Is Steven King in charge of writing Republican life stories now?

South Dakota highways have an unsavory reputation: long empty stretches of nothin’ lined with occasional farms or a small town, with Republican politicians disregarding the speed limits to race hither and yon, collecting speeding tickets because they’d rather be anywhere but there. It’s a mostly featureless death maze with emptiness between the Corn Palace and Wall Drug. Every once in a while one of the conservative road warriors gets caught, but they happily flaunt the law and get back to buzzing about with impunity. Except maybe this time.

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg (R) might face a little justice, because what he did ought to be in a horror novel, or maybe a Coen brothers movie. I’m going to put it below the fold because it is particularly grisly.

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Twisted Sister twisted

It’s hard to believe, but a conservative politician is now claiming Twisted Sister as an ally.

Jerrod Sessler, a former NASCAR driver running against Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) in the GOP primary discussed Twisted Sister vocalist Dee Snider on his Twitter account.

“Bummed to learn that @deesnider, the man with the perfect song written decades ago about the attack on traditional, conservative American values… ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ is riding the train in the wrong direction. How could it be that he sang for us but now fights for them?” he asked.

Hang on there. The Twisted Sister that the PMRC and various conservatives treated as an abomination that was corrupting the youth is now being cited as a courageous defender of the Right and the Conservative Family? Jesus. Have they even listened to the lyrics of the song?


We’ve got the right to choose and
There ain’t no way we’ll lose it
This is our life, this is our song
We’ll fight the powers that be just
Don’t pick our destiny ’cause
You don’t know us, you don’t belong

Sure. That’s definitely a Republican anthem. Dee Snider is amused.

Poor Republicans. In their dreams, Twisted Sister, Bruce Springsteen, and Rage Against the Machine are all playing at their conventions, because they’re incapable of actually listening to the words.

We’ve come so far now that this has become representative of American family values.

Have you been waiting for Pink Floyd to weigh in on the Ukraine war?

Wait no more. The band has released a single in support of a fundraiser for Ukraine.

Here is the official video for ‘Hey Hey Rise Up’, Pink Floyd’s new Ukraine fundraiser feat Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Boombox. Stream / download from midnight at http://pinkfloyd.lnk.to/HeyHeyRiseUp

‘Hey Hey Rise Up’, released in support of the people of Ukraine, sees David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined by long time Pink Floyd bass player Guy Pratt and Nitin Sawhney on keyboards, all accompanying an extraordinary vocal by Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian band Boombox. All proceeds go to Ukrainian Humanitarian Relief.

The track uses Andriy’s vocals taken from his Instagram post of him in Kyiv’s Sofiyskaya Square singing ‘Oh, The Red Viburnum In The Meadow’, a rousing Ukrainian folk protest song written during the first world war. The title of the Pink Floyd track is taken from the last line of the song which translates as ‘Hey, hey, rise up and rejoice’.

The video for ‘Hey Hey Rise Up’ was filmed by acclaimed director Mat Whitecross and shot on the same day as the track was recorded, with Andriy singing on the screen while the band played.

Gilmour, who has a Ukrainian daughter-in-law and grandchildren says: “We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world’s major powers”.

Speaking about his hopes for the track Gilmour says, “I hope it will receive wide support and publicity. We want to raise funds and morale. We want to show our support for Ukraine and in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become.

The artwork for the track features a painting of the national flower of Ukraine, the sunflower, by the Cuban artist, Yosan Leon. The cover of the single is a direct reference to the woman who was seen around the world giving sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers and telling them to carry them in their pockets so that when they die, sunflowers will grow.

But hang on! That’s the band, which had an acrimonious split from their front man many years ago. What is Roger Waters saying? He has posted a letter from a Ukrainian girl, with his response, and it doesn’t surprise me at all. Waters is a radical pacifist who detests the “gangster” (he uses that word a lot) governments of Russia and the US, and idealistically wants the war to just stop and be resolved diplomatically.

I am not that optimistic.

A wrist is slapped!

It’s something, I guess.

The United Nations General Assembly on Thursday suspended Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council over reports of “gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights” by invading Russian troops in Ukraine.

It’s a token response to this (warning: grisly photos), but yeah, it’s something.

But the scale of the killings and the depravity with which they were committed are only just becoming apparent as police, local officials and regular citizens start the grim task of clearing Bucha of the hundreds of corpses decomposing on streets and in parks, apartment buildings and other locations.

As a team from the district prosecutor’s office moved slowly through Bucha on Wednesday, investigators uncovered evidence of torture before death, beheading and dismemberment, and the intentional burning of corpses.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what else we can do, short of escalating the war.

Bucha

Russian troops are retreating from the area around Kiev, and leaving behind the wreckage of war. The recently liberated town of Bucha is an example: dead civilians left in the streets, some bound up and shot. The survivors have horror stories about the brutal occupation. There are mass graves. The Russians have abandoned any pretense of civilized behavior.

At least there are also signs that the Russian invasion cost the invaders heavily, too.

You have to stop & think … who would invite Madison Cawthorn to an orgy?

Cawthorn made a surprising admission: he has been invited to an orgy by Washington fat cats he previously admired.

Whoops. We can exempt a whole slew of liberals from the suspect list, since he wouldn’t have admired them. I don’t know what criteria orgy hosts use to select their guests — I’ve never held one or been invited to one, which feels a little bit like an embarrassing admission about me — but I suspect most people on the left side of the aisle find his views repulsive.

So now the guessing games begin. Which Republicans are staging orgies in the Capitol?

(This is not a very titillating thought exercise. If you’re trying to suppress your libido, just picture a Republican sex party in your head, all interest in sex will vanish quickly.)

I’ve never been to Mississippi. I guess I never will.

There are politicians there who want to murder me.

Robert Foster, a former Mississippi House lawmaker who lost a 2019 bid for governor, is using his social-media platform to call for the execution of political foes who support the rights of transgender people.

He ran for governor of the state. He lost. But he still got 18% of the vote — I am not reassured at the thought that about a fifth of the state didn’t find that automatically disqualifying.

This guy wants to kill me for being an atheist, too.

Do I need to mention that he’s a Republican?

“A city the size of Minneapolis”

Did they have to compare the devastation with a city so close to home?

Don’t worry, though: the Russians say they didn’t do it. The Ukrainians blew up their own city.

If Minneapolis were flattened like that, I guarantee you we could come up with a better excuse. “St Paul must have done it.”

An ugly way to lose a war

Huh. I’ve had my head down for a day — I’m getting back into the swing of classes and had to get a lot of new material together — and I check out the news today, and whoa:

NATO says that up to 40,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded, taken prisoner or are missing in Ukraine, said a senior military official from the alliance.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization calculates the figure based on information provided by Ukrainian authorities and information obtained from Russia–both officially and unintentionally, the official said.

NATO estimates that between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the invasion began on Feb. 24. Using statistical averages from past conflicts that for every casualty roughly three soldiers are wounded, NATO analysts reach their total figure.

Russia began its invasion with roughly 190,000 troops. It has since brought in additional troops from Chechnya, Syria and other locations.

That’s a lot of casualties. If that was an American army rather than a Russian one, we’d be backpedaling so fast, and the media would be blaming the president for their incompetence, and there would be massive protests in the streets. Russia, though, has a reputation for brute force and pouring men into a meatgrinder to accomplish their ends, so it’s probably too early to declare victory.

At best, they can hope for a Pyrrhic victory here. More likely they’re going to have to find an excuse to get out.