The second to final paragraph of this news story on a historical track getting dropped for lack of diversity, veering into the career of Frederick Douglass and striking this false note:

Douglass also campaigned on the issues of women’s rights. He later ran for Vice President, becoming the first African-American to do so.

I… guess? From wikipedia:

Woodhull’s campaign was also notable for the nomination of Frederick Douglass as vice-presidential candidate, although he did not take part in the convention, acknowledge his nomination or take an active role in the campaign.

Does such count as a run? Victoria Woodhull’s is sometimes slighted in favor of the more respectable and organized bid of Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood. Some more on the vice presidential bid of Douglass:

But while Woodhull was clear about her presidential intentions, she never informed her running mate, Douglass, who never even acknowledged he had been nominated. Many have speculated that Douglass didn’t want to recognize the nomination for fear of being associated with Woodhull, who was seen as “a loose cannon and controversial even among radical feminists and abolitionists,” said Harvard historian John Stauffer. […]

Douglass also likely didn’t recognize the vice presidential nomination in 1872 because he was already supporting a different presidential candidate, said Kenneth Mack, a historian and Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. A loyal Republican, Douglass had backed Grant’s run for a second term. During his first four years in the White House, Grant had proven himself a champion of the rights of freed African Americans, having supported several Civil Rights acts in 1870 and 1871, including one designed to the end Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror against Black people in the former confederate states. “And President Grant had supported sending in the Union army to protect the lives and the votes of Black people in the south. So, for Douglass, there was no real choice other than to support Grant.”

I do not understand the point of dropping in this historical footnote, which falls asunder to virtually meaningless under the smallest lean-in.

A little bit of piling on here where in ticking off a litany of bad behaviors defined as beyond any pale you characterize behavior shy if that threshold as beyond any pale.

The headline: Marjorie Taylor Greene vandalized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s guest book and taunted her in a deleted 2019 video.

Question: what does it mean to “vandalize”?

Members of the group filmed themselves vandalizing the congresswoman’s guest book with pro-Trump messages and insults, and demanding that the congresswoman “come out” and “face” them. Greene wrote “you’re a traitor” and drew a picture of the US-Mexico border wall in the book. She also called out to Ocasio-Cortez through the mail slot in her locked door.

Greene and her associates taunted Ocasio-Cortez and her staffers, calling the New York lawmaker a “baby” and referring to her office as a “daycare” and a “college sorority” because of a wall of Post-it messages left outside her office door by supporters.

Greene also encouraged her followers to travel to the Capitol and confront Democratic lawmakers.

I have no idea if every congress critter on Capitol Hill has a “guestbook”, but if they do, open to the public, I don’t see how they wouldn’t be inserted with inflammatory partisan messaging. Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene rips them out of hers?

The rest arises to some levels of concern — open to debate the nature of it all — but we do have that basic”decorum” issue. But I fail to see this 2019 yeared “vandalism”. Or does vandalism have a secondary meaning of which I am not aware ?

The funny thing is that Liz Cheney really oughta have been Senator. Lurking below the surface of this 2014 article on her dismal run and flame-out is the sense that Enzi was set to retire — signs along the lines of lack of fund-raising pointed to it — until Cheney wounded his pride by noisally jumping in with her primary bid.

Her Congressional career saw an immediate opportunity to jump to the Senate, but for Republican House lobbying.

Some Republicans tell POLITICO privately that Cheney is their preferred messenger — even more so than House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) — at what feels like a low point for the party after a brutal midterm election cycle that decimated their ranks of female lawmakers in the House. Others say they can envision her becoming Speaker Cheney one day.

That’s why it would sting to lose Cheney to the Senate. And the blow to the House GOP would come sooner than 2020; Cheney would have to step down from her leadership post if she seeks higher office because of new party rules that took effect this year. […]

While climbing the House leadership ladder could be an attractive option for Cheney, a high-profile Senate seat would put her in the national spotlight — potentially catapulting her to become a future secretary of Defense or even president.

Today we run into the line of thought by Republicans now dropping her from her “3rd Most Powerful Republican in the House” position. A “we’re not obsessed with Trump — you’re the one obsessed with Trump” line shows up. And for the political purposes of winning seats in 2022, they are probably correct. As against Cheney, and the mass of media positioning and opinion meistering — and the idea that you can’t sweep Jan 6 away and place it on ignore — Trump no longer has a Facebook or Twitter page, but he does have a sparkling new blog!

Fascist, you say. Confront the mayor, you sayl. Yeah, that turns out well.

I don’t get itll. What is the angle? What is the reference point? We’re one minute to power and the day of Truth is over? Makes sense? A deeply cynical take on when you become the power you once spoke truth to… Truth antithetical to power. Is that what they are getting at?

Bill Maher defends aged President Biden as paradigm of wise experience and railroad against youthful folly.

And… 2013 … Bill Maher says we have too many old people in politics.

And maybe it is not entirely contradictory. The two positions of one old guy at the Executive branch demonstrating wisdom and experience against a whole pile of old people in Congress showing senility and out of touch disconnects can easily be rectified.  Still, I sense your partisan situational value judgements at play.

Say for example,  Off in a debate over Washington DC statehood, the idea from the likes of Susan Collins of moving the place into Maryland gets poo pooed with the quite right claim — “Republicans just don’t want 2 new Democratic Senators”.  Surely you jest, as though that isn’t a good enough reason to oppose — and never mind it accomplishes that which is at issue on the license plate — ” Taxation Without Representation”, even if it isn’t popular move amongst DC residents who can quickly point out “What about Wyoming?”. Sure, but then… Say you don’t annex DC into Maryland and give it statehood…  What about Seattle?  See my point there?

Actually maybe Cleveland would be better, as Democrats would not want Seattle statehoid as unless the rest of Washington is annexed into Idaho, it is just 2 Democratic Senators offset by 2 new Republican senators.

Working theory on Biden as untouchable versus Trump’s coming sooner or later…

I have been compiling — for my own amusement — a batch of pages from Archie Comics which saw the editors of the company make small alterations years later in reprinting in digests, particularly amused by somewhat arbitrary changes for anything inferring something sexual.  A little less interesting but perhaps more profuse is the manner they have, over the years, changed references to current years — tending to look badly — so I recall an instance with everyone dressed in high 1970s polyester outfits supposedly now (or then) set in 1991.

Now here is an interesting 1983 issue from Archie Comics where the wacky gang in Riverdale see the encroaching totalitarian government squashing them at every turn — now set in 2018.

It appears that this title — Archie at Riverdale High — became the go to place for the company to dump turgid “serious issues”, comics as public service announcements — and lessons that belong in after school specials.  So we get the obligatory “don’t smoke” propaganda, and the discovery that that dumb lunk head Moose isn’t dumb — he just has dyslexia.  This issue of the series, I guess, is your Afterschool Special about the encroachment of Big Brother.

A little bit of kudos to the editors of the digest in reprint selections, as pre facing in the same issue is a more lightheaded allusion to Orwell which, I guess you can read as an earlier chapter to the story where it is shown that these civil liberties issues are swirling around in Archie’s head for when things escalate and things get serious and Mr. Weatherbee’s ego-maniacal tendencies explode into a power grab.

Actually the whole digest has stray political and civil liberties themes woven in from all directions — a story where the kids protest against a parking lot inspired by a student hippy girl sits along with a story where Archie “narcs” on a misguided delinquent kid who claims his “School Stinks” graffiti is a political statement– why, he’s right out of Dostoyevsky’s Demons! Mind you, the stories aren’t interesting in and of themselves but together it gets clever. (For the selection of ‘Archie 3000 stories, the editpr was probably kicking themself for having reprinted this too recently.)

But just as a reader of Archie digests are left wondering what polyester and huge collars doing in 1991, or a crude redrawing of a walkman playing “The Go-Gos” into an MP3 player playing “The Britney Spears” in the oughts, the change from 1983 to 2018 leaves to a simple problem: all very quaint, the 1983 surveillance system. If only we could go back to that! Today we have much more intrusive manners to monitor and affect behaviour of the student body — as we have seen stories of purchasing the service of an nsa-esque minitoring agency to folliw students’ social media accounts and stories of school laptops that can record students as they use them — wherever. So what is the point of retrofitting the year to 2018 when the technology does not follow apace?

And I will leave it to someone else to decide whether the change from 1983 to 2018 counts as “Orwellian”. I don’t think so — at any rate, we’ve seen worse.

As for the rest, I can’t help but note that Dilton’s hacking of the ATM and receiving gobs of money would not get him thanks from the local bank president for exposing the limits and errands of technology, so much as get him a felony prison sentence. And the manner in which the buteacratic red tape from a series of government regulations from, successively, an arrogant Pentagon, Labor Department, and EPA leaves Mr. Lodge in a Kafkaesque bind is moderately amusing.

From the comments section of a National Review online article here, in places the argument holds, buT then a situational what about is m smashes it .

C’mon man, after all they live in the same pseudoreality as Conman-in-Chief Biden who also claims the 6Jan2021 riot at the Capital was “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War”, overlooking, ignoring, or plan ole having lost memory of:  10Nov1898, Wilmington SC; 2Jul1915, Captiol Bldg, Washington DC; 7Dec1941; 1Mar1954, Capitol Bldg, PRNP, Washington DC; 2May1967, Sacramento CA; 1Mar1971, Capitol Bldg, Washington DC; 29Jan1975, State Dept, Washington DC and Oakland CA; 30Mar1981, Hinckley, Washington DC; 7Nov1983, M19, Capitol Bldg, Washington DC; 19Apr1995, McVeigh and Nichols, OKC OK; 11Sept2001; 2002, John Allen Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo; 15Apr2013, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Boston MA; 14Jun2017, Hodgkinson, Alexandria VA; as well as a year-worth of vandalism, looting, arson, and murder perpetrated in numerous cities and States throughout most of 2020 and continuing unto today, including at the time he asserted his delusional prevarication.

To be sure, the 6Jan2021 riot at the Capital was a bigger threat and bigger deal than Benghazzi 2012.  The reason it jumps ahead of some of them — particularly that last reference — and perhaps lies on a different plane where we study it as a separate thing with different problems 

— even if, sure sure, you would rather be at the Washington Capitol than at the OKC Federal Building on that day in 1995 BUT – 

— lies in it being a sanctioned act by Trump to overrule a democratic process of elections and transfer of power.

We are in definitions here.  No, 6Jan2021 riot was not as bad an attack on our democracy as 7December1941, or 10Nevember1898 — though some will insist on comparing it more closely to that one than this random National Review online commenter – 

But we are in an interesting realm of argument, one which probably sits more easily with the hyperbolic claim of voting restriction measures as “Jim Crow on Steroids” — with that one by definition — no, and it is a wash to me on whether the hyperbolicism of the charge focuses on the equitable problems or can get laughed away in its absurdity leaving no room to convince the unconvinced.

But this historical overview leads to a feeling of nitpicking.  “Hey.  We’ve had worse!”