The disease killing American democracy

A few months ago my friend and debate partner talked a bit about the Democratic candidates for president. I probably said my favorite is Elizabeth Warren – that is to say she was and remains my favorite; I don’t remember if that’s what led the discussion. My friend replied that he was concerned that Warren wasn’t “electable.” As with many progressives the primary goal is to remove the nasty guy from office and my friend didn’t think Warren was best to do that. I probably pointed out that Hillary Clinton got nearly 3 million votes more than the nasty guy while she wasn’t considered “electable” before our discussions turned to other topics.

I mention this because …

Financial Times has an article about Warren discussing corruption in general and money laundering in particular that is being used to fund campaigns. David Rothkopf linked to the article and tweeted:

America's oligarchs are actively trying to shut down the Warren campaign. This is why. She is on to the corruption that is the disease killing American democracy.

I’ve read the tweet, not the Financial Times article.

And because …

Mark Fiore of the Daily Kos community comments on an effect of the Democratic National Committee and its ever higher thresholds to qualify for each successive debate. To stay in the debates and in front of the public one needs to be a billionaire, as is Michael Bloomberg. Fiore includes an images of Bloombers with signs saying, “Dems for Billionaire Rights!” and “Plutocrats for the People!” I agree with the comical aspect of those signs – if one becomes a billionaire one does it by exploiting the people and working against progressive causes.

Fiore doesn’t take the next step: A candidate need not be a billionaire if he or she attracts money from billionaires. Attracting that money usually then means the candidate is compromised.

I agree the nasty guy is an immediate threat to democracy. So is the entire GOP. But it was billionaires who made that threat possible. It was millionaires chewing away at tax and other laws that made billionaires and our high inequality possible. So a compromised Democrat may get rid of the immediate threat, but they would still protect billionaires. And our huge problem of inequality would continue.

I remain a fan of Elizabeth Warren because she is campaigning against the nasty guy and the GOP and she is also campaigning against billionaires. She may not be “electable” (though I disagree on that point), but electing many of the other candidates leaves one of the biggest problems in place.

Red Summer of 1919

David Neiwert of Daily Kos wrote a three part remembrance of the Red Summer of 1919. Here are links to the first, second, and third parts. The Red Summer, actually pretty much the whole year, was the peak of lynchings and other violence perpetrated by white people against black people. This year is the 100th anniversary of that violence and too many white people (me included until I read these essays) know nothing about this part of American history and how it affects the present.

The first part discusses what led up to the deadly year. Wrote Neiwert:

These events were in many ways the fevered culmination of the long campaign after the Civil War to reverse its outcome by putting the now-freed slaves in a continued state of submission by other means—violent ones.

The main means was lynching. The Tuskegee Institute says there were at least 3,445 lynchings between 1882 and 1968. Many consider the number to be much higher and they don’t include the large number of lynchings in the early 1870s during the fight over Reconstruction.

The rationale for these horrific acts lay in a kind of guilty white projection, in which black males—many of whom were in fact the progeny of their mothers’ rapes by their white masters—were demonized widely as likely rapists, sexual brutes with ravenous appetites. The supposed threat of black rape, and the ensuing protection of “white womanhood” by “gallant men” of determination who moved in mobs and slaughtered with extreme violence, made it all justified as necessary self-defense in the popular white view.

Ida B. Wells, civil rights pioneer, examined the facts around lynchings and in most cases found “rape” was a pretext for a white woman caught with a black man. Others found …

Far more often, black people were lynched for being too successful by white standards. Economic jealousy fueled many a lynching.

I wouldn’t call it economic “jealousy.” It is more about supremacy – the supremacist can’t allow a black man have a chance to match his economic and social position.

Lynchings were barbaric and cruel. Even so…

Lynchings were hugely popular community events. Parents ensured that their children, especially their daughters, had front-row seats, so they could see what it took to preserve white maidenhood. And, in their minds, it was all justified. Indeed, it was celebrated in popular culture.

That popular culture included the book The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon in 1905, which became the movie The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith. It is credited with reviving the KKK.

So race riots – events with multiple lynchings and ethnic cleansing – happened. These were whites rioting against blacks. First in New York in 1900, a couple in Springfield, Ohio in 1904 and 1906, then across the South, the Midwest, and the nation.

An aggravating factor was black American soldiers returning from WWI in 1917. They were seen not as heroes, but as “uppity” because only white men were supposedly capable and brave.

The second essay describes 30 race riots across the country in 1919. Many included full scale attacks on the black residents of a community, including chasing them out of town. Many riots resulted in hundreds of deaths. Several of these riots lasted more than one day, the longest, in Chicago, lasted a week.

The third essay begins with two more riots. One was in Ocoee, Florida in 1920. The violence and ethnic cleansing resulted in it becoming an all white town, and it remained that way until 1981.

The other big riot was in Tulsa in 1921. The Greenwood neighborhood, the “Black Wall Street” was burned, with help from biplanes dropping flaming turpentine balls. The area was destroyed and the black residents fled.

The violence subsided around 1925.

If I remember right, it is during this era of 1900-1925 that most of the Confederate monuments were built – the memorials and statues that just in the last few years public outcry has finally brought many of them down.

The rest of the third essay discusses the consequences.

Even after cultural mores about racial discrimination and the value of racial diversity finally shifted, the system of economic and cultural advantages and disadvantages the previous regime of violence had created (better known in this case as “white privilege”) persist ad infinitum.

The mechanics of how this happened can be observed by looking at what happened to America demographically as a result of these “race riots.” Essentially, black Americans were driven out of rural America and forced to reside in racially and economically segregated urban neighborhoods.

The NAACP was born to oppose lynching. It got attention by flying a banner outside its New York offices whenever appropriate that said, “A man was lynched yesterday.”

Many places declared themselves to be sundown towns. A black person could be in this town during the day – likely working as a maid or gardener – but laws mandated they be out of town by sundown. There were thousands of towns that passed such laws and they were all across America.

James Loewen wrote the book *Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism*. Here is part of the book’s conclusion:

We have seen how residents often interpret the continued overwhelmingly white population of sundown suburbs as the result of economic differences and individual housing decisions, including those made by black families. Even worse, suburban whiteness can get laid at the eugenics doorstep: whites can blame African Americans for being too stupid or lazy to be successful enough to live in their elite, all-white town.

Token blacks allow them to “prove” that racism is over. That allows the claim that African Americans are responsible for whatever inequalities remain. That’s why it is important to know our nation’s history.

Core impeachment

Earlier this week Rachel Martin of NPR’s Morning Edition talked to Neal Katyal about his new book Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump. Katyal is a law professor at Georgetown University and a historian of the Constitution. The audio is 7 minutes or one can read the web story.

Back in 1787 when the Constitution was being debated some founders were concerned about having an impeachment clause. We have elections. That’s the way to check an abusive president.

James Madison responded: What if you have a president who gets help from a foreign power? What if you have a president who cheats and puts his own interests above the American people?

Madison’s argument changed minds and the impeachment clause was inserted.

Which means what the nasty guy has done and is doing is core impeachment.

So how to define what is impeachable? Some thought a president could be impeached for bad administration or bad policies. That was rejected for something much higher. The phrase actually in the Constitution is “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” We forget those first two words are there. And what happened in Ukraine is bribery, plain and simple. It is core bribery. It is an impeachable offense.

We even get help from the vice nasty guy, words he spoke when he was in Congress back in 2008. He laid it out clearly. He said a high crime is when the president puts his interest over the interests of the American people. Is the president acting in the nation’s interest or is he acting in his personal interest?

Very clear. And with this Ukraine story, very obvious.

So I wonder why the vice nasty guy now supports the nasty guy. Actually I do know why – his supremacist urges are really strong. He wants to inherit a supremacist organization when the nasty guy is no longer there.

Who but a demon?

We’ve seen this kind of thing before – the people get fed up with GOP policies and elect a Democrat to one job or another. The GOP legislature responds by stripping some or all of the power of that job. Indiana (when the vice nasty guy was governor there) did it to the statewide Superintendent of Public Instruction. Wisconsin did it to the governor.

And now the GOP is considering the idea of doing it to the newly elected Democratic governor of Kentucky. This governor-elect is Andy Beshear, who was in the news a lot in November because he won by a small margin and the GOP incumbent who got booted tried to get the GOP legislature to make trouble.

Stephen Wolf of the Daily Kos Elections staff reports the GOP is starting small. The bill is limited to the state Department of Transportation and would mean the Secretary of Transportation is the only cabinet position requiring Senate confirmation. That hands a key post to corporate interests. There are enough Republicans in the legislature they could overturn Beshear’s veto.

These schemes amount to a refusal on the part of Republicans to acknowledge that Democrats are a legitimate opposition party entitled to govern when they win elections.

This is an ominous trend, and one that could rear its head at a level far above state politics. Prior to the 2016 elections, Donald Trump refused to say he would honor the results if he lost, and ever since, he’s repeatedly claimed without any evidence that widespread voter fraud cost him the popular vote. The GOP establishment has given its full support to these power grabs in the states. They could culminate in Trump rejecting a legitimate election loss and refusing to leave office next year—a prospect that Americans must be prepared for.

Walter Shaub is a former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics. He served under Obama, but shortly after the nasty guy took office he resigned saying he could do no more to curb the ethical violations within the nasty guy administration.

Shaub posted a long Twitter thread outlining 39 unethical things the nasty guy has done and which the GOP is permitting. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos lists them all. I’ll just list a few:

* Soliciting foreign attacks on our elections.
* Refusing to build defenses against interference in our elections.
* Refusing to comply with Congressional oversight.
* Firing the heads of the government’s top law enforcement agencies for allowing investigations of the president.
* Abandoning steadfast allies without warning Congress.
* Relentlessly attacking the free press.
* Misusing the security clearance process to benefit his children and target enemies.
* Accusing members of Congress of treason for conducting oversight.
* Hosting foreign leaders at his private businesses.
* Supporting authoritarian leaders and undermining NATO.

Shaub concludes:

None of the Republican Senators defending Trump could say with a straight face that they would tolerate a Democratic president doing the same thing. But, given this dangerous precedent, they may have no choice if they ever lose control of the Senate. Is that what they want?
...
At this point, I would remind these unpatriotic Senators of the line ‘you have a republic if you can keep it,’ but a variation on this line may soon be more apt when Trump redoubles his attack on our election: You have a republic, if you can call this a republic.

Contrast that with this. Georgia Logothetis is part of the Daily Kos team that does a regular roundup of what pundits are saying.

From Dana Milbank of the Washington Post:

On Fox News on Sunday, Energy Secretary Rick Perry reported that he told Trump he was God’s choice: “I said, 'Mr. President, I know there are people that say you said you were the chosen one and I said, 'You were.’”

Who but a demon could vote to impeach God’s chosen one?

The surest way to make a climate-change denier even more aggressive in his denial is to present him with more science. Likewise, presenting Trump supporters with evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing only makes them more defiant of the demons doing the presenting.

Pete Wehner of The Atlantic adds:

Just ask yourself where this game ends. ... Are we supposed to believe that Adam Schiff’s words during the impeachment inquiry are not his own but those of demons in disguise? Were the testimonies of Ambassador Bill Taylor, Fiona Hill, and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman truthful accounts offered by admirable public servants that badly hurt the president’s credibility—or the result of demonic powers?

Bring on the wealth tax

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

I marked the day last Saturday with my sisters and their families. So today I watched the Detroit Thanksgiving Parade, something I hadn’t done before because I was always on my way to visit family. I watched it on the internet – I did not get up early or brave the cold to watch it live.

For many years, perhaps a decade, the Ruth Ellis Center held a Thanksgiving feast the evening before, which was my regular volunteer night. The Board of Directors would bring in the food and serve it.

This year the director told me they would do something different, but didn’t tell me what. So I was a bit surprised when I got there last night and there were no steaming pans of turkey, ham, stuffing, sweet potatoes, green beans, and pies. There was also no crew there preparing anything else. The manager ordered a dozen pizzas – which I served. They were gone by the end of the evening.

Sometime during the evening I was given a flyer for the replacement event – the turkey and all the rest would be served all afternoon today – 1:00-6:00. This sounded like it could be a big deal. Since I wasn’t going to get turkey any other way today I decided I would go late in the afternoon and use that for my supper.

I got there about 4:30. Most of the small crowd had already gone. I didn’t see any leadership or board members. There wasn’t much ham or turkey left, though there was enough for me. Nobody was actively serving, so one youth asked me to serve him (what I normally do when I’m there). Before 5:00, even though they were supposedly going to be open for another hour, the staff started cleaning up. So I helped. Then went home.



Abigail Disney has a few things to say in favor of the proposed wealth tax. From what others have said she is a part of that Disney family.

Suppose one has a billion dollars. Suppose also one makes a conservative 6% return on investment (I thought conservative was more like 2%, but never mind). At 6% wealth will expand by $60 million a year. The wealth tax is proposed to be 2% or $20 million a year. That leaves an expansion of $40 million a year on top of the billion one already has.

There are two kinds of inequality – income inequality and wealth inequality. Income inequality is the obscene gulf between the size of the paychecks of those at the bottom and those at the top. Wealth inequality is the favorable tax treatment the wealthy enjoy for being wealthy, which allows their wealth to expand.

For example, the wealth of the 1% richest Americans has risen from $8.4 trillion in 1989 to $29.5 trillion in 2018, more than tripling. The wealth of the bottom half Americans went from $0.7 trillion to a minus $0.2 trillion in that same time. Disney asks:

Does this strike anyone as fair? More importantly, does this strike anyone as a good idea? Socially stable? The basis for a sustainable future?????

A reason for this massive shift is we have chosen to tax work differently than ownership. Owning things that rise in value get taxed at no higher than 20%. Income can get taxed at a much higher rate.

I'm told that those owners who enjoy that capital gains rate provide jobs and stimulate the economy, but how good at that can they possibly be if they wealth of the working people they are supposedly providing those jobs have gotten less wealthy not more so? If that dynamic worked, wouldn't we have seen improvement in the wealthy held more broadly by working Americans, rather than the cataclysmic plummet into negative numbers with which we are currently faced?

This reduced tax on ownership was because the South was afraid the North would abolish slavery by taxing it into oblivion. So to get the South to join the union the North had to forbid taxing ownership. Do we want to continue to lean on that legacy?

No, raising taxes won’t cause the rich to flee. They don’t have that many places to go. If they make their money here they should pay taxes here.

But no, you say, they will just cheat! Yes, they will cheat. Good lord of course they will cheat. But there's a little something called enforcement. We don't do much of it right now, in fact the IRS has been gutted. But that's like saying murder should be legal because you can't stop people from murdering each other. That is silly and you know it.
…
I'd be all for a tax code that reflected the values we claim as a nation: that work is a good thing, that ownership is nice if it's deployed in a way that supports a thriving economy, and that when a small number of people own enough to completely reinvigorate all the aspects of the supposed American Dream that have decayed into near uselessness over the last 50 years, then Bernie, Elizabeth, I say go for it. Bring on the wealth tax. I will happily pay.

Live free or die

I went off this afternoon to see the movie Harriet. It’s a dramatization of how Harriet Tubman first escaped from slavery, then began to free other slaves. I highly recommend it.

There is violence in the story, because slavery was violent. We also see the viciousness of the white owners. It is very much a supremacy thing at its worst. The movie definitely earns its PG-13 rating, but it is PG-13 and not R.

We watch Harriet evolve from a timid slave. She grieves having her family torn apart as siblings are sold. She knows only one thing – she must live free or die. Her first trip back into the South is to get her siblings out. And soon she is a confident leader with an unshakable mission to get as many slaves out as she can. She’s pretty good at evading or facing down slaveowners.

Legal marriage is good for you

A study in Denmark and Sweden shows that after same-sex marriage was legalized the suicide rate of those in same-sex partnerships declined significantly. Suicide overall dropped by 28%, suicide by those in same-sex unions dropped by 46%. Alas, even as those numbers decline suicide rates of people in same-sex relationships is still twice as high as those in opposite-sex relationships.

Alas, again, suicide by LGBTQ teens is still significantly higher than other teens.

Impeachment is not one and done

Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community says that finding moderate GOP senators willing to vote to remove the nasty guy after impeachment is simply wishful thinking.

Any Republican even partially dependent on Trump’s rabid and virulent base for re-election can count on having that base turn against them if they vote to convict Donald Trump. The number of votes, for example, that Susan Collins is going to gain from “moderates” in Maine would not outweigh the number of votes she is likely to lose by infuriating Trump’s base. That’s true, no matter how “moderate” Maine is overall. Trump’s voting base is now a cult, and a vote to convict their leader is simply incomprehensible to them. Anyone who takes such an action will be shunned, if not subjected to actual violence. On Election Day those people will sit on their hands, and at this point, there are a lot more of them than there are “persuadable” moderates

And nothing the Democrats uncover—no crime, no association, no betrayal or act by Trump—will change that.
…
[Trump’s] historical pattern suggests that he will trumpet his acquittal and use it to justify committing further crimes, with a renewed and much higher degree of impunity. After all, there is literally nothing to stop him from doing so—no legal constraint whatsoever. The Supreme Court isn’t going to stop him, and absent a blatantly illegal war crime, the Armed Services aren’t going to stop him either.
…
The months between the time the Senate acquits Trump and the November 2020 election are going to be the most harrowing months in this country’s modern history, because this Republican-controlled Senate will have allowed a criminal president to run amok with no legal means of restraint to stop him.

So the nasty guy and the GOP will enlist all possible foreign assistance for re-election. It is the only way the nasty guy – and Putin – can survive. They’ll do everything to make sure they survive.

But the Constitution doesn’t say impeachment is one and done. Impeachment inquiries should and must continue from the day of the GOP acquittal to the day the nasty guy leaves office.

And make no mistake, the effects of continued impeachment efforts would be severe and unpredictable. They might be so severe as to rip the country apart.

But Democrats really will have no choice. It’s either that or acquiesce to someone who is essentially going to consider himself a dictator, one totally unfettered by any legal constraints.

Lawrence Lewis, also of the Daily Kos community, adds:

Democrats can’t limit investigations in the House, because there won’t be any investigations in the Senate. Democrats can’t fail to follow the facts, and they’ve only scratched the surface of the facts. This is an existential crisis for the republic. This is the moment. And unless the polls already are moving so strongly in favor of Trump’s removal from office that these unscrupulously debased Republicans feel they have no other option, the republic will fall.

The next step in the GOP playbook

Congress passed a continuing budget resolution and the nasty guy signed it. That means a government shutdown didn’t happen today. But this isn’t a true 2020 federal budget. Congress gave itself until December 20 to make that happen. I’ll offer no predictions on how that will go. Or whether a raging nasty guy will sign it.

As part of the spending bill that got passed the Senate Budget Committee offered some budget reforms. They didn’t get into this bill because they weren’t in the House bill and some level-headed senators knew they didn’t have time for the reconciling process.

There are some provisions in the budget reform package that make sense and are long overdue (I haven’t read the details). But one provision is alarming to Hunter Blair of the *Economic Policy Institute*. Instead of a one year budget, Congress would create a two year budget (in itself not a bad thing). In the second year the Congressional Budget Office would report whether the debt-to-GDP target had been met (don’t fret over that detail) and, if not, special reconciliation instructions would be triggered. And (yes, now is the time to fret) that means cuts to major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and just about every other part of the social safety net Republicans have been clamoring to eliminate over the last few decades.

Even worse, if that second year is part of a recession those cuts would mean both not assisting citizens affected by the recession and not allowing the government to help ease the recession itself. Both would make the recession worse. The CBO reports that it is in recessions are exactly when debt projections are most likely to be extremely off.

So yeah, something like this has been in the GOP playbook as the next step ever since they gave those huge tax cuts to the rich. This next step has been obvious to some of us since those tax cuts passed. Look for it to rear its ugly head again during December.

Investigate the Investigators!

I’ve heard my sources say the nasty guy and his minions – especially Attorney General William Barr – are trying to investigate the investigators. I’ve been puzzled about how they would go about doing that. Then indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provided an example. Reporter Noga Tarnopolsky tweeted a thread about what is going on. After being indicted Netanyahu spoke. He attacked the justice system. He attacked the press. He called for an uprising of the people, railing against what he calls trumped up charges. He said the public has already lost faith in the police and the justice system. He railed that he got the worst press coverage of anyone in the history of Israel. He vowed he won’t let lies win in his country. He said investigators weren’t seeking the truth they were seeking him. “There is one thing that must happen: the Investigators must be investigated!” Only accountability will restore public faith in the justice system.

Any of this sound familiar? Perhaps coming from a certain big mouth on this side of the Atlantic?

Obviously (and it was obvious to many long before now), Netanyahu is an authoritarian.

Just to dispel any doubts: Since the investigators charged Netanyahu with a crime, he – like authoritarians everywhere – concludes that it is the investigators that must be corrupt and we had better expose that corruption before the country (meaning himself) is harmed.



Dawn Onley of Our Prism on Daily Kos asks an important question. The most loyal demographic of the Democratic Party is black women. So why are the first two primaries in lily white Iowa and New Hampshire? The order of primary states matters because momentum matters. Why should Kamela Harris have to wait a month after the first big two to get to states (Nevada and South Carolina) where a higher concentration of voters look like her?

Presidential candidate Julián Castro adds:

We’re right to call Republicans out when they suppress the votes of African-Americans or Latinos, but we’ve also got to recognize that this 50-year-old process was created during a time when minority voices had zero power in the party.

A couple years ago North Korean leader Kim Kong Un wanted meetings with the nasty guy because such appearances would promote the idea that Kim was a legitimate world leader. Those meetings were supposed to be about nuclear disarmament and they have been so much not going well that Kim is frustrated. In response to a hopeful tweet from the nasty guy North Korean official Kim Kye Gwan replied:

We are no longer interested in such talks that bring nothing to us. As we have got nothing in return, we will no longer gift the U.S. president with something he can boast of, but get compensation for the successes that President Trump is proud of as his administrative achievement.

We’ve gone from Kim needing the nasty guy to give him legitimacy to Kim not needing and not wanting the nasty guy.



Journalist Heather Bryant tweeted a thread in which she notes that news organizations are considering editor’s notes for greater transparency. Bryant proposes a few. Here are a couple of them.

To go with a story about labor, unions, and workforce discrimination:

Editor's Note: This company is currently resisting or outright fighting unionization efforts of staff that would help them in regard to these issues.

To go with a story about sexual assault and whether the allegations will ruin the man’s life:

Editor's Note: This media company has known and/or covered up for one or more men who have discriminated, harassed or assaulted women who work or wanted to work here.

Bill in Portland, Maine includes in his weekday post Cheers and Jeers on Daily Kos has a By the Numbers feature. In today’s numbers:

Number of times Pete Buttigieg’s Rhodes scholarship has been mentioned in U.S. publications this year, according to HuffPost: 596

Number of times Cory Booker's Rhodes scholarship has been mentioned: 79

Upset that he got caught

According to the news the public impeachment inquiry has concluded. What, already? The House Intelligence Committee is to now write a report to the House Justice Committee. That Committee then draws up articles of impeachment (or declines). So we wait.

Lawrence Lewis of the Daily Kos Community pulled out a tidbit from the *Washington Post* saying the GOP plans to spend only two weeks on the impeachment trial of the nasty guy. That seems long enough for the GOP to say “See! We did the trial you asked us to do!”

Lewis says to prevent that Democrats need to force testimony from the nasty guy minions who flouted subpoenas and to get the transcripts from that super secure server. The Dems also need to hold hearings into the abuses in the Mueller Report.

Otherwise the nasty guy will know he can get away with anything.

Also while we wait some of the Senators who will be jurors in that trial (some of them using that excuse to avoid talking to the media) met with the nasty guy (the defendant) to “map out a strategy” for the impeachment trial. Yeah, that sounds corrupt. In particular, Senator Susan Collins of Maine who likes to pretend how moderate she is, has gone to the White House for lunch, likely to give a chance for the nasty guy to bribe her.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times notes:

The inquiry hasn’t found a smoking gun; it has found what amounts to a smoking battery of artillery. Yet almost no partisan Republicans have turned on Trump and his high-crimes-and-misdemeanors collaborators. Why not? The answer gets to the heart of what’s wrong with modern American politics: The G.O.P. is now a thoroughly corrupt party. Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and our democracy will remain under dire threat even if and when he’s gone.

Fiona Hill, a Russian expert on the National Security Council scolded those corrupt Republicans during her testimony:

Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. [That Russia was behind the interference] is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified. … Russia's security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them."

Please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests. … If the President, or anyone else, impedes or subverts the national security of the United States in order to further domestic political or personal interests, that is more than worthy of your attention. But we must not let domestic politics stop us from defending ourselves against the foreign powers who truly wish us harm.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, the guy in charge of these hearings, said:

My Republican colleagues, all they seem to be upset about with this is not that the president sought an investigation of his political rival, not that he withheld a White House meeting and $400 million in aid we all passed in a bipartisan basis to pressure Ukraine to do those investigations. Their objection is that he got caught. Their objection is that someone blew the whistle, and they would like this whistleblower identified, and the president wants this whistleblower punished. That's their objection. Not that the president engaged in this conduct, but that he got caught.

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos says Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in a bind. He listened in on that phone call between the nasty guy and the president of Ukraine, knew the quid pro quo was for the nasty guy’s personal interest and not those of the country, and did nothing. Yet, a series of State Department career professionals and seasoned diplomats, have been ignoring their boss Pompeo and offering damning testimony. Those employees are annoyed that Pompeo didn’t stand up for them when the nasty guy attacked them. And the nasty guy raged that Pompeo can’t control his staff and make them serve only himself. Gosh, such a squeeze.

Will Stancil is a lawyer who does metropolitan policy research and tweets his personal opinions:

Okay, let’s review:
-Democrats avoided confronting Trump directly for nine months because of fear of backlash
-Democrats are refusing to investigate key leads or witnesses because they want to stop impeaching ASAP, because backlash
-this is the backlash:

[a tweet from] Sahil Kapur
First governor elections since the impeachment inquiry began

* Kentucky (Trunp+30): Dem +0.4…

Sarah Kendzior wrote an opinion piece for the Globe and Mail saying the impeachment hearings need to go beyond Ukraine. Kendzior first talks about former ambassador Marie Yovanovich, who testified at the hearings.

There is nowhere for Ms. Yovanovitch to go. There is no longer refuge in this world. Like many Americans, she lives in a simulacrum of democracy dependent on the refusal of elites to admit the severity of the crisis. Ms. Yovanovitch swore to tell the whole truth, but to tell the whole truth is to terrify everyone. To tell the whole truth is to say what officials gloss over but what citizens can see: This is apparently a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.
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There is nowhere Ms. Yovanovitch can be safe, because Donald Trump is everywhere. His accomplices are everywhere, and when one of them gets imprisoned – such as Russian operative Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager who worked for Kremlin interests in Ukraine – others, such as Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his indicted followers Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, take their place.
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Democratic leaders claim they want to limit the scope of the impeachment proceedings to Mr. Trump’s 2019 Ukraine shakedown, but that’s both impossible and insulting. The 2019 Ukraine shakedown is a continuation of the 2016 election heist, which was a continuation of Mr. Trump’s apparent lifelong connection to the Kremlin and his schemes with corrupt actors from the former USSR. Limiting the impeachment scope does a grave disservice to people such as Ms. Yovanovitch, whose lives are endangered by the unwillingness of officials to examine crimes in context, and the refusal of institutions to hold perpetrators accountable.

This feeling of being overrun

Stephen Miller is an immigration advisor to the nasty guy. He’s the one who came up with the idea that children should be separated from parents at the border and housed in cages. So, yeah, quite obviously racist. Miller is in the news because a batch of leaked emails shows how thoroughly racist he is. Reaction has ranged from: Oh wow! Look at that! to: Sheesh, where’ve you been?

Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the host of Weekend Edition Sunday on NPR, first talked to Chelsea Stieber, a scholar of French literature at the Catholic University of America. She teaches the book Camp of the Saints, a novel (as in fiction) about an invasion of hordes of migrants who come to the West and bring about its end. Stieber uses the book to teach how students can detect the language of far-right groups.

Garcia-Navarro also talked to Kathleen Belew, who teaches history at the University of Chicago and wrote Bring The War Home, about white power movements. Belew spoke of an aspect of white nationalism:

Most political issues of the day are, at bottom, about the reproduction of the white race and the birth of white children. This is why you see people focusing on the birth rate, right? We see the birth rate appearing in manifestos of violent actors.

But to people in this movement, white reproduction is not just about sort of a peaceful demographic transformation, but it's about this feeling of being overrun by immigrants, about being threatened with forced integration and about the idea that the white race is under attack. And I think that sense of emergency that is depicted and works like "Camp Of The Saints" and "The Turner Diaries" explains how white nationalism becomes such a captivating and kind of world-consuming way of thinking about politics.

Again, I note that overpopulation, which causes so much societal and environmental damage cannot be solved until ideas of supremacy are eliminated.

Belew says there are laws and policies that oppress people as a side effect. There is also personal racial animus. And then there is organized supremacist ideology.

It has a coherent worldview that is not only deeply racist and xenophobic and anti-immigrant, but also, at times, un-American and dedicated towards war on the state. I think this represents a real difference in intent than a policy that's simply enacted with an after-effect of harm. This is about deliberate construction of a white nationalist public policy coming from the halls of power into our laws and into our nation.

I’m dubious of this notion of policies that have a side effect of oppression. I’m quite sure throughout American history the oppression was intentional, well understood, and why a policy was enacted the way it was.

Garcia-Navarro noted that Miller referenced Camp of the Saints. Belew replied that shows the nasty guy’s immigration policies are not in the category of unintentional harm, but is a deliberate and intentional attempt to impose a white supremacist society.



In my post last Sunday I forgot to acknowledge that it was 12th anniversary of the start of this blog. Yes, that was back when Bush II was masquerading as the president. This post is number 4150. I certainly plan to keep going.

Stabilized neighborhoods

Aaron Glantz wrote the book Homewreckers, How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream. Glantz wrote a summary as a guest editorial in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press.

Alas, the summary, close to a whole newspaper page, didn’t say much about those Wall Street kingpins. hedge fund managers, crooked banks, and vulture capitalists. His ire was focused on former President Obama. Though there are a few references say that Bush II is partly to blame. Alas, again, there are real reasons to blame Obama.

Most of the article is a comparison of how Roosevelt handled the mortgage default crisis that was a part of the Great Depression and how Obama handled it in the Great Recession.

Roosevelt’s New Deal included the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation. The HOLC bought bad loans off banks for their true value, created new mortgages, and worked to keep borrowers in their homes, including holding off foreclosure up to a year when borrowers could not pay. The HOLC employed inspectors and contractors to fix the 200,000 homes on its books. They rented the houses to keep them occupied until new buyers could be found. The system kept speculators out and stabilized neighborhoods. Taxpayers eventually got their money back.

As great as the HOLC was it had one big flaw – it was racist. It used “redlining,” the practice of drawing lines around neighborhoods that were “too hazardous” to lend in because they were “infiltrated” with blacks or “threatened” with the possibility of blacks moving in. So this wonderful stabilization force was reserved for only white neighborhoods.

In the recent financial collapse the government again owned about 200,000 properties, this time 240,000. And this time the owners were Fannie May and Freddie Mac, mortgage companies chartered by the federal government.

Alas, Fannie and Freddie had no interest in doing the work of neighborhood stabilization. Yeah, they were given in $1 billion to maintain properties, but with that many properties that much money paid for little more than boarding up windows and disposing of junk cars.

Fannie and Freddie wanted to keep things simple. And simple meant selling properties to Wall Street.

Consumer advocates and realtors had good ideas of how the gov’t should unload all those houses, ideas to help stabilize neighborhoods. Obama even endorsed the idea. The ACLU and others had an alternate proposal that the houses could be used as affordable housing for the poor.

In spite of Obama’s words, his actions were quite different. His administration sold the houses in bulk. Taxpayers lost money. The contracts for these sales stipulated the buyer would manage the property and engage with the community. But those requirements were ignored.

Pizzazz

Collins Dictionary has declared its word of the year for 2019. It is climate strike with a definition of a protest demanding action on climate change. Collins’ lexicographers saw a one hundred fold increase in its usage in 2019.

Some of the words on the shortlist
influencer – a person who promotes lifestyle choices to their followers on social media
rewilding – returning land to a wile state, including reintroducing animal species
deepfake – superimpose one digital image on another while maintaining an unedited appearance
BoPo – a movement advocating that people should be proud of their bodies no matter the shape or size
nonbinary – a gender or sexual identity that does not conform of the binary of male or female, heterosexual or homosexual



As the public impeachment hearings got underway this week someone on NBC snarked that they didn’t have enough pizzazz. Sarah Kendzion tweeted:

If reporters feel the impeachment hearings aren't "exciting" enough, they can go report on Trump's decades of mafia ties, sexual assaults, financial crimes, and all the other horrifying activity they failed to cover.

That prompted responses of more suggestions about what the news media could cover. No doubt they could add pizzazz.

From Mark Vang: A story about prosecutors and judges who failed to notice the nasty guy’s decades long crime spree.

From Midwin Charles: Why did Anthony Kennedy retire so abruptly from the Supreme Court? Why did Kennedy’s son at Deutsche Bank approve loans for Jared and Kavanaugh when no one else would?

Justin G. goes in a different direction: Public hearings are not about pizzazz, they’re about getting to the truth and informing the public.

Jeff Green adds: A sad state of affairs when media rates importance according to excitement.

And winston morrison:

So irresponsible to ward off viewers with "not exciting enough." This is the most important thing they can report on. I'm stunned by you, NBC

The ones whose lives are upended

I went to the Hilberry Theatre last evening to see the play Sweat by Lynn Nottage. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2017. The setting is in a bar in Reading, Pennsylvania in 2000. The characters work on the floor at an area factory – well, the bartender Stan did and his assistant Oscar will. It is the life they know and in many cases the lives their parents and grandparents knew.

This is just after the tech stock crash. Companies are moving operations to other countries. And these characters are the ones whose lives are upended. Tracey, Cynthia, and Jessie are good friends until Cynthia is promoted to supervisor. Tracey accuses her of getting the job because she is black. Cynthia’s ex-husband Brucie worked at a different factory where a strike has now stretched to almost two years. Brucie is now an addict. Tracey’s son Jason and Cynthia’s son Chris are best friends. Chris wants to go to college to become a teacher, but Jason tells him why take the low wages of a teacher over the better wages of a factory job? Chris doesn’t have money for college anyway.

Then the rest of them are locked out of the factory after their machines are hauled out in the middle of the night. Cynthia is accused of not fighting sufficiently hard to keep their jobs. They all become desperate and defiant.

Reading, PA is the setting because in 2011 it was one of the poorest cities in America with a poverty level of 40%. Playwright Nottage spent more than two years interviewing numerous residents. She constructed her play from their stories.

This is the Hilberry, so of course the production was well done and well acted. I was particularly impressed with the guy who played Brucie.

The website Encore Michigan posts reviews of professional theater productions across the state – at least the ones that have a run long enough for them to post a review before the end of a run. David Kiley wrote the review for this play. I think Kiley wrote more about the background of the play than the play itself – the specific plot and the quality of the production and acting.

There are two more performances – tonight and tomorrow.

Savor a warm, slightly salty beverage

Leah McElrath tweeted that candidate Elizabeth Warren “continues to piss off all the right people.” Then McElrath proposed to the Warren staff:

The people want a “Billionaires’ Tears” coffee mug.

Please have your awesome merch people get on that.

McElrath even proposes a few designs.

And within hours the Warren team has such a mug for sale on her webpage. The description reads:

In November 2019, billionaire and former Goldman Sachs executive Leon Cooperman (who as recently as 2017 settled with the SEC on insider-trading charges) was brought to tears on live television while discussing the prospect that a President Elizabeth Warren might require him to pay his fair share in taxes. Savor a warm, slightly salty beverage of your choice in this union-made mug as you contemplate all the good a wealth tax could do: universal childcare, student debt cancellation, universal free college, and more.

McElrath was delighted and quickly ordered one. She tweeted:

While you order yours, think about the astonishing competence of the team Warren has put together that they can perform such a quick turnaround.

It’s a testament to her executive skills.

It takes exceptional instincts and highly-developed executive skills to choose and empower staff who can — quickly and effectively — implement your voice and vision.

There’s something annoying in McElrath’s Twitter feed. No, not this idea. Every image for a proposal and the actual mug is replaced by:

This media may contain sensitive material.

A mug with the words “Billionaire’s Tears” is sensitive? Really? In this case I hope you delightfully click on “view.”

Deregulation is a lie

As part of the impeachment hearings yesterday. Rep. André Carson of Indiana asked questions of George Kent of the State Department. Kent said this gem:

You can't promote principled anti-corruption action without pissing-off corrupt people.

Greg Sargent linked to an opinion piece by Paul Waldman in the Washington Post titled Deregulation is a Lie. Sargent tweeted this quote:

The next time you hear a Republican brag about how the administration is 'deregulating,' remember that they’re doing nothing of the sort. They’re just changing who government is working for.

You can scroll down for some good responses.



Tanzina Vega is the host of The Takeaway on WNYC. She tweeted a thread.

We act like being an Ivy grad says something about how worthy and intelligent a person is. When it often reflects how wealthy, connected and prepared they have been.

We really only care about POC if they can perform the ultimate in life transformations - grow up homeless and graduate top of the class at Harvard etc for example.

But those who fall short of this trope? They have to recite their resumes forever and rarely get the sheen of golden prestige and so called "genius" that being in the right place at the right time can bring.

My comment is also an indictment of how poorly we prepare students in public school for access to these institutions. For low income POC w no resources it's almost impossible to attain - you still need prep classes, tutoring etc.

You also need access and parents and teachers who identify these opportunities for you early on. All of that is preparation. Most low income folks do not have access to those resources.

What pro-life means

NPR Morning Edition host Rachel Martin talked to Gena Thomas and her new book Separated by the Border. Julia was about 5 years old when she was separated from her step-father at the border. Thomas served as a foster mother for Julia until she could be reunited with her mother back in Honduras. As touching as the story is I was caught by something else that Thomas said.

Thomas is an evangelical Christian. Martin asks if Thomas thinks evangelicals have fallen short on family separation. Thomas replied:

Absolutely. I think that falling short actually comes from this idea that pro-life is antiabortion. And I believe that if the evangelical leadership is going to get in the right place when it comes to immigration, it's got to start with really recognizing what pro-life means in a robust manner.

And I believe that it's really a fault of our theology that really stems back to this idea that we are pro-life if, you know, death is right in front of it. But if we're not pro-life when other people are pulling families apart - you know, we talk a lot about family values as evangelical Christians. And if we are going to be for family values, then we need to be for family reunification.

As part of her closing message Thomas said:

One of the other things that I talk about a lot in the book is this idea that salvation is individual. We don't really seek shalom, which is really more of a communal salvation, so a salvation of a whole community. And I think that we need to focus more on that.

Undoing Lincoln with modern parallels

Brenda Winetree wrote the book, The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation. Susan Grigsby, part of the Daily Kos community, discussed it.

In Grigsby’s introduction she notes:

President Andrew Johnson was a hero trying to follow the policies of Abraham Lincoln, which earned him the enmity of the Republicans in Congress and led to his impeachment. He was saved by a single vote, which I learned was cast by a brave senator who did not wish to be responsible for the first conviction of an American president.

Or at least, that is what I was taught by an education system in the middle of the Cold War.

The reality?

Johnson was as supremacist as they come. After Lincoln was assassinated Johnson refused to call Congress back into session, attempting to rule by fiat for 8 months. He wanted Southern elections to be open only to white men. He pardoned Confederate leaders, allowing them to control state governments and militias. He tried to undo all that Lincoln had done and succeeded in undoing quite a bit. The number of Confederate flags still flying shows that Johnson did succeed in undoing Lincoln’s attempts at healing the nation and succeeded in keeping white supremacy alive.

Once Congress was in session the Republicans (the good guys at the time) passed bills to rein in Johnson. He vetoed them.

The 13th Amendment banned slavery, but not what would become Jim Crow. It also got rid of the rule that black people counted as 3/5 of a person. But now counted as whole the South got another 20 congressional seats and electoral votes. Might Johnson’s actions reengergize white supremacists?

The Impeachers step forward. Even in 1868 the process got bogged down in process questions. The Senate dragged out the process, hoping it would go away. And that last vote that meant acquittal rather than removal – it was bought by Johnson supporters.

Grigsby discusses the parallels between Johnson and the nasty guy, which are frequent and alarming. So are the parallels between impeachment then and now. Grigsby concludes:

How long will it take us to recover after Trump? Will we ever return to a government of three separate and equal branches capable of providing balance? Can we ever again be the “nation of laws, not of men” that John Adams envisioned?

Or will we remain chained to the doctrine of white supremacy which has guided us for 250 years? Can we ever reach a point where we actually believe that all people are created equal and then treat them that way?

Perhaps not, but that should not stop us from trying, from pressing forward with an impeachment, and from making sure that all Americans are informed of the high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Trump. If nothing else, The Impeachers can prepare us for what lies ahead.

Was it in the national interest?

Tuesday morning, before the public impeachment testimony began Steven Inskeep. host of Morning Edition on NPR, spoke to correspondent Michele Kelemen about the evidence so far. In an 11 minute segment they made some important points.

Why are people upset about quid pro quo being part of the phone call between the nasty guy and the Ukraine president? Quid pro quo (Latin for “this for that”) is a standard part of diplomatic negotiation. They bring in Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations who has worked for four presidents going back to Carter.

We hear an archive recording of Joe Biden who talked about a quid pro quo – he held up a payment of a billion dollars of aid to Ukraine unless a certain prosecutor was fired. Haass said yes, that was quid pro quo. “Quid pro Quos are the milk of foreign policy.” They’re normal – and Biden’s example was normal – because they’re linked to major policy goals.

On to the nasty guy. Haass says the distinction is what he was asking for. He wasn’t holding up money in the national interest. He was doing it for personal politics.

Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana tried to make a distinction. Asking for an investigation of a political rival is over the line. Asking for investigation of possible corruption by someone who happens to be a political rival is good.

Haass responded but what the nasty guy did is not in the national interest. The intelligence communities have already shown there is no corruption by the Bidens.

Inskeep concluded:

So here is another way to phrase the decision facing lawmakers - do they think the president asked for investigations in the national interest or his own?

Waterworks

I usually don’t post to this blog on Wednesday evenings because I’m at the Ruth Ellis Center until late. This place offers a large array of services for LGBTQ youth, including a meal on Wednesdays. The youth are told it’s time to leave at 8:30 and it can take me 15 to 20 minute more before the kitchen is clean enough for me to leave. Then it’s a half-hour drive home.

At about 6:50 tonight the manager told me we’re closing early. It wasn’t something planned. We’ve closed early in the past, such as after one or more youth get into a fight and tempers all around become heated. Well, OK. I’ll drop my plans to wash big bowls and pots, and turn my efforts to putting the food away.

About five minutes later another staff person said we’re closing, don’t bother with the trash. Well, OK. I put a couple more things away and turned to start the dishwasher. A third staff person came by and said, leave it.

This time I asked what’s going on. The answer: Police are outside and want the building evacuated. Someone had called in a threat to the building.

Oh.

I got my coat and left, with the staff right behind me.



Perhaps two months ago the toilet in my main bathroom started whistling. It would produce a high sustained note. The first time I heard it I wondered what could be making the noise. Hmm… it was loudest in the bathroom. But I didn’t have any devices in there that would make such a noise. The noise seemed loudest towards the toilet. So I flushed it.

The noise stopped. Huh?

I Googled whistling toilets. And yeah, it had an answer. It said that the whistling is caused by worn out mechanical stuff in the tank and it’s a sign the stuff should be replaced. It did not say which gizmo under which circumstances was caused to vibrate though which mechanism. So beyond “worn parts” I don’t know what causes the noise.

The noise appeared a couple times while I decided what I wanted to do. Whether because of stuff in my water or because a failure of the porcelain finish (or both), the bowl was heavily stained. I was already having issues with the flush mechanism not producing a full flush unless I held the handle down.

So I decided I wanted to get rid of it, even though it was new when the bathroom was remodeled 9 years ago.

I called the home improvement guy who had done that bathroom work. It took a few days for him to call me back, though I got a response when, the next time the whistling happened, I called him and held the phone up to the toilet. Even then it took a couple days for him to check the situation. He took pictures with his phone to send to the company. He had never seen one look so bad. There were delays while he waited for an official response, which never came. The unofficial response was it’s more than five years old. It’s out of warranty. He gave me a quote, but that was based on also doing an expensive renovation of the garage. I decided a garage doesn’t need a renovation that expensive.

The delays got to the point where I went to a big box home improvement store. Signs in the toilet section said let us do the installation. I asked about it. The employee took me over to a store computer where he filled out a request form. He handed me a sheet, which said I should get a call from them in two days. It has now been almost two weeks and I haven’t gotten a call.

So, back to calling the home improvement guy. In the meantime the whistling is becoming more frequent. And started waking me up. Yeah, it was loud enough that it could rouse me from my slumbers even with the bathroom and bedroom doors closed. I was getting annoyed. On occasion I would yank the lid off the tank and slam it onto the seat. When I did what I needed to stop the noise I would slam the lid back in place. I had visions of taking a sledgehammer to it. But one needs a toilet.

Yeah, there is another one in the house. I only use it when I absolutely have to. And right now it doesn’t work well either.

So last Friday I and the home improvement guy agreed on a price and that I was next. Monday morning! He bought a replacement (definitely a different brand) over the weekend. Sunday morning the toilet woke me at 6:30. Monday morning the toilet woke me at 4:00. He called that morning. The roads were slippery. He wasn’t going out. I was grumpy. Tuesday morning he called. Was my street plowed yet? No. Well, then he couldn’t come because he wouldn’t be allowed to park his truck and trailer in the street. It was too long to park in my driveway.

The toilet whistled again during the day on Tuesday. It seemed to whistle if I hadn’t flushed in 4 hours. When I cam home after bell rehearsal it was whistling. That was enough. I yanked off the lid, jerked the mechanism, and slammed the lid on again.

And cracked the tank.

Yeah, some water ran onto the floor. I quickly turned the water off and flushed it to empty the tank. I got out the sponge mop and set to work wiping up the water (there wasn’t much). Along the way I picked up a piece of porcelain and it sliced my thumb. It took an hour to stop the bleeding. Only a quarter inch wound.

The crew came this morning to replace it. He had said it might take two hours. I had told him I had to leave in one. To my surprise he was finished before I had to go.

I watched the boss guy and his assistant carry the old toilet out to the garage. A few minutes later I heard something breaking. I went out to look. The assistant had the old toilet in a box and was breaking it up so it wouldn’t be so bulky to transport or dispose. I told him, man, I wanted that job. He didn’t give me the hammer.

I was gone today from 9:45 this morning to 7:45 this evening. The day included lunch with my friend and debate partner. He enjoyed this story (parts he had heard before). And he rejoiced with me it is over.

There was no whistling when I came home. And it’s been a quiet evening.

Chaos and inertia

Today was the first big snowfall of the season, early for these parts. Close to 4 inches came down over the day. I canceled this evenings bell rehearsal. I did my shoveling this evening in the dark – show didn’t stop falling until 8:00 and the sun went down at 5:15. This was wet, heavy snow. It stuck to the shovel and I had to whack it after every scoop to get the snow to fall off.



Sarah Kendzzior, who studies authoritarian regimes tweeted a quote from an interview she did with Boulevard Magazine. She talked to dissidents in places like Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgystan.

They talk about this monotony, this constant combination of chaos and inertia. Things are corrupt, and there’s a mindboggling, horrific acts of corruption and abuse going on, on a daily basis. And at the same time, nothing changes. So you’re in a state of shock, but you’re also in a state of, not quite resignation, but you come to expect it.

Kendzior sees signs of that in America.



Hunter of Daily Kos is concerned about the nasty guy’s Twitter feed. Part one of the problem is he is indifferent to whether whatever he sees is true. Part two is that he consults his Twitter feed rather than actual advisors who know stuff.

Part three – and this is the scary one – is if you want to influence the nasty guy, tweet at him. There are lots of people, especially at Fox News and alarmingly from other countries, who elevate conspiracy theories known to be false to make sure the nasty guy sees them and is influenced by them. These people are engaging in acts of propaganda for their own gain that will harm America. They’re doing it for the same reasons despotic regimes do it.



The nasty guy administration instituted a “conscience rule” that tells health care providers that their conscience is more important than their patient’s health or life. Feel that providing birth control or vaccinations or gender affirming surgery is against your morals or religion, just say your conscience prevents you from doing that medical procedure. The nasty guy administration will hold billions in funding from health care providers if they don’t allow these objections.

Thankfully, Judge Paul Engelmayer, a federal judge in Manhattan has declared the rule to be unconstitutional.



Meteor Blades of Daily Kos shares a little bit of history of racism offered by Joseph Thompson, professor of history at Mississippi State University. President Roosevelt signed the GI bill into law in 1944. In the years after WWII it allowed huge numbers of veterans to take advantage of free college education.

Black veterans saw the race free text spelling out the qualifications and were hopeful. Their hopes went unfulfilled because:

* While white universities had the resources to expand to accommodate the increased numbers of students, the historically black universities did not.

* Black veterans had a much higher rate of not finishing high school.

* The funds to attend college were approved by the local Veterans Administration office – where racist white officials could deny the funds.



Rich people are getting nervous about Elizabeth Warren’s proposals to tax them. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos says they’re not yet to the point of pumping money to a Democratic competitor or the nasty guy. However, wealth managers are doing brisk business holding discussions with those with more than $50 million about steps they might take to avoid paying the tax. Will a person with $60 million really miss $200,000?



I mentioned before that a Democrat won the governorship in Kentucky by less than 5,200 votes. I had also mentioned that Matt Bevin, the Republican who lost, hasn’t conceded, has asked for a recanvass, and talked about using a law (last used in 1899) that allows a candidate to “contest” the results of an election (proof optional) and have the GOP majority legislature choose the next governor.

It is good to hear, as the Daily Kos election team wrote, that Senate President Robert Stivers got such a massive outcry he’s now saying that if the recanvass shows no change in vote totals (and a recanvass has never shown a change before) Bevin lost and should go home.

But now the nasty guy is sticking his nose in. And with that prodding, Bevin might charge ahead to contest the results.

Commenters to this post wonder if this is a dry run for the nasty guy to do the same kind of thing a year from now.

Government run health care

Wendell Potter describes himself as a reformed health insurer exec. He was part of the effort back in 1993 to sink the grand health care plan Hillary Clinton came up with when her husband was president. The effective tool at the time was to brand it “government run health care.” Public opinion dropped. Never mind that the public already had government run health care in Medicare.

Now Potter says there is a better chance to pass Medicare for all. He lists reasons:

* People who get health insurance through their employer want single payer. The number of companies offering health insurance has dropped.

* Those who have employer plans pay dearly for it and find it too expensive to use – their deductibles and copays are too high. I’m still a couple years from Medicare and the employer I retired from is getting rather stingy. Remind people of out of pocket costs and they’re all for it.

* Small business owners want it and can’t afford to offer it to their employees.

* We have people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with enough political power to get the truth of the current system out there.

Potter reminds us that Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg keep defending the insurance industry.



Egberto Willies of the Daily Kos community reminds us the attacks on Medicare for All, even from “friends,” is well orchestrated – and all lies. Willies reminds us:

To be clear, math is absolute. It is impossible for (Cost of Healthcare) to be more expensive than (Cost of Healthcare + Cost of Multiple Executives + Cost of Shareholder Profits + Cost of Duplicate Services + Doctor Cost to Interface with Multiple Insurance Companies + more). That is an absolute statement. Those who are opposed to Medicare for All would like you to forget that basic mathematical fact.

No fiscally responsible politician who has the interest of their poor- and middle-class constituents at the forefront could continue to support a model designed solely as a method to enrich a few while providing absolutely no service. In fact, private insurance adds inefficiency to delivering health care.

Private insurance’s fiduciary responsibility is to its shareholders, and to its overpaid executives. That dictates that the insurance industry performs two immoral tasks. The first is to market to the healthy, even as obstacles are erected that leave those with pre-existing conditions without insurance. Secondly, private insurance companies make every attempt to deny service. These two acts maximize profits to shareholders and ensure exorbitant salaries for their executives.

Profits are not a bad thing if one is providing a necessary service in an efficient manner, or one needs to be innovative. Private insurance provides neither. The industry’s ‘innovation’ consists of finding ways to maximize wealth extraction.

Americans are starting to get it, even if some Democrats and Republicans make believe they don't (wink-wink). Those ‘skeptics’ are wards of the plutocracy.
…
Mayor Pete Buttigieg's ‘Medicare for All Who Want It’ plan is not acceptable because it opens the door to dump sick people onto Medicare for All using many legal techniques, even if the law dictates that insurance companies take everyone. In other words, they continue to immorally manage risk for profit maximization that benefits shareholders and executives.

What does one need that $49 billion won't buy?

Brad Lander, an NYC Council member, read through Elizabeth Warren’s proposal to tax the rich. He tweeted this reaction:

OK, lemme get this straight. If @ewarren's wealth tax had been in place from 1982, Bezos would still have $49B, Gates $14B, Bloomberg $12B.

And we'd ALL have child care & health care. Student debt relief. 4X more Fed $ for public schools.

Can we vote now?

Will Bezos really notice the difference between $111 billion and $49 billion?

Erik Lee responded with a quote from John Steinbeck:

Socialism never took root in America because the poor there see themselves not as exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I reply: Maybe. It also didn’t take root because so many people wanted to make sure black people did not share in that social assistance.

Politijunkee added:

Isn't $49 billion ENOUGH? I mean, as far as quality of life goes, is there any difference between $49 and $160 billion?? What does one need that $49 billion won't buy?!?!?!

Ian Reifowitz of the Daily Kos community wrote about the latest news out of Boeing. It appears Boeing executives knew about the problems in the 737-Max plane and sold it anyway. A few hundred people died. He reviews how lobbying got Boeing into that situation.

Reifowitz mentions other corporate crimes from just this decade, perpetrated by Wells Fargo, Takata, General Motors, Volkswagen, Massey Energy, Toyota, and others.
*+*
But this isn’t about one company: It’s about the need to rein in corporate malfeasance in general. And that’s where it connects to politics. Are Democrats perfect on this? Absolutely not, although some are far better than others (I’ve got a video below of one of the very best on these matters). But the contrast between them and Republicans overall is about as clear as it gets.

Republicans trust corporations. It’s that simple. They don’t trust regular people to be honest when seeking, for example, food stamps or Medicaid benefits. But corporations? They don’t need tough rules, oversight, and regulations to make sure they do the right thing. Republicans think such things just add unnecessary cost and reduce profits to shareholders (i.e., rich people whom the Republicans serve).
*+*

Yeah, it is quite a supremacist thing for the GOP to say corporations – who have demonstrably killed and harmed people and are asking for looser regulations to be able to kill and harm in more ways – don’t need oversight while poor people, struggling to get by, do.

Blue Virginia

There was an election this past Tuesday. I turned my ballot in the week before. What I had was known as an absentee ballot. That meant the voter would be absent and not able to go to the polls on election day. But now that Michigan voters can get such a ballot for any election without giving a reason is it still appropriate to call it “absentee?”

There are the big election stories. All of the Virginia state government turned blue. That’s especially sweet because the headquarters for the National Rifle Association is in Fairfax and most of the Democrats ran on new rules against gun ownership.

Democrat Andy Beshear beat incumbent Matt Bevin by 5,000 votes to become the next governor of Kentucky. For a while it looked like Bevin was maneuvering to get the state legislature, comfortably Republican, to declare something amiss in the results and claim the right to choose the governor. But, thankfully, Senate Minority Leader Morgan McGarvey said they’re not going to play that game.

In the Republican suburbs around Philadelphia – Delaware and Chester Counties – Democrats took all or a majority of the seats on county councils.

And one that’s rather delicious: The vice nasty guy is from Columbus, Indiana. The city council of that city of 44,000 has been controlled by the GOP for nearly for decades. But not anymore.

The LGBTQ Victory Fund provided fundraising support for 111 queer candidates at all levels of government. 80 of them won, including five transgender women. This includes Danica Roem, who was re-elected (an important point) to the Virginia House.

There are now 765 openly LGBTQ elected officials in America according to Out For America. That’s wonderful progress. Alas, it is still only 0.15% of all elected officials.

Bill in Portland, Maine, part of the Daily Kos community observed:

When Republicans defeat Democrats in an election, the media lectures our side to compromise with Republicans. When Democrats defeat Republicans in an election, the media lectures our side to compromise with Republicans.

Sigh.

An impossible position

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos explains that the situation between the nasty guy and Ukraine that is the subject of the impeachment inquiry.

In other words, after decades of being lectured by the United States to clean up their act on corruption, Trump’s team came to town *insisting on corruption* as the price of doing business with the United States. And Trump’s play to pay scheme put the incoming administration in an almost impossible position. To get U.S. military assistance, packages first had to pass a Congress still insisting that Ukraine play by the rules. But the gatekeeper on that assistance was Donald Trump, who made it clear that breaking the rules was his price for delivery.
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Ignore Trump’s demands, and the White House could sit on the current aid package until it expired. Give in, and Congress might be less enthusiastic about directing more funds to Kyiv. And all the while Russian forces were pounding away at Donbass.

After being urged by Rudy Giuliani, Gordon Sondland, and Kurt Volker, Ukrainian President Zelensky was set to make the announcement the nasty guy wanted on September 13.

Then the whistleblower complaint reached Congress and the aid was released on September 12.

I can do better – I’m a billionaire!

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has entered the race to be the Democratic nominee for President. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos noted that Bloomberg could look at the billionaires, such as Tom Steyer who entered and exited the campaign, and look at the current (supposed) billionaire in the White House and say, “Yup, I can do better than that – I’m a billionaire!” Einenkel adds:

But let’s be clear about one thing Billionaires are egomaniacs. Their belief that not only are they the best qualified to run the country but that everyone else believes they are, too, will always trump what is best for the collective United States.

Einenkel included several reactions. A sweet one is from candidate Elizabeth Warren. She welcomed him to the race and added:

If you're looking for policy plans that will make a huge difference for working people and which are very popular, start here:

She provides a link to her website and its calculator so a billionaire could compute they would pay under her Ultra-Millionaire Tax.

Fidder tweeted:

Can’t just ONE rich dude try being Batman instead?

Josh Jordan added:

Bloomberg could just give me 5% of the cash he will burn in this embarrassing episode and I'd be set for life.

Clara Jeffrey responded:

Can billionaires stop running for office and trying to go to Mars and do something actually useful with their money until we can get proper tax reform, thanks.

Bloomberg could be an international hero by throwing all his money at climate change and/or gun reform. These are good things. More of that, please.

And, of course, the nasty guy base was unimpressed.

Man In The Hoody tweeted:

everyone: if we taxed billionaires just a little bit more everyone could get good healthcare

billionaires: or how about instead u make me president and everything stays the same?

Malkym Lesdrae offers a correction:

Bllnaire: how about instead u make me president and we let everything keep getting worse for you and better for me?

Toro Blanco of the Daily Kos Community wrote about billionaires, though not directly in response to Bloomberg’s announcement. At the top of his post he has a graphic that compares the size of a million dollars with the size of a billion.

I’ve written before about how the rich keep money out of the hands of the poor. In that post from last January Melissa McEwan wrote this as Howard Schulz, another billionaire, contemplated being a candidate for president:

Anyone who is a billionaire is de facto completely out of touch with the lives of the majority of the population. They have no comprehension about what life is really like. One cannot effectively and decently lead people whose lives they fundamentally don't understand.

And, truly, no president of a wildly and wonderfully diverse nation can know and understand the lives, needs, interests, struggles, and successes of everyone in the country. But living in a separate, elite economic stratosphere is insulating, even for the empathic and curious.

… and …

"Billionaire" isn't a qualification. It's the description of a person who is hoarding more resources than they could use in 100 lifetimes while other people are starving. It's the name for a human dragon sleeping on its pile of rubies and gold.

Blanco sidesteps that issue to present another: No one should be a billionaire. Nobody has “earned” a billion dollars. “Nobody, no matter how brilliant, creative, innovative, or essential to life as we know it, DESERVES to be a billionaire.”

Blanco adds a thought experiment. Suppose he created a wonder drug that cures all diseases and extends life. A thankful world gives him a stipend of a million dollars a month, or $12,000,000 a year. If anyone deserves such riches it would be the inventor of the miracle cure.

I’m a humble man, so after about a year I’m completely out of things to buy: my whole family have homes, paid in full; we all have our dream cars, money in the bank, set for life; college funds for children and grandchildren, and so on. After just a couple years the money is piling up, the tiny pittance I spend even on food and clothes a drop in the bucket compared to what floods in every month.

But even with income that large it takes 83 years to get to a billion. And 4370 years to match Bloomberg, another 1513 years to catch up to Mark Zuckerberg, and a total of 9250 years to catch up to Jeff Bezos.

I add that someone would say that billionaires can take on big projects, such as going to Mars, that the government can’t do. But the government *can* do things like that – and has (we went to the moon). The advantage of the government doing it is that it has a much greater chance of benefiting the little guy, rather than other billionaires.

Elizabeth Warren is campaigning for the rich to pay their fair share and is ready for the fight. But several others, particularly establishment Democrats like Biden, are silent on the matter. Adam Jentleson tweets why:

The American people are super pissed at corporations and the rich. They are the cause of many huge problems and people know it. All we have to do is name the bad guys. But Democrats keep denying themselves this extremely compelling political narrative because we want their money.

John Drake tweeted a solution: Federally funded campaigns.

One can tell Warren is hitting her target. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos says Wall Street is terrified of the thought of Warren becoming president. Never mind that her policies would have to go through a Congress that they’ve funded. So the finance industry sees two choices which they’ve been funding: One is the expected nasty guy. The other is Pete Buttigieg. And Wall Street thinking he is an acceptable candidate is enough for me to think he is unacceptable candidate. That only confirms the opinion I already had of him.

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary, wrote about The Real Divide, an excerpt here:

In the conventional view of American politics, Joe Biden is a moderate while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are on the left and Donald Trump is on the right.

This conventional view is rubbish. Today’s great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

There are no longer “moderates.” There’s no longer a “center.” The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged system.

I’ll rephrase that a bit: Today’s great divide is not between left and right. It’s between the oppressed and supremacists.

Why bother with a fringe candidate polling under 1%?

I first heard about Tulsi Gabbard when she was one of two dozen people who announced their candidacy for president in the Democratic Party about ten months ago. Very early in the process she said something that I thought was weird for a Democrat to say. It prompted me to put her in the category of nope, definitely not voting for her. I don’t remember what she said that caused that reaction. But nothing has prompted me to change that opinion.

And now Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa of Gaslit Nation have named an episode for her. I’ve written about a couple episodes of the Gaslit Nation podcast, in which the hosts have been very good at explaining the larger picture of the corruption around the nasty guy and the GOP by Russia, and how that explains the Ukraine story.

So, yeah, I’m interested in how Tulsi Gabbard fits into this. Some of my notes on the episode are below. Alas, the transcript doesn’t show timings, so I don’t know how long the audio is, though likely over an hour.

The episode begins with a tribute to Elijah Cummings, the recently deceased Representative from Baltimore, who was highly respected by members of both parties for his integrity and demand for accountability. This tribute included this bit from Kendzior:

Cummings is involved in the Trump-Russia investigation from the very start. He was the person who sent the letter to Mike Pence in 2016 documenting Michael Flynn's illicit activity, a letter which proves Pence knew of Flynn's crimes and did nothing about them. This is important now as people consider whether Pence can be impeached along with Trump.

Chalupa reminded us that the nasty guy must stay in power in 2020 to avoid facing justice. A win is critical to him. The Mueller Report established he’s a criminal and would be facing a court hearing if it wasn’t president (and those DOJ memos from just a couple decades ago that say a president can’t be indicted).

Then on to Gabbard. Kendzior and Chalupa have been avoiding discussing her because she supports dictators, such as Assad in Syria, Sisi in Egypt, and Modi in India. So no need to bother with a fringe candidate polling under 1%. But then Hillary Clinton said:

They're also going to do third-party again. And I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary, and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a Russian asset.

Yeah, Clinton is indeed saying Jill Stein – whose third-party candidacy drew enough votes in Michigan and a couple other state to be a bit larger than the vote difference between Clinton and the nasty guy – is a Russian asset.

Gabbard may not be a Russian asset. But she certainly has defended dictators, and that may be close enough. Is she alarmingly naive or is she willingly deceptive?

As for Clinton … In recent months people have been reviewing what she said through the 2016 campaign about the nasty guy, the Russia Mafia, Syria, Turkey, and all the rest. These people are concluding that Clinton was correct. She had foresight! (Otherwise known as doing your homework.) But then Clinton speaks of Gabbard as a current thing to watch out for and the media is back to dismissing her.

Gabbard probably isn’t on the Kremlin payroll. But there is documented evidence that the Kremlin is interested in her and that bot farms are starting to support her. Gabbard says she can’t control who supports her, but she isn’t disavowing Kremlin help or saying what she would do to counter it. Instead, Gabbard attacked Clinton and fundraised off it. She also hired a lobbyist linked to the Kremlin.

And the issue of our country is again under attack by the Kremlin and by a transnational crime syndicate is again being ignored.

Not that we need a reminder:

If a Democrat wins the White House in 2020, Putin and his regime and his court of oligarchs are in trouble, and they know that. So that is why they will be pulling out all the stops, just like they did in 2016, to make sure that their Russian asset stays in the White House.

Democratic candidates Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg also attacked Clinton, prompting this from Kendzior:

They're following the leads of weak-willed men who are so afraid of seeming alarmist that they let the fires rage right in front of their eyes, and don't do anything to try to put that out or even clarify why the fire is happening.

O’Rourke has now quit the race. But Mayor Pete is still in it. This little revelation means Mayor Pete stays in my nope, not going to vote for him category.

About Gabbard, Chalupa said:

Republicans love Tulsi Gabbard, because her rise threatens to divide the Democratic vote, just like Jill Stein did in 2016.

Gabbard was asked about Assad of Syria. She said since Syria is no direct threat to America we have no interest there. Kendzior and Chalupa then go into detail why Syria matters – It is now a client of Russia. It gives Russia a port on the Mediterranean Sea. It was Russia who bombed parts of Syria, increasing the flow of refugees to Europe and shifting several European governments further to the right. The hosts talk about what the Kurds created in northeast Syria (it sounds pretty cool) and what the nasty guy’s betrayal destroyed. So Gabbard saying Syria is no direct threat to American is “the audacity of stupidity.”

Chalupa said that Gabbard needs to explain her views on Assad. This prompts Chalupa to go into a long discussion of the horrors of the Assad regime, then into a description of Stalin’s famine and genocide of Ukraine. She went on to a discussion of a necessary “banks, not tanks” strategy of holding dictators responsible by stopping oligarchs from profiting off blood money.

Chalupa is tired of progressives, some who are presidential candidates, who don’t have a clue. We need to confront corruption. We need to have a strong social safety net so people who fall through the cracks don’t fall for a fake populist like the nasty guy. We need to have strong public schools so people can develop into critical independent thinkers who recognize what corporate media, Big Tech, and Russian bots are trying to feed them. We need to support anti-corruption reformers and independent journalists in their own countries because that also protects us here in America.

Kendzior points out the false dichotomy of dictatorship versus war. There are choices between no response at all and going in with guns blazing (see Iraq). And those in between choices can be done without violence. This must be done because there is more to violence than actual war. That violence is the brutality in the way a government treats its citizens. We tend to ignore that kind of violence. We can’t if we want to protect the public.