Good morning. Hello. How are you? #717
Congrats to Mary Peltola, thoughts and prayers to Peter Murphy, apologies to that one Facebook acquaintance,
Good morning to you, to everyone, and especially to Mary Peltola, Alaska’s new US Congressman, the first Democrat to hold the seat in basically my entire life, since 1973. Ranked choice voting, man. You just never know. Poor Sarah Palin. My non-Alaskan friend Paul asked me about the race a few weeks ago and I said it was very unlikely that Mary would pull it out. I figured any Republican voting for Palin would put Begich as their second, and most Republicans putting Begich would put Palin, and some Republicans were kind of sick of her shit, but not enough to really matter. I was wrong. Ranked choice voting prediction is hard. Anyway, just fantastic. Mary’s also the first-ever Alaska native to hold the seat. When Nick Begich Sr died and there was a special election for the seat in 1973, Don Young beat out Alaska native Emil Notti in a very close election — the closest Young’s had since then. And Don’s 1974 and 1976 Democratic opponents Willie Hensley and Eben Hopsen were both Alaska Natives. Willie’s election was close, Eben’s was not. That was the last time an Alaska Native even got to the general election. Man. So EXCITING.
Mary won a special election, to fill out the rest of Don Young’s term, which goes till next January. She is alaso running in the general election, for a full 2022-2024 term. The election is in November, and she’s running against Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III again. Please consider donating.
In other news, Bauhaus cancelled the rest of their US tour, thank you to all the many well-wishers who emailed to express their condolences. I’m not totally surprised — the reason I was putting so much effort into going to see these shows is I knew that time was running out for Bauhaus, and the shows have been, by all accounts, really good. Peter’s substance abuse problems are well documented, and of course, the road is a horrendously difficult place for an addict. And he seems to have been giving his all to the shows, and he’s sixty-freakin-four years old. We wish him well and hope and pray for a speedy recovery.
I am still planning a little mini road trip up to New York, New England and Boston, though I might push it back just a smidge because of the exciting new news about Moderna and Pfizer both being approved for “bivalent” versions of their vaccines for boosters for all US citizens that are effective against the Omicron .BA4 and .BA5 variants. Or maybe I won’t wait. I’m not sure. Emma and I are gonna figure it out when she gets back, and she did promise Jane that once she gets back there would be some mommy breakfasts: a very special treat in this house. I will keep you all apprised.
I did a bad thing yesterday and I left an argumentative comment about politics on someone’s Facebook page — an old friend from High School that I haven’t really spoken to in, oh, more than thirty years.
But god, I’m just… tired. Reading 2,000-plus pages about conservative plotting is so exhausting (also this fourth book, the most recent, has so many typos and it is distracting and tiring!) I am so sick of the people in this book. I’m so sick of their unearned machismo and bald heads and goatees and bad suits and petty machinations and sociopathic ranting and interlocking sock puppet, astroturf organizations, their constant law-breaking in the name of law and order, their relentless manipulation of the public. They’ve been at this shit for fifty years. The thing about being at something like this for fifty years is that it’s possible to just look at the body of their work, at all their bullshit doomsday predictions through the years and see the complete farce laid bare. We were supposed to be overrun by Communists now unless we had strong conservative leadership every step of the way. We weren’t. The fluouride in our water was going to kill us. It didn’t. Equality for women was going to lead to housewives being outlawed. Well, TBD on that one I suppose. America would be murdered by the Communists if we reduced our nuclear stockpiles. Hey, look! The Communists lost! They were wrong!
Now it’s the IRS and their “87,000 agents.” Very specific number, plucked from an IRS report about how they’d spend more money, ignoring that most of those hires are not agents, they’re customer service workers so you can call the IRS and get an actual answer. So you can write a letter to them and they’ll write back in the same year. But nope, it’s 87,000 agents and a bunch of people who have a single W2 and take the standard deduction and are convinced they’re going to get audited. Which will be such a chore when you have a single W2 and take the standard deduction.
Can’gt have people follow the law! Nope! Not the law and order party.
And never once does it cross their mind to ask where they heard this 87,000 number, why it’s in the news and on social media everwhere. They’re rogue, independent thinkers who are being played by a colossal PR machine that’s sitting out in the open, but they’re too smart to fall for PR.
One thing I got from this book this week, though, is I understand a little bit more the right’s fear of AOC and the rest of the squad but especially AOC. It’s because she is straight-up the reincarnation of Bella Abzug, which rhymes with Beezlebub in conservstive-ese. But not only that, they understand that AOC gets it. She gets the two things that conservatives have understood since the time of Nixon, and Democrats still have trouble understanding: that the extremeties of the party can eventually control the party and be far, far more effective. And that the grass roots — the “7/8ths of politics that is the iceberg underwater,” as Phillys Schaflley called it — is far more powerful than the stolid centrist leadership. She and the Squad are the Reagans to Bernie’s Goldwater. And they’re younger than Reagan was. It is a generational threat to the Republicans and they know it.
Carter had a supermajority in both the house and senate and yes, he was aloof and imperialist but my god those people were intransigent and petty.
Oh also the president of the NRA who was responsible for turning the NRA into a satanist murder cult from a relatively benign sportsman’s club who worked with the Federal government on gun control laws? An actual murderer. Of a Mexican immigrant, whom he shot in the chest with a shotgun. Was tried and convicted. It was eventually overturned on a technicality. And then, somehow, even with all that on his record, he got a job at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and kicked off a bunch of violent, punitive operations (one was called Operation Wetback) against… Mexican immigrants just like the one he shot in the chest with a shotgun. How did he get that job! That is nuts! Then he took over the NRA.
Jesus.
Anyway, I shouldn’t have ranted on that guy’s Facebook page I feel bad. He commented back but I just hid the notification and I’m never going to go look at it. It was a moment of weakness.
There’s a paradox with Facebook. It’s… unnatural in the history of humanity. Like, on the one hand, the good hand, Facebook lets me stay in touch with so many old friends who are still friends because of Facebook and that is lovely. But it is also unnatural and we end up staying in touch with a bunch of people we never would have stayed in touch with in a pre-Facebook life, and that was probably… fine?
I plugged my phone into my computer and I had that setting in Dropbox checked to back up photos to the computer, and I was already doing that via Wifi each day, so then my phone went and re-backed up all the photos I already filed, so gawd, now I have 4,000 to go through again and I am so annoyed and also this means my entire system of making sure I don’t show you the same Jane photo on two different days is completely out of whack so I apologize if I do any duplicates. I was doing so good on keeping up with my photo filing throughout the year, too. Bummer. This one is definitely new, though.
Okay Justa mix today. I am slowly working my way through 50 hours of my “to investigate” queue, giving albums I liked a second listen, clearing things out. So all of this list is “new” in the sense that I first listened to these specific records this year, but it could have been six months ago, and they might be old songs that are just new to me. I always like this phase, I do it maybe twice a year. Discover some gems I might not have noticed on first listen. The Bezerk song on the Buckner & Garcia record is an oddly touching pop song, real contender for a solid follow-up single to “Pac Man Fever,” I gotta say.
Okay well my computer needs a restart so I’m gonna go. Until tomorrow!