Odd Bits - The Housekeeping Edition

As we did in October, the wife and I attended our neighborhood’s little No Kings protest on Saturday. Last time, it drew about 70 people at its peak. This time, it was about half that. I attribute that to the fact that it was about 40 degrees out with a brisk wind, rather than a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the locals. I was kicking myself because I stood in front of our closet for ten seconds, wondering whether I should bring gloves or not. Within five minutes of being out there holding a sign in that wind, I knew I had chosen poorly.

The cars were honking enthusiastically at the signs, which ran along the same general lines as they did in October, only with a few added pleas for peace. Sweetpea and I reused the same array of signs we made before. My favorite signing came from a protest I saw online (I failed to note where):

Now, “Over The Rainbow” would be a bit of Commie Leftist propaganda rather than a timeless classic.

From the Department of “I Totally Called That”

Over the weekend, TFG mentioned that they are building a large military complex under the new East Wing.

Yeah, no kidding. I pegged that in October:

“Since he was having it all rebuilt from scratch, I figured there would have to be some secret 'special rooms,' something he’d need to be off the books. Something like a protective bunker, something built with today’s best tech, where he could hide out indefinitely, all the while being able to surveil his domain and keep track of what’s being shown on TV. Maybe even have a studio in there from where he could get himself onto Fox and Friends. He could install a special safe to hold the Epstein files that only he could access. And, of course, his own McDonald's.”

Now he’ll have a place that, if his voter-suppression tactics and outright denial of results don’t work, he has a burrow from which someone will have to pry him, like a rabid badger down a hole. I’d recommend one of our famous bunker-busting bombs, if we have any left. Come to think of it, I bet he’ll make sure we’ve used them all up, maybe blowing up some “underground South American druglord fortresses” in October of 2028.

Never forget that the presidency is the only thing keeping him out of jail, and his loyalist Justice Department is doing the same for his family, cronies, and Cabinet. He has zero motivation to leave peacefully, and we need to expect as much. There is no line he won’t cross to keep this gravy train rolling. I bet there will be a helipad within waddling distance, too, so if he must flee, he can get airborne quickly, to shuttle off to Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or some other friendly dictatorship that offers him quarter.

Paper Chase, Cont’

Just to let you know how it turned out with my newspaper subscription, from last week’s post, the situation has been resolved, temporarily.

I called last Tuesday afternoon, and after fighting through a voicemail system that definitely did NOT want anyone speaking to a human, I finally reached an East Asian call center and got my discount reinstated to $159/month. That works out to $5.12 per paper, as opposed to $6.80, undiscounted, which is still crazy but less insane. Cover price is $4.00... I remember paying anywhere from a quarter to a dollar on the street downtown, on days my paper wasn't delivered before I left for work.

I expect I'll have to do this every six months from now on until I die or tell them to screw it and go to weekends only.

Like I said, I mainly keep the paper for the comics and puzzles. I know there are alternatives, but I have my reasons for still wanting the paper. Getting a paper is really an ingrained habit. My parents always got a daily paper or two, so I grew up with it. I’ve had a paper delivered for my entire adult life, save for the 4 years I spent in a particular apartment complex that didn't allow indoor delivery (mid to late 80s).

I've tried doing crosswords online, but I just don't like it. And printing them from online would also cost me a fortune (in paper and toner). I like the daily routine of doing my puzzles during lunch (away from my computer desk) or weekend breakfasts. Sweetpea and I both do them. I do the Baltimore Sun puzzle (which is actually the syndicated LA Times puzzle), the NY Times, the Jumble, and the Sudoku.
I've been doing the puzzles at lunch continuously since 2010, and even started a results-tracking sheet in 2016. Yes, really. I used to keep track on my desk calendar, but started a spreadsheet in 2016 to look for the longest streaks and other personal records.

Someone got me a crossword puzzle book about 15 years ago, and I couldn't use it. It was a book of NY Times puzzles, but they were from the early 1970s. I couldn't complete a single one... it was like they were from another planet.

I like that the puzzles are up to date, always changing, and keep me sharp. Or at least, make me a fountain of useless trivia.

Also, this is Baltimore, and I married a native. We need newspapers to line the tables on blue crab night.

By the way, the paper never mentioned anything about local No Kings protests, including only an article about the big one in Minnesota and all the star power that appeared there. And they didn’t cover much about Speaker Johnson killing a vote on funding DHS and the TSA before sending everyone home on vacation. So remember that when you see the next troll blaming the Dems for long airport lines.

 

Paying Them to Mislead Us

I just got my bill for my daily newspaper, and it seems they removed the discount for which I bargained with them last fall. They did say that it was a six-month deal, but I was hoping they’d forget. They charge $215 a month now for home delivery, which I find to be insane. When I started with the paper, it was about $35. I’ve got to call into the circulation department tomorrow and get my “haggle” on.

I swear, if it wasn’t for the comics and puzzles, I’d chuck it all. I get my significant news online, so I don’t really need that. The paper does keep me up on what’s going on locally, though, and lets me keep track on how the rich are attacking city and state government (both of which are run by the Dems). And due to a press time of around 6-7 PM, most important stories are a day late. Forget about sports game coverage, it’s always from two days prior. Their hockey coverage is abysmal. Last week, they used the previous day’s game results grid, so even two days later, there was still no information.

The problems started when the paper, the Baltimore Sun, was bought by the owner of the conservative news outlet, Sinclair Broadcasting. Now, instead of a reliable stable of in-house reporters, most news articles are farmed out to Sinclair national desks, and often run transcripts of what their Fox “News” affiliates ran on-air.

The old paper definitely had a liberal leaning, reflecting the prevailing views of Marylanders, but they kept it to the Op-Ed pages. The current version splashes its bias across every page, and it is especially obvious if you know how to spot it. Here’s one from last Friday:

With all the ways TFG, his family, and minions have been skimming money from the Federal till, they’re still carrying on about Hunter freakin’ Biden. They rarely even mention all the ways the president is raking in illegal dollars from overseas governments and influencers, let alone outright theft from other countries.

Also note that it comes down to “the whistleblowers say they’ve been vindicated.” Right. Trump said he was vindicated by the Mueller Report, too, remember? (Obviously, TFG doesn’t really remember it that way or he’d have provided a more gracious condolence than he did.) Nowhere else in the article does it say that anyone in authority has “vindicated” anyone. This is a nothing-burger article, meant to reflect negative attention onto Democrats at a time when the president is swimming in bad news and controversy.

They’ve been working hard at that, as evidenced by this article:

My take is that they got some bad polling news, showing that people were unhappy with Republicans on the war, the Epstein Files, the price of gas and groceries, the tanking stock market, etc. But the Sinclair National Desk couldn’t just run the story; they had to drag the Dems along, too. So the article is more about the classic “Dems in disarray” story than about how people are souring on Republicans. And notice how at the end, they talk about “threats against lawmakers and their families,” but they don’t mention where 99% of those threats come from.

Here’s another assassination by headline regarding the funding of the DHS:

They make it plain that those Commie Democrats are holding up funding for the DHS, but never mention that they’ve introduced seven (as of now) bills to pay the TSA agents and all department workers except for ICE, which they will pay if they agree to obey the same laws that local police do. Republicans voted no and killed the bill every time. They’d rather continue the illegal war on brown people than pay workers whose job actions are perfectly above board and not in question, essentially holding them hostage until ICE gets to keep free rein to kidnap anyone with an accent and send them off to detention camps unknown. Also note that female minors in custody are coming up pregnant, which they were not before entering custody. Perhaps this is another reason Republicans are fighting birthright citizenship.

None of that is in the article, just the skewed look at Dems holding up the works and Republicans excoriating them for it, taken from interviews that ran on Hannity.

Adding to their penchant for guiding readers to conclusions while omitting essential facts, we have this one from last month:

Yes, those stupid, socialist, Democrat, commie, liberals want ID from people just to shovel snow! Haw haw haw, they’re so dum!

But one simple line nullifies the whole perception.

The snow shoveling was a paying job with the city. Therefore, if people want to be paid, they must provide documentation! Do you remember all the documentation Republicans insist we provide to prospective employers, to show we’re not illegal aliens? That’s what they’re ridiculing. In actuality, the whole snow shoveling thing worked like a charm. The sidewalks and streets were cleared in a day, and people got paid for doing it. Running an article like this goes against every journalistic principle. It does, though, fit right in with being a shill.

And speaking of unforgivable newspaper sins, wouldn’t you think the paper might have kept an editor or two? JFC, how incompetent does one have to be to include a typo in a headline? Doesn’t anyone over there read?

Lastly, and this has nothing to do with the fast-fading newspaper industry, have you seen the design for the new 250-Year Anniversary coin, bearing the stern visage of our malevolent president?

Anyone alive and going to the movies in the early 80s remembers this famous pose. I think somebody owes Steve McCroskey a percentage.

Looks like he picked the wrong week to quit smokin’.

 

The SAVE Act is a Threat to Democracy

Thankfully, word is that the heinous, disenfranchising, election-rigging SAVE Act is unlikely to pass the Senate. Not for lack of trying, though. Not only has TFG been furiously jumping up and down on levers of power, trying to move Congress to nuke the filibuster to get this thing passed, but the PR game has been ramped up. I’ve seen several memes hitting Facebook via my conservative friends and their Conservative Media Bubble talking points, claiming that A) it’s just a voter ID, and B) it’s no big deal to obtain the required documents. Funny how it’s always “no big deal” for someone ELSE to jump through hoops.

Naturally, they omit the vast problems with this bill, like the time and cost involved in the not-so-simple task of tracking down and obtaining long-lost documents or replacing ones that are no longer acceptable.

The part about how a married woman’s birth certificate is no longer acceptable is particularly insidious. That’s a huge swath of Americans who immediately become disenfranchised for doing absolutely nothing wrong, other than taking their husband’s name (which is something Republicans tend to want women to do).

Consider how the GOP created this standard, on purpose. Why do you think that is? Tell me how it can be anything but the continued devaluation of women because of their perceived bias toward voting Democratic. (Which is a self-created problem due to their pursuit of limiting reproductive rights. Maybe if they weren’t trying to limit women to being incubators, they might have a better image in their eyes.)

So it’s not like it’s an oversight or something. In fact, they’ve had more than enough opportunities to remove that onerous requirement, but they’ve actively resisted doing so.

No, this is how they want it. They want fewer women to vote.

They could also create a Voter ID plan that would garner public support if they created a simple means of obtaining a valid document. But they won’t do that either.

They’re even willing to disenfranchise their own base. Look at how the SAVE Act affects red states:

Their stated basis for all of these new requirements is supposed to be about preventing voter fraud. That’s what they keep returning to in every argument: tall tales about illegal aliens affecting elections. This is the hollowest argument of all. There is no individual voter fraud in any statistically relevant case.

The only voter fraud found has been at the institutional level: doctoring voting machines, “losing” or pre-filling ballots, and providing incorrect details on where and when to vote. And this is in addition to the “soft” voter-prevention techniques of limiting early voting, voting by mail or drop-off, closing voting precincts, limiting hours, and threatening to have ICE teams monitoring urban voting locations. On the latter point, they’ll SAY that ICE is only looking for undocumented immigrants, but we have already seen through that. They’re rounding up anyone who fits the visual or linguistic description. If I were a legal immigrant, I wouldn’t go anywhere near a voting booth, because I wouldn’t want to risk my freedom. And that’s exactly what they want.

And ALL of these voter suppression actions were taken by Republicans. NONE of these things would be prevented by individual voter ID requirements.

Despite there being practically zero voter fraud, Republicans are insisting that a significant portion of our population wade through months of red tape to acquire new documents, counting on the fact that many won’t have the time or inclination.

This is what a political party does when they know their message is not landing. And this group has entrenched itself in positions of power, with no intentions of ever giving them up. Because they know that if they do, many of them are going to jail, from the standard minions to the top of the org chart.

There’s literally nothing they won’t do to prevent that from happening. Just look around.

Source

Truth is Another Casualty of War

This may be the first war in my lifetime where we can’t find out what’s happening on the evening TV news. This administration has a throttle on war news and will never release information that doesn’t glorify their mission.

Recall in previous wars, bombings, or raids, there was plenty of film being shown on TV: missiles hitting their marks, airfields blown up, mobile anti-missile guns wiped out, etc. We all remember that famous footage from the Iraq War of one of our missiles going through the window of some fortified bunker. It was an impressive display of American war skills. We’re getting a little of that, but not much. And we’re certainly not seeing what Iran is doing in their own defense.

Remember a few months back when the Defense Department made all journalists who covered the “war” beat swear an oath that they’d only report what the Pentagon gave them? Remember how the honest journalists quit and were replaced with friendly flaks who were only too eager to push propaganda? Well, that’s why we’re not going to get an honest take on Iran War activity.

Also note that recent events have created a whole new web of Administration-friendly national news outlets. Besides Fox “News” (and the minor cloned conservative outlets), CBS has succumbed to MAGA fever, and now CNN is heading there as well (after CBS/Paramount’s successful bid to take over the Warner Brothers universe). Add the Sinclair chain of stations, and you have a massive broadcasting voice that is willing to repeat whatever the Administration wants. And they’re certainly not going to air anything that runs counter to the claims of excellence and victory.

I’ve been seeing some alternate viewpoints on Facebook, but I don’t really trust them. There was a time when I could rely almost 100% that the liberal assertions were true, but that’s becoming increasingly unreliable.

This is the most truthful thing I’ve ever seen from a Republican.

I’ve read several outrageous claims I initially believed (because they were completely in character with other known MAGA outrages) that turned out later to be false. Either Liberals are now participating on Conservatives’ reality-distorting playing field, or the Russians/Iranians/Chinese are trying to make it look that way. Then, people don’t know what to believe, which is right where they want us.

One claim was that there was an order that went out from military commanders to all their soldiers that they were to think of the Iran attack as a holy war to bring about Armageddon. That tracks with the new Whisky Pete’s new Christian Nationalist military, but Snopes later debunked it as unproven.

But the main issue here is with the other claim I saw, that Iran has completely blown up at least 30 of our air bases in the Middle East; blown up as in completely wiped out. Billions of dollars blown to dust and operational surveillance up in smoke. Many details added depth and realism to the claim.

My take is that there have been some bombs or drones that have landed (see: our seven known casualties to date), even some key radar installations included, but we’re still operational.

But I totally believe that if such a thing DID happen, we’d have to find out from foreign news sources who are not beholden to the US government. Word would eventually leak out as the bodies came home (or disappeared en masse), but it would take a while. In the meantime, just like these guys want, I’m sitting here not knowing what to believe.

The problem is that in some of these FB newsgroups, anyone can post, which means the quality and veracity of the message varies. Usually, a commenter will call the hinky stuff into question, but, of course, you have to look. I hope these groups will begin to police themselves. I think anyone who posts misinformation should have their posting rights removed or just dropped from the group. The one advantage we’ve enjoyed for so many years is that the points put across by Dems and Liberals have generally been factually correct (compared to those of Republicans and Conservatives, the expert purveyors of logical fallacies, especially in TFG’s era). If we lose that edge, we fall even further behind in the fight for hearts and minds in the coming elections, which will be tough enough to win. And it will be even tougher to have that win count for anything, with a giant orange thumb on the scale. 

Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb Iran

So, like everyone who was paying attention last week predicted (myself included), we’re at war with Iran. I’m sure the president expects the country to rally around him the way everyone did with Bush II during the Afghanistan War. There’s nothing he’d like better than to see himself portrayed as a battle-hardened wartime president.

And I don’t think there is much support for Iran’s theocratic regime either. There’s no question that the Middle East would be better off without them in command. Word is that the Supreme Leader was blown up over the weekend, along with the people the Administration thought would be next in line. In fact, they even had plans to work with them to set up a new government. It probably would have worked better if they hadn‘t blown them to bits.

Who knew we had the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in our arsenal?

I’m actually surprised there wasn’t a plan to capture some of the clerics in charge, so they could be debriefed. I bet TFG would love to hear more about how these few people used religion to keep the masses in line and themselves in power indefinitely. That’s a good source of knowledge gone to waste.

So while it seems like good news on the surface, I still have nagging doubts. Right off the bat, you have to have a hard time believing any information that comes from this White House. This is an administration that has turned lying to your face into an art form. There’s no assertion too ridiculous to pursue if it’s something the president sputtered out. So excuse me if I don’t believe anything until I’ve seen confirmation from outside the Administration. And with the consolidation of national news media under Republican control, we can’t trust many of them to report independently. I expect most will simply parrot whatever the White House tells them.

The other thing is, these are people who go off half-cocked regularly. The president says what he wants, and they fly into action. Where’s the plan? How do we even know that there is one? These guys have cocked up a bunch of initiatives only to have to walk them back amid unforeseen consequences.

For all we know, he may be angling for a new Trump Tower in Tehran. He might be acting on someone else’s behalf, maybe someone who has compromising information on him, like we all suspect Israel and Russia do. Maybe his defense contractor donors need another influx of cash, so they request that we use up some of our weapons stockpile so that they may sell us replacements. Or maybe he and Whisky Pete just want to see some things go boom, and feel that swelling in their man parts, like so many other fake tough-guys. And for whatever reason, this “Operation Epic Epstein Fury” (thanks Hackwacker) certainly provides the distraction that they so desperately need. Before too long, we’ll be hearing that they’re far too busy with this war to worry about pursuing Epstein-related charges.

As for American casualties, that’s just an abstraction for this Administration. They don’t give a rusty fuck about losing our servicemen. “Suckers and losers,” remember? They’re just assets on a balance. You can tell by the way they’ve essentially neutralized the VA, making an already overwhelmed institution even more ineffective, by starving it of money and resources.

And if they don’t care about our losses, they sure don’t give a shit about Iranian civilians caught in the bomb zones. Right out of the chute, the first thing we heard was that we blew up a school for girls. Granted, when this first came out, I had doubts about the veracity. I mean, it’s right there in the Middle East playbook: Declare losses of benign entities and claim victimhood. You see it every time, when they claim we blew up a school, or a hospital, or a falafel factory. They omit the part where the factory was making falafel AND IEDs.

But by now, I’ve seen a lot of confirmation and nothing to the contrary, so I believe the part about the girls’ school now. And I also believe that no one in the Administration cares. Do you think they’ll seriously admit to a mistake? About anything? Not these guys. If asked, they’ll come up with some kind of ridiculous rationalization.

But it makes you wonder, that with all our famed intel and spy capabilities, how did we come to bomb a girls’ school? That’s not a great way to change the hearts and minds needed to foment a new West-friendly government. It’s just more evidence to them that we’re a well-armed Goliath who can’t be trusted.

Late Development

New reports call into question the White House's rationale for the bombing, that Iran's attack on us was imminent. Not so, says the Pentagon, in a Congressional briefing:

Oops. But again, it just goes to show how easily this Administration lies to us.