They sing

I did go out today, long enough to travel 3 miles round trip to get a newspaper, The Detroit Free Press. The headline is “Hospitals may lack adequate bed space.”



Here are some of the little things I didn’t write about in the past week.

First up is an article from last Sunday’s Freep originally from USA Today. A couple days ago I wrote about voters, especially Democratic voters, are to the left of Joe Biden, the presumptive nominee. This article, Bridging the Gap by Paul Davidson (couldn’t find link) talks about areas where Democrat and Republican voters agree.

Most American, regardless of party affiliation, support proposals to upgrade infrastructure; provide tax breaks for job-creating businesses; decrease college costs; and retrain adults for better-paying positions.

There are still differences on issues like raising the minimum wage, protecting labor unions, and easing regulations, though the differences aren’t as big as the rhetoric.

I note that Republican voters appear to be less rigid and extreme than Republican lawmakers who are funded by corporations.

Jan Rivkin, a professor at the Harvard Business School, says the problem is more than campaign contributions:

The rewards go not to those that solve problems but to those that rile up their base. Somewhere along the way compromise became a dirty word.

AKALib of the Daily Kos community excerpted a letter from Monica Maggioni, the CEO of RaiCom, a part of Italian Public Television. The letter is about the conditions in Italy dealing with the coronavirus. For the healthy time is suspended. For the afflicted “you die in silence and you’ll be buried in silence” because funerals cannot be held. Doctors are having to make decisions about who can be helped and who is too old or too weak to save because there aren’t enough ventilators.

AKALib ends with a couple videos of one wonderful response Italians have to being confined to their homes. They open their windows or come out on their balconies and they sing, sometimes alone, sometimes together up and down the street. The songs include the national anthem and popular songs. A great example of building community in the face of a threat that isolates.



House Democrats approved a package of measures to help the nation through the epidemic. The nasty guy has said he likes it. The Senate … is on vacation. They say they’ll be back tomorrow.

But these days the Senate is known as McConnell’s graveyard where so many wonderful House bills over the last year have gone to die. Will that happen to this bill? If it dies Sarah Kendzior warns in a tweet:

They cannot do this "Gee we tried but it died in McConnell's graveyard" bullshit anymore with millions of Americans headed for real graveyards. They must stop pretending Trump is reasonable and work around him. At the LEAST coordinate with states and give the public needed info.

There is a lot they can do to educate the public.



One of the provisions in the House bill is for paid sick leave. Great! But it only applies to companies with less than 500 employees. Amazing Maps tweeted a diagram from the New York Times showing the companies with the largest number of employees without paid sick leave. The biggest are McDonalds with 517K without paid sick leave, Walmart with 347K, 189K at Kroger, 180K at Subway, and a large list of others in food and hospitality, retail, and grocery businesses. It looks like all are national chains.



Of course, a Twitter feed named Amazing Maps meant I had to spend a while exploring it. I scrolled through its last two years of entries. All of it fascinating to me. Here’s a link to a few:

*A map of the US with a green circle that covers Washinton to Boston to Buffalo. I’m not sure it includes Cleveland. The description says the circle includes 20% of the population and 50% of the wealth.

* A map of the US counties with thin orange stripes along both oceans and a huge red blob in the middle. The caption says the red and orange areas have equal population.

* A map of the world with ten north to south bands. Each band includes 10% of the world’s population. One band covers the US, most of Canada, and western South America. Four bands cover India and China and the areas north and south of them.

* If one takes a map of North and South America and turns it so that west is down the whole thing looks like … a duck.



Jason Yanowitz tweeted a thread about how the epidemic progressed in Italy. One crucial step in the spread: The virus was ravaging northern Italy and the authorities declared large areas in quarantine. A newspaper published it before they should, which allowed 10,000 people to escape the zone – and carry the virus to the rest of the country.

The progression from first cases to total country lockdown was about two weeks. Which means the same situation could hit America in about two weeks.



Leah McElrath tweeted a segment from The Rachel Maddow Show in which she talks to Donald McNeil of the New York Times about some aspects of how China brought the coronavirus under control (though there are other aspects that were brutal). They had officials who tested for fever everywhere – when one got on the bus, when one entered a building. If one showed signs of fever one was sent to a flu center (which they had built during their last epidemic) and tested, with results in hours. One was not sent to a doctor’s office where one could infect other patients there. One was not allowed home because they found 80% of transmissions happened at home. If the test was positive one was sent to a hospital.



Quote of the day from last Thursday:

Without equity, pandemic battles will fail. Viruses will simply recirculate, and perhaps undergo mutations or changes that render vaccines useless, passing through the unprotected populations of the planet. A man lucky enough to receive an effective vaccine against a new viral threat in Los Angeles may be re-exposed a year later to a mutated version of that germ that circulated among unimmunized populations in poor countries, only to slam North America in a second wave. That is what happened with influenza in 1918, which spread across Europe in a mild form, returning months later in its terrifying virulence and killing more than 50 million people (by recently adjusted estimates perhaps 100 million people).
~~Laurie Garrett, 2011

Blissonance

I wrote yesterday that the nasty guy has an enemies list and, with his acquittal, will feel free to act on it. And today he started.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was one of the important witnesses during the House impeachment inquiry. Today he was fired from his National Security Council job and escorted out of the White House. He is active military, so he isn’t out of a job, just out of that job. Vindman’s twin brother Yevgeny, also a part of the NSC was also escorted out.

Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union and also an important witness, has also been fired.



Senator Sherrod Brown wrote in the New York Times that the GOP Senators who voted to acquit did so out of fear. Fear of the nasty guy’s tweets and that he might campaign against them in their primary. Fear of being attacked by Fox News hosts. Fear of the hosts on conservative talk radio. Fear of Twitter trolls attacking.



At the end of the State of the Union Speech on Tuesday evening (which I avoided) Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped up her copy of the speech. She did so because she said it was filled with lies, what she called a “manifesto of mistruths.” Her actions were a way of prompting the media to talk to her about it. Which she did in detail.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reviewed the speech and said Pelosi’s action was “far more courtesy than this toilet stain of a speech deserved.”

Since then Pelosi has said her actions were thought out ahead of time – about as soon as she received a copy of the speech. There’s more shredding to be done.



Jill Lawrence in USA Today wrote that she used to have respect for all politicians, even those she passionately disagreed with. Then came the nasty guy and respect is gone.



The satirical newspaper The Onion says that the Democratic National Committee has offered a startup company $500 million to manufacture a “cutting-edge tabulation device that will be able to legibly report vote totals on a sheet of paper 99% of the time.” The hexagonal marking implement will be stress tested by the business venture known as Sharpen. DNC Chair Tom Perez reportedly said in the article:

It may not be easy to encase a cylinder of graphite with wood or put a slick coat of glossy paint on its outside. But with this new partnership, we believe we will soon have at our disposal a pencil that is both reliable and totally resistant to any attack by foreign powers.

The article concludes:

At press time, sources confirmed plans for the pencil had been scrapped after election security experts warned the rubber eraser on its tip would quickly erode public trust in the product.

I hear the final tally of the Iowa Caucuses has been announced. Jared Yates Sexton, a political analyst tweeted that it was embarrassing watching the media throw tantrums because their product wasn’t delivered on time. Because of that some in the media are saying the results don’t matter.



There’s an old saying (though new to me) that there are at most three tickets out of Iowa. Laura Clawson of Kos notes we’re hearing that Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg are pretty close to tied. We’re hearing a lot about how Joe Biden underperformed and came in fourth. And … silence.

There isn’t a lot of talk that Elizabeth Warren came in a respectful third and well ahead of expectations and of Biden. Some are declaring it’s a two-man race now.




Kerry Eleveld of Kos reviews this four person field:

Buttigieg doesn’t poll well with people of color and will probably hit a wall in South Carolina and beyond.

Sanders is saying he can inspire enough Democrats to win – but didn’t actually do that in Iowa.

Biden is an uninspiring campaigner.

Which leaves … Warren.

She did better than expected in Iowa. She could pull together a coalition to win. If she can get past the first few states. And gets the media to report on her.



Bree Newsome Bass tweeted a thread calling on us to stop allowing the GOP and their fake outrages to frame the debate. They take the extreme position to pull everyone further to the right. An example:

Republicans deliberately take an extreme action & institute child separation policy.

Instead of shutting down border camps, Dems compromise by asking for more transparent reporting when children die there & give Repubs $$$.

GOP successfully moves goal posts.

Bass agrees with those pointing out that Dems engage only in “performative opposition.” They do the bare minimum.

Ripping up a speech is cool but refusing to fund the border camps, the wall & the militarization of outer space would go further.

A quote of the day:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
~~Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996)

CBS did pretty good at showing what income inequality looks like. News anchor Tony Dokoupil set up a table in a mall with a pumpkin pie and asked people to slice up that pie onto five plates to correspond with how money is distributed in the economy. Those who gave it a try didn’t come close to getting it right. The richest got nine slices out of ten. The next two plates shared a slice. The fourth plate got some crumbs. And the plate representing the poor got the bill – representing that most of them are in debt. This is a very good way of explaining why we need the proposed wealth tax – until he went to get the opinion of yacht salesmen.



Besame of the Kos community says we need new words to talk about climate change. How about the word “blissonance” made up from “bliss” and “dissonance” to describe the feeling of enjoying some nice warm February weather while knowing it shouldn’t be this warm. Another example is enjoying a brightly colored sunset but knowing the intensity of the colors is because of the extra forest fire smoke in the atmosphere. A third is appreciating that the car windshield isn’t smeared with bugs but knowing that’s because the insect population has declined.

So talk about the weather of your youth. People born after 1985 will never experience a colder-than-average month and don’t understand what our weather used to be like. So tell them.



In honor of Adlai Stevenson’s 120th birthday Bill in Portland, Maine offered up a few quotes. For those who don’t remember the 1950s Stevenson ran for president against Dwight Eisenhower. And lost. Twice. But who could have won against Ike? Here’s one of the quotes:

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.

We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

The time to clutch pearls has ended.

The nasty guy quite a while ago demanded refugees applying for asylum stay in Mexico until their case is decided. I won’t go into the huge numbers of ways the process can go wrong and does (which is a feature, not a flaw). José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen, made famous by feeding people in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, has now opened a dining hall tent in the refugees camp in Matamoros. Families can eat with dignity. Local organizations are assisting.



The Supremes, in a 5-4 vote, is allowing the nasty guy to use a wealth test to screen immigrants. The policy is that if the immigrant will need public services the nasty guy doesn’t want them.

That ruling came on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which this year marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. David Walsh tweeted:

Fun fact for Holocaust Remembrance Day: this was the same tactic used to keep European Jews out of the United States in the 1930s.

Walsh adds the details that the earlier law went into effect well before Jews became refugees fleeing the Nazis and that other laws were more important in keeping Jews out. Even so, it was a factor.



Skyedweller tweeted:

I sure hope that each candidate for presidential nominee has a plan for what to do when Trump refuses to leave office and the GOP backs him up.

She goes on to say that candidate Elizabeth Warren does. Well, not quite. Warren released a plan to rid government of nasty guy appointees and appoint replacements and do so quickly. But I don’t think her plan deals with the nasty guy barricading himself in the Oval Office.

And if the nasty guy won’t leave, the GOP senators who are giving him unlimited power may not leave either. Bree Newsome Bass tweeted:

We need to be prepared for Republicans refusing to vacate seats and power. They’ve already made it clear they don’t believe in the integrity of the election. This is about a raw power grab by a party that fears it can’t stay in power by democratic means.

Louis Bridgeman replied:

The time to clutch pearls has ended.
The time has come to grab courage.

Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald wrote in an opinion piece that he saw no point in reaching out to nasty guy voters. Many of his readers were disappointed in that statement. Pitts wrote another piece saying that many people believe that the nasty guy phenomenon was about fiscal insecurity. But Pitts says he has never seen an email from a supporter explain things in terms of a factory or coal mine shutting down. He wrote:

The decisive reason that white, male, older and less educated voters were disproportionately pro-Trump is that they shared his prejudices and wanted domineering, aggressive leaders.

They want the racism the nasty guy is selling.



Martin Longman of The Washington Monthly reports of a technology called geofencing that the nasty guy’s campaign is exploiting and Democrats will soon do as well:

It begins with geofencing, a practice that involves tracking every cell phone that enters a predefined area, like a church or MAGA rally. Armed with these phone numbers, identities can be sussed out from other commercial databases, and then people can be sorted by how frequently they vote, their party registration (if any), and all manner of personal information.

Start with the truth

Cleaning out browser tabs…

George Lakoff, Professor Emeritus of UC Berkeley, tweeted how to disarm the nasty guy’s lies, which other news outlets tend to magnify as they “report” them. Do it with a truth sandwich:

Truth Sandwich:
1. Start with the truth. The first frame gets the advantage.
2. Indicate the lie. Avoid amplifying the lie if possible.
3. Return to the truth. Always repeat truths more than lies.

Alas, too many news outlets don’t point out the lies in what their interviewees are saying.



Jennifer Cohn, an election security advocate, asks:

Legal scholars: What will be the remedy if voter registration systems are hacked (again) and voters are wiped from the rolls? We already know they were hacked in 2016, & yet there was no talk of nullifying a fraudulent election & much remains unknown to the public. Rinse repeat?

Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos wrote about Taco Bell announcing they will test paying some of their restaurant managers a salary of $100,000. That’s a decent living. Higgins then turns to the workers, whose median pay is about $20,000, which is not a decent living. It’s not surprising that 52% of fast food workers use public assistance. She adds:

If one’s gut reaction to these numbers is “get a better job” or “do something more valuable,” it’s important to sit with the following statistics, too. According to a 2015 analysis, 25% of part-time college faculty use public assistance. Close to 50% of home-care workers do. That number is similar when you look at people who work in child care, coming in at 46%. These jobs—just like working in food service—require skills, forms of education, and seriously draining labor. Most families who receive SNAP benefits have at least one person working, though people who don’t (or can’t) work still deserve to survive.

I worked for several years as a part time college instructor. I could afford to do it because I had a pension from an auto industry career. I was paid classroom hours. But add in all the hours preparing and grading papers and the wage was well below minimum.



The NPR show Marketplace Tech has a conversation with the Chief Environmental Officer of Microsoft. The company is investing $1 billion to become not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative within ten years. Carbon negative means drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. They hope to do this partly through new tech, and partly the way nature does it now with photosynthesis.

So, all you other big companies – at least Google, Facebook, Amazon – let’s hear a corresponding pledge from you. With dollars to go with it.



Now that the Space Force proposed by the nasty guy is now a reality it is time to introduce the new Space Force uniform. Twitter had a lot of fun with this one – the basic cloth of the new uniforms is jungle camo. And there aren’t any jungles in space. There were lots of tweets of alternate materials: A wizard cape covered in stars. Child pajamas with flying saucers. Adult pajamas with planets and spaceships. A suit with Star Wars symbols. Sweat pants with brightly colored nebulas.



Kali Gross of The Root talked about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s departure from royal duties. Yeah, part of this was Harry wanting to protect himself and his family from the fate his mother received from the swarming paparazzi. But Gross says another big factor was Markle and the historical legacy of black women’s resistance. She didn’t silently abide the torrents of racism from the press. She fought back, stunning both the royal family and the press. And she rejected exclusionary social institutions. In both of these Gross highlights black women who have done the same thing.



One advantage of living in the Detroit area is access to Canadian radio (I could get Canadian TV too if I watched TV). So most weekdays I catch the classical music hour of Shift, hosted by Tom Allen on CBC music. I’ve been fascinated by his survey of string quartets, which he began in September of 2018 with the first quartets of Franz Joseph Hayden. The survey is currently up to about 2002, so has a way to go.

I mention all this to explain why I have the next link. Allen tweeted out a CBC News report of the recent blizzard in Newfoundland. It looks like they got several feet of snow. Most of the three minute report isn’t about the amount of snow, its about how helpful neighbors were in digging each other out.

End the cover-up

Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate tomorrow. She is urging the Senate to end to cover-up. To emphasize her point she tweeted a comparison of the nasty guy impeachment and that of Bill Clinton:

Key witnesses blocked by the president
Trump: 12
Clinton: 0
Subpoenaed witnesses blocked by the president
Trump: 9
Clinton: 0
Major document subpoenas blocked by the president
Trump: 5 (100%)
Clinton:0 (0%)
Wholesale defiance of document requests
Trump: Yes (all 71 administrative requests ignored)
Clinton: No
Documents produced by the president
Trump: 0
Clinton: More than 90,000 pages
Number of witnesses who testified in Senate trial
Trump: ?
Clinton: 3 (who had already testified in the Starr investigation)



Twitter user uwu posted a long thread of the art that has come out of the Hong Kong protests and the artists who make it. The profile says “Take your broken heart and turn it into art.” The link is to an image of protest cakes, which is in the middle of the thread. Scroll up and down for the rest of it. Naturally, a great deal of the art features gas masks. There are also lots of umbrellas which were the symbols of protests a couple years ago, before the current round started a half year ago.



Andy Doe taught his first child how to use photoshop. And now he has a thread about famous works of art with search and rescue boats added. One of the painting is the Barque of Dante in which several people are in the water outside the boat. It looks like the rescue is coming just in time.



Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has said he will donate $690,000 to help Australia recover from the fires. The odd number makes more sense as $1,000,000 Australian dollars.

He was roundly scorned for such a stingy gift.

Stingy? Yeah. Business Insider says his personal wealth grows by $181 million every day. The profit (not revenue) of his company in 2018 was $74 billion. So $690 thousand is a rounding error.

Jason Karsh tweeted that Bezos could use two days of earnings and give away $1M to some lucky family every day for a year.

Hunter of Daily Kos noted that $690,000 doesn’t even buy a house in Silicon Valley. Then he added:

People can't help but draw conclusions. A good one to draw might be "The charity of the top 0.1 percent and of corporations both are vastly overstated and not even fractionally as useful as simply taxing them at the same effective rate as the rest of us pay, so maybe we should get on with that already."

Elizabeth Warren tweeted:

If the only way to run for president of the United States is either to be a billionaire or to suck up to billionaires, then we're going to have a country that works better for billionaires—and worse for everyone else.

Back when Bush II was trying to convince America to go to war in Iraq a favorite tactic of his supporters was to bully liberals by accusing them of loving Islamic terrorists. Now that the nasty guy is trying to convince America to go to war in Iran his supporters are back to using that tactic. This time it isn’t working. Amanda Marcotte at Salon reports that Rep. Doug Collins tried it and had to (pretend to) apologize.

No tangible results

The guy who started Daily Kos signs his posts as Kos. I’ve seen the full name though I don’t have it in front of me. Kos wrote about the strange candidacy of Pete Buttigieg for president. He’s unqualified and untested (haven’t we seen that before?). He’s never had to win more than 11,000 votes. And his support from the black community, a constituency any Democrat needs to win, is zero – because Mayor Pete has a race problem.



Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave US Attorney John Huber a free hand to find something – anything – on Hillary Clinton. The nasty guy rallies still resound with chants of “Lock her up!” So there should be a reason to actually do that.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reports Huber has turned in his report after two years of investigating. Short answer: “No tangible results.” He found nothing. The Clintons did not profit from the Uranium One deal. The Clinton Foundation really is a charity doing wonderful work around the world (in stark contrast to, say, the Trump Foundation). And as for her emails, the FBI investigation into that (which found no breach of security) was shown to have been conducted properly.

Alas, this report won’t stop the chanting.



Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will send the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate next week. This comes after Moscow Mitch claimed he had enough votes to start the Senate trial before he got the Articles.

This prompted news pundits to say Moscow Mitch won the round and Pelosi lost. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos tweeted that she disagrees. Her reasons:

* The impeachment trial (and we know how it will end – see cartoon here) is only one battle in the long political war of 2020. Moscow Mitch has more risk in losing his majority than Pelosi does. Her withholding of the Articles over the last few weeks has put vulnerable Republicans in a worse place. She has increased their pain while giving up little.

* Moscow Mitch had said delaying the Articles was “fine by me.” Now he’s railing at Pelosi from the Senate floor. The nasty guy is also getting more antsy by the day.

* John Bolton refused a House subpoena but said he would respond to a Senate subpoena. Pelosi now has a big reason to take him to court – which might reveal damaging info just before the fall campaign.



Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports on the 29th paragraph of a story in the Wall Street Journal about the nasty guy’s decision to assassinate Iranian General Soleimani. The article said, with no elaboration or indication of its importance:

Mr. Trump, after the strike, told associates he was under pressure to deal with Gen. Soleimani from GOP senators he views as important supporters in his coming impeachment trial in the Senate, associates said.

Clawson responds:

So Donald Trump assassinated a high-ranking foreign official, risking massive war, in part because it would help him in an impeachment trial that’s happening because he tried to use U.S. military aid to extort a foreign country into helping him win re-election.

Actually, that scans.

And then the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal reported it buried deep in a long article, as if it was no big. Actually, that also scans.

I’ve heard that this assassination is much more worthy of being an article of impeachment than the articles already passed.



Joan McCarter of Daily Kos talks about threats to our election system coming up to America’s big day in 2020. After listing yet another threat and the chaos around it she wrote:

And chaos, says Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, "is the point." She says that "You don't actually have to breach an election system in order to create the public impression that you have. […] You can imagine many different scenarios." Making populations distrust their elections systems is probably the most effective means of undermining a democracy, which in the case of Russia and the U.S. has been the underlying objective. That puts officials trying to combat the incursions in a difficult position; they’re damned if they warn the citizenry of the hacking and increase people's perceptions that the system is rigged and damned if they don't warn the populace to be aware of attempts to manipulate them.

By now you need a dose of cute.

The first time I visited Australia back in 1994 the tour I was with stayed at a resort lodge north of Melbourne. That evening a friend of the lodge owner brought over a joey, a baby kangaroo. She did it by bringing in a basket filled with small blankets that did a decent job of mimicking a kangaroo pouch.

Joshua Potash tweeted a brief video from Siobhan McKenna of nine cloth pouches each with a joey rescued from the fires.

Who loved you into existence?

I finished the July/August 2013 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. One of the science fact articles was *Galactic Cannibalism: Who’s On the Menu* by H.G. Stratmann. It talks about what happens when galaxies collide. In particular, he says the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with our own Milky Way Galaxy in about … 3¾ billion years.

But don’t fret. Galaxies, in spite of their size and having billions of stars, have a huge amount of open space. Our nearest stellar neighbor is about 4 light-years away, which is about 24 trillion miles. So the chance of a star from the other galaxy crashing into our sun is quite tiny. Even so, as the to galaxies interact it is possible the orbit of our sun within the Milky Way may be perturbed, sending our sun (and solar system) either closer to the galactic center or away into the depths of space.

NASA and its Hubble Telescope site and some talented artists created a series of images showing what the collision, um, “merger” will look like from earth over the next 7 billion years. The link is to the first image. Click next for the rest of the series.



This afternoon I went to see the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Lloyd Vogel (played by Matthew Rhys) is a writer for Esquire magazine. After he gets into a fight with his father at his sister’s (third) wedding his editor sends him out to interview Fred Rogers – yes, that Fred Rogers (played by Tom Hanks, who did a wonderful job capturing Rogers). The editor knows Vogel demonizes his subjects and Rogers is the only one who returned calls. Throughout the story I was repeatedly amazed at the kindness that Rogers showed to everyone around him, especially Vogel. At one point Rogers asks Vogel to think about the people who loved him into existence. I highly recommend it.

The editor asked Vogel to write 400 words. The final article was 10,000 words. It was the cover story for that issue.

The movie is based on real life events. Journalist Tom Junod really did write an Esquire article on Rogers and as a result the two men became lifelong friends. Though Junod is clear he did not punch his father at his sister’s wedding – his sister didn’t have a wedding.



Bodie Ashton tweeted a thread about the bush fires in Australia. He talks about how clueless the government is. One measure of the magnitude of the fires: Summer started there about ten days ago. Fire season usually starts two weeks from now. But fires have already been raging for three months. And temperatures have already been consistently well above 40C (104F).

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos adds a few more details. As well as the hottest year, this has also been the driest. Fires have pushed people to beaches or even into the ocean to avoid the heat and flames. The Navy is being rather slow in rescuing those who have been trapped. The gov’t says it is “mostly” meeting goals for carbon reduction. But that statement ignores that a third of the world’s coal comes from Australia. A lot of the locals have moved away from cash but downed telecommunications lines means credit/debit cards can’t be used for gas or lodging.



David Rothkopf tweeted a thread. Here’s part of it:

I just don't believe the only goal is to beat Trump. I believe it is to find a president who can help defeat Trumpism, inequality, and rise to the challenges ahead. I believe any Dem can beat Trump.

If we settle for someone who wins but has no new ideas, does not address the underlying problems, can't rise to the new challenges, can't be re-elected, is unrealistic about the nature of the opposition, then we can win the battle and (continue to) lose the war.

Though Rothkopf doesn’t say which of the Dem candidates best fits this ideal, this is why Elizabeth Warren is my favorite candidate.



Lauren Floyd of Daily Kos suggests four companies to boycott in 2020. I already boycott all four, though only two by conscious decision.

Amazon treats employees “like the gum stuck on the bottom of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ shoes.” He also doesn’t seem to mind extra pollution in neighborhoods of black and brown people. I began boycotting Amazon when I realized how much money he had and that it means he is exploiting his suppliers (he demands special deals that mean authors are underpaid) and workers. When Amazon bought Whole Foods I stopped going there too.

NFL got on the list for its treatment of Colin Kaepernick and because it pays its athletes (mostly black) less money than any other major sport. This one wasn’t a conscious decision for me. I’m just not into football or any other competitive sport.

Walmart has a long reputation for paying its workers so little they qualify for poverty assistance while the owners earn billions a year. This was a decision I made several years ago.

Wells Fargo repeatedly settles lawsuits because of its discriminatory lending policies. This one wasn’t a conscious decision. I’m happy banking with my credit union so never considered being a Wells Fargo customer.



Quote of the day:

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
~~Theodore Roosevelt, Metropolitan Magazine (1918)

Health care for the fetus

One of the blogs I read reminded me that the Bulwer-Lytton contest winners were announced several months ago. This contest, named in honor of the guy who coined, “It was a dark and stormy night,” awards those who come up with the worst opening sentence for a novel. A few of this year’s winners or dishonorable mentions:

From the Purple Prose category, submitted by Eric Mellinger of New York, NY:

Despite being a German, vegan book-cataloger from rural and upscale Connecticut, Marion was quite ignorant and overly opinionated about almost everything, except for Atlas Shrugged and atheism, which made her the embodiment of an Arian, vegetarian, ultracrepidarian-contrarian, non-sectarian, libertarian, librarian agrarian from Darien.

From Vile Puns, by David Franks, Fayetteville, AR:

Being a man of perspicacity, Alexander Graham Bell was able to treat his own stomach-ache (caused by eating three dozen raw oysters and a warm crock of sauerkraut on a bet) without the aid of his assistant, and when asked how he became ill, he would say only "Alimentary dare, Watson."

The winner of the Western category, by Stephanie Karnosh, Springboro OH

"Yeehaw, boys, and so long," called Eugene 'Bullettooth Dynamite' Jones as he rode off into the torrential downpour on his 32-inch-tall miniature horse, Kevin, hiding a frown because he knew deep down in his heart he had yeed his last haw.

On to serious matters.

The news magazine The Week has named Moscow Mitch the decade’s most consequential politician. That’s even over the nasty guy and President Obama. Their reasons:

* His refusal to do anything that might be seen as giving Obama a win. That includes refusing to allow a vote for Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.

* His work in holding federal judge positions empty under Obama and then rapidly filling them with far-right judges, several of them rated as not qualified.

* He has done nothing about foreign interference in our elections, and by his inaction he is inviting more of it.

Perhaps removing Moscow Mitch is more important to democracy than removing the nasty guy.



Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported on a study done by ProPublica and Vox about Texas having the highest rate of women without health insurance and the highest death rates for pregnant women and new mothers. One expert, Eugene Declercq at Boston University School of Public Health described it as…

the extreme example of a fragmented system that cares about women much more in the context of delivering a healthy baby than the mother's health in and of itself.

Some numbers: In Texas a woman qualifies for Medicaid if she makes less than about $320 a month. If she is pregnant she qualifies for Medicaid if she makes less than $3520 (if a family of three). But once the baby is born she likely loses Medicaid and then can’t afford to handle any complications a few months after birth.

In Texas a woman is only worth insuring if she’s pregnant. Put another way, the health care is for the fetus, not the woman.



Senator John Cornyn revealed what he and the GOP think about health insurance. He tweeted:

In 2017, the prices paid to hospitals for privately insured patients averaged 241 percent of what Medicare would have paid.

He was asked, so what’s the solution?

His answer: “Not Medicare for All.”

Translation: The GOP has no solution. Because the health care industry, his donors, would make less money. Because they would not be able to put their profits over the lives of their patients.



I had written about an editorial in Christianity Today in which they called for the removal of the nasty guy because of his bad character. Yeah, the lost subscribers. And gained three times the number they lost.

Evil, illegal, and logical

The quote of the day for December 1:

Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.
~~Bill Moyers, Moyers on Democracy, 2008

Candidate Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly called out the excesses of billionaires and how their wealth hijacks democracy. Eric Boehlert of the Daily Kos community asks an important question: Why is our media so obsessed with what billionaires think of Elizabeth Warren? Boehlert lists more than a half-dozen such news articles. He then notes:

The never-ending emphasis sends a clear message that the votes and donations of Wall Street bankers and billionaires matter more than other people’s. But they don't. It's reminiscent of the media's 2016 campaign obsession with coal miners, followed close by its obsession with those who have manufacturing jobs, which sent the obvious signal that white working-class male voters were the ones who counted the most.

There’s been recent talk about why, well before the 2016 election, the FBI and CIA didn’t know or act on information that the nasty guy was a Russian asset? Twitter user Benjamin Franklin linked to a Buzzfeed article and asked:

What if the bad guys had already hollowed our defenses by 2016 so they were powerless to stop it? Something like this, except with the alphabet boys. Would that make more sense or less sense of the world?

Maybe the reason why the NYT ran 100 HRC email stories and zero Trump mafia/Epstein stories was because the bad guys were already inside the media industry helping make 2016 happen?

Does that make the world make more sense or less sense?

This Benjamin Franklin looked at social media analytics and saw that the far right is growing now as it did in 2015. And in these tweets “they” is Big Tech.

I believe that they are deliberately allowing this to happen, a belief only furthered by the fact that Zuckerberg accepted Russian oligarch money, that the google guys belonged to Epstein's billionaire society - a gateway to the international crime syndicate.

The amount of revenue they get from allowing this activity is peanuts. The danger of allowing far right content to thrive is proven. And yet these companies seem to bend over backwards to preserve the content leading to radicalization.

When current Attorney General William Barr showed that, in spite of his oath of office, he would do all he could to protect the nasty guy, people began to ask why Barr would be willing to take that hit on his reputation (which isn’t as sterling as people pretend it is). Sarah Kendzior tweeted a reply:

What's in it for Barr? A s---load of money and power, entrenchment in government with his family members who also benefit, resources with which to buffer his cohort from upcoming disasters like climate change, opportunity to fulfill sadistic fantasies for his crime cult, etc
…
Trump's entire life has consisted of breaking the law without repercussions, and Barr's entire life has been helping the GOP engage in corruption without repercussions, and they all got rich and more powerful. This was a logical gamble. Evil and illegal, but logical!

Steve Silberman is the author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. He tweeted a thread in response to Greta Thunberg being named Time’s Person of the Year. A lot of reporting on Thunberg doesn’t include that she’s proudly autistic.

The "autistic" qualities of Greta's war on the status quo - her visceral distrust of rationalizations and vacuous rhetoric - are precisely the qualities all humanity must emulate at a time when global political discourse is dominated by nonsense and gaslighting. As the author of a history of autism, I've said for years that gut-level loathing for unfairness and injustice could practically be added to the diagnostic criteria for autism.
...
In the case of #climatechange the "social deficits" are all on the neurotypical side, on Greta's opponents and critics, who use misogyny, ableism, and ageism against her. They lie for a living, deceiving millions of fellow neurotypicals in the process. The success of climate disinformation campaigns in sowing seeds of doubt about science is proof of a potentially fatal "truth dysfunction" in non-autistic people. Want to know the role of #neurodiversity in our collective future? We may not have one without it. Go, Greta!

Break every rule in the free-market playbook

I attended a performance of Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Fallen Souffle by David MacGregor in production at the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea. It’s got about another week to run, though it is probably sold out.

The show is a bit of a spoof of the Sherlock Holmes story, though it isn’t played as a comedy. It is the second in a trilogy. I didn’t see the first (though not a detriment to seeing this one). And while the evening was enjoyable it wasn’t so wonderful that I’d consider going all the way out to Chelsea to see part 3 a year from now. It felt like too much of the plot depended on who was holding the gun last.

One of the characters in this show was Bertie, Prince of Wales and oldest son of Queen Victoria. His attitude reminded me very much of the nasty guy. Holmes was quite unimpressed with the prince, and with monarchy in general.



Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old Swedish girl who galvanized climate strikes, has been named Person of the Year by Time. The honor is given to the person who has the most impact on the world (good or bad) in the year. Thunberg becomes the youngest person so honored.



Qasim Rashid tweeted:

In 5 weeks, billionaires Bloomberg & Steyer have spent ~$200M on their POTUS campaigns.

For 5 years, people of Flint have fought & scrapped for that kinda money for clean water.

Countless Americans suffer so a couple of guys can try to buy an election. Smh.

Taxation > Philanthropy

For those rusty on their math “>” means “is greater than.” So with that in place read that last bit again.



The Quote of the Day from Daily Kos:

Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending, and recognize our debts to the Global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process.
~~Naomi Klein, The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019)

I haven’t paid much attention to the news over the last few days about the FBI being cleared of partisanship in their investigation of the nasty guy’s 2016 campaign ties to to Russia. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports that an FBI counterintelligence employee told CNN says the attack by the nasty guy and Attorney General William Barr are having the *intended* effect:

We're constantly told to be agile and use all the legal tools available to us. But who is going to risk sticking their neck out now only to have DOJ chop it off?

A retired agent adds:

These comments will have a chilling effect on the workforce.

I should get back to reading and reporting on episodes of Gaslit Nation. One episode comes out every week. I’m sure I’m behind by a few weeks. Until I do so, here’s a quote from the podcast host Andrea Chalupa as tweeted by partner Sarah Kendzior. It explains a lot.

Hillary Clinton had her own private server because the United States government was getting hacked by authoritarian regimes like Russia and China in a major security breach that no one stopped. HRC has been vindicated.

It also makes the 600 day long attack of “but her emails…” all the more infuriating.



Lots of news as a result of yesterday’s British election and how the conservatives swept the Labour Party (the liberals). I’m not getting into Who to Blame or What it Means, especially as people try to apply those ideas to America. I will mention one thing that David Schneider tweeted:

One of the most significant stats of the election. 88% of the Facebook ads put out by the Tories contained a lie.

To paraphrase John Bercow: “the lies have it, the lies have it”

Schneider included some numbers:

Number of paid for political adverts on Facebook labelled as *‘indecent, dishonest and untruthful’* by First Draft.

Tory: 5,952
Labour: 0

Michael Lux of the Daily Kos community says that a recent speech by candidate Elizabeth Warren is her most important.

First came the economic ideas: Big corporations have hurt workers and the economy by focusing on short-term interests of investors. In market after market competition has declined. Stagnant incomes and rising costs have stretched family budgets beyond the breaking point.

Second was the theory of change: Making the structural changes to address the economic ideas will be hard. It will require a long term movement to fight through business as usual.

And finally, the core: there is long-term corruption in Washington that supports the current structure. We’ll need to fight the corruption as we fight for economic change.



Bobburnett, also of the Daily Kos community talks of the failure of capitalism, then reviews how likely the Democratic candidates will tackle those necessary structural changes. The seven candidates who have qualified for the Democratic debate next week are: Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer, Warren, and Yang. Steyer is a billionaire. Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar call themselves moderates. They have not called for the reform of corporations.

That leaves Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Both have called out corporate greed, though Warren’s plan is a lot more comprehensive.

I’m with Warren on this one.

Obedient or self-reliant

After a few days of big posts doing big explorations of big issues today I’ll do little stories to clean out browser tabs.

Sarah Kendzior is puzzled by the mainstream media. Why aren’t they telling the truth about the nasty guy? She tweeted:

That's been the irony all along. The truth is popular. The truth sells. The truth is full of horrifying scandals the MSM usually loves -- but now they bury it out of fear of Trump. When greedy MSM works against its own profit margin, that's how you know something is deeply wrong.

A follower asked why the MSM is afraid of him. Kendzior replied:

It's a transnational crime syndicate. That means there are serious threats both to individuals and to nations and infrastructure. I will add though that some in the media don't need to be threatened or blackmailed; they are complicit volunteers.

Francisco Taveira quotes Kendzior discussing the key witnesses in the public part of the impeachment hearings:

Trump’s ability to pull off another election heist relies on silencing people such as Ms. Hill, Col. Vindman, and Ms. Yovanovitch who have seen his machinations from the inside and can explain them to the American public.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut tweeted a thread about the nasty guy again holding up foreign aid that had been approved by Congress. This time the money is for Lebanon. Murphy explains why that freeze is a really bad idea. Much of the money is to go to the Lebanese Armed Forces. The LAF is the most important multi-ethnic institution in the country. Only the LAF can protect the protesters. A weakened LAF means either (1) Hezbollah, backed by Iran, will take over, or (2) Russia will step in to back the LAF. Both options are awful. Both are exactly opposite of official policy goals in Lebanon.



Olga Lautman has some questions about Devin Nunes. He is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and made a big show every day of advancing some weird conspiracy theory in attempts to discredit the impeachment hearings before that committee. Lautman links to a CNBC report that Nunes is a part of the Ukraine scandal. Lautman tweeted:

Why is Nunes allowed to be on the committee w access to our intel?

Why was this not brought up during impeachment hearings? How was Nunes allowed to spew GRU disinfo with no one stopping him and stating his personal involvement? Why wasn’t Nunes forced to recuse since he personally was involved in searching for Biden fabricated info re the mafia?

One of the big bits of testimony that came from the impeachment hearings came from Dr. Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council Russia expert. She said, “Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are running out of time to stop them.”

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos says that’s a big problem because, “We are also running out of experts in the government to do so.” McCarter lists a couple departures from Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. At least a dozen top officials have left and taken their experience and expertise with them.



Alexander Kaufman at HuffPost writes that that the world’s top ten fossil fuel producers are on track to extract (which we would presumably burn) far more oil, gas, and coal by 2030 than the planet can handle without catastrophic warming. There is a big discrepancy between national climate change policies and fossil fuel production policies.



Anders Aslund, an economist with a focus on Russia and Eastern Europe tweeted that he’s amazed at how many Americans are unaware that our democracy is in great danger.

What caught my attention and prompted me to include the tweet is a reply from Kerri Boxx who quoted an excerpt from an article from Political. A pollster (not named in the excerpt) says that four questions in a poll will tell whether a person is very highly invested in enforcing the social hierarchy:

These questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who picked the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian.

Investigate the Investigators!

I’ve heard my sources say the nasty guy and his minions – especially Attorney General William Barr – are trying to investigate the investigators. I’ve been puzzled about how they would go about doing that. Then indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provided an example. Reporter Noga Tarnopolsky tweeted a thread about what is going on. After being indicted Netanyahu spoke. He attacked the justice system. He attacked the press. He called for an uprising of the people, railing against what he calls trumped up charges. He said the public has already lost faith in the police and the justice system. He railed that he got the worst press coverage of anyone in the history of Israel. He vowed he won’t let lies win in his country. He said investigators weren’t seeking the truth they were seeking him. “There is one thing that must happen: the Investigators must be investigated!” Only accountability will restore public faith in the justice system.

Any of this sound familiar? Perhaps coming from a certain big mouth on this side of the Atlantic?

Obviously (and it was obvious to many long before now), Netanyahu is an authoritarian.

Just to dispel any doubts: Since the investigators charged Netanyahu with a crime, he – like authoritarians everywhere – concludes that it is the investigators that must be corrupt and we had better expose that corruption before the country (meaning himself) is harmed.



Dawn Onley of Our Prism on Daily Kos asks an important question. The most loyal demographic of the Democratic Party is black women. So why are the first two primaries in lily white Iowa and New Hampshire? The order of primary states matters because momentum matters. Why should Kamela Harris have to wait a month after the first big two to get to states (Nevada and South Carolina) where a higher concentration of voters look like her?

Presidential candidate Julián Castro adds:

We’re right to call Republicans out when they suppress the votes of African-Americans or Latinos, but we’ve also got to recognize that this 50-year-old process was created during a time when minority voices had zero power in the party.

A couple years ago North Korean leader Kim Kong Un wanted meetings with the nasty guy because such appearances would promote the idea that Kim was a legitimate world leader. Those meetings were supposed to be about nuclear disarmament and they have been so much not going well that Kim is frustrated. In response to a hopeful tweet from the nasty guy North Korean official Kim Kye Gwan replied:

We are no longer interested in such talks that bring nothing to us. As we have got nothing in return, we will no longer gift the U.S. president with something he can boast of, but get compensation for the successes that President Trump is proud of as his administrative achievement.

We’ve gone from Kim needing the nasty guy to give him legitimacy to Kim not needing and not wanting the nasty guy.



Journalist Heather Bryant tweeted a thread in which she notes that news organizations are considering editor’s notes for greater transparency. Bryant proposes a few. Here are a couple of them.

To go with a story about labor, unions, and workforce discrimination:

Editor's Note: This company is currently resisting or outright fighting unionization efforts of staff that would help them in regard to these issues.

To go with a story about sexual assault and whether the allegations will ruin the man’s life:

Editor's Note: This media company has known and/or covered up for one or more men who have discriminated, harassed or assaulted women who work or wanted to work here.

Bill in Portland, Maine includes in his weekday post Cheers and Jeers on Daily Kos has a By the Numbers feature. In today’s numbers:

Number of times Pete Buttigieg’s Rhodes scholarship has been mentioned in U.S. publications this year, according to HuffPost: 596

Number of times Cory Booker's Rhodes scholarship has been mentioned: 79

Chaos and inertia

Today was the first big snowfall of the season, early for these parts. Close to 4 inches came down over the day. I canceled this evenings bell rehearsal. I did my shoveling this evening in the dark – show didn’t stop falling until 8:00 and the sun went down at 5:15. This was wet, heavy snow. It stuck to the shovel and I had to whack it after every scoop to get the snow to fall off.



Sarah Kendzzior, who studies authoritarian regimes tweeted a quote from an interview she did with Boulevard Magazine. She talked to dissidents in places like Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgystan.

They talk about this monotony, this constant combination of chaos and inertia. Things are corrupt, and there’s a mindboggling, horrific acts of corruption and abuse going on, on a daily basis. And at the same time, nothing changes. So you’re in a state of shock, but you’re also in a state of, not quite resignation, but you come to expect it.

Kendzior sees signs of that in America.



Hunter of Daily Kos is concerned about the nasty guy’s Twitter feed. Part one of the problem is he is indifferent to whether whatever he sees is true. Part two is that he consults his Twitter feed rather than actual advisors who know stuff.

Part three – and this is the scary one – is if you want to influence the nasty guy, tweet at him. There are lots of people, especially at Fox News and alarmingly from other countries, who elevate conspiracy theories known to be false to make sure the nasty guy sees them and is influenced by them. These people are engaging in acts of propaganda for their own gain that will harm America. They’re doing it for the same reasons despotic regimes do it.



The nasty guy administration instituted a “conscience rule” that tells health care providers that their conscience is more important than their patient’s health or life. Feel that providing birth control or vaccinations or gender affirming surgery is against your morals or religion, just say your conscience prevents you from doing that medical procedure. The nasty guy administration will hold billions in funding from health care providers if they don’t allow these objections.

Thankfully, Judge Paul Engelmayer, a federal judge in Manhattan has declared the rule to be unconstitutional.



Meteor Blades of Daily Kos shares a little bit of history of racism offered by Joseph Thompson, professor of history at Mississippi State University. President Roosevelt signed the GI bill into law in 1944. In the years after WWII it allowed huge numbers of veterans to take advantage of free college education.

Black veterans saw the race free text spelling out the qualifications and were hopeful. Their hopes went unfulfilled because:

* While white universities had the resources to expand to accommodate the increased numbers of students, the historically black universities did not.

* Black veterans had a much higher rate of not finishing high school.

* The funds to attend college were approved by the local Veterans Administration office – where racist white officials could deny the funds.



Rich people are getting nervous about Elizabeth Warren’s proposals to tax them. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos says they’re not yet to the point of pumping money to a Democratic competitor or the nasty guy. However, wealth managers are doing brisk business holding discussions with those with more than $50 million about steps they might take to avoid paying the tax. Will a person with $60 million really miss $200,000?



I mentioned before that a Democrat won the governorship in Kentucky by less than 5,200 votes. I had also mentioned that Matt Bevin, the Republican who lost, hasn’t conceded, has asked for a recanvass, and talked about using a law (last used in 1899) that allows a candidate to “contest” the results of an election (proof optional) and have the GOP majority legislature choose the next governor.

It is good to hear, as the Daily Kos election team wrote, that Senate President Robert Stivers got such a massive outcry he’s now saying that if the recanvass shows no change in vote totals (and a recanvass has never shown a change before) Bevin lost and should go home.

But now the nasty guy is sticking his nose in. And with that prodding, Bevin might charge ahead to contest the results.

Commenters to this post wonder if this is a dry run for the nasty guy to do the same kind of thing a year from now.

150 million climate refugees

Yesterday, my handbell ensemble took part in a handbell event in the little town of Eaton Rapids, Michigan. It is south of Lansing and about an 80 minute drive from our rehearsal home near Detroit. We went there because that’s where our director lives and has a church musician job, so it is where she hosts this event. While there we taught classes (I taught one of them), participated in the massed ringing concert, and performed three pieces by ourselves. The concert went very well. Afterward our director invited us to her home for supper.

That meant I went to bed early Friday night and was rather tired on Saturday night, so no writing on either night. I’m glad I had the extra hour of sleep (and actually used it for sleeping).



So catching up on news…

Meteor Blades wrote a pundit roundup for Daily Kos. He included an excerpt from an article written by George Goehl in the New York Times titled If Progressives Don’t Try to Win Over Rural Areas, Guess Who Will.

Short answer by Goehl:

I’ve been organizing for 20 years in rural communities and have never seen this level of public activity by white supremacist groups.

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos notes it appears that the nasty guy and his BFF Moscow Mitch have made a deal that the articles of impeachment from the House will be “dead on arrival in the Senate.”



Twitter user umairh tweeted:

The Dems need to put American collapse in a global frame and point out hard right economics led America to become a poor country. But they don’t do that. They buy into the idea they have to justify things to the right, not that the right has to justify things to reality.

Sarah Kendzior responded:

The majority of Americans have spent their entire life in a dead economic fantasy. Or to be more accurate, a murderous fantasy, one that already took a toll on the post-boomer generations and will take its greatest toll on today's children.

Replygubbe added:

Capitalism played an important role in making communism fail. Now it seems to be a tool in the hand of forces trying to break down democracy.

Jacob Ward tweeted a link to a new report in Nature that says scientists have been underestimating the effects of flooding related to climate change. The software that made flooding estimates confused the tops of trees and buildings with ground level. Estimates of flooding were based on treetops. Corrected estimates are really scary. Mumbai, Jakarta, and Bangkok are flooding at high tide. Projections for 2050 show 150 million people will be displaced. Most of the flooding will be felt in Asia. But …

Enormous climate pressure in densely packed places destabilizes everybody everywhere, as those people struggle to find a new home. Added to other volatile ingredients like nationalism and poverty, the cocktail is explosive.

Ward quotes Cass Sunstein, who wrote in the *Columbia Law Review*:

The United States is unlikely to take significant steps to reduce greenhouse gases unless the perceived costs of risk reduction are decreased, an available incident triggers fear of significant are relatively imminent harm, sustained analysis or influential leaders suggest that Americans face serious risks, or all three.

It seems Attorney General William Barr has been investigating the investigation by seeking to overturn the conclusion of US intelligence services and the Mueller Report that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The nasty guy has reportedly requested help from intelligence officials in Britain towards that goal. Olga Lautman tweeted:

This is extremely dangerous Barr/Trump requesting info from our allies to take down our agencies. British official: "it is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence agencies."

All to prove that Russia didn't attack us in 2016. How is Barr not being stopped? This is dangerous for our national security now because Russia has been ramping up their efforts to attack our next elections. It is also dangerous because our allies will not share critical intel.

The trolls have it covered

Several months ago the nasty guy failed in an attempt to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census. The goal was to get minority people to not participate in the census. An Associated Press article in last Sunday’s *Detroit Free Press* (alas, no link) says the nasty guy doesn’t need to worry about that – internet trolls have it covered. There is already a campaign underway on social media of posts with misinformation about how the census works. It is quite possible foreign governments, such as Russia, are supporting the effort. The Census Bureau is now working with the major platforms – Facebook, Twitter, and Google – to stamp out inaccurate stories and get accurate stories out there.



Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty tweeted a chart, based on Credit Suisse data, showing that Russia is the world’s most unequal country. The wealth share of the top 10% is 83%. The share of the top 1% is 59%. Also in the top ten of most unequal are Thailand, Indonesia, India, Turkey, Chile, Sweden, Israel, Czech Repulic, and United States.

For the world as a whole 82% of the wealth is held by the top 10% and 45% of the wealth is held by the top 1%.



Chuck Wending tweeted a thread to remind us there will be renewed calls for civility. Ignore them.

Civility is for normalcy. When things are normal and working as intended, civility is part of maintaining balance. But when that balance is gone, civility does not help return it but rather, destabilize it further. Because your civility gives them cover for evil.
…
They will tell you to smile, that we need to get back to business, that we gotta heal the rift and blah blah blah — but that’s the desire of a savvy bully, who wants you to stop crying after he hit you, who wants you not to fight back. But you can cry. And you can fight back.

Ahmed has an upcoming book, the Middle East Crisis Factory. He tweeted:

The 2 current flashpoints in the ME are Iraq & Lebanon, both currently protesting selfish, corrupt & incompetent govts entrenched by a broken sectarian political system. Govts flailing.
…
This is a totally different phase - other countries had to overthrow a single dictator, but in these nominal democracies there isn't one - it's either systemic change or nothing. And the protestors fully understand that.

Mark Sumner of the Daily Kos staff reports the biggest private coal company in America is going bankrupt. This is Murray Energy, owned by Robert Murray. Mr. Murray is known for forcing employees to be props in nasty guy rallies and being indifferent to the health and lives of employees on the job.

The basic reason for the bankruptcy is that it is now less expensive to build natural gas and renewable energy plants from scratch than it is to maintain a coal plant. All of the nasty guy’s reversal of environmental and employee protections won’t change that.

The top publicly traded coal companies in the U.S. have all passed through Chapter 11 over the last few years, and all but a handful have come back leaner, not-cleaner, and both free from major obligations to miners and shorn of debts to both suppliers and states.
…
Trump also hasn’t done a thing to secure miners’ jobs, safety, or health, or to protect the funds that are supposed to be used to reclaim the land when mining is complete. But his deregulations are allowing guys like Murray to skim every last penny from a failing industry.

Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook, has said that his social media platform won’t take down political advertising that’s based on lies. Eric Boehleert of the Daily Kos community says that’s a gift to the GOP and the nasty guy. The GOP brand is based on lies. They wouldn’t get elected if they told the truth. So if Facebook refuses to block ads based on lies, Zuckerberg is favoring the GOP.

Boehlert sees Zuckerberg’s actions as a response to GOP bullying. And the GOP is bullying because it is claiming Facebook has a progressive bias – another lie.



Ever since gun attacks have become a big thing the shooters have been described as a “lone wolf.” The media likes that term. But, as David Neiwert of Daily Kos explains, these “solitary” actors are usually deeply connected to movements, usually white supremacist. These movements encourage solitary attacks. They are not “isolated incidents” as media and law enforcement like to claim. They are likely the latest act of terror by white nationalists.

Cinderella wheelchair

A bit of great news. Since I don’t have children and I avoid sugar I also avoid Halloween. So other than noticing the big Halloween displays in neighborhood yards I’m not up on the latest holiday trends. Even so, I was delighted to see an article in last Sunday’s *Detroit Free Press* featuring inclusive costumes. This is cool: a costume that turns a child’s wheelchair into a pirate ship or into a Cinderella carriage.



Comedian Ron Delaney was interviewed by The New Yorker. As part of that he talked about his son who became ill and died while the family was living in the UK. Delaney was pleased with one aspect of the care his son got – he wasn’t on the phone arguing with insurance companies. He spent the time with his son.

So Delaney wants to destroy the current private health insurance system in America. We could eliminate all that overhead paying CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars. And then there is the advertising:

“Your choice! Get the plan that’s right for you” – what the f*** is that? The plan is go to the hospital and it’s covered. There’s your choice. Yeah, I’m a zealot on that one and I won’t stop until you can go to the hospital without fear of going bankrupt.

Rafael is a former kid refugee from Uzbekistan. He tweeted a thread:

Zuckerberg responds to Bernie Sanders' call to abolish billionaires by saying it would harm much needed funding of scientific research and philanthropy. (You know, 90% of which is needed to undo the damage of billionaires.)

How different is this than a mobster taking protection fees from small shop keepers every week to keep them "safe" (from them)?

He continued "Let's just have the government take it all...the government can basically decide, you know, all of the medical research that gets done,"

If you build a democracy accountable to its people without the outsized influence of billionaires, yes, PEOPLE should decide!

The State Department has issued a report on its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. They said there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information in emails sent to or from Hillary’s private server.

The New York Times was one of many news organizations that kept the email “scandal” in search of a crime before the public for 600 straight days before the 2016 election. And what did the Times do with this new report? Put a 649 word story on page A-16. Essentially telling readers nothing to see here.

Eric Boehlert of the Daily Kos community wrote:

Just as important today is how the press is washing its hands of the media malpractice from 2016 and pretending news outlets played no role in helping the GOP market its email smear campaign for 18 months. That campaign consisted of phony Republican allegations that have now been relegated to the trashcan of history.
...
Left unsaid, of course, was the fact that the Beltway press positively owned the email story for more than a year and treated it as one of the most pressing news stories of this decade.

The reason the media did that was so that when one thought of Clinton one also thought of emails. She was defined by it. Boehlert then lists several GOP politicians who did actual email crimes and weren’t defined by it.

Yet rather than addressing that gaping, stunning failure in its 2016 coverage, the news media have opted to quietly move on.

Train a generation to be afraid of being shot

End of the week and lots of stuff in the browser tabs.

Kerry Eleveld of the Daily Kos Staff reports on the faceoff between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the nasty guy as she tells him 129 Republicans voted for the House resolution condemning his withdrawal of troops from supporting the Kurds. Pelosi said he had a meltdown.

Frank Figliuzzi, FBI assistant director of counterintelligence, commented on the nasty guy’s mental state:

He is spiraling down into a dangerous, dangerous posture. … He is in a corner all by himself and if you're a foreign leader trying to assess him, you actually don't know where this is going except that he is incredibly vulnerable.

Eleveld added:

Essentially, any foreign leader could call up Trump right now, just like Erdoğan did, and bend him to their will because he's just that fragile. If Trump didn't pose a clear and present danger to this country before, he sure does now, and that danger increases with every passing minute that he continues to occupy the Oval Office.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is an expert on authoritarians at New York University. She tweeted:

A cowed and traumatized population is a population that doesn’t rebel against authority - we are going out our way to train a generation to be afraid of being shot. Take NRA and gun lobby right-wing politics, add police huntings & shootings of people of color=despot’s delight.

The Kyiv Post, the English newspaper in Kyiv, Ukraine, has a big front page story today. It’s titled Shady Cast of Characters, Engineers of Trump-Ukraine scandal. Below that are 20 photos and brief descriptions of the nasty guy, Rudy Giuliani and other Washington players, the lawyers, the dirt diggers and beneficiaries in Ukraine, those with a supporting role in Ukraine, and the Oligarch in exile.

It sure would be nice to have something like that in an American paper.



Sarah Kendzior, also an expert on authoritarians, is concerned Democrats won’t be thorough in their impeachment investigations (as we all urge speed). She tweeted:

When one limits the scope of the crime, one limits discussion of the numerous complicit parties -- and then those parties are not held accountable. This is currently the proposed plan for impeachment and it's dishonest and destructive there too.

Eli Friedmann responded:

Power cannot police itself.
If you go too wide you risk your own power.

It's a catch 22.
If one is powerful enough to (for example) take trump down then one is ALSO probably powerful enough that some of one's own support flows from a place that trump feeds from as well.
Thus: narrow focus to avoid taking one's self down.

Daily Kos has a regular Open Thread for Night Owls. As part of that there is a quote and tweet of the day. The quote:

When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or the other that takes priority over boring stuff such as healthcare and pollution. If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has the time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.
--Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

And the tweet was a little something that’s being passed around (author unknown):

I got a speeding ticket but my attorney, Rudy Giuliani, pleaded it down to first degree murder.

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren tweeted a thread:

For decades, administrations of both political parties appointed big donors as ambassadors. They're usually not experts in the country, foreign policy—or anything else relevant to the job. But Donald Trump perfected the act of selling swanky diplomatic posts to rich buffoons.

Warren then lists people who have donated to the nasty guy’s inaugural committee:

* Gordon Sondland gave $1 million and got to be ambassador to the European Union. He’s been in the news lately testifying what he knows about the Ukraine scandal.

* Robert “Woody” Johnson gave $1 million and is ambassador to the United Kingdom. He saved $300 million in a tax scheme.

* Doug Manchester gave $1 million and is nominated to be ambassador to the Bahamas. He’s been accused of inappropriate behavior with female employees at the newspaper he owned.

And several more. Warren then calls for getting campaign money out of politics.



Bree Neewsome Bass tweeted a thread:

Every article of impeachment against 45 that's introduced to public should be presented along w/ proposed changes for how we prevent this in future. If the charge against 45 is soliciting election interference, follow it up w/ restoring *& expanding* the Voting Rights Act, 4 ex.

Place both of these matters before the Senate at the same time, in relationship with each other. Like I've said before, I think the public needs to see both why the 45 admin has to go and the forward-looking vision for how we achieve democracy & equality in this land.

In the matter of election interference, we also can't allow Republicans, as they may try, to remove 45 from office for that crime & then otherwise continue with their party's domestic effort to deny Americans free & fair elections. Another reason it's key to connect these matters.

America’s Achilles heel

Some things collecting in my browser tabs

When one looks at a county map of America colored by which candidate won the 2016 US presidential race a great deal of the country is red. One could wonder why the nasty guy didn’t win by a landslide. Karin Douïeb created a map that morphs each county into a circle proportional to is population. Most of the red areas shrink to little dots in a sea of white while the blue areas blossom in size. I saw another tweet of this map that reminds us land doesn’t vote. People do.

Scroll down a bit to the second map in this twitter thread, which has a few corrections.



Journalist Greg Palast wrote the book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His general thesis: 2016 was stolen. 2020 will be too. Egoberto Willies of Daily Kos quotes from Palast’s website:

What went down in Michigan is a case study of malfeasance, and much of what happened there was repeated elsewhere.

At least 75,355 ballots were not counted there in 2016. What’s more, most of these were from Detroit and Flint, both majority Black cities (82+% and 55+% respectively). According to CNN exit polls, 92% of Black voters in Michigan voted for Hillary. So if half these uncounted ballots were cast by Black voters at that ratio, an additional 34,662 votes would have been tallied in Hillary’s column and given her the state by a margin of 23,958 votes.

These ballots were not counted because they were unreadable by machines. When the oval next to a candidate’s name on the paper ballot was not filled in correctly — i.e., it was checked or was marked with red ink — the machine did not register it and the ballot was set aside. In other cases, no voter error occurred and the machines simply didn’t work.

I remember news reports about attempted recounts that were halted because of irregularities. Now the question is why didn’t Palast’s warnings and analysis of vote theft get a lot of media attention then or now? Palast said:

We have a great myth that we have a great Democracy and any journalist that dares break that BS myth is persona non grata. That's just the darn truth.

Senator and presidential candidate Kamela Harris tweeted a thread about the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Russia report. Excerpts of her tweets:

"At the direction of the Kremlin," Russians threatened our democracy in 2016—and that threat remains for 2020. And one issue they exploited is racial tensions in America.
…
America’s Achilles heel is rooted in racism, and this report confirms that Russia exploited deep racial divisions in a “strategic assault on the United States” to “sow discord” in America in the 2016 presidential election.
…
I think of America as a family—and like any family, we have issues. We have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation that we need to confront.

But someone came into our house and inflamed these tensions to turn us against each other. We can't let that happen again.

Mark Anderson of the Daily Kos community poses the question: What is the purpose of a college education? Train a person for the workforce? Or allow a person to learn how to think and be a contributor to society?

A vocational school or an associates degree fits with the first question. A bachelor degree or higher fits the second.

This question came up because Bernie Sanders proposed canceling student debt. Joey Saladino replied, “How about people just stop getting super expensive useless degrees?”

That answer tells Anderson a lot about Saladino. Restricting access to higher education (currently by reducing government support and thus making it too expensive for many people) has long been a GOP goal. So what do we do about degrees for jobs that just don’t pay much? Like teacher. Is that a useless degree? Should colleges stop offering classes in teaching?

College teaches about life. And though college isn’t for everyone, it is rarely useless. So let’s get back to public funding of education. Let’s tax the rich and corporations as necessary to make it free for everyone.



This year’s State Energy Efficiency Scorecard has been released by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. It rated each state and the District of Columbia on several areas:

* Utility policies

* Transportation policies, such as policies for tailpipe emissions, electric cars, and transit funding.

* Building Energy Efficiency policies

* Heat and Power policies, such as support for low income efficiencies.

* State Government-led initiatives, such as financial incentives and efforts that lead by example.

* Appliance efficiency standards

The basic report is 150 pages with another 50 pages of appendices. I’ve looked at it, though haven’t read much. The PDF file is here.

At the top is Massachusetts, earning 44.5 points out of 50 possible. Close behind are California, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Michigan is 13th with a score of 28.5. At the bottom are North Dakota with a score of 5 out of 50 and Wyoming with a score of 4.5