Living a life void of love and compassion is not a happy life

My Sunday movie was Project Hail Mary and I went to an actual movie theater this afternoon to see it. This is a movie for the big screen. The story, adapted from the book by Andy Weir, is about Ryland Grace (which means actor Ryan Gosling is in every scene) solving a science fiction problem. A microbe is nibbling on the sun (yeah, that’s a scientific stretch, but let’s go with it) and the decreasing heat and light will cause the death of humanity in thirty years. Scientists determined a lot of nearby stars are also dimming. But one, Tau Ceti, isn’t. So the scientists of the world want to send a crew there to figure out why that star is spared. Grace is a middle school science teacher. In his past he wrote a paper proposing life could exist in other forms that don’t need water. It got a cool reception in the scientific community. But now his way of thinking might be a help, so he is forcefully recruited for the project. At Tau Ceti he wakes up from a coma on the spaceship, quite disoriented (of course) and finds the rest of the crew is dead. He doesn’t seem to know how to run the ship and I wondered why they would send a man into space without thorough training. The reason is eventually explained. He sees another ship nearby, a being from another affected star also looking for a solution. But this being appears to be made of rocks, confirming the paper other scientists rejected. That turns the story into a first contact story, then into a buddy movie as Rocky (what else are you going to name it?) helps Grace in trying to find the solution. The spaceship is, of course, named Hail Mary. IMDb tells me that gives us “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” Overall, I enjoyed it. It’s a fun story, though one must let the problematic science slide on by. The filmscore by Daniel Pemberton (who I hadn’t heard of before) is pretty good too. So are the special effects. The film deserves its box office take (close to $328 million so far). Even seven weeks since it opened the theater was reasonably full. Before seeing the movie I saw there are related videos on YouTube. First is 19 minutes of behind the scenes, how they did the stunts and special effects. This included exploring the puppetry of Rocky, the large array of sounds used in the score, and the wire work to simulate weightlessness. It is pretty good (not great). One person wondered isn’t Ryan Gosling old enough to be Ryan Goose? Second is a 27 minute video of the science mistakes in the film. This is by Hank Green, who apparently has done a lot of these sorts of videos. He asked his subscribers for science problems that pulled them out of the movie. Green begins by saying he very much enjoyed the film. He sees it as hopeful that so many diverse people came together to solve a problem and that some people were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity. Also, if the film was extra careful to get the science exactly right it would likely be unwatchable as a story. That’s important in an Andy Weir story where science plays an integral part in the story. The thing that got most of the attention was Grace uses a centrifuge and puts two vials in adjacent spots, which could introduce a wobble into the machine. Grace, a scientist, should know to put the vials on opposite sides. Related, Grace rarely uses an isolation chamber when dealing with the microbes. That’s dangerous when he’s the only human on board and if the microbes sicken him there goes the chance to save humanity. There are scenes where Grace is weightless and others where spins up the ship to get gravity. But exactly which plane of rotation is used isn’t consistent. But Green wasn’t all that concerned about it. Green thought Weir having the bad guys, the microbes eating the sun, also serving as fuel for the spaceship was a pretty cool idea. There was one aspect of the science not being right that I caught and Green didn’t mention. That is ships in space move differently than they do on earth. In space once the rockets stop thrusting the ship doesn’t stop, it keeps going at a constant speed. And some of Grace’s maneuvering (he wasn’t trained as the pilot) didn’t move as a spaceship should. It’s a highly enjoyable film, even if the science isn’t quite right. Grace and Rocky are great buddies. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Pridesource, discussed toxic masculinity. Her discussion was brought on by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signing an anti-DEI bill and claiming that white males are discriminated against. Witkowski wonders why white male politicians keep seeing white males as victims even while they say it’s weak to be a victim. But the oppression isn’t coming from DEI, but from white dudes telling other white dudes (like her son)...

they have a god-given duty to be violent and misogynistic and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t look like them. Toxic masculinity is at the helm in this country, and we’re headed straight for a tiny fishing vessel that we’re going to blow up just for fun because we think it’s cool to kill people.

She is teaching her son “Cruelty is not strength. Empathy is not weakness.”

As any human with a heart and soul knows, living a life void of love, compassion and care for others is not a happy life. Yet the message in this country being fed to white, heterosexual, cisgender men is that the key to a good life is seizing power from wherever you can get it, especially from people who have less power than you. Fuck love and other sissy s---. Unsurprisingly, this makes these men very unhappy. And their unhappiness is blamed on immigrants and drag queens and women who wear pants and complain about being called “honey” in the workplace. And so they must oppress them. It’s literally a cycle of abuse.

I can hear a lot of men feeling “I’m not happy.” They may not know themselves well enough to recognize they aren’t happy because the manosphere doesn’t talk about happiness or feelings. Instead of trying to find things that make them happy they lash out at the things the manosphere tells them are the cause of their unhappiness. They don’t see the cause of their unhappiness is what the manosphere is telling them.

The entire Trump administration is the perfect encapsulation of this. A collection of mediocre, mostly white males engaged in a never-ending dick measuring contest. That’s literally all they know how to do.

Last Friday Lisa Needham of Daily Kos commented on the recent Callais decision by the Supreme Court that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. She wrote the decision was based on a statistical error, which is an alarming thing to base such a sweeping and harmful decision on. But Justice Alito, the decision author, doesn’t care about such things as truth when destroying democracy. The statistical error was fed to Alito by the Department of Justice. What they said in their brief on the case was: “Black voter turnout in Louisiana surpassed that of white voters in two of the last five presidential elections,” as Needham phrased it. I won’t go into Needham’s details of the flaws that went into that statement. But this is an example of Alito taking anything he can get to claim that racism is totally fixed so the VRA is no longer necessary. I think Justice Roberts made that claim when they first started gutting the VRA, prompting a strong rebuke in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent. But even if the DOJ statement were true, that does not imply that black people are not an oppressed minority in Louisiana and thus don’t need protections when districts are drawn. Alas, Alito has shown us many times who he is. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Nicholas Grossman of Arc Digital. Grossman provided links to articles that show “the judges denied facts, distorted law, and contradicted themselves” in crafting the Callais decision. I haven’t followed the links. He then wrote:

Republican partisans on the Supreme Court created a pretext to gut the Voting Rights Act so the former Confederate/Jim Crow states, and red states more broadly, could manipulate maps to lock Black Americans and other minorities out of government representation. After the decision, multiple Republican-controlled states rushed to do exactly that. Then Republican partisans on the Virginia state supreme court created a pretext to prevent Virginia Democrats from responding in kind.

Many months ago I wrote that it seemed like Alligator Alcatraz was going away. That’s the deportation detention center built in the Florida Everglades in eight days. Alas, my reading of whatever I read, was not correct. The facility is still there. Needham reports that it may really be dismantled now. After it was built there were lawsuits saying the environmental reviews were not done. The federal government sidestepped the issue saying it was a Florida facility, not one of the feds. But to make that statement stick in court the feds could not contribute to running it. Say goodbye to $600 million. Which means Florida has to pay for it with a cost of $1 million a day. And Gov. DeSantis is resenting the expense. Needham discussed what $1 million a day, well, just $1 or $2 million (a piddling amount), could do for many other programs in Florida, but DeSantis wasn’t going to direct money to such things as food banks.

DeSantis’s ongoing quest to either impress Trump, be Trump, or both has jammed him up here. His unique combination of malice and incompetence meant that the Trump administration could always fake him out, and now the state is left holding this very expensive bag.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Robert Kagan of The Atlantic. Kagan noted that previous military failures – early WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq – didn’t prevent the US from keeping its dominance.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

They just, you know, wanted to win elections or something

Robpos of the Daily Kos community discussed what they call a civil war in the Democratic Party between oligarchs and populists. The discussion begins with a Congressional House race in New York in which the “campaign spokesman” (there is doubt about the actual role) of one Democratic candidate bashed another Democratic candidate, saying the opponent was too far left, which would cause Democrats to lose the seat. The accusation of too far left is because the opponent supported or worked on the campaigns for Gary Peters (he’s radical?), Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Robpos then noted that the attacker was funded by various PACs that are funded by billionaires. Robpos wrote:

Since the financial crisis of 2008, which made visible, the devotion of the Democratic Party to its billionaire donor class, the billionaires, through dark money PACs and shadowy think tanks, have opened a battle for the soul of the party and sought to purge the influence of its progressive wing.

A quote from Lever News

MAGA has been trying to harness that [populist] outrage for its authoritarian agenda, much like the Tea Party did when Democrats squandered the Obama presidency by turning hope and change into more of the same. But center-left populists now have their own opportunity to channel the rage in a very different, more productive direction — into causes such as campaign finance reform, anti-monopoly policy, Medicare For All, and higher taxes on billionaires.

Robpos concluded:

Billionaires are not your friends, even if they support the Democratic Party. They have the bucks, but we have the votes if we don’t succumb to apathy, resignation and defeatism.

I long ago concluded that while Democrats aren’t (well, don’t appear to be) actively working for billionaires, they are also not actively working against them, either. What we as a country need is what Democrats are failing to do. That’s why, when not compared against Republicans, Democrats have such a low approval rating. Getting rid of the nasty guy and his authoritarianism is not enough. Even gutting the power of the current Republican Party is not enough. For our democracy to survive we must blunt the strength of the billionaires to control our politics. And that Democrats are not doing. The Supreme Court delivered another blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 yesterday. As I understand it, based on various news discussions, the Court attacked Section 2 that bans the use of gerrymandering to deprive racial minorities from seats in Congress. The law (and I think in an update to the law, not the original) said that if a district map appears to deprive minorities of a seat, it is illegal. The Court ruled that to challenge a map the challengers must prove the deprivation was intentional. That is exceedingly difficult to prove. By “Court” I do mean the six conservatives. The three liberals vigorously dissented. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Stacey Abrams, writing for MSNOW:

For decades, Section 2 gave Black voters in the South and brown voters in the Southwest access to the courts to remedy harm. There was something those voters could do when, for example, state legislatures split Black neighborhoods across districts or packed Latinos into as few seats as possible to minimize their broader influence. Section 2 was not a perfect safeguard but it worked, and it instituted accountability. ... Today’s ruling on Louisiana v. Callais strikes even closer to the bone by narrowing the very mechanism communities use to fight discriminatory maps in court. These decisions have steadily built upon one another, eviscerating the protections mandated by the 15th Amendment and perhaps altering the country’s memory of what the VRA attempted to fix. More than just a law protecting voting rights, the VRA stood as a guard against abuse of power by a racial majority that had — and has — repeatedly failed to act fairly.”

Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, discussing the claim that the Court is being “race neutral.”

The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory—against white people […] It is true that—thanks in large part to the protections that the Roberts Court is carefully dismantling—Americans experience less overt discrimination than they once did. But the obvious flaw in Alito’s logic was revealed when he defended the gerrymander as partisan and not racial by pointing out that most Black people support Democrats, “because race and politics are so intertwined.” In other words: Discriminating against Black voters is okay because they vote for Democrats. Many Democrats in the 19th century, when Black people overwhelmingly voted Republican, would have enthusiastically agreed with Alito’s assessment. But if you apply Alito’s logic to those white-supremacist Democrats, they weren’t racist either. They just, you know, wanted to win elections or something, and Black people were in the way. The fact that discriminating against Black voters would give Republicans an advantage today is not exculpatory; it only establishes a motive for discrimination.

I wrote all that before I had a chance to read an article by the Associated Press posted on Kos about the case. Yeah, I’m getting behind on my reading again after a time of carefully keeping up to date. The AP article begins:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down Louisiana’s second majority Black congressional district in a decision that could open the door for Republican-led states to eliminate Black and Latino electoral districts that tend to favor Democrats and affect the balance of power in Congress.

Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent included, “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.” From the article:

The court did an about-face from a decision in a similar case from Alabama less than three years ago that led to a new congressional map for the state that sent two Black Democrats to Congress. The Alabama decision also prompted Louisiana lawmakers to add a second majority Black district. About a third of Louisianans are Black and they now form majorities in two of the state’s six congressional districts. Alabama has a separate appeal pending at the Supreme Court.

Emily Singer of Kos reported that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida released a new district map that seeks to flip Congressional seats from Democrat to Republican. Though a lot of state Republicans decried Virginia’s voter recently approved redistricting plan they heaped praise on this Florida plan. Yeah, we can gerrymander, you can’t. The new map was revealed only 48 hours before it was to be voted on – no chance for public comment. And it violates the state constitution. Back in 2010 Florida voters overwhelmingly added Fair Districts standards, which also outlawed partisan gerrymandering. Communities were not to be divided for political gain. I hear it passed the legislature. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos included a tweet from Kimberley Johnson, who included a message from Trond Solberg:

Hi. Norwegian here. A big misconception about social democracy is that everyone makes the same money, and that you can’t get rich. But Norway has wealthy people, entrepreneurs, successful CEOs. The difference is that a janitor can afford healthcare. A teacher can afford a home. And the wealthy still live in a society that works. Social democracy doesn’t put a ceiling on wealth. It raises the floor. Follow for more glimpses into life in a social democracy, where dignity is not a privilege.

I went to Johnson’s tweet. It had a reply from Fac Americae Abire:

The complaint I kept hearing is “Why do I have to help ….” That’s one very good reason why social anything doesn’t work in US. Even “Love thy neighbour” doesn’t work.

And charlie859 included a meme:

“In America, people think social democracy is some kind of communism. They think capitalism is freedom. It’s not. It’s only freedom to exploit people.” – Oscar-nominated actor Skarsgård explains his egalitarian worldview

Bill also quoted an article from Mediaite that says Wall Street traders, the ones who described the nasty guy as TACO, have come up with another: NACHO – Not A Chance Hormuz Opens.

An overall miserable place to get an education

I finished the book Horse by Geraldine Brooks. As I read this novel I wondered how much of it was historical. Her Afterward explains a great deal is. I became interested in the book when I heard it was about a black horse trainer before the Civil War. The primary character is Jarrett. His story is almost all fiction. Jarrett was born into slavery at a racing horse farm near Lexington, Kentucky. Since the boy was owned by Mr. Warfield he was known as “Warfield’s Jarrett.” He pretty much grew up in the stables and came to understand horses quite well. In 1850, when he was 13 a colt was born, named Darley. Horse and boy bonded and Jarrett did most of Darley’s training for his first race, even suggesting a few innovations. But slaves and horses that valuable tend to get sold and in 1853 boy and horse were sold together. The horse was renamed Lexington, in honor of the city where he was from. Lexington the horse is historical. He was the fastest horse during his racing years. During his years as a stud he sired more winning horses than any other American thoroughbred before or since. One of them was the winner of the first Kentucky Derby. Jarrett was so good at his job as a trainer of fast horses his life as an enslaved person was much better than most slaves. He job was one he very much wanted to do. His lodgings and clothes were decent and he was well fed (though not the high quality food of his owners). He managed groomsmen and other trainers. He could even talk back to his owner when he felt the needs of his horses were being ignored. One reason why Brooks wrote the book was to acknowledge the work of black horsemen – grooms, jockeys, and trainers – in the success of horse racing in the South. After the Civil War most of those black workers were shoved aside and their jobs given to white workers. Another character is the painter Thomas J. Scott. He is also historical. When we meet him he is trying to sell his painting skills to horse owners. Before cameras owners needed paintings of their horses to attract buyers. And to hang on their walls. Over the course of the story Scott painted Lexington three times. One painting of Darley the colt was given to Jarrett, another was made of the mature horse, and a third was made after his racing career and in this one Jarrett is depicted as the trainer. That’s the only historical record of Jarrett. The stories of Jarrett and Scott alternates with the stories of Jess, a white woman from Australia, and Theo, a black man, son of diplomats who grew up around the world. Their story takes place in 2019 and is fictional (some real aspects of their stories happened in 2010). Theo’s neighbor includes one of the paintings of Lexington in the mound of stuff she puts at the curb after her husband dies. He grabs it and decides to write an article for The Smithsonian on how paintings are restored. That prompts Jess, a Smithsonian researcher, to find Lexington’s skeleton in a museum attic and to try to get it properly remounted. Then there is effort to track down the other two paintings and what happened to them in the years since they were created. The painting now owned by the Smithsonian is here. Another painting is displayed behind the skeleton, now on display at the Museum of the Horse in Lexington. One reason for this modern part of the story is to show the life of a black man in modern America is still precarious, especially if they haven’t absorbed the rules of racial interaction learned by American black boys while growing up. I very much enjoyed the story and recommend it. The author is a fine writer. Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Marsh, which is the imagined story of the missing father in Alcott’s Little Women. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported Speaker Mike Johnson has joined the list of VP wannabees in refusing to commit to the results of the election. He insist it depends whether it is “free and fair.” Which leads to the question: What does he mean by “free and fair”? Does he mean the same thing the nasty guy means? That would be: If the nasty guy wins it was fair. If the nasty guy loses it wasn’t. Johnson says the meaning is: An election where there is no fraud, there are no illegals voting. “Look, we’re the rule of law team.” And, golly, a lot of work is being done to ensure voting is free and fair. First: to state the obvious, by quickly declaring the nasty guy’s trial was a sham, you’ve already declared you don’t believe in the rule of law. Second: I’m highly suspicious of any Republican who claims they’re doing a lot of work to make elections free and fair. Einenkel included stats from the Brennan Center on how much voter fraud there was in the 2016 election – “improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent” across 42 jurisdictions that had a combined 23.5 million votes. Johnson voted against certifying the 2020 election. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported Biden has added a line to his campaign speeches, saying of the nasty guy, “Something snapped in this guy, for real, when he lost in 2020. He can’t accept loss.” That’s why he will be a greater threat in a second term.

"Biden’s framing of this is politically savvy," remarked The Bulwark writers in their "Morning Shots" newsletter. "Biden provides a kind of permission structure for voters who might have supported Trump in 2016 or 2020 to leave him now." Trump being driven to madness by being "a loser"—a status he notoriously can't stand—is entirely believable given what voters already know about his biography.

I’ve spent a lot of my writing time on the nasty guy, so I need to update the other scandal, the one around Justice Alito and his wife’s insurrectionist flags. A week ago Einenkel reported Sen. Richard Blumenthal complained to CNN that Alito was destroying the credibility of the Court. He proposed a few solutions (which Republicans would not approve) and called on Chief Justice Roberts to show some spine in dealing with corruption in his court. Also last week Kaili Joy Gray of Kos reported on what Roberts said to Alito’s refusal to recuse himself from the insurrection cases before the Supremes. Roberts told Democrats essentially: Alito sent a letter explaining why he isn’t recusing. That’s good enough for me. And since no Republican has said anything about the issue a meeting would be “inadvisable.” Wrote Gray:

In other words, since Senate Republicans have no interest in investigating the corruption of Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court, Roberts doesn’t consider the request of the chair of the Judiciary Committee, Dick Durbin, and his fellow Democrat-therefore-not-really-reason-enough colleague Richard Blumenthal sufficient.

So perhaps Democrats should stop asking and start doing. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote that for decades Republicans have wanted to destroy public education. Gov. DeathSantis of Florida is getting close to accomplishing it. Public schools are shutting down for lack of students. Private school enrollment is up 50K, charters are up 68K, and homeschooling up 58% (and would be higher if more vouchers were available).

So why are Florida Republicans so successful in reducing public school enrollment? Because they did their homework. They spent decades draining public school funding, making them poorly staffed, poorly run, and an overall miserable place to get an education. Then they created a voucher system that offers parents unmatched goodies for joining in the enterprise of keeping children ignorant while making right-wing “education” providers rich.

Barbara Miner of Rethinking Schools has a list of reasons why Republicans don’t like public schools: 1. Corporations want to get their hands on the billions spent on education. 2. They believe private is inherently superior to public. 3. Shrinking public education furthers the goal of reducing the public sector. 4. Privatization undermines teacher unions, good by itself, though also unions support Democrats. 5. Privatization rhetoric can woo African American and Latino voters to the Republican Party (why this works is not explained). Sumner adds another reason. Most private schools are Christian and propagate a conservative view that Republicans like. Many homeschool curricula are also highly conservative. I’ll add one too. There are many groups of people – poor or black are at the top of the list – Republicans don’t want educated because they might learn they’re not supposed to be oppressed. As part of that, private schools don’t have to accept students with learning disabilities, the types of students public schools have to help through a long and expensive list of services. Eliminate public schools and these children don’t get educated. That reason is why Republicans consider private superior to public. A private service doesn’t have to help all people while a public service does. And Republicans don’t want some types of people to get that service. Tennessee is watching all this carefully. Their plan didn’t pass this year. Many of the comments noted that private and charter schools are rarely better than public. The teachers tend to be poorly paid (no union) and have less training in how to teach. Pride season is here, with the celebrations beginning last weekend. So a couple queer articles. Alas, they aren’t good. A couple weeks ago Shauneen Miranda, in an article on Michigan Advance, reported:

Twenty-six GOP-led states are suing the Biden administration over changes to Title IX aiming to protect LGBTQ+ students from discrimination in schools. Less than a month after the U.S. Department of Education released its final rule seeking to protect against discrimination “based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics,” a wave of Republican attorneys general scrambled to challenge the measure. The revised rule, which will go into effect on Aug. 1, requires schools “to take prompt and effective action when notified of conduct that reasonably may constitute sex discrimination in their education programs or activities.” ... [One] lawsuit claims that under the updated regulations, teachers, coaches and administrators would have to “acknowledge, affirm, and validate students’ ‘gender identities’ regardless of the speakers’ own religious beliefs on the matter in violation of the First Amendment.”

Though twenty-six states (more than half) are suing, there isn’t one lawsuit. Some states filed their own. Others formed small groups. Also from weeks ago an Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that foreign terrorist organizations or their supporters might target LGBTQ-related events during Pride Month. The announcement is from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. The announcement did not specify any location and the agencies were not tracking any specific threats. Happy Pride!

How can Republicans oppress people if their citizens thwart plans?

I finished the book Magic Season, a Son’s Story, by Wade Rouse. This is a memoir about Rouse trying to understand his father as he is dying. I had read a previous memoir by Rouse, At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life. This was about Rouse and his husband moving from the city to a rural area of southwest Michigan. It was funny and I found it quite entertaining. Rouse was born in the Ozarks of southwest Missouri. As a gay boy he did not fit in. His father tried to teach him to play baseball, which was a disaster. All the other things country boys are expected to do – hunt and fish (and handle what they kill), do farm chores – were also a disaster. His father didn’t know what to do with him. Even though Rouse was terrible at baseball and any other sport he fell in love with listening to the St. Louis Cardinals games on the radio with his father, then the two of them soon made the trip to St. Louis to attend games. The book is structured around the innings of a playoff game between the Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs in October of 2015. Rouse was with his father as caregiver. Not being able to play sports was just one way Rouse disappointed his father. Rouse went off to college to major in journalism, which Dad didn’t consider a real job. Rouse applied to Northwestern for his Master’s. When the acceptance call came Dad said he had decided to go elsewhere, without telling his son. I thought that was the worst of the meddling. When Rouse told his dad he is gay Dad didn’t speak to him for two years (Mom was fine with a gay son). When Dad called at the end of those two years all he did was talk about the Cardinals. Rouse’s boyfriend (later husband) Gary was annoyed that no apology was given. Rouse said the call itself, Dad being the one to break the silence, was the apology. Rouse said he didn’t want to blame his father (though there was plenty of reason to do so). He wanted to understand and honor his father. And by the end I think he managed that. He saw his father as the product of his time and place. Men were not taught how to handle their emotions or to deal with change, such as producing a gay son. All the old man knew how to do was rage at the world and drink another beer. By the end of the book I think Rouse did understand his father and through recognizing the good traits he had learned he figured out how to honor his nemesis. I highly recommend this one. Dartagnan of Daily Kos reported on the hostage taking by Republicans and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio. Republicans say that since the Democratic Convention is after the deadline to put candidates on the state ballot they won’t let Biden be on the ballot unless they get abortion restrictions. There are a couple more things as part of the hostage ransom. This attempt at abortion restrictions comes after Ohio voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to protect abortion rights. There is a bill approving Biden for the ballot – this type of bill passed the Ohio legislature in 2012 and 2020 – but Republicans refuse to advance it. One of those other things is a measure to keep money from “foreign nationals” out of citizen sponsored initiatives. Sounds good, no? The problem is that the new rules for verifying and enforcing whether there is foreign money would so difficult and expensive to navigate that it would end citizen initiatives – which is the point. How can Republicans oppress their people if their citizens keep coming up with ways to thwart them? The other thing is a measure that would immediately funnel challenges to new abortion laws directly to the highly anti-abortion Ohio Supreme Court. One of the justices on that court is Pat DeWine – the governor’s son. Neither of these poison pills, are things the average voter is going to understand. One of them has convoluted reasoning and neither spell out the intended consequences.

What’s transpiring now in Ohio is a textbook example of how Republicans simply do not care about what the majority of their citizens want, and the lengths they’ll go to force their agenda down their voters’ throats.

Silence of the Kos community wrote that the Democratic Party is going to thwart the hostage-taking by doing virtual roll call (like they did in 2020 in the pandemic era) of the delegates well before the Ohio deadline. So Biden’s actual nomination as the Democratic candidate will come well before the convention. Robert Downen and Renzo Downey, in an article for the Texas Tribune posted on Kos, discussed the Texas Republican Party platform recently voted on by delegates. It has such things as: The Bible must be taught in public schools. Statewide leaders (such as secretary of state) must get a majority of votes in a majority of counties, not just overall – with 254 counties, most of them sparsely populated and rural, that would mean a Democrat could never again win statewide office (That would violate the Voting Rights Act? Well, call for repealing the VRA). Abortion is homicide. Gender transition treatment is child abuse. Homosexuality is an abnormal lifestyle choice. Biden was not legitimately elected. Immigration is the “greatest threat to American security and sovereignty.” And many more. Yeah, many of those were in the 2022 platform. And, yeah, the party is moving further right each time it writes a platform.

During a speech on the convention stage on Saturday, former gubernatorial candidate and state Sen. Don Huffines carried a printed version of the platform with him. He noted that Republicans have controlled the Legislature and the governor’s mansion for two decades, but the party still struggles to secure its priorities. “We could get any piece of legislation done anytime we want, but, every session, we struggle to get our platform into law,” Huffines said.

Many of us are glad that turning the platform into law is so hard. In another post from last Friday Downen wrote about the chaos in the Texas Republican Party (though not so much chaos as to stop voting on the platform). It’s a long article that I think is summarized as this: There was a lot of effort to purge Republican members who weren’t conservative enough. That prompted a shrinking of the donor base to there are two major donors left. They are...

Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who have for years funded attacks by the far right on fellow Republicans, pushed for hardline restrictions on immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, and faced recent scandals over avowed white supremacists and antisemites working for their political network. In the decade before Rinaldi became chair, the party received $310,000 in donations from Dunn, Wilks or their political action committees. Since then, they have given more than $1.2 million to the party — and last year, as Rinaldi increasingly used his position to attack their political enemies, the billionaires made up a quarter of the party’s total donations.

The Texas Republican Party is beholden to only two super wealthy far right dudes. No wonder their platform reads as it does. In an Earth Matters report for Kos Meteor Blades had a few interesting segments. Blades looked at the nasty guy’s request for a bribe from the oil industry, saying he’ll undo all the Biden oil regulations. Thankfully, Rep. Jamie Raskin is asking the Department of Justice to investigate. But since there are so many legal ways to make big donations, being able to document the cash that is part of the bribe will be mighty difficult. To get to net zero carbon by mid century we must triple our investment in renewable energy by the end of this decade. And the chance to get to net zero is “rapidly closing.” The researchers who determined that predict that we’ll hit “peak oil” next year with sharp declines after that. Some industries are fairly easy to decarbonize. Others, such as avation and steelmaking, will be much harder. Millennials and Gen Z are anxious about the planet. As an action they can take they are quitting jobs that aren’t eco-friendly. The State of the World’s Human Rights report now includes the status of the right to a healthy environment. It shows climate impacts people in every country and causes more harm to marginalized groups. Cities are buying EVs in bulk for their government needs. That will speed up acceptance of EVs for personal use. It also gives cities a good way to reduce pollution. They’re also cheaper to run and maintain. Half the pasture lands on earth has been degraded by climate change. That threatens food supply. Two weeks ago Mitch Perry, in an article for the Florida Phoenix posted on Kos, reported that DeathSantis has signed a bill that will erase the phrase “climate change” from state laws. The bill was to be signed in Clearwater Beach, but 15 minutes before the ceremony the Gov’s appearance was canceled because the area was under a severe thunderstorm watch. The next day a poll showed that 68% of respondents say the state government should do more to address climate change.

Another justice with a sugar daddy

Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported that Senate Republicans have started endorsing the nasty guy. The post lists several of them and adds important comments.

In Trumpworld, there's no higher form of betrayal than those in his own party who don't prove sufficiently loyal. He made that perfectly clear at the Indianola event when he maligned Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. "I just thought it was really disloyal," Trump told the crowd. "I mean, I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. And that happens in politics.” Guess what: No one wants the Reynolds treatment and everyone knew it was coming, which is exactly why Senate Republicans have started to fall like dominoes for Trump over the past week. ... The real tension here, besides the overall direction of the Republican Party, is that Senate Republicans have lost ground in the last two election cycles precisely because they have been saddled with Trump.

By using the word “betrayal” he is, of course, saying they are to be loyal to him, not to the party or the country. More proof he intends to be a dictator. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark. She wrote that former officials in the nasty guy administration should explain what it was like to work for him. They know the stakes.

But wait, haven’t they done that already? Mark Milley posed for a front-page spread in the Atlantic. John Kelly gave a statement to CNN. Others have back-channeled their grave misgivings, off the record, to Puck and Politico. Hard truth: That’s not enough. I talk to Republican primary voters every week in focus groups, and you know what they don’t read? The Atlantic, Puck, and Politico. Fundamentally, the reason they seem unbothered by Trump’s autocratic tendencies is that a lot of them don’t know about them.

Dworkin quoted Jonathan Martin of Politico. He said the nasty guy camp is feuding over his VP choice, hoping it isn’t Nikki Haley, still in the race for the nomination. Some see the second spot as the consolation prize. But she’s seen as too much of the party establishment and too against the nasty guy, ready to undermine him at every step. A big scandal over the last week is DeathSantis banned a dictionary because its definition of sex was too racy for his tastes. Down in the roundup comments is a cartoon by Dave Whamond. Four people see DeathSantis leave with a dictionary and say:

DeSantis’ book bans have come for ... dictionaries?! I can’t find the words to express my anger! That’s the literal definition of authoritarian ... I think. He’s got away with words!

An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports on a case that was argued before the Supreme Court a couple days ago. On the surface it is about herring fishermen. A recent regulatory rule says they have to have a monitor on their boats to verify they aren’t overfishing and they have to pay the monitor up to $700 a day. That’s the surface. Underneath is a 1984 decision by the Supremes called “Chevron,” yeah, named after the petroleum company. It states that when there is some ambiguity in a law the federal agencies are allowed to fill in the details. When there’s a dispute a judge is to defer to the agency. Supporters of limited government have wanted to get rid of it for forty years. They want judges to wield this power, not experts. Supporters of Chevron say it is indeed the subject experts, not judges, who should hold this power. Supporters of limited government are, of course, gun groups, e-cigarette groups, farm, timber, and home-building groups, all the billionaires in the country, like the Koch network which recruited the fishermen, and anyone who doesn’t want the government telling them what they can’t do. Supporters of Chevron are those of us who call the rules put out by agencies “protections” rather than “regulations” because they protect us from corporations ripping us off and spoiling our planet. They include environmental groups and the American Cancer Society, the last one because abolishing Chevron would be chaotic for the health insurance industry. It would be chaotic for the whole nation because every federal rule would be called into question. Overturning Chevron means every dispute would result in a court case – overwhelming the court system. Which means until the case is heard, perhaps years later, the litigants would feel they could violate the rule. So far justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh have said they are in favor of overturning Chevron. One of them saying they want to give it a tombstone. I hear Barrett is skeptical of overturning the precedent and Roberts has been quiet. We don’t have to wonder about Kagan, Sotomayor, or Jackson. A decision will come by the end of June. The day before the hearing on the herring case Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote that Gorsuch is being pressured to recuse himself from the case. The Guardian reports Gorsuch has his own sugar daddy, billionaire oil baron Philip Anschutz, who “would score big from a favorable ruling by his friend on the high court.” A March 2017 article in the New York Times reported Gorsuch’s ties with Anschutz, just days before his Senate confirmation hearings began. Anschutz was also a donor to the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, both of which worked to get Gorsuch on the high court. Jay offered another reason why Neil Gorsuch should recuse himself. His mother, Anne Gorsuch, was appointed by Reagan to head the Environmental Protection Agency for the purpose of undermining its regulations. Nearly all of her subordinates were industry insiders. She was eventually forced to resign over mismanagement of the “$1.6 billion Superfund toxic waste clean-up program by effectively freezing its implementation” and was cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over records. The son wants to complete what his mother started. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary:

"Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus with 51 percent of the vote. It's worth noting that this caucus was decided by 14 percent of the state's registered Republicans. So Trump won 51 percent of 14 percent of about a quarter of the population of one state out of fifty. So the results are less the will of the people and more the will of Carl." —Stephen Colbert "In a new interview with Fox News, presidential candidate Nikki Haley said that the U.S. has 'never been a racist country.' So if her campaign doesn’t pan out, she can always get a job teaching history in Florida." —Seth Meyers "We have released into the wild hundreds of queens. And listen, If a drag queen wants to read you a story at a library, listen to her because knowledge is power, and if someone tries to restrict your access to power, they are trying to scare you. So listen to a drag queen!" —RuPaul, accepting the 5th Reality Competition Series Emmy for RuPaul's Drag Race. He also won the Best Reality Host award for the 8th consecutive time—the most wins by a person of color.

Yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt

I finished the book Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This is the sequel to the book Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I read this earlier book and last summer I wrote about seeing the movie based on it. This story takes up where the previous one left off – quite literally. Because of that if you haven’t read the previous book (and want to) this is a spoiler alert for the rest of this review. The previous book ends with Ari and Dante out in the desert near El Paso declaring their love to each other in the back of Ari’s truck. This book begins later the same night, perhaps more properly early the next morning, when they realize they had better get home. Ari is the narrator of the story. He feels he has come alive in falling in love with Dante. The story is about Ari’s senior year in high school (Dante goes to a different school, though they see each other frequently). It is 1988 and both are afraid that because they love each other the world won’t accept them and their love. So I kept waiting for the homophobic attacks like there were in the first book. Thankfully, there was only one, and it wasn’t directed at either Ari or Dante. This is a much gentler story, basically about Ari shifting from boy to man. He begins to see his parents as real people and actually talks to his dad. That thing his mom has been doing all his life he now sees actually quite loving. The girls who are always sweet to him but whom he had ignored can be allies. The girl who was always mean to him can be a friend. He surprises fellow students by no longer being “socially disconnected” and challenges a racist teacher who has low expectations of kids with Mexican ancestry, like him. Some people who hadn’t seen him for a while exclaim, “When did you become a man?” He wants to, but doesn’t, say “Last Thursday at 3:30.” Hanging over all this is a big question. Dante has been accepted at a college in Ohio. Ari has been accepted at a university in Texas. Will there love endure or will it merely be a first love? This book is a good one. If a movie is made of this one I’ll watch it too. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported in a few days a federal judge may reveal the names of many of the 187 people associated with Jeffrey Epstein, notorious for providing underage children for his clients to abuse. Of course, there are a lot of people who hung around Epstein (and took flights on his private jet) who did not fly to his private island and who did not partake of his other services. Sumner notes that many news sites and pundits will be making a big deal of one name likely on the list: Bill Clinton. They’ll claim this is the most important name on the list. But those same news sites will be working hard to not mention another likely on the list: the nasty guy. He’s actually the most important name on the list for a simple reason. He’s running for president. Bill Clinton isn’t. Yet the effort to smear Clinton will continue, also for a simple reason. He’s a Democrat. And they hope by association they can smear other Democrats and especially Biden. Yeah, we’ve already had nasty guy sex tapes. That appeared just before the 2016 election. So appearing on Epstein’s list won’t make any difference to his supporters. Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote about a report that appeared in Rolling Stone. It says that in the trial about the nasty guy attempting to overturn the 2020 election his legal team will attempt to turn the courtroom into a “MAGA freak show.” The plans include such things as putting Nancy Pelosi on the stand to accuse her of not adequately securing the Capitol. Claim the attack was an FBI frame job assisted by Antifa. Blame former confidants and legal allies. And they’ll get Hamas and Hezbollah in there somehow. All of this to create the spectacle the nasty guy craves. The base will love turning his own trial into a show trial of his opponents. The actual jury sitting in the DC courtroom – not so much. The prosecution will have a great deal of work keeping irrelevant issues out of the trial. In a pundit roundup for Kos from just after Christmas Chitown Kev quoted Tim Alberta of The Atlantic about the corruption of American Christianity for the purpose of winning elections and dominating the country. That has dropped attendance and the church’s reputation. It has left evangelicals estranged from their secular neighbors.

A community that has always felt misunderstood now feels marginalized, ostracized, even persecuted. This feeling is not relegated to the fringes of evangelicalism. In fact, this fear—that Christianity is in the crosshairs of the government, that an evil plot to topple America’s Judeo-Christian heritage hinges on silencing believers and subjugating the Church—now animates the religious right in ways that threaten the very foundations of our democracy. ... Mobilizing in response to this perceived threat, the forces of Christian nationalism—those who seek to demolish the wall between Church and state, asserting far-right religious dominion over the government as well as the country’s core institutions—are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party. ... Many of the people poised to hold high-ranking posts in a second Trump administration don’t view today’s societal disputes through the lens of Republican versus Democrat or of conservative versus progressive, but rather of good versus evil.

In another pundit roundup what is worth sharing is not the pundits but a comment by Captain Frogbert. The Captain started with a few quotes:

“It is a movement composed of people who are economically comfortable and middle-class, who enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt, screwed over, betrayed—and they are determined to get revenge.” — Tom Nichols, The Atlantic “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” — Herman Melville “When you have been privileged, equality feels like oppression.” “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” — Lyndon Baines Johnson

Then from the Captain, words that do a good job of explaining the MAGA movement – and much of American life:

The entire MAGA movement is populated by people who have led relatively cushy lives — as evidenced by their $90,000+ SUVs and Pickups (and do you know how much it costs to “roll coal?”) and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of guns and ammo — secure in their presumption they were entitled at birth to white preeminence and were certainly born being morally superior to “those people.” Now, “those people” are being recognized and rewarded for their efforts and accomplishments, and not treated (by some) as inferior to the glorious ME, and it burns these MAGA people’s souls. HOW. DARE. THEY? How DARE they pretend black people are equal to whites (ME!)? How DARE they pretend LGBTQ+ people aren’t sick, evil perverts? How DARE they pretend men are not inherently superior to women? How DARE they pretend people who are NOT ME are my equals??? And if those people have anything more than I THINK they ought to have (which is way less than I have, by definition) it MUST be because THEY STOLE IT FROM ME! Worse, those traitorous white people — Sociamalists, commies, Nazis (and not the good kind) LIBTARDS — GAVE MY STUFF to THOSE PEOPLE!!! HOW. DARE. THEY???

Along the same lines Resolute Square posted a cartoon of a baby elephant sitting on Santa’s lap with a very long list. The elephant says, “This is my list of things I don’t want others to have.” An article that’s been sitting in my browser tabs since September of 2022 is a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos by Bill in Portland, Maine and includes this from his collection of late night commentary. Alas, not even the example is dated.

"It's very obvious at this point that the path to Republican power lies in dickishness. I don’t know that there is a political platform or an ideology other than dickishness. This [kidnapping] stunt did exactly what he wanted it to do—jumped his profile [and] made him a hero amongst those for whom dickishness is one of the sole characteristics they're looking for in their leaders. It probably angered Trump because, 'Nobody's gonna be a bigger dick than me.' Imagine the season we are in where they are trying to one-up each other in utter cruelty." —Jon Stewart on Florida governor Ron DeSantis flying Venezuelan asylum-seekers from Texas to Massachusetts for no reason and with no warning.

Farther down in the column Bill included a pretty cool gymnastic floor routine by Katelyn Ohashi. Alas, just now when I played it the video glitched a lot while the audio kept going.

Where people use religion to brand their hatred as love

Stephen Wolf of Daily Kos Elections spelled out that Speaker Mike Johnson has his job (and Republicans have a majority in the House) due to gerrymandering.

The math is striking. Republicans hold just a five-seat majority in the House—and courts have ruled that at least six congressional districts that were in effect for the 2022 midterms in five states broke laws that ban discrimination against minority groups or prohibit drawing districts for partisan advantage

. Those five states are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio. While some of these states are facing legal remedies to add a black majority (and likely Democratic) district Republicans in North Carolina just passed a new map shifting four seats hard to the right. The rest of the article discusses how we got into this mess. Kerry Eleveld, working from polling data from Kos Civiqs, reported that approval of Congressional Republicans is 60 points underwater – 12% approve, 72% disapprove. Congressional Democrats are only 26 points underwater – 32% to 55%. When asked which party is more trusted to tell the truth the results were Democrats 37%, Republicans 26%, and neither 34%. Yeah, a third of voters don’t trust either party. In a pundit roundup for Kos, Chitown Kev quoted Charles Blow of the New York Times. Blow is from the same area of the country as Johnson and knows the type.

He is from a part of the country where your nemesis will smile at you and promise to pray for you, where people will quickly submit that they “love the sinner but hate the sin,” where one hand can hold a Bible while the other holds a shackle. He is from a place where people use religion to brand their hatred as love so that they act on it cheerfully and without guilt. He is what many have feared: an example of second-wave Trumpism — politicians rising in Trump’s wake who come with the same policy priorities and ideological proclivities, but in a far more congenial and urbane package, propelled by something more than personal grievance. Trumpism is a religion developed to serve a man. What happens when it evolves into a pillar of an established creed and is viewed as a way to serve God?

Charles Jay of the Kos community started with a review of what Jesus thought of rich people. An example:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money (Matthew 6:24).

From there Jay turned to Jesse Duplantis, a prosperity gospel preacher in New Orleans, who asked believers to send him donations so he can buy another $54 million personal jet. Duplantis thinks if Jesus were around today he’d give up his donkey and fly around the world to preach. I’ll summarize Jay’s quote from the Harvard Divinity School’s definition of the prosperity gospel. It is frequently associated with evangelical Christianity. It “emphasizes believers’ abilities to transcend poverty and/or illness through devotion and positive confession.” It affirms “the religious and spiritual legitimacy of wealth accumulation,” equates financial success with moral soundness, and material blessings are earned from God. When preached to the poor it can be predatory and manipulative. It seems Duplantis is saying give me your money and God will give you money. Then compare it to the Bible verse above. This bad theology is becoming more popular in the midst of the Great Dechurching – 40 million members have stopped attending church in the last 25 years. Some Republicans, including Johnson, have latched onto this bad theology, which allows them to shift the war on poverty to a war on the poor – they’re poor because of insufficient faith. Many prosperity gospel preachers are non-denominational. And many critics of this theology come from mainstream denominations – including Southern Baptists. Laura Clawson of Kos looked at an article by Tim Alberta of The Atlantic that gushes over Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of him either. Between the gush Alberta insist Biden is a weak candidate – which seems to be news to Democrats, likely a reason no one else is running against Biden. I think Clawson understands the real reason for the article:

It’s about the media’s urge to juice the horse-race angle of any election that seems like a foregone conclusion.

It’s about the media thinking social hierarchy terms. They’re interested in who is winning and who is losing and assume we are also interested. If necessary they’ll make up a story. Hunter of Kos reviewed the campaign of DeathSantis. The short description is the more people get to know him the less they like him. As for the rest of the Republican field:

Haley and the others are simply around, making no solid case for themselves while refusing to take Trump on out of fear of his possible violence-baiting response. If Trump’s supposed competitors aren't willing to make the case that 91 felony counts ought to disqualify someone from a second go at public office, then what purpose do they serve?

I’ve written only a little about the Israel/Hamas war. I guess I’m waiting for a few more stories worth writing about and then put them together. I haven’t seen many stories yet – my regular news source Daily Kos has not been covering the war, unlike the war in Ukraine – though I’ve heard a few on NPR. So I know Israel now has troops in Gaza and I think I heard Israel bombed an ambulance convoy because they claimed Hamas was using the convoy as a shield. The whole situation is a mess! I guess I no longer want to wait to include an article in a larger story, especially since this one is 11 days old. In another pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted an opinion piece in Haaretz:

If at first Netanyahu's efforts were to weaken the state institutions in order to sabotage criminal proceedings against him, by January 2023 he moved to dismantle them altogether, reducing them to such a low level of functionality that Israel, in many aspects, began to resemble a failed state. Why did he do this? He believed that he was betrayed by the state itself – as some would put it – the "deep-state". So according to his logic, it was not only necessary to take control of its institutions, but essentially, destroy them. A key tool in this operation was his move to appoint loyalists with minimal qualifications – if any. The dysfunctionality has been evident to all, most clearly seen first with the unrestrained deadly rampage of criminal gangs in the Israel’s Arab towns and cities and unchecked violence by West Bank settlers towards Palestinians.

I add that the nasty guy and many Republicans feel the same way about the US government and want to act against it in the same way. Rob Rogers tweeted a cartoon appropriate for this war. A woman is standing in the rubble. She is holding one child and another is hiding behind her. She’s looking up at several bombs labeled “For: Hamas, From: Israel” coming over her. To the side an Israeli soldier says, “Relax... We’re not aiming at you!” A third pundit roundup, a second by Greg Dworkin, quoted a tweet by Jonathan Martin from just before Johnson was elected as speaker:

A sage Dem texts, basically: Repubs are gonna elevate a speaker who tried to overthrow the election and backs an abortion ban - the two issues we won on in 2022 “What are they thinking?”

And down in the comments is a meme tweeted by Anonymous and created by Noah Garfinkel:

The “Guns don’t kill people” people sure seem to think a book can make you gay.

A couple more cartoons. Michael de Adder of the Halifax Chronicle Herald tweeted one titled “Pro-Life in America.” It shows a street that has gun shops and only gun shops and down a side alley is the entrance to an abortion clinic. A cartoon by Jay Wamsted shows a teacher throwing down the chalk on his way out the door. On the board he had written a story problem, “If an unappreciated $39,000-a-year math teacher leaves at 11:30 a.m. for a $90,000-a-year job in the private sector, and travels 52 miles at 88 miles per hour, what time will he arrive?”

You are here to make the pageantry look good

Aldous Pennyfarthing of the Daily Kos community discussed the new book ban in Iowa and the growing fallout from it. As for some of the books banned Pennyfarthing quoted what I think is a press release from the Iowa legislature:

This week, the Iowa City Community School District released a list of 68 books that it removed from schools to comply with the law. Among the titles: “Ulysses” by James Joyce, “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison. ... Beyond Iowa City, the Des Moines Register reports that school districts across the state have removed hundreds of books from their school libraries, also in response to that law. Among these titles: “1984” by George Orwell, “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut and “Forrest Gump” by Winston Groom.

Pennyfarthing wonders why the Bible hasn’t been banned for sex acts. I guess I wasn’t aware how steamy that book can get. This post includes the text of Ezekiel 23:16-21 and ... I’ll let you read it for yourself. Pennyfarthing reminds us that 70% of parents oppose book banning, but the remainder tend to be really loud, so school districts might “err on the side of caution.” Pennyfarthing concludes:

Of course, this movement is likely far less about preventing kids from discovering the existence of sex than keeping them from thinking for themselves—and challenging a Christian dominionist worldview. After all, if you read “The Handmaid’s Tale” and are more focused on the “sex scenes” than the message, you really are a pervert.

Tom Gauld tweeted a cartoon he titled, “The shocking truth of what is going on in our public libraries!” There are four scenes with captions:

A friend recommends a book. “Teens prescribed mind-altering experiences!” An adult reads to children. “Children indoctrinated from an early age!” A youth checks out some books. “Free samples distributed to promote addiction!” A sign for a book club meeting. “Groups gather by night to study arcane texts!”

I had lunch with my friend and debate partner today. At one point in our discussions we had to think to tally all the trials the nasty guy is facing. We got into that topic because Sidney Powell, sometimes known as the kraken and was quite active in spreading election conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, has, in the words of Mark Sumner of Kos, been “harpooned.” Meaning she plead guilty and took a deal of probation to escape her own trial. In return she will be a witness against many of her co-defendants in the Georgia election interference case. That includes the nasty guy. This is quite good news! The other person who asked for a speedy trial is Kenneth Chesebro. His trial begins Monday. Though he played a small part in the whole scheme my friend said the prosecutors have to lay out the entire case, so the trial could take five months. Oh, wait! About the time my friend and I sat down to lunch an Associated Press article was posted on Kos that reports Chesebro also plead guilty. He will also assist the prosecution. So that five month trial is avoided, saving all the evidence for a future five month trial for the nasty guy and the other 16 remaining defendants. It also keeps the prosecution’s trial strategy secret for a while longer. Between now and when the big trial starts hopefully more of those defendants will decide to flip. Sumner provides more detail of Chesebro’s plea deal. Sumner asked why Chesebro seemed to get so little punishment. The answer is, as it is in many cases like this, he is a very valuable witness for the prosecution. He’s more valuable that Powell because there are a lot of videos out there of her saying some mighty weird stuff. Defense could easily say that stuff is so weird one can’t trust anything she says. My friend and I also talked about the situation in the House. Joan McCarter of Kos did a liveblog of what happened. There was another vote on whether Jim Jordan should be Speaker. He lost 25 Republican votes, more than the previous two votes. So Republicans went into a closed-door session and held a secret ballot on whether Jordan should continue his quest or drop out. That vote – remember, it was secret – Jordan lost 86-112, significantly more voted against him than in the public vote. So Jordan is no longer the candidate for Speaker. And other candidates are announcing themselves. One of them is Jack Bergman, whose district covers Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and a good chunk of the north end of the Lower. And Michigan Radio says he took part in some aspect of 2020 election denialism. So Republicans will take the weekend for these new candidates to do their thing with a caucus meeting sometime Monday or Tuesday and a floor vote shortly after that. Rivers posted a cartoon of an old man sitting on a porch with his hand on his dog. He says, “It’s OK Rex... after all the weirdness of this year – the weather, the fires, UAPs, threats of nuclear war and a massive internet attack – I’ve been sort of expecting a portal to another dimension to open up in front of our house...” Back on September 1st Laura Clawson of Kos posted a story about 15 year old Quinn Mitchell of New Hampshire asking a question to candidate Ron DeathSantis. The candidate stumbled over the answer. And then campaign staff and security intimidated Mitchell. The candidate’s wife also got involved and told the boy’s mother, trying to speak mom to mom, the lad had been lying to her about what happened. On October 16th, and I’m puzzled by the six week delay, Hunter of Kos took up the story, this time from Mitchell’s side. The lad has a political podcast and has been asking smart questions of politicians for four years. Politicians respond because they know the value of engaging a teenager. Hunter wrote:

There are a whole host of important life lessons here for Mitchell, but the most pertinent one is that asking "hard questions" of Republican political leaders will immediately get you accused of being an enemy—a Democrat. You are not here to ask hard questions. You are here to make the pageantry for America's Next Dear Leader look good, and by God if you make one of the party's more powerful figures look bad even once you will be labeled, as Donald Trump so often puts it, an "enemy of the state."

About that “hard” question...

The question that caused DeSantis to fall flat on his authoritarian ass, for example, was: “Do you believe that Trump violated the peaceful transfer of power, a key principle of American democracy that we must uphold?” The obviously correct answer is "yes." Politically expedient lies would either be "yes, but" or "no." It's not this kid's fault that DeSantis descended into paranoid gibberish, whining, "I wasn't anywhere near Washington that day" or "I have nothing to do with what happened that day," as if Mitchell was trying to Columbo him into a criminal confession. Nobody could have expected that the petty Florida tyrant would crumble so completely.

With the intimidation Mitchell got he has a dilemma. Play nice (as in lobbing only softball questions) with Republican candidates or be banned from Republican events. An AP article posted on Kos on October 7 discusses the growing number of young people identifying as nones – those that check “none” with asked “What’s your religion?” A recent survey puts them at 30% of US adults.

While the nones’ diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups, most of them have this in common: They. Really. Don’t. Like. Organized. Religion. Nor its leaders. Nor its politics and social stances. That’s according to a large majority of nones in the AP-NORC survey. But they’re not just a statistic. They're real people with unique relationships to belief and nonbelief, and the meaning of life.

The article then features a wide variety of young adults who claim the “none” designation. Some stories are about their bad encounters with organized religion. Others are about their alternate methods of expressing spirituality or finding community. One comment I heard last weekend at my church conference (notes still being typed) was that as our youth walk out the door we should ask them why they’re leaving. Then we should listen to their answers. They can tell us what we need to do to fix our churches.

Social media is turning local book bans into national stories

There was a debate among the Republican candidate for president last night. Of course, I avoided that waste of time and brain cells. Instead, I relied on Kos of Daily Kos for a (thankfully brief) summary of the winners and losers. A winner (only in terms of the debate) was the nasty guy. This time his decision to skip the debate was a good one. Another winner was Ukraine. Four of the candidates strongly supported Ukraine. Only Ramaswamy clung to pro-Putin talking points. Moderators won by actually asking decent questions and decent follow-up. It’s not their fault the candidates didn’t answer them. Losers: All the candidates. None of them looked presidential. Also, to get the job they have to pile on against the nasty guy. Instead, they attacked each other. And, though this was seen as a debate for the job of vice nasty, the nasty guy declared none of the current crop will be his running mate. Individually, DeathSantis was too easily ignored and what he did say gave Biden an easy score. Last time Haley did enough things to get noticed. The second debate canceled that notice. Also losers were the audience. They were bored. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed how to interview the nasty guy. He did this because Kristen Welker of NBC’s Meet the Press interviewed him and she allowed him to “release a Niagara of unchecked lies. It was a masterclass in handing a sharp knife to someone who wants nothing more than to murder you.” So how to interview him? First of all: Don’t.

Bringing Trump on and allowing him to speak is nothing short of a campaign contribution. By now, everyone in the news business should be well aware that inviting Trump onto a program is inviting him to spread lies and attack democracy for the length of his appearance. Anyone who doesn’t know this shouldn’t be in the news business.

But if your bosses say you must...

How many lies should journalists attempt to correct when confronting not just Trump, but any politician or candidate for public office? All of them. And especially the first of them, because letting that first one go is simply giving permission for an unlimited number to come.

Orion Rummler of The 19th, posted on Kos, reported that the American Community Survey, put out by the Census Bureau and done next year may ask about LGBTQ+ people. In 2020 (or was it in 2010?) the census asked about same-sex couples living together, but that misses a lot of LGBTQ people. This is important because a lot of government funding is based on data and without asking about LGBTQ people a lot of this funding can’t happen. Unlike the census, this survey does not go to every household. It will be sent to roughly 271K houses. The questions are to be asked about every member of the household older than 15. Other LGBTQ organizations see a problem in the way this is set up. A head of household typically fills out the survey for the whole house. And if that person doesn’t approve of a teen being LGBTQ it won’t be noted on the survey. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Kate Sosin of The 19th. She discussed a Franklin & Marshall Global Barometers Report which gave a letter grade for LGBTQ human rights that looks at a country’s climate of tolerance and their policies.

Uruguay, Luxembourg, Brazil, Norway, Colombia, Malta and Chile are the countries that best uphold the human rights of their LGBTQ+ citizens, according to a report released last week. Conspicuously off that list? The United States, which scored a C or “persecuting” grade when it comes to LGBTQ+ human rights... The report ranked the United States 31 out of 136 countries, based on the lived realities of more than 167,000 queer people surveyed worldwide, trailing behind France, Vietnam and Hong Kong. But the United States is also headed toward a failing grade, said Susan Dicklitch-Nelson, professor of government at Franklin & Marshall College and the study’s founder.

There is plenty of evidence why the US got only a C. Such as... Dartagnan of the Kos community reported that the Charlotte County school district went way beyond current Florida law, though maybe not the desires of Gov. DeathSantis. All libraries in the district removed all books that have any LGBTQ character or theme. Not just the ones that others have claimed are obscene. All of them. Students are not allowed to bring the books to school for the time they sit at their desks and silently read. Even And Tango Makes Three was removed. This is the book about two male penguins who adopt and raise a chick. There is no sexual content, just parenting. The Florida Department of Education has refused to clarify what is to be removed to comply with the law and what isn’t. So the only way to stop overzealous (or even confused) librarians is a lawsuit. Laura Clawson of Kos reported the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina has banned the children’s picture book Red: a Crayon’s Story. They’re banning a story about crayons?

”Red: A Crayon’s Story” is about a crayon that is blue but has a red label. Everyone tells the crayon that it’s red, and tries to help it be better at redness, until a friend helps it see that being blue is what it’s good at. Yes, that can absolutely be read as a parable about trans identity—but that’s not the only way it can be read. As is the case with so many apparently simple children’s books, it can be about lots of things: being true to your inner self, as the publisher explains the message of the book, or finding out that what you’re best at is not what you’ve been told you should be good at, or, in an example taken from the author's life, being told that you’re lazy or stupid when really you’re dyslexic.

Yeah, this is part of the freakout over trans people. But it is also part of the assault on social-emotional learning.

“Let's say a student is working on a really difficult algebra problem and they get so frustrated because they can't remember what the next step is," Aaliyah Samuel, president and CEO of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, explained to NPR. "They have to be self-aware enough to say, ‘You know what? I'm feeling frustrated. How do I handle this?’”

And why do Republicans say that is bad? Because in addition to simply getting in touch with one’s feelings, which toxic masculinity roundly rejects, another aspect of SEL is learning how to disagree respectfully. They don’t want to do the respect thing either. Clawson also reported how social media is turning local book bans into national stories. A tweet or post about a book ban or ban prevention in one town is pounced on by the leaders of the movement – Christopher Rufo and Corey DeAngelis – who amplify it through their large social media followings while adding their praise or condemnation – and lies. So the removals in Charlotte County, Florida don’t stay there.

Right-wing book-banning efforts have money and power behind them these days. Objections to specific books that just a decade ago might have been brought up by one person in one town and laughed out of that town are now taken up by prominent right-wing operatives and pundits and nationalized—which in turn means that local school districts have to take the individual complaints more seriously, lest they become a target for the likes of Rufo or Moms for Liberty.

Not all LGBTQ news is bleak. In another pundit roundup Kev quoted Rebeca Queimaliños of El País in English who is demonstrating Put Yourself in My Skin, virtual reality scenarios to allow people to “experience” LGBTQ+ discrimination for themselves. They show three scenarios: a gay couple being beaten, a lesbian teen, and a transgender person (the actual scenarios of the last two aren’t mentioned).

Once you put on the virtual reality glasses, it is impossible not to feel the panic of a lesbian teenager or the helplessness when witnessing a couple being beaten for being gay. Those feelings are universal. However, after months of touring, Porteiro believes that the capacity for empathy among people between the ages of 60 and 80 is greater than among young people. “I don’t know how to explain it. Without sounding pessimistic, I think there is a regression.”

Alas, the quote doesn’t explain that last bit. Alejandro Serrano and William Melhado of the Texas Tribune in a story posted on Kos report that a federal judge has declared the Texas law banning public drag shows that might be seen by children is unconstitutional because it impermissibly infringes on Free Speech.

"Drag shows express a litany of emotions and purposes, from humor and pure entertainment to social commentary on gender roles," the ruling reads. "There is no doubt that at the bare minimum these performances are meant to be a form of art that is meant to entertain, alone this would warrant some level of First Amendment protection."

A similar case in another federal court in Texas came to the opposite conclusion. And this case addresses that one. That one was a suit brought again West Texas A&M University President Walter Wendler because he canceled a campus drag show. This ruling includes:

"The president's sentiment reinforces this Court's opinion that while some people may find a performance offensive or morally objectionable, it does not mean the performance is not expressive or given First Amendment protection," he wrote. "Not all people will like or condone certain performances. This is no different than a person's opinion on certain comedy or genres of music, but that alone does not strip First Amendment protection."

State Sen. Bryan Hughes wrote the bill and pledged to challenge the ruling. He said:

Surely we can agree that children should be protected from sexually explicit performances. That’s what Senate Bill 12 is about.

And the rebuttal:

Critics of the bill, though, say that Republican lawmakers and officials this year have incorrectly — and unfairly — portrayed all drag performances as inherently sexual or obscene.

In yet another pundit roundup Greg Dworkin quoted John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times. In a tweet Burn-Murdoch wrote:

People are becoming more zero-sum in their thinking, and weaker economic growth may explain why Older generations grew up with high growth and formed aspirational attitudes; younger ones have faced low growth and are more zero-sum.

In a quote from the accompanying article Burn-Murdoch wrote:

You wouldn’t typically think of affirmative action advocates and anti-immigration nativists as being bedfellows. The former group skews young and is composed overwhelmingly of progressives, and the latter skews old and conservative. But according to a fascinating new study out of Harvard University, they have one significant thing in common: a predilection for zero-sum thinking, or the belief that for one group to gain, another must lose. The same way of thinking crops up on all manner of issues that cut across traditional political divides. Roughly equal numbers of US Democrats and Republicans agree that “in trade, if one country makes more money, then another country makes less money”. And while Democrats are more likely to say “if one income group becomes wealthier, this comes at the expense of other groups”, a third of Republicans agree.

To me that last bit is important. Over the last 40 years one group – billionaires – has become wealthier at the expense of the working class. I’d love to live in a society in which we can all become wealthier together. But billionaires define their worth by the difference between their wealth and that of others. They are practicing their own zero-sum thinking – I take more money to myself to make sure others make less money. This is a good time to include a couple cartoons. Both cartoons are about the auto strike that is at the end of its second week. A cartoon by David Horsey of the Seattle Times shows a worker on an assembly line and behind him are a member of the board of directors and the CEO, who is wearing a huge golden parachute, not yet deployed. The CEO says, “...And you know why we’re going bankrupt? That guy thinks he needs health care and a middle class wage!” The other cartoon is by Christopher Weyant of the Boston Globe. It shows a guy in a small rowboat with an “On Strike” sign. Looming above him from the prow of “SS Obscene Profits” a man shouts down, “Livable wages? Benefits? How dare you complain! Do you know how hard it is to squeak by on only $35 million a year?”

Trying to turn 61 losses into a win is good strategy?

How well would women do if they were able to run the world? Would they do worse or better than men? Would they able to shed the social hierarchy that produces toxic masculinity? I think women would do better, which is why, when given the choice on a ballot, I frequently vote for the woman. I also came up with the idea for a novel. In my scenario the number of boys being born drops from 50% to 1%. The effect lasts a few generations. I came up with a long list of questions. In that time is toxic masculinity driven out? Will boys see women in leadership roles as natural? Will gay men making frequent donations to sperm banks be enough to allow them to love who they want? Will the small number of boys still be trained to think they’re entitled? Will men be banned from combat and the priesthood so a supply of sperm isn’t lost? Will women still prize motherhood so highly? Since so many women won’t be tied to children what will they accomplish in the business world? What will the shortage of men do to monogamy and marriage? Will the social hierarchy be discarded? Yes, I’ve thought about this a lot. All these and many more questions are intriguing. But I’m quite aware turning these questions into a plot, deciding which characters do what, and figuring out what scenes are necessary to drive the plot and develop the themes is a significant level up from a list of questions. I don’t think I’m equipped to do that. My training is in computers and music. As much as I want to read such a novel and have it out where other can read it I want someone else to write it. So if any one is or knows of a novelist looking for an idea please contact me. My terms for a partnership will be very generous. That’s a log way of introducing the book I just finished. No, someone didn’t write the book I envision, at least not quite. It’s A World of Women by J.D. Beresford. This book was first published in 1913. It is part of the new series Radium Age put out by The MIT Press. It’s goal is to feature science fiction stories from the time of Marie Curie, who discovered radium in 1903 and died of cancer in 1934. This is the time between H.G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback and isn’t remembered my most science fiction fans. The story opens with an approaching plague. Astra Taylor, in her introduction, is well aware of the similarities to what we just went through. This plague is selective – it kills mostly men, to the point where in England there is about one man per thousand women. Before the plague strikes there is the usual dismissal of severity we’ve come to know well. It’s not going to be that bad, people say. One character, Jasper Thrale, says we must close off Britain to the world. Another says if we do that we will have only a month of food – quite ignoring that losing half the population would be much worse. Much of the story is focused on the Gosling family. Father George is an accountant in a prestigious firm, so has a decent salary. His wife (always, “Mrs. Gosling”) keeps house. Their two daughters Blanche and Millie are trying to get more from Dad to keep up with the latest fashions and attract suitors. They fit in their culture quite well but are unprepared for what’s coming. Then comes the day when the citizens of London realize this pandemic thing is real, it will be bad, and it is close. They panic and flee. Pretty soon no gas (this is before most homes have electricity) and no water. Also soon, no trains. Civilization has collapsed. George realizes he is no longer under the constraint of civilization. His family figures he must have been killed by the plague. They realize they can’t stay in London and follow the migration out. Along the way Mrs. Gosling can’t figure out the response she gets when she asks for something and says, “I’ll pay.” A character replies If I can’t eat it, wear it, or start a fire with it I have no use for it. They end up at a community of women where Thrale serves as the guy keeping the machinery (most steam driven) running. He rebuffs so many women I began to wonder if he was gay, though that concept would not have been known in 1913. As the community works to get the harvest in they realize that many social conventions, especially the social hierarchy, don’t matter anymore. Having been the wife of a Peer is useless – if you don’t work you’ll be asked to move on. Yeah, there are hints of what I am proposing with my own novel. But a lot of what I want to explore is just hinted at the end (and the end seems to be a bit of a cop-out). My idea doesn’t deal with the end of civilization, more with how it will have to evolve over the generations. Overall, it was a good read. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported the nasty guy has a defense plan against the charges from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election – argue he had a right to overturn the election. That means re-litigating all 61 court decisions that went against him in 2020 and 2021. His lawyers think trying to turn 61 losses into a win is good strategy? And Democrats are saying, sure, bring it on. Go ahead if the nasty guy wants to make this the conversation for the next 16 months.

If Republicans are fretting about being forced to focus on Trump’s lies about his loss again, Democrats are poised between pleasure that an opponent is dragging himself down and concern for the democracy he’s undermining. “Swing voters in a general election are not looking for celebration of an attempt to overturn an election and overthrow a government,” Democratic pollster Geoff Garin told The Washington Post. “Swing voters and voters generally take our democracy very seriously and don’t want their votes to be made irrelevant by politicians that want to overturn elections.”

Hunter of Kos explained that the nasty guy had a terrible, horrible, really bad day when he went into Washington for the arraignment. The judge kept him waiting, which is frequently seen as a power move. The judge, a female, didn’t address him as president, but as mister. And unlike when he was in the White House his motorcade had to weave through traffic with certain fingers waved by other commuters. His jet had to wait in line to take off. And when back in Bedminster he had to wait for goats on the road. I have no sympathy. Media has talking a lot about the nasty guy getting a bump in the polls every time he’s indicted. Perhaps he needs a fourth indictment to guarantee a win. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Matt Robinson of Newsweek:

The indictments aren't helping Trump and they aren't the reason he's increasing his lead. For that, you can thank the fact that Ron DeSantis is a historically terrible candidate. As the second place contender, he's widely viewed as the most likely Trump alternative, and as he has gotten more exposed in the national press, he's dropped half of his support. From March 10 through August 1, DeSantis went from 31.4 percent to 15.6 percent. And where did those voters go? That ain't exactly rocket science either. Surveys show that Trump is the second choice of around 40 percent of DeSantis supporters. Lo and behold, as DeSantis has sunk, about 40 percent of the 15 point evaporation in his support has now shown up in Trump's column.

Of course, in the comments of the roundup Denise Oliver Velez posted several cartoons about the indictment. One by Madeline Horwat shows a flying saucer from “Law Offices of Blorp and Glorg” with two aliens handing out a business card and saying, “Take us to your indicted leader.” And a cartoon by Jimmy Margulies showing a clerk in a paint store saying, “Whitewash? I have regular, extra thick, and Florida school textbook...” Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have sent Chief Justice John Roberts a letter. It starts by throwing Roberts’ words back at him:

Since 2011, you have argued that the Supreme Court can police its own ethical conduct. Yet, this year has been marked by revelation after revelation of justices receiving lavish gifts that they failed to disclose as required by law or otherwise using their offices and taxpayer-funded resources for personal gain.

Roberts had his colleagues sign a Statement of Ethics. And Alito and Thomas have acted as though it doesn’t apply to them. Which means the Statement of Ethics is not enough. It is more pressure put on Roberts but he also knows while Republicans hold the House and can filibuster in the Senate Congress can’t impose anything stronger.