Franken is out.

His resignation is a big loss for liberals. He was a good senator, he was a sharp critic of Republican sleaze, he was hard-working and attentive to his constituents. I would have happily kept electing him for term after term. I liked him personally.

However, it would also be a loss if he hadn’t resigned. How effective could he be at criticizing sleaze with this black mark hanging over his head? How well could he continue to do his job while under a pointless investigation that the Republicans, as is their wont, would never allow to come to a conclusion? His offenses were real offenses that needed to be addressed, even if they weren’t as severe as those of Borris Miles (a Democrat in the Texas Legislature), or nowhere near the repellent behavior of Roy Moore or Donald Trump. It’s all got to be cleaned up and out.

There is one way to turn this into a positive gain, though. The Democrats have to wake up and walk the walk, and be strong in demanding ethical, responsible behavior from their representatives. Not only would it make for better government, but it would be a pragmatic step toward strengthening their electoral coalition. Let the Republicans have the bigots and racists and Nazis; Democrats should do right by women. I know who I’d rather have on my side.

And while they’re at it, take pride in being the party of minorities and immigrants and the oppressed. Build a platform for the emerging demographics in this country.

And while I’m dreaming, could the Democrats be the party of labor again? If we want to improve the economy, having a party that actually supported unions would be a phenomenal development. This would build an unstoppable base.

Nah, these are the Democrats. They’ll find a way to fuck it up, probably by continuing to pander to the elite donor class, just like the Republicans.

Here we go: arbitrary provocation.

President Donald Trump has announced that the US formally recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and will begin the process of moving its embassy to the city, breaking with decades of US policy.

“I have determined that it is time to officially recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” Trump said in a televised speech on Wednesday.

Trump plans to announce tomorrow that the US embassy to Israel is being moved to Jerusalem.

Donald Trump appeared on the verge of formally recognising Jerusalem as the “capital of Israel”, in a move that would upend decades of US presidential diplomacy and could trigger unrest across the Middle East.

WHY? No country on Earth has their embassy in Jerusalem. It’s recognized as very delicate bit of diplomacy — all the Islamic nations, including both Iran and Saudi Arabia, are united in their condemnation of such a move, and it would be nothing but a pointless provocation.

Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian legislative council, called the planned relocation “a very reckless and dangerous act from the side of the US president”.

Speaking from Ramallah, he told Al Jazeera that such a move would not “take into consideration what it means to 1.6 billion Muslims, to 2.2 billion Christians, and to 360 million Arabs”.

“It will create a very serious reaction and destabilise the region – and definitely destabilise the situation in Palestine itself,” he added.

“If President Trump proceeds with moving the embassy, he will be killing completely any future American role in any future peace process.”

It gains us nothing to move the embassy, but it will inflame the region and trigger more violence.

It’s almost as if he’s looking for a magic switch he could flip to generate international incidents to distract from the corruption and criminality he’s fomenting at home.

I don’t care if they call themselves “mavericks” or “moderates”, scratch a Republican and you’ll find a slimy shitweasel.

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are, together, richer than the half of the population of the United States. Bezos was the fortunate recipient of an abrupt surge in the value of Amazon stock that has given him a net worth of over 100 billion dollars. Which makes this comment particularly appropriate:

One of the best soundbites I’ve heard about modern economics is (paraphrased)) “It’s not possible to earn a billion dollars. It is possible to steal a billion dollars.”

There is nobody smart enough, hardworking enough, trained enough and dedicated enough to earn a billion dollars without leveraging corrupt systems and exploiting people.

The poverty threshold in America is $11,490 for one person. If someone has a billion dollars, that is 87,032 times the poverty line.

It’s possible for someone to be twice as smart as another worker. It’s possible for them to be four or five times as hardworking. It’s possible for one person to have ten times the training of another person. So if you have one person that is half as smart, a fifth as hardworking, and a tenth as trained, they should reasonably earn one percent of the other. That’s the very outside figure. But anyone who takes in more than a million dollars per year did not earn that, they stole it. They found a vulnerable system to exploit or they found a group of people to cheat. Maybe they did it legally. Maybe they paid someone to make it legal to do that. It happens. But “earn”? Actually -deserving- that much money because of their merits and efforts? No.

I don’t mind some inequities in wealth — I buy into capitalism just enough to think that a motivating reward system for human behavior is a good thing — but we’re well beyond what is fair or reasonable. I can live with some people making a million dollars a year, but only if we’re also making sure that no one has to live in rank poverty. But someone “earning” billions while huge numbers can barely keep food on the table, can’t afford rent, can’t go to a doctor when they need to, and their children have no opportunities for a good education…that is an obscenity.

James O’Keefe is the sleaziest conservative operator ever. His organization hired a woman to lie and pretend to have been in a sexual relationship with Roy Moore when she was 15 in a failed attempt to sting the Washington Post. They failed because the newspaper did what journalists are supposed to do: they checked her story out.

In the course of standard background research—with which O’Keefe and his organization are, apparently, unfamiliar—reporters discovered holes in Phillips’ story. The company she had named as her employer had no record of her, she had a cell phone number with an Alabama area code despite saying she had last lived there in 1992, and a GoFundMe page published in May under her name had asked friends for money so that she could move to New York “to work in the conservative media movement to combat the lies and deceipt [sic] of the liberal MSM.”

When confronted by Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen about the GoFundMe page and other inconsistencies in her story—an exchange that was recorded on video—Phillips stated that she had previously attempted to work for conservative website The Daily Caller and that she was not working for any conservative organizations with the intent of sabotaging the paper. Phillips, who then left the meeting, was spotted entering the Westchester offices of Project Veritas on Monday, where O’Keefe refused to say whether she was employed at the non-profit, which purports to “investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct.”

It purports to investigate those things using “corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud and other misconduct”. All delivered with maximum incompetence, which O’Keefe has demonstrated in every one of his little projects. Everyone associated with him has emerged covered in slime, but the Republicans keep supporting him. Even Donald Trump donated to “Veritas”, but then, he’s a bumbling slime monster himself.

By the way, I should mention that O’Keefe also dragged down a University of Minnesota Morris alumnus, Joe Basel, who I bumped into a few times, and who was involved with O’Keefe’s break-in to Mary Landrieu’s office.

Another was Mr. Basel, 24, the co-founder of a conservative publication at the University of Minnesota, Morris, that features headlines like “Third World Countries Need Sweatshops” and “I Hate Che Guevara T-Shirts.”

Our conservative alternative paper has long been a source of embarrassment here.

But the most despicable thing about this latest example is that it was an attempt to smear the women who have stepped forward to honestly accuse Roy Moore — it’s a blatant effort to silence and harm victims of sexual abuse. For shame.

There is no shame if you’re a Republican, though. For his repulsive bungling, O’Keefe gets paid $317,000 per year.

Joe Basel has gone on to be a conservative political consultant in Texas, and is running an organization called the American Phoenix Foundation, which includes an “Investigative Journalism program” and a “Journalism Training program”. There are never any prices to be paid for being a bumbling conservative criminal and professional douchebag.

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Look at O’Keefe stonewalling when asked a few questions about his attempted hoax.

Trump, supposedly honoring Indian military service, can’t help taking a racist snipe at Elizabeth Warren.

Trump, while remarking on the age and achievements of some of the veterans, known as code talkers, took the chance to mock the Massachusetts Democrat.

You were here long before any of us were here, Trump said at the White House. Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.

You’d think this would be one kind of event where our president could show a little dignity and respect — but he doesn’t have a drop of either in him.

It’s more important than ever, they said. We need to subscribe to the staid, sober journalistic outlets to counter the flow of crap, they said. We’ve got to keep the flow of information going — an informed citizenry is the heart of a democracy.

So I’ve gone back and forth on whether I ought to subscribe to the New York Times. It certainly is professional journalism, but I’m still bitter about their weasely “he said, she said” coverage of creationism from ten years ago, and their dishonest backing of the Iraq War through their lying reporter, Judith Miller, and their utterly execrable opinion pages — Friedman? Brooks? Christ.

And then I think about how Donald Trump hates them, which is certainly a point in their favor. And that they do publish some excellent work — Carl Zimmer, for instance. And that yeah, good journalism costs money, and I ought to contribute, not to the corporate edifice that is the NY Times, but to the principle that we ought to support a healthy journalist class for the good of the country.

And then they go and publish yet another of those shitty pieces that seeks to normalize evil, and I say fuck the New York Times. I will not support a rag that is used to polish the status quo.

The piece in question is “In America’s Heartland, the Nazi Sympathizer Next Door”. They’ve moved from banal stories about “Undecided Voter Weighs in on Crap They Don’t Understand” to “Gosh, Trump Voters Are Just Economically Distressed and Not Racist At All” to now, “Nazis Eat at Applebee’s and Go Grocery Shopping, Like You.” It was a story so vapid that the author, Richard Fausset, felt compelled to write another article that basically consists of him shrugging and saying, “I don’t know what the point was”…and the NY Times published that, too.

Honestly, I already knew that Nazis are human beings — horrible, awful, nasty human beings — who eat food and poop and have two arms and no horns and speak words. It’s not as if there is some widespread delusion that fascists are actually demons with wings and horns that needed to be dispelled — that’s the kind of nonsense the Nazis spread about The Jews.

If you want to learn more about the subject of that high profile piece in the big name newspaper, Tony Hovater, do not bother reading the NY Times. There is no depth or insight to it at all. Instead, just listen to Hovater’s wretched podcast on a site called Radio Aryan. Or you could just stop there and note that he’s a ranter on a site called Radio Fucking Aryan, and go no further — you’ve already learned enough.

If you do listen in, though, be prepared to hear a couple of chuckling thugs go on and on about Christian values, those degenerate “trannies”, immigrants and how they hate ’em, Hitler — misunderstood hero, the Holohoax, and The Jew, The Jew, The Jew.

Yes, New York Times, I know there are Nazis next door. You got the emphasis wrong. You completely missed the point. There are a couple of ways you can handle that phrase.

1. There are Nazis next door…they have a nice little house in the suburbs and a wedding registry at Target and oh, what lovely shrubbery.

2. There are NAZIS next door…and they’re promoting a hateful ideology that wants to exterminate their neighbors, and they worship a murderous megalomaniac who tore up the planet with a world war about 80 years ago.

The New York Times chose Door #1. Fuck ’em. Not a penny from me.

There sure has been a lot of screeching about “witch hunts” and “sex panics” lately. All these recent revelations about handsy celebrities and politicians with a poor sense of boundaries aren’t the perpetrators fault, oh no, boys will be boys and we ought to be willing to overlook a few violations of the personal space of mere Playboy pinups — no, the problem is that people have gotten fed up and are willing to speak up and say “NO!”, which makes them all the equivalent of a Witchfinder General.

I disagree. The social mores have always been crystal clear on these behaviors, and we’ve always known that treating women as chattel is what bad guys do, but there has also always been a set of known exceptions: if you’re rich and powerful, or sufficiently brutish, or an ‘alpha male’, it’s been understood that you get to ignore the requirements, especially on certain celebratory occasions, like when you’ve just conquered a village, or achieved a touchdown, or it’s your birthday, or you haven’t had sex in 3 hours. The Witch Hunters aren’t doing anything unfair or unegalitarian, they’re just declaring your exceptions null and void. Now you have to treat everyone at all times with the same respect you expect to be given to your sister, or your bros.

You can smell the desperation oozing off the press. Lazy journalists are already pining for the good old days when you could split the world they were reporting on in two: there were the Movers & Shakers, the powerful people with special rules, and you could do your job by just reporting what they said; and then there was the complex world of everyone else, who had diverse and rather different ideas about what is right and just, who you could just ignore. What mattered was what white men in nice suits with influential positions might say, and your goal as a journalist was to curry favor with them so that they’d give you a nice quote you could use in a story. Right now, those journalists are busy trying to restore the status quo, so they can stop having to work hard to track down facts and evidence and listen to the Great Mob, who are all Witch Hunters.

Saying there’s a sex panic on the grounds that women don’t like having their asses grabbed is the 2017 way of calling women frigid. In the 1950s, the woman who slapped a man’s face for an unwanted grope was mocked for not being sexually open, for being uptight. Now she’s accused of participating in a “sex panic.” But it’s all the same thing across the generations: When women stand up to say “keep your hands off of me” there’s a good chance they’ll be called prudes. Saying there’s a sex panic is a fancy way of saying that women’s bodies don’t completely belong to them the way their cars do. Someone can damage a woman’s car in a very small way, and insurance companies take it seriously and pay for the repair. She owns that car, and has every right to protect it. But if someone grabs her butt without her permission, she needs to lighten up. What is she, a frigid bitch?

In the America of earlier generations, one thing that silenced women who wanted to report unwanted sexual acts was how important it was not to damage a man’s career, his reputation, his family. Was one unpleasant event really enough to cause so much trouble to a respected member of the community, to a breadwinner? The importance of men’s careers has also become a part of the new resistance. After the first Al Franken accusation, Joan Walsh wrote a piece in The Nation in which she urged readers to remember that Franken was “a champion of Planned Parenthood,” and also “a committed feminist,” which was helpful for those of us who didn’t know that committed feminists sometimes—allegedly—jam their tongues down unwilling women’s throats.

What I find odd about this behavior is the contrast with how desperately they’ve been trying to make excuses for the Odious Trump Voter, who must be featured in regular puff pieces that strain to pretend they’re really nice and just economically distressed, rather than poorly informed (by the media!) bigots who have erected the current flimsy and disastrous power structure, because they want to snuggle up to the Trumpians and get those juicy droppings of words for their editorials. But mere women complaining about grabby assholes? Where’s the conduit to power in that? We’re free to dismiss them as witch hunters.

Not all journalists, of course. Goes without saying. But those Beltway Journalists, jesus…just get rid of the whole lot of them. Take a look at Mark Halperin, chief poisoner of all media. Pay attention, too, to the fact that most of our liberal excuses don’t work. He was not a creature of Fox News, which we all know is the homegrown Pravda of American media; he was the Wormtongue of ABC News, working through his pernicious newsletter, The Note, to debase our understanding of politics.

The Note purported to reveal Washington’s secrets. In fact, its purpose was the exact opposite: to make the city, and US politics, appear impossible to understand. It replaced normal words with jargon. It coined the phrase “Gang of 500,” the clubby network of lobbyists, aides, pols, and hangers-on who supposedly, like the Vatican’s cardinals, secretly ran DC. That wasn’t true — power is so diffuse. But Halperin claimed he knew so much more than we did, and we began to believe it.

Once you believe that, it’s not hard to be convinced that politics is only comprehensible, like nuclear science, to a select few. There were those chosen ones — the people who’d flattered Halperin to get a friendly mention in his newsletter, the ones he declared to be in the know — and the rest of us. Halperin wrote about Washington like it was an intriguing game, the kind that masked aristocrats played to entertain themselves at 19th-century parties: Everyone was both pawn and player, engaged in a set of arcane maneuvers to win an empty jackpot that ultimately meant nothing of true importance.

At the same time, The Note made it seem that tiny events — a cough at a press conference, a hush-hush convo between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell in a corridor — held apocalyptic importance. Cloaked in seriousness, with the imprimatur of Peter Jennings’ ABC News, in reality The Note was not news but simple gossip.

We have to boot Trump and his corrupt cronies from power, but nothing is going to change in the long term until we also eradicate the oily sycophants who have been working to concentrate information in the hands of a select few — the Rupert Murdochs and Jeff Zuckers and the other corporate leeches — and they’re busy little bees right now conniving to get the FCC to undermine Net Neutrality. You know why. Because they’re straining to keep the power of information out of the hands of the people they like to disparage as “witch hunters”. Because you know that if the power structure screws you over in the near future — as you know it will — it’s simpler and easier and more profitable to report on the satisfied sighs of the pigs in power than to relay the groans of the masses. You will not be heard. You will be demonized.