We don’t need the votes

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported on a paper published in the Journal of American Medical Association that shows an enormous number of unnecessary deaths during the COVID pandemic. These deaths aren’t directly because of the nasty guy, but because of the actions by state governments.

As many as one-quarter of a million Americans died simply because their state governments refused to impose good public health standards. They died as appeasements to the twin gods of ignorance and politics.

I’ll let you read the details of how the analysis was done. The refusal to take proper precautions wasn’t about saving money. I’m sure the states lost money through medical expenses. It also has an estimate in the trillions on the value of lives lost (though I didn’t understand that part).

The sheer number of people who died because a group of red state governors chose to—not had to, but chose to—implement policies they could brag about at the next big Republican event is simply devastating. Those amoral governors may never answer for these lost lives in any meaningful way, but voters can make sure those who are still in office get their just desserts at the ballot box.

Alas, many of those governors were and are praised for the actions that caused these deaths and have already been voted back in. In an article from ten days ago Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos discussed a new Florida bill that opens schools to additional counseling services for students from outside organizations. It is a way to get religious “chaplains” on the school campus. Though the volunteer chaplain can, but doesn’t have to, disclose their organization Gov. DeathSantis is clear that the intent is to insert Christianity into public education. Members of the Satanic Temple are ready to join the volunteer chaplains. Pennyfarthing wrote:

The temple is really more secular than satanic, and uses the dark threat of “Satan” to make a point about religious pluralism. Its leaders see the new law as an entree—not for satanism, per se, but for reason and fairness. Satanic Temple members are ready to bring the good news of Satan and all his fictional works—as well as the Founding Fathers’ very real work product—to Sunshine State schoolchildren from the Panhandle to the Keys. But this isn’t a joke or a prank. It’s a serious effort to wake America up to the theocratic cancer that’s currently metastasizing across the country. “You have theocrats pushing further and further, signing unconstitutional bills into law, and they realize there’s no consequence,” Lucien Graves, co-founder of The Satanic Temple, told The Guardian. “And they also realize that when people see these laws passed, and the outrage comes, they’re not even necessarily going to recognize or realize when those laws are later overturned by the courts. “They’re giving everybody the impression that these types of things are legal, this is just the environment we’re living in,” Graves said. “And in that way they’re really numbing people to when these things actually do take effect, or when they are upheld by a corrupt judge who’s just playing partisan politics.”

So when you vote, fill out the entire ballot. Not voting for the lower races means Republicans have a higher chance to slip in a theocrat at the state or local level. You started to vote, so finish the job. In a pundit roundup for Kos from last week Chitown Kev quoted David Litt of The Atlantic who discussed Biden’s proposed (at that time not yet released) reforms to the Supreme Court:

As the Court has become more politicized, its conservative judges have insisted that checks and balances ought not apply to the judicial branch. Chief Justice Roberts declined an invitation to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, citing separation of powers. Alito went further, arguing that Congress doesn’t have the ability to set rules and guidelines for the Court at all. Meanwhile, although no one has formally declared the change, it has become generally accepted that no justices will be confirmed while the Senate and the White House belong to opposite parties, and that justices will not retire while a president of the opposite party is in office. When you combine these two factors, the old method of checking the Court—winning elections and letting time take its toll—has been rendered unworkable. The Court is thus, to use a phrase popularized by Game of Thrones and embraced by Donald Trump and his movement, demanding that the American people bend the knee. It is asking them to accept that their country will continue to become more conservative for decades, maybe forever, no matter what they want or whom they vote for. In proposing checks on the Court, Biden is refusing to capitulate to this new arrangement. This is particularly notable given his former opposition to such changes. He is going beyond a single decision or appointment and taking on the structure of the Court itself.

Kos of Kos listed several reasons why the nasty guy had a bad weekend after having a bad week: The broader electorate is now paying attention to his fascism. Harris is motivating Democrats and independents. The more voters see her they more they like her. She is hauling in the cash and volunteers. Fox released a poll showing Harris ahead in four swing states (and ten points ahead in Michigan!). She’s not firing on all cylinders yet. Vance continues to demonstrate how bad he is and he’s been the butt of jokes. The nasty guy’s favorables went down – the assassination attempt and convention didn’t give him a bounce. He’s still campaigning against “sleepy Joe.” Democratic surrogates – Buttigieg, Walz, and Beshear – are hitting hard and effectively. Biden is and can continue tossing out policies that voters want but will only happen if Democrats control the White House and Congress. The description of the nasty guy/Vance as “weird” has taken hold (and is only better than “creepy”).

For Republicans, the problem is that it’s true. Their obsession with sex is weird. Their archaic notions about the role of women and autonomy over their bodies is weird. Their dalliances with white supremacists and Nazis are weird. Their love for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is weird. Their hysteria over the Paris Olympics is weird. Much of what’s in Project 2025 is weird. Yes, they’re obviously dangerous, but weird captures the zeitgeist far better than any alarmist language (no matter how justified).

That bit about the hysteria over the Olympics: The opening ceremonies featured drag queens and a tableau many are claiming mocks Jesus and the disciples at the Last Supper. Weird they don’t complain about the headless Marie Antoinette. Kos concludes:

Guys, we don’t just have a chance to win, but we have a chance to win big. And winning big doesn’t mean just nipping any second Trump insurgency in the bud. It means lifting up all electoral boats—the Senate, the House, state governorships, and legislatures.

newusername of the Kos community posted a segment of Rachel Maddow and is wondering if Democrats have a plan for dealing with it. The six minute video is included in the post. I replayed parts of it to make sure I got the quotes right. This segment seems to be the end of Maddow discussing the many weird things about the Republican and nasty guy campaigns. Harris is running a traditional campaign. The nasty guy isn’t. In this part she started by saying the nasty guy had called on his supporters to vote “just this time.” Then they won’t have to do it again – as if voting is a burden would would be relieved to leave behind. But democracy is based on voting. And what the nasty guy said is exactly what one would think it is. He said that on Friday. The day before he said it a bit differently: His supporters don’t need to vote for him this November. He had said frequently “We don’t need the votes. We have so many votes.” Saying that is truly weird. Because it means, as Maddow said, “He doesn’t need to win the vote...to win the election. He doesn’t need to win the election in order to take power. He thinks something other than votes is going to determine whether he gets back in the White House.” Rolling stone reported they had identified at least 70 pro nasty guy election conspiracists and denialists working as county election officials in six swing states. Their purpose is to make sure November’s votes do not get certified. They are assuming if they don’t certify in several small counties, the statewide results cannot be certified. Maddow said, “They are not planning on the vote being counted as normal. They are not counting on the election results being tallied as normal. They are not counting on the vote, and in fact Trump is now repeatedly saying the vote will not matter. The Republicans are counting on the election results not being certified, thereby creating chaos in Washington around the results.” These 70 people are in place to make sure there won’t be official results. Maddow concluded: “Are [Democrats] prepared for this level of weirdness after the votes are cast? Are they ready for what’s coming?” I’m including a link to this post of LGBTQ literature not because of the book mentioned (the host took a break) but because the photo at the top is of Harris in a rainbow vest. She’s with us.

Underprivileged is not unqualified

My Sunday movie was Young Royals, season 3, episodes 3 & 4. And, yes, here be spoilers. The school is a month or so from graduation. Simon is seeing a lot more clearly what dating a royal means (though I think the palace should still give him a class). Simon attends, as he has before, the May 1st demonstrations for worker rights and that doesn’t sit well with the palace. Someone threw a rock through a window of Simon’s home, so palace security has to get involved. Wilhelm and Simon are seeing how different they and their backgrounds are. Wilhelm’s mother the queen is having a nervous breakdown and he’s afraid he’ll have to start fulfilling her duties. And August is still playing his mind games. Late in episode 4 some dialogue implied that August was at the school much longer than Wilhelm was, yet they’re graduating in the same year. That dialogue was another of August’s mind games. This week is Holy Week, the time between Palm Sunday and Easter, with a few extra worship services, if that’s your thing. My performance group won’t rehearse this week because so many members are church musicians. My own church bell group isn’t rehearsing tonight because half the group had other commitments. So I don’t have any evening rehearsals this week. Which gives me time to blog – or finish off Young Royals. Or both. So, episode 5. Some of the timeline issues were cleared up. Simon brought Wilhelm a birthday cupcake and it had a 17 on it. I had expected 18. There was also a graduating class dinner and many of the girls who I thought were graduating were servers at the meal. I realized it is August’s graduation, but not Wilhelm’s or Simon’s or the girls who were serving. A big part of this episode is a birthday party for Wilhelm at the palace. Simon was invited, partly to support Wilhelm and partly to meet the parents – the queen and duke. Simon got a suit for the occasion and I could tell it was too big for him. Was the a way for the costumers to say Wilhelm as a royal gets well fitting suits and Simon as a commoner gets badly fitting suits? That birthday party did not go well. Thankfully, it wasn’t because the parents were upset that their son’s lover was another boy. But there were a lot of unresolved issues around Wilhelm not liking being a royal and his parents seemed to be handling it in a passive-aggressive manner. I plan on watching episode 6, the finale of the whole series, tomorrow. Last Friday I wrote about the nasty guy’s options on meeting the $454 million judgment against him in the civil fraud case. At the top of the list I wrote:

An appeals court could step in because in the current American legal system “courts generally despise the thought of handing out big penalties to wealthy financial crooks.”

I mention it because, as reported by Hunter of Daily Kos, (of course) the Appellate Division of the Manhattan Supreme Court said the nasty guy has to pay (or have bonds for) $175 million instead of the full amount before he can appeal the case. He now has ten days to cover the smaller amount. The nasty guy had claimed he can’t pay the $454 million. The $175 million is an amount he has been saying he can come up with. How convenient. And yes, the court gave him a big favor. What’s next is the nasty guy pays (or has bonds for) $175 million. He can then file an appeal. So far the nasty guy’s lawyers can’t explain what parts of the ruling they plan to appeal. If he doesn’t have an appealable case, then he’s back to owing $454 million, plus interest. More likely is the process drags out beyond the election, as appears to be happening with many of his trials. His hope is to get back to the Oval Office and use his authoritarian power to make even this state case go away. In an Earth Matters column for Kos Meteor Blades included a couple interesting topics. First, Republicans are, as they have always been, saying they don’t believe the climate scientists and they are trying to limit the Inflation Reduction Act, with all its goodies to protect the climate (though not nearly enough for what’s needed). As examples, Blades listed several bills taken up by the House that undo IRA provisions. Some have passed the House (alas, some with a few to several Democratic votes), others are still in committee. Getting past the Senate is doubtful. They won’t get past Biden. Even so, this shows what Republicans intend. The other interesting story starts off this way:

The Environmental Integrity Project published its “Feeding the Plastics Industrial Complex” in mid-March. The key findings: 64% of plastics manufacturing plants built or expanded since 2012 received tax subsidies totaling $9 billion, and 84% violated federal air pollution limits. These subsidies cost nearly twice as much as the combined budgets of the state agencies in Texas and Louisiana tasked with regulating most plastics plants in their jurisdictions.

In a thread on Threadreader, Michael Harriot discusses diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at Duke Medical School. Some say DEI initiatives lower standards, others say that’s false. Who is right? First, DEI policies aren’t about lowering standards, they’re about inviting more diverse students to apply and then helping them stay in the program. Under the program the applicants’ GPA increased and the total number of white students also increased (so who is taking spots away from white students?). Duke also found the admission process favored the privileged (children of doctors who know how to navigate the system) and the rich. So they changed it. The “underprivileged” students may not do as well in the first year – but they did better than the privileged students starting in the second year. One more thing. If Duke lowered it standards its graduates – including the white ones – would have a harder time finding jobs. Also, the rich and privileged would stop sending their kids to an inferior school. Underprivileged is not unqualified. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev had a couple interesting quotes. George Makari and Richard Friedman of The Atlantic wrote that we as a nation (perhaps the whole world?) have not dealt with the effects of COVID that is still killing hundreds a week.

Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.

Perhaps that is why so many people believe the economy isn’t doing well in spite of the data saying it is doing great? Makari and Friedman added:

We are not suggesting that the entire country has PTSD from COVID. In fact, the majority of people who are exposed to trauma do not go on to exhibit the symptoms of PTSD. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t deeply affected. In our lifetime, COVID posed an unprecedented threat in both its overwhelming scope and severity; it left most Americans unable to protect themselves and, at times, at a loss to comprehend what was happening. That meets the clinical definition of trauma: an overwhelming experience in which you are threatened with serious physical or psychological harm.

Kev also quoted Nick Paton Walsh of CNN discussing Russia and the terrorist attack at the concert hall.

It exposes how far adrift and overstretched Putin now is. The safety of his muted, urban electorate in the capital has been entirely sacrificed to his war of choice in Ukraine. Special forces did not race in; they are dead, or busy elsewhere. Even some police have been deployed to the frontlines. ... There is so much the Russian system of authoritarianism cannot quash. It relies on patriarchy, fealty, corruption and a curious sense that the tsar, in this case Putin, will intervene to right palpable wrongs. But he does not. He does not always know how badly his state is functioning. And so, four young men can just roll up with automatic weapons to a vast Moscow mall and set fire to it, after shooting dozens dead.

A cartoon posted by Marian Kamensky shows Putin chasing Zelenskyy while a mob chases Putin. Biden says, “Be careful, Vladimir, ISIS-Terrorists!” And Putin responds, “Oh Joe, is that your cheap distraction?”

He catastrophizes everything

My Sunday viewing was the first two episodes of season three of Young Royals. I watched season 1 almost two years ago and season 2 sixteen months ago. But season three just dropped – yeah, I’ve been watching for it and saw the release date announced a few weeks ago. When I wrote about the first two seasons I didn’t say much to avoid spoilers. Enough of that. So if you haven’t seen the earlier seasons (and I recommend you do) you might want to skip to the next topic and come back after 9 hours of viewing. As for these summaries of the earlier seasons, it’s been a while since I watched them. Hours of viewing will be compressed to a few paragraphs. Young Royals is the story of Prince Wilhelm of Sweden. In the first series he was sent off to boarding school at Hillerska. There he would have cousin August to watch over him. I see now when the series started that I though August was in his third (and last) year, but he’s still there in season 3, so they must be the same age. Which implies August was an excellent leader to get to be the rowing captain in his first year – or August was too useful an antagonist to be left out of the third season. In that first season Wilhelm falls in love with Simon, a commoner also attending the school. Wilhelm and Simon are making out as August records them through the window. August releases the video and Wilhelm has to deny his love. In season two Wilhelm is feeling a bit rebellious and gets into trouble. He and August play mind games with each other. August’s girlfriend figures out he made the video. August convinces a classmate to take the fall. But there is a showdown. At the end of the school year Wilhelm is to give a speech and he scraps the text supplied by the palace and admits that he was in the video with Simon. On to season three, episodes 1 and 2. It is now a couple months before graduation. Wilhelm and Simon can be open about their relationship, but there is now a great deal of scrutiny and paparazzi. Other students, ones who aren’t friends with Wilhelm, start spreading stories about some of the salacious parties and rituals at the school, which the paparazzi lap up. Most aren’t true. The students are given a curfew, including no cell phone use except an hour after dinner. Since Wilhelm lives at the school and Simon doesn’t they chafe at so little time together. At a social gathering towards the end of episode 2 one of Simon’s friends talks about his summer job. Wilhelm makes a social blunder by saying he will also have a summer job. Simon is annoyed because Wilhelm will be an adult and that job is a course in how to be a prince and assume royal duties. Simon accuses Wilhelm of being clueless about the privilege he has. That got me wondering whether the palace will require Simon to take lessons on how to be a proper prince consort. It would lessen the chance of Simon making inappropriate social media posts. In England did Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle take lessons on how to be wives of princes? Many times when Simon talks to his mother the show doesn’t dub their words into English, instead switches to subtitles. This has happened through the series. I realized why: They’re not speaking Swedish, they’re speaking his mother’s native language (which I don’t recognize). I’m pretty sure Simon’s dad is Swedish and it looks like his mother is an immigrant. The prince falling in love with an immigrant’s son is another dimension to the story. I reread what I wrote about seasons 1 and 2. At the end of season 1 I said I’d watch season 2, but probably not season 3. And here I am watching season 3 and will finish it. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data today. The website says March 12 was the last day the website would be updated with COVID cases and deaths, though the data would stay around. So the graph my program drew is based on data a week old. I’m disappointed the data won’t be updated because the graph shows COVID isn’t gone. Just three weeks ago the number of new cases per day almost hit one thousand. That number has dropped since then but just a few days before the data ended it was at 325 cases per day. That’s much better than the 1845 cases per day hit at the end of December, but about twice the rate of early last July. The number of deaths per day has been under ten since late January. Hunter of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy doesn’t have and can’t get the money to pay the $454 million fine in his civil fraud judgment. He wants to appeal the ruling but he must post a bond for the full amount before he can file the appeal. And he can’t find any company willing to issue that bond. Many legally can’t issue a bond that big. Others won’t accept real estate as collateral. By telling the court that getting such a bond is “not possible” is humiliating for a supposed billionaire.

What's clear, though, is that no one appears willing to risk losing a half billion dollars for the sake of propping up Donald Trump. It's not just that Trump's countless lies about his supposed assets make it risky to do business with him; Trump's currently running for president again, and this time around he and his subordinates are making it clear that they intend a far more radical, fascist, and authoritarian-minded Trump administration this time around. If Trump does retake the presidency, what are the odds that both his administration and a compliant Republican Congress will simply void all his debts and tell his creditors to pound sand? Not small. And certainly not small enough that anyone is willing to take the risk.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos added:

As The New Republic's Timothy Noah told Greg Sargent on his new Daily Blast podcast, "Trump is broke, on the verge of bankruptcy, and he's running for president. It's a situation just ripe for corruption." The presidency, should Trump win it, is effectively up for sale to the highest bidder. But Trump's personal financial issues are just the tip of the iceberg for the man who just last week secured enough delegates to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president.

Eleveld explained the financial issues: Small donors to his campaign are donating much less. The big Republican donors switched from supporting Haley to supporting Republican candidates for Congress. Though the nasty guy has taken over the Republican National Committee, it is also essentially broke (that takeover is why big donors are supporting candidates directly). And Liz Cheney tweeted “Donors better beware.” Topping it off is the Republican party feud between the establishment members and the Freedom Caucus. Eleveld reported on the news that’s getting a lot of airtime. In a rally the nasty guy said, “Now if I don’t get elected, ... it's going to be a bloodbath for the country.” The rest of Eleveld’s post is a variety of ways, most of them good, various media are reporting on those words. There is some room for interpretation because the nasty guy said them as he was discussing the auto industry. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a couple good quotes on that statement. First, a tweet from Brian Schatz:

Headline writers: Don’t outsmart yourself. Just do “Trump Promises Bloodbath if he Doesn’t Win Election.”

And from a thread by George Conway:

I’m willing to assume for the sake of argument that he was referring to cars. And it makes no difference to his malicious intent or to the danger he and his rhetoric poses. What matters is that he consistently uses apocalyptic and violent language in an indiscriminate fashion as a result of his psychopathy and correlative authoritarian tendencies, and because he’s just plain evil. It’s a classic trait and technique of authoritarian demagogues. He catastrophizes *everything* to rile up his cultish supporters, and to bind them to him, and to make them willing to do his bidding

In another pundit roundup Chitown Kev quoted Renée Graham of the Boston Globe:

There are few among us who don’t know how it feels to be the butt of a joke. At some point in our lives, we’ve probably been the person being laughed at instead of being someone in on the joke and chuckling with the crowd. That includes Trump’s supporters. But with their always aggrieved state of mind, they have anointed Trump as a strongman who allows them to belittle those they see as their lessers. To paraphrase the great Toni Morrison, they can only feel tall when someone else has been knocked to their knees. For them, Trump’s enemies are their enemies and those people deserve nothing but public derision. Of course like all bullies who are, in fact, weak and insecure, Trump can’t take what he so readily dishes out.

Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed the nasty guy’s vow to release the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and why that is bad.

Dictatorships tend to consolidate their power very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that a population may not fully comprehend the magnitude of what has happened to their society. This “shock and awe” is employed to underscore—as immediately as possible—the dictator’s power and to intimidate opposition by convincing people to believe that opposition is futile. In the United States, Donald Trump has freely acknowledged his intent to become a dictator on “Day One” if he is reelected.

Unlike the nasty guy’s other indictments, the on on inciting the Capitol attack is a “shocking, visual, public record of the actual, real-world consequences of his behavior.” That’s why Republicans are trying to recharacterize the attack. And a pardon would demonstrate the nasty guy’s power and rebuke the justice system that has indicted him. But the abuse of that pardon has big implications. A pardon would repudiate the prosecutors, judges, and juries that convicted the attackers and that said what they did deserved punishment. That’s a massive slap in the face of the American criminal justice system. The nasty guy would appoint himself judge and jury. It would legitimize political violence because attackers know those in power will protect them, leading to increased domestic terrorism. It would also be a slap in the face of the police who were protecting the Capitol that day. A third slap is directed at citizens who expect the law to be carried out fairly. Finally, the insurrection leadership, the guys that got the longest sentences, would be eager to resume their roles, now emboldened by the nasty guy.

What place guns should have in a functioning democracy

A week ago I wrote about Nyle DiMarco’s book Deaf Utopia. As part of that I noted he had become a movie producer. So for this week’s Sunday movies I took a look at a couple shows he produced. Both are on Netflix. The first I ventured into was the series Deaf U. The cameras follow several students at Gallaudet University as they do what students do when they’re not in class. I watched one episode and was glad it is only 20 minutes. There’s not a whole lot of story – which is true for most people’s lives. I’m not saying the series is bad. Without the structure of a story the lives of college students don’t interest me. The series is important in that it shows deaf students are like other students except in how they communicate. The movie Audible on Netflix was much more interesting. It is a 40 minute documentary of Amaree a senior on the football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf. Being on the team and playing hearing teams was a way for the players to show what they’re capable of doing. Though they had a winning streak of more than 40 games the story opens with a loss. In addition to dealing with the loss they’re also dealing with a teammate who had transferred to a hearing school, couldn’t handle the bullying, and committed suicide. The football coach said his guys are destined for discrimination. Amaree’s father left the family when Amaree lost his hearing to illness at age two. Dad is trying to reestablish a relationship and sees that his son and the team do not skimp on effort. This movie is a good one. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. I haven’t done that in seven weeks. I also updated by graphing program to display only the last year. I can see recent peaks and valleys much more clearly. There is a rise in the number of new cases per day from mid October to about Christmas, where there is a peak of 2150. The numbers have dropped since then. Over the last few weeks the peaks have been 1563, 1060, 904, and 585. Deaths per day were 10 and under from early May until the beginning of December. During that month there were many days above 10, though the highest was 15. Since the end of December deaths per day has been back under 10. Steve Inskeep of NPR talked to Jill Lepore and David Blight, two of several historians who submitted a friend of the court brief in the case before the Supreme Court testing the 14th Amendment clause that says an insurrectionist should be banned from the ballot. A summary of what Lepore and Blight said: The originalist theory the conservative Supremes keep claiming as their way of working means the interpretation of the Constitution should be based on what people of the time thought of it. And when the 14th Amendment was debated and approved it was intended to be permanent, not just for the period after the Civil War to keep former Confederates out of government. Yes, the amendment does include the presidency. Yes, what the nasty guy did was insurrection. Arguing otherwise is nitpicking. And this: Inskeep: “Is it wise to disqualify someone that millions of people apparently want to vote for, rather than defeating him at the ballot box, which is the way that many people would think it ought to work?” Lepore: “He was defeated at the ballot box, and he incited an insurrection.” Blight: “We have representative democracy. Fine. But we also have laws. And I don't think in this case, a degree of popular will should be the only question in the enforcement of the Constitution, which is itself quite clear.” Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported Texas is threatening civil war and the mainstream media doesn’t think it’s a story. Media (at least NPR) have been reporting Gov. Greg Abbott has put razor wire in the Rio Grande. Children got tangled in the wire and drowned. The border patrol sued to be able to remove the razor wire and save the children. The Supreme Court allowed them to do so. Abbott isn’t backing down. Sumner reported what else is going on. MAGA Republicans are celebrating Abbott’s standoff with the border patrol and are calling for secession or civil war. 25 other Republican governors issued a joint statement supporting Abbott. Putin’s chief deputy has been urging the civil war as a way to distract from Ukraine.

Despite all this, the story has generated exactly zero articles in The New York Times and scant attention anywhere else in the national media. The national press is allowing Republicans to stoke their fabricated border crisis—right down to threats of civil war—even while those same Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine a solution to issues at the border. How do you avoid reporting on the hypocrisy of the Republican position? Leaving off half the story is a good start.

8ackgr0und No15e of the Kos community asks an important question for those considering civil war or secession they seem to have overlooked: “What are you going to use for your new currency?” Some say the Texas economy is comparable to that of Russia. Have you looked at the ruble lately? How’s your infrastructure? The US is helping people blow up Russia’s stuff. You’ve got oil fields? The US government treats oil fields as military objectives. Mia Maldonado, in an article for the Idaho Capital Sun posted on Kos, reported on discussions with librarians across the state.

According to an informal survey conducted by the Idaho Library Association, more than half of Idaho librarians are considering leaving library work as a result of library-related legislation.

Part of it is being the target of legislator and public ire. Another part of it is perhaps having to deal with unworkable demands. Put the challenged book in an “adults only” section? What if the library is a single room? Yeah, the legislature is considering reducing the amounts parents could sue a library for noncompliance from $2500 to $250, but there are also legal fees likely above $1000. And that is a significant impact for a rural library. Add that to the increased stress and librarians are looking for jobs in other states or are considering changing professions. DebtorsPrison of the Kos community runs the online bookstore The Literate Lizard. They also write a weekly column of the latest nonfiction book releases. I don’t think I’ve read the column before, though I did this week. A couple of the book descriptions (I haven’t, of course, read the actual books) caught my attention.

One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, by Dominic Erdozain. As we parse legislation on background checks and automatic-weapons bans, we fail to ask what place guns should have in a functioning democracy. Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings—the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the peaceful republic they hoped to build. They wrote these ideas into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideas that were subsequently affirmed by two centuries of jurisprudence. And yet the twin scourges of racism and nationalism would combine to create a darker American vision—a rogue and reckless freedom based on birth and blood. It was this freedom, not the liberty promised by the Constitution, that generated our modern gun culture, with its mystic conceptions of good guys and bad guys, innocence and guilt. What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, by Jonathan M. Metzl. Looking closely at the cycle in which mass shootings lead to shock, horror, calls for action, and, ultimately, political gridlock, he explores what happens to the soul of a nation—and the meanings of safety and community—when we normalize violence as an acceptable trade-off for freedom. Mass shootings and our inability to stop them have become more than horrific crimes: they are an American national autobiography.

He’s arguing that he has a right to be a criminal

In mid December I wrote about the cold I had earlier in the month and speculated it might have been a third bout of COVID. Recovery from this cold (or COVID) has been slower than the other two times I got it (one confirmed, one presumed). Even now, a month after the worst of it I still have moments of coughing that used to have me sleeping with a cough drop between teeth and cheek. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos has been reporting on COVID for four years, before it shut down the US in March of 2020. He posted another article today. The US is experiencing a surge in cases (I didn’t download US or Michigan data), perhaps peaking next week at 2 million infections a day, according to public health analyst Dr. Lucky Tran. Then Sumner discussed a report published in Scientific American that said keeping up with COVID vaccines significantly reduces the chance of getting long COVID. With most diseases having a case of it is about as good as a vaccine in preventing the disease from infecting a person again. But with this disease, successive COVID infections increases the chance of long COVID. I’ve had the initial double dose of the vaccine and three boosters. I had a narrow window to get the reformulated booster in October with time to take effect before Thanksgiving travel, and missed it. Some of the talk around the boosters is that if one has had COVID a vaccine booster isn’t as effective nor as urgently needed. I wonder if that calculation changes with this report. I’ll be asking my doctor. What attracted me to this post by annieli of the Kos community was the opening photo. Between lines of barbed wire are the words:

Trump is not arguing that he’s innocent, he’s arguing that he has a right to be a criminal...

annieli quoted an article on MSN that says back in 2020 Maggie Haberman of the New York Times said, “one of the reasons why Trump was running was to avoid prosecution, because you can't prosecute a sitting president.” Then the discussion turned to a statement tweeted by George Conway: “Can anyone explain to me exactly why we’ve never had a serious national discussion about Donald Trump’s mental health?” Steven Hassan, PhD responded that he’s been trying to get that discussion going. He wrote the book The Cult of Trump. That mental health question came up because of E. Jean Carroll defamation suit against the nasty guy. In response to losing the original case he got on his version of Twitter and defamed her again. She brought suit again. Recently a federal appeals court denied his attempt to delay the second trial, scheduled to start in two weeks. That news prompted him to post a deluge of a 31-post thread in 26 minutes with more defamatory language. That certainly doesn’t help his case. Is this the action of a healthy mind? When are we as a nation going to discuss it? And, yes, I’m very aware Republicans are going to do all they can to make sure we don’t have the needed discussion. Sigh. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that the Department of Health and Human services has proposed a rule change that would require welfare agencies to place LGBTQ youth in need of foster care in “environments free of hostility, mistreatment, or abuse.” Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana has introduced a bill to prevent that rule change. The rule change is needed because LGBTQ kids are far more likely to need foster care because they are more likely to be thrown out of their original families. Thirty-four states and DC have taken steps to ensure better care of LGBTQ kids. So this rule is mostly for red states. Banks and others are concerned about the rights of parents (to abuse non conforming kids) and the rights of agencies to not place LGBTQ kids. There is a bit of good news in all this. Hating on LGBTQ kids has been quite unpopular at the voting booth. There are several good quotes in this pundit roundup for Kos assembled by Greg Dworkin. In response to the news that the nasty guy received $7.8 million in foreign payments while in the Oval Office – yeah, they’re illegal – James Acton tweeted:

It's pretty much an inviolable law that Trump has actually done whatever he wrongly accuses Biden of doing.

Yesterday I wrote about the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University. Tommy Barone, editorial co-chair of The Harvard Crimson, tweeted a video of him talking about the resignation on MSNBC. He said there are legitimate criticisms of Gay, which the attackers would gladly point out. But their smear campaign against her had nothing to do with those criticisms. And after her resignation Rep. Elise Stafanik, the one who asked the gotcha question that led to Gay’s downfall, crowed about eliminating another supporter of “wokeness” from education. Sherry Pagoto tweeted a link to an article in the New York Times saying because merit can’t be easily defined it is useful for slippery slopes. Pagoto quoted an excerpt from the article:

What has happened at Harvard is not just a blueprint for taking over higher education; it is a strategy for taking over our information environment.

Down in the comments of the roundup are some good cartoons. One is by Mike Peters of the Dayton Daily News. At a pharmacy a mother asks, “Can I get birth control pills here?” The pharmacist replies, “Sure. But do you have a prescription from your congressman?” A cartoon by Bill Bramhall is titled “Bothsidesism.” It shows a balance named “Evidence of foreign payment” and it is level. On one side is the nasty guy with cash falling out of his pockets. On the other side is Biden with no cash around him. A cartoon by Jack Ohman shows the nasty guy at a desk with stacks of papers filling the room. An aide comments, “You wouldn’t think that someone who hates the rule of law would file this many lawsuits.” A cartoon by John Buss showing Speaker Johnson on the near side of a river holding up a gavel and giving the finger. Down the middle of the river are orange buoys that Gov. Abbott placed to make getting across the river much harder. On the far side are a couple of immigrants. Buss captioned it:

Mike Johnson fulfilling his duties as Modern Day Moses. He ain’t parting nothing, because the Promised Land isn’t for everyone anymore.

I wrote about Johnson’s claim to being a Modern Moses a couple weeks ago. In another pundit roundup Chitown Kev quoted Tom Nichols of The Atlantic discussing why, with the economy having been doing quite well for many months, a lot of people continue to think the economy is doing quite poorly.

Even in casual conversations, I find myself flummoxed by people who argue, with much conviction, that America is in fact worse off, even if their own situation is better. When I respond by noting that inflation is not going up, say, or that America is at full employment, or that wages are outpacing prices, or that pay is increasing fastest for the lowest-paid workers, none of it matters. Instead, I get a response that is so common I can now see it coming every time: a head shake, a sigh, and then a comment about how everything is just such a mess.

Perhaps people are confusing the economy with politics? In the comments more cartoons. Nick Anderson drew one of a scene in a birthing room. An elephant stands on the woman’s chest and tells the doctor, “Save the baby. No matter what.” Ted Littleford drew a cartoon of the nasty guy towards the back of an elephant labeled “GOP” and in pain. The nasty guy says, “Shut up, or I’ll squeeze harder.” Off frame are two voices. One says, “Is Trump milking him?” The other replies, “Those aren’t udders.” Since today is a good day for cartoons, here’s one by Matt Wuerker of Politico. The caption what the nasty guy has been saying about immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.” In a hospital bed Uncle Sam is looking mighty green. A Dr. Don with an assistant that looks like white supremacist Stephen Miller is readying injections of bleach, raw fear, racism, hate, bigotry, and MAGA poison.” Wuerker’s title for the whole scene is “The Poisoner in Chief.”

National “checks and balances” and institutions of democracy won’t save us

I began to feel my recent cold loosening its grip about ten days ago. But getting from “feeling better” to “feeling good” took about a week. Sometime during that recovery a friend listened to my litany of symptoms and suggested what I had was COVID. I do not have COVID testing kits and did not visit a doctor, so I don’t know whether that friend was correct. This may have been my second or third bout of COVID. I definitely had it in January 2022 (with medical tests to verify). I may have had it in July 2022 while attending a big handbell gathering. I kept a mask on and one night when the symptoms were bad I considered leaving the event and heading home, but the symptoms were gone in the morning. Afterward, a friend said she had tested positive when she got home. And now might have been the third time. Much praise to vaccines that lessened the severity of symptoms. The possibility that I might have had another bout of COVID, along with news that COVID cases are rising, prompted me to download Michigan’s COVID data for the first time in four months. The data was updated on Tuesday, December 12. The good news is the number of deaths per day has been in the single digits, except for one day, for seven months. There were ten deaths in that exception. The bad news is the number of new cases per day has indeed been rising. The new cases per day rose in August, crested in September below 1000 cases per day, dropped a bit in October, and has been rising since. Over the last four weeks the weekly peak has been 943, 1411, 1272, and 1245. My charting program now displays 2¾ years of data. Next time I download the data I probably should revise the program to chart only the last year. If I don’t the month designations will begin to overlap. This morning on NPR Steve Inskeep and Leila Fadel marked 50 years since the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Before then people, especially the government, justified oppressing LGB people because they were considered mentally ill. I left the T out of the acronym because the change was about orientation, not identity. After the change the mentally ill excuse could not be used, though the government had other ways to fire or discharge LGB people, such as declaring them a possible blackmail target and thus a security risk. Religion declaring homosexuality as sinful was not a part of this discussion. This NPR segment quoted early LGB activists Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny. But it doesn’t say anything at all about why the APA made the change. There’s nothing about the brave gay psychiatrist (alas, I don’t remember his name) who testified before an APA conference while wearing a mask and using a microphone that distorted his voice. Alas, there are still groups, mostly church groups, that still try to “cure” us. Thankfully, more states are banning “conversion” therapy that is merely an excuse for torture. NPR’s Fresh Air host Tonya Mosley had a 35 minute discussion with Charlie Savage of the New York Times about why a second nasty guy administration will be so much worse than the first one. Savage has also written a couple books on growing presidential power, one covering the Bush II years and the other covering Obama (!). This will be a strange election with the nasty guy having to make courtroom appearances between campaign events. Even so, he’s on track to be the Republican nominee. Much, likely all, of the campaigning will be about revenge, mostly against Biden, though also against Democrats and any Republicans who don’t display enough loyalty to him, but rather are loyal to the party or the country. However, the big difference is the growing infrastructure, the sophisticated policy apparatus that is growing up around him and backing him. And that makes his words more than the usual bombast. The things he says he will do: One: Change the Department of Justice from an independent part of the government with the charge to protect the weak from the strong into a driving force to protect him and punish his adversaries. He believes the DoJ has been weaponized against him, so he feels justified in weaponizing it against his opponents. In his first term the DoJ didn’t bring charges against Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, former FBI director James Comey, and others, much to his fury. Enough existing employees, even conservatives, raised legal objections to his punishing his adversaries. That infrastructure – the well-funded think tanks – have been writing legal rationale and vetting lawyers who will support, not resist, what he wants to do. All these people are actually saying this, so it isn’t a secret. One bit of that legal rationale is that the DoJ is supposed to be doing the bidding of the president and the Constitution says nothing about a president opening investigations of his opponents. Some of these think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, are saying they’re creating all this infrastructure for whoever is the next Republican president. But a lot of this work reflects Trumpist ideology. Two: Attempt to implement the unitary executive theory, developed back in the Reagan years. It says Congress cannot create an agency the president cannot control. An example is Federal Reserve – the president can appoint the leadership, but then has no more control. This theory says, for example, that the president should have control over Federal Reserve decisions on interest rates. And, in this example, a president could cut interest rates to help with reelection, no matter the economic mess it made later. Three: Revise federal civil service classifications so that a lot more jobs – any job that might touch policy – are seen as political rather than civil service. They become partisan spoils with hiring now based on loyalty rather than competence. Four: The nasty guy was able to take over the Republican Party in 2016 because of his radical opposition to immigration. His proposals were mostly thwarted in his first term. They won’t be in his second. Up to now deportations might be a few hundred thousand a year. The nasty guy is talking millions a year with all sorts of draconian policies and camps to make it happen. The think tanks believe much of what they want to do is currently legal. If not, he will have a more compliant Supreme Court and maybe a more compliant Congress. Yes, deportations on that scale will disrupt social and economic connections. Agriculture, hospitality, and many other economic sectors will face labor shortages. But Stephen Miller, an advisor and white supremacist, says that’s good. It will open more jobs to citizens and they’ll be at higher wages. Some jobs will go unfilled because Americans are not willing to do things like pick crops, no matter the pay. Five: Many policies in the nasty guy’s first term were blocked because they were badly written. He and his minions are now much better at putting policies in a form that would pass judicial muster. They have a much better understanding of how to manipulate the levers of government. Six: They have a much more compliant judiciary because he got lots of appointments to many federal courts through the Senate. Seven: The nasty guy intends to use the Insurrection Act, the one exception to the Posse Comitatus Act that prevents using the military for domestic policing. He intends to use it for such things as disrupt protests, especially Black Lives Matter protests, to support immigration agents at the southern border, and to enforce order in the “crime dens” of Democratic-run cities. In the last case he won’t wait for mayors to request assistance. Eight: There won’t be the incompetence and dysfunction of his first term. These think tanks will have rosters of competent people – not competent in performing the functions of government, but competent in carrying out an authoritarian agenda. Nine: The nasty guy “has worn down, outlasted, intimidated into submission and driven out Republican lawmakers who had independent standing and demonstrated occasional willingness to oppose him.” Those Republicans who disagree with the nasty guy privately fear violence if they oppose him publicly. Ten: There have been a parade of people in the first administration who have talked about how they restrained him from his more radical ideas and how he is unfit to be president. They and their restraint won’t be there during a second term. So the lawyers – and everyone in the second administration – will be much more likely to say yes to everything, even (especially) the cruelest things, the nasty guy will come up with. That’s ten reasons why the nasty guy will be much more successful in making himself dictator, if he ever gets back to the Oval Office. No, the national “checks and balances” and the strength of institutions of democracy won’t save us. The checks and balances have been co-opted and institutions are crumbling from attacks of claims of already being partisan. I had mentioned even vulnerable House Republicans had voted for the impeachment inquiry. These are the 17 Republicans elected from districts Biden won. So even though they are somewhat vulnerable and even though House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, the guy who brought the inquiry approval to the floor, has become a national laughingstock because of the complete lack of evidence, they all voted for him. As Joan McCarter of Daily Kos wrote:

But this isn’t about Biden. It’s about proving loyalty to Donald Trump, and plenty of Republicans will happily admit that.

Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, were election workers in Georgia. After Georgia went to Biden in the 2020 election Rudy Giuliani accused the women of election tampering. Yes, what he said were lies. The women, who are black, received threats and harassment. It was so bad they couldn’t go out in public. So they sued Giuliani for defamation. And an Associated Press article posted on Kos reports the jury took only ten hours to award the women $148 million in damages and punitive damages. Giuliani kept repeating the lies to the press and kept saying he had evidence that would prove his position. But he never testified and that evidence was not included in the trial. His lawyer said that he was not fully responsible for the harassment the women faced. The lawyer also suggested the award could “financially ruin” his client. Good. The case will be appealed.

It’s time to brand environmental awareness as masculine

Because of news people saying COVID cases on the rise I downloaded Michigan’s data. I hadn’t done that in the last seven weeks. Yes, cases are up, a small but steady rise since the beginning of July (about the last time I checked the data). Over that time the weekly peaks in new cases per day have been 131, 132, 128, 146, 195, 279, 282, 332, and 364. This is much below last December when there were peaks above 2000 and a year ago when there were peaks close to 3000 (and above 23300 just after New Year in 2022). The deaths per day has been in the single digits since about mid May and has been 2 or fewer deaths in the last four weeks. An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reported that though the state of Georgia passed a law to make it easier to ban books out of school libraries, the rate they’re doing so is well below other states with such laws. The reason is that while the process is simpler, it is restricted to actual parents with children in the district. Yeah, parents who join groups such as Mama Bears do challenge books and get them removed. But activist citizens who don’t have children can’t badger schools and libraries. And that makes a big difference. Yesterday I wrote about a CBS poll about nasty guy voters and who they feel is telling them the truth. Today I include another piece of that poll, reported by Kerry Eleveld of Kos. This question asked voters who say honesty is very important who they support. 61%, almost two-thirds, of those who say honesty is important support the nasty guy. In a distant second place is the 17% who support DeathSantis. Yeah, I’m struggling with those who say they value honesty are supporting the guy known for how constantly he lies. The rest of Eleveld’s post is about how convinced the MAGA crowd is that the nasty guy will beat Biden in 2024. And if he’s not the nominee, any Republican will beat Biden.

Only a legitimate cult could believe a guy who twice lost the popular vote, was defeated in 2020, doomed an entire slate of handpicked MAGA candidates in 2022, and is now haunted by four criminal indictments is a shoo-in for 2024.

That may not be such a strange belief when they’re fed a steady diet of videos of Biden stumbling over words and sandbags. If the MAGA crowd is fed a steady diet of a frail and bumbling Biden they could very easily believe that Biden stole the 2024 election too. Joe and Jill Biden went to Hawaii to look over the Lahaina devastation and offer comfort and support. While there he did what Republicans are trying to turn into a scandal. His crime: he petted a dog. Specifically a dog helping to find missing people who might still be under the ashes. That moment, and the Republican reaction to it, prompted Hunter of Kos to review the protocols when a dog presents itself to you. You complement the dog, then you pet it (if the dog is willing). If the dog is accompanied by a human handler you then then acknowledge the handler by complementing the dog. Hunter goes from there. Can’t wait for Republicans to try to broaden the scandal by showing Biden petting dogs. Jen Sorensen of Kos comics noted that conservatives have tried to declare fossil fuels are manly and renewable energy are effeminate. It’s time to flip that script and brand environmental awareness as masculine. One frame says, “Trucks are for wimps. Real men use real muscles.” It shows a man on a bicycle saying to a man in a truck, “Outta my way, softie!” In another pundit roundup for Kos a cartoon by Dennis Goris was posted in the comments. On either side of a child wearing a vest are two women. The kid’s mother tells the other, “I usually don’t like to splurge on back-to-school stuff but it is kevlar.”

Parents send their children into danger because home is more dangerous

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports on a COVID milestone. One of the ways to measure the deadly effects of the virus is to estimate the number of deaths if the virus hadn’t been around and compare that to the actual number of deaths. This difference is the excess deaths attributed to the virus. That can also be shown as a percent. And in the US for the first half of this year that has been 0%. In terms of deaths, the pandemic is over. Yes, that means people are getting sick, sometimes quite sick, from COVID, but they’re doing a lot less dying. There are a couple factors at work. One is that the circulating variants are quite similar to Omicron. So between people having caught it already, having been vaccinated, or having already died about 96% of Americans are protected. The other is medical workers know a lot more about how to treat the virus, reducing the rate of death. Variants of the virus are out there. It can still mutate. The next big wave may never come or may come next week. For now, let’s celebrate the milestone. Sumner had been convince living with the virus would be impossible. He thought we had to eradicate it and were doing a terrible job of it. This news is much better than expected. Kos of Kos asks an important question: Would you prefer to live next to the person complaining about what immigrants are doing to the country, or would you rather live next to the immigrant? At the top of this post is a photo of the words:

No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.

Those against immigration dehumanize them as criminals or opportunists, those hoping to take advantage of hospitality. Yet, data are clear that immigration supports our economy. Florida is now struggling to get enough farm workers. There seems to be a big disconnect in those who can’t get enough farm workers yet still think the nasty guy is the best president ever.

People don’t leave their homes on a lark. They don’t say goodbye to everything they know, the people they love, and the communities they belong to for funsies. They don’t get on rickety boats to cross the Mediterranean, like the one that recently sank and killed over 600 Pakistani, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Syrian migrants, simply because they want a higher-paying gig. It is always an act of desperation. ... The people making these trips are just as desperate as the Latin American immigrants who brave the gauntlet of thieves and rapists, a dangerous river, and a blistering hot desert on the American side full of even more bandits, plus right-wing militia nutbags. Parents will send their children into danger because gang and drug violence at home is even more dangerous. So let’s ask that question again: Who would you rather live next to? The people who risk everything to come work, to find a better life and send money to their families back home, or those who would steal water left for migrants in the desert, point guns at them, and vilify them for their desperation?

A ProPublica article written by Paul Kiel and posted on Kos discussed some of the tax avoidance tricks used by billionaires. The example in this case is Harlan Crow, revealed a few months ago as the sugar daddy for Justice Clarence Thomas. The article focuses on the way Crow uses his yacht, which frequently hosted Thomas, to reduce taxes. The big way to do this is have a wholly owned corporation own the yacht, then write off its cost through depreciation and business expenses. To actually claim the yacht as part of a business it must be chartered. No problem – the company charters it to Crow. He pays for its use, though well under what the company shells out. The company loses money. And Crow gets a tax writeoff. As a billionaire he paid a 15% rate, lower than many middle-income workers. ProPublica got a trove of IRS data with tax info on thousands of wealthy people. I read parts of the original ProPublica article. It’s a long one. They say the data was provided to them after they published a series of articles scrutinizing the IRS. Beyond that they are not disclosing how they got the data. The stash includes returns from Crow. What Crow did is likely illegal. There is no evidence the yacht was chartered to anyone else, which means the charter service isn’t a real business. The article discusses a second way of getting around the law. Above a certain threshold gifts are subject to a gift tax. What Crow gave Thomas is likely way above that. But Crow claims he doesn’t need to report or pay it because his company still owns the yacht – which ignores the value of such things as the services of the yacht’s staff. Since the rich rarely report these sorts of gifts the only way the IRS learns about them is through an audit. That’s a big reason why Republicans were so intent on keeping the IRS budget so low that it didn’t have the manpower to audit the rich.

“A lot of these tax rules were developed in an era where there were a few millionaires and the tiniest number of billionaires,” [Pace Law School professor Bridget] Crawford said, “and now there are many. This is becoming a more visible problem.”

Charles Jay of the Kos community discussed the current situation of Yevgeny Progozhin, the head of the Wagner group that staged a mini coup in Russia. A photo of him has surfaced, the first since the coup, perhaps taken at a camp in Belarus. Of more importance is that for now Russian authorities have dropped insurgency charges. He has already been described as a traitor, so maybe Putin will threaten him with investigating his finances. But there’s still an arrest warrant for Prigozhin in the US. He was indicted for his role in running a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election. He was placed on the FBI’s most wanted list and there is a reward for information on Russian interference in US elections. Progozhin has both denied he interfered in our elections and boasted that his interference was successful and that he founded and was financier of the Internet Research Agency, the troll farm. Hunter of Kos discussed the Turning Point Action conference that was held last weekend. One of the things that happened was a straw poll showing 95.8% of them voted against supporting, “U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine.” The conference leadership is known to be brazen liars, so it is hard to tell if the they made up that poll result or if the attendees actually voted that way. Hunter says either is possible – the nasty guy was the keynote speaker. Support for Ukraine among voters is about two-thirds. Among Republicans it’s a bit over half. And here’s a bunch that’s 95% against Ukraine. So don’t say that candidates and politicians are supporting Russia because their voters tell them to. The only ones demanding the US leave Ukraine are the activists. But it means candidates have to placate this anti-Ukraine crowd or try to evade the questions. Since those activists were aggressively interventionist towards war in Afghanistan, a second war in Iraq, and wanting one in Iran, why do they now say Ukraine is none of our business? The best answer that Hunter has come up with seems to be the obvious one: Money. It seems to have started with Paul Manafort making serious cash boosting Russian interests in Europe. Then there was Rudy Giuliani, the nasty guy (who was impeached for his efforts), Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, and many more activists trumpeting Russian disinformation. Sumner posted a Ukraine update yesterday about noon that has two important topics in it. The first is the Kerch Bridge, the one between Crimea and the Russian mainland, has been hit again. The first time was last October. This time a section of the vehicle bridge has dropped several feet. Perhaps a pillar underneath has been damaged. It is closed. There may be no damage to the adjacent rail bridge, but that is also closed while it is checked for damage. The strike was reportedly done by the Ukrainian navy using sea drones. Russia says it will be repaired in a month, though if that support pillar was damaged, repairs will take longer. The closed bridge will affect Russia’s ability to supply its forces on the southern front of the war. All travelers to Crimea will now have to take a ferry or add to the heavy traffic along the coastal highway in occupied Ukraine, a war zone. The other big topic is that Russia has ended the deal that allowed Ukrainian grain to be shipped to the rest of the world. While the deal was in place 33 million metric tons of grain was shipped. That reduced world grain prices by 20%. Some reports say Putin ended the deal not because of Ukraine, but because Turkish president Erdogan had annoyed him with a couple other actions. The question is what happens now? Will Russia attack the grain ships, causing a halt to getting grain to the rest of the world? Will Turkey escort the ships so that if Russia fires on them it brings all of NATO into the war? Will alternate methods of shipment be found? No clear answers yet.

Tuesday was the hottest day in 125,000 years

It’s been seven weeks since I last looked at Michigan’s COVID data. And, good news! Since the beginning of May the number of new cases per day has been steadily decreasing. The last few peaks have been 279, 227, 241, 156, 189, 126, and 117 last week. Compared to the numbers I had been reporting these are small. Since last week’s peak new cases per day has been less than 100. For seven weeks the number of deaths per day has been in the single digits. I’ve downloaded Michigan’s data 136 times over three years. The data now shows that I can stop. On Wednesday Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that Tuesday was the hottest day in recorded history at a world average of 17.18C (62.92F). Since this is a world average and half the world is in mid winter and the average includes Greenland and Antarctica, this is toasty. This breaks a record that goes all the way back to – Monday. That day’s average was 17.01C. The previous record was set back in August 2016 at 16.92C. This is early July and August tends to be hotter. I think I read that we’ve been recording temperatures around the globe for only 44 years. However, we’ve been keeping temperature data in some places since the 18th century and data from tree rings, ice cores, and isotopes in shells of ocean creatures extends our temperature understanding back 125,000 years. So, yeah, Tuesday was the hottest day in 125,000 years. Sumner has various charts to explain why Tuesday’s record won’t stand for long. Temperatures will still go up. But we’re not doomed. Back in 2000 New Mexico got all of its electricity from burning fossil fuels. Now it is 34%. The state now has a permanent Office of Renewable Energy. They’re ahead of schedule to have 100% of the state’s power needs come from renewables by 2045. In their 2023 legislative session they needed only eight days for their latest bill to push into a renewable future. It passed along party lines. Vote for Democrats. Today an Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that Wednesday’s global average temperature matched Tuesday’s record. A contributor to the record is the mild winter in Antarctica. It’s been 10-20C (18-36F) warmer than the 1979-2000 average. This threatens the regions wildlife and is driving ice melt that raises sea level. Another AP story reported Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights have been collecting signatures to put an abortion rights amendment to the Ohio constitution on the November ballot. They need 413.4K signatures. Today they turned in over 700K. The proposed amendment is similar to the one approved in neighboring Michigan last year. The number of signatures gathered and the number needed to be gathered were similar to what happened in Michigan. There is one big hurdle ahead. There is an amendment on the August ballot (I think the only thing on the ballot) that would raise the vote threshold for amendments from 50% to 60%. Abortion rights amendments in other states have passed with over 55% of the vote, but under 60%. Yes, this Ohio special election is intentionally at a time when most people don’t bother to vote. RO37 of the Kos community posted a Ukraine update. In with all the technical stuff is a description of how mine clearing works. It is difficult and careful work – a crew doesn’t want to miss one that might explode later – and involves what are known as mine plows. A big reason why this is slow work is because the minefields Russia laid down tend to be a few kilometers front to back and clearing needs to be done 8-10 kilometers side to side so following vehicles aren’t clumped together as easy targets. Sumner reported that the usual 3:1 offensive rule doesn’t apply in Ukraine’s attack. The 3:1 rule means an army attacking a well fortified position needs three times the personnel and equipment than the defenders. Ukraine doesn’t have that and is still making progress. Sumner explains that 3:1 ratio is important so that the attackers can withstand losses and not lose unit cohesion. But the defender’s losses can also lead to the loss of unit cohesion and that appears to be one of Russia’s problems. There’s a big reasons why the 3:1 ratio doesn’t apply: It’s has to do wit that bit about a well fortified position. Russia has repeatedly not stayed in its trenches and bunkers, but instead has come out in the open to engage Ukraine fighters. So Ukraine is making progress. Some Independence Day cartoons posted by Denise Oliver Velez in the comments of a pundit roundup on Kos: Andrew Fraser drew a cartoon of the Founding Fathers. One leans over his computer and looks back at his colleagues and says, “If I post this on King George’s wall, you’re all going to like it, right?” David Horsy of the Seattle Times drew one of two people tugging on opposite corners of an American flag and both saying, “Mine!” Dave Whamond drew a cartoon of the Supreme Court Library. Roberts says, “Has anyone seen our book on judicial ethics?” Alito, standing next to Thomas, says, “I think we banned that one along with the ones about honor, integrity, prestige, and legitimacy.” Hunter of Kos discussed the latest in flying cars, the thing that we’ve been hoping for of as one of the great things to come in the future, but hasn’t actually arrived in the last 100 years. Alef, a company owned by Elon Musk, has announced their Model A has received its Special Airworthiness Certification. And maybe you can buy one for $300K in 2025. Hunter says it is all a really bad idea. First, this is more of a flying golf cart. It’s not a car because cars have lots of mandated safety features. Hmm... I recall that just recently a submersible company ran into trouble when it skimped on safety. Personal flying vehicles haven’t appears because, as Hunter wrote, “after a hundred years of dreaming about flying cars nobody has ever, ever been able to explain why a future of individually piloted hovercars would in any way work out.” If one is stuck in traffic and could get out of a traffic jam by levitating, why would one not fly everywhere? The drawbacks are the noise (the sound of eight lawnmowers?), the road debris kicked up at takeoff, the power lines one forgot to check for, and everyone else trying to fly at the same time. Commenters add given how good people are at keeping their cars maintained, they’re not going to be any better at maintaining flying golf carts. And when it stalls out one drops from the sky in a crash. And hitting cars or houses below.

What I don't want to hear is that they care about crime

It’s been three weeks since I’ve looked at Michigan’s COVID data, which I get here. The Michigan health department still updates the spreadsheet I use as input for my charting program. But now this webpage has a notice. Due to the official end of the pandemic Public Health Emergency they will no collect negative test results. That data has been inaccurate since the availability of home testing. Positive tests (though I suspect not from home tests) and deaths will still be reported. The data was updated two days ago, on May 16. Over the last four weeks the peaks in the number of new cases per day has been holding steady at the low level of 393, 428, 424, and 354. For the last three weeks the deaths per day has been in the single digits. All of this is good news! An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reports that publisher Penguin Random House sued the Escambia County School District in Florida over its removal of books about race and LGBTQ people. The removals were because one language arts teacher objected. That teacher appears to have not read the books, but worked from a website that lists which books it finds objectionable. The school board voted for removal over the recommendations of a review committee that declared the books as educationally suitable. From the article:

“Books have the capacity to change lives for the better, and students in particular deserve equitable access to a wide range of perspectives. Censorship, in the form of book bans like those enacted by Escambia County, are a direct threat to democracy and our Constitutional rights,” Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, said in a statement.

Rep. George Santos from New York lied about everything leading up to his election to Congress last November. Shortly after the election his lies made the news and other shady dealings came to light. Recently, Santos was indicted on 13 criminal counts. He remains in Congress. Denise Oliver Velez of Kos reported that as part of a Congressional hearing in which Republicans tried to roast DC Mayor Murial Bowser, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a black Democrat from Texas, had a few things to say.

My Republican colleagues want to talk about keeping D.C. streets crime-free. They can't even keep the halls of Congress crime-free. ... My freshman colleague has just been indicted on 13 counts — 13 felony counts, right? But have [Republican representatives] exhibited any courage to say, 'You know what, we will disallow this in our body. We will make sure that we expel this individual'? They have not. So what I don't want to hear is that they care about crime, because if they did they would start by cleaning up our own House and mind our own business instead of coming after D.C., so thank you so much for your time.

Kos of Kos wrote about a video of a Ukrainian drone operator rescuing a Russian soldier. Over and over Kos described the Russians as not caring about their soldiers. Their guys are told if they retreat they would be shot, that if Ukrainians have a chance Ukrainians would kill Russians. So don’t surrender. This is a story of a Russian soldier who comes to understand that surrendering had a greater chance of survival than retreat or just staying in his trench. He had to trust that Ukraine would rather he lived. The simple explanation is that a Russian POW can be exchanged for a Ukrainian POW. The more complete answer is that Ukraine is a nice country. It doesn’t want to and doesn’t need to kill when it doesn’t have to. Andrew Wortman, a Democratic Activist, tweeted about the corruption of Clarence Thomas.

Shelby County v. Holder (2013)—which killed preclearance requirements for racist voting laws—was decided by A SINGLE VOTE in a 5-4 decision. We now know that Leonard Leo BOUGHT Clarence Thomas’ vote in this case, without which the majority would have voted AGAINST it. My god. I can’t even imagine how much damage this one decision has inflicted upon this country. Without it, we likely wouldn’t have had Trump in office and in the position to appoint HALF of the illegitimate six that struck down Roe. We certainly wouldn’t have a GOP House majority again.

Wortman includes links to previous threads that explain how critical this case has been to the country. Leonard Leo is the guy who started the Federalist Society with the goal of remaking the federal courts into a tool of corporations. Last week Joan McCarter of Kos explained a bit more of who Leo is – and how he’s been making money off his efforts. A couple weeks ago McCarter reported on a move by the House Administration Committee. This committee handles such things as printing the Congressional Record, who gets which office, managing the IT systems, and parking. It also has a Subcommittee on Elections, which oversees federal elections, including “campaign finance, voting rights, election administration, and election security.” And Republicans are now in charge of it. They recently hired Thomas Lane as Elections Counsel and Director of Election Coalitions. He’s a guy subpoenaed by the Justice Department to get his role in the Arizona fake elector scheme in Arizona. His job is to arrange hearings on such things as “State Tools to Promote Voter Confidence.” Yeah, that’s code for voter suppression. And Lane will have some like-minded colleagues to help him out. McCarter concluded:

The Republicans have succeeded in putting a who’s who of voter suppressors and election deniers in charge of “election integrity” to further their plans for stealing the next election and they aren’t even trying to hide it.

Last week Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported that Liz Cheney plans to haunt the nasty guy through this presidential campaign. Cheney is a stalwart conservative that defied the Republican Party to serve on the January 6 Committee. For that she lost her reelection primary. Her first bit of haunting was a 60 second ad, aired during that disastrous CNN Town Hall, that closely ties him with the Capitol attack and reminds viewers he lost the election and knew it. Therefore he is unfit for office. Will Cheney run for president? Only if that is the best way to destroy the nasty guy. That is her only goal. Capital and Main of the Kos community reported how extreme the climate is likely to be by the time today’s teens get to their mid thirties. These kids are not meekly taking climate news. They’re going to court to take aim at state government policies that are harming their futures. In Montana a group of kids say the state failed to protect them from the environmental degradation of climate change. Lead plaintiff Rikki Held, now 22, lives with her parents on a ranch in southeastern Montana. They rely on a river to water their crops. It dried up one year and flooded the next. They hunt elk and deer, but they have migrated away from their property. They see more viral infestations of their animals from midges who used to be killed off during winter. They’ve experienced several wildfires. Montana has known about climate disruptions for decades, yet continues to act in ways that disrupts her family and infringes on her future. The kids claim an inalienable right to “a clean and healthful environment” for the present and their future. They have seasoned environmental lawyers on their side. The trial is scheduled for June. In Hawaii the teens are suing the state’s Department of Transportation for promoting highways over mass transit and for not converting the state’s cars and trucks to greener models. Transportation will account for 60% of Hawaii’s emissions by 2030. One plaintiff in this suit is Kalā Winter. Her family runs a fishery. They’ve been hit by floods that inundated their ponds with salt water. Rising temps have depleted the seaweed and other marine plants that the fish rely on for food. She says, “Climate change is super close and scary.” Which means climate change also affects their mental health. Amazing Maps tweeted one of the world according to Google Street View. This service in Google Maps will color a street blue if its cameras have been down it. Now back out the view until the whole world is visible and turn off the actual maps. The US is quite blue as is most of Europe – with the exception of Germany (privacy issues?) and Belarus. The lower portions of Canada are visible, as is much of South America, but not the Amazon rainforest. Africa is a blank except for South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria and a few other small spots. In Asia there is India, Thailand, and tendrils across Siberia, the rest is blank (likely China has its own product). Australia has a blank middle.

They will find ways to live like lords

My Sunday movie was The Sea Beast on Netflix. I became interested in it when I saw that it had been nominated for a Best Animated Feature Oscar. Maisie is a young black girl reading about the exploits of sea beast hunters to fellow residents at an orphanage. Her parents, like those of many of the other children, died hunting sea beasts. Maisie escapes the orphanage and stows away on the Inevitable, the famed ship of Captain Crow and first mate Jacob. The book Maisie read features the captain and his long line of ancestors who were hunters. Jacob is also in it and he was also orphaned when a beast killed his parents. Then we learn that, similar to many authoritarian societies, a great deal was built on lies and scapegoating. It is quite delicious that it’s the little black girl who confronts the king and queen. The crew of the Inevitable is multiracial – one of the top advisors to Crow is a black woman. The various crowd scenes on shore are also multiracial. That is good to see. I noticed a similarity between the primary beast in this story with the lead dragon in How to Train Your Dragon. I have no idea if the same people were involved in beast design. The IMBD trivia page for Sea Beast says this one of a few, perhaps only, animated film in which the accuracy of sailing ships is followed as closely as possible. That includes the dialogue when the captain and crew give orders. Even so, that doesn’t stop the crew from bouncing off the rigging in gravity defying acrobatics when the ship is attacked. I enjoyed this one. IMDB says a sequel is in the works. I finished the book The Sky Blues by Robbie Couch. It’s billed as a young adult romantic comedy, though isn’t all that focused on the romance and it isn’t there for the laughs. Sky is a couple months from graduating from high school in a small town on Lake Michigan an hour from Traverse City – yeah, the conservative part of the state. His mother threw him out of the house because he is gay and he’s living with Bree, his best friend, and her family. Other students know he is gay but he’s afraid of being too obvious about it. Sky has a crush on Ali Rashid, one of the few students of color in this town, and intends to make a big deal of asking him to the prom during the senior beach party in a month. A problem is Sky doesn’t know if Ali is gay. Then another student sends out a homophobic e-blast and the class president doesn’t want his senior year ruined by all the gay stuff. Sky discovers his inner strength and that many other students are on his side. Along the way he learns about the father who died when he was five. It is an enjoyable read, though perhaps I should shift to older gay characters. Three weeks have passed since I last looked at Michigan’s COVID data. I downloaded it, updated yesterday. And it’s good news! After a two month plateau the number of new cases per day has dropped by quite a bit. The peaks in the last few weeks have been 949, 1009, 783, 647, and 487. That last one, and maybe the week or two before, will likely be revised as more data is reported. Over the last four weeks the number of deaths per day has been 16 and fewer with many days in the low single digits. When I last posted two black men has been expelled from the Tennessee legislature for participating in protests for gun control legislation. Then I wrote they could be back in a matter of days. And they are back. Charles Jay of the Daily Kos community reported on Monday that Justin Jones of the Nashville area was back on Monday. The Nashville Metropolitan Council voted 36-0 to return him on an interim basis. Jones will have to run again for his seat in a special election. I had heard there was a preliminary vote to suspend the rule that a vote would not go into effect for a month – by which time the legislative season would be over. Jones then led a procession through Nashville to the Capitol, where he took the oath of office again. Jay’s post has videos. And Jones can’t be thrown out for the same offense a second time. An AP article posted to Kos reported that today the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, the Memphis area, also voted unanimously to reinstate Justin Pearson. On Tuesday a week ago, Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Sen. Chris Van Hollen, chair of the Senate appropriations subcommittee in charge of the budget for the Supreme Court has started talking about telling the Supremes they must adopt a code of ethics or he’ll cut their budget. The Supremes are the only part of the judiciary that don’t have a code of ethics. Four years ago Justice Elena Kagan called on Chief Justice Roberts to develop and institute such a code. Roberts has done nothing. Gosh, now why would the Supremes need a code of ethics? I’ve written about the need for such code several times as the court proves itself more and more illegitimate. And there’s this: On Thursday, two days later, Laura Clawson of Kos reported that Justice Clarence Thomas is accused of breaking one of the few ethics laws covering the justices. A ProPublica investigation shows that for more than two decades Thomas accepted lavish vacations from billioniare Harlan Crow – and didn’t report it. The law is so lax that the law Thomas broke isn’t about going on these lavish trips. It’s that he didn’t report it. Thomas says he was being entertained by a friend, which – to a point – is allowed. But this went way beyond what is allowed. In this first post Clawson discusses how much Thomas would have had to pay if the money came from his own pocket In a second post Clawson discussed Thomas’ reply. The heat on Thomas got hot enough that he felt he had to issue a statement – I didn’t know I needed to file a report, sheesh, they’re just friends offering hospitality, but I will in the future. Clawson picks that statement apart. They’ve been friends for 25 years. And Thomas has been on the court for 30. There’s a reason Crow decided to befriend Thomas and offer him lavish vacations. Their length of friendship isn’t a valid excuse. Those “family trips” included private jets and time on a superyacht and at a private resort. Other people at that resort included Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society that was instrumental in picking judges and justices with which the nasty guy and Moscow Mitch stacked the federal courts and got a majority on the Supremes – Thomas’ conservative majority colleagues. Those at the resort were just a bunch of guys not talking about their life’s work. Accepting gifts from people without business before the court is just fine. But Crow is a longtime member of the American Enterprise Institute, a major conservative think tank that has filed many briefs with the Supremes. That private resort is Camp Topridge in the Adirondacks – a “camp” in the same way a Vanderbilt mansion is a “cottage.” It is owned by one of Crow’s corporations, so staying there isn’t accepting personal hospitality. Also frequent guests are major corporate executives, major Republican donors, and leaders of conservative think tanks. Nope, they’re not there to influence Thomas. There’s also the little detail of Crow donating a half million dollars to a Tea Party group founded by wife Ginni Thomas in 2011. That donation funded her salary. Aldous Pennyfarthing of the Kos community discussed an article in the Washingtonian that reported Crow has an extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia that he shows off to guests. Leah McElrath responded to that last bit of news by tweeting:

Welcome to the often horrifying but fairly predictable world of psychopathology. ... If this is what he is willing to show, what is he hiding? Everyone has secrets. Everyone. For most of us, secrets are relegated to our internal world. They’re parts of our psyche we never or rarely share. For a wealthy “collector” like Harlan Crow, those intrapsychic dynamics almost certainly play out with his possessions. As fascinating as Harlan Crow’s material collections are, the one that should concern us most is his collection of judges, lawmakers, academics, and media figures—many of whom are stepping forward to defend him in response to these revelations. He has clearly bought many people.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern wrote about the situation for Slate. Here is a bit of what they wrote:

Before the outrage dries up, however, it is worth zeroing in on two aspects of the ProPublica report that do have lasting legal implications. First, the same people who benefited from the lax status quo continue to fight against any meaningful reforms that might curb the justices’ gravy train. Second, the rules governing Thomas’ conduct over these years, while terribly insufficient, actually did require him to disclose at least some of these extravagant gifts. The fact that he ignored the rules anyway illustrates just how difficult it will be to force the justices to obey the law: Without the strong threat of enforcement, a putative public servant like Thomas will thumb his nose at the law. ... Within the legal community, this state of affairs is all justified on the grounds that no justice can retire to become a millionaire lobbyist or general counsel (because, naturally, they must protect the seat). And so unlike regular politicians—as well as other life-tenured judges who step down to take lucrative positions in private practice—the justices are tragically trapped in jobs that don’t pay what they think they are worth. The logic that allows interested parties to buy access by funneling cash to the Supreme Court Historical Society, or judicial spouses, or to million-dollar luxury travel is seen as perfectly acceptable. Indeed, it’s somehow seen as reasonable compensation for lost opportunities—a more dignified alternative to the revolving door. And so long as we believe Supreme Court justices are quasi-monarchs who are entitled to live like lords, they will find ways to live like lords. Those who can afford to purchase their lordliness will pony up whatever it takes. And we will all say that it’s awful. Until we learn about the next one, and the next one, and the one after that.

Andy Marlette tweeted a cartoon appropriate for Easter, this past Sunday. It shows Jesus being crucified and below him are two centurions. One of them says:

Relax! He was a radical, anti-capitalist who was questioning authority & undermining law and order. We’re patriots for putting a stop to it!