsMyNym: Most of the alternatives to LR/PS are not professional grade software(especially the free alternatives, GIMP), I’m continuingly astounded by the complaints I see about the cost from folk who just laid out $15K from a new Sony A-1 and a couple of Sony lens. Just mind boggling.
I did desktop support in a former life, so I understand that can be a pain, but these new features generally come from user requests. Any updates to any software will confuse folk.
Kathleen
@?BillinGlendaleCA: The other thing with me is that I’m easily overwhelmed with technology and start feeling stupid because I have no idea how to make new features work for me. So I constantly battle TSL ( Technological Self Loathing).
Shakti
It’s very striking to me that Biden is repeating a very standard idea that kids are supposed to learn in history and social studies class but conservatives absolutely disagree with every point.
They say they don’t, but they harp on ethnicity, geography, and religion. What is this intense freakout over “open borders” but a screech about ethnicity and geography? What is this babbling about religion being under attack but whining about how they can’t force convert me to their particular brand of Christianity? They’ve never given a fuck about my religion, ever. When they freak out about “voter fraud” they are absolutely terrified that I can vote and have voted in every single Presidential election since I was old enough to and almost every single midterm.
America isn’t really exceptional, of course. There are other countries who don’t self define by geography, ethnicity, or religion. But I have to wonder at people who wholesale chuck this idea of America out of the window because the Cold War is over.
Brachiator
@germy:
Yep. To be fair, there are some newer models which omit a headphone jack and presume that you will use a Bluetooth headphone.
Lots of manufacturers, and over the past two years Chromebooks have hit a sweet spot where there are many models which are good value for the money. Previously, you had too many models that were cheap, crappy and under-powered, and a few “premium” brands that were over-priced.
Representative of a good mid range chromebook is the Acer Chromebook Spin 713, which periodically goes on sale. Recently, a model which normally sells for $529 was going for $329 at Best Buy.
This is the 2020 version of the device. A newer model, with some modest upgrades, has recently been released.
And yeah, this is the model that I purchased, after doing some research. Truth to tell, I used it more when I had to commute to work. And when I would eat at a cafe or coffee shop and wanted to do some work. The pandemic, of course, changed all that.
Kent
Why must I pick? Can’t it be both?
germy
@Brachiator:
Does the Acer take headphones?
I’m in the market for a chromebook and I’ll be heading to bestbuy on Thursday.
Brachiator
@Shakti:
I am not a gung-ho patriot, but I note that one of the good things about America is that we often fight over and re-assert our best values.
Other countries assume that ethnicity, borders, religion are immutable values that could not possibly be disputed.
ETA: one country I admire is India, which currently is fighting a battle over its best values. They adopted democracy, and I recall a time when European dopes asserted that only the white man could understand democracy. And even though India is overwhelmingly Hindu, the Constitution does not have any religious test for becoming its leader.
Baud
Title of the post says “Back to Work,” but the front pagers are still lollygagging.
Kay
@Shakti:
I think Biden is pushing back against the very narrow view of the country promoted by Trumpist “nationalists” who are very much trying to redefine the country as dependent on geography, ethnicity and religion.
Trumpism is tribal. They absolutely believe “American” is defined as a certain ethnicity and religion. They’ll allow individual exceptions, persons, but only as exceptions to the rule- the rule is “them”.
Trump voters themselves don’t shy away from this at all. They 100% believe “American” means “white, Christian with european ancestry. They’d be shocked if you questioned it.
It’s so tribal it’s made me think more about tribalism in general. I think the goal should be to get past it completely. That’s a higher, better standard.
Brachiator
@germy:
Yep. The model I have has a generous port selection, and a headphone jack.
A good review of the 2021 updated model.
I am not a hardware guru, but I have been really happy with this purchase. It works for my needs.
A preliminary conclusion is that if you can find the 2020 model at a good discount, this might be a hell of a bargain and good choice. But the 2021 upgrade is no slouch.
WhatsMyNym
A reminder for Amazon Echo speaker and Ring security camera users…
June 8th is the last day before they switch it on.
Steeplejack (phone)
@germy:
The Acer 713 has both an audio jack and Bluetooth.
The Verge’s Chromebook buying guide. You can Google other sources, too.
germy
@Brachiator:
Thanks. Sounds good.
germy
@Steeplejack (phone):
Thanks for the link
Kelly
I wonder what darkroom chemicals and paper cost in the old days.
Steeplejack (phone)
@WhatsMyNym:
That article is a little scarifying; you still will be able to turn off Sidewalk after June 8 in the Alexa settings. But, yes, people should realize that it’s opt-out, not opt-in.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kelly: Paper was pretty expensive
ETA: Of course, you’d have to shell out a few hundred bucks for an enlarger.
Steeplejack (phone)
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Not to mention rolls of film to hold all of the bad images that now you can just delete from the camera.
WhatsMyNym
@Steeplejack (phone):
It is, but Sidewalk will be up and running on your WiFi until you opt-out. A hacker’s dream courtesy of Amazon.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack (phone): Film was expensive too, even b/w. When I first started shooting digital, I had to unlearn rationing my shots. I rarely ever delete a photo(never delete anything, a hard learned lesson from working for lawyers).
Gravenstone
@Kelly: Chemicals would be cheaper than dirt. But as others have noted, the paper and enlarger were where the costs accumulate.
karen marie
@Tony Jay: Nice!
catclub
Or you could bite the bullet I never bite and PAY for internet on the plane.
NotMax
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Solid state drive.
NotMax
@Jim, Foolish Literalist
“I am not sure what it means when one says that he is a conservative in fiscal affairs and a liberal in human affairs. I assume what it means is that you will strongly recommend the building of a great many schools to accommodate the needs of our children, but not provide the money.”
- Adlai Stevenson
.
NotMax
@germy
Be sure it has, at minimum, 8 GB of RAM. If they try to foist something on you with less, just say no. Emphatically.
Also, place it (floor model which is booted up) and place you in the same position you’d most be in while typing. Some people find certain keyboards a pain (either figuratively and literally) to type on after a while.
If you have the time, drop a YouTube or a TV show or a movie you’re familiar with onto a USB drive and bring that along. Plug it into the model you’re interested in while at the store and see how it looks on its screen.
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
Cummings was laying on the “I’m just a wacky maverick with a different way of thinking” shtick with a trowel. That was him trying to pretend that he can ‘do humility’.
I tried to cover that in the post. They’re not surprising to the politically engaged, but they – would – be news to the large percentage of the population who don’t pay any attention to politics beyond what they read in the headlines of their Tory-backing newspapers. That’s a LOT of people.
Yup. He’s in the frame for all this as well. What we saw last Wednesday was a move by Cummings to signal that he’s not going to be the fall-guy for whatever half-arsed ‘independent’ inquiry Johnson coughs up. The question is, does he have the hard evidence to prove his claims? From the reactions of the rest of the British Media, I’m betting he actually does.
Indeed. Cummings was part of Gove’s team before his promotion to ‘Johnson’s Brain’. He’s part of that Gove/Sunak clique that we might as well label Team Murdoch, which is why he had only nice things to say about the Chancellor whose ‘Eat Out To Help Out’ scheme did so much to accelerate the spread of the virus last summer.
Is that surprising? I made it plain in the post that Cummings is a bastard piece of shit. While he held the power he got from Johnson he was loyal, when Johnson sacked him to please his mistress (now wife) he became his enemy. That’s how bad people operate. Criminals give evidence against their former bosses all the time in courtrooms around the world, no one thinks it makes them good people.
The British Press and the BBC are in his corner (usually) and are doing their upmost to treat this as a non-story, plus the Opposition are pretty much useless at everything to do with their job. Give it time, though. Hancock has to testify before the same joint committees later this month, and the members have asked Cummings to provide evidence of his claims. If Hancock becomes a liability and turns on Johnson….
A lot could be done. The Speaker could penalise him for his refusal to answer questions in Parliament. The Opposition could actually oppose the Government for a change. The Tory Party’s MPs could get together with the 1922 Committee and vote him out as leader. The British Media could confront him with the clear evidence of his lies and what they’ve cost the nation and hound him from office.
The problem is that none of the above are doing anything like that. Johnson is getting the same easy ride he’d always had and getting away with murder in the process. There’s effectively no difference between a parked car and a broken-down car until someone starts the bloody engine, and the entire British Establishment seems to have deliberately lost its keys.
Yup. A Tory conclusion written by Tories for Tories, designed to make Tories feel better about being Tories.
I hate these people.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator:
And as often happens in the US, its best values seem to be losing right now, but maybe the pushback has arrived.
WaterGirl
@Baud: If the post title had included “Please” there might have been a better result! :-)
Cereal
What is this “every other nation you can define by its ethnicity, religion, geography” bullshit?!
Every nation can be defined by its geography. That’s what borders do. Does Biden think the US has no borders? Or does he think only the US has ever changed its borders over time? Both choices are idiotic.
Other nations can be defined by their religion? Well, some can, officially, like Saudi Arabia. But not all nations have a state religion. What about China? Is China a Buddhist or Taoist nation? What about a nation like France, that explicitly *does not* have an official religion, even more forcefully than the US? What’s Canada’s religion? This is dumb. And of course, plenty of people in the US claim it is a Christian nation, or based on “Judeo-Chtistian values” or some shit. Christianity is the majority religion in the US; evangelical Christianity is a significant source of the dominant culture (and not in a good way). Ask most people around the world to define the US by its religion and they will.
As to ethnicity…what garbage. Sure, some ethno-nationalist states define themselves this way, like Hungary, or China. But not all states do this because for fuck’s sake, they are developed nations that recognize ethnic diversity. Does Biden not realise there are Black or Asian or Jewish or Arab or Turkish British or French people? What the fuck is he smoking?
Yeah, the US was founded on an idea. That idea was “steal land from Natives and kill them; import Africans to use as slaves; and only let white men with property run the place, with serious bars to democracy built in.”
What an absolute crock of moronic American Exceptionalism bullshit.