Congress Is Still Wasting Time on Biden's Mental Acuity

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

I’m afraid that, fundamentally, what is going to hold the carefully cultivated conservative majority on the Supreme Court is a deep-seated panic over what the majority considers icky-icky sex stuff. Now, the trans community in Tennessee is going to pay for the majority’s embedded neuroses. From NPR’s Nina Totenberg:

Supporters of the bill were predictably elated over the win. As state Sen. Jack Johnson, the sponsor of the bill, put it in an interview with NPR late last year, the state bars minors from getting tattoos, smoking or drinking, and, as he observed, “We regulate a number of different types of [medical] procedures, and we felt like this was the best public policy to prevent kids from suffering from irreversible consequences, things that cannot be undone.”

Oh, shut up, you neo-Confederate twerp. You fought a battle to keep a bust of the despicable war criminal Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Tennessee state capitol. You’re hurting some of your most vulnerable constituents, and you’re proud of it.

Chief Justice John Roberts has delivered an opinion in U.S. v. Skrmetti that is at best a dog’s breakfast of half-assed legality. It’s so bad that it may shred elements of equal protection law almost casually. But Roberts’ fundamental argument was that the Tennessee law banning medical treatment for trans minors based on their sex did not classify people on, well, their sex.

By the same token, SB1 does not exclude any individual from medical treatments based on transgender status. Rather, it removes one set of diagnoses—gender dysphoria, gender identity disorder, and gender incongruence—from the range of treatable conditions.

W-T-Actual-F? Thank you, Dr. Roberts. That is some pure Republican hackwork right there, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor caught you on it. From her dissent:

“This case presents an easy question: whether SB1’s ban on certain medications, applicable only if used in a manner ‘inconsistent with ... sex,’ contains a sex classification. Because sex determines access to the covered medications, it clearly does. Yet the majority refuses to call a spade a spade. ... By retreating from meaningful judicial review exactly where it matters most, the Court abandons transgender children and their families to political whims. In sadness, I dissent.”

The sudden scapegoating of trans citizens is one of the most loathsome aspects of our loathsome political moment. As bad as it is, however, I’m concerned that it is the thin edge of a very sharp wedge. Christian identity sex panic goes in many directions.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Blood Thirsty Blues” by Tuba Skinny: Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1945, is William Joyce, the infamous Nazi propagandist who performed on radio as Lord Haw Haw. Born in America and raised in Ireland, Joyce saw his career as a political weasel begin promisingly as an informer against the IRA in Northern Ireland. He got active in British fascism and fled to Germany one step ahead of internment. Once there, he became the most notorious of several expatriate Brits working for the Nazi broadcast apparatus. He got shot fleeing capture and then was hung for a traitor. History is so cool.

Proving that, on the Senate Judiciary Committee, there’s always more time to waste, chairman Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, once a key vote on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, held a hearing entitled, and I can hardly believe it myself, “Hearing on Former President Biden’s Mental Acuity in Office.”

Jesus H. Christ on a tractor, Chuck. Los Angeles is under military occupation. The Middle East is blowing itself to bits. The Congress is preparing to shove even more of the country’s wealth upwards. We are completely under the thrall of the reign of morons, and you’re focusing your attention on the tyranny of the autopen. And you brought back Sean Spicer, of all useless drones, to help you do it. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson must be so proud. Here, to make their case, is Senator Marsha Blackburn, the pink balloon from Tennessee who secured herself firmly to the floor of the hearing room lest she float to the ceiling.

“With your very own eyes, you could look at any of the footage and see what was transpiring with President Biden, and I think the fact that many of his own Cabinet members knew that he was not fit to serve and there was a cabal behind the curtain who was making all the decisions so offensive to the American people and it is not something that is a partisan issue.”

Cough. Wheeze. Ghack. Sorry, Senator. Common sense got caught in my throat there for a minute. But, please, do go on.

“I’ve talked with Democrats, many of whom have lost faith in what they thought was going to be a very moderate Joe Biden administration, and it turned into the far-left Bernie Sanders version of the Democrat Party that was using the autopen and making decisions committing our great nation to policies that the American people did not support and would never support.”

Actually—and this kind of thing probably was not taught in the Home Ec curriculum at Mississippi State—those policies actually were more popular than the president who promulgated them. And, as you probably anticipated, there was a long episode of Bad History Theater courtesy of someone named Theodore Wold, a former Idaho solicitor general, aide in the previous Trump White House, and onetime aide to famous konztitooshunal skolar Mike Lee, whose career is currently lighting up the political sky due to a rapid unplanned disassembly attributed to Lee being a colossal dick. Anyway, Wold drew up the full weight of his Club for Growth historical analysis to summon up the concealed health problems of Grover Cleveland, Wilson, FDR, JFK, President Johnson, and Biden. From this, Wold concluded that such practices were “almost a Democrat sport.” Idiot alert: “Democrat” is not an adjective.

In this, of course, Wold elides the secrecy about Dwight Eisenhower’s health, Richard Nixon’s complete meltdown during Watergate, and the absolute whopper of how the Reagan White House managed to prop up a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient during, at least, the years 1984–1988, which also happens to be the time-frame in which his aides activated the illegal cockamamie scheme we came to call Iran-Contra.

Also, note to Jake Tapper. I know you have to hype the book but stop calling the events therein “worse than Watergate.” You sound like a dunce.

Small wonder, then, that the committee’s Democratic members had better things to do than participate in this farce, although I have to commend ranking member Richard Durbin for entering into the record a video compilation of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago’s Greatest Hits: “The windmills are driving the whales crazy!” “They’re eating the dogs!” Injecting disinfectant to fight COVID. And many more to follow, I’m sure, so expect more of these puppet shows unless things change at the midterms.

Housekeeping Note: Our celebration of Juneteenth necessitated the cancellation of this week’s semi-regular weekly survey of the Laboratories Of Democracy. I can assure everyone in the shebeen that Friedman of the Algarve is alive and well and testing the limits of Portuguese cuisine.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Archaeology News:

Now known as the Linschoten Sword, the sword has been dated to between 1050 and 1150 CE, a period in which the Bishopric of Utrecht held sway over the region and feudal territories like Holland and Flanders were gaining political power. One meter in length and 900 grams (1.85 pounds) in weight, the sword boasts a broad 17-centimeter crossguard and a Brazil nut-shaped pommel, a hallmark typical of 11th- and 12th-century Frankish smiths’ swords. X-ray analysis revealed traces of wood and leather still visible on the handle, likely remnants of the grip.

The sword’s most remarkable aspects, however, lie in its decorative symbolism. Both sides of the blade are adorned with extremely delicate inlays of copper alloy wire that form spiritual symbols. One is a sun wheel, or sonnenrad—a circle containing a cross—used widely throughout the Middle Ages in church consecrations, especially in regions where Christianity was still taking root. On the other side is an endless knot made up of five interlaced squares within a circle. This old symbol, commonly used during the Viking Age, signifies unbreakable loyalty, protection, and eternal bonds. Both symbols are highlighted by three parallel lines of bronze inlay, emphasizing the ritual and symbolic significance of the blade.

In my case, the marks on my swords emphasized the fact that my four-parry was lousy. Different strokes, etc.

Hey, KSL, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Inside was a 76-million-year-old fossil that paleontologists had uncovered from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 2005. It was eventually transported to the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City,ry Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, where it ended up being stored in a jar.

[Hank] Woolley, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's Dinosaur Institute, opened the jar to find a fragmentary skeleton, which inspired him to dig deeper. “We know very little about large-bodied lizards from the Kaiparowits Formation in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, so I knew this was significant right away,” he explained in a statement.

That decision a few years ago is now helping researchers gain a better understanding of the fossil's importance, as it gives them an improved glimpse of what Utah's ecosystem looked like 76 million years ago.

“Discovering a new species of lizard that is an ancestor of modern Gila monsters is pretty cool in and of itself, but what's particularly exciting is what it tells us about the unique 76-million-year-old ecosystem it lived in,” said co-author Randy Irmis, an associate professor at the University of Utah and curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and one of the study's co-authors. Paleontologists knew the fossil was “significant” when they first uncovered it two decades ago, Irmis explains. They brought it back to Salt Lake City, where it sat and waited for the right expert to know its gravity.

No longer will gila monsters have to spend money on Ancestry.com. This little guy lived then to make them happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and Nigeria, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles and in Canada, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun, and the folks in Dallas and Tallahassee, who were visited by the Crazy this week. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the folks caught in floods and tornadoes in Nebraska, and in Missouri. And the folks caught in "historic floods" in Kentucky. And in Oklahoma. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in the wildfire zones in Idaho, Pennsylvania, and in Minnesota. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And the victims of the nightclub collapse in the Dominican Republic. And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.