Racist Candidate, Indignant Party, Biden Kissing Scandal, Giuliani Tucked

  • I’m afraid this sort of thing will become more common with time:
     
    tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors highlights an attack by a Republican candidate for Congress. Seems a critic has gone to work for US Senator Cory Booker. So candidate Madison Cawthorn attacks critic Tom Fiedler, whose name he can’t quite spell, for going to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.
     
    To be fair, Republican Madison Cawthorn later explained that his unclear syntax carried the implication that he was critical of Cory Booker for being a black male and working to ruin white males. But Cawthorn is actually not a racist. After all, he once quoted Martin Luther King.
     
    So he clarifies. He is not criticizing Cory Booker for being Black or Male or for working to ruin white male candidates. He is only attacking Fiedler … for going to work for Cory Booker, a Black male working to ruin White male candidates.
     
    Also, he once quoted Martin Luther King.
     
    Of interest to me is the Boston Globe headline, which reads in part:
    GOP House candidate under fire for racist dog whistle attack.
    Really? Dog whistle?
     
  • If an over-the-backyard-fence neighbor told you that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC for us elderly folk with bad memories) had just written up a law called the Green New Deal or that Ted Cruz just introduced a new law to eliminate voting rights, would you walk home thinking both measures had passed the House and the Senate and had been signed into law by Mr. Trump?
     
    Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson is indignant at claims made by a Democratic State Representative. Seems she uses words like law and act to describe bills, and uses bill to describe what can’t be submitted until the Wisconsin legislature reconvenes. It may sound petty but, from what James writes, Republicans in Wisconsin regard it as a bit of an election scandal. False advertising, you know.
     
    Just for giggles, I went to my usual thesaurus to find what synonyms exist for bill. And I found under legislative document that the words bill, act, law, clause, code, statute, measure, enactment, and resolution are all used interchangeably, presumably by normal folk like you and me.
     
    It does remind me of a lawsuit I heard about on the radio decades ago. A small savings & loan in a little community was making a bit of a dent in business conducted by a few large banks in the area. When the little S&L advertised with a modest suggestion, Do your banking with us, the big banks sued. It was not a bank, so people putting their money in the S&L were not really banking. It was false advertising and must be stopped.
     
    The savings & loan countersued. Fair was fair. If the S&L could not advertise using the word banking because it wasn’t a bank, the big shots at the huge banks should not be permitted in their banking business ever to use the word savings or the word loan.
     
    An out-of-court settlement was very simple. All suits and accusations of false advertising were dropped.
     
    I also remember an old story that has an elderly gentleman testifying in favor of some proposal being considered by whatever state in which he lived. A hostile legislator makes fun of the old man’s use of Colonel in front of his name. The title had been awarded by the state as a honor for some bit of past philanthropy. The interrogation is short:

    Are you a combat hero?
    Were you ever in a war?
    Were you ever in the military at all?
    Just what does that “Colonel” in front of your name mean?

    The old man answers evenly:
    It’s like the word “Honorable” in front of your name. Doesn’t mean a thing.
     
    I don’t recall whether the old man and the state legislator were from Wisconsin, or whether the gentleman was testifying in favor of a bill, an act, or a law. Or whether that affects the punchline.

  • Tommy Christopher reports on reports from conservatives on the latest scandal: actual photographs of Joe Biden kissing his son Hunter. Hey, nothing else has worked so what the hell!
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged draws a lesson from the lower half of why Giuliani was in the news this week. Aside from the headline (read it), the best half-sentence was this:

    … it is a damn shame when people are set up to have revealing moments pulled wildly out of context, or to have people use their prior assumptions to create vicious, untrue images that could very well ruin a reputation, don’t you think?

  • Sarah Cooper has a special election message for lawyers.

  • Jonathan Bernstein suggests that voting is a wonderfully constructive form of political activism, but it shouldn’t be so hard. Looking through the ballot itself shows that not everything that makes it a gawdawful burden comes from voter suppression.
     
  • Author John Scalzi at Whatever is a little coarse about it, but he knocks down and squishes every argument and excuse for not voting that he can think of, including a couple I didn’t think of.
     
  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara articulates pretty well the long standing case conservatives always make opposing democracy, complete with supporting quotes from conservative academics. Mostly he documents instances in which a majority had it wrong: slavery, Jim Crow, Nazis in Germany, and (of course) anything Michael can characterize as socialism. If it involves sacrifice by the fabulously wealthy or benefits the non-wealthy, it’s a micron from Soviet tyranny. Well, that’s just how objectivism works. Not much for ideological distinctions.
     
    I do have one point of continuing irritation with conservatives. Michael thinks James Madison supported his view. In fact, Madison opposed it. Here I show why and how. I so don’t know why so many conservatives so often pick on poor James Madison to so misrepresent, and so flagrantly. But they so do.
     
  • Pretty much every post-debate3 shows that Americans regard Biden as the winner. The Borowitz Report covers a slightly different poll, one about switching on the microphone of each candidate only when it is that candidate’s turn to speak. The overwhelming majority of Americans favor continuing to mute Trump now that the debates are over.
     
  • At The Moderate Voice we discover how, regardless of general public reaction, conservative media outlets covered Trump’s final debate.
     
  • Nan’s Notebook remembers Rush Limbaugh for the great national service he performed in extracting every ounce of knowledge possessed by my president about fracking. Best sentence in the piece: How fracking embarrassing.
     
  • Whom (yeah, WHOM – look it up) do lawyers representing Trump’s campaign support for President? Well, DUH! Who even bothers to ask? Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger, that’s who. He devotes the time to research the question. And he gives us the answer.
     
  • My president says he is hyper-confident he will be celebrating victory in a week and a half. But, in case that doesn’t happen, there do exist people of good will who can help with critical decisions. nojo pokes around the globe and finds seven vacation spots that share an essential characteristic.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit looks through reports of the recent hack into Donald Trump’s Twitter account and explains the astonishing level of talent it took.
     
  • Cato’s Julian Sanchez writes about the recently announced lawsuit Trump’s Department of Justice is bringing against Google. Julian suspects it is a political stunt. The basis is not Google’s advertising dominance. It is that consumers are using the website as their predominant search engine. The argument against monopolies ever since they were called Trusts is that they do not provide consumers any meaningful choice. The internet offers dozens of search engines from which to choose, and an easy way to get to them.
     
  • driftglass doesn’t much care for one-time leftist hero and current frequent Fox guest Glenn Greenwald. Damn, it’s hard to be humble at times. I didn’t like Greenwald back when not liking Greenwald wasn’t cool.
     
  • M. Bouffant at Web of Evil brings word of a truly extraordinary bank robbery.

– Podcasts –
 

3 thoughts on “Racist Candidate, Indignant Party, Biden Kissing Scandal, Giuliani Tucked”

  1. Concerning LaFerrara’s claims, the argument for democracy is not that it always produces the best outcome from among available options. The argument for democracy is that it holds leaders accountable to the people. This creates an incentive for those leaders to choose, if not the best outcome by whatever standard, the outcome most preferred by the people they lead.

    In fact, too, the historical record seems to show that democracy produces the best outcome more often than other systems do. In practice democracies almost always better protect free expression, freedom of (and from) religion, etc., and have less corruption and a more robust social safety net than non-democracies do. This is natural since, if a ruling group will not subject itself to popular elections, that implies that it suspects it does not have enough popular support to win such an election — that is, that its policies are not supported by a majority. Suspecting this, the rulers naturally tend to resort to police-state methods to suppress real or imagined threats to their power.

    As to the much-touted republic-vs-democracy distinction, in practice all modern democracies are republics. The point of a republic is that it limits the powers the government elected by the majority can wield, thus protecting the interests of the losing minority. A well-designed republic would not allow a party or candidate to win the popular vote and still lose the election. The majority should rule constitutionally, but it should rule.

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