Cognitive Decline: In Washington, it's a contagious disease

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Medical Correspondent Vincent Boom-Batz, M.D.

The media has been spilling a lot of pixels these days ruminating without evidence about Joe Biden's cognitive decline.  Here's just a few egregious examples from the last two weeks alone:

🚨🚨Scoop: Biden’s cheat sheets - use of note cards, pre-screened questions worries donors. https://t.co/i2XptZAAOk

— Jim VandeHei (@JimVandeHei) February 23, 2024

Do you prepare for important meetings? Court hearings?  Speeches?   Congratulations, you may be a vegetable! 

If you don't believe us (or conventional-wisdom fount Axios), just ask The New York Times:

It appears that cognitive decline is contagious.  Consider the nonstop farrago of incomprehensible demented nonsense from the Tangerine-Faced Defendant.  In just one speech he was unable to pronounce “evangelical,” claimed he was leading Nikki Haley by 91 points, complained about “swastickers” plastered on buildings in Washington, said unnamed woke types were replacing baseball fields with “knocker” fields, said everyone agreed with overturning Roe, and repeated the mainstream Republican talking point that doctors were killing babies after they were born.

Those ravings followed hard on the heels of his confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, and then later claiming he intended to “interpose” the two names to make a (false) point:

"It’s very hard to be sarcastic when I interpose," Trump told the crowd. "I’m not a Nikki fan and I’m not a Pelosi fan. And when I purposely interpose names they said, ‘He didn’t know Pelosi from Nikki from tricky Nikki, tricky Dicky."

But somehow our mainstream media's cognitive abilities short-circuit when it comes to highlighting the overwhelming evidence of Trump's dementia. You might argue that this cognitive breakdown is severe enough to warrant replacing the broken-down old hacks now covering the election with younger journalists who haven't yet lost their ability to report what's really going on.

Just this week, the failing memories of the press were displayed again in the coverage of the Alabama Supreme Court's decision to outlaw IVF on the grounds that the embryos frozen in those test tubes are bouncing bundles of baby joy entitled to the same protections as real live human beings who can be seen without a microscope.

The decision was made possible by the bent Supreme Court's overruling of Roe, on the grounds that states can and should be entrusted to make decisions about matters like reproductive rights and the definition of human life.  Many states had already said that a fertilized egg was as human as the baby Jesus, but those laws had been nullified by Roe. 

As a result of Trump packing the Supreme Court with three new bent forced-birthers, 

there are fears around not only what this means for the future of IVF in Alabama, but reproductive rights across the country. Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, emphasized this didn’t just happen because of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling — and it didn’t start with overturning Roe v. Wade, either.

“There has been a concerted effort in Alabama and elsewhere for years to give legal rights to embryos and fetuses,” Kolbi-Molinas said. “Extremist politicians see decisions like this as part of the building blocks to force the U.S. Supreme Court to eventually say that not only are states permitted to ban abortion, but if embryos and fetuses have legal rights the same way as people, then states must ban abortion.”

This was apparent to anyone who followed the issue of reproductive freedom over the past 40 years.  Some, like Ross the boy no one would have lunch with Leverett House, intended this very outcome.

Others like NPR tried to sound the alarm:

“What is happening is that for 50 years, there has been a constitutional right to privacy and now that right is going away. States can pass laws banning or restricting reproductive medical procedures.” That covers abortion, but could also include IVF, as it is a process inherently focused on the creation of fertilized eggs — and what happens next with them.

And yet thanks to the cognitive decline of our media, the threat to Alabamans who want to have a child came as an utter shock:

To be fair, it's not just The New York Times that was perplexed by fetal-personhood laws and the demise of reproductive freedom.

Republicans too seem to be suffering from near-universal memory lapses and cognitive breakdown.  

Let's help them reclaim their past. Since 1996, Republican platforms have stated that fetuses are entitled to all the rights of children. Now-forgotten moderate mainstream Republican George Bush liked to emphasize the supposedly inherent humanity of embryos by trotting out in front the cameras what his flacks called “snowflake children,” which were children born from embryos (as indeed all are):

Kellyanne's ex doesn't remember much

The message was unmistakable: Within every frozen embryo were the beginnings of a[n adoptable, artificially produced] child... When Karl Zinsmeister, my domestic policy adviser, suggested inviting a group of snowflake babies to the White House, I thought the idea was perfect. Each had come from a frozen embryo that, rather than being destroyed for research, was implanted in an adoptive mother.

He was using those children as props to explain his opposition to stem cell research using frozen embryos – the same embryos that Republicans are now shocked, shocked to discover are routinely destroyed in IVF procedures.

Just this week, Republicans have piously stated their support for IVF, including the 166 House Republicans who signed onto legislation that would have granted full Constitutional rights to embryos.  These Republicans have such bad short-term memories that you have to wonder if they could pass a competency exam.

Which leads to yet another group of supposedly distinguished political savants: ex-Republicans now doing business as never-Trumper allies, who can't stop moaning about what has happened to their once beloved thoughtful moderate party.

They seem to have forgotten the last 30 years of Republican policy positions on reproductive freedom, Bush's insane spineless anti-science decision to cripple stem cell research, and, of course, the fact that three of the six bent Republican Justices who voted to overturn Roe were appointed by Presidents named Bush.  

George Conway, prominent never-Trumper has to be reminded that he cast his ballot in 2016 for his wife's employer, Trump (who appointed three bent forced-birthers to the Supreme Court, in case you like George have forgotten).  At least when called on it he had the grace to apologize, but otherwise he seems to have forgotten his years toiling in the Republican slime factories for the Federalist Society and Clinton's impeachment.

Or former Iraq warmonger Tom Nichols, who seems to have grave difficulty recalling why his shilling for George Bush's disgraceful war of lies and torture in Iraq was so terrible, including the bit about helping to form today's Republican view that the rule of law is, shall we say, optional.

We can't even characterize the case of longtime Republican neocon bag carrier Bill Kristol as cognitive decline because he started from such a low baseline.  He's forgotten that as late as 2021 he was described by The Washington Post as a “prominent anti-abortion commentator.” 

Back in the day he was the forced-birth movement's favorite yeshiva bocher:

Billy just can't remember

A story that I love is the one where Jody Bottum met with Bill Kristol about a job at The Weekly Standard. Jody told Kristol that the day the Standard wavered on the question of abortion would be the day Jody quit. Jody says Kristol “drew his finger along the desk, tapped it for emphasis and said, “We are square on life and getting squarer.”

Back in those long-ago days, the Standard used a pro-life article written by Kristol as a copy-editing test. This to warn any pro-choicer that this magazine was pro-life.

Those were the days, my friend.  

Here's five words for Billy: woman, uterus, freedom, embryo, hypocrisy. Now let's wait five minutes and see how many he can remember.

That's why when we hear plaintive mourning over the wonderful vanished Republican party of snowflake babies and fetal personhood, we wonder if these blowhards are likewise too cognitively impaired to be taken seriously as contributors to political discourse in our time.

What to do about the epidemic of cognitive decline and memory loss in Washington, afflicting as it does the Washington punditocracy, virtually every elected Republican, and even our dear precious Republican allies?

We think that they all need to take a break from their current pursuits, which clearly strain their increasingly fogged brains, and just take the time to enjoy looking at flowers and clouds from their Chevy Chase porches.

As for us, we'll go ridin' with Biden.

Red Sox Spring Training Preview: It's Time to Load the Schmucks!

It's time for that great Red Sox tradition: the loading of the schmucks!

By Spy Baseball Correspondent Sisyphus
with Jenny Herk in Ft. Myers, Florida

It's a Boston tradition as old as flipping off drivers trying to merge ahead of you on the Pike.

In the depths of winter, thousands of Red Sox fans line up in the cold on Jersey St. to participate in the Loading of the Schmucks.

Every year, the Spy's ace baseball columnist Shill Shamelessly hitchhikes down to Sox Spring Training to bring true Sox believers his peerless insights into the Olde Towne Team gained from his decades of baseball experience and close relationships with Sox insiders.– Ed.

Sox fans, take it from ol' Shill! This is the year! Better line up for Series tickets now, because this is a team of destiny

Sure you'll hear a lot of complaining from the usual Grumpy Gusses complaining about the Red Sox failing to sign any of the top-tier free agents. It would have been the easy, popular thing to do to open up John Henry's bank vault and shell out for an impact pitcher like Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Jordan Montgomery.

But the Red Sox supremo is too smart for that.  The fact that Montgomery hasn't gotten the contract he wanted proves how clever John Henry is.

Henry and his brain trust instead shrewdly invested in All-Star reliever Liam Hendriks.  No doubt he'll be ready to go by August, when the Sox are contending for a pennant, and he'll be fully recovered from both Tommy John surgery and a serious form of cancer.  Brains, not bucks – that's the Red Sox story.

And I don't want to hear a lot of whining about how the Sox let Justin Turner get away for short money. Just because Turner was the second most productive hitter in the lineup (.800 OPS, 23 home runs, and 96 RBIs) doesn't mean he was worth the $13 million those silly Blue Jays paid for him.

You've got to remember that the Red Sox are a small-market franchise.  You can't expect them to compete with New York and Los Angeles for expensive talent they way they did before 2019.

If they blow all of John Henry's hard-earned jack on overpriced players, how can you expect them to pay for that great cold cut buffet for all hungry baseball writers, including all the ice-cold 'Gansetts you can drink (or, in ol' Shill's case, stick into his backpack for later consumption at the Palmetto Bug RV Park)?

So here's a shout-out to the 2024 Red Sox and their genius front office.  If I was in the duck boat business, I'd be planning ahead for a busy November!

This winter, as past, the Red Sox are trying to stir up interest in their last-place team by celebrating the loading up of the loyal Red Sox schmucks who travel to Spring Training in Ft. Myers to celebrate the hopeful start of yet another futile Sox season.

Such cynicism, a requirement of membership in Red Sox Nation in the previous century, has returned in full force in recent years as the team that won four World Series championships in 14 years has descended back into the dull mediocrity that Sox fans enjoyed in the days of Frank Malzone and Dick Stuart.

The difference is that now the Red Sox are charging the highest prices in baseball to watch one of its worst teams.  At least when Dalton Jones played, you could watch the game from the bleachers for a buck.

Despite the crushing expense of watching the Sox either live or for a mere $30 a month on their captive TV network, Red Sox billionaire supremo John “I am the boss” Henry has decided to throw his nickels around like manhole covers while he expands his empire into crap like a bunch of tossers kicking a ball in Liverpool, wherever the f*** that is.

By the way, nobody gives two wanks about watching English soccer teams run around and do nothing for 90 minutes on Saturday morning.  Nobody, John, no f***in' body.  Am I going too fast for you?

Despite the caliber of play on the field, and the tightfisted owner's refusal to improve his outfit, the loyal schmucks are loaded up and ready for another unexciting season of Red Sox baseball.

“I look forward to going to Ft. Myers every winter and watch the team,” said schmuck Jeremiah T. Burke of Milton.  “Nothing like cashing those disability checks from the State Police and knocking back a few dozen tall cool ones,” said the former State Police Captain who was injured in the line of duty on a wet floor at Dunkin' Donuts.

His wife Kathleen Burke is another loyal schmuck: “It's so much fun to watch the players work out and run, their taut muscled bodies gleaming in the Florida sunshine.  They're so handsome all I want to do is wait outside the locker room – [I think that's enough from Mrs. Burke –Ed.]

But some schmucks believe that this is the year that the Sox can turn it around.  “This is a good young ballclub and I think that Justin Turner can really step up and be a team leader,” remarked James X. Burke of Wakefield.

Informed that the Sox had lost Turner to free agency because ownership was too cheap to pay up for him, Burke exclaimed, “F***in-A!”

The annual loading up of the schmucks has become a key part of the Red Sox marketing plan.  “Without the millions of schmucks who pay hundreds of dollars for tickets, plus another Benjamin's worth of hot dogs and beer-flavored water, we couldn't afford to give the people of Liverpool the sports team that they deserve, ” said Red Sox PR functionary Tiffany Burke.  “Not to mention $30 a month to watch a mediocre team on TV.”

“And this year we're going to have special days for all the loyal schmucks from around New England without whose support the Sox might actually have to pay for a competitive team,” she said.

“In addition to special games honoring our Maine Schmucks, Rhode Island Schmucks, and Connecticut Schmucks, we're going to target specific cities.”  She mentioned that on Pawtucket Schmuck Night, Pawtucket fans will receive a splinter from the wreckage of McCoy Stadium, abandoned by the Sox minor league affiliate when Rhode Island taxpayers refused to build them a new stadium. 

The excitement around the ceremonial loading of the schmucks was heightened this year when Sox brass announced that baseball genius Theo Epstein was coming back to recruit some deep-pocketed schmuck billionaires to buy Henry out [Surely, advise on strategic issues? – Ed.]

To long-time Red Sox Schmuck Anthony DiBurke of Attleboro, Epstein's return heralds a new age of winning baseball in Boston: “Theo's got a great eye for talent and I'm sure he'll bring in players as good as Mookie Betts.  Or better!”

It's not clear that the Red Sox will even manage to get to .500 this year with their weak staring pitching, lack of bullpen depth, and questionable offense. 

But at least we'll all be able to enjoy great Sox traditions like the season-long loading up and subsequent fleecing of the schmucks!

By the way, the equipment truck arrived in Ft. Myers.

Yard Time: Meet the hatemonger who is supposedly the best friend of 10,000 Jews of Harvard!

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Nellie Bly in Washington

Poor Harvard.  The colossus of wealth, power, championship squash teams, and privilege remains besieged.  On the other hand, nothing burnishes its reputation better than the caliber of its tormentors, like long-time Republican hatemonger Rep. Virginia “Shut Up, Girl” Foxx.

We'll get to her.  But first, it sounds as if things are still pretty rough in Harvard Yard.  No less a personage than Acting President Alan Garber '77 is feeling the heat:

Maybe some Jewish students aren't
really Porcellian material

Harvard University’s interim president Alan Garber...is concerned by reports of “social shunning” of Jewish students in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war, and said there “needs to be a discussion about what are the limits” of permissible speech....

Garber said that what he finds “most disturbing of all are situations or experiences students describe where they have felt they could not speak in class because there are attacks on Israel or maybe Israelis.”

“They feel unsupported in contradicting them,” he said.... 

Social shunning of Jewish students? This is news to Alan? Why does he think that after careful consideration his application to join the Porcellian Club in 1974 was, um, put on the shelf behind the S.S. Pierce Scotch?

So are we to understand that the crisis at Harvard is that students, especially Jewish students, are afraid to speak?  That would come as a refreshing change to contemporaries of Alan Garber, who remember that students, Jewish and otherwise, would never shut the f*** up, even when they had no f***in' idea of what they were talking about.  A little silence at dinner in Dunster House might even have been welcomed back in the day.

Are today's Harvard students more easily cowed than Alan and his buddies? Let's ask a real journalist who hangs around Harvard a lot these days.

They aren't, reports Jill Abramson '76, former Executive Editor of The New York Times:

Over nearly 10 years I taught 250 students. Some of my students came from privileged backgrounds, like one of my best students, Mary Julia Koch, the daughter of the late David Koch. My students also included lefties, whose doctrinaire comments sometimes annoyed me. But they were willing to respectfully engage with their classmates, like Sophia Downs, a leader of the Harvard affiliate of ...the national antiabortion group. (Aren’t those kinds of class discussions what a university education should be?)....

Alan's contemporary John Roberts '76
always shared his views and his weed freely

During the semester she was in my class, I asked Sophia to take me to one of the Students for Life campus meetings ....Sixty students attended the meeting to listen to the speaker, Kristen Hawkins, head of Students for Life. At a place supposedly infested by cancel culture, there were no disruptions.

You don't say?  

By the way, Alan has recently been informed that it's not just the Jewish students who worry about what happens if they run their mouths:

Harvard University faced new challenges Tuesday, from pro-Palestinian and Muslim students alleging the school has not protected them from harassment and racism,...A legal group representing 14 Harvard students asked the Department of Education this week to investigate the school for allegedly failing to protect them from discrimination and targeted harassment due to their Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian backgrounds, or their pro-Palestinian views. 

Gee maybe if your views on the current Gaza war involve valorizing the suffering of your compatriots (whoever they are) and ignoring or worse yet exulting in the suffering of your adversaries, maybe you should keep quiet and study your stats problem set.  If you are a Harvard student, you can be assured that despite what your parents have told you your whole life, no one wants to hear your opinions.  And if the dining room conversation makes you uncomfortable, maybe the whole point of a college education is to have your preconceived notions challenged in ways that discomfort you.

But the hurt feelings of Harvard students, real or imagined, aren't the real crisis facing the University.  

The real crisis is that that bad-faith Republican ideologues have decided to jump on the alleged assault on free speech, not to mention former President Claudine Gay's scholarship issues, to attack the entire structure of higher education and free inquiry itself.

Exhibit A: Mean racist old hag Virginia Foxx, previously best known for telling a Black women journalist who asked a perfectly appropriate question to “shut up.”   She, like fellow bad-faith blowhard Elsie Stefanik '06, has decided that attacking Harvard and other universities is a sure path to ill-gotten fame if not fortune.

So who is she anyway?  It turns out that despite the trailer-trash demeanor, she's a canny well-educated reactionary in the mold of a Phyllis Schlafly with a doctorate in, wait for it, education.   She was one of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election (although not the votes for her in her district).

Virginia Foxx has always been interested in education

Before she glommed onto universities, she had sought to advance bigotry and oppression in America's public schools:

Now Foxx is championing parental rights in schools, a hot-button issue in many states, and recently shepherded a bill through a divided House. She also wants to bar transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.

“Progressivism and the lies it espouses have devastated our public education system,” Foxx says. It’s hardly radical, she says, to declare “men are not women. Women are not men.” 

She knows full well that the path to wrecking American higher education is to attack it at what she thinks she can sell as its weak points: its refusal to take the quantification of white privilege – excuse us, “merit”–  at face value and the supposed climate of anti-Semitism on campus (a campaign immensely aided by brilliant comments like Alan Garber's above).

She knows how to generate headlines like:

As her role model Joe McCarthy proved, you can drag out an inquisition with subpoenas forever, generating additional scurrilous headlines of “coverup” should the unfortunate victim not wish to strip naked for her pleasure.  We'll bet that somewhere in the documents Harvard, no doubt advised by the crack defenders at WilmerHale, someone said something stupid.  That will generate more headlines, more sound bites, and more subpoenas.

If you think that this batsh** crazy supporter of a tangerine-faced bigot and his effort to overthrow democratic government is not really concerned about the well-being of the Jews, just ask her:

Foxx also insisted that her investigation is not being fueled by political or ideological motivations.

“What is driving us is concern for students and for faculty,” she said. “It has nothing to do with ideological beliefs. It’s all about protecting the students.”  

Would she lie to you?

Yes, she would:

Conservative Republicans have long decried higher education in the United States, describing the cultures on most college campuses as being captured by liberal elites who inculcate students with left-wing values and suppress conservative thought. And over time their disdain has deepened.

From 2015 to 2019, the share of Republicans and independents who lean Republican saying that colleges have a negative effect on the country rose from 37 percent to 59 percent, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. By 2022, another Pew poll reported that 76 percent of conservative Republicans said colleges affect the country negatively. Meanwhile, a number of Republican-dominated state legislatures have moved to end what they consider “woke” policies and teachings on campuses.

Democrats on the committee noticed what was happening. “I also want to note that the main point of this hearing should be to identify bipartisan solutions to combat antisemitism, not an excuse to attack higher education, liberal arts education, or important diversity, equity and inclusion work that’s happening at colleges and universities across the country,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore).

And the chaos agent behind this well-financed ideological attack on education under the guise of protecting the Jews, Chris Rufo, is a neo-Nazi eugenics freak.  By definition, that's not a friend of the Jews.

What's really appalling is how few are willing to speak out in defense of Harvard and other universities, either because they aren't exactly appealing victims or because their defenders don't want to fan the flames of the controversy.

That would be a serious mistake.  Letting bad-faith ideologues conduct inquisitions into Harvard and liberal education under the guise of combating anti-Semitism legitimizes these attacks.  That's how it worked in the 1950's until Joe Welch finally stood up to Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, after thousands of lives were ruined.  

It also worked in other places not that long ago:

 

 

That's something that Alan Garber should really be concerned about.

Op-Ed from Zontar: Why won't working class voters try to understand us?

Editors' Note: You can't open your newspaper (assuming you live somewhere that still has them) without running across the usual drivel about how the reason that white working class voters support the Tangerine-Faced Rapist is because those nasty mean coastal elites don't understand them, won't reach out to them, and are generally just so mean! 

Interestingly, the Spy Deep Space Desk recently intercepted another transmission from the distant planet Zontar, which has just the opposite problem.  Their complaint was incomprehensible to us but in the spirit of promoting galactic peace and harmony, we present it to you the reader so that – [They get the setup. Get on with it – Ed.]

By Z. Jean Carroll
Guest Writer
The New Zork Times

It's a commonplace to say that Zontarian politics are polarized.  But what accounts for the wide gap between the two sides?  We think it's because that orange working-class voters have a warped understanding of who the pink professional class are and what we stand for.  They should try harder to reach out to us, with whom they have little contact and even less sympathy.

The highly educated elite brought you television!

Our message to the orange working class is simple: You should get to know us.  We are the people who cure your illnesses, teach your dumb as paint children, design your smartphones and 90-inch TV's you are glued to, even synthesize the fentanyl that you love so much.  We have every skill the pickup-driving, drug-abusing, wife-beating, ignorant orange working classes lack.  So why do you hold us in such scathing contempt?

Professional-class Zontarians often supported Republicanz  until the party shifted its focus to orange supremacy and bigotry against those with different gender or other identities, thus abandoning the emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion that once marked the ZOP. Through this new and divisive bigoted approach, hard-right orange Republicanz not only ignored anyone who looked or sounded different from them, but also started to judge them as not real Zontarians and not worthy of the love and support of the orange working class voter.

Most of us care deeply about respecting the rights of anyone in the LGBTQ population and protecting the reproductive freedom of women. Why can't the orange working class understand our belief that women are entitled to control their own bodies regardless of what religious beliefs you hold?  We also think that women have the right to go out in public or shop without being raped by rich, powerful men who then smear them when they appeal for justice. 

And we can't understand why they describe such violent criminals as “authentic” and then when they lie about their depredations defend these fiends as “he is who he is.“ We're hurt when we hear orange-faced men and women say they like such behavior and invective.  Do they actually approve of sexually abusing women, including underaged ones? 

Well-educated liberals place great weight on family values!

The orange working-class should also know that many of us are deeply religious.  Our religions don't teach hate, intolerance, greed, and self-indulgence.  Instead, they emphasize the dignity of all humanity, the important of good deeds, and the duty to help the poor.  Why can't the orange working class accept our religion as genuine, too?

When the ZOVID epidemic struck, those of us in the healthcare professions bravely went to work to help victims of an unknown contagious disease that for all we knew might claim our own life.  We feared that our children would grow up without parents or worse yet we would bring the virus home to our family.  But we took care of everyone as best we could.

So you can imagine how disappointed we were when many orange working class voters rejected and mocked our science-based efforts, choosing instead to dose themselves with horse dewormers and bleach.  Worse yet, those same orange working class persons refused to cooperate with simple public health measures like masking in close spaces.  They even engaged in intimidation of and violence against those who sought to enforce masking rules.  And it was all because their candidate didn't want to smear his greasy makeup by wearing a mask.

You should know that we, the highly educated, place a great weight on learning, scholarship, and free inquiry.  That's why we react so badly when politicians supposedly representing the orange working class try so hard to cripple our public schools and threaten our teachers. Don't they realize that strong public schools are the only hope for the children of the orange working class?

Because we tolerate diversity and welcome inclusion, we also are firmly opposed to efforts to exclude and stigmatize students who, for example, have a different gender identity.  When will orange working class voters learn that hatred and bigotry have no place in our public schools or indeed anywhere in public life?

Professionals like air traffic controllers keep us safe!

We do understand the resentment of orange working class voters who have seen their standards of living decline after 50 years of largely Republicanz rule.  What we don't understand is why the voters who have suffered so much from Republicanz policies that gave tax cuts for the rich and took away union protections from them consistently vote for the party that exacerbates their very real economic plight.

Many of us spent our entire lives working to improve the lot of the orange working class whether through guaranteed health care, aid to education, protecting public health, or building a planetary infrastructure that promotes economic growth.  Yet in return all we get from the orange base is anger and paranoid conspiracy theories. 

We beg the orange working class Republicanz to speak the language of the educated class again. Put value on the value we contribute to this country. We want to be valued, heard, and shown some respect. 

If only the orange working class voter would reach out to us, they would see we are not their enemies.

They would see we are their friends.  Their only friends.

Danger, danger! Our sensors have detected - DEI!

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling, Yard Editor Larry Lowell,
and Aviation Correspondent Douglas Corrigan

The recent defenestration of ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay and an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max have a surprising link: both are connected to the inchoate evil that is DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, unless you are part of the great right-wing grievance machine, where it stands for the triumph of evil coastal elites.

Don't believe me?  Just ask the most meritorious columnist in America, former National Review table-pounder David French, now peddling his wares in The New York Times:

Uh-oh. This sounds serious. And who better to remind us of the dangers of DEI than a former writer for a magazine that for decades opposed the Civil Rights Act and upheld white supremacy, including gems like this: 

“Why the South Must Prevail” is shocking to the 21st century reader. The piece put National Review on record in favor of both legal segregation where it existed (in accordance with the “states’ rights” principle) and the right of southern whites to discriminate against southern blacks, on the basis of their “Negro backwardness.” The editorial defended the right of whites to govern exclusively, even in jurisdictions where they did not constitute a majority of the population. 

In the same op-ed, Buckley concluded that as long as African Americans remained “backward” in education and in economic progress, Southern whites had a right to “impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to affect a genuine cultural equality between the races.” ...He offered no guidance as to how blacks might attain what he called “cultural equality,” save for by the sufferance of the white population. 

But don't worry: years later self-proclaimed intellectual William F. Buckley said he was sorry.  And since no lasting harm was done by 350 years of armed and entitled racist garbage like this, there's no reason to worry about it anymore.

According to French, that is. 

Before we get to French's half-assed effort to define DEI, let's see how it is used out in the real world. Here's an example of a hiring policy of a well-known law firm not known for hiring third-raters just to advance the woke agenda, to put it mildly:

Gee, if Cravath can commit to DEI without being compelled to hire idiots like Clarence Thomas, maybe DEI is not the clear and present danger that David French and his fellow apologists for white supremacy think it is.

Let David try to explain:

To put it simply, the problem with D.E.I. isn’t with diversity, equity, or inclusion — all vital values. The danger posed by D.E.I. resides primarily not in these virtuous ends, but in the unconstitutional means chosen to advance them.

That's certainly simple, although meaningless.

Although he won't come right out and say it, as a veteran right-wing litigator, he's trying to suggest (without having the intellectual courage to state plainly) that any effort to remedy the continuing effects of America's 425 year love affair with racism is unconstitutional because it would entail taking race into account in making various decisions, like who should be President of Harvard. While this is a popular theory among white reactionaries, it doesn't happen to be – true. As a very meritorious double-Harvard grad wrote last year:

This contention blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count. But the response is simple: Our country has never been colorblind. Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented “inter- generational transmission of inequality” that still plagues our citizenry.

Remember when police were chosen on merit alone?

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. ___ (2023)(Jackson, J. dissenting)

The two dissents dissect the ridiculous anti-text anti-original intent argument that the post-Civil War amendments mandated “color-blindness.”

Guess David isn't too interested in dissenting opinions.  Instead he harps, as did the right wing advocacy group that sued Harvard, on the supposed ill-treatment of Asian-American Harvard applicants:

it is difficult to ignore the overwhelming evidence that Harvard attempted to achieve greater diversity in part by systematically downranking Asian applicants on subjective grounds,  

The process was so devastating to Asian-American applicants that they constituted only 24% of the entering Harvard class at issue, although they represent a full 6% of U.S. population.

It's peculiar that white men seem very upset about this supposed injustice, while Asian students themselves do not.  In fact, major Asian-American student organizations at Harvard supported the University's position.

French goes on to cite vaguely university disciplinary processes that he claims fail to attain the Constitutional standard of due process, which is by definition not applicable to private colleges and universities.  Or, for that matter, to newspapers, who can s***can whichever columnist they want for any or no reason.  We think he must have learned this tidbit at Harvard Law School, but who knows?

What's really going on here, in addition to white supremacy, is white men's fears that they are losing their privilege, or what they like to call “merit.”

Remember when soldiers were chosen by merit alone?

Even French, to his credit, can't swallow the Sissy SpaceX white racist crap about how DEI supposedly led to the door of that Alaska Airlines 737 falling off (the entirely made up theory is that somehow unqualified hires were too stupid to attach the bolts). 

This has led to a spate of racist fairy tales about how DEI would lead to incompetent pilots, surgeons, and other worthies because white men would no longer be ushered to the top of the heap.  Even the less self-serving argument – that all these goodies should go to those with the best SAT scores and GPA's – disappears on a moment's introspection.

We know pilots and surgeons.  I want them to be good at what they do.  I also know that beyond some minimum, there's no correlation between test scores and competence at a job that requires diverse skills, like flying or surgery.

I know plenty of Harvard summas I wouldn't trust in the cockpit or with a blade in their hands.  A pilot needs to be calm, flexible, and patient and have the ability to multitask, scan, and stay cool in a crisis.  A surgeon needs good judgment and good fine motor skills.  I can think of plenty of people with good test scores who don't have the skills to slice a salami, much less an abdominal wall.

Aviation, before it was ruined by DEI wokeness

Further, research into the terrible health outcomes between Black and white Americans has told us that Black patients are more likely to trust and comply with the instructions of Black doctors.  So if the true measure of medicine is its ability to heal the sick and keep us healthy, then medicine needs plenty of Black doctors and other health professionals to serve the US patient population. 

Does anyone think that the rich powerful white billionaires have the best test scores and GPA's?  Have you ever talked to one?

On a related subject, if you think that Harvard must admit students only on the basis of the numbers, then you must think that The New York Times must have the same standards. Columns must be awarded only to those with the most glittering degrees from the finest schools.

What were David French's merits exactly?  He received his BA from Lipscomb University, widely regarded as the finest institution of higher education in Nashville, Tennessee [That would be Vanderbilt – Ed.].

Lips.  Comb.  University.  Is that the best undergraduate background the Times could have found for the demanding job of Op-Ed columnist?  It sounds more like the background of someone who screws bolts for Boeing.

So why was this mook hired?

Here's how Media Matters hailed his hiring:

the New York Times' announcement notably leaves out French’s history as an attorney for the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ legal organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Moreover, French has a history of expressing troubling sentiments about gay and trans people in conservative outlets ....“I don’t agree that trans men are ‘men’ or that trans women are ‘women,” French said....

Wowzeh.

We all know why French was hired: the Times wanted another literate right-winger they could take out in public.  They wanted a staff of editorial columnists who were diverse and inclusive.  As their boss and owner put it, even in Fox News's bent retelling:

The New York Times Company Chairman A.G. Sulzberger defended the newspaper saying it does a good job of representing a diverse set of views after being asked why the company's goals don't include the diversity of views.

That's what Harvard wanted in its entering class, too.  But what's OK when it benefits a reactionary white graduate of Lipsync University isn't OK when it benefits minority groups who have been systematically assaulted for four centuries.

If you have to ask why such disparate treatment is defensible, either ethically or intellectually, then you probably didn't graduate from Lippitydo University. 

And by the way, French, so worked up about the treatment of Asian-Americans in Harvard admissions, doesn't seem to be too upset about the number of Asian-American colleagues on the Times's editorial page.  That number is zero.  Maybe they're just not good with words?

Speaking of those doors flying off Boeing airplanes and how white racist plug-uglies are lying that it's due to DEI, the real reason that Boeing's planes are shiite is...wait for it...white men:

That [safety-first] ethos is hard to instill using only financial incentives or the threat of firing. What’s really needed is a culture of perfectionism—and that’s what Boeing seems to have lost over the past 20 or so years. To take only the most obvious example: The two fatal crashes of the 737 Max were the result of a new flight-control system that depended on data from a single sensor that had no backup....Designing a system that had a single point of failure violated the canon of aviation engineering, which has always emphasized the need for redundancy in cases where failure would have disastrous consequences. But in the new Boeing, people thought the risk was worth taking—or perhaps the new corporate culture they’d absorbed had simply stopped making them value what the engineers said.

Yes, the same rapacious white plutocrats funding attacks on educational institutions, using DEI as the battering ram to destroy academic freedom and intellectual integrity, were the ones whose greed, arrogance, and incompetence led to the deaths of hundreds and the ruination of a once-great company.

Why?  What's gone wrong with white men in this country?  Is it the breakdown of the white family?  The white penchant for drug and alcohol abuse?  The cultural backwardness of many whites, even the richest ones?  The white loss of respect for law and order?  

We don't know.  But unlike French's DEI bogeyman, the rule of rapacious white men is blowing the doors off of our country as we try to navigate through dangerous skies.

I can't wait to read all about it in the diverse opinion pages of The New York Times.

All quiet on the Rio Grande, except for the bodies

By Immigration Editor Emma Goldman
with Texas Correspondent Gus McRae in Eagle Pass

If she's back in the The Spy, you know it's time for the latest immigration outrages, likely featuring more dead refugees.  Sadly you are correct.

Welcome to Eagle Pass, a desolate kraal on the Rio Grande hundreds of miles from, well, anywhere.  It's one of the spots chosen by desperate refugees, having walked over a thousand miles, some of it through the most dangerous and forsaken places on earth, fleeing violence and oppression for a chance to mow Mitt Romney's lawn or slaughter cattle for Big Macs.

While the great and the good on Capitol Hill were chasing that ever-elusive immigration “compromise” (about which more later), down on the border Texas Gov. Greg “I am the law” Abbott was taking matters into his own hands.

Previously Greg had mobilized the Texas National Guard to usurp the federal role in policing the border.  They proceeded to rig barbed wire and razor sharp river buoys to entrap and drown migrants, to great approbation from Texans, Republicans, and the like.

Recently they took their rebellion to the next level, as The Washington Post reports:

The feds are the US Border Patrol, the federal agency charged with enforcing federal law at the border.  Under Article VI of the Constitution that Republicans supposedly venerate, federal law is supreme and states can't interfere with its operation.  

While this is evident from the plain text, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Republican Anthony Kennedy and joined by Republican John Roberts, said as much just 12 years ago:

The Government of the United States has broad, undoubted power over the subject of immigration and the status of aliens. ... This authority rests, in part, on the National Government’s constitutional power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” U. S. Const., Art. I, §8, cl. 4, and its inherent power as sovereign to control and conduct relations with foreign nations....
 
It is fundamental that foreign countries concerned about the status, safety, and security of their nationals in the United States must be able to confer and communicate on this subject with one national sovereign, not the 50 separate States.

Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387 (2012).

For these reasons, the President of the United States seeks the help of that same Court, now larded with three new Republican lunatics, to vindicate the right of federal officers to enforce federal law:

Under the Supremacy Clause, state law cannot be applied to restrain those federal agents from carrying out their federally authorized activities. That conclusion follows from centuries of this Court’s precedent: Maryland could not tax the Bank of the United States (McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 3 (1819)), or enforce its driver’s license laws against federal Post Office workers delivering mail ..; California could not bring criminal charges against a Deputy U.S. Marshal for his actions to protect a Supreme Court Justice..; and Arizona could not superimpose its own approval process on a congressionally authorized dam-construction project ... So too here: Texas cannot use state tort law to restrain federal Border Patrol agents carrying out their federal duties.

This weekend, the dispute was transformed from a thrilling constitutional law exam question into a matter of life and death, or, to put it more precisely, death:

According to NBC News, 

A woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande on Friday night in Eagle Pass, Texas, after U.S. border agents were prevented from responding, federal officials said Saturday.

In a statement, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said U.S. Border Patrol agents were made aware of the migrants’ distress by the Mexican government but were unable to enter the area from the U.S. side after Texas National Guard troops, under the direction of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, prevented them from doing so.

“In responding to a distress call from the Mexican government, Border Patrol agents were physically barred by Texas officials from entering the area,” the spokesperson said. 

Lying as usual, Abbott claimed that after blocking federal officials, his Texas goons looked out over the dark river, saw nothing, and went back to watching the football game. 

The obvious solution to this rebellion is to federalize the Texas National Guard so that it no longer is subject to the illegal and depraved whims of the Governor of Texas, as President Eisenhower did to protect school desegregation from obstruction by an earlier generation of smug white supremacist Southern Governors.

But Democrats have chosen a different course, which will not only fail to protect migrants, but will jeopardize Ukraine's valiant defense of freedom and democracy against Russian aggression.

How'd that happen?

Months ago, Biden decided to wrap aid to Ukraine and Israel with additional money for border personnel, asylum officers, and such.  It was a rationally-designed sweetener.  Therefore it was rejected out of hand by Republicans.

Instead the patriotic Republican supporters of insurrection and election denial proposed their own bill, which would repeal asylum and require the roundup and deportation of millions of noncitizens already in the US, many of whom have pending claims for relief.

As that goodly Man of God, Senator Wilfred M. Romney kindly explained:

"Dems want $106B [for Ukraine and Israel aid]—GOP wants a closed border. That’s the trade. But clueless Dems want to negotiate the border bill. Not going to happen," Romney said on X, formerly Twitter. "Is an open border more important to Dems than Ukraine and Israel?"

We certainly know what's more important to Romney.

We have to agree with ol' Profiles in Courage on one point: the Democrats are clueless.

Despite clear statements from every Republican that they have no intention of reaching a good-faith compromise on immigration, Democrats press on into the Valley of Legislative Death.  To get the aid needed by our ally, which any legislator with a shred of patriotism or concern for US national security should approve in a moment, Democrats are apparently willing to concede to

• turning away asylum seekers at the border with no remedy other than to wait in Mexico to suffer in danger and poverty
• requiring the detention of asylum seekers, including women and children, pending resolution of their claims
• making it harder for asylum seekers at the border, having walked thousands of miles with their babies on their backs, to meet some heightened threshold for relief of which they are totally unaware
• denying asylum to relief to those arriving via third countries that have not actively persecuted them (in other words, all of them)
• allowing refugees anywhere in the country to be swept into detention and deportation through expedited proceedings that provide little if any chance for the noncitizen to substantiate their claims (which of course has nothing to do with easing conditions at the border); and
• limiting the President's historic ability to parole in refugees fleeing war and persecution on a temporary basis or pending resolution of their asylum claims (which has helped reduce queuing at the border).

That's quite a list.  Republicans have pocketed them all and said they aren't good enough, while brave Ukrainians, soldier and citizen alike, die in their trenches and apartments due to lack of US weaponry and the callous indifference of subversive Republicans.

Now playing on the Rio Grande

As a result, Democrats have conceded that helping our allies in wartime is dependent upon cruel, useless changes to immigration law that will only increase the pressure on refugees to cross without inspection and vanish into the country with no chance to prove their claims.

In exchange for which, Democrats have gotten – nothing.  No aid.  No compromise.  And dead children on the banks of Rio Grande while the bent Republican Supreme Court weighs reinstating some sort of state nullification of federal law.

The previous generation of Republicans had no problem questioning the patriotism or toughness of Democrats who wouldn't sign a blank check for needless war and torture.  Why the Democrats can't return the favor and ask Republicans to choose between freedom and Putin in Ukraine remains obscure.

The problem that Democrats have is they, like Anne Frank, believe deep down that people are really good at heart.  That may be true for some people, but not Nazis and their spiritual descendants, Republicans.  

That belief didn't work out so great for Anne Frank.  It doesn't appear to be helping Democrats much either, as the bodies of toddlers continue to wash up on the Texas side of the Rio Grande.

Don't say he didn't tell you

By Political Editor David Bloviator

At least no one is claiming that the rise of white supremacist revanchism is due to economic anxiety anymore.

January 2025: All quiet on the Rio Grande

That's probably because their agenda could not be clearer.  They set it out for all to read and for their base to savor.

It seems like 10,000 outrages ago (which is part of the idea), but it's worth focusing on what White Power is promising if their champion the Tangerine-Faced Fascist is returned to power.  He's already promised to be a dictator on day one.  Here's what he'll do:

His top obsession will be the Justice Department, the FBI and the intelligence community — all of which he thinks conspired to investigate him, thwart him, screw him. He's been very clear that he's willing to unleash these agencies against political enemies.

Of course, he is not the first Republican to weaponize law enforcement against political enemies to subvert democracy.  Nixon famously sicced the IRS on hundreds of Vietnam War dissenters, ordered his personal burglary squad to break into the safe of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in search of dirt, and threatened to take away The Washington Post's then-valuable broadcast licenses unless they muzzled their staff. 

Quick learner and Republican hatchet man Karl Rove then upped the ante in 2006 by ordering the firing of US Attorneys for not bringing enough bogus voter fraud cases, and then escaped punishment by deleting millions of e-mails, which of course contained nothing incriminating.  By the way, our Wonderful Republican Allies of today didn't say boo back then.

This open commitment to subvert both the rule of law and democracy on day one would be an automatic disqualifier, but there's so much more in the Tangerine-Faced Leader's day one agenda.

Number two:

The next priority will be the Department of Homeland Security and the border, with plans to erect sprawling detention camps, "scour the country for unauthorized immigrants," and "deport people by the millions per year," The New York Times reports. We're told Trump's top criterion for immigration officials will be whoever promises to be most aggressive. Trump has told allies he's confident the Supreme Court will back his most draconian moves. 

I wonder why he thinks that?  

We saw children and families separated and locked in cages during the Tangerine-Faced Racist's first term, so there's no particular reason to think he'll go less hard this time.  If pliable and morally flexible mouthpieces like Ron “Take the Babies ” Rosenstein were easily persuaded to sign off on this enormity last time, who will oppose it this time?  

Just put the librarians into Schedule F

And the massive sweeps of undocumented noncitizens promised by Trump are but a recrudescence of the cruel dragnets and deportations that disappeared parents from their children (many of whom are U.S. citizens, not that that matters to anyone) which were authorized by Republican flying ace George W. Bush during his years of madness, again without pushback from our Wonderful Republican Allies.

But wait – there's more:

....a key tool for Trump's "revenge term" would be the use of Schedule F personnel powers to wipe out employment protections for tens of thousands of civil servants across the federal government. Trump allies want a deep and wide purge of the professional staff that often serves across new administrations.

Officials close to the Pentagon tell us they're worried about a plan...to "rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense related matters, including climate change, critical race theory [and] manufactured extremism." Indeed, the Trump allies see obstacles to remove at every level of every agency. 

The translation from the German is a little obscure.  What's really going on?  As you know, both the civil service and the armed forces are supposed to carry out the will of the political branches, subject to legal restrictions (imposed by statute or the Constitution).  It's that proviso that the Tangerine-Faced Tyrant is so desperate to get rid of.  If a civil servant or a member of the armed forces can be fired for trying to operate within the confines of applicable law, that law is meaningless and is supplanted by the whim of the dictator.

While the words “civil-service reform” are often used as a safe non-narcotic alternative to Ambien, the reinstallation of Schedule F will succeed in purging all integrity from the Government.  When the head of the National Institute of Health Bobby Kennedy Jr. replaces vaccines with horse dewormer, you'll see Schedule F in action.  Stay healthy, my friends.

But we've save the best for last.  In case anyone dares to question the triumph of the Tangerine-Faced Duce's will, he's got one more card to play:

The Insurrection Act in action!

Donald Trump has made clear that, in a second term, he would govern differently than any president in U.S. history. He has hinted at suspending the Constitution, building vast deportation camps, weaponizing the Department of Justice, and mass firing career civil servants.

Here’s one you might have missed: he reportedly plans to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to use the military as a domestic police force, on his first day in office.

Let's just say that Trump's views on insurrection have a great deal of, uh, validity.

But it's no joke:

The Insurrection Act’s central failing is that it grants virtually limitless discretion to the president. Its vague and archaic language...provides little meaningful guidance as to what situations do or not warrant deployment. One provision, for example, empowers the president to use the military or “any other means” to “take such measures as he considers necessary” to suppress any “unlawful combination[] or conspiracy” that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.” Read literally, this would permit the president to deploy the Marines to, say, arrest and detain two people suspected of conspiring to intimidate a witness in a federal trial.

Compounding the problem, the Supreme Court ruled in 1827 that the president alone decides whether invoking the Insurrection Act is justified; the courts may not review or second-guess that determination. As for Congress, if it disapproves of a president’s use of the act, its only recourse is to pass a law ending the deployment. The president would likely refuse to sign such a law, and Congress would then have to muster a two-thirds supermajority to override the president’s veto.  

 Not great.

Let's do a thought experiment.  On January 20, 2025, the Tangerine-Faced Dictator-for-a-Day declares that the United States is being invaded by noncitizens crossing at the southern border.  He orders the US Army and Marine Corps to take up positions along the Rio Grande and shoot to kill anyone seeking to cross.  Women and children included.

Or let's turn the clock ahead two years, when the TFD4D orders the military to seize voting machines to avoid a Republican midterm defeat.  He wanted to do that in 2020.

How could those decisions be challenged under the Insurrection Act?  If you're looking for a Republican bent Supreme Court to save you, well, as we say in Dixie, bless your heart.

“Maggie?  I'm privately opposed to ....”

What happens if military commanders think about disobeying the TFD4D's orders?  They have an obligation to refuse to carry out an unlawful order, but on what basis could they say the orders are unlawful?

The defects in the Insurrection Act could be readily remedied by new legislation.  Guess who's blocking it.

The Trump/Republican totalitarian agenda has already disappeared in the media without a trace, in favor of endless discussion about whether insurrectionists should or will be disqualified from running due to insurrection, as required by the Constitution.

The media has already returned to the usual horse-race nonsense, embellished with idiotic inside-dope reporting (which is nothing more than uncritically transmitting anonymous pro-Trump talking points and smears) by the leading Horse's Ass Whisperer, Maggie Haberman.

Ultimately the most shocking thing about this agenda is not that the presumptive Republican nominee has embraced it or that the White Power has made it public.  It is that a majority of white voters heard about it – and love it.  

Whether a majority of real voters in the right places to constitute an Electoral College win care enough to stop it remains to be seen.  What is clear, however, is that if they don't do so, they will not have the opportunity to do so again in their lifetimes.