Ah, Michigan weather. As I prepare to drive south tomorrow the weather forecast says an inch of snow overnight and another 3-8 inches during the day.
Which is why I chose a motel for tomorrow that will allow me to cancel that day. Alas, that means I’ll have to do the drive to Nashville all in one day and probably miss the opening reception of the conference. I suppose I could adjust that hotel reservation too, though I’d have to do that today.
I’ve been reading the Harry Potter series of books by J. K. Rowling. I saw the movies when they came out and bought the whole set of books once the 7th was published, but I’m only now reading them. I’ve enjoyed the series. Rowling has constructed a complete story setting. For example, the students are told it is time to consider a career and Rowling lists several career choices.
I finished the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This is the longest at 870 pages. It took me three weeks to read, but I didn’t feel the story got bogged down. Rather, I appreciate the detail of the constructed world.
The whole series is a struggle against supremacy. Voldemort is a supremacist, wanting absolute power. He has gathered followers who want a supremacist leader and the supremacy he represents. Many of those are wizards who come from a long line of wizards and look down on colleagues who are of mixed muggle (non-wizard) and wizard parentage and even more on those who have wizarding powers yet have muggle parents.
Yeah, very much like the one-drop laws that used to deny full citizenship to Americans with mixed race ancestry.
At the end of the fourth book Harry battled Voldemort and lived to tell about it. Dumbledore, headmaster of the Hogwarts school of wizardry, warned the wizarding community that Voldemort is regaining his powers after a big defeat when Harry was an infant.
At the start of the fifth book the Ministry of Magic is refusing to acknowledge Voldemort is back. It is that act of supremacy, and not so much Harry’s battle with Voldemort, that this book is about.
Over the summer break both Dumbledore and Harry are mentioned in disparaging terms in the wizarding newspaper. The Ministry installs their own person, Professor Umbrage, at Hogwarts and soon gives her quite a few powers, even calling her the Inquisitor. She is the Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor, but refuses to actually teach the subject – no one should need to defend themselves against Voldemort. She punishes Harry because he won’t uphold the Ministry’s lies. She fires other professors who don’t sufficiently toe the party line.
Yeah, she is describing the nasty guy and his administration about 15 years before he came to power. Gosh, one wouldn’t think the actions of supremacists would be so predictable.
Harry and fellow students do manage some resistance. They hold clandestine sessions in which Harry teaches what he knows about Defense Against the Dark Arts. And Harry, who has battled Voldemort, knows quite a bit on the subject.
There is one aspect of these stories that has become annoying. Rowling routinely describes the bad guys with unfavorable physical attributes. Umbrage is described as having the mouth of a toad. Professor Snape, whose allegiance is questioned and always gives Harry a hard time, is described as having greasy hair. The school House full of the children of supremacists is named Slytherin, taken from the way a snake slithers – a snake is the House symbol. I’ve been around long enough to know a lack of physical beauty is not a sign of evil. Depictions like this harm people who came in low in the DNA jackpot. It also allows society to dismiss the misdeeds and crimes of the physically beautiful.
As I read the prior books I could recall some scenes from the corresponding movies, even though I had seen them more than ten years ago. But this one did not bring the movie to mind except for the climactic battle. Hmm.
Interesting … my document editor’s dictionary includes “Voldemort” though it doesn’t include “Slytherin.”
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Sunday, February 23, 2020
Notes and corrections
Even though I have lots of browser tabs of stuff I want to share I’m not in the mood for writing tonight. I might write during the next day or so, and might not.
Then on Wednesday I start my late winter travels. I don’t know if I’ll be able to post much during my trip. I will first travel to Nashville for a Reconciling Ministries Conference. Then to Louisville to spend several days with my niece and her family. I close the trip with a handbell festival in Louisville.
I do have a project for this evening. I started it yesterday. I’ll be attending another memorial soon. At my mother’s memorial I had a large collection of photos I could assemble into a photo timeline of her life. Many of the images came from the slides he took over the decades. I had been transferring those slides to digital files and had gotten about 2/3 of the way through about 3000 slides when my attention was diverted to more interesting pursuits.
However, I now want to make sure I have as many photos of Laney as possible. She lamented that as the fifth child few photos were taken of her, as compared, say, to our twin oldest brothers – who had perhaps 150 photos taken of them in their first couple years.
So far I have a couple dozen good ones of Laney. I am now scanning slides from her graduation ceremony from community college. Yeah, some are of out of focus people walking across a distant stage. But others are close ups and look pretty good. I have a few more boxes to scan before I’m fairly sure I’ve got all of them from when Laney was still at home.
My living sister pointed out a few minor errors in my eulogy from yesterday. I have enough trouble keeping dates of my own life in order, so I’m not surprised I missed a few. So here are a couple corrections:
Laney worked in the northern Chicago suburbs before going to a small town in Wisconsin, not after.
Anners worked for a good long time at the library, but was not a college trained librarian.
Then on Wednesday I start my late winter travels. I don’t know if I’ll be able to post much during my trip. I will first travel to Nashville for a Reconciling Ministries Conference. Then to Louisville to spend several days with my niece and her family. I close the trip with a handbell festival in Louisville.
I do have a project for this evening. I started it yesterday. I’ll be attending another memorial soon. At my mother’s memorial I had a large collection of photos I could assemble into a photo timeline of her life. Many of the images came from the slides he took over the decades. I had been transferring those slides to digital files and had gotten about 2/3 of the way through about 3000 slides when my attention was diverted to more interesting pursuits.
However, I now want to make sure I have as many photos of Laney as possible. She lamented that as the fifth child few photos were taken of her, as compared, say, to our twin oldest brothers – who had perhaps 150 photos taken of them in their first couple years.
So far I have a couple dozen good ones of Laney. I am now scanning slides from her graduation ceremony from community college. Yeah, some are of out of focus people walking across a distant stage. But others are close ups and look pretty good. I have a few more boxes to scan before I’m fairly sure I’ve got all of them from when Laney was still at home.
My living sister pointed out a few minor errors in my eulogy from yesterday. I have enough trouble keeping dates of my own life in order, so I’m not surprised I missed a few. So here are a couple corrections:
Laney worked in the northern Chicago suburbs before going to a small town in Wisconsin, not after.
Anners worked for a good long time at the library, but was not a college trained librarian.
Friday, February 21, 2020
Another shock
Back in 2015 my father died.
In 2016 my brother Tim and sister-in-law Karen (Dan’s wife) died.
In 2017 my mother died. So did her sister Ruth.
In 2018 Ruth’s husband Earl died.
During the first Sunday of a new year my church commemorates those who died in the previous year. Thankfully, they allow us to honor who we would like. They don’t restrict the list to church members. I’m one of the people who tolls bells for each name read. Four years in a row I tolled a bell for someone close to me. I was relieved to not toll a bell this year.
Alas, I will toll again next January.
On occasion I’ve mentioned my sister Laney in this blog. That’s not her real name, though it is the pet name her wife Anners uses. Because they’re a lesbian couple in a conservative area she wanted to remain anonymous in my blog.
On Tuesday afternoon Laney said she wasn’t feeling well and went to bed. A bit later she asked Anners to call 911. By the time the ambulance arrived Laney was unresponsive. The EMS team got her heart started and headed to the hospital.
But her brain had been without oxygen too long. I and our other sister were with Anners when the doctor told us the results of the latest tests. Laney’s brain had swollen. The chance of survival is zero. Death likely in hours or days.
Today Anners requested the hospital withdraw life support. Laney died soon after. She was 62.
Laney was the fifth child in a family of six with four older brothers. She frequently complained about feeling like the one left out.
After finishing her bachelor degree she got a Master of Library Science. She worked in a small town library in Wisconsin, then in the suburbs north of Chicago. A few years later she moved back to Michigan in one of the medium size cities in the middle of the state – in the middle of the conservative area of the state.
For Christmas one year I gave Laney a name plaque for her desk. It had her name and title – “Miss Information.” She used it, at least for a while.
Laney met Anners at the library. Anners was a fellow librarian. The first meeting wasn’t anything special. Soon Laney and Anners were living in adjacent apartments. Then they were living in the same apartment. Then they rented a house.
Back in 2003 at a time Laney was between jobs I commented that her roommate was being kind to allow Laney to not contribute to the rent for such a long time. Laney responded, “Um … she’s a lot more than a roommate.” I quickly figured out what she meant. This was the first time I knew she was lesbian – years before she had dated boys. So the next time I was with Laney and Anners I came out.
Before Anners’ mother died her parents bought a house for them, a nice tri-level and worked it such that Anner’s brother (whom she always refers to as “my mother’s son” because he didn’t approve of their relationship) could not take it from them. This was similar to Laney’s difficulties with our brother Tim.
Just after her 50th birthday Laney had a stroke that affected her left side. Perhaps this was caused by her being diabetic since childhood.
In 2015, a couple months after same-sex marriage was legalized across the country Laney and Anners announced they would get married. A niece replied, “Wait… they’re not?” It was a simple ceremony held at a restaurant with a gathering of friends and nearby family.
Because of her stroke and age Laney was having increasing difficulty navigating their tri-level home. So over this past summer they moved into a ranch home that Laney adored, though Anners didn’t. Laney enjoyed it for only seven months.
Laney and Anners didn’t have human children. However, Laney liked wearing a hat proclaiming, “All my children have paws.” We were greeted at the door by three dogs. On occasion I saw a cat or two.
Dear sister, you disappeared way too soon.
In 2016 my brother Tim and sister-in-law Karen (Dan’s wife) died.
In 2017 my mother died. So did her sister Ruth.
In 2018 Ruth’s husband Earl died.
During the first Sunday of a new year my church commemorates those who died in the previous year. Thankfully, they allow us to honor who we would like. They don’t restrict the list to church members. I’m one of the people who tolls bells for each name read. Four years in a row I tolled a bell for someone close to me. I was relieved to not toll a bell this year.
Alas, I will toll again next January.
On occasion I’ve mentioned my sister Laney in this blog. That’s not her real name, though it is the pet name her wife Anners uses. Because they’re a lesbian couple in a conservative area she wanted to remain anonymous in my blog.
On Tuesday afternoon Laney said she wasn’t feeling well and went to bed. A bit later she asked Anners to call 911. By the time the ambulance arrived Laney was unresponsive. The EMS team got her heart started and headed to the hospital.
But her brain had been without oxygen too long. I and our other sister were with Anners when the doctor told us the results of the latest tests. Laney’s brain had swollen. The chance of survival is zero. Death likely in hours or days.
Today Anners requested the hospital withdraw life support. Laney died soon after. She was 62.
Laney was the fifth child in a family of six with four older brothers. She frequently complained about feeling like the one left out.
After finishing her bachelor degree she got a Master of Library Science. She worked in a small town library in Wisconsin, then in the suburbs north of Chicago. A few years later she moved back to Michigan in one of the medium size cities in the middle of the state – in the middle of the conservative area of the state.
For Christmas one year I gave Laney a name plaque for her desk. It had her name and title – “Miss Information.” She used it, at least for a while.
Laney met Anners at the library. Anners was a fellow librarian. The first meeting wasn’t anything special. Soon Laney and Anners were living in adjacent apartments. Then they were living in the same apartment. Then they rented a house.
Back in 2003 at a time Laney was between jobs I commented that her roommate was being kind to allow Laney to not contribute to the rent for such a long time. Laney responded, “Um … she’s a lot more than a roommate.” I quickly figured out what she meant. This was the first time I knew she was lesbian – years before she had dated boys. So the next time I was with Laney and Anners I came out.
Before Anners’ mother died her parents bought a house for them, a nice tri-level and worked it such that Anner’s brother (whom she always refers to as “my mother’s son” because he didn’t approve of their relationship) could not take it from them. This was similar to Laney’s difficulties with our brother Tim.
Just after her 50th birthday Laney had a stroke that affected her left side. Perhaps this was caused by her being diabetic since childhood.
In 2015, a couple months after same-sex marriage was legalized across the country Laney and Anners announced they would get married. A niece replied, “Wait… they’re not?” It was a simple ceremony held at a restaurant with a gathering of friends and nearby family.
Because of her stroke and age Laney was having increasing difficulty navigating their tri-level home. So over this past summer they moved into a ranch home that Laney adored, though Anners didn’t. Laney enjoyed it for only seven months.
Laney and Anners didn’t have human children. However, Laney liked wearing a hat proclaiming, “All my children have paws.” We were greeted at the door by three dogs. On occasion I saw a cat or two.
Dear sister, you disappeared way too soon.
Sunday, February 16, 2020
Look good or actually educate
David Akadjian of the Daily Kos community explores the crisis in higher education. The well known symptoms are higher tuition and record student loan debt as well as lower graduation rates. The fix, according to one narrative, is that universities should be run more like a private business.
A coalition of students at the University of Cincinnati (enrollment of about 46K in 2019) studied the ways it was being run like a private university. Their report is titled Boldly Bankrupt, a play on the UC marketing campaign of Boldly Bearcat. The report shows who benefits – management, administrators, athletics – and who doesn’t – students and faculty. While the report is specific to UC these issues exist at a majority of universities.
Nearly every state has shifted costs to students. Lower state funding and tuition goes up. Schools are encouraged to be open to market forces and competition. But that creates a race to the bottom. Money is shifted to athletics, which has a high status but loses money. Undergrad programs are used as cash cows to fund graduate programs and research, which increases school ranking. Full time faculty are replaced with poorly paid adjuncts. There is a push to online courses, which are both cheaper and less effective. Athletic directors and top administrators are overpaid.
The students see a discrepancy between how UC presents itself to the public and how it actually functions. Education is pushed aside for things that make the school look good.
Faculty are caught in performance-based budgeting. A college is given a revenue target, say $7 million. If it exceeds that it gets more money. If it makes for example $5 million, it is considered to have a deficit – even if it costs only $4 million to actually run the college. Failure to meet the $7 million target results in a debt at the start of the next year. A college is required to cut its expenses even though their expenses are already less than their income. College deans never stay long – they can’t function under such a budget model.
The students in the Boldly Bankrupt team suggests fixes. See students as more than their tuition money. Create a democratically run student union to be a check on administrative power. Don’t have the governor appoint the Board of Trustees, rather allow students, faculty, and citizens elect them.
A coalition of students at the University of Cincinnati (enrollment of about 46K in 2019) studied the ways it was being run like a private university. Their report is titled Boldly Bankrupt, a play on the UC marketing campaign of Boldly Bearcat. The report shows who benefits – management, administrators, athletics – and who doesn’t – students and faculty. While the report is specific to UC these issues exist at a majority of universities.
Nearly every state has shifted costs to students. Lower state funding and tuition goes up. Schools are encouraged to be open to market forces and competition. But that creates a race to the bottom. Money is shifted to athletics, which has a high status but loses money. Undergrad programs are used as cash cows to fund graduate programs and research, which increases school ranking. Full time faculty are replaced with poorly paid adjuncts. There is a push to online courses, which are both cheaper and less effective. Athletic directors and top administrators are overpaid.
The students see a discrepancy between how UC presents itself to the public and how it actually functions. Education is pushed aside for things that make the school look good.
Faculty are caught in performance-based budgeting. A college is given a revenue target, say $7 million. If it exceeds that it gets more money. If it makes for example $5 million, it is considered to have a deficit – even if it costs only $4 million to actually run the college. Failure to meet the $7 million target results in a debt at the start of the next year. A college is required to cut its expenses even though their expenses are already less than their income. College deans never stay long – they can’t function under such a budget model.
The students in the Boldly Bankrupt team suggests fixes. See students as more than their tuition money. Create a democratically run student union to be a check on administrative power. Don’t have the governor appoint the Board of Trustees, rather allow students, faculty, and citizens elect them.
It morphs and evolves
For Black History Month Michael Harriot tweeted a thread about the history of racism in America. Harriot is a senior writer at The Root and describes himself as a master race-baiter. He begins his thread with:
A myth to dispel: American Slavery was like British slavery. Nope. Americans put it in our Constitution. Our slavery was exclusively race-based. Our enslavement of Africans was not contractual servitude, which usually has an end date. Children of enslaved women were declared to be enslaved. It was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, from gathering together, from growing food. Communities patrolled for runaway slaves.
Harriot turns to the time after the Civil War when there was massive violence, an organized race war, against black people. Then came Jim Crow. And redlining. And poll taxes. And voter suppression. And funding black schools through neighborhood wealth where there was no wealth. And police shootings.
White supremacy hasn’t lessened. It morphs and evolves. Harriot concludes:
One of the most popular misconceptions about black history is that over time, America has gradually become less racist and more tolerant.I’ve recently heard about the 1619 Project which emphasizes what they say is the first time slaves were brought to the English colonies. But, Harriot says, slaves first arrived on these shores in 1526 as a part of the founding of San Miguel de Guadalupe, now Georgetown, SC. This was also the site of the first slave rebellion, way before the Mayflower.
That is not true.
A myth to dispel: American Slavery was like British slavery. Nope. Americans put it in our Constitution. Our slavery was exclusively race-based. Our enslavement of Africans was not contractual servitude, which usually has an end date. Children of enslaved women were declared to be enslaved. It was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, from gathering together, from growing food. Communities patrolled for runaway slaves.
Harriot turns to the time after the Civil War when there was massive violence, an organized race war, against black people. Then came Jim Crow. And redlining. And poll taxes. And voter suppression. And funding black schools through neighborhood wealth where there was no wealth. And police shootings.
White supremacy hasn’t lessened. It morphs and evolves. Harriot concludes:
According to the Haynes report on lynching, between 1889 and 1919, a little fewer than 80 black people were lynched, on average every year.
…
In 2019, police killed 259 black people.
Now, I'm not saying it's worse for black people now than it was during slavery or Jim Crow. I'm not saying they're using the same tactics.
All I'm saying is this:
Don't think they stopped trying.
Unlimited money, elite intelligence & Machiavellian ethics
Blake Zeff has worked against Michael Bloomberg, covered him as a journalist, and worked with his top aides. Zeff tweeted a thread about how Bloomberg uses his billions to manipulate politics. Things Zeff mentions:
* Donate heavily to non-profits and community groups to get endorsements from their leaders.
* Donate big bucks to other politicians, especially new ones, to get endorsements.
* Even as Bloomberg switched from the GOP to independent, he gave the GOP $1M so they wouldn’t attack him.
* Offer free catered food and wine at his campaign events.
* Poach talent from other campaigns with offers of high salaries, catered meals, and a smart phone. He can also hire more staff than all his opponents combined.
* Ask his rich friends to not donate to other candidates so his rivals can’t raise cash (though I’m suspicious of candidates who accept checks from the rich).
* Hire Instagram influencers (who don’t need to be paid much).
* Air non-stop ads. Added benefit of not actually submitting to interview scrutiny. Misleading statements in the ads don’t need to be corrected. For example, he can portray himself as a best bud of President Obama even though Bloomberg didn’t back him on ‘08 and barely in ‘12. He can shape the story however he wants. Who’s going to find out?
* Run against the nasty guy rather than against fellow Dem candidates.
Wrote Zeff:
In a tweet Bloomberg mentioned:
I didn’t like Bloomberg because he is a billionaire and my annoyance with billionaires is well documented. The more I hear about Bloomberg the more I see he isn’t the change from the nasty guy we need.
* Donate heavily to non-profits and community groups to get endorsements from their leaders.
* Donate big bucks to other politicians, especially new ones, to get endorsements.
* Even as Bloomberg switched from the GOP to independent, he gave the GOP $1M so they wouldn’t attack him.
* Offer free catered food and wine at his campaign events.
* Poach talent from other campaigns with offers of high salaries, catered meals, and a smart phone. He can also hire more staff than all his opponents combined.
* Ask his rich friends to not donate to other candidates so his rivals can’t raise cash (though I’m suspicious of candidates who accept checks from the rich).
* Hire Instagram influencers (who don’t need to be paid much).
* Air non-stop ads. Added benefit of not actually submitting to interview scrutiny. Misleading statements in the ads don’t need to be corrected. For example, he can portray himself as a best bud of President Obama even though Bloomberg didn’t back him on ‘08 and barely in ‘12. He can shape the story however he wants. Who’s going to find out?
* Run against the nasty guy rather than against fellow Dem candidates.
Wrote Zeff:
One reason it all works so well is that Mike & the team he was able to acquire, are smart. Other rich candidates have failed. But Mike's team has a combo that's rare - maybe even unprecedented - in U.S. politics: unlimited money, elite intelligence & Machiavellian ethics.After this long list Zeff concludes:
And this is just the stuff we know about.
In a tweet Bloomberg mentioned:
My plan will invest $70 billion in Black neighborhoods, create 100,000 new Black owned businesses, and create one million new Black homeowners.Which brought a couple tweeted replies from Liza Sabater
My goal is to create generational wealth for Black Americans.
IN NYC:And that brought comments from Sarah Kendzior (host of Gaslit Nation) tying Bloomberg to Rudy Giuliani and his swamp of ethics.
1. you looked away during the mortgage crisis
2. encouraged gentrification of & mass evictions in black neighborhoods
3. killed small business leasing by encouraging predatory MONTHLY commercial leases
4. campaigned against rent-controlled housing
5. HURRICANE SANDY
BTW
Streeters don’t want you to know how Bloomberg was complicit in decimating NYC’s Black & Latino home owning class during the subprime crisis; because that’s tied to how Bloomberg used EMINENT DOMAIN across the city, and his biggest get & flip, Putin-backed Barclay’s Center.
I didn’t like Bloomberg because he is a billionaire and my annoyance with billionaires is well documented. The more I hear about Bloomberg the more I see he isn’t the change from the nasty guy we need.
Friday, February 14, 2020
Star Wars same-sex kiss
I finally saw Star Wars IX The Rise of Skywalker. If you still haven’t seen it yet and want to perhaps you should save this post until later.
Yeah, the film opened almost two months ago. I didn’t want to be caught in the rush of fans. Then there were other things to do during my weekends. But then it disappeared from the first-run theaters and I knew I had to act. I caught it at a second-run theater at the only time they were showing it today: 1:30. There were five of us in the audience. I could have waited another month to see it at a nicer second-run theater and with a much bigger crowd, but I’ll soon be visiting people who will expect that I’ve seen it.
My impression is the whole thing is a muddle. I’m not the only one who thinks that way. Metacritic gave it a score of 53/100. Metacritic fans gave it only 4.9/10. Scores like that were a reason why I didn’t want to be trampled by the faithful. There are websites that list plot holes, such as this one that lists 16 and another that lists 20 (some are the same in the two lists). The biggest was: Didn’t we get rid of Lord Palpatine at the end of Episode VI?
However, towards the end it did make an important point that supremacists try to make us feel that we’re facing them alone. But we have allies, people who believe as we do. Alas, the success of recruiting allies is one of the plot holes (even though it is wonderful to see on screen).
The three main characters in this trilogy are Rey, Finn, and Poe. Rey is female and exhibits a strong use of the Force. Finn and Poe are male and are the ones who have her back. They aren’t nearly as much fun as Leia, Luke, and Han were in the original trilogy.
Finn and Poe are best buds. Their onscreen chemistry was so good that some fans wondered if their friendship was the start of gay love. Even Oscar Isaacs, who plays Poe, had said he wanted that to happen. There is a same-sex kiss on screen, but it isn’t Finn or Poe. It’s a lesbian kiss that is so brief it would be easily missed.
LGBTQ people are crying foul (an article I recommend). They say Disney is too timid. Even worse, rather than allowing us to imagine a romance that isn’t explicitly stated, the story gives Poe a former girlfriend and has Finn and a woman hit it off really well.
Yeah, the film opened almost two months ago. I didn’t want to be caught in the rush of fans. Then there were other things to do during my weekends. But then it disappeared from the first-run theaters and I knew I had to act. I caught it at a second-run theater at the only time they were showing it today: 1:30. There were five of us in the audience. I could have waited another month to see it at a nicer second-run theater and with a much bigger crowd, but I’ll soon be visiting people who will expect that I’ve seen it.
My impression is the whole thing is a muddle. I’m not the only one who thinks that way. Metacritic gave it a score of 53/100. Metacritic fans gave it only 4.9/10. Scores like that were a reason why I didn’t want to be trampled by the faithful. There are websites that list plot holes, such as this one that lists 16 and another that lists 20 (some are the same in the two lists). The biggest was: Didn’t we get rid of Lord Palpatine at the end of Episode VI?
However, towards the end it did make an important point that supremacists try to make us feel that we’re facing them alone. But we have allies, people who believe as we do. Alas, the success of recruiting allies is one of the plot holes (even though it is wonderful to see on screen).
The three main characters in this trilogy are Rey, Finn, and Poe. Rey is female and exhibits a strong use of the Force. Finn and Poe are male and are the ones who have her back. They aren’t nearly as much fun as Leia, Luke, and Han were in the original trilogy.
Finn and Poe are best buds. Their onscreen chemistry was so good that some fans wondered if their friendship was the start of gay love. Even Oscar Isaacs, who plays Poe, had said he wanted that to happen. There is a same-sex kiss on screen, but it isn’t Finn or Poe. It’s a lesbian kiss that is so brief it would be easily missed.
LGBTQ people are crying foul (an article I recommend). They say Disney is too timid. Even worse, rather than allowing us to imagine a romance that isn’t explicitly stated, the story gives Poe a former girlfriend and has Finn and a woman hit it off really well.
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Benevolent billionaire
News outlets covering the campaigns to be the Democratic nominee for president frequently highlight a citizen saying what is most important is choosing a candidate to defeat the nasty guy. So there is still lots of talk about electability. Phillip Goff nicely defines the term for us:
On one side of the electability issue is Elizabeth Warren. She was lower in the vote tallies in Iowa and New Hampshire than I would like. It seems strange she isn’t in front when she says things like this in debates:
I noted before Warren seems to be getting less media exposure than the other candidates. A couple people point out reasons why.
David Carroll tweeted:
Ben O’Keefe tweeted:
Politico says Warren “suffered a blow” with a third place finish in Iowa. Yeah, declaring a decent finish in negative terms. But Warren isn’t duking it out with Sanders and Buttigieg, media complains. She is too upbeat.
Well, yeah, she can’t be divisive if she is going to be the unity candidate. She doesn’t want to be divisive, either.
On the other side of the electability issue is Mike Bloomberg. Although he didn’t enter the early primaries, he is filling the airwaves with ads in hopes of a big gain on Super Tuesday. I saw his ads show up on progressive Daily Kos – annoying he is linking himself to President Obama. That Bloomberg is paying for all those ads out of his own billionaire pocket prompted Jared Sexton to tweet:
Which, to me, sounds like they’ve all missed the point. It is quite a ways down the responses before someone quoted Elizabeth Warren:
Will Bunch, an opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tweeted that he hears a lot of people around Philly are desperate to beat the nasty guy and that Bloomberg is positioning himself to be the one to do it.
A few days ago a video of Bloomberg’s praise of the stop and frisk policy he used as mayor of NYC began making the rounds on social media. Josh Rogin of the Washington Post tweeted a thread of a couple more of Bloomberg’s unsavory opinions. He feels Bloomberg misunderstands history, promotes false equivalences, and has too much sympathy for Putin. That’s troubling in someone wanting to be the leader of the free world.
Benevolent billionaire? No such thing.
This pair of tweets confirms for me again that candidate Pete Buttigieg doesn’t have enough experience. Sahil Kapur tweeted:
Y'all get that "electability" is just a word for "I acquiesce to other people's prejudices," right?So give your primary vote to the person who you think is best.
On one side of the electability issue is Elizabeth Warren. She was lower in the vote tallies in Iowa and New Hampshire than I would like. It seems strange she isn’t in front when she says things like this in debates:
But the question we should be asking ourselves is, in America, across the country, including gun owners, agree in certain things. Universal background checks. Get assault weapons off the streets. Why can we not even get a vote in the United States Senate? And the answer is neither -- think about this -- 90% of the Americans agree on this. We can't get a vote in the United States Senate because it is the gun industry that continues to call the shots. Until we attack the corruption in Washington, the influence of money on campaigns and lobbying, we're not going to be able to meet your promises.
I noted before Warren seems to be getting less media exposure than the other candidates. A couple people point out reasons why.
David Carroll tweeted:
Warren is the only candidate hammering Trump’s criminality and that’s why the media can’t deal with her because running her speeches involves confronting how we have all allowed organized crime to swallow us all alive, we were so naïve to think we were immune to the mafia.
The advertising industry is filled with fraud but they look the other way. Much of it comes from Russia. The best fraudsters do their adfraud in Cyrillic. The advertising industry funds your election news. Any questions?
Ben O’Keefe tweeted:
Wondering why the media is silencing Elizabeth Warren?One big idea from Warren is her wealth tax. That tweet includes a link to an article in Forbes with the title These 15 Billionaires Own America’s News Media Companies.
Seems pretty obvious to me.
It's time to take back our country from the wealthy elite and finally become a country that works for the people.
Politico says Warren “suffered a blow” with a third place finish in Iowa. Yeah, declaring a decent finish in negative terms. But Warren isn’t duking it out with Sanders and Buttigieg, media complains. She is too upbeat.
Well, yeah, she can’t be divisive if she is going to be the unity candidate. She doesn’t want to be divisive, either.
On the other side of the electability issue is Mike Bloomberg. Although he didn’t enter the early primaries, he is filling the airwaves with ads in hopes of a big gain on Super Tuesday. I saw his ads show up on progressive Daily Kos – annoying he is linking himself to President Obama. That Bloomberg is paying for all those ads out of his own billionaire pocket prompted Jared Sexton to tweet:
Mike Bloomberg is revealing a horrible truth at the heart of the American political system, and that's that a billionaire can flood the airwaves with slick propaganda and become a presidential contender without so much as speaking to the issues or interacting with the people.That prompted replies defending Bloomberg: At least he’s talking about the ugly truth about Trump. Sure, fight fire with fire. I like his ads! Don’t you want to beat Trump? At least Bloomberg can’t be bought. He’s showing us the good side of the “wealth coin.”
We have to get big money out of our politics. This simply isn't conducive to a functioning system and isn't in line with anything even resembling a democracy.
We're watching our society slip into an oligarchy and it's speeding up in a hurry.
Which, to me, sounds like they’ve all missed the point. It is quite a ways down the responses before someone quoted Elizabeth Warren:
…powerful men who want us to be quiet. And it's not just women - everyone else who has less power should be quiet. Because ultimately what this is about is this is about power. This is about who's got it and who doesn't plan to let go of it…The problem isn’t just the nasty guy. The problem includes the billionaires who back him and that they became billionaires through exploitation of workers and the environment. A guy exploiting enough to be a billionaire does not have the principles I want in my president or in my Democratic nominee.
Will Bunch, an opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tweeted that he hears a lot of people around Philly are desperate to beat the nasty guy and that Bloomberg is positioning himself to be the one to do it.
What could happen is a) Bloomberg arrives on Super Tuesday as the anti-Bernie with a coalition of suburbanites and non-whites to counter the Sanders bloc,
b) in 11/20, we hope that voters choose a (somewhat) benevolent billionaire philosopher-king over a nasty dictator.
That means the White House will either be bought, or retained by a cheating, corrupt autocrat.
A few days ago a video of Bloomberg’s praise of the stop and frisk policy he used as mayor of NYC began making the rounds on social media. Josh Rogin of the Washington Post tweeted a thread of a couple more of Bloomberg’s unsavory opinions. He feels Bloomberg misunderstands history, promotes false equivalences, and has too much sympathy for Putin. That’s troubling in someone wanting to be the leader of the free world.
Benevolent billionaire? No such thing.
This pair of tweets confirms for me again that candidate Pete Buttigieg doesn’t have enough experience. Sahil Kapur tweeted:
Pete Buttigieg says Democrats should focus on cutting the deficit, which fell under Obama and is soaring under Trump.To which Stephanie Kelton replied:
“The time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable owning this issue... It’s not fashionable in progressive circles to talk too much about the debt.”
It’s “not fashionable in progressive circles” because progressives are rejecting the bogus arguments about debt and deficits that have been used to undermine the progressive agenda for decades.Mayor Pete probably had to follow a law that his city’s budget was required to balance or run a surplus. He doesn’t catch on to the idea that the GOP is and has been running up the deficit in order to force cuts to the social safety nets.
Two words: fraud and cruel
In the nasty guy’s State of the Union speech (which I didn’t listen to) he said he would protect Medicare and Social Security. How quickly he forgot (unless he was lying). He has released his budget. The two words that fit are fraud and cruel. Fraud because it is so completely contrary to what he promised and because of the unrealistic assumptions it makes to justify its numbers. Cruel because of the deep cuts it calls for in the social safety net – SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. It also calls for cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (as a pandemic looms) and the Environmental Protection Agency. The nasty guy and the GOP didn’t run up those massive deficits for nothing.
Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reminds us about the “third rail” in American politics. This refers to the third rail in subway systems in New York and elsewhere that power the trains. Touch it and die. Social Security and Medicare are considered third rail topics.
But in the cult of personality surrounding the nasty guy there is no third rail. He can seriously damage their financial security and they’ll thank him.
This budget shows the nasty guy and the GOP aren’t interested in equality. They want to show how wonderful and superior their lives are by oppressing everyone else. Here are a few quotes of the day that say freedom and equality are intertwined and rebuke supremacy.
Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reminds us about the “third rail” in American politics. This refers to the third rail in subway systems in New York and elsewhere that power the trains. Touch it and die. Social Security and Medicare are considered third rail topics.
But in the cult of personality surrounding the nasty guy there is no third rail. He can seriously damage their financial security and they’ll thank him.
This budget shows the nasty guy and the GOP aren’t interested in equality. They want to show how wonderful and superior their lives are by oppressing everyone else. Here are a few quotes of the day that say freedom and equality are intertwined and rebuke supremacy.
For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
~~Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (1994)
When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! … But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the ‘change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system.
~~George Orwell, England Your England and Other Essays (1953)
Equality is the heart and essence of democracy, freedom, and justice, equality of opportunity in industry, in labor unions, schools and colleges, government, politics, and before the law. There must be no dual standards of justice, no dual rights, privileges, duties, or responsibilities of citizenship. No dual forms of freedom.
~~A. Philip Randolph, Autobiography of a People: Three Centuries of African American History Told by Those Who Lived It. (2000)
To assault the whole concept of impartial justice
Sheesh, it’s been almost a week since I last posted. No wonder I’ve got so many open browser tabs.
A report on the state of our democracy:
Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports a federal court has been considering the sentence appropriate for the crimes for which Roger Stone has been convicted. Stone is a nasty guy crony. He was convicted on lying to Congress and threatening a judge with death. When the US attorneys announced their recommended a sentence of 7-9 years (20 is max), the nasty guy tweeted his displeasure and threatened to pardon Stone. Attorney General William Barr instructed the Department of Justice to overrule the attorneys and ask for a lighter sentence.
Three of the four attorneys withdrew from the case in protest. One of those resigned from the DoJ. The nasty guy mocked and threatened them. Sumner wrote:
A day later the nasty guy went after the judge in the case. In a second post Sumner explained what is going on. The nasty guy could easily just pardon Stone and be done with it. But he is using the opportunity to assault the whole concept of impartial justice. He is putting the jury, judge, and prosecutors on trial.
After reminding us how many federal judges Moscow Mitch has installed (192) Sumner wrote:
Along the way Sumner reminded us of Masha Gessen’s Autocracy: Rules for Survival. I’ll list them and let you read her article for the details. The article was written the day after the 2016 election.
Sumner highlights rule 3. Gessen wrote:
Sumner mentioned that the GOP senators aren’t going to do anything. Laura Clawson of Kos describes the non-action of individual senators, noting they are “barely even pausing to furrow a brow.” But this isn’t a little bit of bad weather that gets commented on and passes. This is serious.
Tami Burages describes herself as Aisle Treason Cleanup Crew. She tweeted a thread about what the Democratic and media response should have been and wasn’t.
* News networks stop covering the Dem primary in a tiny state and switch to how this is a rule of law crisis.
* Speaker Nancy Pelosi is covered on all stations as she announces how grave it is and that the Dems will have a response the next morning.
* Every single Dem calls on Barr to resign with the same gusto they did for Al Franken.
* The next morning the Judiciary Committee subpoenas Barr, saying this is not a request. Since they already found Barr in contempt they say a jail cell is ready for him, giving him a choice between resigning and jail.
* The Judiciary Committee also subpoenas the prosecutors to hear why they withdrew and resigned.
* By noon on the second day every Dem governor and state AG calls for Barr’s resignation.
* By that evening all TV networks apologize for not covering the Dem primaries because this is so much bigger.
* Dem candidates urge people to call their GOP senators saying their next vote depends on stopping Barr.
And what did happen? The House Judiciary Committee asked Barr to appear on March 31 – six weeks from now. That gives the illusion of doing something while not doing anything at all.
The nasty guy’s ranting about judge, jury, and prosecutors made Benjamin Wittes tweeted thread important. It is a variation of a well known poem. I hope you recognize the connection. Here’s the start and end of it:
A report on the state of our democracy:
Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports a federal court has been considering the sentence appropriate for the crimes for which Roger Stone has been convicted. Stone is a nasty guy crony. He was convicted on lying to Congress and threatening a judge with death. When the US attorneys announced their recommended a sentence of 7-9 years (20 is max), the nasty guy tweeted his displeasure and threatened to pardon Stone. Attorney General William Barr instructed the Department of Justice to overrule the attorneys and ask for a lighter sentence.
Three of the four attorneys withdrew from the case in protest. One of those resigned from the DoJ. The nasty guy mocked and threatened them. Sumner wrote:
In a matter of just a few hours, every possible flare had been launched to reveal that the Department of Justice wasn’t just being politicized—it was being corrupted, turned into an instrument of Trump’s will.
And then Barr doubled down. As NBC News reports, Barr has taken “control of legal matters of personal interest to President Donald Trump.” That includes persecution of Trump’s enemies.
…
And now the attorney general of the United States has officially made himself Donald Trump’s personal attorney—except that this personal attorney has the ability to protect Trump’s friends, persecute his enemies, and bring an end to the idea of apolitical justice in America.
…
When the Republicans in the Senate voted to allow Trump to get away with abuse of power and obstruction, he did learn a lesson. But it was the same lesson he’d learned before—that he can do anything. There are no laws except the laws that Trump declares. No justice except that which he permits. No republic remaining except what he deigns to allow.
A day later the nasty guy went after the judge in the case. In a second post Sumner explained what is going on. The nasty guy could easily just pardon Stone and be done with it. But he is using the opportunity to assault the whole concept of impartial justice. He is putting the jury, judge, and prosecutors on trial.
After reminding us how many federal judges Moscow Mitch has installed (192) Sumner wrote:
Trump and company will use his case for those two all-important purposes: destroying the republic and fundraising.
...
But the level of assault that Trump and Barr are staging on the remainder of the judicial system at this point demonstrates vividly that this is an endgame for democracy. Republicans didn’t do anything about Trump’s extorting a U.S. ally to cheat in the 2020 election. They’re not doing anything now about his abusing a judge, intimidating a juror, and tilting the scale of justice to favor his friends. They’re not going to do anything.
Except, perhaps, think about how nice elections will be when only Trump-approved candidates are allowed on the ballot.
Along the way Sumner reminded us of Masha Gessen’s Autocracy: Rules for Survival. I’ll list them and let you read her article for the details. The article was written the day after the 2016 election.
1. Believe the autocrat. Others will say he is exaggerating.
2. Do not be taken in by small signs of normalcy.
3. Institutions will not save you.
4. Be outraged. Prepare yourself for being the only “hysterical” person in the room.
5. Don’t make compromises.
6. Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever, including autocrats.
Sumner highlights rule 3. Gessen wrote:
It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed.Sumner adds:
Trump didn’t have to take over American media. Fox News came prepackaged before he even stepped onto the golden escalator. All Trump had to do was scream, “Fake news!” at every fact that squeezed onto a screen. The Republican Senate just upheld Trump’s right to disassemble the electoral system at his leisure. So now it’s time for collapsing that judiciary—and Trump isn’t even trying to do it without notice.
Sumner mentioned that the GOP senators aren’t going to do anything. Laura Clawson of Kos describes the non-action of individual senators, noting they are “barely even pausing to furrow a brow.” But this isn’t a little bit of bad weather that gets commented on and passes. This is serious.
Tami Burages describes herself as Aisle Treason Cleanup Crew. She tweeted a thread about what the Democratic and media response should have been and wasn’t.
* News networks stop covering the Dem primary in a tiny state and switch to how this is a rule of law crisis.
* Speaker Nancy Pelosi is covered on all stations as she announces how grave it is and that the Dems will have a response the next morning.
* Every single Dem calls on Barr to resign with the same gusto they did for Al Franken.
* The next morning the Judiciary Committee subpoenas Barr, saying this is not a request. Since they already found Barr in contempt they say a jail cell is ready for him, giving him a choice between resigning and jail.
* The Judiciary Committee also subpoenas the prosecutors to hear why they withdrew and resigned.
* By noon on the second day every Dem governor and state AG calls for Barr’s resignation.
* By that evening all TV networks apologize for not covering the Dem primaries because this is so much bigger.
* Dem candidates urge people to call their GOP senators saying their next vote depends on stopping Barr.
And what did happen? The House Judiciary Committee asked Barr to appear on March 31 – six weeks from now. That gives the illusion of doing something while not doing anything at all.
The nasty guy’s ranting about judge, jury, and prosecutors made Benjamin Wittes tweeted thread important. It is a variation of a well known poem. I hope you recognize the connection. Here’s the start and end of it:
First he came for @comey, and I said nothing because I was mad at @comey because of the Clinton email investigation and I blamed him for Trump’s election.
Then he came for Andy McCabe and I said nothing because there was this inspector general report that said McCabe lacked candor.
Then he came for Jim Baker and I said nothing because I had never heard of Jim Baker and the FBI director is entitled to his own leadership team anyway.
Then he came for @NatSecLisa and @petestrzok and I said nothing because they sent text messages and the president and Fox News kept reminding me that they had an affair.
…
And then he came for Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother, Evgeny Vindman, and I said nothing—because I was used to it.
Friday, February 7, 2020
Blissonance
I wrote yesterday that the nasty guy has an enemies list and, with his acquittal, will feel free to act on it. And today he started.
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was one of the important witnesses during the House impeachment inquiry. Today he was fired from his National Security Council job and escorted out of the White House. He is active military, so he isn’t out of a job, just out of that job. Vindman’s twin brother Yevgeny, also a part of the NSC was also escorted out.
Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union and also an important witness, has also been fired.
Senator Sherrod Brown wrote in the New York Times that the GOP Senators who voted to acquit did so out of fear. Fear of the nasty guy’s tweets and that he might campaign against them in their primary. Fear of being attacked by Fox News hosts. Fear of the hosts on conservative talk radio. Fear of Twitter trolls attacking.
At the end of the State of the Union Speech on Tuesday evening (which I avoided) Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up her copy of the speech. She did so because she said it was filled with lies, what she called a “manifesto of mistruths.” Her actions were a way of prompting the media to talk to her about it. Which she did in detail.
Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reviewed the speech and said Pelosi’s action was “far more courtesy than this toilet stain of a speech deserved.”
Since then Pelosi has said her actions were thought out ahead of time – about as soon as she received a copy of the speech. There’s more shredding to be done.
Jill Lawrence in USA Today wrote that she used to have respect for all politicians, even those she passionately disagreed with. Then came the nasty guy and respect is gone.
The satirical newspaper The Onion says that the Democratic National Committee has offered a startup company $500 million to manufacture a “cutting-edge tabulation device that will be able to legibly report vote totals on a sheet of paper 99% of the time.” The hexagonal marking implement will be stress tested by the business venture known as Sharpen. DNC Chair Tom Perez reportedly said in the article:
I hear the final tally of the Iowa Caucuses has been announced. Jared Yates Sexton, a political analyst tweeted that it was embarrassing watching the media throw tantrums because their product wasn’t delivered on time. Because of that some in the media are saying the results don’t matter.
There’s an old saying (though new to me) that there are at most three tickets out of Iowa. Laura Clawson of Kos notes we’re hearing that Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg are pretty close to tied. We’re hearing a lot about how Joe Biden underperformed and came in fourth. And … silence.
There isn’t a lot of talk that Elizabeth Warren came in a respectful third and well ahead of expectations and of Biden. Some are declaring it’s a two-man race now.
Kerry Eleveld of Kos reviews this four person field:
Buttigieg doesn’t poll well with people of color and will probably hit a wall in South Carolina and beyond.
Sanders is saying he can inspire enough Democrats to win – but didn’t actually do that in Iowa.
Biden is an uninspiring campaigner.
Which leaves … Warren.
She did better than expected in Iowa. She could pull together a coalition to win. If she can get past the first few states. And gets the media to report on her.
Bree Newsome Bass tweeted a thread calling on us to stop allowing the GOP and their fake outrages to frame the debate. They take the extreme position to pull everyone further to the right. An example:
Bass agrees with those pointing out that Dems engage only in “performative opposition.” They do the bare minimum.
A quote of the day:
CBS did pretty good at showing what income inequality looks like. News anchor Tony Dokoupil set up a table in a mall with a pumpkin pie and asked people to slice up that pie onto five plates to correspond with how money is distributed in the economy. Those who gave it a try didn’t come close to getting it right. The richest got nine slices out of ten. The next two plates shared a slice. The fourth plate got some crumbs. And the plate representing the poor got the bill – representing that most of them are in debt. This is a very good way of explaining why we need the proposed wealth tax – until he went to get the opinion of yacht salesmen.
Besame of the Kos community says we need new words to talk about climate change. How about the word “blissonance” made up from “bliss” and “dissonance” to describe the feeling of enjoying some nice warm February weather while knowing it shouldn’t be this warm. Another example is enjoying a brightly colored sunset but knowing the intensity of the colors is because of the extra forest fire smoke in the atmosphere. A third is appreciating that the car windshield isn’t smeared with bugs but knowing that’s because the insect population has declined.
So talk about the weather of your youth. People born after 1985 will never experience a colder-than-average month and don’t understand what our weather used to be like. So tell them.
In honor of Adlai Stevenson’s 120th birthday Bill in Portland, Maine offered up a few quotes. For those who don’t remember the 1950s Stevenson ran for president against Dwight Eisenhower. And lost. Twice. But who could have won against Ike? Here’s one of the quotes:
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was one of the important witnesses during the House impeachment inquiry. Today he was fired from his National Security Council job and escorted out of the White House. He is active military, so he isn’t out of a job, just out of that job. Vindman’s twin brother Yevgeny, also a part of the NSC was also escorted out.
Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union and also an important witness, has also been fired.
Senator Sherrod Brown wrote in the New York Times that the GOP Senators who voted to acquit did so out of fear. Fear of the nasty guy’s tweets and that he might campaign against them in their primary. Fear of being attacked by Fox News hosts. Fear of the hosts on conservative talk radio. Fear of Twitter trolls attacking.
At the end of the State of the Union Speech on Tuesday evening (which I avoided) Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up her copy of the speech. She did so because she said it was filled with lies, what she called a “manifesto of mistruths.” Her actions were a way of prompting the media to talk to her about it. Which she did in detail.
Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reviewed the speech and said Pelosi’s action was “far more courtesy than this toilet stain of a speech deserved.”
Since then Pelosi has said her actions were thought out ahead of time – about as soon as she received a copy of the speech. There’s more shredding to be done.
Jill Lawrence in USA Today wrote that she used to have respect for all politicians, even those she passionately disagreed with. Then came the nasty guy and respect is gone.
The satirical newspaper The Onion says that the Democratic National Committee has offered a startup company $500 million to manufacture a “cutting-edge tabulation device that will be able to legibly report vote totals on a sheet of paper 99% of the time.” The hexagonal marking implement will be stress tested by the business venture known as Sharpen. DNC Chair Tom Perez reportedly said in the article:
It may not be easy to encase a cylinder of graphite with wood or put a slick coat of glossy paint on its outside. But with this new partnership, we believe we will soon have at our disposal a pencil that is both reliable and totally resistant to any attack by foreign powers.The article concludes:
At press time, sources confirmed plans for the pencil had been scrapped after election security experts warned the rubber eraser on its tip would quickly erode public trust in the product.
I hear the final tally of the Iowa Caucuses has been announced. Jared Yates Sexton, a political analyst tweeted that it was embarrassing watching the media throw tantrums because their product wasn’t delivered on time. Because of that some in the media are saying the results don’t matter.
There’s an old saying (though new to me) that there are at most three tickets out of Iowa. Laura Clawson of Kos notes we’re hearing that Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg are pretty close to tied. We’re hearing a lot about how Joe Biden underperformed and came in fourth. And … silence.
There isn’t a lot of talk that Elizabeth Warren came in a respectful third and well ahead of expectations and of Biden. Some are declaring it’s a two-man race now.
Kerry Eleveld of Kos reviews this four person field:
Buttigieg doesn’t poll well with people of color and will probably hit a wall in South Carolina and beyond.
Sanders is saying he can inspire enough Democrats to win – but didn’t actually do that in Iowa.
Biden is an uninspiring campaigner.
Which leaves … Warren.
She did better than expected in Iowa. She could pull together a coalition to win. If she can get past the first few states. And gets the media to report on her.
Bree Newsome Bass tweeted a thread calling on us to stop allowing the GOP and their fake outrages to frame the debate. They take the extreme position to pull everyone further to the right. An example:
Republicans deliberately take an extreme action & institute child separation policy.
Instead of shutting down border camps, Dems compromise by asking for more transparent reporting when children die there & give Repubs $$$.
GOP successfully moves goal posts.
Bass agrees with those pointing out that Dems engage only in “performative opposition.” They do the bare minimum.
Ripping up a speech is cool but refusing to fund the border camps, the wall & the militarization of outer space would go further.
A quote of the day:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
~~Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996)
CBS did pretty good at showing what income inequality looks like. News anchor Tony Dokoupil set up a table in a mall with a pumpkin pie and asked people to slice up that pie onto five plates to correspond with how money is distributed in the economy. Those who gave it a try didn’t come close to getting it right. The richest got nine slices out of ten. The next two plates shared a slice. The fourth plate got some crumbs. And the plate representing the poor got the bill – representing that most of them are in debt. This is a very good way of explaining why we need the proposed wealth tax – until he went to get the opinion of yacht salesmen.
Besame of the Kos community says we need new words to talk about climate change. How about the word “blissonance” made up from “bliss” and “dissonance” to describe the feeling of enjoying some nice warm February weather while knowing it shouldn’t be this warm. Another example is enjoying a brightly colored sunset but knowing the intensity of the colors is because of the extra forest fire smoke in the atmosphere. A third is appreciating that the car windshield isn’t smeared with bugs but knowing that’s because the insect population has declined.
So talk about the weather of your youth. People born after 1985 will never experience a colder-than-average month and don’t understand what our weather used to be like. So tell them.
In honor of Adlai Stevenson’s 120th birthday Bill in Portland, Maine offered up a few quotes. For those who don’t remember the 1950s Stevenson ran for president against Dwight Eisenhower. And lost. Twice. But who could have won against Ike? Here’s one of the quotes:
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.
We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.
Thursday, February 6, 2020
I’ve got a little list
A comment I read this week went something like this: Now that the nasty guy has been impeached and been on trial maybe he’ll think twice about …
Whoever said that (and I don’t remember who) doesn’t understand supremacy and authoritarians.
The nasty guy is not going to hesitate in indulging his authoritarian desires. On the contrary, he will treat the acquittal as the greenest of lights. He is saying as much already. And it has been only one day.
Today, at an event designed for him to rant about the trial, he declared that no future president should endure what he had to go through. Which means if he gets the chance he will remove the impeachment clause from the Constitution (what, you haven’t figured out he and the GOP plan to rewrite it?).
Laura Clawson of Daily Kos (all of today’s sources are from DK unless noted) reports that a “prominent Republican” told Vanity Fair that “it’s payback time.” There is an enemies last and it is growing by the day.
At the top of the list is John Bolton. Excerpts from his tell-all book says the nasty guy did it. That strengthened calls for witnesses during the trial. The nasty guy is calling for Bolton and his publisher to be criminally investigated. He’s also calling his cronies to “go after” Bolton.
As if the vote to acquit wasn’t enough Mark Sumner reports a couple GOP senators are offering to put heads on pikes to further prove their loyalty. These senators, Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson, are digging through Secret Service records of former VP Joe Biden (who had Secret Service protection) to see if they can find a nefarious meeting between Joe and his son Hunter.
Laura Clawson says that enemies list includes the foreign service professionals who testified against the nasty guy. Since they are mid-level people the nasty guy may wait until after the election before he cleans out the “Deep State.”
Kerry Eleveld says Senator Mitt Romney is on the list. Romney was the only Republican to vote for conviction on one of the articles of impeachment (he voted for acquittal on the other). This one vote deprives GOP spinners the ability to say the it was Democrats and Democrats alone who voted to convict. They can’t say it was a partisan attempt to remove the nasty guy.
Clawson reports that it has been less than two weeks since the nasty guy declared Rep. Adam Schiff “has not paid the price yet.” Already Schiff has already faced a threat on his life. Schiff was the leaders of the House team that served as prosecutors for the trial. The person making the threat has been charged.
Hunter of Daily Kos reports that Senator Lindsey Graham is now calling for a litany of officials from the Obama administration to be brought to the Senate for interrogation. Graham also vowed to summon the whistleblower, the person who revealed the Ukraine scandal.
Wrote Hunter:
Olga Lautman tweeted that Alexandra Chalupa, the one who first exposed Russian operative Paul Manafort, is also being targeted by Grassley and Johnson.
The title of this post comes from The Mikado, an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan. The phrase is sung by the Lord High Executioner. WikiSource provides the lyrics. The song lists all the people who offend the Executioner. He insists that when he is done “they’d none of them be missed.” In many productions of the show parts of this song are rewritten to include modern and local references.
Whoever said that (and I don’t remember who) doesn’t understand supremacy and authoritarians.
The nasty guy is not going to hesitate in indulging his authoritarian desires. On the contrary, he will treat the acquittal as the greenest of lights. He is saying as much already. And it has been only one day.
Today, at an event designed for him to rant about the trial, he declared that no future president should endure what he had to go through. Which means if he gets the chance he will remove the impeachment clause from the Constitution (what, you haven’t figured out he and the GOP plan to rewrite it?).
Laura Clawson of Daily Kos (all of today’s sources are from DK unless noted) reports that a “prominent Republican” told Vanity Fair that “it’s payback time.” There is an enemies last and it is growing by the day.
At the top of the list is John Bolton. Excerpts from his tell-all book says the nasty guy did it. That strengthened calls for witnesses during the trial. The nasty guy is calling for Bolton and his publisher to be criminally investigated. He’s also calling his cronies to “go after” Bolton.
As if the vote to acquit wasn’t enough Mark Sumner reports a couple GOP senators are offering to put heads on pikes to further prove their loyalty. These senators, Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson, are digging through Secret Service records of former VP Joe Biden (who had Secret Service protection) to see if they can find a nefarious meeting between Joe and his son Hunter.
Laura Clawson says that enemies list includes the foreign service professionals who testified against the nasty guy. Since they are mid-level people the nasty guy may wait until after the election before he cleans out the “Deep State.”
Kerry Eleveld says Senator Mitt Romney is on the list. Romney was the only Republican to vote for conviction on one of the articles of impeachment (he voted for acquittal on the other). This one vote deprives GOP spinners the ability to say the it was Democrats and Democrats alone who voted to convict. They can’t say it was a partisan attempt to remove the nasty guy.
Clawson reports that it has been less than two weeks since the nasty guy declared Rep. Adam Schiff “has not paid the price yet.” Already Schiff has already faced a threat on his life. Schiff was the leaders of the House team that served as prosecutors for the trial. The person making the threat has been charged.
Hunter of Daily Kos reports that Senator Lindsey Graham is now calling for a litany of officials from the Obama administration to be brought to the Senate for interrogation. Graham also vowed to summon the whistleblower, the person who revealed the Ukraine scandal.
Wrote Hunter:
Graham, obviously, believes that he will find some conspiracy that will require, or at least justify, doing Trump's personal bidding by exposing the only White House-linked official in the entire administration who put their duty to their country above their fealty to a raving, corrupt man damaging national security and our elections for his own personal gain.
There can be little argument that the Republican Party is now a fascist organization. It has put Dear Leader above the rule of law. It has given Dear Leader an "absolute immunity" to solicit as much foreign government assistance as he can muster or extort for the purposes of throwing the next election in his favor, while insisting that it will still be a “free election” regardless of how much false, conspiracy-premised propaganda Dear Leader can bring to bear. Now it insists that Dear Leader's law-protecting supposed enemies be exposed, and made examples of.
Olga Lautman tweeted that Alexandra Chalupa, the one who first exposed Russian operative Paul Manafort, is also being targeted by Grassley and Johnson.
The title of this post comes from The Mikado, an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan. The phrase is sung by the Lord High Executioner. WikiSource provides the lyrics. The song lists all the people who offend the Executioner. He insists that when he is done “they’d none of them be missed.” In many productions of the show parts of this song are rewritten to include modern and local references.
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Hypocrisy and shamelessness are an asset
Happy palindrome day! Today is 02-02-2020. In honor of that I suggest you listen to the third movement, the minuet, from Haydn’s Symphony 47, in which each phrase is played forward, then backward. A palindrome for your ears!
I’m carefully ignoring the Daily Kos postings for today so that I can get through the transcript of an episode of Gaslit Nation. There are a couple more that look interesting, but I’ll devote this post to the one that has the most immediate importance. This episode is titled “The Republican Party is on Trial” and is dated January 22, which was just before the Senate impeachment trial. As in previous episodes, the hosts are Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa.
Attention first turns to Lev Parnas, who has been described in the press as an associate of Rudy Giuliani and who Kendzior describes as a Giuliani goon. He’s been talking a lot lately. That included a claim that he is in danger.
What Parnas has been saying does correspond to what we already know. There is a long list of people who have gotten death threats (I’m just listing names, you’ll have to look up their relationship to the nasty guy): Yovanovich, Vindman, Fiona Hill, Stormy Daniels, Paul Manafort’s judge and jury, Roger Stone’s judge, Lisa Page, Jamal Khashoggi (who was then murdered), countless other members of the media, and every woman who has alleged the nasty guy committed sexual assault. In addition, Michael Cohen has said that the nasty guy has directed him to threaten 500 people.
The nasty guy was acting like a mafioso decades before taking office. This is nothing new from him.
Kendzior asks, so why did it take a mobster like Parnas to convince people of this? Yeah, Chalupa is grateful Parnas is speaking about it. But, because he is in the pocket of Russian organized crime, he is obviously an unreliable narrator. His also saying what we already know. Is Parnas trying to slow down investigations by tossing out new threads that then need to be followed? Is he keeping himself alive by being a fount of information? Is he trying to charm the Democrats? Is he merely spouting propaganda?
Don’t underestimate the Russian Mafia, their ruthlessness, their long reach, their power, and their eye on the long game.
Also remember that most of the major players in the nasty guy orbit have committed crimes and confessed to crimes, but were not punished for those crimes. They hide crime with scandal. They focus attention on the Ukraine shakedown to avoid attention on the rest of their vast crime apparatus.
And the Democrats fell for this by limiting the scope of impeachment to the Ukraine shakedown.
A criminal, like Parnas, is not a savior. Don’t expect him to be.
It is disturbing that the words of Marie Yovanovich, who is facing threats for her efforts to bring these crimes to light, are taken less seriously than the words of Parnas, who is in thick with the criminals. We must remember that Yovanovich, and the others listed above, are good and brave people we desperately need to combat this crime syndicate. The good people are being threatened.
Attention now turns to the GOP and the Senate. Kendzior has a question: Because the Republicans lie so flagrantly why do they feel they have to hold the trial under the cover of darkness?
Kendzior said:
Democrats are driven by acting in good faith and good governance. They try to establish a culture of respect and decency in the highest offices of the country. Culture is powerful. This is in contrast to the nasty guy’s culture of brutality. A lot of Republicans are retiring rather than putting up with that culture and the way it is dehumanizing them.
Chalupa says the Democratic good faith means they have a hard time fighting GOP fire with fire. They don’t want to start putting people in handcuffs for defying Congress because those tactics could be used against them when the House swings next to GOP and those cuffs are used for small, stupid, and invented stuff leading up to show trials. Kendzior disagrees – the GOP will do all that anyway.
Some people believe SDNY, the Federal Court of the Southern District of New York will catch whatever crimes the FBI or Congress don’t. Kendzior says SDNY won’t be our savior. They have a really bad track record of acting – it was the SDNY that should have indicted the Trump Crime Family long before he entered politics. They’re more like accomplices.
That left the impeachment process. As mentioned before it only highlighted a small part of the nasty guy’s crimes. Democrats could have (and still can) get the whole story out there. But they seem to have given away the bit of leverage they have.
Kendzior goes into detail about the goon squad the nasty guy has assembled as his defense team. Most of them, especially Dershowitz, are implicated in their own crimes (I’ll let you read the transcript for the juicy details) and have their own associations with organized crime. Their hypocrisy and shamelessness are an asset. They very much match the nasty guy. Which is why he chose them.
After noting many of these same players were in Richard Nixon’s orbit Chalupa said:
Finally attention turns to their endorsement for the Democratic candidate for president. Before they reveal the name they remind us that during the Obama years when we had elected the first black president and some progressives through their work was done Karl Rove and the GOP flipped many state governments – House, Senate, and Governor – to red. The attacked people’s right to vote, to help further their corruption and hold on power.
There have been many great progressives battling against this red tide. Even so, no matter who wins in November, our work is far from over. So find a candidate you love and get engaged. Allow campaign colleagues to become family. Deepen your community.
Even though none of the candidates are perfect, they endorse Elizabeth Warren. Kendzior is more excited about her than any person running for office that she’s known. The choice is based on who is capable of beginning to clean up from the horrible mess we’re currently in. She believes Warren is capable of doing that.
They get into the wealth tax Warren has proposed. In support of Warren’s tax they tell a story:
I’m carefully ignoring the Daily Kos postings for today so that I can get through the transcript of an episode of Gaslit Nation. There are a couple more that look interesting, but I’ll devote this post to the one that has the most immediate importance. This episode is titled “The Republican Party is on Trial” and is dated January 22, which was just before the Senate impeachment trial. As in previous episodes, the hosts are Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa.
Attention first turns to Lev Parnas, who has been described in the press as an associate of Rudy Giuliani and who Kendzior describes as a Giuliani goon. He’s been talking a lot lately. That included a claim that he is in danger.
What Parnas has been saying does correspond to what we already know. There is a long list of people who have gotten death threats (I’m just listing names, you’ll have to look up their relationship to the nasty guy): Yovanovich, Vindman, Fiona Hill, Stormy Daniels, Paul Manafort’s judge and jury, Roger Stone’s judge, Lisa Page, Jamal Khashoggi (who was then murdered), countless other members of the media, and every woman who has alleged the nasty guy committed sexual assault. In addition, Michael Cohen has said that the nasty guy has directed him to threaten 500 people.
The nasty guy was acting like a mafioso decades before taking office. This is nothing new from him.
Kendzior asks, so why did it take a mobster like Parnas to convince people of this? Yeah, Chalupa is grateful Parnas is speaking about it. But, because he is in the pocket of Russian organized crime, he is obviously an unreliable narrator. His also saying what we already know. Is Parnas trying to slow down investigations by tossing out new threads that then need to be followed? Is he keeping himself alive by being a fount of information? Is he trying to charm the Democrats? Is he merely spouting propaganda?
Don’t underestimate the Russian Mafia, their ruthlessness, their long reach, their power, and their eye on the long game.
Also remember that most of the major players in the nasty guy orbit have committed crimes and confessed to crimes, but were not punished for those crimes. They hide crime with scandal. They focus attention on the Ukraine shakedown to avoid attention on the rest of their vast crime apparatus.
And the Democrats fell for this by limiting the scope of impeachment to the Ukraine shakedown.
A criminal, like Parnas, is not a savior. Don’t expect him to be.
It is disturbing that the words of Marie Yovanovich, who is facing threats for her efforts to bring these crimes to light, are taken less seriously than the words of Parnas, who is in thick with the criminals. We must remember that Yovanovich, and the others listed above, are good and brave people we desperately need to combat this crime syndicate. The good people are being threatened.
Attention now turns to the GOP and the Senate. Kendzior has a question: Because the Republicans lie so flagrantly why do they feel they have to hold the trial under the cover of darkness?
Kendzior said:
The majority of the American public want him removed. But what's been consistent throughout this Administration and even predates it with the Republicans, is how little the Republicans care about the will of the American people. In their mind, the will of the American people exists to be subverted. That's why they have voter suppression. That's why they have a giant propaganda apparatus in Fox News. They completely don't care what even their own voters want, even the people voting Republican, even the people who love Trump. They don't care what anybody actually wants. This is purely about the accumulation of their own power.
Democrats are driven by acting in good faith and good governance. They try to establish a culture of respect and decency in the highest offices of the country. Culture is powerful. This is in contrast to the nasty guy’s culture of brutality. A lot of Republicans are retiring rather than putting up with that culture and the way it is dehumanizing them.
Chalupa says the Democratic good faith means they have a hard time fighting GOP fire with fire. They don’t want to start putting people in handcuffs for defying Congress because those tactics could be used against them when the House swings next to GOP and those cuffs are used for small, stupid, and invented stuff leading up to show trials. Kendzior disagrees – the GOP will do all that anyway.
Some people believe SDNY, the Federal Court of the Southern District of New York will catch whatever crimes the FBI or Congress don’t. Kendzior says SDNY won’t be our savior. They have a really bad track record of acting – it was the SDNY that should have indicted the Trump Crime Family long before he entered politics. They’re more like accomplices.
That left the impeachment process. As mentioned before it only highlighted a small part of the nasty guy’s crimes. Democrats could have (and still can) get the whole story out there. But they seem to have given away the bit of leverage they have.
Kendzior goes into detail about the goon squad the nasty guy has assembled as his defense team. Most of them, especially Dershowitz, are implicated in their own crimes (I’ll let you read the transcript for the juicy details) and have their own associations with organized crime. Their hypocrisy and shamelessness are an asset. They very much match the nasty guy. Which is why he chose them.
After noting many of these same players were in Richard Nixon’s orbit Chalupa said:
I think America's story is a story of unfinished business, whether it was the failed reconstruction following the Civil War and all the racist policies that came after and the impact they had for generations. That story of unfinished business, a lack of accountability followed Nixon. That story of unfinished business and a lack of accountability followed Reagan's Iran-Contra. Oh. And that story of unfinished business and the lack of accountability followed George W. Bush and his horrific invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and his policies that helped Wall Street become a gambling den, which brought down the world economy. All of this is just a big story of unfinished business and a lack of accountability.
Finally attention turns to their endorsement for the Democratic candidate for president. Before they reveal the name they remind us that during the Obama years when we had elected the first black president and some progressives through their work was done Karl Rove and the GOP flipped many state governments – House, Senate, and Governor – to red. The attacked people’s right to vote, to help further their corruption and hold on power.
There have been many great progressives battling against this red tide. Even so, no matter who wins in November, our work is far from over. So find a candidate you love and get engaged. Allow campaign colleagues to become family. Deepen your community.
Even though none of the candidates are perfect, they endorse Elizabeth Warren. Kendzior is more excited about her than any person running for office that she’s known. The choice is based on who is capable of beginning to clean up from the horrible mess we’re currently in. She believes Warren is capable of doing that.
I do believe she sees things for what they are. She sees the depth of that corruption. She has pragmatic plans to solve it. She's not afraid to take the lead on things, like impeachment. She's not afraid to make enemies out of terrible people. That's why billionaires hate her. That's why Wall Street hates her, but she's also able to actually get along with others to pass through legislation. It's a really rare combination and she has actually created fleeting moments of relief for me in the last few horrible years of this Administration. Just to know that someone else can see these problems.
Someone else realizes that kleptocracy in the United States is inseparable from kleptocracy abroad and is thinking and is listening and is meeting with people and is able to take in others' ideas without being defensive and build upon them and create ways of starting to get us out of this situation. Because I don't want to overstate what she can and cannot do because the situation is very dire. But I think she knows that. She has that realism. She has a combination of realism and warmth that I think is rare. And so, this is the first candidate that I've been this confident in, in their abilities to operate at multiple facets of governing. So, we're lucky that we have Warren for this moment in time.
They get into the wealth tax Warren has proposed. In support of Warren’s tax they tell a story:
And there's an incredible heartwarming story that the New York Times covered of an incredibly wealthy man by the name of Harris Rosen, who owns a chain of successful hotels. Harris Rosen invested, gave away, let's say, but really, it's an investment because he's strengthened his own country by doing this. Harris Rosen gave away millions of dollars to turn around a community in Florida and he invested in schools and early education. And what he saw by essentially living out Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax was he saw this once troubled community blossom into high school and college graduates completely turn itself around.Even with this endorsement they will get behind whoever is the Democratic candidate. However, they wish a few of them would talk more about white supremacy. Kendzior said:
You cannot separate race from class in America, in a country that is founded on slave labor. You simply can't. You need to view these issues holistically. You can't separate civil rights from corruption.Kendzior and Chalupa have a few more paragraphs in praise of Warren. I’ll let you read it on your own.
It's not a coincidence that Trump's Administration is made up of white supremacist mafia affiliates. That these are overlapping categories. And so, we need people, in whatever the next administration is, hopefully not Trump's, that are able to bring all these issues together and see how they intertwine and begin to gut out that corruption and that cruelty at its roots. And I do trust that [Warren] sees this.
Saturday, February 1, 2020
The time to clutch pearls has ended.
The nasty guy quite a while ago demanded refugees applying for asylum stay in Mexico until their case is decided. I won’t go into the huge numbers of ways the process can go wrong and does (which is a feature, not a flaw). José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen, made famous by feeding people in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, has now opened a dining hall tent in the refugees camp in Matamoros. Families can eat with dignity. Local organizations are assisting.
The Supremes, in a 5-4 vote, is allowing the nasty guy to use a wealth test to screen immigrants. The policy is that if the immigrant will need public services the nasty guy doesn’t want them.
That ruling came on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. David Walsh tweeted:
Skyedweller tweeted:
And if the nasty guy won’t leave, the GOP senators who are giving him unlimited power may not leave either. Bree Newsome Bass tweeted:
Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald wrote in an opinion piece that he saw no point in reaching out to nasty guy voters. Many of his readers were disappointed in that statement. Pitts wrote another piece saying that many people believe that the nasty guy phenomenon was about fiscal insecurity. But Pitts says he has never seen an email from a supporter explain things in terms of a factory or coal mine shutting down. He wrote:
Martin Longman of The Washington Monthly reports of a technology called geofencing that the nasty guy’s campaign is exploiting and Democrats will soon do as well:
The Supremes, in a 5-4 vote, is allowing the nasty guy to use a wealth test to screen immigrants. The policy is that if the immigrant will need public services the nasty guy doesn’t want them.
That ruling came on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. David Walsh tweeted:
Fun fact for Holocaust Remembrance Day: this was the same tactic used to keep European Jews out of the United States in the 1930s.Walsh adds the details that the earlier law went into effect well before Jews became refugees fleeing the Nazis and that other laws were more important in keeping Jews out. Even so, it was a factor.
Skyedweller tweeted:
I sure hope that each candidate for presidential nominee has a plan for what to do when Trump refuses to leave office and the GOP backs him up.She goes on to say that candidate Elizabeth Warren does. Well, not quite. Warren released a plan to rid government of nasty guy appointees and appoint replacements and do so quickly. But I don’t think her plan deals with the nasty guy barricading himself in the Oval Office.
And if the nasty guy won’t leave, the GOP senators who are giving him unlimited power may not leave either. Bree Newsome Bass tweeted:
We need to be prepared for Republicans refusing to vacate seats and power. They’ve already made it clear they don’t believe in the integrity of the election. This is about a raw power grab by a party that fears it can’t stay in power by democratic means.Louis Bridgeman replied:
The time to clutch pearls has ended.
The time has come to grab courage.
Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald wrote in an opinion piece that he saw no point in reaching out to nasty guy voters. Many of his readers were disappointed in that statement. Pitts wrote another piece saying that many people believe that the nasty guy phenomenon was about fiscal insecurity. But Pitts says he has never seen an email from a supporter explain things in terms of a factory or coal mine shutting down. He wrote:
The decisive reason that white, male, older and less educated voters were disproportionately pro-Trump is that they shared his prejudices and wanted domineering, aggressive leaders.They want the racism the nasty guy is selling.
Martin Longman of The Washington Monthly reports of a technology called geofencing that the nasty guy’s campaign is exploiting and Democrats will soon do as well:
It begins with geofencing, a practice that involves tracking every cell phone that enters a predefined area, like a church or MAGA rally. Armed with these phone numbers, identities can be sussed out from other commercial databases, and then people can be sorted by how frequently they vote, their party registration (if any), and all manner of personal information.
The shrug emoji
It is one thing to know the GOP in the senate would refuse to hear witnesses on their way to acquitting the nasty guy. It’s another for them to do it. I felt dread when I heard various senators announce their votes and it would actually happen. I was safely eating supper with friends then off to an orchestra concert when the votes were counted.
There appears to be a general vote was 51-49 to prevent witnesses. Then five more votes to deny hearing from particular witnesses and to refuse subpoenaing documents.
Colin Jost of Saturday Night Live summarized it this way:
People have wondered why the Republican senators who have already announced retirement are still toeing the party line. Why can’t they do the right thing? Tim Alberta explains part of it is their earning power after the Senate. Alberta adds they feel trapped and even retirement isn’t an escape:
Even though the GOP still intends to shred the constitution Mark Sumner of Daily Kos has praise for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, lead manager Adam Schiff, and the rest of the prosecution team. The team repeatedly showed they were prepared and gave stirring speeches in defense of democracy and did everything they could. They are American heroes.
They did convince many in the Senate that what the nasty guy did was a crime. But those senators were never willing to say such a crime is important enough to remove him from office.
A quote of the day:
Kimberly Adkins tweeted that during the question and answer days…
Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos summarizes the important points in the whole trial, for those who want to revisit the whole mess.
Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine comments that the Democrats were worried that the impeachment trial will keep too many of candidates who are current senators off the campaign trail so they signaled for a short trial – which the GOP used against them by declaring if witnesses were called the trial could go on for months.
Matt Glassman tweeted “The ammunition of an ‘unfair trial’ seems quite valuable.”
Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos also has a summary:
Pam Keith tweeted:
I enjoy Paula Poundstone when she’s on the NPR comic news quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. So perhaps she, a perceptive comedian, should get the last word:
There appears to be a general vote was 51-49 to prevent witnesses. Then five more votes to deny hearing from particular witnesses and to refuse subpoenaing documents.
Colin Jost of Saturday Night Live summarized it this way:
Democrats spent three days laying out in great detail how they believe President Trump has been the most egregious abuser of power in American history. And then Republicans laid out their defense: the shrug emoji.And a summary by Greg Sargent:
GOP argument:
* We've already heard enough witnesses, so we don't need to hear from the one with the most direct knowledge of Trump's central act.
* We'll acquit, b/c Ds failed to produce testimony from anyone with direct knowledge of Trump's central act.
People have wondered why the Republican senators who have already announced retirement are still toeing the party line. Why can’t they do the right thing? Tim Alberta explains part of it is their earning power after the Senate. Alberta adds they feel trapped and even retirement isn’t an escape:
And it’s not just about money. I’ve had numerous retiring Rs talk warily — sometimes fearfully — about the “cult” of Trump supporters back home. They worry about harassment of their families, loss of standing in local communities, estranged relationships, etc.Pardon me while I fail to find any sympathy.
If you think this is a bunch of weak-ass excuse making from people who ought to rise above it and do what they think is right..... well, no argument here.
Even though the GOP still intends to shred the constitution Mark Sumner of Daily Kos has praise for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, lead manager Adam Schiff, and the rest of the prosecution team. The team repeatedly showed they were prepared and gave stirring speeches in defense of democracy and did everything they could. They are American heroes.
They did convince many in the Senate that what the nasty guy did was a crime. But those senators were never willing to say such a crime is important enough to remove him from office.
When the House impeachment managers come back to the other end of Capitol Hill, they should do so with heads held high. More than that, they should be met with trumpets. With flowers. With every plaudit that can be brought to genuine heroes of their nation. They should get a parade.
And then there should be another parade of people in the streets. In every street in the country.
A quote of the day:
Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge --that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
~~Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017)
Kimberly Adkins tweeted that during the question and answer days…
CJ Roberts just read @SenWarren’s Q: “Does fact that the Chief Justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican senators have thus far refused to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the Chief Justice, #SCOTUS or Constitution?”Warren was criticized for the question because Roberts wasn’t going to answer and the defense team wasn’t going to answer honestly. But many others praise the question because it shows Warren understands what is going on.
Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos summarizes the important points in the whole trial, for those who want to revisit the whole mess.
Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine comments that the Democrats were worried that the impeachment trial will keep too many of candidates who are current senators off the campaign trail so they signaled for a short trial – which the GOP used against them by declaring if witnesses were called the trial could go on for months.
This threat underscored the method Trump has used all along to ward off accountability. He threatens to exhaust every avenue to withhold evidence, running out the clock, and then uses the fear of a lengthy process as a shield. Trump will drag it out, and then Democrats will be blamed for running the process into the election season.Chait goes on to say the House doesn’t have to be done with impeachment hearings. And they could add to that hearings to contradict the GOP belief that abuse of power is permissible.
But what if you assume, instead, that the cover-up affixes the blame onto Republicans?
Matt Glassman tweeted “The ammunition of an ‘unfair trial’ seems quite valuable.”
Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos also has a summary:
But politically speaking, this proceeding was never about putting Trump on trial—everyone who had been paying attention knew the outcome in advance, including Nancy Pelosi. It was about putting the GOP-led Senate on trial. That's why Pelosi held the articles of impeachment for nearly a month, so she could frame the proceeding as a referendum on Senate Republicans. And guess what? They failed spectacularly in a disgraceful show of craven hubris. They couldn't even fake impartiality long enough to allow for witnesses to be heard. In the end, they offered America no justice—no feeling of finality—just a hollow sense of being wronged with no recourse.Many pundits are now talking about a backlash that puts the Senate in play.
But here's the silver lining: During a time when Washington commanded the attention of most Americans and when polling consistently showed that voters overwhelmingly craved resolution, Senate Republicans exposed themselves a nothing short of tools of Trump's regime. They no longer serve the people, they serve him and him only.
Pam Keith tweeted:
Can we all just be honest?Commenters corrected her that the GOP has been against fair elections since at least Gore/Bush in 2000.
The GOP no longer believes in fair elections because fair elections gave us a black president.
It’s really NOT more complicated than that.
That’s the heart of Dersh’s argument that 45 can cheat if he thinks it’s in the national interest.
I enjoy Paula Poundstone when she’s on the NPR comic news quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. So perhaps she, a perceptive comedian, should get the last word:
I didn't used to think Trump would win the next election, because he has been a historically bad President. However, now that the Republican Senate has given the o.k. to his cheating, I don't see how he won't. #ThanksVlad
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