Today's Must-Read: The DNC Kick-Off

Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention. The whole thing is at Bark Bark Woof Woof. Here's the beginning:

Good evening, everyone. It’s a hard time, and everyone’s feeling it in different ways. And I know a lot of folks are reluctant to tune into a political convention right now or to politics in general. Believe me, I get that. But I am here tonight because I love this country with all my heart, and it pains me to see so many people hurting. I’ve met so many of you. I’ve heard your stories. And through you, I have seen this country’s promise. And thanks to so many who came before me, thanks to their toil and sweat and blood, I’ve been able to live that promise myself. That’s the story of America. All those folks who sacrificed and overcame so much in their own times because they wanted something more, something better for their kids. There’s a lot of beauty in that story. There’s a lot of pain in it, too, a lot of struggle and injustice and work left to do. And who we choose as our president in this election will determine whether or not we honor that struggle and chip away at that injustice and keep alive the very possibility of finishing that work.

Read the whole thing. It's a beaut.

What's New at Green Man Review.

Sadly, nohing. We're in between hosts and had expected to be up and running before now, but there have been complications. As for this site, I really am going to have to move over to Wordpress or something. Aside from being user-hostile, Blogger is now causing my computer to stall. I'm having to write posts on Wordpad and copy and past them in, which is a pain. I'll try to keep you posted.

Blatant

This will probably bemy last post fora while. Blogger has "updated", with the result that I'm finding it next to unusabe. I'll probably try moving everything over to Wordpress, but it may take a while. I'll try to post a link to the new blog once I've started setting it up. Trump and his allies have gotten to the poiont where they're not even pretending any more. Trump himself lets the cat out of the bag:

President Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud, admitting he’s intentionally withholding money from the U.S. Postal Service to undermine its ability to handle mail-in voting in the 2020 election. “They need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said on Fox Business Thursday morning of the states that are implementing universal mail-in voting ahead of the November election. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”

What's New at Green Man Review

Our usual mix of this, that, and the other, with a couple of surprises:

Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Son, Hugo Award Winners, King Arthur Revisited, the Universe, a Graduating Class, and Other Cool Stuff

So, off you go to enjoy all the goodies.

Critter Chronicles: Pigeons Are Weird

Firsts off, they walk funny -- like wind-up toys -- their heads bob back and forth, and the faster they walk, the faster their heads move. It's a wonder they don't get whiplash.



And have you ever noticed how a flock of pigeons will take off from wherever they're roosting, fly around in circles for a while, and then light just where they were to begin with?

Culture Break: Penguin Cafe: 'Protection' for Erased Tapes

Penguin Cafe is the successor to Penguin Cafe Orchestra (reviews of their music are here and here. This piece was a new one for me, that I ran across quite by chance. I like it a lot:

I don't know if this has been released on an album, but you can find a review of their album A Matter of Life. . . at Green Man Review this coming Sunday.

They're worth checking out on YouTube, as well -- lots of nice stuff.

Nice Company You've Got There

Be a shame if anything happened to it. This broke a couple of days ago:

President Donald Trump said TikTok will have to close in the U.S. by Sept. 15 -- unless there’s a deal to sell the social network’s domestic operations to Microsoft Corp. or another U.S. company.

Trump also said the federal government will have to be paid a “substantial amount of money” as part of any deal.

“I don’t mind whether it’s Microsoft or someone else, a big company, a secure company, a very American company buys it,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “It’ll close down on Sept. 15 unless Microsoft or somebody else is able to buy it and work out a deal, an appropriate deal, so the Treasury of the United States gets a lot of money.”

Trump really has started to think of himself as the godfather. I can't see how the U.S. government can legally demand a cut of a business deal between two corporations. My own feeling is it's just Trump blowing gas again -- he announced originally, on Friday, that he would ban TikTok's operations in the U.S. on Saturday via his old stand-by, executive order. Nothing happened.

However, the reactions have been, predictably, not positive. The Chinese, in particular, are not pleased:

Chinese state media this week is blasting Washington for what it calls the United States' "nasty" treatment of TikTok — the wildly popular video-sharing app that has become emblematic of worsening US-China relations.

"The US' decoupling from China starts [with] killing China's most competitive companies," wrote the Global Times, a state-run tabloid, in an editorial published Monday. "In the process, Washington ignores rules and is unreasonable."

And as usual, Trump's own people have no idea how this is supposed to happen, if it happens (and that's a big if, but it's the press' latest shiny object):

White House officials on Tuesday could not say how the U.S. government would receive a portion of the proceeds from any sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations, one day after President Donald Trump called for a cut of the money.

“There’s no specific blueprint here,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Fox Business Network on Tuesday.

“It may be that the president was thinking, because the Treasury has had to do so much work on this, there are a lot of options here. I’m not sure it’s a specific concept that will be followed through ... Regarding fees or anything like that, all that remains to be seen,” Kudlow said.

This is revealing of Trump's thinking on this (among other things):

Experts have said the U.S. government generally does not have the authority to take a cut of private business sales. But Trump, a real estate developer and former reality television star who has touted his “art of the deal,” on Monday said “a very substantial portion” of any TikTok sale must go to the U.S. Treasury “because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen.”

That's a stretch, at best -- the only possible way we "allowed this to happen" is if it requires an OK from the Commerce Department, or DoJ, on anti-monopoly grounds, which wouldn't apply here.

The man's an idiot.

Oh, and if you're wondering why Trump is going after TikTok in particular, aside from the fact that it's a Chinese company, note this, from the Bloomberg story:

Teenagers opposed to Trump have also used the app to disrupt the president’s campaign activities, including signing up for tickets to his first rally since the beginning of the pandemic, in Tulsa. Attendance at the late June event was far below expectations, and Trump hasn’t held another rally since.

Bottom line: they're being mean to him.

All via Joe.My.God.

What's New at Green Man Review

Another Sunday, and more reviews. There's sort of a theme this week:

de Lint books and music, blatant self-promotion is a good thing, a boozy trifle and other good things

It's not all de Lint -- just mostly. Hop on over and see what else is waiting for you.

Catching Up: The Next Step

Toward what? you may ask. Why, toward a fascist authoritarian state, of course. This is from a couple of days ago (I don't seem to have highlighted it yet):

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020

He can't do that of course -- no matter what Mike Pompeo says. The date of the presidential election is set by federal law. Good luck with getting Nancy Pelosi to agree to a delay. But even the Republicans aren't jumping on this particular bandwagon:

Top Republicans on Thursday rejected President Trump’s suggestion that the Nov. 3 general election be delayed — something he has no authority to order. “Never in the history of the federal elections have we not held an election and we should go forward,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, adding that he understood “the president’s concern about mail-in voting.”

Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, declined to answer questions on Capitol Hill, but dismissed Mr. Trump’s suggestion in an interview with WNKY television. “Never in the history of the country, through wars, depressions, and the Civil War have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3,” Mr. McConnell said. “We’ll cope with whatever the situation is.”

Meanwhile, Trump's minions are doing everything possible to make voting by mail untenable:

The U.S. Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country after a top Trump donor running the agency put in place new procedures described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming postal workers who warn that the policies could undermine their ability to deliver ballots on time for the November election.

As President Trump ramps up his unfounded attacks on mail balloting as being susceptible to widespread fraud, postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by Trump fundraiser-turned-postmaster general Louis DeJoy are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.

Of course, the Republicans have been wanting to kill the USPS almost as long as they've been trying to repeal Social Security.

Needless to say, the reactions to this ploy have been less than positive. A sample:

This is Trump's most dangerous Tweet ever. And I know that is saying something. It is not within his power to change the date of the election. But that he wants to try should set off alarms everywhere. He is publicly contemplating a dangerous, authoritarian power grab. https://t.co/QhOMi6AlTr

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) July 30, 2020

We all knew it was coming to this. Make no mistake about it: Any announcement of a delay of the election will be a declaration of war against America by our criminal president. https://t.co/fIAE4spGWd

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) July 30, 2020

I'm really starting to think we're heading toward a civil war, courtesy of Trump and the Republicans.