Monday roundup

Seems to be a lot of focus on looking for hate and bigotry in today's roundup:

Bill deBlasio, the NYC mayor who spent his honeymoon in Havana, says that as a result of the recent conflagration in Charlottesville, his city will conduct a 90-day review of "symbols of hate" around Gotham.

Emily Jashinsky at the Washington Examiner says that the branding of mainstream conservative and Christian groups is just the latest evidence that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a toxic force in post-America.

Even inanimate objects that precede the appearance of human beings by billions of years don't escape suspicion of their motives:

The Atlantic, a once-great magazine, has determined that the total eclipse of the sun due to occur on Monday will fail to affect enough black people.

The Atlantic’s very lengthy essay on the failure of the eclipse to occur where a sufficient number of black people reside is entitled “American Blackout.” It clocks in at a remarkable 4,544 words and does not appear to be satire.

Concerning “the Great American Eclipse,” Brooklyn Law School professor Alice Ristroph writes in the rapidly deteriorating magazine, “there live almost no black people” “along most of its path.”

The Atlantic’s longwinded law professor assures readers that “implicit bias of the solar system” is “presumably” not the cause of eclipse’s failure to affect enough black people. 

“Still, an eclipse chaser is always tempted to believe that the skies are relaying a message.”

Oregon, where the eclipse will first appear in the continental United States, “is almost entirely white.” “There are very few black Oregonians, and this is not an accident.” It’s totally on purpose in 2017, The Atlantic claims, because the Pacific Northwest state had a “racial exclusion” clause in its original 1857 constitution.

This Lindy West is a real piece of work:

A contributing opinion writer covering feminism and popular culture, West has written eight articles for the Times, including six since July. I think the best way to describe her is as the unrestrained id of the Democratic party. She is convinced, as if by impulse, that conservatives are terrible people, and will say so at every opportunity. I can see no evidence of any self-regulating mechanism in her work.

No, the author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Women, lets it all out. On Wednesday, West called Republicans every name in the book. She started off relatively mild: Republicans — aside from Trump — pretend to be “on the side of goodness and rationality and respect. Do not let them off the hook so easy,” she wrote. Apparently, we right-wingers are all on the side of badness, irrationality, and so forth.

For West, this was only the beginning. “Sure, pre-Trump Republicans traded more in dog-whistles and plausible deniability than overt Nazi sloganeering,” she wrote. “But the goal was the same: white men in charge, white women at their elbows. Systematically enforced poverty turning millionaires into billionaires. Bigots may have swapped subtext for the Jumbotron, but what is the substantive difference?”

In her eyes, there is no “substantive difference” between normal, pre-Trump Republican rhetoric and “overt Nazi sloganeering.” Further, what Republicans want, she claims, is to keep women and minorities down, and to perpetuate systemic poverty. That is the goal, she believes, of half the country. That is their vision of success in politics.

Unfortunately, the article would descend further into the mud. After pulling a Gore Vidal — all but calling Republicans crypto-Nazis — she doubled down, rebuking the conservatives who criticized Trump’s comments on Charlottesville. “It is easy to denounce Nazis. Republican lawmakers, if you truly repudiate this march and this violence, then repudiate . . . ,” she wrote, before launching into a list of 18 things that Republicans must disavow — including opposition to abortion, environmental regulations, gun control, reparations for African Americans, Obamacare, and transgender rights — in order to “truly” oppose Nazism.

This is kind of a gloomy theme, isn't it? Let's end with an item that is at least a tiny move toward something a little sunnier (nice eclipse-day imagery, don't you think?). Missouris State Senator Maria Chapelle-Nadal issues an actual  apology for calling for Squirrel-Hair to be assassinated.