Moron theory of government

The lame duck session of the Michigan Legislature is over. The various anti-democracy bills are now before the outgoing governor. At the height of this lame duck season Ian Reifowitz of Daily Kos asks: Why have democracy? The answer should come rolling off our tongues. It’s in the preamble of our Declaration of Independence: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

But that runs against the “moron theory of government.” Reifowitz uses that phrase when he teaches courses on Western Civilization (Plato to NATO).

If the established values of a society see people in general as morons—i.e., people incapable of making sound choices—then that society won’t put decisions about who holds power into the hands of the people. Talking about morons with my students usually gets a smile, but the point is a serious one, namely that societies generally deny participation in the political process to those who, in the dominant view, shouldn’t be exercising it for one reason or another—or at least that’s how those who do the denying justify it.
…
In all these cases, the underlying theme is the same: They. Will. Have. Power. They don’t care what they have to do in order to seize and hold as much of it as possible. They believe they deserve it, irrespective of what the people want.
…
We, the American people, are not morons, and our collective decisions about whom we want to govern us matter. We are a democracy because we believe the people not only have the right, but the wisdom to govern ourselves.

Running from an inferno

Articles have appeared talking about Republicans who privately say they are “disgusted” with the nasty guy and regret supporting him. That prompted a response from Melissa McEwan of Shakesville. She notes:

* The nasty guy is doing now exactly what he’s always promised he would do.

* The nasty guy isn’t an anomaly of the GOP but its inevitable endgame.

* This game of “oh we’re secretly so horrified!” isn’t new. It has been out there for the last two years. McEwan wrote about it 21 months ago.

* Those that regret supporting the nasty guy say they still support the vice nasty guy. The methods may be different but the depth of malice is the same.

* Those speaking their regret are lying.



Saturday Night Live did a segment critical of the nasty guy. He, of course, tweeted about it and included the phrase, “Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal?” McEwan responds:

The distinction between satire and news is *irrelevant* to Trump. The only thing that matters to him is that they are both critical of him, which he is suggesting *should be a crime*.
…
The president is threatening to wage war on us for criticizing him.

This is not a joke. It can happen here.



Twitter user Juleyka has a few things to say about the men who did crimes and are now helping the special prosecutor and expect to be praised or are leaving the administration on principle:

So here's something I don't get: why are we admiring men who are just now abandoning the radioactive center of a toxic government after they willingly signed up to make it so? There's nothing brave or inspiring about running for cover when the roof is caving in during an inferno you brought matches to. Nothing redemptive about saying enough when you're nose-deep in the toxicity you contributed to. These men do not deserve any redemptive narrative.

David Drucker of the Washington Examiner reports that the South Carolina GOP is considering scrapping next year’s GOP primary to prevent challengers to the nasty guy. Other states are considering it. Since SC taxpayers pay for the primary they may be pleased to not pick up the tab. But it is a blow to democracy. The article doesn’t talk about the possibility that no one wants to run against the nasty guy. If I remember right Obama didn’t have any challengers in 2012.



In a Twitter thread Olga Lautman notes that the nasty guy’s past (as well as present) operations are under investigation. He was a “Kremlin mob satellite for almost 4 decades.” Why has no one looked into it? Why was he not stopped? He would never pass a background check for any type of employment. Why did we let him into the White House and why did these investigations happen only after he got there?



Christopher Ingraham, in a Twitter thread, discusses the wealth inequality in America. The top 10% owns 73% of the nation’s wealth. The middle 40% own 27%. And yes, those two figures add up to 100%. The bottom half owns -0.1% – they’re in debt to the top half.

That reminds me again of the many government policies that appear to make the rich richer, but their real goal is to make the poor poorer. It’s a way to enforce the social hierarchy.

Love happens here

I’ll be doing some traveling during Christmas week. I’ll visit my sisters for Christmas day. Then a couple days after that I’ll head to Kentucky to visit my brother and his family until New Year’s Eve. All that travel means I probably won’t post much over the next week.

It also means I won’t be able to go to the Detroit Film Theater to watch the British Arrows. So I watched them online at home.

The British Arrows are awards for the best commercials created by the British advertising industry. I don’t watch much television and one reason is the ads. So it is strange that I would watch a whole show made up of only ads. But these are British ads with a very different point of view. Some are provocative and some are full of a British sense of humor. You can watch all of the 2018 award recipients here. It will take a while – there are 20 bronze winners, 14 silver winners, 21 gold winners, and a couple special mentions. Some are short – 30 seconds to 1½ minutes. Many are 2 minutes or so, a few are 5-10 minutes. So in a theater where they are shown one after another it is a full evening.

Here are some of my favorites:

Bronze arrows

Love happens here. There had been a poster campaign around London briefly describing hate crimes against LGBT people. The purpose was to show hate happens in the city. The campaign then switched to showing that love happens in London too. They featured real stories of love and acceptance in both posters and TV spots.

Mars Petcare has a commercial in which a cat befriends a chick.

Edeka supermarkets has a commercial of a time after a technology takeover when a young robot goes searching for humans. It was cool, but I don’t know what it has to do with promoting a supermarket chain.

A video for the site on-running.com told the story of a running coach who worked with refugees to give them a sense of togetherness, and purpose. A Refugee Team even went to the Olympics.

A couple of Silver Arrow winners just for fun.

A company that makes dishwasher detergent created I Love Doing Dishes.

Epic Lift which is fun, but hard to describe.

Gold arrows

Warburtons breads created Pride and Breadjudice where the heroine falls for the baker.

The BBC and its CBeebies channel asked several pairs of kids (frequently one non-white) and asked them what was the differences between them. The kids are either puzzled by the question or come up with an answer that was never about race.

Marmite is a yeast extract that some British (and some Australians) spread on toast. One either loves it or hates it. Because of its reputation I never tried it. The commercial envisions a gene test that determines whether a person is a lover or a hater (of Marmite). People are shown receiving their test results with awkward scenes where they come out to other family members.

A top award went to The Talk in which black parents talk to their children about racism. It’s time there was more discussion about the talk so it didn’t need to happen.

Scolding her elders

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville believes Nancy Pelosi has earned the right to resume being Speaker of the House. Pelosi’s response to the nasty guy’s demands for money for a border wall reinforces the opinion that Pelosi is the right person for the job. The response was short and direct:

The wall is not about money. The wall is about morality. It's the wrong thing to do. It doesn't work. It's not effective. It's the wrong thing to do and it's a waste of money.

Two hundred countries have been meeting in Poland and just barely managed to produce an agreement on how to work towards doing something about the environmental catastrophe of global warming. Greta Thunberg, a 15 year old student from Sweden, decided this wasn’t good enough. So she had a few things to say to her elders.

She has also inspired thousands of students around the world to stage walkouts on Fridays. She took inspiration from the students in Parkland, Florida affected by a mass shooting there.

At the conference Thunberg and fellow students entered holding signs that together read “12 years left.” From the CNN article:

That's a reference to the latest dire report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global climate targets could become impossible in just 12 years. The report says emissions need to be cut about in half by 2030, which would require a near-complete overhaul of the global energy system.

Here’s a bit of Thunberg’s scolding:

You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake.

You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet.

Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money.

Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.

The artist and the “art”

The Hollywood Reporter profiled Babi Christina Engelhardt who, more than 40 years ago, had an affair with Woody Allen when she was 16 and he was 41. That means Allen’s 1979 movie Manhattan was a depiction of that relationship.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville says it is time to stop insisting that we “separate the art from the artist.”

Allen is an artist who does not want to be separated from his art. To the absolute contrary, his art is *about his life*. Even more specifically, his art is about normalizing the abuse he perpetrates in his life, laundering his predation into romance. And he doesn't even do it by concealing or softening the abuse, but simply by telling the story with witty banter that makes it palatable to audiences who are themselves primed by the rape culture to tolerate abuse of women and girls, given the slightest opportunity to view it as something else.
…
But this is the truth about abusive men who make art about their abuse: They don't want to be separated from their art.

They want their art to serve as confession, and they want acclaim to serve as absolution.

We’re too willing to see all this as art so we can deny it is confession.



In a separate post on Shakesville Fannie Wolf looks at a sexual harassment incident between Yael Stone and Geoffrey Rush. She went on to write:

Rape culture exists, in part, to grant ugly, powerful old dudes sexual access to young attractive people under the lie that such men are hot, sexually-desirable studs, rather than just possessive of some financial, physical, emotional, professional, and/or cultural power over their targets.
…
As women bare detail after detail of their traumas, the backlash crowd starts first from the assumption that cushy jobs are certain men's birthright and second from the assumption that even if women might have "experienced distress," the men's pain is simply the more compelling pain for us to concern ourselves with.
…
Consider, that many of the high-profile #MeToo cases involve attractive, thin cishet white women is a reflection of the complicated reality that the pain of attractive, thin cishet white women matters more in the court of public opinion than other women's pain, that no woman is safe, and that a lot of misogynistic sadists exist in the US who love nothing more than reading about "hot" powerful, uppity women being humiliated.

So tell me, how, exactly, is art separate from the human beings who both create it and live, love, breathe, eat, sleep, laugh, fuck, rape, and terrorize within rape culture?

No match for that power

A big New York Times article yesterday revealed how Facebook handed over user data to all the top tech companies and also to a Chinese company. A frequent response is to call users to delete their Facebook accounts.

Monjula Ray, in a Twitter thread, says to stop lecturing about deleting Facebook and call Congress to regulate instead. The problem isn’t just Facebook. All the major players buy and sell user data.

Mclissa McEwan of Shakesville reminds us deleting a Facebook account isn’t always possible. For many people Facebook is vital to their social interaction. Its loss would leave many in a devastating social vacuum. Many who are disgusted with the company are looking for alternatives – to find there aren’t any because Facebook swallowed them up. So don’t gloat if you’re not on Facebook.

So I won’t gloat.

McEwan added that her Shakesville blog would be much better known if she had a Facebook presence. She decided against it for the safety of the Shakesville community.

Noel King, a host on NPR’s Morning Edition, talked about the situation with Anand Giridharadas, author of the book, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade Of Changing The World.” Giridharadas says deleting your Facebook account isn’t enough. Part of what he said (emphasis added):

I think it's worth thinking about analogies here. When you think about the predatory power of big food, and big sugar specifically, I think we've now learned that, you know, all of us trying to diet harder is no match for their political power. When we think about, you know, the opioid crisis and the people who promoted OxyContin, people individually fighting the demons of addiction is no match for that power. When you think about, you know, the Koch brothers and the deregulation agenda around pollution, you buying better paper towels and doing homework on which rivers are safe for your kids to swim in is no match for that political power.

And I think, by the way, when you think about Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and her advice to women - as Michelle Obama recently reminded us, you know, women simply leaning in and raising their hand higher is actually no match for thousands of years of oppressive patriarchy. So this company is actually part of this larger narrative that plutocrats and big corporations have been spreading in American life, which is that abusive behavior by the powerful is, in fact, your problem to solve as an individual.

Don’t build that wall!

Frank Vyan Walton of Daily Kos examines what nasty guy has been saying to support his claims for a wall at the southern border. He goes into detail. I’ll summarize.

The border wall at El Paso has been a success! At the moment what is at El Paso is fence. Yes, immigrant crossings are down there. But immigrant crossings are down along the entire length of the border, including places that don’t have a fence. And a bit of specifics: Immigrant crossing of people from Mexico are down. Crossings of people from Central America are up – including at El Paso.

Crime in El Paso has plummeted since the “wall” was built! That’s really important since the town on the other side of the border is so violent. But violent crime all across America is down even more than in El Paso.

Immigrants are criminals! Look at the high percentage of immigrants in federal prison! But half of them are there for repeated immigration violations, not drug smuggling, murder, or even drunk driving (which are state crimes). In addition, studies have shown immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans.

Immigrants bring diseases! That claim is an old one going back to the early 20th century, first applied to the Chinese. It’s a racist presumption that Americans are healthier. Mexico has a national health care system for its citizens and its quality is almost as good as the broken American system.

Immigrants bring drugs! Yeah, they do. But not across the southern border. The come through Florida by sea and air.

The nasty guy is saying asylum seekers have to come through the “right way.” But he’s the one not following federal law.

There has been recent news that the nasty guy’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey has been hiring undocumented workers and threatening them. Walton wrote:

This is what they want: certainly not fellow citizens, but pliant and subservient serfs, ready and willing to be used as they see fit for their convenience and profit. They don’t see them as potential citizens, and they don’t even see them as human beings.
…
He … wants to focus on importing useful, disposable workers and employees that you can then treat like virtual slaves and chattel until they displease, annoy, or dare to defy the company line. At that point they can have their company-dependent H2-B visa cancelled, or simply be deported for being undocumented—and then another chattel wage slave can be brought in to replace them.
…
The “they bring crime” excuse is bunk. The terrorism excuse is bunk. The disease argument is bunk. The “they bring drugs” justification is bunk, the “merit” argument is bunk, and the “they should come in the right way” line is a crock. There is no “right way” to immigrate to the U.S. for a work visa legally without a pre-arranged corporate sponsor; you can’t do it on your own. If you have family or can afford to come for school or a vacation, then maybe, but if you’re poor or working-class and don’t have any connections, you’re screwed. It’s all bullshit. All of it.
…
They only care about how they can make use of these people for their own enrichment, and if they have no way to make use of them, then they are considered worthless. Claiming that they are diseased, criminal, or are terrorist drug dealers that are dumb as dogs is just an after-the-fact rationalization based on moral cowardice, greed, and avarice.

Another line of attack is against Democrats and Liberals, who are supposedly doing all this because immigrants tend to dilute the power of the white vote and tend to vote Democratic. But it isn’t Democrats who have been grabbing power in the lame duck sessions in Michigan and Wisconsin, passing voter suppression laws, purging minority voters, and harvesting ballots in North Carolina. Democrats violate the rule of law?

Democrats don’t support comprehensive immigration reform (including reasonable border security) just to gain some kind of electoral advantage. We support it because it’s just, it’s right, it’s moral, it's kind, and it’s humane for everyone involved. Not just for us, for everyone.

One single cup of water

I recently had brunch with some of my fellow volunteers in our campaign to end gerrymandering in Michigan. Part of the lame duck session of the Michigan legislature is a bill to “clarify” the constitutional amendment we passed. Some see it as a rather benign bill (though not completely so) into which a whole bunch of amendments can be attached just before final passage. A fellow volunteer suggested another possibility – simply get the amendment tied up in court so that it can’t be implemented in 2020 to draw new districts for the 2022 election.



Michael Cohen has been in the news because of his sentencing for crimes done on behalf of the nasty guy that are traitorous to our country. Cohen sat down with George Stephanopoulos for an interview, which contained this nugget:

One of the hopes that I have out of the punishment that I've received, as well as the cooperation that I have given, I will be remembered in history as helping to bring this country back together.

Twitter user fonticulus translates:

I know I helped set your house on fire, but I hope I’ll be remembered in history as a guy who brought you one single cup of water to put the fire out after it was a blazing inferno.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville adds:

It's really something that this traitorous drip imagines for a single nanosecond that he might be remembered in a positive way, because he got caught breaking the law while he was helping steal an election for a sadistic crook, then lied to investigators about it, then got caught in that lie, then ratted out all the felonious clowns in his orbit in exchange for leniency because he is every bit as craven as he is corrupt.

Looking over the current state of the nasty guy presidency – the corruption (see Michael Cohen, above) and support for racists (see Mexican border) – and it seems much of the elite political press is finally saying, “Wha…?” For example, on Thursday the New York Times published a piece titled The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It.

Twitter exploded, “we” didn’t miss anything. You did.

Charles Pierce, writing for Esquire expands on that. We’ve been watching the rise of extremism on the right for 30 years now – bombings of gay bars and women’s health clinics, their spewings on radio and television, the militarization of our police, the racist campaign of the nasty guy, and lots more.

And now with a budget bill and a threatened government showdown looming and the political press is urging “compromise.”

“We” didn’t miss anything. We’ve been watching very closely.

The United Methodist prize

A critical United Methodist General Conference happens in about 70 days. The conservative Wesleyan Covenant Association has laid out its strategy. I describe more in my brother blog.

Becoming toothless

I’ve been enjoying the wonders of livestreaming this evening. A nephew and several grand nieces and nephews of the large Texas part of my family participate in a choir program in their town. The program has choirs for kids 4 years old to high school and family was in most of the choirs.

I could identify the family members in the select choir, the high school choir, and I think I identified the ones in the middle school choir. But I couldn’t tell which of the little cherubs in the upper and lower elementary choirs were related to me. I hope they send Christmas cards with family photos. Or I need to visit Texas again soon.



Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica wrote a big article about the gutting of the IRS.

Congress may allocate dollars for this or that government program, but the Internal Revenue Service actually puts those dollars into the federal treasury so those programs have real dollars to use. The IRS gets that money by collecting taxes – designing the forms, helping citizens fill them out, matching forms from workers with forms from employers, processing those forms, receiving withholding dollars from employers and workers, verifying that what we put on those forms makes sense, and then receiving our payments or issuing refunds.

The IRS also gets money through enforcement – the dreaded IRS audit. They look for people underpaying or not paying taxes and go after them so that they do. This can bring in billions.

But Congress has been steadily slashing the IRS budget. The enforcement team needs workers and equipment to do that enforcing. The team that processes the forms needs workers. And Congress is making sure they don’t have enough workers.

This would have been big news if there were streams of workers coming from IRS offices holding layoff notices. But the process has been slow enough – one departure at a time over eight years – that we haven’t noticed.

The number of IRS auditors is down a third from 2010. Nearly a third of the rest are eligible to retire in the next year, and with current conditions, many of them will. The number of audits is down 42% since 2010. Even though they conduct fewer audits the remaining auditors are stretched thin. They limit how much investigation they do in each case to be able to get on to the next.

Investigations of those who don’t file a tax return have plummeted. As has investigation of those who file but don’t pay. Tax obligations expire in 10 years and the amount of expired tax in 2017 is $8.3 billion. That number will surely rise over the years.

And the ability to investigate criminals is also down. And here we get to why. The biggest beneficiaries of a gutted IRS are corporations and the wealthy (we’re not surprised). It takes specialized auditors to unravel tax avoidance schemes or even simply audit a billion-dollar company. And those auditors are leaving. The chance of being caught doing something wrong has greatly diminished. The IRS is much less feared.

So the IRS is going easy on the rich, not able to keep up with the ways they avoid taxes. But audits haven’t dropped off for one group of people – the poor. In particular the poor who claim the Earned Income Tax Credit. They’re 20 times more likely to be audited than the rich. Yeah, that’s messed up logic. And evidence of class warfare the rich are waging against the poor (while they accuse the poor of waging against the rich).

Of course, the big danger is that the general public will realize the IRS has become toothless. Tax cheating would explode and the federal deficit will balloon by a trillion dollars.

“Abolish the IRS” has been a GOP talking point since Newt Gingrich became Speaker in 1994. They depicted an agency that had run amok with biased examiners and agents in flak jackets storming a business. The agency recovered from that false black eye by 2010. But the IRS became a GOP target again because the Affordable Care Act is also a tax act, requiring the IRS to verify if a person has health insurance, among other things. The attacks weren’t any more truthful, but still effective, at least in providing a rationale for further budget cuts.

Congress made a big cut in December of 2014, just before the tax season. The biggest hit was in hiring temporary people to answer phones. That brought such a complaint from the public that the next year funding was restored for “taxpayer services” while cutting the enforcement budget again. There haven’t been cuts since. There was even an increase for 2018 – but only to implement the tax scam bill.

I’m a strong believer in an equitable and balanced tax system. When government is acting like it should I get benefit from my tax dollars – good roads, clean air and water, safe food, safe cities, beautiful parks, a healthy and educated populace, opportunity for all, a presence for peace in the international arena, someone to side with the little guys against the big ones, someone to stand against racism, someone to champion justice, and on and on. When this works as it should in a functioning democracy it is worth what I’m paying in taxes.

But that’s not what we have now. We have a government that is malicious to the little guy to give benefits to the big guy, someone who encourages racism, someone who doesn’t care about our health, education, or safety, someone who stirs up international conflict, wants to exploit our parks, and generally turn the government into a way to enrich themselves and their cronies.

And I’m required to financially support that?

Standing against the War on Truth

Time has announced its Persons of the Year. They are The Guardians standing against the War on Truth. The magazine created four covers for the four groups of honorees. Time displayed the covers in a Twitter thread, but didn’t explain who these people are. For some of them I went to Daily Kos.

* Jamal Kashoggi, murdered for his coverage of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

* The Capital Gazette, attacked with four reporters and a sales associate killed.

* Maria Ressa, a critic of Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, under indictment supposedly for tax fraud.

* Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, sentenced to seven years in prison for reporting on the massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Kos quotes Time’s actual article for several other journalists threatened or in jail in Bangladesh, Sudan, Brazil, and Hong Kong.



The news out of the Russian collusion investigation last Friday was mostly about Michael Cohen. But that news means the Department of Justice has credibly accused the nasty guy of committing a felony.

The reaction from the GOP was such things as these comments from Sen. Rand Paul:

It’s just like a lot of other things that we’ve done in Washington. We’ve over criminalized campaign finance. … I don’t think campaign violations should be criminal.

Comments like that prompted Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post (quoted in a Daily Kos collection of similar statements) to write:

For a party that claims to be “tough on crime,” Republicans seem pretty confused by what it means to hold criminals to account.

Particularly when it comes to white-collar crimes, or really any crimes committed by rich people.

And Paul Krugman of the New York Times to write

For whatever may happen to Donald Trump, his party has turned its back on democracy. And that should terrify you.

Zev Shalev of CBC’s The Weekly and a blogger about Russia, notes in a Twitter thread that

Thousands of of Russian tanks and trucks have amassed on Crimea/Ukraine border. … More than 80,000 Russian troops in the area.

And it looks like Russia is waiting for an excuse to invade. Then Shalev adds a link to a story in Wired with this comment:

Experts warn cyber attacks may cripple parts of Ukraine during any attack. Ukraine, like The U.S., has booby-trapped electricity grids.

A summary of that Wired article says:

Blackouts in Ukraine were just a trial run. Russian hackers are learning to sabotage infrastructure – and the US could be next.

Though Russia may be experimenting with sabotaging our infrastructure, we don’t have to help them. From Ruth Clegg and Manveen Rana at the BBC:

A technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch, the BBC has learned.

The Jedi project, a huge cyber-cloud which could ultimately store nuclear codes, has already sparked security fears.

That prompted Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to respond:

Setting aside for the moment that a company with ties to a sanctioned oligarch who's pally with Putin was even allowed to bid on the contract, what in god's teeth is the Pentagon doing proposing to keep military secrets on a cloud?!
…
And as incredible as it seems, it might not even matter — because there's a good possibility Russia already has access to our nuclear codes.

As I mentioned in October, a Government Accountability Office report found that U.S. weapons systems are stunningly vulnerable to hackers, many of whom can hack our systems without alerting the military teams who manage them.

Russia may not need to loft their nukes at us. They’ll use our own.



Nah, you wouldn’t think the Pentagon is don’t that because the nasty guy told them to share info with the Russians? Couldn’t be. He wouldn’t be that brazen.

McEwan has been saying for the last three years that the collusion is right there in the open. Much of the stuff that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been putting on court papers, has long been known.

Over and over, people have argued with me that what I was saying about collusion couldn't possibly be true, because no one would be so stupid as to be that brazen.

But the brazenness wasn't stupidity. It was calculated. Trump and his co-conspirators knew damn well that there would be people lining up to argue that what they were seeing with their own eyes couldn't actually be what they were seeing with their own eyes, because no one would be stupid enough to be that brazen.

And here we are.

Maria Butina got cozy with the NRA and various conservatives during the 2016 election. She has been arrested and accused of being a Russian spy of using that coziness to allow Russia to influence the election by funneling money through the NRA. Five months later she is reaching a plea deal. Such a deal could bring down nasty junior.

But McEwan notes that Putin’s traitors tend to end up dead. Butina is either taking a big risk or has Putin’s blessing. And what might that mean? Perhaps that task that Putin has given the nasty guy is complete and Putin has no more need of him? Would Putin rather have the vice nasty guy instead? This is definitely speculation.

That prompted aphra_behn to comment:

In the end, I'm not sure it matters much to Vladimir Putin whether he has a compliant Pence leading an evangelical theocracy that's actually run by corporations, or whether the Democrats clamber back into the seat of governance.

Because even if the Dems were to re-take some branches of government, they can't fix everything quickly or easily. And that will, in turn, be fodder for propaganda inflaming both the far right and left to further attack democratic government and human rights, as the Russians exploit our diversity as well as our divisions.

Russian operatives aren’t waiting around to see what happens. They are still actively working their propaganda machines, with one group saying they are taking fresh aim at America. A Western security official said, “It's about undermining key pillars of democracy and the rule of law.”

Life after coal

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the likely collapse of the coal industry. Mark Sumner used to be a coal company executive and now writes for Daily Kos. He reviews the steps the nasty guy is taking in hopes of bringing back coal jobs. Sumner shows again why that isn’t going to happen – after a peak in 2007, coal consumption has dropped 40% and is at 1979 levels. Sumner includes a graph that shows this well.

In contrast, Arthur Nelson, writing for Huffington Post discusses the coal industry in Spain. The last of its mines will close later this month. Spain’s government is paying the equivalent of nearly 300 million dollars over a decade in compensation to miners, retrain the workers for low-carbon jobs, restore the environment.

But workers say that isn’t much money per worker per year. Workers are skeptical the government will actually come up with the money – it won’t start to appear for perhaps six months – and that it won’t make much difference.



Steven Dennis, a reporter for Bloomberg, tweeted that members of Congress are still seeking unpaid interns to work in their offices. He also notes there are zero apartments around Capitol Hill for less than $1000 a month. An unpaid intern can’t afford that – or the intern has another source of income, such as Mom and Dad. Meaning those that can afford to be interns don’t reflect the average American.

So incoming Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has announced she will be paying her interns at least $15 an hour. She has also started publicly shaming other lawmakers, as in most of them, to do the same. I don’t have actual numbers, but it seems lawmakers have the money to pay interns if they wanted to.



Yesterday I shared a scenario in which the GOP in Congress maneuver the nasty guy out of office to install the vice nasty guy, the one who will really help to keep their party in power.

But as the VNG makes his moves behind the scenes (such as angling to install his chief of staff as his boss’s chief of staff) some of the nasty guy’s minions are starting to whisper in his ear that perhaps the VNG is a political liability and should be dropped from the ticket in 2020. It seems the one doing the most whispering is his chief of staff John Kelly. That whispering, or at least the idea that the VNG’s job is in jeopardy, has made it into the news. Melissa McEwan of Shakesville explains:

It's a public shot over the bow at Pence, warning that if he keeps coming for Kelly's job, Kelly will keep coming for his.

These sorts of internecine politics are not something that Trump is capable of managing. So it will just keep getting more toxic, until Trump impetuously picks a side, for reasons that are significantly less than well considered.

And, at that moment, whomever he chooses — John Kelly or Mike Pence — is going to get a lot more powerful. Dangerously so.

Restore confidence and trust

John Dingell is now retired from serving as a Democratic Representative from Michigan for 59 years. Before he retired he was the Dean of the House for 20 years. The Dean is the longest serving member. Those 59 years means Dingell holds the record for tenure in Congress and also holds the record for longest time as Dean. The current Dean – Don Young from Alaska – is still 13 years behind Dingell.

In an article for The Atlantic Dingell noted in 1958 73% of Americans trusted the federal government. As of a year ago (the last time it was measured) only 18% of Americans trust the government.

There are many reasons for this dramatic decline: the Vietnam War, Watergate, Ronald Reagan’s folksy but popular message that government was *not* here to help, the Iraq War, and worst of all by far, the Trumpist mind-set

So Dingell offers suggestions on how to restore confidence and trust in government and in our democracy.

* Full participation in elections – at age 18 you’re automatically registered and there are no impediments to voting.

* Eliminate money in campaigns.

Public service should not be a commodity, and elected officials should not have to rent themselves out to the highest bidder in order to get into (or stay in) office. If you want to restore trust in government, remove the price tag. I am fully aware that the Supreme Court has declared that “money is speech.” That’s nonsense. The day my wallet starts talking to me, I might reconsider that view.

* Protect an independent press.

And the suggestion that got the most attention:

* Abolish the Senate. Dingell notes that

California has almost 40 million people, while the 20 smallest states have a *combined* population totaling less than that. Yet because of an 18th-century political deal, those 20 states have 40 senators, while California has just two. These sparsely populated, usually conservative states can block legislation supported by a majority of the American people. That’s just plain crazy.

Some of those states have fewer people than a congressional district in Michigan.

I checked 2017 census estimates. California has more people than the bottom 21 states. California plus Texas has more people than the bottom 27 states, and the top four – Cal., Texas, Florida, and New York, have more people than the bottom 33 states. In the Senate the larger of those population blocks gets 8 senators and a smaller block gets 66 senators.

Along with the Senate Dingell would also abolish the Electoral College because it has the same flaws.

Yeah, the people in those small states would block any effort to give up their outsize power. So one way around that it to combine the House and Senate into one. Even to make that happen would take a national movement lasting about a generation.

I add that another option is to break Senate district boundaries away from state boundaries. One example of how that might look is here.

Good guys draw the line

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville quoted a bit of what Hannah Gadsby said at the 2018 Women in Entertainment gala. A summary: The “good men” like to talk about drawing a line. He says I stand with the good men. Here’s the line that separates me from the bad men. But, Gadsby says, there are problems: Men draw the line. They draw different lines depending on where they are (with wives or in a locker room). All men believe (because they moved the line) they are standing on the good side of the line. Women should control the line.

A commenter added:

I used to tell the ex, after whatever fight he had just picked, that it felt like he wrote himself as the hero of every interaction, especially the arguments, which meant he needed a villain, and guess who that always was.

I went on to read the whole original. This sentence jumped out at me because it is the essence of ranking:

But if you have to believe someone else is bad in order to believe you are good, you are drawing a very dangerous line.

Holding him accountable

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville noticed that the witnesses that have been cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller – Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Michael Cohen – seem to be getting off quit easy. Mueller recommends Michael Flynn not receive any jail time, even though in normal times his actions would be considered treason.

Then McEwan wrote:

At this point, I suspect that the biggest role the Mueller investigation has to play is to create the public rationale for Senate Republicans to vote to impeach, so they can install Pence.

As I've previously speculated, when Trump isn't of use to them anymore, they'll just get rid of him in exchange for Pence. And then they'll claim to be heroes for holding their own president accountable.

It would really be something if House Democrats, newly the majority again, drafted articles of impeachment against Trump, and Senate Republicans "reluctantly" supported the measure, but assured their base it was the right thing to do, meanwhile garnering extraordinary headlines about being ethical patriots, as they move to install an authoritarian dominionist who was on his way to losing his reelection bid for the governorship of Indiana when Manafort plucked him from the precipice of obscurity to be second in line to a dude colluding with the Russians to capture the White House.

In a month and a half, Pence can assume the presidency and still run for two more full times. Let's see what happens then.

Perhaps that is why Nancy Pelosi is saying impeachment is off the table?

Voter fraud v. election fraud

The GOP has been doing all it can to prevent voter fraud, in which a non-citizen tries to vote or a citizen tries to vote more than once. All this effort for something that happens quite rarely. But the GOP seems just fine with election fraud, messing with other aspects of the election process.

The Congressional race in North Carolina’s 9th District still hasn’t been certified. And the board that does the certifying is refusing to do so for this race. GOP candidate Mark Harris is up by just over 900 votes. It looks like the size of the election fraud is about 1300 votes.

The scandal comes down to a coordinated effort to take possession of absentee ballots. A crew went to people who had absentee ballots and offer to turn them in – and apparently also fill them out. Minorities were targeted. One piece of evidence is the signatures of witnesses on the ballots. A person would normally ask a friend or family member to witness the signature. One person rarely witnessed more than one or two ballots. But in a big batch of absentee ballots the same signatures were seen many times. Another piece of evidence is testimony of the voters. It is illegal for a third party to collect absentee ballots.

This may trigger a new election. But that would be against the same two candidates. It is also possible for the US House (to be controlled by Dems) to declare the seat vacant, which would require fresh primaries.

Put a sock on it

I wrote earlier this week about the hassles of replacing my car headlight. That light has stopped working. I have to spend the money to get it replaced. I called the shop to order the headlight assembly and I should have it installed by Monday.



I’ve been listening to a series on RadioLab about how a body develops a gender and how it is sometimes hard to determine gender. The last episode in the series was about sex ed. In that episode they discuss the problems when the state bans demonstrating how to put on a condom. Sanford Johnson got around that by demonstrating how to put on a sock to protect your foot to get ready for a bit of shoe action. It’s a two minute video.

No need to lionize him

I suppose I should say something about GHW “Poppy” Bush, who died last Friday and had a state funeral yesterday. There are lots of media voices willing to extol about his virtues and have done so at length this week. I don’t need to repeat all that gushing (nor could my fingers survive wading through it all), though I’ll repeat the comment that he is considered the last “good” Republican president before they turned bad (starting with his son).

Some are saying that the GOP turned bad because of him (Newt Gingrich rose in power in response to Poppy). Some are also saying the Religious Right rose in power in reaction to him – it was in the 1992 GOP Convention that I heard derogatory comments about LGBT people from a convention speaker (Pat Buchanan?), turning me solidly away from the party.

However, there were signs of the current GOP trajectory under Saint Ronald and even before.

Back in 1988 I voted for GHW Bush – I was still young and stupid then. For half of his presidency I lived in Germany. I experience the opening of the Berlin Wall as well as what the Germans thought of the 1990 Gulf War to liberate Kuwait. I did not vote for him in 1992. I saw he had accumulated a very high approval rating from that war – and squandered it. He could have done a great deal with such high approval. Instead he did nothing with it.

On to a couple voices that you won’t here amongst all those talking heads – the LGBT voice and the progressive voice.

The LGBT voice is brought by Chris Johnson in an article for the Washington Blade that was reprinted in Between the Lines. Johnson talked to Barney Frank, a former Congressman who is gay, and Urvashi Vaid, who was executive director of the National LGBTQ Task Force during Bush’s years in office.

Frank mentioned such things as gays banned from serving in the military (Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell appeared under Clinton) saying, “Bush was simply unsupportive on any issue.” The two pro-LGBT bills that Bush signed were because Congress had packaged them so that Bush had no choice.

One bill was the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, which required the Department of Justice to collect data on hate crimes and included sexual orientation as one of the categories. This was only to collect data. Having the DoJ actually prosecute those crimes had to wait until Obama signed the Matthew Shepherd & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009.

The other bill was the Immigration Act of 1990, part of which repealed a 1952 law that banned “homosexual or sex perverts” – any LGBT people from entering the United States. The repeal was worked out in Congress and part of a larger package.

Vaid said, “I think that that administration pandered to the right wing in the Republican Party and did not stand up to it and allowed itself to do a lot of things. The president allowed himself to be led by people who were far-right zealots like Patrick Buchanan.”

The AIDS epidemic prompted protests by the activist group ACT UP. One of their protests was outside the Bush summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Bush said they showed an “excess of free speech” and were totally counterproductive.

Bush did sign the Ryan White Care Act, which provided health coverage for low-income people with HIV/AIDS. But he signed it only in response to the protests by such groups as ACT UP.

George Bush was not supportive. In contrast, his wife Barbara was. In one memorable scene at an AIDS home in DC she hugged two people with AIDS, an infant and a gay man.

In a Twitter thread Leah McElrath talks of Bush’s response to the AIDS epidemic and adds:

Large swaths from within two generations of gay men were wiped out. Approximately 200,000 from 1981-1993. Just think about that. The impact of the loss. Not only at a personal level, but for the LGBTQ community and culture and for the nation as a whole.

The progressive voice is that of Mark Sumner of Daily Kos. Sumner gives a bit of biography of Bush, then discusses why he is not any better than the rest of the GOP crowd. Sumner provides a little quote showing Bush didn’t try to hide his racism:

"The new civil rights act was passed to protect 14% of the people. I'm also worried about the other 86%." — George H. W. Bush, explaining why he voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964

Meaning he was just fine with Tyranny of the Majority.

Bush vetoed the 1990 Civil Rights Act that would have supported the 1964 law that the Supreme Court was undermining. His actions towards women didn’t match his support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Sumner wrote:

Rather than lionize Bush, let’s hear from a lion.

“He is more interested in appeasing extremists in his party than in providing simple justice for working Americans.” — Ted Kennedy

It’s lame duck season!

Lame duck season is here and the Michigan and Wisconsin legislatures are going full out to pass anti-democratic measures before the new year when a Democrat governor will take over in both states.

Michigan legislators were told by environmentalists that there is a big problem with P-FAS chemical pollution around the state. P-FAS is (had been?) used in fire fighting foam and is showing up in lots of places around the state. So it would be really helpful if the legislature offered some help. The response: we don’t have time.

They don’t have time because of all the destruction they want to accomplish. This is what I know is being worked on in Michigan:

* Delay the increase in minimum wage from 2022 to 2030. This was approved in September in an obvious ploy to keep a voter initiative off the ballot with the intent of undoing it after the election. And here we are. They are very practiced in the crocodile tears they are shedding on behalf of business.

* Repeal the paid leave act, another voter initiative approved for the same reason.

* Amend the recreation marijuana law that voters approved to ban letting citizens grow their own plants.

* Provide some “clarity” for the recently passed constitutional amendment for a citizens redistricting commission, the campaign I spent the fall working for. That “clarity” defines who is counted as associated with each party, making it easier for strong party supporters to masquerade as something they’re not. Campaign staff are also wary of the amendments that are likely to be added just before passage. The campaign has already declared that since the commission is part of the constitution any bills to modify it are unconstitutional. But that doesn’t stop the GOP from trying.

* An effort to curb the power of the Attorney General to take effect as the office passes from GOP to Dem control.

And in Wisconsin they are definitely working to limit the power of the incoming Dem governor.

The GOP efforts in Michigan and Wisconsin to limit incoming Dem governors caught the attention of NPR in a couple stories, here and here.

Brian Dickerson explains why this is going on. He is the Editorial Page Editor of the Detroit Free Press. The reason is actually simple – term limits. Every two years about a third of each Michigan legislative chamber is term limited and can’t be elected again.

Before term limits were imposed most legislators would face voters again in two or four years. That is no longer true. This year a third of the Michigan House was replaced and an amazing three-quarters of the Senate won’t be back. The Senate will still be in GOP control, though with a smaller majority. So these legislators who aren’t continuing in January don’t care what voters think.

They do care what their donors think. Because at the end of the year they’re out of a job and if they do what donors want the donors might supply that missing – and usually cushy – job.

Dickerson sees two ways out of this mess. Alas, neither can be done this year. The first is to repeal term limits. But, this requires a big voter-led initiative and too many voters still think term limits are good – keep the rascals from becoming entrenched! They don’t understand the shorter a politician is in office the more he or she must rely on the advice of donors and lobbyists and that there is higher incentive for lame duck destruction.

The other option is to abolish lame duck sessions. Again, it would mean another voter initiative.

I’ve heard from a few people on the team that got the redistricting commission passed that they’re looking for another government reform to tackle. One I’ve been thinking of is campaign finance. Ending lame duck sessions could be another.

Lighting the road

Pardon me while I grumble.

I retired from the auto industry almost a dozen years ago (that’s not what I’m grumbling about). Sixteen months before then I bought a new car using my employee discount. I still have and use that car. It’s now 13 years old with 174K miles. It has been through one big accident. It carried me back and forth to Dad’s house over the 30 months it took to clean it out, which added 40K miles. It still runs good, starts promptly (though on occasion needing a second try), and I figure it will go to at least 200K, which will take about 2½ years.

Though there are days (thankfully they are rare) I can get really annoyed with the car and the company that designed it.

And – you guessed it – this weekend was one of those times.

Thursday evening I noticed the driver side headlight was out. I didn’t go anywhere Friday, so didn’t deal with it until Saturday, when I knew the weather would be a tiny bit warmer.

I got out the owner’s manual which listed helpful instructions: pull off the bulb cap (a piece of rubber that keeps the bulb assembly clean), twist off the bulb retainer ring, pull the bulb straight out. Install in reverse order.

But the instructions don’t say anything about removing the power connector and how to align the bulb to get it to fit back in.

And the instructions don’t say anything about trying to do this in a cramped space where one can’t see what one is doing and can barely fit two hands into the space.

I fussed with it for about 15 minutes, long enough to see the spare bulb I had wasn’t a headlight bulb. I went off to an evening movie (First Man, an enjoyable show) hoping the police didn’t see me with a dud headlight.

Sunday afternoon I went to an auto part store and bought replacement bulbs, getting two, figuring the other will likely go soon, which is what happened once before with this car. Then in the warm (50F, warm for December) afternoon I worked at changing the bulb. Between Saturday and Sunday I had these difficulties: Getting the bulb cap off. Getting the bulb out – the wires weren’t long enough to get the tip of the bulb back far enough to get it out of the housing. Getting the bulb off the connector (I think I broke half the lock). Getting the new bulb back in the housing (for the same reason I had trouble getting the old one out). And getting the new bulb aligned with the tabs of the reflectors and pushing it in far enough to fasten down the retainer ring. I may not have had the retainer ring on the right way and nothing on it gave me a hint which way it should go.

The tiny space where my hands had to go was hemmed in by other engine compartment components (the space around the engine is quite efficiently packed). One of those was held in place by a clip with a sharp edge. I had been struggling with it for a half hour when that edge drew blood for the second time.

With that I decided I’m done. I can take the whole mess somewhere – like my usual service center – and have them do it. But I still had an event to attend Sunday evening. So I got the bulb as close as I could to the intended position, verified it worked, and went on my way.

After that evening event I wrote a letter to the company’s customer relations office complaining that changing a headlight should not be this difficult, that it was a very poor design, and that their manual was quite inadequate. I seriously doubt they’ll do much for a 13 year old design. However, I hope it has some influence on future models. The letter went out in today’s mail.

This afternoon I went to the service center and told them to change both bulbs. Might as well have them change the second while they’re at it. I hate sitting in their waiting room with the TV on, so I walked to a library a few blocks away to sit and read.

When I got back to the service center they said the bulb had melted into the plastic of the reflector. They refused to try to extract it. The bulb works (meaning it is legal), but the bulb isn’t positioned properly within the system of reflectors so there isn’t much of a forward beam.

I talked to the service guy and asked him whether I’ll be struggling to see because the light isn’t where it needs to be. He didn’t test it to tell where the light is going, though pulling up to my garage door I can see where it is going – up and to the side.

To replace the melted area they have to replace the whole light and reflector assembly on that side of the car. And to do that they have to take off and put on the bumper. Total cost, parts and labor, is $180. So I could leave it as is. They couldn’t do it for a few days anyway because the assembly isn’t in stock.

As for the other light, they did replace it with the bulb I brought. Half hour of labor, $56. Yeah, a shop that knows what it is doing and it still takes them a half hour. That’s much more than they charge for an oil change and full inspection. Which mean the owner’s manual and its, “Pull the bulb straight out. Install in reverse order,” is laughable.

I asked the service guy if the more recent models are designed so bulb replacement is easy (or at least easier). Short answer: a few models yes, many models no.

So perhaps I’ll get strange looks a couple years from now when I walk into the dealership and say, “Before I buy this car show me how easy it is to replace a headlight.”

Protections in a trade deal

The nasty guy, along with Prime Minister of Canada Trudeau and President of Mexico Peña Nieto, signed the USMCA (also known as NAFTA 2.0) trade deal. The nasty guy is, of course, crowing that it is the best trade deal in the history of the world, even though it isn’t much different than the original NAFTA.

But a few GOP members of Congress are pissed over the deal. One of the changes is LGBT employment protections. Trudeau insisted that the agreement redefines the word “sex” to include “sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Rep. Doug Lamborn complained that the nasty guy administration has been doing such good work unifying policy around excluding sexual orientation and gender identity and this trade deal is ruining that work. “A trade agreement is no place for the adoption of social policy.”

I think a trade agreement is a fine place to adopt social policy, especially this one, though also including worker rights and environmental protections.

A right to life … and food

There is a United Methodist Building in Washington, DC, squeezed between the Supreme Court and the Senate Office Buildings. I’m not sure how they got that plum location. There is a “church sign” on the corner facing both the court and the Capitol. Currently on that sign is:

“I was a stranger, and you tear gassed me.”
… Wait a second

Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons posted a picture on Twitter. You can find the original passage in the book of Matthew in the Bible, somewhere in chapter 25.

I looked at his Twitter feed and at the top is another sign:

A caravan of 5000 migrants confronted Jesus. He fed them. Matthew 14:13-21.

The replies to that tweet were indignant of the church (and Guthrie) of misusing Scripture. Of course, he had lots to say about conservatives misusing Scripture.



Rep. Thomas Massie, Republican from Kentucky (and chair of the 2nd Amendment Caucus) tweeted:

How long until someone runs on the platform of #FoodStampsForAll? If healthcare is a right, is food as well?

This is just one in a long list of Republicans spouting off that if people want to eat they had better work for it. Melissa McEwan of Shakesville has been keeping that list. In a previous episode in the series she reminds us that people die without food. So the GOP is saying people don’t have a right to life – in direct contradiction to to the Declaration of Independence and to what the GOP says about the unborn.

The replies to Massie’s tweet pointed out the hypocrisy:

Molly Rod: Now tell us all about your personal relationship with your lord and savior Jesus Christ, Tom. Can't wait to hear about that.

FrivYeti: Well, we've found the modern "Let them eat cake", I guess.

Frostinglickr: Being pro-starvation is a hot take.

SunShineIce: I would argue that plentiful food, by its very nature, would be a necessary component of "health care".

TCCICV: Not to mention a vital component to the “life” part of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness

MrOzAtheist: Your economy deliberately manufactures poor people. You have a huge disparity between CEO earnings and lower level worker earnings. There are so many “yes, we need this job done, but you have to be poor doing it jobs”. Then you say, if you’re sick, and poor...bad luck. You suck.

Pat Caldwell: Wasn't the $1.9T handout (TaxScam) to the 1% and large corporations supposed to trickle down so everyone had food and healthcare? What happened?

Richard Dickson: Running on the "Hurry up and die already" platform, I see.

Joe in Memphis: Food and healthcare are not rights, but guns are. Gotcha.

Cvfan: How dare a necessity to stay alive be a right!

Dylan McKenna: Interesting question, Congressman. Under which circumstances is it not morally objectionable to let another person starve to death? Looking forward to your reply.

Filibuster Keaton: When I was a child, we relied on food stamps to eat. Now as an adult, I have a college degree in political science and I’m going to make sure you are replaced. Aren’t you so PISSED I was fed?

McEwan reminds us the above tweet comes at a time when Russia is being very aggressive against Ukraine. And this round of aggression came at a time when Ukraine was remembering Holodomor a time when millions of Ukrainians were starved by Joseph Stalin.

That prompted a reply from RachelB

When Republicans think that people are not entitled to food, this is what I think of: Stalin attempting to starve his own people into compliance. This is the model of authority they admire. This is the company they want to keep.

Strange blog stats

This blog is hosted on Blogger, now owned by Google. I’ve been using this system for the entire 11 year history and 3869 posts of this blog. I forgot to mention the blog anniversary a couple weeks ago.

I think more than a year ago (hard to tell because I can’t get some types of past data) I started getting spikes in the blog readership. In one hour there would be 75 or more page reads while page reads in other hours would stay under 10. They would happen about every other day. Those same days there would be a spike in readership in Italy of about the same number. I thought that was strange so I did the “send feedback” thing wondering if there was a problem. I never got a reply and the situation continues. I’ve been getting about 2,000 page reads a month.

Then in the middle of this month. I got a spike of 7,661 page reads in one day. I think (though can no longer check) that most of those page reads were in a very small number of hours. A couple more spikes in the following days, so the total for four days was 13,511 page reads.

Yeah, really strange, especially since that is three times the total number of posts on the blog. Even stranger, the Traffic Sources report says all those hits were linked to my blog from google.com. All came from within the United States.

That makes me wonder if someone or several someones downloaded the entire contents of my blog. Perhaps they want to do some kind of data analysis of what I’ve written? If so, for what purpose?

Objective controversy

The nasty guy has ranted many times against CNN news. Sarah Kendzior, who has studied authoritarian regimes, tweeted an explanation of those rants:

He does this to give the appearance of universally acrimonious relationships with cable media, which is false, but makes his crony outlets seem more "objective". FOX is a Trump admin megaphone; CNN hires his campaign team as commentators. This is more effective than state TV.

In reply Twitter user Parrhizzia had a few things to add:

This. CNN’s goal is balance, not truth. “Both sides” given equal time and equal weight. That was seen clearly this weekend in regard the climate change report. This is EXTREMELY dangerous as it gives cover for the Republicans as they rapidly become more radical

But they go further; by the MSM presenting them as a valid or rational party, by false equivalences between massive disparities, by presenting their most moderate members as the mainstream, they’ve allow for further unchecked Republican radicalization.
...
Trump is not a black swan. He is not an alien from space. He is the natural and obvious next step of the tactics and radicalization of the Republican Party, which has accelerated from Nixon, Oliver North, Atwater, Stone, Gingrich, Rove, Palin to now Bannon and Trump.

This radicalization is a greater threat to the US than “radical Islamic terrorism”. Unless the Republican collapse can be arrested, unless they can return to being the party of Eisenhower, I worry that the next step AFTER Trump will be truly terrifying. The media MUST step up.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville also has a complaint about the mainstream media, explained in a Twitter thread:

"Controversial" is a word that has long been used by press to cover all manner of sins — and to maintain an illusion of objectivity by not taking a side on the "controversy," as though not condemning abuse is a neutral position. But its current service to bothsideserism is gross.

Donald Trump and the various members of his vile administration are not "controversial figures." His policies of malice are not "controversial." People in power who perpetrate abuse and the people who object to it and/or are harmed by it are not two sides of a "controversy."

And I want to emphasize, again, that using "controversy" (or "debate," or variations thereof) to affect neutrality is bullshit. There is no neutral in Trump's vast abuses. There is only condemning and resisting it, or abetting it, either actively or passively.

It takes some hefty denial to manage to convince oneself that weasel words like "controversy" are somehow superior to the complicity of silence.

Deadliest decision

A couple little things in the news.

The kids who survived the school shooting in Parkland, Florida created March For Our Lives and campaigned across the country for an end to gun violence. They’ve become rather effective at it. The leaders have now been awarded the 2018 International Children’s Peace Prize. It was awarded by Desmond Tutu who received the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-apartheid leadership. The youth traveled to Cape Town, South Africa to receive the prize. Congratulations for a well deserved award.



That huge climate change report the nasty guy’s administration released last week (done Friday of Thanksgiving week in hopes nobody was paying attention) says some pretty dire things. That prompted Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to write:

I have observed many times before that the Bush v. Gore might have been the deadliest Supreme Court decision of all time, and this is precisely why. Of course it isn't certain that we wouldn't have wasted 15 years (and even more) of response time had the decision not halted the recount in Florida and Gore had been allowed to win the election via the completed recount. But it is far more likely, inestimably more likely, that we would be on a completely different course than we are now had our president been the man who has dedicated his life, before and since, to climate change.

Messy collapse or neat collapse

Yesterday I wrote about coal not coming back because it is now cheaper to build new new wind and solar installations than to operate an existing coal plant.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos takes a look at the current state of the coal industry, including the way it is financed and the bonds it must cover to restore the landscape when the mining is done. Part of the way it is financed is through the projected value of the coal still in the ground (Sumner explains in detail). That value is rapidly falling. The book value of the companies is falling and could “disappear in a puff of accounting smoke if challenged.” There is vast overcapacity. The industry could collapse.

Which is a good thing since burning coal is so disastrous to the environment – greenhouse gases, toxic waste, acid rain, mercury, radiation.

Except coal still supplies a third of our nation’s electricity. If coal collapses before alternatives are online there would be huge economic consequences.

So we could have a messy collapse or we could have a neat collapse. A messy collapse is when all the companies fail together. A neat collapse is when the fail one at a time and the others take up the slack for a while.

Democrats should be planning to help coal die with dignity by implementing plans that transition workers away, speed up implementation of reclamation plans, and assist power companies in getting replacement systems online.

The massacre generation

Julia Savoca Gibson is a college freshman. She wrote a perspective piece for the Washington Post. She says her entire life has been framed by violence. She is part of the massacre generation. She doesn’t remember 9/11 because she was a year and a half old. She does remember the Virginia Tech shooting. The lockdown drills at her elementary school. A teacher in 7th grade weeping as she told the class about the Newtown shooting – the town where the teacher’s grandchildren lived. The Orlando nightclub. Las Vegas. Parkland, and demonstrations classmates organized.

She recently attended a Jewish Shabbat service. The next morning she heard about the Tree of Life shooting. She had a haunted thought that the shooter might have come to the service she attended. She attended the vigil and will remember her Jewish friends’ eyes.

I remembered that for anyone born near the year 2000, this is all we’ve ever known.

I remember filling out my absentee ballot a few weeks ago. I remember voting, hoping that weeks, years, decades from now I’d be able to remember that we changed.

The young don’t vote? They do now. The difference is school shootings.



Another shooting incident on Thanksgiving Day. Victor Laszlo tweeted:

For the second time this month, a good guy with a gun tried to stop a bad guy with a gun — and was murdered by the police for the crime of being good while black.

The NRA has said nothing.

Neither has the KKK — and for precisely the same reason.

The BenShot company makes whiskey shot glasses that look like they’ve been struck by a bullet. Yeah, I’m laughing. But I’m not laughing at what the father and son company owners gave their employees for Christmas. Every employee got a gun. Even if they didn’t want one. Even though having a gun makes one less safe.

I read that and had a very strong reaction. If that happened to me I would immediately hand in my resignation. I wouldn’t want to be there even if an exception was made for me because I would know all my colleagues had guns.

Restructured on love

About two weeks ago, while the world was marking the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, Diana Butler Bass used a Twitter thread to discuss what happened to theology during and after the war. Well known theologians of the 20th Century, such as Paul Tillich, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Barth, Rev. Giuseppe Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII who convened Vatican II), and Rabbi Solomon Freehof, were all deeply involved with WWI as a soldier or chaplain. Several developed PTSD as a result of their experiences.

They struggled over who God was or what he represented. They had seen evil and their previous understanding of God was shattered. Their writings were about universal ideas, about justice and a global community.

All these visions emerged from the horror of gas and mud and bullets and bombs and the uselessness of a hideous war. The theologies were more honest about human nature and doubt, more attuned to the suffering of the world, appreciative of freedom, restructured on love, and emphasized the authority & voice of regular people, the "laity," as God's body.

They set a theological table for much that would come later -- the theologies of liberation and ecumenism and liturgical renewal -- by either opening new theological conversations or inviting argument with their shortcomings.

Bass asks us how has our theology changed in this century? We’ve experienced 9/11 and two wars, one we can’t get out of. Women have been shouting Me Too. Students are crying over slain classmates. Immigrants are oppressed. Are we examining our theology in the wake of these events?

Let us work with passion and heart, taking our experiences seriously, re-reading and wrestling with our ancient texts, searching for paths of love, hints of beauty and grace.

Hadrian and Antinous

The opera this afternoon on Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) (I hear it out of Windsor) was Hadrian by Rufus Wainright. Yes, that Rufus Wainright, the pop singer. He’s been fascinated by opera for quite a while. This is the second opera he’s written. The first had mixed reviews, but the Canadian Opera Company saw enough promise to commission a second opera.

I’m pleased a gay pop singer chose a gay relationship for the center of the opera. Hadrian was an emperor of ancient Rome. One thing he is known for is his love for Antinous (another is Hadrian’s Wall in England).

Act 1: Hadrian is near death, grieving the loss of Antinous. As part of a chance to eliminate enemies he accepts a deal to relive two days of his life.

Act 2: The first of those days is the day he met Antinous. The youth had saved the emperor’s life. There are prophesies that Antinous will sacrifice himself for the emperor.

Act 3: The second day is six years later, Hadrian’s wife Sabina knows their marriage is without love. She leads palace intrigue, and Antinous is killed.

Act 4: Back in the later time as Hadrian dies the plotters realize Hadrian really did love Antinous. The two are reunited in the afterlife.

Yeah, that is a simplification of a 2½ hour plot.

The music is in a modern style and quite different from what the singer would use in his pop concerts.

I’m not impressed with the music or the story. I’m delighted that a gay relationship is at the core. I’m also delighted that such a story didn’t scare off the Canadian Opera Company.

Kids in an awful position

In a Twitter thread Leah McElrath lists a few incidents where middle-school students reported incidents of guns near their school. The kids discussed each incident on social media before getting adults involved. McElrath wrote:

The students are 11-15 years old. ALL of these incidents were discussed on social media BY KIDS before adults became aware of them. The CHILDREN had to make triage decisions about reporting.

We are forcing CHILDREN into the position of making life and death triage decisions involving potential gun violence by their peers and by adults. We are doing this because we are allowing an international arms dealing organization to dictate gun policy.

We are ALL being held hostage by the NRA. The NRA is an international arms dealing and domestic terrorist organization. Its influence has grotesquely distorted childhood in America. It is insane. It is unacceptable. It must end.

An obvious question is why do the kids need to discuss it? Why not simply immediately turn the situation over to the police? A couple commenters answer:

Because reporting your peers to law enforcement is a perfectly normal thing to expect kids to have to do. Especially kids of color who face the extra risk of being beaten up and/or killed by the police.

Ahh. Yeah. Well that's why Leah correctly characterizes it as kids having to make life or death triage decisions. These kids know that risk. That's why, sometimes, they don't report it. They're being put in an awful position.

Coal isn’t coming back

Proposals to end gerrymandering won easily on election night in Michigan, Missouri, and Colorado. The one in Utah was declared passed just a couple days ago after all the ballot counting. It won by 50.3-49.7%. The Utah proposal isn’t as independent and robust as I would hope, for a few reasons. First, the commission is appointed by the governor and legislature, though both parties get seats. Second, it advises. That means the commission can draw up maps and the legislature can substitute their own. Third, the proposal becomes a law that the legislature can repeal. The legislature is heavily GOP. They’re faced with whether they fear a public backlash over such a naked power grab if they repeal.



Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discusses an important cost analysis. First:

For the last several years, it’s been considerably cheaper to build a wind farm than it has been to build a fossil fuel-based power plant.

And then:

But, as reported by CBS, the cost difference between coal and renewables has now passed another milestone. It is now more affordable to build a new wind farm or solar installation, from scratch, than it is to simply operate an already existing coal plant.

So, no, the nasty guy is not bringing back coal jobs.



Nate Silver, the statistics guy at FiveThirtyEight, has another way of discussing the strength of the Democrat win. He compared the number of votes a president got compared to the number of votes the opposition party got for House races two years later going back to 1950. The midterm election is usually seen as a rebuke of the president, even with low turnout. A couple examples: in 1964 Lyndon Johnson won with 43.1 million votes. Two years later GOP House members received 25.5 million votes, or 59% of what Johnson got when elected. That year the Democratic majority in the House grew. In 1968 Nixon won with 31.8 million votes. Two years later with Watergate scandals raging, Democrat House members got 29.1 million votes, or 92%. Again, the Dem majority grew.

And this year… In 2016 the nasty guy won with 63.0 million votes. This year Democrat House members got 60.5 million. That’s an amazing 96%, higher than before.



Democrat Stacey Abrams, in a carefully worded statement, did not concede in the race for Georgia Governor to Brian Kemp. She did, however, say she saw no legal way forward, so was no longer pursuing it. Instead, she will work towards free and fair elections in Georgia.

Mother Jones magazine tweeted what Abrams was up against. And what she will be fighting to change. This tweet was, of course, an introduction to a full Mother Jones article.

This race was a disgrace:
* 1.5 million voters purged by Brian Kemp
* 53k registrations on hold
* 4.5 hour lines to vote
* 214 polling places closed
* Dems falsely accused of cyber crimes
* AND Kemp oversaw his own election

In a Twitter thread, Leah McElrath talked about her daughter expressing doubts about becoming a mother because the world is such a mess and she can’t imagine bringing a baby into it. The daughter is 13, an age of becoming aware of national and international events. The daughter also has plenty of time to reassess.

McElrath’s daughter may have time to change her mind, but commenter Carly doesn’t. She said she was told that due to health issues if she wants a baby she needs to have it quickly or not at all. Again, given the state of the world, should she?

Several others report that Millennials feel they shouldn’t have kids. Beyond the mess, political and environmental, of the world they’re also concerned about job insecurity.

A rake to the Finnish

The nasty guy has been claiming that the horrendous damage by fire in Northern California is because the forests have not been properly managed.

When the nasty guy was in Europe meeting heads of state Sauli Niinistö, president of Finland make a comment that it is a land covered by forests and they have a good monitoring system. “We take care of our forests.” Of course, coming out of the mouth of the nasty guy it got mangled. He said Finland spends “a lot of time raking and cleaning” their forests.

That prompted the Twitter hashtag #haravointi (raking). The Finns responded with various images of them raking and mocking. Some examples of what was posted (at least in English):

“Rake America Great Again” / “Make America Rake Again”

“Rake News!”

“Rake against the Machine” (photo of a rake leaning on a garden tractor).

A video of a man raking a beach to prevent sea level rise.

A photo of a woman in the forest with a vacuum cleaner.

A suggestion that synchronized raking be added as an Olympic sport.

“Here in Canada we have automated with our forest Roomba.”

“I have been so wrong! I thought we were suppose to drain the swamp. No! We are suppose to rake the forest. Thank God we do not have to rake the swamp. That would be so dangerous.”

“Rake, Rake against the dying of the light.” Apologies to Dylan Thomas.

“A rake to the Finnish.”

And one more: two men using a giant comb on the desert.

Leah McElrath, in a Twitter thread, talks about the magnitude of the destruction of the Camp Fire did to the town of Paradise, California. Workers are sifting through ash to find bone shards of people who didn’t make it out.

Then McElrath wrote:

Trump deceptively pushes a land “mismanagement” narrative because he is laying groundwork to privatize public lands/expand logging. When you hear Trump or any Republicans talk about “forest management” or “land management” in relation to these wildfires, you need to replace the words with “expanded logging company access” or “privatization of public lands.”
...
There is no indication forest “mismanagement” played any role whatsoever in the #CampFire. That is simply false.

Commenters add: The forest is managed by the Secretary of the Interior – a person who works for the nasty guy. The mismanagement claim fits the conservative narrative that the government can’t do anything right, so let the private sector do it.

Red brain, blue brain

In the last year I’ve been enjoying the NPR show Hidden Brain. It is on in my area at 11:00 on Sundays, so I listen to it after church and on my way to meet friends for lunch. That means I tend to hear about half an episode.

A month ago the first half of the episode was intriguing enough that I wanted to listen to the whole thing. I finally did so online tonight, taking notes as I went.

The episode is titled Red Brain, Blue Brain; Nature, Nurture and Your Politics. Host Shankar Vedantam talked to John Hibbing, a political scientist of University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Hibbing is one of the authors of Predisposed: Liberals, conservatives, and the biology of political differences. The online audio is 26 minutes.

Hibbing found many correlations between political views and other things in our lives. For example, conservative like order, liberals embrace ambiguity and diversity. Conservatives tend towards meat and potatoes. Liberals embrace ethnic foods. Conservatives like predictability. Liberals are more experimental. Conservatives decorate their homes with sports memorabilia and keep things tidy. Liberals are more likely to have lots of books and a diverse shelf of CDs in a space that is more messy. Conservatives like purebred pets. Liberals like mixed-breeds and think of the pet as a member of the family. Conservatives want poetry that rhymes, novels with a clear resolution, and music with a clear melody. Liberals tend more towards free verse, appreciate less tidy novels, and more accepting of the spontaneity of jazz. Conservatives like tradition. Liberals like innovation.

Yes, these are averages and based on correlations. So while it is possible to make a pretty good guess of political preferences by the food one eats and the music one listens to, it is definitely not a strict correlation. I’m a liberal that isn’t into jazz. Even so, there are differences in temperaments – genuine psychological differences between liberals and conservatives that goes beyond politics.

So what shapes our politics? Originally, our views are shaped by our parents and other prominent adults. After a while we test our politics against our world view and come up with our own opinion.

When people hear about these correlations they don’t like them. No one want to think to be a good liberal I need to eat in ethnic restaurants. We’re being ourselves. And or politics is also being ourselves.

So on to bigger things, such as how we perceive threats. An example is a rant by Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA. He listed a large number of threats we face. To conservatives these threats are numerous and are very real. To Liberals the world isn’t all that threatening and we don’t want to build our lives around these inconsequential threats.

Guns are one issue where each side baffles the other. Immigration is another. Conservatives see immigrants are a threat. Laws need to be strong. Citizens need to be well armed. The government needs to spend lots on defense and empower police. We need the death penalty. Those who make it here need to be extremely vetted. We don’t understand why anyone would be opposed to safety. A good citizen is one who is prepared to defend home and country from these threats.

Both sides accuse the other that they don’t get it. But each threat (or lack of threat) is real from their perception. We think if they don’t agree with us it is because they are deliberately obtuse or biased. We have a hard time believing other people don’t see the world as we do.

Hibbing and Vendantam turn to the science. Is there a source for these differences? Is that source our home environment? Growing up in a conservative home a person is influenced by much more than political views, such as foods, types of pets, and the way the home is decorated. All these traits may tend to come together. So is political preference just about nurture?

Hibbing was able to access a large study of twins. This data included political views. His team looked at fraternal twins, who have similar genes, and identical twins who have the same genes. Twins grow up in the same household, eat the same food, and listen to the same politics from their parents. So a lack of difference in political views might be traced to genetics.

And, indeed, that was found. About 30-40% of our political views are influenced by genetics and 60-70% are influenced by the environment (go ask a scientist what that really means). The scientific community was a bit upset that the influence of genes over politics was more than zero.

There are several traits that we now see as biologically based, such as being left-handed or being gay. With that recognition usually comes tolerance. Will that same tolerance come to political views?

I have a personal answer to that last point. If you want to eat just meat and potatoes, go right ahead. While you do that I’ll enjoy the area Thai, Indian, Mexican, and Lebanese restaurants. But it is hard to be tolerant of a conservative viewpoint when their stated goal is malice and harm – of the immigrant, of other races, of other religions, of the poor, of LGB and especially T people, of women. Of everyone but straight white Christian men. That isn’t just a different opinion, a different way of looking at things. That results in pain, suffering, oppression, and death. That needs to be resisted.

There is another episode on a similar topic. That will have to wait for another day.