Wreck the government this way or wreck it that way?

Last evening I went to the Fisher Theater for Broadway in Detroit’s presentation of the musical Kimberly Akimbo. It was featured in the 2023 Tony Awards where it was nominated in eight categories and won five, including Best Musical. The featured scene and basic story intrigued me. Kimberly has a rare (one in 5 million?) disorder that causes her to age four to five times faster than normal. So she’s in high school, about to turn 16, and looks about 70. I’m pretty sure Victoria Clark, who played the part on Broadway and won the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical, got it because she really is in her 60s and acted like she was 16. Clark is not in the touring production and I was too far away to tell how old this actress looked. Kim becomes friends with fellow student Seth, one of the nerdier kids in the school. He likes making anagrams, which is where “Akimbo” comes from. Also at school are Martin, Aaron, Delia, and Teresa, members of the show choir. At times they also serve as a Greek Chorus. At home Kim is dealing with parents Buddy and Pattie, who have many issues of their own. Then Aunt Debra shows up. She has a shady past and wants accomplices for her next scheme while staying on the good side of her parole officer. In terms of the story I through Buddy and Pattie had too many of these side issues to fit in this story. I felt Aunt Debra and her scheme were not necessary to the story at all. As for the songs, they were OK, as in not memorable. The show does a good job of exploring Kim’s situation of having a teenager mind with a body in decline and not long to live. Because of that I enjoyed the show. The current federal budget runs out at midnight tonight. Signs strongly suggest continued funding will be passed in time. Avoiding a government shutdown is normally great news. Whether that is true this time is debatable. Usually, a CR continues the funding levels of the last budget and this one proposes to keep those funding levels until the fiscal year ends in September 2025. Which means the levels are essentially from when the last budget was passed (theoretically October 2023 but I’m sure it was actually signed much later). So the nasty guy would have to follow a budget signed by Biden? Sounds good! But... Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos has a few reasons why this CR gets a jeer. One of them is that Congress would relinquish oversight of tariffs to the nasty guy. Emily Singer of Kos reported on Wednesday about the tariff oversight and another nasty thing: It cuts $1 billion from the District of Columbia budget, forcing cuts to police and teachers. One Republican voted against it, so it passed. Also one Democrat voted for it.

All but one Democrat (Rep. Jared Golden of Maine) voted against the funding bill for that very reason, saying the levels in the funding bill don’t even matter because Trump and Musk will ignore what Congress put in the bill and cut from it what they want. In fact, GOP leaders were selling the bill to Republican lawmakers by making that very point. “This Congress must decide: do we have the authority to control spending, as we were granted and is laid out in Article I of the Constitution? Why would we want to relinquish this to give this administration, which is already doing massive harm, dismantling agencies, firing people, telling them today they are no longer needed, the chaos and confusion caused by Elon Musk and President Trump—why would we want to turn over our authority to appropriate bills?” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, wrote in a statement explaining why she voted against the funding bill.

On Thursday, with the bill heading to the Senate, Republicans were already priming to blame Democrats if a shutdown comes. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a tweet from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez written in response to Republican threat of blame:

Republicans run the House, the Senate, and the White House. You run the government. If you have the votes, then go ahead. If you need Democrats, then you need to negotiate with Democrats. Those are your two options. Blaming someone else because your shoes are untied isn’t one.

Dan Pfeiffer of The Message Box wrote:

A few weeks ago, I argued that Democrats could not — and should not — vote for anything that didn’t prohibit Musk from unilaterally shutting down government agencies. Last week, after interviewing several Senate Democrats on the night of Trump’s joint address, I softened my stance. Some Senate Democrats are scared of the fight and would prefer to roll over and play dead. But many others want a strategy and are considering whether a shutdown would actually help Musk accomplish his goals of gutting the federal government. A shutdown only works as a point of leverage if Trump et al feel pressure to reopen the government. If they plan to destroy the government or are content to let the government stay closed for as long as possible, the plan is useless.

In the comments Robert Petersen included a tweet by Sam Brody.

Old Soviet joke for our times: Guy stops by the newsstand every day, scans the front page, doesn’t buy the paper. One day the vendor asks what he’s up to. Guy says: “Looking for an obituary.” Vendor says: “Those are towards the back of the paper.” Guy says: “Not the one I’m looking for.”

In this morning’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Laura Fox and Sarah Ferris of CNN:

The Democratic leader’s decision privately disappointed many in his caucus, and stunned his House colleagues across the US Capitol — leaving the party deeply divided on the path ahead at a moment when their base is clamoring for a strong response against Trump and Elon Musk’s actions to radically reshape the federal government. “We are in a perverse, bizarro land where we’re having to decide between letting Donald Trump wreck the government this way or wreck the government that way,” New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker said of Democrats’ predicament. It’s a moment that has been months in the making. Still, top Democrats in Congress struggled to find a cohesive message and strategy that would allow them room to fight without the potential risk of what it would mean if thousands of government workers were suddenly thrust into more uncertainty with a shutdown. Perhaps the clearest sign of the dilemma: Their top two leaders took opposite paths, with Schumer deciding to vote for the GOP plan that top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries has spent a full week bashing.

Down in the comments exlrrp posted a tweet from Bryan Tyler Cohen showing a graph (source of data not given) showing the S&P 500 stock index scaled to show a value of 100 on four inauguration says and what happens for two hundred days after. Three of the lines – Obama in 2013, nasty guy in 2017, and Biden in 2021 – rise to some degree in that time. The fourth, nasty guy in 2025, rises for about 30 days, that drops sharply to day 50. Further down in the comments exlrrp posted a meme showing Marie Antoinette, though her face has been replaced by Musk and the words are now, “Let them buy Teslas.” Last week I included the little bit that the Defense Department removed from the Pentagon’s website and database photos of the bomber that released the first atomic bomb because the plane’s name was “Enola Gay.” Just after I mentioned that Alex Samuels of Kos posted a more complete account. The purge also include photos of U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. A.C. Gay; of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black squadron to fight in the US military; of an all female crew taken during Women’s History Month; and of Air Force Maj. Laura Perry before her gender reassignment surgery. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Pridesource, wrote:

“Today, I signed into law a bill that safeguards the rights of women and girls,” Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-Iowa) said in a video posted to X. Sounds good to me! What’s in the bill? Reproductive freedom with abortion and birth control that is accessible to everyone who needs it? Strengthened domestic violence protections? Gun safety measures to keep kids from being murdered in school? Better access to mental health treatment? Better oversight of children in the foster care system in order to ensure that children are not placed in abusive environments? Sadly, the answer is none of the above. Gov. Reynolds did not, in fact, do anything to protect the rights of women and girls. What she did was intentionally and maliciously hurt transgender people in the state. With the stroke of her pen, Gov. Reynolds ended “18 years of protection against discrimination based on gender identity in Iowa's civil rights law," the Des Moines Register reports. “The signing makes Iowa the first state in the country to take away civil rights from a group it has previously protected in law.”

One of my church friends told me that her sister (who refuses to be put in the box marked “female”) was instrumental in getting those protections passed 18 years ago and is now quite upset at their demise. Bonnie Jean Feldkamp of Pridesource discussed how she refuses to teach her children gender stereotypes. Her son loves to help her cook and haters object. That son likes his mom to braid his hair. His peers said that makes him “look like a girl.” But she resolved even more to make sure she describes things in gender neutral terms. That includes describing future lovers as “spouse” or “partner.”

Social media will bring out the angry, bitter people who don’t know unconditional love. Home should be a space where you absolutely know you are loved. It should be your refuge when the world is cold. The best tool I have to counter outside hate is to work on dismantling the proverbial closets in my own home. I will challenge assumptions and give my children the freedom to learn who they are and the security to be the allies our communities deserve. They are the future and I plan to fill the future with love.

Love is simply acknowledging the full humanity of the other

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed a release from the World Meteorological Organization that says the next five years will be the hottest on record (following eight years that were the eight warmest) and in those five years there will be more weather disasters. Also, we’ve been told we should not let the earth warm by 1.5C if we want to avoid big climate catastrophes, and we have a 66% chance of passing that by 2027. So far the earth has warmed by 1.1C. For the last three years the oceans have been in the La Niña pattern in which warm waters are pulled lower and the surface remains cool. But the oceans are shifting to the El Niño pattern, in which all that warm water returns to the surface. That will fuel the heat and the disasters. Sumner wrote:

There will be droughts, floods, wildfires, and economic disruptions like power plants being idled by low river levels, barge traffic halted, and livestock dying in masses from sheer heat. The climate crisis already significantly drives immigrant movements in the Americas and Europe. Those movements will increase, and as they do, they will contribute to increased political instability, not just in the nations people are forced to leave, but in the areas where they arrive. The effects of climate change and the associated disasters are a matter of local, national, and international security.

We need to prepare for this at each of those levels. And we aren’t. Pro-polluting politicians like to point out the cost of addressing climate change. Already climate disasters and lost production have been much more expensive and the costs will go up.

In any one of these El Niño years, the combination of decreased production and increased disasters amounts to something like a 2-3% downturn in the global economy. The two-year El Niño in 1982-83 meant a loss of $4.1 trillion. Another two-year cycle in 1997-98 cost $5.7 trillion. Now we’re heading into another such cycle, and there are no guarantees it will last only two years. Over the remainder of this century, the cost associated with these cycles is estimated to be $84 trillion. That’s about the same size as the entire global economy. That’s what we are already paying for not taking the steps necessary to address the climate crisis. Addressing climate change now is being fiscally responsible for the future. That price will only increase along with rising temperatures. It’s not too late to move. It’s never too late to move. But the longer we wait, the more costly it becomes.

An Associated Press article posted on Kos discussed the world’s shrinking lakes.

A close examination of nearly 2,000 of the world's largest lakes found they are losing about 5.7 trillion gallons (21.5 trillion liters) a year. That means from 1992 to 2020, the world lost the equivalent of 17 Lake Meads, America's largest reservoir, in Nevada. It's also roughly equal to how much water the United States used in an entire year in 2015. Even lakes in areas getting more rainfall are shriveling. That's because of both a thirstier atmosphere from warmer air sucking up more water in evaporation, and a thirsty society that is diverting water from lakes to agriculture, power plants and drinking supplies, according to a study in Thursday's journal Science. Authors also cited a third reason they called more natural, with water shrinking because of rainfall pattern and river runoff changes, but even that may have a climate change component. That's the main cause for Iran's Lake Urmia to lose about 277 billion gallons (1.05 trillion liters) a year, the study said.

For now, the Great Lakes around Michigan seem to be maintaining size. Another AP story on Kos reported that New York City has passed a law requiring reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by buildings starting next year. This will affect about 50K buildings. This is important because buildings are the largest source of the city’s emissions, accounting for about two-thirds. The article tells the story of machinery in the basement of one of those buildings that captures carbon dioxide, the most prevalent problematic gas, and sells it. The company that buys it, Glenwood Mason Supply, combines the CO2 with calcium in cement to create calcium carbonate, which becomes a stable part of concrete. That’s pretty cool! And definitely a help. But... Better than trying to capture emissions is no emissions. Also, many of these buildings are more than a century old and under-maintained. Switching to a better energy source is a better solution as is making them more energy efficient. But that takes time and money (though we could debate whether it is better to install carbon capture or to make these other improvements). There is also the question of whether storing CO2 is safe. A large release of CO2 replaces oxygen and lead to asphyxiation. But safer than what? Safer than natural gas? Safer than a warming climate? Yes, to both. Installing carbon capture is a good short term solution to lower emissions now on our way to something better. But it cannot be the end solution, one that permits ongoing use of fossil fuels. Jeffrey Levin tweeted a cartoon by Mike Peters from the 1970s that, alas, is still appropriate. A guy at a desk marked Big Oil says:

You want coal? We own the mines. You want oil and gas? We own the wells. You want nuclear energy? We own the uranium. You want solar power? We own the er... ah... Solar power isn’t feasible.

Othuke Umukoro tweeted the poem To the Young Who Want to Die by Gwendolyn Brooks. Here’s part of it, though the whole thing isn’t very long.

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day.

I found the whole thing meaningful. And no, I am not depressed and I don’t want to end myself. However, if you are, in the US please call 988 to reach the crisis hotline or call the Trevor Project. Leah McElrath tweeted a thread:

I believe in love. As a verb. Love as a feeling is wonderful, but feelings change. If you think of love as a verb, you can choose how to act in a consistent way that’s not based on transient emotional states. Consistently applying love as a verb makes love into a practice, similar to prayer or meditation. What you’ll discover if you consistently practice love is that doing so sometimes upsets people. It seems that many in our culture have a belief that some people are deserving of love and others are not. Many confuse loving with approving. But that’s not what love is. At its most pure, love is simply acknowledging the full humanity of the other. Love dependent on approval incentivizes secret-keeping and shame and will ultimately render us all unloved. Loving is a choice we make for ourselves, not for the other. Love is a way of being.

David Hayward tweeted a cartoon of Jesus saying:

I said feed my sheep, not feed on them!

Rachel Martin of NPR has started a series titled Enlighten Me. The first episode, 16 minutes long, was during All Things Considered last Sunday. Martin talked to Simran Jeet Singh, who is Sikh and the author of the book The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. The book is a response to a shooting in 2012 in which a man opened fire in a Sikh Temple, killing six (a seventh died of their wounds in 2020). Singh didn’t know the victims, but recognized it as a racist attack on his faith and culture. Here are some ideas from that discussion. Don’t let fear keep you from life. Live with no fear and no hate. The hate, the anger at what someone has done to us is a natural reaction. But it’s not the only choice. The anger directed at me is not my problem unless that person can’t control their anger. Forgiveness sometimes doesn’t seem quite right. Part of that is forgiveness is expected – a church is supposed to forgive a shooter. And forgiveness may not be the solution to our suffering. An attempt to get to know the Sikh Temple shooter (who had killed himself at the scene) didn’t work Singh felt he and the shooter had nothing in common. So why did that guy kill? He talked to some kids about it and one suggested he killed because he was evil. But evil is not a Sikh concept. We are all from the same light, we are all interconnected, we have a shared sense of humanity. We are able to hurt one another when we fail to see that humanity.

Part of what I didn't expect coming out of this conversation with the kids was this way of thinking, essentially saying there's no place for judgment. There's no place for discrimination. This is a core teaching of Sikh philosophy and I realized that as I was thinking about this white supremacist, I was so judgmental of him and I had developed the same kind of supremacist thinking that I was upset at him for. I thought I was better than him as a human being. I thought I was more divine or had more light inside of me, or however you wanna describe it. I just thought I was better than him at the end of the day. ... I don't think that our ability to live in certain ways necessarily means we're better than other people. Growing up, the one thing that I found most frustrating and the biggest turnoff about religion was when people thought that they were better than you. And maybe it's because I grew up in Texas and there's a lot of that kind of judgment, the whole "holier than thou" mentality. It always rubbed me the wrong way. I never really understood why it was particularly unacceptable to me until I started to think about this very one-sided relationship, because he was dead, with this man. But in trying to see his humanity and learning that if I wanted to see him as equally divine I had to get over this assumption that just because he did horrible things means that he's a monster or he's inhuman and doesn't deserve the same kind of dignity as everyone else.