Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Bark louder, little dog.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

This really is a full service blog.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Glad to see john eastman going through some things.

No Justins, No Peace

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Consistently wrong since 2002

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Notes on needing/supporting Abortions in the US, now and Post-Roe (Open Thread)

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Everything below is from my prior awareness and information collected recently. Corrections welcome:

If you need assistance, or want to help the fight via donations and/or volunteering? This document focuses on local/state level support groups.
(Thanks to UncleEbeneezer for the hookup on this!)

A broader, if slightly older (just a couple years), set of guidance is the Handbook for a Post-Roe America by Robin Marty. I can recommend the author as someone I paid into the Patreon of, before she closed it. And that was due to the quality, and importance, of her work in this area.

I hear from some sources, including a Doula I know, that acquiring Plan B now is wise — if you can w/o impacting overall supply. For those unaware, Plan B is a “morning after” drug. However, you should be clear on it’s usage and esp. it’s weight restrictions. It’s not dangerous, just has key limitations.

In addition to http://reprocare.com, mentioned in 1st link above, someone here noted https://aidaccess.org/ as another site for Abortion via mail.

I’m providing a variety of approaches — different people will have different needs. Even today, Roe is a dead letter for poorer people, especially of Color, due to lack of Internet access and ability to take time off for the procedure, if needed — including for bullshit “waiting periods”.

Many of the agencies and advocates mentioned above have experience, and guidance, in these areas. It’s worth at least getting familiar with modern options now, even if you’re in a “safe” State.

We have a lot of threads on the Roe leak. This one’s Open.

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OH Whoopi Goldberg NO

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So, while The View team discussed the MAUS-banning school board, it turns out Whoopi Goldberg needs to be working thru her business:

[Whoopi] Goldberg continued to assert that Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” was not racial.

“What is it about?” Behar asked at one point.

“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about,” Goldberg replied.

“But it’s about white supremacy,” co-host Ana Navarro retorted. “It’s about going after Jews and G*.”

Goldberg, meanwhile, claimed that “these are two white groups of people,” prompting co-host Sara Haines to point out that “they didn’t see them as white” while Behar noted that the Nazis targeted Black people as well.

[Edit and Emphasis mine — MisterDancer]

Now, I showed my ass in comments on this topic a few days ago. I’m still working thru my crap on this. So take this post with that pound of salt y’all keep in the pantry, please.

Yet: who just drops Jewish identity as unambiguously “white,” even in my relative ignorance compared to many? She should at least understand that whiteness, and the power it’s stamp brings, is a social construct. As such: it can be granted, denied, or even rescinded. Its arbitrariness is a boon to those who wield it — and Jews are so not in charge of that wielding.

And sometimes, that is explicitly laid out, in black and white.

See, Whoopi might not know this: Jim Crow and related US laws were used by the Nazis to baseline their Nuremberg Laws:

[…]American law, hard though it might be for us to accept it now, was a model for everybody in the early 20th century who was interested in creating a race-based order or race state. America was the leader in a whole variety of realms in racist law in the first part of that century. Some of this involved American immigration law, which was designed to exclude so-called “undesirable races” from immigration. In 1924 American immigration law in particular was praised by Hitler himself, in his book Mein Kampf.

But it wasn’t just about American immigration law. There was also American law creating forms of second-class citizenship — for African-Americans, of course, but also for other populations including Asians, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Not least, there were statutes in 30 American states forbidding and sometimes criminalizing interracial marriage. Those were of special interest to the Nazis.

[Bill] Moyers: And these lawyers saw America’s “Negro problem” as similar to their “Jewish problem?”

[James] Whitman: You bet they did.

Moyers: American law did not specifically target Jews, but— 

Whitman: But it certainly had a highly developed body of law targeting other groups.

Being a born-and-bred New Yorker, she might have heard about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. If she had, its implications should have been echoing in her ears as she made that horrible argument, pulling her up.

That implication? That our struggles are united. Harm done to one easily spreads to all. It’s imperative we understand the cross-currents of bigotry, lest we fail to see the warning signs.

Yes, she should know better, as should have I. I’m not going to dive into the long a painful history around Black and Jewish communities, and struggles for equality. Yet I must say: to buy into this “they both white!” bullshit is beyond merely “harmful.” And we Black folx should know that, more than most.

She deserved not just the pushback on the show, not just the callout from the ADL, but a lot more, besides. And it’s something to not just throw vitriol at, but to learn from and strive to avoid.

I don’t have a great ending for this post. Just a promise that I’ll try to do right by y’all — and a fucking great heap better than Whoopi.

(Also, too: I get The View person trying to correct Whoopi via incorporating the other groups targeted. Yet Romani is a much better term to use; something else I learned the hard way. Those folx are to this day getting the short end of damned near every stick there is, and deserve at least a modicum of respect.)

OH Whoopi Goldberg NOPost + Comments (154)

Well Imagine That

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It appears that despite there being an MBA program in every college in the nation, ostensibly teaching the administration of business, it appears that some knowledge has eluded business owners. Like the many scrolls lost in the burning of Alexandria, many arcane business practices have been lost, but all is not lost, as some new ideas have been rediscovered:

The owners of Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor had hit a wall.

For months, the 98-year-old confectionary in Pittsburgh couldn’t find applicants for the open positions it needed to fill ahead of warmer weather and, hopefully, sunnier times for the business after a rough year.

The job posting for scoopers — $7.25 an hour plus tips — did not produce a single application between January and March.

So owner Jacob Hanchar decided to more than double the starting wage to $15 an hour, plus tips, “just to see what would happen.”

The shop was suddenly flooded with applications. More than 1,000 piled in over the course of a week.

“It was like a dam broke,” Hanchar said. Media coverage that followed his decision soon pushed other candidates his way.

We’re the stupidest fucking country in the world that “giving people more money to get them to work for you” is apparently a relevatory piece of information. I mean jesus christ. Fast Freddie Herzberg just died in 2000, how the hell did everyone forget this shit.

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The Labor Freakout

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Unless you live underneath a rock, the last couple of days you have witnessed a genuine freakout from the chattering classes about the jobs report. To save you some time, I will summarize:

“OMG 300 DOLLARS MORE A WEEK IS MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO FORCE THE POORS TO CLEAN THE GREASE TRAPS AT MY FAST FOOD FRANCHISE FOR A WAGE TOO LOW FOR THEM TO PAY THE RENT!”

And really, I am not exaggerating. Shitty, low paying jobs are not being filled, and it is FREAKING out the MBA class. We are at a point where several generations of businesses and business owners have never actually experience a tight labor market, and they literally have no idea what to do. Since the Reagan era, they have been in the driver’s seat, neutering labor unions, having MBA’s nickle and dime employees to death with suppressed wages, cutting away at medical and retirement benefits, shifting them to 401k’s while not providing commensurate pay increases, and so forth. They’ve spent four decades masturbating about being job creators while siphoning all the profit upward, treating employees like indentured servants eager to work 35 hours a week for 8 bucks an hour with no stable schedule, so with employees not willing to literally die during a pandemic to smell like french fries and walmart working the two jobs they need to survive, these shitlords finally find themselves without enough workers.

The one thing they can not find themselves willing to try to do is to try to pay them more. You’ll hear anecdotal stories about McDonald’s owners paying a whole 12 dollars an hour for an “entry level job,” sneering while saying it because everyone knows an entry level position shouldn’t pay enough for the serf to pay rent AND eat. So fuck them.

My suggestion to the government is to not do ANYTHING except push for a 15$ minimum wage, and these assholes will either figure it out on their own and start paying people what thy are worth, start picking the tampons out of their own Burger King bathroom toilets themselves, or go out of business. All of these are fine by me.

These guys can go McFuck themselves.

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Tax These Motherfuckers

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Spending a couple billion on the IRS seems like it would be as pretty smart investment:

More than 20% of the wealthiest Americans’ income isn’t being reported to the Internal Revenue Service, according to a new study that calculates U.S. tax evasion is far higher than previously estimated.

Random audits of the rich can detect some tax evasion, but the study’s authors found that the IRS easily misses income hidden in sophisticated ways, including in private businesses and offshore structures. Collecting all unpaid income tax from the top 1% would boost revenue to the U.S. Treasury by $175 billion a year.

The wealthy have made so much in gains the past few decades while the rest have just been screwed, and they cheat because they can. It’s to the point they don’t even know what to do with the money, they have so much of it:

I have just taken a picture of my chair. I am not going to go through the trouble of doing any of this, but I have it on good authority that I can now host an auction for that digital photo, and sell the unique “ownership” of it to the highest bidder. That winner can then display the photo online, and while anyone could simply download it and own a lossless copy of it themselves, a record on the blockchain will confer the true owner the knowledge that they have the original.

They get nothing else, really, except that knowledge. Anyone in the world can look at or even acquire the same JPEG file from the internet. This is ownership as a feeling. And it’s the biggest innovation in the art world. One of these JPEGs just sold for $69.3 million (not a typo). And it’s further confirmation that decades of inequality have left the idle rich with entirely so much money that they do entirely ridiculous things. And where money goes, scams are sure to follow.

There is a point to crypto art, though you have to squint to see it. Artists put out limited-edition prints all the time, which aren’t entirely discernible from a printed copy, aside from the artist’s signature and the knowledge that there aren’t many in the world. By auctioning a non-fungible token (NFT) that confers ownership, artists can also deliver a scarce object to fans, and get direct compensation for it. This could prove useful in businesses with a lot of direct intermediation between artists and fans, like music. Kings of Leon selling an NFT that can unlock concert tickets and digital art gives big Kings of Leon fans a way to support the band’s work, rather than funnel their funds to a record label or streaming company.

FFS.

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Bigfooting Cole For a Good Cause: The Durham Foodraiser!

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Bigfoot Is Real

Normally I wouldn’t be posting this late, but I was scrolling through various Twitter feeds while commenting in my earlier post and came across T. Greg Doucette’s Foodraiser. At Levenson’s Twitter feed. And since Levenson is right in saying:

(For the Hebrew impaired a mitzvah is a good deed)

I decided that this is something everyone here, who is awake, reading, commenting, lurker, should know about.

Anyhow, there’s a really long thread explaining the Durham Foodraiser, but the bottom line up front is that Doucette, a lawyer from Durham, NC, has been raising money every year for the past four years to make sure that children in the public schools in the poorest areas of Durham who would ordinarily be suffering from food scarcity while school is out for the winter holidays have enough to eat. He’s got a bunch of matching donors, so a $1 donation winds up being something like a $26 donation or something, I got kind of lost because he keeps tweeting that he’s added matching donors through the thread. Regardless, any donation you make is going to get matched. And he’s got a 501c3 in place this year, so your donation is tax deductible too! The Foodraiser will remain active until 11:59 PM PST. So there’s still time to donate if you’ve got a couple of extra bucks that could do some good as we head into the holidays. Here’s Doucette’s thread.

And here’s where you go to donate:

Do read the whole thread if you have the time as he’s a very good storyteller.

You all know what to do!

Open thread!

 

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Medicaid Expansion is busy in August

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A few quick notes for the upcoming month and Medicaid Expansion.

Missouri residents will be voting on adding Medicaid Expansion as a state plan amendment to the Missouri Constitution on August 4, 2020. The state plan amendment part is critical as that precludes administrative burden maximizing requirements such as work search and frequent redeterminations of eligibility.

The results of another referendum to expand Medicaid will be felt on August 1st. Nebraska voted to expand Medicaid in November 2018. The state government slow-rolled implementation so the first day of coverage won’t be until October 1, 2020. However enrollment can start August 1, 2020.

If you live in Missouri, make sure that you can vote safely. If you live in Nebraska, help organize and mobilize folks to find the coverage that they need.

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