Category Archives: Uncategorized

Often, marketing & sales is combined into a single entity, not only by the public, but by the organization employing them as well, because they often seem to be the same. But this example may be helpful.

Marketing is the message an organization sends out to advertise its wares. Consider a few of the GOP’s various marketing messages: We’ll lower taxes and raise prosperity; climate change is a lie; regulation is bad; all of the legal indictments and impeachments of former President Trump are hoaxes; we’ll never change abortion rights; fiscal responsibility is our middle name.

Sales is the wares delivered. In the case of the GOP, it has delivered lower taxes for the top 1% of taxpayers while prosperity dropped; the Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights and, consequently, high profile attempts to restrict access to abortion, sometimes successfully; increasing environmental damage from weather & climate, which, in turn, is impacting our economy; increasing Federal deficits that are directly tied to Republican financial policy, implemented when they controlled Congress.

An organization in which marketing and sales is significantly divergent is an organization in trouble. And the thoughtful American public is delivering on this model, as Steve Benen summarizes:

• A combined 65% of Americans believe the charges against Trump are either very or somewhat serious.
• 60% of Americans believe the former president acted inappropriately in the way he handled classified documents after leaving the White House. (The poll found that 1 in 4 Republican voters agree.)
• 60% of Americans believe Trump has left serious questions about the scandal unanswered.
• A narrow 51% majority of Americans agree that Trump should be prosecuted.

To be sure, the results weren’t all bad for the Republican: The Quinnipiac poll found that most Americans agreed that politics have played at least some role in the case.

But those assumptions — which do not appear to have any basis in fact — do not negate the other findings. In other words, most of the country has effectively said, “Politics probably contributed to Trump’s indictment, but it’s a serious prosecution anyway.”

Circling back to our earlier coverage, these results were hardly inevitable. In fact, I wasn’t necessarily expecting them. For months, there’s been a noticeable asymmetry to the public conversation: One side of the political divide has flooded the airwaves with vitriol, insisting an indictment would be proof of a corrupt Justice Department and an unjust system, while the other side has been largely circumspect, saying very little about the suspect, the process and his alleged crimes.

Given this, Americans have generally only heard one side of the argument. As Republicans have screamed bloody murder in defense of Trump, Democrats have largely responded with “Anyone want to talk about infrastructure and the importance of reproductive rights?”

And that’s because the White House has told the Democrats to stay away from the topic, as Benen notes. The President appears to have confidence that, if the message is not obscured or confused by the Democrats, then the indictments being delivered will speak loudly, and without Democratic intercession, there’s less of a chance of Americans disregarding serious legal claims as being political.

Which means that, once more, Republicans are caught with marketing making one assertion, while sales, in rough analogy, is quite a different matter. In essence, this pack of fourth-raters claims Trump is just a bit foul-mouthed, and nothing more; instead, the indictments speak of brazen law-breaking, with more to come.

I look for 2024 to be a blowout, unless Republicans begin adapting to the landscape. That would entail admitting error, though, and the Party backed, quietly as they may whisper it, by God, well, they just can’t do that.

Polysemy:

Polysemy (/pəˈlɪsɪmi/ or /ˈpɒlɪˌsiːmi/; from Ancient Greek πολύ- (polý-) ‘many’, and σῆμα (sêma) ‘sign’) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “The race to extract an Indigenous language from its last lucid speaker,” Simeon Tegel, WaPo:

Over time, Campos, who communicates with Zariquiey in both Iskonawa and Spanish, has managed to share much of this frequently onomatopoeic tongue from the Panoan family of languages of the Western Amazon. It’s heavy with polysemy — words with multiple meanings — and notable for allowing users to stack multiple verbs one atop the other.

The turning of Yevgeny Prigozhin, owner of restaurants and other food services to the Kremlin^[1], as well as the leader of the Wagner Group, a mercenary band fighting in Ukraine, and, according to Wikipedia, owner of groups accused of interfering in the 2016 and 2018 American elections, on President Vladimir Putin is a grave new step in Russia’s evolution, and not necessarily a welcome step. Prigozhin is unlikely to inspire a popular revolution against the current effective form of government in Russia; instead, he appears to be attempting to establish control over the military facilities in Russian cities:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to punish those behind an “armed uprising” after the head of the Wagner private military group launched an apparent insurrection, claimed control of military facilities in two Russian cities — Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh — and warned that his troops could head for Moscow. [CNN/World]

And, of course, Russia has an immense nuclear arsenal.

Speaking of which, it’s not beyond imagination that Putin, if finding Prigozhin out of the reach of conventional means, decides to resort to nuclear weapons to put down this attempted coup. In that case, everyone in the nuclear chain of command becomes potential coup plotters, as using nuclear weapons on “the motherland” will not sit well with them.

Putin may fall to the classic internal plot.

And, for those convinced that Putin and former American President Trump shared, and continue to share, links, this must be provoking intense speculation as to how Trump’s Russian ties will change, and how that will echo throughout what passes for his business and political empires. And it’s worth wondering if the fall of Putin might affect his view of the generic autocratic head of state, which has been famously positive.

This may mark an inflection point in world history, and not necessarily a positive inflection.

¹ Thus, the epithet Putin’s caterer or Putin’s chef.

floccinaucinihilipilification:

floc·ci·nau·ci·ni·hil·i·pil·i·fi·ca·tion

noun

rare

noun: floccinaucinihilipilification

1. the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. (The word is used chiefly as a curiosity.).

   “my new book is more than just a 400-page exercise in floccinaucinihilipilification.“

Courtesy my Arts Editor.

Randy Rainbow, hard at work:

Professor Richardson is not entirely pleased with the media:

… a study out today by Media Matters shows that cable news networks are “obsessed over Biden’s age while overwhelmingly ignoring Trump’s.” Biden is only three years older than Trump—80 and 77, respectively—and apparently in significantly better health, but in the week after Biden announced his reelection campaign, CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC mentioned his age 588 times, suggesting it is a negative attribute rather than a positive reflection on his experience, while mentioning Trump’s only 72 times.

Then again, most pundits are not always happy with the media. Erick Erickson regularly rails on and on about its tilt to the left.

No doubt everyone has a point. Also true: for zealots, there are no independent, neutral media. Either you’re for us or agin’ us!

It’s worth nuancing Richardson, though. Age is only guaranteed to bring wrinkles^[1]. Good experience comes from working in an area for many years and then properly analyzing one’s failures and accomplishments. From this perspective, Trump is little more than a yahoo who managed to get elected to a single four year Presidential term, and, in that term, was ineffectual or worse by most measures, although conservatives will argue that is picks to SCOTUS were acceptable, an assertion disputed by non-conservatives.

Former Senator Joe Biden (1973–2009) and former Vice President Biden (2009-2017) benefited not only from being an influential Senator from age 31 to 67, but from being a VP, as he famously built a close working relationship with President Obama.

And he was a council member prior to his shock election to the Senate. That’s called working your way up, rather than buying position.

That’s a lot of experience, and, given his surprising list of accomplishments, from infrastructure to his response to Putin’s War, it’s clear he’s put that experience to good use.

Is it surprising the House GOP, already clearly a pack of third and fourth raters, has been repeatedly humiliated and defeated? Not really.

Yes, Biden’s age, just like Trump’s, should be concerning to the voter. It concerns me. But that’s why we have VPs. Right now we’re benefiting from his experience in two legs of the stool.

¹ An observation I picked up from late SF writer Robert Heinlein, but I doubt it originates with him.

You guessed it. Starting tomorrow, with this sneak special preview.

This weekend it’s Back to the Fifties at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds!

For those readers who’ve noticed a drop in output, we’ve been busy with other things (hello, solar panels! Well, not yet), and, politically speaking, it’s actually quite boring. The GOP is melting into a puddle as the fourth-raters desperately dig for a scandal to uphold their conspiracy theories, the transgender advocates are discovering reality is a tough nut to crack, and the rest is just details.

And I’m working on other projects as well, mostly the sort of thing that tortures my Arts Editor.

We’re in a mini-drought here in Minnesota, and it’s impacting the garden.  All season I’ve been remarking on how pictures don’t seem worth it. I tried to make something happen with a couple of clematis, but this is the best of the bunch.

And that’s after a good watering yesterday. Hopin’ the rain comes through on Saturday as forecast.

Freeze corer:

To extract [Lake Crawford’s] layered sediments, the team used a tool called a “freeze corer,” but more affectionately known as “the frozen finger.” The long aluminum wedge was filled with a mixture of alcohol and dry ice, making it much colder than the surrounding water, soil and air.

They suspended the freeze corer from a tripod and lowered it through a hole in the raft. Down, down it went, through 75 feet of water, until finally it sank into the squishy mud on the lake bottom.

Then they waited. It would take about 40 minutes for the lake sediments to freeze onto the corer’s chilly surface. [“HIDDEN BENEATH THE SURFACE,” Sarah Kaplan, WaPo]

WaPo’s latest reporting on mental illness the desire for control over our lives:

One surefire way to bring the American left and right together is an external existential threat, and in this context China, despite its enormous problems, is mentioned from time to time. This appears to be the next, ceremonial step in a careful attempt to push the divided American States out of the way and off their perch at the top:

In the last couple of years, financial news about Egypt has mainly focused on the country’s economic crisis, mounting debt and subsequent IMF bailout. However, there was some more positive news in May: The African Development Bank approved a Partial Credit Guarantee (PCG) equivalent to $345 million in renminbi as Egypt accessed the Panda bond market for the first time to finance green and social development projects.

The Abidjan-based multilateral development bank said that the PCG will allow Egypt to raise the equivalent of $500 million in the panda bond market, in which a non-Chinese entity issues bonds in Chinese currency that are placed in the domestic market of mainland China. It is often seen as an attractive funding source to businesses and sovereigns looking to diversify their funding and access low-cost capital. In 2022, the market was worth around $21 trillion but the demand for overseas yuan funding is growing.

Egypt’s fundraising also marks the first time an African country has accessed this lucrative market. [AL-Monitor]

Small in itself, but an opening that may prove attractive to borrowers who distrust American reliability. Squabbles, beware. And read Turchin.

It turns out smart phones aren’t so good for photographing bumble bees, but here’s my best.

At least when it comes to politics. Here’s Paul Waldman making an important point:

Yeah, let’s send her first. The alligator looks hungry.

See How They Run (2022) is a comedic telling of what’s happening behind the scenes at a London run of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. It’s elaborate, is populated with vivid, even overblown stereotypes, and is fun while it lasts.

But a week or two later you won’t remember it. A pity, as good work was done here, but there’s no feeling of a real heart here.

This one is odd enough I have to wonder if a password was busted,  and is from the account of Rep Clay Higgins (R-LA):

President Trump said he has “been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.”

This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this.

Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.

If his account hasn’t been usurped, then he’s going to have some explaining to do soon enough. It’s quite the embarrassment.

Which is to say, the pics are at least a week old, and the irises are done.

In a season in which the garden has seemed a bit scrubby, these were a nice pickmeup.

Canard:

a false report or piece of information that is intended to deceive people [Cambridge Dictionary]

A word that we should be used far more often. Noted in “In the House, a spectacular flameout,” Dana Milbank, WaPo:

I fear Erick Erickson is looking a little ragged this morning in his reaction to the indictment of the former President:

I will not waste my time convincing Democrats that indicting Trump is a bad idea. They are so convinced of the righteousness of the cause there is no point explaining to them that they’ve just opened their own candidates to future indictments.

I am an independent, not a Democrat, but I’ll take the liberty of answering for them: Good! If the Democrats nominate and even get elected a candidate who appears to have broken the law, then an indictment is appropriate and welcome.

Being a candidate, successfully or not, does not excuse criminal activities, and former lawyer Erick Erickson should know that in his bones. This is a red flag for me: He should know better than to spew such a hollow pronouncement, so either he’s following orders or he’s fighting for his job.

Republicans yesterday, before the indictment news broke, were busy laying out their case that Joe Biden had taken bribes. If he loses in 2024, he better lawyer up. So too should Hunter Biden.

My understanding of this is that notorious Trump operative Rudy Giuliani claimed to have talked to someone who made said claim, and the FBI, not-so-incidentally run by a Republican, Christopher Wray, nominated by the former President, and confirmed in a hugely bipartisan Senate vote of 92-5, rejected the claim as unsupported. That doesn’t seem to have stopped Republicans from making the accusation, who are frantic to achieve moral parity with the Democrats, and while the Democrats have some shady actions and characters on their account, I fear the former President is unchallenged. The man, after all, was impeached twice, condemned by Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), been indicted and subsequently lost a civil sexual assault case to E. Jean Carroll (found not guilty of rape, it should be mentioned), broken many norms and rules, claimed on tape that sexual assault is completely acceptable for a certain class of men, and, finally, been criminally indicted, reportedly for violations of the Espionage Act. That’s a tough, tough act to beat.

Are their acquisitions of bribe taking? Of course there are. The Republicans don’t care if they smell like skunks, just so long as do the Democrats as well. But who will bell the cat?

Donald Trump and his administration did not aggressively legally pursue Hillary Clinton. No Republican, in the future, will do anything other than aggressively pursue their Democrat rival upon taking office.

What, Trump was being nice? (Don’t let him hear that, Erickson, or he’ll humiliate you unmercifully, and take away your job.) Let’s not be too silly here: There’s a difference between a campaign accusation and standing in a courtroom, a judge eyeing you skeptically, making the same accusation. The first might result in some embarrassing questions, while the second might be far more costly.

Sure, they’ll pursue their ideological foes. Filing a sheaf of accusations in Court isn’t the same as putting them away, though. This is win-win for voters.

You can claim the cause is righteous. The other side does not see it that way. You can claim highmindedly that justice demands action, but even the Greeks knew justice at the cost of the world burning down was not worth pursuing.

In other words, if you can make yourself Too big to fail, you can go and do anything you like. Erickson hasn’t thought this through, or he thinks his readers won’t. But those who do will have one of those teeth-gritted laughs, because he’s obviously playing on emotion, not thoughtful rationality.

I don’t know the Grecian reference, but it sounds like they blew it.

The balance of his post is more or less adrift, since it depends on these unbalanced pronouncements, so I’ll just let it go. Just keep in mind, for being a pundit, Erickson’s often not just wrong, but badly wrong.

… there seems to be a lot of clapping in MAGA-world this and last week.

The two big items?

MAGA-world in the US House of Representatives gaped an abyss:

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) on Tuesday became the first House conservative to explicitly state he is considering a push to strip McCarthy of the gavel over his recent [debt ceiling] deal with President Joe Biden.

“Absolutely,” Bishop told POLITICO in an interview, when asked about using the tool to force out a sitting speaker. “It is inescapable to me. It has to be done.” [Politico]

So? Leading members of the caucus Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) voted for the debt ceiling deal. Yep, here the Caucus thought Speaker McCarthy (R-CA) was their hand-puppet, and not only did he, apparently, trick them, but some of their caucus supported McCarthy.

Former President Trump (R-FL) is trashing his staffers:

Former President Trump slammed his onetime press secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Tuesday, accusing her of providing the “wrong” poll numbers during an appearance on Fox News.

“Kayleigh ‘Milktoast’ McEnany just gave out the wrong poll numbers on FoxNews. I am 34 points up on DeSanctimonious, not 25 up,” Trump said in a Truth Social post, using his nickname for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

“While 25 is great, it’s not 34,” he added. “She knew the number was corrected upwards by the group that did the poll. The RINOS & Globalists can have her. FoxNews should only use REAL Stars!!!” [The Hill]

Just one of many, too.

And then SCOTUS came along and found enough votes to reject a gerrymandering scheme, shocking more than a few SCOTUS observers and assorted liberals in the process – oh, and conservatives who thought they could rely on SCOTUS as a backstop:

A divided Supreme Court said Thursday that the Alabama legislature drew congressional districts that unlawfully diluted the political power of its Black residents, an unexpected decision from a court that recently has been more skeptical of the Voting Rights Act’s protections.

The 5-4 decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., bucked the court’s recent trend of rulings that weakened provisions of the landmark 1965 act. He was joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberals, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

They upheld a decision by a three-judge panel that threw out Alabama’s maps for its seven congressional districts, which included only one with a majority of Black voters even though African Americans make up more than a quarter of the state’s population. [WaPo]

This and similar cases may result in more seats moving from the Republican column to the Democrat or Independent columns. Expecting Chief Justice Roberts to follow orders when it’s his legacy on the line? Incompetent.

And now MAGA-world shakes as the former President is indicted:

Donald Trump’s attorney Jim Trusty confirmed Thursday night that the former president has been charged with seven counts – and revealed that the charges “break out from an Espionage Act charge.”

“It does have some language in it that suggests what the seven charges would be. Not 100% clear that all of those are separate charges, but they basically break out from an Espionage Act charge,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

Trusty called the espionage charge “ludicrous,” and added that there are also “several obstruction-based-type charges and then false statement charges.”

He said his team did not get a copy of the indictment but instead received a summons via email. Trusty refused to reveal when his team received the initial letter from the Justice Department that listed Trump as a target of their investigation.

Look for self-important Republicans claiming that this will make Trump stronger. Look for the Republican base to continue edging away from Trump as they slowly realize he’s a pathological narcissist. It’ll be slow because this is a blow to the ego of the base, because they voted for someone who’s turning out to be a criminal.

And look for those closely associated with Trump to run for the hills, but only if they think they’re not totally dependent on Trump for their positions.

And look for those such as former Governor Christie (R-NJ) begin to rebuild the Republican Party in a more sane manner by kicking out the nutcases.

And, yes, relying on constant lying to bail yourself out of jams is a signal red flag of incompetency.

Poor kid.

So what’s going on with freshman Representative, and noted liar, George Santos (R-NY)?

The judge overseeing the case against indicted Rep. George Santos agreed Tuesday to unseal the names of the people who put up the New York Republican’s $500,000 bond.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Anne Shields kept her order and related filings under seal, however, to give Santos until noon Friday to appeal her decision.

Several news organizations requested that the names of the co-signers of Santos’ bond be released following the lawmaker’s indictment last month. In a letter to the judge on Monday, Santos’ lawyer, argued that unsealing the names of the co-signers would put them in a position to “likely to suffer great distress, may lose their jobs, and God forbid, may suffer physical injury.”

“There is little doubt that the suretors will suffer some unnecessary form of retaliation if their identities and employment are revealed,” the lawyer, Joseph Murray, wrote. [NBC News]

Really? Can the good consul, Mr. Murray, provide proof of the magnitude?

OK, so maybe it does, or would, happen.

Then again, maybe not. Is this just more drama from one of the noted drama queens of the age, George Santos. His fevered imagination may not quite match that of his idol, Mr. Trump, but is certainly heated.

It’s even possible Santos wants to be in jail, either for safety or notoriety reasons.

This one’s a real puzzle, I must say, and I’m looking forward to the climax.

Special Effects had a bad day when working on Time Blandishments.

Time Bandits (1981) is a rollicking exploration of what lengths a Supreme Being will go to in order to

1. Have their own version of the Monty Python troupe;
2. Retrieve the super-secret map of the world from whoever stole it this time;
3. Test out the new formulation of evil they stayed up late concocting.

Pick one and only one, please. Or, if you prefer, most movies aspire to, and some even attain, Jello Salad status, where the gelatin is the action and the fruit embedded in the gelatin is/are the themes.

Time Bandits forgot the fruit.

Which doesn’t make it boring, but it is a bit choppy and even puzzling. Best taken with a measure of alcohol. You pick the measuring utensil.

Coterie:

1. a group of people who associate closely.
2. an exclusive group; clique.
3. a group of prairie dogs occupying a communal burrow. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Trump-funded studies disputing election fraud are focus in two probes,” Josh Dawsey and Amy Gardner, WaPo:

The findings were never released to the public as Trump and a coterie of allies continued to say there was fraud. For example, the reports were not turned over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump advisers said. The reports were not reviewed by investigators until after The Washington Post reported on their existence, two people familiar with subpoenas in the case said.

The former President as a prairie dog. Gotta like it.