No sidebars about billionaires buying elections

My Sunday viewing was the Tony Awards, celebrating the best on Broadway. It looks like a lot of great shows appeared over the last year – and I saw shows on Broadway last summer before the season began. My goodness, the Tony Awards show was so gay! Close to the top was a song from Death Becomes Her. I was sure the words were “Everything I do is for the gays.” While I was glad they wanted to do something for all of us (and it was quite the spectacular number), I wondered if I heard it right. So I found the list of songs for the show. The lyric is actually, “Everything I do is for the gaze,” in which the woman sings about the length she will go to attract attention. The similarity between “gays” and “gaze” is, I’m told, totally intentional. The show Operation Mincemeat was introduced by one of the actors, who assures us that he is male and is playing a female character. I think it was Jak Malone, who won for best actor in a featured role. Cole Escola plays Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary! and the outfit he wore for the Tonys was a gown revealing much of his chest – and ample chest hair. He won for best actor in a leading role in a play. A photo of that gown and chest hair is here. The playwright of Purpose, which won best play, thanked his husband, as did a few other winners. The show Maybe Happy Ending is a look at a different kind of love, that between two robots. It won best actor in a leading role in a musical for Darrin Criss, best direction of a musical, best book of a musical, best score for a musical, and best scenic design for a musical. I’ll put that one on my list of shows to see. One of the shows nominated for best revival of a play was Romeo + Juliet. It’s worth a mention because Romeo is played by Kit Connor. He played Nick, one of the gay lovers in Heartstoppers. This version of R+J looks like the Montagues are white and the Capulets are not. My friend and debate partner might be interested that one of the shows nominated for best revival of a musical was Pirates! The Penzance Musical. It strays somewhat from the Gilbert and Sullivan original – it is set in New Orleans and the song I saw featured washboards – so I don’t know if my friend is a purist and would avoid it or might enjoy a new interpretation. I know the big news this past weekend is about Los Angeles and I’ve accumulated a lot of browser tabs about the story. Alas, I don’t have time for the whole story this evening. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the guy mistakenly included in a raid and deported to El Salvador. The nasty guy and his minions admitted the error, but refused to return him. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that Abrego Garcia is back in the US, where he went straight to a detention facility. Attorney General Pam Bondi has charged him with a human trafficking horror story based on “recently found facts.” Einenkel describes the charges as “bogus.” At least Abrego Garcia will be able to defend himself in court. Though I won’t get to the weekend news, the big news last week, before the LA story took over, was the breakup between the nasty guy and Elon Musk. There was a genial moment when Musk was given a sendoff as he officially left his government role to return to private business. Emily Singer of Kos reported that the relationship began to sour when Musk called the Big Brutal Bill an “abomination” for not cutting government spending enough – or maybe because it will cut the EV mandate, which Musk’s Tesla company benefits from. The nasty guy responded. Musk declared that without him the nasty guy would have lost the election and Democrats would have controlled both chambers of Congress. Lovely when two huge egos get into a catfight. Alex Samuels of Kos said that Tesla got caught in the crossfire. It’s shares dropped 14% after the spat. Then the nasty guy threatened to end all of Musk’s government contracts and subsidies. And Musk responded by saying he would fund a primary challenger for every Republican who voted for the Big Brutal Bill. Musk had one more shot, that the nasty guy is named in the Epstein files and that’s the real reason why they haven’t been made public. The Epstein files are about the sex trafficking that Jeffrey Epstein offered to rich people. There are a lot of photos of the nasty guy and Epstein together, even some with the two and scantily dressed women I don’t know of evidence that the nasty guy was a customer. Musk is implying there is evidence. In the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos exlrrp posted a meme that says, “So elon musk has known about trump and the epstein files but was fine to keep it a secret as long as he got his way? He is no good guy. Not by a long shot.” Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about all the ways the nasty guy and Musk could damage each other. Musk installed loyalists through the government. The nasty guy could fire them. The nasty guy can cancel all Musk’s government contracts, worth many billions, and prevent new ones from going to Musk. The nasty guy could reinstate all the government investigations into Musk’s businesses. The spat has many Republicans in a tizzy. Do they declare their loyalty to the nasty guy and lose their campaign funding from Musk or have his vast cash used against them? Or do they align with Musk and face the nasty guy’s great wrath? I love such dilemmas. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet from Brian Stelter:

As every political junkie in America watched the Donald Trump-Elon Musk alliance shatter into a million X-shaped pieces, consider what was assumed and baked into the news coverage and commentary.

Stelter then quoted a document (not identified). Here’s part of the quote:

>> Reporters and analysts openly talked about all the ways that Trump might now turn the levers of government to punish Musk, without much talk of the legal or ethical implications. >> Talking heads also speculated that Musk might tweak the X algorithm to push anti-Trump messages into users’ feeds, again sidestepping all the implications. >> No one seemed overly surprised that the richest man in the world spent hundreds of millions of dollars to sway an election and now has buyers’ remorse. There were hardly any sidebar stories about the consequences of billionaires buying elections.

Down in the comments are many cartoons about the spat.

A scam on a massive level that was incredibly successful

I haven’t discussed an episode of Gaslit Nation since just before the new year. I get notices of each new episode then think I would rather read the transcript than spend at least 45 minutes listening. Yes, the ability to take notes and quote passages does have a lot to do with my preference. But a transcript comes a few days later and my usual source for blogging (Daily Kos) gives me plenty of material to write about. So I don’t get back to Gaslit Nation. It’s time for a break from Kos. The Gaslit Nation transcripts page shows 20 entries. So my first task was to decide, from a list that goes back to the inauguration, which one to write about today. I chose a recent one, a summary episode: How We Got Here, excerpts from seven episodes stretching back to 2021, a “best of” montage put together by host Andrea Chalupa, that explain how we got into this mess. This transcript page has links to the original episodes for more detail. Up first is Ari Berman, investigative journalist of Mother Jones and author of the book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It. He was a guest on Gaslit Nation in June 2021 and April 2024 Berman starts with the compromises made when the Constitution was written. The big thing was to get it passed, to have a guiding document for the nation. The first compromise was the makeup of the Senate. James Madison was opposed to two senators from every state because he thought states with a minority of the population to thwart the will of the states with a majority of the population. Which is what has happened. The second was the Electoral College. Many framers wanted direct election of the president. But others thought the people could be duped or weren’t well enough informed for that type of decision (hmm, sounds familiar). Also, small states and slave states (key point there) wanted protection. That reminds me of Elie Mystal’s point that the Constitution was written by slavers. The greater point is there were compromises between democratic and anti-democratic forces (there still are).

What we see over and over again is that the constitution that was created was a product of these compromises, and often what happened is the compromises would favor smaller states or would favor slave states, or it would favor wealthy white property owners. So over and over, these privileged minorities were getting preferential treatment in ways that would hurt this much larger and more diverse majority. And I think that's what sparked and laid the groundwork for minority rule to become a reality across the US society and across the US history.

Jump to 2010 and the Republican reaction to the election of Barack Obama. Wisconsin, a great example of the progressive movement, was converted to minority rule through gerrymandering and voting restrictions. Republicans went after labor unions, the primary support of the Democratic Party. Wisconsin became a national model of how to convert a progressive stronghold into minority rule and autocracy. I wrote about Elie Mystal’s book Allow Me to Retort just a few days ago. He is the Justice Correspondent for The Nation and he has another book out, this one Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. He was on Gaslit Nation in February this year. Mystal said that Biden gets credit for good policies and programs. But Biden failed at the most important thing he needed to do. Alas, part of that was he didn’t recognize that thing. That thing was to roll back the voting rights restrictions implemented by John Roberts and the Supreme Court in 2013. The Court had implemented those rules because Republicans recognized the election of Obama as the first black president meant the black people had enough power to elect one of their own. The restrictions were to make voting harder so that could never happen again. That voter suppression was what made the nasty guy’s first term possible. So Biden missed job one listed above. He also missed job two: making sure the nasty guy couldn’t run again. Democrats had a chance to secure the guardrails – and didn’t. We’re paying for that now and will be for a very long time. Mystal does a great job of summarizing my view of Biden. Great policies, but not doing the two most important things he needed to do. Back to Berman. Voter suppression had been going on long before the nasty guy’s big lie weaponized it in 2021. But since then the effort has gotten more intense. Republicans are still working to pass voter suppression laws. Now there is a related effort to overturn election results. That was tried after the 2020 election. Republicans are now working to make that succeed in the future by trying to control how elections are run and managed. In Georgia the state election board can now take over local election boards. Where there are Republicans willing to stand up to the nasty guy they are getting primaried, so the party is in lockstep with the nasty guy. This is what happens in authoritarian countries. Stephen Ujlaki created the film Bad Faith about Christian Nationalism. He was on Gaslit Nation in April 2024. Ujlaki talked about Colin Weyrich who had worked for Goldwater in 1964 and co-founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973. He was the one who decided the Republicans should cultivate the Evangelicals, who had stayed away from politics since the Scopes trial of the late 1920s humiliated them. Evangelical leaders were told they would get wealth and political influence if they told their followers that Republicans were the party of God and Democrats were the party of the devil. Many of those followers still believe that. One thing the leaders wanted was protection for their segregated Christian academies. But the rallying cry wasn’t racism, but rights of the unborn. Being against abortion was long a Catholic position, but not Evangelical. But after that deal with Republicans abortion was the reason why the followers were told they needed to vote. Said Ujlaki:

It's a scam on a massive level that was incredibly successful, both the rallying cry and the divisiveness in the country that it caused.

Nancy MacLean is the author of Democracy in Chains, about how powerful plutocrats developed anti-democracy networks to hold the US hostage. She was on Gaslit Nation in June of 2022. The dumbing down of the American public, the huge number of people who believe things easily disproven, began with the ending the Fairness Doctrine of broadcasting in 1986. That doctrine required accuracy and balance on the public airwaves. Its end opened the way for conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News. The industry of disinformation became very profitable. Jesse Eisinger is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist at ProPublica. He wrote the book, The Chicken S--- Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives (the real title doesn’t have dashes). He was on Gaslit Nation in December 2023. In the early 1970s conservatives noticed liberals controlled the institutions of the economy, government, and culture. Pretty much the power in the country. Louis Powell wrote his famous Memorandum, which earned him a seat on the Supreme Court. That Memo was a conservative call to arms. Wealthy people built the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and a few more while the Koch Brothers built their vast network. The right still claims the left controls the culture when they are actually the ones in control. The left needs to emphasize anti-trust efforts (there is a conservative anti-trust faction). But their efforts are blocked by judges. First, conservative judges did the blocking, but now Obama and Biden judges are also blocking anti-trust efforts. We need a decades long revision in legal thinking. There is the American Constitution Society, the liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society (I didn’t know they existed!). Caroline Frederickson, head of the ACS, admitted (back in 2023) they had made a big mistake – they had vetted judges on social issues like abortion, not economic ones. They hadn’t thought to ask about anti-trust, labor reforms, and regulation attitudes. MacLean talked about the Koch brothers. David ran as a candidate of the Libertarian Party in 1980. The platform was no public schools, no national parks, no postal service. It did include providing for national defense, ensuring the rule of law, and guaranteeing social order and very little else. The overwhelming majority of people rejected that platform. So David and Charles created their network to use disinformation to make their ideas more acceptable. Koch money and influence helped the Federalist Society capture our courts, especially the Supreme Court. On January 6th, 2021 the 147 members of the House and seven of eight members of the Senate who refused to certify that Biden won were all funded by Koch money. Efforts to gerrymander, suppress votes, and change how elections are run are also funded by Koch money. It’s a stealth strategy to rewrite rules of governance, even the Constitution, to return our government to what it was about 1900. At that time workers had no rights and no voice. There was no Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Only a tiny minority want this vision, which is why disinformation is so central and systematic. Social Security is so widely popular the disinformation on it included the stability of it and dividing current recipients from tax payers by saying it won’t be there when the youngsters need it. Koch money was also behind the Tea Party that appeared in 2009 in response to Obama’s election. They worked to control state legislatures in 2010 and succeeded in 28 states. Those legislatures attacked liberal laws, lying about why that was necessary. They also highly gerrymandered their states and pushed voter suppression masked as preventing voter fraud. Eisinger said that in the 1980s Democrats were crushed by Reagan and became afraid of economic reform. That was their start of no longer being the party of the working class. MacLean said Reagan was good at communicating: “Government is the problem,” and “Welfare Queen.” Though he made a lot of radical changes he did nothing close to what the Koch network wanted. When Reagan understood the cuts he asked for would cut Social Security and benefits for veterans and farmers, his base, he backed off. He didn’t cut spending, but still cut taxes. Between Reagan and Bush II the Koch brothers realized they can’t depend on elected officials. To remain popular enough to get elected again candidates couldn’t be as extreme as the Koch people wanted. That’s why the Kochs turned to disinformation. Anne Nelson is a journalist who has covered a few countries. She also wrote the book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She was on Gaslit Nation in May 2024 to discuss Project 2025. She said:

Institution Project 2025 is a document that was released under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation a few months ago in late 2023. And it is a blueprint for the way that the radical right wing of the Republican Party plans to transform American flawed but functional democracy into a complete dictatorship. That's the short answer, but it goes into 900 pages of detailed information about exactly how they're going to do that throughout virtually every possible branch of the government.

One example from Project 2025 is about climate. The point, as Nelson describes it, is to “burn as many fossil fuels as quickly as possible because the priority is the profit for the profit stream for the fossil fuels industry.” To do that the document says to pull out of climate accords, remove energy ratings from appliances, even remove the Migratory Bird Act. Other parts of it talk about lowering all taxes on the wealthy. Allow fundamentalists to turn the country into a theocracy. Reverse marriage equality. Remove all rights from trans people (and the rest of the LGBTQ community). Challenge the right to birth control. And, the big one, concentrate government power in the White House, including control of the Department of Justice and turning the FBI into secret police. Take over the State Department so cronies become ambassadors able to cut deals at will. Replace all federal workers with loyalists without checking for education or competence. Nelson’s appearance in Gaslit Nation was before the election. I note that because of this comment from her:

Well, I don't think that Trump can win without the support of a hundred plus organizations who signed on to Project 2025.

These are the groups that met with the nasty guy in June 2016 offering money and campaign support. In return they wanted him to stack the federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down. Of these hundred groups, about half got funding from the Koch network. That and other funding sources has billions of dollars behind it.

When they can’t win a fair fight, they rig the system

I finished the book The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper. It’s a gay teen romance that is science fiction adjacent. The narrator is Cal. He lives in Brooklyn and finished his junior year in high school. He’s a budding journalist and has a social media following for his video posts of what is going on around NYC. He occasionally creates news, such as asking city candidates awkward questions they didn’t expect from a teen. Then his father announces he’s the final hire in NASA’s class of 20 astronauts for their program to go to Mars. The move to Houston happens Monday. Cal is upset at leaving his life in Brooklyn. Once in Houston Cal sees most of the astronauts are parents of young children, with one exception. Kat and Leon are his age and Cal is immediately attracted to Leon. We know where this is going. NASA’s funding to go to Mars is in a large part because of StarWatch, a celebrity gossip network. Their program Shooting Stars is about the astronauts and their families, the modern version of Life magazine which presented the 1960s astronauts to the public. The show host and producers thrive on presenting the families with as much drama and not-quite scandal as possible. Some of the astronauts have gotten good at deflecting or redirecting those attacks. StarWatch does not like Cal offering an alternate portrayal, one of information and truth. NASA does. That is the driving conflict of the story. I enjoyed the book. I call it science fiction adjacent because the focus isn’t on getting to Mars, it’s on StarWatch and Cal, who is helped by NASA’s public relations office. I was amused and baffled by one small point. The cover illustration shows two young men sitting on the ground with their backs to us watching a rocket launch. Their fingers are intertwined. I got the impression that one was white, the other black. But because of the light of the launch I could not be sure. I was about a third of the way through the book before skin color was mentioned in passing, then it was never mentioned again. Race was never a factor in their growing relationship. Yeah, that’s a good thing. However, without those brief mentions of skin color Cal and Leon would be seen as two white lads. Alex Samuels of Daily Kos reported that the law firms that caved to the nasty guy’s demands are facing serious backlash from their clients. The nasty guy targeted these law firms because at some point they helped his opponents. He pulled security clearances to make business difficult for them. Then he offered a deal – give him millions of dollars in free legal help for his unconstitutional agenda and he would return them to his good graces. Several firms sued. At least nine major firms submitted and took the deal. In response, many of their clients are walking. Their reasoning is simple. If the law firm can’t stand up for itself it’s not going to stand up for its clients. The firms look like the legal arm of the White House. They lost credibility. Submitting has a steep price. That’s in addition to many of their lawyers leaving for other, more ethical, law firms or starting new ones. Carter Walker, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, discussed voter fraud in the 2021 mayoral election in tiny Millbourne, Pennsylvania, suburb of Philadelphia. It’s tiny as in 50 acres, less than a tenth of a square mile, and about 1,200 residents. It is now majority Asian and many are Bangladesh immigrants. The fraud was done by Muhammad Nurul Hasan with help from Muhammad Munsur Ali. They illegally registered dozens of nonresidents as Millbourne voters, then cast ballots for them. Hasan’s opponent was Mahabubul Tayub. He reviewed the voter rolls before the election because adding 29 names to the rolls in a short time in a town with 600 voters didn’t make sense. Tayub recognized the names of several people who did not live in Millbourne. Last month Hasan pleaded guilty. Walker noted that these small cases of election fraud are used to claim fraud is rampant and laws to protect against it (while actually suppressing voters) are necessary. But cases of fraud look like what happened in Millbourne – a small number of people affecting a small number of votes that could make a difference in a local race. Scaling up the effort to make a difference in a state or national race is much more difficult. It would involve a lot of people, and they would leave markers that officials would see. The perpetrators would be caught. Alas, the difficulty in scaling up is not a persuasive argument. And that can undermine trust. The Millbourne town council is only five members. Two resigned for reasons unrelated to fraud. The three remaining members, barely a quorum, include Hasan and Ali. Though they are convicted (sentencing pending) they are still on the council. Nothing says they must resign. And if they did the council could do nothing until new members could be voted in. That is making for difficult moments in the tiny council meeting room. The Congressional Budget Office rated the Big Brutal Bill, about to be taken up by the Senate, and said the bill will raise the national debt by trillions. Some Republicans by saying the CBO has been taken over by partisan hacks and its numbers can’t be trusted. They claim big tax cuts for billionaires will actually pay for themselves – a line Republicans have been using consistently since Reagan with plenty of evidence the opposite is true. In yesterday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Jessica Reidl:

Elected Republicans are coalescing around the talking point that CBO's tax cut estimates are complete fiction and that tax cuts pay for themselves. Well, CBO's 2018 and 2019 revenue estimates - which included the previous year's TCJA - were ... 99.5% accurate.

The TCJA is the 2017 tax cut bill. Way down in the comments exlrrp posted a couple memes about Elon Musk:

Elon Musk, who was once worth over $400 billion in December 2024, has seen his fortune plunge by $200 billion, setting a new world record for the largest personal wealth loss in history.

Contrast that with this:

Elon Must is officially out of DOGE. It might look like he failed since he didn’t save us any money, find waste, or uncover fraud, but his true goal was in data mining and on that front, he made out like a bandit.

In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo about Musk’s departure from the White House along with Musk calling the Big Brutal Bill and abomination.

Musk isn’t shifting sides here. He’s complaining that the cuts to social programs in the GOP budget aren’t deep enough. He claims this is about growing deficits. But he’s not said anything about the centerpiece high income tax cuts which are the drivers of those deficits. So while it’s probably obvious to most of you reading this, it’s important to note that Musk isn’t in any way switching sides...I’m skeptical.

Down in the comments are several cartoons and meme in response to what Sen. Joni Ernst said in a town hall meeting. Ernst talked about how wonderful the Big Brutal Bill was. A constituent said that because of the cuts to Medicaid people would die. Ernst cold-heartedly replied, “We’re all going to die.” My favorite cartoon shows a man on the ground reaching towards Jesus, who says, “Why bother healing you? We’re all going to die.” Three weeks ago Lisa Needham of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s efforts to keep us in the dark. He closed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather and Climate Disasters program so we can’t learn the cost of extreme weather events. Also, agencies are barred from considering the economic effects of climate change. Don’t believe in climate change? Don’t track the costs of climate change which allows pretending it doesn’t exist. Also gone are over a dozen health-tracking programs. Who needs to know about pregnancy risks, cancer clusters, childhood lead poisoning, domestic violence, or police misconduct? If risks can’t be shown there is no downside to eliminating regulations.

If Republicans refuse to track the bad effects of their bad policies, they can obscure the harms their policies create. Genius move for them, but bad news for everyone else.

Yeah, this is a chance to clean out my browser tabs. Nearly four weeks ago Oliver Willis of Kos tackled the question of why the right hates colleges. He gives several examples. Yeah, the attack on Harvard and other top schools. There is the harsh restart of payments of student loans and the work to eliminate the Department of Education and its programs who help the financially disadvantaged to get to college. So why? One answer is that conservatives have long seen college as a source of liberal indoctrination – their children come home as liberal radicals. But millions of college graduates voted for Republicans.

What is really going on isn’t indoctrination, but a failure of conservatism to win the war of ideas. And as is so often the case with the right, when they can’t win a fair fight, they try to rig the system from the inside. Republicans fail to enlist those who go through a college education to their side of the aisle, so they undermine student loan programs, try to bully colleges, and even attempt to turn college sports into another casualty of the bigoted “culture war.”

Democrats need to end linguistic contortions

I’m on the email list for First Run Features, a company that makes documentary films. Most of the time I glance at the latest offering and delete it. Recently the notice was about the film The Cinema Within, talking about the film editing process. I’ve watched a few other films about filmmaking, so this sounded intriguing. The film’s page on the First Run Features’ website said it can be viewed through Kanopy, while its page on IMDb says it can be seen through Prime Video. Kanopy looked worth exploring. So I explored. It is a streaming service for and supported by libraries and colleges/universities. Here’s the Wikipedia page for the service. All I needed was my library card. Since I buy books and rarely visit my town’s fine library I had to renew my card. Once I did I signed up to be a Kanopy member. My library created a list of films it made available. I am given twelve “tickets” a month and for each film I’m charged one or more tickets (kid’s films are free). I did some exploring of what films in my “to watch” list are on Kanopy. Some are, many aren’t. I do see LGBTQ films are available (at least through my library) and there is an LGBTQ category under Browse. There is also access to some BBC shows. I’ll be back to Kanopy. The film The Cinema Within discusses why film editing works. In no other experience in life (or the 400 million years of eyeballs) are two different images shown immediately one after the other and we make sense of it. If we couldn’t make sense of such cuts film would be reduced to a motionless camera pointing to an acting area. The first films were exactly that. But by 1910 filmmakers had figured out a standard set of continuity principles that are still used in film today. Modern films cut every 3-4 seconds and we don’t notice. The same techniques are used around the world. We don’t need years to understand what these cuts between images mean. This film asks the question: Why do these techniques work? Yes, research was done. A woman found a village in Turkey where the residents had not seen movies. She showed them short videos of the various editing techniques and asked them to describe what they saw. She and other researchers were surprised at the results and surprised again when they saw what made a difference. Other researchers focused on the eye and blinking. Only a small area of our vision is in detailed focus, so 2-3 times a second we shift our focus. The brain can’t process the images as we shift, so doesn’t. Between that and blinking about a third of the time we’re functionally blind. Of course, other aspects of the research are also surprising. I found it fascinating and recommend the film. Kos of Daily Kos discussed a way Democrats might better reach voters. The discussion was prompted by an article in the Washington Post about “a growing backlash among Democrats who are fed up with jargon that alienates voters more than it persuades them.” Some examples of the jargon that confuses and turns off voters: “Oligarchs” instead of “rich people.” “People experiencing food insecurity” instead of “people going hungry.” “Equity” instead of “equality.” “Unhoused” instead of “homeless.” Bernie Sanders has toured, speaking against the oligarchy, and drew big crowds. But even he has switched to saying “greedy billionaires.” There are words and phrases that just baffle many voters: “privilege,” “cultural appropriation,” and “settler colonialism.” There is also that acronym that has gone from “LGBT” to “LGBTQ” to other versions that try to include every variation of human gender and sexuality (few are going to wade through all those letters or to understand “two spirit”). Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona won last November by championing liberal causes while speaking English. Not “social equity” but “even chance.” Gallego won the state’s Latinos 61-37, the same margin as Biden in 2020, while in 2024 Harris won them by 55-42.

Yes, some of these terms seek to avoid stigma and otherwise redress certain injustices embedded in our language, but it’s a distinction that’s lost on most people. The intent is noble, but the outcome is disastrous for those who are supposedly being protected by these linguistic contortions. ... Talk like a human—and win more voters.

Kos posted that article Thursday evening. He posted again on the same topic Friday evening. That first post got more than 1,000 comments (it’s over 1220 when I checked). Kos expected commenters would blast him. Yeah, some did. But the rest offered constructive commentary. Kos contrasted the big words of Democrats with the straightforward message of the other side:

Trump’s message is all about danger. You’re physically in danger—because Black and brown people are going to kill you. You’re economically in danger—because “globalists” (i.e. Jews) and immigrants are cheating you. You’re culturally in danger—because trans people are coming for your children. Security isn’t a luxury: It’s as fundamental as food, water, and shelter. And Trump taps into that primal fear so effectively that he’s peeled off major parts of our traditional base: lower-income voters of color and the organized labor movement.

Those three components about danger – they’re all lies. But they’re quite effective lies. To win again candidates need to talk about the most important issue, the economy, and to speak English. Mark Sumner, Kos Emeritus, discussed a lot of Democratic politicians and consultants are talking about. They believe Democrats need a “Joe Rogan of the Left.” Rogan has radio show or podcast (or something like that) who is quite influential in promoting conservative ideas. Rogan is far from the only conservative voice, just an effective one. So, we should have effective liberal voices out there too. Sumner calls the idea “painfully stupid.”

I do know what anyone who wants to reach out to young people should say: Billionaires took your money. They took your chance to buy a home. They took your chance at a good education. They stole your opportunities. Billionaires took the things you want in life. If you really want those things, you have to take them back. That's the message. That's the whole message.

Republicans are still at it, taking from you and giving it to people who already have so much.

How does a tiny fraction of the population get away with this? They do it by dividing the other 99% of Americans against themselves. They turn us against other working people who happen to be women. Other working people who happen to be Black. Working people who happen to be gay. ... Every single day, Joe Rogan and a host of other influencers spread out across social media to tell young people that their problems exist because Black people exist, gay people exist, immigrants exist. Women exist. Go forth and hate. Their message is clear: It's not you, it's them. And they're right. It is them. Only "them" isn't people of color or someone who happens to be LGBTQ. Them is billionaires. Them is funding this message of hate because they just f'ing love it when the little people turn on each other. Them is laughing at us all.

Conservatives, with the “again” part of their slogan, are invoking a time when finding a good job and buying a home was much easier.

But the reason that things were better for those Americans wasn't because that time came double-dipped in racism and misogyny. It was better because that time came with strong unions, vast investments in education and infrastructure, and tax rates that meant money flowed to first homes rather than super yachts.

Urge your progressive candidates to run on that message. That should be their job. A Joe Rogan of the Left isn’t necessary. The Senate has a tradition that if a member puts a hold on something, like confirming the nomination to a job, the whole body can’t combine that nomination with others and must go through a roll-call vote. Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville put a hold on about 450 military promotions for nearly a year because he opposed letting service members travel out of state for abortions. The hold put all those promotions in limbo because the Senate didn’t have the time to do a roll-call vote on that many individual confirmations. They’re usually handled many at a time and by voice vote. The vice nasty, back when he was a senator, also put holds on Biden’s attorney nomination. By the time he became a senator most of Biden’s nominations had already been confirmed, so no great damage. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that Democrat Sen. Dick Durban put a hold on the nomination for US attorney for Florida and said he might put a hold on other attorney nominees. Wow, a Democrat showing some spine! It’s also a nice switch for Durban who kept honoring the tradition of blue slips, which prevented the Senate from confirming liberal federal judges in conservative states. Putting a hold on nominations, as Tuberville did, is a long Republican tactic. And they’re quite annoyed that Democrat Durban is using it.

Republicans genuinely can’t conceive of a world where Democrats deploy the same tactics they do. Democrats are supposed to follow the rules, and the rules are whatever Republicans say they are. But as Durbin put it in his statement about the hold: “As I’ve said time and time again—there cannot be one set of rules for Republicans and another set for Democrats.”

Andrew Mangan of Kos puts out a weekly column on the most important polls. One of interest this week is about what Americans think of Biden’s cognitive decline. Did it have no effect on his ability to be president? Little effect? Or severely limited him as president? The poll shows 58% thought Biden was severely limited. That’s 31% for Democrats, 58% for independents, and 83% for Republicans. Yeah, the nasty guy is also cognitive decline and is also a terrible guy, and we’re still focused on Biden? It matters because another poll shows 57% of all people believe Democrats concealed Biden’s true mental state. That includes 28% of Democrats, 57% of independents, and 86% of Republicans. A reminder that Republicans were pushing the idea that Biden was too old, so of course their people believe that he couldn’t handle the job. But poll numbers like that indicate how the public views the Democrats. Less trust and lower favorability ratings. Which means while voters are turning away from Republicans they are not necessarily turning toward Democrats. To win back trust Democrats need to honestly discuss all that happened around Biden’s mental abilities. Kai Ryssdal of the NPR show Marketplace spoke to Evan Osnos, whose new book is The Haves and the Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich. While working on the book Osnos began to wonder if America was approaching an “untenable imbalance.” We may be living in the most unequal time in all of history. Wealth has accumulated so fast our minds, laws, and institutions can’t keep up. About 100 years ago some of the top capitalists realized that disparities had gotten so large that if they didn’t figure out a more even distribution capitalism could be in doubt. They wanted to make sure the country was sustainable. The current moment is quite different. The Vanderbilts, even when they could buy members of Congress, didn’t have a White House office. Also, Republicans are flat on their backs as Musk rampaged through the government. Even so, Osnos is optimistic. Americans are noticing and clearly seeing who is standing in their way of succeeding. America has “a way of finding its way back to a more sustainable path. But it takes a time, and it takes sustained commitment on the part of the public.” Lisa Needham of Kos wrote that the nasty guy, through his Truth Social, attacked Leonard Leo. I’ve mentioned Leo a few times as the guy at the Federalist Society who recommended sufficiently conservative candidates for federal and Supreme courts. He was the one who made sure it was Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett who got onto the high court. So why did the nasty guy attack the one person who shaped the American court system to allow the nasty guy get where he is? Recently, a three judge panel on the Court of International Trade ruled that the nasty guy’s wide ranging tariffs are not legal, at least through the law the tariffs are based on. And the nasty guy is not capable of admitting his mistake of selecting a judge who would rule against him. So he blamed Leo, even though Leo probably didn’t have a part in selecting these judges. Rather nice these two are in a catfight. So the nasty guy will select judges without Leo’s help. A problem with that is at least the candidates Leo recommends are competent. The last time I wrote about the Russian invasion of Ukraine was quite a while ago. And over the weekend there is news. NPR talked about the massive drone strikes Ukraine pulled off deep in Russian territory, but didn’t give details. So I did a bit of online searching and found a story by NBC. I’ll let you read the details of the audacious plan. Though Kos didn’t post an officially reviewed article, annieli of the Kos community has been posting daily for quite a long time and, of course, included this attack. The post included another attack on the Kerch bridge, which allows Russia to get supplies into Crimea. This explosion wasn’t enough to bring the bridge down, but it was just as good – the bridge was declared unstable and closed for use. About a third of the way down annieli’s post is a meme showing the cost of various aircraft carriers. The US model costs $13 billion. The British model is $7.6 billion. The French is $4.14 billion. And the Ukrainian version is 39,000 Euros – it looks like a semi truck and “Comes with kettle and toaster.” Down in the comments of a pundit roundup for Kos are several of memes and cartoons about the attack. A few more are in response to the nasty guy telling Zelenskyy that he doesn’t have any cards. Zelenskyy is showing holding a royal flush (with an extra ace) the whole time. Todd Alcott posted what looks like the cover of a comic book with Batman wearing a pink outfit with identical green, yellow, blue, purple, and orange outfits behind him.

Robin: Batman! You’ve been wearing a different color suit every night! What’s going on? Batman: Homophobes are terrified by rainbows, old chum!

Back in the main body of the roundup Chitown Kev quoted Margaret Sullivan of the Guardian talking about libraries and museums.

Why would any politician – especially one as hungry for adulation as Donald Trump – go after such cherished parts of America? It seems counterintuitive, but this is all a part of a broad plan that the great 20th-century political thinker Hannah Arendt would have understood all too well. Take away natural beauty, free access to books and support for the arts, and you end up with a less enlightened, more ignorant and less engaged public. That’s a public much more easily manipulated. [...] What’s really going on is a long-term power grab. In crippling learning, beauty and culture Trump and his helpers “seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination”.

Jonathan Sumption is a former justice of the supreme court of Britain. He wrote an article for the New York Times about failing Western democracies:

The tragedy is that historical experience warns us that strongmen do not get things done. At best they may indulge the fantasies of some of the population. But at what cost? Strongmen tend to be fixated on a few simple ideas that they offer as solutions to complex problems. The concentration of power in a small number of hands and the absence of wider deliberation and scrutiny enable them to make major decisions on the hoof, without proper forethought, planning, research or consultation. Within the government’s ranks, a strongman promotes loyalty at the expense of wisdom, flattery at the expense of objective advice, and self-interest at the expense of the public interest. All of this usually makes for chaos, political breakdown, economic impoverishment and social divisions.

Max Burns, a Kos contributor reported that “A supermajority of Americans support ditching the Electoral College in favor of using popular vote,” though no mainstream media is discussing it. The Electoral College is a big deal because Republicans won the presidential popular vote only twice since 1992, yet won the presidency four times. And because of that Republicans haven’t wanted to get rid of the Electoral College. They are changing their opinions on the EC because the nasty guy won the popular vote. They could claim to be the ones to get rid of it. There are lots of reasons to get rid of the EC. One is that voters in all states matter, not just those in the swing states. In the comments of another pundit roundup are several cartoons for Pride month. One posted by paulpro and created by Bless the Messy shows two rainbow colored circles. The top one is what people think Pride is: rainbows and parades. The bottom one, with a lot more colors, is what Pride actually is: Being in the closet to stay safe. Having community. Feeling free. Loving yourself more than needing to be loved by others. Being accepted and respected as ourselves. Protecting trans youth. Fighting for equal rights. Honoring those who paved the way (especially black trans elders). And a few more. There are also more cartoons about TACO – Trump always chickens out. Quite a ways down is a cartoon by Monte Wolverton showing a taco talking with lots of exclamation points. Xi of China tells Putin, “I’m not particularly concerned about it... It’s mostly full of beans.”

A long history of ignoring and undermining the Constitution

I finished the book Allow Me to Retort, a Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal. This is a book I would love to delve into and write about every interesting thing I found, filling pages and pages. But that wouldn’t be fair to Mystal and his book (and its copyright). So I’ll reluctantly stick to summarizing the book rather than each page. In case that wasn’t clear, I highly recommend this book. I’ve encountered Mystal’s writing a few times and I’ve heard others praise his fine logic, his ability to get at the core of an argument, and doing so with wit. He went to Harvard Law School, but being a lawyer didn’t suit him. So he switched to law and justice commentary. He has appeared on CNN and MSNBC and helped the NPR show Radiolab with their series on the Supreme Court titled More Perfect. Yeah, he knows his stuff and he’s quite the justice warrior. The hardcover edition came out in 2022. When the paperback edition (the one I read) came out in 2023 he had to add another chapter as a preface, condemning the “originalism” used to overturn abortion rights. Of course, the Constitution, its amendments, and the commentary of the late 18th century don’t mention abortion! The Constitution was written by people who owned slaves! They were also highly misogynistic and restricted government participation to land owners like themselves. Mystal is okay with the body of the Constitution – well, most of it. It’s the amendments that cause all the problems. It isn’t that the amendments are bad, but that the white supremacists running the country have always been very good at ignoring and undermining the parts they don’t like. And, yes, for a great deal of our national history white supremacists have been in charge. Some examples. The Supreme Court, urged on by the NRA, reinterpreted the Second Amendment to mean a personal right to own and carry a gun (if one is white). Mystal gets into the original intent of the amendment – protection against slave uprisings – and the illogic of those who are fans of this interpretation. Our police brutality would wither away if courts actually enforced the Fourth Amendment. Mystal told his own harrowing story of a police encounter. Courts don’t enforce the Fourth because white people don’t want them to. If the Fifth Amendment says a person cannot be a witness against themselves why do police spend so much time trying to trick a suspect into confessing and why is that confession admitted into court proceedings? Yeah, we’re familiar with the Miranda rights from their use in police shows, but does a frightened teenage black kid facing hostile cop know what it really means? If we really believed the Eighth Amendment on cruel and unusual punishment no criminal would get the death penalty. Mystal was not a fan of the Constitution created by slavers. But then came the Thirteenth (banning slavery), Fourteenth (birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection), Fifteenth (the right to vote), and Nineteenth (women voting) Amendments. These are great! They make the rest of the Constitution work! Except society and the courts find all sorts of reasons why they don’t apply in particular cases. See Jim Crow. Mystal has only two complaints about the main body of the Constitution. The first is the makeup of the Senate. It was designed to make sure slavers could stay in control. It is now justified by saying the needs of rural states should not be overrun by the needs of urban states. That doesn’t make sense to Illinois where Chicago dominates the rural areas of the same state. The second complaint is the Electoral College. An amendment would need to be passed to get rid of it, which isn’t going to happen. The National Popular Vote Compact is great – until someone is elected using it. That case will go to the Supreme Court, who will pick the president. A big problem in the US, as defined by this Constitution, is the Supreme Court. A body that can limit or overturn every law that comes out of Congress, even limit or ignore the Constitution is a threat to democracy. Perhaps we should prevent the Court from reviewing laws. That review is not in the Constitution. There is one thing worse than a Supreme Court full of conservatives that block progress. That worse thing is conservative politicians who are quicker to wield their supremacy. So to close the book Mystal discusses how to reform the Court. Reform could start by saying that a Justice may be appointed for life, but not necessarily on the Supreme Court. They can be given senior status and sent to lower courts, able to return when a sitting justice recuses themselves. Mystal suggests the right number of justices should be 29. Some circuit courts have this many. Perhaps the Supremes should reorganize to handle cases as a circuit court does with a randomly selected three-judge panel hearing a case and the full court getting involved only when other justices disagree with the original panel. There is a lot more to the book – it is over 250 pages – and all worth reading. Again, I highly recommend it.

Rich guys installed loyalists in agencies that regulate them

Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that on Friday the nasty guy threatened 50% tariffs on the European Union, then on Sunday had a call from Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission on Sunday and backed off. And on Tuesday he boasted what he had done was a successful negotiating tactic to speed things along. The article doesn’t say the nasty guy got anything through this negotiation, other than avoiding tariffs the EU would impose on the US. He also changed the deadline (by one day) for I’m not sure what, probably the date for trying to reimpose tariffs again. Market analysts have a new phrase for this tariff dance: TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out. In the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos there are a lot of cartoons about the nasty guy, chickens, and tacos. Also in the comments Shelly Kirchoff posted a meme:

Jake Tapper is now calling Joe Biden’s mental decline “Worse than Watergate.” If he was an actual journalist he would be reporting how Trump is committing crimes worse than Watergate every single day.

For those interested in the details James Fallows, writing for his own Substack, posted an account of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem telling Harvard University that she was canceling all the visas of their international students. That is followed by Harvard’s response and lawsuit, followed by a court issuing a temporary restraining order saying the visas must remain valid while the case goes through the courts. Kos celebrated that Daily Kos is now 23 years old. That’s geriatric in internet years. And the site has lasted because it created a community. He wrote:

That spirit is alive and well. In the past year alone: You published over 40,600 stories More than 4,500 different writers contributed The community submitted 1.9 million comments And logged-in users viewed community-authored stories 17.5 million times On an average day, 21,000 of you log in to read, write, recommend, and respond. On Election Day last year, nearly 45,000 of you showed up. You’re not background noise. You’re the engine.

Kos also noted the site changed its revenue stream (I think more than a year ago, though he doesn’t say) from ads, political campaigns, and advocacy groups. The members were the product. Not any more. Now 80% of revenue comes from members. Ten days ago Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about four Silicon Valley tycoons who were able to install loyalists in the government agencies that regulate their industries. The big one is, of course, Musk who through DOGE has people planted in over a dozen agencies, including the ones regulating his industries. Those industries include the FAA, NASA, NOAA, the departments of Transportation, Labor, and Energy. Peter Thiel got friends in the Department of Health and Human Services. The Wall Street Journal reported that HHS has given Thiel’s data company Palantir almost $376 million since 2010, meaning already a long term relationship. Palmer Lucky got a director of his company Anduril nominated to a high position in the Department of Defense. Anduril, Palantir, and SpaceX are all courting the DoD. This director has said he’ll keep his Anduril stock as he works for the company that has the power to give contracts to Anduril. The fourth is Marc Andreessen, whose role, at the moment, is a moneyman investing in his pals’ companies. Needham detailed more corruption between these four and the government, then concluded:

None of these technocrats will do the right thing and put the interests of the taxpayers and the country above their own. Indeed, they’re valuable to Trump precisely because of that. People who actually value the work of government and its role in regulating companies pose a problem for Trump, as he sees the presidency only as a vehicle for personal profit and a means for revenge. Now, he has four incredibly rich and terrifyingly amoral friends to help.

Almost two weeks ago Alix Breeden of Kos discussed the latest issues with AI systems. This was prompted by Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protections Agency saying he has plans to make the US the “AI capital of the world.” He didn’t say what that has to do with the EPA. Here are those issues: Americans fear that AI will take away jobs. It looks like AI is also making hiring decisions. Those decisions are likely to be as biased, or biased in new and unknowable ways (AI doesn’t say how it decides things) based on the biased data it was trained on or the biased connections it came up with. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is promoting a bill that proposed a ten year moratorium on state and local restrictions on AI. That means AI companies will have a decade to do what they please. More people are reporting the environmental harm of AI. That includes the huge amount of water AI computers will need, perhaps equivalent of half the water needs of Britain. And researchers are just beginning to look at the public health burden of AI needs. Maybe this is where the EPA comes in (as in an EPA that looks out for polluters, not the environment in its name). Zeldin likes that AI centers like huge amounts of energy. So Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is fast tracking uranium mines for nuclear power and signing new coal leases while delaying a new rule that would protect miners from black lung disease. Two weeks ago Needham reported that Russell Vought, in his side job as acting director of what’s left of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tossed out a proposed rule that would have limited what data brokers could do with private data, like credit history. Needham wrote this seems to be a part of the nasty guy’s assault on privacy. Needham then discussed several ways this is taking place or is planned. An autism database, supposedly to learn the “real” cause of autism. A massive government database, a terrible idea in many ways, one of which would be to make deportations easier. Hacks into and thefts from government databases even before they’re combined. Government used to strive to protect privacy. Now it is assaulting privacy. Also two weeks ago Needham discussed goodies for AI companies going into the budget bill the House has passed. A half billion so the Department of Commerce can adopt AI. The ban on AI restrictions at the state and local levels as mentioned above – free of restrictions AI companies can spew a lot of pollution. Permission to train AIs on copyrighted data without compensating the copyright holder (the reason why the U.S. Copyright Office Director was fired).

Protecting AI companies from spending their own money or obeying pesky regulations is just the latest iteration of the Trump administration’s AI fever dreams. AI is supposed to increase government efficiency by ferreting out fraud and replacing government workers. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has already deployed AI at the Environmental Protection Agency to spy on employees, including looking for anti-Trump sentiments. It’s not clear how that sort of witch hunt increases efficiency, but at least it will cost a lot of money and line the pockets of some already stupendously wealthy people. And, really, isn’t that what the Trump administration is all about?

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted G Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers. I’ll summarize. There is a debate among Democratic strategists. One side says to read the polls and move to the middle on key issues (such as immigration) to win back the pivotal center. The other side says Democrats should shape public opinion, not just follow it, then lead on what is right. This side says the party lacks leadership, especially on corruption, democracy, and civil rights. There are plenty of examples to work with, such as the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Democrats need the courage and conviction on these issues to create mass support. Yeah, I’m looking for Democrats to take the second side. In the comments are a couple cartoons posted by paulpro. The first is by an author whose name I can’t make out. The caption is “Innovations in Medicaid” and shows a woman with an ice pack on her head, her left arm bandaged and in a sling, and with an IV pole behind her. She is on her knees mopping the floor with a bucket and sponge. The administrator standing over her says, “Good news, Beth! You’ve earned almost enough work-credit points for your pain killer!” The second is much further down in the comments. It is based on the King Charles visiting Canada to give the throne speech on the opening of the new parliament. The cartoon, created by deAdder, has the caption “How things have changed since 1776:” the king and the nasty guy are shown at podiums. The king’s podium says, “The King defends democracy.” The other says, “The President defends autocracy.”

One of the most brazenly made-up things from the Supreme Court

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote about a troubling Supreme Court ruling. The nasty guy had fired Cathy Harris, the head of the Merit Systems Protection board, and Gwynne Wilcox, the chair of the National Labor Relations Board. The firings troubling because both are independent agencies, intended to be insulated from the whims and vendettas of the president. They are supposed to be removed only for cause. These removals are now in court. Last week the Court used the shadow docket to rule the firings could stay in effect while litigation continues through lower courts. In the process they overturned a 90 year precedent. The shadow docket allows them to avoid explaining themselves. Franklin Roosevelt tried to remove members of the Federal Trade Commission and was blocked by the Court because the FTC is independent and the Court understood why it needed to stay independent. Why not let the board members stay on the job while litigation continues? What the Court did was reward the nasty guy to fight every battle in court.

Harris and Wilcox had argued—correctly—that if they can be removed without cause, so can Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve, because that body is structured the exact same way as the NLRB and the MSPB. But the majority made an arbitrary carveout for the Fed, saying it is a “uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks” and therefore isn’t the same. As Mark Joseph Stern said on Bluesky, “this bespoke exception for the Fed is one of the most brazenly made-up things I've ever seen the Supreme Court do.” Yep The sole reason to protect the Fed like this is because the Supreme Court is trying to prevent Trump from further crashing the economy by destabilizing the Fed through removing Powell. No law supports this. There’s no reasoning in the opinion. But it’s stark evidence that the only thing the conservative court majority does care about is the economy. Harris’ and Wilcox’s removals mean that federal employees have no way to contest their firings and unions cannot bring any labor actions—and this troubles the majority not at all.

Back on May 7 (three weeks ago) Needham did the nasty guy another favor. He can go ahead with his plan to ban transgender people from the military while the case goes through lower courts.

By now, it’s almost routine. The administration keeps losing at the lower courts, so they rush to the friendlier confines of the Supreme Court to try to eke out a temporary win, one where Trump gets his way while litigation continues. It’s not a strategy that pans out all the time, but when it does, it’s a treat for Trump and terrible for the rest of us. And that’s precisely what happened here.

This transgender band isn’t because they are trans, it’s because, as Needham wrote, “it’s just that trans people happen to be afflicted with radical gender ideology that harms troop readiness.” No explanation provided. The Court’s action is a preliminary injunction. There are standards and criteria for when they can be used. The public can’t tell if they were because the order is less than a page. So one could assume the Supremes did not follow these standards and criteria Kos community member bilboteach posted an article about what being a member of the House is like. They wrote the post because there are too many people who think being a House member is a cushy job. They work only Monday to Thursday and get weeks at a time away from Washington. So bilboteach discussed what a representative’s schedule in the House is like, frequently 9am to 9:30pm with a quick lunch. And when they go home to their districts, the schedule can be just as grueling. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Lucy Ash of the BBC. I’ll summarize: Young (white) American men are converting to the Russian Orthodox church because it championing a form of virile, unapologetic masculinity. Down in the comments exlrrp shared a tweet from Alex C about the nasty guy.

Donald sad no one wanted to join the military under Biden while speaking to an entire graduating class aw West Point who joined under Biden.

Also shared by elxrrp is a meme about the nasty guy’s youngest son Barron, which may explain why the nasty guy is attacking Harvard so relentlessly:

Barron was rejected by Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia. These three are the most prominent universities in the country. Colleges Trump attacks are the ones that, with all of his money, said ‘no endowment will let Barron in.’

In a second roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman of The Cross Section who titled his piece, “Corruption Is Still Corruption Even If It Happens Right In the Open.”

At the heart of this failure is an expectation that no longer holds, that when a politician commits acts of corruption, they will seek to conceal their misdeeds. While it is entirely possible that Trump and his family of fraudsters have engaged in personal enrichment schemes that have been kept secret (in fact, I’d be surprised if they hadn’t), what he has done right out in public is more than enough to demand a change in how we talk about the corruption that defines this presidency. The fact that he is not hiding his corruption — indeed, he seems to revel in making it as public as possible — is still shocking to many in the news media. And they have yet to adapt.

Dworkin added:

Also assumes politicians feel shame. Trump is a broken individual who has none of that human trait.

I had lunch today with my friend and debate partner and his term for the bill with those Medicaid cuts is The Deficit Expansion Bill (sorry, friend, if my quote is not accurate, though it is close). I think my favorite name is still The Big Brutal Bill. Way down in the comments, below the cartoons commenter The Geogre discussed the likely cuts in Medicaid. He quoted Paige Skinner of Huffpost reporting Mike Johnson said they would not “cut Medicaid for the deserving people.” Geogre said “So nice of him to JUDGE THE VALUE OF AMERICAN LIVES.” I look at Johnson’s statement and wonder who got to define the word “deserving?” Looks like it came from Prophet Mike’s definition, taken directly from the Prosperity Gospel, or maybe it was Calvinism. The idea is that God rewards the good and punishes the evil and does it in this life. If one is poor it is because one is sinful (better check on the definition of that word too) and anyone helping the poor is acting against the Will of God. Wrote Geogre, “It’s a way of thinking that even the Puritans found pernicious.” Yeah, it’s a pretty slick way of a rich person justifying why the policies he’s shepherding through Congress are designed to boost the rich by taking money from the poor.

Only fools and toddlers care about contribution limits

My Sunday movie was The Piano Lesson, a screen adaptation of August Wilson’s play available on Netflix. This is not about someone sitting at the piano and learning to play it. The story, set mostly in Pittsburgh in 1936, is the conflict between Boy Willie and his sister Bernice. He wants to sell the piano to get enough money to buy the land where their ancestors were slaves. He’s quite intense in his demand. She refuses to sell because it is a family heirloom – one of their slave ancestors carved family portraits into the wood. Because of bad memories she also refuses to play it. There are questions why this land is now available. The descendant of the slave owner died by falling down his well. Was he pushed? Why does Bernice say she sees the landowner’s ghost in her house in Pittsburgh? I enjoyed it. I had held off on watching it because it didn’t get great reviews. I would have placed it higher than the Metacritic score of 69. It came out last year and I heard about it both because it is based on the August Wilson play and because it is a Washington family production. Boy Willie is played by John David. It’s directed by brother Malcolm who also co-wrote the screenplay. Don’t recognize those names? And one of the producers was father Denzel. I’m sure you recognize that one. In a minor role was Olivia and a bit of searching showed she is Malcolm’s twin. And the credits show Katia, John David’s older sister as another producer. Alex Samuels of Daily Kos discussed some of the recent surveys. One of interest is opinions of aspects of the nasty guy’s agenda. For example, opinions on various parts of his immigration policy show 39% of adults in support, 45% opposed, for a net difference of -6. The topics include DEI at net -14, executive power at -26, and at the bottom is health care at -31. At the top at net +10, and the only one positive, is LGBTQ rights. Scary that his policies are aimed at rolling back our rights, yet 10% more people support his position than don’t. Samuels wrote:

Why the outlier? It’s likely because Trump’s LGBTQ+ policies are really about attacking transgender people. For instance, rather than loudly going after same-sex marriage, which a strong majority of Americans want to remain legal, Trump is targeting a vulnerable minority. And unfortunately, discomfort with transgender people remains widespread, even among Democrats. As grim as that is, it explains why a lot of voters support Trump here.

Another survey of interest was about safety of air travel. Plane accidents for the last three months are down compared to last year, but public perception says safety is worse. Samuels says part of the answer is the media coverage of the big disasters. Another part is the nasty guy, in pushing to fire air traffic controllers, is not helping public confidence. Andrew Mangan of Kos says the nasty guy is waging war on our fridges. He’s doing it in two ways. First, the Food and Drug Administration is planning to end most routine food safety inspections. Some, but not all, inspections can be shifted to the state. 84% of voters oppose such a move, including 75% of Republicans. The second war on fridges is the plan to end the Energy Star program. This is the blue star logo that indicates how energy efficient an appliance is compared to similar products. It has saved more than a half trillion dollars in energy costs. Every $1 the Environmental Protection Agency spend on the program resulted in nearly $350 in energy savings and massively reduced greenhouse emissions driving he climate crisis. Yep, 55% of voters oppose killing it. 86% of Democrats want the EPA to keep funding the program, though only 22% of Republicans feel the same way. I had talked about the nasty guy boosting the value of his personal crypto currency by offering investors dinner with him. Yeah, that dinner has happened, and Emily Singer of Kos says it was as corrupt as one might think it would be. The dinner was held at his own golf club in Virginia and he used a military helicopter to get there (as in taxpayer-funded), yet the White House won’t release a guest list because the nasty guy attended on personal time. That detail is of interest because the Supreme Court said he immune from prosecution only for official acts. (So is someone going to prosecute?) The attendees said they spent millions on the coin to get access to the nasty guy. These are foreign nationals, people who are banned from contributing to his campaign. The top contributor was Chinese crypto magnate Justin Sun who spent $40 million. He’s been sued by the SEC for fraud. He got a gold watch for his troubles (plus face time with the nasty guy). Another investor praised the nasty for being good to his sponsors, who expect a return on investment. Singer wrote: “That's as blatant of a ‘pay-to-play’ scandal as it gets.” Lisa Needham of Kos has a weekly series titled Injustice For All to show the nasty guy is trying to weaponize the justice system and the people fighting back. In last Saturday’s edition Needham wrote vice nasty declared that Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t understand the judiciary, saying the judiciary is supposed to allow the deportations the American people voted for. Needham wrote:

Good god, man. The Roberts court invented immunity for Donald Trump. The Roberts court is the reason you have a job. The Roberts court is wholly controlled by your allies. The executive is not exactly beleaguered here, you big baby. But aside from Vance’s usual whining about how oppressed the Trump administration is, this is also spectacularly wrongheaded in terms of how separation of powers works. Vance’s theory of governance seems to be the one that the administration as a whole has settled on: Because people elected Trump, they implicitly endorsed every future action Trump takes, so courts can’t rule otherwise. If they rule against the administration, goes the thinking, that violates the separation of powers. Such a theory, of course, makes courts entirely unnecessary, which may actually be Vance’s goal.

Needham also wrote about that crypto dinner.

What is the current price of dinner with the president? Well, it’s variable based on the price of his stupid crypto meme coin, but here’s how it breaks down: 220 people, many of whom are anonymous, bought $394 million of scammy crypto coins owned mainly by two Trump-affiliated private companies. Individual spend ranged from $55,000 to $37.7 million, averaging out at roughly $1.7 million per head. Federal per-person campaign contributions are capped at $3,500, but everyone knows that only fools and toddlers care about that. Savvy folks know the move is just to bribe the president directly by investing in whatever scam he’s got going. Never thought we’d long for the low-key days of everyone bribing Trump by spending a few thousand bucks at his D.C. hotel. Things used to be so innocent.

Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote that the Qatari jet has been delivered to the Department of Defense. This is the gift that is worth $400 million, but the DoD would need to spend a billion to make it usable as Air Force One. The necessary modifications probably won’t be done before the nasty guy’s term is up. That means the plane should go straight to the presidential library. That presidential library is becoming a corruption magnet. Missed out on donating to the inauguration? It broke records in pulling in money. So the next way to get time with the nasty guy is to donate to his library. Donating to him directly is supposed to be illegal because of the Constitution’s Emolument Clause. Mother Jones wrote that because of the nasty guy’s known shady handling of classified document and his lack of transparency we should not believe what anyone of his team says about how much is actually going to the library and how much to current pockets. Yeah, presidential libraries are expensive. The price tag for constructing Obama’s is about $830 million. But building his was not an invitation for bribes. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Crispin Sartwell of Splice Today, a person Kev is surprised he agrees with enough to quote.

Let me express my skepticism. I don’t think that Biden’s cognitive decline or his late withdrawal made a decisive difference in the outcome. And I think the direct claim that it did, as in Klein’s headline (the “cover-up” “re-elected Trump”) is self-serving in a familiar way. Also in a way that indicates that Democrats will find it difficult to absorb useful lessons from their 2024 disaster. [...] I don’t think that the Democrats would’ve won in 2024 if Kamala had had more time to run. I agreed with those commentators who at the time argued that the compressed schedule might be an advantage for her. I don’t think that there are good reasons to believe that if there had been a full-fledged or compressed primary and the Democrats had nominated Buttigieg or Shapiro or Whitmer that they would’ve done any better. Harris was as plausible a candidate as any, and ran a fairly competent campaign. The Democrats are fooling themselves if they stick to Biden’s dementia as their explanation, and that without a more honest assessment, they’re liable to lose again. Going into Election Day, everyone on both sides and in between seemed to agree that 2024 was “a referendum on Trump.” I think, by and large, that’s just what it was, and that a variety of factors had the whole country, essentially every region and every demographic group, trending to Trump by Election Day. I don’t see any reason to believe that it would’ve been any different with Gretchen Whitmer. Trump is an overwhelming personality who’d become even more overwhelming after his 2020 loss. It’s hard to focus on anything else while he’s there, yapping and thrashing away. Maybe there wasn’t even exactly a rightwards sing in 2024, but rather a swing to Trump, which isn’t ideologically defined except perhaps as a sort of screeching nationalism.

Peter Orszag is a former Office of Management and Budget Director and writes for The New York Times.

For years it was reasonable to tune out the worrywarts carping about deficits. With very low interest rates, a lack of particularly attractive alternatives to U.S. Treasuries for investors and a muted market reaction to serial Capitol Hill dramas over raising the debt limit, those who bemoaned the unsustainability of deficit spending and debt levels seemed to cry wolf — a lot. Even as a former White House budget director, I grew skeptical of their endless warnings. Not anymore. Two things have changed: First, the wolf is now lurking much closer to our door. Annual federal budget deficits are running at 6 percent of G.D.P. or higher, compared with well under 3 percent a decade ago. Interest rates on 10-year Treasuries have more than doubled — around 4.5 percent now versus just over 2 percent then — and in the current fiscal year the government is projected to spend more on interest payments than on defense, Medicaid or Medicare. That’s right: Our borrowing now costs us more each year than each of these big, essential budget items. Meanwhile, federal debt held by the public, excluding Federal Reserve holdings, as a share of G.D.P. has increased by about a third since 2015. The Congressional Budget Office, which I once led, projects that by 2029, our debt as a share of our economy will grow to levels unprecedented since the years after World War II. All of this is occurring against a backdrop of an even more polarized political system, increased tension with foreign debt holders and less confidence in American security protections that promoted the dollar as the world’s safe haven.

Back in mid May Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos honored George Carlin on what would have been his 88th birthday. One of the Carlin quotes:

To my way of thinking, men have only one real problem: other men. That's where all the trouble starts. A long time ago, men gave away their power. To other men: princes, kings, wizards, generals and high priests. They gave it away, because they believed what these other men told them. They bought into the okeydoke. The bulls---. Men always buy the okeydoke when it comes from other men.

Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows a man, woman, and child wearing life jackets and in the water. The man’s life jacket is labeled Medicaid. An elephant in a speedboat comes alongside and says, “You heard me. Billionaires need your life jackets...”

No use for robust public corruption investigations

I finished the book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain. I’m contrasting it with the book The Cross-Time Engineer, by Leo Frankowski and the rest of the eight books in his Conrad Stargard series. Twain’s book, published in 1889, is about Hank from that time who gets a blow to the head and wakes up 528. A couple days later he uses a solar eclipse to save his life and establish himself as a magician to rival Merlin. Not many people in the 19th century know the dates of eclipses thirteen centuries before. Hank becomes The Boss, top aide to King Arthur. Frankowski’s book was published almost 100 years later in 1986. It is essentially a remake of Twain’s story. Conrad, a young engineer in Poland, is transported back to 1231. Once he realizes what has happened to him he sees he has a huge task – Mongols will destroy Poland in ten years. In time travel stories the question is whether or not to change history and in what way. There is a subgenre featuring time police. If the goal is to change history, does the change take hold by the end of the tale and we understand it will persist, firmly altering the history we know? In Twain’s tale, the basics of Arthur’s legend are there – Guenevere, Launcelot, Morgan le Fey, Mordred have their usual roles. The Round Table and its knights are there but Twain says nothing about what made the table special. Instead, Hank declares his disgust with kings – nobility in general – and church officials who fill the heads of commoners with superstitions to keep the nobility in power. Hank tries to work the system to bring about a republic, a society of equals. Since he is second only to Arthur he tries to sell that idea. Over four years he develops schools and the basics of 19th century industry, which soon includes the telephone and guns. But when Hank goes out in public he is still expected to wear armor, which gives Twain a chance to rant about how uncomfortable it was. I was disappointed that Twain didn’t show how Hank caused that industry to come into being. But Twain wasn’t an engineer and went with his strengths, portraying the injustices humans perpetrate on each other. But he recognizes the superstitions the people grew up with will not be overcome. That’s one reason for the schools. Causing that industry to come into being is exactly what the Frankowski books are all about, which is why I was disappointed it wasn’t in Twain’s book. Conrad builds one concept onto another, first the basics of industry and schooling, then modernizing Polish society, especially the military so it can repel the Mongols. Every so often I fantasize about how I would go about things (minus the military part) if I was in Conrad’s position. I enjoyed Twain’s book and appreciate his defense of democracy and the equality of humans. The first five of of Frankowski’s stories were printed from 1986 to 1990. I enjoyed them very much when they came out. The sixth book came out in 1998. I was annoyed enough with the ending that I was done with Frankowski’s stories. So I didn’t read the prequel (that explains the time machine) that came out in 2002 or the final book that appeared in 2005. From online reviews I didn’t miss much. I might have a different opinion of the whole series if I read them today because Conrad’s dealings with women isn’t the best. Fandango at Home lists three Connecticut Yankee movies. One featuring Will Rogers came out in 1931. Another stars Bing Crosby in a musical version released in 1949. The third was released in 1989 and it is a black woman who goes back in time. Alas, none appear to be highly rated. Wikipedia has a long list of adaptations as movies (the first in 1921), TV movies and series, cartoons, stage shows, and other books. Frankowski’s books aren’t in the list. Long ago I saw a scene from the Bing Crosby version and today I watched the trailer. I don’t think I want to see this story as a musical. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported on a surprising ruling from the Supreme Court. The case is out of Oklahoma and is about whether the Catholic Church can run a public charter school and have it teach Catholicism. Yes, that’s a violation of the separation of Church and State. So the decision should be simple. But we’re talking about a very conservative Supreme Court. The first surprise is that Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case. This is a Court becoming known for justices not recusing themselves even when the outside world can see a clear conflict of interest. Justices don’t have to give a reason for a recusal, but Barrett likely did it because she taught at Notre Dame University and their religious liberty clinic represented the case before the court. The second surprise was that the decision was deadlocked at 4-4, not the expected 5-3. When deadlocked the Court doesn’t need to give its reasoning and doesn’t have to tell how justices voted. Even so, oral arguments suggest Chief Justice Roberts voted with the liberals. So the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling stands, which said the Catholic Church cannot run a public school. Don’t consider the issue dead. The Catholic Church will try again, perhaps through another state. This next time they won’t ask Notre Dame to represent them. Or... Needham reported that Republicans are proposing a federal voucher system. It would allow federal money to be spent on religious schools (see Church and State above) which would pull money from public schools. These schools discriminate against LGBTQ student and don’t have services for learning challenged or disabled students. For conservatives, all that is a big win. The proposed system would demand participation from states that have laws or constitutions that prohibit funding church related schools. Also, the funding proposed, $5 billion a year for four years, won’t be nearly enough for the expected demand. Voucher money is mostly claimed by parents who have already been sending students to private schools (showing they can afford them) or homeschooling them. Which means the money not going to public schools affects poorer students. Conservatives like to proclaim vouchers give parents a choice, meaning the parents would choose the better schools. But these schools are shown to mostly be a lot worse than public schools. Kos of Kos reported Senate Republicans voted to strip California’s right to set its own vehicle emission standards. That’s bad because it is hostile to the climate and defiant of states’ rights. If it gets any further than the Senate it will be tied up in courts for years. Kos found good news in the move – for Republicans to get their way they gutted the filibuster. The filibuster, requiring a supermajority of 60 vote, is anti-democracy. And it has a long history of being used in racist ways. Also, even though at the moment Democrats could use the filibuster to stop some things Republicans want to do, most of the time the filibuster hurts Democrats. That’s because the Senate gives more power to smaller states, which lately are strongly Republican. Also, Republicans have carved out filibuster exceptions whenever it suited their agenda. So why were Democrats clinging to it (see Joe Manchin)? As for the current situation:

Yes, it means Republicans can pass bad laws when they’re in charge, but that’s democracy. Let the public see what happens when they put the GOP in power. Let Democrats offer a clear alternative. No more hiding behind obscure rules, no more excuses.

Several Democrats warned that when they’re in power again they have a lot of bills they want to pass and will be glad Republicans can’t stop them. Needham does a weekly column on how the nasty guy is trying to weaponize the justice system and the people fighting back. In her column from a week ago this is her last bit:

Can’t get in trouble for corruption if you stop investigating corruption. The FBI is shuttering its public corruption squad. You’d think an administration so committed to pretending to be rooting out fraud and firing traitorous deep state federal employees would want to keep the team that was responsible for those things. But the public corruption squad, working with special counsel Jack Smith, is the unit that investigated Trump’s many crimes. In this instance, the squad wasn’t likely shut down simply because it hurt Trump’s feelings. An administration that is 100% committed to its own graft and enabling the graft of others has no use for robust public corruption investigations. After all, that would greatly interfere with Trump’s effort to turn the government into his own personal corruption machine.

In a separate post from this past Tuesday Needham discussed the ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell that was filed in response to DOGE forcibly dismantling the United States Institute of Peace. The USIP isn’t a government agency, but a nonprofit corporation. Yet, DOGE showed up with with the DC Metro Police and the FBI to break in. Howell’s ruling listed a lot of reasons why this DOGE action was unlawful. But it didn’t put a stop to the destruction. The administration obeying this order is doubtful. From their point of view the longer they drag this out (with appeals to Circuit Courts and Supremes) the more likely the USIP can’t be put back together. It has already been damaged. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Billy Binion reacting to the nasty guy’s announcement of a 25% tariff on Apple iPhones not manufactured in America:

You will not be able to afford an iPhone. You will own 2 dolls. You will work in a factory. And you will be happy about it. That is actually the MAGA platform right now. What a wild time to be alive.

Down in the comments Carol *Resister Sister* posted a cartoon by Clay Bennett. It shows a car with several bumper stickers saying “Equality” with a rainbow background, “Climate Change,” “Gun Control Now,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Abortion Rights,” “Harris 2024.” The car has been stopped by the Department of Justice. The caption says, “Driving while Democrat.” The Naked Pastor posted a cartoon showing Jesus visiting the nasty guy. Jesus says, “Hey, I have an idea! Why not use your power for the good of all?” The nasty guy says, “Get behind me, Satan!” The caption says, “The problem is, unwise people often think the evil they are doing is actually good.” Bill in Portland, Maine, in yesterday’s Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary.

"Another wildly destructive day in Washington D.C. They pulled another all-nighter in the House, where they passed Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill.' And, man oh man, if this is the beautiful bill, I'd hate to see the ugly one. I'm not sure which part of the bill is the most beautiful: the part where we take food from hungry kids, or the devastating effect it'll have on college education, or the trillions of dollars it'll add to our national debt, or the almost 700-billion dollars in cuts to Medicaid. Either way, say goodbye to Grandma." —Jimmy Kimmel "If something is beautiful, you don’t do it after midnight." —Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who voted against the bill "How weird is it that the ‘news’ is selling you a book about news they should have told you was news a year ago for free? It's just fun to watch them continue to push the book in light of this difficult news [of Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis], but to actually frame this difficult news as even more of a reason to buy this book. ... Some observers might think, do these CNN people work on commission? Like, why are they hawking this f---ing thing? Is this a Girl Scout cookie situation? Whoever sells the most Tapper books gets a Schwinn?" —Jon Stewart, on CNN's disgusting 24/7 infomercial'ing of Jake Tapper's Biden hit job