Cinco de Mayo

Today is Cinco De Mayo, a holiday that celebrates Mexico's victory over a superior French force at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. So it is a holiday that celebrates a French military defeat-- sort of like every other holiday in Germany and every third holiday in England.

The French began mucking around in Mexico in 1861, because the United States had more pressing matters to attend to than to get froggy about a violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

Despite the victory and despite heavy guerrilla resistance by Mexican patriots, the French were able to set up a puppet regime in Mexico. By 1866, with some realization that the United States now had the largest navy and the most battle-hardened army on the planet, the French began to withdraw. The United States helped things along by "losing" arsenals of weapons to the Mexican resistance.

For some reason, the French puppet emperor of Mexico, Maximilian I, didn't flee. He was captured, given a trial by court-martial, and, along with two of his generals, shot by a firing squad on June 19, 1867.

Max is on the right side.

The story was that Maximilian paid the firing squad not to shoot him in the head, so that his mother could view his body after he was embalmed and sent home. They kept to the bargain.

The generals died shouting "long live the Emperor". Which was sort of futile, as they shot Max first.

Anyway, today isn't supposed to be a day for stupid Anglos to get wasted. That's St. Patrick's Day.

Because It's Friday

The Flying Scotsman:

She might be the most-traveled locomotive ever.

Coupla Things

I've had quite a bit to do at work this week.

Also, I've enjoyed the hell out of The Expanse. So I picked up some of the books. Leviathan Wakes, the first book, took a season and a half for SyFy to adapt. The latter part of the second season gets into Caliban's War.

There is stuff out of sequence, as the show introduces some characters far earlier than the books did. And the series on syFy seems to be diverging from the second book to some extent.

Anyway, each book is over 500 pages and they are not speed-reads. I'm part-way through Caliban's War.

What all that means is that I have other stuff that's, at the moment, more interesting for me to do than blog frequently. I don't get paid for this, mind you. So if there is something for me o do that is either paying (work) or is more fun, then so be it. I'll probably drop a post a day, maybe two.

Yes, I know that TrumpCare advanced with the assistance of the Zombie-Eyed Granny-Starver. That's a meaty topic, for now, and I'm not going to tear into it.

The blogrolls await your attention.

Unless You're Muslim. Then It's OK to Discriminate Against You. Especially by DHS.

At his signing ceremony in the White House’s Rose Garden, Trump delivered a speech steeped in religious pride and said the order “will not allow people of faith to be bullied, targeted, or silenced any more.”

He vowed to defend all faiths, saying the order showed the United States “will never stand for religious discrimination.”

Riight. I call bullshit. Anyone remember when The Donald was loudly proclaiming that he'd ban all Muslims from entering the United States once he became president?

We've had at least one sitting state supreme court judge who has declared that religions that do not follow the Ten Commandments aren't genuine. And that, of course, is just one example. You can find many more examples of government officials and even judges who have been perfectly happy to discriminate against people who follow non-Christian faiths.

You want to go look for examples where people have been bullying Muslims for practicing their faith? You want to look for places that are fine with people building churches, but panic at the idea of someone erecting a mosque? Won't take you very long to find them.

You want more proof? Change your last name to something that sounds vaguely Arabic and then try to enter the United States. Even on a U.S. passport, you'll damn near be strip-searched by the CBP goons for no other reason than your religion.

How Soon Conservatives Forget

They've must have had their brains wiped with some really strong street meds, for they have completely forgotten their treatment of President Obama.

Which is why it's kind of amusing to read their umbrage over this:

Now that their guy is in the job, the Right demands that we respect the president and be loyal to him. But none of those itemst were not in stock on the Right when President Obama was in office. And you can bet your next paycheck that they would have been in extremely short supply in conservatives circles if Hillary had won. You'd not see a shred of what the conservatives are now demanding.

But hey, none of this is new stuff. Conservatives hated JFK to the point that their kids cheered when he was killed.

Gimme That Old Southern Hatred

So there was an old married gay couple in Mississippi. They'd been together for half-a-century and got married after the Supremes said it was legal for them to get married.

One of them got ill and died. A funeral home agreed to handle things. But then it got hateful:

The couple’s nephew, John Gaspari, made the arrangements ahead of time with Picayune Funeral Home, the only funeral home in the county with an on-site crematory, according to the complaint. Zawadski had hoped to hold the funeral there so the couple’s local friends could pay their respects. On May 11, 2016, Gaspari contacted the funeral home to let them know Huskey had died.

But after filing the paperwork, including a document naming Zawadski as next of kin, Gaspari got a call from the nursing home. “The Nursing Home relayed to John that once received the paperwork indicating that Bob’s spouse was male, PFH refused service because it did not ‘deal with their kind,’ ” the lawsuit stated.

I'll withhold comment as to the lack of humanity or basic dignity with regard to the staff and owners of the Picayune Funeral Home in Picayune, Mississippi. Because all of that is self-evident.

It is Illegal to Laugh at Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Third When It is Claimed That He Has Been a Defender of Civil Rights

Katherine Coronado of the U.S. Capitol Police was in her second week on the job when she was assigned to keep watch over Sessions’ confirmation hearing on Jan. 10. Coronado was involved in the arrest of Desiree Fairooz, an activist affiliated with the group Code Pink, after Fairooz laughed when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said that Sessions’ record of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.” (Sessions had been rejected as a federal judge in the 1980s because of concerns about his views on race, and back when he was still a Democrat, Shelby himself actually ran an ad suggesting Sessions had called the Ku Klux Klan “good ole boys.”)

Fairooz was seated in the back of the room, and her laugh did not interrupt Shelby’s introductory speech. But, according to the government, the laugh amounted to willful “disorderly and disruptive conduct” intended to “impede, disrupt, and disturb the orderly conduct” of congressional proceedings. The government also charged her with a separate misdemeanor for allegedly parading, demonstrating or picketing within a Capitol, evidently for her actions after she was being escorted from the room.

This is a pretty good example of why I hold Congress, especially Congressional Republicans, to be among the lowest slime on the continent. Shelby uttered a bald-faced lie and got laughed at. I'm surprised that the entire room didn't break out in laughter.

More troubling, if it's OK to laugh when one of the hearing participants tells a joke, but it's not OK to laugh when they say something that is ludicrous, then we're getting into content-specific charges that relate to the freedom of speech, which is a pretty damn iffy area.

"The Derp is Strong With That One"... Trump Edition

Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross recalled the scene at Mar-a-Lago on April 6, when the summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping was interrupted by the strike on Syria.

“Just as dessert was being served, the president explained to Mr. Xi he had something he wanted to tell him, which was the launching of 59 missiles into Syria,” Ross said. “It was in lieu of after-dinner entertainment.”

As the crowd laughed, Ross added: “The thing was, it didn’t cost the president anything to have that entertainment.”

1. How much of a sociopath does one have to be to equate a military strike to an after-dinner act?
2. Did Trump pay for those 59 Tomahawk missiles with points from his credit card (or with S&H Green Stamps)? Because unless he did, that missile strike cost the American taxpayer around $80 million or more, given that the replacement cost of those missiles is about $1.6 million per.

For the Love of G-d, Read a Book for Once in Your Life, Donnie!

"I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn't have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, 'There's no reason for this.' People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why? People don't ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?"

Does Trump not know that Andrew Jackson was long dead before the fucking rebs opened fire at Ft. Sumpter?

Trump also does not seem to realize that the Civil War may well be the most written-about war in American history. You could blow out the springs in a large car if you loaded it with one copy of every book on the war. And there is no shortage of discussion in those books about the causes of the war and whether or not there was a hope in avoiding the outbreak of the war.

But Ol' Dumb and Delusional doesn't know a thing about that. Your average fifth grader would know more about the Civil War than Our Preznit.

He's earning the appellation of Dolt-45. He may very well be the dumbest motherfucker ever to hold down the job.

Update: This.

Freedom-Hating Snowflake Donnie Wants to Change the First Amendment

Let's be clear on this: Trump thinks that "being unfair to me" means "writing pieces that are not flattering me." So Donald the Special Snowflake wants to revise the Constitution because he can't handle people saying mean things about him.

My response:

Dear Mr. President:

Grow up and suck it up. Bad press is a fact of life for presidents. And, for the sake of argument, what would happen to your favorite news channel if you got your way? What would happen to Steve Bannon's baby, Breitbart? What would happen to your favorit eInternet broadcaster, Alex Jones, if they were not free to sling mud that had no foundation in fact?

Hell, what would have happened to you with the Birther Conspiracy? You would have been sued into bankruptcy, to the point that you would have been lucky if "The Trump Estate" was a rusting out mobile home in the northern tier of New York State. You are proviing to be the stereotypical asshole with a glass jaw..

If you can't stand the heat that comes with being a politician on the national stage, then follow the advice of Harry Truman and get the hell out of the kitchen.

Sincerely,
Me

Feel free to copy and/or plagiarize any and all parts of this post.