A few observations.
POLITICS IS LOCAL
First the good news: at the local level, things are not horrible so long as we have people like Sam Garcia.
POLITICS IS LOCAL, PART 2
Republican Representative Bryan Steil of Wisconsin discovered at a “listening session” that “because the Biden Administration had a bad immigration policy” is not reason enough for ICE and the Border Patrol to hide their credentials and their faces and deport people to torture camps without due process. I mean, Poland’s Boleslaw III had a tolerant policy towards the Jews in 1102 C.E., but that’s not an excuse for Auschwitz.
It’s a fundamental question of justice: people cannot be expected to obey an illegitimate authority. And presumably Steil’s people remember it.
I strongly recommend watching the video below: it restores my faith in people who vote their own interest. They are not necessarily without a sense of fairness for doing that.
TRUTH DECAY
Ghislaine Maxwell’s attorneys have rebuffed James Comer’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which subpoenaed her testimony, by declining to testify without a proffer of clemency, among other things.
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to know what’s going on here, because Trump has been openly telling us what his goals are: the prosecution of big-name Democrats and donors, exonerating himself. Maxwell’s lawyers are aware of Trump’s ultimate goal here.
Part of that operation means keeping Maxwell away from openly testifying under oath except in a carefully controlled environment where she isn’t invited to perjure herself further than she already has. Again, this isn’t conspiracy theory. This is simply noting that she has spoken to Trump’s former personal lawyer and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche about 100 people implicated in the Epstein case. It should go without saying that if Trump’s name came up, her only contribution would be that he was a model of chastity and restraint, since Trump has the power of pardon or (more likely) commutation of her sentence.
MAGA wants pedophiles prosecuted, Trump wants to give it to them, so long as he isn’t in the line of fire. And if you think that Trump wouldn’t throw even his own big donors under the bus rather than face accountability, you really are special.
Fortunately for him, he doesn’t have to do that. He just has to let Maxwell say her piece, scribble her commutation, wash his hands of Epstein, and get back to fucking up the country.
STOLEN
I’ve written a lot about Virginia Giuffre. Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse and rape of girls has been used constantly as a political noose. Well and good. There’s a lot of people who have a lot to answer for, and consequences should accrue to them.
Trump this week said he remembered Epstein “stealing” girls from Mar-A-Lago’s staff, singling out Giuffre.
Giuffre’s family was rightfully indignant, and immediately and correctly put pressure on for Maxwell not to be pardoned.
“It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been ‘stolen’ from Mar-a-Lago,” the family said in a statement.
Of Maxwell: “A predator who thought only of herself, she destroyed the lives of girls and young women without conscience… Virginia always said that Ghislaine Maxwell was vicious and could often be more cruel than Epstein.”
And Maxwell’s dubious testimony is essential to exculpate Trump and smear his enemies.
The price of the papers just went up for Trump.
Good.
IT’S NOT THE HEAT, IT’S THE STUPIDITY
One of the downsides of having Trump Derangement Syndrome is that Trump keeps proving my paranoid fantasies correct.
I take it for granted, for instance, that instead of engaging with a complicated issue that demands attention and intelligence, he’s going to simply disappear the other side’s arguments, funding, and platforms. He also likes to talk out of his ass in a sort of Gish Gallop of counterfactual claims meant to stun and overwhelm his audience.
And so it proves, time and again. When confronted by an inconvenient truth, he lies and he bullies. That’s it. That’s the whole tactic.
The Trump Administration took down the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA05) from the .gov domain earlier this month. (You can still download it and read it here, for the moment. I’ve downloaded it and put it in the folder where I keep things I suspect the Administration will disappear permanently… it’s not an insubstantial folder.)
Climate Change as a scientific hypothesis has ridden some crazy rails over its tortured history. There has been shabby data, questionable politicization, and a lot of hysterical overstatement. Critics and climate denialists, have rightly sharpened their blades on such mistakes, errors and even fraud.
In spite of all of that, there are still mountains of data that point to anthropogenic climate change, and it’s getting harder and harder for interested parties to avoid that reality. The insurance industry, for instance, is pretty well persuaded, as their bottom line is increasingly affected by rising temperatures and changing weather patterns.
The insurance industry tends to keep pretty meticulous records and to specialize in arithmetic models; shaving a half-point of profit in any area can have huge ramifications over time. For instance, if you want to actually discover whether more planes and ships go down in the Bermuda Triangle than any other place in the world, you go to Lloyd’s of London, who will tell you, Nope, our insurance outlay in that area is pretty much the same as any other comparably-sized stretch of sea.
In other words, they’re not prone to politicizing actuarial tables or obscuring realities that affect peoples’ lives.
Unlike the U.S. Government.
WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ
I’ve loved rock music and played rock music for many, many years. My hearing loss testifies to a great love of rock.
But somehow I never really dug deep into Black Sabbath or Ozzie Osbourne. Whenever I heard a song on the radio or covered in a band, it was worth hearing, but I never learned to play their music and couldn’t sing more than a chorus or two. “Crazy Train” is rock gold, but that’s about as far as I got. (No doubt, growing up evangelical, I would have provoked grave converstaions by bringing home a record by a band called “Black Sabbath.”)
Nevertheless, the death of the strangely jerky, addled, sweet person of Ozzie Osbourne was a light going out. Even without attending much to him, he was a person of substance in the Room That Is Rock. He also appears, to all appearances, to have been a basically kind person in spite of his satanic on-stage persona.
I have resolved to repair my badness and learn something of The Great and Terrible Oz, and Black Sabbath.
If the British Army can do it, so can I.
ON A HILL FAR AWAY
Just for fun. Some King of the Hill. The longer I live in Texas, the more I find King of the Hill to be an essential field-guide.