Opposing gay marriage helped boost the rethuglicans for a minute early this millennium, then turned against them at a later stage in the discourse.  In the same midterm, like three trans women were elected, including in deeply conservative areas.  Shit can change in a hurry, for good or ill.

One of these doomy tumblr gals going by something like “transfeminist-separatism” was already yelling about how we’re doomed doomed doomed by these results.  It’s a long way out of hell, sure, but that is the wrong takeaway.  Worse, this is pointed at a hope-starved demographic known for high rates of suicide.

What’s the proposal, sister?  Get your girls together to squat in a tenement?  Spend the rest of your life commiserating about how everyone hates you and wants you dead, when you got millions of potential allies outside your door?  Tell lonely vulnerable people that staring into the abyss is the only possible future for them?

That’s the path of mass suicide.  Not gonna help our public image, I gotta say.  That matters to those of us who plan to still be here when shitler isn’t.  Fucking stop it, thanks.

–

Some of Trump’s most vicious enablers are expected to make quick getaways before congressional investigations rain down on them for their rampant corruption and abuses and the various committees issue subpoenas for them to appear and explain their actions. Up to now, the Republican committee chairs and majorities in congress had blocked any serious attempts to check their excesses.

Already Robert Garcia, who is expected to be the next chair of the powerful house oversight committee, has issued a terse warning to Trump officials.

Robert Garcia, the Democratic congressman set to become the next chair of the oversight committee of the House of Representatives, had two words for Republicans on Tuesday evening: “Lawyer up.”

The House oversight committee serves as a “watchdog” committee and has broad authority to call witnesses, request government documents and issue subpoenas.

Garcia has previously said that, if Democrats won, he would lead investigations into Elon Musk’s role in the “department of government efficiency (Doge)”, the Trump family’s business dealings, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abuses and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

“We’re not starting from scratch here,” Garcia previously told Punchbowl News. “There’s an enormous amount of work that has happened that is public, and there’s an enormous amount of work that’s happened that we’ve been quietly working on for many months.”
…

Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator poised to lead the Senate finance committee, also flexed on his potential future authority. “Subpoenas,” Wyden wrote on X.

With the Senate and House back in Democrats’ control, Garcia, Wyden and other congressional leaders will be able to lead and steer investigations into the US president, his allies and agenda.

“We have the power to go to the courts on behalf of the House. We have the power of contempt, and not just criminal contempt, but civil contempt that goes to the courts. We have the power of subpoena,” Garcia told Punchbowl News.

Other reports spelled out more potential investigations.

Garcia’s team indicated it would be investigating “The Trump Crime Family, Crony corporations ripping off the American people, Corrupt Trump admin officials profiting off the presidency, Associates of Jeffrey Epstein” and then specifically called out Corey Lewandowski, who stands accused of funneling contracts at the Department of Homeland Security to allies.

Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Wednesday issued a job posting for new oversight, investigative and legislative counsel.

“House Judiciary Democrats are prepared to put an end to the rampant and out-of-control corruption overflowing the Trump swamp,” the committee wrote Wednesday on social platform X.

“Through investigations and legislation we will work to expose, counter and dismantle the grift and the graft, the ongoing corruption of government and the outrageous destruction of the rule of law. We will be unflinching in our defense of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

And House Homeland Security Committee Democrats told Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “clear your calendar.”

The first out of the gate to try and flee is Harmeet Dhillon, who made a mockery of the traditional mission of the civil rights division of the justice department, whose departure was announced yesterday by attorney general Todd Blanche.

Dhillon dramatically transformed the civil rights division in a little over a year and a half there, reorienting its mission away from the work it had traditionally done protecting the civil rights of minorities. Under her leadership, the department dropped many cases alleging discrimination against racial minorities in voting, housing, employment and education. Scores of career lawyers also left the division under her leadership, leading to an exodus of expertise of civil rights enforcement.

Dhillon aggressively pursued claims of discrimination at universities, including claims that minorities were unfairly favored in admissions and claims of antisemitism against Jewish students. A whistleblower has said that investigations into the schools were conducted with a predetermined outcome and that lawyers were told to find a reason to file a lawsuit.

The civil rights division also oversaw investigations into the killing of US citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal agents in Minnesota during an immigration enforcement surge – neither has resulted in criminal charges.

“From day one, Harmeet Dhillon abdicated her responsibility to enforce our nation’s federal civil rights laws and destroyed the crown jewel of the justice department,” said Kristen Clarke, who led the civil rights division under Joe Biden and is now general counsel at the NAACP.

“Instead of protecting the civil rights of all Americans, she abandoned cases, purged the work force and weaponized the division to target institutions to achieve illegitimate, partisan goals.”

The division also had some high-profile failures under Dhillon’s watch. It sued more than two dozen states for voter roll information and lost every single case. Several of the judges who ruled against the department were appointed by Donald Trump,

“Harmeet Dhillon has been the most destructive, lawless and hateful head of the civil rights division in DoJ history,” said Stacey Young, a former civil rights division lawyer who now leads the group Justice Connection, a group for justice department alumni.

Then earlier today, two other top justice department officials also resigned.

There are rumors swirling around of others seeking exits. One is that Marco Rubio is eying leaving, no doubt to create some distance from Trump for his expected attempt to win the Republican nomination for president in 2028. His main rival JD Vance has no choice but to stay with Trump though he issued a lengthy tweet blaming the Republican losses on the Iran war. That is a facile self-serving explanation since that is the one issue he thinks can try to evade complicity with. The fact is that the loss was a repudiation of Trumpism in general and he has been an enthusiastic warrior in that unpopular cause.

Another rumor is that Pete Hegseth, who thinks he might be impeached, is also planning an exit strategy based on getting himself appointed to the senate seat in Tennessee that is currently held by Marsha Blackburn who just won election as governor. He could wait until she is sworn in as governor on January 16 and have her appoint him. Or Blackburn could resign her senate seat before that and the current Republican governor of Tennessee could appoint Hegseth to fill the vacancy. In either case, he would hold the senate seat until the end of her scheduled term in 2030.

Then there are the rumors about the US Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas (78) and Sam Alito (76) are the two oldest members of the court. They are also the most partisan right wingers. If they leave after the new congress is sworn in, the Democratic majority in the senate will be able to block any Trump nominee who is as extremely right wing. So one plan is for either one or both to resign immediately and then the current Senate can quickly approve their replacements. It would be one of the most shamelessly partisan moves in court history, exceeding even Mitch McConnell holding up Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. Obama nominated him in March 2016 after Antonin Scalia died but McConnell, then the senate majority leader, refused to bring the nomination to the senate. Garland’s nomination expired when that congress ended. After Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, he nominated Neil Gorsuch who was then confirmed.

On the other hand, Thomas and Alito seem to love being on the court and pushing their rightwing agenda and they may try to hold on until 2028 and hope that a new congress might be more open to having a new Republican president nominate replacements like them. This is a long shot strategy and would collapse if Democrats win the presidency in 2028 so Republicans might try to pressure them to leave sooner.

Trump and the Republicans are also trying to squeeze as many judicial confirmations as possible before the new Democratic majority takes office on January 3.

Whether these rumors have any validity is not known. What is clear is that Trump and the Republicans are capable of trying anything to hold on to the remaining shreds of their power.

The Probability Broach, Appendix

In sketching his anarcho-capitalist utopia, L. Neil Smith wanted to put his best foot forward. Among other things, that means he wanted his world to appeal to all kinds of people, and not just white men.

In contrast to Ayn Rand, who loudly endorsed the prejudices of her era (for example, she denounced Asian culture and food, called Native Americans “savages” who had no right to their own homeland, believed women should be subservient to men, and tried to pretend slavery never happened), Smith was at least somewhat concerned about equality. He’s eager to show that his fictional North American Confederacy has less racism and less sexism than the real world.

That is, until we come to this line of the appendix:

89 1865 Actor John Wilkes Booth murdered by obscure Illinois lawyer.

As I previously mentioned, in Smith’s history, Abraham Lincoln assassinated John Wilkes Booth, rather than vice versa. You might think that this is a meaningless historical inversion, silliness for its own sake. But no: Smith despised Abraham Lincoln.

He said that Lincoln should have been put on trial for war crimes like the Nazis at Nuremberg. He said that pennies should be melted down, five-dollar bills should be shredded, and the Lincoln Memorial should be destroyed by wrecking ball. He snarled, “Libertarians know Lincoln as the worst President America has ever had to suffer.”

Why so much venom? In an essay on his archived personal website, “The American Lenin“, he explains why:

Suppose a woman—with plenty of personal faults herself, let that be stipulated—desired to leave her husband: partly because he made a regular practice, in order to go out and get drunk, of stealing money she had earned herself by raising chickens or taking in laundry; and partly because he’d already demonstrated a proclivity for domestic violence the first time she’d complained about his stealing.

Now, when he stood in the doorway and beat her to a bloody pulp to keep her home, would we memorialize him as a hero? Or would we treat him like a dangerous lunatic who should be locked up, if for no other reason, then for trying to maintain the appearance of a relationship where there wasn’t a relationship any more? What value, we would ask, does he find in continuing to possess her in an involuntary association, when her heart and mind had left him long ago?

If it’s not completely clear, the Southern states are the battered wife in this analogy, and Lincoln is the brutal domestic abuser. He held the Union together by force, when some of the states would have preferred to secede. In Smith’s anarchist view, that’s the greatest crime imaginable.

But that’s not all; Smith offers more reasons for his ire. He also says that Lincoln was to blame for the South wanting to secede in the first place:

History tells us that Lincoln was a politically ambitious lawyer who eagerly prostituted himself to northern industrialists who were unwilling to pay world prices for their raw materials and who, rather than practice real capitalism, enlisted brute government force—”sell to us at our price or pay a fine that’ll put you out of business”—for dealing with uncooperative southern suppliers. That’s what a tariff’s all about. In support of this “noble principle”, when southerners demonstrated what amounted to no more than token resistance, Lincoln permitted an internal war to begin that butchered more Americans than all of this country’s foreign wars—before or afterward—rolled into one.

This is a reference to tariffs such as the Morrill Tariff, which was passed shortly before the Civil War. The tariff was a tax on imported goods such as metal tools, machinery and textiles—the idea being to weaken European competition and boost the growing Northern industrial base. But Southern states, whose plantation economy relied on cheap imported goods, hated the tariff. Smith, as a libertarian, takes the South’s side and argues that free trade is a sacred right, so any law that impedes it must be evil.

Now wait just a minute, you must be shouting. Maybe the Southern states had reason to dislike tariffs, but they practiced human slavery on an industrial scale. What’s more, it was enforced with extreme brutality and arbitrary terror. How can that not figure into Smith’s thinking? How can an anarchist libertarian, who claims to value liberty above all else, not cheer the downfall of this monstrous system? What’s really the lesser evil here?

Here’s his answer to that:

The fact is, Lincoln didn’t abolish slavery at all, he nationalized it, imposing income taxation and military conscription upon what had been a free country before he took over—income taxation and military conscription to which newly “freed” blacks soon found themselves subjected right alongside newly-enslaved whites. If the civil war was truly fought against slavery—a dubious, “politically correct” assertion with no historical evidence to back it up—then clearly, slavery won.

With this passage, all of Smith’s pretensions to anti-racism evaporate in a puff of smoke.

This paragraph lays bare the ugly, seething racism beneath the surface of right-wing libertarianism. Smith may have abolished slavery in his fictional world, but when push comes to shove, he still downplays and excuses slavery in the real world.

In the libertarian view, having to pay a percentage of your income in taxes, or being drafted into the army to protect your country in time of war, is exactly the same as living in brutal 24/7 servitude to a master who forces you to perform backbreaking labor for no pay; who tears families apart for profit; who forbids you from traveling or getting an education; and who can have you tortured or murdered for showing the slightest hint of resistance or resentment.

Smith’s extreme binary thinking sees no distinction between these scenarios. Needless to say, anyone who’s actually experienced racism or other kinds of prejudice knows the difference.

The obvious historical reality is that enslaved people wanted to escape and did so whenever they could. In later generations, Black people migrated to the North in huge numbers to escape Jim Crow and other kinds of institutionalized prejudice. In Smith’s view, there was no reason to do this. Since the North had taxes, it was just trading one kind of slavery for another—a monstrously ignorant and insulting dismissal of the lived reality of millions of people who survived unimaginable terrors.

Right-wingers like Smith engage in revisionist history because the Civil War causes them cognitive dissonance. They don’t want to admit that the side that wanted centralized government and more economic regulation was also the anti-slavery side, and the side that wanted small government and laissez-faire was pro-slavery. It casts an unflattering light on their pretenses to moral superiority.

In his fiction, Smith’s solution was to rewrite history to put everyone on the “right” side. In the real world, this move isn’t available, so instead he tries to obfuscate the record and reduce the Civil War to a solely economic dispute provoked by the tyrant Lincoln.

But this revisionist history founders on the fact that we have the Confederate states’ declarations of secession. We can read the reasons they wrote. And each and every one of them cites the preservation of slavery as their chief motive. It’s small wonder that libertarians want to whitewash the record and retreat into fantasy rather than address the evidence in front of them.

Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach

Also, she directly challenges the ineffective leadership of the current Democratic party.

This is going to be great.

He’s afraid. Trump looked at the election results and was terrified that in two years, at most, his legacy was going to be demolished, and his legacy, of course, is the tacky gold geegaws he has glued to the walls of the oval office. That’s his precious. He thinks of himself as a builder, an architectural genius, and that he will be remembered for his gifts to the American people: his stupid ballroom that no one asked for, his line of presidential portraits that mock his predecessors, his helipad, his tasteless golden decorations, his arch, his insufferable efforts to put his name on every cultural landmark. They’re all going to be swept away as one of the first and easiest act of his successor. He knows it. We all know it. Whoever takes the oval office someday, we’re all going to be disappointed if they don’t erase that stupid man’s ugly efforts to mar a historical place.

We know that is what he fears, because he rushed to his office to sign another executive proclamation to say they can’t do that.

In the days since his party suffered historic defeats in the midterm elections, the president has seemingly turned his attention to the many renovation projects he has begun across the nation’s capital. Sitting behind the Resolute Desk on Thursday, Trump declared the Oval Office a national monument.

I’m going to be signing a document which will make them into a landmark for the ages, he told reporters in the gold-covered Oval Office.

According to the president, the proclamation would ensure the West Wing rooms would not be touched by anybody, destroyed, ripped down by stupid people, in order to build something in a slightly different shape.

I just thought it was very important that nobody be allowed to come and take it down and try and do something with it, he said.

Every once in a while they’ll look and they’ll say, oh, maybe what we’ll do is we’ll put some glass up that’s a little bit better or something, and I say no, you’re not going to do anything. We’re going to leave this as it is, he continued.

If anyone ever decides to come and start knocking down walls, you’ll call me wherever I may be, and I will come back here and I will make sure it never happens.

Right. The president who ignored laws and planning regulations to take a bulldozer to the East Wing now thinks his signature is all it takes to keep his petty treasures in the face of all future presidents. He’s stupid.

He’s not King Arthur, who will rise from his tomb to restore his kingdom when it is threatened. He’s going to be rotting in his grave, where the only gold he’ll see is the trickle of urine from all the visitors there to revel in his defeat.

Russell Brand has been found guilty of raping a fan and sexually assaulting three other women, ending a years-long legal saga that has raised questions about how he was able to commit his crimes at the height of his fame.

Brand, 51, was described during his trial as a ruthless, calculated and manipulative sexual predator. He was convicted of raping a woman at his luxury London townhouse and of sexually assaulting women in front of his entourage at their workplaces, at a radio station and TV studio.

The Hollywood actor turned online influencer was accused of gaslighting his victims after the attacks, and treating women as a “disposable commodity” and a “means to an end” to satisfy his voracious sexual appetite.

The description of his acts as presented during the trial were sickening. He seemed to act like a deranged maniac with women.

Apparently police are investigating new allegations that surfaced recently.

It’s getting close to the end. We had a biology discipline meeting today — 9 faculty sitting around a table and over zoom — to discuss teaching load and classes for the 2027-2028 school year. That’s normally an interesting meeting, where we propose new classes and assign faculty to required courses, a lot of compromise and discussion. But guess what? I have nothing to contribute since I’ll be fully retired then.

It was a mix of oh boy, relief, I don’t have to teach that course, and oh no, that’s my course, I’ve been teaching it for 25 years. This peculiar disconnect is going to get worse as this year proceeds.

Russell Brand has been getting increasingly weird and desperate — he has become frantically Christian. It may be that the motive driving his bizarre religiosity and political extremism may have been guilt, or maybe fear of getting called to account.

Pray harder, and chant harder, Russell. He’s been convicted of rape and three counts of sexual assault, and while he hasn’t been sentenced yet, and the judge has said, “I therefore have to remand you into custody.” He’s going to jail!

This ballot measure would prohibit biological males from competing in school sports reserved for females and require students to provide a signed statement from a healthcare provider verifying their biological sex based on reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup or natural testosterone levels.

The practical results of that would be that young girls who wanted to participate in sports would have to pull their pants down and get their genitals inspected.

It passed.

For shame. At least King County, where I grew up, rejected it. The rest of the state is just full of panty-sniffing peeping perverts, I guess.

I am not a historian, but from what I remember from elementary school, this is a pretty good summation of that particular part of Czech history. So if you are interested in that, I recommend listening to this too.

Unfortunately, Eleanor’s pronunciation of Czech people’s and places’ names is a mixed bag. That is not her fault – it is very, very rare for a foreigner to get this right; our language is really difficult, especially for Anglophones. Although I do find some of it a bit baffling, tbh.¹

One example of bad pronunciation: Tábor. She pronounced the “á” as “a” in “baker”, whereas it should be pronounced in every word more akin to how it sounds in “father”. I had real trouble finding an English word that has this sound. “Á” differs from “A”, which is always pronounced as in “gap”.

On the other hand, she pronounced “Žižka” correctly, which I would expect to be more difficult for an English speaker since English doesn’t have “Ž”. Go figure.

¹ I find it a bit baffling that Anglophones, when learning Czech, insist on trying to guess the pronunciation of each unfamiliar word based on how they would instinctively pronounce it if it were an English word, given that English does not have any rules for pronunciation/transliteration whatsoever.² For example, “oo” in English sounds differently in: flood, floor, moon. In Czech, in an absolute majority of instances, each letter in the word is pronounced, and it is pronounced always exactly the same. The three aforementioned English words would be transcribed as: flad, flór, můn. Yet every Anglophone whom I have ever met struggles with learning these strict and easy pronunciation rules and insists on guessing as if English had rules (it doesn’t).
There are, of course, exceptions and difficult grammatical problems, but silent letters and similar nonsense are very rare, and cases of the same letter/letter combinations being pronounced differently in different words are almost nonexistent. At least I cannot remember any from the top of my head.

² One rule for pronunciation is to pronounce short Czech names for each letter quickly after one another, and in 99,9% cases the word emerges. We teach little children to read this way. And boy, are Czechs caught off guard when learning to read English after that.