A book full of humanity, humor, and tenderness

I finished the book My Friends by Fredrik Backman. On the title page translator Neil Smith is listed, so I had to do some checking. Backman is Swedish, so a translator is necessary. The story is triggered by a painting. Most people looking at it see it as a painting of the sea. But Louisa sees there is also a pier and three boys in their early teens portrayed as laughing. Louisa spent most of your childhood in the foster care system and at one point was given a postcard of the painting. That painting is up for auction and she just has to see the real thing before it is sold for millions. She does see it before being thrown out of the auction. Then she encounters the artist who, with his friend Ted, sold all they had to buy it back. The artist recognizes Louisa as a fellow artist. That night the artist dies, telling Ted to give the painting to her. She doesn’t want something that expensive. But Louisa, just turned 18 and out of the foster care system, convinces Ted to take her with him as he boards the train to return to his home. On the way he tells her about the origins of the painting. The story then switches back and forth between the summer when Ted and his friends are fourteen, about to turn fifteen, when the painting was created and Ted traveling with Louisa twenty-five years later. Beside Ted and the artist (never explicitly named until the end of the book) the friends are Joar and Ali, the one girl in the group. Yep, one of the boys in the painting is a girl. They spend as much time together as possible and most of that time is on the pier or in the sea around it. They’re together so much because their home life is bad. Joar’s father is abusive. Ted’s is dying. Ali’s father tends to not pay bills so she’s in town only a couple years before dad needs to move on to avoid creditors. And the artist’s parents think he’s strange, drawing all the time, and just want him to be normal. Joar recognizes the artist’s talent. He also recognizes the artist can’t stay in this city and develop his craft. The artist isn’t doing much after being thrown out of the class of a nasty art teacher. So Joar announces that a contest is coming up and the artist absolutely must enter it, then makes sure he does, creating this painting. In the later time Ted took care of the artist as he was dying. There is strong implication that they were a gay couple. That is reinforced on the train ride when Louisa notices Ted admiring he conductor. Though this explains some of the artist’s strangeness, that they are probably gay is barely mentioned. Though the kids are dealing with bad home lives they are great friends to each other with days that are idyllic. Being fourteen they also get into mischief, usually with funny consequences. There are moments of blessing with mothers, older brothers, and various adults. It’s a beautiful story, full of humanity, humor, and tenderness. There isn’t much plot, though a great deal of simply living. Backman is an excellent writer and Smith did a masterful job in translating – I thought of the translation process a lot while reading. I very much enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. I may have to find some of his other books. Nick Romeo, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Daily Kos wrote that the most dangerous innovation of Silicon Valley is tech fascism. He discussed this with author and journalist Gil Durán, who wrote the book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Romeo described tech fascism...

This anti-democratic ideology is destroying laws and norms while promising a glorious future delivered by technology, and it’s now moving from the fringe belief of a few eccentric billionaires to the cultural mainstream, according to Durán.

Some of the major points Durán talked about: There is a rising cult of Silicon Valley billionaires “who believe that technology is going to make democracy obsolete in the 21st century.” It is fascism because it aligns with the MAGA cult and is funding the nasty guy through gifts and crypto.

Fascism is generally a cult of grievance and self-victimization that promises a return to greatness through the purging and persecution of enemy groups. What tech fascism adds is that instead of only promising a return to some greater period in the past, it also promises this great, glorious future that will be achieved if only we eliminate the obstacles in our way, including regulation, law, democracy and anybody who opposes this acceleration of technology.

AI is being marketed as a terrifying invention that will fundamentally disrupt our lives quickly while not giving us a choice. Yeah, a lot of it is hype, but AI isn’t harmless and is already having an effect. The AI industry is calling it an existential threat to humanity and the biggest job killer ever. Of course, there is a backlash. Another claim is AI will create super abundance. We already have that, but too much of it is sucked up by the tech billionaires. The tech bros are claiming that AI is promising the greatest economic depression (except for billionaires becoming trillionaires). That’s while AI seems less useful than its marketers say.

We are taught to revere wealthy people. If you’re wealthy, it means you’re morally better. It means you’re a superior intellect, and you’re important, and people should be in awe of you. I think that people get this idea in our country that somehow people become billionaires because they’re smart and disciplined and visionary, which is actually not the case at all. And unfortunately billionaires also buy into this myth of their own greatness.

The tech bros demand all the power to destroy everything and no one has the right to stop them. What if farmers said that? Or garbage men? His book is about, “the radicalization of Silicon Valley billionaires into the most dangerous anti-democratic force the country has ever faced.” We have to deal with the billionaire threat. But many of the big champions of the Democratic Party blast at the nasty guy, but not at billionaires. The nasty guy will be around for only a couple more years. Tech bros will be around a lot longer. There are some Democrats speaking out, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. People don’t trust billionaires. We need politicians that won’t take billionaire money and will increase the distrust. Start with the 5% wealth tax on California’s ballot. It’s great, but not nearly enough. In Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jill Lawrence of The Bulwark listing the three new demands that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made that prompted Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, to pull out of trade talks. The quotes are quite likely from Carney:

Limits on Canada’s ability to negotiate and sign trade deals. Canada has negotiated twenty economic and security partnerships in the last year, and forthcoming deals in the next six months could double its market access. “We’re the partner of choice in many respects for countries around the world and the Americans wanted to restrict that. ... It’s a power play and becomes a question of sovereignty.” Continual efforts “until the very last minute” to restrict French language protections (like bilingual labels), Canadian culture, “and in effect our sovereignty,” even though “these issues were never on the table” and never will be. Late U.S. demands that would have been unfair to Canadian auto parts and extended favorable tariff treatment to some cars and trucks but not others. The exclusions were “a big change” with no rationale given, Carney said, and would have made Canadian vehicle production “more uneconomic over time.”

Each of the three sounds like a good reason to pull out of the talks. In the comments exlrrp posted a meme of a Dolly Parton quote from the Larry King Now show in 2016:

If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight. And you should be allowed to be how you are and who you are.

Thanks, Dolly. Another meme posted by exlrrp:

Remember when Trump collected $12 billion dollars, started WWIII, & then we never heard from the Board of Peace again? One of Trump’s biggest scams and nobody ever talks about it.

In the comments of today’s roundup exlrrp posted a meme about the broken trade talks with Canada that prompted the nasty guy to order Lake Ontario be renamed Lake America. The meme has the text:

Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, announced today that the United States of America will be renamed South Canada, the 14th Province.

Another meme posted by exlrrp show a house labeled Quality of Life and rooms labeled Affordable Housing, Healthcare, Good Jobs, Lower Prices, Safe Communities, and Education all going up in flames. In front of the house the nasty guy is telling a man in a MAGA hat, “Oh look, a trans person!” Anil Dash has a couple tweets on Meta’s settlement over the harm its products might do to children and teens:

So Meta will always choose to pay, rather than to fight, because then it doesn't have to change. The initial investigation by the FTC into Facebook's abuse of its users was *SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO*, and that one also ended in a settlement. After which, they... went back to abuse their users. Meta is a creep who will _never_ take no for an answer, and never stop trying to ignore their lack of consent. Every media & regulatory organization in the world seems determined to ignore this reality; I genuinely don't understand why. Today's settlement is so that Meta can keep violating consent.

David Michigan added that the $17 billion in payments will be spread out over ten years. This becomes barely more than a rounding error to the company. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos has something to say about Meta’s settlement:

No admission of algorithmic skullduggery. No apologies. No nothing. Just some chump change distributed to a bunch of states that will probably toss it into their general fund to shore up their coffers a bit. But, hey, Zucky Boy promises—cross his heart and all!—that he’ll “make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm [to kids] from its platforms—and will do it within months.” And here’s my promise: I’ll let you know when media outlets start publishing stories “within months” about how Facebook and Instagram’s “transformations” are riddled with holes, if they’ve been done at all.

Bill also remembered an event from, 2002, which was 24 years ago. Bush II invited Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan to his Crawford ranch. In on the meeting was Adel Al-Jubeir, a foreign policy adviser to the Saudi kingdom.

“If the objective is to dismantle the weapons of mass destruction program, we could probably do that without going to war,” Al-Jubeir said. “Why not use that option? Why do people want to risk the lives of tens of thousands of American men and women in uniform for an objective that can be achieved through negotiations?”

Bill added:

Oh, let’s see: to get our hands on cheap oil, to feed the military-industrial complex, to scare Americans into re-electing the macho Republicans, to bully the world, to get revenge on Saddam for “tryin’ to kill muh daddy,” and to act out G.I. Joe fantasies aboard an aircraft carrier under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Other than that, I got nothin’.

Joy is not a reward for success, but a way of living

Kos of Daily Kos discussed Latino culture and how it compares to American conservatism. Latino communities still put the church at the religious, social, and moral center. It is where they participate in community. Family is a lived reality and cultural expectation is a deep obligation to parents. There are still strong traditional gender roles (so stop with that “Latinx” nonsense). That is a part of why the nasty guy got 46% of the Latino vote in 2024. There was cultural alignment and many could assume his bigotry was aimed elsewhere and not at them. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show depicted sugar cane fields to demonstrate Latinos are hard workers. The several small businesses showed their hustle culture. It showed extended families with children everywhere – when they party they don’t leave their children at home. Many images were highly masculine and highly feminine, but they were not sexualized. This was the only halftime show to feature an actual wedding. Even the moments of queer imagery showed them as belonging, part of the family. All of that (well, not the last one) depict conservative values promoted by American conservatives.

Where Latinos fundamentally break from American conservatism is joy. Joy is not a byproduct of success for Latinos. Unlike cultures that treat professional status or financial achievement as prerequisites for a meaningful life, Latino culture has long defined success more relationally than materially. To our occasional economic detriment, joy is not deferred until we have the house or the fancy car. It has nothing to do with bank balances. Joy is integrated into daily life and shared whether or not circumstances cooperate. That joy is not abstract or intellectual. It is physical. It lives in the body. It shows up in dancing that starts early and never really stops—children learning complex salsa steps, being twirled by grandparents right alongside them. Movement is not performance; it is participation. Joy is learned somatically, taught through rhythm, proximity, and repetition, embedded before it can ever be articulated.

Joy also shows up in touch – “affection is public and unembarrassed” – and in the music.

You did not need to speak Spanish to feel any of that radiating from that stage. The music, the movement, and the intimacy were the message. Joy was not a reward for success, but a way of living: collective, embodied, and freely offered to anyone willing to feel it. Even many MAGA conservatives begrudgingly admitted it spoke to them. Conservatism, by contrast, is dour, punitive, and obsessed with control. It treats pleasure with suspicion, happiness as frivolous, and celebration as weakness.

The joy on the stage was defiant and incompatible with American conservatism. I had written about AG Pam Bondi’s infuriating performance before the House Judiciary Committee that wanted answers about the Department of Justice’s obstructive release of the Epstein files. Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote about a couple bad moments. One of them was Bondi saying:

The Dow is over 50,000 right now. The S&P [500] at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. … That's what we should be talking about.

A record-setting stock market is terrible reason to not investigate pedophiles. Emily Singer of Kos wrote that Bondi’s performance was the “most dreadful” by any Cabinet-level official before Congress. She ranted and hurled personal insults at Democrats rather than answering fair questions. Anyone who tuned in to watch would have thought her antics embarrassing and wondered why she was doing it. Singer said Bondi was performing for an audience of one – the nasty guy. He gets pleasure when his enemies are insulted. Also, the nasty guy has dropped hints that she hasn’t been wielding her power as quickly as he would like, so this performance may have been an effort to save her job. The moment that proves the point was when Bondi demanded the Judiciary Committee apologize to the nasty guy for impeaching him. Jeff Danziger posted a cartoon of showing a cat labeled Bondi having spilled the trash, scattered papers, clawed up the furniture, and was now puling down the curtains. A guy in the doorway says to the nasty guy, “Sir... She’s getting more publicity than you!” He replies, “She must be stopped!” The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases job data monthly to get a quick, though maybe not so accurate, look at what the economy is doing. After the end of the year, they take time to go through more reliable statistics and revise the year’s numbers. Singer reported that on Wednesday the BLS announced their updated numbers for 2025. The estimates made during the year came up with 584,000 added jobs. The revised numbers say only 181,000 jobs were added in the year. That’s close to a 70% drop and a mighty small number. And tiny compared to 2024’s job gains of nearly 1.5 million. Yeah, the BLS is the agency that the nasty guy accused of lowering the numbers to make him look worse than Biden. So were these numbers falsified and the real numbers are worse? Singer also included statistics that show private education and health care added jobs and the entire rest of the economy lost jobs. Republicans are trying to save face by saying 130,000 jobs were added in January. That’s still low compared to the Biden years. And jobs haven’t really grown since April, when the nasty guy announced his tariff Liberation Day. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that the House voted on a resolution to end the emergency that the nasty guy declared to justify tariffs against Canada. This was brought by Democrats and enough Republicans voted for it that it passed 219-211. This is a symbolic rebuke of the nasty guy. Of course, speaker Johnson didn’t want it to come to a vote. But enough Republicans were worried about the high prices their constituents are paying. The measure goes to the Senate and the nasty guy will surely veto it. Besides, it’s a resolution, not a bill. In Friday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Ali Breland of The Atlantic talking about how Jeffry Epstein helped revive the idea of “race-science” or the false idea that there is a genetic reason why non-while people are supposedly inferior. I’ll bypass that discussion for Kev’s comments on the article.

~35% of the world’s population is either Indian or Chinese and I think that official number has been over the 30% mark for at least decades (and probably centuries). When you think about it, “white people” have always been a minority of the world’s population. If “non-whites” wanted to “slaughter” white people, we have the numbers to do so.

Óscar Gutiérrez of El País in English:

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, founded in Germany more than a century ago, has been monitoring aid flows since the start of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In its latest assessment, published Wednesday, the think tank states that “Europe has almost offset the collapse in U.S. support.” Specifically, U.S. contributions plummeted by almost 99% last year; those from European partners increased by 59% in financial and humanitarian assistance, and by 67% in military aid. “As a result, total aid in 2025 remained close to previous years,” the institute notes. [...] With the numbers in hand, it’s clear that Trump has achieved his goal. The Republican leader reiterated in the first months of his presidency that it was Europe’s responsibility to defend Ukraine. He even demanded that Zelenskiy reimburse the money the United States had spent during the first three years of the Russian occupation, a demand he softened with the signing of the minerals trade agreement. […] The distribution... is uneven. The Kiel Institute points out that Scandinavian and Western European countries, with Germany and the United Kingdom leading the way, account for almost 95% of military aid, far ahead of the southern region where Spain is located — the Spanish government pledged €817 million ($970 million) last November, 75% of which was for military equipment — and Ukraine’s eastern neighbors.

In the comments Jimmy Margulies posted a cartoon of two workmen adding to the side of the Kennedy Center a sign that says “ICE Detention Facility.” One workman says, “Trump remains confident he can fill the seats here.” The nasty guy held up money for another tunnel under the Hudson River into New York, then said he would release it if Chuck Schumer would rename Penn Station as Trump Station and Dulles Airport near Washington as Trump Airport. RJ Matson of e pluribus cartoonum created a cartoon of “Chuck Schumer’s The Art of the Counteroffer.” It shows “The Donald J. Trump Memorial Long Term Parking Lot” at Dulles Airport and the “Donald J. Trump Taxi Stand at Penn Station.” A cartoon posted by paulpro and created by Jeffrey Koterba shows Bondi with a smile on her face at the doctor’s office as a nurse show her chest x-ray to the doctor. The nurse explains, “She redacted hear heart x-ray... So we don’t actually know if she has one...” Daniel Boris posted a cartoon of Bad Bunny saying, “Release the Epstein files in Spanish. Maybe then MAGA will get upset about them.” In today’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a pair of tweets about the six Democrats who recorded a video telling military personnel they had a duty to refuse to obey orders that were illegal. A grand jury refused to indict them. Kyle Griffin tweeted:

*None* of the D.C. grand jurors who heard the Trump admin's pitch on why they should indict the Democratic lawmakers who recorded that illegal orders video believed the Justice Department had met the low threshold of probable cause, two sources familiar with the matter told NBC.

Joyce Alene added:

I have never heard of a situation where every single grand juror rejected an indictment. Every single one.

Singer reported that Tom Homan, the “border czar” who was put in charge of ICE in Minnesota, said federal agents are already leaving the state and the rest will leave through next week. Homan said the reason was the operation was a “success.” Others say this was an admission the thuggish methods were hurting the popularity of the nasty guy and Republicans. Many people in this administration are very good at lying. Are they doing that now? Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, said, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Meanwhile the community will keep up their patrols. Perhaps this is a way to get headlines to get people to think the problem is over so they look away. That way ICE can continue to violate people’s rights with less public attention. They did that kind of thing before when Homan took on oversight in Minnesota, giving the impression the brutality was ending, but nothing changed. Bill of Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary:

"This whole culture war [against Bad Bunny] last weekend has demonstrated one thing: for all of MAGA's triumphalism, it's not a movement that seems confident in its position. These people, who control every branch of government, are so triggered by someone singing in Spanish for 20 minutes that they need to create their own 'safe space' alternative halftime show, where 'Trad Bunny' over here is singing songs about how he can't even enjoy sitting in his truck and drinking beer because knows that somewhere out there is a trans person. It's actually f---ing pathetic. The gap between the power you all wield, and the victimhood you all claim, is the real offense. If you didn’t actually have the power to do so much damage in our country, I think we'd all dismiss it as a weak and pathetic pity party." —Jon Stewart, on the fake MAGA tantrum over the Big Bunny halftime show

Randy Essex, retired journalist, wrote an opinion piece for last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press. Alas, the online version is for subscribers only. In it Essex described the vice nasty’s view of manhood is sad and absurd. The vice nasty called on white men to call the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to report incidents where they were passed over for a job that went to a minority person. Yes men face challenges – see the suicide rate. We tell boys highly mixed messages to be both tough and sensitive. Essex (a white guy) wrote that DEI made him better and appreciate a variety of experiences and perspectives, critical to complete news stories and being an empathetic human. He also grew up poor as the vice nasty claims to have done. There were jobs he wanted and didn’t get. He was told to get over it.

Diverse voices simply are needed for organizations to cope effectively with our dynamic society. Diversity of leadership is an even greater need to challenge institutional bias. ... To my fellow white men, I say that not getting a particular opportunity isn’t discrimination. It’s both a part of life and a chance to be better next time. Man up.

Drew Sheneman posted a cartoon on Kos showing a man looking at another man labeled Corporations sitting in piles of money. The corporation man says, “Congress let your Obamacare subsidies lapse? That’s odd, my subsidies came as scheduled.”

Refusing to hate confuses and disorients the hateful

I didn’t watch the Superbowl. I heard a lot of good things about Bad Bunny’s halftime show. So when I saw a link to it on YouTube I watched it. My general impression: Those other people are going to hate. We’re going to party. Please party with us. An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos before the game was a discussion about what the show might contain and what the elements might mean. Afterward, Alix Breeden of Kos explained the symbolism of many of the things in the show. This includes: The sugar cane fields surrounding the house where many Puerto Ricans worked as slaves (this is one thing I recognized). The taco stand. The child sleeping across several chair. The dancers hanging from utility poles representing the huge blackout after Hurricane Maria. The video briefly showed a wedding, which was an actual wedding. A couple who are superfans invited Bad Bunny to their wedding. He turned it around – would they like to get married as part of his Super Bowl show? Kos of Kos discussed a thread by Ross Douthat, conservative and columnist for the New York Times. Douthat listed things the nasty guy and his administration could do over the next eight months that would improve his political position.

It’s actually a great question. Under normal circumstances, it could spark a real debate. With Donald Trump as president, however, there is only one answer: His administration can’t improve its political position. Because the problem isn’t the tactics. It’s the man.

Kos then supplies a rebuttal to each of Douthat’s suggestions, explaining why the nasty guy would never do it. A couple of the suggestions: “Don't issue any more gross pardons.” And, “Pressure allies by all means, but don't threaten to use the U.S. military to seize their territory.” Kos wrote:

Sure, he’s not wrong. But what Douthat is really offering is a fantasy in which Trump stops being Trump long enough for Republicans to survive him. That’s like asking a tiger to pretend it isn’t a predator until dinner is over.

In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included tweets by Logan Phillips responding to Interactive Polls. First, what Interactive tweeted:

For the first time, GOP strategists are telling Axios that losing the Senate — where Republicans have a 53-47 majority — is a distinct possibility. According to GOP internal polling, even deep-red states like Alaska, Iowa, and Ohio are now in play

Phillip’s response:

Republicans shouldn’t be so surprised. They won the 2024 election by convincing Americans they’d make life more affordable - then used their hard-earned power to cut Medicaid, reduce food stamps, and raise everyone’s prices with tariffs. The worst thing a party can do is break the central promise of its campaign. The GOP has spent the last year pushing policies that made life even less affordable. Voters noticed.

Simon Van Zuylen-Wood of New York Magazine:

QAnon is premised on the idea that a global cabal is engaged in the rampant sex-trafficking of minors, and one takeaway from the never-ending Epstein blowback is that we really are governed by an overclass of degenerate elites.

In the comments The Geogre posted a 19 minute video of Jon Stweart discussing the release of the Epstein files.

Today is Groundhog Day. If Trump sees his shadow we’ll have six more weeks of not knowing who the co-conspirators are.

Jon Stewart is in the files. It’s not because he was a friend of Epstein, but because someone suggested a video could be narrated by someone like him. The sanctuary cities of concern aren’t Minneapolis and places like it. The big one is Washington. Stewart doubts those who appeared in the Epstein files will be held accountable. This video is Stewart is at his outraged comedic best. Roxane Gay tweeted a response to the nasty guy’s racist post about the Obamas.

1. It was not an accident. 2. It was not a staffer. 3. While the president may have dementia his racism is not due to dementia. 4. He isn’t sorry. He means every racist thought he shares. 5. His base agrees with him. 6. He will do it again. 7. No one in power will hold him accountable.

Bill Bramhall posted a cartoon of a news anchor saying, “We can now confirm that 100% of the 1% are in the Epstein files.” In Wednesday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Cliff Schecter of Blue Amp Media:

For years, we’ve been sold a comforting fairy tale: America’s worst predators come in different species. There are those predators; sex traffickers, monsters, villains in Netflix documentaries and then there are these predators; the respectable ones in fleece vests who “optimize” companies, “disrupt” democracy, and somehow always end up with your pension money in their carry-on. ... This week blew the lie straight to hell that those with bloodlust for bankrupting their neighbors and our country are different than those who prey on young girls. The only difference is we’ve allowed the first to become respectable since the Reagan days (remember when they were called “corporate raiders?” Private equity sounds more thoughtful. Kinder.). It turns, out destroying people’s lives and livelihoods with no allegiance to anything but your own wealth and power is always evil. So, it turns out, it’s the same guys. Same billionaires. Same vibes. Same moral black hole—just different crimes on different days.

In the comments The Wolfpack posted a cartoon of Charlie Brown speaking to Linus.

If you believe that teaching about God in public schools will improve people’s morality, you first need to explain why it doesn’t work in churches.

The New Republic posted the text of a sermon by Rev. Michael Delk of St. Thomas à Becket Episcopal Church in Morgantown, West Virginia. This is a time of those in power mocking, beating, and killing those they don’t like or who get in their way. Are we being desensitized to worse that is to come? Those in power also mocked, beat, and killed Jesus. How do we be faithful to Jesus in such a time?

Those who oppose the truth of love, who rely on lies and cruelty and brutality, strive to induce us to abandon our principles, and they do it slyly by contriving to make us hate instead of love. We all know the temptation. We watch the videos and read the stories. Our outrage rises rightly at the injustice, and before we know it, the consuming fire of hatred surges in our hearts. We despise the people responsible, and maybe even fantasize about vengeance, which is precisely what the hateful in our world want most from us and for us. The hateful want us to hate so that we can be miserable and puny just like them. It’s also the only game they know how to play. Refusing to hate confuses and disorients the hateful. We must stay disciplined in Christ’s unconditional love, disciplined in prayer for those who persecute us and others, disciplined in our desire for the repentance and redemption of the hateful and cruel and brutal, disciplined in our witness that there is a different way, a way of forgiveness and reconciliation given to us by Jesus.

Lauren Hodges of NPR went to the retirement ceremony of several transgender military members who were forced out by Secretary Pete Hegseth’s anti-DEI efforts. The ceremony wasn’t put on by the Pentagon, but by the Human Rights Campaign. Officiating was General Stanley McChrystal, known for his leadership during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Of those forced into retirement one was a Colonel, the highest-ranking trans member of the US armed forces. In the nasty guy’s first term he said that transgender people already serving can keep their job by getting a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. So many did. In his second term that same diagnosis was designated as disqualifying for service. The nasty guy and Hegseth say pushing out trans people is necessary for mission readiness, cost issues and unit cohesion. Army Major Kara Corcoran, one of those who did what she was told and got that diagnosis, disagrees that being transgender harms mission readiness – she served well and in combat for 17 years. As for the cost – transgender surgeries take less recovery time than things like shoulder or knee surgery. They’re back in service faster. It seems unit cohesion suffers more from having to protect service members from being outed than for dealing with an out member. Hodges:

General McChrystal says the separations are a mistake and that they're affecting mission readiness, one of the listed values that Secretary Hegseth claims as a priority for his Department of War amidst several simmering global conflicts.

McChrystal:

God forbid, if we had a major war and we need to start calling everybody up, I would hope that we would not suddenly say we are only going to draft people of a certain type. Because we wouldn't have enough.

In today’s pundit roundup Dworkin quoted Greg Sargent of The New Republic. I’ll get to his quote in a moment. The Michigan NPR news said a lot about the nasty guy’s threat to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. This bridge has been in the news for a couple decades. It’s the second one across the river, the other being the Ambassador Bridge (there’s also a tunnel). The Ambassador Bridge is frequently backed up and dumps traffic onto Windsor streets for a couple miles. The new bridge connects freeway to freeway and is to open later this year. One of the nasty guy’s demands is to require more US steel, rather than Canadian steel, be used. That prompted the mayor of Windsor to say, hey, the bridge is built, it doesn’t need any more steel. Also much in the news over the decades I’ve live here, is that the Ambassador Bridge is privately owned. It is not owned and run by the local, state, and national governments on either side. The owner is Maddy Maroun, who has demonstrated he can be a real pain when he wants to. He also owns a lot of property in Detroit – which had included Michigan Central Station in Detroit that was a poster child for ruin porn until Bill Ford bought it and renovated for a beautiful result and wide acclaim. Maddy and his son Matthew opposed the Gordie Howe bridge because they saw it eating into the profits of their own bridge. Thankfully, the Marouns have been quiet during much of the time the bridge was built. But Matthew is the billionaire in Sargent’s quote:

It turns out a billionaire Trump ally who owns another bridge linking those locations—which will face competition from the new project—privately met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick this week, according to The New York Times. Lutnick spoke with Trump after the meeting and just before Trump’s threat. Maybe, just maybe, Lutnick whispered to Trump that it would totally own Canada and supercilious Prime Minister Mark Carney if Trump blocked that bridge.

Why was the bridge named for Gordie Howe? He was a Canadian who played hockey for the Detroit Red Wings for 25 years. Julie Brown, in her own Substack, discussed AG Pam Bondi’s appearance before a Senate Committee yesterday. Other sources have mentioned her pleasing and flattering demeanor when answering questions posed by Republicans and quite nasty when answering Democrats. When accused of exposing Epstein victims Bondi blustered back that no one has been more helpful to victims than she has. Brown wrote:

Fact Check. Bondi dropped the ball on investigating Epstein and his abuse of children in Florida a long time ago. She was Florida’s attorney general — the state’s top prosecutor — as more and more Epstein victims came forward in the years after Epstein received federal immunity in 2008. She was in office from 2011 to 2019. During that time, there was an ongoing federal lawsuit on the case, brought by Epstein victims. There were also some 22 other civil lawsuits filed, by victims, all of whom were abused as teenagers by Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, in Palm Beach. There was coverage in the media about how Epstein’s victims were fighting to undo that plea deal, and how Epstein flaunted his freedom by leaving his private jail every day via chauffer to work in an office he set up in West Palm Beach. The irony is as Florida attorney general, Bondi tried to position herself as an advocate for victims of sex trafficking, and created a statewide panel on human trafficking. But she remained silent on the most famous sex trafficking case in Florida’s history.

Bondi’s claim of being the best for victims is like the nasty guy proclaiming he’s the least racist occupant of the Oval Office ever. In the comments the Naked Pastor posted a cartoon about the Parable of the Sower. That parable talks about a farmer who sows seed, some on rocky soil where it doesn’t grow, some on the path where birds eat it, and some on good soil where it produces a bountiful harvest. This cartoon shows Jesus with a satchel of hearts sowing them widely. The Naked Pastor wrote:

I think the original point of the parable of the sower was that the seed was thrown indiscriminately everywhere. It illustrates how love is everywhere for everyone. Like the sun and rain falls on everyone indiscriminately, so does love. Sow love, so love.

A couple memes by Liberal Jane. The first shows a woman with a variety of pride buttons plus a BLM pin. She holds a sign saying, “I’d rather be hated for who I include than loved for who I exclude.” The second shows a man in ratty clothes sitting on a sidewalk. His sign says, “You are always closer to being unhoused than you are to being a billionaire.”

Only after causing chaos and sowing turmoil

The nasty guy has put Greenland back in the news. To distract us because he has no idea what to do with Venezuela after kidnapping its leader? A second distraction (Venezuela being the first) from his Department of Justice which is definitely not releasing the Epstein files, though required to do so by law? A week ago Wednesday an Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported that Denmark and Greenland officials met with the vice nasty and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Afterward a Danish official said there was still a “fundamental disagreement.” The nasty guy has given reasons for wanting to take over Greenland. National Security. Keep it out of the hands of Russia and China. Take control of its mineral wealth – the kind of minerals needed in cars, computers, and green energy. The Danish and Greenlandic officials say: We already have treaties for you to put as many military bases there as you want. What Russian and Chinese attempts to take the island? There’s a reason why those minerals aren’t being extracted – the place is cold and covered in ice! Besides, the natives of Greenland don’t want to be a part of the US. So those reasons must be a cover for something else. Does the nasty guy want it own it to feed his vast ego? Denmark and other NATO allies are increasing their military presence on Greenland. On Thursday of last week another AP article noted troops from Denmark and several European countries, including France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden, have started to arrive in Greenland. It is to tell the nasty guy that NATO can protect Greenland from Russia and China Under the nasty guy’s threats is a growing concern of what happens if the US, a member of NATO, invades Greenland, also a member of NATO through its association with Denmark? What happens to NATO and its vow that an attack on one is an attack on all? A week ago Saturday strawbale of the Kos community posted a delightful AI generated video showing those ready to defend Greenland from US invasion. Those stalwart fighters are polar bears and walruses. The song that goes with it is properly heroic. In the comments are two more videos. The first (and lower in the comments) was created back in April when the nasty guy first invoked tariffs, including on two southern islands populated by only penguins. The Democratic Penguins Republic was created to show they’re ready to protect their islands. That’s why the second video (higher in the comments) features the Democratic Penguins Republic in the fight for Greenland along with the polar bears and walruses, though that’s on the opposite end of the world. LEastsound tweeted a cartoon by John Deering. It shows a Greenland child facing the nasty guy surrounded by his Secret Service. The child says, “We’re already great, thanks.” On Wednesday Kos of Kos wrote about the state of the situation. The nasty guy gave a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Kos described it as “wildly incoherent.” In response the US stock markets dropped in the range of 1.5% to 2.5% (I don’t have numbers in front of me). Between that and Europeans holding firm, the nasty guy announced he and the Secretary General of NATO had a “framework” for a deal and that the tariffs he had imposed on every NATO country that supported Denmark had been called off. When I originally heard the news about having a “framework” I imagined Danish and Greenlandic leaders saying, “We do?” Guys, don’t feel bad about not knowing that a nasty guy’s “framework” is equivalent to his “concept of a plan” that will be delivered “in two weeks” that never seems to actually appear. It seems that NATO holding firm and the stock market reaction (it has since gained back most of its losses) prompted the nasty guy to fold. Or, as the phrase that became popular when he pulled back on the tariffs he had imposed, he did a TACO, Trump Always Chickens Out. Wrote Kos:

In other words, Trump has once again backed down from threats on which he couldn’t follow through—but only after causing chaos, sowing turmoil, and further damaging relationships with our closest allies. He then tried to declare victory for a “deal” that does not exist and—even if it did—would amount to little more than what’s already in place. ... How many more of these self-inflicted wounds can this country take?

So what will be the next Epstein distraction? Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary:

"That's right. After all the bullying, the threats, all the anguish we caused, all the alliances we damaged, all the demands, we reached an agreement that is in all probability nearly identical to the agreement we already made back in 1951. And that is the art of the deal, folks. No one solves a problem that he manufactured completely on his own better than Donald J. Trump." —Jimmy Kimmel

In the comments of Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos is a tweet from Christopher Hale:

For the first time in U.S. history, the archbishop responsible for Catholic pastoral care of U.S. service members said military officers may be morally obligated to disobey a sitting president’s orders. Archbishop Timothy Broglio said a Trump-ordered invasion of Greenland would violate Catholic teaching and that Catholic troops could refuse to comply.

In the body of the roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman of The Cross Section on Substack discussing the brutal tactics of ICE and the “Don’t Tread On Me” flags:

To the naïve observer, those statements and warnings might have indicated an aversion to excessive state power and state violence. But that was never what the conservatives felt. To the contrary; one could always detect a yearning for violence, not a dread that the day would come when they would have to start gunning down their enemies, but the fervent hope that the day would come sooner rather than later... In other words, many conservatives believe that if a liberal even tries to evade an ICE agent in their car, that’s sufficient justification for the agent to kill them, but using your car to kill someone is perfectly fine if the person under the wheels is a liberal. Many prominent Republican lawmakers support laws that allow people to kill protesters with their cars if those protesters get in their way, since shutting down traffic is a tactic that has more often been employed by leftists. Four Republican states have passed laws removing civil liability for those acts of vehicular death-dealing. And of course, conservatives regularly turn killers like Kyle Rittenhouse (who killed two people and wounded a third) into heroes, provided the people they kill are liberals. So when they saw the video of Renee Good’s murder, they weren’t horrified, they were exultant. It’s just the kind of thing they’ve been thirsting for: some woke lib lesbian who was “very, very disrespectful” (as Trump put it) to a man with a gun, and got just what she deserved. And they want more.

In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

But the reality is also that, despite his over-the-top rhetoric, Mr. Trump can’t get away with whatever he likes. He is constrained by democratic institutions in the U.S., the necessity of maintaining alliances abroad, and public opinion as measured by polls and investors. The Greenland saga is a telling example. On Saturday Mr. Trump issued his demand to own the icy island and he vowed to impose tariffs on Europe to compel a sale. Opposition built over the holiday weekend, and financial markets cast a decidedly negative vote on the tariffs and threats on Tuesday. Members of Congress spoke against the use of military force in Greenland, with even GOP leaders expressing doubts. One Senator told us that, if Mr. Trump had gone ahead, Congress would have voted to cut off funds for an invasion, and with veto-proof majorities. European leaders also made clear that taking Greenland by force, military or otherwise, would break the NATO alliance. And what do you know? On Wednesday in Davos, Mr. Trump issued his familiar criticisms of Europe’s weakness, many of which are accurate. But he disavowed the use of force. And by the end of the day he had canceled the tariffs and claimed victory over what he called a “framework” deal over Greenland that he said will make everyone happy.

Nandita Bose tweeted:

Trump to Canada's @MarkJCarney at Davos: “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful also, but they're not. I watched your Prime Minister yesterday. He wasn't so grateful. They should be grateful to us... Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that Mark the next time you make your statements.”

Benjy Sarlin added:

Glad Greenland is behind us so we can get back to threatening Canada.

In the comments is a tweet by Mrs. Betty Bowers with a link to a New York Times article titled, “Volunteers in Minnesota Deliver Groceries So Immigrants Can Hide at Home.” Bowers wrote:

These type of people are America's only shot at ever being great. In other words, they are the opposite of empathy-free Donald Trump and his terrorizing Gestapo goons who are destroying our country.

Comments to that tweet contain warnings that ICE is known to deliver food to get people to open their door. Only open for delivery people you know. I’ll get to the Board of Peace on another day. In this roundup Brian Allen tweeted:

Trump just “ratified” his Board of Peace like he’s founding a new world order. But the Constitution is clear: treaties need 2/3 Senate approval. So unless the Senate voted, this isn’t an international organization. It’s a photo-op with a flag.

Democracy is not exported by missile strike

My Sunday movie was Swan Song, a documentary about putting on the ballet Swan Lake. The title has a second meaning in that it was the last production by former ballet star and artistic director Karen Kain. Kain was a big deal in Canadian ballet. She became a principle dancer and a star at a young age, even becoming a protegé of Rudolf Nureyev. She has a painting of herself done by Andy Warhol. After she retired from dancing she joined the leadership of the National Ballet of Canada and rose to becoming the artistic director. Back in 2020 Kain decided the NBC’s production of Swan Lake would be her last. She wanted something different than the standard treatment the ballet usually got. But COVID delayed that for a couple years. This documentary is about what has to happen to get the show from concept to opening night. Swan Lake is a ballet by Peter Tchaikovsky. An evil guy turns women into swans. Through the help of the Swan Queen they try to get their humanity back – and that’s about all I know about the plot. There are principle dancers, though a major part of this ballet is the corps de ballet, the women who portray all those swans. This production might have had a corps of two dozen. And that’s what makes this ballet difficult, these two dozen dancers have to move in synchronization or the critics will pounce. The film shows Kain at work guiding the production. She was in charge, but she wasn’t the choreographer, working out what each dancer did when. That was done by Robert Binet. So there are several scenes where Binet shows Kain what the dancers have done so far and does that meet with her approval. We also see some of the life of principle dancer Jurgita Dronina, who played the Swan Queen. Her life started in the Soviet Union. Her family escaped when it collapsed. We also see Shae Estrada, who is in the corps who faces tensions because she doesn’t fit in. She’s also a lesbian, though that doesn’t seem to be the source of tension. Something this film doesn’t show is the scenery design and what goes into that. We see some of the scenery being made and some of the installation at the theater, but not the design. As opening night approaches and the company shifts from the studio to the stage with scenery, lighting, and costumes, a lot of adjustments need to be made. Kain and Binet hope it all gels by the time they are before an audience. Since the show is so strenuous there are four sets of principle dancers that rotate the roles. But the corps has to rehearse with all four sets. I quite enjoyed it. I’ve written about capitalism needs to be strongly regulated to survive and thrive, and to be compatible with democracy. I did a long post on that based on articles by Trenz Pruca. Daily Kos community member dratler says there is a country that is regulating capitalism quite well so that their economy is thriving and doing all the things that capitalism does best. From my earlier post an easy guess is that country is not the US, where late stage capitalism is making a mess of things. No, this country is China. While democracy is not a part of the Chinese system...

China’s great industrial firms are beating ours, Europe’s and even some in Japan in productivity, price and more recently quality. They are nearly all privately owned and privately run and therefore “capitalistic” in every sense. In this respect, they resemble the robust private firms of the postwar US.

We used to have such a robust economy. That was after WWII when capitalism gave us an amazing array of innovative goods and services. That was also a time when business was strictly regulated and antitrust laws were enforced. Those in control may be the Chinese Communist Party, but their handling of the economy is nothing like the state control of the Soviet Union. Many in US politics see “Communist” in the name and don’t see how it differs from the disastrous Soviet model. The author returns the focus to the US, listing three (out of many) signs that US capitalism is collapsing. The first is “financialization,” which is making money without producing anything. An example is the huge number of private equity firms that buy up property or companies, load them with debt to finance the purchase, then squeeze out all the wealth they can before letting the husk file for bankruptcy. Workers and other shareholders get little to nothing. Another example is cryptocurrencies. Do we really need a replacement for money, credit cards, and internet services like PayPal that already thrive? The only people who benefit from crypto are criminals. The second sign of economic decline is the crash in the rate of real innovation (by this dratler excludes software, which just improves productivity).

During the late nineteenth and the last century, we Americans made or rapidly adopted most of the innovations that make our modern world. They include electric lighting, airplanes, electric grids, voice recording, broadcast radio, antibiotics, television, high-altitude flight (with pressurized cabins), rocket ships for space flight, digital computers, transistors, chips full of tiny transistors, minicomputers, microcomputers/PCs, MRIs, CAT scans, cells phones, smart phones, genomic medicine, and now “designer drugs” conceived by computers analyzing possible chemical compounds. Yet since Apple introduced the first smart phone nearly twenty years ago, I can’t think of any physical invention (except perhaps genomic medicine and designer drugs) that we Americans produced or rapidly adopted that is remotely comparable in economic potential to any of those in the previous paragraph.

And the software improvements – social media and AI – have many undesirable side effects. The third sign is marketing, advertising, public relations, and propaganda all combined into the word promotion or “promo.” In all forms it is the effort of getting people to do thing, not in their own best interest, but in the interest of the information provider. Much (most? all?) is based on things not true. Disinformation rivals facts. An example of promo is web searches. One had been able to used logic operators, such as “this” and “not that” to search directly for something. Now the search results are flooded by paid promotions to prioritize their links, whether the match is close or not. And I’m pretty sure “not that” searching does not work. AI is supposedly free of that promo pressure, but likely won’t stay that way. Besides, isn’t the power and wonderfulness of AI also propaganda?

It’s the capitalism of a self-indulgent, self-regarding, under-educated, over-egoed and exploitive computer/financial class that has no clue about physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, medicine or the histories of successful human societies. It’s a recipe for the most rapid decline of a successful capitalist democracy in human history. ... The essence of today’s China is a vast state-capitalist nation, ruled by smart, practical leaders (many of them trained as engineers) whose main motivators appear to be not their own private wealth, but their nation’s advancement. If you’d ask me to compare the leadership of China’s elite with the “leadership” of our tech-bro class and the likes of Elon Musk, I’d say there isn’t even a contest. Intelligence, experience, practical knowledge, genuine scientific curiosity and real patriotism beat ego, self-regard, self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment as useful character traits and motivations every time.

Before you complain, I’m very aware that China does not permit many rights I hold dear, the top being freedom of speech that includes the freedom to criticize the government. I don’t want to live in such a country. But we can admire and learn from the way the Chinese regulate capitalism. In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted an editorial in El País discussing the nasty guy’s operation to kidnap Maduro of Venezuela.

Donald Trump’s decision caps a year of impulsive, personalistic foreign policy that ignores multilateral norms. Trump is not acting here as a guarantor of democracy, but rather placing force above the rule of law. Other powers will take note of these new rules as they look at Taiwan or Ukraine. Pointing this out is not a defense of the Venezuelan regime, but a warning: democracy is not exported by missile strike, nor imposed from the air —much less when invoked by someone who has repeatedly shown contempt for institutions.[...] Added to this political ambition is another, no less alarming: the announcement that U.S. companies will take over Venezuela’s oil industry to “make money,” reinforcing the perception that the intervention is not aimed at restoring rights, but at managing power and wealth. Even if the reconstruction of devastated infrastructure is invoked, this amounts to the forcible external appropriation of natural resources, blurring the line between aid, investment, and economic domination.

Collette Capriles of the New York Times

For Venezuelans, our situation will not be fixed by Mr. Maduro’s departure, let alone by a foreign occupying force. We are not a nation held together by a government or a social contract, but a collection of individuals trapped in a struggle for survival. Replacing the man at the top will not dismantle the web of bosses, private loyalties, corrupt practices and institutional ruins that have replaced public life here.

Whitney Neulich, Sophie Hills, and Caitlin Babcock of Christian Science Monitor

“If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership? What stops [Russian leader] Vladimir Putin from asserting similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president?” asked Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, following Saturday’s operation. “Once this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it.”

In the comments there are, of course, many memes and cartoons about Venezuela. That includes a meme posted by exlrrp:

Anyone who has a problem with Maduro being captured and brought to justice should review the following footage of what Maduro did to his own people. THIS IS WHO YOU STAND WITH COMMIES. Free Venezuela!

Mickey Lenin responded:

The city of Portland would like a word.

Oliver Burdick tweeted:

Homosexuality is a different type of evil. The Bible rarely refers to something as “an abomination.”

Dr. Kevin M. Young responded

Sweet Summer Child, the Bible lists at least FORTY-TWO different things as an "abomination" (תּוֹעֵבַה). That isn't a rarity; it's one of the most common words the Bible uses for anything that is taboo. The 42+ include: — Businessmen who lie — Using faulty weights/measures — Divorce — Breaking Fri/Saturday Sabbath — Arrogance Oh, it also lists "those who bring false witness or stir up conflict in a community" as an abomination, like you are here. That, along with your arrogance and (I presume) your lack of keeping the Sabbath each Fri/Sat, YOU ARE AN ABOMINATION THRICE OVER. So you might as well go ahead and have sex with that dude.

Melanie D’Arrigo tweeted:

Trump’s billionaire allies now control X, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Truth and Twitch. They own Fox News, CBS, WaPo, WSJ and NY Post — plus 185+ local tv stations and news in 100 markets. They control the AI you're asking for answers, the algorithms feeding you content, your personal data you've given up for access, and the devices you rely on. The news and your privacy are now what Trump and his billionaire pals say it is. This is all by design.

That tweet includes a chart of which rich dude owns what. Larry & David Ellison: CBS News, CBS, Paramount+, plutoTV, TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and a few more logos I’m not familiar with. Murdoch Family: Fox (including News, Business, TV stations), tubi, Wall Street Journal, New York Post. Sinclair Family: 185+ local news affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and CW, plus The Baltimore Sun. Jeff Bezos: The WashingtonPost, Prime Video, twitch, Wondery. Alphabet Inc.: Google, YouTube, Android, Google Play, Gemini, Blogger (where these words get posted). Elon Musk: X, XA, Grok. Apple Corp.: Apple, AppleTV, iTunes, Apple Intelligence. Sam Altman: ChatGPT. Every so often I’m reminded Doonsbury by Garry Trudeau is still around. His comic from Sunday is pretty good.

The posturing, the belittling, the proud lack of empathy

My Sunday movie was The History of Sound. I saw it in an actual movie theater and for the third time in my life I was the only person in the audience. This is the story of Lionel. He was was born about the turn of the 20th century in rural Kentucky, where he grew up. His father taught him a lot of folk songs. A music teacher recognized his talent and arranged for him to attend the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. One evening in a tavern her hears the guy at the piano singing one of the songs he learned from his father. This is David and they strike up a friendship and fall in bed together. Lionel goes back to Kentucky. Soon David sends a letter proposing the two of them hike through rural Maine stopping along the way to record the songs the locals sing. They even tote around an Edison recording machine, the one with the wax cylinders. When they get back to Boston David is called up for duty in the Great War. Lionel is spared because he wears glasses. After the war David says he is staying at the college where he teaches and suggests Lionel is such a good singer he could get a job anywhere in the world. He does, but that doesn’t satisfy. Much of the music for the film is the folk songs they record, listen to, and sing. This is a rich part of American musical history. The movie also has some background music. Paul Mescal, the actor who played Lionel looked a bit older than the college student he was playing. Josh O’Connor who played David looked older than that. We were well into the movie before I figured out David wasn’t a fellow student, but a college instructor. I also learned from IMDb that neither lead actor is American – O’Connor is English and Mescal is Irish. Strange for such an American story. I’m not sure if this is a gay love story. There is certainly gay sex, but there is hetero sex too. And Lionel isn’t sure what to make of their relationship. I very much enjoyed this movie. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Between the Lines, wrote about how conservatives talk about Charlie Kirk’s civility – and demanding liberals be civil in return – because Kirk was able to broadcast their beliefs in a “civil” manner. But those beliefs are still vile. I had written Kirk was known for inviting debate, though his “debates” were set up to show liberals in a bad light, to show Kirk winning. In another post I wrote that maybe he wasn’t so bad, that he genuinely wanted to hear another person’s opinion. Witkowski said I was right the first time.

But to claim that Kirk was some kind of paragon of free speech devoted to the free exchange of ideas is simply false. Sure, he invited debate. He was, in fact, under a tent that said "debate me” when he was killed. But he did not invite a dialog. He did not listen. Not in a meaningful way. He did not seek to understand where other people were coming from. Debate, for Kirk, was a game of one-upsmanship. He was exceptionally good at interjecting and interrupting to dominate any and all exchanges. It was, in fact, the very thing he was doing when he was killed. He was interrupting the person “debating” him to control the narrative. It was something that a lot of people liked about Kirk. He was very alpha in his approach to “debate.” It’s something that a lot of people like about Trump, too. The posturing, the belittling, the proud lack of empathy with an emphasis on cruelty. It’s a type of masculinity that is, sadly, highly valued in American culture. It’s often called “toxic” masculinity. I, personally, find it abhorrent. In a culture where toxic masculinity rules — and in this moment, it absolutely does — there’s a winner-take-all attitude toward the things we all need to participate in that whole “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” thing. Under toxic masculinity rule, there is no need to take care of the most vulnerable among us. Because they are getting exactly what they deserve. Which is nothing.

Two things can be true. Kirk said vile things. He didn’t deserve to be murdered. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos discussed Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday (so we didn’t have to watch it – and I didn’t). To sum it up: The grieving widow and the nasty guy turned Kirk’s hate from a memorial service into a campaign rally. It included a lot of whitewashing Kirk’s record and vowing vengeance on the left. AKALib of the Kos community gathered together reviews of the nasty guy’s speech at the United Nations general assembly. It was an international embarrassment, but very much true to form for this guy.

Trump’s nearly 56-minute address (it was scheduled for 15 minutes) to the United Nations General Assembly was both appalling and disgusting in how he turned it into his hate-filled campaign-like speech targeted to satisfy members of his cult.

A post by lamina566 of the Kos community talked about questions liars ask to manipulate people and derail a discussion. The author took college classes in Logic and Stoicism and recently watched a video on “The Stoic Habit.” These five questions are pulled from the video. This post includes a lot of discussion on how the questioner is trying to flip the discussion and a way to respond to the question. I’ll summarize. 1. Why are you being so sensitive? Response: I’m not sensitive, I’m observant. Does that make you uncomfortable? 2. You trust me, right? Trust is earned. If you’re asking you know you don’t have it. Response: Are you asking me to ignore my judgment? 3. Are you accusing me of something? Response: Maintain eye contact for several seconds, then “Should I be?” 4. Would I ever lie to you? That isn’t a question, it’s theater, meant to demand trust. Response: “Would I know if you did?” 5. Can’t we just move on? It’s a way to escape accountability. Response: “I’ll move on when I understand what happened.” The liar’s purpose is to exhaust you until you’re too tired to keep searching for the truth. Alex Samuels of Kos explored the idea of moving to Canada or some other country to get away from the horrors of the nasty guy, MAGA, and their destruction of democracy. Yeah, web searches for moving to Canada spiked after the 2024 election. Those searching were presumably Democrats, though there were reports of Republicans expecting to do the same if Harris had won. A new survey by the Pew Research Center suggests moving to another country might not fix what one is running from. They surveyed adults across 25 countries. In 20 of them majorities of adults say their nation’s political system needs significant change. In 7 of them about 80% of adults said the same. In all but a few countries “sizable portions of the population are pessimistic about whether reform is even possible.” Democracy forces compromise, but if the democracy isn’t functioning well, getting something accomplished can be hard. One reason why compromise may be difficult in some countries is because voting systems are winner-take-all. When I lived in Germany decades ago colleagues explained to me that so many seats are allocated directly to candidates (who are members of a party) and other seats are allocated to parties. Voters vote for both the candidate and the party. Then the party seats are allocated according to the percentages each party got in the vote. The candidate part might be winner-take-all. The party part isn’t. I will not guarantee I heard or remembered all that accurately. Samuels wrote:

While it’s tempting to blame “the other party” or fantasize about starting fresh in a new country, dissatisfaction with politics is widespread worldwide. The U.S. stands out for its particularly low trust in elected officials and extreme polarization—but the desire to escape isn’t uniquely American. Pew’s data suggests that leaving may not give you the political reprieve you’re expecting.

This post and the survey doesn’t consider whether another country’s politics is to the left or right of the US. I had reported a while back that Canada’s is far to the left of ours. And that may be enough for a refuge. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Magdi Jacobs:

Just a reminder: any & every issue that possibly divides Democrats is regularly used against us on social media by foreign, especially Russian, interference campaigns. The "source" of the issue could be organically American or not. Either way it will be amplified by bots/trolls.

In the comments are a lot of cartoons and memes about the recent big press conference in which Robert Kennedy Jr. and the nasty guy blamed Tylenol for the rise in autism. Of course, they provided no scientific evidence and the medical community says there is none. Frank Amari posted a cartoon by Dennis Goris. It shows a bullet and a Tylenol tablet. The caption says, “Only one of these this has been proven to harm children. The other will come with a warning label.” There are also many memes about the nasty guy’s speech at the UN. One meme is from Joe Walsh, who tweeted: “Every single word he says here is a lie. Every single word.” Alas, the gathered world leaders had to witness the speech. A meme posted by paulpro (author not identified) shows a young woman talking to a young man:

I see, so if I don’t have sex with you I’m a prude bitch, if I use the pill I’m a slut, if I get pregnant I’m an idiot and if I choose abortion I’m Satan. Yay.

A cartoon posted by paulpro and created by Sophie Labelle of Assigned Male shows a reporter stopping a man on the street, “Sir! In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, do you think the left is incapable of respectful debates?” The man responds with many ways in which Kirk did not engage in respectful debates. I took a look at Labelle’s Bluesky account and saw this cartoon: “The government won’t tell you that they are fascist, but they will tell you that anti-fascists are their enemies.” Another of Labelle’s cartoons talked about Horst Wessel. He was a skilled public speaker for the Nazi party and wrote the song that became the Nazi anthem. He died in 1930 during a forcible attempt to evict him for unpaid rent. And...

Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist, had been looking for someone to turn into a Christian martyr for the party and drum up enrollment. He turned Wessel’s funeral into a major propaganda event full of speeches antagonizing leftists. Thinking about him today for no particular reason.

That last bit shows a sign outside the arena where Kirk’s funeral was held. In Sunday’s pundit roundup Chitown Kev quoted Michael Bader of Salon:

We are experiencing extreme moral injury, every single day. So what do I mean by moral injury? That can happen when a soldier is ordered to torture, abuse or kill an enemy combatant or, worse yet, to harm civilians. Or when a drone operator learns, after an attack, that his drone killed several children. Or when a nurse administers a painful treatment to a terminally ill patient, knowing it is not likely to change the patient’s ultimate fate in any way. Or when, during the COVID pandemic, medical professionals were forced to make impossible choices due to resource shortages — to decide who got ventilators, to ration out protective equipment or to work in conditions they knew were unsafe for their patients or themselves. Those situations, and others like them, are classic examples of moral injury. The individual afflicted feels guilt, shame and anger, but ultimately, and perhaps more important, feels — and is — objectively helpless to do anything about it. The nurse or the soldier in most such situations is not experiencing direct physical harm. The harm is psychic and moral, reflecting a conflict between deeply held ethical beliefs and behaviors that violate these beliefs, particularly behaviors over which one has little or no control. [...] I believe that under Donald Trump, millions upon millions of people are enduring daily moral injuries that are extremely harmful to psychological well-being.

In the comments paulpro posted a cartoon (author not identified) showing Charlie Kirk arriving at the gates of Heaven and, surprise!, he’s welcomed by a black woman. Scott Horton posted a cartoon by Matt Wuerker showing a dam on a river labeled “Journalism” showing some big cracks as the lake behind it is the dumping grounds for sludge coming from pipes labeled, “Propaganda, Conspiracy Theories, Fake News,” and more. No longer available is a tweet of two men dropping off a plastic spine at ABC, the company that let Jimmy Kimmel go.

Messing with the numbers doesn't shield you from reality

My Sunday movie was Universal Language. It is one of the most eccentric movies I’ve seen. Matthew Rankin was one of the writers. He also directed and plays a major character named Matthew Rankin. I have no idea how much is autobiographical. A tagline says it happens somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Most of the story takes place in Winnipeg, though the major language isn’t English, but Persian. All the signs are in Persian and nearly all the characters – Matthew is one of the few exceptions – look to be of Persian descent and speak Persian or French. How this came to be is not explained. The story takes place during a Winnipeg winter. Matthew leaves his government job in Montreal (or maybe Quebec) and takes the bus to Winnipeg, where he grew up. He is trying to find his mother. Two young girls find paper money frozen in ice and try to get a way to get it out before an adult can do so. Massoud leads walking tours of Winnipeg for tourists. Many major sites on his tour now have highways next to them. Another site features a briefcase on a bench someone left behind fifty years ago. The tourists complain of the cold. There is a turkey shop owner promoting his frozen turkeys and he paid for a prized turkey to be a passenger on Matthew’s bus. A scene takes place in a Kleenex repository. Canada submitted this for “Best International Feature Film” for the 2025 Academy Awards. It wasn’t chosen as a finalist. It did win an award at the Cannes Film Festival and won and was nominated in many other film festivals. I heard about it when it was shown at the Detroit Film Theater perhaps a year ago, but didn’t see it then. This is definitely an unusual movie, something to watch when one is tired of movies seeming all the same. And I enjoyed it. Sharon Lerner, in an article for ProPublica posted on Daily Kos, discussed Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr and his effort to find the cause of autism. He said he would have an answer by September. Erin McCanlies, an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a part of HHS, was stunned by Kennedy’s announcement. She was about to release her fourth paper on exactly that. I think she was able to finish it before she was fired, though many offices around hers were already empty. So why was her job and funding cut when Kennedy said he was looking for an answer that she and the rest of his department were well on the way to finding? Kennedy said the answer was vaccines and environmental toxins. Based on what McCanlies found he was half right. To put this in proper scientific terms, McCanlies and others found autism risk factors. The more factors the higher the chances of a child being on the autism spectrum. That doesn’t mean a particular child will be autistic. Some of the factors are genetic, others are things like parental age and whether the mother had a fever during pregnancy. Still others are whether the mother had been exposed to chemicals such as the solvents varnish, xylene, methylene chloride, and others. More culprits are certain pesticides, certain metals, and air pollution. Folic acid, one of the B vitamins, can decrease the chances of autism. One can see reasons why Kennedy doesn’t like the results McCanlies and others are publishing. His favorite culprit of vaccines has been proven not to be a cause of autism. The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin is blocking air pollution rules and reversing bans on several chemicals that have been shown to be a risk. Kennedy likes to say we don’t know the causes of autism and because the condition can be so devastating we need to find those causes quickly. I’ve heard media say over the last several years that the higher rates of autism are because of more frequent testing, implying there isn’t a cause. But we do know the causes. Alas, the corporations that back the nasty guy would rather protect their profits through the use of harmful chemicals and releasing pollutants into the air. So the nasty guy hires people willing to put corporate profits over the health of mothers and children. Mary Childs of NPR discussed the consequences of a government not publishing honest and trustworthy financial statistics. The story was aired because the nasty guy recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the reported jobs numbers. Childs talked to George Papaconstantinou, who became the finance minister of Greece in 2009, just after the financial mess that caused the Great Recession. At the start of his term a person went to him and said the financial situation is quite bad, much worse than what is officially said. His team needed more than a year to figure out the real numbers. According to European Union rules, member countries were to keep their deficits under 3%. The real deficit number, once determined, was 15%. That created a huge loss of trust. To recover Greece had to borrow a lot of money at much higher interest rates and cut its spending to austerity levels. “Messing with the numbers doesn't shield you from reality.” Recovery took nearly ten years. I usually use dashes or asterisks to soften expletives. I grew up at a time and in a family where such words were not used. There have been times where I thought including such words were critical to the tone or forcefulness of a quote, but years have passed since I’ve let one through. But I can’t hide the expletives in this next quote because they’re the point. So if such words offend you just skip the first quote. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quotes Glenn Kessler, formerly of the Washington Post and now writing his own Substack.

Twenty years ago this month, the late Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published his seminal work On Bullshit, which argued that bullshit was worse than lying. His point was that a liar knows the truth and deliberately tries to hide or distort it, while a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all — they care only about the impression they make. When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage in 2015, Frankfurt wrote in Time magazine that Trump was the epitome of the bullshit artist he had identified a decade earlier. [...] But, following Frankfurt’s theory, focusing only on Trump’s lies obscures a deeper danger to American society. As a bullshitter, Trump doesn’t care whether what he says reflects reality. He says whatever serves his momentary purpose, often contradicting himself without hesitation or shame. This indifference to truth makes Trump’s bullshit more insidious than lies.

Kev followed that quote with one from Frankfurt. I’ll let you read it. Kev also quoted Jason Linkins of The New Republic:

But Trump is getting plumped by some in the media as well: The Atlantic’s Michael Powell idly handwaves the fact that D.C. brought the violent crime rate to a 30-year low in 2024 to admonish Democrats for “downplaying crime.” (In this case, “downplaying crime” means “marshaling statistics demonstrating that the crime rate is trending in the right direction.”) Charles Fain Lehman, also in The Atlantic, goes to similar lengths to dismiss the actual facts to assert that “the reality is more complicated” and that some “deliberate intervention”—atop the one that brought the crime rate to a 30-year-low, presumably—is warranted. These authors and others are making a profound error from the jump in assuming that Trump sincerely desires to lower the crime rate in D.C. Trump is actually a “blank, sucking nullity” who wants to see himself on television and has decided that his second term in office will be about self-enrichment and revenge. He is inventing a crisis of crime as a pretext for further consolidating his power; this is authoritarianism 101. Personally, I think downplaying crime in the nation’s capital is not nearly as irresponsible as downplaying Trump’s authoritarianism. But if we must pretend that Trump’s efforts are sincere, then I’d challenge the proponents of his militarized deployments to approach their work with more rigor, and less vibes. Trump has proposed a thesis: Crime in D.C. will go down if masked paramilitaries flood the city and amble about the streets. The task, then, is to see if his theory stands up to the test—to take this seriously.

America has grown too comfortable with violence and cruelty

The national handbell seminar begins tomorrow. I’m not attending in person. Even so, it will be livestreaming three concerts a day starting with one tomorrow evening. The concerts will feature a selection of the best handbell performers. I don’t know how much this will affect my blogging time. I may post regularly or I may not post again until Sunday or Monday. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that 144 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to administrator Lee Zeldin objecting to new agency policies. Another letter in March complained of the illegal dismantling of core agency functions. In response to the latest letter Zeldin put all who signed (some were anonymous) on leave. This is a violation of First Amendment rights of free speech. Needham spent much of the rest of the article explaining in what cases employees do and don’t have free speech rights. In this case they clearly do. What caught my attention in this article is the last few paragraphs:

Trump treats the presidency like an extension of his person, and his Cabinet has adopted that same framing: People voted for Trump, which means they preapproved anything he chooses to do. Any disagreement, therefore, means you are not respecting the will of the voters. It isn’t surprising, with that mindset, that the administration is coming for the free speech rights of public employees. After all, how dare they speak out against Dear Leader? Just because the GOP has signed on to Trump’s cult of personality doesn’t mean that federal workers have to do so as well.

Brett Kelman, in an article for KFF Health News posted on Kos a month ago, reported many American doctors are moving to Canada. One big reason is because, as Kelman paraphrased one of the doctors, “Too much of America has simply grown too comfortable with violence and cruelty.” There are a lot of reasons inside the big one. The nasty guy becoming more authoritarian. The deep cuts to Medicaid. Appointing Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead and dismantle federal health agencies. On the other side of the border, applications to be licensed in Canada has increased more than 750% in the last seven months compared to a year ago. Some are saying they are moving specifically because of the nasty guy. Also, Canadian provinces have relaxed some licensing regulations in recent years to allow easier migration. A Canadian physician recruiting company said they saw a 65% increase in inquiries from January to April and is now contacted by up to 15 American doctors a day. Another company helps doctors to get licensed in other foreign nations. They had previously worked with doctors with wanderlust, seeking adventure. Now it is more intentional about getting out of the US. Doctors who have made the move feel less stress, do less paperwork, and have no fear of burying patients in medical debt. And in the US we already don’t have enough doctors. When Musk slashed his way through federal agency personnel some of the talk was we’ll just replace all those workers with AI. Some of the most vocal people, like Musk, have shown they are anti-human and would rather deal with technology. So a month ago Needham reported that two AI tools have been installed at the Food and Drug Administration. And both of them suck. FDA Commissioner Martin Makary gushed over the new tools, as did Jin Liu, deputy director for Drug Evaluation Sciences. One of the tools isn’t connected to anything – like medical journals or even other computers – so it can’t manage basic tasks. The other was asked questions about publicly available information and answered incorrectly. We may get half-baked AI anyway. Also from a month ago Needham discussed another way the nasty guy is threatening universities. It is telling the organizations that do the accrediting that universities are in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws. In Needhan’s example the nasty guy claims Columbia doesn’t meet the standards for accreditation because of the way it treated Jewish students. The threat – the Notice of Violation – includes no information on what Columbia needs to do to comply. There are only the threats if it doesn’t. Columbia is finding out that although it bent the knee to the nasty guy it will still be attacked. It can’t do enough to stop the attacks (except maybe cease operations).

The government doesn’t accredit any school and therefore can’t yank any accreditation. The federal government does certify accreditors, but while it's likely that the leftover remains of the Department of Education could approve new accreditors, getting rid of the existing ones isn’t that easy. These are vague, meaningless attacks that don’t have a lot to do with the actual requirements for certification of accreditors. As the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions explained in a statement about Trump’s executive order, the Higher Education Act establishes due process requirements for recognition of accreditors, including reviews from multiple offices within the Department of Education. And it included a pointed reminder that “concerns about accreditor recognition can be escalated to federal court.”

There’s another reason why the nasty guy is attacking the accreditors. They were a big part of the demise of Trump University. In the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos Paul Fell posted a cartoon shows a waiter has delivered a dead bird, type unknown but definitely not appetizing. The customer says, “Waiter! This isn’t what I ordered!” The waiter holds up a sign saying “2024 election” and says, “Wanna bet?” Fell added:

As Americans keep finding out all the disastrous, cruel, & frankly anti-American things Trump & Republicans are doing, even MAGAts are saying this isn't what they voted for. Don't believe them. This is *exactly* what they voted for.

A meme related to the devastating Texas flood posted by exlrrp shows a photo of the president of Mexico. Below it is the text:

Mexico’s president just sent rescue teams to Texas. After all the hate. After all the anti-immigrant policies. After all the racism towards brown people. She still helped. She still showed up. She still did the right thing. To a red state that wouldn’t do the same for her. That’s leadership. That’s power. That’s a woman.

I’ve written about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claiming that Democrats can control the weather and that it must stop. Fiona Webster posted a cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz titled “Weather Control Machine” and showing a truck labeled “Big Oil” that is spewing a lot of pollution.

Kids get 3 dolls and 5 pencils. He got $2.9 billion.

I finished the book A Secret I Can’t Tell, The First Generation of Children from Openly Gay and Lesbian Homes by Joe Gantz. The secret is the children had gay parents and were afraid to tell anyone. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s Gantz did extensive interviews with families headed by gays or lesbians. Well, more accurately he sat there with a tape recorder and let them – parents and children – talk about anything they wanted. After a first round of interviews he briefly contacted the families for an update. Shortly after that he selected five families for inclusion and the book was published. And a few months later the publisher went out of business. The book sat on the shelf for close to 40 years before Gantz tried to get it published again. Before this second edition he contacted some of the children again, now close to or in their 50s, for another update. First, a minor quibble – I wouldn’t call these children the “first” generation. I’m sure lesbian and gay parents ended up raising children decades and centuries before the 1970s. In all but the first story the parents married opposite sex partners before realizing they were homosexual. So part of the story is the breakup of the marriage and how that affected the children. In that first story the couple divorced and only later did the father figure out he was gay. In only a couple of the families did the children feel a lot stress about not being able to explain their parents. That inability tended to isolate the child from their peers. They tended to have few close friends. In other families the children didn’t care much if their friends knew. But there were other stresses – trying to blend the children of two families into one. Going to court so the lesbian couple would have custody (one thing worse than leaving children with lesbians is leaving them with a religious maniac father). Watching their parents’ marriage disintegrate without the parents explaining why. Whether the child will accept the new stepparent giving love and discipline and whether they’ll get along with new stepsiblings. In other words, all the same stresses of straight families experiencing a breakup that are magnified by lesbian and gay issues. One of those issues is the parent going through a second adolescence – wanting to explore their new understanding of their sexual interests while still having to take care of children. This does not imply children do better when raised by straight couples. It does mean the children would do better in a society that doesn’t demonize LGBTQ relationships. I enjoyed the book. It is a good exploration of what lesbian and gay families had to deal with in the years on either side of 1980 when our society more universally condemned same sex relationships. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since then. No movie on Sunday. I went to Detroit’s Greektown and had supper with Sister and Niece. I was surprised the parking structure nearby showed up on Google Maps but was actually demolished. We did not get the flaming cheese. When a table about ten feet away did Sister said she could feel the heat and did not want a flame that big anywhere close. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that America First, a legal group founded by Stephen Miller, the most racist of the nasty guy’s advisors, has sued Chief Justice John Roberts in his role of the Judicial Conference. The suit, if successful, would drastically shift power between the Executive and Judiciary branches of government. The Judicial Conference is the organization that manages the federal courts. It issues policy. It handles harassment complaints against judges. It promotes ethics rules. It provides financial, technological, legislative, and program support services. It develops an annual budget. And it produces plans on how to assign judges. Needham explained the reasoning in the suit: The Judicial Conference is an agency, not a court, because it doesn’t issue a decision. It responds to congressional oversight. The claim is that if it is an agency it is part of the executive branch and thus under the control of the president. And if it is under the control of the nasty guy he can do such things as: Slash the budget. Replace congressional oversight (see Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s inquiry into the freebies from billionaires given to Alito and Thomas) with his own. Protect judges who rule in his favor and harass those who don’t. Needham is quite surprised and annoyed that Roberts and Alito haven’t publicly said anything about the case. Both have issued statements and op-eds over far less matters and Needham lists several. Why the silence on a direct challenge to their power? I scanned through the comments to read what others think of Needham’s take. Several say that this is a part of the efforts by the Supremes to allow the nasty guy to become dictator. Some believe the Court is avoiding conflict with the nasty guy so there is no appearance that the Constitution is being violated and that the Court has no power. Others say don’t confuse “the Court” with “conservatives on the Court” – Ketanji Brown Jackson is definitely speaking out and condemning the case. And RETIII wrote this is brought as a lawsuit. It will go to federal court and get tossed. If it is appealed up to the Supremes, they simply refuse to hear the case. Lawsuit blocked. No need to comment on it. As part of a series of explaining the right Oliver Willis of Kos discussed why Republicans are so bad at managing the economy. After showing how the economy always declines under Republicans (at least as far back as Reagan) Willis gets to the explanation. The reason is Republicans push tax cuts favoring the rich and large corporations. Research shows these cuts don’t stimulate the economy. Instead they increase economic inequality and cut the money that could have been used to invest in America. But focusing on the needs of the middle class runs contrary to the interests of the super rich, who disproportionately benefit from the tax cuts. These people are largely unaffected when services and protections for middle and working class people are cut. Don’t cater to the rich and the rich stop donating to Republicans, their major source of money. So Republicans will say again that their economic policies just need another chance. Along with that they claim liberal policies – the ones that restore the economy after every Republican crash – are a failure. Needham didn’t mention that polling shows Republicans do a great sales job on this issue. Voters still rate Republicans better than Democrats at handling the economy. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that Senators Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren called for an ethics probe into a recent nasty guy scheme. It appears to be an offer of dinner with the nasty guy to the top investors of his $Trump crypto coin. After the scheme was announced the coin’s value increased by more than 50% and insiders got $0.9 million in trading fees in just two days. Yes, this sounds like “pay to play” corruption, according to the letter to Trade Representative Jamieson Greer written by Schiff and Warren, of ...

selling presidential access to individuals or entities, to include foreign nationals and corporate actors with vested interests in federal action, while personally enriching the President and his family.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted several writers discussing the nomination of Ed Martin for US Attorney for the District of Columbia and how there are predictions his nomination won’t even get through the Senate committee. That prompted Dworkin to add:

Should Ed Martin fail ... maybe we have reached a point where no, anything and everything doesn’t go. And if you defy Trump on this, you can defy him on other things. Crack the wall. Let the tide do the rest.

Down in the comments exlrrp quoted a tweet by Aaron Rupar, who quoted the nasty guy. This comment has been reported several times in news outlets. The comments were made in response to big box stores saying they may have empty shelves before Christmas. Rupar wrote:

Trump: “I don’t think a beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls ... they don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”

A response by Nathalie Baptiste:

Every time Trump talks about toys you get more insight into how little he interacted with his children when they were young.

A bit below that exlrrp posted a meme. The first part was from a CBS News report:

Trump family’s net worth has increased by $2.9 billion thanks to crypto investments, new report says.

Andrew Weinstein responded

Your family: 3 dolls and 5 pencils. Trump’s family: $2.9 billion Any questions?

In the comments is a tweet by Fiona Webster, the start a thread. On the left of the image are guns designed for hunting. On the right are guns designed for killing humans. There is a notable difference between the two. In response to the Supremes allowing a ban on transgender troops while the case goes through the courts (and will eventually get to the Supremes) paulpro posted a cartoon (author not specified) showing a military drill sergeant towering over the nasty guy and saying “I’m transgender! You gotta problem with that, punk?” Much further down exlrrp posted a meme of yesterday’s meeting between the nasty guy and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. The meme shows the nasty guy saying “We don’t do much business with Canada.” Below it is a graph showing Canada is our top trading partner with Mexico right behind, each doing more than twice the trade the US does with China. Below exlrrp added “He means Canada’s not paying him anything.” I would put the emphasis on “him.” In a second roundup Chitown Kev quoted Yuval Levin of The Atlantic:

Congress is not doing its job, and the vacuum that its dereliction has created is encouraging presidential and judicial overreach. Congress’s weakness is our deepest constitutional problem, because it is not a function of one man’s whims and won’t pass with one administration’s term. It is an institutional dynamic that has disordered our politics for a generation. It results from choices that members of Congress have made, and only those members can improve the situation. It is hard to imagine any meaningful constitutional renewal in America unless they do. [...] The reasons for the subsequent decline in Congress’s stature and assertiveness are complex, but some of the very measures Gingrich took to consolidate power on Capitol Hill contributed to the trends we are witnessing now. Gingrich advanced an almost-parliamentary model of the House of Representatives. He empowered the speaker and majority leader at the expense of the policy-focused committees, and set in motion a process that robbed most members of the opportunity for meaningful legislative work. His moves dramatically accelerated what was by then a 20-year trend toward the centralization of authority in the hands of congressional leaders. House leaders of both parties have pushed further in that direction in this century, and the Senate has largely followed suit. These efforts were intended to make Congress more effective, but in practice, they rendered most legislators almost irrelevant.