The moment the gavel changes hands, they are witnesses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such as this tweet from John Couger Colleencamp:

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

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

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

A tweet from The Viscount:

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

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

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

They want a doctor that knows them and sees their humanity

I finished the book Rough Sleepers, Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People, by Tracy Kidder. I had mentioned back in April that Kidder died at the age of 80, so this was his last book. Rough Sleepers refers to people sleeping on the street. Kidder spent quite a bit of time with Jim (as he’s referred to in the book) and his work. This is the way Kidder had worked with his previous books. Jim’s work included driving around downtown Boston with a small team looking for homeless people and offering them soup, extra blankets, and a bit of money. Other days he worked at the Mass General Hospital in a clinic for homeless people or at a separate clinic with rooms that cared for the homeless while they recovered from an illness. Jim found that the homeless want to see the same doctor each time, a doctor that would know them from one visit to the next and spend as much time as needed rather than limit themselves to the allotted time a medical system has as its standard. They want a doctor who cares for them as people rather than seeing them as a body to be treated. They want a doctor that treats them like a human rather than the dregs of society. I think we all want that. A couple of the staff at the clinic worked to get their people into housing. They know the system well enough they sometimes have success. Sometimes they don’t. Kidder includes a discussion of the housing first movement – get a person housed and that will make all their other issues easier to manage. In many places that works quite well, in others it doesn’t. Some communities try to spend the funds to end homelessness, again with good results. Other times it doesn’t work as well. A big issue is many lawmakers (I add: usually Republicans) who simply don’t want to spend the money, no matter the great benefits. And, yes, that implies they want people to be homeless. Kidder describes Tony, one of the homeless men. He’s a big man and a kind soul, one who will do all he can to help out his fellow rough sleepers. Homeless women appreciate him because he will protect and not exploit them. But he is also an addict. Using frequently lands him in the live-in clinic. When he recovers enough to function he’ll serve as a social director – helping other residents, stepping in to break up arguments, and just being a friend to everyone. After a few days he’s back on the streets using again. Attempts at getting him housed don’t succeed because of things in his troubled past. I very much enjoyed the book and recommend it. Kidder is a very good writer, able to explain things well while maintaining his subject’s humanity. Michigan news has periodic stories of the Palisades nuclear power plant in southwest Michigan. The plant reached the end of its useful life and was sold to Holtec, a company that would decommission it and, presumably, tear it down in a manner that would minimize radiation exposure. But perhaps a year or two later that same company decided instead of decommissioning the plant they would return it to operation. The stories I hear are about the latest steps in the process, something that has not been done before. Karl Grossman and Harvey Wasserman of the Daily Kos community discussed an open letter to Congress by Arnie Gundersen that explains the plant isn’t and cannot be made safe. Gundersen has extensive experience and certification in the nuclear industry. But in the last three years, as long has this venture has been going on, he has been rebuffed by the The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and many other people in the nasty guy’s administration. The issue: Holtec has experience decommissioning reactors. It does not have experience running them. Staff members are not certified for that. The reason Holtec wants to run this one is that nuclear plants have never been profitable and never been as safe as they claim. They run with a great deal of government subsidy. And getting hands on that cash appears to be profitable for Holtec. In contrast to the significant subsidies needed by nuclear energy wind and solar are much cheaper. Gundersen goes into detail on the problems in the plant. I’ll skip that. The likelihood of a failure within the first 18 months is high, a failure that would prompt an evacuation out to ten miles. Fortunately, there is no city in that zone, but Detroit is only 180 miles downwind with Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Jackson, Ann Arbor, and me in between. Gundersen hopes that Congress (or the one that takes control in January) will take him more seriously than the NRC has and stop Holtec’s efforts to revive the Palisades plant. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoting Jon Stewart’s response to the vice nasty blaming the French riots on Muslim immigrants. Those riots began with students protesting conditions at their schools and expanded to include people protesting the cost of living. Stewart said:

I’m sorry, Vance, are you seriously suggesting that immigrants have brought a culture of revolution and protest to France??? Have you not been to the theater? Can you not hear the people sing? Do you know why Versailles is a museum? It used to be someone’s house, full of people with heads! Do you want to know how French these protests were? They stormed the Bastille! Other than adultery, it’s the most French thing you can do.

This is a good Marine, why wouldn’t we retain him?

No Sunday movie this weekend because I did a two-day trip to the Stratford Festival in Ontario. The journey allowed me to drive over the new Gordie Howe bridge, though that route included construction traffic near London. Eight years ago I saw the show Something Rotten! in Detroit. It is a spoof and love letter to Shakespeare and musicals. I wrote about it here. Two years ago I went to the Stratford Festival when Something Rotten! was one of the shows, though I told myself and others I had seen it and didn’t need to see it again. I did see four other shows over two days for an enjoyable trip. When Something Rotten! was announced for the Stratford Festival season this year I felt this time I needed to see it again. So I did on Friday evening. And I very much enjoyed it again, smiling and laughing throughout, from the opening “Welcome to the Renaissance” – aren’t we glad the Middle Ages are over? – to the closing number (telling you that could be considered a spoiler). The singing was excellent, the dancing high energy (the cast must be exhausted by the end of the show), the one-liners just as funny, and the whole thing still overmiked. The substantial crowd did standing ovations for two of the songs in addition to the show as a whole at the end. My friend and debate partner has told me over the years he enjoys interesting theater, but not spectacle. Then, my friend, you would not have enjoyed this one. While the numerous quotes of Shakespeare plays used in unexpected ways would amuse you, this show is about spectacle. Though if the rest of you are a fan of the Bard’s plays or of musicals or both this show would be a delight. Also while at the Festival I saw the show Saturday, Sunday, Monday, a new translation of a 1959 Italian play. The story is about a large Neapolitan family (husband, wife, three adult kids, spouses, fiancee, siblings, and father, plus a few friends). Saturday is spent preparing for Sunday dinner, including Mama’s legendary ragu. Sunday is the dinner and all that happens during it, and Monday morning is dealing with the consequences. The marriage of the senior couple is not healthy, Father has gone almost silent. That is compounded by the friendly attentions of one of the friends. The Sunday meal makes the jealousies worse. And on Monday Father sees the errors of his ways. The program booklet says the Italian author wrote it during a troubled time in his own marriage, hoping for a better outcome. Of course, the production is quite well done and the show enjoyable. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported on how well the military is following the nasty guy’s demand to remove transgender people from their ranks. Willis worked from a New York Times report that says the military set up review boards to consider individual transgender personnel.

In 12 cases that have come before the Navy and the Marines, boards have voted to retain troops nine times. The Trump purge has been more successful in the Air Force and Army, where troops are more likely to be removed. Former Air Force lawyer Rachel VanLandingham explained the quiet rebellion to the Times, “We are seeing them nullify a process they see as unjust.”

An example is Marine Staff Sgt. Damien Contreras. He was designated for removal but his board said he “remains qualified.”

“They see I’ve always done my job, I’ve deployed, I’ve mentored other Marines, followed the rules. They say, ‘Hey, this is a good Marine, why wouldn’t we retain him?’” he said.

Yes, this shows the administration’s stance is destructive and contrary to their claim of wanting the most powerful fighting force. Yeah, political appointees can overrule the boards. But this quiet defiance shows the conservative movement does not have unified support of the military. On to something completely different and not at all fun. Back in July (yeah, it’s been sitting in my browser tabs since then) Muriel Vieux of the Kos community wrote about the ever returning topic of men abusing women. Nearly all of the abusers are men these women know. Vieux concluded:

So, guys, when you say “not all men” “I’m not like that” “it’s only a small percentage of men”, how can women tell which men are safe, this is not snark but a serious question. What do we look for, what’s a clue that “this good presenting man” will not turn on us? Because every time we share our stories, it seems a lot of men here don’t understand the underlying issue, trust. They seem to miss the common thread that most of us have been raped by men we knew, loved and trusted.

Most Kos posts start with a photo or image. For this one Vieux reproduced a poem she wrote in 2023 in response to the MAGA movement, though she says it has nothing to do with the subject in the body of her post. She starts the poem with “You call yourselves ‘good people’” and ends with:

You call yourselves moral and virtuous Claim to value all human life It’s so easy to “call” yourself good It’s so easy to wear the make up of morals It’s so easy to cover yourself in pretend virtue What you call yourselves is immaterial What you are screams through the lies What you are shouts out loud piercing the facade What you are comes out in your actions You are vile, cruel, petty, and mean.