Tories Partied Like There Was No Tomorrow...

...and for Boris Badhair, there might not be a tomorrow the rate the current scandals are overtaking his UK government.

When last we left the United Kingdom/Brexit news (my last full comment on it was 2019): Boris Johnson had pulled off an electoral stunner over Labour in spite of his unpopularity, and was poised to make a hard No-Deal exit from the EU to fulfill his dream of an economically-independent UK happen. 

What happened since then got a little overwhelmed by this minor inconvenience of a COVID-19 PANDEMIC, but since then the news about the UK's economic hardships piled up fast and often. Some of it tied to the overall economic hardships of surviving a global pandemic, but a lot of tied to Johnson's and his fellow Conservatives' (Tories) delusions about how to pull off their Brexit policy changes without hassles. (P.S. If you want better details, please follow Chris Grey's excellent blog updates for more)

The biggest problem has been their nation's supply chain woes: As predicted by several pro-EU critics, Brexit created a staffing shortage with truck (or lorry, in their terminology) drivers that the existing UK population can't sustain. 

Overall economic growth has been sluggish, even against what the pandemic did to bring a lot of business to a temporary halt: It is all well below the promises Johnson and other Leave advocates made from 2016 onward.

And now piling onto that is an energy crisis during a hard winter where energy bills for many residents are skyrocketing, creating conflict over Brexit ideology that Johnson's intraparty factions can't resolve.

So speaking of parties... Guess what it is that's pulling Boris Johnson and his political allies downward to the brink of resignation/no-confidence votes/all-out government collapse?

If you hadn't heard - and I think there's two ensigns on Deck 39 who haven't heard yet - Johnson is facing harsh scrutiny for allowing office parties to take place at 10 Downing Street and elsewhere back in 2020/2021 during the COVID Pandemic when rules were issued to the whole United Kingdom to disallow such gatherings. In short, the Tories - and Boris himself, who got caught on camera indulging in the shenanigans, oh Boris no, not with a LIGHTSABER - partied like the rules didn't apply to them.

From this Guardian opinion essay from Andrew Rawnsley:

The defenestration of a prime minister between elections is usually triggered by a seismic event. Neville Chamberlain was forced out after Norway was gobbled up by Hitler. The national humiliation of the Suez debacle did for Anthony Eden. The epic unpopularity of the riot-provoking poll tax impelled Margaret Thatcher towards her unwilling exit. David Cameron felt compelled to quit when he lost his gamble on the Brexit referendum. If Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson soon joins the gallery of toppled PMs, it will be because he attended a “bring your own booze” party in the back garden of Number 10 and his aides had a lockdown-busting piss-up in Downing Street the night before the Queen buried her husband...

True, the optics of that - Queen Elizabeth II, the human symbol of Great Britain's storied history and global importance, the Crown, beloved mother figure to an entire kingdom, and Doctor Who Number One Fan, sitting alone at her husband's grave while Rome burned Tories partied - should have caused mass resignations out of sheer British decency, but I digress. Back to Rawnsley:

No other premiership has had such a pathetically shabby ending. No finale to his slummy reign would be more appropriate. It has always been highly likely that cavalier and blatant rule-breaking, and then lying about it, would be the undoing of a prime minister with a career history of casual contempt for truth and integrity.

In its relatively short life, his premiership has been splattered with scandal. There was the “crony express” that sped lucrative Covid contracts to Tory mates down a “VIP lane”, which the high court has just ruled unlawful. There was the decanting of infected elderly patients from hospitals into vulnerable care homes at the height of the pandemic. Nor should we forget the multiple-sourced accounts that Mr Johnson callously declared that he would let the bodies “pile high in their thousands” in the winter of last year rather than take timely action to contain a resurgence of Covid, an appalling choice that resulted in many avoidable fatalities and has left Britain with the highest death toll in Europe.

These and other outrages ought to have deeply troubled Tories, but many in his parliamentary party responded to scandal after scandal with a dismissive shrug... When previous charges of moral turpitude bounced off him, Tories told themselves that their leader was coated with a lacquer of Teflon so thick that nothing could stick. Some cynically opined that voters knew that Mr Johnson was a mendacious scoundrel when he won the election in 2019 and so appalling behaviour was expected and – ghastly phrase – “in the price”. It was often averred that a substantial chunk of the public enjoyed having a “lovable rogue” at Number 10. “Everyone loves a sinner.” So one senior Tory chortled to me last autumn when his party was still sitting on a poll lead even as Wallpapergate and several other scandals were on the boil. He went on: “If Boris was caught shagging a goat in Downing Street, people would immediately make a goat beer and drink to his health...”

If this all sounds familiar, to a certain person's claim in the States that he could "shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and I wouldn't lose voters," you wouldn't be wrong. What you are reading/hearing/seeing is the arrogance of a political elite that holds themselves above all rules even their own, at the expense of any ethics or integrity we should expect from our elected leaders. Again, I digress:

It is hard to say which is the more jaw-dropping. The flagrancy of the rule-breaking. The arrogant stupidity of it. Or the stunning frequency with which the denizens of Number 10 behaved as if laws did not apply to them. The prime minister’s feeble plea in mitigation for the garden party that he admits to attending is that he thought it was a “work event”. This laughable excuse asks us to believe that he failed to notice that alcohol was flowing and that his wife and her chums were present. He had to fall back on such a risible defence because the alternative is to confess that he flouted his government’s regulations and afterwards sought to dupe the public and deceive parliament...

Even if he (Boris) was not physically present for all the parties, he was at every one in spirit. What possessed Number 10 staffers to think that it was sensible or decent to turn Downing Street into a drinking den while people were dying? As I like to remark from time to time, the culture of organizations is greatly shaped by the character of the person at the top. The most egregious rule-breaking became habitual at Number 10 and that is surely directly connected to the fact that the most senior person in the building is a compulsively shameless rule-trasher. “Fish stink from the head,” remarks one former Tory cabinet minister. “So does Number 10...”

It seems a bit off that with all of the chaos afflicting the United Kingdom right now it would be a set of ill-advised drunken bacchanals that would drive out a sitting Prime Minister, one of the most politically powerful figures across the world.

Under other circumstances, such rule-breaking would likely involve the civil workers caught partying to quit or get fired, a shake-up of the lesser Cabinet seats of expendable party members to bring in more "reform-minded" replacements, and then brush it all under the rug of "I apologize, lesson learned."

But it seems Boris and his ilk are receiving the full force of national outrage, with 63 percent of the general UK population calling for his resignation. While the intraparty support isn't wavering - it never will until the party faithful are told it's okay to support someone else - the Conservative Party itself is under serious threat. Two recent by-elections to fill seats vacated by this scandal both went Liberal-Democratic (a staunch pro-EU party) in what were heavily-Conservative gerrymandered districts (well, not rotten boroughs but along the same lines).

From where I'm sitting, the PartyGate situation has less to do with the rule-breaking and more to do with the general outrage most Brits were feeling after several years of Brexit follies and COVID mishandles. Unable to express full anger over the supply woes, unable to express outrage over rising costs both Brexit and COVID related, all because a strong plurality of the population are Conservative-leaning (what we'd call Center-Right) and couldn't complain about a Brexit process they supported, these party scandals seem like an outlet granting the citizenry their chance and their right to vent at bad leadership caught lying to them over and over again. And not just the leadership under the clownish Boris Johnson, but a decade or more of questionable leadership from the likes of Theresa May and David Cameron who held onto hard-line Conservative values that left the UK unprepared for the crises happening today.

Yes, leadership ought to be held accountable. Yes, leadership needs reminding that they themselves are not above the laws. But this outrage is a rupture of scope and anger somewhat disproportionate to the damage actually caused by these reckless parties the Tories sought to indulge in.

Not that I'm complaining. I'm breaking out the popcorn - well, okay, the Nestle Buncha Crunches because I got out of eating popcorn as a teenager, damn you braces! - watching all of this just like everybody else who's Center-Left enjoying the schadenfreude of the Right-leaning wingnuts crash and burn.

There's supposed to be an official government report investigating these parties due next week. Thing is, as Prime Minister Boris will get the first look at it, and God knows if he'll try to redact it or suppress it in some way. Of course, something this big will be bound to leak out, so any suppression effort will hurt him anyway.

(keeps munching on those Buncha Crunches) Would it be tacky of us to throw a Farewell/"GET THE FOOK OUT" party if/when Boris is forced to resign...?

Bring on that tomorrow, Tories. It's the bill for decades of mismanagement and self-entitled bullshit come due.

Do Call It Sedition, Do Hold Insurrectionists Accountable

At last, some good news in the year-long case into the trumpian rioters who stormed the nation's Capitol to disrupt our electoral system. The Department of Justice arrested the leader of the Oath Keepers - one of trump's militant backers - on the charge of seditious conspiracy, a more serious charge than the Obstruction charges most of the 725 previously detained rioters have been hit with (via Carrie Johnson and Ryan Lucas at NPR): 

Federal authorities arrested Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes in Texas on Thursday morning and also took Edward Vallejo into custody in Arizona. The other nine people had already been accused of some crimes related to the siege on the Capitol last year.

The grand jury indictment in the District of Columbia is the most serious and sweeping case to emerge from the federal investigation into the Capitol riot and the first to include the seditious conspiracy charge, which carries a maximum of 20 years in prison. Rarely seen in recent years, seditious conspiracy charges are made against those who plot to prevent the execution of U.S. law.

The Justice Department said the Oath Keepers were determined to stop the lawful transfer of power, with two groups marching in military-style formations toward the Capitol that day and other personnel labeled "quick reaction forces" waiting outside D.C. to transport firearms and other weapons. Vallejo allegedly helped coordinate one of those quick-reaction teams.

The court papers said the defendants organized teams to use force and bring firearms to the Capitol, recruited members to participate, organized trainings and brought paramilitary gear, knives, batons and radio equipment to Washington.

Rhodes communicated with other leaders on Jan. 6 using a chat group on the encrypted app Signal, according to court documents.

"Pence is doing nothing. As I predicted," Rhodes typed to the group that day. "All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the Patriots are taking it into their own hands. They've had enough..."

Just in case you're interested, the actual law being enforced here is 18 USC 2384:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

It may have taken a year, but it likely involved the slow digging through the 700-plus foot soldiers of Rhodes' army to flip enough documented evidence to bring this charge to the judges. This is big league stuff now, and the organizers of this planned riot - hi, trump's inner circle working the war room at the Willard Hotel! - are the next link in this flowchart of shame.

Let's go to Emptywheel - who's been covering this with great detail - and see what she has to say about it:

The charges are, at once, no big deal, because they’re really just the same conspiracy charged in a different way with two conspiracies added. They’re a huge deal, because now Republicans will be hard pressed to continue to downplay January 6. And they’re a solution to some problems and a tool to move on...

Though Kenneth Harrelson released some of the key communications from the Willard Hotel from earlier in the day, those still don’t show up in this indictment. So the government is remaining coy about what it knows about coordination with people at the Willard Hotel. That’s probably because it still needs others to flip — Joshua James would be ideal, but Roberto Minuta might be useful as well — to confirm whatever Mark Grods and Mike Simmons (if he is cooperating) were able to offer about it.

But they are making it clear that they know more about some communications they’ve been talking about for some time...

This indictment will, presumably, impress all those who’ve been wailing the existing 20 year charges the Oath Keepers were facing were not adequate. But it may also clear a path to move up the chain...

The rioters doing the dirty work busting into Congressional chambers and offices have ties to the Oath Keepers. This seditious conspiracy charge shows the coordination between the Oath Keepers, and provides a link to trump's people. And trump's people are linked to trump himself: NONE of them could have done this without his blessing. 

Where Mueller had a problem proving a link between trump's 2016 campaign to Russian business and political allies - because of the Obstruction that the Congressional Democrats failed to investigate towards impeachment - there's already a lot of evidence between the rioters to the war rooms (there were two, one at Willard Hotel and one in the Eisenhower Executive Office (!)) and between the war rooms and trump.

Evidence but not enough proof yet to take to a court of law. THAT'S where the Justice Department needs to hurry up. There's not a lot of time between now and November 2022 when the midterms could lead to the Republicans reclaimed part or all of Congressional control to obstruct any further investigations and arrests.

I know they want to get it right, but dammit the clock is not on the nation's side. If any accountability, if any justice can be done to punish trump for his coup attempt, it's got to be soon.

The Omicron Overwhelm and DeSantis Deceit

Welcome to Hell, Florida United States (via Ian Hodgson and Christopher O'Donnell for the Tampa Bay Times): 

The omicron variant is spreading like wildfire across Florida and infecting a record number of people.

The state averaged nearly 57,000 COVID-19 infections a day from Dec. 31 to Thursday, according to the weekly report released Friday. That is the highest weekly infection rate thus far during the 22-month pandemic. It is also more than 150 percent higher than the peak of the Delta wave that swept through the state last summer.

Florida accounted for one out of every 10 infections in the U.S. last week and had the seventh-highest rates of infection per capita, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention...

Florida hospitals are seeing the effects of omicron firsthand: There were 8,548 confirmed COVID-19 cases filling state hospital beds as of Friday, four times as many as two weeks ago, according to federal data.

There were 12,353 patients admitted in the past seven days, a nearly 75 percent jump from last week. It’s the highest number of new COVID-19 hospitalizations since the end of August. That number includes 570 children under 18 — the highest number of kids hospitalized in one week throughout the pandemic...

I said earlier, before the holidays, that a kind of pandemic fatigue has settled in, that too many Americans have given up on masking in public and enough of a minority of us have refused to get vaccinated out of misinformed belief or intentional partisan spite.

Making this situation with the Omicron variant wave worse than the earlier pandemic spikes has been the failure of leadership - including Biden and the CDC - caving to pressure to force our schools to stay open guaranteeing that our teachers and students - our families! - expose each other to COVID that even in its mildest forms can leave damage in its wake.

But that's nothing compared to the outright sabotage committed by Republican / Red State Governors refusing to take the pandemic serious and stubbornly refuse to admit there's still any problem at all. Especially Florida's governor Ron DeSantis, who has been flailing and FAILING to lead the state as the pandemic overwhelms our hospitals again.

It's particularly horrifying that DeSantis and his administration were caught WASTING test kits for months that could have helped people track their health. From Stephen Adams via the Tampa Bay 10 Action News:

Back on Dec. 30, (Agricultural Commissioner Nikki) Fried accused the Florida Department of Health of storing a large number of a particular type of COVID-19 tests that were about to expire.

“It’s come to my attention that Governor DeSantis’ Department of Health has a significant number of COVID-19 tests stockpiled that are set to expire imminently," Fried wrote at the time.

"Given the Governor’s lack of transparency throughout this pandemic, there’s no known public information about these tests or how soon they expire," Fried continued in her prior statement. "With omicron infections exploding throughout Florida, I beg of him to release these tests immediately to local counties and cities, and to stand up state-sponsored testing sites. To let these tests expire while Floridians anxiously wait for hours in testing lines is negligent at best, and heartless at worst...”

Some clarity on the matter came during a news conference DeSantis held on Thursday in West Palm Beach. Asked by a reporter about Fried's claim the state was stockpiling tests, DeSantis turned the podium over to Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie.

“We had between 800,000 and a million test kits – Abbott rapid test kits in our warehouse – that did expire," Guthrie explained. "We tried to give them out prior to that, but there was not a demand for it...”

DeSantis and his spokespeople are, by the by, gaslighting like brazen children caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

NO DEMAND FOR THE TESTS?! Nearly every store in Florida had run out of them before Christmas. If you drove out to the drive-through rapid test locations, you ran into lines of cars that circled the testing area and sometimes blocked traffic on the nearby highways. We're still dealing with long lines this weekend:

I need to mention when I drove by the Bartow FL Medical Center yesterday, the rapid test drive-thru line was all the way out to US 98. It was the longest I'd ever seen that line.

— Witty Librarian (@PaulWartenberg) January 7, 2022

DeSantis is LYING when he claims that demand for the test kits is low. Demand is so high it'd be easier to find toilet paper in March 2020 than it is to find a home test kit at Walgreens today.

And why is DeSantis lying?

Because he wants to project the illusion that Florida is safe, that COVID-19 isn't ravaging our population, that the numbers are down so he can lie later when he's campaigning - for the Governor's office this November, for the Presidency in 2024 - that he beat COVID... when the truth is he's letting the pandemic run wild to appease the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who make up the rabid GOP voting base.

To quote my fellow Floridian survivor Betty Cracker:

I think the state almost certainly sat on those tests and is now issuing this guidance that contradicts the public health expert consensus because they want to limit political damage to DeSantis for his ongoing mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis. DeSantis claims he didn’t know about the stockpile of now-expired tests, and possibly that’s even true.

But DeSantis has loaded every state agency with Republican hacks, sycophants and donors whose primary job is to turn the organizations into political assets for DeSantis as he gears up to run for president...

I keep hoping the growing evidence that DeSantis is focused on self-promotion at the expense of everything else — our health, our university and K-12 education system, the state’s economy — will finally motivate Floridians to kick his ass out of office later this year...

It all depends on if people see past DeSantis' deceit. It all depends on if every Floridian gets hit hard - either themselves or their families or their closest friends - with this Omicron wave and make them realize DeSantis allowed this all to happen because he sacrificed our health for his benefit.

Goddamn him. We ALL can't be blind to the idiocy coming out of the governor's office.

Deep Scars

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please do me a favor and review the articles I'm considering for the FWA Royal Palm Literary awards this year.)

Today was the one-year anniversary of donald trump's Insurrection, the massing and angering up of a mob of his supporters to go smash their way into the halls of Congress to disrupt the Electoral Vote count and prevent Joe Biden from winning the 2020 Presidential election.

And while today's press coverage and blogging memorials provided some catharsis - with President Biden using the moment to speak against trump's ongoing Big Lie campaign, openly calling trump a "defeated former President" without even calling trump by name - the facts remain that 1) we have not yet reached a full accounting of justice for those - from trump himself to all the handlers running "war rooms" in nearby hotels coordinating with the extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who enacted the violence - who planned and executed the riots, and 2) the insurrection itself shows just how broken and divided the United States truly is.

We still have a sizable number of Republican voters - not just the hard-core trumpians but the party in general - who still view the attack on Capitol Hill was "peaceful" or that the violence was overblown. Two-thirds of Republican voters believe trump's Big Lie that the Democrats stole the election with fake votes (either with massive voter fraud that trump's lawyers can't prove or by hiding ballots that favored trump that trump's lawyers can't find).

The problem here is the divide between those who look to the facts and those who look to the GOP Grand Narrative. It's gotten to the point where the MAGA supporters are actively behaving like a religious cult. To refer to that NPR article by Tovia Smith:

This kind of intractability, however, isn't stopping people around the nation from continuing to try to get through to their loved ones. Many are filling up support groups for people struggling to reach family members who've fallen deep down the rabbit hole.

"I get frustrated and angry at my dad," says one such woman, who goes by Rain. "I've always thought of him as so intelligent. But he's being misled, and there's no way to get him to see the light on that."

In a meeting that's run online by Antidote, a group that combats psychological manipulation, the stories are remarkably similar. Shannon, a 37-year-old from Colorado, explains how heartbroken she is that the "big lie" has come between her and her mother. The participants asked that their full names not be used to protect their family members from retribution and so as not to jeopardize their reconciliation.

Shannon tells the group that her mother, who she says was at the Capitol during the insurrection, will barely listen when her daughter tries to bring her evidence that the election was not stolen.

"It's a waste of my breath," she sighs. "I brought up all kinds of information, and she dismisses it immediately. It's blind allegiance. And I've seen it get worse..."

Facts don't matter when the emotional intensity of the Far Right echo chamber means more. This is akin to dealing with a fervent devotee to extremist faith - doesn't matter if it's Christian, Muslim, Hebrew, Hindu, or Unitarian - who won't consider the irregularities or hypocrisy of their own religious texts and insists on the infallibility of the Truth that tells them to strap on a bomb vest and blow up schools. Or if you want a secular analogy, this is akin to dealing with fans of a long-losing football team who won't admit how bad the Washington No-Names are and switch their support to a better-run organization like the Pittsburgh Steelers.

(Awkwardly looks at all the Tampa Bay Bucs gear and memorabilia from the 2021 Super Bowl LV win) Uh, yeah I don't talk much about the years between 1983 to 1996 much... or the 2008 to 2019 years either... But then again I'm self-aware enough to admit the Bucs have been bad... just... um... yeah I can't quit them baby. (I actually got national attention for fifteen minutes ranting FIRE SCHIANO! on a sports blog years ago) ANYWAYS I digress. 

This is how I see how the Far Right is behaving: They are wholly devoted to a Republican Party and Far Right agenda because that is their "team" and they are loyal to the bitter end no matter how racist, sexist, and violent that team becomes (in many cases, they are loyal because of that team being racist, sexist, and violent). 

Back to Smith's article:

These days, identifying as red or blue, or as a die-hard Trumper or anti-Trumper, has become a kind of "mega-identity," as it has been dubbed by Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University associate professor of political science. She says partisan identity has become so fully fused with cultural, religious, racial, gender and geographical identity that it's very high stakes for people to break with their party — or the party line.

"To feel that they are losing all [those aspects of themselves] wrapped together, that's a devastating psychological harm," says Mason. "And people tend to react to that with a lot of not only anger, but really defensive mechanisms."

That's why Mason says no recount or court case is going to be convincing to Trump supporters who are clinging to the myth that their side didn't actually lose.

"At this point, over one year out, I don't think there is any way to get through to them," Mason says. "They've had this entire fever dream, where Trump is really stoking these ideas of 'No matter what anybody else tells you, I'm telling you you're a winner.' And that feels great. That's just like the most primitive human instincts to follow the good feelings, not the bad feelings."

There is no rational way to reach people like the Far Right who have reached an irrational world-view. Like John Cole said in 2009, "I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties (The Republicans) is insane." Only it's not bipartisanship itself that's at risk twelve years later, it's the very nature of the federalist system itself that makes up the United States of America.

I've mentioned it before: The entire model of checks and balances baked into the Constitution and into the operational practices of government itself require acts of compromise and cooperation (forms of "Good Faith" behavior) between all parties. As we've seen during trump's tenure in the White House, almost all of that Good Faith needed for government to function gave way to pandering, policy hostage-taking, and outright grifting that made much of government grind to a halt. The rest of the Republican Party couldn't get much done - outside of a massive tax cut the majority of Americans didn't ask for - because trump kept violating norms even they needed to work with. 

With one major political party broken, the rest of the political structure of the nation itself falls apart. You have states openly dismissing federal guidelines during a global pandemic. You have planned efforts to dismantle electoral systems to guarantee voters have no say. You have federal courts ignoring centuries of Judicial Review to tack towards extreme interpretations of conservative thought just to achieve political agendas against the majority will.

With the political culture broken, the social norms of the United States are breaking as well. We have more angry people lashing out at public workers and nurses than ever before. A violent wave of arrogant privilege towards our neighbors and communities making it harder for people to remain civil at all.

It is in that mood, in this moment, that we need to realize all this public rage and violence are physical markings of emotional scars, deep rooted fears and hates rising up to the skin exposing this all to the world. 

These scars are from wounds that never healed up since the Constitutional enshrinement of slavery, never healed up since the Andrew Jackson years, never healed up from the Trail of Tears and centuries of Native reservation camps, never healed up since the fugitive slave laws of 1850s, never healed up from the Civil War, never healed up after Reconstruction and decades of Jim Crow, never healed up after the union fights, never healed up after women's suffrage, never healed up after the Red Scares and McCarthyist witch hunts, never healed up after Japanese internment camps, never healed up after decades of lynchings, never healed up after the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s, never healed up after gays rights and trans rights and human rights, never healed up after Obama proved a Black Man could lead America, never healed up at all because too many people - mostly white, mostly male, mostly rich - in power and privilege are too terrified that they're losing both to the long arc of history.

These scars won't heal even if we pursue justice to its natural end in arresting trump and his Insurrectionist mobs for the public crimes - all caught on film they can't deny - they've committed. We cannot ignore the law on this: trump and his cronies must answer for the violence they called into existence that dark January day. But we need to realize their arrests and their accountability will not heal these scars, and will not bring an end to the division across America that they promoted, expanded, profited from.

This fight to rebuild America is not over.

Input For Another Round of Blog Award Submissions for 2022

Well, it's a new year started and already I gotta think about what to submit to the Florida Writers Association's Royal Palm Literary Awards for their Non-Fiction / Blogging category.

There's a limit to the submissions - Five per category - so I'd like to narrow down my favorite 2021 articles some time before February when the early bird submission prices aren't so bad.

So to the nine regular followers to this blog, lemme know which of these articles I ought to submit to the judges:

• Irrational (Already submitted to Batocchio's annual Jon Swift Roundup, and one I've already decided to submit to RPLA no matter what. I just need re-affirmation (grin))
• Hark! A Ranking of Nirvana Albums (I didn't get through even Semi-Finalist status last year with the four I ended up submitting, and I think part of the reason was that they were too partisan in tone. So throwing in a non-political article might help balance things out)
• The Battle of GameStop
• It's the Stuff That's Legal That Should Worry You
• The Big Lie And the One Truth
• Let The Rock Cry Out to Gaetz, No Hiding Place
• The Tragedy In Surfside
• What Would You Have the Ladies Do, O Sexists?
• The Fall of Afghanistan
• Strange Days Inside the Job Lines
• Oakland High Shooting: Red Flags Everywhere

Okay, I know I've got a clunky Comments section here, but if you don't want to post a comment on which ones you'd like submitted, you can tweet me @PaulWartenberg or email p.warten AT gmail. I need to know before the first week of February.

Thank ye, and Happy New Year!

Update 1/30/22: Okay, I've narrowed the choices down to:

• Irrational
• Hark! A Ranking of Nirvana Albums
• The Big Lie and the One Truth
• The Tragedy In Surfside
• Strange Days Inside the Job Lines

Thank you all... um, actually I only got one of you to comment so... I really need to see about making comment posting easier (while avoiding the Chinese spammers).

Update 7/20/22: Bad news, Big Lie and Strange Days did not make the Semifinalist cut. Irrational, Hark!, and Surfside articles did reach Semifinalist status and will now get judged for the Finalist round!

Nice new logo from FWA by the by: 

Update 8/12/22: The Finalist results are in and Holy Forking Shirtballs, people. Irrational and Hark! A Ranking of Nirvana Albums 
made it to the Finalists. I'm a bit surprised/disappointed Tragedy of Surfside did not make the cut, alas. But now I have a reason to attend the Writers' Conference for the awards banquet.

Update 10/23/22: Holy forking shirtballs, Irrational won a silver!

So What To Expect for 2022?

In the THINGS THAT MATTER Category:

We should expect the COVID pandemic to continue on. The massive upturn in cases due to the Omicron variant means this January we're going to see overwhelmed hospitals and ICUs again with no foreseeable relief for our health care professionals.

The United States is heading into the Congressional Midterms, meaning the damned Beltway obsessions over the horse races between Republicans and Democrats are going to obscure everything else going on. The maddening drum beats of political warfare, with unhinged mudslinging and "gotcha" moments of increasing absurdity, is going to deafen and blind us all (again).

And still voter turnout is a necessity - despite all the storm and fury trying to drive voters away out of fatigue and anxiety - because Gods help us the Republicans are gerrymandering the districts and suppressing the voters like never before... and good old turnout is still the best way to overcome all that.

Our schools are going to be overwhelmed by the Far Right groups pursuing another round of book banning and ideology purging, such as the schools in Oklahoma getting threatened with a law weaponizing the bounty system to gift offended parents $10,000 per book in school libraries that offend them. Just think, an outraged grifter parent can complain about five different titles - hell, one of them can be the DICTIONARY that happens to include curse words like "hell" - in one week and steal earn $50k of easy money from our financially-strapped schools - an amount that's roughly an annual income for most Americans - without breaking a sweat.

Did I mention the ongoing COVID pandemic? Because it feels like this should be big news every night instead of getting overlooked while our HOSPITALS CROWD UP AGAIN.

The House Investigation into trump's January 6 Insurrection is reportedly looking at issuing more subpoenas, starting to look into the financial backing of the war rooms and overall organization that planned the riots. But they need to hurry: The committee needs to get all their criminal charges filed to the Department of Justice before any possibility of the Republicans retaking the House after November...

Speaking of investigations into trump, there are rumors that he's facing tax evasion and even racketeering charges from the New York federal prosecutors digging into trump's business misdeeds. It would be pretty to think so, but I'll believe it when I see trump himself perp-walked with handcuffs into the courtroom for the official charges.

And it would be nice to hear about any results from the criminal investigation in Cobb County regarding trump's effort to interfere with the ballot counting there.

There is little sign of sanity or calm returning to our corner of the universe this coming year.

So strap in kiddos, it's going to be a fight all the way in all day every day.

(Did I forget anything...?)

Year 2021 As Tragedy And Farce

(Update: With many thanks to Driftglass for including this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please do me a favor and review my best articles of 2021 for submission to Florida Writers' Association's annual Royal Palm awards!)

As the year ends, today becomes a moment to look back and wonder at how we survived it at all.

(Christ. As I type this I just got word that Betty White passed away. FUCK YOU, 2021, DIE IN A FUCKING FIRE WILL YA)

Ahem.

The tragedy of the year stems from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, now rolling into its second year. Even with a vaccine program in place, even with all we know about how to fight COVID and how to reduce the risks... we're ending this year with a dangerously effective Omicron strain that's threatening to force shutdowns of workplaces and schools in spite of the Far Right forces obsessed to ignore the risks to stick to their own crazed Narrative.

The tragedy of 2021 got worse as donald trump - stinging from his Electoral losses in 2020 - refused to play by the rules of the Constitution and sent in mobs of insurrectionists into the halls of Congress to force that body from confirming the vote counts. For all the digging into the events of January 6th, we're barely seeing major arrests and serious punishments of the rioters and the culprits that we know so far who planned the whole attack.

If there'd been anything major going on all year long, it was the war of attrition between the madness of the Pandemic and the madness of trump's Big Lie. A lot of other crazy things happening in 2021 tended to tie into either ongoing crisis.

If there was any saving grace to this past year, it was how much of a farce the trumpian War On Reality could become.

The arguments trump forced his handlers to take - in arguing over stolen votes that were never stolen - led to those handlers and lawyers getting taken to the woodshed by judges who cut through every gaslighting lie they offered. These were lawyers who showed no sign of understanding the Constitution or election laws from beginning to end. The next sight we need to see of these inept lawyers should be them losing their license - like Giuliani - to practice law.

Everything coming out about how trump's inner circle coordinated and planned the January 6th Insurrection would be pure comedy if it didn't involve serious crimes. The very idea that they created a PowerPoint presentation to show trump how they planned it - and a sloppy PowerPoint at that - would be the crowning moment of funny whenever future Hollywood producers film the streaming miniseries about the riots.

As for the efforts in 2021 to fight the Pandemic, trump's early drum beats to push an anti-vax agenda to humiliate Biden and keep the nation in chaos led to the growing realization that trump's actions were literally killing off their own Far Right voting base... forcing trump's more recent calls to vaccinate falling on deaf - even hostile - ears.

Both nightmare and comedy at the same time in the same crises.

No wonder 2021 feels like a bad dream refusing to end.

Gods help us in 2022. 

Breaking: Justice For a Moment For Abused Young Women, But More MUST Be Done to Serve Justice Forever

Was going to write something else, but this news broke while I was stuck at the train crossing on State Rd 60 earlier this evening. Socialite Sex Trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell found guilty by jury on five counts (via Jasmine Garsd and Vanessa Romo at NPR):

A federal jury deliberated for five full days before finding Maxwell guilty on five of the six counts she faced, including the sex trafficking of a minor. The 60-year-old was acquitted of enticing a minor to travel with intent to engage in illegal sexual activity. Epstein, a convicted sex offender, died in 2019 while in a Manhattan correctional facility.

Throughout the trial, jurors heard from four women who accused Maxwell of luring them into Epstein's lavish homes to have sex with him and other powerful men. Over three weeks, the women described how Maxwell, who dated Epstein in the 1990s, presented herself as a friendly older sister, earning their trust with gifts and shopping sprees. Two of the women testified they were 14 years old when Maxwell coaxed them into engaging in sexual acts with Epstein. One woman testified that Maxwell was present and even participated in some of the encounters...

Epstein, as noted earlier, died under questionable circumstances back in 2019 when the legal system re-opened cases they found out were illegally pled out against the wishes of Epstein's victims back in 2007. Between them, Maxwell and Epstein had ties to multiple political and business figures who were alleged - then and also in this trial - to have sex with these underage girls as trade-off for business deals and favors that Epstein would exploit. Back to the article: 

It's a case that has captured international attention and sparked countless conspiracy theories. And there's plenty of fodder: Maxwell and Epstein, who were a couple in the 1990s and early 2000s, surrounded themselves with wealthy and powerful men, including Bill Gates and Bill Clinton.

Over the past few years, a steady stream of women have accused Maxwell and Epstein of abusing them when they were underage. Some have also said the couple forced them to perform sex acts on famous men such as Prince Andrew and former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. Both deny these accusations...

These men can deny all they want, but the evidence is all there, and this jury saw enough of it to convict Maxwell of sex trafficking to these men of power. And they were named in this trial: One witness mentioned meeting donald trump back in the 1990s, another witness - one of Epstein's pilots - detailed a veritable list of Who's Who traveling to Epstein's residences where a lot of the sexual abuse took place.

At some point, all of these sins connect to each other.

Maxwell's conviction is a good day for justice in defense of many women and girls who are sexually abused and raped by those in power, but it dare not end here.

This conviction is meaningless if the prosecutors fail to go after the men of wealth and power who profited from Epstein and Maxwell's actions, who abused these young women for their own perversions. They had enough evidence to prove Maxwell was working much like a madam/pimp, recruiting teen girls and molding them into playthings.

There's already a lawsuit filed against ol' Randy Andy that's due to get a hearing next week. There ought to be more of them, if there is to be any true justice in this world.

If men of power like Clinton and trump and Gates - and even those not connected to Epstein like Matt Gaetz and Roy Moore and a thousand others across the spectrum - are allowed to walk away from this scandal untouched, it will merely grant them the ability to find the next wannabe pimp willing to recruit and farm out young girls for abuse and rape and worse.

If there's evidence Bill Clinton had sex with any of these women when they were teenagers, charge him. If Bill Gates did, charge him. If donald trump did, charge him. If Prince Andrew did, charge him. If there's evidence Alan Dershowitz got more than the massage he claimed he got, charge him.

Going after the Pimps is one thing. Going after the Johns is where the justice matters.

Anniversary: End of the Soviet Union

It's an event from 30 years ago that signaled a major tidal shift in the long river of history. On this Christmas Day back in 1991, the leader of the Soviet Union - ye olde USSR, the stronghold of Communism since World War I, the scourge of Capitalist Western Values, shaky ally against the Nazis in World War II, the superpower rival to the United States since 1945 - Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from his office as President and ended the Soviet Union once and for all.

Via Vladimir Isachenkov at AP News:

People strolling across Moscow’s snowy Red Square on the evening of Dec. 25, 1991 were surprised to witness one of the 20th century’s most pivotal moments — the Soviet red flag over the Kremlin pulled down and replaced with the Russian Federation’s tricolor.

Just minutes earlier, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation in a live televised address to the nation, concluding 74 years of Soviet history.

In his memoirs, Gorbachev, now 90, bitterly lamented his failure to prevent the USSR’s demise, an event that upset the world’s balance of power and sowed the seeds of an ongoing tug-of-war between Russia and neighboring Ukraine.

“I still regret that I failed to bring the ship under my command to calm waters, failed to complete reforming the country,” Gorbachev wrote.

Political experts argue to this day whether he could have held onto his position and saved the USSR. Some charge that Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, could have prevented the Soviet breakup if he had moved more resolutely to modernize the anemic state-controlled economy while keeping tighter controls on the political system...

Thing was, Gorbachev really couldn't: No one outside of a full-on autocrat could have forced through the economic reforms because the political corruption and economic corruption were too intertwined. Just look at today: Putin has the political power but does so through economic corruption which is sapping at modern Russia's strength. An autocrat in Gorbachev's situation wouldn't have made any attempts at reform in the first place, he'd have kept the stagnant system chugging along.

It would take a book - no, a library full of books - to go into how the Communist Utopian ideals of the 19th Century gave way to the revolutionary violence of Lenin's overthrow of Tsarist Russia, and the steps towards corruption - the rise of Party elites, the rise of Stalin to place all power into autocratic rule, the buildup of party bureaucracy that calcified Soviet society, the Greed of elites that always threatens every economic system we know, and everyday state-sanctioned brutality that dulled the Russian population into despair - that created by the 1980s a Soviet empire incapable of maintaining itself without serious reforms.

With respect to Gorbachev, it was that need for reform that led to his rise to high office in the first place. Problem was, the reforms that were needed most - honesty from leadership, cracking down on party corruption, curtailing the high costs of maintaining a war footing in a 40-year-long Cold War that included policing their own Eastern European "allies" (occupied territories, really) - were reforms that Gorbachev's own party couldn't abide.

During all of Gorbachev's early steps to fix a broken empire, the Soviet Union was hit hard by the reality of their own corruption causing for example the meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor, exposing not only their engineering failures but their political failures to respond effectively to crises. The empire itself came to an end when Gorbachev freed the Eastern European nations to decide their own policies to enact local reforms: Instead, nearly every nation from Poland to Bulgaria to Czechoslovakia to Hungary to East Germany broke off from Soviet influence as their Communist regimes collapsed with mass uprisings and protests overthrowing them (Only Romania fell through mass violence and bloodshed, alas). By November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and Communism as an economic utopian ideal fell with it.

Whatever ideology Gorbachev was trying to use to keep the Soviet Union itself intact wasn't sticking. The push for Glasnost - open transparency of the political bureaucracy - and Perestroika - economic reforms to shift away from Communism to a more Socialist model - met with pushback by lower rungs of the system that preferred the corrupt status quo. Any economic reforms implemented failed with supply shortages and mismanagement.

By 1991, resistance to reform led to rebellion by a faction of Community Party leaders who wanted to go back to the way things were under Stalin Khrushchev Brezhnev. In August - responding to Gorbachev's plan to decentralize power to the 15 Soviet states that made up the USSR - that faction staged a coup attempt by "arresting Gorbachev" and passing power to Gorbachev's VP Gennady Yanayev, with the faction becoming a "Committee" overseeing the "state of emergency" they themselves were staging.

In the bleak style of Russian humor, they failed. Nothing they did went right. It was like the coup plotters believed that all they had to do was capture Gorbachev, go on state television to announce a calm transfer of power, and the majority of the population would just roll over like always.

Except too much had changed by then. In the Machiavellian measurement of "being Loved or Feared," the old Soviet hacks thought they were still Feared. But decades of party corruption had turned much of that fear into Hatred, and the Russian population - along with the other ethnicities that made up the USSR - had seen enough out of the Soviets to rise up in protests against the coup.

Helped by the fact that Gorbachev's decentralization plan would have empowered them, the regional leadership - especially Boris Yeltsin, a political rival of Gorbachev - called for the protests and avoided arrest. Attempts by the coup to shut down radio stations failed. When they called in troops to establish control of Moscow, the brief skirmish left three protestors dead and only enraged the mobs more. There was this quiet realization that the plotters hadn't thought this through, and hadn't counted on escalating any crackdowns.

Whereas Stalin wouldn't have hesitated to send in tanks and let his secret police round up everyone for executions, Yanayev and his bunch couldn't work up the nerve. Which was a good thing for the protestors and for history in general. Without that threat of violence to back them, the plotters turned on each other (several committed suicide) and were arrested themselves.

It was Soviet Communism's last dying gasp.

From then on, Yeltsin held the upper hand over Gorbachev, who no longer had a Soviet state or Communist party he could control. The decentralization plan went through, creating a Commonwealth of Independent States by early December with Russia itself a federation. By then, Gorbachev's departure wasn't a matter of If it was a matter of When, and Christmas seemed like the best time to do it.

Thirty years later, we're still dealing with the ramifications.

Russia as its own state is still a major global player: A permanent stock of nuclear weapons will do that for a nation. In terms of economic power, it's actually slid out of the top bracket - nations like Brazil and India generate more GNP - and they're still struggling to regain any foothold there. 

The corruption that led to the end of the Soviet Union never went away. The kleptocracy that defined the Communist Party re-emerged with the oligarchy - and organized crime - that controls Russia today. Putin's authoritarian power flows from the greed of the national elites, each side feeding off the other to keep Russia broke, stagnant, and hungry to steal from every other nation around them.

In some respects, the threat was never Communism, nor was it Capitalism. It's Greed. A universally recognized human sin that caused the collapse of one empire (USSR), consumed its remnants (Russia), and threatens our American empire here.

I'd wish that was the lesson from history the rest of us could have learned.

COVID Fatigue At the End of 2021

So here we all are as a planet, rushing out of 2021 headlong in 2022 with the slow realization that this latest COVID-19 variant called "Omicron" - why yes, it COULD be a Transformers villain - is rampaging across humanity as the most virulent and infectious variant yet.

And the collective response of at least the American population is "What the hell, now? On the holidays??? Let me at least fly home next to 180 maskless passengers on this plane so I can see my relatives before we all turn up positive for COVID."

Yup. That's where we're at.

It's been more than two years now - if you date the outbreak back to November 2019, at least back to March 2020 when even trump couldn't ignore it anymore - that the entire planet has been coping with this lethal virus and we honestly can't keep up with it, if we ever did.

The isolation / cabin fever of lockdowns early on - combined with the overwhelming over-reliance on social media (Hi, Twitter!) that numbed our common sense - generated what could be best described as "COVID Fatigue," this jaded ennui of losing a certain amount of empathy or concern for self-care and the care of others. 

As a set of vaccines showed up that could combat the spread of the pandemic, a lot of people took that to mean they could get the shots and become fully protected even though what the vaccines DID were to slow the transmissions and reduce the more lethal side-effects - like shredding your lungs and hearts - to prevent more death. It's still not really safe to go about unmasked even if you are vaxxed.

It did not help matters that a sizable chunk of our humanity is made up of contrarian nay-sayers, people like anti-vaccinators who think every scientific medical treatment is a lie or a scam - or in some cases, a Biblical prophecy to Mark us all for the Beast - and would prefer to treat themselves to "holistic" or wholly implausible "natural" cures that did more harm than good. The efforts by Fox Not-News and other Far Right outlets alongside a number of Republican governors like Florida's DeSantis fighting CDC guidelines and federal vaccination mandates - pushed by a Republican party leadership that wants the pandemic to continue under Biden's administration so they could blame HIM for the hundreds of thousands dead and dying - have only added to that contrarian reality where too many of our neighbors and family members are still unvaccinated and fully vulnerable to a lethal fast-spreading disease.

This latest flareup - the Omicron variant that's proven to transmit faster than previous COVID versions, and those were already quick - is just happening to occur during the part of the year in America that happens to involve our busiest family-oriented holidays: Thanksgiving through Christmas/ Hanukkah/ Saturnalia/ Kwanzaa/ New Years. Given how nearly everyone gave up those holidays for 2020 - as the vaccines had yet to clear safety protocols - it is looking like too much to ask for everyone to give those days up again for 2021.

So here we all go, driving off to visit with the folks or the kids/grandkids, traveling to exotic locales for the holidays and New Year's Eve, easily carrying viruses with us that won't show any symptoms until it's too late, and a lot of us refusing to mask up even as we mingle among the thousands of us who haven't gotten vaccinated to prevent further spread.

And count me among those people who selfishly went out in public just as the Omicron numbers are multiplying faster than they ever did with Delta.

My twin brother, like myself, attended University of Florida (Go Gators). Unlike myself, he could afford season tickets to home games, which qualified him to a good deal on bowl game tickets to Tampa's Gasparilla Bowl this year hosting UF playing against University of Central Florida (where his son, my nephew, attends right now). So there was a family reason - I received the invite, thank you Brother Phil - to pack into Raymond James stadium with 60,000 other sports fans of both schools Thursday night to see which in-state school program could beat the other's (DAMMIT GATORS YOU HAD ONE JOB! /cries).

I had gone to a comic con this past November, but it was to a small, city-level event with maybe a couple hundred people. It was also before the Omicron variant was out there and when the Delta variant seemed to have burned itself out. I still dreaded it, and took enough precautions to avoid physical contact and maintain social distancing, and I masked whenever I could.

I used to be a heavy movie goer, attending a new film release - or occasionally rehashing a film I liked - nearly every weekend right up until February 2020 - last movie I saw in the theaters was "Harley Quinn/Birds of Prey" how that's for a trivia answer - and one of the things I hoped to do after getting the vaccine shots was going back to the theaters. Except I haven't. Even as the blockbuster movies I want to see - Black Widow, Shang Chi, Eternals, Godzilla vs Kong, The Suicide Squad - on the big screen came and went, I could not work up the nerve to go to see a single one of them. The latest Spider-Man movie, MAYBE I might go see that while it's out now, but I still cannot bring myself to risk going to a crowded, cramped theater. 

The bowl game last night, I took the risk, and I am so regretting it. Last night was different. Multiplying-the-attendees-into-tens-of-thousands different. Granted, much of the game-watching is spent outdoors where the spread of COVID is less likely to happen, you're still in a situation where there's NO social distancing available and a high risk of being too close to an asymptomatic person long enough to get exposed. It was like being in twenty movie theaters at the same time, and I dreaded hearing anybody coughing to spike my paranoia any higher.

The good news, I've been vaccinated and boosted. I also took a mask with me and wore it as often as possible (only taking it off to eat a hot dog and drink bottled water).

Bad news is, I might have been the only one at that game who stayed masked for much of the night. Maybe one other guy was masked in our seating section, but nearly everyone else I walked past getting in and out of the stadium - other than vendors and staff (and NOT security!) - went without a mask. Even my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew only wore their masks heading into the game: Once it started and after it ended, they went unmasked.

Yes, I am that paranoid about mask-wearing anymore. Working in a public library will do that to you during a pandemic.

That's how bad it is right now with the Omicron variant bearing down on all of us. Too many of us uncaring, unworried with the responsibility of doing even the bare minimum of protecting ourselves and others against a virus because those minimums - wearing a mask over our faces - has become too much a burden.

We all need - myself included - to be more careful during this winter as COVID flares back up again. At least mandating wearing masks in public. Lockdowns would help but too many Red States will fight those again as economy-killing, and given the holidays situation we won't see any move on THAT until after January 2nd.

So here we are, waiting for COVID to get worse again.

Gods help us.

Stay healthy.

And So Manchin Burns the Nation

I've said this before: There is nothing more dangerous and destructive to the United States than a self-serving arrogant tone-deaf Senator.

Yes. This means Senator Joe Manchin out of West Virginia just shot his own Democratic Party in the collective foot again. From Russell Berman at The Atlantic (paywall): 

With a few short sentences on Fox News, Senator Joe Manchin today dashed the dreams of Democrats by coming out firmly against President Joe Biden’s signature legislative proposal. “I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there,” Manchin said of the $1.75 trillion bill that the House passed last month.

His opposition after months of negotiations adds to a hellish winter that followed a brutal autumn for Biden, who is presiding over yet another resurgence of the pandemic, stubbornly high inflation, and an electorate that has soured on him. Now, Manchin has seemingly demolished the centerpiece of the president’s economic agenda in Congress, validating the warnings of progressives who for months held up the passage of a bipartisan infrastructure bill because they feared the West Virginia centrist—who, in a 50-50 Senate, essentially wields a veto pen among Democrats—would do exactly what he did...

Anyone wanting to blame Progressives in this fight ought to punch themselves in their own faces. The Far Left held up their end of the bargain only to have Manchin - posing as a Centrist but in reality he's a crass opportunist hiding his personal greed behind the excuse of bipartisanship - pull his card out of the castle to let it all tumble down.

I'm a self-proclaimed Moderate (not a Centrist) and even I can't understand why Manchin is pulling these stunts other than to keep his own pockets lined with lobbyist cash while his own state of West Virginia slides deeper into poverty.

I have to refer to West Virginia resident John Cole at Balloon-Juice, who has long seen Manchin up-close in action and has loathed the corrupt Senator's behavior for years:

Yes, Manchin knocked bunch a bunch of beers on his houseboat last night, woke up this morning and drove his Maserati to the tv studios, and opened his piehole. It’s more of the bad faith bullshit, and I don’t know how much of it he will walk back or if he even will, or he is just setting the stage for his colleagues and the WH to shit on him so he can peace out and join the Republicans or go Independent. I don’t know, and I don’t really care any more, the man is dead to me...

I don’t know why this is so hard for Joe to explain. I’d think it would be pretty easy to explain extending the child tax credit, black lung benefits, lowering prescription drug prices, expanding medicare, providing home health care for the elderly, and so on to West Virginians. Especially considering that West Virginians are some of the poorest, sickest, and oldest Americans, as well as having a large community of miners with black lung...

The only ones profiting from Manchin's stubbornness has been Mitch McConnell and his fellow upper-class warriors of the Republican ranks. They're reveling in the self-immolation between Democrats all the while making sure that our nation never does ANYTHING to address poverty, hunger, suffering of families, and reconnecting millions to the American Dream of good jobs, safe communities, and a future for our children. And they don't even have to lift a finger: Manchin is doing all of the dirty work for them.

There is still a chance the Democrats will go back and repackage the major parts of Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda, and still a chance they could pass something short-term to placate the likes of Manchin, but I doubt it. Manchin is strutting here like a god-emperor Corrupt Senator of the Gilded Age, unconcerned with the damage he leaves in his wake while heading to his expensive racecar en route to his personal yacht.

Gods help us. This is how we're rolling into 2022.

All I Want for Saturnalia 2021

'Tis the season for wishes and hopes as the winter solstice brings 2021 to a close.

And I look out upon this world with all this going on:

• A new COVID variant unleashed upon us all just as the Holiday season for traveling everywhere to visit loved ones is kicking into high gear, meaning lockdowns are next to impossible to enforce and so we're going to see Omicron kicking our butts well into 2022;
• trump dumping on American Jews, accusing them of controlling Congress, and claiming Christian Evangelicals love Israel more;
• One Democratic Senator - Joe "The Grinch" Manchin - is nuking Joe Biden's social spending agenda ("Build Back Better") in ways even Republican Senators wouldn't get caught doing, all in the name of some aimless attempt to "moderate" the bill but actually destroying it all because Manchin cannot abide any aid to poor Americans (even ones in his own poverty-stricken state!);
• China is still committing genocide / torment against the Uyghur population, all the while prepping for a Winter Olympics that by all rights should be boycotted by athletes out of human compassion for the oppressed; 
• Republicans suppressing any intellectual debate over racism in the U.S., with goddamned Florida jackanape Ron "Pander Forever" DeSantis pushing a bill to allow wingnuts to sue any teacher/school for thousands in damages if any of them teach "Critical Race Theory" or ANY kind of history exposing America's sinful past much in the same way Texans will be able to accuse and sue other people for abortions;
• Fox Not-News raising more of a stink over their fake Christmas burning down due to a crazy homeless guy as a "War On Christmas" then they are raising any concern over families devastated in the Kentucky area hit by winter tornados;  
• There's a massive refugee crisis happening across Europe and Asia fueled by ongoing civil wars like Syria's, stirring up political anger between nations like Poland and Belarus, and there's no global solution in sight;

And I just wanna wish the Roman God Saturn for a simple little thing:

SANITY. FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY, SOME GODDAMNED SANITY FOR THIS FCKING COUNTRY AND THE WORLD.

I wanna wish for a safe and safe Saturnalia to come true just for once, can't we all agree to that, someday...? 

A Terrifying Brush With Tragedy This Week

I woke up to this news and it terrified me.

We almost had yet another college mass shooting event, this time the threat was at Embry-Riddle in Daytona (via Claire Metz at WESH Orlando): 

John Hagins was arrested at his off campus apartment Thursday after two other students alerted authorities of the suspect's alleged threatening statements.

Officials have no doubt classmates of 19-year-old Hagins, an aeronautical science student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, averted tragedy Thursday, the last day of classes before winter break.

According to the arrest report, last week Hagins began talking excessively about purchasing a gun and the gun being able to fold so it could fit inside of his backpack to take to the school...

Hagins also allegedly told the student witness he would purchase a silencer so he would be able to shoot inside the school library...

"He referenced Columbine," Daytona Beach police Chief Jakari Young said. "He said once he was done at the firing range he was going to campus to enact a Columbine.

Hagins is charged with terrorism, written threats to injure or kill and attempted murder...

Some of the photos and video clips show the wanna-be gunman packed extra clips to ensure as many targets hit as possible.

And when I say targets I mean "students, professors, campus staff, and anybody else that would satisfy his bloodlust."

And when I say this news terrifies me, more than any other recent gun-related nightmare our nation has witnessed during my whole lifetime, I mean this one hits me close to home.

I have a nephew attending Embry-Riddle in Daytona right now.

Do you hear that, gun nuts? Did I stutter, National Rifle Body Count Association?

One of YOUR fucking "lone wolf" shooters was about to kill or wound a family member.

GODDAMN YOU.

GODDAMN YOUR WORSHIP OF MURDER WEAPONS, EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU GODDAMN GUN NUTS.

GODDAMN YOUR PROFIT MARGINS, NRA. GODDAMN YOUR PUSH TO MAKE IT EASIER TO GET MURDER WEAPONS AVAILABLE TO THE MENTALLY UNSTABLE AND HAPPILY VIOLENT AMONG US. 

These mass shooters, these gun nuts going off in our schools and our malls and our churches, THOSE MURDERERS ARE COMING FROM YOUR WORLD, YOUR CULTURE, YOUR OBSESSIONS AND OUTRIGHT WORSHIP OF THE GUN. We didn't ask for these rifle-toting sociopaths but YOU ALL keep insisting they have their chances to KILL the rest of us.

This would have bloodied my family.

Just as EVERY OTHER MASS SHOOTING IN THE UNITED STATES HAS TOUCHED THOUSANDS OF OTHER FAMILIES WHO DID NOTHING TO YOU BUT STAND THERE AND BE TARGETS FOR YOUR RAGE, YOU GUN NUTS.

GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL.

#GunReformNow

Quick Question to the Nine Readers of This Blog: It's Jon Swift Roundup Time!

Batocchio has sent out the call for the annual blogging highlights, and I would like to ask the readers of this blog out of all the crazy stuff I've written this 2021, which one should I present as the best of the brat?

I'm kind of leaning towards the Irrational article, although the articles about the tragedy of Surfside has its points to make, and the Fall of Afghanistan has a lot to say about the failures of our nation after 9/11.

Please do me a favor and help get this in by Saturday December 11th, thank ye. You can leave a comment below or if you hate the comments setup you can tweet me @PaulWartenberg or yell at me on Facebook.

DeSantis and His Minute Men Militia

It's been pretty obvious since trump's fall after the 2020 election results that some of the more ambitious Republicans are positioning themselves to run in 2024 (hoping that trump - who still rules the GOP voting base - will be sidelined with court trials and prison time).

The worst of the lot is my own state's governor, Ron "Let COVID Kill You" DeSantis, whose pandering to the Fox Not-News audiences is starting to exceed the trump himself. DeSantis has been eagerly playing to the anti-vaxxer crowds - hiring every cop or firefighter or city worker who quit their jobs in places mandating vaccines, for example - and demonstrating all of the virulent hatred that trump deployed but with more political savvy.

Which brings us to his latest political move, one that should be setting off every alarm in the system: DeSantis wants his own damn army. Via Steve Contorno at CNN:

DeSantis pitched the idea Thursday as a way to further support the Florida National Guard during emergencies, like hurricanes. The Florida National Guard has also played a vital role during the pandemic in administering Covid-19 tests and distributing vaccines.

But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be "not encumbered by the federal government." He said this force would give him "the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible." DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them.

States have the power to create defense forces separate from the national guard, though not all of them use it. If Florida moves ahead with DeSantis' plan to reestablish the civilian force, it would become the 23rd active state guard in the country, DeSantis' office said in a press release, joining California, Texas and New York. These guards are little-known auxiliary forces with origins dating back to the advent of state militias in the 18th century. While states and the Department of Defense share control of the National Guard, state guards are solely in the power of a governor.

The proposal from DeSantis comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's directive warning that National Guard members who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will have their pay withheld and barred from training. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, had requested an exemption for guard members in his state, which Austin denied...

I can immediately point out a flaw in DeSantis' reasoning: If he wants to supplement the state's standing National Guard, he could just simply recruit more volunteers to the Guard. He's playing this as wanting to forge a home guard that won't be encumbered by federal vaccination rules, but he could play obstructionist over the pandemic without this kind of power grab. He wants something more, which begs the question:

Q: Why the hell else create a free-standing military unit answerable only to him? 

A: Because it'll answer to him and not to the United States' military chain of command that the National Guard has to answer to. This is DeSantis' chance to make himself into a wannabe field general with his own tin soldiers - brought in without any outside review or oversight, meaning they could be the Goddamn KKK for all we know - to do his dirty work.

Ja'Han Jones at MSNBC has his concerns, mainly that DeSantis can't be trusted:

States technically have the power to establish defense forces that are independent from the National Guard, and 22 states currently do. That’s an issue worth discussing and debating, but the most pressing issue right now is that the right-wing governor of Florida can’t be trusted with a military force of his own. 

DeSantis said re-establishing the state guard would “make sure that we have the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible.”

“Some of that will require us to be able to have access and use support in ways that are not encumbered by the federal government, that don’t require the federal government,” he added. 

Don’t let that hodgepodge of political jargon fool you: There’s no reason whatsoever to believe Ron DeSantis would use his army of militarized volunteers to do anything but wreak havoc on vulnerable people.

This is the same person who hastily deployed the Florida National Guard to patrol anti-racist protesters demonstrating in response to George Floyd’s murder last year. This is the person who championed an “anti-riot” law struck down by a federal judge this year after plaintiffs claimed it was “designed to target those who protest police violence...”

Jones doesn't mention it but DeSantis has been waging a war against his media and pandemic critics, a fight that can easily escalate if he's got 200 Minute Men Brown Shirts Florida Men at his beck and call with the power to detain people and use firearms with little or no provocation from others.

Because abuse of power like this happens. We've seen it repeatedly under trump and other bullies in office.

This is straight out of the playbook used by the fascist villains of Upton Sinclair's It Can't Happen Here. Christ. We're replaying the same goddamn nightmare of having trump in the White House calling on his Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to "Stand Back and Stand By," which we saw come to fruition during the January 6th Insurrection to subvert the 2020 election results.

What DeSantis is doing here can well be replicated by other Republican governors across the nation, and the ones who already have a state-controlled militia to start thinking about how they can turn those troops into their own personal praetorian guards. They can turn these militias into private police rounding up and harassing anybody opposed to the party in any way, from public stances over abortion and police brutality all the way down to refusing to wear those damn MAGA hats.

Think I'm joking? Think back to all the sh-t happening for COINTELPRO... and that was illegal. What's being asked here will be legal, governor-seal-of-approval, all out in the open (just not broadcast on Fox Not-News for public consumption) and nobody will be able to challenge it until too much damage and suffering has happened.  

It can happen here, and it's escalating.

Gods help us.

Oakland High Shooting: Red Flags Everywhere

"He said Bro. Red flag."
- unnamed student surviving the Oakland High shooting, before classroom flees from the possible shooter. It turned out that was a sheriff's deputy looking to evacuate the room, who chose a poor time to use 'hep slang'. Watch that video. Nearly every student freaked when he said 'Bro'.

It's not even a joke in this pandemic reality that the United States' "return to normalcy" for 2021 included the return of mass shootings. 

We've gotten so blase about gun violence at our schools that no major media outlet noticed until this week we're up to our 28th school shooting and our 641st mass shooting for the year. And we've still got December to go.

What made the Oakland High shooting in Michigan stand out were the circumstances that led to that fateful Tuesday November 30. A series of decisions and actions that should have raised concern and triggered a secure response that kept getting ignored or overruled.

A timeline should help highlight what went wrong (via Becky Sullivan at NPR):

The 9 mm Sig Sauer SP2022 pistol used in Tuesday's shooting at the high school in Oxford township, a small community north of Detroit, was purchased by James Crumbley at a local gun shop, authorities said. His son, Ethan Crumbley, was with him at the time of the purchase, they said.

Jennifer Crumbley referred to the gun as their son's "new Christmas present" in a social media post, McDonald said during Friday's news conference. She added that the gun was stored unlocked in a drawer in the parents' bedroom.

The day before the shooting, an Oxford High School teacher reported Ethan Crumbley, a sophomore at the school, after the teacher spotted him using his phone to search for ammunition, the prosecutor said.

School officials left a voicemail and email for Jennifer Crumbley, who did not respond, according to McDonald. But Crumbley sent a text message to her son that said, "LOL I'm not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught."

Then, on the morning of the shooting, the prosecutor said, Ethan Crumbley's teacher found a drawing on Ethan Crumbley's desk of a handgun, bullet and shooting victim, with the words "blood everywhere" and "the thoughts won't stop, help me."

Disturbed, the teacher informed school authorities, who called both James and Jennifer Crumbley to the school; they were told they would be required to seek counseling for their son.

"Both James and Jennifer Crumbley failed to ask if their son had his gun with him or where his gun was located, and failed to inspect his backpack for the presence of the gun, which he had with him," McDonald said.

The parents "resisted the idea" of Ethan Crumbley leaving school at that time, McDonald said. Afterward, Crumbley returned to class. Just before 1 p.m., he entered a bathroom wearing a backpack, then came out with the pistol in his hand and began shooting, authorities have said...

At every single point where the parents made the situation worse, I noticed myself shaking my head and muttering "Jesus Christ..."

Just the idea that his parents thought a handgun would make a nice Christmas present for their teenage son is a serious red flag to me. Until I saw someone point out on social media that on Black Friday - the high holy Consumer Day of holiday shopping - there were around 187,000 legal firearms purchases. Historically, Black Friday seems to be a great time (sarcasm mode) to stock up on murder weapons.

Guns?! FOR CHRISTMAS?! In religious terms, a day honoring the birth of one of humanity's greatest seekers of Peace and Hope for all??? In secular terms, a day for family and friends and ugly sweaters snuggled in against the cold winter outside (Northern Hemisphere only, Southern Hemisphere gets beach trips and sand castles)??? /headdesk

Back to the timeline, where the parents' behavior towards each growing alarm about their son's openness at school about pursuing - obsessing over - guns, ammo, and acts of violence kept ignoring his deteriorating mental state. When the mother texted "LOL don't get caught" that should have been a moment for herself to wake up and realize "Wait, he's getting caught at school obsessing over guns maybe we need to calm him down." Christ, she thought it was funny. I wonder how her reaction would have been if Ethan was caught scanning PornHub videos at school instead of the Guns & Ammo shopping page.

One thing bothering me - and probably haunting the school officials from now until forever - is the point where the school authorities had both parents and Ethan in the office, why the hell didn't they inspect Ethan's bookbag then? I thought the schools had exemptions to search students' belongings if they could show cause for others' safety.

Then again, the parents would have likely thrown a major conniption. Given what we know now - with the report that Crumbley's mother wrote a letter praising donald trump for his Second Amendment support along with rants against illegal immigrants threatening her livelihood as a realtor - any attempt in that principal's office to see if Ethan was packing a gun would have led to lawsuits or a physical altercation. The rights of the privileged gun nuts - usually upper income, usually White, always paranoid and aggressive - will always outrank all other rights in this NRA Utopian America.

Instead, there were no altercations, just the Crumbleys insisting that Ethan remain in school, giving him one more opportunity to show off that Christmas gift to the world.

Even then, it looked like the parents were abandoning their own son to his demons, his rage, his fate.

The only time either parent expressed any concern was after the shooting started, when Jennifer Crumbley sent a cover-your-ass text message "don't do it." By then it was already too late. James Crumbley reported the gun "stolen" from his house, but by then law enforcement had a pretty good idea James allowed Ethan full access to "his Christmas gift".

All of this damage done, four teens killed, more wounded, all because one family worshipped the gun more than they worshipped the Christmas Spirit.

All of this leading up to one of the more interesting twists in our nation's ongoing gun violence crisis. For the first time in recent memory, the parents of the school shooter are facing manslaughter charges. As mentioned in Becky Sullivan's NPR article, this is a rare move indeed:

"These charges are intended to hold the individuals who contributed to this tragedy accountable and also send a message that gun owners have a responsibility. When they fail to uphold that responsibility, there are serious and criminal consequences," (Oakland County Prosecutor) Karen McDonald said...

The involuntary manslaughter charges for the suspect's parents are highly unusual for a school shooting. But Michigan's criminal code does not give prosecutors more straightforward options: The state is not among those with laws that specifically target children's access to guns, nor does it have a negligent gun storage statute, according to the Giffords Law Center, a research group that advocates for gun control laws.

The Oakland County prosecutor advocated for strengthening the state's gun laws at her news conferences this week, calling the laws "woefully inadequate."

In addition to the rare step of charging the shooter's parents, prosecutors' decision to charge the younger Crumbley with terrorism is unusual in Michigan. The criminal complaint accuses Crumbley of "intending to intimidate or coerce" the high school community.

"What about all the children who ran, screaming, hiding under desks? What about all the children at home right now, who can't eat and can't sleep and can't imagine a world where they could ever step foot back in that school? Those are victims too, and so are their families and so is the community," McDonald said at a news conference Wednesday. "The charge of terrorism reflects that..."

Given McDonald's enthusiasm to pursue more serious charges, I doubt that terrorism charge will stick. The Nation Rifle Body Count Association is sure to step up to file a complaint, arguing that gun ownership isn't an act of intimidation or threat, trying to protect their fellow gun-worshipping fanbase from any similar charges brought against them when they open-carry everywhere.

But the charges against the parents should be a welcome change to see about reducing the risks of guns in our schools. Far too many times, the absence or abandonment of any parental figure working to keep their kids away from guns has led to those school shooters getting their hands on those murder weapons. A number of times, those shooters were coming from a home where parents pushed those guns onto them, teaching them a mindset that those weapons were everyday common, simple to use, and that those things gave them power over everyone else.

No more. I hate to break it to the parents, but dammit you got to teach your children the dangers of firearms and the risks they carry. Of all the red flags parents are supposed to keep an eye out for - drug use, sexual harassment or assault, bullying (either as victim or perp), petty theft, vandalism, listening to bad Country music, other troubling signs of teen behavior - the likelihood of gun violence ought to top the Parenting To Do list.

If we can hold parents accountable for their guns, if we as a nation can start getting into those parents' heads that they have to treat their guns with better personal security, if we can make these gun nuts realize they DON'T have to treat firearms like Christmas toys...

If...