Monday, February 24, 2020

The Present Darkness

The dark days are not "coming". The dark days are here.

- Rachel Maddow (2-21-2020)

This week's featured posts are "What's Wrong With a Decision-Making Convention?" and "Accelerating Corruption and Autocracy".

This week everybody was talking about the Justice Department

I covered this in "Accelerating Corruption and Autocracy".

and Bernie Sanders as front-runner

Sanders' win in the Nevada caucuses was impressive. He was a clear winner among Latino voters, a demographic that wasn't behind him in 2016. Sanders is now the clear front-runner, partly due to his own strength and partly due to the fracturing of his opposition. Even if you wanted to vote for the stop-Bernie candidate (and from my comment stream, I can tell that a lot of you don't), who would that be?

Now that I'm a Massachusetts voter, I have to make my choice on March 3. I'm still undecided, but I promise to explain my thinking next week, the day before I vote.

Right now I'm wondering if I've given Bernie a fair shake. I've been rooting against him, and I'm not sure whether that's for justifiable reasons, or whether it's because I'm still annoyed from 2016. In 2016, I was part of his big majority in the New Hampshire primary, but I was voting more to send a message to Hillary than because I seriously intended to make Bernie president. As the campaign wore on, I came to regret that vote.

Unlike some people who voted for Hillary against Trump, I don't fault Bernie for not campaigning harder for her in the fall. I think he did as much as could have been reasonably expected. But I thought a lot of his late-primary-campaign criticism of Hillary was unfair, that it continued well past the point where he had a chance to win, and that it set up Trump's "crooked Hillary" rhetoric. It was irresponsible, and he should have known better.

That said, this is one of those situations where turnabout is not fair play. As Bernie becomes the front-runner, I think we all should bear in mind that he may well become the nominee. And while I'm all for every candidate's and every voter's right to criticize, I think we need to try very hard to criticize fairly. For example, I think it's fine to say that Bernie should release his medical records, or to ask how his plans will be paid for, or how he will get them through Congress. But I don't think it's fair to call him a "communist" or to lie about what his healthcare plan will do. Trump will want to do that in the fall, if Bernie is nominated, and his rhetoric will sound more convincing if it can be prefaced with "Even Democrats say ..."

On electability, I don't know what to think. Polls consistently show Sanders running as well or better against Trump than the other Democrats do -- worse than Biden in some polls, but never by much. At the same time, I have yet to meet a Republican who's afraid of facing Bernie in the fall. Many of them are actively rooting for him, including (it seems) Trump. Maybe they're just stupid, or maybe they have some insight.

and the continuing spread of the Chinese virus

It's now known as COVID-19. Outbreaks are now happening in Italy and South Korea, which might imply that they will eventually happen everywhere.

Even so, try to maintain some perspective. Staying away from Chinese restaurants is not going to make you safer.

but you should pay more attention to Trump's acting DNI

I also discussed this in "Accelerating Corruption and Autocracy". Few things are could be worse than a Director of National Intelligence who tells the CIA what the President wants to hear them say, rather than tells the President what the best experts think is true.

and you also might be interested in ...

As I write this morning, the stock market is plunging. The Dow is about 1300 points below the peak it hit a week or two ago. I don't think the fall is Trump's fault any more than the rise was, but if you live by the sword you die by the sword.


I don't know how good her chances are, but I've got to root for Amy McGrath to beat Mitch McConnell. This online ad is from last summer, but it's still worth looking at.


Remember the original justification for the assassination of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani? Supposedly it prevented one or more "imminent attacks".

Well, never mind. The White House has sent Congress its official explanation for the raid, and the imminent-attack justification has vanished. Now the purpose of the assassination was to "deter future attacks".

Without the threat of an imminent attack, there was no reason the administration couldn't have consulted Congress, as envisioned in the War Powers Act. Instead, the report makes the argument that Congress intended the pre-Iraq-invasion Authorization for the Use of Military Force to include Iran, which is patently absurd.

In short, the Soleimani attack was an illegal assassination, and the President's initial explanation of it was a lie.


Researchers at Scripps Oceanography Institute offer some good news on climate change: One of the tipping-point disaster scenarios is less likely than previously thought.

A long-feared scenario in which global warming causes Arctic permafrost to melt and release enough greenhouse gas to accelerate warming and cause catastrophe probably won’t happen.

and let's close with something ambiguous

Sometimes it's hard to tell who a satirist is satirizing. ABC News reported:

Pigeons wearing MAGA hats and Donald Trump wigs have been released by a shadowy protest group calling themselves P.U.T.I.N. – Pigeons United to Interfere Now -- across the city of Las Vegas, Nevada

When I saw that, my first thought (after some concern about the pigeons) was "What a clever protest against Trump!" Plainly, the stunt casts MAGA-hatters as pigeons -- stupid and gullible. When I heard the group was calling itself PUTIN, that cinched it.

But apparently not, at least if the Las Vegas Review-Journal has it right.

The pigeon release was done as an “aerial protest piece in response to the arrival of the 2020 Democratic debate,” the group said. Six Democratic presidential candidates will debate Wednesday night in Las Vegas.

“The release date was also coordinated to serve as a gesture of support and loyalty to President Trump,” said a group member who goes by the alias Coo Hand Luke.

Or maybe Coo Hand Luke is spoofing the local reporter, pretending to be precisely the kind pigeon-like Trumpist the birds represent. Or not. Maybe the satire is too subtle for any of us to grasp.

Monday, February 10, 2020

Malice

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

- Abraham Lincoln
2nd Inaugural Address (3-4-1865)

As everybody knows, my family, our great country, and your President, have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people. They have done everything possible to destroy us, and by so doing, very badly hurt our nation. They know what they are doing is wrong, but they put themselves far ahead of our great country.

- Donald Trump
at the National Prayer Breakfast (2-6-2020)

This week's featured post is "Let's Talk Each Other Down". Think of it as a counterweight to all the depressing or panic-worthy stuff in this summary.

This week everybody was talking about Iowa and New Hampshire

OK, Iowa was a mess. But there's a reliable paper trail, so there's good reason to believe the result. Tomorrow is the New Hampshire primary, which I am amazed to discover I have not covered at all. I have not been to a single candidate event this year, despite living just over the border in Massachusetts.

To a large extent that's because the main thing that matters to me is electing Not Trump. I have likes and opinions, but I'm all-in for whoever gets the nomination. Anyway, here's one comment about each major contender:

  • Biden's fourth-place finish in Iowa was a huge disappointment, and he doesn't look to be running well in NH either. He's counting on his black support to get him back in the race in South Carolina. I'll bet Kamala Harris is kicking herself for getting out, because there is no obvious inheritor of Biden's black support if he fails.
  • Bloomberg is running such an unorthodox campaign that it's hard to know whether his strategy is working or not. But he gets Trump's goat better than any other candidate, and that has to count for something.
  • Buttigieg was the biggest beneficiary of Iowa. Sanders won the popular vote, but Buttigieg was the big surprise and wound up with the most delegates. His NH polls shot up afterwards, largely, I think, because his Iowa performance gave people who already like him a reason to take his candidacy seriously. (Likeability is one of those nebulous concepts that is easy to abuse and hides a bunch of prejudices. But for what it's worth, Pete is the candidate I feel the most affection for. That doesn't necessarily mean I plan to vote for him, though.) It's hard to tell whether this week's debate blunted his momentum or not.
  • Klobuchar is the tortoise in this race. She also got on the map in Iowa, and is probably the second choice of a lot of Biden's white supporters. She's polling near zero in South Carolina, though, so she needs to do well in New Hampshire to stay in the race.
  • Sanders got more first-round votes than any other candidate in Iowa, but his case for beating Trump didn't do so well. The theory of how Sanders wins in November is that (even though he may lose some voters in the center) he raises turnout by inspiring a lot of new voters to come to the polls. But turnout in Iowa was not much different from 2016, and much lower than 2008, when Obama really did inspire people. He needs a win in NH, but he also needs to win the right way, with a big turnout.
  • Warren is the president I would appoint, if the Universe would grant me that power. She's got to be disappointed in her distant third-place finish in Iowa, and recent polls have her running third in NH as well. She was briefly the front-runner last fall, but it's hard to see where her break-out state is.

Josh Marshall makes a prediction of how Trump will smear Bernie, should he become the front-runner. He also pre-debunks the smear.

and the final impeachment trial result

The biggest surprise of the Senate vote was that Trump's acquittal wasn't a party-line vote, and that the lone defector was a Republican, not a Democrat. After lots of speculation that Joe Manchin or some other red-state Democrat would find a way to excuse Trump, the Democrats held firm, and Mitt Romney found his conscience.

I've been a bit appalled at how uncharitable many of my social media friends have been, trying to see Romney's choice as some kind of 2024 calculation. That seems really unlikely to me. Mitt is smart enough to realize that no matter how badly Trump blows up, nobody is going to get the 2024 Republican nomination by being anti-Trump. Assuming Trump even bothers to observe the term-limit rule -- I mean, the Constitution is just a piece of paper -- the next Republican nominee is either a Trump successor (Pence? Ivanka? Don Jr.?) or somebody who has stayed conveniently off the national stage (like Paul Ryan or a governor).

I think Mitt is at a point in his career where he sees History staring him in the face, and doesn't want to be remembered as Trump's accomplice. I'm amazed that more late-in-their-careers Republicans haven't looked at things that way. Lamar Alexander, for example, has just guaranteed that none of the things he's proud of will be remembered. The headline of his obituary will be that he shut down the witnesses to Trump's crimes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5oPNG6HLgM&fbclid=IwAR3euto6Zz2lZoYM-ytCKtA3mkWkFcNysRR8QomtARqB7Y8-1h4HAl8gUKI

Mitt's vote has provided contrast for the cowardice of the other Republican senators. We can hope other Republicans will be emboldened to take a stand as well.

and reprisals against those involved in Trump's impeachment

The Washington Post put President Clinton's and President Trump's post-acquittal speeches side-by-side. They could not be more different. Clinton was short, contrite, and tried to put conflict behind him. ("I believe any person who asks for forgiveness has to be prepared to give it.")

Trump, by contrast, was long-winded and dishonest, and took no responsibility for the acts that started this whole national trauma.

Trump repeatedly called Democrats involved in the impeachment “evil,” “corrupt” and “vicious and mean.” He railed against the Russian investigation, former FBI director James B. Comey, and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, adding, “It was all bullshit.”

He seemed poised for revenge, and soon began to take it. Donald Jr. made the threat explicit:

Allow me a moment to thank—and this may be a bit of a surprise—Adam Schiff. Were it not for his crack investigation skills, @realDonaldTrump might have had a tougher time unearthing who all needed to be fired. Thanks, Adam!


After the show trial, the purge. Ambassador Gordon Sondland lost his job, as did Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman at the National Security Council. Somewhat stranger, Vindman's brother Yevgeny was also fired from his job as an NSC lawyer. But that also fits the Stalinist pattern: Once you've been judged to be an Enemy of the People, your relatives are also suspect. That's probably why Mitt Romney's niece, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, has been so quick to declare her fealty to the regime.

Joshua Geltzer and Ryan Goodman comment on the Just Security blog:

Some have suggested that the outcry sparked by Friday’s reprisals was overblown. After all, any president is, on some level, entitled to surround himself at the White House and be represented overseas by those he trusts. But the question raised by Friday’s purge is: trusts to do what? And that’s where these actions raise serious concerns for American democracy: because Trump increasingly wants an executive branch that’ll serve not the United States of America but Donald J. Trump personally.

Trump was punishing key witnesses for doing precisely what the United States Congress swore them in to do: explain what they’d seen and heard.

... [E]xploitation of America’s diplomatic, military, and law enforcement mechanisms was the very usurpation of power that got Trump impeached in the first place. At the heart of the Ukraine extortion scheme was Trump and his personal lawyer’s appropriation of those mechanisms for political benefit and to the detriment of the country’s national security interests. Having survived impeachment, Trump now seeks to accelerate the redirection of America’s instruments of power into his own instruments of power.


Trump is not the only Republican engaged in post-impeachment reprisals. During the trial, Senator Rand Paul on numerous occasions named someone he claimed was the whistleblower whose complaint started the Ukraine investigation.

Friday, Tom Mueller (author of the book Crisis of Conscience about the history of whistleblowing) wrote a complaint to the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, explaining how Senator Paul's behavior violated the law.

Senator Paul’s actions constituted a retaliatory outing of a government witness—which is criminal conduct. Federal criminal law prohibits the obstruction of justice, and provides that “[w]hoever knowingly, with the intent to retaliate, takes any action harmful to any person, including interference with the lawful employment or livelihood of any person, for providing to a law enforcement officer any truthful information relating to the commission or possible commission of any Federal offense, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.”

Paul's outing of the whistleblower occurred not just on the floor of the Senate (where it might be constitutionally protected) but also outside the Senate and on Twitter.

If Senator Paul goes unpunished, this will be the kind of weakening of the law typical of the descent towards fascism. In the late stages of fascism, criticism of the Leader is punished by the State directly. But in earlier stages, critics simply lose the protection of the laws and can be attacked by followers of the Leader without consequence. When the Brownshirts come to beat them up, the police watch and do nothing.


Speaking of brownshirts: Immediately after Romney's guilty vote, CPAC chair Matt Schlapp disinvited him from the flagship conservative convention. Yesterday, Schlapp said "I would actually be afraid for his physical safety" if he showed up.

and the State of the Union

The State of the Union address was Tuesday. Trump stayed on script, but the script was full of lies and exaggerations.


At the end of the State of the Union address, Nancy Pelosi very decisively ripped up Trump's speech. For some reason, this display of disrespect resounded across right-wing media, as if this were most uncivil thing to happen in months. I agree with Trae Crowder, a.k.a. the Liberal Redneck:

The level of disrespect she showed by, like, ripping up the president's speech at the State of the Union like that -- it's nowhere near disrespectful enough. ... This is the most disrespectful motherfucker on Planet Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDm_virxvxw&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1x8u3UMKyyHav5Vm0l127O5QvJw8wGSQr0p1MwA7z6-LOtYi0hM7rZJP4


Medals of Freedom are essentially lifetime achievement awards that presidents give to people who make Americans proud. Usually that means other Americans, but sometimes a medal goes to a foreigner (Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking) who just makes us proud to be human.

Presidents have complete discretion to pick whoever they want, and for the most part they've done a good job. Over the years MoF awards have gone to authors like John Steinbeck and Harper Lee, artists like Georgia O'Keefe and Andrew Wyeth, musicians like Count Basie and Bob Dylan, and businessmen like Henry Ford II and IBM-founder Tom Watson. Computer-programming pioneer Grace Hopper got one, and so did photographer Ansel Adams. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel got one for being the conscience of the world.

In baseball's Hall of Fame not everyone is Babe Ruth, and the same thing happens with Medals of Freedom. They've also gone to people who were famous and deserving of respect but not legendary, like actor Tom Hanks, Western-genre author Louis L'Amour, and Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels. It happens. Presidents have their own idiosyncratic tastes. Some awards looked fine at the time, but shameful in retrospect, like President Bush giving one to Bill Cosby in 2002.

Well, Tuesday during the State of the Union address, President Trump awarded one to Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh has been a purveyor of hate and lies for more than 30 years. Who can forget his branding of Georgetown student Sandra Fluke as a "slut" and a "prostitute" for the unpardonable sin of defending ObamaCare's contraception mandate?

So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.

Feel proud yet? How about when he accused Michael J. Fox of exaggerating the symptoms of his Parkinson's Disease? Or when he made up a series of "facts" in order to falsely blame measles outbreaks on immigrant children? Or his addiction to prescription drugs, which resulted in a settlement with the State of Florida to get them to drop charges for doctor shopping?

Politifact has looked into 42 of Limbaugh's controversial statements, and found zero of them to be entirely true. Thirty-five were rated Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire.

In short, if I were Sidney Poitier or Buzz Aldrin or some other living recipient of the Medal, I'd be looking at that award with considerably less pride than I did a week ago.

Not all of Trump's awardees have cheapened the Medal. (I thought NBA legends Bob Cousy and Jerry West were worthy choices.) But a number of them look like deliberate attempts to debase the award: ethically challenged Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese; Arthur Laffer, creator of the discredited "Laffer Curve" theory that tax cuts increase revenue; and Miriam Adelson, wife of GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson.

This is some of the hidden damage Trump is doing to America. Even if we get rid of him in November, it will take a while to recover the value of things he has desecrated.

and you also might be interested in ...

David Fahrenthold has found yet another way that Trump is profiteering off the presidency: He's making the Secret Service stay at his properties, and then overcharging them.

President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties — billing U.S. taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night, according to federal records and people who have seen receipts. ...

“If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Trump’s son Eric said in a Yahoo Finance interview last year.

Are you surprised to learn that's a lie? However, the really scandalous part of the story is the extent to which Trump has kept the public in the dark about his self-dealing.

The Secret Service is required to tell Congress twice a year about what it spends to protect Trump at his properties. But since 2016, it has only filed two of the required six reports, according to congressional offices. The reasons, according to Secret Service officials: key personnel left and nobody picked up the job. Even in those two reports, the lines for Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago were blank.

As I said above about Rand Paul, this is how fascism starts: Not with new laws, but with refusing to enforce the old laws.


A somewhat technical but worth-reading NYT article about Instex, a device Germany, France, and Britain set up to avoid US sanctions on countries and businesses that trade with Iran. It's not working, but the lengths the US is going to in order to keep it from working is a lesson in how hard it is to be an independent US ally these days. Either you give up sovereignty and let Trump write your foreign policy, or the full economic fury of the United States will be unleashed on you. Sooner or later, our former allies will realize they need to work with China to balance our power.


China's National Health Commission announced the 97 people died of coronavirus yesterday, more than any previous daily total. That brought the overall Chinese death toll to 908.

and let's close with an inside joke

In order to understand this, you need to know the stories of my people.

Monday, February 3, 2020

Decadent Superfluities

The proper procedure, the gathering of evidence -- these things mean nothing, not anymore. Not since Hitler. He cuts through these decadent superfluities and shows us that the conclusion is everything, Gunther. You of all people should understand this. The important thing in concluding a case successfully is actually concluding it.

- SS General Johann Rattenhuber,
as fictionalized in Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr

Will we pursue the search for truth, or will we dodge, weave, and evade?

-- Senator Mitch McConnell,
discussing investigations of President Clinton, 2-12-1998

This week's featured posts are "If Obama ..." and "Jared's Plan for Mideast Peace".

This week everybody was talking about impeachment

Friday, the Senate voted not to hear any witnesses or subpoena any documents. The vote was 51-49, with Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and all 47 Democrats voting to hold a real trial. The other 51 Republicans voted to join Trump's obstruction conspiracy.

it was predictable (I predicted it Tuesday on Facebook) that the number of Republican crossovers would be either two or many. If a third Republican voted to hear witnesses the motion would still have failed, but then all 50 Republicans voting against a real trial would be personally responsible. ("You, Cory Gardner, could have made the difference and let the American people hear what John Bolton had to say, but you joined the cover-up instead.") If exactly four voted with the Democrats, each of them would be held personally responsible by Trump's base. Nobody wanted that kind of responsibility, so it had to be two or many.

As it is, the only surprising thing was that the Senate didn't go straight into an acquittal vote Friday by the dark of night. Instead, Senators will get the opportunity to make speeches explaining their positions before voting to acquit Trump on Wednesday.

I intend the quote at the top of the page as a comment on the Republican approach to this trial: The conclusion was fore-ordained, and nothing mattered other than getting there. Don't think about the evidence, don't try to find out what happened, don't concern yourself with the good of the country -- just get to the conclusion, because that's all that counts. It's fundamentally a fascist approach to justice, so I think the Nazi comparisons are appropriate.


Mitt Romney's vote to call witnesses in Trump's impeachment trial had immediate consequences: It got him explicitly uninvited from CPAC 2020, the flagship convention of what used to be the conservative movement. Not even his niece would defend him. If she did, maybe she'd become an Enemy of the People too.

Romney's expulsion just underlines something that should be obvious anyway: Today's "conservative" movement is no longer about conservative principles, or any principles at all. It's a cult of personality centered on Donald Trump. Romney's vote didn't subvert conservatism in any way, but it did inconvenience the Great Orange Führer. So Mitt is excommunicated.


Alan Dershowitz's opinion that Trump's misdeeds are not impeachable represents a complete reversal of the opinion he held during the Clinton impeachment. But he explains the difference like this:

[Then] I simply accepted the academic consensus on an issue that was not on the front burner at the time. But because this impeachment directly raises the issue of whether criminal behavior is required, I have gone back and read all the relevant historical material as nonpartisan academics should always do and have now concluded that the framers did intend to limit the criteria for impeachment to criminal type acts akin to treason, bribery, and they certainly did not intend to extend it to vague and open-ended and non-criminal accusations such as abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Tuesday, Josh Marshall pulled no punches in his assessment:

To put it baldly, if it’s a topic and area of study you know nothing about and after a few weeks of cramming you decide that basically everyone who’s studied the question is wrong, there’s a very small chance you’ve rapidly come upon a great insight and a very great likelihood you’re an ignorant and self-regarding asshole.

Then, in the Q&A period Wednesday, Dershowitz went completely off the rails:

[I]f a hypothetical president of the United States said to a hypothetical leader of a foreign country, "unless you build a hotel with my name on it, and unless you give me a million dollar kickback, I will withhold the funds." That’s an easy case. That’s purely corrupt and in the purely private interest.

But a complex middle case is, "I want to be elected. I think I’m a great president. I think I’m the greatest president there ever was. If I’m not elected the national interest will suffer greatly." That cannot be impeachable.

A lot of people misrepresented this doctrine as saying that the president can do anything to get elected, and it's OK. Bad as it is, it doesn't quite go that far. A better explanation is here.

and Jared's Mideast "Peace" plan

I originally just wanted a quick note about this, but it got out of hand and became its own post.

and the Iowa caucus

It's tonight, and I have no idea who will win. Bernie Sanders seems to have the late momentum, but the polling is really tight. The RCP polling average has Sanders at 24.2%, Biden 20.2%, Buttigieg 16.4%, Warren 15.6%, and Klobuchar 8.6%.

and Brexit finally happened

It became official in London Friday night at 11, which was midnight in Brussels. The United Kingdom is no longer part of the European Union. There is still a lot to work out: an UK/EU trade agreement, trade arrangements with other countries that are used to dealing with the UK as part of the EU, whether Scotland will seek independence and rejoin the EU, and so forth. But at least the uncertainty is over and the adjustment can begin. I'm reminded of a quote from the South African author Alan Paton:

Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

and the Coronavirus is still spreading

The latest numbers say that 361 Chinese have died from the virus. That already makes it deadlier than the 2002 SARS outbreak, which killed 349 people in mainland China. There are more than 17,000 confirmed cases.

Large parts of the Chinese economy have shut down in response to the virus, and it's anybody's guess how big a hit the world economy will take. Lots of manufactured goods contain some part that is made in China and nowhere else, so it's hard to say how far the ripple effects will go. And if your company sells products in China, your financial plan may take a hit.

you also might be interested in ...

This week three news stories made Trump's border wall look a little less "impenetrable" than advertised. Wednesday, a section of it blew down in a windstorm. (We knew that coyotes were helping migrants sneak across the border, but now it looks like the Big Bad Wolf has gotten involved as well.) Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the wall is vulnerable to flash floods, and so it will need flood gates that will have to be left open for months at a time. Also on Thursday, US officials announced the discovery of a tunnel under the border; it's 70 feet underground and goes for nearly a mile.

Previous articles have noted how easy it is to saw through the wall or climb over it.


I'm not sure how I missed this Vox video "Why Obvious Lies Make Great Propaganda" when it came out in August, 2018. It examines the "Firehose of Falsehoods" propaganda technique, which was pioneered by Putin before it was adopted by Trump.

Unlike most propaganda, the lies in the firehose aren't intended to be credible. The point is not to convince people that your lies are true, but to demonstrate that reality has no power to control what you say. Ultimately, the goal is to reduce everything to a struggle: There is no True or False, only Our Side vs. Their Side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nknYtlOvaQ0&feature=youtu.be


A justice of the peace in Waco has been refusing to perform same-sex marriages, despite being the only marriage-performing JP in town. When the state's Commission on Judicial Conduct gave her an official warning, she sued. She is seeking $100K in damages. The state attorney general is refusing to defend the Commission in court, claiming that this is a "religious liberty" issue.

Once again, "religious liberty" being used as a code-word for Christian special rights. Imagine, for comparison, that a devout Hindu health inspector refused to sign any permits to open restaurants that serve beef. It's absurd to think the Texas AG would stand up for his non-Christian religious liberty. "Religious liberty" is for conservative Christians, not for anybody else.

My position: I think public officials should either do their jobs, implement reasonable workarounds that are invisible to the public they serve, or find new jobs. No citizen should ever go to a public office, only to be told that they can't be served because some official's "religious liberty" allows him or her to discriminate against that citizen.


The Trump administration rolled back Obama's restriction on the use of land mines because ... . I got nothing; it just looks like evil for the sake of evil.

Well, I don't exactly have nothing, I have an attack of paranoia: What if this is a prelude to mining the southern border? I haven't heard anybody in the administration threaten to do this, so my fear is based on nothing right now.


In spite of an $28 billion dollar federal bailout, farm bankruptcies were higher in 2019 than in any year since 2011.


Six more countries have been added to Trump's travel ban, including Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa.


Every week I could do a bunch of Trump-is-stupid stories, but I don't think they serve much purpose. Occasionally, though, one is actually funny.

So after the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl last night -- in a great game, BTW -- Trump tweeted congratulations for how well they "represented the Great State of Kansas". (The tweet was later removed.) The problem: Kansas City straddles the Kansas/Missouri border, and the Chiefs play on the Missouri side.

Recalling Trump's hurricane-threatening-Alabama fiasco, somebody on Facebook came up with a Sharpie solution.

 

and let's close with something backwards (or not)

Weird Al's song of palindromes: "Bob".