Category Archives: National

DL Open Thread Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Closing arguments concluded in the Trump hush-money trial, so the speculation has begun. Few think he’ll be acquitted, but opinion seems split on whether he’ll be convicted. One person who has earned the right to opinionate about Trump is David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has covered him, mostly from a financial perspective, for 36 years. I don’t think that gives him any special insight into what a jury might do, but for what it’s worth Johnston thinks Trump will be convicted. My money’s on a hung jury, parlayed with Trump claiming total exoneration.

You would think Republican politicians would have learned by now that groveling before Trump only wins you temporary favor, and it won’t wash away previous disloyalty. Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, leader of the laughingly labeled Freedom Caucus, learned that the hard way yesterday. He was among the toadies who traveled to New York to “kiss the ring,” and the media often puts it, only to see Trump endorse his challenger because Good originally backed Ron DiSantis. BTW, a “ring” in this context is the polite media term for “sphincter.”

Primary elections in Texas swept a number of incumbent Republicans out of office, replaced by candidates further to the right. The biggest impact will be on the state’s public schools, because Gov. Greg Abbott now has enough votes to resegregate the schools via a private-school voucher system. The way bad ideas never die, they’re revived generation after generation, might be where the idea of reincarnation was born. Or reborn.

The oft-repeated story about the demise of Red Lobster pinned the blame on its all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion, but the real culprit was the private equity owners, who pillaged the business as thoroughly as the mob did that restaurant in “Goodfellas.” It was more fun to blame the country’s Homer Simpsons, though.

The floor’s yours.

DL Open Thread Tuesday, May 28, 2024

Anyone who thinks that removing Benjamin Netanyahu from power would end Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza is overlooking an inconvenient truth: Two-thirds of the Israeli public doesn’t just support the war, they support denying humanitarian aid to its victims. There are right-wingers in Israel who make MAGAts look like hippies, like the illegal settlers in the West Bank attacking Gaza-bound aid trucks. Seems like “good Israelis” are as rare as good Germans once were.

Democrats probably won’t retain control of the Senate after November because they have so many seats to defend, but GOP voters are doing their best to help by nominating some dreadful candidates. Congratulations, Republicans, on inventing the bottomless barrel.

Remember when Cape Town, South Africa, almost ran out of drinking water a few years back? That was just a harbinger. The combination of drought and extreme heat has Mexico City and Bogota, Columbia, facing the same problem.

In Mexico City, more and more residents are watching their taps go dry for hours a day. Even when water does flow, it often comes out dark brown and smells noxious. A former political leader is asking the public to “prioritize essential actions for survival” as the city’s key reservoirs run dry. Meanwhile, 2,000 miles south in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, reservoir levels are falling just as fast, and the city government has implemented rotating water shutoffs. The mayor has begged families to shower together and leave the city on weekends to cut down on water usage.

The population of Phoenix, Ariz., has grown 4% since 2020, which means there are now more than 1.6 million people there whistling past a very dry graveyard.

The floor’s yours.

DL Open Thread Monday, May 27, 2024

The Washington Post’s motto is “democracy dies in darkness.” It doesn’t say anything about dispelling it. You probably saw the story last week about Supreme Court justice Sam Alito flying an upside-down American flag outside his home. You would have read about it three years ago if the WaPo had decided to print it then, which is when it learned about it. Liberal media. Heh.

If you’re confused about why a majority of Congress, Democrats included, backs Israel no matter how it treats Palestinians, consider this: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) plans to spend $100 million on congressional races in 2024, much of it aimed at ousting pro-Palestinian lawmakers in Democratic primaries. This is $100 million more than the Palestinians plan to spend. Hope that clears it up for you.

The NCAA agreed last week to a $2.8 billion settlement with five sports conferences over a host of antitrust claims, an obvious attempt to maintain the organization’s chokehold on minor-league football and basketball. The organizer who convinced the Dartmouth men’s basketball team to unionize vows the movement to unionize all college sports will continue regardless, as it should – pay for play should be a bedrock principle in a capitalist country that has rejected slavery. Good luck organizing the Southeastern Conference, though.

Government trust-busters are at long last going after Ticketmaster, but as this article explains, it’s not just because concertgoers are getting screwed. It’s because artists, venues and promoters are, too. See what happens when you wrong the Swifties? Be warned, Donald Trump.

The floor’s yours.

Song of the Day 5/26: Stevie Wonder, “Too High”

There’s a reason “the dog ate my homework” was a plausible excuse, and had a better chance of working with teachers who owned dogs: Dogs will eat anything. Too picky for plain paper? Spill a little gravy on it.

And so, in the age of legalized marijuana, veterinarians have seen a growing number of pet canines that overdosed on cannabis. It’s not fatal, but the symptoms, as described by the author of this Philadelphia article about the trend, can be alarming.

When my son came home from school, Beau didn’t get up to greet him as usual. We noticed his head wobbling and swaying. An hour later, he couldn’t pick his head up; his doggy lips were stuck to the hardwood floor in a smear of drool like two slugs. …

His diagnosis: “Suspected marijuana ingestion.” The vet said Beau would be fine; the THC would clear his system within 24 hours. “Marijuana toxicosis is typically relatively harmless, although unpleasant for the patient,” my hospital discharge paperwork read.

Stevie Wonder described the phenomenon back in 1973 on his seminal “Innervisions” album.

Song of the Day 5/23: Paul Simon, “Graceland”

For supermarket tabloids, Elvis is the gift that keeps on giving, even though he’s been dead for nearly 50 years. A headline the Weekly World News might have invented declared that Graceland, Presley’s Memphis mansion-turned-tourist attraction, was up for public auction. A finance company claimed Lisa Marie Presley died with an unpaid loan of $3.8 million, and had used Graceland as collateral.

The King’s granddaughter, Riley Keough, moved to block the sale and countersued claiming fraud. A judge stopped the planned auction, the company said it was withdrawing its suit, and now the FBI is taking an interest in the case because the woman who notarized the company’s documents says she’s never seen them before. All the late, lamented Weekly Word News could have added was Batboy.

Graceland opened as a home museum in 1982, just a few years before Paul Simon wrote the title song to his 1986 album. (It was a home museum because until Elvis’ Aunt Delta died in 1993, various relatives still lived there). Though the single only made it to No. 81 on Billboard’s Hot 100 (and No. 38 on whatever the name of the AOR chart was that year), it won the 1988 Grammy Award for Record of the Year.

DL Open Thread Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Rehoboth Beach, the resort town of 1,100 year-round residents that gifted Delaware politics with Pete Schwartzkopf and Kathy McGuiness, is embroiled in a controversy that for once involves neither of them. The city, repeatedly turned down in its quest for a new city manager, hired a guy named Taylour Tedder on a pay-and-benefits package surpassed only by the presidents of the University of Delaware. His haul: a $250,000 base salary, a $50,000 allowance for moving expenses, and a $750,000 housing loan from the city that he won’t have to repay if he stays in the job for seven years. Residents, like six out of seven dwarves, are not happy.

A bioflick of Donald Trump’s early years as a New York real estate mogul and self-imagined playboy is the talk of Cannes, and the thin-skinned dotard has already promised to sue. Director Ali Abbasi sounded unimpressed. “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people,” he said. “They don’t talk about his success rate.”

The Biden administration announced it will erase another $7.7 billion in federal student loans, bringing the total debt canceled through various programs to $167 billion for nearly 5 million Americans, an average of $33,400 apiece. I didn’t read far enough into the article to learn why it’s bad news for Biden.

In the latest sign of our totally normal climate, a heat wave in Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Tabasco had howler monkeys falling dead from trees.

Wildlife biologist Gilberto Pozo counted about 138 of the animals dead or dying on the ground under trees. The die-off started around May 5 and hit its peak over the weekend.

“They were falling out of the trees like apples,” Pozo said. “They were in a state of severe dehydration, and they died within a matter of minutes.” Already weakened, Pozo says, the falls from dozens of meters up inflict additional damage that often finishes the monkeys off.

Thom Hartmann says America’s oligarchs are dragging us toward civil war, and illustrates his thesis with some parallels to the antebellum period while debunking a recent capitalist talking point.

To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen. It was a story popular in the South leading up to the Civil War, now part of the “lost cause” mythology. …

While there were some in America among the Founders and Framers who had amassed great land holdings and what was perceived then as a patrician lifestyle, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders, that they couldn’t hold a candle, in terms of wealth, to the true aristocrats of England. With page after page of photographs and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers, Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were rich by European standards.

As Kevin Phillips describes in his masterpiece book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich: “George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms.” Phillips documents that it wasn’t until the 1790s—a generation after the War of Independence—that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today’s dollars.

The floor’s yours.

Song of the Day 5/21: Randy Rainbow, “Forty-Five”

This is a weird coincidence. Just a couple of days after featuring “9 to 5” as Song of the Day, Randy Rainbow released a new parody song set to its melody. It’s a warning about the Previous Guy, No. 45, and a warning not to make him No. 47, but I’m concerned that it’s not menacing enough for the job.

DL Open Thread Tuesday, May 21, 2024

That Trump trial in New York is getting close to its conclusion, with all the plot twists the writers could think up. Michael Cohen revealed on cross-examination that he stole money from Trump, because of course he did, and a defense witness tried to stare down the judge, which did not go well. Oh well, it will all be over soon, and I can’t imagine it ending with anything other than a hung jury.

Will the environmental news ever be so dire that governments might actually take meaningful steps to rein in oil companies and petro-states? Probably not. They might make sounds of concern when they read that the warming oceans have imperiled the majority of the world’s coral reefs. You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

Democrats in the Senate are finally taking an interest in Supreme Court grifter Clarence Thomas. They want to know if he paid taxes on those unreported gifts, like his luxury RV. I’m so old I remember when this sort of sleaziness had repercussions. Even Richard Nixon had the sense and grace to resign. He set the bar, but it turns out the GOP is competing not in the high jump but the limbo.

The most exasperating thing about dealing with MAGAts is their resistance to facts and logic. Consider this story out of Texas, where a right-winger won a seat on the school board by campaigning on the usual right-wing talking points – well, shouting points in their case – and what happened next.

Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”

But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”

Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”

The floor’s yours.

Song of the Day 5/20: King Willonius, “Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Body”

It’s not exactly life imitating art, more like reality imitating reality TV, but the Catfightin’ Congresswomen of Washington could be the hottest new show in the capital.

In last week’s episode, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Domestic Longhair) told Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Abyssinian) that Crockett couldn’t see through her false eyelashes. Crockett responded by referencing a hypothetical colleague with a “bleach blonde, bad-built butch body.”

This is the AI-assisted internet era, so within hours, Crockett’s tongue-twisting insult fueled a raft of YouTube videos, in various musical styles. Let’s start with a soul tune from Los Angeles comedian King Willonius (real name Willonius Hatcher), who produced it with the help of AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwCcHxbAakw

The phrase spawned several hip-hop remixes of what amounts to a diss track. This one pares it all the way down to the sextuple B.

Naturally, a guy with a guitar wrote a country tune about the incident, but it won’t appeal to MTG fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSPuZpHGrbk

This is by no means a comprehensive survey. For most people politics is entertainment, and America’s smartasses are eager to provide the soundtrack.

DL Open Thread Monday, May 20, 2024

Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, was killed when his helicopter crashed. That should give conspiracy theorists plenty of grist, but analysts agree the effects will be internal, because he was seen as a likely future Supreme Leader. Gee, he seemed like such a swell guy.

It turns out there were outside agitators. The Washington Post reported that “business titans,” meaning rich Jewish guys, pressured NYC Mayor Eric Adams to call the cops on the protesters at Columbia. If you guys are trying to stoke belief in a Vast Jewish Conspiracy, well done. Otherwise, WTF is wrong with you assholes? That story encapsulates the problem Biden has had since Oct. 7: his big donors back Israel while his constituents back Gaza.

Americans are adept at saying one thing and doing another, and nothing illustrates that better than their incessant whining about inflation. Yes, corporate America is gouging its customers, but guess what? Even after adjusting for price increases, Americans just kept buying more, outstripping the growth in their disposable income. But whine on, big electorate, whine on.

SCOTUS scuttling Roe was supposedly the dogs of the GOP finally catching the car. Turns out the car was empty, because despite near-total abortion bans in 13 states and tighter restrictions in another dozen, the number of abortions in the U.S. rose since the decision. This reinforces the theory that it’s not so much about saving babies as fucking over women.

Delaware’s new gun law wasn’t five hours old when attorney Tom Neuberger filed a lawsuit challenging it. He outlines his concerns in an interview with the News Journal’s Esteban Parra. It shows how hard it is to fight gun violence when the courts have stacked the deck in favor of guns.

The floor’s yours.

DL Open Thread: Sunday, May 19, 2024

Brief campaign note.  Was knocking doors for Branden Fletcher Dominguez yesterday, and I was paired with Susan Sander, who just won a seat on the Red Clay School Board.   She’s the real deal!  What an upgrade.

Hey, it’s an open thread, so that’s not a digression…

Ezra Klein: Why Biden Is Losing, And What He Can Do To Change It.  I agree with him that one step is to stop the poll denialism:

It’s not Joe Biden’s poll numbers that worry me, exactly. It’s the denial of what’s behind them.

Democrats need to redefine Trump. “Biden is not running against God,” as Bernie Sanders put it. “He is running against Donald Trump.” A year ago, Democrats were pretty confident than as the possibility of a Trump presidency came closer, voters would realize what they were risking and come home to Biden. That looks less likely with each passing day.

The mistake Democrats keep making about Trump again and again is to assume that the rest of the country will see Trump as they see Trump. But Trump won in 2016 and he came scarily close in 2020; absent the pandemic, he may well have been re-elected.

There are other ways to run against Trump: He cut taxes for rich people and tried to cut Medicaid for poor people. He cut funding for the police before a crime wave and got rid of the National Security Council’s pandemic preparedness group before the coronavirus hit. He told the oil companies to give him a billion dollars because they’d get preferential treatment if he’s re-elected. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, took $2 billion from Saudi Arabia to fund his private equity firm. Trump’s flagrant violations of democratic norms and basic decency often overshadow the banal ways in which he governed, or let others govern, in cruel, stupid and corrupt ways. Right now, the Biden campaign has much more money than the Trump campaign; it should be using it to redefine Trump in the ways that matter to the voters they need.

Discuss.

Rudy Giuliani Gets His Felony Indictment.  Fittingly, during his 80th birthday party:

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was officially served with a felony indictment on Friday night for allegedly interfering in Arizona’s 2020 presidential election. Officials with the office of Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes served Giuliani in front of nearly 100 guests at his 80th birthday celebration in the Palm Beach, Florida area.

The New York Post reported early Saturday morning that the former personal attorney to Donald Trump was in high spirits when he was served around 11 PM on Friday at the Lake Clarke Shores home of GOP consultant Caroline Wren. Prior to being served with felony indictment paperwork, Giuliani reportedly “belted” the song “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra in front of what the Post said was between 80 and 100 guests. Some of the more high-profile attendees of the party were longtime Trump aide Roger Stone and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.

“Some partygoers started screaming and one woman even cried as Giuliani was served,” the Post’s Lydia Moynihan wrote.

Yep. Segregation Academies Still Exist In Alabama:

Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal courts repeatedly ruled against the South’s massive resistance, many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children.

Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.

But across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified — about a dozen — are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often persist as a dividing force.

We had the same thing happen here in Delaware after desegregation.  They were called ‘Christian schools’.   And, yes, de facto vestiges remain to this day.  They shouldn’t get any public funding, but they do.

Great Gut Food.  Hey, I eat lots of these (but no miso in lukewarm water thankyouverymuch).  Perhaps it’s why I’m often referred to as a magnificent chiseled specimen of manhood.

The Burgeoning DE Turf Frederica Empire.   Pretty much everything you need to know.  Except THIS:

Now, academic researchers are conducting higher-quality studies to determine whether PFAS and other chemicals detected in turf samples can end up on athletes and pose a risk to their health.

“I don’t think there’s been nearly enough studies to know,” said Christopher Kassotis, an assistant professor in the Institute of Environmental Health Sciences at Wayne State University who is preparing to conduct a study on whether the chemicals found in turf can affect the endocrine system. “There’s very little work here on human exposure, and that’s certainly a piece of the puzzle when it comes to risk.”

Kyla Bennett, the lead researcher behind the tests in San Diegoand the director of science policy for PEER, said the results are a “red flag,” and larger studies are needed.

But some parents aren’t waiting around for clearer answers.Parvini has lobbied forlocalschool boards in California to use turf fields made without PFAS.In the meantime, he tries to limit his daughter’s playing time on artificial turf fields.

“If they want to use PFAS in microchips, great. My kid doesn’t eat microchips,” he said. “But if they want to use it in artificial turf and my kid is exposed to it 2,070 hours a year, well, what is that doing to her body?”

That’s an article worth reading.  You won’t find it in any Delaware articles cheering the economic development boon that may be forthcoming in Frederica.

What do you want to talk about?

DL Open Thread Wednesday, May 15, 2024

You can tell Donald Trump has been stung by the fact that, contrary to what pollsters will tell you, he doesn’t have all that many diehard fans. The proof: He issued call after call for his supposed minions to show up at his trial in New York, and was rewarded with crowds in the single digits. So he put out the call for his real minions, the Republican Party’s office-holders. They responded in droves, showing up outside the courthouse to lend their support. The headline says to show they stand with Trump, but really, it’s to do what Stormy Daniels wouldn’t – suck Trump’s metaphorical dick. Trump even gave them a scripte they dutifully followed. It makes me think that, fittingly for a Russian tool, a lot of Trump’s support in of the Potemkin village variety.

Maryland held its primary elections yesterday. Nikki Haley got her now-typical 20% of the Republican presidential vote. But the important story was on the Democratic ticket, where Total Wine owner David Trone got trounced, 54-42, in the Democratic primary for the Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Ben Cardin. Trone spend $60 million of his own money on the race, but saturating voters with ads might have backfired. The Baltimore Sun’s paywalled article says “more than a few voters [said] they got fed up.”

Trump’s offer to oil executives – give me $1 billion and I’ll gut climate regulations – has drawn the attention of Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who’s opening an investigation. His letter to eight oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute in part read:

Media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions.
Mr. Trump’s unvarnished quid pro quo offer is especially troubling evidence in light of recent accounts that the ‘U.S. oil industry is drawing up ready-to-sign executive orders for Donald Trump aimed at pushing natural gas exports, cutting drilling costs, and increasing offshore oil leases in case he wins a second term,'” he wrote, citing Politico. “These preparatory actions suggest that certain oil and gas companies, which have a track record of using deceitful tactics to undermine effective climate policy, may have already accepted or facilitated Mr. Trump’s explicit corrupt bargain.

In the least surprising result imaginable, a miniature poodle won the Westminster Dog Show. The only more likely outcome would have been yet another win for a wire fox terrier, the only breed that’s won more than the 11 victories by poodles of various sizes. The winner was handled by Kaz Hosaka of Greenwood, a longtime top-flight handler who says this was his last year at Westminster.

The floor’s yours.

DL Open Thread Monday, May 13, 2024

A little wake-up call for anyone who thinks putting Republicans in power would help the Palestinians in Gaza: South Carolina lickspittle Lindsay Graham wants Israel to nuke Gaza. It won’t happen, of course, because if they did Jared Kushner would be deprived of all that waterfront real estate.

I’m not saying everyone in MAGA World is a monster, but some jamoke who used to be an aide for Trump released a video of himself giving money to homeless people – except it’s counterfeit money. Here, I’ll let Johnny McEntee force all pregnant women to register with the state. Did I mention that all these people are monsters? I know we’re not supposed to refer to these, um, creatures as non-human, but it would help if they would show any evidence of actually being human. OTOH, the only creatures we ever accuse of being inhuman are … humans.

One sign that brain worms have damaged RFK Jr.’s brain: He’s bragging about having worms in his brain. Of course, “brain worms” isn’t an accurate label for the parasitic infection that left him in his present condition.

Trump wants to cut taxes on billionaires, but does he really need to? Rich Americans already pay a lower rate than working-class people do. And it’s not like he’s a real billionaire anyway.

The floor’s yours.