Last night, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court declared that voters in Brazil have elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva president, replacing right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro. A factory worker from a young age, the new leader, popularly known as Lula, is a workers’ rights supporter who held the presidency from 2003 to 2011. In office, he launched programs to end hunger, strengthen family agriculture, provide housing, and protect Brazil’s environment, including the rain forests. During his first term, malnutrition among Brazil’s poor was cut by half, from 14% to 7%.
Prof. Richardson refers to "Republicans desperate to spin the deadly attack as a reflection of political violence on both sides of the aisle...or—appallingly and without evidence—of a gay tryst gone bad."
Why not mention that the richest man in the world, now the owner of the most influential social media platform in the world, was the most prominent source of the rumor that the Speaker's octogenarian husband is the victim not of an attack by a manicacal political assassin but "of a gay tryst gone bad"?
Nothing seems more consequential to me, even Bolsonaro's defeat, than the takeover of Twitter and Musk's posting a malignant apologia for attempted murder on his first full day at work as Dear Leader.
“Like Trump, Bolsonaro now faces investigations and possible criminal charges that have been delayed while he enjoyed presidential immunity. He has told two senior officials he is worried that, out of office, he will go to prison.”
I hope that the Brazilian justice system works faster than ours has to date!
Yes, there are parallels in the Pelosi & Jan. 6 attacks, but an even clearer comparison can be made in the conspiracy to kidnap & kill Michigan’s woman governor, Gretchen Whitmer. Authoritarians become incensed at women in positions of power. Progressive women are their nightmares. Our Sec. of State, Jocelyn Benson, was also threatened by armed men outside of her home.
Every-time I hear “Where’s Nancy?”, I want to scream “Where’s the DOJ?”
Trump may have condemned what happened to Mr.Pelosi, saying “it was a terrible thing”, but in the same breath he equated it with everyday, Urban violence, thus diluting his own culpability for having caused it. While Trump shapes the court of public opinion, sows the seeds of his violent dictatorship, and sends cryptic messages to his followers on who to attack and when, AG Garland is still gathering evidence. Trump’s message has not just been weaponized, the big lie being propagated like never before. Why is the DOJ investigating the messengers, while the sender is still sending them? It’s treating the symptom and not the problem. Trump turned his message into blood, for all the world to see, and he is still hammering (forgive the pun) away at our Democracy with his big lie, while the DOJ is still building the case that it is even happening. It’s as if they’re chasing after the bullets, rather than the shooter. If the DOJ thinks they’re sending a message’ with the charges they filed, then they can’t deny the impacts (sorry another terrible pun) the ‘messages’ being sent by Trump have. The DOJ cannot deny that damage is being done to our Democracy, while they are busy counting the holes.
Tonight, I sat out on my porch with a spooky purple Halloween light, a plastic skull with glowing eyes, several pumpkins, and a big cauldron full of treats, waiting for Trick-or-Treaters. Halloween seems to be fading away as a tradition. Tonight, we had three teen-agers.
I watched the moon, a lovely waxing quarter-moon. I remember seeing the moon in late 2015, as the Beast from the Abyss was clearing the field of presidential contenders -- a full moon, I think -- and it was a great comfort to me. My most distant ancestors had watched that same moon. The pre-Colombian residents of the land I now live in had seen that moon 20,000 years ago. The earliest humans looked up and saw that self-same moon. And the face of Lady Luna looked down and watched empires rise and fall, rise and fall, then rise and fall again. There was, and is, a kind of stability in that, a comfort, unmatched by anything made by humans and wrapped in plastic, whether it is a nougat of sugar, or a government.
But eventually, I pulled out my phone and started reading news articles. A boredom reflex, a modern pathology. I normally just do a quick scan. This went on. And on. And on. And I started to realize that I was not getting any news at all. I was getting pure sewage, masticated, regurgitated, mixed, and delivered up again on a new plate. The Paul Pelosi story is at the top of the fold, as they say, and what is being written by the news services is utter filth.
I stopped reading, and removed all news services from my phone in the same way an alcoholic might remove all of the bottles of liquor from his house.
It isn't that news isn't interesting, or even valuable. It's that what is being published isn't news. It's regurgitated filth. It is a bunch of lamprey eels, stuffed into a barrel, eating each other, striving to get to the top of the barrel for just a moment, to get that by-line, that article. Is it thoughtful? Irrelevant. Is it even true? Equally irrelevant. Does it "sell papers?" Or garner clicks? That's all that matters.
The blind intensity of hate that the right has stoked has been burning for a long time. But there's something about what happened to Paul Pelosi that helps me not just see it more clearly but feel it. I've imagined myself at the crime scene, struggling with his attacker, and hearing the hammer bashing my skull.
In my heart of hearts, I've known the rabid insurrectionists who unleashed their rage at the Capitol on Jan. 6 will come eventually for more than Democratic leaders if the guardrails of society are overrun. They will come for us. But I didn't want to believe it.
The reaction on the right to what happened to Pelosi — jokes, absurd speculation, whataboutism — says all we need to know. They have been brainwashed into believing Democrats are evil. I keep seeing and hearing the word in interviews. What's happening is no different than what led to Nazi Germany.
tfg tries to delay things, because that's what he does. This time, though, even if Republicans take over the House and Senate in the mid-terms, we still have Joe Biden in the White House and judicial processes well underway to take down tfg and his loyalists like Alex Jones and Steve Bannon. Sure, we'd all like them jailed yesterday. But I expect that justice will be served because this has gone from political tribunals to legal ones.
No matter the results of the midterm elections, it seems so very likely that violence and chaos will erupt. Even if it’s a short lived event, it further sows doubt for many that our elections are tainted. That’s at the heart of the Republican playbook, because it’s a significant step toward ending elections.
The Republican Party gives us our daily list of reasons why it should not be allowed to exist. It's all very disheartening: watching Kari Lake make a joke of the attack on Paul Pelosi, seeing the tweets from Donald Junior, the near silence of the GOP (which I equate to tacit support of the violence). I wonder what it will take for the Republicans (the members of the T**** cult) to understand what their party is doing. I live in a 'blue' state, but the local Republican candidate in my district for the state representative seat is an election denier, as are the GOP gubernatorial candidate and the head of the state party. T**** is still sowing divisiveness, and the DOJ is taking way too long to bring him to justice. He needs to be kept away from social media, isolated in a cell, in prison, until his trial for treason, for which, on conviction, he could be hanged. His guilt has already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Letting him continue to roam free and use social media to further his lies is only going to cause more violence.
In short, Tony Earls and his wife were robbed at a Houston ATM. When the robber fled with his cash, Earls pulled out a gun and fired nine shots into a pickup he mistakenly thought carried the robber. The truck carried the Alvarez family instead. He hit nine year old Arlene Alvarez in the head, killing her.
It gets worse.
Last week, in the face of this callous disregard for human life and public safety, a grand jury declined to bring charges against Mr. Earls, citing "his right to defend his property". Local authorities are searching for the"real murderer", the bank robber. Mr. Earls is a free man, since he cannot be prosecuted twice for the same crime.
So we have come to this. In a country where the legal system can consider the negligent killing of an uninvolved nine year old child to be justified in retaliation for a robbery, is it any wonder that people joke about a hammer attack on an 82 year old?
There's nothing surprising about the vapid punditry, silence, outrageous defamatory theories circulating about the Pelosi attack. In fact, if the event were simply a "script", fishing for reality TV responses, the writers would come up with a similar set of garbage narratives. Except for the authentic injuries and crimes committed, the fact that it occurred at all is yet another tiring episode in the made-for-TV drivel that is emblematic of our political cycle. How much more of this will we all have to bear with another whole week before voting day still before us? I know it sounds selfish and belittling to the actual victim. I am truly horrified and sympathetic towards Mr. Pelosi; I think the perp is truly nuts, most likely not attached to any radical right-wing conspiracy group, actually worthy of pity, truly a circus clown whose strings are being pulled by the ring master he hears in his head, or perhaps on some right-wing podcast somewhere. But, really, I've had it up to my eyebrows. No amount of additional scaldalization will cause me to change how I feel or how I voted. I thought the best recent news was that from Brasilia. It's fascinating that the South American continent is moving left, even as Europe, the US and parts of Asia are moving right; a sort of shifting of the world-wide political weather under global climate change. What is both sad and alarming is that we have little time remaining to enjoy the political spectator sport of international political trends while we fail to address the increasingly urgent and ACTUAL course of global climate change. Where is my cryogenic chamber? what pill can I take that will allow me 8 days of uninterrupted sleep until November 9 arrives?
On the attack on the Pelosi's home, I note the appropriate coordination between the separate federal & state cases. The federal charges includes 1 count aimed at impeding or interfering with Nancy Pelosi's duties as a USG official. I have reviewed the Federal complaint (USA vs DWD) & update the following: A 2nd count, 18 USC Section 115(a)(1)(A), (b) is for assaulting an immediate family member [Paul] of a Federal Official (Nancy).
Federal criminal investigation rules known as "discovery" starts immediately after Federal arraignment. That discovery information can used to supplement the separate state claims with positive, fully admissible evidence & possible amended state pleadings.
Paul was concious & was able to be interviewed by the SF DA`s office before state charges were filed. Paul is still in intensive care under the treatment of a world class neurological surgery unit at Zuckerberg SF General whose mission statement is that a TBI (traumatic brain injury) is not an event it is a process; Paul is expected to recover over time which definitely takes a process toward full healing. Been there.
Should the Democratic Party come out of the upcoming election with gains in both houses, the first item of business must be a federal law spelling out harsh penalties for those commissioning acts of stocastic terrorism.
One hopes that the Brazillian political parallel of the rise and subsequent fall of a criminal authoritarian leader/political movement carries through to our own elections next Tuesday.
One is guardedly, very guardedly, optimistic.
Another thought this first day of November in 2022; I wish the news media, all of them, including PBS and NPR, would stop treating elections as sporting events, with breathless shouts about this candidate's gaff and this other candidate's "surge" in the polls. All the yelling is aimed not at providing relevant information but to attract readers/listeners/viewers in order to boost sponsor revenue.
About those polls; one of my heroes, the late Mike Royko, (showing my age here,) had this advice. If a pollster contacts you, engage, and lie through your teeth.
Prof. Richardson refers to "Republicans desperate to spin the deadly attack as a reflection of political violence on both sides of the aisle...or—appallingly and without evidence—of a gay tryst gone bad."
Why not mention that the richest man in the world, now the owner of the most influential social media platform in the world, was the most prominent source of the rumor that the Speaker's octogenarian husband is the victim not of an attack by a manicacal political assassin but "of a gay tryst gone bad"?
Nothing seems more consequential to me, even Bolsonaro's defeat, than the takeover of Twitter and Musk's posting a malignant apologia for attempted murder on his first full day at work as Dear Leader.
“Like Trump, Bolsonaro now faces investigations and possible criminal charges that have been delayed while he enjoyed presidential immunity. He has told two senior officials he is worried that, out of office, he will go to prison.”
I hope that the Brazilian justice system works faster than ours has to date!
Yes, there are parallels in the Pelosi & Jan. 6 attacks, but an even clearer comparison can be made in the conspiracy to kidnap & kill Michigan’s woman governor, Gretchen Whitmer. Authoritarians become incensed at women in positions of power. Progressive women are their nightmares. Our Sec. of State, Jocelyn Benson, was also threatened by armed men outside of her home.
Every-time I hear “Where’s Nancy?”, I want to scream “Where’s the DOJ?”
Trump may have condemned what happened to Mr.Pelosi, saying “it was a terrible thing”, but in the same breath he equated it with everyday, Urban violence, thus diluting his own culpability for having caused it. While Trump shapes the court of public opinion, sows the seeds of his violent dictatorship, and sends cryptic messages to his followers on who to attack and when, AG Garland is still gathering evidence. Trump’s message has not just been weaponized, the big lie being propagated like never before. Why is the DOJ investigating the messengers, while the sender is still sending them? It’s treating the symptom and not the problem. Trump turned his message into blood, for all the world to see, and he is still hammering (forgive the pun) away at our Democracy with his big lie, while the DOJ is still building the case that it is even happening. It’s as if they’re chasing after the bullets, rather than the shooter. If the DOJ thinks they’re sending a message’ with the charges they filed, then they can’t deny the impacts (sorry another terrible pun) the ‘messages’ being sent by Trump have. The DOJ cannot deny that damage is being done to our Democracy, while they are busy counting the holes.
Tonight, I sat out on my porch with a spooky purple Halloween light, a plastic skull with glowing eyes, several pumpkins, and a big cauldron full of treats, waiting for Trick-or-Treaters. Halloween seems to be fading away as a tradition. Tonight, we had three teen-agers.
I watched the moon, a lovely waxing quarter-moon. I remember seeing the moon in late 2015, as the Beast from the Abyss was clearing the field of presidential contenders -- a full moon, I think -- and it was a great comfort to me. My most distant ancestors had watched that same moon. The pre-Colombian residents of the land I now live in had seen that moon 20,000 years ago. The earliest humans looked up and saw that self-same moon. And the face of Lady Luna looked down and watched empires rise and fall, rise and fall, then rise and fall again. There was, and is, a kind of stability in that, a comfort, unmatched by anything made by humans and wrapped in plastic, whether it is a nougat of sugar, or a government.
But eventually, I pulled out my phone and started reading news articles. A boredom reflex, a modern pathology. I normally just do a quick scan. This went on. And on. And on. And I started to realize that I was not getting any news at all. I was getting pure sewage, masticated, regurgitated, mixed, and delivered up again on a new plate. The Paul Pelosi story is at the top of the fold, as they say, and what is being written by the news services is utter filth.
I stopped reading, and removed all news services from my phone in the same way an alcoholic might remove all of the bottles of liquor from his house.
It isn't that news isn't interesting, or even valuable. It's that what is being published isn't news. It's regurgitated filth. It is a bunch of lamprey eels, stuffed into a barrel, eating each other, striving to get to the top of the barrel for just a moment, to get that by-line, that article. Is it thoughtful? Irrelevant. Is it even true? Equally irrelevant. Does it "sell papers?" Or garner clicks? That's all that matters.
No. More. Clicks.
The blind intensity of hate that the right has stoked has been burning for a long time. But there's something about what happened to Paul Pelosi that helps me not just see it more clearly but feel it. I've imagined myself at the crime scene, struggling with his attacker, and hearing the hammer bashing my skull.
In my heart of hearts, I've known the rabid insurrectionists who unleashed their rage at the Capitol on Jan. 6 will come eventually for more than Democratic leaders if the guardrails of society are overrun. They will come for us. But I didn't want to believe it.
The reaction on the right to what happened to Pelosi — jokes, absurd speculation, whataboutism — says all we need to know. They have been brainwashed into believing Democrats are evil. I keep seeing and hearing the word in interviews. What's happening is no different than what led to Nazi Germany.
Maybe Bolsonaro and trump can be penpals? One in jail in Brazil and the other in jail in U.S. I can hope can’t I?
tfg tries to delay things, because that's what he does. This time, though, even if Republicans take over the House and Senate in the mid-terms, we still have Joe Biden in the White House and judicial processes well underway to take down tfg and his loyalists like Alex Jones and Steve Bannon. Sure, we'd all like them jailed yesterday. But I expect that justice will be served because this has gone from political tribunals to legal ones.
No matter the results of the midterm elections, it seems so very likely that violence and chaos will erupt. Even if it’s a short lived event, it further sows doubt for many that our elections are tainted. That’s at the heart of the Republican playbook, because it’s a significant step toward ending elections.
The Republican Party gives us our daily list of reasons why it should not be allowed to exist. It's all very disheartening: watching Kari Lake make a joke of the attack on Paul Pelosi, seeing the tweets from Donald Junior, the near silence of the GOP (which I equate to tacit support of the violence). I wonder what it will take for the Republicans (the members of the T**** cult) to understand what their party is doing. I live in a 'blue' state, but the local Republican candidate in my district for the state representative seat is an election denier, as are the GOP gubernatorial candidate and the head of the state party. T**** is still sowing divisiveness, and the DOJ is taking way too long to bring him to justice. He needs to be kept away from social media, isolated in a cell, in prison, until his trial for treason, for which, on conviction, he could be hanged. His guilt has already been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Letting him continue to roam free and use social media to further his lies is only going to cause more violence.
"[I]f we’re not going to ostracize people who are yukking it up over taking a hammer to a man in his 80s, then we’re a different society.”
Sorry to break it to you, Dr. Richardson, but we do live in a different society. As evidence, I present this story:
https://www.aol.com/news/grand-jury-declines-indict-texas-174256162.html
In short, Tony Earls and his wife were robbed at a Houston ATM. When the robber fled with his cash, Earls pulled out a gun and fired nine shots into a pickup he mistakenly thought carried the robber. The truck carried the Alvarez family instead. He hit nine year old Arlene Alvarez in the head, killing her.
It gets worse.
Last week, in the face of this callous disregard for human life and public safety, a grand jury declined to bring charges against Mr. Earls, citing "his right to defend his property". Local authorities are searching for the"real murderer", the bank robber. Mr. Earls is a free man, since he cannot be prosecuted twice for the same crime.
So we have come to this. In a country where the legal system can consider the negligent killing of an uninvolved nine year old child to be justified in retaliation for a robbery, is it any wonder that people joke about a hammer attack on an 82 year old?
There's nothing surprising about the vapid punditry, silence, outrageous defamatory theories circulating about the Pelosi attack. In fact, if the event were simply a "script", fishing for reality TV responses, the writers would come up with a similar set of garbage narratives. Except for the authentic injuries and crimes committed, the fact that it occurred at all is yet another tiring episode in the made-for-TV drivel that is emblematic of our political cycle. How much more of this will we all have to bear with another whole week before voting day still before us? I know it sounds selfish and belittling to the actual victim. I am truly horrified and sympathetic towards Mr. Pelosi; I think the perp is truly nuts, most likely not attached to any radical right-wing conspiracy group, actually worthy of pity, truly a circus clown whose strings are being pulled by the ring master he hears in his head, or perhaps on some right-wing podcast somewhere. But, really, I've had it up to my eyebrows. No amount of additional scaldalization will cause me to change how I feel or how I voted. I thought the best recent news was that from Brasilia. It's fascinating that the South American continent is moving left, even as Europe, the US and parts of Asia are moving right; a sort of shifting of the world-wide political weather under global climate change. What is both sad and alarming is that we have little time remaining to enjoy the political spectator sport of international political trends while we fail to address the increasingly urgent and ACTUAL course of global climate change. Where is my cryogenic chamber? what pill can I take that will allow me 8 days of uninterrupted sleep until November 9 arrives?
On the attack on the Pelosi's home, I note the appropriate coordination between the separate federal & state cases. The federal charges includes 1 count aimed at impeding or interfering with Nancy Pelosi's duties as a USG official. I have reviewed the Federal complaint (USA vs DWD) & update the following: A 2nd count, 18 USC Section 115(a)(1)(A), (b) is for assaulting an immediate family member [Paul] of a Federal Official (Nancy).
Federal criminal investigation rules known as "discovery" starts immediately after Federal arraignment. That discovery information can used to supplement the separate state claims with positive, fully admissible evidence & possible amended state pleadings.
Paul was concious & was able to be interviewed by the SF DA`s office before state charges were filed. Paul is still in intensive care under the treatment of a world class neurological surgery unit at Zuckerberg SF General whose mission statement is that a TBI (traumatic brain injury) is not an event it is a process; Paul is expected to recover over time which definitely takes a process toward full healing. Been there.
Should the Democratic Party come out of the upcoming election with gains in both houses, the first item of business must be a federal law spelling out harsh penalties for those commissioning acts of stocastic terrorism.
One hopes that the Brazillian political parallel of the rise and subsequent fall of a criminal authoritarian leader/political movement carries through to our own elections next Tuesday.
One is guardedly, very guardedly, optimistic.
Another thought this first day of November in 2022; I wish the news media, all of them, including PBS and NPR, would stop treating elections as sporting events, with breathless shouts about this candidate's gaff and this other candidate's "surge" in the polls. All the yelling is aimed not at providing relevant information but to attract readers/listeners/viewers in order to boost sponsor revenue.
About those polls; one of my heroes, the late Mike Royko, (showing my age here,) had this advice. If a pollster contacts you, engage, and lie through your teeth.
Have a nice day, everyone.
Just when you think it can’t get any more crazy and dangerous, it does. I am concerned someone will get seriously injured or killed soon.