Quote of the week:
“Nixon actually had a conscience. He could experience shame. Donald Trump can’t. I don’t think it’s in his character and his makeup.” – John Dean, Nixon White House counsel
1.
Oh, look at the pretty cow!
2.
The bio on Youri Cansell’s (aka Mantra) website, written by Martha Cooper, reads While equally adept at painting humans as animals, Mantra is especially fascinated by entomology, the world of insects. Mining memories of his childhood garden in France, he now paints exquisite murals, often of moths and butterflies, on urban surfaces where these ephemeral beings are seldom seen in the wild.
3.
As of Q1 of 2021, the top 10 percent held 69.8 percent of total U.S. net worth (which is the value of all assets a person holds minus all their liabilities). The top 1 percent held about half of that wealth – 32.1 percent, while the next 9 percent held approximately another half at 37.7 percent.
So if you’re in the 98% of folks in this country who will never be in this club, and still vote Republican, I updated R. Crumb’s infamous drawing just for you.
When Republicans take back control of Congress there will no plans for legislation to help the majority of folks in the United States. Nope. According to AXIOS, If the GOP wins control in the midterms, leaders want to kick off high-profile investigations as soon as the new Congress is seated. Republicans plan to draw on investigative power from allies across Washington.
Instead of focusing on policies that help working stiffs, the people scraping by, and those who cannot even do that–as the Biden Administration has tried to do–a recent retreat hosted by the Heritage Foundation, the Conservative Partnership Institute and the American Accountability Foundation, a nonprofit run by Trump administration alumni that's dogged Biden nominees with independent investigative work just might raise the hair on your neck and, a hopefully, fan the flames of your ire. If they win congressional majorities, Republicans plan to use that power in retrospective fashion to dig into Biden administration conduct going back to his inauguration. That will mean a congressional microscope on Biden administration policies and spending. It will also bring stepped-up GOP scrutiny of private sector actors such as tech companies that Republicans see as politically adversarial.
I will say, these people are organized. Not only are their plans for oversight overload broken down into minute detail, The New York Times reported that Biden’s legal team us already preparing for the possibility of impeachment as payback for the two impeachments of President Donald J. Trump.
The article goes on to say It is a routine dynamic of Washington life that when one party controls both elected branches of government, Congress goes easy on oversight. When government is divided, the opposition party is much more aggressive about wielding subpoenas and oversight hearings to try to uncover and highlight incompetence or wrongdoing by the executive branch.
But the turbulence of the Trump era and its aftermath are taking that to new levels of intensity, and some Republicans appear eager to focus on Mr. Biden and his family — particularly the foreign business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden. A handful of far-right Republicans have already signed onto a flurry of impeachment resolutions.
Republicans have also signaled an intent to scrutinize various matters related to the pandemic that could reach into the White House, including the administration’s imposition of mask mandates and the extension of an evictions moratorium, both of which were later blocked in court. A particular target is Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a top medical adviser in the Trump and Biden administrations who has become a villain to supporters of Mr. Trump.
Republican Representative James Comer of Kentucky has said he believed promising an inquiry into Hunter Biden would bolster Republican turnout in the midterms. Hunter Biden…that will bring out the hicks to vote Red. Gets ‘em all salivatin’ and shit.
In that spirit, a word from Lee Papa: Democrats shouldn’t be afraid of talking about what complete, breathtakingly fucked hypocrites Republicans are. They call us “groomers”? Please, SBC. They call us baby killers? They call themselves “pro-life”? It’s a fucking joke. They’re a fucking joke.
One day, perhaps, in a future that I’m not sure is going to happen, historians will hopefully look back on this era and write new textbooks for kids at school. Those textbooks will hopefully talk about how a cabal of wealthy fucks tried to hide the past from its children while at the same time allowing those same children to live in a nation that requires them to learn how to attempt to survive being massacred in their classroom. Those historians will hopefully teach the kids of the future the cruelty of the leaders who thought a book about being gay was more obscene than children's bodies being shredded by bullets. And those historians will hopefully say that this was just a continuation of the very violence and hatred at the core of America's story, that what those terrible people were trying to hide was themselves.
If we don't do better, if we don't take this anger we have right now, this despair, this sorrow and turn it into action, then we deserve to be a footnote in that history. And that footnote will say that we knew that an ideology of hatred and violence was ruining another generation, yet we still failed to do everything we could to stop it. We failed to save ourselves or our kids.
Let's not be like the Uvalde cops.
Do I need to say it? Just. Vote. Blue.
4.
I don’t really follow celebrity bickering stories and such, but the Depp/Heard debacle seems to be about more than just a spat between lovers. I am interested in what Wendy Murphy, a former sex crimes prosecutor, told the Guardian, “This is a symptom of a culture that has oppressed women since its founding. This is exhibit one in proof that women need full equality under the law in this country. Without it, we get absurd verdicts like this.” Murphy said Heard was denied equal protection because the US constitution has denied it to women since 1868, when the 14th amendment guaranteed “equal protection of the laws” without explicitly mentioning women. It wasn’t until 1971 that a supreme court ruling, Reed v Reed, established that dissimilar treatment of men and women was unconstitutional. She went on to say, “Without constitutional equality, the laws need not be equally enforced on behalf of any woman by any court ever, but the idea that this verdict is going to set us back, that women are going to go silent, women are scared, is bullshit. Women will respond to this with a vengeance. We will rise up, we will speak out, we will organize and respond.”
Rebecca Solnit penned an article in Harper’s titled Cassandra Among the Creeps. In part she said I wrote about the Depp/Heard trial of 2022 in 2014, because it conforms perfectly to the pattern that was perfectly clear then: The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf — that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be. The daughter of the king of Troy, Cassandra was cursed with the gift of accurate prophecies no one heeded; her people thought she was both crazy and a liar and, in some accounts, locked her up before Agamemnon turned her into a concubine who was casually slain along with him.
I have been thinking of Cassandra as we sail through the choppy waters of the gender wars, because credibility is such a foundational power in those wars and because women are so often accused of being categorically lacking in this department.
Not uncommonly, when a woman says something that impugns a man, particularly a powerful one (not a black one unless he’s just been nominated for the Supreme Court by a Republican president), or an institution, especially if it has to do with sex, the response will question not just the facts of her assertion but her capacity to speak and her right to do so. Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once.
Silence, like Dante’s hell, has its concentric circles. First come the internal inhibitions, self-doubts, repressions, confusions, and shame that make it difficult to impossible to speak, along with the fear of being punished or ostracized for doing so....
Surrounding this circle are the forces who attempt to silence someone who speaks up anyway, whether by humiliating or bullying or outright violence, including violence unto death.
Finally, in the outermost ring, when the story has been told and the speaker has not been silenced directly, tale and teller are discredited. Given the hostility of this zone, you could call the brief era when Freud listened to his patients with an open mind a false dawn. For it’s particularly when women speak up about sexual crimes that their right and capacity to speak come under attack. It seems almost reflexive at this point, and there is certainly a very clear pattern, one that has a history.
But I'll never, oh never, oh never again
If I live to a hundred or a hundred and ten
Well I fell to the ground and I couldn't get up
After drinking the quart of the Johnny-Jump-Up
5.
Here’s a bit of national press about border crossings, Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, and the Casa Alitas Welcome Center in Tucson, and how it all ties together. Sheriff Hathaway says national politicians stoke fears of a migrant "invasion" which never materialize and this has become red meat for national politicians. He calls Title 42 'dishonest' and he's mostly given up on federal leaders, after two decades of an impasse on immigration reform. He's also concerned that just continually using taxpayer money to build up more humanitarian aid infrastructure in cities like Tucson will only serve as an incentive for more illegal crossings.
An interesting read which also includes comments from Tucson mayor, Regina Romero.
6.
When we were kids, we were sure that the ‘future’ for us would include travel by jetpack. What happened?
And now…