Month: November 2021

Two Trials, Judge Not, Jan 6, Alex Jones, Eric Trump, Antifa Infiltration, Boosters

  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger looks to the just verdicts in the Arbery murder for hope, but points out the fight is far from over.
     
  • Dave Dubya is grateful for the application of justice by a mostly white jury to three white neighborhood vigilantes, but sees racism continuing as a powerful undercurrent. He has a deeper gratitude for our opportunity to work and vote for sanity and decency.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged points out that it should not have been so hard to expect a conviction in the murder of a jogger. But the system nearly failed. It took more effort than it should have even to bring charges.
     
  • Hackwhackers keeps the week’s justice score. 1 good, 1 not so good.
     
  • We have all seen the same video by now. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by the father-and-son McMichael team with the help of their friend Roddie Bryan.
     
    The question that should not have been a question was whether a southern, nearly all white jury would follow the evidence and convict.
     
    Tommy Christopher has the numbers. A new national poll taken just before the verdict shows that only a third of Republicans thought the three were guilty of anything.
     

  • At The Moderate Voice David Robertson has a criticism. Those of us who were not on the juries in the Wisconsin and Georgia murder trials are not entitled to make judgments.
     
    On the Arbery verdict:
    I am not a member of the Arbery jury. So, I am not in a position to declare Arbery’s killers guilty of murder. Neither is anyone else who isn’t a member of the jury.
     
    I hold an opposing view.
     
    It is true that, as a member of a jury, I am constrained by the Constitution and my own notions of fairness in deciding whether a defendant will be deprived of liberty for the crime of murder. The prosecution must prove its case conclusively on the basis of submitted evidence.
     
    Not being on a jury, I am allowed to non-judicial opinions, to wit:
    – O.J. Simpson is a murderer.
    – So was Charles Manson.
    – And so were Byron De La Beckwith and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price.
    – So were a host of lynch party enthusiasts in the often sad history
         of US civil rights.
     
    While my opinion may be of little value, except to myself, I violate no-one’s rights in holding to it.
    Not sorry, O.J.
     

  • Frances Langum listens carefully as Alex Jones explains that he doesn’t want to go to prison. He will testify to the Congressional committee investigating the Jan 6 lynch mob insurrection. He will refuse to answer questions, based on his 5th Amendment rights. He will claim that in answering truthfully, he would incriminate himself.
     
    But he wants everyone to know that he won’t really mean it.
     
  • The Palmer Report contemplates the story now circulating that Eric Trump’s wife was in secret communication with organizers of the Jan 6 lynch mob insurrection. They supposedly used burner cell phones – to be used and discarded. Well… so far, it’s a single story in a single magazine, so who knows whether it will stand up. And Eric Trump can be expected to issue a blistering denial – fake news, unfair smear, and all.
     
    Except for this:
     
    So far, Eric hasn’t said a word. Deafening silence.
     
    Remembering one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s favorite Sherlock Holmes adventures The Adventure of Silver Blaze and the dog (which is to say Eric) that didn’t bark.
     
    About those secret calls:

  • It’s looking like white supremacist infiltration was responsible for a whole lot of the violence blamed on antifa and BLM. Much more than we thought.
     
    While it is accepted by most as a legitimate news source, I do have a bias about The Intercept. It was founded, in part, by the prickly Glenn Greenwald, so we should put it in the Trust-but-Verify category. I confess to a low opinion of Mr. Greenwald. Let’s wait for the verify part.
     
  • Wearying though it may be…
     
    Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit looks to South Africa to find that while you may be done with COVID, COVID is not done with you.
     
  • John Scalzi at Whatever explains why he got the booster shot.
     
    Has to do with listening to the experts about vaccines, and not, say, podcast hosts or virulently racist and/or performatively ignorant politicians.
     
    Well… when you put it that way.
     
  • Andy Borowitz reports as Dr. Anthony Fauci urges Americans to use COVID as an excuse to skip Thanksgiving with horrible relatives.

Continue reading “Two Trials, Judge Not, Jan 6, Alex Jones, Eric Trump, Antifa Infiltration, Boosters”

John Kennedy and
the Seven Football Games


 
[Every few years I remember President Kennedy in my own small way, by republishing]

The concussive violence of football, the long term damage to players, was never in the national consciousness in those days. Back when I was a kid, such thoughts never intruded. We had no idea.

There is something about football crowds. I’m not sure exactly what it is. But if most of us were blindfolded and put into the middle of a crowd at a professional game, we’d be able to tell if it was football or some other sport. The raucousness of the crowd, maybe? The yelling of the vendors? The play-by-play enthusiasm? Hard to say what the rhythm is, exactly, but it is unmistakable.

The Redskins vs Eagles game at Franklin Field in Philadelphia had been billed as a big deal. The stadium itself seemed like the setting for it. It was the oldest stadium in the country. The Eagles had been there only a few years.

By the time the coin was tossed that Sunday, there were over 60,000 fans in the stadium. But, on that Sunday, you would not have recognized the sound as happening during a football event. In fact, there was an eerie silence during the entire game.

A 25 yard pass from Jurgensen to Brown provided some hope for the home team. Yet, even during the breakaway run for the goal, the entire stadium was still. No cheering. No reaction. The vendors selling hotdogs and drinks worked without any of the normal shouting. Money and food were wordlessly exchanged.

The Redskins won the game. The home team lost. Nobody seemed to notice. It was as if 60,000 people had simultaneously lost their voices.

The same strange silence was reported from every stadium in which a professional game was played. There were 7 games in all that Sunday. Each one played out before a silent, sullen crowd. Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, everywhere the same. The Cardinals narrowly beat the Giants in New York. Nobody reacted. The New York crowd seemed more interested in the National Anthem than in the game.

It is hard to give a sense of those days to anyone who did not experience the times in which we lived. That Sunday, two days after the assassination, provides only small anecdotal illustration. It was a choking sort of grief.

In those days of the Cold War, the terror of nuclear conflict combined with fear and loathing toward the Soviet empire. The domino theory of international Communist conquest was considered an established fact, with debate reserved for the dangerously naive. As President Kennedy called for personal vigor, office personnel, secretaries, clerks, and managers, actually worked overtime just to feel they were contributing to the national effort.

Civil Rights was a noble struggle against evil itself, and segregationists were a national embarrassment.

It has been described as a time of innocence, with innocence lost on that bloody Friday in 1963. But it was more than that. It was less an innocence than a sense of national purpose that seems almost childlike from today’s jaded weariness. There is a sadness in many of us at the loss of that purpose, now seen through cynical eyes as something other than what we experienced then.

The carping was as severe as it is now. Pamphlets were distributed in Dallas that day with a photograph of the visiting President and the words: “Wanted For Treason!” The antecedents of Tea Party-ism existed in Birchers. Racism was evident in KKK sympathizers. Violence was met by peaceful demonstration.

A very large proportion of Americans thought that reasonable balance required a stand somewhere “between the two extremes.” Yes, voting rights and safety of black citizens in the south were considered one of the extremes.

John F. Kennedy was on a national wave. But he did more than ride that wave. He seemed to those who wanted to join the effort, as having channeled and directed it into a mighty force for progress. The country was deeply flawed, but America was working, growing, toward national redemption, leading the world on a similar path.

I was very young back then. I remember adults joining children in public sorrow, men and women crying unashamed. I remember a sort of communion of grief. It was as if we were, briefly, an extended family.

I had nightmares through my teenaged years. My imagination tells me I was not alone.

Today, the President we knew back then was not simply a reflection of an innocent country in innocent times. Partly because of his youth, his leadership, the way he spoke the words he gave to us, he, and we, were something more.

Not so much an innocent country in innocent times.
We were an inspired nation in inspired times.

– Podcasts –
 

RittenOff, Biden Builds, Gaetz Gotten, MAGA Trauma, Pence Parked, Posted

One minute of pure talent, 10 seconds of contagious joy.
Can’t not smile.
Ellen Alaverdyan, 9 year old bass player:

  • Yesterday was the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s address at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: the Gettysburg Address. In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson contrasts the dedication to a proposition with yesterday’s Republican responses to Biden’s bill to improve American lives and the Rittenhouse acquittal.
     
    Nice celebration, folks.
     
  • Max’s Dad summarizes the Rittenhouse trial containing such incompetence from all sides that it seemed as if nobody wanted to win, and reacts to the verdict.
     
  • About that verdict: Hackwhackers has reactions from a President, a Governor, and parents of a victim that a judge said would not be called a victim.
     
  • North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz says that Kyle Rittenhouse may have escaped justice, but followers of this troubled young man have convincingly testified against themselves.
     
  • Matt Gaetz offers to hire young Rittenhouse. Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson reacts:
     


    I have a slightly different take:

  • CalicoJack in The Psy of Life looks closely at MAGA folk and sees similarities with survivors of trauma.
     
  • Green Eagle explores developing evidence of a trip by then Vice President Mike Pence to a parking garage, why it is significant, and how the national press misses the point.
     
  • I already knew that our image has improved since our national leadership went from Trump to Biden. But Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger dives into the numbers and oh WOW!
     
  • As far as we know, Donald Trump had nothing in particular against the Post Office. But he wanted to win, and he hated the idea that Democrats might vote in 2020. Trump had been instructing Republicans that COVID-19 was a hoax. Democrats, by and large, didn’t believe him, so they were more likely in 2020 to vote by mail. So he came up with a plan.
     
    Louis DeJoy did have something against the US Postal Service. As a subcontractor, he had investigated by postal authorities for cheating taxpayers by overbilling.
     
    So Trump and DeJoy: It was a match made in Heaven.
     
    Trump didn’t appoint DeJoy. Only the Post Office Board of Governors could do that. But Trump had, by June 2020, appointed every member of that board. They did as Trump ordered, and THAT’S how DeJoy was hired as Postmaster General.
     
    DeJoy promptly fired senior officials like crazy and slowed down mail delivery. Slowed WAY down. With luck, enough of those Democratic ballots would get delivered too late to count and Trump would win the election.
     
    Luck ran out. Ballots counted after all. President Trump became bad loser Trump.
     
    But Dejoy is still Postmaster General and still hates the Post Office. The damage continues, and only the Board of Governors can fire the guy.
     
    But with time, terms run out. Members of the board are slowly being replaced with uncorrupted patriots.
     
    tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors says President Biden just appointed a couple more members and might have enough to kick DeJoy down the highway.
     
    And tengrain notices something odd and a little sad and somewhat revolting about news coverage.
     
  • Andy Borowitz reports on Steve Bannon’s indictment for Contempt of Soap.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit draws a lesson from the legal travails of Alex Jones. He is now officially guilty of inflicting pain on innocent parents of murdered children. The amount of damages is still in the hands of a jury.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged cannot think about the Alex Jones verdict without contemplating the nightmare of having a child murdered while sitting in a classroom, then getting calls from Jones devotees accusing you and your child of faking it.
     
  • Representative Paul Gosar(R-Hell) doesn’t like AOC so he posts a video showing himself assassinating her. Nice.
     
    He gets censured by the House of Representatives. Censured basically means he gets officially scolded and removed from committees.
     
    driftglass doesn’t like Gosar so he posts something. Tit-for-tat, I suppose, except this is a non-threatening, non-video, in which nobody gets hurt.
     
  • At The Onion, the House votes to remove Gosar from the Anime and Manga Committee.
     
  • Republican leader Kevin McCarthy holds the floor for hour after dreary hour, for a full 8 hours. Tommy Christopher watches as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki entertainingly summarizes the whole grim talkietime then demolishes McCarthy, leaving him soaking into the carpet.
     
  • Frances Langum has the courage and stamina to watch the everlasting speech by McCarthy (Okay, I know. Only 8½ hours). McCarthy insists that No One Elected Joe Biden To Be FDR, then doesn’t know how to respond to a 2 word interruption.
     
  • At The Moderate Voice social media has lots of fun with McCarthy’s long, long ramble.

Continue reading “RittenOff, Biden Builds, Gaetz Gotten, MAGA Trauma, Pence Parked, Posted”

Thank Veterans, Bannon Bumped, Kyle Cries, Fox Edits, BBB, Give Cruz the Bird

Thank you

Continue reading “Thank Veterans, Bannon Bumped, Kyle Cries, Fox Edits, BBB, Give Cruz the Bird”

Combat Hero in a Library

[Written and published in 2008. It seems fitting today.]

Last evening he reacted with amazement. “You gotta be kidding me!” I had just mentioned I was writing about him. I thought for a moment he might object. As it is, I hope he forgives me for the details I may have gotten wrong.

It was one of several encounters I had happened upon with this impressive, self-deprecating man. I often stop by the local library, and that’s where we kept bumping into each other. The first time, he was trying to recover a lost file on a library computer. I tried to help him, unsuccessfully as it turned out. We talked about the coming election. He was for McCain, I for Obama.

Then he told me a little of himself. He is a war hero from the Vietnam era. That’s my description not his. He seems hesitant as he talks about it, and he talks about it sparingly. “I just went a little crazy,” he says. His “craziness” saved others who were in mortal danger, pinned down and taking enemy fire. He was later awarded the Bronze Star for bravery. That medal is awarded for any of several acts, but when earned for bravery in combat, it is the fourth highest possible military citation given by the U.S. Armed Forces.

For years, modesty and uncertainty of how it might be regarded prompted him to keep the award stored out of view. He would not expose this symbol to derision. It was his father who changed his mind. His dad had served in the Air Force in World War Two, flying over the Empire of Japan with General Curtis Lemay. He confessed to his son that he felt just a little envious. The younger veteran was incredulous and so his father explained, it was that hidden Bronze Star. The son objected. The old man was a hero many times over. He pointed to the many ribbons, medals, and awards the elder hero had on his own wall. “But I never earned a Bronze Star,” the father stated simply.

They are everywhere, these heroes who have our lasting thanks and admiration, earned in far off lands. They are lucky to have made it back, and we are blessed in having them back. A choir director, members at church, workmates, and casual acquaintances are among them. There are many more unknowingly met in bank lines and pharmacies, the routine encounters that are part of everyday life. I have a letter from a onetime coworker, recently assigned to Afghanistan. He has my prayers until the moment he returns.

My friend in the library had a special relationship with his dad. They each shared an admiration of the other, quiet and well deserved. The last act of that regard came as the son gazed into an open casket. He placed next to his father the Bronze Star that had been awarded for an act of desperation decades ago in a land far away.

The father had chosen his son well.

Women Attracted to Strength
Because Dinosaurs

found on Twitter by Burr

 
Sean Parnell(R-PA), Candidate for Congress
 

Yes, he said these words, on the record:

  • “From an evolutionary standpoint, it used to be women were attracted to your strength because you could defend them from dinosaurs.”
     
  • “The idea that a woman doesn’t need a man to be successful, the idea that a woman doesn’t need a man to have a baby, the idea that a woman can live a happy and fulfilling life without a man, I think it’s all nonsense.”
     

Returns Return, Jan 6, QTips, Dune, Haw Haw Hawley, Manchin, Economy

Continue reading “Returns Return, Jan 6, QTips, Dune, Haw Haw Hawley, Manchin, Economy”