A basket of gripes and grudges

I wrote yesterday about Ukraine aiming towards Kupyansk, a Russian held city that is a major railway crossing critical to supplying northern Donbas. In a Thursday morning update Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote that in the last few days Ukrainain forces have covered 50Km and is within 10Km of Kupiansk. Several villages and towns along the way have been liberated. Russian sources discuss their panic. In a Thursday evening update Kos of Kos compared that day’s map to the one for the day before. There is quite a difference. Kos also discussed his puzzlement of Russia attacking Dibrovne south of Izyum, which Ukraine defended. Why is Russia attacking this meaningless village when Kupyansk – the source of all of Izyum’s supplies – is being attacked by Ukraine. Is it just another stupid Russian move? Kos offered an explanation:

Well, Russia explicitly prohibits personal initiative. Too dangerous, someone might get into their head the idea of overthrowing the tsar, in this case, Vladimir Putin. So some local commander has orders to march south toward Sloviansk, and he’ll keep doing it until told otherwise. Except that his superiors are up around Kupiansk and have either fled or are dead. So he’ll keep expending men, supplies, and ammunition on attacks with zero chance of success, just because that’s what he was last told. It boggles the mind!

Another thing Kos noted was the Ukrainians in that drive towards Kupyansk. When they take rest breaks there is no effort of secrecy. They’re out in the open. They know there are no Russian artillery positions or overhead aircraft. It seems Russian soldiers are fleeing, and leaving a great deal of equipment behind for Ukraine. The haul includes tanks, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft guns, trucks, and lots of other stuff. Kos included videos showing that it is safe for Russians to surrender to Ukraine. It is a best-case scenario. When Ukraine moves through Donbas they don’t want the locals to resist. They also want Russian soldiers to say Russia lied to us. We have nothing to fear from Ukraine. Donbas residents forced to fight are also seeing Russians loot the homes around them. So let’s win those Donbas residents over. Hunter of Kos reported on the rulings by the Michigan Supreme Court that ordered two proposals onto the November ballot. I mentioned this yesterday. The Michigan news today was that the Board of State Canvassers did meet and did approve both proposals. One of the dissenting justices was Brian Zahra. Democrat Justice Richard Bernstein had a rebuttal to Zahra’s reasoning:

Justice Zahra notes that, as a wordsmith and member of this Court, he finds it "an unremarkable proposition that spaces between words matter." As a blind person who is also a wordsmith and a member of this Court, I find it unremarkable to note that the lack of visual spacing has never mattered much to me.

One of the cases on the US Supreme Court docket for the coming year is from North Carolina and tries to argue that the Constitution says a state legislature has the only say in their slate of Electoral College electors – without regard to the actual vote of the citizens, the state’s laws, or the state’s constitution. This would lead to some drastic abuse of democracy. Will Doran, who writes about NC politics, tweeted:

In a rare move, the group of all 50 states' Supreme Court chief justices wrote to SCOTUS, urging them to shoot down the argument NC Republican lawmakers are making--that there should be no checks and balances for election laws--in their "Independent State Legislature" case.

That includes the chief justice of NC. Laura Clawson of Kos reported:

According to a new poll from Reuters/Ipsos, 58% of respondents, “including one in four Republicans—said Trump's ‘Make America Great Again’ movement is threatening America's democratic foundations.” A majority of the Republicans surveyed said they don’t think Trump and his MAGA movement represent their party. They’re going to need to start acting on that, then, because right now it’s not really showing. More than half of Republican gubernatorial nominees have sought to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Same goes for secretary of state nominees in six states, attorney general nominees in four states, Senate nominees in seven states, and House nominees in 20 states. At least 60% of voters will see an election-denier on their ballot this November.

That includes Republican candidates for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general in Michigan. Rebekah Sager of Kos reported that US District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the Affordable Care Act mandate to cover HIV prevention drugs violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and is unlawful. These are drugs that keep gay men safe from HIV. The law was challenged by Braidwood Management who doesn’t want its employees to have those drugs covered because it encourages homosexual behavior and prostitution. My reaction is please no, not this again. O’Connor was appointed by Bush II and back in 2018 ruled the whole ACA was invalid. That was overturned. But we have a different Supreme Court. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Sen. Ted Cruz is looking to overturn Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan. Cruz and the Heritage Foundation are looking for plaintiffs, those (presumably banks) who feel they’ve been wronged by Biden’s decision. McCarter goes on to explain why Biden has the authority to forgive that debt. But with this Supreme Court that may not matter. As with overturning the provision in the ACA we see Republicans don’t want those lower in the hierarchy to have nice things. They want them oppressed. Qasim Rashid, a human rights lawyer with a show on Sirius XM, tweeted:

MAGA: Canceling student loans is immoral. This is why we need a Govt based on the Bible. Deuteronomy 15: “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made.” MAGA: Not that part of the Bible.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Tom Nichols of The Atlantic. Nichols included a bit of Biden’s recent speech calling out the violence of the MAGA Republicans:

They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country ... MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.

Then Nichols added:

This, as Biden pointed out, is what makes the MAGA movement so dangerous. It has no functional compass and no set of actual preferences beyond a generalized resentment, a basket of gripes and grudges against others who the Trumpists think are looking down upon them or living better lives than they are. It is a movement composed of people who are economically comfortable and middle-class, who enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt, screwed over, betrayed—and they are determined to get revenge. Biden broke with tradition by saying what presidents are never supposed to say: He admitted that he was finally giving up on trying to accommodate a group of Americans, because he understands that they do not want to be accommodated. ... These citizens do not want a discussion or a compromise. They don’t even want to “win,” in any traditional political sense of that word. They want to vent anger over their lives—their personal problems, their haunted sense of inferiority, and their fears about social status—on other Americans, as vehemently as possible, even to the point of violence.

The quoted excerpt names the grievance. I’ll expand: They are white people who are told they should be at the top of the social hierarchy. And even with a comfortable middle-class life they see people above them – some way above them – and they see people who they believe should be below them are catching up to them. Their position in the social hierarchy is more important to them than their comfortable lives. Karen Attiah, a columnist at the Washington Post who describes herself as Ghanian, Nigerian, Texan, tweeted:

Black and brown people around the world who were subject to horrendous cruelties and economic deprivation under British colonialism are allowed to have feelings about Queen Elizabeth. After all, they were her "subjects" too.

Someone needs a warm fuzzy. Or maybe a good air conditioner. April Siese of Kos reported that researchers used computers to cross check four billion tweets against the UN’s definition of hate speech and against temperature. They found there is a window of 54F to 70F in which people stayed friendly on Twitter. Below and especially above that window hate speech increased. Previous studies had found extreme weather makes mood and mental health worse. Karin Kirk, a geologist and science writer for NASA Climate, tweeted:

Someone wrote to NASA and asked how such a small amount of CO2 can make such a big difference. I did some math and came up with this fun comparison.

Kirk included the tweet from NASA Climate:

Can you tell the difference between caffeinated coffee and decaf? If so, you have detected a concentration of 400 parts per million (ppm). There’s more than 400 ppm of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. Small amounts of powerful substances have big effects.

I had written about the Patmos Library in Jamestown, Michigan in which some agitators made a lot of noise about the LGBTQ books in the library. They campaigned to defeat a millage that funds the library and won. I had mentioned a GoFundMe drive that covered the cost of keeping the library open. Marissa Higgins of Kos wrote that Nora Roberts has donated $50,000 to keep the Patmos Library open. She has offered to donate more. The Stateside program at Michigan Radio did a segment on the library. Host April Bear talked to Larry Walton, president, Board of Trustees for Patmos Library and John Chrastka, founder, executive director of EveryLibrary Institute. This segment begins at minute 12 of the audio and is about 20 minutes long. One of the points Chrastka makes is defunding a library isn’t just an attack on LGBTQ people and on this particular library. It is an attack on democracy. Walton said GoFundMe and other donations are great in the short term. But they can’t fund the library in the long term. Only a millage can do that. The millage will be on the ballot again in November. This time the library board and friends of the library will be campaigning much harder than they did in the summer. The presidential portrait of Barack Obama was recently revealed at the White House. Somehow that didn’t happen during the nasty guy years. Here’s a link to White House History that shows all of the presidential portraits. For Obama and before they are paintings. The last two are photographs. I imagine Biden will eventually get a painting. There is an interesting difference with Obama’s painting. Up through Bush II the background depicts some sort of setting. The background in Obama’s painting is plain white. Scroll down from the images of the presidents for a link at portraits of the first ladies and other women who had the role of White House Hostess.