GOP has trained media to take their legislative terrorism as a given

No “Sunday movie” this weekend. Yesterday’s opera was enough. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos discussed the “Limit, Save, and Grow Act” passed by House Republicans. Yeah, the Senate will reject it, and Biden has already declared a veto. It does raise the debt limit a bit, high enough that it would need to be done a year from now – in time to be a spectacle for the election. McCarter described the bill this way:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is telling President Joe Biden that he has two choices: Destroy the economy with a default on the nation’s debt, or destroy the economy by accepting ruinous cuts to government operations.

Shalanda Young, Director of the Office of Management and Budget explained that, since the Department of Defense would be exempt from cuts, everything else in the federal budget would get a 22% cut – this year, deeper cuts in later years. Young spelled out some of the impacts. Here are a couple:

A 22 percent cut would impact 25 million students in schools that teach low-income students and 7.5 million students with disabilities, which could force a reduction of up to 108,000 teachers, aides or other key staff. A 22 percent cut would result in 7,000 fewer rail safety inspection days next year alone, and 30,000 fewer miles of track inspected annually—enough track to cross the United States nearly 10 times.

McCarter added:

All of these cuts, the White House veto statement notes, citing a Moody’s Analytics report, “would lead to 780,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2024 and would meaningfully increase the risk of recession.” ... It’s not about the deficit. It’s not about keeping the nation from going into default. It’s about wrecking Joe Biden’s economy. Oh, and more tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s always about that for Republicans.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Dan Froomkin of Press Watch:

Republicans threaten to tank economy. Media blames Biden. ... Sure, Biden says he won’t negotiate, but “business groups, fiscal hawks and some congressional Democrats” want him to make a deal. So Biden, Tankersley writes, “faces a cascading set of decisions as the nation, which has already bumped up against its $31.4 trillion debt limit, barrels toward default.” But the nation is not “barreling toward default,” nor is it “careening,” or even “drifting” there. It is being pushed there by Republicans. ... Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall tweeted: “Has there ever been a clearer example of the ‘GOP has trained us to take their legislative terrorism as a given’ mentality so clear in so much MSM reporting?”

I’ve written that the goal of Russia in Ukraine is genocide. In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Russia is now saying Poland is next. Sumner quoted a tweet by Anton Garashchenko who quoted Dmitry Medvedev, who used the phrase “who should be ruthlessly exterminated like stinky rats.” Back on March 31 the Marketplace episode included a segment by Krissy Clark titled Poverty is a big business. They don’t offer a transcript, so these are my notes from listening to it again. Republicans are again pushing the idea that to receive government benefits a recipient needs to show they are working. They say this would reduce the deficit and the labor shortage and keep recipients from becoming dependent. Clark looked at a foos assistance program in Milwaukee that already has a work requirement. Compliance for that program has been outsourced to a private company, one that is multi-million and multi-national. The company requires people go through a job readiness program. In addition to the stuff about resumes, proper dress, and how to hunt for jobs, the students hear a lot of blather about “self-sufficiency” and aphorisms about hard work. The company claims they are better for this task than government because they already have a “business mentality.” They pitch their students to companies that need workers, usually for low paying jobs. As part of the student’s training tasks they are sometimes sent to zero-pay “internships” to get work experience. Divide their welfare check by the number of hours worked and this is below minimum wage. Clark talked to one of the students who got a job – doing something she had done before and heard about through friends. This job was part time, had no benefits, and she still qualified for food assistance. From the company’s side, this is good business. They get a bonus of thousands of dollars if the student stays in a job, even a low paying job, for a month. Another bonus when the student stays in the job three months. Between the management fees and bonuses the company got more than the student got in assistance. Over the last decade the company got $7 million because a few thousand people got jobs. The student now works two jobs, 60 hours a week, and still qualifies for assistance. Which means the student would do a lot better if that $7 million went to those needing assistance instead of going to the company. Since the student got these jobs on her own all the company did for her was a bit of resume coaching. The governor says he’ll be reviewing the program. Also from a month ago Laura Clawson of Kos talked about those attempts to add work requirements to assistance programs. Rep. Dusty Johnson is one of those leading the effort. Johnson said, “We know that work is the only path out of poverty.” So why are they making getting and keeping a job harder? There is already evidence that increasing work requirements only remove people from assistance rolls. And that makes them hungry. They are removed because of a complicated verification system, which may require them taking time off work. It also doesn’t allow for losing one job before finding another. No vacation, no sick leave. And if they fall out of compliance they are screwed for three years. In a pundit roundup from the end of March Chitown Kev of Kos quoted an article by Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic, discussing the comparative makeup of Congressional districts held by Republicans and Democrats. Here’s Brownstein’s summary:

Equally revealing is to examine what share of each party’s total strength in the House these seats represent. From that angle, the parties offer almost mirror-image profiles. About two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts with more seniors than the national level, while about two-thirds of Democrats represent districts with fewer of them. Roughly two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts where the median income lags the national level, while three-fifths of Democrats hold seats where incomes surpass it. Almost exactly half of Republicans, compared with only about one-third of Democrats, represent districts with an unusually high concentration of people lacking health insurance.

Yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt

This afternoon I attended a Metropolitan Opera simulcast into a local movie theater. The opera is a recent one, Champion by Terrence Blanchard. He is the first black composer to have his operas performed at the Met. This is his second opera there, the first being Fire Shut Up in My Bones about 18 months ago. Champion is about black boxer Emile Griffith whose prime career was about 1960-1965. I am definitely not a fan of boxing, so there must have been something else to draw me. And there was – Griffith was gay. The story centers around a fight with Benny Paret in Madison Square Garden in 1960. Before the fight Paret uses some nasty homophobic slurs against Griffith. And in the fight Griffith pummels Paret, which puts him in a coma, from which he later dies. That key scene – in a boxing ring on stage – is the end of Act 1. The frame for the story is Griffith as an old man, now with dementia because of his boxing career. Even so, he has deep regrets for what he did. We see the younger Griffith arrive in New York from the Virgin Islands. He wants to get a job making hats, but the shop manager sees his physique and that taps into his own dreams of managing a prizefighter. We also see Griffith visit an LGBTQ bar (though that term wasn’t in use at the time) before his big match. Between the taunts and the fight Griffith sings what makes a man a man? Is it inside or outside? How does love fit into it? Act 2 was what happened after that bout. There was further success in the ring, an attempt to marry though they both sing about the loneliness, and the decline and end of his career. Then there is an attempt to find peace because he feels haunted by the dead man. Close to the end the old Griffith sings “I killed a man and the world forgave me, but yet I loved a man and the world wants to kill me.” The music is described as an opera in jazz. There are jazz elements and there are also long sections that sound like modern orchestral writing. I enjoyed all of it – the music, the singing, the story, the acting, and the sets and costumes. I had written about David Gianforte, child of Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, who is nonbinary and lobbied their father to veto the anti-trans bills being passed by the state’s legislature. Charles Jay of Daily Kos, sometimes quoting a story in the Montana Free Press tells a more complete story of what happened between father and child. Here’s a quote from the MFP:

“It’s bizarre to me to read the press release that my father put out,” David said. “He talks about compassion toward children, the youth of Montana, while simultaneously taking away health care from the youth in Montana. It’s basically a contradiction in my mind.”

And Jay ends with this:

But David Gianforte told the Free Press that he didn’t expect his conversation with his father to change the outcome of any of the anti-LGBTQ bills. “He is concerned about his career … And he’s aware that being able to stay in the position of governor is dependent on him staying in favor of the Republican Party,” David said. “And I believe that that affects his decisions on some of these bills.” But David said people need to speak candidly and openly in order to move forward, in their own families or in the public arena. “I feel like I have a voice and I can be heard. And I feel, not only in communicating with my father, that’s not necessarily the main point, but also just showing support for the transgender community in Montana,” David said. “I think that could be meaningful, especially at this time.”

Michael Harriot saw the question “What’s wrong with a classical education?” The person posing is was trying to denigrate black people and implying getting a classical education was far superior to what black people were getting. But Harriot took the question seriously. He was homeschooled and from his mother knew what the phrase meant – learning about Socrates, Plato, and the rest, also learning Greek and Latin which are the roots of about 60% of English. Students learn critical reasoning and how to debate. So what’s wrong with that? Two things wrong. First, it declares what “smart” is. A “smart” person would know what this, this, and this is. Harriot uses the counter example of a cousin who could play anything by ear and do it on at least three instruments. But he couldn’t read music. Gatekeepers to some music groups declared he wasn’t smart enough to join.

Classical Education, that's how. It doesn't measure a student's ability to learn or teach them TO LEARN. It teaches students to learn LIKE WHITE PEOPLE LEARN who have already been deemed smart because they know white things.

Second, those clasicists didn’t know things. They thought the sun revolved around the earth. So why do we base our education on what people believed two thousand years ago? That makes it hard to progress as a society.

Unless, of course, progress is not your goal. If your goal is to ensure that white people are smart, then Classical Education works great. Smart white people write three-act plays like the Greeks and speak Latin at dinner parties and play baroque music on violins. People without a classic education make musical instruments out of turntables because they can't read a treble clef. Without a Classic education, you might start music that evokes MORE EMOTION than the Beethoven with words that Shakespeare didn't and engineer an entirely different form of recording. Or you might invent a cotton gin or a light bulb or a whole genre that WHITE PEOPLE CAN'T DO.

Strange that Sheri Few, a lady now pushing hard to institute a classical education, didn’t get a classical education and has never worked as an educator. She must be doing it for a reason... I’m linking to another pundit roundup, this time not for the pundits, but for the comments. Both of the comments of interest are by Captain Frogbert. In the first comment he quoted Awful Falafal Waffles of Kos:

In the minds of conservatives there are: Two races: White and political Two genders: Male and political Two sexualities: Straight and political Two religions: Christian and political

Frogbert added:

[DeSantis,] like nearly all conservatives, believes the entire world should always be a flattering reflection of himself. Anything that does not flatter his bloated ego is wrong, evil, and “political.” Whatever he says and wants can’t be political because it’s simply the world as it should be and MUST be in order that he doesn’t feel lessened by anyone failing to constantly affirm he is the role model for all humanity.

In the second comment Frogbert quoted Tom Nichols of The Atlantic:

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.

Frogbert added:

It’s an entire culture of people who believe they are entitled to far more than they have, and who believe the only reason they are not rock stars/sports legends/sex gods/billionaires/living gods is that everything they are entitled to has been illegally handed to the people they hate (which is everyone not themselves). It’s a culture of entitlement, grievance, and violence. And the greatest threat this nation and world has ever faced.

TealBomb of Kos, in a post from ten days ago, started with:

I planned to start this post with this statistic from the Gun Violence Archive, "As of April 18, at least 5,358 Americans have died from gun violence in 2023, and another 7,128 have died by suicide." But that statistic is already out of date. The number actually increased in the time it took me to write this post. And by the time you read this, the country's gun-related death toll will be even higher. Enough is enough.

And since you’re reading it several days later, yes, the numbers have gone up. She then has a couple things that have improved gun safety, and a few that made the situation worse. She then lists things that Congress can do but aren’t. Mark Sumner of Kos looked at the long list of recent shootings in which small infractions prompted people to fire. He includes a list of the incidents. As part of that he looked at the phrase “An armed society is a polite society.” He wrote:

But even if it were a fictional quote taken completely out of context, the saying turns out to be true, in a way. In a sufficiently armed society, any small transgression is met with bullets. America is sufficiently armed. ... In an armed society, the perceived insult of being asked not to cuss at a child is a shooting offense. Opening someone’s car door is a shooting offense. Pulling into a driveway where the owner was tired of people using their little stretch of blacktop to turn around is a shooting offense. Asking someone to slow down is a shooting offense. Anything that might have ended with an exchange of fists, or just hot words, a raised finger behind a window, or even with one person just mumbling under their breath is a shooting offense. That’s the point of the saying. In an armed society, you don’t dare offend anyone, at any time, about anything. Because everything, no matter how trivial, is a shooting offense. America … is an armed society. We’ve reached that dystopia where a child fetching a basketball, or a cheerleader touching the wrong car on her way back from practice, or a kid stepping onto the wrong porch doesn’t get words or glares. It gets bullets. ... These are such tiny, ordinary, everyday events that they should be forgotten in a moment. That guy next door? Sorry, I don’t remember. What was his name again? Except they turn into trauma, or injury, that can last a lifetime. Or they cut that lifetime hugely short. ... All those scenes you see on TV and movies where multiple people point at each other and no one shoots? Those. Are. Bulls---. When two people have guns, they both shoot. Or at least one of them does. Standoffs make for good tension on screen, but people shoot and keep shooting in real life. If the second person doesn’t shoot, it’s because the first shot saw to that. ... The only way to stop the smallest action from bringing the threat of death, is to stop being an armed society. There are plenty of democracies around the planet which are not. In fact, every other democracy on the planet is not. Somehow they maintain their freedoms even when they can’t shoot someone for being on their porch, touching their car, etc.

And those stand your ground laws, they are written so that a prosecutor has to prove the shooter was not afraid. But fear is why they have a gun in the first place. Dave Grandlund tweeted a cartoon of what could get you killed. He shows tombstones with, “Turning in a driveway.” “Went to wrong address.” “Stray ball.” “Music too loud.” And more. AnonOpsUnited tweeted a cartoon of a character saying, “Remember kids, Guns don’t kill you. The GOP does.” Along with that the tweet includes nine politicians that accept ...

NRA's Blood Money $104,456 Rand Paul $176,274 Ted Cruz $226,007 Chuck Grassley $1,267,139 Mitch McConnell $1,269,486 Ron Johnson $1,306,130 Marsha Blackburn $1,391,548 Josh Hawley $3,303,355 Marco Rubio $13,647,676 Mitt Romney Republicans are killing children

I wrote several days ago that I now understand that Republicans – anyone who blocks gun reform – are doing it for more than the big bundle of cash they are getting from the NRA. They want those deaths. They want the mayhem. They want the trauma. This article, these cartoons, and others I read recently reminded me of one more thing their inaction and obstruction is doing. They are preparing us for mass death.

Maintaining the moral high ground

Hunter of Daily Kos wrote about the travails of Elon Musk trying to get the verified blue checkmark on Twitter accounts to do what he wants it to do. This shows the guy has no concept of the way humans think. Musk finally carried through with his threat to reserve the verified status for those who paid him $8 a month. This status elevats a person’s tweets to the top of a thread of replies. Musk intended it for his far-right allies, the ones he wanted to promote. Musk wanted people to pay for their chance to be at the top of replies. But nearly all – including the muppet Elmo – said goodbye to the checkmark. Which mean those who still had a checkmark were the far-right fringe, which made knowing who to block easy. Perhaps even an app could do that. Then Musk tried to give a checkmark to celebrities – such as Stephen King – who responded they don’t want it, they don’t want to be identified as far-right. Checkmarks were bestowed on accounts with a million or more followers in an attempt to thwart methods of automatically blocking accounts. Those users denied paying for it and didn’t want it either. Wrote Hunter:

Musk instituted a system by which the most dedicated spammers, trolls, incels, racists, and the rest of the internet's least popular people can pay to play their way into becoming the featured "content" of the Musk hellsite. He's made the blue check synonymous with "a person whose opinions are so deeply unpopular that they could only receive attention by paying for it." He's made it toxic.

Kos of Kos discussed the large number of conservatives who see the firing of Tucker Carlson from Fox News as the death of the First Amendment. It only shows these people don’t understand the First Amendment. He began is discussion with:

No constitutional amendment is more misunderstood than the First, despite being just a handful of plain English words. And there’s nothing like Tucker Carlson’s firing at Fox News to bring out the ignorance in full force, with too many people thinking that a right to free speech somehow also means a right to a platform.

I add that while the First may be the most misunderstood, the Second is right behind it. SemDem of the Kos community reported there is a case before the Supreme Court that could devastate unions. There has always been a tussle between corporations and unions, especially in the last forty years when profits are less likely to be shared with the workers. Over the last two years union membership has exploded. Along with it has been union busting efforts. That includes corporations simply ignoring the union – and there isn’t a lot a union can do other than take the corporation to court (which could take a decade) or to strike. Leonard Leo, head of the Federalist Society, has been doing considerable work to get conservatives onto courts – and under the nasty guy and Bush II has been quite successful at it (see: Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch, even Roberts and likely Alito, and hundreds more in other federal courts). His latest project is to “crush liberal dominance.” And that includes delivering a death blow to unions. The case before the court, Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters is about a strike at a concrete mixing company that left behind a bit of damage. Glacier Northwest sued the union for $11K (yeah, not much). But if any company could sue a union over damages – say food that spoiled in the fridge while workers were on strike plus lost business – there goes the ability of a union to strike. This case goes before a Supreme Court that does what it wants, disregarding precedent, and has always given corporations what they want. Doesn’t look good. Keep in mind that things we now see as an essential part of working life – the weekend and the 40 hour week among them – we have because of unions. Even so, in countries that respect their unions they have paid vacation, sick days, and parental leave. And a decent minimum wage. David Nir and David Beard of Kos Elections are hosts of the Downballot podcast. In the second part of last week’s episode they talk to Matthew Sugart, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. I read through the transcript and summarized a 48 minute discussion. The US uses a majoritarian system, also known as winner take all. If your candidate gets 50% plus 1 vote your party is represented in Congress or the legislature. If your candidate doesn’t meet that threshold then your party does not represent your district and almost half of the citizens may feel they aren’t heard. Some countries use proportional representation, with variations in method. In countries that use it their citizens want to keep it. Instead of one representative from a district there are five (or ten, or 150). Yes, that changes the size of districts. For maybe one or two of the candidates the citizens vote directly for the candidate. For the rest they vote for the party. The number of representatives from each party are based on the percentage of votes that party got. If they got 60% of the vote they are awarded 60% of the seats. Yeah, 50% of the vote and five seats means a party should get two and a half seats, which isn’t possible. There are also several ways a party chooses which candidates get the seats. In some places the party ranks them, in others the voters do. There are several advantages of the proportional system. Candidates have to campaign in all districts, rather than ignoring the ones that don’t have a tight race. Also, the threshold for a small party to get a seat is much lower – in the case of a five-seat district it is 20% instead of 50%. As for applying this in the US, there is nothing in the Constitution and federal law that would prohibit it. In a Ukraine update from Friday of last week Mark Sumner of Kos discussed an incident where it looked like Russia bombed its own city of Belgorod, not the first time that has happened. The news has been full of reports of Russia bombing and sending missiles into Ukraine. There was another of those just last night. Which leads to an interesting question. Why isn’t Ukraine bombing Russia?

One thing should be clear right from the start—if Ukraine wanted to destroy the Russian city of Belgorod, or at least cause enormous damage and kill many Russian civilians, it could do so.

Since Belgorod, only 30km from the border, is a rail nexus and a lot of Russian war supplies go through the city the thought of bombing it had likely been tempting. Yeah, a few military related sites have exploded. But nothing has damaged the city, as Russia has done to Ukrainian cities. Russia bombs Ukrainian cities...

Because they can. Because it kills people. Because it causes suffering and misery for Ukrainians.

And why doesn’t Ukraine do the same?

Ukraine’s restraint in not attacking Russian towns and cities, when it very much could, is in part because it wants to maintain the moral high ground. No matter how much the West shares with Ukraine, or how foolishly Russia wastes its men and materiel, Ukraine is still the underdog in this fight. Maintaining the moral high ground is important to how Ukraine presents itself to the world. Russia brought this fight to Ukraine, not the other way around. Ukraine doesn’t want to do anything that makes them appear as the aggressor, even if it’s plain old retaliation. Ukraine is defending its nation from an illegal, unprovoked invasion. Period.

From Thursday of last week Sumner discussed a speech by Secretary of State Tony Blinken on why we’re fighting there. Sumner then has a few comments on the latest round of peace proposals. He wrote:

Defending Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is about much more than standing up for one nation’s right to choose its own path, as fundamental as that right is. It’s also about defending an international order where no nation can redraw the borders of another by force. If we fail to defend this principle, when the Kremlin is so flagrantly violating it, we send a message to aggressors everywhere that they can ignore it, too. We put every country at risk. ... Here’s the reality. None of us chose this war. Not the Ukrainians, who knew the crushing toll it would take. Not the United States, which warned that it was coming and worked to prevent it … One man chose this war. One man can end it. Because if Russia stops fighting, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. As Russian sources keep making clear, that’s not just true of the nation of Ukraine. It’s also true of the people of Ukraine. With the latest round of peace proposals being pressed by multiple analysts, it’s worth remembering that all these supposed solutions for “lasting peace” are actually formulas for three things: * Dividing Ukraine * Preventing Ukraine from entering NATO * Giving Russia a chance to rebuild their military

The proposals also ignore “what Russia has done in Ukraine.” They ignore the mass graves and war crimes, the theft of children, the destruction of many cities, especially Mariupol. The proposals also ignore the crimes Russia wants to commit – Putin and his propagandists have called for the total elimination of Ukrainians, for a genocide. We may get tired of the war and of funding the war, but the consequences of implementing any of these “peace” plans will be disaster. The Intel Crab tweeted that Google Earth has updated their satellite images of Mariupol. What is visible is a great deal of destruction. In a post from a couple days ago Sumner discussed the war of apps. There is an app called Alpine Quest that, to the horror of and with the disavowal from the makers, has become important for Russians to mark the location of Ukrainian troops so other forces who are better positioned can attack. Even though the maker prevents downloading to Russian devices the app has been around for a decade and is easily shared. Russia has also created several other apps. And, of course, Ukrainian military people have come up with a comparable app of their own, plus a few more. Perhaps after the war Ukraine could be the next place to attract investment to tap into their technical prowess. Sumner, who used to work in mining, talked about the technology developed 30 years ago to keep track of all the mining vehicles. Each one required the installation of $40K of special hardware. Fifteen years ago he realized all that could be replaced with an app on smartphones. He earned a lot of hate from the drivers. Of course, the best thing smartphones do for soldiers is to keep them in contact with family.

Detailed plans for how they will wreck the federal government

In the comment section of a pundit roundup for Daily Kos Denise Oliver Velez posted (with protest) a few cartoons joking about Biden’s age. That’s a big topic now that he has announced another run for the presidency and a lot of stories are noting that Biden will be 86 at the end of his second term. Velez noted that these jokes and stories leave out that the nasty guy is only three years younger, so will be 83 in 2028. Also left out: Biden is healthy and of sound mind, while the nasty guy isn’t healthy and has been showing signs of dementia. And VP Harris will be in her early 60s during that second term. Not long after Tennessee Republicans expelled two black representatives who they felt disrespected them for speaking against their schemes of oppression and hit significant blowback, Republicans in another state want to do the same. This time the scene is Montana. It also has a Republican supermajority with plans for oppression. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported in this case it is transgender children. In defiant opposition is Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who is a transgender woman. Zephyr spoke against the bill, saying denying care means transgender children die. She hoped at the next invocation prayer “you see the blood on your hands.” Yeah, bigots trying to implement oppression do not like to be called out on their bigotry. They demanded Zephyr apologize. She refused. So on Thursday, April 20, they censured her. During debates on Thursday and Friday they would not recognize her to join the debate. On Monday a crowd of protesters gathered outside the Capitol chanting, “Let her speak!” An AP article posted on Kos reported after the rally outside the protest moved inside to the House gallery and the same chant brought House business to a halt. House leadership asked police to clear the gallery, and seven were arrested. They claimed an unacceptable attack on civil discourse, though nothing was damaged and no one was injured or even threatened. Tuesday’s floor session was canceled. Michel Martin of NPR spoke to Mara Silvers of the Montana Free Press. That Republican supermajority voted to bar Zephyr from the House floor for the rest of the session. She can vote, but not participate in debates. The reason for their action was they said Zephyr encouraged the protests in the gallery by holding a microphone in the air. While the anti-transgender bill will easily pass, the governor’s signature is no longer guaranteed. That’s because David Gianforte, child of the governor, has publicly come out as nonbinary and has been lobbying their father, saying their own friends will be harmed by the bill. Einenkel also reported that these efforts of oppression are deeply unpopular. When a progressive policy is on the ballot it passes easily. So the Republican effort now is to make it harder to put progressive policies on the ballot. Ohio residents are working to get a constitutional amendment preserving abortions on the November ballot. So Republicans are working to get an amendment raising the level of votes needed to ratify an amendment onto the August primary ballot, when the turnout is lower. The Missouri legislature is also getting such an amendment onto the ballot, even without the threat of preserving abortion. Dartagnan of the Kos community reported Republicans have also noticed the youngest voters are going strongly for Democrats. So they’re increasing their efforts at suppression of college student voters. In a functioning democracy the politicians would modify their platform when they see what they propose is widely unpopular. But that’s not what America has. Instead of changing the platform they change who can vote, as they yell about the youth being radically indoctrinated. In the process they are turning off young voters – which could be a big deal because people tend to vote for the same party their entire lives. Shove them away when they’re young means shoving them away for a lifetime. Nick Anderson of RA News of Texas tweeted a cartoon in response to a new Texas law requiring the Jewish Christian Ten Commandments be posted in every school. The cartoon shows a man shoving a Ten Commandment tablet into a child’s mouth as the man says, “Repeat after me: Schools are for education, not indoctrination!” Meteor Blades of Kos wrote about the new Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise published by the Heritage Foundation. This 900 page manifesto details exactly what conservatives want to do to the federal government whenever they get the chance. The 30 chapters discuss what they want done with the presidency, each federal department, personnel agencies, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Federal Reserve, Export-Import Bank, Small Business Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Elections Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and a few more. Each chapter is written by a person who knows a bit about that department or agency – such as Ben Carson, former head of HUD writing about HUD. We can’t say we’ll hope for the best if Republicans are able to seize control. These people have detailed plans for how they will wreck the federal government, to make sure it can’t help the poor and those who need it. There will be no protection of the little guy from the big guy. Instead, what’s left of the government will be reworked to help the rich and punish those whom the rich want punished (which is everyone not rich). David Atkins, a member of the DNC from California, tweeted a thread that begins with a chart of the 2016 electorate (the 2020 data not available). It has dots representing voters, red for Republican, blue for Democrat. The dots are spread with economic liberals to the left and economic conservatives to the right. Also, social liberals are on the bottom and social conservatives are on top. The blue dots are mostly in the lower left quadrant. The red dots are mostly in the top half with the center of the large cluster a bit to the right of the balance between economic liberal and conservative. Atkins used the chart to explain Democrats are chasing the wrong thing. The quadrant of those who are economic conservative and socially liberal is mostly empty. And the social conservative and economic liberals, the people that love Social Security but hate LGBTQ people, aren’t going to vote for Dems. That means Democrats shouldn’t try to chase moderates, they should move even more liberal in both social and economic issues. There is no group they would lose if they did. When I can I end a post with something uplifting or witty. Alas, not today. Leah McElrath tweeted a link to an article in the New York Times (no paywall on this one) about the crime scene investigators and what they saw at the Sandy Hook school after the shooting. One of the milder things they dealt with was dumping out twenty uneaten lunches and mistakenly reading a love note from a mother to a child. You think we have to witness an event to preserve it? Go see what these people saw before answering that question. This isn’t an issue of public perception. Not seeing the horror is different from refusing to understand the horror. McElrath added:

There are three events over the past two decades that normalized mass death in ways that still send chills down my spine: • The 9/11 attacks • The Sandy Hook massacre • The COVID pandemic ... I am sharing it because we must remember the massacre of our innocent was once unthinkable. It is now not only thinkable but has been repeated many times on various scales. Our children now drill for these scenarios. ... Living in fear is NOT freedom.

If the law can’t get him on his crime, get him on his taxes

My Sunday movie was more a combination of concert and documentary. It was Identity: A Song Cycle presented by Against the Grain Theatre. Shortly after George Floyd was murdered, baritone Elliot Madore of Toronto realized he needed to come to grips with being biracial. He posted his thoughts to Instagram. With composer Dinuk Wijeratne and poet Shauntay Grant they created this song cycle. Madore’s singing seems somewhat classical, but the accompaniment is a jazz trio – piano, bass, and percussion. Wijeratne is one of the instrumentalists, I think piano. It was filmed in a studio with a relaxed atmosphere. In between the songs are pictures of Madore as a boy as he discusses his identity. He grew up in a loving family with a single mother and doting grandparents. He was eight before his mother said anything about his father. On being shown a picture of the man his reaction was hey wait, this guy has dark skin! He heard from his father briefly when he was 16 and has yet to meet him. Is he white? Culturally yes. Is he black? His skin is dark enough that some think he might be Italian or Spanish. But he doesn’t have any of the culture. For a long time he didn’t want to talk about his identity. He had imposter syndrome. One of the songs talks about being half this, half that, and I’m tired of the boxes and categories and tags. He is tired of friends and colleagues insisting the he is white (as in why would you want to give up your cultural superiority?). He is thankful for the black colleague who said, “Welcome home.” This video has been available for about six months. I finally saw it on the last day before it is set aside for a while. Sorry, you can’t find it and view it right now. I’ve now seen a couple things by Against the Grain Theatre. Both have been impressive and quite different. The earlier piece was Handel’s Messiah with each of the solos done by a different singer, most of them indigenous and singing in their own language and many with stunning Canadian scenery as backdrop. They’ve also done a new interpretation of Bluebeard’s Castle by Bela Bartok. Instead of Judith playing mind games with Bluebeard about what happened to his previous wives, this one imagines Judith sinking into dementia. It’s an intriguing concept, but it was done live and not recorded, so I haven’t seen it. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated today. The peaks in the number of new cases per day over the last several weeks are looking pretty good! They are 1022, 847, 774, 584, 427, and 349. In the same week that the peak was over 1000 there was one day with 16 deaths and one with 14. Since then the deaths per day have been 14 and under, mostly in the single digits. The big news of the week has been Fox News firing Tucker Carlson. There are lots of media stories about it such as this one by Hunter of Daily Kos. There is speculation of why the network booted its most popular host. The most obvious reason is the $787 million settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting, which happened just last week. Joan McCarter of Kos also discusses the reasons for the firing. Was it about Carlson’s lies over the ongoing coverage of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack? That was two years ago. But... Ray Epps, an insurrectionist, was accused by Carlson of being an FBI plant. Epps’ harassment has gotten so bad he’s on the run and now he’s suing Fox. Leah McElrath tweeted that perhaps Carlson’s ouster is to give the network respectability during these lawsuits and in advance of the 2024 election. Or it was because the discovery process for the Dominion case uncovered skeletons in his closets. Keeping those from coming to light might be a reason why Fox settled. Those skeletons may be related to how Carlson harassed female staff. Now that he’s gone McElrath said a thought that has crossed her mind is the nasty guy asking Carlson to be vice nasty. Others have suggested he might run for the top job. Hunter looked again at the idea that Carlson was booted because of the lies that made up his show. Why would Fox News put up with his lies for all these years only to dump him now? Hunter cataloged those lies: Promotion of “Great Replacement” claims. Promotion of election hoaxes. Of anti-vaccine hoaxes. Of violent far-right figures. Of conspiracy theories against conservatism’s enemies. Of Russia over Ukraine. He demanded retaliation against Fox reporters who discredited the Big Lie. He defended the Capitol attack. And he attacked the gender of M&Ms. One voice I read during the week warned us that though Carlson is gone from Fox that does not mean his voice will go silent. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that the Russia propaganda machine is quite disappointed that Carlson has been booted. Clips from his show had been a regular feature of Russian broadcasts because they could say, “See! A prominent American broadcaster agrees with us!” So Tucker, need a job? Russia would gladly hire you. Or maybe you cold put on a Russian uniform and fight in Ukraine? Charles Jay of the Kos community reported that the abortion pill ruling puts the Supreme Court in a bind. The case asks the justices whether restrictions can be placed on a drug the FDA approved decades ago. It’s a bind because the case is between Big Pharma (big corporations in general) and religious rights. Siding with corporations is why the Federalist Society nominated the conservative justices to the court. Their conservative corporate values also came with conservative religious values, which were on display when Roe was overturned. But those religious values will be in conflict with the corporate values. As for the abortion pill, an Associated Press story posted on Kos reported late Friday, just before their extended deadline, the justices ruled it can remain available without restrictions while the case is being litigated. It is still before the conservative 5th Circuit Court and will likely be back before the Supremes next year or the year after. Joan McCarter of Kos reported another Supreme corruption scandal. This one involved Justice Neil Gorsuch. He had a Colorado property he wanted to sell, but had no takers. Nine days after his confirmation it sold. He properly disclosed the sale but carefully did not disclose the seller was Brian Duffey, CEO of Greenberg Taurig, a powerhouse law firm with regular business before the court. The legacy of Chief Justice John Roberts: Corruption. The old saying, I think applied to Al Capone, is that if the law can’t get him on his crime, get him on his taxes. Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee may be trying to make that also true for Justice Clarence Thomas. If those gifts from Harlan Crow were as expensive as they appear to be then they were way above the annual gift tax exclusion. With the House in Republican hands doing something about the corruption in the Supremes is likely not possible. And Wyden’s attempts likely won’t cause Thomas to behave or respond to invitations or subpoenas to appear before a Senate Committee. But Wyden sure can create a big public relations mess going into the 2024 election year. Jesse Duquette tweeted a cartoon of Thomas in an alley doorway saying, “Pssst, hey you... wanna buy a ruling?" In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jill Filipovic on Substack discussing why conservatives are obsessed with gender identity.

Conservatives who push and support these bills claim to be concerned about “gender ideology” perverting young minds — telling boys they can be girls and vice versa, allowing men to compete in women’s sports, giving children hormones and genital surgeries. This is all pretty dishonest. Members of the conservative movement aren’t concerned about women’s sports (otherwise they’d be funding them), children’s health (otherwise they’d be fighting the number-one killer of children), or women’s rights (otherwise they wouldn’t be virulent misogynists attacking women’s rights at every turn, banning abortion, and electing rapists to office). They care about liberal “gender ideology” for one reason: Because they want to impose and enforce their own right-wing gender ideology on the public.

Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star Tribune tweeted a cartoon of a grumpy man saying, “I don’t want big gov’t coming in and taking away my freedom! I just want it to take away hers.” McElrath linked to an article in Tech Crunch that reported the Missouri government set up a website to allow citizens to report on “transgender concerns” – otherwise known as a snitch site. The response: citizens spammed it until it crashed.

A philosophy that justifies being assholes

Hunter of Daily Kos takes apart a new trend (that has lots of features of old trends). He discussed an article in the British site The Telegraph about the “pronatalism” movement sweeping the wealthy tech bros of Silicon Valley. Here is my summary of the movement: Because these people equate their wealth with superiority they assume their genes must also be superior. Therefore they must produce more kids. This philosophy also says that the top problem in the world is not enough kids, without them the world is doomed. Having more kids is more important than climate change and a world so polluted it may soon have trouble sustaining life – problems made worse by too many people. It’s also more important than the proliferation of guns, economic inequality, and wars. Must be nice to have a philosophy that justifies being assholes. Yeah, that’s the summary. Alas, there are many philosophies and religions that justify being assholes. Hunter’s full rant is still a good read. He even notes that with a story this absurd with an internal logic this messy it is hard to tell if the Telegraph reporter is teasing us. BuzzFeed has announced they are shutting down their news department due to a lack of money. So what’s left? Fluff? Clickbait? Sarah Kendzior explains why this is bad news:

BuzzFeed News was one of few outlets to report in depth about transnational organized crime and its ties to government. The type of reporting they were doing a few years ago has essentially vanished, despite the topic's popularity. I wonder what will happen to their archives. Buzzfeed News was targeted by the Mueller probe because its reporters dared to dig deep into institutional corruption - long-term corruption that revealed how awful Mueller was in multiple jobs.

Clyde Haberman, former columnist for the New York Times, tweeted:

Years ago, a stranger came to my NY apartment building wanting to speak to me about a topic he hoped I'd write about. The befuddled doorman let him up. I was leery but I talked to the guy, then saw him to the door. The point is: I didn't shoot him. US gun madness has to stop.

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer added:

Most people #onhere support journalism and say it's critical for saving democracy. Here's what no one talks about: Great journalism depends on talking to strangers. And it's becoming impossible to talk to strangers in America

A few days ago a 16 year old black boy name Ralph Yarl went to pick up his twin brothers and knocked on the wrong door. 84 year old Andrew Lester shot Yarl. Thankfully, the boy survived and appears to be healing well. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed that black boys and men appear to whites to be bigger, stronger, and more threatening than they actually are. Lester was sure Yarl was six foot tall, when he’s only 5-foot-8 and weighs only 140 pounds. Tamir Rice was described as a 12-year old in an adult body. Michael Brown was compared to Hulk Hogan. Several studies have shown this consistent bias. As for Lester, Dartagnan wrote:

The New York Times interviewed neighbors and relatives of Lester, who described him as “surly,” sometimes “aggressive, and spen[ding] considerable time at home in a living room chair, watching conservative news programs at high volume.” In other words, he seems to be just the type of person—with a hair-trigger temper, just waiting to feel threatened—who one might expect to react violently to the unexpected appearance of a young Black male.

I write a great deal about the social hierarchy, how people are so caught up in their position in the hierarchy they seem to spend all their time oppressing people they think should be lower than themselves. A major part of maintaining the hierarchy is convincing those in the lower levels that their place is how things are supposed to be, that being dumped on by the higher levels is natural. Here’s an attempt at that kind of justification. I’m quite interested in the rebuttals. Yann LeCun, professor at NYU and chief AI scientist at Meta, tweeted to justify that AI won’t dominate humans.

Humans are hardwired by evolution to be a social species with hierarchical structure. This includes hardwired drives for dominance or submission. AI assistants will simply have hardwired drives to submit and not dominate.

Leah McElrath replied:

1) Your assertions are not supported by science. 2) Humans aren’t computers. We are not “wired” but rather have neuroplasticity that enables our adaptation. 3) Cooperation contributed to the rise our species. Civilization dates back to the first healed human femur bone fossil.

Daniel Baryon also replied to LeCun:

This is false. In fact, we have very little in common with species that function on natural hierarchies. Very few mammals do. Our species achieved its success by cooperation and the extension of ethical principles to other members of the species, regardless of prestige.

Peter Gelderloos, who is fighting for a world of care, imagination, and mutual aid, also replied:

We should be immensely worried that the people with the most power to sculpt the social architecture of the next decades promote the same kinds of pseudo-science used to justify slavery and segregation.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, had a few interesting quotes. Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann of The Atlantic discussed Fox News lies and that the National Enquirer pushed false info while hiding true info in helping the nasty guy gain power. The quote ends with:

Together they have succeeded in polluting the marketplace of ideas in which democratic politics is supposed to thrive.

Dworkin quoted James Poniewozik of NYT, who discussed Fox News and Tucker Carlson, who said, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”

Say this for Carlson, he can pack a lot into a few words. There’s an implicit agreement here: Whether or not you, the viewer, are correct in the technical sense, you are right in the larger sense. You are the authentic voice of this country. So you deserve to feel right about your beliefs, about your enemies, about how you have been cheated. You deserve — through whatever combination of insinuation or hypotheticals or myths — to have the space to keep believing it, without us making that harder. All this, trial or no trial, makes clear what Fox News really is. It’s a service provider. That service is the maintenance of a reality bubble and the deference to beliefs that Fox’s hosts helped shape.

After that quote Dworkin added (addressing my annoyance that Dominion didn’t force more accountability onto Fox News):

The other side of the coin is that Dominion, which settled their libel suit for $787.5 million, is also corporation. Corporations are not people, my friend. They are not activists, and their job is to make money, not stick it to Fox. That’s our job.

Dworkin finally quoted Oliver Willis on Substack who discussed the conservative believe that Gen Z is rejecting them because the “radical indoctrination” by the left.

They think that the Borg-like Boogeyman creature they caricature as “the left” has burrowed its way into young minds, via high school and college teachers and professors who are purportedly preaching Karl Marx like biblical heretics, pop culture icons like Cardi B who are imparting life lessons about wet genitals, and TikTok videos that are supposedly making everyday teens decide to become transgender. As always, the Left of the right’s fevered nightmares are impressive and terrifying. Of course, this is all nonsense. What is really happening in America is that young Americans are lashing out at the nightmares built by years of conservative policy and rhetoric, because those toxic ideas are making their lives worse.

She loved her son and wouldn’t put up with this kind of nonsense

The suit brought by Dominion Voting against Fox News has concluded. This is the suit the Dominion voting machine company brought against the media giant asking for $1.6 billion for lying about the 2020 election and accusing Dominion of programming its machines to flip votes. That, of course, hurt Dominion’s reputation and business. Thus the suit. On March 31, three weeks ago, after the parties had been going at this for a while and after Dominion released lots of emails showing Fox management knew what was going on-air was a lie, Judge Eric Davis gave a ruling. KeithDB of the Daily Kos community reported the ruling said Fox News had lied and that Dominion had been defamed by those lies. Going into the trial Fox cannot dispute those lies and cannot dispute the defamation. Fox cannot claim it is just reporting news about a famous person. That means the court comes down to one thing: was that defamation actual malice. There is a standard definition of malice that must be met. And meeting that definition looked likely. And on Wednesday, April 19, Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Dominion and Fox News settled, avoiding the trial. That came after the start of the trial was delayed, so all the jury heard was a thank you from the judge. The settlement is that Fox News will pay $787 million, just under half of what Dominion wanted. And Fox’s lawyers issued a statement saying “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” That is definitely a non-apology. But Fox on-air hosts don’t (and won’t) have to say anything other than the lawsuit is over. They will hear continued claims about fraud in the 2020 election, even if Dominion isn’t named. That means Fox – and Tucker Carlson – can claim they won the suit. And go back to their usual lies. As for that $787 million – that’s all of 5% of Fox News revenue for 2022. This trial of Dominion against Fox News was the best shot of reining them in that will come in a long while. We – those who treasure democracy – lost a chance. Perhaps Smartmatic’s similar case will go better. And it gets worse. Sumner reported that Fox is looking to us to pay its bill. Many TV stations are bundled together and a viewer gets access to all the channels in the bundle. That means people who don’t watch, perhaps are even disgusted by, Fox News pay for Fox News. And Fox need only go to the cable services and when the contract is up for renewal demand a higher fee. This subscription bundling is why Fox News can be quite profitable without airing commercials. Fox News can also declare the settlement is a legal expense ordinary and necessary for doing business – and get a hefty tax break. Wrote Sumner:

No apology. No admission of guilt. Bills covered by people who don’t watch Fox. Massive tax break. Yeah. That’ll teach ‘em. Fox News will never do that again.

Yeah, I’m disgusted by it all. I had written that Fox News has been trying to make a story of a Bud Lite commercial featuring a transgender person. Walter Einenkel of Kos explains another part of their coverage – Fox News is not covering the recent scandal around Justice Clarence Thomas. Hunter of Kos reported that Thomas was also given money by billionaire Harlan Crow in the form of Crow buying property from Thomas. Wrote Hunter:

If you're familiar with any of Thomas' work on actual Supreme Court cases, that's not terribly surprising. When it comes to omitting inconvenient details and regularly inventing new theories to explain why most of the other details never mattered to begin with, Thomas' opinions are masterpieces. Of course Thomas doesn't think "a billionaire Republican activist-donor who sponsors my vacation lifestyle purchased my mom's house so that he can build a museum honoring my greatness" would rise to the level of reportable income. It falls in the narrow disclosure gap outlined by subsection I Don't Have To, paragraph Bite Me. CNN now has some news updates on the land-deal story, and none of it is any better for Thomas than it was before. Thomas now says he intends to amend his financial disclosures, yet again, to disclose the 2014 sale of his mother's house to Crow. According to a "source close to Thomas," Thomas believed the sale wasn't required to be disclosed because he allegedly "lost money" in the transaction. This is absolute hokum, and Thomas is always a real hard-ass when deciding cases in which a defendant was confused about the rules and got wrecked by our legal systems because of it. He despises the idea that you're allowed a second chance if your lawyer accidentally flubs your case due to an egregious oversight. He despises the idea that you should get a chance to correct the record. When it comes to himself, he's still regularly re-re-updating disclosure forms filed during the Obama administration. To repeat: All of this is ridiculous. Absurd.

The Daily Show was hosted by its own correspondent Jordan Klepper. He had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a guest and she put it simply: Supreme Court justice should not be receiving money from anyone. That’s why we pay salaries to public servants. Want to live lavishly? Resign. Biden has had a pretty good run getting his nominees for federal courts approved. He’s kept up the pace, nominating a diverse pool of progressive people. His approvals are ahead of what the nasty guy did at the corresponding point in his term. Then Dianne Feinstein, who is 89, possibly suffering from dementia, and has already announced her retirement, had a bad case of shingles. She left Capitol Hill to recuperate and that plus complications has kept her away for about six weeks. Without her the Democrats don’t have a majority on the Judiciary Committee. Judicial confirmations have stopped. Feinstein recognized the problem and asked Schumer to replace her, at least temporarily. Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Republicans said nope. Several have made statements saying Republicans should not assist in packing the courts with “activist” judges. Never mind that Senate committee assignments have never been subject to partisan fights. There are ways, cumbersome ways, to get around the deadlocked Judiciary Committee. One of those ways is to bust the filibuster – and we know which Democrats blocked that from happening last time. McCarter also posted that this stunt has Moscow Mitch’s fingerprints – and words – all over it. Mitch is newly back to the Senate after recovering from a concussion resulting from a fall. McCarter wrote:

This, again, from the man who engineered a court packed with Trump nominees the American Bar Association deemed unqualified, with right-wing extremist nutjobs like District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who most recently declared himself more of an expert on drug safety than the Food and Drug Administration. ... Setting aside Feinstein’s wishes represents a new low from McConnell. This exact situation is unprecedented, at least in modern Senate history, but this is the first time one conference has absolutely denied the opposing party a committee seat. This is just basic stuff about how the body works, determined by the organizing resolution at the beginning of the Senate. Leadership of both parties divides up how many seats on each committee the majority and minority get, and the composition of those memberships is decided by each party conference. Period. Until now. McConnell has now destroyed all of the most basic norms and traditions of the Senate, leaving Democrats completely flat-footed, again.

I heard Mitch’s words while in my car. I slammed the off switch, muttering that man is vile. Because of the Thomas scandal Chief Justice has been invited to testify before the Judiciary Committee to talk about ethics in general and Thomas specifically. And this is another way in which Mitch is strangling the committee – without Feinstien and the majority she adds, the committee isn’t able to issue subpoenas – such as for Thomas’ financial records. The biggest scandal to hit the court in decades and Mitch has hobbled the committee that should investigate it. John Darkow of the Columbia Missourian tweeted a cartoon of two janitors cleaning the Supreme Court hearing chamber. One of the nine chairs has been replaced by a throne. One janitor says, “That’s Justice Thomas’ chair – Harlan Crow bought it for him.” Sister sent me a link to a story by Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker. It is a history of Jeanne Manford and her son Morty. I had heard parts of the story and glad I could learn the rest of it. Jeanne caught attention when she walked in the 1972 Christopher Street Liberation Day March in NYC (the predecessor of the Pride Parade). She held a sign “I’m proud of my gay son” and Morty walked beside her. That was a phenomenal statement for the time. The crowd reaction included gay men coming up to her asking, “Could you talk to my parents?” By the end of the march she and Morty had come up with a plan to create what became PFLAG – Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Its purpose was and still is for people to come together to talk about their LGBTQ children and friends and learn how to be supportive both in the family and in the political scene. It grew into a national organization with international chapters. Morty died of AIDS. Jeanne died in 2013 at age 92...

The next month, Barack Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal for her work on behalf of L.G.B.T.Q. people and their families. In his remarks, he summarized, in the plainest possible terms, the reason she stood up against bigotry on behalf of her son: “She loved him and wouldn’t put up with this kind of nonsense.”

She was a hero and founding mother in the LGBTQ rights movement. Her national organization has shifted towards trans issues and is doing all it can to counter the growing tide of anti-trans bills. PFLAG’s current president sums up their purpose:

We love all of our children, and we’re not going to leave any of them behind.

Thank you Morty, Thank you Jeanne.

Believing they should behave like jerks

My second cataract surgery was yesterday. It went smoothly. However, once the anesthesia on the eye wore off it was quite painful, more than with the other eye. I went to bed early and slept for close to 11 hours. Part of that was the general sedation I had been given, part of that was I hadn’t slept well the night before. So now I’m seeing the world without glasses – and confirming I still need glasses. New lenses might be available tomorrow, certainly by Monday. My Sunday movie was Corsage (the French word for corset even though this is a German language film). This is a completely fictional (thanks IMDB) story of Empress Elizabeth of Austria when she has passed her 40th birthday in 1877 and considered “old.” She is tired of the constraints of being the wife of the Emperor (the corset is a symbol too) and through the course of the story she does something about it, though until the last scene I didn’t guess her solution. Because she is expected to have a small waist (and there are lots of comments in the press speculating whether she’s gained weight) during most of the meals seen in the film what we see on her plate is a small amount of food that she mostly ignores. Her son, about age 20, and her daughter, a preteen, both chide her for actions unbecoming of an Empress. There are a lot of constraints for her to rebel against. The completely fictional part means, according to IMDB, that the real Elizabeth was nothing like the woman presented here and didn’t do these things. The film was nominates for lots of film festival awards and won a few of them. Yeah, it’s highly regarded. I enjoyed it, though at times it seems rather slow paced. Last week Michigan had temps that topped 80F, 20 degrees warmer than average. Monday, just two days later, temps were in the 40s, 15 degrees cooler than average, and we had snow flurries. Meteor Blades, in his Earth Matters column for Daily Kos wrote about the EPA proposing new emissions standards for cars. These standards will essentially require automakers to switch to EVs faster – though not all that much faster than previous laws and their own plans prompted them to do and not fast enough as our climate requires. These standards are now in the phase of getting public comment, which lasts 60 days. Then various groups (though not so much car companies) will sue. Blades also discussed an article by Amy Westervelt at the substack Drilled that explained Big Oil is now facing two dozen climate liability lawsuits by various cities, counties, and states. They are trying to shift these cases out of state courts and into federal courts. Blades wrote:

So, why are the fossil fuel companies so desperate to see these cases in front of the Supreme Court? A few reasons: first, they have successfully argued before that the Clean Air Act preempts any state action on greenhouse gas emissions. Second, they believe they have a better shot at this pro-industry bench siding with them than any left-leaning state court judges. Third, they'd like to put an end to the barrage of lawsuits they've been facing over the past five years. But fourth, and this is where I've seen almost no one connect the dots: they want to further expand corporate free speech. In almost all of the climate liability cases, the fossil fuel plaintiffs, once they get past arguing jurisdiction, are making a free speech argument that goes roughly: Anything we've ever said about climate change was said with the intention of influencing policy; that makes it political speech (or in legalese "petitioning speech"), which is protected by the First Amendment.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch discussing the behavior of young Republicans

Everywhere I look these days, I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks or like the body parts they cover with those red ties. Because they have no frame of reference, no meaningful political experience or memory of politics prior to this shabby era, they think being shabby is normal and smart.

In another roundup Dworkin quoted several commentators remarking how much the abortion issue has put Republicans into a corner, which Democrats are now working hard to exploit. At the top of this post is a picture of a person protesting the expulsion of Justin Pearson and Justin Jones from the Tennessee Legislature. The sign he’s holding says, “No Justins No Peace.” SemDem of the Kos community discussed why the Tennessee legislature was so eager to expel Justins Jones and Pearson. The expulsion was shocking and didn’t make sense to the rest of the country. But state residents saw this coming and knew it wasn’t about decorum:

The GOP lawmakers were tired of constantly being called out on the House floor by these two Black men and saw an opportunity to get rid of them. Thankfully, their plan backfired spectacularly.

SemDem included the transcript of a recent exchange as an example:

John Ragan (R): “My belief is in God. I settle other things with facts and data. The fact of the matter is, sir, this bill is not racist. It is not unconstitutional. Justin Jones (D): “You keep bringing up God. but God says in Isaiah 10: ‘Woe to those who pass unjust laws that hurt the poor and robbed them of their rights. And so stop using God to justify your bigotry. Stop using God to justify hatred and racism.” [Speaker] Cameron Sexton (R): “You are out of order!”

Jon Stewart hosted Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks at the War Horse Symposium, a journalism and public policy forum held in Chicago, to talk about the nation’s defense budget. Hicks did a lot of dodging and weaving, trying very hard to not directly answer Stewart’s questions. They talked about the inability of the Defense Department of being audited. It took a while for patient Stewart to get to his main point:

When I see a State Department get a certain amount of money and a military budget be ten times that. And I see a struggle within government to get people, like, more basic services. And then that department that got that, I mean, we got out of 20 years of war and the Pentagon got a $50 billion raise. Like that's shocking to me. Now, I may not understand exactly the ins and outs, and the incredible magic of an audit, but I'm a human being who lives on the Earth and can't figure out how $850 billion to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps. Like, to me, that's f---ing corruption.

Merriam Webster, the dictionary company, asked people whose first language is not English to share a word in their language that has no equivalent in English. They shared their favorites and out of those here are mine: Verschlimmbessern, a German word for making something worse by trying to make it better. Kabalsalat, German for cable salad, the mess of tangled cables under your computer desk. Qti maz, an Armenian word for “nose hair” and also someone concerned with details that don’t matter. Fargen, a Yiddish word that means to support someone in a warm and loving and non-judgmental way. Apapachar, a Mexican Spanish word for “hug with the soul,” to cuddle, support, console, to throw all your love to someone when they need it most. The list also includes a video of an ASL sign that means something like “authentic,” “open up,” “unmask,” and “share my raw feelings.” Amazing Maps tweeted a map of the US with every county colored according to life expectancy. The data came from GHDX with the darkest red an expectancy of 66.8 years up through cream to a darkest blue at 86.8. Much of the Northeast and central Midwest is cream to blue. The West is a bit mixed (though I suspect the darkest reds highlight Native territory). And most of the South – east Texas and southern Oklahoma to Georgia and the Gulf to eastern Kentucky – is quite red. Several months ago while pondering what to do while visiting Sister and Niece for a holiday I contemplated printing out maps of Europe and Asia and seeing how many countries we could name. They agreed to this diversion. Map data with coordinates in latitude and longitude are easy to find online. The map of Europe was fairly easy to print using Mercator projection (I’m not sure that’s accurate, what I did was convert latitude and longitude to x and y and scale it so Spain didn’t look squished). But when I did that to the map of Asia Russia looked huge! So I looked up other projections. The one that looked like it might correct the size of Russia also had mathematics that looked too complicated to program in a hurry. During that holiday we named the US states and the countries of Europe and that was enough. Tomas Pueyo tweeted a thread about map distortions. The standard Mercator projection makes the countries away from the equator seem larger than they are, places like Russia, which does look huge, but also the US and Europe, want that because it shows they are more important than they actually are. That also means the countries around the equator – most of Africa and South America are smaller in comparison and are seen as less significant. So Pueyo starts with a map where all the countries are scaled by their true size. Russia and Canada do look considerably smaller. He then shows various other things: A human face distorted as it would be in a map (cool hair and chin!). The east-west length of Russia is shorter than Morocco to the Horn of Africa. Papua New Guinea is as long as the distance from London to Moscow. How the projected sizes of Greenland and Mexico would change if they traded places on the map. The Mediterranean Sea is about the same east-west size as Australia. The land area of all the continents would fit inside the Pacific Ocean. How the world map would look if it was centered on Antarctica. And what the world would look like if mapped by fish. Kos of Kos discusses what Pueyo’s thread says about Russia. Standard maps greatly exaggerate Russia’s size.

Americans don’t take pride in our country’s size, but in its accomplishments. Russia has few of those to point to, hence the obsession with land, and hunger for more of it. ... Yes, Russia is big, but it’s no longer the globe-dominating behemoth we’ve been conditioned to expect. But when a country bases its self worth on the amount of land that it holds, it certainly has all the wrong incentives when dealing with its neighbors.

The US can work with allies towards common goals, but it can’t dictate terms. Russia doesn’t understand that. So the Belarus partnership with Russia is only a step towards full integration. And we know what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Kos went on to discuss the latest pronouncements from Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the mercenary Wagner Group that has been trying to take Bakhmut for eight months. Prigozhin wants to call a cease fire so that Russia can consolidate the territory it already holds. Of course, in his call he belittles Ukrainians and talks big about Russians. Strangely, Prigozhin isn’t taking his own advice and still attacking Bakhmut. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Russia appears to be gaining in Bakhmut – only because it seems Ukraine is withdrawing. Is Ukraine withdrawing because they see holding the town is hopeless or are they repositioning troops for the big offensive? If Russia’s victory there strengthen its resolve to fight off the coming offense? Those questions don’t come packaged with answers. Sumner also reported that a few US analysts are feeling gloomy about Ukraine ultimately being able to expel Russia. They give lots of reasons. They call for plans for what the US should do if that happens. They call for those plans to include doing about the same thing Prigozhin is calling for – freezing Russian gains and somewhere within Ukraine creating a DMZ. Sumner responded to all that by saying look at all Ukraine has accomplished in the last year. And as for that coming offensive let’s see what Ukraine can accomplish. And if Ukraine can’t drive Russia out in a few months...

What Ukraine deserves then is … more months. Months in which any suggestion that a solution less than full defeat of the Russian military is at all acceptable, must come from Ukraine. It is way too early to talk about handing over more of Ukraine to Putin and giving him the weakened, divided Ukraine he wanted a year ago. If the West slackens in supplying Ukraine, or pressures the government in Kyiv to look for a peace plan that they don’t want, we won’t just be failing the people who have done yeoman’s work in making the whole world a better place, we’ll be extending a lifeline to Putin, and to the whole concept of war for territorial gain.

Prigozhin said he is making his call so that there can be lasting peace. The problem with that statement is this is Russia we’re talking about. Give Putin any gains at all and in a few years he’ll be back for more. The gains and cease-fire in 2014, which gave him control of Dobass and Crimea, only prompted him to try for the rest in 2022. The world does not want to fight this war again in 2030. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. Here’s one:

President Biden has officially declared the covid national emergency to be over. I learned a lot during the pandemic. I learned that people who are most resistant to the government telling them what to do also happen to be the people who most need the government to tell them what to do, and they're ironically the same people who are most supportive of the government telling other people what to do. There were some positives. People helped each other. We found out who in our community cares about others. And maybe most importantly, we have enough toilet paper to last the rest of our lives. —Jimmy Kimmel

Artist David Hayward tweeted a cartoon of Jesus taking a selfie as he kisses a rainbow colored sheep. Hayward added:

This is a reminder to my LGBTQ+ friends: You deserve to be loved loudly.

Foundational to identifying fake news

Hunter of Daily Kos discussed an article put out by the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s paper, on Texas Senator Ted Cruz. It’s such a fluff piece Hunter discussed why such a piece would be published – such as why did the publisher or, in this case the subject of the interview, want us to know whatever is in the piece. In this case Cruz is trying to burnish his reputation because his previous win was a bit too close for his comfort. Once the journalist saw the interview was going to be Cruz saying what he wanted the world to know about him, the journalist had three choices. One, they could have told the boss sorry, that interview was a waste of time. Two, they could have reported what Cruz said and supplement it with examples showing Cruz is feeding us a line. Or, three, the journalist could be a stenographer, offering no doses of reality to what the subject said. At least, in this case, the writer was upfront about the nature of this interview – if the reader caught the clues. So we as news consumers should ask some questions. Can we identify the motive of the story? Are we being sold a product (and a candidate is a product)? How did the journalist obtain the news? Who benefits? Who is damaged? Why would the source want the information to be public? Was the relationship between the reporter and source adversarial, cooperative, or neutral? Why does the journalist or media company consider the story newsworthy? What does any secondary information imply? Why were certain examples, and not others, chosen to be included?

Identifying the reasons why a story might be being distributed is foundational to identifying fake news in an era awash with government-sanctioned hoaxes. But it's also required for simply flipping through the pages of your preferred newspaper or scrolling through the homepage of a staid network's internet site. None of the stories write themselves. There was a spurring event for each of them: A press release that sounded interesting. A friend of a friend who noticed something out of the ordinary. A senator facing uncomfortable recent polling numbers that have him sweating for a chance to rebrand. None of it is necessarily malicious, but it's your attention that's being purchased. Not just by the advertisements, but by the people so freely giving the quotes.

The same day I read Hunter’s article (which is today) I read three more stories where this discussion is important. Hunter discussed another article from the NYP. Bud Light did a sponsorship deal with Dylan Mulvaney, who is trans. Kid Rock, a conservative celebrity, put out a video of himself shooting at cans of Bud Light (and missing quite a bit). The only media outlets that think this is worth more than a quick mention are the NYP and Murdoch’s other big empire Fox News. And both are devoting significant hype to this story.

There are stories that are in the news because they are unambiguously news. And then there are other stories that exist solely because someone who owns or operates a gargantuan media outlet wants to make it news, and is willing to devote a significant portion of their company's attention to making it happen.

The second story is from the Washington Post, and Mark Sumner of Kos discussed it. Sumner’s post is titled a Ukraine update, though a good chunk of it isn’t directly about the war. A couple months ago some detailed highly classified material about the war started appearing on a site that discusses gaming. It went unnoticed by the wider world for quite a while. Then some of it was posted on more mainstream social media. And some of those posts were obviously doctored to show the Russian position to be better than it was. There has been a lot of discussion of whether the original data was real or a psy-ops fake. Attention turned to who leaked the material and why. News today is the leaker has been caught. What is (for me) of greater interest, which follows the theme of today, is the WaPo article that treats the leaker in a “glossy, airbrushed, kid glove” manner. Gosh, the kid was just sharing goodies with a bunch of pals with a similar love of guns, military gear, and God. So what if in one of his posted videos he shouted anti-Semitic slurs? The article doesn’t question why no one in this online circle thought to alert the FBI. Though Sumner comments that he’s never read an article (even in the nasty guy era) that tries so hard to be kind to its subject, especially one who has committed a crime. Sumner doesn’t answer Hunter’s questions of: Why was the article written? What is the media outlet pushing? Who benefits? Who is hurt? So we should ask. The answers I come up with don’t look good for Wapo. The third story appears in the current issue of Between the Lines and is written by Cameron Parkins and Logan Harding of Stand with Trans. They discuss the irresponsible manner in which many media outlets focused on the Nashville shooter possibly being trans, then being inaccurate and sensational in their descriptions. By mishandling the story trans people, already under a great risk of violence, were placed under even greater risk. This misreporting quickly spawned two troubling and trending hashtags, #TransTerrorism and #TransDayOfVengeance. There were claims that hormone replacement therapy was a source of rage – false (they’re confusing HRT with steroids). There were calls for the execution of trans people because of the false belief that being trans was an attack on Christianity. That’s all because of the way the story was handled. We never see a story with a headline of “Cis White Person Shoots Students.” Instead of focusing on a trans person with a gun, let’s focus instead on cis people with guns. Let’s focus on the guns, especially the assault weapons “in the hands of people who lack the training, emotional regulation and mental stability to responsibly handle firearms designed for literal war.” Since questions are being asked, here’s another (though the answer is obvious): Why, through several media outlets, was so much emphasis placed on the shooter being trans? A couple things related to my discussion yesterday about the lavish vacations offered to Justice Clarence Thomas that are obviously corrupting. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported on a poll released by Economist/YouGov. Nearly 60% of Americans disapprove of what Thomas did and 40% of Republicans disapprove, with 34% saying they approve. Even so, 67% of Republicans hold a favorable view of Thomas while 60% of Democrats hold an unfavorable view of him. Marty Two Bulls tweeted a cartoon of Thomas in a straw hat:

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was confronted about his failure to disclose a free trip to Indonesia valued at more than $500,000. The Yale graduate with almost fifty years of law experience, gave the classical defense of a teenager... “I didn’t know it was illegal.”

Joan McCarter of Kos reported the Missouri House Republicans voted to defund public and school libraries in the state budget. The move is in retaliation to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU to overturn a new state law banning sexually explicit material in school libraries. While libraries have other revenue streams this is definitely a hit to their budgets. It is also bad for the state’s kids, particularly those in rural areas. And it’s bad for democracy. The budget also cuts diversity initiatives, pre-kindergarten programs, and support for child care. Typical of modern Republicans. Librarians are hoping the Missouri Senate loves them more than the House does. This story prompted Ted & Lyn to tweet a cartoon by Mike Luckovich. It shows an elephant standing on a pile of guns holding a sign that says, “Protect school kids, ban books.” Garth German tweeted a cartoon showing various people with protest signs saying such things as “I’ll tell teachers what to teach!” On one side is a man reading a paper with the headline, “Survey: Less than ½ US adults could name all 3 branches of government.” The man says, “America is going to dumb itself to death.” Joe Heller tweeted a cartoon of a man telling a teacher he doesn’t trust her with books, with history, grammar, rainbows, or art. But he does trust her with a gun to protect kids. Eleveld listed a few more mass shootings, then discussed a recent KFF poll. More than half of US adults have been personally affected by gun violence. They or a family member have been affected by personally being threatened, by a family member killed by a gun (including suicide), by witnessing someone being shot, by shooting someone in self-defense, or by being injured by a gun. Eleveld also reported on a Harvard Youth Poll of voters under 30. 63% support stricter gun laws, 73% support requiring psychological exams for all gun purchases, and 58% support banning all assault weapons.

Despite being on the verge of losing a massive generation of voters who literally fear for their lives, Republicans remain both obstinate and impervious to the peril. ... Former Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker wrote, “We have to undo years of liberal indoctrination,” by which he meant that Republicans needed to indoctrinate young Americans themselves or else face electoral doom. That’s the former Republican governor of a swing state suggesting that the GOP’s best course of action is to re-educate an entire generation of kids rather than simply address their concerns. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether mass shootings are happening weekly, daily, or even hourly, Republicans aren’t going to lift a damn finger to curb gun violence in this country.

Which means: They want that. They want the deaths and the trauma. Boston Globe Opinion tweeted a cartoon of two Ukrainian soldiers in a trench with bullets flying overhead. One says, “Is it me or does this still feel safer than living in America?” A bit of good news: An AP article posted on Kos reports that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has signed bills that say anyone who buys a gun must undergo a background check and gun owners with minors must safely store guns and ammunition. The signing ceremony took place on the Michigan State University campus, the site of a recent shooting. Bills for red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders, will be voted on by the Michigan House soon.