The evidence is mere conspiracy and the truth is its opposite

I filled out my ballot this afternoon. I waited this long because I wanted to see what the Detroit Free Press had to say about one of the Michigan amendment proposals, which was posted Friday. As I read through the text of the proposal, saying a lot about where money is to go, I kept wondering what was going on behind the scenes, such as money the proposal doesn’t talk about. I’ll hand deliver my ballot to City Hall tomorrow. Jessica Sutherland of Daily Kos has tweets, some with videos and the rest with photos, of early voting activity around the country. Some sites had people to entertain those in line or offered water and snacks. Kaivan Shroff tweeted:

I’d complain that it took 4 hours to vote, but I’ve honestly been waiting 4 years for this moment.

Sutherland concluded:

It is my greatest hope, with voting rights unprotected like they haven’t been in my lifetime, Trump’s corruption, and this level of enthusiasm, that we’ll see shorter lines on Nov. 3 so that ballots aren’t being cast at 3 a.m., and voters aren’t being intimidated by crazed MAGA bots.

Avoiding long lines and crazed MAGA bots sounds like a fine reason to vote early. Meteor Blades, in his night owl article for Kos, quoted Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams who wrote that three House members have unveiled a bill to impose 18 year term limits on Supreme Court appointees. That happened last month. It’s back in the news because two dozen constitutional law experts have signed a letter endorsing the bill. Blades also included a quote of the day:

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge --that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ~~Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017)

And a tweet of the day from Eric Holthaus:

By the way: Texas now employs more people in renewable energy (254,000) than in oil and gas (162,000). We’re already *well* on our way to a transition away from fossil fuels.

Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics, tweeted a quote of Shane Harris of the Washington Post:

This is a very big deal: Trump issues order for some career federal employees to lose their civil service protections.

Shaub expands:

This is an attack on the rule of law. The laws protecting career federal officials don't exist primarily for the benefit of the officials. They exist to protect the American people against career civil servants having to carry out illegal orders from political appointees. If Trump wins the election, the little noticed executive order he issued yesterday may be the most dangerous thing he's done yet. It's a bureaucratic-sounding topic. But it moves the full might of the federal government into the unchecked hands of corrupt political masters.

Translation: This allows career officials to be pressured to become a part of the nasty guy’s corruption or be fired. Laura Clawson of Kos explains it in more detail. A while back I wrote about Sarah Kendzior’s take on QAnon, that it was built on a kernel of truth of a pedophile ring running the government. What it got wrong was that the nasty guy was a customer, not the one breaking it up. Hunter of Kos has another take on the QAnon movement. Excerpts:

This week, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani was revealed to have been secretly filmed (as part of a new Borat movie, of all things) fondling himself in front of a youthful female "interviewer." Without getting too far into a description of that particular chunk of nightmare fuel, it continues the pattern of 1) Republican 2) conservative 3) Trump-allied 4) powerbrokers revealed as tawdry often-sexual-assaulting ultrapervs. From Wynn to Epstein to Broidy to Falwell to Rudy, there is a very robust claim to be made that the QAnon suspicions of an enormously powerful cabal of sex freaks are indeed well-founded—and that they radiate from the Republican National Committee's finance offices, from Mar-a-Lago, or both. All these real-world crimes and bizarre improprieties, however, are dismissed by the QAnon faithful. Nope: They are convinced that the True Pedophiles are "Democrats" and "globalists," and that four years of the nation's top Republican figures getting caught with their pants around their ankles are the fictional part. It should be obvious from that history, then, that isn't a conspiracy base that gives a damn about pedophilia and child sex trafficking, and if anything the “movement” has sabotaged law enforcement’s attempts to pursue sex traffickers by flooding lines with false claims pointing to everyone but the true culprits. This is a group born to defend criminal acts by the powerful, not combat them. It does so using the precise playbook Trump himself uses when caught committing apparent tax fraud, foreign extortion, or embezzlement: The projection defense. It's not me, it was that other guy. It has always been that other guy. No matter how much the evidence proves it was me, the evidence is mere conspiracy and the truth is its opposite. … If anything, the rise of Q belief as increasingly mainstream Republican phenomenon, complete with its own candidates and in-movement codes, appears to be the natural culmination of multiple conservative trends, all balled together in one malevolent, hyper-cynical lump: Fox News and conservative talk radio provided a large Republican base already trained to disbelieve news uncomfortable to the party, a base literally willing to deny reality in favor of pleasing fictions. A set of gullibles that could easily be transformed into deplorables. The white supremacist and white nationalist movement provided the conspiracy itself, a bog-standard edition of "evil global cabal that has secretly undermined world governments" that has been a staple of neo-Nazi movements in this country and in others. American militia movements are providing, in a literal sense, the ammunition: A far-right collection of malcontents who insist that violence against nonright citizens is essential, glorious, and nigh. The Republican Party's own widespread embrace of corruption, nearly all of it centered around Trump, has all but required more and more outrageous conspiracy theories as official party defense. … It is a scam intended for the most gullible. Its adherents should be pitied. … And mocked. As racism-embracing nitwits incapable of discerning truth from fiction despite having access to nearly all of human history tucked in the space before a single wandering thumb, its adherents should be mocked. … If you believe that Donald Trump, serial sex abuser, pedophile-adjacent thug is the good Christian hero who will secretly reveal that everyone aside from him is the dribbling pervert he appears to be, however, you are something closer to a half-sentient wart. You should be pilloried as one of the true suckers of the planet. Congratulations, all those willing to fall for transparent anti-Semitic gobbledegook rather than admit you got played by a skeevy lifelong con man.

Hunter’s analysis makes me think there are two level of cons going on here. Level one is the billionaires of America have bought and conned the Republican Party. We understand the bought part. The con is making the GOP think they have real power. In a sense, though, they do – over the rest of us. But in the social hierarchy they are still well below the billionaires in power and those billionaires would never allow them into their lofty domain, because those lawmakers are only servants. The nasty guy’s subservience to Putin is this same kind of thing. Level two is the rabid nasty guy supporters. They think he is going to do all kinds of wonderful things for them, including better jobs (or at least keep the jobs they have in such areas as manufacturing and coal). But, he has shown many times he won’t actually do that. He looks poised to take away their health care and do it in a pandemic. In both levels the same dynamic is going on, the selling of supremacy over somebody else. The billionaires do it by encouraging (perhaps demanding) the GOP enact laws to oppress the working class (also known at the billionaire’s own workers). The GOP legislators can share in the sense of superiority. The nasty guy tells his base that they will feel even more superior to black people because he will make their lives worse, so they’ll look better in comparison, even as he attacks their own standard of living. On the lighter side (well, a bit) Denise Oliver Velez of Kos has been highlighting black performers of the past. This week she focused on Hazel Scott who was born 100 years ago. She was highly popular in the 1940s. Never heard of her? I hadn’t. Though I don’t listen to jazz I am familiar with many of the names of the past, such as Cab Calloway, Paul Robeson, and many others. I hadn’t heard of Hazel Scott. So here’s an introduction, a scene from a Hollywood movie where she plays two pianos at once. That’s an incredible left hand. Her time is Hollywood was brief. She refused to play a demeaning character – servant or prostitute – which is about all Hollywood offered at the time. She played herself. In one movie where the black women were costumed in dirty aprons she demanded they be changed, then went on strike until the producer agreed. That was her last movie. She volunteered to go before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy era. She denied being a Communist, attempted to clear her friends, then accused the committee of being bullies. Because of that last bit her work in America disappeared and she fled to Paris. McCarthy and his gang came close to erasing her name from public consciousness. Velez included a 20 minute documentary of Scott’s life in her post.