At last, a concrete example of “woke”! Poetry.

You may have noticed that Tommy Tuberville was holding up military appointments. We now learn what kind of thing he thinks justifies his dilatoriness.

Tuberville attempted to defend his monthslong blockade by fighting the culture war on “wokeness.”

“Right now we are so woke in the military, we are losing recruits right and left,” he said. “Secretary [Carlos] Del Toro of the Navy he needs to get to building ships; he needs to get to recruiting; and he needs to get wokeness out of our Navy. We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker. It is absolutely insane the direction that we’re headed in our military.”

OH MY GOD. Sailors might hear poetry. Real men don’t read or listen to poetry, or pay any attention to song lyrics. It is not surprising at all that a moron like Tuberville lacks all music or prosody in his brain. Poor man.

Is there hope of justice?

Maybe. This outcome of the January 6 insurrection trials gives me hope.

Former Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, described by a judge as “the ultimate leader” who “was motivated by revolutionary zeal” in organizing members of his far-right group to spark the breach of the U.S. Capitol, was sentenced Tuesday to 22 years in prison, the longest sentence yet among the hundreds convicted of disrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.

Let the punishment match the crime, and I think that’s a good punitive sentence that will discourage others from repeating this escapade. Even better: Tarrio was not one of the stupid goons who smashed windows and pounded on cops and barged into offices — he was a high level officer who stood back, wasn’t even in Washington DC, but incited the stupid goons and fired up the insurrection.

Tarrio, 39, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and obstructing the congressional proceeding meant to confirm the 2020 presidential election as part of a riot that U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly said broke America’s long democratic tradition of peaceful transfers of power. Tarrio was the last of five Proud Boys to be sentenced after all were convicted in May following a 15-week trial.

Tarrio, of Miami, was convicted even though he wasn’t in Washington on Jan. 6. He had been arrested two days earlier for burning a “Black Lives Matter” flag torn down from a D.C. church during an earlier protest in the city following President Donald Trump’s defeat. He was banned from the city as a result.

Who else is now pretending innocence because they didn’t actually swing a stick? Who else was just telling goons to smash things? Maybe that person is going to face a sentence as severe as Tarrio’s. Lock ’em up for a decade or two.

But also, this got me wondering. I don’t know any Proud Boys, have never even met one, and if I did, I’m likely to just turn on my heel and walk away. Do you know any? It’s weird how this tiny, obnoxious fringe group is getting so much attention when what it deserves is revulsion, and how it has been a tiny bit successful in puncturing the stability of the country.

Similarly, who knows a real live Groyper? These are groups with insane, hateful ideologies that have somehow risen high in the popular (or, at least, media) consciousness, and have some strange aversive influence. I mean, seriously, if one of them showed up at a party at my house, they’d get the bum’s rush, and if they wouldn’t leave, I’d be calling the cops. I don’t understand how these people walk in public without getting their shoes spit on constantly.

I learned some Latin this morning

Mark Meadows, the creationist ninny who also happened to be Trump’s chief of staff and self-serving MAGA nut, rushed to testify in an Atlanta court on Monday. He was basically trying to get himself off the hook — I expect a lot of the indicted are thinking about how to get out from under a prison sentence — and his defense was the good ol’ “I was just following orders” excuse. The cute thing about that is that he just passed the buck to the ex-president.

It’s all the more curious, then, that Meadows decided to take the witness stand on Monday and assert that he was merely doing his job as Trump’s chief of staff when he partook in what Atlanta prosecutors call a pressure campaign to flip the vote there. Because in doing so, he’s essentially pointing the finger at his boss.

“He now cannot ever say, ‘I wasn’t doing this for the president, I was acting on my own,’” said Peter Odom, a former prosecutor at the Fulton County DA’s office.

Indeed, Meadows’ entire defense rests upon the idea that he was just doing his job, that his efforts to connect Trump with people who would help to overturn the election was at the direction of the former president himself. It’s precisely that point which Fulton County DA Fani Willis is trying to prove: that Trump was at the center of this entire criminal conspiracy.

Anyway, more important than yet another day of legal maneuvering is that I learned a Latin phrase!

“There’s an ancient legal doctrine: Respondeat superior. It’s Latin for ‘Let the master answer,’” which means that a boss is ultimately responsible if he “directs the agent to do something,” Carlson said.

That’s going to be so useful in the coming months.

Revenge is a dish best served flaming hot with lots of collateral damage

It was a strange detour in the war in Ukraine — the Wagner group, led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, abruptly left the field and started marching towards Moscow. Then Prigozhin equally abruptly gave up and retired to Belarus. I certainly had no idea what was going on, or what politicking was behind the maneuvers. It was clear that Prigozhin had made Putin sweat, briefly, and given Putin’s reputation for dealing brutally with betrayal, it was surprising that his opponent was walking away without a dose of poison or falling out a window.

Well, the price of crossing Putin has been paid. Prigozhin apparently has died, along with the crew and other passengers, in a catastrophic airplane crash.

In one video geolocated by NBC News near the village of Kuzhenkino in Tver Oblast, Russia, what looks like a plane can be seen spiraling down through clouds, trailing smoke behind it. The video, filmed from the ground and posted on social media, shows the apparent jet hurtling toward the ground before crashing and erupting into flames, sending a dark plume of smoke spiraling into the sky.

Another video filmed from a car near the same area shows an eyewitness driving beside a field in which the fiery wreckage of a plane can be seen. Another, graphic and close-up, shows someone inspecting the flaming wreckage in a field and swearing as they come across what appears to be two bodies.

You are clearly paranoid if you think Putin could have anything to do with such a ruthless, violent ‘accident.’

The children were bickering at the kiddie table last night

There was a Republican debate last night. Who cares?

To my surprise, I do. The Republicans are reduced to a cadre of climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, anti-science loons, opportunistic parasites, and Trumpkins. They are irrelevant. Their only strategy for electoral victory is to be as outrageously flamboyant as possible and get votes by fueling the worst elements of society. It’s fine if the loons want to flush themselves down the toilet — it could be a way to concentrate the bad guys before purging the political process.

Sounds great…except what’s happening on the other side. The Democratic choice is now and forever going to be an apparatchik anointed by the party and advances to confront the shambling horde. This is not a way to run a democracy. It’s how you run a bureaucracy. We need change, deep structural change, but you know the Democrats aren’t going to bring it, while the Republicans are going to bring looney autocracy and theocracy.

Sympathy for the state next door

Oh, Wisconsin. The Republicans want to strangle their university system.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers had proposed a $305 million increase for the UW System over the next two school years.

Republican lawmakers instead cut state funding for campuses by $32 million in an effort to defund diversity offices, which they see as a waste of money.

UW-Madison will bear the brunt, losing $7 million, or 44%, of this year’s $16 million cut. The university enrolls about one-third of UW System students. UW-Madison declined to comment on the cut.

Diversity offices are a waste of money? Only if you think only wealthy and middle class white people deserve a university education…which, I will admit, is true to the Republican ethos. Don’t worry, though, they’re dangling a carrot with the promise of restoring the money. All the university has to do is focus on vocational programs and cut all the diversity and equity programs. This is

UW System has a chance to recoup the $32 million budget cut. Officials must present a plan to the Republican-controlled budget-writing committee on how campuses would spend the money on workforce development.

The Regents will receive a preview of the plan in October, said UW System chief finance officer Sean Nelson. Spending will focus on engineering, data, science and nursing programs.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, said the UW System won’t get its money back unless it eliminates diversity and equity programs — an idea UW officials have previously shot down.

“Let’s hope these campuses start by eliminating their unnecessary (diversity, equity and inclusion) positions,” he said in a statement responding to the latest furlough news. “It would be a first step in showing they’re serious about cutting wasteful spending, shoring up their deficits, and working with the Legislature to develop sustainable long-term funding solutions.”

Well, great. My daughter is currently on the job market, and the kinds of jobs she’s looking for are in biomedical computing — so those positions aren’t in immediate danger. But a healthy workplace in academia or industry requires a good balance, and also requires diversity, so this is a long-term threat.

Another long-term problem is that we’ve been starving the universities in Minnesota as well as Wisconsin.

Ten of the 13 universities are projecting deficits this year, too, and many are taking significant action to rein in spending. UW-Oshkosh is laying off 200 employees and mandating furloughs for all other staff. UW-Parkside and UW-Platteville are considering similar measures.

Most campuses are using money from a tuition increase to offset their deficits. The Regents voted earlier this year to increase in-state undergraduate tuition across all 13 universities by about 5%. It was the first time since 2012.

Many campuses are also tapping tuition balances, which is what campuses carry over as their main source of reserves. They’ve been spending down their reserves for more than a decade. UW-Oshkosh, for example, said it expects to deplete its balances by the end of this school year.

“This is not sustainable,” Rothman put it plainly.

Again, this is the Republican agenda. Diversity programs are just the latest crack in the system that they’re hammering on, but make no mistake: the ultimate goal is the destruction of all of higher ed.

All we’ve got are bones

History is ugly. You can dig up things that will horrify you.

Archaeologists in Poland have unearthed the 400-year-old skeleton of a young child buried face-down with an iron padlock on its foot – seemingly to stop its rising from the dead.

The child was buried in the 17th century in the village of Pień near Poland’s northern city of Bydgoszcz, in what seems to have been a graveyard for “abandoned souls” and the poor who could not afford to be buried in a churchyard.

The archaeologists estimate the child was between 5 and 7 years old at death.

OK, dead child who was demonized and buried with a symbol of mistrust. I have to wonder about the pain the family must have felt…although they also found more bodies buried with various vampire accoutrements. Maybe it was a whole blighted family cursed by the religious abuses of their culture?

Thank you, Georgia

The whole carpet began to unravel with a call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensberger, asking him to find 11,780 votes to overturn the presidential election in his state. The carpet was woven well before that, though, with plans made even before the election to cast doubt on any results that went against the desired result of Trump’s victory. These people knew it, they conspired to replace legitimate votes with fraudulent ones, and now they’ve been called to court over it.

  • Donald Trump, former US president
  • Rudy Giuliani, Trump lawyer
  • Mark Meadows, White House chief of staff
  • John Eastman, Trump lawyer
  • Kenneth Chesebro, pro-Trump lawyer
  • Jeffrey Clark, top Justice Department official
  • Jenna Ellis, Trump campaign lawyer
  • Robert Cheeley, lawyer who promoted fraud claims
  • Mike Roman, Trump campaign official
  • David Shafer, Georgia GOP chair and fake elector
  • Shawn Still, fake GOP elector
  • Stephen Lee, pastor tied to intimidation of election workers
  • Harrison Floyd, leader of Black Voices for Trump
  • Trevian Kutti, publicist tied to intimidation of election workers
  • Sidney Powell, Trump campaign lawyer
  • Cathy Latham, fake GOP elector tied to Coffee County breach
  • Scott Hall, tied to Coffee County election system breach
  • Misty Hampton, Coffee County elections supervisor
  • Ray Smith, Trump campaign attorney

They’ve been indicted on racketeering charges by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (quick — has Trump been medically tested for syphilis? That’s how they got Al Capone, you know.)

These charges represent many serious felonies, and it’s not just a pattern of criminal behavior — it’s an overt attempt by the chief executive to undermine the rule of law and commit treason against the Constitution. Invoke the 14th Amendment and kill this guy’s campaign to run for re-election again.

Although, to be sure so far these are just more charges against these awful people, and we’ll have to see if he actually gets convicted. I grew up seeing Nixon getting off scot-free so my confidence isn’t high.

Brace yourself for the flurry of disingenuous defenses to come.