There is no incentive for them to end their criminality

A couple days ago I wrote of the fund the nasty guy (well, his Department of Justice) set up to award money to the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. I wrote about the many ethics problems of the fund. Of course, that’s not the end of the story. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified before a Senate subcommittee Tuesday and had to face intense grilling from Democrats. Blanche sidestepped and did the usual muddying of the issues. And, as Einenkel concluded:

If you’re keeping score, Blanche declined to rule out payments for people convicted of assaulting law enforcement, political donors, and insurrectionists accused of sexually abusing children.

Oliver Willis of Kos reported Rep. Dan Goldman of New York told CNN on Monday night that creating the slush fund is an impeachable offense. He said when Democrats take back the House the fund will be one of many intensive investigations. Other Democrats criticized the fund. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the DoJ added an addendum to the Settlement Agreement, which is really an order. The “settlement” is between the nasty guy and the IRS because an IRS contractor revealed some aspects of the nasty guy’s tax returns. The settlement was not reviewed by a judge and is a “settlement” is in name only with the purpose of obscuring what is going on. On to the addendum. That’s also skeezy because the original agreement left a loophole to allow things to be added. This isn’t just any little thing.

Instead, we just got Blanche dashing off a single paragraph that, on behalf of the United States government, provided an entirely new waiver that says the IRS will never audit, investigate, penalize, or prosecute Trump and others for anything at all, known or unknown, for anything that happened prior to May 18, 2026. ... That sweet forever freedom from prosecution no longer just applies to the plaintiffs in Trump’s sham lawsuit: Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization. Now, it applies to “Plaintiffs or related or affiliated individuals (including, without limitation, family or others filing jointly), or parties including trusts, parent, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries.” Yeah, that’s a lot more people, and a lot more protection.

A tweet by Ronald Brownstein included a tweet by Acyn of Meidas Touch. Acyn included a video of (Josh?) Shapiro, governor (of Pennsylvania?) and quoted a bit of the video:

Somehow, he can’t find the money to pay for healthcare, but he can steal from you to pay off the criminals who stormed the Capitol.

Brownstein added:

One of what will be many many examples of how easily Trump’s move to funnel taxpayer money to J6 rioters will fold into the core Democratic message for 2026.

Oliver Willis of Kos reported:

Two of the police officers who responded to the pro-Trump Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol are now suing the administration after it revealed plans for a taxpayer financed slush fund to reward insurrectionists and other Trump allies. D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn filed suit on Wednesday. The suit seeks to block the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” created after Trump dropped his suit against the IRS and “negotiated” with his own officials to create the $1.7 billion slush fund. In the suit the officers allege that the fund “encourages those who enacted violence in the President’s name to continue to do so.”

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing in his own Substack:

At this point Trump and his MAGA minions have stolen so much, committed so many crimes — not just theft but taking America to war illegally, abusing ICE detainees, and much more — that if and when they lose power many of them will face personal ruin at best, years of jail time at worst. This would happen even if they stopped committing more crimes. So there’s no incentive for them to end their criminality, or to end the attempts to bribe others to go along. Either they succeed in destroying America as we know it, or they won’t. And until that’s resolved, they may as well engage in even more corruption and criminal acts.

Sherrilyn Ifill of her own Substack wrote:

It is by now widely understood that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, and protection from state interference with citizenship rights. The Amendment incorporates the concept of equality – racial equality – into our Constitution for the first time. In so doing the 14th brings our Constitution into harmony with the core principle of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” The drafting and ratification of the 14th Amendment constituted a stunningly ambitious act of constitutional repair and reconciliation. […] Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s grotesque scheme to reward January 6th insurrectionists with payouts from the federal treasury completes the Trump administration’s section-by-section effort to violate the 14th Amendment. Section 4 of the Amendment bars the United States from paying money to those who participated in insurrection. Congress, the branch of government empowered by Section 5 of the Amendment to enforce the 14th Amendment’s guarantees, must block this blatantly unconstitutional scheme from moving forward.”

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and independent pundit quoted a friend. If the nasty guy is funneling my tax money to people who attacked the Capitol, why am I paying my taxes? Why not cheat as so many acquaintances have? Hartmann added an explanation:

By the way, the entire frame — picked up and dutifully repeated by the corporate media — was a lie. Trump’s lawsuit was about to be thrown out by a skeptical judge, so he simply killed it. There’s no “settlement.” No “in exchange” for dropping the suit, none of that. Instead, Trump wants us to think that, but in reality — as Rachel Maddow pointed out — Trump is just forcing us taxpayers to give him a $1.776 billion slush fund.

I’ve heard NPR repeat the frame that the slush fund was a settlement. Hartmann added that nasty junior has created venture firms that have contracts with the Pentagon and other federal agencies. So in addition to being routed to an insurrectionist slush fund a man’s tax money is being routed to the private fortune of the nasty guy’s son. More corruption. The corruption and dismantling of democracy is happening while the nasty guy is breaking our alliances that kept the free world safe since 1945. And that is happening while Russia and China are cooperating in military efforts. How to stop all this? The mess deserves more than a shrug and can’t wait until 2029 or even 2027.

House and Senate Democrats should be holding shadow hearings right now, on the record, with witnesses named and a documentary record being built in real time, so that the day the gavel changes hands there is no two-year Merrick Garland-style delay while everyone studies their shoes. And the Blue states’ attorneys general, who answer to their own voters and not to Todd Blanche, should be opening criminal inquiries into the Trump organization’s conduct under state law, where no federal addendum and no presidential pardon can reach. Letitia James already showed in New York that state fraud statutes have teeth. There’s no reason the attorneys general of at least a dozen blue states couldn’t be coordinating that work this afternoon.

Hartmann says to call your senators and representative and tell them you want hearings on corruption, and do it now, not next year. Emily Singer of Kos reported Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky lost his primary to a guy endorsed by the nasty guy. The reason the endorsement didn’t go to Massie is he led the charge to release the Epstein files and voted against the One Big Brutal Bill. Massie’s lost came just after Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary. He had also displeased the nasty guy by voting to convict him in the 2021 impeachment trial. The nasty guy has also endorsed Ken Paxton over Texas Sen. John Cornyn, pretty much assuring Cornyn will soon lose his primary runoff. Add to that the five Republican state lawmakers in Indiana who lost primaries because they refused to go along with a mid-decade gerrymander. All that shows how much the nasty guy still controls his voters. Republicans who risk defying him could also be removed. These lawmakers have hurt feelings and have nothing more to lose. They could be problematic for the nasty guy. For example, Cassidy has flipped his vote on the war powers resolution Democrats have been bringing up repeatedly to stop the war in Iran. Kos of Kos wrote the nasty guy is winning the wrong battles.

But forcing Republicans into total submission comes with a cost. Every GOP candidate will now carry the weight of Trump’s 38% approval rating and disastrous economic numbers. There’s no room left for distance, nuance, or independence. Trump is making every contest on the ballot about himself, and Republicans can’t win that choice. After Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress this November, Trump will discover that less-MAGA Republican lawmakers, however much he may hate them, are more useful as allies than as enemies.

The more a candidate grovels to the nasty guy the easier a Democrat can win. An Associated Press article posted on Kos announced the death of Barney Frank. He was 86. He served in the House for 32 years, first elected in 1980, representing Boston suburbs. He was able to get a lot done because he recognized what could be accomplished and didn’t turn things that couldn’t be done into a litmus test. He was a pioneer of LGBTQ rights and in 1987 voluntarily came out as gay, rather than being outed. He is also well known for his work in response to the 2007 economic collapse, in what became the Dodd-Frank Act that enhanced consumer protections and strengthened banks. Alas, the nasty guy has worked to undo many of the Act’s provisions, saying they were too onerous. Having an unashamed gay guy in Congress way back in 1987 is pretty cool!

I worked all day and can’t feed my family

In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos Chitown Kev quoted Leonard Pitts, of his own Substack:

In her 2020 book, Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson argues that those of us who have accused white people of voting against their own interests are defining those interests differently than white voters do. We assume those interests would be economic, particularly in financially straitened rural communities. But Wilkerson contends that those voters actually have no greater interest than to maintain white dominance. When you’ve got nothing of social value other than the tint of your skin, to what lengths would you go to protect it? As historian Taylor Branch, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner, observes in Wilkerson’s book, “If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” The answer, according to the last election: 57 percent. About 61 million people.”

Emily Singer of Kos reported:

But while Republicans may have a short-term high, their racist gerrymandering appears to be having the unintended and politically damaging consequence of boosting Black voter turnout in the midterms, erasing any gains the GOP made with the voting bloc in 2024. In Louisiana—where Republicans went as far as to throw out already cast ballots and delay the House primaries to redraw a new map more favorable to their party—Black voter turnout is skyrocketing.

Andrew Mangan of Kos wrote “the era of gerrymaxxing is upon us.” If both parties took gerrymandering as far as they could which party would come out on top.

If all states where one party controls redistricting were to maximize their number of safe seats in that same way, Democrats would walk away with 106 seats to Republicans’ 184. To win a majority in the House, Republicans would then need just 34 more seats out of the 145 that reside in states where redistricting is not under single-party control. Democrats would need 112.

Add to that five states – Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Washington – that have a separate redistricting commission but have Democrats in control of the government and could bypass their commissions. Republicans have only two states where this is the case – Idaho and Montana.

[That] would raise Democrats to 170 seats to Republicans’ 187 in states with single-party control over redistricting. That narrows the gap to 17 seats in favor of the GOP, which is seven better for Democrats than where things stand now.

This is theory. State laws might prevent the worst gerrymandering. Another way to win is for Democrats to control more state legislatures to reduce Republican’s efforts to rig maps. And there are places where Democrats are close, such in Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

It is a crime against democracy that this is what electoral politics in America has come to. But until partisan gerrymandering can be outlawed nationwide, Democrats must fight back. And hopefully, one day, they can gerrymander themselves into enough power to ban the practice forever.

Mangan also reported on a poll showing the net favorable opinion of the Supreme Court justices. The first important number is how many respondents chose “Don’t know.” That varies from 27% for Thomas to 44% for Kagan. As for net favorable, the three liberal justices all have a positive view, ranging from +7 to +11 and all six conservative justices have a negative view, from -4 for Gorsuch to -10 for Roberts.

Much of this difference is likely due to more highly educated Americans being more likely to have an opinion on the justices. For example, 43% of those without a college degree don’t know who Ketanji Brown Jackson is, while the same is true for only 25% of college graduates. And in general, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to have college degrees. So it would make sense that they, in turn, have a more positive view of the court’s liberals and a less sunny view of its conservatives.

David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing a black man with a ballot being directed to throw that ballot into a trash can marked “Colored” instead of a ballot box marked “White.” The sheriff holding the trash can lid says, “It ain’t racism. It’s redistricting.” In Tuesday’s roundup Kev quoted Muflih Hidayat of the Australia-based Discovery Alert discussing the closed Strait of Hormuz on the availability and price of fertilizer. The quote includes a chart that shows the Persian Gulf share of the global supply ranges from 13% to 36% depending on the type of fertilizer.

These figures represent physical product that is no longer moving through global trade channels. Unlike a price spike that can be managed through substitution or efficiency, a physical removal of supply at this scale has no quick remedy. The world cannot conjure nitrogen from alternative sources on a growing-season timeline.

Fertilizer plants in the rest of the world will have trouble manufacturing the stuff because much of it is based on liquified natural gas and 20% of that comes from the Persian Gulf. That shortage will also lower the availability of fertilizer. Garrett Owen of Salon reported on how that affects American farmers.

The price of chemicals necessary to produce fertilizer — phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, among others — has risen sharply since the start of the war, putting even more pressure on the nation’s small and independent farmers and producers. When the Iran war began, fertilizer prices jumped from around $400 per ton in early February to nearly $600 per ton in early March. It’s only risen since then. This would be a problem in any other year, but this year is especially bad. Coming off of 2025, market volatility saw farmers across the country hesitant to buy their year’s fertilizer early, opting instead to buy it closer to the start of the spring growing season. What had been an expensive fertilizer became unaffordable for many, even after accounting for the Trump administration’s bailout to farmers. […] An April report from the American Farm Bureau Federation found that 70% of the nation’s farmers cannot afford the fertilizer needed to operate another year. The problem is especially acute in the Southeastern U.S., where just 19% of farmers and producers pre-booked their fertilizer shipments prior to the Iran war. As such, a whopping 78% report being unable to afford all the fertilizer they need.

Bobby Ghosh of his own Substack discussed Iran’s efforts to charge ships for passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

The closure of the Strait, in Tehran’s plan, is no longer a temporary act of war. It is the beginning of a permanent revenue stream and a permanent claim of sovereignty over the most important oil chokepoint on the planet. The pitch is aimed less at shipping companies than at the Trump administration, the Gulf monarchies and governments of countries that get their hydrocarbons through the Strait: Tehran wants them all to accept that this is the new normal. “We own the Strait now,” it is saying. “The world will pay.” It is a bluff. Iran threatened to close Hormuz for 40 years and never did it; there was a reason for that, and that reason has not gone away. I argued in a column for Foreign Policy a month ago that the surprise element of the Hormuz weapon was already spent — that the world would adapt and the costs Iran could impose would dwindle. The picture today is harsher than that for Tehran. The world is not adapting to Iranian leverage. It is dismantling it.”

Oliver Willis of Kos reported far right podcaster Ben Shapiro lashed out at other conservative media people. The division seems to be between traditional conservatism and the MAGA movement. Willis wrote:

But what’s happening is even more contentious than simple infighting. Right-wing media had a sense of unity and purpose under Democratic presidents, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But in Trump’s second term, they’re finding it hard to keep up the sustained attacks against Democrats while also making excuses for Trump’s increasingly unpopular policies. ... The right-wing media world is fundamentally based on decades of grift, where a willingly receptive audience is sold falsehoods, smears, and bigotry—where they’re constantly told to buy this product or donate to this campaign, all with the purported goal of defeating the left. ... The increasingly extreme beliefs among the right—and the need to constantly one-up each other—have reached a natural end point...

Willis reports that New York Mayor Mamdani has opened the first of five city owned grocery stores. At the opening he said:

“I cannot help but think of the words of our 40th President Ronald Reagan. He famously said, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” Mamdani said. He continued, “It’s a good quote. But I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’ We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table.” Mamdani’s statement was a direct rebuke of the right’s consistent attacks on government help that became mainstream orthodoxy following Reagan’s presidency.

One of the single most corrupt acts in American history

My Sunday movie was Twilight’s Kiss, a love story between two senior men, both with families. One scenario is two men who realize late in life that they are gay. That’s not the case here. Pak, 70, appears to have been cruising for quite a while. Hoi, 65, is a member of a group of senior gay men petitioning for a gay nursing home. Figuring out the setting of this film took me a while. Pak drives a taxi and doesn’t want to retire. In addition to “TAXI” on the side of the car there are Chinese characters. But he drove on the left, so this isn’t China. But their speech didn’t sound like Japanese. I realized what it was only a moment before the movie confirmed it – it’s set in Hong Kong. Pak has a wife, a daughter about to be married, and a son with his own daughter. Pak picks the girl up from school and they all frequently eat together. He doesn’t want to lose all that. Hoi, newly retired, was divorced a long time ago and raised a son on his own. That son, with wife and daughter, is now a member of a conservative Christian church. Hoi doesn’t want to lose that either. Pak meets Hoi in a park. Hoi wants more than a quick release. They become lovers, hiding it from their families, taking time together when they can. It’s a tender story. I enjoyed it. I finished the book We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian. I bought the book because I heard it had the same setting as the author’s book You Sound Be So Lucky which I read and discussed here. At the time I didn’t recognize that book is the sequel and still didn’t until I was done with this book and reread the opening of the other and saw character names I recognized. As in many series like this – a gay romance, well any romance – additional books in the series focus on a different couple with the main characters of one story serving as side characters in the next. The setting is 1958-1959 New York. As in the other book one of the characters is a reporter or writer for the New York Chronicle newspaper. In this case it is Nick. He’s there when the owner’s son Andrew III shows up and is assigned to the news room, where Nick works. Andy looks so lost and inept that Nick befriends him and serves as mentor. Their friendship deepens. When Andy can’t stand to live in his deceased mother’s apartment anymore Nick offers his spare bedroom. Nick is deeply closeted (this is a decade before Stonewall). That his older brother Mike is a cop only makes that worse. When Andy, who was engaged to a woman before she called off the wedding, begins to realize he is queer and has fallen for Nick, there are a lot of issues to work through. Andy is about to inherit the paper, though he feels he’s not cut out for the job. Will Andy being Nick’s boss work? Can Nick allow himself to love and consider a future when the society is so homophobic and he could lose so much? But this is a romance. It follows the formula, complete with happy ending. I enjoyed it, though I’m souring on romances and their formula in general. Sabrina Haake of the Daily Kos community lists the huge amount of grifting the nasty guy has been doing, from the “astonishing” number of stock trades quite likely based on insider information to the gilded phone he offered that now has updated terms that say thanks for your deposit but the phone may never actually appear. He’s even more corrupt than the infamous New York Tammany Hall. Emily Singer of Kos reported on those stock trades.

Financial disclosures released this past Thursday show Trump’s investment portfolio included over 3,600 stock trades made in the first three months of 2026. Wall Street experts say that the trade volume is so large that it looks more like a hedge fund’s balance sheet than that of a singular trader—especially the president of the United States. It also raises serious questions about insider trading. Trump’s stock portfolio is not in a blind trust, and many of the stocks he bought and sold were from companies whose leadership he has worked closely with in his capacity as president, including Intel, Nvidia, and Oracle. “I’m baffled,” Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance, told Bloomberg News. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

So, of course, the nasty guy is against passing a law that would ban members of Congress and the president from trading stocks. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy dropped his lawsuit against the IRS, where he demanded $10 billion for leaking tax returns. There is all kinds of wrong with that lawsuit, including he was essentially suing himself. Instead, he “settled” for a $1.776 billion (yeah, we know where that number comes from) “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate those who attacked the Capitol back in 2021 and were jailed for their crimes. Other grifty aspects of this deal: The money is to be disbursed by a committee and the nasty guy has control of the membership. The deal was not reviewed by a court. There will be no reporting of how much was given to whom, so fraud is almost guaranteed. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Democrats do it too and this deal is just like an Obama-era settlement. Needham documents the important differences that show why one is legal and the other is pure corruption. NPR host A Martínez talked to reporter Carrie Johnson about the case, giving more detail than Needham had supplied. NPR host Leila Fadel spoke about all this with former federal prosecutor Harry Sandick.

FADEL: I'm curious if you agree with the assessment we just heard from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that this is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history. SANDICK: I do agree with it broadly. Nothing like this has ever happened before. For a president to sort of reach with his, you know, with one hand as the litigant and with another hand as the person who controls the government. And to take almost $2 billion and intend to use it, with almost no controls, to provide, you know, settlements, I guess is what they'll call it, to people who were engaged in the January 6 insurrection. So there's - I've never seen anything like this before.

In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman’s Substack:

This is what Democrats so often lack: Not something they can talk about today, not a proposal they can make, not a failure of the other side they can point to, but a big idea that helps voters understand and articulate both what the problem is, and most importantly, who is to blame. It’s the corruption, stupid. Trump’s corruption? Yes, of course. But it’s more than that. It’s a system, a rot, a disease, an explanation for nearly every complaint voters have. Corruption is why you can’t afford health care, why prices are too high, why there aren’t enough good jobs, why the government keeps failing at the things it’s supposed to do, and so much more. This is the big idea Democrats have been looking for.

Alas, a problem is that Democrats, by taking donations from billionaires, have been corrupted. Katie Rogers tweeted a link to an article in Vulture with the title and subhead:

The Feed is Fake That “viral” song, movie, influencer, and celebrity drama you scrolled by recently was likely the result of a stealth marketing campaign.

Rogers added a quote from the article

Reporters and editors who get their ideas from their social-media feeds — which is most of them, most of the time — can mistake a paid simulation of public interest for the real thing and then make it real by covering it.

A week ago Kos of Kos discussed a comment by the nasty guy made at a time when his approval ratings are quite low as voters blame him more and more for the bad economy.

President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter Tuesday, “To what extent are Americans’ financial situations motivating you to make a deal?” It’s a fair question, right? ... “Not even a little bit,” he answered. “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran: they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing—we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Kos says though the statement seems ludicrous it is among the most honest things he’s said. It’s also a gift for Democrats In Friday’s pundit roundup Dworkin quoted John Stoehr and his Editorial Board:

In the run up to the midterm elections, the Democrats accuse Donald Trump of broken promises. Among other examples, they cite rates of inflation that have wiped out wage gains. But the president kept his promise. A majority of voters wanted whiteness to be dominant again. That’s what he’s doing. The problem is that whiteness causes ruin, even for those who vote for it. You can’t have one without the other, but they didn’t believe it, because, to them, whiteness is prosperity. What they’re mad about now is their own desire backfiring on them. If the Democrats win in November, which seems likely, the leadership will have incentive to control everything rank-and-file Democrats say for the purpose of seeming reasonable to these voters, therefore retaining hopefully their support in advance of the 2028 election. The problem is there’s no way to seem reasonable to Americans who desire freedom from consequences.

A nation of private opulence and public squalor

I finished the book To Be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers. I’ve read several of Chambers’ other science fiction books and enjoyed and wrote about them. This one is a novella, only 140 pages. The title comes from words by UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim that went on the Voyager Golden Record in 1977 saying that humanity (or at least its artifacts) leave the solar system...

to teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate.

The story is of four astrobiologists who go to another solar system to study four planets that might have life. That is wrapped up in a report they send back to earth. The story isn’t so much conflict and resolution, but a description of what an astrobiologist might do in their setting and how they would go about doing it. I enjoyed the story and if this kind of science fiction is your thing, you might enjoy it too. A week ago Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported that Democrats in New York have reached an agreement to tax multimillion-dollar second homes. The money raised, perhaps up to a half billion will help pay for the affordability issues Mayor Mamdani wants to address. He announced the plans for the tax in front of the $238 million penthouse owned by billionaire Ken Griffin. Of course, Griffin and other billionaires had a few things to say. They described Mamdani’s words as “Just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs.” That it’s a message to “resent success rather than trying to emulate it.” They called Mamdani a communist and un-American. I see that phrase “resent success” and think Mamdani isn’t resenting success as he is opposing the oppression that billionaires do to get that much money, then refusing to support the society that helped them get it. This past Monday Willis reported on words by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the response by Jeff Bezos, the guy made rich by Amazon. AOC had said:

You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.

Bezos replied through the editorial board of the Washington Post, the paper he owns and has bent to his will.

If someone becomes a billionaire selling expensive shoes, it’s because people want and are willing to pay for them. That’s something to celebrate, not admonish. ... To say that it’s impossible to legitimately earn a billion dollars is to put an arbitrary limit on human potential.

I’m amused that the Post editorial board included the word “legitimately.” Bezos certainly got his billions legally. But he did it by overworking and underpaying the people who work for him. That’s ethically wrong. Also, the editorial board sidestepped the possibility that a company can sell shoes, even expensive ones that people will pay for, and then make sure all the employees and suppliers are paid well, even if the CEO doesn’t reach the billion dollar level. Every Thursday Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quotes a bit from the late columnist Molly Ivins. Today, Bill posted:

The conservatives have been preaching this Me First stuff as though life were a race to the finish and the only object is to pick up as much money as you can. It doesn’t work—not even if you wind up with a lot of toys. As another noted economist said, we are becoming a nation of private opulence and public squalor. Look, we all do better when we all do better. You raise the minimum wage, it works for everyone. —May, 2006

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bob Flaherty of The Bulwark. The topic is the “autopsy” of the 2024 campaign that the Democratic National Committee shelved. It was said to be a detailed assessment of the Harris campaign. Flaherty wrote:

My understanding—based on Dem-world hearsay—is that the truth is stupider than the fiction: No autopsy was released because there is no actual autopsy. The members of the “autopsy team” were in over their heads and struggled to put the thing together.

Flaherty added that he wonders what an actual 2024 autopsy would have said. Yes, 2024 was the year that incumbents around the world were thrown out of office.

We underestimated then—and are underestimating now—just how disillusioned people are. There was and is a pervasive sense that nothing works and the institutions holding us up have failed. Media, government, business—no one trusts anyone anymore. For reasons both of Democrats’ own making and from simply being incumbents, the Democratic brand sucked.

I think people are disillusioned because Democrats seem to be beholden to billionaires as much as Republicans are. Historian Timothy Snyder, in his “Thinking about...” Substack discussed Superpower Suicide. The war with Iran, which is utterly unethical and utterly self-destructive, suggests the nasty guy’s foreign policy is superpower suicide. I think Snyder came up with the term and readers asked him to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

To explain Snyder listed thirteen traditional bases of state power and what the nasty guy has done with them. Here are some of them. Of course, Snyder has a much fuller explanation. 1. A superpower must be a state. It has institutions of law and other things. But the nasty guy sees it as a commercial opportunity. (Or a grifting opportunity.) 2. The power must be used for the good of the people. The nasty guy sees the power to be used for the good of himself. 3. The state must be able to maintain itself, to have a line of succession. Democracy can provide that. The nasty guy has declared he wants to stay in power indefinitely. 4. The right people have to be in charge. There is a tension because those who gain authority want to pass it to their children, which is why Roman Catholic priests are celibate. The source of qualified people is usually civil service or the military. The nasty guy gutted the first and is firing the competent ones of the second. 5. Education is the way to refresh society and help citizens understand the challenges of the world. The nasty guy is attacking them. 6. A great power forges an alliance with science. The nasty guy is shutting down research. 9. A great power practices diplomacy to understand other countries. The nasty guy trashes it. 10. A great power has allies. They may change as national interest changes. But the nasty guy damages alliances based on personal whim. 12. A superpower tends to win confrontations. The nasty guy loses a lot and others see his actions as loss (see: TACO and then Iran).

After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable. The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

In Sunday’s pundit roundup Kev quoted Michael McFaul, writing for his own Substack, about the growing cracks in Valdimir Putin’s rule of Russia. The top reason is his failure in Ukraine. That war has now lasted longer than the Soviet’s war against Nazi Germany. I hear he’s losing ground. He hasn’t achieved regime change. Instead of stopping NATO expansion he hastened it. The Russian economy is stagnating, a combination of recession, inflation, and budget crisis. The lifting of oil sanctions in response to the closed Strait of Hormuz won’t produce enough cash to make enough of a difference. The military is eating too many resources. Demographic challenges are worse because so many young people have fled or have died in the war. How long until this might remove Putin from power is not discussed.

Living a life void of love and compassion is not a happy life

My Sunday movie was Project Hail Mary and I went to an actual movie theater this afternoon to see it. This is a movie for the big screen. The story, adapted from the book by Andy Weir, is about Ryland Grace (which means actor Ryan Gosling is in every scene) solving a science fiction problem. A microbe is nibbling on the sun (yeah, that’s a scientific stretch, but let’s go with it) and the decreasing heat and light will cause the death of humanity in thirty years. Scientists determined a lot of nearby stars are also dimming. But one, Tau Ceti, isn’t. So the scientists of the world want to send a crew there to figure out why that star is spared. Grace is a middle school science teacher. In his past he wrote a paper proposing life could exist in other forms that don’t need water. It got a cool reception in the scientific community. But now his way of thinking might be a help, so he is forcefully recruited for the project. At Tau Ceti he wakes up from a coma on the spaceship, quite disoriented (of course) and finds the rest of the crew is dead. He doesn’t seem to know how to run the ship and I wondered why they would send a man into space without thorough training. The reason is eventually explained. He sees another ship nearby, a being from another affected star also looking for a solution. But this being appears to be made of rocks, confirming the paper other scientists rejected. That turns the story into a first contact story, then into a buddy movie as Rocky (what else are you going to name it?) helps Grace in trying to find the solution. The spaceship is, of course, named Hail Mary. IMDb tells me that gives us “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” Overall, I enjoyed it. It’s a fun story, though one must let the problematic science slide on by. The filmscore by Daniel Pemberton (who I hadn’t heard of before) is pretty good too. So are the special effects. The film deserves its box office take (close to $328 million so far). Even seven weeks since it opened the theater was reasonably full. Before seeing the movie I saw there are related videos on YouTube. First is 19 minutes of behind the scenes, how they did the stunts and special effects. This included exploring the puppetry of Rocky, the large array of sounds used in the score, and the wire work to simulate weightlessness. It is pretty good (not great). One person wondered isn’t Ryan Gosling old enough to be Ryan Goose? Second is a 27 minute video of the science mistakes in the film. This is by Hank Green, who apparently has done a lot of these sorts of videos. He asked his subscribers for science problems that pulled them out of the movie. Green begins by saying he very much enjoyed the film. He sees it as hopeful that so many diverse people came together to solve a problem and that some people were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity. Also, if the film was extra careful to get the science exactly right it would likely be unwatchable as a story. That’s important in an Andy Weir story where science plays an integral part in the story. The thing that got most of the attention was Grace uses a centrifuge and puts two vials in adjacent spots, which could introduce a wobble into the machine. Grace, a scientist, should know to put the vials on opposite sides. Related, Grace rarely uses an isolation chamber when dealing with the microbes. That’s dangerous when he’s the only human on board and if the microbes sicken him there goes the chance to save humanity. There are scenes where Grace is weightless and others where spins up the ship to get gravity. But exactly which plane of rotation is used isn’t consistent. But Green wasn’t all that concerned about it. Green thought Weir having the bad guys, the microbes eating the sun, also serving as fuel for the spaceship was a pretty cool idea. There was one aspect of the science not being right that I caught and Green didn’t mention. That is ships in space move differently than they do on earth. In space once the rockets stop thrusting the ship doesn’t stop, it keeps going at a constant speed. And some of Grace’s maneuvering (he wasn’t trained as the pilot) didn’t move as a spaceship should. It’s a highly enjoyable film, even if the science isn’t quite right. Grace and Rocky are great buddies. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Pridesource, discussed toxic masculinity. Her discussion was brought on by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signing an anti-DEI bill and claiming that white males are discriminated against. Witkowski wonders why white male politicians keep seeing white males as victims even while they say it’s weak to be a victim. But the oppression isn’t coming from DEI, but from white dudes telling other white dudes (like her son)...

they have a god-given duty to be violent and misogynistic and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t look like them. Toxic masculinity is at the helm in this country, and we’re headed straight for a tiny fishing vessel that we’re going to blow up just for fun because we think it’s cool to kill people.

She is teaching her son “Cruelty is not strength. Empathy is not weakness.”

As any human with a heart and soul knows, living a life void of love, compassion and care for others is not a happy life. Yet the message in this country being fed to white, heterosexual, cisgender men is that the key to a good life is seizing power from wherever you can get it, especially from people who have less power than you. Fuck love and other sissy s---. Unsurprisingly, this makes these men very unhappy. And their unhappiness is blamed on immigrants and drag queens and women who wear pants and complain about being called “honey” in the workplace. And so they must oppress them. It’s literally a cycle of abuse.

I can hear a lot of men feeling “I’m not happy.” They may not know themselves well enough to recognize they aren’t happy because the manosphere doesn’t talk about happiness or feelings. Instead of trying to find things that make them happy they lash out at the things the manosphere tells them are the cause of their unhappiness. They don’t see the cause of their unhappiness is what the manosphere is telling them.

The entire Trump administration is the perfect encapsulation of this. A collection of mediocre, mostly white males engaged in a never-ending dick measuring contest. That’s literally all they know how to do.

Last Friday Lisa Needham of Daily Kos commented on the recent Callais decision by the Supreme Court that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. She wrote the decision was based on a statistical error, which is an alarming thing to base such a sweeping and harmful decision on. But Justice Alito, the decision author, doesn’t care about such things as truth when destroying democracy. The statistical error was fed to Alito by the Department of Justice. What they said in their brief on the case was: “Black voter turnout in Louisiana surpassed that of white voters in two of the last five presidential elections,” as Needham phrased it. I won’t go into Needham’s details of the flaws that went into that statement. But this is an example of Alito taking anything he can get to claim that racism is totally fixed so the VRA is no longer necessary. I think Justice Roberts made that claim when they first started gutting the VRA, prompting a strong rebuke in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent. But even if the DOJ statement were true, that does not imply that black people are not an oppressed minority in Louisiana and thus don’t need protections when districts are drawn. Alas, Alito has shown us many times who he is. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Nicholas Grossman of Arc Digital. Grossman provided links to articles that show “the judges denied facts, distorted law, and contradicted themselves” in crafting the Callais decision. I haven’t followed the links. He then wrote:

Republican partisans on the Supreme Court created a pretext to gut the Voting Rights Act so the former Confederate/Jim Crow states, and red states more broadly, could manipulate maps to lock Black Americans and other minorities out of government representation. After the decision, multiple Republican-controlled states rushed to do exactly that. Then Republican partisans on the Virginia state supreme court created a pretext to prevent Virginia Democrats from responding in kind.

Many months ago I wrote that it seemed like Alligator Alcatraz was going away. That’s the deportation detention center built in the Florida Everglades in eight days. Alas, my reading of whatever I read, was not correct. The facility is still there. Needham reports that it may really be dismantled now. After it was built there were lawsuits saying the environmental reviews were not done. The federal government sidestepped the issue saying it was a Florida facility, not one of the feds. But to make that statement stick in court the feds could not contribute to running it. Say goodbye to $600 million. Which means Florida has to pay for it with a cost of $1 million a day. And Gov. DeSantis is resenting the expense. Needham discussed what $1 million a day, well, just $1 or $2 million (a piddling amount), could do for many other programs in Florida, but DeSantis wasn’t going to direct money to such things as food banks.

DeSantis’s ongoing quest to either impress Trump, be Trump, or both has jammed him up here. His unique combination of malice and incompetence meant that the Trump administration could always fake him out, and now the state is left holding this very expensive bag.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Robert Kagan of The Atlantic. Kagan noted that previous military failures – early WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq – didn’t prevent the US from keeping its dominance.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

Systems designed to funnel wealth upward

I finished the book The Brightness Between Us by Eliot Schrefer. It is described as the sequel to The Darkness Outside Us (my discussion of that book is here), but it actually alternates between sequel and prequel. I’ll start by saying I enjoyed the book and find it a fitting continuation of the story of the love between Ambrose and Kodiak that developed on a spaceship. I start with that because I really can’t describe this book without including things I refused to say about the first book, not wanting to spoil it. So much of my discussion must be a spoiler alert. The true mission of the first book, not revealed until well into it, is that Ambrose and Kodiak are to settle a new planet. The spaceship is staffed by a series of clones of the two men, each new pair having to relearn the mission they thought they were on was a lie. Once on the planet they activate the gestation devices and start creating a family. Yeah, this contrasts with my discussion of the book A City on Mars, which I discussed last month. That book considers a minimum number of people to make an outpost of humanity viable. And, yeah, that number is a great deal larger than two. In the sequel side of this story the two children created by the gestation devices are coming up to their 16th birthdays. The devices were used more than twice, but these two are the only ones still alive. The family is getting by, but discovering the planet gets hit by comets a lot more frequently than earth does. One of the children is beginning to have mental health issues, which they’re not equipped to deal with. That is another issue A City on Mars considered. In the prequel side the original Ambrose learns the true mission of the spaceship – and why he’s not on it and his clones are. Ambrose is the scion of the hugely powerful corporation that built the ship and plays a giant role in global politics. Of course, he rebels. He goes off to find the original Kodiak, also bumped from the flight. They worry a war might finish off humanity. There is an interesting interplay between the prequel and sequel parts of the story. The originals discover things that are playing out on the new planet. The author says he consulted people at NASA. Even so, I found some aspects of the science a bit dubious. For example, as one more comet approaches (and we knew there would be) one of the children is told to limit outside exposure due to the comet’s radiation. That word implies nuclear fission, and I’m pretty sure comets have very little of that, certainly none that would affect the surface of a planet while it is still in space. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that Tennessee Republicans redrew Congressional districts in the Memphis area to eliminate a Democratic seat. The entire Tennessee delegation will now be Republicans. This redistricting effort is directly a result from last week’s Supreme Court decision to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Since Memphis is majority black its district was protected by Section 2. With that gone so is the district.

While GOP state Rep. Todd Warner entered the House chamber wearing a Trump 2024 flag as a cape—and was roundly booed by protesters—Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson called the legislative session a “white power rally, and a white power grab.” The measure passed along party lines [in the House], 64 to 25, as protesters blared alarms and chanted “shame,” a sentiment that followed the all-white Republican lawmakers as they left. ... Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson, who represents the predominantly Black Memphis, spoke before the vote, invoking Tennessee’s history of slavery, lynchings, and mass incarceration. “I want you to know—and I want my nephews, sons, and the future to know—no matter what you do,” Pearson said. “No matter how much you try and break us and make us bend and make us quit, we will still be here!”

This action is “absolutely racist and regressive.” Emily Singer of Kos reports that Chief Justice John Roberts is pouting.

“I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides,” Chief Justice John Roberts complained Wednesday. “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty.” Yes, darn those “people” who think that you put your finger on the scale for President Donald Trump and Republicans when you declare him to be above the law and tear up settled cases to take away Americans’ rights and stack the deck for Republicans!

An Associated Press article posted on Kos begins:

The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down a voter-approved Democratic congressional redistricting plan, delivering another major setback to the party in a nationwide battle against Republicans for an edge in this year’s midterm elections. The court ruled that the state’s Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize the mid-decade redistricting. Voters narrowly approved the amendment April 21, but the court’s ruling renders the results of that vote meaningless.

This is a part of the redistricting wars and Democrats had hoped to gain 4 seats in Virginia. Voters had previously approved an amendment to the state Constitution to have a redistricting commission draw districts rather than the legislature. That means an effort to override the commission must also be in the form of an amendment to the Constitution. To get an amendment before the voters the legislature must approve it twice, with a statewide election in between. And this is where the justices got picky. The first approval was in October. But early voting for the November election was already underway. So does an “election” mean the one day, or the entire time that citizens are voting? Back in January a lower court ruled an election is the entire time citizens are voting. The Supremes let the vote proceed before hearing the case. Then they ruled against the vote. The court is not obviously liberal or conservative. In Friday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jill Lawrence of the Los Angeles Times:

I’m not alone in hoping for a tough and confrontational 2028 nominee, someone who is aggressive, persistent and, when necessary, as ruthless as the forces on the opposite side. This person also must have the energy to undertake the mammoth task of repairing the institutional wreckage of Trumpism. Which suggests Democrats should be checking out younger nominees. Fortunately, newer generations of leaders are emerging. Those who “get it,” in my view, include Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.

There are a few others mentioned, some better known, but Lawrence questions whether they would “prioritize thinking big and fighting hard for the fundamental changes we need.” In today’s roundup Dworkin included a series of tweets on the fallout of gutting Section 2. In response to the possibility that these redistricting efforts allow Republicans to keep the US House Brian Rosenwald tweeted:

And let me tell you something, this is going to compel even the most reticent Democrats like me to support drastic changes to the courts. I’ve resisted for years. But this just shows that Republican judges are anti-small d democratic forces in the worst way.

Another from Rosenwald referring to Democratic candidates for president.

You’re not going to be able to win the 2028 primary without being for Court packing. I have misgivings, but a bunch of judges wholly lacking in common sense have made their own bed.

Lakshya Jain tweeted:

More broadly, the House is not a tossup for 2026, even after the current set of redraws. Our surveys consistently show a pretty blue environment (a bit bluer than 2018). Dems are still in position to get ~225 seats — and maybe more — even after redistricting AL/LA/TN.

A majority is 218 seats. Election Enjoyer tweeted:

This is one of the most overlooked pieces of the redistricting war. Several states could flip to Democratic trifectas this November, and that alone opens the door for more Dem-friendly map redraws before 2028.

Egberto Willies of Kos summarized an exchange between Katy Tur of MSNOW and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with AOC saying billionaire wealth is unearned. From the summary:

The commentary challenged the mythology surrounding extreme wealth accumulation and exposed how billionaires often profit not through individual brilliance alone, but through public investments, labor exploitation, market manipulation, and systems designed to funnel wealth upward. Katy Tur’s reaction appeared awkward and uncertain, reflecting the discomfort the establishment media often displays when foundational assumptions about capitalism are questioned publicly. The discussion expanded by revisiting Tony Dokoupil’s comments on billionaire philanthropy, arguing that charitable giving by ultra-rich elites does not replace democratic decision-making. Instead, the segment asserted that workers, taxpayers, engineers, educators, and government-funded researchers collectively create the wealth that billionaires later claim as personal achievement. ... The conversation exposed a truth many Americans increasingly recognize: extreme wealth concentration is not the natural outcome of hard work alone. It is the product of systems designed to privilege capital over labor. As inequality widens, more people are questioning why a handful of billionaires wield more economic power than entire communities. Progressive movements continue pushing Americans to rethink wealth, democracy, labor, and the role government should play in creating an economy that works for everyone—not just the chosen few.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit wrote about how billionaires are stealing from the rest of us. Many people, including myself, have known this is going on, though not knowing the details. This is confirmed by Ashley St. Clair, former brand ambassador and mother to one of Elon Musks’ 14 kids. She created a series of TikTok videos and did a feature for The Washington Post describing the conservative influencer economy. She estimates “roughly 99 percent” of the largest influencers are compensated in some form with the amount locked behind nondisclosure agreements. And that doesn’t need to be disclosed because the content is “political” and not “commercial.” Thanks, Supreme Court! When a point is pushed by a few big influencers it is picked up and echoed by the smaller ones, adding to the echo chamber. Yeah, this is similar to a 2024 case of Putin funneling almost $10 million to influencers that promoted Kremlin interests. Hartmann noted that there is so much conservative money going to influencers Putin could plug into it with no one noticing. The effort started with the Powell Memorandum of 1971, which I’ve mentioned a few times. It suggests that American business “had to build a permanent infrastructure of think tanks, media operations, scholars-on-call, colleges, and legal foundations to destroy New Deal programs like Social Security and union rights.” And rich people responded, creating the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the CATO Institute, ALEC, Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, and more. And these groups fund the influencers. The money pays for a constant flow of messages saying such things as: + Working class white people should be afraid of Black and Hispanic people. + Women are stealing their jobs. + Gay and trans people are coming after their kids. + The “trickle down” theory really works, despite 45 years to the contrary. + Deregulation lowers prices. + Fossil fuels are essential and climate science is a hoax. + Russia and Israel are friends; Canada, Germany, and France are enemies.

It’s a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance, and it has one purpose: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.

One estimate is that since 1975 “$79 trillion has been ‘redistributed upward’ from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent.” And in 2023 alone that was “$3.9 trillion, enough to give every working American a $32,000/year raise.” That’s while we don’t have a national health care system, going to college means a lifetime of debt, our infrastructure is crumbling, and the climate crisis gets worse. The rich and Republicans rely on this because if their actual policies, which caused all these problems and are widely unpopular, were known the political landscape would dramatically shift overnight. It should be a scandal.

And the next time somebody in your life forwards you a piece of viral right-wing outrage, ask them one simple question: who paid for that post? The answer, more often than not, will be a rightwing billionaire or the fossil fuel, pharma, insurance, tech, or banking industry that made them rich. And once people know that, the spell starts to break.

The illusion that their fortunes are entirely their own

Last week Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported on the chaos the Supreme Court created by releasing its decision that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part that bans gerrymandering based on race. In Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry postponed primary elections until after that legislature redraws maps, even though early voting begins in ten days. Mass voter confusion will result. In Alabama they’re ready to redraw maps, but their case before the Supremes back in 2023, which the state lost because of Section 2, requires them to keep their existing maps until 2030. They’re trying to get that little provision removed. I’ve heard Tennessee has passed a new map destroying black majority districts around Memphis. Emily Singer of Kos reported in Florida, which just approved new maps that give Republicans a more seats, a lawsuit has been filed saying the maps were drawn for partisan advantage, which is illegal according to a state constitution amendment passed in 2010 with 63% of the vote. We know the maps were drawn for partisan advantage because important people said exactly that. Jason Poreda, the guy who drew the new districts, admitted such during a hearing. Fox News presented the map by coloring the new districts red and blue. The new districts were drawn using the standard gerrymandering principles. Tampa was divided into three districts so that the Democrats in the city are much fewer than the Republicans in the surrounding rural areas. David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing this opinion was written by Justice Jim Crow while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson looks on. In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing the gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court.

What the Roberts Court is making possible is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.

David Shuster of Blue Amp media:

California’s billionaires are freaking out. Like most other obscenely wealthy Americans in this Trump era, the plutocrats have been bloated with paper wealth, fortified by legions of accountants, and possess a moral philosophy that rarely extends beyond their own reflection. They hold to the illusion that their fortunes are entirely their own. But, more than 1.5 million California voters have a different view and have now signed a petition pushing forward a ballot initiative that would impose a billionaire tax. The California proposal is disarmingly simple: If voters approve the initiative this November, the state will impose a one-time levy of roughly 5 percent on the swollen fortunes of those whose wealth has passed the billion-dollar mark. The proceeds will be directed largely towards health care, food assistance, and the assorted necessities of a functioning civilization.

See below for more on taxing the rich. In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Jermaine Fowler of his “The Humanity Archive” Substack discussing the bankruptcy of Spirit Airlines.

Spirit carried the people the legacy carriers did not want. Working class. Disproportionately Black, Latino, and immigrant. The fees, the seats, the mockery were the visible signs of the sorting. […] The hubs tell the story. Fort Lauderdale. San Juan. Detroit. Atlantic City. The Caribbean. Latin America. Spanish at the customer service line since 2001, the year of the San Juan route. The carrier the legacy airlines mocked was the one that flew the diaspora home. Thirty-seven percent of American households earning under fifty thousand dollars flew at all in the past five years. Seventy-three percent of households earning over fifty thousand did. Take the floor away and the slice that depended on it does not move up. It stops flying.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted David Daley and Eric J Segall of The Guardian:

The court has essentially ruled that unless a legislator records a confession of their own bigotry, the map is constitutional – making the only person allowed to define a racist act the person committing it. Congress understood the absurdity of this in 1982, which is why legislators wrote an effects-based standard into the law. Discrimination does not announce itself. The intent standard is the cloak of the coward. Roberts sealed the trap years ago: in Rucho v Common Cause, he ruled that partisan gerrymandering is beyond federal review. Now, any map that dilutes Black voting power hides behind partisan strategy, and the courts cannot touch it. The court has achieved something more perverse still: drawing districts to protect Black voters is itself the racial discrimination. Erasing them is not.

Dan Pfeiffer of The Message Box on why the press is harder on Democrats than Republicans.

For the press, the story of Trump and his family being corrupt is old news. The New York Times and others still do deep investigative pieces uncovering the corruption, but those stories rarely make it into the daily coverage of the Trump administration. Trump, Karoline Leavitt, and other Trump surrogates are rarely pushed to answer tough questions about it, and when they are, they just feign outrage and never engage with the substance. The second reason is that the press holds Democrats to a higher standard. This has always been sort of true, but it’s been particularly true in the Trump era. Reporters think Democratic voters care about whether their leaders are corrupt and Republican voters don’t. Therefore, a Democratic scandal could have bigger political implications, while a Republican scandal dies on the vine. Third, most of the media is VERY sensitive to accusations that they are biased against Republicans. This is less true than it used to be, but most reporters are personally liberal on issues like abortion, guns, and climate. Some end up overcompensating by being tougher on Democrats.

In today’s roundup Kev quoted Gaby Goldstein of Talking Points Memo discussing the ruling that did the gutting, known as Louisiana v. Callais:

The conservative strategy for consolidating state-level power has never been a secret. In March 2010, Karl Rove penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed literally titled “The GOP Targets State Legislatures.” The sub-head: “He who controls redistricting can control Congress.” The piece laid out the whole playbook for Project REDMAP: by flipping a few handfuls of state legislative seats in the 2010 midterms, Republicans could redraw congressional and state legislative maps for a generation. Democrats either did not believe them or had nothing to counter it. That year, Republicans gained control of 11 additional state legislatures and ran the table on redistricting. Today, they hold 23 trifectas — a net loss of just two in 15 years. But REDMAP was only one part of a larger architecture. The deeper strategy has three moves. First, build and solidify power in state legislatures. Second, strip away federal protections — through the courts, and by dismantling federal regulations, funding, and programs. Third, devolve that authority to the states where you’ve already built structural advantages through gerrymandering, voter suppression and long-term policy infrastructure. The linchpin of the whole operation is control of state legislatures.

Alphonso David of The Contrarian:

But there is also a simpler economic truth: voter suppression has a price. When districts are manipulated and voting becomes harder, people pay by driving farther and spending more on gas or transit to vote. For working people, especially hourly workers and parents without flexible schedules or support systems, voter suppression leads to increased childcare costs or missing a shift to vote. The cruelty of it all is that voters are being asked to absorb those costs when they’re already living paycheck to paycheck in a system attempting to further dilute their political power. That is the math of modern voter suppression: make voting more expensive while making each vote feel less powerful. ... A 2019 study on Black disenfranchisement and taxation in the South found that after literacy-test requirements were introduced, counties with larger Black populations saw a nearly 5.4% decline in real per-person tax receipts. Put simply, when Black people were pushed out of the electorate, local governments collected and invested less money to serve Black communities. That meant fewer resources for schools, weaker public services, and less support for the very communities whose political power had been stripped away. The result is a double economic penalty: you make less money, and then your community gets less support from the government meant to serve you.

Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine hosts an Ask Bolts column where readers can ask a question and a couple experts will answer them. The column for May 5 was about the Calais decision with Kareem Crayton and Justin Levitt providing the answers. I didn’t read the whole article, jumping to the section on what are possible remedies. Here are part of the answers. Crayton noted we haven’t explored all of the 14th Amendment. The second provision is the Penalty Clause, which says that if a state denies or curtails voting rights Congress can penalize it with a reduction of Congressional representation. It has never been used. Crayton also said, “We’re not going to get better from this court, I don’t think. I think they’ve shown us who they are.” Levitt discussed what Congress can do. It still has some things it can do.

There are ways to insulate congressional bills from judicial review. There are ways to insulate current bills from review by the Supreme Court. There are ways to craft remedies that rely on things like the 14th Amendment’s second section or on the Guarantee Clause (which guarantees “a republican form of government” for all states in the union). There are ways to craft remedies that do things other than what the court has forbidden in Callais, including relaxing the assumption that the remedy has to be single-member districts. By the way, other remedies are already available under the VRA: There was a Federal Voting Rights Act claim resolved using proportional representation in Eastpointe, Michigan. But I’ll say it’s going to take a really strong push by the public to get a Congress that’s willing to reform voting rights in this way. And while we’re there, there’s an awful lot that could be done on court reform. If there is a strong enough prodemocracy movement to change Congress’s orientation, that means there is a strong enough prodemocracy movement to change the court’s orientation.

Crayton again:

Our mission is to do the “citizen work” (organizing, speaking up, and voting) without distractions. What are the distractions? They include the voices that say you must accept second class citizenship when the constitution guarantees you first-class. And it also means ignoring and sometimes pushing back on friendly voices stuck on dismay and disorder. Things are bad, but they don’t have to be if we use the power we each have to demand change.

Kevin Hardy, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the growing effort to tax the rich. Maine recently passed a bill to add a 2% tax to those with an income more than $1 million a year. Maine joins Washsington, New Jersey, and Massachusetts that have passed such laws. A dozen states, including Illinois, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Virginia have proposed new taxes. In California advocates gathered enough signatures to put a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. Proponents say these bills make the tax structure, already tilted against the poor, more fair. Opponents fear taxes on business owners will dissuade starting new companies (yep, again trotting out the smallest companies to protect the greediness of the biggest). There is also the claim that taxing the rich more will prompt them to move to a state with lower taxes. But data doesn’t show that happening. Taxing the rich in liberal states comes as conservative states are making their tax systems more regressive, placing more tax burdens on the poor. Both efforts come as the wealth gap has been getting wider for decades and made worse by last summer’s Big Brutal Bill.

The gap between the rich and poor has been widening for decades. Wealth for the bottom fifth of American households has barely moved in recent decades, while the top 0.1% have seen their wealth increase by nearly $40 million each, according to an analysis by the anti-poverty nonprofit Oxfam America. Between 1980 and 2022, the share of national income going to the top 1% doubled, while the share going to the bottom 50% fell by a third, Oxfam reported.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit started a post with:

Nikita Khrushchev famously said “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim”) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized.

Hartmann listed several ways that this is happening. The nasty guy announced pulling 5,000 troops from Germany, harming NATO. He ended sanctions on Russian oil, giving Putin billions in revenue. Robert Kennedy is undermining trust in vaccines and disease prevention, making us more vulnerable. Pete Hegseth is purging senior career leadership of the military. DOGE hollowed out federal institutional expertise. Musk ended USAID, allowing China and Russia to secure natural resources and military outposts. Voice of America broadcasts propaganda, weakening America’s advocacy of democracy. ICE and Stephen Miller are gutting the asylum system, straining courts, devastating tourism, and destroying our reputation. Russel Vought concentrated the budget in the nasty guy’s hands, overriding Congress. The FBI has been weaponized and purged, as has the Department of Justice. The Department of Education is being vandalized, cutting school and student protections. A climate denier runs the Department of Energy and another runs the National Park Service. The Transportation Department is loosening safety regulations The Treasury Department pushes for financial concentration and deregulation. The Commerce Department is pushing tariffs and trade decisions, straining trade relationships and exploding inflation. Witkoff and Kushner have screwed up negotiations with Iran. The Department of Agriculture favors agribusiness over family farms while stripping food stamps and school meals. The Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back regulations for Big Oil billionaires. Housing and Urban Development is dropping programs for poor families. The intelligence agencies have politicized their analysis and sidelined career analysts. The State Department has hollowed out diplomatic staff, allowing Russia and China to set the agenda.

This list is an operational blueprint, the kind of document a hostile foreign intelligence service might draw up if it had been handed unlimited access to the executive branch and told to dismantle the American republic from inside without firing a single shot: — Hollow out the public health system so disease can do its work, — Demoralize the officer corps and burn through munitions in unconstitutional wars, — Terminate the diplomats and intelligence professionals who keep allies aligned, — Replace independent journalism with state propaganda at Voice of America, — Defund the agencies Congress created, — Abandon the clean energy transition that would have weakened OPEC and Russia simultaneously, — Politicize the FBI and DOJ so they target dissenters instead of crooks, and — Turn armed, masked ICE thugs loose to terrorize immigrant communities while training the rest of us to accept anonymous federal agents disappearing our neighbors into massive concentration camps. Every line item that would appear on such a plan has been checked off in the last 14 months, executed by a cabinet of grifters, ideologues, and 13 billionaires whose loyalty runs to Trump and the morbidly rich rather than to the nation whose Constitution they swore an oath to defend. ... [Khrushchev] may have been right about something deeper than ideology: a great power can absolutely be killed from the inside by people who pretend to govern while methodically removing every load-bearing wall in the structure just to enrich themselves.

This will end with “ordinary Americans deciding we’ve finally had enough.”

Khrushchev never managed to bury us. Let’s make damn sure Trump, Putin, and America’s rightwing billionaires don’t either.

Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series of Explaining the Right, discussed the conservative media bubble.

The point of this fake world is to keep conservative-leaning voters in a state of constant agitation, fuming about the supposed excesses of the left while being fed a steady diet of lies about right-wing leaders, both elected and cultural, fighting against these forces. ... But this isn’t reality for millions of people. Despite the success of right-wing media outlets, they haven’t fooled everyone yet.

To that last point note since Fox News launched in 1996 Democrats won presidential elections in 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020 and won the popular vote in 2000 and 2016. There have also been several times Democrats held majorities in at least one house of Congress. Which is the reason for the current gerrymandering drive. That conservative media bubble is vulnerable when voters can see for themselves there is a disconnect, which can prompt voters to vote for Democrats.

Schrödinger’s war

I finished the novel Red Dog Farm by Nathaniel Ian Miller. I saw it during a recent visit to Barnes and Noble and it looked interesting. I pulled out my phone and looked it up on Goodreads and saw the rating was pretty good. So I bought it. The setting is Iceland. Orri is the narrator. He is in his first year at university in Reykjavik and misses the farm where he grew up and his father, his Pabbi, raises cows for beef. When Mamma calls to say maybe Pabbi is depressed Orri uses that as an excuse to leave school (though continues online) and return home. Before Orri left home for school Pabbi didn’t ask him to help around the farm because Pabbi didn’t want his son to realize how hard the life of an Icelandic farmer is. But back from the city Orri is ready to be educated in the difficulties. And much of the story is about how hard such a life is. This is a coming of age story. Orri is trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, though he sees he likes the life of a farmer. He also begins to experience love and learns about the tradeoffs love requires. The title comes from the dog Pabbi owns. It’s an Australian kelpie, a herding dog. And this one happens to have red fur. But a kelpie is not the best breed for the Icelandic climate. That sort of thing doesn’t stop Pabbi. There is an LGBTQ character in the book. One of Orri’s high school classmates has developed into a beautiful woman and Mamma tells Orri he should date her. But, the classmate confides she’s a lesbian and rural Iceland is not a good place to find a partner. She asks Orri to be her beard, though has to explain what that means. They remain good friends. The book does a good job describing what life in rural Iceland is like. One has to deal with constant wind, long winters, thin soil, and an occasional volcano that can upend life. That left me wondering how the author knows Iceland so well when the book’s jacket says he worked for newspapers in New Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin, and Montana, and currently lives in Vermont. Of course, there are lots of ways that could happen, the author just doesn’t say which. The Acknowledgments at the end do include several names that look Icelandic. I enjoyed the book. The author writes quite well and Orri’s situation is an interesting one. Instead of watching a movie this Sunday I watched and listened to a video of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. I had written about this work when I discussed the book Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler several months ago. The work was part of the consecration of the new cathedral in Coventry, England, which was built beside the remains of the earlier cathedral bombed in WWII. The soprano soloist, large choir, and children’s choir sing the text of the Latin requiem mass. The tenor and bass soloists sing the English poems of Wilfred Owen, who was gay, wrote about the battles of WWI, and died in combat in 1918. The text is, of course, online. There is one of Owen’s poems that is quite meaningful. It tells the story of Abram told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. The Biblical story ends with an angel stopping the hand of Abram, offering a ram to be sacrificed instead. Owen’s poem ends differently:

But the old man would not so, but slew his son, – And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Reading through the text this time these lines caught my attention:

The scribes on all the people shove And bawl allegiance to the state, But they who love the greater love Lay down their life; they do not hate.

The premier of the work was in 1962. For that the tenor was English, the baritone was German, and the soprano was Russian. I attended a performance of the work when I lived in Germany in 1990. When I was working on my Master of Music degree the composition class featured a modern piece each week and this was one of them. And now I’ve watched it online. This performance was led by Marin Alsop and the choir and orchestra (except the children’s choir) looked to be made up of college students doing a fine job. Alas, the webpage to give more detail of them is no longer online. Schrödinger’s cat is the name of a thought experiment related to quantum physics. No, I’m not going to try to explain quantum physics. In this thought scenario a cat is placed in a box with a vial of poison. A quantum event may or may not break the vial. Is the cat alive or dead? Quantum physics says we can’t know until the box is opened. Put another way, until the box is opened the cat is both alive and dead. Yeah, it is hard to understand. And people wonder what Erwin Schrödinger has against cats and why he came up with such a cruel way to explain quantum physics. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote that what’s going on in the Strait of Hormuz might be Schrödinger’s war – the statements by the nasty guy and his minions are so confusing and contradictory that one could conclude the war is both still going on and concluded. The nasty guy said the war was over so Congress isn’t required to follow the War Powers Act and its 60 day deadline to confirm that he can keep on fighting. The same day he told supporters that people saying we’re not winning the war is “treasonous.” He has said both he rejected the latest deal from Iran and that he knows nothing about it. While saying the war is over he is also saying 15,000 more troops to the region. He tried Project Freedom to escort ships out of the Persian Gulf, but that lasted only a day because he didn’t convince any ship insurance companies that the effort was safe. And the United Arab Emirates intercepted Iranian missiles during a ceasefire. Both concluded and in progress, both dead and alive, at the same time. Anastasia Tsioulcas of NPR reported:

A statue that was erected mysteriously in central London early Wednesday has been confirmed as the work of the mischievous, often politically oriented artist Banksy. The statue depicts a man in a suit hoisting a large flag. The flag's cloth covers the man's face, however, and his proud march appears to be courting disaster, as he steps off the plinth with no ground beneath him.

Banksy may not have gotten permission to erect the statue, but city officials say they welcome it. The NPR article has a photo of the statue from the front. Here’s another view of it from the side. I think it is cool political commentary.

What’s possible when Democrats finally stop wimping out

I wrote yesterday about the Supreme Court gutting the part of the Voting Rights Act that banned racial gerrymandering. Many Republican legislatures announced they were ready to rework district maps that would eliminate perhaps a dozen black Democrats from Congress. Emily Singer of Daily Kos wrote that the Democratic governors of New York and Illinois that they would work to eliminate more Republican seats. The redistricting race will continue. Back in 2010, when Republicans began to put serious, computerized effort into gerrymandering Democrats were more concerned about maintaining fairness. This time they’re willing to fight in the manner of Republicans.

Ultimately, this is a race to the bottom. But if Democrats don’t follow Republicans to the gates of Hell, then it gives Republicans carte blanche to draw their way to a permanent majority—something Republicans are already crowing about doing.

Illinois had been preparing a statewide Voting Rights Amendment. That effort is is being scrapped because it would have prevented this type of redistricting. In a second post Singer discussed the possibilities of Democratic gerrymandering efforts. She included a tweet by Stephen Wolf that showed by 2028 Democrats could flip 19 seats in 9 states (based on a Republican winning the seat in 2024, recognizing some may flip to Democrat this year). In addition to those mention this redistricting could be done in New Jersey, Maryland, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. In contrast Republicans might be able to squeeze out another 12 seats in eight Southern states. Of course, the Democratic response can only be done in states where there is a Democratic governor and Democrats control both chambers of the legislature. So vote for Democrats this fall. And we hope that in 2028 with Democrats in control of both chambers of Congress and with a Democrat as president they will pass a nationwide gerrymandering ban to stop this race. I’m hopeful, but they had a chance in 2022 and didn’t take it. Lisa Needham of Kos writes a weekly column on what the courts are doing. Alas, many of the stories are about how they support the nasty guy. This column is from last week. In what should have been an obvious decision Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said that Texas can require schools to display the King James version of the Ten Commandments because it “looks nothing like historical religious establishment.”

Per Duncan, the separation of church and state is only implicated if the state tells churches how they could worship or punishes someone for rejecting the Ten Commandments or takes your tax dollars to support clergy. It also “does not co-op churches to perform civic functions.” Come on, man. This is impossibly, deliberately slippery. No, the law didn’t say “we hereby outsource evangelical churches to perform the civic function of education,” but it did say, essentially, “the civic function of education now must include a specific religious text with the specific religious language used by specific, conservative, evangelical churches.”

Red states keep passing laws that they know lower courts will block. This is an example. They keep doing it so they can get the cases before the “theocrats” on the Supreme Court so they can explain our understanding of the separation of church and state has been wrong these past 250 years and our founders really did want to mandate the display of the Ten Commandments. There is news about the Senate race in Maine. Susan Collins has been one of their senators and is known for her “concern” about what her fellow Republicans were doing, yet would vote with them anyway. It’s a seat that seems within Democrat’s grasp. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit described the Democrats campaigning for the seat. There is Governor Janet Mills, 78, who has done a fine job, is appreciated by the citizens, and is the darling of the party insiders who want the “safest, most ‘electable’” candidate to beat Collins. The other candidate is Graham Platner, oyster farmer, whom Hartmann describes this way:

Maine’s Democrats saw a guy who’d actually served three tours in Iraq, who runs a small business on the working waterfront, who talks the way they talk, and who isn’t afraid to say out loud that the people robbing them are the billionaire class and the Republican shills they own.

Platner has been across the state, speaking wherever a group will listen and raising lots of money. Yes, there have been problems, such as a tattoo of a Nazi emblem that has since been removed. Platner has become so popular and raised so much money that yesterday Mills suspended her campaign, even though the primary is still a couple months away. That leaves Platner as the presumptive challenger to Collins. Hartmann says Mills’ withdrawal is sending a message to the rest of the party and they had better listen. That message is adjacent to the reason I touched on yesterday.

People are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.

Note the “corporate” label. That refers to Democrats who don’t want to upset the billionaire money spigot. As Mills withdrew the Congressional Progressive Caucus rolled out its New Affordability Agenda, a ten point plan. Here’s a bit of it: + Make drugs cheaper (and they provide detail on how). + Make utilities cheaper. + Make gas cheaper by taxing extra profits. + Make childcare cheaper, max of 7% of income. + Make housing cheaper. + Make groceries cheaper + Abolish Super PACs so billionaires can’t buy politicians so easily.

New polling from Data for Progress found that every single one of those proposals is supported by close to 60% of Republican voters. Among Democrats it pushes into the 80% range. That’s not a “leftist” agenda. That’s a genuine populist agenda that works for the actual American electorate.

Hartmann says Democrats began to go astray with Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” that included “End welfare as we know it” and sucking up to banks, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big Defense, and defending Netanyahu no matter the count of war crimes. Hartmann then reminded us what the Republicans have been doing with the power voters keep giving them. Here are the nine points Hartmann listed: + Cut taxes to billionaires (the national debt just crossed 100% of GDP). + Rigged elections. + Cheered wars. + Allowed the nasty guy’s grift. + Kept the minimum wage at $7.25. + Taken money from the fossil fuel industry in spite of global warming. + Taken money from the gun industry. + Hijacked Christianity, pushing a twisted version. + ICE. Sounding mealy-mouthed against that isn’t going to please voters. So if that New Affordability Agenda is popular with 80% of Democrats it is good politics.

Maine just showed the rest of the country what’s possible when Democrats finally stop wimping out and trying to appease Republicans. Voters want candidates like Graham Platner who’ll take names and kick ass.

Ruben Bolling of Kos, in his Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon poses an interesting idea. The nasty guy has been saying he needs a new ballroom as part of the White House for security. The shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner confirmed the need (at least in his head). So a great way to keep children safe at school is to turn each school building into a ballroom. Though there is the problem of getting shrimp cocktail sauce on the math worksheet. Back in October I wondered if my blog had become famous because in September there were 163,988 views, beating by three times the previous record. Since then the peak in views was last month, at 67,191. April finished at 177,760 views, most of that in the second half of the month, setting a new record. Back then I had just cleared a million views (since 2010). New the all time tally is 1.47 million views. A bit more than a quarter of those views came from Brazil and the US. However, what caught my attention was this: Blogger tells me the top 19 countries that view this blog. It then groups all other countries under “Other.” And this group is close to a third of all views. Since Blogger orders countries by number of views those grouped under “Other” will have no more than the bottom country in the list. That means there are at least another 20 countries that have viewed this blog in the last month and the number is likely far higher than that. So compared to the record set last September this record appears to come from a much broader base.