Huddle Shudder

Too good to last, the Morning Huddle hiatus since February.

The bosses have been too dispersed and lonely, it seems; schmoozing opportunities are no longer a few steps from their office doors, as in all the years past. And likely, a meeting still needs to go on "Accomplishments" lists for their performance reviews.

To kick off the new cycle, we first had to have a meeting on the subject: Having Meetings. There was nothing to discuss, so the manager filled time by reminding us the group will move offices again, in about three years.

Although this has long been the plan, and I will be retired long before it happens, I can only hope some newer topic can be found during my remaining months. Even if executive decision was for this Huddle incarnation to be held weekly, not daily, I am concerned it will become the weekly Three-Year Plan meeting.

Actually, the boss did have one other topic to raise: Simone Legree's group combine birthdays into a once-monthly party, and do we want to join them. Dead silence, until the woman whose default conversational tone is an annoying one-note snarkiness said, "Why don't we just keep it the way we have it."

Another week, another meeting: the boss announces, "We will celebrate with Simone's group." Poor babies; I avoid all of this stuff, but the co-workers will now have their party taken over. Simone is so much like my previous supervisor, Cruella, in braying for attention and giving the stink-eye to anyone not important enough to be fawned over.

My big complaint is that the Huddle is no longer a few minutes of standing in a doorway, waiting for it to end: it's newly sit-down, around a conference table. Where I used to slip back to my desk as the official part ended and the gossip began, now I'm trapped into staying through the latter, which is this group's real objective.

Meet The New Boss

Maybe just a tad more beady-eyed, but even more irritable and ready to squawk than the other ...

Five Decades After Selma

Sam Seder with Ari Berman, on how little the local power structure changed in fifty years. And in the national context, how fifty years of Southern Strategy has left Republican politicians unwilling to participate in what once would have been an uncontroversial, bipartisan commemoration.

Berman observes of Selma politics that, after the Voting Rights Act, "you had to get more creative to steal elections." Practice makes perfect; it also helps to put a judiciary in place for killing off the VRA.

A Star Is Made...

They sure aren't born—not among the GOP's material. First, there's Tom Cotton's creepy resemblance to Anthony Perkins in "Psycho." More significant is the repellant ideology contained in the dog whistle—

Common sense ... has never been the forte of race-hustling charlatans like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Unfortunately, it also seems lost on supposedly educated people like Roger Wilkins, Lani Guinier, and Derek Bell.

Nope, GOP stars have to be created: Steve M. observes the process at work, in the latest media crush.

Never mind the object of their affection's race-baiting, war-mongering history. Or that expert and leader on furrin affairs Cotton has been in Congress a mere few weeks. Or that even—fergawdsakes—the NY Daily News attacked the GOP stunt.

The swoon is all in a day's work for the insider media. Birchite delusions once considered beyond the pale of respectable journalism are embraced, now that the GOP serves them as Tea.

Unsurprisingly, some foreigners patronized by Cotton are light years' savvier than our media—

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif said late Monday that the letter drafted by Republican lawmakers addressed to Iranian leaders cautioning against a nuclear deal with the US was "mostly a propaganda ploy."

...

"I wish to enlighten the authors that if the next administration revokes any agreement with "the stroke of a pen," as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law"...

This, too, would be more credible than Tea Party worldview—

TEHRAN (The Borowitz Report)—Stating that "their continuing hostilities are a threat to world peace," Iran has offered to mediate talks between congressional Republicans and President Obama.

...

"Tensions between these two historic enemies have been high in recent years, but we believe they are now at a boiling point," Khamenei said. "As a result, Iran feels it must offer itself as a peacemaker."

He said that his nation was the "logical choice" to jumpstart negotiations between Obama and the Republicans because "it has become clear that both sides currently talk more to Iran than to each other."
He invited Obama and the Republicans to meet in Tehran to hash out their differences and called on world powers to force the two bitter foes to the bargaining table, adding, "It is time to stop the madness."

Speaking of racist Arkansans: it's a good time to look at some background, and to listen to a version.

TGIF

For all the institution's horn-blowing about being Sustainable, and, Green: I seem to be the only pedestrian around my new place, something that's been particularly aggravating this week. After work Monday, a boot toe's collision with uneven sidewalk ended by badly bruising both my knees and the palm of one hand. The next morning, invisible ice on a campus sidewalk sent me flying; the crash landing was onto the most painful of the previous knee injuries. Well, just one kneecap this time... but all very maddening, in that it happened on work premises, and that my knee hurt so much that it took a while to manage getting up.

This sidewalk begins at exactly the spot where the bus drops me mornings, and from there it leads to a convenient side entrance. The sidewalk also has the slightest degree of downward incline, which was where I'd gone sailing. So next day I tried a much longer (but flat) way, via sidewalks at the two major streets adjoining the buildings. No falls that day, but going the distance of just two blocks took nearly 15 minutes of negotiating pavement covered by ice.

Aside from parking lots, maintenance is indeed spotty. And I don't expect to ever hear a word from the building contact I e-mailed about the condition of the sidewalks.

Something that really gets me: one day, the snow and (subsequent mud) will be gone, and I'll want a nice solitary walk outside the factory. Which is just when the grounds will be full of walkers: administrative assistants who've changed to athletic shoes and puffed out their chests, striding purposefully to show they are becoming healthy, and doing their all to save their employer medical costs.

Meanwhile, I've lost track of the odd weather this week, but at some point, a shiny layer of thin ice appeared on every snow pile in town. It's lent my surroundings just a soupçon more surreality than before...

Not snow blobs on those trees, as it might seem, but buds—

Art budgets do exist to be used up (and what I've seen so far has been as bad).

Medium is message; rusted wheels and shredded plastic = recycling?

That's one small step for man; one giant leap for corporate expansion.

Shaking Down

"Highlights" of the DOJ Ferguson report—

The Justice Department report found that African-American Ferguson residents may have felt like they were being used as the city's personal ATM, by the way the police department hit them with traffic fines.

One woman has paid $550 on what was original a $151 fine for two parking tickets -- and, more than seven years later, she still owes $541.

The police also let dogs loose on residents, sometimes without warning.

One 14-year-old African-American boy said he was waiting for his friends at a house, unarmed, when police released a dog that bit his ankle, thigh and arm.

Harassment was also a common occurrence.

An African-American man was cooling off in his car after playing basketball in a public park in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2012 when a police officer approached him and accused him of being a pedophile.

Eric Holder: "It's not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg."

He pointed to the use of excessive force overwhelmingly against African-American residents, noting that only African-Americans were bit by police dogs, and said "no alternative explanation" except racial bias exists to explain it.

The racist e-mails revealed in the report certainly show police, court and city officials who felt no inhibition at expressing how they felt about black citizens.

Holder also said Ferguson's police department violated residents' First Amendment rights to record the activities of officers, regularly conducted illegal searches and unlawfully detained citizens and competed with each other to "see who can issue the largest number of citations in a single stop."

He said the city's municipal courts and local government "relies on the police force to serve essentially as a collection agency."

Racism fuels the system and targets victims, of harassment or worse. According to Darren Wilson, the late Michael Brown was a "demon."

According to Ferguson officials whose e-mails the DOJ cited, black women should get crime prevention bonuses for having abortions. (As Charles Pierce notes, not a particularly new or original "witticism.")

Beyond the obvious and casual bigotry shown in the DOJ report, Ferguson is a model of governance in the absence of taxation. It's municipal financing by shaking down those least able to pay. The practice parallels the way asset forfeiture in drug cases became too lucrative for agencies to resist applying it to more charges, while using it disproportionately against minorities.

Ferguson is far from the only place to turn police and courts into collection agencies.

Because it's a model that starts by targeting the most disenfranchised poor and working-class groups, it's been mostly people of color harassed—or killed—by authorities who feel justified in their contempt for the victims.

But as police statistics padding and municipal financing rackets continue to expand without oversight, anyone from middling circumstances can be caught. Clever Sister happened to spot this instance.

Turning Over Rocks

Clearly no expense was spared, to find these plaintiffs.

Four Little Words.

Supposedly, the King v. Burwell decision may all depend on Roberts' degree of concern that the public not notice the partisan hackery.

The verdict is due for June or July vacation news dump.