This has been a weird week. Work hasn’t been more stressful than usual, but I’ve had more than a few symptoms and indications that I may have something more serious the autumn hay fever going on. I’ve gotten some writing done this week, and started reading the next book in my virtual pile, but haven’t gotten as far as I had hoped on either.
So, let’s jump to this week’s Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the moronic thug occupying the Oval Office, and five videos (plus some things I wrote).
I had a very busy weekend, and never managed to sit down to do a Weekend Update, even though there were a lot of things worth posting. Particularly since I thought it was a better use of the blog to post something for National Coming Out Day and for Indigenous Peoples Day. So I started assembling a post-weekeng update, and realized that my collection of memes and political cartoons to use in future posts is overflowing, again, so today you get a subset of those surplus images, as I post those that apply to the news links below.
Please, please..And here we are at the second Friday of October, getting closer to Halloween, and yet the most frightening things most of us encounter day to day are found in the headlines of major news organizations, because we are trapped in a hellscape which is being mode worse—both intentionally and through gross incompetence—by people who have sworn oaths to protect us.
I can’t write a scarier story than the headlines that are so low on the page most people can’t get to them, let alone the much worse ones higher up.
Let’s jump to this week’s Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about deplorable people, five stories about the fight to save my homeland, five stories about the moronic thug occupying the Oval Office, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
Eddie Van Halen, Hall of Famer Who Revolutionized the Guitar, Dead at 65. “I don’t know shit about scales or music theory,” he told Rolling Stone in 1980. “I don’t want to be seen as the fastest guitar in town, ready and willing to gun down the competition. All I know is that rock & roll guitar, like blues guitar, should be melody, speed, and taste, but more important, it should have emotion. I just want my guitar playing to make people feel something: happy, sad, even horny.”
It wasn’t long after the news that the pussy-grabber-in-chief had tested positive for COVID-19 that I saw the messages praying for his swift recovery, et cetera. All of which that passed through my social media streams I carefully avoiding replying to, lest I say something wrong. I did retweet a person wishing that the almighty show trump exactly the same compassion and grace that Trump has ever expended to others. I made a similar comment myself as a follow-up. But at no point did I say I was glad he was sick or express any hope for a bad outcome.
And honestly, I haven’t seen much of that at all. I’ve seen a lot of people talking about why they are having trouble mustering any sympathy. And I’ve been one of the people explaining why I have virtually no sympathy in this case. I’ve even seen people explain how much they don’t want him to die precisely because they want him to live long enough to face criminal prosecution for at least some of his crimes.
But this has not stopped his supporters from wailing and screaming at all of us “evil libs” for not showing the compassion and respect they think he observes.
Here’s why I’m barely restraining myself for tracking them down to laugh in their faces: just last week they were cheering and metaphorically dancing in the streets over the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That’s only one of the reasons, though. Just to list a few more:
President Super-spreader put thousands of children in cages at the border, and has let diseases run rampant through the camps,
his minions are asking the Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare even while he himself is getting treated in a government hospital, every penny of his care paid for by the U.S. taxpayer,
the Russian president put out and has paid several bounties to terrorists for killing U.S. soldiers, and Prez Super-spreader has refused to even broach the topic, let alone express any sympathy to the families of assassinated soldiers,
when, at a white supremacist rally, one of the Prez’s supporters drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors and killed a young woman, the Prez was too busy trying to say that there were many fine people among those white supremacists to ever express sympathy to the family of the slain woman,
also while arguing with reporters about those same rallies, he kept using the word “us” while referring to the white supremacists,
over 214,000 Americans have died in this pandemic, most of those deaths could have been prevented if the Prez hadn’t decided that the disease was only killing people in Blue States so it didn’t matter,
over 214,000 Americans have died, and just two weeks ago the Prez was saying that the disease hurts virtually nobody.
he knew he was positive for the virus before the Presidential Debate, but he didn’t warn anyone who was at the debate, he attended a fundraiser and a rally afterward during which he refused to wear a mask, and even when his symptoms became bad enough to scare him, it never occurred to him to call his opponent in that debate and inform him (you know, the thing that any decent human being would do),
et cetera
et cetera
et cetera
I could keep going and going.
The simple fact is that the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and counting (and that’s only Americans who have died of the pandemic, he’s responsible for a lot more) does not deserve one fucking iota of pity for getting a disease which he allowed to run rampant across the country. A disease he pretended didn’t matter. A disease he claimed could be cured if people drank bleach. A disease he insisted would magically disappear any second now.
The other thing that’s driving me to distraction on this is the reaction of the professional pundit class. As soon as they learned about Prez Super-spreader’s diagnosis, suddenly all of the non-Fox news outlets had dire warnings about a constitutional crisis if the Prez is incapacitated—because there are a bunch of gaps in the process laid out in the 25th amendment for dealing with the incapacity of a president. One of the biggies being that there is no process for what could happen if the Veep gets seriously ill, too.
And I’ve listened to one podcast where some experts are dismayed that all the non-trump-cultists aren’t reacting to their dire warnings of a constitutional crisis.
You know why? Because we’ve been in the middle of a constitutional crisis for nearly four years now. We, the ordinary people on progressive side of the political spectrum have been screaming at the news media, our congressional representatives, and anyone else we thought might help—some for only the last few months, some of us for years.
Day one he refused to obey the Emoluments Clause of the constitution as well as the The Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute. He repeatedly suggested that he should be able to serve an extra long term because people were supposedly mean to him the first couple of years in office. He then switched to suggested that the coming election results can’t be trusted. He has repeatedly claimed that he would not be bound to accept a loss at the ballot box if he decided the process wasn’t fair. He has repeatedly (and in official communications) threatened to illegally send troops into cities and states where he believed officials and citizens oppose his policies. He has illegally sent troops into at least one such city. He was repeatedly refused to say that there would be a peaceful transition if he loses the election.
All of those were constitutional crises that should have been engendering dire headlines long, long ago.
The only people who care about his blatant violation of the very foundations of our form of government at all have been worrying about this for years while the pundits have been acting as if it’s all some kind of game or horse race.
I’m glad something finally got their attention, but I have lost all respect for those that took this long to start pulling their heads out of whoever’s orifice they’ve been stuck inside.
Catch up, guys. The rest of us have been dreading and bracing for the chaos.
This meme hits me hard…September is over, alas. Which means we are now at the first Friday in October. But October is the month of the Spooky Holiday, and I have begun to put up the pumpkins and other fun decorations!
Let’s jump to this week’s Friday Five. This week I bring you: a late breaking story on its own, the top five stories of the week, five stories originating near me, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about deplorable people, five stories about the fight to save my homeland, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
‘They’re all hustlers’. The person being quoted in the headline is Trump from some private conversations. The big takeaway is that when Trump accuses other people of doing what we all suspect he’s doing, it’s not so much project as an apparent sincere belief that everyone (except suckers) are lying and scamming and cheating just like he is.
Trump’s Debate Performance Was an Embarrassing Debacle: A Closer Look – Seth Meyers Goes to Town After Watching Trump Debate: ‘It Was Like Hotboxing a Porta Potty with Crystal Meth in Phoenix in July’:
I was working on something else, and not certain I wanted to say anything more about the grifter-in-chief’s taxes, but then I saw this excellent post elseweb:
1. The way he’s been able to continue functioning is a classic rich fuck tactic, in which if your business fails to the tune of, say, 15 million dollars, you can carry that loss forward across several years to avoid paying taxes. One massive loss can clear out your personal tax burden for several years, even as you bring in more money with new businesses and investments.
2. Trump is literally a national security risk. If he underwent the same background check other people need to pass to get clearance, he would have fucking flunked it. The NYT piece says there’s a mysterious foreign debt lender on Trump’s records, whom he owes half a billion dollars, and we don’t currently know who the fuck that is. But that debt is personally guaranteed to come due in the next few years, and he doesn’t have the money to even dent it. So, what does a man with no morals do when he owes a shitton of money and has no way to pay? Apparently he runs for president.
3. According to Dan Alexander at Forbes, the actual amount that Trump owes is spread across a lot of his properties and comes to around $1.1 billion overall. Same dude is trying to tally up how much income Trump’s properties bring in. So far, it doesn’t add up to that much.
4. Trump’s businesses are almost exclusively real estate, hospitality, and attractions. All of them were hit hard by COVID. This readily explains why he was so adamant about reopening the country as quickly as possible; his loan repayments depend on that income.
5. Also explains why he spends so much time away from the WH and at his own properties. When we talk about how much the taxpayer spends on Trump’s outings and golf trips, if that money is paid to the Trump Organization, it’s essentially an attempt to funnel money out of the US Govt and into his pockets to, again, prepare to pay off his massive debts.
6. He’s essentially using the IRS as a loan provider. That massive 72.9 million dollar tax return from the IRS that he’s being audited over, it’s essentially him taking out a ‘loan’ to try to pay down other prior debts.
7. Oh yeah and he stealthily wrote off a bunch of money in “consulting fees” that were paid to fucking Ivanka. Imagine using your own daughter to dodge taxes, jesus.
Basically, Trump has done the billionaire version of taking out a credit card to pay off other credit card debt, and the time is running out for him to make payments. His entire presidency is a money-making scheme of someone who is coming up on major deadlines on his loans and doesn’t have the money to pay.
There’s a lot of reading to do, but I personally suggest this thread from the Forbes guy, which outlines how much Trump is in debt for each of his properties, and then how much operating profit is allegedly coming in.
If you want to read the referenced thread from Forbes contributor Dan Alexander, click here.
The reason I hadn’t planned to say anything more about this topic is similar to the reasons why I’m not watching the debate.
None of Trump’s supporters are going to be swayed by this revelation. I’ve already seen some of them crowing about how this proves how awesome Trump is, because only suckers pay taxes, or taxes are evil, et cetera.
Trump’s 40% is locked in. Members of his base would support him even if Don Jr kicked down the door to their home and held them at gunpoint while Trump strangled their child to death right in front of him. They are a lost cause.
No matter what happens in the debate, Trump, the GOP, and the right-leaning media are going to lie about what happened and will declare Biden the loser.
No matter what happens in the debate, most of the so-called liberal media will act as if it was a meaningful exchange of ideas, and will cite any gaff or mispeaking that Biden does as being the equivalent of the blatant lying that Trump will do.
There is nothing I could learn at the debate that will change my mind about who I’m voting for.
The only people who care about facts have already decided not to vote for Trump. So, what’s the point?
I realize that there are people who do care about the facts who might not understand what we’ve learned from seeing the grifter’s tax returns, so there is some value in sharing this.
While the debate is on and being analyzed, I’m going to watch the season finale of Julie and the Phantoms and then settle in with my the new Dresden Files book.
She did!Between the incredibly fun on-line birthday party Friday (featuring a rather large number of martinis), running an online roleplaying game Saturday, watching my favorite football team with their third game in a row this season, along with errands and housework and sleeping in, I did not do a Weekend Update post. And there were so many news stores were worth commenting on that broke since Thursday night when I queued up the latest Friday Five. So I’m giving y’all the update today. Which is a good thing, since the story I’m going to lead with officially broke late Sunday…
So, the one the biggie: Tax bombshell reveals Trump’s image is a sham. This really isn’t a bombshell. It’s something most of us have believed for at least the last four years. A man who is worth multiple-billions of dollars doesn’t need a constant flow of endorsement deals (many of those weird businesses that come and then fail, such as Trump Steaks, aren’t actually owned by him; rather, the company pays him to use his name and get him to endorse it for a time), nor does he need to charge hundreds of millions of dollars to the taxpayer to keep a few of his golf courses and hotels afloat.
And most importantly, an actual billionaire running for political wouldn’t fight tooth and nail for more than four years to conceal his tax returns from the public.
There are some details worth noting, the the least of which is that our tax code needs a major overhaul some people who have hundreds of millions of dollars of cash-flow every year are paying less in federal taxes than a minimum wage worker does. So, start here for some of that info: The Ordinary Taxpayer’s Guide To The Extraordinary Story Of Trump’s Tax Returns.
Welcome to the fourth Friday in September. September, the month when superior people are born, and this day in September is the on which extra-special awesome people are born.
I’m just a little bit prejudiced in that evaluation. Today’s blog post has a slightly odd title because today is my birthday. And it’s one of those big ones evenly divisible by ten. I am now officially a member to two different groups within the population considered at high risk in the pandemic. Yesterday I was in only one. I usually make a post on my birthday that ends with some words of wisdom. I decided I don’t need to do a separate post today, so you get the words of wisdom here: Taking care of yourself is being productive.
And now it is time for me to roll out this week’s Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories about deplorables, and five videos (plus notable obituaries and some things I wrote).
Words to live by…I kept not finishing this post, nor two others regarding sci fi topics. I have resolved to do better this week! You may be aware of the fact that week before last wildfire smoke from California came to the Seattle region via the jetstream. Slowly our air quality went from Good to Moderate to Unhealthy for Sensitive Individuals. Than Saturday before last the air flow below the jetstream also shifted, and we got smoke from Oregon as well as more from California. The air quality went through stages of Unhealthy for Everyone, Very Unhealthy, and Hazardous for a bit over a week.
Meanwhile, only a few hundred miles south of us (where some friends and relatives live) the air quality was frequently “too bad for the sensors to measure.” So I was also feeling a lot of anxiety about their safety.
Despite closing up the house and changing the hepa filters in the air cleaners, I started coughing eight days ago (and had almost constant headaches and itchy eyes). After calling my doctor to verify that the inhaler he has me keep around for when I get bronchitis was okay to try to use for this, I began using it. I’m only supposed to use it four times a day, and each time it gave me relief from the coughing for about an hour at a time. Which isn’t much out of the day, but better than nothing.
My husband had headaches and a little bit of coughing during the same period, but nowhere near as bad as the symptoms I had. I blame past me. While I quit smoking 27 years ago, I did smoke for a number of years (which is why I tend to get bronchitis so often), whereas he never did. So I suspect part of the reason I reacted so badly is the damage done to my lungs back when I was a smoker.
It was not fun keeping all the doors and windows closed as much as possible, as things got uncomfortably warm and stuff on several days.
The good news is that we finally got real rain over both our state and Oregon for the last two and a half days. The Air Quality Index starting Saturday morning was all the way down in the Good range! I still have a bit of a cough but things are definitely improving.
Unfortunately, wildfires are still burning in Washington, Oregon, and California (not to mention many other parts of the world), so I’m not sure how long we’ll keep having good air quality.
In other news, I have a significant birthday coming up, and we have toyed with trying to do a virtual party, Unfortunately I don’t have a guarantee at this point that I won’t be called in to work despite having requested time off months ago because I’m the only Tech Writer that hasn’t quit, been laid off, or retired over the last few years in the entire division, and we have software releases this week.
I’m also still reeling from the news about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That has really done a number on my mood.
Rest in Power, Justice Ginsburg
It is once more time for a post in which I link to stories that either didn’t make the cut for this week’s Friday Five, or broke after I composed the Friday Five, or are an update to a story I’ve linked to and ranted commented upon in a previous post. This is going to be a bit different than my usual Weekend Update, it gets personal a couple of time. You’ll understand why, I’m sure.
Script: “Hi, my name is ____ I am one of your constituents. I am calling to ask Congressperson ______ to go on the record saying they will respect Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying wishes as well as the precedent set in 2016 to not nominate a new Justice until after a new president is installed. Thanks for your time.”
Call your senator: (202) 224-3121 Capitol Switchboard
Don’t know who your senator is? Find your senator.
Script: “Hi, my name is ________ and I live in (STATE). I am calling to ask Senator ______ to go on the record saying the Senate will not hold hearings on any potential replacement for Justice Ginsburg until after a new president is installed, per Justice Ginsburg’s last wishes and the precedent set in 2016. Thank you for your time.”
I have been trapped in the house since last weekend, thanks to the Air Quality Index ranging from Unhealthy for Everyone, Very Unhealthy, and not very far south of us sometimes Hazardous. When the haze first came in more than a week ago and they started forecasting worse to come, I replaced the Hepa filters and Charcoal filters in both of our air cleaners. Even so, by Saturday night I was coughing. We did our best to keep everything closed. I converted our two box fans to air cleaners (take a 20 inch Merv-13 rated furnace filter, bungy it to the back of the box fan, set up the fan somewhere in the middle of the room and let it run. Do not put the fan in a window. Keep the windows closed.).
They had originally predicted thing would get better on Monday, but that was wrong for a variety of reasons: What makes smoke forecasts so hard to predict — and how tech could help. The fires themselves are not probabilistic, for one. Another is that the smoke itself changes the weather in ways that break our forecasting models.
We finally got enough rain over a wide enough part of the region to clean things out. I was so happy, after checking the Air Quality Index, to open our windows. It was too warm and stuffy inside!
In case you need a reminder, I’ll just drop this hand sum-up I’ve referred to before:
Sometimes when a man and a woman love each other, and the man is the president of an evangelical Christian clown college and is friends with the pussy-grabbing authoritarian president of America, they get married and then they meet a 20-year-old pool boy named “Giancarlo” and they are like “Oh hey, Giancarlo, is that the Holy Bible in your pocket, or is it your boner?” and he is like “Oh it’s just my boner” and they are like “Good, we really aren’t into that Holy Bible shit when we aren’t profiting financially from it” and the pool boy is like “cool” and they are like “cool” and so they start having a sexual affair with the pool boy for years and years, where the lady does nakeds with the pool boy while the clown college Christian leader husband plays shadows puppets with his weener and watches in the corner, and they end up giving the pool boy SWEET business deals that kinda sorta look like payoffs, and fly him all over the country in their jet, and maybe there’s a similar arrangement with the hot jacked personal trainer, but we’re not sure yet, but anyway then everybody finds out and the man has to quit being a clown college Christian leader, WOMP WOMP.
—The Wonkette
When Falwell Junior finally was forced to resign and the university opened investigations into possible financial improprieties, certain commenters out there opined that this was either part of Falwell’s kink (the pool boy and the other pool boy situations seeming to be on the cuckold fetish spectrum) because many cucks like being humiliated publicly, or that he was slamming his fist on the self-destruct button because he is tired of pretending to be an evangelical leader.
I didn’t buy either of those scenarios at the time for a variety of reasons. Only one of them being that first drunk call Junior made to a conservative radio show a few days after the Instagram post with his arm around a woman who wasn’t his wife, with his pants on done and a glass of what he later claimed wasn’t alcohol, but “black water” in his other hand.
No, the reason why is because I’ve known men like Junior before. White straight men, often from a conservative southern background (though not required) who are used to “getting away with it” over and over. They think they are invincible. They think the rules don’t apply to them. They have always been able to lie their way out of it before, and they are confident that they will continue to do so.
Let me give a very personal example. Content Warning: I’m going to be discussing my dad’s physical abuse of more than one family member and the death of a pet.
There are no further news links, so if you want to stop reading, now’s the time.
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Okay, mind the content warning…
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I was nine years old, my alcoholic and abusive father was hung over, and he had yelled at my four-year-old sister several times to keep it quiet. But she was in a hyper mood (many years later when she was diagnosed as, among other thing, bipolar, we would refer to these days as one of her manic periods). Eventually, Dad snapped and he beat her viciously… and left her lying apparently unconscious on the floor of her bedroom.
When she roused it was clear that something was seriously wrong. On the drive to the hospital, Dad drilled us with the cover story that we were all to stick to: she was being rowdy and won’t settle down and she fell down the stairs.
Among her injuries was a fractured skull. At some point during her medical treatment, she apparently told the nurse that “after the third time Dad hit me everything went blurry, so I don’t remember what happened.”
About a week later a state patrol officer or a county deputy (I don’t remember which) and a man from Child Protective Services showed up at our house. The tiny town we were in didn’t have any state agency offices, and the guy had had to come out from a city somewhere.
Each of us was taken by the guy from CPS individually to a nearby park to tell our version of events. I had learned my lesson about never contradicting Dad’s version years ago, so I dutifully repeated that Dad had told her to settle down several times, but she kept running around singing and then fell down the stairs.
I assume that Mom, my sister, and Dad all told the same story.
There was a glaring problem with our story.
There were no stairs.
We lived in a three-bedroom mobile home. It was a fancy mobile home, with an Extandal (as they called it at the time) which made our living room twice as wide as the rest of the trailer. But it was a single-story home with no stairs.
The CPS guy never asked any of us to show him the stairs.
The CPS guy and the officer left. Dad was angry for days afterward, but also on his best behavior even when no one was around. Eventually he learned that there would be no charges and the investigation was closed. Dad was still angry about my sister breaking the rule and contradicting his story, but because he was afraid people were still watching, he couldn’t do his usual thing of punishing one of us and explaining to my sister that he was hurting me or Mom because sister had screwed up.
So, instead Dad killed the family cat in order the punish my sister for telling the truth.
He got away with it. And his job had us move a few months later, and there was an incident where I was the one who wound up in the hospital… and he got away with that. And continued to with each of my younger half siblings and the only time he ever faced consequences was when he slapped one of the grandkids hard enough that she wound up in urgent care… but even then, the only consequence was that for a time all of my younger siblings had restraining orders on him that he couldn’t be around his grandkids without supervision.
Anyway, to get back to Falwell Junior…
I don’t have any knowledge that Falwell Junior was ever abusive of his kids or his wife, and I’m not claiming that he is that kind of abuser. But we know that for the last several years he has done other things that should have had consequences (talking repeatedly at work about his personal sex life, sending pictures of his wife in fetish gear to a number of university employees who didn’t ask to see them, attending nightclubs and consuming alcohol in direct violation of the university rules which are supposed to apply to employees, the shady real estate deals that some former employees started talking about last year, the pool boy’s shady real estate deal that reporters contacted the university about years ago, et cetera). And I’m pretty sure that Junior has been getting away with various things like that his entire life.
I know I’m bringing some of my personal baggage into this, but every time I have seen Junior speak, I have recognized that cocky smirk and the look in his eyes that say he knows the rules don’t apply to him. Because I spent 15 years of my life being raised by a man who had that some smirk and the same glint in his eyes.
Now Junior’s finally facing consequences, and he doesn’t know how to handle that. Self-medicating by drinking heavily constantly is only the tip of the iceberg, I suspect.
And here we are at the third Friday of October.
Font Folly 