West Virginia to Name Bridge for Working Class Hero and Bluegrass Pioneer Hazel Dickens

Hazel Dickens is posthumously honored by her home state with a bridge in her name. Dickens sang about women and the working class, especially coal miners.

Here is some truly lovely news.

Nationally renowned singer, Hazel Dickens, will be memorialized in Montcalm on Saturday, June 1.

To honor Dickens, her outstanding musical career, and her representation of the miners and families of Southern West Virginia, a bridge in Montcalm will be dedicated to her. Set to be named the “Hazel Dickens Memorial Bridge,” the bridge that extends across the Bluestone River, in Montcalm, will be dedicated on June 1 at 1 p.m.

Dickens was a giant in the traditional music scene, with a scorching, keening voice that was a micrometer away from a yowl. She and her musical partner Alice Girard pretty much forced the bluegrass and traditional music community to deal with feminism and political activism. They wrote their own songs, standing up for women and workers, especially coal miners. She was a staunch supporter of unions and the working class. I was deeply grateful to have seen her live, and she was a major inspiration on me as a musician.

Here’s some Hazel for you late-nighters.

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You can find more Hazel Dickens at the link below.

Jennifer Rubin Is Part of the Reason Why ‘Much of America is Comprised of Idiots’

The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin says “much of America” is made up of “slothful idiots.” Maybe she should look in the mirror, since she helped make the bed we all have to lie in.

The Washington Post’s resident conservative, Jennifer Rubin, has had a tough few years since Donald Trump was re-elected elected president (typo on my part, and God help us if he is). In 2016, she wrote a Dear John letter to the GOP, and according to Politico, has left the party. Conservatives –or at least the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem the movement has devolved into– hate her right back, writing a letter to the Post calling on them to stop calling her one of them.

The problem is, of course, that until President Trump, Rubin was hunky dory with the Republican Party, whose only real objection to the president is that he says the quiet parts out loud. She spent the 2012 campaign shilling so obviously for Mitt Romney –who until Trump was the most mendacious presidential candidate in history– that her former ombudsman publicly called for her to be fired.

So it was rich over the weekend to see Rubin bemoaning on Twitter that more Americans weren’t freaking out over Robert Mueller’s public statement about Trump’s crimes.

I will take this moment to point out that the Department of Education and public education in general has, for decades before Trump, been the target of Republicans and conservatives. This was Rubin’s party since the 1980s, as she points out in her Dear John letter. Where was she then? Embracing the very same people that don’t believe in an informed electorate. Here she is in 2010 advocating for voter ID laws using the exact same language she now abjures.

Rubin herself has also spread “durable conservative fantasy narratives” about Benghazi, and went after Chuck Hagel. And of course, there is plenty of Obama is worse than HITLER material in her wake.

Rubin displayed an obsessive antipathy toward President Obama. Indulging the most paranoid ravings of right-wing jingoists, for instance, she insisted the president’s “sympathies for the Muslim World takes precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens.” She accused him of being “the most anti-Israel U.S. president (ever),” and insisted that supporters of Israel “must figure out how (quite literally) the Jewish state is to survive the Obama presidency.” Even more egregiously, Rubin quoted, in apparent approval, an elderly Jewish woman in Florida who professed to see “parallels” between Nazi Germany under Hitler and the United States of America under Barack Obama.

So having spent nearly 40 years supporting the Republican party -complete with their anti-education and anti-voter agenda- and spreading all sorts of right wig lies and misinformation, Jennifer Rubin is now nonplussed to learn that Americans are uninformed and believe things that aren’t true.

Speaking of Mitt Romney, whose lies Rubin gleefully spread and promoted as truth? It turns out her hero has feet of clay.

It must truly be difficult to lie in the bed you helped make. Too bad the rest of America has to lie in it too.

What Does the Sohrab Ahmari/David French Fight Say About Bipartisanship?

Christian conservatives increasingly see themselves in a culture war where ethics and norms can play no part.

I confess that I can’t quite figure out what The Federalist’s Ben Domenech is talking about. He says that “American culture is past the point of peaceable navigation of conflict.” Does that mean we should start shooting each other? Are there states ready to secede from the Union?

He says that “The Left seeks to destroy all that Christian conservatives hold dear,” but he just assumes that his readers know what that means. Are liberals about to pillage their villages, poison their wells, slaughter their livestock and carry off the womenfolk?

This is all part of a pseudo-intellectual debate spurred by a spat between the National Review’s David French and New York Post editorial page director Sohrab Ahmari. Ahmari is an Iranian immigrant and recent adopter of Roman Catholicism, and he appears to have the convert’s familiar penchant for zealotry. Writing at At First Things rather than his own newspaper, Ahmari went after David French for being too civil. Here’s a sample:

It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no “polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.” (What prompted my ire was a Facebook ad for a children’s drag queen reading hour at a public library in Sacramento.)

I added, “The only way is through”—that is to say, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.

French prefers a different Christian strategy, and his guileless public mien and strategic preferences bespeak a particular political theology (though he would never use that term), one with which I take issue.

Personally, I find it a little odd that David French is considered to be such a nice person, because I’ve never felt that way about him. Yet, setting that aside, he has now been assigned the role of a weakling in the great Culture War. If conservative Christians follow his strategy they will never be able to stop drag queens from corrupting the children of Sacramento.

Somehow this dispute spurred a wider debate, with most conservatives weighing in on Ahmari’s side to argue that the times call for the combative style of Trump rather than the milquetoast approach of French.

In some ways, it’s a mirror image of the same debate liberals are having with Joe Biden.

A split has emerged among the Democratic presidential candidates over whether the party should aim to work with Republicans or wage war against them, a division stemming from a belief by many rank-and-file Democrats that the GOP has stopped playing by the old rules.

Former vice president Joe Biden repeatedly touts the need to return to an era of bipartisan comity, saying that “compromise is not a dirty word” and predicting that Republicans will have an “epiphany” on bipartisanship after President Trump is out of office.

Others say Biden’s view is naive and harks back to an era of bipartisanship that no longer exists, rather than confronting the hardball tactics that have helped Republicans notch big political wins in recent years.

“We’re done with two sets of rules, one for the Republicans and one for the Democrats,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a candidate for the presidency, said recently, suggesting that if Democrats win the Senate they should consider eliminating the filibuster rule that requires 60 votes to pass most legislation.

The main difference is that the liberals are talking about voter suppression, gerrymandering, politicized courts, abuse of power, and the impossibility of working with Republicans who lack even an iota of good faith. In other words, they’re mainly concerned with structure and process. The conservatives are concerned with people’s naughty parts and sexual preferences, which is to say that they’re freaking out about issues.  They feel under siege because they’re being punished for homophobic and racist views, and for being extremists on abortion and contraception. They think the liberals are trying to criminalize their opinions, but the liberals are more concerned that the Republicans are trying to rig our elections.

That’s not to say that liberals don’t care about issues. They know that nothing can be done about climate change, for example, as long as there is a legislative filibuster in the Senate. They are beyond concerned about the right’s assault on reproductive freedom and women’s health. But they still see the assault primarily in process terms, and seek solutions in structural reforms rather than is some ill-defined resort to incivility and win-at-all-cost tactics.

Perhaps the conservative warriors would disagree, but I see their defeats as occurring more in the private sphere than the public one. They are disinvited to speak on college campuses and their more intolerant outbursts cause media boycotts targeting advertisers.  The liberal losses come in political power, through lost seats and elections, unfavorable court rulings, and tax and regulatory decisions that favor rich Republicans and predatory industries.

Even where the conservative Christians have been dealt some blows, as on gay marriage and sodomy laws, those rulings came from a Republican-majority Supreme Court. That majority would be Democratic now if Merrick Garland had been confirmed in 2016, so which side has more right to feel aggrieved?

My takeaway from all of this is that partisans on both sides think bipartisanship has no near-term future. It’s hard to argue with them, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of America is happy with this situation. The politics of bipartisanship- of a promised return to normalcy- are probably more potent today than at any point in the past when we actually had some cross-party consensus.

Most of all, this silly debate on the right just highlights that conservatives feel that they’re in a fight to the death and that ethical concerns that get in the way of winning are signs of a dangerous weakness.  They’ll work with Trump despite his transparently fake Christian values because he has the same enemies and he’s willing to do anything, say anything, to wage the fight successfully.

The Democrats aren’t there yet. That’s why Joe Biden is so far ahead in the polls.

The Internet is Forever: Joe Biden Edition

Democratic presidential front runner Joe Biden has made a lot of inconvenient statements. Eventually they’ll catch up with him, thanks to the Internet.

Here’s a little blast from the past…

It’s Joe Biden explaining how he’d compete in the south in the 2008 elections. This is the same year he said, describing his warm relations with Indian (and presumably Pakistani) immigrants “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” A year later Biden said Barack Obama is clean and articulate.

The Internet is forever as many people have sadly come to learn. I remember all of these comments, because I was stunned and offended by them. In fact, they were part of what pushed me toward Barack Obama (I was also fairly surprised when he picked Biden for veep).

I don’t see how comments like these will help Biden’s candidacy, which I suspect is primarily built on the goodwill he built up as Obama’s vice president (and perhaps a small debt is due to the Onion’s portrayal of the former Delaware Senator as Diamond Joe. I know that they hurt him back in 2006, when the electorate was… a lot different than it is now.

I expect to see more of these clips the longer Biden remains a credible candidate. There are too many people who want to knock him out of the running, for reasons both good and bad.

The GOP is No Longer the Party of Business

Just as in the United Kingdom, the business community is watching the destruction of their natural political home.

I don’t know if the Republican Party’s top strategists are focused on what’s happening to the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom or not, but the business community should be paying attention. The Tories were almost exterminated in the parliamentary elections for the European Union, winning only four seats in all of England, Scotland and Wales. A new YouGov poll of a potential UK parliamentary election shows the Tories pulling 19 percent, even with Labour and behind both the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats (24 percent) and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party (22 percent).

The Tories will have a harder time clawing back support than Labour because they’re still expected to deliver a Brexit deal, and they probably cannot accomplish that task. The business community is looking at a Conservative Party that can no longer represent them in a minimally acceptable way. The Tories will either crash out of the European Union with no deal (as the Brexit Party demands) or they’ll cede their position as a major party.  The Labour Party can adjust to the surge for the Liberal Democrats by adopting a more coherent and consistent Remain position.

In America, the Republican Party has basically been taken over by a Brexit-type mentality, and the president’s decision to ramp up tariffs on Mexican goods is going to cause the same kind of economic chaos and hardship as a No-Deal Brexit will cause for the United Kingdom.

If you think of the Republican Party as a vehicle that can carry any kind of passengers, it’s careening down the road picking up white nationalists and evangelicals while tossing out business leaders. Unlike in the UK, where the Brexit Party is threatening to supplant the Conservatives, in America the Republican Party is being transformed into the Brexit Party.  Neither outcome is any good for business interests, but the American version can leave them homeless.

I doubt that Charlie Cook was really thinking along these lines when he noted that Trump has abandoned the center and given the Democrats an opening to seize the moderate vote. I think he’s suggesting that the left can screw things up by looking this gift horse in the mouth and abandoning the center themselves. But it remains true that many business leaders will conclude that their interests cannot be served by giving Trump another four years to consolidate his hold over the GOP. If given a choice between Trump and Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, they may look to form a third party. In general, however, they will see a Democratic president as less of a risk than the possible permanent loss of a natural political home.

The Republican Party is not in the same dire straits as the Tories because it’s much harder in America for third parties to win seats or elect national leaders. The GOP is absorbing the Brexiteers rather than losing out to them. But it’s a distinction without much difference for the big business community. Their party is no longer their party.

Friday Foto Flog v. 3.005

Hello photo lovers!

The new series of foto flogs continues.

Posting photos should be easy. Do you have images hosted somewhere? You should just need an url. Once you place an url of your photo into a comment, your photo should post just fine. No need for any code any more.

The Foto Flog was curated by a lot of people over the years. At one point, they were even themed – Foto Fairs. For now let’s keep it loose. I was up on a bridge that usually is open to traffic across the Arkansas River, and got a change to get up close to several trees that were still in bloom. The cover photo is from one of the shots I took. I am definitely not Olivia, but I do my best. Got a lot of shots I am going through now. Being on a major bridge that is temporarily a pedestrian bridge (until the waters subside) is probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience for us. At least that is the hope.

To participate, you don’t have to be a pro. I am definitely an amateur hobbyist. I’ve been taking tons of photos – mostly of landscapes and cityscapes – since I was in my early teens. Currently, I use my LG ThinQ 40 for everyday use. I do have a 35mm camera that is a good three decades old, although one of my daughters seems to have commandeered that one. I’ve always been impressed with the folks who have posted their work in the past. So, let’s make this come to life.

Cheers!

Wanker of the Day: Charles C.W. Cooke

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

I had to talk myself into responding to Charles C.W. Cooke because it’s exhausting to deal with these people. But some things just can’t go unanswered, so here goes. The premise of Cooke’s piece is that Robert Mueller treated the president unjustly by refusing to exonerate him despite the fact that he did not bring any charges against him. For some, like Jonathan Chait, this is a nonsensical objection since Mueller concluded that he could not charge the president with a crime. Cooke’s answer to this is twofold.

First, he disputes that Mueller concluded that he could not charge the president. To do this, he cites testimony that Attorney General William Barr delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee (I’ve bolded the most relevant part):

“Now, we first heard that the special counsel’s decision not to decide the obstruction issue at the March 5th meeting when he came over to the department and we were frankly surprised that they were not going to reach a decision on obstruction. And we asked them a lot about the reasoning behind this and the basis for this. Special counsel Mueller stated three times to us in that meeting in response to our questioning that he emphatically was not saying that but for the OLP opinion he would have found obstruction. He said that in the future the facts of a case against a president might be such that a special counsel would recommend abandoning the OLC opinion but this is not such a case. We did not understand exactly why the special counsel was not reaching a decision.”

It’s true that William Barr gave this version of events to Congress. It’s also true that the Special Counsel and the Department of Justice issued a joint statement on Wednesday that read:

The Attorney General has previously stated that the Special Counsel repeatedly affirmed that he was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found the President obstructed justice. The Special Counsel’s report and his statement today made clear that the office concluded it would not reach a determination — one way or the other — about whether the President committed a crime. There is no conflict between these statements.

Based on the fact that Barr testified that Mueller could envision a scenario in which he could have charged the president and that Mueller did not call Barr a liar in their joint statement, Cooke concludes that Mueller must not have charged the president because he didn’t have a case.

There are several problems with this but the biggest one is that the Mueller Report explains why he didn’t feel he could charge the president with a crime and that Mueller followed that up in person by explaining his rationale again during his brief press appearance.

The introduction to the Volume II of our report explains that decision. It explains that under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited. A special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider.

He says that he could not consider it, but Barr says that he privately said he could consider it under different circumstances. Charles C.W. Cooke chooses to believe Barr on this point, but he does so by pretending he doesn’t have to disbelieve Mueller in order to reach that conclusion.

Cooke’s second approach is to dispute that Mueller meant to infer that crimes were committed by the president. This is an odd and difficult take for someone who wrote a whole column based on their outrage that Mueller had left that exact impression with the public.  Nonetheless, he attempts to refute Chait by saying:

[Mueller] didn’t say that “Trump committed crimes”; Chait inferred it. And he didn’t say that “department policy prevents him from labeling those actions as crimes”; Chait inferred it. This being so, there’s no need for anyone to accuse Robert Mueller of being a “liar,” because there’s no need for anyone to accept Chait’s characterization of what Mueller said.

Let me start with the second point about department policy preventing Mueller from labeling Trump’s actions as crimes. Going back to the transcript of Mueller’s press appearance, I find this (again I have bolded the most relevant point):

First, the [Office of Legal Counel] opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president, because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now.

And second, the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing. And beyond department policy, we were guided by principles of fairness. It would be unfair to potentially — it would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.

So that was Justice Department policy. Those were the principles under which we operated. And from them, we concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime. That is the office’s final position, and we will not comment on any other conclusions or hypotheticals about the president.

Now, there is admittedly a bit of ambiguity in what Mueller is saying there. It’s pretty clear that he is he saying that it’s the policy of the Department of Justice that Congress has the responsibility to “formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.” On the other hand, he appears to be saying his office determined independently of formal department policy that a basic sense of fairness should preclude them from accusing the president of a crime in the absence of some formal process whereby he could defend himself. Taken together, however, the drivers of the decision-making process are not very murky. The OLC memo said he could not charge the president, so he could not charge the president.

This seems to undermine Mueller’s assent to the construction that he would not have charged a crime even in the absence of the OLC policy. But to make things a little clearer, we have to look at a couple of other things that Mueller said.

Does this sound like he thought the president obstructed his investigation?

The indictments allege, and the other activities in our report describe, efforts to interfere in our political system. They needed to be investigated and understood. And that is among the reasons why the Department of Justice established our office. That is also a reason we investigated efforts to obstruct the investigation. The matters we investigated were of paramount importance. It was critical for us to obtain full and accurate information from every person we questioned. When a subject of an investigation obstructs that investigation or lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of their government’s effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.

He definitely makes it sound like someone obstructed, and when he later says that “if we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” he makes it obvious that the president is one of those people. At most, you could quibble that he only went so far as to express a lack of confidence that the president is innocent of the charge.

Cooke suggests that Chait and many other people are only inferring that Mueller felt constrained in labeling or charging crimes, but it’s much more than a mere inference.

Here’s how I put this debate in a tweet.

A less smart-ass way of rendering that is that Mueller was asked if he would have charged a crime in the absence of a policy that precluded him from charging a crime, and he basically said the policy precludes me from answering that question. I used this example to show how the joint Special Counsel/DOJ press release made no sense, but it gets to the heart of the confusion here.

Mueller is saying that the president cannot be accused of a crime and that it’s wrong to infer that he committed a crime. That’s for Congress to decide. Barr is saying that Mueller’s refusal to insinuate a crime in more explicit terms is a form of exoneration. But Mueller was willing to go so far as to say that he could not exonerate the president.

In the matter of a conspiracy, he only said that his case was obstructed and that he could not prove the case. In the matter of obstruction, he said he would have told us if he could have cleared the president. In other words, he could not.

This is how Cooke objects to Mueller’s actions:

That’s not how it works in America. Investigators are supposed to look for evidence that a crime was committed, and, if they don’t find enough to contend that a crime was a committed, they are supposed to say “We didn’t find enough to contend that a crime was committed.” They are not supposed to look for evidence that a crime was not committed and then say, “We couldn’t find evidence of innocence.”

But, again, Mueller followed Cooke’s prescription to a ‘T’ on the conspiracy charge. He said outright, “We didn’t find enough to contend that a crime was committed.” But it’s possible that the reason he couldn’t contend that is because his investigation was obstructed, and what he conspicuously did not do is clear the president of that charge.

To summarize: the Office of Special Counsel found evidence of crimes and they explained the evidence in a report. They took the position that they could not say one way or the other whether a sitting president was guilty and that it is Congress’s constitutional obligation to create a “process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.”

For some reason, people like Cooke are hung up on whether the OLC memo is the sole reason why Mueller took this position. It doesn’t seem relevant to me. Given the totality of what Mueller said and what he produced, it’s clear that he thinks someone ought to judge the case.  It’s also clear that that that someone isn’t William Barr.

It’s up to Congress to decide. So, let’s get on with the impeachment inquiry and let the cards fall where they may.

‘Not Only is the President Politicizing the Military, the Military is Politicizing Itself’: CNN anchor and military spouse Brianna Keilar

After the US Navy went along with White House demands to obscure the name of the USS John McCain to keep Trump from going ballistic, military spouse and CNN anchor Brianna Keilar delivers a solid rebuttal.

CNN anchor Brianna Keilar is a military spouse and since February of this year has been running a regular feature on the lives of military families in an effort to bridge the gap between civilians and those who serve.

My career is a big part of my life, but my family is paramount. As a military spouse I view the news through a very different prism than I did before I was with Fernando. Now when I cover North Korea, the reality of what a war with an unpredictable nuclear power could mean to my family and our friends is the first thing that comes to my mind. This makes my job a lot more emotionally taxing but I also think it makes me better at covering the news. It takes me outside of the bubble as I cover foreign policy.

So it was really something to watch her call out not just President Donald Trump, but the Navy leadership, for their role in acquiescing to White House demands to hide the USS John McCain during the president’s visit to Japan in an understated but devastating editorial comment earlier today. It’s worth watching in its entirety, and I’ve included some highlights below.

Keilar noted that Trump’s politicization of the military was already well underway, pointing to sailors wearing “Make Aircrew Great Again” patches, the president’s partisan rant while visiting troops in Iraq over the Christmas holiday, and his order sending troops to the border to carry out unconstitutional and illegal police activities.

“The Navy, which is stretched so thin on resources and deployments that many experts think that’s to blame for recent fatal accidents, like on the McCain at sea, is dedicating manpower to deal with this USS John McCain controversy,” Keilar pointed out, saying that Trump’s actions were putting troops in harms way. She would be one to know: she has written movingly of worrying about her husband -who by February 2018 had deployed 6 times- while hearing explosions in the background on phone conversations.

“The military is supposed to serve America, the Constitution. They are yours, not the president’s,” she continued. If Trump’s efforts continue, the military will ultimately be weakened as those who don’t support the president will decline to serve,” Keilar continued. She said America risked the military being “weaponized” by one party, pointing the the example of Venezuela and other dictatorships.

“The fact that the president never authorized this move to obscure the name of the ship is actually worse than if he did,” Keilar said. “Because it means that some officials in the Navy are catering to the president’s political vendetta against John McCain.”

“It means not only is the president politicizing the military, it means the military is politicizing itself.”

It was a remarkable indictment from an otherwise straightforward reporter.

Department of Energy Celebrates Export of Molecules of U.S. Freedom

In a press release, the Office of Fossil Energy tried to rebrand liquified natural gas as “freedom gas” and said we’re bringing it to Europe.

After examining the results of the European Union’s parliamentary elections, I noted that climate had proved a potent issue for mobilizing voters and that it ought to serve as a warning sign to America’s Republican Party. The younger generations, in particular, were motivated to go to polls to send a message to the establishment parties, and the Green Party was the main beneficiary.

I did not realize that Energy Secretary Rick Perry had begun acting in a strangely defensive manner about the unpopularity of burning fossil fuels before Europe’s election results were even in.

“Seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi Germany occupation, the United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent,” the energy secretary said earlier this month, according to EURACTV.

“And rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.”

Selling Europeans on the idea that buying liquified natural gas from Texas refineries is a way of enhancing their freedom is somewhat defensible in theory. The Continent is overly reliant on Russian energy sources, which makes the governments there wary of provoking the Kremlin.

However, I think the Department of Energy is taking things too far.

Mark W Menezes, the US undersecretary of energy, bestowed a peculiar honorific on our continent’s natural resources, dubbing it “freedom gas” in a release touting the DoE’s approval of increased exports of natural gas produced by a Freeport LNG terminal off the coast of Texas.

“Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world by giving America’s allies a diverse and affordable source of clean energy,” he said.

In the same press release, Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg was quoted saying, “With the US in another year of record-setting natural gas production, I am pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of US freedom to be exported to the world.”

Megan Geuss at Ars Technica noted dryly: “According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and Japan were the top importers of freedom gas last year. China, India, and the UK buy a smaller number of molecules of US freedom.”

I’d add that it’s unclear how many molecules of U.S. freedom we can sell to foreigners before we risk losing our rights to speak, assemble and practice our religions.

In all seriousness, though, the fact that the fossil fuel industry is pushing this Orwellian language is a demonstration that they’re spooked about their brand. Maybe they noticed that Washington state governor Jay Inslee is running for president on a platform that includes “transforming the DOE Office of Fossil Energy into the Office of Industrial Decarbonization.” Maybe they’re acting with new urgency now that they’ve seen the election results from Europe.

I’m wary of mocking this kind of language no matter how ridiculous it may sound. I don’t underestimate the government’s ability to mislead. But “molecules of U.S. freedom” does seem like a poorly considered rebranding effort.

Donald Trump Is Forcing Me to Stand Up for Meghan McCain

What kind of weirdo takes pleasure in tormenting the surviving family of a dead man?

I have never made a secret of my disdain for Meghan McCain.

But while it’s not the most important thing in the world, the latest nonsense from the White House involving the late Senator John McCain -also not one of my favorite people- is simply beyond the pale. It is utterly nothing more than the act of a fundamentally indecent individual, devoid of class, empathy, and dignity. The man has not been dead for even a year, and President Donald Trump simply will not stop shitting on his memory.

As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, a U.S. Indo-Pacific Command official wrote an email to Navy and Air Force officials about Trump’s arrival in Japan over Memorial Day weekend. It included instructions for the proper landing areas for helicopters and preparations for the USS Wasp, the ship on which the president was to speak.

The official then issued a third instruction: “USS John McCain needs to be out of sight,” according to the email, which was obtained by the Journal and whose existence was confirmed to The Associated Press.

The three U.S. officials spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss private email correspondence.

Trump is denying any knowledge of it, but the man lies all the time so there’s no way anyone can believe his protestations of innocence. Meghan McCain certainly isn’t buying it.

I don’t like being in the position of having to defend someone like McCain, an entitled child of wealthy parents, who was born on third base and thinks she hit a triple. But here we are.

I simply do not understand what would drive someone to repeatedly and public demonize a dead person, while that person’s immediate family is still alive and mourning. I mean, there are exceptions: the victims of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Idi Amin, and their ilk certainly have the right to celebrate the death of a brutal dictator.

But John McCain, whatever his many faults, wasn’t that. He was a military brat who served his country honorably, which is an ongoing thorn in our classless president’s side. He was a conservative Republican who voted with Trump most of the time.

Whatever you can say about Meghan McCain, she clearly loved her father. And so did Cindy. And so does Bridget, who’s not even a public person.

These poor people -who again, haven’t even had a year without the family patriach- have to relive his loss publicly every single time Trump brings it up. And it’s clear he revels in. What kind of weirdo takes pleasure in tormenting the still-grieving family of a dead man?

It’s fucking wrong, and the president needs to shut his fat fucking mouth and leave the goddamn McCains alone. And that goes double for his awful garbage base that thinks it’s funny.