I’d rather have an “emotional” woman at the nuclear button

My Sunday movie was Claydream, a documentary about Will Vinton who built a video studio based on claymation, the stop-motion technique using clay scenes and figures. He didn’t invent claymation, but certainly raised the level of quality of the art. If you’re a few decades old you probably remember the singing and dancing California Raisins of the 1990s. That was Vinton’s creation. Vinton attended the University of Berkeley in the 1960s, which contributed to his unconventional view of the world. He and a partner created the film Closed Mondays about a man who visits a museum while it is closed and all kinds of strange things happen. That won an Oscar for a short subject in 1974. After that he got four more nominations. He created feature films, one of them The Adventures of Mark Twain. It took three years to make and was released in 1985. Alas, it had at least PG-13 content (I don’t know if this rating was used then) yet was marketed to kids. It didn’t do well. I found it online and may watch it soon. For a while his studio was quite prosperous. But it didn’t last. He was a great creative guy, but not a good CEO. He went to the wrong people to be investors. A lot of what he did was replaced with computer animation. And he didn’t own the California Raisin characters (the California Raisin Board did), so didn’t earn anything off the merchandising of what his team created. One of his last gigs was to help market M&Ms. He was the one who came up with the idea that each color of M&M should have its own personality, such as the green one wearing high-heeled shoes. I enjoyed the movie and was fascinated by some of the characters he brought to life. Natalie Kon-yu, Michael Burke, and Tom Clark of Victoria University with Emily Booth of the University of Technology Sydney, all in Australia, wrote an editorial that appeared in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press. Alas, the article is behind a paywall. They didn’t explain why Australians were writing about American politics. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lost to the nasty guy in part because people said a woman is too emotional to be allowed near the nuclear button. Have you seen the guy who is near that button? The authors say that everything about the MAGA movement is steeped in emotion. The nasty guy bases is actions on his latest grievances (an emotion). The attack against Iran was title Epic Fury (and emotion). MAGA men are all about how their manhood has been slighted (and emotion) or who they are jealous of (an emotion). The nasty guy and many of his top officials yell at their staffs when displeased (an emotional response). His campaign was based on retribution (an emotion). I’d rather have an “emotional” woman in charge than these people. An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported that yesterday Virginian voters narrowly passed a constitutional amendment to temporarily suspend what the citizens redistricting commission did and allow Democrats in the General Assembly substitute a map that would give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in their delegation to the US House. This would replace a 6-5 map and give Democrats a national 10-9 advantage in the redistricting battle the nasty guy started with Texas. I found a map of the new districts put out by The Cook Political Report. It accomplishes its goal in the usual way gerrymandering is done – several new districts take a chunk of the huge Democratic population in the DC suburbs, then snake out into Republican territory. The AP article concludes:

A Tazewell County judge ruled that the redistricting push was illegal for several reasons. Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley Jr. said lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session. He ruled that their initial vote failed to occur before the public began casting ballots in last year’s general election and thus didn’t count toward the two-step process. And he ruled that the state failed to publish the amendment three months before that election, as required by law. If the state Supreme Court agrees with the lower court, the referendum results could be rendered moot.

Florida has yet to try redistricting and some of the Republican legislators see the likely blue wave and think the effort will leave too many districts with margins too small. Some of the other Republican redistricting attempts are still in court. Beyond Florida states are too far into the primary process and the election cycle to attempt a change. On Sunday – before Virginia’s vote – Andrew Mangan of Kos discussed why Virginia should approve their referendum.

Put simply, Virginia will go from having a very fair map to a very biased one. So how is that good for democracy? Because Republicans have rigged maps across the country for decades, skewing the House’s overall partisan makeup, and Virginia’s proposed map would be merely a minor corrective. In general, congressional delegations tend to be biased in Republicans’ favor. Among states with at least five House seats, there are five where Republicans regularly receive less than 50% of the statewide vote but hold a majority of that state’s House delegation: Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There is not one state where the same is true for Democrats.

And this mid-decade redistricting skews states even more.

The big difference is that only one party—the Democratic Party—is pushing to eliminate partisan gerrymandering altogether.

So far they haven’t been successful. And some of their attempts have been blocked by Democrats. A voice I heard today while driving suggests that this redistricting battle will show Republicans the battle cannot be won and they approve a deal. I won’t hold my breath. Mangan included a 2025 poll by YouGov (about the time this redistricting arms race began) that shows 69% of US adult citizens say gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9% say it should be legal. Even among Republican citizens 57% say it should be illegal and only 14% say it should be legal. In today's pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a quote of an article on NPR that was posted late last week:

The more seats you try to flip with redistricting, the harder it is to win approval from the court and the public — and the harder it is for your party to hold the seats it has. In Virginia, some Democrats wanted to settle for a new map that could pick up three House seats. But Democratic state Sen. Louise Lucas, one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers, wanted to go for four seats. It could take the state’s U.S. House delegation from a near-even six Democrats and five Republicans to possibly 10-1 for Democrats.

Acyn, senior digital editor of Meidas Touch tweeted a clip of a speech by Pete Buttigieg talking to fellow Democrats. Alas, I don’t think he’s running for anything.

And my word of warning to my own political party is that we would make a terrible mistake if we thought that our job was to just take power somehow and then put everything back the way it was. That’s not what we’re here to do. We’re not out to go around and just find all the little bits and pieces of everything that they smashed and tape it together and say, “Here you go, I give you the world as it looked in 2023.” That’s not going to work. It’s not what we need. So much has changed, and the truth is they are destroying things right and left. They’re destroying a lot of good, important things. They’re destroying some useless things too, because they’re destroying everything. So now we get a chance to put things together on different terms.

We’re not ready to live in space yet

I finished the book A City on Mars; Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith a husband and wife team. With Elon Musk wearing an “Occupy Mars” shirt this is a timely look at how feasible putting humans on the moon, in a space habitat, or on Mars really is. From the title one could easily guess that the authors don’t agree with Musk. They tackle all the reasons why people say we should put people in habitats. Here’s some of their responses: The belief is that giving humanity a home off earth will allow the species to continue in case we destroy our current home. But earth at its global warming worst is still a zillion times better than life on the moon or Mars. Also, we’re not ready for life in space so let’s keep working to save earth. Putting industry in orbit to protect earth’s environment is too expensive. Consider cement – yeah, there is enough material in space for all the cement we use, but space is too cold for making it and getting all that mass back to earth is expensive. Space resources won’t make us all rich because mining what little there is would be too costly. Sending humans to space won’t end or reduce war and property disputes in space may get fought on earth. When astronauts come back to earth they frequently talk of the new feeling of how fragile earth is and we’re all in this together. But that hasn’t gone much past the wonderful sounding slogans. The authors talk about the things we don’t yet know about living off earth. Does a fetus need gravity to develop properly? Do children need gravity to grow properly? Is moon or Mars gravity enough? What does a livable biome require? No research has been done on the first few questions, not nearly enough on the last. The moon is not a great place to live and would require living underground. Do we really want that? There aren’t enough resources in the regolith to support trade with earth. Mars is not better, partly because there is a poisonous chemical in the soil. Space habitats are better but would take such a huge effort they aren’t feasible, especially at the scale needed for a viable population. The authors spend a quarter of the book discussing current space law and why it matters. The space treaty that exists was created in the 1960s when there were two space-faring nations. Now there are six plus a couple corporations. Things have been fine so far, but what if one of those corporations sets up a mining operation somewhere that is illegal under the current treaty? The authors explain what a company town is and why they have such a bad reputation. What if the company town is on Mars where the employee can’t simply leave and the boss can coerce the worker by reducing the amount of oxygen? We’re not ready to live in space yet. The benefits aren’t as great as is claimed. The size of a viable population is much bigger than most theorist suggests. But if we still want to go to space, there are important things to research. The biggest is in addition to creating a rocket that can go to Mars, Musk should also be putting billions into biome research and space pregnancy. And that space treaty needs a serious update. I enjoyed the book, though my interest flagged towards the end of the discussion on why space law matters. The authors explain their positions well to the non-science reader, using slang and humor. Author Zach is a cartoonist and has lots of drawings to illustrate the points. I recommend the book to science fiction fans and space nerds. I would enjoy reading science fiction stories based on the ideas in this book. I get emails from March for Our Lives, the group founded by survivors of the school shooting in Parkland Florida. Yeah, they include requests for money. They also explain what they’re doing, both the gains and losses. The email I got a few days ago essentially says discussing the emotional and psychological damage of gun violence hasn’t made any difference in lawmaker actions. Instead, this email talks about the economic cost, Lawmakers want to talk about economic things a lot.

Gun violence costs the United States an estimated $557 billion every year, equating to roughly 2.6% of the entire U.S. economy, or more than $1,600 per person annually. To put that into perspective, these costs exceed what the federal government spends on education each year. And yet this burden is rarely part of the national conversation about guns.

The costs show up in medical costs and higher insurance premiums. Survivors face chronic pain and disabilities affecting their ability to work. Their family’s finances become more unstable through the loss of an income and future earnings. The losses hit the communities already facing economic hardship. In this way gun violence is a hidden tax on the country. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote:

President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission had its final meeting on Monday, and you’ll be hyped to find out that everything you ever learned about the Founding Fathers and religion is incorrect, you fools. Trump’s handpicked selection of zealots on the commission want you to know that the separation of church and state is a lie and has been all along.

Needham then quoted a few of those founding fathers to contradict that commission (whose name actually means Religious Liberty for me which includes permission to oppress you). First is Roger Williams, who founded Providence in what became Rhode Island: civic life must be separate from spiritual life with a “high wall” between them. Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote to Baptists:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

James Madison noted that if a government can establish Christianity over other religions it can also establish one Christian sect over others. Needham also noted that of the 12 members of the Commission all are members of Judeo-Christian religions. We know “exactly what church Trump doesn’t want separated from the state.” So the nasty guy having a spat with Pope Leo is rather curious. A lot of nasty guys supporters delight in claims and images that show him as a Christ figure. One of those images made the rounds recently. If not a Christ figure, the nasty guy is at least God’s Chosen President, as is preached to many Evangelical congregations. StanleyYelnats dotcom of the Kos community noted that some supporters have switched from calling him the Christ, to calling him the anti-Christ.

According to biblical prophecy and tradition, the Antichrist is a future, charismatic, and deceptive world leader who opposes Jesus Christ, sets himself up as God, and brings about a, “man of lawlessness” persona characterized by immense power, blasphemy, and the persecution of believers. He is empowered by Satan to perform fake wonders and establish a totalitarian global system.

Some characteristics of the anti-Christ are: He appears peaceful but is cunning. He opposes all things related to God (well, the nasty guy seems to bask in being compared to Jesus). He will control the world’s economic system. He will persecute followers of God (depends on whether one thinks Evangelicals actually follow God). He is focused on power. I will make no claim that the nasty guy is (or isn’t) the anti-Christ. Part of that requires the belief that the End Times are about to start and some Christians have been expecting the End Times for two thousand years. Instead, I will note some of the nasty guy’s Christian followers are turning on him and seeing him for who he is and as the opposite of what they had wanted. Oliver Willis, in his series of Explaining the Right column for Kos wonders, “Why conservatives think they own religion.” I can’t say he gets any closer to the answer than usual, which is not close. He does document Evangelicals think that. Willis goes all the way back to the rise of the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell, who rose to national attention when Ronald Reagan was president. Much of that political energy was put to use in opposition to abortion that came along with the rise of feminism and women asserting bodily autonomy. But all that loud noise convinced the media and too many Democrats that only the right is the true religion. Willis then gives several examples of the left using religion to make its point. The prime example is Martin Luther King and his work in the Civil Rights movement. Currently, James Talarico is using religion in his campaign to be the Democratic senator from Texas.

But conservatives continue to suffer the mass delusion that only their brand of faith is legitimate, falsely arguing that the more inclusive liberal tradition—where other religions and nonbelievers are on equal footing with Christians—is somehow hostile. It wasn’t Biden, Obama, Clinton, or any other Democrats who picked a childish fight with the pope—or who sold personally branded Bibles to their supporters. And Democrats certainly haven’t openly blasphemed against Christianity by posting images depicting themselves as Jesus Christ. That has been the domain of the so-called “religious” right. But they don’t own religion—not at all.

In Thursday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Mike Brock of the Notes From the Circus Substack.

You do not need intelligence services or insider access or political analysis to figure out what is going on in Donald Trump’s mind at any given moment. He is thinking zero steps ahead. As the philosopher Vlad Vexler has observed, Trump is floating through dispositional states inside very malignant pathologies. There is no strategy to decode. There is no chess game to map. There is a man moving from one psychological state to the next, driven by the same neurological machinery as any other organism in the grip of a compulsive disorder — seeking the next hit, escalating when the last one wore off, displaying dominance when the hierarchy feels threatened. That is all that is happening. That is all that has ever been happening. […] The commentariat keeps attributing chess to someone playing slot machines. I want to give credit to George Conway, and to the other clinicians and public intellectuals who have spent years trying to bring the public’s attention to this fact. Conway has been consistent and precise and largely ignored by the very establishment press that prefers the “distraction strategy” frame because that frame preserves the comforting fiction that someone competent is in control. The Duty to Warn coalition. The sixty thousand signatories. The people who were called alarmist and hysterical and politically motivated for saying, in clinical terms, what is plainly visible to anyone willing to look.

Daily Kos has upgraded to a new platform. Because of something between the new comment system and the browser I’m using, which is Vivaldi, I don’t have access to comments. And that means no access to the cartoons usually posted there. In Friday’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Christopher Hale:

Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical with no theological training, says Pope Leo XIV doesn’t understand Catholic just war doctrine. Pope Leo XIV’s patron, St. Augustine, invented the Catholic just war doctrine.

Tennis player Martina Navratilova added:

Pretty soon Mike will start telling me how to hit a serve or something….

James Patterson of Providence Magazine

When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism. How is that possible? How did this happen? The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.

A tweet by Mike Levin

It should be a much bigger story that JD Vance flew to Hungary, stood on a campaign stage, and told voters to return a head of government widely documented for human rights abuses and democratic backsliding. Then, after his candidate lost, Vance said what had happened during the Hungarian campaign was “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or ever even read about.” Was he describing himself? The Hungarian people rejected it all. Democracy held, despite America’s intervention, not because of American leadership. The United States has long argued that elections should be free from outside influence. That standard should apply to everyone, including us.

In the roundup from Saturday a week ago Dworkin quoted Lauren Egan of The Bulwark:

However understandable the downward trend in campus protests might be, the dynamic has become a point of frustration for some parts of the Democratic coalition who feel that anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists are tougher on Democratic officials than on Republicans. They note that even though Harris is out of office, she still gets interrupted at public events by pro-Palestinian protesters. “Every single speech that Kamala Harris gave in those 107 days, they found a way to protest her and call her a proponent of genocide. But they never did that throughout the campaign for Donald Trump, and then they never did it in 2025 when he was giving Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check to annihilate Gaza,” said a former Harris campaign official. “Now, when Donald Trump is threatening to do the thing that they accused Kamala Harris and Joe Biden of being complicit of, they’re silent.”

America loves to get to reconciliation without truth

In this episode of Gaslit Nation, host Andrea Chalupa interviewed Wajahat Ali, who is the author of the book Go Back to Where You Came From, which recommends how to become American. The episode is 40 minutes. I worked from the transcript. Chalupa posed the basic question of the interview. With America losing patience with the nasty guy, Republicans, and the MAGA movement so much that the Senate might be in play, how might Democrats screw it up? Ali said:

I've always said the three major sins in America are sins that we refuse to confront. Our white supremacy, greed and misogyny. And Donald Trump is the inevitable end result of us unwilling to confront this truth about ourselves.

Ali then listed some contradictory aspects of America. An example is the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants, including Ali’s parents. Then people like the nasty guy tell them to go away. A rage is building and Democrats don’t understand its cause. Democrats think restoring them to power is the answer. But Democrats and Republicans have the same donors. They go to the same golf clubs. Both are still wedded to the rich. Democrats are acting like the nasty guy is so corrosive we’ll gain power without having to promise anything. Have you seen a Project 2028? They intend business as usual. But the AI bubble will burst and the AI and crypto people will say their company is too big to fail. Things can change quickly. Eric Swalwell is suddenly out. Orbán is out. Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of NYC, seemed to come from nowhere.

I'm seeing like this is a massive populist vibe. People want accountability. They want fighters and they want change. And if you don't give it to them, my fear is, okay, Democrats win. You give them same old, same old. 2032, you get your first America First Nazi president.

Chalupa discussed the swamp of Washington DC. The nasty guys says he is cleaning it up, but he is actually at its center.

I want to point out, because my sister was in DC for many years, and word on the street is a lot of those partners, a lot of those wives are on the payroll of foreign governments like Saudi Arabia to further their interests. There was a social club of elite political women and media wives that Ivanka Trump was welcomed into during the first Trump term. And that is an underground, under the radar form of lobbying. Everybody is paid off in DC. And that's why we have the swamp in the first place. That's what the swamp is.

Ali said:

I could close my eyes and throw a pebble in DC and I'll hit someone being paid by UAE, Quatar, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. Notice I didn't say Democrat or Republican.

Ali told the story of working as a reporter at the White House. Sean Spicer, the nasty guy’s first press secretary, gave his first press conference. He lied to and mocked the press. And then the press people invited him to their party where he seemed to be pals with everyone.

For the average Jose who sees that, they're like, "Oh, you're actually friends with the guy who mocked you, ridiculed you, called you enemy of the people and is having the best time at your party."

Ali said that America loves to get to reconciliation without truth. We have monuments to Confederates. Nixon was pardoned. Financial criminals were declared too big to fail. Even though Joe Biden did great things, Ketanji Jackson being one of them, there are three major sins of his presidency that will harm his legacy. The biggest is Merrick Garland, who slow walked the investigations into the nasty guy. The Attorney General should have had brass knuckles. The second sin is his blindness of what was going on in Gaza. Biden’s base stayed home because they could see genocide unfolding. The third sin is he tried to run for a second term. That left Kamala Harris – or any other Democrat – insufficient time to effectively campaign. The blindness includes the Democratic Party. They still refuse to tax the rich. They still give unwavering support to Israel. If we vote for them things will be different? Ali said:

And folks, anyone who's waiting for the DNC to change, Andrea, it's been 10 years, 10 years. This is who they are. They won't change. They can't change. They're not made for this moment. They're not built for this fight. Thank you for your service. We appreciate you. It's time for you to either evolve or we have to cull you in the next six months and replace you with fighters. Too much is at stake.

Chalupa said that Democrats experienced the Capitol attack, an insurrection, and they did very little in response. They had Constitutional powers they didn’t use, powers that would have kept the traitors out of power. Yeah, the went after the foot soldiers, but not the coup plotters. Ali said:

That's what the lesson that Republicans learned was, "Wow, you're weak. You're pathetic. You guys don't know how to flex power. You didn't stop us. Awesome. That was a dress rehearsal. We'll do it again." And the one credit I'll give Republicans, I don't want to give them credit, but I have to, is when they get in power, Andrea, they flex. They don't give an F. They don't look at the polls. They're like, "We'll do whatever the hell we want. Stop us.”

That’s why most of the Democrats must be replaced. Another example. Randy Fine, Andy Ogles, and Tommy Tuberville say the worst genocidal and anti-Muslim stuff, and Rashida Tlaib, who has Palestinian ancestry, is the one Democrats censure. Democrats are overperforming in elections yet the Democratic brand is worse than that of the nasty guy. How does that make sense? Ali said,

People do not trust these institutions anymore. People are not voting for Democrats. They're voting against Trump. ... So Democrats are misreading this and saying, "Aha. People love the Democratic Party,” but then I give you the poll that the Democrats are ranked lower than Donald Trump, who has the lowest favorability rating.

Ali’s fear is Democrats end up back in office, perhaps even win the presidency in 2028, then proceed with business as usual. They won’t go after the infrastructure that made the nasty guy possible. And a fascist wins in 2032. The people are rising up. And the Democratic leadership remains tone deaf, to be Republican light. One key aspect of fighting this is to hold fast to our own humanity. They discussed Eric Swalwell. His team knew about his sexual harassment and still tried to get him to be the governor of California. Swalwell’s survivors held onto their humanity and declared they would not tolerate the hiding. And now he’s out. Republicans might worship a rapist. But people knew about Swalwell long before he was taken down. Swalwell was part of the Epstein class (and this identification does not rely on being an Epstein client). Chalupa said,

Ukraine is a laboratory of Kremlin aggression and Ukrainian civil society, the independent journalists, the activists, the anti-corruption reformers, they are the reason why Ukraine still exists as a country, as a democracy, and they hold Zelensky accountable. Their grassroots engine is extraordinary. It's historic. And we're seeing resistance here in America on the same level of Ukraine.

To overthrow the guy before Zelenskyy Ukrainians ran towards danger. We’re seeing the same thing in the US in Renee Good and Alex Pretti running towards danger. That’s what gives Chalupa hope. We’re not just fighting fascism. We’re fighting corruption generally. We’re fighting on two fronts. We’re fighting MAGA and fascism. We’re also fighting Democrats who are part of the system, who are complicit in genocide, who take money from AI and crypto and help them with “deregulation,” who think billionaires are part of the party’s Big Tent (a line Gavin Newsom has used), who are unwilling to hold the criminals accountable. Me talking: Not long ago I wrote that we should not blame Democrats for not acting now, because they don’t hold the levers of power and there isn’t much they can do. After working through this interview I see we can blame them for not loudly proclaiming all the things they will do to protect the country and democracy once they are back in power. They’ve been way too silent, which implies they don’t intend to protect democracy. I’ve got a few letters from various Democratic organizations, including from Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. In the recent past I’ve sent a few back, not with checks, but with writing on the donation form that says that I won’t send a check as long as they keep accepting checks from billionaires. I think I now need to change the message to be: If you accept donations from billionaires you’re not enough different from Republicans. That’s a project for tomorrow.