26 July 2020: Sobering shit + a bit more humor

Sobering shit.

Man, y’all. The world is just broken beyond belief. A friend sent me this article today, and it’s not wrong: America is Having the Mother of All Social Collapses. It’s hard to even know where to start. We’re 100 days out from the most consequential election in my lifetime, perhaps yours too, and while I feel paralyzed many days, today I registered to work at the polls in November and also reached out to several organizations re: writing postcards to and texting voters.

If you want to volunteer to staff the polls, PLEASE register here. I have heard that especially in light of Covid, we’re in desperate need of poll workers. If you’re healthy, please help.

If you want to get involved with voter registration, postcard writing, texting, or other politically-oriented work, consider these organizations, all of which offer virtual activism opportunities:

NOPE Neighbors

When We All Vote

Fair Fight

Resistance Labs

Postcards to Swing States

Swing Left

Otherwise, pick a race and volunteer directly for the campaign. Go big with Biden, or support the great down-ballot candidates who can send cowardly, trump-enabling GOPers packing. Click on my Political Resources tab and then click on Candidates to Support for some ideas of who to throw your energy behind and why.

By the time you receive this blog in your email tomorrow, America will have lost more than 150,000 citizens to Covid-19. trump still has no national plan besides letting people die. If that’s not reason enough to get busy, I don’t know what is.

(Admittedly slim) Laugh track.

Thank you, Anne. I will soon be joining this cat.

Thank you, Liz.

Shit's bad

Friends, I’m not really sure what to say. In short, America is in extremely deep trouble. Uninformed and misinformed citizens are marching willingly with leaders -who at best have been brainwashed and hoodwinked but who are, more likely, fully cognizant of what they’re doing in the name of personal gain and power- into the maw of authoritarianism.

Since the GOP acquitted trump, he has:

• disinvited Mitt Romney to CPAC, and the conference’s organizer stated that ‘the Utah Republican’s vote for more witnesses and documents in President Trump’s impeachment trial would make him unsafe at the event.’ “This year, I’d actually be afraid for his physical safety, people are so mad at him,” American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp said in an interview Saturday on “Full Court Press” with Greta Van Susteren;

• recalled Gordon Sondland (who really cares, but still) for not-enough fealty;

• fired Lt Colonel Vindman AND his twin brother from the NSC and had them escorted out of duty by security officers as if they were criminals;

• worked with AG Barr to interfere in the federal sentencing of Roger Stone, a move so unprecedented, wrong, and offensive to the justice system that all four federal prosecutors resigned from the case and one from his job entirely;

• urged government prosecutors to indefinitely delay Michael Flynn’s sentencing and the judge agreed;

• told Barr/approved of Barr’s decision to create “an ‘intake process in the field’ that could vet information coming from Giuliani, as well as ‘all information that comes to the department relating to the Ukraine.’ This would allow the information to “be carefully scrutinized by the department and its intelligence community partners so that we could assess its provenance and its credibility.” The justice department is NOT supposed to serve as a secretive informational pipeline between the White House and shady, off-book, rogue actors like trump’s “personal attorney,” Rudy Giuliani.

• withdrawn the nomination of Elaine McCusker, a Defense Department official who was to become the chief financial officer of the Pentagon, because she had raised objections to his withholding aid to Ukraine;

• suggested that warmer weather in April will “miraculously” end the coronavirus epidemic.

and on and on.

This is all seriously bad and seriously dangerous. I hope you are doing everything you can to encourage a blue tsunami in November. Everything depends on it, and I am not being dramatic or hyperbolic in the least.

Please call your representatives and demand that Barr be called to testify before House Judiciary MUCH sooner than March 31.

At least Parasite won Best Picture and Bong Joon Ho won Best Director. Sigh.