What place guns should have in a functioning democracy

A week ago I wrote about Nyle DiMarco’s book Deaf Utopia. As part of that I noted he had become a movie producer. So for this week’s Sunday movies I took a look at a couple shows he produced. Both are on Netflix. The first I ventured into was the series Deaf U. The cameras follow several students at Gallaudet University as they do what students do when they’re not in class. I watched one episode and was glad it is only 20 minutes. There’s not a whole lot of story – which is true for most people’s lives. I’m not saying the series is bad. Without the structure of a story the lives of college students don’t interest me. The series is important in that it shows deaf students are like other students except in how they communicate. The movie Audible on Netflix was much more interesting. It is a 40 minute documentary of Amaree a senior on the football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf. Being on the team and playing hearing teams was a way for the players to show what they’re capable of doing. Though they had a winning streak of more than 40 games the story opens with a loss. In addition to dealing with the loss they’re also dealing with a teammate who had transferred to a hearing school, couldn’t handle the bullying, and committed suicide. The football coach said his guys are destined for discrimination. Amaree’s father left the family when Amaree lost his hearing to illness at age two. Dad is trying to reestablish a relationship and sees that his son and the team do not skimp on effort. This movie is a good one. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. I haven’t done that in seven weeks. I also updated by graphing program to display only the last year. I can see recent peaks and valleys much more clearly. There is a rise in the number of new cases per day from mid October to about Christmas, where there is a peak of 2150. The numbers have dropped since then. Over the last few weeks the peaks have been 1563, 1060, 904, and 585. Deaths per day were 10 and under from early May until the beginning of December. During that month there were many days above 10, though the highest was 15. Since the end of December deaths per day has been back under 10. Steve Inskeep of NPR talked to Jill Lepore and David Blight, two of several historians who submitted a friend of the court brief in the case before the Supreme Court testing the 14th Amendment clause that says an insurrectionist should be banned from the ballot. A summary of what Lepore and Blight said: The originalist theory the conservative Supremes keep claiming as their way of working means the interpretation of the Constitution should be based on what people of the time thought of it. And when the 14th Amendment was debated and approved it was intended to be permanent, not just for the period after the Civil War to keep former Confederates out of government. Yes, the amendment does include the presidency. Yes, what the nasty guy did was insurrection. Arguing otherwise is nitpicking. And this: Inskeep: “Is it wise to disqualify someone that millions of people apparently want to vote for, rather than defeating him at the ballot box, which is the way that many people would think it ought to work?” Lepore: “He was defeated at the ballot box, and he incited an insurrection.” Blight: “We have representative democracy. Fine. But we also have laws. And I don't think in this case, a degree of popular will should be the only question in the enforcement of the Constitution, which is itself quite clear.” Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported Texas is threatening civil war and the mainstream media doesn’t think it’s a story. Media (at least NPR) have been reporting Gov. Greg Abbott has put razor wire in the Rio Grande. Children got tangled in the wire and drowned. The border patrol sued to be able to remove the razor wire and save the children. The Supreme Court allowed them to do so. Abbott isn’t backing down. Sumner reported what else is going on. MAGA Republicans are celebrating Abbott’s standoff with the border patrol and are calling for secession or civil war. 25 other Republican governors issued a joint statement supporting Abbott. Putin’s chief deputy has been urging the civil war as a way to distract from Ukraine.

Despite all this, the story has generated exactly zero articles in The New York Times and scant attention anywhere else in the national media. The national press is allowing Republicans to stoke their fabricated border crisis—right down to threats of civil war—even while those same Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine a solution to issues at the border. How do you avoid reporting on the hypocrisy of the Republican position? Leaving off half the story is a good start.

8ackgr0und No15e of the Kos community asks an important question for those considering civil war or secession they seem to have overlooked: “What are you going to use for your new currency?” Some say the Texas economy is comparable to that of Russia. Have you looked at the ruble lately? How’s your infrastructure? The US is helping people blow up Russia’s stuff. You’ve got oil fields? The US government treats oil fields as military objectives. Mia Maldonado, in an article for the Idaho Capital Sun posted on Kos, reported on discussions with librarians across the state.

According to an informal survey conducted by the Idaho Library Association, more than half of Idaho librarians are considering leaving library work as a result of library-related legislation.

Part of it is being the target of legislator and public ire. Another part of it is perhaps having to deal with unworkable demands. Put the challenged book in an “adults only” section? What if the library is a single room? Yeah, the legislature is considering reducing the amounts parents could sue a library for noncompliance from $2500 to $250, but there are also legal fees likely above $1000. And that is a significant impact for a rural library. Add that to the increased stress and librarians are looking for jobs in other states or are considering changing professions. DebtorsPrison of the Kos community runs the online bookstore The Literate Lizard. They also write a weekly column of the latest nonfiction book releases. I don’t think I’ve read the column before, though I did this week. A couple of the book descriptions (I haven’t, of course, read the actual books) caught my attention.

One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, by Dominic Erdozain. As we parse legislation on background checks and automatic-weapons bans, we fail to ask what place guns should have in a functioning democracy. Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings—the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the peaceful republic they hoped to build. They wrote these ideas into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideas that were subsequently affirmed by two centuries of jurisprudence. And yet the twin scourges of racism and nationalism would combine to create a darker American vision—a rogue and reckless freedom based on birth and blood. It was this freedom, not the liberty promised by the Constitution, that generated our modern gun culture, with its mystic conceptions of good guys and bad guys, innocence and guilt. What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, by Jonathan M. Metzl. Looking closely at the cycle in which mass shootings lead to shock, horror, calls for action, and, ultimately, political gridlock, he explores what happens to the soul of a nation—and the meanings of safety and community—when we normalize violence as an acceptable trade-off for freedom. Mass shootings and our inability to stop them have become more than horrific crimes: they are an American national autobiography.

We want the freedom to poison you

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reports that the jury in the case of the nasty guy versus E Jean Carroll awarded her an additional $83.3 million. A previous trial determined he had assaulted her and he was ordered to pay $5 million. This trial was about him lying about her and thus defaming her while he was in the Oval Office. In this trial the prosecutors asked for $24 million, which was thought “an unusually high punitive award.” What the jury awarded is significantly higher. There is no doubt it will be appealed. As the last opponent in the Republican primary Nikki Haley has turned to target the nasty guy. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that’s been a gift to Biden. He’s now tweeting out excerpts of her speeches.

Without a doubt, Trump is decisively winning the Republican primary and, short of suffering a sudden heart attack, will claim it. But in the process, something very unsettling is happening for his campaign: The primary contest is exposing all of his general election vulnerabilities. That's not going to get any better moving forward. As long is Haley stays in the race, she is simultaneously cultivating the anti-Trump vote and fueling Biden's general election campaign.

The nasty guy threatened Haley’s donors. In response the never-Trumper crowd gave her a big boost in donations. A way to limit her damage is to get her out of the race as fast as possible. The nasty guy’s allies tried to get the Republican National Committee to simply declare him the nominee, as I wrote about before. That effort has been withdrawn. The longer Haley is able to hang in there – and the longer there are actual primaries – the weaker the nasty guy will be for the general election. Good. Eleveld reported:

As the New Hampshire results rolled in Tuesday night, veteran political journalist John Harwood tweeted, "We're in early stages of massive analytic shift from ‘Biden's in big trouble’ to ‘Trump's in big trouble.’”

Reasons for the shift: The economy is humming and people are noticing. Biden’s numbers match or are better than when the “red wave” narrative started appearing in the spring of 2022. On the other side a CNN exit poll in New Hampshire showed that of Haley voters, “94% would not be satisfied with a Trump nomination.” Which means “nearly all of Haley's 43% share of the New Hampshire electorate consists of potential Biden voters.” I happened to think of a caution: That “share of the New Hampshire electorate” is those who actually voted, which I believe was below 20%. Also, New Hampshire isn’t Montana or even swing state Wisconsin. I had written about a case before the Supreme Court that has the potential of disrupting all of the federal government consumer protections rules. Joan McCarter of Kos reported on some of the dark money behind the case. One of the drivers is, of course, Charles Koch. Another is Leonard Leo. They’re asking the Supremes for “individual freedom” (as in corporate freedom) from having to follow rules that protect us from such things as bad food, bad water, and bad medications, Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, includes several interesting numbers in each post. In yesterday’s post he wrote (alas, without source):

Percent of Gen Z adults (age 18-25) who identify as LGBTQ+ according to polling by the Public Religion Research Institute: 28%

That is of great interest to me because when I was much younger (though older than 25) the estimate (which is all we had then) of the number of LGBTQ people was 5%, or about one in 20. Now it is more than one in four! Interesting how people identify themselves when the social pressure to conform to heterosexual norms is significantly lessened. I had written that conservatives loathe Taylor Swift because she is urging her fans to get involved in voting. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported her efforts are fruitful enough that conspiracy theories are being spread about her, that she’s being used by the White House in a way she doesn’t recognize. Concluded Einenkel:

The fact of the matter is that most of the people Swift is inspiring to get involved in our political process are exactly the type of young Americans who conservatives loath. But if you are trying to get even a few of those younger voters, calling their favorite singers psychological operatives is probably going to have the same success as when conservatives’ parents and grandparents told them Elvis Presley’s hip-swinging would be the end of morality.

Republicans and conservatives in general get loud (and campaign on) all those not white people wanting to enter the southern border. There’s lots of talk of deporting them. Biden is accused of letting them in the country so they would vote for him (never mind only citizens can vote). SemDem of the Kos community wrote about a conservative white family from Germany that intentionally overstayed their visa. They’re undocumented and threatened with deportation. And conservatives are pressuring to allow them to stay. The family says they came to America to flee “religious persecution.” The persecution is being denied the option to homeschool their kids, which is illegal in Germany. German public schools didn’t have the right “family values” for them. German religious schools didn’t either. And conservatives are now champions of illegal immigration for some people, the ones who happen to look and act like they do.

Culling the party down to a smaller, harder-right faction

While at lunch with my friend and debate partner today I talked about an opinion piece in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press. The site may complain if you’re using an ad blocker. I was able to close that message. The author is John Corvino, a philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. He is gay and has a partner. Likely more than a dozen years ago I wrote about Corvino as the Gay Moralist who looked at homosexuality from the moral side, usually using the moral stance of the anti-gay crowd and showing how they aren’t applying it fairly to LGBTQ people. In the early 2010s Corvino also traveled America with a conservative man. Corvino would debate him at each stop, he saying same-sex marriage is good and his opponent saying it was bad. Neither changed the other’s opinion of the debate question. In this opinion piece Corvino talked about the limits of free speech. I and my debate partner have discussed free speech many times. Corvino phrased part of his argument in a way that would delight my friend:

But free speech disputes aren’t merely about permission to speak. They are about who belongs at the table — and whether there are limits to the viewpoints we should listen to, argue with or allow to change our minds.

That word listen is the one that interests my friend. You have a right to say what you want. But that does not mean I have to listen. 19th Century philosopher John Stuart Mill argued for a “big tent” approach – engage with all viewpoints. I could show the other person is wrong. I could be wrong. Even if I’m right the debate can sharpen my reasoning. But do I really want to listen to a person who insists the earth is flat? Contemporary philosopher Jeremy Fantl wrote the book The Limitations of the Open Mind. One limit is a deceptive argument. Suppose a convoluted mathematical proof concludes 2 + 2 = 5. Only those with expertise would be able to spot the fallacies. Another limit is arguments that harm people.

To engage open-mindedly with Holocaust denial, for example — to treat it as an option on the table — is to fail to express appropriate solidarity with Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime. More than giving offense, engaging those views could make someone complicit in ongoing oppression, possibly by undermining education about genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Back to Corvino’s debates, should we engage with opposing views to refute them? Fantl says that can have value but could be ineffective or dishonest, as in pretending to be open-minded when actually not. But there is space between open-minded and closed-minded. Constructive conversation happens here. Though neither changed the opinion of the other on the central question, Corvino said the debates built relationships and fostered mutual understanding. It also corrected his view of the other’s arguments. He found his opponent didn’t use theological arguments and didn’t hate gay people. They learned that Corvino does care about children’s welfare. While Corvino’s opponents didn’t change their view of same-sex marriage others very much did. Corvino’s conclusion comes down to this: Get to know the opponent and see them as human. When evidence doesn’t go your way, admit it. Look for the good in the other side. Bridge building is relationship building. Recognize you don’t know everything. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos wrote that Fox Business gushed over Biden’s economy! Also, the University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment jumped a lot in January. Lots of other sources say the economy is in good shape and people are starting to notice.

The same Fox analyst also promised to scour the report "to see if there are signs that maybe the economy doesn't feel as, or isn't as resilient as it might seem." Shorter Fox-speak: Stay tuned, Trump. We'll invent bad news one way or another!

Eleveld noted the nasty guy is getting erratic trying to fabricate bad news for Biden: Torpedoing the border deal, pushing for Biden’s impeachment, rooting for an economic crash, and promising “bedlam” if he loses “(a chaos candidate promising chaos if The People vote against chaos).”

Trump knows New Hampshire and Iowa both exposed serious cracks in his general election voting coalition. The turnout and makeup of the electorate in both states suggests he isn't expanding the universe of Republican voters. He's simply culling the party down to a smaller, harder-right faction of the electorate. In short, Trump's not adding, he's subtracting. And if he's going to ride that smaller slice of the electorate to victory, he's going to need to trash the country in every way possible in order to depress turnout for Biden. That’s all fine by Trump because the main impetus of his every move is the sheer terror of spending his last living years in a jail cell. If he has to single-handedly unravel the country on his quest for freedom, so be it.

Dartagnan of the Kos community wants media to stop using the phrase this election is the “rematch nobody wants.” He linked to five such articles. The nasty guy has all this baggage yet Biden is “unpopular.” Dartagnan pulls on that a bit. Back when Biden won in 2020 was there much expectation he wouldn’t run for a second term? Well, maybe a tiny bit. But since he announced his 2024 run in November of 2022 he hasn’t wavered. And nobody “dreaded” a Biden-Haley contest. So what is this really about? It isn’t the Biden half of the equation. People don’t want the nasty guy in an election again.

Ultimately, it’s simply a “both-sides” talking point that does nothing but poison the political environment and further dampen voter enthusiasm. We must get this right; democracy is at stake.

I’ve got a big bunch of links to cartoons that have accumulated. I usually try to wait until I can match a cartoon to a story. But I now have lots, so I’ll share. The Department of Justice issued a report on all the things that police officers did wrong at the Uvalde shooting. This police group, that sheriff group, and all those other groups were not sufficiently trained. Those on the outside declared it was a hostage situation rather than an active shooter situation that required them to go in. That prompted a cartoon by Megan Herbert. The caption says, “How a 575-page report about school shootings that doesn’t recommend gun reform can be used to prevent future tragedies from occurring:” It shows a child with a couple of the thick volumes tied to his front, a few more tied to his back and one protecting his head like armor. In the comments of a pundit roundup WhoWhatWhy wrote “Donald Trump may be a madman, but who’s got a big enough net?” That’s over a cartoon by Jon Richards showing the nasty guy as Napoleon saying all sorts of things that are too small for me to read. A guy holding a net asks, “Now?” A guy holding a straightjacket replies, “Just about.” John Darkow of the Columbia Missourian posted a cartoon of an elephant opening a refrigerator and finding the nasty guy sitting inside. The elephant says, “Leftovers again?!” In the comments of a second pundit roundup Wes Rowell drew one of Nikki Haley. Biden and the nasty guy say, “We’d like to be president.” Haley replies, “Too old!” An old couple says, “We’d like to retire.” Haley responds, “Not old enough!” Aaron Rupar tweeted a screen capture of Kevin McCarthy over a banner saying, “McCarthy: Will serve in Trump Admin if asked.” Elie Mystal added, “Can somebody please get this man a dominatrix so he can carry on his submission kink in private.” In a third pundit roundup, Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted a tweet, then offered a paraphrase:

Basically, New Hamphsire Gov. (and Haley surrogate) Chris Sununu is giving the GOP party line: “Rapist or crook or insurrectionist, never you mind. There’s nothing worse than a competent Democrat who’s a decent person and I’ll never ever vote for one. Otherwise the public will get ideas.”

And Santiago Mayer tweeted about DeathSantis leaving the presidential race:

Ron DeSantis should be forced to carry his presidential campaign to term.

Pastor David Hayward tweeted a cartoon with the caption:

When someone tries to take away your rights, that’s call persecution. When someone else gets rights you already enjoy, that’s call sharing.

Tjeerd Royaards created a cartoon of Davos. Rich people are in a presentation room lounging against huge sacks of money. The lecturer points to the screen that has the words, “How we could save the world.” It shows the earth ready to roll over a cliff into flames but prevented from doing so by huge sacks of money. Mike Peters posted a cartoon showing two boys. One says, “I thought Republicans were pro-life...” The other replies “...Yeah, but they aren’t pro-children.” Pedro Molina of Kos posted a streets scene in which all the faces of the immigrants are replaced by targets. One say, “It happens every election year...” Jen Sorensen of Kos posted a comic titled “Billionaire Buttinsky on Campus.” The summary: A billionaire swoops into campus and tells the administration he will donate big bucks if the university gets rid of their diversity program.

They’re used to leaders with closets jam-packed with skeletons

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos wrote five things Democrats should like from the results of the New Hampshire primary. 1. After coming in much better than expected (though still definitely second in a two person race) Nikki Haley is now swinging hard against the nasty guy. She calls him geriatric and a loser (about time someone made an issue of his age and mental state instead of Biden’s age). 2. The nasty guy seethed about Haley for not dropping out.

But this is who Trump is—a seething loser. And the more it's on full display and the more voters get reacquainted with it, the better.

3. Haley overwhelmingly won independents. 4. Since Biden wanted South Carolina to be the first primary he wasn’t on the ballot in New Hampshire. He still won as a write-in candidate with 55%. Say goodbye to challenger Dean Philllips. 5:

Haley planning to stay in the race is the icing on the cake for Democrats, especially as she appears to finally be hitting her messaging stride. Haley could drop out, but frankly, what else does she have to do?

Mark Sumner of Kos also reports consequences of the NH primary. The nasty guy’s win, for a guy who is portraying himself as an incumbent, was unimpressive. Because Haley didn’t drop out he went to his social media to declare that anyone who supported her will be “permanently barred from the MAGA camp.” Then he released a video statement saying he would also purge rogue bureaucrats, security officials, justice officials, and anyone else that isn’t MAGA.

Give it time, and a good MAGA rating might soon also be required to get a government contract. Or to travel freely around the country. Or to stay out of the massive internment camps Trump is planning. Trump has dropped all pretenses. Anyone who wants a future in Trump’s America had better get in line, and they better get in line now. And that’s exactly what Senate Republicans are doing.

That shows up in the combined Ukraine aid / Southern border deal Republicans said was required. Senate Republicans appear to be close to a deal.

Then, on Wednesday, Trump told Republicans to kill the deal so that he could continue to talk about the border for his campaign. And just like that, what Republicans were calling a crisis and an invasion became something that could be put off. Because nothing, nothing, nothing matters more to them than pleasing Trump. “I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that [Trump] would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn't want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”

Joan McCarter of Kos reported the border deal seemed to be veering towards a crash on Tuesday. She included tweets by Sen. Mike Lee complaining that senators aren’t allowed to have enough time to review it – they should have at least three weeks. That ignores Congress has been talking about immigration for two decades. And he needs another three weeks. To come up with poison pill amendments?

That’s the perennial story of immigration reform in Congress. There’s two decades’ worth of supposed bipartisan history on immigration that’s been killed by the Republicans. This is too salient a political issue for them. They don’t want to secure the border with new funding and new policy directives. They want to keep the so-called border crisis in the headlines, just like they’ve done since 2001.

I heard a prediction a few weeks back that Republicans tied Ukraine aid to the border situation because the nasty guy didn’t want it to pass and the link was a way to do that. The prediction went on to say border security was chosen for the link because that wasn’t going to pass either. Lexie Schapitl, Eric McDaniel, and Susan Davis of NPR covered much of the same story, though added the reasons why the nasty guy shut down the border deal – it wasn’t “perfect.” As in: How could it be perfect if a Democrat agreed to it? Back to New Hampshire. Matt Wuerker posted a cartoon of of a news woman pointing to two people holding “IA” and “NH” signs and saying “The people have spoken!” as 48 other people holding other state signs stand behind her. That was posted the day before this news from Sumner that the cartoon might be true: The Republican National Committed has drafted a resolution to scrap its own rules and declare the nasty guy to be the “presumptive nominee” without bothering with primaries in the other 48 states. One reason for doing this is their rules say they can’t support a candidate unless he is the nominee. But it seems (to me) easier to scrap that rule than all the others. Another reason is the nasty guy is ahead in the polls. So why did they bother with Iowa and New Hampshire? I wonder if this is a way to keep Haley from being in the news attacking the nasty guy. Yes, all of this is very much not democracy.

But hey, at least Republicans are being consistent. They hate democracy in the general election, so why pretend it matters in the primary? No word yet on when the coronation will be held.

Eleveld reported the nasty guy and his MAGA backers are getting annoyed at Rep. James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee. Comer has been digging for impeachable dirt on Biden for a year now and has nothing. The annoyance is because:

When pundits call him the twice-impeached, four-time indictee, Trump has to be able to point at Biden and say he's the one who's really corrupt. Just look at what Congress found on him.

The annoyance has been expressed through leaks. That means:

In many ways, the leaks seem specifically designed to put Comer on notice that he not only needs to produce, but he'll be singularly on the hook if he doesn't.

Sumner wrote that Democrats have gotten organized and are now making hearings of Comer’s committee more fun.

Democrats aren’t just tearing Republican arguments apart: They’re derailing hearings and getting their opponents genuinely flustered. ... If all that seemed like it took a lot of behind-the-scenes planning, it did. But it won’t be the last time. Because as The Daily Beast reports, Democrats have a plan to make these hearings just as silly as the claims Republicans are making about Biden.

The goal of the hearings are, of course, to dig up dirt on Biden to reduce his chances of reelection and to tell the nasty guy they’re working on revenge for his two impeachments. For this purpose Democrats now have a Truth Squad of Reps. Jamie Raskin, Greg Casar, Jasmine Crockett, Maxwell Frost, Daniel Goldman, and Jared Moskowitz. I’ve reported on some of what they’ve done already, such as completely flustering Republicans when Hunter Biden showed up to testify. Sumner then mentioned the leaks on Comer’s competency I mentioned above:

These anonymous Republicans don’t seem to be seriously considering that maybe Comer is failing not because he’s incompetent (or at least, not only because he’s incompetent) but because Joe Biden did nothing wrong. But then, they are Republicans. They’re used to having leaders whose closets are jam-packed with skeletons.

Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos it shows almost a dozen prominent Republicans with Mike Johnson saying, “We sold our souls to Trump and are awaiting payment...” I haven’t written about Ukraine in at least three weeks. So I’ll start with an article Sumner wrote on January 5. The front hasn’t changed. Ukraine keeps pushing back Russian assaults.

What has changed is that there are increasing reports that Ukrainian forces are just bloody tired. That operations are running on superhuman efforts that can’t be sustained. That Ukrainian artillery units are being forced to retreat, or are incapable of halting a Russian advance because they are too low on shells. And that some Ukrainian units are unable to fill their ranks because Ukrainians are all too aware of conditions at the front.

Ukraine is considering raising the age limit of soldiers who want to stay. It is also considering lowering conscription from 27 to 25 – which seems quite high to Americans dragged off to war at 18. But Ukraine doesn’t want to win a war by losing a huge percentage of young men. Yeah, it is Russia who is taking kids out of school and drafting pensioners and not giving them sufficient training. Their soldiers are getting tired of the “meat assaults.” There are reports of shortage of artillery shells. Ukraine isn’t using shells at the same rate as Russia – which is now using shells decades old. But the West relies on combined arms operations which doesn’t depend as much on artillery, so the West doesn’t stockpile as much. North Korea is restocking Russia’s shells, maybe as many as a million – which should last a few weeks. Drones have changed the war and neither side has a formula to give themselves an advantage. The situation is still a stalemate. Also in early January in a pundit roundup on Kos exlrrp commented with a meme. It shows Putin saying:

Buy American. I bought one Trump and got the whole Republican Party for free.

On January 10 Kos of Kos wrote a Ukraine update that was more about the current axis of evil. That’s a phrase Bush Junior used to justify invading Iraq. The current axis is Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China. Kos wrote that if the US doesn’t lead the opposition, no one will.

These nations have realized that their global aspirations cannot be accomplished as long as a militarily and economically dominant West acts as a roadblock to their regional ambitions. Still, that doesn’t mean they aren’t trying. Take a look at the world’s war-ridden hotspots and you’ll see that virtually every one of them has at least one of these nation’s fingerprints on it.

The invasion in Ukraine is by Russia supported by North Korea. Next to Israel Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are supported by Iran. Russia backed a coup in Niger. The spat between Venezuela and Guyana is supported by both Russia and China. North Korea changed its policy of reuniting with South Korea to one of conquest. And China is being belligerent to Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, prompting Australia to update its navy. This axis is watching Ukraine – and Republicans in the US Congress – very carefully.

If Putin succeeds in even annexing part of Ukraine, it will be a rousing victory and a call to arms for this new axis. But if the West rallies, builds up its military arsenal, maintains and even strengthens its sanctions, the axis will likely determine that any military adventurism is too fraught with risk, and the status quo, however tense, will remain. The alternative—a hot war in the Korean peninsula, the Taiwan strait, or Europe—would be catastrophic both in terms of lives lost and to the global economy. The bigger the cost to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, the less likely a war between major powers becomes. The bigger Russia’s defeat, the greater the damage to Iran, North Korea, and maybe even China. (At the same time, China appears to be in a win-win scenario at Russia’s expense. If Russia wins, China has an emboldened ally that would almost assuredly aid in an invasion of Taiwan. And if Russia loses, China gains a new vassal state with the natural resources to feed its own machine.) Ultimately, the West needs to do everything in its power to help Ukraine win—and do so as quickly as possible. We need the Republican Party to stop being Iran and China’s biggest international ally. (Their support of Putin is well past absurdity.) Global peace depends on it.

On January 19 Kos wrote about German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who said Putin could attack NATO in 5 to 8 years. So is that really a threat? That ignores Putin is already attacking NATO through election meddling and cyberattacks. He has also pushed migrants towards NATO borders to destabilize European governments. But a conventional war against the West? Extremely unlikely. But that’s still a reason to help Ukraine. The ground war in Ukraine is at a stalemate. They can’t advance without horrific casualties. The war probably can’t be won on the battlefield. It is now time to press the economic war and push Russia to its economic and sociological brink.

The German defense minister is right that Russia is a threat, and Ukraine has gone a long way to neutering it. The best way to avoid the nightmare “World War III” scenario is to not just keep supporting Ukraine but also to give the country what it needs to eliminate Russia’s war-making potential. That won’t pay dividends just in Europe. It will be a signal to China, too, that any military designs on Taiwan would be similarly doomed to failure.

Sumner wrote that this past Wednesday marked 700 days since Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia expected Ukraine to fall in days. Remember that 40-kilometer convoy where officers brought along dress uniforms?

The truth is, almost everyone expected Ukraine to lose—and lose quickly. Except the Ukrainians. The next time anyone saw those Russian dress uniforms, they were being pulled out of tanks destroyed along the highway after Ukraine drove away Russian forces. Putin couldn’t take Kyiv in three days. Or three weeks. Or three months. And he’s not going to take it in three years. Because he’s simply not going to win this war.

Tax cuts for the rich don't inspire voters. Racism does.

My Sunday movie was Theater Camp, the story of a summer camp for theater kids in the Adirondacks. Yeah, eccentric kids working with eccentric adults. There are, of course, problems. While out doing recruiting and fundraising Joan, the leader of the camp, has a seizure and is in a coma. That leaves the camp in the hands of her clueless son Troy, so there are financial issues. Every year the director of acting and the director of singing write a musical – which they haven’t started yet, though that does give them a chance to write Joan’s story. Early in the movie there is a claim it is a documentary. But it didn’t take long for me to doubt that. I had watched a documentary last week and this didn’t feel like one. Shots looked too planned, catching pivotal moments documentarians would not be able to plan for. And, I was right – there is a cast list showing which character was played by which actor. I think the word is mockumentary. IMDb trivia for this movie did say why there is a bit of a documentary feel – all the dialogue was improvised. That would have been fun for creative actors and it explains why they ended up with 70 hours of film – enough to film each scene 46 times. There are credited writers, who also played major roles, so I’m sure they had strong outlines for each scene. I enjoyed this one. Several years ago my friend and debate partner told me about a movie he had seen. I think it was called Sound and Fury. I looked in IMDb and see at least eight movies by that name, so I’m not going to sort through them all. The story was about a deaf community debating whether a newborn should get cochlear implants. A great deal of what I do has to do with music, which, of course, is sound and one needs functioning ears to take in. So I’m puzzled why someone would want to be shut out from that and from all the communicating our world does through voice and ears. I’ll admit right now I have no idea if cochlear implants are actually any good at allowing one to hear the full expression of music. I bring that up because I finished the book Deaf Utopia, A Memoir – and a Love Letter to a Way of Life by Nyle DiMarco. He was born deaf (well, he can hear things louder than a lawnmower), the fourth generation of deaf people. He grew up in a house where the primary method of communication was American Sign Language. He went to deaf schools and Gallaudet University. And he explains all that to us. In the intro DiMarco explains that he sat before a video camera and signed the whole book. His college roommate Robert Siebert (also deaf) watched the videos and translated the signs into English. Then the two polished up the English text. DiMarco ignores my puzzle entirely. He’s deaf. He’s become quite a fan of Deaf culture and glad to be a representative. At the time his parents and grandparents were in school the primary goal was to get them to function in a hearing world – reading lips and speaking. The philosophy of teaching the deaf (set out by hearing people and reinforced by the wider world) meant if one couldn’t speak one was considered not very intelligent. Students are guided into professions accordingly. But DiMarco, who had been in an ASL environment since birth learned much better in ASL. Part of his story is a campaign to let students learn using the tools that are best for allowing them to learn. If it is hearing aids, great. If it is ASL, do that. Nyle’s twin brother Nico, also just as deaf, became fascinated by music, though he had to crank the volume all the way up to hear it. After college he became a DJ. After DiMarco graduated he got into modeling. That got him onto the show America’s Next Top Model. He tells the story of being assigned an ASL interpreter, but on one important day the regular interpreter needed a break and the substitute didn’t show. Though he loves being a part of Deaf culture, it was a frustrating day of not understanding what was going on. He had related earlier of the time his grandfather went to the hospital and, even though the Americans with Disabilities Act was law, the doctor refused an interpreter and pen and paper, insisting on explaining things verbally to Grandma and Mom. That was scary. After ANTM DiMarco was on Dancing With the Stars (this isn’t a spoiler alert, both shows are mentioned on the book’s back cover). He found it pretty easy to follow a pattern of movements in a particular tempo. Cranking up the music so he could hear it was just confusing. In one performance he planned for the music to fade and he and the backup dancers did their moves to silence. He did just fine. The backup dancers had problems. After that he tried an acting career, but few directors wanted to imagine characters as deaf. So he is settling into being a TV and movie producer, working on shows that display at least part of the vast deaf experience, such as Deaf U on Netflix. He wants to show that “deaf and dumb” do not go together. There is one more aspect of DiMarco’s story. During his time in college he realizes he’s ... not straight. And after college he makes a connection. When young he and his twin celebrated a Power Ranger themed birthday. Nyle chose the pink one, a female character. It was only much later that he realized he wasn’t in love with the pink one, he wanted to be the pink one because she was in love with the green one and he was pretty hot. This book is a good one. DiMarco is a quite good storyteller. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community wrote about the history of the rich over the last 45 years. He wrote it during the World Economic Forum in Davos, that gathering of rich people. The article uses the term neoliberalism many times so I start with a definition (which the article does not supply). Neoliberalism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary is “A political theory of the late 1900s holding that personal liberty is maximized by limiting government interference in the operation of free markets.” Oligarchs really like this idea (except when the government has benefits for them and not the poor). The article also discusses populism, which the AHD defines as “A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.” Oligarchs don’t like populism. And the nasty guy is leading a populist movement. The rich are troubled by the rise of populism because they thought the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan would bring greater prosperity. It did – for the rich. Since Reagan the rich pay a lower tax rate than the working poor, America shipped jobs to China, and money in politics is no longer regulated. Strip malls and small towns lost small businesses to monopolistic national chains. Those changes don’t get discussed in the medial because massive corporations and billionaires own over 90% of our media. Before Reagan people were getting what they wanted from Congress. Afterward, the money was sucked up by the 1%. Before Reagan there were 13 billionaires and the richest had $6 billion. Now there are nearly a thousand billionaires and three of them have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans. Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3% of the nation’s wealth. Millennials in their 30s today own 4.6% of the nations wealth. The missing 17% went to the rich. A Kinsey study reported on Forbes found almost 60% of Gen Z aren’t meeting their basic needs.

As a result, working class Americans are pissed. They know they’ve been screwed, but most couldn’t tell you what neoliberalism or the Reagan Revolution were if their lives depended on it.

This is where we get to the grand Republican misdirection, led by the nasty guy. They are very loud in saying yeah, we know you’re screwed. It was black people, immigrants, and women (and any other group of not white males) that did it to you. In other countries that embraced neoliberalism over the last 40 years the impoverishment of the working class and the gains by the billionaires are driving populist movements. And their leaders are also pushing the siren song of racism and xenophobia. Reaganomics turned a people who largely got along into an ongoing riot directed by the most hateful voices in the Republican Party. Jamie Dimon, the head of some bank or investment firm – an oligarch, isn’t worried about the nasty guy back in the White House. He knows his desires will be met. There is a bit of good news:

Most Americans have no idea that President Biden is the first president of either party since Lyndon Johnson to explicitly reject Reagan’s neoliberalism. Biden has raised taxes on giant corporations (with his 15% minimum tax on profits), strengthened union protections, forgiven billions in student debt, expanded the social safety net, and fought to raise the minimum wage nationwide. He’s successfully bringing manufacturing home from overseas, and is kickstarting a nationwide electric vehicle infrastructure.

So this election can be seen as a choice between falling deeper into oligarch repression or rejecting Reaganomics and let Biden return to the family and worker oriented values of FDR and LBJ. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about the nasty guy’s supporters, the ones not in his cult. It matches what Hartmann wrote:

They know Trump is a liar, that he lost the 2020 election, and that many of his ideas are bad. They support him because they’re just tired and disappointed with their lives. They believe Trump will change things. They really don’t care how. In past cycles, some of these voters talked vaguely about “economic anxiety.” But this time around, they seem even less focused. They don’t know what’s wrong, and they don’t know how to fix it. They know only that they want things to be different. Even if, for some, that means burning it all down.

Sumner then discussed various people interviewed by media outlets. One of those was interviewed by Politico:

This isn’t someone who thinks all Americans are behind Trump, or that Trump will heal the nation’s divides, or that Trump even has some policy that will help him personally. He’s looking for the opposite of all that. He’s looking for damage. He’s looking for people to hurt.

Alas, the people who would be hurt are not the ones that caused his hurt. Another is still a believer in Reagan’s trickle-down economics, saying taxing his boss more hurts him. Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary to the nasty guy by 12 points, much better than the 32 point loss in New Hampshire. She vows to stay in the race until Super Tuesday in March. Matt Davies posted a cartoon that gives New Hampshire an Oscar, “For acting as if the presidential primaries matter in 2024.” Haley was also in the news because she said America has “never been a racist country.” Yeah, that ignores taking the land from the natives, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, the KKK and lynching, police brutality, and all the rest. One can find memes with a variety of rebuttals. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote rebuttal that is a bit different. Yes, America is racist and Republicans want to keep it that way.

Because if it isn’t, they’ve been wasting literally the last 60 years and billions in political donations in a strangely quixotic quest to nail down the racist vote and make it their own. In fact, if this nation were not as racist as it is, there likely wouldn’t be a modern Republican party to begin with.

Republicans are all about doing the bidding of the rich. They may add in the religious right and those who oppose abortion. But that is far from a national majority and Republicans know this.

That is why the Republican Party has, for the past 60 years—and now, even more virulently thanks to Trump—turned to crude racism as its chief motivator to get out the Republican vote. Because its actual policy goals of more tax cuts and more deregulation don’t particularly inspire people, Republicans must rely on something that does. That “something” is and will continue to be appeals to racism, the seemingly overwhelming human impulse to believe, as Webster’s explains, that a person’s race is determinative of inherent superiority or inferiority, and that policies and attitudes should implicitly work to advantage one race over another. In practice, such racism is typically channeled as a justification for discrimination and oppression, and this country is certainly no exception to that rule.

There have been lots of laws passed over the last sixty years in an attempt to reduce racism. Republicans have continually worked to undermine those laws, though they haven’t re-established racism as a fixed governing principle.

In its quest to satisfy the needs and desires of its primary donors and sponsors, the Republican party has quite deliberately exploited the continued appeal of racism in this country at nearly every turn over the past 60 years. ... Their party’s standard-bearer, Trump, clearly views exploiting Americans’ racism as a viable political strategy. He’d be awfully disappointed (and probably politically impotent) if that weren’t the case. Because if it was, both he and the rest of his party would have to explain to their voters what their actual goals are. And those voters would probably not be impressed.

This post marks 1,000 times I’ve tagged a post for discussing Republicans. I’m sure only a tiny number of those discussions were complementary. This post is number 5,211. I’ve been writing them over 16 years.

Another justice with a sugar daddy

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported that Senate Republicans have started endorsing the nasty guy. The post lists several of them and adds important comments.

In Trumpworld, there's no higher form of betrayal than those in his own party who don't prove sufficiently loyal. He made that perfectly clear at the Indianola event when he maligned Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. "I just thought it was really disloyal," Trump told the crowd. "I mean, I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. And that happens in politics.” Guess what: No one wants the Reynolds treatment and everyone knew it was coming, which is exactly why Senate Republicans have started to fall like dominoes for Trump over the past week. ... The real tension here, besides the overall direction of the Republican Party, is that Senate Republicans have lost ground in the last two election cycles precisely because they have been saddled with Trump.

By using the word “betrayal” he is, of course, saying they are to be loyal to him, not to the party or the country. More proof he intends to be a dictator. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark. She wrote that former officials in the nasty guy administration should explain what it was like to work for him. They know the stakes.

But wait, haven’t they done that already? Mark Milley posed for a front-page spread in the Atlantic. John Kelly gave a statement to CNN. Others have back-channeled their grave misgivings, off the record, to Puck and Politico. Hard truth: That’s not enough. I talk to Republican primary voters every week in focus groups, and you know what they don’t read? The Atlantic, Puck, and Politico. Fundamentally, the reason they seem unbothered by Trump’s autocratic tendencies is that a lot of them don’t know about them.

Dworkin quoted Jonathan Martin of Politico. He said the nasty guy camp is feuding over his VP choice, hoping it isn’t Nikki Haley, still in the race for the nomination. Some see the second spot as the consolation prize. But she’s seen as too much of the party establishment and too against the nasty guy, ready to undermine him at every step. A big scandal over the last week is DeathSantis banned a dictionary because its definition of sex was too racy for his tastes. Down in the roundup comments is a cartoon by Dave Whamond. Four people see DeathSantis leave with a dictionary and say:

DeSantis’ book bans have come for ... dictionaries?! I can’t find the words to express my anger! That’s the literal definition of authoritarian ... I think. He’s got away with words!

An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports on a case that was argued before the Supreme Court a couple days ago. On the surface it is about herring fishermen. A recent regulatory rule says they have to have a monitor on their boats to verify they aren’t overfishing and they have to pay the monitor up to $700 a day. That’s the surface. Underneath is a 1984 decision by the Supremes called “Chevron,” yeah, named after the petroleum company. It states that when there is some ambiguity in a law the federal agencies are allowed to fill in the details. When there’s a dispute a judge is to defer to the agency. Supporters of limited government have wanted to get rid of it for forty years. They want judges to wield this power, not experts. Supporters of Chevron say it is indeed the subject experts, not judges, who should hold this power. Supporters of limited government are, of course, gun groups, e-cigarette groups, farm, timber, and home-building groups, all the billionaires in the country, like the Koch network which recruited the fishermen, and anyone who doesn’t want the government telling them what they can’t do. Supporters of Chevron are those of us who call the rules put out by agencies “protections” rather than “regulations” because they protect us from corporations ripping us off and spoiling our planet. They include environmental groups and the American Cancer Society, the last one because abolishing Chevron would be chaotic for the health insurance industry. It would be chaotic for the whole nation because every federal rule would be called into question. Overturning Chevron means every dispute would result in a court case – overwhelming the court system. Which means until the case is heard, perhaps years later, the litigants would feel they could violate the rule. So far justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh have said they are in favor of overturning Chevron. One of them saying they want to give it a tombstone. I hear Barrett is skeptical of overturning the precedent and Roberts has been quiet. We don’t have to wonder about Kagan, Sotomayor, or Jackson. A decision will come by the end of June. The day before the hearing on the herring case Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote that Gorsuch is being pressured to recuse himself from the case. The Guardian reports Gorsuch has his own sugar daddy, billionaire oil baron Philip Anschutz, who “would score big from a favorable ruling by his friend on the high court.” A March 2017 article in the New York Times reported Gorsuch’s ties with Anschutz, just days before his Senate confirmation hearings began. Anschutz was also a donor to the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, both of which worked to get Gorsuch on the high court. Jay offered another reason why Neil Gorsuch should recuse himself. His mother, Anne Gorsuch, was appointed by Reagan to head the Environmental Protection Agency for the purpose of undermining its regulations. Nearly all of her subordinates were industry insiders. She was eventually forced to resign over mismanagement of the “$1.6 billion Superfund toxic waste clean-up program by effectively freezing its implementation” and was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over records. The son wants to complete what his mother started. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

"Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus with 51 percent of the vote. It's worth noting that this caucus was decided by 14 percent of the state's registered Republicans. So Trump won 51 percent of 14 percent of about a quarter of the population of one state out of fifty. So the results are less the will of the people and more the will of Carl." —Stephen Colbert "In a new interview with Fox News, presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that the U.S. has 'never been a racist country.' So if her campaign doesn’t pan out, she can always get a job teaching history in Florida." —Seth Meyers "We have released into the wild hundreds of queens. And listen, If a drag queen wants to read you a story at a library, listen to her because knowledge is power, and if someone tries to restrict your access to power, they are trying to scare you. So listen to a drag queen!" —RuPaul, accepting the 5th Reality Competition Series Emmy for RuPaul's Drag Race. He also won the Best Reality Host award for the 8th consecutive time—the most wins by a person of color.

Until we greatly reduce the power of the oligarchs

I have a Martin Luther King Day cartoon that didn’t get posted promptly. It is by MacLeod and shows an elephant saying, “Spare a thought for us Republicans on this difficult day when we have to dredge through everything MLK ever said to find something we can post that’s half acceptable to our racist supporters.” Brother recommended a post on Daily Kos that I would have found eventually. He also recommended a couple comments in the post that I would not have seen. So, thanks Brother! The post is by Dartagnan of the Kos community. His central point is that the nasty guy and his followers want one thing: revenge. Yes, a lot comes from the nasty guy’s use of revenge as his major campaign theme. It is more than that.

As Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic, observes, the Republican electorate has, for the most part, swallowed Trump’s fiction and internalized it. Republicans have transformed Trump’s embarrassments into an insult against their own personal identities and belief systems. It’s an offense that demands and necessitates revenge against those fellow Americans who dared to insult them.

Admitting one’s choices are wrong can be difficult to impossible. Those who can’t admit do a lot to save face. And to do that they have to ignore the nasty guy’s criminal charges. They have to invent and believe preposterous stories of the Biden family, and conjure up fake horrors, threats, and enemies. It’s a coping mechanism. They are now convinced that millions of Americans, including their neighbors, look down on them. They hear it through the attacks and critiques of the nasty guy. And revenge doesn’t respond to discourse or reason. In the comments is a meme by DoctorH showing Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka saying, “What could be more noble cause for a Second Civil War than a litany of IMAGINARY grievances?” Now on to the comments that Brother recommended. These confirm a lot of what I’ve concluded over the last few years that what is going on is these people are highly invested in the social hierarchy, in which they consider themselves rather high up. What they are doing is protecting their social position. A comment by Bring the Lions:

The Big Lie is there to cover the Big Truth: the MAGA/GOP base can’t accept losing elections and power to the Democratic coalition. They can’t accept that they are out-numbered by the rest of us (hence the fixation on the size of rallies and flags). They refuse to see members of the Democratic coalition as legitimate Americans, having equal standing to them. That’s the Big Truth that keeps being alluded to in so many ways. Better to have the Big Lie about “election fraud” to masquerade the blatant racism and bigotry behind the whole denial. Because if they didn’t have the Big Lie, the conversation would have to be about how one segment of America simply refuses to accept that they can lose elections to the other, and refuses to accept that the other side has the legitimacy to govern over them. Once the conversation moves there - and that’s exactly where it should be - you can’t “both sides” it. You’re effectively having the conversation that needs to be held: how do you run a democracy when one side has given up on….democracy?

Confirmation bias on my part? I see it as: I’ve come to this conclusion of how the world works and here is someone who has come to the same conclusion. Brother pointed to the response to Bring the Lions by theghostofjohndewey:

great comment, but I will posit that it goes deeper even than what you say—the MAGA crowd is simply NOT ABLE to accept what America has become and is turning into; specifically, a country where being a white Christian male does not automatically put you on top of the social hierarchy; a country where gays are free to walk around “flaunting” their “unnaturalness”; a country where women-folk are not kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen; a country where Blacks are free to vote and live outside “approved” neighborhoods and marry into “the white race”; a country that is increasingly diverse, increasingly non-white, increasingly non-Christian, and possibly worst of all, a country where people are increasingly tolerant of anything or anybody that is “different.” “Make America Great Again” is all about “restoring” that (mythological) utopian America where none of the above existed, where even the poorest white man living in a shack with no power or running water still knew that they were somehow better than an educated, well-to-do black man (to use the most obvious example).

Yep, it’s all about the social hierarchy and their (rather high up) place in it. Brother also recommended the comment by jsteve7:

I think the biggest reason for the size of Trump support is what they see as a defense against their biggest fear of all — being voted into irrelevance from a DEMOCRACY. Being voted into irrelevance by people that don’t look like them, pray like them, sexually orient like them, and intend to create a racial, gender, sexual, and economic level playing field in this country. Trump supporters see themselves as bunkering up in a mindless and existential fight against anything perceived as “left.” The biggest right wing enemy in this fight is federal government as it is now seen by Trump supporters as THE instrument of the left to implement their vision of equality and justice for ALL — the last thing the right wing wants. So, what better way to fight this enemy than a gigantic wrecking ball? And even if Trump fails to completely wreck our democratic institutions, as he did in his first term, he can be a block against the perceived inevitability of government by and for the people.

I also noted the comment by doncoolodge:

There’s no way to defuse that deep an animus. That it exists makes it imperative that we utterly defeat them at the polls; the only alternative is surrender, and that’s unthinkable. But when we eliminate that possibility of elective revenge, that is most likely to only increase their rage. And they’ll still take their revenge, in the only way that’s left. Sigh. I keep flip-flopping from hope to despair, with the events that might bring me hope also leading me to picture the horrors that are also likely to evolve from them.

Peter Olandt of the Kos community wrote about something I and others have recognized for a long time but others still get it wrong. Olandt rejects the common idea that if we just defeat the nasty guy the problem is over. The article above says no to that – the nasty guy’s followers won’t disappear quietly. Olandt says no in a different way.

Both Trump and corporate media are tools of American oligarchs. The Murdochs, Kochs, and Crows of the world are the real power, menace, and conspirators out to destroy America.

The current effort began as a response to Roosevelt’s New Deal when taxes on the wealthy were 70% and higher. Reagan tackled the discontent of the rich with the mantra “Government is the problem.”

The elected Republicans needn’t have solutions to make government better, they could just muck things up worse and use that as justification that even more government needed to be eliminated. Republicans are anarchists and nihilists. So over the years we have privatized some parts of government, downsized much of it, and in Red States essentially removed much of it all while oligarchs got richer on it. When the initial results came in and most of us saw no benefit to the downsizing of government, the oligarchs needed to up their game to keep the momentum in their favor. The oligarchs tied themselves to racism, guns, and abortion as the polarizing topics to keep getting their servants elected while weakening anti-trust statutes allowing for media consolidation to push their message. With Citizens United, they legalized bribery making the process more streamlined for themselves. ... We haven’t come close to defeating the Fascism arrayed against us right now. We’ve barely kept the first attempt from succeeding while addressing NONE of the conditions which led us here. Until we greatly reduce the power of the oligarchs and keep them in check, we will simply face a Trumpian threat again and again.

In the comments JaketheRake says the article missed an important piece.

The oligarchs have turned from trump because they don’t control his cult. They have been wanting a different candidate for a while now. Desantis has failed to shine for them, now Haley will probably fail as well. They are done with trump, but can’t control his mob.

For a while now I’ve had the wish the nasty guy would save the nation a great deal of trouble if he just died. Lots of commentary say he’s ripe for a heart attack. But ... His base won’t believe he died in the same way they don’t believe a lot of other obviously true and well documented things. Also, the oligarchs are still there, making yachts full of cash. Peter Schickele has died at the age of 88. He is famous for his classical musical comedy. The biggest part of that was his invention of P.D.Q. Bach who he claimed was “the youngest and oddest of Johann Sebastian’s 20-odd children.” He would claim he had found another work by P.D.Q. which would be a parody of some aspect of classical music. An example is the “1712 Overture,” a parody of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” I became acquainted to Schickele in high school. Brother had bought a double vinyl album “The Wurst of P.D.Q. Bach” and I very much enjoyed it. A few more albums appeared after that. I saw Schickele live three times. The first was in the 1970s at a concert in Kalamazoo. I greeted him after the concert as was amazed at the number of food stains on his tux shirt. The second was in the 1980s when he did a concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. During that concert he wanted to point out an error in the program – at the end of the previous week’s concert description the period was missing from the last sentence. The third was a few years ago when Schickele was guest composer at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival. I likely attended more than one concert. By then he was walking with a cane and didn’t do any playing. But he definitely made his presence known – a pianist was playing one of his pieces and between movements Schickele came on stage. The laughter of the pianist showed he did not know that would happen. Schickele made some appropriately funny comment, then left to let the pianist continue. I also remember an appearance or two on Prairie Home Companion when it took up brief residencies in New York. Schickele would come up with compositions featuring quite unusual combinations of instruments. This article on ClassicFM has an obituary of Schickele and also a video of one of his biggest jokes – narrating the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony as a sporting event. In doing so he taught a lot about how that piece is laid out. When I taught music theory at a small college in Detroit (now out of business) I played an audio version of that joke. My Detroit student’s didn’t get it. Classical music wasn’t their thing. Of course, there are a lot of his fun stuff on YouTube. I wouldn’t be able to find or link to them all. I’ll end with a link to Al Hirschfeld’s caricature of Schickele.

A rate of $14 million per hour

My Sunday movie was 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture. That mistranslation was deciding two Greek words in the Bible were best translated as “homosexual.” The culture shift was that it gave the religious right a way to demonize LGBTQ people. This documentary explored the questions: Does God condemn gay people? On what proof? What does the original text say? What about translations through the ages? How did the word “homosexual” get into the Revised Standard Version in 1946? What happened once it was there? The story features Sharon Roggio, lesbian daughter of a conservative pastor. She works hard to try to maintain a relationship with him in spite of his insistence she is living in sin. There is also Kathy Baldock. She considered herself an exemplary Christian woman. She liked to hike and met Netto and the two began to hike together. Then she came to know Netto is lesbian. How could this fine friend be condemned by God? That got Baldock into researching the question. She saw it wasn’t that gay people hated the church (as church people claimed) it was the church hated gay people. She gives talks about what the Bible says and wrote about about it. I found the book online as Walking the Bridgeless Canyon, Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBTQ Community. The third major person in the story is Ed Oxford. His Christian friends left when he came out and his gay friends were angry with him for staying Christian. His struggle prompted him to collect old Bibles – his oldest is from the 1500s. He found “homosexual” was not in the Bible before 1946. A ways into his research he connected up with Baldock. The effort to create the RSV translation from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek was led by Luther Allan Weigle. Baldock and Oxford went to the repository of Weigle’s notes on the translation effort at Yale University. They didn’t find notes on why the word “homosexual” was chosen. But they did find a letter to Weigle dated 1959 that challenged the translation. That’s enough for you to get the direction of the story and I strongly recommend you watch it. Except that’s not easy. The movie is not on a streaming service. The producers are still trying to shop it out to movie festivals. I was able to watch it online because Reconciling Ministries Network made it available for three weeks – and I found out about it just prior to the last weekend. While I recommend seeing the film, yet knowing how difficult it would be for you to view it, I offer a summary of the rest of the story. So this is definitely a spoiler alert. Even so, my few paragraphs can’t offer the breadth of understanding the movie can. How did the word “homosexual” get into the 1946 version? Baldock points out the men (of course, they were all men) on the translation team were all born between 1880 and 1911. What did they know about homosexuality when they started the process in 1939? As pointed out before, Baldock did not find any documents on why the particular word choice was made. The challenger was David Sheldon Fearon. His call to ministry is dramatic and he accepted, though he was gay. Being gay didn’t matter to the United Church in Canada. He wrote the letter while in seminary, so it is quite scholarly. He called the error a “sacred weapon.” And Weigle acknowledged the error. But starting an updated version of the RSV wouldn’t happen until 1961 and it wouldn’t be published until 1971. When it was it did not contain the word “homosexual.” Also published in 1971 was the Living Bible. This is a paraphrase, meaning it doesn’t go for exact translation and uses language that is easier to understand. Some say paraphrases aren’t sufficiently scholarly and this one definitely was not. It worked straight from the RSV – before the corrected version was published. Also begun in the 1960s (without the benefit of the correction) was the New International Version and a couple other translations highly regarded by conservative Christians. It was the Living Bible that Billy Graham started passing out at his rallies. It quickly sold in the millions. A second edition of the Living Bible inserted the word “homosexual” in other “clobber” passages. This is more evangelical propaganda. Then about 1984 conservative religion united with politics and the tone of the Republican Party shifted radically by the 1992 Convention, when I was turned off by them. We now have the situation where many people can say my personal Bible condemns homosexuality and my Bible, they tell me, is the direct word of God. Therefore I won’t deviate from God’s condemnation of gay people. Though it is rather nice that my Bible supports patriarchy as I do and condemns deviations from it. The movie notes mistranslations have power. And if this one had not happened a great deal of religious pain inflicted on LGBTQ people might have been avoided. In the current state both sides are harmed by bad theology and focusing on LGBTQ people means the true sexual predators avoid the needed scrutiny. Towards the end as Fearon becomes more involved in trying to recover Christianity from this translation error he says he came to realize, “I wasn’t called to ministry in spite of being gay. I was called to ministry because I’m gay.” Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that DeathSantis accused Fox News of election interference. The Associated Press was the first to call the Iowa caucus for the nasty guy and did so about a half hour after the caucuses started not a half hour after they ended. But who in the Republican caucuses pays any attention to the AP? Then at 8:31, a half hour in, Fox News called the contest for the nasty guy. This is different. Phones started buzzing within caucus venues. Votes had not yet been cast. Sumner noted:

As a YouGov survey highlighted last year, there are 16 different media outlets that Democrats regard as highly reliable. The Associated Press is in there. So is Reuters, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the BBC. Republicans only express that level of trust for two sources. And one of them is The Weather Channel.

Then Sumner says their trust of Fox isn’t all that high. Fox has spent years villainizing journalists. If it is seen rewarding the nasty guy so obviously its position on the right may collapse. Sumner noted in 2020 the nasty guy took 97% of the vote over Bill Weld. I don’t remember him either. That’s important because... In another post Sumner reported that the nasty guy getting 51% in Iowa this year isn’t all that strong of a finish. Yeah, he got more votes. But it also means nearly half of Republican caucus goers voted against him. He’s a weak candidate in a divided party. Now think about the headlines if Biden got only 51% of the vote. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin started with a comment of his own:

So 49% of an older, whiter, and more evangelical electorate voted against Donald Trump in a low-turnout Iowa election made up of roughly 110,300 caucusgoers. That’s higher than the average attendance of the Taylor Swift “Eras” tour—about 72,500—but not by very much.

An ABC News entrance poll was taken at caucus venues. One question asked was, “Is Trump fit to be president if convicted?” Elliott Morris tweeted the results: 63% said yes and 32% said no. Dworkin also quoted Ryan Burge:

“Here's the composition of Republican caucusgoers vs the gen pop (from the [Cooperative Election Study])”: White: 97% vs 69% 65 or older: 43% vs 22% White evangelical: 54% vs 22% Bachelor's or more:53% vs 35% Rural: 43% vs 20% And, again, it's 150K folks. There are 260M adults in the US. [final turnout was closer to 108K]

Down in the comments Gary Varvel’s cartoon showed Iowa Caucus History of Picking Presidents: Mike Huckabee, 2008; Rick Santorum, 2012; Ted Cruz, 2016; Donald Trump, 2020. In the comments of another pundit roundup there is a cartoon by Rob Rogers showing the nasty guy as a vampire feasting on the neck of Uncle Sam and saying, “Blech, Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country!” There is also a cartoon by Dave Granlund showing Uncle Sam at a table at the Campaign Cafe. The waiter tells him “These folks will select for you...” and points to a table with two guys labeled Iowa and NH. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed a hypothetical scenario posed by Chris Mirasola, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and writing for Lawfare. Mirasola posed the question: What are the chances of terrorist violence by nasty guy supporters if he is removed from the ballot by the Supreme Court and how might federal, state, and local governments respond to the violence? The likelihood the nasty guy is tossed from the ballot is low. The Supremes are likely to take one of many legal off-ramps to avoid repudiating the Republican standard-bearer. Let’s examine the question anyway. Mirasola poses three assumptions, all of which sound likely.

The first is that Trump’s rhetoric will grow more enraged and his calls to violence from supporters will intensify as his legal jeopardy increases. The second is that the number of his supporters willing to commit violence will increase with those exhortations. Lastly, the federal government will respond in accordance with predictable, existing practices. For the third assumption, Mirasola relies on standard, institutionalized protocols about how the chain of command operates between local, state, and federal governments.

As the Supremes take up the case assumption one will happen. If the nasty guy loses there will be violence. There will also be violence in each state that implements the decision (some won’t). There will be urgent need to guard state courts and election offices. The national guard, and perhaps even the military, will be called to do the protecting. And that might unleash “destructive forces that the American republic might not survive.” So are local, state, and federal officials preparing for this?

For the Biden administration, the question is how to logistically prepare for such events in a manner that deescalates potential civil unrest. ... As Mirasola observes, “the scale of foreseeable domestic unrest has the potential to far exceed what we experienced on Jan. 6.” ... Again, Mirasola suggests that the administration be upfront and transparent with the American people about the potential for crisis before it actually happens. Nor should Congress sit on the sidelines: It should exercise its oversight powers to ensure that the administration in fact does have a workable plan of action.

I see a problem in that last part – about half of Congress wants that violence.

But whatever may occur, there is one point that should never be forgotten: We would not be forced to consider such questions but for the malign and corrupt actions of one individual, and the cynical, cowardly, and heedless encouragement that the Republican Party has provided him.

Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote:

While the world’s richest people convene this week in Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum, Oxfam has released a new report detailing the extraordinary increases in wealth inequality since 2020. Some of the key findings include: The five richest men in the world more than doubled “their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 —at a rate of $14 million per hour.” At the same time, 5 billion humans on the planet got poorer.

That’s a million every 4.3 minutes. Einenkel quoted the Washington Post on who those five men are:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk; Bernard Arnault and his family, who own luxury goods group LVMH; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Oracle founder Larry Ellison; and investor Warren Buffett — increased from $453 billion in 2019 to $869 billion as of November 2023. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Einenkel includes the expected critique of Republicans, that they do all they can to protect the rich. Which is why Republicans are annoyed with this news: An AP article posted on Kos begins:

The IRS says it has collected an additional $360 million in overdue taxes from delinquent millionaires as the agency's leadership tries to promote the latest work it has done to modernize the agency with Inflation Reduction Act funding that Republicans are threatening to chip away.

Fascist rulers need absolute immunity to be effective, not presidents

I finished the book In Search of Emma, How We Created Our Family by Armando Lucas Correa. He’s in a long-term gay relationship with Gonzalo. Since childhood Correa wanted to be a father. At age 42 Correa had a dream about holding his daughter. This is the story of turning that dream into a reality through surrogacy. It did not go smoothly and Correa tells us about the agony of every choice (who to choose for the egg donor?) and every setback, and also every joy along the way, especially at the end when he can finally hold Emma. He then jumps ahead four years for the birth of twins Anna and Lucas. Along the way he recounts the history of surrogacy and lingers over the stories of cases that went bad, such as the surrogate refusing to give up the child. It’s a good story and very much shows how much love Correa and his partner, siblings, parents, and other relatives had for the new babies. It also shows what LGBTQ people are willing to go through to become parents. I did have one small annoyance with the story. For much of the story, especially the first third, this was Correa’s passion, not one for both Armando and Gonzalo. He kept referring to “my” future daughter, not “our” daughter. I was quite a ways into the story before finding out that Gonzalo wanted the child just as much. I finally did a count of the number of books I read last year: 36. I heard today the number most people read in a year is two. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported that the day after the nasty guy’s lawyers argued he has immunity in criminal cases a reporter asked him about it. His answer was yes, a president had to have immunity because he wouldn’t be able to do anything and would be prosecuted once he leaves office.

In essence, in Trump's telling, a president must have absolute immunity in order to function. How convenient … not to mention false. Actually, autocrats, authoritarians, and fascist rulers need absolute immunity to be effective, not presidents. When President Joe Biden was asked about the matter in December, he said he "can't think of one reason" for total presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump can likely think of a lot of reasons: extortion, grifting from the White House, and losing an election all come to mind. There are a lot of reasons to need absolute immunity as president when criming comes as naturally as breathing.

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that Republicans are incensed that the nasty guy was tossed from the ballot in Colorado and Maine. So Sen. Thom Tillis introduced a bill that says the Supreme Court has “sole jurisdiction to decide claims arising out of section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.” Yeah, he wouldn’t propose it if he had any doubts that the Supremes would declare the event that made him and his colleagues flee the Senate chamber was not an insurrection. This bill has little chance getting past the Democrats of the Senate and the current president. Eleveld reported:

Whether by hook or by crook, a majority of Americans—56%—are willing to see Donald Trump kicked off some or all state ballots, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday.

John Hartzell, who also goes by Middle Age Riot, tweeted:

I'm not saying Donald Trump should die in prison. I'm saying we should give him the chance.

I’ve written before about Project 2025, the effort by the Heritage Foundation to give the next Republican president, whether or not it’s the nasty guy, guidance on how to become a dictator. SemDem of the Kos community provides a more detailed look about what’s in the document and how it came to be. The first such conservative plan was published in 1980, when Reagan became president. This first one was 20 books. By the time Reagan was done 60% of the ideas were implemented.

The Heritage Foundation would go on to print updates to this plan on a routine basis, with the previous one being called Project 2020. Yet Project 2025 is unique in its audacity and complete disregard for constitutional checks and balances.

They also appear to be a lot more public about it, with a tent to pass out info in Des Moines, Iowa.

Yet at the heart of Project 2025 is an audacious attempt to reverse a century of perceived liberal encroachment in Washington. The plan literally seeks to undo the very fabric of American governance.

What departments that aren’t eliminated – Justice, Education, Commerce – are converted to efforts to please the president. Civil servants, workers that are supposed to be immune from politics, partly to protect their institutional knowledge, would become “at-will” employees who can be fired for insufficient loyalty. Remember all those inept attempts at conservative policies, like the Muslim travel ban? Project 2025 has the goal of making sure future attempts are not inept. This dangerous plan is based on the “unitary theory” of the Constitution. It claims that Article II, the part of the Constitution that describes the presidency, grants the office holder complete authority over the federal bureaucracy, eliminating any checks and balances. When Reagan assaulted the federal government he called it too big and emphasized “accountability.”

Project 2025 goes beyond the Reaganite view that the government has grown too big, but rather that the government is weaponized against conservatives. This initiative seeks to completely dismantle the government and the institutional protections in a quest to destroy what they call the deep state.

Project 2025 knows not to speak of eliminating Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, known to be political suicide to those who attempt to touch them. But Republicans are now talking about undermining them by significantly underfunding the Department of Health and Human Services that administers them.

What’s most alarming is that after all the attention that was paid to this initiative after it came out, the Heritage Foundation didn’t walk back any of it. They are yelling from the rooftops about their plan to turn this country into a Christo-fascist nation, and the media is treating it just like another political platform.

Even if Democrats win in 2024 Project 2025 doesn’t go away. It can sit until the next Republican presidential candidate with authoritarian dreams. Wayne LaPierre became the head of the National Rifle Association in 1991 and was the one who radicalized it from a hunters association into a vehement voice for gun rights. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported he stepped down a week ago, just before the start of a civil trial over his spending for personal travel and other perks with the NRA picking up the bill. He is accused of spending a lot on himself, including more than a half-million on eight trips to the Bahamas. That got me wondering what one has to do to spend over $60,000 per trip. Apparently one starts and ends the trip flying on a private jet and in between keeps up a very high level of luxury. Michael Adder posted a cartoon showing LaPierre in the courtroom at the defense table looking at two women at the prosecutor’s table where one says, “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an expense account, is a good guy with an expense account.”

Policy positions v. a baseball bat

Testimony in the nasty guys business fraud case is wrapping up. He wanted to give his own closing arguments, an unusual move. The judge, Arthur Engoron, first thought to let him provided he didn’t turn it into a campaign speech, then on Wednesday said no he couldn’t. An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported that early morning Thursday, the day of closing arguments, authorities went to Engoron’s home in response to a bomb threat. No actual bomb was found and the court proceedings continued as scheduled. A second AP article reported:

Barred from giving a formal closing argument, Donald Trump seized an opportunity to speak in court at the conclusion of his New York civil trial Thursday, unleashing a barrage of attacks during a six-minute diatribe before being cut off by the judge. “We have a situation where I am an innocent man,” the former president protested. “I’m being persecuted by someone running for office and I think you have to go outside the bounds.” After a few minutes, Judge Arthur Engoron — who had denied Trump permission earlier to give a closing statement at the trial — cut him off and recessed for lunch.

This article added a bit more about the bomb threat and also reviewed the case. Bill Bramhall of the New York Daily News tweeted a cartoon of a bomb squad in Engoron’s office and the squad leader saying, “All clear to write the verdict.” Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about projection and the nasty guy’s escalating use of it.

Donald Trump dropped some blatant teasers last week revealing what the day-to-day experience of living under a second Trump regime would be like. They all share a common theme or motif, one routinely employed by fascists and despots in autocratic societies to bamboozle the public while keeping their critics (often the media) off balance. The method is called “projection,” and for Trump it is a well-documented, well-established rhetorical tool. ... Projection essentially means accusing your opponents of the crimes and misdeeds you are actually guilty of yourself in order to distract from your own behavior. Its effect is reminiscent of the classic old carnival attraction known as a “hall of mirrors.” A hall of mirrors, of course, is a room or series of rooms staged and set up to reflect back grotesquely distorted images of everyone who passes through. The purpose is to unsettle and confuse, to keep the observer off balance and questioning their reality through a repeated sequence of disturbing illusions.

The projection is now to the point where the nasty guy is calling Biden the insurrectionist. Dartagnan quoted Jason Stanely, professor of philosophy at Yale University:

Fascist tactics always involve projection. The fascists are always accusing their opponents of being the totalitarians. The fascists are always accusing their opponents of being the threat to the nation that they in fact are. The fascists are the most corrupt people, like the Nazi party was incredibly corrupt, incredibly lawless. But they accused their opponents of being corrupt.

Dartagnan quoted professors Chris Bell and Gary Senecal who wrote an article for Room analyzing the nasty guy’s rhetorical tactics. They said projection can make a situation difficult to understand. That creates confusion and obscures reality. It gives the appearance the opponents are doing the same things, creating a false equivalency. Back to Stanley, who said projection manipulates a susceptible population, to make them feel like victims, that they’ve lost something because of a particular enemy. Stanley wrote, “This is why fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss.” Dartagnan quoted David Renton, writing for Jacobin, who said fascists use projection to co-opt the state institutions best equipped to perpetrate the violence that sustains fascism. In fascists states the violence is aimed at women (for violating the “natural order”) and anyone that blurs the line between male and female, such as LGBTQ people, especially transgender. In present day America that means co-opting the military and the intelligence services. The nasty guy will escalate the sense of threat and use the formidable tools to eliminate the threat. He and his enablers have announced they will do just that in a second term. Escalating the threat keeps the focus off the person doing the escalating. Bell and Senecal explain that projection bypasses logical debate, including developing a background knowledge of an issue and engaging in a reasoned case over position. Instead, it confirms preexisting biases. This is what is coming in a second term. It will be similar to the first but with a much more sophisticated propaganda and disinformation apparatus. If you don’t wish to live in such a country understand this well and vote accordingly. Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press shows a modern debate. The Democrat has a stack of policy positions. The Republican has a baseball bat. Mark Sumner of Kos has a few things to say to those who believe the nasty guy won’t impose a national abortion ban. First, instead of participating in the last Iowa debate (Haley and DeathSantis on stage) the nasty guy had a solo “town hall” on Fox News where the host lobbed easy questions so he could talk about himself. As part of that he bragged about he was the one to end Roe v. Wade. Second, he has been talking, not about enacting a national abortion ban, but warning fellow Republicans that talking about abortion before the election isn’t good for getting elected. But after the election he’ll be ready to sign a national ban through executive order. Third, he’s been repeating a hideous lie, one that Fox News hosts are letting slide, that Democrats want to kill babies, even after they are born. (See above about projection.) Dartagnan also discussed the nasty guy telling European officials he intends to pull us out of NATO. A fundamental position of that organization is if one member is attacked it will be seen as an attack on all and all will respond. That’s why during the Cold War the Soviets never attacked West Germany. It why in the current war Putin isn’t attacking Poland or the Baltic states. That deterrence won’t mean much if the US president says the other members are on their own. If Russia doesn’t fear a US response they are much more likely to attack. Ask Ukraine about it. The US betrayal of Europe would also make South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel wonder if they’re next. The US military would lose standing in the world. Trade agreements would be seen as suspect or worthless.

As those alliances disintegrated, the entire idea of democratic representation—the idea that people deserve a voice in their own government—would start to erode on a global scale. It wouldn’t happen quickly, as Applebaum notes, but, “By the time people here realize how much has changed, it will be too late.”

The nasty guy may have complained about US protection being a handout to Europe. But this is about “our own country’s future and its ability to survive in the world we are faced with.” And the nasty guy seems willing to throw that away. My goodness, I’m getting tired of writing about this guy and the havoc he intends to inflict. I want to ignore him until after election day, but I dare not. Last week I wrote about environmental tipping points. Pakalolo of the Kos community reported that science has determined another. This is the “snow loss cliff.” As long as the average winter temperature of an area stays below 17F (-8C) the snowpack at higher elevations is stable. What melting it does provides water to people who live downstream. But when the average temperature rises the snowpack decreases. Here’s the tipping point part: each degree of warming means faster decreases in the snowpack. This is not a linear relationship. By the time the temperature reaches 32F (0C) half the snowpack can be lost. Snow cover is not the same as snowpack. Snow cover refers to the geographic range of the show. Snowpack refers to the amount of water frozen in the snow.