Well, Keebler Elf Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III was firedlet-go resigned yesterday at the request of tRump. Rumor has it Mueller is ready to indict Junior which would be bad for the brand and AG Sessions has been at odds with tRump for a long time. About 12 dog years give or take.
Enter acting Attorney General Matthew G. Whitaker — a tRump loyalist, Mueller investigation critic, and bureaucrat thrown in to gum up the works should need be.
In response and this is not much notice, but today at five (5) PM (Thursday, 11.08.2018), MoveOn.org has organized a protest to protect Mueller. Participate and find a site near you here.
In my opinion, this protest pre-emptively shows the current administration that we the people are watching. We are concerned for the rule of law. We are concerned that no.one is above the law.
Future protests by MoveOn.org will happen on an as-needed basis and will be scheduled as necessary if or when these identified red lines are crossed (MoveOn.org):
For those of you who followed along with White Lies I & White Lies II, Mr. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III was US Attorney General for 636 days.
Health care is self-care. With all the attention on the 2018 midterm elections coming up in 3 weeks, don’t forget to take care of yourself. Mark your calendar and sign-up if you need coverage!
And! If you’re 18 or older and a US citizen, you have the pre-existing right to vote.
Chop wood, carry water. So Zen. Small, consistent actions win the day. Enlightenment will be yours. Already enlightened?
Chop wood, carry water.
This week the New Hampshire Gazette – Admiral Fowle’s Piscataqua River Tidal Guide (Not for Navigational Purposes)¹ column contained this little gem dated September 28:
“1891 – In New York a 72-year-old writer named Herman Melville dies in obscurity.”
Herman Melville died not knowing that 90 years later, in 1981, Moby Dick was force-fed reading for an American Literature course. And I was not the only one, it was not the only course, and it was not the only university. After Melville died, Moby Dick became a thread in the rich fabric of American literature. Speaking of fabric, another Melville quote:
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.”
-Herman Melville
In life, Melville was not feted for Moby Dick. One-hundred-twenty-seven years after his death? Plays staged, movies made, and the Moby Dick Wikipedia entry looks to be a comprehensive Master’s thesis with 167 footnotes. Whoa!
You don’t know if what you do makes a difference. Do it anyway.
Chop wood. Carry Water.
I worked at an electric utility on the bulk electric or, to my way of thinking the supply-side of the house. Power was measured in units of megawatts. Every four (4) seconds at hundreds of meter points across the footprint, measurements were taken, calculations were made and generators set to respond would follow the load. In megawatts. For the sciencey, a megawatt is 10 raised to the 6th power, (10**6 or 1,000,000). By way of comparison, kilowatts are delivered to residences, consumption is billed in kwh, A kilowatt is 10 raised to the 3rd power or 10³, but let’s get out of this rabbit hole.
If you plugged in your Christmas tree lights on a hot muggy day in July, we wouldn’t notice. Air conditioners running full bore, your string of lights would be a drop in the ocean. Our attention was focused elsewhere. But! The first Monday after Thanksgiving, tens of thousands of homes have Christmas tree lights plugged in and ready to go. The sun goes down, the load goes up but not like the Monday before. In aggregate, those Christmas tree lights make a difference, and you have our attention. Everyone weighs in with more light. And the point?
You might not be aware of the difference you make. Make a difference anyway.
¹ My absolute favorite newspaper: The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 262, No. 26, September 14, 2018. Admiral Fowle’s Piscataqua River Tidal Guide (Not for Navigational Purposes) is on the back page.
Actively participate with others in grassroots political engagement, and please …
Be heard by being seen and have fun!
From the Power To The Polls website:
“The day will include speakers, performances, canvassing, phone and text banking, postcard writing, food trucks, fellowship and more. Additional details will be posted to the Facebook event.
“Wisconsin’s marginalized and progressive communities have been attacked by voter suppression efforts which also impacted the 2016 election results. There’s too much at stake in this election to sit on the sidelines. We have a real chance to turn things around and build a progressive majority. This year, we won special elections in Wisconsin Senate Districts 1 and 10, and we elected Rebecca Dalletto the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Voters are saying to the racist, sexist, xenophobic, ableist, and transphobic policies of the Trump administration and majority in Congress.
We can win by working to amplify the women’s narrative in the electoral space, support local grassroots leaders and elect more women and people of color to public office. The P2P tour is only going to 10 priority states and Wisconsin is one of them, be a part of the movement for victory by registering today!”
Full disclosure: I will be out-of-town during this event but I will be looking for future similar events and will post them here.
We, the disillusioned, search for the reason the 2016 election swung the way it did to a non-truther. And further, we look for a reason that 30-some-percent of the populace still supports the deranged lying cantaloupe.* We blame Russians that ran interference on multiple fronts — meetings with campaign representatives, FaceBook advertising, the NRA, et alad nauseum— all the way to boots-on-the-ground-US-citizens who turned up for events.¹
And soul-searching continues. In previous posts, I’ve blamed the 2016 election results on the misogyny of women in my demographic. Or my favorite and always front-runner, the GOP and Reince Priebus who really kicked things off by playing along with the ruse that the Teflon Cheeto was qualified to run for office, any office, even POTUS.
But recent evidence offered up in a Cheeto Tweet from the “nation’s most prestigious unit of public housing”² –“The Failing @nytimes quotes “a senior White House official” who doesn’t exist, as saying “even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed.” WRONG AGAIN! Use real people, not phony sources.”
And then The New York Times followed up with information that the “phony source” was a “senior White House official.”³
The source was not phony. The source was a White House official at a press briefing.
Prescedense Cheeto lied! And he knows that. And we know that.
And his minions are polished at the lie — Kellyanne, Sarah, et al. And we know that, too.
Politicians lie. All the time. Examples exist on both sides – Democrats and Republicans*.
And therein lies truth.
Everybody lies.
And I’m reminded of “Love the Way You Lie,” the Eminem (featuring Rihanna) anthem to the complexity of abusive relationships:
“Just gonna stand there And watch me burn But that’s alright Because I like The way it hurts Just gonna stand there And hear me cry But that’s alright Because I love The way you lie I love the way you lie.”
-Eminem
-Skylar Grey
The Trump Regime: Love the Way You Lie — abusiveness writ large on the all of us. We burn. We cry. We hurt. We were sucked into and are stuck in this moment with an abusive Prescedense.
And his support? I contend that they love the way he lies. They’ve been lied to over and over, and now? They prefer bald, orange comb-over straight up lies to deceit dressed up as truth. After all, packaged and polished, lies are lies are lies.
Ugh. I stop now.
Below this line: thought and prayers comments, resources, and links I viewed while writing this post.
*Book: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. I’m currently reading this page-turner on analysis and interpretation of the voluminous amounts of data we’re willing to share anonymously-but-not with the faceless internet. Frood — not her real name, and friends are Big Data enthusiasts. Graduates even. <smile>
* Propensity and proclivity imply tendencies and choice and I’m convinced that The Donald’s lying is embedded in his DNA. But then we’re back full circle to everyone has DNA and everyone lies.
*No fault of cantaloupes.
¹ Read Baratunde conclusions and full break-down of Mueller’s indictment here.
² Description of the White House from The New Hampshire Gazette. I’ve tripped across this verbiage in their paper more than once. A note, however. Early news reports today indicate that Melanie Melania Trump is moving back to the Trump Tower in New York City. We could make the argument that perhaps the Trump Tower is the most prestigious unit of public housing.
³ My mind boggles that NYTimes continues to give quarterwhite-washing uncontested ink to a congenitally disposed liar: “It is not clear whether the president was simply unaware of the actions of his own senior staff or if he knowingly ignored the truth.” He lies. He’s a liar. How do you know? His lips were moving. His fingers were twitching Tweeting. This isn’t that hard.
* How to Break the Cycle of Verbal and Emotional Abuse, by Beth Cone Kramer. IMO, although written for personal relationships, it would help if the media would recognize the abuse of power for what it is and if they would change their response. They are legitimizing illegal behavior.
For love of wordplay, the phrase “no s*it¹ Sherlock” recently resolved itself into “know s*it Sherlock.” Know s*it. ‘Know’ the homonym of ‘no’ turns the snarky phrase “no s*it Sherlock” into a cheer for furthering one’s education — “know s*it Sherlock.” Know, know, know!
Sherlock Holmes required a 7% solution.
And as an information junkie, I am happy to report that 3.5% of a solution is required to shake this current s*itstorm of an administration apart. From my new favorite periodical — The New Hampshire Gazette — A Non-Fiction Newspaper, Grab Me, I’m Free! Vol. CCLXII, No. 16, April 27, 2018, page 2:
“If enough people stand up to the status quo, eventually it will cave.
“The question is, how many people would that take? According to researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, not as many as one might think.
“They found that ‘no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population — and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.’ “²
Whoa! What!? If we throw the 3.5% solution at the 2016 election turnout, an additional 4.8M resisters need to participate and march their feet to the polls to effect change. And though we may not participate for the same reasons — a metaphorical herd of cats — pick your protest issue(s), make your voice heard, and at election time, make your vote count for change you believe in. Shoot, if you look at the number of votes Jill Stein and Gary Johnson peeled off in 2016, we’re there!
And like it or not, I offer the contemporary Tea Party as a recent example of effective civil resistance. The Tea Party formed in January 2009 after the election of President Obama. Although never a formal political third-party, the Tea Party organized, endorsed, and elected Senators and Representatives that formed a coalition within the current GOP. And while verifying this assertion, I tripped across this nice essay obituary for the Tea Party by Matt Kibbe, one of the original Tea Party organizers.
The rise and fall of the Tea Party happened within a decade more or less. Horrified as we were, they affected real political change. And treated us with Ted Cruz. And now their adjunct-cum-Emporer Prescedense Trump. And the damage done by the Trump Prescedensey internationally just this week and the week’s not even over, will persist longer than a decade.
Participate. Encourage others. The 3.5% solution is within our reach.
Know shit hope, Sherlock.
¹ s*it: I recently blogged that s*it looks French and sounds French if pronounced ess-EEE.
Well, in this day and age of I has been busy, there has been so much news that has spilled over the edge. It’s hard to keep up, so I’ll start here.
March 24, 2018 – March For Our Lives
“What [injustice] would move you enough to get you to march?” I was asked this at book club years ago during the George W. Bush Administration and although I was outraged at much going on at the time, I was hard-pressed to think of anything I felt so strongly about that I would put my feet in the street.
Well, fast forward less than 20 years and here we are! February 14, 2018, Nicholas Cruz, a lone gunman entered the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 students, wounded 17 more, and sparked a movement.
So I marched.
My sign, Ann’s sign¹:
And while I’m reassured that the Stoneman Douglas students who SURVIVED a mass-shooting are kicking it — putting walk to the talk, engaging parents, veterans, and gun owners, including people of color marginalized in discussion of gun violence, the all of it — this time is different.
And it hit me. The survivors of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting look like the younger brothers and sisters of the Stoneman Douglas high school students because age relative, THEY ARE! Five years after Sandy Hook, the six- and seven-year-olds are eleven and twelve.
Already through a mass-shooting once, they are not even in high school. Ugh.
Boom. There it is. Gun control. March For Our Lives has put my feet in the street.
At noon on Wednesday, March 28, Traxler Park, Janesville, WI there was a meet-and-greet rally for the group of students who extended March For Our Lives by 50 miles and marched from Madison, Wisconsin to Janesville, Wisconsin — hometown of Paul Ryan.
The student speakers were impressive. Recounting their 50-mile walk, I expect #50milesmore was a formative experience. It will be a jumping off point in their lives to bigger things.
So today I restrict my comments to the speech by Pardeep Singh Kaleka. Mr. Kaleka’s father was killed in the mass shooting at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in 2012. As his father died on the floor, he prayed. But his father didn’t pray for himself.
His ‘thoughts and prayers’ were for the living. For those that remain. And here I am. Thoughts and prayers put my feet on the street.
Finally, from Mr. Kaleka: react in peace.
React in peace. Not rest. React.
React in peace.
I can get behind that.
Live in a spirit of relentless optimism. Here is video of Pardeep Singh Kaleka relating the story of his father’s last words at the TEDxMilwaukee. (Video starts at 15:00 although the whole is IMO, worth the watch):
¹ Our signs were lettered, colored, and the AK-15s drawn freehand by a professional to whom we say ‘thank you’!
