Month: August 2019

Here’s something fun for a Friday evening.

Virginia Giuffre, who says that [Jeffrey] Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell trafficked her [while underage] to powerful people for erotic massages and sex, claimed in depositions in 2016 that Maxwell directed her to have sex with former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Britain’s Prince Andrew (whom she has accused before), wealthy financier Glenn Dubin, former senator George Mitchell, now-deceased MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, and modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, as well as “another prince,” a “foreign president,” a well-known prime minsiter” and the owner of a “large hotel chain” in France.

None of the men named in the deposition have been charged with a crime or even sued in civil court in connection with the Epstein case. The deposition represents accuser Giuffre’s allegations, and the court documents unsealed on Friday did not contain any corroboration or further details, though many documents remain sealed.

I don’t know why she would throw the names of powerful people into legal depositions unless she’s telling the truth. I suppose she could have some motive I can’t fathom, but I’m inclined to believe her.

Before this is all done, I am sure other victims will provide similar lists. I find the whole thing sick and disturbing. Though I am going to enjoy watching Alan Dershowitz get his time in the barrel.

President Trump has made costly political decisions in the past resulting from his determination to maintain the support of his far right base. Most famously, he said that there were “good people on both sides” of the 2017 clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia over the removal of a Confederate monument.

The Unite the Right rally was a white supremacist rally that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, from August 11 to 12, 2017. Protesters were members of the far-right and included self-identified members of the alt-right, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and various right-wing militias. The marchers chanted racist and antisemitic slogans, carried semi-automatic rifles, Nazi and neo-Nazi symbols (such as the swastika, Odal rune, Black Sun, and Iron Cross), the Valknut, Confederate battle flags, Deus Vult crosses, flags and other symbols of various past and present anti-Muslim and antisemitic groups. Within the Charlottesville area, the rally is often known as A12 or 8/12. The organizers’ stated goals included unifying the American white nationalist movement and opposing the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Lee Park.

I already described the conundrum the president faces on gun control. Having eschewed a traditional reelection campaign of capturing the middle, he’s dependent on getting overwhelming numbers out of rural counties where gun control is least popular.

What’s good for the party as a whole is not necessarily good for the president. He’d face a loss of faith from many of his most ardent supporters if he signed a bill banning assault weapons, and even enhanced background checks and ban on high-capacity magazines would dampen enthusiasm for him with many people in his base. He certainly can’t afford a drop-off in turnout in rural areas. Trump’s strategy depends on them turning out in droves and voting overwhelmingly to reelect him.

NRA president Wayne LaPierre confirmed this for the president this week when the two discussed possible legislation to address the recent mass shootings in Ohio and Texas:

[Trump] has directed White House aides to determine what he might be able to do through executive action if Congress does not act. And he has reached out to Wayne LaPierre, the embattled head of the N.R.A., seeking to test whether the organization’s formidable clout in blocking gun control legislation is ebbing…

…Behind the scenes, Mr. Trump has made at least some appeals to Mr. LaPierre. On Tuesday, the president called the N.R.A. leader to describe his thinking, according to two people familiar with the call. The call was first reported by The Washington Post.

Mr. Trump talked up the idea of a signing ceremony in the Rose Garden and insisted that he believed it would be successful, according to those briefed on the call. Mr. LaPierre made clear that his members — many of whom back Mr. Trump — would not favor such a move.

The sight of Trump celebrating a gun control bill in the Rose Garden with ardent opponents of the NRA would not do much for the president’s reputation with the hardline gun rights crowd. He’s tried to cultivate that relationship with speech after speech where he has promised “Your Second Amendment rights are under siege, but they will never, ever be under siege as long as I’m your president.”

The two proposals that seem to have legs are more thorough background checks and “red flag” legislation that would make it easier to disarm people who demonstrate mental instability or a propensity for violence.  While wildly popular with most Americans, the NRA and the Republican Party have vociferously opposed both measures as infringements on people’s constitutional right to bear arms.  It will be hard to do an about-face on that position and maintain that promises have been kept.

Supposedly, theres’s a split among Trump’s children:

The hard-liners and Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is close to pro-gun activists, are uneasy about angering the president’s heavily white and rural base by pursuing gun control measures ahead of 2020.

But others, particularly Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, are aggressively lobbying the president to take action, according to Republican officials who have been in touch with her.

There seems to be some thought that the “red flag” legislation is an easier lift than the background checks,

Senator Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a close ally of the president, said Mr. Trump was “open-minded” about pursuing background check legislation, but he sounded more optimistic about the possibility of a red flag law.

But I’m not sure that it would be the easier sell with the gun rights crowd. Expanded background checks are opposed mainly because they introduce a level of hassle to law-abiding gun enthusiasts who enjoy being able to attend a gun show and walk out with their purchase without any delays. A red flag law actually threatens to disarm people whose friends and relatives think are a danger, and that describes a lot of Trump’s supporters.

As a purely political matter, it would probably be suicidal for Trump to sign any significant gun control legislation and I think Donald Trump Jr. will win any internal argument with his sister Ivanka. A different Republican would be eager to show some distance from his base in order to gain some territory in the middle, but Trump has no plans to cater his campaign to the middle. He’ll try to win some support in the suburbs by talking about socialism and some of the Democrats more unpopular health care and immigration positions, but he’s not going to go for their hearts and minds in the culture war.  He won’t get enough credit for relenting on gun control to compensate him for the loss of support with his rural base which is already reeling over his agricultural policies.

Obviously, I hope I am wrong about what he’ll do. I’d love it if he passed a bill that would both save lives and sink his reelection chances. I just doubt that he’ll make that choice.

Hello photo lovers!

The series of foto flogs continues on the revamped and revitalized Progress Pond.

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. This week’s featured photo was taken in Rotterdam. Just one of many intersections one might encounter while walking around the “cool district” in that wonderful city. So although perhaps we are not quite ready for a Foto Fair, let’s see if anyone has any good street scenes or cityscape photography to share. Maybe it’ll be an informal Foto Fair.

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. I host some of my personal photos on Flickr. I think some others use Imgur and find that hosting service satisfactory. Whatever works.

To participate in the foto flogs, 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!

I’ll admit that I have mixed feelings about the American presence in Afghanistan. My inclination is to support a complete withdrawal of our troops on the theory that things won’t get better and the status quo isn’t good enough to justify the effort. But I’m also mindful of what happened the last time we abandoned Afghanistan and how that led to a lethal national security threat. The 9/11 attacks cost us the lives of nearly 3,000 people that day, but it also caused incredible amounts of property damage, crippled the airline industry, and sent the economy into a tailspin that cost me and many other Americans their jobs. It led to an immediate increase in the surveillance state, an erosion of civil liberties, a spate of hate crimes, and an ill-advised and catastrophically expensive (in lives, treasure, and moral authority) war on terrorism.

I always weigh the downsides of being in Afghanistan against the downsides of getting attacked again on a scale like 9/11, and the complicating factor is really that I can’t be certain that we’re really preventing another 9/11 by being there. For all I know, we could be making another massive terror attack more likely.

However you come down on that question, it should be clear by now that if we’re only focused on the loss of life, we have bigger terror threats to worry about than al-Qaeda or ISIS.

When you think of a terrorist, what do you see? For more than a generation, the image lurking in Americans’ nightmares has resembled the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: an Islamic jihadist. Not a 21-year-old white supremacist from a prosperous Dallas suburb.

But long before that young man drove to El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3 and allegedly murdered at least 22 people at a Walmart crammed with back-to-school shoppers, it was clear that white nationalists have become the face of terrorism in America. Since 9/11, white supremacists and other far-right extremists have been responsible for almost three times as many attacks on U.S. soil as Islamic terrorists, the government reported. From 2009 through 2018, the far right has been responsible for 73% of domestic extremist-related fatalities, according to a 2019 study by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). And the toll is growing. More people–49–were murdered by far-right extremists in the U.S. last year than in any other year since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in July that a majority of the bureau’s domestic-terrorism investigations since October were linked to white supremacy.

Our real problem is that we have a president who is the Usama bin-Laden of white supremacist terror. The good side of that is that we’re not at risk of going overboard like we did in response to 9/11. The bad side is obvious. The fox is in the henhouse, and there’s no prospect of fighting this security threat effectively so long as he remains in charge.

This post was originally going to be a snarkfest about how Fox News talking meatwad Todd Starnes wrote some dumbass article about country music like he knows something about the genre when he doesn’t, and how he needed to be called out about it, specifically by me. I started out by calling him out as someone who writes tediously and pedantically, someone who sounds like an uptight prig, and someone whose written attempts to affect the sound of jes’ plain ol’ country folks instead came off like Monty Python’s Graham Chapman impersonating an English housewife.

I recently received a rather urgent telephone call from my beloved Aunt Lynn, the church pianist down at the Methodist church in Mississippi.

“Todd, what in the name of Minnie Pearl is going on with country music,” she demanded to know. “The girls in our Bible study class think they’re going liberal.”

[…]

That poor lady sounds like she’s been Dixie-Chick-a-fied. Bless her heart.

It’s sad to say, but Ms. Musgraves is part of a new wave of liberal artists who are determined to change the culture and twang of country music.

It works either way, to be honest, but yes: Blah-de-blah-de-blah. The half-demented ramblings of any other Fox News dipshit who gets paid handsomely to be half-demented. The rest of it continues predictably, until Starnes writes the following:

And I’d also be willing to bet a gallon of sweet tea and a bucket of chicken that a good many country music fans go to church, own a gun and share the same beliefs as Gov. Huckabee. That’s why there are more country music songs about God and pickup trucks and honky-tonks instead of Chevy Volts and juice bars.

And they also own guns – lots of guns. So why in the world would Ms. Musgraves insult so many law-abiding, gun-toting fans?

Her profane diatribe was about as popular as somebody bringing a bucket of store-bought chicken to Wednesday night church supper.

Putting aside for a moment that Starnes’ entire premise—that country music is a “conservative” genre threatened by left wingers, a demonstrably untrue position-did he just say, days after 31 people were murdered in Dayton and El Paso, that Kacey Musgraves’ position on guns might drive a country music fan to shoot her? Barely TWO YEARS after country music fans were gunned down in Las Vegas? Did he just say that?

I’d like to be going on right now about how Johnny Cash, Steve Earle, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Margo Price, and many many more would give Starnes a swift kick in the ass for so misrepresenting their personal politics. Hell, Ralph Stanley cut ads for BARACK OBAMA. Or about how Starnes’ portrayal of country music fans as a bunch of hot-headed hillbillies popping off guns at anyone they disagree with is a bigoted and elitist caricature of the people he imagines he speaks for.

Instead, I have to go on about how a Fox News personality—someone with an audience of god knows how many people—is saying a public figure (and an outspoken young woman at that) could wind up on the wrong end of a gun because someone disagrees with her.

That’s not funny at all. It borders on threatening. We’ve seen too many times that words matter: the would-be pipe bomber specifically named Donald Trump as his motivation, the Knoxville church shooter specifically wanted to kill liberals, the El Paso shooter left a manifesto echoing Trump’s language.

Starnes—who’s been fired from several positions for false reporting—knows all this perfectly well. He thinks he’s being clever by including “law abiding” in what otherwise sounds like a not-so-veiled threat to Ms. Musgrave. But he’s not fooling anyone—a Fox News personality is going out of his way to tell a public figure to keep her mouth shut, lest someone blow a hole in her head. He’s not blowing a dogwhistle so much as he’s blaring a siren.

Maybe I missed the vote, but I don’t remember electing Todd Starnes as spokesman for country music or its diverse fans. This is still America, and Kacey Musgraves has every right to say what she wants, including about guns.

President Trump’s effort to be the mourner-in-chief on Wednesday has not been receiving glowing reviews. You might say that he “failed miserably.” He trips to El Paso and Dayton, Ohio weren’t just panned in the newspapers, but also on cable television. By Thursday morning, the president had lost his patience and went on another diatribe against the “fake news” on CNN and MSNBC.  Meanwhile, his strongest defender, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, announced he was going fishing with his son. Network executives insisted that the “vacation” had long been in the works.

As Oliver Darcy of CNN notes, there is a long tradition at Fox News of sending their embattled “talent” on vacation when they arouse too much controversy and threaten the network’s advertising revenue.

— Laura Ingraham announced she was going on vacation in March 2018 after mocking Parkland survivor and gun control activist David Hogg…
— Sean Hannity went on vacation in May 2017 after losing advertisers for promoting the Seth Rich conspiracy theory…
— Jesse Watters headed out on vacation in April 2017 after making a comment widely criticized as lewd about Ivanka Trump…
— Bill O’Reilly went — and never returned from — a vacation in April 2017 after NYT reported he had settled five sexual harassment allegations for millions of dollars…

Carlson is the latest on the list, and there’s no telling yet whether he’ll come back refreshed and ready to stoke more racial hatred or be put out to permanent pasture like Bill O’Reilly.

The Fox News host has been insisting for quite some time both that the country is being overrun and fundamentally damaged by non-white immigration and that white supremacy is not a real threat. It has been trying a lot of people’s patience, but it reached a boiling point in the aftermath of the El Paso massacre when he tried to keep to the same schtick.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson is being roundly criticized for claiming that America’s white supremacy problem “is a hoax.”

It’s “just like the Russia hoax,” he told his viewers on Tuesday night. “It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power.”

This nonsensical claim came after several days of scrutiny of the El Paso suspect’s racist views and the forces that may have radicalized him. News outlets have pointed out that some of the anti-immigrant “invasion” language in the manifesto published online shortly before the attack mirrors what is frequently heard on far-right-wing talk shows and websites. And many prominent politicians have warned about the growing threat of white nationalist violence.

Carlson responded in a monologue on Tuesday night. He asserted that “the whole thing is a lie.” And he downplayed the threat by saying it’s “actually not a real problem in America. The combined membership of every white supremacist organization in this country would be able to fit inside a college football stadium.”

This immediately caused a social media storm and a reinvigorated effort to organize a boycott of any company that advertises on Carlson’s show. He announced his fishing expedition with his son one day later at the end of his Wednesday broadcast.

I don’t know when the tipping point will come, but we must be getting closer to the moment when the Republican Party and its media organs can no longer demonstrate the kind of silent complicity needed to keep Trump in his protective cocoon.

Here’s a little story that seems to have slipped under the radar that perhaps merits a little more attention: China has stopped buying U.S. agricultural products, and that is bad news for American farmers and the companies and consumers that both supply and rely on them.

With China officially pulling out of buying U.S. agricultural products, American farmers are losing one of their biggest customers. It could be a devastating blow in an already tough year for crops and commodity prices. It may also dent U.S. gross domestic product and hurt companies like Deere, whose business is directly tied to farming in the Heartland.

“Sales have already been lower this crop year because of the existing tariffs. If we went all the way to no China exports whatsoever, that would of course result in even larger market and price impacts,” said Pat Westhoff, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “Cutting China completely out of the market would be a very big deal.”

That’s our fourth largest agriculture market according to a chart further down in the article $5.9 billion dollars, out the window, down the shitter, gone like a fart in the wind, pick your pejorative. And what will we do will all those soybeans?

China made up $5.9 billion in U.S. farm product exports in 2018, according to the U.S. Census. It’s the world’s top buyer of soybeans and purchased roughly 60 percent of U.S. soybean exports last year. Westhoff estimated that soybean prices have already dropped 9% since the trade war began last July.

From September 2017 to May 2018, soybeans exports to China totaled 27.7 million tons. That number dropped by more than 70% to 7 million tons during the same nine-month period in 2018 and 2019, according to an analysis by University of Missouri.

If you read a little further down, the market for soy as animal feed here at home “has softened” thanks to floods and swine flu. So maybe Americans can finally learn to love tofu and tempeh?

As the opening paragraphs make clear that’s not just bad news for farmers—it’s bad news for companies like Caterpillar and other farm supply manufacturers.

China’s end to agricultural buying may also hurt sales at U.S. companies like Deere and Caterpillar, which rely on farmers for much of their business. Deere said in May that farmers were delaying buying products based on uncertainty. Shares of Moline, Illinois-based Deere dropped 4.8% Monday after reports that China would stop buying U.S. farm products.

Sucks to be you, John Deere! And sucks to be you, farmers! Your profit margins were already screwed by President Trump’s tariffs, climate change, and all the other pressures facing your industry, and now the guy you voted for is fucking up your lives once again!

Well the poor old dirt farmer, how bad he must feel.
He fell off his tractor, up under the wheel.
And now his head is shaped like a tread, but he ain’t quite dead.

Well the poor old dirt farmer, he can’t grow no corn.
He can’t grow no corn, cause he ain’t got a loan.
He ain’t got no loan, can’t grow no corn
He ain’t got no loan

No, I haven’t forgotten that y’all did this to yourselves. And to the rest of us, for that matter.

Photo credit: Avalon_Studio/iStockphoto

I’ve often said that our two major political parties are like vehicles that can carry any kind of passengers. Because of structural advantages they enjoy, it’s not likely that either of them will simply pass out of existence like the Whigs. Rather, the parties will evolve together with each attempting to bounce back from losses by devising new strategies to win voters from the other side. Over time, they can become complete inversions of their former selves, as we see today with a solid Democratic south replaced by a solid Republican south, the formerly rock-ribbed Republican suburbs now the fulcrum of the Democrat Party’s electoral fortunes, and the formally bright blue coal fields of Kentucky and West Virginia as ruby red as any part of the country.

The Republican Party’s vehicle began dropping off progressives and liberals and picking up conservatives in the early-mid 20th-Century. At this point, everyone on board is a conservative of one stripe or another. But the conservative movement was really birthed in response to two Democratic movements: the New Deal and The Great Society/Civil Rights Era. There will come a time when the Republican vehicle gets tired of losing and decides to start dropping off conservatives and picking up other kinds of people.

For now, that has not happened. We’ve seen a few Republicans ask to get off on their own accord and some others get kicked to the curb, but this has only resulted in fewer passengers because the only folks invited to replace those who have departed are white nationalists. The conservative movement does not want to change.

Republican strategists like Karl Rove recognize that a Republican vehicle carrying only conservatives will not continue to have the same kinds of successes they enjoyed over the last forty years.

“The 2018 election should have been a wake-up call for a Republican Party in Texas that has become too complacent,” said Karl Rove, the former adviser to George W. Bush, who built a multiracial coalition in his time as Texas governor. Mr. Rove urged Republicans to recognize that the state and country “are becoming more diverse and we need to reflect that.”

The conservative movement isn’t capable of reflecting diversity except through tokenism. They exist to preserve the position and privileges that wealthy whites have always enjoyed in this country. So, Rove is not addressing conservatives with those remarks. He’s addressing the vehicle.

If the Republican Party wants to succeed in the future, it has to start dropping off conservatives and start picking up a different kind of passenger.

The Democrats have faced the same challenge. It’s in the nature of the two-party system that each party will perform one side of a two-sided dance. But the Democrats have a few advantages at the moment. The kids at the train station prefer the look of their vehicle to the beat up jalopy the Republicans are using as a taxi. Immigrants that gain citizenship prefer to ride with the Democrats, too. Suburban voters, particularly women, are repelled by the GOP. A lot fewer of the Democrats’ passengers die each year. And, there are a ton of people idling around looking for a lift whose only option right to now is to hop in with the Democrats.

Finishing up with this analogy, there will probably not be a point at which the conservatives willingly hand over the keys to the Republican Party’s car. As we’ve seen in California and New England, they’d rather get no fares than change their ideology and rhetoric to attract the wrong kind of passengers. It looks like Texas is the next state on the list, and if it falls to the Democrats it will signal the end of the conservative movement’s viability as a taxi company. But, remember, the conservatives in the Republican Party had enough influence even in the wilderness years between the 1932 election of FDR and the 1994 Gingrich Revolution to keep the GOP in a near-permanent congressional minority. The party does not adapt easily.

What’s different about Texas is its impact on the Electoral College. During the wilderness years, the Republicans still manage to elect Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Poppy Bush. The party’s congressional misery was thus offset to a considerable degree by their potential to own the White House. If Texas goes blue, it will end that hope for conservatives of the future.

Perhaps at that point, the financiers of the right will finally conclude that conservatives need to find another ride.

When that happens, assuming it ever does, the conservatives will be stranded outside of the two-party system and may go back to the quietism that typified the religious right before the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1970’s.

Or they may not be so quiet, armed as they are with enough guns to fight a Central American civil war. The recent gun violence we’ve seen from this group probably signals that they anticipate their coming fate and don’t plan on giving up easily.

One of the funny things about bullies is that deep down inside, they are the biggest pussies you can imagine—just a bunch of whimpering, simpering, dickless wonders who talk a lot of shit but cry like babies when someone so much as claps back.

So, a day after Moscow Mitch tweeted out images of headstones bearing his Democratic opponent’s name and images of his thugs choking and groping Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Senate Majority Leader and Russian asset made a peepee in his adult diapers when protestors showed up at his house.

The senator was reportedly home recovering from a fractured shoulder at the time of the protest. Facebook video captured a moment where one of the protesters urged another to stab a voodoo doll representing McConnell in the heart.

In tweets Tuesday, McConnell’s campaign characterized the protesters as “an angry left-wing mob of Amy McGrath supporters,” referencing a Democrat who is seeking to topple McConnell in next year’s election in Kentucky.

“These threats go far beyond a political cartoon or a broken shoulder, they are serious calls to physical violence and we’ve alerted law enforcement,” the campaign said in one of its tweets.

Mitch McConnell -who just a few hours earlier was chortling and chuckling over images that could well be described as “serious calls to physical violence”- simply can’t take it when someone slaps back at him. He’s a bully, a coward, and a wimp when it comes to dealing with actual human beings. It’s one of the many reasons he’s hated at home and in DC.

Poor little Mitchy loses his shit over a fucking VOODOO DOLL. That’s the quality of leadership in the U.S. Senate. A grown-ass man calling the cops over a dolly.

The sooner that man is afflicted by dementia and has to be dropped off at a home, the better. In the meantime, help elect someone who’s not afraid of dolls.

Hi music lovers!

Another midweek, another cafe/lounge. Let’s check out an indie artist and occasional actress Sharon Van Etten. In addition to a number of recordings, she appeared in a few episodes of the recently cancelled The OA on Netflix.

And here’s her cover of a Flaming Lips tune:

The bar is always open as is the jukebox. Pull up a chair and stay a while.

Cheers!