Al Franken Shouldn't Resign

 Yes, I'll say it, and I hope it's not too late: Al Franken should not resign. He shouldn't be forced to resign, either by the Democrats who (rightly) can't abide double standards or the Republicans who would love to see a Democratic knock-down. I can agree that what he did to Leann Tweeden was stupid, gross, and thisclose to sexual predation, and still want him to stay where he is.

Leann's story came out yesterday and it's shocking Sickening. I've read Franken's new book, Giant of the Senate, so I know he was no angel during his years as a funny man. He recounts in the book how even he had doubts about his past and how it would play when he ran for a job that followed in the footsteps of his hero, Paul Wellstone. Franken knew his state, knew his politics, had a great education, and was smart as hell--but his chief claim to fame was as a sometimes raunchy comedian. (He should have been a shady billionaire blowhard instead. Pure Teflon.)

The former Fox reporter says he kissed her during a 2006 USO skit but went too far, tongue inserted where it wasn't wanted. (Note to men--and women, too--unless you're in the throes of hot passion, grinding face to face--both of you--don't try to stick your tongue down someone's throat. Coming as it does, unexpected and/or unwelcome, the recipient will gag on what feels like a cold, slimy slab of liver. You must know that by their reactions. Just don't do it.)

And worse, while Tweeden slept, Franken thought it would be cute to pretend he was groping her breasts, and even funnier, have his picture taken while doing it. (She was wearing a flak vest and it's not clear whether or not he actually touched her, but the picture is there and it's insulting, demeaning, and damning. Leann Tweeden has every right to be appalled by its existence.)

So, all that said, how could I, flaming liberal feminist, active #MeToo member, wish for Al Franken to go on working in the Senate? I confess I've been torn over this, asking myself why I should accept Franken's admission and apology and still go after Roy Moore or Donald Trump for their ugly sexual transgressions.

Well, yes, they're lowlife scum and don't deserve my defense--I agree--but I want the punishment to fit the crime. Franken has plenty to apologize for--gross, sexist stupidity is finding its day in court and, after so many decades of unfettered applications, it can't come too soon--and he has apologized. Twice so far, without the usual equivocations. He is as disgusted with himself as we are. Leann Tweeden accepted his apology. She said she doesn't want him to resign, adding that he does good things for the people of Minnesota while still acknowledging it was wrong and these things shouldn't be ignored.

She's right. They shouldn't be ignored. Spreading sunshine all over the place encourages women--and sometimes men--to come out of the shadows and tell their stories. We are at a crossroads now and we have to get it right. Sexual predators, no matter who they are, need to be exposed. We should, of course, look to punishment, but who gets to decide what form and how much?

Did Al Franken do something worthy of expulsion? There's the dilemma. I want women like Leann Tweeden to be able to come forward without consequence to tell their stories. I want the men who abused them to feel their pain, to get it, to show us they've learned from these revelations and will work to put a stop to a culture that has for too long equated power with the freedom to use sex as a right.

I believe Franken gets it. I want him to stay in the Senate because his work is important. Too important to set aside. He does good work there. He asks relevant, sometimes burning questions, does his homework, and works for the disenfranchised, the underdogs, the people hungering for attention to their condition. The loss would be painful.

I want him to work for us, against the Trump administration and the GOP majority, against any hateful agents who try to diminish or harm those of us without power. I want him where he can do the most good. I want him in the Senate.

(Cross-posted at Dagblog and Crooks & Liars)

In an Era of Super-Villains we need Super-Heroes

Since the dawn of man there has always been the need for a healthy society to smack down villains.  Villains are the human version of opportunistic rats:  There is no compunction about doing us in if that's what it takes to keep their kind going.  If their population is allowed to grow and thrive, their numbers will take us over.

In this country we're finally waking up to the evidence before us: our home-grown rats have blind-sided an easily distracted population, speedily metastasizing into super-villains.   For over two centuries they've been working on doing us in, taking us over, and now they own us.

They've commandeered our congress, corrupted our governors, pirated our airwaves, and swayed our elections, recently spending untold millions to create a phony, astro-turfed movement with no real goal except to destroy whatever safeguards are left to keep us safe, civil and healthy.

They own us.

Who are they?  We all know who they are.  They know who they are.  They take pleasure in their mischief-making, periodically rubbing our noses in it, lest we forget.  Their goal, as stated, is to destroy Barack Obama and the Democrats so fully there will never, ever be another Democratic majority.  Not ever.  Their goal is to turn all public works over to private interests and to keep it that way for all eternity.  Their goal is to dehumanize the worker bees and make them dependent on the benevolence of their bosses.  Their goal is to lead us into temptation and make sinners of us all.

They are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  They are the Heritage Foundation.  They are the Religious Right.  They are Dick Armey and FreedomWorks.  They are the Koch Brothers.  They are Fox's Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes.  They are Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove.  They are John Boehner and Mitch McConnell.  They are the same people you knew they would be.   The same bunch we've outed hundreds of times before. The same bunch still moving forward unimpeded, more bloated, more dangerous, less likely to look back.

The last thing they want or need is the presence of a Super-Hero.  But not to worry.  They're breathing easy, sleeping well at night, knowing there are no Super-Heroes on the horizon.  They're safe from us.  While they've been forming legions of followers, we've been looking in vain for our 21st century redeemers.

Where are this century's Mother Joneses?  The Walter Reuthers? The Martin Luther Kings?  The larger-than-life figures deep in the trenches, laying down their lives for causes that seem beyond any reasonable hope for success?  Where are the men and women who accept that they'll be jailed or bloodied or both but do what they need to do because it's the right thing at the right time and somebody has to do it?

Martin Luther King - March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963

 
Where are the leaders who understand that a country can't survive without livelihoods, without dignity, without fairness and justice?  Leaders who understand that there are promises to keep, obligations to fulfill?  Who understand that what is happening in our country is all wrong and something must be done now?

(There are a few bona fide heroes, such as the good senators Bernie Sanders and Al Franken. [And Elizabeth Warren.  Added 3/13]  They're working hard but they can't do it alone.  They could use a few Super-Heroes.)

So that's it, then.  Let me know if you find one.  I'll keep looking, too.

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FRIDAY FOLLIES: On Gingrich and Dust Devils and Supply Side Jesus.

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Possible presidential candidate and every parent's nightmare of a potential son-in-law, Newt Gingrich,  revealed on the CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) that we're not the only ones who think he's been a bad boy:  "There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate."

Hard work and love of country--it'll do it to you every time.  Thank God for our lazy, unemployed America haters.  That's all we need--to be awash in infidelity on top of everything else we've got going on.

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You can call me Red, you can call me Fred, but don't call me a BANKER!

The Guardian reports:  The controversial former bank chief Sir Fred Goodwin is the latest high profile figure to obtain a superinjunction, it has emerged.
The existence of the measure – which bans the press from reporting that an injunction has been obtained – can be revealed after a backbench Liberal Democrat, John Hemming, raised the issue in the Commons.
"In a secret hearing this week Fred Goodwin has obtained a superinjunction preventing him being identified as a banker," said Hemming, the MP for Birmingham Yardley.

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Warning, sacrilege alert:  By way of Blogging Blue (a great liberal site from Wisconsin) here is Al Franken's "Supply-side Jesus" (from his before-senator days, but worth resurrecting again).   From Al's lips to God's ears--if we're lucky.

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 I've mentioned a couple of times that I fight the Right Wing with the kind of passive resistance that most people would say is more than just passive, it's a snoozer, but I've convinced at least one other person that stealth shelf shuffling can be loads of fun.

Here's how it works: 
If you find a bookstore that promotes Right Wing books over the more liberal kind (by placing them prominently on tables by the doors or at eye level facing forward on the shelves), you pretend you're checking out Our Good Books and then, instead of putting them back on the bottom shelves or behind the RWNJ books where you found them, you casually place them where they belong:  on top of or instead of the stinkers.  Note that there are cameras on the ceiling, hence the "stealth".  And remember not to buy anything while you're there.

Anyway, I saw this story about a guy who stocks Walmart shelves with obscene photos of himself in drag, and I realized that when it comes to really making waves, I'm pathetic.

FREMONT -- The Toledo man who told police he placed naked photographs of himself inside and outside Fremont's Walmart store will face felony charges.
Fremont police arrested Rodney Kunkel, 44, after store employees called at 7:45 a.m. to report they recognized the man's car in the parking lot while reviewing video footage from earlier in the week. Fremont Detective Sean O'Connell said the store was able to identify the man because the obscene photos found at the store were developed by its photo center.

So in case you're ever looking for a place to develop your obscene photos, Walmart's the place.  But don't go looking for liberal books there.  You won't find them.  They only carry the RWNJs.

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I found this amazing video on The Political Carnival, another great liberal website.  A slow dust devil creates a gorgeous ballet with plastic sheeting covering strawberry fields in Germany.  It needs music badly.   I chose Aaron Copland's "Simple Gifts" from Appalachian Spring.  You might hear something entirely different.

Martha Graham performing in Appalachian Spring, 1944.

© Jerry Cooke/Corbis

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Cartoon of the week:

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Shut your damned Enthusiasm Gap and get out there and DO something

We all know that certain people who make it a practice to depreciate the accomplishments of labor - who even attack labor as unpatriotic - they keep this up usually for three years and six months in a row. But then, for some strange reason they change their tune- every four years- just before election day. When votes are at stake, they suddenly discover that they really love labor and that they are anxious to protect labor from its old friends.
 
I got quite a laugh, for example - and I am sure that you did - when I read this plank in the Republican platform adopted at their National Convention in Chicago last July: "The Republican Party accepts the purposes of the National Labor Relations Act, the Wage and Hour Act, the Social Security Act and all other Federal statutes designed to promote and protect the welfare of American working men and women, and we promise a fair and just administration of these laws."
 
You know, many of the Republican leaders and Congressmen and candidates, who shouted enthusiastic approval of that plank in that Convention Hall would not even recognize these progressive laws if they met them in broad daylight. Indeed, they have personally spent years of effort and energy - and much money - in fighting every one of those laws in the Congress, and in the press, and in the courts, ever since this Administration began to advocate them and enact them into legislation. That is a fair example of their insincerity and of their inconsistency. 

The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels. The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and the depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all social progress under the New Deal.

Now, imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery - but I am afraid that in this case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud.

FDR, September 23, 1944

Okay, I feel like the mother hen here--the dotty old mother hen who keeps repeating herself, even when it's clear that nobody wants to listen.  We mother hens do this, not because we're so keen on being royal pains-in-the-ass, but because we're keen on looking at the big picture and keeping it real. 

So, yes, I've said this before and I'll say it again:  We Dems/Libs/Progs need to do everything we can to keep the Democrats in control.  If we don't, the Republicans win and their gloating will take the form of locking us in towers and throwing away the keys.  They haven't even won yet, but on the strength of polls and pundits telling them they will, they're already planning ways to kill the few puny safety nets we've been able to jimmy into place.

So along with the satisfaction you get from gunning for the Democrats who in your view are either clueless or cowardly or in bed with the corporates, you might want to give a thought to how all that griping is fueling the other side.  They're loving these little internecine battles, because while all that spitting and hissing is going on, they can move on down that low road with nary a care in the world. 

I'm not going to rehash the horrors that will be unleashed if the Republicans take over congress, because there are others who have done it much more thoroughly already.  It will be bad.  You know that.  It will be so bad, we'll wonder how we could have let it happen again.  We'll pretend we didn't have anything to do with it--that the Big Money/Tea Party juggernaut was just too much for us.  But we'll be lying to ourselves, won't we?  All of this energy going toward attacking our own should be going toward attacking them. They are the enemy of the people, the destroyers of the universe (given half a chance), and we have an obligation to heal the wounds, not make them deeper.

The One Nation rally should be enough to convince us that we have the power if we'll only just use it.  It's a lie that we are a right-leaning country.  We couldn't have accomplished as much as we did if we had historically followed the dictates of the right.  We would never have had a healthy labor movement, a vibrant middle class, a claim to the title of greatest power on earth, without liberal pressure and sweat.  We built this country; they tore it down.  Now we're trying to rebuild and they're on the fast-track to tearing it down again. 

 The press is profiting from the looniness of the Right Wing and spends almost all of their time mooning over them.  Meanwhile, the good folks with mountains of practical, beneficent ideas but no talent for hawking them sit around and wait their turn.  Still, I'm seeing encouraging signs of a momentum building.  The Huffington Post, for example, has a new page called "Third World America", where real people talk about real problems and real solutions.  Elizabeth Warren finally has the president's ear, and someone is actually quoting the irrepressibly sensible Bernie Sanders.   Al Franken's heart is a hit on the senate floor.  Rachel Maddow has become an unlikely and refreshingly brilliant star.  Lawrence O'Donnell--smart guy in his own right--has his own show.  Michael Moore gives the Dems five steps to a win and in his follow-up he sees some progress.  And President Obama is beginning to sound like his old self.

It's a start.

So what's it going to be?  The Republicans taking over congress and making sure none of our programs ever see the light of day?  Or the Democrats winning a clear majority, sending a message to the entire country about where our priorities must lie? 

I'm declaring a moratorium on Democrat-bashing until the elections are over.  If you're not willing to get on board, I'm blaming you for everything that happens from here on out.

Have a nice day.

Ramona