Onyx Lynx

1. First and foremost:  Welcome to the folks from Crooks and Liars' Mike's Blog Round Up.  I am honored.  Warning:  I do snark.  All the time.  You may have noticed.
2. Whistleblower punished for connecting Hive Collapse and pesticides.  Because bees don't make campaign contributions the USDA doesn't want to get in trouble with large corporations and large corporations don't need food.  By Susie Madrak in Crooks and Liars; longer article at the StarTribune.  Dr. Kelsey is spinning in her grave.
3. Whenever I read or hear about the Republican debates, two thoughts float to the surface:
   
   1. When listening to professional liars politicians, my mental mendacity meter has three levels:  Largely true/what I remember as true; true-ish but exaggerated; poppy seed of truth surrounded by prevarication and weaselling; and bullshit.  Four levels.
   2. Six Characters in Search of an Author
   Also, why aren't the candidates also publishing a Republican version of The Onion? That would actually be funny.

He's claiming to have spied on and blackmailed umpires.  No, really.

Take him to church.

• Maureen O'Hara, actress
• Princeton Univerity honors the memory of John Nash.  (Obit here)

• Marty Ingels, comedian.
  
• Driftglass is keeping a running account of the "Pillory Clinton" hearings.  (Note:  SATIRE EXAGGERATED FOR EFFECT. ETA: Actual transcript of hearings.)
• Trey Gowdy insists there's something to it.
• Star, destroying planet.

• So-called "crisis pregnancy centers" required to inform clientele of all options.  They don't like that and they're suing.
• Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister of Canada.  This is good news.
• Joe Biden will not be running for President.
• Myths of fluency, or myriad ways languages get used.  (Babbel.com magazine.)

• Ken Taylor, former Canadian ambassador to Iran. Yes. That former Canadian ambassador to Iran. (Broad outlines of story in Argo.)
• ETA: Joan Leslie, actress

• Bernie Won All the Focus Groups & Online Polls, So Why Is the Media Saying Hillary Won the Debate?
  

  Firstly, it’s important to point out that online polls, and to a lesser extent focus groups, are obviously not scientific. But it’s also important to point out that the echo chamber musings of establishment liberal pundits is far, far less scientific. It wasn’t that the online polls and focus groups had Sanders winning, it’s that they had him winning by a lot. And it wasn’t just that the pundit class has Clinton winning, it’s that they had her winning by a lot. This gap speaks to a larger gap we’ve seen since the beginning of the Sanders campaign. The mainstream media writes off Bernie and is constantly shocked when his polls numbers go up.

  Adam Johnson, AlterNet.
• Jurassicpork's imagining of President Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby as written by a selection of modern Republicans.  (Letter linked to in article, but you might want to see it first.)

Dean Chance, pitcher.

Via Avedon's Sideshow, voter suppression under another name, not to mention large numbers of unlicensed drivers having accidents, and huge lines at the Alabama DMV's remaining offices, because did the legislators and bean counters really think that making it difficult to get a driver license would prevent people from driving in a largely rural state?  (To those who believe that people who drive without a license tend to be more cautious to avoid police attention:  Are you kidding?)

Also, possibly the schools or churches or local organizations or whoever with transportation might want to arrange to bus or otherwise transport people, preferably in batches, to the DMV offices that remain open, rather than wait for the outcome of the inevitable legal maneuverings that should be happening right now.  (It could be a junior-to-senior rite of passage if high schools take it up.)  Yes, the later the injunction (or whatever) happens, the less likely countermeasures can be brought into play, but there's probably a deadline on registering to vote, and why register if you lack ID to be able to vote?

In fact, I'm in favor of organizing efforts to thwart disenfranchisement.  And I'm in favor of starting yesterday.  State political groups should be helping their poorer and/or older constituents obtain documentation or duplicate documents in order to get what will be accepted as voter ID, or should be making that information available.  Students could access that information through their schools, especially those attending out-of-home-state institutions.

To sort of quote Joe Hill:  "Don't mourn.  Organize."

Because those folks allegedly chewing their fingernails about voter fraud (you could put all the voter fraud committed in the last ten years, usually by those people "concerned" about voter fraud, onto the head of a pin and still have room for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim baseball team to do the Lindy hop) are organized.  And they don't mean us well.

This, by the way, has been a rant.

• Paul Prudhomme, chef (Cajun cuisine).
• Billy Joe Royal, singer

I'm a little late to this party:

[...] everyone knows that American infrastructure—what used to be called our public works, or just our bridges and railways, once the envy of the world—has now been stripped bare, and is being stripped ever barer.

What is less apparent, perhaps, is that the will to abandon the public way is not some failure of understanding, or some nearsighted omission by shortsighted politicians. It is part of a coherent ideological project.

"The Plot Against Trains," Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 15, 2015.  Because it's emblematic.

(This is the same strain of "conservative" that goes into spasms about "anarchists.")

• The Jill Stein for President website has probably been live since June.
  
  (My current favorite candidate for President is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who [as you remember] is not running.)
• California Lawyer has ceased publication.  It was published by Daily Journal Corp., which publishes legal newspapers in California.  The website will probably continue.  I'd hate to miss articles like the one about e-discovery:

  In its recent Formal Opinion (No. 2015-193), the State Bar of California Standing Committee On Professional Responsibility and Conduct concluded that “a lack of technological knowledge in handling e-discovery may render an attorney ethically incompetent to handle certain litigation matters involving e-discovery, absent curative assistance under rule 3-110(C), even where the attorney may otherwise be highly experienced.”

  I spent a couple of years poring through legal newspapers (job); this stuff interests me even though I don't have that legal twisty mind.