Insurrection, Fox, Pardons, Arrests, Next Election, Uvalde Police, 2nd A

Best play in baseball – Best. Play. Ever:

  • Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice explains why the Fox Network did not carry the first evening of testimony live on the January 6 insurrection and will offer no live coverage next week.
     
  • I do like a good burn, even when it’s unintentional. An especially sweet neighbor complimented me on my health.
    I just hope I’m that healthy when I get to your age..
    I managed to suppress a chuckle until I was out of earshot.
     
    Tommy Christopher has a more deliberate example. Former Obama official Dan Pfeiffer explains that the Fox Network decision not to carry live coverage of the Jan 6 hearings is an example of journalistic ethics because – aw hell – click to see it.
     
  • Andy Borowitz reports that the real reason the Fox Network can’t, just can’t, cover the Jan 6 hearings is their commitment to reruns of Benghazi.
     
  • News Corpse reports that the Fox Network took unusual steps to counter the Jan 6 hearings. But the number of viewers of the initial opening Thursday night turned out to be much greater than anyone anticipated. Much, much greater.
     
  • Frances Langum examines the logic of a Fox episode that discovers an unusual reason Joe Biden must be impeached.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged considers the final day before President Trump became Citizen Trump: Why did so many Republican office holders feel they needed pardons? And why did they do whatever required pardons?
     
  • PZ Myers catches glimpses of the initial Jan 6 hearing, finds hope but, as an American, knows that when it comes to political spine any hope is false hope.
     
  • It’s speculative, but reasonably so. The Palmer Report points to the strange reaction of Mr. Trump to the testimony of daughter Ivanka and concludes the one-time most powerful individual in the world is having a complete meltdown.
     
  • In Hackwhackers Michigan Republican politics was already a mess after a host of primary candidates got disqualified because of signature fraud. Now, after someone happened to see one of the gazillion videos, one of surviving candidates just got himself arrested for his part in the Jan 6 insurrection.
     
  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson has little patience with anyone who participated in the that attempt to overthrow the US government:


    And I feel compelled to add to the conflagration:

  • In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson reviews the audience size, the reactions to the insurrection hearing, and the heartburn bubbling through the Republican party.
     
  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life offers the sort of civics lesson we never considered when I was a lad: how the GOP will steal the 2022 election.
     
  • Nojo expresses a non-high opinion of the Uvalde police.
    Reminds me of Everett Dirksen, who once said he held another US Senator in minimal high esteem.

Continue reading “Insurrection, Fox, Pardons, Arrests, Next Election, Uvalde Police, 2nd A”

Celebrity Speaks of Murdered Kids: How Do GOP Politicians React?

Shootings, Thoughts & Prayers, Jan 6, 2nd Amendment, Durham Dropped

3 Powerful Minutes Worth Watching:

Continue reading “Shootings, Thoughts & Prayers, Jan 6, 2nd Amendment, Durham Dropped”

Uvalde, Police Hesitate, Both Sides, Gun Groom, Beto Terror, Miami Heat

  • For several days, news reports have had Uvalde police cowering outside the school in fear while the shooter was inside shooting little kids and their teachers. Scotties Playtime finds a new report with a new detail. It seems Uvalde police delayed federal law enforcement from going in to kill the gunman for 30 minutes. Only then did the feds decide to ignore local advice and go on in.
     
    How should this affect our perception of those local police officers?
     
    This would seem to count against police reacting in simple fear. What fear would cause them to pull federal agents back from entering?
     
    This was a peaceful community in which crime waves were on a jaywalking level. Most likely, I think, is that those in command made snap decisions based on a wrong idea of the degree of danger to those kids. Should police charge in and further endanger what they may have thought were child hostages?
     
    I confess to being a support-your-local-police kind of guy, as well as a BLM person. My opinion may change as evidence comes forth. I still see this as a reasonable reaction:


    On the other hand:

  • Legal expert Imani Gandy is unimpressed with the latest story about police hesitation:

  • Dave Dubya discovers one important commonality a whole lot of shootings share.
     
  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has certainly done the historical research, coming up with a pretty long list of deadly shootings going all the way back to …well… all the way back to January.
     
    That’s a hell of a lot of violent history for not quite 5 full months.
     
  • PZ Myers runs the death-by-gun data state by state. Missouri, where I live, is not the worst, but’s it’s bad. And Professor Myers runs a timeline, finding the single event that happens to coincide with a national explosion of death. A casual reader might detect a cause-effect relationship.
     
  • tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors walks us past the gun-grooming of kids, dozens of Fox network non-safety solutions to gun violence, Ted Cruz fleeing questions, to a kid hired to drive around with his mom doing a little shopping to prove a horrific point.
     
  • Max’s Dad is the master of funny, entertaining rants. This time, he’s bitter, angry, and eloquent about the killing of infants.
     
  • North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz wishes that those who love their firearms would grow tired of people dying.
     
  • It seems Beto O’Rourke caused a bit of discomfort:

  • Dave Columbo has a funny, bitter, valid take on post-shooting press conferences
    @davecolumbo Oh the humanity #democrats #democratsoftiktok #political #politicaltiktok #politics ♬ original sound – Dave Columbo

  • Andy Borowitz reports as a shaken Greg Abbott describes the moment of terror when Beto O’Rourke talked to him.

Continue reading “Uvalde, Police Hesitate, Both Sides, Gun Groom, Beto Terror, Miami Heat”

Mass Murder, SCOTUS Cold Draft, Putin Invasive Stall, Pro-Life Until

Continue reading “Mass Murder, SCOTUS Cold Draft, Putin Invasive Stall, Pro-Life Until”

SCOTUS, Abortion Decisions, Ukraine, GOP Humor, Susan Collins, Jan 6

  • Green Eagle detects a parallel between the political strategy that led to the disastrous prohibition era and current thinking in contemporary conservativism.
     
    Green Eagle is reasonably tuning out opinions about the right to make personal abortion decisions, on the reasonable grounds that opinions on both sides are totally predictable.
     
    I dunno. Let’s give it a try.
     
    Analysts keep telling us the prospective Supreme Court decision attacks the 14th Amendment. It doesn’t.
     
    My wife and I met and got married a little more than 20 years ago. If we had married here as teenagers, the marriage would have been annulled and we both would have been put in prison for violating Missouri Criminal Code, Section 563.240, specifically outlawing interracial marriage.
     
    That law was overturned as violating the 9th Amendment, which says rights not mentioned in the Constitution are emphatically protected by the Constitution. The 14th Amendment simply applies that protection to state, as well as federal, laws.
     
    The new leaked decision attacks the 9th Amendment. It says that protection, the protection that allows us to stay married, only applies to rights “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition”.
     
    That means the 9th Amendment no longer means what the 9th Amendment says it means.
     
    That is why conservatives can now attack other rights in addition to abortion decisions, rights that may not have been “deeply rooted” at the time. Like gay rights, same sex marriage, birth control.
     
    And interracial marriage.
     
  • Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo of Rewire News Group talk on podcast about fallout from the impending, already leaked, SCOTUS decision eliminating abortion rights, and how some lawmakers regard the new SCOTUS ruling as a start, not an end of their campaign to restrict that and other rights.
     
  • SilverAppleQueen suggests that the right to make a personal abortion decision has been abridged for decades. There is a difference between freedom to make an individual decision and freedom to purchase an abortion.
     
  • Nan’s Notebook contrasts the availability of male enhancement pills with the new law on who can make abortion decisions. She reaches an inevitable conclusion.
     
  • In Happiness Between Tails da-AL discusses the about-to-be law moving the right to make abortion decisions from each woman to each state legislature, and reveals a very personal story.
     
  • Andy Borowitz has the details as Senator Susan Collins calls 911 after checking her mail and discovering an anonymous copy of the Constitution. Took her a while to figure out what it was.
     
  • North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz is pro-choice. He mourns for those women who oppose allowing other women to make their own abortion decisions.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit suggests, persuasively, one reason so many Russian generals are killed in Ukraine.

Continue reading “SCOTUS, Abortion Decisions, Ukraine, GOP Humor, Susan Collins, Jan 6”

New Alex Conspiracy: QAnon is a Conspiracy Within a Lib Conspiracy

The current state of contemporary conservatism: A house of mirrors.

Aging Process

Burr phones in with apologies.
He is out today with tests for an age related condition, tests that are going longer than expected.

He does not see much advantage to the aging process,
and does not recommend it to others.

Despite advancing years, he assures us he will remain cheerfully immature.

He promises to be back next week.

Supreme Court and Rights:
This Has Gotten Personal

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

It is startling, perhaps even stunning, that a Supreme Court decision was leaked weeks ahead of its official release. Certainly an investigation will be launched. The leaker may yet be found.
 
We ought to be more shocked by the substance of the prospective decision.
 
The initial target, of course, is women.
 
I have long regarded the abortion debate to be valid on an individual level. Sometimes I think abortion is right, sometimes I’m against it.
 
But the decision has to be individual. As a practical matter, abortion bans involve the crushing of personal independence. It is not, and should not be, my decision, the decision of religious absolutists, or the decision of government.
 
The reasoning of the draft opinion, the opinion that has been leaked, goes beyond today’s outrage.
 
Beginning half a century ago, protection of a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy was based on the 9th and 14th Amendments. This new draft says that right is not covered because abortion was not part of America’s traditional rights.
 
The same interpretation of the 9th and 14th Amendments, before and since, protected voting rights for minorities, birth control, gay rights, same-sex marriage, and more. Saying that this legal basis is not valid, and was never valid, abolishes those legal protections.
 
The new draft decision should shock the conscience of anyone, no matter their circumstance.
 
I confess it does get even more personal for some of us.
 
Had my wife and I met and gotten married when we were decades younger, we would have been in violation of Missouri Criminal Code Section 563.240 specifically outlawing interracial marriage.
 
We would have been arrested and sent to prison. Both of us.
 
The protection of our rights, those of other couples, gay people, people who practice birth control, and women who do not wish to relinquish control of their bodies, is based on clear logic. The Constitution explicitly protects what are called unenumerated rights.
 
The Ninth Amendment:
 
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
 
For seven and a half decades, this was used to protect citizens from potential federal abuse of rights that were not specifically named. The fourteenth amendment extended that protection to state laws as well.
 
The Fourteenth Amendment includes this language:
 
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.
 
The draft that the United States Supreme Court is due to officially announce in a few weeks includes this about unenumerated rights covered by those two amendments:
 
…any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”
 
We should find within ourselves a righteous and furious anger that the conservative Republican agenda has succeeded in targeting women.
 
We should find within ourselves more than a vague concern that it will not end there.