Onyx Lynx

Yes, I have noticed that I am posting a lot of obituaries and not much about politics.

I have resolved to correct that.  New Year's Rez:  More snark and satire on politics, some of which will write itself; baseball, because a sport that recapitulates the Odyssey is worth occasional aggravation and can be forgiven its pace; and whatever I feel like.  More essays with reference links and less linkspam (mind you, I do linkspam because the folks I'm linking to say what I'm thinking better, and sometimes I am juxtaposing points of view.  But.  I used to do thinkpieces; it's time I started thinking again).  And I may start using the obits as jumping-off points for discursions.  Maybe.

(Three weeks until we have to start dodging authoritarians.)

Happy New Year!

 Debbie Reynolds, actress/dancer (and mother of Carrie Fisher)

• Vera Rubin, astronomer ("dark matter")
• Carrie Fisher, actress/author/screenwriter  (she had a massive heart attack on a plane and died after 3 days in the ICU)
• ETA:  Richard Adams, author (Watership Down et al.) Via   in comments

• Zsa Zsa Gabor, celebrity and actress
• China Machado, model

Doonesbury!

Mike drop!

• An interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, and opportunities lost.

  Gorbachev, who helped end the Cold War by launching liberal reforms, cutting nuclear stockpiles and allowing Soviet bloc nations in Europe to break free from Moscow's diktat, spoke bitterly about the West's failure to embrace the new era of cooperation he says his policy of "perestroika" offered.
  [...]
  He blasted what he described as Western "triumphalism," saying it remains a key factor in tensions between Russia and the West.

• AlterNet's Ilana Novick summarizes Robert Reich's suspicions of Donald Trump's relationship with Russia.
• Via Body Impolitic:  Zadie Smith, "On Optimism and Despair."
• Ta-Nehisi Coates, "My President Was Black."  Warning:  It is long and thorough.  A taste:

  Throughout Obama’s 2008 campaign and into his presidency, this attitude proved key to his deep support in the black community. African Americans, weary of high achievers who distanced themselves from their black roots, understood that Obama had paid a price for checking “black” on his census form, and for living black, for hosting Common, for brushing dirt off his shoulder during the primaries, for marrying a woman who looked like Michelle Obama. If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television.

  Read it. That is all.
• Zandar on the Kentucky Noseless.

  They're finding out now that the bulk of people on Obamacare were always poor white folk from the hills anyway, and that they're going to be the first people with their heads on the block when the axe comes thundering down. But guess what? I have little sympathy for people who thought they were gladly condemning others to lose their health care in order to benefit themselves. They voted for Trump because he was going to "fire" those people and make white America great again. Trump sold them the dream and they bought the coming nightmare hook line and sinker.
  
  "Trump will take Obamacare from those people who don't deserve it, but never from me and my family."
  
  That'll be on the gravestone of the Affordable Care Act in 2017.
  
  It should be on the gravestones of a lot of Kentuckians over the next four years too.

  Yes, they've spited their faces,and now they all look like Voldemort. /sarcasm mine.
• Why was I humming "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" on the way back from the clinic?

• E. R. Braithwaite, who wrote To Sir, With Love, on which the movie was based.
• Alan Thicke, actor

Why not?  He's at least as qualified as the rest of the President-elect's nominees for cabinet positions.

The Satirists and Surrealists salute you, Mr. Canseco.

• They're gunning for Medicare and Social Security and lying about it.  (Zandar Versus the Stupid)

  Republicans aren't stupid enough to cut Social Security, are they? After all, the average Trump voter is on the older end of the scale of the American electorate and the oldest Boomers will be 72 starting next year, with millions retiring over the next four years of the Trump administration. The famous Tip O'Neill political adage that "Social Security is the third rail of American politics, you touch it and die" still has to apply in the Trump era, right?
  
  Funny story about Republicans, to "save" things they like to burn them down.

• Syphilis is returning, and it's drug-resistant.  (ars technica.com, via Andrew Ducker (andrewducker on Lj and Dreamwidth), who scatters many links every day.)

  Researchers studying syphilis have been aware of a growing problem with macrolide resistance, says Stamm. “At first, the macrolide treatment failures were in US patients, but then there were reports of macrolide treatment failures in patients in several other countries.” Macrolide resistance is now a “global public health problem,” she says.
  
  But researchers haven’t known how widespread this resistance is, because a lot of research has been done on strains of syphilis that were obtained from humans (sometimes a long time ago) and then kept in labs, passed down in generations of lab animals. The information from these strains is useful, but it doesn’t tell us much about what strains might be prevalent in the real world or how they might have evolved differently from the strains in lab animals.
  
  [...]
  
  They found that modern syphilis infections fall into two main strains, called Nichols and Street Strain 14 (SS14), that appear to have split from each other sometime between the 1960s and the 1980s. Syphilis research has largely focused on the Nichols strain, but SS14 was actually more common in their samples. “We didn’t expect to see something so widespread,” says Arora. “We expected regional clusters, maybe, but instead we see something that apparently has crossed frontiers and boundaries.”
  
  [...]
  
  Isolates of both strains show up with resistance to azithromycin, but resistance is far more prevalent in SS14. A quarter of the Nichols samples had the genetic pattern that leads to macrolide resistance, but 90 percent of the SS14 samples had it. Together, this evidence suggests that SS14 is a relatively new strain of syphilis that’s far more widespread than we thought and far more resistant to macrolides than we thought.

• The return of The Rude Pundit.  It's rude of course.  Adults at leisure only, 18 and under not admitted.

• Yes!  Rampant voter fraud!  My smelling salts!  My pearls!  My fainting -- wait, 4?

  We combed through the news-aggregation system Nexis to find demonstrated cases of absentee or in-person voter fraud — which is to say, examples of people getting caught casting a ballot that they shouldn't have cast — during this election. This excludes examples of voter registration fraud — the filing of fraudulent information. Those aren't votes cast — and given that organizations often provide incentives for employees to register as many people as possible, registration fraud cases (while still rare) are more common.
  
  Here's what we found: [examples]
  
  [...]
  
  There is simply no evidence that fraudulent ballots played any significant role in the 2016 presidential election whatsoever.

  That's four actual cases and three maybes. Somebody is using an eggbeater on that teapot, trying to create a tempest.
  
• Remember when we used to joke "It's a Russian plot" about seemingly-conspiratorial weirdness? It seems it's not a joke anymore.  Furthermore: 
  • Southern Beale,

    While this is the current headline, let me be blunt: this is not news. I wrote about this over the summer, here. I’m just a dumb housewife in Tennessee but even I can read a damn newspaper. When you read that the Russians hacked everyone, but only the DNC’s emails got sent to WikiLeaks, it’s pretty obvious that they were trying to help one team, and it sure wasn’t Hillary’s. As I wrote then:
    

    […] it’s far more worrisome that Putin is trying to help get Donald Trump elected than that Debbie Wasserman Schultz tried to help elect Hillary Clinton.

    But did we have that conversation? Noooo. We had to get all emo over Debbie Wasserman Schultz. That was super-fun.

    There's more.
  • Zandar

    The White House wanted to make sure everyone was on board with this, but Mitch McConnell said no, as he has for eight years. More importantly this [has] seriously thrown the legitimacy of Trump's win into doubt and Republicans like McConnell would have rather won with Russian help than a fair election.  Remember that.

    and
  • Driftglass

    Our country has been hit by a massive sneak attack by a hostile foreign power: a sneak attack whose very existence was covered up by leaders of the Republican Party.
    
    [...]
    
    The word you are looking for is "treason".

• Joining Anthony Weiner's therapy group: Jefferson Parish's president (Louisiana Republican) Mike Yenni.

  Fox 8’s Lee Zurik asked Yenni what his intent was in exchanging erotic texts with a teen.
  
  “I can’t…I really can’t answer it,” said Yenni. “I mean, it was just…it was a stupid action. It was a stupid action to even get into this form of text messaging. It was something…something that I can’t explain why I did it.”

  via skippy.
• Not the song or the musical group:  New theory about the Bermuda Triangle, with ominous music.

Appaarently I forgot to post this here Thursday:

• John Glenn.  
• Greg Lake, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (later Emerson, Lake and Powell) and King Crimson

Sorry.

• The Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire; links to articles about it in one place (at least for now, later may require search terms).  No, I wasn't there.  List of confirmed victims.  Map apps will still have the intact building in 3D and street view until the next pass/visit/upload (Mapquest, back in the day, showed pre-9/11 aerial views of WTC for a couple of weeks -- I used to check) happens--Google Maps last scanned that area in 2014.  

Meanwhile, the forces of evil around are assuming their triumph, and we shall call them Fascists because the Devil really hates being called by Its name.

• Hypocrisy and health care.  (Daily Irritant)
• They don't mean you well, that's for sure.  (Indomitable)
• Remember "Kinder, Küche, Kirche?"  Guess who wants to bring it back? (from Echidne of the Snakes)

  I'm not sure if this post makes the point I want to make: The right-wing in this country wants to socialize decisions about conception, about pregnancy and even about giving birth, but once a child is born, everything should be privatized: Almost all responsibility is saddled on the shoulders of the mothers, while the wider conservative society, in general, refuses to budge one inch from its traditional gendered expectations about the role of mothers.

  [Emphases in original]
  
• "Full employment" vs. "inclusive growth" and economic implications thereof. (naked capitalism)
• Unions and Fascist undermining and destruction.  (Booman Tribune)
• The war on libraries. (Wonkette)
• Rising tide of "fake" news and believers thereof.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)

• One of the many reasons that Megan McArdle is a terrible person is that she thinks she can-and, god help us, should-school Ta-Nehisi Coates on race.

  (The Hunting of the Snark)
  
• Robert Reich calls out Trump.  (AlterNet)
• Jerks vandalize football player's home.  (Crooks and Liars, first seen at sfgate.com)

• The Daily Banter's Justin Rosario discusses national voter ID.

  It will be nigh impossible to convince Millennials who came of age during the Great Recession that corporations and the 1% are the good guys. They watched corporate greed destroy the lives of millions and watched the rich get even richer from the destruction. Republicans will also be unable to convince them that they should vote Republican because Jesus hates abortion and brown people but loves guns. The usual wedge issues will have lost their potency. Republicans know this.
  
  The only move left to them has been rigging the election through extreme gerrymandering and massive voter suppression. Now that they control the entire government, the next step is to implement Voter ID laws on a federal level, forcing even Democratically controlled states to adopt a law that will reduce the number of eligible voters by millions.

  That to me smacks a little of conspiracy theory (also, someone who thinks Baby Boomers are "reliably conservative" has not met nearly enough of them).
• Variations on the term "crony capitalism."

  The real thing the doctrinaire conservatives get upset about in these contexts certainly has nothing to do with any meanings of the word "crony" in any case. It's the questioning of the miraculous rightness of the Invisible Hand, or less metaphysically the idea that any democratically constituted authority should question the judgment of the "rationally selfish" bourgeois through whose individual decisions the Hand is believed to operate. It's the bourgeois religion, according to which whatever the bourgeois wants is right, however destructive it may seem over the short run.

• Van Williams, actor (The Green Hornet)
• Margaret Whitton, actress (Major League, et seq.)
• Andrew Sachs, actor (Fawlty Towers)

51 days, folks.  Fifty-one days.

• The Tooth Fairy called.  That last tooth crumbled.  Please leave $1,000 under the pillow.  

  Camerota explained that the false claim that President Obama suggested people go out and commit voter fraud was drummed up on Fox Business Network, with deceptively edited video.

  I understand that there are intelligent, non-foaming Trump supporters out there, but apparently none of them ever cross the path of anyone in any media.
• Driftglass, taking it further:

  The doctored video is there, the doctored transcript is there, and the original transcript is there, and what is abundantly clear is that Fox News' Stuart Varney knowingly perpetrated a massive fraud on his viewers and that if he worked at a reputable news outfit and not Roger Ailes' Wingnut Whorehouse and Vomitorium he would have been shitcanned immediately.

• Why the Republicans want to destroy Social Security/Medicare (and Obamacare), as explained by Lance Mannion.

  Of course there’s nothing at all religious in it except for the self-righteous zeal with which they impose it on the body politic. It’s rank hypocrisy. An excuse to do whatever they want to make and pocket gobs of money they didn’t earn all on their own through their individual enterprise and hard work. It’s canned language they can use to explain away their naked greed and justify their social Darwinism. They’ve done a good job of proselytizing. There’s been no shortage of willing converts. The political media seems to teem with them. There are hardly enough loaves and fishes to feed them. How this all developed is the subject of Kevin Kruse’s indispensable One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, but to sum up quickly here, it was a response to the New Deal, an attempt to counter Franklin Roosevelt’s casting the New Deal in a Christian light.
  
  Ever since, the Republican party has been devoted to preaching their revised version of the gospel in which Jesus commands the storing up of treasures on earth and the parable of the sheep and the goats is inverted, as if he said “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters you do for me and my capricious, vindictive, sky-demon father.”
  
  A Christian nation is one in which the hungry starve, the sick go uncared for, and strangers are turned away, all for their own blessed good.
  
  End of sermon.

  There are links in original.
  
• Via skippy, Chattanooga's experience with municipal gigabit-per-second fiber internet network.

• Pauline Oliveros, experimental music composer
• Fritz Weaver, actor

Ron Glass, actor (Barney Miller and Firefly).  (Tributes.)

Florence Henderson, actress

• I'll be eating this year.  You?
• It's that word "intelligence." 
• The traditional recording of "Alice's Restaurant," complementing a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat.

•  Ralph Branca, pitcher.
•  Sharon Jones, singer

My sanity, that is.

• Via a comment at Making Light:

  Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today.
  
  Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget.
  
  Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.
  
  Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.
  
  [...]
  
  And the plight is beyond party politics: it is not a matter of having a president-elect whom many dislike, but having a president-elect whose explicit goal is to destroy the nation.

  "We're Heading Into Dark Times," Sarah Kendzior, the Correspondent. There's a lot more.  Read the whole thing.
• Two from Driftglass:  
• Unheeded warning from an old Twilight Zone.  Someone [ETA: Driftglass!] had a clip from "The Monsters Are Coming to Due on Maple Street," but I purged history yesterday.  Many people in the '50s--you know, the Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best '50s that "conservatives" think was the ideal time--had, within living memory, seen the endgame of Fascism/Naziism/Right-wing tendencies up close and personal.  There is a reason that it became possible to pass civil rights legislation in the '50s and '60s.  
• Lamenting people cutting off their noses to spite their faces health care, up to a point.

  It saddens me too.
  
  And then I remember that these people also voted to take away my family's health insurance, and my sadness alloys into something else.
  
  If you're holding my family hostage, I'm suddenly a whole lot less interested in your sad back-story that I otherwise might have been.

  Featuring a long quote from Charles Pierce article at Esquire.
• Sarah Lazare, AlterNet, on what the alt-right (ie the Nazis) wants.  Hint:  Not fresh flowers with breakfast every morning.
• More warnings from the Daily Beast.
• The Rude Pundit is taking a breather.
• Forsetti's Justice (tumblr):

  When someone doesn’t trust you and isn’t open to anything not already accepted as true in their belief system, there really isn’t much, if anything you can do. This is why I think the whole, “Democrats have to understand and find common ground with rural America,” is misguided and a complete waste of time. When a three-thousand-year-old book that was written by uneducated, pre-scientific people, subject to translation innumerable times, edited with political and economic pressures from Popes and kings, is given higher intellectual authority than facts arrived at from a rigorous, self-critical, constantly re-evaluating system that can and does correct mistakes, no amount of understanding, no amount of respect, no amount of evidence is going to change their minds, assuage their fears.
  
  Do you know what does change the beliefs of fundamentalists, sometimes? When something becomes personal. Many a fundamentalist have changed their minds about the LGBT community once their loved ones started coming out of the closet.

  It's harsh, but he escaped that environment.
• A doctor fights back.
• Down With Tyranny:

  Meanwhile, between his apparently crazy, Adderall-fueled critiques of the wildly popular Broadway play Hamilton and the weekly TV show Saturday Night Live, Trump's actually managed to get the media's and public's attention off the $25 million settlement he was forced to pay to get out from under 3 of his Trump University fraud lawsuits. [Emphasis added.]

  You may see the word "kakistocracy" bandied about a lot in the next year.
  
• Speaking of election rigging...  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
• ETA:  Susie Bright's call to arms.

  Your condemnations about yesterday do nothing for tomorrow’s opportunities.
  
  None of that matters now.
  
  Connect with friends and family... and strangers, in small and big ways.
  
  Don’t make an isolating personal decisions in the next three months.
  
  This period is going to evolve A LOT in the coming weeks. —No divorces, no disappearing acts, no evictions, no sudden vices, no cutting someone out of your will, no ultimatums… just put a pause on it. You can always return to it in 2017. Right now, ride the wave.

The Mahablog:

Because most non-college-educated voters don’t know that Republicans plan to privatize Social Security. Most don’t know that Republicans want to privatize Medicare. Most don’t understand what how the loss of organized labor has hurt all working people.

And that’s because nobody bleeping tells them.

Indeed, if you were to walk up to a standard red state voter and tell him that Republicans are planning to gut Medicare and Social Security, they probably wouldn’t believe you. Republicans like to tell voters that they are the ones who are going to protect Social Security and Medicare from those goofy liberals. However, somehow, they’ve got it in their heads that the Democrats are the party in thrall to Wall Street and the Republicans aren’t.

[Emphasis added.]

So let me repeat those items.  Just in case:

• Republicans plan to privatize Social Security. And I don't see them hiring a lot of old people when the [privatized] accounts crash the next time the stock markets have the vapors. Social Security was enacted during the Depression for a reason.
• Republicans want to privatize Medicare. Because it is now considered uncivilized to put frail elderly folks out on ice floes, and besides, there aren't enough ice floes, what with unmentionable climate change/global warming.
• The loss of organized labor has hurt all working people. Strong unions and labor law were the best friends the workers ever had; corporations are weasels. (If they can be persons, they can be weasels.)

Pass it on!

So many post-mortems.  So much blame and guilt.  So much sniping.

It took me a week to get around to buying my Booze of Choice for a Ceremonial Drunk (it's in some of Larry Niven's stories about asteroid miners), not that I can have a real Ceremonial Drunk because medications, but less than half of one of those plastic cocktail glasses had to suffice.  Tasty, though.  Prosit.

Yes, of course I was stunned.  I mailed my ballot in a week early so that procrastination would not insure arriving at the (lovely) polling place at 7:30 pm.  I stayed away from the computer all day.

Well.  Everyone was warned.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but Donald Trump won the Electoral College.

Yes, mucho mad scrambling and protesting and acts by creepazoids as well as acts of faith and beauty.  Best analysis is probably at Avedon's Sideshow.  (Aren't all politicians beholden to "Wall Street," or is that just my cynicism?)  I was thinking that this would be a good time to read up on Mussolini and Italian fascism because there are historical parallels.  (Mussolini's full history is instructive for obvious reasons, but I was particularly interested in his climb to power.)

• Mark Morford shares "Five things you can do right now..."  (Actually six things, but we'll let that go.) Although one of his suggestions is to move to a swing state, and, um, no.
• Another suggestion is to support real journalism.  Driftglass has something to say on that score.

  But now that Trump is threatening their privileges and their traditions -- which I agree are very important -- well that is a bridge too fucking far.
  
  Sorry, but no. You were supposed to be our sword in the darkness. You were supposed to be democracy's watcher on the walls. You were supposed to be our shield that guards the land of the free.
  
  And every time you offered us frauds and madmen and gibbering Both Siderists because ratings, you betrayed us. And every time you stayed silent while your colleagues offered up frauds and madmen and gibbering Both Siderists -- every time you sat across the desk from a monster and looked him in the eye and bit your tongue and refused to say the word "monster" because your employer would be displeased -- you deserted your post too.

• And Ken White at Popehat discusses libel laws and Trump.
• The Rude One, of course, got Rude.  In fact, quite Rude.  Really, really, really Rude.  (Read at home.)
• Via Body Impolitic, a crowd-sourced survival guide for folks who may be targeted or who need good information.
• Chauncey DeVega (Indomitable) touches on European reactions and buries American "exceptionalism" (that vampire is hard to kill, though).
• And Professor Chaos (The Daily Irritant) apportions blame and raises an eyebrow (metaphorically).
• Ted Rall on the *ahem* anti-intellectual bent in the United States.
• Echidne of the Snakes.
• Driftglass hosts video (postsed by Elle magazine) on Black Women and the 2016 Elections.  Yes, it's an hour long.  Watch anyway.

There is a lot more out there.

• Robert Vaughn, actor (Illya Kuryakin was my guy, but Napoleon Solo was not half bad)
• Aileen Mehle, gossip columnist (as Suzy Knickerbocker)

I'm not sure the Cubs winning the World Series makes up for the ugliness of this year.

Leonard Cohen, poet, songwriter, singer.

"First, we take Manhattan..."

Mr. Trump claims that African-American voters will vote for him tomorrow.


Or on YouTube.

I think that tomorrow after I read the comics, I'm going to disconnect until the evening.

Thank you, Lieutenant Gerard!*

• Vagabond Scholar:

  Step one is defeating Trump, but efforts can't stop there. I'm always in favor of outreach and discussion, but it's important to acknowledge that they might not work – some people will never be persuadable – especially if they're primarily driven by spite. We can't count on 'cooler heads to prevail' or 'the better angels of their nature' to hold sway for everyone. The conservative base hates many of their fellow Americans and will not be dissuaded. So while we're trying to convince the crowd charmed by the season's latest bigot or snake oil salesman to reconsider, it's essential to get out the vote in case such outreach fails. Voting is crucial, and sustained activism is even more so.

• Mr. Trump argues that a woman cannot be president, because that's never happened before.
  
  Of course, there is precedent for having a crook in office... (Shareblue, Melissa McEwan, via Shakesville)
• I really need to do a roundup about the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock; meanwhile, have some pictures.  (Swiped from skippy the bush kangaroo)
• ugh at Obsidian Wings:

  so, too, vote suppression is a long term GOP project that pre-dates and will post-date Trump. It may swing the Senate election in North Carolina, where according to the elections project twitter account it's the only southern state where African-American early voting declined.... UPDATE: Massive non-evidence of voter fraud!

• Ilana Novick, AlterNet, summarizing Paul Krugman:

  Fox, Breitbart, and their ilk may have been outwardly spreading lies, but, as Krugman notes, the mainstream media "simply refused to report on policy issues, a refusal that clearly favored the candidate who lies about these issues all the time, and has no coherent proposals to offer."
  [...]
  First, Clinton, against all possible odds, has run an excellent campaign, one whose relentless attacks would have felled lesser candidates in days. Second, if she does win, it will be "thanks to Americans who stood up for our nation’s principles—who waited for hours on voting lines contrived to discourage them, who paid attention to the true stakes in this election rather than letting themselves be distracted by fake scandals and media noise."

  Oddly, one pageview in the last day came via Dr. Krugman's NYTimes blog.  I assume that was an accident.
  
• Roleplay, unacknowledged .  (Lance Mannion, too much to quote.  Well, maybe a nibble:  "Every answer she tried sounded like an evasion, because it was---she was evading saying 'Fuck off. I can't explain it. I wasn't paying that much attention to the details back then because it didn't occur to me I'd have to explain why I was doing what my predecessors did as a matter of course to a howling pack of shallow-minded, self-important, clueless hacks!'----but also because it wasn’t accepted or reported as an answer. It was just another excuse for another story about how there were still 'questions.'")
• "Who discovered America?" Who is to blame for Trump? Conservative gibbering as reported by Yastreblyansky.  Smaller families.  Hah!
• Zandar Versus The Stupid:

  One of the big fights here in Cincinnati is over the Brent Spence bridge, which carries I-71/75 traffic across the Ohio River and is one of the busiest trucking bridges in the country. Republicans really, really want to turn it into a private toll bridge because it would be a massive profit generator for whoever got the bid. Voters really, really want to throw out whoever votes for such a plan in either northern Kentucky or southwest Ohio.
  
  Trump vowed to fix the bridge with this plan on Friday at his rally in Ohio.
  

  Trump did not announce how he planned to replace the Brent Spence or what he would do to cover those costs.

• ThinkProgress:

  In other words, if it’s discrimination on the basis of race to treat an employee differently because of the race of their partner, then it should be discrimination on the basis of sex to treat an employee differently because of the sex of their partner. “Only because the Court finds the sex stereotyping rationale sufficiently compelling and dispositive, does it not examine fully the ‘association’ line of cases and how they would apply here,” Bissoon wrote.

ETA: And don't forget to vote tomorrow!

---

*Yes, I know, The Fugitive.  Les Misérables has entertaining descendants.

• Janet Reno, former Attorney General of the United States.
• Vaino Spencer, California judge.
• Kay Starr, singer

Unspecified "conservatives" are hanging around the watering hole down the street from one of the unspecified "news" rumor mills, telling each other monumental fish stories and the one about the stereotype and the caricature meeting in the bar.

One (called Z for purposes of story) slaps forehead and says:  "I've got it!  The other candidate is just as sleazy as our candidate, but no one seems to be able to prove anything!  We need to distribute fake evidence to all the media!  That'll work!"

A second one, Y, says:  "How about that the other candidate will confiscate your guns?"

X set down a stein of beer and said:  "No, that's been tried.  Can we say that the other candidate advocates taxing bullets out of existence?"

Y:  "That's outrageous!  How dare--"

Z:  "No, no.  Something that can pass as proof, at least until the election is over.  Forged passports or something!  Fake evidence!"

A lightbulb flashes above X, who leaps up and runs from the bar.  This leaves Z and Y to stick X with the bar bill because personal responsibility.  As they shrug into their coats, X returns with a box.  "Here!"

Y and Z:  "What?"

X:  "What you want!  Made in a non-union sweatshop in North Korea!  Not bulletproof!  Only sold on the Internet!"

Y and Z:  "What???"

X:  "Fake Kevlar vest!"

Via the inestimable rydra-wong at dreamwidth:  The ACLU has posted a guide/FAQ about voter rights and intimidation, with a link to a printable .pdf, which may be a useful reference when you go to the polls.

Contact the Election Protection Hotline (866-OUR-VOTE), the Department of Justice Voting Rights Hotline (800-253-3931), or an attorney if you believe that your rights have been violated.

And here's a graphic:

• The alternate universe we don't inhabit:

  Wow! You know, I am kinda digging this "Sane Donald Trump" fella.
  
  And yet my admiration for this wholly fiction candidate invented by a blithering liar to lead a wholly fictional Republican Party that is somehow, suddenly not overflowing with bigots and imbeciles is somewhat tempered by the fact that these character traits -- giving the GOP leadership more benefits of the doubt than they deserve by a factor of 1000, offering the country hope instead of fear, proposing a humane and comprehensive immigration policy, trying to fix our trade problems and prepare our people for the realities of tomorrow, standing up to the Republican obsession with shredding the social safety net and an overall reverence for the democratic process -- all sound remarkably like this guy:
  
  [photo of President Obama with children]
  
  You know, the guy you and the rest of the actual Republican Party and it's actual candidate have spent the last eight years trying to obstruct, slander, sabotage and in every other way nail to a cross with a belt-fed bullshit gun?

  Ask me again why I'd rather read Driftglass than Mr. Brooks, Mr. Douthat, or Ms. Noonan, and I may explain, if I can stop laughing long enough.
  
• Rude but fair.

  Republicans are scared shitless of the realities of democracy. We see that in their almost comically racist attempts at suppressing voter turnout through bullshit i.d. laws. We see that when they make the filibuster a regular part of legislative action so that they have eliminated the ability of a simple majority to pass anything in the Senate. We saw it back in the Bill Clinton presidency when they sought to eject him from office for the limpest of reasons. We saw it in the constant attempts to strip Barack Obama of legitimacy.
  
  What all this has done is make the nutzoids and dumbshits that make up the GOP voter coalition completely mistrust that democracy works. If everything the opposition does is a cataclysmic event ready to bring on an apocalyptic nightmare of zombies, terrorists, and government health care, then obviously you'd believe that elections are rigged and evil agents are trying to steal your lovely country from your innocent hands. Donald Trump has succeeded in working his followers into a fever pitch by promising them shit that he couldn't do even if he was elected and telling them that if he loses, it's only because bankers or someone are working against him. What the fuck are they gonna think about democracy if their Trump godhead doesn't ascend to his White House iron throne?

• BooMan Tribune:

  Maybe he only intended to irritate people. Maybe he’s one of those morons who thinks if some black person somewhere uses the n-word or the NAACP doesn’t abandon “colored” it gives him permission to throw those words in black people’s faces while explaining his motives for screwing them.
  
  The important thing, I think, isn’t any meaning that’s conveyed in the actual words. It just makes conservatives feel good when they insult and denigrate their opponents. It makes the base feel good when they see a politician laying into their enemies. “Heh, heh, he called them ‘colored.’ They hate that.”

It'll be a long time before I trust "conservatives" or Republicans to collect my garbage, let alone have any kind of power. And speaking of garbage:

• Somewhere, someone is having a fantod about this story, but it is made clear that this guy signs up for huge amounts of overtime.  And frankly, the janitors should be making this much money as a matter of course.  They are far more valuable to the "system" than directors.
  

Don Marshall, actor.

• Chauncey DeVega scoops Washington Post; Washington Post adds interviews.
• A take on the Dakota Access Pipeline you may otherwise miss.  Not favorable to the Obama Administration.  (Jerri-Lynn Scofield, naked capitalism)
• Trumpery.  (Paul Bibeau, Goblinbooks)

  But it's ok. It's nothing. In less than a week, if you keep this up... you'll be able to send a SEAL team after people you don't like. You'll be able to make people you don't like disappear. With a phone call. Isn't that worth a little crap-eating? Isn't it? Making nice with the female reporters and taking them seriously? Keep it up. Just a little longer.

• Troglodytes.  (Paul Bibeau, Goblinbooks)

  The scandal that should have taken down Donald Trump right at the beginning is the one that requires no investigation. You know the facts already. He and his supporters are bigots - against so many different kinds of people it's hard to keep track of them. They don't believe in the equal rights guaranteed by the American Constitution. They don't share the values we claim to support.
  
  The reason that scandal did not take him down is that too many people in this country agree with them

I got tired of the blue.  I'll probably change it again in the near future.

= 3³ x 4

Cubs win the World Series.  Apocalypse does not happen.

I remembered the existence of the song not on Dylan's account but because a fragment bubbled up from deep memory as I was about to brew the coffee:  "Too much nothing can make a fellow mean."  So I proceeded to bring up the Peter Paul & Mary version, which is slightly softer than I remember; maybe I listened to it on maximum volume back then.

• Some people went to jail after the Malheur Refuge standoff.  (My inner dragon/basilisk suggests that the third strike for the Bundys should be their entire ranch getting swallowed by the earth with maybe a little lava.  My inner dragon/basilisk is Not Nice.)  Spocko's Brain is cautiously optimistic.
• Indomitable is not.

  Thursday’s acquittal of the Bundy militants, by an all-white jury, is a de facto endorsement of political violence by conservatives and other members of the American right-wing against the United States government. This decision comes at a very perilous moment in American life.
  
  The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have categorized the so-called sovereign citizen and broader Christian right-wing militia movement (of which the Bundy militants are part of) as being a greater threat to America’s domestic security than Islamic terrorists.

   
• I do in fact remember Waco, and I had heard about Ruby Ridge 20 or so years ago.  There are supposedly guidelines now...
• Echidne of the Snakes:

  But wait! There's more: In this job interview for one of the most important jobs on the globe one candidate's utter lack of relevant expertise is entirely ignored. It doesn't matter. The other candidate's relevant expertise is regarded as a disadvantage, because it makes her an insider.

• That'senoughfornow.

• A little bouquet from Goblinbooks:
  
  • "Pranking" the babysitter
  • Indefinite subject
    
  • Supression, not sopresata
• Scat rude.  (The Rude Pundit.  Being Rude.)
• Traditional music of the season.

New York Times obits:

• Tammy Grimes, actress (mostly stage)
• James Galanos, designer

• We begin with Oliver Willis:

  If you are faced with bigotry and racism and hate, and you bend yourself into a pretzel-like shape in order to excuse it, you aren’t much better than the bigot in question. Racism and hatred must always be challenged, always be opposed. It isn’t just a “point of view,” it is a cancer on public discourse that must be exposed to blinding light and stamped out.

• Badtux talks about election fraud as practiced in Louisiana. Notice anything?

  This is how you steal elections. This is how we did it in Louisiana, this is how it was done in Chicago back in the day. You don’t do it by registering Daffy Duck, because Daffy Duck’s voter registration card would get returned as “addressee unknown” and he’d be struck from the rolls. You aren’t going to do it by hiring tens of thousands of people to show up and impersonate dead or moved voters — how are you going to recruit tens of thousands of people without tipping your hand that you’re doing something ridiculously illegal? Have you ever even *tried* hiring that many people within a few weeks’ time while keeping it secret? That’s insane!
  
  No, you’re not going to do it that way. You’re going to do it by methods that require the involvement of relatively few people, but which can amount to tens of thousands of votes. Specifically, you’re going to do it by ways that suppress the vote for your opponent (rigging the machines, intimidation / cuts in hours / etc. at polling places in precincts that support your opponent) and by voting the nursing homes (absentee ballot fraud) to inflate your own vote. You’re not going to do bullshit like registering illegals and trotting thousands of people past polling places doing voter impersonation. It’s too damned easy to get caught that way, because how the fuck can you keep something secret if thousands of people (as versus dozens of people) know about it? And if you don’t keep it secret, you go to jail. Crap, I don’t know any politician who wants to be elected enough that he’d take this almost 100% chance of exchanging his suit and power tie for prison stripes!
  
  So why are Republicans so fixated on the vote fixing methods that *won’t* work? Well, it’s because they get to do #3 (and to a certain extent #4) in a different way if they float this bullshit about “voter impersonation” and “illegals voting”. In short, Republicans have invented this “voter impersonation” and “registration fraud” bullshit in order to rig votes the good ole’ fashioned Louisiana way — by depressing the vote of opponents to their rule via intimidation and via striking people off the voting rolls who’ve been voting since before I was born half a century ago.

  I got this via a comment at Just An Earth Bound Misfit, I, who was highlighting a Des Moines Register article (Warning:  Music plays on opening) on someone who'd voted twice because she was convinced the polls were rigged.  Meanwhile, there were two women in Florida (!) practicing their own version of fakery.  Ineptly, I might add.
  
• Yes, that is Beethoven's 9th in the background.  
• Happy Hallowe'en to those who celebrate.  And to those who don't, take that stick out.

• Sheri S. Tepper, sf author.  (John Scalzi notes her passing.) 
• John Zacherle, TV horror host (and later dj), sometimes called the Cool Ghoul.

Paging Mr. Mussolini...Mr. Benito Mussolini, to the green courtesy phone, please...Mr. Mussolini...Paging Dr. Duvalier....Dr. François Duvalier, to the red courtesy phone, please...Dr. Duvalier...Paging, um, Chairman Mao...Chairman Mao Zedong, to the orange courtesy phone, please...Chairman Mao...

Call your respective offices, please.  You have an aspirant.

ETA: Video.  (Mock, Paper, Scissors)


[ETA:  Sure, he may be joking.  And I may be King Charles III.]

First let me say that tracking the game yesterday at the MLB site is weird.  I'm not watching on Fux and I'm not a subscriber to MLB.tv, so I followed along on their graphic representation of the game, which was ...

(I got into baseball as a child--I have told that story before--through listening to it on the radio.  There are certain disadvantages to that method, one of which is that I don't know what a split-finger four-seam lightly tongued fastball looks like.  Although Bugs Bunny was sort of a tutorial.)

... silent.

On the radio and TV, the audience gets both the play-by-play and incidental chatter meant to fill the silences and gaps between action impart the lore of this storied game.  In the graphic representation, none of that happens.  Totally mit out sound.  There's an image of a batter in the batter's box (right or left, with the uniforms facing the correct way) against a backdrop of stadium.  The strike zone is indicated by a rectangle divided into 9 parts approximating the width of home plate and the length between knees and midchest.  Trajectory of incoming balls (there must be a device recording this stuff behind home plate) is shown graphically.

And that's it.  There's other information--batting order, strikes and balls, strikeouts, walks, doubles, scoring, the usual statistics.  But silent.

I have to check that out again this evening.

Oh, and Cleveland won the first game.  6-0.

---

And now for sewer-side:

• Meta family structure and political/moral value beliefs.  Doug Muder, from 2005, and still prescient.
• Echidne of the Snakes warns of the threat of the alt-right.
• Zandar Versus The Stupid on a deliberately-engineered glitch in Obamacare.  (The Republican governors' non-expansion of Medicaid, that is, not the fact that healthy people aren't getting health insurance as much as unhealthy people are.)

  Republican governors refusing to take money set aside to soften the blow for consumers through expanded Medicaid and health insurance companies bailing out of the single-plan market have largely succeeded in damaging the system in enough states to put the burden on shifting costs to premiums[...]

• Two-fer:
  
  • Yastreblyansky:

    That's really about it. I can't understand why he skips the obvious solution, which is monarchy. If you have a king then he can appoint all 30 or 40 of the nation's true conservatives to run the legal and governmental and cultural and intellectual establishments and the lack of votes isn't a problem, which completely eliminates the other problem, of meritocracy, in which liberals keep winning out just because they do better in their exams. Monarchy, and a judicious use of prison torture and capital punishment. And it's very alt-right, which is so fashionable just now.

  • Driftglass:

    Today was the day it began to dawn on H. Pecksniff Rosencrantz "Ross" Douthat III that he and every other card-carrying member of the professional Conservative Brain Caste really really suck at their job:
    
    [...]
    
    What Mr. Douthat is trying gently suggest is that if Dubya hadn't lied American into the wrong war and hadn't fucked that war up something something New American Century!
    
    What Mr. Douthat is desperately trying not to say is "Holy shit, the Left really was right about us smug little assholes all along!"
    
    [...]
    
    For the record, it has taken less than the gestation period of the average porcupine for Donald J. Trump (and that vengeful bitch Karma) to force both of the New York Times' highly-paid professional Conservative Public Intellectuals into clenched-teeth admissions that they have have never really had the slightest fucking clue as to what was going on inside the Conservative movement, the Republican party or America in general[.]

    (See the post for the Douthat quotes, or go to the New York Times [linked in post] to get the full experience.)
    
  • ETA:  Now three-fer:  Susan of Texas (Hunting of the Snark):

    The purpose of academia is to gain knowledge and pass it on to our young. Bureaucracies exist to run the business of governing, the entertainment industry exists to make money, and the legal establishment exists to create, maintain, and enforce a code of law. None of these organizations owe conservatives a living. If these organizations are meritocracies, moreover, then the cream will rise and the dregs will fall. The same conservative philosophies that glorify individual achievement and success through hard work and discipline should make whining for more power, money, and jobs a humiliating task. Sadly, however, Douthat is forced to admit that competence has a liberal bias.
    
    Since, as Douthat admits, the conservative elite don't have enough brain or artistic power to succeed in lucrative and/or prestigious profession[s], they must depend on their base's power to get jobs. But once again, an impediment stands in their way. After yanking around, lying to, and ignoring their followers, the followers no longer trust their elite.

    (Ahem. It's called "reaping what one sows."  A conservative value.)
• The ballot ( I vote absentee; there's usually a 50-50 chance I won't be here in November) for federal, state, and county offices and various propositions is four pages long, and the pages are approximately 11 x 17.
• Conspiracy satire, from Paul Bibeau.

  It makes the Trumpkins crazy. The worst thing for a conspiracy theorist is to discover an actual fact. They go insane over it. It's like chumming the water around a few dozen tiger sharks. You give them a little bit of detail, and what happens? They're out there on Twitter and Facebook trying to convince their friends and family that every time John Podesta had a conference call it was so he could help the Fed put tracking chips in your Lucky Charms. They sound angry and unhinged, and the fact that their niece with the big H on her profile doesn't care makes them even more angry and unhinged. Nothing sells a seventh Clinton term like Trumpkins frothing and ripping their hair out.

• Pernicious is the word; more on voter suppression with loud cries over non-existent fraud.  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
• Bringing the day the Hollywood Walk of Fame is enclosed to a depth of 4 inches of plastic and requires airline-travel levels of security to visit closer:  Vandal destroys Trump's Walk of Fame star.  More details from Oliver Willis.

• And as we all know perfectly well, The Gingrich Rules can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom where they were forged.

  Driftglass. Because...
  

1. Since this is the last day to register to vote in California (deadline date is on all the buses!), it's time to revisit the smelly carcass of canard that is Fear of Voters.
   
   • It is possible that Republicans don't realize that there are more city-dwellers than suburbanites and rural people.  (David Atkins, "Political Animal," Washington Monthly)

     More people live in cities than live outside of them. And we vote. Legally. Usually for Democrats. And exurban Republicans tend to dramatically underestimate just how many of us there are.

   • Reposting the link to the Brennan Center for Justice's report on voter fraud, posted in 2007.
     
   • "Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth" updates the Brennan Center's report (downloadable PDF available).  One example:

     Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a longtime proponent of voter suppression efforts, argued before state lawmakers that his office needed special power to prosecute voter fraud, because he knew of 100 such cases in his state. After being granted these powers, he has brought six such cases, of which only four have been successful. The secretary has also testified about his review of 84 million votes cast in 22 states, which yielded 14 instances of fraud referred for prosecution, which amounts to a 0.00000017 percent fraud rate.

2. People stretching really hard to hear what they want to hear.
3. Racism and xenophobia poison everything. (Brian Ross, The Huffington Post.  Small amount of handwavium in evidence.)

So.  The Cubs face the Cleveland Indians on Tuesday.

Yeah, the mechanism is creaky, but it still works.

• Jake Tapper was interviewing Curt Schilling (whom I respect as a pitcher, much as I do Jim Bunning, but whose politics I despise, much as I do Jim Bunning's, but Bunning is retired and Schilling never pitched a perfect game.  I have standards) when the latter got ... weirdly anti-Semitic and tried to lasso Mr. Tapper into playing that game.  He wants to run against Elizabeth Warren. Mostly the voters in Massachusetts have better sense than to elect him, but he was a hero of the Red Sox curse-breakers.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars.  See also the update.)
• Yastreblyansky takes a whack at Mr. Brooks (following Driftglass's thorough evisceration of a Brooks column, linked in both posts) and points out that Mr. B. is trying to legitimize Mr. "No Sex, Just Lies on Videotape" O'Keefe, apparently in the name of "repairing moral capital." And this is where I have to say that when I hear conservatives talk about morals or morality, I (a) make sure my wallet is in a safe place and (b) start scanning the media for the incoming scandal, because there's always a brewing incoming scandal.  
• I like the idea of balancing the budget; I have, however, noticed that the people who are supposed to bear the belt-tightening are never legislators, millionaires, billionaires, or large and/or multinational businesses.  Also, when taxes were "lowered," fees for the services formerly covered by taxes were imposed.  Also, remember inflation, the bugaboo of the '70s?  It never really went away.  It just slowed down.  Somewhat.  
• Speaking of economics, naked capitalism has an article by Lynn Parramore on what economists fail to understand about race.  (A lot, apparently.)

  Asked if there have been improvements in the way academic economics tackle issues of inequality since his student days in the 1970s, Darity does not have particularly good news:
  
  “Actually, I think it’s shifted even further to the right so that alternative approaches are even more marginalized now,” he says. “The ideological content of economics is masked somewhat by the high degree of technical requirements. So in some respects I think economics is even less open than it was when I was first exposed to the field.”

  "Stratification economics" looks at this situation.
• When I see the term "intellectual elite" in the first paragraph of an article, I reach for my revolver tend to suspect the point of view of the rest of the article, and this is a piece that raises all sorts of red flags ("red" flags, get it?), but being reminded of the long history of the populist tendency in the United States and the dangers thereof (yes, I said "thereof."  The pearls are in the next room) is useful.  (Anis Shivani, AlterNet)

  Whether or not Trump is a neo-fascist is less interesting than tracing his similarities to European right-wing populists like Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider, Umberto Bossi, Gianfranco Fini, and others. It can’t be denied that every extreme right-wing movement has a tendency to slip into overt fascism at times, as when entire populations are targeted for exclusion and punishment. But to understand Trumpism we are better off searching for familiar strains in American populism, from Father Coughlin to George Wallace, from Huey Long to Pat Buchanan. I mention Long, the populist governor of Louisiana during the Great Depression, because there are elements of Trump’s critique that have something of the redistributive element as well, though Coughlin’s charismatic media presence, Wallace’s appeal to white supremacy and Buchanan’s America First xenophobia and protectionism are clearer markers of Trumpism’s homegrown origins.
  
  [...]
  
  Trumpism and allied movements cannot take on globalization without also taking on multiculturalism. The neo-populists see no way around neoliberal globalization except through overcoming multiculturalism. They see those unfairly benefiting from the multicultural model as being the cause of their misery, their perpetual uncertainty in the new economy, because there is no telling when their jobs might be permanently lost due to lower wages in other countries or because of unfair competition from immigrants who ought to have less of a rightful claim than natives. Whether it’s called France for the French, Germany for the Germans, or Make America Great Again, the idea is the same.

  It is an unwritten rule that invoking -isms is a hallmark of stuff trying to sound profound.
• "Why the Media is Botching the Election." (Brian Beutler, New Republic.  Say no more.  I can say no more.)

• The dark carnival that is the Trump Campaign continues to limp onto the ash heap of history by butt-scooting it's crackpot theories and racist demagoguery all over the hallowed ground of Gettysburg. I'm not sure which Trump brain-wizard decided that the sight of a doomed racist cause making a suicidal charge into the teeth of overwhelming force was the very best metaphor on which to begin the final chapter of the campaign of their unhinged orange fire demon, but I hope they got their money up front.

  Driftglass. Who is running his annual fundraiser. SEND HIM SOME MONEY!
  
• ETA:  [Yes!  I know!] Bruce Springsteen does not care for Trump.  (Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, at AlterNet)

Probably more than you want on a Saturday afternoon. Take your time.

Richard Eskow (ourfuture.com) on the third debate and what was wrong with the debates this time.

But moments like these are just that: moments, without much meaning. They’re flash photos, jump cuts, shooting stars in an attention-deficit media universe. They’re never fully explored or explained, just left to linger as afterimages on instant replay.

Clinton and Trump had three ninety-minute debates. That’s four and half hours altogether.

Four and a half hours with no detailed discussion of economic inequality.

Four and a half hours with no in-depth talk about long-term unemployment, under-employment, or stagnant wages.

And so on.  Reposted in Crooks and Liars.

Right here:

If you’re finding this title a little offensive, wait until you read the true story that inspired it. And if you’re wondering why our Presidential Debates are the opposite of everything you’d like them to be, well, this story will provide you with the exact, irrefutable answer… but you’re not going to like it.

Memo Salazar, Medium (via cyberwulf's comment at SVKA Refugees) "No Girls Allowed."

• Perhaps Republicans believe senior citizens will all go out and get janitorial jobs.  (Down With Tyranny.)

  Bernie [Sanders] pointed out that the 0.3% increase announced yesterday amounts to an average of $4/month for the typical Social Security recipient. "Seniors and disabled veterans need more help than a few extra dollars in their monthly checks," he said. "These are the people who built this country-- our parents, our grandparents and our soldiers. At a time when senior poverty is going up and more than two-thirds of the elderly population rely on Social Security for more than half of their income, we must do everything we can to expand Social Security. Seniors and disabled veterans deserve a fair cost-of-living adjustment to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs and health care. Unfortunately, the increase announced today doesn’t come close to doing that."

• Crooked Timber is going to moderated comments.  
• The Rude One dismisses Gary Johnson (and barely bothers with Jill Stein).
• Metaphor at Southern Beale.
• The verdict at Balloon Juice.  
• ETA:  Driftglass leaps in.

"I can't stop talking 'bout love."

• Via Mark Evanier, who excerpts 2 paragraphs to make a point, an interview with Senator Bernie Sanders in the New Republic.
• Senator Elizabeth Warren beats on Trump's lack of qualification for office like the traditional rented mule lambastes Mr. Trump's unfitness for office.  She may have Curt Schilling running against her in 2018.
• Guess who has endorsed Trump?  (Chauncey DeVega sounds the alarm.)

  Will Donald Trump, the Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate, and his basket of human deplorables reign? Or will the American people send them back into the shadows and the dustbin of history? 

  The American people will again have to decide what type of people they want to be and the country they want to have.

Different conspiracy.

Enough of that.  In other news, Chuck Berry, whose 90th birthday was yesterday, is releasing a new album, his first in 35+ years.

And I missed Banned Books Week, so have a belated link to Vagabond Scholar, who didn't.

Giuliani's "conspiracy theory" of voter fraud.

No, I don't know.  Maybe he thought he was talking to the Jake Tapper of The Onion.  I am reluctant to perform Net psychoanalysis just because someone says something stupid.  Also, I'd have to charge for that service.  Although that would end cash-flow problems for all time, wouldn't it?

Also, if someone is paying folks to vote as dead people, where's my money?

Trump to SNL:  "Time to retire the boring and unfunny show."

Proper SNL comeback:  "You first."

• Ominous threat?  Michele Bachmann prophesizes on what a Trump defeat would do.  (David, Crooks and Liars) With audio.  Be right back after my shower.
• Bob Dylan!
• Wins Nobel Prize for Literature!
• Yastreblyansky on his first taste of Dylan (with YouTube audio)
• Driftglass with video for "Things Have Changed."
• This is where I confess to have memorized many of his songs, internalized a few, and generally tried to be honest while living outside the law.  And I still resonate to "Masters of War" and "Visions of Johanna" and that song I can hear but the title escapes me and "Tiny Montgomery Says Hello."
• Guess the party of this candidate.  Just from the headline.

• King Bhumibol, King of Thailand
• Dario Fo, playwright (and Nobel Prize for literature, practically on the same day this year's winner was announced)
• Patricia Barry, actress
• Richard 'Specs' Simmons, saloonkeeper bar owner
• Modern Times Books 
• Thomas Ford, actor

Not just non-whites, non-rich, women, people whose ancestors only go back three generations, religious minorities, sexual minorities, and Methodists folks with college degrees.

If Republicans are wondering why blacks, women, Hispanics, Asians, and pretty much every non-white-male group in America seems to hate them, this is why. If you want to oppose diversity mandates, that's one thing. There are ways to do it. But to blithely claim that the whole idea is nonsense because no board of directors in America would ever choose a board member for any reason other than pure merit?

And yes, he's only taking a small piece of the problem.

Via skippy, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones.

• "...a lot of that was done for the purpose of entertainment."   (Video, Crooks and Liars) The purpose of entertainment, he said.  Someone should have explained to him that This Was Burlesque (brief video) closed many years ago, although the burlesque style is being revived in San Francisco.
• Why I love Margaret and Helen.

  Now they are celebrating that Mike Pence can walk and chew gum at the same time. Bless his heart but Pence was so tied in knots that I’m pretty sure he no longer knows whether to check his ass or scratch his watch at this point. He spent the whole night claiming that Donald Trump didn’t say what we all have heard him say. If we learned anything at all from that debate it’s that Tim Kaine really likes being Hillary’s running mate and Mike Pence has never met Donald Trump.

• Why I love Margaret and Helen.

  [HELEN] This man is a misogynist, yes, but that one word falls way short when you consider he also made fun of a disabled person and attacked the grieving parents of a soldier killed in battle only to then accept someone else’s Purple Heart and joke how easy it was to get. I didn’t make any of this up, honey. This man is a…
  
  I still can’t find the word.
  
  [...]
  
  [MARGARET] I believe the word you are looking for is Asshat.

• Comprehensive fiskings of the Other NYTimes conservative columnist by driftglass and Yastreblyansky.  Really.  As RJ sometimes said, set down any beverages before reading.
• I hope it is clear that I will not vote for Trump, right?  No one reading this blog should have the idea that I approve of anything right-wing; I am of the "left" by virtue of being everything the "right" hates, especially the part about having a (currently) working brain.

Deleting your Yahoo account, if that's what you want to do.

(No, I've never had one.  I might have been allergic to their advertising.)

• Out-there voter fraud claim.  (Karoli Kuns, Crooks and Liars)  Mind you, this is an "organization" that has been screaming about Republican Satanic panic "voter fraud" for years.  With audio.
• Paging The Onion...  Please call your office.  Crooks and Liars has scooped you...no, wait, that's real.  Never mind.

  Alex Jones melted down on his talk show Tuesday morning after learning that Wikileaks' Julian Assange, who boasted about the release of big news today, had actually no damaging documents to release against Hillary Clinton.

   With (slighly edited) video.
• An actual political spoof with video.  (Alexandra Rosenman, AlterNet)
• Yahoo(!) has been snooping on you.

I had several tabs of thought-provoking (that is, juicy) articles open, but the ISP went into Reset mode or something.  Sorry about that.

• Trump's taxes you know about already (although apparently according to his (former) accountant, there's worse), and Colbert gets scathing (video).  (AlterNet)
• Let's just say that Chauncey DeVega is less than complimentary about Mr. Trump.

P.S. 2800th post! Whooooopie!

• Edward Lofgren, physicist
• Shimon Peres, Israeli prime minister, president, Oslo Accords negotiator
• Agnes Nixon, creator and writer of soap operas
• Jean Shepard, country singer, member of Grand Ole Opry

Via Mark Evanier:  NPR has a transcipt with analysis and fact-checking of the debate.  For those of us who prefer to fast-forward through horror movies.

(Yes, there should have been a Debate Anticipation post, but I was disposing of garbage.)

Arthur Silber has offered an alternative to the debate:  The Metropolitan Opera is livestreaming Tristan und Isolde today at 4:55 PM (EST; it runs long).

Much more likely to be a transcendent experience.

• In memoriam:  Jose Fernandez.  What an arm.
• The Chicago Cubs have not only clinched their division, they also have the best record in the National League, which insures they will not get out of the first round of the playoffs.
• The Dodgers and Washington have clinched in their respective divisions.  The Wild Card is looking like the Mets, the Giants, and the Cardinals.  Maybe.
• Texas is the Western Division champ in the American League.  Cleveland and Detroit are still contesting the Central Division.  Boston has clinched a playoff spot, but Toronto (Toronto!  W0000t!) still has a very tiny chance.  
• Toronto, Baltimore, and Detroit have a shot at the Wild Card.

Arnold Palmer, golf champion

Seriously, when I was 9, he was All Over the Place. He was Mr. Golf.

• Have health care?  Need health care?  You might want to consider the ramifications of electing Trump.  

  Republican candidate Trump would repeal "Obamacare" and replace it with a new tax deduction, insurance market changes, and a Medicaid overhaul. Democrat Clinton would increase financial assistance for people with private insurance and expand government coverage as well.
  
  The two approaches would have starkly different results, according to the Commonwealth Fund study released Friday.
  
  The analysis was carried out by the RAND Corporation, a global research organization that uses computer simulation to test the potential effects of health care proposals. Although the New York-based Commonwealth Fund is nonpartisan, it generally supports the goals of increased coverage and access to health care.

  Well, I didn't think I would need health care, either, but one's body proves everyone wrong sooner or later.  As usual, the Republican health plan is "Don't get sick."  (Yes, I stole that years ago.)
• Two essays from Jesse Curtis that probably need to be read together:
  
  1. On how "evangelical" does not mean "Trump supporter," and why. 

     Many Americans know evangelicalism primarily as a political movement. So it may surprise some people to learn that evangelicals are spending far more time and money working on things like poverty, racism, health care, and education than they are in trying to elect Republicans. World Vision, for example, is an evangelical aid organization with a budget that by itself dwarfs all the activities of the "Christian" Right in the United States.
     
     [...]
     
     This is the culminating act of political self-destruction in a 40 year campaign of harmful politics. When I think of the "Christian" Right, I'm inclined to repurpose a line from Frederick Douglass' first autobiography: "between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference..." Indeed. Despite all the good done by evangelicals in local communities, the dominant political expression of American evangelicalism is hateful and selfish, and unworthy to be called Christian.

  2. On racism and denial.

     White Americans desperately want to be innocent of any racial wrongdoing. You notice this pretty quickly when you begin to talk about race. Once you look for it, you'll see how often White people are approaching the whole conversation with one goal: establishing their innocence. "My family didn't own slaves. My grandparents immigrated here in the twentieth century. I worked hard for everything I have. Black people have had the same opportunities." Etc.
     
     These kinds of statements tend to be beside the point, and often plainly false. But truth in a literal sense is not the goal of this kind of rhetoric. We use it to claim that we are good, and that we bear no responsibility for racial injustice. We use it to avoid negative feelings. We want to claim innocence not by doing something, but by creating our own reality with our words.

  They're related.
• Noam Chomsky, taking the long view (excerpt, via AlterNet):

  "We want quick victories," Chomsky pointed out, but went on to explain that even the Civil Rights movement was rooted in a movement that had spread to America nearly 200 years prior.

  (There are interesting typos, such as "writers" for "Riders.")
• ETA:  Department of Oh, And By the Way:

  Bob Schieffer, a CBS news veteran and former presidential debate moderator had a very different idea of what the job of a debate moderator is.
  
  CBS' Face The Nation host John Dickerson asked, "There's been a big question about fact-checking and what the moderator's role should be in that. How do you see that question?"
  
  The only reason there are questions about fact checking is because Trump is against it.
  
  Schieffer replied, "Well -- and I've said and I've thought about this over the years, after doing these things -- the first fact-checkers have to be the candidates themselves. If one candidate makes a mistake, you want to give the other person a chance to call him out on that."
  
  This is very smart from Schieffer, but he didn't stop there.
  
  Schieffer said, "If he or she doesn't, then the moderator steps in and sets the record straight. But if you don't give the candidates themselves that opportunity, you're being unfair to both of them."

  Got that? (John Amato, Crooks and Liars.)  EFTA:  Because the Debate Commission Chief begs to differ:

  Janet Brown, executive director of the commission, which organizes the debates every four years, said [...] "I don't think it's a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica."
  
  Once the fact-checking door is open, "I'm not sure, what is the big fact, and what is a little fact?" [...]
  
  Trump campaign aides have staked out a similar position. Some of them say a pro-fact-checking stance is really an anti-Trump stance.

  Emphasis mine.  And gee, I can't imagine why they'd think that.