RFK Jr Is Pestilence And Trump Is His Horse, Plus
We had to destroy the town in order to save it, plus green cards are just paper, plus music
RFK Jr Is Pestilence And Trump Is His Horse
Yes, we have the First Horseman of the Apocalypse, roaming the countryside distributing childhood diseases and bogus cures like heart-shaped candies on St. Valentine’s Day imprinted with terrible advice and leavened with HGH and enough testosterone to turn your face permanently red.
(You can tell when Kennedy gets his boosters—his face turns brick red and then gradually fades to a more normal color across the course of a few days.)
(It’s supposed to be a white horse not orange but there’s a pallor underneath.)
Cod liver oil! Overdose on vitamins A & D! Catch a disease to cure a disease! Recreational polio!
Rectal blue light therapy.
Do your own research, so long as you’re not a research scientist in a laboratory doing research.
And he has a legion behind him, including health departments in several states—we mentioned Louisiana a few days or weeks or years ago, time, what does it mean anymore—which are now refusing to promote vaccinations for anything, measles and other childhood diseases included. Flu, no. Covid, no. RSV, no. Pneumonia, no. Die, peasants.
Imagine that: a health secretary sowing the seeds of nationwide pestilence. And as usual, the impact of this will hit poor people and minority people the hardest, especially as access to medical care shrinks.
We have within the regime, and within the federal legislature, hard-core Christian nationalists who are praying for the arrival of the other three horsemen. Want famine? Cut food support for the working poor and price supports for farmers. Look, here comes the fashion-plate on the red horse.
And the nice thing for them is that all of these issues—food insecurity, poverty, disease, civil unrest (horseman #3)—reinforce one another. There’s a synergy. Politicians and corporate CEOs and billionaires are always talking about synergies, and we’re about to experience some motherfuckers, between all of those issues and, as I’ve written elsewhen but can’t locate now because substack’s search function continues to suck, a massive upward transfer of wealth.
We had to destroy the town in order to save it
War correspondent Peter Arnett attributed that sentiment to an anonymous U.S. armed forces officer following the Battle of Bến Tre during the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam; it could equally well apply to what renegade senate Democrats, under the flag of minority leader Chuck Schumer (and including one of my senators, deputy chief whip Brian Schatz) did in voting to relinquish the congressional power of the purse to the regime.
The argument the renegades advanced was basic: jettisoning any leverage and partially shredding the constitution to keep the government open as the regime runs wild was a better option than shutting the government down and cutting off federal funding while the regime still ran wild, and with the possibility that they would simply not reopen the government at least until they finished destroying it.
They were also afraid voters, to whatever extent they’re still relevant at the federal level, would blame Democrats for a shutdown; this has historically not been the case particularly when the party has offered an alternative. In this instance, the alternative would have been the 30-day continuing resolution championed near unanimously by House democrats and by most in the senate.
The argument against is only slightly less basic: the legislation transmogrified from a continuing resolution to keep the government running at the same level of spending, into a budget bill with new appropriations and cuts and the aforementioned surrender of congressional authority over spending. Passing it did nothing to prevent the regime from continuing to destroy agencies while illegally impounding and redirecting funds, and it established a legislative precedent for doing so at the same time as it destroyed one of the very few points of leverage the Democrats will have this year.
So you have the hardships of a shutdown and a possibility that Democrats could negotiate a better deal on one pan of the scales, and the promise of a continuing rampage and the associated hardships, but without the possibility of bettering the situation, and with the creation of that legislative precedent to which the regime can now point in court, on the other pan.
We should note that the American Federation of Government Employees wrote a letter to Democratic senators in opposition to the bill, arguing that the government is already being shut down, to which Schumer responded, “They were wrong.”
Schumer will be setting out on a book tour next week. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say howdy.
Mon 3/17 7pm Central Library, Baltimore
Wed 3/19 Politics & Prose, DC
7pm Thursday 3/20 at the Weizman, DC
Sunday 3/23 · 3pm Moss Theatre Santa Monica, CA
Mon 4/21 MJCCA Atlanta 7:30PM
Spread the joy.
Green cards are just paper
You all know about the case of Mahmoud Kalil, who has been kidnapped and detained by homeland security in connection with his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.
Now comes the tale of a German national with a green card who was detained at Boston’s Logan Airport on his way back into the country, abused by homeland security agents, and ultimately hospitalized before being moved to a detention facility. Fabian Schmidt has had a few minor, resolved encounters with the law but no current issues, and has a partner and daughter who are U.S. citizens.
[Schmidt’s mother] described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.
She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
“He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.
Welcome home, Fabian!
Music
Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, featuring Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons, Lee Morgan, and Jymie Merritt, Night in Tunisia, “Night in Tunisia;”
Lee Morgan, featuring Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Paul Chambers, Kenny Rodgers, and Charley Persip, Lee Morgan, “Whisper Not;”
Horace Silver Quintet, Live at the Village Gate, “Filthy McNasty.”
Subscriptions and stuff
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Be well; take care.