Demolition at the White House with no oversight

Kos of Daily Kos wrote about the scam PACs of the 2024 election cycle. These are groups that sent emails and texts that screamed, “Donate! Help us defeat...” They raked in $678 million and less than $11 million went to Democratic candidates or the party. “This is theft—pure and simple—bleeding the progressive movement dry while the right builds real power.” These PACs did spend some money on campaigns – on political ads. Kos calls them “grossly inefficient.” Better to spend the money on voter registration and door-knocking. The main point is Democrats will have a hard time winning while these organizations still exist. Better that we citizens donate directly to candidates. That got me wondering. Did the Democratic Party know about these groups? Did they let them stay in operation? Think they were doing good work? Try to shut them down? Or were they really Republican organizations pretending to be progressive to suck money out of the progressive cause? Yeah, that last bit sounds all “deep state” and conspiracy minded, but since this is about Republicans who have proved how willing they are to ruthlessly cheat I wouldn’t be surprised if is was true. Kos also wrote about the latest from Sen. Rick Scott, Florida Republican. In response to Zohran Mamdani doing quite well running for New York mayor as a Democratic Socialist, Scott introduced a resolution in the Senate declaring socialism to be the greatest threat to the nation. He claims “it is a proven path to tyranny, starvation, and death.” Scandinavia would disagree. Their socialist democracies are doing quite well, thank you. It seems the nasty guy would also disagree. Maybe not in words, but in actions. He has been doing quite a lot to interfere with capitalism. He’s demanded the purge of DEI programs, bullied executives, and demanded an ownership stake in Intel. Maybe Scott should have a chat with the nasty guy? Emily Singer of Kos wrote that about the jobs numbers released on Friday. The June numbers were revised downward to a loss of 13,000 jobs. July numbers were revised up a bit (I had heard early reports elsewhere that the July revision was also down). And in August a measly 22,000 jobs were added. A month ago the jobs numbers were bad enough the nasty guy fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This month he posted about – Jeffrey Epstein. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy is ready to start work on his ballroom. The first part is demolition of some parts of the East and West Wings. The nasty guy named Will Scharf to be the head of the National Capital Planning Commission, the organization that oversees and approves changes to the White House. And Scharf says the NCPC has no jurisdiction over the demolition process. Mighty convenient. I previously wrote the nasty guy said it would be paid for through donations – as in another way to bribe him. Needham concluded:

So, let’s recap. We don’t get to know anything about the demolition of the White House, because there is no oversight and no approval process. And we don’t know anything about what the ballroom will actually look like, because there are no building plans yet. Then we don’t get to know anything about the contractor [who is named] because they didn’t have to go through an approval process. And we don’t know how it is being paid for. All we really do know is that, because Trump is involved, it is going to be tacky as hell.

Singer reported that recent comments from Robert Kennedy Jr. imply he is laying the groundwork so he can limit the access to mifepristone, one of the two medical abortion drugs. Sister sent me a link to an article in Smithsonian Magazine, written by Brandon Tensley. It is a short article about Frank Kameny. He was an astronomer with the Army Map Service, but fired because he was gay. This was a part of the Lavender Scare of the 1950s when being gay was considered a governmental security risk because gay men could be blackmailed. He appealed his firing all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case. A year before Stonewall he coined the slogan “Gay Is Good.” He was an early activist in the LGBTQ struggle for equality. He played a big role in getting the American Psychiatric Association to say homosexuality was not a mental illness. I had heard much of that before. There is a bit I didn’t know. Kameny kept notebooks. Two of them are now in the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History. Included in the notebooks is information about what bars and restaurants he had been to were gay-friendly. What Kameny intended to do with those recommendations is not known. Since he didn’t publish them perhaps they were only for the use of himself and friends. However, this article speculates if he had published them they would have been the first LGBTQ equivalent of the Green Book which black travelers used to avoid discriminatory businesses during Jim Crow.

Like everything else the cheers had been manufactured

I had written that the nasty guy had tweeted that illegal workers at farms and hotels should not be picked up because they are necessary for these businesses. I noted that the White House said the policy of raiding those places had not changed. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that Homeland Security tried to clarify by sending Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin to Newsmax. Yes, raids on worksites are sill a cornerstone of ICE operations. There was no exemption for farms and hotels. McLaughlin lied when she said ICE was only going after “the worst of the worst.” I recently wrote that Sen. Alex Padilla was forced to the ground and handcuffed when asking HS Secretary Noem a question. Now there is a second political arrest. Lisa Needham of Kos said ICE arrested Brad Lander, a Democratic candidate for NYC mayor. The reason appears to be because he was accompanying someone they wanted to nab and he tried to prevent it. One problem: ICE isn’t allowed to arrest citizens. McLaughlin announced the charges as impeding a federal officer. That nicely confuses FBI agents who can arrest citizens with ICE agents, who can’t. They way she said it made it sound like the real victims were ICE agents, not the immigrants. Needham talked about the old practice of company towns. When a company set up operations in a remote area workers had to live in company housing and shop in company stores. They were paid in company scrip, which couldn’t be spent elsewhere. Pay and prices were such that the workers fell deeper into debt, and thus were stuck. Bringing that up to date, the possibility of creating new crypto currencies allows Walmart and Amazon to consider issuing their own. At least they are thinking about stablecoins, meaning their value is pegged to the dollar. But a person paid in Walmart coin would be restricted to spending it at Walmart, even if prices were better elsewhere. There is a reason, outside of tying people to their store, for issuing their own currency – they can sidestep the significant costs of payment processing and banking fees. But it leaves consumers juggling currencies. A different president might protect consumers. But the nasty guy made $57 billion from crypto last year and the Securities and Exchange commission dropped a crypto case after the company cozied up to a nasty guy company. Needham reported that companies that cozy up to the nasty guy are getting a good payback. Sure, that cozying can cost millions, but the payback is much higher. Needham gave a couple examples. I’ll mention one. GEO is a company with government contracts to run ICE detention centers. The EPA had a complaint against GEO last year for failing to provide protective gear from chemicals that can cause skin burns and eye damage. The NLRB filed a complaint for using detainees as workers and not paying them proper wages. Large fines were pending. Then the company gave the maximum to the nasty guy’s campaign, $1 million to his PAC, and smaller amounts to other Republicans. The NLRB no longer has a quorum and can’t hear cases. And the EPA withdrew its complaint. That’s called corruption. Alex Samuels of Kos wrote about the other side of the issue: “Sen. Bernie Sanders is urging Democratic leaders to stop cozying up to their own wealthy donors.” Sanders and seven other Democratic senators wrote a letter to the leaders asking them to ban super PACs and “dark money” in Democratic primaries. If Democrats are to fight the influence of rich people, something Sanders has been talking a lot about lately, they need to start with themselves. The letter noted that these super PACS spend in Democratic primaries, then spend to defeat Democrats in the general election. Overturning Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling that opened unlimited outside spending, is a long-term project. But citizens already notice (thanks to Musk) that rich people have too much influence. That give Democrats an opening. In 2022 the 988 suicide crisis hotline began working. One could contact that number in a variety of ways. A person is first asked a bit about who they are. One of the options is LGBTQ. If that is chosen they are passed on to the Trevor Project, counselors trained to handle queer people. This separate service is needed because of the high suicide rate of queer youth. Oliver Willis of Kos reported that initial menu option disappears on July 17. The reason is the nasty guy is being nasty and said so. Yeah, this is part of his and Republican attacks on LGBTQ people and trans people in particular. Suicide rates will go up.

Young LGBTQ+ people are under attack by their state and federal governments. And now, if they are driven into darkness, Trump has cut off a vital and lifesaving resource that the community increasingly depends on.

Thankfully, the Trevor Project remains. All that is being lost is the vital connection to the 988 hotline, which is much easier to remember than the name and full number of the Trevor Project. That’s still losing a lot. If you are in crisis, contact 988. If you are queer you can still contact 988 for now or find the Trevor Project number. The nasty guy created a Religious Liberty Commission. Alix Breeden of Kos reported they met for the first time this week. Thankfully, it seems all they did was gripe about “anti-Christian bias,” how Christians are “under attack,” that religious liberty is threatened, and that the society has no moral code. Yes, we as a nation do have a moral code. It’s quite a good one, though far from perfect. It just isn’t completely Christian. Though this is a “Religious” commission one can easily guess how much representation there was from Muslim, Jewish, or even liberal Christian groups. The group’s next meeting is scheduled for September. We can hope they’ll gripe some more and not actually do anything. In last Friday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin had a couple good quotes. This was before the No Kings protest and the dreary parade for the nasty guy. Just before then the nasty guy went to the re-re-named Fort Bragg and used cheering soldiers as a backdrop for a rally style speech. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer added a bit of background.

The insurrectionist Bragg surely would have been heartened when Trump used his powerful platform to rally an entire army against democratically elected public officials like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — and when the uniformed troops of a once-proudly-apolitical U.S. Army answered with thunderous applause. Like everything else about Trump’s strongman regime, the cheers had been manufactured. Military.com later reported that the chiseled forces of the storied 82nd Airborne Division behind Trump’s podium had been picked in part for their right-wing political views and also — according to one email obtained by the news site — to satisfy our allegedly 224-pound (lol) president with “no fat soldiers.” (Yes, Donald Trump’s Tinder ad for his dream-date U.S. soldier essentially read, “No fatties.”)

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted the generals did not speak up and added:

He mocked former President Joe Biden and attacked various other political rivals. He elicited cheers from the crowd by announcing that he would rename U.S. bases (or re-rename them) after Confederate traitors. He repeated his hallucinatory narrative about the invasion of America by foreign criminals and lunatics. He referred to 2024 as the “election of a president who loves you,” to a scatter of cheers and applause. And then he attacked the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, again presiding over jeers at elected officials of the United States. He led soldiers, in other words, in a display of unseemly behavior that ran contrary to everything the founder of the U.S. Army, George Washington, strove to imbue in the American armed forces.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme playing on one of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s claims that Democrats could control the weather. This meme shows a woman with a bright smile ready to push the button on the Democrat Party Weather Machine on the day of the parade. It did rain that day in Washington, though a White House spokesperson claimed that it hadn’t. In today’s pundit roundup Dworkin had more good quotes. From Ron Fournier of Convulsions:

During a contentious Senate Armed Service Committee meeting Wednesday, [Elissa Slotkin,] freshman Democrat, grilled [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth over whether he had authorized members of the military to "detain and arrest protesters" in Los Angeles. He ducked and deflected. She erupted. "What is the order?" Slotkin demanded. "Be a man, list it out. Did you authorize them to detain or arrest? That is a fundamental of democracy. I'm not trying to be a snot here. I'm just trying to get the actual — did you authorize them to do that?" Be a man, she said. But Hegseth didn’t have it in him.

Dworkin wrote about the nasty guy saying he’ll decide in two weeks if the US should help Israel against Iran:

Reports are that Pete Hegseth and [director of intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard are ignored when it comes to input on what Trump is supposed to do. No surprise; they, like DHS Sec Noem are only there to cosplay. And as for Bibi Netanyahu, Trump knows any advice he gets is to benefit Netanyahu, not Trump. When it comes to Iran, Trump is stuck with making a decision. The buck stops with him. And he’s afraid to decide. My best guess is that Trump will do the right thing (not bomb Iran) for the wrong reason (he’s a coward and is afraid of his base turning on him). But who knows? Trump’s a damaged human being and is hard to predict when it comes to doing something difficult.

Thomas Edsall of the New York Times worked with Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the Berkeley law school, to list five grounds on which to impeach the nasty guy. Dworkin quoted two.

Trump has repeatedly ignored due process of law, such as in sending people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador and to the South Sudan without a semblance of due process. The cutoff of funds to universities and to grant recipients has been done without any due process. This is a very serious abuse of power. President Trump has used his power for retribution. His actions against law firms, which have been done without due process, have been expressly stated to be for personal retribution because they employed lawyers who investigated or prosecuted him. This is a very serious abuse of power.

Dworkin reminds us we need “a Democratic House to impeach him (and a heavily Democratic Senate to convict).” Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. A sample:

“I am genuinely baffled. Why is it when a foreigner—or someone that shouldn’t be here—kills one of us, we’re going to put 150-billion dollars into border security, we’re going to militarize our cities, we’re going to spend trillions of dollars to bomb and destabilize foreign countries overseas, we're going to ban people from random countries from ever f---ing visiting here, [and] we’re going to take our shoes off at the airport forever? But when we do it to ourselves? Nothing. It makes no sense—it's jarring cognitive dissonance.” —Jon Stewart, on the MAGA cult’s obsession with beefing up law enforcement and the military in response to barely-existent shootings by immigrants, while doing nothing to reduce the epidemic of shootings—like the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark—by home-grown Americans.

A tweet from the Daily Show has the caption, “Iran: Weeks away from having nuclear weapons since 1995.” And something I heard in the news: As part of the Israel-Iran war Iran hit an Israeli hospital. Israel’s defense chief declared that to be a war crime. I thought that statement took chutzpah to cover the hypocrisy, considering what Israel has been doing in Gaza. Bill quoted an NBC News report:

“Nearly all hospitals in Gaza are now damaged or destroyed, and half of them are no longer operational,” Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, told NBC News. During the war, Gaza’s hospitals have eked back services, only to be repeatedly struck or besieged again.

Which shall rule—wealth or man?

My Sunday movie was Fortune Feimster, Crushing It. I quite enjoyed the first Fortune Feimster comedy video I saw a few weeks ago and this was like a sequel. It was also as much fun. The first story was about the honeymoon she took with her wife Jax to the Maldives. Only on the plane – a 24 hour trip – did Fortune find out being gay in the Maldives is illegal. The trip there included an overnight in Qatar, where being gay is also illegal. She was afraid of gay booby traps the whole time. It was not a romantic honeymoon. Again, there were stories of dealing with her mother. Some were when Fortune was a teen. After her parents divorced her mother started treating Fortune as her husband – even though there were older brothers. Other stories were about dealing with a now elderly mother. And to my delight she talked about being a teen in the church bell choir! Sigh, not the most flattering of stories. My phone has been added to an emergency alert system. It is now 0-3. The first alert I got was a couple weeks ago. The alert said that strong thunderstorms were heading my way and would hit in several hours. By the time the storm reached me it had died out and I think we didn’t even get a sprinkle. The second alert was 6 am Monday morning. It said there was a possible explosion, though unconfirmed. It gave an address, but not a city (and there are a lot of cities in the Detroit Metro area). The alarm sound woke me up. Then my phone chirped about once a minute demanding I read the message. I eventually got out of bed to get it to shut up. Going back to sleep wasn’t easy. I checked the local news this morning. Yes, there had been a fire at that address. Whether there was also an explosion is unknown. If I needed to be concerned about an explosion why did the alert come two hours after the fire started? Yeah, I’m glad it didn’t wake me at 4 am. The fire was about ten miles away. Why did I need to be concerned at all? The third alert is one that didn’t get sent. Sunday afternoon a line of thunderstorms did sweep across the area. It was strong enough my city’s civil defense sirens went off. The news this morning included how many homes had lost power. So why no alert? Who issued these alerts and under whose authority is not mentioned in the messages. As soon as I touch “OK” they disappear. How did I get on this alert system? I’ve had the phone about 22 months before the first alert. How might I get off? I think I would do better on my own city’s system, if I’m on any system at all. Now here on Wednesday evening a thunderstorm is passing through. No alert. So maybe the score should be 0-4. Big news out of the US Senate is the 25 hour speech given by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ). He started at 7 pm on Monday and yielded the floor after 8 pm on Tuesday. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported on the speech as of Tuesday morning.

Throughout his marathon speech, the senator has taken aim at key Trump policies and actions, particularly the systematic attack on multiple government agencies under the guise of Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Trump has signed off on DOGE-led purges of thousands of government employees (some purges of which judges have ruled unconstitutional), closures of federal agencies, and intrusions of sensitive government systems at agencies like the IRS and Social Security Administration. “What kind of man is in our White House that makes fun of the disabled, who lies so much that the fact-checkers lose count, that minimizes the pain and the suffering?” Booker asked.

Alix Breeden of Kos reported this afternoon, and explains a bit more. Yes, this sets a record. The previous longest speech was by Strom Thurmond in 1957, fighting against civil rights. Breeden reported on the response from Democrats, which was strong praise, and on the response from the public.

According to The New York Times, more than 14,000 people called Booker’s office from the time he began his speech Monday until he yielded the floor. He reached young voters on TikTok, amassing more than 350 million “likes” on videos of his speech posted to his profile. On YouTube, his videos have more than 140,000 views. And across social media, the left is praising Booker for lighting a fire under the Democratic Party.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Christian Paz of Vox:

Into his second day of a marathon address on the Senate floor, Booker is engaging in almost, but not quite, a filibuster — an old congressional tradition. Filibusters are marathon addresses used as a procedural tool. They take advantage of the Senate’s rules that allow for unlimited debate or speaking by a senator unless there have been special limits put in place. Senators recognized by the presiding officer can speak indefinitely, “usually cannot be forced to cede the floor, or even be interrupted”…but “must remain standing and must speak more or less continuously,” according to the Congressional Research Service. But Booker’s address isn’t a filibuster — there’s no legislation that he’s trying to hold up. Instead, it’s a form of political theater and protest against the Trump administration. And it comes at a time when overwhelming shares of his party’s membership think their elected leaders aren’t putting up a tough enough fight to resist Donald Trump’s agenda. About two-thirds of Democratic voters would prefer their leaders “stick to their positions even if this means not getting things done in Washington” a March NBC News poll found.

Down in the comments was a lot of praise for Booker. And a rebuke to calling the speech “performative” or political theater. And exlrrp posted a meme, created by The Resistance before the speech ended.

If Senator Cory Booker can stand up and speak out against the fascist regime for over 22+ hours and still going strong, every single Democrat needs to do the same. One after another. We must disrupt business as usual. Our democracy is on fire. This is a national emergency. No more compromises with the fascists. They do not care about the US Constitution, or judges or the rule of law. RESIST. DISRUPT. DO NOT COMPROMISE.

Last Saturday, before yesterday’s Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, wrote a guest post for Kos. Wikler began with a quote by Justice Edward Ryan, chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1873.

The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economic conquests only, but for political power. The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine: Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

Wikler brought that quote up to date.

Are we feudal serfs of the richest man in the world, Elon Musk? Or are we free?

Wikler wrote that because Musk spent likely more than $25 million to get the Republican backed candidate, Brad Schimel, elected. Musk came to Wisconsin several times. In the most recent trip he offered two $1 million checks to two selected voters. Yeah, offering money to get someone to vote is election bribery and is a felony. The Wisconsin AG has files suit. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that Susan Crawford, the Democratic-backed candidate, won the seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. This preserves the liberal majority and prompts a big sigh of relief from liberals.

The contest was the most expensive court race on record in the U.S., with spending nearing $99 million, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. That broke the previous record of $51 million record, for the state’s Supreme Court race in 2023. All of the spending and attention on the race led to high early voting turnout, with numbers more than 50% higher than the state’s Supreme Court race two years ago.

Two years ago the Wisconsin Supreme Court was flipped from a conservative to liberal majority. Emily Singer of Kos has details on how good this win is for Democrats – and how much of a rebuke it is for Musk and the nasty guy. Crawford won by 10 percentage points. All 72 counties had higher Democratic percents than in November. Crawford won ten counties that the nasty guy had won. Oh, yeah. There were to special elections in Florida to fill vacancies in the US House. They were vacant because Matt Gaetz resigned and Mike Waltz became National Security Advisor (though seems to know nothing about security). Both districts are strongly Republican and in both the Republican candidate won, though by a smaller percentage than in November. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported:

The Trump administration announced on Monday that it will be reviewing nearly $9 billion in “multiyear grant commitments” to Harvard University and its affiliates. “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination - all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry - has put its reputation in serious jeopardy. Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in the statement. ... Under the guise of ending antisemitism, the Trump administration has targeted 10 universities for similar federal investigations, including Columbia University. The attacks have led higher education institutions to pledge to remove protections for marginalized groups while cracking down on speech and activism on campus.

A Martinez of NPR spoke to Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor, who is in the process of leaving Yale University, where he’s been since 2013, for the University of Toronto. Stanley is Jewish and an expert on fascism, including writing the book Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. The page for this segment is a combination of news article and shortened interview transcript. Alas, I think they left out an important point or two. Stanley is moving to protect himself and his family. That fear was prompted by Columbia University (with other universities targeted) agreeing to rework student protest policies to get back $400 million in federal research funding. From the news article:

Though the administration says they are pulling funding from universities to protect students from antisemitism, Stanley says the administration is using Jewish people as an "excuse to take down democracy."

In the interview Stanley said:

But you can't win a war unless you recognize it's a war. This way they're going to pick us off one by one. And history is watching here. Our institutions will be written about. They're being attacked for this entirely fake reason that's furthermore fomenting antisemitism in the United States. It's going to create mass popular anger against Jewish people. So, if universities want to fight anti-Semitism, they need to stand up and say, 'No, we are not threats to American Jews. You are threatening American Jews.'

If I remember right, that anger is because people will see these institutions losing money because of Jewish people. Also, Stanley said instead of allowing the nasty guy to pick them off, one by one, they need to start working together to present a strong and united voice. Stanley said of the University of Toronto:

I have the privilege and good fortune to get a job there. And they have a long term plan of creating a center that will be a refuge for politicians, journalists and professors from democratically backsliding or authoritarian countries like the United States or Russia. And my job will be to work with these people to jointly strategize about how to return our countries to democracy.

Last Friday Singer reported the vice nasty and his wife went to Greenland. They went to a military base quite a ways north and a good distance from actual cities. He was there long enough to give a combative speech, then flew home. In that speech he claimed Denmark, of which Greenland is an autonomous territory, “hasn’t done a good job by the people of Greenland.” So the US just has to take it over. Earlier that day the nasty guy explained, in his rambling way, why he wants Greenland. One phrase: “If you look at the waterways, you have Chinese and Russian ships all over the place.” Kos of Kos offered a rebuttal to the nasty guy and vice nasty.

“Denmark hasn’t done a good job at keeping Greenland safe,” Vance said, which was patently absurd on its face. Has anyone invaded Greenland in decades? Of course not. And the American military presence on the island, part of an array of early-warning radars against a Russian nuclear attack, is the reason why.

Denmark, a member of NATO, has allowed the US presence in Greenland. So yeah, Denmark is keeping it safe. The vice nasty said Denmark hasn’t done enough military spending to keep Greenland safe “from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, China and other nations…” What “aggressive incursions” by Russia and China? Put another way, looking at the nasty guy’s worship of Putin and what’s going on in Ukraine, Greenland should not expect the US to protect it from Russia. Kos included a map of Greenland showing the major cities and the military base. They’re not at all close.

Ultimately, as a NATO ally, Denmark has been open to allowing a greater American military presence in Greenland. There appears to be nothing stopping the NATO alliance, or the United States individually, from building up a presence in Greenland.

Easy to figure out this isn’t about defending Greenland. It’s about the nasty guy appropriating its mineral wealth, now unlocked because of climate change. Since Denmark has universal health care, free college, and low income inequality, is rated the second safest country in the world, and the seventh highest economic freedom score, Kos (and I) like the idea of Greenland annexing the US. disamson of the Kos wrote a variation of what I’ve written a few times. I probably wrote about this when discussing articles on Gaslit Nation. disamson took it from an article posted on Quora.

They don't want to take over the government, they want to destroy that ability of anyone to govern. Traditionally, government was the locus of power in a society. Whether it be right wing or left wing, the most significant power was exerted through government action. That is no longer the case. The real goal of people like Musk & Thiel is corporate feudalism.

I went to that article on Quora. It was written by Feifei Wang, who lives in Seattle. Here are some of the important ideas. A dictator needs a strong central government because that’s how they exert their power. Chaos is bad for maintaining centralized control. But the nasty guy and Musk are not building a central government, even though they have loyalists in the important posts. This looks more like destruction. But a weak government doesn’t help the nasty guy or Musk. The government is a source of enormous wealth for billionaires through the military-industrial complex, subsidies, and regulatory loopholes. A strong central government is the source of their power and money, yet they’re destroying it. So what’s the real goal?

Project 2025 is a “controlled demolition” of the US federal government. Instead of building a competent dictatorship, Trump and Musk (and people from the Heritage Foundation) are gutting federal institutions so they simply cease to function. If you replace career civil servants, scientists, and legal experts with unqualified loyalists, these institutions will be unable to function properly—even if someone competent takes office in the next election. This is not about reforming or restructuring the government for a dictator. It is about rendering it permanently ineffective. ... But what if there are better income sources? What if, instead of gaming the system, they became the system? What if, instead of bending the rules, they make the rules? ... If the government is weak and ineffective, essential services (education, health care, energy, law enforcement, military) will become private industries controlled by the wealthy. When everything is privatized, we effectively live in a plutocracy where corporations run everything, and ordinary people have no democratic protections.

Even if a Democrat were elected president in 2028 they would see the only way to govern is to rely on the private sector. And nationalizing basic government functions would be labeled communism. The nasty guy doesn’t want a functioning government because only a government can hold him accountable. Musk and billionaire tech bros don’t want a functioning government because they want a deregulated playground, one without antitrust laws, labor protections, environmental restrictions, or safety regulations. They become the new ruling class. This is worse than an authoritarian regime like China because they still fill potholes and check food safety. In response to this article Kelvin Bauldry commented:

The Republicans have been running up debt for decades because it makes government look “broken” and starves future governments of the resources needed to fix things let alone adopt new policies like universal health care. Fits right into a plan like what you described.

And Chris Jankowski replied to Bauldry:

You’re right Kelvin, and if you check the record, every single time this has happened, the economy tanks and we vote in a Democrat to fix it. We are a deeply stupid nation...

The bullying backfired

I came home Monday. The church conference was great! I plan to report on it soon. I had a good time with my cousin and his family and visited his mother, my aunt. Flights were on time and unremarkable (always a good thing). And I’m ready to get back to discussing the news. The two big news stories when I left are the same two big news stories on my return – the lack of a Speaker in the House and the Hamas attack on Israel. On to the first of those. Back on Monday Laura Clawson on Daily Kos reported that Jim Jordan, leading (actually, only) candidate for Speaker, was trying to round up votes. Republicans held a secret ballot and Jordan got 55 no votes. To be Speaker he must have only 4 or fewer no votes. To get the needed 51 more votes Jordan began threatening his colleagues. To me that is a sign of how much Jordan is a supremacist with strong authoritarian tendencies. Clawson wrote that even some of Jordan’s supporters think his bullying campaign is a bad idea. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Jordan supporter, said, “the dumbest thing you can do is to continue pissing off those people.” News stories out there reported that Jordan held a vote on Tuesday and 20 of his colleagues (and all the Democrats) voted against him. There was another vote today. Joan McCarter of Kos did a liveblog of the voting and reported Jordan lost that one by 22 votes. There is now talk of giving Speaker Pro Tempore McHenry enough interim power so the House can function leading up to the next budget deadline in a month. McCarter also noted Democrat Hakeem Jeffries again got more votes (as he did for 14 rounds last January), but didn’t get a majority of those voting. Ten days ago Pat Chappatte posted a cartoon with Matt Gaetz saying, “This time, the insurgents did take the Capitol.” In a pundit roundup for Saturday (I did read some news while gone) on Kos Greg Dworkin quoted John Harris of Politio Magazine. The important bit:

So far, no Republican has managed to emerge as a genuine leader in the Trump era — not by seeking alliance with him, nor by standing up to him, nor by trying keep a safe distance from him. If Trump is a would-be authoritarian, the House drama shows that he is not the kind who cares much about exercising authority beyond himself. To the contrary, he seemed to regard the turmoil and ritual humiliations — first McCarthy, then Jordan, now Scalise — as a sideshow. In important respects, he is right.

In today’s pundit roundup Dworkin had a few good quotes. The first is from Politico that says the bullying backfired.

The arm-twisting campaign, which in many cases included veiled threats of primary challenges, was meant to help rally support behind Jordan’s candidacy. Instead, it has put the Judiciary chair’s bid on life support and threatened to plunge House Republicans deeper into turmoil with no clear way out… Some Republicans chalked up the frustration to a lack of understanding, on the part of both Jordan and high-profile conservatives off the Hill, about how less conservative colleagues operate. Some Jordan opponents said they hadn’t received a call from him directly about their concerns with his potential leadership, particularly on government funding.

To that Dworkin responded:

That last paragraph is the most interesting. ‘We’re cowards with no moral compass, and don’t care a whit about policy, why aren’t they?’ And if you think that means they understand Democrats any better...

Dworkin quoted a tweet from Josh Huder:

McCarthy struggled to get 20-ish right-wing votes. Jordan struggles to get 20 moderates + some. Opposition votes are almost a mirror image of one another. Perfect illustration of any GOP leader's conundrum attempting to unite this majority.

Dworkin quoted Peter Hamby of Puck discussing the rise and fall of GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The nail in the coffin appears to have been struck by Sean Hannity of Fox News. Hannity’s complaint is that Ramaswamy would say something, then when asked about it in an interview would deny he had said it. And Hannity was tired of those games. In the comments are cartoons by Denise Oliver Velez. One of them is by Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune and speaks to the other big issue. On the edges are people looking over their shoulders at those on the opposite edge. The text between says:

All the Israelis and Palestinians I know are lovely people worthy of a future. Don’t choose a side. Choose a solution.

Another cartoon from a separate roundup, this one by Rob Rogers, shows ruined landscape on either side of an Israel/Gaza border. The family on one side holds the sign, “We are not Netanyahu.” The sign held by family on the other side says, “We are not Hamas.” An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports that the nasty guy is using donations to pay his huge legal bills. This is money donated to his campaign, which means it shouldn’t be used for personal expenses. But since the money is going through a “leadership political action committee” the Federal Election Commission has ruled the ban doesn’t apply. So the nasty guy’s PAC has paid nearly $37 million to more than 60 law firms and individual attorneys since January 2022. This raises ethical questions, even if technically legal. In these sorts of cases the little guys are persuaded to testify against the big guys. What if the big guys are paying for the little guy’s lawyers? This sounds like the nasty guy is fleecing his base to pay his bills to defend against the crimes he’s allegedly committed. But many of his base are fine with that. He’s convinced them that he’s the target of political persecution. Meteor Blades of Kos, in an Earth Matters report, shared a pretty good idea, one I’ll be sharing with my state legislators. Forty-five years ago solar cells cost more than $30 a watt. They’re now down to $0.20 a watt and are a lot more efficient. A big need is a place to put them. The idea is to put solar panels along America’s highway rights-of-way. That includes the land within freeway interchanges. There are several advantages. There would rarely be local opposition, as there would be for panels on farm land or ecologically delicate public lands. No easements need be purchased from hundreds of individual landowners. There is less need for environmental impact studies. Along highways is also a good place for the transmission lines. That can cut the whole approval process from 3-5 years to 1 or 1½ years. Finally, it is a boost in income for the state’s Department of Transportation. Wisconsin passed this idea way back in 2003. And California has passed a bill, which is awaiting Gov. Newsom’s signature. But that’s only two of fifty. I’ll be adding this to the idea of putting solar panels over parking lots (especially over stadium lots and big box store and mall lots).

Wouldn't even accept a gift of bagels and lox

When the Clarence Thomas ethics scandals broke I saw an image of Thomas and a bunch of white guys sitting on a deck with woods behind him. There’s also some sort of statue with arms upraised. The first time I saw it the image was identified as some sort of rich man’s retreat, perhaps in the Adirondacks. I’ve since learned the image isn’t a photo, but a painting. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos expanded on a tweet by Sawyer Hackett that identifies the people. There is Harlan Crow, the guy funding all those swanky vacations; a lawyer working with supremacist Ginni Thomas; Leonard Leo, the guy dedicated to installing conservatives onto the federal courts; and the dean of the law school at the University of Georgia who writes briefs for Leo’s Federalist Society to influence Court decisions. These are men with a lot of interest in what Thomas does on the Court. Yeah, this was a gathering the attendees wanted to commemorate by having someone paint it. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported on what Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse had to say about Thomas’ explanation of why he didn’t report the vacations. One of the props Whitehouse used is a reproduction of that painting, which is at the top of Einenkel’s post. First problem: Travel by private jet is not on the personal hospitality exemption list. Second: Thomas said it was okay not to report because he asked colleagues, but he should have asked the Financial Disclosure Committee. Third: there’s no legal way to not disclose that Harlan Crow bought his property in Georgia. Fourth: The hospitality came from people known to want to turn the court into a tool of billionaires. A lapse in reporting back in 2011 was referred to the Financial Disclosure Committee. But the committee appears to have no public record of the referral. What happened to it? As Einenkel mentioned, Thomas started not reporting all he should back in 2011. McCarter has details and notes that nothing will be done as long as Chief Justice Roberts does nothing and the House is controlled by Republicans. Thomas certainly won’t resign. So Democrats need to keep the corruption front and center, keep reminding the country the corruption is enabled by Republicans, and keep talking about how every extreme decision by this court and others is because of Republicans and their rich donors. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that the Senate Judiciary Committee knows Thomas won’t come clean, so they demanded his benefactor Harlan Crow send them a list of all gifts over the $415 limit. They also sent letters to the known companies where Crow and Thomas vacationed. Sumner included a description of how Crow and Thomas got to be best buds. Sumner also noted the Washington Post suggested that Thomas is rich enough – his net worth is about $24 million, Ginni’s around $78 million – he could reimburse Crow for all that Crow spent on him. But he won’t.

Republicans will continue to pretend that this is all just “political.” And it is. Because for them, corruption and injection of massive wealth into the system is necessary for their party’s survival. It’s no coincidence that, right between getting the private school tuition, the $500,000 gift to Ginni Thomas, and the real estate purchase, Thomas delivered the deciding vote in Citizens United v. FEC, which opened political campaigns to unlimited spending by outside groups. Votes like that … that’s what this is all about.

We certainly can’t leave Ginni Thomas out of the scandals. Sumner reported on the latest. Leo funneled tens of thousands of dollars to Ginni prior to a case by the Judicial Education Project coming before the Court on which her husband sits. And funneled is the right word because there were intermediaries – which means they knew it was corrupt. Sumner wrote:

If the idea for sending the money originated with Leonard, then it’s an obvious bribe. If the request for the money came from either Ginni or Clarence Thomas, then it’s out and out extortion. Either way, it appears to be such a blatant example of criminal activity that it could result in charges.

That particular case coming before the court was the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Again, Thomas supplied a crucial vote. McCarter reported that, not surprisingly, Crow brushed off the demand he document how much he’s spent on travel with Thomas. So Congress can ask for Crow’s tax returns, which they can demand for any citizen. But Crow now has a second passport with tax haven St. Kitts and Nevis, which may complicate demanding his returns from the IRS. Editorial and Political Cartoons tweeted a meme showing the Supreme Court building with these words from Thomas Paine:

A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.

Now contrast Thomas with Justice Elena Kagan. Aldous Pennyfarthing of the Kos community working from a story in The Forward reported that a bunch of women who went to high school with Kagan offered to send her bagels and lox from a legendary Lower East Side deli. They wanted to support her because she had to work with Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett every day. And Kagan – declined, saying she can’t accept gifts. Even gifts way under the $415 limit. When I see a situation I know is wrong – Supreme Court corruption, lax and loosening gun policies that result in daily deaths – and the people who could do something about it aren’t I conclude they want that. In this case, they want a corrupt Supreme Court. Thomas wants to be corrupted. He gets lavish vacations. He gets to show the rest of the country how powerful he is (never mind he dances to the tune of his benefactors). Republicans want that corruption because it keeps them in power (see gutting the Voting Rights Act, opening the floodgates of political donations, and refusing to rule on gerrymandering) and keeps their big donors happy. Rich people (who I’ve said many times wouldn’t be billionaire rich without oppressing their workers, which is a form of corruption) want a corrupt court that will consistently do their bidding and take their side against the little guys. Democrats or at least enough of them are also corrupt and want a corrupt court. My reasoning for that is they had a chance to reform the court, to expand it to blunt conservative power and impose ethics, and didn’t take it. We have a corrupt court and too many people in power are just fine with that. Both Crow and Thomas have said they take these lavish trips together because they are dear friends. I wonder how long that friendship would last if Thomas, for any reason other than retirement and maybe including that, left the Court. I’ve heard lots of voices saying this corruption calls for ethics reforms of the Court. I’ve heard only a few voices call for the impeachment of Thomas. Yeah, I know the current House would never approve it. Back on April 21 Brooke Gladstone of the NPR and WNYC show On the Media spoke with Corey Robin, journalist, professor, and author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. A transcript of the segment is available here. The key to Thomas is money – if you have it you can wield it. The more money one has the more Thomas believes one should play a role in society. He has built his jurisprudence to justify that. Some of that view of wealth came from his grandfather. Thomas was born into poverty, then went to live with his grandfather, who was reasonably wealthy and who had pulled himself out of poverty with hard work and money. Thomas was critical of liberals who treated the grandfather’s limited wealth with scorn. In the 1950s through the 1970s the Supreme Court built protections around Free Speech. Business saw the Constitution did not protect them and they saw they could be regulated and constricted in all sorts of ways. In 1987 Thomas gave a speech saying we should redefine business activity not as economic, but as speech. That would give business a Constitutional status. (I’m sure that speech was a big reason Thomas was invited to the court four years later.) The effort began with advertising, with fossil fuel advertising in particular. That was declared to be political speech, which opened the gates to everything else – such as a cake maker who refused to serve gay people. Kagan recognized the problem with that. Everything business does uses words, from telling an employee they’re fired, to every written contract. And now all of that is protected by free speech. Other things this effort did: Give moral standing to the businessman. Declare a political donation to be an expression of our values, and thus speech. And equate money with speech. Modern campaigns are expensive. Costly campaigns require big donors. That big wealth can convince voters to select certain candidates, to convince voters of the correctness of the corporation’s ideas. That is in a Supreme Court opinion. It’s in the open, not hidden in a footnote or anywhere else. Yeah, it is a roadmap for wealthy people. The idea that money is speech goes back to Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, two great liberal justices. So campaign expenditures are off limits from government regulation. And campaign contributions can’t be limited for the sake of equalizing speech. That means limiting money isn’t a way to campaign finance reform. The money (voices) of small donors will never be equivalent to the money (voices) of the billionaires. The real solution is distribution of money in the economy. Even Noah Webster was concerned with the concentration of wealth – a democracy or republic would be impossible with it. What this scandal has shown is how much money Harlan Crow has and what he’s willing to do with it. And issues, such as minimum wage, are more than economic questions, they’re also cultural and political questions about who gets to talk in our society and who gets heard in the media. We have a long tradition of one person, one vote. But equating money with speech erodes that tradition. The rich person is worth more in both the economic and political spheres. That’s the legacy of Thomas. I add... If the solution is to eliminate concentrated wealth, how do we do that? What remedy is open? Congress has been bought. The Court has been bought. Even voter suppression and gerrymandering are rampant, reducing the remedy through voting. Robin didn’t answer, though Gladstone said “that would probably be impossible now because they would be seen as impinging on the speech of business.” I’ve been a part of Voters Not Politicians here in Michigan. This group was responsible for passing the citizens redistricting commission amendment, which contributed to the state now having a Democratic led legislature. They also got a voter bill of rights amendment passed. Now they’re starting a push towards campaign finance reform. I haven’t yet attended any of their townhall meetings because the ones close by have been on evenings I have commitments. I don’t know what measures they have planned. I wonder how this effort will fare against corrupt Thomas.

The real Dr. King cannot be commodified, homogenized, and white-washed

The big voting rights bill has been blocked. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported a coalition of civil rights groups declared it wasn’t a defeat. It wasn’t a useless exercise. It shone a bright light on anti-American senators. McCarter wrote:

They added: “Democracy’s foes have not had the last word. As civil rights leaders and as patriotic Americans we will never stop fighting to preserve and defend the rights for which our predecessors bled and died.”

And Schumer said:

While tonight’s vote was disappointing, it will not deter Senate Democrats from continuing our fight against voter suppression, dark money, and partisan gerrymandering. With no support from Senate Republicans, many of whom deny the very existence of voter suppression, we faced an uphill battle. But because of this fight, and the fact that each Senator had to show where they stand, we are closer to achieving our goal of passing vital voter protection legislation. Now that every Senator has gone on record, the American people have seen who’s on the side of protecting voting rights and it will only strengthen our resolve as we work to ensure that our democracy does not backslide. The Democratic Caucus pledges to keep working until voting rights are protected for every American.

As for Sen. Sinema, who voted against ending the filibuster, Kerry Eleveld of Kos noted her favorability rating from the Kos/Civiqs polls. 27% of Arizonans in general have a favorable opinion of her. It’s also 27% of independents, 44% of Republicans, and only 8% of Democrats – though since she skipped out on the vote for the January 6th Commission last May her favorability by Democrats has been under 14%. Alas, the next time she’s up for reelection is 2024. Eleveld also reported several progressive organizations who have declared they will no longer support her. Cameron Joseph, senior political reporter at Vice News, tweeted:

I talked to more than a dozen volunteers and former staff who worked hard to elect @SenatorSinema in '18. Now? They feel "betrayed," "livid," "crushed." "People need to know she sucks," one former campaign staffer told me. Many were big fans of her in '18, but they feel like she's been intentionally sticking her finger in their eyes ever since, and some said the past week has been the "last straw" for them. And this isn't just progressive activists. These were her own supporters.

As for Sinema’s sidekick (or maybe she’s his sidekick) Sen. Manchin, McCarter reported he declared the big Build Back Better bill that he killed will have to start over from scratch. After Congress gets its financial house in order and pushed inflation down. And gotten COVID out of the way. Yeah, he’s the one who has been moving goalposts and reneging on agreements, so this isn’t a surprise. Maybe some of the individual pieces can get passed. Maybe he’ll block those too. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, had a couple interesting quotes. First from Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post discussing the vote on voting rights:

A funny thing about those votes: They put the best and the worst of the Senate on full display… Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday shredded the “never before changed the filibuster” argument. Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) gave one of the most stirring speeches, making clear that while John Lewis gave blood on the Edmund Pettus bridge, this Senate couldn’t bring itself to “bridge” a procedural rule. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who bent over backward to accommodate Manchin’s concerns on voting reforms, blasted the gamesmanship: “I think by voting this down, by not allowing us even to debate this, to get to the conclusion of a vote, that is silencing the people of America, all in the name of an archaic Senate rule that isn’t even in the Constitution. That’s just wrong.” When Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) insisted it was unfair to equate voting restrictions to Jim Crow, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) let him have it. “Don’t lecture me about Jim Crow,” Booker declared angrily. “I know this is not 1965. And that’s what makes me so outraged. It is 2022, and they are blatantly removing more polling places from the counties where Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented.”

Dworkin also quoted Dan Froomkin of Presswatch:

A Quinnipiac poll out this week found that a significant majority of Americans – by a 58 to 37 margin – believe “the nation’s democracy is in danger of collapse.” Some of that is right-wingers who think the 2020 election was stolen, but it’s 56 to 37 percent among Democrats, too. Over half of Americans also consider it very likely (19 percent) or somewhat likely (34 percent) that there will be another attack in the United States like the one at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. And while people who follow me on Twitter are hardly a representative group, I was struck by how many people responded to this tweet by telling me that not only are they terrified, but that everybody they know is terrified, too. I don’t read about people who feel that way in the news, though.

Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center tweeted:

Not enough attention has been paid to how powerful dark money interests mobilized to pressure Manchin and Sinema to maintain the filibuster—and, in turn, to maintain the power of those wealthy special interests at the expense of voters. For example, last April, the dark money group Heritage Action described a $24M plan to “block federal legislation & tackle state based reform." A key part of that anti-voter effort was blocking filibuster reform: “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment," said a top Heritage official. ... As part of that $24M campaign, Heritage Action organized a rally in WV urging Manchin to oppose filibuster reform. Heritage claimed to be “stand[ing] up for WV values,” but had to bus in activists from hundreds of miles away, across state lines. ... McConnell’s dark money group, One Nation, also spent millions on ads targeting Manchin on the filibuster The Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity mobilized against filibuster reform, too. AFP spent at least $500K on ads opposing filibuster changes in states like WV, organized astroturf rallies, and set up the website The US Chamber also fought against voting rights legislation and filibuster reform. As @andrewperezdc reported, the Chamber has sway with Manchin & Sinema, and the pair echoed Chamber talking points when describing their opposition to filibuster changes. Ultimately, the Freedom to Vote Act would have taken power from wealthy special interests and returned it to voters, and that was a huge threat to dark money interests like Heritage Action, the Kochs, and the US Chamber.

Yesterday marked the start of Biden’s second year. Rebekah Sager of Kos thought it was a fine time to list his first year accomplishments. That list would help us feel a little less glum about the defeat of the voting rights bill. Before getting to the actual list (which I’ll let you read) Sager wrote:

As former President Barack Obama before him, Biden entered office with a deep hole to climb out of. Former President Donald Trump left a trash fire of sick, conspiratorial Americans doubting their own election, as well as the science that could lead us out of the pandemic and climate change. He opened the door and invited in white supremacy, gave tax breaks to the ultra-rich, and broke an already broken country further apart. Let’s not even get started on the country trying to heal from an attempted coup on the U.S. Capitol.

Sager also wrote about the first year accomplishments of VP Harris. Again, I’ll let you read the list. Sager wrote:

Although her first year in office has been impressive, Harris has been scrutinized in a way that’s unlike so many of her predecessors in the role. Talk around D.C. has ranged from petty, with comments about her being “difficult” to work with, to Republicans and Democrats sparring about her being “too radical” and “not radical enough.” Her approval ratings equal President Joe Biden’s; a recent CBS News poll found that Americans have given her a 44%.

Eleveld reported that during Biden’s two hour press conference he said:

What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they are for?

Moscow Mitch responded (“it” being the Senate):

That is a very good question and I'll let you know when we take it back.

Eleveld repeated the story of GOP Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire being asked to run for a seat in the Senate. When he heard the entire Republican goal was to keep Biden from accomplishing anything for two years he declined. Marcus Johnson tweeted an answer to Biden’s question, “Name me one thing they are for?” The answer: “Jim Crow.” Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote The 1619 Project about slaves arriving in America with the first settlers. She says every aspect of this country has been touched by slavery. Lauren Sue of Kos reported Hannah-Jones, a black journalist, was invited to speak at an event to honor Martin Luther King. Yet some people opposed her, calling her “unworthy of such association with King.” So she scrapped her original speech. The first half of what she did say was all excerpts from King’s speeches, though she replaced the N word with “black” so the audience wouldn’t catch on to what she was doing. Sue included many of those excerpts, then linked to Hanna-Jones’ Twitter thread that told the rest of the story:

Oh, the uncomfortable silence as I read Dr. King's words at a commemoration of Dr. King's life when people had no idea that these were his words. When I revealed that everything I said to that point was taken from his speeches between '56 and 67... Can you say SHOOK! Then I read all the names that white Americans called King: charlatan, demagogue, communist, traitor -- and brought out the polling showing more than three-quarters of Americans opposed King at his death while 94 percent approve of him now. I left them with this: People who oppose today what he stood for back then do not get to be the arbiters of his legacy. The real Dr. King cannot be commodified, homogenized, and white-washed and whatever side you stand on TODAY is the side you would have been back then. In fact, most white Americans in 1963 opposed the March on Washington where Dr. King gave the "I Have A Dream Speech" with that one line that people oppose to anti-racism like to trot out against those working for racial justice. ... This is why the 1619 Project exists. This is why the decades of scholarship that undergirds the 1619 Project exists. Because if we do nothing, they will co-opt our history and use it against us. Dr. King was a radical critic of racism, capitalism and militarism. He didn't die. He was assassinated. And many, including Reagan, fought the national holiday we're now commemorating. If you haven't read, in entirety, his speeches, you've been miseducated & I hope that you will.

News reports have said there is now a website to which one can go to order COVID tests and get them for free. That prompted Dr. Thrasher to tweet:

The Democrats seem as intent on making getting at-home Covid tests as complicated as Republicans want to make voting I can’t stress enuf that tens of millions of Americans can’t read. There is an unspoken consensus in news media and both major political parties that these ppl should be left for dead every time “Go to the website” or “Google it” are evoked to fight COVID If you can’t read enough to work, you can’t Google where to find a test and fill out a form for reimbursement. They should be freely available everywhere. Ppl who can’t read are no more deserving of contracting or dying of COVID than anyone else, but they’re ignored when pols say Let Them Google Cake. I think at-home tests should be mailed to everyone (create a culture of at home tests) AND available via schools, libraries etc. But if you must request them, why a website? Why not a phone #? It costs more to staff a call center, but... Covid affects older ppl a lot. And if you watch ads on TV that are targeting the elderly, they have phone numbers, not websites. Everything abt this pandemic ought to make getting help easier for the ppl most affected—& they might not read (English or at all) or use computers.

Ana Cabrera, of CNN, tweeted this morning:

The WH has opened a hotline for those who can't order their 4 free COVID tests online. The number to call is 800-232-0233

Doug Mack bought the fonts used by the Park Service, and with them created some signs for alternate national parks. A few of examples:

Welcome to Everything is Fine National Park. Quiet Sobbing Area Next 1,000 Miles Welcome to Twitter National Wildlife Preserve. Home of Bad Faithful Geyser. Welcome to Meh National Park. Welcome to Yes, We Have Bears National Forest. Stop Trying to Take a Selfie With Them OMG. Welcome to Stay on the Damn Path National Forest. You’re Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.

Courting the Republican donor spigot is so much easier

I’ve now been in my current residence for 30 years! In December of 1991 I moved in after two years of living in Germany. I think my parents and a sibling or two helped me wash the place on December 1 and the moving van arrived December 2. It’s a nice place, though at times the upkeep feels daunting. At the moment I plan to stay put until simply can’t live here anymore. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported that Gallup has been polling how we think about Roe v. Wade for over three decades. Support for overturning Roe has never been higher than one third of Americans. In May of this year just under a third support getting rid of the right to an abortion. Support for keeping abortion legal “in all or most cases” hovers around 60%. Overturning Roe could hurt Republicans with college educated and suburban voters. 68% of college graduates say abortion should be legal. In another post Eleveld write that Republicans are indeed running scared. They’ll talk about anything but abortion. Democrats have a definite line of attack. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post who discussed Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s question of whether the court could survive the stench of such a blatantly political move in overturning court precedent.

[Sotomayor] was referring to the apparent willingness of the court to overthrow precedent simply because its membership changed. (The usual reasons for overriding precedent — such as new facts or an evolving social consensus — do not apply in this case.) As the solicitor general and the counsel for the Center of Reproductive Rights argued, this is the first time in history that the court will rip up decades of precedent to take away a fundamental personal right.

CDSofNM of the Kos community did an analysis of a partisan ruling on this abortion case wound mean. I’m not that much of a legal scholar to want to trace down every source in the footnotes (yes, there are footnotes to this post). I don’t understand how these things connect. I’ll let you read the details for yourself. The short summary: 1. Allowing the abortion laws in Texas and Mississippi (this case) to stand violates the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution, the clause that says federal law takes priority over state law. 2. A political ruling in this case invalidates the entire Bill of Rights.. 3. Reversing Roe is contrary to the Constitution’s Due Process Clause, and the 9th and 14th Amendments. That destroys the New Hampshire Compact and invalidates the entire Constitution. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote that Sotomayor’s statement – coupled with what the three conservative justices said in oral arguments – is a strong call for expanding the Court. We can’t wait for the Court to erode our rights. Expand the court now. And what are Democrats doing? Scaring their base as an opportunity to fundraise so we can elect more Democrats to protect abortion rights. Yo, Dems, that’s what we did in 2020. We worked real hard and especially hard in Georgia to give you a majority. You have that majority now. We expect action now – not after the next election – which from the voting rights issues you’re not addressing you’re likely to lose. And what can they do now? End the filibuster. Expand the Court before this ruling is handed down (which can’t be done with the filibuster in place). Pass federal pro choice legislation. Fundraising will be a whole lot easier if abortion rights are secure and Democrats brag about it rather than using the loss of abortion rights as a fundraising tactic. Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, tweeted:

I don’t think the White House understands how much its weakness in the fight for democracy demoralizes a public that will have to find strength to fight for democracy after Biden is out of office and his staff is back at their big law firms and influence peddling consultancies.

Ashley Nicole Black described it quite well:

You may lose some rights, but don't worry you can vote! Oh, they're restricting voting and gerrymandering so some folks votes don't count? Okay! Well, you can protest! Wait, they made it legal to run over protestors with cars and ppl get away with shooting them? Ok you can uh...

Joan McCarter of Kos reported Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin has been gumming up the Democrat’s agenda so well that Moscow Mitch prays for him every night. And the Coalition to Protect American Workers (actually to protect mega-donors – another case of a group choosing a name that is opposite of what they do) is spending a large six figures on an ad campaign thanking Manchin for standing up to Biden to protect the American worker. And they’re using the same lies that Manchin has been spouting for the last few months In a post from a couple weeks ago McCarter reported on Manchin and his sidekick Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and their routine to reduce the size of the Build Back Better bill:

When one made a demand that was satisfied, the other would pop up with their own demands, dragging the process out and singlehandedly fanning the flames of “Dems in disarray” reporting. The whole point of this exercise for the two of them, it appears, is to open up the Republican donor spigot. That’s were the really big political money is, and courting it is so much easier than doing the necessary work it takes to amass small donor donations. Like showing up in your state, holding town meetings, and being accountable to the people who put you in office. ... The two have set personal bests for fundraising this year, Sinema raking in $2.6 million in the first three quarters—“two and a half times as much as she raised in the same period last year”—and Manchin $3.3 million, which is a whopping 14 times as much as his haul from last year. Both are up for reelection in 2024, so this push isn’t to save their seats in a difficult midterm election for Democrats. More likely, at least in Sinema’s case, it’s to try to scare off a primary challenger.

McCarter wrote that the White House has broken out how much of the BBB money would go to their states of West Virginia and Arizona and how much would help the needy in each state.

There’s a tremendous need in both states, with both ranking in the bottom 10 in the nation for the people living in poverty, Arizona at 43rd and West Virginia 44th. You sure couldn’t tell it by the priorities of these two senators.

It’s been about ten days since someone drove a vehicle into the Waukesha Christmas Parade, killing a few and injuring several. At the time Robert Silverman tweeted a thread about how the far right disinformation machine went after the driver. Someone got the identity of the driver and found their social media account. Then another added screenshots with an editorial slant somewhere between inflammatory and false. There were claims the driver supported Black Lives Matter (though the driver didn’t use that tag). Soon they added the claim that the vehicle driver was doing it as a BLM revenge attack on the Rittenhouse verdict. None of that is true, but their audience will remain convinced that BLM targeted the parade. Alec Karakatsanis, founder of the Civil Rights Corps, tweeted a thread about the New York Times publishing a headline it knew was false. The headline was for another bit of pro-police propaganda. The false headline:

After Murders ‘Doubled Overnight,’ the N.Y.P.D. Is Solving Fewer Cases

Note the quotes in there that say this isn’t a verified fact, but what someone said. That someone is a professor. In the article he didn’t say murders doubled, but police detective caseloads doubled. But the NYT didn’t provide stats or verification or identify their professor as a former cop. They put all this in the headline, which is all many people read, but is enough to create clicks and outrage. They put it in quotes so they could deny making the assertion themselves. Grab a tissue for this last one. Some people understand what a community is for. This scene took place after the school shooting in Oxford, Michigan. Allie Gross tweeted and included a photo of the crowd:

McClaren Hospital where Oxford community is gathered to support the family of Justin Shillings, one of the four teens killed this week. Justin is an organ donor and the crowd is here so that when his body is moved for surgery his family can look down and see the love and support.

Gerrymandered for black and white

The Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission has published their maps for Congress districts and state Senate and House districts. They actually produced three version of the legislature maps and five of the Congressional map. I didn’t see an explanation of why did it that way or how they will decide which one to put into official use. In the last couple days I looked over some of the maps, guided by analysis from the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. I saw the state House map labeled “Pine” which the Princeton group rated as “C” as in average, could be better and could be worse. It rated the map B for slight Democratic advantage, C for competitiveness, and F for geographic features due to non-compact districts. The Princeton analysis also noted that none of the districts are black majority, though several are minority majority. In looking at the map of the districts in the Detroit area I see a problem. Eight Mile Rd. is the boundary between the predominantly black Detroit and the predominantly white northern suburbs (the Eminem movie titled 8 Mile was given that name for that reason). This map shows nine long, thin state House districts that cross Eight Mile. Several others cross the city border to include parts of western suburbs that are just as white as the northern burbs. I think there is one, maybe two, districts that are completely in Detroit. Yeah, it looks like gerrymandering – not so much Republican and Democrat (all these districts around Detroit are strongly Democratic) but to keep blacks out of the state legislature. This afternoon and evening was the first time for citizens to give in-person feedback. Another four meetings will be held across the state this week and next. This meeting was in Detroit. I thought of attending, but didn’t think I had a particular comment to make that others would be better able to say. So I watched part of the afternoon proceedings online citizens came to the microphones and had 90 seconds to say what they though. The overall view of the maps is that the commission screwed up. Even the heavily gerrymandered 2010 maps had 12 black majority House districts (there are 110 members of the House). This map proposes two. Unacceptable. This doesn’t even fulfill the Voting Rights Act (which, alas, has been gutted). The commission must start over. Several Detroit people who worked hard to get the Redistricting Commission approved in the 2018 election spoke of their disappointment. We worked hard to get something better. These maps are better in that they may restore the balance in the legislature, but they are not better in minority representation in that legislature. Try again. Meteor Blades, Daily Kos staff emeritus, listed and commented on a few climate related stories. Here are some of them: * Congress had better act really quick so that Biden has something tangible of American plans to take to the Glasgow climate summit in about 10 days. It would be good if he could tell China and India we’re doing something, what about you? * That climate summit has a few corporate sponsors. One would think having corporate sponsors at a gathering to talk about the climate crisis would be a bad idea. At least Big Oil won’t be there. But Microsoft, Unilever, and Land Rover will. They’ll have space to tout how green they are. Sure. Unilever is among the top five largest producers of polluting plastics. * The US will need a big increase in the solar workforce. * There are two dozen fossil fuel projects waiting for some level of approval from the US federal government. If approved they will increase fossil fuel emissions by 20% at a time when we’re supposed to be cutting emissions. So don’t approve them. Sydney Pereira of Kos Prism wrote about what is now being called the Great Resignation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nearly 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August. That’s 2.9% of the workforce. The reasons: The old job overworked them (or didn’t offer enough COVID protections) or didn’t pay enough. Workers are saying the old job just wasn’t worth it. Some employers are now reevaluating pay and benefits. Dartagnan of the Kos community added that workers aren’t looking for just more pay. They also want better benefits and better work/life balance. Chitown Kev, in his pundit roundup for Kos, included a couple quotes about the Great Resignation. From Derek Thompson of The Atlantic:

Nearly 7 percent of employees in the “accommodations and food services” sector left their job in August. That means one in 14 hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and barbacks said sayonara in a single month. ... As I wrote in the spring, quitting is a concept typically associated with losers and loafers. But this level of quitting is really an expression of optimism that says, We can do better. You may have heard the story that in the golden age of American labor, 20th-century workers stayed in one job for 40 years and retired with a gold watch. But that’s a total myth. The truth is people in the 1960s and ’70s quit their jobs more often than they have in the past 20 years, and the economy was better off for it. Since the 1980s, Americans have quit less, and many have clung to crappy jobs for fear that the safety net wouldn’t support them while they looked for a new one. But Americans seem to be done with sticking it out. And they’re being rewarded for their lack of patience: Wages for low-income workers are rising at their fastest rate since the Great Recession. The Great Resignation is, literally, great.

And from Paul Krugman of the New York Times who asked: Why now?

Well, it’s only speculation, but it seems quite possible that the pandemic, by upending many Americans’ lives, also caused some of them to reconsider their life choices. Not everyone can afford to quit a hated job, but a significant number of workers seem ready to accept the risk of trying something different — retiring earlier despite the monetary cost, looking for a less unpleasant job in a different industry, and so on. And while this new choosiness by workers who feel empowered is making consumers’ and business owners’ lives more difficult, let’s be clear: Overall, it’s a good thing. American workers are insisting on a better deal, and it’s in the nation’s interest that they get it.

Last Saturday Michel Martin of NPR talked to James Fallows, former editor of the U.S. News and World Report. The discussion was about that magazine’s ongoing ranking of best high schools and colleges and its new ranking of the best public elementary and middle schools. The magazine publishes these rankings because it is good for business. It appeals to the human desire for ranking. While ratings are good, ranking is not. Ranking West Point to Caltech to Julliard is preposterous. Ranking encourages abuse: Parents buying their children’s way into the top ranked schools, sometimes using fraud. Schools jiggering their ranking through their acceptance rate – the number of students they accept compared to the number who apply so they encourage more to apply. As for elementary schools, their quality is already tied too much to property tax differentials. Telling one elementary school they rank #2115 while another a few miles away is ranked 600 places higher is absurd, useless, and harmful. We shouldn’t rank elementary schools. Though there is a human desire for hierarchy and these rankings are not going away, it is essential to dilute the influence of one source through having more sources, such as other rankings that use different criteria. This discussion fits right in to my understanding that ranking and a hierarchy of either schools or humans are bad things. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote that Sen. Manchin’s end game is clear. He wants to decouple the two infrastructure bills, have the House vote quickly on the bipartisan bill already passed by the Senate, ... and let Biden’s Build Back Better plan die. Yeah, that’s the bill with all the climate saving programs. And Manchin has no interest in saving the planet. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported on Manchin’s fellow obstructionist, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

Sinema, who raised $1.1 million in the third quarter, apparently thinks she can buy her way to reelection with the backing of corporate America and GOP donors while pissing off those that brung her. Lots of corporate lobbyists from the pharmaceutical and finance sectors took an interest in Sinema, as she and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia continue to erect roadblocks to President Joe Biden's potentially transformative agenda. ... But perhaps what is truly amazing about Sinema selling out her party for dollars is just how anemic her fundraising numbers look next to those of her fellow Democratic Arizona senator, Mark Kelly, who amassed $8 million in third-quarter fundraising.

Kelly doesn’t accept PAC donations. McCarter wrote that many Congressional Democrats are getting frustrated with Biden and his passivity on what is a huge chunk of his own agenda. So he has reengaged with tweets and speeches and sitting down with various groups of Democrats. McCarter didn’t report on Biden’s discussion with Manchin. Peter Doocy is the Fox News reporter at the White House. He uses his questions to try to get soundbites suitable for his network. Press Secretary Jen Psaki is pretty good at knocking down his idiotic questions. Laura Clawson of Kos reported on the latest round. Doocy blathered on about vaccine mandates for police officers. Mandate getting the jab and they’ll quit. Then, while understaffed, how will they deal with public safety – terror, murder, robberies, kidnappings? Psaki responded, “What was the number-one cause of death among police officers last year, do you know?” ... long silence ... “COVID-19,” she said. COVID has also been the number-one cause of death among police officers this year. As for police quitting in the face of mandates, very little of that his happening. Clawson wrote:

Terror? The U.S. is currently experiencing about a 9/11’s worth of COVID-19 deaths every two days. Murder? A year’s worth of homicide deaths from COVID-19 about every 12 days, at the current rate. Kidnapping? Abduction by strangers is extremely rare—you’d have to go to the state level to express the frequency of COVID-19 deaths relative to that.

Doocy and Fox News have shown they don’t care about the police or public safety or the people who have died from COVID. “Doocy and Fox News are concerned about the appearance of supporting police, using it here as a tool to attack efforts to end the pandemic.” Clawson also wrote about the latest use of the shadow docket by the Supreme Court. This time the unsigned decisions were involved in two cases of police brutality and their protections under qualified immunity. Clawson wrote:

These actions were protected, the court said, because there must be precedent that a specific form of brutality is extreme enough to wipe away qualified immunity—and that precedent must come from the Supreme Court. It’s not enough that a lower court has told officers it is unacceptable to put a knee on someone’s back with enough force to injure them. The Supreme Court must have signed on to that very specific opinion. It’s almost like if an officer can figure out what the court hasn’t ruled out in the way of harming suspects—which is a lot—he has a free pass to do that.

It sounds like the court is saying it isn’t brutal until we say that specific thing is brutal – and we’re the only ones who get to decide. Clawson concluded by writing:

Qualified immunity allows law enforcement to essentially torture at will, knowing that the courts will protect them in all but the most gratuitous, egregious, and outright disgusting cases—and even sometimes then. The Supreme Court earlier this year showed some willingness to say that there are limits to that. On Monday it qualified that with a “but not too often, not too many, not too strict.”

Aysha Qamar of Kos reported that the Center Academy, a private school in Miami, has announced that students are to be quarantined for 30 days when they are vaccinated. One would expect a quarantine to happen after being exposed, though perhaps they do that too. The school said they added the quarantine because of concerns of the vaccine side effects and the spread of COVID-19. Yeah, it’s all bunk – vaccines do not have a living virus and anything in the vaccine cannot be spread to another person.

Scorched-earth Senate

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that Monday Sen. Dick Durban, the second highest Democrat in the Senate, gave a speech on the floor. He talked a bit about the history of the filibuster – defend Jim Crow – and that it’s time to end it. Durban said the filibuster ...

is what hitting legislative rock bottom looks like. […] Rather than protecting the finely balanced system our founders created, today's filibuster throws a system out of balance, giving one half of one branch of government what amounts to a veto over the rest of government. It promotes gridlock, not good governance.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that in response to Durban Moscow Mitch threatened the Senate yesterday. If the Senate limits or gets rid of the filibuster, Mitch said,

Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like.

Republicans are also threatening Democrats with what they will do the next time the GOP regains the majority. Mitch laid out the agenda: anti-union laws, defund Planned Parenthood, a massive hardening of the southern border, sweeping abortion restrictions. Eleveld wrote, first if the GOP controls the House, Senate, and Presidency any time in the next decade, the filibuster will be the least of our worries. Second, blocking every part of the Biden/Democrat agenda is what they were planning anyway. Third, the GOP caucus is such an unruly beast they won’t be able to legislate anything if they get back in power. Finally, since the GOP goal is to block progress, the filibuster hurts Democrats more than it does Republicans. Eleveld concluded:

Following McConnell's "scorched-earth" threat, Jentleson, author of the filibuster-themed book Kill Switch, tweeted, "Trading this for the ability to actually pass bills like voting rights seems like an easy call. If McConnell's tactics become truly onerous, Dems can always pass further reforms to end obstruction. McConnell's goal is to make government fail, Dems' goal should be to make it work."

McCarter wrote that in response to Mitch’s threats, Durban said:

He has already done that. He's proven he can do it, and he will do it again

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is now the chair of the Subcommittee on Federal Courts, part of the Judiciary Committee. When part of the Senate minority he kept a list of things that he saw as not right. Now that he’s chair, and now that Merrick Garland is Attorney General, it is time to act. Joan McCarter reported first up is why was there a lack of investigation by the FBI when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court? Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault. Witnesses came forward. None were listened to. A tip line was set up, but Whitehouse wrote: “This 'tip line' appears to have operated more like a garbage chute with everything that came down the chute consigned without review to the figurative dumpster.” Christopher Wray was head of the FBI during the Kavanaugh hearings and still is. He hasn’t been answering Congressional inquiries. Either Garland can shake him loose or recommend to Biden to get rid of him. Then maybe Whitehouse will call for investigations to Kavanaugh, especially into how so much of Kavanaugh’s debt so quickly disappeared in the year before he was nominated. I reported that after the insurrection many corporations stopped donating to Republicans. Funding insurrection was not a good corporate look. Laura Clawson of Kos reported that corporations have also stopped giving to Democrats. All the major Democratic Party campaign committees have seen a drop of more than 90%. Yes, it is good to get corporate money out of politics. Alas, it isn’t the big source of money it used to be. That’s been taken over by dark money, outside groups that run attack ads, have secret donors, and don’t have morals. Clawson laments that in an era filled with shouts of “both-sides do it!” this is one of the worst examples.