Whatever they find to scream about loudest, do more of

The General Conference of the United Methodist Church is underway. This is the first GC since the one scheduled in 2020 was canceled. GC is the legislative body of the denomination and has the power to revise the denomination rule book and to set budgets. Delegates come from the US, Africa, the Philippines, and a few from Europe. The 2020 GC was supposed to approve guidelines for congregational disaffiliation, a way for those that disapprove of better treatment of LGBTQ people to exit gracefully. The guidelines were not approved. About a quarter of US congregations left anyway. That gives those who remained an opportunity to make the denomination more welcoming to LGBTQ people. The first vote to help that happen came sooner than I expected. My friend and debate partner found an article by Peter Smith of Associated Press that reports on the vote. Up to this point the United Methodist Church was structured so that local regions, such as Africa, could adapt the rulebook to their local situation. Congregations in the US could not. The worldwide delegation voted on US pensions – and the way US churches were allowed to treat LGBTQ people. That has meant restricting what we could do. This vote was to make the US its own region with the ability to adapt the rulebook to our needs. It passed by 78%, which is good because this is a constitutional change and needed 66% to pass. It now goes to conferences in each subregion (such as Michigan) for approval over the next year. Over the next week there will be two more important votes. One is accepting a rewrite of our Social Principles. This version was led by the global church, not by the US. It is a way of decolonizing the denomination, avoiding the US view being imposed on other countries. The other vote is to remove language harmful to LGBTQ people. The LGBTQ caucus is not (yet) promoting adding pro-LGBTQ language, which could be voted down by the more conservative African churches. Once the harmful language is gone then the US as a region could adapt the rulebook to local needs and add pro-LGBTQ language for US congregations. The investigation into attempting to find impeachable crimes committed by Biden has been led by House Oversight Committee Rep. James Comer. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that after 15 months of trying Comer just wants the whole thing to end. He’d even accept divine intervention. Comer is done because they have found no evidence of impeachable crimes. All of their “witnesses” were nothing. And they’ve been well played by Democrats and even Hunter Biden, one of their targets. McCarter wrote, “There’s just so much humiliation one man can take, I guess.” On to other stupid things Republicans have been doing. A year ago a gunman killed three children and three adults at the Covenant School in Nashville. Charles Jay of the Kos community reported that now Republicans in Nashville, learning nothing, have approved to allow teachers to carry concealed handguns. The protests from the galleries was loud enough that the Speaker ordered them to be cleared. Rep. Justin Pearson, one of the two black men expelled a year ago and voted back in by their district, wrote a protest piece for CNN:

Arming teachers increases the likelihood of shootings in schools, increases the chance that students will have access to guns and erodes trust in educators. A teacher with a handgun is unable to stop a shooter with a military-style weapon, and teachers aren’t able to respond in the ways trained law enforcement agents can. Adverse impacts — including fatal outcomes — will disproportionately fall on already marginalized populations such as disabled and Black students.

Jay wrote:

The bill would require any school employee who wants to carry a handgun to have an enhanced carry permit, obtain written authorization from both the school’s principal and law enforcement, clear a background check, undergo a psychological evaluation, and complete 40 hours of handgun training. One point of contention with the legislation is that parents would not necessarily know or be notified if their child’s teacher was carrying a handgun.

Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed the Republican response to the likelihood of an abortion rights proposal being placed on the Arizona ballot in November in response to the 1864 abortion ban being ruled enforceable.

According to a leaked PowerPoint presentation prepared by Arizona House GOP general counsel Linley Wilson, Republicans’ best course is to deceive Arizonans by forcing them to wade through one, two, or even three competing anti-choice initiatives in order to “dilute” support to amend the state constitution in favor of abortion rights. ... The Arizona GOP has reacted to the backlash against the resurrection of this grotesque “zombie” law by doubling down on the same strategy that has always served them. It begins and ends with the premise that anyone who becomes pregnant is simply unfit to decide these issues for themselves. That assumption is more than just offensive and insulting: It’s fundamentally dehumanizing. Democrats should take special care to underscore that aspect as the 2024 election approaches.

Gloria Rebecca Gomez, in an Arizona Mirror article posted on Kos, reported the Arizona House managed to pass a repeal of the ban. It took three tries to get enough Republican support to get past the procedural vote that allowed voting on the bill. It now goes to the Senate where they might take action on May 1. Nadra Nittle, in an article for The 19th posted on Kos, reported that many times to get a book pulled from a library it is labeled “obscene.” Getting tagged that way are books about sexual assault, about violence against women told by the female survivors. These make up 19% of banned books. Survivors need to have their literature reflect their experience. If they think they’re the only victims they will likely blame themselves. And no, this isn’t an adult topic – about 27% of girls and 5% of boys 17 years old have experienced sexual abuse. The numbers are much higher for LGBTQ youth. Scott Berkowitz of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network he founded and leads said that these bans play into the common misconception that sexual assault is about sex when they’re really about power. Mokurai of the Readers and Book Lovers community on Kos discussed the book Why We Can’t Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer and published in 2015. Here’s a quote from the book:

How can it be claimed that we can’t afford the rich? Here’s a short answer. Their wealth is mostly dependent ultimately on the production of goods and services by others and siphoned off through dividends, capital gains, interest and rent, and much of it is hidden in tax havens. They are able to control much of economic life and the media and dominate politics, so their special interests and view of the world come to restrict what democracies can do. Their consumption is excessive and wasteful and diverts resources away from the more needy and deserving. Their carbon footprints are grotesquely inflated and many have an interest in continued fossil fuel production, threatening the planet.

The book says real development means allowing everyone to have a good life. That includes having enough food, shelter, health services, security and freedom from violence, being able to participate in political decisions, and being able to interact without coercion or neglect. Mokurai lists a way we might get to this. Make taxes more fair. There are alternate ways of doing things, such as cooperatives instead of corporations. Some things, such as public transportation, education, energy, and water should be run by the government or by tightly regulated companies. There should be basic income, help for the disabled, and pensions. And remove the political dominance of the rich. And one last quote from the book:

Whatever they find to scream about loudest, do more of.

George Packer of The Atlantic discussed the ongoing protests at Columbia University and other schools. He said what we see now is a consequence of the protests back in 1968 when students were upset with the Vietnam War and used tactics far more severe than they are using now. Some of his major points: A university is a special place whose legitimacy depends on recognition of reason, openness, and tolerance. That can’t thrive in an atmosphere of constant harassment. Packer quoted Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter’s 1968 commencement address at Columbia:

“A university is a community, but it is a community of a special kind,” Hofstadter said—“a community devoted to inquiry. It exists so that its members may inquire into truths of all sorts. Its presence marks our commitment to the idea that somewhere in society there must be an organization in which anything can be studied or questioned—not merely safe and established things but difficult and inflammatory things, the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” This mission rendered the community fragile, dependent on the self-restraint of its members.

It didn’t work that way. Universities did not remain neutral. Radical students claimed they were oppressed. Radical ideas in the 60s, such as decolonization, were folded into reading lists and core curriculum. Which means now students take decolonization for granted and don’t actually think about it. The university leaders call the cops on students for practicing what they’ve been taught. What universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another. After October 7 Jewish students were harassed. They responded in the way they had been instructed to respond to hurt, by saying they were “unsafe.” In 1968 Republicans exploited the campus takeovers and the protests at that year’s Democratic Convention and we got Nixon. Republicans are already exploiting campus protests and activists are promising to show up at this year’s Democratic Convention. A few months ago I wrote about Rep Elise Stefanik and her questions to university presidents, including Harvard. The president of Harvard muffed the question and she soon had to resign. At the time I was suspicious because Stefanik is very hard core Republican and doesn’t really care about how minority students are treated. Why weren’t media outlets also suspicious? Packer’s reporting suggests I was correct in my suspicion. Stefanik’s question was whether calls for genocide violated their universities’ code of conduct.

If they said yes, they would have faced the obvious comeback: “Why has no one been punished?”

Which means Stefanik’s question was a gotcha question with no answer that would please her. I didn’t know and had no reason to find out that diva Bette Midler tweets. And she can be delightfully snarky. I found her because a pundit roundup included one of her tweets. The nasty guy’s election corruption trial is in progress and he has been sleeping on occasion (the thing he accuses Sleepy Joe of doing). So Midler tweeted an image of “My Pillow, Court Room Edition.” Another of her notable tweets (and I see them only the ones that get a huge response), this one from 2022, includes a list of incidents where there is a minor threat but it changed the way we do things. Here are the last two entries:

2001 – One person attempts to blow up a plane with a shoe bomb. Since then, all air travelers have to take off their shoes for scanning before being allowed to board. Since 1968 – 1,516,863 people have died from guns on American soil. Gun violence kills an average of 168 people every two days! Now, the problem apparently can’t be solved except with thoughts and prayers.

And another:

Planned Parenthood isn’t killing children. You’re thinking of the NRA.

He's too big of a liability to get a job at your local mall

My Sunday viewing was Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom. Lunana is a village in northern Bhutan (small enough it doesn’t show on Google maps) and is likely to have the most remote school on earth. A young man named Uygen is teaching at a school in the capital Thimphu. He is called before the education director because he is seen as unmotivated. He would rather move to Australia to be a singer. But he has another year in his teaching contract. So he is sent to Lunana. He is driven to Gasa where two men from Lunana meet him to escort him to the village. They tell him it’s an easy six day hike. They lied. The elevation at Gasa is 2,800 meters (9180 feet) and at Lunana it is 4,800 meters (15,750 feet). The village people, all 68 of them, are delighted to meet their new teacher, a profession they hold in high respect. Yeah, it’s primitive, including only intermittent solar electricity. A fire in the stove is best started with yak dung (he is cautioned it’s best collected after it dries). The classroom has very little paper and no blackboard. Yet, the nine children are charming and eager to learn. A young woman, Saldon, becomes a sort of cultural guide. She sees him trekking a long way for yak dung, so she brings a yak to his classroom so he doesn’t have to walk so far. She says he must keep it in the classroom because it is too cold outside. Of course, also in the classroom is the dung. One begins to suspect a budding romance (with the woman, not the yak). At the harvest season he is told snow is coming. Head back to the city now or you’re stuck here until spring. Will you come back next year? An old story trope is the young man from the city who gets stuck in the hinterlands and finds the locals actually have some pretty good qualities. In these tales a question is whether the lad will stay with his new friends or return to the city. Back in 2019 I saw the documentary A Polar Year with that same outline. It was also about a teacher. A young man of Denmark went to a tiny village in Greenland (a Danish territory) to take the teaching job. In that one he stayed. Lunana was Bhutan’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars in 2022 and was a finalist. That’s when I became interested in it. It took a while for it to get to Netflix. It has also won and been nominated for awards at various film festivals around the world. The trivia page for this film on IMDb has these entries:

All the actors in Lunana are highlanders, many of whom had never seen the outside world. They had never seen a movie, and had never seen cameras before. ... The director and crew loaded 65 mules with cameras, solar panels, batteries, lights, and sound equipment for the eight-day trek up the mountains to isolated Lunana to undertake filming. ... The crew members of Lunana didn't take bath while they were up there filming for three months because of extreme weather and lack of facility.

Michel Martin of NPR spoke to political strategist Rina Shah about the House votes on foreign aid. They talked about how Speaker Johnson finally stood on principle rather than the nasty House politics, even though he might be removed for it. Shah added this tidbit:

Yeah, it says that he's taken the most principled stance, again, of his speakership. Those folks who are saying that this is the weekend in which he became speaker I believe are not wrong, because this is about governing.

Good to hear that he has, though I wish he had done so maybe five months ago. David Nir of Daily Kos Elections noted that with the resignation of Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher the Republican margin in the House is down to one vote. One Republican can vote against a bill and it will still pass, but not two. But since the Freedom Caucus is much larger than that slim margin Johnson has already been relying on Democrats to pass critical legislation. Which only enrages the Freedom Caucus.

Whatever happens next, the chaos in the ranks of House Republicans will only further serve to remind voters in November that only the Democrats are capable of governing the country. In fact, you could even say that they already are.

Wilson Dizard of the Kos community reported that New York Attorney General Letitia James has asked the court to reject the nasty guy’s bond that he posted so he can appeal his business fraud case. James listed several reasons why the bond is suspect. Knight Specialty Insurance Company, who put up the bond, is not a legitimate bond company. Knight doesn’t have enough cash on hand to cover the bond if it comes due. New York regulators have condemned Knight’s sketchy accounting methods. Federal regulators also complain about the nature of the bond. An Associated Press article posted on Kos that there has been a settlement on what Knight has to do to make the bond acceptable. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported the group Republican Voters Against Trump have released an ad against the nasty guy and put up six figures to get it aired. The ad shows a job applicant walking a mall asking potential employers if they would hire him as he says he has the legal baggage the nasty guy has – facing 88 felonies, liable for sexual assault, and retention of classified documents. The tagline:

If Trump is too big of a liability to get a job at your local mall, he is too big of a liability to be president of the United States.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted David Frum of The Atlantic discussing the Ukraine aid bill passed by the House:

At the beginning of this year, Trump was able even to blow up the toughest immigration bill seen in decades—simply to deny President Joe Biden a bipartisan win. Individual Senate Republicans might grumble, but with Trump opposed, the border-security deal disintegrated. Three months later, Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine.

Down in the comments is a cartoon by Vilnissimo showing a person at a laptop talking to another: “Which do you want first? The bad news or the fake news?” In another pundit roundup Dworkin quoted Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. The conventional wisdom was the nasty guy was going to dominate the courtroom during his trial.

How wrong they were. When the criminal trial actually began, reality hit home. Rather than dominate the proceedings or leverage his court appearance to appear in control and demonstrate no court could corral him, Trump day by day has become smaller, more decrepit and, frankly, somewhat pathetic.

Dworkin had his own comments on the trial:

This is a conspiracy and fraud trial. The prosecution alleges that Donald Trump conspired to keep information from the voting public and committed fraud to do it. It’s being called by media a hush money trial, but it isn't.

Even NPR has been calling it a hush money trial. Down in the comments is a cartoon posted by Fiona Webster. It shows a gunman silhouetted in a classroom door as the kids cower behind a desk. One kid says, “I was safer as a frozen embryo.” NPR is doing a series of stories on roadside historical markers. There are about 180,000 of them across America. Last Sunday host Andrew Limbong had a 16 minute conversation with Laura Sullivan about some markers. She and colleagues didn’t visit them all. They did an analysis using a database of the markers. Not all markers tell the truth. There are markers on alien sightings and on ghosts. Texas claims to be the home of the first airplane flight (the Wright brothers lived in Ohio and tested in North Carolina). They went to a marker in Eufaula, Alabama. The marker is about Edward Brown Young and wife Ann Fendall Beall and their entrepreneurial activities. It doesn’t say he was one of the most powerful men in the slave trade. Nearly 70% of markers for plantations do not mention slavery. Many do vilify the Union or promote the Lost Cause. There is a marker in Tuskegee, Alabama, home of Rosa Parks and the Tuskegee Airmen. The town is 90% black. And in the center of the square is a marker put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy, a highly racist group made up almost entirely of white women. The town would like to get rid of it. But many markers are owned by private groups, such as the Daughters. They don’t live or pay taxes in Tuskegee, yet they dominate the square. Getting this marker removed is in court. Many markers are 50 to 100 years old. It’s hard to discover who owns the marker and the land, who to contact to remove it. Three states – Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee – passed laws prohibiting the removal of markers, no matter how wrong or offensive they are. While other groups have been working to remove Confederate monuments the Daughters have been erecting more markers, “proof that the victors of war do not always get to write its history.” Bryan Stevenson eventually became executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In his early days he noted the words slave, slavery, and enslavement didn’t appear in Montgomery. He asked the Alabama Historical Association to put up markers about slavery, but was told that’s “to controversial.” So he followed the idea of the Daughters: “If you want to own the narrative, write it yourself.” The National Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery has more than 100 markers. One way to deal with offensive markers is to put up adjacent markers, perhaps bigger, that tell the rest of the story. Theo Moore, the African American heritage coordinator for the Alabama Historical Commission, noted another aspect of markers. Cities like Tuskegee and Tuscaloosa were named after Creek Native Americans. Where are their markers? Monday was Earth Day and this is National Park Week. So let’s honor one of the better ideas to come from America. Jacob Fischler of Michigan Advance reported:

The Bureau of Land Management will publish a final rule soon allowing the nation’s public lands to be leased for environmental protection, a Thursday news release from the Interior Department said. The rule, which both proponents and detractors say marks a shift in the agency’s focus toward conservation, directs land managers at the agency to identify landscapes in need of restoration and to create plans to fill those needs.

I like the idea. Alas, the article doesn’t say for these leases who is giving money to whom. Does a group pay for the privilege of raising and spending money to restore the land? That’s what I think of when BLM and leases are discussed. I’m sure there are groups that would do it. Or does the BLM pay the groups to improve the land for the BLM? Bill in Portland, Maine, in a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, wrote:

I have never seen... A bison throw a cigarette butt out a window A flock of geese blow the top off a mountain A seal cause an oil spill A raccoon go out and leave all the house lights on A bobcat fight legislation to lower carbon emissions A songbird sing "Drill Baby, Drill" A pride of lions wage war over oil

...and many more. And something good for your eyes: The US Department of the Interior has a page with some beautiful photos from our national parks. Of the thirteen shown here I’ve been to ten of them – and to many more not shown here.

Democrats to the rescue. Again.

I finished the book Treasure by W. A. Hoffman. It is book three in his Raised By Wolves series. I had written about the first book back in 2008 and I didn’t write about the second. Now, at least a decade, maybe 14 years later I finished the third. The big reason for the delay – they’re long. This one is 560 pages. I think the other two are at least 600. I enjoyed the earlier books, otherwise I would not have bought the second or third. But I guess I didn’t love them well enough to immediately dive into the next. So this one sat on the shelf until it got low on books. The story is about Will and Gaston in the 1660s. Will is the son of English nobility and Gaston is the son of French nobility. Both of them had childhoods in which they were severely abused. Then they were sent to Jamaica. Both of them have severe mental health problems, though at the time they would have been called “mad.” Each has helped the other recover from bouts of madness and they are now lovers. The series is titled Raised by Wolves as Will considers their fathers and the rest of European nobility to be wolves, ready to eat or shear the human sheep around them. In the earlier books (what I remember of them) they became part of the Brethren, a society of buccaneers who cause trouble for the Spaniards. This is an egalitarian outfit in that the various ship positions are voted on by the company – quite different from the patriarchal society they’re from. The buccaneers encourage the men to pair up as lovers. A man is more likely to fight a foe to protect a lover than to protect a fellow crew member. Some “favor men,” some don’t, beyond their lover. This can lead to unusual situations. Pete and Striker are lovers and Striker is also married to Will’s sister Sarah. Striker loves both. As this book opens Gaston gets word that his father is coming to Jamaica. Has he come to insist Gaston give up his male lover and concentrate on producing an heir or to try to make amends? Will discovers how much his father is meddling from afar. He begins to wonder if everyone, beyond the Brethren, is an agent of this father. There is also Will’s wife, the woman his father sent for him to marry to produce heirs. She’s about to birth a child and Will, and much of the town, know it isn’t his. Is it better for relations with his father to claim the child anyway? A good deal of the book happens over a couple weeks. The baby is born. There is a great deal of discussion about what to do about Will’s father. Who should Gaston marry? Christine or Agnes – a lot of hints are dropped that Agnes is lesbian. And Christine is quite the shrew. Yeah, that means that part of the book is quite talky. It is only in the last fifth of the book that Will, Gaston, and their crew head out to join up with other ships to do some roving against the Spanish. That had a lot more action, though also a great deal of violence. There is a fourth book. The issue with Will and his father is not yet resolved, though Will has said how he wants to resolve it. It seems likely that Christine will cause trouble. But it was published 15 years ago and is no longer available at Barnes and Noble. I have found it online – for $35 for a used paperback. Perhaps I go to a review site, such as Good Reads, and find a review with spoilers and skip reading another 600 pages. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported Mike Johnson sounds like he finally believes intelligence reports that say Russia won’t stop with Ukraine, but will then turn perhaps to Poland. He finally decided to do the right thing and risk his job as Speaker to pass aid to Ukraine along with aid to Israel and Taiwan. The aid to Ukraine has been stalled in the House for several months. The last step before a bill goes to the House floor for a vote is through the Rules Committee. This still has three Freedom Caucus people installed by McCarthy as he struggled to take the Speaker job a year ago. This committee decides whether a bill actually gets to the floor and with three definite no votes to Ukraine aid passage didn’t look good. There are ways around the Rules Committee. The Speaker can ask for suspension of rules, though that takes 60% (or is it 66%?) of members to approve it, more than either party has. This is how the budget bills to fund the government got through. Another way is through a discharge petition, in which a few more than a majority of members need to sign. That bypasses committees, but it takes time and enough members willing to sign. A discharge petition was in process, still hoping for more Republican signatures. Back to the Rules Committee. Democrats provided the votes to get it through. It’s been a long time since the opposition party has helped the Speaker in this way. Johnson is now the head of a coalition government of willing Republicans and Democrats. The package of aid bills went before the full house where more Democrats than Republicans voted for it. And because of that another member or two will support the effort to kick out Johnson. And when that vote comes will Democrats save him? They just might. This is a weird time. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Greg Sargent of The New Republic about Johnson’s change of position.

Did we really hear the speaker say that he believes what our intelligence services have told him about the long-term consequences of cutting off aid to Ukraine? This is a direct challenge to the MAGA worldview in multiple ways. Johnson is treating Putin as the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and acknowledging his broader imperialist designs, which is heresy to some MAGA Republicans. But he’s also flatly declaring that on these matters, the deep state is very much to be believed.

An Associated Press article posted on Kos has details of the aid bills. The article also includes reaction by members of Congress and the history of why it took so long to pass. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported the Kennedy family has released an ad endorsing Biden. One of them, Chris Kennedy said that Joe Biden is the RFK of his generation and the one carrying the torch of Bobby Kennedy. Yes, this is definitely a rebuke of Robert Kennedy Jr., now running for president as a spoiler. The family asks Junior to withdraw. This comes as RFK Jr qualified for the ballot in Michigan. He did it by contacting one of the minor parties that has a guaranteed spot on the ballot and volunteering to be their candidate. They agreed. That means RFK Jr doesn’t need to gather signatures to get on the ballot. A few days ago I wrote about Detroit’s Renaissance Center as an attempt at Detroit and riverfront revitalization. I mentioned that General Motors uses it for its headquarters and did a lot to lessen its bunker mentality and improve the riverfront. At the end I said GM is moving out of the RenCen. Rick Haglund of Michigan Advance discussed what happens to the RenCen now. The place is huge – five million square feet, twice as much as the Empire State Building. It is the tallest building in Michigan and a riverfront landmark. It’s occupancy is already low because of more people working from home. How might it be repurposed? Can it be converted to apartments? Downtown living is booming, but will that overload the market? Is there another use? Or is it another behemoth, like the old Hudson’s department store, that will be torn down because no one knows what to do with it or how to solve its design problems? GM is moving into the building that is finally rising on the site of the Hudson’s store.