It’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me

I finished the book Only This Beautiful Moment by Abdi Nazemian. It is a novel about three generations of Iranian men at the time they each come of age. The youngest is Moud, a name he prefers to Mahmoud because that is the same name of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who said Iran doesn’t have any gay people. Moud is gay. He’s a senior in high school in Los Angeles in 2019 and has boyfriend Shane. He lives with his father, who is distant and doesn’t speak about Moud being gay with a boyfriend. Moud is told his grandfather in Tehran is ill and doesn’t have long to live, so he and his father fly to Tehran to spend a few months before the old guy dies. In Tehran Moud’s cousin takes him to the underground queer community and he finds it to be much more loving and supporting than he thought possible. While in the country he begins to understand his heritage. Moud’s father is Saeed. He was a college student in Tehran in 1978 when there were large protests against the Shah that prompted violent regime responses. For safety Saeed is sent to Los Angeles to live with the American grandmother he had never heard about. Saeed’s father is Bobby who was a senior in high school Los Angeles in 1939 and living with his mother Margaret and stepfather. He is also gay and in love with Vicente of Mexican descent. Mom is quite the stage mom and gets Bobby an audition at MGM studios, which accepts him. He is asked (ordered) to play piano at a party hosted by Joan Crawford at the home of a gay couple. There he sees that gay people can form lasting and loving relationships and that there are clubs where queer people can gather. But studios have morals clauses in their contracts. Margaret, Bobby, and Saeed are very bad at telling the next generation about their history and culture. Bobby isn’t told about his Iranian father. Saeed isn’t told about his father being gay and that his mother is a lesbian and their marriage is one of convenience and support. Moud isn’t told much about his mother who had died when he was young and nothing about his grandfather being gay. When all this history is revealed it leads Saeed and Moud into greater appreciation for their culture and family. Saeed and Moud call the old man Baba. The book doesn’t say if the term means “Grandfather” or if it is the Iranian version of Bobby. In Tehran Moud learns his grandfather is is more than a music teacher. He and his wife are mentors in the queer community. Moud’s cousins tell friends to visit the teacher for “music lessons” which many times are lessons in love and acceptance of themselves. This is a wonderful book, full of family and community. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it. Even so, I think there could have been more to the story. How did Margaret come to fall in love with an Iranian man and why did she leave him behind? The broad outlines were sketched but I would have enjoyed more detail. I also wanted to read more about what happened when Bobby met his father and why he decided to stay in Iran. I wanted more about the marriage Baba and his wife created and how that resulted in Saeed. Yeah, nearly 400 pages wasn’t long enough. Daily Kos community member alkatt posted an exchange with transcript between Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic nominee for the Senate from Michigan, and a man named Tommy. The exchanged happened at a campaign event and has gotten a lot of notice. Here’s my condensed summary: Tommy: “Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” Abdul: “Yes, absolutely.” But why are you asking the question? You’re assuming because I’m a Muslim I must have dual loyalties, that I would have a higher allegiance than the US Constitution. So why are you asking the question? Abdul brings up John F Kennedy and the concern the country had that because he was Catholic he would have a higher allegiance to the Pope. But Abdul won’t be a Muslim Senator, he’ll be a Senator who happens to be Muslim. Abdul: Tommy, are you a man of faith? Tommy: Yes, a Christian. Abdul: The Constitution guarantees both of us the right to choose the faith we practice. “So I’m going to ask you, do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?” Tommy: “I do not.” Abdul: “You don’t disavow that. So, I think it’s you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me.” The audience cheers as Tommy leaves, visibly defeated. Oliver Willis of Kos adds background to the story. The event happened in Caro, Michigan, a small town in Michigan’s “Thumb,” very much a conservative area of the state. Willis wrote:

After the exchange went viral, reporter Marisa Kabas uncovered that the questioner was Thomas Teepell, who previously served as operations director for Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. Teepell also worked for a Republican gubernatorial campaign in Kansas and is the son of Republican strategist Timmy Teepell, who worked for former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Teepell’s attempt to throw off El-Sayed at a local event came just a few weeks after the conservative super PAC America Next offered up $200 to college Republicans to travel to Michigan and disrupt El-Sayed events.

Willis also reported on conservative talking heads who attacked El-Sayed for claiming he didn’t issue is disavowal fast enough or what he said wasn’t actually a disavowal. Since then I’ve seen cartoons featuring cartoons with one person mad at another for not disavowing the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed is very much someone I can vote for. I’m pleased he took the time to root out what was behind the question. Thom Hartmann of the Kos community wrote about what he calls the greatest betrayal in American history. He begins with:

What the hell is going on in the Republican Party? Trump gutted his own Russia sanctions law, cut a diesel deal with Putin, and is now talking about carving up the world with Putin and Xi. Congress has the power to stop him right now: why are Thune and Johnson still on vacation? Yesterday Donald Trump told reporters he’s ready to sit down with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in Shenzhen next month — apparently, a modern-day Yalta conference to carve up the world — and that Ukraine’s president may not be invited to the meeting that will decide Ukraine’s fate. ... The party of Mike Johnson and John Thune, however, appear to have decided that the fate and future of American and European democracy is simply negotiable, and that it’s just fine that Putin is now running our foreign policy.

Some Republicans are muttering about this, but not more than that. Conservative pundits, such as the Murdochs, are using much stronger language. Hartmann reviews what Putin has been doing in Ukraine, including that it includes torture, children kidnapped and sent to Russia, and other vile things. He also noted “Elon Musk has put $366 million into this midterm cycle, $276 million of it in the last three months alone” thanks to the Supreme Court legalizing corruption. Republicans are the only ones who can stop the nasty guy and this Shenzhen summit. Where are they? Both the House and Senate are on break, scheduled to return after the election.

They can keep calling themselves “Republicans” if they like, but they’ve forfeited the right to call themselves “patriots” or, arguably, even “Americans.” My dad’s party — and the Republican statesmen of his day like Goldwater and Dirksen — would’ve been on a plane back to Washington the Friday night Trump killed those sanctions, and had an impeachment resolution on the floor by Monday morning.

Hartmann urges us to call Republicans, even those who work at the state and county level, and ask if they side with Eisenhower or Putin and Xi. Do they intend to stay in the party that betrays our nation this way? Eric Schmeltzer a Kos contributor and a Democratic communications consultant wrote that Republicans are trying to escape the stink of being associated with the nasty guy. Democrats should act like Rocky in the Rocky IV and keep them stuffed in the corner, keep their association with the nasty guy front and center. The nasty guy is providing plenty of help, having said, “pretend I’m on the ballot.” For every issue that’s brought up every Democratic candidate needs to say the problem is because of “Trump and [local candidate].” Every news reporter should ask the questions that link the candidate in front of them to the nasty guy. Everyone who can stomach going to a Republican campaign event should ask a similar question and record the answer. If they can’t send the video to a local news outlet, send it to Schmeltzer and he’ll get it into the appropriate hands. And one of the things journalists and citizens can ask about is whether they approve of the nasty guy meeting with Putin and Xi to carve up the world. Over the last few days NPR has played a clip from the nasty guy saying he’s mad at Zelenskyy for not making a deal. I hear that and think the nasty guy doesn’t care about Zelenskyy or Ukraine. What he cares about is getting credit for closing the deal. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy and the vice nasty have set aside $25 million for the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program. Uh, guys, we have a whistleblower program. It allows a person who knows the details of a government department to warn of possible fraud. It offers protections to the whistleblower.

What’s happening here is, well, not that. This is just encouragement for randos with no connection to or understanding of federal programs to declare that a company or city or state or person that they don’t like is misusing federal funds. If that little stunt catches the administration’s eye and they convict someone for fraud, you get up to $30,000. You’ll note that happens whether there’s any recovery of federal dollars or not. The point is the brutality of the prosecution and conviction, not of getting taxpayer money back. It’s the second part of the announcement—that you’ll get rewarded if your tip leads to federal enforcement action—that really shows what this is all about: getting the worst people in the world to gin up laughably thin claims of “fraud” in a program they have no understanding of or familiarity with or connection to, as a way to allow the administration to come in and brutalize a blue city or state.

As evidence of what Needham is saying she wrote the first award went to Nick Shirley, the guy who created videos claiming to show massive fraud in Minnesota daycare facilities. Those claims were what accelerated Metro Surge in the state, which murdered two people and arrested 3,800, of which more than 60% did not have a criminal record. No federal money was recovered.

So, to sum up: this announcement is nothing but is a bounty on the heads of immigrants and blue cities and blue states, and the scummiest people are going to be happy to try to collect it. Those same scummy people will cheer as a city gets crushed under the brutal weight of ICE.

The movie Digger starring Tom Cruise came out at the start of October. Metacritic gave it an average score of 46 out of 100 with Original-Cin giving it a score of 100 and New York Post giving it zero. I haven’t seen it. Thom Hartmann went to see it and discussed it for Kos. He wrote:

Don’t believe the negative reviews coming from the rightwingers; this is a brilliant movie about one of the most important issues of our day, climate change, and the fossil fuel industry’s complicity in knowingly destroying our planet and our culture.

For most of the two hour run time it seems like a cartoonish satire. “But the shocking last twenty minutes reorganized my entire understanding of what Cruise was doing.” That says the movie is effective in its message and the bad reviews are to keep people from seeing it. Hartmann wrote:

He [Cruise] lays out the fossil fuel industry’s last and best alibi — that they drilled and sold us oil because we demanded they do it — that I’ve been pointing to ever since 1998 when I published the first edition of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

No, we didn’t simply demand more oil. Government and corporate policies pushed us to needing more oil and away from policies that would reduce our use of oil. That includes eliminating streetcar lines (see streetcars, Detroit, and General Motors) and minimizing train service. Big Oil’s business model includes a disinformation campaign and buying politicians. Back to Hartmann’s book. For most of humanity’s history we lived off “current sunlight” captured by plants. That became the basis for everything we ate and much of what we built. We found coal 900 years ago and oil 150 years ago. We began to live off the planet’s sunlight savings. We could consume more resources, in food, heat, and other things than what current sunlight could provide. That leads to a population that “depends on it and will suffer if it is taken away.” Movies like Digger can reshape the narrative around oil. That can reshape behaviors. Hartmann asks us to see the movie before it is buried by conservative slander.

Cute AI climate projects hide AI increasing fossil fuel use

I finished the book Only Son by Kevin Moffett. A sticker on the cover says it was on the longlist for the National Book Award. A description is straightforward: In the first third of the book the narrator describes the effect of losing his father at about age nine. In the middle third he talks about life as an adult with a son of his own. In the final third he and his son take a road trip, the basic outline taken from a brief description in his father’s diary. The trip happens the summer before the son goes off to college. While the book is praised and Goodreads gives it a decent reader rating of 3.9 out of 5, I was less pleased. Each scene in the book is short – rarely up to two pages, usually just a couple paragraphs, many times just s sentence or two. A lot of those scenes, especially in the middle of the book, seem to have topics all jumbled together, most of them seeming to have little to do with the general flow of the story. I bought the book because it was about the relationship between a father and son, including how the narrator losing his father affected how he raises his son. I don’t think I got much of that. With a book that gets this much praise I did enjoy reading it. I don’t think the story adds up to much. Last weekend Dan Gearino, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Daily Kos discussed the chatter about AI at Climate Week NYC. One part of that chatter was about how AI could help reduce emissions in transportation, manufacturing, and buildings. Those benefits would outweigh AI’s big climate footprint. But AI also produces climate denial and perhaps misplaced optimism that technology can get us out of the mess. There was also chatter in how AI could optimize fossil fuel extraction and production – coming up with ways to increase the use of fossil fuels. So the benefits of AI are still hazy and off in the future and the problems of AI, such as high electricity demands for data centers, are happening right now. Holly and Will Alpine wrote about all that in the journal Nature. Holly said in an email to Gearino:

What we’re seeing at Climate Week is a familiar pattern: companies spotlighting a handful of clean energy pilot projects while the overwhelming majority of AI’s actual applications are aimed at increasing fossil fuel extraction and production. Nvidia’s post is a good example—highlighting a renewable energy partnership is easy and photogenic, while conveniently omitting how much AI is being deployed to find, extract, and produce more oil and gas.

Gearino turned to data centers. The AI companies don’t know how many of what size they will need. Electricity companies don’t know how many power plants to build. If they build too many, if the AI boom slacks off, the electricity companies may have to cover their costs by billing the rest of us. But if they don’t build enough and fast enough AI centers will use the “least efficient and most expensive power technologies, such as natural gas combustion turbines.” Lisa Needham of Kos wrote:

Bloomberg is reporting that the Trump administration has hit yet another milestone, and it is not a good one: For the first time, federal contract spending is more than $1 trillion. That’s “trillion,” with a T. Part of why you’re paying more is that because President Donald Trump’s gutting of the administrative state means outsourcing tasks to private companies, and that costs more.

These contracts to private companies are to pay for services the government used to do before DOGE fired 400,000 government employees. The services still need to get done and if the government doesn’t have enough employees to do it they must pay a private company to do it. And private companies want profit. So DOGE “savings” cost us more than leaving employees in place. Two weeks ago Needham told another side of the story.

Right now, every week, you’re paying $1.6 million to Voice of America employees, which probably sounds totally good and fine, because we should pay federal employees and pay them well, right? The problem is that you’re paying them to not work, and you’ve been paying that for months now.

The nasty guy wanted to close VOA and appointed Kari Lake to dismiss the staff. But a judge ruled her appointment to be illegal and those hundreds of employees were ordered back to work. But with VOA closed these employees have nothing to do. They’re not the only workers in this predicament.

Last month, an entirely different government agency, the Government Accountability Office, issued a report saying that in the aftermath of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency rampage through the federal government, $9.5 billion of your tax dollars have gone to paying federal employees not to work. That’s because DOGE’s antics resulted in a 435% spike in paid administrative leave.

DOGE claimed they would save us $2 trillion, a number that kept dropping. But in its first few months DOGE cuts cost us $135 billion. Some of that was because of cycles of firing and rehiring.

Overall, after all of these cuts, the administration shrank the workforce by over 350,000 employees. Yet somehow the federal deficit is higher and total spending is higher. Terrific job, everyone. It costs a lot to be this stupid, apparently.

Kos of Kos discussed a New York Times article that talked to disaffected conservatives. They are voters who want to punish Republicans by voting against them or tuning out the election. Kos says not voting is better than the alternative of voting for Republicans. But it must be nice to simply tune out the suffering their vote for the nasty guy caused. Even nicer would be to take responsibility for that mess and help clean it up. Yes, that means voting for Democrats. People who care for others.

The dealmaker makes another empty deal

I’ve mentioned the nasty guy made a deal with Russia to sell diesel fuel to the US. He made that deal because diesel prices are so high due to the war he started in Iran. Kos of Daily Kos explains how bad the deal is. Russia would supply 300,000 metric tons with another 500,000 tons in November and eventually up to 4 million tons sometime in the future. That sounds like a lot. But it isn’t. That first shipment is about 14 hours of American diesel consumption. The three shipments of 1.8 million tons will last about three and a half days. The grand total will cover less than ten days. The total amount is not enough to affect global prices. The deal is based on whether Russia has diesel to spare – and it doesn’t. Ukraine has so damaged Russia’s refineries it doesn’t have enough for domestic needs. Russia had banned exports and is importing from Iran and South Korea.

Trump doesn’t care about any of that. What matters to him is that 1) he could finally align U.S. policy alongside fascist Russia, and—this is particularly important—2) he could now blame Ukraine for high diesel prices. And his surrogates spent the weekend doing just that.

The nasty guy is also able to announce he made a wonderful deal to help out truckers and farmers. He won’t be saying anything about how empty the deal is.

Trump and Putin are fuming about Ukraine because their refinery strikes have emerged as one of its most effective weapons against Russia’s war machine. They damage Russia’s ability to fuel its military, disrupt its domestic economy, and deprive the Kremlin of revenue it needs to continue its invasion. So for Trump’s diesel deal to work, he needs Ukraine to stop doing one of the things that is actually working against Russia.

Thankfully, not many people are buying the BS the nasty guy is selling. That means he has no more leverage over Ukraine. And Europe has noticed and is working to replace American military and intelligence assistance. That leaves Ukraine to chart its own course through the war. The nasty guy announced an energy ceasefire. Zelenskyy said he would agree to it if Russia did. Russia hit some energy infrastructure – so Ukraine is back to attacking refineries. FischFry of the Kos community worked from a thread by progressive economist Gabriel Zucman to explain one of the ways the rich don’t pay taxes. The particular rich person in this story is Peter Thiel. He founded PayPal and got rich when he sold it. He’s gay yet a far right political player and anti-tax crusader. Back in 1997 the Roth IRA was created. It allows a person earning less than $110K to put up to $2K a year into a Roth account. When the person turns 60 he can withdraw from it tax free. At the time Thiel set up his Roth he was earning about $73K at PayPal. Thiel had his Roth invest in PayPal stock – 1.7 million shares at a price of $0.001 a share. A month later PayPal sold shares to investors for $500,000 each. Now there is speculation Thiel’s Roth is worth about $20 to $30 billion. And he can start withdrawing it – all tax free – in six months. FischFry wrote:

One can only begin to imagine the impact Thiel might have with that vast fortune, but we should fear so much of it will be used to further pollute political discussion, advancing the worst elements of our body politic.

Time for a wealth tax. Eleanor Beardsley of NPR reported that 500 to 700 grocery stores in France had their freezers and cold rooms hacked, turning them from coolers to heaters. Of course, all the food in them was spoiled. Strangely, the hackers didn’t ask for money. The freezers were hit because their security software hadn’t been updated (a reason not to connect freezers to the internet? – didn’t used to need to). One of the shopkeepers said incidents like this will only increase with AI able to sniff out hacking opportunities. My thermostat is programmable, but does not connect to the internet. I’m going to keep it that way. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing for his own Substack. By mid March of 1945 Hitler knew the war was lost. He didn’t believe he had failed, he had been failed by the German people. Yeah, the tyrant believed the people hadn’t sufficiently supported his tyranny.

So on March 19 he issued the “Decree concerning demolitions in the Reich territory,” which has come to be known as the Nerobefehl or Nero decree. It ordered the destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure — supposedly to deny that infrastructure to the Allies, but the obvious purpose was to punish his own country. […] Think of the Kennedy Center, a national icon that Trump is destroying because he can’t put his own name on it, as the model for what is all too likely to happen to America over the next two years. Can Democrats stop the coming reign of destruction?

Democrats won’t get any help from the Supreme Court or supine Republicans and the nasty guy has backing of billionaires,

with vast resources who will continue to enable his attack on democracy even if their billions in political spending aren’t enough to buy this election.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme from Tom Weinner.

Trump decided what to do in Iran by listening to Netanyahu. Now he’s deciding what to do in Ukraine by listening to Putin. The worst people in the world just lead him around by the nose from one catastrophe to another.

South Grand Prairie High School in Texas was told by their school board to shut down a production of Little Shop of Horrors. The reason: The lead character is Seymour, but not enough boys auditioned for the part. So it was given to a girl. That would mean when Seymour fell in love it would be with another girl. And that would violate Senate Bill 12. At least that’s the excuse the school board is giving. The version of SB12 prohibiting sexually-oriented performances on public property in the presence of anyone under 18 has been blocked by the courts. That provision isn’t in the current version of the bill. But Gov. Greg Abbott and AG Ken Paxton are pressing the ambiguity, prompting the school district to obey in advance. Thankfully, Abbott and Paxton are both in tight races.

And while the bill originally targeted drag queens, Texas Republicans have now made a new and vocal enemy: theater kids.

David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing a large pizza with four people around it. The guy with a huge grin labeled “Top 1%” will get most of it. “Merely wealthy” with get a small slice. “Upper middle class” will get a thin slice. And “Lower 50%” will get crumbs. Horsey’s caption says, “This is not a joke.” Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos appropriate for the Cornell 7 scandal. It shows a ball rolling downhill gaining size as it goes. Beside the small ball at the top is, “They’re just boys.” At the next larger ball is, “Their parents should teach them how to behave... I’m talking about the girl’s parents, of course!” After three more quotes, the one at the bottom is, “You know, I have this private island.”

Hurt some and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else

My Sunday movie was Tales from the Script, documentary about movie screenwriters. More than 40 writers talk about their work. Some of the famous ones are John Carpenter, Frank Darabont, Antwone Fisher, and William Goldman. They talk a bit about the writing process and needing to be willing to rewrite it 40 or more times. They talk more about: How competitive the business is and no one cares how good your previous script was, until you are a proven moneymaker. How hard it is to get an agent. How hard it is to pitch your story to a movie executive who loses nothing if he says no and might cause himself and his company a great deal of worry if he says yes. Costs are so high studios are very cautious. Or the producer says it’s a great idea but I want another writer to do it. Or they want changes – and if they want to add a chase scene it’s an indication there is a structural flaw elsewhere in the story. One must try to look lesser than the producer. What happens when the director and actors get ahold of it. They’ll say the character isn’t quite real and should say this instead. You must let them do it. This movie is divided in to chapters – talking about agents, producers, directors, actors – and at the start of each one is a scene from a movie about making a movie. And if you do end up with a hit the success can scare you so badly your writing freezes. So become a screenwriter only if your personality won’t let you do anything else. I enjoyed the film. Many of the stories are amusing or interesting. An example is Antwone Fisher working with Sidney Poitier. Fisher is so in awe in meeting his idol he can’t get coherent sentences out. I had previously written about documentaries about film composers and casting directors. I finished the book Packing for Mars, the Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. One might think this is about what to throw in a suitcase and a rebuttal to the book City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith that is highly critical of the efforts to get to Mars and that the fundamentally difficult problems in getting there seriously question the benefits of going. I reviewed that one back in April. But this book is more of a companion piece. I think a more accurate title would be Packing a Body for Mars. Getting a robot to Mars now seems easy. We’ve done it many times. Getting a human body to Mars is significantly harder. Roach, with a humorous touch, explores the history of getting a body into space and to the moon, covering several of the issues: Can someone live in a can for the many months flying there would take? Can someone live with someone else in that same small can without going outside for a break? (The International Space Station shows we can, though an escape to earth is never far away.) What can the forces of liftoff do to a body? Of landing? Of the weightlessness between those two points? How to deal with the weightless equivalent of motion sickness? Why we need to bathe and can one adequately bathe in space? The main purpose of Gemini VII was to spend two weeks testing that. I learned a lot more than I wanted to about space toilets. I think the first two paragraphs explain the book well:

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. It’s structural elements don’t start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing. To take an organism whose every feature has evolved to keep it alive and thriving in a world with oxygen, gravity, and water, to suspend that organism in the wasteland of space for a month or a year is a preposterous but captivating undertaking. Everything one takes of granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed – full grown men and women toilet-trained, a chimpanzee dressed in a flight suit and launched into orbit. An entire odd universe of mock outer space has grown up here on earth. Capsules that never blast off; hospital wards where healthy people spend months on their backs, masquerading zero gravity; crash labs where cadavers drop to Earth in simulated splash-downs.

This is a fun and enjoyable read, and a great book for those into space exploration. On Monday Homeland Security obtained a warrant and raided the house of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Even NPR saw that the raid was politically motivated. The reason for the raid was to look for evidence of illegal immigration – she came to the US from Somalia as a child, though is now a US citizen. The raid was to look for evidence that her father did something wrong on the immigration papers. Of course, the real reason for the raid is because Omar is Muslim and also an outspoken critic of the nasty guy. He’s trying to silence his critics. David Michigan of the Daily Kos community says there is another reason behind the raid. In the midterm elections (results should be known in three weeks!) Republicans will quite likely lose control of the House and could lose control of the Senate. Once in office Democrats will open (they’d better open – it’s one reason why we’re sending them there) investigations into the corruption of the nasty guy, his cabinet, and the other big people in his administration.

Given all this, what does trump want to do, more than anything else? De-legitimize the very notion of accountability for public figures. Opening a blatantly corrupt investigation of a political figure may seem like a curious way of achieving this end, but work through the logic: Democrats and even neutral observers immediately picked up on the political implications of the Omar raid and denounced it as politically motivated. If an investigation of a Democrat is widely seen illegitimate because of the political motivation, then how could an investigation of trump or his minions by a political body be anything other than illegitimate? That’s the question they are working to plant in the minds of Americans, and especially in the minds of reporters and editors. Surely we must both-sides everything. Three months now, if (knock on wood) the Congress opens investigations into administration malfeasance, the media will be under intense pressure to compare the hearings to the blatantly illegitimate raid on Ilhan Omar. ... Yes, the Omar raid was blatantly corrupt. Such a clear violation of every norm that the norm-breaking itself made the front pages. That was the point.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community has a different and complementary take on the raid. It is the same terrifying tactic used by every dictator:

As every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically-selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away.

The tactic costs the tyrant little and can have enormous impact on public behavior. Hartmann explored some of the history of this tactic. King George II executed Admiral John Byng because he lost a battle. Voltaire included that in his novella Candide. Hitler threw a few thousand liberal commentators into newly opened Dachau. Stalin used it. Putin used against one billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and all the rest immediately fell into line. Joe McCarthy never sent anyone to prison but his hearings prompted thousands of people in the movie industry and elsewhere to shut up. Hartmann also lists the people the nasty guy has attacked in this or similar manner: James Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Jan. 6 testifier Cassidy Hutchinson, former CIA Director John Brennan, Olympian Davey Hearn who touched the Reflecting Pool paint, black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, George Stephanopoulos and Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, reporters banned from the White House, and many more.

As former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor told me on my radio/TV program when Trump went after him, Comey, and others, the raid itself is the punishment. To destroy a person financially, to traumatize them emotionally, and to scare the hell out of their colleagues in a way that will make them shut up you don’t need a conviction. Hell, you don’t even need a trial. Just a subpoena, a lawyer letter filled with threats, or a raid can lead to hundreds of thousands in lawyer bills and months of sleepless nights.

Right now judges are the only force capable of stopping the nasty guy. So, of course, he or his minions are attacking them too. If the legislature and the press are cowed the courts will eventually crack too.

Trump’s goal is a quiet country. A country where the prosecutor doesn’t bring the case against the powerful donor, the reporter doesn’t file the story, the professor doesn’t sign the letter, the grand juror doesn’t want the hassle, and the judge wonders about her family before she rules.

Another group that has a chance of stopping the nasty guy is Democrats in Congress. Vote to make sure they gain a majority in both chambers. In the comments of the pundit roundup for Kos from Wednesday a week ago exlrrp posted a meme of a message by Jon Stewart:

I just want to say this to Trump’s defenders. You don’t have to bend over backwards trying to make Trump’s authoritarian power grabs seem like the rule of law. He does not give a f--- anymore. He’s saying it straight up. Trump is saying the people like dictators. Trump is saying I hate my opponents and I want them punished. And Trump is saying I’ll use all the levers of government at my disposal to accomplish that goal. So you can get on board with that and say I’m with that or you can join the rest of us and fight like hell for this constitutional republic.

Another meme posted by exlrrp:

The liberal plot to make Republicans look stupid, also known as “Operation Just Let Them Speak,” is working splendidly.

In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Timothy Snyder writing for his own Substack about Hegesth saying the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed. Hegseth says it will deter terrorism.

To livestream an execution will not deter terrorism. It will invite terrorism, as Mr. Hegseth no doubt understands. The deeper political consequence, however, is domestic. The basis of politics in the Trump regime is sado-populism. Rather than offer policy that benefits Americans, Trump uses the government to hurt some, and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else. To livestream a public execution is to take that politics to its logical extreme. The federal government would be instructing us to observe, and thus participate in, a public killing. This invitation to us is a major step towards seeing politics only as the pain of others. While execution by firing squad is the endpoint of a judicial proceeding, broadcasting it is to advertise killing is a political transformation. If Americans view, clip, share, and permanently enshrine an American public killing in a million ways on the internet, we will move towards fascist rituals of violence.”

In the comments darthstar included a tweet by News Eye that says, “This is how you write a headline.” The headline appeared in The Telegraph for an article about Trump making a deal with Putin to buy diesel fuel. The headline and subhead:

Trump backstabs Zelensky for five minutes of midterm relief. Deal with Putin for Russian’s oil might soften the markets but Ukraine will pay the price.

And a tweet by the James Talarico campaign, running against Ken Paxton for the Senate. It’s a spoof of the easily debunked claim that Talarico wasn’t seen for several days, not because he was home with the flu, but in a mental hospital in Ohio.

I challenged Ken Paxton to a debate 85 days ago, but no one has heard from him. People are getting worried. I’ve received credible reports he’s suffering from a rare condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice. @KenPaxtonTx: I’m asking for proof of ability to debate.

Ways in which AI could seriously hurt humanity

Mark Sumner had been a writer for Daily Kos and over the years I referenced his articles many times. He has retired and is now just a community member, still writing occasional insightful posts. Like this one about five ways in which AI could seriously hurt humanity. 1. The AI companies have been talking about AI replacing workers. That has already started to happen. Many are run by people who have demonstrated they don’t like humanity. They are projecting the value of their companies to reach $50 trillion. That means they are “planning to absorb all the salaries and benefits paid to every worker, at every level, on planet Earth.” While they predict that AI is going to turn all of us into zillionaires, their spending to figure out how we get that money is zero. Elon Musk has said there will be universal high income checks from the federal government. That’s a weird thing for someone who plays close to zero taxes to say.

A world in which AI succeeds as planned is one in which everyone on the planet is dependent on the largess of a tiny faction that has demonstrated again and again that they regard empathy as a flaw. It may not be the worst outcome, but it’s certainly not great.

I wonder if everyone loses their job to AI who pays to use the AI products that are the source of income for these guys. 2. What if AI fails? There is a great deal of circular investing. What if outside investors close their wallets? Sumner thinks the current level of investing can’t continue indefinitely. The AI companies make up 45% of the total value of the S&P Index, without them the S&P would be 25% lower. So people who have their life savings in stock will be hit big if these companies fail. The entire economy would go into recession or depression. The country would be dotted with dead data centers. Yeah, we could return to a time before ChatGPT. But that would not be painless. 3. AI stays meh. Only some companies fail. Investors stop urging corporations to get with AI. If this happens wealth concentration continues. 4. AI is getting better at simulating human presence. Now on TikTok bots sometimes account for 97% of new activity. Internet traffic from bots and agents has exceeded human traffic. Bots create more bots by the millions, filling the compute power of all those data centers. Tools to detect what is a bot and what is a human are becoming worthless. A great deal of that compute power will be used to attempt to scam us humans. Finding and interacting with an actual human on the internet could be difficult. Keeping business transactions working could be impossible. AI could take over the internet, making it unusable for humans. 5. There are a bunch of violence-loving idiots – the nasty guy, Putin, Kim, Netanyahu, maybe a few more – who have access to red nuclear buttons. They don’t use them because of MAD – mutually assured destruction. No one has used those buttons in 80 years. People often give AI far too much trust. They believe what AI tells them, even when the answer is entirely made up. AI has Artificial Gravitas. AI has already nudged the US towards war with China and approved of the bombing of a girl’s school. What happens when humans are removed from the launch decision or the lone human is faced with a chorus of AI voices urging a launch? AI can bring methods of mass destruction to a lot more people than currently have red buttons. Some of them might be more excited about inflicting damage than worried about any return fire. Sumner says the list of ways AI could harm humanity is much longer than five. I have considered a way AI could cause harm. Bots could take over the computers that control our utility companies. A bot in an electric company could open the floodgates of a dam, flooding downriver sites and bringing the water level so low the dam couldn’t generate electricity. Kos of Kos wrote: ⁠

As reported by NPR and ⁠The Washington Post, a foreign influence operation used artificial intelligence to generate propaganda and publish it across American media platforms, including right here at Daily Kos. The result from the made-up persona was three stories/diaries published in the community. The operation evaded our existing automated safeguards and human moderation. That’s a failure we take seriously, and one we’re working to address. None of the stories attracted much attention. But that’s beside the point. The problem isn’t how many people read them. It’s that a fabricated identity was able to participate in our community without anyone realizing it.

Kos is more than a news service. It is also a community of liberals discussing, even arguing, amongst ourselves. The problem is...

Every disagreement can become another opportunity to question someone’s authenticity. Every unfamiliar voice can become a suspect, which is particularly damaging to us because we can’t survive without growing our community. ... So yes, this happened. But no, it doesn’t mean that someone you disagree with is a bot, a foreign operative, or even using AI. Disagreement isn’t evidence of deception.

Kos promises that he and his team will do everything they can to prevent bad actors from succeeding on the site, to make it so difficult they’ll look for easier targets elsewhere.

We use media for indoctrination, so you must be doing it too

Arcelia Martin, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Daily Kos reported:

More than 451,000 people are projected to die across the globe in the next six months from the additional heat brought by a super El Niño, according to estimates from climate scientists released Wednesday. ... In the new estimates, scientists at the University of Chicago Climate Impact Lab project the hotter land conditions brought by El Niño will resemble the higher temperatures climate change is predicted to deliver in 20 years. The estimated heat death toll, the scientists warned, are on top of the impacts from droughts, wildfires and flooding, expected from hotter temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns in a world already superheated by greenhouse gases.

This El Niño could be the strongest on record and could permanently push average temperatures past the 1.5C, the rise determined by scientists and written in political agreements to be the point where climate impacts could be irreversible. Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series on Explaining the Right, looked at the conservative view of Rachel Accurso, known as Ms. Rachel who is popular on various children’s television.

On Thursday’s broadcast of “Fox & Friends,” co-host Lawrence Jones described Ms. Rachel as “sinister” while the network displayed a graphic of the host, detailing her donations to charities assisting Palestinian children and her interactions with Democrats, including Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon. Among Ms. Rachel’s infractions: She discussed the joy of cartwheels with Nixon’s 5-year-old daughter Ashanti.

Other words used were “pure indoctrination.” Ms. Rachel is, of course, part of a long line of people where a conservative talking head has made similar accusations of children’s entertainment. There was Jerry Falwell condemning Teletubbies of turning kids gay. Sesame Street was attacked for advocating for vaccines. They also didn’t like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

The motivation for these attacks can be traced to the right’s weird view of the media. Unlike the rest of the population, the right has come to believe that programming (like Fox News) mostly exists to indoctrinate viewers into a right-wing lifestyle. Since the programming they enjoy is oriented this way, they then believe that lessons about compassion, grace, and even sharing are the left-wing mirror of their media world. In this twisted take on things, Ms. Rachel isn’t just a figure advocating for Palestinian and migrant children, but an insidious left-wing agent. ... Trump so thoroughly embodies cruelty, bigotry, and discrimination that when “Sesame Street” or Ms. Rachel tells children to be kind, it sounds like a direct rebuke of conservatism.

Well, kindness is a direct rebuke of conservatism. People on children’s TV are popular because they are authentic advocates for value most people support. Republicans are included in “most people.” This is the American Library Association Banned Books Week. I’ll get to a few of the books on their top ten list of challenged books (actually eleven this year because of a four-way tie for eighth place).

The 2025 data reported to ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) shows that the majority of book censorship attempts continue to originate from organized movements. In 2025, 92% of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, and decision makers, up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of challenges originated from individual parents. The most common justifications for censorship provided by complainants were false claims of illegal obscenity for minors; inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters or themes; and covering topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice.

The ALA says many book challenges are not reported to them or covered in the press, so this isn’t a full count of challenged books.

OIF documented 5,668 books banned from libraries (66% of the total challenged) in 2025. An additional 920 books were censored through access restrictions such as relocation or requiring parental permission. This is both the highest number of titles censored in one year and the highest rate of challenges resulting in censorship from 1990–2025.

The LGBTQ books in the top 11 list, which seems a lot fewer than in previous years. 2. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky 3. Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe 5. (Tie) Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo. The club is a lesbian bar. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported:

The European Parliament unveiled “The Orange Plague,” a new gold leaf-covered statue depicting President Donald Trump naked while sitting on the shoulders of a smaller man. The 8-foot statue—which is in a parliament building in Strasbourg, France—shows Trump holding a golf club on top of a pedestal that reads, “I am sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under my burden. I will do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back.”

The nasty guy’s part of the statue is covered in gold leaf. In addition to the golf club he is also holding the scales of justice. Alix Breeden of Kos has been interviewing Democratic candidates for US Congressional races who have a better chance of winning than pundits thought just a few months ago. One of those is Lindsay James, running for Iowa’s 2nd district. She is also a Presbyterian pastor. Her answer that caught my attention is in response to the nasty guy administration’s claim that Christianity is under attack.

Part of the reason why I’m talking about my faith a lot on this campaign has to do specifically with how I’ve been shaped by the “Parable of the Good Samaritan.” What I love about that parable—I think that this parable really meets this moment—is how Dr. Martin Luther King talked about it. Because what King said about this parable is, it’s not just our moral obligation to pick up the person who’s hurting and harmed on the side of the road. It’s our moral obligation to fix the road, because what King knew about the road was that it was a place that was notorious for being dangerous, where people were regularly exploited and hurt and harmed. And too often, this feels like what’s exactly happening in Washington, D.C. Politicians who have the power and the ability to actually fix this person’s circumstances are turning a blind eye and walking the other way, and we need leaders who have the courage to help their neighbor but also to fix the challenges that have caused the harm in the first place.

The story of the Good Samaritan is in the Bible, Luke, Chapter 10. A man is beaten and left for dead at the side of the road. Important church officials pass by on the opposite side. A Samaritan, someone loathed by Jews at the time of Jesus, offers considerable help. Jesus asks: Which of them acted like a good neighbor? I’ve heard a similar take on our obligation from Soulforce, an organization working to dismantle spiritual violence against LGBTQ people (I donate to them). Their version went like this: You are watching a swift flowing river. You see a person in the river calling for help and you rescue them. Soon you see more people in the river and rescue them as well. As the number of people in the river increases, at what point do you go upstream to find out why people are being thrown into the river and get that to stop? In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jerry Zremski writing for his own Substack:

In the most impassioned and eloquent sermon I’ve ever heard, Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, admonished all of us who have seen the suffering in front of us and then turned our heads. In his homily for the Mass for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, McElroy likened us not to the Good Samaritan, but to the priest and the Levite who, in Luke 10:25-37, saw a wounded robbery victim and just walked away. “For the last year and a half, the people of the United States have witnessed the suffering of the undocumented in our midst, purposely and strategically magnified by our government, and for the most part, we have simply passed on by,” McElroy said. And that was just the start of a sermon that served as a call to action — one that seemed to make some parishioners squirm either out of guilt or, in some cases, disagreement.

An article in Politico said that this year Republicans have been trying to find a new boogeyman to rail against. The usual targets – Joe Biden, Zohran Mamdani. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders – aren’t working as targets so well this year.

Democrats’ foil, meanwhile, has never been more obvious, with Trump’s approval rating in the mid-thirties amid continued high prices and the Iran war.

In the comments indianobserver wrote:

Democrats seem to be in a David vs Goliath situation. Democrats are up against: 1. Billionaires and unlimited cash 2. Tech overlords and cutting edge tech 3. Wall Street 4. The oil and gas industry 5. Bought out national and local media 6. The DOJ (maybe) 7. The FBI (maybe) 8. The Trump administration 9. A majority of the Supreme Court 10. Elements of the Netanyahu govt/Israeli intelligence (maybe) 11. Elements of the Putin regime/Russian intelligence (maybe) What the Democratic Party has against this arsenal are 1. the rule of law 2. the judiciary 3. millions of votes. 4. stout hearts :)

Ben Urban tweeted a tweet by John Fugelsang:

My dad was a public school teacher; and he always said the toughest parts of the job were: 1. Having to play for your own classroom chalk, and 2. Performing gender-reassignment surgeries during class hours w/out parents finding out.

A cartoon by Jen Sorensen posted on Kos shows two women, one saying it feels like something is taking over everything and no one is capable of stopping it. The second says, yea, AI is scary. The first responds, “AI? I’m talking about our insane shareholder-first economy.”

No trust in lowering drug prices if they own drug stocks

My Sunday movie was Rebuilding. Dusty, a rancher in southern Colorado, loses close to everything when a wildfire burns his home and property – the burn is so bad the bank thinks the land will need a decade to recover. That means no collateral for a loan to rebuild. The ranch has been in the family for a few generations. FEMA offers him a trailer in a group of a half-dozen trailers placed out in the middle of nowhere. But he lost his purpose in life and needs time to figure out what replaces it. He gets to know some of the other trailer residents who also lost everything. They begin to form a community. The two elderly women who share a trailer and used to share a home seem to me to be a lesbian couple. Since his job is gone he has time to reconnect with his daughter Callie Rose and ex-wife Ruby, though she appears to already have a boyfriend. I was amused that because the trailers don’t have WiFi Dusty and Callie occasionally spend time parked outside the town library because though it is closed it’s WiFi is still on. Several other displaced people do the same thing. That’s the only way for some to fill out FEMA forms. I enjoyed it, but while it is a good movie (Metacritic gives it 72/100) it isn’t a great one. The pace is slow. While Dusty does become a part of the trailer community not a lot of that is shown. While Dusty does connect with Callie he doesn’t otherwise exhibit much personal growth. He does come up with a solution, a next step, for his little community’s future. Eric Schmeltzer, a contributor on Daily Kos posted another article on what Democrats need to do when they take the House and if they take the Senate. The first bill of a new Congress, HR1 or S1, is greatly important. It is introduced to tell the country what the party in power is all about. Since the other party will filibuster or veto it if they can, it is a “messaging bill.” Hakeem Jeffries, presumed Speaker in the new House, is already directing work on a bill to lower costs in housing, gas and utilities, food, caregiving, and healthcare. This is his planned HR 1. Schmeltzer says all that is great and sorely needed. But it should be HR 2. HR 1 should be an all encompassing bill on ethics. If the cost of living bill is first, Republicans will roll out their own version, the nasty guy will use executive orders to lower some prices, and Democrats have a muddle they can no longer easily define and campaign on. But the ethics bill can be first because voters have already connected that to the cost of living. No one is going to trust a plan to lower drug prices until there is a ban on lawmakers owning drug stocks. Schmeltzer’s plan has four major components. Transparency: The president, every member of his cabinet, all senior White House officials, and every member of Congress must post a daily log of who they met with. Both Obama and Biden did that, but both times the nasty guy stopped it. Every lobbyist must post their daily log to be matched with the government officials. Making money from the office: The president, every member of his cabinet, all senior White House officials, every member of Congress, members of the Supreme Court, and their families are not allowed to own stock and cannot hold a stake in a company with business before their office. We’ve seen the nasty kids rake in the dough while daddy is in the Oval Office, which is why the ban must include them. Crack down on lobbyists: That same group of people should have a lifetime ban on being a lobbyist. No lobbying for foreign governments. Require registering as a lobbyist even if less than 20% of your time. Tax any company paying more than a half million for lobbying. An ethics cop: Create an Anti-Corruption Bureau with subpoena power and commissioners the president can’t fire. It can look into all the same groups, including the Supreme Court. Fund it through the lobbying tax so Congress can’t so easily cut its funding. And a fifth part: Start the process to overturn Citizens United through a Constitution amendment to limit campaign spending. A quarter of voters say they trust neither party to end corruption. A strong ethics bill will end that for Democrats. They’re about to spend two years investigating the corruption of the White House and Republicans. An ethics bill that also affects Democrats will block the calls of “hypocrite.” On day one, they put up an ethics bill. Republicans will vote no. Democrats now own the issue. If Republicans say they have a better plan for prices, Democrats can reply you voted against the corruption that is keeping prices high. Tell your members of Congress that a strong ethics bill needs to be first. Require Republicans to vote on it. Kos of Kos discussed why Republicans in Texas are desperate to hang on to their Senate seat. They’re pouring huge amounts of money into that race and could better spend it to keep Republican Senate candidates strong in Kansas, Iowa, and Alaska. They might get even more overall seats and one from Iowa counts the same as one from Texas. But a loss in Texas would be a symbolic disaster. It would breach the wall, show that Democrats could will statewide in Texas. It would also blow a hole in their 2028 presidential aspirations. What they’re losing is the luxury of assuming they’ll win in Texas. Having to spend big to keep Texas red means not spending as much in other states. The nightmare is having to fight for Texas every November. And I’m ready for it. In the comments of Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos exlrrp posted a tweet (I think) by peechloves:

I’m sorry am I getting this right? NYC Mayor Mamdani taxed wealthy people on properties they own if they don’t live in them, it balanced the city’s multi-billion dollar budget immediately, and all the wealthy people are still wealthy? Am I getting this right? They’re still wealthy right? And no middle or lower financial earners saw any additional tax? Am I getting this correct?

Someone else (not identified) added:

The craziest part? The wealthy stayed wealthy. The middle class didn’t get hit. The sky didn’t fall. Almost like the panic was always propaganda.

David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing kids with shirts that say the names of the big AI companies pulling out sticks of dynamite and lighting the fuses. A voice says, “What are you boys doing out there?” One replies, “Don’t worry, Mom, we can police ourselves!”

We learned it’s high time to get off fossil fuels

In 2024 the nasty guy made an explicit deal when he asked oil executives for a billion dollars and promised to gut climate rules. He kept that promise by killing wind, solar, and EV incentives. Then he invaded Iran and they’re enjoying big profits from the high prices. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community wrote that a few oil tankers are getting through the Strait of Hormuz and the price came down a bit.

Meanwhile, though, the big lesson the world seems to have learned because of Trump’s fiasco — other than that our military is under the control of an irresponsible alcoholic and a narcissist and unreliable wannabe king — is that it’s high time to get off fossil fuels. Starting a stupid and criminal war is probably the dumbest way to wake the world up to the need to kick their/our collective addiction, but here we are: the war has done more to encourage conservation and the transition to renewables than any other single effort by anybody anywhere in recent memory.

The International Energy Agency reported global oil demand has fallen 2.5%, the equivalent of 42 million gas-burning cars. Hartmann described the German “100,000 Rooftops” program approved about 2000. Banks and power companies worked together to get solar panels on to 100,000 rooftops. The program was basically free to residents. The power companies were in on it because they could avoid building new power plants and even decommission old ones. Solar now supplies about 14% of Germany’s power, and that’s for the cloudiest country in Europe. EVs sell well elsewhere in the world, nearly 100% of sales in Norway, 30% across the EU, and 50% in China. In the US EVs sell 5.8%. In America the price of oil does not include externalities, the other things, “the cancers and the asthma, the wildfires and the floods, or the wars we fight to keep tankers moving through places like the Strait of Hormuz” not included in what we pay for oil. We pay externalities for tobacco, for the cost to health and society. Europe has taxed fuel that way for decades with Germans paying about $3 a gallon in taxes. The federal gas tax has been at $0.184 since 1993. Those European fuel taxes mean people drive smaller cars for fewer miles. They walk (and improve their health) or take the train.

A high price cuts consumption whether it comes from a war or from a tax, but what separates the two is where the money ends up. — When a war drives up the price of oil, the extra dollars flow to fossil fuel companies and dictatorial petrostates as windfall profits. — When a tax does it, the money belongs to us. It can go right back to working families as a rebate check or EV subsidy, and it can pay for the kind of loan guarantees that put solar on all those German roofs.

That doesn’t happen in the US because Republicans have, since Reagan, kept oil companies happy so the companies will keep them in power. The nasty guy has only been more explicit about the deal. This year has shown:

Instead of subsidizing fossil fuels to jack the profits of the companies that fund the GOP, we should be taxing them the way Europe does and using that money to turn every American roof into a power plant.

Let your members of Congress what you think. Kos of Kos wrote that if just 1 in 10 Republicans switch sides Democrats will have an easy victory. That 1 in 10 might be possible because 11% of voters who backed the nasty guy regret their vote. Sure, some will switch parties only long enough to tell Republicans how displeased they are. Some will stay home. And some with switch sides. Kos talks about all three types of voters. One of them is Washington Sun columnist Matt K. Lewis who will be voting for Democrats this year. As part of his reasoning he wrote:

Besides, what bad, un-conservative things could Democrats do? I mean, are they going to start another forever war in the Middle East? Start socializing industries? Raise the national debt to $40 trillion? Cause abortion rates to rise? Increase the cost of groceries and gas? Pal around with socialists (like Zohran Mamdani)? Suck up to communists (like Chinese President Xi Jinping)? Nominate a bunch of weirdos, drunks and inexperienced hacks to the Cabinet? Pursue self-enrichment? Start building monuments to themselves? Threaten to use the power of government on their opponents?

Kos added the nasty guy is responsible for about a quarter of the $40 trillion national debt. He provided links to the other things Lewis mentioned. Kos concluded:

If Democrats can use that opening to demonstrate what responsive government looks like—a government focused on people’s material needs rather than the interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley—then maybe some of those temporary defections become more durable.

Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy has been saying to the courts, and the rest of us, that he needs to slap his name on the Kennedy Center because that is the only way to attract donors to keep the place open. Like all nonprofits ticket sales and government grants are not enough to keep the place open. One must have donors. And those donors stopped donating to the Kennedy Center when he took over. So, no he won’t be attracting donors if he slaps his name on the place. Instead, the place is likely to go bankrupt, as many of his businesses have. The way he can attract donors is remove his cronies from the board and resign as chair.

If Trump’s vision for the Kennedy Center was so amazing, so profitable, people would be donating money. Artists would be begging to get booked. People would be clamoring for tickets. But everyone hates Trump and his low-rent, tacky garbage vibe.

Oliver Willis of Kos reported that for the first time the Kennedy Center Honors will not be at the Kennedy Center this year. The reason is the Center is closing because courts won’t let the nasty guy put his name on it. In the comments of today’s pundit roundup for Kos is a meme posted by exlrrp about special prosecutor Jack Smith (remember him?) and his testimony before Congress.

Fun fact: Jack Smith had 86 witnesses of Trump’s crimes, and not a single one was a Democrat.

A tweet from Abdul El-Sayed posted by 2thanks:

I'd rather have an economy that makes 1,000 millionaires than 1 billionaire.

Instant family!

I finished the book Safe, A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family by Mark Daley. When Mark started dating Jason each recognized in the other they would be a good father and both had a desire for a family. By the time they were married they were deep into discussions on how to get that family. Surrogacy seemed that it would take too long, be too chancy, and be too expensive. Adoption might be possible, but foster care leading to adoption sounded better. Just weeks after their wedding they started attending foster care certification classes. They learn foster care is never the choice of the child and by the time they’re in the system they have experienced trauma, sometimes on multiple levels. Within four months of their wedding they were offered the chance to foster Ethan at 13 months, and his brother Logan at 3 months. Instant family! Birth parents Amber and Zach were still wanting to get their children back. How could Mark care for such cute kids and avoid falling in love so his heart wasn’t hurt if he had to give the boys back. Too late, the love was also instant. The boys thrived. Amber and Zach were in and out of rehab. Mark and Jason had to take the boys to visit Amber and Zach, but those meetings either didn’t happen or were much shorter than the court allowed. After some visits Ethan seemed mighty stressed. Mark could see Amber and Zach would not be good parents. How could he turn his little boys over to someone who would likely harm them? Along the way they dealt with a foster care system that seemed more harmful than helpful. Most of the case managers were way overworked, a few incompetent. Some of the judges actually cared bout the boys, others gave into novel arguments from young lawyers. The system was a mess. Daley is a good writer, though the story he tells can be loving followed by harrowing and heartbreaking. My only complaint is he spends so much time rehashing the dread and panic over the possibility that he’ll lose his boys. Then again, he lived in those emotions for months on end. Even so, I highly recommend the book. I appreciate that other than a prompt for why they chose foster care very little of the story is about them being a gay couple. Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on Monday that some Republicans are trying to distance themselves from the nasty guy and he is lashing out at them. One example is Byron Daniels, Republican candidate for governor of Florida. He rode the nasty guy’s endorsement to win the primary. But last week Donalds removed photos and mentions of the nasty guy from his website. The nasty guy got angry and Donalds restored his site. Then the nasty guy claimed stories about it are fake news.

Ultimately, Republican attempts to distance themselves from Trump were never going to work when there’s so much footage and proof of Republicans bending to his every whim. But if Trump is lashing out at Republican candidates who try to separate themselves from him, the odds for those lawmakers and candidates should grow even grimmer, possibly causing even some MAGA diehards to stay home. No matter how you look at it, Trump is a problem for Republicans. It’s almost as if they should have gotten bailed on their Dear Leader when they had the chance.

Last Saturday Oliver Willis of Kos said that the nasty guy barring CNN, MS NOW, and Politico is just smoke and mirrors. Fox News has been a cheerleader for the nasty guy and Republicans, but has little influence in setting the overall media agenda. For that one needs the power of ABC, CBS, NBC, The Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Since 2015, when the nasty guy entered the political scene, all the big ones have also been promoting the nasty guy’s cause. See the numerous stories of Hilary Clinton’s emails and Biden’s age, just a bit older than the nasty guy. Even before then they promoted the Republican cause. See stories of Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction.

The right has had this sway over the mainstream press because it created a well-tuned and well-refined grievance machine designed to cajole the mainstream media into following its agenda. Conservatives invoke cries of “liberal media” bias and insist—via pundits and elected officials—that right-wing priorities must be reported on. The left has nothing of this size or scale, which means that even when the political winds favor Democrats—like Barack Obama’s 2008 win—the results are still interpreted through the lens of what’s most favorable to conservatives. ... Ultimately, when it comes to what’s covered, how it’s covered, and how widely it’s covered, the mainstream media is more ally than adversary to the right.

Even if they don’t sing his praises all the time. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez spoke at the More Perfect University’s fourth “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall. Her topic is why Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be abolished. There is the corruption: The detention centers are privately owned and need to make a profit. That means they need a steady supply of new inmates. As Congressional Republicans boosted the funding of ICE they also bought stocks in those detention companies. Their personal fortunes also depend on more inmates. The surveillance companies used to track down immigrants are also private and their profit depends on us being afraid of immigrants. But such a system should not exist in a democracy. We already have laws and a judicial system to provide due process to both citizens and undocumented residents. Republicans are going to be all over the “abolish” part. They will also resist ending the corruption. Pedro Molina posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows a couple guys, one in a red hat, sitting in the mouth of an alligator. The red hat guy says, “Remember how funny we thought it was to imagine other people being devoured by alligators?”