The moment the gavel changes hands, they are witnesses

Thursday evening I went to the Fisher Theater in Detroit to see the show Maybe Happy Ending. It won Tony Awards for Best Musical and five other categories out of ten nominations in 2025. It’s creators are South Korean and American. It’s first production was in Seoul. The story is about two HelperBots, robots that look human (and played by humans), who do domestic chores for their owners. These bots, Oliver and Claire, live in the company’s “retirement” community because they are obsolete. Oliver sings about how he loves his little room and is waiting for James, his owner, to come back and return him to service. He’s been waiting for a dozen years. Claire lives across the hall. She’s a later model but isn’t as durable and needs to use his charger because she can’t get repair parts for her own. They become friends and soon have a plan to go out and find James. Yes, the show shows robots with feelings, including eventually falling in love, and my friend and debate partner would strongly object to that. But go with it, the story makes a very good point about human emotions, including love, and solves a dilemma in a way only robots could. Which is why the happy ending is a maybe. This is pretty much a two character show. There are a few moments with other characters, such as James and his son, but they aren’t on stage for very long. And some of the characters appear only in video flashbacks, so while there are seven actors listed in the cast only four take bows at the end. I enjoyed the show. The music is pleasant, though the songs aren’t memorable. The set is memorable with screens pulling up and to the sides to reveal the active part of the stage and outline it with a border of light. We’ve seen some efforts to disrupt the midterm elections. So far the efforts have been rejected by a court or remain tied up there. But the nasty guy and his Republican minions will still keep trying. Daily Kos community member xaxnar quoted Dean Blundell of his own Substack discussing a calendar of seven steps the nasty guy plans to take to disrupt and steal the election. Blundell does not link to the source of his information (it may be leaked and not on a website). Blundell did post a graphic attributed to Brian and Ed Krassenstein, which xaxnar also included (though I won’t). The seven steps: Nov. 3 – Start declaring fraud while votes are still being counted. Immediately created doubt. Nov. 4-6 – Hold press conferences to push the allegations and highlight any voting anomalies. Make it look like a nationwide problem. Nov. 7-12 – Direct Department of Justice to investigate, subpoena voter records, threaten lawsuits to slow down the certification. Nov. 13-20 – Pressure states to not certify results, demand investigations to delay certification in close races. Nov. 21-Dec. 5 – Escalate legal battles, file lawsuits, claim voting machines were hacked, keep disputes in the news. Dec. 6-20 – Push Congress not to seat certain elected members, pressure other members to support the objections, block the new members from being seated. Up to Jan. 3 – Keep all this in the news, dispute the legitimacy of the new Congress, undermine public trust in the opposition. Blundell explained why the nasty guy is doing this:

Because losing the House is not a political problem for Trump. It is a legal one. A Democratic House means subpoena power. It means the Epstein files in their entirety, not the redacted scraps. It means the oligarchs who bought the crypto coin, the pardons, the Qatari jet, and the cabinet of cable hosts all get hauled under oath. It means the ICE contracts, the Pentagon slush, the family’s billions. Every person who has spent two years protecting him understands that the moment the gavel changes hands, they are witnesses. He is not fighting for a majority. He is fighting for his own skin and the skins of everyone standing behind him, and a man fighting for his skin will burn the house down and call it a renovation.

One way to fight this is to make the margins too big to deny. Another is to be ready for each step as it begins by having countermeasures ready to go. Kos of Kos discussed a report on Fox News that some Republicans are contemplating using a maneuver to challenge the oath of members of the Democratic Socialists of America. This oath is to uphold the Constitution and is taken by every member. The claim is that the DSA platform calls for scrapping the current US Constitution. That means they can’t swear an oath to uphold it. But the Constitution itself has articles explaining how to amend it, even calling for a convention to propose amendments. So, yeah, calling for scrapping the current one is perfectly constitutional. Thankfully, Speaker Mike Johnson said refusing to seat any Democrats is a “nonsense narrative” and the Supreme Court has previously ruled that the House can’t refuse to seat members who meet the requirements of being 25, a citizen for 7 years, and a resident of the state that elected them. Republicans are very good at performative outrage. It gets them on Fox News. Kos community member Hopeforthefuture says there might be an effort to unseat Johnson before the end of the year. A reason for that could be because of arcane rules. The only carryover from one House session to the next is the Clerk. One task is to accept the state election certification and list the new House membership. A very routine process.

However, the Clerk can, in theory, deliberately omit names from the list. For example, every new representative from the state of California. Clerks are normally elected by the full House and no normal Clerk would ever do this. However, when the House is not in session, the Speaker has the authority to dismiss the Clerk and appoint an acting Clerk. If the Speaker is Mike Johnson, there’s certainly a chance he would dismiss the current Clerk during the Christmas recess and appoint some corrupt, craven toady who would. I think this is exactly why the DOJ presented California with the illegal and impossible demand to disenfranchise 20,000 voters. They knew how California’s leaders would react, and they knew they could use that as a pretext for not seating California’s newly elected representatives.

Replacing Johnson with someone loyal to the Constitution could stop that effort. Am I chasing conspiracies? We’ll see. I’d be happy if this was wrong. Kos of Kos discussed a Gallup survey about which values Americans thought the country needed most. All Americans: Honesty (34%), responsibility (32%), integrity (31%), equality (29%), and fairness (26%). Democrats: Equality (44%), fairness (34%), honesty (32%), integrity (29%), and kindness (25%). Republicans: Patriotism (46%), responsibility (41%), honesty (38%), integrity (33%), respect (28%). Democrats put patriotism at 6%, independents at 15%. Kos questions Republicans about their honesty. They elected the nasty guy twice and an Economist/YouGov poll in September found of registered voters 53% described him as corrupt, 51% as dangerous, and 46% as cruel. And of Republicans 10% described him as corrupt, 49% as honest, and 41% as cruel. That doesn’t sound like they value honesty.

In a late September YouGov poll, just 26% of Republicans said Trump had “set a high moral standard.” That’s such a low bar for the president of the United States to meet, yet his own supporters couldn’t give it to him. So what happens when Republicans claim to value honesty, integrity, and responsibility, yet won’t hold their own president to those standards? What happens when their political loyalties matter more than the principles they insist America needs?

They won’t admit the nasty guy is a mistake. But what about the next guy? Such as the vice nasty. Or any of the Republicans currently in office. At least Republicans believe values exist and they say honesty and integrity are important. But they aren’t living by those values. They don’t influence what they’ll sacrifice for or condemn. They aren’t committed to the values they claim are important. Emily Singer of Kos reported last Monday that news outlet Puck reported that Sen. Marsha Blackburn is running to be governor of Tennessee. If she gets the job Pete Hegseth wants her to appoint him to fill her vacancy in the Senate. His reasons for his request (which he has not confirmed): It will help him launch a bid to be president. It also would avoid being impeached and removed, or perhaps fired, from his job at the Pentagon. The House is already working on articles of impeachment to be voted on after the midterms. Being impeached would stain his chance to run for president. If impeachment and trial happen it puts Republicans in a bind, whether to vote to keep the guy who goaded the nasty guy into war with Iran that is damaging the global economy. For that reason Blackburn could decide there are much better people to appoint to the Senate. Lisa Needham of Kos discussed the state of those articles of impeachment in the House. Kos discussed Obama on the campaign trail, rallying for Democrats in tight races. In Cleveland he packed a 10,000 seat venue for Amy Acton, running for governor. Kos included clips supplied by Aaron Rupar and HQNews. Some of Obama’s lines:

Remember draining the swamp? The only thing they drained was the reflecting pool after a no bid contract, and they messed it up. When I was president, all these Republicans are all deficits, deficits, debt, debt. You got to do something about it. And now—$40 trillion—Crickets. Somehow deficits only matter when a Democratic president is in office. Trump should be on HGTV. He's building a ballroom, paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn, and what's up with the gold? He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory!

Sheesh, that last one. Stirred up a storm. I’ve eaten at a Cheesecake Factory once and was with Sister and Niece. Sister said her food was bland and returning was not worth it. I agreed. Kos wrote that a CF restaurant is indeed gaudy and over-the-top. It looks like “several ancient civilizations collided with a Las Vegas casino.” Which for CF is the point. It’s glorious excess is its charm (according to Kos). But the White House should have dignity. Ah, conservatives hyperventilated over the Cheesecake Factory and how elitist Obama must be. Kos provided several examples. Nate Silver called these people “performative humorless scolds.” The contrast between Obama and the nasty guy is a good reason for Republicans to “spend their weekend pretending to be offended by a Cheesecake Factory joke than talking about what Obama actually said.” Kos continued the discussion in a second post:

During the Obama years, conservatives could manufacture outrage and largely control the ensuing narrative. These days, liberals have the platforms and reach to turn that outrage right back on them, making the performative freakout itself the object of ridicule.

Such as this tweet from John Couger Colleencamp:

The right: “The left can’t take a joke!” Obama: makes a joke The right: starts a brand new culture war over…The Cheesecake Factory

And a tweet by Stephen Moran showing the nasty guy in a gilded room squirting ketchup on a steak while...

Saddam Hussein: I like what you’ve done with the place! Liberace: Me too!

A tweet from The Viscount:

The entire right wing media apparatus taking up pistols at 40 paces to defend the honor of the Cheesecake Factory is exactly how I want to close out the election cycle. Thank you all for this.

And in a third post Kos shows Obama’s reaction to the uproar, given in Atlanta while helping Sen. Jon Ossoff and Keisha Lance Bottoms, running for governor. Kos included a full transcript of his remarks. Here’s part of it:

I accused this administration, based on the facts, that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. They didn’t say anything about that. The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him! But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the artisans in the White House. And they mobilized—this was, I mean it’s all crazy, but this is the really crazy part—they mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke. Not to inflation, but to that joke! ... To everybody out there, including the press, I want you to understand this. This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems. So they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory. That’s the game they’ve been playing for the last two years.

Point toward goodness, toward democracy, and toward hope

Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the primary election in California. The election day is a week ago and only this week were many races called. When a large number of people vote by mail and only have to get the ballot to the post office by election day, counting will take a while. And, of course, that gives an excuse for the nasty guy and Republicans to cry fraud. A prime example is the primary for mayor of Los Angeles. As at the state level, all candidates are on one ballot. The two who get the most votes, no matter the party, go on to the November ballot. This story is about Spencer Pratt, Republican. He wasn’t all that qualified for the job, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Republicans. His campaign ads featured conspiracy theories. He came in second in early tabulation, but fell behind as mail ballots were counted. In Los Angeles the nasty guy got 26% of the vote in 2024. He would get a lot fewer votes now. There was no way Pratt would become mayor.

But now that their dreams of capturing control of LA are likely dead, Republicans have resorted to spreading baseless and dangerous voter-fraud lies to explain away their defeat, rather than admit that running a right-wing, reality-TV freak in dark blue Los Angeles was a bad choice. The lies about voter fraud come both from right-wing personalities and social media accounts that profit off lying to Republican voters, as well as from elected officials who know better but need to pander to their easily duped base of MAGA morons.

In a second post Singer continued the story.

But rather than accept that a conspiratorial, pro-MAGA grifter was not a good fit for the overwhelmingly Democratic city, President Donald Trump and other GOP lawmakers baselessly cried fraud—the same strategy they’re likely to employ when they lose in the midterms.

Singer then listed the many Republicans who claimed fraud, starting with the nasty guy. From the end of the article:

For now, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said that he and fellow Democrats have made it a crime to interfere with elections by lying about voter fraud. “Trump says voter fraud should land people in prison. Agreed. And let’s start with the politicians spreading election lies with the goal of illegally interfering with counting ballots,” Newsom wrote on X. “In California, I just signed a law making that punishable with up to 3 years behind bars. More to come. FAFO, Donald.” But given that Trump acts with impunity, and the Supreme Court he packed with right-wing hacks basically lets him do whatever he wants, that threat is unlikely to make any difference.

Leila Fadel of NPR reported that California Attorney General Rob Bonta is responding to the Republican claims by pushing against claims of fraud and promoting transparency. He explained the process and why the tally takes so long. And in in LA County there is a livestream of the counting.

"The best counter to misinformation and disinformation is calling it out, confronting it, providing the facts that show that it's demonstrably false," he said. "So I immediately went to my own platforms to share how Trump is lying. The facts rebut everything and contradict everything that he said, and it's important that he be called out for it, because it's wrong and it's not true." "I'm worried about what he might do. Will he deploy the military? Will he deploy ICE to the polls? Will he interfere with the U.S. Postal Service in the November election, and the vote-by-mail ballots that move through the U.S. Postal Service?" he said. "All those things are possible, and they rest on this lie, this fabrication that there's widespread voter fraud," Bonta added.

A White House spokesperson said a lot of people share the concern of fraud, but offered no evidence there had been any. Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about the best political nonfiction books released so far in 2026. I haven’t read any of them (and I’m trying to shift my reading to more enjoyable novels). I’ll list a few of them to show a sense of what authors want to call attention to. Eric Lichtblau: “American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate” Lichtblau’s book about the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein by a former high school classmate who targeted Bernstein because he was gay and Jewish traces a neo-Nazi history that is uniquely American. Danny Funt: “Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling” Heather Ann Thompson: “Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage” In December 1984, Bernie Goetz shot four unarmed Black teenagers in a New York City subway car after one teen asked Goetz how he was doing and then asked for $5. Goetz said he believed they were about to mug him, and he carried a pistol—illegally—because he had been mugged before. For Thompson, Goetz is a way to unpack the Reagan-era retreat from the civil rights advances of the preceding decades. Nicholas Enrich: “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID” If you feel like you already know how brutally immoral the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development was, you’re wrong. Enrich spent over a decade at the agency and was the director of policy, programming, and planning at USAID’s Bureau for Global Health when Trump returned to office, giving him a front-row seat to unprecedented, unimaginable cruelty. Commenters listed several more books. In Monday’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted Lawrence Winnerman of Blue Amp:

The word we were given was cloud. It is one of the most effective pieces of marketing in the history of technology, because it tells you the thing is weightless, floating, somewhere up there and nowhere in particular—a place your photos live, made of nothing, costing nothing, sitting on no one. Ask Beverly and Jeff Morris what the cloud weighs. They live in Newton County, Georgia, in the kind of rural country people from the cities drive through without seeing. In 2018, Meta broke ground on a data center about a thousand feet from their home. Within months, the Morrises’ well—the private well their household actually drinks from—began to fail. Sediment in the water. The dishwasher, the ice maker, the washing machine, the toilet, all faltering. They have spent roughly $5,000 trying to fix it and can’t afford the $25,000 it would take to replace the well. Meta commissioned a study and concluded its data center was “unlikely” to have affected their groundwater. Three of the Morrises’ neighbors have reported well trouble since the data center went in. The cloud, it turns out, has to land somewhere. It landed on them.

In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Bobby Ghosh, writing in his Substack about that useless war.

The humiliation is not in the events of a single bad evening, it is in the design of the thing. Tehran has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a precondition for any deal with Washington. Israel, insisting its Lebanese campaign falls outside the truce, keeps hitting Hezbollah whenever it suits. Each sortie over Beirut blows up the diplomacy elsewhere. The Houthis, never wanting for an excuse, have warned they will go after Israeli ships in the Red Sea. So the timetable for ending Trump’s war is set not in the Oval Office but in an Israeli targeting cell, an Iranian command bunker and a Yemeni hillside — none of which answers to the White House. Tehran grasps this more clearly than anyone, which is why it is in no rush. As Brett McGurk argues, Trump’s options have narrowed to three: endure the economic pain, concede on Iran’s terms, or fight the wider war he swore to avoid. The Iranian regime is employing the oldest move in its book, which is to hold what the adversary wants — and wait. It is holding the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran now says will reopen only under its own conditions, transit toll included. […] The IDF’s resumption of attacks in Lebanon, after the briefest of pauses, gave Iran the opportunity to test that leverage — hence its Sunday missile barrage. That led to the astonishing situation where an American President publicly sought to protect the Islamic Republic from retaliation by Israel. In nearly three decades of covering the Middle East, that is a sentence I never could have imagined writing. It would have amused and pleased the Iranian leadership in equal measure.

Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate:

By most measures, the United States still hoists plenty of power on the global stage. It possesses the most lethal and far-flung military; it controls the leading currency; its leaders’ words and deeds are more closely observed and analyzed than those of any other leaders. But Trump has proved remarkably inept at brandishing this power. He seems to believe that he can rule the world through crude threats and assertions of unilateral dominance, that (to use Mao Zedong’s phrase) power grows out of the barrel of a gun. And so when this formula fails—when he backpedals from his threats, when his bark carries no bite, when relentless volleys of firepower destroy targets but fall short of accomplishing political aims (because he mistakenly thinks that the former automatically yields the latter)—then the rest of the world, friends and foes, start to take his (and, therefore, America’s) threats and assurances less seriously. They start going their own way, and try setting security arrangements and supply chains that avoid U.S. control. In other words, Trump’s misunderstandings and abuses of power in the short run are sparking a recalculation of power balances in the long run.

Alix Breeden of Kos poses the question, “Can there really be a Turning Point USA of the left?” Turning Point USA is the highly successful conservative movement started by Charlie Kirk, assassinated last September. There are also several popular conservative podcasters, notably Joe Rogan. Liberals have long wondered and hoped for a liberal equivalent of either of those. And now perhaps there is. William He started Dream for America when he was 16. He is now 19 and a student at the University of Texas – Kirk was about the same age when he started Turning Point. He was interviewed by Breeden. Here’s a bit of what he said. Dream for America has chapters on 50 campuses and another 600 schools wanting to join. Two thirds of the chapters are in red or swing states. Those 600 schools are waiting because DFA doesn’t have enough staff – they’re all college student volunteers facing burn-out. DFA will have a conversation with anyone, just to get the ideas out.

It’s not about trying to clip farm people. It’s more so about trying to really have conversations and point toward people, toward goodness, toward democracy, and toward hope. There’s a great quote that I always love: “There are two types of leaders: those that bring people down to the lowest common denominator,” which is what I think a lot of the right does. “And then there are those who uplift and bring out the best in people,” and that’s what I want to do—bring out the best in our young people, bring out the goodness in all of our young people, and really get our young people to believe in democracy again, and hopefully to believe in this country again one day too.

Zain tweeted:

A friend of mine has two tickets for game 4 of the nba finals. They are courtside seats plus airfare and hotel accommodations. He didn't realize when he bought them that this is the same day as his wedding - so he can't go. If you're interested and want to go instead of him, it's at St. Peter's Church in New York City at 5 PM. Her name is Donna. She will be the one in the white dress.

The illusion that their fortunes are entirely their own

Last week Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported on the chaos the Supreme Court created by releasing its decision that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part that bans gerrymandering based on race. In Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry postponed primary elections until after that legislature redraws maps, even though early voting begins in ten days. Mass voter confusion will result. In Alabama they’re ready to redraw maps, but their case before the Supremes back in 2023, which the state lost because of Section 2, requires them to keep their existing maps until 2030. They’re trying to get that little provision removed. I’ve heard Tennessee has passed a new map destroying black majority districts around Memphis. Emily Singer of Kos reported in Florida, which just approved new maps that give Republicans a more seats, a lawsuit has been filed saying the maps were drawn for partisan advantage, which is illegal according to a state constitution amendment passed in 2010 with 63% of the vote. We know the maps were drawn for partisan advantage because important people said exactly that. Jason Poreda, the guy who drew the new districts, admitted such during a hearing. Fox News presented the map by coloring the new districts red and blue. The new districts were drawn using the standard gerrymandering principles. Tampa was divided into three districts so that the Democrats in the city are much fewer than the Republicans in the surrounding rural areas. David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing this opinion was written by Justice Jim Crow while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson looks on. In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing the gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court.

What the Roberts Court is making possible is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

David Shuster of Blue Amp media:

California’s billionaires are freaking out. Like most other obscenely wealthy Americans in this Trump era, the plutocrats have been bloated with paper wealth, fortified by legions of accountants, and possess a moral philosophy that rarely extends beyond their own reflection. They hold to the illusion that their fortunes are entirely their own. But, more than 1.5 million California voters have a different view and have now signed a petition pushing forward a ballot initiative that would impose a billionaire tax. The California proposal is disarmingly simple: If voters approve the initiative this November, the state will impose a one-time levy of roughly 5 percent on the swollen fortunes of those whose wealth has passed the billion-dollar mark. The proceeds will be directed largely towards health care, food assistance, and the assorted necessities of a functioning civilization.

See below for more on taxing the rich. In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Jermaine Fowler of his “The Humanity Archive” Substack discussing the bankruptcy of Spirit Airlines.

Spirit carried the people the legacy carriers did not want. Working class. Disproportionately Black, Latino, and immigrant. The fees, the seats, the mockery were the visible signs of the sorting. […] The hubs tell the story. Fort Lauderdale. San Juan. Detroit. Atlantic City. The Caribbean. Latin America. Spanish at the customer service line since 2001, the year of the San Juan route. The carrier the legacy airlines mocked was the one that flew the diaspora home. Thirty-seven percent of American households earning under fifty thousand dollars flew at all in the past five years. Seventy-three percent of households earning over fifty thousand did. Take the floor away and the slice that depended on it does not move up. It stops flying.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted David Daley and Eric J Segall of The Guardian:

The court has essentially ruled that unless a legislator records a confession of their own bigotry, the map is constitutional – making the only person allowed to define a racist act the person committing it. Congress understood the absurdity of this in 1982, which is why legislators wrote an effects-based standard into the law. Discrimination does not announce itself. The intent standard is the cloak of the coward. Roberts sealed the trap years ago: in Rucho v Common Cause, he ruled that partisan gerrymandering is beyond federal review. Now, any map that dilutes Black voting power hides behind partisan strategy, and the courts cannot touch it. The court has achieved something more perverse still: drawing districts to protect Black voters is itself the racial discrimination. Erasing them is not.

Dan Pfeiffer of The Message Box on why the press is harder on Democrats than Republicans.

For the press, the story of Trump and his family being corrupt is old news. The New York Times and others still do deep investigative pieces uncovering the corruption, but those stories rarely make it into the daily coverage of the Trump administration. Trump, Karoline Leavitt, and other Trump surrogates are rarely pushed to answer tough questions about it, and when they are, they just feign outrage and never engage with the substance. The second reason is that the press holds Democrats to a higher standard. This has always been sort of true, but it’s been particularly true in the Trump era. Reporters think Democratic voters care about whether their leaders are corrupt and Republican voters don’t. Therefore, a Democratic scandal could have bigger political implications, while a Republican scandal dies on the vine. Third, most of the media is VERY sensitive to accusations that they are biased against Republicans. This is less true than it used to be, but most reporters are personally liberal on issues like abortion, guns, and climate. Some end up overcompensating by being tougher on Democrats.

In today’s roundup Kev quoted Gaby Goldstein of Talking Points Memo discussing the ruling that did the gutting, known as Louisiana v. Callais:

The conservative strategy for consolidating state-level power has never been a secret. In March 2010, Karl Rove penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed literally titled “The GOP Targets State Legislatures.” The sub-head: “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.” The piece laid out the whole playbook for Project REDMAP: by flipping a few handfuls of state legislative seats in the 2010 midterms, Republicans could redraw congressional and state legislative maps for a generation. Democrats either did not believe them or had nothing to counter it. That year, Republicans gained control of 11 additional state legislatures and ran the table on redistricting. Today, they hold 23 trifectas — a net loss of just two in 15 years. But REDMAP was only one part of a larger architecture. The deeper strategy has three moves. First, build and solidify power in state legislatures. Second, strip away federal protections — through the courts, and by dismantling federal regulations, funding, and programs. Third, devolve that authority to the states where you’ve already built structural advantages through gerrymandering, voter suppression and long-term policy infrastructure. The linchpin of the whole operation is control of state legislatures.

Alphonso David of The Contrarian:

But there is also a simpler economic truth: voter suppression has a price. When districts are manipulated and voting becomes harder, people pay by driving farther and spending more on gas or transit to vote. For working people, especially hourly workers and parents without flexible schedules or support systems, voter suppression leads to increased childcare costs or missing a shift to vote. The cruelty of it all is that voters are being asked to absorb those costs when they’re already living paycheck to paycheck in a system attempting to further dilute their political power. That is the math of modern voter suppression: make voting more expensive while making each vote feel less powerful. ... A 2019 study on Black disenfranchisement and taxation in the South found that after literacy-test requirements were introduced, counties with larger Black populations saw a nearly 5.4% decline in real per-person tax receipts. Put simply, when Black people were pushed out of the electorate, local governments collected and invested less money to serve Black communities. That meant fewer resources for schools, weaker public services, and less support for the very communities whose political power had been stripped away. The result is a double economic penalty: you make less money, and then your community gets less support from the government meant to serve you.

Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine hosts an Ask Bolts column where readers can ask a question and a couple experts will answer them. The column for May 5 was about the Calais decision with Kareem Crayton and Justin Levitt providing the answers. I didn’t read the whole article, jumping to the section on what are possible remedies. Here are part of the answers. Crayton noted we haven’t explored all of the 14th Amendment. The second provision is the Penalty Clause, which says that if a state denies or curtails voting rights Congress can penalize it with a reduction of Congressional representation. It has never been used. Crayton also said, “We’re not going to get better from this court, I don’t think. I think they’ve shown us who they are.” Levitt discussed what Congress can do. It still has some things it can do.

There are ways to insulate congressional bills from judicial review. There are ways to insulate current bills from review by the Supreme Court. There are ways to craft remedies that rely on things like the 14th Amendment’s second section or on the Guarantee Clause (which guarantees “a republican form of government” for all states in the union). There are ways to craft remedies that do things other than what the court has forbidden in Callais, including relaxing the assumption that the remedy has to be single-member districts. By the way, other remedies are already available under the VRA: There was a Federal Voting Rights Act claim resolved using proportional representation in Eastpointe, Michigan. But I’ll say it’s going to take a really strong push by the public to get a Congress that’s willing to reform voting rights in this way. And while we’re there, there’s an awful lot that could be done on court reform. If there is a strong enough prodemocracy movement to change Congress’s orientation, that means there is a strong enough prodemocracy movement to change the court’s orientation.

Crayton again:

Our mission is to do the “citizen work” (organizing, speaking up, and voting) without distractions. What are the distractions? They include the voices that say you must accept second class citizenship when the constitution guarantees you first-class. And it also means ignoring and sometimes pushing back on friendly voices stuck on dismay and disorder. Things are bad, but they don’t have to be if we use the power we each have to demand change.

Kevin Hardy, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the growing effort to tax the rich. Maine recently passed a bill to add a 2% tax to those with an income more than $1 million a year. Maine joins Washsington, New Jersey, and Massachusetts that have passed such laws. A dozen states, including Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Virginia have proposed new taxes. In California advocates gathered enough signatures to put a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. Proponents say these bills make the tax structure, already tilted against the poor, more fair. Opponents fear taxes on business owners will dissuade starting new companies (yep, again trotting out the smallest companies to protect the greediness of the biggest). There is also the claim that taxing the rich more will prompt them to move to a state with lower taxes. But data doesn’t show that happening. Taxing the rich in liberal states comes as conservative states are making their tax systems more regressive, placing more tax burdens on the poor. Both efforts come as the wealth gap has been getting wider for decades and made worse by last summer’s Big Brutal Bill.

The gap between the rich and poor has been widening for decades. Wealth for the bottom fifth of American households has barely moved in recent decades, while the top 0.1% have seen their wealth increase by nearly $40 million each, according to an analysis by the anti-poverty nonprofit Oxfam America. Between 1980 and 2022, the share of national income going to the top 1% doubled, while the share going to the bottom 50% fell by a third, Oxfam reported.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit started a post with:

Nikita Khrushchev famously said “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim”) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized.

Hartmann listed several ways that this is happening. The nasty guy announced pulling 5,000 troops from Germany, harming NATO. He ended sanctions on Russian oil, giving Putin billions in revenue. Robert Kennedy is undermining trust in vaccines and disease prevention, making us more vulnerable. Pete Hegseth is purging senior career leadership of the military. DOGE hollowed out federal institutional expertise. Musk ended USAID, allowing China and Russia to secure natural resources and military outposts. Voice of America broadcasts propaganda, weakening America’s advocacy of democracy. ICE and Stephen Miller are gutting the asylum system, straining courts, devastating tourism, and destroying our reputation. Russel Vought concentrated the budget in the nasty guy’s hands, overriding Congress. The FBI has been weaponized and purged, as has the Department of Justice. The Department of Education is being vandalized, cutting school and student protections. A climate denier runs the Department of Energy and another runs the National Park Service. The Transportation Department is loosening safety regulations The Treasury Department pushes for financial concentration and deregulation. The Commerce Department is pushing tariffs and trade decisions, straining trade relationships and exploding inflation. Witkoff and Kushner have screwed up negotiations with Iran. The Department of Agriculture favors agribusiness over family farms while stripping food stamps and school meals. The Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back regulations for Big Oil billionaires. Housing and Urban Development is dropping programs for poor families. The intelligence agencies have politicized their analysis and sidelined career analysts. The State Department has hollowed out diplomatic staff, allowing Russia and China to set the agenda.

This list is an operational blueprint, the kind of document a hostile foreign intelligence service might draw up if it had been handed unlimited access to the executive branch and told to dismantle the American republic from inside without firing a single shot: — Hollow out the public health system so disease can do its work, — Demoralize the officer corps and burn through munitions in unconstitutional wars, — Terminate the diplomats and intelligence professionals who keep allies aligned, — Replace independent journalism with state propaganda at Voice of America, — Defund the agencies Congress created, — Abandon the clean energy transition that would have weakened OPEC and Russia simultaneously, — Politicize the FBI and DOJ so they target dissenters instead of crooks, and — Turn armed, masked ICE thugs loose to terrorize immigrant communities while training the rest of us to accept anonymous federal agents disappearing our neighbors into massive concentration camps. Every line item that would appear on such a plan has been checked off in the last 14 months, executed by a cabinet of grifters, ideologues, and 13 billionaires whose loyalty runs to Trump and the morbidly rich rather than to the nation whose Constitution they swore an oath to defend. ... [Khrushchev] may have been right about something deeper than ideology: a great power can absolutely be killed from the inside by people who pretend to govern while methodically removing every load-bearing wall in the structure just to enrich themselves.

This will end with “ordinary Americans deciding we’ve finally had enough.”

Khrushchev never managed to bury us. Let’s make damn sure Trump, Putin, and America’s rightwing billionaires don’t either.

Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series of Explaining the Right, discussed the conservative media bubble.

The point of this fake world is to keep conservative-leaning voters in a state of constant agitation, fuming about the supposed excesses of the left while being fed a steady diet of lies about right-wing leaders, both elected and cultural, fighting against these forces. ... But this isn’t reality for millions of people. Despite the success of right-wing media outlets, they haven’t fooled everyone yet.

To that last point note since Fox News launched in 1996 Democrats won presidential elections in 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020 and won the popular vote in 2000 and 2016. There have also been several times Democrats held majorities in at least one house of Congress. Which is the reason for the current gerrymandering drive. That conservative media bubble is vulnerable when voters can see for themselves there is a disconnect, which can prompt voters to vote for Democrats.

Destroying democracy by saying they protect citizens

Daily Kos community member LaFeminista has a few thoughts about the promises of AI. From an article in Le Monde:

“It will not all go well. The fear and anxiety about AI is justified; we are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.” S. Altman

Sam Altman has been the CEO of OpenAI since 2019, according to Wikipedia. LaFeminista wrote:

The amount of resources being thrown at basic AI is truly frightening, but worry not, AI will solve all the environmental damage done, it’ll solve most everything. Why stop at basic AI? Where is the gain in that mere bagatelle? The amassing of these colossal fortunes demands more, ever more. The race for Artificial Superintelligence and Artificial General Intelligence is on, the Prize for being first? Everything, it is the ultimate win. Ignore the damage! Perhaps not, methinks, but what do I know next to these titans of AI?

Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about an ongoing event, a major piece happened last Tuesday and I’m glad I missed it. This major piece is the nasty guy reading from the Bible while in the Oval Office. Noting like smearing the separation of church and state.

He’s not going to read it silently as a humble expression of faith, of course. That would be silly. This latest incursion into the separation of church and state comes courtesy of this grifty little America Reads the Bible production, where the world’s most ostentatiously Christian of Christian nationalist types in and out of government are reading you parts of the Bible over the course of a full week.

The other participants will be at the Museum of the Bible. And I’ll be happy to miss those too. I’m sure they will find the passages about war and ignore the ones where Jesus said love your enemy and feed the poor. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, discussed the latest book by Ibram X. Kendi. His book Stamped From the Beginning has been on my to-read shelf for at least a couple years. His bestselling book is How to Be an Antiracist, which became “a cultural touchstone” and a handbook for Americans “confronted with the depth and persistence of the nation’s history of antiblackness.” His newest book is Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, discussing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory and its significance in the rise of fascism. Wrote Kaplan:

Kendi defines the Great Replacement Theory as the belief that global elites are enabling people of color to displace the lives, livelihoods and electoral power of white people.

Kendi is a professor, a scholar of racism, and a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient. He’s also attracted the fury of the MAGA movement, always a good recommendation. When attacked he responds as a scholar – doing research and writing a book. GRT has been around in various forms for a long time. This version...

was coined by French novelist Renaud Camus in 2010, when he became convinced that Muslim immigrants from former colonies were overtaking the white population of France and its traditions. GRT warns that Muslims and people of color, whether immigrants or citizens, are literally replacing white Christians and traditional European culture, and must be stopped.

GRT isn’t just racism. It claims that social justice movements are acts of “white genocide.” It’s a zero-sum view of the world. It declares Democracy and multiculturalism are threats to whiteness and cannot be tolerated. It should sound absurd. But it is promoted by Elon Musk, Viktor Orbán of Hungary (now out of power), far-right parties in France, and the nasty guy. GRT makes a distinction between a “good” immigrant who came in the past and a “bad” immigrant who came recently. The “good” came legally and assimilated. The “bad” came illegally and they’re destroying the nation. Black Americans, many who have been here for more generations than many white people are also declared to be “bad” based on comments by people like Thomas Jefferson who believed slaves should be freed, but could not live among white people and should be sent back to Africa. GRT and its zero-sum thinking also infects other populations. Black people believe they are being replaced by Latinos. Black Christians believe they are being replaced by Muslims. Black people may be below white, but they can be higher than black immigrants who fear being nabbed by ICE. GRT is insidious because it “causes people to consent to dictatorial states.” Some people choose the protection of privilege over democracy. That’s why authoritarians push it. They can justify destroying democratic infrastructure by saying they are protecting the citizens. GRT is a problem for black people because they’ve fought for democracy for hundreds of years. Kendi says that’s why they need to understand GRT.

There is nonetheless a hopeful cast to Kendi’s latest work, centered on his belief that “human groups are natural allies against inequities,” and that coming together is more instinctual than sowing division.

A week ago Jessica Huseman, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, reported that Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, California, also Republican candidate for governor, seized the ballots from a recent election. His reason is to do his own recount and open a criminal investigation into the election. The California Supreme Court ordered a halt to his investigation. There isn’t any more reason for this Republican to seize ballots than for any other Republican to dispute any election in a decade.

Elections in the U.S. are run locally. So is law enforcement. That overlap creates a real vulnerability. The same county responsible for storing and counting ballots is also overseen by a sheriff who can get a warrant, enter election facilities, and take materials as part of a criminal investigation. In contrast, federal authorities seeking to obtain election materials have to establish jurisdiction and work through multiple layers of oversight. A local sheriff can act much more quickly, often before state officials or courts have time to respond.

Thankfully, in California the state attorney general has some authority over local law enforcement and was able to tell Bianco to halt his investigation. This may have been before the Supreme Court could act.

Lots of things make Riverside a special case. Chiefly, Bianco’s candidacy for governor raises an obvious question of self-interest — he may be using the powers of his office to elevate a political issue that he thinks will benefit him as a candidate. He is also stepping into the administration of the same election system he wants to compete in — a personal conflict many have long complained about in relation to secretaries of state who run for office during their tenures.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing Virginia’s vote to approve gerrymandering the state to give Democrats a bigger advantage.

What Virginia Democrats did by redrawing the congressional maps was antidemocratic, and it should be illegal. But, for those who care about ensuring the future of democracy, it was the least bad option of those available. As the political scientist Seth Masket wrote last year, Democrats couldn’t force the Republican Party to “feel more reverent toward institutions and norms”; they could only “raise the costs of irreverence. In the long run, that’s the most effective tool available.”

Thomas Edsall of the New York Times asked Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author of The Right-Wing Idea Factory: From Traditionalism to Trumpism, how consequential the nasty guy’s time in the Oval Office has been. The choice of “consequential” isn’t about how much the guy benefited the country, but how long his actions will endure. Edsall wrote of Kettl:

On this measure he placed Trump in the Top 5 of American presidents, alongside George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, noting, however, that “Trump’s consequences have been aggressive efforts to unravel the ideas of the other four presidents.”

A decision maker seduced by previous military successes

My Sunday movie was A Nice Indian Boy. The story centers on Naveen, a young gay man who is a doctor. He’s rather timid. He’s also annoyed that at his sister’s wedding everyone tells him, “You’re next.” A few years later Naveen meets Jay (played by Jonathan Groff). He’s white though adopted by Indian parents so knows the culture – somewhat. They seem to fall in love quickly. This is a romance story and follows the formula. The difficulty here is when Naveen finally gets the courage to take Jay to meet his sister and parents things don’t go well, more from misunderstanding than homophobia. The second difficulty was how to fit a gay couple into a traditional Indian wedding. I enjoyed it. Nearly all of the threads of the story conclude in the way one would want. The movie has a bunch of award nominations and a few wins. Zarna Garg plays Naveen’s mother. She is an Indian American comedian. Back in mid February she was interviewed for Pridesource by Chris Azzopardi. She talked about being an ally and working to tell other parents they need to support their queer kids, well, queer people in general. As part of the interview Garg said that her friends who are gay have the highest EQ of the people she knows. I had to verify what that means – Emotional Quotient or Emotional Intelligence, the ability to recognize the emotions in themselves and others to guide thinking and behavior. Garg says she’s used to the “brown guys” who avoid emotional friction and was startled when the gays around her are so empathetic. She also tells the story of her sister, who became an ally because of the movie. The family lived in Ohio after they came from India. The sister booked theaters across Ohio, telling Indians they have an obligation to see the movie. There is no excuse, it’s all paid for. I finished the book My Government Means to Kill Me, a novel by Rasheed Newson. The story isn’t as dire as the title might sound. The phrase comes from something many LGBTQ people, especially black gay men, figure out about their interactions with the government. The story is about Trey, called that because his full name includes “III” and he’s trying to distance himself from his family. He’s black and gay. He grew up in Indianapolis in a house big enough his parents named it. In 1986 at 17 he flees to New York City, rejecting the family wealth. At first, this reads like a biography instead of a novel. But then one notices the little differences between the story and history. Trey is mentored by Bayard Rustin, the gay assistant to Martin Luther King who did a lot of work to organize the 1963 March on Washington. They meet and do most of their talking at a gay bath house and a footnote tells us there is no evidence that Rustin ever visited a bath house. That bath house is where Trey finds his community (and a whole lot of sex). Through the rest of the book there are another 80 footnotes explaining the gay cultural significance of historical people, places, and songs that Trey and others meet or mention. This is Trey’s coming of age story, including how he becomes an activist. He becomes a volunteer for Gay Men’s Health Crisis (this is the AIDS era) an early member of ACT UP, founded by Larry Kramer. One of his early actions is to tangle with Fred Trump (yes, that Fred Trump), the racist slumlord who hid behind interlocking corporations. Each chapter’s title is a lesson he as an activist needs to learn, such as: “Devils Have a Weakness.” “Allies Don’t Always Harmonize.” “The Best Spontaneous Moments are Planned,” which is about the work that was done before Larry Kramer’s famous “last minute” speech that prompted the creation of ACT UP. I enjoyed the story and recommend it as a look into the history of gay activism in the AIDS era in NYC. Though there was a lot of the story I already knew there were a few things I didn’t. Reading about a participant in this era, even if a fictional one, leads to a greater understanding of what they went through. Yes, Trey spends a lot of time in a bath house engaging in sex during the AIDS era. He speculates the reason why it was allowed to stay open is because the clientele was mostly black. The news this morning was that there is a two week ceasefire between US/Israel and Iran and that the Strait of Hormuz is open. The news this evening was the Strait was closed again and Israel is still firing on Lebanon, because Israel claimed that Hezbollah wasn’t part of the deal. Check news again in the morning. Ilan Goldenberg tweeted:

I am thankful that we have a ceasefire. It happened much faster than I expected and it was the right move. But let’s be clear that this war ends (if the ceasefire holds) as a total strategic disaster. The scorecard: Nukes: Iran still has the HEU [Highly Enriched Uranium] Proxies: no change or impact Missile and drones: Iran demonstrated its arsenal is sustainable and survivable under massive US and Israeli pressure. Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s leverage to use it as a bargaining chip has dramatically increased.

There is more, some of which I’ll summarize: + The son of the Supreme Leader has the job and is likely stronger. + US Gulf allies screwed, relations with Europe strained. + Israel is more isolated and no more secure. + Global economy: major damage. In a previous post I mentioned that the nasty guy fired Pam Bondi as Attorney General. If you still need a news article or two about it here’s one by Oliver Willis of Daily Kos and one by Lisa Needham of Kos. The second one adds that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will take the top job until a replacement can be confirmed so Needham reviews why the nasty guy likes him and why we won’t. I had also previously mentioned that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had fired – asked to take early retirement – Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, a very strange thing to do in the middle of a war. An Associated Press article posted on Kos explains who George is. Jeremy Lindenfeld, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, discussed the Imperial Valley, the region in California between the Salton Sea and the Mexican border. This is a fertile area for both white and Native farmers, but only because of water from the Colorado River. Because of global warming (I hear March set a record in heat) and a drought in the West the water level in the Colorado River has dropped. A lot of farmers have adopted methods to use less water, but they may need to reduce more. Now also snooping around the valley are companies that want to mine lithium from the enormous underground reservoir of geothermal brine and to set up data centers. Both need lots of water with the Colorado River being the only source. That loss of water could drive a lot of farmers out of business. In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Heath Mayo commenting on the search and rescue effort for the downed Air Force pilot.

One emerging theme of the war effort is that (1) our military is extremely competent and extremely good at war fighting and doing its job even as (2) our political leadership that sets the strategic ends and objectives for military action has absolutely no clue what it’s doing.

David Baer of The Bulwark discussed the election in Hungary, which is this weekend. Baer’s title (from a week ago) says it well, “Orbán Will Lose Hungary’s Election in Two Weeks—If It’s Clean.” Baer then lists all the levers of power that dictator Orbán has seized or crafted for himself, enough for observers to think he can’t be removed. Then Baer describes Orbán’s opponent, Péter Magyar. So, back to that bit in the title, “If It’s Clean.” Idrees Kahloon of The Atlantic:

The Hormuz crisis has some beneficiaries: America’s adversaries. To prevent even higher oil prices, the Trump administration has lifted sanctions on Russian exports and even some of Iran’s. “Things that Iran and Russia had sought to achieve through negotiations with the United States, they’ve managed to achieve without having to negotiate,” Michael Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. “This is bailing out the Russian economy, which had been on the ropes, and, at least temporarily, it is giving a windfall to Iran.” Russia could recoup an additional $40 billion or more in oil exports this year, which it can plow into its war effort against Ukraine. Iranian oil production may be as high as before the war.

A tweet by Gandalv, which includes a video (which I did not listen to):

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling is not mincing words. The former Commanding General of US Army Europe says these generals were purged because they stood up against Pete Hegseth’s push to turn the US military into a Christian nationalist crusade. Retired Army Maj. Gen. Randy Manner says dozens of chaplains who don’t share Hegseth’s views are being marginalized and excluded from staff meetings. The chaplain corps exists to serve all service members regardless of faith. That apparently made Green’s position untenable. The Pope has now weighed in. Hegseth’s prayer for battlefield violence prompted a response from Rome: God does not listen to those who wage war in his name. Hertling has seen enough. So have the troops.

On Tuesday Willis reported the nasty guy had tweeted Iran should concede and do so quickly or “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Yeah, that’s a vile thing for an Oval Office Occupant to say. Experts said the particulars would likely be war crimes. Willis reminds us that back in November Democrats warned us of such things. That’s when several members of Congress released a video saying military personnel have a duty to not follow illegal orders. Of course, the nasty guy and his minions tried to make life hard for the creators of the video, especially Sen. Mark Kelly. But prosecutors weren’t able to find an actual crime that had been committed. In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Shane Harris of The Atlantic:

If a...panel of experts scrutinized the run-up to the current war in Iran, their assessment might go something like this: The intelligence community was accurate and consistent in its prewar judgments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions to attack the United States and its allies. Contrary to what President Trump has said to justify his decision, the intelligence showed that the Iranian regime was not preparing to use a nuclear weapon; it did not have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States; and in response to a U.S. military attack, Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis. All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was an intelligence success. […] The failures of the intelligence community on Iraq’s WMDs produced systemic changes meant to keep botched calls like that one from recurring. In many respects, those reforms have worked. But they couldn’t account for a decision maker who had been seduced by previous military successes into thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed command, could never stumble.

In Wednesday’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet by Aaron Blake discussing the firing of AG Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche as her interim replacement.

Even in her confirmation hearing, Bondi assured cases would be judged on their merits -- "No one will be prosecuted, investigated because they are a political opponent." Here, Blanche conveys a more relaxed standard where the president just gets to order stuff.

That “here” is a tweet from Acyn:

Blanche: We have thousands of ongoing investigations going on and it is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the president believes should be investigated. That is his right and it is his duty to do that—meaning to lead this country.

In the comments is a tweet by David Shiffman. The image is a reworking of a meme I’ve seen before in which a rich man with a plate mounded with cookies sits between a white worker with a plate with one cookie and an immigrant worker with nothing in front of him. The rich man says to the white worker, “Careful mate... that immigrant wants your cookie!” Shiffman reworked the meme in response to the nasty guy issuing a proposed 2027 budget that increased the military budget by 40% to $1.4 trillion and saying the budget had no room for the social safety net. Over the rich guy’s face he put “ICE, War in Iran.” Over the white worker’s face he put, “Medicaid, Medicare, and daycare.” Over the immigrant he put the emblems of NASA, NOAA, EPA, NSF, NIH, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. The rich guy says, “Careful mate... that science wants your cookie!” Shiffman added:

Science is not why you and your family are struggling, friends. President Trump and Congressional Republicans are the reason why you and your family are struggling.

Tweets by Max Burns:

You guys don’t get Trump’s 4D chess. He had to attack Iran in order to open the Strait of Hormuz which was open before he attacked Iran. So Donald Trump fought this disastrous war with Iran and the end result is a deal in which Iran gets: – Control of the Strait of Hormuz – Unlimited uranium enrichment – All U.S. sanctions lifted – All U.N. resolutions against it lifted – Cash compensation from the US Who won again?

And just for fun, Fergi Jo Lisa posted a 15 second video of a bird (I think a parrot) and six dogs.

It’s about grappling with something that hurts

Cesar Chavez is considered a civil rights icon. He is a hero to the labor movement, particularly farm worker’s rights. There are a large number of streets, schools, and other things named for him and in 2024 Obama designated March 31 as Cesar Chavez Day in honor of his birthday. But about three weeks ago the New York Times published a yearslong investigation that revealed Chavez abused women and underage girls. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos discussed the report and the fallout. The allegations by the NYT is more than rumors and unsourced accusations, so can’t simply be dismissed. Since the publication Dolores Huerta, cofounder of the United Farm Workers, revealed she had two pregnancies because Chavez raped her. The children were adopted. The left then had to grapple with what to do. Many issued statements condemning Chavez while expressing grief at the downfall of an important man. Efforts began to rename streets and schools, pull down statues, and cover over murals. March 31 was renamed as Farm Workers Day.

Overall, Democrats accepted the revelations and moved to cancel all gestures honoring Chavez while wrestling with heartbreak. Contrast that with how Republicans deal with sexual abuse allegations on their side of the aisle.

When Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court, women came forward with allegations of abuse. Republicans worked to discredit the victims and gave Kavanaugh a lifetime seat on the Court. The nasty guy was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and there was no Republican condemnation.

But Democrats aren’t distancing themselves. They are taking accountability—a thing that the GOP simply doesn’t believe in. It’s about grappling with something that hurts, but realizing that Chavez hurt people far more. ... Denouncing a man who was a hero to many is hard, and it’s sad, and it’s what has to be done.

Last week an Associated Press article posted on Kos reported:

Transgender women athletes are now excluded from women's events at the Olympics after the IOC agreed to a new eligibility policy on Thursday which aligns with U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on sports ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. ... In the U.S., President Trump signed the executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” in February last year, and pledged to deny visas to some athletes attempting to compete at the L.A Olympics. The order also threatened to “rescind all funds” from organizations that allowed transgender athletes to take part in women’s sports. Within months the U.S. Olympic body updated its guidance to national sports bodies citing an obligation to comply with the White House.

Transgender World tweeted the reaction of Sophie Labelle to the IOC’s announcement. That was in the form of a bit of history. Gender policing of Olympic women began in the 1936 Nazi Olympics.

Naked parades in front of a jury, gynecological inspections, chromosomal testing, certifications that only richer countries could issue... These were all attempts at gender policing by the Olympic Committee between 1936 and 1996. One after another, these practices were outlawed. They were all found to be flawed, misleading, humiliating, discriminatory, racist, misogynistic. Since 2003, strict guidelines have allowed intersex and trans women to participate. Despite 20 years of inclusion, there has only been one trans women who competed. She did not win any medal. However the I.O.C. has decided to go ahead and bring back gender policing to ban intersex and trans athletes in time for the Nazi Germany Olympics of 2028. Oops, I mean the United States.

Earlier this week Needham reported on a Supreme Court ruling that went against us. It is especially annoying because the decision was 8-1. In 2019 Colorado adopted a law banning conversion therapy for minors. Kaley Chiles, an evangelical Christian therapist, sued in 2022, saying her free speech rights were being violated.

Here’s the logic behind the decision, such as it is: Talk therapy is simply speech, and telling evangelical Christian therapists that they can’t traumatize children into denying their sexual orientation or gender identity therefore restricts those therapists’ speech.

The idea that a law restricting what she can say in therapy restricts her viewpoint brought Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan on board.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the lone dissenter, called out why that’s bulls---, writing, “Chiles is not speaking in the ether; she is providing therapy to minors as a licensed healthcare professional.” Exactly. Colorado isn’t stopping Chiles from speaking out in non-therapy settings about how groovy it is to force kids to be straight. Colorado isn’t stopping Chiles from doing conversion talk therapy with adults who can consent to such a thing. Colorado isn’t even fully banning conversion therapy for minors, because the law applies only to licensed therapists and carves out an exemption for those “engaged in the practice of religious ministry.” All Colorado sought to do was stop licensed therapists from using an inherent position of power to force an objectively harmful treatment on a minor child.

Part of why the majority opinion is so bad is it frames the issue as helping the minor person with their own desires to not be queer or trans. And they have those desires because their religious community beats into them that being queer or trans will send them to hell. Robert Ito, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, discussed the increasing difficulties in teaching LGBTQ history. In California some high school history teachers do quite well in integrating our history into their national history courses and other classrooms. It’s a topic important and relevant, especially since more people died of AIDS than died in Vietnam. The effort has been helped by California’s FAIR Education Act, passed 15 years ago. But the law has no penalties for non-compliance and a lot of districts never heard of it so only 37% of self-reporting districts are using FAIR-approved materials across all grade levels. Add to that the nasty guy’s forceful attacks against DEI coupled with people (who may not be parents) who complain to school boards. Then there is the Supreme Court ruling of last June that says parents can opt their children out of LGBTQ instruction. Many teachers become wary of the topic or afraid of the pushback they might get if they start teaching it. So they don’t. Of course, the people hurt most are the LGBTQ students who feel more isolated. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Shanaka Anslem Perera:

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next. Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given.

Randa Slim responded, quoting @fordrs58:

“The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no.”

Pam Bondi has been fired as Attorney General. Glad to see her go, though I doubt her replacement will be any better. That prompted Aaron Blake of CNN to comment:

Attorney general may be the most impossible job in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. Trump demands things that are not only ethically problematic, but also that reside somewhere in the space between highly difficult and impossible. Nobody has gotten the balance right.

Bondi served “the shortest tenure for a confirmed attorney general in 60 years.” Dan Pfeiffer, tweeting a discussion of the nasty guy’s recent TV speech to the nation.

The most damning revelation is that the public and the markets have tuned out Trump. Oil prices spiked, and stock markets sank as Trump was speaking. When the public tunes out a 2nd term president, they rarely tune back in.

Another Dan Pfeiffer tweet:

The thing to understand about Pam Bondi’s firing is that she was ousted for incompetently executing on Trump’s corrupt wishes, not resisting them.

In the comments is a cartoon by Mike Luckovich showing Musk telling the world’s poorest “No more free lunch!” while behind him is a huge mound of bags of money marked as “Fed. funds Musk gets.” Dr. Art Garfunky added commentary:

Elon Musk had DOGE defund USAID, the largest humanitarian organization in the world, causing HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of deaths from starvation and disease - and Trump GLEEFULLY approved it. It’s the single most evil act in US history.

A tweet by Mehdi Hasan shows a video of Bondi at a Congressional hearing. Hasan added:

Watch shameless sycophant Pam Bondi, who Trump just fired as AG, heap endless and ridiculous praise on Trump. And he still fired her. Amazing. So, so humiliating

. Lady Haha posted a cartoon by Jeff Danzinger. It shows what appears to be a blind man labeled The Draft tapping forward while carrying manacles. Young men, throwing away their red hats, are trying to step out of his way. The caption says, “Young Trumpers Realize They May Face the Draft for Trump’s War.” Just below the cartoons is a comment by learn:

Bondi was fired for not being vindictive enough. From the Republican’s approval they knew she was a bad manager, unqualified for such a large operation and was chosen for putting Trump way before justice. The criticisms about “mishandling” Epstein files meant she wasn’t able to redact and hide fast enough. And her main “failure” was in not effectively persecuting [sic] Trump’s enemies much less forcing indictments. She was fired for not being good at bad.

More money flows upward, faster, and with fewer speed bumps

My Sunday movie was an online handbell event. I originally thought it would only be of interest to handbell geeks. Then one of the people interviewed was Damian Kulash of the band OK Go. Why him? The band has played handbells to accompany at least a couple of their songs at live events. The two songs I know about are Return and Shoot the Moon and I found low-quality videos of them on YouTube. Kulash, in that 37 minute interview, said right off he and the band played with bad technique, which I saw was true. On saying that the interviewers invited him (and the band) to come to a handbell event where people would be happy to teach them better ways and show other things bells can do. Even though their technique was bad I saw in the videos the band could handle multiple bells and play syncopated rhythms while singing. Quite good! Here are the various interviews in that handbell event with Kulash’s interview a ways down the list. In my previous post I wrote about the life cycle of capitalism and that it ends in oligarchy. This was based on posts by Trenz Pruca on Daily Kos. My friend and debate partner responded with a private email. His friend side declared the post to be one of my best. Thank you, friend! Then his debate side asked, “But what is Pruca's relationship to reality?” Fair and important question. I was attracted to Pruca’s post because it added in details to what I already understand. So one way to determine Pruca’s reality is to test my own. How well have my 5,500 posts over the last 18 years (and I forgot to mark this blog’s birthday, which happened a week ago) described reality? That’s for the reader to answer. While I trust I have described reality well, saying I trust Pruca because his ideas align with my own describes a lot of conservatives, who are my opponents. In short, this is not good enough to affirm Pruca’s ideas. Pruca said he has his own blog, in addition to what he posed on Kos. I went to it and read the About page.

Trenz Pruca is the pseudonym for a retired attorney and businessman. During his career as an attorney he participated in the management of a large international law firm. He also consulted for a state legislature and drafted significant laws regarding land use and the environment. He has served as legal counsel and director of state agencies dealing with land use, planning and environmental protection. In addition, he has acted as Chairman of a state governmental authority responsible for the construction of one of the nation’s largest transportation projects. He has lectured and written widely about issues of law, economics, religion, land use, environmental protection and politics.

Which is rather evasive. If his posts are of good things why be anonymous? But I give few details about myself on my own blog. Pruca does give us a way to trust him and show he is anchored in reality. He provided sources for all four parts of his discussion. For example, the bottom of the first post lists historical books by 18th century economist Adam Smith. Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, 20th century economist John Maynard Keynes. For his life cycle of capitalism he references books by Giovanni Arrighi, Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, Hyman Minsky, Greta Kripper, and Thomas Piketty. Even more books are about corporate structure. With each book Pruca includes a link to where the book can be found online or to the publisher’s website. The other three parts have similar source lists. I hope that’s enough to see Pruca knows what he’s talking about and we can trust what he writes. With that I turn to another essay Pruca posted on Kos, this one about whether tax cuts for the rich created the Great Divergence. This is the “long, relentless widening of income and wealth inequality” that began with Reagan and Reaganomics. In 1980 the top income tax rate was 70%. Reagan cut it to 28%. It has moved up and down and is currently at 37%. Because most of the income of the wealthy comes from assets and not wage or salary income the important number is the effective tax rate. For the top 1% the 1979 rate of 37% dropped to 30% in 2019. For the bottom 20% refundable credits brought their 1979 rate of 8% to about 1% for 2019. Alas, Pruca doesn’t show the changes in effective tax rate for the middle class, saying only that they got squeezed. Yes, cutting tax rates increases inequality, though cutting taxes on capital gains has more of an effect that cutting income taxes. But so does capital mobility, decline of unions, emphasizing shareholders over workers, monopolization, and corporate capture of politicians. Another aspect is that while taxes were cut federal spending increased. The reasons for that were continued high defense spending, exploding health care costs, and the baby-boom generation claiming its Social Security and Medicare. Also there were fiscal interventions for pandemics, climate events, and geopolitical shocks, such as the Great Recession. And all that was financed through borrowing, which is now well over 100% GDP. The rich benefit from the extra borrowing (they receive the interest the government pays). And the middle class pays through higher taxes and reduced public services. Add to that the actions of the nasty guy part 2, where a major goal is to shift public wealth into private hands, especially loyal hands. His particular actions mean “More money flows upward, faster, and with fewer speed bumps.” Add to that the gutting of IRS oversight, which is a tax cut for the rich without legislation. We have shifted from the passive Great Divergence to the much more active Great Extraction. That leads to weakening worker power, undermining democratic checks and balances, deepening polarization, and tying wealth to state favor instead of market competition. Fiscal policy is both a reward and weapon. Taxes become optional for the rich and powerful and compulsory for everyone else. “Empires Don’t Fall Because the Tax Rate Is Wrong—They Fall Because the Social Contract Breaks.” And the Great Extraction becomes the Great Unraveling. Again, Pruca provides sources. Some items in the news: An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA flamethrower who spoke out for releasing the Epstein file for which the nasty guy called her a traitor, has announced she will resign from the House on January 5. Her departure is causing quite a bit of consternation in the House. Another AP article reports the criminal cases against James Comey and Letitia James have been dismissed. The US District judge said the prosecutor who brought the case, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally hired, so any actions she took must be thrown out. Oliver Willis of Kos reported that the Department of Government Efficiency – DOGE – has been shut down, eight months ahead of its scheduled end. It’s quiet demise was quite different than its start that had figurative trumpets blazing. DOGE did not save the government trillions, more likely cost it millions to billions. But no one kept accurate tally. And DOGE was good at lying. There are no mourners. Lisa Needham of Kos reported a week ago that the Texas redistricting effort was ruled illegal. The new maps were to increase the gerrymandering so that Republicans would get five more House seats in next year’s election. The US District Court in El Paso said the new maps are a racial gerrymander, which is illegal (at least until the Supreme Court hears the appeal or runs it through the shadow docket). The evidence for the redistricting being racially motivated is that the majority nonwhite Democratic districts were changed and the majority white Democratic districts were not. The California redistricting effort recently approved by voters does not say it is dependent on the Texas case. There is no surprise that Republicans have taken that result to court. So how will the Supremes approve the Texas gerrymander and not the California gerrymander? That’s another indication the ruling will come through the shadow docket, where explanations are not provided. wellbillyboy posted a cartoon by Drew Sheneman. An elephant at complains to the bartender.

Moral bankruptcy is a wild ride. One day you’re voting for Reagan and smaller government, the next you’re condoning pedophilia and pretending vaccines don’t work.

In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Indrees Kahloon of The Atlantic discussing Republicans showing why the consternation of Greene’s resignation is possible:

The reality that Donald Trump’s presidency will end in January 2029 is already making Republicans restless. Normally, Trump angers, exhausts, and eventually prevails over elected Republicans—not vice versa. Just this week, though, rebellious Republicans forced the release of the so-called Epstein files in defiance of Trump, who had spent months trying to suppress them before abruptly reversing course. Plenty of other cracks are showing too: Staunch allies of the president are mouthing critiques that would have been unfathomable a year ago. These disputes are the prelude to an ugly battle over the post-Trump Republican Party.

Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post discussing the House vote to release the Epstein files

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) had joined Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) to introduce the bill in July and then lead the signature-gathering exercise to force a vote. Massie said in an interview that his own party’s leadership in the House has ceded too much to Trump. “Basically, Mike Johnson has handed the keys to the House of Representatives to the president, and we took the keys back this week,” Massie said. “They weren’t driving very well, and we were able. We didn’t crash the car. We got it right to the destination.”

Benjamin Strick on Bluesky tweeted:

X rolled out a new feature overnight showing where accounts are based. This network of “Trump-supporting independent women” that claimed to be “real Americans” are based in Thailand. The photos [of examples] were stolen from European models & posts pushed pro-Trump lines while targeting Islam and LGBTQ people.

Jay in Kyiv added:

How much of MAGA twitter is being run out of Russian troll farms in Russia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Thailand? Today's revelations Likely put it around half. They're now quickly changing their stated locations to US.

In the comments Nikki Reale responded to a tweet by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas complaining about Biden’s inaction on immigration. The tweet and response are a couple year’s old, but Reale’s conclusion still holds.

Here’s why we don’t have immigration reform: 1. In 2023 Democrats passed a bi-partisan immigration reform bill in the Senate. 2. House Republicans REFUSED to allow the bill to even be debated. 3. Obama asked Republicans to propose THEIR OWN immigration bill. 4. Republicans REFUSED. 5. Then Republicans demanded Obama do something about illegal immigration! 6. So Obama used his executive authority to enact some immigration reforms. 7. Republicans were outraged and called Obama a tyrant for doing exactly what they asked him to do. Republicans don’t really want reform. They want a problem to scare you with!

In the comments of Tuesday’s roundup are a few memes commenting on the revelation that many bot farms influencing the right aren’t in the US. A meme posted by thisjoshsmith:

Genuinely shocked at how many are just now discovering that MAGA is a psyop designed by Russia and grown in foreign bot farms before finally being perpetrated by some of the biggest loser cucks the world has ever known. Like, y’all really thought that this s--- was legitimate? It took 10 years and Elon displaying the location on Twitter accounts for you to figure it out? Welcome to the resistance, I guess?

And a meme by the_pesky_liberals

All the final pieces are falling into place this week: MAGA was never a grassroots American movement. It was a foreign-influence, billionaire-funded psychological operation that hollowed out a major political party and compromised U.S. foreign policy – and we’re only now seeing the full extent because the walls are starting to crack.

Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow! I hope your day is pleasant. I’ll spend the day with Sister and Niece. And I won’t eat one of the Recession Recipes mentioned in a cartoon by Brian McFadden. One idea is mash potatoes sculpted to look like a turkey and covered in brown gravy. Another is:

Means Test Meal Cook an inadequate amount of food. Have guests complete forms to see who qualifies to eat it. Serves 1, maybe.

If he gets immunity for official acts, so does she

I mentioned yesterday that the federal debt went up by $1 trillion in eight weeks in August and September. Three weeks ago Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported what the government is doing with our money can’t be determined. Neither budget experts nor Congressional appropriators can figure out the savings DOGE supposedly brought us, or probably cost us. There is supposed to be “savings” from canceled contracts, from money appropriated by Congress that the nasty guy has refused to spend, and from the salaries not paid out to employees who were fired or resigned (made more confusing by the need to rehire some of them). And there is supposed to be income from tariffs. So how did the national debt go up by $1 trillion in two months and by $1.8 trillion since he took the Oval Office? A week later Needham reported:

Trump is demanding that the Department of Justice give him $230 million as compensation for being the subject of past federal investigations, according to The New York Times. He’s reportedly submitted his claims through an administrative claim process, under the Federal Tort Claims Act, and he has apparently done a bit of back-of-the-envelope math to come up with the idea that the U.S. taxpayers owe him nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.

Since the people who need to authorize that payout are already in the nasty guy’s pocket or are highly ethically compromised they’re quite likely to approve it.

It should be a five-alarm fire that, in the middle of the GOP’s government shutdown, Trump is demanding taxpayers cough up hundreds of millions of dollars to slake his endless twin thirsts for grifting cash and airing his grievances. But these days? It’s just par for the course for a president who sees the federal government as his personal piggy bank.

Two weeks ago Emily Singer of Kos reported:

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has now been in recess for an entire month—and it's all because House Speaker Mike Johnson does not want to release the government’s files on accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. ... Yet, rather than bring the House back to negotiate with Democrats to reopen the government—much less pass individual appropriations bills to fund the government for longer than just a few weeks—Johnson has kept the House out of town. And it's all because bringing the House back would require Johnson to swear in Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who is expected to be the final signature on a petition to force the House to vote on releasing the government’s files on Epstein.

As I’ve mentioned before Johnson’s reasons for not swearing in Grijalva have been shown to be bogus. Even a far-right Republican is criticizing Johnson.

“The House should be in session working,” far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wrote Monday in a post on X. “We should be finishing appropriations. Our committees should be working. We should be passing bills that make President Trump’s executive orders permanent. I have no respect for the decision to refuse to work.”

Two weeks later the House is still closed. Not everything is bad news. Two weeks ago Alex Samuels of Kos reported that House Democrat LaMonica McIver is claiming the same legal immunity the Supreme Court gave the nasty guy. She was indicted on charges that she “forcibly impeded” immigration officers outside a detention facility. She was there as part of the Congressional duty of oversight. An ICE agent shoved her. As part of a chaotic protest she pushed back. She was accused of assaulting and obstructing officers. Her lawyers say if the nasty guy gets immunity for “official acts,” she does too. And oversight of what ICE is doing is an official act. She is not charged with corruption or a financial crime, the usual indictment of members of Congress. There could be a cost to McIver. Samuels wrote, “Members of Congress cannot accept pro bono legal help, according to Politico, meaning an extended court battle could be financially devastating.” Bearing such costs could chill Congressional oversight. Last week Samuels reported that the nasty guy’s Justice Department announced it would send election monitors to several places in California and New Jersey. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, says this is groundwork to sow doubt in the election results and scare away voters. Monitoring is not necessary, but federal officials will be welcome. In response California will have monitors of the monitors to make sure they don’t interfere in the election. California may be receiving a lot of threats from the nasty guy, but it isn’t backing down. During the first week of September liberaldad2 of the Kos community shared an email from California Gov. Gavin Newsom touting some of the good things about his state. Here are a few of them.

Middle class families in California pay LESS in taxes than in states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. 50 million of the 52 million jobs created since the Cold War have been created in Democratic administrations. Republican presidents have one thing in common: recession. Life expectancy, infant mortality, deaths of despair, wages and uninsured rates are all worse off in red states. For Greg Abbott: California is the fourth largest economy in the WORLD. We contribute $83 billion to the federal government while Texas takes $71 billion.

Toonerman posted a cartoon from a year ago, though the incident that prompted it appears to be from four years ago.

Caption: (“See you in church on Sunday”) William Gallagher, Texas Christian talk radio host and author of “Jesus Christ, Money Master,” has been convicted to 30 years for ripping off old people with his Ponzi scheme. Toonerman’s dog: Really? ‘Jesus Christ, Money Master?’ Jesus (holding bags of money): Yep! It’s what I do! You can read about it in Denominations $100:10-50

This blog’s viewership for October is similar to what it was in June and July – and significantly down from what it was in September. The number of views in September was 163,988, prompting me to wonder if I was now famous. The total for October was 47,467 and for July was 48,646. After hitting 9K to 11K views per day in the last week of September, views dropped on October 1st to 1,600 views. That was when I reported September’s numbers. There were almost 5K views on October 8, but in the last two weeks the number of views in a day has been mostly under 300. That’s quite a drop from a month before. Fame is fleeting.