Morris is too diverse, according to a Republican regent

WHAT THE FUCK? It’s hard to believe that a regent of the University of Minnesota asked this fucking stupid question, but then you notice that it’s a former speaker of the Minnesota house of representatives, a Republican, and it becomes a little less surprising.

Steve Sviggum asks if my university has become too diverse, from a marketing standpoint. Jesus.

His concern, or rather his excuse for his concern, is that two people, two bigots, wrote to him to say that the diversity on the University of Minnesota Morris campus made them uncomfortable and they wouldn’t send their kids here.

Seriously. This is one of the people who controls the pursestrings of my university. He got two letters that he should have instantly shredded, and instead he decided to confront our chancellor with the fact that the Republican bigots of Minnesota have his ear.

Fortunately, Chancellor Ericksen responded calmly and appropriately to such an outrageous assertion.

It’s a good thing she has the job, and not me (not that there’s ever a chance I’d end up in such a position), because I’d have just yelled, “Fuck you, asshole” and scrabbled for something on the desk I could throw at Sviggum.

Weird guy, weird senate race

Pennsylvania politics is taking a twisty and unsavory turn. It seems Oz has a long fascination with drinking urine.

OK, it’s odd and rather woo-wooish (but then we knew he was a quack), but what’s particularly annoying is the lying. Med schools don’t expect you to taste urine. It’s not part of modern medical diagnostics. Historically, it was a test to diagnose diabetes, but Oz is not a centuries-old doctor who might have done such a thing. I like CD’s take: it’s a kink that isn’t going to endear you to the voters, but if you’re doing it at home, it’s not something that would disqualify you for office. If you’re trying to promote it as a tool for better health, though, you’re wrong and you’re a quack.

Flying to Washington state tomorrow

Should I worry?

It’s no secret that Washington state has a white nationalist problem. Among the rugged mountains and towering pines are neo-Nazi groups and one of the largest chapters of a violent white supremacist organization. But there’s one group that has been increasingly and alarmingly connected to these extremists: Washington state’s GOP.

The latest example is a pro-Nazi blogger Greyson Arnold’s affiliation with the state party. According to Federal Election Commission records reviewed by The Daily Beast, the Washington State GOP paid Arnold $821.87 on July 15 for “payroll.”

Arnold runs the far-right Telegram account “Pure Politics,” which traffics in Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, praise of controversial lawmakers, and anti-COVID-containment sentiments. It also has more than 12,000 followers who frequently comment with racist and antisemitic language.

But Arnold himself has said plenty of distressing things. As CNN reported last year, Arnold has advocated shooting refugees, killing undocumented immigrants, and has posted praise for Nazi Germany. He actually once said Adolf Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand.”

Nah, I’m not going to worry any more than usual, because the Republican party is pro-fascist everywhere. It should not be at all surprising anymore that Republicans are finding common cause with Nazis.

Also, I grew up there. I knew people who were exceedingly deplorable; I had good friends of Japanese descent who could tell stories about how their families were mistreated in WWII; I’ve been reading David Neiwert for years (his blog has gone quiet, unfortunately, but he’s now a staff writer for Daily Kos). It’s a great state with some ugly veins of authoritarianism running through it. Also, being dependent on a single major employer, Boeing, for so long, now supplanted by places like Amazon and Microsoft, really enabled a lot of pro-business Republican types.

Violent spasms are never a healthy symptom

That’s what we’re seeing in Ukraine — senseless, vicious attacks on civilian centers to pointlessly satisfy Russian honor.

Tragic and terrible. Also tragic and terrible: take a moment to pity the Russian mothers whose children are dying and rotting in Ukrainian fields. No one wins. It’s all a stupid waste of life.

They’re all liars

Last week, Elon Musk tweeted (you know, the usual forum for high-level diplomacy) a “peace plan” for Ukraine that was simply total surrender and concession to all of Putin’s demands and then some. Then it was revealed that Musk had had a recent phone call with Putin, which I could believe — he’s not a very bright guy, and simply parrots whatever the last person who spoke to him said. Now he denies the phone call, and I can believe that, too. Musk is the kind of ego-driven guy who would claim to have inside info on the plans of powerful people.

Elon Musk has denied the claim he spoke to Vladimir Putin before tweeting a peace plan for the war in Ukraine.

The Tesla CEO’s peace suggestion included Ukrainian territory being handed over to Russia.

Eurasia Group subscribers were sent a report in which Ian Bremmer wrote that Mr Musk told him that the Russian president was “prepared to negotiate” if the Crimean peninsula remained in Russian hands, Vice reported.

Other conditions included that Ukraine retains permanent neutrality and that Ukraine recognises the Russian annexation of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

Mr Bremmer reports that Mr Musk said that Mr Putin told him that these targets would be reached “no matter what”.

Basically, I can shrug and believe he said things that have little basis in reality, because he is a glad-handing liar. Once you accept that, you can understand the motivation behind all the noise that comes out of his mouth.

I’ll also easily believe that Putin is a liar. The people who have the most experience with Russian neighborliness will tell you that.

Baltic leaders have long argued that Western sanctions adopted in 2014 after Putin illegally annexed Crimea showed the West’s lack of resolve in confronting the Russian president over his land grab. European leaders seemed to think the Baltics were so traumatized by Soviet occupation that they could not be objective.

“Jokingly, you know, we call this ‘West-splaining,’” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said. The West’s message, he said, was that “after 50 years of occupation, it’s understandable that you would have trust issues with a country that occupied you.”

“For us in the Baltics, it all boils down to this notion of appeasement: that basically we can appease Russia,” Landsbergis continued. “For us, it was always very clear, black and white. If a country is eager to cross another country’s border, they’re an aggressor and they will do that again, if they’re not stopped. And they have not been stopped.”

“That notion is quite pervasive, this notion of peaceful settlement with an aggressor,” he added. “I’m really hopeful that it’s now waning.”

Don’t trust imperialist countries. It’s that simple.

I think Central and South America are all clear on that, too.

The prize for coolness under pressure goes to…

Ariel Elias, a comedian who was doing a comedy set in front of a few MAGA rednecks who didn’t like what she was saying and threw a whole can of beer with great force at her. She scooped it up and drank it while mocking them. I was impressed.

It’s got to be tough to be doing comedy in a bar attended by deplorables. I did notice, though, that when she called for support, the overwhelming majority of the crowd cheered in her favor — the few MAGAts must be feeling isolated and alone, which is good.

Also good: the beer-flinger is being prosecuted for his actions.

Conservatives really hate education

Let’s start calling students names.

“College doesn’t look like it’s fun anymore. I mean, have you seen how miserable and how miserable-looking a lot of the students are?

“They’re deliberately like ugly-fying themselves. You see them on TikTok. They’re out of shape, they’re asexual. They’re rejecting the truth in beauty.

“They all look like rejects from a loony bin. I’d steer clear of college, too.”

I’ll have you know that all of my students are brilliant, beautiful, and sane. (Near as I can tell — some of them are just black squares on Zoom.)

Keep in mind that the guy talking about students being ugly-fied is Greg Gutfeld.

None of my students look that awful.

Another Crimean war

No good comes of war, and now the Ukraine war is expanding to the south. Ukrainians blew up a significant transport route between Russia and Crimea.

A giant explosion ripped across the Crimean Bridge, a strategic link between mainland Russia and Crimea, in what appeared to be a stunning blow early Saturday morning to a symbol of President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to control Ukraine.

The damage to the bridge, which provided a road and rail connection from Russia to the Ukrainian peninsula the Kremlin illegally annexed in 2014, marks another serious setback to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine by disrupting a crucial supply route.

I had to look up the Kerch Bridge to see where it was.

No matter how this war ends up, Putin has to regret having picked a fight there. That’s a lesson for every country — no matter how big and tough you are, and how confident you are in attacking a smaller country, you might end up paying a greater cost than you expected. We should have figured that out in Vietnam (I doubt that we did), and Putin’s imperial ambitions are getting a serious reality check.

Imagine a Senator Herschel Walker…

If this were a soap opera, I’d call it unbelievable. Herschel Walker, senatorial candidate from Georgia, has been accused of paying for a woman’s abortion. He denies it.

“This is a flat-out lie – and I deny this in the strongest possible terms,” Walker said in a statement posted on his verified Twitter account in which he called the report a “repugnant hatchet job” and criticized what he described as the Daily Beast’s reporting tactics.

“Now, they’re using an anonymous source to further slander me,” Walker said. “They will do anything to hold onto power. It’s disgusting, gutter politics.”

How dare they. HE DOESN’T KNOW HER, he shrieks.

And now a new revelation:

A woman who said Herschel Walker paid for her 2009 abortion is the mother of one of his children, according to a new report Wednesday, undercutting the Georgia Republican Senate candidate’s claims that he didn’t know who she was.

The Daily Beast, which first reported Monday on the abortion, said it had agreed not to reveal details of the woman’s identity to protect her privacy. But Walker, who has expressed support for a national abortion ban without exceptions, vehemently denied the story, calling the abortion allegation a “flat-out lie,” threatening a lawsuit against the outlet he has yet to file and saying he had no idea who the woman might be.

So on Wednesday night, The Daily Beast revealed that the woman – who was not named – was so well known to Walker that, according to her, they conceived another child years after the abortion. She decided to continue on with the later pregnancy, though she noted that Walker, as he had during the earlier pregnancy, expressed that it wasn’t a convenient time for him, the outlet reported.

To be fair, it’s entirely possible that he has completely forgotten who the mothers of his children are — there are so many of them, and it’s not as if he has invested much time with his families, even his own children seem to dislike him, and he seems to be a remarkably stupid person. Which all makes him the perfect Republican candidate!

For all that, it’s more than conceivable that Walker wins his race against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. That remains Republicans’ hope — with faith placed in Walker to run the same game-plan that got him to this point.

Right. He’s a good representative for the party of conservative values and personal responsibility, which has somehow morphed into the theocratic party that loves a guy who, after every scandal, defends himself with the assertion that he’s a Christian.