To mask or not to mask... That’s still the question?

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled in favor of abortion rights. The ruling affected a law in Louisiana that required a doctor to have admitting privileges in a nearby hospital. That law is only for limiting abortion. It doesn’t have a medical use.

The five justices that voted for overturning the law included Chief Justice John Roberts. He agreed with the liberal justices that the law should be overturned, though wrote his own opinion. His reasoning was simple: The exact same law (though from Texas) was before the court four years ago. Therefore it is settled law and shouldn’t be changed. That’s it. That’s even though he thinks abortion is wrong and voted on the other side of the issue four years ago.



Greg Dworkin in his Daily Kos pundit roundup quotes Scott Duke Harris of USA Today. He wrote that people in Hong Kong think Americans who refuse to wear a mask during this coronavirus pandemic must be suicidal.

To mask or not to mask... That’s still the question? Seriously?

It shouldn’t be, not when a lethal virus might be a sneeze, a cough, or simply a breath away. Not when the pandemic has killed nearly a half-million people worldwide, including more than 124,000 in the United States — and several states are spiking.

People here in Hong Kong understand this and wonder: Why, after so much misery, are millions of Americans so clueless?

In the same roundup Dworkin quoted Rachel Bitecofer. There has been a lot of news about Russia supposedly setting a bounty on American soldiers in Afghanistan. This reportedly has resulted in deaths of Americans. But the nasty guy denies he was ever told, though John Bolton insist he did. I’m not going to confirm the details with links. Plenty of news sources have several stories.

And do you know why EU intel is confirming this?

They want YOU, the American voter to know, before Election Day, that your president not only DID NOTHING, he continued to coddle the Russian president after finding out.

For months.
...
And finally, its clear exactly WHY Trump didn't do anything. He's counting on Putin's help in the election. He's willing to accept the targeted murders of our soldiers in the field so long as he gets his personal favors.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC, said:

We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control. We have way too much virus across the country for that right now, so it’s very discouraging.

After quoting Schuchat, Mark Sumner of Kos responded:

It’s not just discouraging. It’s enraging. The virus may be a natural development that evolved from a related infection of wildlife. But the reaction to that virus was a series of human choices.
...
None of that happened because it had to. None of it came because the U.S. could not do those things.

All of that happened because Donald Trump chose not to provide any genuine federal response to the crisis, and because Republicans refused to address his failure.

How bad might it get? I’ve heard projections of 100,000 cases a day.



Leah McElrath tweeted a thread. Here’s part of it:

The human suffering in this country alone is about to accelerate and will likely reach levels we haven’t seen since the Great Depression.

People on here don’t talk often about it when their lives go sideways, but—with tens of millions of jobs lost—we know evictions are starting.

Millions are jobless, will be without healthcare, and, soon, will be homeless as well.

During a pandemic.

A pandemic seemingly being managed in such a way by the GOP leaders in this country as to lead to the greatest numbers of infections and deaths possible.

This is insane.

And where are the Democratic leaders?

People need IMMEDIATE financial relief NOW. Anything that can be done to prevent homelessness MUST be done. But it isn’t.

It isn’t even being DEMANDED.

I want our leaders with their hair on fire SCREAMING right now.

That’s not happening.

Instead, we get the condescending admonition just to “vote” from Dem leaders living in multi-million dollar houses who spend more on grooming than many of us can afford to pay to feed our children.

And we DID vote.

Those of us who could. Those of us who weren’t disenfranchised.

Do they have ANY concept of how much suffering is going to happen between now and November?

If the answers is yes—and it might be—I want to hear them BEING OUR VOICES.

Because many of us are on the edge. Some of us might not make it.

But simply knowing you are seen CAN help.

She then quotes Robert Reich:

Brace yourself. The wave of evictions and foreclosures in next 2 months will be unlike anything America has experienced since the Great Depression. And unless Congress extends extra unemployment benefits beyond July 31, we’re also going to have unparalleled hunger.

Walter Einenkel of Kos reports that Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education, had reinterpreted the education rescue parts of the CARES Act, the big coronavirus relief bill. Congress designated the money to help desperate public schools. In spite of what the law says DeVos says the money must be shared with private schools. Another example of diverting public money to private interests. Einenkel wrote that a big difference between public and private schools “is that public schools must follow considerably better vetted policies of equality than private institutions.”



The House has approved a bill approving statehood for the District of Columbia. Its citizens do not have voting representation in the House or Senate. It’s lot likely to get far in this Senate. Beau Willimon explains why:

Why don’t Republicans want DC statehood? Because the only way they have a chance at keeping a Senate majority is with small red states getting 2 senators each.

The Senate is even more important to them than the presidency. The senate oversees judicial appointments. The senate controls executive branch nominations. The senate can hold up any federal legislation. These four states are the key to them maintaining disproportionate power.

The four states are Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. All of them are close in population to DC, which has about 710K. And definitely Democratic.

To put this in perspective, the combined populations of these four red states is about 3 million people. That would be like Chicago having 8 seats in the Senate.

Tonight’s opera is Die Walküre, part 2 of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. Yes, I saw it about three months ago as part of Metropolitan Opera’s Wagner week, when all four of the cycle were presented. This time it is alone and this time it is a 1989 production. One thought is why is the stage lighting so dark? It would be nice to see a bit more.

I’m watching because I so enjoy the music of the third act, or at least the first 20 and last 20 minutes. The whole thing is four hours. I felt I only wanted to spend two. So I listened to much of the first act, which, beyond the love duet is rather boring. I skipped most of the second act for the same reason.

Beautiful singing and vocal fireworks

The opera this evening is Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment or The Daughter of the Regiment. Though Donizetti is Italian this opera is in French. He wrote it for performance in Paris at a time when he was living there. Definitely French because the good guys are the French Army.

This one is a comedy. A baby girl named Marie is raised by a regiment of the French Army. She considers all 40 of them to be her papas. She’s now grown (and doing the laundry and cooking for her 40 papas). She vowed to eventually marry one of them. When the regiment is near Tyrol she falls in love with local Tonio. And Tyrol is an enemy of France.

Donizetti wrote in the Bel Canto (beautiful voice) style of the early 19th Century. In this case it means writing in a florid style with lots of high notes (vocal fireworks) – the tenor’s famous aria features nine high Cs. This is where he asks the regiment of Marie’s papas to be allowed to marry her. The Metropolitan Opera has a rule against encores. I’ve heard this is the only aria in which the audience response allows one. And there was one in this performance. (There is a chorus in Verdi’s Nabucco that also sometimes gets an encore.)

In the second act the Duchess of Krakenthorp appears. It is a brief, non singing role. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a big fan of opera, has appeared in this role (and the script was revised for her).

Because I was enjoying the opera so much I didn’t get any other writing done.

Corruptly each day

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reminds us that antifa as an organization doesn’t exist. There is no affiliation, no membership cards. But antifa – anti-fascism – is an attitude that is is everywhere.

Which is why William Barr, head of the Department formerly known as Justice is creating a task force dedicated to “countering anti-government extermists.” In part of Barr’s statement I want to ask, project much? However, Sumner handles it well:

In that memo, Barr claims that the people at the focus of his task force are extremists who, “profess a variety of ideologies [but] are united in their opposition to the core constitutional values of a democratic society governed by law. . . . Some pretend to profess a message of freedom and progress, but they are in fact forces of anarchy, destruction, and coercion.” Ignoring the half-dozen contradictions implicit in Barr’s description, there’s no doubt that Barr’s task force exists to play up a threat that does not exist, while ignoring the genuine threat of right-wing militias who regularly invade state capitals with AR-15s in hand.

Sumner wrote that if one is anti antifa, as Barr is, than one us is pro fascist.

Walter Shaub tweeted:

Barr impeachment

Pros
-the right thing to do
-expose his wrongdoing
-impede his election interference
-impede his interference in cases
-show future AGs that abusing power has risks
-give the media something to cover other than Trump rallies

Cons
-Trump's base will be mad

Limericking put it this way:

Bill Barr was a big power-seeker
Who made checks and balances weaker.
He ran DOJ
Corruptly each day.
“Ah, well,” said Pelosi, the Speaker.

As for why that impeachment should come soon, Lean McElrath tweeted in response to a memo from the nasty guy alleging local governments have “surrendered to mob rule” – likely rhetorical groundwork for…

What I’m saying is I don’t think this is about statues/BLM.

I think Trump is using Barr to try to feel out ways to mobilize state and local law enforcement agencies as his personal armed forces—likely in coordination with right-wing extremist militias.

In advance of November.

Sarah Kendzior replied:

Yes. It's also a loyalty test. They're seeing which people are departments are most malleable and/or complicit in advance of November, and which are most likely to reject anti-constitutional orders. This is especially true with the military.

Yeah I’m a bit late on noting the number of new unemployment claims reported last Thursday. It was just under 1.5 million.



An opera tonight. This one is Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte or The Magic Flute. While I readily declare Mozart to be a top composer I prefer his music in small doses – so an entire opera can be a bit much. However, this production was designed to Julie Taymor, the leading artist behind the stage version of The Lion King. For that it is definitely worth watching. And watching Papageno is always fun.

Alas, some of the opera’s age is showing. There’s the duet about the joys of being married and that it is to be desired. That’s a bit much for this lifelong bachelor. Then there was a bit by Sarastro’s guard about how one shouldn’t believe women. Granted, there is plenty of reason not to believe the Queen of the Night. But it isn’t good to smear all women.

My skin is a monument

Greg Dworkin of Daily Kos, in his pundit roundup, quoted Caroline Randall Williams in the New York Times talking about Confederate monuments.

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
…
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

I wrote yesterday about the rise of coronavirus cases across the South and Southwest. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that this rise should be considered a crime.

John Stoehr asks, “Why aren’t we talking about negligent homicide?” Why aren’t we talking about what the GOP governors knew and when they knew it in their rush to reopen the economy? Stoehr compares these governors to the tobacco industry which put profits over lives for decades. These governors are also putting profit (and reelection) ahead of people. “Dead people were the cost of doing GOP politics.”

People in the top 1% view nearly everything as gains and losses. GOP governors think the rest of us do too. But we don’t. These governors may not face criminal consequences, but it looks like they will face political consequences.



In another pundit roundup Dworkin quotes Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post. The summary is simple. Economic status does not explain support for the nasty guy. Racism does.



I don’t remember who suggested this and don’t see it in my browser tabs, so I can’t give credit.

The AIDS quilt was conceived during the pandemic that killed tens of thousands of gay men. When a victim died friends would create a panel, mostly cloth, about 3x6 feet (the size of a grave), to honor and remember them. Too many victims of AIDS didn’t receive funerals because families didn’t want the social stigma of death by AIDS and because many funeral homes and cemeteries refused to handle the remains. The quilt now has 48K panels and weighs about 54 tons. It was last displayed in its entirety on the National Mall in 1996 (panels have been added since). It is the largest piece of community folk art. One of the goals of the quilt is to demonstrate how massive the AIDS pandemic really is.

Similar quilts have been created for US Armed Forces killed in the Iraq War, those who died in the 9/11 attacks, those who died of breast cancer, and a few others.

The suggestion is to now do the same or similar for COVID victims. We need something to express how massive this pandemic really is.



The Twitter feed for Henry Sotheran’s antiquarian bookshop in London (est. 1761) includes this:

The disturbing lack of time travellers arriving to stop 2020 happening suggests we never actually invent it.

Maryanne McDonald replied:

Maybe it's one of those plot lines where everything they do to stop stuff just makes it worse in an apparently unrelated way?

And Matt Hunziker added:

There are two options here:

1. Time travel is a theoretical and practical impossibility, and always will be, or;

2. Time travellers have tried their best to fix 2020, and the version we're currently enduring is the best they could do.

Both are equally terrifying.

What’s happening now is a crime

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos has a couple graphs that show how quickly the coronavirus is again spreading across the US. We’re seeing a similar rate of increase as back in March. Sumner wrote:

The United States isn’t the only nation still reeling toward disaster, but the U.S. is unique in being the nation that has failed to address the pandemic, seen the horror that it could bring, and then failed again. The rising tide of cases in the United States represents an unmatched level of failure. An unrivaled instance of mismanagement. A peerless instance of utter incompetence.

In a separate post Sumner says that the nasty guy and his minions have received significant help from Sean Hannity of Fox News. Sumner says his viewers have been “hannitized” – he’s right up there helping the nasty guy spread lies. It’s to the point that studies are showing …

The most astounding result: Both infection rates and mortality can be mapped to places where Sean Hannity is most popular.

Steven Joseph of the Kos Community discussed the virus in Arizona, one of the new hot spots. He starts off with a chart of major events, which show how nonsensical Gov. Ducey has been.

March 20, 33 new cases that day, Ducey closed bars, theaters, gyms, and limited restaurant services.

March 30, 138 cases, Ducey issues a stay at home order. Over the next two weeks the number of cases a day rose and dipped, then rose again.

May 8, 365 cases, barbershops and hair salons are allowed to reopen.

May 15, 495 cases, stay at home order lifted and local governments are banned from issuing local restrictions.

June 17, 1752 cases, the ban on local government restrictions lifted.

June 23, 3779 cases, nasty guy holds a rally in a church in Phoenix.

It seems strange that Ducey would issue a stay at home order when there are 138 new cases a day and won’t reissue it when there are 1752 or even 3779 new cases a day. Then again, we’re dealing with the GOP. It makes me think they want a lot of people to get sick and die.

In another post Sumner wrote that what happened to New York with its skyrocketing cases early in the pandemic was a tragedy. Everyone was blindsided. But what is now happening in Arizona, Texas, and Florida is not due to being blindsided. These GOP governors already had New York as an example of how bad it can get and what works to keep the virus under control. And they’re not doing it. Sumner concludes:

New York got blindsided. The states most affected now walked into the red tide of COVID-19 with their eyes wide open, and their minds tight shut to the advice of experts. Governors like Abbott, DeSantis, and Ducey had a choice: they could protect their citizens, or they could please Donald Trump. There is absolutely no doubt about which way they went.

What happened before was a tragedy. What’s happening now is a crime.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

Three times as many Americans have died from COVID-19 in the past four months than died in the first four years of the AIDS crisis.

Think about that for a moment.

And in thinking about it I realized both viruses flourished because the government didn’t want to do anything.

Ana Mardoll, who describes himself as “A Boy Named Ana,” tweeted that he wants to get rid of Hanlon’s razor:

Hanlon's razor is an aphorism which states "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." It became popular in computer programming circles because bugs are easy to carelessly introduce into software.

The problem is that we now have cases where a politician makes choice after choice after choice--all of which add up to a consistent, singular bad outcome for his country--and folks just brush his actions aside as "stupid" rather than malicious.
...
"Do you really think [politician] is SMART enough to do X?" is a thing we have to hear about time and time again, and it's a distraction from the *fact* that the politician is doing X and that we need to respond.
...
Consider assuming that everything our politicians are doing *is* deliberate and coordinated, and not some aspect of "stupidity" that we throw up our hands at and say well-what-can-you-do-eh.

Bubba Wallace is the only African American driver in NASCAR’s top circuit. He recently got several white drivers to support his call to ban the Confederate flag at NASCAR events. NASCAR agreed. Of course, this flag is very popular with NASCAR fans.

On Monday someone on Wallace’s team found a noose in his stall at the track. Investigations are proceeding. Leading up to Monday’s race the other drivers showed their solidarity with Wallace by walking with him as he positioned his car in pre-race ceremonies.



From Bill in Portland, Maine’s collection of late night commentary.

I just wanna say to all those [MAGA] people: the next time you get an operation, you just say to the doctor, ‘You take that liberal bulls*** somewhere else. You come in here with no covering, you don’t wash those hands, and you stick them in my open wound, because I am an American.
—Jon Stewart, on the Trump cult's refusal to wear masks, on The Late Show

If you're missing the sensation of shaking a good friend's hand, I've found that a 4-day-old mango has a pretty similar feel.
—Conan O'Brien

They don’t think peace is possible

Last evening I watched the movie Crescendo, directed by Dror Zahavi. I saw it on the Detroit Film Theater newsletter. It was available through the DFT, though only for a limited time and I missed it. So a bit of online searching got me to the distributor’s website and I saw I could see it through Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theater, which will probably get a portion of the ticket sale.

Crescendo is a musical term and let’s get the annoyance out of the way. In music the word means to grow louder over a period of time. Alas, I’ve seen newspapers use the phrase “build to a crescendo,” implying the word refers to the peak volume, not the rise. To be correct newspapers should use the phrase “build to a fortissimo” or “crescendo to a fortissimo.” OK, rant over.

The tag for this movie is “Make Music Not War.” Famous conductor Eduard Sporck of Germany is convinced by and organization that advocates for peace to create a short-term youth peace orchestra equally made up of Israelis and Palestinians.

This movie is not a documentary. It is actors presenting a fictional story, though it is loosely based on Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. As with most movies of actors portraying musicians I look for how accurately an actor is playing the instrument being held. Sometimes it looked pretty good, most of the time not accurate at all. Which makes me think the few times it looked good it was a closeup on a real player’s hands, not the actor’s hands.

The movie opens with both Layla and Ron practicing the same violin piece. Layla is in the West Bank and must interrupt her playing because of tear gas floating in through the window. Ron is in Tel Aviv. He’s quite cocky. Then we see Layla and Omar (who plays clarinet) held up at an Israeli checkpoint. Then it is on to the auditions in Tel Aviv. Ron is upset that Layla is chosen as concertmaster over himself.

Lucky for the American viewers the common language is English. We get subtitles when dialogue is in Hebrew, Arabic, or German.

Layla, as concertmaster, tries to get a rehearsal started before Sporck arrives. This results in the first brawl among the young musicians. The organizers quickly see that holding rehearsals in Tel Aviv isn’t going to work, partly because of local antagonism and partly because of trying to get the Palestinians through the checkpoint every morning. So the backers transport all two dozen musicians to a villa in the Italian Alps (the youth seem confused whether they’re going to Austria or Italy, the credits say filming was done in Italy but the security team spoke German). The youth are all given the same outfit to wear. They object to “uniform” so these are “expressions of solidarity.”

There are rehearsals, though it seems Sporck must spend more time in exercises trying to get the youth to consider the other half of the orchestra might actually be human. During one episode the youth tell their stories. Layla tells about her great grandfather who is still alive. He was driven from his home when Israel came into being and still carries the house key in his pocket hoping to use it again. An Israeli youth tells about his family in the Holocaust, then just after Israel declare itself to be a country all of the surrounding Arab countries attacked. He lost family in that war.

Later I realized these passions run deep – both of them mentioned events that happened around 1948. Today both Israel and Palestine stoke those old grievances.

When Sporck first asks them whether they want peace, most of them don’t. They don’t think it’s possible. He reminds them he has seen healing between Germans and Jews. He had thought he’d never be allowed to visit Israel.

Omar falls in love with Shira, who is Israeli. She takes a selfie of the two of them in bed. It doesn’t end well. Even so, the youth do have some respect for each other by the end.

Laying the groundwork for claiming fraud

The nasty guy is again ranting that vote by mail is rigged, that millions of mail-in ballots will be sent from foreign countries. Hunter of Daily Kos discusses an article by Philip Bump in the Washington Post that explains all the reasons why that can’t happen.

* Millions of such ballots would not go undetected.

* It requires knowing ahead of time which states are close.

* It requires knowing ahead of time who didn’t vote.

One might manage this for a handful of voters, but not millions.

Miles Parks of NPR also fact checks the nasty guy. As part of his story he talked to Jennifer Morrell, an election consultant, who said:

Ballots are built unique for each election. Each jurisdiction will normally have dozens to hundreds of unique ballot styles. Proofs for each ballot style are reviewed and tested to ensure the ballot scanners will read those ballots and only those ballots. Even ballots created on that system from a previous election cannot be read.

You would need to replicate all of these elements exactly and do it for the 10,000-plus jurisdictions and hundreds of thousands of unique ballot styles within the U.S.

Hunter wrote:

In claiming [vote by mail is rigged], Trump is only seeking to sow distrust in the election results and stoke possible violence if his voters do not come out on top. For Trump and his Republican House and Senate allies, it is just another day of undermining American democracy and violating his oath of office for self-gain. Or for the sake of emotionally coping with another draining weekend.

It will be a case of who will people in the base believe – the nasty guy or NPR?

In June the nasty guy is laying the groundwork for claiming fraud in November’s election. He is chipping away at voter confidence.

Anne Applebaum tweeted a response to the nasty guy’s tweet:

Who needs the Russians anymore? The American president himself is launching Kremlin-style conspiracy theories designed to undermine faith in democracy, break trust, create division.

If he can't win, he'll burn the whole country down instead.

George Carrillo replied:

It’s really appalling to hear the President so openly and unabashedly use tactics like these. This is the stuff of dictators and despots. Even if he loses he will leave a long stain on American democracy, trust in institutions and integrity.

As did Dave McKinnon:

I think we can expect the postal ballots to be stuffed with vary many obviously fake Dem votes, done deliberately by teamTrump, so that they can be "spotted" and held up as apparent evidence.

This morning David Greene of NPR talked to Manisha Sinha, professor of American history at the University of Connecticut about toppling statues of those who weren’t a part of the Confederacy. Is it possible to go too far? What about Ulysses Grant or George Washington? Both owned slaves. Sinha replied that there’s a difference between a Confederate, who fought against the US, and Grant, who fought for the US and also owned slaves at one point. The first should be removed. The second should stay, but with context.

With that in mind Leah McElrath quoted tweets from Shaun King, here’s part of it:

Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. … All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother and their white friends should also come down.

McElrath responded:

This is what attempting to sabotage a social change movement looks like.

He’s literally out here encouraging people to tear down churches.

Don’t trust people who engage in accelerationist rhetoric under the guise of racial awareness language.

It’s a trap.

Naturally, Fox News started talking about Black Lives Matter’s war on Christianity.

Life doesn’t begin when you’re thin

Carolyn Copeland of Daily Kos discussed fatphobia and fat shaming. Copeland quotes Chevese Turner of the Binge Eating Disorder Association:

We are socialized to believe that fat is a negative and that fat people are lazy, dirty, and less than hard-working,” Turner said. “We believe thin is better and desirable, and have created an entire culture—diet and wellness culture—around these beliefs. We are taught from the moment we are born that fat is bad and we should, at any cost, not be fat. Some people are more fat-adverse than others and this may be because of the degree to which they have internalized fatphobia and just how much value thinness held in their families of origin or amongst their friend groups.

Fatphobia has long ties with white supremacy and religion. One aspect of Protestantism is the encouragement of self-discipline in order to find salvation. That included self-discipline over food. If a person was heavy that indicated low commitment to self-discipline, perhaps an “animalistic inability to control oneself.” American colonists associated being heavy with racial inferiority and immorality. In the same way white skin was put at the top of the social hierarchy and black skin at the bottom, thinness was put at the top and heaviness at the bottom.

Copeland wrote:

Teaching people to love the body they’re in isn’t promoting obesity or an unhealthy lifestyle. It means letting people know that life doesn’t begin when you’re thin, that people of all weights and sizes can live a happy, fulfilling life, and that people don’t have to hate themselves or the way they look simply because they’re heavier.

As part of a discussion of celebrity weight shaming and the reaction to Adele after she lost a lot of weight, Copeland wrote:

The overwhelming commentary on social media surrounding Adele’s transformation revealed a deep, underlying societal problem: Women who are heavier are often viewed as less-than, and value is only truly reached when they’re thin enough.

Copeland notes that when one person uses “health concerns” to comment on another person’s weight that doesn’t prompt the target person to exercise more and eat less. Instead, the opposite happens due to stress and shame. Also, there are a lot of reasons other than a lack of self-discipline that cause weight gain. These include physical disorders and financial limitations.

There is no excuse for fat shaming. We should not judge people by their shape. However, Sabrina Strings, author of Fearing the Black Body, the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, said:

It's hard to envision a time in which we were not focused on other people's appearances. Keep in mind that we don't just hate on folks based on their looks, we celebrate people when we find them attractive. There is no ‘attractive’ without an unattractive—it's a comparative designation.

An end to these recurring characters

Leading up to the low turnout rally in Tulsa a couple days ago the nasty guy campaign got pranked. Bobby Allyn of NPR talked about it with Mary Jo Laupp. She directs musical theater productions at a high school in Iowa. She created a TikTok video suggesting people reserve tickets to the rally even though they had no intention of going. Prominent TikTok people shared it. Korean Pop boosted it. The day after Laupp posted the video 300,000 people said they were interested in the event. A lot of them, actually got tickets as a joke.

Did it actually have an effect on the rally’s turnout? Who can say? There are other reasons for pranking.

Steve Schmidt, a political strategist, has worked on GOP campaigns, but strongly opposes the nasty guy. His teenage daughter got a ticket. Schmidt said:

It was really an act of civil disobedience, of subversion by young people who understand the consequences and are appalled and disgusted by the comportment and behavior of this president.

Laupp says there are teens and young adults who are saying, we did this. It will likely lead to more online activism and get-out-the-vote efforts.



Sarah Kendzior tweeted a quote from her Gaslit Nation podcast:

If Biden wins, he needs to spend four years identifying every official who was complicit in Trump admin corruption. They have to be named, outed, and permanently banned from power. They can't let it go.

We can't have a repeat of what happened with every other admin dealing with GOP crime, which was to let criminals go free. Nixon, Iran-Contra, 9/11 aftermath, 2008 crash. That's how we got the same criminal elites in power over and over.

They can't -- for the sake of 'not being divisive' or 'moving forward" or whatever euphemism they'll give it -- excuse elite criminality. They must prosecute it. There needs to be consequences and an end to these recurring characters.

Kelly Thompson describes himself as “Person for the ethical treatment of facts and humans. Fan of inalienable rights.” He tweeted a quote from Kendzior’s book Hiding in Plain Sight:

Kushner does not need to fear the law when his father-in-law can rewrite it. That is how life works in a dynastic kleptocracy. That is how life works now in the United States of America.

Kos of Daily Kos looks at the nasty guy’s current reelection prospects. His approval rating remains low and stable. His rating for handling the virus is low and stable and is at the top of voter’s minds. There isn’t much white backlash against the Black Lives Matter protests. That means his “Law and Order!” campaign message means little with so many people dying from the virus. As Kos wrote, keeping grandma alive might be a good campaign message but the nasty guy has zero interest in that.



Greg Dworkin of the Kos community, in his pundit roundup for today, quoted Stephanie McCurry of the Atlantic:

For the four years of its existence, until it was forced to surrender, the Confederate States of America was a pro-slavery nation at war against the United States. The C.S.A. was a big, centralized state, devoted to securing a society in which enslavement to white people was the permanent and inherited condition of all people of African descent.

Bill in Portland, Maine honored the birthday of George Carlin. Bill described him as Philosopher of Comedy and included a few quotes. Here’s one of them:

Traditional American values: genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods.

There is no way to read it other than as corrupt

The nasty guy held a campaign rally in Tulsa yesterday.

Before the rally Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed all the ways the campaign staff was making things worse for the coronavirus (worse for humans, better for the virus). The campaign says it sent out 800,000 tickets for a venue that seats 19,200, none of them assigned. Which means attendees must mingle together for hours in hopes of being part of the first 19,000 to get in. Because seats weren’t assigned there was no way to block off seats for proper distancing. Masks were to be handed out, but wearing them is not required and they’re unlikely to be worn.

As for the rally itself…

Alyosha Karamazov of the Kos community titled her post, Trump Tulsa Turnout Tragically Tanks. Titter. Tee-hee. Reporters Report Ridiculous Rally. Really. This post includes a few photos and excerpts from various news sources that highlight some things:

That 19,200 seat venue had under 6,200 people. It was about 1/3 full – really low numbers.

There were plans the nasty guy would speak inside (which he did for nearly two hours) then go to an outside stage to speak to those who didn’t make it in. The outside plans were scrapped.

The campaign blamed protesters for blocking the entrances to the arena to explain the low turnout. But the plaza outside was empty.

Jen Hayden of Kos created a post of pictures and videos of the empty plaza and the sparse arena.



On Friday William Barr, head of the Department Formerly Known as Justice, said Geoffrey Berman, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was resigning. Berman responded, no I’m not.

The SDNY is the federal court for a region that includes New York City, so gets all sorts of financial corruption cases. And because the nasty guy used to run his businesses from the city Berman has been looking into various nasty guy cronies, such as Rudy Giuliani.

Barr announced Berman is to be replaced by Jay Clayton, someone without any courtroom experience.

A big question: Why did Barr lie? Important people are asking.

On Saturday Barr announced “I have asked the president to remove you as of today, and he has done so.” The nasty guy said he’s not involved. Either Barr or the nasty guy is lying. Both have a track record making a lie from either one of them plausible.

Somewhere in there it sounds like Barr offered Berman another job away from SDNY. Berman declined.

Late Saturday Berman resigned. His statement says his deputy (not the person Barr nominated) would take his place.

Hunter of Kos explains the whole thing. He wrote:

There is no other way to read the move to install Clayton other than as corrupt, given the proximity of SDNY to at this point an unknowable number of investigations that tie directly into Trump, Clayton's status as Barr ally, Barr's bizarre announcement of a resignation that did not happen, and Barr's now well-reported moves to "reach down" into numerous federal prosecutions that Trump, personally, has objected to.

Hunter concludes:

House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler has already indicated that Berman will be summoned to testify on these events, and soon. There still seems no urgency to force Barr's own testimony, however, part of a continued reluctance on the part of the committee and House Democrats to truly pressure Barr on even the most brazenly corrupt moves, whether it be the gassing of a peaceful protest on Trump's apparent orders or the order to drop charges against Trump ally Michael Flynn outright. That is not good enough. The premise by House Democrats appears to be that no matter what criminality Barr and Trump get up to, it can be tolerated until November under an assumption that it can later be undone.

There is no assurance of either. Barr's corrupt acts are focused on paving the way for further corruption by Trump, who has given ample evidence that would certainly again participate in crimes, in order to gain reelection. And Barr's current acts, sabotaging each federal probe into potential Trump criminality one-by-one, will have consequences that an election cannot so easily paper over.

In another article Hunter discusses an article from the New York Times that talks about mid level government managers telling scientists to remove references to human causes to climate change. The reason is these managers are trying to follow what their bosses want. They are scared because jobs, or at least career advancement, are based on pleasing the bosses.

Hunter concludes:

The takeaways here are twofold, perhaps. One: We cannot count on our institutions to save us. Not from corruption, not from mismanagement, not from ideology-premised sabotage. Two: If government agencies can adapt within the span of a few years to extremist positions, it seems reasonable to expect the same agencies will adapt just as quickly when the wind blows from another direction.

That last bit doesn't negate the true damage being done here, of course. The problem with incompetent management is that it makes competent people want to leave even as the incompetent ones hang on for dear life. It is self-fulfilling. Those who are taking early retirement or drifting off into Literally Anything Else as their departments struggle with their new deadbeat between-lobbying-jobs overlords will probably not be eager to come back. The long-term effects of Trump's demands for incompetent government done boorishly will outlast him by two decades, at least.

Rev. William Barber tweeted:

Some are calling for Juneteenth to be a national holiday. How about we go further & pass healthcare & living wages for all, a fully restored Voting Rights Act & reparations, etc. Please don’t just ask for a holiday. Let’s make it a holy day of repentance & reconstruction.

I heard a radio broadcast of a recent concert – recent as in just a couple weeks ago. The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, directed by Sir Simon Rattle, didn’t play from their concert hall. Instead they played from Bavarian Radio’s Studio 1. The instrumentalists, the strings in one piece, the winds in another, were spread around the room keeping more than six feet apart with the director in the middle. Live orchestra music is still possible, though I would want to be in the room with them.



Amazing Maps tweeted a map showing the amount of land where 5% of the world’s population lives that is least and most densely packed. I figure 5% is about 350 million people. That number live in Bangladesh, and around Kolkata, India. Another 350 million are spread out over combined Canada, Alaska, central continental US (though not Colorado), Amazon rainforest, Patagonia, Sahara, the Namib Desert, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Siberia, Tibet, Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and a few more.

To show he controls these people

Some people are now suggesting that the November election has the possibility of being a blowout for Dem candidate Joe Biden. For example, Harry Enten suggests Biden could get 412 electoral votes (270 needed to win), the biggest Democrat win since LBJ in 1964. Peter Hambly added this reminder: “Deeply unpopular candidates lose elections. The end.” Enten reminds us other models show Biden getting only 200 electoral votes. So don’t take a win for granted.



Gwen Snyder tweeted that she thinks the nasty guy recognizes the coming loss, so is grabbing all the power he can now. That faster action is because his ego couldn’t take such a big loss (see above) and a big power grab would prevent that from happening.



Wajahat Ali, in an article for The Daily Beast, talks about some of the things the nasty guy might use to stay in office even if he loses in November.

The man lies about elections he wins. Just imagine what he will do if he loses.

[Jason Stanley, professor and author of How Fascism Works] added that if Trump and Republicans can represent the electoral system itself as being rigged, then “being a norm-breaker makes Trump seem authentic. That’s the authentic appeal of a lying demagogue—people think your brash, norm-breaking behavior is a sign of authenticity.”

He’s authentic all right. He hasn’t strayed from who he is. However, he is authentically an an authoritarian wanting to stay in office for life.

If the election is close and comes down to a contested state, say Wisconsin or Florida, what confidence does anyone have in this Supreme Court to be impartial?
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And if he is declared the loser, who knows what the limits are for a commander in chief who’s already exhorted his followers to “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!" He sent similar messages about Minnesota and Michigan, and weeks later an armed militia shut down the Michigan state house and forced lawmakers to work from home.

“That was to show he controls these people,” said [Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed. How They Fail]. “That those people can be trotted out to make trouble... he has planned that very carefully.”

I get the newsletter from Detroit Film Theater and their @ Home offerings. I watched one of them this evening. It was Mr. Topaze directed by and starring Peter Sellers. It came out in 1961 and is described as a classic thought to be lost and now restored. Sellers plays a schoolteacher who refuses to change the failing grade of the grandson of the duchess and loses his job. DFT says of the film “Sellers’ first and only credited directorial feature captures the comic genius at his peak …” The description reminds us that Sellers starred in The Pink Panther, comedies I remember fondly from my youth. However, this wasn’t a comedy. It was quite interesting and enjoyable and I didn’t expect the ending. But it wasn’t a comedy.

You should consider he’s racist

A while back the nasty guy promoted hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus wonder drug. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reviews how this mess got started. Surprisingly, it started with Elon Musk, the head of Tesla. Sumner says Musk’s accuracy of statements surrounding the virus is quite low. I’ll let you read the twisting story for yourself.

However, the result of the nasty guy’s hype is the government started stockpiling the pills – as in more than 94 million pills. There are currently 63 million pills in federal warehouses and 31 million in state warehouses.

The people who really need the drug – to treat lupus, arthritis, and malaria – are having a hard time getting it because it’s all in government stockpiles.

From Bill in Portland, Maine’s collection of late night commentary:

Remember when Trump was pushing hydroxychloroquine as the coronavirus miracle drug? The FDA officially this week withdrew their support for it and now the government is stuck with 66 million useless doses. So I guess we know what the Trumps will be giving trick-or-treaters for Halloween for the next 30 years.
—Jimmy Kimmel

I’ve read a couple stories now about the nasty guy planning an October surprise – some big event that month to change public opinion before the election but leaving too little time for the opposition to respond (though stories about it four months ahead of time seems to defeat the purpose).

The plan is the nasty guy will announce the availability of a vaccine against the virus. The big problem would be that no vaccine would actually be ready by then – more accurately no vaccine would be certified to actually prevent an infection of the virus (the sole reason for it to exist) and to not cause harm to those who get it. Even so, the nasty guy could pull some regulatory strings and demand that something be made available. The nasty guy would be seen as the savior, boosting his chances to be reelected.

Joan McCarter of Kos sees a couple problems. First, the nasty guy has a very bad track record dealing with this virus. So bad that if he rushed a vaccine into a public’s hands a majority of people wouldn’t trust it. Second, if this first vaccine is shown to not be effective or to have serious side effects there would be a lot less trust for any future vaccine, no matter how safe and effective it is.



Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred with the opinion that Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the DACA case. However, she wrote her own opinion to add a bit more. That little bit more was to chide her colleagues, especially Roberts, that they should have considered the nasty guy’s actions as racist and draft their opinion accordingly.

The nasty guy has already tweeted that he intends to try to overturn DACA again. And advocates will take him to court again. Actual DACA people hope the litigation lasts at least until the next Democratic president.



A few days ago I wrote that the military pushed back against the nasty guy and his desire for them to attack citizens. Kerry Eleveld of Kos felt that the military would refuse such an order and that they might even escort him out of the White House at the end of his term.

Alas, the nasty guy has an answer to that: purge the military. Mark Sumner of Kos provides details and added:

Just as with Mitch McConnell’s blanket replacement of the federal judiciary, Trump’s team is reweaving the fabric of the Pentagon at every level. Those whose loyalty is to tradition, the services, and law, are being driving out in favor of those who support Trump. And only Trump.

With this post I now have 70 posts tagged with coronavirus. Out of the 750 tags I’ve used over the years (240 get displayed on this blog’s website) this one is now 37th most used. That high a rise in less than four months.



This is a fun commercial.

That triangle is back

The big news of the day is that the Supreme Court preserved DACA, the program that protects from deportation undocumented people who came here as children. The nasty guy tried to end the program and immigrant rights groups sued to keep it in place. The Supremes agreed it should stay.

DACA recipients are, of course, delighted with the news. Gabe Ortiz of Daily Kos shares some reactions.

In a separate post Ortiz explains the decision. In his discussion he quotes from Mark Joseph Stern of Slate. The deciding vote was Chief Justice John Roberts, who also wrote the majority opinion.

This was not a resounding upholding of the DACA program. Roberts wrote that when the executive branch wants to change a policy it must provide a reasoned explanation. For example, the policy should consider how to handle a DACA person in a commitment, such as military service or in a course of study. But circumstances were ignored. So Roberts concluded the policy was enacted in an “unlawfully arbitrary and capricious way.”

Roberts concluded by giving his blessing to the nasty guy to try again. If the replacement policy was done properly, taking existing law into account, then he could end DACA.

There is sweetness in the victory of this battle. But the war is far from over.



Bill in Portland, Maine, in his daily Cheers and Jeers post for Kos quoted an article from Huffington Post. There is a news service for police called Law Enforcement Today. It has repeatedly promoted far-right conspiracy theories and authoritarian policies. That has continued during the recent mass protests. There is also a Facebook group Law Enforcement Family that perpetuates racist stereotypes and calls cops that kneel with protesters “pussies.” There are more than 53,000 members of this group. That’s not a “few bad apples.”



John Bolton wrote a book of all the incriminating details he wouldn’t share during the impeachment process last January. I urge you to not buy the book so that he won’t profit from spurning his duty to save the juicy stuff for the book.

John Bonifaz tweeted:

Here's a question for the House Judiciary Committee: in the face of the revelations from the Bolton book, what is your constitutional duty? Reconvene the impeachment inquiry + issue the subpoena to Bolton that neither the Senate nor House ever issued. And, while you're at it include in the focus of a new impeachment inquiry Trump's incitement of violence and murder. There is no "several months before the election" exception to the impeachment power of Congress.

Gail Berenger replied:

Anyone who thinks we are out of Trump danger because of the impending election has not considered his lame duck session and all the damage he could do. Impeachment for his crimes is what “law and order” and the violation to protect the constitution demand.

Consider all the damage the nasty guy has done since the impeachment.



Georgia’s recent primary election was a disaster. Jennifer Cohn, an election security advocate, says there was another aspect to that disaster which could reappear in November.

This is horrifying. Votes from predominantly black precincts in TN & GA have vanished from ES&S voting systems. Election commissioner @benniejsmith made the TN discovery by comparing precinct poll tapes to reported totals.

Hunter of Kos reports the nasty guy campaign has started using a red triangle in its advertising. That’s a hugely big deal because that same red triangle was used in Nazi concentration camps to identify political prisoners, or more accurately, used by fascists to identify enemies of fascism. And the nasty guy campaign is using this triangle in that same way.

Hunter then rebuts the idea this was used accidentally. No, says Hunter, it is obvious the campaign knows about the history of this symbol and is using because of that history. Hunter concludes:

It would be easier to believe that Trump's band of for-hire white nationalist deplorables stumbled on things like Nazi concentration camp symbols accidentally if they also did not run actual concentration camps, in this case for refugees, intentionally. Or demand the militarization of the streets, or promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, or declare, even in the Senate, that the law of the nation is now subservient to Dear Leader's personal agenda and interests. There is no subtlety here, however. The movement is both advocating for explicitly fascist things and declaring "anti-fascists," real or imagined, to be enemies of the state. There is no flowchart needed to get from A to B.

KeithDB of the Kos community wrote that Facebook has deleted the ads. He adds:

Team Trump is not even trying to hide what they are anymore.

Some of us think he stopped trying to hide a long time ago. Others say he never did try.

Read the fine print

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos goes through all the details to show wearing a mask in public significantly – as in at least 85% – reduces the spread of the coronavirus. Hand washing helps too.

So why aren’t people wearing masks? One reason is early in the pandemic the US Surgeon General declared the public shouldn’t wear masks, though he also said the reason is to reserve masks for health care workers who desperately need them. That last part didn’t get properly out to the public. Other reasons are that it makes the wearer look weak and cowardly. Or not sufficiently manly. Or wearing a mask is like slavery. Or that God will protect them. Or the nasty guy doesn’t wear one so I’m not either. Or something.

Sumner wrote:

If 70% of Americans wore masks in public, it would provide an effect that mimicked the much-sought after “herd immunity” until a vaccine becomes available. If 80% of Americans wore masks in public, it might push the rate of transmission so low that, well before the end of the year, America would be in the position of China or South Korea or Japan—fighting the occasional local flare up, rather than going forward in a fog of rising cases and impending doom.
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We don’t need guidelines on mask use. We don’t need more FDA suggestions about mask use. We need a nationwide requirement that all people wear masks over both mouth and nose while in public areas, always, for the duration of the emergency. And keep them on, even when there’s a television camera pointed your way.
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If everyone would wear a mask, it would save tens of thousands of lives in the next few months.

But Republicans are instead chasing people who are wearing masks, and sometimes assaulting people who are wearing masks, and even barring people from their stores if they are wearing masks. It’s almost as if they’re determined to rack up the biggest body count available. But at least they’ll die knowing how they owned those libs.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos created a chart showing the percentage of where new cases are reported. The states and counties where Clinton won in 2016 have been dropping in the percentages. The states and counties where the nasty guy won have been rising.

Back in March the nasty guy declared he was the “wartime president.” Now as the pandemic rises in red America the nasty guy has abandoned the field.

That poses the question of why the nasty guy thinks killing off his voters will benefit him. Of course, I know the answer – to him the election doesn’t matter, except to trumpet big numbers to stroke his ego.



States and cities are passing laws to curb police brutality. Yay! Laura Clawson of Kos says read the fine print.

The question is how seriously they’re responding, and whether the reforms being announced will ever be enforced. In too many cases, the loopholes are going to be big enough for police officers to use to get away with murder.

For example, California is calling for the end of training of neck restraint techniques, not banning their use. Broward County, Florida did ban neck restraints – except when deadly force is justified (and George Floyd’s killer would have justified it to himself). There are several other examples.



Moscow Mitch has a policing reform bill for the Senate. It doesn’t do much. However, it can be used as a dare to Democrats to oppose it.

The system is just fine but individuals are unworthy of assistance

Lots of stuff in my browser tabs so some of the items may not get more than a mention.



Lauren Floyd of Daily Kos reports that seven Minneapolis police officers have quit and another six are in the process. Why stay? Everybody hates the police right now. Gosh, I wonder why?



If no police what might be done instead? Meteor Blades of Kos quotes an article in Mother Jones by Delilah Friedler which says the Native American population of Minneapolis has some good ideas. Back in 1968 they created American Indian Movement Patrol because they were fed up with police violence and unlawful arrests. They now maintain neighborhood safety. This is a model that the replacement for the police can use. And it’s already in the city.

The article includes an example. An AIM team saw four white teens looting a liquor store. They stopped and soon had the youth on the ground, where they stayed until parents picked them up. The teens had come from 90 miles away.



I had reported that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchen had declared who got bailout money to be a secret. The legal justification for that secrecy … was made up. Both parties in both chambers of Congress do not like that secrecy. That’s good to hear.



Greg Kaufmann wrote for USA Today:

I’ve covered poverty in America for more than 10 years and, for me, there is a certain kind of madness that comes with the beat.

It stems primarily from witnessing profound and unnecessary human suffering caused by bad policy choices, from food to health care to policing, and a rage towards policymakers who maintain a steady drumbeat of baseless claims such as “we need more data to know what to do,” or worse, blame people for their poverty by portraying them as lazy, scheming, dependent, or anything else to suggest that the system is just fine but these individuals are broken and unworthy of assistance.

Marissa Higgins of Kos reports the United Nations calls for a ban of “conversion therapy” which is an attempt to turn gay people straight. This therapy has been denounced by the American Psychological Association and many other groups because it does significant harm to the patient who remains gay. The practice has been banned in only five countries (not the US) and in 20 states plus DC and Puerto Rico. Thanks to the UN for calling for the ban.



There is a huge heat wave over Siberia. Since January temperatures have been up to 8C (14F) higher than usual with an average 5.3C (9.5F) higher than normal. This is causing the permafrost to melt which is damaging to buildings sitting on the permafrost. That is likely why there is a 150,000 barrel oil spill from a nickel mine now flowing down rivers towards the Arctic Ocean.



Mark Sumner of Kos reports there is a Seattle Autonomous Zone in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. It’s an area without police and is an experiment in practicing community safety. It’s been in existence for about a week now and doing quite well, part street festival and part commune. It’s happening because Seattle police have been involved in repeated acts of violence.

But Fox News viewers are shown chaos in the area as it is being pillaged by armed lunatics, complete with burning buildings. The nasty guy has been tweeting that the mayor had better take back his city fast or he will. The images that Fox News and other conservative sites are showing are in stark contrast to what is actually happening. That’s because they’re making it up. Many images aren’t even of Seattle.

Against that background [of police violence], many in Seattle, including many Seattle officials, seem open to the idea of making the Capitol Hill area an ongoing experiment in operating without police, and for how shared community resources can be mixed with ordinary shops and businesses.

Conservatives aren’t upset because Seattle is burning. They’re terrified because it is not.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reviews the various military leaders and their pushback against the nasty guy. Eleveld concludes with this good news:

Mattis and other military leaders have resolutely affirmed that the reason they joined the military in the first place was to protect the people in the streets, not antagonize them. And the protesters’ fight for fundamental fairness and equal justice is indeed a legitimate and unifying demand, as both the polls and the diversity of the protests have shown.

If Trump, in his inability to deliver that justice, tries to instead quash the cries for change rising up from the streets, he will no longer have the support of the U.S. military to do it.

When the law says “sex” it includes LGBT

The Supreme Court ruled today that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids discrimination based on sex it means that sexual orientation and gender identity are included. Discrimination against workers based on being LGBT is forbidden. The ruling was 6-3. That includes the four liberal justices plus John Roberts and, surprisingly, Neil Gorsuch. It was Gorsuch who wrote the opinion. Alito and Thomas dissented and Kavanaugh wrote a separate dissent.

Yes, Gorsuch is the first justice appointed by the nasty guy. However, a transgender person who heard the oral arguments is not surprised that Gorsuch took our side.

Some of the phrases Gorsuch used:

It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating based on sex.

An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

The limits of the drafter’s imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.

Nina Totenberg on NPR said Gorsuch added a little caveat at the end, suggesting that it might be OK to discriminate on religious grounds. That will make the Catholic bishops happy.

Selena Simmons-Duffin, also on NPR, compared this legal ruling with a rule change issued by the nasty guy’s Department of Health and Human Services last Friday. The ruling says that health care providers may refuse care for transgender people if it conflicts with their religious beliefs.

Simmons-Duffin said the ruling by the Supremes has no direct bearing on the health care rule because this decision affects only employment. But when the rule is challenged (and the ACLU says it will be) the Supremes now have placed a marker on how to decide. Alas, that means an actual court challenge. And this court challenge took seven years and two of the three plaintiffs have already died – Aimee Stephens just a few weeks ago.

Simmons-Duffin says the timing of the HHS rule was not a coincidence. One could wonder why the nasty guy administration want to issue a rule change when they know the supremes are about to issue a decision. Even so, HHS intentionally issued ahead of the Supremes.

The nasty guy is reversing Obama’s rules where Obama specifically said when the law says “sex” it includes LGBT. And now the Supremes are saying what Obama said.

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos says this decision is a double blow to the nasty guy:

The ruling confounds the Trump administration both legally and politically. Not only did Trump and Co. argue in favor of perpetuating discrimination against LGBTQ Americans and lose, the fact that Gorsuch penned the majority opinion kneecaps one of Trump’s key appeals to religious conservatives—that he’s delivered them the perfect justices to the Supreme Court.

Joan McCarter of Kos adds that when Kavanaugh was confirmed by the senate he reportedly got the vote of Maine Senator Susan Collins by telling her he considered legal same-sex marriage to be settled law and implied he would protect LGBT rights.

Not only did Kavanaugh dissent, he felt he had to write his own dissent to adequately say what he thought.



Kennett High School in the White Mountains region of New Hampshire did have a graduation ceremony, though an unusual one. Graduates in cap and gown, along with parents, boarded a ski lift up Cranmore Mountain. At the top school staff greeted the graduate. The principal called the name. The graduate picked up the diploma off a music stand. A volunteer sanitized the chair. The staff gave an official goodbye. And the graduate went back down the mountain. One the way up and down the graduate had a chance to see classmates not seen in three months. It only took six hours to get all 160 graduates up and down. The class of 2021 wants to do the same even if there is no pandemic.

Testing unconstitutional practices

I read another transcript of an episode of Gaslit Nation, hosted by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Protest Season. Here is some of what they had to say.

The protests in America, promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement, have spread internationally and have become general protests against supremacy. I had previously mentioned the protests in Bristol, England that removed the statue of a slave trader and in Belgium against King Leopold II.

Chalupa says this reminds her of the 2013-14 revolution in Ukraine. After Yanukovich, Putin’s puppet, was toppled the government passed a “decommunization law.” Statues were removed and places renamed to remove references to Soviet brutality and to bring back historical names. It was a declaration of independence from Russia and announce to the rest of the world that they must view Ukraine as its own place, not just a former Russia satellite.

There are two Americas. One is founded on genocide. The other is a beacon of hope to the world. Chalupa’s parents saw that beacon. They were born in German refugee camps in Ukraine at the end of WWII and sought asylum in the US. It is this beacon that prompted Ukrainians in US and Canada to create a website on how to talk about racism. See it here. I’ll explore it as I have time.

Chalupa notes that though her parents are from another country she is not black. And that made a big difference when dealing with the police. Her community needs to understand that. Black Lives Matter is a self-education movement. She can go into a Ukrainian community, where her last name is common, and feel protected. She feels uncomfortable to step out from that protection and say, yeah, we’ve been oppressed, but we’re seen as white and given white privileges. We need to talk about how we benefit. And we’ll probably need to keep talking about that for the rest of our lives.

One thing in particular that the Ukrainian community should talk about is how the US treatment of black people is similar to the Soviet treatment of Ukrainian people. Then teach people in their own community how to not be racist. Don’t think a public space is a white space. Don’t be anti-black to demonstrate how white you are. That’s something Irish and Poles had to deal with before being accepted as white.

Stop those who try to say there are “good blacks” and “bad blacks.” Those who are racist attack the good blacks too. An example is Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. This was the “Black Wall Street,” a very affluent time and place for black people. Good people, right? White people burned the place to the ground.

Kendzior gets into the calls to defund the police. Over the last 40 years public education, healthcare, and other social services were steadily defunded. The police were not. They were militarized and given big budgets. So those calling for defunding police mean reallocating resources to drug counselors and social workers. The overall goal is to protect people – including from the police.

But supremacists – like the nasty guy and pandemic prince – have a different view of the police debate. Their goal is to make sure white collar crime, the kind they perpetrate, will not be punished. This may hide this under the guise of “criminal justice reform.”

Another danger is that police will quit when they are no longer allowed to brutalize people. They will be replaced by private militias whose only loyalty is to the company that hires them. One person eager to expand such a business is Erik Prince, brother to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Kendzior said:

The entire apparatus needs to be viewed as one interlocking system. If you're going to reform or abolish the police, you need to take into account how a crime will be defined, who will mete out justice, how the new system will be exploited by this administration, and so on. What we need to destroy is elite criminal impunity. That necessitates changing more than just the police, but the criminal justice system itself.

Chalupa reminds us this crisis doesn’t end when Biden takes over the Oval Office. Then she talked about our high levels of income inequality.

And as a result, you have the powerful police unions, the financially influential police unions, expanding their jobs because police are being sent into schools instead of guidance counselors and therapists.

Police are being sent to arrest addicts on the street. Police are being sent to arrest those suffering from mental illness on the street. So when we say “Defund The Police”, we're saying, “bring back the social programs to treat addiction, bring back the social programs to support students in classrooms. Pay your teachers more, make classrooms smaller, expand public schools, put that money into public schools.”
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We're not going to get Black Lives Matter unless we take on income inequality, and that's the real test for people. So all those brands and all these leaders, Mitt Romney and so forth, marching and saying, "Black lives matter,"; it's about the rich paying their fair share in taxes. It's like Elizabeth Warren advocated for, which was that multi-millionaire tax. If you could afford to own several homes, please pay your taxes.

Jeff Bezos, please pay your taxes to support public schools, and education, and Medicare For All, and free college. That's what we need right now and that's the real test, not the black squares you're posting on social media.

Kendzior said that because the nasty guy and his minions are encouraging bad behavior in police we should now consider police to be foot soldiers of a mafia state. That’s another reason for defunding the police. Things at the local level should be viewed in the context of a narrow elite hoarding wealth and resources. That elite has also connected up with a transnational crime syndicate, a network of billionaires, as well as criminal and white supremacist actors.

Local and state governments are trying to put their power up against the nasty guy. They do it by declaring they’re a sanctuary city, by proposing to dismantle or defund police, and by refusing to act on national orders to open up during the pandemic. Even so, the danger from the nasty guy is overwhelming.

November won’t be a quick and easy solution no matter who wins. Said Kendzior:

And what we've been seeing in recent weeks, I think is to some extent, a dress rehearsal for that. They're seeing what the police will do. They're seeing what the consequences are for that brutality. They're seeing how the military reacts when the military is encouraged to fire on the American people.

This is Trump and Barr and the rest of them testing unconstitutional practices, trying to terrorize, and intimidate, and brutalize protesters into submission, trying to establish the court of public opinion on this issue, and they're going to exploit it in every possible way. But what you should never forget is that these are criminals themselves. Trump is Individual One.
…
We've said on the show many times that white collar crime is violent crime. That is why they call it blood money. And they're going to use that blood money for their propaganda apparatus. They're going to use it to build up private unidentified militias. They're going to use it to brainwash further the police and other just ordinary citizens into tearing this country apart. So that's where the danger lies.

Chalupa said we’ve already had a dress rehearsal for stealing an election. We’ve already has a dress rehearsal in William Barr spinning the Mueller report so that gullible newspapers report is says something other than what it said. He’ll spin the results of the 2020 election.

Chalupa reminds us what protesters are really demanding:

Defund The Police is an anti-corruption movement saying the police have gone too far, especially in New York City. We saw them beating people with impunity, and so let's put that money towards social strengthening and building a social safety net. That's it. It's that simple.

To those who declare defunding the police will return New York to the levels of crime in the 1970s and ‘80s Chalupa says a big reason for the high crime in that era was corrupt police.

This episode ends with a call to unsubscribe from the New York Times. Kendzior says they have been a mouthpiece of the nasty guy administration for some time. The reason for this renewed call is that the Times solicited an op-ed from racist Sen. Tom Cotton, who proposed using the military against American protesters. Yes, the Times does good stuff with their 1619 project (the year slaves first came to America). But Dean Baquet, the editor said he doesn’t want to cater to the resistance – which are people trying to keep democracy intact. Chalupa asks do you believe in human rights or do you not? She contends the Times does not.

Statues coming down

Another 2.25 million Americans filed unemployment benefits last week.



Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reports:

[Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin] says that where the more than $500 billion of taxpayer money authorized by Congress has been spent is "proprietary" and "confidential" information. In other words, the Chamber of Commerce and all the individual businesses like the Ritz-Carlton are unhappy that they had to answer questions about why they got billions when thousands of real small businesses got little or nothing. But he wants more of that secret money to go out now.

A lot of Confederate statues are coming down and its good to see it is black people taking them down. Also coming down are are statues to colonizers and slavers. Native Americans took down a statue of Christopher Columbus. Even other countries are joining the fun. Bristol, England took down a town benefactor who made his stash in the slave trade. Belgium took down statues of King Leopold II, for whose actions in Congo the term “crimes against humanity” was coined.

Alas, several Republicans don’t like the disappearance of Confederate heroes of racism. That prompted author Mikel Jollett to tweet:

Dear Republicans,

You can't call yourselves "the party of Lincoln" AND wave the Confederate flag.

Love,

History


A QUICK HISTORY LESSON FOR CONSERVATIVES CONFUSED BY THIS IDEA:

Lincoln was the President of the United States.

Racist people in the South wanted slavery more than they wanted the US to be a country.

Their symbol was the confederate flag.

They got their asses kicked.

Still Laurie One tweeted this photo.



As all this protesting is going on I’ve been staying home and working in my garage (which is proceeding nicely – I hope to get a lot done before the weather gets hot on Tuesday). At times I feel I’m not doing enough for the cause. My garage ceiling is not that important.

Aysha Qamar of Kos suggests other things one can do outside of protesting. You can educate yourself. Qamar lists several books, such as The Karma of Brown Folk by Vijay Prashad and Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlele Carruthers. There are movies, TV shoes, and videos, such as Dear White People. There are podcasts, such as Code Switch on NPR. The post contains lots more suggestions in each category.

You can fund racial justice organizations, such as Black Lives Matter and Unicorn Riot. You can follow The Movement for Black Lives and see what actions they have scheduled. You can join or fund organizations that protect and promote voting.

And you can continue to show up for difficult conversations on race.

Carolyn Copeland of Kos Prism says black people thank you for your statements of support. How about some sustainable action?

Solidarity and public statements of support can still be impactful, but if allies really want to make a difference, organizers say they should do more to mobilize friends and family to vote racist politicians out of office in November, familiarize themselves of the demands of Black Lives Matter activists, and reach out to the Black community to ask what they can do to help.

From Bill in Portland Maine’s Cheers and Jeers collection of late night commentary.

To the people still saying “but if you take down the statues, how will people learn their history?” Read a book, motherf*****. The bubonic plague was a major event in history, but we don’t go around putting statues of rats.
– The Daily Show

What a time this is to be alive. Two weeks ago we were on Instagram teaching each other how to make no-knead focaccia, and now we're dismantling systemic racism. I think that's progress.
– Jimmy Kimmel

Bill also lists actions this week taken to sweep away the Confederacy:

* Nancy Pelosi called for the removal of Confederate statues from the Capitol.

* Confederate statues pulled down in Richmond, VA and Jacksonville, FL.

* Senate Armed Services Committee voted to require renaming military bases named for Confederate generals.

* NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. US Marine Corps and US Navy did too.

Legal threats usually come from Venezuela

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah yesterday. Biden said his greatest concern is that the nasty guy will try to steal the election. He has thought about what would happen if the nasty guy refused to leave. Biden is heartened that several of the top military leadership have spoken out against the nasty guy and his desire to use the military against protesters. He is now convinced if necessary they would escort the nasty guy from the White House.

I’m so glad he recognizes the threat.

Yesterday I mentioned the possibility the disastrous Georgia primary was a practice run for November showing who is loyal when the nasty guy refuses to leave.

That fits with this news: Hunter of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy campaign showed their boss poll numbers showing he is losing by a lot. He was infuriated. To placate him the campaign threatened CNN with legal consequences. And then followed through, sending a cease and desist letter to CNN. Wrote Hunter:

The letter, which again is apparently absolutely real and demands a "conspicuous retraction, apology, and clarification,” claims that the poll was "a stunt" and "phony," to "cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for" the White WalkerToChurch leader, reports CNN. And it uses numerous weird claims from perennially sketchy Republican pollster McLaughlin & Ass. to assert that well, CNN's pollster did it all wrong and Actually Dear Leader would be leading if they did it right, so everybody needs to shut up and apologize and I still cannot believe this is a real letter, are we serious about this insanity? Wait, I'm being told it really is.

Of course, the CNN poll is not the only one showing he’s losing and many news outlets are reporting these polls.

CNN tweeted their response:

To the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media.

Your letter is factually and legally baseless. It is yet another bad faith attempt by the campaign to threaten litigation to muzzle speech it does not want voters to read or hear. Your allegations and demands are rejected in their entirety.

I add: The nasty guy’s response to an unfavorable poll is an indication of what his response will be to an election result that doesn’t go his way. He won’t believe that either and will turn to the courts, or anyone who will listen, to punish those who try to embarrass him like that.



I watched another opera tonight. This one The Ghosts of Versailles bu John Corigliano, a composer still alive.

I had known The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart and The Barber of Seville by Rossini were two parts of the same story, perhaps more properly two connected novels by the same author, Beaumarchais. With this opera I find there is a third novel of the set. But this isn’t a simple adaptation of that third story. It serves as an opera within an opera. And that outer opera…

The characters in the outer opera are the ghosts of the French royalty killed in the Revolution. Marie Antoinette wants to forget the horror and turns to Beaumarchais to tell a story that will revise history so she will live again. That story is the third novel – sort of. The two stories end up intertwined. The scene at the Turkish Embassy when Figaro tries to prevent Almaviva (both characters from the earlier stories) from selling Antoinette’s necklace to the English ambassador is quite fun and funny. But Antoinette’s trial and the imprisonment of the aristocrats are quite serious.

This video is from a 1992 production. With an interest in what a new opera might be like I saw it on TV at the time. Alas, I don’t remember it (and it was 28 years ago). Though the composer uses a lot of modern techniques that most people don’t find beautiful, he doesn’t use them exclusively and there are many lyrical and beautiful moments.

An F in voting

This is a delicious dilemma. If Congressional GOP flee the nasty guy his base turns against them. If they cling to the nasty guy the rest of the country turns against them. Actually doing the right thing – protecting citizens from the virus, providing adequate financial protection during the lockdown, and doing something about police brutality for starters – doesn’t seem to have entered their minds.



Georgia had a primary election yesterday. It didn’t go well. Kristen Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said, “If we view the primary election as a dry run for November, then Georgia gets an F today.” New voting machines didn’t work right. Back up provisional ballots ran out. Many precincts (the black ones) had hours long lines. One precinct ended voting after midnight. Many people weren’t able to exercise their right to vote simply because they couldn’t afford to wait that long.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (GOP) says the problems were with the counties. Voting rights advocates, such as Stacey Abrams, point to Raffensperger.

Greg Bluestein tweeted a thread with images and videos of the problems of voting in the state.

LeBron James tweeted:

Everyone talking about “how do we fix this?” They say “go out and vote?” What about asking if how we vote is also structurally racist?

Jenn Budd tweeted:

Okay. I’m just going to say it. I think this was a practice run for November to see which of his people and which law enforcement he can trust to fight for him when he refuses to leave. It’s just crazy to say that but I believe it.

Sarah Kendzior replied:

Not crazy at all. They have other horrific objectives along with it, but it is indeed a test run for Nov and a loyalty test.

It’s been a while since I’ve watched an opera stream from the Metropolitan Opera. I did this evening. The opera was Hansel and Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck. The basic plot is the fairy tale we know well.

This is the only work I know by this composer and it’s a good one. The most famous bit is the Evening Prayer. The children are lost in the woods and night is coming on. They pray that fourteen angels will guard them during the night. That is followed by orchestral music for the dream pantomime. In most productions one sees the angels arrive and take up position. The music of the prayer and pantomime are wonderful.

This production focuses on the reason why the children are in the woods – they’re hungry. So in this production instead of angels the children dream of a fabulous banquet with waiters uncovering all the dishes in a big flourish.

A couple other things about this production. It is sung in English instead of the original German. And the witch is sung by a tenor. If you want something to do Thursday look for the Met Opera free streaming.

I saw this opera live maybe 25 years ago in Toronto. It was a Sunday afternoon and the audience had a lot of kids – I think there were five children on either side of me. In that production the sets and costumes were designed by Maurice Sendak, the author of the children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. When the opera ended and the witch came out for her curtain call all the children booed. The actor reacted, mustered some dignity, and bowed anyway.