A Grim Fairy Tale

And recognized as such by a Texas jury—which added a twist to the story—

A grand jury convened to investigate whether a Houston Planned Parenthood clinic had sold the organs of aborted fetuses on Monday cleared the clinic and instead indicted the undercover videographers behind the allegations, surprising the officials who called for the probe and delighting supporters of the women's health organization.

The Harris County grand jury indicted David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, both of California, on charges of tampering with a governmental record, a second-degree felony with a possible sentence of up to 20 years in prison. It also charged Daleiden, the leader of the videographers, with the same misdemeanor he had alleged – the purchase or sale of human organs, presumably because he had offered to buy in an attempt to provoke Planned Parenthood employees into saying they would sell.

Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson announced the indictments in a statement, noting the probe had lasted more than two months.

"As I stated at the outset of this investigation, we must go where the evidence leads us," said Anderson, a Republican. "All the evidence uncovered in the course of this investigation was presented to the grand jury. I respect their decision on this difficult case."

An arrest warrant was issued late Monday; documents detailing the charges were expected to be available Tuesday.

As M. Bouffant put it, "Tangled Web Woven, Snaps Back."

Also, Cecile Richards interview.

In The Open

David Ehrenstein connects a number of dots.

Donald Trump "could stand on New York's Fifth Avenue 'and shoot somebody,' and still not lose voters"... In "open carry" Ohio, armed white man threatens a black neighborhood as police stand down, a break Tamir Rice certainly never had...

Ehrenstein quotes Steve Sondheim—

What a wonder is a gun!
What a versatile invention!
First of all, when you've a gun
Everybody pays attention.

Oldies

Roy Edroso on Palin's endorsement of Trump.

Steve M.—

Ever watch an aging Top 40 group run through a medley of decades-old chart-toppers? No song gets played to the end. The lead vocalist asks the audience to sing half the words. The band just has to go through the motions.

That's Palin. She knows her audience spends every waking moment watching Fox, listening to talk radio, or watching the latest Trump interview on Morning Joe -- so she doesn't have to finish any of her thoughts....

Here's the formula: Take half a dozen ten-minute Fox or talk radio segments. Boil each one down to the takeaway bullet point. String these multiple bullet points together. Now you've made one Sarah Palin sentence:

Tell me, is this conservative? GOP majorities handing over a blank check to fund Obamacare and Planned Parenthood and illegal immigration that competes for your jobs, and turning safety nets into hammocks, and all these new Democrat voters that are going to be coming on over border as we keep the borders open, and bequeathing our children millions in new debt, and refusing to fight back for our solvency, and our sovereignty, even though that’s why we elected them and sent them as a majority to DC.

So few words, so many grievances! In a way, it's artful. Except for the awful draftsmanship, it's compressed like a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song, or a Bosch canvas.

Palin's audience doesn't need any of this explained. Palin's audience lives on these grievances, wallows in them, has them burned into memory via endless repetition in the right-wing media. The audience doesn't care if Palin plays any of the hits all the way through -- just play the chorus! just play that one riff!

In comments, Yastreblyansky adds—

Yes, I think that's exactly right, it's all affect. What she does isn't that different from Limbaugh, or Trump, or Rubio for that matter, it just looks funnier written down. I think it's important to note that you can't in fact coherently narrate the story of whatever the audience is so made about, because you can't really make it add up to a story, as has been the case with all these things since Whitewater. You just utter the words--BENGHAZI! Lead from behind! Free stuff! to make them shake with rage. And I hate to say it, but you know who else gave rambling, incoherent speeches full of dark accusations that didn't really make any logical sense.

Or as a Driftglass commenter, bluicebank, said last week of this footage—

Ten seconds in, and the Historical Memory kicks in: "We've seen this before, but it was in black-and-white. In another country."

Heartache

After GOP crocodile tears over the SOTU, it's a treat to see how appalled they were the next day, when Iran released captive U.S. sailors.

The release was followed by U.S. lifting of sanctions. For all the administration's shortcomings, the thaws with Iran and with Cuba are true accomplishments.

It won't shut off right-wing screaming; still, it's so enjoyable to see their angst at being deprived of a hostage crisis for this campaign season.

In A State

I caught most of the SOTU last night. If the exceptionalist rah-rah is obligatory, it's still not very palatable, especially in its most militaristic form. And in its overlooking who benefits from the economy and who doesn't.

Today Digby joined Sam Seder to discuss the speech. While acknowledging Obama's second term has been the more vigorous, thanks to his willingness to use executive orders, Sam and Digby hit all the speech's objectionable points. Which also serves to list of some of the most misguided ideas of the last seven years.

Obama had again expressed his disappointment at not having brought people together, as promised. Digby remarks that his pre-Washington life experience seems to have made him believe he truly could have united the country, despite this being "a really fatuous idea"—

There are ideologies at work: people have them, they believe them, it's not just some ... sense that they need a leader to come along and stitch together this great American patchwork quilt, and we'll all live happily ever after—that just isn't what's going on ... We're in a battle, and it's a big one ..."

And Digby found the "the howler of the night": Obama's saying to Republicans, "we all want people to vote"...

About Nikki Haley's GOP response (and its supposed rebuke of Trump), Sam notes the media refusal to recognize that—

...the story is about the Republican party, not Donald Trump—it's the people who support Donald Trump, not that Donald Trump is some type of magical wizard who's able to conjure up something that wasn't there before.

With conventional wisdom assuming a part of the GOP knows it will have to deal with issues like immigration, Digby observes—

there is a fringe: now called, the Republican Establishment.

It's a striking point, and it's reflected in the way Cruz can play to every other faction and ignore the Establishment, knowing the latter will have to come around to accepting him.

Even so, Obama says, "It's one of the few regrets of my presidency that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide..."

Harold Myerson responds with a little history―

Neither Lincoln nor FDR was able to bridge the gaps that their own policies created. Their triumphs, rather, were to prevail over their opponents. Simply by winning the 1860 election, months before he took the presidential oath, Lincoln prompted South Carolina and six other Southern states to secede. His first inaugural address concluded with a plea to the South not to commence a civil war. He appealed to the "better angels of our nature." The South responded by bombarding Fort Sumter. So much for Lincoln's ability to bring the nation together through his powers of persuasion. He was surely the greatest and most profound orator ever to serve as president, but while Frederick Douglass acclaimed his second inaugural address as "a sacred effort," John Wilkes Booth heard the speech and resolved to kill Lincoln then and there.

From 1933 through 1937, Roosevelt was able to persuade Congress to enact the most far-reaching social legislation the nation had ever known. He did not accomplish this by convincing mainstream Republicans to back these measures. (There were liberal Republicans in those days who did support them, but they were the exception.) Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, Glass Steagall, and a host of other structural reforms were enacted, and the Works Progress Administration funded, because an electorate that had moved left in response to the Great Depression sent to Washington the most lopsidedly Democratic congresses in the nation's history. Republicans reviled Roosevelt, calling him "that man" rather than even mentioning his name. His political appeal crossed the partisan aisle only when he donned the mantle of wartime president—and then, only sometimes.

At least FDR wasn't assassinated—though there was that little matter of the attempted coup (which I wrote about here). In any case, Roosevelt was willing to make "We Have Only Just Begun to Fight" the theme of his 1936 re-election campaign speech. Roosevelt didn't speak about playing nicely with vicious opponents, and he couldn't have put it more clearly—

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

The Circus Comes To Town

Trump goes to Vermont; so does Charles Pierce, and he observes of crowd and media in attendance—

Only He, Trump can put on this kind of show and, even if you're only there to observe it and to chronicle it, you are complicit in its creation and in its very life force in our politics. He has put the entire system in a box. He takes it out a couple of times a week to play with it.

So: mega-huckster, with perfect instincts for exploiting media, inserts self into a political system degraded to the point of said media being unable to take its cameras off him... Pierce gets at some real essence behind the absence of reality—

There is no point in discussing pots and kettles any more. There is no point in pondering what's real and what isn't. Until they start casting votes in anger, we're all just barkers in a splendid carnival, playing to packed houses in a country that has been conditioned for decades to look at its politics as a television show, as divorced from ordinary life as The X-Files. Government is a sham, but politics is a show. Line up around the block. Don't be late. Step right up, suckers.

Different Strokes

A year-end travesty in Cincinnati.

In that link above, Charles Pierce wrote on 12/29—

I have to admit that it took a day before I could sit down and write about the thoroughgoing bag-job that was the official investigation into the summary execution-by-cop of Tamir Rice, a 12-year old who apparently had the misfortune of having a growth spurt in the fevered mind of one Officer Timothy Loehmann, who found it necessary to shoot Rice down before he could grow any bigger and more threatening. When will African American children learn not to grow so suddenly into monsters in the minds of our brave folks in blue?...

Pierce adds—

There certainly is no point in emphasizing the damn irony that Ohio is an "open carry" state so, even if the cops assumed Rice was 18, and they also assumed his gun was real, they had no cause even to stop him, let alone open fire. Listen to the spiel that Wayne LaPierre unspools every time he's in a room with more than four people listening: arm yourselves, because the world is a hellscape of violent Others who are coming for you and your children. At its heart, open carry is about open season on the people who scare you. It's certainly not about an absolute Second Amendment right that applies to black people as well as white. Open carry is about You and the Others, and so is the training of our modern, militarized police forces. If only Tamir Rice had not been born with that congenital ability to become huge and threatening the way he did in the mind of Timothy Loehmann. If only...

A media spectacle in Oregon's (white) hinterlands.

No cause for concern; as an ABC Twitter headline put it, "Peaceful protest followed by Oregon wildlife refuge action."

On January 3 tengrain observed—

Say, we have not heard from our old pals, the land-grabbing, tax-cheating, grifting Bundy family of Nevada. If it is an election year, the Bundy's must be up to something.

A couple days later, tengrain may have been correct here, in predicting the situation could be ended by a shut-off of power to the refuge.

But Roy Edroso is certainly right about these characters' efforts to seize federal land—

... which I guarantee you would not in such a case be equitably distributed among We the People, but would instead get funneled to the usual shitheels whose cries for devolution of government resources always come down to "gimme."