Gotta admit, Al Franken is one hard-hitting advocate

More like this, please. Al Franken interrupted a Republican apologist when she started to lie, and reduced her to stammering incoherence by simply demanding that she back up her claims of historical legitimacy for packing the court with incompetents by citing examples and evidence. This is how we have to deal with Republican dishonesty, by hitting back hard.

“I disagree with what the chief justice said. The legitimacy of the court was undermined when they wouldn’t take up Merrick Garland. And you’ll remember that [then Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell said it was because it was during an election year. And you remember Lindsey Graham pledging that if a vacancy came open during an election year in 2020, that he wouldn’t vote for — they wouldn’t take up a nominee,” Franken said.

“They’ve stolen two seats: The one that Merrick Garland wasn’t given a hearing for and the one that [Amy Coney Barrett] was, where she was seated a week before the election. That destroyed the legitimacy of the court.”

Acosta tossed it to CNN political commentator Alice Stewart — who worked on Mike Huckabee’s campaign when he ran for president in 2015 and was also a campaign communication director for Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann at various times — saying that the Court has become “titled to the far right.”

“To throw some accuracy in what Al said there, Merrick Garland was held up because we had divided government, a Democrat in the White House, and Republicans in control–,” she started, only to be interrupted and corrected by Franken.

“That’s not what McConnell said,” Franken argued. And the back-and-forth arguing began.

“But that’s the way historically this has been. When you’re in close to an election year and you have divided government–,” Stewart said, only to be interrupted by Franken’s, “No, that’s not the way it’s been historically done. Tell me when this happened before. Tell me when it happened before.”

“Well,” she started, “Merrick Garland is certainly one. When there’s a–”

Again, Franken, popped in. “No, before Merrick Garland. Tell me when it happened before. You said this is what happened historically. Tell me when it happened before.”

“I can’t give you an exact example when this happened in the past,” she answered.

“You know why you can’t? Because it hasn’t happened before,” Franken shot back.

She attempted to divert the subject, but he wouldn’t let her.

“This is total hypocrisy,” a fired-up Franken said. “And actually, I’m surprised that you’re claiming this, and you can’t come up with an example because there is none.”

She tried to respond and get back to what she called “the point of the conversation,” but Franken stepped on that with a boisterous “This is the point!”

This is a general problem with conventional rules for debate. There’s a habit of insisting that both sides must get equal, uninterrupted time, even when they start spinning out absurd lies — don’t let them do that. If they make a claim, insist that they must back it up. Don’t give them 5 minutes to compound their lies into a tangle that will take hours to un-knot, which is what they want.

Yeah, he was rude. Ruder still is the privilege that gives liars unquestioned opportunities to make stuff up.

Optimism must be tempered with realism…and dread

Portrait of Victory!

Tragedy and waste, that’s all anyone will get out of the war in Ukraine. It seems to have entered a phase where exhausted, demoralized Russians get to run away.

In the end, the Russians fled any way they could on Friday, on stolen bicycles, disguised as locals. Hours after Ukrainian soldiers poured into the area, hundreds of Russian soldiers encamped in this village were gone, many after their units abandoned them, leaving behind stunned residents to face the ruins of 28 weeks of occupation.

“They just dropped rifles on the ground,” Olena Matvienko said Sunday as she stood, still disoriented, in a village littered with ammo crates and torched vehicles, including a Russian tank loaded on a flatbed. The first investigators from Kharkiv had just pulled in to collect the bodies of civilians shot by Russians, some that have been lying exposed for months.

Russia has announced that they are regrouping in the face of the Ukrainian surge.

Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the north-east of the country has inflicted an extraordinary defeat on Moscow, prompting the Russian army to pull back thousands of troops after suffering a series of battlefield defeats.
Ukraine appears to have regained control of the two key cities of Kupiansk and Izium after a major counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in recent days, after wrongfooting Russian forces with a much-publicised Ukrainian southern offensive to distract Russia from the real one being prepared in the Kharkiv region.
Photos published by the Ukrainian security forces showed troops raising the national flag in Kupiansk, an important logistical hub for Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, where rail lines linking Russia to eastern Ukraine converge and which, in the last months, has supplied Russian forces in north-eastern Ukraine.

Nobody has won. Russia is spasming and continues to rain missiles on civilian targets. Ukraine has retaken narrow strips of land that were theirs to begin with. Putin must react savagely to this embarrassment; there are whisperings of discontent among the militaristic factions in his country, and he will be deposed if he loses his strongman reputation. I want Ukraine to win, to be honest, but let’s be willing to face the facts and see every bloody step forward as an action that will demand more blood.

Let’s bash Oz some more

It’s fun! He is such a bad doctor and a dishonest candidate. He also tortures and kills puppies. That’s almost comically villainous.

In 2004, complaints about Dr. Mehmet Oz’s dog experiments were cited in a report from an internal investigation into allegations of poor animal care made by Dr. Catherine Dell’Orto, a post-doctoral veterinarian. See also individual reports of Dr. Oz’s dog experiments. According to the report, “highly invasive and stressful experiments” on dogs were performed without a “humane end point.” AWA violations included a litter of whelped puppies killed by painful cardiac injection:

“The screams of these puppies could be heard through closed doors. All of these puppies, lying in a plastic garbage bag, were killed in the presence of their litter mates.”

Subsequent applications for grants to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by Dr. Oz have been denied. In 2004, Columbia paid $2,000 in fines to the USDA.

I have to make a significant caveat to that accusation, though. Almost all the sources are from PETA, and PETA is not trustworthy. I haven’t been able to find a source outside PETA for the claims (there is an NYT article from that time, buried deep behind a paywall), but that NIH cut his support is a more significant fact…but on the other hand, a $2000 fine is kind of insignificant. I also have no idea what the purpose of the experiments was — why was a TV doctor doing that?

True confession: I’ve euthanized puppies in the past (not in over 40 years, though!), and why would you do it with cardiac injection, and why would you do it en masse? Something is wrong there. Ask a vet who has to put animals to sleep — you do it quietly, respectfully, and with a sedative injection that lets them die peacefully. Screaming animals means you’re doing it wrong.

But then, Oz has always been an ethical nightmare. He has been featured in the AMA Journal of Ethics, and not positively.

Columbia’s affiliation with Oz had been under fire long before he launched a surprise Senate run in late November. In 2015, when Oz testified before the Senate about his endorsement of shady “miracle” cures, a group of some of the country’s top medical professionals sent Columbia a blistering letter demanding the renowned medical school fire the Oprah-blessed daytime star.

“Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops,” the physicians wrote. “Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”

Columbia University has also severed all ties with him (rather murkily, unfortunately).

After years of criticism, Columbia University Medical Center has finally—quietly—cut public ties with celebrity doctor turned Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz.

The acclaimed teaching hospital, where Oz held senior positions like vice chair of surgery and director of integrated medicine for years, stripped his personal pages from their website in mid-January.

I had no idea Columbia was in Pennsylvania, though.

Can we all forget Oz after the November elections? I look forward to that.

The daily Oz skewering

It’s not really going to be a daily event here.

But jeez, Oz provides a target-rich environment.

Can I just say that the claim that “life begins at conception” is sufficiently absurd in all of its particulars that anyone who says it needs to be laughed off the stage? Life doesn’t “begin” at conception, and the question is not whether the focus is on life (it’s not, or these same people would be against the death penalty and eating meat or any living thing at all), it’s about when human personhood begins, which is a much fuzzier and poorly delimited thing altogether. Except we know it doesn’t happen at conception.

Is demographics destiny?

This is fascinating, and I have no idea what the consequences will be. The populations of many countries are rapidly shrinking, and it defies simplistic explanations.

Is that good? Bad? I don’t know. Reducing the human population is good for the planet overall, but how these countries will respond is an open question. Also, modern capitalism seems to be a gigantic Ponzi scheme that relies on continuous growth — what happens when the base of the pyramid shrinks?

The decline in growth isn’t entirely universal. Some countries continue to expand that population base, largely through the mechanism of immigration. Look at the difference between China and the US!

My grandchildren are going to grow up in a different world than I did. We need to accept the fact of change and prepare to adapt with it.

Dr Oz needs to erase his internet history, it’s just too embarrassing

This could easily evolve into a Daily Dr Oz Gaffe. So much material!

First problem: taking medical advice from a quack.

Second problem: thinking a 15-minute physical could do anything. Physicals are a diagnostic tool, they’re only cheap if they find nothing obviously wrong.

Third problem: who is going to do these physicals? They’re not going to be cheap if they require a highly trained doctor to carry them out. They’re not going to be good if they farm them out to volunteers.

Fourth problem: “festival-like atmosphere”? If I have a health problem, I don’t want to go to a festival. I want it fixed.

Fifth problem: People don’t have a right to health? That promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence was a lie, then. How nice that the Constitution promised us big guns instead.

This is a nothing solution that will only appeal to Republicans who will fixate on the word “cheap”.

Look at a map

Did you know that Philadelphia is in the southeast corner of Pennsylvania? That to the southwest is Delaware, and to the south and east is…New Jersey? I guess Dr Oz was hoping that Pennsylvanians were as ignorant of their geography as he is.

I’ve been vastly entertained by the incompetent campaign of Oz, and the masterful way Fetterman has been ripping him up. This is going to be an example brought up in political science classes for decades to come.

The return of Il Duce

You would think the Republicans, with their immense respect and admiration of everything the Founding Fathers did, would be aware that they did not want a monarch, that Cincinnatus was their ideal, and that Washington was admired for gracefully conceding power and setting a model for future transitions. Yet here they are, pretending that an ex-president has privileges that are in ways greater than those of a sitting president, and obstructing justice that attempts to recover confidential materials that are the property of the nation, not some imperial individual.

It’s never been about the Constitution, or tradition, or the good of the country for these Republicans. It’s always been about power and money.

But now we know. That ex-president, who still has a death grip on the more fanatical fraction of the Republican party, was an opportunist who looted everything he could from the office, either as trophies or for sale or as blackmail material. You would also think that a party of arch capitalists who value property rights above all else would recognize that he did not own these things, they were not his, they were the property of the country, and that he was a criminal thief and traitor. We’re getting a better picture of exactly what he stole.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs, according to people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.

Documents about such highly classified operations require special clearances on a need-to-know basis, not just top-secret clearance. Some special-access programs can have as few as a couple dozen government personnel authorized to know of an operation’s existence. Records that deal with such programs are kept under lock and key, almost always in a secure compartmented information facility, with a designated control officer to keep careful tabs on their location.

And now, of course, Trump’s defense is a crooked judge he appointed who is now abusing the courts to hinder any investigation. This is fascism, plain and simple. Not semi-fascism. Fascism.

“Chinese genocide bill”? Is this an example of expert messaging?

Just so you know, Tom Emmer is an old school conservative Republican who was in the state House for about as long as I’ve lived in Minnesota — he then moved up to the US House to replace Michele Bachmann in 2014, and is currently chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. He’s the guy whose job it is to help elect more Republicans to the House. It just makes it particularly piquant that he went on Fox News to announce that he trusted his candidates to know how to ‘message’ the Republican party position on abortion.

…good luck to them [the Democrats] trying to defend their extreme position. Every one of them voted for what I call the Chinese genocide bill, which would allow abortion up to moments before a child takes its first breath. I think our candidates know how to message that and be just fine in the midterms.

Lead on, Tom Emmer! Your party’s candidates can follow by example and learn how to both misrepresent the law and be achingly racist in the moments before they lose elections.

He emerged out of the white suburbs that ring Minneapolis on the eastern side of the state. He does do a fine job of representing his people, I’m sorry to say.

Congratulations, UK?

So you’ve got a new prime minister, who is a continuation of your last one. Sorry.

In an opinion piece in the Sunday Telegraph, Truss described Britain as stuck with low productivity, high taxes, overregulation and an inability to do big things. “We will break with the same old tax and spend approach by focusing on growth and investment,” she said. She complained of the “heaviest tax burden in 70 years.” She said it was outrageous that there had not been a new water reservoir or nuclear power plant built in a quarter-century.

The disconnect of her words was noted by her critics, who pointed out that Truss didn’t mention that her party has been in power for the past 12 years — and that she has served in the cabinet since 2012 — so these problems were the doings of the Conservatives.

Opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer tweeted: “I’d like to congratulate our next Prime Minister Liz Truss as she prepares for office. But after 12 years of the Tories all we have to show for it is low wages, high prices, and a Tory cost of living crisis. Only Labour can deliver the fresh start our country needs.”

I’ll congratulate you sincerely once you get rid of these damned Tories, just asa we have to get rid of these damned Republicans.