Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images The big news of the day is the Biden administration’s ongoing efforts to combat international terrorism and lawlessness through cybersecurity and international cooperation. Today the Department of Justice, the State Department, and the Treasury Department together announced indictments against two foreign actors for cyberattacks on U.S. companies last August. They announced sanctions against the men, one of whom has been arrested in Poland; they seized $6.1 million in assets from the other. The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information about other cybercriminals associated with the attack. Treasury noted that ransomware attacks cost the U.S. almost $600 million in the first six months of 2021, and disrupt business and public safety.
My father hated rugby, saying the only rule of the game was that you couldn't use a gun. "Ah yes, there are rules," he said, "but nobody follows them, so what you have is chaotic mud wrestling. And who plays the game? Thugs hell bent on murdering each other."
Perhaps he was describing today's GOP... classless, loud, ugly, pugnacious, flailing, interested only in getting over the goal line, the be all and end all of their existence which conveys on them the power to lord it over others.
Today's elected Democrats don't seem to have caught on to the fact that although they think they may be playing polite pickle ball, the other side is playing a vicious game of rugby. They talk about things that have become meaningless, like "bipartisanship," "getting it done together," "due process," "healthcare for all," and other things one might expect of a civilized society. But they seem unaware that, sadly, the most visible part of this society is anything but civilized. It has become like my father's conception of rugby....mud wrestling by thugs with no rules of play or decorum applicable.
Maggie Hassan, junior senator of New Hampshire, is running ads that show in the Boston area for her next senate run. They talk about what she's promoting in soft, polite terms, and a local character comes on to tout that what she's proposing is bipartisan..."that's the way to go, because when something is bipartisan it sticks." Every time I see this ad I want to scream "You're playing pickle ball against a rugby team!" Within minutes of this ad appearing there's a Halloween style horror ad for a NH GOP candidate depicting Nancy Pelosi as an Addams Family creature with the message "Tell Nancy Pelosi to keep her hands off your bank account!!!!.....vote for xxx ." The juxtaposition of the ads so makes my point about Dems playing pickle ball against a rugby team it's laughable.
Do I know what to do about all this? Hell no, but I do think it's time for democrats to recognize the cognitive dissonance they are practicing and get real about who and what they are dealing with. There IS no bipartisanship. There is NO deal making to be done. Schumer needs to use every single loop hole and procedural gambit available to get things done for good just as McConnell has used procedural gambits to obstruct for decades now. Garland needs to hurry up, accept that he is dealing with a nationwide mafia led by a ruthless Don, and take action to put the scofflaws in jail. Slow and deliberate isn't cutting it...it's just emboldening the thugs to get up to more dirty tricks...and the stakes are horrifyingly high.
So Cruz has nothing more substantive to offer than to criticize a Sesame Street character who has spoken for vaccines longer than Cruz has been alive. For Cruz that was not surprising. Gosar and his "cute" little anime piece should have been under investigation as soon as it came to light. If that had been put out by a citizen they would have been under investigation yesterday.
As a health care worker I am sick to death of listening to the stupidity about "my rights, my body, my choice" from anti-vaxxers, that the majority of the unvaccinated are GQP and those are the ones dying is not a cause for rejoicing, but if that is the hill they want to die on then stay home and die in your beds so you don't take needed health care resources from people that you might have infected.
"In Georgia, [Trump] has backed Herschel Walker, whose ex-wife got a protective order against him after he allegedly threatened to shoot her. In Pennsylvania, Trump has endorsed Sean Parnell, whose wife testified that he choked her and abused their children physically and emotionally."
"Representative Paul Gosar ... yesterday posted an anime video in which his face was photoshopped onto a character that killed another character bearing the face of New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Gosar character also swung swords at a Biden character and fought alongside Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO)."
I remember a time when the US was finally beginning to open its eyes to domestic violence. Now, Republicans are actively endorsing candidates who have a proven history of domestic violence. I remember a time when a member of Congress wouldn't dare release an ad remotely hinting of violence against another member of Congress let alone the president. Gosar's anime rip off is obscene, it left me shaking with anger and disbelief. These trends illustrate the very alarming fact that Republican leaders are willing to stop at nothing to actively push their base towards accepting and commiting increased violence in the home, within our communities and political arenas.
For weeks we have been discussing the Democrat's failure to coalesce and send a message of strength and party unity. Why? Because it simply does not exist. We've watched our leaders waste time, money and resources nitpicking about is "it" too progressive, not progressive enough, too conservative. In the meantime Republicans are literally flinging shit at the American people and no one, NO ONE, has the guts to stand up to them and pull the plug on their vile, immoral, unethical and illegal behaviors. It has gone on for far too long. Who is going to take a stand and speak up?
Tonight, in my mind's eye, I have the image of a house perched on the side of a hill with the rain washing away the ground beneath it. In a few moments there will be a mudslide and the house will go down destroying everything in its path. This is where we are.
Teddy Roosevelt's approach to diplomacy was charactorized as "speak softly and carry a big stick" the success of this approach required the possession of superior force, acting justly, never bluffing and only striking when prepared to strike hard. It seems to me that the current administration is having great difficulty with the last part...striking hard. Just waggling the big stick in the air never impressed anyone and encourages the enemy to believe you're bluffing. Time for Garland to strike for democracy and hit Bannon hard and for the democrats to hit hard the filibuster rule protecting voting rights from its iniquitous clutches.
'Instead of leaving the Republican party, Trump is rebuilding it in his own image.'
Trump is not rebuilding the Republican party. The Republican party is overthrowing our constitutional democratic republic.
Trump personifies the Republican party. He tailored his suit to their style - it did not take much alteration. Red hats are the new white hoods; racist right wing religious extremists need no longer cover their faces. Although the Leonard Leo Supreme Court continues the tradition of covering their white sheets with black robes. (Including, Clarence Thomas, who pulling the affirmative action ladder up behind him, has declared civil rights protections to be the new slavery which is emasculating Black men.)
Trump did not create today's GOP whole cloth, he merely put his brand on their product. Trump is the second coming of their god Ronald Reagan - writ large and writ vulgar. Arousing populists in service of plutocrats was long in place. If Trump brings anything to the table, it's a taste for sexual brutality which appeals to men from the hardhat to the tassel loafer variety - and the women who love them.
Trump has the bully's obsession with domination and the coward's fascination with violence. As January 6 put center stage, when Trump cried 'Hey boys and girls, let's put on an insurrection' they all hopped to - while he hied it back to the White House (and Pence was hidden in a garage.)
Trump tried to co-opt the military, but only got so far as his Pentagon appointees assisting the street brawlers in sacking the Capitol, while Trump supporters of the McConnell and Cruz sort tried overturning the election in the chambers. From Reagan to Trump, from Ailes to Hannity, the right wing revolution is made to be televised.
Although I am relieved that the Fourth Estate (the press) is finally starting to go back to its day job of actual investigative reporting, we still have to deal with the dog-whistling, whiplash-inducing idiocy of these same press outlets, which use melodramatic headlines to sell papers (paper and digital). What I see as more promising is that local politics are finally getting some attention from Dems, who are beginning to realize that the grassroots neo-Con movements of the 1980s and forward created the crisis we are now in. I am not sure if it is too little too late. I am hoping it is a start.
Once everyone stops huffing and puffing about the faux controversy over Critical Race Theory, I am predicting that the new rightwing hysteria (and I use that term deliberately, as it means "womb disease" in the original Greek and refers to the Hippocratic idea that women have uteruses that are untethered and wander around their bodies in search of nutrients) will come from the public response and excitement over a new book about the origins of human civilization--which is getting a lot of attention (I suspect) because the two authors are white men, so therefore safe (although one founded the Occupy movement)--The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, both of whom are/were (Graeber died last year) prominent social scientists in anthropology and economics, and who have written an exhaustive account of how anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and economics, by assuming a male default, have been consistently wrong about how civilization came to be. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/
For me this is a "well, duh" moment because I have been arguing that line for decades, as have pretty much all of the women in academia in those fields and history for the last 30 years or so. But because we have vaginas, no one in media pays attention. Feeling a little cynical that the white male savior thing that the West still seems to consider necessary is actually being enacted in order to DEBUNK the white male savior thing, but it's a start at least. But because this book has hit the Amazon feed with a bang, expect the rightwingnuts to go bananas.
As a final Tuesday musing (sorry, these have been building up over a very busy couple of weeks!): For those of you who follow John Pavolvitz, he is getting trolled to the max by the MAGA crowd for his new book--full bore hysteria about it. So if you like him and think his essays on religion and human behavior are worth reading and pondering (which I do, even though I am an atheist), "like" his books on Amazon and other bookstore outlets. His newest book, If God is Love, Don't Be a Jerk is the one getting most of the haters' attention.
And the wait for Steven Bannon's prosecution continues. Being methodical in such matters is a quality, but this case is hardly rocket science. To mix metaphors, it's a slam dunk for the Justice Department. And forcing Bannon to testify will put enormous pressure on the growing list of others subpoenaed to not play games. The House select committee has identified the key conspirators, now it's time for them to face questioning under oath.
Sesame Street started using the character Ronald Grump in 1988 in unflattering skits. So I see the flack about Big Bird to have an audience of one for Sen. Cruz, etc. In 2017, I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal 10-Point column readers response question on DTs first budget and made a reference to Big Bird then.
“Mr. Trump’s budget proposal is one I would expect from some third-world, despot dictator who has no empathy for the well-being of its citizenry. This does not make us safer since it encourages an arms race; it does make us dumber by devaluing the arts and science. The world loses because climate catastrophe can only be diverted by world cooperation. In buying Mr. Trump’s narcissistic, vindictive reality, Earth is headed for the failure of its experiment with civilization. If I have a choice between Sesame Street and another new fighter, I choose the Big Bird that doesn’t fly or carry nuclear weapons.”
To mirror my response from my Facebook post, as encouraging the Biden Administration is to its efforts on International terrorism, I feel they are doing nothing more than nailing jello to the wall regarding the January 6th Insurrection. If the Justice Department isn't willing to enforce both its decisions and the law, why bother with subpoenas. It just reinforces the weakness of the Democrats.
The stakes could not be higher for the 2022 midterm election. Indictments needs to come down from the Justice Department. And, why has Steven Bannon not been charged with ANYTHING after ignoring a Congressional subpoena???? The longer this goes on, the more emboldened the seditionists will become.
The Watergate scandal began early in the morning on June 17, 1972. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. That's two-plus years between the criminal act and the president's resignation.
We are now just 10+ months beyond January 6. It is my belief that under a democracy, accountability does not rush in, guns blazing. Democracy follows the Rule of Law. That takes time.
First, I am profoundly grateful every day for you. I marvel at your ability to put such hard work into this every day. I’m always glad when you take a break! We need you. Second, I am alarmed at how slowly the wheels of justice are turning both in the Congress and in the department of justice and various other jurisdictions investigating Trump and the insurrection. and it is my sense, without any factual basis, but Biden in ministration did not wish to spend it’s energy or political capital in pursuing and prosecuting Trump both for practical and political reasons. However, I cannot see how the country could be any more polarized than it is now, So I do not see a downside to a swift and figure is prosecution of the former president. It seems to me that the danger of allowing a sitting president to commit treason, election fraud etc without consequences outweighs the political and civil fallout. What is your opinion? Are they worried about civil unrest or even civil war?
I hear clearly and share in the frustration expressed in the comments today. You are all excellent writers. Start flooding the newspapers with letters to the editor. Not just one, keep writing every week. Be clear, succinct and firm. And keep those emails and calls to the White House and your Congress people going out. Let’s not be part of the silent majority.
What a palaver! These Republicans are beyond belief! The fact that they are elected officials makes my skin crawl. What a bunch of conniving crooks and liars!
Can anyone speak to the end game of the The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol? Will it report its findings well before the midterms? Will private citizens be able to sue Trump into bankruptcy for damages for putting democracy in danger, based on the House Select Committee's findings? It seems that $1-10 per US resident, in a class action lawsuit, would do the trick.
My father hated rugby, saying the only rule of the game was that you couldn't use a gun. "Ah yes, there are rules," he said, "but nobody follows them, so what you have is chaotic mud wrestling. And who plays the game? Thugs hell bent on murdering each other."
Perhaps he was describing today's GOP... classless, loud, ugly, pugnacious, flailing, interested only in getting over the goal line, the be all and end all of their existence which conveys on them the power to lord it over others.
Today's elected Democrats don't seem to have caught on to the fact that although they think they may be playing polite pickle ball, the other side is playing a vicious game of rugby. They talk about things that have become meaningless, like "bipartisanship," "getting it done together," "due process," "healthcare for all," and other things one might expect of a civilized society. But they seem unaware that, sadly, the most visible part of this society is anything but civilized. It has become like my father's conception of rugby....mud wrestling by thugs with no rules of play or decorum applicable.
Maggie Hassan, junior senator of New Hampshire, is running ads that show in the Boston area for her next senate run. They talk about what she's promoting in soft, polite terms, and a local character comes on to tout that what she's proposing is bipartisan..."that's the way to go, because when something is bipartisan it sticks." Every time I see this ad I want to scream "You're playing pickle ball against a rugby team!" Within minutes of this ad appearing there's a Halloween style horror ad for a NH GOP candidate depicting Nancy Pelosi as an Addams Family creature with the message "Tell Nancy Pelosi to keep her hands off your bank account!!!!.....vote for xxx ." The juxtaposition of the ads so makes my point about Dems playing pickle ball against a rugby team it's laughable.
Do I know what to do about all this? Hell no, but I do think it's time for democrats to recognize the cognitive dissonance they are practicing and get real about who and what they are dealing with. There IS no bipartisanship. There is NO deal making to be done. Schumer needs to use every single loop hole and procedural gambit available to get things done for good just as McConnell has used procedural gambits to obstruct for decades now. Garland needs to hurry up, accept that he is dealing with a nationwide mafia led by a ruthless Don, and take action to put the scofflaws in jail. Slow and deliberate isn't cutting it...it's just emboldening the thugs to get up to more dirty tricks...and the stakes are horrifyingly high.
So Cruz has nothing more substantive to offer than to criticize a Sesame Street character who has spoken for vaccines longer than Cruz has been alive. For Cruz that was not surprising. Gosar and his "cute" little anime piece should have been under investigation as soon as it came to light. If that had been put out by a citizen they would have been under investigation yesterday.
As a health care worker I am sick to death of listening to the stupidity about "my rights, my body, my choice" from anti-vaxxers, that the majority of the unvaccinated are GQP and those are the ones dying is not a cause for rejoicing, but if that is the hill they want to die on then stay home and die in your beds so you don't take needed health care resources from people that you might have infected.
Edited and reposted.
Excerpts from Today's Letter:
"In Georgia, [Trump] has backed Herschel Walker, whose ex-wife got a protective order against him after he allegedly threatened to shoot her. In Pennsylvania, Trump has endorsed Sean Parnell, whose wife testified that he choked her and abused their children physically and emotionally."
"Representative Paul Gosar ... yesterday posted an anime video in which his face was photoshopped onto a character that killed another character bearing the face of New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Gosar character also swung swords at a Biden character and fought alongside Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO)."
I remember a time when the US was finally beginning to open its eyes to domestic violence. Now, Republicans are actively endorsing candidates who have a proven history of domestic violence. I remember a time when a member of Congress wouldn't dare release an ad remotely hinting of violence against another member of Congress let alone the president. Gosar's anime rip off is obscene, it left me shaking with anger and disbelief. These trends illustrate the very alarming fact that Republican leaders are willing to stop at nothing to actively push their base towards accepting and commiting increased violence in the home, within our communities and political arenas.
For weeks we have been discussing the Democrat's failure to coalesce and send a message of strength and party unity. Why? Because it simply does not exist. We've watched our leaders waste time, money and resources nitpicking about is "it" too progressive, not progressive enough, too conservative. In the meantime Republicans are literally flinging shit at the American people and no one, NO ONE, has the guts to stand up to them and pull the plug on their vile, immoral, unethical and illegal behaviors. It has gone on for far too long. Who is going to take a stand and speak up?
Tonight, in my mind's eye, I have the image of a house perched on the side of a hill with the rain washing away the ground beneath it. In a few moments there will be a mudslide and the house will go down destroying everything in its path. This is where we are.
Teddy Roosevelt's approach to diplomacy was charactorized as "speak softly and carry a big stick" the success of this approach required the possession of superior force, acting justly, never bluffing and only striking when prepared to strike hard. It seems to me that the current administration is having great difficulty with the last part...striking hard. Just waggling the big stick in the air never impressed anyone and encourages the enemy to believe you're bluffing. Time for Garland to strike for democracy and hit Bannon hard and for the democrats to hit hard the filibuster rule protecting voting rights from its iniquitous clutches.
'Instead of leaving the Republican party, Trump is rebuilding it in his own image.'
Trump is not rebuilding the Republican party. The Republican party is overthrowing our constitutional democratic republic.
Trump personifies the Republican party. He tailored his suit to their style - it did not take much alteration. Red hats are the new white hoods; racist right wing religious extremists need no longer cover their faces. Although the Leonard Leo Supreme Court continues the tradition of covering their white sheets with black robes. (Including, Clarence Thomas, who pulling the affirmative action ladder up behind him, has declared civil rights protections to be the new slavery which is emasculating Black men.)
Trump did not create today's GOP whole cloth, he merely put his brand on their product. Trump is the second coming of their god Ronald Reagan - writ large and writ vulgar. Arousing populists in service of plutocrats was long in place. If Trump brings anything to the table, it's a taste for sexual brutality which appeals to men from the hardhat to the tassel loafer variety - and the women who love them.
Trump has the bully's obsession with domination and the coward's fascination with violence. As January 6 put center stage, when Trump cried 'Hey boys and girls, let's put on an insurrection' they all hopped to - while he hied it back to the White House (and Pence was hidden in a garage.)
Trump tried to co-opt the military, but only got so far as his Pentagon appointees assisting the street brawlers in sacking the Capitol, while Trump supporters of the McConnell and Cruz sort tried overturning the election in the chambers. From Reagan to Trump, from Ailes to Hannity, the right wing revolution is made to be televised.
Although I am relieved that the Fourth Estate (the press) is finally starting to go back to its day job of actual investigative reporting, we still have to deal with the dog-whistling, whiplash-inducing idiocy of these same press outlets, which use melodramatic headlines to sell papers (paper and digital). What I see as more promising is that local politics are finally getting some attention from Dems, who are beginning to realize that the grassroots neo-Con movements of the 1980s and forward created the crisis we are now in. I am not sure if it is too little too late. I am hoping it is a start.
Once everyone stops huffing and puffing about the faux controversy over Critical Race Theory, I am predicting that the new rightwing hysteria (and I use that term deliberately, as it means "womb disease" in the original Greek and refers to the Hippocratic idea that women have uteruses that are untethered and wander around their bodies in search of nutrients) will come from the public response and excitement over a new book about the origins of human civilization--which is getting a lot of attention (I suspect) because the two authors are white men, so therefore safe (although one founded the Occupy movement)--The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, both of whom are/were (Graeber died last year) prominent social scientists in anthropology and economics, and who have written an exhaustive account of how anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and economics, by assuming a male default, have been consistently wrong about how civilization came to be. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/
For me this is a "well, duh" moment because I have been arguing that line for decades, as have pretty much all of the women in academia in those fields and history for the last 30 years or so. But because we have vaginas, no one in media pays attention. Feeling a little cynical that the white male savior thing that the West still seems to consider necessary is actually being enacted in order to DEBUNK the white male savior thing, but it's a start at least. But because this book has hit the Amazon feed with a bang, expect the rightwingnuts to go bananas.
As a final Tuesday musing (sorry, these have been building up over a very busy couple of weeks!): For those of you who follow John Pavolvitz, he is getting trolled to the max by the MAGA crowd for his new book--full bore hysteria about it. So if you like him and think his essays on religion and human behavior are worth reading and pondering (which I do, even though I am an atheist), "like" his books on Amazon and other bookstore outlets. His newest book, If God is Love, Don't Be a Jerk is the one getting most of the haters' attention.
Happy Tuesday everyone.
And the wait for Steven Bannon's prosecution continues. Being methodical in such matters is a quality, but this case is hardly rocket science. To mix metaphors, it's a slam dunk for the Justice Department. And forcing Bannon to testify will put enormous pressure on the growing list of others subpoenaed to not play games. The House select committee has identified the key conspirators, now it's time for them to face questioning under oath.
Sesame Street started using the character Ronald Grump in 1988 in unflattering skits. So I see the flack about Big Bird to have an audience of one for Sen. Cruz, etc. In 2017, I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal 10-Point column readers response question on DTs first budget and made a reference to Big Bird then.
“Mr. Trump’s budget proposal is one I would expect from some third-world, despot dictator who has no empathy for the well-being of its citizenry. This does not make us safer since it encourages an arms race; it does make us dumber by devaluing the arts and science. The world loses because climate catastrophe can only be diverted by world cooperation. In buying Mr. Trump’s narcissistic, vindictive reality, Earth is headed for the failure of its experiment with civilization. If I have a choice between Sesame Street and another new fighter, I choose the Big Bird that doesn’t fly or carry nuclear weapons.”
Why isn’t Donald Trump in prison? He is a Traitor.
Thank you Heather.
To mirror my response from my Facebook post, as encouraging the Biden Administration is to its efforts on International terrorism, I feel they are doing nothing more than nailing jello to the wall regarding the January 6th Insurrection. If the Justice Department isn't willing to enforce both its decisions and the law, why bother with subpoenas. It just reinforces the weakness of the Democrats.
Be safe. Be well.
The stakes could not be higher for the 2022 midterm election. Indictments needs to come down from the Justice Department. And, why has Steven Bannon not been charged with ANYTHING after ignoring a Congressional subpoena???? The longer this goes on, the more emboldened the seditionists will become.
Morning, all!! Morning, Dr. R!!
Just yesterday we were talking about time...
The Watergate scandal began early in the morning on June 17, 1972. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. That's two-plus years between the criminal act and the president's resignation.
We are now just 10+ months beyond January 6. It is my belief that under a democracy, accountability does not rush in, guns blazing. Democracy follows the Rule of Law. That takes time.
First, I am profoundly grateful every day for you. I marvel at your ability to put such hard work into this every day. I’m always glad when you take a break! We need you. Second, I am alarmed at how slowly the wheels of justice are turning both in the Congress and in the department of justice and various other jurisdictions investigating Trump and the insurrection. and it is my sense, without any factual basis, but Biden in ministration did not wish to spend it’s energy or political capital in pursuing and prosecuting Trump both for practical and political reasons. However, I cannot see how the country could be any more polarized than it is now, So I do not see a downside to a swift and figure is prosecution of the former president. It seems to me that the danger of allowing a sitting president to commit treason, election fraud etc without consequences outweighs the political and civil fallout. What is your opinion? Are they worried about civil unrest or even civil war?
I hear clearly and share in the frustration expressed in the comments today. You are all excellent writers. Start flooding the newspapers with letters to the editor. Not just one, keep writing every week. Be clear, succinct and firm. And keep those emails and calls to the White House and your Congress people going out. Let’s not be part of the silent majority.
What a palaver! These Republicans are beyond belief! The fact that they are elected officials makes my skin crawl. What a bunch of conniving crooks and liars!
I always felt bad for Beaker. (Just saying.)
Can anyone speak to the end game of the The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol? Will it report its findings well before the midterms? Will private citizens be able to sue Trump into bankruptcy for damages for putting democracy in danger, based on the House Select Committee's findings? It seems that $1-10 per US resident, in a class action lawsuit, would do the trick.