Didn't bend, didn't cower, emerged with dignity intact

I finished the book Leg, the Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It by Greg Marshall. This is a memoir of Greg growing up with “tight tendons” that cause him to walk with a limp and about recognizing he is gay and beginning to act on it. He doesn’t learn the true reason for his limp until he’s close to the age of 30. The setting is Salt Lake City in the 1990s and beyond. Marshall is one of the few in his school who is not Mormon. His mother cycles between bouts of cancer with chemo and remission, still hanging on decades later. Marshall seems to accept being gay more easily than walking with a limp. He is afraid that no one will love him. Between the short term trysts (with fear of AIDS) he does have three long-term boyfriends. He wishes that two of them were more honest, and he talks about why that matters. When he’s in middle school the French Club goes to France. His father is one of the chaperons and Marshall is a bit jealous how easily his father gets along with some of the natives, even though he knows little French. A decade later his father develops ALS and Marshall is a key caregiver, partly because his mother is going through another round of chemo. I enjoyed the book. My Sunday movie was The Adventures of Mark Twain, directed by Will Vinton, the subject of the documentary Claydream I watched last week. In my description last week I said it was rated PG-13, if that rating was around in 1985. I was wrong – it is rated G. What the documentary said was that the movie has adult themes, but marketed to kids. I had interpreted that wrong. The adult themes were not about sex. They were about topics children wouldn’t understand or have much interest in. Those topics were Satan and Heaven and Twain’s ridicule of them. The time is 1910 and Halley’s comet is in the sky again. Twain had held the belief that since he was born with the comet in the sky he’ll leave this world when it comes back. In this story to help that happen he has created an airship so he could rise up and actually meet the comet. Three of his characters – Tom Sawyer wanting to be famous, Huck Finn and his pet frog Homer, and Becky Thatcher – steal aboard. During the flight they encounter more of Twain’s stories. Homer becomes the star of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Then comes The Diary of Adam & Eve, Twain’s version of the story from the Bible. There is The Mysterious Stranger, a novella Twain never finished in which the main character is Satan who has a rather poor view of humans. Another was Captain Stormfield’s Diary, which gave Twain a chance to criticize the popular view of Heaven. These are some of the views a discouraged Twain developed later in life. Through it all the story takes advantage of all the things that Vinton had developed during his work on claymation. I enjoyed it. My favorite quote of the movie: Twain says...

The human race, in all its poverty, has only one truly effective weapon: laughter. Against the assault of laughter - ha-ha-ha-ha! - nothing can stand.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos quoted from Carbon Brief:

Renewable energy has overtaken coal to become the world’s largest source of electricity in 2025, according to think tank Ember. The growth of solar and wind meant that, for the first time since 1919, the share of coal power was lower than that of renewables. Fossil-fuel generation fell by 0.2% in 2025, the think tank’s latest annual review says, with wind and solar alone meeting 99% of the growth in electricity demand last year.

Nadra Nittle, in an article for The 19th posted on Kos, discussed book bans and libraries. Nittle tells the experience of librarians faced with demands to ban books and dealing with hostile school boards or city councils. It’s a story that’s been going on for a while, so here are some of the ideas included: Pennsylvania is behind Texas and Florida in highest rates of library censorship. Many people think other states would be higher. Because of the hostility “few fully certified librarians remain in the Philadelphia school district.” Back in the 1990s there were over 170.

“This is also a class war,” [American Library Association President Sam Helmick] said. “Whether people read freely and have access to information is really at risk. We’re in an information age. If we’re not willing to invest in our communities so they can successfully navigate the digital divide and digital citizenry, we will not be equipped to continue to be a nation of, by and for the people.” ... Despite a sustained years-long effort during the 2020s to restrict reading materials, Helmick finds hope in polls indicating that 70 percent of the public opposes censorship of any kind. “That’s quite incredible because I joke that 70 percent of Americans wouldn’t agree that water is wet,” they said. “The vast majority are uninterested in this, which makes me wonder why we’re attacking the public information sector in the middle of an information age.”

Tracy Fitzmaurice, a librarian in rural North Carolina warned her fellow librarians not to buckle to outside pressure.

Don’t do anticipatory compliance. ‘If I just move this book, maybe they’ll go away.’ They won’t. These people have been at it for five years. What it really comes down to is local elections.

Nittle linked to the American Library Association list of the most challenged books of 2025. There are 11 books in this year’s list because there is a four-way tie for eighth place.

The 2025 data reported to ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) shows that the majority of book censorship attempts continue to originate from organized movements. In 2025, 92% of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, and decision makers, up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of challenges originated from individual parents.

As has been the case for many years the usual justifications for filing a complaint against a book are false claims of illegal obscenity for minors, LGBTQ characters or themes, or topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice. There were 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025. That’s second only to the 4,240 titles in 2023. In 2025, 1,671 (40%) titles were about LGBTQ people and people of color. Out of the 11 books in this year’s list three of them are definitely about LGBTQ characters. There are likely more, but book descriptions are not on the page of the list and I don’t recognize the titles. An email from March For Our Lives discussed the number of shooting deaths over the first quarter of 2026 compared to prior years. In these three months of this year there were 3,103 lives lost to gunfire. There were shooting deaths in every one of the 50 states. That is way too many. But MFOL sent the letter because that number is lower than every year since 2015, which was slightly above 2026. The death toll rose each year with the highest in 2021 at well more than 4,500 deaths in 3 months. The chart doesn’t show actual numbers. Since 2021 the death toll has dropped. The MFOL message is that the culture is shifting away from guns and their advocacy to reduce and halt gun violence is having an effect. A week ago Emily Singer of Kos reported:

Since retaking office more than a year ago, the amount of corruption and lawlessness President Donald Trump has engaged in has been truly staggering. Between his grifts and profiteering off of the presidency, his pay for play pardons, his use of the Department of Justice for political retribution, and his shredding of the Constitution to impose tariffs, launch wars, and commit war crimes without congressional approval, Trump is committing impeachable offenses at a fast clip. And now, a majority of Americans agree it’s too much, with a new Verasight/Strength in Numbers poll finding that 55% of Americans say Trump should be impeached for a third time. Another 37% opposed and another 8% said they were unsure. “That net +18 verdict puts Trump in the neighborhood of the numbers Richard Nixon saw at the peak of the Watergate scandal in August 1974,” “Strength in Numbers” author G. Elliott Morris wrote.

The nasty guy is losing support from Republicans – 21% of those who voted for him in 2024 now support impeachment. In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Kevin Kruse commenting on the Department of Justice dropping its criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve and its outgoing chairman Jerome Powell. That investigation was more about intimidating Powell to get him to lower interest rates to boost the economy before the midterm elections.

Didn't bend, didn't cower, didn't even feel the need to stand next to Trump grinning awkwardly like it was normal. And now he's emerged unscathed with his job and his dignity intact and his reputation even stronger than before. Huh. Seems like this could be a model for others in power.

Jonathan Last of The Bulwark

Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan was fired. Twenty-one days ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George was fired. Fifty-four days ago, the American military launched its largest war in a generation. These datapoints are linked. They are an admission by the president that America is losing the war. Because the simple fact of the matter is: You do not make high-level personnel changes in the middle of a war if you are winning.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quote Mike Brock of Notes from the Circus discussing an article Ben Shapiro wrote explaining why he voted for the nasty guy. Shapiro admits that the nasty guy is what every liberal critic says he is – a usurper who was constrained by strong American institutions. Brock then quoted and discussed Shapiro’s reasoning on why voting for the nasty guy was still a good idea.

The reasoning is the lunacy: “The guardrails would largely hold… his worst mistakes would end up being mitigated by the pushback of reality.” This is the argument. The president of the United States is a man who would, if he could, end the constitutional order. The reason it is acceptable to elect him is that he probably cannot. The institutions are strong enough to contain him. The Madisonian architecture will hold, the Supreme Court will strike things down, the Treasury Secretary lives on Earth, the bad picks will be replaced by the merely bad picks. The wannabe dictator is, in the Shapiro analysis, a manageable risk.

Sheesh, wasn’t that said about Hitler? In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

Donald Trump lost this war in its very first days. Everything that has happened in recent weeks — the threats, the negotiations, the live-on-social-media breakdowns — has simply been a matter of trying to get free of that fact. This isn’t a political attack. It’s simply an accurate appraisal of what we all see. More importantly, it is the only way to understand what is happening now. Everything that’s happening today and for weeks has been focused on breaking Iran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, something it didn’t have before the war started. That’s the definition of failure: fighting a war and continuing a war to clean up the mess the war of choice actually created. By this measure, the best way to achieve what is now the central war aim — opening the Strait — would have been simply not to start the war in the first place. You can see the reality of the power balance in the visible fact that Trump wants negotiations and an end to the conflict more than Iran does. He keeps asking for them or demanding them. Iran holds back. They have the upper hand, notwithstanding all the vast damage to infrastructure, civilian and military, Iran has suffered.

In today’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet from Anne Applebaum mentioning and linking to an article on Financial Times. Applebaum’s tweet:

Hungarian oligarchs begin fleeing the country, transferring assets, in anticipation of corruption investigations.

The article title and subtitle:

Hungary’s business elite pivots away from Viktor Orbán. Several loyalists have moved overseas while others vow to form ‘constructive co-operation’ with incoming premier.

David French of the New York Times:

A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine — a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion — has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process. It has become an indispensable security partner in the Western alliance, including in the war against Iran. Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence. This is what happens when, as Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in a piece for The Atlantic, “Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States.” If that is true — and it looks as though it is — it may be worse news for the United States than it is for Ukraine.

Not a Constitutional crisis but a Supreme Court crisis

I finished the book The Underground Library by Jennifer Ryan. Yeah, I read it in about a week. In 1940 at the start of the London Blitz the Bethnal Green Library was hit by a bomb and damaged. The library moved its undamaged books and shelves to the nearby Bethnal Green Underground station and reopened. This was a logical move because the Underground stations were already being used as bomb shelters whenever the civil defense sirens went off. This part of the story is true. All the rest is well researched fiction. The main characters of story are three women. Juliet was engaged to Victor, but he was reported as an army deserter at Dunkirk. Since her parents weren’t all that loving she escapes to London and gets the job as deputy librarian at the Bethnal Green Library. The head librarian isn’t too thrilled to hire a woman (this is 1940) but a lot of men are a part of the war effort. She has ideas for programs at the library. He isn’t interested. The student intern says do them anyway and the boss will pretend he doesn’t see. At the rooming house she meets Sebastian, nephew to the landlady. He was injured and sent home from the front and now works for the war effort. He’s not looking for a life partner (yeah, we know where this is going). That student intern is Katie, about to go to college and able to do that because so many men are at war. Her boyfriend Christopher is at the front and she gets word that he went missing and presumed dead. Shortly after that she realizes she is pregnant (glad she works at a library and can look these things up as sex ed was rather Victorian). At the time an unmarried woman brings shame to herself and her parents. And her parents are desperate to maintain their respectability. The third main character is Sofie. She is Jewish, originally from Berlin, and got to London on a visa to fill a job as a domestic. Her boss is quite demanding. She is trying to find out what happened to her sister, who wasn’t able to flee with her. Some residents of Bethnal Green don’t like her because she has a German accent. Through her story I learned that the Isle of Man was used as a detention center during the war and life there was rather pleasant. As in several of the Underground stations during the Blitz the people who slept in the Bethnal Green station developed into a community. In this station the library went a long way to make that happen. This community becomes important to the story. Another big part of this story is romance. Juliet is torn between Victor and Sebastian. Katie still longs after Christopher. And Sofie has Mac, a fellow Jew whose contacts started the search for Sofie’s sister. Though this story has a wartime setting (spoiler alert) every thread has a happy ending. At times I felt a bit annoyed with all that cheery news. Even so, I enjoyed the book. Mary Louise Kelly of NPR spoke to Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia about the Supreme Court’s somewhat vague decisions on immigration cases and the nasty guy who seems determined to ignore those decisions. The discussion focused on two rulings by the Supreme. The first said that deportees must have due process, but the case went through the wrong forum, so start over. Frost called this ruling “frustrating.” The second case is the one involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The lower court was specific in their language saying the government must get him out of that El Salvador prison and return him to the US. The Supreme Court decision said the same thing but in a weaker manner. And the government is taking advantage of that weak language to do nothing. Kelly said to Frost:

It sounds as though they are issuing rulings that are so carefully worded that they tiptoe up to wishy-washy. ... Listening to you, it sounds like you see this more as a Supreme Court crisis right now than a constitutional crisis.

A constitutional crisis would be the nasty guy openly declaring he would not follow court rulings. But he doesn’t need to say that because the rulings are so weak. He doesn’t need to ignore court rulings when he can get away with this misbehavior. Frost said:

President Trump said, if the Supreme Court orders him returned, I will do it. And then the Supreme Court issues a weak order that I think suggests it's now afraid of the constitutional crisis that would come if the Trump administration were to ignore its rulings.

Frost is suggesting the Supremes water down their ruling to avoid open defiance and a constitutional crisis. Which to me sounds like a democracy crisis – that and their ruling giving the nasty guy immunity for official acts. Every year the US State Department produces a report on the human rights in countries around the world. These reports are carefully read by both authoritarians and activists. Graham Smith of NPR explained a State Department memo demanding significant changes to this year’s report. Congress uses these human rights reports to determine how to spend taxpayer money overseas in security assistance, weapons, or other aid. When Marco Rubio was a Florida senator he praised the report for shining light on failures to respect citizen rights. Now as Secretary of State he is responsible for the reports. The law says the report must document internationally recognized human rights. But the memo instructs editors to delete references to more than 20 rights, to bring the report in line with executive orders.

Gone are violations against the right to peacefully assemble, the right to a fair public trial, to privacy. The directive eliminates everything that's not separately listed in the language of the law.

The report on El Salvador is no longer cited for terrible prison conditions. Sections in reports for other countries no longer mention government corruption. Gone are sections on the sexual exploitation of children and women, the denial of rights of political minorities, and violence and discrimination of LGBTQ people, religions or ethnic groups, Indigenous people, and internally displaced people. I’m sure there are many more things to be deleted. From Paul O'Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA:

What you've just read me out is a list of civil and political rights that are essential. So what this is is a signal that the United States is no longer going to uphold those rights that guarantee civic and political freedoms, the ability to speak, to express yourself, to gather, to protest, to organize. ... Any constraints or pretensions around protecting vulnerable populations writ large seems to be going away.

From Christopher LeMon, who served at State under President Biden:

You can't overstate the value in the real world of the annual State Department human rights reports being credible and impartial. You also can't overstate the damage it will do to that credibility if the Trump administration's edits are seen to diminish not just the scope of what are defined as human rights, but also if those edits are seen to play favorites.

O’Brien is worried that the deletions aren’t just about how the US views rights in other countries, they are also about how the administration views rights in the US. I’ll work through several browser tabs to clear them out before movie night and rehearsal nights and the corresponding days of collecting more stories in browser tabs. I’ve mentioned that many Republicans got a fierce public response when holding town hall meetings with constituents. They were so bad (from the view of the member of Congress) that Republican leadership suggested stop doing them. Walter Einenkel of Daily Kos reported Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa did one anyway. He was met with a lot of jeers, demands he do his job, and to actually act on the oath of office he took.

Grassley continued to act powerless, pointing to the fact that the “only tool” for Congress to discipline the president is impeachment. “And you missed that opportunity in his first administration. You had two opportunities for that. That was probably one of the only reasons we're having this situation now,” the attendee responded.

Alex Samuels of Kos reported that the Associated Press had been banned from White House press briefings because it refused to use the nasty guy’s name for the Gulf of Mexico. A US District Judge ordered the administration to let the AP back in. The AP remains locked out.

This isn’t just petty—it’s calculated. The strategy’s clear: Bully the press into compliance, and if that doesn’t work, slam the door shut. Outlets that hold the line—like the AP—get punished. Ones that cozy up to Trump, like The Washington Post, get a pat on the head and a few flattering social media posts.

The nasty guy has also ranted against CBS News and “60 Minutes” because of stories he didn’t like. He has also ranted against ABC News and NBC News because he claims they gave Harris preferential treatment during last year’s campaign. Oliver Willis of Kos reported that since the administration has sidelined legitimate media organizations from the White House press briefings, those briefings “have turned into a playground for pro-MAGA outlets.” They aren’t interested in providing a clear picture of the administration. Instead, they amplify the conservative falsehoods and bigotry. An article by Sharon Lerner of ProPublica posted on Kos reported the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants, coal mines, and companies that make petrochemicals, cement, glass, iron and steel, and other polluters from having to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The data guides policy decisions and is submitted to the international body that tallies global greenhouse gas pollution. The data allows for accountability, to record which region or factory is emitting how much gas. The “government can’t curb the country’s emissions without knowing where they are coming from.” It also makes climate policy more difficult and would be devastating for the world’s ability to limit climate change.

“The bottom line is this is a giveaway to emitters, just letting them off the hook entirely,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Cleetus derided the choice to stop documenting emissions as ostrich-like. “Not tracking the data doesn’t make the climate crisis any less real,” she said. “This is just putting our heads in the sand.”

A couple weeks ago Kos of Kos again looked at how the nasty guy could get a third term, in spite of the 22nd Amendment saying “No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice.” I highlighted the key word to this possible scheme. One possible route would be to be elected Speaker of the House. The Constitution does not say this has to be a member of the House. Then the people actually elected to president and vice president resign, and the nasty guy steps back in. But how likely are two people, who just went through a grueling national campaign, willingly give up the chance to be president? Especially for him. Other routes are to be appointed President Pro Tempore of the Senate (and three people would have to step aside) or Secretary of State (four people...). There is another route, the one he tried in 2021.

But it does say a lot about Trump that rather than focus on the job at hand, he’s obsessing over a third term. He wants power for the sake of power itself, jealous of despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Of course, he’s going to indulge in these sorts of fantasies.

Writing off whole schools as needing detention not education

One day after writing about a book I’m writing about another. This one is short – only 125 pages of text and another ten of photos. The book is How We Sleep at Night by Sara Cunningham. It is her story of coming to terms with her son Parker being gay – when he told her she definitely did not sleep well at night. The Cunningham family attended a Baptist church, mostly because that was the one in the neighborhood. They became deeply involved in the church because they felt cared for, not that they were strong believers in every point in the doctrine. But when Parker told her he was gay her main thought was: How do I keep my son from going to hell? It took her a while to see that he wasn’t. She saw when he fell in love with a man he became more confident. During her process she became annoyed with the way her church treated her and the kinds of prayers they said for her son. It’s been many years since I’ve read these kinds of stories. Alas, they’re still happening (though this one is almost ten years old) and some with much worse outcomes. Cunningham doesn’t work through the Bible passages used to condemn LGBTQ people, though she does list a few books that do. Each chapter of the book ends with the lyrics of one of Parker’s songs. A website is included so the reader can listen to Parker sing it. Alas, ten years later that is now an Asian site. I did find a YouTube video of Parker singing, but a song that was not related to the book. An online search of Sara shows that she offers “Free Mom Hugs” at pride events and has offered to be the mom at any gay wedding. Dartagnan of the Daily Kos community discussed that the nasty guy and Putin desperately need each other. To evade jail the nasty guy needs to get reelected and get his Department of Justice cronies to call off the cases against him. And to do that he needs Putin’s election interference that he enjoyed back in 2016. To not lose in Ukraine Putin needs the nasty guy to get elected. Once in office the nasty guy will pull out of NATO, thus weakening it, and put an end to America’s supply of military equipment to Ukraine. To make all that not happen a few other things should happen. First, the nasty guy should be convicted well before the 2024 election. Second, Ukraine should push Russia out of its territory before our election. And third, we need to be prepared for the onslaught of interference. That interference is definitely already being planned for, the onslaught not so much. And as part of that preparation we need to improve our capabilities to thwart that interference. Americans have a right to know what hostile foreign agents are trying to influence our voters. Related to the nasty guy’s criminal liability Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about more indictments against him. Media was expecting indictments related to Georgia election tampering or to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. But those haven’t dropped yet. This set of indictments are additions to the case of failing to turn over classified documents. The main part of this is an attempt (I’m not sure, did he succeed?) to destroy surveillance camera images, the destruction of evidence he was told to preserve. There are also additional charges against the nasty guy, the big one being he waived around a classified document at his Bedminster resort. The nasty guy is up to 40 indictments, a few more were added to his valet Walt Nauta and a few were given to aide Carlos De Oliviera. Hunter of Kos reported that “libraries in at least 28 Houston public schools are being repurposed into ‘disciplinary centers.’ ” Students who misbehave will be sent there. They might watch lessons virtually, work alone, or work with other detained students. The books will still be there (that’s quite a concession!), but the librarians and media specialists were laid off. All this is being done by the new state-appointed superintendent of Houston schools.

This is what a failed state looks like: lots of guns, lots of focus on discipline, and lots of contempt for anybody who looks like they might grow up to be a book-learner. ... But "most" of the 28 schools that will have their librarians relocated to other campuses "are located in low-income communities of color," notes Houston Public Media, and again: You can't get a more on-the-nose example of how Republican-led states are trying to reshape our schools than removing school librarians in communities of color so that they can repurpose the rooms into disciplinary centers. Are we supposed to pretend this is anything but what it looks like? Because it looks like writing off whole schools full of kids as needing detention rather than education.

I’m finally getting to a pundit roundup by Greg Dworkin for Kos originally posted December 17, 2022. Pundits were talking about classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and COVID vaccines. There was also a pair of quotes from Noah Smith tweeting and writing on Substack. The tweet is from August 28, 2017 and says:

15 years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.

And from Substack in 2022:

Five years ago I was sitting around drinking a beer with my college buddy Dayv. I was scrolling through Twitter and watching people get mad at Donald Trump’s latest outrage, and I said “You know…fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now the real world is an escape from the internet.” “Tweet that!”, Dayv said, so I did. That banal observation became my most popular tweet of all time, and the quote has now been posted ad infinitum on content mills all over the web.

There was a hearing in Congress about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (formerly known as UFOs). I’m not going to get into that. Though one frame of a comic by Brian McFadden of Kos comics is worth sharing. It shows Mr. Spock of Star Trek saying:

Earth is experiencing multiple crises that require immediate action and you’re investigating imaginary phenomena? Highly illogical.

The red state paradox

I finished the book Just Like Being There by Eric Choi. It is a collection of science fiction short stories (though at least one is novella length). I recommend it. Back in 1994 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (which I used to read) asked for submissions for a best new writer award. Choi submitted the first story he had written – and won. That story, Dedication, launched his writing career and leads off the collection. It is a story of a crew on Mars paying homage to the Viking 1 lander and how it gets them out of a tight situation. Most of the stories are about a situation that includes some sort of scientific speculation – the kind of science fiction I like. There’s none of this battling the Ultimate Evil – there’s not even any battling of monsters. There were three stories for which I was less pleased. I might call them technological alternate histories. One of them was about the Canadian development of a passenger jet in the early 1950s, but the company that developed it dropped the project in favor of military jets. Choi’s story proposes if a certain little thing happened Canada might now have an airplane manufacturing industry to rival Boeing. One of the other alternate histories is about the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003. What if the possibility of a damaged wing were taken more seriously? Could the crew be rescued? Here’s a bit more on the Tennessee House expelling two black men for leading protests against inaction on gun control. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported how rare expulsions are – a child molester had been a member for years and the Republican Party helped get him reelected. Clawson wrote:

Expelling two members for a peaceful protest was an extreme act by Republicans and they’re not backing down, releasing a statement claiming, “Unprecedented actions yield unprecedented consequences. Unfortunately, we were obliged”—obliged!—“to levy unprecedented consequences on those members today.” Thursday night, NewsChannel 5 investigative reporter Phil Williams tweeted, “Scrolling through Tennesse legislative Twitter, Republicans are incredibly quiet tonight!” He added, “Privately, some Republicans express concern to me that these events are not only alienating independents, but also GOP women who don’t want their kids getting killed at school.” (Kids getting killed at school is apparently not a concern for GOP men.) So maybe Tennessee Republicans are feeling a little concerned about the backlash against their actions, which saw the state Capitol once again filled with protesters. But it didn’t stop them from expelling the two men, which required near unanimity, and it wasn’t the first anti-democratic action the Republican lawmakers have recently taken. After Nashville government rejected the Republican National Convention, Republicans in the legislature moved to strip power from that local government.

David Nir of Kos explains how the two expelled members may be back in a matters of days. And if their districts send them back, they can’t be expelled for the same thing again. Besides, these two black men now have national name recognition and a good pulpit to speak from. Kos of Kos discussed what the abortion issue is doing to the Republican Party. Conventional wisdom long held that abortion bans were something the party dangled to keep the anti-abortion crowd loyal to the party, but they didn’t really want a ban. Then the Supremes actually overturned Roe v. Wade. And Republicans rammed through as many abortion bans as they could, doing it as fast as they could. Their sense of superiority and maintaining the social hierarchy kept them at it. They’ve been paying for it since. The recent progressive win for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was because the progressive candidate ran on protecting abortion and the conservative candidate ran on crime and transphobia. The progressive won by 11 points in an evenly divided state. Here’s some of what Kos wrote:

But the fallout isn’t limited to Wisconsin. Many conservatives have finally realized they’re in trouble—as in lasting trouble—over their abortion stances. ... [Republican Party chair Ronna] McDaniels is right and wrong at the same time. She’s right that the message is the problem. She’s wrong in that it’s a messaging problem. There’s no way to message, “We’re taking away your rights, and you should be happy about it!” ... Moderates and liberals are done with any effort by Republicans to restrict abortion. The jig is up, and it’s now common knowledge that abortion is just the first step. They are using the same legal reasoning to go after same-sex marriage, contraception, and other cherished rights. Suddenly, pretending there’s a reasonable middle ground is fooling no one. Meanwhile, the same people who have spent half a century claiming that abortion murders children in some sort of holocaust are now going to proclaim, “It’s okay to murder babies for 15 weeks”? If the center and left are like “nope,” imagine the hard-core true-believer right. They really have no interest in Lindsey Graham’s supposed compromise. The anti-abortion movement spent decades radicalizing its activists, convincing them that they weren’t just morally right, but that their position was popular with the American people. But it wasn’t.

Ariel Alberg-Riger, writing for CityLab and posted on Pocket Worthy, discussed the history of the American Public Library. There are 16,500 of them in all parts of America. 70% of Americans visited their library in the last year (don’t know if that is pre-pandemic). 80% of Americans believe what they find inside is reliable and trustworthy. They are one of the last free places that caters to everybody, providing a place that is safe, helps them grow as people, is a critical part of the social infrastructure and allows the public intellect to grow. The first American libraries were clubs for wealthy white men to share books and mold character. Soon there were similar societies for people of color. After the Civil War rich white women’s clubs were also formed, with books about suffrage and other women’s issues. Black and working class women started their own clubs. In 1896 women’s clubs brought books to children who couldn’t access major city libraries using bookmobiles. At the turn of the 20th century it was women’s clubs that pushed Andrew Carnegie to fund 1,687 US libraries. But they remained segregated – Richmond refused Carnegie funding to keep blacks from accessing a library. Across the country twelve colored Carnegie libraries were built. Libraries were a battleground of the Civil Rights era. But even with racial restrictions removed libraries in poor communities have limited hours, if they manage to open at all. This history lesson ends with:

A healthy democracy demands an informed, engaged, and empowered public where all citizens freely have access to information, and a forum to explore and discuss ideas with a community of neighbors. Libraries are our institutions dedicated to doing just that.

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about what’s happening to libraries. Since well before the Library of Alexandria, built sometime around 300 BC, libraries have been an essential part of civilization. And now Republicans are moving to eliminate them.

Because, just like Donald Trump, the Republican Party loves the poorly educated. Ignorance may not be bliss, but it certainly makes people easier to control. ... When someone who is not a parent of a child in the district, or even a resident of the district, can insist that a book be removed, and a demand for removal can be made without a stated cause. Those laws have very serious potential consequences, including fining school officials or librarians for every “violation,” avoiding those complications by just not having a library at all is a compelling solution. County officials undoubtedly feel the same about public libraries. ... Schools are being charged with crimes for refusing to remove books. They’re being sued when they do remove books. How is it possible for schools to operate a library under these conditions? Answer: It’s not. And that’s the point. ... What [Republicans] care about is how they can use these issues to enrage the public and to attack public institutions. It’s not about banning specific books, or limiting the content of certain classes. It’s about limiting the channels through which knowledge is transmitted to ones where Republicans can exert explicit, overt control.

The target isn’t just public libraries, it also includes public schools, and for the same reasons. Republicans claim “without the Second Amendment, the others don’t matter.” But back in 1789 Thomas Jefferson wrote “A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny.” And that, of course, means if one wants to impose tyranny one must make sure the citizenry is not well informed.

The VisiGOPs are here to sack institutions that have defined civilization as long as there has been civilization, and which the Founders rightly identified as essential to the character of America. And somehow, they call that conservative.

SemDem of the Kos community looked at the red state paradox. Even in red states progressive ideas are popular with a majority of voters. They don’t like gerrymandering, they want to keep Medicare and Social Security, they support legalizing marijuana, protecting the environment, restoring voter rights to felons, securing abortion rights, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, and many more. Yet Republicans consistently refuse to adopt such ideas. And when citizen initiatives try to implement them anyway Republicans routinely try to thwart the effort and are sometimes successful. So why do voters in these states keep electing Republicans? Gerrymandering is part of the answer. But it is not the full answer, because these states also elect Republicans to statewide offices. SemDem wrote that psychology is a better predictor of behavior than politics. And Republicans are good at manipulating psychology. Fox News relies on keeping its viewers in a perpetual rage. Candidates attach ideas, such as “Christian” and “Patriotic,” to their policies. They’re also good at exploiting grievance and demonizing marginalized groups, both of which exploit their fear of losing their place in the social hierarchy. That place in the hierarchy is more important than the actual policies.

Democratic politicians in red states would do well to highlight their patriotism and rally around traditional American imagery (flags, monuments, etc.) as Republicans do, but include in their message that they are championing policies that will actually help the lower socio-economic class regardless of race. We can do much to make living wages, voting rights, health care access, and union protections synonymous with American patriotism, and help supplant the twisted Republican version of hating and scapegoating other people for their problems.

A recent issue of the Hightower Lowdown, written by Jim Hightower, explains why doing it that way is a problem – the Democratic Party seems to have abandoned red states. Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, columnist for MSNBC, tweeted:

I really don’t think we are ready for the ugliness that this campaign season is going to bring- & what it will unleash in communities across the country. Every community needs to be shoring up victim support services & preventative, community resilience efforts now

Karl, a freelance writer on the dystopia beat, added:

Many of us on the academic and research side are trying to tell people this is the beginning of a new phase of the movement and it’s nothing like 2016 or 2020 it’s gonna be far darker, and far far far more dangerous. The republicans are intent on ending it all in a wave of hate.

Lean McElrath tweeted about progressives flipping the Wisconsin Supremes:

Ali Alexander telegraphs the GOP plan for 2024, which is to win not via the popular vote but through vote challenges and corrupt courts stacked with right-wing judges: “We just lost the Wisconsin Supreme Court. I do not see a path to 270 in 2024.”

Later, she quoted Chris Hayes, who said the nasty guy is unpopular, the Republicans have tied their fate to his, and it has been a political disaster. She added:

I need people like @chrislhayes to understand that Republicans do not plan on trying to win the popular vote to gain the White House. They plan on using legislative and judicial means to challenge vote counts and manipulate the electoral college.