unraveling

30.Nov.2024

Rats

The kind of top story (from the Idaho Statesman, I saw it picked up by The Seattle Times) is that Rats are spreading in Southwest Idaho, and they’re here to stay. One Nextdoor user posted that “over the last two weeks I’ve trapped and killed 10 large rats and 10 mouse-sized rats. I have lived in the Gary Lane-Hill Road area for 69 years and have never even seen a rat till three weeks ago.” David Neiwert noted it's "deeply appropriate [that] Idaho’s burgeoning rat problem apparently originated in downtown Eagle."

"Norway rats — also known as brown, street or sewer rats — average around 16 inches in length and weigh about half a pound to a pound. They live in habitats including garbage dumps, sewers, open fields or any area where they can find food and shelter such as homes and basements."

We've seen mice around (and occasionally inside) our homestead from time to time, and they're small, and cute. We'll be talking about a cat if one of these bad-ass Rattus norvegicus shows up, but I guess it'll need to be a large cat?!

Somehow this story seems connected to the larger political scene, wherein the Dumpster Fire has capped his November by announcing he's going to appoint his son-in-law's felonious father, Charles Kushner, Ambassador to France, and the totally creepy and wholly inappropriate Kash Patel as FBI Director (which will require firing the current FBI Director—the one that Trump himself appointed, after firing James Comey—7 years into his 10-year term).

"In a stunning reversal of political polarity, a significant part of the [so-called] law-and-order GOP now regards the men and women of federal law enforcement with contempt and paranoia. If Trump’s goal is to break the FBI and undermine its missions, Kash Patel is the perfect nominee.

"The Russians speak of the “power ministries,” the departments that have significant legal and coercive capacity. In the United States, those include the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the FBI, and the intelligence community. Trump has now named sycophants to lead each of these institutions, a move that eliminates important obstacles to his frequently expressed desires to use the armed forces, federal law-enforcement agents, intelligence professionals, and government lawyers as he chooses, unbounded by the law or the Constitution."

Don't even get me started on the carpetbagging billionaire who bought the election for Big Daddy and now thinks he's in charge, free to blurt out accusations of treason as it suits him.

27.Nov.2024

Thugocracy

I keep trying to change the subject, but it keeps coming back at me. Ugh. Thug. Anne Applebaum's post with a link to CNN. "Instead of brownshirts, the 21st century has internet mobs." Elon Musk publicized the names of government employees he wants to cut. It's terrifying federal workers. The comments have all the emotions. "Cruelty is the point." "Oh, we’ll probably have brownshirts too. Just a matter of time." From CNN, emphasis added:

"Last week, in the midst of the flurry of his daily missives, Musk reposted two X posts that revealed the names and titles of people holding four relatively obscure climate-related government positions. Each post has been viewed tens of millions of times, and the individuals named have been subjected to a barrage of negative attention. At least one of the four women named has deleted her social media accounts."

It goes on to say that the civil servants in question are "otherwise unknown employees in roles that do not deal directly with the public." He's always punching down. As bullies do.

Slavery was on the ballot

High Country News' home page caught my eye with a photo of firefighting slaves in California, from 2020. That loophole in the 13th Amendment, don't you know.

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

The headline question is: Why did Nevada vote to ban slavery, when California didn’t? Voters in Nevada just struck “slavery and involuntary servitude” from the Nevada Constitution, while in California, a measure to strike (just) “involuntary servitude” failed. Too expensive to give it up? Didn't know what involuntary servitude meant?

ABC News reported on the two ballot measures in late October, noting that just seven states had done something to end the exception ratified in late 1865. Now there are eight: Alabama, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, and Vermont.

That leaves 42 states where enslavement is legal as punishment for a crime. The history of unfree labor in the United States is still a work in progress, Kanye West's 2018 pitch to the former guy notwithstanding.

Spoon feed?

Branching out in my sources and commentary a bit, after some computer clean-up this morning, I came across this item on the ABC News website: Trump border czar Tom Homan says he's willing to jail Denver mayor over mass deportation protest. That'd be Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who has "said he was willing to go to jail to stop possible mass deportation efforts under the incoming Trump administration," but did "did walk back comments he made about stationing police officers at the county line to stop federal forces from coming in to deport undocumented immigrants." At the end of the short piece, there's this:

"Homan and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who were both interviewed by Hannity on Monday night, said they plan to make two stops along the border to feed National Guard troops and DPS troopers who have been vital to Texas' mission to stop immigrants from coming to the border."

Our presumptive "czar" and the most panderful Texas governor are going to stage an event to "feed" troops and troopers, as if... what, we've been withholding rations from them to make them nastier? Just in time for Thanksgiving, our national holiday celebrating the shared feast with the natives of this land and the first wave of illegal immigrants.

26.Nov.2024

Billionaire bonanza

Let's say you had a billion dollars. Bravo! Built on an inheritance, mebbe, or won the dot com lottery with a startup or two? Something something advertising, or government contracts, or built yourself a monopoly. Lucky spin of the wheel.

Now what are you going to do with it? Aside from active investing (buying a small dictatorship or something), the retirement withdrawal rule of thumb is that you can withdraw 4% per annum more or less indefinitely. That would give you $40,000,000 a year walking-around money. And the daily task of spending $109,000-something. Downpayment on another mansion? Of course, you could drop most of a year's allowance on a (remarkably ugly) Rolls-Royce La Rose Noire Droptail, but how many of those could you enjoy?

Or you could buy yourself a position of power, from a grifting conman with a large portolio on offer. That's the current game on the verge of Trump II. The first transition team was infamously slap-dash because the poor little rich kid wanted to glom all the money to himself. The second one has been gamed to a T with Project 2025, the blueprint that Donold said was TL;DR (you know, more than three pages, and no pictures), before using the authors list as a personnel menu. Heather Cox Richardson:

"Super wealthy donors funded Trump’s 2024 campaign, and in a departure from every previous incoming president, Trump is refusing to sign the documents required as part of a presidential transition at least in part because those documents mandate that he disclose who is funding his transition and limit those donations to $5,000 per donor. Without that disclosure, it is impossible to see who is funding him. For all we know, that list could include foreign governments."

Is he flat-out criming? Probably. But the Supremes say IT DOESN'T MATTER. He's above and beyond. Hors catégorie! Abnormal is the new normal. Rolling Stone's DIRTY MONEY feature: Trump Refuses to Disclose Who Is Funding His Transition; "He is the first president-elect not to sign an ethics agreement that sets fundraising limits and transparency." And oh, "the transition also has not signed an agreement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that would allow the agency to do background checks on Trump nominees."

Because, come on, he couldn't pass one. But he doesn't have to! There are no crimes! Only witch hunts.

I'm old enough to remember when Jared Kushner getting a free pass around a background check was too minor a scandal to bob its head above the seamy swamp of Trump I. But hey, at least he brought peace to the Middle East, amirite?

This time around, the grift is fully incorporated: Trump Vance 2025 Transition, Incorporated. And get this: "Transition funding is not regulated by the F.E.C. And I.R.S. rules permit the nonprofits in question to accept donations from foreigners without public disclosure." As the ever-sober NYT reports,

"Experts on presidential transitions say lawmakers did not appear to have anticipated that a presidential candidate would decline millions of dollars from the federal government or refuse to post an ethics code."

I was looking for what the RS said "according to The New Your Times," that the TT "has privately created an ethics code and conflict-of-interest guidance" for the team, which sounds like a bad joke. Didn't find it in the Times. RS did say that "Sources told CNN that behind closed doors, Trump has questioned whether background checks are necessary." Duh.

HCR highlights activist Melanie D’Arrigo on Bluesky, not putting too fine a point on it. (The Yahoo link is to a repost of the Rolling Stone piece.)

Addendum:
Rachel Maddow spells it out similarly:

"Anyone, any entity, anywhere in the world can just pay him any amount (for anything he promises in return), and there's no disclosure of the payments, no oversight of any of it by anyone, and of course no potential bribery prosecution (of him) because... immune."

Even without the singular presidential immunity, the Klown Kourt ruling from just this summer, Snyder v. United States, has legalized "gratuities" for public officials, in general. It's like Wimpy's approach, just gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

But that makes it too breezily humorous. It's not going to be funny. Take it from Timothy Snyder's updated Strongman Fantasy:

"[W]hen you vote a strong man in, you vote out the rule of law. In court, only loyalism and wealth will matter. Americans who do not fear the police will learn to do so."

25.Nov.2024

What if no one shows up to swear him in?

He could just crown himself, à la Napolean I, I suppose. But out of the comments on Joyce Vance's blog post (next item below), this piece by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen for a forthcoming Harvard Law Review: Sweeping Section Three under the Rug: A Comment on Trump v. Anderson. By the time it's put in ink, it might be too late, so all hail SSRN for its early (and free) distribution.

It was less than a year ago that the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that "President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three" of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. And not even 9 months since the Supreme Court harumphed that away just in time for "Super Tuesday" to herald the second coming of our worst president in history. What could I add to my blog post open in early March?

The question about the current Republican Party that nags at me: Is this the best they can do? A mad man political neophyte who knows only smash and grab, cheat and steal, lie and con, willing to destroy any and every institution that attempts to hold him accountable for malfeasance and crimes. Today's the day, Republican voters rise in acclamation to say Yes! Yes! We want another four years of destruction, chaos, looting, and capitulation to Russia! Super Tuesday. My god.

Fast forward to Baude's and Stokes Paulsen's comment, with a spoiler alert, from the last of the five paragraphs of the abstract:

"The upshot is that Donald Trump remains constitutionally disqualified from the presidency and may not lawfully serve in that office or any other unless Congress removes the disqualification by two-thirds majorities of both houses."

Imagine if

Reading Joyce Vance's latest "Week Ahead" with winter coming is downbeat, even as she does what she can to look toward a more positive future. The whole Rule of Law/law and order thing has taken an ugly beating of late, sung to the tune of +rumplican gaslighting about "crime waves." In a nutshell:

"At this point, it does not appear that Trump will face justice in a criminal court, despite being indicted in four of them and convicted in one. Future historians will undoubtedly assess this era as a dark time where the rule of law was under attack and a demagogue rose to power. But it does not have to be the final chapter in the American experiment. Already, as Trump prepares his next administration, there is work for us to do."

I am not shocked, shocked that Marjorie Taylor Greene says Republicans will take a look at defunding NPR; Republicans have been beating that drum every chance they get. What's different now is that they might get that, and a lot more done this time.

Mike Gonzalez's Project 2025 chapter on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting starts by complaining that (emphasis added)

"Every Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding. That is significant not just because it means that for half a century, Republican Presidents have failed to accomplish what they set out to do, but also because Nixon was the first President in office when National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which the CPB funds, went on air.

"In other words, all Republican Presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake....

I looked through the Project 2025 document to see that the 13 times "Fox News" appears are all in footnote citations, or contributors' bio blurbs. Gonzales' note 50 is to "Pew Research Center, “Where News Audiences Fit on the Political Spectrum,” October 21, 2014," which it says was accessed March 21, 2023. The URL given now redirects to a 2011 interactive, but it was easy enough to find the 2014 report, here: Where News Audiences Fit on the Political Spectrum.

2014, you may remember, was in the middle of Obama's second term as president, and before the nearly decade-long campaign by our demagogue to poison the well of news by calling everything that found him disagreeable "fake," even as he worked the genuinely fake channels for free coverage, relentlessly. The reporting is a period piece, but the fairly obvious take-aways that Gonzales didn't attend to are telling.

The sub-pages in that reporting have URLs that redirect elsewhere, oddly, but from the link above, the sidebar menu "Compare Media Habits by Ideology / Overall" shows a tabulation of sources, with percentages for "Have heard of," "Get news from," "Trust," and "Distrust." I made a column for the net Trust, which was led by CNN with 34% net trust (the old CNN, we might say), followed by ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, PBS (26%), WSJ, USA Today, NPR (20%), NY Times, MSNBC, Google News, Washington Post, the Economist, and, in 15th place, Fox News, with 7% net trust. The dregs were the Sean Hannity Show (-9%), the Glenn Beck Program (-14%), and the Rush Limbaugh Show (-27%).

The main page of the 2014 report Political Polarization & Media Habits, includes an informative datagraphic sidebar of the "Striking Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives" at the moment of perhaps the greatest ascendancy of Fox News political program to promote demagoguery. Before the golden escalator moment, "consistent conservatives" already had net distrust of 24 of the 36 news sources in the survey, while "consistent liberals" showed net trust for 28 of 36. The big maroon dot showed "Consistent conservatives are tightly clustered around one main news source," 47% for Fox News. In 2014. And the foreshadowing of what Facebook would become, long before we'd heard of Cambridge Analytica: "Consistent conservatives are more likely to hear political opinions similar to their own on Facebook."

Joyce Vance noted the presumptive nominee of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, author of the FCC chapter in Project 2025, provided warm palaver about "a diversity of viewpoints," while hinting that "tradition" need not bind a president who wants to work the loopholes in the law to advance more than a 3-to-2 partisan advantage in the five member commission. And the threat:

In response to an LA Times tweet, suggesting Carr might “make life more difficult” for media companies, Carr confirmed it, suggesting he could take away broadcast licenses from media companies that don’t “operate in the public interest.” That’s preparation for authoritarianism.

Imagine if the FCC chair were serious about gauging "operation in the public interest" and commissioned a legitimate, fact-based assessment of the damage disinformation has done in the last 10 or 20 years.

As a postscript, while looking up that old Pew information, I found a piece from September, with an interesting overview of How U.S. Public Opinion Has Changed in 20 Years of Our Surveys, by Jenn Hatfield. The span of her retropective starts with the founding of the Pew Research Center, in 2004.

And from this month, a "short read" titled What Trump supporters believe and expect, which might have had the title Just How Polarized Are We Now? Ironically, 83% of Trump supporters "viewed the criminal justice system as not tough enough on criminals." And more than half surveyed were ok with using the DOJ for retribution. In the September survey:

• 54% said it would be acceptable for him to order federal law enforcement officials to investigate his Democratic political opponents.
• At the same time, 58% said it would be unacceptable for him to fire government workers for not being loyal to him.
• 57% said it would be unacceptable for him to pardon friends or supporters who have been convicted of a crime.

He'll do all three of those things. He did all three of those the last time he was in office. Why wouldn't he do them more forcefully this time around? Who's to stop him? The new administration is being carefully vetted to avoid adults in the room who will be willing to check Trump's power applied to serve his psychopathy.

24.Nov.24

Pete Hegseth: The Short Course

That's Timothy Snyder's title on his must-read blog post outlining 13 Steps to National Destruction. It's a hell of an indictment, and not made lightly. Snyder has plenty of receipts, from Hegseth's own writing: The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free (2024); Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (2023, with David Goodwin); and American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free (2020).

It's the short version of his longer, three-part series of posts centered on Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale, consider the parallels with the second coming of Donald Trump, and his announced choice for Secretary of Defense. Atwood's Republic of Gilead is "a Christian Reconstructionist regime controlling some of the territory of the United States, characterized by an extreme inequality among classes and between sexes."

Some of the territory.

Here are links to the three part series: Men and Women Perform; Casting the First Stone; and The Crusade Against America.

Snyder added the summary post to his substack blog, because "Hegseth's anti-qualifications for the position of secretary of defense are so blatant that they deserve a separate and clear presentation." Shorter still:

Hegseth "has no qualifications for the job. He has never run a large organization and has no national security expertise." (The Defense Department's budget is closing in a trillion dollars a year, with 1.3 million active-duty troops and another 1.4 million in the National Guard, Reserves and civilian employees around the world.)

That should be enough to disqualify him, of course, but there's more. Always more. No demonstrated awareness of what countries might threaten the US, or how. Repudiates NATO.

"Hegseth has almost nothing to say about the most significant armed conflict of our time and has not visited Ukraine or learned anything about it."

And so on. Last, but definitely not least:

"Hegseth thus represents a policy of regime change. Trump’s nomination of Hegseth is best understood as part of a decapitation strike against the republic. A Christian Reconstructionist war on Americans led from the Department of Defense is likely to break the United States."

22.Nov.2024

Most of the awful nominees will get through

Heather Cox Richardson's latest Letter from an American highlights important reporting about +rump's pick for SecDef, by Heath Druzin in the Idaho Capital Sun. (After covering the Matt Gaetz debacular nomination failure, and the other "central casting" picks that need to be deep-sixed: Linda McMahon, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the front of the line.)

Turns out Pete Hegseth is a member of a Tennessee congregation affiliated with Moscow (Idaho)-based Christ Church, led by Doug Wilson. Wilson's burgeoning empire is the "Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches," now with "congregations in nearly all 50 states and several foreign countries," promulgating "a rigid patriarchal belief system" that looks toward a merger of church and state rather than maintaining separation.

"They support taking away the right to vote from most women, barring non-Christians from holding office and criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community."

Druzin quotes Air Force veteran and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, Mikey Weinstein:

“Pete Hegseth is a poster child for literally everything that would be the opposite of what you would want to have for someone who’s controlling the technologically most lethal organization in the history of this country...

“Christian nationalism is an absolute fatal cancer metastasizing at light speed (for) the national security of this country. It is a Christian version of the Taliban.”

Metastasis is all the rage just now, showing up in Susan B. Glasser's Letter from Trump's Washington as well, her "early lessons" in the second coming of narcissistic psychopathy's yearning for dictatorship. (So much "winning," we are well and truly tired of it.) "There are many more manic Thursdays to come."

"Trump 2.0 is about an all-out attack on that system by a leader who fears neither Congress nor the courts nor the voters whom he will never have to face again."

21.Nov.2024

Dark fantasies

We have a long-standing habit of watching "the news," in the form of the PBS Newshour, going back to when it was the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, some time between its beginnings and when we acquired a television in the 1980s. (Motivated by Jeanette's work on the community access channel "cable TV" had to provide, but that's another story.) That PBS history page reminds us that those two giants of journalism had their breakthrough "with public television’s unprecedented, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the U.S. Senate Watergate hearings in 1973."

The sour taste from the current milieu has put me off it somewhat. As readers can see, online sources are keeping me more or less up to date with the "transition" we're in, even if there are not enough hours in the day to capture every outrage. Last night, we skipped over a bunch of the opening (including, you know, the House Ethics committee punting on its partisan divide and attempting to keep the presumptive nominee for Attorney General's possibly criminal secrets secret), but did watch the segment on the ongoing nightmare in Haiti; the celebrations of Leonard Cohen's music and poetry (with its brief introduction of his songwriting collaborator, Sharon Robinson); and Transgender Americans sharing their concerns about Trump’s threats to rollback rights.

The last of those led with a prepared statement the felonious former guy made in February, 2023, standing in front of a phalanx of flags, when he and his campaign started leaning into the attack on all things transgender. It kept going, right through (apparently effective) campaign ads during football games this fall. It's a program of demonizing the "other," and of cruelty, something the former guy has long specialized in. The broadcast conversation between Amna Nawaz and "three Americans, a parent of a trans daughter, the executive director of a trans crisis hot line, and a two-spirit activist and parent to a two-spirit kid" made quite a contrast with the campaign posturing. (The conversations were normal; the campaign was not.) One excerpt:

Kai Alviar Horton:
"We continue to be told that our bodies are not ours, that we don't get the right to decide how we exist in our own bodies.

"No matter how much we fight for people to see us as human, we are constantly up against this idea that trans people are not human."

I woke up this morning still thinking about all that, about yesterday's Transgender Day of Remembrance, and the politico-religious posturing about gender, what has become part of the right-wing extremist agenda, with its obsession about controlling others.

It's abnormal, in the extreme. After all the made-up conspiracy theories (many of them putting up chaff for demonstrably real conspiracies), we now have credibly accused sex offenders sitting on the Supreme Court, and being proposed for some of the highest offices in the executive branch, as well as the president-elect, himself. An "ethics" committee that wants to bury what they know; a proposal to subvert the Senate's constitutional role for advice and consent; plans to set aside (or at least put on hold) criminal convictions and indictments of Donald J. Trump, as if those were made up.

It's not easy to avoid "outrage fatigue." It can be debilitating to maintain one's equilibrium when so much around us is on "tilt." But it's important to maintain our fundamental decency, and respect for one another against these too many transgressions, against the metastasizing deviance attempting to claim all "normalcy" for itself.

There is nothing normal about what we've come to. Rex Huppke's opinion from November 6 haunts me.

America needs to admit it's not 'better than this.'
We are a country that just elected – that just willfully chose – one of the most cruel, unscrupulous and transparently self-serving political figures in modern history to be president. Again.

"We just elected a convicted felon who has normalized bullying, spread hate like an industrial sprinkler and shown us over and over and over again he sees laws as irrelevant and self-enrichment as sacrosanct. Faced with a billowing ocean of red flags – from indictments for trying to overturn the 2020 election to the coddling of dictators who rule enemy nations – a majority of Americans cast their vote for the man who is a totem of the worst in all of us."

And I thought about the role of professed "Christianity" being used as a weapon, the antithesis of the actual teachings of the supposedly supernatural being they claim to follow. But Christianity has been about political power for much of its existence, and it has readily been employed for demonizing (!) whatever out-group was conveniently powerless, defending wanton immorality, coercion and cruelty. Here we go again.

Postscript:
Jim Wright's Facebook post this morning comes at this same story from a different (more familiar) angle: "The first thing fascists do when they take power is to designate a scapegoat...." And from one of the folks commenting on his post: "It’s interesting how Mike Johnson is filled with righteous indignation to protect women from Sarah McBride, but not from Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, or Donald Trump."

20.Nov.2024

Evening kicker

Carole Cadwalladr: How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world. "In the wake of Trump’s unnerving appointees, the investigative journalist and veteran of the libel court offers pointers on coping in an age of surveillance."

1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it....

3 To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.

And eighteen more.

Morning reads

My penchant for responding to what I read gets in the way of getting all the way through the list. So, some short takes with a link potpourri if you're not so situated, and just looking for interesting referrals. (Alternately, "note to self" for me and thee as history is written.)

"Giving Up is Unforgivable." Do you need motivation? Steve Bannon, on his War Room podcast, November 15:

“Donald Trump and his revolution is in charge now. And that revolution is going to make its way from Mar-a-Lago and from every part of the country, like Andrew Jackson, it's going to converge on the imperial capitol in late January. And yes, we're going to burn some of these institutions down to the ground. Because you know why? They need to be burned down to the ground. Metaphorically. As the process of creative destruction. The process of the structure of revolutions, the paradigm shift has impact.”

Remembering yesterday's date, and that last time insurrectionists set about burning institutions to the ground, Heather Cox Richardson's November 19, 2024 Letter from an American. (Spoiler alert: The Gettysburg Address.)

Jason Sattler's LOLGOP, on resistance, in light of the nomination of the wife/partner of a reputed sex trafficker to "lead" the Department of Education, and building on outrage: Trump must pay a cost for everything.

Timothy Snyder starts a three-part post, "Handmaid Fails," by deconstructing the New York Times' 16 word summary of Margaret Atwood's bestselling novel, The Handmaid's Tale. I see that Reader's Digest is updating a list of the 50 most banned books in America right now.

As Margaret Atwood herself wrote in an op-ed earlier this year, “To those who seek to stop young people from reading The Handmaid’s Tale: Good luck with that. It’ll only make them want to read it more.”

One more and I'll stop. Popular Information outlines how the once "Pro-LGBTQ" South Carolina Congresswoman, Nancy Mace, has launched a vicious attack on the first trans Congresswoman, because bathrooms. Oh, and because punching down is so popular right now.

Dear Senator

You've been in politics a long time, with a distinguished career. The new Republican majority in the Senate gives you a significant opportunity for leadership.

I'm wondering what you hope to do with that opportunity. I'm hoping it's more than simply enabling the second Trump administration to fully realize the plan it (and the Project 2025 coalition) has mapped out for sabotage of the federal government.

Perhaps you're still seeing it as "necessary reform," but it doesn't seem possible to square that with the candidates Trump is putting forward for leadership positions. The choices are worse than "not serious." Matt Gaetz as AG? Pete Hegseth heading Defense? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services? Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence? And now Linda McMahon for Education?

The bid to subvert the Constitution, and push nominees through with "recess appointments" asks you and your colleagues for full capitulation.

Is this the culmination of your career you imagined, to become a footman to serve autocracy? Or will you and your colleagues insist on your Constitutional role, and insist on some integrity from the executive branch?

Emailed this morning to Idaho's pair, Jim Risch, and Mike Crapo. Pins and needles.

19.Nov.2024

The UI Humanitarian Engineering Corps

Idaho Matters describes How U of I students are helping farmers in Bolivia, and gaining hands-on experience while they're in school. HEC is a student-run "club," so they get all the education and experience of building and managing an organization to boot. Great program at our alma mater, and thanks to Boise State Public Radio for the feature.

18.Nov.2024

Do not obey in advance

From Timothy Snyder's 2017 book, On Tyranny:

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen how adapts this way is teaching power what it can do.

Not that you hadn't noticed, but Joyce Vance, in The Week Ahead:

"It is already starting. Trump is trying to get the people most likely to oppose him to capitulate before he even takes office."

Calling for Courts martial over the withdrawal from Afghanistan (which he set in motion, and doomed himself, but never mind). Making good on the more than a hundred threats to prosecute or punish his enemies that NPR reported on, weeks before the end of the election that sealed the worst deal in American political history.

"Trump is already trying to tear down the institutions by threatening people who are doing their jobs without subservience to him. He is attacking the military and the Justice Department, and it seems likely the intelligence community won’t be far behind. Those three institutions stood up to him in 2020, and he hasn’t forgotten that....

"The word unprecedented feels wholly inadequate for what we’re about to experience."

Terms of Service

Now that I'm writing "Retired" in the Occupation slots, I had an unwritten to-do item to change my LinkedIn profile to reflect the change. I might just as well roll up the tent and call it a day, with too many social media channels going at once, and this particular channel sending me many more email notices than I'm interested in. But I took one more jump, and edited my profile while I was in. I didn't find a convenient "Retired" checkbox (why should they do anything for retired people, eh?) so the edit was a bit ad hoc.

The jump was to The workers who doubt AI the most, a mashup of "LinkedIn News" and commentary, built around a survey of the generations. The source for that is "LinkedIn Market Research," which produced a datagraphic and a footnote that 4,328 professionals in the U.S. were surveyed from Sept. 21-Oct. 18, 2024. No details about the sampling method, or margin of error, and as far as they show, just one item, with a forced choice between "I doubt AI will have much impact on my job" and "Gaining AI skills will help my career progress." Nearly 1 in 5 respondents didn't choose one or the other. Some of those might be thinking AI will probably obviate my job, and there's nothing to be done about it? But the single chart offers no clues about "Other."

The Gen Z folk who responded landed about 40-40. Millennials and Gen X more than 50-30 toward "gaining skills will help" and Baby Boomers 45-36 that way, for a total average of 50-31. Then the engaged opinions from other subscribers: a "Cyber Security Leader," a "Strategic and Creative Marketer slash Thought Leader," an Anchor on Bloomberg TV, an "Employee Whisperer & Culture Curator," and so on. Speaking of creative marketing, that last title sounds way better than "HR," for which it is apparently a euphemism.

There's talk of industry trends, and workflow. "Who are we kidding? If it hasn't already been integrated into your daily workflows, you're already behind," writes William Sherman, Creative Director, Real Estate Broker & Entrepreneur. He saw a conference speaker "show[] directly how her increased content directly correlated to her sales. Early adopters are already reaping the benefits."

Increased content, oh boy. There's a banner across the top of my browser, about updates to the LI User Agreement, effective Wednesday. Among the "Learn more" tidbits, it says

"We are also making available a new opt out setting for training AI models used for content generation in countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, and the United Kingdom."

The Official Blog post, Updates to LinkedIn's Terms of Service is a short sort of executive summary, with links to the new User Agreement, Privacy Policy, and the opt-out setting, the last of which goes to their LinkedIn and generative AI (GAI) FAQs. First up, Does LinkedIn use my personal data for generative AI? They appear loath to just say "yes" directly, but yes. Except if your government told them they could not.

"[W]e do not currently train content-generating AI models from members located in the EU, EEA, UK, Switzerland, Hong Kong, or Mainland China."

Second up, do they "use (or process) my personal data to train GAI?" Again, yes, except for members located in the EU, EEA, UK, Switzerland, Hong Kong, or Mainland China.

The answer to "Can I opt out" is the first one that starts directly. Yes. It's one of 21 settings in the Settings, Data privacy section, a simple On/Off slider for "Use my data for training content creation AI models." (I see I've already turned that off; good for me.) The prompt above the labeled switch starts "Can LinkedIn and its affiliates use your personal data and content..." by which they seem to mean May they. Because they jolly well can. It would be nice for them to ask permission (and respect your choice), but that doesn't speak to their ability. Or predilection.

While I was hanging out in the medium longer than usual, a "Sponsored" message came at me. The Sponsor "would like to invite [me] to apply for inclusion in the 2024 edition of Who's Who in America!" Woot.

17.Nov.2024

ROI

At a different fin de siècle, "this period was widely thought to be a period of social degeneracy," and here we go again, this time with the fin de la démocratie. Our bottle-blond(ish) deranged king is going with his "gut" (so, ah, microbes are in charge?!) while the oligarchs are going with the tried and true: money, honey.

Open Secrets tallies the most recent cycles in various categories. All federal; Hard money, by family; Hard money, by individual; Outside money only; Super PACS; and so on. Timothy Mellon, "retired," from Saratoga, Wyoming, tops the list with $197,047,200 total contributions, of which 0.02% was "hard" and the rest "outside." $172 million to Republicans, and minus $2,900 to Democrats.

Richard & Elizabeth A. Uihlein, aka "Uline Inc," of Lake Forest, IL came in second, with $137,810,226; Miriam O. Adelson, of the Las Vegas Sands/Adelson Drug Clinic, Las Vegas, NV third at $136,855,700; and the "richest man in the world," Elon Musk of SpaceX ("excetera"), Austin, TX, a miserly fourth place, with only $133,038,600. All of those also-rans' not quite $408 million went to Republicans. You have to get down to #8 on the list (Michael Bloomberg, $47 million) before you come to a Democratic donor.

Perhaps Melon Usk was feeling a little stingy after his in-kind contribution buying Twitter for about 5 times more than the market thinks it's worth now? But even with $30 billion flushed away for his ego-stroking and rabble rousing, he'll come out all right. Robert Reich:

So the richest man in the world spent $130 million to elect Donald Trump.

Now he's being put in charge of a "government efficiency" agency while controlling corporations with billions in government contracts that are also under federal investigations.

See how this works?

From Usk's point of view, destroying democracy in the bargain isn't a bug, it's a feature. He's got his Texas compound, so What Me Worry.

16.Nov.2024

This pre-catastrophic moment

Among the responses to Dan Gillmor's quote and link to Timothy Snyder's Decapitation Strike post: "It's almost like Putin is picking some of these clowns. Perhaps he is." And, "A fish rots from the head." Peter Gleich:

What could go wrong?
No FBI background checks, no release of investigations of Trump's associates, no advice and consent by the Senate responsible for reviewing nominations, all for people who are going to be in charge of our national security, economy, and well-being.

The concept of checks and balances has been central to American governance for 250 years. It's no accident that Trump is trying to circumvent FBI investigations, independent commissions, and Senate advice and consent. These ARE background checks that are supposed to protect us from authoritarian abuse of power.

It's a hell of a pickle we just voted ourselves into. Knowing that it's not all brand new isn't reassuring. Snyder, emphasis added:

"Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government. In historical context we can see this. There is a history of the modern democratic state. There is also a history of engineered regime change and deliberate state destruction. In both histories, five key zones are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. These people, with power over these areas of life, can make America impossible to sustain....

"Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective, Trump's proposed appointments—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Matt Gaetz; Elon Musk; Vivek Ramaswamy; Pete Hegseth; Tulsi Gabbard—are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer."

Cycles

Checking in before sunrise, I see out my window where the oak used to be, there's a patch of pale blue sky, and the late full moon hangs high to the northwest.

Sunlight bounces off the ripples, to the sky, the moon, turning transparent to blue, and gray to white, air to trees, to leaves that fall and feed gardens.

It's going to be another beautiful day out on this third planet circling an average star out on the fringe of an arguably beautiful galaxy.

I know things aren't all they should be here, but I hope you're able to enjoy some of this.

Not many moments after posting this little word-picture to Facebook, the moon had slid to touch the nearest treetop, kind of winking at me. It moves fast! And there's the sun in the treetops, too. A distraction or two later, it's slipped out of view, the night's dream lost in the new day.

Winter is coming up here, even as austral spring rounds to summer, ever spinning ahead.

15.Nov.2024

Greasy

It's hard to imagine a more cynical and corrupt choice for Attorney General than Matt Gaetz, but "give it time." (RFK Jr. is saying "hold my beer" right about now.) Robert Reich "worked in the Justice Department in the years following Richard Nixon’s attempt to use the department to prosecute and intimidate Nixon’s enemies."

"To restore faith and trust in the department, President Gerald Ford appointed Edward Levi as attorney general. Before his appointment, Levi had been dean of the University of Chicago Law School and president of the University of Chicago.

"One of Levi’s most important accomplishments was to insulate the Department of Justice from political interference by establishing a set of rules that prevented the White House from privately contacting an attorney general or any other Justice Department officials."

Now that the Supreme Court has formally set one person above the law (on the way to delaying and sabotaging the prosecution of the Insurrectionist in Chief), all bets are off.

"Gaetz, a 42-year-old congressman from Florida, has zero qualifications for being the highest law enforcement official in the land. He has never been a government attorney, never been a judge, never taught law or burnished his legal standing in any way....

"If confirmed, Gaetz would lead the Justice Department’s more than 100,000 employees at a time when Trump’s allies are demanding a purge of career DOJ staffers who may have opposed some of Trump’s efforts during his first term or worked on cases involving Trump or his supporters.

For his part, our latter day Lear is keen to have an unscrupulous, "ashamed of nothing" sycophant running a DOJ turned into an engine of retribution. Speaking of unscrupulous sycophants, Lindsey Graham.

"Senator Lindsey Graham — currently the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a reliable weather vane for the unscrupulous — said he was surprised Trump picked Gaetz, whom he called “clever,” and predicted Gaetz would face “tough questions” at his confirmation hearing. But Graham also said he was inclined to support presidential appointments."

"Inclined" is darkly funny. Graham is supine to support Republican presidential appointments. As I rather suspect Idaho's two senators will be, even if hope springs eternal that they will—someday—show themselves among the Vertebrata.

As the clusterbomb of future nominations covers the news landscape, wisdom from Garry Kasparov (passed along by Joyce Vance) needs to be our daily reminder.

"The ability of demagogues & autocrats to surprise, to create a new scandal every day, is their superpower. It diminishes attention to the previous day's transgressions & normalizes them. It slowly numbs the sense, including outrage. Values are the only defense. Hold them dear."

14.Nov.2024

Man bites dog

As Porgie Tirebiter so memorably said to his father, "no Irishman can stop you from being dogkiller this time!" That was 54 years before an actual dog killer was on tap to become Director of Homeland Security. (TIL, there was an actual George Tirebiter, and three successor Tirebiters, after the first one's tragic demise.)

Then I saw the fake news news about The Onion, saying it has bought "InfoWars," and before I looked up the NYT story, I checked the ONION, as one does.

"With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

"Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

"No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars...."

That semi-sendup aside, it appears that this is real fake news news, not fake fake news, accountability reaching the forgettable man's pile of filthy lucre through the working of a bankruptcy auction.

Says there Global Tetrahedron really is the parent company of The Onion, and "the publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” and misinformation, which may or may not turn out to be funny, even if the idea is funny.

Anyway, the fatuous felon former guy upstaged himself by pushing Matt Gaetz into the queue for his next administration's Klown Kar, as Attorney General, a move so outrageous that it caused Idaho's Mike Simpson to break character, and uh, decorum are we calling it? He said, and I quote what our local TV commentator wouldn't say out loud, "Are you shittin me?"

Joyce Vance noted the nomination "kills two birds with one stone, giv[ing] Gaetz an excuse to resign, which he did this afternoon to prevent release of the House Ethics report on his conduct, due Friday, while letting [the fatuous felon] tweak Dems into outrage, which he enjoys doing."

FFFG also gets a bizarre loyalty test for the Senate that has to approve a nomination, putting "G.O.P. Senators in a Box" for Gaetz, Pete Hegseth (SecDef?) and Tulsi Gabbard (DNI?!). (So far. Presumably, THE WORST IS YET TO COME!!!) FG blurted that he wants the Senate to take recess, which it has very quietly avoiding doing for close to "ever," with the unanimous endorsement of the (2014) Supreme Court to prevent an executive from doing what the Faux Great Future Grifter wants to do for his project 2025.

If you're wondering how whack this idea is, consider that the bloody National Review has a strident opinion piece about how "terrible" it would be for the Senate to give up its Constitutional role. At any rate, it wouldn't happen while Joe Biden was still president, and come January, recess is going to be the furthest thing from the minds of Republicans in (narrow) control of the whole shebang.

Postscript:
Joyce Vance's blog-length question and discussion, Will the Senate Bend the Knee? included this gem coloring the quality of some of the "advice and consent" on offer:

"Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said Matt Gaetz wasn’t a “serious candidate,” while Alabama Senator “Coach” Tommy Tuberville said that Trump was elected by an “enormous vote” (he wasn’t) and he “deserves” to have the “team” around him that he wants. But that’s not how it works. Tuberville, who during his campaign didn’t know what the three branches of government or the Voting Rights Act were, still doesn’t understand how the Constitution works."

12.Nov.2024

It's going to get darker. A lot darker.

If you're still regrouping from what happened a week ago, you won't want to take my first-read-and-blog jump this morning, to Thom Hartmann's "Daily Take." You might want to just skip this whole post, but unfortantely, that won't make it go away. A Second Reign of Terror: Trump’s Blueprint for ICE Home Raids.

[Thomas] Homan notoriously ran ICE during the last Trump administration and is often considered, along with Stephen Miller, as the father of Trump’s brutal child separation policy that traumatized so many thousands of young families and has left about 1,000 youngsters trafficked into pop-up “Christian” adoption services missing to this day....

Homan also helped write part of the immigration policies for Project 2025. And famously bragged to CBS that if he found families with “illegal” members in this country, he’d simply deport the entire family, US citizens or not.

When asked by Cecilia Vega on 60 Minutes [Oct. 27, 2024], “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Homan barely took a breath before asserting, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

I didn't see that episode until just now. If we needed a poster boy for portly, comfortable, white privilege in the guise of a bully from New York, "How ya doin'" Homan could be it. "The proud pitchman of mass deportation" was preaching to the choir at the Republican National Convention this summer, the non-union printed MASS DEPORTATION NOW! signs bobbing among the delegates.

"I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden's released in our country. You better start packing now."

CBS reported that "he worked his way up from border patrolman to acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement," one of those so-many "acting" positions that +rump I used to short-circuit the advice and consent of the Senate, and to keep his lapdogs on a short leash.

Homan was a police officer in his home town, joined the INS in 1984 (!) to serve as a Border Patrol agent, investigator, and supervisor, and was appointed by Obama as ICE's executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations in 2013, according to Wikipedia's page on him. It was during the Obama administration that he'd "begun to argue that separating children from their parents would be an effective means of discouraging illegal border crossings." On 60 Minutes, Homan was asked about being "the father" of the child separation memo, and he tried to tap dance away from it.

"It's not true. I didn't write the memorandum to separate familes. I signed the memo."

The Wikipedia page ends with notice that on Sunday, our president-elect announced Homan will be the "border czar," "in charge of all deportation of illegal aliens," for which he "plans on using the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798."

Making American great again with Russian titles, and intraparty battles from the 18th century. Wikipedia tells us that two of the four Alien and Sedition Acts have expired, one was repealed, and only "the Alien Enemies Act as amended, is still in effect as 50 U.S.C. ch. 3." (Title 50 is War and National Defense.)

The acts were passed by a Congress controlled by the Federalist party, and directed against their opponents at the time. Publicity from selective prosecution "caused massive criticism and contributed to the Federalists being removed from power in the 1800 election." Fast-forward to our Rasputin, at a CPAC, gushing about his fever dream:

Stephen Miller: "So you grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging ground and that's where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home. You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement..."

God knows I haven't studied the whole of Project 2025, but I have looked at parts of it in detail, and this prompted me to have a look at some of the 37 pages of the Department of Homeland Security section, nominally authored by Ken Cuccinelli, but with this precious "Author's Note" disclaimer to try to keep him and his co-conspirators out of The Hague:

"I had the honor of coordinating the efforts of the experts listed as contributors to this book, nearly all of whom have spent more time inside or interacting with the Department of Homeland Security than myself. I wrote only a small portion of the chapter and relied on the contributors’ experience and expertise to give the chapter both its depth and policy impact. No views expressed herein should be attributed to any single contributor."

US Code Title 8 (Aliens and Nationality) appears in Kuccinelli's section, first in a bullet item about "Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agents in the 1811 series", who it says "should enforce Title 8 and 18 crimes as the biggest part of their portfolio." (Title 18 is Crimes and Criminal Procedures.)

On page 152, under "Averting or curtailing a mass migration event," an event the Secretary of Homeland Security can "determine" on his or her own, in the midst of 17 proposed Executive Orders, there is this, with my emphasis added:

"Provide that notwithstanding any other provision of law, when the Secretary makes such a determination and then promulgates, subject to the approval of the President, such rules and regulations, the Secretary shall have the authority to waive all legal requirements of Title 8 that the Secretary, in his or her sole discretion, determines are necessary to avert or curtail the mass migration."

All of the planning—and warnings—about the "project" were in plain sight, even as the clanging noise of disinformation and distraction kept it just another noisome ingredient in the excrement-flooded stew of antisocial media. One of the Wikipedia sources cited is dated a year ago yesterday, Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's report from "inside Trump's 2025 Immigration Plans": Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations.

The "immigration issue" was kept fully alive during the campaign by the puppetmaster pulling Speaker Mike Johnson's strings to keep the bipartisan Senate bill from coming to a vote in the House. The compromise deal would have given conservatives much of what they said they wanted, but never enough. Four decades after the last comprehensive immigration reform made it through Congress, and four months after a bipartisan group of senators began working together, "it took less than four days for its support among Republicans to collapse" in early February.

The Brookings Institute looks deeper than "the easiest explanation" that +rump wanted to keep it alive for his campaign, but the Occam's Razor slice says it's been kept unresolved to provide campaign fodder because (a) it's a hard problem, and (b) it's always easier to sabotage than it is to build. Some last words from Hartmann:

"[I]f you have an Hispanic last name or live anywhere near Hispanics and have black hair and brown eyes, be sure to get your proof of citizenship ready and carry it with you at all times, even when you sleep.

"And the rest of us? No dictator in history has ever started a violent inquisition attacking the weakest in society — and they all begin there — without soon extending his terror against every person he thought opposed him or who represented a challenge to his power."

Armistice Day, 2024

Zeitgeist

Today's dateline hearkens back to the "old" name, set in 1938 as "a legal holiday to be dedicated to world peace," twelve years after Congress had resolved that November 11, 1918 “should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.” That first holiday declaration was one year before Hitler's Germany invaded Poland and kicked off the Second World War.

Heather Cox Richardson reminds us of all that and more in her dated-yesterday post. In my life, today's holiday has always been Veterans Day, changed in 1954, "to honor the armed forces of wars after World War I." The year before, the Korean War's fighting stopped with an "armistice," so maybe they wanted to avoid the word?

At any rate, I've always felt it as a national holiday, which doesn't quite get to "peace through good will and mutual understanding." It's on my mind on the eve of a Republican-controlled Congress and our Executive about to betray the Ukrainian people and capitulate to Russia's dictator.

Idaho's Senator Jim Risch, soon to be exalted to chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is likely to play a subservient role. (There's always the possibility he could stand for principle and buck the Don, but don't bet a nickel on that.) His election night palaver quoted on Friday night's Idaho Reports included this:

"[Trump] is very strong on uh international matters, he says he's going to end the two wars we've got [sic]. When he says something like that, count on it. Uh, he'll get it done, and uh, we've gotta give him the space to do it."

Idaho's other senator, Mike Crapo, the presumptive chair of the next Senate Finance Committee, also made an appearance. He's already promising to extend the deficit-exploding "$4 trillion" 2017 tax cuts, as he put it, multiplying by ten years for theatrical effect. The fog of majority amnesia relieves his anxiety about the national debt. (His home page on the web still has its spinning counter, closing in on $35T.) The truth is complicated, of course: FactCheck.org has an explainer about the latest "opportunity to test the theory that tax cuts pay for themselves due to economic growth," a self-serving "theory" that's been reliably disproven for four decades and counting, with no discernable effect on the touts.

Yesterday's New York Times front page had these headlines (and a selection of the bottom-of-page blurbs):

• Gazans Spend A Whole Year In a Blackout
• A Child Influencer Whose Avid Frans Were Men (Seeing the Dismal Side of the Internet, and Profiting From It)
• Foreign Chiefs Quicken Stride to Trump's Ear
• DEMOCRATS SIFT THROUGH RUBBLE, SEEKING ANSWERS
• In Tumultuous Times, More Readers Are Reaching for Magical 'Healing Fiction'
• Librarians Facing a Crisis (of Violence and Abuse)
• Elon Musk's Secret Compound, in Texas
• Go Ahead, A.I., Take Charge

10.Nov.2024

Unreconstructed

Thom Hartmann's weekly book excerpt is from The Hidden History of the War on Voting; Who stole your vote—and how to get it back. The caption under the cover image has a link to Amazon (which I'm including, with his tag rather than mine), and the promise that "over the next few months, the entire book will be here," serialized on Sundays. Today's Stacey Abrams Was Robbed chapter refers to her 2016 run for Governor, in which

"Out of over 3.9 million votes cast in Georgia, Kemp won by a mere 55,000, about the same as the number of people he’d forbidden from voting because there wasn’t an exact match of the middle names or initials or commas on mostly Black voters’ registration forms submitted in the months running up to the election.

"Not to mention over 1.5 million voters he’d removed from the rolls—such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s cousin, 92-year-old Christine Jordan, who was one of thousands turned away at the polls or given a provisional ballot that was never counted. Jordan had been voting every two years at the same precinct for a full 50 years until Kemp’s radical administration removed her name from the rolls."

The "exact match" provision, and closing or reducing the hours of polling places had been stymied by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which John Roberts and the gang's 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision effectively neutered. (Eric Holder was the first Black man to serve as Attorney General, for our first president of color. Probably just a coincidence.)

Hartmann's history preface goes back to so-called "Reconstruction," between the end of the Civil War and 1870, when Georgia was finally readmitted to the Union. The shorter of it is in the lede: The white men who run most of the elections in Georgia were never going to let a Black woman become governor.

Hartmann refers to the work of the Brennan Center for Justice, documenting the state legislative efforts to "aggressively attempting to limit voting access and roll back gains in turnout" (as well as efforts to expand access to the vote). It's hard to weigh the barrage of numbers in their Overview, but that does end on the positive note that "expansive laws have outpaced the number of restrictive laws passed."

"At least 41 states plus Washington, DC, have enacted 168 expansive laws since January 2021, and at least 156 of these laws across all 41 of those states and DC [were] set to be in effect this fall."

Their September Roundup, on the other hand, noted that "this fall, voters in more than half of the states will face obstacles to voting that they have never encountered in a presidential election before."

"In the 11 years since the Shelby County v. Holder decision removed a key check against voting restrictions, at least 31 states have enacted 114 restrictive voting laws."

9.Nov.2024

The fake news, with a microphone, in the TV room

Somewhere, someone with the skill and initiative for a deep dive is analyzing WTF just happened (as it were). A lot of us would like to know, but it won't be easy to swim through the sea of hot takes to marshall facts. It might be Heather Cox Richardson, part of a larger effort. For this morning, her latest Letter from an American makes the case for disinformation, first and foremost. From hoards who are (or will be) "shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices." Having gassed up yesterday for under $3 a gallon, it occurs to me that it won't be long before we're looking back at the Biden economy as the good old days.

Along with her usual rich collection of links to other voices, Cox Richardson connects our current dots to the book banning and burning of 1850s, and the "reassurance" of a South Carolina senator that secession would be a bloodless coup. But here, now, the link to Amanda Marcotte in Salon, noting that "Trump voters backed abortion, minimum wage and family leave — but don't get that Project 2025 would take it away."

"Perhaps out of fear of insulting their audiences, the pundits, journalists, and political consultants engaged in the lengthy post-mortem about Donald Trump's horrific victory Tuesday are avoiding the most obvious cause: ignorance. Millions of people who desperately want more progressive policies cast their ballots for a man whose agenda is exactly the opposite of what they want....

"When voters have factual information about the candidates, they prefer Democrats.... The problem is most people simply do not absorb quality information. Instead, increasing numbers of Americans have a media diet that is mostly a bunch of lies, conspiracy theories, irrelevant diatribes and other such bunkum that right-wing propagandists use to deceive people....

"Looking at newspaper sales and news site traffic, we can see that the consumption of reality-based news is plummeting."

And the only thing "secret" about the feeding on ignorance is lies is that the bottomless stew of fact-free nonsense obscures it in plain sight.

"...Trump and his allies don't even hide how much they think his voters are ignorant and deluded. Even back in 2016, Trump was raving about how he loves "the poorly educated." When it looked like Project 2025 might hurt him politically, Trump, shameless as usual, said he knew nothing about it. The architect of it, Russ Vought, admitted to an undercover reporter that Trump is just "running against the brand," but that he fully intended to use it as his policy agenda. After Trump's win was secure, his top lieutenant, Steve Bannon, giddy from his recent release from prison, gloated about this on his "War Room" podcast, by promoting a tweet by Matt Walsh: "Now that the election is over, I think we can finally say that, yeah, actually, Project 2025 is the agenda."

In the rich, ironic turn of tireless gaslighting cooked into self-fulfilling prophecy, the "fake news" won the day. "An all-propaganda media diet" is worse for the world than eating beef.

Adam Serwer, with a dateline from the Before Time (i.e. Monday) in The Atlantic, describes the dark fantasy Trump's followers are living in, the epistemic bubble carved into concentric circles of Bounders, true Believers, and the Bandwagon. (Gift link to the article, and my mnemonic alliteration for free.) The innermost circle includes the legislative co-conspirators, led by

"[current] House Speaker Mike Johnson, "who has vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act; policy aides such as Vought, who has spoken of mass deportation as a means to “end multiculturalism”; and elite backers such as Elon Musk, who hopes to use his influence to inflict hardship on Americans by dramatically cutting the welfare state so that he can reduce his own tax burden. It is no coincidence that Musk has transformed the social network formerly known as Twitter into a haven for racist pseudoscience that he himself consciously amplifies.

"This faction also includes those far-right figures who are not official members of Trumpworld but who see the reality-show star as a champion of a resurgent white-nationalist identity. These people understand what Trumpism’s goals are, and most of them also understand that, absent the particular devotion Trump inspires, their plans would not be politically viable."

Then the "devoted Trump fans," keen to go to a rally and load up on vulgar and red hat schwag, willing themselves to believe in the "Great Replacement" conspiracy coming to take what's theirs unless a big, strong man gets in the way. The ones lit up by their guy declaring in Greenville, SC, that “Kamala is importing millions of illegals across our borders and giving them taxpayer benefits at your expense.” And the outer circle:

"Americans with conservative beliefs who may be uneasy about Trump but whose identification with conservative principles and the Republican Party mean they wish to persuade themselves to vote for the Republican candidate. They may be ardently anti-abortion, or small-business owners, or deeply religious. They do not believe everything Trump says; in fact, their approach to the man is dismissiveness. These are voters who fall into what my colleague David Graham calls the “believability gap.” They don’t like Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric but also don’t think he will follow through with it. This is the “What’s the downside for humoring him?” faction."

And the part that could keep you awake a night:

"As different as some of the people I spoke with at these Trump rallies could be, when they went into the crowd, they experienced the ecstasy of the cruelties they would perhaps not allow themselves to indulge in alone. The rationalizations and explanations and denial melted away. They understood that they were there to mock and condemn those they hate and fear, and to listen to all of Trump’s vows to punish them.

"A person, alone in conversation, can be rational. People, in a crowd, become something else."

There's more than I can summarize and excerpt in Serwer's excellent analysis. Take the jump.

Postscript:
Also h/t to HCR, Michael Tomasky, in The New Republic, just the punchline (spoiler alert!) of the real reason Trump won for your teaser: "Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country."

"This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter."

8.Nov.2024

Wait, there's more?

L O L G O P offers an invite to a better social medium (Bluesky), with an ode to blocking. If I were looking for more social media time (or maybe "when"), I might give it a whirl. But not today, thanks.

It is nice to have the endless spigot of political fundraising emails and texts mostly shut down. Not that the unsolicited and semi-solicited have stopped, of course. I'm still on Costco's list, and god help us, they're talking about an early "Black Friday." For $49.99 Delivered (After $15 OFF) with a minimum quantity of 12 to purchase, I could get a Custom "Your Name Here" Corporate 9-tier Gold Tower, teeming with sugar and salt that no one needs but everyone seems to want. If only I had $600 (plus tax) to burn in order to impress a dozen clients with trumpery.

Foundering fathers

Just over 40 years ago, when we came to Boise at the start of one career and the end of another, one of the movers in his endless trips down the stairs to the basement large room with space for 96 book boxes exclaimed that "you've got more books than the BSU library!" We took it as a compliment at the time, despite the slim possibility that he'd ever seen the inside of the latter to compare.

Fast-forward to a larger collection, at least doubled over the decades, and it's time to reconsider, sort, treasure or dispose. Many loads have already gone to the Boise Public Library! but my final review of Jeanette's choices have given me enough to stay busy reading for a while. Attention, focus, and precious time are the determining elements for that.

One of the re-finds was a set of cheap paperbacks comprising six-sevenths of the original Poldark Saga, written by Winston Graham in the 1940s, 50s and 70s, "a novel of Cornwall" in the late 18th century. (The indispensible Wikipedia entry shows me there are twelve altogether, seven from 1783 to Christmas, 1799, and then five that go from 1810-1820. It was quite the remarkable 57 year run of writing.)

We've greatly enjoyed some of the 5 seasons (!) and 43 episodes (!!) of the BBC's second adaptation, and I was a little worried the writing might not live up to that, but it does. One can "see" and understand more through the eyes of an omniscient narrator (even if he chooses what to feature here and there) than just attending to scenes and dialogue. Memory of the film characters enlivens the imagination of it all.

I'm in the second of the six books, 1788-1790, with Captain Poldark home from the war that lost the American colonies, King George still on the throne, the industrial revolution and political revolutions starting to come to a boil. In the midst of a national Celebration, and the grand party put on by the upstart Warleggans, one chapter starts with this:

"A gathering at which the Lord Lieutenant of the County was present was a gathering of importance. For the Lord Lieutenant was the King's Man, and from him came all things great and small. Or, to be explicit, what came from him was appointments to be Justice of the Peace, and to be a J.P. meant to be the possessor of undisputed local power. For good or ill the J.P.s ruled, unchecked by Privy Council or the public purse. So the Lord Lieutenant was a man to be sought after, flattered and fawned on."

What was old is new again.

7.Nov.2024

Darkness and hope

HCR's day-after post has a lot to absorb. "[The] results were a surprise to everyone," she said, but I don't know what to make of that. So close to evenly divided, and with our gerrymandered, winner-take-all electoral system, I expected better than Republicans-take-all, definitely. Maureen Dowd quoted Biff, at his still-above water Florida residence, on election night, surprised. "Look what happened! Isn't this crazy?" Big, strong men with tears in their eyes are saying "yes." Yes, it is. Heather Cox Richardson:

"Trump is a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in a number of jurisdictions. He refused to leave office peacefully when voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020, instead launching an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, and said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office."

What a choice the prevailing "American people" just made! They—and our derelict Supreme Court majority—have chosen to let the felon squirt out of his far more consequential federal indictments for inciting the 2021 insurrection, and stealing national security documents on his way out of office, among so many other things. Versus

"Harris and [...] Walz offered a message of unity, the expansion of the economic policies that have made the U.S. economy the strongest in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and the creation of an “opportunity economy” that echoed many of the policies Republicans used to embrace. Trump vowed to take revenge on his enemies and to return the country to the neoliberal policies President Joe Biden had rejected in favor of investing in the middle class."

Hungary's dictator, Viktor Orbán, posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!” Vladimir Putin has big plans as well, no doubt.

Cox Richardson's conclusion is that the “political technology” of "a virtual political reality through modern media" amplified the festering racism, sexism, and xenophobia of our culture. Speaking of technology:

"X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged."

Robert Reich's first post in a series he plans "over the next weeks and months" starts with his observation that "Trumpism is the consequence, not the cause, of a long-term structural change in the American political economy."

"Over much of the past 30 years, as the Republican Party embraced bigotry, lies, and hate to stir up working-class fears and resentments, the Democratic Party abandoned the working class and embraced global trade, deregulation of finance, and lower taxes on the wealthy, and has allowed corporate bashing of labor unions and monopolization of industry.

"As a result, the median wage of the bottom 90 percent has risen just 15 percent, adjusted for inflation, while the stock market has soared 5000 percent."

In the big cage match between labor and capital, the 30-year score is 15% to 50x. Not a fair fight. Never mind that "the Biden administration is the first Democratic administration in more than 30 years to reject additional moves toward globalization and deregulation, propose higher taxes on the wealthy, strengthen labor unions, aggressively utilize antitrust, and adapt a forward-looking industrial policy"; those changes could take years—or decades—to take effect strong enough to counter the headwind of disinformation. It don't mean a thing if you can't make it sing.

Reich provides "three short pieces" to encapsulate his view of the start of this (transcripted from Talk Radio 95, October, 1994); who we are, now that the abnormal has been officially declared "normal" (Carlos Loxada's NYT op-ed, Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are); and Rebecca Solnit's How to Hope, Even Now.

6.Nov.2024

Sore winner

It's been 40 years since we moved into our neighborhood, not long before Reagan was reelected. It's a long time to be in one place. We're lucky to have had mostly good neighbors over the years. People we meet on the street have been generally cheerful, pleasant, or at worst, taciturn. It's OK to mind one's own business if there's no invitation.

After doing an errand for a friend (and making a bike ride out of it for myself), I set about a political task I'd agreed to: picking up our Democratic candidates' yard signs in the precinct. Just after putting one in the car, and driving up a street, a fellow walking the other way gave me a real sourpuss and a thumbs down, for no apparent reason. Other than he saw me with a yard sign. Picking it up, the day after the election.

That seemed weird, but I continued on my rounds, up one street and down another. Oh, there he was again, coming down a street I was going up. I turned off the radio, rolled down the window and stopped to engage him in conversation. "Why the thumbs-down?" I wanted to know. He pointed at the back of my car.

"Those signs."

"What? I'm picking up signs after the election," I said. It seemed like a good, and neighborly thing I was doing.

"I know," he said grumpily, as if it were something dirty I was doing.

"I worked for candidates, I worked at the polls yesterday, and now I'm picking up signs," I explained, and before the third item on my list, he said "I did too," ambiguously. I'll wager he didn't put in a 13-1/2 hour day as a poll-worker yesterday, and did approximately jack-shit for any candidate in the district, but whatever.

"I'm on the other side," he said. "The side that won."

Never mind that I was picking up signs for our legislative candidates, and the ACHD candidate we worked for (all of whom had won their races), and not any of the presidential race signs. Of which there were far more Harris/Walz signs than the other kind, by the way. Yes, here in Idaho.

He'd never really "stopped" to chat, and I wasn't going to shout after him as he walked on, even if I'd thought of something to add, which I hadn't. I did take notice of his camouflage Trump hat, first of those I've seen.

Oh, he must be at that house that's been showing Trump paraphernalia for four years, most recently the Trump flag on the tall flagpole (that they'd installed). I noticed that today it had been replaced with a US flag, as if... they're only US-patriotic now that the "stolen" election has been rectified.

But here I was, one of "them," still inhabiting "his" state, county, city, precinct, neighorhood. It seemed to make him angry. After the winning.

I walk, and bike a lot on the streets where we met (and the one I think he lives on). This is the first time I've seen him "out for a walk." He didn't really look like the "out for a walk" sort, but there he was. Angry at a neighbor.

Jeanette gave me l'esprit de l'escalier when I told her the story. "I would have said, 'You must be so happy....'"

First light local results

By 7am today, Ada County is showing 100% of its precincts reporting, with 271,185 ballots cast. More than half of the total came from early voting (81,104) and absentee ballots (61,727); and everything counted before sunrise, for an impressive logistical feat. The red-blue divide shows in the presidential results, as our day begins with large, illegal fireworks being lit off.

Our little blue bubble of District 16 is intact (other than the fireworks), and the Ada County Highway District will be served by the two candidates we worked for, Alexis Pickering, and Patricia Nilsson, so that's good. (I see by zooming in that the precinct we worked yesterday, 1613, is the pinkest of our blue peninsula.)

The big, out-of-state money working to get taxpayer's money to private schools succeeded in defeating Senator Rick Just's reelection bid, so that's bad. Rep. Steve Berch, perhaps the hardest-working campaigner the state has ever known, won another term, but first-time challenger Shari Baber came up short in District 15 to the west of us.

Idaho voters broadly affirmed amending the consitution to provide that only citizens of the United States can vote in Idaho elections (which of course is already the case, and not a problem), and soundly trounced the open primary / ranked choice voting initiative, 70-30 with 41 of 44 counties fully reporting. The Republican super-majority will feel free to be as extreme as they want.

What have we got to lose?

Besides, you know, everything. I'm thinking "our habitable planet," first of all, wishing that were overblown grandiosity, tracing back the wrong turning points. 1980. 2000. 2024. More than four decades' opportunity to do the right things, gone forever.

The venal signs in our neighborhood come to mind. The guy with the mini-monster pickup truck, towing a sprinkler blow-out compresser who passed me on Sunday, stomped on it, and then coal-rolled to own the lib riding a bicycle. The house with the tall flagpole where they quit the homage to the Stars and Stripes and just went straight Trump. That didn't stand out too much (being in a little culdesac) in our blueish precinct. But now.

We worked at a nearby precinct's polling place yesterday, 7:00am to just after 8:30pm, with an ok, but not extraordinary turnout. No last minute rush, or lines, just two first-time voters who had had to make three trips to get their paperwork in order pushing us a few minutes past closing time. Announcing so-and-so "has voted, FOR THE FIRST TIME," our crew of 9 gave a cheer and round of applause, as we'd done for all our first-time voters throughout the day.

If we can believe our smash-and-grab leader (as if), apparently successful in his second insurrection, they won't have to ever worry about voting again.

Election Day Eve, 2024

It's always a swing election

Getting through Anat Shenker-Osorio's text in The.Ink's piece (teased in the previous item, below), I'm reminded of my recent experience serving as treasurer for 5 years on our church board. I came into the group of people that I mostly knew pretty well, but would get to know better, as we had a friendly first meeting in the summer, a working retreat, leaned into the monthly meeting work, held a congregational meeting in the fall. My first term was busy with re-learning the ropes from when I'd been treasurer 30 years (!) prior, the accounting systems, and a staff transition, all at once.

By the end of that first year, the dust had settled, I felt like I knew what I was doing, and had settled into the rhythm of the job, and the people I was working with. Second summer, a couple people leaving, and a couple new people joining, it was probably more the same than it was different, but it was certainly different than it had been. A year or two later, the blindingly obvious was no longer in the background noise: each time a member comes or goes, the group changes. Which means the work changes, along with the group dynamics, and the shared understandings, and the corpus of what "we" know. That reality of a group microcosm is write large in the political macrocosm. Under "Don't: Forget the job of campaigning," (which ok, might be better stated as Do: keep campaigning or the like, but she had a balanced Do/Don't list), Shenker-Osorio writes, with my emphasis where it hit me:

"What people seem not to have internalized is that median voter theory, which is what all of this swing stuff is built out of, is a very old political science idea, and rests on the notion of the electorate as a fixed group of people. And so someone presumably occupies the ideological center of it.

"But what's preposterous about that is that the composition of the electorate changes in every election. And it is the job of the campaign to change that composition by increasing the number of voters who have never voted before, whether they've just aged into the electorate, never voted before because they just became naturalized, never voted before because they didn't feel like it, or are very unreliable voters.

"And that is where the payoff is, is the reason why Biden won, is the reason why in the places we staved off the red wave, why there was what my colleague Michael Podhorzer called a “blue undertow.” It's because of those “surge voters.” And there are just so many more surge voters than there are swing voters."

There are precious few "swing" voters in my karass, that I know of. I can't speak to the frequency of "surge" voters in it, either, but I know there are far more reliable voters than unreliable ones in it, and relatively few regular Republican voters. I made a gentle attempt to persuade one of the latter (who lives in a swing state, unlike here we have Idaho), and found out that I was too late (assuredly way too late to get started), and he'd already voted, for "none of the above." I was disappointed, but with a couple days to reflect on it, I'm seeing the glass as half full: he didn't vote for the malignant proto-fascist leading a band of miscreants.

In our Sunday church service yesterday, we had a "show of hands" for people who had worked in some way related to this year's election; knocking on doors, making phone calls, writing postcards to voters in other states, working at the polls, and so on, and it was heartening to see how many in the crowded room were standing up to engage in the work. These are my people!

Our theme for November's worship is "Living Love Through The Practice of Repair," and yesterday's topic was “Tikkun Olam: To Repair the World.” Between the gathering, the singing with the choir, and the sermon, my scribbled notes included this:

HOW TO HEAL THE WORLD
Listen
Be kind
Lead with love
Keep going.

Regression from the mean

Marcy Wheeler does such a deep, comprehensive job of covering so many complicated political topics, "it's hard to keep up" can hardly do it justice. But after reading Robert Reich's eve-of reassurance, We the People will succeed, I went on to Jason "LOLGOP" Sattler's post on The Cause, "this is how we win" with the affirmation in the headline: Voters are turning out in record numbers to swear in Kamala Harris.

"There are, of course, reasons to be anxious. Democracy is at stake. Races like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania Senate show extremely lackluster Republican candidates pulling closer. And Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown need near miracles to overcome their extremely lackluster Republican opponents just because of the twin factors of negative partisanship and a tsunami of cash from the right.

"But there are far more reasons to be optimistic."

The link to emptywheel followed, but the eye-catching forecast map delayed my taking the jump. Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics X'd (fka "tweeted") that "based on NYT polls, Harris wins the Electoral College even without PA and MI. Feel free to bookmark this." Since I don't do Melon Usk's slander site anymore (and since I can't find it in RCP's generally pandering noise—Nikki Haley's op-ed in the WSJ? Pfft), I'll just screen scrape and "bookmark" it right here:

Sattler's thesis came from "go-to messaging expert" Anat Shenker-Osorio, on The Ink: Five things Harris — and you — can do to close the deal. And boils it down to the DOs and DON'Ts:

DO:		DON'T:
» Run like we're winning		× Act like underdogs
» Call out what we're against		× Feed what you're fighting
» Tell the bigger story on gender		× Accept received wisdom on male voters
» Sell the brownie, not the recipe		× Forget the job of campaigning

Received wisdom on male voters, what? That's where Ms. Wheeler comes in, with an antidote to the blind spot of Nate and Other Nate: Male Pollsters Shocked — Shocked!! — When a Woman Pollster Discovers Women Voters.

"The reason we’re seeing this herding is because Nate Silver has spent 16 years training pollsters to herd. It probably makes things worse that polling has become far more difficult, far more expensive, and far more important in shitty campaign coverage (not least because of Nate Silver). The herding is happening because, thanks to the early but not more recent success of Nate, political operatives know they can create a reality in poll averages."

Then along came J. Ann Selzer, with a poll for the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa that found this: "Democrat Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump in Iowa 47% to 44%." Within the margin of error still, but hello Dobbs effect.

The whole post on emptywheel is well worth your time.

2.Nov.2024

Blow the Man Down

In the NYT teaser for their interactive What made a $40 million superyacht capsize? there's an unintendedly (I have to assume) ironic ad for Fisher Investments, with the headline: How Long Does $1 Million Last After 60? The story has elements familiar from centuries past. At anchor. A mighty storm.

"Lightning crackled. Winds neared hurricane strength. The sky dumped a blinding torrent. The yacht drifted out of control. Then it was gone."

They don't hold back on their spoiler, so—spoiler alert!—neither shall I. The single, super-tall mast on a 184' long "superyacht" was too damn tall. "At 237 feet tall, the mast was one of the tallest in the world." "At least 24 tons of aluminum, possibly more." The windage of the mast and bare rigging was too much, in the end.

The conceit of its original buyer, Dutchman John Groenewoud (who christened her "Salute"), spelled doom for the current owner of the Bayesian, it seems. Not just that super-tall mast, but "tall glass doors" at its sides, a "sunken deck" (!!), and a retractable keel that was not fully extended. The boat builder blamed the sinking on operator error.

"Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, the company that owns Perini Navi, said that when operated properly, the Bayesian was “unsinkable.” He maintains that the yacht was carefully engineered to survive bad storms, and he has put the blame for the tragedy squarely on the crew, accusing them of making a chain of fatal errors."

Incredibly (in every sense), speaking of the sunken ship, Costantino insisted “The ship was an unsinkable ship,” he said. “I say it, I repeat it.”

Before it went down, there were high times on the ship named after a theory of probability, we're told. "The days were typically warm, sunny and calm," it says there, as if a yacht could command the weather. (Wouldn't it ask for a little bit of wind, though?)

"Most of the time, though, the Bayesian operated like a motorboat, powered by two enormous diesel engines. During her five-day voyage, Ms. VanSickle said they sailed only once, for just a few hours."

But being under sail for even just a few hours was really nice, felt like they were "gliding," which, yes, sailing is like that. It also says the days were "finished off with plates of fresh langoustine" and stuff. You know you're superrich when you eat things people have never heard of. (It's some kind of lobster, I see.)

"[T]he original buyer for this yacht didn’t want the standard two-mast design. Instead, the Italian Sea Group said, he wanted the boat to be built with one large mast for better sailing performance.

"That led to a radically different design, said three people with knowledge of what followed, and a cascade of modifications — some to accommodate the gigantic mast, and some apparently for stylistic or other reasons."

The Bayesian's "sister ships" were all two-masted, with a "better center of gravity," more resistant to capsizing.

The story brought to mind another ship that foundered on the overamped imagination of the ruler who commanded design changes, the Vasa. The Bayesian put in more miles than the Vasa, which went down in less than one mile, on her maiden voyage.

King of Sweden Gustavus Adolphus wanted seventy-two 24-pound guns (each weighing something around 2½ tons), and apparently didn't get all that, but says there, the final complement was fifty-six 24-pounders distributed over two gun-decks. Even without all of those on board, when the wind picked up to slighly more than a breeze, over, and down she went.

It's an ill wind that blows no good, though: salvaging the bronze cannons was a boon, salvaging and preserving the ship made an epic story, and now, 500 years on, the Royal National City Park in Stockholm has "the most visited museum in Scandinavia." Sweden's most popular tourist attractions "has been seen by over 45 million visitors since 1961," Jeanette and myself included.

The light at the end of the tunnel

Every once in a while when I read about a "snap election" in another country's parliament, I think "that would be nice." Thanks to a certain infamous loser, our years-long "campaign" now extends past early voting and Election Day (now, "the end of voting," hopefully not literally), into "litigation." We were spared the "stop the steal" tactics in 2016 because whoops, the Electoral College handed the loser a W, but 2020 showed us the incredible power of narcissistic psychopathy. It seemed comical through November and December, dozens of pathetic lawsuits tossed out of court. Rudy Giuliani's press con at Four Seasons Landscaping was whatever the opposite of apotheosis is. ("power thesaurus" says they have 178 "opposites," but only show a sample unless I Join PRO. The list they do show reveals the poverty of language churned through their filter. Bottom. Shame. All-time low. Rock bottom. Ruin. Beginning. (wut) Fiend. Devil. Lowlight. Poor example. Pumpkinification. But not the very bottom.

We've learned there's always lower we could go. January 6, 2021, was just a way station on the highway to hell. As it were. Jokes aside (please!), lasting damage has been done in the packing of the Supreme Court, and we will be paying the price of that for a generation.

Today's light, right before the timekeepers give us back the hour they swiped in March, is "the end of voting," coming Tuesday night. On the other side of the mountain will be the false claims, litigation, and the potential for legislative malfeasance. We're going to need to pace ourselves.

What with the fever dream of firing squads from pumpkin-man (no slight intended to our beloved orange fruit), his toadying speaker walking legislation forward and backward, Washington State's governor activating its National Guard, and Florida, Missouri, and Texas announcing they won't permit DOJ election monitoring inside polling stations, Heather Cox Richardson's daily dose of history runs a little dark. How much darker can it get than a Texas teenager paying the ultimate price for "pro-life" extremism?

The way out will not be easy, or quick. But there's hope in the air, for those who can hear it:

"Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris made two stops in Wisconsin today before packing the Wisconsin State Fair Exposition Center in West Allis near Milwaukee.

"In Madison, Harris told a reporter: “What I am enjoying about this moment most is that in spite of how my opponent spends full time trying to divide the American people, what I am seeing is people coming together under one roof who seemingly have nothing in common and know they have everything in common, and I think that is in the best interest of the strength of our nation.”

1.Nov.2024

You guys

Reading "[my] guide to the 2024 Elections" in my inbox from the NYT, Oct. 31 issue, Jess Bidgood's roundup titled "Trump is offending women. His campaign is reaching out to young men."

First of all, ew. Even without Charlie Kirk's smug mug at a Turning Point Action conference, with his "LIVE FREE" t-shirt. A gender divide has been in the air from before the 2016 October surprise "Access Hollywood" candid of a playboy imagining his prime. Now, because he "loves women" so much, he's going to "protect" them. (From the likes of, uh, misogynists and rapists such as himself? JK! It's the "other," the alien, the "illegals," the same bloody schtick we heard from the golden escalator get-go. It's not me, it's them.)

“I said, well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.”

"Whether the women like it or not," is a line so creepy I don't think even Stephen Miller could come up with that. (Miller might come up with some follow-on riffs now that it's out, and the self-selected drooling mob "roared" its approval.) Our great bloviating Protector. Add that to the other titles he's claimed. Your Retribution. Ill Douche. And most recently, Garbage Man.

If this was a dive bar, we all would've dove on out hours ago, long before the headliner stand-up with the guy in a brand new safety vest got to bragging about pretending to be a garbage man, stumbling into the passenger seat of a clown car garbage truck. It's definitely got "iconic epic moment" written all over it.

He says he's going to protect suburbs, and cities (but not the "Democrat run" ones, ha ha) and farms. And not just the women! "Also, we're going to protect our men." Apparently those milquetoasts not man enough to protect themselves.

In the outer orbit of his sometime-reluctant fellow travelers, some still feel the need to belabor the obvious, “That is not the way to win women,” Ms. Haley said, imagining someone could be swayed by her opinion at this point. “That is not the way to win people who are concerned about Trump’s style.” Ya think?

“This is not a time for them to get overly masculine with this bromance thing that they’ve got going,” she added. “Fifty-three percent of the electorate are women. Women will vote. They care about how they’re being talked to, and they care about the issues.”

So why the hell is she still on the Donold Express? It's hard to imagine there's something in it for her at this point, but she seems to have a wider imagination than most. Liz Cheney has the same message, but without the weird, viscid attachment.

“When you think about that level of instability, the level of erratic decision-making, the misogyny, that’s not someone that you can entrust with the power of the Oval Office,” Ms. Cheney said.

Along with the WWE punch-down, the lumpen stump is littered with his dark fears, projected on the opposition. Who's a "low IQ individual" these days? Short on intellect, stamina, and the "special quality" of leadership? Who's a liar and a cheat? Who has cheated his whole bloody life? Who's leading a parade of "professional thieves"? He's not (yet) so demented that he doesn't know the answer to those questions, gnawing at him in his gathering darkness, whenever he's not on stage wallowing in adulation.

"He's like a child that didn't do his book report," Jimmy Kimmel said, after rolling a nine-year retrospective of "we have a plan" (ending with "I have concepts of a plan!", the latest meme to launch a thousand spit-takes).

"Can you even believe we're saying this?" Yes, it's definitely hard to believe. Then there's the sad shell of Howard Kurtz interviewing the former guy, on his Murdoch propaganda network, over a chyron of "TRUMP TAKES ON SPRINGFIELD, OHIO," trying to get him to walk back the xenophobic idiocy of "they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats," and getting this jerk-weave rejoinder:

"What about the goose, the geese? What about the geese, what happened there?"

Kurtz was in the maelstrom, only one hand left waving as Trump talked over the follow-up question, "One goose? Or geese?"

"Why don't you go after the newspaper that reported it, don't blame me!"

Kimmel's sample array of Republicans who have disembarked from the T train leads with Dick Cheney, and his daughter. (The forgotten man in the right corner is former Senator Jeff Flake down in the right corner.) Kimmel solo-featured +rump's own vice president, Mike Pence. Pence's hillbilly replacement has steadily thumped the 2020 "stolen election" drum, and said he would've gone along with the Trump plan to actually steal the election, on January 6, 2021, with this little song and dance:

"It’s not about what Donald Trump asks somebody to do. It's about, what do we do when you have a problem like what happened in 2020? [sic] How do you respond to it? How does the political system respond to this?"

The monologue wind-up reminded me of the sorry couple sitting in the Garden Café one afternoon of our Alaskan cruise last month, him wearing his red hat and a t-shirt that said I'M VOTING FOR THE FELON. She had on some less memorable team colors, I think it was a never-needs-irony t-shirt about what cheaters the Democrats are. On a shipful of people happy to be away from politics and media for a week and a half, the two of them looked as out of place as a cigar in a punchbowl.

"I saw a shirt the other day, it said 'I support Trump because he pisses off the people who piss me off,' and it's funny, and I get it, sometimes it feels like no one has a sense of humor anymore, but is that really all we want for America is to piss each other off?"

The chilling postscript from Heidi Li Feldman, on Mastodon:

"Of course TFG is willing to do anything to be installed in the WH again. If he isn’t, sentencing on his NY state felony convictions awaits and so does a federal criminal trial in which DoJ has made it clear that his efforts to overturn the 2020 election are not “official acts” even under the Supreme Court’s capacious presidential immunity doctrine.

"He will do anything."

raveling

Tom von Alten