Outside the Beltway

Comments

1. Not the IT Dept. says:
   Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 08:46

   I assume this is going to have its very own post but until it does – Trump appoints a genuine insane person to head the FBI:

   https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/30/politics/kash-patel-fbi-director-trump/index.html

   Even nuttier than Hoover takes some doing.

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2. Jen says:
   Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 08:50

   I’m curious about the logistics of Trump’s recent spate of pardons. He is not president (yet), so do these pardons not take effect until after Jan. 20? I am assuming that’s the case and that these are simply announcements of what will kick in after he’s sworn in, but oof, do these pardons ever piss me off.

   @Not the IT Dept.: Yeah, that’s going to be a sh!tshow. Good luck, FBI.

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3. Kathy says:
   Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 08:59

   I had a rather good day cooking yesterday. I made chicken milanesas with an onion and bell pepper topping. I also made the roasted mashed potatoes and potato skins. IMO, yes, roasting the potatoes is better, but not that much better. So in the future I’ll likely resort to dehydrated potato flakes. It’s faster and takes far less time and effort.

   I also broke my favorite rubber spatula. It looks like a clean break, which might be fixed with some epoxy. It lasted for like 12 years.

   Meantime, here again is the link to my story “Ours.” It opens with this password: G7#kL9!vQ2@wX5

   I’d appreciate any feedback anyone cares to give.

   I don’t intend to flood the comments with this link. So, act now in this pre cyber monday deal! 😀

   Once again, the gist is a transgender woman winds up in a parallel universe a little different from her own. It’s about 15,000 words.

   Many thanks for those who dare read it.

   1
4. charontwo says:
   Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 09:10

   I previously posted a Hartmann piece comparing John Adams to Trump, re the Alien and Sedition Acts, XYZ affair etc.  This link:

   “Hartmann”

   Hartmann now has another piece up on the same topic, this link:

   “Hartmann again”

   The piece is quite long, some excerpts:

   When Presidents Declare War on the Press: The Battle for Free Speech and Democracy

   From Adams’ Sedition Acts to Trump’s relentless attacks, the war on truth threatens to unravel the very foundation of our republic…

   snip

   Yesterday, for Thanksgiving, I published a short history of Jefferson’s and his Democrats’ reaction to John Adams’ fearmongering for political power around the “XYZ Affair.” I referenced Adams’ shutting down the opposition newspapers in America, but a surprising number of people responded with:

   “What??? Really????? An American president shut down all the opposition newspapers because they insulted him? That really happened?”

   So here’s the rest of the story:

   Some Americans are suggesting that the ascendance of a strongman president who wants to shut down America’s press is totally new in the experience of America and may spell the end of both democracy and the Bill of Rights. History, however, shows another view, which offers us both warnings and hope.

   Although you won’t learn much about it from reading the “Republican histories” of the Founders being published and promoted in the corporate media these days, the most notorious stain on the presidency of John Adams began in 1798 with the passage of a series of laws that would give him virtually unlimited strongman powers to attack his political enemies and, like Trump says he wants to do, end the First Amendment right of a free press.

   It started when Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin and editor of the Philadelphia newspaper the Aurora, began to speak out against the policies of then-President John Adams. Bache supported Vice President Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party (today called the Democratic Party) when John Adams led the conservative Federalists (who today would be philosophically close to today’s Republicans).Bache attacked Adams in an op-ed piece by calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.”

   snip

   Abigail Adams followed the logic employed by modern-day “conservatives” who say that those opposed to Trump’s policies are “unpatriotic,” by writing that Bache’s “abuse” being “leveled against the Government” of the United States (her husband) could even plunge the nation into a “civil war.”

   Worked into a frenzy by Abigail Adams’ and Federalist newspapers of the day, Federalist senators and congressmen — who controlled both legislative houses along with the presidency — came to the defense of John Adams by passing a series of four laws that came to be known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

   The vote was so narrow — 44 to 41 in the House of Representatives — that in order to ensure passage the lawmakers wrote a sunset provision into its most odious parts: Those laws, unless renewed, would expire the last day of John Adams’ first term of office, March 3, 1801.
   Empowered with this early gift of presidential power, President John Adams ordered his “unpatriotic” opponents arrested, and specified that only Federalist judges on the Supreme Court would be both judges and jurors.

   Bache, often referred to as “Lightning Rod Junior” after his famous grandfather, was the first to be hauled into jail (before the laws even became effective!), followed by New York Time Piece editor John Daly Burk, which put his paper out of business. Bache died of yellow fever while awaiting trial, and Burk accepted deportation to avoid imprisonment and then fled.

   Others didn’t avoid prison so easily. Editors of seventeen of the twenty or so Democratic-Republican-affiliated newspapers were arrested, and ten were convicted and imprisoned; many of their newspapers went out of business.

   snip

   Which brings us to today. The possible ray of light for those who oppose the attempts of Donald Trump to emulate John Adams is found in the end of the story of Adams’ attempt to suborn the Bill of Rights and turn the United States into a one-party state:— The Alien and Sedition Acts caused the Democratic-Republican newspapers to become more popular than ever, and turned the inebriated Luther Baldwin into a national celebrity. In like fashion, progressive websites and talk shows are today proliferating across the internet, and victims of Trump’s ending women’s right to abortion are often featured in the press.— The day Adams signed the Acts, Thomas Jefferson left town in protest and never again saw John Adams face-to-face. Even though Jefferson was Vice President, and could theoretically benefit from using the Acts against his own political enemies, he and James Madison continued to protest and work against them. Jefferson wrote the text for a non-binding resolution against the Acts that was adopted by the Kentucky legislature, and James Madison wrote one for Virginia that was adopted by that legislature.— Jefferson beat Adams in the election of 1800 as a wave of voter revulsion over Adams’ phony and self-serving “patriotism” swept over the nation (along with concerns about Adams’ belligerent war rhetoric against the French).— When Jefferson exposed Adams as a poseur and tool of the powerful elite, the rot within Adams’ Federalist Party was exposed along with it. The Federalists lost their hold on Congress in the election of 1800, and began a 30-year slide into total disintegration (later to be reincarnated as Whigs and then as Republicans).

   snip

   Ever the optimist and the realist, Jefferson ended his letter with both hope and caution. “Better luck, therefore, to us all, and health, happiness and friendly salutations to yourself,” he closed the letter. But under his signature, Jefferson added: “P. S. It is hardly necessary to caution you to let nothing of mine get before the public; a single sentence got hold of by the Porcupines, will suffice to abuse and persecute me in their papers for months.”

   It is time, now, for us to once again follow Jefferson’s wise advice. Hope for the best, organize for a better America, and recognize the power and evil unleashed by politicians who believe that campaign lies are defensible, laws gutting the Bill of Rights are acceptable, and that the ends justifies the means.

   America has been through crises before, and far worse. If we retain the vigilance and energy of Jefferson and his contemporaries — as today we face every bit as much a struggle against the same forces that he fought — we shall prevail. For the simple reason that, underneath it all, “this is a game where principles are the stake.”

   https://bsky.app/profile/hartmannreport.com

   4
5. Franklin says:
   Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 11:47

   @Kathy: Hey, I dropped a text file with some feedback in it. Feel free to grab the file and delete from the shared drive.

   1
6. Flat Earth Luddite says:
   Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 12:07

   The word for the day is

   kak·is·toc·ra·cy (kăk′ĭ-stŏkrə-sē, kä′kĭ-)
   n. pl. kak·is·toc·ra·cies

   Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.

   Can you say “kakistocracy” boy and girls? I knew you could.

   H/t to Jeff Tiedrich.

   4
7. CSK says:
   Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 12:12

   Trump sure likes his daughters’ fathers-in-law. He’s hired Massad Boulos, dad of Tiffany’s hubby Michael, as his senior advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.

   1
8. Kathy says:
   Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 12:39

   @Franklin:

   Thank you! That was very helpful. And the proof reading just goes above and beyond.

   I borrowed some terminology from other science fiction works. Analogue comes from Asimov’s “The End of Eternity,” though it refers to different timelines rather than parallel universes. The use of “belay” comes from Star Trek The Next Generation, and means something more like abort than delay. Maybe I should change it to abort, as that might feel subversive in this day and age.

   To distinguish the Marinas I had planned to borrow from Futurama’s episode The Farnsworth Parabox*, which also deals with parallel universes. In the ep, they term one universe “Universe A” and the other “Universe 1.” But I decided that might be even more confusing, and it would have added more dialogue to explain it. I went with using a diminutive in one universe instead. I tried to show both of them know it as a diminutive, when Marina angrily tells the medical doctor not to call her Rina.

   I thought it was clear Hank went to get Rina in a shuttle, and Marina was streamed up to the ship in the first place. So they’re both aboard, and avoiding each other.

   *Not paradox. Futurama is a comedy, after all. And the big joke was a universe contained in a box. The whole series is available on Disney+.

   1
9. Franklin says:
   Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 13:32

   @Kathy: Ahh, thank you for sharing some of the background inspiration. Lol at considering being more subversive! This is the time for that.

   I think some of my mild confusions were from reading a couple sections at a time over the course of days. My focus has not been great of late. But I was always happy to get back to the reading.

   2
10. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 14:05

    @Franklin:

    Ahh, thank you for sharing some of the background inspiration.

    Any time. I can also share how the story changed from conception to development.
11. Mister Bluster says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 14:39

    Today’s History Lesson
    December 1st, 1953 – First Publication of Playboy Magazine

    When I was a Boy Scout in the late 1950s (Troop 113 Webster, New York) once a year we would go house to house on a Saturday morning in the summer and collect old newspapers that would be sold to raise money for our Troop. Some people actually saved their old papers since they knew when the paper drive was scheduled. At least once I found old copies of Playboy in the stacks with the Rochester Times-Union and Democrat and Chronicle. It was like finding gold! I never could figure out a way to smuggle the entire magazine into the house however I carefully removed the center fold. You wouldn’t believe how many times I was able to fold it up small enough to fit in my wallet with out it bulging too much. Of course there was no money or drivers license to take up room. I think the only other thing I carried was my New York State Minor Work Permit that allowed me to deliver my afternoon paper route (Times-Union) at the tender age of 12. Can’t remember how long I had it. I know my parents never found it or there would have been hell to pay. I showed it to one of the neighborhood kids and then he produced some girlie magazines that we buried in the woods behind my house along with my fold out. From time to time he would steal cigarettes from his parents and we would go into the woods and dig up our porn and choke on the butts.
    The good old days!

    2
12. Mister Bluster says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 15:27

    More American History
    December 1, 1955
    On this day, Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her bus seat.
    National Constitution Center

    4
13. Michael Reynolds says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 19:25

    @Mister Bluster:
    I was a Boy Scout very briefly, to please my Dad. After just a couple of weeks there was a jamboree. Camping and whatnot. I was never a fan of camping, and I’m still not – no room service, and that’s not acceptable. Anyway, it seemed it was tradition to pants the new kids and make us run through the woods naked. Presumably for the enjoyment of the scout masters.

    I don’t work and play well with others being pathologically incapable of ‘going along,’ so this was not going to happen. We had no camping knives at home so my Dad, the soldier, gave me a Marine Corp bayonet to take on my jamboree. About eight inches of razor sharp, blued steel. I showed this to the other kids in my tent and said that’d I’d stab the first little prick who came at me.

    Then – perhaps because I didn’t really want to stab anyone – I slipped out of the camp and walked a couple miles home.

    Sometimes I forget what a weird little fucker I was.

    4
14. Gustopher says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 19:39

    @Mister Bluster:

    On this day, Rosa Parks wouldn’t give up her bus seat.

    Inspiring a fairly terrible episode of Doctor Who, in which Brits scold Americans for racism, as if they don’t have plenty of their own.

    (If it was a good episode, I would forgive the preaching, but it was not a good episode. Time traveling racist tries to disrupt the bus driver’s day so the Rosa Parks bus ride never happens…*)

    I suppose it probably inspired a few other things.

    ——
    *: you can make something good out of any premise. But they didn’t.

    1
15. Mikey says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 19:51

    A fitting end to a prosecution undertaken for purely political reasons.

    President Biden pardons his son Hunter Biden

    “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” Biden said in his statement. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

    Comments from LGM:

    The presidential pardon power is a royalist anachronism that either shouldn’t exist at all, or should be far more hemmed in by bureaucratic limitations than it currently is, but that’s not relevant to the merits here. Those include:

    (1) Hunter Biden was subject to criminal prosecution for purely political reasons. The offenses he was convicted for are almost literally never prosecuted. The tax evasion charge is particularly outrageous: pursuing criminal charges for tax evasion when the defendant has paid back all the taxes, penalties, and fines that the taxpayer owes essentially never happens.

    (2) That Republicans will scream about this is, under the circumstances, something to which any decent person, i.e., not a Republican, should pay exactly zero attention.

    ETA: Any Republican who drools on about this should be reminded of the truly heinous offenses for which Trump pardoned the execrable Charles Kushner, whom he just named as Ambassador to France.

    3
16. Rob1 says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 20:00

    @Mikey:

    After all, the SCOTUS Republican majority issued a pardon for Trump, the magnitude of whose crimes where far more significant than Hunter’s.

    2
17. CSK says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 20:00

    @Michael Reynolds:

    I was a girl scout very briefly The pack consisted of about four of us, and the den mother was a drunk, or something. She took us fishing once and forgot the rods. That was a barrel of fun. Everybody dropped out after that. I was the first. Boring as hell.

    1
18. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 20:59

    @Franklin:

    I decided to do a major change that will, perhaps, make the ending clearer. It also fixes the scene where Rina rushes off to sick bay, which seemed rather weak to me. I know what I want to put in it, but not how.
19. Mister Bluster says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 21:01

    @Michael Reynolds:..
    I don’t remember much about my Boy Scout days. I do recall two week summer camp at Massawepie Scout Camp in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York. The base camp where we spent most of our time living in tents had latrines and showers and a dining hall. It was when we took off into the woods for camping on the forest floor that I was introduced to leeches. Nasty little bloodsuckers were in the ponds that we were swimming in and would get stuck on us before we knew that they were there.
    We did have our own version of the Boy Scout oath:
    “On my honor I will do my best
    To help a Girl Scout get undressed!”

    1
20. JKB says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 21:46

    Biden pardons son for violations of Joe Biden authored 1994 Crime Bill gun violations that was used to send thousands of black men to prison re Kimberly Klacik

    1
21. Kathy says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 21:55

    @Mikey:

    They don’t drool. They foam at the mouth. I wonder if the wingnuts feel owned.
22. Gustopher says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 22:21

    @JKB: Hunter Biden has become an unwilling part of the MAGA-QANON cinematic universe of insanity, and has been being attacked and prosecuted because of this, far more than anyone else who committed the same crimes.

    Good on Joe for pardoning his kid. I’ve been very consistent in saying that he should.

    Given how much Hunter tends to fuck things up, maybe he should just slip out of the country and go on vacation for the next decade or so. Just out of subpoena range so no one can make him testify to anything and then start tearing it apart looking for any discrepancies and claiming that they are criminal perjury.

    There’s no chance the Republican vengeance squad will leave him alone, and no chance Hunter won’t find a way to fuck things up. He might enjoy Spain.

    I think he should mess with people and issue another pardon for all crimes Hunter does this December.
23. Stormy Dragon says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 22:38

    @Gustopher:

    We’ve ALL become an unwilling part of the MAGA-QANON cinematic universe of insanity. Part of the reason we’re in this situation is four years of Biden fiddling while Rome burned, telling us the whole time that he couldn’t possibly bend the rules to address our oncoming crisis. And in the end, when it was already too late to do anything, he finally pulled the levers of power… to help himself.

    Hunter may be saved, but who will save the rest of us? Certainly not Joe Biden.
24. de stijl says:
    Sunday, 1 December 2024 at 23:34

    Luka. The song by Suzanne Vega. 1987.

    You could make a hard punk 2 minute cover of that song, easy. And it would fucking rock! It has a structure and form that you could easily make a punk cover song out of that. There are a few attempts that fail by going too easy (looking at you Lemonheads).

    There needs to be a hard, fast version of Luka sung by a singer with hard, but understandable elocution. Tim Armstrong would do.

    Rancid should cover Luka, but hard and fast.

    Couple a years ago, I had the same fancy for Bad Romance – that would kick ass as a punk cover song. Searched on that. It actually does. There are several good versions.