Politics

A young poet sums it up in just two sentences:

It takes a monster to kill children. But to watch monsters kill children again and again and do nothing isn’t just insanity—it’s inhumanity.

— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 24, 2022

The U.S. Senate as currently configured is the obstacle to a solution, as usual. Pick your existential crisis — voting rights, women’s bodily autonomy, police reform, LGBTQ equality, climate change, tax reform, gun safety, whatever: the U.S. Senate is the cracked saucer where desperately needed legislation drains away.

Every Senate Republican will oppose doing anything to stop the next monster who will use a battlefield weapon to mow down schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, concert goers, movie viewers, etc. At least one but probably two Democrats will help them make sure nothing is done.

According to PawPaw Blacklung, letting a simple majority in the Senate pass legislation is “total insanity,” but apparently ongoing intolerable carnage is just the price we have to pay to maintain the glory that is the fucking filibuster.

Goddamn, I hate these people. All of them who refuse to address this, for whatever reason. I despise them jointly and severally.

This guy makes a good point:

Ten days ago it took the Senate about twenty minutes to unanimously pass a bill extending security protection to the family members of Supreme Court justices when it looked like a house might be picketed.

— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) May 25, 2022

Further, he said it’s all about which families are worth protecting, and he’s 100% correct. Brett Kavanaugh’s family is. The families in Uvalde, Texas aren’t. Yours and mine aren’t either.

I don’t know what to do with the anger and sadness anymore. Continue reading…

“As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”

An anguished and angry President Joe Biden called for new restrictions on firearms Tuesday night after a gunman killed 18 children at a Texas elementary school. https://t.co/gri29JI8es pic.twitter.com/zPOm5Nms2c

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 25, 2022

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and, like, i've mostly given up on the prospects for any kind of meaningful gun regulation, because i know a lot of gun owners who are, i think, otherwise good people and who i think are unlikely to ever give them up. this is the price of that.

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) May 24, 2022

I wish I didn’t agree with this.  Yes, I’m going to keep trying to change peoples’ minds, because we have to keep trying, but…

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Some pundits seem mildly surprised that Mike Pence is stumping for Kemp in the Georgia GOP primary. That race is a proxy for Trump’s grudge match against Kemp, and Trump’s enmity toward Kemp is a proxy for Trump’s grudge match against the reality that he, Trump, is a losing loser who lost.

But is Pence’s defiance of Tangerine Baal in Georgia really surprising? Jonathan Martin in yesterday’s Times:

After four years of service bordering on subservience, the increasingly emboldened Mr. Pence is seeking to reintroduce himself to Republican voters ahead of a potential presidential bid by setting himself apart from what many in the G.O.P. see as the worst impulses of Mr. Trump. He’s among a small group in his party considering a run in 2024 no matter what Mr. Trump decides.

BORDERING on subservience? Pence steamed over that border and occupied the entire country of Subservientstan! He was the most obsequious toady in the history of servility!

And I think that’s why Pence is absolutely compelled to run again, even though Trump Republicans were baying for his blood on January 6 and it’s clear the party prefers loud-mouthed lib-owning authoritarians rather than the prim, Bible-humping variety. For Pence, it’s just too much to have endured that pride-swallowing nightmare for naught.

Pence simply cannot accept the fact that 4.5 years of starting every sentence with “Under President Trump’s exceptional leadership,” that all the ceaseless ass-kissing he lavished on a gross orange pervert was undone by one day’s adherence to the law. The smooth brain beneath the neatly clipped, fly-attracting white hair just cannot compute that fact. Pence is in denial.

Anyway, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving lickspittle, and I hope the forthcoming series of rejections causes severe psychological distress. Fuck that guy.

Also, there are some interesting primary races today. It looks like Georgia Republicans really will put a domestic-violence prone serial liar up against Senator Warnock. Will Hice prevail over Raffensperger, perhaps setting the stage for overturning fair elections in the future? Could be!

Will terrible Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey avoid a runoff? Maybe. Will Mo Brooks overcome Trump’s un-endorsement to prevail for the U.S. Senate race? That would be funny. Will felonious TX AG Ken Paxton finally put the desiccated Bush dynasty out of its misery?

The only race I’m personally invested in is Cuellar vs. Cisneros in the TX 28th. The anti-choice, possibly corrupt as fuck Cuellar is favored to win, but I hope Cisneros kicks his ass.

Which races are you watching? Open thread!

NYT columnist Tom Friedman had an off-the-record lunch with President Biden a week ago today. (Sounds like bad staff work to me.) Friedman damned Biden with faint praise by comparing his ability to pull together international support to GHWB’s. But Friedman came away from lunch fearful that we’re a Friedman Unit away from the abyss because of divisions at home:

Biden didn’t say it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. I could hear it between the lines: He’s worried that while he has reunited the West, he may not be able to reunite America.

It’s a legit fear. But then Friedman says this:

But with every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he can bring us back together. I wonder if it’s too late.

Emphasis mine to highlight the stupidity of the both-sides framing. On one side we have the Republican Party, which has morphed into an authoritarian cult whose powerful elected officials openly reject democracy, suppress votes, ban books, persecute vulnerable citizens, censor and/or punish protected speech, etc.

On the other, a party whose leaders explicitly rejected a poorly worded slogan that failed to gain traction beyond a handful of activists and backbenchers two years ago, and speaker controversies on college campuses. Friedman and other unfortunately influential elites are still equating these things, and that’s a big problem!

To defeat Trumpism we need only, say, 10 percent of Republicans to abandon their party and join with a center-left Biden, which is what he was elected to be and still is at heart. But we may not be able to get even 1 percent of Republicans to shift if far-left Democrats are seen as defining the party’s future.

Emphasis mine because that’s where Friedman tells on himself, with that passive language. Whose job is it to inform Americans about their society and government, to let them know what forces are driving and responding to events? A category that includes Friedman.

CPAC is in Hungary this year. Republicans are celebrating the demise of Hungarian democracy with the autocrat who smothered it, Viktor Orbán, and he, their guest of honor, told Republicans how to finish smothering democracy here in the U.S.

But on the other hand, 1) Ilhan Omar, and 2) some Yale students were rude to a Federalist Society speaker.

If the republic is saved, it will be in spite of people like Friedman, who, unfortunately, get invited to the White House for lunch.

Open thread.

Folks, I’m excited to tell you that the first flight from Operation Fly Formula is loaded up with more than 70,000 pounds of infant formula and about to land in Indiana.

Our team is working around the clock to get safe formula to everyone who needs it. pic.twitter.com/cX4KU0eDtZ

— President Biden (@POTUS) May 22, 2022

*All* the elements…

BREAKING: U.S. announces 12 countries join Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a pact designed to bolster trade with Asian economies. https://t.co/uUDUHKye3f

— The Associated Press (@AP) May 23, 2022

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Religious shelter for pedophiles and abusers of vulnerable children denies communion to those who would decrease its supply of victims. https://t.co/aemZxXI31o

— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) May 21, 2022

Assuming you’re the kind of Catholic who assumes the Pope is the God-anointed leader of His church:

*pope francis standing athwart the abortion controversy yelling BE NORMAL* https://t.co/lX9x341NMb

— a nosy archaeologist says vote AND 🇺🇦 (@merovingians) May 20, 2022

Of course, there seems to be some questions about Archbishop Leone’s general fitness to make judgements about other peoples’ failings… Continue reading…

Congratulations, Australians of the centre-left!

Australia election: A great shock to the system https://t.co/oaeqvkooLN

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) May 22, 2022

Victory belongs to Anthony Albanese, only the fourth Labor leader since World War Two to oust a Liberal prime minister, but the 2022 Australian election was primarily a rejection of Scott Morrison and the brand of politics he has come to personify.

A politics that denied, and sometimes even mocked, the seriousness of the climate crisis – as Treasurer, Morrison laughingly brandished a lump of coal in parliament.

A politics that many female voters especially found bloke-ish and boorish…

At a time when conservative politics down under has displayed some small-t Trumpian traits, historians may conclude that Australian voters evicted from office the country’s first post-truth prime minister…

Albanese is the son of a single mother who grew up in public housing in Sydney. His biography doubles as an Australian dream. But the 59-year-old has become better at sharing his backstory than outlining a compelling vision for Australia.

That said, his promise to make the country a renewable energy powerhouse, along with his pledge to adopt the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which is so important to First Nations people, has the potential to give his government a narrative that weaves together the unaddressed challenges of the future and the unfinished business of the past…

The federal election has made politics here greener, more feminine and, at a time of creeping Americanisation, more emphatically Australian.

Perhaps the overwhelming message from voters is that they want a different kind of politics. Certainly, 2022 will be remembered for its shock to the system result.

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