We lived that history. We saved the evidence.

I had a nice lunch with my friend and debate partner at a restaurant new to us. The food was good, though the sound system was loud. As part of our discussion I mentioned that Democrats should kill the filibuster if they take the Senate in January (I hear a 60% chance they will) and mentioned a few of the reasons I mentioned in a recent post. My friend says the Senate should keep the filibuster to keep the Republicans from doing bad things. When I got home I saw an article by Eric Schmeltzer, a contributor on Daily Kos who went through the reasons the filibuster should be killed. He’s the guy who wrote the article I just mentioned, so some of the same things are said here, but with more reasons to eliminate the filibuster. Here’s a summary. Democrats have a good chance of taking control of the Senate. The chance of having 60 senators is pretty much zero. Some senators say that with the filibuster senators are forced to work together. That essentially means any big and important project is watered down. Something important, like an ethics bill with teeth, becomes a bill to fund studying the issue. The nasty guy vetoes it anyway. Or signs a bill with him getting the credit but is otherwise of no consequence. Either way Democrats have nothing to show for their effort. They can’t run on their big bill being vetoed because they didn’t pass a big bill. But if 51 senators pass an important bill that goes to the Oval Office and he vetoes it Democrats have something to run on. Yes, Republicans can pass horrible things with 51 votes. That’s still good for democracy.

Right now, the filibuster lets Republicans hide. They introduce extreme bills to fire up the base, knowing Democrats will block them, and they never pay a price. Voters hear about some awful GOP idea on the news, it dies in the Senate, and life goes on. So a whole lotta people look at Washington, see nothing change no matter who wins, and figure both parties are the same.

Republicans have ways to get their nasty bills through anyway, sometimes by declaring the filibuster does not apply in a particular area (such as confirming judges). But Democrats’ wonderful bills die in the Senate because of the filibuster. Back to those horrible Republican bills...

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s big argument for keeping the filibuster, in a Washington Post op-ed this summer, is that without it, Republicans would have passed big chunks of Project 2025. Okay. Then voters would have lived under Project 2025, and they’d know exactly who did it to them. Which is my point. When people watch an election turn into laws that truly impact their lives, voting stops feeling pointless. You can’t tell somebody both parties are the same after they’ve lived through that. People who’ve seen what an election actually decides come back for the next one.

The Senate has had a Gang of Eight (the count may vary) that try to overcome inaction. The result is a mash everyone hates and can’t sell to the other 90-plus senators. Or there is an effort to find ten Republican senators of conscience – good luck finding even one. The only things the filibuster helps are Republicans and their special interest donors. Kill it. I had written that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants all male military service members to be tested for their level of testosterone and take a course of treatment if it is low. Stewartking of the Kos community ponders why:

This comes from an idée fixe that Secretary of Defense Hegseth has that military efficiency is somehow connected with a man’s sexual prowess. Truly manly men have erections all the time, I guess, and that rampant manliness somehow equates to the ability to kill the enemy and destroy his property with high efficiency. History is full of counter-examples, of course – examples of people who were very efficient at warlike tasks despite either completely lacking manliness on account of being women or being male but lacking in the aspects of manliness that SecDef Hegseth is planning to test for.

To those counter-examples... Alexander the Great, one of the greatest military leaders of history, didn’t seem to be interested in women beyond fathering kids and had a life-long relationship with Hephaestion son of Amyntor, one of his generals. Major General Winfield Scott was quite fat, so wouldn’t pass Hegseth’s fitness standards. He was our nation’s senior general from 1841 until after the start of the Civil War. He successfully invaded Mexico in 1847 and he designed the strategy that finally defeated the Confederacy, though he was too old to actually fight. In the War of Independence Henry Knox, who was “full figured,” helped capture Fort Ticonderoga, then during the winter got its cannon to Boston, where they forced the British to evacuate. For the rest of the war he was commander of the artillery, then the first Secretary of War (back when it really was the Department of War). During WWII Audie Leon Murphy was underage, underweight, and illiterate. He became a great soldier who took care of those under his commands to the point he expected to sacrifice his life to protect his troops. He became America’s most highly-decorated soldier. There are a few more.

A focus on masculinity, and especially militaristic masculinity, is a central characteristic of fascism, as Italian philosopher Umberto Eco discusses in his famous essay “Ur-Fascism”.

Benito Mussolini stressed the importance of a New Man, stressed masculinity in public art, and loved getting his photo taken with his shirt off while doing manly things.

Fascists generally try to paint their opponents as feminized, either because they are actually women or, if they are men, because they lack characteristics the fascists see as defining masculinity.

Back to where we started, crazed masculinity in the military does not have broad political appeal. There are no political ads featuring the manly military. Perhaps the target for all this is the young men in the military. But a purge of the old guys, the ones who really know what’s going on and distrust the new leadership, can weaken the military. Mark Segal of Pridesource reported on the nasty guy’s attack on the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, wanting to purge it of displays that don’t feature straight white men. Segal says the attack is personal because he had donated his artifacts of LGBTQ history to that museum. Having your stuff displayed at a Smithsonian museum is a pretty big deal. But the nasty guy’s attack is more than personal. History is to tell us what happened. They should not be erased.

Because if you erase the demonstrations, you erase why we demonstrated. If you erase the hatred, you erase what we had to overcome. And if you erase Stonewall, Gay Liberation and the first Pride marches, future generations might believe the rights they have today were simply given to them. They weren’t. We fought for them. Those artifacts in the Smithsonian are not just objects. They are witnesses. They say: We were here. This happened. We fought back. Donald Trump can try to rewrite America’s history. But he cannot change one essential fact: We lived that history. We saved the evidence. And we are still here to tell the story. You cannot erase people who refuse to disappear.

In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Stephen Walt of Foreign Policy. He compares the nasty guy to Machiavelli’s The Prince and concludes he would make a bad prince. Machiavelli says that being feared is better than being loved. But there is something worse: being hated or despised. To avoid being hated don’t go after your subject’s property or women. The nasty guy has violated both by grifting through every chance he can create and by being a pal of Jeffrey Epstein.

What about being despised? Machiavelli warns that a prince is “rendered despicable by being thought changeable, frivolous, effeminate, timid, and irresolute.” Nobody would call Trump “effeminate,” but the other adjectives apply in spades. For all his macho bluster, Trump’s vacillations and inconstancy are now well-established, and leaders made of sterner stuff (e.g., Chinese President Xi Jinping) have figured this out and taken advantage of it. Corporate leaders, university presidents, and law firms that bent the knee to Trump early in his second term look both craven and foolish, while those who stood up to him now seem both courageous and farsighted. Not only is Trump no longer feared as much as he once was, but he’s also well down the road to being both hated and despised.

Sarah Longwell and Andrew Tobias of The Bulwark explain why people hate data centers. That’s especially true in rural (Republican) areas that have the land where data centers have room to build. First, data centers raise energy prices (or water prices), a cost increase to the locals. Second, they’re loud and ugly. Third, data centers are seen as taking jobs. So data centers feel like a thing being done to them in which they have no say. That’s why they are a big issue and why politicians are trying to tread carefully. A news tidbit says ICE agents were told to stop arresting non-criminals. That prompted Mike Nellis to tweet:

ICE being told to stop arresting non-criminals is an extraordinary admission of guilt by the Trump administration. They’ve spent the last two years arguing that they weren’t arresting people indiscriminately based on the color of their skin, and now they’re basically admitting to it and telling their own agents to stop.

Of course, some will say, believe it when I see it. In the comments Rambler797 posted a tweet by Sarrah Bellus:

James Talarico to Fox News on redistricting: “If Republican policies are so popular, why do they need to redraw these maps; why not run on their policies?”

Zac Harmon added:

Talarico is *really* good at this. The Fox News host couldn’t accomplish his spin and was told by his producers to “wrap it up” because of it.

Rambler797 also posted a tweet from theleahfiles:

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond studied a dozen societies across thousands of years, from the Maya to the Vikings, to answer one question: why do great civilizations fall? What he found wasn't drought, war or bad luck. None of those were ever enough on their own. The one thing present in every collapse was how the people at the top responded to what was happening below them. The warning sign he found again and again was leaders who were completely insulated from the pain of ordinary people. When the powerful never feel the consequences, they stop seeing the problem, and when they stop seeing it, they stop fixing it. The Maya kings kept enriching themselves and building monuments while the farmers who fed them went hungry. Their civilization didn't fall because of one bad year. It fell because the people in charge had stopped living in the same world as everyone else. Diamond called them "distant managers." They are the people in power who live so far from the damage that they are the last to understand how bad it has gotten. By the time they notice, the fields are already empty. His most important finding was that collapse is a choice. Every society that fell had leaders who could have changed course and chose not to. The question for us is whether we will keep letting people who can't see us make that choice for us. Because we are there folks.

In today’s roundup Dworkin quoted Jack Jenkins of Religion News Service:

At last month’s Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, Joe Mitchell, a Republican running for U.S. Congress in the state’s second congressional district, jabbed at his Democratic opponent, state representative the Rev. Lindsay James, saying she “calls herself a pastor.” He then turned to the crowd of conservative evangelical pastors and coined a term he said applies to James, a Presbyterian minister, and other faith-forward Democratic candidates — namely, Lutheran minister the Rev. Sarah Trone Garriott, an Iowa state senator also running for another seat in Congress, and James Talarico, a state representative and Presbyterian seminarian running for U.S. Senate in Texas. “I call them PINOS,” he said, explaining the term is an acronym for “Pastors in Name Only.” “Because they’re not real pastors, right? They don’t profess the true gospel of Jesus Christ,” added Mitchell, who has attended an evangelical church in the past.

The pastors running as Democrats are the real pastors, the one teaching the love of Jesus. There are several of them and doing well. The pastors running as Republicans are the ones who have contorted the love of Jesus into an excuse for dominance and oppression. Their campaigns aren’t doing so well.