Sacred places profaned by the blasphemy of war

My Sunday movie was Sasquatch Sunset from 2024. It is the story of four sasquatch (also known as yeti or bigfoot) – two adults males, and adult female, and a juvenile male. They are perhaps the last of their kind. They live in a forest and we see them deal with the world around them. They encounter the other animals, decide what they can eat, groom each other, signal one another, have sex, all without language. Though one tries to count. It is billed as a comedy with plenty of hijinks. My reaction wasn’t so much laughter, but boredom. I thought we might get somewhere when they began to encounter evidence of humans, such as a road. But not much. Only at the end do we see they sense they are losing their habitat. I will give it credit for unique and bizarre. I rarely bother to see a movie with a Metacritic rating of 60 or less. This one got 42 reviews with a rating all the way from 100 to 25 with an average of 66. So I thought this would be decent. Alas, I agree more with the review that gave it a 50 – it would have been brilliant at 15 minutes, but this was 90. IMDb gave it 5.4 out of 10. I think that’s more accurate. Thankfully, I’ve watched very few duds. I had mentioned that Pope Leo has been criticizing the nasty guy and his wars. Emily Singer of Daily Kos has details. He’s been doing this for quite a while. Here are a few of his pronouncements.

God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. ... Absurd and inhuman violence is spreading ferociously through the sacred places of the Christian East, profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives, which are considered at most collateral damage of self-interest. But no gain can be worth the life of the weakest, children, or families. No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood. ... I would like to invite everyone to truly think in their hearts about the many innocent people, so many children, so many elderly, completely innocent, who would also become victims of this escalation of a war that began from the very first days

Kos of Kos discussed the current national conversation. After the firing of Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi the focus is back on the nasty guy. He’s crossed into more dangerous mental territory, to the point that even Tucker Carlson said he should not have nuclear codes. Others on the right have called for invoking the 25th Amendment. Yet, mainstream media has returned to sanewashing, filtering his comments and protecting him. Democrats aren’t much better:

Democrats push war powers resolutions that, even if passed, would spend years tied up in courts before a friendly Supreme Court neuters them. Everyone is still operating within boundaries Trump has already blown past, reacting to events instead of confronting the reality driving them.

And Republicans, who know they are in deep trouble in the midterm elections, have chosen complicity. On Sunday, the news out of Hungary was pretty sweet. Yeah, this is another story that got wide notice before I had a chance to write about it. Maybe I can share a view not widely reported. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister, who has been quite the dictator over his 16 years in office was defeated in Saturday’s national election. Even better, he conceded. The winner was Péter Magyar. Prime Minister is not a position voters elect directly. To be elected prime minister he had to create a political party, which he named Tisza, and recruit candidates to run for each seat. Then he had to convince the public to vote for them. And he did it – in an environment that Orbán made quite difficult, including extensive gerrymandering and public media in his pocket. TheCriticalMind of the Kos community reported Magyar won 138 seats of 199. That gives him enough of a majority he can undo the constitutional changes Orbán had made. Voter turnout was an impressive 78%. This means citizens soundly rejected autocracy and want democracy. They want to end Orbán’s veto of aid to Ukraine and resist Russia. The far right parties across Europe are taking note. AKALib of the Kos community has a bit on the night before the election. The photo of the nighttime rally with small torches is impressive. On Sunday afternoon Kos wrote about Magyar’s win. His party got 53% of the vote and Orbán’s party got 37%. Orbán had been following and promoting the autocrat’s playbook for quite a while. He spoke the language of MAGA (or they spoke his). He knew how to target scapegoats. He served as a model for and incubator of conservative power. And the people said no. Just a week before America’s vice nasty went to Hungary to campaign for Orbán. A tweet shows a Polymarket prediction of the winner moved sharply against Orbán after the vice nasty spoke. The nasty guy has lost a strongman ally. We’d like to lose him too. An open question is who is Magyar? He used to be a member of Orbán’s party. How much of that party platform is he keeping and how much is he rejecting? Where is he on the political spectrum? Probably more accurately, how far right is he? We don’t know yet. Rob Schmitz of NPR reported on the election. Citizens partied when the results were announced because they had doubts Orbán could lose. But with Orbán gone Magyar has aid he will rebuild ties with NATO and the EU. The EU had blocked aid to Hungary because of Orbáns anti democracy policies. Because the EU works on consensus Orbán, the leader of a small country, had enormous power through the use of vetoes, and could direct investment towards other authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, China, and Turkey. And members of Orbán’s government were caught handing EU memos about Ukraine to Russia. NPR host Michel Martin spoke to David Pressman, who had been ambassador to Hungary under Biden and is now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He said Orbán’s attacks on the EU and on Soros and Zelenskyy and his conspiracy theories could not explain failing schools, crumbling hospitals, and why Hungary was the poorest country in the EU. His great propaganda system couldn’t hide the disparity between the common man’s poverty and the prime minister’s palatial estate. Hungarians voted for change because they “were seeing the cost of corruption in their daily lives.” Magyar countered that by focusing on corruption. With that focus he was able to reach the conservative rural voters. He was prepared to fight and go places that he was told were off limits, places where people used government talking points to ask questions. Pressman said the vice nasty’s visit didn’t help Orbán because it was all about the nasty guy’s interest in rewarding loyalists – it was about the nasty guy himself. In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a pair of tweets, first from Garry Kasparov:

Apologists trying to credit Orbán for conceding are intentionally missing the point. He would’ve done anything to stay in power had he thought it possible. Hungarians made it impossible. Trying & failing to destroy democracy receives no credit. He didn't stop; he was stopped.

Michael Weiss added:

It was an overwhelming result and impossible to fudge without risking a protest movement that would have been Euromaidan on steroids. Also don’t discount the fear of the ignominious Ceaușescu exit.

I remember the news of the execution of Ceaușescu, president of communist Romania. If you really want to know more his Wikipedia page is here. I looked for it to remember which country he had led. Isaac Stanley-Becker of The Atlantic

The prime minister’s loss is a crushing defeat for Donald Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, who modeled their agenda in part on Orbán’s governance and staffed their movement with activists trained at his think tanks. As Trump alienated traditional U.S. partners, Washington looked to the like-minded leader in Budapest to represent its interests inside the European Union. The bond was so meaningful to Vance personally that he traveled to Budapest last week to campaign alongside Orbán as if they were running-mates.

A tweet from Jonathan Martin:

Orban's overwhelming defeat will, among other things, only prompt Trump to further question Vance's political utility. Perhaps tis not fair, the margin appears decisive enough that it woulda been same whether Trump or nobody from the U.S. showed, but Trump is who he is.

And a tweet from Harry Enten:

Vance's unsuccessful efforts to help Orban in Hungary are part of a larger problem. Vance's net approval has tumbled by over 20 pts since early 2025. He's the least popular VP at this point in a vice presidency. And most say the Trump admin is too focused on foreign matters.

Josh Keefe of the Maine Monitor discussing the race to be the Democratic nominee for US Senate between Gov. Janet Mills and Graham Platner. Mills says she will go toe to toe with the nasty guy, but is a part of the Democratic establishment.

Platner is up to something different. He isn’t running a campaign so much as seeking to build a mass movement against the status quo. He’s not trying to woo the working class to the Democratic Party; he’s trying to mobilize the working class to take over the Democratic Party and use it to fundamentally change the relationship between government and citizens. To him, Trump is a symptom of a larger rot, a fundamentally broken system, and the old rules of American politics are already beside the point. The Democratic establishment is “still existing in this world where they think that if you know the rules the best, you’re going to win,” he told me. “When the other side is just beating you over the head with the rule book, it doesn’t matter.”

Andy Kim, senator from New Jersey, commented on the single day effort by the vice nasty to try to get a deal with Iran.

Did Vance think he was going to solve decades of disputes with Iran in 1 day? He spent 5 days in Feb hanging out at the Winter Olympics. Iran got highest level negotiations with America ever and still controls the Strait of Hormuz, while Vance appears to be giving up. Diplomacy takes enormous planning, technical expertise, and persistent engagement, especially in war time. Our servicemembers in harm's way and Americans struggling with gas prices deserve serious negotiations, not the performance we just saw.

Another pair of tweets, first from Sami Gold:

Who’s gonna take over as world patron of the illiberal right now that Orban is gone? Trump clearly isn’t that concerned, Meloni’s too tactical, Bolsonaro’s in jail, Milei’s a libertarian, and Putin’s in a fortress mindset. Netanyahu? Fico? Modi?

Benjy Sarlin added:

Similar to Orban, Netanyahu also has high odds of being ousted by a somewhat less illiberal unity coalition in a few months.

Meteor Blades, Kos staff emeritus, posted without commentary a quote from an editorial board opinion from Israel’s left-leaning newspaper Haaretz. This is the entire quote:

Without a shred of shame, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again asked the Jerusalem District Court to postpone for at least two weeks his testimony in his corruption trial. In a letter to the judges, the prime minister’s lawyer claimed that “classified security and political reasons” related to the war justified the request. It is difficult to ignore the fact that the “dramatic events” due to which the request was submitted are the handiwork of none other than the person making the request. If Netanyahu uses the war as a pretext to postpone his trial, he should not be surprised when it is said that his military and diplomatic moves are driven by ulterior motives. This is how he manipulates the court time and again: With one hand he creates “dramatic events,” and with the other he points to them as a force majeure that prevents him from testifying in his trial and “proving his innocence.” But even if these are circumstances beyond Netanyahu’s control, the repeated delays in his trial in the wake of his requests confirm the logic of the petitions to the High Court of Justice demanding that he be barred from running in the next election precisely on account of the trial: There is an inherent conflict of interest between being prime minister and being a criminal defendant. […] Netanyahu and his lawyers behave like actors in a farce meant to ridicule the court and the principle of equality before the law. But those responsible for this farce are first and foremost the judges, who are letting the defendant play them as if they are the ones on trial, not Netanyahu.

The right has a great deal more “pearl-clutching energy”

I finished the book Following the Equator by Mark Twain. Through more than 700 pages and with lots of photos and drawings he describes his year-long trip around the world. The trip may have started in Southampton, England, which he doesn’t mention until the end and doesn’t include the trip across the Atlantic and across America. Most of the book is his visits of several months each to Australia, India, and South Africa. He also describes visits to Fiji, New Zealand, and Mauritius. He couldn’t go ashore in Hawaii because of a cholera outbreak. He took this trip in 1895-96 to give lectures, which was a major source of income. In the book he rarely mentions the lectures and doesn’t describe what he said. At the beginning of the book he mentions the date but not the year. He does mention seeing a lunar eclipse on September 4, and an online NASA catalog showed an eclipse on that date in 1895. In each place he describes his travels by train and ship and includes encounters with locals and descriptions of local customs and history. A regular travel book. When an incident jars his memory he’ll tell a story about something that happened in England or America. Along with that he includes much praise of the indigenous people and some condemnation of the European colonizers. Some of the highlights of the story: His condemnation of the Queensland, Australia slave trade. South Pacific islands were raided to supply workers for the sugar cane fields of Queensland. This is brutal work. The only good thing is the slavery was for three years rather than life. Twain says the Australians claim the experience “civilized” those they enslaved, but such “civilization” didn’t last long. That doesn’t mean the freed men returned to savagery, but that the definition of civilized was meaningless. Twain tells the story of Cecil Rhodes in Australia finding a newspaper clipping in a shark that told of impending war. The shark had come from England a lot faster than a ship could. Rhodes used the information to make himself rich. In South Africa he talks again of Rhodes, texplaining about how much he ruled over the country, both in and out of the government. So I looked up Rhodes in Wikipedia. It talks about how much Rhodes was involved in the formation of the De Beers diamond company, which became close to a worldwide monopoly. The man created Rhodesia and is buried there, though modern locals aren’t too happy about that. Wikipedia also says there is evidence to say Rhodes was gay. The page mentions Twain writing about Rhodes in this book then adds a footnote saying the story of the shark was not true. Yup, not all of the stories and incidents Twain tells are true (a shark that visits both England and Sydney in a week?). And that’s not really a surprise, though it leaves one wondering which stories were not true. In India Twain describes over many pages the Thuggees, a group that worshiped a god that demanded they murder. They committed many (tens of thousands?) in the early 1800s. Twain credits the British for stopping the Thuggees, and goes on to say that’s why the British rule of India was a benefit. He takes a train trip into the Himalayas. That was nice. What was better was the trip down. It was by handcar where the only control was the brake. The 35 mile downward ride was the delight of the year. I enjoyed the book, though by the end I felt it was too long. It does have a lot of Twain’s dry humor and I’m pleased at his support for indigenous people, who in his telling don’t seem so backward and inferior as the white people justifying colonization claimed at the time. During 2025 I read 44 books. Lake Superior State University released its annual list of words that should be banished for “mis-, mal-, over-use, or general uselessness.” 2026 marks the golden anniversary of the list. This year’s offenders: 6-7, that popular phrase that has no meaning. Massive, for incorrect use and overuse. Incentivize, where motivate should be enough. Full stop, where a period should be enough. My bad, an infantile way to apologize. And for general overuse: Demure, Cooked, Gifted, Perfect, and Reach out. This year LSSU included a list of repeat offenders, words that refused to stay banished. Banished three times is the phrase, At the End of the Day. Words and phrases banished twice are: Absolutely, Awesome, Game Changer, and Hot Water Heater (water already hot doesn’t need to be heated, it’s just a water heater). At the start of last week Jacob Wendler of Politico reported that a dozen staffers of the Heritage Foundation, the people who created Project 2025, left that group and went to Advancing American Freedom, which was founded by former vice nasty Mike Pence. Those that left were the heads of the legal, economic, and data analysis teams and several members of their teams. The reason for their departure stems from Tucker Carlson airing a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes in October. Fuentes is a strong antisemite. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation stood by Carlson’s decision to interview Fuentes. Several conservative voices rebuked Roberts. That turned into an internal squabble at HF, with some saying antisemitism has no place there and others saying only so much dissent is permitted at HF. Some reports imply those who left HF were terminated, others say the departures were voluntary. Even so, an HF spokesman seems glad they’re gone and replacements will make them stronger. However, the infighting is reverberating through the Republican Party. Kate Plummer of Newsweek explains the situation in more detail and used the headline “The Heritage Foundation is Imploding.” I would be delighted if the Heritage Foundation fell apart. But I’m skeptical it will happen soon. Steve Inskeep of NPR spoke to Republican strategist Marc Short, who is also described as the chairman of AAF. Short described the HF story from the AAF viewpoint. He went on to describe general conservative goals. As a part of those goals Short complained about the government “picking winners and losers.” They want “a limited role of government in the economy and allowing the marketplace to thrive.” My first reaction to that is they want limited government because government protects the little guy. And I guess “thrive” now has a definition of making money any way they can, including fleecing customers and polluting the environment. My second reaction goes back to a post in November where I discussed late-stage capitalism. Democracy and capitalism exist together only when democracy tightly controls capitalism. Short is saying an important part of conservatism is rejecting those tight controls and letting capitalism continue to its end stage where billionaires control everything. Alas, conservatives have a few key phrases they repeat whenever they can and media, including NPR, don’t delve into what is meant by that. The way conservatives say it limited government is a good thing. But, as we’ve seen in the last year, limited government in practice means no consumer protections (goodbye CFPB), no environmental protections (goodbye EPA), and no safety net for the poor (goodbye affordable care act premium support). And Inskeep didn’t delve into that. This seems to fit right in. Two weeks ago Oliver Willis of Daily Kos, as part of his series of Explaining the Right wrote about Why Republican scandals and misdeeds get a pass. I’m sure I’ve written many times of something the nasty guy or Republicans did and note that if Biden or Obama had done them they would have been quickly impeached and convicted, while Republicans remain unscathed. Willis gives other examples of other Democrats who faced tough scrutiny that sometimes ended their careers for things that were much less severe than what Republicans now commit seemingly daily.

Why does this happen, and with such regularity? The mainstream media has an institutional bias towards both-sidesism, which is the notion that the Democratic and Republican parties and the related liberal and conservative movements engage in outrages at the same pace. This simply isn’t true by any objective measure.

Another reason is that for over six decades the right has relentlessly been “working the refs,” hitting the media with false allegations of bias. The media now consistently rolls over for the right – yet still gets attacked for bias. A third reason is the right has a great deal more “pearl-clutching energy.” They remained outraged over liberal misdeeds with more noise and for a longer time than the left can maintain over conservative misdeeds. I’ll add a fourth reason – many mainstream media outlets are owned by billionaires or others who have a large stake in conservative goals. So they’re inherently biased. Willis wrote that media companies can take things only so far. They fail when Americans can see the truth with their own eyes. Right now no amount of spin can mask the problems in the economy. At the top of today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev included a photo of the midnight swearing in of Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York City. It was done a subway station that’s no longer used that leads directly into City Hall. It’s a pretty location. Mamdani had a second swearing in, this time during the day, on City Hall steps, and with the public able to attend. Kev quoted Hayes Brown of MSNOW discussing the many artists who have canceled gigs at the Kennedy Center, especially after the nasty guy added his nasty name to the building. Ric Grenell, president of the Center, called these artists “far-left political activists.” Brown wrote:

Grenell essentially accusing performers of being performative illustrates an utter lack of understanding about the arts and audience. It’s as though his mind cannot fathom why an artist might decide to withhold their work from certain audiences at certain venues. And as though there is not a rich tradition of art as protest in this country, either in boldly staging performances calling out injustice or in shunning stages that demanded segregated audiences.

Then Brown discussed Grenell’s focus on “sound fiscal policy.” He wants arts that actually sell tickets and make a profit. That misses the point of arts. It is why most arts institutions, including the Kennedy Center, are non-profit. Arts are important whether or not they make a profit. The Nation magazine reposted a 2015 essay from Toni Morrison that gives another reason for what Grenell is really up to.

Dictators and tyrants routinely begin their reigns and sustain their power with the deliberate and calculated destruction of art: the censorship and book-burning of unpoliced prose, the harassment and detention of painters, journalists, poets, playwrights, novelists, essayists. This is the first step of a despot whose instinctive acts of malevolence are not simply mindless or evil; they are also perceptive. Such despots know very well that their strategy of repression will allow the real tools of oppressive power to flourish. Their plan is simple: 1. Select a useful enemy—an “Other”—to convert rage into conflict, even war. 2. Limit or erase the imagination that art provides, as well as the critical thinking of scholars and journalists. 3. Distract with toys, dreams of loot, and themes of superior religion or defiant national pride that enshrine past hurts and humiliations.

In the comments is a tweet by Prof. Peter Hotez:

Year One MAHA: 1. Measles returns to America 2. Pertussis returns to America 3. Chronic hepatitis liver cancer returns 4. Pandemic preparedness gone 5. Swung & missed on autism 6. CDC disassembled 7. Biotech industry shutting down 8. Brain drain underway.

I see that as more oppression by the wealthy. Those near the top of the social hierarchy and most invested in their position make their lives appear better by making the lives of others worse. Killing others off through unrestrained disease is one way to accomplish that goal. That tweet was followed by one by Dan Diamond. It includes a link to a Washington Post article that is the source and includes a way for a person to look up the stats of their own county. Diamond wrote:

5 million-plus kindergartners now live in counties where schools don’t have “herd immunity” for measles, Washington Post reporters found.

A comment by pelagicray lamented the destruction of the federal executive branch, which included...

That came with significant deaths, many infant and children deaths, from USAID shutdown so chaotic medicine and food went bad in warehouses rather than into a final distribution. That is on us. We let it happen. While many of us voted for the good, collectively it is on all of us. A piece in the U.S. Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health notes

The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande.

After all that something light and sweet. Rund Abdelfatah, host of NPR’s Throughline brought to All Things Considered and 8-minute segment on the history of chocolate. The link also has a transcript.

Maintaining the moral high ground

Hunter of Daily Kos wrote about the travails of Elon Musk trying to get the verified blue checkmark on Twitter accounts to do what he wants it to do. This shows the guy has no concept of the way humans think. Musk finally carried through with his threat to reserve the verified status for those who paid him $8 a month. This status elevats a person’s tweets to the top of a thread of replies. Musk intended it for his far-right allies, the ones he wanted to promote. Musk wanted people to pay for their chance to be at the top of replies. But nearly all – including the muppet Elmo – said goodbye to the checkmark. Which mean those who still had a checkmark were the far-right fringe, which made knowing who to block easy. Perhaps even an app could do that. Then Musk tried to give a checkmark to celebrities – such as Stephen King – who responded they don’t want it, they don’t want to be identified as far-right. Checkmarks were bestowed on accounts with a million or more followers in an attempt to thwart methods of automatically blocking accounts. Those users denied paying for it and didn’t want it either. Wrote Hunter:

Musk instituted a system by which the most dedicated spammers, trolls, incels, racists, and the rest of the internet's least popular people can pay to play their way into becoming the featured "content" of the Musk hellsite. He's made the blue check synonymous with "a person whose opinions are so deeply unpopular that they could only receive attention by paying for it." He's made it toxic.

Kos of Kos discussed the large number of conservatives who see the firing of Tucker Carlson from Fox News as the death of the First Amendment. It only shows these people don’t understand the First Amendment. He began is discussion with:

No constitutional amendment is more misunderstood than the First, despite being just a handful of plain English words. And there’s nothing like Tucker Carlson’s firing at Fox News to bring out the ignorance in full force, with too many people thinking that a right to free speech somehow also means a right to a platform.

I add that while the First may be the most misunderstood, the Second is right behind it. SemDem of the Kos community reported there is a case before the Supreme Court that could devastate unions. There has always been a tussle between corporations and unions, especially in the last forty years when profits are less likely to be shared with the workers. Over the last two years union membership has exploded. Along with it has been union busting efforts. That includes corporations simply ignoring the union – and there isn’t a lot a union can do other than take the corporation to court (which could take a decade) or to strike. Leonard Leo, head of the Federalist Society, has been doing considerable work to get conservatives onto courts – and under the nasty guy and Bush II has been quite successful at it (see: Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch, even Roberts and likely Alito, and hundreds more in other federal courts). His latest project is to “crush liberal dominance.” And that includes delivering a death blow to unions. The case before the court, Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters is about a strike at a concrete mixing company that left behind a bit of damage. Glacier Northwest sued the union for $11K (yeah, not much). But if any company could sue a union over damages – say food that spoiled in the fridge while workers were on strike plus lost business – there goes the ability of a union to strike. This case goes before a Supreme Court that does what it wants, disregarding precedent, and has always given corporations what they want. Doesn’t look good. Keep in mind that things we now see as an essential part of working life – the weekend and the 40 hour week among them – we have because of unions. Even so, in countries that respect their unions they have paid vacation, sick days, and parental leave. And a decent minimum wage. David Nir and David Beard of Kos Elections are hosts of the Downballot podcast. In the second part of last week’s episode they talk to Matthew Sugart, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. I read through the transcript and summarized a 48 minute discussion. The US uses a majoritarian system, also known as winner take all. If your candidate gets 50% plus 1 vote your party is represented in Congress or the legislature. If your candidate doesn’t meet that threshold then your party does not represent your district and almost half of the citizens may feel they aren’t heard. Some countries use proportional representation, with variations in method. In countries that use it their citizens want to keep it. Instead of one representative from a district there are five (or ten, or 150). Yes, that changes the size of districts. For maybe one or two of the candidates the citizens vote directly for the candidate. For the rest they vote for the party. The number of representatives from each party are based on the percentage of votes that party got. If they got 60% of the vote they are awarded 60% of the seats. Yeah, 50% of the vote and five seats means a party should get two and a half seats, which isn’t possible. There are also several ways a party chooses which candidates get the seats. In some places the party ranks them, in others the voters do. There are several advantages of the proportional system. Candidates have to campaign in all districts, rather than ignoring the ones that don’t have a tight race. Also, the threshold for a small party to get a seat is much lower – in the case of a five-seat district it is 20% instead of 50%. As for applying this in the US, there is nothing in the Constitution and federal law that would prohibit it. In a Ukraine update from Friday of last week Mark Sumner of Kos discussed an incident where it looked like Russia bombed its own city of Belgorod, not the first time that has happened. The news has been full of reports of Russia bombing and sending missiles into Ukraine. There was another of those just last night. Which leads to an interesting question. Why isn’t Ukraine bombing Russia?

One thing should be clear right from the start—if Ukraine wanted to destroy the Russian city of Belgorod, or at least cause enormous damage and kill many Russian civilians, it could do so.

Since Belgorod, only 30km from the border, is a rail nexus and a lot of Russian war supplies go through the city the thought of bombing it had likely been tempting. Yeah, a few military related sites have exploded. But nothing has damaged the city, as Russia has done to Ukrainian cities. Russia bombs Ukrainian cities...

Because they can. Because it kills people. Because it causes suffering and misery for Ukrainians.

And why doesn’t Ukraine do the same?

Ukraine’s restraint in not attacking Russian towns and cities, when it very much could, is in part because it wants to maintain the moral high ground. No matter how much the West shares with Ukraine, or how foolishly Russia wastes its men and materiel, Ukraine is still the underdog in this fight. Maintaining the moral high ground is important to how Ukraine presents itself to the world. Russia brought this fight to Ukraine, not the other way around. Ukraine doesn’t want to do anything that makes them appear as the aggressor, even if it’s plain old retaliation. Ukraine is defending its nation from an illegal, unprovoked invasion. Period.

From Thursday of last week Sumner discussed a speech by Secretary of State Tony Blinken on why we’re fighting there. Sumner then has a few comments on the latest round of peace proposals. He wrote:

Defending Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is about much more than standing up for one nation’s right to choose its own path, as fundamental as that right is. It’s also about defending an international order where no nation can redraw the borders of another by force. If we fail to defend this principle, when the Kremlin is so flagrantly violating it, we send a message to aggressors everywhere that they can ignore it, too. We put every country at risk. ... Here’s the reality. None of us chose this war. Not the Ukrainians, who knew the crushing toll it would take. Not the United States, which warned that it was coming and worked to prevent it … One man chose this war. One man can end it. Because if Russia stops fighting, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. As Russian sources keep making clear, that’s not just true of the nation of Ukraine. It’s also true of the people of Ukraine. With the latest round of peace proposals being pressed by multiple analysts, it’s worth remembering that all these supposed solutions for “lasting peace” are actually formulas for three things: * Dividing Ukraine * Preventing Ukraine from entering NATO * Giving Russia a chance to rebuild their military

The proposals also ignore “what Russia has done in Ukraine.” They ignore the mass graves and war crimes, the theft of children, the destruction of many cities, especially Mariupol. The proposals also ignore the crimes Russia wants to commit – Putin and his propagandists have called for the total elimination of Ukrainians, for a genocide. We may get tired of the war and of funding the war, but the consequences of implementing any of these “peace” plans will be disaster. The Intel Crab tweeted that Google Earth has updated their satellite images of Mariupol. What is visible is a great deal of destruction. In a post from a couple days ago Sumner discussed the war of apps. There is an app called Alpine Quest that, to the horror of and with the disavowal from the makers, has become important for Russians to mark the location of Ukrainian troops so other forces who are better positioned can attack. Even though the maker prevents downloading to Russian devices the app has been around for a decade and is easily shared. Russia has also created several other apps. And, of course, Ukrainian military people have come up with a comparable app of their own, plus a few more. Perhaps after the war Ukraine could be the next place to attract investment to tap into their technical prowess. Sumner, who used to work in mining, talked about the technology developed 30 years ago to keep track of all the mining vehicles. Each one required the installation of $40K of special hardware. Fifteen years ago he realized all that could be replaced with an app on smartphones. He earned a lot of hate from the drivers. Of course, the best thing smartphones do for soldiers is to keep them in contact with family.

If the law can’t get him on his crime, get him on his taxes

My Sunday movie was more a combination of concert and documentary. It was Identity: A Song Cycle presented by Against the Grain Theatre. Shortly after George Floyd was murdered, baritone Elliot Madore of Toronto realized he needed to come to grips with being biracial. He posted his thoughts to Instagram. With composer Dinuk Wijeratne and poet Shauntay Grant they created this song cycle. Madore’s singing seems somewhat classical, but the accompaniment is a jazz trio – piano, bass, and percussion. Wijeratne is one of the instrumentalists, I think piano. It was filmed in a studio with a relaxed atmosphere. In between the songs are pictures of Madore as a boy as he discusses his identity. He grew up in a loving family with a single mother and doting grandparents. He was eight before his mother said anything about his father. On being shown a picture of the man his reaction was hey wait, this guy has dark skin! He heard from his father briefly when he was 16 and has yet to meet him. Is he white? Culturally yes. Is he black? His skin is dark enough that some think he might be Italian or Spanish. But he doesn’t have any of the culture. For a long time he didn’t want to talk about his identity. He had imposter syndrome. One of the songs talks about being half this, half that, and I’m tired of the boxes and categories and tags. He is tired of friends and colleagues insisting the he is white (as in why would you want to give up your cultural superiority?). He is thankful for the black colleague who said, “Welcome home.” This video has been available for about six months. I finally saw it on the last day before it is set aside for a while. Sorry, you can’t find it and view it right now. I’ve now seen a couple things by Against the Grain Theatre. Both have been impressive and quite different. The earlier piece was Handel’s Messiah with each of the solos done by a different singer, most of them indigenous and singing in their own language and many with stunning Canadian scenery as backdrop. They’ve also done a new interpretation of Bluebeard’s Castle by Bela Bartok. Instead of Judith playing mind games with Bluebeard about what happened to his previous wives, this one imagines Judith sinking into dementia. It’s an intriguing concept, but it was done live and not recorded, so I haven’t seen it. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated today. The peaks in the number of new cases per day over the last several weeks are looking pretty good! They are 1022, 847, 774, 584, 427, and 349. In the same week that the peak was over 1000 there was one day with 16 deaths and one with 14. Since then the deaths per day have been 14 and under, mostly in the single digits. The big news of the week has been Fox News firing Tucker Carlson. There are lots of media stories about it such as this one by Hunter of Daily Kos. There is speculation of why the network booted its most popular host. The most obvious reason is the $787 million settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting, which happened just last week. Joan McCarter of Kos also discusses the reasons for the firing. Was it about Carlson’s lies over the ongoing coverage of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack? That was two years ago. But... Ray Epps, an insurrectionist, was accused by Carlson of being an FBI plant. Epps’ harassment has gotten so bad he’s on the run and now he’s suing Fox. Leah McElrath tweeted that perhaps Carlson’s ouster is to give the network respectability during these lawsuits and in advance of the 2024 election. Or it was because the discovery process for the Dominion case uncovered skeletons in his closets. Keeping those from coming to light might be a reason why Fox settled. Those skeletons may be related to how Carlson harassed female staff. Now that he’s gone McElrath said a thought that has crossed her mind is the nasty guy asking Carlson to be vice nasty. Others have suggested he might run for the top job. Hunter looked again at the idea that Carlson was booted because of the lies that made up his show. Why would Fox News put up with his lies for all these years only to dump him now? Hunter cataloged those lies: Promotion of “Great Replacement” claims. Promotion of election hoaxes. Of anti-vaccine hoaxes. Of violent far-right figures. Of conspiracy theories against conservatism’s enemies. Of Russia over Ukraine. He demanded retaliation against Fox reporters who discredited the Big Lie. He defended the Capitol attack. And he attacked the gender of M&Ms. One voice I read during the week warned us that though Carlson is gone from Fox that does not mean his voice will go silent. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that the Russia propaganda machine is quite disappointed that Carlson has been booted. Clips from his show had been a regular feature of Russian broadcasts because they could say, “See! A prominent American broadcaster agrees with us!” So Tucker, need a job? Russia would gladly hire you. Or maybe you cold put on a Russian uniform and fight in Ukraine? Charles Jay of the Kos community reported that the abortion pill ruling puts the Supreme Court in a bind. The case asks the justices whether restrictions can be placed on a drug the FDA approved decades ago. It’s a bind because the case is between Big Pharma (big corporations in general) and religious rights. Siding with corporations is why the Federalist Society nominated the conservative justices to the court. Their conservative corporate values also came with conservative religious values, which were on display when Roe was overturned. But those religious values will be in conflict with the corporate values. As for the abortion pill, an Associated Press story posted on Kos reported late Friday, just before their extended deadline, the justices ruled it can remain available without restrictions while the case is being litigated. It is still before the conservative 5th Circuit Court and will likely be back before the Supremes next year or the year after. Joan McCarter of Kos reported another Supreme corruption scandal. This one involved Justice Neil Gorsuch. He had a Colorado property he wanted to sell, but had no takers. Nine days after his confirmation it sold. He properly disclosed the sale but carefully did not disclose the seller was Brian Duffey, CEO of Greenberg Taurig, a powerhouse law firm with regular business before the court. The legacy of Chief Justice John Roberts: Corruption. The old saying, I think applied to Al Capone, is that if the law can’t get him on his crime, get him on his taxes. Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee may be trying to make that also true for Justice Clarence Thomas. If those gifts from Harlan Crow were as expensive as they appear to be then they were way above the annual gift tax exclusion. With the House in Republican hands doing something about the corruption in the Supremes is likely not possible. And Wyden’s attempts likely won’t cause Thomas to behave or respond to invitations or subpoenas to appear before a Senate Committee. But Wyden sure can create a big public relations mess going into the 2024 election year. Jesse Duquette tweeted a cartoon of Thomas in an alley doorway saying, “Pssst, hey you... wanna buy a ruling?" In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jill Filipovic on Substack discussing why conservatives are obsessed with gender identity.

Conservatives who push and support these bills claim to be concerned about “gender ideology” perverting young minds — telling boys they can be girls and vice versa, allowing men to compete in women’s sports, giving children hormones and genital surgeries. This is all pretty dishonest. Members of the conservative movement aren’t concerned about women’s sports (otherwise they’d be funding them), children’s health (otherwise they’d be fighting the number-one killer of children), or women’s rights (otherwise they wouldn’t be virulent misogynists attacking women’s rights at every turn, banning abortion, and electing rapists to office). They care about liberal “gender ideology” for one reason: Because they want to impose and enforce their own right-wing gender ideology on the public.

Steve Sack of the Minneapolis Star Tribune tweeted a cartoon of a grumpy man saying, “I don’t want big gov’t coming in and taking away my freedom! I just want it to take away hers.” McElrath linked to an article in Tech Crunch that reported the Missouri government set up a website to allow citizens to report on “transgender concerns” – otherwise known as a snitch site. The response: citizens spammed it until it crashed.

A kiss to a lesbian daughter

My Sunday movie was Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. It has been a long time since I saw the original Disney version (and didn’t see the recent Disney live action) so certain images are in my mind, but a lot of the details have been forgotten. Of course, I remember Jiminy Cricket singing “When You Wish Upon a Star.” In this new version, set in Italy, some of the plot points appear to be the same – including the puppet joining the traveling show and being swallowed by a sea creature. There’s also a cricket to serve as the conscience. Others are quite different – Geppetto loses a son, still a boy, in WWI and when WWII comes around Pinocchio is created through deep grief and drunken rage. And Lithwick, now Candlewick, is the son of the town’s fascist leader. I very much enjoyed this version of the story. The storytelling is excellent, as is the animation. I and a few people from my church bell group attended a bell festival in South Bend, IN Friday evening and all day Saturday. It is time for a few hundred enthusiasts to gather and put on a concert, with much of the time rehearsing together so we are playing together. There were also classes of a variety of bell related topics and to hear a top notch group from the region put on a concert. Sister suggested I look up a particular bit the opening monologue for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for March 2nd. Here it is: Rep. Nate Schatzline of Texas authored a bill that would seek to limit drag by designating any establishment as a “sexually oriented business” if it allows “on-premise consumption of alcoholic beverages” and performances by a person wearing any clothing or makeup not stereotypical to their born sex. Colbert added:

If serving alcohol and having men in gowns makes you a sexually oriented business I’ve got bad news about church.

Also on that episode was an extensive interview in several segments Colbert did with Steven Spielberg. I think part of it had to be used in the next week. That delayed part included John Williams, the composer of most of the scores for Spielberg’s films. One sentence from the session is worth sharing. Spielberg spoke of antisemitism and its growing boldness since about 2014:

Hate became a kind of membership in a club that has gotten more members than I ever though possible in America.

There has been a lot of news about the revelations about how much Fox News has been lying to their viewers. There has been talk from pundits that their viewers would leave countered with talk that they aren’t going anywhere – the lies are the point. Hunter of Daily Kos responded to that second idea:

The audience doesn't want accurate news. They want Sean Hannity to tell them that banks are failing because of wokeness; they want Tucker Carlson to tell them that there was no pandemic, there never was a pandemic, and all their dead relatives actually just were sent to a farm upstate. They want to be told that it's not that their own bigoted and paranoid worldviews are unpopular, there's just an enormous "globalist" conspiracy to hide just how popular their own fantasies are. While it may seem like this unnamed cable executive is unfairly belittling the Fox News audience, there's simply no question that they're right. Fox News viewers love being lied to. ... Fox isn't worried one bit about losing viewers who feel lied to. They're much more concerned about losing viewers who don't feel lied to enough.

In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Kos also mentioned Carlson. At the start of the war Carlson’s support for Putin seemed an extreme view. But he kept hammering that position and then two weeks ago he, as Sumner wrote, “has made support for Vladimir Putin a touchstone for would-be Republican nominees in 2024.” Sumner also posted a video of middle school students in occupied Crimea learning how to assemble weapons and being drilled in military maneuvers. It seems to be lifted from Nazi youth videos. This is grooming children to be ready to be a part of a war about an hour’s drive away. And American media is using it as proof that Russia is superior to the US. A brief story from the Associated Press posted on Kos reported:

The International Criminal Court says it has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Putin for war crimes because of his alleged involvement in abductions of children from Ukraine. The court said in a statement that Putin “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.” It also issued a warrant Friday for the arrest for Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation on similar allegations.

That whole Hunter Biden laptop thing appears to have started when Hunter took that laptop in for repairs and didn’t claim it within 90 days. The owner claimed it as abandoned and released the drive to Republican operatives. Laura Clawson of Kos reported Hunter is now suing the repair shop for invasion of privacy. Some of the points in his suit. * There was plenty of opportunity to put things on the laptop’s hard drive for the purpose of framing Hunter. * Delaware law says property is not considered abandoned until one year has passed. * The shop owner has admitted to accessing Hunter’s data before the 90 days were up. * The repair authorization form says the shop will make every effort to secure the data. When a computer is abandoned the data is to be wiped. Clawson concluded:

At this point nothing will get Republicans to back off of their attacks on Hunter Biden, who they see as the way to cause his father the most possible pain. They’ve done all this work turning his name into a synonym for corruption that they cannot prove, so they can’t abandon the effort. But Biden’s aggressive new approach could at least exact some pain in response.

Jon Stewart had economist Larry Summers on his The Problem with Jon Stewart. Walter Einenkel of Kos discussed the interview. Summers had advised every Democratic leader since Dukakis in 1988. But that doesn’t mean Summers is a progressive – he’s been doing a great job of defending corporate interests. Einenkel summarized the interview this way:

Summers has been running around for the past year saying that the federal reserve and President Joe Biden must continue to raise interest rates in order to loosen up the labor market. What that means is that there are too many people working and pulling in living wages, according to Summers, and we must therefore create an economic environment that promotes laying off millions of workers. He and others have disregarded the fact that as much, if not more, of the world’s inflation issues has been generated by corporate greed.

Michigan has done it! Laina Stebbins of Michigan Advance reported:

In a historic and profound moment for LGBTQ+ rights in Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Thursday signed legislation to expand a nearly 50-year-old civil rights law to encompass protections for LGBTQ+ Michiganders. Whitmer put her signature to Senate Bill 4 — which expands the 1976 Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA) to protect against discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation — in Lansing alongside LGBTQ+ leaders, officials and lawmakers and one of the two original cosponsors of ELCRA.

At the signing ceremony was 86 year old Rep. Melvin Larson, who was instrumental in getting the original bill passed. The other original cosponsor was Daisy Elliott, who died in 2015 at the age of 98. Larson debunked the Republican talking point that LGBTQ+ protections were not intended to be in the original bill. The photo at the top of the story is of Whitmer giving a kiss to her lesbian daughter Sherry. Anna Gustafson of the Advance reported that an eleven bill package of gun reforms has passed the Michigan Senate. Michigan law says bills can address only one thing, so there are frequently packages of bills. The package mandates universal background checks, safe storage of firearms, and permit a court to temporarily remove guns from someone who may be a danger to themselves or others. Gustafson had details on the votes and arguments from both sides. This vote comes a bit more than a month after the shooting at Michigan State University, only four miles away, and only sixteen months after the shooting at Oxford High School. Many students were present for the vote. Also present was Gabby Giffords, who was injured in a shooting in Arizona in 2011. The bill goes on to the state House. Who controls the government matters! Right now Michigan’s government is in Democratic hands. Paul Hogarth of Kos reported almost two weeks ago that the Michigan House Elections Committee held its first hearing on having Michigan join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The NPVIC is an agreement by states to award their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote rather than the winner of their state’s vote. This ends the situation that has happened twice this century in which the candidate who won the most votes did not become president. It is a way of overturning the Electoral College without actually amending the Constitution. The Compact says it doesn’t go into effect until enough states, those representing 270 electoral votes, have signed it. So far states representing 195 votes have approved the Compact. Michigan and Minnesota will hopefully approve it this year, bringing the total to 220. After these two most of the blue states will be on board and adding more states will be harder. Even so, there is hope the Compact will be in place by 2028. If Hogarth’s explanation isn’t enough David Beard and David Nir of the Downballot podcast on Kos talked to Christopher Pearson of the National Popular Vote, the organization advocating for the Compact. Nir and Beard also talk of other things, so perhaps search this transcript for Pearson. Pearson discussed his major talking points, including refuting objections to the Compact. One objection is there isn’t a national vote count. But there are 50 state counts plus DC certified by secretaries of states and it is all very public and spreadsheets are very good at adding things together. On election night news outlets keep a running tally, as they did in 2020 where Biden was ahead by 7 million votes, but the win came down to 43,000 votes in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia. One might challenge 11,000 votes in Georgia, but not 7 million votes. A benefit is that all states are swing states. We won’t have the situation of Republican candidates for president ignoring California and Democratic candidates ignoring Louisiana. New Hampshire says it will get ignore because it is so small. But big New York is currently ignored because it is so reliably blue. Currently 70% or more of our voters are ignored every presidential election cycle. And that means it is harder to get people to register to vote in those states. They don’t see that it matters. Or college students say they can’t register because they’re from another state. But under the Compact the state doesn’t matter. The people do.

It is financially lucrative to feed the hate of millions of curmudgeons

This story appeared more than two weeks ago, but it has been a busy two weeks for me. On the positive side I can include a few developments since then. That story is a part of the lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. Dominion accuses defamation because Fox News people said Dominion stole votes as part of their claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reported the big development in the case two weeks ago. Though it is difficult to win a defamation case Dominion asked for summary judgment, asking the judge to rule on the case without a trial because they believe their evidence is so strong a trial isn’t necessary. It is routine for a defendant to ask for summary judgment, claiming the evidence is nowhere near strong enough for the plaintiff to win. It is rare for a plaintiff to ask for summary judgment. Clawson wrote:

That is what you call confidence in your filing. And the filing backs it up with page after page of quotes from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Rupert Murdoch, and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, showing that they knew the score. Maybe there were some true believers left at Fox, but they were not the majority. Fox News pushed lies about Dominion for its own cynical reasons. “This filing argues a fire hose of direct evidence of knowing falsity,” RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, told The New York Times. “It gives a powerful preview of one of the best-supported claims of actual malice we have seen in any major-media case.” (Actual malice is one of the legal standards such a suit has to meet.)

Clawson quoted some of the evidence, such Carlson saying “Sidney Powell is lying.” Of the claim of a stolen election Clawson wrote:

They knew it was nonsense, but they were worried about losing their voters to Newsmax and OAN. Trump supporters were already angry with Fox for calling Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night, and Newsmax and OAN were all in on election lies. Not alienating the Trump base meant Fox News had to offer those viewers at least some of what they wanted.

Jen Hayden of Kos added some next day commentary, saying that Fox News is a super PAC for Republicans.

Sure, Fox News skates the line by claiming its primetime superstars like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are entertainment and not actual news and therefore don’t have to follow journalistic standards. But does their audience really get that? And does supposed distinction matter when the network’s goal is to rile up its viewers to help the Republican Party win? It’s not just building up Republicans, though. Damaging Democrats and their agenda has been part of Fox’s core daily mission, too. Hillary Clinton was a near-daily focus for 25 years. Why? Because she was capable of becoming president. Because she was an adept messenger of Democratic ideals and progressive goals. And because it is financially lucrative to feed the hate of millions of mostly older, mostly white curmudgeons who tune in for the performative outrage.

Erik Wemple tweeted a thread, showing some of the evidence, now posted on Thread Reader. Mark Sumner of Kos wrote about Fox News’ reply to Dominion. That summary judgment is highly unlikely. But the reply comes down to “Fox actually has no answer to the evidence of wrongdoing.” Their response might as well be a confession. From about that time Greg Dworkin’s pundit roundup for Kos naturally has a lot of comments about Fox News. One is by Brian Stelter of The Atlantic, who quoted a former producer, who felt himself being brainwashed and becoming a Fox addict. That former producer said:

People don’t care if it’s right; they just want their side to win. That’s who this show is for. It’s sad.

Mike Luckovich tweeted a cartoon of a man watching Fox with a broken window behind him. He asks a boy, “Why’d you tell me you didn’t break the window?!” They boy, holding a bat with a ball nearby, says, “ ‘Cuz you like being lied to...” At one point Carlson had said he supports Putin, saying ... and here I’ll let a cartoon take over. It is by Andy Marlette and shows Carlson at his desk saying “What did Putin ever do to hurt me?! His desk sits on several murdered reporters and cameramen. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported on Monday of this week that Fox News host Howard Kurtz, on his show Media Buzz addressed the question of why he hadn’t been reporting on the Dominion case against his employer. He replied that his company has said he can’t talk about it. Yup, the biggest story about Fox News is not being reported to Fox News viewers. On Tuesday morning NPR reported in a story by David Folkenflik:

In the heat of the moment, right after Election Day 2020, media magnate Rupert Murdoch knew that the hosts on his prized Fox News Channel were endorsing lies from then-President Donald Trump about election fraud. And he did nothing to intervene to stop it. Instead, Murdoch, the network's controlling owner, followed the lead of the network's senior executives in sidestepping the truth for a pro-Trump audience angered when confronted by the facts. Asked whether he could have told Fox News' chief executive and its stars to stop giving airtime to Rudy Giuliani — a key Trump campaign attorney peddling election lies — Murdoch assented. "I could have," Murdoch said. "But I didn't."

There are a lot of details in Folkenflik’s story. Sumner added some background to Murdoch’s blunt testimony:

As everything connected to the Dominion lawsuit has made clear, protecting the narrative—the one Fox wants to spread and has taught its viewers to expect—is everything. It’s not just worth putting on guests again and again when it’s clear they are lying; it’s threatening to fire a reporter for slipping up and telling the truth. To a degree that would be hilarious if it were not actively ripping apart this nation and others, Fox News simply made up whatever it needed to support its position. ... The most amazing thing about this lawsuit so far is that Fox hasn’t gotten out the checkbook to ask Dominion how much they would take to stop. Or maybe they have, and Dominion’s numbers had more zeroes than even Murdoch could squeeze onto a check. Or maybe Fox figures none of this ultimately matters anyway. Sure, they’ve admitted they lied. Yes, they did it to forward a greater narrative that is itself a lie. But their viewers aren’t going to hear any of this, and other lie-promoting outlets like Newsmax look like much less of a threat than they did at the end of 2020. So maybe Murdoch figures just plowing on through court is the better option. Anything, so long they don’t have to tell the truth on Fox News.

A couple days ago Clawson reported that Kellyann Conway, former advisor to the nasty guy, popped up on Fox News. Clawson wrote:

But it does seem like a message is creeping into Fox News coverage that might be a response to all this, an indirect way to instruct its credulous viewers on how to respond. The basic message is: “You’re going to be lied to anyway. You might as well be lied to by us.” ... There’s a reason that a 2012 study of political knowledge of people who watched different news networks found that Fox viewers were the worst informed. A 2020 study found that, while people who got their news from the Fox website understood political process as well as people reading other news websites, there was a “significant, negative relationship between visiting foxnews.com and facts about society writ large.” Fox News lies. It’s what they do. When they get caught, and their lies are indisputably revealed in public, their response is to try to convince their viewers that everyone else lies more. Which is another lie.

Kevin Siers tweeted a cartoon that shows a few news sources and their famous taglines. One is the Washington Post saying, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The one for Fox News is, “You can’t handle the truth!” Bob Englehart tweeted a cartoon of two guys fishing off the end of a pier and one hauling up bags of money. The other asks, “Rupert, more viewers, more money... What do you use for bait?” Rupert replies: “Lies!” One would think that one controversy swirling around Fox News at a time would be plenty. Alas, no. While all that was going on... Hunter of Kos reported:

In a bizarre development, Axios is now reporting that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who owes his speakership to deals struck with House Republican allies of the Jan. 6 coup attempt, has given "exclusive access" to "41,000 hours" of U.S. Capitol surveillance footage from that day to ... Fox News' Tucker Carlson and his producers. Yeah, that Tucker Carlson, the promoter of white nationalist conspiracy theories and one of the Fox hosts that helped promote the false "election fraud" conspiracies Republicans used to justify attempts to nullify Donald Trump's 2020 presidential election loss. Tucker Carlson's team of conspiracy theorists is now being granted access to thousands of hours of sensitive footage from Capitol security cameras so that they can fish for new conspiracy theories defending the violent rioters. ... While McCarthy previously bleated about releasing the full Capitol footage to all of the "American public," when push comes to shove, he chose to hand it "exclusively" to the most pro-Putin, pro-rioter, pro-conspiracy far-right host on television. And that host will have his people looking hard for anything that can be used to launch their next hoax.

Frank Figliuzzi, retired FBI Assistant Director, tweeted that the videos reveal security camera capabilities, safe room locations, and more. Leah McElrath, expanded on that:

The footage provides anyone planning future attacks on the Capitol or lawmakers with invaluable information. Both domestic terrorists and foreign enemies will likely seek out the security footage. The release of this material to Tucker Carlson means that there are no more “safe rooms” for lawmakers in the event of an attack of any kind, plus all routes of escape are now known. I would imagine the Capitol Police and Secret Service are concerned about the release of the security footage to Tucker Carlson. Having the information circulating in the public domain to any extent makes their job of securing the safety of lawmakers and the Capitol challenging.

David Neiwert of Kos talked more about the security and propaganda issues.

As my colleague Mark Sumner commented today in our Slack channel: “I can't imagine what two-second clips he's going to splice together to prove the police baited Trump supporters into storming the Capitol, while simultaneously using freeze frame images to prove these were not Trump supporters at all. And just where was Nancy Pelosi walking in this shot? Was she opening a door so Antifa could get in?”

Neiwert reported on complaints by various Democratic lawmakers, then ended with:

Carlson, predictably, was unconcerned. "If there was ever a question that's in the public's interest to know, it's what actually happened on January 6. By definition, this video will reveal it. It's impossible for me to understand why any honest person would be bothered by that," Carlson told Axios. Carlson is now an established liar for profit. But then, as we have known all along, Carlson’s gaslighting technique isn’t so much a matter of his credibility, but rather, an expression of raw power. That’s what happens with men like McCarthy in control, and men like Tucker manipulating the masses.

Clawson reported that after the release of all that video Republicans are pretending to care about Capitol security. We wouldn’t want Russia or China to be able to get ahold of that data. Sorry – neither Russia or China has attacked the Capitol. Yeah, safety is not their priority. Sumner reported on McCarthy’s next step:

McCarthy claimed to have handed the videos to Carlson in order to make them available to the public. What he did was exactly the opposite of what he promised to do. All it would take to make the video fully available to the public is for McCarthy to make them fully available to the public. Just as the Jan. 6 committee made their final report and supporting materials available to everyone. It would take McCarthy not even one minute to order the videos placed on a government site where anyone could access them, look at them in detail, and see every image in context. Instead McCarthy gave the videos only to Carlson, a man who has consistently chopped up the news and patched it together in ways that generate false associations and unsupportable claims. In what universe would Kevin McCarthy handing over video to Tucker Carlson be considered making it “fully available to the public?” Why … in the one where McCarthy is making money off the deal. Which is exactly what’s happening now.

In this case, “making money” means political fundraising. Please send money. But wait! There’s more! Hunter reported that Rep. Barry Loudermilk has indicated that Republicans will support the release of some of these videos to help (I’m not sure how) defendants now facing federal charges in their roles in the violence. One can be reasonably confident of how Loudermilk expects the videos to be used. He’s the one who led a dozen people on a tour of the Capitol the day before the attack. One of his guests shows up on security videos taking photographs of staircases, directories, and security checkpoints, then boasting the next day, “There's no escape, Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler, we're coming for you." Got a problem with that? This post marks the 900th time in 5031 posts I’ve used the tag “GOP”. I do have a lot to say about them. The next closest subjects of this blog are Gay marriage/Marriage Equality at 699 posts (though I don’t have need to write about it much anymore), personal stories at 436 posts, and the nasty guy at 416 posts (and he isn’t going away).

An ideology that lends itself naturally to murderous tendencies

In a report from last Friday Charles Jay of the Daily Kos community wrote that the last Ukrainian fighters have left the Azovstal factory in Mariupol. Their fate in the hands of Russian soldiers is unknown, though Russians now have a reputation for brutality. Mariupol was under siege since March 1. At the end of April the factory was surrounded. President Zelenskyy has declared them to be heroes. Kos of Kos wrote again about the tankies in an update from Monday. These are the people who demand peace and allow Putin to save face even though that means Ukraine concedes territory. The tankies include the New York Times editorial board. Strange they say little of what Ukraine thinks of that demand. Strange they get to decide for Biden and Congress what kind of aid to send and to decide for Ukraine how much destruction they should be able to tolerate to preserve their own country. M. Podolyak of Ukraine was rather diplomatic in response:

Today, any concession to Russia is not a path to peace, but a war postponed for several years. Ukraine trades neither its sovereignty, nor territories and Ukrainians living on them. It's a pity that we have to explain such simple things to such reputable media as @nytimes.

Kos quoted Hillel Neuer who tweeted:

Russia’s Counsellor to the United Nations in Geneva has resigned. Boris Bondarev: “Never have I been so ashamed of my country.” UN Watch is now calling on all other Russian diplomats at the United Nations—and worldwide—to follow his moral example and resign.

Part of what Bondarev wrote:

Those who conceived this war want only one thing - to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity. To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died just for this.

Kos also quoted a tweet from the Lithuanian government that said they are now totally independent from Russian gas, oil, and electricity. Kos included a video posted by Igor Sushko of a bunch of Ukrainian soldiers doing a bit of song and dance in praise of the Bayraktar drones that have been so helpful to their cause. It is good to see them have fun, though the way some of those guns hang is mighty suggestive. By the time I got around to writing about one mass shooting anther has happened (and wasn’t there a smaller one in between?). Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about the shooting at the Tops grocery in Buffalo. She then compared some of the writings of the shooter to things Tucker Carlson of Fox News said back in 2018. Both questioned how does diversity increase strength? Both Carlson and the shooter posed the question to imply diversity does not increase strength. I’ll give that question a moment of serious consideration, meaning what I can come up with in a moment. (1) Diversity encourages the input of multiple points of view so that more points can be considered when shaping a solution. (2) Diversity helps in shaping a solution that is beneficial to all people rather then beneficial to a few and oppressive to others. (3) Diversity demonstrates that all are welcome, which welcomes more people and more diverse people, which lessens the chance of one group trying to declare they should hold a social status higher than others. As a result all are safer. Michael Harriot tweeted:

It’s easy to point to a mass murdering racist and call him a white supremacist. But can we acknowledge that these restrictive voting laws, anti-CRT legislation and gerrymandered maps are also based on the Great Replacement Theory? Probably not.

Georgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quotes several that I think are worth quoting. Many are talking about the Great Replacement Theory that influenced the Buffalo shooter. This theory claims that liberals are working actively to replace white people with immigrants (definitely meaning black and brown immigrants) so that white people lose political power. Yes, white people in this country are becoming a smaller percentage of the population and about 20 years from now will drop below 50%. But liberals are not actively working to make that happen. Jonathan Chait of the New York Magazine:

Carlson’s allies on the right wish to exculpate him of any blame for the violence committed by his adherents. Their defenses amount to lawyerly haggling, collapsing important distinctions in service of avoiding the obvious: Carlson explicitly advocates “great-replacement theory,” a belief system that has inspired a string of mass murders. [...] Carlson is not directing his audience to commit murder. But he is spreading an ideology that lends itself naturally to murderous tendencies and has accordingly spawned a violent wing. White nationalists see Carlson as their champion, and so too does the vast majority of the conservative movement. ... The defenses of Carlson will ensure that the power of white nationalism continues to grow, along with its body count.

From an NYT editorial:

Replacement theory is an attack on democracy. It privileges the purported interests of some Americans over those of others, asserting, in effect, that the will of the people means the will of white people. It rekindles fears and resentments among white Americans that cynical practitioners of American politics have stoked throughout the nation’s history. It also provides a disturbing rationalization for people inclined to resort to violence when the political process does not deliver what they want or protect what they see as their place in society.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post:

What we need to talk about is how politicians and thought leaders on the right are using the vile poison of replacement theory to further their own selfish ends — garnering campaign donations and votes, boosting television ratings, achieving fame. And we need to talk about how most of this demagoguery is coming from people who should know, and probably do know, that what they are telling potential killers, such as Payton Gendron, the man in custody after the Buffalo shooting, is complete fiction.

Michelle Norris at WaPo who noted a poll that found nearly half of Republicans believe in a deliberate attempt to decrease white voter influence.

GRT is like the fertilizer that feeds and sustains white fear when America’s racial makeup is changing. These trends will continue and how that is explained — or alternatively exploited — will impact the safety and security of all Americans. But Black and brown people cannot inoculate against fears that Whiteness is no longer America’s cultural default. White people have to do that themselves.

Brittney Cooper at The Cut:

Taken together, violent racist acts like these, the stripping of rights from women, and the collective political will to do absolutely nothing about it effectively inculcate the idea that this is normal. Just accept it. Just be scared. Just demand less. Just shut up. Just stop yelling “Black Lives Matter!” Just stop insisting on your right to vote. Just stop insisting on your right to control your reproduction. Just stop critiquing the police. Just stop it with your demands. Just stop. I imagine images of white people with their fingers in their ears, yelling insolently like children, “I can’t hear you!” in the face of Black protest. Perhaps that’s not fair. But I’m not interested in being fair, or nice, or reasonable, or nuanced, or civil. That s--- does not work.

Kerry Eleveld of Kos has details of the poll Norris referenced. Mark Sumner of Kos dissected a poll by Morning Consult that showed 60% of Republicans voters are more concerned about white replacement than the mass violence of white supremacists. Sumner said the choice is false because one side of the comparison is false. US immigration policy does not try to lessen the influence of white people. Nick Anderson of Kos posted a cartoon about the Great Replacement. Hate, paranoia, fear, and a lot of other garbage are being dumped into a person’s head, replacing their brain. deltopia of the Kos community wrote that since 1850 the percent of the US population that was foreign born has been rather consistently under 15%. This post started with another cartoon: A white man in a suit points to a family and says “It’s time to reclaim America from illegal immigrants!” And a native person replies, “I’ll help you pack.” In another pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Greg Sargent of WaPo interviewing Amy Spitalnick, who takes on neo-Nazis and sees ominous signs.

Sargent: There’s a tendency in the culture and in the media to see these mass shootings as isolated events. But in many of these cases — and particularly Jan. 6 — organizers and shooters see them as part of a much larger struggle. They fully intend for them to be galvanizing of more such events later. Spitalnick: That’s exactly right. They’re not lone wolves. They’re part of a broader extremist network in which each attack is used to inspire the next one.

In case you missed it (and with just the corner of news I consume I doubt you have) here is a report by April Siese of Kos on the latest mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas and the surrounding politics. Biden is annoyed and called for action. Schumer set up a vote in the Senate for a small gun control bill (which won’t pass, certainly not with the filibuster in place). Abby Vesoulis tweeted:

In 2021, Gov. Abbott signed 2 laws allowing Texans 21+ to carry handguns without licenses or gun training, and to allow certain 18-20 year olds to carry handguns too. Today, he says the shooting—which killed at least 14 children and one teacher—is "incomprehensible."

Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that the senators who most talk about prayer as the appropriate (and only) response to a mass shooting are the ones whose campaigns have accepted the most from the NRA. Brady United listed the top senators who have received NRA money and Einenkel lists 20 of them with the amounts they’ve received over the years. Most have received millions. These numbers are from 2019, which makes me wonder how big donations have been since then now that the NRA is “bankrupt.” Einenkel pointed out usually the biggest money goes to candidates in swing states. Why give to Texas Republicans when they’re going to win anyway. Better to donate to candidates in Ohio or North Carolina. However, that doesn’t quite explain Mitt Romney of Utah at the top of the heap receiving $13 million. I don’t believe (and haven’t for a long time) that Republicans refuse to vote for any sort of restrictions on guns because the NRA pays them well. Sure, they’ll take the money and use it to get elected. However, I’m convinced they refuse any sort of restrictions on guns because they’re high in the social hierarchy and want to protect that spot. Guns are very good at enforcing the hierarchy. Their spot in the hierarchy looks better (to them) when those lower down are oppressed. Killing and terrorizing are great tools of oppression. I’m convinced they want that terror. They want that mayhem. They want those deaths. And Americans will keep dying. I had written about Zander Moricz, the gay high school class president who was told he wasn’t allowed to talk about the Don’t Say Gay bill at graduation under threat of his mic being cut. Melissa Higgins of Kos reported the graduation ceremony happened without incident and Moricz talked about the bill without saying “gay” and doing so in a clever manner: Here’s a bit:

I must discuss a very private part of my identity. As you may know, I have curly hair. I used to hate my curls. I spent mornings and nights embarrassed of them, trying to desperately straighten this part of who I am. But the daily damage of trying to fix myself became too much to endure. There are going to be so many kids with curly hair who need a community like Pine View. And they will not have one. Instead, they’ll try to fix themselves so that they can exist in Florida’s humid climate.

Later, Moricz was on Good Morning America, where he said:

I knew that the threat to cut the mic was very real. So I wasn’t gonna let that happen. I just had to be clever about it. But I shouldn’t have had to be, because I don’t exist in a euphemism. I deserve to be celebrated as is.

Higgins included videos of both the graduation speech and the GMA interview.

Allowing one man with such power to inhabit an imaginary bubble world

We’re three weeks in? The Russian invasion of Ukraine happened three weeks ago today or tomorrow. I’m still reading Ukraine Updates at Daily Kos, though instead of trying to keep them in chronological order (though they may end up that way) I’ll just highlight points I think are important. Laura Clawson reported that Marina Ovsyannikova of Russian state television slid into view behind a reporter holding a sign condemning the war. It said “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here.” She was, of course, fired and arrested. For a while her lawyer didn’t know where she was, though a later picture shows her with her lawyer. In a video she created before her moment of fame she said she is now ashamed for the years of promoting Putin’s propaganda. An update says she was fined. Maybe the regime would rather ignore her rather than make an example of her. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, included a cartoon of the same sign being held behind Tucker Carlson of Fox News. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Putin, in the face of losing, might be showing flexibility. Maybe he doesn’t need to replace the government of Ukraine. Sumner wrote:

[Scholar and journalist Samuel] Ramani emphasizes that it doesn’t matter nearly as much to Putin if this invasion is perceived as a failure by the West, as it does that it be perceived as a victory in Russia. “Even if Putin fails militarily in Ukraine, he has many means at his disposal to create a rally around the flag effect and preserve his legacy at home. We should be very careful about assuming that this war will weaken his regime, it might have the opposite effect.”

Sumner also wrote that in contrast to the Russian military supply lines, the Kyiv supply line is doing just fine. Shelves are better stocked than in unoccupied parts of Ukraine and much better stocked than stores in parts of Russia. The prime ministers of Poland, Slovenia, and Czech Republic were able to go to Kyiv by train without problems. They’re expected to discuss proposals on rebuilding after the invasion ends. Sumner included a tweet from the Kyiv Independent:

Russia announces leaving the Council of Europe, hours before its expected expulsion. It means that Russian citizens will not be able to bring cases to the European Court of Human Rights, and the Russian government can re-introduce the death penalty.

Russians are known for flaunting their wealth through eating caviar. But very little of that comes from Russia. They may find out what life without it is like. In a third post Sumner noted that Russia has made little to no military progress. He also included a tweet from Visegrád 24 that’s going to sting:

Speaking to media after meeting with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Poland’s Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau stated there are discussions about Poland taking Russia’s seat in the G20. Founded in 1999, it consists of 19 of the world’s largest economies and the EU

And from Nexta TV:

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports that 3 million people have left #Ukraine.

I’ve heard other reports say 3.5 million refugees. Kos of Kos did another overview. A surprise is there is no evidence of more military supplies coming from Russia. Exposed supply lines and there is no effort to resupply? There is only so much food they can pillage from locals. Two things getting a lot of discussion, but Kos disagrees. He says: Belarus won’t invade Ukraine. That dictator has told Putin no and his troops are even worse. There won’t be an amphibious assault on Odesa. The forces in ships in the Black Sea are far from enough to take the city. Those kinds of attacks need surprise and satellite images mean surprise is not possible. Kos labeled this high comedy: Oleg Matveychev of the Russian Parliament said his colleagues should think about demanding reparations for the cost of damage the sanctions are doing to Russia. He is also demanding a return of Alaska. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed an article by Maxim Trudolyubov of Meduza, a Latvian news site that publishes in Russian and English. Dartagnan wrote the article...

makes a persuasive case that Putin is failing because he is irrevocably committed to his own fantasy-based worldview, one which crumbles and dissolves with the slightest degree of examination, and one which is failing now, in full view of the rest of the world.

Dartagnan added it is also quite similar to how the nasty guy treated COVID. Since that incompetence has been covered I’ll stick to what the Meduza article discusses. When Putin took over the government he purged government administrators, activists, politicians, and journalists who had an independent perspective. The removal usually included intimidation, force, or violence. They were replaced with people who would fabricate the facade of civic leadership. The government could only rubber-stamp what Putin wanted, and then propagandize it, and couldn’t perform any civic function. Dartagnan wrote:

Trudolyubov recognizes that the immense problem Russia now faces with its seemingly disastrous invasion of Ukraine is one borne of complacency, of those Russians with an independent voice not taking the complete dissolution of their public sphere seriously and allowing one man with such power to inhabit an imaginary bubble world of constant yes-men, unconstrained, allowing them to inhabit a fake world that now threatens not only to inflict immeasurable damage on Ukraine, but possibly the rest of the world (including Russia itself) as well.

And from Trudolyubov:

He not only believed in the reality he had bought, but he also made it the basis for action in the real world. Today, it is clear that his plan to conduct a short military operation in a “brotherly nation” was based on a fiction that he authored himself. Apparently, he expected that the use of force by a “real” state — that is, “his” state — would lead to the collapse of the “non-real” state of Ukraine.