Kids deserve to be annoying without being arrested

About six weeks ago I saw the Apollo space exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum of Innovation. While there I bought the book Apollo 11, The Inside Story by David Whitehouse. I’ve now finished it. I don’t think this book has an accurate title. Yeah, it had a lot of inside stuff about the first time humans actually stepped onto the moon. But it was much more than that. It actually begins with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian who first worked out some of the principles of space flight before the Russian Revolution and the First World War. These principles are such things as recognizing the need for an airlock and creating a formula for how a rocket speeds up as the fuel is used up and its weight goes down. Which means the book covers the entire history of rocketry from Tsiolkovsky to the end of the Apollo program. It includes the German development of the V2, how we got some of those Germans into America, and the entire space race. For a good part of the book, covering more than 20 years, the book interleaves the two sides. The Americans did this as the Soviets doing that. For a good deal of that time the Soviets were in the lead – first animal in space, first human, first orbit, among others. But once President Kennedy committed us to the goal of a man on the moon by the end of the decade the American goal was quite methodical – this has to be done, then this, then that. There was a definite purpose, goal, and method. But the Soviet response was gosh, look at what the Americans just did! What can we quickly do in response for propaganda purposes? That didn’t work so well. So the book covers Sputnik, all the Redstone failures, the Soviet successes in the early 1960s followed by a string of failures, the Mercury program, the very good Gemini program, and the Soviet attempts to match each while failing as much as they succeeded. Of course, the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 was covered. It seems there was a great deal of emphasis placed on schedule and that first Apollo capsule just wasn’t ready. Perhaps more accurately it was a piece of junk. I hadn’t known that while Aldrin and Armstrong were on the moon the Soviets were trying to match them with a mission to send a robot to the moon, dig up some soil, and return it to earth. It crashed into a mountain. The inside story part of the title is accurate. Over the years the author had interviewed many of the American astronauts, so we get their accounts. He had also interviewed a few of the Soviets. So when someone suggested this might be his next book he realized he already had a great deal of material. I enjoyed this book and it’s a great one for a space geek. I watched the Tony Awards last night. There was a lot of great LGBTQ representation and a lot of diversity. The host was Ariana DeBose, who had won an Oscar for West Side Story and is a lesbian. She did a great job. The play Take Me Out is about a baseball player that comes out as gay. Three guys in the cast were nominated for Best Featured Actor in a Play and Jesse Tyler Ferguson won. The show won Best Revival of a Play (it was first produced in 2002 and won a Tony for Best Play in 2003). The musical A Strange Loop is about Usher, who is a black queer movie theater usher and writer writing about a black queer movie theater usher. Behind Usher are six Thoughts that annoy him with self doubt. It was nominated for Michael R. Jackson’s Best Original Score and won for his Best Book of a Musical. The show also won Best Musical. There were, of course, other LGBT people among the winners – at least one guy, on winning, kissed his husband. Back when I was in high school the choral and theater teachers directed the musical The Music Man. I had the role of the train conductor, so had the opening line, then played one of the townspeople. So it is a favorite. I also saw the original movie with my family when it came out (yeah, I’m that old) and a later remake. I like the original and Robert Preston was a good scoundrel. I didn’t like the 2003 TV remake because Matthew Broderick was too nice to be a scoundrel. There is a revival on Broadway starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. And yeah, he could be enough of a scoundrel to make it work. Though the box office and Tony organization loved the show critics weren’t kind. In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Daily Kos included tweets of pictures of high school kids in Chernihiv. A photo posted by Visegrád 24 shows students posing in their bombed school building. A tweet by Mikhail Khordorkovsky shows students posing on a wrecked tank. Beyond those pictures Sumner has little that’s new. In a separate post Jaaneezutto of the Kos community posted what is becoming an iconic image of this year. Sixteen year old Valerie wore the beautiful bright red gown she was to wear to her high school prom and posed in the ruins of her school. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote that Putin is expecting to hold on in Ukraine long enough for public opinion to change. He’ll likely get help from American Republicans or maybe even the return of the nasty guy. Europe has responded wonderfully to Putin’s invasion. Politics in Germany (increased military spending), Sweden, and Finland (rushing to join NATO) changed dramatically in a short time. Europe sees the brutality of Russian soldiers and are quite willing to help in the biggest refugee crisis since WWII. They also see who is next if Putin absorbs Ukraine. They’re also motivated by their memories of what the nasty guy did to NATO while in the Oval Office. So of course there is fear this issue needs to be dealt with as fast as possible in case he should return to Washington. The ways that some of the Republicans are acting Putin may not have to wait that long. But there is the public opinion to worry about. That could quickly change due to global inflation, high energy costs, and possible food shortages. There is also simple exhaustion. Changing public opinion could prompt a falter in standing up to Putin. Putin has ranted that he will start tearing up treaties between Russia and the West. Matas Maldeikis, a member of Lithuania’s Parliament, tweeted:

If Russia revokes her 1991 recognition of Lithuania's independence, Lithuania will revoke the 1634 Treaty of Polyanovka and demand that Putin submits to the authority of Władysław IV and returns all occupied territories to the Grand Duchy. Smolensk is Lithuania!

Visegrád 24 tweeted:

In response to the plans of the Russian Parliament to revoke Russia’s recognition of Lithuania’s Declaration of Independence from the USSR in 1991, the Kyiv City Council has cancelled the decree by Kyiv Rus Grand Prince Volodymyr of the founding of Moscow in 1147. Moscow is gone

Kyiv was founded in 996. Kos of Kos again wrote about the tankies:

Tankies believe that all the world’s evils are the product of imperialism and the only country capable of imperialism is the United States. ... they never escaped the idea that “America is bad,” even when Russia is the actual aggressor today. Yes, it’s true—our country can sometimes do the right thing!

I’ll let you read the rest, though I’ll note there is now a tankie bingo card. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Andrew Exum of The Atlantic saying putting armed veterans in schools is madness.

The only veterans who have the time to do this, then, are those veterans who are mentally or physically disabled from their service, or veterans who have otherwise failed to transition back to “civilian life” and find gainful employment. Many, I would respectfully argue, are the very last people you want walking around schools with firearms.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

Clip of cultist Rep. Steve Scalise at press conference on gun violence: We had AR-15s in the 1960s. We didn't have those mass school shootings. Samantha Bee: Okay, then. Let's go back to the 1960s when AR-15s were only available to the military. Amen! —Full Frontal When we throw more cops into schools as an easy way out of that difficult and necessary conversation [on gun control], we not only fail to keep our kids safe from gun violence, we condemn them to a system that criminalizes the very essence of childhood. Kids deserve to be annoying without being arrested, to be sad and angry without being body slammed. They deserve to have tantrums, throw carrots, do science experiments, talk shit, and carve their names into stuff without risking being thrown in the back of a police car. —John Oliver, on the epidemic of terrorism against elementary school students by police overstepping their sole job duty—to stop bad guys with guns

Ian Reifowitz of the Kos community discussed Biden’s proposed wealth tax. Someone having a billion dollars while fellow Americans have to do without basics is a moral and economic problem. Minimizing that inequality means more Americans would not live in hardship. Inequality stunts overall growth. Capitalism causes wealth to trickle up (that trickle down stuff is a myth) and the Republican tax policies since the 1980s have increased the flow. To reverse that trend and to pay for vital priorities it is time for the wealth tax Biden has proposed. An in-depth article by the New York Times is based on research by Matthew Lacombe, Benjamin Page, and Jason Seawright, political scientists of Northwest University. They looked at the 100 wealthiest billionaires in the US. They found the wealthy say almost nothing about policy positions. There’s a good reason – their opinions are quite different from the positions held by most Americans. So the way to see their influence is to look at the voting records of those who receive that money. One of the points of the research Reifowitz explains through a quote of Berkeley Law School professor Ian Haney López:

Racism is the primary weapon wielded by the power elite in a class war they are winning. This describes what’s been happening in society since colonialism, but over the last half-century in particular.

A logical question is whether those power elites are themselves racist or are just using racism because it will prompt the lower classes to dance to their tune. I believe they are themselves racist. They’re certainly supremacist in that are sucking money out of the lower classes, which is oppressive to lower class people. Reifowitz reported that billionaires give a half million per person per year to political causes. Their methods of giving are quite stealthy. No wonder political elites do their bidding – and I’m not singling out Republicans because I believe many elite Democrats are willing to dance the tune to get the money dangled in front of them. Reifowitz explained how the rich avoid paying much in taxes. He included a chart that shows the tax rate for the richest has declined since 1950 – with big assists from Reagan, Clinton (the capital gains tax cut), Bush II, and the nasty guy. Their effective tax rate is now below that of to bottom 90% and the bottom 50%. Biden is proposing a billionaire minimum income tax. It calls for them to pay at least 20% of their full income – including investments they haven’t sold yet. This can be sold to the American public as a way to “make sure that the wealthiest Americans no longer pay a tax rate lower than teachers and firefighters.” The Wall Street Journal attacked Biden’s plan saying it won’t make all that much difference in the federal budget, even though it would have funded the original version of the Build Back Better plan. The WSJ also says dividing up the assets of the wealthy would amount to only $14,000 per person. That conveniently ignores that is more wealth than a quarter of US households and the money doesn’t need to be divided equally. The paper also ignores that during the pandemic (which has killed over 1 million) the wealth at the top has increased by 57% or $1.7 trillion (almost enough to pay off the nation’s entire student loan debt). I doubt the WSJ mentioned one more thing taxing the rich could accomplish and Reifowitz didn’t mention it. Taxing the rich could reduce their hold on American government. Alas, it would take a lot higher tax rates to make that happen. Alas, they want that hold on American government and will fight to preserve that hold. Reifowitz also discussed that raising taxes on the richest is a much better and more fair way to reduce inflation than raising interest rates, which harms the poorest the most. The Republican Party ...

makes a lot of noise giving their target audience of mostly white, working- and middle-class people a bulls--- enemy, a scapegoat for some overhyped or just plain made up problems. Right-wing candidates, office-holders, and media figures bleat on about the cultural elite who supposedly want to destroy traditional, Christian values on LGBTQ matters, and the liberal elite who supposedly want to oppress white Christian Americans in every way possible. Democrats need to push back hard against those culture war attacks, and also get voters to see the underlying bait-and-switch Republicans are pulling by making them in the first place.

David Rothkopf tweeted about the complicity of big donors to the mainstreaming of racism and corruption.

There are only two groups that can change the GOP--voters and donors. Party leaders--Cheney aside--aren't doing it. When voters turn Trumpist extremism into a loser is when other voices will begin to resonate. But don't underestimate the role of donors. One reason for this is that the real politics of the GOP donor class is that if they get lower taxes and less regulation than they will accept anything else that goes along with it. But another is that consumers have not made them pay a price for their betrayal of the country. The same holds true for shareholders--particularly large institutions. If big institutional investors said, "Sorry, we draw the line at companies that support coups or racism or misogyny or violating basic rights or corruption or hobnobbing with enemies" then change would happen.

There is another possibility not mentioned in that middle paragraph – these big donors want more than the lower taxes and less regulation (though that is clearly part of it). That possibility is they also want the racism, the overturning of democracy, and the oppression of everyone who isn’t them. As for the voters changing the GOP, Dartagnan of the Kos community listed several issues where Republican voters align with progressives. One example is that “three-quarters of Republicans favor government action to ‘reduce greenhouse gas emissions.’ ”

The list goes on, but I won’t bore you. Because the reality at this point in history (and likely for the foreseeable future) is that what Republican voters may believe or think is completely irrelevant to the political discussion from our standpoint. What matters is how they vote, and for the most part, they vote on one issue, and one issue only: their hatred of Democrats.

So forget the talk of unity and bipartisanship. And ignore those who say Democrats have a messaging problem. The people we would want to reach only listening to Fox News.

And that tells them that voting for Democrats is akin to voting for the Devil incarnate, no matter what the issue is.

Dartagnan quoted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

When you find the other side politically unacceptable, you’ll go along with anything that your side is associated with. You can add abortion and Covid to guns and coups. There are yawning differences between what Republicans in the electorate say they believe on all these matters of grave import and what the Republicans who represent them do. Yet Republicans almost never punish their leaders for these difference of opinion. ... In short, political accountability is dead among those on the political right in America. It doesn’t matter if most disagree with the party on assault weapons and background checks. It doesn’t matter that 70% of Republicans supported mask mandates in 2020 while their leaders scoffed at them. It doesn’t matter that many Republicans have no interest in seeing Roe overturned. The power of polarization will have them out in force in the fall providing lockstep support to their congressional candidates.