The Fall of Afghanistan

While we're coping with pandemic horrors here in the United States, we have to cope with the horror of our foreign policies failing as our decades-long military and political intervention into Afghanistan falls apart. 

To quote Mike Jason at the Atlantic (paywalled): 

Watching the rapid deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan—the Taliban have captured a third of the country’s provincial capitals in the weeks since the U.S. military pulled its troops out—has evoked a feeling of déjà vu for me.

In 2005, I was an adviser to an Iraqi infantry battalion conducting counterinsurgency operations in and around Baghdad, one of the most violent parts of Iraq during one of the most violent periods in that conflict. It was difficult to have any hope at the time. I returned to Iraq in 2009, this time in Mosul, where my unit advised and supported two Iraqi-army divisions, one Iraqi-federal-police division, and thousands of local police officers. This time, I sensed more progress: Leaving Iraq in 2010, I felt we had done a great job, turning a corner and building a capable and competent security force. A year later, I found myself in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, recruiting and training Afghan police units and commandos. After nine months there, I again rotated home thinking we had done some good.

I would be proved wrong on both counts. In 2014, by then stationed at the Pentagon, I watched in dismay as the Iraqi divisions I’d helped train collapsed in a matter of days when faced with the Islamic State. Today, as the Taliban seizes terrain across Afghanistan, including in what was my area of operations, I cannot help but stop and reflect on my role. What did my colleagues and I get wrong? Plenty...

To quote John Cole (who served out there) at Balloon Juice:

What is happening right now in Afghanistan is horrifying. It’s awful. Tens of thousands of people will be slaughtered, the women and children of the area will be sent backwards in history hundreds of years, chaos and brutality and backwards ass theology will rule the day, and it will be awful for a long time to come. And it was all entirely predictable and completely inevitable...

We’ll see a lot of blame thrown at Joe Biden over the next couple of months, and no doubt right-wingers will blame him for “losing” Afghanistan, but most of it is bullshit. Are there some things that could possibly have been done better? Sure. Much of the bitching by our warrior class is focused on the timing of the withdrawal (often ignoring the fact that it was Trump who set the original date), saying we should have waited until the winter when the majority of the Taliban will be at home and it won’t be “the fighting season,” the name for what you and I know as summer and fall. And I suppose he could have. And then we would be reading all of these headlines next spring and summer instead of right now. That’s the thing about delaying the inevitable, it is, in fact, just a delay. This was going to happen no matter when we left and there is nothing anyone can say that will convince me otherwise...

I'd quote from Fred Kaplan at Slate, but he's behind a paywall I haven't subscribed to so all you get are the links. But he's pretty pissed and bummed as well.

So what the hell went wrong with American intervention in Afghanistan?

If you ask me, it all went wrong at the beginning when we charged into Afghanistan back in 2001.

We went into Afghanistan not for any humanitarian reason, not to stop the Taliban's horrific abuse of women. We went in because September 11 happened, Osama Bid Laden pulled off his big attack on the United States and wounded us far worse than any enemy nation ever could. And so wounded, and angry, and vicious, and blind, we charged into the country that was giving him safe haven in order to hunt him down and punish his extremist allies.

We went into Afghanistan out of revenge.

We didn't go in with a grand objective, and we certainly didn't go in with a coherent plan on how we were going to get out of Afghanistan in a timely fashion. We had no exit strategy in the first place.

Oh, our political leadership - George W. Bush's administration at the time - thought they had a plan: clear out the Taliban, kill Bin Laden, install a puppet regime that would perform like a westernized democracy (but really leave in place a corrupt autocrat), and get out. 

Except we never did any of that right.

We couldn't clear out the Taliban because the Taliban had allies right across the border in Pakistan, where they could hide out because Pakistan was technically an ally of the United States and we didn't have the political might to force Pakistan to abandon the Taliban to us.

We hunted Bin Laden alright, at least as far as Tora Bora, but then for some goddamn reason Dubya's administration let him slip away. It was left to the next administration under Obama to bring justice to one of the persons most responsible for 9/11, but by then it had been TEN YEARS during which our occupation of Afghanistan had turned into a quagmire far greater than Vietnam.

As for our nation-building efforts to stabilize a nation that had been literally The Graveyard of Empires for 1000 years, let's refer back to Mike Jason: 

From the very beginning, nearly two decades ago, the American military’s effort to advise and mentor Iraqi and Afghan forces was treated like a pickup game—informal, ad hoc, and absent of strategy. We patched together small teams of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, taught them some basic survival skills, and gave them an hour-long lesson in the local language before placing them with foreign units...

But from my tours in Iraq through to my time in Afghanistan, larger systemic problems were never truly addressed. We did not successfully build the Iraqi and Afghan forces as institutions. We failed to establish the necessary infrastructure that dealt effectively with military education, training, pay systems, career progression, personnel, accountability—all the things that make a professional security force. Rotating teams through tours of six months to a year, we could not resolve the vexing problems facing Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s armies and police: endemic corruption, plummeting morale, rampant drug use, abysmal maintenance, and inept logistics. We got really good at preparing platoons and companies to conduct raids and operate checkpoints, but little worked behind them...

Over these past 20 years, there have been many failings. We checked the box when it came to saying that we had trained our partners, spun a rosy narrative of progress, and perhaps prioritized the safety and well-being of our troops over the mission of buttressing partner capacity... We didn’t send the right people, prepare them well, or reward them afterward. We rotated strangers on tours of up to a year and expected them to build relationships, then replaced them. We were overly optimistic and largely made things up as we went along. We didn’t like oversight or tough questions from Washington, and no one really bothered to hold us accountable anyway. We had no capacity or experience with some of our tasks, and we stumbled...

In short: We failed to nation-build in Afghanistan because nobody at the political level - not in Washington DC and not in corrupt Kabul - took it serious enough to follow through. We got stuck going through the motions, posing for the cameras, cheering on the minor successes while sweeping the major disasters under the rugs.

Even shorter: We had no exit strategy.

Unspoken in all of this was how Bush the Lesser shifted focus away from Afghanistan onto the more "glorious" and desired target of overthrowing Saddam in Iraq. While we were still engaged on the ground in Afghanistan, our military under Rumsfeld - and pushed along by Dick Cheney (aka Halliburton's Best Bud) and other neoconservatives eager for war as a profiteering scam - pursued an invasion of Iraq that was under-manned and under-planned, and ended up becoming a quagmire just like Afghanistan did. But where the disasters in Iraq made the front pages - thanks to the Big Lies of WMDs that turned out to be fake - the disasters in Afghanistan got shunted to Page 16 of the newspapers and rarely talked about on the cable pundit shows: It all turned into a forgotten Shadow War that nobody cared about.

And Afghanistan turned into this Thing That Would Not Go Away for the administrations that followed Bush the Lesser's into the White House and Pentagon. Obama inherited this mess, and went through enough headaches evacuating Iraq that getting out of Afghanistan seemed impossible. He ended up pursuing a military agenda of getting after Taliban leadership with drone airstrikes, but it never broke the will of the Taliban itself. Like the Viet Cong did to LBJ and Nixon, the Taliban realized they didn't have to beat the United States, they just have to outlast us...

Leading up to trump taking over in 2016. A blustering amateur at foreign policy and nowhere near being "smarter than the generals," trump made the big show of figuring out a ceasefire plan with the Taliban in 2020... which was so full of loopholes that the Taliban are exploiting in 2021 as they retake most of the major cities. The peace deal was more trump's attempt to win a Nobel Peace Prize and win over voters for 2020 than it was a serious attempt to broker a lasting peace in a part of the world that's known only war for generations.

Again, we had no exit strategy.

We were blinded by rage when we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and we are now stumbling out blind and drunk 20 years later with nothing to show for it but the tears and blood of the Taliban's victims.

Are we doing enough now to help evacuate the thousands of Afghanis - especially women - who are going to suffer under Taliban rule? Because we can't stop them from retaking that nation. It's no longer a question of "If" but of "When."

And are we ever going to learn our lessons as John Cole asks of us:

...There is a reason terms like “mission creep” exist. There is a reason when I was a young E-3 my tank commander and Troop CO gave me reading lists, and included on those lists were books like Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy and A Bright Shining Lie and All Quiet on the Western Front and About Face and so many others that sit on my bookshelf to this day. There were lessons to be learned. And we didn’t learn them, myself included. I will grapple with my own culpability the rest of my life.

And I know that my seeming nonchalant writing here about this can seem smarmy and irritating, and I hope that is not what you are taking from this. It’s horrible. I feel terrible for all those innocents. I feel terrible for all our guys who served there and are dealing with trauma and injuries, barely getting their lives back together finally, only to turn on the tv, stare at the horrible images unfolding while glancing at the scarred stumps where their legs and arms used to be, realizing everything they gave everything for has turned out to be nothing.

But while this horror is occurring right now, we can still take advantage of the opportunity to learn this lesson once more. Maybe this will save us a couple generations of needless military adventurism, like Vietnam did before we went and fucked up our memories in Gulf War I and thought war was easy again. Stop listening to the war pigs. Ignore them. Stop listening to the Kagans and Ledeens and the Cheneys and the Kristols and the Tom Cottons and the Friedmans and that one curly hair young twat name Michael something or other who was all over the tv in the late aughts. Don’t let this happen again...

It's all tragic, there's nothing we can do - other than to continue pumping in more bodies and spilling more blood - to stop it, and we're likely setting ourselves up for the next cycle of international terrorism that will drive us back into roaring rampages flattening the countryside and solving nothing.

Even Charlie Wilson saw this coming and nobody else cared enough to stop it coming.

WE FUCKED UP THE ENDGAME.

Update: Not more than thirty minutes after I posted this, reports are now out that the Afghan President has fled the country, and the Taliban are in Kabul itself. This is a nightmare.

Alas, A Writer's Lament 2021

On a personal note: You might remember back in February I asked for input about which blog articles to submit to the Florida Writers' Association's Royal Palm Literary Awards. They have a Non-Fiction/Blog category and I had placed Silver with them in 2020, and was hoping to make a mark for this year.

I went with four articles (I could max out to five), along with the short story submission "War of the Murder Hornets" to mix it up a little.

Well, the judging panel finally reached back to me and...

You know, I could have sworn the article about the reality of trump having a Presidential Library would have been relevant and coherent enough to get past the Semifinalist stage... /sigh

I had submitted that one along with Not All Heroes Wear Capes about John Lewis' passing, and How America Fell Into the Darkest Timeline of 2020 due to their relevancy and partly non-partisan rancor. They too did not reach Semifinalist levels. /sigh

I haven't heard back about this one - The Five Reasons trump Refuses to Concede - and so I may yet have some good news that my political blogging isn't out of vogue. (Update 8/14: Aaaaannnddddd nope that didn't make Semifinalist either.)

Oh, and they didn't like the Murder Hornets either.

I should note that judging depends a lot of who volunteers to read and score the submissions, which changes every year. It depends a lot on the mood, whims, and personal belief structure of those judges - even as they're required to leave such world-views at the door in order to be impartial - so I may have well gotten a judge or two this time who were ardent trump voters (this IS Florida, alas. Also, "alas" has become my word of the year, please punch me if I keep using it too much).

I served as a judge for a couple of years, before they opened up Non-fiction to Blogging (when they did in the interests of fairness I dropped out so I could submit to that category without conflict). I should mention I judged a lot of Non-Fiction works that I scored harshly due to factors such as "lack of research" and "lack of citations to outside data or materials that could back your claims." I'm sorry, but as a librarian and researcher, I value the ability - the right - to examine the merits of a claim with the facts that prove that claim. I had several Non-fiction books to review where I agreed with the author's opening arguments... and still graded them poor because they failed to cite their facts. Alas. (punch) Owww stop hitting me.

I got one submission from someone who WASN'T a scholar on the subject who claimed his "copyrighting" of an idea on that subject made him an expert (um, no, an expert goes through an educational vetting process towards an accredited degree, and then garners recognition from peers in that field through a series of published works that demonstrate due diligence to facts while generating results that are reproducible by said peers), and the first three chapters for review were mostly about how he gained insight where everyone else hadn't (also, he offered no outside citations). "Death of Expertise" indeed. When I blog, I at least try to provide links to sources that back up what I'm ranting aboot...

That all said, I don't blame the judges if I didn't pass muster this year. I do recognize my rants aren't for everyone, and my writing style perhaps not to their tastes.

As they say in baseball, Better luck next year.

Also, the Rays are poised to win the AL East again this year. Maybe if I blogged about that... 

(gets judges who are Marlins fans) aw DAMMIT!

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.

DeSantis The COVID Bully

I can't keep up with this shit (via USA Today):

The state "could" defund the salaries of district superintendents and county school board members who mandate mask wearing in schools, according to a statement from Gov. Ron DeSantis' office. 

The statement comes as the latest salvo in an ongoing battle over mandating masks in schools, a fight that has flared in school districts across the country as the pandemic resurges as the school year is set to start...

At least one superintendent offered an immediate defiant response. Leon County Superintendent Hanna told school officials at a meeting Monday afternoon "you can't put a price tag on someone's life, including my salary."

“We want to make sure that children also have access to a high-quality education but they can’t if they’re sick and in the hospital,” he added. Hours earlier, Hanna announced that students in elementary and middle schools will be required to wear masks as the upcoming school year begins in Tallahassee...

DeSantis has been running around, acting like he's on top of things, like he's got COVID-19 beat, that all of the talk about the Delta variant surge is just panicking from hospital admins and doctors.

DeSantis wants to pretend he knows what's best. DeSantis is buying into the Far Right Narrative that masks "destroys our Freedoms." Because DeSantis knows damn well pandering to that Narrative is how he wins the Presidential nomination in 2024 (he's gambling trump will be in jail by then). 

DeSantis wants to show that Florida's economy is running strong: That everyone's back to work in offices and eateries and tourist traps, and smiling happily at crappy wages and increased exposure to the pandemic. But he can't get everyone back into the offices and coffee shops if the kids are still at home needing parental supervision, so he's GOT to ship all the kids back to in-person classrooms that also work well as super-spreader locations. It matters not that children under 12 can't yet qualify for the vaccines (we're not sure it's safe yet for those ages). It sure as hell doesn't matter to DeSantis that the prominent Delta variant is more lethal to the young.

Above all: DeSantis cannot abide anyone ranked lower than he is on the chain of command doing something that makes HIM look bad. Having all these school board commissioners and superintendents speaking to student safety makes HIM look bad.

So DeSantis is going to threaten, to bully, to scare those lesser mortals into bending to HIS will.

No matter the cost to the number of dying and sick children in the GREAT STATE OF FLORIDA.

All hail DeSantis! All hail the King of COVID-19!

HIS public image matters more than our lives, after all.

How Fared the 2021 Olympics?

Well, all things considered the United States fared rather well at the Tokyo shindig (via Deepa Shivaram and Mandalit del Barco at NPR):

After 17 days of competition at the Tokyo Olympics, the United States finished with the most medals won overall and the most gold medals, with its 39 golds just barely beating out China, which won 38.

On the last day of the Games, the U.S. women's volleyball team secured the 39th gold medal, beating out Brazil to win the country's first gold in the sport.

Team USA is taking home 113 medals. In addition to their gold medals, U.S. athletes won 41 silver and 33 bronze medals. China, which was also second in total medals won, is bringing home 88 medals, including 32 silver and 18 bronze.

U.S. women won 66 medals — more than half of the U.S. team's tally. According to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, if the American women were a separate country, they would have ranked fourth in the world in terms of how many Olympic medals they won...

And to hell with trump anti-patriotic dismissal of our women athletes. USA! USA! USA!

There was, to be honest, a lot of concern going into these events that we were going to witness a massive COVID-19 super-spreader event. I had spelled out an argument for cancelling these games in fear of the pandemic:

While a majority of the athletes may be vaccinated, and most of the on-site workers as well, that's no guarantee of complete immunity. The vaccines help in reducing the harmful effects, and reduces the likelihood of spreading the virus further, but there's still odds that COVID could spread and affect far too many athletes to effectively hold the sporting events...

But we're risking the reality that too many athletes intermingle - it's one of the few joys of this international event for them - and they're bound to become vectors of the pandemic towards each other. Even with Tokyo refusing to provide solid beds and condoms to discourage the sex that happens each Olympics, there's other ways of socializing and moments during competition when COVID can spread in an instant. And then you'll have hundreds sick all at once, unable to participate and likely infecting those still unvaccinated.

The Olympics organizers might be praying to every deity in the phone book, and it WILL take divine intervention to make sure most of the Olympians survive this summer...

Still a little too early to know which Gods deigned to provide good health to our global athletes, and an honest reckoning of what COVID did pop up at the games should matter (PDF via the Olympics.com website): It's looking so far that they had 33 athletes/coaches and about 105 workers test positive up to August 6.

We should also note it takes at least five days to two weeks for a Positive test to show, so not until next week should we consider these Olympics as any level of success against the pandemic.

Here's to another week or so to praying to the Sports Gods on this.

Also, another two months of praying to the Baseball Gods that the Tampa Bay Rays win the AL East again and make a serious return to the World Series. What? I gotta root for my home team, be true to your school, peeps. 

An Inglorious August Ahead

This year's August is starting to terrify me.

I'm living in a state led by a mad governor in DeSantis who is so obsessed with winning the leadership of the Republican Party he's willing to let COVID infect and kill our kids in school starting next week.

There are ongoing signs of the Far Right that eagerly participated in the January 6 Insurrection are making plans to repeat that act again. One of trump's business allies - the MyPillow CEO Lindell, who's so far gone he's abandoned Fox Not-News as being not crazy enough - has been openly backing trump's Big Lie that the election "was stolen," and is shilling this "symposium" scheduled for August 13 (a Friday no less) and claiming his revelations are so shocking it will force Biden and Harris to both resign in shame and a regretful House to make trump Speaker, allowing trump to reclaim the Presidency through the 25th Amendment. As with everything else surrounding this Big Lie, Lindell has no proof to reveal and is selling shit to trump's fanbase... who are still going to eat it all up like steak and get driven further into their own bubble of madness. 

There is a good chance Lindell's antics - especially if trump joins in - can stir up another riot in DC or elsewhere. Given how Congress tends to hold recess in August, this would be a perfect month for Proud Boys/Oath Keepers/Other White Separatists to band together to storm Capitol Hill again...

Last night, one of the foreign policy/intelligence/unconventional warfare contributors to Balloon Juice Adam L. Silverman posted a brief entry basically sending up a warning flag to the rest of the United States:

I just wanted to post a quick note. I’m really not actually trying to depress, scare, upset, and/or anger anyone here, though I’m not surprised if everyone thinks I am. I’ve already done two threat assessments on this insanity we’re living with – one in November that covered the transition and one started the night of 6 January covering the attack at the capitol and what it might lead to – and I’m currently working on a third one. I’m hoping to have it done before 13 August, which is Mike Lindell’s day of miracles or something.

I think everyone has figured out I’m incredibly concerned. Every bit of my professional experience and expertise is screaming at me right now. While hope and I stopped talking a long time ago, and don’t even get me started on faith, nothing would please me more than to write a marking my beliefs to market post in a couple of months about how the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate managed to overcome all the obstacles and pass voting rights and electoral integrity legislation...

Only time will tell if I’m Cassandra of Troy or James Jesus Angleton lost in the wilderness of mirrors. Until then, I’m going to make a real effort to not post about this stuff anymore...

I’m truly sorry that we all have to live through this. I’m also very sorry to those I’ve upset or angered in trying to make clear what I think the threats are. And that’s not a “if you are offended” apology. I know I’ve made some of you quite angry and upset and I’m sorry that that has been the effect of my posts and comments on this topic, which is why I’m going to try not to post or comment on it anymore...

Silverman has access to a lot of intel and connections to a lot of other experts in the Intelligence Community (for you conspiracy-minded that's the Deep State, but relax he's a good guy he brings the occasional donut box in). This is someone who knows what terrorism and high-level threats looks like, and has contributed some thoughtful and analytical essays on terrorism (especially domestic) for BJ for years.

That brief entry is telling me at least that Silverman has seen something that scares the hell out of him. He's trying to downplay it, offering caveats that he may yet be wrong (if you know your Cold War history, his reference to Angleton - whoa, his middle name WAS Jesus - is to a high-ranking CIA official who went mad thinking there were deep mole Soviet spies everywhere).

One of the scary things about trump and his willing cohorts supporting trump's coup attempts is how inept they've been planning those attempts. They didn't do a very good job of hiding their efforts for the January 6 insurrection, and they're likely doing a poor job of it now for whatever they've got planned for Friday the 13th. If you read that ProPublica article and various others that looked back at how that riot unfurled itself, you'll realize one of the biggest reasons it got as far as it did was poor response and awareness by various law enforcement agencies who didn't grok how serious it was going to get.

The other big reason trump's riot got as far as it did was trump himself making sure a stronger response like the National Guard wouldn't deploy in time. One would hope under a Biden Presidency that won't become an issue... but it still boils down to whether or not the proper authorities will take things seriously this time.

If whatever it is Silverman saw is a legitimately big scary deal, let's pray those authorities are as rattled by it as he is and are taking proper steps to prevent it.

What is adding to all of this paranoia - yes, I admit I am being a bit panicky right now - is trump's latest money-making scam that also happens to double as a big fat "OMFG WHAT DID HE DO" warning.

"Trump Cards." No, I'm not making this up.

Especially in the top left one, Traitor Trump shows his Nazi inspiration. Arrest him now. pic.twitter.com/hWsxg680BA

— Harry Turtledove (@HNTurtledove) August 5, 2021

Any similarity between that gold eagle card and the Nazi eagle is purely intentional...

They may look like credit cards - and the thing is, if these ARE credit cards who the hell is stupid enough to back a trump business like this given all his failures? - but all they really are is just symbols of membership to trump's "exclusive club" of fellow MAGA drum-beaters and potential brownshirts.

Ever see that TV Afternoon Special movie about a high school teacher who started a social experiment to show his students how a fascist movement can take over an entire nation? One of the things that happened in that experiment was the students making their own membership card to emphasize who belonged and who didn't.

That social experiment incident was the first thing I flashed back to when I saw those trump Cards. More so than the damn red MAGA hats or the damn fan art that portrayed trump as a muscled Rambo, these cards are more terrifying than mocking. These cards are terrifying because they're promoting devotion to one thing: trump. his name in big letters. These cards aren't membership to the Republican Party, or to a Make America X movement. These cards spell out fidelity to trump himself.

This is the point where the fascist movement embraces the Cult of Personality with a whole heart, without embarrassment or excuse.

It Can't Happen Here? It's already happened, and it's getting worse.

Along with what Silverman's seen, none of this is making me hopeful for the next couple weeks.

Republican FREEDOM Is Really Their Freedom To Condemn Everyone Else

Let Paul Krugman at the New York Times (paywall) set the indictment not only for DeSantis but for the entire Republican philosophy of "F-ck You":

...Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, isn’t stupid. He is, however, ambitious and supremely cynical. So when he says things that sound stupid it’s worth asking why. And his recent statements on Covid-19 help us understand why so many Americans are still dying or getting severely ill from the disease...

We now have highly effective vaccines freely available to every American who is at least 12 years old. There has been a lot of hype about “breakthrough” infections associated with the Delta variant, but they remain rare, and serious illness among the vaccinated is rarer still. There is no good reason we should still be suffering severely from this pandemic.

But Florida is in the grip of a Covid surge worse than it experienced before the vaccines. More than 10,000 Floridians are hospitalized, around 10 times the number in New York, which has about as many residents; an average of 58 Florida residents are dying each day, compared with six in New York. And the Florida hospital system is under extreme stress.

There’s no mystery about why this has happened. At every stage of the pandemic DeSantis has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus, for example by issuing orders blocking businesses from requiring that their patrons show proof of vaccination and schools from requiring masks. More generally, he has helped create a state of mind in which vaccine skepticism flourishes and refusal to take precautions is normalized...

So, given these grim developments, one might have expected or at least hoped that DeSantis would reconsider his position. In fact, he has been making excuses — it’s all about the air-conditioning! He has been claiming that any new restrictions would have unacceptable costs for the economy — although Florida’s recent performance looks terrible if you place any value on human life.

Above all, he has been playing the liberal-conspiracy-theory card, with fund-raising letters declaring that the “radical left” is “coming for your freedom.”

So let’s talk about what the right means when it talks about “freedom.” Since the pandemic began, many conservatives have insisted that actions to limit the death toll — social distancing, wearing a mask and now getting vaccinated — should be matters of personal choice. Does that position make any sense?

Well, driving drunk is also a personal choice. But almost everyone understands that it’s a personal choice that endangers others; 97 percent of the public considers driving while impaired by alcohol a serious problem. Why don’t we have the same kind of unanimity on refusing to get vaccinated, a choice that helps perpetuate the pandemic and puts others at risk...?

True, many people doubt the science; the link between vaccine refusal and Covid deaths is every bit as real as the link between D.U.I. and traffic deaths, but is less obvious to the naked eye. But why are people on the right so receptive to misinformation on this subject, and so angry about efforts to set the record straight?

My answer is that when people on the right talk about “freedom” what they actually mean is closer to “defense of privilege” — specifically the right of certain people (generally white male Christians) to do whatever they want...

Once you understand that the rhetoric of freedom is actually about privilege, things that look on the surface like gross inconsistency and hypocrisy start to make sense.

Why, for example, are conservatives so insistent on the right of businesses to make their own decisions, free from regulation — but quick to stop them from denying service to customers who refuse to wear masks or show proof of vaccination? Why is the autonomy of local school districts a fundamental principle — unless they want to require masks or teach America’s racial history? It’s all about whose privilege is being protected...

DeSantis for months has been describing his decision-making against closing businesses and against masking people in public places as his efforts to keep Florida's economy going... even at the risk of collapsing said economy when (not if) the ICUs fill up with too many sick people and too many of those businesses have to close anyway because half the staff are out sick (or dying).

The rhetoric of FREEDOM means nothing when the people who can enjoy those freedoms have tubes shoved down their throats to ensure they get enough oxygen to live. The illogic of that makes no sense until you remove from the equation the logical assumption that our leadership should be empathetic to the needs of the people.

DeSantis has no empathy, save only for those billionaires who can fund his 2024 Presidential aspirations.

The rest of us are condemned to the FREEDOM of choosing the colors of our coffin linings.

August 2021: This Is the Only Story That Matters Right Now

This is the only thing I can blog about right now.

Right now, in Florida and across half the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic is flaring back up due to a Delta variant that is more contagious and more harmful to our young.

Every day it is getting worse out there. Even with the good news that full vaccination can minimize the damage, people are still catching COVID and likely to spread it to others.

A fellow librarian I follow on Twitter just reported this morning she tested positive. She has children, the youngest apparently at high risk if he catches it himself.

We've spent more than a year now fighting this pandemic, and yet the political will to push back against this spike - the necessity of closing down public places again like we did in March-April 2020, the need to keep our children and teens out of super-spreader locations like schools - has pretty much died.

Our elected leaders like Gov. DeSantis are actively pushing laws and executive orders forcing our cities and counties to stay open, forcing our schools to reopen for fall semesters this August, and insisting our schools NOT do the simplest easiest step of mandating face masks to reduce transmission of the virus.

It's like DeSantis and his fellow Republicans WANT the virus to spread to our kids.

And nobody's rising up to stop them.

It's like we've given up fighting the anti-vaxxer and anti-mask madness.

If I were able to talk to every parent in Florida, I would be telling them right now to insist on keeping your kids at home and safe from the Delta COVID. If I were able to talk to every business owner and county/city commissioner, I would be begging them to close the offices and do all work remotely and over the phone like we did last year.

If I were able to talk to Joe Biden, I would be begging him to realize this is another medical crisis threatening our entire nation and he needs to issue executive orders overriding every Red State governor's madness, insisting on masks in public and delaying our school openings at least until September, and DEMANDING we make vaccinations mandatory for people to go to work or travel from state to state. 

Something, ANYTHING, to get our nation back to fighting against COVID and preventing our hospitals from getting overwhelmed again.

I know everyone's tired and emotionally screwed up from more than a year of this pandemic. I'm there myself, my anxiety and depression are all over the place. Thing is, what's causing my anxiety is the reality I work in a public sector - library - and I have to deal every fucking day with the nightmare that just one person can come in sick as hell with COVID and spreading that damn thing everywhere.

I may be fully vaccinated but I am still a high-risk person (diabetic and sleep apnea/pulmonary issues). I am ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED I WILL CATCH COVID.

My anxiety and stress would go down a lot if we mandated masks and did a two-week lockdown to reduce the spread of the virus. But it's not going to happen, is it? I live in a Red State that was already notorious for crazy self-destructive behavior, and everyone around me is doubling down on this shit.

And DeSantis' failures of leadership right now - refusing to put Florida on even a temporary lockdown, refusing to mandate masks indoors, refusing to admit COVID is back and more dangerous than before - increases the risks I face every day.

I am going to see more of my fellow librarians report online that they've caught COVID.

I am risking every day I go to work that same fate.

Goddamn you, DeSantis. Your posing and preening for the cameras while Florida burns in fever ought to condemn you to the deepest pit of Hell.

Goddamn every anti-masker and every anti-vaxxer. Your contrarian bullshit is not only killing yourselves but killing the rest of us.

DeSantis Doesn't Want Masks In Schools, He's Already Decided He Will Let Our Kids Get Sick and Die

It's literally getting worse in Florida right now (via Ian Hodgson and Rose Wong at the Tampa Bay Times): 

Florida leads the nation in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations as the Sunshine State becomes the epicenter of the delta-driven fourth pandemic wave.

The state saw 110,477 new coronavirus infections over the most recent seven day period from July 23 through Thursday, according to the weekly report released Friday. Florida averaged more than 15,780 infections a day.

It’s the first time since early January that the state surpassed 100,000 infections in a single week.

Florida accounts for nearly one out of every four new infections and hospitalizations in the country, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

No longer is this a pandemic affecting mostly Florida seniors or those with pre-existing conditions. Now it is younger, healthier, unvaccinated adults who are falling ill. New Florida infections and hospitalizations are being driven by adults in their 20s to 40s, state data shows. They account for 53 percent of infections and about 34 percent of hospitalizations...

And what does Florida's governor Ron DeSantis want to do?

Make it illegal for school districts to mandate their own masks and vaccination policies (via Matt Papaycik at WPTV Orlando):

Florida's governor on Monday threatened state legislative action to prevent face masks from being mandated in schools throughout the Sunshine State.

During a COVID-19 roundtable discussion in Tallahassee, Gov. Ron DeSantis once again reiterated his firm stance that school districts should not impose mask mandates on students and staff members, even as coronavirus cases surge due to the highly contagious Delta variant.

"Our view is that this should absolutely not be imposed. It should not be mandated," DeSantis said...

DeSantis can't be bothered, you see. DeSantis has already made himself the victor in this pandemic, has already attacked and insulted and mocked the health experts to order to raise campaign funds for his re-election in 2022.

DeSantis never took the shutdowns and masking and social distancing guidelines to heart anyway, even back in 2020. He saw it all hampering businesses, the tourist trade, the bars and restaurants whose owners pay him big bucks to keep the doors open and the staffers underpaid.

DeSantis doesn't want us going BACK towards lockdowns and masking people, he doesn't want to push vaccines on the unvaccinated who are all deep-rooted MAGA trumpian supporters anymore. Because he needs to pander to those voters to win in 2022 and hope for a shot at the White House in 2024.

DeSantis has already decided. He's decided to let the COVID Delta variant win. He's decided to reach the higher levels of elected office on the backs of our sick and dying kids.

There is no other way to explain this.

Gods help us. DeSantis won't do a damn thing until there's 10,000 dead teens and children piled up on his doorstep.

BREAKING NEWS: The Feds Sell the Single-Issued Wu-Tang Album!!!

IT HAPPENED:

The United States has sold the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to an anonymous buyer. The price of the sale was also kept confidential.

The album was previously owned by Martin Shkreli, the infamous "Pharma Bro" who raised the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000 percent and was later convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison. He was forced to hand it over to the United States in 2018 as a part of a $7.4 million forfeiture judgement.

The announcement was made today by Jacquelyn M. Kasulis, the Acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. "Shkreli has been held accountable and paid the price for lying and stealing from investors to enrich himself," said Kasulis. "With today's sale of this one-of-a-kind album, his payment of the forfeiture is now complete."

Shkreli purchased the 31-track album at auction in 2015 for a reported $2 million. It was promoted as a "unique work of art" with no physical or digital duplicate in existence, and included appearances from the wider Wu-Tang family from Redman to Killarmy. Upon learning that it was Shkreli who bought the album, Wu-Tang member RZA told Bloomberg that the group decided to give "a significant portion of the proceeds to charity..."

DAMN YOU, JUSTICE DEPARTMENT. TELL US WHO BOUGHT THE WU-TANG ALBUM.

Are we gonna have to plan that Wu-Tang/Bill Murray heist after all???

To whomever bought the album off from the DOJ: 

FREE THE WU! 

OPEN CONCERT IN CENTRAL PARK! 

FREE THE WU!!!

House Hearing on trump's Insurrection Begins

After all the drama of the Republicans playing "Chicken" with the committee process, and Pelosi telling McCarthy and his trumpian lackeys to get bent, we're finally getting some public hearings on what happened on January 6:

The select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is holding its first meeting Tuesday. Four police officers are giving testimony about the physical and verbal assaults they faced responding the the riot that day.

The four officers — Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell of the Capitol Police, and Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Metropolitan Police — each gave opening statements and are answering questions from committee members.

Gonell recounted the events of that day and the impact it has had on law enforcement officers: "For most people, Jan. 6 happened for a few hours," he said. "But for those of us who were in the thick of it, it has not ended..."

NPR should provide live links to the hearings, as well as other websites.

As I wrote earlier about the need for hearings:

It's that kind of evidence that if confirmed by committee would establish trump's refusal at the very least to take the riot seriously, which could lead to charges of negligence on the then-President Loser of the Popular Vote (especially from Capitol Police who survived that day and the family members of those who died). Any additional evidence confirming how trump egged that mob into action against Congress could lead to charges of insurrection...

These are things the Republican leadership do not want happening, because trump still has his mob at his beck and call and if becomes clear he's getting handcuffed over this he will incite that mob again, and again against fellow Republicans who won't bow to him...

The committee only would have the merit of documenting the atrocities for the public who still need to know what happened... and for future history, as long as it aids rather than blocks the ongoing criminal investigations that have already arrested a sizable number of rioters... and the committee can add to the already-overwhelming proof that insurrection happened. It all becomes a question of if (sadly not when) the people truly responsible for the violence that day (trump trump and more trump) gets held accountable...

trump and his Republican allies would rather whitewash and ignore the violent events of that day, because it clashes with their Grand Narrative of libruls and minorities as the violent rioters. trump would rather pretend it was all fun and games, while giving enough freedom to his brownshirt army of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to prepare for the next round of violence he'll want to commit to keep his own corrupt ass out of a New York jail cell.

This committee - with any luck - will remind the majority of Americans of how craven and desperate and violent trump's own side has been, and how trump and his people threaten to get worse.

We shouldn't be watching these hearings for entertainment, everybody.

We should be watching these hearings to find out how we fight back.

 

Brief Notes On the Price of Political Pandering July 2021

It's become clear in 2021 that the Republican Party still kneels and begs for table scraps at the foot of the eternal Shitgibbon known as trump.

As the near-unstoppable cycle of election campaigning kicks up for 2022, a number of high-profile Republican candidates at the state and Congressional level have spent a lot of effort playing to trump's unstable world-views and conspiracy rants. Noticeable among these sycophants is George P. Bush, son of... one of the Bush brothers, hold on let me check the Wikipedia biography oh yes it's JEB! - who is entering the political stage by running for state-level office in Texas. Specifically for State Attorney General, running as a challenger against the incumbent Ken Paxton.

Normally, intraparty challenges are rare outside of the purity-test extremists taking their shot at the office-holder they deem insufficiently RINO. It's kind of hard to paint Paxton as a RINO given all the crazy-ass stuff he's done as AG... and that's just the legal stuff. Another big reason for Bush's challenge is that Paxton is currently indicted on corruption and securities fraud charges, something that ought to have driven an honest crook to resign for the good of the party. It's just with this modern Republican Party, corruption charges is now a goddamned badge of honor to these guys.

In order to win, George P. has spent his early days campaigning even further to the right than Paxton, going so far as to openly worship at the foot of trump (party kingmaker) himself. All of this in spite of the open contempt the Bush family itself has towards trump, whom they view as destroying a Republican Party they built and once dominated themselves.

But hey, one of the things about the Bushes, if you ever watched them from Bush the Elder from the 1960s on through to Bush the Lesser in the 2000s to weak Fredo uh Jeb! the Exclamation Point: A Bush running for office will pander and debase themselves as much as needed to win that office.

So where did all of George P.'s love affair for trump lead him?

trump still went with the openly (allegedlys) corrupt Paxton. Why not? trump must figure Paxton will cut him into Paxton's piece of the action...

Ergo, to this bit of schadenfreude:

Donald Trump just endorsed incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over the GOP primary challenger, George P. Bush—who sold out his own family to kiss Trump’s ass. No hero in this tale, just a reminder that there’s no honor among thieves—and a deal with the devil can backfire. https://t.co/sRUg0qQpg4

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) July 27, 2021

I wonder what George P. will do now. Probably crawl back to the Bush Family Compound and convene a session with their current elders to decide the next step of revenge against Paxton. I wonder how many judges in line to handle Paxton's indictments still owe a favor or three to the Bushes... 

Why Aren't We Doing The Smart Thing - Back to Lockdown - To Combat the Newest COVID Wave? Because IDIOTS...

As the COVID-19 pandemic gets worse with the Delta variant heading towards the end of July 2021, there isn't as much anxiety as we had back in July 2020. Instead, this time there's a shit-ton of anger building up among the vaccinated towards the contrarian, ignorant, brain-dead, Fox-Not-News-worshipping UNvaccinated SOBs that make up our trumpian neighbors.

Even David Frum is pissed:

In the United States, this pandemic could’ve been over by now, and certainly would’ve been by Labor Day. If the pace of vaccination through the summer had been anything like the pace in April and May, the country would be nearing herd immunity. With most adults immunized, new and more infectious coronavirus variants would have nowhere to spread. Life could return nearly to normal.

Experts list many reasons for the vaccine slump, but one big reason stands out: vaccine resistance among conservative, evangelical, and rural Americans. Pro-Trump America has decided that vaccine refusal is a statement of identity and a test of loyalty...

The Far Right are driven by Purity Tests: if any of them even flinches or looks like they're changing their mind on something, that person gets driven out. And right now the Purity Test requires these contrarian SOBs to oppose COVID vaccination on the flimsiest of pretexts, based on bad information from fellow contrarians who are neither experts nor correct.

Pro-Trump vaccine resistance exacts a harsh cost from pro-Trump loyalists. We read pitiful story after pitiful story of deluded and deceived people getting sick when they did not have to get sick, infecting their loved ones, being intubated, and dying. And as these loyalists harm themselves and expose all of us to unnecessary and preventable risk, publications—including this one—have run articles sympathetically explaining the recalcitrance of the unvaccinated...

Biden’s America is home to vaccine holdouts too. But state and local leaders in Biden’s America have spoken clearly and consistently about the urgency of vaccination. The leaders in Trump’s America have talked a double game: Like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, they urge vaccination one day, then the next they fundraise by attacking public-health officials such as Anthony Fauci. The consequence of DeSantis’s weeks of pandering to COVID-19 denial: More than one-fifth of all new COVID-19 cases in the United States are arising in the state of Florida—24,000 recorded on a single day, July 20...

Compassion should always be the first reaction to vaccine hesitation. Maybe some unvaccinated people have trouble getting time off work to deal with side effects, maybe they are disorganized, maybe they are just irrationally anxious. But there’s no getting around the truth that some considerable number of the unvaccinated are also behaving willfully and spitefully. Yes, they have been deceived and manipulated by garbage TV, toxic Facebook content, and craven or crazy politicians. But these are the same people who keep talking about “personal responsibility.” In the end, the unvaccinated person himself or herself has decided to inflict a preventable and unjustifiable harm upon family, friends, neighbors, community, country, and planet...

We are not going to see an end to this until both the monsters distributing misinformation and the fools eagerly lapping it up answer for their sins. And by then, half our school-bound kids (our states are forcing everybody back to in-person classes!) will likely be sick and dying.

Goddamn these goddamn wingnuts.

Winners and Losers on trump's Bad Day

Ahh, this has been one of those days where the Schadenfreude ("malicious joy") was tasty and warm.

First Part: I don't know if I ever told you my sports fandom, but as a long-time Tampa Bay resident I am true to my school when it comes to rooting for the Bucs (NFL), Lightning (NHL), and the Rays (MLB). Ah, if only Arena Football was still playing... 

You might have noticed it whenever I rant against donald trump: Thanks to his moronic ass, he manipulated the USFL - a spring pro football league that was struggling but popular - back in the early 1980s into a legal fight against the rival NFL that backfired on him, killed the USFL, and ended the Tampa Bay Bandits franchise. So yeah, that still hurts.

Anywho, right now is a great time to be a Tampa Bay sports fan. Our Lightning hockey team just accomplished back-to-back championship seasons (2019/2020 and 2020/2021), a difficult run in any professional sport. The Bolts have been one of the more successful southern ice hockey teams, proving the haters - the traditionalists who argue hockey should be played in cities that actually get snow - wrong with Stanley Cup wins in 2004 and a valiant effort in 2015.

Over in baseball, the Tampa Bay Rays are in the hunt for another AL East division title, having won that last season en route to their second overall World Series matchup (sadly losing to the L.A. Dodgers in 6). The Rays are at the top of the baseball world the past 13 years (since 2008) as one of the small-market teams that figured out a winning formula that's garnered a number of wild card berths, division titles, and so on. Even in the dire situation of playing in one of the worst ballparks, under constant threat of relocating, the Rays are winners while large market teams struggle to stay above .500 in the wins column.

On top of that, the Tampa Bay Bucs are coming off the high of a Super Bowl victory this past season. The first pro sports franchise in the area (1976), infamously one of the worst teams in the NFL having the first ever winless season in 1976 and losing their first 26 games, the Bucs were a laughingstock franchise due to bad ownership and dumb decisions (their rookie drafting faux pas remain some of the worst in league history). Things turned around with new ownership in the 1990s, a good coach finally leading the team (Dungy!) although he got traded out for another good coach (Chucky!) who did get the Bucs to their first Super Bowl in the 2002 season... only to have it all crash and burn by 2008 when Gruden's unbalanced team-building (over-reliance on expensive free agents) bankrupted the cap space and the team sunk back into malaise.

The Bucs went through another series of questionable coaching hires - ahem #FireSchiano - and desperation to find a franchise QB, leading up to the 2020 season when the team made the fateful decision to let could-have-been Jameis Winston go and bring in a veteran team leader... Tom Freaking Brady.

A little bit more later on about how big a move that was, because combined with an already great receiver corps (and adding Tom's BFF Gronk to the Tight End roster) and a developing defensive unit, that lineup had the Bucs' first winning season since 2010, the first playoff spot since 2007, and one of the biggest mind-blowing playoff runs in NFL history leading up to a 31-9 smackdown of the previous SB winner Kansas City Chiefs (told you back-to-back championships are hard to make).

There are few sports cities that have seen ALL of their franchise teams make the championships the same year, fewer still to have all of them WIN those championships (dammit, Rays...). Like I said, what a time to be a Tampa Bay sports fan. CHAMPA BAY, people!

We've made boat parades a thing, everybody!

Brady throwing the Lombardi Trophy at 1:05 on the YouTube clip became an instant meme.

That all said, what happened today was a recent sports tradition of the winning team visiting the White House to get congratulated by the President of the United States. So today the Buccaneers went, led by Tom Brady, who made some rather pointed jokes about his 2020 performance and the ongoing performance of a particular person by the name of trump (via Jonathan Chait at the New York Intelligencer): 

Brady made two jokes at Trump’s expense. First, he made fun of Trump for refusing to accept defeat:

Tom Brady: "Not a lot of people think that we could've won. In fact, I think about 40% of the people still don't think we won."

Biden: "I understand that."

Then, twisting the knife, he made a second joke:

Brady: “We had a game in Chicago where I forgot what down it was. I lost track of one down in 21 years of playing and they started calling me Sleepy Tom. Why would they do that to me?”

While this sounds more gentle than this first joke, it is in fact much more deeply vicious. In Trump’s mind, Biden is a pathetic loser, and he is the winner. Like Tom Brady.

Yet here was Brady, inverting the whole hierarchy. Biden is the winner, like Brady, and Winners now are guys who get called sleepy by the Losers for making a small mistake on the way to their triumph...

I've mentioned before that trump's ego is driven by the need to be seen as a Winner at all times, as much as driven by the fear that he must never be seen as a Loser (or Sucker as he calls it). As Chait also notes:

In Trump’s mind, the two men were parallels to each other: both Winners, and natural companions on the basis of their mastery of their respective fields. “He’s a friend of mine, he’s a great guy, and he’s a great athlete obviously, but he’s a winner,” Trump told TMZ in 2016. “I think Tom is totally innocent. I think Tom is — first of all, I know him, he’s such an honorable guy, and I’m with him all the way.” Trump has repeatedly expressed his regret that he “could have had Tom Brady” as his son-in-law, rather than the nerdy Jared Kushner.

The relationship always had an asymmetric quality. Brady repeatedly expressed discomfort at Trump’s public adulation, and has declined to talk about who he voted for. In 2017, he skipped a White House invitation to celebrate a previous Super Bowl win, citing his need to attend to his ailing mother. The snub, according to the Washington Post, sent Trump into a rage...

Getting dissed like this in public will undoubtedly drive trump even further into madness. But what can trump really do? Any insult he lobs at Tom Brady will be weak and laughable. Brady has proven himself a Winner on the global stage multiple times, the only Quarterback in NFL history to win SEVEN Super Bowls and named MVP five times, holding nearly every passing record in the book, pulling this all off well into his mid-40s when most QBs retire by their 30s, and poised in 2021 to make a serious run for yet another Super Bowl with a veteran Bucs team that lost no talent from last year and may have an easier run this season.

Brady's a goddamned Winner. All trump can do is pose and pretend and brag lie about wins he never really achieved.

And now, the Second Part of the Schadenfreude Day: 

One of donald trump's closest business buddies Tom Barrack got himself hit with a ton of federal charges involving foreign shenanigans during the 2016 elections (shades of Manafort's and Flynn's shenanigans all over again). From Carrie Johnson at NPR:

Thomas Barrack, a longtime friend of Donald Trump's who chaired the former president's inauguration committee, was arrested Tuesday on federal charges that he acted as an agent of a foreign government.

Note: when the report first got out, the Justice Department had to clarify that Barrack wasn't getting arrested over the investigation into questionable fund-raising for that inauguration committee. Yeah, that's still ongoing...

Prosecutors said Barrack, 74, parlayed his close ties to the Trump White House to advance the interests of the United Arab Emirates.

Along with Barrack, Matthew Grimes, 27, of Aspen, Colo., and Rashid Sultan Rashid Al Malik Alshahhi, 43, a UAE national, are accused of acting and conspiring to act as agents of the Middle Eastern nation between April 2016 and April 2018. Grimes worked for Barrack at an investment management firm.

Prosecutors said the three defendants did not provide the required notification to the U.S. attorney general that they were acting as agents of a foreign government.

Barrack is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal agents...

Court papers said Barrack exploited his close ties to Trump as far back as the 2016 campaign when he inserted language favorable to the UAE into a speech about energy policy. Prosecutors said Barrack also asked for a wish list of policy goals at various points throughout the Trump administration, and they said he advanced the UAE's interests in television appearances and an opinion article...

Barrack is the latest person in or near Trump's inner circle to be charged with federal crimes...

It's like you need a scorecard to keep up with all the people in trump's personal circle getting hit with federal felony charges. Seriously, I've been doing a mental check of all the people I've ever known from high school to now, how many of them have been charged with felonies, and out of hundreds of people I can't recall a single one. Okay, my family's history of speeding tickets don't count.

I mean, just think about it. Just with the campaign handlers from 2016 - Paul Manafort dealing with Ukraine (when it was a Russian puppet state), Mike Flynn dealing with Turkey, Steve Bannon dealing with China, Roger Stone dealing with Russia - trump had too many connections to too many corrupting influences, especially linked to Russia.

All of it based on trump's desperation for wealth backed by foreign powers, so trump can pretend being a billionaire Winner when he was really a clown living on credit.

What a Sucker trump's turned out to be.

What a day to be a trump hater! MMmmmmmmm, tasty tasty Schadenfreude indeed. Now bring us more tax evasion arrests from the New York grand jury PLEASE AND THANK YOU...

Too Little Justice Or No Justice At All (w/ Update)

Update below:

You'd think the legal system under a Biden administration would be fighting harder to punish both the liars and thieves that made up trump's administration, or at least go after the January 6 Insurrectionists with more fervor.

Alas on both counts. Although some justice is served for one of the rioters, it still doesn't seem like eight months is enough does it? (via Ryan Lucas at NPR): 

A Florida crane operator who walked onto the Senate floor during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has been sentenced to eight months in federal prison and two years of supervised release.

Paul Hodgkins' sentencing is the first in a felony case stemming from the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters. It is viewed as a potential bellwether for how other Capitol defendants charged with similar offenses are likely to be treated.

Hodgkins pleaded guilty last month to a single count of obstructing an official proceeding. On Jan. 6, he marched from then-President Donald Trump's rally near the White House to the Capitol, where he walked inside and onto the floor of the Senate while carrying a red "Trump 2020" flag...

You could argue that Hodgkins by pleading to a felony does some measure of mercy, but dammit there are still too many who participated in that attempted coup who haven't even been caught yet, and there are too many trumpian supporters eager to try another takeover. We ought to be seeing more felony charges against these rioters, more than just the single indictments of Obstruction that our Justice Dept. seems to think sufficient enough.

Another act of injustice reported today relates to trump's corrupt Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who was facing the possibility of Perjury charges relating to false testimony he gave before Congress during his tenure. Due to legal chicanery, Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland decided not to press the matter further, stirring up commentary like Paul Waldman's at the Washington Post (likely behind paywall):

There’s a temptation to view what Ross did as simply politics, which in a way it was: When he repeatedly made false statements to Congress under oath about the administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, Ross was operating in the service of a broader lie being repeated by multiple Trump officials and advocates. But that makes it worse, not better...

I can’t say why they decided Ross’s case did not warrant prosecution, though it’s true that people are not often prosecuted for lying to Congress. That doesn’t mean it’s unheard of, however. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former factotum, pleaded guilty in 2018 to lying to Congress on Trump’s behalf. Figures in the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals were also indicted for that crime.

Upon taking office, the Trump administration decided it wanted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time in 70 years. The reasons were plain: The administration was doing its best to intimidate immigrants, both documented and otherwise, and a citizenship question would make them fearful about answering the census. That would make their communities look smaller, which would then deprive them of resources and political power.

But the administration couldn’t just come out and say that. So it came up with one of the dumbest cover stories in an administration that was full of them: adding a citizenship question to the census, they said, was necessary for the Justice Department to properly enforce the Voting Rights Act. It made no sense at all, and nobody believed it for a moment.

But on two occasions, Ross was questioned under oath about it and made specific factual assertions — assertions that were false. Ross testified that his department (Commerce has authority over the Census Bureau) only pursued the citizenship question because it was asked to do so by the Justice Department.

But emails obtained in a lawsuit revealed that not only was that false, but Ross and his aides had pressured a reluctant Justice Department to essentially create a bogus paper trail that would give support to the lie that the whole thing was the department’s idea...

In a sane and just world, it's that kind of deceit in government that ought to trigger warrants and court trials. But why not, why allow one of trump's biggest corrupt cronies to skip merrily away from ANY accountability? Back to Waldman:

It wouldn’t be too surprising to hear that the department figured it wasn’t a serious enough crime to justify indicting someone so high-ranking. But that’s just the trouble: When you communicate that you can perjure yourself before Congress with impunity, the result will be more perjury.

And it reinforces the idea that in politics, anything is justified — manipulating the system, lying to the public, lying under oath, anything — and you might well get away with it. At this particular moment in our history, is that a message we want to send?

It's as though there's a strain of cowardice within Democratic ranks that pursuing justice against partisan and corrupt Republicans could stir up more trouble for themselves rather than push back against the lies that break our nation further into pieces.

The only way we can rebuild America is to return to our efforts to build towards justice. We need to hold the likes of Ross - and William Barr, and Steve Mnuchin, and trump himself - accountable for the lies they spewed that warped our reality.

I just wish Biden and Garland and other Democratic leaders realize that, and act soon. trump's lies keep spreading every day that we don't do anything about that.

Update 7/20: It turns out myself and the other Paul - and other commentators - jumped the gun on this. The decision to NOT go after Ross for perjury was done under Barr's watch, not Garland's.

An update on the Wilbur Ross story from yesterday: Turns out that the decision not to prosecute him for lying to Congress was made during the Trump admin, so everyone who said "Damn you Merrick Garland!" was jumping the gun a bit.

My updated story: https://t.co/xMYcZHuHix

— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) July 20, 2021

So, apologies to Merrick Garland.

(beat)

Um, why isn't Merrick Garland reversing Barr's bad call here and prosecuting Ross anyway?! CMON MAN.

The Insanity of Olympics in a Pandemic Year (w/ Update)

Update 7/25/21: So, obviously, the IOC and Japan didn't cancel the Olympics... and there's already a slew of positive cases turning up that are bound to spread. Also, many thanks to Infidel753 for including this article in the Sunday Link Round-Up!

We don't like it, but the COVID pandemic is still going strong because not enough vaccines are out there across the globe, and yet here our governments go forcing an Olympics event - delayed due to 2020 pretty much shut down by the pandemic's beginning - onto an athletic population exposing each other to Gods knows what (via Wynne Davis at NPR):

With less than a week before the opening ceremonies begin at this year's Tokyo games, at least two players on the South African soccer team have tested positive for COVID-19 inside the Olympic Village.

The two players, Thabiso Monyane and Kamohelo Mahlatsi, are the first athletes to test positive for the coronavirus at the site of the Olympic Village in the Japanese capital. A video analyst for the team, Mario Masha, also tested positive.

All three have been isolated, along with those who were in close contact with them...

The announcement of the new cases comes at a moment of deep trepidation inside Japan about the wisdom of holding the games, with Tokyo already under its fourth state of emergency since the pandemic began. With vaccination rates in the country lagging behind those in the United States and much of Europe, there are fears that an influx of thousands from around the world could spark new outbreaks. The state of emergency will mean no spectators during the games inside the capital, but even without international fans, more than 18,000 people are expected to come in for the games.

Though the results announced Sunday are the first cases to appear in athletes, there are growing concerns that others will test positive before competition begins later this week...

COVID can hide in a person between five to fourteen days, meaning the negative tests yesterday won't cover for the positive tests likely to trigger next week at the start of the Olympics itself.

While a majority of the athletes may be vaccinated, and most of the on-site workers as well, that's no guarantee of complete immunity. The vaccines help in reducing the harmful effects, and reduces the likelihood of spreading the virus further, but there's still odds that COVID could spread and affect far too many athletes to effectively hold the sporting events.

Seriously. We are in no current shape to have an Olympics right now. The IOC and the many nations participating in this need to step back, cancel the damn thing.

We've cancelled Olympics before, when world wars condemned us. We've had boycotts between the two sides of the Cold War. Did it break the hopes of athletes of those eras who missed out? Yes, there were many who missed their chances to shine on the global stage. But at least we didn't risk their lives in the process.

There's only one reason the IOC is pushing to get these Olympics done: Money. Television broadcasting rights are in the billions, a lot of advertising revenue at stake, and dammit someone at NBC (and any other overseas networks) will want to get paid for this.

But we're risking the reality that too many athletes intermingle -it's one of the few joys of this international event for them - and they're bound to become vectors of the pandemic towards each other. Even with Tokyo refusing to provide solid beds and condoms to discourage the sex that happens each Olympics, there's other ways of socializing and moments during competition when COVID can spread in an instant. And then you'll have hundreds sick all at once, unable to participate and likely infecting those still unvaccinated.

The Olympics organizers might be praying to every deity in the phone book, and it WILL take divine intervention to make sure most of the Olympians survive this summer.

It is utter madness we are relying on that instead of common goddamn sense. Cancel the Olympics.

DeSantis Is Dancing On Our Graves Right Now

I just posted a few days ago how the COVID pandemic is on an upswing in Florida - and the whole nation - and yet our state's Republican leadership isn't doing a goddamn thing to fight it. Hell, the supposed Governor of the Sunshine State is fucking mocking the pandemic with his campaign merch (via Digby quoting from the Washington Post): 

“Don’t Fauci My Florida,” read drink koozies and T-shirts that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s campaign team rolled out just as his state sees some of the highest coronavirus hospitalizations, new infections and deaths per capita in the country. It’s the latest example of Republicans running on their opposition to virus-fueled shutdowns and mask mandates. A pandemic hero to some and villain to others, Fauci has become a high-profile target.

While the merchandise is focused on Florida before the 2022 gubernatorial race there, DeSantis is seen as a potential front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. A key part of his pitch: He resisted public health experts’ calls for stricter measures against the spread of the coronavirus, spurring criticism on the left and praise from the right for keeping his state’s schools and economy comparatively open...

While discussing the Florida budget this summer, DeSantis said his state’s rosy financial outlook would not have been possible “if we had followed Fauci.”

“Instead we followed freedom,” he said.

His campaign’s “Team DeSantis” Twitter account announced the new merchandise Monday. The Fauci items are listed alongside “Keep Florida Free” hats and red koozies that take aim at face coverings with a DeSantis quote: “How the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on?”

Every ICU doctor and nurse would like to ask DeSantis' marketing geniuses this: "How the hell are they going to drink a beer with a ventilator tube down their throats?" 

The campaign team did not respond to The Washington Post’s questions Tuesday, and Fauci did not respond to a request for comment...

DeSantis and his Republican buddies are touting "freedom" but what they're really doing is KILLING THE UNVACCINATED IN FLORIDA.

Christ. This isn't freedom: This is genocide.

As Digby herself notes:

That (fighting the pandemic) is meaningless to him. He’s owning the libs and that’s the key to success in the GOP.

He’s also killing his own voters — only the unvaccinated are dying at this point and most of them are Republicans — which seems to be politically foolish but whatever. But now that kids are getting it, and young parents, this seems even more cruel than before. In fact, it should be criminal that these right wing nihilists aren’t doing everything they can to tamp down this virus...

Our state leadership can't be bothered with deaths unless it's something that screws with their Narrative. Like the unborn fetus they so brazenly defend except for the point after that fetus is born because then that newborn has no postnatal care or social aid waiting for it.

In this situation, DeSantis can't be bothered with COVID not because our vaccination program defeated it - our vaccination rates haven't reached that point - but because he never really believed COVID was a serious threat to Florida's residents, and he'd rather push the narrative that he's been great for state business.

But DeSantis isn't all that great for business or our schools or our communities because at this rate in another two weeks our hospitals are going to be overwhelmed and half the state is going to have to close down no matter what with half the workforce and half the school populations sick or dying on us.

Let me repeat. This isn't freedom: This is genocide.

And it's DeSantis' responsibility, which he's refusing to accept. Which makes it his fault.

Goddamn him.

Brief Observation of Watching trump's Lawyers Get Shamed (If They Ever COULD Be Shamed) in a Court Of Law

So there was some fun to be had on Monday when the lawyers that had been running around post-elections in late 2020 had to appear before a judge to answer for their shenanigans (via Adam Klasfeld at Law&Crime): 

In the first federal court reckoning since the failure of the so-called “Kraken” litigation, a judge on Monday told pro-Trump lawyers Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and their co-counsel that she was concerned that their legal team allowed dodgy affidavits to be filed.

“The court is concerned that these affidavits were submitted in bad faith,” U.S. District Judge Linda Parker said in a blockbuster remark...

More than half a year ago on Dec. 7, Judge Parker decisively rejected Powell and Wood’s effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan in a scathing, 36-page ruling.

“Plaintiffs ask this court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters,” Parker wrote. “This, the Court cannot, and will not, do.”

“The People have spoken,” she added.

Named after a mythical octopus-like creature, the “Kraken” is the name that Powell gave to her quadruple-armed effort to overturn election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Each bid failed, and every appeal was rejected. Parker convened the hearing on Monday to consider whether every lawyer who participated in legal offensive in her court should face sanctions, up to their referrals for disbarment proceedings...

You kind of need to read all of Klasfeld's article: In the details are various acts of fraud, questionable witnesses (like this "Spyder" who claimed to be Army Intelligence but turned out to be an Army mechanic), and various efforts by Lin Wood to distance himself from any legal liability of the shenanigans he signed up for.

via GIPHY

Which all kind of led up to this quote:

...Systematically questioning what, if any, vetting the “Kraken” legal team performed on a stack of affidavits, Judge Parker tore apart the allegations inside one of those declaration.

“This is really fantastical,” Parker said.

“How could any of you as officers of the court submit this affidavit?” she added...

My observation here is: Why the hell isn't Judge Parker whipping out Ye Olde Hammer of Contempt of Court to toss each of trump's inept and inaccurate lawyers straight into jail cells? Under any measurement of Common Sense, Wood and Powell and the others committed serious unethical acts and perpetuated an ongoing fraud on both the nation and the electoral process. Those lawyers made themselves look like fools - without evidence of fraud, without any legal history to back up their claims - and mocked each courtroom doing so.

I understand what Parker is doing now is reviewing the matter for sanctions, which seem to imply fines and disbarment charges when she makes her ruling. However, she should be able to issue Contempt charges under her own power as Judge, as a means of maintaining control of her courtroom.

Either there's a concern that going this route turns trump and his lawyers into martyrs, or that there's possibly a standard of judicial ethics restraining Parker (or any other judge that has do deal with trump's decades-long attack on the legal system) from going there. 

But from where I'm sitting, EVERYTHING that trump and his legal lackeys have done have been open and blatant acts of contempt towards everything the rule of law should stand for.

Contempt of Court is the FIRST thing those bastards should be held accountable for.