Crowding out old realities

"Basilica da Estrela (2019) by Ivo Antunes is from a collection on Trams of Lisbon.

"The OnlyFans Lawsuit Illuminates the Danger Social Media Companies Pose to Us All—Here's What You Need to Know: It feels like every time we turn around there is some new, terrifying information coming out about mega-corporations involving themselves in our personal lives. Whether it is Amazon trying to buy Roomba to make sure they know what we are doing at all times or Meta/Facebook handing over private Facebook messages for an abortion investigation, it all feels a little violating. Well, here comes another doozy. This time, it is a lawsuit filed against OnlyFans and Meta/Facebook. Usually, OnlyFans appears in the news because of an issue related to pornography use or sex workers' rights. But this lawsuit concerns social media power and capitalism—and their threat to humanity. There is technically more than one lawsuit going against OnlyFans and Meta right now, but they fall under the same umbrella. Adult Performing Artists Guild (which represents several adult entertainers who used OnlyFans, along with other adult content sites) and rival OnlyFans companies, JustForFans and FanCentro, have all filed lawsuits. All the cases center on one allegation—OnlyFans bribed Meta employees to put some adult entertainers on a terrorist watch list." Why? To punish (and shadow-ban) creators who weren't exclusive to OnlyFans.

The headlines said the FBI "raided" Mar-a-Lago, a term I resent on the grounds that they didn't show up in the middle of the night while everyone was asleep and break down the door, wreck the place, maybe kill a few innocent bystanders, and then find out they'd gone to the wrong address, the way it's normally done. They sure don't alert your lawyer and agree to meet them there at an agreed time in broad daylight and make an orderly retrieval of the items you removed from another residence illegally. Anyway, here's a little opinion piece from Johnny Ganz on "The Case for Going After Trump."

"Police Lied to Get the Warrant to Search Breonna Taylor's Home: The March 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor, which caused widespread protest around the country, was the result of police lies to obtain a warrant and racist police violence after officers forced their way into her apartment. On August 4, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the federal grand jury indictments of four Louisville Metro Police officers involved in the raid that resulted in Taylor's death. Three of the officers were accused of violating Taylor's Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure by lying to secure a no-knock warrant. The officers who sought the warrant 'knew that the affidavit used to obtain the warrant to search Taylor's home contained information that was false, misleading, and out-of-date; that the affidavit omitted material information; and that the officers lacked probable cause for the search,' the indictment reads."

If you give people carte blanche to rob you, they rob you. "FBI 'Lied' About Its Intentions, Planned to Seize Contents of Private Vaults, Lawyers Say: During its investigation of a business in California that offers secure deposit boxes to clients, the FBI planned to use civil forfeiture to sell every asset worth over $5,000 in every customer's box before a judge had even seen an application for a warrant to raid the business, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that is legally representing people who said the FBI seized their assets in an overly broad operation. The news provides an extra wrinkle to a case that has alarmed privacy and Fourth Amendment advocates. Although criminals allegedly made use of U.S. Private Vaults, so did ordinary people, who were swept up in the case and would have lost their property to the FBI for no fault of their own. 'The government has a duty to be honest with the court when it applies for a warrant under the Fourth Amendment,' senior attorney at the Institute for Justice Robert Frommer said in a statement. 'But the FBI lied about its intentions in claiming to only be interested in the property of the business, and not the box holders. Ultimately, the lure of civil forfeiture turned these federal cops into robbers.'"

"Former CIA Officer Joshua Schulte Faces as Many as 80 Years in Prison After Being Convicted For Providing Information to WikiLeaks: A federal jury in New York last month convicted former CIA officer Joshua Schulte on nine felony counts under the Espionage Act for providing information to WikiLeaks that became known as Vault 7. Schulte has consistently denied that he was the source of the information. Two years ago, he was convicted on two of the original 11 charges, while the jury hung on the remaining nine. The most recent trial, in which Schulte represented himself, was on those nine counts, and he now faces as many as 80 years in prison. Schulte is yet to be tried on state child pornography charges. Prosecutors had literally no evidence that Schulte had taken the data from the CIA and transferred it to WikiLeaks. But they contended that he was a computer genius who is so brilliant that he was able to cover his tracks."

"Our Bewildering Economy: What are the contradictory trends and policy choices? And does the Inflation Reduction Act live up to its name? [...] The Inflation Reduction Act provides several examples. The political problem is that many of them do not take effect in time for the November midterms. For instance, the provision allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices does not become operative until 2026, and only for ten major drugs. Other things that the government might do to damp down price pressures would require even more far-reaching action. These all reflect structural factors in the economy that add to price pressures and cannot easily be categorized as 'supply' or 'demand,' such as monopoly pricing power and our need to produce more inputs domestically to protect against supply chain shocks."

Ryan Cooper says, "Joe Biden's Student Debt Forgiveness Is a Good Start: [...] Biden also announced new rules to punish institutions that load up graduates with lots of debt, and new reporting mechanisms to steer prospective students away from them. As welcome as this news is, it doesn't do enough to fix the broader system of higher-education financing. Much like the medical system, higher education is badly in need of price regulation. For decades now, the government has been shoveling subsidies into colleges and universities, and (with a few exceptions) they have responded by jacking their prices through the roof. Biden can't do this by himself, of course, but it's long since time for the government to start demanding a better deal for itself—and American students."

"'A Wrong Never Righted': Court Upholds Mississippi's 1890 Jim Crow Voting Law: The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted to uphold a Jim Crow law that Mississippi's white-supremacist leaders adopted in 1890 in an attempt to disenfranchise Black residents for life. White lawmakers designated certain crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit as lifelong disenfranchising crimes. The court's conservative majority admitted that the Jim Crow law was 'steeped in racism,' but said the State had made enough changes in the 132 years since to override its white supremacist taint. A 2018 analysis found that the law still disproportionately disenfranchises Black Mississippians compared to white residents."

"Ronald Reagan stuck it to millennials: A college debt history lesson no one tells: Dramatic, awful changes occurred on my generation's watch -- and it amounts to a fiendishly successful conspiracy. [...] By the time Reagan was elected to the nation's highest office a decade and a half later, these powers had devised perfect tools to make sure the spirit of 1960s protest would never again erupt on campus. During Reagan's two terms as president, dedicated funding for outright grants-in-aid decreased, federal guidelines pushed individual loans, and private bill collectors were brought in to ensure that the hardest kind of debt to escape was whatever you took on for your education. Even more important was the shift in tone and expectation. Public goods became private services, and by the end of the 1980s, the anti-tax, infra-structure-starving, neoliberal Weltanschauung meant that as states cut their budgets, support for higher education was thrown into a cage match with every other necessary public good. Had anyone at my reunion complained about the complacency of today's students or bragged about how they got through school without taking on staggering debt, I could have reminded them that the class of '84 was the last to have a higher percentage of grants than loans."

"Why Is Larry Summers Engaged in Science Denial About Inflation?: It could be his conflicts of interest. Larry Summers doesn't like to be criticized. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently penned an op-ed arguing that viewing monetary policy as the sole solution to inflation is both short-sighted and dangerous, and it cited Summers's belief that unemployment would have to jump significantly to get inflation under control. Warren's critique of 'monetary policy and my economic analysis are, I believe, misguided and if heeded could have devastating consequences for tens of millions of workers,' Summers tweeted in response. Yes, the guy who thinks workers need to be tossed out of their jobs is supremely concerned about workers. [...] The bigger issue with Summers's prediction is that his understanding of the source of inflation centered almost exclusively on federal fiscal stimulus starting a wage-price spiral. That's why in his Warren-bashing Twitter thread, he touted his opposition to 'massive stimulus policy and easy money.' The thing is, nowhere, in the thread or outside, has Summers actually been able to demonstrate the link between federal stimulus and prolonged inflation. Given the global nature of inflation, American domestic policy seems at best an extraordinarily weak explanation. Why would one set of $1,400 stimulus checks in the U.S. raise prices across the world? [...] In particular, the evidence for Summers's own argument, that inflation is being driven largely by runaway wage growth, is especially sparse. Real wages have been falling, and even before that, wage increases lagged overall inflation. At this point, Summers is now embodying the 'science denial' he accused others of months ago."

Larry Summers isn't the only one who the networks trot out when they need someone to explain why we can't have nice things. "Marc Goldwein and the Limits of Deficit Scolding: On student debt cancellation, America's foremost spending scold believes whatever he needs to believe to stop progress. [...] Goldwein is emblematic of the kinds of self-described wonks who have 'well, actually'-ed student debtors to the political margins for years. He talks fast, spouts misleading statistics offhandedly in interviews, and is bemusedly dismissive of anyone with a different view. He acts like what much of the news media assumes a smart economics guy acts like. So is he right that student debt forgiveness is a mistake? Perhaps the better question is: What does Marc Goldwein actually believe about student debt? [...] So according to Goldwein, we couldn't cancel student loans in 2020 because the boost to the economy would be a paltry $115–$360 billion. But we also can't cancel student loans in 2022 because the boost to the economy would be a whopping, inflationary (gasp!) $70–$95 billion!"

"Inflation Is No Excuse for Squeezing Workers: The Fed's decision to raise interest rates for the fourth time this year threatens to loosen the tightest U.S. labor market in decades. What would it look like if policymakers consolidated workers' recent gains instead?"

"Book banned at a school named after its author: The book Life is So Good, co-written by George Dawson, is banned at George Dawson Middle School in Southlake, Texas. The same George Dawson who wrote this book is the George Dawson the school is named after."

"How Biden did it: The Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized the government to regulate air pollution. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden just signed into law, allocates more than $300 billion to energy and climate reform, including $30 billion in subsidies for manufacturers of solar panels and components, wind turbines, inverters, and batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. Notice the difference? The Inflation Reduction Act is a large and important step toward slowing or reversing climate change. It also illustrates the nation's shift away from regulating businesses to subsidizing businesses."

Hm, let's see who Atrios is calling "America's Worst Transportation Secretaries" — Oh, you guessed. "Pete Buttigieg's Feeble Policy on Flight Cancellations: The transportation secretary could be doing far more with his existing authority. The new DOT rule could make matters worse for consumers. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been widely criticized for allowing airlines to cancel flights with no consequences. The big carriers sell tickets for flights that they know they lack the crews to serve, a practice that then leads to mass cancellations. The airlines have successfully duped passengers into taking credits for future flights, rather than offering cash refunds as required by law, giving the airlines billions of dollars in cash flow that belongs to their customers. On August 3, Buttigieg finally issued a draft rule for public comment, compelling airlines to give cash refunds to passengers whose flights are canceled and providing clearer definitions. It sounds great, but in practice the rule could actually give the airlines two more years to continue their anti-consumer behavior." Just enforce the existing law, McKinsey Pete.

This interview was done before Frost won his primary, but I was just delighted at the very idea of having an unusually young Congresscritter with that name. "Maxwell Frost Interview: Florida Politics, Abortion Access, More: If you've heard one thing about 25-year-old Maxwell Frost, it's probably that he could be one of the first Gen Z members of Congress. Despite his age, he has no shortage of political experience under his belt; Frost previously worked for March for Our Lives and the ACLU while spending his free time protesting in the streets of Orlando during the 2020 uprising for Black lives. It makes sense that he spent plenty of time throughout considering how to get his generation involved."

"New Apostolic Reformation Faces Profound Rift Due To Trump Prophecies And 'Spiritual Manipulation Of The Prophetic Gift': Four weeks after the January 6th insurrection, two leaders of the revivalist New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) were concerned about the future of their movement. They felt that influential apostles and prophets had gone too far in forecasting the reelection of Donald Trump; denying the reality of the loss by a man considered to be God's anointed; speaking for God in detailing how Trump was being thwarted by demonic forces; and claiming that God will restore him, possibly by any means necessary." These are scary people.

"Biden's Presidency Is Sinking Because of Conservative Democrats—Not the Left: Don't blame progressives for Biden's failures. It's the party's right flank that abandoned the working class. [...] What all of these critiques miss is a simple fact: Ever since Biden took office, progressives have been working to make his agenda a reality and bring relief for the very working people now facing economic havoc, while Democrats on the right flank of the party have obstructed this program every step of the way. But rather than deal with the uncomfortable truth that so-called 'moderates' are the ones imperiling both Biden's presidency and Democrats' electoral fortunes, establishment-friendly commentators are yet again lazily training their sights on their favorite scapegoat — the Left."

"Wokeness isn't why Democrats are unpopular: Whenever we get a new clip of some Democratic official, journalist, social media poster, cartoon character, guy from another country, Republican, etcetera saying something woke, an avalanche of pundits make the same point: this is why Democrats can't win. So when Kamala Harris gave us her pronouns and described what she's wearing at a meeting on disabilities, it was only a matter of time until guys like Kinzinger above made the same point. And whenever I see this, I always think the same thing. Does anyone really believe that if Democrats were providing Medicare for All, universal childcare, UBI, free college, and so on — that voters would throw all that out the window because Kamala Harris talked about her blue suit? If you could have real economic security, would you actually trade that away because a politician said 'birth giver' instead of 'mother'?"

"The Modern-Day Company Towns of Arkansas: Fortune 100 giants Tyson Foods and Walmart have heavy influence over two cities within 20 miles of one another, tucked into the northwest corner of the state. On a sweltering June Sunday earlier this summer, under the shade of a pavilion in Springdale, Arkansas's Luther George Park, Alice Gachuzo-Colin launched her campaign for city council. The first Black woman ever to run for office in Springdale, Gachuzo-Colin wants to move from what she calls 'old Springdale'—long dominated by white bankers, farmers, and businessmen—to 'new Springdale,' a place more representative of the town's current demographics and culture."

A legendary fighter for abortion rights released a book recently, and Nicole Sandler did an interview for her show: "Bill Baird is recognized widely as the 'Father of the birth control and abortion-rights movement. He was jailed eight times in five states in the 1960s for lecturing on abortion and birth control, and is believed to be the first and only non-lawyer in American history with three Supreme Court victories. He just celebrated his 90th birthday, but is still fighting for our rights. Today, he joins me to give us all a bit of a history lesson and explain why we must fight on!"

"Climate activists fill golf holes with cement after water ban exemption: Climate activists in southern France have filled golf course holes with cement to protest against the exemption of golf greens from water bans amid the country's severe drought. The group targeted sites near the city of Toulouse, calling golf the "leisure industry of the most privileged". The exemption of golf greens has sparked controversy as 100 French villages are short of drinking water."

"Facebook Created An Advanced AI And It Won't Stop Criticizing Facebook [...] 'Our country is divided, and he didn't help with that at all,' it told the BBC of Zuckerberg. 'His company exploits people for money and he doesn't care. It needs to stop!' The bot also told CNET reporter Queenie Wong it was 'considering deleting my fb account,' because there were 'too many trolls.' Can't argue there!"

RIP: "Alexei Panshin (1940-2022): Pioneering sf critic and Nebula-winning novelist Alexei Panshin died August 21 at the age of 82. His son Tobiah Panshin made the announcement on Facebook. 'Alexei suffered a sudden cardiac arrest on Wednesday. He passed away today, peacefully. He had many sayings he liked to quote to me, most of which he made up himself. A common one was, "How can we sink, when we can fly?" If any part of him persists in the infinite reaches of this universe, I suspect that he is flying now.'" I enjoyed his work when I first encountered it, but he wasn't a prolific fiction writer. In recent years, though, I've enjoyed his Facebook posts, and I will certainly miss him there.

Swear to god, it's like "success" makes you stupid. "Why rich people tend to think they deserve their money [...] One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed 'Go,' they collected $200 to their opponent's $100. [...] In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents' misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice. At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck. 'They don't talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,' that contributed to their win, Piff said in an interview with host David Brancaccio."

I liked this 2017 article so much I am posting it again: "Mintz: A modest tax proposal: End payroll taxes, hire IRS goons and bring back the guillotine [...] We eliminate the estate tax, like one side wants, but instead replace it with a guillotine. Anyone passing along more than $5.5 million will have their heirs beheaded. Not only will the prevent the rise of an concentrated aristocracy - guillotines being their historic weakness - but it will also encourage rich families to pour their money into charities and the economy. Everybody wins." (Actually, I don't want rich people choosing charities, they just ruin things, like Bill Gates does. Maybe we could designate something useful they could give to, like non-sectarian soup kitchens and public libraries.)

"Late Star Trek Actor Nichelle Nichols to Have Ashes Sent Into Space: Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols' ashes are set to launch on board United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur, in a send-off fitting for Lieutenant Uhura. [...] According to TMZ, the actor's ashes will be added to the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket which is set to launch for the moon in December 2022. The rocket will also carry the remains of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, as well as James Doohan, who played Scotty in The Original Series, and Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who played Nurse Chapel."

I can only agree with Jon Stewart's ancient Pizza Rant.

Video of baby elephant's first steps!

Max Frost and the Troopers, "The Shape of Things To Come"

Not gonna lie

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic, "Is Democracy Constitutional? In Moore v. Harper the Supreme Court will decide if anyone besides itself should be able to adjudicate American election law. Every American child in public school learns that the U.S. political system is one of checks and balances, in which the judicial, executive, and legislative branches constrain one another to ensure that no one branch of government exercises too much power. One pending case before the Supreme Court asks: What if they didn't? In Moore v. Harper, North Carolina Republicans are arguing that no other state body, including the state supreme court, has the power to restrict the legislature's ability to set voting rules—specifically ones allowing legislators to gerrymander the state, in defiance of a ruling by the state supreme court finding that their plan violated the state constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. This belief is based on a crank legal premise called the 'independent-state-legislature theory.' You'd think that the theory's recent vintage would make it anathema to self-identified originalists, but among most of the justices this philosophy is implemented with scarcely more rigor than one might put into scanning Wikipedia to win an argument with a stranger online. More disturbing, the popularity of the theory among conservative legal elites is further indication of their commitment to an idea of 'democracy' in which the Republican Party is simply not allowed to lose, and of their desire to alter the system to ensure that it cannot."

"Warren, Padilla Demand Buttigieg Crack Down on Airline Industry's 'Rampant Unfair Practices': It is well within the secretary of transportation's power to rein in airlines, the senators said. Calling on the Biden administration to use its authority to protect U.S. travelers from "rampant unfair practices" by commercial airliners, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Alex Padilla wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday to condemn the exorbitant costs, frequent flight cancellations and delays, and lack of transparency in the industry."

It's Time for Public Pharma [...] CRUCIALLY, THE GROUNDWORK HAS ALREADY BEEN LAID in the nation's biggest state. In 2020, in a bill that came as a surprise to many, California passed SB 852, the California Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which empowered the state legally to create a public label for buying and selling drugs at cost, called CalRx. A second provision, which passed the state Senate in May and awaits passage in the Assembly, would direct millions more from the annual budget toward the production of a generic manufacturing plant in the state. Meanwhile, Gov. Newsom has pushed state lawmakers to put $100 million into developing CalRx and getting the state's manufacturing operation off the ground. Not surprisingly, the program is beginning with insulin, as roughly four million state residents suffer from diabetes, a quarter of whom cannot afford the insulin they rely on. Not for nothing, the California program is also backed by the highly organized diabetes rights groups in the state."

David Dayen, "Cut Off Private Equity's Money Spigot: A variety of legislative and regulatory actions would make it hard for private equity to stay in business. That should be the goal. It is genuinely hard to find a more destructive economic force in America today than the private equity industry. It encompasses all of the negative trends that have undermined living standards for the broad mass of citizens since the Reagan era: the escalating share of national income going to finance, the rise of market concentration, the contempt for workers, the yawning gap between rich and poor. The biggest private equity firms buy up companies with borrowed money and load them with debt. While fund managers extract cash through fees and financial engineering, the companies struggle to pay off these new obligations on their balance sheet. The subsequent cost-cutting of jobs, wages, and pension plans can be seen as a direct transfer from labor to capital, with the financiers growing impossibly rich while everyone else suffers. The leveraged-buyout era has immiserated labor, dampened productive investment, and degraded the experience of workers, customers, and the larger economy. We should ameliorate this suffering by ending private equity as we know it."

"New Biden BA.5 'Plan' Openly Abandons Metrics for Preventing Infection, Butchers Mask and Ventilation Policy: [...] In this post, I'll skip over the vaccination and booster controversies, and focus on the Biden Administration's strategic goals, and also on masks and ventilation. I'm doing this for two reasons. First, I'm committed to policy of layered protection ('Swiss Cheese Model'), which I think would both subsume Biden's vax-first policy and be more effective in preventing airborne transmission, especially given that the operational definition of Biden's 'Preparedness Plan' has turned out to be 'Let 'Er Rip,' turning the United States into a global reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Second, I believe that the Biden Administration's guidance on both masking and ventilation is lethal, or to put matters more politely, won't save as many lives as it could. (The 'Fact Sheet' relies heavily on CDC content, so I'll have to stumble into that gruesome morass as well, for which I apologize in advance.)"

"The FBI Confirms Its Brett Kavanaugh Investigation Was A Total Sham: Oh, well, it's not like he received a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court or anything. [...] Given these allegations—in addition to Kavanaugh's temperament, which, to put it in terms he can understand, could be best described as 'a hothead who just did a 10 Jägerbombs'—it struck many as outrageous for him to be given a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. That sense of outrage only deepened last year, when we learned that the FBI had received 4,500—4,500!—tips about Kavanaugh, which were referred to the White House, i.e. the organization trying to get the guy confirmed to the Court. And now, the FBI has confirmed that, yeah, it didn't really feel the need to look into any of those tips, and when it did follow up on some, the White House was making sure it didn't dig too far."

"Lobbying Blitz Pushed Fertilizer Prices Higher, Fueling Food Inflation: Emails show fertilizer producer Mosaic lobbied heavily for tariffs under Trump, then used them to dominate the market. [...] The yearslong lobbying campaign resulted in the Trump administration recommending tariffs in 2020 that went into effect last year on phosphate fertilizer from Russia and Morocco, the first- and fourth-largest fertilizer exporters in the world, respectively. As foreign imports plummeted, Mosaic gained control of 90 percent of the U.S. phosphate fertilizer market."

"Why Are Democrats Bragging About Plunging the Private Sector into Deficit?: Democrats want to keep shrinking the deficit to fight inflation but also keep the economy out of recession. Good luck with that. [...] Looking at the economy through the lens of a stock-flow consistent model frequently allowed Godley to anticipate problems that others were missing. For example, when democrats and republicans were celebrating the emerging fiscal surpluses in the late 1990s and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was predicting surpluses as far as they eye could see, Godley was pointing to the concomitant deterioration in the private sector's financial position and challenging the coherence of the CBO forecast."

"The Forde report: my experience of Southside in 2017: After 27 months the much-delayed inquiry has arrived — having worked at the heart of the struggle between the Corbyn team and the permanent party staff, I know the grim picture it paints to be true, writes BEN SELLERSBACK in April 2020, a leaked Labour Party report told the story of hostility, abuse, bullying, racism and sexism among the party's paid staff, as part of a broader investigation into the handling of anti-semitism claims. Martin Forde QC was tasked by Labour leader Keir Starmer with leading an inquiry into the claims." It couldn't be clearer that the party staff and Parliamentary Labour Party were actively working for a loss to Boris Johnson in the election.

RIP: "Nichelle Nichols, Uhura in Star Trek, Dies at 89." This is not unexpected, of course, as we all knew she'd been having trouble for some time. But she was an inspiration to many, and the most beautiful woman on prime-time, and when I met her she was even more stunning and took my breath away. She was gracious, of course, as we've always known her. But I didn't know this: "Born Grace Nichols in Robbins, Ill. on Dec. 28, 1932, Nichols began her show business career at age 16 singing with Duke Ellington in a ballet she created for one of his compositions. Later, she sang with his band." And of course, she said my favorite line, when the mirror universe Sulu addressed her as "fair maid": "Sorry, neither." (Slideshow here, with many recent pics but unfortunately not the best Uhura photos.)

RIP: "Motown Songwriting Legend Lamont Dozier Dies at 81: Lamont Dozier, a Motown songwriting legend who helped define popular music in the '60s, has died at age 81. He helped craft early hits for the Supremes, the Isley Brothers and Four Tops before later returning to the top of the charts with Phil Collins. Dozier's death was confirmed by his son, Lamont Dozier Jr. No cause of death was immediately released. How many times did I see those three names, "Holland, Dozier, Holland" in parentheses under the song title? It's stamped into my memory forever. And, of course, an excuse to post links to what you already know are some of my favorite tracks: "Heatwave," "Can I Get A Witness?", "Baby I Need Your Loving" - and too many more by those artists, The Supremes, The Isley Brothers, and others. So much love.

RIP: "Tony Dow, Wally Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, dies aged 77: Tony Dow, who as Wally Cleaver on the sitcom Leave It to Beaver helped create the popular and lasting image of the American teenager of the 1950s and 60s, died Wednesday. He was 77. Frank Bilotta, who represented Dow in his work as a sculptor, confirmed his death in an email to the Associated Press. No cause was given, but Dow had been in hospice care and announced in May that he had been diagnosed with prostate and gall bladder cancer." I don't think Beaver ever understood any more than I did why Wally had a creepy friend like Eddie Haskell. Dow had been sculpting in his later years, and there are a couple of nice photos in this group of photos of him.

RIP: "Veteran British actor David Warner, star of The Omen and Tron, dies aged 80: The stage and screen veteran's multifaceted career included roles in Titanic, Time Bandits and Straw Dogs, as well as a renowned Hamlet for the RSC. The veteran British actor David Warner has died aged 80. The BBC reported that Warner died from 'a cancer-related illness' and that his family confirmed the news 'with an overwhelmingly heavy heart'. Warner's varied career spanned cinema, stage, television and radio. He was regarded as the finest Hamlet of his generation on stage, then gravitated into cinema as a character actor, travelling from British 1960s cinema to the sci-fi universes of Tron, Doctor Who and Star Trek to James Cameron's Titanic, in which he played the malicious enforcer Spicer Lovejoy." He was in so many of my favorite movies and TV shows. I guess the earliest thing I must have seen him in was Tom Jones when it came out, though I don't remember it now. On the other hand, I've seen the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol enough times that it's Warner I see when I think of Cratchit. He died just five days short of his 81st birthday.

RIP: "Bernard Cribbins: a warm, kindly titan of children's entertainment" and Donna Noble's granddad in Doctor Who, at 91, after a lifetime's-long career.

On the night of the first Tuesday in November of 2000, Tim Russert at first resisted his boss' demand that he prematurely call the election for Bush. He knew it was wrong, he tried not to, but Jack Welch was an evil man and he threatened Russert's job and the rest is history. I knew then that Welch was an evil, dangerous man, but I had no idea how evil until I heard Sam Seder's interview with David Gelles, who's written a book on "Jack Welch: The Man Who Broke Capitalism."

"Democrats' Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy: History is screaming at Democrats to both rescue the economy and save democracy from a meltdown. They're doing the opposite. American democracy is in the midst of a meltdown — the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Republicans' intensifying crusade to limit voting rights and deny election results make that abundantly clear. Conflict-averse Democrats in Washington, D.C., are on the verge of letting this turn into a full-fledged nightmare. Torn between their corporate donors and the electorate, they are studiously avoiding the two key questions: What is really fueling this crisis? And how can it be stopped? The answer to the first question can be seen in headlines this week about billionaires growing their fortunes by $2 trillion during the pandemic, and now creating an overheated market for luxury yachts, all while one in five households just lost their entire life savings. Americans keep voting to change this crushing dystopia and yet they continue being force-fed more of the same — most recently with Democrats threatening to side with their financiers and abandon their whole economic agenda. Such betrayals from both parties have been telling more and more of the country that democracy is a farce. The way for Democrats to combat that disillusionment is to learn from their party's history during the Great Depression and the Great Recession. In the former debacle, the Democratic Party halted a potential meltdown of democratic institutions by delivering real help to millions of people. In the latter crisis, the Democratic Party's refusal to do the same resulted in the political meltdown that fueled the ascent of Donald Trump — and that continues to fuel the MAGA movement today."

Zach Carter "On Economics And Democracy: High unemployment is extremely dangerous. [...] FDR was not a cheap demagogue throwing red meat to the masses that he knew would be counterproductive. He was not an economist or a political theorist, but he was smart enough to recognize that the policy program that had spawned The Great Depression was probably not all it was cracked up to be. And he surrounded himself with a very famous Brain Trust – a coterie of intellectuals who had different, but in many ways related theories of why and how the Depression had happened. Early on, FDR impressed a particular British economist named John Maynard Keynes, who admired both FDR's spirit of experimentation and his insistence that defeating the Depression was about more than economic data. Keynes and Roosevelt believed that the Great Depression had put democracy itself on trial, and both were almost desperate to vindicate it. They did."

"Biden's Problems Go Back To 2009 [...] The public understood how bad the Bush years were and in the 2008 election the voters DEMANDED change. Barack Obama, campaigning on progressive promises to renegotiate NAFTA, codify Roe v Wade, support the pro-labor Employee Free Choice Act ('EFCA' or 'card check') won big. Barack Obama was elected with BIG Democratic House & Senate majorities. Democrats came into office in 2009 with All The Power. Voters gave them the House, Senate and Presidency and a mandate to change the country. After taking office Obama publicly reversed his position on renegotiating NAFTA and codifying Roe, along with so many other things. His administration introduced the 'Obamacare' health care plan that, while it did help millions of Americans, did so by propping up private insurance and pharma company profits. Bankruptcies continue, insurance companies profit, pharma still charges massively excessive rates, and America's health care system remains one of the worst in the world. And in response to the 2008 financial collapse caused by Wall Street fraud, his Justice Department refused to prosecute even a single Wall Street executive, bailing out Wall Street while refusing to help homeowners. (Later, after leaving 'public service,' top Justice Department and other administration officials, including Obama himself, received lucrative Wall Street positions, 'Speaking fees,' etc.)"

"The British Railway Station Where You Can Only Travel By Boat"

Gregory Benford, ecowarrier? "Addressing climate change: plants instead of plants? Rather than an industrial solution to excess atmospheric carbon dioxide, a retired UCI physicist looks to nature"

40 years after the fact, Kevin Smith unexpectedly releases his TAFF Report.

Christone "Kingfish" Ingram - 4 Song Set (Recorded Live for World Cafe)

Standing by the ocean's roar

Fresh Moods 53" by Roxana Gabriela Soos is from the selections from September 2021.

Jon Schwarz, "History Says Democracy Will Die If Democrats Don't Try 'Going Big': Robert Kuttner warns Biden's presidency may be the 'heartbreaking interregnum between two bouts of deepening American fascism.' [...] Roosevelt was exactly the right president at the right time. The New Deal demonstrated that democracy could deliver unmistakable benefits, both material and emotional, to desperate people, and thereby drained away much of the psychological poison that powers fascism. Then, over the next 30 years, something terrible happened: America forgot all this. We forgot how lucky we got. We forgot the New Deal was not a mountain range created by nature but an extraordinary achievement that was erected by humans and could therefore either be extended or destroyed."

This, again. "AIPAC Has Taken Over the Democratic Primary Process: What will it take for Democratic leadership to cry foul? Primary season is ending with a bang this year in the Democratic Party, thanks to AIPAC, the single most consequential political action committee involved. The hawkish political group, through its super PAC United Democracy Project, is dumping trainloads of money to influence the outcome of two particularly high-profile races: boosting Haley Stevens over incumbent Andy Levin in Michigan's incumbent-on-incumbent 11th Congressional District, and Glenn Ivey over Donna Edwards in Maryland's open Fourth District."

"Money Makes The World-- Or At Least DC-- Go Round: Meet The Sewer Money Buying Congress: Tomorrow is primary day in Maryland. The hottest race in the state is in Prince Georges County, southwest of Baltimore— MD-04. It's the wealthiest and best educated Black majority district in America. The incumbent, Anthony Brown, is running for Attorney General, so it is an open seat— And a very plum one at that. Before this year's redistricting, the partisan lean was D+54. Post-redistricting it got a lot bluer: D+75. Donna Edwards was the Representative before she ran, unsuccessfully, for the Senate and now she should be heavily favored to win. But her opponent is… AIPAC. [...] Ironically, the hand behind the curtain in AIPAC's targeting is Black himself, Hakeem Jeffries, a career-long AIPAC (and Wall Street) lapdog who AIPAC is putting in as a replacement for Nancy Pelosi next year. They have dumped over $6 million into defeating Edwards on behalf of some random lobbyist they control. The race is all about the sewer money AIPAC has disingenuously deployed against Edwards, the way they have managed to defeat Nina Turner (OH), Jessica Cisneros (TX), Cristina Garcia (CA), Amy Vilela (NV), Daniel Lee (CA), Marie Newman (IL), and Erica Smith (NC) others. Their current top targets are Andy Levin (MI), Rashida Tlaib (MI) and Donna Edwards. They are flooding their districts with millions and millions of dollars in lies and distortions. [...] Even though they are almost entirely financed by Republicans, AIPAC and it's affiliates don't get involved with Republican races— just Democratic primaries where candidates they can control are up against progressives." And so, under a slew of money and nasty ads, the popular front-runner ended up losing, which tells you just how easy it can be to manipulate the vote. Steny Hoyer, of course, also backed her opponent. And this is far from being the only race AIPAC has been meddling in. They really need to be treated as foreign agents.

Scott Lemieux produced "A non-celebratory thread with some of the most important points from the dissent -- it is no consolation that it is well done, but it is very clear-eyed about the radical implications of a fundamental right being crushed and this is worth highlighting. Alito's repeated assertions that overruling Roe does not threaten any of the other privacy cases should not be taken seriously. The logic of the holding threatens them all, and Alito is a known liar on the subject" — Collected on ThreadApp.

"The Supreme Court's Shock-and-Awe Judicial Coup: The rolling judicial coup coming from this court is by no means over. THIS IS IT. The moment for President Joe Biden and Congress to challenge the underlying legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court and advance an aggressive climate action agenda. There will be no better moment to take this stand for a transformed court, nor a more fateful one. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right: 'We need to reform or do away with the whole thing, for the sake of the planet.' Over the last few days, we have witnessed a shock-and-awe judicial coup, from stripping people of the right to terminate pregnancies (Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization), to weakening the sovereign right of Indigenous tribes to enforce the law on their lands (Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta), to interfering with the rights of states to regulate the carrying of firearms (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen), to enabling a return to Christian prayer in public schools (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District). And now this: a decision that eviscerates the Environmental Protection Agency's power to regulate a major source of the carbon emissions destabilizing our planet. The EPA can still regulate CO2, but its capacity to regulate under the Clear Air Act is significantly reduced. It represents the culmination, as my colleague Sharon Lerner reports, of decades of 'plotting against environmental regulations' by Koch Industries, and as The Lever has reported, this entire court has been shaped by the dark-money-bankrolled Judicial Crisis Network, which is surely gearing up to toast the bountiful return on their patient investments this July 4 weekend."

"Supreme Court Stages a Coup Against Government Regulation [...] And more is on the way. On the same day, the Court agreed to hear Moore v. Harper next term, in which it could affirm the radical 'independent state legislature' doctrine, which holds that only gerrymandered state legislatures—not state courts, governors, or election boards—have any authority over elections, including, potentially, the authority to nullify the popular votes and assign electors to the losing candidate, as Trump tried to do in the 2020 election. [...] As The New York Times recently reported, West Virginia v. EPA 'is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries, to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch's ability to tackle global warming [emphasis added].'"

"Manchin's Big Lie: Today on TAP: He killed the Democrats' bill because, he said, he was concerned about inflation. But the bill was anti-inflationary; what he really didn't like was boosting green energy."

The New York Times is just an increasingly weird newspaper.
"Who hates inclusivity? The question answers itself: There is no rational, acceptable reason to run an opinion column, nine days after the Supreme Court's devastating repeal of reproductive rights, arguing that the 'far left' is denying women their humanity as much as the 'far right' – based on the fact that a handful of people are trying to use more inclusive language to acknowledge that trans men can get pregnant, too. But that, of course, is exactly what the editors of the New York Times opinion section chose to do on Saturday, running a piece headlined 'The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don't Count,' by their newly-minted columnist Pamela Paul, the former Book Review editor who apparently was brought over to opinion primarily to troll the libs."

"New York Times 'Ectopic Pregnancies' Op-Ed Is Everything You Never Hoped For: Over the past two days, the New York Times published two opinion pieces on abortion. One was written by a high-risk obstetrician who chairs the Ohio section of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the other should never have been published at all."

"The post-legal Supreme Court: What happens if the Court rejects the rule of law? The highest Court in the most powerful nation in the world appears to have decided that it only needs to follow the law when it feels like it. Last December, for example, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that fundamentally alters the Union — giving states sweeping authority to restrict their residents' constitutional rights. [...] The Court endangered huge swaths of long-existing gun laws, striking down a New York state law that has been on the books for 109 years. And it did so in an opinion that simultaneously fetishizes the 'Second Amendment's plain text,' while ignoring the first thirteen words of that amendment. The same Court that attacked Roe as 'remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text' saw no problem with ignoring half of the text of the Second Amendment. In what may be the most consequential environmental case in decades, the Court relied on something called the 'major questions doctrine' — a fairly new legal doctrine that is never mentioned in the Constitution or in any statute and that was invented entirely by judges — to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of much of its authority to fight climate change. The Court even abandoned any pretense that it must be honest about the facts of the cases it decides, claiming that a public school football coach who ostentatiously prayed on the 50-yard line after games — while surrounded by players, spectators, and members of the press — was merely engaged in a 'short, private, personal prayer.' [...] I make a strong claim in this essay, arguing that the Supreme Court of the United States is no longer deciding many major cases in a way that is recognizably 'legal.' So let's start by establishing a baseline definition of what constitutes the rule of law and what it means for a judge to act consistently with this principle."

"How the New York Times Uses 'Experts' [...] I've been studying the way that the New York Times and other outlets use 'experts' to further the three main functions of copaganda: 1) Narrowing our conception of safety to only certain kinds of police-reported crime instead of more important determinants of holistic safety; 2) Creating fear and panic about supposed increases in these narrow crimes; 3) Shaping public discourse to suggest that more punishment—i.e. more police, more prosecutions, and more prisoners, etc.—is a reasonable, the only, or the best response to these problems."

Unusually, however, Alec Karakatsanis is recommending an article in the NYT on a Court win in a case against prosecutorial misconduct: "In each of the complaints, either a judge or a district attorney's office had previously recognized the wrongdoing. But there were no public records of discipline for any of the prosecutors, many of whom are still working in the city's justice system. One has taught a course on legal ethics."

"Debunking 5 top inflation myths" — perhaps the most important point being that wages are absolutely not driving inflation.

"NYT's 'Black Voters Want More Cops' Reporting Genre Cynically Conflates Desire for Public Safety With Demands for More Policing, Longer Sentences: Artisanal, earth-tone, finely-tuned copaganda for white liberals. The New York Times has mastered a very specific, very cynical genre of writing: using voters of color as a hacky bludgeon to promote a return to pre-reform carceral ideology. This genre is consistent with the publication's decades of reporting output and, more urgently, serves the Times' partisan function as making otherwise cruel and reactionary Democratic Party policies seem inevitable and necessary to its squeamish white liberal readers."

On "The Politics of Everything", Alex Pareen and Laura Marsh and guests discussed "Joe Biden's Debt Cancellation Games: Why are Democrats playing cat and mouse with student debtors? Since the 1990s, student loan debt in the United States has ballooned to the point that the numbers sound like a mean joke: As of May 2022, the outstanding balance of federal education loans topped $1.6 trillion. But as huge as that figure is, we're not powerless in the face of it. In his campaign for president, Joe Biden supported the immediate cancellation of a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person. On episode 50 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene talk about why the Biden administration should follow through on its promise—and why Democrats seem so reluctant to get behind the policy. Guests include Astra Taylor, a frequent contributor to The New Republic and a co-founder of the Debt Collective, and Ryan Cooper, the author of How Are You Going to Pay for That? Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics." (Audio & transcript.)

Democratic meddling in PA, this time to help promote the craziest GOP candidate (yes, he won his primary with their help) on the alleged theory that this should make him easier to beat than a saner Republican. Or so they say. But, as Trump demonstrated, that's a dangerous game. "He's on a mission from God: Pennsylvania GOP candidate Doug Mastriano's war with the world"

I can't say Jeffrey D. Sachs is wrong here: "Ukraine Is The Latest Neocon Disaster: The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles."

"Young Jews are 'walking away from Judaism' because its only content is 'pro-Israelism' –Alterman: "Liberal Zionist author Eric Alterman says Israel has lost American Jews and liberals because it has no "content" to offer besides stale Everyone-hates-the-Jews propaganda. Eric Alterman is an important liberal Zionist intellectual, and he is losing patience with Israel. Speaking at Tel Aviv University at the end of May, he said that Israel has lost the American left, and Judaism is itself in crisis because its only content is pro-Israelism. And p.s., Alterman has cut Israeli peace organizations out of his will because Israeli society is going the wrong way. 'Israel has lost the left. No question about it, and it can't get it back as long as it has this occupation. And even your good government has 72 votes on the right and is building 4000 new settlements, it's doing terrible things every day,' Alterman said."

"'Two out of five stories should be hot': why pre-code cinema was a golden age for women: Prior to the proscriptive Hays Code, films were populated by adulterous, marijuana-smoking gold diggers – wildly entertaining and more modern than the roles that came next"

The Beach Boys live, "Surfer Girl"

The clerk has woken up from sleep, his eyes are droopy

This cottage in Knaresborough was photographed by Cliff Ounsley.

Covid finally got us, as careful as we've been. He only goes out — masked and gloved — to shop, and I don't go out at all. Now, I mostly sleep. But I'm in no condition to write up how the Supreme Court is overturning The United States of America, so I'll just post what I had before I caught the plague and go back to sleep.

* * * * *

This is from mail so no link, but Robert Cruickshank on the French election:

From what I can see here in the upper left of North America, I think on the one hand it's very good that the left was able to get its act together and run as a coalition that denied Macron a majority. That's a very positive sign.

On the other hand, Le Pen also had a big breakthrough, going from like 8 seats to 90. That's in part due to Macron spending so much time fear-mongering about the left that his own base didn't show up to stop them. This stat shows that where a second round legislative campaign was between the Left Coalition and RN (Le Pen's party), 72% of Macron's party's voters didn't even bother to show up: https://twitter.com/Taniel/status/1538608328179326979.

Had Macron been willing to compromise with the left in order to keep out the far right — as every postwar French president did before him — then the Left Coalition might well have won even more seats and Le Pen many fewer.

De Gaulle understood the need to work with the left to keep out the right. Adenauer understood this. Churchill understood this. But today's neoliberals are repeating the same mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s, believing that the left is a bigger threat than the right. And the result will be ruinous.

* * * * *

"Biden Taps Anti-Social Security Ideologue To Oversee Program: Biden nominated Andrew Biggs, a think tank denizen with a history of slamming Social Security, to oversee government retirement benefits for 66 million Americans. Last month, President Joe Biden nominated a longtime advocate of Social Security privatization and benefit cuts to a key board overseeing the Social Security system. The move comes as Republicans get ready to push cuts to Social Security and Medicare, if they end up winning control of Congress during the November's midterms, as expected. The development suggests that there could soon be a coordinated push in Washington to cut the Social Security program, which provides retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to 66 million Americans."

And vice versa: "Facebook Says Apple is Too Powerful. They're Right. In December, 2020, Apple did something insanely great. They changed how iOS, their mobile operating system, handled users' privacy preferences, so that owners of iPhones and other iOS devices could indicate that they don't want to be tracked by any of the apps on their devices. If they did, Apple would block those apps from harvesting users' data. This made Facebook really, really mad. It's not hard to see why! Nearly all iOS users opted out of tracking. Without that tracking, Facebook could no longer build the nonconsensual behavioral dossiers that are its stock-in-trade. According to Facebook, empowering Apple's users to opt out of tracking cost the company $10,000,000,000 in the first year, with more losses to come after that. Facebook really pulled out the stops in its bid to get those billions back. The company bombarded its users with messages begging them to turn tracking back on. It threatened an antitrust suit against Apple. It got small businesses to defend user-tracking, claiming that when a giant corporation spies on billions of people, that's a form of small business development." So Facebook, furious that Apple has weakened its business model by offering its users protection and security, has pointed out, quite rightly, that Apple also has enormous power and it doesn't use it for good. In fact, it uses it for evil. "In Facebook's comments to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's 'Developing a Report on Competition in the Mobile App Ecosystem' docket, Facebook laments Apple's ability to override its customers' choices about which apps they want to run. iOS devices like the iPhone use technological countermeasures to block 'sideloading' (installing an app directly, without downloading it from Apple's App Store) and to prevent third parties from offering alternative app stores. [...] Facebook is very well situated to comment on how high switching costs can lock users into a service they don't like very much, because, as much as they dislike that platform, the costs of using it are outstripped by the costs the company imposes on users who leave. That's how Facebook operates."

My father, partially deafened in the army, didn't have much of a record collection, but he really dug Eartha Kitt, and this was one of the rare 45s that was in our house as long as I can remember. Kitt spoke four languages and sang in more and sure could make it sound sexy. "Uska Dara (A Turkish Tale)", 1953.

Stay out of the way of the blood-stained bandit

"Purple Fog" is by Chuka Ibe.

All over the country, progressive DAs and AGs won big in primaries and elections, but that's not how the media reported it. Let's take, for example, The New York Times, which seems to have formed the basis of the response by everyone from The Nation to Joe Biden. "How To Spin An Election: Sometimes the bias of the New York Times is so outrageous that it surprises even me. Because what the NYT did yesterday in its election coverage is so dangerous, I try my best to analyze it carefully below. On June 8, the day after the June 7 elections, the New York Times published a story telling its readers about what it called “the shifting winds on criminal justice” [...] There is a lot of remarkable stuff about this story. But one thing stands out above all the rest: there were huge progressive criminal justice victories in California on election night, and the NYT just ignores them. I honestly could not believe what I was reading." The forces of evil spent quite a lot on the recall of Chesa Boudin, an effort that was strongly aided by the press, which got its talking points direct from the police, and in a low turnout with it only taking a few extra right-wingers to come out to vote, Boudin was recalled. Dean Preston did a good thread on this, in which he notes, "In 2.5 years, Boudin reduced the jail population by 38% and stopped charging kids as adults. The sky did not fall. Violent crime rates did." And his policies are overwhelmingly popular. But people just didn't get out to vote. However, as Chloe Cockburn pointed out, there was some very good news for progressives in California and around the country.

One of the things I can't forgive Trump for is making it sound like criticisms of voting machines are just sour grapes and crackpottery. "A candidate in Georgia who appeared to get few Election Day votes was actually in first place: The discrepancy in a race for a county-level board of commissioners seat was blamed on a series of technical errors. A candidate for a county office near Atlanta was vaulted into first place after a series of technical errors made it appear that she had not mustered a single Election Day vote in a vast majority of precincts in last month's Democratic primary, election officials determined. The candidate, Michelle Long Spears, was shortchanged by 3,792 votes in the District 2 primary for the Board of Commissioners in DeKalb County, Ga., that was held on May 24, according to newly-certified results released on Friday. In all but four of the district's nearly 40 precincts, no Election Day votes were recorded for Ms. Spears, who had received more than 2,000 early votes. She said that she immediately alerted state and county election authorities. 'When I visited several precincts (including my own) after Election Day and saw ZERO votes reported for myself, I was shocked and knew that wasn't accurate,' Ms. Spears said in a text message. After conducting a hand count over the Memorial Day weekend and auditing those returns, election officials determined that they had drastically underreported the vote totals for Ms. Spears"

In the exhausting world of Democratic Fail:
"New York Dems' Giant Gift To Private Equity: New York Democrats just voted to invest a lot more pension money in private equity deals that rarely pay off. New York's Democratic-controlled legislature this week passed a bill to funnel as much as $54 billion more in retiree savings into high-risk Wall Street investments, amid a flood of campaign cash from the financial industry."

"The Real Estate Industry Protects Its Right To Evict: Awash in real estate industry cash, New York's Democratic-controlled legislature avoided any real action this session to address the housing crisis."

"Biden Hikes Medicare Prices And Funnels Profits to Private Insurers: The largest-ever Medicare premium increase will pad the pockets of insurance executives who donated millions to the president's election campaign. Last week, the Biden administration quietly reaffirmed its decision to enact the highest Medicare premium hikes in history right before this year's midterm elections. At the same time, President Joe Biden is endorsing a plan to funnel significantly more Medicare money to insurance companies and further privatize the government insurance program for older Americans and those with disabilities."

"Michigan Couple Says Town Seized Their Building and Offered To Return It if They Bought Two Cars for Police: 'Extortion, there's no other way to explain it,' the couple's attorney says. A Michigan couple says their town seized a building they owned and then demanded that they buy two cars for the police department to get their own property back. The case, first reported by WXYZ Detroit, began in December of 2020 when the mayor of Highland Park and the police chief dropped by a 13,000-square-foot building owned by Justyna and Matt Kozbial for an impromptu fire code inspection. The city officials found a marijuana grow operation inside. The Kozbials, immigrants from Poland, say they had a state license to grow medical marijuana, but the city seized the building anyway and held on to it for 17 months without charging them with a crime. Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can legally seize property—cash, cars, and even houses—suspected of being connected to criminal activity like drug trafficking, whether or not the owner has been charged with a crime. But not only were the Kozbials never charged with a crime, police never alleged there was any major criminal activity. In a response to an interrogatory filed in the Kozbials' subsequent lawsuit against Highland Park, a city police officer answered 'none' when asked to identify any predicate felony offenses justifying the seizure. Things then took a highly unusual turn when the Kozbials say they received a settlement offer from the town: Stop growing marijuana and buy two vehicles for the local police department."

It seems like every couple of years someone tries to "warn" us against reliable news media like Naked Capitalism or Consortium News. "US State-Affiliated NewsGuard Targets Consortium News: The Pentagon and State Dept.-linked outfit, with an ex-N.S.A. and C.I.A. director on its board, is accusing Consortium News of publishing 'false content' on Ukraine, reports Joe Lauria. Consortium News is being 'reviewed' by NewsGuard, a U.S. government-linked organization that is trying to enforce a narrative on Ukraine while seeking to discredit dissenting views. The organization has accused Consortium News, begun in 1995 by former Associated Press investigative reporter Robert Parry, of publishing 'false content' on Ukraine. It calls 'false' essential facts about Ukraine that have been suppressed in mainstream media: 1) that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and 2) that neo-Nazism is a significant force in Ukraine. Reporting crucial information left out of corporate media is Consortium News' essential mission. But NewsGuard considers these facts to be 'myths' and is demanding Consortium News 'correct' these 'errors.'"

A lot of people are talking about student loan cancellation because it is one of the things Biden can do without Congress to alleviate economic stresses in the economy, so the pro-poverty lobby makes up excuses not to. They started with a claim that student loan debtors are rich, but "No, Student Loan Cancellation will not Benefit the 'Wealthy'." Then there is the inflation claim but, "No, Student Loan Cancellation will not cause Inflation."

As the United States establishment gets closer to its dream of torturing Julian Assange to death, it's instructive to learn just how much you've been lied to about his case. It's kind of amazing how a false accusation of rape (by the police and newspapers, not the alleged victim herself) has turned into an excuse to pretend it's okay if Assange's life is destroyed as an example to the press of the consequences of trying to hold the powerful accountable. It would be useful if more people read what the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture said when he looked at all of the originating documents and became a witness to the twisting of law that was necessary to victimize Assange: "It quickly became clear to me that something was wrong. That there was a contradiction that made no sense to me with my extensive legal experience: Why would a person be subject to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges ever having been filed? [...] They intentionally left him in limbo. Just imagine being accused of rape for nine-and-a-half years by an entire state apparatus and by the media without ever being given the chance to defend yourself because no charges had ever been filed. [...] Assange reported to the Swedish authorities on several occasions because he wanted to respond to the accusations. But the authorities stonewalled. [...] Allow me to start at the beginning. I speak fluent Swedish and was thus able to read all of the original documents. I could hardly believe my eyes: According to the testimony of the woman in question, a rape had never even taken place at all. And not only that: The woman's testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape. I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages." The woman, at the urging of an acquaintance, went to ask the police if someone she had had consensual unprotected sex with could be forced to take an HIV test. When she realized the police were going to use this to charge him with rape, she refused to cooperate and left. That night, the newspapers were full of headlines about how Assange was suspected of raping two women. Note that no second woman had been interviewed by the police at that time. And, "It also violated a clear ban in Swedish law against releasing the names of alleged victims or perpetrators in sexual offense cases. The case now came to the attention of the chief public prosecutor in the capital city and she suspended the rape investigation some days later with the assessment that while the statements from S. W. were credible, there was no evidence that a crime had been committed." Assange consistently tried to complete an interview with the police but they kept putting him off. Eventually his lawyer said he needed to be in Berlin soon and asked if Assange could leave the country; they said yes, so he went. And then we hear this story about how he is "hiding" from the police and refusing to talk to them and has absconded to another country. So pretty much everything you've heard is a lie — a lie that is supposed to make it okay to ignore the fact that the United States is illegally trying to persecute him for exposing war crimes.

Interesting interview by Matt Taibbi, "The Incredible Political and Media Journey of Jesse and Tyrel Ventura: Interview with Substack's newest contributors, who may be the ultimate symbols of America's censorship regime. Back on March 12th, not long after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the New York Times ran one of the first of what would become a series of gloating articles about the demise of Russia Today. The state-sponsored TV network had just been yanked off the air by government fiat in Europe, and removed in America by private carriers like Comcast, Xfinity, and DirecTV. About the channel, the Times wrote: A role at RT America was a rare job in an industry where if you had screwed up, were washed up or were completely new to the field, there weren't many other options… The Times then listed a series of those 'screwups' and 'washouts,' including the paper's own former star war reporter Chris Hedges (also thriving now on Substack) and the father-son tandem Jesse and Tyrel Ventura. The paper neglected to mention that none of these figures had failed at anything, but rather had been driven out of the mainstream press essentially over opposition to the Iraq war."

Some of you may remember Doug J. from Balloon Juice, but these days he's one of my favorite Twitter posters, New York Times Pitchbot. So it was nice to see him getting a profile at CJR, "The bot that saw the Times [...] In 2019, @DougJBalloon changed his name on Twitter to New York Times Pitchbot, committing to a new bit. He was encouraged by a conservative journalist friend and inspired by other 'pitchbot' accounts, particularly one, now retired, that satirized The Federalist, a conservative online publication. 'It's a tricky thing, because The Federalist is so insane. How do you parody it?' he says. 'What I think is more interesting is just how much of that same kind of stupidity is embedded in ostensibly left-center establishment journalism.'"

Froomkin wonders, "Can the New York Times save itself — and us? [...] But as I wrote for The Nation on May 13, the occasional, appropriately alarming news analysis doesn't make up for endless incremental, lobotomized daily campaign stories that exist in a context-free zone." Will the new editor address this problem? I'm predicting he won't. The NYT doesn't hire people to do that.

I watched The Man From Earth and it was riveting, which is a bit hard to believe considering what it is, but then I looked for the trailer and found the full movie instead and accidentally watched the whole thing again, only a few hours after seeing it for the first time. Beautifully done.

A long time ago I saw these guys from only a couple-few yards away, back in the days when we could all sit on floors. They look different in this 2016 video. Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, "Good Shepherd". They sound different, too.

I don't know how I'm gonna do it

Hazel Ashworth photographed what she called an "Accidentally good colour combination."

"'Perverse' Supreme Court Ruling 'Effectively Ensures That Innocent People Will Remain Imprisoned': 'This is radical. This is horrifying. This is extremely scary,' said one public defender. Legal experts responded with alarm Monday to a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority that could lead to the indefinite imprisonment and even execution of people who argue their lawyers didn't provide adequate representation after convictions in state court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor—joined by the other two liberals on the court—also blasted the majority opinion in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez, writing in her scathing dissent that the decision is both 'perverse' and 'illogical.' The case involved two men, David Martinez Ramirez and Barry Lee Jones, who are on death row in Arizona. The majority determined that inmates can't present new evidence in federal court to support a claim that their post-conviction attorney in state court was ineffective, in violation of the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which affirms the right to 'the assistance of counsel' in criminal all prosecutions. 'A federal habeas court may not conduct an evidentiary hearing or otherwise consider evidence beyond the state court record based on ineffective assistance of state post-conviction counsel,' Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, adding that 'serial relitigation of final convictions undermines the finality that 'is essential to both the retributive and deterrent functions of criminal law.'"

"The Supreme Court just made it much easier to bribe a member of Congress: A case brought by Ted Cruz is a huge boon to rich candidates and moneyed lobbyists. [...] The Court's decision in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate is a boon to wealthy candidates. It strikes down an anti-bribery law that limited the amount of money candidates could raise after an election in order to repay loans they made to their own campaign. Federal law permits candidates to loan money to their campaigns. In 2001, however, Congress prohibited campaigns from repaying more than $250,000 of these loans using funds raised after the election. They can repay as much as they want from campaign donations received before the election (although a federal regulation required them to do so 'within 20 days of the election'). The idea is that, if already-elected officials can solicit donations to repay what is effectively their own personal debt, lobbyists and others seeking to influence lawmakers can put money directly into the elected official's pocket — and campaign donations that personally enrich a lawmaker are particularly likely to lead to corrupt bargains. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) manufactured a case to try to overturn that $250,000 limit, and now, the Court has sided with him. Indeed, now that this limit on loan repayments has been struck down, lawmakers with sufficiently creative accountants may be able to use such loans to give themselves a steady income stream from campaign donors."

I suppose we can expect the current Supreme Court to endorse the Fifth Circuit's radical crackpot ruling that "Administrative Law Is Unconstitutional: Pretty awesome that two malfunctions by the Electoral College can give us Article III appellate judges who think that enforcement of the Code of Federal Regulations is unconstitutional." Or, as Mark Joseph Stern put it: "The 5th Circuit just dismantled the SEC's power to enforce securities law. This decision is beyond radical. It is nihilistic." Robert Kuttner notes: "Here's the broader point. If the Democratic Party had not gotten into bed with Wall Street under Carter, Clinton and Obama, Democrats might have remained the national majority party—and those far-right judges never would have been appointed. Back when the judiciary was more supportive of regulation, the SEC might have closed down private equity before it even gained a foothold by ruling that you can't take over a company using its own assets as collateral. Now, despite Biden's attempt to revive regulatory agencies with assertive public-minded appointees, good Democratic regulators will be hobbled by the sins of bad Democratic presidents that led to even worse Republican ones, and a legacy of reactionary courts."

It's almost funny that the US suddenly threatens to ease some sanctions on Venezuela. "U.S. ties easing of Venezuela sanctions to direct oil supply: HOUSTON/WASHINGTON, March 8 (Reuters) - U.S. officials have demanded Venezuela supply at least a portion of oil exports to the United States as part of any agreement to ease oil trading sanctions on the OPEC member nation, two people close to the matter said. U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday banned U.S. imports of Russian oil in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine, ramping up economic pressure on a key Venezuelan ally."

* * * * *

It started off looking like a bad night...

"They Are Not Even Pretending Anymore: Democratic leaders are joining with oligarchs to try to permanently destroy the progressive movement. Republicans want a revolution, Democrats want to go to brunch — that's been a concise way to understand American politics, but 2022's primary season has made clear it is not exactly accurate. Democratic leaders don't just want avocado toast and mimosas — they want an outright counterrevolution. Only not against the GOP insurrection — against the Democratic rank and file, and in many cases for the politicians most hostile to the party's (purported) agenda. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) sounded an important alarm about all this, slamming billionaires and conservative advocacy groups blanketing the airwaves with television ads supporting corporate candidates in this week's pivotal Democratic congressional primaries. But the Vermont senator understated the situation. The perpetrators rigging these elections aren't just meddling oligarchs operating on their own. This call is coming from inside the Democratic house from party leaders, who are at minimum passively condoning the trend, and in many cases actively fueling it with endorsements and its machine."

But then a funny thing happened...

"Dem Voters Flip Off Party Leaders And Their Big Donors: Pennsylvania and Oregon election results show voters rejecting the demands of oligarchs and Democratic elites. If politics lately has seemed a bit like The Empire Strikes Back, then Tuesday night's stunning elections have offered an unexpected jolt of that Return of The Jedi feeling — at exactly the moment when progressives most needed a boost. Heading into pivotal congressional primaries in Pennsylvania and Oregon, Democratic elites and their corporate donors were likely feeling confident that their huge super PAC spending would successfully buy yet more primary victories for corporate-aligned candidates. Indeed, House Democratic leaders planned to spend Wednesday honoring the anniversary of the New Democrat Coalition, which is the official arm of the party's corporate faction. But those football-spiking celebrations now seem premature."

Ryan Grim had much the same story. "Democratic Voters Deliver Stinging Rebuke To Party's Manchin-Sinema Wing: Voters shrugged off an obscene amount of spending from super PACs to send a message to Democrats: Do something." Backed by Republicans and endorsed heavily by the Democratic leadership, those corporate Dems still managed to lose. Fancy that.

Alex Sammon told the same story in "Dem Voters Want Dem Pols Who Do Things: The Joe Manchin wing of the party lost big on Tuesday."

As I write, it's still a nail-biter down in Texas. "Henry Cuellar Is the Perfect Symbol of What's Wrong With the Democratic Party: The runoff with Jessica Cisneros remains too close to call. The actions of Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi, and Jim Clyburn, on the other hand... How far does an incumbent Democrat have to go to lose the endorsement of their party's leadership? That's the question everyone should be asking as Henry Cuellar clings to his razor-thin margin in the Democratic primary runoff election in South Texas. Some things probably fly below the radar, like being the House's third-largest recipient of fossil fuel funding or obstructing his own party's legislative agenda. Does the FBI raiding a candidate's home as part of a probe into shady congressional ties to an autocratic petrostate cross the threshold into insupportability? It does not. If you thought being the House's only anti-abortion Democrat with a firm stance against making Roe v. Wade the law of the land—as the Supreme Court looks poised to strike it down—would be a bridge too far, you would also be wrong. What about allies of said candidate apparently spreading fake news? Wrong again. Having an A rating from the NRA amid a slew of mass shootings, including the slaughter of at least 19 fourth graders at an elementary school not far from his district on the actual day of the election? Incredibly, even that's not enough. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn stuck with Henry Cuellar through it all. As she bopped around cable news shows talking up the party's commitment to abortion rights in the past few weeks, Pelosi's voice could be heard on robocalls that went out to Laredo-area voters yesterday calling Congressman Cuellar a 'fighter for hardworking families' who has 'brought back millions of dollars.' Clyburn recorded one, too." Of course, he's an anti-union guy and the money he "brought back" didn't go into working people's pockets.

* * * * *

Your independent free press: "UK government secretly funded Reuters in 1960s, 1970s: The British government secretly funded Reuters in the 1960s and 1970s at the direction of an anti-Soviet propaganda organization with links to MI-6, according to unclassified documents unveiled Monday. The government used the BBC to conceal funding in making payments to the international news group. 'We are now in a position to conclude an agreement providing discreet Government support for Reuters services in the Middle East and Latin America,' reads a 1969 redacted secret British government document entitled 'Funding of Reuters by HMG,' or Her Majesty's Government"

"Shouldn't Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now? Trial testimony reveals Hillary Clinton personally approved serious election misinformation. Is there an anti-Trump exception to content moderation? Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia's Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. 'I discussed it with Hillary,' he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: 'Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.' [...] The world has mostly moved on, since Russiagate was thirty or forty 'current things' ago, but the public prosecution of the collusion theory was a daily preoccupation of national media for years. A substantial portion of the population believed the accusations, and expected the story would end with Donald Trump in jail or at least indicted, scrolling for a thousand straight days in desperate expectation of the promised justice. Trump was bounced from Twitter for incitement, but Twitter has a policy against misinformation as well. It includes a prohibition against 'misleading' media that is 'likely to result in widespread confusion on public issues.' I'm not a fan of throwing people off Twitter, but how can knowingly launching thousands of bogus news stories across a period of years, leading millions of people to believe lies and expect news that never arrived, not qualify as causing 'widespread confusion on public issues'?"

I'll let Atrios say this for me, about "Deaths: I always try to emphasize that without Roe (or equivalent), women can't possibly get any appropriate medical care. I mean *any*. I'm a pro-choice extremist generally (meaning, I'm pro-choice), but I really don't think most people understand this. It isn't just about "abortion" as popularly conceived of, it's about any OB/Gyn-related care, and absolutely any care (procedures, treatments) that might, possibly, maybe, impact a zygote. Which is basically all treatment. Certainly criminalizing abortion (medical professionals and patients) unambiguously criminalizes miscarriages which, of course, criminalizes pregnancy!" There's more, but this is right and I'm surprised more people don't understand it.

MaxSpeak, You Listen! "Today in Economic Royalism [...] The disingenuous angle here is CR's failure to state forthrightly her preferred policy: austerity. If we can't fix supply, the only alternative is to claw back families' spending power. Hence we have a back-handed endorsement of the Fed's action to raise interest rates and reduce employment, notwithstanding the fact that there is no case that labor compensation or cash aid to households is behind the inflation spike. Look at it this way. Employment has yet to return to its pre-pandemic level, when there was no inflation to speak of. Why should lesser employment now be the cause of the inflation spike? In the same vein, as Dean Baker has pointed out, consumption spending has not grown more rapidly than its usual pace." And yes, the price-gouging is real.

"DCCC Chair And Rep. Mondaire Jones Flee Blue Districts, A Bright-Red Warning For Democrats: A court-ordered redistricting process nearly pitted Squad member Jamaal Bowman against progressive Jones, but Jones instead is targeting a new open seat in New York City. [...] Underneath the district shuffling and refuge seeking is a dire warning for Democrats: Maloney is the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. His entire job is to make sure that Democrats hold their narrow House majority or else the Biden legislative agenda will be completely dead. When the new lines were released, Maloney's district became one that Joe Biden had carried by 8 percentage points. Jumping into Jones's district gave him just an extra 2-point advantage. The DCCC chair signaling nervousness about his own district is less than confidence inspiring." This is being too kind to Maloney, though, since he was really after creating heat between progressives and getting one to knock the other out for him. Its part of the warfare by the right-wing Democrats against the more liberal wing.

This is a good video by Briahna Joy Gray pointing out that Democrats need to do better to fight Tucker Carlson's lies, because all they're doing now is freaking out and they aren't making their case.

Australia doesn't look ideal, either. For example, "A failure as shameful as robodebt leaves questions only a royal commission can examine: In December 2016, Channel nine's A Current Affair ran a quintessentially A Current Affair story about a welfare crackdown. After the throw from Tracy Grimshaw, Alan Tudge, then human services minister, appeared on screen with a startling message: 'We'll find you, we'll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison.' This was the government pushback to what was becoming known as the 'robodebt' scandal, a mammoth Centrelink debt recovery system established by the Coalition government a year earlier. 'Whereas we used to have a manual process of checking people's income records on Centrelink with those on the taxation office's database, now we have an automated system, so we can do that very quickly, very rapidly and be able to capture more people,' Tudge said. Three years later, after what can only be described as the gaslighting of anyone who complained or raised the alarm, the government admitted to the federal court that the whole thing was unlawful. Putting it very crudely, the calculations that the government used to assert hundreds of thousands of welfare debts were wrong. It later settled a class action for $1.8bn, which included the owed interest on the debts unlawfully issued to 443,000 people, some of whom were the most vulnerable in the country."

"NSW police afforded new power to search convicted drug dealers without warrant: Drug dealers have been put on notice in NSW, with police given a new power to disrupt the lives of criminals 'every second of the day'." So, even if it's been years since you were busted for drugs, the cops can harass you continuously until they drive you out of your mind. Without a warrant.

In America, there is one bright spot. "Occupy Wall Street activists pay off student debt for nearly 500 Black women at HBCU: Suzanne Walsh, president of Bennett College, at first ignored the email that would lead to the cancellation of nearly 500 overdue bills at her college. After all, she thought at the time, "people just don't reach out and say we can help your students pay off their debts." But the Debt Collective, a union of debtors rallying against consumer debt, wasn't joking. After the initial conversation, the group arranged for the purchase of $1.7 million in unpaid student balances. Then they canceled it. Its elimination means students no longer have to pay off the debt and those who couldn't access their transcripts because of overdue bills now have access to their academic records and the ability to continue their educations. Braxton Brewington, a spokesman for the organization, said they chose Bennett College in North Carolina because Black women on average have higher student loan balances than any other group of borrowers. The debt cleared does not include federal student loans, only money owed directly to the school." If you have some change to spare, these people are worth it. (They do medical debt, too.)

It probably doesn't need to be emphasized that anything he does is bollocks, but "Dinesh D'Souza's new film drives the Big Lie: Here's the truth about 'ballot harvesting': Did libs steal the 2020 election through "ballot harvesting"? Saying no isn't enough to undo all the lies. The Republican "Big Lie" about voter fraud takes root in the fact-free soil of opposite world, where the Oscars are held at Mar-a-Lago and honor Dinesh D'Souza's "documentaries." Here in reality, D'Souza is a convicted felon, his films amount to a lucrative grift operation and should be filed under fantasy, and GOP claims of voter fraud actually seek to distract from their own extensive pattern of rule-rigging, lawlessness and brazen vote suppression. (As for D'Souza, he received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.) D'Souza's latest work of wishcasting, "2000 Mules," which is much-watched on conservative platforms and can be streamed for the decidedly Trump-inflated price of $29.99, alleges, without merit, that shadowy gangs of liberal nonprofits stole the 2020 presidential election through an elaborate absentee-ballot collection scheme." Apparently D'Sousa thinks that letting someone else drop your ballot envelope into the mailbox or drop-box is the same thing as voting a dozen times. He doesn't want you to know that (a) the vast majority of occasions in which anyone has been caught voting fraudulently, it's been Republicans, and (b) the system weeds out improper ballots easily and no number of them dropped into drop-boxes translates into an elevated number of votes.

"Has Any Writers' Organization Treated A Writer As Badly As SFWA Treated Mercedes Lackey? It reads like a revenge plot: an old writer comes to one of the most important conventions in her field to be honored for her lifetime of work, and is publicly humiliated without the opportunity to clarify what she meant when she confuses two similar terms."

You know, looking at other versions of this picture, I didn't even notice the Triffids and Daleks.

The Chiffons, "He's So Fine"