Some base level of integrity

A few days ago Blogger, where this blog is hosted, forced me to use their new post editor and denied me a way back to the old one. I have a big issue with this new editor (and told them about it). When I write these posts I use a document editor (I use LibreOffice, not Microsoft Office) and use a blank line to separate paragraphs. I copy the text into the Blogger editor and enter the formatting things like block quotes and italics. The old editor honored the blank lines that mark paragraphs. The new one does not. What I wrote appeared in a page preview as one gigantic paragraph. Not acceptable. That was the reason I stuck with the old editor as long as I could. The editor allows me to work in html a computer language for web pages. I’ve been trying various html commands to keep my paragraphs distinct. The first was to enter a paragraph marker for each paragraph, but that’s tedious. A little less tedious was to switch to a compose view where instead of showing the html commands it showed me the effects of the commands – text marked for italics were shown in italics. In that view I could press “enter” a couple of times and it would add the paragraph markers. But I still had to do this all over again for each paragraph. I tried to copy my text straight into the compose view and saw that for every paragraph it inserted formatting instructions before and format canceling instructions after, which it inserted again before the next paragraph. I didn’t like that. I searched online for another possible html command and found one to say treat blank lines as new paragraphs. I put this short command at the top and cancel command at the bottom and things look good! Then my friend and debate partner, who receives postings through email, commented on one of yesterday’s post by return email. It showed what I had written as one gigantic paragraph. We exchanged a bit more and I figured what Blogger sent to him was nicely split into paragraphs, but what he emailed to me was one gigantic paragraph. This is a long way of saying if what you receive through email is a formatting mess, please let me know. And please describe what you see because the mail system might change the formatting too. For those of you in Michigan the Between the Lines gay newspaper with other progressive organizations have released the 2020 version of their progressive voter guide. Enter your zip code to get a guide appropriate for your districts. For each candidate it shows which organizations have endorsed them. There are broad categories of LGBTQ, women, environment, labor, gun (which looks like it from Gun Sense Voter, put out by Everytown for Gun Safety), and conservative. Remember to turn your ballot over and vote for judges. Jen Hayden of Daily Kos reported that early in person voting has already begun in Virginia. And the lines were long. Minnesota also started voting, though lines there weren’t as long. The post has pictures. Hunter of Kos reported the US Civil Rights Commission is to investigate civil rights issues and recommend remedies. They started a report on how to better protect minority voting rights in a pandemic. The GOP half of the commissioners have voted to not release the report. Hunter concluded:

Each of these commissions rests on the assumption that regardless of party differences, some base level of integrity is necessary for the nation to function at all—whether that be policing against illegal campaign activity or keeping watch against intentional voter suppression efforts. Those assumptions are no longer true; one of the two parties now sees itself as benefiting from the relaxation of both norms. So here we are, again.

A few days ago I reported on Michael Caputo of the CDC Public Affairs going into a rant about a resistance unit within the CDC working to undermine the nasty guy. Hunter reports Caputo has now taken a 60 day leave of absence to focus on his health. In the past week the nasty guy talked about wanting students of America to get a “patriotic education.” Jeff Sharlet, who has studied American Evangelical Fundamentalism tweeted a long thread to explain what that means. Here’s a part of it:

"Patriotic education" is Stephen Miller's fascism + Mike Pence's fundamentalism. Some years ago, I took a course in "patriotic education" for my book THE FAMILY. I spent a season reading its textbooks & talking to its teachers. ... 1st time I heard Orwell quoted at a patriotic education rally was from William Federer, author of America's God & Country, which then had sold 1/2 mil copies--cherry picked, distorted, & fabricated quotes for students "proving" U.S. founded as Christian nation. "Patriotic educators" teach that Jefferson's wall of separation between church & state is misunderstood. It was meant as a "one-way wall," Federer claimed, to protect church from state, not the other way around. "Patriotic education" is a fundamentalist concept. Just as fundamentalist religion supposes that divine truths are literal & determined by (white male) authority, so fundamentalist history discards the ongoing work of knowing the past. "Patriotic education" proposes, as did the White House conference, that the Constitution is divine, "god-breathed," as some say, & thus impervious to expanding ideas of rights. That's the religion behind Clarence Thomas' constitutional "originalism." It's false. ... When I began reading the Christian nationalist school curriculum over a decade ago, it was already being taught to more than 10% of U.S. kids. That number has grown, a lot. It's big enough now to make a bid for control of least some public schools. The modern Christian Right--without which there would be no Trumpism--began not in national politics but on school boards. Those elections matters. The Right knows that. Those dismissing "patriotic education" as 2020 tactic are themselves ignoring history.