February 25, 2021

I got my appointment!!!

2/26 at 5:55 PM. My 1st dose.

February 18, 2021

Bard College at Simons Rock, in Great Barrington on lockdown due to bomb threat.

Police are investigating.

February 11, 2021

Speaker Pelosi Appreciation thread

She selected this outstanding team of House Managers who have kept us riveted for these past two days.

January 17, 2021

Austin City Limits 1/16/2021

Featuring The War And Treaty, and Ruthie Foster

https://www.pbs.org/video/the-war-and-treaty-ruthie-foster-dojsex/

If you don't know about Ruthie Foster, here is your chance.

January 7, 2021

Random Observations on an Insurrection: The Rude Pundit

1. This was inevitable. Anyone even casually observing the last five years knew that the Trump reign was going to end in violence. Unless you willfully put blinders on and truly believe the bullshit fairy tale of "This is not who we are." This is very much who we are. We have always been a nation filled with racist, incoherent yahoos who are on the verge of violence and whose white privilege protects them in ways that no Black or Muslim person would ever be. Those yahoos just needed a leader to tell them to go and they were gonna go, and, in Donald Trump, they found their leader, someone who is as devolved and cretinous as they are, with the illusion of strength and courage and success, all lies, all fantasy.

So when Trump asked his MAGA drones to show up in Washington, DC for a rally on the day that Congress would certify that Trump lost and Joe Biden won the presidency, what the fuck else would you expect to happen? And then he implored them to march to the Capitol, where Congress was meeting. Oh, sure, he dropped in the word "peacefully," but he also told them, "You have to show strength, and you have to be strong." Whether he intended violence or not (and I think he was desperately hoping for violence because that's the kind of bitch he is), the idiots who think Joe Biden is a pedophile and hundreds of thousands of votes just disappeared heard exactly what they wanted to hear: It was finally, at long last, go time.

2. It could have been much, much worse. The motherfuckers built a gallows in front of the Capitol building. They talked about hanging members of Congress. And if you want to blindly dismiss that as hyperbolic bluster, go fuck yourself. These fucking animals had zip ties with them. There were fucking pipe bombs found, as well as a cooler filled with Molotov cocktails. They fucking vandalized the joint, wrecking shit and scrawling "Murder the media" on a door. The intention was to harm people. Do not have a single iota of doubt: If they could have gotten their hands on a Democratic member of Congress or Mitt Romney or another Republican they see as disloyal to their Orange King, they would murdered them. And if you think that's paranoid nonsense, then you put yourself in the shoes of the Senators and Representatives in that building, hearing the doors and windows break while a hooting mob of dullards who have been told that you hate them and their America come streaming down the hallway towards where you are. You'd have shit yourself in fear. They wanted to take over by force. They wanted a coup. This was an insurrection by people who believe a gigantic lie that is being cynically propagated by Republicans. You don't bring a Confederate flag into the Capitol unless you're making a pretty clear point about what you think of the United States government.

3. Every single Republican who ever enabled Donald Trump, and that includes supporting his campaign, voting for his judges and his fucking bullshit wall, voting against his impeachment and removal from office, and so much more horrible shit, cannot be allowed to weasel out of their complicity. This didn't happen without Republicans rolling their eyes at and waving off Trump's extravagant fuckery. They made a deal with the Devil, and that spike-dicked motherfucker is ready to sodomize some souls. So I don't wanna hear about how brave and patriotic Mitch McConnell's speech was where he said that Biden won and Trump lost. I don't wanna hear how Lindsey Graham redeemed himself with his call to speak the truth to MAGA cretins. Even Republicans like Adam Kinzinger, who has been outspoken in his outrage at Trump's refusal to concede, don't get a pass when they spent their entire time in Congress helping Trump. I don't wanna hear about the conscience that the now-resigning members of the administration have suddenly discovered like a long-lost, beat-up teddy bear. No, fuck all of you. This didn't happen without your blithe acceptance of every bowl of shit Trump fed you. You anonymously spoke against Trump while being too fucking cowardly to go on the record. You should all have a large "Trump" carved into your foreheads so that for the rest of your lives, everyone will know where you stood when your country was falling the fuck apart.

...snip...

More at the link

https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2021/01/random-observations-on-insurrection.html

January 7, 2021

Hawley needs to be expelled from the Senate.

His actions incited the riot.

January 6, 2021

Congressional Gopigs waste no time wasting time.

With their objection to Arizona's vote I can see that this is going to take a long time. What will they get for their efforts? Not a damn thing, I think.

December 14, 2020

What will you be drinking when the Pres. Elect speaks tonight?

I have a nice barleywine from Tree House Brewing Co.

December 13, 2020

American Democracy Was Never Supposed to Work Bill Moyers

https://billmoyers.com/story/american-democracy-was-never-supposed-to-work/

If the United States were a democracy, this election wouldn’t have been close. The fate of the world wouldn’t depend on a handful of suburban precincts. The winner would have been known immediately. With a comfortable lead well into the millions, the president-elect and his party could have moved on to crafting and passing the program that gained them an undeniable mandate.

But we do not have a democracy, and not because Trump undermined it but because the framers of the Constitution did not create one. They felt the Articles of Confederation left too much power in the hands of economic populists in the states, and so they constructed a system meant to serve and protect the rich. The Constitution was designed specifically to prevent, as James Madison put it in the Federalist Papers, “an abolition of debts” or “an equal distribution of property” from passing into law.

Nearly two and a half centuries on, the antidemocratic provisions of the Constitution are still working as the framers intended. Even in an era of global capital, the wealthy benefit from a sclerotic, dysfunctional government. When early election results suggested a Joe Biden presidency with Republicans maintaining their grip on the Senate, the Associated Press reported that “stocks rallied on Wall Street as investors embraced the upside of more gridlock in Washington.” Divided government, these investors seem to think, will derail what Madison called “wicked or improper projects”: the abolition of student debt, higher taxes on the wealthy, the Green New Deal.

Read the rest at the link at the top.

December 9, 2020

"DONALD TRUMP WAS DOING THINGS THAT WERE ILLEGAL AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL":

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/12/massachusetts-ag-maura-healey-on-prosecuting-a-president

“DONALD TRUMP WAS DOING THINGS THAT WERE ILLEGAL AND UNCONSTITUTIONAL”: MASSACHUSETTS A.G. MAURA HEALEY ON PROSECUTING A PRESIDENT

As a new era dawns in Washington, state attorneys general, who have filed nearly 140 lawsuits against President Donald Trump’s administration over the last four years, are also preparing for what is to come in the next administration. It’s a welcome change for someone like Maura Healey, Massachusetts’s attorney general, who has joined more than 100 of those suits, on everything from Trump’s family-separation policy to census issues to environmental protections. “I don’t think you can overstate how much energy and effort it took to hold the line against the Trump administration that was doing things so entirely unprecedented and in violation of so many norms and the rule of law,” she said in an interview with Vanity Fair earlier this month.

The work, however, is not done, as the country reckons with coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter movement, and issues around free, fair, and trusted elections continue, even after Joe Biden’s decisive win. Healey discussed what lies ahead, what Republicans need to do to help bring our country together, and what she thinks should happen to a post–White House Donald Trump: “I’m going to be limited in what I can say,” she told me, “but it is important that Donald Trump, his enablers, those who acted in concert with him and furthered actions that may have been illegal, criminal or otherwise, are held accountable.”

Read the whole interview at the link.