Historian Heather Cox Richardson has been writing a daily newsletter called Letter from an American, since around the time Trump’s perfect call to get dirt on Biden’s son from Ukrainian president Zelensky became public. I highly recommend you subscribe to her free newsletter (there is a tab at the top of this link). It is a well-curated selection of news developments, snappily well-written and placing ongoing events in historical perspective. It comes into your email inbox, virtually every day, at some point during the wee hours of the early morning and is always worth reading.
Last night’s ended with this great analysis, and killer clinching thought, which follows a description of some of the planning that went into the insurrection at the Capitol, including the meeting, the day before the Capitol Riot, at the Trump hotel in D.C., attended by newly-elected Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville (who, with Trump’s help, defeated disgraced traitor Jeff Sessions in the primary), Michael Flynn, Corey Lewandowski, members of the Trump family and so on [1]:
Former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Robert Grenier noted yesterday in the New York Times that the United States is facing a violent insurgency and should apply the lessons we have learned about counterinsurgency to head off political violence. Grenier notes that the nation must insist on criminal justice, tracking and trying those responsible for crimes. We must also return the nation to a fact-based debate about issues.
Crucially, Grenier noted that it is a national security imperative to convict the former president and bar him from future elective office. “I watched as enraged crowds in the streets of Algiers, as in most Arab capitals, melted away when Saddam Hussein was ignominiously defeated in the Persian Gulf war,” Grenier wrote. “Mass demonstrations in Pakistan in support of Osama bin Laden fell into dull quiescence when he was driven into hiding after Sept. 11. To blunt the extremists, Mr. Trump’s veneer of invincibility must similarly be crushed.”
In all my years of studying U.S. politics, seamy side and all, I never expected to see the name of an American president in the New York Times in a list comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But then, I never expected to see an American president urge a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol to overturn an election, either.
News broke yesterday that extremists began planning for an attack on the Capitol in November. The Alabama Political Reporter broke the story on Tuesday that new Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) met on January 5 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., with the then-director of the Republican Attorneys General Association, an organization that backed the January 6 rally, and with members of the Trump family and the family’s advisors, including Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. One of the attendees wrote on Facebook that he was standing “in the private residence of the President at Trump International with the following patriots who are joining me in a battle for justice and truth.”
Comedian Seth Meyers has emerged during the Trump decade (it seems much longer…) as a witty purveyor of reality-based respite. He employs liberal doses of comedy to serve up his frequent insights against the dark backdrop of brazen, maddening, hate-filled alternative-fact based absurdity that has become the norm for many of our public officials. The choice, when our president insists that Nazis and their victims are all “very fine people” (I just prefer the former), is laughing or raging, and laughing is better — it feels good and reminds us to remain philosophical while we figure out how to organize to make things better. Meyers, a peerless master of snark, always gets a laugh out of me, a marvelous thing during times like these. He is as disgusted as the rest of us to have become our fellow citizen of a shit-hole country and much funnier about it. He takes a closer look at some of the worst of “current events”, sets out the facts, reports them, mocks them, often while providing a serious, sensible comment you don’t hear anywhere else.
Seth’s recent A Closer Look: “Republicans Try to Dismiss Trump’s Second Impeachment Trial” concludes with the smart observation that Republicans, in their focus on maintaining power at any cost, have shown they truly don’t care whether Trump organized and incited a murderous riot against Congress or not. (It’s not like anyone actually strung up Mike Pence… get over it!!! Pelosi is alive too, so shut up!) He points out that the GOP also, by taking the position that Trump, now that his term has expired, may not be constitutionally impeached or otherwise punished for “provoking the riot” (in Mitch “this is unconstitutional” McConnell’s phrase), shows they don’t care if Trump, or anyone else on their side, does the same thing again. There is clearly no problem with planning and inciting an armed insurrection against the government, as long as it is done for their side. Here’s Seth:
The arguments of Trump’s champions in Congress — and their charges of Democrat [sic] “hypocrisy” “double standards” and “breathless hysteria” — are hard to refute — unless you look plainly at the facts of the case.
‘This impeachment is nothing more than a partisan exercise designed to further divide the country. Democrats claim to want to unify the country, but impeaching a former president, a private citizen, is the antithesis of unity.” — Libertarian Rand Paul introducing his vote on the constitutionality of Trumps’ second impeachment.
“They hate Donald J. Trump and they are engaging in an act that I think is petty, I think it is retribution, I think it is vindictive, and I think it’s a waste of time. And so, to coin a phrase, I think it’s time to move on.” — Lyin’ Ted Cruz, dismissing the whole thing as more ugly, left-wing bullshit.
“You’ve got nothing to apologize for!… this is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics, and if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you have done to this guy! Are you a gang rapist? [Kavanaugh: “no”]. I cannot imagine what you and your family have gone through. Boy, y’all want power. God, I hope you never get it! I hope the American people can see through this sham… Dr. Ford is as much a victim as you are…”
Here is the mind-twisting fact about truth — it is versatile, it can be used just as righteously for good or for ill. The truth, plainly stated, will be agreed to by virtually everyone who hears it.
Here’s one: if you let somebody take over your mind and beliefs, they will be able to control you.
There is no question that this is true. The devil is in how this truth is applied to the larger discussion/argument. It depends completely on who the somebody is that is trying to control your beliefs. Are you warning against Charles Koch and his ilk controlling you by controlling the information you get and what you believe or George Soros and his?
I can find no fault with the absolute truth of the following statement by right-wing provocateur/opinion journalist Tucker Carlson, a celebrity newscaster and culture warrior I generally disagree with. In the clip below, Tucker’s statement is followed by opinion journalist Medhi Hasan, putting his finger on the larger problem — the mainstreaming of crazy beliefs across the conservative right. Hasan rightfully identifies that alarming trend as one of the big stories of our time:
Take Tucker’s comment by itself, out of context. It is hard to dispute the truth of it.Tucker is absolutely right, if a dictator takes over your mind, you are his mindless slave.When I read this to Sekhnet (omitting the reference to Q) she guessed Malcolm X had said it. I thought that was a good guess, Malcolm surely made the same point many times. Here’s Tucker:
(The real threat is a forbidden idea, it’s something called Q-Anon.) [1] Your mind belongs to you, it is yours and yours alone. Once politicians attempt to control what you believe, they are no longer politicians, they are by definition dictators, and if they succeed in controlling what you believe, you are no longer a citizen, you are not a free man, you are a slave.
Like so much in life, the entire enchilada is in the framing, the context, how the indisputable statement is used to support the argument it proves. Change just one word here — “forbidden” (the left doesn’t want you to know about this idea) to “dangerous” (if you believe this blood curdling fantasy you will do just about anything to save innocent children from these sick fucks who richly deserve death) and there is no problem at all with what Tucker said. It is 100% true. Add in some kind of indisputable right to act on your belief that you are fighting a powerful cabal of blood drinking child rapists and you have a different proposition.
But therein lies the cleverness of the skilled propagandist. Take a true premise nobody can disagree with — if your leaders control your beliefs you are their slave. Then, since that’s self-evident, and we all value our freedom — well, follow me, it’s a short step to convincing the gullible that whatever they believe, no matter how wildly improbable, no matter how demonstrably false, is their god-given right to believe and that no godless leftwing radical so-called “Truther” has the right to say anything about a fervently held belief of yours. They may not judge you! It is a matter of belief, not intellectual analysis. In many ways, belief is more powerful than mere knowledge.
This relates closely to the true concept that it is impossible to argue with a feeling. A person may be right or wrong to feel the way they do, but the feeling is real, and the feeling colors everything else in the conversation. The reality of the feeling must be dealt with first, before the facts of the cognitive matter at issue can be productively discussed.
At the risk of being tedious with a personal example I’ve offered before, here’s a scenario that illustrates this feeling/fact split to yer proverbial T. Watch how the end of this interaction with a very smart, intellectually capable friend, mirrors what Tucker stressed in that clip — the right to your belief is the thing that matters most. It is worth infinitely more than preserving your dearest lifelong friendship.
After my health insurance was illegally terminated for the first time in 2020 (the second time was during April of the pandemic), an old friend calls me to challenge me about my anger, which he says is disproportionate, out of control and which, my old friend stresses, concerns him greatly, as it’s very unhealthy for me to be so angry. He was angry about an email he got from me. He called my email snide and inaccurate, said it revealed an unfair anger directed at him, which was, in any case, totally misplaced.
After I managed to avoid a violent argument with him, declining his loud challenge to tell him to “go fuck himself” and we talked further, he conceded that my email had not actually been inaccurate, but that it was still somewhat snide, he said, particularly coming from someone who claims to be dedicated to ahimsa, non-harm. I do claim to be, and try to be, mild in my emotional reactions, to the extent I can be. There is a great value to not giving in to anger, whenever you can manage to. There is even value to the exercise when you fail.
Over the next few months we did an increasingly frustrating dance for clarity about whether I had a right to be angry about anything. It ended in him snarling at me and hanging up the phone in frustration at the implacability of my “righteous” anger. At one point he thanked me for my generosity in not blaming the blow up on him. That gratitude was soon outweighed by unbearable grievance.
In the course of our long email attempts to salvage our mortally wounded friendship, I mentioned the concept of Complementary Schismogenesis, which our impasse seemed to vividly illustrate (I know of no better illustration, actually). I wrote:
There is a dynamic called Complementary Schismogenesis — two people in an emotional cul du sac, locked in a conflict both want to solve, each of their best efforts to resolve things making the schism worse. Their conflicting styles and clashing emotional needs exacerbate the problem. One, when upset, needs a period of quiet to think, the other needs more talk, immediately.
A: “I need quiet to think, then we’ll talk” confronts B’s “I need to talk right now, then we can be quiet.” And here we go loop de loo.
Empathy should, ideally, not have to be requested, especially when a friend is up against a concrete circumstance that is both frightening and unfair, is at wits’ end, and cries out for help. A can say: but this IS me being empathetic; B will say: feels like you being defensive.
A hurt feeling does not go away because an intelligent, analytical friend says “you really shouldn’t feel that way, it isn’t healthy, cortisol’s a killer, I don’t understand why you have such a strong feeling about this thing that happened to you, you seem disproportionately angry. To make matters more upsetting, you’re not explaining it very well, I don’t know what you actually expect of me since you’re not being clear and you’re also not letting me get a word in, even as you unfairly accuse me of things I can’t even understand. Can I defend why I feel this way? Do I get a chance to defend myself against your unfair charge that I’m hurting you?”
A feeling may turn out to be unreasonable, and when it’s shown to be, after its intensity has faded a bit, hopefully the misunderstanding is over and a lesson learned — but the time to debate the validity of the feeling is not when the strong feeling is still incomprehensible to the friend who keeps demanding a rational account of why the strong feeling is not unreasonable.
In our case, the more times he told me he had no idea what my issue was and asked me to please explain again, the more pointed my explanations became as I had to tamp down more and more frustration at his inability to understand or empathize — and his repeated refusal/inability to engage with or respond to anything I wrote.
That was probably the single factor that made me more and more pessimistic about saving our long friendship — his silence on any point I raised. Though he repeatedly asked for my thoughts, and further clarification, and I’d expressed several times how hurtful silence is to me by way of response, his only response to anything I raised was silence, and telling me he still didn’t understand why I was so unforgiving. When he eventually told me he was sorry, for whatever he might have done that was hurtful, my position remained that accepting an apology for something you insist you don’t understand the hurtfulness of is a piss-poor sign for the future of a mutual friendship.
Predictably, in hindsight, my analysis fell on deaf ears, in spite of several attempts at simplifying, clarifying. I heard nothing back on any point I raised — including how hurtful I find it not to be responded to — only more genuine confusion about what I was actually talking about, what exactly had hurt me so much in his series of inadvertently hurtful acts. All this as though I do not express myself clearly. He simply would not even allow that I express myself with reasonable clarity.
My friend claimed that although he regarded me as his closest friend, loved me like a brother, he truly had no idea why I’d been upset. He expressed pessimism that anybody could truly understand what is in the heart of another person, even someone he’d been friends with for fifty years. I spent many, many hours writing and refining my replies to him, in hopes of getting through to his analytical mind. We were in the realm of feelings, though. Accordingly, he wrote that in spite of our long conversations and many words by email, I’d never given him any hint as to why I felt it necessary to be so mean to him in the end, after being so mild for many years. The long correspondence, from his point of view, was simply me trying to angrily out-lawyer this longtime successful litigator with lawyerly tactics. That was a battle the experienced litigator was not willing to lose.
In the end, for him, it all came down to me being, as originally charged, irrationally, disproportionately angry, and hurtful, and a supreme hypocrite unforgivingly insisting on the righteousness of my maddeningly superior nonviolent viciousness, directed at my innocent friend who loved me dearly, and unconditionally. He was totally justified in feeling as though I’d simply reamed him for no reason (“reaming” was the metaphor he chose, I never touched the boy, your Honor…). In the end, he wrote, I hadn’t given him a single clue as to the basis for my feelings, or convinced him of anything. He closed his final email by noting that he had searched our many emails in vain for “any clue” of what the hell had made me so insanely hurtful to him.
So, again, you can be as smart as you like and analyze things as clearly as you like. State them simply, boil them down to a point nobody can disagree with — nobody should tolerate being hurt by a thoughtless friend, even one who claims to love you. Then it is only a matter of framing and delivering your irrefutable conclusion, based on an unshakable belief: it is the fucking Jews (people like me, for example) and angry Blacks who are the real tyrants and oppressors!
Beware of people who often express hatred, suddenly bearing indisputable truths. These truths will be put to their usual uses, for better or worse.
[1]
This sentence, by itself, means little: “the real threat is a forbidden idea, it’s something called Q-Anon.” It seems to be a statement — someone, possibly Tucker (?), believes the real threat is this forbidden idea. Why is it a forbidden idea — because it is objectively bad? Because it is so ugly, inflammatory and improbable as to be unthinkable? Because, while there is no proof of any of its claims, it so easily leads to violence against the evil conspiracy set out in the idea, if you believe the forbidden theory? To forbid is to censor, to cancel, to negate someone else’s freedom of inquiry and belief.
The Q-Anon “idea” is simple enough at its root: Q is a highly placed insider of secret identity who states that Donald John Trump is the only person who can defeat an evil conspiracy of very powerful elites [top Democrats, Hollywood celebrities, wealthy liberal donors] who are pedophile sex traffickers who occasionally drink the blood of their innocent young victims. These are extremely dangerous pedophile cannibals of amazing cunning who are also, horrifyingly enough, child-murdering cannibals.
Just an idea, you dig, the details of which are constantly evolving through a kind of online crowd-sourcing. Just like Liberal Cancel Culture, you know, to “forbid it”.
Unconstitutional to impeach a president for “provoking” a riot to overturn an election, so that we can prevent him from ever holding office again? Illegal to use legal means to severely curtail his bullying political influence on the party he dragged to the very edge of open fascism, climaxing in a violent insurrection his followers argue is no big deal? We argue, you decide.
As for the glorious four year plus reign (and counting) of our greatest citizen, MAGA-man, here are some of the highlights from the lying NY Times:
The radical right, when they get a drum to beat, never stop banging it over their media megaphones. They are tireless in sticking to a few points and they hammer them endlessly. Hillary’s emails, Benghazi, Obamacare, Mueller Witch Hunt, Voter Fraud, Stolen Election, Illegitimate Democrat President (again!!!), etc.
Since I wrote this the other day (and forgot to post it) Ron Paul (see paragraph below about his principled, “patriotic” “answer” when asked if he believed Biden had been fairly elected) called for a vote about the “constitutionality” of impeaching Trump since he is no longer president. A shocking 45 of the 50 Republican senators voted “yea” to the shaky, legally dubious proposition that the Constitution prevents any accountability for an elected official who repeatedly summons, provokes and whips up a crowd that immediately turns into a deadly mob — and slips out of office while the Senate is in recess.
The logic is clear. If a president provokes a riot in the Senate to overturn an election result he attacks as a lie, but his impeachment trial is delayed because the Senate is on vacation for two weeks, then he can’t be tried for inciting the deadly attack. Pretty fucking simple, you have to admit, and certainly the way the sainted men who framed our constitution intended. Mitch McConnell announced that Trump had provoked the riot, it’s just… he was getting a leisurely bikini wax (probably also a turtle wax) and the Senate couldn’t get back together in time to do anything while the master was still in office. On his return, we have Mitch as Mitch: now that I’m back, bitches, I say it’s unconstitutional, clearly. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, cucks.
But back to our complicit mass media (all now announcing that Trump won’t be convicted, no matter how irrefutable the evidence against him presented at trial). It’s all about who wins the battle of talking points. As Trump said in his strong pre-riot address to his angry followers, during the speech where he once again claimed over and over that he’d won the stolen election in a landslide:
Now what they [the lying media] do is they go silent. It’s called suppression and that’s what happens in a communist country. That’s what they do. They suppress. You don’t fight with them anymore unless it’s a bad story. If they have a little bad story about me, they make it ten times worse and it’s a major headline.
But Hunter Biden, they don’t talk about him. What happened to Hunter? Where’s Hunter? Where is Hunter? They don’t talk about him.
We will not be intimidated into accepting the hoaxes and the lies that we’ve been forced to believe. Over the past several weeks, we’ve amassed overwhelming evidence about a fake election. This is the presidential election. Last night [run-off in Georgia] was a little bit better because of the fact that we had a lot of eyes watching one specific state, but they cheated like hell anyway. You have one of the dumbest governors in the United States [Trump loyalist Brian Kemp].
“But Hunter Biden, they don’t talk about him. What happened to Hunter? Where’s Hunter? Where is Hunter? They don’t talk about him.“
First it was that Ukrainian liar Zelensky who refused to announce a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden after a perfect phone call that led to a totally bogus, illegal partisan witch hunt “impeachment” and now silence in the media about Hunter Biden, total silence! Trump’s not the only one suspicious about this suspicious silence on a huge scandal story the entire media was covering seriously at one time.
Here you go, boss. FOX has been flogging this debunked story for the last few days on youTube, and presumably on the air.The smoking gun that proves Hunter, a supremely dumb criminal, forgot about a laptop with all the incriminating Ukraine and China evidence on it that computer repair man John Paul Mac Isaac (if that is his name) turned over to America’s Mayor, super-lawyer Rudy Giuliani — irrefutable, covered-up proof that Joe Biden is a lying fuck.
Fair, balanced and constantly stirring the simmering shit pot of godless liberal treachery.You can tell by the still photo that this patriot in the odd hat is an honest American about to tell ‘opinion journalist’ Sean Hannity the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the pathologically criminal, insanely stupid Hunter Biden and his weak, sleepy, lying, doddering, stuttering, illegitimately elected Communist puppet father.
Stay tuned for FOX updates on the real, covered-up truth about Pizzagate and Benghazi– new information on the hidden basement child sex slave prison the liberal media denied exists and footage of Hillary laughing after she learned four Americans died in Libya, pursuant to her evil plan.
In related right-wing news, Sunday Senator Rand Paul would not admit that Biden had been fairly elected president. Paul accused George Stepahnoplous (and liberals in general) of calling Republicans liars when they are merely insisting (as Paul still is) on a debate about the accurate accounting of massive electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election. According to Paul, the many court cases contesting elections lost by Trump’s and the RNC’s lawyers were thrown out on technicalities like lack of standing, not on the merits. Technicalities, Rand claims, prevented any kind of honest examination of possibly massive, massive, massive voter fraud in a few densely populated Democrat [sic] strongholds. He left the viewer with the strong impression that we’ll never know the truth, unless we spend the next two years vigorously investigating how Biden’s people pulled off this massive cheat.
Rand Paul, either lying or deluded, claims the merits of the election fraud cases were never reached in the literally hundreds of court cases his party and the Trump campaign brought, before and after the election. Then, without a hint of irony, two days later, calls for a vote claiming a technicality that will invalidate the upcoming impeachment trial weeks before the merits can even be presented. Merits, if we can use that word for anything Mr. Trump did during his glorious reign, which are clearly understood by about 70% of American citizens and, presumably at least that percentage of the lawmakers besieged by an angry MAGA insurgency (a “false flag” operation like Sandy Hook, where those dead “kids” and their falsely crying parents an siblings were all well-paid actors). Never mind, the radical right now has its fig leaf: “constitutionality”. Let the gaslighting games continue.
You can read the record of the 1 win 63 loss GOP post-election lawsuits, if you’d like to know if Paul is correct about the need for a commission to re-examine the many, many frauds that led to the “election” of this Commie-puppet Biden. The baseless Texas AG’s hail-Mary attempt to get the Supreme Court to hear a case about the unfairness of anti-Trump votes in other states was thrown out for lack of standing, true enough. But I’d refer Rand Paul to one of the many opinions, written by Trump-appointed judges like J. Nicholas Ranjan, dissecting with great precision the evidence-free, feverishly stated fraud claims in state after state.(More details from Judge Ranjan’s scathing pre-election dismissal of the GOP federal case in Pennsylvania here).
Evidence, of course, is not the issue. Never is for an extremist. Rand Paul and his indignant colleagues insist they are merely calling for the fair, nonpartisan debate we are all entitled to about whether there was massive organized Democrat [sic] fraud in the 2020 election. As Paul, Cruz, Hawley and others keep pointing out, many Republicans unaccountably (if you don’t consider Trump’s constant repetition of unfounded lies about massive Democrat [sis] electoral fraud for the last five years) believe the election was rigged, stolen from Trump, no matter what proof may or may not exist, and no matter what federal officials including William Barr’s DOJ (plus Barr himself) and the courts might have concluded.
The advocates of ongoing debate about widespread Democrat [sic] cheating in the election claim they are taking this principled stand to defend the Constitution, mainly because a large majority of Republicans believe their former president’s transparent, endlessly repeated lie about massive election fraud (as there was in 2016 when his fraud commission found none) and that it is essential to restore faith in the security and fairness of our elections.
Or Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson, Kevin McCarthy, Madison Fucking Cawthorn and company are liars, as the lying liberal media keeps implying they are.
Hopefully, for the rest of us, the evidence presented at the impeachment trial, and the witness statements, and the videos and other recordings of Trump as he schemed to stay in office in spite of the election results, coupled with some additional very stupid move by the Artist of the Deal (perhaps threats to ‘primary’ traitors as the votes are about to be cast, or during somebody’s sworn testimony) will allow a dozen of those 45 GOP lock-stepping zombies to vote what’s left of their consciences. The main thing is that Trump be disqualified campaigning for his next from future attempts to destroy and overthrow our government.
This is a simple recipe based on a delicious sauce my mother used to make. Minimalist, slightly verbose, directions below:
I don’t remember if my mother used red pepper or a carrot (I haven’t watched her make the sauce in more than 45 years), but they add a nice sweetness to the sauce. We like garlic, so I use several large cloves, 1/2 cup, from the looks of this, finely chopped. One medium onion, finely chopped.
Cover the bottom of your sauce pan with a thin layer of oil (we use avocado oil), turn on the heat– medium high. When the oil is hot (a dropped chopping sizzles) stir in the chopped ingredients, stirring frequently until the onions are a caramel color (the photo above is early in the process).When I make this with fake meat (my mother used real chopped meat, particularly when she made her incomparable lasagne), I brown the fake meat during this stage of cooking.
During Sekhnet’s tomato season I cut off the tops of and parboil as many as she harvests (until the skin looks wrinkly), remove them carefully with a slotted spoon, into a strainer, run them under cold water (the suckers are hot!) and pull the skins off, before adding them to the ingredients above. In the winter, it is a can or two of whole tomatoes, which have been skinned somewhere in Italy. Using canned tomatoes (though not quite the same as fresh, ripe ones) eliminates the real possibility (the first time) of being hurt by a scalding hot tomato you are skinning.
Pour the tomatoes into the sauce pan, mixing well and crushing them with a wooden spatula or potato masher (I suppose you could also use crushed tomatoes in the can). Once it reaches a boil, simmer it over a low flame, uncovered (this allows it to reduce into a rich sauce). Stir frequently while it simmers.
Every half hour or so spoon out a bit, let it cool, taste it. When it is close to your liking, add chopped fresh oregano and fresh basil to the sauce, stir and simmer a bit longer.This is also the time to start the pasta cooking.
You will notice I mention neither salt nor ground pepper, though both can be added. We use only a pinch or two. These can also be added to taste once the sauce is on your plate, if anyone at your table is trying to limit their salt intake.
It is possible to eat this sauce after a fairly short cooking time (less than an hour, or even twenty minutes in). But Sekhnet, shrugging like one of her mother’s old Italian friends will say, with the tolerant, slightly pitying nod of someone forced to state the obvious, “it’s young.”
The young sauce is not bad, but the longer you cook it, the more it reduces (as water slowly boils away) and the richer the flavor becomes. Like many good things, this sauce rewards your patience.
A great sauce for a cold day, and if you love a good pasta sauce, your house will smell great for a few hours while it’s cooking.
History often provides the answers to those WTF?!! questions in our political system. The dirtiest things in American politics often seem to have their roots in slavery. How can a presidential candidate win by millions of votes and still lose the election? Biden could have easily lost, in spite of winning by 7,000,000 votes, if about 50,000 votes had been changed in just the right places. What? How? The Electoral College, of course, where 55 Electors go to the winner of California whether the candidate wins by 5 votes or 5.1 million votes, as Biden did in 2020. WTF? The Electoral College was designed, in large part, to give slave states an equal say and final veto power over a bullying majority in states whose economies did not depend on human bondage.
During a century of unpunished lynching of countless American citizens, intended to terrorize them into submission (both the brutal killing and the lack of punishment for the killers), how is it that bills to make lynching a federal crime were blocked and killed in the Senate decade after decade?
A little thing called the filibuster, of course, employed by Dixiecrats (today’s solid southern Republicans) over and over to block legislation that would infringe on sacred States’ Rights to treat certain of their damned citizens however they damned well pleased. A technique once requiring stamina and deliberate, public obstruction for as long as one wanted to block a vote, the modern filibuster does not even require a long speech on the floor of the Senate, an email from any opposition senator now blocks “cloture”, an invention requiring 60 votes that allows a filibuster override and a straight vote on the bill in question [1].
The filibuster was first imagined and employed by Senator John C. Calhoun [2], “The Great Nullifier”, America’s most famous public champion of the Peculiar Institution. It was used over the next almost two hundred years by men like Calhoun to fight laws that would have benefitted those ungrateful former slaves, freed from bondage and still complaining, no matter how many of them were strung up [3]. If you call such men racist, mind you, you’re playing right into the Progressive propaganda exposed in the 1776 Report — calling racists racists is like calling Blacks the “n-word”. John C. Calhoun is laughing in his grave.
But leaving race, and arguments over who is a racist and who is a “nigger,” aside, the filibuster has primarily been a tool of obstruction used, more often that not, by minority defenders of an unjust status quo. Picture Ted Cruz in 2013 reading Dr. Seuss on the floor of the Senate, “I do not like them in a box,” delivered in his famous whining drawl, with that patented shit sniffing grin, to block some bill or a presidential appointment, back in the days when a senator actually needed to actively “filibuster”. Would you be surprised to learn that nobody has made more consistent use of the filibuster than the adorable ageless obstructionist tortoise of the Senate Mitch McConnell?
The incomparable Terry Gross did a recent interview with Adam Jentleson, author of a book setting out the history of the filibuster:
“Kill Switch: The Rise Of The Modern Senate And The Crippling Of American Democracy” is a history of how the filibuster started as a tool of Southern senators upholding slavery, and then later was used as a tool to block civil rights legislation. The book concludes with Senator Mitch McConnell’s advances in the use of filibuster as an obstructionist tool…
(talking to Jentleson later in the broadcast) … we’ve established that needing a supermajority to pass legislation was not what the founders wanted. They wanted simple majorities. You’ve talked about how the filibuster was initiated in the mid-19th century and the ways it was used to enable slave owners and to keep the institution of slavery. But you write that the only time the filibuster was used during Jim Crow with any consistency was to block any form of civil rights legislation and that this happened through the 1960s.
Check out the interview with the presently ubiquitous Jentleson and then write to your senators and tell them to weigh in against minority leader’s McConnell’s shameless ploy to preserve his right to block anything his party of Trump finds objectionable.He and his Republican colleagues are already attacking Biden as a hypocrite who calls for unity while his party refuses to cave to GOP demands to fairly share power with them in a way Trump’s party sneered at for four years during Mitch’s “51-49, ram it down your throats, suck it cucks” reign as the Grim Reaper.
Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin (as good a rhyme as Carl Sandberg’s folksy Yahn Yohnson from Wisconsin) a member of the block of Republican zealots (the Senate branch of the Sedition Caucus) that voted to obstruct certification of the election on January 6, recently smacked weak Democrats with a hard (if also false) choice between getting cabinet positions filled or illegally impeaching Trump [4]. For my money, Johnson, Hawley, Cruz, Tuberville, et al should be expelled using section 3 of the 14th Amendment [5] that bars those giving aid or comfort to an insurrection from serving in Congress, absent a two-thirds vote to let them stay in power.
Think of it this way, with the filibuster intact, McConnell and his less than principled ilk still win. Biden needs 60 votes (not the simple majority needed to get Kavanaugh — 50-48, and Coney-Barrett — 52-48, on the now openly partisan 6-3 Supreme Court for life) to do anything positive legislatively (or even to have his cabinet confirmed– after months of Trump’s historic denial of basic transition courtesies). If the Biden administration needs to find ten votes among the party united in opposition to impeaching a president for planning and inciting an insurrection, an actual deadly attack on Congress (Hang Mike Pence!), to get anything done, you can kiss any kind of progress away from outright cult of personality fascism goodbye. You will need not 51 votes (the margin for most of Trump’s appointees) but 60 to move anything on to the Senate floor for debate and vote.
How do you like them green eggs and ham, Sam I am?
[1] Adam Jentleson on Fresh Air:
But in the modern Senate, the filibuster looks nothing like that. And actually, speaking is not even required. All you have to do when a bill comes to the floor is have a member of your staff send an email to what’s called the cloakroom, which is sort of the nerve center of action on the floor, saying that your member, your – the senator you work for, has an objection to this bill. That single email could be a phone call, could be a conversation in the hallway. That single objection raises the threshold from passing a bill from the simple majority, where technically the rules still have the threshold today, to a supermajority of what is now 60 votes.
And that is a filibuster. There’s no speaking required. No one has to take the floor. No one has to explain themselves. If a senator raises this objection and increases the threshold from a majority to a supermajority, they never actually have to explain themselves at any point. They just do it. And it’s become accepted. And that is why it’s become normalized that most bills in the Senate require 60 votes to pass.
But I just want to emphasize that this is not actually a matter of the rules themselves because the rules still state that a simple majority is what’s required to pass. This is a matter of a procedural hurdle that’s come to be developed over the last few decades and become routinized. The reason bills need 60 votes to pass is that they can’t clear that procedural hurdle to get to the final vote. And that is the problem that is paralyzing the Senate today.
So the progenitor of the filibuster, its main innovator, was John C. Calhoun, the great nullifier, the leader, father of the Confederacy. And Calhoun innovated the filibuster for the specific purpose of empowering the planter class. He was a senator from South Carolina. His main patrons were the powerful planters. And he was seeking to create a regional constituency to empower himself against the march of progress and against – what was becoming clear was a superior economic model in the North. So Calhoun started to innovate forms of obstruction that came to be known as the filibuster...
…Calhoun took it upon himself to argue that there was nothing evil about [slavery]. In that same speech that you quoted, he went on to explain that slavery was not a necessary evil, but, quote, “a positive good.” He was such an ardent defender and such a vehement racist that he couldn’t even accept the sort of antebellum acknowledgement that there were parts of the institution that were evil. So it was very clear what his motivations were. He wanted to preserve slavery. And the filibuster was what he deployed to achieve that goal.
So what Southern senators faced starting in the 1920s was majority support for civil rights bills. These were rudimentary civil rights bills. These were anti-lynching bills and anti-poll tax bills, but they were civil rights bills nonetheless. These bills started passing the House with big majorities. They had presidents of both parties in the White House ready to sign them, and they actually had enormous public support. Gallup polled the public on anti-lynching bills in 1937 and found 70% of Americans supporting federal anti-lynching laws. And they polled anti-poll tax laws in the 1940s and found 60% support. So Southern senators started to block these bills in the name of minority rights, deploying the supermajority threshold and talking about it as a vaunted, lofty defense of minority rights, just as John Calhoun had done in his time.
This continued to be the case against every single civil rights bill that came before Congress from the time that Reconstruction ended all the way up until 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson finally was able to rally a supermajority of senators of both parties together to break a Southern filibuster against civil rights. But from the 87 years between when Reconstruction ended until 1964, the only category of legislation against which the filibuster was deployed to actively stop bills in their tracks was civil rights legislation.
[4] As hardball playing insurrection-supporter Senator Ron Johnson put it the other day:
[5]
Fourteenth Amendment
Section 3 No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, a big Trump supporter, was one of the last diehard loyalists to go into the White House, not many hours before Mr. Trump left to let a new administration take over. Lindell was photographed carrying notes for a discussion of his plan for invoking the trusty Insurrection Act against traitors who insisted on officially tallying certified votes, mobilizing martial law to keep his guy in power. As you do.
The rumor is that Lindell used to be a crackhead. He loved crack, people are saying. Some irreverent wiseass had a little fun with that, picturing him with his favorite crack:
After a long sermon, in Appendix II, about the importance of recognizing that all morality flows from biblical sources, the now defunct 1776 Commission offers Appendix III: Created Equal or Identity Politics?a solid John Birch Society analysis of what makes these despicable freaks demanding equality so goddamned repulsive and deserving of our scorn (to skip to their Conclusion, scroll to [1]):
In recent times, however, a new creed has arisen challenging the original one enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. This new creed, loosely defined as identity politics, has three key features.
First, the creed of identity politics defines and divides Americans in terms of collective social identities. According to this new creed, our racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as individuals equally endowed with fundamental rights.
Second, the creed of identity politics ranks these different racial and social groups in terms of privilege and power, with disproportionate moral worth allotted to each. It divides Americans into two groups: oppressors and victims. The more a group is considered oppressed, the more its members have a moral claim upon the rest of society. As for their supposed oppressors, they must atone and even be punished in perpetuity for their sins and those of their ancestors.
Third, the creed of identity politics teaches that America itself is to blame for oppression. America’s “electric cord” is not the creed of liberty and equality that connects citizens today to each other and to every generation of Americans past, present, and future. Rather, America’s “electric cord” is a heritage of oppression that the majority racial group inflicts upon minority groups, and identity politics is about assigning and absolving guilt for that oppression.
According to this new creed, Americans are not a people defined by their dedication to human equality, but a people defined by their perpetuation of racial and sexual oppression
You can, of course, put it much more simply and without the fancy, pejorative “ideological” label (or without hammering the word “creed” over and over, telltale tic, that). If it is self-evident that we are all created equal, if the Constitution has been amended to ensure the rights of citizenship to all former slaves and their issue, then equality among citizens is a goal as American as apple pie and belief in Jesus Christ Himself. It follows that people who are not treated equally even now are entitled to equality under law. So sorry if it makes you pompous oppressor fucks feel perpetually angry and guilty!
Look around at America right now– whose foot does this shoe fit on?
Identity politics, on the other hand, sees politics as the realm of permanent conflict and struggle among racial, gender, and other groups, and no compromise between different groups is possible. Rational deliberation and compromise only preserve the oppressive status quo. Instead, identity politics relies on humiliation, intimidation, and coercion. American self-government, where all citizens are equal before the law, is supplanted by a system where certain people use their group identity to get what they want.
humiliation, intimidation, and coercion
Nobody we know specializes in that shit.
Again, this hits me personally, from a lifetime of experience with people who insisted they loved me and claimed the right to angrily define me as they saw fit. If you have the good fortune to stand calmly beside their deathbed you might hear a last minute admission that they were wrong to call you a vicious, unfair, irrationally hurtful fuck. You may hear, as I did from my father, that the long war had not been your fault but their’s, though they uncompromisingly blamed you for all of it.
The 1776 Report was a long exercise in identity politics, from the lofty perspective of the noble knights of the Ku Klux Klan.Good riddance to Trump and the stinking Historical Revisionism Commission he commissioned (a Biden executive order dissolved the 1776 Commission).
[1]
Conclusion
Identity politics is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
Proponents of identity politics rearrange Americans by group identities, rank them by how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the majority culture, and then sow division among them. While not as barbaric or dehumanizing, this new creed creates new hierarchies as unjust as the old hierarchies of the antebellum South, making a mockery of equality with an ever-changing scale of special privileges on the basis of racial and sexual identities. The very idea of equality under the law—of one nation sharing King’s “solid rock of brotherhood”—is not possible and, according to this argument, probably not even desirable.
All Americans, and especially all educators, should understand identity politics for what it is: rejection of the principle of equality proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. As a nation, we should oppose such efforts to divide us and reaffirm our common faith in the fundamental equal right of every individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
gratuitousblahg 