Author: Burr Deming

• Gritty is the ferocious mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team (that’s hockey as in “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out”). Gritty fits the mascot motif of weirdness but combines it with a tough, ready for a fight, borderline bully, image of the game.
   
  Nicole Conlan writes comedy for Stephen Colbert.
   
  Put Gritty and Conlan together and you get a story for the French public, as Conlan explains Gritty in French. Don’t worry. It’s subtitled for us rubes.
   
  For finding this cultural piece, we are grateful to occasional contributor 4YourConsideration.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit brings us a recording of the seconds before and after the moment World War I ended. The thunder of guns stops. Then birds begin to sing. Remarkable.
   
• Vagabond Scholar has written many articles over the years about the absurdity and brutality of war. He links to some of them on this week’s Veterans Day, and asks for contributions written by others. I, of course, respond. I take a somewhat different tone with an article from a dozen years ago about a chance encounter in a local library.
   
• Max’s Dad gets beyond impatient at selfish ignorance as anti-maskers put themselves and everyone else at risk. After all, Veteran’s Day reminds us that so many sacrificed so much, often everything, to allow these modern patriots to stand tall, demanding their own independence from minor inconvenience.

Continue reading “Gritty, Fox, War, Armistice, Veterans, Thanksgiving, COVID, Masks, Transition”

 
Startling if true
 

I’m a ballot observer at a table with a Republican lawyer who is objecting to ALL military absentee ballots to keep them from being counted.

Absolutely sickening.

— Roger Misso (@RogerMissoCNY) November 12, 2020

What makes this wrong (if true)

Military absentee ballots are not cast by those seeking to avoid going to the polls for health reasons.

They are primarily cast by those serving their country in outposts around the world.

I checked the local Auburn paper, The Citizen, near where I grew up. Misso is a U.S. Navy veteran who flew on combat missions in the Middle East. He is also a public figure who briefly ran for Congress against two fellow Democrats in rural New York. Works on veterans’ issues.

Does this fit a documented pattern?

Republicans have insisted that some military service people from Nevada be investigated for voting absentee from out of state, apparently unaware that they are allowed by federal law. Military families are encouraged to vote, especially when stationed at remote outposts. In the Nevada case Republicans included names and addresses in documents that were made public, exposing families to harassment by right-wing extremists.

Updates

Scottie has done more research and has updates. Apparently the Republican lawyer was real, but was eventually replaced. Military ballots were put back into count.

 

From John Scalzi at Whatever:

Yes, I do actually mean it. Trump is a virus and he infected our body politic, a body that the GOP spent four decades lowering its immune system so that it could receive just the sort moral and political sickness that Trump personifies. And it worked! We got very sick, and we’re very sick still.

But it turns out our antibodies were stronger than suspected. We rallied despite the best efforts of the virus. And now we have the opportunity to get better. It’s not a done deal; the GOP is still out there trying to get us sick again, and our viral load is still regrettably high. But now, at least, there is a chance to rout it and get our body politic healthy again. That works for me, today.

– More –
 

 

Delighted to discover who posted this

 

 
Wait. What?
 

WAIT. When asked about whether Joe Biden will receive access to intelligence briefings, Kayleigh McEnany says, “That would be a question more for the White House."

Kayleigh McEnany IS the WH Press Secretary, though she is appearing on FOX as a Trump 2020 adviser. pic.twitter.com/34gfs72fzE

— The Recount (@therecount) November 12, 2020

Just to clarify:

The question was whether Joe Biden will receive access to intelligence briefings.

And
Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, speaking for the White House, replied, “That would be a question more for the White House.”

 

From Música para Despertar:

 
Read more about Marta C. González Saldaña (Marta Cinta)

It turns out that much of the story of her past does not check out.
Records, if they still exist, have been difficult to locate.

Certainly Marta C. González Saldaña was a dancer.
The video is genuine. The power of music in her life remains apparent.
But she was a woman with a mysterious personal history.

 

From Dave Dubya:

Let’s celebrate our limited victory, but be clear in this perspective.

We need to understand the Right will never stop their voter suppression. They will never surrender in their war on democracy. Fascism is always lurking in the resentments and anger of white nationalism. Corporate interests will always try to dominate our government. Hatred and division will always be stoked by Republicans and the far Right. As long as the Senate is controlled by Republicans we will have nothing close to a representative republic.

“Consent of the governed” is in the Declaration of Independence. The founders blew it with their compromise with slave states that produced the electoral college.

– More –
 

I was barely old enough to be dimly aware that Presidents are elected and that there is a difference between a democracy and a democratic republic. But I was old enough to be entranced by the candidate.

As the years since have become decades, and decades have become measurable as generations, John F. Kennedy has remained a sort of standard, for me, by which others are to be measured.

Democrat John Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon were not antagonists in the couple of years during which they were both in Congress. Some accounts had them as friends who enjoyed each other’s company. Nixon was elected Senator from California in 1950 after an extraordinarily vicious campaign against incumbent Helen Gahagan Douglas. If Douglas was not a communist, the Nixon campaign held, she was at least a fellow traveler. “Pink right down to her underwear” became part of that year’s ugly narrative.

In private, Kennedy defended Nixon when most observers held the new Senator in distain for his dirty tactics. The friendship continued through most of the 1950s as Richard Nixon became Eisenhower’s Vice President and John F. Kennedy was elected the junior Senator from Massachusetts.

Somewhere along the line things soured. It may have been in 1960 as both won party nominations for President and campaigned against each other.

A steady pattern of small incidents seemed to demonstrate a lack of Nixon class. The candidates held the first televised debates in American history. They talked with each other casually as television preparations occurred around them. Kennedy noticed that, at odd moments, Nixon’s demeanor would suddenly change for a few seconds. He would scowl and point his finger at Kennedy’s face while talking about some personal triviality. The pattern became clear. It happened whenever Nixon noticed some photographer about to snap a picture. He wanted to look tougher than his opponent.
Continue reading “60 Years and No Class Ago –
Compared to Today”

 

 

 
• In Scotties Toy Box, poll workers sign up as a part of good citizenship. They work to help voters and find themselves targets of abuse that sometimes goes to physical assault. Thank you Mr. Trump.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson advises patience. Careful counting of ballots may seem slow, and it is. But, as she reminds us, that care is a good thing. She notes the turmoil, much of it generated by Trump camp angst. At the center, election workers calmly keep on totaling.
   
• At The Moderate Voice, Kate Starbird reads social media for falsehoods and warns of the five most common types of misinformation.
   
• Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger notes an alarming election trend.
   
• Max’s Dad thinks about the number of people who would vote for a child caging, fascist, sexist, homophobic white supremacist, considers one or two horrible new representatives, celebrates a prospective Biden victory, and wishes the new President luck in cleaning up the mess.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara holds that critics of the electoral college fail to understand America. Well that settles it, right?
   
  I respectfully disagree. (sort of respectfully)
   
• On January 20, 2009, minutes after Barack Obama became President Obama, Mitch McConnell met with Republican Senators and conservative lobbyists to plan the following four years. At the center was a firm resolution to fight against any and every proposal the new President might make, no matter how valid, how necessary for the protection of the nation. The Senate filibuster as it then existed would enable their obstruction. Their only objective would be to prevent a second Obama term.
   
  Twelve years later, there are a couple of outstanding Senate runoffs in Georgia. But it looks like an extreme longshot to take the Senate back from McConnell’s current Republican majority. So here we go again. Infidel753 comes up with a simple, elegant idea on how incoming President Joe Biden can frustrate this term’s McConnell obstruction. AND he can show great bi-partisan reconciliation while doing it. Presumably he can smile while sprinkling peace and friendliness along every flowery step.
   
• Lie, lie, lie!! At The Onion, both-sides-do-it media condemns Biden for his false claim that, as the election counting concludes, the nation will come together.

Continue reading “Poll Workers Count, DisElect College, Misinfo, Lotsa Luck Biden, Bye Bond”