Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: December 28, 2019 Filed under: just because, morning reads, U.S. Politics 32 Comments
Good Morning!!
I really dislike these two “holiday” weeks at the end of every year. I always end up with a sense of unreality. This year I’m away from my home–I’m house- and cat-sitting for my brother and his family while they visit Denmark and Norway for two weeks.
I’ve been reading constantly and avoiding TV. I’ve been reading a lot; I just finished a book by Stephen King, The Institute. I guess that is contributing to that freaky unreal feeling I’m experiencing. And of course there’s the knowledge that Trump is still “president” and our country and the world are in danger because of him.
I don’t know if anyone will read this, but if you do I want tell you that this blog and everyone who has read it and/or commented on it have helped me maintain some sanity in a crazy world over the more than a decade since 2008. I’m grateful to all of you and I wish you strength to get through whatever is coming in 2020. I love you all.
If you read nothing else today, I hope you’ll choose this essay by Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times: The 2010s Were the End of Normal.
TWO OF THE MOST WIDELY QUOTED and shared poems in the closing years of this decade were William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”), and W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” (“Waves of anger and fear / Circulate over the bright / And darkened lands of the earth”). Yeats’s poem, written just after World War I, spoke of a time when “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Auden’s poem, written in the wake of Germany’s invasion of Poland, described a world lying “in stupor,” as democracy was threatened and “the enlightenment driven away.”
Apocalypse is not yet upon our world as the 2010s draw to an end, but there are portents of disorder. The hopes nourished during the opening years of the decade — hopes that America was on a progressive path toward growing equality and freedom, hopes that technology held answers to some of our most pressing problems — have given way, with what feels like head-swiveling speed, to a dark and divisive new era. Fear and distrust are ascendant now. At home, hate-crime violence reached a 16-year high in 2018, the F.B.I. reported. Abroad, there were big geopolitical shifts. With the rise of nationalist movements and a backlash against globalization on both sides of the Atlantic, the liberal post-World War II order — based on economic integration and international institutions — began to unravel, and since 2017, the United States has not only abdicated its role as a stabilizing leader on the global stage, but is also sowing unpredictability and chaos abroad.
A 2019 Freedom House report, which recorded global declines in political rights and civil liberties over the last 13 years, found that “challenges to American democracy are testing the stability of its constitutional system and threatening to undermine political rights and civil liberties worldwide.”
If Lin-Manuel Miranda’s dazzling 2015 musical “Hamilton,” about the founders’ Enlightenment vision of the United States, embodied the hopes and diversity of America during the Obama years, dystopian fables and horror-driven films and television series — including “Black Mirror” (2016), a rebooted “Twilight Zone” (2019), “Joker” (2019), “Get Out” (2017), “Watchmen” (2019), “The Handmaid’s Tale” (2017) and “Westworld” (2016) — spoke to the darkening mood in the second half of the decade, as drug overdose deaths in America rose to nearly half a million by the decade’s end, life expectancy fell in the United States and Britain, and many of us started to realize that our data (tracking everything we viewed, bought and searched for online) was being sold and commodified, and that algorithms were shaping our lives in untold ways. In what was likely the hottest decade on record, scientists warned that climate change was swiftly approaching a “point of no return”; we learned that glaciers were melting at record speed at the top of the world; and fires ravaged California and Australia and threatened the very future of the Amazon rainforest.
A bit more and then you’ll need to head over to the NYT to read the rest.
Many of these troubling developments didn’t happen overnight. Even today’s poisonous political partisanship has been brewing for decades — dating back at least to Newt Gingrich’s insurgency — but President Trump has blown any idea of “normal” to smithereens, brazenly trampling constitutional rules, America’s founding ideals and virtually every norm of common decency and civil discourse….
Mr. Trump’s improbable rise benefited from a perfect storm of larger economic, social and demographic changes, and the profoundly disruptive effects of new technology. His ascent also coincided with the rising anxieties and sense of dislocation produced by such tectonic shifts. Around the world, liberal democracy is facing grave new challenges, authoritarianism is on the rise and science is being questioned by “post-fact” politicians. Echoes of Mr. Trump’s nativist populism can be found in Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain’s recent electoral victory and the Brexit referendum of 2016, and in the ascent of the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. Democracy is under threat in Hungary and Poland. Once fringe right-wing parties with openly racist agendas are rebranding themselves in Sweden and Belgium. And far-right groups in Germany and Spain are now the third-largest parties in those nations’ parliaments.
AT THE SAME TIME, Donald Trump remains a uniquely American phenomenon. Although the United States was founded on the Enlightenment values of reason, liberty and progress, there has long been another strain of thinking at work beneath the surface — what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk,” and the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style.”
It’s an outlook characterized by a sense of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” Hofstadter wrote in his 1964 essay, and focused on perceived threats to “a nation, a culture, a way of life.” Its language is apocalyptic (Mr. Trump’s “American carnage” is a perfect example); its point of view, extremist. It regards its opponents as evil and ubiquitous, while portraying itself, in Hofstadter’s words, as “manning the barricades of civilization.”
The “paranoid style,” Hofstadter observed, tends to occur in “episodic waves.” The modern right wing, he wrote, feels dispossessed: “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it.” In their view, “the old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals,” and national independence has been “destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centers of American power.”
You might also want to read this opinion piece by Deborah Pearlstein at The Atlantic: How the Military Lost Its Proper Place in the Constitutional Order.
In his efforts to mask the seriousness of his actions around Russia and Ukraine, President Donald Trump has taken aim at one essential democratic institution after another—questioning the legitimacy of the press, the intelligence community, the courts, and, most recently, the House of Representatives itself. But he has so far mostly held his fire against both “his generals” and “our boys” in America’s military. “I will always stick up for our great fighters,” Trump promised his political supporters in Florida at a recent rally, championing on that day his recent decisions to pardon soldiers accused of war crimes.
The military, for its part, has had more mixed feelings. As a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, described one such pardon, the president’s action was nothing less than an “abdication of moral responsibility.” Indeed, the military’s generally steadying reactions to the president’s worst moments of volatility have given members of Congress on both sides of the aisle reason to hope that the Pentagon at least will remain a check on presidential impulse that might really compromise national security, should other checking institutions fail.
But hoping that a president will defer to the judgment of the professional military is a sign that something has gone very wrong in America’s constitutional infrastructure. The American republic was, after all, founded on the complaint that the king had “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” The Constitution’s Framers abhorred the British army, as much or more for its treatment of colonists in the years leading up to the war as during it. As Alexander Hamilton put it with characteristic clarity in “Federalist No. 26”: “The people of America may be said to have derived an hereditary impression of danger to liberty from standing armies in time of peace.”
Click the link to read the rest.
A few more stories to check out:
Margaret Carlson at The Daily Beast: McConnell’s Big Mistake Defending Trump? Listening to Him.
Raw Story: Trump interrupted his vacation for a Friday night social media meltdown.
Salon: Pelosi “has the right” to submit Trump to an “involuntary evaluation”: Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee.
Scott Turow at Vanity Fair: Could Chief Justice Roberts Be the Democrats’ Impeachment Savior?
Have a nice weekend, Sky Dancers! If you’re around today, please comment and/or share a link.
Friday Reads: Get ready for 2020! Out with the Olds!
Posted: December 27, 2019 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: 1984, IOWA is six weeks away!!!, mona eltahawy 29 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
It’s hard to believe we’re careening towards 2020. I’m reading for the year to get started in many ways because I really would like us to find a way to dump Trump. My New Year’s resolution is just plain “Out with the Olds”. However, I realize that it’s likely to be a brutal year because thugs never go quietly into the night no matter which way they’re turned out and that’s if he gets turned out at all.
We’re going to have to take the bad with the good and hope that the good outweighs the bad.
The political season will be brutal. I can only wonder what horrid lies and diatribes we’ll get at the State of the Union Address. There are a few early trends on what may be ahead.
First, it appears that 2020 is stacking up for a historical gender gap in voting. This comes via CNN. Women hate Trump. They really hate him and in increasing numbers.
If President Donald Trump loses in 2020, it will be at the hands of women.
An examination of recent CNN polls reveal that we could be looking at a record gender gap in the 2020 presidential election. For simplicity’s sake, I’m comparing Former Vice President Joe Biden (the leader in the Democratic primary polls) to Trump. In general election matchups against all the leading Democratic candidates, a greater than 25-point gender gap existed.
Biden has held a 60% to 36% lead over Trump among women in an average of our last two (October and December) CNN/SSRS polls. The same polling put Trump up 52% to 42% among men voters. When you combine Biden’s 24-point lead among women and Trump’s 10 point lead among men, this makes for a 34-point gender gap.
Gender gaps have been getting larger in recent years. From 1952 to about 1980, there really wasn’t a gender gap in presidential elections. So this isn’t just about Trump.
Still, this 34-point gender gap would be a significant increase from what we saw in 2016. In that election, the gender gap was 25 points. This, itself, was a record gender gap for any presidential election dating back to 1952. In fact, no presidential election had previously featured a gender gap of even greater than 20 points.
The gender gap becoming larger would fit with what we’ve seen in the Trump era. There was a larger gender gap in the 2018 House midterm election (23 points) than in any previous midterm.
But what’s causing an escalation in the gender gap from even 2016 and 2018? It’s women turning even more against Trump than they were previously.
That’s some really good news right there except the Biden part. The Hill reports that it will be a “bloody primary” season and that no one candidate appears to have a lock on it as of right now.
Democrats are bracing for a long, drawn-out primary season.
With just six weeks until the Iowa caucuses, some Democrats say they don’t expect a likely nominee to emerge anytime soon after early-voting states hold their contests. Instead, they’re preparing for a bruising four-way match-up that could drag on for months as candidates compete for the chance to challenge President Trump.
Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have consistently topped nationwide polls, but Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg remain key contenders who show no signs of slowing down.
“It’s going to be uglier than ugly,” one Democratic strategist said, pointing to surveys showing there is no clear winner across the first four states in the nominating process. “It’s going to be a bloody slugfest. And the thing a lot of us fear is that Trump will benefit from all of it.”
Democrats have focused their efforts on electability, making the case for rallying behind the kind of candidate who can topple Trump. Some Democrats say that while a progressive candidate can energize the party’s base and win in the primary, it would be much more difficult for that same White House hopeful to win the general election against Trump.
Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, argued that because the top candidates each have strong pockets of support, the primary may even lead to a brokered convention in July.
“Although people always say that, this time it could be true,” Zelizer said. “Democrats are so desperate to defeat Trump they have very different visions of how to do this and won’t concede easily.”
The party’s top four candidates — two progressive candidates and two moderate candidates — are indicative of where the Democratic Party is right now, said Democratic strategist Michael Trujillo.
Maybe more of us need to adopt Mona’s policy . “I refuse to allow those who don’t recognize my full humanity to expect politeness of me,” she said.
Over time, she’s developed a reputation for telling the patriarchy and its footsoldiers—as she calls the white women who believe in polite feminism—to fuck off, literally. Cursing is a very important aspect of Eltahawy’s feminism; the third chapter in her latest book is titled “profanity.” On Twitter, where Eltahawy is known for telling people to “fuck off, kitten,” she’s amassed a following of over 300,000.
“I will not be civil to those who do not recognize my full humanity,” she explains.
But Eltahawy’s rhetoric is driven by more than shock value. It is rooted in her own horrific sexist experiences across the globe, and her commitment to eradicate them for herself and other women in the future. We spoke to Eltahawy about what the last decade taught her about feminism and what needs to happen in the next decade for a true feminist revolution.
VICE: Take me back to a decade ago. What did your feminism look like and what brought you there?
MONA ELTAHAWY: I always say I was traumatized into feminism. I go all the way back to when my family moved from Cairo to London, and then we moved from the U.K. to Saudi Arabia and what I learned on those journeys. Very quickly, what I learned in the U.K. was that very little was expected of Arab-looking women because my white teachers kept asking me, “What does your father do that brought you to London from Cairo?” They never bothered to ask what my mother does, and both my parents were on government scholarships to study for a PhD in medicine. It never occurred to my white teachers in London in the mid 70s that my mother could be studying her PhD. And then when we moved to Saudi Arabia, I saw what happened. My mother couldn’t drive anymore. We were utterly dependent on my father to take us everywhere. So those experiences in the U.K. and Saudi Arabia back to back were a reminder of how universal patriarchy is everywhere you go.
But the years 2009 and 2010 brought me to a really pivotal moment in my life, and that was when the revolution in Egypt started. For me personally, the revolution led to the dying of the old Mona and this coming out of this new Mona because in November of 2011, almost exactly eight years ago, Egyptian riot police beat me and broke my left arm and my right hand and sexually assaulted me. I was detained for 12 hours. You very rarely get a before-and-after moment in your life where you can actually point to a moment and say, this is my moment. But that was my moment. The last decade was that moment when I survived. And I survived by the old Mona dying and this Mona coming to be.
And, this from Mashable, just about sums up the last decade: “2010s = 1984: The decade we finally understood Orwell” written by Chris Taylor.
Don’t call him Winston Smith. Call him Mr. 2019. Because it’s looking increasingly like we live in Oceania. That fictional state was basically the British Isles, North America, and South America. Now the leaders of the largest countries in each of those regions — Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro — are men who have learned to flood the zone with obvious lies, because their opponents simply don’t have the time or energy to deal them all.
As we enter 2020, all three of them look increasingly, sickeningly, like they’re going to get away with it. They are protected by Party members who will endure any humiliation to trumpet loyalty to the Great Leader (big shout-out once again to Sen. Lindsay Graham) and by a media environment that actively enables political lies (thanks, Facebook).
All the Winston Smiths of our world can see what the score really is. It doesn’t seem to make any difference. But hey, at least we’re all finally aware of the most important line in 1984, which is now also its most quote-tweeted:
Yes, Virginia, there is no impeachment! Huhn?
And as we approach New Year’s Eve and Day and the entire freaking year, let’s just think, out with the old, in with the new. That includes old white dudes like Trump, Biden, and Bernie. Out out OUT!!!
And I continue to debate the folks that say just vote for whoever looks bestest to beat Trump regardless of the fact that some one like Bernie has no plans, past history of accomplishment, or for that matter real grasp of anything beyond what the wobbles thought about way back when. OR, that Biden has actively written and passed legislation hurting women, the black community, and every one that’s ever incurred a debt. You want to trade one dotard for another?
So, here’s USA Today with a riff on the thought that just elect some one to Dump Trump. “Beating Donald Trump in the 2020 election isn’t everything; it’s the only thing”.
But there is also a warning in it: Few of the ideas being debated are getting much traction beyond Democratic true believers. And even many Democrats are ready to see some winnowing of the field in the early caucus and primary states.
This is a pretty good indication that the party’s voters should focus largely on one overriding issue: which of the candidates is best equipped to defeat Donald Trump next November.
In just a few short years, Trump has promoted the interests of U.S. foes, needlessly run up massive government debts, thwarted progress on climate change, done palpable harm to America’s health care system, and turned the once-proud party of Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan into an adulation cult.
Ridding the nation of his unfit leadership is far more important than who has the most extensive plan to hand out free money (we’re looking at you, Andrew Yang) or require everyone to get their health care through an expanded Medicare (Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders).
The Democrats need a nominee who can go toe-to-toe with Trump, explain to the electorate why he is so wrong in so many ways, and build a consensus on taking the nation in a new direction.
But tell me, do we really know who that is at this point? Voters in Iowa sent Biden packing two times already? Are we supposed to wait for South Carolina to put his pasty ass first? I’m pretty sure neither Iowa or New Hampshire is going to do that.
But, any way, I digress, and I just want some peace and quiet a few days before the 2020 hell realm breaks lose. Meanwhile, point me to the wine cave for poor people.
What’s on you reading and blogging list today?
Thursday: Day After Christmas Open Thread
Posted: December 26, 2019 Filed under: just because, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, baby black rhino, Bernie Sanders, cognitive decline, dementia, Donald Trump, Doppsee, Ingrid Bergman, Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, Nicole Marie Poole Franklin, Potter Park Zoo, Seth Davin Norrholm, Spellbound, US Cybercom 27 Comments
Santa resting on the day after Christmas
Good Morning!!
We’re halfway through the holiday madness, and I have to admit it has been nice having slow news days instead of shocks to the system every few hours day after day. There really is nothing to write about today, but here are a few reads to check out if you’re interested.
Of course Trump is still nuts and he’s still tweeting nonsense.
And he’s still in steep cognitive decline. Raw Story: Psychiatry expert says Trump’s rambling Merry Christmas rant includes three signs of serious mental impairment.
President Donald Trump’s speech in Florida over the weekend provides evidence that he is suffering from cognitive decline, according to a psychiatric expert.
Seth Davin Norrholm, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, said Monday that the president’s recent rant about Christmas included at least three signs of mental problems.
“So if anybody wants to be a nice conservative, talk show host is not a bad living, I would say. But I have to say, he’s a very unique guy and he’s a great man and he’s been a great friend. So thank you to Rush. Thank you,” Trump said.
“And let me begin by wishing you a beautif — [NOTE from BB: This is the point where he had the shoulder spasm and lost the plot at 22 sec.] look, do you remember this? Do you remember this? Remember, they were trying to take Christmas out of Christmas. Do you remember? They didn’t want to let you say Merry Christmas,” Trump continued.
“You’d go around, you’d see department stores that have everything red, snow, beautiful, ribbons, bows. Everything was there. But they wouldn’t say Merry Christmas. They’re all saying Merry Christmas again. You remember?”
The Washington Post: U.S. Cybercom contemplates information warfare to counter Russian interference in 2020 election.
The New York Times: Black Rhino Born at Michigan Zoo on Christmas Eve.
Doppsee, a 12-year-old black rhino, presented a Michigan zoo and conservationists with an early holiday gift on Christmas Eve, delivering a newborn calf in a rare zoo birth for the endangered species.
The arrival of the male calf, which hasn’t been named yet, was the first time that a black rhino had been born at the Potter Park Zoo in Lansing, Mich., in its 100-year history, according to a news release.
Pat Fountain, an animal care supervisor at the zoo, said on Wednesday that the birth was one of the zoo’s “crowning achievements” because black rhinos are “statistically and historically very hard to breed and be successful.” Getting Doppsee to breed with Phineus, the calf’s father, who came to the zoo in 2017, was a “milestone,” he said.
About two black rhinos are born every year in facilities accredited by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums in the United States, Mr. Fountain said, noting how rare the birth was.
Here’s some material for nightmares from Politico: Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination.
For months the Vermont senator was written off by Democratic Party insiders as a candidate with a committed but ultimately narrow base who was too far left to win the primary. Elizabeth Warren had skyrocketed in the polls and seemed to be leaving him behind in the race to be progressive voters’ standard-bearer in 2020.
But in the past few weeks, something has changed. In private conversations and on social media, Democratic officials, political operatives and pundits are reconsidering Sanders’ chances.
“It may have been inevitable that eventually you would have two candidates representing each side of the ideological divide in the party. A lot of smart people I’ve talked to lately think there’s a very good chance those two end up being Biden and Sanders,” said David Brock, a longtime Hillary Clinton ally who founded a pro-Clinton super PAC in the 2016 campaign. “They’ve both proven to be very resilient.”
Democratic insiders said that they are rethinking Sanders’ bid for a few reasons: First, Warren has recently fallen in national and early-state surveys. Another factor, they said, is that he has withstood the ups and downs of the primary, including his own heart attack. At the same time, other candidates with once-high expectations, such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke, have dropped out or languished in single digits in the polls.
The Washington Post: Woman who drove into a girl for being ‘a Mexican’ hit a black child the same day, police say.
A woman accused of driving into a teenager because she believed the girl was Mexican had struck another child with her car less than an hour earlier, authorities say.
Police in Iowa say Nicole Marie Poole Franklin struck a 12-year-old black boy as he walked home from school earlier this month. The 42-year-old Des Moines woman has not discussed her motive in that incident, but authorities say they are sickened by the seeming hate behind actions that occurred over less than two hours that day, ending with Franklin allegedly calling African Americans racial slurs in a gas station.
“When you look at the pattern of behavior here, you look at the victim selection, I think it speaks for itself,” said Sgt. Paul Parizek of the Des Moines Police Department.
Franklin’s case drew anger and fear last week when officials announced that the woman had not only confessed to a Dec. 9 hit and run but also told police that she targeted a 14-year-old for her perceived country of origin. Community members pushed for a hate crime designation on top of an attempted murder charge.
Lucy Ellman at The New York Times: Patriarchy Is Just a Spell.
I was in line at a cheese shop, contemplating our dependence throughout life on milk, mothers’ milk (even if we move quickly on to the milk of other species’ mothers, like cow, goat, sheep, buffalo or vegan substitutes, which emerge from mother earth), when it occurred to me that the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Spellbound” is really about sexual harassment. It’s not about Gregory Peck’s goofy psychological problems; it’s an elucidation of women’s problems — with men. Hitch was way ahead of his time: It’s a #MeToo movie released 74 years ago.
Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck in “Spellbound.”Credit…Getty Images
Hitchcock was always keen on female protagonists, usually blond. He used (and some would say abused) Grace Kelly, Carole Lombard, Eva Marie Saint, Tippi Hedren, Joan Fontaine, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak and Ingrid Bergman. Oddly, he settled on Hedren for “The Birds” and “Marnie,” an awkward actress at best, brittle and shaky. Hitchcock’s treatment of these actresses was pretty sadistic, yet his dramatic portrayals of women are often sympathetic….
One principle of psychoanalysis is that what is buried deep will surface; it will pop out in some way, no matter how well you try to repress it. The craziness buried in “Spellbound” is misogyny: The movie veers off to become an examination not of the hazards of neurotic trauma but of what it’s like to be a woman tormented by patriarchy. For wherever Bergman goes, she’s under scrutiny from men, if not direct attack.
The story seems at first to be about Gregory Peck’s mixed-up identity and amnesia and phobias and fainting spells and stuff, but in the end you realize Peck is by the by. The movie is told from Bergman’s point of view, and it’s really about the difficulties she faces (Hitchcock was probably one of them, given his penchant for tormenting his leading ladies). You can tell Peck doesn’t matter much, by the way the three central traumas of his life are so breezily dealt with once they surface. These complexes of his are MacGuffins. What matters is Bergman. Of course.
Read the whole thing at the NYT link.
The Washington Post: Girls adored ‘Little Women.’ Louisa May Alcott did not.
Above all else, Louisa May Alcott was a radical. From an early age, she was an abolitionist. She was also a feminist, committed to never marrying, and loved to pull up her skirts and go for a long run through the woods.
Louisa May Alcott
Alcott’s most famous work, “Little Women,” was nearly the opposite — a light, juvenile novel focused on sisterly love and domestic peace. And though it was semi-autobiographical, she hated it. Now, the latest film version, directed by Greta Gerwig, hits theaters Christmas Day.
Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, with whom she was close, was also a radical. He hung out with Transcendentalist poets and used the family home as a stop on the Underground Railroad. He was also a teacher who was disgraced after publishing a book with ideas about education that were a little too innovative.
And he was prone to depression. Once he was fired from his school, he didn’t work again for years. An attempt to start a utopian community failed utterly, deepening his depression, and his wife and daughters were forced to take any work they could to keep the family afloat.
Alcott took on sewing projects, worked as a maid to a rich woman on a trip to Europe, and tried to sell stories she had written to women’s magazines. She also worked as a Civil War nurse, and her written account of this period turned into her first literary success.
But her favorite things to write were suspense novels, which she published under the name A.M. Bernard. These stories featured liberated women following sensational passions across the high seas and in glamorous locales. She wrote dozens of these stories for women’s magazines but earned only a pittance.
Then her editor finally convinced her to grind out some sentimental schock. BTW, I hated Little Women, and I’m glad to know that Alcott did too.
Have a great day everyone!
Christmas Eve Reads
Posted: December 24, 2019 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Christmas Eve 14 Comments
Christmas in the Brothel, by Edvard Munch
Good Morning!!
It’s Christmas Eve and I’m going to begin this post with a little more history behind modern Christmas traditions. The Independent: The dark history of Christmas traditions.
People have been marking the midwinter for far longer than the 2000-odd years since the birth of Christ… and even that’s in doubt, anyway. It was only in the year 340 AD that Pope Julius I fixed the date of Jesus’s birthday at 25 December.
Prior to that it was marked on at least three different other dates: 29 March, 6 January, and sometime in June – which historians today think is most likely, given that the nativity is meant to have occurred during a census-taking.
It was 250 years later that Julius’s successor a few times removed, Pope Gregory, gave the job to Saint Augustine of converting the heathen Brits to Christianity.
Fortunately, with the birth of Christ now established as 25 December, it gave Augustine a bit of leverage with the population who were already marking several midwinter festivals, ensuring they could take this new-fangled religion on board without losing the annual December piss-up.
Because the idea of getting blind-drunk at Christmas isn’t something invented by the Pogues and your dad. There were two major pre-Christian festivals of note which roughly coincided with Christmas: the Roman Bacchanalia, or Saturnalia, and the Yule Feast of the Norse countries.
The Saturnalia began on 19 December and lasted for the best part of a week, which sounds about right for those currently enmeshed in the Christmas party rush. Morality and restraint were politely shown the back door, schools were closed, no criminals were punished.
The Roman god Saturn, in whose honour the festival was staged, was no benign Christ-figure or benevolent Santa, even though his party was eventually absorbed into Christmas. Ancient astrologers thought being born under the sign of Saturn was bad news.
Slaves were allowed to swap places with their masters, and one was elected king for the duration of the festival. The wealthy distributed gifts to the poor.
On Christmas Eve “restless spirits walked the earth.”
Should you be brave enough, legend has it that if you venture into a graveyard on Christmas Eve and dig a hole, then you’ll find gold.
But be careful getting there; on that night cattle are said to kneel down and speak in human voices. And those leaving church on Christmas Eve while the consecration is still going on are bang-on guaranteed to witness a procession of ghosts wending their way through the streets.
Ghost of Christmas Past, John Leech
Speaking of supernatural beings abroad on Christmas Eve, what about the big man himself? Father Christmas, Santa, Saint Nick. Why do we hang a stocking out for him? Because, according to legend, Saint Nicholas heard about three sisters who were forced into a life of prostitution to earn enough money to eat, so he tossed three coins down their chimney to help them out, which landed in the girls’ stockings drying on the hearth.
Father Christmas as a jolly old man with a white beard was indeed thought to be based on St Nicholas, who can be traced back to Asia Minor in about 350 AD (around the time Pope Julius was fixing the date of Jesus’s birth), and somewhere along the way he got mashed up with other folklorish characters, including Kris Kringle from 19th-century German tradition.
Read more about the history behind Christmas traditions at The Folklore Society.
Now on to today’s politics reads:
This interview with Rudy Giuliani is wild. Olivia Nuzzi at New York Magazine: A Conversation With Rudy Giuliani Over Bloody Marys at the Mark Hotel.
It was early in the afternoon on Sunday, December 8, and Giuliani had just returned from Ukraine, where he said he was looking for information to undermine the case to impeach his client, President Donald Trump. [….]
Over a sweater, he wore a navy-blue suit, the fly of the pants unzipped. He accessorized with an American-flag lapel pin, American-flag woven wallet, a diamond-encrusted pinky ring, and a diamond-encrusted Yankees World Series ring (about which an innocent question resulted in a 15-minute rant about “fucking Wayne Barrett,” a journalist who manages to enrage Giuliani even in death).
The Holly King, the spirit of Yule
In addition to being the president’s free personal attorney, Giuliani, who is 75, is an informal White House cybersecurity adviser and a high-priced cyber-security contractor. In one hand, he clutched three phones of varying sizes. Two of the devices were unlocked, their screens revealing open tabs and a barrage of banner notifications as they knocked into each other and reacted to Giuliani’s grip. He accidentally activated Siri, who said she didn’t understand his command. “She never understands me,” he said. He sighed and poked at the device, attempting to quiet her….
Giuliani is quick to announce that he knows “every block of this city,” but he lives on the Upper East Side and doesn’t linger much across or below the park. When I asked him to bring me somewhere he likes to hang out, he quickly directed his bodyguard to the Mark, a five-star hotel on East 77th Street. Always a creature of habit, Giuliani is extra-aware of where he’s welcome these days. He says that “because of what’s happened” his circle is tightening, that he doesn’t trust anyone anymore.
I asked him how he ever trusted Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Russian associates with a business called Fraud Guarantee who were arrested by the FBI in October. “They look like Miami people. I know a lot of Miami people that look like that that are perfectly legitimate and act like them,” Giuliani said. “Neither one of them have ever been convicted of a crime. Neither one. And generally that’s my cutoff point, because if you do it based on allegations and claims and — you’re not gonna work with anybody,” he said, laughing. “Particularly in business.”
As we sped uptown, he spoke in monologue about the scandal he co-created, weaving one made-up talking point into another and another. He said former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whom he calls Santa Maria Yovanovitch, is “controlled” by George Soros. “He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents.” I told him he sounded crazy, but he insisted he wasn’t.
“Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him,” he said. “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.”
Read the rest of the demented interview at NY Mag.
Norse mythology tells us of the god Balder who was killed by an arrow made of mistletoe.
At CNN Vicky Ward writes about David Correia, who a co-conspirator in the Ukraine mess: The invisible man: Text messages reveal former golfer’s role in Ukraine scandal.
When Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman traveled to Ukraine last winter to help Rudy Giuliani dig up dirt on President Donald Trump’s political opponents, they were accompanied by a 44 year-old American named David Correia.
A former pro golfer and restaurateur, Correia had gotten to know Parnas and Fruman in South Florida, where he’d gone into business with Parnas years earlier.While Parnas and Fruman, who had high-level contacts in Ukraine, worked to gather documents that they believed showed evidence of corruption by Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Correia was there to make the effort pay off in lucrative business deals, according to people who talked to him at the time, as well as copies of text messages obtained by CNN.Before the trip, Correia texted an American associate that he wanted to “be fully prepared to close specific deals in Ukraine while we are there,” according to the message viewed by CNN. Though he had no experience in the gas or energy business prior to working with Parnas, Correia was bent on securing a deal to sell US liquified natural gas to Ukraine through a pipeline in Poland.When the three men were indicted in October for illegally funneling foreign money into Republican political circles, attention quickly focused on Parnas and Fruman, who have become key characters in the ongoing impeachment saga of President Donald Trump.Meanwhile Correia’s role has gotten little scrutiny. In part, that’s due to the lack of detail in the indictment beyond Correia’s alleged involvement in an effort to lobby for a marijuana business that, according to the indictment, was secretly backed by a Russian businessman. Compared to the four counts Parnas and Fruman face, Correia was charged with just one. All three men have pleaded not guilty.
Read all the details at CNN.
Democrats are talking about new articles of impeachment against Trump. Politico: House counsel suggests Trump could be impeached again.
House Counsel Douglas Letter said in a filing in federal court that a second impeachment could be necessary if the House uncovers new evidence that Trump attempted to obstruct investigations of his conduct. Letter made the argument as part of an inquiry by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals into whether Democrats still need testimony from former White House counsel Don McGahn after the votes last week to charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Yakutia reindeer photo by Alexander Dersu in 2018
“If McGahn’s testimony produces new evidence supporting the conclusion that President Trump committed impeachable offenses that are not covered by the Articles approved by the House, the Committee will proceed accordingly — including, if necessary, by considering whether to recommend new articles of impeachment,” Letter wrote.
It’s the first impeachment-related filing by the House since lawmakers voted, mostly along party lines, to impeach Trump over allegations stemming from efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals. It comes just hours after the Justice Department argued that the impeachment votes undercut lawmakers’ ongoing court case demanding testimony from McGahn, who was special counsel Robert Mueller’s central witness.
Paul Waldman at The Washington Post: Could Democrats impeach Trump twice? They might have to.
While we wait for Mitch McConnell and the White House to figure out whether they can get away with beginning and ending President Trump’s impeachment trial in an afternoon, a provocative new question has been raised: Once impeachment is over, presumably with an acquittal in the Senate, could House Democrats impeach Trump for a second time?
Don’t dismiss it as an absurd idea just yet. Not only might it happen, but it also might be absolutely necessary. At the very least, considering the possibility will help us understand just how deep our governing crisis could get if Trump wins a second term in office….
The first thing to understand is that the mere fact that no president has ever been impeached more than once doesn’t mean that it can’t happen if the president’s behavior warrants it. There’s no “one and done” clause in the Constitution stating that Congress has only one opportunity to impeach, and if the president is acquitted then he has a free pass for the rest of his time in office.
And if there were ever a circumstance where a president at least hypothetically might warrant a second impeachment, it’s this one: a president with utter disregard for all norms of ethical behavior who nonetheless has enough slavish support from members of his party in the Senate to make conviction virtually impossible.
To clarify, I’m not talking about Trump being impeached again for the misdeeds for which he is currently being called to account. I’m talking about an impeachment for new misdeeds that we have yet to discover, or that he has not yet committed but will in the future.
What stories are you following today (if any!)?
Monday Reads: You Learn Something every Day
Posted: December 23, 2019 Filed under: 2020 Elections, morning reads, Nancy Pelosi 38 Comments
Wandering Hotei, the happy Buddha monk, with his bag that never empties
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
It’s Monday and let’s hope it’s a good one for a change! I learned about two new yuletide critters this week and now I’m deep in thought about the universal idea of St Nick/Santa Claus/Hotei and all those pre christianity yule practices of a holy guy that walks around with a big ol bag with an endless supply of good stuff.
In the Buddhist paean, this would be Hotei, the Happy Monk, who is endlessly mistaken by hapless westerners as the Buddha. He’s a type of Buddha but not the one that god centric folks think is some god substitute. He isn’t. There’s no creator god anywhere in Buddhism. We, are in fact, all made of Buddha nature and headed that direction so at this point there are endless Buddhas. But, back to Hotei and his happiness and his sack that never empties out. I’m not sure how he eventually wound up to be the statue whose belly you rub for good luck or why leaving gifts of oranges and things on him at an altar is supposed to help your gambling luck or provide you with showers of gold coins but I’ll leave that to the folks that study that.
I was drawn to Hotei/Budai as a kid and even have the two small statues my mother had in a shadow box sitting on my bookshelf. I named one Zen and the other Buddha. Both still sport the child handwriting in blue pencil on the bottom with their names. I’m not exactly sure how I came up with those names at that age, but I did. There’s another Buddhist idea of a wish fulfilling jewel which is a lot like having your own personal wishing star that works.
I’m just amazed that many cultures have developed similar characters. Some of many gods, some have no gods. and some have one god. But, they all have the equivalent of a generous guy that travels around bestowing gifts. It’s a universal myth seeming to spontaneously develop in many places or travelling by story and winding up entering another mythos. American Santa Claus appears to be the latest emanation. I still have a partiality to Father Christmas or Pere Noel. But, that’s me!
Budai showed up around 916 a.d. and may be related to an actual wandering monk in China from around the period. Us Westerners are more familiar with St Nick who may have been the role model for the modern Santa. He was said to be Saint Nicholas of Bari who was an early Christian bishop in ancient Greece. He dates back to around 343. So, it appears the legends of generous wandering holy men took hold and started spreading. Many even connect the entire thing back to Saturn and some of the early Greek/Roman Gods.
I’m just thinking we all need somebody good to pin our hopes on but we also seem to need an offset. Sorta of a ying to Santa’s yang. I found out that in Sweden Santa trots around on a yule goat (Julbocken) which is actually a pagan symbol connected to Thor but now is connected to the Nordic/Germanic St Nick. So, a goat is Santa’s helper in Sweden. So, Santa may actually be based on Odin too and you may read that here.
And, thanks to Ann, I’ve discovered the Yule Cat of Iceland who has some connection to Krampus which has been my latest fascination with pagan yule festivities. So, enjoy these pictures of the Yule Cat (Jólakötturinn) and be glad he didn’t visit your house this year. The Yule Cat appears to have shown up sometime during the 1600s and steals away children–like Krampus–if they’ve been horrid for that year. Ah, isn’t religion grand!
There are actually a lot of monsters associated with Christmas/Yule. Who knew? Go read about 8 of them at that link and turn your yule into scary story event!
I’m surprised the Yule Cat didn’t get to Mar a Lago this year. He’d have had a blast.
The death of Washington Post journalist Jamal Kashoggi and the way the Trumpist regime has enabled it continue to stain our country’s reputation. Five men were sentenced to death in Saudia Arabia for his death but that’s not true justice. WAPO reports this today from Istanbul.
The verdicts came after a trial in Riyadh’s criminal court that lasted nearly a year and was largely shrouded in secrecy, with sessions closed to the general public. Human rights groups warned that the lack of transparency made the proceedings unfair, and increased the likelihood that senior officials could escape justice.
Diplomats from the United States, Turkey and several other countries were allowed to attend but told not to reveal details of the trial. Members of Khashoggi’s family also attended, according to Shalaan al-Shalaan, a spokesman for the Saudi public prosecutor.
In addition to the five people who received the death penalty, three more people were sentenced to jail terms totaling 24 years, Shalaan said. He did not name any of the convicted defendants. The death sentences must be confirmed by higher courts before they may be carried out, he said.
The CIA concluded last year that the crown prince had ordered Khashoggi’ s assassination, contradicting Saudi Arabia’s insistence that Mohammed had no knowledge of the plot. However, Saudi authorities said they were investigating the roles played by two senior aides to the crown prince in organizing and dispatching the team of agents who killed Khashoggi.
Shalaan said Monday that the two senior aides — Saud al-Qahtani and Ahmed al-Assiri — had been exonerated.
I’m thinking this may be a bit of agreement on Kushner and Trump’s part to let the Saudis go as long as they interfere in our elections. This Eli Clifton headline really got me thinking today: “Purged Saudi Government-backed Twitter Accounts Urged U.S.-Led Regime Change in Iran, Deflected Responsibility for Khashoggi Murder.” They seem to be joyously interfering a la the Russians in everything!
A review of comprehensive data tied to nearly 6,000 Saudi-linked Twitter accounts has found a manipulation campaign targeting its English language messages at President Donald Trump, urging regime change in Iran, whitewashing Saudi human rights abuses in Yemen, and deflecting responsibility for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi away from the Saudi government.
Twitter announced on Friday that it had removed the accounts, saying they violated “platform manipulation policies.” Twitter also said the accounts were the “core portion of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behaviour across a wide range of topics,” adding that “[r]igorous investigations by our Site Integrity team have allowed us to attribute these accounts to a significant state-backed information operation on Twitter originating in Saudi Arabia.”
The accounts, which produced and amplified more than 29 million tweets, were operated by Smaat, a social media marketing company based in Saudi Arabia. Twitter reported, “Our in-house technical indicators show that Smaat appears to have created, purchased, and/or managed these accounts on behalf of — but not necessarily with the knowledge of — their clients. We have permanently suspended Smaat’s access to our service as a result, as well as the Twitter accounts of Smaat’s senior executives. Smaat managed a range of Twitter accounts for high-profile individuals, as well as many government departments in Saudi Arabia.”
Smaat’s client list includes a number of Saudi government ministries and high-profile Saudi institutions, according to the company’s marketing materials. Smaat’s website was taken offline after Twitter made its announcement, but a promotional presentation, previously available on the website, listed as clients the Saudi Ministry of Commerce and Investment, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s Vision 2030 economic development program, the Saudi Ministry of Health, Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Ministry of Finance, the Saudi General Entertainment Initiative, and Alwaleed Philanthropies, a charity overseen by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud. Alwaleed was actually an early investor in Twitter and owns more than three percent of the company.
You can read the rest of the analysis at Responsible Statecraft. Marcy Wheeler has also been following the connection between George Nader and the Saudi Regime. His testimony may be damaging to both the Trumpist regime and the Saudi.
Brad Heath spotted this Beryl Howell opinion granting George Nader’s request to get a copy of his own grand jury transcript.
We can be sure it’s Nader because of the details she includes: Someone currently jailed for crime with significant mandatory minimums charged using evidence from a phone seized in the Mueller investigation, awaiting trial early next year. The person provided testimony with immunity on four occasions in February and March 2018.
That all fits Nader and only Nader.
In my continuing interest in tracking the dregs of the Mueller investigation, several details are of interest. Howell describes that his transcript is 900 pages long. Several of the redactions suggest Nader may need the transcripts to craft a defense in potential additional charges, which would more obviously raise a need to consult the transcript and the limits of his immunized testimony. And, the government claims that Nader was asked “questions regarding ongoing investigations.”
That’s not surprising in the least. Nader’s testimony touched on so many crimes it is unsurprising some of them remain active investigations (note the attached picture, which shows Nader with Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman.
The question is how he wants to use this transcript. It’s possible he needs it to argue that potentially pending charges against him are improperly based on immunized testimony (and as such wants to eliminate criminal exposure before making the best plea deal he can). Or it’s possible he wants the transcript to be able to explain the risks any cooperation he’d offer would pose to powerful people.
Good Question. And here’s some hope for the New Year!
I’m not sure you’ve been following this story but the Center for Public Integrity may have found a smoking gun. Key portions are blacked out which likely means someone in Congress or the Press will have to move on this.
To learn more, Public Integrity in late September petitioned the Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department for copies of their communications about the aid halt. But the Justice Department so far – in two document releases on Dec. 12 and 20 — has chosen to conceal key passages in those documents. And the federal district court judge overseeing the case, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, on Dec. 18 set a schedule for reviewing Public Integrity’s appeal that makes a final determination of the request unlikely to occur before March.
According to some of those involved in the funding halt, officials were deeply worried from the outset that a delay even for a few weeks could make it hard to ensure all the money was spent by that Sept. 30 deadline. DOD Comptroller Elaine McCusker, for example, noted what she called “increasing risk of execution” in an email on Sept. 5 to the Pentagon’s top lawyer and policy officials, among others, meaning she was worried the money could not all be spent by the end of the month.
After robust internal discussions, she and other officials did their best to carry out the policy, temporarily, by ordering a series of short-term holdups in the funding, while affirming in writing that they still planned to disburse it soon.
They specifically undertook an unusual maneuver, stopping the disbursements by adding a rare footnote to spending documents for Pentagon operations and maintenance efforts, which declared the Ukraine funding in particular was being held up for a week at a time. Then, over a period of about seven weeks, they tacked the footnote again and again onto eight such documents, each time as a temporary measure.
An unnamed lawyer at OMB, not wanting to participate in what appeared to be an illegal funding policy, decided to quit, as did another OMB official, according to congressional testimony by Mark Sandy, the office’s deputy associate director for national security and a 12-year veteran at the agency. OMB spokespeople have disputed the account, saying the resignations were not over the policy.
Bottom line for this comes from Chris Murphy of Connecticut. It kinda looks like a smoking gun to me!
I suppose the thing we should be very thankful for is that the entire remaining Trumpist players are not very bright but very very open and obvious. How’s this for saying it’s not a ‘smoking gun’ but a ‘confession’?
https://twitter.com/QasimRashid/status/1208557399549853697
So, yes Virginia! There is a Santa Claus! But, there are also Christmas monsters! It also appears that we can add the Mar a Lago Swamp Monster to the list!
So, my final read recommendation is this from the UK Guardian: “Nancy Pelosi: the woman who stood up to Trump”.
It was not how Pelosi, who once said Trump was “not worth” impeaching, had hoped to end a year that began with her historic, second ascension to the speakership. Pelosi, the first – and only – woman ever to serve as Speaker of the House, would rather be remembered for legislative accomplishments – the Affordable Care Act above all – than for impeachment. But Trump, Pelosi said, left her “no choice”. She quoted Thomas Paine: “The times have found us.”
In the wake of Trump’s impeachment, however, Democrats believe there was perhaps no leader better suited to the times.
“She is, thank God, the exact right person in the right place at the right time,” said Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and CIA director and a California native who’s known Pelosi for decades. “I’m not sure anybody else would have had the experience or capability to be able to do what she has done.”
“Donald Trump really has met his match with Nancy,” Panetta added.
Her grace under fire as speaker has earned comparisons to Sam Rayburn, the country’s longest-serving speaker, who died in 1961. One Democrat called her an “as good or better” legislative leader than Lyndon Johnson, who was a Senate majority leader before he was president.
And when the question is asked whether a female presidential candidate can beat Trump in 2020, the Democrats point to Pelosi, who “does it every single day”.
Even Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s fiercest defenders these days, is impressed. In an interview with CNN decrying the impeachment process, the South Carolina senator called it “quite a feat” that she was able to advance bipartisan legislation even as efforts to remove Trump cleaved the House – and the nation.
If there is a wish fulfilling jewel or a bag of endless gifts, I would like to ask it for one thing. Impeachment for Pence and Trump followed by the Speaker of the House taking the Oval Office. If I was really going to get greedy, I dream she goes back to her Speakership by resigning in favor of Hilary Clinton.
Isn’t great to have a dream during the longest night of the year?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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