Without looking at what she said here, I have to groan at the headline. Apparently it is inflammatory to knock on Kwanzaa — as though its founder is in sullied and totally virtuous.

It is sometimes somewhat difficult to split the atoms for radicals and activists who move in and out of the FBI orbit, or become somewhat get sponsored by our intelligence agencies. In not wanting to see the Black Panthers take hold, they throw money — clandestinely — to Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga as he takes up his version of Black Nationalism — one of a type which sees him moving into conspiracy theories on how OJ Simpson was set up by that very same FBI that once sponsored him.

On Kwanzaa being an “artificial” or ” made up” holiday — aren’t they all? I suppose there is a dilemma that this observance hasn’t any connection to the African nations that its supposedly getting back at (except as inspiration, which gets hazy with myth), but you can suggest the same disconnect with Christmas through history. Its actual adherents do so in a complementary cafeteria selection of those other holidays. Christmas or Ramadan with a slice of Kwanzaa.

Taking two to tangle, a separate set of observations on the deliverer and recipient of the veiled insult — “Let’s go, Brandon.” The Bidens, reportedly, “did not seem aware” of “Let’s go, Brandon” as conservative anti-him comment. And that is the Oscar’s Razor to his ” sure, sure” good natured response. But on the other hand, if you are Biden, you really do not want to dwell on this good natured presidential honorific occasion, best not to waste time dwell that the guy slipped in a “f you”. A bit of a “can’t win” occasion — though, the good thing on that “can’t win” is does you do land on a “who cares?”. Sliding past with no (or little) acknowledgement is the best course, even if the overwhelming opinion is ” old man, out of touch, doesn’t even know the opposition’s popular insults toward him”.

And I can’t even say what it would mean if he did not. Twitter is not the world and all that.

For the deliverer, he becomes a “folk hero” for fifteen minutes. In this day and age it does appear enough enough to give him speech a time at cpac or a Trump rally/ Trump lead RNC convention. But you throw yourself back to the Bush administration, and that era of “Shut up and sing”. Damnedit it if someone smacking at Bush wouldn’t have just been accused of ” undermining the war effort” by much the same group making this guy their folk hero.

To be sure, when following up in a speakers’ platform after a celebrity made a pointed anti-Bush jibe, the former President was good at making that “good to have strongly held opinions” jibe. Though such would hardly be sensible in Biden’s situation.

The headline: West Virginia car dealer, son of US rep files pre-candidacy for governor…

Seeing the image accompanying the story and I am thinking — Huh. West Virginia is more Progressive than I thought.

Apparently on the verge of either a Civil War or a Nazi take-over. If I read this this right, it is because Joe Manchin has blockaded the elderly Joe Biden’s big budget program, thus alienating the youth and leaving them to move to Fascism and Communism. Woe to the alternate universe where the Republicans had won the Georgia senate seats at the top of the year so Mitch McConnell would have successfully blockaded the elderly Joe Biden’s earlier big budget program that Manchin let sail through in our reality. Then the youth — who usedta tolerate the aging President but now hate him — would be going even further right than the Fascists and even further left than the Communists. Which is about what this guy is advocating… I think?

The great hope to avoid the disaster apparently lies in the resurrection of Hillary Clinton as Hail Mary last gasp candidate in 2024. There lay a faint weep in the politico editorial to this affect — like, no one thinks this will work, but it is all we gots. Anyways, Hillary Clinton delivered parts of her planned victory speech… For everyone… interested…

I want to hear Dukakis’s speech next!

So, Trump churning about … The Jan 6th events to turn into the equivalent of the Beer Hall Putsch if successful…

Or so you gander from Trump’s ruminations on what stood in his way that day…

Or maybe as the National Review thinks… Apathy will defeat the coming hordes. Allegiances drawn away from politicos and toward… Individual pursuits. Mixed Martial Arts and Beyonce. Something.

(…)

I suppose your Seattle Seahawks fan half wishes to just have the season cancelled altogether — yeah, half of the Rams team was out on covid and they came this close to getting an easy win by forfeiture! — but then rescheduling for Tuesday and… Here on a “wintry mix Sunday”, where not wanting to venture out — watching professional football becomes appealing enough — but that Seahawks game is off the table…

Hey!  Even if the team is only slightly in a playoff picture remember: They are ALL exhibition games.

In this day and age where the Internet makes these broadcast map schedules meaningless, and I am a click away from seeing any damned game, this still presents curiousities:

Tuesday brings two games at the same time — and it is understandable that Seahawks / Rams is thrown to the West and Eagles / Football Team is thrown at the East, but then come the exceptions.  I see that the St Louis area still gets Rams games — residual support from when the team was located there just a few years’ back.  We see Green Bay, Detroit, and Cleveland get the west game — I do not know — maybe they figure Detroit still wants to see their old quarterback play.  I figure New Mexico gets dragged into the NFC East market by way of deciding they want the teams most directly fighting Dallas.

So, what I am left with… What I want to know is… That small strip at the top of Wyoming.  And odd hat in Western Nebraska?  Are there a couple of small colleges with a player on one of those NFC East teams?

This parody from the conservative / right-wing Babylon Bee — paralleling some plot points of GK Chesterson’s Man Who Was Tuesday as well an Onion article on media undercover in the Kim — initially lands on a kind of “funny, but not particularly germane to the real.” Or — the January 6th capitol incursion and Michigan governor kidnapping plots were not FBI projects, so screw this.

On second glance, though, the grand event from last summer– I am having some trouble recalling precisely what it was but it was supposed to be a gathering of mean jerks on Washington — does slide easily into this “FBI project” narrative. But I suspect it was done so on purpose — the FBI kept its fingerprints all over in plain sight to discourage the 1/6 ers from taking part — which they all did, with a lot of internet social media calling it out — a disruption move from Intelligence and a conspiracy’s conspiracy.

The problem of the day comes in listening to the Election day podcast of the Babylon Bee with guest Jonah Goldberg chiming in that Trump isn’t Hitler — and he will leave after the likely presidential loss peacefully –we won’t have a private “Downfall” speech. He spoke too soon. What you have to watch right now is round about here.:

Finally, not only is Trump endorsing earlier in national races, but he’s also backing candidates in state-level elections, particularly for secretary of state.

Trump has endorsed candidates for secretary of state — a state’s top election official — in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan. This is an unusually niche endorsement for a president to make; Trump didn’t endorse in any secretary of state primaries in 2018, for instance. But the logic here is clear: These three secretaries of state in question refused to overturn the 2020 presidential result in their states, and Trump is now attempting to fill these positions with officials who baselessly think the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Is this enough for an alternate counting designation in these states to slide in as electors with 2024’s q-shaman serving as enforcer? Lordy hell. And here it appears to take less shamelessness on Trump’s part — an admission of defeat — to get to that dramatic meme deployed speech… Not in keeping with future political strategy.

Within the comments section of am-con on an article on the major issue dominating all political opinion sites this week — Abortion — I find one deploying a productive use of conspiracy theory, conspiracy theory being a useful tool for working out counter- historical narratives and financing the various political crowds winds at work in the culture.:

Back in the 1970s, a few years after the Roe decision, I heard a rumor that the case came about because of a conspiracy by the usual shadowy elites to bypass the legislative process and slap nationwide abortion rights into place by judicial fiat, because they were in a hurry, because they were scared. What they were scared of was another conspiracy, this one by radical feminists, to create a network of underground clinics offering safe, low-cost or free abortions and other gynecological services that were either illegal or difficult to get through the medical establishment, served up with a dose of radical politics. This would have been around 1971, during the raging heat of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Radical political groups such as the Weather Underground had demonstrated an ability to run rings around law enforcement. The elites supposedly feared that these underground clinics, which had political indoctrination as their real purpose, would be effective enough to tip the balance and bring about revolution. They hoped that, just as the repeal of Prohibition crippled organized crime by making alcohol a legitimate retail business again, so the legalization of abortion would cripple the radicals.

Now let’s imagine that it was all true and that the spiritual granddaughters of those radical feminists of fifty years ago still have those plans, keeping them updated to allow for things like social media and the morning after pill, ready to activate when abortion is outlawed. Roe is reversed this year. How is the abortion situation going to look five years from now? How is the political situation going to look? Assuming that, between moral suasion and increased conscientiousness about birth control, only a quarter of a million American women are receiving abortions and political indoctrination at these underground clinics (as opposed to the upwards of 600,000 who got legal abortions in 2016, the most recent year for which Wikipedia has data). What will the political spectrum look like?

Dipping into the electoral effects and meaning of public opinions — one where an ease toward the word “extremist” to describe political opinions held by many a friendly neighbor or relative, so became a hard edged sword that to bandy about “leads to suspicion of mere pandering” —

We are left right now with a lot of cries of “Legitimacy of the court will be destroyed” warning with that looming court ruling — and this beings to mind a question of wanting to sync up polling data on the court with previous unpopular rulings. 1962’s Engel v. Vitale — the end of school prayer — had an approval roughly according to what polls suggest on Roe v Wade — maybe? Data becomes oddly wishy-washy, and mostly you see people just wanting to affirm general impressions — for Roe we really do have a kind of “ugh. Good enough.”. This graph for this century on opinions relating to the Court with a ” good enough” for calling in “legitimacy” (numbers are on approval / disapproval)– The only thing I can note is that right at the top — 2001 — people mad at “Bush v Gore” figured not much at all in driving the numbers down, but there was something that crashed the Institution in 2005 and 2012.

I do suspect the ruling lands on over-rated. It scrambled partisan political coalitions, perhaps, but it was Nation writer Katha Pollit who hypothized “we woukd be right where we are now” absent the ruling in terms of procedure and practicalities. So, in postulating a “post Roe” nation of even more uneven Abortion coverage in the nation — the symbolism for the oppression of things needs to happen be updated– there are no “coat-hangers”, unless you can say the coat-hangers are in ” pill form”. Makes for an odd image for signage — less clear cut.