It’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me

I finished the book Only This Beautiful Moment by Abdi Nazemian. It is a novel about three generations of Iranian men at the time they each come of age. The youngest is Moud, a name he prefers to Mahmoud because that is the same name of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who said Iran doesn’t have any gay people. Moud is gay. He’s a senior in high school in Los Angeles in 2019 and has boyfriend Shane. He lives with his father, who is distant and doesn’t speak about Moud being gay with a boyfriend. Moud is told his grandfather in Tehran is ill and doesn’t have long to live, so he and his father fly to Tehran to spend a few months before the old guy dies. In Tehran Moud’s cousin takes him to the underground queer community and he finds it to be much more loving and supporting than he thought possible. While in the country he begins to understand his heritage. Moud’s father is Saeed. He was a college student in Tehran in 1978 when there were large protests against the Shah that prompted violent regime responses. For safety Saeed is sent to Los Angeles to live with the American grandmother he had never heard about. Saeed’s father is Bobby who was a senior in high school Los Angeles in 1939 and living with his mother Margaret and stepfather. He is also gay and in love with Vicente of Mexican descent. Mom is quite the stage mom and gets Bobby an audition at MGM studios, which accepts him. He is asked (ordered) to play piano at a party hosted by Joan Crawford at the home of a gay couple. There he sees that gay people can form lasting and loving relationships and that there are clubs where queer people can gather. But studios have morals clauses in their contracts. Margaret, Bobby, and Saeed are very bad at telling the next generation about their history and culture. Bobby isn’t told about his Iranian father. Saeed isn’t told about his father being gay and that his mother is a lesbian and their marriage is one of convenience and support. Moud isn’t told much about his mother who had died when he was young and nothing about his grandfather being gay. When all this history is revealed it leads Saeed and Moud into greater appreciation for their culture and family. Saeed and Moud call the old man Baba. The book doesn’t say if the term means “Grandfather” or if it is the Iranian version of Bobby. In Tehran Moud learns his grandfather is is more than a music teacher. He and his wife are mentors in the queer community. Moud’s cousins tell friends to visit the teacher for “music lessons” which many times are lessons in love and acceptance of themselves. This is a wonderful book, full of family and community. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it. Even so, I think there could have been more to the story. How did Margaret come to fall in love with an Iranian man and why did she leave him behind? The broad outlines were sketched but I would have enjoyed more detail. I also wanted to read more about what happened when Bobby met his father and why he decided to stay in Iran. I wanted more about the marriage Baba and his wife created and how that resulted in Saeed. Yeah, nearly 400 pages wasn’t long enough. Daily Kos community member alkatt posted an exchange with transcript between Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic nominee for the Senate from Michigan, and a man named Tommy. The exchanged happened at a campaign event and has gotten a lot of notice. Here’s my condensed summary: Tommy: “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” Abdul: “Yes, absolutely.” But why are you asking the question? You’re assuming because I’m a Muslim I must have dual loyalties, that I would have a higher allegiance than the US Constitution. So why are you asking the question? Abdul brings up John F Kennedy and the concern the country had that because he was Catholic he would have a higher allegiance to the Pope. But Abdul won’t be a Muslim Senator, he’ll be a Senator who happens to be Muslim. Abdul: Tommy, are you a man of faith? Tommy: Yes, a Christian. Abdul: The Constitution guarantees both of us the right to choose the faith we practice. “So I’m going to ask you, do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?” Tommy: “I do not.” Abdul: “You don’t disavow that. So, I think it’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me.” The audience cheers as Tommy leaves, visibly defeated. Oliver Willis of Kos adds background to the story. The event happened in Caro, Michigan, a small town in Michigan’s “Thumb,” very much a conservative area of the state. Willis wrote:

After the exchange went viral, reporter Marisa Kabas uncovered that the questioner was Thomas Teepell, who previously served as operations director for Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Teepell also worked for a Republican gubernatorial campaign in Kansas and is the son of Republican strategist Timmy Teepell, who worked for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Teepell’s attempt to throw off El-Sayed at a local event came just a few weeks after the conservative super PAC America Next offered up $200 to college Republicans to travel to Michigan and disrupt El-Sayed events.

Willis also reported on conservative talking heads who attacked El-Sayed for claiming he didn’t issue is disavowal fast enough or what he said wasn’t actually a disavowal. Since then I’ve seen cartoons featuring cartoons with one person mad at another for not disavowing the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed is very much someone I can vote for. I’m pleased he took the time to root out what was behind the question. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community wrote about what he calls the greatest betrayal in American history. He begins with:

What the hell is going on in the Republican Party? Trump gutted his own Russia sanctions law, cut a diesel deal with Putin, and is now talking about carving up the world with Putin and Xi. Congress has the power to stop him right now: why are Thune and Johnson still on vacation? Yesterday Donald Trump told reporters he’s ready to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Shenzhen next month — apparently, a modern-day Yalta conference to carve up the world — and that Ukraine’s president may not be invited to the meeting that will decide Ukraine’s fate. ... The party of Mike Johnson and John Thune, however, appear to have decided that the fate and future of American and European democracy is simply negotiable, and that it’s just fine that Putin is now running our foreign policy.

Some Republicans are muttering about this, but not more than that. Conservative pundits, such as the Murdochs, are using much stronger language. Hartmann reviews what Putin has been doing in Ukraine, including that it includes torture, children kidnapped and sent to Russia, and other vile things. He also noted “Elon Musk has put $366 million into this midterm cycle, $276 million of it in the last three months alone” thanks to the Supreme Court legalizing corruption. Republicans are the only ones who can stop the nasty guy and this Shenzhen summit. Where are they? Both the House and Senate are on break, scheduled to return after the election.

They can keep calling themselves “Republicans” if they like, but they’ve forfeited the right to call themselves “patriots” or, arguably, even “Americans.” My dad’s party — and the Republican statesmen of his day like Goldwater and Dirksen — would’ve been on a plane back to Washington the Friday night Trump killed those sanctions, and had an impeachment resolution on the floor by Monday morning.

Hartmann urges us to call Republicans, even those who work at the state and county level, and ask if they side with Eisenhower or Putin and Xi. Do they intend to stay in the party that betrays our nation this way? Eric Schmeltzer a Kos contributor and a Democratic communications consultant wrote that Republicans are trying to escape the stink of being associated with the nasty guy. Democrats should act like Rocky in the Rocky IV and keep them stuffed in the corner, keep their association with the nasty guy front and center. The nasty guy is providing plenty of help, having said, “pretend I’m on the ballot.” For every issue that’s brought up every Democratic candidate needs to say the problem is because of “Trump and [local candidate].” Every news reporter should ask the questions that link the candidate in front of them to the nasty guy. Everyone who can stomach going to a Republican campaign event should ask a similar question and record the answer. If they can’t send the video to a local news outlet, send it to Schmeltzer and he’ll get it into the appropriate hands. And one of the things journalists and citizens can ask about is whether they approve of the nasty guy meeting with Putin and Xi to carve up the world. Over the last few days NPR has played a clip from the nasty guy saying he’s mad at Zelenskyy for not making a deal. I hear that and think the nasty guy doesn’t care about Zelenskyy or Ukraine. What he cares about is getting credit for closing the deal. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy and the vice nasty have set aside $25 million for the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program. Uh, guys, we have a whistleblower program. It allows a person who knows the details of a government department to warn of possible fraud. It offers protections to the whistleblower.

What’s happening here is, well, not that. This is just encouragement for randos with no connection to or understanding of federal programs to declare that a company or city or state or person that they don’t like is misusing federal funds. If that little stunt catches the administration’s eye and they convict someone for fraud, you get up to $30,000. You’ll note that happens whether there’s any recovery of federal dollars or not. The point is the brutality of the prosecution and conviction, not of getting taxpayer money back. It’s the second part of the announcement—that you’ll get rewarded if your tip leads to federal enforcement action—that really shows what this is all about: getting the worst people in the world to gin up laughably thin claims of “fraud” in a program they have no understanding of or familiarity with or connection to, as a way to allow the administration to come in and brutalize a blue city or state.

As evidence of what Needham is saying she wrote the first award went to Nick Shirley, the guy who created videos claiming to show massive fraud in Minnesota daycare facilities. Those claims were what accelerated Metro Surge in the state, which murdered two people and arrested 3,800, of which more than 60% did not have a criminal record. No federal money was recovered.

So, to sum up: this announcement is nothing but is a bounty on the heads of immigrants and blue cities and blue states, and the scummiest people are going to be happy to try to collect it. Those same scummy people will cheer as a city gets crushed under the brutal weight of ICE.

The movie Digger starring Tom Cruise came out at the start of October. Metacritic gave it an average score of 46 out of 100 with Original-Cin giving it a score of 100 and New York Post giving it zero. I haven’t seen it. Thom Hartmann went to see it and discussed it for Kos. He wrote:

Don’t believe the negative reviews coming from the rightwingers; this is a brilliant movie about one of the most important issues of our day, climate change, and the fossil fuel industry’s complicity in knowingly destroying our planet and our culture.

For most of the two hour run time it seems like a cartoonish satire. “But the shocking last twenty minutes reorganized my entire understanding of what Cruise was doing.” That says the movie is effective in its message and the bad reviews are to keep people from seeing it. Hartmann wrote:

He [Cruise] lays out the fossil fuel industry’s last and best alibi — that they drilled and sold us oil because we demanded they do it — that I’ve been pointing to ever since 1998 when I published the first edition of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

No, we didn’t simply demand more oil. Government and corporate policies pushed us to needing more oil and away from policies that would reduce our use of oil. That includes eliminating streetcar lines (see streetcars, Detroit, and General Motors) and minimizing train service. Big Oil’s business model includes a disinformation campaign and buying politicians. Back to Hartmann’s book. For most of humanity’s history we lived off “current sunlight” captured by plants. That became the basis for everything we ate and much of what we built. We found coal 900 years ago and oil 150 years ago. We began to live off the planet’s sunlight savings. We could consume more resources, in food, heat, and other things than what current sunlight could provide. That leads to a population that “depends on it and will suffer if it is taken away.” Movies like Digger can reshape the narrative around oil. That can reshape behaviors. Hartmann asks us to see the movie before it is buried by conservative slander.

Cute AI climate projects hide AI increasing fossil fuel use

I finished the book Only Son by Kevin Moffett. A sticker on the cover says it was on the longlist for the National Book Award. A description is straightforward: In the first third of the book the narrator describes the effect of losing his father at about age nine. In the middle third he talks about life as an adult with a son of his own. In the final third he and his son take a road trip, the basic outline taken from a brief description in his father’s diary. The trip happens the summer before the son goes off to college. While the book is praised and Goodreads gives it a decent reader rating of 3.9 out of 5, I was less pleased. Each scene in the book is short – rarely up to two pages, usually just a couple paragraphs, many times just s sentence or two. A lot of those scenes, especially in the middle of the book, seem to have topics all jumbled together, most of them seeming to have little to do with the general flow of the story. I bought the book because it was about the relationship between a father and son, including how the narrator losing his father affected how he raises his son. I don’t think I got much of that. With a book that gets this much praise I did enjoy reading it. I don’t think the story adds up to much. Last weekend Dan Gearino, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Daily Kos discussed the chatter about AI at Climate Week NYC. One part of that chatter was about how AI could help reduce emissions in transportation, manufacturing, and buildings. Those benefits would outweigh AI’s big climate footprint. But AI also produces climate denial and perhaps misplaced optimism that technology can get us out of the mess. There was also chatter in how AI could optimize fossil fuel extraction and production – coming up with ways to increase the use of fossil fuels. So the benefits of AI are still hazy and off in the future and the problems of AI, such as high electricity demands for data centers, are happening right now. Holly and Will Alpine wrote about all that in the journal Nature. Holly said in an email to Gearino:

What we’re seeing at Climate Week is a familiar pattern: companies spotlighting a handful of clean energy pilot projects while the overwhelming majority of AI’s actual applications are aimed at increasing fossil fuel extraction and production. Nvidia’s post is a good example—highlighting a renewable energy partnership is easy and photogenic, while conveniently omitting how much AI is being deployed to find, extract, and produce more oil and gas.

Gearino turned to data centers. The AI companies don’t know how many of what size they will need. Electricity companies don’t know how many power plants to build. If they build too many, if the AI boom slacks off, the electricity companies may have to cover their costs by billing the rest of us. But if they don’t build enough and fast enough AI centers will use the “least efficient and most expensive power technologies, such as natural gas combustion turbines.” Lisa Needham of Kos wrote:

Bloomberg is reporting that the Trump administration has hit yet another milestone, and it is not a good one: For the first time, federal contract spending is more than $1 trillion. That’s “trillion,” with a T. Part of why you’re paying more is that because President Donald Trump’s gutting of the administrative state means outsourcing tasks to private companies, and that costs more.

These contracts to private companies are to pay for services the government used to do before DOGE fired 400,000 government employees. The services still need to get done and if the government doesn’t have enough employees to do it they must pay a private company to do it. And private companies want profit. So DOGE “savings” cost us more than leaving employees in place. Two weeks ago Needham told another side of the story.

Right now, every week, you’re paying $1.6 million to Voice of America employees, which probably sounds totally good and fine, because we should pay federal employees and pay them well, right? The problem is that you’re paying them to not work, and you’ve been paying that for months now.

The nasty guy wanted to close VOA and appointed Kari Lake to dismiss the staff. But a judge ruled her appointment to be illegal and those hundreds of employees were ordered back to work. But with VOA closed these employees have nothing to do. They’re not the only workers in this predicament.

Last month, an entirely different government agency, the Government Accountability Office, issued a report saying that in the aftermath of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency rampage through the federal government, $9.5 billion of your tax dollars have gone to paying federal employees not to work. That’s because DOGE’s antics resulted in a 435% spike in paid administrative leave.

DOGE claimed they would save us $2 trillion, a number that kept dropping. But in its first few months DOGE cuts cost us $135 billion. Some of that was because of cycles of firing and rehiring.

Overall, after all of these cuts, the administration shrank the workforce by over 350,000 employees. Yet somehow the federal deficit is higher and total spending is higher. Terrific job, everyone. It costs a lot to be this stupid, apparently.

Kos of Kos discussed a New York Times article that talked to disaffected conservatives. They are voters who want to punish Republicans by voting against them or tuning out the election. Kos says not voting is better than the alternative of voting for Republicans. But it must be nice to simply tune out the suffering their vote for the nasty guy caused. Even nicer would be to take responsibility for that mess and help clean it up. Yes, that means voting for Democrats. People who care for others.

The dealmaker makes another empty deal

I’ve mentioned the nasty guy made a deal with Russia to sell diesel fuel to the US. He made that deal because diesel prices are so high due to the war he started in Iran. Kos of Daily Kos explains how bad the deal is. Russia would supply 300,000 metric tons with another 500,000 tons in November and eventually up to 4 million tons sometime in the future. That sounds like a lot. But it isn’t. That first shipment is about 14 hours of American diesel consumption. The three shipments of 1.8 million tons will last about three and a half days. The grand total will cover less than ten days. The total amount is not enough to affect global prices. The deal is based on whether Russia has diesel to spare – and it doesn’t. Ukraine has so damaged Russia’s refineries it doesn’t have enough for domestic needs. Russia had banned exports and is importing from Iran and South Korea.

Trump doesn’t care about any of that. What matters to him is that 1) he could finally align U.S. policy alongside fascist Russia, and—this is particularly important—2) he could now blame Ukraine for high diesel prices. And his surrogates spent the weekend doing just that.

The nasty guy is also able to announce he made a wonderful deal to help out truckers and farmers. He won’t be saying anything about how empty the deal is.

Trump and Putin are fuming about Ukraine because their refinery strikes have emerged as one of its most effective weapons against Russia’s war machine. They damage Russia’s ability to fuel its military, disrupt its domestic economy, and deprive the Kremlin of revenue it needs to continue its invasion. So for Trump’s diesel deal to work, he needs Ukraine to stop doing one of the things that is actually working against Russia.

Thankfully, not many people are buying the BS the nasty guy is selling. That means he has no more leverage over Ukraine. And Europe has noticed and is working to replace American military and intelligence assistance. That leaves Ukraine to chart its own course through the war. The nasty guy announced an energy ceasefire. Zelenskyy said he would agree to it if Russia did. Russia hit some energy infrastructure – so Ukraine is back to attacking refineries. FischFry of the Kos community worked from a thread by progressive economist Gabriel Zucman to explain one of the ways the rich don’t pay taxes. The particular rich person in this story is Peter Thiel. He founded PayPal and got rich when he sold it. He’s gay yet a far right political player and anti-tax crusader. Back in 1997 the Roth IRA was created. It allows a person earning less than $110K to put up to $2K a year into a Roth account. When the person turns 60 he can withdraw from it tax free. At the time Thiel set up his Roth he was earning about $73K at PayPal. Thiel had his Roth invest in PayPal stock – 1.7 million shares at a price of $0.001 a share. A month later PayPal sold shares to investors for $500,000 each. Now there is speculation Thiel’s Roth is worth about $20 to $30 billion. And he can start withdrawing it – all tax free – in six months. FischFry wrote:

One can only begin to imagine the impact Thiel might have with that vast fortune, but we should fear so much of it will be used to further pollute political discussion, advancing the worst elements of our body politic.

Time for a wealth tax. Eleanor Beardsley of NPR reported that 500 to 700 grocery stores in France had their freezers and cold rooms hacked, turning them from coolers to heaters. Of course, all the food in them was spoiled. Strangely, the hackers didn’t ask for money. The freezers were hit because their security software hadn’t been updated (a reason not to connect freezers to the internet? – didn’t used to need to). One of the shopkeepers said incidents like this will only increase with AI able to sniff out hacking opportunities. My thermostat is programmable, but does not connect to the internet. I’m going to keep it that way. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing for his own Substack. By mid March of 1945 Hitler knew the war was lost. He didn’t believe he had failed, he had been failed by the German people. Yeah, the tyrant believed the people hadn’t sufficiently supported his tyranny.

So on March 19 he issued the “Decree concerning demolitions in the Reich territory,” which has come to be known as the Nerobefehl or Nero decree. It ordered the destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure — supposedly to deny that infrastructure to the Allies, but the obvious purpose was to punish his own country. […] Think of the Kennedy Center, a national icon that Trump is destroying because he can’t put his own name on it, as the model for what is all too likely to happen to America over the next two years. Can Democrats stop the coming reign of destruction?

Democrats won’t get any help from the Supreme Court or supine Republicans and the nasty guy has backing of billionaires,

with vast resources who will continue to enable his attack on democracy even if their billions in political spending aren’t enough to buy this election.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme from Tom Weinner.

Trump decided what to do in Iran by listening to Netanyahu. Now he’s deciding what to do in Ukraine by listening to Putin. The worst people in the world just lead him around by the nose from one catastrophe to another.

South Grand Prairie High School in Texas was told by their school board to shut down a production of Little Shop of Horrors. The reason: The lead character is Seymour, but not enough boys auditioned for the part. So it was given to a girl. That would mean when Seymour fell in love it would be with another girl. And that would violate Senate Bill 12. At least that’s the excuse the school board is giving. The version of SB12 prohibiting sexually-oriented performances on public property in the presence of anyone under 18 has been blocked by the courts. That provision isn’t in the current version of the bill. But Gov. Greg Abbott and AG Ken Paxton are pressing the ambiguity, prompting the school district to obey in advance. Thankfully, Abbott and Paxton are both in tight races.

And while the bill originally targeted drag queens, Texas Republicans have now made a new and vocal enemy: theater kids.

David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing a large pizza with four people around it. The guy with a huge grin labeled “Top 1%” will get most of it. “Merely wealthy” with get a small slice. “Upper middle class” will get a thin slice. And “Lower 50%” will get crumbs. Horsey’s caption says, “This is not a joke.” Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos appropriate for the Cornell 7 scandal. It shows a ball rolling downhill gaining size as it goes. Beside the small ball at the top is, “They’re just boys.” At the next larger ball is, “Their parents should teach them how to behave... I’m talking about the girl’s parents, of course!” After three more quotes, the one at the bottom is, “You know, I have this private island.”