A Progressive Perspective

There is a great deal of speculation of late on the possible (make that probable…) invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces. Speculation of whether or not Vladimir Putin really intends to make good on his gambit of a military build up of epic proportions on the Ukrainian border. A build up not seen in Europe since World War ll.

When considering this prospect I am reminded of Chekhov’s Dictum; an admonishment often referred to as Chekhov’s Gun;

It is a dramatic principle put forth by the Russian playwright which states that every element in a story must be necessary, and that irrelevant elements should be avoided. The included elements should not make “false promises” by never actually coming into play. The statement is recorded in letters by Chekhov several times, with some variation.^[1][2][3][4] 

My personal variant of his principle states that if you place a gun on the table in act one, then there should be a body on the floor by act three.

Donald Rayfield notes that Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, contrary to his own advice, has two loaded firearms that are not fired. It is speculated that the unfired rifles tie into the play’s theme of lacking resolve or a timidity of nature and inability to take action.^[5][6]

Ernest Hemingway mocked the principle in his essay “The Art of the Short Story”, giving the example of two characters that are introduced and then never mentioned again in his short story “Fifty Grand“. Hemingway valued inconsequential details, but he conceded that readers will inevitably seek symbolism and significance in these inconsequential details.^[7] I suppose I should acknowledge at this point, the somewhat ironic end of Hemingway’s own “third act” which concluded with him dead of a self inflicted gunshot.

So, given the current set of elements that Putin has placed on the European stage we are left to wonder; does Putin subscribe to Anton Chekhov’s admonishment or is he more of a Hemingway guy?

“But why would he do this? It makes no economic or political sense.”

I hear people say this over and over. They are mystified and completely at a loss for an answer, as they search for the logic in the actions of this authoritarian strongman. Indeed from the point of view of anyone that has grown up in a capitalist/democratic society the attempt at discerning such factors would be difficult as the set of values that would be employed in creating a behavioral framework simply offer no corresponding list of probable motivations.

The answer I suspect would come, properly enough, from Putin himself when we examine even a brief history of his actions and public statements we see a pattern of aggression, hostility and coercion toward his geographical neighborhood of former Soviet block countries. In addition he proclaimed, mockingly, to Joe Biden; “You think that because I look like you that I perhaps think like you, but I assure you that I am nothing like you”

The why of Putin’s seeming obsession with Ukraine is clear enough. Ukraine is one of the largest exporters of grains in the world. The fertility of Ukrainian soil is well known. Metalurgical production is well established and profitable. In addition to this, Putin’s contention that Ukraine belongs to Russia as a matter of historical fact is a deeply held core belief of the little dictator. Indeed it is a central component of his “sphere of influence” doctrine.

A more cynical explanation would conclude that Putin simply does not care about any short term economic downside of an invasion and he cares even less about the suffering and loss of life that his actions will create.

Because here’s the thing:

Regardless of what he tells the world, or himself for that matter, at the end of the day Putin really only cares about one thing, Put simply; the goal and the prize for Putin is raw power. In his twisted mind that end; the unbridled and ruthless pursuit of power, justifies any means used in achieving it.

He believes that his actions, even more than being justified, make him look like a bold and decisive leader (albeit in a mold more akin to Peter the Great rather than that of Joseph Stalin…) and retaking Ukraine, or more accurately bending it to his will, moves him one step closer to a reconstituted Soviet Union, or more grandly; a reconstituted Czarist empire (with the historical way-points of Kyiv and Odessa as the “jewels in the crown”) and in recapturing Ukraine he substantially broadens his sphere of influence, now and for posterity, economics and politics be damned.

Add to that what may be an additional prize in Putin’s Machiavellian mindset; one that was vividly illustrated for him in the abrupt departure of US troops from Afghanistan and the rapid and demoralizing collapse of the Afghan resistance, leaving behind a substantial cache of shiny new US made weaponry which is now in the hands of the Taliban. Such a get would provide him the opportunity to make the US look weak and impotent before the world and show everyone susceptible to his propaganda that his iron-fisted Authoritarian style of governance is more effective and also provides a template for would-be autocrats to follow, thus bringing them further under his influence.

The means of pulling these armaments into Ukraine was relatively simple; mass his troops on the eastern and northern borders of Ukraine and then sit back and wait for the west to flood Ukraine with defensive weapons in the predictable response to an imminent invasion. An invasion that employs Russia’s enormous and largely unchallenged air superiority, would be intended to be swift and overwhelming thus limiting Ukraines ability to use such weaponry and leaving it for Russian troops to collect, study and incorporate into their own arsenal thus minimizing the efficacy of such weapons against them.

The potential down side of this psychopathy of course is the distinct possibility that he may underestimate Ukrainian resistance and a willingness to fight his invasion thus creating a protracted and very expensive eastern version of the Afghanistan quagmire that contributed substantially to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. A possibility that literally grows by the day as the Ukrainian army and the nations people become more hardened in their commitment to armed resistance and the very ground beneath his tanks begins to soften and gradually turn to mud, making the movement of large and heavy ordinance nearly impossible. A fact that Hitler and his army learned the hard way eighty years ago.

I don’t have a lot of working knowledge about what drives a Russian dictator, to want to see the world burn, but I do have some personal experience with bullies and the motivations of men who, above all else, desire power. My sad suspicion regarding Vladimir Putin’s adherence to Chekhov’s dramatic principle is that he likes to show us the gun, primarily to prevent us from seeing the knife that he will use to carve Ukraine up into little pieces that Russia will swallow up, first by fomenting violence and unrest in the region, then by declaring them at risk in some fashion, then by “recognizing” their independence from Ukraine, and then by declaring them part of Russia. This scenario is well established. He did it with Crimea and he will do it with Donens’k and Luhans’k, then Balaklava and Kharkiv, and then…

Unless something akin to a geo-political miracle happens soon, it is very likely that by the end of the third act of Putin’s wretched play, Ukraine will be laying on the floor bleeding and the Global economy (including that of the United States…) won’t be far behind.

You are absolutely right. I don’t know what I was thinking. “He” could never rise to power here. We should not utter his name. To do so is to rave. To do so is to make light of all of those poor, semitic souls that fell under his awful, goose-stepping shadow. To do so is to somehow diminish his horrific, mocking and ruthless creation of the “other” that gave the angry mob a face and a shape upon which to trace their hate and their malice.

No, we should not whisper his name or make any sputtering, hyperbolic comparisons of a similar ilk. Let the memories of such evil remain veiled and ominous in their seeming historical singularity

We have too many proud and impervious democratic institutions that will prevent it from ever happening here. We have seen too much to ever make the same mistakes that all of those foolish, ignorant Germans made all of those fading and dusty years ago.

We are the ones that defeated that madman. We are the ones that vanquished fascism. We are immune to such things here in this shining city on the hill.

We are civilized. We are an enlightened and advanced society.

We could never subjugate and utterly ruin the indigenous people in a land that we invaded, calling it the “New-Land,” calling it New-England, calling it New-York, and claiming that we had “discovered” it, as if it were empty and baron of all life or culture when we arrived. As if there was not a thriving and vibrant nation of people already living here for thousands of years.

We could never torture and kill those people, and strip them of their beliefs and their heritage and then force them to walk across the country by the thousands only to cast them out and curse those of them that survived to live on a land that they had never known or desired.

We could never enslave another race of people, certain of our genetic and cultural superiority. We could never sell them like cattle and kill them with impunity, labeling them as three-fifths of a human being and enshrining such cruel dictates in our foundational documents.

We could never split a nation in two in defense of such an evil institution, and then murder a President that gave his life to save us from ourselves.

We would never turn away an entire ship full of innocents (a ship ironically named the St Louis) who were simply trying to escape the murderous regime that was bent on their annihilation, and then watch with indifference as they sailed back to their doom.

We could never imprison our fellow citizens simply because they shared an ethnic heritage with the nation that attacked us. We would never strip them of their possessions and their humanity without any rational or legal pretext for doing so.

We could never hang a young black man from a tree simply for speaking to one of our white women. We would never gather and laugh beneath that strange fruit as it hung above us, twisting in the wind.

Because we are exceptional.

We are one people and the enemies of freedom and democracy could never play us for fools. They could never exploit our differences and turn us against each other simply by pressing on a wound that had never really healed. They could never set us at each others throats and then sit back and laugh as we do all of the damage to ourselves that they had never been able to do to us from the outside.

Because we are too smart for that and we would sense the danger immediately and do whatever we needed to do to repel that threat, as one nation. The fabric of our union is too strong to be torn by such meager and obvious means.

We would never allow ourselves to be deceived and enthralled by a lying, conniving lunatic that defiled and ruined everything that he ever touched. We would never give license and agency to a man that represented only the worst in ourselves and served only to amplify that dark emptiness within us. We would never cheer as he ridiculed and maligned those within our country that disagreed with him and were guilty only of being of a different ethnicity or subscribing to a different religion than us.

We would never elect such a monster to the highest office in our land and watch and even revel in his flouting of our laws and emulate his sneering disregard for our most prized traditions and symbols of freedom.

Surely the democratic institutions that fell one after another throughout the world could never fail here.

Here, we are righteous and safe in the armor of our Democracy.

Here, on this land, no weed of fascism can take root.

Here in this fair and cool place no fires can rage, consuming our homes and our lives.

Here in this sanctified land there is no plague to take our loved ones by the hundreds and by the thousands. Here, we do not know that another thousand will be gone tomorrow.

Here, we are miraculously made “GREAT AGAIN” by a capering fool of a man that has never known greatness in any form and in fact knows only avarice and hate and contempt for anything that is kind or welcoming of the pursuits that our founding principles gave voice to.

Here we are secure in our retrograde perfection.

Here, the center will hold. Here things will not fall apart. There is no rough beast, it’s hour come round at last, slouching toward Bethlehem, to be born.

But tyrants are not born, they are made. They are fostered and grown in the fumbling and festering darkness of our own disbelief and lack of imagination.

If we choose not to acknowledge that which history has held forth for us to recognize, and it is left there, trembling under the great weight of our willful ignorance, then the bill will come due and an awful price will be paid.

If we choose not to see, and be chastened and humbled by the dark potential of our own barbarity and depravity, made manifest by a bloated and gilded buffoon, then that history will have taught us nothing.

And soon, if we are not very careful, it will teach us nothing…again.

Recently there have been some Trumpist lunatics spouting nonsense about how people over 50 should be willing to sacrifice themselves “for the children” by going back to work and ignoring the difficult but critically necessary pandemic safety measures that have been implemented, in some warped and cult-like idea of saving the economy.

Ok, lets just set aside the inescapable facts that we have what is essentially a service economy and that our economy is only one part of a vast and interdependent global economy, and we’ll run with that line of COVIDiocy for a moment (which is a moment longer than it deserves).

Explain to me how that works exactly? I mean surely you have mapped it all out. Right? No? Well let me break it down for you.

You say that you want older people to go back to work to save the country for our kids, which apparently means that they say goodbye to those kids for the last time and then hop on board the bus to set off for a new and exciting life in a brand new TRUMP internment camp. Because, as you must know, you can never go back home once you have exposed yourself to the infection. As soon as you do so you become a transmission vector for the virus and you are now a threat to the very people that you claim that you want to save the country for.

And once you cheapen life down to an actuarial cipher in some nebulous and absurdly paramount economic construct, then where does that end?

Because I’m curious about just how far of a leap it then becomes from saying that the old folks should die in order to save the children, to saying that the brown folks should die, or the poor and the homeless folks should die.

Because here’s the thing; sooner or later your going to run out of old folks and someone must be sacrificed in Donald Trump’s twisted and indifferent version of America. The version in which the ultimate sacrifice must be made by everyone but him.

And then please tell me just which children that the country should be saved for? Are some children more deserving of this distopian inheritance than others?

Trump loves to make pronouncements that he repeats over and over until they are accepted as reasonable and coherent (though they never are) by a confused and beleaguered public, pronouncements such as “we can’t let the cure be worse than the disease…”

The fuck does that even mean?

Answer: it means that Donald Trump cares more about an economy that he can brag about in his re-election campaign, than he does about the lives of the people that drive that economy.

An easy trade for a man that wants all of the credit and accepts none of the responsibility.

The British people are at odds with themselves. They did something that they regret…

…well, of course they did. Don’t we all…(well no, actually some of us don’t have regrets, and there is a name for them: Sociopaths).

You see, regret is our higher self speaking to us. It is the conscience making us aware that we have made a mess of things, that we have gotten something wrong. So those of us that aren’t sociopaths or…something worse, are confused and hesitant when we hear our conscience whispering “you fucked up…” in our ear.

Oh yes, hesitation and confusion follow regret like a hungry dog follows a meat truck.

But why? Why would we be confused or hesitant if our higher self speaks to us, if our better angels are trying to guide us toward the light? Because it isn’t the sense of regret that drives us mad so much as our not wanting to admit that we got something wrong. We hate the feeling of weakness that resistance to what we know is the truth creates in our sense of self.

Ego. Yes Ego my friends, with a capital E and that rhymes with P and that stands for Power! Yeah, right.

Ego is the Id flipping off the conscience as we shuffle off across the yard only to step on a rake.

But hey, a rake handle in the face, that’s not a problem for you. After all you guys will be able to fund the NHS with the 350 million pounds that you would have sent to the EU. Right? I mean, you couldn’t put that on the side of a bus if it wasn’t true, could you?

The Brits are masters of this particular fool’s game. They see consistency and fortitude and steadfastness as symbols of their “being”, their raison d’être. But sometimes a stiff upper lip just makes you look like you’ve had a stroke, and the Sun actually did set on the Empire (unless you really want to consider Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Virgin Islands as an Empire…oh, and the Falklands. Let’s not forget the fucking Falklands…).

Look, I know that you want it to all go back to how it used to be but it never does. We cannot go back to anything. The past is just lessons learned or mistakes made. That, and dust. To try and go back is to only wind up with our head up our own ass and then wondering why it got so dark.

You cannot leave and take back control because
1: control is an illusion.
2: The concept is oxymoronic.
Just like we can’t make America great again because greatness is not a thing that you make, it is a result, it is the culmination of intentions made manifest by deeds. That manifesto of greatness is written in the collective good that you do on behalf of those that have less and are in greater need than you.

We understood that once, and we will again.

Yeats told us that things fall apart. He was right about that. If you don’t believe me, buy a house…and wait…

But after we stare at the remains of what was long enough, we begin to see the shape of what can be. We pick up the various parts and turn them in our hands and we begin to see how they can fit together in a new way. We improvise. We adapt.

It was Winston Churchill, that staunch guardian of the Empire, who in a flash of brilliance and a fit of supreme irony, said “the man that never changes his mind never changes anything…”

The British people are afraid to change their minds. They are afraid of what it will say about them as a people and as a nation. And that will be their undoing. They know in their hearts that leaving the European Union is a mistake but they can’t admit it to themselves or to the world. They are afraid of how the world will see them if they say…”um, you know what…that’s a do over…

I think that is what the British hate most about Americans. We change our minds all the time and we really don’t care what anyone thinks. We are too self-absorbed to really even consider that the world would think less of us. After all, we are the center of the fucking Universe…aren’t we?

Hey, Britain. I know that we are your obnoxious and boorish cousins and it really pisses you off to even consider following our example but, just this once, follow our example; just shrug your shoulders, accept that you just spilled your 3 pound latte all over the front of your brand new suit. Don’t try and pretend that you didn’t because we can all see that you did. We are not going to judge you harshly for admitting it because…and you can trust us on this…we just spilled an entire tray of tall lattes with extra foam down the front of ourselves and very soon we will be going home to change.

“It doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway…”

So says the Trump Administration’s  press office staffer Kelly Riddell Sadler to a shocked and chagrined group of PR staff assembled at the White House. Comments that came to light on May 10th 2018. That sickening statement was made in reference to Senator John McCain when the previous day, he released a public statement regarding the administration’s nominee for the office of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel. Haspel was the Agent In Charge of a CIA “black site” that utilized torture in the interrogation of it’s prisoners during the Iraq war.

In his remarks in response to Haspel’s testimony before the Senate, McCain stated that even as he believes that Haspel was a patriot… “her past work at the CIA overseeing interrogation programs was disturbing. Her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying,” McCain further said in his statement: “I believe the Senate should exercise its duty of advise and consent and reject this nomination.”

Various commentators have remarked that even though Trump did not himself make the remarks attributed to Sadler, it wasn’t beyond comprehension to believe that the statement was in keeping with other remarks of a similar tone that he has himself made about the Senator from Arizona.

My view is that if Kelly Riddell Sadler remains in her position within the Trump administration after making these remarks, then Donald Trump has indeed made, or at the very least, endorsed these reprehensible statements.

Kelly Sadler is about 43 years old. In those years, through efforts such as her craven public commentary fueling racial and cultural discord in claiming that philanthropist George Sorros paid millions of dollars to bankroll the potesters in Ferguson MO and her inflammatory and exaggerated statements about the so-called threat and criminal nature of undocumented immigrants, she has managed to find her way to a position in a White House that is noted primarily for its bigotry, dishonesty, and blatant corruption.

For comparison, let me provide a brief timeline of the accomplishments of John McCain by the time he had reached his forties.

By the time John McCain was Kelly Sadler’s age he had:

• already graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1958 and followed his father and grandfather—both four-star admirals—into the U.S. Navy.
• He became a naval aviator and flew ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers.
• During the Vietnam War, he was almost killed in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire.
• While McCain was on a bombing mission over Hanoi in October 1967, he was shot down, seriously injured, and captured by the North Vietnamese.
• He was tortured repeatedly by his North Vietnamese captors as a prisoner of war for over 5 years, refusing offers to be sent home until those that had been captured before him were also released.
• He was finally freed in 1973.
• The injuries that he received during his time as a POW were crippling and permanent, preventing him from doing things that many of us, including Kelly Sadler, take for granted, such as combing his own hair and dressing himself unassisted.

The truth is that there is very little of John McCain’s life that could be appropriately characterized with the phrase “it doesn’t matter…”

The truth is that although I have radically different political views from his and I strongly disagree with him on many issues, I can say without hesitation that John McCain has and is still, living a life of tremendous import and consequence. His sacrifice and effort has made life in this country better in many ways for the people of this nation and he has done so with grace and humility.

Yes, John McCain is dying, and so are you Ms. Sadler, so are you. You would do well to remember the direction in which all flesh is headed. One of the many frustrating indignities in that sad truth is the likelihood that John McCain, a hero to all Americans with the mental capacity to realize it, will shuffle off this mortal coil before you. When that sad day dawns and we are all left to remember him with reverence and respect, we can and will be thankful for having had him at all.

But here’s the thing Kelly…

After all the years of your sad little life are utterly spent, will a grateful nation mourn your passing in the way that we will all mourn the passing of John McCain?

Will historians and statesmen laud your sacrifice and your courage in the face of adversity that most of us, or more precisely, that you, cannot possibly imagine?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say: No, they will not.

Sleep well Kelly.

I have seen train-wrecks before but I have never seen one that lasted for 76 minutes.

On Thursday, February 16th, Donald Trump gave his first solo press conference since being sworn in as President. I wish I could say that he was in “rare form” during the fact-free, insult-laced, one hour and fifteen minute rant, but sadly, there was nothing rare about it. It ranged from the now commonplace; in his false claim that his electoral win of 306 was the largest since Ronald Reagan’s victory (Barrack Obama’s 08′ electoral win was 365, Bill Clinton received 370 and George H. W. Bush’s win was well over 400!), to the truly novel; in his statement that “the intelligence leaks are real, but the news is fake!”

As he said that, I imagined all the heads of the journalists seated in the room, exploding in unison.

To revisit the train-wreck metaphor; I was horrified and fascinated. I couldn’t look away and yet prayed that it wasn’t really happening (and who knows, Donald Trump may very well claim tomorrow that it never did…).

To be honest the display resembled nothing so much as the court mandated psychological observation of a psychotic. He ranted, he rambled, he threatened, he played the victim, he veered into nonsensical misdirection and projection.

To recount just some of the low-lights (and by low-lights, I mean blatant lies), he said:

• “Hillary Clinton gave Russia 20% of the uranium in our country…”
• “Drugs are becoming cheaper than candy bars…”
• “The ninth circuit court has been overturned a record number of times…”
• “I inherited a mess…”
• “The Dakota / Keystone pipeline will create thousands and thousands of jobs…”
• “Elijah Cummings was told by [Senator] Schumer, or some other light-weight, not to meet with me…”
• When he was confronted by MSNBC’s Peter Alexander on the obvious falsity of the electoral win statement, Trump responded; “I was given that information…actually, I’ve seen that information around…”
• “Russia is a ruse…I have nothing to do with Russia….I haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years… don’t speak to people from Russia…To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with has any…” (For the record, Trump has many past and present business ties to people in and from Russia. His most recent visit to Russia was in November of 2013 for a beauty pageant that he owns but which was funded by a Russian billionaire. In an October 2013 interview with David Letterman – scrub to 14:43 on the slider, Trump stated that he has “done a lot of business with the Russians…” It is safe to assume that those business ties are still intact. Consider that if those ties had been severed it is a good bet that Trump would be making a big deal about making sure that everyone knows that.)
• “There is zero chaos…this administration is running like a fine-tuned [sic] machine…”

That is just a sampling of the dissembling, obfuscation and bald-faced lying that was on display. However, no statement by Trump was quite so telling as the one that just might be the only true thing that he said, in his declaration that “I love this, I’m having a good time.”

Zero Chaos? This man is driven by chaos. It is his raison d’être. I have come to believe that without chaos, Donald Trump would simply blink out of existence; his voice getting smaller and more helium-induced as he recedes, until…poof! A flash of light and a small puff of smoke. We hear a little popping sound as he vanishes, like a cork being pulled from a bottle…

It has been reported that Vice-Admiral Robert Harward, to whom Trump had offered the now vacant position of National Security Advisor (replacing Michael Flynn), decided after watching the press conference, to turn down the offer.

Clearly, Robert Harward was exactly the person that Donald Trump needs; he was the smartest guy in the room. The speed at which he left that room was proof of that.

Trump supporters recited the same answer over and over, like some insane parrot that had suffered head trauma, when asked why they were supporting Donald Trump for president;

“I want someone who’s gonna shake things up…”

So, mission accomplished! Your candidate was elected and I think that we can all agree that things are “shaken up” beyond all recognition. So everyone in Trump Town is happy right?

To quote Donald Trump: WRONG!

They are not happy with all of the “Sore Losers” that are making all this ruckus and the  “fake protests” that constitute millions of “paid protesters” that are “crying because their candidate lost.”

To which I politely respond, FUCK OFF!

Listen meat puppets, you can’t have it both ways (although most angry children want exactly that…). You wanted to shake things up. Well this is what shaking things up looks like on a global scale. This is the kind of shaken up that you can see from space.

So here’s the thing:

If you are not able to make the mental leap that electing a candidate as divisive as Donald Trump whom has derided and alienated most of the people in this country during a hate-filled and contentious campaign, might result in those citizens deciding that they want to express themselves through their constitutional rights of assembly and protest, or you are just not willing to accept the fact that the election result that you asked for would look like this, then you need to do something that I am pretty sure you have never done before in your bitter, angry lives as perennial victims;

Blame yourself, not us.

Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to find out who I talk to about getting my hands on some of that sweet, sweet protester money…

…as the Field Director of the Trump Administration’s Office of Islamic Outreach. The offices of which will be located at the site of the Notorious “Bowling Greene Massacre”

In other fake news; KellyAnne Conway announced the grand opening of a new chain of  face stretching clinics that will specialize in using her patented techniques for maintaining that wax-like appearance that she is known for. The company slogan will be;

“You will be telling lies with a straight face, with a little help from KellyAnne…”

She will giving a 20 minute info-mercial for the clinics from the Brady Briefing Room at the White House. They will launch the grand opening with a “Donor Night” Gala Event.

Featured performers for the event will be Three Doors Down, The Washboard Guys and “Bullwinkle” the yodeling Basset Hound.

“…she was given an explanation, never the less, she persisted!”

This admonishment was spoken by Mitch McConnell on the floor of the Senate when he invoked a provision of the arcane and seldom used “Rule 19” of the Standing Senate rules in response to Senator Elisabeth Warren’s recitation of a letter written by the late Coretta Scott-King in 1986, to segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond (who conveniently neglected to enter the letter into the Senate record) expressing her deep concerns about the potential appointment of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to the court as a Federal judge.

McConnell claimed that Senator Warren “impugned the motives and conduct” of Senator Sessions in her reading of those past statements about Sessions from Ms. Scott-King and the late Senator Ted Kennedy (King’s letter accused Sessions of racial bias; Kennedy’s statement called him a “disgrace to the Justice Department”).

The letter finally resurfaced over thirty years after Ms Scott-King’s appearance before the Senate, when writers at BuzzFeed brought it to light. It was later published in full by the Washington Post.

You can see the entire letter and a transcript of Ms. Scott-King’s testimony before Congress here.

The move by McConnell was calculated to create maximum impact by virtue of its timing. Senator Warren was standing at the podium, reading the letter on the Senate floor when she was interrupted, mid-sentence, by McConnell’s suppressive tactic.

After a party-line vote of the entire Senate, the Republicans ordered Warren to sit down and not take part in the rest of the debate over Sessions.

In explaining his use of the invocation to silence Senator Warren, McConnell said “She was warned, she was given and explanation, never the less, she persisted…”

McConnell, without intending to do so, just created one of the greatest and most powerful campaign slogans ever uttered, for Senator Elisabeth Warren. Indeed, McConnell’s patronizing statement has already become an internet meme, often appearing with iconic images of women like Rosa Parks and Malala Yousafzai engaged in actions of protest and defiance, leaving little doubt that those scornful words will be coming soon to protest placards and feminist t-shirts near you.

Thanks Mitch! Now slip back into your shell and finish your hibernation. Spring is almost here and you are going to need your rest.

#Mitch The Angry Turtle

#PERSIST

Donald Trump likes to make threats about pulling federal funds from the UC college system because he doesn’t like the protests that are popping up in reaction to the fascist troll Milo Yiannopoulos who was scheduled to spew his bile at Berkeley last night.

The president delivered his ultimatum on Twitter at 3:13 a.m. Pacific time: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”

A typically eloquent missive Donald…

First lets stipulate that no one is condoning the violence and property damage that took place on the Berkeley campus. It was wrong and the people that perpetrated those foolish acts should and will be arrested and charged for what they did. It was an irrational, counterproductive act by angry, frustrated people who feel like they are not being heard or respected. Sound familiar?

That said, we should also point out the UC Berkeley college did not do those things. Berkeley is the birthplace of the free speech movement and has a well earned reputation for allowing opposing points of view to be voiced and to be heard.

What Trump does not understand (and that list is getting longer every day…) is that California doesn’t depend on funding from the federal government nearly as much as the federal government depends on funding from California.

California is a “donor state” which basically means that we contribute more to the federal government than we get back. For every dollar that we send out to the federal government we only get back around 78 cents.

California has the fifth largest economy in the world (that’s right, THE WORLD…). We fund roads and bridges and yes, schools in other states that are welfare states (meaning states that get more money from the federal government than they pay out…). Most of those states went for Trump in the 2016 election.

So if Trump wants to withhold federal funds from us, I say fine, we will keep all the money that we send to you and instead spend that money on the needs of Californians.

We will see just who funds who…