Monthly Archives: February 2024

I received this bit overnight from a friend up north, with the subject line, misspellings and all:

Want your blood to boil?d

Rather bald-faced manipulation, isn’t it? Here’s the body:

Heard on the news tonight that Minnesota is putting forth a bill to make MN a “sanctuary state” !!!!!  Good grief!  The dems control governorship, and noth the house and senate in MN.   We’re doomed.

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/lawmakers-push-north-star-act-in-effort-to-make-minnesota-sanctuary-state-republicans-warn-of-economic-burden/

or how about this:

www.startribune.com/hennepin-county-minneapolis-leaders-back-minnesota-sanctuary-state-proposal/600340789

If this doesn’t make you panic, nothing will.  Disgusting.

So I glanced through the StarTribune article and then replied to the sender:

“Uh huh. From the cited article:

It says the board supports “efforts to ensure that non-citizen residents are assured due process in the criminal legal system, be free from harassment, and supported in their efforts to remain in Minnesota and contribute to community vibrancy.”

Terrible? Horrible? The doom of society?

Hysteria.

Here’s the problem with the far right conservatives: Manipulation. They take serious discussion and turn it into The End Of The World. And they do it again and again and again, all while sticking their hands out.

And everyone’s learning this is how they operate. You can’t have a serious debate with them, you – or rather they – won’t compromise unless it’s an overseas issue, and even that is beginning to become infected with this sickness.

So we don’t have as serious of debates as we might. I have a conservative friend with whom I dined a month or so ago. He runs an organization that keeps an eye on the Legislature, and he expressed concerns about the Democrats’ control of all both wings of the legislature and the governorship. Not that they are Democrats per se, but the potential, partially fulfilled, that bills are now sailing through the legislature and becoming law far too quickly, without the substantive and respectful debate that society should require.

And that, by and large, is the fault of conservatives who have suffered the manipulative grifters to not only live, but to hold positions of power and influence. Names such as Trump, Gingrich, Greene, Gaetz, for everyone who is paying attention knows they are clowns, absolutists and grifters.”

There ya go.

The 2022 Senate race was interesting for what it said about polling. I noticed that pollsters with lower FiveThirtyEight ratings tended to skew a trifle conservative, both during and afterwards, as did other pundits. For example, in my post-mortem summary, I said this about Senator Hassan’s (D-NH) reelection bid:

In New Hampshire, some conservative pollsters gave challenger Don Bolduc (R) a small lead over Senator Hassan (D), while others called it a dead heat. Then pollster Lowell Center gave Hassan a ten point lead, pointedly out of step with everyone else. Hassan’s final margin of victory? 10 points.

This was echoed in a few other races, such as Fetterman/Oz in Pennsylvania. It was as if the conservative pollsters were trying to generate enthusiasm for their ideologically aligned candidates, rather than just reporting their findings.

Maybe their adjustment models reflected a poor understanding of electoral realities. Or perhaps the electorate came late to the realization that Bolduc, Oz, et al, held deeply inappropriate views for Senators from those States.

So how is this playing out in the 2024 Presidential election? On Daily Kos, Kerry Eleveld has an observation on recent polling:

The Economist published a welcome reminder Sunday that not all polls are created equal. The outlet parsed the 538 aggregate of national polls, dividing them up by pollster ratings between the very good, good, decent, poor, and unranked. Generally speaking, the worse the pollster’s ranking, the better Trump performed in the survey.

• Very good (13 polls): Trump +.15
• Good (eight polls): Trump +2.4
• Decent (30 polls): Trump +1.7
• Poor (four polls): Trump +5.3
• Unranked (two polls): Trump +6.5

So it may be that, once again, the lower quality pollsters are trying to incline the playing field to the far-right candidates. Keep that in mind when my reader sees a poll. Here’s the FiveThirtyEight ranking of pollsters, dated late January of 2024. They’ve apparently switched from a letter grade system to a star system, 0 to 3 stars. And the above mentioned dead-eye Lowell Center? They have a 2.9 stars rating. Trafalgar, who had given Bolduc a small lead? Less than a star at .7.

Steve Benen has had lot of good stuff of late, but this made me grin:

If you want to get an ugly look, call a [US S]enator “congressman.” Lasers practically shoot from their eyes.

I see Robert Hur, Special Counsel investigating President Biden’s possession of classified documents from his time as Vice President, chose today to release his report. It tries to be damning:

• The investigation found Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified military and national security information, but he will not face charges. [CNN/Politics]

However, this is not only mitigating, but even contradicts the above findings:

• In the report, Hur noted that Biden cooperated with the investigation and returned the classified documents once they were discovered — noting the significant differences between this case and the one against former President Donald Trump, who was charged last year in relation to his handling of classified documents after he left the White House.

Naturally, the White House and Biden’s personal lawyer ripped the report. I’m not in a position to judge the report, although the above contradiction seems obvious.

But I will note this: There may be an opportunity to reset our politics.

How so? Today was also the day SCOTUS heard arguments as to whether Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection on 6 January 2021 and, if so, is he then disqualified from the Presidency and all other offices. I tried to listen to the arguments, but, being a working dude in a job consumed with details, I found their nattering and nitpicking both irritating and, due to their unknown references, incomprehensible. No offense. And I’ve noticed pundits are already opining that Trump will win this fight, which will be a rare victory for him.

But this can be changed.

Keep in mind that a widespread complaint among the electorate is that both Presidential candidates, Biden and Trump, are, really, way too old for the rigors of the job; I disregard Haley as it seems unlikely that she’ll win the GOP nomination. The electorate, outside of the evangelicals on the right, really would prefer someone younger, even though Biden has done far better than we could have expected, foreign and domestic, when he was elected, despite frantic GOP stonewalling and denial. And as a manager responsible for picking his subordinates, he has done very well.

Also, Biden has said that if Trump was out of the race, he’d be tempted to step out as well. He knows he’s too old, I think.

So here’s what Biden might consider doing: open a line of communications with Chief Justice Roberts, and suggest that if Trump is found to be an insurrectionist and disqualified from office, Biden will cancel his reelection run. Trump will scream, but most everyone else will sigh with relief. There’ll be a mad scramble on both sides of the aisle.

Naturally, Roberts would have to find a confederate, assuming the liberal wing is willing to find for the plaintiffs (Norma Anderson is lead plaintiff in Trump vs. Anderson), to gain the necessary 5-4 advantage. He might try to intellectually convince one of the six conservatives to join him, or he might just lay it on the line. But it’s noteworthy that there’s really no precedent at stake here. As Tristan Snell points out, it’s awfully darn clear that Trump’s politically an insurrectionist. The 1314th Amendment very clearly states that insurrectionists are ineligible to occupy elective offices. If they choose to find for Anderson, it’s not likely to result in damage to the polity in the future.

And the Republicans will find some of the pressure is off them. As anyone paying attention to politics knows, the border problem persists because of the GOP absolutely refusing to do anything about it; it’s the new abortion issue, if you accept that abortion was the issue with which the GOP kept their base in line for decades. But it’s also the Trump issue de jour; if he is forced to trundle off and just whine about the unfairness of the world, perhaps we can make progress on the border issue, Ukraine assistance, Taiwan assistance, and Israel assistance, all of which are tied up in the GOP fourth-rater incompetence vortex.

There’s a lot to like in a deal like this: younger, if inexperienced, candidates. Haley, as nominee presumptive, will get vetted, as will Democratic nominees. Maybe some new ideas will pop up. Younger voters may find new candidates more attractive. President Putin of Russia will be disappointed, of course, as Trump is widely viewed, correctly in my opinion, as Putin’s patsy – but if Trump cannot deliver, then Putin will have to make a move, such as sue for peace with Ukraine. And with Trump forced out, Ukraine funding might open up.

My oh my. I wonder if Biden’s discussing this idea with his advisors, because this may be win-win-win, the third being for voters.

Author and lawyer Tristan Snell points out that SCOTUS, and everyone else, shouldn’t try to hide behind the declaration Let the voters decide!, because, well, they already have:

Fortunately, the Supreme Court need not look far for answers to these questions. They can simply look across the street at the Capitol, where majorities of both chambers of Congress already found that January 6 was an insurrection and that Trump not only engaged in it but “incited” it.

This may come as a shock. When, one might ask, did Congress ever hold such votes?

Those votes came in the second impeachment of Trump, in January and February of 2021, in which majorities of both the House and the Senate backed an article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection.”

This was a finding of fact, by majorities of our elected representatives, after a full public trial in which Trump was able to mount a defense — and it should be deemed persuasive, if not conclusive, in answering the factual questions before the Supreme Court. Indeed, for the more right-wing justices, who are often fond of pontificating that courts should not make policy judgments and should instead defer to legislatures, one would think that such a clear public pronouncement from Congress on Trump’s engagement in insurrection would be a compelling precedent. [CNN/Opinion]

Are we seeing the end of Senator and long time GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)?

Senate GOP leadership screwed this up—and screwed us. Even while refusing to let us see the bill they claimed to be negotiating on our behalf—for MONTHS—they were never in doubt, insisting we’d be dumb and even unpatriotic NOT to support it. This is a disqualifying betrayal. https://t.co/PZnI6KorFK

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) February 5, 2024

Senate GOP leadership screwed this up—and screwed us. Even while refusing to let us see the bill they claimed to be negotiating on our behalf—for MONTHS—they were never in doubt, insisting we’d be dumb and even unpatriotic NOT to support it. This is a disqualifying betrayal.

Posted just a few days ago, it’s one of several signifying instances collected by Steve Benen. But he doesn’t think McConnell’s yet near the cliff’s edge:

My point is not that members like Cruz and Lee will successfully soon replace their party’s Senate leader. That’s unlikely. But the fact that this far-right duo is going after McConnell, against a backdrop of setbacks, challenges, partisan infighting, and congressional dysfunction, leave little doubt that the minority leader’s power has diminished, and McConnell’s influence appears to be ebbing away.

But I’ve noticed that shifts in power in the GOP do happen with some rapidity. My guess is that, soon enough, someone in the GOP will decide that McConnell is a liberal, start shouting RINO! because they want to be a Kentucky Senator, and McConnell’s age and general decrepitude will work against him. He may gracefully retire rather than fight it.

It’ll be Another RINO run out of a position of influence, and someone, probably more than one, will prance about proclaiming victory, that they’ve purified the Party.

The ironic part of the deal, of course, is the complete ignorance of history. If it weren’t for McConnell’s dishonorable leadership when Justice Scalia died, and, later, when Justice Ginsburg died, SCOTUS would be short two conservative Justices, probably Kavanaugh and Barrett, Roe vs. Wade would still be shielding Republicans from the mistake of pushing anti-abortion legislation, and the USA would be in a far better place. But McConnell couldn’t make himself lead his caucus in voting for impeachment on either occasion, seriously miscalculating the depth of Trump’s pathological narcissism, and, having followed Gingrich’s proclamations for the Republican Party, is faced with a Party getting ready to kick out a loyal Party man, so loyal that he dishonored himself, for Not Being Loyal Enough.

Poor guy. And it’s not even clear, at least to me, that he’s smart enough to realize he’s been playing a leading part in the stage drama The Dissolution of the Republican Party, and The Reduction of America To Second Rate Status.

And now a third-rate McConnell will soon be replaced by some fourth-rater extremist, who’ll fight for Trump’s favor.

I seem to be cranky tonight.

Steve Benen gives a casual summary of Republicans nation-wide:

While the GOP’s self-imposed drama [concerning border security] unfolds in the Senate, elsewhere on Capitol Hill, Republicans are poised to impeach the Homeland Security secretary for reasons they’re struggling to explain, knowing that their Senate counterparts intend to ignore the entire fiasco.

The impeachment vote later failed. Maybe they’ll try again!

Meanwhile, Donald Trump appears to be throwing his handpicked chair of the Republican National Committee [Ronna Romney McDaniel] under the bus for reasons he also hasn’t explained.

It’s against this backdrop that the state Republican Parties in Florida, Arizona, and Michigan have recently parted ways with their chairs; the chair and vice chair in Oklahoma don’t appear to be on the same page; and Nevada is holding a presidential primary and caucus on the same week for a series of confusing reasons that have left local voters baffled.

Yep, that sounds like arrogant amateurs at work.

Which all reminds me: a few years back I went to a birthday party where I met a lady who had helped run elections in a number of roles. While she was obviously of a leftish inclination, she seemed quite honestly bewildered when discussing the lawyers who represented the right over election night issues, who she described, if I remember rightly, as becoming more and more stupid as the years passed.

Perennial award hopeful Rep Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has submitted a House Resolution for approval that gives him another nomination for the Earl Landgrebe Award:

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that former President Donald J. Trump did not engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or give aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

Just the sort of thing you’d expect from someone whose only strong leg is the one to which he clings.

What’s he going to do when Mr. Trump becomes a political non-factor? Retire?

Meme coin:

A meme coin (also spelled memecoin) is a cryptocurrency that originated from an Internet meme or has some other humorous characteristic. It may be used in the broadest sense as a critique of the cryptocurrency market in its entirety—those based on particular memes such as “doge coins”, celebrities like Coinye, and pump-and-dump schemes such as BitConnect—or it may be used to make cryptocurrency more accessible. The term is often dismissive, comparing the value or performances of those cryptocurrencies to that of mainstream ones. Supporters, on the other hand, observe that some memecoins have acquired social currency and high market capitalizations.

That could be an expensive joke. Noted in “Solana-based GameStop meme coin gains traction after retailer pulls plug on crypto,” SlamAI (oh, great, now I’m quoting fucking AI writers), yahoo!finance:

A Solana-based meme coin inspired by GameStop’s GME shares has surged to over US$31 million in market capitalization in just three days.

The new cryptocurrency, which also has the GME ticker, rose by more than 285% in the past 24 hours, echoing GameStop’s headline-making stock market saga.

In January 2021, GameStop experienced a dramatic stock surge due to a short squeeze largely driven by users of the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets, inflicting heavy losses on hedge funds and short sellers.

Surely it’s a sign of the apocalypse.

Which itself will be memorialized by the Apoca-coin. Its mascot will be the alpaca, its fruit will be the opalka, and its dance?

The polka. Music provided, naturally, by “Weird Al” Yankovic fronting The Ramones. Because.

And we’ll all die dirt poor and bewildered on while our schemes bore fouled fruit. Except Weird Al. He’s too smart for that. He’ll die in a stampede of alpaca, or maybe smothered in opalka.

One way Mr. Trump is keeping attention focused on his campaign is by not naming his VP pick. Now, I don’t envy him that particular task, as former VP Mike Pence (R-IN) has too high of moral standards to use again, and your replacement pick is always ticklish.

But he’ll have a few eager volunteers to pick from: Rep Stefanik (R-NY) and Mace (R-SC) have reportedly waved some flags, for example. But here’s the guy I’d put my money on … if I really had to. From Maddowblog:

In the same interview, Stephanopoulos reminded [Senator J. D. Vance (R-OH)] of a 2021 podcast in which Vance suggested that Trump can and should defy court rulings. Evidently, the Ohioan hasn’t changed his mind.

“The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings, but if the Supreme Court ― and look, I hope that they would not do this ― but if the Supreme Court said that the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling and the president has to have Article 2 prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit,” Vance said, suggesting politicians should decide which court rulings are and are not “legitimate.”

But I was especially interested in an exchange in which the ABC News host asked, more than once, whether Vance would’ve agreed to certify the 2020 presidential election had he been the vice president at the time. It led to this answer:

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”

Hey, look at Vance’s qualifications:

1. He blows with the wind. He used to be a Trump critic, now he’s a Trump lover. Moral flexibility – ironic from a guy against divorce – is an important quality when working for Mr. Trump.
2. Senator Vance has held the title for 1 year, with no other elective experience; by inauguration, he’ll have another year under his belt. No real accomplishments in the Senate, which are hard to come by for newcomers to the chamber.
3. His foreign affairs experience appears to consist of opining that Ukraine will just have to give up territory to the aggressor, Russia. Perhaps we should ask him if he’d prefer to fight the Russians on the fields of Ukraine, or at Niagara Falls.

These are dream qualifications for Mr. Trump, as it discourages the use of the 25th Amendment to remove Trump, as Vance would be just about as ineffectual as Trump.

And possibly as ambitious, but more for power than prestige or flat-out wealth.

My Arts Editor tried baking muffins on the new stove this morning.

Clearly, we’ll have to practice a bit.

This report from ABC News is intriguing for both the alleged behavior and its implications:

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has questioned several witnesses about a closet and a so-called “hidden room” inside former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago that the FBI didn’t check while searching the estate in August 2022, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

As described to ABC News, the line of questioning in several interviews ahead of Trump’s indictment last year on classified document charges suggests that — long after the FBI seized dozens of boxes and more than 100 documents marked classified from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate — Smith’s team was trying to determine if there might still be more classified documents there. …

As investigators would later learn, Trump allegedly had the closet’s lock changed while his attorney was in Mar-a-Lago’s basement, searching for classified documents in a storage room that he was told would have all such documents. Trump’s alleged efforts to conceal classified documents from both the FBI and his own attorney are a key part of Smith’s indictment against Trump in Florida.

To be sure, this is an unverified report. But I think if it’s found to be true, immediately put Mr Trump up on charges of obstruction, as a signal to the American electorate that one of the prominent figures in the Presidential 2024 election is apparently guilty of illegal behavior.

Next, determine, if possible, the contents of all of these hidden rooms, and if the release of those contents could be damaging to the security of the United States.

And if this report is not verified, then “never mind.”

Architrave:

As we mentioned before, architrave is a form of interior moulding — those little timber (or plaster) strips or sections that cover up the otherwise messy joins between surfaces.

In the case of architrave, this is the strip of material (usually timber) that covers the join between door frames and the walls. Not only does it hide the join, it will also conceal future movement or shrinkage that may occur between the wall and the casing within the door surround.

Architrave is used for internal doors, external doors and also around windows and built-in cupboards — and can even be used to smarten up loft hatches.

Other examples of interior mouldings include skirting boards that conceal the junction between wall and floor, and cornice, the plaster mouldings that deal with the point at which the ceiling and wall meet. [Homebuilding & Renovating]

Noted in this video by Our Restoration Nation’s Laine Berry:

Reading Professor Richardson’s description of political social influencers sparked a thought in me:

Right-wing influencers want views and shares, which translate to more money and power, Darcy wrote. So they spread “increasingly outlandish, attention-grabbing junk,” and more established outlets tag along out of fear they will lose their audience. But those influencers and media hosts don’t have to govern, and the anger they generate in the base makes it hard for anyone else to, either.

Too often, millions of readers and watchers, audience members, are patronizing someone like me: neither trained, credentialed, nor exhibiting any particularly good track record^[1] in political punditry. Some, like the infamous Alex Jones of Infowars, have been so absolutely awful at it that they’ve been sued and fined millions of dollars.

Which, sadly enough, they can actually afford to pay, despite their pathetic grasping after victimhood.

You guessed right. This is a depiction of a political social influencer working over an audience member. Please note the audience member’s juices are untouched, but their wallet is becoming empty.

So, rather than according them a learned role name that sounds respectable such as political social influencer, I suggest a new role name should be selected. It should reflect the fact that all they really bring to the table is an imagination, a mouth that will say anything, some strong opinions, and a few dollars and odds and ends.

Never forget the impact that a strongly expressed opinion will have on some folks who are too befuddled by the subject matter, or the process of nuanced thinking, which is a hard process to learn and use, to formulate an opinion of their own.

So, for those who favor neologisms, I suggest tongue-waggers. It has a natural visual sufficiently repellent to be applicable to its new usage, and should induce the proper skepticism in those who learn to use it.

And, for those of a more old-fashioned bent, I think you’ll find town gossips to be of sufficient age, meaning, and negative connotation to warm the cockles of your heart. Town gossips, for those unfamiliar with the term, specialized in salacious news, unverified rumors, and all the other information that was better ignored or unknown, as applied to the common weal of a town.

¹ I actually hope to not quite satisfy that third criterion.

Well, this morning we thought we were making the final trip to the vet with Mayhem. We woke to find he’d gone blind in his right eye, and was already blind in his left. Add to that having gone deaf a few months ago, advanced decrepitude, and excessive vocalizations. It didn’t look good.

The vet even walked into the room with the fatal syringe, or so Deb reported.

But the vet looked into his right eye, pronounced that, unlike the blindness in his left eye, which is mysterious, his right eye clearly has a detached retina, which she said often happens in response to hypertension aka high blood pressure. I didn’t know that.

And she had noticed, from two or three weeks ago when we brought him, that the attempt to take his blood pressure yielded a reading on the borderline of hypertension. OK, then. Treatment? I asked.

Amlodopine, she replied, naming a human hypertension treatment drug. I took it, briefly.

And … lowering hypertension in cats frequently results in the retina re-attaching itself.

That was new to me, too.

So he came back home, took his first dose of Amlodopine, is also on gabapentin for possible joint pain, and is nosing his way energetically around the house, learning how to avoid falling down stairs, and nesting on his relocated (off the bed) heating pad.

And still vocalizing. Supposedly that’ll stop in a couple of days.

So I guess that was the feline Grim Reaper, just some fella with the same suit.

I was struck by the magnitude of anti-Americanism exhibited by Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro:

Staring directly into the camera on Monday, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro had a message for [singer/songwriter Taylor] Swift: “Don’t get involved in politics; we don’t want to see you there.” [WaPo]

As if the United States was not founded on the principle, among others, that we all get to participate in the governance of our nation, and all the activities that go along with that^[1], regardless of skin color, religion, and a few other unjust reasons for exclusion^[2]. Sorry, Mz. Pirro, but Taylor Swift’s American citizenship makes her far more qualified to comment on and influence American elections than, say, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Naturally, we can say this is just part of the rough and tumble of American politics, but it puts Pirro in an unfortunate light.

But this bit speaks to the paranoia and methods of the managers of the conservative movement:

¹ Subject to what are often portrayed as common-sense constraints, but are argued over and meddled with endlessly, which is itself part of politics.

² But age is not one of them. Age is used as a constraint for the office of President. It’s important to note that age is inevitably changing, unlike, say, skin color and religion, both of which can change, but are unlikely to do so. 30+ years ago some Minnesota legislative member advocated for giving the vote to kids, which I thought was just nutty.