Again, the Men of Power Fail Us

There's a lot going on, so I'll be brief. Angry, but brief.

JFC, guys. AGAIN? (via Andrew Solender at Axios): 

It's a stunning reversal of political fortunes in just 24 hours. Swalwell was among the frontrunners in the race, but his campaign is in free fall due to allegations of rape, sexual assault and misconduct, which he denies.

His page on the Democratic fundraising website ActBlue and the endorsement tab on his website have been pulled down, his ad buys are being pulled back, at least one fundraiser has been scrapped, and he is reportedly hemorrhaging staff.

It doesn't end there: Swalwell is under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) plans to force a vote to expel him from Congress.

Swalwell said in a video posted to social media Friday: "These allegations of sexual assault are flat false. They are absolutely false. They did not happen, they never happened..."

It's hard to keep up that defense, Swalwell, when your victims are coming forward with witnesses, evidence, and receipts.

Considering how consistent a scandal this is - elected officials abusing women, especially the women working for them, and that they won't stop until confronted in public and a court of law - across both Republican and Democratic candidates, we are honestly at the point where we shouldn't allow men at all to run for any elected office or get appointed to administrative roles. I'm a guy, and I can't trust any of these guys for God's sake.

We need to flush out this corruption, this twisted mindset among men of wealth and power that they can hurt and control anybody they like. /rage

Our Military Implosion

Update: Thank you Batocchio for providing another link at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning. As the attacks on Iran seem to be intensifying this morning (April 7th) into full-scale genocide, please everyone stay safe but please also keep standing against this stupid, globally destructive war. 

Also Update: Just posted my thoughts this morning (April 7th) about our slide into genocide. Goddamn trump and every idiot who supported him.

The damage being done to our nation's military - not by our enemies but by our own leaders - in the middle of a goddamn war is a straight-up nightmare (via Tom Nichols at the Atlantic): 

The United States is in the middle of a major war, but that didn’t stop Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Thursday from firing General Randy George, America’s most senior Army officer. George was the Army’s chief of staff, and he was cashiered along with another four-star general, David Hodne, and Major General William Green Jr., the top Army chaplain, in what has been a rolling purge by Hegseth of senior officers—particularly those close to the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.

Firing the Army chaplain in particular is a hell of a move, something that's never happened before, and allegedly by someone in Hegseth who claims to be of Christian faith. A little more on that later.

Why were these men fired while U.S. forces are fighting overseas? The Defense Department has given no official reason for their dismissals, but likely they are the latest victims of Hegseth’s vindictive struggles with the Army, which he feels treated him poorly—the service “spit me out,” he said in his 2024 book—as he struggles in a job for which he remains singularly unqualified.

Hegseth began his tenure by acting against what he sees as a Pentagon infested with DEI hires. He pushed for the removal of the then–chairman of the Joint Chiefs, C. Q. Brown, who is Black, and he fired a raft of female military leaders, replacing them all with men. But dumping the Army chief of staff in the middle of a war, without explanation, is a reckless move even by Hegseth’s standards. George is a decorated combat veteran who was slated to stay in his job until 2027, and he has never publicly feuded with Hegseth—despite having good reason to do so.

This is where firing the Army Chaplain becomes an issue, because Green - guess what - is Black. Hegseth didn't see the man's qualifications as a preacher or an officer: all he saw was a "Woke" hire and let his racist world-view push Green out the door.

Making this all worse is how Hegseth - fulfilling trump's own dark hatreds - is clearly attempting to redesign our prestigious armed forces to reflect his own recklessness, viciousness, and disdain for others.

Trump and Hegseth have been on a clear mission to politicize the U.S. military, and to turn it into an armed extension of the MAGA movement. Hegseth regularly proselytizes, both for Trump and for his right-wing evangelical beliefs, from the Pentagon podium. He has intervened in Army promotions, recently culling four colonels—two Black men and two women—from the list for advancement to brigadier general. (This may be the tip of the iceberg: NBC is now reporting that Hegseth has also canceled the promotions, across multiple services, of at least a dozen minority and female officers.)

...Even in less dangerous times, the public would still have a right to answers about such an unprecedented purge of the senior U.S. military ranks. These officers are all people with long and distinguished records of service; none of them has been charged with any wrongdoing, and none of them has been accused of any kind of incompetence or disloyalty. They all seem to have committed only the offense of being part of a military institution that Hegseth—who still harbors obvious bitterness about his undistinguished and ultimately shortened military career—wants to restock with MAGA loyalists.

Instead of maintaining a military that spent decades developing a genuine system of merit based on qualifications and understanding of how things work, Hegseth is switching that out for a system openly based on toadying, ego-stroking, and posturing. Granted, some of that does happen in any organization, but at least the Defense Dept. tried to keep that on the down-low to avoid incompetency blowing everything up. Hegseth wants that as Standard Operating Procedure.

And while the U.S. military has a rather scary history of religious fervor among the ranks, they've tried to keep it moderated and leveled out between the various faiths (and among different Christian beliefs). Hegseth doesn't care about that: He's openly pushing the Christianist evangelical platform of Holy War in a way we've never seen from our political leadership in previous wars (not even during the GWOT versus the Taliban and Iraqi Sunnis). Today, a major scandal erupted when he staged a Good Friday prayer service... that failed to invite the Catholics - a world church currently criticizing the unjust war against Iran - to one of their major holy days (from Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost):

The Pentagon has invited more than 3,500 employees to attend a Good Friday service at its in-house chapel. Except it’s only for Protestants, not Catholics.

“Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel,” reads a Friday email sent by Air Force leadership, a copy of which was shared by an employee.

“I guess so the Catholics know their kind ain’t welcome,” said this employee, who requested anonymity to speak about internal communications. “It’s so ridiculous.”

A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed it is not hosting another, separate religious service for Catholic employees.

I'm Unitarian, and even I know - well, I have my ex-Catholic dad as a source - that Good Friday is one of the Big Ones, especially where they perform the Stations of the Cross. Even the Pope does it (well, when he's young enough to handle carrying the heavy crucifix). To exclude the Catholics from a Good Friday service - even one meant for Protestant service - is a huge insult to that church. Considering how many Catholics are in the U.S. armed forces (roughly 1.8 million Americans in uniform or families or base employment) this could well have serious effects on morale.

And as Nichols noted earlier, Hegseth is clearly waging a war on women in the military, allowing sexism to affect the chain of command. He's risking our armed forces at the worst possible time for the dumbest (and selfish) reasons (from Edith Olmstead at the New Republic):

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rampant racism and sexism extend further than we previously knew.

Hegseth has made efforts to block or delay the promotion of more than one dozen female and Black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marines, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process who spoke with NBC News.

“There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth,” one of the U.S. officials told NBC News...

The apparent reasons to block these promotions varied but seemed to have nothing to do with conduct—more with the identities of the officers and what they represented to Hegseth.

These are qualified officers: People who have served in the military for decades, who know how things work and how to get the best out of the personnel under their commands. Hegseth is kicking out people who know their jobs, all because Hegseth doesn't know his own job.

This ongoing war - not just the war in Iran, and South America; but the Culture War against America's move towards social justice - is going to get worse, and it's not going to end until these goddamn wingnuts from the Far Right are out of power forever. Pray for that.

Unhappy Thoughts Part One

Currently coping with a swirl of thoughts, most of them unsettling and troubling. There's so many of them that I'm going to have to break them down into bite-sized chunks.

I seriously believe the level of sexism in this nation means we will never see a woman elected to the Presidency. I know that people are pointing to "other issues" as to the reasons why the two major candidates - with Hillary in 2016 getting tarred with "her emails" fake scandal, with Kamala in 2024 getting tarred with "inflation" - lost to a clearly unqualified (and by 2024 clearly criminal) donald trump, but the backlash they both got from male voters can't be ignored. Olga Khazan at the Atlantic makes the case:

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was a former secretary of state and senator running against the politically inexperienced real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. She lost. People would vote for a woman, the thinking went, just not that woman.

In 2024, Kamala Harris was the vice president, a former senator, and a former attorney general also running against Trump, who was by then a convicted felon and sexual abuser. She also lost. People would vote for a woman, once again, just not that woman.

The events of the past eight years might prompt some to wonder: If Clinton wasn’t good enough, and neither was Harris, will a woman ever be good enough to be president? What kind of a woman would it take? According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president. “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”

...In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man. This bias against female presidential candidates, Ono and Burden found, was most pronounced among men and among politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with.

There is painful irony that women candidates lost to a man exposed as a vulgarian towards women, a court-adjudicated rapist and confirmed misogynist.

For all the decent - if not great - choices of women leaders in the Democratic ranks like Governor Whitmer or AOC, it is insane that too many men - even among liberals! - just won't consider it.

Screaming Into the Void

I went to bed early on Election Night because I didn't want the stress to get the worst of me.

I wake up to a goddamn nightmare.

I thought the worst case nightmare of a trump "win" was that he was going to fight legal challenges all the way up to the Supreme Court. I didn't consider even the possibility trump would claim more popular votes than Harris. trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by three million votes, and lost it more by seven million in 2020. trump had done nothing to improve his favorability numbers in all that time, and yet... what the hell?

And it's not that trump's winning by garnering a higher count than the 74 million he got in 2020: his current total is below that (last saw it was 71 million) and even after all the final tallying is done by this weekend it doesn't look like it'll be any higher than that 74 million from last time.

What's horrifying is how Kamala's vote total - based off the 81 million Biden got earlier - dropped off a literal cliff down to 66 million(!). That total should increase slightly during the final ballot counting, but there's no way she's finding 15 million votes hiding away under a sofa or something to regain the popular vote or flip the Electoral College. This is... wrong. This is broken.

WHERE THE HELL DID 15 MILLION DEMOCRATIC VOTES GO?

This was after all the reports of increased voter registration, this was after all the early voting reports of higher turnout. Pennsylvania and Florida in particular were reporting big turnout overall. There were few signs that the turnout numbers were favoring trump or Republicans. If anything, most of the turnout numbers were matching - if not exceeding in some states - 2020 numbers. AND YET. There's 15 million votes unaccounted for.

This can't be right.

By all accounts, Harris ran the final stages of the campaign - taking over from President Biden when he dropped out from media pressure to do so - just right. She fundraised better than trump. Her rallies drew bigger crowds. The ground game was knocking on every door in the battleground states and then some. There weren't any signs from the voting base itself that they disapproved of Harris (other than the pro-Palestinians fearing the year-long war Israel was inflicting on the Gaza and West Bank citizenry).

There wasn't any evidence that turnout was going to drop this bad. Where the hell did 15 million voters from 2020 go?

Other than grappling at the conspiracy train of thought that the voting machines were rigged - across every battleground state, even the ones where Democrats held local control - the only other thought is that all that voter turnout was a mirage, or that voters avoided marking off a choice for President on the ballots either way.

Looking at the results nationwide, it's not as though that 15 million votes went towards the Libertarian or Green candidates (the Libertarians had barely 540,000 votes, and the Greens got 611,000). Those 15 million votes are just... gone.

What the hell happened to the 81 million voters who showed up for Biden where 15 million of them refused - in an election that could have stopped a known felon and sex offender in trump - to show up for Harris?

This is both frustrating and alarming as hell.

And now we're stuck in hell.

I am regretting ever getting this emotionally invested into my nation's own well-being and survival against the forces of darkness that trump (and his BFF Putin) represent.

For a long time, I thought the Far Right was too extreme, too cruel, too corrupt to truly represent what the United States could be (even with all the racism and sexism dripping through our history books).

I believed the Republican Party wasn't truly reflective of the majority of Americans - not since the 1990s when the sheen of Reaganism fell away - and that they were really a minority party surviving on gerrymandering and voter suppression. The possibility that massive voter suppression happened last night is there, but on this scale? Considering how so many Americans ARE happy voting for a known criminal felon, tax fraud, and sex offender in trump, the only honest reality is that GODS HELP US a majority of Americans are truly this blind, truly this cruel, truly this spiteful towards their own communities and families.

I'm despairing for the poor, for the Blacks facing law enforcement crackdowns to serve trump's obsession for violence against them, for the Latinos and Arabs about to suffer hardships under a vicious anti-immigrant regime, for the women who are about to lose even more rights to an evangelical mob, for the children about to see their personal lives and their safety violated by anti-trans and anti-gay haters.

I'm not despairing for America though. Those sons of bitches voted for a monster about to blow everything up to feed their fear and hate, and they will get caught in the chaos and destruction they thought was going to inflict everyone else.

Goddamn us tonight. History and humanity will never forgive us.

The Conservative Contempt for Women

As low as the Far Right Republican political agenda for 2024 can sink, it still keeps going in a downward spiral. Over the weekend, the media got wind of yet another interview VP candidate JD Vance gave where he exposed more misogyny towards women who did not fit his world-view (via Jason Wilson at the Guardian (US)): 

Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.

The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”...

Ever since he was picked by Trump, Vance has been hit by scandals over his past comments, especially those concerning women and his perception of their role in society.

Last week his campaign was rocked by previous comments blasting a teachers union president for not having “some of her own” children. His previous characterizations of Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies” have also troubled the Trump campaign’s efforts to appeal to suburban women.

Sophie Bjork-James, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who has written extensively on topics including US evangelicals and populist politics, said: “Vance represents a new articulation of rightwing politics that is bridging the Christian right and a tech-influenced hypermasculine conservatism.

“He appeals to evangelicals with the message that we find happiness by fulfilling traditional gender roles, which is a cornerstone of white evangelical Christianity. He also speaks to a misogynist trend emerging out of the tech world among people who would prefer not to talk about any kind of diversity at all.”

“What they share is the view that women shouldn’t be in paid work: they should be in the home and rearing children. But the public line isn’t ‘we hate women’, it’s ‘women will be happier if they stay at home’,” she added.

The Guardian contacted the Vance campaign for comment but received no response...

As a man, JD Vance is trying hard to present himself as a patriarchal Alpha Male: dismissive of women's rights, projecting his own misery onto them, and refusing to express any basic decency at all. 

We've seen these Alpha Male wannabes - and their Incel cousins - running around on social media, showing off their "conquests", expressing their toxic mindsets, and acting out their dominance towards everyone they view as their lessers. 

Remember Andrew Tate, the preening jackass who advertises himself as a male role model and tried taunting a young woman about his prized gas guzzling sports cars... and ended up exposing himself to arrest by Romanian authorities pursuing him for abuse, fraud, and human sex trafficking? He resumed his public behavior as a misogynistic asshole even after that arrest, which all led to fresh arrests by Romanian officials now including sex trafficking of minors.

This is who these women-hating men are: They can't stop themselves from their attitudes that women - and the younger the better - are property, no different than the 16 cars Tate has to own to make himself feel superior to the rest of us. To these men, women are basically slaves to their whims and needs. They don't see women as half the human population, or as humans at all. Ask them if women have brains, these guys will laugh. Ask them if women have souls, these guys will shrug it off.

As human beings, Vance and his Alpha Male colleagues just keep proving themselves - and everything their world-view represents - vile and wrong.

It's not just Vance that's the problem. The guy who hired him as his vice presidential candidate - trump - is demonstrably worse. Above all, donald trump is officially a sex offender, found liable for sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll that the judge declared was by definition rape. There's the long history of trump abusing his "privileges" owning the Miss Teen USA pageants. There's the report he raped his first wife Ivana. There's trump himself proudly boasting he can grab women by the p-ssy in the most vulgar way possible.

And with all that, the so-called "family values" religious-type leadership of the Republican Party accepts trump - and Vance, and hundreds of other vulgar Alpha Male assholes - as their own. Because those "Christian" values aren't about family, or humility, or love.

This contempt, this rage, this violence towards women explains how deep into the rot the conservative ideology has fallen. 

This is who conservatives are, in service to their ideology that only the true elites - rich, white, and male - must rule. Remember what Frank Wilhoit said: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Everyone else outside of their circle - the ethnic minorities like Blacks and Latinos (and even Asians), the youth, the poor, and now above all the women - must be shunned, defamed, disposed of.

Even those lessers who ARE in their circle - the conservative women (and Blacks and Latinos and Gays) in this case - who pander to this message of misogyny are just there to convince these men - if not those in the media looking for narrative cover - that they are ideologically in the right. The conservative women playing to the "tradwife" or anti-feminist stances are doing so because they personally profit - above all, the wealth and social influence - from living in the status quo that the conservative movement seeks to enforce. But the second these women are no longer valued for their contributions, they will find themselves in the same mess - poor, physically broken, emotionally drained - every other American woman suffers now.

Wonder why teacher's pay is so low across so many Republican-controlled states? It's because it's viewed as "women's work." Wonder why women's health care is declining across the nation? Because the bans on abortion - and the coming threat to birth control - are sending many OB/Gyns into retirement - and scaring potential new doctors out of the profession - before they can get criminally charged by ignorant wingnut politicians over basic women's health care.

If trump is trying to walk back the damage he'd done already over abortion - and health care in general - don't listen to him. Look at what he's doing. Look at who he's working with to promote even worse ills on the nation if he - and his cohort Vance - lie and steal their way back into the White House.

The Republican platform on women boils down to one word: SUFFER.

The cruelty remains the point.

For the Love of God and for the women in your lives, Stop Voting Republican.

Bad Numbers and Bad Vibes and a Bad Choice

Vanz can't dance, but he'll steal your money/
Watch him or he'll rob you blind...
-- John Fogerty, "Vanz Kant Danz"
(and I'm not the only one who thought of this song when JD Vance got picked for trump's Veep)

It's taken me awhile to write about donald trump's Vice Presidential selection of Senator JD Vance for his 2024 ticket, but in the few weeks that Vance has been on that ticket it's become hilariously - and horrifyingly - clear that picking Vance was a bad idea.

Given trump's previous history with his Veep - trying to bully Pence into throwing the election results in 2020 to the point of sending an insurrectionist mob at him - it was a bit sad to see other Republican figures audition themselves on Fox Not-News for the 2024 ticket, but there was nothing you could do dissuade them. DeSantis, Tim Scott, Doug (seriously, North Dakota?) Burgum, all of them made their daily talking head shows to argue their own submission to trump's will; but none of them pandered - attacking Ukraine, praising Russia, showcasing misogyny - like Vance did.

Thing is, when trump picked Vance - or had others pick him, depending on the story - he didn't do a good enough job of finding out if Vance would boost the ticket or not.

For all I've said about the need for Vice Presidents, as long as that office is part of the electoral process it matters that you choose wisely. A Presidential candidate choosing his/her campaign partner is signaling to voters what he/she values as skills for those who will work in their potential administration. If you're a domestic policy guru, tagging someone with foreign policy cred helps win over the voting base (definitely the punditry) that you'll balance out your agenda. If you're a Moderate from the Midwest, it helps to get a more die-hard candidate from another region (South, Pacific, Northeast) to appease the other party factions (and vice versa). And no matter what, you have to make sure the VP choice has their own charisma or credibility (just not too much to outshine the boss) to win over the mainstream media.

In short: Your Veep pick sets the tone.

What trump and his handlers found out real quick post-convention was that Vance - for all that he's known at the state and federal level of politics- is tone-deaf. And more unpopular than anyone - other than several polling services who were firing off emergency flares - realized.

Let's hear it from Nicholas Liu at Salon:

Senator JD Vance, R-Ohio, is making history as Donald Trump's 2024 running mate, but not in the way that the Trump campaign had hoped. According to a CNN survey taken after the Republican National Convention, Vance has an approval rating of -6 points, making him the first vice presidential nominee to enter the general election with a negative rating since 1980.

The average rating for a running mate after a party convention has been +19 points.

"Frankly, I don't really understand the pick, and apparently neither do the American voters," CNN data analyst Harry Enten said on Tuesday's OutFront with Erin Burnett. Vance, he said, is "dragging Trump down..."

With Trump struggling to appeal to moderate women, the former president may rue choosing a man who ran for Senate on a hardline anti-abortion stance, criticized childcare subsidies as "class war against normal people" and suggested that married women would be selfish for divorcing their abusive husbands, saying in 2021 that "one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace" was "making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear...”

Even Vance's purported appeal among white working-class voters appears overstated. He won Ohio in his 2022 Senate election by 6 points; by comparison, Trump won by 8 points in 2020 and Gov. Mike DeWine carried the state in 2022 by 25 points. Among white voters without a college degree, Vance, with a 31-point lead over Democrat Tim Ryan, also lagged behind Trump and DeWine, who won by 36 and 45 points respectively...

I've talked before about how at the state level, a candidate can overcome personal faults to win election all because the partisan nature of local elections make it too easy to win no matter what. Ohio could have run a dead dog for the Senate back in 2022, and that poor mutt could have beaten Tim Ryan by double digits. Vance arguably eked by at 6 percent.

And trump picked a guy with negative popularity at the national level, something that hadn't happened since 1980 (was that Bush the Elder?). For a campaign that's supposed to be tracking every favorable poll to feed trump's vanity, how did they mess that up?

Think back to some of the, ahem, more questionable Veep picks we've seen. 

Sarah Palin? She had a positive boost - and genuinely gave McCain and the GOP a healthy poll bounce - coming out of the convention before her appearances and interviews quickly exposed her as a near-illiterate self-absorbed fool before the November election. Joe Lieberman? In terms of polling and voter turnout, Lieberman mattered little to how Gore performed: However, Lieberman's more conservative stances turned off the more progressive Dem voters which hurt the eventual turnout (the same might be said for Hillary's VP pick Kaine). Dan Quayle? The jokes about him started flying the moment he was tabbed, but even then he brought enough positives to the table that his polling wasn't as bad as Vance.

In each of their cases, there were valid reasons at the time for their picks that did help balance the ticket - geographically, demographically, ideologically - even as those picks ended up hurting or negating the overall effort. The same can't be said for Vance: He mimics trump's ideology to a horrifying tee, and he doesn't appeal to the youth demographics of Millennials or Generation X. He only fulfills a geographic necessity by being from a Midwest (Rust Belt) state, and that will get negated by whomever Kamala picks as her running mate (especially if it's a Rust Belt figure like Walz, Beshear, or Shapiro).

Vance is standing on the national stage with little in the way of genuine charisma or likeability. One of the new breed of Culture War Republicans who attack often and impress rarely, he's demonstrated a shocking ability to alienate people in a heartbeat even among his own Far Right audiences. His anti-immigrant and "DEI" stances - and eagerness to attack a biracial opponent like Kamala Harris - are hard to reconcile with the fact Vance married an Indian (Asian) American woman (where Kamala is Jamaican-Indian (Asian) with a similar background). And Vance's views on women? "Misogynistic" is the nicest word you can say about that.

As Paige Oamek at the New Republic notes in her article title, "Everyone Hates JD":

Just when J.D. Vance thought his polling numbers couldn’t get worse, they have.

Vance’s net negative favorability rating was a major topic of discussion during a Tuesday night CNN roundtable. According to this week’s ABC News/IPSOS polling, Donald Trump’s running mate is polling at a staggeringly low minus 15 points.

It's like watching the rushing numbers by UMass' football team get worse every drive they play against Georgia's defense.

During the CNN segment, former South Carolina state Representative Bakari Sellers called Vance “the Sarah Palin of Dan Quayles.” But as Enten pointed out last week, both former vice presidential picks began with positive favorability ratings: Quayle with 15 points and Palin with 26 points.

“He is historically unpopular, even more so than V.P. nominees who of course went on to infamy,” Enten said of the Ohio Republican.

Vance also won’t be saved by his home state or by the Rust Belt, where last week he polled even worse at minus 16 points, according to a CNN/SSRS poll, with 44 percent of people saying they have an unfavorable view of the senator...

When I noted earlier how intraparty dynamics would give Vance a chance to survive in Ohio, now that he's a candidate on the national level that state-level partisanship won't be able to help him (this is what Scott Walker and Jeb Bush and Rick Perry and other milquetoast candidates found out long ago).

Vance is so unlikeable he's vulnerable to that most dreaded of political attacks, the Whisper Campaign. 

Someone off in the far corners of social media posted a joke rumor - completely unfounded and without direct evidence - that JD Vance wrote a scene in his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy - by the way the "memoir" turned out to be exaggeration at best and deplorable at worst - having sex with a couch. The joke spread quickly on Twitter to where the AP Newswire had to publish a report calling the story "false"... but then retracted that report because of the slight possibility that Vance could have engaged in that act anyway the editors claimed it wasn't vetted properly.

As Zachary Folk covered at the Daily Beast (paywalled):

The anonymous poster who started the viral—but false—rumor that Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance had sex with a couch said he came up with the smear while shopping at a grocery store. The viral post’s author, who only identified himself as “Rick,” gave his first interview to Business Insider on Tuesday, telling the publication the joke came from “a place of irreverence if not outright disrespect.” The viral tweet has since attracted the attention of late night hosts, Fox News talking heads, and even Vice President Harris’ campaign. Rick said he has since protected his account and changed his Twitter handle to avoid unwanted attention. He also said he did not intend to spread misinformation, but instead simply wanted mock the Republican candidate...

Since then, while the mainstream media tried to keep away from it everyone else went all-in on the "couchfucker" mockery. Why is this joke proving so harmful to Vance?

Because being this unlikeable already didn't provide Vance with enough popular support to laugh off or shrug away the insult. Just looking at Vance - his physical appearance is just on the wrong side of being creepy, his hateful demeanor that just advertises "messed-up psychology," the general vibe of being weird - makes it more believable to the general population that this is a guy who would do something tawdry with your living room sofa.

Any stand-up comedian - or wannabe who did the Open Mic nights in South Florida back in the 1990s, ahem - can tell you this: When the majority of people are laughing at you instead of with you, you're screwed.

Rumors are now swirling that trump has soured on Vance already (don't forget, trump is a Bad Boss who will kick you to the street curb once he thinks you're no longer useful) while other party leaders are discussing how to remove Vance from the ticket. Problem is, replacing a ticket partner at this stage of the election is dicey at best (and that's just the paperwork you need to refill). The last time a Vice Presidential candidate got replaced mid-campaign was Eagleton back in 1972, and all that did was confirm that McGovern's campaign was in utter chaos and led to one of the biggest Electoral College defeats in history (that fact gets diminished with how Nixon's campaign unleashed massive sabotage and trickery against the Democrats when the facts of Watergate went public). 

trump can't afford to dump Vance even at this early stage of the final leg of the 2024 election cycle. trump can't afford to keep Vance because the way things are going JD is going to make Sarah Palin look like Margaret Thatcher.

This needs to be a warning to the American voting public at large: trump has no idea how to pick competent people to work for him. The Republicans don't have any competent or quality candidates to choose from anymore. For the LOVE OF GOD, don't vote trump/Vance this 2024, or for any other Republican hack ready and willing to destroy everything America stands for.

And in the meantime, ScotchGard your ottomans!

The Tucker Carlson Hate Machine Unplugged

Let's just get to the facts. This Monday morning, without ceremony or forewarning, Fox Not-News kicked their prime-time fearmonger Tucker Carlson to the curb. To refer to David Folkenflik at NPR:

In an austere, four-sentence statement, Fox News announced Monday that prime-time star Tucker Carlson is leaving the network, effective immediately.

"FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways," the network said in a statement released by a spokesperson. "We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor."

Fox said Carlson's last day hosting his show was Friday, April 21. Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executives of Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp. respectively, had decided Carlson's fate on Friday, a source with knowledge told NPR...

The ouster of Fox's top opinion host comes less than a week after Fox settled an epic defamation lawsuit by an election technology company for more than $787 million. Dominion Voting Systems sued over segments promoting bogus claims that election fraud cheated then-President Donald Trump of victory in 2020...

Oddly enough, the follow-up reporting on Carlson's ouster wasn't the damaging revelations from Dominion's civil suit - although it should have been the reason - it had more to do with the pending damage involving the lawsuits from former show producer Abby Grossberg, who claimed a harmful sexist workplace and apparently had the receipts to back her up.

In a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York, Grossberg accused Carlson and Fox of sexism and harassment, alleging that his show's workplace was replete with examples of misogyny. Her lawsuit claims, among other things, that mocked-up photographic images depicted then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "in a bathing suit revealing her cleavage" and that staffers were polled — on two separate occasions — on which of two female candidates for Michigan governor they would rather have sex with.

"Tucker Carlson's departure from Fox News is, in part, an admission of the systemic lying, bullying, and conspiracy-mongering claimed by our client," said Tanvir Rahman, one of Grossberg's lawyers, in a statement Monday afternoon. "Mr. Carlson and his subordinates remain individual defendants in the S.D.N.Y. case and we look forward to taking their depositions under oath in the very near term."

All that said, let's go to the man in the street to get his opinion on how Tucker Carlson deserved this shoddy mistreatment by his billionaire bosses. (checks notes) Actually let's go to Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog for more:

Whatever is happening, it's odd. Fox put election denialism on the air in 2020 because rejecting one of the Fox audience's core beliefs was seen as likely to damage the Fox brand. But in 2023 nothing could damage the Fox brand in the eyes of viewers more than letting Tucker Carlson go. Has Rupert Murdoch stopped caring about the brand? Or does he resent Carlson's demagoguery about "globalism," which he might regard as an indictment of people like himself?

I assume everything will settle down soon. There'll be a Jesse Watters or Greg Gutfeld show in Carlson's slot and the vitriol will be flowing again as if it never stopped.

But Carlson was worse than other Fox hosts, and it will be good to have him gone -- possibly for a while. Does he have a non-compete clause? If so, how long will it silence him? For a long time, I hope.

As Steve notes, the Fox Not-News network was chugging along just fine with its brand of Far Right toxic fearmongering before Tucker showed up. After all, he filled the gap left open by Bill O'Reilly, who also departed under a cloud of sexual misconduct. And the network will happily plug in a fresh face who'll figure out the proper mix of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism that made Tucker their number one guy (until he was a millstone).

That Tucker is getting forced out over the same troubles with women that O'Reilly departed, and considering how Roger Ailes' tenure as network overlord ended over sexual harassment charges, we should all notice how misogynistic that whole network seems to be (they may hire a lot of women but they sure as hell mistreat them).

But Tucker Carlson was a monster in his own right, a horrifying blend of upper-class privilege and white-boy grievance. He began with a conservative bent and skewed further rightward towards fascism. If Tucker wasn't shilling lies about the January 6th insurrection, he was sucking up to Putin and his dreams of Russian empire.

What made Tucker truly dangerous was his mostly-open support of the odious Replacement Theory at the base of every racist, anti-Semitic attack on American norms. It formed the foundation of every rant, every outrage towards The Dread Other - immigrants (mostly Hispanics), Blacks, Jews, women - that Tucker aired on his shows.

For all of Tucker's - and Fox Not-News' - pretensions of being a journalist, this was all he ever was: A Fearmonger. He spewed lies about others in order to have his audiences recoil in fear and then respond in anger. Tucker - and many other Far Right pundits and writers and celebrities - reveled in the controversies he stirred up, playing himself a victim to "woke" critics and getting his followers more addicted to the hate he sold.

Everything about Tucker Carlson and Fox Not-News echoed the practices of the authoritarian regimes of a fictional dystopia, Orwell's 1984. In that work, the powers running Oceania behind the leadership of Big Brother organized daily sessions of Two Minutes Hate, where workers were brought together and overwhelmed by propagandistic showings of "enemies of the state":

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started...

Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically...

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O’Brien’s heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein’s nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. - 1984, George Orwell

This was what Tucker Carlson brought to Fox Not-News every night. This is what Fox Not-News wanted every night. They served up Fear and Hate like drugs and their audiences got addicted to it even more.

And gods help us, the Fox Not-News overlords will find a replacement for Tucker who will provide another session of Two Minutes Hate for a full hour (minus the 27 minutes for ad space).

None of this is going to end until the whole nation wakes up to the reality that the Hate Speech Tucker and his Far Right allies are shilling - getting us to shout at screens at enemies of their state of mind - is a danger to us all. None of this is going to end until the Murdoch family and their business partners owning Fox can no longer profit from this Hate.

They unplugged Tucker Carlson today. The rest of us need to unplug Fox Not-News and finish this moment.

What Would Ye Have The Ladies Do, O Sexists?

I hadn't commented on it much, but the ongoing sexual harassment scandal involving Governor Andrew Cuomo is coming to an end. He's resigning to avoid a likely impeachment process (via NPR): 

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced he will resign from office following a scathing report from the state's attorney general concluding that the third-term Democrat sexually harassed 11 women, and in one instance, sought to retaliate against one of his accusers who went public with her allegations.

"Wasting energy on distractions is the last thing that state government should be doing, and I cannot be the cause of that," Cuomo, 63, said in remarks from the capital of Albany on Tuesday...

In a nice touch, the Lt. Governor is a woman Kathy Hochul who will replace him as New York's first female Governor.

Hochul, who served one term in Congress before being tapped by Cuomo to be his running mate in 2014, said in a statement she agreed with the governor's decision to step down.

"It is the right thing to do and in the best interest of New Yorkers," she said. "As someone who has served at all levels of government and is next in the line of succession, I am prepared to lead as New York State's 57th Governor..."

Cuomo's departure from office, which will take effect in 14 days, represents a remarkable turn of events from just over a year ago, when the governor was seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party for his administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Yet even that performance is now under a cloud of scrutiny, as a separate investigation by the attorney general found that the number of nursing home deaths disclosed by the state was far worse than officials disclosed.

But it was the allegations of harassment that precipitated the once unthinkable prospect of Cuomo's resignation. The 165-page report released last week followed a months-long investigation into Cuomo's actions and outlined what New York Attorney General Letitia James called violations of both state and federal law. Prosecutors said their findings substantiated allegations from several women — allegations that included unwanted and nonconsensual touching, groping and kissing and sexual comments...

Another thing to note is how Cuomo handled the whole situation: Pursuing a policy of shaming his victims or attacking any accusers to bully his way through the scandal. "Deny deny deny" with a helpful dosage of "Attack attack attack."

But that's the common mindset, isn't it, of the hypocritical bastards who play their way to the top tier of politics or finance or anything to do with power. It's rare, hasn't it been, to see someone seize the reins of power who hasn't been a son-of-a-bitch towards those he (usually a he) views as his lessers (usually women).

I've noted it here often enough: The hypocrisy of sexism in high office. Cuomo is not even the first New York Governor I'm commenting about. There have been many others - across both major parties here in the United States - that it all starts to blend into each other as an ongoing crisis of leadership. A failure to be better men towards women, a failure of justice where fully one-half of our population suffers in the hallways and back rooms of power.

When you look at how men of power mistreat and attack the women in their circles, you should also pay attention to how women's pay in this country remains sickeningly unequal, you should also pay attention to how our legal system refuses to honor or defend rape victims far too often, you should also pay attention to how our culture continues to belittle and devalue anything women say or need.

Kicking Cuomo to the curb is one step towards holding men accountable for the bad behavior we've been showing women for millennia. But our nation has a long way to go and many steps to make - EQUAL PAY for Women! Take rape crimes seriously! - before women are going to be any safer in our workplaces and schools and homes.

In the meantime: Keep punching back, women.

One Sentence Thought About the Legal System Letting Cosby Walk On His Sex Crimes

There are sixty women, AT LEAST SIXTY WOMEN, who came forward to report how Bill Cosby drugged them, sexually assaulted them, publicly humiliated them, and they had enough evidence for a Pennsylvania jury to find him guilty of sexual assault on three of those women, and even with all that the state's Supreme Court lets Cosby walk free overturning those convictions because an idiot district attorney from an earlier administration gave Cosby a verbal agreement of immunity when he testified beforehand in a separate legal matter, and now there are thousands if not millions of women who endure sexual harassment and rape in this country who realize they may NEVER see any modicum of justice from a legal system and nation that seems to punish women for their sex. 

The Very Simple Reason Republicans Are Bashing Trans Teens

This is a priority thing apparently among the Republican-controlled state legislatures, because the Florida Legislature are passing these Hate bills instead of working on things like fixing our state's unemployment benefits system, or upgrading our schools or paying our teachers better. Via Saundra Weathers, Troy Kinsey, and Justin Soto at Bay News 9 website:

The Florida House on Wednesday approved a GOP-proposed ban on transgender female athletes joining female athletic teams in high school and college sports by a 77-40 vote.

The companion bill in the state Senate still has to pass before legislation makes it to Governor Ron DeSantis' desk for his signature. The vote in the House followed party lines.

Florida is one of more than 30 other states with bills aiming to force transgender athletes to play on teams for their sex assigned at birth.

In House Bill 1475, lawmakers are proposing a ban on athletes born male, from competing in female sports, but it allows anyone born female to compete in any sport...

You'll notice the bill only affects those born male who shift to female. Nothing about females who shift to male. You'll also notice the unsubtle amount of homophobia in the whole charade the Republicans are pushing. Back to the story:

Supporters of the LGBTQ community say the bill is just discriminatory. Tampa Bay Rowdies player Zach Steinberger is a member of the LGBTQ organization Athlete Ally. While he says as a straight man he can’t identify personally with those trans athletes, he plans to continue to fight for their rights. 

“No matter what you identify as, no matter what or how you’re born it’s something that should be a safe and free environment," he said. "And to try and take that away from somebody is, that’s dismantling to me. That is so un-American..."

The article also highlights how the collegiate NCAA organization is protesting these laws and threatening to cancel any state-level championship games (like the regional basketball tourneys) to express their disgust and hurt the states' prestige and loss of revenue. Other sports are talking about similar boycotts and cancellations.

But the Republicans are not cowed on their agenda, for a very simple reason:

The cruelty is the point. It doesn't matter to them if this hurts 10,000 transgender teens or just one, as long as they can express that cruelty they will indulge in it with the upmost glee.

Much in the same way that the Far Right hates various groups of people for who they are - Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Women (not just feminists, they barely conceal their contempt for their fellow conservative women), Gays - the Far Right hates Trans people out of a twisted level of fear. The Evangelical religious base that dominates much of the Far Right are terrified that Trans people will "teach our male children anal sex" or other forms of sexual debauchery, echoing the fears that the Far Right that Black men lust after White Women, or that the Gays/Lesbians will impose their "lifestyle choices" on Heteros to destroy our population.

None of that fear based on fact, and yet still it drives the Far Right to hate everyone "not us" in these extreme ways.

There was no crisis involving our teen and college athletics programs. There's no evidence that Trans people - or men claiming to be Trans - are attacking women in locker rooms or bathrooms. This is all hysteria, built on fear by Hetero men (and it's mostly guys) that they're gonna get anal-raped.

This is all bullshit. All these laws are going to do is humiliate Transgender people - especially youths, who are under enough social pressure as is - or worse expose those Trans teens to acts of violence promoted by that Far Right fear and hate.

Christ said to Love One Another like brothers and sisters, yet these Evangelicals and demagogues and wingnut politicians would rather hate us all instead.

God help us.

It's the Stuff That's Legal That Should Worry You

Who can forget the time Bo Pilgrim, the East Texas chicken magnate, walked onto the floor of the senate during a special session in 1989 and started handing out checks for ten thousand dollars - payee blank - to any senator who would take one? Seven took the money, but five gave it back when the story broke. Still, it was technically legal. That's Texas ethics for you. The real scandal isn't what's illegal: it's what's legal.

-- Molly Ivins, Nothin' But Good Times Ahead (p. 205)

You should probably read David A Graham's article in full (behind the paywall) at the Atlantic, but here's the highlights:

If these scandals seem to demand an explanation for how a member of Congress, entrusted to hold power in Washington, could behave in such a way, the reality may be the opposite: Only a member of Congress could behave like this and get away with it. Whether Gaetz’s alleged behavior rose to the criminal is yet to be seen, but if true, it would have gotten him fired long ago in any conventional gig. Congress is no normal gig, though. It is, almost by design, a hostile workplace...

Previously, while serving in the Florida House of Representatives, Gaetz was “part of a group of young male lawmakers who created a ‘game’ to score their female sexual conquests, which granted ‘points’ for various targets such as interns, staffers or other female colleagues in the state House,” according to ABC.

His behavior didn’t improve when he got to Washington in 2017. According to CNN, staff in then–House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office had “a discussion with Gaetz about acting professionally while in Congress.” Gaetz also screamed at then-Representative Cedric Richmond during a June 2020 hearing.

One might hope that “acting professionally” would be the bare minimum for a U.S. representative, especially one who had already served in a state legislature—and whose father was once president of the Florida Senate. But Congress has often been the site of abhorrent behavior, and state legislatures are even worse. Gaetz was a product of his milieu.

Congress has none of the measures in place that other workplaces do to deal with bad behavior. There’s no HR department, so when members misbehave, there’s no one to handle it. In theory, the House and Senate ethics committees can investigate and punish members, but in practice they are reluctant to punish their colleagues, and anyway, there are few real punishments short of expulsion. Nor are there bosses. The Ryan staff meeting may seem like a weak response, but the speaker has little real control, either...

I don't think Graham covered it in his article, but it should be worth noting that Congress managed a slush fund to pay of sexual harassment claims whenever they came up. It was fucking baked into the system, people. They only changed the rules on that to make the congresscritters pay out of pocket once the news leaked in 2017.

But Graham does note, much like others in the Beltway media have pondered, that Congress does not have a means to discipline reckless and abusive and misbehaving members. The ethics committees in both houses are toothless, and the Speaker's powers to punish wayward members (and reward the better behaved ones) were taken away by "reforms" in the 1990s. One of Newt Gingrich's lasting legacies of his Far Right takeover of the Republican House leadership in 1994 has been the near-constant lapses of ethical behavior by even the deepest backbencher, all because he emboldened the fringe caucuses to worse and worse behavior.

One thing the Graham hints at, but doesn't go into great length about, is how Congress intentionally writes into a lot of their regulatory laws for other businesses and industries ways to exempt themselves from such ethical oversight or regulation. Hiring practices, healthcare coverage, benefits, transparency requirements, safety regs, what have you: Congress - regardless of who's in charge, which should shame the Democratic leadership but doesn't - doesn't want to be held accountable like the rest of us lowly plebeians.

So from that foundation, you can see how someone like Gaetz - like a lot of elected officials who keep getting caught in both sexual and financial scandal year after year - could even thrive in such a work environment while his bad behavior goes public.

We are dealing with a new breed of elected official since the 1990s: One that knows full well the game is rigged to your benefit as long as you remain shameless and vulgar. The ones who resign out of shame and duty are actually more honorable than the bastards who stay in office right up until their Guilty verdicts in a court of law. And by then, of course, it's all too late.

If we want to get rid of the Gaetzs who clog up our elective offices from both the state and federal levels, the majority of voters need to pay attention to the unethical (even legal) stuff they do and vote them out (IMHO, that means voting out the corrupted GOP). Confirm the ones we're hiring in will get serious about reforms to give their ethics committees more power to enforce. Hold them to the same legal standards the laws hold us. Balance the scales.

Otherwise, everything illegal for us remains legal for them. God DAMN them.

Blood in the Streets of Atlanta: Violence Towards Women, Violence Towards Asians.

Let's break this down to the most basic explanation to what happened this past week across the Atlanta metro.

An angry guy with a gun shot and killed Asian women. If that doesn't sound racist to you, if that doesn't sound misogynistic to you, then YOU have a goddamn problem because that's EXACTLY WHAT THIS IS. (To the NPR article by Bill Chappell, Vanessa Romo, and Jaclyn Diaz)

The sheriff's office said Long confessed to the crime and told officials about a "temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate." They said it is too early to determine whether he'll be charged with a hate crime.

Six women of Asian descent are among the dead, raising suspicions of a hate crime. Long claims race did not play a role in his decision to target the businesses, authorities said, relaying details from questioning the gunman.

Long is believed to have "frequented these places, and he may have been lashing out," Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said after noting that the suspect indicated to investigators that he has a sexual addiction.

Tuesday's violence has amplified fears in the Asian American community, which has already been experiencing a spike in attacks and harassment since the coronavirus pandemic began...

The murderer - do not say his name - allegedly visited the spas earlier. He knew where he was going and as soon as he got that gun (without background check, without waiting) he knew exactly what he was going to do.

No excuse he and his defenders throw out there should stick. He targeted Asian women (his rampage did include White women and two men), and he targeted women who did nothing to him except exist without his permission and outside of his dominance.

What the murderer did is no different from a lot of other murderers and purveyors of domestic violence. There is a serious problem in our nation - no, scratch that, when you consider what happened in the United Kingdom recently with Sarah Everard, when you consider how Turkey is formally removing itself from an European committee addressing violence against women (implying they no longer care and may even encourage it), when you consider rape as a war crime is happening in every civil war and border clash out there, there is a serious problem with our planet - when it comes to addressing the underlying misogyny to a lot of the violence out there.

Racism is a serious trigger for acts of violence, but the amount of violence committed against women ought to horrify you. How many mass shootings in the United States revolve around domestic abuse culminating in one final act of gunfire?

How important is it that we as a nation pass a Universal Background Check for gun purchases, and making sure domestic abusers are included in those checks? How vital is that our Congress pass a new Violence Against Women Act that should force our lax law enforcement agencies to treat domestic abuse as a serious threat to public safety?

Both of those bills have passed the House this month, thank God. But they're held up now in a Senate that debating whether or not to get rid of the Filibuster, a tool of obstructionism likely to block those bills from passing like the majority of Americans want them to.

God damn our nation's history of racism - not just towards Blacks and Hispanics but also tragically towards Asians from Chinese to Japanese to Filipino to Vietnamese and so many others - and God damn our species' history of sexist-driven violence towards women.

We need to make our laws act towards both injustices before more people - WE ARE ALL HUMAN BEINGS DAMMIT - are killed for the rage and bloodlust of angry white men.

The Soul of Liberty As the Equality Act Gains Ground

This still has to pass the Senate, but it's arguably one of the bigger deals the Democrats have gotten done (other than a COVID relief bill we're still waiting on dammit) as they pass a historic Equality Act in the House (via Danielle Kurtzleben at NPR): 

The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to pass the Equality Act, a bill that would ban discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It would also substantially expand the areas to which those discrimination protections apply.

It's a bill that President Biden said on the campaign trail would be one of his top legislative priorities for the first 100 days of his presidency. The House vote was largely along party lines, passing with the support of all Democrats and just three Republicans. The bill now goes to the Senate, where its fate is unclear...

The Equality Act would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to explicitly prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The bill has been introduced multiple times before and previously passed the House in 2019. However, the law's impact would be different in practical terms now than it was then.

That's because the Supreme Court ruled in June of last year, in Bostock v. Clayton County, that the protections guaranteed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the basis of sex also extend to discrimination against lesbian, gay, and transgender Americans. The logic was that a man who, for example, loses his job because he has a same-sex partner is facing discrimination on the basis of sex — that, were he a woman, he wouldn't have faced that discrimination.

This act would explicitly enshrine those nondiscrimination protections into law for sexual orientation and gender identity, rather than those protections being looped in under the umbrella of "sex." However, the Equality Act would also substantially expand those protections.

The Civil Rights Act covered discrimination in certain areas, like employment and housing. The Equality Act would expand that to cover federally funded programs, as well as "public accommodations" — a broad category including retail stores and stadiums, for example...

One upshot of all of this, then, is that the Equality Act would affect businesses like flower shops and bakeries that have been at the center of discrimination court cases in recent years — for example, a baker who doesn't want to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Importantly, the bill also explicitly says that it trumps the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (commonly known by its acronym RFRA). The law, passed in 1993, set a higher bar for the government to defend laws if people argued those laws infringed upon religious freedom...

What this law is trying to do is overrule any religious bigotry that would taint our citizenry's right to, you know, live like normal people.

One of the shameful elements of evangelical or conservative religious groups is how they use their Faith as an excuse to be hateful, in many ways defying core tenets of Grace and Charity that much of our Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs require from their followers (also any core tenets for Hindus and Buddhists I would hope. As a Unitarian Universalist I'm aiming for inclusivity, brah). It's that excuse that alienates more people from accepting religion, as one of the reasons over the years why people have been walking away from churches as those faiths become more identified as biased as hell.

Again, we're waiting on the Senate to take up this bill and hold a vote - pending the likely filibustering that's still baked into the system, what the hell Democrats get rid of that damn thing - but we're one step closer to equality and liberty for more Americans. That long arc is bending towards justice again, thank God.

trump's True Appeal to a Rabid Base

It still bothers me a little that I can never fully comprehend how ANY INSANE person let alone a SANE person would ever support donald "bankrupt failure racist pussy-grabbing vulgarity shitgibbon" trump. I kind of understand it ever since I read Rude Pundit's reveal of voter polarization back in 2014, but it still galls that there's a faction of fellow Americans who swallow the shit and call it caviar.

And as the madness gets worse during this pandemic, the real reason is all the more clear.

As Tom Sullivan notes at Hullabaloo:

No. It is not to save the country except for themselves. It is because they think they are losing their country and Trump is the only Republican who can save it for them, Limbaugh explained.

But it is also because Trump’s wanton bigotry, dishonesty and viciousness liberate them to wallow in their own. Like a medieval pope, he is selling a plenary indulgence. Go, and sin some more, says Trump in red letters held upside down and backwards. All it cost them is the surrender of whatever withered moral authority the movement had remaining...

As shared by this photo making the rounds on Twitter:

Would love to find out who originated this.

For all the worship of Saint Ronnie, for all the early passion for Dubya in a post-911 global war, the Republican voting base still expresses disappointment that neither "savior" figure went far enough into douchebaggery to become the "hero" the Far Right wanted.

trump is different. Not only is he an openly vile and vulgar life form, he constantly tweets to his fanbase to indulge in his not-so-private vices as well.

And a lot of them take him up on that offer.

Look at every Angry White Guy. Look at every Angry White Woman. Look at the Karens having meltdowns. Look at the maskless wingnuts throwing tantrums along with everything else when they're asked to wear a mask to protect other people.

All of them have a License to Asshole, signed by trump and passed around by a gleeful Republican Party wanting to "own the libs" forever.

This is where blind rage has led us.

It's up to the rest of us to call this bad behavior for what it is and vote these bastards out. For the LOVE OF DECENCY as well as GOD, we need to vote them out.

Serious Stuff for Sunday Part Three: Kavanaugh Lied. And He's a Sexually Abusive Drunk. Thanks, Mitch

The New York Times, after flubbing the Tweet rollout for the article, and even burying the lede by opening their investigative report with anecdote, did at least provide an in-depth examination of accusations against Brett Kavanaugh that the FBI refused to check during the Senate Supreme Court hearings. To wit:

Ms. Ramirez’s legal team gave the F.B.I. a list of at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence. But the bureau — in its supplemental background investigation — interviewed none of them, though we learned many of these potential witnesses tried in vain to reach the F.B.I. on their own.

In short: Both trump and the Republican Senate squashed any attempt to bring to light more credible allegations that Kavanaugh was a mean drunken sexist bully.

Republicans knew they had a snake for a nominee to sit on the highest court in the land, and they pushed him in anyway. Rather than take the honorable route of asking him to step aside like previous troubled nominees, they WANTED Kavanaugh to pass the Senate approval both to spite the Democrats pointing out his flaws and to spite women in general. When you look at how defensive the GOP leadership was and still is over Kavanaugh's nomination, a lot of it had to do with downplaying if not outright scorning women's concerns over sexual assault in college and sexual harassment in the workplace.

I wrote about this earlier:

But what Kavanaugh did to them DOES matter today.

He assaulted young women out of anger and lust and arrogance, driven by a sense of privilege that protected him from ANY accountability. He's lying about all that today, trying to protect himself from ANY accountability.

This is a man who is fighting to gain a seat on a judicial bench that will pass not just legal judgment but also moral and social judgment on others. A man who will do ANYTHING to avoid legal and moral and social judgment on himself.

This is not a man we should trust with that power.

And yet, the Republican Party as a whole is poised to grant him that power and privilege.
Because THEY want that power and privilege for themselves.

There is everything nightmarish about having a monster on the Supreme Court bench. And the Republicans are still defending the indefensible.

One Sentence About My Thoughts Regarding Jeffrey Epstein's Death in Jail

For starters I'm not buying the suicide report because he'd already tried something like this earlier and for the love of GOD should have been under 24/7 suicide watch just to make sure nobody tried to shiv him, because Jeffrey Epstein's career as a Pedophile Pimp for an exclusive club of billionaire greed-heads and political figures - a list including the Shitgibbon himself, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew from the UK (!) - along with growing evidence Epstein was involved in human trafficking across the globe made him a high risk for certain powerful figures who would risk Epstein's death in jail and withstand the coming public outcry against such an obvious conspiratorial move by fearing the possibility of Epstein exposing global diabolical criminal activities, and so I call on the New York District Attorneys investigating Epstein and his Circle of Carnal Crime to keep digging and arrest every child-fucker and human slaver they can find. Gasp. Shit, that's two sentences. SHIT, THAT'S... okay you get my gist.

Still Vulgar

A columnist for the New York magazine came out Friday about getting sexually assaulted by donald trump years ago.

Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said:  “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did...

Just look at the list of names E. Jean Carroll rattles off. She names 15 other women as credible witnesses to their own assaults at donald trump's - the Pussygrabber in Chief - hands. There are other accounts out there. Like all rapists and sexual predators, trump never stops at one...

There are several facts about what happens next that are so odd I want to clear them up before I go any further:

Did I report it to the police?

No.

Did I tell anyone about it?

Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.
“He raped you,” she kept repeating when I called her. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”

My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)...

Why haven’t I “come forward” before now?

Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun. Also, I am a coward...

I am not going to describe the assault. It's too painful to read.

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue...

I wrote this before the election:

We've known for some time Trump is lewd towards women - the number of stories about women fleeing from him in tears have been out there for decades - but this is in his own words. His own honest-to-God view of women as his objects of lust and acquisition.

He talks in the language of the rapist. Uncaring. Self-absolving. Everything justified because he's a "star" and he can do anything.

How is this abomination of a lifeform even allowed to go out in public to meet people?
I have friends who have endured sexual assaults, unwelcomed advances, moments even in public where guys attack them in variations of what Trump brags about doing (please note: TRUMP IS BRAGGING ABOUT THIS). As a guy who will never have to go through this hell, the best I can do is understand the pain my friends go through every time this shit happens to them, all because there are other guys out there who are sexual predator assholes who don't give a fuck about how women actually feel...

A vote for Trump is a vote for vile vulgarity. It is a vote against every woman who ever lived. It is a vote against every kind and decent thing any American has ever done for others.

Damn you forever if you vote for THAT...

And now it's 2019. People voted for that vulgarity in enough numbers to "win" a broken Electoral College. In 2017 we watched Republicans fall over themselves supporting an Alabama teen stalker in Roy Moore (self-appointed moralist and ex-judge) all because they loved sexual predators more than any Democrat.

And now we're getting more stories public - because of the public view AGAINST rape/assault victims makes it difficult for them to even report it when it happens - the mainstream media is shrugging this off. Not a single major newspaper ran with this story as front-page news. As though we've normalized the "reality" that trump is a goddamned rape monster.

We're living in a nation and a timeline where the political leadership is committing crimes - has committed crimes - and are simply allowed to get away with it because nobody wants the hassle of even bothering.

There are still 42 percent of American voters still willing to vote for this vulgarity.

Jesus.

How Low CAN We Go?

I used to have faith in my fellow human beings that there was some level of common sense to prevent the worst of what we can do to ourselves.

But in the wake of watching 62 million Americans buy into the trumpian BS, becoming willing accomplices in the Crime of the Century, my faith has been shattered. I still cannot comprehend how so many voters genuinely thought trump was a better choice than Hillary. And while I knew that a lot of the Far Right were hypocrites about faith and Christian grace, for so many of them to eagerly embrace a self-avowed pussy-grabber and greedhead in trump seems a betrayal of absolutely everything Jesus stands for.

I still cannot comprehend some of the progressives I know on Facebook and Twitter who openly argue that Hillary would have been just as bad a warmonger and ripoff artist as trump. They've become so convinced that Bernie could have won that they've blinded themselves to how bad trump really is.

Who thinks like that?

This is why this week is going to be so troubling. This Tuesday, Alabama will have their Special Election to fill a Senate seat.

The choice is between a Democrat in Doug Jones who's been an effective prosecutor, with a clear track record of civil rights defense and pragmatic policies that lean Center-Left on the spectrum. The kind of person you think rational Alabamans would support to lead their state into the 21st Century.

The other choice is Republican Roy Moore. The Roy Moore who openly proclaims himself God's Chosen eager to put the Ten Commandments on display as though that would enforce God's will, while violating half of those Commandments on a daily basis. Roy Moore, who openly contends that slavery was great, everyone liked it including the slaves, and shows every sign of wanting to bring those days back.  Roy Moore, who allegedly stalked and molested HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS when he was in his 30s. This is the kind of person who represents every worst aspect of Alabama and the Deep South, the long dark shadow of Slavery and Jim Crow that still haunts this region, combined with the sexist Patriarchy of Far Right religious views of women as playthings and breeders.

And there's every possibility enough Alabamans will close their eyes to everything WRONG about Roy Moore and vote for him.

All because the Conservative mindset of Alabamans excuses every sin a fellow Conservative - now Republican - could and did commit.

All because they've been ingrained over generations to HATE anything that reeks of liberal values that now associate with the Democratic Party.

All because there are enough of us who want everything to burn in the Hellfire that these Republican crooks and hypocrites will inflict on the entire world.

There may be, hopefully, a chance that Doug Jones wins, that enough Alabamans are repulsed by Moore's extremism and sins to turn away. But after what happened in 2016, I can't believe that.

We are so royally fucked, America.

And it's your damned fault, Republicans, for letting us sink this low.

You could have stopped all this. You could have shown some ethical standards and kept trump off the ticket in 2015 when he so clearly came out on a racist, hate-filled agenda. But now you're stuck, like the rest of us. And it's getting worse.

Moore shouldn't have won the primary earlier. You had a standard level evil-doing Hard Right candidate in Luther Strange, but he wasn't hate-filled enough and your own primary voters went with crazy asshat Moore.

And do you think Moore will be the lowest point?

Your voting base can now easily forgive PEDOPHILES as long as they are librul bashers. Your voting base will easily go for the most racist, most sexist, most insane candidate on the ticket because they've bought into your party's nihilistic views on governance.

But you can't control that. For all the dogma and certainty these Far Right candidates present, they will not recognize common sense in any way shape or form. They will pander to the most vicious instinct and destroy everything our nation - even things YOUR OWN PARTY respects - built up for the last 200 years.

Until the Republicans and their media enablers wake up to the damage these extremist candidates present, we are going to get the WORST OF THE WORST coming out of Alabama and every other hardcore Red State.

Gods help us.

We are so very royally fucked.