A kiss to a lesbian daughter

My Sunday movie was Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. It has been a long time since I saw the original Disney version (and didn’t see the recent Disney live action) so certain images are in my mind, but a lot of the details have been forgotten. Of course, I remember Jiminy Cricket singing “When You Wish Upon a Star.” In this new version, set in Italy, some of the plot points appear to be the same – including the puppet joining the traveling show and being swallowed by a sea creature. There’s also a cricket to serve as the conscience. Others are quite different – Geppetto loses a son, still a boy, in WWI and when WWII comes around Pinocchio is created through deep grief and drunken rage. And Lithwick, now Candlewick, is the son of the town’s fascist leader. I very much enjoyed this version of the story. The storytelling is excellent, as is the animation. I and a few people from my church bell group attended a bell festival in South Bend, IN Friday evening and all day Saturday. It is time for a few hundred enthusiasts to gather and put on a concert, with much of the time rehearsing together so we are playing together. There were also classes of a variety of bell related topics and to hear a top notch group from the region put on a concert. Sister suggested I look up a particular bit the opening monologue for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for March 2nd. Here it is: Rep. Nate Schatzline of Texas authored a bill that would seek to limit drag by designating any establishment as a “sexually oriented business” if it allows “on-premise consumption of alcoholic beverages” and performances by a person wearing any clothing or makeup not stereotypical to their born sex. Colbert added:

If serving alcohol and having men in gowns makes you a sexually oriented business I’ve got bad news about church.

Also on that episode was an extensive interview in several segments Colbert did with Steven Spielberg. I think part of it had to be used in the next week. That delayed part included John Williams, the composer of most of the scores for Spielberg’s films. One sentence from the session is worth sharing. Spielberg spoke of antisemitism and its growing boldness since about 2014:

Hate became a kind of membership in a club that has gotten more members than I ever though possible in America.

There has been a lot of news about the revelations about how much Fox News has been lying to their viewers. There has been talk from pundits that their viewers would leave countered with talk that they aren’t going anywhere – the lies are the point. Hunter of Daily Kos responded to that second idea:

The audience doesn't want accurate news. They want Sean Hannity to tell them that banks are failing because of wokeness; they want Tucker Carlson to tell them that there was no pandemic, there never was a pandemic, and all their dead relatives actually just were sent to a farm upstate. They want to be told that it's not that their own bigoted and paranoid worldviews are unpopular, there's just an enormous "globalist" conspiracy to hide just how popular their own fantasies are. While it may seem like this unnamed cable executive is unfairly belittling the Fox News audience, there's simply no question that they're right. Fox News viewers love being lied to. ... Fox isn't worried one bit about losing viewers who feel lied to. They're much more concerned about losing viewers who don't feel lied to enough.

In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Kos also mentioned Carlson. At the start of the war Carlson’s support for Putin seemed an extreme view. But he kept hammering that position and then two weeks ago he, as Sumner wrote, “has made support for Vladimir Putin a touchstone for would-be Republican nominees in 2024.” Sumner also posted a video of middle school students in occupied Crimea learning how to assemble weapons and being drilled in military maneuvers. It seems to be lifted from Nazi youth videos. This is grooming children to be ready to be a part of a war about an hour’s drive away. And American media is using it as proof that Russia is superior to the US. A brief story from the Associated Press posted on Kos reported:

The International Criminal Court says it has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Putin for war crimes because of his alleged involvement in abductions of children from Ukraine. The court said in a statement that Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.” It also issued a warrant Friday for the arrest for Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation on similar allegations.

That whole Hunter Biden laptop thing appears to have started when Hunter took that laptop in for repairs and didn’t claim it within 90 days. The owner claimed it as abandoned and released the drive to Republican operatives. Laura Clawson of Kos reported Hunter is now suing the repair shop for invasion of privacy. Some of the points in his suit. * There was plenty of opportunity to put things on the laptop’s hard drive for the purpose of framing Hunter. * Delaware law says property is not considered abandoned until one year has passed. * The shop owner has admitted to accessing Hunter’s data before the 90 days were up. * The repair authorization form says the shop will make every effort to secure the data. When a computer is abandoned the data is to be wiped. Clawson concluded:

At this point nothing will get Republicans to back off of their attacks on Hunter Biden, who they see as the way to cause his father the most possible pain. They’ve done all this work turning his name into a synonym for corruption that they cannot prove, so they can’t abandon the effort. But Biden’s aggressive new approach could at least exact some pain in response.

Jon Stewart had economist Larry Summers on his The Problem with Jon Stewart. Walter Einenkel of Kos discussed the interview. Summers had advised every Democratic leader since Dukakis in 1988. But that doesn’t mean Summers is a progressive – he’s been doing a great job of defending corporate interests. Einenkel summarized the interview this way:

Summers has been running around for the past year saying that the federal reserve and President Joe Biden must continue to raise interest rates in order to loosen up the labor market. What that means is that there are too many people working and pulling in living wages, according to Summers, and we must therefore create an economic environment that promotes laying off millions of workers. He and others have disregarded the fact that as much, if not more, of the world’s inflation issues has been generated by corporate greed.

Michigan has done it! Laina Stebbins of Michigan Advance reported:

In a historic and profound moment for LGBTQ+ rights in Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Thursday signed legislation to expand a nearly 50-year-old civil rights law to encompass protections for LGBTQ+ Michiganders. Whitmer put her signature to Senate Bill 4 — which expands the 1976 Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA) to protect against discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation — in Lansing alongside LGBTQ+ leaders, officials and lawmakers and one of the two original cosponsors of ELCRA.

At the signing ceremony was 86 year old Rep. Melvin Larson, who was instrumental in getting the original bill passed. The other original cosponsor was Daisy Elliott, who died in 2015 at the age of 98. Larson debunked the Republican talking point that LGBTQ+ protections were not intended to be in the original bill. The photo at the top of the story is of Whitmer giving a kiss to her lesbian daughter Sherry. Anna Gustafson of the Advance reported that an eleven bill package of gun reforms has passed the Michigan Senate. Michigan law says bills can address only one thing, so there are frequently packages of bills. The package mandates universal background checks, safe storage of firearms, and permit a court to temporarily remove guns from someone who may be a danger to themselves or others. Gustafson had details on the votes and arguments from both sides. This vote comes a bit more than a month after the shooting at Michigan State University, only four miles away, and only sixteen months after the shooting at Oxford High School. Many students were present for the vote. Also present was Gabby Giffords, who was injured in a shooting in Arizona in 2011. The bill goes on to the state House. Who controls the government matters! Right now Michigan’s government is in Democratic hands. Paul Hogarth of Kos reported almost two weeks ago that the Michigan House Elections Committee held its first hearing on having Michigan join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The NPVIC is an agreement by states to award their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote rather than the winner of their state’s vote. This ends the situation that has happened twice this century in which the candidate who won the most votes did not become president. It is a way of overturning the Electoral College without actually amending the Constitution. The Compact says it doesn’t go into effect until enough states, those representing 270 electoral votes, have signed it. So far states representing 195 votes have approved the Compact. Michigan and Minnesota will hopefully approve it this year, bringing the total to 220. After these two most of the blue states will be on board and adding more states will be harder. Even so, there is hope the Compact will be in place by 2028. If Hogarth’s explanation isn’t enough David Beard and David Nir of the Downballot podcast on Kos talked to Christopher Pearson of the National Popular Vote, the organization advocating for the Compact. Nir and Beard also talk of other things, so perhaps search this transcript for Pearson. Pearson discussed his major talking points, including refuting objections to the Compact. One objection is there isn’t a national vote count. But there are 50 state counts plus DC certified by secretaries of states and it is all very public and spreadsheets are very good at adding things together. On election night news outlets keep a running tally, as they did in 2020 where Biden was ahead by 7 million votes, but the win came down to 43,000 votes in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia. One might challenge 11,000 votes in Georgia, but not 7 million votes. A benefit is that all states are swing states. We won’t have the situation of Republican candidates for president ignoring California and Democratic candidates ignoring Louisiana. New Hampshire says it will get ignore because it is so small. But big New York is currently ignored because it is so reliably blue. Currently 70% or more of our voters are ignored every presidential election cycle. And that means it is harder to get people to register to vote in those states. They don’t see that it matters. Or college students say they can’t register because they’re from another state. But under the Compact the state doesn’t matter. The people do.