#Liz Heather

[thisislizheather]

Happy Halloween!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bramhall

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 3, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 04, 2025

Today a new Congress, the 119th, came into session. As Annie Karni of the New York Times noted, Americans had a rare view into the floor action of the House because the party in control sets the rules for what parts of the House floor viewers can see. Without a speaker, there is no party in charge to set the rules, so the C-SPAN cameras recording the day could move as their operators wished.

Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. All eyes were on the House, where Republicans will hold 219 seats. Initially, though, that number will be 218: The seat to which Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was elected will be empty since he resigned from the previous Congress and, after the House Ethics Committee released a report saying there was “substantial evidence” that Gaetz had broken state and federal laws, apparently decided to focus on his new media show rather than return to the House. When the clerk announced that Gaetz would not take a seat in the 119th Congress, applause broke out.

The Democrats hold 215 seats, and everyone showed up to opening day, including Dwight Evans (D-PA), who has been absent since suffering a stroke last May, and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who fell and broke her hip on a congressional trip to Luxembourg in mid-December. Scott MacFarlane reported that Pelosi, who received a hip replacement at the U.S. military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, entered the chamber smiling. C-SPAN reported that she had replaced her trademark high heels with flats.

Notably, there are fewer women in the 119th Congress than in the previous one, and there will be no women chairing committees in the Republican-dominated House.

The first problem for the Republicans to solve was the election of a House speaker. It took 15 ballots to elect Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) when the Republicans took control of the House in 2023, and McCarthy had made so many concessions to the far right that they were able to remove him from office just ten months later, the first time in history that a party removed its own speaker in the middle of a session. Then they cycled through four candidates and four votes before settling on backbencher Mike Johnson (R-LA) for speaker. But while Johnson’s evangelical Christianity and support for Trump’s Big Lie about having won the 2020 presidential election indicated he was an extremist, Johnson immediately infuriated the far-right wing of the Republican Party by agreeing to fund the government without incorporating their extreme demands.

Far-right members want to use the need to fund government operations as leverage to get what they want. In a memo before today’s vote, they claimed that Trump and the Republicans hold a “historic mandate,” although in fact Trump won less than 50% of the vote in one of the smallest margins in U.S. history. They have said publicly they would not vote for Johnson as speaker again, likely to extract concessions that give them more power, but Johnson vowed not to make any concessions to them.

Trump was mad at Johnson for backing the passage just before Christmas of a continuing resolution to fund the government without getting rid of the debt ceiling as Trump demanded. But, likely recognizing that the House needs to be organized before it can count the electoral votes that will make him president, Trump endorsed Johnson on social media and worked the phones to support him before today’s vote.

In the first ballot today, all 215 Democrats voted for Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), with him and former House speaker Pelosi sharing a hug when she voted for him. A number of Republicans declined to vote initially, then 216 voted for Johnson while three others voted for someone else, leaving Johnson two votes short of the 218 he needed to be elected.

It was a dramatic rejection not only of Johnson, but also of Trump, who had posted that “[a] win for Mike today will be a big win for the Republican Party, and yet another acknowledgment of our 129 year most consequential Presidential Election!!—A BIG AFFIRMATION, INDEED. MAGA!” But his candidate still could not get the votes he needed from within his own party to run the House.

Scenes like this explain why I remain astonished by the persistence of the narrative that the Democrats are divided while the Republicans are in lockstep.

After the initial vote but before it was gaveled to a close, Johnson went into his office with eight members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, while Trump and incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles called the holdouts. When they emerged, two of the members who had voted for people other than Johnson switched their vote to him, giving him the votes he needed to become the speaker of the 119th Congress. One of the holdouts, Ralph Norman (R-SC) was the man who urged Trump to declare “Marshall Law” on January 17, 2021, to keep President-elect Joe Biden from taking over the presidency.

As soon as they had voted for Johnson, eleven far-right representatives sent a letter to their colleagues saying they had voted for Johnson because they wanted to make sure they didn’t mess up the January 6 counting of Trump’s electoral votes. But they warned that if Johnson didn’t reduce the deficit by enacting “real” spending cuts, stop working with Democrats, and only entertain measures supported by a majority of Republicans, they would challenge his speakership.

For his part, Democratic leader Jeffries said to the House: “Our position is that it is not acceptable to cut Social Security, cut Medicare, cut Medicaid, cut veterans' benefits, or cut nutritional assistance from children and families in order to pay for massive tax breaks for billionaires and wealthy corporations.”

So Johnson is speaker again, but he’s already caught between the MAGAs demanding significant budget cuts and the Democrats’ promise to call attention to every one of those cuts. And popular anger at billionaires seems to be increasing daily: today Pulitzer-Prize-winning political cartoonist Ann Telnaes left the Washington Post after her editor killed a cartoon criticizing the tech and media leaders who have been currying favor with Trump. “[E]ditorial cartoonists are vital for civic debate,” she wrote, and after watching colleagues overseas “risk their livelihoods and sometimes even their lives to…hold their countries’ leaders accountable,” she chose to leave so she could continue to speak truth to power.

This afternoon, Judge Juan Merchan ordered Trump to report in person or virtually for sentencing in the election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies related to payments he made to film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from going public with the story of their sexual encounter before the 2016 election. Trump had tried to get the case dismissed because he had been elected president. His spokesperson called the sentencing order a “witch hunt.”

Merchan indicated he would not sentence Trump to serve time in jail.

Meanwhile, at the White House today, President Joe Biden awarded the Medal of Honor to five Korean War veterans who may have been denied the nation’s highest award for military valor because of their race or ethnicity, and upgraded awards of the Distinguished Service Cross to the Medal of Honor for two veterans of the Vietnam War. Specialist Fourth Class Kenneth J. David was the only one of the men who could receive the honor personally. Biden also awarded fourteen individuals with the National Medal of Science and nine people and two organizations with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He also awarded the Medal of Valor to eight public safety officers for acting above and beyond the call of duty. The awards went to officers who ran toward gunfire to save children during the Nashville Covenant School shooting, swam through freezing water to save a drowning woman, and rushed into burning buildings to rescue women and children.

Biden honored the military personnel for their bravery, and the scientists for their “discoveries that are helping us meet the climate crisis, treat crippling disease, create lifesaving vaccines, pioneer the way we communicate, and significantly improve our understanding of the universe and our place within it.” But it was his remarks about the eight public safety officers awarded the Medal of Valor for acting above and beyond the call of duty that stood out.

He called in the press and said: “Folks, I wanted you to come in because…I think it’s very important that the public see them and know who they are…. There’s a lot fewer empty chairs around the kitchen table and dining room table because of what these guys did.” Biden thanked their families, “because if you’re the spouse of a firefighter or a police officer, you always worry about that phone call,” and told the award recipients: “You’re the best America has to offer.”

Yesterday, Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal, given to those “who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens,” to twenty Americans including former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who served on the January 6 committee. Today, Trump attacked Cheney and others who investigated the events of January 6, 2021, as “dishonest Thugs.”

Cheney responded: “Donald, this is not the Soviet Union. You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us. Remember all your lies about the voting machines, the election workers, your countless allegations of fraud that never happened? Many of your lawyers have been sanctioned, disciplined or disbarred, the courts ruled against you, and dozens of your own White House, administration, and campaign aides testified against you. Remember how you sent a mob to our Capitol and then watched the violence on television and refused for hours to instruct the mob to leave? Remember how your former Vice President prevented you from overturning our Republic? We remember. And now, as you take office again, the American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our Constitutional Republic—to protect the America we love from you.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Characters, book, and author names under the cut

Thom Morgan/Clay Parker - Love, Hate, & Clickbait by Liz Bowery

Milo/Xander - How Not To Date A Dragon by Lana Kole

Ballister Blackheart/Ambrosius Goldenloin - Nimona by N.D. Stevenson 

Vivienne (“Vivi”) Duarte/Heather - The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

[justinspoliticalcorner]

John Knefel at MMFA:

Right-wing media figures have amplified a conspiracy theory that Democrats are attempting to steal the 2024 election by weaponizing a longstanding law that allows Americans overseas to vote. As researchers at the University of Washington explained, right-wing junk site The Gateway Pundit appears to have originated the false claim in early September, and former President Donald Trump promoted it later that month. The September 6 Gateway Pundit blog mischaracterized a Democratic Party press release announcing a plan to register Americans living overseas to vote through a 1986 law known as the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). The article’s headline falsely claimed that the get-out-the-vote effort — a first from the Democratic National Committee — was an “Undetectable Way to Steal the Election From Trump,” rather than a legal avenue to reach voters.

“The Democrats are talking about how they’re working so hard to get millions of votes from Americans living overseas,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform on September 23. “Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT!” David Becker, the founder and executive director of The Center for Election Innovation and Research, told The Associated Press, “In over 25 years of working in elections, in both Republican and Democratic administrations, and with election officials of both parties, I don’t recall any of them, or any elected leader from either party, ever denigrating this important program, until Trump’s false claims this week.” Shortly after Trump endorsed The Gateway Pundit’s misinformation, Republican officials in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan filed lawsuits challenging aspects of UOCAVA and related laws designed to facilitate overseas voting. Cleta Mitchell, a prominent election denier and former Trump adviser who attempted to overturn the 2020 election, said on a right-wing radio show that she’d “helped to organize” the suits in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, adding that she hoped to file another, similar suit in Wisconsin.

[...] The right-wing targeting of UOCAVA comes against the backdrop of a larger conservative campaign to spread fear that noncitizens will vote in large numbers in November (there is no evidence to support that allegation, but Fox News and other right-wing networks have saturated their airwaves with it). The GOP has its own outreach program to Americans abroad called Republicans Overseas — one of more than 100 conservative organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling right-wing effort to provide policy and staffing to a second Trump administration.

Right-wing election deniers push bonkers conspiracy theory that overseas voting is akin to “cheating”. This is part of their faux outrage campaign against “noncitizen voting.”

[horror-lady00]

What is it with lesbian girls and dying in horrible "accidents"?

[giddlywinks]

Did someone say...

Giddy Mag #10: The Secret Circle Rides Again

This part is the prologue. This is a reminder of why we make better choices this sequel.

Now, do you remember where we left off?

"I'm thinking about the separation."

"Architectural Digest Presents: Julia and her magical hen Ketchup."

"I love it. I love it. I really do. I do love you."

"And she was so very bloody, Mrs. Might-Be-Marvelous."

"The knot of abundance is worth working out."

"I'm burning in Venusian pressure. My depths. My vulnerable spots. Kissing every bullet lodged in my flame."

"The bark could simply float away. The sting could simply smile."

"The energy whipped me into this. I made my choice."

"In due time, this will be a memory I won't regret. I will not forget."

[nosensedit]

⊹ ִ࣪ এ credits on twitter ִ࣪ ⌁ like or reblog if you save! ♡ ¸. • *

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Heather Mac Donald

Published: Dec 15, 2023

University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill would not have been forced to resign last weekend had Penn’s donors and alumni not been organizing against her for two months.

The Penn rebels have now upped the ante. They have drafted a new constitution for the school that makes merit the sole criterion for student admissions and faculty hiring. The new charter requires the university to embrace institutional neutrality with regard to politics and faculty research. The rebels want candidates for Penn’s presidency to embrace the new charter as a precondition for employment.

With this latest twist in the battle over university leadership, the academy stands at a crossroads. For decades, Wall Street titans funneled billions of dollars into their alma maters, even as those universities promoted ideas inimical to civilizational excellence and economic success. When students started celebrating the October 7 Hamas attacks, however, the mega-donors took note. They did not recognize their campuses, they said, though the pro-Hamas rhetoric came straight from the ethnic- and postcolonial-studies courses that had been a staple of university curricula since the 1980s. Some donors, at Penn and elsewhere, initiated funding boycotts and sought board shake-ups, hoping to pressure their alma maters to correct the anti-Semitism that they deemed responsible for the terror celebrations.

The pro-Hamas protests have exposed the anti-Western ideology that is the sole unifying belief system on college campuses. The question now is whether disgruntled donors and alumni can overcome decades of intellectual misdirection. To do so, they first must define the problem correctly—and avoid the temptation to adopt, for their own purposes, the intersectional Left’s rhetoric about “safety” and “protection” from speech. The proposed new Penn charter is a promising start.

The donor revolt could have broken out at any number of campuses, all of which featured ignorant students cheering on the deliberate massacre of civilians, those students’ faculty enablers and bureaucratic fellow travelers, and feckless presidents. But it first erupted at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, perhaps because of the organization and self-confidence of their alumni.

Penn’s most generous donors were already on edge at the time of the October 7 massacre. Two weeks earlier, the university had hosted a conference on Palestinian culture, called the Palestine Writes Literature Festival. The conference speakers were predominantly anti-Zionist; some had long been accused of anti-Semitism. Prominent Jewish alumni, such as Ronald Lauder, demanded that Penn president Magill preemptively cancel the conference. Marc Rowan, chairman of the Wharton School’s Board of Advisors and a $50 million donor to the school, circulated an open letter asking Magill to denounce the conference’s invitations to “known antisemitic speakers,” remove the Penn logo from conference materials, and implement mandatory anti-Semitism training. By September 21, more than 2,000 alumni, including several current members of Penn’s board, had signed the letter.

Conference organizer Susan Abulhawa, a firebrand Palestinian novelist, criticized “the hysterical racist conversations and panic” over the festival. “We remain proud, unbroken, defiant, honoring our ancestors, even though we are battered, colonized, exiled, raw, terrorized and demeaned wholesale,” she announced in typically florid rhetoric. The university tried to split the difference between the festival’s critics and advocates. On September 12, it put out a statement noting “deep concerns about several speakers” and “unequivocally—and emphatically—condemning antisemitism as antithetical” to Penn’s values. The university claimed to “also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas” as central to its educational mission, even ideas “incompatible with [its] institutional values.” The conference went forward without incident, despite the occasional anti-Zionist trope such as might be found on any given day in a Penn class on “settler colonialism.”

Nevertheless, the fuse was ready to be lit. Following the October 7 massacre, Magill made the blunders that would bedevil other college presidents: she did not respond to the attacks with sufficient alacrity to satisfy her critics, and she failed to use the words “I condemn” and “terrorism” when she did respond. By the time she put out a correction on October 15, it was too late; the donor revolt was already spreading. On October 10, Rowan, said to be Penn’s wealthiest alumnus, initiated a second mass movement: a close-the-checkbooks campaign. He urged alumni to send in one dollar to Penn and explain that their ordinary contributions would be suspended until Magill and the chair of Penn’s board, investment bank CEO Scott Bok, resigned. Rowan began emailing a letter to the trustees every day, selecting from among the thousands of such letters from major donors who were closing their checkbooks.

Despite a flurry of big-name and big-dollar defections, including Jon Huntsman (former governor of Utah and ambassador to Russia, China, and Singapore) and David Magerman (a major donor and former overseer of the engineering school), Penn’s power structure was reinforcing its defenses. Throughout October, Penn’s board of trustees put out various statements in support of Magill and Bok; the president of Penn alumni weighed in as well in favor of the status quo.

Behind the scenes, Bok asked the three trustees who had criticized him to resign and suggested that Rowan reconsider his chairmanship of the Wharton board. Leaders of the faculty senate put out a statement on October 19 denouncing “individuals outside of the University who are surveilling both faculty and students in an effort to intimidate them and inhibit their academic freedom.” The senate “tri-chairs” played the wealth card against the recalcitrant donors: academic freedom was “not a commodity that can be bought or sold by those who seek to use their pocketbooks to shape our mission.”

The hypocrisy had reached gargantuan proportions. Even as Penn’s leadership and faculty proclaimed their devotion to free speech, law professor Amy Wax was in the dock for statements criticizing racial preferences and U.S. immigration policy. Since publishing an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2017 advocating the embrace of bourgeois values as a means of economic and social advancement, Wax had been under relentless attack from the law school’s leadership and faculty. The leadership had banned her from teaching first-year law courses. In 2022, Penn initiated a formal investigation to determine whether her “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements” were serious enough to require a “major sanction” that could include stripping her of tenure and firing her.

No leader of Penn’s faculty senate and no representative from its chapter of the American Association of University Professors objected to the hounding of Wax for protected speech. The board looked the other way. Yet here they all were, declaring Penn a lighthouse of free expression. In fact, the campus Left and its administrative enablers accused their opponents of double standards, since some donors were calling for bans on anti-Israel speech. After the Penn trustees voted to express their confidence in Magill and Bok on October 16, trustee Andy Rachleff, co-founder of Benchmark Capital, scoffed: “There are a lot of people who want free speech—except when it affects them.”

As December began, Magill was acting like a president confident in her staying power—namely, one given to announcing hollow new initiatives couched in vapid bureaucratic prose. On November 30, she released “In Principle and Practice,” a “strategic framework that emphasizes strengthening community, deepening connections, cultivating service-minded leadership, and collaborating across divisions and divides.”

The rebels were in a self-reflective mood. The damage will take generations to undo, one told me. “I hope we have the staying power.” Another said: “I’m mad at all of us. We all kind of knew [how bad things were]. But I’ll be brutally honest: we all wanted the option of having our children and grandchildren go to Penn. If donors say that that is not part of why they donate, they are not telling the truth. We should’ve stopped years ago because we were giving them the rope to hang us with.”

This donor was under no illusion about the ruling ideology on campuses: “If you’re successful and white, you’re evil; if you’re unsuccessful and brown, you must be right.” Yet despite such knowledge, he admits that he was on contribution “autopilot.”

Then Magill and the presidents of Harvard and MIT were called to testify on campus anti-Semitism before a House committee on December 5. That hearing was itself the result of discussions between the Penn donors and committee members. All three presidents came in for a drubbing, above all for their unwillingness to agree that campuses should punish calls for the genocide of Jews. (The question itself was hypothetical; the committee’s lead prosecutor, New York representative Elise Stefanik, extrapolated from actual student chants of “intifada” to a hypothetical call for Jewish genocide.) The resulting uproar was bipartisan. Though it was the genocide question that garnered the most attention, the presidents’ shameless untruths about their campuses’ free-wheeling intellectual environments should have been the most damning.

Another petition against Magill was launched, this time on Change.org. It quickly garnered more than 12,000 signatories. On December 7, Ross Stevens, CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, withdrew a $100 million gift that had funded a center for finance at the Wharton School. He would consider restoring the funding only if Magill was replaced.

Penn’s board held an emergency meeting the next day, but it once again declined to oust Magill or Bok. Magill tried to stanch the bleeding by declaring on video that she now understood that some forms of anti-Israel speech must be prohibited on campus.

Magill did not survive the storm. She offered her resignation on December 9. Most surprisingly, Bok tendered his resignation as well. The rebellious donors were jubilant, since they understood that the critical lever for institutional change was boards of trustees, known heretofore only for their hands-off, see-no-evil rubberstamping of whatever direction a university might choose. 

Meantime, Harvard’s president Claudine Gay was facing her own crisis, albeit without the same level of organizing behind it as the crisis that had brought down Magill. Some of Harvard’s wealthiest donors had also been closing their checkbooks since October 7, due to Gay’s perceived foot-dragging when it came to condemning the terror attacks. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman had called for the release of the names of student signatories to an early pro-Hamas letter so that firms could avoid hiring those students. The Kennedy School lost millions of dollars in donations. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, investor Seth Klarman, and three other Harvard Business School graduates responded to the spreading campus militancy on October 23 in an “Open Letter to Harvard Leadership Regarding Antisemitism on Campus.” The letter attracted more than 2,300 alumni signatures in two weeks.

 Ackman, who has taken the lead in the campaign against Harvard, had been going through a very public education about the diversity, equity, and inclusion complex. On November 6, he admitted on CNBC that until recently he had never read Harvard’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statement. When he did, he was surprised to learn that the school’s DEI mandate did not cover “all marginalized groups,” as he put it, such as Asians and Jews. The solution, in Ackman’s view, was to expand the diversity bureaucracy’s client base to include the full panoply of students and faculty who were “at risk of being taken advantage of, of being harmed, of being emotionally harmed,” in his words, by the “majority.” This recommendation showed that Ackman, a liberal Democrat, remained naive about the university. The alleged “marginalized groups” at Harvard and elsewhere are at zero risk of being harmed by the majority; they are petted and fêted at every possible opportunity by an ever-diminishing white subset of the campus population that either embraces its fictional role of oppressor or is dragooned into playing one. A month later, Ackman was calling for the elimination of DEI, though he rushed to deny that he meant to “suggest whatsoever that the goal of a diverse university that is welcoming for all should be abandoned.” But Harvard is already welcoming to all; its only goal should be to provide the most rigorous possible intellectual training for its students.

Harvard had lost billions of dollars in donations since October 7, according to another Ackman missive. Harvard’s overseers met over the weekend of December 9 to consider Gay’s tenure. On December 12, the fellows of the Harvard Corporation announced that Gay retained their ongoing support as the “right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.” Harvard’s mission, the fellows reiterated at the end of their letter, was addressing “deep societal issues.” What those deep societal issues were, the corporation failed to say—possibly anti-Semitism, but the chances were great that they meant the usual deep issue: racism.

Gay had a supreme advantage that Magill lacked: the magic amulet of race. Magill could check off just one box in the victim sweepstakes: being female. Gay was not only female but the “first black president” of Harvard, as her supporters in the media never tired of reminding us. (MIT president Sally Kornbluth also survived the House anti-Semitism hearing. But MIT’s alumni were only starting to organize against the school’s leadership and had yet to bring significant financial pressure to bear against the school.) The Harvard Corporation is itself 27 percent black (twice the percentage of blacks in the national population) and 36 percent URM (underrepresented minorities, when its Hispanic member is included).

Almost all of Harvard’s black professors wrote a letter as “Black members of the Harvard university faculty” urging Gay’s retention. Any suggestion that Gay was elevated “based on considerations of race and gender are specious and politically motivated,” the professors wrote. Never mind that the chair of the presidential search committee, senior corporation fellow Penny Pritzker, had lauded Gay’s “inclusiveness” and deep appreciation for “diverse voices” upon announcing Gay’s selection. (That the signatories to the current letter of support were themselves all black was apparently another coincidence.) While serving as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Gay had released an eight-page template for upping Harvard’s anti-racism work in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd race riots. The document, promising an orgy of race-based hiring and curriculum changes, was an early pitch for the presidency. Gay sought, she wrote, to “challenge a status quo that is comfortable and convenient for many.” Read: for Harvard’s whites, who are presumably responsible for the university’s failure to be “truly inclusive,” and who perpetuate the “devastating legacies of slavery and white supremacy.”

Notwithstanding the black faculty’s claim that Gay’s race was irrelevant to her presidency, Harvard’s black alumni also felt called upon to write the fellows in support for Gay’s efforts to build, as they put it, a more “inclusive community.” Her “leadership at Harvard as a Black woman” was “critical and deserving of the opportunity to coalesce and take shape,” the alumni wrote. Gay’s status as the daughter of Haitian immigrants allows her to understand better than anyone else the need for Harvard to “stand against hate,” the black alumni argued. Gay’s rapid ascent up the academic hierarchy—as an undistinguished scholar, at best—represented a triumph over the hate directed at immigrant daughters, we are to believe, however invisible such hate might be to the untrained eye.

This is the first of a two-part article. Tomorrow: Penn 2.0 and the traps awaiting reformist alumni.

[obstinaterixatrix]

So last week liz took me to see a local production of heathers, which was the first time I’ve actually seen the show the whole way through, which was really interesting. The thing is, the production had a Diversity Equity and Inclusion guy listed on staff, which makes sense for a black comedy from the 80s, but ALSO there were several asian americans in the main cast and I think they must’ve been pretty strategic about casting in a pretty interesting way. heather chandler, JD, and martha were the characters in the principle cast that were played by asian americans, and it reminded me of the book ‘Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites?: The Asian Ethnic Experience Today’—if heather c was the only asian american, that’d have unfortunate implications with ideas of assimilation/privilege (sidebar, I’ve talked to friends who live/have lived on the west coast and they’ve told me ‘yeah asian americans on the west coast are SOOO DIFFERENT from asian americans in other parts of the usa’ which is pretty interesting, but I’d imagine it’s dependent on how high the asian population is in any given place—I’m not on the west coast but my high school was like 30% asam and I’m pretty sure I walk around with less baggage than asam folks who don’t have that experience) and if JD was the only asian american that’d have really unfortunate implications mirroring that whole Yellow Peril Those Barbaric Asian Men Are After Our White Women (which, with an ungenerous reading one could argue that those implications are there anyway, but I think that having heather c as asam it leaves room for that *dichotomy*—while it’s pretty common nowadays in the usa to consider asam folks as ‘honorary whites’ [when it’s convenient], having asam characters that counter that perspective [both JD and Martha] allows room for more nuance). (another sidebar, JD is a character where I feel like the narrative is less difficult to navigate if he’s played by a white actor because it becomes more delicate if he’s played by any actor of color—I think it worked for that production, and of course I’m mega biased [pan-ethnic solidarity] [lol] so this did get me way more sympathetic to JD than I no doubt would’ve been if he had been played by a white actor). and if only JD and heather c were played by asam actors—well imo that dichotomy would be enough for some nuance, but—it’s still kind of in the unfortunate implication zone with them both being primarily antagonists, and having martha played by an asam actor neutralizes some of those implications by being a purely sympathetic character. so to me it feels like it definitely works in a way that the tv show casting Really Did Not. anyway, I’m talking about all this separate from performances, but they were all really good too—heather c was doing high kicks in insane heels??? and ballet in bathroom slippers??? also my bias kicked in for her too, she did a great job playing a severe and ruthless terrible person (lol).

[burned-lariat]

Liesl has all this smoke for Liz when Heather, Joss, Carly, and Dex deserve it more. Ridiculous.

[thisislizheather]

Summer List 2024

Welcome to the absolute worst time of year! Rather than ranting about exactly why this is the worst season (ie. sweating into the sheets as you sleep, the buzzing of mosquitoes near your ears, the awful body odor of strangers too close to you on the subway), there may be just a few things that can be enjoyed this time of year. Unexpected summer rainstorms, late sunsets, ice cold pools, sandal tan lines, frozen pina coladas, absolutely all of the produce in season and children that you love not having to go to school. And best of all - eating as much heirloom tomato toast as humanly possible.

So let’s try to get through these next three months as best we can until the sweet scent of September arrives. Here’s the plan.

Go to a carnival.

Eat the soft serve at either Seed + Mill in Chelsea Market or at L’Industrie.

Get out of town somewhere fun to celebrate our 15 year anniversary.

Go swimming at least five times.

Make this truffled garlic bread with ricotta.

As always, I beg you to make a list of your own. If you’re looking for some ideas, here are some past summer lists I’ve made: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2015.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"Rule of Reason" :: Dwight D. Eisenhower

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 18, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 19, 2024

Yesterday, Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) released an “Interim Report on the Failures and Politicization of the January 6th Select Committee.” As the title suggests, the report seeks to rewrite what happened on January 6, 2021, when rioters encouraged by former president Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol. Loudermilk chairs a subcommittee on oversight that sits within the Committee on House Administration. The larger committee—House Administration—oversees the daily operations of the House of Representatives, including the Capitol Police. Under that charge, former House speaker Kevin McCarthy permitted MAGA Republicans to investigate security failures at the Capitol on January 6.

Loudermilk was himself involved in the story of that day after video turned up of him giving a tour of the Capitol on January 5 despite its being closed because of Covid. During his tour, participants took photos of things that are not usually of interest to visitors: stairwells, for example. Since then, he has been eager to turn the tables against those investigating the events of January 6.

Loudermilk turned the committee’s investigation of security failures into an attack on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. Yesterday’s report singled out former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who has taken a strong stand against Trump’s fitness for office after his behavior that day, as the primary villain of the select committee. In his press release concerning the interim report, Loudermilk said that Cheney “should be investigated for potential criminal witness tampering,” and the report itself claimed that “numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney” and that the FBI should investigate that alleged criminality.

The report seeks to exonerate Trump and those who participated in the events of January 6 while demonizing those who are standing against him, rewriting the reality of what happened on January 6 with a version that portrays Trump as a persecuted victim.

Trump’s team picked up the story and turned it even darker. At 2:11 this morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee, which states that ‘numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI.’ Thank you to Congressman Barry Loudermilk on a job well done.”

To this, conservative writer David Frum responded: “After his successful consolidation of power, the Leader prepares show trials for those who resisted his failed first [violent attempt to overthrow the government].”

Liz Cheney also responded. “January 6th showed Donald Trump for who [he] really is—a cruel and vindictive man who allowed violent attacks to continue against our Capitol and law enforcement officers while he watched television and refused for hours to instruct his supporters to stand down and leave.” She pointed out that the January 6th committee’s report was based on evidence that came primarily from Republican witnesses, “including many of the most senior officials from Trump’s own White House, campaign and Administration,” and that the Department of Justice reached the similar conclusions after its own investigation.

Loudermilk’s report “intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee’s tremendous weight of evidence, and instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did,” Cheney wrote. “Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence, and are a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth. No reputable lawyer, legislator or judge would take this seriously.”

CNN aired clips today of Republican lawmakers blaming Trump for the events of January 6.

Last night, Trump also filed a civil lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer, her polling company, the Des Moines Register, and its parent company Gannett over Selzer’s November 2 poll showing Harris in the lead for the election. Calling it “brazen election interference,” the suit alleges that the poll violated the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Brian Stelter, Katelyn Polantz, Hadas Gold, and Paula Reid of CNN: “This absurd lawsuit is a direct assault on the First Amendment. Newspapers and polling firms are not engaged in ‘deceptive practices’ just because they publish stories and poll results President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t like. Getting a poll wrong is not election interference or fraud.”

Conservative former representative Joe Walsh (R-IL) wrote: “Trump is suing a pollster and calling for an investigation of [Liz Cheney]. Don’t you dare tell me he’s not an authoritarian. And don’t you dare look the other way. Donald Trump is un-American. The resistance to him from Americans must be steadfast & fierce.”

This afternoon, Trump’s authoritarian aspirations smashed against reality.

The determination of the MAGA extremists in the House to put poison pills in appropriations measures over the past year meant that the Republicans have been unable to pass the necessary appropriations bills for 2024 (not a typo), forcing the government to operate with continuing resolutions. On September 25, Congress passed a continuing resolution that would fund the government through December 20, this Friday. Without funding, the government will begin to shut down…right before the holidays.

At the same time, a farm bill, which Congress usually passes every five years and which outlines the country’s agriculture and food policies including supplemental nutrition (formerly known as food stamps), expired in 2023 and has been continued through temporary extensions.

Last night, news broke that congressional leaders had struck a bipartisan deal to keep the government from shutting down. The proposed 1,500-page measure extended the farm bill for a year and provided about $100 billion in disaster relief as well as about $10 billion in assistance for farmers. It also raised congressional salaries and kicked the government funding deadline through March 14. It seemed like a last-minute reprieve from a holiday government shutdown.

But MAGA Republicans immediately opposed the measure. “It’s a total dumpster fire. I think it’s garbage,” said Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO). They are talking publicly about ditching Johnson and voting for someone else for House speaker.

Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk also opposed the bill. Chad Pergram of the Fox News Channel reported that House speaker Mike Johnson explained on the Fox News Channel that he is on a text chain with Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom are unelected appointees to Trump’s proposed “Department of Government Efficiency” charged with cutting the U.S. budget.

Johnson said he explained to Musk that the measure would need Democratic votes to pass, and then they could bring Trump in roaring back with the America First agenda. Apparently, Musk was unconvinced: shortly after noon, he posted, “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Later, he added: “No bills should be passed Congress [sic] until Jan 20, when [Trump] takes office.”

This blueprint would shut down the United States government for a month, but Musk—who, again, does not answer to any constituents—seems untroubled. ″‘Shutting down’ the government (which doesn’t actually shut down critical functions btw) is infinitely better than passing a horrible bill,” he tweeted.

Pergram reported that Musk’s threats sent Republicans scrambling, and Musk tweeted: “Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead. The voice of the people has triumphed! VOX POPULI VOX DEI.”

But Trump and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance seem to recognize that shutting down the government before the holidays is likely to be unpopular. They issued their own statement against the measure, calling instead for “a streamlined bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”

Then Trump and Vance went on to bring up something not currently on the table: the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a holdover from World War I, when Congress stopped trying to micromanage the Treasury and instead simply gave it a ceiling for borrowing money. In the last decades, Congress has appropriated more money than the country brings in, thus banging up against the debt ceiling. If it is not raised, the United States will default on its debt, and so Congress routinely raises the ceiling…as long as a Republican president is in office. If a Democrat is in office, Republicans fight bitterly against what they say is profligate spending.

The debt ceiling is not currently an issue, but Trump and Vance made it central to their statement, perhaps hoping people would confuse the appropriations bill with the debt ceiling. ”Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch. If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now”—again, it is the Republicans who threaten to force the country into default—“what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration. Let’s have this debate now.”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) explained: “Remember what this is all about: Trump wants Democrats to agree to raise the debt ceiling so he can pass his massive corporate and billionaire tax cut without a problem. Shorter version: tax cut for billionaires or the government shuts down for Christmas.”

President and Dr. Biden are in Delaware today, honoring the memory of Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and his one-year-old daughter Naomi, who were killed in a car accident 52 years ago today, but White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre issued a statement saying:

“Republicans need to stop playing politics with this bipartisan agreement or they will hurt hardworking Americans and create instability across the country. President-elect Trump and Vice President–elect Vance ordered Republicans to shut down the government and they are threatening to do just that—while undermining communities recovering from disasters, farmers and ranchers, and community health centers. Triggering a damaging government shutdown would hurt families who are gathering to meet with their loved ones and endanger the basic services Americans from veterans to Social Security recipients rely on. A deal is a deal. Republicans should keep their word.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out the relationship between Trump’s authoritarianism and today’s chaos on Capitol Hill. Trump elevated Musk to the center of power, Marshall observes, and now is following in his wake. Musk, Marshall writes, “is erratic, volatile, impulsive, mercurial,” and he “introduces a huge source of unpredictability and chaos into the presidency that for once Trump doesn’t control.”

Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews captured the day’s jockeying among Trump’s budding authoritarians and warring Republican factions over whether elected officials should fund the United States government. He posted: “The owner of a car company is controlling the House of Representatives from a social media app.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[juneberrie]

so veronica would fight for jd but whos gonna fight for me huh 🤨🤨

[saintlesbian]

Liesl, babygirl, I know you’re hurting but your rage is kinda misdirected rn…!

[manuelamordhorst]

Tipp: FEEL ME –  MIND x BODY x SPACE im Trapholt

Kommen Sie mit auf eine die Sinne und den Körper ansprechende Reise in das Land der Gefühle. Gehören die Gefühle zum Körper oder zum Kopf? Können Computer und die Wissenschaft unsere Gehirne und Gefühle manipulieren? Kann man einen Ort kreieren, an dem sich alle Menschen wohlfühlen? Erleben Sie eine internationale Sonderausstellung, die mit großen Installationen und die Sinne ansprechenden…

[perfettamentechic]

24 dicembre … ricordiamo …

24 dicembre … ricordiamo … #semprevivineiricordi #nomidaricordare #personaggiimportanti #perfettamentechic

2023: Kamar de los Reyes, attore portoricano di teatro, televisione e cinema. È noto soprattutto per il personaggio di Antonio Vega nella soap opera della Una vita da vivere e per quello di Raul Menendez, il principale antagonista del videogioco del 2012, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. (n. 1967) 2023: David Leland, regista, sceneggiatore e attore britannico. Formatosi come attore alla Royal Central…