Running the gauntlet

I knew that Ketanji Brown Jackson was a good choice when I saw this illustration:

Not shown is possibly the most important qualification: she isn’t the choice of the Federalist Society.

But I also made a prediction to myself, that the hearings over her appointment were going to be a kangaroo court. Her qualifications don’t matter. She’s black. The Republicans were going to go for blood. Of course they did: Josh Hawley immediately accused her of being soft on pedophiles.

The pedophilia smear put the lie to Republicans’ assurances that they would conduct the hearings with dignity.

“We won’t try to turn this into a spectacle,” proposed Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the committee’s ranking Republican.

“It won’t be a circus,” promised Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.).

Even Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), a regular ringmaster, said “this will not be a political circus.”

Then the clown car rolled in. Republicans used their opening statements to portray Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the high court, as not just a pedophile enabler but also a terrorist sympathizer with a “hidden agenda” to indoctrinate Americans with the “racist vitriol” of critical race theory.

Then the assholes opened their sphincters.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) scolded Jackson, a former public defender, for the way she represented “people who have committed terrorist acts against the United States,” saying her “zealous advocacy has gone beyond the pale.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) seemed to be trying to associate the nominee with a host of evils in an inchoate tirade about “anarchists, rioters and left-wing street militias,” the “breakdown of society,” and “Soros prosecutors” who “destroy our criminal justice system from within.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), the final Republican to speak, accused Jackson of providing “free legal services to help terrorists get out of Gitmo and go back to the fight,” supporting “the radical left’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court” and harboring a “hidden agenda … to let violent criminals, cop killers and child predators back to the streets.”

A further prediction: in the final vote, the Republicans will be in lockstep to deny a highly qualified person a seat on the court.

We really need to destroy that political party. Those named Republican senators above, and many more, are a national disgrace, every one of them.

They’re indoctrinating school children? How horrible!

It is most peculiar to read an article deploring the use of propaganda in Russian schools. I agree that this practice is sad and dishonest and intended to mislead and miseducate a whole generation…but this is the United States of America.

Russia’s education minister, Sergey Kravtsov, openly described schools as central to Moscow’s fight to “win the information and psychological war” against the West. At the same time, Russia has imposed laws against spreading “fake” news or “discrediting” the Russian armed forces — prompting many journalists and activists to leave Russia.

The country’s Internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, also ordered media outlets to delete reports using the words “invasion” or “war” and only rely on official government sources, which call the Ukraine war a “special operation.” Russian state TV removed all entertainment shows from its programming, filling the broadcasts with propaganda-filled talk shows and state-vetted news.

On March 3, Kravtsov said more than 5 million children across Russia watched a lesson called “Defenders of Peace.” It’s part of a government-produced series broadcast online in schools or given to teachers in the form of a slide show for mandatory lessons. The series includes other episodes, including “Adult Conversation About the World,” all pushing Putin’s historical revisionist speeches justifying the Ukraine invasion.

I grew up having to recite a pledge of allegiance every morning. There are flags everywhere. Go to a baseball game, and someone is going to sing our awful national anthem, and you better stand up for it. Put your hand over your heart and look reverent, damn it. GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Remember the blacklist, when you could lose your livelihood for even once attending a communist party meeting? Remember when a television show featured the Tulsa Massacre, and everyone was saying, “What? That was a real historical event?” We had a few generations grow up with the mythologizing of the westward expansion, cowboys & Indians, and the cowboys were always the good guys who shot ‘redskins’ without remorse. Hey, we’ve still got athletic teams that promote ethnic slurs.

In the 1940s, Bugs Bunny was a propaganda tool, a cartoon rabbit who humiliated little yellow bucktoothed ‘Japs’, while in the real world we herded people of Japanese descent into concentration camps.

Our schools dutifully taught that Columbus was a brave explorer who sailed the oceans blue in 1492, glossing over the fact that he enslaved the people he met, murdered them, chopped off their hands, etc. The American Revolution was a noble effort to bring liberty to the people…except for the ones who had the wrong color of skin. Any effort to counter the white-washed version of history taught in the schools is met with near-hysterical opposition — Google the 1619 Project to see what I mean.

I agree that it is disgraceful that Putin is erasing history and lying to schoolkids, but before you get high and mighty about it, look to your classrooms at home.

Republicans grasping at children give me the creeps

Hey, remember Matt Shea? He’s the Republican politician who proposed splitting Washington state in two, and further, wanted to name the new state “Liberty”. He’s a caricature of a far right conservative.

Also, he dropped out when the more rational people of Washington noticed that he was nothing but a provocateur who kept getting tangled up with armed insurrectionists, so he’s no longer in office, fortunately.

Shea was a longtime far-right legislator in the Washington House of Representatives until 2020, when he opted not to run for reelection after a report concluded that he’d engaged in domestic terrorism — the result of his involvement in the standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife refuge.

Shea, who the report found had been involved in several armed stand-offs, is also known for his support of a separatist 51st state movement, and for authoring a document, “Biblical Basis for War,” that included steps for killing non-believers (Shea is Christian).

You might be wondering what he’s up to now. He’s in Poland, where he seems to have kidnapped 62 Ukrainian children.

Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right Republican who was found by a House-commissioned investigation to have planned and participated in domestic terrorism, is in a small town in Poland with more than 60 Ukrainian children, trying to facilitate their adoption in America.

Shea has said his group helped rescue 62 children and their two adult caregivers from an orphanage in Mariupol, the city in southeastern Ukraine that has been bombarded by Russian forces.

No one is actually calling it kidnapping yet — they’re accepting, more or less, Shea’s claim that he “rescued” them. Somehow I doubt that.

But international agencies say, with the chaos and confusion of war, now is not an appropriate time for international adoptions from Ukraine. And Shea’s presence, and the lack of information surrounding the American group he’s with, has raised concerns among some residents of Kazimierz Dolny, the small Polish town where the children are staying at a hotel-guesthouse.

“I asked him many times, ‘What are you going to do with these children?’ and he told me that it’s not my business,’” Weronika Ziarnicka, an aide to the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said of Shea. “I got the feeling in my gut that something’s wrong with this guy; he didn’t want to tell me his last name.”

Shea claims he’s doing this on behalf of a Texas adoption agency. It’s a bit dodgy.

Loving Families and Homes for Orphans appears to have a website, but it is nonfunctional.

The group, based in Fort Worth, registered with the Texas secretary of state in 2018. No such group is registered as an adoption agency with the Texas Department of Health and Human Services. The group is also not registered with the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity, the group that oversees American agencies involved in international adoption.

I imagine there are many Ukrainian families who have sent their children out of the country to avoid the terrors of war. Imagine doing that for your kids and then discovering that they’d been scooped up by some fanatical ideologue and shipped off to Texas to be stolen by Western conservative Christians — we don’t even know that these are orphans at this point.

Artur Pomianowski, the mayor of Kazimierz Dolny, said in a post on Facebook that he’d visited the children and they are safe and being well cared-for. He also said the “case is being investigated and clarified by the relevant authorities” and that the kids would not leave Kazimierz Dolny without consent of the authorities.

“I do not know what Matt Shea and his friends are doing here around children,” Pomianowski said in an email. “Mr. Shea and his friends have given us some contradictory information and, for that reason, it is difficult for us to trust them.”

That’s putting it mildly.

In related news, Matt Shea’s old buddy, Ammon Bundy, is also in the news, and it’s about a child. Bundy is making terrorist threats against a hospital in Idaho, which has responded by going into lockdown and rerouting patients. He is trying to get a baby out of the hospital.

The baby was temporarily removed from from family custody last Friday after officials determined the 10-month-old was “suffering from severe malnourishment” and at risk of injury or death, according to a statement from police in the city of Meridian near Boise.

The baby’s parents had refused to let officers check on the child’s welfare after the family canceled a medical appointment, the police statement said.

I don’t think either Matt Shea or Ammon Bundy ought to ever be trusted with the welfare of any children anywhere, yet there they are. I don’t even understand why these horrible people are still running free, let alone why they have the privilege of claiming they’re working in the interests of children.

We must preserve the purity of our essence

Chilling. Putin is decrying the influence of the degenerate West, with their “foie gras, oysters, and gender freedom”, but the most terrible line is this one: “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion, and readiness to respond to any challenges.” Uh-oh. “Purification” is a scary word. The dictator of Russia is talking about cleaning house — here come the purges, in response to his embarrassment in Ukraine.

That is exactly the sentiment that resonates with our authoritarian right wing. If only we could end gender freedom and purify the American people, we would be stronger! The white supremacists, like Nick Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, are eating this stuff up. You know you’re way out on the fringe when even a dumbass like Herschel Walker is backing away from you.

OMG, they’ve also lost wacky conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez! What next? Will Ben Garrison say something nice about a Democrat?

Now here’s a political nightmare for you

This bozo, a right-winger running for US Congress from Minnesota, made a stunning proposal last year.

What is it with Republicans who can’t get support for their bad ideas deciding to split states so they can get a majority somewhere, anywhere? This idea doesn’t even make sense from their selfish perspective: those regions of the state already elect Republican representatives, and they’d be merging with a Republican state, so they wouldn’t gain anything in the Senate.

I presume that a more politically savvy Republicon took Mr Munson aside and explained how stupid this idea was, since it never got anywhere.

Good news from outer space!

How about if we just send them all to live on the ISS?

I didn’t even know that we had an astronaut on the International Space Station, but we did, and the good news is that the Russians won’t be leaving him there.

Roscosmos, the Russian state space agency, has announced that they will not be stranding United States astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the International Space Station (or ISS) While this would seem like a bizarre statement to have to make (via the Russian state-owned news outlet TASS, no less) even just a few months ago, this is the world we now live in. Vande Hei, a former US Army officer and highly experienced astronaut and engineer, has been aboard the International Space Station since April 2021. Last year, he had his assignment extended in duration for another six months, and recently broke the record for the longest stay in space by an American astronaut. However, mounting tension between Russia and well, a whole lot of other countries in the world, led to some doubt whether the plan for Vande Hei to leave the station via Russian transport would be honored.

Of course, we all knew they’d let him go. It’s not as if Russia is the kind of country that would murder astronauts or blow up babies, after all. Well, maybe they’d do the latter, but only because mass graves are easier to ignore than dead astronauts drifting through space.

But that’s not what caught my eye about this particular article. Apparently, the author dislikes Elon Musk about as much as I do.

The International Space Station was launched in 1998 as a five-part collaborative effort by the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and a conglomerate of European nations. For the 23 years it has been in operation, it has been a marker of relatively benevolent international cooperation and goodwill. Unfortunately, we live in an increasingly bizarre world where the planet’s richest man (whose best long-term idea has been “a subway, but real fast”) uses social media to challenge the President of Russia to single combat. For the record, an estimated three million refugees have fled Ukraine during the ongoing invasion by Russian forces, while Elon Musk makes bear and flamethrower jokes about it.

As a true gesture of good will, I suggest we let Musk take Mark Vande Hei’s place.

That’s how much smug costs, I guess

Until recently, Congress had a mask mandate, and if you showed up without a mask, the first time they’d hit you with a $500 fine…the second and subsequent times, it shoots up to $2500. Guess who refused to wear a mask?

Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Rather than just putting on a mask, she decided to stand up for her rights and refused to wear one or to pay the fines. Except she decided to sue to have the fines revoked. Guess what? She lost.

All those fines added up to more than her yearly salary of $174,000 (she’s grossly overpaid), so we basically got her ‘services’ for free.

You get what you pay for. Or in this case, a bit less.

I support the Minneapolis teachers’ strike

Families have struggled for the last few years with pandemic issues, and you’d think everyone would by now realize how important schools are to both parents and kids. We should be in agreement that we should provide more support to public schools and their staff, and not be trying to cheap out on an obviously indispensable service. That’s what we’ve been trying to do, though, and now it’s going to bite some communities in the butt. Teachers in Minneapolis went on strike yesterday.

Their demands are reasonable. They primarily seem to be about giving support staff a living wage.

The union wants Minneapolis Public Schools to raise the starting salary for educational support professionals from about $24,000 to $35,000. More than 1,500 educational support professionals work for the district, according to the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. They help with transportation, language translation, one-on-one assistance for kids with special needs, and before- and after-school programs, among other things.

Union leaders are also seeking class-size caps, increased mental health support and “competitive salaries” for teachers, noting that their compensation lags many districts in the Twin Cities metro area. The average salary for Minneapolis Public Schools teachers is about $71,500, according to state data.

Let’s be fair and look at the other side’s situation.

At a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Minneapolis Superintendent Ed Graff said proposals from the union and district are “still very far apart.” The total cost of the union’s current proposals is “an additional $166 million annually above what we’ve already budgeted for,” he said.

I can believe that they did not budget adequate funds for the work they expected to be done, but that is not an excuse! That is a management problem, not a worker problem. When we had a contractor do some work on our house a few years ago, we did not have the option to tell him after he was done that “you did $10,000 worth of work, but we only budgeted $5,000 for the job”. That’s not how any of this works. It is the teacher’s job to teach, it is management’s job to fund the work they expect to be done.

I do have some sympathy for the school superintendent. It’s not easy to get support for schools because we’re coping with a 19th century solution to funding schools (property taxes) that promotes inequality and makes life most difficult for the poorest districts. However, the solution is to change the system, not to gouge cash out of the lowest-ranked workers.