"Partisan" no longer suffices to describe it

My Sunday movie was The Wedding Banquet, a 1993 movie by director Ang Lee. Yeah, I’m revisiting an old one I hadn’t seen before. It is billed as a comedy/drama, though I thought more drama than comedy. Wai Tung and Simon are gay lovers. Wai Tung’s Taiwanese mother has been putting the pressure on him to get married and give his father the grandson he’s been waiting for. So Wai Tung agrees to marry Wei-Wei, which would help her get her green card. His parents announce they are coming. An old army friend of the father announces he’ll host the wedding banquet. Of course, things get complicated. It was amusing and touching. Alas, the story required some good old cultural homophobia. A while after watching this one I began to think maybe I had seen it before. Much of the movie didn’t look familiar, though there was a late scene between Wai Tung’s father and Simon, that did. Or at least the broad outlines did. I wonder if scenes like that have appeared in a lot of gay movies (yeah, there’s no answer to that since I didn’t say what happened in that scene). The scenes of the actual wedding banquet are similar to the movie The Farewell which also featured a fake Chinese wedding, though there was no gay relationship on the side. On Monday afternoon I was on my way to a specialty grocery when the radio in the car cut out. When I had a moment I glanced at the display and it said, “Low Battery.” I knew it wasn’t the car battery because that was only two years old. I didn’t think the radio had its own battery. Another mile and the airbag warning light came on. The mile after that the antilock brake system warning light came on. No problem. That’s needed in winter when driving on ice. Soon the brake warning light came on. I knew that brakes weren’t a problem because they had just been replaced. As I pulled into a grocery parking spot the engine cut out. Yup, when my shopping was done the car wouldn’t start. No attempt to turn over the motor. There was enough juice that the CD player (yeah, I still have one of those) decided it needed to cycle through all six CDs. I refuse to carry a cell phone, even if it would be handy at a time such as this. I went back into the store and was able to use their phone to call road service. I was first told the wait would be 90 minutes but a guy was there in 20. He cleaned up the attachment posts on the battery and connected his test equipment. As I suspected, the battery was fine, though out of power. The alternator wasn’t. He charged up the battery and advised I go straight home. I said the service center I used would be even closer. So I went. I go there ten minutes before they closed. Their oil change service said I would have to go to full service. I got in there five minutes before they closed. Thankfully, a woman allowed me to use their phone to call to get the number of a friend who picked me up. She even stayed a few minutes late. However, I had to go back outside and fill out the service request envelope, put my key in it, and push it in the slot. The service center called Tuesday morning. The price of a new alternator is about five times what the road service guy suggested it might be and labor doubled the price. That amount came seriously close to the value of my 15 year old car and brought up the question of whether it is worth fixing. I spent the rest of Tuesday checking the value of this car, and prices of available cars. I would like my next car to be an electric, but I don’t know how soon small electric sedans will be available. It might be a couple more years. So a used car to last those years might be good. I also checked another repair shop. That guy didn’t want to estimate a price without seeing the vehicle because he got tired of customers saying, “But over the phone you said the price was ...” But I had to know if the hassle of getting the car to him was worth it. So he estimated a price, which was quite close to what the first shop wanted. Then I got to be thinking it is hard to go out to see cars when one doesn’t have a car to get there. Besides, just a couple days is not enough time to research my options – I need a car on Friday. So this morning I called the first place and said go ahead and fix it. I should get it back tomorrow. But I probably won’t get a new one quickly, considering how much money I just put into this one. My goodness, a lot of browser tabs have accumulated since I last wrote! I’ll need several days to get through them. Hunter of Daily Kos wrote a good rant in response to Supreme Court Justice Amy Comey Barrett urging her peers to not let personal biases influence their rulings. She doesn’t want the their rulings to be partisan. Hunter went into detail in saying too late for that. He listed partisan rulings, including several kinds of voting restrictions Republicans are busy passing, then concluded:

New laws include means by which the Republican Party can install partisan acolytes to challenge the vote tallies of counties that vote against them. Does the public believe the Supreme Court will stop them, or help them? The question here is not whether the Supreme Court is now being perceived as too "partisan" by the public. At this point, large sections of the public believe the court has passed beyond partisan and is now altering, unmaking, and justifying new laws to such an extent that "partisan" no longer suffices to describe it. It appears to be an effort to undermine laws themselves rather than tolerate a decline of conservative power; are such broad actions legitimate, from the court? And what happens if the public broadly decides they are not?

Georgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted a couple articles of interest. First from Emma Pierson, Jaline Geradin, and Nathaniel Lash of the New York Times:

During the latest coronavirus wave, in July and August, at least 16,000 deaths could have been prevented if all states had vaccination rates as high as the state with the highest vaccination rate. The number of lives that could have been saved will grow unless vaccination rates in lagging states improve.

Second, John Cassidy at The New Yorker wrote about Biden’s vaccine mandates and the rule that slowing the virus is the way to fix the economy. Cassidy discussed a study that showed that people don’t choose to go to a store based on whether there is a lockdown, but on their fear of the current rate of virus spread. Hawaii Delilah tweeted a link to an article in the Washington Post and noted that Republicans in the California recall election were using the Big Lie, saying if they lose it is because of fraud by Democrats (Gavin Newsom won his recall by 67%). Delilah added:

This playbook has gone international because Bolsonaro in Brazil is using it.

Greg Sargent wrote an opinion piece for WaPo, then tweeted about it:

This is ominous. I've compiled numerous examples of high-profile GOP candidates who are vowing to contest future losses as illegitimate. In GOP politics, this is becoming a badge of honor, and that's a serious threat to democratic stability. ... The willingness to abide by election losses, on the understanding that you can live to fight another day, is a hallmark of democratic stability. But it’s becoming a hallmark of GOP primary politics to publicly renounce that ethic, defiantly and proudly.

SemDem of the Kos community wrote the Republican war on election workers is working. He documents several of the attacks and what that means for professional election administrators.

They are already paid dismal salaries and are expected to be experts on logistics, cybersecurity, communications, customer service, and voting law. Now, in addition to having to face harsh criminal penalties for administering their duties, they and their families have to live in fear. And that’s not the worst of it. Is it any wonder they are leaving?

Hunter also wrote about a California bill, likely to become law, that requires companies to distinguish whether their products are theoretically recyclable or actually recyclable, meaning there is someone out there recycling it. If only the former this bill would require them to remove the recyclable symbol from their product. Recycling centers currently handle the difference between theoretical and actual. They have to dispose things that can’t actually be recycled. This bill shifts the burden to the manufacturer, who should know their product. Customers would then not send the theoretical stuff to the recycle center. They would also demand packaging and products that can actually be recycled. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

All I'm saying is, if you're in charge of one region of my body, what sense does that make? Just the uterus? At least take the whole bottom half—I want a federally-funded pedicure! Can you do that? Of course you can't, you dumbf---s. So don’t take charge of the biggest decision I'll ever make in my whole life when you can't even get me a goddam pedicure! —Amber Ruffin on Late Night