Category Archives: Politics

Thank You Ginni Thomas

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Calling the Court’s independence into question, Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, pressed Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, to overturn the 2020 election.

From The New York Times:

“In one message sent in the days after the election, she urged the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to ‘release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,’ invoking a slogan popular on the right that refers to a web of conspiracy theories that Trump supporters believed would overturn the election.

In another, she wrote: ‘I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin consequences.’ She added: “We just cave to people wanting Biden to be anointed? Many of us can’t continue the GOP charade.’

Other texts end with “I hope this is true”. Here are two examples:

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states. I hope this is true.”

“Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition. I hope this is true”.

I’ve struggled mightily to understand some of my fellow citizens growing number of conspiracies related to our national politics, among other things. Now, for the first time, thanks to Ginni, I may actually get it.

Whenever Tucker Carlson, Ginni Thomas, or your QAnon brain addled neighbor says, “This is true,” what they really mean is, “I hope this is true.”

I hope the Ginni Thomas’s of the world get the help they need.

Headlines To Ponder

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  1. MacKenzie Scott Gives $436 Million to Habitat for Humanity.
  2. World No. 1 Ash Barty, 25, Announces Retirement from Tennis.
  3. Afghanistan’s last finance minister, now a D.C. Uber driver, ponders what went wrong. Semi-related, no prime minister of Pakistan — a country that has swung between democracy and dictatorship — has ever completed a full term in office (The Financial Times).

Tuesday Required Reading

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  1. Girls flag rugby. Beautiful lead picture. Of course the red-head is kicking ass.
  2. UCLA reverses course and will pay the adjunct professor after all. HR clown show.
  3. How much do the best pro cyclists make? “. . . pocket-money compared to some of the world’s wealthiest sports.”
  4. Right on. My Covid guy gets the top job. Everyone has a Covid person or team that affirms their preconceived notions about all things ‘rona. Ashish Jha is mine.

Symbolism Over Substance?

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I am fortunate to live in Olympia, Washington in the upper lefthand corner of the (dis)United States. This morning I did one of my fave runs. To Priest Point Park, a loop of the heavily wooded east-side trail, and back, 7.5 miles for those keeping score at home. Now I’m sitting at my desk looking alternatively at my computer monitor and Budd Inlet, the southernmost part of the Puget Sound, a series of saltwater inlets that are, in essence, a bucolic part of the Pacific Ocean.

But did I really run to Priest Point Park and am I really sitting above Budd Inlet? Indigenous groups are succeeding in renaming places based upon their history. Now, Budd Inlet is more appropriately called the Salish Sea and the Olympia City Council is in the process of renaming Priest Point Park, Squaxin Park, after the Squaxin island tribe, who lived here first.

I am down with the updating, but I wonder about a potentially subtle, unconscious even, unintended consequence. What if we think land acknowledgement in the form of updated place names is sufficient and stop short of more substantive changes that would both honor Indigenous people’s history and improve their life prospects?

Of course it doesn’t have to be either/or, it can and should be both/and, but we seem prone to superficial, fleeting acts that are often “virtue signaling“. We change our blog header to Ukraine’s flag, we put “Black Lives Matter” stickers on our cars, and otherwise advertise our politics in myriad ways, but we don’t always persevere. With others. Over time. To create meaningful change.

What is the state of the Black Lives Matter movement? How much attention will the media and public be paying to authoritarianism in Eastern Europe a year or five from now?

Admittedly, that’s a cynical perspective, but I prefer skeptical. I’m skeptical that substituting the Salish Sea for Budd Inlet and Squaxin Park for Priest Point Park will do anything to protect salmon, extend educational opportunities for Indigenous young people, educate people about our Indigenous roots, or improve Indigenous people’s lives in the Pacific Northwest more generally.

In fact, I wonder if it may, in an unfortunate paradoxical way confound those things. I hope not.

Ca$hing In On The Political Divide

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Imagine if there was some perfectly legal way to make money based upon people’s mutual antipathy for one another.

Introducing Conservative Move whose message is simple:

WE’RE MOVING YOU

TO VALUES, PROSPERITY, & SAFETY

When your community no longer reflects morals and values, it might be time to move. We’re an organization of real estate agents here to help you sell your home, organize the move, and buy a home in a community where you feel safe, valued, and at home.

They emphasize three things that liberals make damn near impossible . . . great schools, safe streets, and lower taxes. Because any rational person knows liberals stand for crap schools, dangerous streets, and high taxes.

They could’ve gone with “no longer reflects YOUR morals and values,” but chose instead to tap deeper into their potential customers inner hate.

Then a kicker:

TIRED OF YOUR WOKE WORKPLACE? WE CAN HELP! 

I prob deserve some blame for this entrepreneurial effort for writing about gun control back in the day on this way too liberal blog.

Right to Bear Arms

“Maybe we should just divide the country into 25 “hawk” and 25 “dove” states. Pick one representative of each view and have them take turns picking states for everyone else. Since I disagree with almost everything in paragraph one, I nominate myself for the doves, and my first pick is Washington State. Clint Eastwood, representing the Hawks, will no doubt take California which I’m not happy about at all. My second pick, Oregon.

For practical reasons, residents of hawk and dove states will be allowed to travel freely into ideological enemy territory; however, they will have to agree to adapt to life in ideological enemy territory. For example, Clint will have to leave his gun at home when he flies to Seattle and I will have to avoid committing a violent crime when visiting California lest I be fired upon by private citizens and/or executed by Ahrnold. Social scientists can do longitudinal studies on the quality of life in each set of states.”

So I guess you have me to blame or thank for Conservative Move, depending upon your perspective. Now certainly, it’s only a matter of time before every conservative finds every other conservative and they fix their children’s schools, eliminate the crime in their community, and lower their taxes.

Why Ukraine Has Captured The Global Imagination

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From Kara Swisher’s conversation with Clint Watts on her podcast, Sway.

Swisher asks Watts why Ukrainians have captured the global imagination so much more than most other victims of war.

Watts:

“Several factors have changed over the last decade that are important. One, cell phones in everyone’s hands worldwide. Two, social-media platforms of all stripes connecting everybody at the same time. But the bigger ones, just to be honest, are, this is a predominantly white, predominantly Orthodox Christian population in Europe. And so the West cares. Having worked on Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria over the last 15 years, which is how I got into this, I’ve never seen so many people care about what’s going on.

People see that fight, and they see themselves. It’s implicit bias in social media. You like information from people that look like you and talk like you. And you’re seeing that kick into full gear with this battle. And people can identify with themselves, particularly in Europe. Poland — very worried about what’s going on. Germany, all of the sudden, has kicked up its military commitments. We begged them to do this since World War II with NATO, and they didn’t do it. So I think that is the biggest driver of it.”

Swisher points out that there has been horrific imagery from other conflict zones to which Watts responds:

“Absolutely. And I think if you went to the Middle East today and listen to discussions, they’re like, oh, everybody cares now. What about last decade when all of these invasions and battles, and Assad is barrel-bombing? Oh, you don’t know what’s going to happen in Kyiv? Maybe you should have watched Aleppo, or maybe you should have seen in Grozny. That’s their perspective on it.

And I think there’s an importantness, which is the power of translate today compared to 10 years ago. You can engage with Russian content on Twitter or Google when you do a search on a website. You can read it now. It almost magically switches, right? So that’s allowing the West to engage in languages and platforms that they otherwise would have to — they wouldn’t even know existed. They wouldn’t be able to compute it.”

Later in the conversation Watts asserts:

“We could find several Ukraines around the world right now.”

He references the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar specifically.

Our compassion, activism, and charitable giving doesn’t have to be a finite, zero-sum game. We should extend just as much compassion, activism, and charitable giving to all victims of war regardless of their skin color or religion.

my emphasis added

Delusions of Grandeur

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From the New York Times.

“Richard P. Donoghue, a former top Justice Department official, repeatedly informed Mr. Trump that both his specific and general claims of fraud were false.”

“Instead of accepting Mr. Donoghue’s account, Mr. Trump abruptly switched subjects and asked about ‘double voting’ and ‘dead people’ voting, then moved on to a completely different claim about how, he said, ‘Indians are getting paid’ to vote on Native American reservations.”

Paragraph To Ponder

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From Tom Friedman in the New York Times.

“If Putin goes ahead and levels Ukraine’s biggest cities and its capital, Kyiv, he and all of his cronies will never again see the London and New York apartments they bought with all their stolen riches. There will be no more Davos and no more St. Moritz. Instead, they will all be locked in a big prison called Russia — with the freedom to travel only to Syria, Crimea, Belarus, North Korea and China, maybe. Their kids will be thrown out of private boarding schools from Switzerland to Oxford.”

Monday Required Reading

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You Can Learn to Love Being Alone.

“People who pursue solitude of their own volition ‘tend to report that it feels full — like they’re full of ideas or thoughts or things to do. . . . In this way, it’s distinct from loneliness, a negative state in which you’re disconnected from other people and it feels empty.”

Putin’s Bloody Folly in Ukraine.

“As Putin spills blood across Ukraine and threatens to destabilize Europe, Russians themselves stand to lose immeasurably. The ruble and the Russian stock market have cratered. But Putin does not care. His eyes are fixed on matters far grander than the well-being of his people. He is in full command of the largest army in Europe, and, as he has reminded the world, of an immense arsenal of nuclear weapons. In his mind, this is his moment, his triumphal historical drama, and damn the cost.”

The style and substance of South Carolina basketball’s Dawn Staley.

“‘She loves on them hard,’ associate head coach and longtime confidante Lisa Boyer says. ‘She’s playful with them, she’s hugging them, she’s there for them. I think they sense the fairness. I think they sense the genuineness of her. She speaks to them — it’s not some fairy tale. She’s telling them the deal.'”

“‘I owe basketball,’ Staley says. ‘I’m forever indebted to it. It engulfed my life for the positive. The game has gotten more of my time than my friends and my family. I feel like on a smaller or larger scale, it can impact my players’ lives in some kind of way.'”

A Renowned Community of Quilters is Taking on Copycats—and Winning.

“’We put a lot of work into it, and it’s about our life,’ Charley says of quilting. . . . We used these quilts for warmth. It was about our struggle, and our survival.'”

“Charley might feel differently, she offers, if these makers — who may have, say, studied textiles at art school — sent some of their profits back to the community that inspired them. But that doesn’t happen. “This work is ‘inspired’ in your mind, because you see the quilt pattern,” Charley says. “But you don’t know my story. And you’re going to try and duplicate it — and go to Joann Fabrics to do it?’”