Not magic dirt, not magic blood, but a magic idea

I finished the book An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. I read it because Michael, the main character, plays second violin in a string quartet that performs classical music – Haydn, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and such. Much of the setting is London. There are three primary threads to the story. The important one is life in a string quartet. What it’s like to rehearse, perform, and travel together. How to work out musical challenges. Working with a manager to get bookings. Another thread involves Julia. When Michael was a student in Vienna ten years ago he and Julia, a pianist, performed together and fell in love. But his relationship with his teacher soured and he returned to London and took too long to explain why to her. After a chance meeting in London he knows he’s still in love with her, but she now has a husband and son. The last thread is the quartet hires a pianist for a particular piece and discovers the pianist has gone deaf. The music is marvelous but they all have to adapt to visual cues rather than sonic ones. I quite enjoyed this one. The writing is beautiful and I appreciated all the musical references. That means if one isn’t a classical music fan a lot of terms won’t make sense. Jessica Huseman, in an article from more than a week ago for Votebeat posted on Daily Kos, reported that the nasty guy fired the two Democratic commissioners of the US Election Assistance Commission. The remaining Republican commissioner was allowed to resign. The other Republican commissioner had left earlier in the year to join the Heritage Foundation. There are supposed to be four members on the commission, two from each major party. Now there are none. The commission has workers that can keep current efforts going, but without people at the top it cannot take any official action. New members are nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the Senate.

The EAC was created by Congress after the 2000 election to help states improve election administration without federalizing elections. Its role is mostly supportive: distributing federal election funds, maintaining the national mail voter registration form, testing and certifying voting systems, and offering best practices and guidance to state and local election officials.

Yes, this firing happened just after the Supreme Court, in its Slaughter decision, granted the nasty guy the power to fire independent agencies simply because he wants to. An EAC that cannot act is also one that cannot alter voting registration and voting-system standards before the November midterms. Conor Murray of Forbes says that tarps have gone up around the North Portico of the White House. There is something about security upgrades to the White House front door that will take a couple months to complete. Or maybe the columns need repair. Or 150 year old paint needs to be removed. The White House is saying very little. That goes along with the helipad being built close to the south side. And the East Wing still showing little evidence of being turned into a ballroom.

$1.2 billion. That’s how much 18 major construction projects Trump launched across Washington, D.C., could cost, according to an estimate by the New York Times. It’s unclear how much of this is funded by taxpayers, but the Times reported a White House official suggested taxpayer money would be used for most of these projects.

David French, a columnist for the New York Times, tweeted (with a link to the full article):

Birthright citizenship is especially noxious to the populist right. They scorn it as relying on magic dirt — the idea that there is something inherent in American soil that makes a person an American citizen. Yet the same populists seem to believe in something like magic blood — that one’s lineage can make one superior. America doesn’t have magic dirt, and it certainly doesn’t have magic blood. But it does have a magic idea — the creed that declares “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Alix Breeden of Kos spoke with Brian Tyler Cohen, author of the new book The Day After: How to Wield Power in a Post-Trump World. Here’s some of what they talked about. The nasty guy gave a speech last week urging the Senate to pass his voter suppression bill he calls the Save America Act. As part of it he ranted again that the 2020 election was stolen. Cohen said this is laying the pretext that if Republicans lose the 2026 midterms he can claim they were stolen. Or ahead of time he can claim presidential powers to attempt to rig them. He’s doing this because Republicans are fully in control of the government and have failed to deliver on promises of lower costs, releasing Epstein file, starting no wars, and keeping prices down. He can’t credibly blame Democrats, though he is trying. The electorate was largely disillusioned with Democrats in 2024, which explains Republican gains. But Democrats are getting a second chance in 2026 because Republicans were “so focused on self enrichment and blind deference to Trump instead of delivering for their constituents” Democrats get a second chance. Republicans are tearing down the institutions of government. Democrats reflexively prop them up. But these institutions are part of the reason why Americans are struggling. Americans don’t want the institutions protected, they want them reformed to give them a better chance at life. Thankfully, the nasty guy got rid of the idea that institutions are sacrosanct. But he did it for self-enrichment. Democrats should not treat the institutions as sacrosanct, but should reform them to benefit those at the bottom. That means passing voting protections (including banning gerrymandering), taking serious action on climate change, and reforming the Supreme Court so they can’t veto what Democrats enact. In general, Democrats need a message that is more than being against the nasty guy. One way to do that is to urge the old timers who think they should die in office to step aside for younger people. Another is to create progressive media – Democrats had relied on mainstream media being liberal but the nasty guy is making them conservative. See CBS. Cohen believes there will be a world after the nasty guy. All of his cronies are also quite low in public opinion, especially the vice nasty. And the spirit of resistance (see No Kings protests) is still quite strong. Mark Kreidler, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, reported that billionaires in California are spending big this election cycle, significantly bigger than before. Some of the reason is to defeat the one-time tax on their wealth. Some of it is to elect candidates who are favorable to unregulated AI and crypto. They donate to Republicans where they can and to business-friendly Democrats in races where Republicans don’t have a chance. A recent poll by NPR/PBS News/Marist shows the same thing as other polls back in 2023 have shown, that Americans love the idea of term limits in Congress. 80% to 90% want them. Andrew Mangan of Kos explains why term limits for Congress are a bad idea. Here are some of the reasons. Going back to 1975 American’s approval of Congress does not correlate with the average years of service of its members. Approval can fluctuate widely, average years of service fluctuates only a little bit. Yes, there are out-of-touch fossils (Grassley, Schumer). But being a member of Congress is a job and jobs take a while to learn and be good at. When a member is still new to the job (where “new” could be many years) they need to rely on experienced members and term limits would get rid of the experienced members. That means they would rely on lobbyists, the ones we don’t want them relying on. If a member knows their time is limited they have less of an incentive to learn the job, to delve into policy and procedures. Many of the most effective Democrats have been in Congress much longer than term limits would permit. Term limits appear to increase political polarization and to hamper economic growth. Enacting term limits would require changing the Constitution. Something just as effective to increase accountability and productivity with similarly high levels of public support is a lot easier to enact. That is to ban gerrymandering. Michigan enacted term limits many years ago. And, yup, the people who know how to make the legislature run are the lobbyists.

They keep volunteering to be fleeced

I finished the book Theater Kid, a Broadway Memoir by Jeffrey Seller. He’s famous for being the producer of Tony winners Rent, Avenue Q, In the Heights, and Hamilton. He also brought other shows to the stage. Yes, he was a theater kid from an early age. He was born in the suburbs north of Detroit, adopted into a Jewish family, and grew up in a poor part of the suburb Oak Park. His father had been in a motorcycle accident and wasn’t a good provider. His mother worked at a drug store. His goal was to get out of Oak Park. He first got involved in a play at his temple. Then it was community theater, when there were parts for boys, and school theater. Then off to University of Michigan with summers directing kids at an arts camp. He got a job at a booking agency in New York, a company that books touring shows into theaters across the country. He did community theater at night. That’s when he realized he was not very good at directing and much better at producing. With a colleague they formed a production company focusing on musicals. One of their early efforts was Rent. In college he realized he was gay and had a steady boyfriend who was also into theater and also moved to NYC. It didn’t last. Through his experiences with Rent we learn what a producer does. This was at a time when there were few musicals on Broadway and those weren’t all that good. It seems the old formulas for musicals had run out of ideas and the older producers didn’t have any interest in new ideas. So he had a wide open field to find and develop the talents of the next generation of storytellers that brought a different kind of music and told stories of a different kind of people than previous Broadway musicals. Rent was definitely both of those. He, as a producer, recognizes, nurtures, and guides the shaping of a worthwhile story. He was blown away by Jonathan Larson’s one-man show that became Tick, Tick, Boom... (which eventually became a pretty good movie). So when Larson had ideas for his next show Seller was ready to help, as in providing feedback and signing up for workshops so others could provide feedback. The show that appeared on Broadway was at least the fourth version. He raises funding and manages the money. He determines what kind of theater is appropriate and books it. He figures out how many people will want to see the show, which determines the size of the theater. And when the show is ready for Broadway he books that theater too. In New York that means meeting with the big theater companies. He assembles the talent. That includes the director and perhaps actors to play important roles. He gets the designers and teams for the sets, costumes, lighting, and advertising (though Seller learned 90% of ticket sales are people telling friends a show is worth seeing). He hires the musicians. He makes sure everyone is paid. He arranges for the cast album and, when appropriate, the movie rights. I found the story to be fascinating and enjoyable. If you are someone who delights in theater and wants to know how it works this is a worthy story. However, I do have a quibble or two with the book. Seller says a lot about that first boyfriend and their relationship and then talks about years without a lover. But he says very little about the man who became his partner and helped him raise two kids, and we hear very little about them too. He says a great deal about the development of Rent, which is good, but he says a lot less about the other three shows that got him Tony awards. That was somewhat annoying because two of them are by the now-famous Lin-Manuel Miranda (and famous long before this book came out last year). Kos of Daily Kos wrote the nasty guy proclaimed himself to be the “crypto president.” Back in October of 2024, before his election, Bitcoin was at $60K. It rose from there to $120 last October. It is now back at $60K. The crypto industry was delighted the nasty guy took the Oval Office, thinking he would give them everything they want and there would be a crypto golden age. They did get a lot – friendly regulators, government backing, a proposed strategic reserve, direct access to the White House, even legitimacy. It just didn’t make anyone rich – except him. He made out quite well. I’ve heard the nasty guy didn’t make his money from buying and holding the various crypto currencies. He made it through the deals surrounding the buying and selling the currencies or through branding. The coins could fluctuate or lose money and he still raked it in. Kos’ conclusion discussing the crypto bros:

They mistook a salesman for a true believer. He didn’t see a financial revolution. He saw marks for a new grift. If you judge the crypto industry’s bet by political access, it has been a spectacular success. But if you judge it by investment returns, it’s more of a disaster. And if you judge it by who is actually getting rich, there may never have been a better investment than becoming the crypto president.

Kos also wrote about the people who bought the nasty guy’s meme coins. The nasty guy made $2.3 billion off crypto, according to Reuters. That money came from his supporters. One might think that his income and their losses would enrage them. But the people Reuters interviewed think he’s such a wonderful businessman he’ll still change their losses into profits. Then Kos looked at the fine print of nasty guy’s crypto business and the various meme coins. They all say similar things: Buyers should not expect to make a profit. The coin has no real value. The coins are an expression of support for the ideals of the coin and are not intended to be an investment opportunity. You may experience substantial losses. They’re not pretending to have value. And still people bought. And still they voted for him.

No matter how much evidence people are given of Trump’s corruption, incompetence, or failed ventures, millions convince themselves that this time will be different. It never is. The remarkable thing isn’t that Trump keeps finding new ways to profit from his supporters. It’s that they keep volunteering to be fleeced.

To mark Independence Day Alix Breeden of Kos listed 11 times (only 11?) that the nasty guy and his cronies were unpatriotic. We could probably expand the list. I won’t list all 11. He cut care for veterans. He demonized immigrants. He pardoned those who attacked the Capitol. He is erasing history. He tried to get rid of birthright citizenship. He is making the America military partisan. Two weeks ago an Associated Press article posted on Kos reported a federal judge halted the nasty guy’s executive order to create a federal voter list which would be used to limit who could receive a mail ballot. The reason is the president has no role in national elections. Oliver Willis of Kos reported the nasty guy and his minions released its report attacking the Smithsonian National Museum of American History on Sunday.

The report, titled “Saving America’s Story,” claims that the widely celebrated museum has been the subject of “ideological capture” and says the institution is guilty of erasing “our heritage.”

This looks like one of those places where an accusation is actually a confession. Willis noted the report uses language long used by white supremacists. Examples are “heritage” to mean white culture and “degeneracy” for non white culture. Willis summed it up quite well:

Trump wants history rewritten to excuse abuses by white supremacy.

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Dana DuBois of Blue Amp Media:

They call us hysterical. They always have. The word itself tells you everything. Hysterical comes from the Greek hystera — uterus. The ancient diagnosis for women who wouldn’t calm down, who felt too much, who saw things men didn’t want to see. The language they invented to dismiss us was named after the organ they wanted to control. This isn’t a coincidence. This is a blueprint. Women said Roe was going to fall. We were called hysterical. It fell. No one apologized. Women said the voting rights protections were fragile. We were called hysterical. The SAVE Act passed in the House and barely died in the Senate — for now. No one apologized. Women said birth control was next. We were called hysterical. The quiet legislative pressure on contraception access has been building for three years. No one’s apologized for that either. The pattern isn’t incidental. The pattern is the point. The consistent thread running through it all? The United States hates women.

Drew Sheneman posted a cartoon on Kos. One guy wears a MAGA hat, has a shirt that says, “Corporations are people,” and has a sign showing “Mamdani” with a line through it. The other guy has a shirt that says, “In DOGE we trust,” and has a sign that says, “Billionaires know best.” The first guy says, “I know I’m supposed to hate Democratic Socialism, but I don’t know why.” Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos commenting on the recent Supreme Court decision that allows corporations or at least their PACs to work more closely (I think share more money with) political campaigns. The cartoon shows a house labeled “US Elections.” In front the Supreme Court is posting a sign, “For Sale to Highest Bidder.” And here comes a rich guy with a bag of cash. Anastasia Tsioulcas of NPR reported on the premier of Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 15 “Lincoln” by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Tanglewood Music Festival. The symphony includes a singer and has a text of Lincoln’s own words. The symphony was supposed to be premiered a month ago by the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. But when the nasty guy added his name to the side of the building Glass withdrew it, saying the current values of the Center were in direct conflict with the message of the symphony. I’m not a big fan of Glass’ music. But since he has now written 15 symphonies I, as a lover of classical music, thought I should listen to them. So I found his first symphony on YouTube and listened while working. It was boring. One was enough. My dislike for his music does not stop me from praising Glass for standing up for principles.

A grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold

I finished the book The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen. I didn’t realize until after I bought it that it’s a graphic novel. And it’s a beautiful one. The author and artist is the child of Vietnamese immigrants. The story is about Tiȇn, who is 13, and his mother Helen. He speaks mostly English and she speaks mostly Vietnamese and her name is the Anglicized version of her birth name. To help his mother learn English he reads fairy tales to her. The boy is gay, but doesn’t know the Vietnamese words to explain it to her. The first fairy tale featured in the story is Cinderella as told by German sources (which explains the images of Neuschwanstein Castle (the original on which Disney castles are modeled). Images here. The story isn’t exact, but does feature a beautiful woman attending a dance, meeting the prince, and leaving before he can know who she is. The second is a Vietnamese version of Cinderella in which the Stepmother is a lot nastier. Instead of a fairy godmother the story features a talking fish. The third fairy tale in Anderson’s Little Mermaid. Again the ending is changed. In all three the artwork is beautiful. The girls in the center of the stories are shown in wonderful gowns. I highly enjoyed and recommend it. At the end of the book the author says he sees the Little Mermaid story as an immigrant story. A person of one place tries to live in another place and doesn’t seem to fit. My Sunday viewing wasn’t a movie and wasn’t on Sunday. On Saturday evening I went to the Fisher Theater in Detroit to see lesbian comic Fortune Feimster. Her opening act was a gay guy with the last name Tower. I didn’t catch the first name. Both were quite funny, though definitely not PG, and I needed the laugh. Since both are queer, and their queerness is a part of their act, the audience was also quite queer. I very much enjoyed the evening. I’ve mentioned this before and Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the full story. Elon Musk, because of the initial public offering for his company SpaceX, is now a trillionaire, the world’s first.

That’s a grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold—made worse by the fact that it’s Musk, who has proven that he won’t use his fortune for good.

Some of the reasons Musk makes it worse: He has been spending big on Republicans. Through DOGE he has made government worse – less able to do the things Congress budgeted for and harming children and seniors. He destroyed USAID (US Agency for International Development), worsening health and hunger around the world. And he didn’t save the government any money.

Musk is a menace to society, and the fact that he’s now the world’s first trillionaire is a disgusting failure of public policy. “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote on X Friday. “The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth. We need a wealth tax.”

Vyan of the Kos community discussed recent reports documenting the damage from Musk’s destroying USAID. Vyan suggests “Google ‘Deaths due to DOGE Cuts.’” The results, which Vyan quoted, looks like output from AI, though it does include links to specific articles. The current death toll is between 300,000 and 750,000 and is projected to “lead to more than 14 million additional preventable deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under the age of five. That implies Musk, according to Vyan, is a mass murderer. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) proposed that a one-time 5% tax on Musk’s wealth would bring in enough money to fund “universal child care for every family.” That brought on a feud of words between Khanna and Musk with Musk hurling insults and Khanna referencing research. Vyan described Musk as “a perfect example of predatory capitalism.” Then he quoted a tweet from DogeDesigner:

USAID was a criminal organization that funded bioweapons, censorship & global coups with your tax dollars. It was never about helping the poor. It was a viper’s nest of radical-left corruption, waste, and anti-America operations.

The tweet then listed some places where USAID money supposedly went. I have no trust that any of those statements are true and dispute USAID was never about helping the poor – if it prevented millions of deaths it was very much about helping the poor. Musk threatened to sue Khanna for lying. Vyan tweeted, “Go ahead and sue; discovery will be an absolute bitch.” Also ABC News has verified Khanna’s claim. Tim Henderson, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the current state of American inequality.

The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%. The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies. Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.

Because of this inequality and the problems it brings a dozen states have passed or proposed new taxes on the wealthy. Californian has a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. This year at least 12 billionaires have left the state and new wealth has created 23 more. Nationally,

The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

The divide also affects views on inflation. The lower classes are hurt by it and the rich are unaffected. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a tweet by millesini that includes a half-minute video:

Albanians have begun to push construction crates downhill, in protest of the Kushner and Trump families’ plans to take over and island. Well done.

Kos community member xaxnar quoted from Timothy Snyder’s Substack about his discussion of “Utopias of Violence.” The opening:

The war in Iran began with a dream of violence. The question now is whether the nightmare that followed returns to the United States. The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want. You can think that firing some missiles and dropping some bombs will end Iran’s nuclear program, overturn its government, and lead to a victory that makes you feel grand about yourself; and then you can find that you no longer have any leverage over the nuclear program, that you have strengthened the power of the regime, and that you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations as the world draws conclusions from your capitulation.

Big proponents of the idea that might makes right and that the US military can’t lose are the nasty guy, the vice nasty, and the war nasty. Will they turn their violence on Americans? They tried it in Minnesota and it didn’t produce the results they wanted.

Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.

In the pundit roundup for Kos for last Wednesday Greg Dworkin quoted the International Crisis Group:

The war’s ambiguous end carries a clear lesson: wars of choice, launched based on inflated threats and wishful thinking, are far more likely to deepen than to solve the problems they purport to address. The specific lesson regarding Iran is also difficult to escape. After years of deploying every available coercive tool, from suffocating sanctions to military force, diplomacy remains the only approach that has delivered positive results. That reality argues for taking it more seriously this time round, not less.

Dworkin included a tweet from Politics and Poll Tracker with results from a CNN poll. As of May 27% of those polled said they were a Democrat, 26% said they were a Republican. They are quite evenly matched, likely within the margin of error. And 47% said they were independent. That’s almost half and the highest in a decade. The accompanying chart shows Independents showing a steady rise from 35% and Democrats showing a steady drop also from 35% starting about 2021. Republicans started their decline about 2022. Voters are disgusted that both parties are beholden to the rich and aren’t doing anything about why they are getting screwed. In last Sunday’s pundit roundup, down in the comments is a variation of a meme posted by exlrrp. I’ve mentioned several other variations. The original shows a woman walking down the street towards us. A man walking the other way turns to look at her. A second woman, presumably the man’s wife or date looks at him with annoyance. Each of the three people is named or described in some way. In this new variation the woman walking towards us is replaced by the supreme leader of Iran. The man doing the looking is the nasty guy. The one annoyed at his gaze is Netanyahu. Last week Thursday Singer reported on the state of the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in the center of Washington. Barely a week after the pool was “repaired,” painted by a nasty guy crony, and refilled, it became green with algae. Hydrogen peroxide was poured in to get rid of the algae, though not enough to actually make a difference there, but it was enough to cause the new paint to peel in chunks and float to the surface. That disaster is bothering the nasty guy, who blamed the mess on vandals on the nasty guy. That line of attack was taken up by conservative commentators, such as Grant Stinchfield. That prompted Singer to respond:

Hey Grant, if Democrats were so powerful enough to cause the biggest algae bloom in years in the reflecting pool just hours after it was refilled, they wouldn’t have lost the 2024 election. The real reason the pool is once again green is science, as algae thrives in hot water. But I guess we shouldn’t expect a halfwit like you to understand that.

The water is hotter because the dark “American Flag blue” absorbs more heat than the bare concrete. Democrats are using this mess to say the nasty guy is spending all his time on disastrous vanity projects and not on the cost of living. Instead of draining the Washington swamp the nasty guy has made it worse. In the comments of today’s roundup David Michigan posted a tweet by Edwin Heathcote that shows the green water of the Reflecting Pool with the words, “I saw this referred to as the Strait of Warm Ooze. Very good.”

This isn’t about the 2020 election, it's about 2026 and 2028

I finished the book The Mother by B. L. Blanchard. It is a companion book to The Peacemaker by the same author I read back in January. That book is set in a North America that had never been colonized and all the characters are natives. This book is set in a Europe, particularly an England, that had never colonized. Though the blurb on the back of the book starts with that I don’t see that it made much difference to the story. Yes, this is a different Europe and England, but how it became the way it is depicted doesn’t seem to depend on not colonizing. The England we see is modern – characters use phones and computers – but high in patriarchy and governed by Church Law, which appears to be Catholic Church Law, not Anglican. The main characters are from the aristocracy where a woman’s sole job is to produce a male heir. The story is mostly centered on Marie. However, I’ll start with her mother Charlotte. She was married to an Earl and had three daughters – Alice, Emma, and Marie. Since she hadn’t produced a son and her husband seemed to be auditioning successor wives she faked her death and disappeared. Alice was able to get a husband, though she was not beautiful and thus not a trophy, and produced three sons for him. Emma announced she was pregnant by the stable boy and thrown out and disowned. Marie married a Duke, a step up for her, but did not produce any children, son or daughter. When Marie hears her mother-in-law speak in a way that implied Marie had failed in her sole job and her son should should get rid of Marie, she fakes her death and flees, taking a few jewels and other valuables with her. Marie found Emma (who wasn’t hard to find) and learned Emma hadn’t been pregnant, she just wanted out of that life. Marie also wants to act on hints that her mother is still alive. So off they go. And they soon discover the Duke’s family is after them to drag Marie back to his manor house. The rest of the story is Emma and Marie rediscovering each other. That is mixed in with the chase. There are lots of dangers and narrow escapes as they travel across Belgium, Germany (still the Holy Roman Empire), and France. It’s a gripping story – I usually read in sessions a little longer than I usually do. And while I enjoyed the tale it was not the story I wanted it to be. I wanted a depiction of a Europe that had avoided the need to colonize. What I got was a Europe that was still very much in the mindset of the 15th century but with modern technology. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported that while the Senate is refusing to pass the Save America Voting Act (which is full of voter suppression and other nonsense pushed by the nasty guy) Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas gave hints about what the next House budget will include.

Right now we are actively working on reconciliation 3.0. It’s gonna include healthcare, housing, election fraud, election integrity fraud, energy, defense, and tax portions.

I’m not sure what “tax portions” are and I’m afraid of what Republicans handling of “housing” would look like. I do know what “election fraud, election integrity fraud” means and I know “reconciliation” means crafting a budget using a process that doesn’t need Democratic votes. Lisa Needham of Kos reported that the nasty guy is pushing so hard on the Save Act that he’s willing to sacrifice national security. The story is convoluted so forgive me if I’m not accurate in my summary. Bill Pulte was appointed as acting Director of National Intelligence, about to take over for Tulsi Gabbard, who is leaving to care for an ailing husband. Since the Senate soundly rejected Pulte (they didn’t have to take a vote to get their point across) the nasty guy nominated Jay Clayton. Clayton’s hearings were to begin this week, but the nasty guy halted them. He wants the Senate to pass the Save Act first. The Senate doesn’t have enough Republican votes to pass it. The nasty guy also wants a vote on James McDonald, the guy who is taking the job Clayton is leaving. Also in the mix Democrats are refusing to vote for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which expired. It, once passed, allows surveillance of foreigners in the US. But refusing to vote is different than voting no, meaning FISA is stuck too. With Clayton’s nomination stuck Pulte may be able to serve as DNI anyway. But the nasty guy’s snit means national security is vulnerable. Dion Nissenbaum and Alexander Shur, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos, reported the FBI is investigating the 2020 election. Agents were sent to Milwaukee to talk people who said they saw suspicious things, though suspicions are not evidence for a judge. But...

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.” ... John Keller, a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration appeared to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention. “They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results don’t go their way, he said.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community wrote about previous Republican efforts to rig elections. In 1968 Richard Nixon learned of the deal between President Johnson and the leaders of both North and South Vietnam. Nixon reached out to the South Vietnamese leaders, promising riches, of they backed out of the deal. Nixon won and Humphrey didn’t. The war lasted another seven deadly years. Everett Dirkson, Republican leader in the Senate, called it “treason.” In 1979 during the Iranian hostage crisis, Reagan promised the new regime weapons if they held onto the hostages through the 1980 election. The hostages were released as Reagan took the oath of office. That new regime is the same one the nasty guy has been battling. In 2000 Florida governor Jeb Bush, in order to help his brother George W. was aggressive in “cleaning” voter rolls. There were estimates of between 10,000 and 70,000 black people were unable to vote. GW Bush won the state by 537 votes, and thus the presidency. In all three cases we didn’t learn of the manipulation until well after the affected election. We didn’t have a chance to protest the action. In contrast, the nasty is openly trying to rig this year’s election.

If it’s true that Trump became president in 2016, as Robert Mueller’s investigation found, because of major help from Putin, then the last legitimately elected Republican who didn’t commit or at least flirt with treason to become president was Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-1961). By coincidence, he was also the last Republican president to reject the influence of America’s oligarchs and instead kept the top 90% income tax rate on oligarchs and actually worked to increase union membership and expand Social Security. So, get ready. We know in advance at least some of the dirty tricks they’re going to try to pull. Musk and Zuck spinning their social media outlets; Fox, CBS, and CNN under oligarch’s thumbs; ICE disruption; seized ballots; corrupted mail; and now realistic, highly deceptive AI-generated Republican deepfakes are already appearing in the Texas senatorial election.

In a second article Hartmann expanded on what the nasty guy is doing to steal the 2026 election.

The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open. ... The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.

The nasty guy and others have talked about such things as have ICE surround the polls to intimidate voters. Todd Blanche, formerly the nasty guy’s personal lawyer and now acting Attorney General told a conservative crowd, “[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”

He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done. A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.

Blanche has reason to be worried. He knows the true nature of the nasty guy quite well. He isn’t being paranoid.

A Democratic majority doesn’t need to convict anyone to change everything. It can deny the appropriations that fund the deployments and the detention machine, it can compel sworn testimony and drag the concealed directives into daylight, and it can restore a Justice Department willing to enforce laws like Section 242, the Reconstruction-era statute that makes it a felony for any official to strip any citizen of their constitutional rights. ... These lawyers and judges aren’t afraid of impeachment as an abstraction: they’re afraid of the reckoning that oversight makes possible.

Make sure you’re registered to vote, then actually do it. Vote by mail if you can and do it early so the Post Office can’t interfere. Tell your senators and representative how you feel. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quotes the late columnist Molly Ivins on Thursdays. Yesterday was a quote from 1995 on why Rush Limbaugh was so popular. The reason is still true.

A large segment of Limbaugh’s audience consists of white males, eighteen to thirty-four years old, without a college education. Basically, a guy I know and grew up with named Bubba. Bubba listens to Limbaugh because Limbaugh gives him someone to blame for the fact that Bubba is getting screwed. He’s working harder, getting paid less in constant dollars, and falling further and further behind. Not only is Bubba never gonna be able to buy a house, he can barely afford a trailer. Hell, he can barely afford the payments on the pickup. Limbaugh offers him scapegoats. It’s the “feminazis.” It’s the minorities. It’s the limousine liberals. It’s all these people with all these wacky social programs to help some silly, self-proclaimed bunch of victims.

Between 2010, when I started having Blogger track viewership, and October 2025 this blog received one million views, most of that in the two years before then. Now just eight months later the number of views has passed two million and is at 2,008,968. In the last 30 days there have been 32.9K views from Brazil, 17.4K from Bangladesh, 17.1K from Iraq, and 16K from the US. Surprises include 12.1K views from Saudi Arabia and 10.2K views from Tunisia. This is post 5646. I’ve spent a lot of evenings over 18 years writing this blog. Brother is coming again for a short visit, this time with his daughter and her family. So I probably won’t post again until the middle of next week.

Point toward goodness, toward democracy, and toward hope

Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the primary election in California. The election day is a week ago and only this week were many races called. When a large number of people vote by mail and only have to get the ballot to the post office by election day, counting will take a while. And, of course, that gives an excuse for the nasty guy and Republicans to cry fraud. A prime example is the primary for mayor of Los Angeles. As at the state level, all candidates are on one ballot. The two who get the most votes, no matter the party, go on to the November ballot. This story is about Spencer Pratt, Republican. He wasn’t all that qualified for the job, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Republicans. His campaign ads featured conspiracy theories. He came in second in early tabulation, but fell behind as mail ballots were counted. In Los Angeles the nasty guy got 26% of the vote in 2024. He would get a lot fewer votes now. There was no way Pratt would become mayor.

But now that their dreams of capturing control of LA are likely dead, Republicans have resorted to spreading baseless and dangerous voter-fraud lies to explain away their defeat, rather than admit that running a right-wing, reality-TV freak in dark blue Los Angeles was a bad choice. The lies about voter fraud come both from right-wing personalities and social media accounts that profit off lying to Republican voters, as well as from elected officials who know better but need to pander to their easily duped base of MAGA morons.

In a second post Singer continued the story.

But rather than accept that a conspiratorial, pro-MAGA grifter was not a good fit for the overwhelmingly Democratic city, President Donald Trump and other GOP lawmakers baselessly cried fraud—the same strategy they’re likely to employ when they lose in the midterms.

Singer then listed the many Republicans who claimed fraud, starting with the nasty guy. From the end of the article:

For now, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said that he and fellow Democrats have made it a crime to interfere with elections by lying about voter fraud. “Trump says voter fraud should land people in prison. Agreed. And let’s start with the politicians spreading election lies with the goal of illegally interfering with counting ballots,” Newsom wrote on X. “In California, I just signed a law making that punishable with up to 3 years behind bars. More to come. FAFO, Donald.” But given that Trump acts with impunity, and the Supreme Court he packed with right-wing hacks basically lets him do whatever he wants, that threat is unlikely to make any difference.

Leila Fadel of NPR reported that California Attorney General Rob Bonta is responding to the Republican claims by pushing against claims of fraud and promoting transparency. He explained the process and why the tally takes so long. And in in LA County there is a livestream of the counting.

"The best counter to misinformation and disinformation is calling it out, confronting it, providing the facts that show that it's demonstrably false," he said. "So I immediately went to my own platforms to share how Trump is lying. The facts rebut everything and contradict everything that he said, and it's important that he be called out for it, because it's wrong and it's not true." "I'm worried about what he might do. Will he deploy the military? Will he deploy ICE to the polls? Will he interfere with the U.S. Postal Service in the November election, and the vote-by-mail ballots that move through the U.S. Postal Service?" he said. "All those things are possible, and they rest on this lie, this fabrication that there's widespread voter fraud," Bonta added.

A White House spokesperson said a lot of people share the concern of fraud, but offered no evidence there had been any. Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about the best political nonfiction books released so far in 2026. I haven’t read any of them (and I’m trying to shift my reading to more enjoyable novels). I’ll list a few of them to show a sense of what authors want to call attention to. Eric Lichtblau: “American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate” Lichtblau’s book about the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein by a former high school classmate who targeted Bernstein because he was gay and Jewish traces a neo-Nazi history that is uniquely American. Danny Funt: “Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling” Heather Ann Thompson: “Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage” In December 1984, Bernie Goetz shot four unarmed Black teenagers in a New York City subway car after one teen asked Goetz how he was doing and then asked for $5. Goetz said he believed they were about to mug him, and he carried a pistol—illegally—because he had been mugged before. For Thompson, Goetz is a way to unpack the Reagan-era retreat from the civil rights advances of the preceding decades. Nicholas Enrich: “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID” If you feel like you already know how brutally immoral the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development was, you’re wrong. Enrich spent over a decade at the agency and was the director of policy, programming, and planning at USAID’s Bureau for Global Health when Trump returned to office, giving him a front-row seat to unprecedented, unimaginable cruelty. Commenters listed several more books. In Monday’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted Lawrence Winnerman of Blue Amp:

The word we were given was cloud. It is one of the most effective pieces of marketing in the history of technology, because it tells you the thing is weightless, floating, somewhere up there and nowhere in particular—a place your photos live, made of nothing, costing nothing, sitting on no one. Ask Beverly and Jeff Morris what the cloud weighs. They live in Newton County, Georgia, in the kind of rural country people from the cities drive through without seeing. In 2018, Meta broke ground on a data center about a thousand feet from their home. Within months, the Morrises’ well—the private well their household actually drinks from—began to fail. Sediment in the water. The dishwasher, the ice maker, the washing machine, the toilet, all faltering. They have spent roughly $5,000 trying to fix it and can’t afford the $25,000 it would take to replace the well. Meta commissioned a study and concluded its data center was “unlikely” to have affected their groundwater. Three of the Morrises’ neighbors have reported well trouble since the data center went in. The cloud, it turns out, has to land somewhere. It landed on them.

In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Bobby Ghosh, writing in his Substack about that useless war.

The humiliation is not in the events of a single bad evening, it is in the design of the thing. Tehran has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a precondition for any deal with Washington. Israel, insisting its Lebanese campaign falls outside the truce, keeps hitting Hezbollah whenever it suits. Each sortie over Beirut blows up the diplomacy elsewhere. The Houthis, never wanting for an excuse, have warned they will go after Israeli ships in the Red Sea. So the timetable for ending Trump’s war is set not in the Oval Office but in an Israeli targeting cell, an Iranian command bunker and a Yemeni hillside — none of which answers to the White House. Tehran grasps this more clearly than anyone, which is why it is in no rush. As Brett McGurk argues, Trump’s options have narrowed to three: endure the economic pain, concede on Iran’s terms, or fight the wider war he swore to avoid. The Iranian regime is employing the oldest move in its book, which is to hold what the adversary wants — and wait. It is holding the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran now says will reopen only under its own conditions, transit toll included. […] The IDF’s resumption of attacks in Lebanon, after the briefest of pauses, gave Iran the opportunity to test that leverage — hence its Sunday missile barrage. That led to the astonishing situation where an American President publicly sought to protect the Islamic Republic from retaliation by Israel. In nearly three decades of covering the Middle East, that is a sentence I never could have imagined writing. It would have amused and pleased the Iranian leadership in equal measure.

Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate:

By most measures, the United States still hoists plenty of power on the global stage. It possesses the most lethal and far-flung military; it controls the leading currency; its leaders’ words and deeds are more closely observed and analyzed than those of any other leaders. But Trump has proved remarkably inept at brandishing this power. He seems to believe that he can rule the world through crude threats and assertions of unilateral dominance, that (to use Mao Zedong’s phrase) power grows out of the barrel of a gun. And so when this formula fails—when he backpedals from his threats, when his bark carries no bite, when relentless volleys of firepower destroy targets but fall short of accomplishing political aims (because he mistakenly thinks that the former automatically yields the latter)—then the rest of the world, friends and foes, start to take his (and, therefore, America’s) threats and assurances less seriously. They start going their own way, and try setting security arrangements and supply chains that avoid U.S. control. In other words, Trump’s misunderstandings and abuses of power in the short run are sparking a recalculation of power balances in the long run.

Alix Breeden of Kos poses the question, “Can there really be a Turning Point USA of the left?” Turning Point USA is the highly successful conservative movement started by Charlie Kirk, assassinated last September. There are also several popular conservative podcasters, notably Joe Rogan. Liberals have long wondered and hoped for a liberal equivalent of either of those. And now perhaps there is. William He started Dream for America when he was 16. He is now 19 and a student at the University of Texas – Kirk was about the same age when he started Turning Point. He was interviewed by Breeden. Here’s a bit of what he said. Dream for America has chapters on 50 campuses and another 600 schools wanting to join. Two thirds of the chapters are in red or swing states. Those 600 schools are waiting because DFA doesn’t have enough staff – they’re all college student volunteers facing burn-out. DFA will have a conversation with anyone, just to get the ideas out.

It’s not about trying to clip farm people. It’s more so about trying to really have conversations and point toward people, toward goodness, toward democracy, and toward hope. There’s a great quote that I always love: “There are two types of leaders: those that bring people down to the lowest common denominator,” which is what I think a lot of the right does. “And then there are those who uplift and bring out the best in people,” and that’s what I want to do—bring out the best in our young people, bring out the goodness in all of our young people, and really get our young people to believe in democracy again, and hopefully to believe in this country again one day too.

Zain tweeted:

A friend of mine has two tickets for game 4 of the nba finals. They are courtside seats plus airfare and hotel accommodations. He didn't realize when he bought them that this is the same day as his wedding - so he can't go. If you're interested and want to go instead of him, it's at St. Peter's Church in New York City at 5 PM. Her name is Donna. She will be the one in the white dress.

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.

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.

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.