Blood on the Streets of Buffalo

Welcome to America, where every public place - our schools, our churches, our movie theaters, our music concerts, our city halls, our grocery stores - are just wonderful targets for the gun nut mass shooters who want to rack up a body count. Yesterday, Buffalo joined the list of cities that have suffered gun violence by an AR-15 wielding asshole (per Carolyn Thompson, John Wawrow, Michael Balsamo, and Dave Collins with AP News):

A white 18-year-old wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera opened fire with a rifle at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three others Saturday in what authorities described as “racially motivated violent extremism.”

Police said he shot 11 Black and two white victims before surrendering to authorities in a rampage he broadcast live on the streaming platform Twitch...

One of the things these mass shooters love to do, they love to show off how easy it is for them to kill others.

The massacre sent shockwaves through an unsettled nation gripped with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes. In the day prior to the shooting, Dallas police said they were investigating a series of shootings in Koreatown as hate crimes. The Buffalo attack came just one month after another mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway train wounded 10 people...

The article didn't mention the shootings in Milwaukee the night before, or the number of domestic violence shootings that happen pretty much every day, but we've become so overwhelmed by gun violence the past 20 years it's all a blur now.

The suspected gunman in Saturday’s attack on Tops Friendly Market was identified as (name redacted because the SOB wants to be famous), of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of Buffalo.

It wasn’t immediately clear why (redacted) had traveled to Buffalo and that particular grocery store. A clip apparently from his Twitch feed, posted on social media, showed (redacted) arriving at the supermarket in his car.

The gunman shot four people outside the store, three fatally, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Inside the store, security guard Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer, fired multiple shots. A bullet hit the gunman’s bulletproof armor but had no effect, Gramaglia said.

The gunman then killed the guard, the commissioner said, then stalked through the store shooting other victims...

There was a "good guy with a gun" at the store, just as the pro-gun advocates say we need to really stop gun violence, but guess what? The mass shooters have access to body armor too, and they plan ahead for that shit. The "good guy with a gun" excuse doesn't work, it never really did. All we have now are just more and more heavily armed people believing they have license to shoot anybody they want.

The shooter also drove over 200 miles, literally going out of his way to find a place where he could find enough targets for his rage to shoot at. This is similar to the shooter who drove eight hours across Texas to attack a Wal-Mart in El Paso.

And much like the mass killer in El Paso, the mass killer in Buffalo was driven by racism, programmed with hateful ideology based on a "Replacement Theory" lie that "Jews and Blacks are going to replace Whites in a massive genocide." Photos of the gunman's assault rifle highlighted the number "14", which refers to the word count of the wingnut motto. Witnesses noticed the N-word painted on the rifle as well. There shouldn't be any confusion about what motivated the mass murderer. Back to the AP article:

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that investigators were looking into whether he had posted a manifesto online. The official was not permitted to speak publicly on the matter and did so on the condition of anonymity.

Buffalo police declined to comment on the document, circulated widely online, that purports to outline the attacker’s racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic beliefs, including a desire to drive all people not of European descent from the U.S. It said he drew inspiration the man who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019...

Each of these mass shooters do not work in a vacuum. They watch others who share the same rage and who share the same bullshit White Power lies. If it's not Christchurch it's getting inspired by the murderer in Norway, or the church shooter in Charleston, or the synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh. These aren't lone wolves: They are part of a global violent movement, raging against the world, feeding off of each other's ill-formed conspiracy junk.

Only it gets worse here in America, because the goddamned Second Amendment is - thanks to an increasingly wingnut Supreme Court - no longer an amendment allowing states to well-regulate their militias, it's become a license for death-worshipping gun nuts to shoot anybody they hate.

And it's worse here in America where we have a Far Right media environment that pumps out that "Replacement Theory" bullshit on a daily basis to where it's programmed White extremists into a conniptic rage. This is an article from last week about Fox Not-News pundit Tucker Carlson (via Cynthia Miller-Idriss at MSNBC):

Before he was indicted on charges of killing 22 people and injuring 26 others in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in 2019, the identified gunman had been linked to a document posted online that referred to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The motivation behind that horrific incident — that there is an intentional, global plan orchestrated by national and global elites to replace white, Christian, European populations with nonwhite, non-Christian ones — gets at the core of a recent three-part New York Times series on the rise and ideology of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

In part one of the series, journalist Nicholas Confessore describes Carlson’s efforts to stoke “white fear” of immigrants and changing U.S. demographics as “recasting American racism to present white Americans as an oppressed caste.” In so doing, Confessore shows, Carlson has drawn repeatedly on the leading far-right conspiracy theory of demographic change, known as the “great replacement.”

Coined by a French scholar more than a decade ago, the term was quickly taken up globally by white supremacists, for whom the theory now provides a single, overarching framework for ideas that had already been percolating for years. Last September, Media Matters reported that Carlson spent a year embarking on a “dedicated campaign to insert the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory … into mainstream Republican discourse.” Carlson has repeatedly used the language of replacement to suggest or directly argue that Democrats are orchestrating “demographic replacement” to gain political power. The day before the September Media Matters report, Carlson told his viewers that President Joe Biden aimed to “replace ‘legacy Americans’” and “change the racial mix of the country” for political gain... 

It's not just Carlson and Fox Not-News (via a report from the Anti-Defamation League):

One of the most visible Great Replacement propagandists is Fox media personality Tucker Carlson, who claimed during a September 22 broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that the point of Biden’s immigration policy is “to reduce the political power of the people whose ancestors live here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly-arrived from the third world.” He went on to refer to the policy as “The Great Replacement” which he explained is “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

Carlson’s rhetoric was immediately echoed by U.S. Rep Brian Babin (R-TX-36) in a September 23 Newsmax interview, when he said that Biden and the Democrats are using immigration to "replace the American electorate with a third world electorate."

One day later, Charlie Kirk of the far-right student group Turning Point USA said on his show that Texas should “deputize a citizen force and put them on the border” to protect “white demographics in America.” He added that the left is focused on “bringing in voters that they want, and they like, and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.”

The same day, during an appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show, Tucker Carlson criticized the ADL for calling out his Great Replacement comments and reiterated his view that the Democrats are “going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for” them.

On September 25, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL-1) voiced his support for Tucker Carlson and The Great Replacement theory, tweeting, “@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America. The ADL is a racist organization.”

White supremacists celebrate: “We are mainstreaming now...”

All of this talk isn't just talk. It builds up an environment that encourages believers to act out, commit violence towards their targets, justified in their fear and hate that the ones they're killing "deserved" to die. It's known as the George Tiller Effect, where Far Right pundit Bill O'Reilly openly named an abortion doctor often as a threat to the unborn, driving a gunman to kill Tiller in Tiller's own church.

What's happened here - like in El Paso and Charleston and a hundred other racially-motivated mass shootings - is formally known as Stochastic Terrorism: Using a constant barrage of rhetoric and accusations to encourage others to commit violence for your cause. It's stochastic because there's no one specific target named, just a general population to pick and choose, making it "random" enough that the demagogues fueling the rage can claim they weren't responsible. But it's not random, when you look at the bigger picture.

It's still Terrorism: These Far Right White Power wingnuts are convinced they need to kill ethnic minorities, and that they've been given license to do so.

This is the war the Far Right wants: The wingnut pundits and politicians who stoke their audiences to commit acts of insurrection and public displays of violence, they love this shit because they will go onto those Far Right media outlets and actually flip the narrative around to make themselves still be the victims of our outrage while dead bodies pile up in our streets.

They're not even hiding their glee for it anymore.

Goddamn them all.

When, for the Love of God, is someone in our federal government going to recognize these mass shootings are not isolated, they are all part of the same terrorist movement of White Separatist bullshitters, and we need to officially declare them a domestic threat under the Patriot Act? When are we going to admit we're in an actual shooting war with extremists who want to destroy everything a free and diverse America represents?

Update on DeSantis' 2022 Gerrymander of Doom

I mentioned a month ago my rage at Florida Governor DeSantis' heavy-handed gerrymandering effort to skew the Congressional districts so far Republican as to offend common sense. Well, the court matter is moving relatively quickly because a couple days ago a district court smashed DeSantis' map with a sledgehammer (via Mary Ellen Klas at the Tampa Bay Times (paywall)): 

In a swift reversal of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bold political gambit, a Leon County Circuit Court judge on Wednesday threw out the new congressional map drawn by the governor and approved by legislators, ordering a new map drawn by a Harvard expert to be put in place.

Judge Layne Smith, in a ruling from the bench after a four-hour hearing, found DeSantis’ map unconstitutional under the Fair Districts Amendment of the Florida Constitution “because it diminishes the African Americans’ ability to select the representative of their choice.”

Smith, who served in the administration of former Gov. Rick Scott, was appointed to the county bench by Scott and later appointed to the circuit court by DeSantis. He said it would be up to lawmakers to decide if they want to enact a new map when the Legislature convenes for a week-long special session on May 23.

But in an effort to get precincts set for candidates to qualify, he ordered a map drawn by the plaintiffs’ expert, Harvard professor Stephen Ansolabehere, to replace the one approved by the governor and Legislature...

It should be interesting to note that Smith's place on the bench is due to Republican governors putting him there, and he still noted how racist DeSantis' gerrymandering was. It's also helpful to note that Smith is well aware of the urgency of the matter, bringing in a third party serving the court to make a replacement map should the Florida Legislature refuse to act. Considering the Lege DID have a Congressional map - only for DeSantis to veto it and force his own obviously broken one to replace it - it would be interesting to see if the House and Senate re-pass their original bill and dare DeSantis to veto again.

Back to the report:

Voting rights groups, such as the League of Women Voters of Florida, and individual plaintiffs filed the lawsuit April 22 and asked the court for a temporary injunction and to order the Legislature to redraw a constitutional map.

The plaintiffs argued that the district drawn by the governor’s staff, and approved by the Legislature along mostly partisan lines, violated the provisions that prohibit the state from diminishing the ability of minority voters from electing candidates of their choice.

Smith ultimately agreed.

“I do find persuasive the arguments that were made about the diminishment of African American votes,” Smith said. “...The district that has since been enacted and signed into law by the governor does disperse 367,000 African American votes between four different districts.”

He acknowledged that the governor’s proposed Congressional District 5 may be a more compact district but said it is not in line with the minority voting rights protections in the state Constitution...

However, an attorney for the state, Mohammad Omar Jazil, argued that recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have restricted the use of race as a guiding factor in redistricting cases.

He said that adhering to the Fair District provisions would not be considered a compelling interest as required in the federal Constitution.

“No court has ever held that complying with a state constitution is a compelling interest,” Jazil said.

However, the plaintiffs countered that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 2019 case, Rucho v. Common Cause, that “provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply...”

The Fair District Amendments DO clarify that the districts cannot be drawn to diminish minority voter representation, which is likely the point on which Smith pinned his decision. It should be noted that DeSantis' map also violated another provision in the Amendments saying the districts should not skew favorably to one party over another: Nobody can tell me a "20-Republican to 8-Democrat" map in a state where Republicans and Democrats are near-equal in registered voters is NOT skewed.

As Klas notes in the Times article DeSantis is already planning to appeal, and Judge Smith is expecting that even as he finalizes his court order. By the looks of it, the next stop is the state appellate court and then the Florida Supreme Court (and if DeSantis is really pissed about it, the U.S. Supreme Court).

There is no guarantee that Smith's ruling will stand: The upper state courts are just as stacked with Republican appointees and Federalist Society conservatives, to where they can rule for DeSantis by ignoring or even mis-reading the state constitution and its amendments.

But this is a good sign, that even a Republican-picked judge like Smith said Aw Hell Naw to DeSantis' openly partisan and racist attempt to pack the U.S. Congress with gerrymandered Far Right wingnuts.

Here's hoping THIS Gerrymander dies a quick death. And DeSantis has to choke on eating its remains.

P.S. I hope that Harvard guy Ansolabehere - wait, seriously, Ansola Be Here? - draws up a new Congressional district that includes one district that's No Party Affiliate plurality, just so we can see how fcked up partisan gerrymandering really is.

P.S.S. I shouldn't mock other people's last name. I suffer from that fate myself. Did I ever tell you how one year my high school yearbook added an "h" to the end of my last name? They made me Scottish! The school cafeteria started serving me haggis! I'm with Mike Myers on this: All Scottish cuisine IS based on a dare.

What To Do When Republicans Kill Roe

Update: With thanks to Tengrain at Crooks & Liars including this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up!

The most likely thing that will happen once Alito's ruling - using the Mississippi anti-abortion law to nuke Roe - from the bench becomes official is that 18 states will automatically trigger abortion bans, with 4 other states implementing severe bans.

After that, the reactions - by both the women suddenly reduced to second-class cattle and the Far Right religious nuts eager to turn them into breeder stock - will get messier.

Anyone hoping for a mass exodus of every woman and girl from ages 13 to 40 fleeing the Red States will have to think again. While it makes the most sense - "Get the HELL out before they harm you!" is the most logical move to make - the sheer logistics of it can't happen. Too many women will be tied down, either for personal reasons (family), financial reasons (too poor), or age (too young). A number of women could flee - either with family living in pro-choice states that can take them in, or with high-enough job skills to relocate for employment - but it will be in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands.

These Republican-controlled states are already passing legislation punishing pregnant women if they try to leave their states. Wanna guess how quickly those states will pass laws stopping women of child-bearing age from traveling at all to keep them in one place?

One thing that should happen once the states nullify Roe is that women should say goodbye to the dating scene. I'm not being flippant here or throwing out a Lysistrata gambit as a lark. This is a genuine concern. ANY social interaction with men is going to lead to a risk of pregnancy, even when the sex is consensual. Relying on birth control is not an option, especially when you see these Republican bastards are going after IUDs and condoms and birth control pills next. 

I do worry that this will give the prudes among the Far Right some enjoyment in seeing the Hookup Culture take a severe blow, but desperate times desperate measures. Ladies, you simply cannot risk a social life that could end up with you enduring a pregnancy you can't afford and could kill you.

I'm serious: Pregnancy mortality in the United States is horrifying. Increasing those mortality numbers through forced-birth - especially in matters of ectopic pregnancies - is a given at this point. 

The only way to survive this attack on your personal well-being right now is to just cut off the social stuff with guys. Uninstall the dating apps. No more speed dating or lock and key parties. Stay home. Watch movies with your girlfriends. Zoom chat while hanging out with your pets. Start up gaming nights on your XBoxes and Playstations, private teams, no boys allowed. Blow shit up on Call Of Duty, and avoid calling David for a quick one.

On the bright side, the end of Ladies' Nights at the college bars is going to drive a lot of conservative young men fratbros out of their goddamned minds.

On a more serious note, the dangers of sexual assault and rape are going to go up. Hell, a number of these rapists out there are going to view the end of Roe - especially as these states get rid of any abortion exemptions for rape victims - as a license to go wild. What we know about rapists is how they tend to view women as things, as objects, and the way that the Far Right is banning abortion rights for women is basically turning the entire gender into cattle, dehumanized and easily targeted by men who enjoy the power and pain they inflict. 

It hasn't been safe at all for young women in our world: the threat of rape is always there. But now it's going to get worse. In some respects, fleeing is the only rational response to all of this: There's only so much protective measures like traveling in groups and learning self-defense fighting can do. But again, Gods help us too many poor women can't afford to flee, and too many teen girls don't have the freedom to make that call. They're going to have to rely on their parents to get them to safety, and again not all of them can (or worse, the parents are too Far Right and anti-abortionist to care).

The only other rational response to the end of Roe ought to be a massive voter realignment among women - and among the men who agree women should have the rights of privacy and equality under the Constitution - away from the wingnut Republicans who caused all this chaos and despair. It would be pretty to watch as every unregistered woman 18 and older head to the nearest place with voter registration forms and sign up to be Democratic voters. It would be nice to see any registered No-Party or even pro-choice Republicans re-apply their voter IDs and switch to Dem. One hopes that the number of angered, eager pro-choice voters reaches levels even in Red states that would flip control from Republican to Democrat, and that the new Democratic majorities at the state level would rewrite the laws to give women back their power of choice.

Thing is, in the week we've learned that the Supreme Court is poised to end Roe and abortion rights for women, there hasn't been a noticeable stampede of angry women or angry voters filling out registration forms. It's likely that most of our fellow citizens, even young women, may well be worried about this loss of personal rights: It's just they won't do anything about it until it directly affects them (Abortion as an issue being, well, Someone Else's Problem). Sad thing is, by the time they will be affected by this, and by all the other privacy rights the wingnuts are about to eliminate, it'll be too late.

The rights pertaining to abortion choice rely a lot on the due process rights of the 14th Amendment and the privacy rights of the 9th. Once the Far Right has a way to cut away one of those rights, they'll be able to cut away all the others. People need to understand that risk, and they ought to be registering to vote to get those Republicans the hell out of elected office to stop them from dragging our nation into the firepits of our worst historical behaviors.

It'll be a fight these midterms because the Republicans in power have already made efforts to rig the upcoming elections results anyway to favor themselves. The only way to beat them is with massive voter turnout against them.

Please wake up and fight back, Americans.

It's not just women's rights that are getting killed here. It's all of our rights on the chopping block.

George Perez Drew ALL The Superheroes. Seriously. On One Panel.

Not in the mood to announce this, not on Free Comic Book Day (first Saturday of the month of May), but saw this on Twitter just a few hours ago:

To all of George’s fans and friends,

Constance here, with the update no one wants to read. George passed away yesterday, peacefully at home with his wife of 490 months and family by his side. He was not in pain and knew he was very, very loved. pic.twitter.com/0aGnBpYd6z

— TheGeorgePerez.com (@georgepereznet) May 7, 2022

I've mentioned George Perez once or twice, running into him at the local Comic Cons between Tampa and Orlando. If not on this blog at least on my librarian/writer's blog over here.

When I seriously got into comic books as a teen, it was at a pivotal moment in the industry as the two major publishers - DC and Marvel - were beginning to straighten out their respective universes and provide better continuity - an accurate and faithful history - to avoid all the narrative confusion that had begun piling up since the 1960s.

In particular, DC Comics - which had multiple Earths to deal with the all the convoluted storylines that were adding up since 1938 - decided to do a 50th anniversary mini-series to streamline everything into one 'Verse. Called Crisis on Infinite Earths, it killed off various major characters, got rid of the multiverse in favor of one Earth, and rebooted everything to fit modern times.

None of it stuck, of course. The need for multiple storylines in order to tell tales that wouldn't conflict with the main 'Verse - DC tried Elseworlds stand-alone issues for awhile - overwhelmed the intent. But at the time it was grand storytelling, one of the classics in all of comic book history.

One of the reasons the work is held in high esteem even 35 years later - oy - was the brilliant artwork drawn by George Perez. One of the biggest in-demand artists of his day, known for not only believably-drawn figures but also for incredibly detailed line work, Perez drew some of the most famous images in the comics medium:

The cover of Issue #7,
the Death of Supergirl.

Above all, Perez was famous for drawing Crowd Scenes: Piling in as many figures - heroes, villains, bystanders - as possible within the frame to imply an intense, overwhelming moment. In that cover above, he inserted every major and minor superhero of the DC Universe into the background, each of them conveying personal shock at the loss of their friend.

Such work made him high-demand between both DC and Marvel, so much so that he had to take breaks every so often because his wrists would need splints and rest. But when it came to one of the biggest events of all time - an official Justice League/Avengers crossover, decades in the planning - he was the only artist qualified to draw it.

JLA/Avengers alternate cover #3 in 2003.
Perez drew 208 (!) characters from both 'Verses.
When he finished this he had to rest for THREE MONTHS to recover.

There were few artists of his era - Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, maybe - who could draw with that level of detail. There are few artists today who could dare match it - Phil Jimenez his most obvious successor - in terms of such overwhelming scope.

There have been other great artists over the decades - many popular, many with long, heralded careers - each of them who provided impact and inspiration to graphic artists everywhere. Neal Adams for example, who also just recently passed, was highly praised for his shaded, emotive work. But NONE of them had the impact or influence that Perez had to the fanbase.

The MMO superhero game City of Heroes named an entire city zone - Perez Park - in his honor. When I got the game in 2004 and saw it on the game map I squeed.

I'd actually met him a few times at the local Comic Cons. The first time I'd met him, he was a guest of honor at a new comic book store opening in Palm Harbor. I think it was in 1989, maybe 1988, it was when they were about to redo Wonder Girl's origins (again) and I had a question or two about it. He was friendly and helpful, explaining why they were rebooting her origins - in reaction to some of the changes made in Crisis the year before - and also helped correct a character's name for me. I was mispronouncing Lilith's name wrong.

Last time I saw him in person was 2013, at Tampa Bay Comic Con:

He always worn that shirt or something similar ever since I met him in that Palm Harbor store, it's blurry but it was made up of art panels he'd drawn over the years.

Perez revealed back in 2019 that he was retiring for health reasons, and it came out a little later that it was terminal cancer. He wasn't going to fight it, but take palliative treatment to cope with the pain. Even though the fanbase - and his fellow artists and writers - were prepared for this moment, I guarantee you this is a huge blow to everyone this weekend.

They're planning a memorial for George Perez at Orlando MegaCon this May 22nd. I wasn't planning on going - I'm still wary of COVID super-spreader locations - but I might now.

It's Cinco De Mayo 2022 and Where the HELL Are My Taco Trucks???

You know, we're two years in to Joe Biden's legitimately won Presidency, and it's May 5th which makes it CINCO DE MAYO, and yet I am utterly pissed off right now.

I mean, in 2016 the trumpian assholes declared that if Hillary would win the election, there would be and I quote "TACO TRUCKS ON EVERY CORNER." And this was a good idea, this was tempting, and goddammit not enough of us voted for Hillary to make it happen.

What I said back then:

Just think of the economic benefits of having taco trucks on every corner! No, this is serious! Food truck service is actually a smart investment in the right markets!

Hell, give me the seed money right now! Lemme go start my own taco truck service!

But now we got Democrat Joe Biden in charge, and yet we're STILL WAITING ON THOSE TACO TRUCKS!!!

Where's the funding, Joe? WHERE'S THE SBA GRANTS FOR TACO TRUCKS?!

How the HELL are we going to be able to effectively celebrate General Zaragoza's incredible victory over invading French forces at the Battle of Puebla? We need those taco trucks, we need the beer license to sell Mexican brands! 

WHAT THE HELL, JOE! 

JUST SIMPLE TACO TRUCKS, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

/cries

What Is Actually In the Upcoming SCOTUS Ruling to Overturn Roe

I'm not a legal scholar, merely a political history amateur, so I should refer to others will legal backgrounds have their say on what they've noticed in the leaked rough draft.

Here's Paul Campos at Lawyers Guns and Money giving his two cents: 

(2) The hypocrisy of the Furious Five in regard to the issue of democratic legitimacy is something to behold. The overwhelming majority of the public supports legal abortion in most circumstances — to the Great Unwashed the question of whether Roe should have been overruled and the question of whether abortion should be legal is of course the same question — but in a few weeks abortion is going to be illegal in much of the United States because it’s a Republic Not a Democracy. What that means in practice is that a distinct minority of religious fanatics, white supremacists, and super fans of the patriarchy (but I repeat myself) will get to make abortion illegal, despite an overwhelming national consensus against doing so, because our political system is set up to empower those people far beyond what power they would have in anything resembling an actual democracy...

(3) Speaking of which, the most emetic portions of Alito’s little Schoolhouse Rock sermon were the bits where he claimed that the Dobbs majority was taking no position on the substantive question of whether or not abortion should be legal. Sure Sammy. So when the radically anti-democratic [see (2) above] GOP trifecta makes abortion illegal across the entire nation in three years or so, you’ll be striking that anti-federalist overreach down, right? Oh I thinks not...

Here's Ian Millhiser at Vox to give some understanding:

1) This is a maximalist opinion

For many years, largely as a bid to convince the relatively moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy to permit as many abortion restrictions as possible, many abortion opponents did not explicitly ask the Supreme Court to overrule Roe. Instead, they urged the Court to uphold restrictions that would make it so difficult or expensive to operate an abortion clinic that facilities in anti-abortion states would simply shut down.

But Kennedy is no longer on the Court. And Jackson already achieved the goal of permitting states to shut down abortion clinics by imposing such severe costs on those clinics that they could not remain open. There’s only one more frontier left for abortion opponents to cross: a Supreme Court decision explicitly overruling Roe. And Alito’s opinion skips gleefully across that frontier.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito claims in the draft opinion, which holds “that Roe and Casey must be overruled...”

4) If Alito prevails, abortion will swiftly be illegal in at least 18 states

At least 18 states currently have total or near-total abortion bans on the books. Some of these laws were enacted before Roe was decided, while others were enacted more recently. Some of these laws contain narrow exceptions to protect individuals who need an abortion to save their life or to avoid a permanent disability, but not all contain exceptions for non-life-threatening medical conditions. Some of these bans will also forbid abortion even when a pregnancy results from rape...

If Roe is overruled, many of these laws will take effect immediately. Others will take effect days, weeks, or perhaps a month after Roe is overruled. But, by the end of the summer, it is likely they will be in full effect...

Here's Mary Ziegler at The Atlantic (paywalled):

Something fundamental about the Supreme Court has changed in recent months. It is not simply that the Court has a conservative supermajority, although that is true enough. What is really striking is just how emboldened that conservative supermajority is—how willing to take on a number of deeply divisive culture-war issues; how blasé about making major decisions via the Court’s shadow docket; how open to making rapid, profound changes to long-standing precedent. Last night, when Politico released a leaked February draft of an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that would reverse Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision recognizing the right to choose abortion, the public got its most arresting taste thus far of just what this conservative bloc could do...

...The draft claims that the justices cannot predict the consequences of their actions and, even if such a prediction were possible, shouldn’t care what the public thinks anyway. The job of the Supreme Court, Alito suggests in the draft, is to say what the law is, not to care about what the people think, much less what the people think the Constitution means...

That the conservative majority could make such an argument—that it could believe such an idea—is a product of America’s grievous polarization. This majority knows that it will be celebrated by the conservative legal movement and the leaders of the Republican Party...

But even so, the speed with which this conservative majority is moving to reverse Roe is astonishing. The Court did not have to take this case—the lower courts had not split on the constitutionality of 15-week bans. The anti-abortion-rights movement had not invested much in such laws, which did not make for an especially strong case against abortion rights. The conservative majority is not going to sit around and wait; nothing about this seems particularly hard for these justices. No soul-searching was required.

This is the kind of draft that comes from that sense of certainty. It suggests that there can be no right to abortion because states were criminalizing abortion when the relevant constitutional provision, the Fourteenth Amendment, was ratified. Though the draft stresses that other precedents are not on the chopping block, it’s unclear why that would be: The same logic applies to same-sex intimacy and contraception, which were being outlawed at roughly the same time.

The draft concludes that this issue should be decided by voters, not justices, but—and this is subtle but quite significant—it also distinguishes abortion from other rights the Court has protected by stressing the value of fetal life. If this language is in the final opinion, it will be read by anti-abortion-rights leaders as an invitation to return to the Court and ask the conservative justices to hold that the Constitution recognizes the personhood of the fetus—and that abortion is unconstitutional in blue as well as red states. If the Court goes that route, the issue will be far, far out of the hands of voters in all states for a very long time to come...

In short: America is going backwards, the Republican minority control of our nation is going to make things worse, and the only recourse is for a supermajority of American voters even in the Red states to rise up and kick Republican officials out of elected office before it's too late.

GET THE GODDAMNED VOTE OUT, AMERICA. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN.

The Day When Women Become Second-Class Citizens

We knew this day was coming.

We knew it when Anthony Kennedy retired from the bench, leaving his own abortion ruling Casey vulnerable to the Far Right candidate - that drunkard Kavanaugh - willing to overturn it and Roe V. Wade.

We knew it when Justice Ginsburg died back in 2020, allowing Mitch McConnell - that hypocrite - and trump to put onto the Supreme Court a radical Far Right candidate to skew the Court so far against abortion rights that overturning Roe was pretty much a done deal.

We knew it when Justice Scalia died back in 2016, when Obama was still in office and still President of the United States able to nominate a replacement - Center-Left - Justice, only for McConnell to stonewall Obama's nomination in the hopes that a Republican win that November would give him the chance to replace Scalia with another Far Right Justice.

We knew it when donald motherfucking trump won the Electoral College in 2016, in spite of losing the Popular Vote, all because enough Democratic voters refused to support Hillary out of partisan spite (yes, to every so-called Leftist or Progressive who thought Hillary Clinton didn't deserve your vote, go fuck yourselves, this IS on you as much as the goddamned Far Right wingnuts). When Hillary got only 65.8 million votes whereas Biden got 81.2 million votes four years later, where the hell were those 15 million or so voters when the nation needed them???

We knew it the minute all those Red states began passing laws specifically designed to attack Roe and to criminalize abortion, laws so harsh that even rational exceptions - for rape, incest, or the health risks to the mother - were denied. We knew it every time a Republican moronically claimed pregnancies were safe, or that rape wasn't a problem, just so they could believe their lies that abortion was a greater sin.

We knew it the minute Red states like Georgia and Texas and Missouri passed anti-abortion bills that sought to punish women - and anyone who helped them - who fled their states to get abortions in states where it's still legal. We knew it when Texas added an insane bounty law incentivizing the wingnuts of their state to hunt down and accuse others of committing abortions or helping women get an abortion. By making it financially safe to accuse others without punishment for being wrong, that law is bound to get innocent women - and any of their friends and family members - accused of something they didn't do and forced to pay out of their own pockets fines that they cannot afford. Can YOU afford paying $10,000 to some lying Bible-thumping wingnut accusing YOU of helping a friend with an abortion for a pregnancy they never had?

We should have known all this since 1992, when Pat Buchanan went before the nationally televised Republican Convention and declared a "Culture War," beginning the partisan divide between Red State and Blue State, the purge of Moderates from a Republican Party to ensure only the pure anti-abortion racist sexist haters were the ones in charge. 

We knew this, we've always known this: This was never about the fetus, this was always about punishing the women. This was always about the power to control what women can do for themselves, not just their health care choices but their rights to vote, their rights to earn fair wages, hell their right to have a career and live their own lives.

What is about to happen now - as Politico leaks the rough draft of Justice Alito's decision to overturn Roe and Casey and apparently a number of other civil rights victories over the decades - is that we are going to watch this conservative Supreme Court deny women any rights they have under the 9th and 14th Amendments. We are going to see not only the legal excuse to deny women their right to an abortion to save their own lives, we are going to see the devaluation of women, period.

Let me point this out: Alito is crafting a decision that will protect the rights of the Proud Boys gun nut ready to shoot up the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic, but if you're a 13-year-old girl that's just been raped by your college-age cousin you are shit out of luck.

Welcome to the Republican Wingnut Utopia of Women Suffering in Hell.

This is why I've been screaming for the past TWENTY YEARS to my fellow Americans to FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN. 

This day was coming.

And now millions of women are going to pay for the wingnuts' cruelty.

Shall We See The End of Tweeting Soon?

Welp, all my efforts as a Gen Xer to stay hip and cool with all the newest social media apps since 2007 have all gone for naught, because one of the apps I've gotten addicted to in the past 15 years might finally crash and burn now that another oligarch has seen fit to buy his way into media domination.

In short: Greedhead Elon Musk just bought out Twitter for 44 BILLION DOLLARS. Via Lauren Feiner at CNBC: 

Twitter’s board has accepted an offer from billionaire Elon Musk to buy the social media company and take it private, the company announced Monday...

The cash deal at $54.20 per share is valued at around $44 billion, according to the press release. Twitter would become a private company on completion of the deal, which requires shareholder and regulatory approval...

Okay, my first thought was "Crap, they're letting the narcissistic billionaires in, there goes the neighborhood."

Second thought was "WHERE THE HELL DID MUSK DREDGE UP 44 BILLION DOLLARS in the first place???" Was that pocket change hiding in the sofa cushions or something?

Seriously, you know anybody with 44 BILLION DOLLARS lying around they can use to just buy a large-scale social media app like they were buying groceries?

Why even bother to spend so much in the first place? Musk tried buying his way onto the company's board a week or two ago, only to get thwarted by some of the regulations set in place for publicly-traded companies. So, his solution was to sledgehammer the entire process with a massive buyout and take Twitter private.

Why the hell is he so desperate trying to buy this social media app?

Forget the line he's trying to sell to the public about his interest in Twitter. This is not about encouraging free speech, or bringing his "brand" of innovation to improve security or service to a cornerstone of global social media. No, what Elon Musk is doing is Buying speech, there is nothing FREE about what he's doing. From here it's looking like Musk wants control over one of the many social networks that have openly derided his - and other billionaires' - obsessions with space travel, his self-marketing overkill, his lack of genuine philanthropy, his business model of racism in his workplaces, and more.

Musk's call for a more open Twitter runs the serious risk of creating an environment of lax rules governing online behavior. Twitter already has problems with online harassers, raging haters, and sociopathic doxxers looking to bully and threaten people because of their gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and/or political beliefs. Musk is poised to make things worse.

While Twitter as a social media app eventually became a business looking for ad revenues and profitability, it still served as a relatively free and easy-to-use app that people rallied to as a means to get instant news and updates from people they know, in a way faster and more satisfying than other major apps like Facebook. Its limited character count required savvy messaging in short sentences, allowing for clever snark and witty repartee (but also the trolling nightmares of direct insults and death threats).

For ill and for good, Twitter became a dominant means of getting news AND opinions out there, which mainstream media scooped up and gobbled for all its worth. On the bright side, it connected the world in ways other social media apps couldn't, passing along news of tragedies and victories faster than professional reporters could. It got the messages out in places and situations where dictators and despots couldn't stop them.

On the dark side, it got us donald trump tweeting out his racism and sexism and bullshit gaslighting. It got bad enough to where even Twitter had to suspend his ass because trump crossed the code of conduct lines too many times.

Rumor is Elon Musk is looking to buy Twitter so he could open up the rules of conduct and allow the likes of trump back on it, possibly seeing money to be made on ragetweets attracting more views than ever before. It seems unlikely, given how eager a lot of current Twitter users are about to jump ship if Musk ever invites that Shitgibbon back on. It's more likely Musk would make an attempt to overwhelm Twitter users with his godless Bitcoin crypto scams.

Either way, we're seeing an end to a troubled yet useful social media app getting bought out by a billionaire ready to twist that product into an unrecognizable mess. Sort of like what happened to Tumblr, which never recovered from unpopular policy changes under new management. 

The talk now is about escape plans. Saving your Twitter history to a zipped archive for future civilizations to find. The next social media app everyone can congregate to that won't be threatened by an oligarch's buyout anytime soon.

It's not TikTok by the way. China owns THAT already.

Fight Back: DeSantis Can and Should Lose

Well, Governor DeSantis signed the bill this Friday ending Disney's special tax district, basically giving every resident of Osceola and Orange Counties the middle finger regarding their property taxes going up 20 percent. He's also violated Disney's Constitutional rights (thank you Mitt Romney - oh GOD did I just say that - for reminding us "Corporations are people, my friends."), if Ian Millhiser has the right info on this (via Vox.com):

Florida’s decision to strip a government benefit from Disney because, in DeSantis’s words, Disney expressed “woke” opinions and “tried to attack me to advance their woke agenda,” is unconstitutional. And it’s not a close case.

As the Supreme Court said in Hartman v. Moore (2006), “official reprisal for protected speech ‘offends the Constitution [because] it threatens to inhibit exercise of the protected right.’” Nor does it matter how the government retaliates against a person or business who expresses an opinion that the government does not like — any official retaliation against someone because they engaged in First Amendment-protected speech is unconstitutional...

The "Don't Say Gay" law that's at the crux of this fight, according to Millhiser, is unconstitutional itself:

The law is unconstitutional because it is so vaguely drafted that teachers cannot determine what kinds of instruction are permitted and what kinds are forbidden — although it remains to be seen whether a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees will strike the law down...

So there is a big "If" attached to that possibility, although we've seen Roberts' Court reject some of the more extreme Far Right attempts at legislation due to such vagueness. Back to the fight:

Think of it this way: Imagine that José owns a bar in Orlando. One day, José tells the local paper that he dislikes Ron DeSantis and plans to vote for DeSantis’s opponent in the upcoming election. The next day, the state sends him a letter informing him that “because you disparaged our great governor, we are stripping your business of its liquor license.”

José does not have a constitutional right to sell liquor for profit. And the overwhelming majority of Florida businesses do not have a license permitting them to do so. But if Florida strips José of his liquor license because the government disapproves of José’s First Amendment-protected speech, it violates the Constitution.

Disney’s ability to govern the Reedy Creek Improvement District is no different from Florida’s hypothetical decision to take away José’s liquor license. If Florida has a legitimate reason to strip away this benefit from Disney, the Constitution most likely would permit it to do so.

But no one can be punished because they express a political opinion...

If DeSantis and his fellow Republicans had come up with some valid excuse - some evidence of criminal misdeeds involving those special tax districts, financial evidence that removing those districts is a benefit to the state and its residents in some way - then they ought to be able to pass that bill and get it through judicial review.

Problem is, DeSantis and his fellow Republicans have made it clear in public that this law is meant to punish Disney for their public opposition to DeSantis' anti-gay agenda. DeSantis openly accused Disney of attacking him promoting their "woke agenda," and his Lt. Gov. Jennette Nunez admitted on Eric Bolling's Newsmax show that all Disney has to do is change their position on gay rights and they can have their tax district back (it won't expire until 2023). There's no true reform element to what DeSantis is doing: He is straight-up kneecapping Disney as a warning to everybody else to stay out of his way.

DeSantis thinks he's in full control of the situation, and he thinks he's untouchable.

But he's not untouchable. He can lose, not only in the courtrooms where his actions can turn on him. He can lose at the ballot box, especially because he's more vulnerable than he wants to admit.

In 2018, he only barely won election as Governor by barely 35,000 votes, in an election with 8.2 million voters out of 11.5 million or so registered voters.

Orange County has roughly 854,000 or more total voters, Osceola has 245,000 or so voters. Granted, a sizable majority in both are registered Dems (361,000 / 98,000), but how many of them are going to show up to vote now to express their displeasure? How many No-Party Affiliated (NPA) voters (264,000 / 86,000) are now willing to show up and vote their displeasure? How many of them are now willing to join the Democratic Party?

Because what DeSantis and the state GOP did legitimately hurts them, strikes at their incomes and their businesses: They are now looking at the possibility their tourism industry will take a huge hit.

All those county residents gotta do is, they gotta go get their Voter Registration forms - county elections offices have them, your DMV offices have them, your public libraries have them - and get them filed this Monday. Register for the first time, or otherwise re-register and change their affiliation to Democratic. Hell, let's see how many registered Republicans in those counties (214,000 / 56,000) decide to re-register to NPA just to send DeSantis a message?

Because they STILL have a First Amendment right to send DeSantis a message saying "You Suck." He can try to retaliate all he wants, but he deserves to lose that fight if he keeps pushing it.

Punch back, Florida voters. Your votes matter, your voices matter, and DeSantis deserves to lose for what he's doing to our families and to our businesses.

The Battle for Florida: DeSantis Declares War On the Mouse

(Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for adding this blog article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please leave a comment below and peruse the rest of the blog, thank ye!)

When my family moved to Florida, I was seven. We lived in a part of Florida that had just exploded with new housing and thousands of relocating Americans, at the forefront of the 1980s population boom that turned Florida from a swamp-infested minor state to the third most-populated in the nation.

Part of that boom relied on the development of a major tourist attraction called Disney World, built outside of Orlando by Walt Disney's corporation in an attempt to expand his theme park empire. The popular Disneyland of southern California brought the company fortune in the 1950s but when he needed to add more rides, all the surrounding land had been bought up by developers who added their own businesses to feed off the tourism trade. By the 1960s Disney realized the next time he started a theme park, he needed to buy up all the land possible first, then start the theme park and expand from there.

The best place he could do that was Florida, where land was cheap and few people lived because the heat and humidity of most months made it untenable for non-agricultural or shoreline living. Picking a spot where a big enough airport existed to help with the flow of tourists and near an interstate to handle traffic, Disney quietly bought up as much as possible between Orange and Osceola counties in order to ensure construction of multiple theme parks and associated hotels/resorts under the company's control.

All of that land development still required a lot of corporate control, so Disney's company worked out a deal with the state of Florida by 1967: Reedy Creek Improvement District, a special taxing district run by the corporation. Disney would be responsible for paying and managing the infrastructure costs and constructions, much like its own city/county: In return, Orange and Osceola residents didn't have to pay anything towards the district, which benefitted both counties when businesses grew up around Disney's area and the population/work force grew to fill all those tourism jobs.

Everybody - except for the massive income inequality that non-union labor has to cope with - kind of won with that deal. Today, Orlando is one of the largest metros in the nation, only second behind the South Florida (Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach) area in the state itself. Florida generates more money from tourism dollars than any other industry. And its allure has drawn in other industries - aeronautics, health care, energy, financial firms - to employ hundreds of thousands more. 

There may be a Busch Gardens theme park in Tampa, a Legoland in Winter Haven, a... well, does Coral Castle count as a theme park? No, it's a roadside attraction my bad. (Big thanks by the way to Neil Gaiman for shouting out the mermaids of Weeki Wachee in his work American Gods) There may be a Universal Studios park in Orlando itself, a Sea World park just down the road, and a hundred attractions along International Drive, but EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING in the Orlando metro revolves around Disney World.

They don't call it Mickeytown for nothing...

This makes it all the more insane that the Florida Republicans running our state - basically operating as one-party rule since 1998 - led by autocrat-wannabe Ron DeSantis have decided to nuke Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District from orbit.

To the Tampa Bay Times (linking to the Associated Press reporting):

The Florida House of Representatives on Thursday gave final passage to a bill that would dissolve Walt Disney World’s private government, handing Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis a victory in his feud with the entertainment giant over its opposition to a measure that critics have dubbed the “don’t say gay” law.

The move could have huge tax implications for Disney, whose series of theme parks have transformed Orlando into one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, and serves to further sour the relationship between the Republican-led government and a major political player in the state. Disney did not return an email seeking comment Thursday...

See, what happened is that DeSantis is angling for the 2024 Republican nomination for the Presidency - he's hoping that current overlord donald trump will be in handcuffs by 2023 - so during this legislative year he pushed for a lot of culture war laws he could sign to win over the GOP's racist/sexist voter base.

That not only included a racist "anti-CRT" law that essentially made it illegal to discuss the history of racism in both Florida and the United States, it also included the "Don't Say Gay" law that makes it illegal to "discuss gender identity" to the point where teachers could get fined saying the word "gender" on school grounds in front of students, and regardless of grade level due to an "age appropriate" clause vaguely worded enough to threaten even high schoolers. When that "Don't Say Gay" law was finally discussed in the legislature and passed by the GOP-controlled House and Senate, there was a lot of media discourse about how Disney World - Florida's biggest private employer - would handle the matter.

See, over the years Disney has garnered a reputation for being Pro-People i.e., a megacorporation that actually thinks about marketing to gay/lesbian/transgender audiences as well as the other demographics (yes, there is always a profit to be made). There's been Gay Days organized at the theme parks since 1991. Disney has never openly denounced the appropriation of popular characters - especially Elsa from Frozen - as gay icons, which helped maintain the fanbase. They market it all - even as they sell themselves as "family-friendly" - as an inclusive community where love and acceptance matters more than culture war posturing.

However, Disney is still a business, and a pretty big one at that: So they've always had their eye on keeping their corporate taxes low and government regulation off their backs. This means a lot of campaign contributions to Republicans on a regular basis, especially at the state level to ensure nobody messed with the flow of revenues.

So when Disney's head honchos were all asked about how they felt about Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill, their first response back in March was... well, hem-hawing at best. Which led to a major walkout of Disney employees angered by the spineless owners. Shamed by the public display, the CEO took a harder stance early in April, after which DeSantis still signed the bill into law while accusing Disney and others who opposed it of "grooming" kids, like the theme park was staffed by registered sex offenders.

And at that point, DeSantis called for a special legislative session - usually the state legislature works for six weeks to pass bills, and if it misses anything they have to hold special sessions at taxpayer expense - not only to force the legislature to approve his gerrymandered nightmare of a Congressional map but also to remove Disney's special tax district as punishment. Back to the AP article in the Tampa Bay Times:

The bill passed by the legislature on Thursday would eliminate the Reedy Creek Improvement District, as the 55-year-old Disney government is known, as well as a handful of other similar districts by June 2023. The measure does allow for the districts to be reestablished, leaving an avenue to renegotiate its future. The bill now moves to DeSantis’ office to be signed into law...

Democrats have criticized the Disney proposal as clear retaliation against the company and warned that local homeowners could get hit with big tax bills if they have to absorb bond debt from Disney — although such details are far from clear.

Disney is one of Florida’s biggest private employers, last year saying it had more than 60,000 workers in the state. It is not immediately clear how the company or local governments around its properties would be affected if the district was dissolved...

You can kind of see the carrot the Republicans left in the bill, where they could re-institute the special district if only Disney would behave like a good little puppet for DeSantis' political ambitions.

But the Republicans are risking a lot on this brash and open assault on a major economic revenue source for the entire state. If Disney World is curtailed, shut down, reduced in any way, that's a serious hit to the surrounding hotels and restaurants responsible for the hotel and sales taxes flowing into Tallahassee. 

One noted effect of losing the special district status is that Disney would have to fire the county-level emergency services people - the EMTs, the fire fighters, the police - working within the district. The district itself disappears, meaning the counties it's in - Orange and Osceola - would have to pick up the slack and staff those services themselves. Those counties would start have to paying for all that, not Disney.

Adding on top of that is a bond liability Disney has tied into the Reedy Creek finances, a massive debt worth around $1 billion (it might even be $2 billion) that those counties - not the state, which is really rubbing it in hard - would have to cover. If we refer to that CNBC article by Robert Frank:

Reedy Creek has bond liabilities of between $1 billion and $1.7 billion, according to the district’s financial filings. Under Florida statute, if Reedy Creek is dissolved, those liabilities are transferred to the local governments — either Bay Lake or Lake Buena Vista, or more likely, Orange and Osceola counties.

State Senate Minority Leader Gary Farmer, D-Fort Lauderdale, tried to amend the bill to include further study of the bond debt, but the amendment failed on a voice vote.

Farmer said the bond debt could total more than $2 billion and that tax authorities are increasing their estimates as they learn more about Reedy Creek’s outstanding liabilities.

“This is a very real impact, the extent of which we don’t fully understand yet,” Farmer said.

If the liabilities of $1.7 billion or more are transferred to Orange and Osceola counties, he said, the debt could amount to $1,000 per taxpayer...

In short: If Reedy Creek goes, the state government gets all the money while the local counties are forced to pay the bills.

All of this damage happening all because DeSantis and his fellow Republicans are vindictive assholes.

This is only part of the stuff that can happen if (more like when) DeSantis gets his revenge on Disney.

What happens when the Walt Disney Company, megacorporation generating around $68 billion a year, decides to fight back?

Remember at the beginning of the article when I mentioned my family moving to Florida? We moved to the Tarpon Springs area, and during those early formative years I witnessed up close the Disney company going after a day care center right off Klosterman Road. The day care had painted on the exterior a number of kid-friendly cartoon characters, among them Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Disney did not approve, because they were not affiliated to that day care. I didn't fully understand as a kid what trademarks meant and "controlling the brand" was all about, all I knew was a big business in Disney was going after a tiny local business on the side of the highway.

What I learned back then was something a lot of people understood over the decades that Disney turned into the media behemoth it is today: You do not fuck with Disney. You NEVER fuck with Disney. They go after day care centers, for God's sake.

This is an international company, with a reach extending to nearly every country on the planet. They hire hundreds of thousands of workers at theme parks across the globe. They make movies and television shows every minute of the day. They own the franchises of nearly every cultural foundation - their own animated characters, Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, they just bought 20th Century Fox a couple years ago to seize the X-Men characters for future MCU planning - of modern fandom. They only things they don't own are Star Trek and Dr. Who, and Gods help us if they ever buy those up.

And they have on staff hundreds of lawyers all working to ensure protection of their trademarks, to brush aside lawsuits and damage claims, with a ruthlessness that would impress Sith Lords.

In terms of this retaliatory - and rushed - law DeSantis is about to sign, Disney can easily send an army of lawyers to poke enough holes in the law to where the courts - even the Republican wingnut ones - can invalidate it. 

On top of the legal fight about to ensue, Florida Republicans ought to start realizing that Disney - and a number of Disney's corporate allies - may not be sending fat checks to their campaign war chests, which is an important thing this midterm elections cycle. It wouldn't be logical of Disney's CEO to help pay for a political party that just kneecapped him and stripped one of the most profitable pieces of Disney's corporate empire of its power.

While businesses may think the Republicans are the "Pro-Business" party, what DeSantis and the Florida GOP just did demonstrated that when it comes to pandering to the voting base on culture war issues, the Republicans will sacrifice and abuse their corporate "buddies" for cheap political points. Republicans, it turns out, are NOT really Pro-Business: Republicans are Pro-Power, and they are not going to share that power with anyone...

Would Disney roll over on this issue? I wouldn't expect them to: Show DeSantis or any other bullying politician that you're willing to cave, and all the other state governors and elected officials will pile right on. So I would expect Disney to take stock of the state political landscape, take a deep breath, and begin funding Democratic candidates - especially the centrist Pro-Business ones - with truckloads of SuperPAC funds and ad support and voter turnout efforts.

For all the gerrymandering the state Republicans have done, they are still vulnerable to voter turnouts (DeSantis barely won in 2018 by little over 3,000 votes). This stunt the Florida GOP is pulling is about to hit the wallets of hundreds of thousands of residents - and not just in Orange and Osceola counties - in a way that they'll view as unforgivable. No amount of culture war fearmongering can distract from families coping with higher property taxes and lost jobs.

If the Florida Republicans are kneecapping you with punitive laws to make you suffer, you fight back to make sure those Republicans are out of office by the next election (which is this November).

And that's all the LEGAL stuff Disney can do to punish DeSantis for starting this culture war fight. You might expect some of the illegal stuff like literal kneecapping to happen over the next couple months.

In the meantime... well, in THIS fight between Wingnut Assholes vs. Corporate Overlords, I'm gonna have to side with the Corporate Overlords. 

#GoDisney 

and #SayGayFlorida

Every Leaf In Wartime

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
- Martin Luther

It's Easter Sunday today, so let's talk war.

We're more than 50 days into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and to say it hasn't gone well for Russia is an understatement. Estimated losses are up to 20,000 troops, with 20 percent of that officers who are part of a chain of command that can't afford to fall apart. Ukrainian troop losses are around 3,000 troops but an ungodly number of civilians - nearly 5,000 innocent lives - caught in Russia's genocide.

Russia has lost an incredible number of its tanks and heavy armor vehicles within the last two months, due to Ukrainians' effective use of Javelin anti-tank weapons supplied by Western Europe. And word is, Russia's arms manufacturers can't replace what's been lost thanks to sanctions cutting off much-needed materials.

Russia may have command of the Black Sea, but Ukrainian forces are striking without fear and with success. Above all, the sinking of the flag ship Moskva has been a huge win for Ukraine. Not only was it the largest class ship Russia had in those waters, but due to Turkey barring military ships through the only strait in and out of the Black Sea means Putin can't send any ship to replace it.

It's also a huge win for Ukraine because Moskva was the warship that threatened Ukrainian troops - merely a handful, around 13 or so - defending Snake Island off the coast of Odesa during the earliest stages of Putin's invasion. When confronted with a ship that could pound the tiny island into rubble, the soldier in charge - Roman Hrybov - decided there was only one sane response:

"Russian Warship, Go Fuck Yourself:" The defiance of the Snake Island soldiers was note-perfect for this meme-friendly media environment, the "Nuts!" of the 21st Century, and easily marketable for t-shirts and mailing stamps (I'm not kidding! It's already a collectible!)

I know a couple of people who collect stamps,
I totally want to buy a couple for them, I swear.

While the early reports were that the Ukrainian defenders were killed, it later turned out they surrendered after the Moskva's barrage flattened everything, and then were taken to Russia for a month's worth of torture before a prisoner exchange was worked out. Still, the defiance mattered, their survival in the face of incredible odds mattered, and we should expect the Michael Bay biopic to wrap up filming next month for an early January 2023 release date.

Speaking of defiance, one of the reasons why Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine was to spook other neighboring nations like Finland and Sweden into not joining NATO. Well, on that front Putin is getting humiliated even as he rattles his saber ever louder (via Thomas O Falk at Al Jazeera):

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Finland and Sweden have sought the protection of NATO and are considering a paradigm shift of their respective security policies: the abdication of neutrality and military independence.

In January, Social Democratic Prime Minister Sanna Marin declared in Helsinki that Finland could not be expected to seek NATO membership during the current legislative period. However, Russia’s invasion has laid bare the disadvantages of being a non-member...

There are indications both Finland and Sweden are heading towards a genuinely historic change of course in their respective security policies. During the Cold War, Sweden and Finland were essentially considered neutral states, albeit for different reasons.

“Sweden’s neutrality was much more part of their national identity, whereas Finland’s neutrality was more pragmatic and virtually forced upon them by the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance signed between Finland and the USSR in 1948,” said (senior lecturer for European security at Aberystwyth University) Alistair Shepherd...

“Polling in Finland found 53 percent in favour of NATO membership and 41 percent in Sweden. More recently that has risen further with over 50 percent now in favour in Sweden [rising to 62 percent if Finland joins]. In Finland, 68 percent are in favour of joining NATO [rising to 77 per cent if the government recommends it],” said Shepherd...

In essence, their memberships would further enhance NATO’s presence and security within the Baltic region. Both Sweden and Finland bring advanced and well-trained militaries into NATO.

“It could create some long-term challenges because having 32 members can slow down or hamper consensus decision-making. It also indicates how far Russia has isolated itself from the rest of the European community,” Alexander Lanoszka, assistant professor in international relations at the University of Waterloo, told Al Jazeera...

“In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, it’s likely to be approved quickly and membership fast-tracked to show the unity and strength of the alliance in the face of Russian aggression,” Katharine AM Wright, senior lecturer in international politics at Newcastle University, told Al Jazeera...

Putin's belligerence towards Ukraine and open talk about rebuilding a Russian Empire that would dominate all of Eastern Europe isn't winning friends and influencing people. Neutral nations like Finland and Sweden now realize their neutral status means nothing to a bullying autocrat, and nations like Poland that are NATO members now remember all too well the bleak despair of being Russian puppets from the Cold War years (and even centuries before all that).

Russia is making noises about elevating hostilities with Finland and Sweden - by placing nuclear-capable warships in the Baltic Sea - in a desperate attempt to stall any NATO vote. There's a rule in NATO's charter they can't accept any member with a standing border dispute with another nation (the legal reason why NATO can't just speed-track Ukraine as a full member right now), and Russia hopes to exploit that against Finland/Sweden to stop them from joining. Thing is, NATO will see the farce for what it is (Russia may have the dispute but Finland and Sweden don't) and proceed on the vote.

The only other hope Russia has to stop Finland and Sweden from joining would be a friendly nation like Hungary - where fellow autocrat Orban just won another election - using its veto power to stop the vote. Thing is, Hungary may be friendly but it's also part of the massive European Union: Hungary cannot afford to isolate itself economically in the middle of that behemoth.

There are few options left for Putin to survive his genocidal folly, at the rate things are going this spring. Things will arguably get bloodier as he doubles down on the madness and death.

But there will be another spring. Another turn of the seasons as his madness fails and his war collapses on itself. Another chance for sunshine to return and for the leaves to turn green again. 

Always another chance for hope.

The Stupidity Plus Racism Plus Fearmongering Divided By Republicans, It All Adds Up In Florida

I am waking up to THIS STUPIDITY from my state's Department of Education:

Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students

Yes, our Republican-controlled state government led by Uber-Panderer DeSantis is going after Critical Race Theory again, even WITHOUT evidence that CRT was getting taught in our primary schools in the first.

And the Republicans are so afraid of CRT, so afraid of white students learning about how systemic racism has been throughout our history at the national and state levels, that these wise learned assholes are going after MATHEMATICS as though Florida's pre-Algebra classes are full of race theory.

...

Yes. Republicans are going after MATH now.

You know, I'm 50-something now, it's been ages since I studied mathematics, but I'm pretty sure when I took Algebra I in the Ninth Grade at Tarpon Springs High that there was no racism being discussed in the class.

I mean, I can recall we studied stuff like 2x + 3y = z, or the emphasis on parenthesis in equations, and I vaguely recall word problems like "If Monique goes shopping and finds that cereal boxes of Lucky Charms are selling two for $4.00, how much would it cost if Monique buys 9 boxes of Lucky Charms?" At some point we learned IF = THEN calculations for variables, and then we learned about fractions and percentages, but we NEVER learned about the Rosewood Massacre and its effects on early 20th Century population trends in our state, and we never learned about the economic effects of Redlining and the Ghetto as Financial Policy.

These Far Right wingnut Republicans are so intent on finding "reverse racism" or anything that would make White folk uncomfortable about the long tragic reality of systemic racism in our nation's existence that they will wipe out entire sections of learning to root out such fears.

DeSantis and his lackeys will be going after Biology (because God trump forbid Darwinian Evolution will make religious White folk worry they evolved from apes) and Physics (because God trump forbid learning about potential and kinetic energies might teach kids about passive political resistance used in Black Lives Matters protests) next. Maybe after Chemistry (because trump forbid that our kids learn about mixing things like interracial dates) as well. 

The stupidity of all this is excuse for Florida Republicans to degrade and demolish enough of our public education system to where our public schools are broken, useless, and incapable of preparing our children to higher education or well-paid jobs that require actual learned skills.

The madness of all this is that too many of my fellow state residents aren't paying attention to how Republicans are driving this state right over the cliffs and into the sharp pointy rocks below.

If only there was a mathematical equation that would explain the damage that happens when our entire state crashes into those rocks.

No Debate: trump Was Lousy At It Anyway

In minor news today - since all the major news like Putin's genocide in Ukraine gets a bit overwhelming - the Republican Party voted this week to stop joining the 4-year farce of Presidential debating because as it turns out trump is too much of a pussy to risk it anymore. Well, that's MY take on it. Let's hear from the official reporting from Reuters (via The Guardian link):

The Republican National Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, saying the group that has run the debates for decades was biased and refused to enact reforms.

“We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people,” the committee’s chairperson, Ronna McDaniel, said in a statement.

What McDaniel means by "bias," by the by, translates into "the moderators wouldn't let trump go bugfuck psycho like he wants to."

The move, which followed months of wrangling between the RNC and the commission, will potentially deprive voters of seeing Republican and Democratic candidates on the same stage.

Millions of Americans usually watch the presidential debates and many viewers say they help them to make up their minds about whom to vote for, according to research by Pew Research Center.

The RNC’s decision follows grievances aired by former president Donald Trump and other Republicans about the timing of debates, debate formats and the selection of moderators.

Defenders of the debates say they are an important element of the democratic process, but critics say they have become television spectacles in which viewers learn little about the candidates’ policies.

Trump refused to participate in what was supposed to be the second of three debates with Biden in 2020, after the commission switched it to a virtual contest following Trump’s Covid-19 infection.

What the article didn't mention was how the first debate between trump and Biden in 2020 turned out: A complete and utter disaster for trump. Don't take my word for it: Every other pundit who watched it were sickened by trump's bullying behavior. Here's the link back to what David Frum documented for The Atlantic:

Instead, he talked to Facebook conspiracists, to the angriest of ultra-Republican partisans, and to violent white supremacists. He urged the Proud Boys to “stand by” because “somebody’s got to do something” about “antifa and the left.” He refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the (likely) event that he loses. He threatened months and months of chaos if the election does not go his way.

Trump yelled, threatened, interrupted—and changed nothing. All he did was confirm the horror and revulsion of the large American majority that has already begun to cast its ballots against him.

Correction: Trump did one thing. On the Cleveland stage, Trump communicated that he will seize any opportunity to disrupt the vote and resist the outcome. He communicated more forcefully than ever that the only security the country has for a constitutional future is that Biden wins by the largest possible margin...

Even Frum could see by September 2020 that trump was plotting a coup to hold onto power even when he lost the election that November.

Many people will criticize how the moderator, Chris Wallace, managed the debate, and surely he could have done better. But really, nothing short of a shock collar around Trump’s neck would have disciplined the man who is, after all, the president of the United States. A president who does not respect tax laws, does not respect the FBI, is surely not going to be constrained by a debate moderator. It was pandemonium. But it was revealing pandemonium. Who and what Trump is could not have been more vividly displayed in all the psychological reality. Debate one was not Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, or red versus blue. It was zookeepers versus poop-throwing primates...

It was the worst public behavior out of a President Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice) in modern memory. There had been times when Presidents like LBJ and Reagan were combative or defensive during public pressers, and in private the likes of Nixon behaved so much worse. Those were mere flashes compared to trump's performance: trump heckled, he interrupted, he spoke out of turn, he YELLED out of turn, he did everything except physically assault Biden. If trump had been graded by the Toastmasters for his debate behavior, they would have flunked him in the first three minutes.

And it wasn't like trump was masterful in his debates against Hillary Clinton back in 2016. He flared out in the first debate, he acted like a bully during the open forum format of the second debate, and he failed to impress during the third debate. 

You have to remember: trump never won the popular vote in 2016 and in 2020. If debate performances are meant to sway undecided voters to your banner, trump only succeeded in rallying his base. His Democratic opponents were able to do that as well, and in Biden's case rallied an uptick in voter turnout that trump couldn't surpass.

This move by the Republicans has all the markings of a sore loser - trump - deciding he wasn't going to play the game on a level field. Either he's hoping that this will force the Debates commission to revise their policies and grant him more power to set the rules his way, or he's hoping he won't have to face the embarrassment of losing debates in 2024. It'll probably be the latter because the commission is supposed to be non-partisan managed between both major parties, and the Democrats on the commission will refuse to yield to trump's antics.

Part of me even wonders why the debates still matter. I understand the optics of it - a public demonstration of the American electoral system, the spectacle of holding elected officials accountable to the issues that matter to the voters - but the mechanics of it have broken apart the past twenty years as partisan hackery took over the democratic (small d) process.

It's not as though our Presidential elections needed these debates over the nation's history. Impractical back in the day before railroads or cars or airplanes that could allow a large gathering to watch a debate of that scale, it would take something like mass communication of radio and television to pull it off. 

Previous elections didn't even have the candidates campaigning all that hard: Late 19th Century tradition made it that they didn't even leave their front porches. Most candidates still stuck to their individual campaigns, avoiding direct public forums as though to avoid giving their opponent any validation.

There aren't any full explanations I can find why candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy agreed to televised Presidential debates in 1960. Kennedy had his reasons because he was trailing the polls as a still-obscure figure, while Nixon was better-known due to serving as Vice-President under Eisenhower. It could have been that television was still a new technology and both sides saw potential in reaching national audiences. We were in the middle of a Cold War versus Communism, so there may have been the appeal of debating with a free exchange of idea(l)s between candidates to market the virtues of elective democratic republics like the United States.

The results were disastrous for Nixon. He debated well enough on the issues, but his image paled in comparison to Kennedy's charisma. Nixon lost his polling lead and then lost a close election. It should be telling that the following elections in 1964, 1968, and 1972 there were no Presidential debates at all (as Nixon ran in '68 and '72, there was no way he was going to fall for that trap again).

It took Nixon's Watergate, and the distrust in elected leaders, for the debates to return in 1976, as President Gerald Ford and Candidate Jimmy Carter both needed them to appeal to an electorate that barely knew both of them. But the rationale - the open discussion of ideas and opposing views on how to answer crises - for hosting these things quickly devolved.

By the 1990s, the focus of the debates were to avoid getting pinned on any ideological position that would get used in attack ads by your opponents, and to basically avoid saying anything dumb to ruin your poll numbers. The Saturday Night Live skit in 1992 aptly titled "Debate ’92: The Challenge to Avoid Saying Something Stupid" pretty much spelled out how bland and boring these debates became.

Nothing's really ever gained in these spectacles, to be honest. The candidates appearing at these debates are prepped into one-sentence ten-words answers that don't say anything, oft-times stuck with those one-liners creating gaffes of their own. Undecided voters tuning in to watch are mostly watching for those gaffes, not for leadership potential or for policies that matter to them. Decided voters don't want to tune in because we already know why we're voting for our candidate. The partisan nature of our nation's political parties have gotten to where the issues don't even matter (look at how the Republicans didn't even create a new platform for the 2020 elections).

We don't need these debates anymore, or at least not right now. Not when the choices are already too stark and the issues are so easily ignored.

It's actually a good thing donald trump doesn't want to do debates anymore. It means less airtime on my television screens to where I and millions of others don't have to look at his orange-painted lying face.