They decided a republic was worth more than their own comfort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tortured bad-faith reading of the Constitution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’re gonna be driving the car over a cliff

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

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

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

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

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