And In Other News

Fistfights in the Durham City Council chambers, in delicious detail. Read the INDY all about it HERE.

Only His Hairdresser Knows For Sure

 I'm running a poll now on Mastodon (vastly better than Twitter - highly recommend) that raises the following question: Will The Former Guy:

A) Turn himself in.

B) Barricade at Mar-A-Lago.

C) Flee to exile.

The numbers, so, far, favor A (65%) over B (26%) and C (11%).

I can see an argument for any of these outcomes, but personally I'm in the B category. The question, as I see it, is whether or not he is more dedicated to:

A1) Turning this indictment into a payday, or

B1) Destroying the institution of democracy.

Turning himself in favors A1. But B1 has the virtue of potentially incorporating a payday into his very public denial of the rule of law. His base are largely criminals, or people who believe that everyone else is a criminal, so why not? They all hate democratic governance, because they see everything as transactional. Their distrust of institutions and systems runs deep, and sometimes with good reason. Guile, manipulation, and the cis mostly-White male power of Christianity are their stock in trade. The rule of law doesn't even make the list.

This is what I believe TFG is aiming for - no less than the end of American democracy. Once he ascends the throne, the payday becomes permanent.

To be fair, he may be playing an even longer game than the one in my estimation, turning himself in so he can drag it out and mount his battle in the 2024 elections. I can't think of why he would do that, though, when he's got DeSantis running interference for him on the extradition front. Trump has DeSantis deliciously jammed up, and I'm sure he's savoring the fact. 

For my part, I hate these people with the heat of a thousand suns.

Just sayin'. 

Selective Prosecution

I see that one of our City Council people - a person with whom I am distantly acquainted - is being censured for asking city employees to do campaign work for her during normal work hours. Worse yet, she is now being investigated by the SBI for "extortion." Apparently she told a developer that she'd back their development plan if they would contribute to her campaign.

What? So now that's a crime?

I mean, I know she's a City Council member and not a US Senator or ex-President or something, so . . .

Un-huh.

Promises, Promises

If there's one thing you can count on, it's that politicians will pull the football out, Lucy-style, any chance they get. I'd like to say these "I didn't say Simon Says" stunts are more popular with the beer-and-christianity crowd, but, honestly, I'm not sure the libs aren't just as prone to some underhanded machinations. Today, however, it's the right-wing North Carolina legislature that is insisting, "Go ahead, Charlie! I'll hold the ball so you can kick it! Promise!"

The ball, in this case, is the extension of Federal Medicaid benefits to about 500,000 more mostly-poor North Carolinians. The program has been available for years, but the Berger-Moore cabal has held off on approving it until now. They're making big hooey about this being "bi-partisan" legislation, but it's only bi-partisan because the party in charge has finally relented to something most Tar Heels have long sought. The Legislature celebrated this accomplishment by giving themselves a round of applause.

I suggest you don't bring out the streamers and noise-makers just yet.

There's a catch.

The deal is, this legislation cannot go into effect until after the budget is approved. Soooo, if the (did I mention, mostly right-wing?) state legislature sends a bunch of ban books/outlaw abortion/deny CRT/restrict Trans therapy/end LGBTQ rights budget items to the Governor for his likely veto, they will all stand as if the head of a single snake and hiss "Cooper just shot down Medicaid expansion." 

See how that works?

That's the way we get shit done, bless our hearts.

The New Normal

 I don't know who Cristopher F. Ruto is, but I'm gonna make some guesses about him, based on the attached post. For starters, I'd guess he's a college admin somewhere in the Midwest or South - probably not a big university, but some smaller school.

I figure he went to college himself, probably a business major. He certainly never willingly took a humanities course - you can tell by how he thinks and speaks. No student of English in their right mind would publish the jargon-filled wheelbarrow of manure that Chris has delivered here. I'd credit him for having been in the Military ("mission-aligned") but he probably just watched Top Gun: Maverick. Apparently the student body will be "recomposed," which is code for "indoctrinated into the ways of the Schutzstaffle."

I'm a professor whose tenure spanned the time when Universities - including apparent bastions of liberal thought and progressive ideology, including HBCUs (I'm looking at you, NCCU) - began the shift (the fucking "mission-alignment") from a focus on liberal arts to the trades. More jargon - they called it "the new normal." Confession here: I was safely positioned teaching Criminal Justice. The country always needs more cops, more private security, more prison guards. The thinking, then and now, is that a college degree is of no use unless it gains the student a paying job. Forget philosophy, sociology, history, literature, fine arts. Up with PE, Criminal Justice, Library Science, STEM, Nursing, Architecture, Law - that's where the Benjamins are. Those are the students most likely to pay their student loans.

Of course, it's a little more complicated than that, but not much. First we gut the institution of any courses that require true intelligence and critical thinking, any sense of human development and transcendent experience (that would be your "ideologically captured," right there). When schools are little more than shop classes, students are much easier to indoctrinate and manage. Public universities must step in line or their enrolments will fall and they will fail. But they have already failed, because they have become for-profit ventures and have re-defined "education" as "employability." Public universities have succumbed to the Christopher Rutos of the world, and they have become "mission-aligned." 

Of course, you CAN still get a good liberal arts education. It's a feature of all best - and most expensive - private schools.

Addendum: I didn't know this guy but now I do - according to today's post by H.C. Richardson, he is "right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, the man behind the furor over Critical Race Theory and one of DeSantis’s appointees to the New [College of Florida] School board. . .".

Early Early Voting

 As teachers we learn a valuable fact about the attention of our students - if we want to be sure they heard something, we have to repeat it at least four times, because they only tend to hear about 25% of what we have to say. (Honestly, for some it doesn't matter how often you repeat yourself, but that's an issue for a different day).

I mention this little gem about teaching so that when you gripe at me about repeating myself I can refer you back to this. Here's the repeat: If you are willing and able to register as an independent, and thereby vote in the Republican primary - as we in NC are allowed to do - please, please, do so, and vote for Ron DeSantis. 

Here's the logic: If Trump wins the Republican primary, which seems to be fully possible, along with invasions of locusts and ice in Hell, he will have a clear shot at the presidency. BUT, if anyone else wins the Republican primary, they'll be screwed. Because Trump is going to run again, hell or locusts, and he will split the ticket with the presumptive nominee, paving the way for a likely Biden win. Simple, no? Vote in the Republican primary, vote for DeSantis. A single bullet in the campaign heart of two fascists. It's a primary vote well spent.

Today's Weather

 

I have travelled to Russia and much of it is just this bleak, vast stretches of uninspired apartment blocks. The sign, for your amusement, is a typical piece of anti-Ukrainian propaganda: "Russia's border ends nowhere."

The oligarchs and wanna-bes in this country support Putin and would have this be the View From Your Window. I'm referring to Trump and Carlson, Murdock, McCarthy and Green, and a bunch of others. MTG is now openly calling for red-state succession (in, as Liz Cheney notes, clear violation of her pledge to uphold the Constitution).

As for me, it's a nice warm day, I figure I'll go outside and clean the dust out of the barrel of the 9 mm auto my old man took from a Nazi POW at the end of WWII.