Friday Reads: Saying Goodbye to Donny’s Dank Dystopia

Self-Portrait: The Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937 – 1938), LEONORA CARRINGTON

Good Day Sky Dancers!

It was quite the contrast between the coverage of what what was happening a year ago with the pandemic and massive shutdowns of schools and businesses last night right before Biden’s speech and then seeing the coverage of the speech after.  Here’s how The New Yorker‘s Susan B. Glasser characterized it: “It’s Morning (and Mourning) in Biden’s America.

Fifty-one days into his Presidency, on the first anniversary of our collective quarantine, Joe Biden pivoted to optimism. He spoke of “finding light in the darkness,” vaccines for everyone by the end of May, and a country open for barbecues by the Fourth of July. That certainly counts as an upbeat message in the midst of the pandemic, although it was appropriately accompanied by the expressions of concern and communal grief at which this new President so excels. Good news is a lot easier than bad to deliver.

For much of his short time in office, Biden has stuck to the sober facts of the covid-19 crisis that he inherited. He has been the perpetual un-Trump, wielding science and seriousness against the pandemic and the political toxicity that has accompanied it. Even in his twenty-four-minute address to the nation from the East Room of the White House, on Thursday night, Biden did not abandon that approach. How could he? Everything that he does and says to address the pandemic, which has killed more Americans than all combat deaths in the last century’s wars combined, is a rebuke to his predecessor. Trump’s failed stewardship of the nation during the coronavirus outbreak is both the signal fact of his Presidency and the inescapable emergency of Biden’s nascent one. Yet Biden did more than lament or lecture on Thursday. He offered, for the first time since he took office, the gauzy optimism that predecessors from Roosevelt to Reagan have embraced at times of national trouble, speaking of “real progress” and getting the job done, of setting goals and beating them, of “hope and light and better days ahead.”

The clichés did not really bother me. That is because I spent the few minutes right before Biden’s speech listening to Trump’s nine-minute address to the nation from the same night a year earlier. In the awful hindsight created by the deaths of more than five hundred thousand Americans, it’s a true horror to again hear Trump promising the country that “the virus will not have a chance against us,” and insisting, “I will never hesitate to take the necessary steps to protect the lives, health, and safety of the American people.” Watching this risible B.S. a year later, it seemed to me that even Trump had had a hard time believing his own bluster. When he read off the teleprompter that he was “confident” of victory over the pandemic, he appeared to be gasping for air.

Autoportrait (Self-Portrait in a Green Bugatti) (1929),TAMARA DE LEMPICKA

The partisan response to the speech which just obvious in the right wing media.  It’s just that the character of the two men couldn’t be more opposite. Here’s some good news from Axios on the Trump Chidren in Cages Travesty: “Biden to end Trump-era agreement between ICE and agency housing migrant children.”  Remember children being scurried around in the darkness too?  My hope is there is a full blown 911 commission on reforming ICE.

The Biden administration will prevent the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from sharing any information about families who accept migrant children with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to administration officials.

Why it matters: By terminating a 2018 legal agreement between HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement and ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, the Biden administration hopes to encourage more sponsors to work with the government to accept unaccompanied minors apprehended at the border.

• Moving those children out of HHS shelters and into sponsors’ homes helps free up space, which is needed to process the surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
• HHS has some 8,500 minors in custody, with an additional 3,500 still being held at border patrol stations, according to the Washington Post.
• To alleviate strain on HHS shelters, CBP has eased COVID-19 protocols that were limiting the number of minors in a given facility, allowing them to fill up to full capacity. “We are aggressively adding hundreds of beds by the week,” said an administration official.

Self portrait, Rosa Bonheur

New York Magazine published a harrowing story of sexual harassment written by reporter Jessica Bakemen: “Cuomo Never Let Me Forget I Was a Woman” .  Calling him a cad doesn’t even begin to capture his lewd and loutish behavior.

I walked up to the governor, who was in the middle of a conversation with another reporter, and waited for a moment when I could interject. He took my hand, as if to shake it, then refused to let go. He put his other arm around my back, his hand on my waist, and held me firmly in place while indicating to a photographer he wanted us to pose for a picture.

My job was to analyze and scrutinize him. I didn’t want a photo of him with his hands on my body and a smile on my face. But I made the reflexive assessment that most women and marginalized people know instinctively, the calculation about risk and power and self-preservation. I knew it would be far easier to smile for the brief moment it takes to snap a picture than to challenge one of the most powerful men in the country.

But my calculation was a bit off. I was wrong to believe this experience would last for just a moment. Keeping his grip on me as I practically squirmed to get away from him, the governor turned my body to face a different direction for yet another picture. He never let go of my hand.

Then he turned to me with a mischievous smile on his face, in front of all of my colleagues, and said: “I’m sorry. Am I making you uncomfortable? I thought we were going steady.”

I stood there in stunned silence, shocked and humiliated. But, of course, that was the point.

I never thought the governor wanted to have sex with me. It wasn’t about sex. It was about power. He wanted me to know that I was powerless, that I was small and weak, that I did not deserve what relative power I had: a platform to hold him accountable for his words and actions. He wanted me to know that he could take my dignity away at any moment with an inappropriate comment or a hand on my waist. (The Cuomo administration has declined to comment.)

It’s not that Cuomo spares men in his orbit from his trademark bullying and demeaning behavior. But the way he bullies and demeans women is different. He uses touching and sexual innuendo to stoke fear in us. That is the textbook definition of sexual harassment.

And then some great young black female atheletes endured this last night.

Self Portrait. Anna Bilinska

The Bulwark‘s Amanda Carpenter writes it like it is: ““Election Integrity” Means Restriction. You can’t have a reasonable debate about voting rights with people who wanted to cancel votes.”

If you value more voter participation, then you want more Americans to have access to the voting options that worked so successfully in 2020. If you prefer lower voter participation, then you want those options either rescinded or restricted. This isn’t rocket science.

Also not rocket science: It’s clear that one of our country’s two political parties overtly prefers less voter participation and so, as a consequence, is now actively pursuing avenues designed to reduce—or suppress, or depress, or whatever perfectly non-judgmental verb you’d like to use—the number of votes cast in future elections.

Republican lawmakers, still testifying to lies about a “stolen” election from 2020 loser Donald Trump, are currently advancing hundreds of bills on the state level to restrict voting rights in the name of restoring “election integrity.” Go ahead and take a look at some of these “integrity-filled” proposals.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, having avoided a lynching by Trump supporters on January 6, has decided to use the fight for “election integrity” as his way back to the warm embrace of MAGA. He emerged from his new post at the Heritage Foundation to announce that “Voter Integrity Is a National Imperative” at the same moment that Heritage Action plans to spend $10 million to tighten election laws in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin.

But what exactly does “election integrity” mean to Mike Pence and those pushing restrictionist laws? For the MAGA crowd, it’s code for eliminating “fraud.” No matter that Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr said, “There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.” Or that officials at Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised,” and the election was “the most secure in American history.”

Pence’s piece is a work of art, designed to simultaneously appease both his lawyers and the QAnon chat boards. He writes, “Many of the most troubling voting irregularities took place in states that set aside laws enacted by state legislatures in favor of sweeping changes ordered by governors, secretaries of state, and courts.” He doesn’t say what these “irregularities” were exactly. Or mention that the “sweeping changes” were made to ensure the election would go smoothly during the pandemic. Which it did.

The only thing that was “irregular,” as Pence puts it, was the exceptionally high number of Americans who voted. Against him.

The plain fact is that more Americans voted against Trump and Pence—both singularly in 2020 and cumulatively in combination with 2016—than any other ticket in the long history of our nation. That’s the real problem Republicans have with the 2020 election.

So, I think I’ll stop here and let you take over.  Again, celebrate Women’s History Month by discovering Women in all kinds of places !!!  And again, discover the misogynyist patriarchal bastards who want to keep them down too!  Tucker Carlson thinks mocking pregant service members is cool.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Friday Reads: Leave Neera Alone!

Good Morning Sky Dancers!

I started to look for the picture of the Brittany guy for the title I choose today when I found out some one at Twitchy had grabbed it first.  I’ve never seen a bunch of whiny over sensitive old white guys–both on the Bernie Bro side and the Rightish side of the Political spectrum–that have their panties in a bunch about Neera Tanden.

What Twitchy did was send me to Politico and this article. “Neera Tanden Got Twitter Right—And That Was Her Problem.  But Twitter has a way of turning on you.”  All you really have to be in the world of Joe Biden’s appointments is to be a woman of color associated with Hillary Clinton and damn sharp at critical thinking and the white guys pee themselves.  I swear.

I believe this is called cyber bullying and the hypocrisy on the right side of the aisle is just over the top!  They support the king of the nasty ass twitter trolls but gang up if a woman criticizes them or their politics or for Pete’s sake their daughter who price gouges diabetics?  PUHLEEEZZEEE!   This is from Politco and  Joanna Weiss: “Neera Tanden Got Twitter Right—And That Was Her Problem – POLITICO.  So what’s the bottom line here?  It’s Politico, afterall so deep breath.

The internet is overflowing with snarky diatribes about Senators Susan Collins and Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell. A veteran political player, who might someday need Cruz or Collins or McConnell for a vote, should have known it would do her no good to pile on. And, on some level, she did know: In 2016, she told an interviewer, “I’m willing to concede I should tweet less.”

Instead, Tanden did what a lot of us do: She went for the dopamine hit, again and again. Over the past few years, she tweeted that “a vampire has more heart than Ted Cruz,” compared McConnell to Voldemort, and called Collins “criminally ignorant.” It wasn’t just Republicans she angered; she was also known for tweaking left-wing rivals like Senator Bernie Sanders, suggesting in one tweet that Russia had helped Sanders in the 2016 election. Some have detected sexism in the sudden rush to scold her, but Tanden stands out among Biden’s Cabinet nominees for the edginess of her social media posts.

So, after years of Trumpist Trolling on twitter and the tv and just about everywhere the outrage is going to fall on Tanden?  Some one tells these guys politics requires thicker skin then that.  Even Joe the plumber and former pol gets it.

So, comparing Cruz to Voldemart is nowhere near as bad as what some of his colleagues say about him or what Trump has said about him.  Again, why the focus on Neera?   Just today, AXIOS reports that Former Speaker of the House John Boehner said Cruz could “go fuck himself”.   Where’s the pearl clutching on that?

John Boehner has been going off script while recording the audio version of his new memoir, using expletives and asides not in the book — such as the former Republican House speaker saying, “Oh, and Ted Cruz, go f**k yourself.”

Why it matters: The book is appropriately titled, “On the House: A Washington Memoir.” It promises to share “colorful tales from the halls of power, the smoke-filled rooms around the halls of power and his fabled tour bus.” Two sources familiar with the tapings told Axios about the asides.

• The audio version, which includes an even heftier price tag of $39.99, will be sprinkled with Boehner’s unfiltered, baritone, inner monologue.
• Similar to the cover — where he’s pictured in a dark room, drinking red wine with a cigarette burning in an ashtray — Boehner has been taping his audiobook with a glass of wine in hand.
• The Ohioan never hid his penchant for tan skin and red wine, or his love of cigarettes (two packs a day).

And let’s not forget this moment earlier this month: “Lawmakers Are Reading Hilariously Mean Tweets About Ted Cruz On The Senate Floor, And People Are Absolutely Delighted”.  They were actually reading Tanden tweets and it rather backfired on them

If you were wondering who the most disliked politician on Capitol Hill was, the answer is Ted Cruz.

The Republican senator from Texas got dragged by his fellow lawmakers while they were attempting to dig into the background of Neera Tanden, President Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget. During Tanden’s confirmation hearing, Republican senator attempted to point out how damning Tanden’s social media posts — many of which condemned Republican party leaders like Mitch McConnell and Cruz — were in light of Biden’s appointment. They wondered if she could do a good job of sticking to the president’s commitment to bipartisanship after calling McConnell “Moscow Mitch” and Senator Tom Cotton a “fraud.”

What they didn’t realize was they were giving audiences a live Mean Tweets reading on the Senate floor, and that their colleague, Cruz, would get the worst of it.

A lot of people, Republican and Democrat, can’t stand Ted Cruz but Tanden’s tweets managed to trash the insurrection-supporting senator with some truly stunning linguistic verbosity. At one point, Tanden was accused of tweeting that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz,” which, just … wow.

Okay, so enough on that and again, I seem to just have a thing for showing the ragging Cruz takes from every one.  Oh wait, just one quote from Lindsay Graham and I’ll move on, I promise!!   From CNN: “Lindsey Graham jokes about how to get away with murdering Ted Cruz”.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham thinks his party has gone “bats—” crazy, and joked Thursday that it’s possible to get away with murdering Ted Cruz if it happened in the Senate.

“If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” the former presidential candidate said at the Washington Press Club Foundation’s 72nd Congressional Dinner, referencing the Texas senator’s unpopular reputation on Capitol Hill.

And then, read further about what he said about Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.  See, it’s okay to continually call Hillary crooked as long as you’re a white guy.

The Parliamentarian’s ruled that the minimum wage bump to $15 an hour can’t go into the Covid relief bill and the reconcilliation process.   The House is set to pass the $1.9 Billion relief package today.      A number of Democrats want to take the same path Republicans did when they fired a parlimentarian twenty years ago.  This is from WAPO today: “Some Democrats want to fire the Senate parliamentarian who scuttled $15 minimum-wage plans. It’s been done once before”.

But at least one lawmaker called for an even more radical solution: firing the Senate’s referee.

“Abolish the filibuster. Replace the parliamentarian,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said in a tweetThursday.
“What’s a Democratic majority if we can’t pass our priority bills? This is unacceptable.”

The Biden administrationshowed little appetite to challenge MacDonough following her ruling on Thursday, saying it was “disappointed” but would move forward with the stimulus without the minimum-wage increase.

Of course, the Republicans fired the Parlimentarian then over a ruling about tax cuts.  Tax cuts and being angry, hypocritical screamers are about the only thing they’re about these days.  Oh, yeah, that reminds me the CPAC–your basic forum for Angry, white, hypocritical screamers--is coming up and let’s pray we don’t have to see any film footage of it or the Trumpsterfire from the Pandemic stricken stet of Floridadia. By the way, Pence turned down an invitation to speak and McConnell didn’t get one per that Guardian link.

Okay, I couldn’t contain myself.  More gratiutous Ted Cruz bashing today from his colleages: “Ted Cruz’s colleagues mocked him by putting memes of his Cancun trip in the Senate gym locker room: ‘Bienvenido de Nuevo, Ted!'”  Guess I’ll never be considered to head the Budget office.

After his infamous Cancun junket, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was the subject of a prank in the locker room of the Senate gym midweek, Carol Lee and Leigh Ann Caldwell of NBC News reported.

Early birds turning up for a workout Wednesday morning came across color printouts of Cruz in his airport getup, which included a light polo shirt and a mask bearing the Texas flag, according to NBC, who reviewed the materials provided by two sources.

“The rendering featured a manipulated photo of Cruz from his well-documented trip to Mexico, dragging his luggage across an arctic landscape while holding a tropical cocktail garnished with a slice of fruit in his other hand,” Lee and Caldwell wrote.

The printouts included a crossover meme, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont’s viral pose in mittens at President Joe Biden’s inauguration photoshopped into the frigid backdrop, NBC said.

Ah, gee … same bunch of folks with the worst twitter trolls on the planet getting reemed on sacred ground.  Have they no mercy?  No sense of the sacred?

Speaking of which, I think that I’m going to start picking on Rand Paul more since he’s defintely up there on the most offensive person in the Washington Beltway crowd.  I still can’t get how he could compare child genital mutilation to the procedure to becoming intersex to a transgender Doctor who is candidate for a leadership position for HHS.  Can we just start understanding the gender is a social concept?  And there’s wonderful research on it from indigenous tribes and other places not considered “western”.

There’s a lot to discuss concerning these issues.  Can we start by having a discussion on that gender and sex are not the same thing no matter how hard some folks want to believe they are?  But sheesh, that line of questioning was uncalled for under any circumstances but a serious conversation about the forced gender mutiliation of children–including circumcision–in a hearing on why we let a lot of religions get away with cruel rituals.

Okay, so that’s it from me today. What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

So,  let’s sing one for Rando! or Teddy Boy!  Your choice!