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Featuring the Fabulous Dadbots: Mark M., Dave S., Mark O., Dennis C., Paul C., and Geoff Carter
Hey Bots,
(3) news items from today
- ‘pubs put MTG back on a committee after her “cooling off period”–dismissal for anti-semitism and other confederacy-esque remarks sent her to the woodshed last year. I’m confident she’s done requisite introspection and is ready to begin anew.
- Same for the ‘zona pub who created a meme killing AOC. Paul Gosar. Misdemeanor. No blood, no foul, he’s back on the playing field.
- But the real shocker comes out of NM, where a recent loser organized a parade of drive-by shootings of significant Dem homes. (wtf!!!).
At the risk of being redundant, I think the culprit for this is chiefly the orange ex prez, potentiated by Bannon, FB-etc… and others. My mind again goes to Crime and Punishment as well as George Carlin’s the (7) words you can’t say on TV/radio. These Dostoevsky lines in the sand—though we scoff at them during adolescence—perhaps rail at them during intoxications with insurrection, are important to keeping society’s loose cannons at bay. The orange gave all these idiots the green light to bully. And bullying includes shooting into teenagers’ bedrooms in Albuquerque.
Hate to end on such a dour note. Attached, if not spun too far left by the author, holds some good news for decarbonization. Texas leading the way! Just make sure you call it clean, not green. Cute last line: “We struck wind!”.
-Dave S.
“Go to Texas to see the anti-green future of clean energy | The Economist“
One interesting media development is the resurrection of the term “Republican moderate”. With the Freedom Caucus letting their freak flag fly, anybody even slightly closer to reality becomes a “moderate”. These are the “moderates” who decided, as virtually their first act as a Congress, to pass a messaging bill on abortion, requiring that doctors take life saving measures when a late term aborted fetus survives the abortion. This is a vanishingly rare occurrence! But the moderates wanted to make sure we know where they stand.
This same crew of moderates initially raised some questions about the “rules package” that accompanied Kevin McCarthy into his speakership. The most concerning of these rules is the appointment of three Freedom Caucus members to the Rules Committee. This is an extremely important committee, and it most recently has always been under the control of the leadership of the majority party. No more! We can expect to see a hell of a lot more bills demanding a balanced budget in five years, abolishing the IRS, and banning even the thought of abortion, because the FC jokers on the Rules Committee will demand them. Finally, after raising their questions, the so-called “moderates” in the GOP House majority meekly okayed this rules package.
And don’t forget.Many of these same “moderates” deny climate change, refused to impeach an obviously guilty Donald Trump, and even voted to overturn the 2020 election AFTER a mob had invaded the Capitol! Some “moderates” these jamokes are.
Interestingly, Marjorie Taylor Green has become a huge McCarthy supporter, and really could be considered in his “inner circle”. She’s come a long way from the Jewish Space Lasers. But the old MTG hasn’t disappeared completely. I just heard her railing at Biden’s outright THEFT of state secrets (classified docs) and the Communist cabal at the National Archives who is enabling him. So there’s still a whiff of fire & brimstone emitting from her smokestack. Is she now considered a “moderate”?
The big action this spring & summer will be on the debt ceiling. Republicans are charging headlong into demanding major spending cuts to balance the budget, before they’ll sign onto raising the debt ceiling. But simple arithmetic shows that those cuts are going to have to come out of Social Security and Medicare. And if you didn’t realize that, the Democrats will be happy to remind you. This could be the biggest unforced error since the Seahawks threw an interception at the Super Bowl 1-yard line, when they could have just handed the ball to Marshawn Lynch. And it’s not an error that a “moderate” Republican would make.
–Mark M.
It’s hard to say how much clout the Freedom Caucus will have. I have to believe that the monetary powers that be will not allow these cretins to collapse our economy just to make a point. I hope—maybe foolishly—that some “moderate” Republicans (we’d only need five or six) would vote to raise the ceiling in opposition to McCarthy’s clown show (and yes, clowns are scary and getting scarier).
Speaking of big money controlling the world, did you guys happen to catch the clause buried in a big Ohio bill reclassifying natural gas as “green energy”?
Here’s the WAPO story detailing it:
How dark money groups led Ohio to redefine gas as ‘green energy’
Of course, this is dark money talking, and, according to Alex Wagner of MSNBC, this legislation is another one of Republican legislative think-tank ALEC’s templates—it’s going to go on a nationwide tour. ALEC, if you remember, is the organization that brought us ACT 10, the union-busting law that wasn’t quite as successful in other states. Here’s more on ALEC:
The fossil fuel fossils won’t quit. They’d rather have a full piggy bank on an uninhabitable planet than keep Earth alive. MTG and her ilk will probably try this on the federal level, too. Just when you think you’re getting out of the swamp, they pull you back in….
Geoff
Attribution:
C-SPAN, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The impending debt ceiling crisis is a case where the loudest, most radical, least responsible voices will be heard very loudly, and will be very influential, at least in the early stages. This reminds me of the second Planet of the Apes movie (the new versions). The apes go to war against the humans. And we see the war councils of apes discussing their strategy. The young hotheads keep pushing the apes into violence, while the older and wiser apes counsel patience. (I think this is Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which came out in 2014.)
Thumbnail description: “The fragile peace between apes and humans is threatened as mistrust and betrayal threaten to plunge both tribes into a war for dominance over the Earth.” -–Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) – IMDb (Pretty timely, eh?)
Kevin McCarthy has already taken Social Security and Medicare off the table, apparently. But the screaming radical apes will be demanding something. Pundit Mike Murphy describes it as a case of the Republicans “storming the castle” but with no idea of what to do when they get there.
Here are my predictions.
1. Biden and White House will continue to refuse to negotiate. The caveat here is, they won’t negotiate on anything substantive, just some window dressing.
2. Some sort of compromise fig leaf will be floated. A blue ribbon committee to address spending, say.
3. This will not initially be acceptable to the House majority.
4. The stock market will start to crater.
5. This will scare the Freedom Caucus and every other Republican, and they will accept the fig leaf proposal. I do NOT think anything like sequestration (actual future spending limits) will be part of the proposal. It will be window dressing.
6. Crisis solved!
7. This is the final step needed to reassure the equity markets. After the new debt ceiling is voted in–and it won’t expire for some significant time — the stock market will recover and, in fact, the bull market will return to some degree. We will make up most if not all of the approximately 20% loss that was experienced in 2022.
My step #4 is my version of Geoff’s assertion that “the monetary powers that be” will step in. It will be the markets that constrain the nuts, not some shadowy cabal of high dollar financial CEOs.
This is a LOT of predicting! And as I always say, predictions are difficult, especially when they involve the future. It will be interesting to see how they play out!
–Mark M.
Yeah, it’s funny…seems like everyone knows the script. One big brinksmanship hoodwink. (I suppose the below is an SNL skit)
K-mac meets with Uncle Joe tomorrow—trust it is after his nap and he’s had a nice stiff espresso. Wouldn’t it be fresh if Joe gets really close and whispers, “Ya know Kev you and I could shock everyone and make a lot of political capital for ourselves if we “flip the board…drain the swamp…don’t do same o, same o…rewrite the script….and solve this right now…way ahead of Janet Y’s ticking time tomb. Boom! Now! Today!, this afternoon! Let’s do this bro!
Like Mark predicts, they bump the ceiling but form, not just a blue ribbon committee , but really get after spending long term. Back to Joe (whispering again…inner circle shit, ay…): “….we’ll form an elite group—let your FC hot heads blow off some steam… and to build esprit de corps we’ll give them a cool name. Uhmm….yeah I’ve got it: Scorpion. … just heard that somewhere recently…can’t recall where?…maybe it was in the new Black Panther movie.”
–Dave
Excuse me if that name suggestion was satire, but Scorpion is off the table (I hope). Scorpion is the name of the “special crime unit”, aka goon squad, that killed that black skateboarder in Memphis. Lots of cities set up these “special units” as a response to the public outcry on a crime spree of some sort. “You (mayor, council, police chief) have to do something about this crime wave and we want to see results, NOW!”. The only thing that can show visible results NOW, is to create a new crime unit with wide latitude in acceptable methods, and staff them with thugs. Results are almost guaranteed. All kinds of results. I wonder if Milwaukee has such a unit.
MO
‘twas satire. It would be taboo even for SNL to make fun of old Joe and do that…although maybe not…maybe they could convince themselves to do it based on consciousness raising… I can get away with it on the bot channel.
Re the Memphis mess.
- Murder rate there is high.
- Since we don’t do the big 4 that tackle the root of the problem (a. gun control, (b. education, (c. planned parenting nor (d. good housing, we have to police it with a heavy hand. Out of control. Triage. Address it from the back end.
- Fighter jet pilots are usually young, same with others ready to “dive in”. Pat Tillman was so pumped he ended up getting himself and 1-2 others killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. Wild young men armed and high on endorphins, at a minimum. Recall Pat was an NFL DB for the Arizona Cardinals who left out of duty to his country—Army Rangers. Died in a year or two.
- Older cops aren’t going to go into the seedier parts of Memphis, so they need to get the esprit de corps thing going. The Scorpion squad.
- But then it gets out of hand quickly…license to kill…nearly (and probably more often than the cameras catch).
- I read yesterday—wish I could find it—something to the effect of ‘police not policing’….not responding to calls in certain neighborhoods. “I ain’t going in there” Thus the special units are hatched. (Saying the same thing MO said below). If not the Scorpions, then who? The Wagner Group?
Dire state.
–Dave
The cop discussion is definitely a tangent. Our fearless leader will need to edit… or not.
Tangent of no, this commentator must, of course, speak out. The NYT recently published an opinion column by Jamelle Bouie which is relevant to the discussion. Like Dave, he discusses “front end” and “back end” in terms of police accountability. The back end— legal action against officers who abuse—is pretty much as Dave describes. Bouie describes the front end in more narrow terms, as the “democratic accountability” over policing.
Bottom line—WHAT democratic accountability? Local governments and elected officials have very little control over the cops. Police departments are essentially operating on their own, with little oversight. They are a law unto themselves. The courts have instituted “qualified immunity”, which makes it virtually impossible to prosecute a cop. The police unions are extremely powerful in protecting rogue officers. In cities where other institutions attempt to take on the cops, they flex their political muscles. Hence the campaign against liberal DA Chelsea Boudin in San Fran. And how many times have local DAs FAILED to prosecute abusive cops?
It’s a black hole. Only the most egregious cases ever get disciplined. Raymond Floyd. Tyre Nichols (maybe). Brianna Taylor (kind of).
In Milwaukee, the abuses of Harold Breier’s brownshirts (that’s a song by Marty Mulhern, btw) resulted in the imposition of a limited term of 10 years for the chief. But the cops continue to abuse black people. These abuse cases are a major expense for the City of Milwaukee, to the tune of hundreds of thousands per year.
The biggest problem in my view is the “warrior mentality” of the cops. They are there to occupy the neighborhood, not to “protect and serve “. When you have that attitude, everything that moves is your enemy.
–Mark M.
Attribution:
Becker1999, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Scorpions! OMG. Yeah, Dave, the Freedom Caucus’s rebranding as the Scorpions would be a fine, cringe-y SNL skit. For sure, there are parallels between the rogue Memphis cop unit and the rogue congressional unit. Both units feel justified in taking drastic, destructive actions as means to “solve problems”. Just what those problems actually are, well, neither group seems to have much grasp of that, nor do they seem to really care. The main thing for those in both groups is to see themselves as the tip of the spear, the bad asses, the iconoclasts, the wolf pack, the action movie heroes, the Yipee- ky-yi- yay mutherfuckers. Yep, I blame Hollywood.
Cops! As a firefighter/EMT, I worked with cops all the time—at car accidents, or crime scenes like shootings or domestic violence incidents where people needed to be patched-up and emotions and adrenaline among the citizens at these scenes were running high. In my experience, there are some truly amazing, great cops out there, but there are a lot of cops who just seem burned-out by the job—and there are some cops who are full-on scary assholes. I remember how some of the asshole-ish cops would relish getting citizens at crime scenes and other incidents even more jacked-up so they could have an excuse to rough them up and arrest them. Some departments seem to be getting better at weeding out the scary assholes; obviously Memphis has not been among them.
My brother lived in Memphis for a while when he was in his twenties. I don’t recall the exact details, but one night four or five Memphis cops beat the living shit out of him. He said he was never so scared in his life — really thought he was going to die. To add insult to injury, they threw him in jail for the night, too. Inside the holding cell sat a bunch of other guys who’d been beaten-up by the cops and thrown in jail too.
When he told friends who were life-long residents of Memphis about this, they did not seem at all surprised. They told him that Memphis cops were basically low-paid, poorly trained thugs who were to be avoided as much as possible. That was like thirty years ago, but it doesn’t seem like much has changed on the Memphis PD since then.
DC
Cops: There was a good cop show, back in the 70s—at least it was good to my ‘70s consciousness self: Police Story. It had a special consultant Joseph Wambaugh, an ex-cop and author of The New Centurions. Realism was his (advertised) brand. Dennis’s real world experiences below remind me of that book/show—though it tended to focus on only the seedier side. Stabilizing to hear Dennis report that there are decent cops in the mix. Random: Watching a cop leaving a Portillo’s (Chicago hot Italian beef chain), also springs to mind. Big bald guy—main memory was his swagger…..he was just begging for someone, anyone, to look at him the wrong way.
(going to fact check self on Wambaugh—above is from memory)
I did pretty well…he’s still kickin, born in ’37, 14 years as a cop before hitting it big as a writer. Onion Field was the other one I read.
–Dave S.
Hey bots,
I think the part of the Tire Nichols equation that’s not in the other killings–like Trayvon Martin or George Floyd or any of the other dozens of murders, is the fact that all the killer cops–like the victim–are African Americans. I suppose it’s somewhat ironic to refer to this as a Black on Black crime, but that’s what it is. I’m not sure if that has anything to do with the fact that unlike the other murders , the Nichols protests were for the most part peaceful.
It’s only speculation on my part, but I’m thinking that removing race relations from this particular police killing has created an entirely different animal–cops being brutal without racism as a factor.
Of course, it may be that the American people have become wiser and realize that violence is bad. Well–let’s wait until we see Philadelphia (win or lose) after the Super Bowl.
Geoff
Racism is bad, here and abroad. Militarism is also bad, domestically or internationally. I think these are both social viruses but not the same virus. We are infected with both nevertheless.
MO