Tag: republicans

Second verse, same as the first

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Ten Republicans.

This man incited a mob to storm the Capitol, where they called for his own Vice President to be hung. There’s no doubt about this. There’s no alternate explanation. This is a thing that happened. And only ten Republicans in the House thought that was reason to remove him from office.

Not included among the ten: Greg Pence, Mike Pence’s brother. That crowd was seeking to murder his own brother and he still can’t turn on the worst president America has ever had. Hell, Mike Pence can’t bring himself to impose any consequences.

I do not understand these people. I’m still trying to play this game over here where I’m doing my damnedest to understand them, to treat them like they’re people, and I just can’t do it. I can’t.

I am terrified that they’re all going to end up just … skating. I mean, sure, only president to be impeached twice and all, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they did end up convicting him in the Senate, because I think McConnell is done with him and that’s all that really matters. It won’t be done soon enough to matter, though.

But there’s a whole lot of people in office who need to not be in office any longer. A whole lot of people. Lay aside, for the moment, the notion that these people saw all this happen, had to run and hide and barricade themselves inside secure rooms as people outside bayed for their blood and murdered police officers, that these same people then came out of hiding and still voted to overturn the election. Let’s actually forget about that for a moment.

Today, several House members were deliberately evading metal detectors so that they could bring who the fuck knows what onto the House floor, at least two of them have claimed that they have brought guns onto the House floor, and three of them may have literally escorted some of the seditionists through the halls of the Capitol building to make sure they knew where to go during the riot. One of them tweeted out the location of the Speaker during the riot. And we’ve heard today of House members who didn’t secure themselves with certain Republican members because they didn’t think they could be trusted.

These people have got to be expelled from our legislature. And if some of these allegations are true they’ve got to be jailed for a long, long time.

And in the longer term, the Republican Party absolutely must be torn up by the roots and left to rot. They’ve done nothing for my entire lifetime but get worse. This has got to stop.

But it won’t.

A very brief Congressional explainer

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I’ve seen a fair number of people who are confused about what the hell the House is doing right now. To be clear, I am very very far from being an expert, and it’s possible that I’m going to get some details incorrect in this, but I think I’ve got the basic gist, and if anybody sees any outright errors, please put them in comments and I’ll amend the post.

My current understanding is that Pelosi has brought the House back into session today and has already asked for unanimous consent to bring a bill to the floor calling on the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. That unanimous consent has been denied, and therefore there will be a vote by the House on the bill tomorrow. Pence will be given 24 hours to do the right thing and then impeachment proceedings will begin.

I’ve seen a lot of people asking why they have to wait so long, and why they can’t vote on the bill today. That is, in fact, exactly what they asked for unanimous consent on. You cannot introduce a bill and vote on it on the same day; that’s been a rule for several years now, and it’s a rule that makes good sense– remember, a lot of the bills passed can be hundreds of pages long and complicated, so it makes sense to give people enough time to read the final version of the bill before they vote on it. Now, of course, you don’t need a full day to read a two-page resolution, but the rule still stands. The House can break their own rules with unanimous consent— in other words, if no House member disagrees with breaking the rule, a rule can be broken. But since they didn’t get that unanimous consent– the Republicans blocked it– they have to go to a full vote, and therefore have to wait until tomorrow, when the resolution will most assuredly pass.

Now, in theory, and at least as far as I know, they could also formally introduce the impeachment article or articles (more than one Congressperson has announced that they’re working on them, and I’m not sure who wrote the final text) today, and then again, in theory and as far as I know, they could vote on them or at least get the process started on Tuesday. They’re waiting an extra day to give Pence his 24 hours basically as a strategic measure, which … well, you can decide on your own whether that’s a good idea or not, given that Mitch McConnell has refused to bring the Senate back into session before the 19th. The resolution on Pence is something the House can do on its own. Impeachment is not. The only way to get that done any faster is if, oh, say, Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski were to agree to caucus with the Democrats for a while, giving them the majority immediately and making Chuck Schumer the Majority Leader. Otherwise, the Dem majority doesn’t actually kick in until Kamala Harris is Vice-President.

(EDIT: It does look like the impeachment articles have been formally introduced.)

(Don’t ask me what happens if Pence does invoke the 25th. I don’t even know if there are rules for that, or whether Pence is for-real President or acting President or what if the Beast is removed via that method. I have no idea who casts tie breaking votes in the Senate under those circumstances, but it definitely wouldn’t be Harris before the 20th, so it probably doesn’t actually matter.)

(I’m also not sure exactly how the 14th Amendment applies to all of this– I know the Senate and the House can expel their own members, and they’ve used this power in the past, but I have no idea how the law works regarding declaring that someone cannot run for office again. I’ll look into it.)

Anyway, hopefully this is helpful, and again– I’m not an expert, so if you see something I’m wrong about, let me know.

i wish I was surprised

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments

The President of the United States must be removed from office tonight. I don’t care how; an immediate impeachment, the 25th Amendment, whatever. I don’t care about the method. He must be removed from office tonight.

His Twitter account and any other social media account he controls that he is using to direct the actions of these people must be permanently banned.

Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Mike Braun, Jackie Walorski and every other member of Congress who was involved in this attempt to overturn a fair and free election must resign or be expelled by the Senate.

Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn should be in jail.

Every single one of these white supremacist thugs, these maggots who have so little fear of consequences that they’re doing this without even bothering to conceal their faces, should spend the rest of their lives in jail for sedition.

After a thorough investigation, anyone involved in the chain of command that led to Capitol police standing down and allowing these animals into the Capitol building without a trace of resistance should be fired and jailed.

Fucking. Enough.

In which I turn a tweet into a post

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics4 Comments

Who’s the dumbest Democratic elected official, at a national level? Meaning, like, either a member of the national government or a high enough state or city-level official that people who don’t live there might have heard of them?

I’m either back on my bullshit or still on my bullshit, depending on how long you’ve been around here, and I have (like many of you) grown increasingly impatient with stupid Republican arguments. The person in the White House is still insisting, as recently as today, that America is having more coronavirus infections on a daily basis than some countries have had in total because we have more testing. A recently elected Republican Senator announced this morning that America fought in World War II to preserve Europe from the horrors of socialism. And enough Republicans have confidently asserted something about masks that was utterly horseshit or pointed at a mostly-red electoral map of America recently and smugly declared that they don’t understand how the Democrats could possibly when when so much of America votes red that I really don’t feel the need to point to a specific example. It literally happens multiple times a day.

There has got to be a similar Democratic equivalent. There’s got to be. Like, this has got to be my bubble working against me. There are dumb Democrats, I know there are, because Democrats are people and people are dumb. By definition, there must therefore be some really dumb elected Democrats. I’m not asking for stupid on the level of the numbskull that just lost his job, or any of the various no-exaggeration brain-damaged Qanon morons they just put in office. Just regular, run-of-the-mill, that’s a dumb guy dumb guys.

Like, Biden is probably the dumbest person I’ve ever voted for for President, but the only reason that can be true is his competition. When you’re being compared to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore and John Kerry (himself probably the least of that group), it’s gonna be really hard to come off as intellectually impressive. On any kind of remotely objective scale, he’s at least high-average, I think.

The funny thing is that I think if I asked Republicans who the dumbest elected Democrat was, I’d probably take their answer as evidence that they themselves were pretty fucking stupid. I suspect it’d be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, frankly, and I don’t know how many times this woman has to run rings around Republicans before they admit she’s smarter than most of them. That’s only something they go after her for because of sexism, racism, and ageism; she’s a young woman of color so she can’t be smart.

Seriously. I want to know. Who’s the Mike Pence of the Democratic party?

Not that I’ll take my own advice, but …

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

My grading for the weekend and most of my planning for next week is done already, which is a good thing, but that hasn’t stopped me from spending most of the morning doomscrolling. And something has occurred to me: this situation being what it is, we literally cannot trust a single thing we hear from anyone at all. Certainly not the administration, not the doctors, not photographs (note that this picture of him “working” involves signing a blank piece of paper, and this isn’t even the first time that they’ve been caught pulling that dumb-ass move,) nothing. Not one word that any of these people say can be trusted.

There are only two things that can be assumed to have some sort of reasonable truth value here: 1) he dies, or 2) he leaves the hospital. Both would be rather difficult to fake, although I’m sure it’ll be at least a day or two before they admit it if he does actually die.

(I paid fairly close attention once Herman Cain went into the hospital, checking in on his condition once every day or two, and they did the exact same thing– dude was in the hospital for weeks and they consistently insisted he was fine and/or getting better right up until he died.)

Anything short of release or death, good news or bad, has to be presumed to be a lie. And therefore there’s really no point in the doomscrolling, because if he does die or leave the hospital once that information leaks out it’ll be everywhere in seconds, so it’s not like we won’t find out.

So I’m going to try and do something else. I’m going to fail, mind you, but I’m going to try.

On not being “political”

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

A quick recap: In the now-five weekends since school started, I have had two (2) weekends where students in my building lost younger siblings to gun violence– one who was playing with (or at least near someone who was playing with) a loaded weapon that went off, and another killed in a drive-by shooting at a birthday party. Last weekend, one of my former students apparently fired a shot or two at someone she had gotten into an altercation with at a bar, and then her gun went off while she was in the back seat of what was effectively their getaway car, going through the front passenger seat and killing her best friend, another former student.

Today’s horror involves a killing this afternoon at my local mall. I came across this Facebook post just now; one of those where you don’t know the person but someone you know interacted with them and so the post makes its way onto your feed. I would like you to direct your attention to the first two sentences, in particular:

Now, I don’t know this dude, which is why I didn’t respond to him on FB, and is why I’m cutting his name out here. He’s going through some shit I’ve never had to go through right now and I feel for him.

But God damn it, this impulse toward oh don’t make this political, when the problem is, oh, gun violence is completely the fuck out of control, is part of the god damned problem. This comes from the same impulse that occasionally leads to ignant shit like this:

And … nah.

You cannot “make” gun violence political. Gun violence is inherently fucking political. You cannot take politics out of gun violence. When we have a political party in this country that is literally encouraging its followers to stockpile as many guns as they can and the fucking person masquerading as our nation’s President is actively calling for gun violence in response to the results of our upcoming election, you can not take politics out of gun violence.

America has decided that it does not matter how many people die; their guns are more important than the lives of children, the lives of their friends, the lives of their families, whatever. That is a political decision. These folks literally don’t care who dies so long as they get to keep their toys and people with darker skin than them don’t. And the “be like Bob and Sally” bullshittery exists to obscure that, to hide the fact that for a whole god damn lot of people politics is literally a life and death matter and it is not only perfectly fucking okay but frankly the only sane decision to cut people out of their lives who have made the political decision that you are not human and your life does not matter. My white skin and manly cishet genitals are going to protect me from this to a certain extent but sooner or later these fuckers are going to get around to the atheists. This is not fucking theoretical to me. Not at all.

We are at the point where one of our two major political parties is actively courting fascists and white supremacists. Where actual fucking Nazis not only support the party holding the White House but hold positions of power within that party and are not actively shunned by those individuals who don’t yet identify specifically with them.

When you have one Nazi sitting at a table with eleven people who don’t mind that the Nazi is there, you don’t have one Nazi and eleven “adults” who don’t want to rock the boat. You’ve got twelve Nazis sitting at a table.

America is the world’s largest source of gun violence because America has made the political decision to be the world’s largest source of gun violence and Americans who disagree have not managed to summon the political will to stop them. If you are trying to skate around that to avoid fights and losing friends, you are part of the problem.

In which I hope for less bullshit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I spent the day administering standardized tests, of all fucking things, which are somewhat more difficult to do remotely than in person. Furthermore, spending seven hours in front of my computer– I literally did not leave my desk all day, and my wife was nice enough to bring me lunch– watching numbers slowly tick up from 1 to 53 has got to rank as one of my most boring days as an educator ever.

And I get to do it a minimum of twice more, since they’re not all done yet. This is basically the plan for the rest of the week.

Nonetheless, I’m going to loudly insist that I’m not complaining, because the alternative remains worse.

Speaking of that: neighboring districts have announced their plan to move to hybrid learning in a couple of weeks, which will be fun until they back off of it right before it happens. The state’s numbers have done nothing but worsen in the month of August, and so have the county’s, particularly once Notre Dame came back– so do you know what the state board of health did? They took a set of metrics that had everything in the red and added a new color band so that what was once red and definitely recommending distance learning was now orange and distance learning was just “strongly recommended,” or some shit like that.

Just say you’re bored and you don’t care if people die. Just fuckin’ do it, we all know it’s what you mean.

It’s more honest and I’m really tired of bullshit.

We closed everything down in March, when there were virtually no cases in the state. We closed them again in August, when things were much much much worse than they were in March because Americans are dog-stupid and selfish as fuck and no one could be counted on to act right. Now in September damn near everything is worse than it was in August and with Labor Day next weekend, guess what’s about to happen? Motherfuckers are gonna have parties and then two weeks after that they’re gonna get sick.

Oh, and Notre Dame, fresh off of two weeks of quarantine, is about to allow crowds at the football games they’re still insisting they’re going to have. So, a super-spreader event in my town roughly every two weeks for the next few months? Awesome. Just what we want.

It’ll work out fine, I’m sure. After all, we’re bored.

I’m tired, dammit

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I just thought to myself “Gee, I’m finished early today!” and then looked at the clock and discovered it was nearly 8:00, then remembered I hadn’t written a blog post today.

Getting tired of days where I’m not done with work until sunset.

Still happy I’m doing this and not the alternative.

Meanwhile, in the last 24 hours a gun-toting 17-year-old right-wing lunatic was thanked by cops before gunning down some protesters, a hurricane is about to level Louisiana again, and I have to see Nick Sandmann’s stupid fucking punchable face on my computer again, because the only thing necessary for Republicans to promote your existence is that you be an asshole.

(An observation: there is no such thing as a right-wing militia. Those are gangs. The word militia implies legitimacy. They have none.)

I’m tired. We’ll see if I can finish this Stephen King book I’m reading tonight. Normally he doesn’t take four days, but … 2020.