Friday Homestead Dispatch

Some Dry Skin

“Only 31 felonies away from being the Republican candidate for president.” —Jimmy Kimmel on Hunter Biden’s conviction

1.
It’s been almost a year since I penned a piece on the ongoing mining projects in the Santa Rita range south of Tucson. Mostly hidden from view by motorists, projects are in full swing.

The Radavist, a website dedicated to bicycling by a group of individuals who share a love of cycling and the outdoors, recently published a piece by Loren Mason-Gere about the changes rapidly taking place in and around Patagonia.

In describing the region, he says no matter how you look at it, these mountains are rich. They’re among the most biologically diverse places in the continent. Here in the Madrean Archipelago, North America’s Rocky Mountains phase out as Mexico’s Sierra Madre rise south. Life of all forms follow the spines of their respective ranges to this terminus, creating an evolutionary trading-ground. In order to avoid mass species extinction, the world-famous ecologist E.O. Wilson says this area is among the most important places in the world to protect.

About the impending damage, he writes in strikingly Orwellian phrasing, their plan necessitates “de-watering” the entire watershed – pumping out all the groundwater so that unmanned heavy machinery can do their work three thousand feet below the surface. Their requested permits would allow 6.4 million gallons of water to be dumped down Harshaw Creek per day. There is no contingency plan for town flood risk, no guarantees of water access to land-owners, and little water testing or mitigation included in their plan.
While the mine claims the aquifer will “recharge,” hydrologists are quick to point out that underground water at these depths has been there for centuries and would take equally long to replenish. Regardless, South 32’s plans for a “multi-generational” operation with sufficient raw material to mine for at least 75 years, such a process is far-fetched.

As I’ve mentioned before the Patagonia Area Resource Alliance (PARA) has a resource page for you to play a part in voicing your concerns. As Noam Chomsky said, “The reason things change is because lots of people are working all the time. They’re working in their communities, in their workplace, or wherever they happen to be —and they’re building up the basis for popular movements, which are going to make changes. That’s the way everything has ever happened in history.”

2.
Republicans: swallowing lies as if they are free French fries at Burger King. Heather Cox Richardson: a key reason for Trump’s story of an apocalyptic America: describing the nation as a hellhole that only he can fix also maps over a common pattern of American grifters. So long as supporters send him money, he claims, they will be able to defend the country against dark forces: communists, Marxists, atheists, immigrants, pedophiles, feminists—just what the dark forces are matters far less than that they are a foil for the grifter. 

Fuckleroy must have dirt on every one of those GOP hucksters on Capitol Hill as the sound of sucking up could be heard all across DC as he made his first appearance there since January 6, 2021. Despite the orange one suggesting two years ago that Mitch McConnell had a “death wish” because he had voted to approve legislation sponsored by Democrats, and his derisive and racist remarks about the turtle’s wife Elaine Chao, McConnell’s sucking up could be heard the loudest. The vapid Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) uttered between sucking sounds, “There was certainly a sense of unity, the most unified I felt our caucus has been in a long time. I think we passed that magic moment when we are all ready to move forward.” Seconds of pleasure at this Hieronymus Bosch inspired pep rally.

Arizona’s Kari Lake keeps trying to bang YOUR head against the wall with the grift that she is the rightful governor of Arizona. Appeal after appeal and she keeps losing in her efforts to overturn Katie Hobbs 2022 election. Presiding Judge Sean Brearcliffe wrote that the appeals court concurred with Thompson that Lake’s “allegation(s) of fraud leap[ed] over a substantial gap in the evidence presented. We noted that Lake had ‘presented no evidence that voters whose ballots were unreadable by on-site tabulators were not able to vote,’ and only ‘sheer speculation’ that issues on election day discouraged ‘a substantial number of predominantly Lake voters’ from voting.”

Other grifters coming to light happen to be (at least) two Supreme Court Justices. According to the Arizona Mirror, Reps. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and vice ranking member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brought together fellow progressive Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse with experts and advocates for a roundtable discussion on the “ethics crisis” facing the nation’s highest court. Ocasio-Cortez said “The Supreme Court as it stands today is delegitimizing itself through his conduct. Americans are losing fundamental rights in the process — reproductive health care, civil liberties, voting rights, the right to organize clean air and water because the court has been captured and corrupted by money and extremism.” And Raskin, in his opening statement, characterized the court as “the judicial arm of the Republican Party,” drawing a throughline from Bush’s appointments to the bench of Chief Justice John Roberts and Alito to Trump’s appointments of conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Then Wednesday, U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked for unanimous consent (UC) for the Senate to pass the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency (SCERT) Act. Sen. Lindsey Graham got a stiffy as it was his turn to jump right up and block this attempt of checks and balances for the Great Robed Ones.

As you’ve heard by now the supreme court ruled Thursday in an unanimous 9-0 decision to allow the FDA’s current regulations of mifepristone to remain as is. Between sips of beer, Justice Kavanaugh wrote “Because the plaintiffs do not prescribe, manufacture, sell, or advertise mifepristone or sponsor a competing drug, the plaintiffs suffer no direct monetary injuries from FDA’s actions relaxing regulation of mifepristone, nor do they suffer injuries to their property, or to the value of their property, from FDA’s actions. Because the plaintiffs do not use mifepristone, they obviously can suffer no physical injuries from FDA’s actions relaxing regulation of mifepristone.” Well said, frat boy!

But as Charles Pierce makes clear, the decision does not touch on the merits of the case, or on the legality of mifepristone in a post-Roe world. The court just decided that the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the nuisance group that challenged the legality of the drug, was simply a gathering of random busybodies who lacked standing to challenge the legality of mifepristone because none of them could identify how they were harmed by the availability of the drug. If another case can be brought by someone who can claim they were harmed by the drug, who knows what this court will decide? And the Comstock Act is still floating around the whole business like an angry ghost.

And for those of you keeping score, and it is hard to keep up, the New York Times reported yesterday that Clarence ‘Payola’ Thomas never disclosed three trips aboard the private jet of the Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, according to documents obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee released on Thursday. This on top of a laundry list of expensive gifts from folks who need favors.

On top of all this the do-nothing House voted to hold the attorney general, Merrick Garland, in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over audio of President Joe Biden’s interview in his classified-documents case. All this while Gym Jordan, the GOP chair of the House judiciary committee, defied his own congressional subpoena last session. Talking Points Memo wrote the James Comers and Jim Jordans of the world have been churning out disinformation at a staggering rate since even before they won the majority. But each “story” they package exists in its own little universe in the media coverage instead of as another in the long and never-ending stream of disinformation.

Meanwhile, those madcap Southern Baptists banged their drums on Wednesday when a measure opposing in vitro fertilization as “dehumanizing” and asking “the government to restrain” the practice was approved, a sign of the broadening effort by conservative evangelicals and the anti-abortion movement since the fall of Roe v. Wade. These are the folks who want to make sure women have no pastoral role in their cult. Rev. Mike Law, the Arlington, Va. pastor who in 2000 amended the Faith and Message statement to say “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” said, “Let’s be exceptionally clear: We gladly celebrate the myriad of women who serve the church in many ways, and we are so grateful. This is not about women in ministry. It’s about women in the pastoral office.” Get back in the kitchen where you belong, you womens!!

3.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a Tulsa Massacre Lawsuit pertaining to the last known remaining survivors of the 1921 attack by a white mob. The Oklahoma justices ruled that the plaintiffs’ grievances, including any lingering economic and social impact of the massacre, though legitimate, “do not fall within the scope of our state’s public nuisance statute. The continuing blight alleged within the Greenwood community born out of the Massacre implicates generational-societal inequities that can only be resolved by policymakers — not the courts.”

On May 31, 1921, a white mob gathered outside a county courthouse in Tulsa where a young Black man was being held over allegations that he had assaulted a young white woman. White men deputized by the civil officials assaulted the neighborhood from the ground and the sky. Within two days, Greenwood was no more: 35 city blocks were reduced to heaping ashes, up to 300 of its citizens were dead and thousands were left homeless. The attack erased generational wealth that had been built at a time of great racial oppression. were hoping for their day in court.

4.
Was Eisenhower the last reasonable Republican? In a letter to his brother Edgar in 1954 he wrote, Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this–in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon “moderation” in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

5.
And the prize for the story of the week goes to…Marion Stokes’s archive of over 35 years of recording TV from 1975 to her death in 2012. Damn. According to Atlas Obscura, about 71,000 VHS and Betamax cassettes are sitting in boxes, stacked 50-to-a-pallet in the Internet Archive’s physical storage facility in Richmond, California, waiting to be digitized. The tapes are not in chronological order, or really any order at all. They got a little jumbled as they were transferred. First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life.

In 1975, Stokes got a Betamax magnetic videotape recorder and began recording bits of sitcoms, science documentaries, and political news coverage. From the outset of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 4, 1979, “she hit record and she never stopped,” said her son Michael Metelits in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a documentary about his mother and the archival project that became her life’s work.

And now…