Suppression, Sydney, Fox, Trump Riots, Ron Johnson, DeJoy, Racism, Guns

  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged explores the defamation defense of Trumper Sydney Powell: that no reasonable person would have believed her accusations about vote stealing during the 2020 election in which Joe Biden was the winner and Donald Trump was the loser.
     
    We all know I am not well versed in legalities. But even I know that the only perfect defense against defamation is proof that the so-called “defamation” is actually true. Sydney has claimed to have that proof in hand. She can show beyond any doubt that Dominion’s machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden. So all she needs to do is present that proof in court, and the lawsuit against her goes away.
     
    Instantly.
     
    Instead, she goes with the second best defense. Anyone who believed me would have to have been an absolute fool.
     
    By the way, when I pointed that out on Twitter, one noted Tweeter blocked me.



    Tee Hee.
     
    Imagine. Big Bold bellicose Joseph J. Flynn, fierce brother of recently pardoned General Michael Flynn, deathly afraid of a frail, elderly, Missouri citizen, armed only with the truth.
     
  • Sydney Powell, back when she was accusing Dominion of helping to switch the election from Trump to Biden, was interviewed a whole bunch of times by the Fox network, who then sympathetically reviewed her accusations on screen over and over again. Now Dominion is fighting back. Which is why Sydney says anyone who believed her was kind of crazy. Frances Langum reports as Fox goes all Sydney? Don’t recall any Sydney! Who is this Sydney?
     
  • News Corpse watches Fox as once-upon-a-time president Trump explains that the Trump rioters weren’t rioting at all. They were harmless patriots out for a little family fun.

  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson seems skeptical about Senator Ron Johnson’s conspiracy based excuses for the January 6 Trump riot and the current direction of the Republican party.
     
  • CalicoJack, in The Psy of Life, finds a pattern in what he sees as Republican mind boggling defiance toward no-brainer essential steps against three existential threats to our nation.
     
  • tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors lists the 9 main provisions of the shockingly restrictive Georgia anti-Black voter suppression law.
     
  • In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson says there is one, and only one story, that overarches all others. Georgia is not the only state enacting ridiculously restrictive voting laws, allowing office holders to select who gets to vote, rather than voters getting to select their legislators. Around the country, on a state level, over 250 radical changes to our system of government may make the most significant story the one involving the end of democracy as we know it in America.
     
  • At The Moderate Voice, Joe Gandelman surveys reactions to efforts by legislators in Georgia to make it harder to vote particularly in areas with longer lines, longer drives, fewer automobiles, older and fewer voting machines. You know, urban areas. The current euphemism for Black people.
     
  • As Julian Sanchez of CATO points out, the substance of the Georgia crackdown on Black voting is paralleled by the accompanying imagery:

  • We all should remember how Louis DeJoy, appointed by a once-upon-a-time president to head the Post Office, slowed up deliveries just in time to nearly mess up mail-in voting last November. Cynics may have thought that was his intent, mainly because it was not an accident. I mean, he didn’t trip and fall into the USPS like Maxwell Smart, destroying it through comic clumsiness.
     
    In Hackwhackers DeJoy is revealing a 10 year plan to slow down service and increase cost. President Biden is jumping through the necessary hoops to get him out of there.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit is on it as an in-the-news public GOP legislator notes that, by agitating for all this stuff about equal rights in voting and in police protection, Democrats are making life terrible for white people.
     
    It is not a view without precedent in today’s Republican party. Such is the current state of contemporary conservatism.
     
  • driftglass has little patience when it comes to conservative critics of the new Republican right-wing radicalism who refuse to acknowledge their own role in forming it. So he briefly investigates former winger Joe Walsh, who defends President Biden’s press conference performance from Republican attack (He had notes!!!). driftglass discovers Walsh tweets from years ago that attack Obama (he used a teleprompter!!!). Such hypocrisy. Such use of the memory hole.
     
    Here’s the problem. Joe Walsh is, and has been for a while, his own worst critic, along the same lines that driftglass now discovers. Walsh apologizes for his role in creating Trump. He exposes and broadcasts his own previous racist comments in doing that, and continuously apologizes.
     
    driftglass is right to expose the past when those who hold themselves to be above the fray pretend the past never happened. Redemption should require some degree of honesty about the past.
     
    But… if driftglass thinks redemption is impossible, that real change never happens or is irrelevant, he should say so.
     
    He can thereby condemn such figures in history as onetime slave trader, later ardent abolitionist John Newton, or in more recent history, white supremacist Hodding Carter who became a fiery opponent of segregation, Klan member Robert Byrd who became a pro-civil rights Senator, or Barrack Obama whose opinions on gay marriage evolved. I would certainly join much of humanity, cast into darkness by the cold standard advanced by driftglass. My question is whether conversion from great evil should be hoped for, or abandoned as impossible.
     
  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger is a reliable thought leader in the fight for passionate, reasoned advocacy. That makes exceptions all the more shocking. Take this both-sides-equally-unreasonable presentation on gun safety. I’m good with both-sides-are-equally-wrong conclusions. I object to a both-sides-are-equally-wrong premise. Gun safety advocates are not after your guns.
     
  • Dave Dubya totals up a partial list of mass-shooting related deaths.
     
  • Green Eagle looks into what created the monster who killed all those people in the Atlanta area.
     
  • The ever wise nojo gets exasperated by the instant question that pops up when a white shooter kills a mass of victims who just happen to be members of a vulnerable ethnic or racial group: Was racism actually involved?
     
    I’ve noticed that too. It reminds me of well paid researchers, decades ago, funded by the Tobacco Institute, earnestly questioning whether the cancer that is killing test rats is really, actually, caused by the cigarette smoke piped into their containers. The rats frantically mold the ashes into “Save us! We’re dying from the cancer smoke!”
     
    Let’s go with the obvious unless counter evidence shows up. Yeah, it was racism.
     
  • M. Bouffant at Web of Evil reacts as National Guard transport carrying COVID vaccine is stopped by a crazed gun owner who demands they release the kidnapped women and children he has convinced himself they are carrying. So, why would the NRA get indignant about separating this lunatic from his weapons?
     
  • North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz has a thought about 10 people who survived the COVID epidemic only to die from an incident of gun violence.
     
  • Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes says the on-going tragedy of pandemic death and survival-hardship is leading to unexpected hope of a new type of radical love.
     
  • Imani Gandy at Rewire News Group takes a look at the increasingly radical legal standards of the Supreme Court when it comes to abortion restrictions. Perhaps the court should stop making settled law a new matter of debate. Leave settled rights alone.
     
  • JoAnn Williams guest-hosts a uterus writing from Texas about Texas lawmakers who are not medical experts, but play doctors in the legislature.
     
  • With white people under assault from minorities and their supporters making outrageous demands for equality, self-confidence can become an issue. So Reductress helps out with four proven ways to be confident while posting as someone’s white aunt on Facebook.
     
  • Iron Knee at Political Irony looks at solid evidence of a steep decline in bigotry over sexual orientation.
     
  • Conservatives rubbed hands like a cartoon villain at the thought of President Biden’s presser. Finally, his lack of mental acuity would be exposed to the world. Alert reader Trey finds that Rex Huppke of the Chicago Tribune is getting irritated by President Joe Biden’s “stubborn and un-American refusal” to behave like the “senile old man who barely knows he’s there” that Fox keeps telling him to expect.
     
  • Andy Borowitz watches the spectacle, then Fox coverage as Tucker Carlson accuses Biden of faking prolonged mental sharpness.
     
    Oh leave me alone! I’m not a Sydney Powell cultist. I know it’s satire.
     
  • At the long-awaited Presidential press conference, a CNN reporter presses President Biden on the 2024 election. Will he run? Will he keep Kamala Harris as his running mate? Will Donald Trump be his opponent? Tommy Christopher reports on the reporters. Their unified reaction is one of embarrassment for their colleague. As in Oh good God, please make her stop.
     
  • I love Scotties Toy Box. I read the content every chance I get for insight and wonderful political entertainment. I’m grateful that he posts prolifically,
     
    It is only on the rare occasion that Scottie drives me so crazy, and I bounce totally off the golf course.
     
    Like when he explains that a Democratic Socialist – think Bernie Sanders – is not a Marxist Socialist, or a Communist. A Democratic Socialist just wants to reign in the self-destructive excesses of capitalism. Case closed.
     
    Reminds me of defund police which doesn’t mean abolish police, although that’s pretty much what every non-student of politics thinks it means. A slogan or a self-description that has to be explained repeatedly, endlessly, is a dumb slogan or self-description.
     
    I agreed with a friend that Democratic Socialism does not mean what most people think it means. When you look at the real-life definition, it simply means getting your ass handed to you in the next general election.
     
    To most of us, wanting to reign in the worst excesses of capitalism makes one a liberal leaning centrist.
     
  • At The Onion, Los Angeles acts quickly to head off a humanitarian crisis. As police confront homeless people trying to survive in a public park, the city makes available emergency hotel shelter for weary officers to rest between skirmishes.
     
  • Infidel753 reminds us how far we’ve come from the Wright brothers a century plus ago, as the first helicopter to fly on Mars will be sending back video in a couple weeks. A realistic video simulation is amazing.
     
  • Michael John Scott, current leader of MadMikesAmerica, has sad news for America’s once-upon-a-time president. If Donald Trump goes ahead with plans to set up his own social media platform, a former aide in a position to predict says it will probably suck.
     
  • On TikTok, @momwino98 reacts to the joyful gift of more children:
     

    @momwino98

    ##stitch with @thebabydustjourney πŸ™…πŸΌβ€β™€οΈπŸ™…πŸΌβ€β™€οΈπŸ™…πŸΌβ€β™€οΈπŸ™…πŸΌβ€β™€οΈ..No more babies….##fyp ##tiktokmom ##comedy

    ♬ Drive Forever – Remix – Sergio Valentino


     

  • Tea drinkers who brew their own and those of us who have used coffee bags share an annoyance unknown to the rest of the world. The Journal of Improbable Research does their homework and discovers a patent for a teabag that doesn’t float maddeningly on the surface of hot water. Where do I sign?
     
  • Athena Scalzi at Whatever wonders why she should worry about her weight when some active volcano might end regional life.
     
    I regard it as a safety issue. My size makes success much harder for any potential kidnappers.
     
  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara discovers some famous folks, and some ordinary people, who remain friends while agreeing to disagree. Michael profoundly disagrees.
     
    Comments, as of this writing, are mercifully non-existent.
     
    The wisecracks would invent themselves.
     
  • Sometimes I have to be reminded: I’m just a tired old sinner. Like when I smile, then laugh, then smile again at an account by PZ Myers. Seems someone donated a loud music generator to a cemetery next door and the saga of hate began.
    (So ashamed of myself – Heh heh)

– Podcasts –
 

2 thoughts on “Suppression, Sydney, Fox, Trump Riots, Ron Johnson, DeJoy, Racism, Guns”

  1. Thanks so much for linking to my post about the Atlanta shootings. I was afraid that it was too intemperately expressed for a lot of people, so it means a lot to me to see that it is worth linking to.

    1. Thank you for your thoughtful comment.

      To be fair, your intemperance seemed fairly nuanced to me.
      It could be that a touch of intemperance is merited when a large number of people are killed over a bad day.

Comments are closed.