“Citizens should not obey in advance. Much of fascism is a bluff — look at our loyal cult, listen to our outrageous language, heed our threats of violence, we are inevitable! Hitler was good at that sort of propaganda. Yet to gain power, he needed luck and the errors of others. American fascism, likewise, is far from inevitable. It, too, is largely bluff, most of it digital.

The internet is much more fascist than real life, which is discouraging. But we vote in the real world. The crucial thing is the individual decision to act, along with others, for four months, a little something each day, regardless of the atmospherics and the polls and the media and the moods.”

– Timothy Snyder

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I love this shit…but then, you knew that.

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VOTE BLUE!

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(Forgive me if I’ve posted something similar to this in the past. I’m too lazy to actually go searching through a decade and a half of posts.)

Picture it: San Francisco 1988 (or maybe 1989)…

I learned of The Whispering Bushes at the end of Golden Gate Park long before we moved to San Francsico via Tales of the City. It wasn’t until sometime after our arrival that I actually went exploring there, and I’m here to tell you. It’s all true. (Or at least it was.)

Over the years of cruising the venue, I had more experiences than I could ever relate (and for some reason, generally did not record for posterity in my journals), hooked up with guys who I became friends with, and fulfilled more than one fantasy (see: Jeff York). Despite AIDS ravaging the gay community, sex was still to be had, and amazingly everything I saw or participated in was considered “safe” sex. Police patrols were rare. I recall only one instance when I pulled up to park before hitting the trails and saw several police cruisers had beaten me there. Naturally I turned around and went home.

Oh, the stories of Golden Gate Park I could tell…

This picture reminded me of one afternoon in particular: It was the day Al Parker relentlessly pursued me up and down the trails until it reached a point where I had to leave the park simply to get away from him.

That picture is also pretty much how he looked that afternoon.

When he first started following me I thought, “Well that’s interesting. Al Parker. Chasing me? Yeah, he is. I’m flattered man, thanks. I really am, but I’ve seen where your dick has been and no thanks!”

Now I know that many of my readers would’ve jumped at the opportunity to service Mr. Parker any which way, but even in his prime, he never pushed any of my buttons, and frankly at the time this happened it was common knowledge in the community that he too was battling advanced HIV. So yeah…no.

After about 30 minutes, it was obvious he wasn’t taking my hints, so I ended up going back to my car and driving off.

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From Palmer Report:

As I touched on yesterday, the 2024 presidential election is starting to have echoes of 2016. We’ve got the entire media (on both sides) dishonestly whacking away at the Democratic candidate in the name of trying to manufacture ratings, even while going soft on a scandal-plagued Republican candidate because everyone already knows he’s scandalous. But I think it’s really important to focus on what’s different this time.

The media spent every single day of the 2016 election cycle pushing false and misleading headlines about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Yet none of that had any deciding impact. How can I say that? According to every expert statistical analysis that’s been performed in the years since, Hillary would have won if not for the last minute Comey letter. The media’s year and a half of lies about Hillary didn’t hand Trump the win. That all happened solely in that final fateful week. Everything that happened prior to that week ended up being meaningless.

So here we are in 2024, and the entire media is once again intent on pushing false and misleading narratives about President Biden’s fitness. Nevermind that Biden, jetlagged, short on sleep, ill, and on cold medicine, was roughly as coherent as Trump on an unusually good night. Biden is fine, Trump is the one who’s deep into dementia, and so of course the media is pushing the opposite narrative for effect.

But none of this is going to matter. Why? Look at the polling averages. The 2024 election was tied within the margin of error before the debate, and it’s still tied within the margin of error. Nothing changed. This means that no one out in the real world thinks that this debate mattered or that there’s anything wrong with Biden. All this wall to wall fictional media hype about Biden’s fitness isn’t impacting the people out there who are going to do the actual voting.

This is simply going to be yet another one of those elections where the entire media lies about the Democratic candidate the entire time, and we simply have to overcome it. Remember, we did overcome it in 2016, if not for a last minute fluke. And while another fluke can happen, there’s no reason to expect that it’ll happen in the way it did in 2016, or that the shift will even go in the same direction this time. That’s the thing about flukes: they’re not predictable, and anyone who claims to be able to predict flukes is full of it.

Aside from the fact that there isn’t going to be a Comey letter this time around, I believe there’s a much more important difference in 2024: us. No really. You have to understand what it was like back in 2015 and 2016, when the entire media (including the beloved MSNBC) was spending every single day pushing false narratives about Hillary’s emails. I was pretty much the only person trying to push back against it. I was new to this line of work and I didn’t have much influence. I did what I could, but it was just me and the handful of people following me back then.

This time it’s an entirely different game. There are a night and day number more people reading Palmer Report now than there were back in 2016. And that’s because so many more of you are now in a place where you recognize the media’s false narratives and you want to be able to push back against them effectively.

It’s also not just Palmer Report this time around. In 2024 there are a number of other political analysts and activist groups who are willing to call out the media on its bullshit each day (Meidas Touch, Mueller She Wrote, Aaron Rupar, just to name a few). I don’t see any of these folks as competitors. I see them as a welcome relief. This is more of what we need.

As for the Palmer Report audience and community, you’re a large army at this point, and you’re eager to go out and set the record straight. You’re also willing to go out and do the kind of work that needs to be done in order to win any competitive election: small dollar donations, volunteer shifts, knocking on doors, phone banking, sending voter registration postcards, you name it.

So yes it’s going to be different this time around, because we’re different. We’re better at this than we used to be, and we’re more powerful than we used to be. We’re not going to let the media screw up this election. We’re going to fight back, work hard, and be smart, and we’re going to win: Donate to Palmer Report

VOTE BLUE!

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I just spoke with my sister (a dyed-in-the-wool blue mainstream Democrat who was already planning on voting for Biden) after she sent me a “Happy 4th of July” text. I replied, “There’s nothing good about it, Sorry. FUCK TRUMP, FUCK REPUBLICANS, FUCK THE SUPREME COURT, FUCK PROJECT 2025.”

She had not heard of Project 2025. I told her to Google it. She came back, aghast. I think if more people knew of the Republican’s dystopian plan for America it would cinch a Democratic President, Senate, and Congress.

VOTE BLUE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. BECAUSE IT DOES!

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Same goes for the Gang of Six on the ‘Supreme’ Court and all Republicans. VOTE for Biden, VOTE Democrat, send all these traitorous spineless Chrisofascists back to the darkness they crawled out of. Your life may very well depend on it.

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Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year. It is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” ~ John Lewis

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To all Republicans who insist on banning abortion because it “kills innocent humans.”

So do chemical spills in our water. And gun rampages in our malls and at our schools. And starvation because mothers can’t earn a living wage even working 60-hour weeks. And curable diseases when parents have no access to affordable healthcare.

And yet, while you sanctimoniously stick your nose in my family-planning choices, you have smugly opposed every attempt at safety regulations, gun control, raising the minimum wage, and the ACA.

You are the worst kind of hypocrites: Arrogant and ignorant. You are what’s wrong with America today.

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VOTE BLUE!

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That’s why everything feels wrong.

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VOTE BLUE TO END THIS MADNESS!

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From Mock Paper Scissors:

I know I have more than a bit of a Pollyanna reputation (I can hear you guys), and I suppose I should be as sardonic as the next blogger and post some cynical nice knowing ya, democracy post given our corrupt and illegitimate Supreme Court essentially torpedo’ing the Rule of Law. (5 of the 6 Republican Justices were put in place by Republican Presidents who did not actually win: all of ‘em except for Thomas, and boy-howdy, Eiron really outdid herself there!)

But I’m not going to do that.

We’ve been in tough times before, we will be in tough times again:

If you’re about my age or older… you’re familiar with this uncanny sensation of living through a moment when history turns. It’s happened every few months or years since Bush v. Gore: First, Bush v. Gore itself. Then 9/11. The Bush torture regime. The collapse of the false case for the war in Iraq. The global financial crisis. The election of Barack Obama. Then of Donald Trump, with control of the Supreme Court again on the line. COVID-19. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Dobbs. And now this: The Supreme Court’s whole-cloth fabrication of criminal immunity for presidents, just as the incumbent’s path to re-election is closing, and his challenger flaunts dictatorial ambition undisguised.

I don’t want to sound like Captain Kirk not believing in the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario, but I do see the world as an engineer and so set-backs are problems that need to be solved. I look at times to my Civics education and have a basic understanding of how government stuff works, and of course, our American history.

The simple truth is that we legislate laws. Laws change all the time. We amend the Constitution, and we even have repealed a Constitutional Amendment. What I am getting at is that the Supreme Court is not the last word, we the people are the last word. We have the superpower to make any change we want, but we MUST vote and hold our representatives accountable. As I have said elsewhere, it is a heavy lift, but not an impossible one.

Everything we are facing is a problem with a solution, and the solution begins with us; no one is going to rescue us other than ourselves. As we’ve said here so many times, there is no cavalry coming, there is only us.

We vote the bastards out, up and down the ticket, and then the real work begins. IF we can get the Trifecta (House, Senate, Presidency),then  there is nothing we cannot do, including remaking the Supreme Court. As the corrupt Roberts court has blown up the tradition of stare decisis, we can toss out and over rule their obviously corrupt and un-American rulings. Our history is littered with Supreme Court decisions along the roadside of progress.

So buckle-up, it’s a rough 4 months ahead, and we need to be unified and get shit done. As Ben Franklin said,

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Courage.

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From Gregfallis.com:

Yeah, I’m talking about those Nazgûl motherfuckers on SCOTUS. Like almost everybody I know, I spent yesterday vacillating between 1) feeling depressed and helpless and 2) wanting to set fire to the entire combustible world. The decision yesterday that POTUS (and Trump in particular) is essentially above the law was appalling and frightening, but the fact that it was delivered in smug terms by the most conspicuously corrupt and openly partisan SCOTUS in history was insulting. It’s like they’re standing there, grinning in their black robes, saying “Fuck yeah, we’re corrupt. And ain’t nothing you plebs can do about it.”

Justice Sotomayor, in her properly raging dissent, wrote, “in every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” And she’s right. That whole notion that nobody is above the law has gone straight down the porcelain facility. This is an unprecedented fuckwankery. This is deep fuckwankery; fuckwankery down at the cellular level. I mean, the spouses of two of the Justices (Alito and Thomas) openly supported the insurrection/insurrectionists, and yet those two tainted pricks didn’t have the fundamental sense of decency to recuse themselves from the case.

What makes this even more galling is the fact that those arrogant motherfuckers on SCOTUS were put on the bench by partisan politicians who represent a minority of US citizens. A combination of partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the absurdity of the Electoral College means that the US is largely ruled by the minority. And in recent years, that minority cheated, lied, and wriggled around enough to install three partisan hacks onto the SCOTUS bench.

Every single one of the Justices sitting on this SCOTUS testified under oath that they respected stare decisis, the legal concept that courts should follow precedent. At least six of them lied about that. This Court has largely shat all over precedent. For almost half a century, Roe guaranteed a woman’s right to choose. That’s gone. The Bakke decision on race-conscious admissions in higher education was the law of the land for almost as long. Not any more. For 40 years, Chevron — Jesus suffering fuck, people, there have been 70 SCOTUS and some 17,000 or so lower court cases based on Chevron, which states courts need to defer to the experts in various regulatory agencies when deciding how to interpret a law. A judge probably doesn’t know enough to decide what level of exposure to a certain chemical or substance would be harmful to a child. A judge probably doesn’t have a fucking clue about the long term effects of effluent run-off from a hog containment farm into a local river upstream from a small town. Experts need to decide this shit, not judges. But nope, this SCOTUS has turned that power over to elected or appointed judges.

Wait…I forgot bribery. Last week, this SCOTUS (and I am NOT MAKING THIS UP) made the bizarre decision that while it’s illegal for a public official (like, say, a mayor or a member of Congress, or possibly a judge) to accept a bribe, it’s perfectly for fine for them to accept a gratuity. A bribe is the offer of money (or something of value) from a person/entity beforethe public official makes a decision affecting that person or entity. A gratuity is accepting the same fucking thing after the decision is made. Seriously, the Court says bribes are bad but gratuities are okay. This decision was written by the Justice whose massive credit card debt was mysteriously paid off before he was nominated. You know who I’m talking about–the guy reliably accused of sexual assault. That guy. (Okay, Kavanaugh.)

If you’re reading this hoping that at the end I’ll suggest some way to make you feel better about the situation…sorry. If you’re hoping I’ll cobble together ideas for a way forward, or maybe offer some practical advice on how to minimize the damage…nope. Maybe tomorrow or at some point in the future. For now, all I have to say is let yourself be angry or depressed for a while. Maybe just be numb for a while.

But pretty soon we’ll need to get over it and resist. Resist in any way we can. Resist in every way we can. But today it’s literally raining here in the heartland, and for today that’s fine.

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We all need our escapes from the seemingly never ending existential dread that surrounds us these days, and Anubis knows I have mine. I’ve never escaped via illicit drugs or alcohol (no, really!), but as you’ve surmised if you’ve followed me here for any length of time, you know I do have my…obsessions.

Today I did a thing. I brought my 1984 Yamaha amplifier into the 21st century by swapping out the existing speaker binding posts with the newer style 5-way binding posts that accept so-called “banana plugs.” These also don’t balk at the thicker, 14-gauge wire I currently have running to my speakers.

It really wasn’t something I’d previously considered because the amount of work involved in swapping these posts out individually was well beyond what I ever wanted to do on my own. But one day I stumbled upon a link in an audio discussion forum to a guy who builds plug-n-play assemblies that simply replace the existing part. Done and done.

It took me the better part of an hour to swap out the part—mainly because I have the soldering skills of a 6-year old and the eyes of a 66-year old—but once I got everything put back together I was pleasantly surprised how easy it really was…and I was even more surprised that I did it without blowing anything up!

Does it make the amp sound any different? No, of course not. But I like the look and the future ease of using those banana plug connectors.

 

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VOTE BLUE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT. BECAUSE IT DOES!

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The Germans in the 1930s had no idea what was coming. WE DO! History affords us that knowledge and we can stop this madness in its tracks, yet all the major media outlets are still treating this election like it’s some innocuous horse race, not the difference between remaining a free (if imperfect) United States and a full-blown, nuclear-armed fascist dictatorship led by a narcissistic, delusional madmen. The country’s smoke detector is going off and it seems everyone is ignoring it!

WTF is wrong with people?!?

VOTE BLUE LIKE YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT. BECAUSE IT DOES!

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