They feel like they should control the world

Kos of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy was asked how he would lower food prices. He replied he would not allow so much food to be imported from other countries. First of all, supply and demand. I learned about this in high school. Restrict the supply and the price goes up, not down. Second, a lot of our fruits and vegetables would become seasonal rather than year-round – such as blueberries, avocados, and grapes. Over half of our fruits and vegetables are imported. Also, very little coffee is grown in the US. Same with chocolate. Say goodbye to bananas and a lot of ethnic foods. The nasty guy has also talked about mass deportations of immigrants. We can ask Florida what that’s like since DeathSantis has passed a strict anti-immigrant law. Farm workers fled. Crops don’t get picked so they rot in the fields.

If Trump wants to run on “you won’t be able to find bananas,” then all the power to him. If he wants to cancel Halloween, as very little chocolate is grown in the U.S., that’s weird, but okay. At the very least, the media should cover it, not ignore it.

I mentioned yesterday that there was a second assassination attempt on the nasty guy. If you’re still interested, a pair of Associated Press articles posted on Kos (here and here) have a lot of the details. James Tees posted a cartoon by Marlette showing to boys walking home from school.

White boy: Dude, my parents are outraged that gunmen have been able to keep targeting Trump! It’s all they’ve been talking about! Black boy: Interesting... Do they get that passionate about gunmen who keep targeting us in schools?”

Daria Solovieva, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos discussed Silicon Valley tech leaders, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists and who they support for president. Many support Harris and many refuse to support the nasty guy. However, there are a few who do support him. Those who do support him the reasons tend to want to continue his tax cuts for the wealthy and his promise of less regulation. As billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban said the tech elite have, “gotten to the point now where they feel like they should control the world.” This week Kos put out a series of articles on how Harris could win big, though polls currently show a tight race. I won’t bother with the first article, which was about the numbers – poll numbers and energized voter numbers. I’ll also skip the second article, which was about how Harris has a significant get out the vote effort and the nasty guy barely has one at all. The third article (which has links to the other two) is about the nasty guy’s deficiencies. He has a lack of focus – the first debate showed how old Biden is, the second showed how old the nasty guy is. He is lying to his supporters – he keeps flipping his position on Project 2025 and abortion and IVF. His supporters can no longer trust him to do what they want done. He is falling further into conspiracies. One bit of evidence is how much he has been hanging out with conspiracy spreader Laura Loomer, which is turning off other Republicans. These are a part of the signals that could turn into a strong win for Harris as well as downballot Democrats. But it will take work. Bill in Portland, Maine, in a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. One of them:

“For 11 years, I had the tremendous privilege of playing the lead in a comedy series called Murphy Brown. I was surrounded by brilliant and funny actors, had the best scripts to work with and, in one classic moment, my character was attacked by Vice President Dan Quayle when Murphy became pregnant and decided to raise the baby as a single mother. Oh, how far we’ve come. Today a Republican candidate for vice president would never attack a woman for having kids. So as they say, my work here is done. Meow.” —Candice Bergen, at the Emmy Awards

In the comments of a pundit roundup from Tuesday Captain Frogbert riffed on the famous poem by Martin Niemöller. He says something I concluded a few years ago.

First they came for the poll workers Then they came for the opposing candidates Then they came for the civil service workers Then they came for the judges They WILL come for the journalists They WILL come for the Democrats The stupid reality is, they WILL ALSO come for the “insufficiently loyal” Trump voters They will also come for the tech bros (just as Putin did for the oligarchs and their money) They will also come for EVERYONE, eventually Because that’s what fascists ALWAYS DO. Fascists cannot exist without an existential enemy and, as they winnow down the initially most obvious enemies, they will always, ALWAYS, eventually, COME FOR YOU.

Real people in a real city become props in a lie

An Associated Press article from last Saturday posted on Daily Kos discussed the situation in Springfield, Ohio after the nasty guy claimed Haitian immigrants there were eating pets. A lot of cities have been reshaped by immigrants without attracting notice. But Springfield is now in the spotlight. In a city of about 60,000, the roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants now make up a quarter of the town. Yes, there have been tensions about newcomers taking jobs (which weren’t being filled), driving up housing costs (though they filled many vacant houses), making traffic worse, and straining city services. Also, the presence of the new residents has led to the downtown being revitalized. Many Haitian residents are now living in fear. Some now consider leaving, which could lower the town’s newfound prosperity. Local officials continue to try to tamp down misinformation. Even Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is helping by offering more law enforcement. A second AP article on Tuesday featured a photo of DeWine in Springfield at a news conference to do his part to denounce the rumors of pet eating. He was also there because the Springfield City Hall, several schools, and the state motor vehicle offices in town were forced to evacuate after receiving bomb threats. So state police will sweep every school building every morning before staff and students arrive. The town canceled its CultureFest that was supposed to start next week. The reason was safety. This past Sunday, Sept. 15, Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press discussed the situation. Alas, the article is for subscribers only. He wrote about how fast a lie can travel. As part of his story he talked about the woman who started the rumor. Seeing how far her rumor spread, how it is being used, and how much pain it is causing, she now deeply regrets starting it. Vance is unrepentant and vowing to continue his lies. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Vance appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with host Dana Bash. As part of that he said,

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.

I ask: Suffering of which American people? Right now the Haitian residents and the town of Springfield as a whole – his constituents because he is one of Ohio’s senators – are suffering. He appears to have no interest in them. Also, this is Vance admitting he’s lying, making stuff up to suit his political narrative, regardless of the pain he’s causing and how well his narrative matches reality (as in not at all). In Sumner’s words Vance said, “he wasn’t going to stop repeating his false narrative just because his words were putting people in danger.” To make the whole situation worse, the nasty guy is planning to visit Springfield “soon.” Mayor Rob Rue said it “could be difficult, a very difficult visit.” Don’t expect honesty. Sumner concluded:

Meanwhile, threats of violence in Springfield continue. That’s what happens when real people in a real city become props in a lie created specifically to stir up hate.

Oliver Willis of Kos wrote:

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance knew that stories about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, stealing and eating domestic pets were untrue before he and his running mate Donald Trump repeatedly amplified the claims, new reporting from The Wall Street Journal has revealed. Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck told the Journal that a staffer for the Ohio senator reached out to him on Sept. 9 and asked if there was any truth to the stories. “I told him no,” Heck said. “There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.” Despite this, Vance did not delete or correct a social media post from that same day...

Kaili Joy Gray of Kos wrote:

Ohio Sen. JD Vance doesn’t care that his racist lies about Haitian immigrants are endangering his own constituents—he’s going to keep telling them anyway. That was his message to supporters at a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday when he complained about the media describing the Haitian immigrants in Springfield as legal—which they are.

Part of his logic of branding the Haitians as illegal is that Harris waved a wand to make them legal and that wand is illegal. But Harris isn’t president and could not have waved any wand. Also, that “wand” is legal. It is a part of immigration law known as temporary protected status in which a person won’t be sent home because their home country is in turmoil and thus dangerous. Yesterday Juana Summers of NPR spoke to Garry Pierre-Pierre, founder of the Haitian Times about what Haitians are dealing with in Springfield. Yes, there were tensions in town before the lies began. Some of that was because the most recent immigrants did not understand how to function in America. He and his crew were to hold a town hall meeting with residents and had to cancel because security could not be guaranteed because the town is so tense. There were death threats and bomb threats. Pierre-Pierre described the Haitians:

Well, life for the Haitians in Springfield is that of a newly arrived immigrant. They are building their community. They have stores, you have restaurants, sending their kids to school. They're struggling economically, but they're doing much better if they were in Haiti. And so that's essentially Springfield. That is also Indianapolis, where I now live. That's Columbus, Ohio, with a large community, parts of Alabama - just all across the Midwest and the Deep South, that's what Springfield, Ohio, is.

On Tuesday Sumner posted, in response to a second assassination attempt on the nasty guy, but also about Springfield:

In a social media post on Monday, Trump made it clear that while he wants everyone else to shut up, he intends to only ramp up his own vitriol. In that statement, Trump blamed “the Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate,” along with the court cases he is facing, for taking the country to “a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust.” “Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” he added. If this seems like the ultimate exercise in hypocrisy, it is. If it seems like an effort to muffle his opponents while he ramps up attacks … yes.

Morgan Stephens of Kos listed seven times the nasty guy’s rhetoric supported or led to political violence. The most recent one is his repeated lying about Springfield. He also mocked the attack on Paul Pelosi. He encouraged the Capitol attack. He villainizes Mexicans. He declared there were “very fine people, on both sides” of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. He has called for violence against counterprotesters at his rallies. Back in 1989 he called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five. Not surprisingly political violence is on the rise. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted a couple good articles. The first quote is by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, discussing the opinion that since the Springfield story is about immigration it will help the nasty guy. Marshall disagrees this story is helping.

More specifically, is this really about the border and immigration? Sort of. But the story we’re seeing is more one of a small community being terrorized by a campaign that looks desperate and in which the Republican town and county leaders have been begging the Trump campaign to stop and now saying that they’re not even sure they’re going to vote for Trump because they’re so mad about the situation. I think there’s at least as much argument that the story people are seeing is about the chaos and destructiveness of Trump, which most people don’t like.

The second quote is from Adam Serwer of The Atlantic:

The reward that the Haitian community in Springfield has received for doing exactly what Republicans demand of legal immigrants—work, provide for themselves, contribute to their community—is a campaign of slander and intimidation. Contrary to Vance’s insistence that he is creating “stories” about a community to alleviate the suffering of Ohioans, what the Trump campaign is actually doing is invoking that suffering as license to justify violence and harm. This is the most employed rhetorical device of the Trump campaign: point to someone’s suffering and then offer as a solution the application of state violence against a disfavored group, using Americans’ problems as a pretext to harm people they have chosen to hate.

Down in the comments Denise Oliver Velez posted a four minute video by Jason Kravits with many helpers that uses animation and song to explain Project 2025. And does a pretty good job of it. Further down in the comments Hugh Jim Bissell posted something he found (author not named) related to the second assassination attempt.

I don’t think the Secret Service is up for the task at hand. It’s time to switch over to thoughts and prayers. And just in case, I think we should also post a copy of the Ten Commandments at all the golf courses and rally events.

It’s simple. They love each other.

My Sunday movie was Join or Die. To see it I had to go to a theater and watch with other people. Cinema Detroit is one of two remaining art-house movie organizations in Metro Detroit. The other is Detroit Film Theater, which is quite healthy and celebrating 50 years. It is also attached to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The area has lost two art-house theaters, the Main in Royal Oak (now demolished) and the Maple in West Bloomfield. Even Cinema Detroit has given up its permanent home. It now sponsors movies about twice a month at Planet Ant in Hamtramck. Planet Ant has a variety of other types of programs, including improv theater and standup comedy. I hadn’t been there before and I’ve rarely visited Hamtramck, so this was a bit of an adventure. The hall had seats for perhaps 100 people. I think about 30 people watched the movie. Join or Die is a documentary about the need for citizens to join clubs. It is based on ideas that Robert Putnam has developed over the last fifty years. In the 1970s Italy decentralized its government, less power in Rome and more in the states. This became an ideal time for Putnam and other researchers to study why some state governments did well and others did not. They studied a lot of parameters, including wealth and education. They found the parameter that correlated best was civic engagement. This wasn’t just civic engagement in government, just civic engagement in general. The idea is much older and others have called it social capital. One of those others is Jane Jacobs, a name my friend and debate partner knows – he lent me her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (I wrote about the book here and a documentary about her here). She studied the street scene in American cities and showed the best neighborhoods were the ones that fostered interconnectedness between people. The social capital was what was lost when a neighborhood was destroyed for “urban renewal.” Social capital essentially means we do better when we join a club. Of any kind. Even religious clubs are good – churches provided about half of our civic engagement. Though all are good try to join a club with membership that has a wide variety of people. Unions are good. So are Parent Teacher Associations. We do better personally – those who join a club are about 50% more likely to live longer (I don’t remember the exact nature of this statistic). Being in a club is also a great benefit to the community and the nation, even for the quality of democracy. Back in the US Putnam turned his analysis skills to his homeland. In 1995 he wrote an article he titled Bowling Alone. People were bowling just as much, maybe more, than they were in the 1950s and 60s. But there was a lot less bowling in leagues. That caught the attention of President Bill Clinton, who invited Putnam to do a few presentations. Other people dismissed his conclusion, saying he didn’t look in the right places. So over the next five years he looked in every place he could. All of the studies he found showed the same decline in civic participation. He put all of that into this book Bowling Alone that came out in 2000. An important question Putnam needed to answer in the book is: Why? Why has there been such a dropoff in all aspects of public participation? He uncovered three broad areas that contribute to less public life. The first is television and its successor social media. The second, related to the first, is how hard people have to work to get by and how they don’t want to go to some club in the evening. They would much rather plop in front of the screen. The hard work is related to growing inequality. Which leads us to the third part. There are forces in America that don’t want us in clubs whose existence supports democracy. They promote rugged individuality so that we say we are not joiners. Putnam has been speaking out to get people to join clubs for nearly thirty years. He’s been helped by Pete Buttigieg and Hillary Clinton (both appear in the film). Yet the trend remains downward and the pandemic made things worse by closing a lot of clubs. It’s enough to make a guy lose hope. Putnam went digging again through a lot of different archives. The charts in his book all showed descending lines from 1960. What about before then? Ah. From the late 1800s – America’s Gilded Age when corporate barons reigned supreme – to about 1960, participation in clubs climbed by quite a bit. We’ve done it before. We can do it again. And there are signs that we are doing it again. The movie highlighted several. That does not mean the 1950s were an ideal time, that we should go back to what our society was like then, that we should be sending women back to the kitchen. But to keep our fragile democracy and to move forward people need to form and join clubs. Some of the ideas for clubs may not last. And some will. I read a couple reviews of this movie (IMDb has links). They point to a question not covered in the movie. All groups are beneficial? Even hate groups? Or groups with discriminatory membership rules? I finished the book The Reason You Walk by Wab Kinew. The author is Anishinaabe and grew up in northwest Ontario, north of Minnesota. I bought the book while at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. The Indigenous shop featured this book and a few more in addition to the Indigenous tourist art and fine art. If the other books I bought there are any good I’ll discuss them eventually. The story centers around Kinew’s father, Tobasonakwut, frequently referred to in the book as Ndede, which is Ojibwe for daddy. The story begins with the birth of Tobasonakwut in the 1940s, then his time in the residential schools that have been in the Canadian news quite a bit over the last decade due to the graves of children found on many school sites. The purpose of these schools was to “kill the Indian in the child” and replace it with white culture. The one Tobasonakwut was taken to was run by the Catholic Church, as were many of the schools. That means Tobasonakwut was raised by people who did not love him, who frequently abused him. He grew up to be a strong and angry young man. That anger affected the family – Tobasonakwut didn’t know how to love and treated people the way he had been treated. For a while he wrecked relationships and lives. Because of that Kinew also grew up angry and also damaged relationships. Tobasonakwut and Kinew immersed themselves in Anishinaabe culture, the sundances and powwows. And they began to heal. Also during this time various Indigenous movements developed and Tobasonakwut and Kinew were a part of them. The Canadian government officially apologized for the residential schools. The government set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Tobasonakwut gave his testimony in Ojibwe. Kinew was offered a job with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and was instrumental in creating documentaries about the schools and Indigenous life. He became known across the country. Tobasonakwut also worked to reconcile with the Catholic Church. He was met halfway (the church didn’t quite give up its superior attitude), enough that Tobasonakwut and a willing Archbishop of Winnepeg conducted an Anishinaabe ceremony declaring they were brothers. They achieved much in advancing acceptance of Indigenous people. There is still a long way to go. The Ndede got cancer. Kinew took a leave of absence from the CBC to learn as much about Anishinaabe culture from his father as he could in the time remaining. Through that he learned what a remarkable man his father was. Ndede had learned how to forgive. As for the title:

Ndede had explained that there are four layers of meaning to these words. They are from the perspective of the creator, as though God himself were singing to you. The first meaning of “I am the reason you walk” is “I have created you and therefore you walk.” The second meaning is “I am your motivation.” The third meaning is “I am the spark inside you called love, which animates you and allows you to live by the Anishinaabe values of kiizhewaatiziwin.” The fourth and final meaning is “I am the destination at the end of your life that you are walking toward.”

It’s a beautiful and amazing story. I highly recommend it. A few years ago this book was a part of Canada Reads, a program that tries to get the whole nation to read and discuss the same book. From that height we descend to the depths. Yesterday, Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that Speaker Johnson has two weeks to fund the government to avoid a shutdown. Chuck Schumer in the Senate says he needs a week to get any bill through his chamber. So Johnson really has only a week. Last week Johnson pulled a funding bill because he couldn’t get enough Republicans to vote for it. This week he brought the same bill back. It includes a racist provision that demands proof of citizenship before being allowed to register to vote. Democrats in the House won’t vote for it. Democrats in the Senate will remove it, which will require time to reconcile with the House. But Johnson can’t get enough Republicans to approve the bill with the racist language and can’t get approval without it. Of course, the nasty guy is in the background demanding the racist language be included. Johnson could take it out and let Democrats bail him out. Again. And again weaken his standing in his caucus. And on Monday Sumner reported that the nasty guy can’t admit he lost his debate with Harris. So Republicans, eager to please him, are calling for an investigation into the debate. They even say they have a whistleblower, though can’t decide whether he is dead or alive (though likely never existed). They want to investigate important issues – at least as important as those around the Biden impeachment scandals that never produced evidence. They claim ABC, who ran the event, had given Harris the questions ahead of time (no, she simply prepared well). They claim Harris wore a wire in her earrings. They claim ABC was biased towards Harris because they didn’t fact-check her while they did him. Thus ABC should lose its license.

Trump’s real problem is that he’s a loser who never wants to admit he lost. That was true in 2020, and it’s still true today. To cover up his losing, Trump employs a three-part plan: insist in advance that his opponents will cheat, claim to have won no matter how badly he lost, and then spread conspiracy theories about why he lost.

And out of the depths. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev had a couple good quotes. The first is from Christopher Kane of the Washington Blade who did the “first-ever interview by a LGBTQ newspaper with a sitting President of the United States.”

Through to today, Biden said, “most of the openly gay people that have worked with me, that I’ve worked with, the one advantage they have is they tend to have more courage than most people have.” “No, I’m serious,” he added, “I think you guys underestimate that.” The president has spoken publicly about his deep respect and admiration for LGBTQ people, including the trans community, and trans youth, whom he has repeatedly said are some of the bravest people he knows. A record-breaking number of LGBTQ officials are serving in appointed positions throughout the Biden-Harris administration. Among them are Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay Senate-confirmed Cabinet member; Rachel Levine, the highest-ranking transgender appointee in history, who serves as assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; the first out White House communications director and press secretary, Ben LaBolt and Karine Jean-Pierre; and 11 federal judges (the same number of LGBTQ judicial nominees who were confirmed during the Obama-Biden administration’s two terms).

I had to go read the whole Washington Blade article. It’s a great one. Mostly, it is about Biden discussing the importance of the many LGBTQ initiatives he accomplished during his term, and a few that didn’t get done. This is a good quote:

“My dad used to say that everyone’s entitled to be treated with dignity,” the president said, recalling a story he has shared before about a time when, as a teenager, he was surprised by the sight of two men kissing in downtown Wilmington, Del., and his father responded, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.”

Back to the roundup. Kev quoted Paul Krugman of the New York Times writing about small cities, like Springfield, Ohio.

I’ve written before about the problem of regions left behind by the 21st-century economy, a problem that is common to many wealthy nations. Decline in parts of the former East Germany has fed right-wing extremism in ways that resemble the rise of Trumpism in some depressed parts of our country. There are, however, some small cities that have managed to buck the trend; and in quite a few cases immigrants have been central to their revival. Springfield, with its community of (legal!) Haitian migrants is one example. Other examples include my hometown, Utica, N.Y., buoyed by refugees from Bosnia and Myanmar; Springdale, Ark., which has attracted people from various places including the Marshall Islands; and many others. [...] Why do immigrants move to some small cities? Partly in response to housing costs that were, at least until recently, relatively low (as they tend to be in declining cities). In some instances, they also move to take advantage of jobs that some native-born Americans, for whatever reasons, are reluctant to do. In Springdale, the home of Tyson Foods, these are often jobs in poultry plants. In Springfield, which, The Times reported, has seen “a boom in manufacturing and warehouse jobs,” employers suggest that some young native-born adults shun “entry-level, rote work.”

In the comments are several good cartoons. One is about the woman who started the rumor of Haitians in Springfield eating pets and now admits it is false and regrets the story that grew up around it and the trouble it created. Garthtoons show a man and woman talking:

Man: Wait. So you’re saying I don’t need to proclaim my stance on breaking news within moments of it happening and can wait to get all the facts before proselytizing on social media? Woman: I know, it’s a radical idea.

ayiti libre! Posted a cartoon by Mackay showing a Haitian family dressed in Ukrainian outfits trying to file an asylum claim. Attached to that tweet is one by nawè who wants us to notice who gets labeled “immigrants” and who gets labeled “refugees.” Deborah Kleinhomer posted a cartoon by Joel Pett with the caption, “Diabolical undocumented-immigrant voting schemes.” A man says to his wife, who is holding an infant, “Let’s abandon our families, blow all our money, risk our lives, sneak into the U.S., then commit a crime that will get us sent back!” A cartoon posted by Trumpton contrasts statements by the nasty guy:

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump 2016 "(Biden and Harris’s) rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country" Trump 2024

And a cartoon by Peter Steiner of a boy talking to his teacher. “The dog ate my book report, and an immigrant ate the dog. But I have a concept for a book report.” Way down in the comments exlrrp posted a photo showing two pickup trucks, one sleek, the other quite beefy. The caption says, “The same make, model, and color. Thirty years apart.”

What if a foreign adversary baits him?

In a pundit roundup on Daily Kos Greg Dworkin included a quote from Greg Sargent of The New Republic:

In a shocking new development—OK, it was entirely predictable—the mayor of Springfield, Ohio has now confirmed that the widely reported threat by email to bomb Springfield’s City Hall included hateful language toward immigrants. This suggests at least the possibility that MAGA’s Two-Minute Hate of the Week about Haitians eating people’s house pets helped incite a threat of mass violence.

Dworkin also included a video of Pete Buttigieg speaking on CNN (his host wasn’t named in this clip). He said the nasty guy wanting us talking about people eating pets is a strategic move. Better we talk about something outrageous that sucks up all the oxygen and sends reporters scurrying to debunk it than to talk about his record: Tax cuts for the rich, jobs lost, limiting abortion. Or about his agenda, Project 2025. Also from Sargent is a discussion of the nasty guy’s many authoritarian statements.

Yet as horrifying as all that is, another, less-garish scenario also potentially looms—and in some respects it might be a more plausible one. A second Trump presidency could unleash a kind of lower-profile, slow-burn authoritarianism, something that unfolds much more quietly and largely behind the scenes. In its targeting of internal enemies and its efforts to carry out revolutionary changes via far-right governance, it could end up being much less dramatic, visible, or splashy—but at the same time, extremely insidious, difficult to track, and very challenging to mobilize against.

In a second pundit roundup Dworkin quoted Philip Bump of the Washington Post:

This is a central reason that Vance and others on the right are susceptible to being described as “weird.” There’s an online world in which things get taken to the nth-degree because its economy rewards that sort of hyperbole. But then these obsessions and claims are taken out of that bubble and presented to everyone else and they don’t hold up. What else can you do but marvel at how strange it all is?

Ruben Bolling posted a Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon on Kos. It tells the story of an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile hitting a school. The story features a nine year old perpetrator, solemn facial expressions from Republicans, a resident with his own collection of ICBMs, an ICBM enthusiast who insists the weapons are protected from children, and Justice Clarence Thomas using an Ouija Board to contact Thomas Jefferson to pronounce ICBMs are covered by the Second Amendment. Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos with this caption:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, because JD Vance told her what to do.

Louis DeStroy is still in charge of the United States Postal Service (why is he still there?) and there is again concern that ballots sent through the mail won’t arrive in time to be counted. From an Associated Press article posted on Kos about a letter listing concerns about continuing problems at USPS.

The two groups, the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, said local election officials “in nearly every state” are receiving timely postmarked ballots after Election Day and outside the three to five business days USPS claims as the standard for first-class mail. The letter comes less than two weeks after DeJoy said in an interview that the Postal Service was ready to handle a flood of mail ballots expected as part of this November's presidential election and as former President Donald Trump continues to sow doubts about U.S. elections by falsely claiming he won in 2020.

So use drop boxes for your ballot. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that the nasty guy and his surrogates have been linking the attempt to assassinate him to Democrats, that it was an “inside job.” That claim is based on Biden’s campaign emphasis that the nasty guy is authoritarian who must be stopped and that rhetoric lead to the shooting. Missing from that claim is the decades in which Republicans have been promoting gun culture and doing nothing about mass shootings in schools and elsewhere. This logic can easily “be seen as justification for taking similar measures in response.” It is a part of laying the groundwork for Big Lie 2.0.

But if the polls run away from Trump following his miserable debate performance, he may not wait until Jan. 6. Trump has already been insisting that the election system is corrupt. It would not be hard for him to move to insisting to his supporters that they need to take action before ballots are cast. ... Trump’s lies are likely to grow along with his desperation. And so will the threat those lies represent.

Sumner also reported that the Secret Service and allied organizations are gearing up for heightened security around the Capitol on January 6, 2025 when the Electoral College votes are counted. This is partly in response to the nasty guy planning how to get his supporters angry enough to coup again. But funds for proper protection of the Capitol are still caught up in a government funding bill that is supposed to be passed by the end of the month but House Republicans are making sure is going nowhere. People are working through plans for a wide array of horrible post-election scenarios. Other people are preparing to defeat those pans and create those horrible scenarios. Yet Republicans may simply leave the doors unlocked. Kos of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s debate performance and why it should disqualify him to be back in the Oval Office (one more big reason to add to all the other big reasons). His debate prep advisors knew Harris would bait him. Yet, he fell for the bait every time. He could not help himself. What if a foreign adversary baits him?

Does America really need a president with zero impulse control? When his advisers actually offer sage (and obvious) advice, and he knows it’s good advice, he still can’t help doing the wrong thing. ... [Axios’ Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen] then speculate as to why Trump couldn’t manage the relatively simple task of just staying on message: He’s “haunted” by his 2020 loss and being labeled a loser; he falls for fake news like the racist lie that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Ohio; he’s old and won’t change his habits; and he surrounds himself with conspiracy theorists like Laura Loomer who are happy to lie to him. That sums up the case against Trump’s reelection very neatly. Age alone is not disqualifying. The other three factors are, and it’s a blight on our country that he still has a chance to win this thing.

Rain in the Sahara

A week ago FishOutofWater of the Daily Kos community and of Climate Change SOS wrote that quite a bit of rain has been falling in the Sahara Desert. Yes, it is one of the driest places on earth. It has been a desert for about five millennia. Some places there get rain perhaps once a decade.

In normal years the subtropical high pressure area, a heat dome, sits relentlessly over the Sahara. The sands are so reflective, the air so dry and the ground is so hot that heat is actually lost to space over the Sahara under normal conditions. ... But this summer something is different. The waters of the north Atlantic are relatively hot while the waters of the south Atlantic are relatively cool. And the waters of the Indian ocean on the east coast of Africa are very warm. And the Mediterranean sea is hot. The high heat content of the north Atlantic and the Mediterranean sea has affected the atmospheric circulation patterns bringing exceptional heat to far northern Europe and allowing the heat dome over western north Africa to break down, bringing monsoon moisture north into the Sahara desert.

The good news is this has disrupted the formation of hurricanes. There have been a lot fewer this year. The bad news is a more humid Sahara means more water vapor in the atmosphere and that is a strong greenhouse gas. On Sunday Mark Sumner of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s claim that schools are performing gender reassignment surgeries on students without parental permission. Instead of simply ignoring such a bizarre claim, CNN decided to fact-check it. First, there is no evidence of this happening. No one has reported an instance of it. Second, school nurses are barely willing to hand out an aspirin without parental permission.

And when CNN asked Trump’s campaign for examples of the “transgender thing” their candidate was pushing, the outlet didn’t receive any. Instead, a Trump spokesperson insisted that she had personally talked to parents who were upset after learning that their children were “being called entirely different names” at school. Somehow, that doesn’t seem like the same thing.

We’re not surprised to learn the nasty guy lied. Alas, some conservative groups are delighted with the lie, such as Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty. She doesn’t care if it is true. She cares whether audiences will be outraged by it. Which is why the nasty guy will keep repeating it. JP tweeted:

As a conservative voting for Harris, someone asked what policies of hers I actually liked. I like the one where she didn’t call to terminate the constitution to overturn an election her own legal team repeatedly told her she’d lost. Mainly that one. When choosing between someone I disagree with on policy and someone that tried to overturn an election to unlawfully stay in power like some 3rd world dictator, it’s an easy choice.

A week ago Sumner pondered if everyone hates JD Vance why is the nasty guy campaign thrilled with him? His weird comment are frequent and repeated and he will be out campaigning to say them a lot more. The Bulwark said Vance is still there because he’s an asset in turning out the base, not win over liberals or even persuade moderates. But there are problems with that. This election isn’t so much about turning out the base, but in reaching out to the middle. And the nasty guy is terrible at reaching out to the middle – see his many flip-flops on abortion rights. At the start of this week Sumner reported the nasty guy claimed that 20% of mail-in votes in Pennsylvania are fraudulent. But how can he claim they are fraudulent if they haven’t been sent out yet?

Trump’s claim about Pennsylvania doesn’t represent concern over votes in the state. Just as in 2016 and 2020, Trump is lying about voter fraud or a “rigged election” far in advance of Election Day. He’s preparing to lose and prepping his followers to repeat the kind of actions seen in 2020 to perpetuate the Big Lie.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a couple good quotes. First, from Peter Hamby of Puck talking about how hard it is to reach a large number of voters:

That much-hyped Harris interview on CNN with Dana Bash? More than a third of swing state voters (34 percent) didn’t know it happened. More than half of voters (53 percent) haven’t seen or heard any of Trump’s many podcast interviews this year. Almost half of battleground state voters (43 percent) said they’ve never seen or heard a Harris meme on social media. As I wrote a few weeks back, TikTok gets a lot of press coverage. But TikTok, like Twitter, Is Not Real Life.

Second, a tweet from Tim Alberta discussing the debate:

One way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times and Harris zero times Another way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times instead of 500 times

In the comments exlrrp posted two memes with the same image of Putin and Kim of North Korea with a bottle of alcohol as seen through a hotel room door peep hole. One says, “Open up it’s your homies... heard you had a bad night.” The other says, “Hey asshole... why you let a girl beat you up?” That debate was split-screen. Both candidates were visible the whole time. And Harris did a fine job of using facial expressions to respond to the absurdities spouted by the nasty guy. She didn’t need to say a thing. WTFGOP posted a chart to decode her expressions. And a ways down in the comments is a cartoon from The New Yorker Humor. It shows a man in a highly decorated uniform saying to a psychiatrist, “It’s like Trump is deliberately praising every brutal dictator except me.” Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. Here’s one of them.

"Kamala Harris came in needing to rattle Trump's cage, and now that it's over they're still looking for pieces of his cage in low orbit. Harris got under his skin like she was stuffing in butter and rosemary. It was beautiful—by the end of the debate the meat was falling off the bone. … Trump was so nonsensical that she looked at him the way a parent looks at a kid giving a presentation of why they should be allowed to get a pet tiger." —Stephen Colbert

She pressed every one of his oh-so-sensitive buttons

I said I would write about Tuesday’s debate between Harris and the nasty guy only if I read something interesting about it. And I did. First some tidbits from the debate. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos posted the segment in which Harris talks about how much the nasty guy admires dictators. They can manipulate him with flattery. So military leaders say he’s a disgrace. We need a president good at national security and understands respecting the military. Einenkel posted about the nasty guy willing to let Putin take over Ukraine with his eyes on Poland. Harris said:

And why don't you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor, and what you think is a friendship, with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch?

Kos of Kos gave his (definitely progressive) opinion on how the debate went.

Vice President Kamala Harris began the debate Tuesday night with a power move—walking right up to a befuddled Donald Trump and shaking his hand. It signaled who was the boss, and she took command of the debate from the start. For 90 minutes, Trump was forced to respond to Harris’ attacks while she ignored his. In question after question, Harris took hard, focused, and effective swipes at an increasingly agitated Trump. Increasingly rattled, Trump’s voice sped up, louder and louder until he was yelling into his microphone, sounding hysterical, repeating lies like “after birth abortions”—provoking a rare fact-check from the moderators. In fact, more than one.

Harris came out ahead even after the ABC moderators fudged on the time and allowed the nasty guy speak for an extra nine minutes. All that did was allow him to hang himself with his rambles. Kos also discussed that afterward the nasty guy reveled in polls showing he won. These are polls from far right organizations that have zero scientific validity, which progressives will ignore. Kos discussed the nasty guy’s obvious lack of debate prep. He didn’t take it seriously, because “he has benefitted from a lifetime of success without having to really work for any of it.” And “The world has consistently rewarded his laziness and lack of preparation.” Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that the nasty guy had memorable lines (see below), but there was another part of what he said that is more important. During the debate he was asked about his desire to repeal and replace Obamacare. He admitted he has no plan and never did. What he has are “concepts of a plan.” This is important because back when running for president in 2015 the nasty guy made repeal and replace the core of his campaign. He wanted repeal because he hated Obama, who got the thing passed. Republicans also wanted repeal (thanks to Sen. John McCain for thwarting them). But he only and perpetually promised the replace part. Which meant he was and still is, “willing to rip away the health care of 50 million Americans with no replacement to offer—a level of vindictive recklessness that's hard to imagine.” Sumner discussed the shift in mood among progressives after the debate. As part of that he explained:

In Tuesday night’s debate, Harris might as well have been holding a technical diagram showing the precise location of every one of Trump’s oh-so-sensitive buttons. And she pressed them all. Gleefully. Or, as The New Yorker put it, “Kamala Harris, veteran prosecutor, proved beyond a reasonable doubt on Tuesday night that her opponent will always take the bait.” ... How Harris was baiting Trump into one unforced error after another became obvious early on. No matter what the topic, Harris made sure to insert one shiny little nugget certain to ramp up Trump’s ire: Crowd sizes. People leaving his rallies because his speeches were boring. His felony convictions. And every single time, Trump jumped on the bait, losing his chance to respond to Harris’ policy statements, and becoming angrier and angrier as he realized that his golden opportunity was slipping away.

The lines that got repeated the most by the media were the ones about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating pets. For the record it is disgusting, false, and easily debunked. Springfield is “ecstatic” immigrants are coming to their town that was shrinking. They’re filling jobs and living in houses that had been empty. Sumner reported that lie came from JD Vance. The nasty guy was just repeating it. So after the debate Vance was asked about it. And he didn’t back down. Which means this is now Republican dogma.

The embrace of this overtly, deliberately racist, and utterly disgusting claim is the ultimate outcome of where Republicans have been going for years. Decades, even. It’s a mishmash of Trump’s xenophobic racism against Mexicans, the white supremacy at the heart of the Republican Party, and the vilest Nazi-inspired blood libel. Now they own it. And have to defend it. No dogs may actually have been harmed in Springfield, but Republicans have definitely thrown away their dog whistles. And taken off their sheets.

The nasty guy’s claim, of course, spawned dozens of memes and cartoons. Several were collected in the comments of a pundit roundup for Kos. “Out of an abundance of caution, the national touring company of CATS has canceled upcoming Springfield dates.” An image of Harris looking at the nasty guy has the caption, “The face you make when you realize it’s time to take away grandpa’s car keys.” The Wieners Circle restaurant in Chicago has been putting snarky messages on its sign. The current one says, “Immigrants eat our dogs.” A cartoon by Matt Davies shows Vance and the nasty guy behind a cauldron of something green and bubbling. The nasty guy offers Uncle Sam a ladle, asking, “Haitian dog-whistle stew?” A yellow flag showing a kitten and the words, “Don’t snack on me.”

Sanewashing

I had a movie picked out for my Sunday viewing. But Fandango/Vudu didn’t like my password. I reset the password and it rejected what I had just successfully reset it to. And then I learned again resolving something through chat can take a really long time. Though in this case it wasn’t resolved. So to Netflix. I watched Hanna Gadsby’s Gender Agenda. This is a filmed stage show at a location in London. Gadsby was both comedian and host for the show with seven other gender queer standup comics. I hadn’t heard of any of them. Gadsby doesn’t like the term “nonbinary” and would rather be known as a gender surprise. Many men are uptight about protecting women’s sports. They’re afraid that a man would dress as a woman to have access to the perks of women’s sports. What are those perks? Jes Tom transitioned from female to male and also from lesbian to gay. That provided for lots of jokes about gay men contrasting with lesbian women. Chloe Petts is a masculine lesbian, which frequently gives her access to male privilege. She was very good. Asha Ward, is a lesbian. She focused more on drug use than on being lesbian. The audience loved her. I didn’t. Deanne Smith had top surgery and went no further. But they aren’t really nonbinary. Also good. Dahlia Belle is a transgender woman. She was very funny though her jokes were quite blue. Krishna Istha is a transgender man and nonbinary. And good. Alok, is transgender. They talked about how airline baggage weight limits are so unfair to transgender people needing to look fabulous. Overall, seven out of eight is pretty good odds. And with those seven I laughed a lot. This is a good one. I finished the book You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo. This is a science fiction story and the title is the name of a bioship, a spaceship that is grown, not built, and has a brain. How it got that name is not provided, though perhaps it is a whim of the rich person who owned it. Niko used to be a captain in the Holy Hive Mind in which an implanted chip allows her to communicate with her mixed species team telepathically. She got them all out of the Mind and the chip was turned off. They’re still her loyal crew and are very much a family. At the start of the story they’re running a high quality restaurant in a big space station. They need to evacuate and end up on the bioship with a few others, though the destination is not under their control. While in transit Dabry, the head chef teaches the ship how to cook, not just use the replicator. For the most part the story is fun and enjoyable. The part that isn’t is because of the cruelty of the leader of their forced destination. Early on I got the sense that, like many American stories, the ending will be pleasant one. The protagonists will thrive after the major conflict. The better the thriving the better we like the story. We Americans are annoyed when a story does not turn out that way and Hollywood has taken note. I’ve heard many times, and have said myself, that a story was great, but I hated the ending. Niece even says it about Romeo and Juliet. One example of a hated ending is The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason, which I read shortly after it came out in 2003. Another Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Both had such a beautiful story I didn’t want them to end the way they did. Especially with Patchett’s book I wanted her to to come up with a different solution to the problem that was the core of the story. I was a bit surprised with the book Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. I had picked it up during one of my trips to Australia. It didn’t have the expected happy ending. And that got me wondering whether that expectation is an American thing. I also finished the book Our Colors, a graphic novel, by Gengoroh Tagame. I had read and enjoyed both volumes of Tagame’s My Brother’s Husband, so I wanted to read this one too. As was the previous books this one is set on Japan. It focuses on Sora, a sixteen year old boy who knows he is gay and knows he can’t ever tell anyone. Homophobia is stronger in Japan. There is also Nao, a girl his same age who has been his friend since elementary school. Sora is friends with another boy and secretly in love with him, but is afraid that proclaiming his love will disgust the other boy and he’ll lose a friend. Sora also watches the other boys talk of pursuing girls and watches couples hold hands and wishes he could do the same. A bit before summer break Sora encounters Mr. Amamiya and his cafe. The cafe is strange in that it seems to have very few customers, sometimes just Sora and Nao. Mr. Amamiya is gay and has regrets. He vows he will no longer live a closeted life. Through long discussions with the older man Sora begins to understand that being gay does not have to lead to a lonely life in the closet. I enjoyed this one, as I did Tagame’s other books. The story and the artwork are well done. Alas, because it is a graphic novel, it takes only a few days to read and seems over too soon. Last Friday Kos of Daily Kos discussed a term I hadn’t heard before and now I’m hearing a lot. The term is sanewashing, taking someone’s word salad and extracting bits to make the speaker sound more sane. Kos gave an example. The day before the nasty guy gave an economic address. In response to a question the nasty guy gave a long rambling answer that didn’t answer the question, which Kos included in full. It is too long for me to repeat. Then Kos included the sanewashed version given by Michael Gold of the New York Times.

After his speech, Donald Trump was asked how he might address rising child care costs. In a jumbled answer, he said he would prioritize legislation on the issue but offered no specifics and insisted that his other economic policies, including tariffs, would “take care” of child care. “As much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”

Saying the nasty guy gave “a jumbled answer” and not explaining what that means or what that says about his mental state? Sheesh. Also, the nasty guy said, in all that jumble, nothing about “prioritize legislation.” Said Kos:

Gold went out of his way to make Trump’s aside about tariffs sound semi-coherent, as opposed to the nonsensical pivot it really was. Or, to put it another way, Gold made it sound as if Trump gives a damn about child care when it’s clear from his answer here—as well as his current policy platform and his priorities during his administration—that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about it.

Alas, the NYT is not the only media company doing this. On Monday Meteor Blades of Kos quoted some recent articles. Jon Alsop at the Columbia Journalism Review discussed sanewashing.

As applied to Trump, the idea is that major mainstream news outlets are routinely taking his incoherent, highly abnormal rants—be they on social media or at in-person events—and selectively quoting from them to emphasize lines that, in isolation, might sound coherent or normal, thus giving a misleading impression of the whole for people who didn’t read or watch the entire thing. ... If the word “sanewashing” is not new, neither is the idea that the media is masking Trump’s incoherence.

Blades quoted Jake Lahut, also of CJR who said that the decline of local news is a problem for campaigns. Elissa Slotkin, Michigan candidate for the US Senate, campaigned through northern Michigan. The crowd was decent, but there were no newspeople from the local television stations or the major paper of the area, the Traverse City Record-Eagle. There was a person from a public radio affiliate, the nonprofit startup Michigan Advance, and a New York journalist. And Blades quoted Jay Rosen, author of the 1999 book What Are Journalists For?, wrote in the Economist back in 2010:

My own view is that journalists should describe the world in a way that helps us participate in political life. That is what they are "for". But too often they position us as savvy analysts of a scene we are encouraged to view from a certain distance, as if we were spectators to our own democracy, or clever manipulators of our fellow citizens.

Rosen advocates for the “Citizen’s Agenda” in which the citizens, and not the politicians, party, or media, determine what topics the candidates should be talking about. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted John Stoehr of The Editorial Board discussing sanewashing:

I would say most of my students understood this. Others, however, were not prepared. They were not even willing to accept as theirs the responsibility of communicating. Some would even grow visibly upset at realizing I would not do the work for them. It was, after all, a shock. I was sometimes the first adult to hold them accountable not only for what they said, but for what they didn’t say. If they wanted to reach the highest standard, they had to take responsibility for themselves.

Then Stoehr quoted Parker Malloy of The New Republic:

This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former — and potentially future — president.

In the comments is a tweet from Ian Sams quoting an article in Huffpost.

“Here, presented for the first time, is an exhaustive list of the previous GOP presidents, vice presidents and nominees to these posts who have publicly said they will be voting for Trump in November: 1. Sarah Palin. That’s it. That’s the whole list.”

Way down in the comments is a tweet by Odee showing a cartoon by Mark Parisi. It shows a teacher getting a banned books list and using it as the year’s reading list. In an article published in the Texas Tribune and posted on Kos Nic Garcia wrote about something that has appeared in several news sources and alluded to in the comment about Republicans not voting for the nasty guy. Yes, one is Dick Cheney, VP under Bush II, frequently seen an instigator of the Iraq war, and sometimes called Darth Cheney, has said he will vote for Harris. His daughter Liz Cheney, co-chair of the Jan 6 Investigation Committee and whose presence there was a big reason why Wyoming did not return her to the House soon after, has also endorsed Harris. Clay Bennett tweeted a cartoon of the front page of a newspaper that has a big headline, “Dick Cheney to vote for Kamala Harris.” Headlines on related articles are, “Hell freezes over,” and “Pig flies.” Yeah, there was a debate last night. I heard a little bit of the nasty guy saying something about his daddy left him no inheritance and he earned billions through his own wonderful talent before I was able to switch to some music. I haven’t yet read the commentary on Kos about the debate. If I find anything of interest (beyond “Harris won”) I’ll include it in a future post.

You can't have a democracy without unions

I read the transcript of a Gaslit Nation episode titled America’s Income Inequality Crisis: How Did We Get Here? with host Andrea Chalupa. The guest is Michael Podhorzer, former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, among other things. He is also the architect of the 2020 movement that helped protect the integrity of the vote (a subject of another episode). From the introduction:

The American Dream is increasingly resembling a Neoliberal Ponzi Scheme, where the promise of prosperity seems to be reserved for nepo-babies. Beyond the obvious moral implications, income inequality has profound consequences for our society. It undermines trust in institutions, worsens political instability, and contributes to declining life expectancy—a stark reality in America today. When the rich get richer and the rest of us get left behind, it doesn’t just create social rifts; it destabilizes the United States, and therefore the world.

Podhorzer did most of the talking. Unless I note otherwise I am summarizing what he said. He starts with going back to the Gilded Age, which was worse than now. Rich Andrew Mellon as Secretary of Treasury was seen as appropriate. The US had the most violence against unions, which was legal. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal worked to change that, which brought an era of worker agency, important in the post-war boom.

What is true in any capitalist system is that it will run amok. It will crash everything. It will make this kind of inequality if there isn't a countervailing power. And that was explicitly the purpose of the Wagner Act and the Early New Deal legislation was to give working people the power to contest GM or US Steel or the big companies at the time. And it worked right, it created a shared prosperity.

That shared prosperity didn’t extend to everyone because of racism, though that is not part of this post’s discussion. Of course, corporate bosses never accepted his new order and, in the 1970s, began to unravel worker power. Simply voting is thin protection against capitalist power. Workers must also have power. Republicans were out to destroy unions (and still are). By 1976 and up to the Biden administration Democrats weren’t explicit about gutting unions, but did support business and banking deregulation done by Clinton and Obama, things that if a Republican president had proposed it a Democratic Congress would have rejected. The solution to inequality, to good healthcare, to decent wages and pensions – to democracy – is healthy unions. We had it and we threw it away. “You can't have a democracy without unions.” Chalupa added, the big change in the 1970s was in 1971 when the Powell memo rallied business leaders to send lobbyists to Washington to attack the new deal, roll back regulations, reduce taxes, declare war on workers, and buy off the Democratic Party establishment. (Powell was awarded a seat on the Supreme Court.) Which explains Biden’s difference. He was a part of the Democratic Party establishment for quite a while, but had a pro-union upbringing. Podhorzer added a clarification. It wasn’t that Democrats were bought off. It’s that they were replaced with pro-business Democrats, thanks to support from business. So Obama was not bought off. He actually believed that getting Larry Summers from Wall Street into his administration was a good thing. Also, Carter and Clinton didn’t have to get union support to be governors in Arkansas and Georgia, right to work states. And Obama didn’t have to go to a lot of union halls to get to Illinois state legislature, the Senate, or to be president. They didn’t have to learn what Biden grew up knowing. Harris is being pressured to give up her goal of getting the rich to pay more taxes. Of course she is and will be – that’s billionaires being billionaires. Will she succumb? Whether she does or not billionaires have enough resources to pressure the more than 200 Democratic representatives and 50 Democratic senators. And if that fails the Supreme Court has been mighty friendly to business lately. But for America to work for working people the tax rate must go much higher. There are other things Harris could do. Join picket lines as Biden did is a big one. That’s a powerful message. Also, enforce labor laws so workers feel safe trying to form unions, make pro-union nominations to the National Labor Relations Board and similar pro-union boards, and continue pro-union rulemaking. But that won’t be enough. She or any president won’t be able to do enough until all of us understand that democracy and freedoms depend on strong unions. Reagan accelerated what started in the 1970s by taking us from the conventional wisdom that America should be a pluralistic society to one that was focused only on a good business environment. Trickle down economics was laughed at until people saw it was in their best interest to believe it. Biden may be helping the union resurgence, but it also comes from a decline in confidence in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, police, military, and big business. Confidence in all those is at really low levels. Much of that confidence was lost in the 2009 crash [I thought it was in 2008] when all but unions failed the working people. Though media doesn’t mention it, Americans have increased their confidence that unions can help America be better off. Even Republicans are increasing their support. Until the New Deal the purpose of the US federal government was to protect the rich. Before then most of the rest of the industrialized world had a labor party to counterbalance the business party. We had that balance for a while, creating the myth that the purpose of government is to protect the little guy (I stubbornly believe in that myth). The biggest way the government subsidizes business is to protect it, to make class action suits difficult, to prevent gig workers from unionizing. Remember that in the early years of the New Deal the Supreme Court struck down really basic things, like minimum wage. Podhorzer said:

The Supreme Court has really been there to be the last line of defense against democracy. That it's like if there's too much democracy breaking out in Congress that they can clean it up afterwards.

Would Congress be able to let billionaires spend freely in elections, allow gerrymandering, or repeal the Voting Rights Act? They could not. That’s what the Supreme Court is for and why the Federalist Society captured it. The solution is to unionize. Part of that is to pressure Democrats to stand up to the Supremes. Democrats were pretty mild on abortion rights – until the Supremes overturned that right. Then Democrats found their voice. They need to find their union voice. Adding more justices to the Supremes is good, but not enough. We must go after the power that packed the court the way it is now. Just rebalancing the Supremes means billionaires will find another way to push their influence. We must seek a rebalancing of power. Podhorzer thinks we don’t have an oligarchy in America, we have a competitive plutocracy. The fossil fuel industry controls Republicans that want a low wage economy. Democrats are controlled by tech and finance who need knowledge workers and innovation. They have some interests in common (like low taxes), but in many other issues they are in competition. That means we have some ability to veto the worst. To get the society we want for ourselves and our children we have to work for it. Podhorzer doesn’t believe in Martin Luther King’s moral arc of the universe that bends towards justice. We have to constantly work at it and institutionalize the gains. And unions are an important way to get there.

Regulatory strip-mining

I haven’t heard that Congress is back from its August recess. When they come back they have only until the end of the month to fund the government for the next fiscal year. More than a week ago Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that the House Freedom Caucus will disrupt it any way they can. One way they might disrupt the month is to try to force a vote on the impeachment of Biden. An impeachment report was issued in mid August. Of course, whatever charges it might hold are bogus. Speaker Johnson hoped it would be ignored – thank the report’s authors and move on. But the Freedom Caucus said, nope. We must have a vote. And they have ways to force one.

The rest of the GOP accepts reality: Forcing a vote would be a distraction at best, and would more likely piss off voters. It could very well motivate progressive voters to turn out for downballot Democrats running against vulnerable Republicans, and would make MAGA voters mad at any GOP representatives who vote against it. It is absolutely a lose-lose scenario for Republicans, and Democrats are totally here for it. ... Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida has one message for the House hard-liners: Bring it on. "Call the vote. They should do that. That vote is a paved road to the minority," Moskowitz said, noting that there are plenty of Republicans who "have never wanted to do the vote." But if GOP House members do vote for impeachment, he continued, Senate Democrats should “call their bluff” and have a trial. “We should make them own it, every day on TV.” "If they want to show that their top issue is impeaching Joe Biden, a lame-duck president, then we should make them own it. We're not going to go on the defense, we're going to go on the offense," Moskowitz said.

Also from last week Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about another playbook for the next Republican administration that isn’t getting much coverage but is at least as bad as Project 2025. This one is put out by the America First Policy Institute. It’s goal is to crush Biden’s regulations and executive orders to erase almost everything he did. As expected, the biggest beneficiary of these efforts would be Big Oil. And they want to overturn regulations even though under Biden America has reached record production of both gas and oil, producing more crude than any country in history.

To make this regulatory strip-mining happen as quickly as possible, AFPI is reportedly preparing over 100 executive orders for Trump that would blow away much of the work done under Biden. And to make sure that there are no holdouts actually concerned with protecting the environment, safety, or labor, the plan overlaps Project 2025 in efforts aimed at replacing current officials and experts with industry lobbyists. Just think of when Trump named coal-industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to run the Environment Protection Agency. Times a thousand.

Project 2025 is about the federal government. This AFPI plan also has components to wreck regulations at the state level. This state focus is what makes it worse than Project 2025. AFPI says it is all about putting “the interests of the American people first.” That’s the kind of misdirection Republicans like to use a lot. They try to get us to believe “the American people” means only the Big Oil companies. In a third article from a week ago Kos of Kos wrote that big media is playing by rules from decades ago. They assume politicians are boring and small slips should be treated as important. Infidelity used to be a big story (See Gary Hart in 1988) and ended campaigns. The nasty guy changed both of those. He also changed the dignity of the presidency by treating it as a source of grift, He frequently doesn’t speak intelligently and is in mental decline from age. Media would report every detail if a Democrat did it (and did for Biden’s age), but ignore it for the nasty guy. In addition, news outlets are supposed to be good at fact checking. But Kos showed several recent incidents where fact checking failed and outlets published false and misleading statements.

Republicans and independents have long soured on the media, but liberals have finally been s--- on enough to give up defending it. According to Gallup data released in early 2024, the share of Democrats rate “the honesty and ethical standards of journalists” highly or very highly has plummeted from over 50% in 2018, to just 34% recently—and the trend is down, down, down. ... On Thursday [last week], Harris and Walz will hold a sit-down interview with CNN. But that’s unlikely to stop the media’s demand for undue deference. And the sooner liberals surrender giving that power to the Beltway media, the better we’ll all be.

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

"We're nine weeks away from election day, and things are looking up for Kamala Harris. In the latest USA Today-Suffolk University Nerds Gummy Clusters poll, Harris leads Trump 48 percent to 43 percent. Forty-eight percent—that really restores my faith in almost half of humanity. But because of the electoral college, the election might come down to just seven states: Michigan, Wisconsin, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance." —Stephen Colbert

He intimidates people into not holding him accountable

Another school shooting (that phrase alone shouldn’t happen), this one in Winder, Georgia. In the comments of a pundit roundup on Daily Kos Denise Oliver Velez posted several cartoons (definitely not the funny kind) about America’s obsession with guns colliding with schools. Some are old, and alas still appropriate. Here are some of them. One by Matt Davies shows the ABCs as “Active Shooter Alert, Barricade the door, Contact law enforcement”. Jason Betzner did a take on Normal Rockwell on America’s Pastime but showing off guns instead of baseballs. Cali posted one by Paul Fell showing a shot-up school with a sign saying the school is protected from drag queens and dirty books. Drew Sheneman posted one of an elephant telling a teacher. “You should have a gun.” The teacher replies, “We don’t even have pencils.” Pat Bagley showed an elephant crying “Stop Him!!!” not at a guy whose feet a buried in spent shell casings, but at a black man voting. Jane of the North included a picture of a statue of a child cowering under a desk. The caption:

"Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” - British Journalist, Dave Hodges.

No, some of us did not decide killing children was bearable. I hope Harris has large enough majorities in Congress to accomplish her plans for meaningful gun restrictions. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote:

Donald Trump keeps telling his supporters to vote for him in 2024 and they “don’t have to vote again.” Some Republicans are growing increasingly worried this is true—but not in the bye-bye-democracy way that Trump seems to intend. They’re worried that if Trump is defeated in 2024, he will leave behind a broken Republican Party that will have no path to power for generations. Or that even if Trump wins, he could drag his twisted cult of personality into a condition from which it can’t recover.

The nasty guy and his minions are despised by the young. Harris now has a 16 point lead in those age 18-29. That is a potential blue wave the could keep the GOP out of power for decades. I briefly mentioned the nasty guy at Arlington National Cemetery illegally using the graves of fallen soldiers as a campaign photo. I hadn’t mentioned then that he had an altercation with cemetery employees, the ones charged with enforcing the rules. They decided if they insisted on proper behavior the incident would escalate more, so let the nasty guy proceed to violate the law. Daniel Miller, in ThreadReader, wrote:

The incident at Arlington cemetery demonstrates a really profound and potentially underrated point. Trump intimidates people into not holding him accountable. Imagine how much worse this could get if he’s the president and controls the immense powers of the executive?

Miller lists several scenarios. Being the judge or on the jury at a nasty guy trial – do they worry about themselves and family? The board of a company doing business with a nasty guy company – do they worry the nasty guy Department of Justice might investigate? A Democratic member of congress considering oversight. A journalist reporting on him.

You might think you’re strong enough to overcome it. To push back. Maybe. But the fact is, when most people get put to the test, they fail the test. It’s just human nature. Maybe we’re different. And part of me thinks we are, that we have the courage and integrity to stare down such fear. But we really don’t want to find out one way or the other.

An Associated Press article posted on Kos discussed Dolly Parton’s three-decade program Imagination Library book give away program. A child under 5 can enroll to have a book mailed to their home each month. The program operates in 21 states (paid by the states) and sends out over three million books a month. It is in honor of her father, who never had the chance to learn to read. Said Parton:

Of course I want to be known as a songwriter and a singer, but I honestly can say that the Imagination Library has meant as much, if not more, to me than nearly anything that I’ve ever done.

Another AP article described the Benedictine sisters of Mount St. Scholastica outside of Kansas City. They have a tradition of being corporate activists. They may hold just a few shares in a company – Google, Target, Citigroup, and many others. But as shareholders they submit resolutions at annual meetings, asking the companies to respect human rights, implement DEI, reduce climate change, and consider the consumer when setting prices. The resolutions rarely pass. When they do they’re usually non-binding. Even so, they raise awareness inside the corporation. Support used to be in the low single digits and can now be near 30% or sometimes even win. In other ways they are traditional nuns. They hold services in their chapel three times a day. Those who work outside the community – as physician, church lawyer, concert violinist, and such – they share what they earn. David Hayward, the Naked Pastor artist, drew a rainbow sheep in front of two other sheep, one with “hate” glasses, the other with “love” glasses. The caption says:

If they want to see a sinner, they'll see a sinner. And if they want to see a saint, they'll see a saint. Don't let someone else's perception of you affect how you live your life.

The power of the empire against the power of love

On Saturday evening NPR aired a segment of Heath Druzin, host of the Extremely American podcast, and James Dawson of Boise State Public Radio talking to Gabriel Rench, a promoter of Christian Nationalism (CN) and one founder of Fight Life Feast, a conference to discuss national takeover. The segment is 11 minutes and there is a transcript. One goal of CN is that only Christians (and implying the right kind of Christians, certainly white and male – and definitely not gay) can run for political office. That is disconcerting to Druzin, who is Jewish. That takes away one of his fundamental freedoms. Add to that this self-serving statement from Rench:

I think that the Christian faith is the ideal moral doctrine and principles for a thriving society, and the farther you get away from that, the more in chaos we descend.

The discussion can be disconcerting for another reason. Rench and his colleagues are unfailingly polite and they appreciate a good whiskey. They don’t call down fire and brimstone and they aren’t pastors at megachurches. Their conferences have a distinct bro motif. Yet, they talk of takeover. Though they may offer you, the non-Christian, a drink, they consider you the enemy. America is rapidly becoming less Christian. So it seems strange that CN people need support from the people they want to disenfranchise. They also recognize that democracy may no longer return their historical results. Druzin said, “Being in the minority isn't as much of an issue if the majority can't vote.” CN people are building a parallel society and economy with their own email, movies, books, and crowdfunding. They interact with the ideologies the rest of us see and explain it (denigrate it) from their point of view. Andrew Whitehead, a professor at Indiana University who studies these groups, said:

Ultimately, Christian nationalism is focused on gaining and maintaining access to self-interested power. And I think that that ultimately draws Christians away from the example and words of Jesus in trying to break down dividing walls of hostility and to actually loving our neighbor.

I thought about this segment and how how far CN proponents have strayed from the Jesus they say every American should bow down to. I was going to rant about that, but I see Whitehead did a great job more succinctly than I would have, though I’ll add that the “ideal moral doctrine” that Rench proclaims is the doctrine of power, not the doctrine of love. Also, I think it better that credentialed Christian leaders should have a go at it... In looking for that NPR article I found an Extremely American podcast episode with religious leaders discussing their opposition to CN. The audio is 42 minutes with periodic ads and I don’t see a transcript. CN is having a moment, with proponents in Congress and associated with the nasty guy. It is time to hear opposing voices. So the moderator (I think Druzin) discussed CN with a panel. Ben Cramer grew up in an Evangelical family and now writes in opposition. Angela Denker is an ELCA Lutheran pastor, who wrote the book Red State Christians and the upcoming book The Disciples of White Jesus. Owen Strand is provost of Grace Bible Theological Seminar in Arkansas. He wrote the books The War on Men and Christianity and Wokeness. Yes, though he opposes CN he is very much anti-woke. I took notes while I listened, though could not transcribe it well enough to quote. Since most of the panelists’ comments were variations on the same thing (and usually full of Christian jargon) I’ll summarize much of what they said. The primary point (as mentioned above) is that CN reorients the church to look like the power of the empire rather than emphasizing power of love. This is the difference between promoting the social hierarchy and working to subvert and eliminate the hierarchy. It turns Jesus from being the embodiment of love into a militant and political idea. The church is to hold the empire accountable when it abuses power, not to be that abusive power. Jesus called his disciples to care for the marginalized (the ones at the bottom of the hierarchy). When Jesus calls us to make disciples of the nations most Christians believe we are to disciple the people around us. But CN takes that “nations” bit literally. They say they are to disciple America, Sweden, and Uganda. But we are not the ones to make nations bow down to Jesus. Denker is critical of the “prosperity gospel,” the idea that if one does something good (like give money to the church) then God will reward them financially. But that reduced God to being an ATM and ignores many people we recognize as following Jesus quite closely, yet who were poor – and were frequently assassinated (see MLK). The participants were asked how we might counter the CN movement. They all gave variations on a theme: treat those you might oppose with love. Listen to them and be aware of weaponized language. Be aware of our own, often subconscious, narratives that we project onto others. Strand said a lot about wokeness and I need to respond to it. He said being woke teaches boys they are toxic, teaches whites they are racist and can’t help but commit microagressions at every turn, and that capitalism foments a power structure. Wokeness is thus fomenting CN because it targets white people by declaring them white supremacists. That has pushed boys and men into the arms of actual white supremacists. White supremacists say that whiteness isn’t a problem but an element of pride. All that reminds me of the book, White Fragility, Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo, I wrote about it in May and here is an excerpt:

Since being white is seen as normal, yet is so full of privilege, white people expect to feel comfortable everywhere in their world. When they are challenged in their racism they become uncomfortable and that’s supposed to be not allowed. When they are uncomfortable they strike back at what caused that feeling. That conveniently turns the conversation from the racism the non white person is experiencing to the distress the white person is feeling. And white superiority is maintained. In the author’s work of diversity and racism training she has seen that many times. As long as she’s talking generalities white people are fine. As soon as she says something like: that little thing you did or said is actually racist, white people claim they’ve been attacked. The one receiving the correction and all the other white people there usually leave, not to continue with the training.

Wokeness means to wake up from the slumber of being oblivious to the effects of ones actions and to recognize one’s privileged position and how it affects those who aren’t white. And then one tries to do something about it, to correct the wrong and not repeat it. I see Strand looking at wokeness and having the typical privileged white reaction of striking back at what caused him to feel uncomfortable. In this case it is condemning wokeness to the point of writing a whole book condemning wokeness. Can boys and men show toxic masculinity? There are a multitude of examples showing they can, based on attitudes taught by a society built around racism and misogyny. Are they hardwired so they must show toxic masculinity? Of course not. Vice President nominee Tim Walz appears to be one who doesn’t. So let’s teach our boys and men, not that they are innately wicked, but that they can treat themselves, each other, the girls and women in their lives, and those who aren’t white with kindness and respect, even love, without including elements of dominance. Let’s teach them a different definition of masculinity. Let’s counter the message of the hierarchy that has so thoroughly saturated our culture. Strand is wrong about the goals of wokeness, but he is right in how to educate boys and men, to accomplish the goals of wokeness. He said we must put an arm around them, to love them, to teach them about grace, to guide them into the ways of love. Tell them they way forward is not to preserve your whiteness, but to trust the teachings of love.

Poverty is not natural. It is man-made and can be eradicated.

Following on my look at LGBTQ comedians from last week (and wanting something short and light) I started the Netflix show Tig, a documentary about Tig Notaro. Scenes didn’t look familiar, but the ideas did. So I did a bit of checking (of texts of previous posts) and I saw that I had seen it, more than a year ago. So I switched to Tig’s comedy show Happy to Be Here taped at a Houston comedy venue back in 2018 and an hour long. During the show she talked about being mistaken for a man at least once a week (she’s very flat chested and even flatter after breast cancer), one of her temp jobs before being a comedian paid enough, funny comments from her wife Stephanie (Can a bee sting a bee?), playing with her cat, fun things her twin sons said (probably toddlers at the time), and the pranks she would pull at parties. My overall view of this show is there were funny moments, but I kept checking how soon it would be over. And the closing gag went on way too long. In the comments of a pundit roundup for Daily Kos are several cartoons appropriate for Labor Day, which is today. One by Garth German shows workers in a break room just after the boss has put up several anti-union signs, such as “De-regulate, it makes life easier.” “‘Strike’ is just another word for ‘I quit.’” Vasco Costa posted one by Barry Deutsch that shows corporate bosses through the years, starting in 1842, complaining that if workers got such-and-such right their business would be doomed. The workers rights are such things as the right to strike, equal pay for black people, worker safety, child labor, 40 hour workweek, and equal pay for women. Thank a union for each of these and, yeah, businesses had to deal with them and still managed to survive. Remember that faulty prediction of doom the next time they want to withhold worker rights. Another one by Deutsch explaining that “Right to Work” doesn’t mean the right to a job, but the right not to pay union dues, which weakens the union. A third by Deutsch shows workers shows workers explaining why they are against unions, such as a woman saying “I deserve less pay than men.” Captain Frogbert included several good quotes:

“Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” — Abraham Lincoln, Republican, 1861. “Forgive me for noticing that conservatives seem to believe that the rich will work harder if we give them more, and the poor will work harder if we give them less.” — E. J. Dionne, Jr. “Republicans... think the American standard of living is a fine thing -- so long as it doesn’t spread to all the people... And they admire of Government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it.” — Harry S. Truman “Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like Slavery and Apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.” — Nelson Mandela We live in a nation where doctors destroy health; lawyers destroy justice; universities destroy knowledge; governments destroy freedom; the press destroys information; religion destroys morals; and our banks destroy the economy. — Chris Hedges “The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.” — George Bancroft (1800-1891) “That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

I was never in a job covered by a union. But in a big corporation whatever union got we office workers got too. So I’m thankful for the union.