They decided a republic was worth more than their own comfort

I did not go out to see fireworks this evening, partly because my city isn’t putting on a display and I don’t want to search the schedules of neighboring cities. I am hearing a lot of fireworks shot off by neighbors. I did listen all day to the weekend classical station that featured American music – I think I heard The Stars and Stripes Forever about four times. And some of the commentary between pieces and on NPR got me to stop and ponder the day. And this evening I spent time as a patriot writing about what is wrong with the country and how it could be better. Andrew Mangan of Daily Kos discussed the Independence Day festivities.

In his second term, Donald Trump scored one of the biggest gimmes in presidential history: His term included America’s 250th birthday. How easy it should have been to unite the nation—at least a little, at least briefly—under a common star-spangled banner. Instead, he has failed to find popular support for the key events in his semiquincentennial project.

An aside: The best Latin can do in naming the anniversary is “Half-Five Hundred”? I’ll admit I don’t know the Latin rules for how to name numbers. Why bother with the Latin? But onward.

Excitement isn’t matching the occasion, and Trump is the most to blame. He doesn’t know how to throw a party.

There’s the fight on the South Lawn of the White House. Only 8% of Americans follow mixed martial arts, compared to 40% for football (that’s American football). The concert was a bust when so many unknown artists pulled out. The Great American State Fair is a bust. So many states refusing to participate and the rest favoring the nasty guy and conservatism was part of that. The nasty guy is doing quite well at degrading America’s view of itself. Those who are proud to be American is at 53%, down from over 90% in 2004. One part might be because he doesn’t know how to throw a party. Another part, likely much bigger, is that people recognize his party isn’t about America, it’s about him. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community discussed several signers of the Declaration of Independence who lost quite a bit to the Redcoats in the War of Independence. Are the Redcoats (or the Redhats) ruling America again? How did that happen? Hartmann points to the Reagan Revolution fueled by the Powell Memorandum. This was led by a group of rich people and industrialists fed up with the gains made by Labor and the Middle Class since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. They wanted to reassert their dominance.

For the morbidly rich and big corporations back in the 1970s, this average American’s trust in a government that was then maintaining high tax rates and — through the newly-created EPA, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act — holding corporations accountable for their pollution and poisonous products, was, they believed, an existential threat to their wealth and power.

Powell described it as a hatred of corporate power, an assault “on our government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system.” This is an example of portraying their opponents not as someone who disagrees, but as an enemy. I’m sure many middle class people liked corporations because they funded their middle class lives. The response of the rich was to create think tanks to alter public opinion, pack the courts, create conservative media empires, repeal bans on corporate donations to candidates, replace trust in the government with cynicism, and to fill schools and colleges with conservative educators while pushing out the liberals. Yeah, all that began back then. The goals included reducing the tax rate. If I understand it right (it’s not mentioned in this article) a high tax rate meant the bosses didn’t ask for big salaries because they would be taxed anyway, which left more money for the workers. That bit about trust in government was to get Americans to reject government programs in favor of corporate sponsorships of research centers, health centers, and civic centers. Medicare was partially privatized through the “Advantage” scam. There is an ongoing attempt to privatize education through vouchers and charter schools. Public parks, stadiums, museums, and more are encouraged to turn to billionaire charity (and naming rights) instead of tax dollars. All that to say government bad, rich people good. The effort of those think tanks shows up in college textbooks and thousands of opinion pieces in media outlets and social media every day. Conservative talk radio provides a steady stream of stories that “government can’t do anything right” as the hosts get millions in subsidies. That’s a gusher of political poison. All that to say don’t trust the government your ancestors fought to establish. Reagan and his VP Bush I negotiated trade deals that moved 15-20 million good-paying union jobs from America into low-wage countries. There goes the middle class. And their campaign has been and continues to be effective. The number of billionaires and the size of their wealth has jumped considerably. Fox News is quite influential and half of Republican voters are ready to reject democracy. Voter suppression gets lots of effort. The head of the Heritage Foundation said the Republican Party is willing to slaughter Americans who oppose Project 2025. The party no longer believes in democracy, “equality before the law,” and a government whose power comes from the “consent of the governed.” They’ve sworn their fealty to the rich. Many people believe we’re headed to another Civil War because many conservatives say that’s what they want. They believe democracy was a dangerous mistake and the rich (the modern version of the white male landowner) should run everything, suppressing all dissent. Some individual thoughts:

A political network run by a group of right-wing billionaires has a larger budget and more employees than the entire Republican Party. The single largest source of threats of violence and murders by terrorists in America today are committed by white-supremacists aligned with the GOP who hate and fear the idea of a pluralistic, democratic society. Tragically, for the third time in our nation’s history, patriots who believe in the ideals of July 4, 1776 must defend America against those who don’t. We had our third chance in 2024, and we let it slip. Trump won, and he came back not chastened but emboldened, surrounded by the same billionaires who bankrolled his rise and are now getting their return on investment in spades. Everything the Loyalists and the Confederates and the Redcoats ever wanted — rule by the rich, contempt for the ballot, a leader who answers to no one — is being assembled in front of us in real time.

All that means is getting rid of the nasty guy and voting out Republicans isn’t enough. We must also rein in the rich. The people who signed the Declaration were not the big guys.

They were outgunned, outspent, and written off. But they won anyway, because enough of them decided a republic was worth more than their own comfort.

We must do the same. Will Democrats? Will they reject “big, dark, and foreign money”? Will they agree a republic is worth more than their party, their reelection, and their own comfort? When they win at least one chamber of Congress will they work to throw off the control of the rich, or join it? That’s a big reason why Democratic Socialists are making big gains. From Thomas Paine in The American Crisis, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” In last Tuesday’s Pundit Roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Colby Smith and Tony Romm of The New York Times discussing the Supreme Court ruling that prevents the nasty guy from firing Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook just because he wants to.

But the Supreme Court left much unresolved. The justices did not clearly articulate the full legal criteria that would allow Mr. Trump to fire Ms. Cook, who denies any wrongdoing and has never been charged with a crime. Nor did they wager an opinion on the exact allegations against her. And the court majority did not even prescribe the exact venue in which Ms. Cook should be allowed to respond to the allegations. […] The president did not hesitate to seize on that legal ambiguity. In a social media post, he described the decision as merely a “procedural” matter and vowed to “take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!”

Joshua A. Douglas of Washington Monthly wrote about an aspect of another Supreme Court ruling that allows states to count ballots that were postmarked by election day but received a few days later. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, affirmed 5-4.

Instead of affirming the security of our election system, however, Justice Barrett seemed to accept the premise that absentee ballots might lead to the appearance of fraud. She wrote, correctly, that “even under plaintiffs’ interpretation, last-minute flips are possible, because the election-day statutes set no deadline for counting ballots or certifying election results.” Yet there is no such thing as a last-minute “flip,” and speaking in terms of “flipping” the results during the election night count is improper. Leads may change as ballots are counted, but no results are “flipped” because they are not final until the state has counted all ballots and election officials have certified them. It’s the same as saying the result in a World Cup match is “flipped” by a last-minute goal; although one team might have had the lead, there is no winner until the final whistle blows. So, while the Mississippi decision was good for voters, it was concerning for the underlying message about voter fraud and the leeway the Court may give to states to combat it.

The word “flip” also implies individual votes were switched. That also fuels the appearance of fraud. In Friday’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Bill McGuire discussing the El Nino weather system developing in the Pacific Ocean.

This is absolutely terrifying. The Nino 3.4 forecast temperature anomaly mean is now at 4C, when even the biggest historical super ninos have seen less than 3C. I really have no idea what this is going to bring over the next 12 months, but it will be very, very, grim.

Might we have massive crop failures this year or next? In the comments exlrrp posted a meme: “The saddest part of Trump’s historically corrupt 2nd term is witnessing the impotence of our entire political system to do literally anything about it. Another meme posted by exlrrp:

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool had aging pipes and filtration issues. Trump’s administration spent $14 million. Not on fixing the infrastructure. On painting the pool dark blue. Now it is covered in algae. It’s the perfect metaphor for modern Republican governance. Paint the surface. Ignore the problem. Blame somebody else.

I watched another video from Broadway Backwards, the annual show that raises money to combat AIDS. This one was from 2023 and is a reinterpretation of “One Day More” from Les Misérables as a group of LGBTQ activists preparing for a march in Washington. This one wasn’t just the song, there was a scene to introduce the characters – a newly out man afraid to be seen protesting, a mother who lost a son to suicide. The whole thing was nine minutes and it’s well worth watching.

A tortured bad-faith reading of the Constitution

I had lunch today with my friend and debate partner. He opened with a debate he had with others. He and they rejected tomorrow as the founding of the country because in 1776 we were just a bunch of argumentative colonies, not a united country. So when can we claim the start of America the country? How many states were needed to ratify the Constitution? Yeah, the version with the Bill of Rights. Three-quarters of the original colonies? Two-thirds? So I looked it up. New Hampshire was ninth when it ratified the Constitution on June 21, 1788. Virginia was tenth four days later on June 25, 1788. That was enough for either threshold. Rhode Island, the last, didn’t get to it until May 29, 1790, well after George Washington started his term as president on April 30, 1789. The Supreme Court ended its term and released its rulings on some big cases. A week ago Thursday Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported the Court was very good at supporting the nasty guy’s racism. Which means non-white immigrants will get the shaft. The decisions were: First, remove due process protections for green card holders. That will lead to deporting people who have come legally. Second allow the elimination of a way to apply for asylum. Refusing entry for people fleeing for their lives (which is why they are seeking asylum) is just cruel. Third, allow the nasty guy to eliminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians. TPS for these countries was set up because the countries are not safe and they aren’t any safer now than when TPS was granted. And Venezuela, likely next on the nasty guy’s list, just suffered a double earthquake that has killed at least 2,500 people. Needham wrote on the Mullin v. Al Otro Lado decision about asylum claims (though it could apply to all three) written by Justice Alito:

In the ruling, Justice Samuel Alito goes through a tortured bad-faith reading of immigration statutes to get to his decision that the administration doesn’t need to process asylum claims if it doesn’t feel like it.

In this case Alito wrote that an asylum seeker must actually enter the US and if a US agent prevents them from stepping a foot across the border, oh well, too bad.

On its face, this is a dispute about how to interpret statutes. In reality, it means that the United States is free to refuse to ever let anyone apply for asylum for any reason—which was always the goal of the Trump administration. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out in her dissent, this is an abandonment of the policies adopted by the United States and other countries following World War II.

Needham points out additional ways all three rulings are absurd. Alito had a goal in mind and reasoned his way to it no matter what law or the Constitution says.

It’s all disingenuous bigotry dressed up as even-handed, rational, sober-minded statutory interpretation. But it’s anything but. This is straight-up racism—and under this Supreme Court, it’s increasingly the law of the land.

Needham and colleague Alix Breeden review the TPS and asylum cases in more detail. They first give the legal view, then the human impact. In addition to tossing out a lot of Haitians and Syrians, on which many companies such as nursing homes depend, the ruling allows the nasty guy to end TPS for several other countries. On Tuesday this week Needham wrote about a couple more rulings by the Supremes. These two cases are about whether the nasty guy has the ability to fire at will the heads of agencies that Congress set up to be independent of the president. One case is about the Federal Reserve, the other about all the other agencies. For all the other agencies the ruling, written by John Roberts, says the nasty guy is free to fire who he wants to without supplying a reason. For the Federal Reserve Roberts said it is special and the nasty guy must show cause before firing.

Why is the Federal Reserve special here? You won’t find a genuine answer in the opinions, both of which are written by Chief Justice John Roberts. It’s honestly nothing more complicated than that Roberts is perfectly thrilled to give the most worm-brained toddler of a president free rein to remake the administrative state in his image, but not to give the most worm-brained toddler free rein to destabilize monetary policy. Gotta know what’s really important here.

The nasty guy certainly shouldn’t be allowed to destabilize the economies of the billionaires that give so lavishly to the Court’s conservative members. Of course, the nasty guy shouldn’t want his billionaire donors to be destabilized, but his thinking probably isn’t rational.

How does Roberts square this? He doesn’t, really. And why should he? This isn’t about what the law actually is. It’s what Trump and Roberts want the law to be.

The ruling says that though the Constitution gives Congress the power create independent agencies, that really isn’t true. The Court is simply restoring balance. Which means:

Indeed, that’s exactly what Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent: “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time.”

I’m sure Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson are getting mighty tired that a major portion of their job is to call out the BS of the six conservatives.

What Trump now gets is nothing less than a return to the spoils system, where the whole of federal jobs are filled with allies, cronies, and failsons and faildaughters who need jobs, regardless of any actual qualifications.

As for the Federal Reserve and the nasty guy’s target Lisa Cook, the ruling says he can’t simply fire her. But the ruling does not say in any detail what he does have to do to legally get rid of her. The big case before the court was whether the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees whether a person born in America is a citizen of America. Kos of Kos wrote the ruling by the Court looked at the plain reading of the Amendment and said, yes, that’s what it says. But the decision was not unanimous. That’s scary. Kos quoted Alito’s dissent, in which Alito described a case of birth tourism in which the baby grows up to plot against the US. Then Kos wrote Alito’s argument is about policy, wishing the Amendment was written differently than the way it was. The Constitution asks whether they were born here, not whether they’re patriotic. The First Amendment says Americans are free to hate their government. If someone plots against the country, that’s what intelligence and law enforcement are for. And Alito’s hypothetical hasn’t “posed the constitutional crisis he imagines during the 158 years since the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.”

What makes Alito’s dissent so striking isn’t simply that he reaches a different conclusion. It’s that he barely attempts a textual defense at all. His objection is that the Constitution produces a result he finds unacceptable. That’s a perfectly legitimate argument for amending the Constitution. It’s a terrible argument for pretending the Constitution already says something else. Every day, this hyper-partisan, hyper-ideological court proves that it has lost the moral authority that should accompany its constitutional role. More than ever, it is in dire need of reform.

The number of views this blog got in June didn’t quite top that of May, though for much of the month it looked likely. The number of views in May, not quite doubling the previous monthly record, was 313,818. For June the total was 298011. For three weeks in June the daily number of views was mostly near or above 12,000 with some days going up to 20,000. Then in the last week the daily number of views dropped to 2,000 and went down from there to about 1,200. I have no idea why there was a dropoff.

You’re gonna be driving the car over a cliff

I finished the book The Second World by Jake Korell. I agree with a book I wrote about several weeks ago that says colonizing Mars is a lot harder than people claim it is. Even so, setting a story on Mars can still produce a decent tale. Flip Buchanan is the narrator. I think the first name is a nickname because so many of his friends are referred to with nicknames, but while their real names are occasionally used, his never is. The story is about him from age 8 to 28 from when he was a junior troublemaker until he fully embraces adult responsibilities. All that is complicated because his father Buzz is the Director of Mars and Flip sees him more as a the worst kind of politician and not a good administrator. On top of that Dad is quite annoyed that his son seems to always come in second – second in his generation to be born on Mars, second in his high school graduating class, and more. Even so, Flip does accomplish a lot. There were a couple times I didn’t quite believe the science in the story. However, the author does come up with some cool solutions (though maybe dubious), such as when one environment dome lays siege to another by pulling a gigantic sun blocking blanket over it. I enjoyed the story, but it’s not so great as to get a recommendation. I have praise for the Detroit Free Press and it’s edition for last Sunday. The cover story (front page above the fold) was about Jake transitioning to Jackie. Jake grew up in a west Michigan town with highly conservative beliefs that didn’t like him trying on his mother’s clothes. He trained to be a nurse. After serving through the pandemic and watching patients die he needed counseling. Only then did he began to deal with being transgender. One fear was rejection by his parents and brothers. Once firmly into her transition Jackie did experience that rejection. I thought the Free Press did a fine job of presenting Jackie’s story accurately, fairly, and without sensationalism. Good job! The article is here, though one must be a subscriber to read it. A second page, available to all, shows several pictures, many more than appeared in the printed newspaper. The Free Press also did a great job in turning it’s entire opinion section over to LGBTQ writers. These are not blocked by a paywall. Roland Leggett wrote that Pride is a protest, a call to action. There are many ways to respond, with a top one being voting. Bella Bakeman is a lesbian English teacher who left many clues around her room that it is a safe place. She’s delighted when a student recognized that. Jacob Robinson-Suarez is chief of staff at Teach for America Detroit and emphasized fostering a sense of belonging at school is critical for academic success, especially for LGBTQ kids. Drew Atkins wrote that we need to live authentically even as people try to punish us for doing so. Lyra Opalikhin wrote about realizing she is transgender. Life improved when she transitioned. Again, a big thank you to the Free Press for honoring and sharing so many LGBTQ voices. In a lengthy article (long enough that I just scanned the second half) Maddie Stone of Drilled with help from Amy Westervelt of Drilled and Katie Worth or ProPublica, in an article posted on Daily Kos, wrote about a landmark paper on climate science published in 2004 by Princeton researchers that is now reported to have been heavily influenced by the oil giant BP. The paper is known as “Wedges” and was heavily cited in other research papers and even referenced by Al Gore in his work to spread knowledge of the climate crisis. This paper is a big deal. The general point of the paper is there are enough little things that can reduce carbon pollution that taken together can save the planet. These little things were “wedges” that would flatten the angle of the rising emissions. This was an optimistic message the world wanted to hear. The paper, as ongoing climate research and human action has shown us, has two major and intentional flaws. First, it relied heavily on carbon capture and storage, the process of taking CO2 out of the air and storing it underground. The technology for this is still unable to operate at the scale needed (or at any scale) to reduce the threat of climate change. The rest of the wedges, even if implemented fully (and they weren’t), could not bend the emissions curve enough. The second flaw was that BP was able to claim that all these other things worked so well that the company could continue to encourage the use and growth of fossil fuels that it saw were necessary for economic growth. The paper as a whole made the solution to climate change seem easy. The solution still eludes us. What the paper did was to get us to waste time and allow big oil companies to continue to rake in profits. Stone talks about how influential the paper was. Some of its ideas are still ingrained in our thinking about climate. She talks about the million dollar gifts BP made to Princeton to fund the research. That alone, we now know, is enough to bias research. Stone also talks about how much the authors of the paper reviewed it with BP officials and how much those officials suggested (demanded) and shaped changes. This was not the first time a big oil company paid for research that benefited them. Exxon started doing that in the late 1970s. However, this 2004 paper seems to be the most influential. This post discussed the influence of the paper and how it boosted the careers of the authors. Stone wrote:

In 2006, former Vice President Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” exposed millions of viewers to the fact that fossil fuel use was pushing the planet toward disaster. Gore soberly presented the earth’s dwindling ice, rising seas and increasingly violent weather. And then, toward the end, he shifted to optimism. Americans need not despair, he said, because “we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.” Behind him as he spoke, the opening words of Socolow and Pacala’s paper — the same ones [BP official] Mottershead had suggested moving to the top — appeared on a screen. Papers published in Science often enjoy a media moment before fading into obscurity. “Wedges” was different. Its simple, optimistic message — polished with the help of BP’s sophisticated public relations expertise — had an irresistible allure. And the media loved it. “How to save the world in fifteen easy steps,” read one headline the day it was published. “The 15 ways to stop global warming revealed!” read another.

Gore’s optimism wasn’t accurate. We did not know everything we needed to know. Still don’t. We don’t know how to make carbon capture, the core of the argument, work at a cost that is viable. As for those 15 steps, few have been implemented enough to make a difference. Most of them are not yet mature enough to help and would require much more research. Marty Hoffert, New York University physics professor, wrote a critique of “Wedges” in 2013, saying it “made the solution seem easy.”

To a lot of people, Hoffert said, “Wedges” served a purpose. “You have to give people hope” that climate change could be solved without radically disrupting society, he said in a recent interview. “Yet in the end,” he added, if that hope is gained by convincing people they can continue without getting rid of fossil fuels, “you’re gonna be driving the car over a cliff.” The fact is, he added, BP “got their money’s worth.”

After that a little bonbon that YouTube proposed for my enjoyment. Every year Broadway Backwards puts on a show turning Broadway tunes inside out. The show raises money to fight AIDS. The words are kept the same but the actors are both of the same sex. In the 2017 show Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Jay Armstrong Johnson did the duet “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from The Sound of Music. I may have to explore more of these.

A good argument to vote for Democrats

My Sunday movie was Close, filmed in Flanders in 2022. It was Belgium’s submission for Best International Feature Film in 2023 Academy Awards and nominated for an Oscar. I’m sure I learned of it then. I got around to watching it now because it is about to leave Kanopy. I’m sure it is on other streaming services. The story centers on Leo, 13, and his best friend Remi, also 13. They are such close friends that Leo frequently does a sleepover with Remi. Both boys are well loved by their own and the other’s parents. Though they are besties, there is no hint, other than they’re always together, that either is gay. That fall they start a new school (not sure if middle school or high school). The other students notice their closeness. One asks if they are a couple, which Leo denies. At this point I don’t see any homophobia. But a while later another student uses the gay slur. Each boy begins to look for other interests and friends, and begins to push the other away. That leads to disaster. Much of the movie is about the consequences. Boys who are not gay can be harmed by homophobia. Both boys do an excellent job of acting – the whole cast does. It’s a beautiful bittersweet story. GoodNewsRoundup of the Daily Kos community discussed ten days ago about hints that Fox News (or at least their website) is turning on the nasty guy. A couple of the hints: Noting the nasty guy’s Iran deal is worse than the Obama agreement he tore up along with quoting Republicans who agree. Reporting on Republicans who question the funding of the new ballroom. This post also has examples of Republicans disagreeing with the nasty guy on the Iran deal. Even Newsmax is critical. There is also criticism of Bibi Netanyahu and Putin (though maybe not by Republicans). I don’t know the source of this quote:

Bibi is about to learn the ETTD rule the hard way. Everything Trump Touches Dies, and Bibi has just been touched, a lot. I say this as a man who advised a race against Bibi in 2021; if Bibi loses, he dies in prison. His odds of winning again are much lower than his odds of wearing the Israeli version of an orange jumpsuit. Bibi’s political utility for Trump in the United States was once decisive, both electorally and financially. When even Trump thinks you’re a war criminal who needs to be thrown off the sled to the wolves, you’re well and truly cooked.

Emily Singer of Kos reported words of Speaker Mike Johnson:

If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, … y’all, impeachment’s not even the biggest concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors and friends—half of you in this room will be targeted.

Singer replied that is a good argument to vote for Democrats. Democrats like the idea too:

“Good point,” Democratic strategist Dan Pfeiffer wrote in a post on X, regarding Johnson’s remark. “If you think politicians, billionaires, elites, and members of the Epstein Class should be able to do whatever they want without any accountability, vote Republican this Fall.”

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Soren Dayton. That includes a tweet by Jordan Weissman. First by Weissman, quoting an article in Vox that quotes him.

So in several cities now, democratic socialists have put up younger, progressive “change” candidates who’ve channeled many voters’ dissatisfaction with Democratic establishments both in their cities and nationally – and promised something new, while an increasing out-of-touch establishment was defending the past. “You have an extremely energized left activist network that really knows how to put together a ground game, whereas on the moderate side there’s just a void,” said Jordan Weissman of the Progressive Policy Institute (who is sympathetic to moderates). “What’s the center-left organization that is supposed to provide any kind of counterweight to DSA? There’s none.”

Dayton added:

Another way to look at this is that moderates in both parties just aren't interested in building power. They are mostly interested in relying on the institutional power they have, even as it atrophies before their eyes.

In the comments of Sunday’s pundit roundup are a couple good memes, both posted by exlrrp One shows Richard Nixon in his famous victory pose. The caption says, “I am not a crook ... by today’s standards.” The other one, is of an AI generated book cover showing the nasty guy splattered with algae sitting in a rowboat on the Reflecting Pool. The title of the book is The Old Man and the Pool.

No money for health care, endless money for unpopular war

Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic discussed Poolgate, the mess in the Reflecting Pool at the National Mall. Warzel says the mess is an example of the nasty guy’s debacles, which tend to unfold in 13 steps. I won’t mention all 13, partly because some of them repeat. Devise unnecessary spectacle, such as improving a landmark. All the better if he can claim he’ll do it faster, cheaper, and better than Obama. Disregard expertise. Bypass normal procedures because it has to be done right away. Declare victory too early. Spend way more than estimated. Realize it’s not going well. Bypass procedures to fix the problem. Allege conspiracy and sabotage, blame other people. Lose interest. Pretend it never happened and move on to the next thing. Emily Singer of Daily Kos said the nasty guy has asked Congress for $87.6 billion cover costs of the war with Iran, to bail out farmers hurt by his tariffs, and to fund his vanity construction projects around DC. He’s asking for that much even though the war is widely unpopular and many voters think it was a waste. As for his vanity construction projects he appears to be turning his eye towards the WWII Memorial and its fountain (having learned nothing from Poolgate).

If Republicans vote to give Trump more money for the conflict and bail out farmers but not help average Americans afford their skyrocketing cost of living, Democrats will almost certainly use that in attack ads this year. “President Trump launched a reckless and costly war with Iran—without authorization from Congress or the support of the American people—that he should never have started, and now, instead of doing anything to help families get by, he is asking taxpayers to pick up the tab and give him billions more to wage wars overseas,” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement. Murray added, “This president is telling the American people there’s no money for health care, housing, or child care—but there should be endless taxpayer dollars to fund wars they don’t support.”

I heard a bit about this in the morning news and I’m glad I found links to the whole story. That story is told by Pete Buttigieg on his Substack about what his family just went through. An anonymous person called Child Protective Services saying that a woman claimed that several years ago Buttigieg told her he had committed violent crimes against his twin children, now age 4. The caller thought those children were still at risk. I’ll pause the story to note that if Buttigieg said that “several years ago” the children would have been infants or it happened before they were born. Did CPS spend any time investigating the veracity of the claim before traumatizing the family? Buttigieg doesn’t say. He eventually told them he had never been to the place where the woman said it had happened. Because of the allegation he had to stay away from the children for 24 hours. They stayed with grandparents. The next day each child was interviewed with no family member present. Only after that would the case workers interview him, then explain what was going on. They ended by saying there was nothing to substantiate the allegation. That was traumatic for the kids. After being warned against talking to strangers each child had to spend an hour with only strangers. The night before they couldn’t have Papa read their bedtime stories and couldn’t understand why. That was also traumatic for Buttigieg. He’s endured all kinds of hate and cruelty from opponents and is able to take it in stride. But this cruelty involved his kids. And it appears to be politically motivated. Buttigieg noted that the target of this cruelty was a family led by gay dads and done during Pride month.

Now our family is left to deal with the aftermath. I worry about any unseen effects this had on our kids, on Chasten and me, and on the rest of our family. Even though the accusation was absurdly and obviously false, and was promptly rejected by law enforcement, I still worry about the harm it has done. Chasten and I worry about who else might try to do this kind of thing, to us or to others. And at the most basic level, I worry about how anyone, even in today’s world, could fail to respect the absolutely fundamental principle that whatever you think about someone in politics, you leave people’s kids out of it.

Jon Paul Sydnor of the Kos community and its Street Prophets group discussed a progressive Christian political vision. Towards that he discussed authenticity. To be in a relationship with God we must be honest and authentic.

If a church demands that we hide our self to be accepted, if a church creates an artificial standard and demands that we conform to it, then that church has stifled the image of God within us.

Sydnor divides churches into low social control and high social control.

A low social control church respects members’ uniqueness, trusting that cohesion will emerge from diversity, as it does within God. Some churches deny the possibility of unity-in-diversity and become high social control groups, subjecting members to shame, shunning, denial of sacraments, and threats of damnation if they fail to be who the church wants them to be. These churches demand that members subordinate their God-given uniqueness to a church-generated stereotype, hiding their authentic self within a conformist shell.

Where there is hiding, there are secrets, and there is shame. A low social control church, an authentic church, celebrates their LGBTQ members. A high social control church does not, instead it denies what LGBTQ people know about themselves. And that causes horrific harm. When transgenders transition they frequently change their name. The Bible has stories of people who undergo a profound change and change their name.

Abram became Abraham, Sarai became Sarah (Genesis 17), Jacob becomes Israel (Genesis 32), Simon becomes Peter (Matthew 16), and Saul becomes Paul (Acts 13).

A church that is a true reflection of God is one that celebrates the authenticity of its LGBTQ members.

Must show that they’re actually willing to take on corruption

Grace Panetta, in an article for The 19th posted on Daily Kos, reported that Graham Platner, running for US Senate in Maine is saying, “We will take back our government from the Epstein class.” He’s one of many Democrats using the phrase that Rep. Ro Khanna created. They use it because it connects with voters.

“I’ll give the survivors credit, but I did coin the phrase ‘Epstein class’ because they’re a group of rich and powerful people who are not playing by the rules, and it offends the sense that we have one tier of justice,” Khanna told The 19th.

The phrase connects because it encapsulates two ideas – high level corruption and rich people rigging the system for their own interests.

“I think it directly fits in with voters’ top concern of cost of living right now,” [Ryan] O’Donnell [executive director for Data for Progress] said. “Broadly, Democrats, if they want to fight their way out of this, have to show that they’re actually willing to take on corruption in that way, and I do think that the Epstein class language is one way to do that.”

Oliver Willis of Kos, in his series Explaining the Right, discussed “Why Republicans suck ad being patriotic.”

As a whole, Republicans don’t understand the idea of American patriotism, which is far more complex and unifying than bellicose virtue signaling about being “strong” and “powerful.” ... Republicans are of limited scope—they can’t understand America as anything but the story of faux macho men. They don’t understand America at all.

Lisa Needham of Kos reported on the latest method the nasty guy is using to rig the election.

If they can’t win on the law, they’ll win with the purse strings and illegally withhold money from states that won’t comply with Trump’s conspiracy-addled demands. The money the administration is threatening to withhold, however, only highlights how little Trump cares about the country’s safety and security and how far he will go to get his way. States that refuse to bend the knee and let Trump dictate how their elections work could face losing 20% of Department of Homeland Security grant money that is intended to be used to protect infrastructure, combat terrorism, and prepare for disasters. Sure seems like a weird move for an administration that constantly claims that we are awash in terror and DHS needs infinite funding to keep us safe.

The nasty guy wants to add state voter rolls to a database so non citizens can be flagged. However, that database frequently incorrectly flags citizens. And state election officials (well, some of them) know that. Dion Nissenbaum, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos discussed getting new voting rules in place faces a race against time. Changes to the voting system don’t happen quickly. First, there will be court challenges. Then there is the logistics of turning the nasty guy’s demands into an actual, workable system in time for election day. Votebeat included a discussion of how to election fact from fiction. The suggestions fit many types of claims. What was the original source? Is there evidence beyond screenshots and that it “just seems weird”? Do independent observers and credible sources said anything? Also, isolated irregularities, a tiny part of every election, are not proof of widespread fraud. Anna Maria Barry-Jester, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos discussed yet another way the nasty guy is defying Congress. The budget that Congress passed for this fiscal year has specific amounts the State Department is to spend in particular ways. An example is the $5 billion to be spent on emergency humanitarian aid. Another is money designated for USAID, though Elon Musk and DOGE closed it last year But the administration isn’t spending the money according to what Congress put into law. All the money goes through the Office of Management and Budget (as is normal, as far as I can tell). Russel Vought is the head of OMB and a top supporter of the nasty guy. When the money reaches him he classifies a great deal of it as “unallocated” in defiance of Congress. All unallocated money needs his approval and he isn’t approving very much, leaving money unspent. Or the money is held up so the nasty guy can make a deal with the target country that favors himself.

As ProPublica has chronicled, Vought takes an expansive view of presidential power and has moved to give the executive branch dramatically greater authority to not spend legally appropriated money. Foreign aid has been a clear focus; after USAID was razed last year, Vought was made acting administrator and tasked with overseeing the closeout of the agency.

Emily Singer of Kos reported Congress has passed a bill with several provisions to eventually make housing more affordable. It even had broad bipartisan support! The nasty guy was set to sign it. Then he said he wouldn’t until Congress also passed his SAVE Act, the one that demands verification of citizenship to vote. Enough Republicans refuse to vote for it so it won’t pass. And they need something to show their constituents that they’re working on affordability. Amazingly, according to a tweet by Jake Sherman, Speaker Mike Johnson might finally be defying the nasty guy.

SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON is sending the housing bill to President DONALD TRUMP. Starts a 10-day clock for him to take action -- or it becomes law.

A tweet from Telegraph Football with a link to an article in the Telegraph:

Fifa will not stop fans from bringing rainbow flags into the stadium when Iran face Egypt in the controversial “Pride Match” in Seattle. Egypt and Iran have both lobbied Fifa demanding they have no association with Seattle’s PrideFest.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos included a few quotes (not necessarily recent) appropriate for the end of Pride month.

“Pride is both a celebration and a protest, and in the last few years pride marches have become big business, raking in millions of dollars for their host cities. And when corporations heard all those ch’chings, they jumped in. But ever since Donald Trump started viciously attacking the LGBTQ community, corporate sponsors are now pulling back their pride support. As one corporate insider said: they ‘never know if day-to-day they’ll be targeted.’ Wow—not knowing if you’ll be targeted must be so hard for those companies. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for them to come out to their parents…as companies.” —Stephen Colbert

Why is someone donating this much money?

Kos of Daily Kos posted a piece titled Why Democrats need their own Trump. He admitted that was a poor choice for a title. But his point is a good one: The nasty guy has been the most effective recent president. Alas, what he’s done is all to benefit himself and not the country.

The reason is simple: Trump doesn’t believe in constraints. He doesn’t care about norms, traditions, public opinion, elite opinion, or whether anyone thinks he should be doing what he’s doing. ... Trump has shown that all those traditions and conventions were nothing more than artificial constraints on the power of the presidency. All those Democrats before him who claimed they couldn’t do this or that? It’s all been shown to be bulls---. The office has extraordinary power, now with the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval. ... Trump has exposed something that many Americans—and certainly many Democrats—never fully appreciated: The modern presidency is far more powerful than anyone admitted. For decades, Democratic presidents treated many of those powers as off-limits, constrained by norms and a fear of backlash from the wealthy and powerful interests most invested in the status quo. Sometimes public opinion mattered too. But more often, caution was treated as wisdom because the people who benefited from inaction demanded it. Trump has demonstrated that most of those constraints were voluntary.

Too often Democrats used their time in power to make small adjustments while explaining why they can’t make bigger changes. I see that as a big reason why voters are so annoyed with Democrats. To succeed in 2028 Democrats much actually use power. Anything less and voters are caught between Republicans who break the government and Democrats who restore the status quo. There is the illusion that good things can’t happen quickly. That illusion benefits the wealthy – and we now have a trillionaire. Kos knows what kind of candidate he wants out of the dozens who will run for the Oval Office in 2028. He knows what kind he doesn’t want. Anyone who talks about the old Congressional camaraderie, who wants to make sure the other party has a voice, who accepts that the Supreme Court can’t be fixed – instant disqualification. I add: Yes, Democrats have been too constrained. But in many cases we need that constraint. We need a president who spends money according to how Congress allocates it, who brings Congress with him when he thinks war should be declared, who respects the right to vote and its outcome, who protects the little guy from the big guy instead of the reverse, who works for democracy instead of breaking it. That post prompted a second. In the comments of the first post many said the nasty guy and Republicans smash things. Democrats need to build. Kos agrees that Democrats need to build – housing, clean energy, infrastructure, health care that actually works, an economy for all people. But before building, Democrats need to smash a lot of things too, to make all the building possible. They have to stop protecting the machinery that created and protects today’s extreme inequality. Kos lists more than a dozen things Democrats should smash and says in his first draft of the post the list went on for pages. Here’s just a few things from his list.

+ The Senate filibuster + Citizens United and the campaign finance system it unleashed + Corporate monopolies + The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington + Social media algorithms designed to maximize outrage instead of informing people + Major media outlets owned and controlled by right-wing billionaires + Private prison companies

These things exist because they protect the people with money and power. Democrats need to stop treating them as if they were inscribed on stone tablets – that was the party’s big mistake between the two nasty guy terms. Democrats like to say change takes time. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York because he was able to say here is part of the solution we can implement right now. Obama accepted the conventional limits to the presidency. The nasty guy tested every limit. Don’t mistake the status quo for progress. Robert J Petersen of the Kos community posted Hunter Biden’s advice to Democrats prior to the New York primary earlier this week. Here are a few of his points:

+ Authenticity is measurable. Voters can smell a focus group from a mile away. + Conviction beats caution. The candidates who said hard things about rent, about who pays for what, about Gaza, they won. The triangulators lost. + Cost of living is everything. Everything else is wallpaper. + If you want to lead a party you have to be willing to fight inside it. Mamdani didn’t ask permission. He took the field.

In a third article Kos wrote that conservatives are sicker and die younger than liberals. We remember their antics during the pandemic when they refused masks and other things that could keep them healthy. But this study includes data from the mid-to-late 2010s. One reason for the disparity might be that less healthy people became more conservative. See how the right responded when Michelle Obama suggested children eat vegetables. Another reason might be more disturbing: “Conservative politics itself may now be a health risk.” People on the right are more skeptical of medicines, not just vaccines. They’re more distrustful of the “institutions and professionals trying to keep them alive.” They’ve been told expertise is the enemy and are hostile to it.

And to add insult to injury, liberals are now subsidizing those ridiculously unhealthy conservatives through higher health insurance premiums, just like rural red America wouldn’t survive without blue states and cities subsidizing them.

Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos, assembled by Greg Dworkin, features several quotes about the New York primary I mentioned. The short answer is that the candidates that Zohran Mamdani endorsed won. Below that Dworkin included tweets by Jamie Dupree:

Senate rebukes Trump over the Iran war, voting 50-48 to approve a House-passed resolution directing the President to remove U.S. military forces from hostilities against Iran. 4 Republicans voted Yes, 1 Dem (Fetterman) voted No. Trump cannot veto this war powers resolution on Iran - because the form it was in (a concurrent resolution) does not go to a President for signature. In essence, it is a non-binding vote by Congress.

Axios commented on US House races in Maryland suburbs to Washington. The summary: There is such a thing as spending too much on a candidate. It leads to people asking, “Why is someone donating this much money?” Down in the comments. ClimateHawk reported on the number of formerly Confederate states won by Republicans (the party that freed the slaves) from 1880 (after Reconstruction ended) to 1948. In those 18 presidential elections Republicans took zero of those eleven states, except for 1920 when they took 1 and 1928 when they took five (Hoover). They took 3-5 states from 1952-1965, two of those were for Eisenhower. Then Lyndon Johnson, Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965. He said he was doing the right thing but would lose the South for a generation. In the 15 presidential elections since then (much longer than a generation) Democrats have taken 0-3 states except when voting for Carter after Watergate, when all Southern states voted for him, and when Clinton took 4 of 11 states. In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Robert Jimison and Michael Gold of The New York Times:

“Hours after President Trump angrily confronted Senate Republicans for joining Democrats to approve a war powers resolution rebuking his handling of the war in Iran, Republican leaders brought another, nearly identical measure to the floor. In a 50-to-47 vote, with one senator voting “present,” they defeated the measure in a largely symbolic move that did nothing to change the resolution the Senate had narrowly approved a day earlier. Instead, it served as an unmistakable gesture to mollify a furious president who had just berated them. ... Ultimately, the maneuver did not undo Tuesday’s vote, which was the first war powers measure approved by both chambers since the war began and remains adopted. Wednesday’s vote neither rescinded nor superseded it. Still, Republicans sought to characterize the procedural move as a chance to “re-vote,” even though the initial action cannot simply be erased through a subsequent vote on different legislation.”

Jay Michaelson of Forward wrote that Israel is now pretty much isolated in the world and is doing a good job of alienating its allies in the US.

And for what? For what bowl of porridge did Israel sell its birthright as a member of the civilized world? For nationalist pipe-dreams of Gaza wiped off the map? For keeping Bibi’s coalition alive so he doesn’t go to jail for bribery? For messianic dreams of Greater Israel? For the most hawkish possible interpretation of Israel’s legitimate security needs? For revenge?”

I saw images of this elsewhere (which I can’t find now). The Independent in Britain reported that in 2014 a French TV channel showed a fictional weather report for August 2050 to show the effects of climate warming. It showed France hitting 43C (109.4F). That prediction was surpassed 24 years early. France and much of Europe and Britain are in a heat wave and the temperature in Paris hit 42.6C (108.7F). And that happened in June. This is a big problem because only a quarter of homes in Paris are air conditioned.

A grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold

I finished the book The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen. I didn’t realize until after I bought it that it’s a graphic novel. And it’s a beautiful one. The author and artist is the child of Vietnamese immigrants. The story is about Tiȇn, who is 13, and his mother Helen. He speaks mostly English and she speaks mostly Vietnamese and her name is the Anglicized version of her birth name. To help his mother learn English he reads fairy tales to her. The boy is gay, but doesn’t know the Vietnamese words to explain it to her. The first fairy tale featured in the story is Cinderella as told by German sources (which explains the images of Neuschwanstein Castle (the original on which Disney castles are modeled). Images here. The story isn’t exact, but does feature a beautiful woman attending a dance, meeting the prince, and leaving before he can know who she is. The second is a Vietnamese version of Cinderella in which the Stepmother is a lot nastier. Instead of a fairy godmother the story features a talking fish. The third fairy tale in Anderson’s Little Mermaid. Again the ending is changed. In all three the artwork is beautiful. The girls in the center of the stories are shown in wonderful gowns. I highly enjoyed and recommend it. At the end of the book the author says he sees the Little Mermaid story as an immigrant story. A person of one place tries to live in another place and doesn’t seem to fit. My Sunday viewing wasn’t a movie and wasn’t on Sunday. On Saturday evening I went to the Fisher Theater in Detroit to see lesbian comic Fortune Feimster. Her opening act was a gay guy with the last name Tower. I didn’t catch the first name. Both were quite funny, though definitely not PG, and I needed the laugh. Since both are queer, and their queerness is a part of their act, the audience was also quite queer. I very much enjoyed the evening. I’ve mentioned this before and Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the full story. Elon Musk, because of the initial public offering for his company SpaceX, is now a trillionaire, the world’s first.

That’s a grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold—made worse by the fact that it’s Musk, who has proven that he won’t use his fortune for good.

Some of the reasons Musk makes it worse: He has been spending big on Republicans. Through DOGE he has made government worse – less able to do the things Congress budgeted for and harming children and seniors. He destroyed USAID (US Agency for International Development), worsening health and hunger around the world. And he didn’t save the government any money.

Musk is a menace to society, and the fact that he’s now the world’s first trillionaire is a disgusting failure of public policy. “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote on X Friday. “The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth. We need a wealth tax.”

Vyan of the Kos community discussed recent reports documenting the damage from Musk’s destroying USAID. Vyan suggests “Google ‘Deaths due to DOGE Cuts.’” The results, which Vyan quoted, looks like output from AI, though it does include links to specific articles. The current death toll is between 300,000 and 750,000 and is projected to “lead to more than 14 million additional preventable deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under the age of five. That implies Musk, according to Vyan, is a mass murderer. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) proposed that a one-time 5% tax on Musk’s wealth would bring in enough money to fund “universal child care for every family.” That brought on a feud of words between Khanna and Musk with Musk hurling insults and Khanna referencing research. Vyan described Musk as “a perfect example of predatory capitalism.” Then he quoted a tweet from DogeDesigner:

USAID was a criminal organization that funded bioweapons, censorship & global coups with your tax dollars. It was never about helping the poor. It was a viper’s nest of radical-left corruption, waste, and anti-America operations.

The tweet then listed some places where USAID money supposedly went. I have no trust that any of those statements are true and dispute USAID was never about helping the poor – if it prevented millions of deaths it was very much about helping the poor. Musk threatened to sue Khanna for lying. Vyan tweeted, “Go ahead and sue; discovery will be an absolute bitch.” Also ABC News has verified Khanna’s claim. Tim Henderson, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the current state of American inequality.

The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%. The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies. Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.

Because of this inequality and the problems it brings a dozen states have passed or proposed new taxes on the wealthy. Californian has a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. This year at least 12 billionaires have left the state and new wealth has created 23 more. Nationally,

The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

The divide also affects views on inflation. The lower classes are hurt by it and the rich are unaffected. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a tweet by millesini that includes a half-minute video:

Albanians have begun to push construction crates downhill, in protest of the Kushner and Trump families’ plans to take over and island. Well done.

Kos community member xaxnar quoted from Timothy Snyder’s Substack about his discussion of “Utopias of Violence.” The opening:

The war in Iran began with a dream of violence. The question now is whether the nightmare that followed returns to the United States. The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want. You can think that firing some missiles and dropping some bombs will end Iran’s nuclear program, overturn its government, and lead to a victory that makes you feel grand about yourself; and then you can find that you no longer have any leverage over the nuclear program, that you have strengthened the power of the regime, and that you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations as the world draws conclusions from your capitulation.

Big proponents of the idea that might makes right and that the US military can’t lose are the nasty guy, the vice nasty, and the war nasty. Will they turn their violence on Americans? They tried it in Minnesota and it didn’t produce the results they wanted.

Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.

In the pundit roundup for Kos for last Wednesday Greg Dworkin quoted the International Crisis Group:

The war’s ambiguous end carries a clear lesson: wars of choice, launched based on inflated threats and wishful thinking, are far more likely to deepen than to solve the problems they purport to address. The specific lesson regarding Iran is also difficult to escape. After years of deploying every available coercive tool, from suffocating sanctions to military force, diplomacy remains the only approach that has delivered positive results. That reality argues for taking it more seriously this time round, not less.

Dworkin included a tweet from Politics and Poll Tracker with results from a CNN poll. As of May 27% of those polled said they were a Democrat, 26% said they were a Republican. They are quite evenly matched, likely within the margin of error. And 47% said they were independent. That’s almost half and the highest in a decade. The accompanying chart shows Independents showing a steady rise from 35% and Democrats showing a steady drop also from 35% starting about 2021. Republicans started their decline about 2022. Voters are disgusted that both parties are beholden to the rich and aren’t doing anything about why they are getting screwed. In last Sunday’s pundit roundup, down in the comments is a variation of a meme posted by exlrrp. I’ve mentioned several other variations. The original shows a woman walking down the street towards us. A man walking the other way turns to look at her. A second woman, presumably the man’s wife or date looks at him with annoyance. Each of the three people is named or described in some way. In this new variation the woman walking towards us is replaced by the supreme leader of Iran. The man doing the looking is the nasty guy. The one annoyed at his gaze is Netanyahu. Last week Thursday Singer reported on the state of the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in the center of Washington. Barely a week after the pool was “repaired,” painted by a nasty guy crony, and refilled, it became green with algae. Hydrogen peroxide was poured in to get rid of the algae, though not enough to actually make a difference there, but it was enough to cause the new paint to peel in chunks and float to the surface. That disaster is bothering the nasty guy, who blamed the mess on vandals on the nasty guy. That line of attack was taken up by conservative commentators, such as Grant Stinchfield. That prompted Singer to respond:

Hey Grant, if Democrats were so powerful enough to cause the biggest algae bloom in years in the reflecting pool just hours after it was refilled, they wouldn’t have lost the 2024 election. The real reason the pool is once again green is science, as algae thrives in hot water. But I guess we shouldn’t expect a halfwit like you to understand that.

The water is hotter because the dark “American Flag blue” absorbs more heat than the bare concrete. Democrats are using this mess to say the nasty guy is spending all his time on disastrous vanity projects and not on the cost of living. Instead of draining the Washington swamp the nasty guy has made it worse. In the comments of today’s roundup David Michigan posted a tweet by Edwin Heathcote that shows the green water of the Reflecting Pool with the words, “I saw this referred to as the Strait of Warm Ooze. Very good.”

This isn’t about the 2020 election, it's about 2026 and 2028

I finished the book The Mother by B. L. Blanchard. It is a companion book to The Peacemaker by the same author I read back in January. That book is set in a North America that had never been colonized and all the characters are natives. This book is set in a Europe, particularly an England, that had never colonized. Though the blurb on the back of the book starts with that I don’t see that it made much difference to the story. Yes, this is a different Europe and England, but how it became the way it is depicted doesn’t seem to depend on not colonizing. The England we see is modern – characters use phones and computers – but high in patriarchy and governed by Church Law, which appears to be Catholic Church Law, not Anglican. The main characters are from the aristocracy where a woman’s sole job is to produce a male heir. The story is mostly centered on Marie. However, I’ll start with her mother Charlotte. She was married to an Earl and had three daughters – Alice, Emma, and Marie. Since she hadn’t produced a son and her husband seemed to be auditioning successor wives she faked her death and disappeared. Alice was able to get a husband, though she was not beautiful and thus not a trophy, and produced three sons for him. Emma announced she was pregnant by the stable boy and thrown out and disowned. Marie married a Duke, a step up for her, but did not produce any children, son or daughter. When Marie hears her mother-in-law speak in a way that implied Marie had failed in her sole job and her son should should get rid of Marie, she fakes her death and flees, taking a few jewels and other valuables with her. Marie found Emma (who wasn’t hard to find) and learned Emma hadn’t been pregnant, she just wanted out of that life. Marie also wants to act on hints that her mother is still alive. So off they go. And they soon discover the Duke’s family is after them to drag Marie back to his manor house. The rest of the story is Emma and Marie rediscovering each other. That is mixed in with the chase. There are lots of dangers and narrow escapes as they travel across Belgium, Germany (still the Holy Roman Empire), and France. It’s a gripping story – I usually read in sessions a little longer than I usually do. And while I enjoyed the tale it was not the story I wanted it to be. I wanted a depiction of a Europe that had avoided the need to colonize. What I got was a Europe that was still very much in the mindset of the 15th century but with modern technology. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that while the Senate is refusing to pass the Save America Voting Act (which is full of voter suppression and other nonsense pushed by the nasty guy) Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas gave hints about what the next House budget will include.

Right now we are actively working on reconciliation 3.0. It’s gonna include healthcare, housing, election fraud, election integrity fraud, energy, defense, and tax portions.

I’m not sure what “tax portions” are and I’m afraid of what Republicans handling of “housing” would look like. I do know what “election fraud, election integrity fraud” means and I know “reconciliation” means crafting a budget using a process that doesn’t need Democratic votes. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy is pushing so hard on the Save Act that he’s willing to sacrifice national security. The story is convoluted so forgive me if I’m not accurate in my summary. Bill Pulte was appointed as acting Director of National Intelligence, about to take over for Tulsi Gabbard, who is leaving to care for an ailing husband. Since the Senate soundly rejected Pulte (they didn’t have to take a vote to get their point across) the nasty guy nominated Jay Clayton. Clayton’s hearings were to begin this week, but the nasty guy halted them. He wants the Senate to pass the Save Act first. The Senate doesn’t have enough Republican votes to pass it. The nasty guy also wants a vote on James McDonald, the guy who is taking the job Clayton is leaving. Also in the mix Democrats are refusing to vote for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which expired. It, once passed, allows surveillance of foreigners in the US. But refusing to vote is different than voting no, meaning FISA is stuck too. With Clayton’s nomination stuck Pulte may be able to serve as DNI anyway. But the nasty guy’s snit means national security is vulnerable. Dion Nissenbaum and Alexander Shur, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, reported the FBI is investigating the 2020 election. Agents were sent to Milwaukee to talk people who said they saw suspicious things, though suspicions are not evidence for a judge. But...

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.” ... John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention. “They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community wrote about previous Republican efforts to rig elections. In 1968 Richard Nixon learned of the deal between President Johnson and the leaders of both North and South Vietnam. Nixon reached out to the South Vietnamese leaders, promising riches, of they backed out of the deal. Nixon won and Humphrey didn’t. The war lasted another seven deadly years. Everett Dirkson, Republican leader in the Senate, called it “treason.” In 1979 during the Iranian hostage crisis, Reagan promised the new regime weapons if they held onto the hostages through the 1980 election. The hostages were released as Reagan took the oath of office. That new regime is the same one the nasty guy has been battling. In 2000 Florida governor Jeb Bush, in order to help his brother George W. was aggressive in “cleaning” voter rolls. There were estimates of between 10,000 and 70,000 black people were unable to vote. GW Bush won the state by 537 votes, and thus the presidency. In all three cases we didn’t learn of the manipulation until well after the affected election. We didn’t have a chance to protest the action. In contrast, the nasty is openly trying to rig this year’s election.

If it’s true that Trump became president in 2016, as Robert Mueller’s investigation found, because of major help from Putin, then the last legitimately elected Republican who didn’t commit or at least flirt with treason to become president was Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961). By coincidence, he was also the last Republican president to reject the influence of America’s oligarchs and instead kept the top 90% income tax rate on oligarchs and actually worked to increase union membership and expand Social Security. So, get ready. We know in advance at least some of the dirty tricks they’re going to try to pull. Musk and Zuck spinning their social media outlets; Fox, CBS, and CNN under oligarch’s thumbs; ICE disruption; seized ballots; corrupted mail; and now realistic, highly deceptive AI-generated Republican deepfakes are already appearing in the Texas senatorial election.

In a second article Hartmann expanded on what the nasty guy is doing to steal the 2026 election.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open. ... The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

The nasty guy and others have talked about such things as have ICE surround the polls to intimidate voters. Todd Blanche, formerly the nasty guy’s personal lawyer and now acting Attorney General told a conservative crowd, “[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done. A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

Blanche has reason to be worried. He knows the true nature of the nasty guy quite well. He isn’t being paranoid.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights. ... These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible.

Make sure you’re registered to vote, then actually do it. Vote by mail if you can and do it early so the Post Office can’t interfere. Tell your senators and representative how you feel. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quotes the late columnist Molly Ivins on Thursdays. Yesterday was a quote from 1995 on why Rush Limbaugh was so popular. The reason is still true.

A large segment of Limbaugh’s audience consists of white males, eighteen to thirty-four years old, without a college education. Basically, a guy I know and grew up with named Bubba. Bubba listens to Limbaugh because Limbaugh gives him someone to blame for the fact that Bubba is getting screwed. He’s working harder, getting paid less in constant dollars, and falling further and further behind. Not only is Bubba never gonna be able to buy a house, he can barely afford a trailer. Hell, he can barely afford the payments on the pickup. Limbaugh offers him scapegoats. It’s the “feminazis.” It’s the minorities. It’s the limousine liberals. It’s all these people with all these wacky social programs to help some silly, self-proclaimed bunch of victims.

Between 2010, when I started having Blogger track viewership, and October 2025 this blog received one million views, most of that in the two years before then. Now just eight months later the number of views has passed two million and is at 2,008,968. In the last 30 days there have been 32.9K views from Brazil, 17.4K from Bangladesh, 17.1K from Iraq, and 16K from the US. Surprises include 12.1K views from Saudi Arabia and 10.2K views from Tunisia. This is post 5646. I’ve spent a lot of evenings over 18 years writing this blog. Brother is coming again for a short visit, this time with his daughter and her family. So I probably won’t post again until the middle of next week.

Israel thought that Trump was a trusted partner

The nasty guy has announced an agreement with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides have already signed it. And the more we hear about it the worse it is for America. The deal opens the Strait now and puts off the big issues to be resolved over the next 60 days (don’t hold your breath). One of the possible sticking points is Israel and Lebanon. Iran says that must be part of the deal. But the nasty guy doesn’t control Netanyahu – to the point of letting loose a few expletives. Merlin196360 of the Daily Kos community discussed that Netanyahu has the ability to blow up the deal. But does he have the chutzpah to use it?

There are two parts to this Israeli fantasy. The first is that the Iranian regime could be overthrown with just airstrikes alone. The American military knew this already, but Trump and Netanyahu just proved this point. The second part of the fantasy is that Netanyahu and the Israeli public thought that Trump was a trusted partner. The only people more delusional and gullible than Netanyahu and the Israelis about Trump are MAGA cultists.

Netanyahu was not told the nasty guy is capitulating and had no input to the terms. As the details of the deal are being made public the number of Israelis who object will skyrocket. They can’t take their anger out on the nasty guy. That leave Netanyahu to receive the backlash. The Israeli leader is surely hoping someone will stop the nasty guy. We’ve already seen such a person has already been shoved out of the way. The nasty guy signed the deal while in France and at the Palace of Versailles where he had dinner with French leader Emmanuel Macron. Emily Singer of Kos reported on the news:

“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” Trump said Wednesday at a news conference in France during the G7 gathering. “But all I know is, every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship.” Trump’s comment is an accidental admission that Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz boxed him into this deal—in which Iran gets both sanctions relief and hundreds of billions to rebuild from the bombing carried out by the U.S. and Israel—because the longer the major oil passageway remained closed, the closer we got to economic collapse.

This is a wild admission from an Oval Office occupant. Iran holding the global economy hostage worked. They’ll surely do it again. “Even Republicans are saying that the deal Trump struck is itself a catastrophe.” Singer is sure Macron knew and that the nasty guy didn’t that the Palace of Versailles is where Germany signed its unconditional surrender in WWII. I just realized I’m getting conflicting information. One part says he signed the deal while at the fight on the White House South Lawn that was staged for his birthday last Sunday. This site says he signed it while in France. That’s in addition to the formal signing in Geneva in Sunday (or maybe Friday?). Kos community member chloris creator discussed who profited from the Iran war. This list isn’t complete. At the top of the list is the Military Industrial Complex. That include nasty junior and his brother. Next is insider traders, the same people who bet on various aspects of the war as it started. Oil companies raked in windfall profits. Iran is getting $300 billion in reconstruction funds plus a suspension of sanctions. It will likely start charging “tolls” or maybe “fees” for ships sailing through the Strait, even though that’s illegal under international law. China is filling in the void created by the chaos. What it is gaining is explained in a video I didn’t watch. On to the losers. Short answer: It’s the rest of us. First is paying maybe up to $90 billion in taxes to fund the military. Second is paying close to $59 billion (so far) in higher gas prices. That doesn’t include the higher prices of jet fuel. Third is American farmers facing higher fertilizer costs and export tariffs. Fourth is America’s reputation in the world. We started a war we didn’t need to, it affected the world economy, and we lost, leaving Iran stronger. Our remaining ally is Israel and the nasty guy now cusses when saying his name. Then to global losers: Inflation hit everyone. I don’t know if inflation is worse here than elsewhere. Other possible losers: Taiwan. China may be seeing the US as unable to defend Taiwan. Maybe renewable energy? See oil profits above. The disruption of oil may spur more countries to switch to renewables. Is the deal any good? The text hasn’t been released and the vice nasty is spinning it as fast as he can. That’s all you need to know. In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bobby Ghosh, writing for his Substack that some of the terms of the deal are yet to be worked out, but what is there may be enough to finish off Netanyahu.

As analysts like Danny Citrinowicz have noted, for 30 years the Netanyahu doctrine was based on the proposition that Iran was an existential threat, that only force could stop it, and that he alone could make Washington exert the necessary force. Every Israeli leader since Yitzhak Rabin feared the Iranian bomb. Netanyahu alone turned the fear into a brand. He carried a cartoon bomb to the rostrum of the United Nations. He lectured a joint session of Congress, over a sitting President’s objections, against the 2015 nuclear accord. He told Israeli voters, campaign after campaign, that he was the one man who could deliver an American President willing to finish the job. […] And the calendar is closing in on the prime minister. The Knesset has voted to dissolve itself, with an election due by late October and the ultra-Orthodox pressing for September — the same partners now drifting from Netanyahu over their sons’ exemption from the draft. The brief lift the war gave Likud is gone; the latest polling leaves his bloc around 51 seats, a long way from the 61 a majority requires. And the deal has already become a cudgel in the hands of his opponents, and some of his allies: Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman and voices inside his own camp are competing to brand it a gift to the Islamic Republic. The autumn vote will not turn on the deal’s clauses, but on the doctrine that produced them.

Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo discussed the UFC fight that took place on the South Lawn:

Overall, the evening exemplified the new flavors of American life and power. By the time the last punch landed and the blood was wiped away, the night included suspicious stiff armed salutes, transphobic insults, and fresh allegations of sexual assault as well as pitches for Silicon Valley AI, crypto, prediction markets, and the Saudi regime.

Paul Krugman, in his Substack, compared today’s billionaires with the rich men of the Gilded Age:

Members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society… Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.

In today’s roundup Kev quoted Ghosh again:

Long before the first American bomb fell on Iran this February, the US military had already fought this war dozens of times — on paper, in classified exercises, in rooms full of officers pushing markers around a map. It kept losing. Across more than two decades of these games, the script bent the same way every time: once the shooting started, Iran reached for the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, and the global economy seized. The most famous of them, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, ended with the retired general playing the Gulf adversary crippling much of the American fleet using little more than small boats, couriers on motorbikes and the element of surprise. The umpires refloated the sunken ships and ran it again.

In the comments, which I’m able to see again, there aren’t the long list of cartoons, but memes still show up. Such as this one posted by exlrrp and credited to Cameron Corduroy, though I’ve seen variations with the same text:

Renames it to the Department of War. Names himself Secretary of War. Fights one war: Loses.

The nasty guy had the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial repainted and supposedly fixed because algae had been growing so well. The fix didn’t work and the algae is worse than before. So exlrrp posted a meme of a red cap in the muck with the slogan, “Make Algae Grow Again.”

The right to move, to disobey, to reshape society

My Sunday movie was Choco Milk Shake. It’s a South Korean Boys Love story of 11 short episodes that fit into 2½ hours. I learned of this series through the Boys Love articles written by Krotor on Daily Kos. Jungwoo is a young man feeling quite sad and lonely. He works for his uncle in a coffee shop (which seems to rarely have customers – saves on hiring extras?). The uncle appears to be not much older. One day as Jungwoo is walking home two young men greet him with bright smiles. When the strangers have a chance to explain themselves they say they are the reincarnation of Jungwoo’s pet dog Choco and pet cat Milk. They were given bodies not of infants but of young men. Choco has a bright smile and follows Jungwoo around. Milk is more reserved. Both want their owner to pet them when they’ve been good (which is most of the time). Over the course of the show we learn that Jungwoo rescued Choco, which explains the devotion. Since Krotor writes about Boys Love stories one quickly wonders where this is going. Hopefully not a threesome. We are quickly shown through a blind date that Jungwoo is gay. And that Choco can be jealous. But where does that leave Milk? The acting is excellent (Krotor agrees). The story is cute and fun. I enjoyed it. If you watch be aware there is always one more scene after the episode credits roll. I finished the book The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I read the paperback edition of the book and it begins by Wengrow announcing that Graeber died three weeks after they finished writing the book. The book had taken ten years to write, first as a way to bounce ideas off each other, then in earnest once they saw they had an important story to tell. That story examines human history since the end of the Ice Age (10,000 BCE). And their central questions are: Where did inequality come from? Is a social hierarchy the natural and default human condition? Seeing that focus I thought, yep, I’m in. These are questions I’ve been exploring. So I want to hear what these guys say about it. Alas, they don’t quite answer them. That doesn’t mean reading the book was a waste – there’s a lot of good and hopeful information here. Yeah, it’s long – 525 pages with another 165 pages of notes (worth reading), bibliography, and index. And, yeah, towards the middle as they reviewed yet another society, it got to be a bit of a slog. There has been a standard way of archaeologists to understand what they saw as they excavated ancient sites. Humans progressed from hunter-gather bands, to tribes, to cities, to states. Each one is declared more advanced than the previous. Along with that was the assumption that as agriculture took hold, which made cities possible, the social complexity of a city required a social hierarchy in which administrators and eventually kings organized the work and a worker class did it. The authors used 500 pages to show that view is contradicted by the evidence. The authors examined evidence of ancient sites from around the world – North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The earliest sites were inhabited in 8,000 BCE, the latest in 1800 AD. These late ones were on the Pacific coast of North America as Europeans arrived, so they were documented directly by Europeans. Some of these places developed hierarchies. Many did not. Some developed hierarchies and later abandoned them. Over and over the authors looked over the evidence and saw previous researchers, in explaining what they found, projected the standard model as well as their own thoughts and understanding onto the evidence. A man steeped in patriarchy would project patriarchy onto an ancient society. A researcher who had been schooled in the social hierarchy would interpret findings as evidence of a social hierarchy. Places where the evidence didn’t fit that was seen as an outlier or was about to develop into a society that fit the pattern. The authors said the older researchers assumed too much. Why is this society – and that, and that – an “outlier?” Why must this place develop in this way to fit the model? Perhaps your model is wrong. A lot of this book seemed like an indictment of how archaeology had been done over the last couple of centuries. Some of the things I learned in those 500 pages: We must assume that throughout human history people were as smart as we are, even if they didn’t know all we know now. They could figure things out. In the 12,000 years since the Ice Age the standard model assumed all of the ancient cultures of a particular size did the same thing. 120 centuries is a long time for societies to try different ways of organizing themselves. That organization does not require an administrative staff. In some situations involving more people than previously believed the people are quite capable of administering and organizing themselves. The authors discussed places, one if them in Florida, where the society was hunter-gatherer, yet was ruled by a brutal king. If I remember right, the Spaniards took him out. The shift from hunting to farming didn’t happen all at once. In many societies it happened over centuries. Many times they farmed small amounts when they had good weather and hunted at other times. A big influence in the Enlightenment in Europe was native tribes of North America facing their first contact with Europeans. Jesuits learned native languages in hopes of converting the natives, but the natives were good at pushing back. The native societies were not hierarchical. Leaders could not give commands because the rest of the community refused to follow commands because that would place one person over another. Jesuits wrote about what they learned and their books became widely read (by those who could read) across Europe. Wendat chief Kandiaronk traveled extensively around Europe describing native life. The idea of a society not based on hierarchy caused a stir and lead to the American and French Revolutions. Kandiaronk was good at arguing that native life was better than the European hierarchical life, though Europeans tried to argue the reverse. One argument in Kandiaronk’s favor was that many Europeans who were raised by natives and later offered the chance to return to European style life chose to stay with the natives. The native life was more concerned with the person. European life was boring – a person had to do the same thing every day. My family is well acquainted with the story of Frances Slocum. There is a Frances Slocum State Park in Indiana. She was abducted by natives at age 5. Her siblings found her when she was in her 70s (I think). She refused to go with her siblings, saying her life was with the natives now. We has always assumed the reason was she felt she was one of them now – well, she had married a prominent member of the tribe and produced two children. This book suggests another reason – she thought the native way of life was better. So the assumption that natives would prefer the European lifestyle once they got to know it, was hubris. Europeans said they had the right to take land from the natives because natives didn’t use the land (as in farm it) and were lazy. Natives countered they managed the land, such as burning out the undergrowth in a forest or reshaping a river bottom to improve fish spawning. Also, their hunting and gathering took less time than farming so they had time to be lazy. Natives were amused by the European belief that natives had dispersed across the North and South American continents by overland routes. They said they had spread down the coasts and up the rivers. The authors talk about basic freedoms and rights. And they aren’t what we have in our Declaration of Independence. The freedoms are: (1) The right to move, to leave this community and join a different one. (2) The right to disobey an order. (3) The right to reshape their social connections, to work out a different way to manage the community. They also listed ways one person or group is able to control another. The methods are: (1) Violence. (2) controlling information. (3) Charisma. I wasn’t able to get a clear sense of whether this last one referred to individuals, such as Hitler, or to a group of people, such as a warrior or hero class. Maybe both. The authors discussed the Cahokia society centered east of St. Louis. They had extensive influence across the Mississippi watershed. After thriving for centuries the leadership turned tyrannical. The society collapsed for what appears to be a simple reason. People objected to being ruled by tyrants. They exercised their first right and moved away. (One thing I feel this book lacked is a timeline, showing when many of these cultures were active. The only thing I remember of when the Cahokia society was active was that it collapsed before Europeans arrived yet the natives were still reacting to it.) Though I feel the authors didn’t quite answer their important question. A great deal of the world today is stuck in a social hierarchy where a government or oligarchs control or oppress those under them. There are many examples in human history where the people threw off the control and oppression. Since they did it so can we. There is hope.