Strictly for the birds

After this week from wherever is below Hell, here’s something with no human involvement: birds at the feeder.

 

These aren’t actually birds that I want to encourage. Not  sure exactly what they are, species-wise; I only know they’re greedy pigs who can empty a feeder in a New York minute.

What’s fascinating to me is that there appears to be one Momma and several adolescent kids. I mean, they look adult, but they’re clamoring for Momma to feed-us-feed-us-feed-us, like babies.

Since I shot this I’ve been experimenting with adding fishing weights to the spring-loaded feeder. Trying to get a weight that allows the little birdies to eat but clamps shut when any of these bullies lands. So far I’ve got rid of the really big ones, but still getting some of these guys.

Order in the court

I saw the news on the way home yesterday that Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from SCOTUS. That means the Kleptocrat gets another seat on the court. He already had a free pass with Neil Gorsuch—that was the appointment that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Reptile – Kentucky) stole from President Obama by refusing to consider his nominee for the last year of his presidency.

McConnell—whose greatest ambition is to return us to those halcyon days of the Nineteenth Century, when women and darkies knew their place—has already announced that the Senate will be voting in the fall (i.e., before the mid-term elections) on whichever crack-brained right-wing nut job Space Cadet Bone Spurs nominates.

The Gorsuch Court has already done serious harm to America—upholding the Muslim travel ban, retaining blatantly gerrymandered districts… Another Nazi on the bench will overturn Roe v. Wade.

Not only are we totally screwed, but our kids and their kids are screwed.

Civil matters

You’ll no doubt have noticed that the party of “Lock her up”, “Rope, Tree, Journalist”, separating toddlers from their parents and tossing them both in separate prisons in their thousands, cutting off healthcare to millions, literally shouting down Democratic colleagues, calling the cops on bar-be-cuers, yelling racial epithets from moving vehicles, and tweeting lies and vile threats to practically anyone from official accounts—they’re suddenly every one of them shocked—utterly shocked and horrified by the incivility they’re encountering from…people who have started pushing back against their affronts to decent society.

Yes, the GOPigs have had their minions pore through the dictionary to find le mot juste, and pulled out their pop-beads to clutch as they use that word. Over and over. With voices shaking in outrage.

The Repugs really understand neither irony nor that whole goose-gander equality thing.

There’ve been numerous instances of this. But the biscuit-taking prince would be David Gergen, who served as a talking head in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations, and who has been one of CNN’s political talking heads for a while. Because on Monday, Gergen’s mouth went on flapping long after his brain stopped sending any intelligent thoughts its way.

Specifically, he pronounced that there has never been a time in American discourse so divisive as our present one. Not even…not even the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements in the 60s and 70s. No, no—a guy who served in Nixon’s White House said:

“I cannot remember a time—the Anti-War movement in Vietnam… The Civil Rights movement in the 60s and early 70s. Both of those were much more civil in tone.”

And then he doubled down: “Even the Anti-War movement was more civil in tone but certainly the Civil Rights movement among the people who were protesting…”

Dave, Dave—put down the Ambien and back away from the microphone.

More civil? More effing civil?

Back in the 60s and 70s, we went on strike. We took to the streets. We shut down universities. We blocked Army convoys. We poured blood on Selective Service records. We burned draft cards, We burned bras. We went to jail. We went to Canada. We marched from Selma to Montgomery. We rode buses. We took over the National Mall. We rioted outside national political conventions. We were escorted by the National Guard into grade schools.

More civil?

We shouted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” We sang “We Shall Overcome”.  When they told us to shut the fuck up, we yelled even louder.

They doused us with firehoses. They fired tear gas grenades at us. They set attack dogs on us. They cracked open our heads with truncheons. They used electric cattle prods on us. They fired rifles at us.

More civil?

Our blood was splattered across college campuses, school yards, national parks, draft boards, city streets, lunch counters.

They burned crosses on our lawns. They bombed our churches. They lynched our sons. They murdered us. Our bodies were scattered from Watts to Kent State to Mississippi.

They shot Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, before our eyes.

There was nothing—not one fucking thing—civil about it.

If you doubt me, there is ample evidence from contemporary news reports, written, photographic and film. It was literally in all the papers, and on all the evening news broadcasts, day after day, year after year. You’d think that a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a CNN pundit would be aware of that. But evidently you’d be wrong. 

(Upon reflection, I suppose it's possible that our Dave is engaging in wishful thinking, imagining he lived through the pretty time when gallantry took its last bow, that world of cavaliers and cotton fields, where gentlemen like him, sippin' bourbon in the Big House, heard nary a whisper from the womenfolk or the slaves. A world that was so much better than the one that, in fact, was there.)

And no, we will not shut up; we will not pretend that this cattle car of fascists represents American values; we will not be talked over; we will not be shouted down. In the words of one hero of these days, we are reclaiming our time.

And you can stuff your one-sided application of civility up right beside that poker you’re sitting on. Y'all released the Kraken. Deal.

Baby bumper

I was down to the ABC store a couple of weeks ago. As I was getting out of my car, I noticed this, uh, license plate decoration:

And I wondered about the story behind it.

I mean—it’s not just the little critter. What’s up with the pacifier?

M-maybe it's a...hat?

Gratitude Monday: dining out

As I write this post, I’ve got a fan going at the wind tunnel setting in my living room, with four holes in my walls.

This is because last Thursday I was working from home and realized my bare feet were wet. Water was seeping up through the floor throughout an area about 4’x10’ along the wall I share with my neighbor’s dining room. I called the condo management association and spent the day waiting for their plumber to come out. He cut three of the holes, in an attempt to find the source of the flood, before he went next door and discovered that my neighbor’s ice maker was leaking, and her floor was flooded, too.

Well, he fixed the ice maker, but as it wasn’t clear whether that was the cause of my disaster (it might have been the torrential rains we’ve been having), the condo association sent a contractor out on Friday, who cut a hole in the wall approximately where the refrigerator is on the other side. The short version of this story is that both the plumber and the contractor believe the ice maker is the source of the water, and therefore the water damage. But just to be sure, I have to live with four holes in my living room walls, with buckled floor boards, rugs rolled up in another room and a fan going to try to dry things out. The thinking is, if there are no more leaks, then it was the ice maker, and I’ll have to put in a claim with my neighbor’s insurance to rip up and replace the floor (and remediate any mold underneath it), patch and paint my walls, and whatever.

All this when I don’t even know for sure that I’ll have a job next week.

But even so—I have reason to be thankful. Because Friday night a tiny (26 seats) restaurant in Lexington, Virginia (home to the Virginia Military Institute, but also to Washington and Lee University) asked a party of eight, which included Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to leave. The owner had polled her staff—some of whom are LBGTQ—and when they said they did not want to have to serve that lying, bigoted, arrogant, soulless mouthpiece for the Kleptocrat, the owner asked Sanders to leave.

Which she did, although she used her official press secretary Twitter account to whine about it the next day, lying once again about how she’s always polite and treats people respectfully—as though her pressers aren’t recorded for all to see her at her reprehensible worst come day, go day, week after week.

(It was a bad restaurant week for foot soldiers in Cadet Bone Spurs’ army: chief Nazi Stephen Miller and Aryan DHS Rottenführer Kirstjen Nielsen were both shouted out of DC restaurants by protesters. Mexican restaurants. They were eating in upscale Mexican restaurants after orchestrating the policy of imprisoning asylum seekers at the Mexican border. Talk about yer cojones grandes.)

Leaving aside the protestors yelling “Shame! Shame!” (which is absolutely their right, although pretty painful for other patrons in the cavernous space where Nielsen was videoed), I’m a little uncomfortable that restaurants can start denying service to people based on their lying scumbaggery when they are not otherwise disrupting the place of business. Being a fascist mouthpiece is not a protected class, like race, ethnicity, religion, gender identification or sexual orientation, though. And I admit that it gives me enormous satisfaction to know that these despicable humanoids are tasting some of the rotten fruit they’re so happy to dish out to others.

But the Red Hen restaurant is now facing not unexpected backlash from the MAGAts, including death threats that forced them to close on Saturday. Losing a Saturday night’s revenue is tough for a business that runs on such tight margins. The Deplorables have also invaded the restaurant’s Yelp, Google Reviews and Facebook pages, leaving badly spelled one-star reviews. It’s possible that the restaurant will be closed for a while, which could be disastrous for owners and staff. “For a while” could well become “permanently”.

So here’s what I’m grateful for today: following the example of someone on Twitter, I ordered a Red Hen gift card, and asked that it be sent to Project Horizon, a Lexington-based organization that helps victims of domestic violence. 

Looking at their menu, $40 is not going to go far, but it’s about five days' worth of meals from downtown DC food trucks. (I don’t buy my lunches at work precisely because of the expense, but I reckon that one week’s potential lunches is a fair amount to contribute.) I do not know that I’ll have a job after this week, but I’ve got one now, and I can use some of my income to help the principled folks at the Red Hen and give someone from Project Horizon a treat.

That balances out the holes, the fan and the mold.