Overworked, redundant, illogical, ineffective, baffling, or irritating

I’m very glad to say goodbye to 2020 tonight. Let’s just call it a year and move on. I hope 2021 is much better. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported Moscow Mitch has blocked efforts to raise virus relief checks from $600 to $2000 a couple more times. He called the checks “socialism for rich people,” though that doesn’t make any sense. At this point one meaningless reason is as useful as any other. This Congressional session could technically run until Sunday, so there is still time. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that the vaccine distribution is going much slower than anticipated, even though the nasty guy bragged for months about how wonderful the rollout would be. The complaints are getting louder. The nasty guy is doing his usual of blaming others. In a second post Sumner described some of the distribution problems. Shipments of vaccine had to be thrown out because they had overheated in transit. That means other shipments are delayed until the logistics of refrigeration are corrected and replacements come from some other place’s allotment. States complain they aren’t getting promised doses while millions of doses sit in storerooms waiting for instructions on where to ship them. Cold storage isn’t being provided so doses aren’t getting to more remote places. Badly written rules mean doses are diverted from frontline workers, such as to hospital administrators who have no contact with patients. Sumner included a photo from Florida. Rather than giving the available doses to frontline workers the state advertised that any senior could come get one. Of course seniors rushed to line up (in unsafe lines) without anyone saying how many doses were actually available. In a third post Sumner reported an incident in Wisconsin where 600 doses were spoiled because they were left outside a refrigerator overnight. The medical center issued a statement saying a now ex-employee admitted to doing that intentionally. The person did not provide a motive. Pam Keith, a Democratic nominee to Congress from Florida, tweeted:

Raise your hand if you had ZERO doubts that Team Trump would knee-cap the roll-out of the vaccine because they intentionally sabotaged literally EVERY. OTHER. EFFORT. TO CONTAIN. THIS. DISASTER! I don’t buy incompetence. Incompetence improves. It’s malice. Pure & simple.

Sumner also reported that the nasty guy had given all signs he was at his Florida resort to stay. One of those signs was to sell hundreds of tickets to a New Year’s Eve party. For all the work he’s actually doing (close to zero) he might as well work on his golf game and stay out of the way. But suddenly he few back to Washington this morning. That’s six whole days before the Electoral College votes are tallied in Congress. Does he need six days to plan how to disrupt it? Might he be doing something else, like starting a war? What can be more important than a party full of adoring fans? Whatever it is can’t be good. Sarah Kendzior tweeted:

We're living through: 1) Worst pandemic in modern history 2) Worst economy since Great Depression (maybe worse) 3) Worst hack of US govt ever 4) An attempted coup 5) A brewing civil war 6) A brewing foreign war 7) An admin serving organized crime 8) Led by a nuke-loving sociopath

She left it at 8 things because she ran out of characters in a tweet. Ben Franklin tweeted about the day the Electoral College vote will be presented to Congress:

I have an especially bad feeling about the dangers of the 6th in that Trump needs a large, bad thing to happen on the 6th to maximize chaos and I believe he is willing to cause large bad things to happen on the 6th in particular to his supporters.

This was in response to a tweet strongly urging people to stay out of DC that day. Stay away so violence doesn’t break out giving the nasty guy an excuse to deploy forces. Franklin said more in another thread:

Okay, on to more practical things. In advance of January 6th, which will either be a clownshow or a deadly serious event, I'd recommend A) restocking useful stuff in case of an emergency and B) do not go to DC for this one. The other guys will hopelessly outnumber the good guys. If nothing bad happens on January 6th, then you didn't need to be there. If something very bad happens, there's nothing you can do to stop it and you'll be needed locally to deal with the aftermath. Just my opinion. There are good arguments which I support that say you should not allow the fascists to take physical, public space. I think on this occasion the odds are not in your favor to make a difference by showing up and the downsides vastly outweigh the upsides.

I’m staying home. Another of Franklin’s tweets:

There’s no such thing as “just a tantrum” sedition. There’s no such thing as “it’s just a grift” sedition. There’s no such thing as “theatrical” sedition. There’s no such thing is “guaranteed to fail” sedition. Sedition is a wildfire that can burn out of control once started.

After that we need a bit of humor. Lake Superior State University has released its annual list of words and phrases that should be banished for “overuse, misuse, or uselessness” or more generally because they are “overworked, redundant, oxymoronic, clichéd, illogical, nonsensical—and otherwise ineffective, baffling, or irritating.” No surprise that seven of the ten words and phrases have to do with the pandemic. Here are a few of them. * COVID-19 – yeah, medically useful but the committee still wants to banish it along with the virus. * In an abundance of caution – should caution be measured in metric or US standard units and how much is “an abundance”? * In these uncertain times – it is way too vague and dilutes reality. If you’re uncertain of the times look at a clock! * Pivot – basketball players pivot, companies don’t.

Multicultural music

I’m sure the first time I heard Messiah by G. F. Handel was when I was in middle school and my older brother was in the choir. They didn’t perform the whole thing, but certainly a great deal of it, more than I wanted to tolerate sitting on gymnasium bleacher seats. That gymnasium was at the college where my parents met. It was also the college that my high school choral director graduated from. The high school choir traveled for three hours to join the college’s choir and several other choirs, the orchestra (from the college?), and soloists. A year or two later I was in the high school and in the choir. I sang bass and my brother sang tenor. And we did Messiah. I learned the bass part of many of the choruses. We went back to the same little college gymnasium. The rest of the family stayed at the family farm about 25 miles away (which is why my dad attended that college). They came to the performance on Sunday afternoon. In college the choir (which I was in) Christmas Concert was usually one of Lessons and Carols. One year we sang Messiah in which each solo was sung by a different vocal student. A few years after college, when I was settled in the Detroit area, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra did a Messiah sing-along. I took my score (of course by then I had my own) and joined in. There was one director for the orchestra and one for the audience. I think I got most of the florid 16th notes and was amused by some of the high school men around me who managed only the broad outline of the convoluted passages. So, of course, I had a recording (on LP!) of Messiah, though not of me in the choir. I played it each December. Then my musical tastes changed and I found music of Handel’s era (early 1700s) mostly boring. I much prefer classical music of the last 150 years. So I had enough Messiah in what came across the radio in December, which was rarely the whole thing. One of the advantages of living near Detroit is being able to hear CBC Radio, the national radio service of Canada. I usually listen to the classical hour of the early afternoon program Shift hosted by Tom Allen. The second part of the program is popular music and I turn back to the Detroit station. A couple weeks ago Allen talked about and played an excerpt of Messiah/Complex produced by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Against the Grain Theatre. This sounded intriguing, so last evening I watched and listened to it. The video is less than 80 minutes, so they didn’t do the whole piece (which can take two hours), though they did the most famous parts. What they did is really cool and excellently done. The cool part is they included soloists from across Canada’s diversity – white, black, and indigenous, gay and Arab. Each soloist sang in their native language and in their native setting. While the music was Handel’s in many cases the words were not. The orchestra played the overture from their home stage in Toronto, masked and distanced and with wind instruments enclosed in plexiglass. I’m sure the soloists recorded their parts in a recording studio somewhere. The choirs, also masked (or outside) and distanced, sang from or were recorded in their home church or space. The first part after the overture is the tenor solos “Comfort Ye” and “Every Valley.” During the first he was shown singing beside the inlet on the north side of Vancouver and during the second he was in the gay neighborhood (obvious from the rainbow street crossings). The bass solo that includes the words “For he is like a refiner’s fire” we see images of a refinery and of a man building a bonfire. The solo “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain” was sung by an indigenous woman in her native language with a backdrop of the Yukon Rockies. Her words were retranslated into English for subtitles. We didn’t get the old English words still sometimes used by the Church, instead we got a fresher text: “Share the news from the highest mountain.” The creator is here. I didn’t always keep track of which solo or chorus was sung in which location. The locations included a provincial park in Manitoba with lots of tall trees, more mountains visible from a hilltop in Nunavut, and Lake Louise near Banff, Alberta. A Muslim (I think) woman in Montreal sang in French. She changed words a bit to “a woman of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” The images showed an older woman at a prayer rug. On the coast of Labrador a woman sang in her native language. I was getting a bit tired of the images of slow motion feet walking over the scrub, then I realized the words were “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace.” A black woman sang “Why do the nations so furiously rage together” from Graffiti Alley in Toronto. The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir sang the Hallelujah Chorus on the streets of Toronto outside the orchestra’s home concert hall. An indigenous woman in Yellowknife, Alberta sang in her native language and the retranslated words were “I know my creator lives.” She had a campfire and tent and performed some of her people’s rituals. To the music of “The trumpet shall sound” and we will be raised incorruptible the bass soloist and his father visit the hockey rink of his youth, a time that is shown through family videos. A woman singing in Arabic with an introduction not by Handel visits the ruins of a church in which the walls are intact, though the roof is gone. The final chorus is is sung by a choir in Halifax. This was the only time that I was annoyed with the otherwise excellent camera work. In this case I felt the cameras moved around the singers a bit too much and too quickly. Overall this is an excellent performance of parts of Messiah. The scenery is spectacular, as is the photography. It is well worth the time to watch. One can watch for free (or donate to the theater) though I found navigating the website confusing, as in I download a ticket, then wondered what do I do with it. The program will be online through January 7.

With every government department

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that a case of COVID, if it doesn’t kill you, can leave you with permanent heart damage, lung damage, eye damage, and, worse, brain damage. That brain damage can happen even in asymptomatic cases and show up weeks later. The damage results in severe psychotic symptoms or paranoid delusions. The virus has been known to cause damage in a few ways. First, it can trigger the development of tiny blood clots, cutting off a bit of the flow of blood to an organ or the brain. Second, it pushes the body into an overactive immune response. Third, it uses cells of an organ (such as the heart) to replicate, damaging those cells. I heard on today’s news that Joe Biden set an ambitious goal to get 100 million people vaccinated in his first 100 days. He complained that at the current pace under the nasty guy’s administration getting everyone vaccinated will take years. Josh Mchaud tweeted an image to show what the nasty guy and his minions are doing. The image is of a horse. The tail and back legs are drawn in fine detail and labeled “Research” and “Clinical Trials.” The body of the horse is sketched in and labeled “Regulatory Review.” The outline of one front leg is labeled “Allocation.” And the head and other front leg don’t look like a horse and are labeled “Distribution.” Joan McCarter of Kos shows the gigantic task awaiting Joe Biden by discussing what happened to the Economic Research Service (ERS) and National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), both under the Department of Agriculture (USDA). Sonny Perdue, the current head of Agriculture and under the direction of the nasty guy, sent hundreds of jobs to Kansas City, telling workers to move or quit. And when they quit the vacant jobs were not filled.

In the meantime, the projects the agencies were taking on food safety, nutrition, conservation, farm economics, and climate change have either just been dropped or continued with little oversight or direction.

So Biden and Tom Vilsack have 400 jobs to fill. Some will be filled by hiring back those that had quit. As for those that moved to KC it would be irresponsible to force them back to DC, now that they’ve settled in. It’s a good thing we have learned how to work remotely. A group doing a review process called Climate 21 Project discussed a demoralized workforce. The also sent a memo to the presidential transition team:

The forced relocation to Kansas City has also meant dozens of reports and millions in research funding have been delayed or scuttled, setting back critical climate change and other research.

McCarter concluded:

Bringing climate change research back and catching up to where the research should have been by now, after four years of derailment from Trump, is going to take a massive effort. So is trying to heal the whole of the USDA. And that's got to happen with every government department. The next year is not going to be a picnic for anyone.

Mark Sumner talked to Emily Epstein White, who is a stand-up comic, about humor in communicating political ideas. Some of the things they talked about: Republicans look at how things touch them as an individual – how does this affect me? Democrats look at how does this affect us? That us includes groups that we are not a part of. We look at how it impacts the whole world. That means Republicans relate through anger and outrage. The nasty guy is successful because he knows how to push the buttons that generate anger. Democratic candidates talk about how policies help the group and conservatives keep wondering how does that help me? Democrats are more able to relate through humor, which involves empathy. The better jokes are the one focused on the person as ridiculous and silly things happen around them. Avoid low hanging fruit and don’t be cruel. The post ends with a couple of White’s routines. Reza Zadeh tweeted a two minute video of robots dancing. It makes them less intimidating. They’ve got some pretty cool moves (better than I can dance). Must have been fun to be on the Robot Dance team. Some of the replies: Less intimidating? Nope.

“Healthcare Billionaires” is a phrase that should not exist

I’ve mentioned some important spending bills in Washington over the last few days. Here is an update. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported the House passed a bill to increase the direct relief payments from $600 to $2000. Because the bill didn’t go through the standard committee process (there wasn’t time) it needed to get a 2/3 majority, which it did. The House also overwhelmingly voted to override the nasty guy’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, funding the military. Both now go to the Senate. And in the Senate … McCarter reported Moscow Mitch blocked a request for a vote on the $2000 relief checks. That was followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders blocking a quick vote on overriding the veto of the defense spending bill. Sanders now threatens a filibuster. Several GOP senators want a vote on the $2000 checks (which is not the same as wanting the bill to pass), especially the two senators from Georgia who face a runoff election a week from today. Moscow Mitch is looking for ways to poison the bill for the $2000 checks. This would allow him to hold the vote and still have the measure lose (with the bonus of blaming Democrats). When the nasty guy vetoed the defense spending bill he said it was because it was missing two things – which don’t belong in a defense spending bill anyway. One is an act that he claims allows Twitter to censor him (not true) and the other is to demand an investigation into voter fraud. Mitch is trying to combine both of those into the bill for the $2000 checks. Either would poison the bill. Rep. Louie Gohmert has a reputation of being a nasty guy bootlicker. Hunter of Kos reported Gohmert has filed a lawsuit claiming that when the Electoral College votes are counted in Congress on January 6 the vice nasty has the power to throw out votes he doesn’t like. Short answer: the Constitution does not say that. Gohmert has been part of a group strongly urging the vice nasty to disrupt the proceedings on January 6 and strategizing how to make it all come out in the nasty guy’s favor. Hunter concluded:

It's already been made clear that even conservative courts are not going to go along with Republican attempts to stage an outright coup. House Republicans and Trump are instead working to so delegitimize our elections process that the violent far right comes out to do what the courts will not. Just because it probably won't work doesn't make it less dangerous. This is another test of the system's bounds. They will be tested again, and again, and again.

Mark Sumner of Kos reported the “March for Trump” is on for January 6 with plenty of instructions on how to get to Washington as a group. But there is nothing about what the nasty guy expects them to do once there. Also, there is no idea how many people will show up (there will be lies about crowd size). Public Citizen tweeted a headline from Newsweek:

Healthcare Billionaires Got Nearly $150B Richer Due to COVID Pandemic.

And Public Citizen responded:

“Healthcare Billionaires” is a phrase that should not exist. Why do we tolerate a system that grants health care CEOs record profits during a mass death event?

I’ve written a few times now that for a person to become a billionaire they are exploiting someone or something. In this case they are exploiting their patients. I’ve also written that healthcare is incompatible with the profit motive. Leeia tweeted:

There are 57,000+ names on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. Imagine the size and scope of a Covid Memorial.

Matt Ghaffari responded:

December is now the deadliest month in USA #RepublicansDontCare Jan - 0 Feb - 1 Mar - 5,277 April - 60,738 May - 41,703 June - 20,112 July - 26,446 Aug - 29,532 Sept - 23,418 Oct - 23,974 Nov - 36,964 Dec - 63,575++

And Leeia replied:

December’s death toll from COVID is higher than the number of names recorded on the memorial wall.

I was by myself at Christmas. Leah McElrath explained why I did so in a heartbreaking story. She hasn’t been within 20 feet of her mother for ten months because her mother's lung function is already minimal. Mother lives with stepfather, sister, and nephew. Nephew visited his father and they went on a holiday outing. Nephew caught COVID and brought it home. Jared Yates Sexton tweeted:

This government is not designed to help people but to serve as an organ to redistribute the people's wealth from the bottom up. Any gesture otherwise is only intended to keep people from understanding this and realizing how angry they should be. It does not have to be this way. We can have an actual government for and by the people that serves public good rather than a system that plunders our wealth and sells out our well-being. It can be different. It has to be different. For decades now there has been an economic consensus that wealth is best served being handed over to the wealthy and allowing the powerful to operate based on their own interests. That consensus has to be broken. If it isn't, fascism and economic collapse are inevitable. This austerity is artificial. This suffering and inequality is by design. We can live better lives than this. We can have a better society than this. And this current path is completely unsustainable anyway. The pandemic made it very clear. The fates of the wealthy and powerful are vastly prioritized over the rest of us. Heading into the new year, we have to recognize that ugly truth and fight to change things before it's too late. It's not too late, but the clock is ticking.

Back in September I wrote about a big story by The New York Times that the rich nasty guy hadn’t paid income taxes in ten of the last fifteen years. At the time I didn’t read the transcript of the associated Gaslit Nation episode. Sarah Kendzior, one of the hosts of that podcast, sometimes reposts threads and back about mid December she reposted a thread of quotes from that episode.

With Trump, people have been reluctant to follow the money. Because when you follow the money, you don't find someone who is incompetent. You find someone who is deeply immersed in organized crime and in covering for organized crime. Trump spent his life structuring his businesses in order to launder money for and whitewash the crimes of the Italian mafia and then the Russian mafia, which extended to his collaboration with the Kremlin and especially with Putin. The Mueller probe was low-hanging fruit. They did the bare minimum. They didn't risk their lives to go after the Trump Crime Family and we are paying the price for that. 200,000 dead Americans paid that price. Trump figured out how to share very little of his fortune with the country he now leads. As POTUS, he takes American taxpayers' money directly, treating the govt as his personal piggy bank. That's what kleptocrats do. People need to look at Trump mentor Roy Cohn, who dreamed of dying owing the US govt big money. Aquisition isn't the goal; debt isn't a problem. A luxurious lifestyle, powered by fraud and threat and untouchable by law, is the goal. They don't see obtaining wealth as an investment in the future. The accumulation of raw power is what they value and what they want to pass on to their offspring. The laundering operation itself outweighs the value of monetary assets The US government knew all about Trump's tax fraud and other crimes! The IRS and the Dept of Treasury have been investigating Trump on and off for my entire life. The FBI knew for decades. These institutions act as his enablers.

1 in 1,000

Meteor Blades of Daily Kos quoted Elimy Cochrane of the New York Times who reported that the nasty guy signed the spending bill that provides some virus relief and funds the government through September. The signing was described as “abrupt” and “sudden.” Nobody expected him to sign and then he did. Blades went on to report the nasty guy demanded a list of changes to the bills, including raising the $600 relief checks to $2000. These demands will go nowhere – the Senate GOP isn’t going to raise the relief checks and we’re in the last week of this Congress. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, also quoted the NYT:

But [the nasty guy’s signing] also came after two critical unemployment programs lapsed, guaranteeing a delay in benefits for millions of unemployed Americans.

The states have to rework their computer systems to account for the lapse and restart, which could take a couple weeks. In some states recipients will have to reapply. Also, there was a date given for the end of federal benefits, which is now ten weeks instead of eleven. Joan McCarter of Kos has an overview. Ryan Struyk of CNN tweeted:

1 in 1,000 people in the United States have now died from coronavirus. US population: 330,752,923 US deaths: 330,844

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer tweeted about the day the Electoral College votes will be accepted by Congress and the possibility that some GOP members will try to challenge the tally:

If Trump has anything resembling "a plan" right now, it's to cause massive political chaos and violence on January 6, as a pretense for God knows what. Not signing the relief bill, and jacking up anguish and despair, would fit right into that evil scheme, unfortunately. To be clear about the Jan. 6 date, I think there's zero chance Trump could get a positive result in Congress. What I'm worried about is violence in the streets of D.C. (which he's encouraging) as a pretext for his 11th-hour Pentagon lackeys to try and send in troops.

Then a series of threads by Ben Franklin. First, responding to New York Magazine that tweeted “It’s not going to succeed.”

A little early to declare that it hasn't succeeded until Biden is in office. If January 6th passes without any major incident the chances of that happening go up. But Trump himself calling his followers to DC for that date is not a great sign.

Then, in response to a nasty guy tweet of that call, he tweeted:

I think it's an effort to intimidate Congress, I think the previous rallies were building momentum and infrastructure for January 6th. Does he intend for them to do something beyond merely showing up? We don't know yet. Seems to be a coordinated effort to get people there:

That last bit quoted a map of someone organizing caravans of “patriots” from Michigan, Tennessee, Alabama, and Boston and points along each route. And a third thread:

There will definitely be some violence in DC. It’s normal for people to get stabbed at these rallies now. What we want to avoid is lots of people getting hurt, which will only inflame the general situation. I’m worried that the bad guys need this to happen. The worst case scenario IMO is some sort of false flag attack on the Trump supporters attending, to blamed on antifa of course. That would send the whole situation into dangerous territory. Given that Trump et al are perfectly willing to use their own supporters as a vector to worsen the pandemic, I’m not under the impression that these guys are pro life enough to not hurt their own for political gain.

Mark Felt replied:

There’s too many people on both sides that think standing in the streets taunting and blind siding each other is the way to solve the years of deceit AND the left WILL lose when you have the DC police backing the right.

Hunter of Kos reported that while COVID cases soar and the nasty guy is causing chaos in national politics and inviting chaos to come to Washington … the vice nasty, head of the COVID response team, is on an extended ski vacation with his family. He’ll appear in Washington to preside over the acceptance of the Electoral College vote on January 6. That same day he is scheduled to leave the country for a tour of the Middle East and Europe. In other words: hiding. We found something he’s good at.

Lights!

This evening I drove through the Wayne County Lightfest, a light display in Hines Park. This park is the floodplain of the Middle Rouge River and is 17 miles long. During weekdays Hines Drive is a good commuter route from Northville to Dearborn because there are few cross streets. Once on a person can cruise for a few miles. When rain comes the drive is closed. Parts of it are also closed on Saturdays in summer to encourage bicycle use. And I try to, though not every week. Starting at least 20 years ago the park and the electric company started putting up a light display in a four mile segment of the drive. Five dollars per car is a pretty good deal. The display is active from mid November to New Year’s Eve. I don’t go before Christmas because I figure the line is too long. I didn’t go the last couple years because I was traveling between Christmas and New Year. I didn’t have a reason not to go this year. So I did. Alas, I did it on a Sunday. The line was long. On entering the park we’re told to form two lanes (one on the actual road the other on the shoulder) then directed west about a mile before looping around and coming east that same mile. I was on the shoulder lane. For a while my lane went faster. That changed once we did the loop around. I guessed the reason and was right – there were two pay stations for that lane and one station for my lane (and it was on the opposite side of the car). I was in line for 45 minutes. Since I last saw the lights (though it may have started sooner) it looks like the incandescent bulbs have been replaced with LEDs. They are brighter and have a much greater variation in color. There are also more of scenes, though some I remember from the first year. Each scene outlines objects and figures in lights. Some “move” by turning some lights off and others on. They depict practically everything associated with Christmas or winter in Michigan and a few things that aren’t. So there are toys, gift packages, gingerbread houses, skiers, bikers, golfers (this one sits on golf course land), a reindeer stable (though I didn’t see the reindeer flight school this year), a Hanukkah menorah, a Christian nativity scene and giant Advent wreath, a marching band, a patriotic display, and I’m sure I’m leaving stuff out. Rather early in the route we pass through the “Time Tunnel” to the land before Christmas where the displays are of dinosaurs. In all, an enjoyable evening, once one is through the line. Here’s the Lightfest website with pictures towards the bottom. The photo of fireworks is from opening night, though not this year.

Demonstrates is how violent American poverty truly is

I downloaded Michigan’s coronavirus data this morning. Cases per day continues a downward trend. However, because of the holiday the data was last updated on December 23. I expect the same thing next weekend, so perhaps I’ll wait until well after New Year before downloading again. Then I’ll need to add year designations below the months. Meteor Blades, in his Night Owl column of Daily Kos, quoted Caleb Brennan of The New Republic who wrote about Operation Santa. It’s a program that has been around for more than 100 years in which Post Office employees and charitable organizations try to fulfill requests that desperately poor children made in letters to Santa. The program has been connecting 13,000 children to donors, though that number may have doubled in 2020. Wrote Brennan:

But what these letters demonstrate, far better than any PSA or statistical model, is how violent American poverty truly is. They also provide a counterbalance to the ways childhood poverty is depicted in popular media, where poor kids often serve as a way for a protagonist to demonstrate their generosity, from Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol to the demented poverty porn of the holiday pop hit “Christmas Shoes.”

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that many people would like to see the nasty guy convicted of tax fraud. It was tax fraud that got Al Capone sent to Alcatraz. Sumner wrote we should think much bigger – mass murder. This particular crime has nothing to do with war, national security, or sanctions against another country. The nasty guy’s actions weren’t to prevent more deaths in the future. There is no aspect of exacting revenge. It has risen beyond staggeringly bad judgment. But this appears to be killing with cold knowledge and with expectation of personal gain. His actions fit both genocide and crimes against humanity. “He deserves a trial and punishment appropriate to scale of those crimes.” Then don’t forget sedition. Will Trumpism continue after Trump? Ian Reifowitz of Kos wrote that the GOP should wrestle with that question. Then Reifowitz traces the idea, though when it started it was called racism. Barry Goldwater in 1964 was the first presidential nominee to run against civil rights. The nasty guy was still in school at the time. Ronald Reagan used race-baiting when he successfully ran for governor of California in 1966. Reifowitz provides many examples of his dog-whistle or outright racist language. That included the phrase “law and order” the nasty guy has been using and stories of “welfare queens.” Then there’s Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968 which played on white fears of racial integration. Reagan successfully ran for president in 1980 using the same language. Pappy Bush said he was the “kinder, gentler” Republican, but still ran the despicable “Willie Horton” ad that implied Michael Dukakis would release black prisoners who would kill once they got out. Reifowitz didn’t write about Bush Jr. and only mentions the nasty guy as a continuation. Can we yet make the case that Trumpism, also known as racism, will lead to further GOP losses? Is there someone who might make that case? Perhaps Mitt Romney, who was the only Republican to vote to remove the nasty guy after he was impeached? Alas, racism has been a central part of the GOP message the entire adult life of the nasty guy. It is deep seated. Can the GOP get rid of racism for the health of the nation?

America will not survive a contest between cruelty and milquetoast

Here it is Christmas Day and I spent it by myself. In all my decades of life I hadn’t done that before. Even the Christmas when I lived in Germany an American couple invited me and a few other unattached people to their home for dinner. I have a white Christmas. The Detroit area got snow overnight and it has been snowing most of the day. I think we got 1.5 inches. Tomorrow’s exercise will be shoveling. I ate reasonably well today. For “dinner” I warmed up a precooked pork chop with some dressing I got at a gourmet grocery. I also had salad greens from a bag with dressing. This morning I started up the crock pot to have beef stew for supper. It turned out pretty good. I had the tree lights plugged in all day (I’ve had it lit up only in the evening) and Christmas music on the radio (until I got tired of it). I did a bit of genealogy work and a bit of composing. And I called my sister and sister-in-law. That’s about it. Yesterday I wrote about the spending bills Congress passed and how the nasty guy managed to blow it all up. At the time I said I didn’t have links to news articles. This morning I found a few, which gives me a bit more information. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act. McCarter reported on Nancy Pelosi’s effort to get the $2000 relief checks the nasty guy said he wanted and that the GOP House leadership shot down. Pelosi will bring the House in session on Monday for a roll-call vote, to force members to put their names to approval or rejection. McCarter reported that the GOP in the Senate will just ignore the increase to $2000. They know they can’t get 60 votes. In addition GOP senators are relying on the nasty guy to sign the government funding bill he hasn’t signed yet – so no plans for if he doesn’t. McCarter added more details here. In one more post McCarter reported if the virus relief package doesn’t pass there will be an “avalanche of evictions.” The census estimates 11.3 million households won’t be able to pay next month’s rent or are already behind. Moody’s Analytics estimates there is a $70 billion backlog in unpaid rent. And communities of color will be hardest hit. Anand Giridharadas, publisher of The Ink, tweeted a thread:

It is simply unsustainable that so many of the leaders who wish Americans ill have no dearth of confidence about their authority, while so many of the leaders who wish Americans well are full of insecurity about their power. … I understand the practical difficulties. But message matters. Rhetoric matters. Moving the public matters. Why is there not a thundering, historic, down-through-the-ages speech being given every day by someone right now? That doesn't require Mitch's consent. … America will not long survive a contest between cruelty and milquetoast. Step up to the plate, people. And within the party, the new voices who are brilliant, who are fiery, who have passion, who know how to tell a story, who ache for regular people -- they are sidelined, they are scorned, they get no speaking time. And the bland, the encrusted, and the passionless reign forever. You can't blame the other side for beating you if you don't try to win.

There has been a lot of talk during this year’s campaign about raising taxes on the rich. There are ideas for higher income taxes and suggestions of a wealth tax, based on the total stash, not just on the new stash this year. Neither of those will pass if the GOP still controls the Senate in January. Hunter of Kos suggests an alternate method of taxation – increase the likelihood of audit by the IRS. A big reason the wealthy pay so low in taxes is they hide income, committing crimes as they do so. Raising the possibility of an audit means those schemes to hide money will be exposed. Right now the IRS focuses on lower income Americans because they can’t afford to lawyer up to fight the case. Another reason is the IRS budget has been cut so much they don’t have the staff to go after the big cases – and that was intentionally done by the GOP and their donors, the ones who would be audited. If the GOP stays in control of the Senate the IRS budget won’t get increased. Even so, Joe Biden can direct them to stop harassing poor people and spend their limited efforts on the rich. Hunter concluded:

The heart of the problem here is that the American upper class is awash in financial crimes as a way of life. It is expected, and celebrated. It is seen, by the plastic classes that file through Mar-a-Lago, as cleverness. The Occupy movement had them dead to rights, but could not make headway against a government too keen on collaborating with its own saboteurs. Appeals to decency or patriotism have never worked. Enforcing the laws already on the books, Republicans often say, is the path to ending out-of-control criminality. Imagine tens of thousands of Donald Trumps squealing like stuck pigs at the news that their tax returns are being genuinely probed; imagine a good chunk of those taking Trump's own path, declaring that if it's the nation versus his own pocketbook, then it is the nation which must go down. Russia, it seems, is not the most powerful nation that’s under the thumb of an inherently criminal class.

Mark Sumner of Kos is embarking on a book project that sounds intriguing and like a neat way to tell history. He started the idea in an essay posted in 2008. Two weeks before Arthur Schlesinger had died. Sumner wrote about the major world events (well, the western world) that happened during Schlesinger’s life from the most recent and going back in time. Schlesinger was born in 1918, the same year that “Buffalo Bill” – William Frederick Cody – died. Sumner did a similar review of world events during Cody’s life. From there he switched to John Quincy Adams (1767-1848). And through the lives of just three people he’s back before the United States came into being. We declared our independence in 1776, 244 years ago, which is now a bit longer than the lives of three people living to the age of 80. For the book project Sumner would like to start with someone still living or who died recently (Ruth Bader Ginsburg was suggested), then go much further back, perhaps through the lives of 60 people to when Abraham came to Canaan. Laura Clawson of Kos reminds us what in our Christmas wrappings can be recycled and what cannot. Do not recycle glittery, metallic, or flocked, paper. Do not recycle bows and ribbons. Do recycle other types of wrapping paper, even pieces with tape. When you buy more paper buy the stuff that can be recycled, even better buy paper made from recycled paper. All that stuff that can’t be recycled – the metallic paper and the ribbons – can be reused. My family has been reusing for years. I’ve got a couple bags of it in my closet. Ruth Fremson is a photographer based in Seattle. She was on the East Coast to cover the last few months of this weird election. At the start of December she took the long way home, spending more than two weeks on the road taking photos of Christmas plus one of Hanukkah. Her travelogue and photos are now published in the New York Times. My friend and debate partner sent me the link. One of his favorite pictures is also one of mine. It is a sign in front of the Frostburg United Methodist Church in Maryland that says, “Love Thy Neighbor, Wear Thy Mask.”

Stir it up and vanish

I checked my records – in the thirteen years of this blog the only previous time I posted on December 24 was in 2013 when a lot of state bans on same-sex marriage were challenged and overturned. Prior to this year on Christmas Eve I would be at the church warming up the bell choir, then leading them during the service. Going back to 1980 I missed only a couple services. I also played bells at the Christmas eve services while in middle and high school. This year I and the other ringers recorded our part in the service last Friday. We each had our own well spaced table and our own bells. We wore masks. And we were glad we could play a second take. And a third. So I’m home this evening. I watched my church’s online service, mostly to see my bell choir. Because the service was posted this afternoon I could watch the bells a second time. I woke up this morning and glanced at the bedside clock. It was dark. Oh goody, the power was out. The battery run clock said it was 7:30. The house wasn’t real cold, so I figured the power hadn’t been off long. I lit candles (sunrise hadn’t happened yet), then called the electric company. Thankfully, the voice said power would be restored by 11:30. An update call said the problem was caused by downed trees. There was rain and snow last night with wind. I bundled up and settled in to read for a while. Thankfully the electricity was back on before 10:15. At about 10:45 the electric company called again. If I was still having problems there is another underlying issue. I should tell them about it through their app (I don’t have a phone to run it on) or their website (and how do I do that if I don’t have electricity to run my computer?). The nasty guy is getting good at stirring things up, resulting in chaos. I don’t have a post (or a series) with a definitive account of what happened in the government over yesterday and today. So I don’t have links to sources and I may get it wrong. Which means I may have to correct things in a day or so. This is what I think happened. Congress, after months of wrangling (otherwise known as inaction), passed three spending bills, which together have about 5000 pages. A lot of other things in there too. The three are defense authorization, general federal budget to last until September, and virus relief. This got done yesterday, the day before Christmas Eve. The nasty guy vetoed the defense authorization, the first time that’s happened in 60 years. He vetoed it because of provisions to rename military bases currently named for Confederate leaders. The nasty guy did nothing with the general budget bill, which means there could be a government shutdown if he doesn’t sign by Monday. The nasty guy said the $600 per person in virus relief aid isn’t enough. It should be $2000. Then he left for Florida. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said $2000 instead of $600? That’s a great idea! She called the House into session to quickly pass it. The GOP shot down the quick method. Pelosi plans on Monday to have the House hold a roll-call vote so people will see which members voted it up or down. If the virus relief bill isn’t signed there will be a whole lot of hurt. In addition to the money there are things like eviction protection that run out next week that this bill would renew. There’s likely enough votes to override the defense authorization bill. That would mean Congress would be busy next week when they would rather be home. After declaring the relief checks should be $2000 instead of $600, is the nasty guy twisting any arms to make it happen? Nope. He’s in Florida with his golf game. After the Republicans and Democrats carefully reached a compromised, in a few words he blew it up. And vanished. I get the feeling this was intentional (while looking good to voters) as another way to make the government fall apart. Jake Sherman of NBC News tweeted:

So let’s recap where we are on Christmas Eve. — Unemployment expires Saturday. — Government funding expires Monday. — House Rs blocked Dem 2k check bill. — Senate R leadership says 2k check bill cant get 60 in the Senate, unlikely to bring it up. — No plan to keep govt open.

Leah McElrath responded:

The REAL “War on Christmas”:

The load-bearing superstructure of our society is abuse

I’ve heard of PolitiFact, an organization that rates political statements with a truth-o-meter that goes all the way from true and partly true on down to pants-on-fire. I hadn’t heard they do a lie of the year. I discovered that when their discussion of this year’s lie of the year was printed in the Detroit Free Press last Sunday. A sampling of previous lies of the year. 2009 – Death Panels. Sarah Palin was the first to make this claim of the Affordable Care Act. 2013 – President Obama claimed that through the Affordable Care Act “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” 2015 – Candidate nasty guy’s aggregate of statements while campaigning. 76% of them were rated mostly false, false, or pants-on-fire. 2018 – Online smears of the Parkland High School students. They suffered the trauma and deaths of a gunman in their school. Then, when they advocated for action, the smears began. Compared to this year the ones from prior years seem pretty tame. On, to 2020. Wouldn’t the lie of the year be a president who lost the election and insisted he had won get the top spot? It would if there wasn’t an even bigger lie. So the lie of the year for 2020 is: The coronavirus is no worse than the flu. What made this worse was the pile of lies that came along trying to assert the big lie or undermine aspects of the truth.

It was a symphony of counter narrative, and Trump was the conductor, if not the composer. The message: The threat to your health was overhyped to hurt the political fortunes of the president.

PolitiFact listed: * The claims that masks don’t work, that social distancing was a joke. * The claim of a death count much smaller than it really was. An example was the claim that if a person with diabetes died after being infected he died of diabetes. No, he also died of COVID and should be counted as such. * The claim that since the scene outside a hospital was quiet, the hospital must be lying about what is going on inside. * The claim that hospitals were declaring all deaths were because of COVID because doctors got more Medicare money that way. * The claims that hydroxychloroquine and bleach were effective treatments, a claim supported by “real” doctors. * The claim by the nasty guy, once he recovered from COVID through drugs most people can’t get, that there is nothing about the virus to fear. * Various claims about the vaccines: that it will also inject a microchip to track you, that it causes infertility, that many of the side effects are life-threatening, that the government will force people to take it. The whole pile – this and more – taken together, and because the virus and the economic shutdown affected everyone in the country, deserves to be called the lie of the year. A. R. Moxon tweeted a thread:

They're talking about a military coup right now and if it doesn't happen we're going to be told the best way to heal is pretending it never happened. This is how abuse works. 3,000 people are dying a day and after nearly a year of this Congress is releasing the barest fraction of the economic relief needed to keep people safe and only in exchange for the promise that we can't sue those who endangered the dead. This is how abuse works.

There were a few more statements similar to that, then:

The undergirding load-bearing superstructure upon which our entire society is built is abuse and enablement, and it's sick, and it has to stop. We need to stop this deadly unreasonable practice of expecting people to accept unacceptable things in order to be thought reasonable. In order to have healing, we first need to cleanse the wound. This healing needs rage. Rage, and consequence, and a real reckoning. Anything less is just pretending it didn't happen. It's how abuse works.

Then several statements similar to this:

They're going to tell you that your anger makes you just as bad as them, as if it's anger that is the problem, rather than the reason for the anger. It's appropriate to be angry when you're told that, because that is enablement. Enablement of abuse is abuse.

Then:

Your rage is yours, and it's appropriate, and it's necessary right now. The reason abusive enablers want it gone is simple: It's evidence. Abusive people and their enablers dislike evidence. Evidence leads to conviction. Conviction, to consequence. Reject the abusive notion that your anger is the problem, not the abuse that made your anger appropriate. Reject the enabling notion that abuse is an unfortunate necessity, changing it is unrealistic, and demanding better is immature or divisive. Refuse to pay the tax of abuse. They're going to tell you that your anger is causing the abuse: *Your anger demonizes abusers. *Your anger leaves no room for them to be redeemed. *Your anger makes abusers angry. *It's forcing them to be abusive. All this is how enablement of abuse works. Enablement is abuse.

What to do about it? Sometimes maintaining the existing order is abusive.

Sometimes, the only appropriate thing is to change the locks—whatever that might look like. Maybe changing the locks looks like this: Refusing complicity. Speaking up. Not letting people infer through your silence that you think their abusive beliefs are good and just and true, rather than unjust and harmful and abusive. Maybe it looks like this: Refusing debate with someone whose methods and purposes are abusive, simply on the grounds that their premises are abusive and harmful to others, and you will not lend unacceptable premises the respectability a debate provides.

And several similar statements. Bes has this in his Twitter bio: “Jeff Bezos gained $50k & 1 child died of hunger by the time you finished reading my bio.” A couple days ago as the virus relief package was being finalized, he tweeted:

here's a list of the wealthiest members of congress. i don't think these people have a right to tell you that $600 is enough

At the top of the list is Sen. Kellly Loeffler of Georgia with a net worth of $500 million. She’s in a runoff election in Georgia. At a distant second is Rep. Greg Gianforte of Montana with $135.7 million. His list has 35 names with the one at the bottom worth $8.8 million. This is data from 2018 and the numbers are likely higher. Charles Norman, while linking to an article in the Washington Post tweeted:

John Kelly is wrong. These were not good people. “The number of senior officials who quit on principle is close to zero. The number of former Cabinet officials who came forward during the impeachment to give testimony is zero.”

After the election and as the nasty guy was sending minions to file court cases in battleground states, Fox News participated by spreading the lies. One of them was that Smartmatic and Dominion voting machines gave extra votes to Joe Biden (though the real complaint was they were hard to hack to make black votes disappear). Hunter of Daily Kos reported that now Smartmatic and Dominion are preparing to sue Fox News for defamation. And they have a pretty solid case that what Fox News hosts said isn’t just freedom of speech. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Politico. The nasty guy has been recruiting Congressional supporters to muck up the Electoral College certification with objections when it gets to Congress in January. GOP leaders say the effort is doomed to fail. But …

The objections will also force Republicans in Congress to go on record voting to affirm Biden’s victory — acknowledging the outcome and likely inflaming Trump’s diehard supporters, a crucial GOP faction that has joined the president in denying the election results. Republican strategists and Trump allies inside and outside Washington said Trump’s core supporters will remember how their lawmakers vote on Jan. 6.

There are lots of fears the nasty guy won’t leave the White House. Here’s a tweet from Weijia Jiang, White House correspondent for CBS News, that might quiet some fears:

NEW: Despite Trump’s fight to stay, last night White House staff received a detailed email from his exec. office with directions on the departing process. Employees will start leaving the week of 01/04. Note addresses everything from cleaning microwaves to ethics debriefing. One more note: WH sources say senior staff isn’t even showing up anymore, one explanation for why Sidney Powell can come and go as she pleases. Some employees have already started other jobs. And if there was any illusion about a Hail Mary, last night’s email intercepted.

Before this year such a memo hasn’t been news.

Imagine outside the punishment paradigm

I awoke to banging on my front door at about 4:50 this morning. When I opened it two police officers were standing there. I asked why they had come. They were puzzled by that. The woman of the pair said that 911 had received a call from my phone, with an immediate hangup. She asked if I was OK. I said I was. She asked if I lived alone. I said I do. I asked what phone number made the call. She talked to her base, then said the number. I agreed it was my number. She apologized for bothering me and they left. I went back to bed, then got up and wrote myself a note and returned to bed. It took more than an hour before I fell asleep again. I slept in. The note was where I had left it, so it wasn’t just a particularly vivid dream I managed to remember. This afternoon I called AT&T to get a confirmation of the 911 call. I wanted to know: Was it my phone, had someone spoofed my number, or was there another problem? The AT&T website provided a customer service number, though that wasn’t easy to find. I waded through the decision tree. I talked to a person who verified who I am, then said I needed to call customer service, here’s the number for someone in southeast Michigan. Wait, hadn’t I called customer service? I called the second number and a bot answered, one of those computer voices that tries to interpret what the customer is saying to route the call appropriately. In my experience bots always get it wrong. So I kept saying “agent” until it connected me to a human. I explained the situation, that I wanted to verify a call had been made from my phone to 911 this morning. The agent said if the call in question happened this morning it was too soon to find it. Besides, I would need a subpoena. Huh? This is a call from my own phone, shouldn’t I be allowed to see it? Sorry, sir. It’s a private AT&T record. If you want to see it you need a subpoena. But maybe you should talk to Tech. This is Billing. I was connected to Tech. This agent kept asking me to confirm details of my account and finally said he handles AT&T Uverse (which includes TV and internet), not AT&T (which is just landlines). The agent gave me a number. I called and got another bot. This time I asked for a “tech agent.” I was put through. After another round of identification this agent said we don’t have that information, maybe Repair does. She forwarded my call. Back to the bot. I knew to ask for a “repair agent.” Once speaking to a person I explained what I wanted. I was told I could get a lawyer or have the line checked. I said let’s check the line. I was handed off to another agent (this time avoiding the bot). Yeah, she said, faulty lines have been known to dial 911. The earliest the line could be checked is Saturday. They’ll do the check. If they need to come onto the property they’ll call me and set up a time. Yeesh! Yeah, I’m feeling grumpy today. Especially when someone from some sort of Medicare services keeps calling, even after I explain I’m not eligible for Medicare and ask them to not call again. When I got a second call today I went into a rant (I said I was grumpy) and they hung up before I was done. I’m sure it was not someone from the actual Medicare department of the government. Those that warn of scams remind us the government doesn’t call. They send letters. So it is likely someone from some sort of Medicare “service” – a variety of services, some attached to actual medical companies, have been badgering me all fall to make sure I pick their Medicare package during December’s open enrollment, even though I don’t qualify for Medicare. I think open enrollment ended two weeks ago. While I’m somewhat on the subject of police here are couple related items that have been in my browser tabs for a while. The first is by Mary Hooks for Prism within Daily Kos. It was published on December 1. Hooks, a woman of color, talked about a day in second grade when Officer Friendly and McGruff the Crime Dog (someone in a dog costume) came to class to talk about public safety. The officer telling kids that when they saw crime they should call the police was in conflict with what she heard at home. There they did not call the police. Things that happened in the house stayed in the house. The officer had all the kids be fingerprinted in case they were ever kidnapped. In hindsight she now understands that in they eyes of Officer Friendly she and her classmates were already suspects and cops were just waiting for the first mistake. While Hooks was growing up visits by the police in her community were frequent and unwelcome. Things were worse after they left. The police would take someone, which meant on Sundays they went to the jail to visit that someone. She first thought the adults around her were making bad decisions, not knowing all options were bad. Nor did she know about the War on Drugs, the welfare-to-work laws, the disappearing factory jobs, and the Clinton crime bill. Hooks wrote:

I know without a shadow of a doubt that this has all been a set up. There is no way the “public safety” we have been taught is going to bring about safety in a real and meaningful way. The reality is that we have lived this lie long enough and public safety must be redefined and reimagined in order to consider the totality of the people who inhabit the public sphere, not just the properties that make for a good skyline. To reimagine public safety requires a sober assessment of the current order of the day and being honest about who it’s hurting, what is being kept safe, and what isn’t.

What would make her and her neighborhood feel safe are such things as meaningful work they could control, services to address the crack epidemic, and a place to gather to talk about the hard things in life. Let’s aim for a different direction. Portugal has decriminalized drug use and provided harm-reduction methods. An organization provides recreational facilities to give an alternative to drugs. There have been attempts at training people to be violence interruptors. Hooks concluded:

We can’t get rid of policing as we know it if we continue to value one person’s time and labor over another’s, which is a requirement of racialized capitalism. We must fight like hell to break isolation and mediocrity which nurtures capitalism and fear. This may seem like a tall order. However, if we exert the same amount of force and energy that has been used to instill fear, make mass consumption an art form, shred the social safety net, lie to and manipulate the public to support war and exploitation, and instead imagine and build alternative systems of public safety, then I believe we can do what must be done to turn the world right side up again.

Arissa Hall was a guest writer for Kos Prism. This particular post has been in my browser tabs since September 23 (and one I recovered when I lost my browser tabs). While she awaited the birth of her first child she pondered what it meant to raise a free black child. That meant avoiding police propaganda aimed at children. One idea was to teach the child of full autonomy – he was in charge of his own body. That included no spankings or shaming. She didn’t want to teach punitive systems. Such systems stunt our ability to imagine outside the punishment paradigm. People want to avoid accountability because that is usually associated with punishment and pain, but there are ways to hold accountable without it. This glamorization of punishment and policing has been a part of a long-running public relations campaign that dates back to the early 20th century as part of an attempt to clean up their negative reputation as extorters and paid enforcers of the underground economy as published in the provocative Lexow Commission. Since then, the police have been portrayed in Hollywood as fully formed human beings who are goofy, tender, brooding, brave, and heroic—turning them into nice, relatable crime-stoppers, instead of the deadly and violent arm of the white supremacist state. Even more, the violence and terror police wreak is framed as noble and necessary, as seen across media and Hollywood—including shows like Law & Order SVU, as well as children’s shows such as Paw Patrol. Hall also had to be on guard for helpful police who pop up in children’s books and shows. The police PR machine starts early. And she’s looking for things for children that include collective learning around cultivating safety and accountability, that show marginalized identities as fully human. There was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn yesterday, the closest they’ve been seen in 800 years. My area of Michigan had cloud cover. This evening was clear and I saw Jupiter, but didn’t see Saturn. Lots of branches from shrubbery didn’t help. Thankfully Ed Piotrowski got a good picture. Click on it for a larger view.

Easy decisions are the ones where more people live

Yay, Congress has come up with a bill to fund the government until September and provide a small amount of virus relief (yeah, close to a trillion, but small compared to what is needed). Both parties have agreed to it. If the vote isn’t taken by the end of the day there will be a government shutdown. But Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is not happy. She tweeted:

This is why Congress needs time to actually read this package before voting on it. Members of Congress have not read this bill. It’s over 5000 pages, arrived at 2pm today, and we are told to expect a vote on it in 2 hours. This isn’t governance. It’s hostage-taking. And by the way, it’s not just members who need to see the bill ahead of time - YOU do. The PUBLIC needs to see these bills w enough time to contact their rep to let them know how they feel. Members are reeling right now bc they don’t have time to consult w/ their communities.

Soquel Creek responded:

This is how Congress continues its crime spree. 1. Identify "must-pass" legislation (spending, defense, COVID-relief) and hold it hostage. 2. Stuff it full of your favorite pork and wet-dream projects. 3. Keep the text secret until it's too late. 4. Pass by voice vote.

Kyle Cheney of Politico tweeted about signs that various members of Congress will try to challenge the Electoral College vote when it is presented to Congress on January 6. Since Moscow Mitch has acknowledged Biden’s win this will only stretch out the process and the fight will be fresh propaganda to those who believe the election was stolen. Political Sponge responded:

What is scary is not how far Trump is willing to go. The man is amoral and only holds himself dear. We knew this. What is scary is how many elected officials, those who swore an oath to protect the constitution, are willing to aid him in this attempt.

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos quoted Erica Newland in the New York Times. She had been a Department of Justice lawyer. When she left …

I continued to believe that a critical mass of responsible attorneys staying in government might provide a last line of defense against the administration’s worst instincts. Even after I left, I advised others that they could do good by staying. … I was wrong. Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results, I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed…. No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it. We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.

Leah McElrath tweeted a video from Dr. Allison Rodgers showing how a coronavirus enters a cell, then what the vaccine does to make it stop. It’s a minute long. Dartagnam of the Kos community reported of plans of rich people to buy their way to the front of the vaccine line. They’re willing to donate tens of thousands to a hospital to get the vaccine sooner. Always the way of rich people. Andy Slavitt, the head of health care under Obama, tweeted a thread he wished he didn’t have to write. He wrote it four days ago. Here are excerpts:

Yesterday one American died every 30 seconds. But no one has the tolerance to talk about it any longer. We’re forced to talk about the economy. Because enough people are apparently no longer motivated by 3600 people dying. In a day. ... Many Americans will absolutely as a badge of pride gather in large numbers for Christmas now. We know this for sure. Because of: Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day & Thanksgiving. It means we could have days in January where more than 6000 people die in a day from COVID. Much of this is driven by non-compliant behavior. People who refuse. A president who doesn’t care. Essential workers we push out. People who live in poor working conditions. And Kristy Noem [Governor of South Dakota]. ... I have sympathy for all of the people who have to make tough decisions. But there are easy decisions too. Easy decisions are the ones where more people live if you make them. Easy decisions mean supporting the people losing their livelihoods so we can be safe. Right now there are people who are in 4 categories of compliance: 1-Taking very few risks 2-Taking more risks than they think 3-Forced to take risks because of job/living 4-Carefree It would be one thing if the losses were confined to people in category 4. Expressing their liberty. But category 3 (essential workers, ppl facing homelessness, multi-gen houses) suffer disproportionately based on Category 4 behavior. As prevalence grows more & more people in the first 2 categories— occasionally letting their guards down but trying very hard— are more & more at risk.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos has a quote from George Clooney talking to Howard Stearn about masks:

This thought where everybody is like, “Well, it’s my freedom.” That’s not how this s--- works, dumbass. Your freedom is this: You’re free to smoke until your lungs turn black, but you can’t do it on the bus. And you’re free to drink until your liver comes out your ass, but you can’t drink and then get behind the wheel of a car. Put on a f---ing mask and we’ll get through this. We’ve got vaccines coming—let’s save another 60,000 lives before the vaccines.

Reconciling Ministries Network offered an online Longest Night service this evening. This is a service for those who aren’t feeling the joy of Christmas. It was a comforting series of readings, some from the Bible, some from other writings. There were also a few musical interludes. The service will remain on the Reconciling Ministries Network YouTube channel. The whole service is 47 minutes and has an ASL interpreter. The final reading of the service is also there separately and is two minutes. RMN is working to make the United Methodist Church more inclusive and loving, especially for LGBTQ people.

Political trench warfare and a Cold Civil War

Yesterday, as part of my discussion of a Gaslit Nation episode, I wrote about the Russian hack of the US government and corporations. Here’s a bit more from various things in my browser tabs I didn’t get to yesterday. A question that came up: Is it a massive hack or a cyberattack? I’ve seen both terms. I’m leaning towards calling it a hack because this Russian action didn’t cause things (individual computers, servers, or the US power grid) to stop working. The whole thing could turn into a cyberattack through the vulnerabilities this hack has revealed. Olga Lautman tweeted:

Yikes! More Russian cyberattack details: "Nearly all Fortune 500 companies, including The New York Times, use SolarWinds products to monitor their networks. So does Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed, and major defense contractors like Boeing" Omg! "Security researcher Vinoth Kumar told Reuters that, last year, he alerted the company that anyone could access SolarWinds' update server by using the password "solarwinds123"

So the hack was because SolarWinds was lazy with their security. I’ve heard a big company that got hacked is Microsoft, which seems ironic to me. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported placed that were hacked included the Nuclear Security Administration, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and national labs. Russia is looking into how US weapons are designed and built and where they are stored. A hack into the FERC is a big concern because it keeps data on the electrical grid that could identify the most disruptive locations for attacks. Such a hack would also provide info on the status of the country’s oil supplies. Russia could blackmail us by saying do what we want or we shut down your electricity and oil. Or … Ben Franklin tweeted:

Obtaining state secrets is how you blackmail an entire government. They’re state secrets because they’d cause the government to collapse if they came out. This is what the Biden admin is sailing into.

Ani Bernard added:

To preempt this they’ll have to lay it all out on the table—all the crimes and the horror.

Jonathan Zasloff is a law professor at UCLA with a PhD in American History. The title of his piece in Democracy is How to Finally Win the Civil War. The subtitle is:

The South has never believed in democracy. So it’s no wonder the GOP doesn’t. But the battle for democracy must be won.

In laying out his main idea Zasloff wrote:

In a non-trivial way, the Confederacy triumphed in the Civil War by establishing a particularly Southern pattern in national politics. This pattern rejects the fundamental tenet of any democracy: namely, multi-party competition, with various rules and informal norms designed to ensure a modicum of fairness. … The Republican Party wishes to destroy democracy. It seeks a form of one-party state: many can compete, but only one is allowed to win.

Southern politics rejected multi-party competition from the beginning. A second party could not be trusted. And race was the major reason.

A solid one-party South was necessary to prevent “tyranny” —which is to say, any threat to chattel slavery, no matter how distant.

In this case “tyranny” is anything that prevented them from oppressing – enslaving – black people.

The historian and political theorist Richard Hildreth recognized that the South’s antipathy to democracy—no matter the name of its dominant political party—drove its form of politics. He entitled his classic 1840 antislavery treatise Despotism in America, and he argued that the slave system meant war by other means. The South was a slave society, in which the conflict between master and slave defined all social relations. Thus, Hildreth observed, slavery’s permanent war footing also required a severe reduction in liberty, such that critical political and moral issues simply could not be discussed, making the minor party competition essentially cosmetic. Then the war came. As a political matter, the secession crisis was driven by the South’s basic refusal to accept the results of an election that it lost—even when it had established biased rules of the game such as the three-fifths rule. The rules were set by the Constitution, the parties agreed to play by them—and then when the South lost, it decided literally to take its people and go home. This is why Lincoln at Gettysburg could say that the “great civil war” tested whether republican government could “long endure.” Political theorists had long wondered whether it could, because it would constantly split into different factions and then into different nations. After all of the theorizing about how America was different, it turned out that it was, in one sense, not so different after all: It stayed together only through the application of four years of massive and devastating violence.

After the North gave up on Reconstruction (see Ulysses Grant and Rutherford Hayes) the South reimposed one-party rule, which was hell for the former slaves. The South switched parties after the Civil Rights Act was signed, helped by Nixon’s Southern Strategy. For a while it seemed there might be a viable two-party system, but that lasted only until the remaining Democrats retired or died off. Even Al Gore lost his home state of Tennessee in 2000. When the GOP gained control of the House in 1994 much of its leadership, including Newt Gingrich, was from the South and brought their one-party ideas with them.

Southern dominance led to a politics squarely in the Southern tradition. For Gingrich, Democrats were not simply opponents: They were enemies of the nation and civilization. McKay Coppins noted in The Atlantic that “one memo, titled ‘Language: A Key Mechanism of Control’ included a list of recommended words to use in describing Democrats: sick, pathetic, lie, anti-flag, traitors, radical, corrupt.” … But while Gingrich perfected the language of demonization, his strategy had a long history in the South. Southern politicians had long demonized their opponents—be they the shell of a Southern Republican Party, northerners, Blacks, Jews, or anyone else—as not merely opponents, but rather threats to “our culture and civilization,” in the words of Mississippi’s Eastland. … The point was not to defeat, but to delegitimize.

That opinion that Democrats were illegitimate led to Texas re-gerrymander its districts in the middle of the 2000 decade and the GOP to do extreme gerrymandering in 2011 in all the states they controlled, including Michigan and especially Wisconsin. In that state when the voters elected a Democratic governor the GOP controlled legislature and the outgoing governor stripped the new one of several powers.

The entire point was to lock down party competition, in the best Southern tradition.

Southern politics had come North. And invaded the Supreme Court. So, what to do? We must enact pro-democracy measures.

American politics must be de-Southernized: which concerns less symbols such as Confederate flags, statutes, and names of buildings, and concerns more entrenching democracy throughout American political institutions. … The goal is, quite simply, free and fair elections, such that a majority of voters choose their political leaders.

A first step is to eliminate the filibuster. It is a Jim Crow relic. Also, because a Constitutional amendment is impossible (it would require approval from those who would lose power), it is time to add states.

The United States Senate is undemocratic by design, yet in the twenty-first century, as metropolitan regions grow and rural areas decline in population, it has reached untenable levels. In 1790, Virginia, the largest state, was 12.65 times the size of Delaware, the smallest; currently, California, the largest state, is sixty-eight times the size of Wyoming, the smallest. … The problem has already crept up on us: Democrats have won a majority of votes for Senate in each of the last two election cycles, often by very large percentages, and very likely will do the same in 2020 once all the data comes in, yet the GOP has maintained a majority throughout the entire time.

It is also time to expand – “unpack” – the Supreme Court. A majority of the current members are hostile to democracy. If we don’t do those things we will have political trench warfare and a Cold Civil War. I think the Cold Civil War began in 1994 when the GOP took Congress. It took 160 years after the South lost the Civil War to come very close to winning the country.

In 2009, Republicans repeatedly proclaimed Barack Obama to be a “tyrant” simply because he attempted to fulfill his campaign promises. Jon Stewart said in April of that year, “I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing.” Yet that is the entire point: Equating tyranny with losing runs deep within the Southern tradition of American politics, despite the constant encomia [high praise] to democracy.

In nice contrast to Zasloff is the latest edition of The Hightower Lowdown written by Jim Hightower. In the November issue he wrote about timeless truths for trying times. Hightower listed many reasons why it seems humankind has gone mad. They cheer a tyrant in the White House. There are corporate profiteers who routinely poison us and the planet and knowingly sicken thousands with the virus while pocketing billions. Proud Boys who proclaim themselves heroes for beating protesters. And much more. So here are truths about humanity. Warning: They are contrary to popular thinking. * Most people are fundamentally fair minded, kind, and generous. * The basic human instinct is social cooperation. * Only about 10% of American drivers act like they own the road. The other 90% want to drive harmoniously with others. * John Rawls conducted exercises on how people envision society. Repeatedly participants from every social status want a world that ensures the least well-off, marginalized person would be treated justly. * The Law of the Jungle? Many species are cooperative, not competitive. Even bees work by consensus. * Before the invention of property law hunter-gatherer societies had a cooperative, sharing ethic that was more successful than an authoritarian ethic could have been. Some of us (thankfully not me) have read the book Lord of the Flies by William Golding, published in 1954. It depicts a group of English schoolboys stranded on an island and their descent into barbarism. It has been hailed for its “realism.” But – it’s fiction. This is reality: Back in 1965 six boys, ages 13-16, from Tonga took a boat out to sea. They were caught in a storm and washed up on an island. They weren’t found for 15 months. They created their own democratic society. When they were rescued, all six were quite healthy – physically, socially, and spiritually. No barbarism at all.

In striving to institute a culture of justice, it’s self-defeating to assume humankind is innately selfish. Rather, we should shame the culprits as deviants and rally the majority to common-good solutions by appealing directly to their natural instincts for an egalitarian society that equitably shares both responsibilities and benefits.

There is a parable appropriate here:

An old man says to his grandson: “There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you and inside every other person, too.” After a moment, the boy asks, “Which wolf will win?” The old man smiles. “The one you feed.”

Failed election fraud, failed court battles, next violence

I downloaded Michigan coronavirus data this morning. The number of new cases per day is thankfully still trending downward, though daily counts will still likely be adjusted upward. A week ago there were several days with deaths above 130. On to another transcript from the Gaslit Nation podcast, hosted by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. This episode is titled Barr and Other Hacks. Chalupa gave her thanks for the two vaccines to halt the spread of the coronavirus, then discussed we might be entering the age of the pandemic. That would be due to climate change and human overpopulation that puts pressure on the natural world, as well as vulnerabilities from the way we raise animals to eat. So vote for people who trust and believe in science. One of the scientists is Katalin Karikó, who is a Hungarian immigrant. She studied the messenger RNA that has become the main component of both approved vaccines. She was spurred on by imagining all the diseases she could treat. Kendzior turned to the coup, usually known at the presidential transition period. We’re halfway through it. A big development is the resignation of William Barr, who had created the Department of Injustice. But people like Barr in the inner core of the nasty guy’s orbit – Bannon, Manafort, Stone, Flynn – don’t actually leave. In addition, he has been implicated in the Trump Russia and Jeffrey Epstein cases, and many other crimes going back to Iran-Contra. He’s the GOP cover up guy. He will likely continue his crime spree from a distance. He’s accomplished his department’s goals of burying the Muller Report and making the Epstein case disappear. Kendzior calls on media to not dare rehabilitate Bill Barr. Do not whitewash him. He’s the same guy he’s always been. He’s not and won’t be a secret white hat. The people who will try are the ones who vouched for Barr and don’t want to hurt their reputations by admitting they were wrong. Both Kendzior and Chalupa go into detail about what Barr has done in his Department of Injustice. I won’t repeat it. On to another topic. Chalupa said:

The 126 Republicans that signed on to this farce of challenging the legitimacy of Biden's very clear win, understand that, yes, they're doing that as a gesture. There's no real teeth behind it. There haven't been any real teeth behind any of these clown car efforts to overturn the election. But the real danger of what they're doing is disinformation. They're spreading harmful disinformation and continuing to convince tens of millions of Trump's voters that they're victimized, that they're oppressed, and therefore justified in using any means possible to attack and undermine what they're perceiving as a "tyrannical system", aka, democracy.

The oppression they feel is in not being allowed to be oppressors. Kendzior said:

Yeah. The coup has moved into its violent stage, and this is what we had predicted before. We had the first stage of the coup, which was Trump attempting to rig the election through things like trying to destroy the Postal Service, trying to delay the mail, making up narratives of election fraud. That has failed. They then went to the courts over 50 times and that failed, most notably, last week in the Supreme Court. Now, we are in the next stage, which is violence, as you said, by white supremacist groups acting on behalf of Trump and backed by the sedition caucus (which you just named) of these 150+ overtly treasonous Republicans. This is the revival of the Confederacy and they should be treated like Confederates. They should be marked as traitors and made to face serious consequences. It's sedition. It cannot be laughed off or treated as just a grift, or dismissed as inconsequential simply because the court cases failed. This is the building blocks of a new narrative—a narrative of violence—and it needs to be dismantled before it can grow. So yes, as you said, we had a violent weekend. We had the beginning of what may be many weeks of these acts of violence.

That violent weekend was the Proud Boys in DC. There is talk of a second Civil War. But it won’t be a Union v. Confederacy. It will increased incidences of violence…

bombings, mass shootings, and things like the desecration of Black churches, white supremacists burning Black Lives Matter banners in the streets in marching, stabbings, things like that, and we're going to continue to see people like Michael Flynn, Alex Jones, these are grifters but they're also extremely dangerous propagandists who have the ability to incite violence, and they were there last weekend trying to rev people up.

Kendzior said some white supremacist websites are calling for everyone to prepare for war, to get supplies to last for the duration. But others say that yeah, they support the nasty guy, but because of the coronavirus crisis the job is gone, there is no money, and they can’t afford weapons. Does it really have to go that far? The militant ones reply yes, we have to take it that far. Kendzior said that negates the idea in mainstream media that all 70 million people who voted for the nasty guy are equally fanatical and militant about having a war between Americans. Even so, there doesn’t need to be many violent fanatics to cause a giant problem in America. Maybe just a hundred. Will the FBI find them in time? Those of us who don’t want violence should not seek violence. Instead, peacefully stand up for those being attacked, such as black churches, and push for the end of elite criminal impunity. We want the people who have been committing crimes to be brought to justice. Many of these people are the same ones QAnon supporters also want brought to justice, such as Jeffrey Epstein and the Sackler family (who got rich off selling opioids). And that is a way of uniting a broken nation. For several days now I’ve been collecting tweets and articles in my browser tabs about the Russian cyber attacks. I’ve now got several. But I wouldn’t get to that topic in my evening writing and the next day the story would be bigger. So I decided to wait to see what Gaslit Nation had to say about it. That turns out to be plenty. Kendzior and Chalupa were discussing more than a year ago that a cyber attack by Russia was imminent. These attacks are not new. Kendzior said:

During the second term of the Obama administration, They hacked the DOD, the State Department, the White House, the DNC, the RNC, and the emails of seemingly everybody in government with one exception, which is of course, Hillary Clinton, who protected herself by having a private server and was punished for it. So how about that?

There was also a prelude to these tactics in Ukraine. Chalupa said that Russia changed the results of Ukraine’s election in 2014, though Ukraine’s authorities caught it early and changed votes back. In 2017 Russians launched the NotPetya attack. It was intended for updates of a Ukrainian tax software company. But the malware quickly spread and caused $10 billion in damage around the world. This was documented in the book Sandworm by Andy Greenberg. Part of the book explains why Ukraine matters to the world and how to confront Kremlin’s aggression (which will outlast Putin). The Kremlin has no trouble using methods the rest of the world cringes from. Russia also hacked Ukraine’s power grid, causing a massive blackout with humanitarian consequences. John McCain, before he died, said that Russia had infiltrated the US power grid. US officials looked at it quite seriously in 2017-18, but very little since. So maybe we should stock up on extra supplies. The current hack happened through malware attached to upgrades from tech company SolarWinds, which makes network modules. SolarWinds said that 18,000 of its customers installed this bad upgrade. It allowed hackers to spy for nine months. Affected were Departments of Homeland Security, Treasury, Commerce, State, and Defense. Also National Institutes for Health and thousands of business that work with the government. It’s a massive hack. There was a prior hack at Treasury, done back in 2015. Obama only punished the whistleblower. The story broke publicly in 2018 by BuzzFeed. Steve Mnuchin was chosen to head Treasury to allow that hack to continue. Mnuchin is one of a cult of corporate raiders. Before this year’s hacks he and Wilbur Ross at Commerce had already compromised the departments they lead. They were never loyal to America. Strangely (though not surprisingly) the nasty guy has said nothing about the current hacks. Kendzior ponders whether these hacks were made public and tied to Russia so that the nasty guy could not blame them on Iran. The nasty guy had already revised the Nuclear Posture Review to say nukes could be used in response to a cyber attack. Perhaps the Russia connection was leaked to prevent a lame duck nasty guy from using nukes against Iran. Kendzior said it was interesting that right after this massive cyber attack was revealed to be Russian (and after the Electoral College vote) Putin congratulated Biden on his victory (which allowed Moscow Mitch to do the same). But don’t think Putin is abandoning his efforts to bring Biden down. Chalupa read from an article in Newsweek. A cybersecurity firm FireEye was one that got hacked. In investigating its own hack they traced the problem to SolarWinds and alerted the National Security Agency. If FireEye hadn’t been hacked the campaign could have gone on much longer. So why didn’t the NSA know about this predicted hack and respond? Had the agency been purged of the competent? There are signs the pandemic princess is moving to Florida and eyeing Marco Rubio’s seat in the Senate. Yeah, elbowing her way straight to the Senate. The nasty guy is allegedly pondering pardoning his kids. That’s a way of saying Daddy knows the kids were committing crimes while in the White House. Chalupa then listed some of the Princesses’ crimes. One is tax fraud, much more serious than tax avoidance. Slate has been documenting the crimes of the Trump Crime Family. One of those is grift. China has been awarding the Princess trademarks for her lifestyle brand. She was presented to the public as a senior advisor, moderating the extreme views of her father. But that idea has been shown false through the lack of any affect on his extreme actions, such as separating kids from parents. Slate also calls the Princess “probably the most prolific government grafter of the siblings.” It wrote that the Prince and Princess reported $135 million in income in 2018, much of it from foreign business. And there is much more. The list of crimes committed by the Prince is probably longer. Let’s hope these investigations lead to indictments – before she tries for that Senate seat. Beware of attempts to rehabilitate the Prince and Princess. They have deep roots in public relations in New York. Maggie Haberman, the daughter of a Trump and Kushner family publicist, loves to write puff pieces for the families from her perch in the New York Times. Getting them in prison is all about reducing the harm perpetrated on the American people. Dave Wasserman, a polster at the Cook Political Report noted Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes and came within 77,744 votes of winning the presidency. This year the nasty guy lost by 7.1 million yet came withing 65,009 votes of winning. He could have lost by 6 million and still won. So another Trump in power in ten years is easy to imagine. Remain vigilant.