Wait, a socialist?

With Yolanda and Martin Luther III on the Magic Skyway ride at the New York World's Fair in 1964. Via ABC News.

So Sarah Palin was astonished to hear CNN spreading rumors that Dr. King was some kind of non-Republican:

CNN however just set a new low bar for things to be said about the influential figure.

In a tweet, the media outlet said, “He’s an environmental hero. He was a socialist before it was cool. He never let a political disagreement turn nasty.”

Wait, a socialist?...

Appears CNN finally figured out that Martin Luther King Jr. was actually a registered Republican so in their desperation to IGNORE that inconvenient tidbit they decided to make him a socialist hero.

I sent her a note, but she hasn't responded.

KIng's attraction to socialism is very well known. https://t.co/NmdIGEIpvO pic.twitter.com/L5caArjLIH

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 16, 2018

He wasn't "actually a registered Republican" (or Democrat) either, as you might imagine, and took considerable care, as befits a professional religious leader, to remain detached from partisan politics, though he wasn't quite able to do that in 1964:

Winter music

Image by WhoCares7 at Deviant Art. If you embiggen you can see that the fences in the middleground are musical staff notation.

By pure and fairly extraordinary coincidence, I'm not the only one who has brought together Sarah Palin and late Beethoven: The pianist Jeremy Denk interviewed her in October 2008 on the subject of the piano sonata op. 106 ("Hammerklavier"). I'M NOT KIDDING (it's just possible that somebody else was kidding, though ;-)). Everybody needs to read it.

Not sure I want to commit myself to listening to the whole Hammerklavier in the middle of a blizzard; I found a video of Denk playing the last sonata, op. 111, instead, which should be just about perfect:

Cheap shots: Goobernatorial

One third of the Texas Navy. Photo by David Martin Davies via Wikimedia Commons

Wonderful piece by Seth Robbins and Paul J. Weber at TPM detailing Texas governor Greg Abbott's plans to supplement his $3.5-million gunboat navy (for real, six boats!) with his own state border patrol, with a price tag of $800 million (in a budget that cuts a little over a billion dollars for programs like full-day preschool, family planning, and Medicaid). Apparently the situation is pretty urgent: illegal immigration in Texas is down 44% over last year, so if he doesn't hurry it just might stop itself before he gets a chance to stop it.

This detail portrays the fear-stricken residents:

Bristolnacht

Image via Crime Scene Kansas City.

"Bristolnacht" is Tengrain's name for the Spilla in Wasilla, when the Clan of the Palins betook them in their limo to beat the shit out of everybody they saw and then retired in confusion on all sides, and I realized that's what it would be called if it was a German opera, which it really should be. And this is what it would look like, approximately:

Sacramentary

If Sarah Palin were in charge, I hear, our enemies

would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.

Just a few random thoughts on the combination of torture with the Sacraments:

Baptism

Ice baptism at Epiphany, apparently a problem.

When you say "Happy holidays" are you aborting Christ? Asking for a friend.

Drawings by Josh Lange, Credo Magazine.

 Update: Welcome BooManiacs! Nice to see youse.

Adams to Jefferson, 28 June 1813:

It is very true that the denunciations of the priesthood are fulminated against every advocate for a complete freedom of religion. Comminations, I believe, would be plenteously pronounced by even the most liberal of them, against atheism, deism,—against every man who disbelieved or doubted the resurrection of Jesus, or the miracles of the New Testament. Priestley himself would denounce the man who should deny the Apocalypse, or the prophecies of Daniel. Priestley and Lindsey have both denounced as idolaters and blasphemers all the Trinitarians and even the Arians. Poor weak man! when will thy perfection arrive?

Ex-governor Palin, as cited in Jezebel, on the War on Christmas:

“If you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, then we will not follow our constitution, there will be no reason to follow our constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand that there is something greater than self, we are to live selflessly, and we are to be held accountable by our creator, so that is what our constitution is based on, so those revisionists, those in the lamestream media, especially, who would want to ignore what our founders actually thought, felt and wrote about in our charters of liberty – well, that’s why I call them the lamestream media,” Palin said....

The opposite of leadership; or, Why it's always projection

CNN at the NRA convention in Houston, via BooMan:

Palin argued the president was practicing the "politics of emotion" by "flying in grieving parents on Air Force One, making them backdrops in his perpetual campaign-style press events."

Par for the course, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee faulted the media for being a "reliable, poodle-skirted cheerleader for a president who writes the book on exploiting tragedy."

Politics of emotion, she argued, won't make the country safer. "It's the opposite of leadership. It's the manipulation of the people by the politicians for their own political ends. It's not just self-serving. It's destructive and it must stop."

Our media. From Glamour Daze.

Leadership is:

1. the politics of Vulcan rationality
2. making grieving parents take the bus
3. not campaigning for things

What interests me the most is the implication that Obama is using the Newtown families, for example, for some hidden purposes of his own; not, that is, to pass gun control legislation, but to achieve an end he doesn't name. What do you suppose it could be? Is he a short-seller betting heavily on a fall in Remington shares? Does he represent a clandestine freemasonry or trade union of burglars hoping to rid Middle America of the ubiquitous semi-automatic under the bed? Is he part of a vast conspiracy against the Third Amendment aiming at quartering troops in everybody's master bedroom?

She's not going to think it through that far, naturally; or she'll toss her grappling hooks to New World Order or Socialism and just hang on. But she knows that you can use emotion to suspend people's judgment and make them do what you want, chiefly involving their checkbooks. It's always projection because that's all the sociopathic imagination can do, really.

Nerdpron, er, prom, with swagbag of Tweets

Nerd Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. From also smarter-than-she-looks romance novelist Sarah MacLean.

That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 28, 2013

No kidding, man. Why, as far as I could tell, nobody mentioned Sarah even once.* [jump]

A winkle in time

Winkles may sleep for a period as long as three years. From Proceedings of the Ever So Strange.

Digby spotted a great retroactionary quote from Michael O'Hanlon, in a 2008 discussion of remarks made by Sarah Palin, and in defense of her deep understanding of foreign policy:

Also her speech yesterday about going over to defend us against those who committed the attacks of 9/11, to troops headed for Iraq, is also correct because in fact al Qaeda is in Iraq now, even if it wasn’t then.

Not that Digby actually uses the word "retroactionary", but she knows intuitively that the passage needs some mocking attention, and that's why she bolded it.

O'Hanlon provides a more sophisticated example of the retroactionary than the kind we've looked at up to now. He doesn't believe in a literally reverse time, in which the troops could be able to drive Al Qa'eda out of Iraq, return the country to the terrorist-free condition it was in in 2003, and raise the Twin Towers. He realizes it was the Al Qa'eda in Afghanistan that brought the towers down.

What he does, rather, is a reversal of causality in respect to time. By arriving in Iraq behind the Yankees, Ali Musab al-Zarqawi and his Qa'eda in Mesopotamia organization made themselves the cause of the fall of the towers, the tragedy the US forces were trying retroactively to prevent. It's no different, really, than the way Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson made themselves responsible for slavery in the U.S. by being Democrats...

He's a tenther!

Uncredited, from the National Catholic Register.

Archbishop is out there with former part-time Governor Palin and the rest of the Tenth Amendment rights-reserved-to-the-states crowd, as suggested by this, quoted from the Times:

“Never before,” Archbishop Dolan said, setting the tone, “has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.”

 See, before it was only state governments forcing individuals and organizations to go out and violate their consciences!

Also, too, free exercise of religion does not rank first:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It's the establishment clause that comes first, thanks, and I think that implies that free exercise of religion does not include bishops of any particular denomination dictating exceptions to the law.