Refusing to hate confuses and disorients the hateful

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phillip’s response:

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

Simon Van Zuylen-Wood of New York Magazine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McChrystal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Must I say something positive?

I finished the book Everything I learned, I learned in a Chinese Restaurant, a Memoir, by Curtis Chin. The author is American with Chinese ancestry and his parents owned a Chinese restaurant in Detroit’s Chinatown. This is his story from birth in 1968 to graduation from college in 1990. I’ve lived in the Detroit area since 1979. I did not know Detroit had a Chinatown. The original Chinatown was west of Downtown and was demolished in the 1950s to make way for a freeway, in the same way Black Bottom, on the east side of Downtown was demolished for a freeway. The new Chinatown was created in the Cass Corridor, the area between Downtown and New Center, which soon had the reputation as the worst of Detroit. Much of the Corridor has been revitalized and renamed Midtown, though Google Street View still shows the area around the restaurant as rather empty. There is a red roofed building at the corner of Cass and Peterboro that might be the restaurant building, though it has been renovated and looks like a showroom. The first school Chin attended on the other side of Cass is still there, but it isn’t a school anymore. After looking around the school through Street View a bit more I realized I had been inside – it was the first home of Cinema Detroit (which now appears to hold events in other movie theaters or in Planet Ant). And I now see in Street View a kiosk with Chinese characters marking Chinatown. Chin was at that school only a year or so when the declining conditions prompted the family to move their home out to Troy, one of the whiter suburbs. The restaurant stayed where it was. To fit in, he became an ardent adherent of the Republican Party, though he was barely a teenager. Also about that time he figured out he is gay, and was terrified of being outed. I wondered what, if anything, would prompt him to leave Republicanism behind. Surely, now a proud gay man in his 50s would he stick with them? He was in the restaurant pretty much all the time he wasn’t in school. There was a room in the back where he studied with his siblings, and when he wasn’t studying he was working either in the kitchen or in the dining room. He learned about what it meant to be a family, what it meant to be part of a team, and how to meet and get along with people from across the economic and racial spectrum. His early encounters with being gay were at the restaurant, from asking the super cute cook to teach him (an excuse just to be close) to the gay couple, one in drag, who used a racial slur but still showed a gay adulthood was possible. So, yeah, he also learned about racism. Chin is a fine writer with a compelling story to tell. I enjoyed the book and recommend it. My Sunday movie was Ennio, a documentary about film composer Ennio Morricone, released in 2021 after his death, though that is not mentioned. I streamed this through Kanopy and was surprised it didn’t come with subtitles. I had to explicitly turn subtitles on. Yes, Morricone is Italian, so his words and most of the commentary was in that language. His father demanded he learn to play the trumpet as Dad did. When the boy was a teen in WWII he played in clubs to get enough to eat, sometimes substituting for his father. But he felt humiliated to play for food and tired of it. His playing was good enough to get into music school. While there he studied composition with a well known composer. A lot of that music was experimental. To pay the bills he arranged songs for singers. He wanted to do more than provide the chords, so every arrangement had something different about it. That led him to arrange, then compose, for films. He thought it was degrading, a thought a lot of film composers have, a thought pushed by composers able to write exclusively for the concert hall. His name got around and soon film director Sergio Leone wanted his talents. They realized they had been classmates. Leone is known for his spaghetti Westerns – Italian films set in the American West, such as A Fistful of Dollars. The quite unusual scores Morricone wrote for those movies set his reputation. Morricone could write fast and appears to have been able to do it at a desk, not at a piano. When a director wanted a change he could come up with something quickly. In 1969 he wrote for 23 films. Sometimes he could start developing his musical ideas as the script was being written. The actors could get a sense of what the director wanted by listening to music already written. Morricone’s fame grew with the score for The Mission in 1986 and The Untouchables in 1987. He was nominated for an Oscar for both and won neither. Several people thought his score was much better and his loss an injustice. After being nominated for and losing a few more Oscars the Academy gave him a lifetime achievement Oscar – and then he won outright the following year for The Hateful Eight. Morricone also wrote concert music, though those pieces aren’t well known, party because many of them are avant-garde. But starting about 2000 concerts of his film music became cultural events, filling arenas. He also saw that many of his tunes were so good they were pulled into the music of other composers. He pretty much redefined what film music could be. I found it all quite enjoyable and fascinating, but then I compose and I very much enjoy listening to film music. I have a CD of The Mission, which I listen to every so often. I once streamed one of his arena concerts (likely at his death). While I recommend this film I know it isn’t for everyone. While I spent evenings watching an orchestra concert, a movie (above), was a part of two rehearsals, and went to supper with my friend and debate partner (emphasis definitely on friend this time), there was a peace deal between Israel and Gaza. Hostages were released! Prisoners returned! After two years and significant destruction and death is the war over? Will I have to say something positive about the nasty guy? Last Friday morning Leila Fadel of NPR spoke to Gershon Baskin, described as a “veteran hostage negotiator,” an Israeli peace activist, and “was involved in back-channel discussions over this deal.” Baskin said:

I've been in regular communication with Steve Witkoff, the presidential envoy to the Middle East and his No. 1 confidant. And from that point, I was communicating with him. Mostly a one-way communication on the importance of the U.S. understanding that the only way that the war in Gaza would end is if President Trump decides that it has to end because Prime Minister Netanyahu had no interest in ending the war whatsoever. He was willing to continue it forever because it keeps him in power.

He also had contacts within Hamas. He told Fadel:

Every time they said, Israel won't accept this, Israel won't accept that, I kept telling Hamas, Israel won't accept anything. You have to imagine that you're sitting in a room across the table from Donald Trump, not from Netanyahu. The person you need to convince is Trump. Trump will impose a deal on Israel when the time is right, when he believes that you are serious about ending this war, returning the hostages, no longer controlling Gaza.

Then about how much credit the nasty guy gets:

A hundred percent. There's no question about it. Without Trump, this would not have happened.

Why doesn’t Biden get any credit?

Biden's relationship with Israel was problematic from the Israeli side. Let's face it, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ron Dermer, his main ally in the Israeli government, are Republicans. They support the American Republican Party, not the Democratic Party. They were hostile to Barack Obama. They were hostile to Joe Biden, and they're very supportive of Donald Trump. So that was one thing. Biden never had the leverage over Netanyahu that Trump has. I couldn't get Biden's people to look at the deal that I negotiated with Hamas in September 2024.

I was pleased that Friday evening NPR broadcast a rebuttal to Baskin. Host Scott Detrow talked to Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser to former President Biden. I’ll summarize his main points: When Biden left office there was a ceasefire in place with a plan for the end of the war (so Biden must have looked at something). Israel walked away. In the six months since then Hamas’ position has been very badly weakened and is a shadow of its former self. That allowed the nasty guy to apply some pressure.

So to me, the key thing here is that Israel had no more military objectives to achieve in Gaza, and Hamas had lost a huge amount of its capacity to continue to resist militarily. And when you put those two things together, this situation was ripe to be resolved.

Sullivan says there are still big issues: Will Israel withdraw out of Gaza? When? How willing are Hamas fighters to keep fighting? Who will govern Gaza? I’ve heard since there are still lots of ways the deal could fall apart. For example, the deal calls for other Arab countries providing a peace-keeping force. But why would they want to? Why would they want to put their own troops into a very dangerous situation? So because the nasty guy has done and continues to do so much harm, and because the peace in Gaza is far from a sure thing I won’t credit him for doing something good. Some examples, though mild, of the nasty guy continuing to be vile... Last week Alex Samuels of Daily Kos reported that as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary next year the nasty guy wants to hold an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout on the White House grounds. This will also be around his 80th birthday. I read that and thought he thinks the best way to celebrate our history is with violence. A reminder that the purpose of violence is to enforce the social hierarchy. Also last week Alix Breeden of Kos reported the nasty guy revealed plans for America’s own triumphal arch. I don’t know how it will compare to the Arch de Triomphe in Paris. The map on the nasty guy’s desk showed the arch would be placed across from the Lincoln Memorial where there is a traffic circle, currently just grass. Breeden noted it is another way the nasty guy insists on leaving his fingerprints on the capital. I note an arch of triumph implies destroying an opponent, not learning to live together. Oliver Willis of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s tendency to turn Fox News reporting into governmental policy. The nasty guy doesn’t read and he is an avid watcher of the network. That appears to be his major source of information. And he’s quite susceptible to suggestion. Couple that with Fox News’ reason to exist being the pumping out of conservative propaganda. The network showed one image of a migrant scaling the border. The nasty guy starts pushing a migrant invasion. The network shows old isolated images of violence in Portland and the nasty guy claims the city is “war ravaged.” His North Korea policy is based on what he watched on Fox News.

In his first term, the Trump-Fox feedback loop—as Media Matters for America senior fellow Matt Gertz has termed it—came to life. Trump watched the network religiously and built his presidency around its obsessions.

And the network’s influence has only gotten stronger during the second term. Alan Austin of the Kos community listed 40 ways the nasty guy and the MAGA movement are violating the Bible. He lists their actions with links to articles and the Bible verse that contradicts the actions. Here is a selection:

2. Greed for personal wealth. Proverbs 29:4 affirms that rulers intent on justice build strong nations but those obsessed with money ruin them. 3. Skewing the economy in favor of the rich. Jeremiah 22:16 refers to the righteous King Josiah who won God’s approval by defended the poor first and foremost. 6. MAGA leaders refuse foreigners equal rights as the native-born. Leviticus 19:33-34 demands equality: “Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” 7. Trump and other MAGA leaders routinely call for violence against perceived political enemies. Philippians 4:5-7 urges believers to be peaceful and gentle towards everyone. 18. Multiple court cases and bankruptcy hearings have confirmed Trump has defrauded thousands of employees of their wages. Jeremiah 22:13 vehemently condemns the employer “who makes his people work for nothing and does not pay their wages.” 29. Changes to tax and other laws have shifted wealth and income from the poor to the rich. Proverbs 22:16 warns that this eventually impoverishes a nation.

Eat Together, Stick Together

My Sunday movie was The Old Oak. It is one of a series of films director Ken Loach has made about the lower class in England. The Old Oak is a pub, the last one in a village in northeast England. The village is not named but is near Durham. The town is deep in poverty because it had been dependent on coal mines, now closed. Town houses are going for dirt cheap prices because people are leaving. Many of those who remain can’t sell when prices are that low. That means in 2016 there was plenty of space to move in Syrian refugees. The locals are quite annoyed because the refugee families get government assistance and they don’t. Of course, there are the usual white – non-white issues. The pub owner is TJ. He tries to do what he can to help the refugees and is soon working with Yara, whose English is decent. She had worked with the nurses in the refugee camp in Syria, which gave her some medical training and helped her learn English. The pub has a back room, which has been locked up for 20 years. It has been neglected so long it can no longer be used, even though it might be the last place in town that big enough for any sort of community gathering. TJ takes Yara into the room to get something. She sees on the walls photos and sayings from the miner strikes. One photo shows big community meals with the caption “Eat Together, Stick Together.” And that gives her ideas for how to get the English and Syrians to respect each other. Of course, it doesn’t go smoothly. In the meantime TJ is dealing with poverty and failed relations. Yara and the other Syrians are dealing with the trauma of having lived in a war zone, being pulled from their homeland, and trying to make sense of a new country where they don’t feel welcome. I recommend this one. It is a good example of building community. I finished the book Boys Come First by Aaron Foley. It is a novel about Dominick, Troy, and Remy, three black gay friends (not lovers) in their early thirties living in Detroit. Over about nine months they deal with common issues of that age. Looking for sex and trying to turn it into love. Struggling to keep or establish a new career. Worried the best in life has already passed them by. Dealing with aging parents. And some issues unique to being black and living in Detroit. It has been a black city for decades. So white people moving back into the city feels like gentrification, leading to pushing out the black people and taking over the levers of power. This is very much a Detroit story. It is full of Detroit and suburban locations and of Detroit products. People not in the area won’t know the character of such places as Corktown, Midtown (formerly Cass Corridor), Rosedale, Indian Village, Somerset, Ferndale, Livonia, Novi, and Birmingham. They won’t know the reputations of Renaissance and Cass Tech High Schools. They won’t recognize Vernors and Faygo. I’m familiar with them because I’ve now lived in the area for more than forty years. I enjoyed this one. An item in the news today is the nasty guy had a long conversation with Putin about Ukraine. Whether Ukraine had any input about its own fate seemed to not be a part of the discussion. Yesterday, Kos of Daily Kos reported that in an interview with Fox News the nasty guy sounded like he was saying he would give Ukraine a half-trillion in military aid and wants a half-trillion in rare earth elements. Kos says though an exchange like that is morally repugnant, it would be an easy yes by Ukraine. First is that half-trillion in military aid. Second, the biggest deposits of rare earth elements are in the districts that Putin claimed back in 2014. To give those elements to America implies pushing Russia out of there. And those elements were why Russia invaded. Third, it seems this offer comes without the conditions Biden put on his gifts. Ukraine could use the supplies to attack sites within Russia. Lisa Needham of Kos wrote that the way the nasty guy has been talking matches the idea of the unitary executive, that the Constitution gives the president complete authority over the executive branch of our government without any checks from Congress or the judiciary. The prez can ignore a law he doesn’t like and can fire any employee he doesn’t like. No, the Constitution does not say that. Needham says this is not a new idea. Back in the Reagan years Attorney General Edwin Meese created the idea. Under Bush I Deputy Attorney General Bill Barr used the idea to say Congress didn’t need to authorize sending the military into Iraq. Under Bush II John Yoo and Dick Cheney said the president could authorize torture even though it was illegal. And Barr was back to push that idea onto the nasty guy. Needham then described a couple of the ways the nasty guy is acting like a unitary executive. He fired 17 inspectors general and removed the chair of the National Labor Relations Board. Now the question is whether this Supreme Court will side with the nasty guy or tell the executive branch it must follow the laws laid out by the legislative branch. We’re depending on the Supremes to uphold the Constitution because, as Emily Singer of Kos reported, Republicans in Congress aren’t going to do it. She listed many of the excuses they are using. And I’m not going to repeat them. Jeff Stein of the Washington Post tweeted the apparent DOGE game plan. It has three parts: 1. Gut and fire the federal workforce, which unlocks: 2. Control over agency functions and records, which unlocks: 3. Mass budget and agency cuts, reducing the size of government. As part of (1) we’ve seen attempts at buyout and purges of agency leadership. Coming soon might be mass sales of federal property. Part (2) would include sucking up internal and personnel records that had been carefully guarded, feeding sensitive government databases to AI to look for automation, and to put allies in charge of the payment systems. Then in part (3) they cut freely.

To me the biggest outstanding question now is what happens if/when the courts say much of this is illegal, as is widely believed by senior U.S. officials. Do Musk/Trump back down? Or do they ask John Roberts what troops he commands?

Kos reported that the mass deportations ordered by the nasty guy aren’t up to demanded quotas. That’s because immigration officials are already at capacity. They need help from local and state law enforcement. The nasty guy doesn’t want to punish red states by doing his mass purges in friendly territory. He would rather punish blue states. So his Justice Department filed suit against Illinois for being a sanctuary state. The stated reason is that there is a national emergency from illegal immigration (which is not an emergency). Illinois’ defense is solid. Back in 2017 Antonin Scalia wrote the federal government cannot command state or local officers and police to enforce a federal program. And if the Supremes reversed that decision the next Democratic president could demand local police more aggressively enforce gun laws. That’s the reason why Scalia ruled as he did. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted the New York Times:

Mr. Vance, a 2013 graduate of Yale Law School, has repeatedly argued in recent years that presidents like Mr. Trump can and should ignore court orders that they say infringe on their rightful executive powers. While his post did not go that far, it carried greater significance given that he is now vice president. The post may also offer a window on the administration’s thinking toward the orders against it as Mr. Trump has openly violated numerous statutes, like limits on summarily firing officials and effectively dismantling U.S.A.I.D. and folding it into the State Department. It also raised the question of whether the administration would stop abiding by rulings if it deemed them to be illegitimately impeding his agenda.

A major part of any court ruling against Vance and the nasty guy will be whether what they did was indeed a “rightful executive power.” In the comments Frank Amari posted a cartoon by Garth German showing a barbecue presided over by a man in a MAGA hat, who says, “I don’t want immigrants bringing their culture and ruining our country!!” Around him are pointers to where the barbecue supplies originated – fireworks from China, hot dogs from Germany, beer and chips and salsa from Mexico, lemonade from Egypt, apple pie from England, Cole slaw from the Netherlands, and the hat made in China. In a second roundup Chitown Kev quoted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. This one is about the National Institute of Health drastically cutting indirect support (the costs of simply running a lab) to universities. Marshall thinks there are two reasons. One is payback for COVID research and a general hostility to scientific expertise with the belief universities are not friendly to the nasty guy. The second reason is once the grants are seen as coming at the political pleasure of the Oval Office they become a powerful tool to discipline the institutions. Criticize him and your budget gets cut. In the comments of this roundup is a cartoon by Dennis Goris. A husband and wife are in bed. She shows him her phone and says, “It’s a text from Elon Musk – he’s in our checking account. We just bought a Tesla.” Way down in the comments of a third roundup The Geogre talks about the advantages of demonizing DEI.

Quite simply, it is a magical term for every person a bigot hates explained away by category so as to escape any individual critical thinking or moral accounting. 1. I don’t want to work around [Black people/ women, because I’m convinced I’ll be sued every minute of the day by those 1980’s propaganda campaigns/ gay people (because I have a stereotype of Ru Paul calling me names I don’t understand], 2. There is this one person _____, and I really envy/hate/argue with her/him. 3. If there were no quotas affirmative action DEI, then THEY wouldn’t be around me. 4. Therefore, I don’t have to think about why I dislike/avoid/can’t talk to THEM, and, even better, 5. No one can tell me I’m a bigot! Best of all, 6. I can tell them that they’re for waste fraud and abuse because they want DEI!

Yes, we can tell him he’s a bigot. Further down in the comments is a cartoon by Paul Fell. It shows three wolves, labeled as the Nebraska Legislature and their Stand with Women Act, surrounding a girl with a red hooded cape. The wolves say:

Hiya, sweetie! Don’t mind us... We’re here to protect you from boys in girls restrooms! What’s in the basket?

The caption says:

What those pushing anti-trans legislation never tell you is that in order to apply their new laws, someone has to examine your kids. And as we all know, from religious figures to Olympic team doctors, too often that ends up with kids being assaulted.

Kyle Bravo posted a cartoon of God talking to an angel as he looks at a blackboard covered in mathematical equations, “I guess I can’t prove I exist either.” Pundit roundups seem to be a good way of getting a sense of what’s going on. In a fourth roundup Dworkin quoted Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum of Musk Watch discussing the invasion of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Musk has been talking about creating a peer-to-peer payment system, the kind of app the CFPB regulates. With Musk in control of this system he “now has tremendous access to confidential information about his competitors,” an official warned. Dworkin included a tweet by Chad Pergram:

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Dems/DOGE: The Democratic party has latched on to this new, shiny object called the rule of law

Noah Smith of Noahpinion wonders what DOGE is up to. It moves so fast and is so secretive we can’t keep up. Coverage is mostly reactive, filing suits against it and digging up dirt on its people. That’s too slow. So we should focus on two questions: “1. What is the actual purpose of DOGE? What are the main dangers of DOGE?” We have to think about what it is doing now and what it will do in the future. David Dayen of The American Prospect notes that for a half-century conservatives have been digging up dirt on small government programs while ignoring the real waste, “like the trillions of dollars that get funneled up from ordinary taxpayers to elites like Elon Musk.” One reason DOGE is going after IT systems is to integrate AI into government operations. The purpose is to automate government work and use AI to catch discrepancies.

So you have a bunch of techno-futurists who think that the future of government efficiency is either cherry-picking stuff that sounds bad, or running everything through a supposed HAL 9000 super-computer to weed out the waste. Neither will accomplish their aims, and will probably lead to tons of negative consequences in the process.

Dayan titled his piece, “Government by Malicious Autopilot.” Down in the comments Regina Schrambling posted a cartoon by Pedro Molina:

Two weeks ago he said he wanted Panama. A week ago he said he wanted Canada, Yesterday he said he wanted Greenland. Today he said he wants Gaza. But what he really wants is the attention of the world while his minions destroy the USA.

Way down in the comments is a cartoon by Jen Sorensen titled “In the end it was a catch-22.” It shows a gay man and two women talking to a guy in a suit. The black woman says, “Hey, we’re feeling a little existentially threatened over here.” The suit responds, “So elitist and polarizing! You mustn’t alienate the people who demonize you.” Not so far down in the comments paulpro posted a cartoon by Marco De Angelis. It shows a formal dinner with a waiter serving an apple. Around the table are people looking to enjoy that apple – Adam and Eve and the snake, Isaac Newton, William Tell and his son, Snow White and the witch, a couple I haven’t identified, and Bill Gates (though some say it should be Steve Jobs). In a separate post on Kos is Sorensen’s cartoon about the Consumer Financial Destruction Bureau. The tagline is a CFDB official saying, “Remember, the weak call strength ‘crime.’” At the top of a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos from Bill in Portland, Maine is a video from Denmark’s TV2. Several dozen people come into a room, each definable group standing in a square on the floor. There’s us and them, people we trust and people we avoid, the young and old, farmers and city dwellers. The announcer asks people of various characteristics to come forward to stand before a wall for a group photo. Who was the class clown? Who are stepparents? Who believes in life after death? Who has seen a UFO? Who loves to dance? Who has been bullied? Who has bullied? Who has had sex in the last week? Who feels lonely? Who is bisexual? (Only one came forward.) Who admires his courage? Who loves Denmark? That brings everyone forward. “Maybe there’s more that brings us together than we think.”

Send deportees to Guantanamo for a more macho message

Mary Louise Kelly and Sacha Pfeiffer of NPR talked about the nasty guy’s announcement of using Guantanamo to hold deportees as they’re processed and before they are sent to their country of origin. The big issue is cost to get perhaps up to 30,000 deportees there, to feed, house, and supervise them. Congress would have to allocate the money and they might not approve it. There are also legal issues. They brought Ben Wittes of the legal website Lawfare to talk about the legal issue and also why the nasty guy thinks this is a great idea. Said Wittes:

The name Guantanamo Bay to America signals terrorist detention. So it elevates the status of what are really routine immigration enforcement actions into something like holding major terrorist figures that signals, I'm going to bring back the big bad Guantanamo Bay for this.

Pfeiffer adds that putting the detention center somewhere on the US mainland “wouldn't send as much of a macho message.” Khalil AlHajal is an opinion page writer for the Detroit Free Press. I’m pleased that with the Detroit region having such a large Arab population the Freep has an Arab opinion writer, though the piece I’m discussing isn’t about Arab issues. It’s about a Detroit program that has helped lower homicide rates. Detroit has a ShotSpotter system in which microphones are placed around the city that listen for gunshots. When the system registers a shot police are notified with the hope they will respond quickly. Detroit also has various neighborhood watch programs to help reduce crime. These are run by the citizens and have been quite successful. They helped get funding so the ShotSpotter system could expand. Along with that help they went to police and said there is a fundamental flaw to the system. By the time it registers something, the shot has already been fired. That’s too late. What we need is a ShotStopper system. That’s us. So help us get funded so we can do the work full time, rather than as volunteers who also have full time jobs. Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison described the program and the people who work it.

“They actually understand and know the lifestyles of these young men and women,” Bettison said. “These community violence intervention groups know exactly where to find them, exactly how to communicate with them and how to inspire them to leave that life. When they realize that they do matter, and they start seeing themselves in the future, at that point, with hope, they stop acting reckless ... “If you’re hopeless and you don’t see yourself in the future, you’re very, very dangerous, because you don’t care about yourself or anybody else. You’ve just completely given up. And the young folks have a word for it — crash out. … You just don’t care about nothing. At that point, you’re a suicide dummy, and you don’t care who you destroy as you’re going out.”

In the program areas homicides dropped 45% between Nov. 1, 2023 and Oct. 31, 2024. AlHajal gets to the reason for his opinion piece. State funding to keep the program running didn’t actually get into a state law by the end of the year. This program is worth funding. Without it lives are at risk. Wednesday night a commercial airplane about to land at Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC collided with a military helicopter. Both craft ended up in the Potomac River. Between the two craft 67 lives were lost. Of course, NPR has been looking at this story from every angle they can think of. There have also been many related political stories. And one of those is by NPR host Kelly talking to reporter Lisa Hagen. The kernel of the story is in Kelly’s introduction:

So the investigation into what caused this fatal air collision is just beginning, but almost immediately, President Trump and other administration officials said diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the Federal Aviation Administration were to blame. Trump also acknowledged he had no direct evidence that DEI had anything to do with the crash.

Hagen talked to Ian Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California who wrote the book “Dog Whistle Politics.” Hagan summarized what he said:

Blaming DEI is shorthand for a story that America used to be based only on competence and meritocracy, which - that's an inversion of our actual history of pervasive discrimination against people other than straight, white men.

During the press conference the nasty guy read from the actual FAA DEI policy, decrying what it said. But it is the same policy that was in effect during his first term. The argument for DEI is that it makes hiring more about merit than anything else. The argument against DEI is that it makes hiring less about merit. With those competing claims I know who I believe. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos wrote that the nasty guy gutted an aviation safety committee just a few days before the crash. He couldn’t eliminate the committee because that would require an act of Congress. But he could fire all its members. The article doesn’t say in what way, if any, gutting the safety committee had on the collision. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported the nasty guy blamed more than DEI for the collision. He also blamed outgoing Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Barack Obama, Democrats, air traffic control, and all the kinds of people the DEI policy helped. Emily Singer of Kos reported on Buttigieg’s response, posted on X.

Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.

Buttigieg also said the nasty guy bears part of the blame. He had succumbed to Musk’s demands to fire the head of the FAA because he fined Musk’s company SpaceX. So at the time of the crash there was no head to the FAA. Singer included a tweet by Vince Monroy about a moment in the press conference:

Reporter: You blamed the diversity elements but then told us you weren’t sure that the controllers made any mistakes. Trump: It’s all under investigation. Reporter: That’s why I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash.

Singer also noted the new Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seem quite unprepared to handle the situation. And that’s because they’re quite unqualified for their new jobs. Singer also reported that staffing at the control tower at Reagan National was low. Note above that Buttigieg said he “grew Air Traffic Control” which is still below what it should be, though getting staffing up to where it should be takes time. Singer discussed what we face if the DOGE group is able to shrink the government workforce as they say they want to. Too few air traffic controllers would lead to flight delays, fewer flights, higher prices, and less safe skies. Too few Food and Drug Administration inspectors would lead to unsafe food and contaminated drugs. Too few Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors would lead to more workplace injuries and deaths. Getting passports, Social Security cards, and payment for Medicaid and Medicare claims would take longer. We’ve had one big pandemic, gutting the National Institute of Health could mean a second one. And a whole lot more government services would be interrupted. Liam Clymer of Pridesource offers guidelines on how to keep yourself safe when protesting. His tips are from LGBTQ advocates. The tips are offered because LGBTQ people can be especially targeted by counterprotesters. I’ll mention the tips and let you read the article for details. Research the event and understand its goals. Know the situation and what voices will be raised against yours. Practice self-care. Know your limits. Don’t wear anything that would let others think your intentions are violent. You may also want to protect your identity to prevent doxxing, which might mean wearing a COVID style mask. Take water, snacks, fully charged phone, and ID. If you use Face ID to unlock your phone turn it off. With Face ID police may feel emboldened to pressure you into unlocking your phone. Use a digit-based code. Observe your environment for danger from those who want to escalate the protest and from police. Move to minimize risk. Have a buddy, both outside of the protest and within. When someone tries to escalate remain calm with your voice steady. Avoid provocative behavior that others might interpret as leading to escalation or violence. If necessary, remove yourself. Learn from the elders and veterans at meetings beforehand and at the event. Know your rights. You have a right to demonstrate in public places and to photograph anything, including police, that’s in plain view. Identify where the protest marshals are. Also, medics and who has water supplies. Make sure the marginalized (such as trans people) are included and their voices heard. Write the number of a lawyer on your arm. See Michigan Legal Help and ACLU. If detained try to write down police names, badge and patrol car numbers, and the agency they work for. Also record and take pictures of injuries. Use social media to amplify the message of the protest. In a Cheers and Jeers column from a week ago Bill in Portland, Maine of Kos included his usual late night commentary.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen: it happened. Donald Trump is president again. I have an important announcement to make: for the next four years we get to live by airport rules: calories don’t count, and it's perfectly reasonable to have a vodka tonic at 8am." —Stephen Colbert

And more late night commentary from today.

"A new report shows that since last year the price of eggs has risen more than 35 percent, due to a shortage caused by new laws in red states that force chickens to carry their eggs to term." —Michael Che

Is this school better? You're not allowed to know.

I visited the Detroit Auto Show this afternoon. My purpose was to talk to representatives of the various car companies to ask if they have an electric car that meets my needs. My needs are straightforward. I want a car. Not an SUV or a truck. A car. And it doesn’t need to be very big. I want one car. I don’t have space for two. I want an electric car with a sufficient range to visit by brother on one charge. He lives about 275 miles away. The trip is short enough that I don’t want a lengthy recharging stop halfway through. Any farther than that and I’ll likely stop for a meal and could include a charge. The bad news is car companies are not there yet. The good news is they’re getting close. Several said they have vehicles with a 300 mile range or close to it. Alas, most of these vehicles are SUVs and bigger than I want and costing much more than I want to pay. Stellantis has a nice little electric car, but it gets only 150 miles on a charge. Jon Paul Sydnor is a writer for Street Prophets, a progressive Christian community on Daily Kos. He recently wrote that concepts of God matter and he proposed a progressive concept of God. The post discusses a lot of theology, most of which is of no interest to me (and likely to you). However, this is one idea that is interesting and is related to conservative Christianity.

Christian theologians, following Plato, have insisted that since only imperfect things can develop or increase, and God is perfect, God cannot develop or increase. Divine development would imply divine imperfection. ... Intentionally or accidentally, this concept of God condemns change. If God is immutable—static and unchanging—then to be static and unchanging becomes our highest ideal. If God is immutable, then by implication that which is must take priority over that which could be. All change becomes decline. Divinized immutability reinforces social rigidity, preserving entitlement and preventing reform. Such stasis was never the intention of the Hebrew prophets or Christ Jesus.

Eli Hager, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, discussed the school voucher program in Arizona. The example in the story was Title of Liberty, a private Mormon school in Mesa that went out of business. It’s source of income was voucher payments through the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. There were some reasons why this particular school failed. But there were other reasons related to the way Arizona set up their voucher program. Some of them: The law that created the ESA provided zero transparency into a school’s finances, or academic quality. Parents has no information on whether this school was better than that school (or any good at all), had a solid or shady past, and was financially healthy enough to stick around for the entirety of their child’s education. Public schools in Arizona are tightly regulated and their performance is known. That’s not true of charters. Schools that take public money yet have no public accountability is baffling to many educators and parents. The vouchers benefit the rich, who could afford the tuition anyway. They don’t benefit the poor mainly because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods. Parents who send their kids to private schools can speak at public school board meetings and vote in school board elections. Public school parents cannot attend the board meetings of a private school. Defenders of vouchers say the American education should be a free market of options. But if the quality of a school is a secret a parent can’t make good purchasing decisions. A parent needs quality assurance. The No Child Left Behind law, a big legislative achievement of Bush II, was big on transparency and accountability. Schools had to prove they were educating kids up to state standards. The same standards applied to schools accepting vouchers. About 2017-2020 studies “found that larger voucher programs had produced severe declines in student performance, especially in math.” The declines were blamed in part on overregulation, which prompted no regulation and secrecy. Is the school you’re considering for your child better? You’re not allowed to know. Oliver Willis of Kos discussed why Republicans are so eager to blame various people for the Los Angeles fires and their severity. Willis includes several examples of their accusations. Their tirades aren’t just about the fire and they’re not new. California is frequently targeted because it is highly Democratic.

Over the decades, conservative politicians and right-wing media have frequently used California as subject of scorn and derision because of the state’s liberal politics. California has embraced many progressive policies on the environment, gender equality, LGBTQ+ equality, and racial equality, while also being the home to the entertainment industry and much of the tech industry. When something bad happens in California, conservatives flock to the issue to use it as “proof” that liberalism and the Democratic Party are also bad.

In the case of the fires the severity can partly be blamed on conservatism and their climate change denial. Willis also reported that this time Republicans aren’t content to lay blame. They’re now talking about politicizing the fires. There is talk to link relief funds to a plan to raise the federal debt limit. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. With the way the government is spending money (to soon be made worse by renewing tax cuts) the debt limit has to be raised. Not doing so means a government shutdown. Also, because of the House Freedom Caucus Republicans on their own don’t have enough votes to raise the limit. So enticing Democrats to vote for the increase by throwing in wildfire aid might be good. But it is also bad because it sets a precedent. If done once there will be a next time. And next time the pairing may not be with raising the debt limit, but with such things as tax cuts for the rich, or efforts to remove LGBTQ books from school libraries, or authorization to invade Greenland. I also remember that a big reason why the nasty guy wants the debt ceiling raised is so he can extend tax cuts to billionaires. That’s bad. But he is going to do that anyway. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Edward Helmore of The Guardian:

The politicization of the Los Angeles fires could be showing signs of intensifying. To opposing political factions, the ruin of parts of Los Angeles offers an inviting but deadly tableau on which to lay out their contrary agendas. To Democrats, the intensity with which the fires took hold, propelled by the late-season Santa Ana winds, is evidence of climate change that some Republicans deny as a political hoax. To some Republicans, including Trump, the fires are evidence of mismanagement under Democrats’ racial- and gender-equity drives. ... Warren Davidson, an Ohio representative, called on Friday for federal disaster relief to be withheld from California unless the state reforms its forestry management practices.

And from Parker Malloy of The New Republic:

The same people who spent years telling us climate change isn’t real are now trying to blame the fires on the fact that the L.A. Fire Department’s chief is a woman. Never mind that Kristin Crowley worked her way up through the ranks for 22 years. Never mind that the department’s leadership is still predominantly male. The right has found a way to combine their favorite bogeymen: diversity initiatives, California governance, and climate science. ... This is the playbook we’re going to see for every climate disaster going forward. Rather than acknowledge the role of climate change, rather than have honest discussions about infrastructure and emergency preparedness, the right will search for ways to blame their cultural grievances. Everything becomes evidence of their preferred narrative: Hydrant failures become proof of Democratic mismanagement, female leadership becomes proof of “woke” politics gone wrong, and the actual causes get buried under an avalanche of manufactured outrage.

In the comments of a second pundit roundup is a cartoon by Mike Luckovich. It shows a person at the base of a devastated hillside crawling for help. A person labeled “GOP” says, “You want aid? Put on this MAGA cap.” And exlrrp posted a meme:

Over a MILLION acres of wildfires in Texas last year. Funny that it wasn’t blamed on poor water resource management, black or female firefighters or [Gov.] Greg f---ing Abbott.

Hurricane over Kentucky

Last evening I went to downtown Detroit for the Ruth Ellis Center 25th anniversary gala. The first part of the adventure was parking. The freeway exit I wanted to take – near the Fox Theater and entertainment district, baseball stadium (the Tigers are doing quite well now, but I don’t know if there was a game), hockey arena (has the Red Wings season started?), and football stadium (Lions are also doing well, but I’m sure they weren’t playing on a Thursday night) – was way backed up. I figured the nearby parking lots would be full. So I went around downtown and ended up at Grand Circus Park, not too far from my venue, and with a parking garage underneath. So I parked. Many of the pillars have signs on how to pay by phone, saying how easy it was – do something on their app and then just drive out. The exit stairwell had a sign about the penalties of not paying. But there was nothing about how to pay if one doesn’t have a phone – and I hadn’t brought mine. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to put their app on it even if I had brought it. There was no sign of payment machines in the stairwell, entranceways, or on the parking floor. At the end of the evening I got in my car and drove to the exit. There was no payment machine there, either. The exit opened and I drove out. Was parking free for the evening? Will I get a bill with a penalty? For that I’ll simply wait. And if there is a penalty I will strongly object. And my reasoning will be simple – they do not provide a way to pay for those without a smartphone. On to the fun part of the evening. In walking to the venue from Grand Circus and past the Fox Theater I could see downtown Detroit is a happening place now. That’s good to see. Though I hadn’t been to the Center since the start of the pandemic, four and a half years now, one of the women checking guests in recognized me. I had served supper on Wednesdays for 11 years and the youth had gotten to know me. This woman had been a youth at the time. Also, pretty cool, a staff person I knew well and the executive director also recognized and welcomed me. The cocktail hour was followed by a sitdown dinner. There were over 200 people in the hall, which was quite resonant and thus loud. I had the butternut squash ravioli with a butter herb sauce (a little too sweet) plus a salad, rolls, and dessert. The emcee for the evening was comedian Sandra Bernhard, a lesbian. She gave a passionate condemnation of the nasty guy and spirited support of Harris. Beyond that she stuck to her emcee role and did little comedy. Executive Director Mark Erwin spoke about the history of the Ruth Ellis Center. Memorial Day weekend in 1999 several elders in the Detroit LGBT community got together. By elder I don’t mean old, I mean they were well into adulthood. Some are still around. They had heard a youth had been thrown out of his home because he had told his family he was gay. The elders said this is not good, what are we going to do about it? They laid out immediate plans to get the boy a place to stay, some intermediate plans to create a safe space for LGBT teens, and long term plans for their most elaborate wishes for safe medical care and safe housing. They named the project for Ruth Ellis, caretaker and mentor for many of these elders and for many other LGBT people in Detroit through the 20th century. By the following year they had a place. And Ruth Ellis, at age 101, cut the ribbon. She died two months later. By 2007 a new drop in space was purchased, renovated, and opened. This is where I had done my volunteer work. A couple years before the pandemic a small medical clinic opened in the building. In 2022 the Clairmount Center for safe housing and support services opened. They’ve gone on to success in many areas of helping LGBT youth thrive and stay connected to families and they are a model for similar organizations around the country. Bernhard talked about the nonsense of requiring women to give birth and then throwing the child out because they are queer. If you’re so pro family to insist on one how can you do the other? A youth leadership award was given to a young woman who had needed the Center’s services and was now giving back. The name wasn’t familiar to me (though I knew few of their names). There was a Ruth Ellis Legacy Award given to a person who most exemplified the spirit and grace of Ruth Ellis. I was delighted with the winner – Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer! She has done a lot for the LGBTQ citizens of the state, as was documented. Whitmer wasn’t there to receive the award in person, though did appear on video. I’m pretty sure a drawing of her lesbian daughter was on the table behind her. The award was accepted by the chairperson of the LGBTQ commission, which Whitmer created to guide the state government in how to better treat LGBTQ people. The evening ended with a few songs by Wyn Stark. I hadn’t heard of him before (as I don’t pay attention to popular singers). He is good. One of the songs was about coming to terms with being gay. This was their first gala in five years. In previous years I went as a volunteer of some sort, such as checking in the guests. This time I actually paid to attend. It was a great evening and I’m glad I went. Hurricane Helene has swamped the big bend of Florida, soaked Georgia, and as I write this is over Kentucky. Kentucky?! My niece, living north of the eye said they expected worse wind and the power to go out. Schools had closed. Now they’re waiting for the rain to end. My forecast for the next four days is rain. I don’t know if this will be Helene remnants reaching north or another storm system. In a pundit roundup for Daily Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet by Craig Pittman who included a photo of a marina in which all the boats were on the beach and road. He included a quote from and a link to an article in the Florida Phoenix.

"Project 2025 calls for tying the hands of the National Weather Service, eliminating its role as a forecaster. It would relegate the agency to only collecting data. Then private companies could use that taxpayer-funded info."

Dworkin also quoted Alan Elrod of The UnPopulist

During a White Dudes for Harris fundraising Zoom call, Walz said, “one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” The point wasn’t to argue for the implementation of doctrinaire socialism, as his conservative critics alleged, but to emphasize that actions and policies that take our pluralism seriously often get unfairly dismissed as radical leftism. His aim was to redefine progressive politics not as a slow-moving statist takeover, as Republican portrayals suggested, but as a form of affirmative concern for your community and the people around you. Neighborliness is one of the main victims of this era of intense polarization and digitized communication. In recent decades social trust has eroded, and other social capital indicators reinforce the same conclusion. There is an anger and cynicism about one another that runs from small town squares to urban high-rises. However, neighborliness is not just about interpersonal decency. In Walz’s usage, it’s about social policy, which is far broader than most uses of the word; this is a neighborliness of scale. Walz is not dismissive of everyday neighborliness—on the contrary, for him it’s a microcosm of good governance. But his conception does go beyond mere interpersonal neighborliness and informs a full social vision predicated on the idea that what it means to be a good neighbor is the same as what it means to take seriously the demands of a multicultural democracy.

The nasty guy told women, “I’ll be your protector.” In the comments are several cartoons showing how creepy that comes across.

Institutionalize racism into our federal government

I don’t pay attention to what goes on in popular music – classical is my thing. A couple interviews in Pridesource prompted me to listen to a couple songs – songs with definitely queer lyrics. Ben Platt became famous as the lead in Dear Evan Hanson that was a big hit on Broadway and ran for long enough that Platt became obviously too old for the teenage character he was playing. He has acted elsewhere and recently released his third studio album. The album cover shows Platt and his soon to be husband in a 1950s convertible making out. The song on this album I listened to is “Andrew.” It is a lament of a gay boy who has a crush on his straight male friend, an Andrew. The friend doesn’t seem aware the gay boy would be delighted with a kiss, but the gay boy knows he won’t ever get one. It’s all a cruel joke with no one to blame. Lyrics here. The other singer is Orville Peck. He sings country and is openly gay. He also just released an album, one of collaborations with other country singers. He’s been performing wearing a mask because it helps him feel more comfortable and vulnerable, though in his interview he said with each album the mask feels less important. The song is “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.” This song was written way back in 1981 by Latin country musician Ned Sublette. Willie Nelson sang it as a solo back in 2006 – he’s quite the ally. This version is Peck and Nelson alternating verses – Peck has rich sonorous voice. The first verse, which Peck sings, is:

Well, there's many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas There's many a young boy who feels things he can't comprehend And a small town don't like it when somebody falls between sexes No, a small town don't like it when a cowboy has feelings for men

And the second half of Nelson’s verse:

Well, a cowboy may brag about things that he's done with his women But the ones who brag loudest are the ones that are most likely queer

Both songs are easily found on YouTube. I finished the book Dearborn, by Ghassan Zeineddine. Dearborn is the suburb directly to the west of Detroit. The city used to have a highly racist mayor at a time when Detroit was becoming increasingly black. The Detroit metro area has the highest population of Arabs outside the Middle East and many of them moved to Dearborn. The city has such a large Arab population the mayor is now Arab and it was the center of protests against Biden for his support of Israel in the Gaza war. The book is ten stories of Arab-Americans living in Dearborn. The people in these stories came from Lebanon or had ancestors who did, so many stories feature why they left – a civil war and a war with Israel would do it. Some of the newer arrivals are afraid of being caught by ICE. A few are hoping for the big sign of success – their company is successful enough they can put their face on a billboard. Some women tell of when they were a teenager and a young man showed up at the house and proposed marriage. Single men and women are expected to live with their parents, no matter their age, until they are married. After the 9/11 attacks they become wary of the FBI. There is even a story of a transgender person, a father and husband who would rather dress as a woman – and quite glad Muslim women can wear garments that cover all but the eyes. I very much enjoyed these stories. I was surprised to learn in the author’s biography that he probably never lived in Dearborn. When he mentions locations and street names I thought all but one were accurate. The one that wasn’t referenced a nursing home on Ford Rd. at the highway. There are two places where a highway is near or crosses Ford Rd. I don’t see a nursing home at either of them. A few days ago I wrote about the mattering movement, the effort to help children and youth feel they matter. On Saturday on NPR reporter Cory Turner visited one elementary school in the Livingston Union School District in California’s Central Valley. The reason for the visit is a kindergarten class that has exceptionally low absenteeism, not just in the post pandemic era of lots of children missing lots of school days, but for several years before. Sujie Shin of the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence says there is a basic question related to a child’s success in school: “Is there an adult at school that cares about you - yes or no? That's it.” In another kindergarten class across town Diana Dickey greets each child. When one child is not there they move the child’s photo inside a big heart. That tells children when they’re not there they are missed. Another kindergarten cheers when all students are there. When one boy feels apprehensive about coming another boy waits and they walk in together. The parents are delighted with the school and that their children want to go and are disappointed they don’t go on weekends. Turner said:

By building a school culture where the children feel valued, Mrs. Dickey says students also learn to value and help each other.

The children feel valued. They learn to value each other. That’s the mattering movement. It is giving the students a grounding in mental health. My Sunday movie was Absolute Beginners, episodes 1 and 2 out of six. It is a film out of Poland, so Netflix dubbed it and actor’s lips don’t match the English. This time other actors are credited with the dubbing. Niko and Lena are two high school seniors trying to get into film school. They have been friends since quite young, almost brother and sister, and their parents share a cottage at a seaside resort. When the story begins they have a week to make the film that they’ll submit with the application. But as they get to the sex scene Niko refuses. Also at the resort is a basketball training camp. Igor is the captain of the team. He has a troubled past he hasn’t talked about yet. Scouts will be at the weekend game, a chance for him to go on to something better. Igor has a girlfriend Malwina, whom he’s known all of four days. She’s the daughter of the couple who own the restaurant and feels she will get left behind when Igor moves on. As the second episode ends Lena’s parents say they need to sell their share of the cottage and Niko’s parents don’t have enough to buy them out. Also, Lena tells Igor she has just the right part for him in her movie, the obvious implication is that Igor will replace Niko in the sex scene. I wrote about Justice Alito flying two flags as symbols of support for the 2021 Capitol attack. Daily Kos community member davidkc asks the important question: If that flag flying was in 2021 why is the Washington Post reporting it now? WaPo had an article written three years ago. They didn’t publish it. In it they described the upside-down American flag as a “political charged symbol.” Yet, they said the argument between Martha-Ann Alito and a neighbor that supposedly prompted her to display the inverted flag was not clearly “rooted in politics.” Which prompts many of us to say: Huh? My friend and debate partner sent me a link to this article, written by Aaron Pellish of CNN, about Chase Oliver winning the nomination for president of the Libertarian Party. My friend sent it to me because Oliver is gay. A gay presidential candidate! He’s also quite young – 38. This article says Oliver’s win signifies an embrace of “wokeness,” though I can’t tell if the person saying that thinks that’s a good thing or bad thing. Back in 2017, when I was working to collect signatures for the anti-gerrymandering proposal that passed in 2018, I spent an afternoon at a table outside the convention for the Libertarian Party of Michigan. The state chair and a few others signed. The convention as a whole voted to reject it. From what little I could hear from my table and from what I’d read elsewhere my feelings of the Libertarians is quite simple. They are so anti-tax their philosophy comes across as “I got mine. Too bad you don’t got yours.” Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about one aspect of the proposed nasty guy administration and the Project 2025 document supporting it. This piece would “institutionalize racism and racial bias into our federal government.” It would accomplish that by redefining “racism,” which would redefine all the laws that mention racism and are meant to alleviate oppression of non-white people. Dartagnan wrote:

For them, “racism” is quite literally reimagined and reconfigured as anything that they perceive as a threat to the continued hegemony of white Americans. We are already seeing an implicit reappraisal of “racism” and civil liberties in several Republican-dominated states, as white people seek to preserve and maintain the racial dominance they have enjoyed in this country since the days of its founding.

Racism becomes defined as oppression by non-white people against white people. So “affirmative action” becomes “affirmative discrimination.”

In recent years, the Republican Party has consciously and deliberately abandoned almost all efforts to present itself as anything but a group devoted to maintaining white power and white supremacy. The political weapon they choose to wield: blame. White Americans—particularly middle- and working-class white Americans—are routinely indoctrinated by right-wing media to believe that their inability to make economic headway in American society is due to the encroachment of other races upon their “status” as white people.

Examples of the lies they use in their blame: Other races are willing to accept lower pay so white people’s pay can’t be increased. Black people are blamed for the high cost of health care, Medicare, and Social Security. Racial preferences hold white people back. Corporate DEI programs discriminate against whites. Nothing in those examples are true, though they are still potent. I’ll try a rewrite those examples to be closer to the truth: Corporations underpay non-white people and use that as an excuse to deny wage increases to white people. Corporations insert themselves between patients and their health care. Rich people block being taxed fairly and Social Security is denied enough money. As for racial preferences and DEI programs white people interpret non-whites being treated equal to themselves as discrimination.

Put bluntly, white people do not need such protections. Civil rights laws were not passed to rectify injustice against white people, because white people—particularly white men—are the nation’s most wealthy, most politically dominant, and by far the most privileged American citizens. Anti-discrimination laws will probably never change that dynamic, but they do preserve some degree of equal opportunity and protection from this country’s apparently immutable racism. Nevertheless, emboldened by a right-wing Supreme Court demonstrably hostile to racial equity, Project 2025’s proponents see this as their moment.

Project 2025 establishes white supremacy as national policy. Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos quoted an Associated Press article:

A new report released Tuesday by States United Action, a group that tracks election deniers, said nearly one-third of the lawmakers in Congress supported in some way Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 results or otherwise cast doubt on the reliability of elections. Several more are hoping to join them, running for election this year to the House and Senate.

Pennyfarthing adds:

More specifically, States United Action found that 170 representatives and senators of the total 535 Congress members are election deniers of some kind. Meanwhile, the group determined that two new Senate candidates and 17 new House candidates fall into the same category.

Clio2 of the Kos community wrote this month’s installment of LGBTQI+ Literature. The topic is autobiographies of intersex women. Amazingly, three such autobiographies were published last year. They are by Pidgeon Pagonis, Caster Semenya, and Alicia Roth Weigel. I had heard of Semenya before, but not the other two. Pagonis described surgeries to “fix” her, to remove the male portions of her anatomy. The surgeries were done without her informed consent (for some of them she was too young to consent). Things were not explained well to her parents either. All of the surgeries were cosmetic and not necessary. Pagonis is not working to get such intersex surgeries banned. While growing up in South Africa Semenya discovered she could run really fast. Soon she was entered into races, which was a big help to her family’s finances. When she began to break records she was subjected to a full gynecological exam. Only then did she learn “she had no uterus, no fallopian tubes, and a pair of undescended testicles that produced an elevated level of testosterone in her blood compared with most women.” And the sports community put her through hell. Even so, she brought home a silver medal from one Olympics and a gold from the next. Weigel also had surgery at a young age to remove undescended testicles. Her parents were told it should be done because they might become cancerous (the truth and logic of that is doubtful). After learning about intersex at 27 she became an advocate against the gender binary. That made her a public figure and a target for threats. Clio2 wrote:

Under the orders of -- perhaps not coincidentally, male -- authority figures, each of them subjected to drastic, involuntary medical interventions designed to remodel their bodies, surgically and/or chemically. In order to conform them more closely to a certain conceptual archetype of female. To render them, in effect, "female enough." ... A notion that also is deployed to buttress "traditional" power relations, including racism and the subordination of women. In line with which interest, exceptions must be erased. While "protecting children" is invoked as cover for "protecting the status quo."

A quote from Pagonis’ book:

We are raised to believe that you should just be able to glance at someone for a split second and know not only what lies between their legs but between their ears....[T]here is also supposed to be an inherent synchronicity between the two.

Weigel noted the contradiction of bills in which trans kids who want gender-affirming care are denied that care and in the same bill intersex kids who haven’t asked for such care yet have it forced on them. The demand to “fix” intersex kids is a piece of the demand to prohibit treating trans kids and the demand to “cure” gay people. And that is all wrapped up in misogyny, racism, and all the other things where one group oppresses another.

If other democracies can hold their leaders accountable...

I saw two documentaries this weekend, both a part of the Freep Film Fest (Freep is the nickname of the Detroit Free Press newspaper). Thankfully, I could stream both of them at home. The first was: Ignore the Noise: The Transformation of the Detroit Riverfront. It is just under an hour long. For much of Detroit’s 300 year history (it was founded in 1701) the river was all about commerce and it was essentially the back door to companies along the river. Except for Belle Isle the public didn’t have access to the river. As Detroit fell on harder times after the middle of the 19th century there were attempts to use the riverfront as a way to revitalize the city. The first of those was the Renaissance Center, built in the mid 1970s. It is the tallest building in the city. But it was built with a bunker mentality as a place for white suburbanites, not black Detroiters. And though it was right on the river it didn’t provide access to the river. Then General Motors bought the RenCen (this movie doesn’t say they bought it from rival Ford). GM needed more space for its headquarters. One of the early things GM did was to create the Wintergarden, a glass-enclosed atrium to connect the complex to the river and to improve access from the atrium’s doors to the river. That was part of talk to improve public access to the river from “bridge to bridge” – the four miles from the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor and the bridge to Belle Isle. Another step happened in the 1990s when President Bill Clinton designated the Detroit River an American Heritage River. I think this was the only urban river to get the designation. That provided grant money. Then Windsor got a casino and Detroit was in a tizzy watching so much gambling money go across the river. Detroit had voted down casinos (I think three times) but then Detroit had all the problem gamblers of a nearby casino but none of the revenue. So another vote was held and casinos were approved. There was talk of putting the three casinos on the riverfront. Thankfully, that was abandoned when planners realized it would not increase public access to the river. The next prompt for action was Detroit’s 300th birthday in 2001. There was a fleet of Tall Ships, old sailing ships, that came up the river. Planners saw clearly the only public access was Hart Plaza. People lined the river anyway, even if they had to go through private property to get there. The Detroit River Conservancy was created in 2002 to revitalize the riverfront. It was created separate from the mayor’s office. They raised money with a few key grants. They were responsible for stringing together each piece of property on the riverfront. Some parcels had apartments and the conservancy said you really want to lease your riverfront to the city for free for 99 years, don’t you. A later apartment building went up and could advertise as life on the riverwalk. Another task was cleaning the industrial waste and remains. That included the silos of three cement companies. There was talk for a while about keeping one set of silos and painting murals on the sides. They’re all gone now. That separation from city government turned out to be important when Detroit was the hardest hit city during the foreclosure crisis. Again when Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who had been a big help with the riverwalk, was convicted of embezzling (I was surprised he appears in the film – and not just in old news clips). A third hit was GM’s bankruptcy and a forth was Detroit’s bankruptcy. If the riverwalk was under the control of the city government the project would have been abandoned, rather than delayed. The riverwalk is not complete all the way from downtown to the Ambassador Bridge. It is complete to the Belle Isle bridge, though some of the land near the bridge hasn’t been developed yet. I’ve walked a section of it and it is quite nice. And people – both city and suburban – use it. This is a Detroit success. Just days after watching this film I heard the news that GM will move its headquarters out of the RenCen into the old Hudson site where the second tallest building in the city is being built. This was the site of the largest Hudson Department Store, a huge place. I never made it inside (I didn’t grow up in the Detroit area) and the one time I tried I discovered they closed at 5:30. Lots of ideas were floated for reuse, but in 1998 it was imploded. Then the site sat empty for 20 years. The second move is The Riot Report. The movie begins with the 1967 riots – rebellions – in several, maybe more than 20, major cities, including Detroit. We see images of rioting, police response, fire and destruction in Newark, then Detroit. The March on Washington was four years before. This was a big event in the struggle for equal rights. And President Lyndon Johnson was leading on it, with his Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Great Society initiatives. He said it isn’t enough to open gates. All should have the ability to walk through those open gates. But every action had a backlash (in this case a “whitelash”). That included Barry Goldwater, who was the Republican candidate for president in 1964 and quite conservative. His claim was Johnson was fueling the unrest. Blacks were saying we have had enough of the systems that oppress us. Whites were saying you have made gains, why wasn’t that enough? The 1960s were still part of the black Great Migration from the south to the north. Cities were getting higher percentages of blacks. But the reporters discussing the black experience were white, male, and middle class. The Los Angeles Watts rebellion happened in 1965. Several more cities were hit in 1966. One voice in this movie said “riot” was not a good word because it means destruction without reason. When the 50th anniversary of the Detroit riots were commemorated in 2017 the word rebellion was decided to be a better fit. I’ll try to use it. Whites had sympathy for blacks in the south for resisting Jim Crow. But whites turned against blacks when they rebelled. There was lots of fear of blacks moving into white neighborhoods and their violence coming with them. In 1966 conservatives followed Goldwater’s playbook. When the rebellions happened in 1967 Johnson was in a political trap. He saw a commission to investigate the rebellions was a way out. Of course, many said, sure, another commission. That’s a way out, not to solve the problems. Johnson created the commission on civil disorders to figure out why it happened. He required members of the commission to be supporters of the Civil Rights act and the Vietnam war. The 11 members included politicians, business people, a woman, and two black men. One of them was from the NAACP. It was named the Kerner Commission for the chairman, Otto Kerner, governor of Illinois. Some thought Johnson could pull strings to get what he wanted out of them. That’s not what happened. Johnson essentially had three questions he wanted the commission to answer about the rebellions: What happened? Why did it happen? How can we prevent it from happening again? Some members wanted to look at root causes. Others wanted only to support police in how to crush the next uprising. Those wanting to look at causes prevailed. So the commission toured the country, visiting the cities where there had been rebellions. They sent teams to these cities to listen, then write reports of what they found. Sure, they talked to white people. They spent more time talking to black people. They saw the terrible living conditions. They saw the faces of the people who lived in those conditions. This was quite amazing for the 1960s. The black people said they knew how to protest Jim Crow with civil disobedience. But the rules of segregation in the North were not written into laws. They didn’t know how to protest something unwritten through civil disobedience. They had to protest in the streets. Youth saw the Civil Rights law has passed, yet their lives hadn’t changed. They had nothing to lose. Black people understood police were there to protect white interests. And whites didn’t want black people around. So the primary purpose of police was to patrol the boundary between white and black neighborhoods and keep blacks docile. They were frequently brutal. Their purpose was to remind black people: We’re in control. You’re supposed to be afraid of us. One would think that if the war on poverty wasn’t working the police would try something new. Instead, they doubled down. The situation was waiting for a spark. And the police had plenty of opportunities to provide it. They did so by overreacting. One solution was to integrate police (fifty years later we see how well that went). Some witnesses to the commission, such as J. Edgar Hoover, blamed the riots on outside agitators and Communists. They said our blacks wouldn’t behave this way. But the commission saw no Communists. When the report was published the reason for the rebellions was clear: white racism. The report said it that plainly. Black people were not crazy, they had good reason to act the way they did. The report indicted institutions and systemic power that supported that racism. It said racism threatened America. It proposed solutions to correct institutions. It was a report for white America to read, learn from, and act on. Failure to act would mean continued black rebellion. Other solutions included guaranteed basic income, open housing, and new jobs. It would cost about the same as what Johnson was spending in Vietnam. The report was published in paperback and sold widely. There were lots of media coverage of the report. The blurb for this movie seemed to imply it was buried. No, it wasn’t. It was in the hands of the public. When the report was published Johnson was in a box. Conservatives would not accept the conclusion. But Johnson couldn’t reject it without annoying liberals. So he refused to receive it. As for all those fine proposals Johnson claimed he didn’t have the money the proposals said should be spent. Congress said we’re waiting for bills to come from the president (a fine passive-aggressive stance) and Johnson offered none. Vietnam threatened Johnson’s Great Society initiatives. His presidency would be known, not for the good he did, but for Vietnam and riots. He had formed the commission to enhance his presidency. Instead, the report sunk it. In 1968 Johnson declared he would not run again. In a way, Johnson was right about not having money for what the report recommended. White people didn’t want to pay taxes to help rioting blacks. When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 rebellions flared again. Many blacks thought King’s efforts to end racism through non-violence hadn’t worked. The predictions of the Kerner report were fulfilled. A couple things came from the Kerner report. There was a fair housing law passed in 1968, but it was toothless. Also, news reporting as diversified. Black people reported on black people. Robert F Kennedy ran in 1968 saying he would take the Kerner report seriously. He was assassinated. Nixon (famous for his racist Southern Strategy) rejected it. He claimed Johnson’s programs had failed (when they hadn’t gone far enough or hadn’t even been tried). He said rioters should not be rewarded. Time to stop these programs. He ran on a war on crime, which made all the things blacks were rebelling against worse. The Kerner report was dead. The Kerner report is still relevant. As the nasty guy’s first criminal trial gets underway Charles Jay of the Daily Kos community asks:

While this might be unprecedented in U.S. history, other democracies, including France, South Korea, and Israel have charged, convicted, and even jailed former presidents and prime ministers. So why are we having such a hard time wrapping our head around this as a country?

Jay reminds us that President Harding was involved in the Teapot Dome scandal and escaped being implicated by dying. And Nixon avoided indictment and trial by being pardoned by Gerald Ford. Jay then lists the Republican politicians who dismiss the nasty guy’s trial and proclaim the American people are rallying behind him (well, some are). Israel’s Netanyahu has so far avoided a trial, but Israeli President Moshe Katsav and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were convicted. In France former presidents Jacques Chirac and Micolas Sarkozy were convicted. In South Korea four former presidents and one still in office were convicted. Another committed suicide while under investigation. In Italy Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was convicted, through is sentence was reduced to probation. In Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro is being investigated for plotting a coup carried out by his supporters. He has been banned from running for office until 2030. We wish the US Senate had done the same for the nasty guy in 2021. Jay concluded: “If other democracies can hold their leaders accountable, there’s no reason why we can’t do the same.” Jay also wrote “Tax cuts for the rich are a bad deal for corporate elites—and everyone else.” But that’s not quite the sense of Jay’s article. That can be more accurately described as: Supporting a fascist regime because they’re willing to cut taxes and overturn consumer protections is bad for corporations and their owners. First, some of the other things the nasty guy has said he would do would crash the economy and make the workforce problems worse by deporting workers. Second, a fascist regime will eventually come from them for insufficient loyalty. See Disney and DeathSantis as the most famous such situation. An Associated Press article posted to Kos on Tax Day discussed the difference between the tax policies of the two major candidates for president.

“For 36 years, I was listed as the poorest man in Congress,” Biden told donors in California in February. “Not a joke.” In 2015, Trump declared as part of his candidacy, “I'm really rich.”

Biden releases his tax forms. The nasty guy has refused. Biden will make sure the 2017 tax giveaway will expire next year. He’s talked about raising other taxes on the wealthy while pledging those earning $400K or less will not pay more taxes. He talks about tax fairness. The nasty guy talks to billionaires about how much he will cut their taxes. I don’t think he talked about taxes paid by the middle class or poor people. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Richard Stengel of The Atlantic writing about paywalls. More than 75% of America’s leading media are behind paywalls. Almost 80% of Americans ignore paywalled sites and seek out free media.

Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.

In the comments of another roundup are some good cartoons. One by Bill Bramhall shows a TV news host saying, “A court decision upholding a 1692 law banning witches is causing problems for Republicans.” A cartoon posted by Fiona Webster and written by Adam Zygus shows Lady Liberty getting an ultrasound by a doctor with the nametag SCOTUS. On the screen is a fetus labeled “Trumpism.” The doctor says, “This baby will likely kill you, but you’re legally required to carry it to full term...” Kos user exlrrp posted a meme that shows a crowd of red hats and says, “They will never admit he’s guilty, because that will mean he’s made fools of them all.” In the comments of a third roundup is a cartoon by Drew Sheneman showing a woman with a sign reading, “My Body My Choice.” An elephant tells her, “If you wanted rights you should have been a corporation or an embryo.” Irena Buzarewicz posted a cartoon by Grant Snider showing the hierarchy of humor. From the top: Paradox, Dark humor, Self-deprecation, Slapstick, Modern art, Irony, Illogical humor, Scatological humor, Logical humor, Impractical joke, Practical joke, Double entendre, Puns, Dumb jokes, Cats. Your ranking may be different. Ellis Rosen posted a cartoon of a corner of an art museum. There are four images of the same woman, one has white horizontal lines through it, another shows a small image on a big canvas, a third shows an upside down image too big for the canvas, and the last shows the bottom of the image all crumpled. The docent tells patrons, “In this series, the artist is in dialogue with her printer.” Irena Buzarewicz posted a cartoon by Dave Coverly showing a king looking down on a mob with pitchforks and torches. An aide says, “Oh, you don’t need to fight them – you just need to convince the pitchfork people that the torch people want to take away their pitchforks.” As part of Mark Sumner’s seven less reported stories for Kos he discussed a walkability score put out by Walk Score. There is also a nature score put out by the Washington Post. I tried it for my address. I live in generic suburbia, though next to a park. My home’s walkability score is 4 our of 100, as in almost all errands require a car. I’ve mentioned this problem of suburbia. I also got a bikeable score of 55 because there is some bike infrastructure. No public transit score was given. It listed nearby parks, but didn’t include the one I actually live next to. I would think my nature score would be decent because I live next to a park. But that’s behind the WaPo paywall. I tried the address of my friend and debate partner. He got a walk score of 99, a walker’s paradise, a transit score of 65, and a bike score of 94, a biker’s paradise. I doubt his nature score would be as good as mine.