Monday, May 31, 2021

Revelations

When people are moving heaven and earth to block an investigation, you've got to ask: What is it they're afraid will be revealed?

- Senator Angus King (I-Maine)

This week's featured post is "The Bipartisanship Charade is Almost Over".

This week everybody was talking about the Trump grand jury

Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. had "convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself".

Vance has had Trump's tax returns for about three months, after fighting a years-long legal battle to obtain them. In March, The New Yorker had a long article on Vance and the Trump investigation, which it described as

a broad examination of the possibility that Trump and his company engaged in tax, banking, and insurance fraud. Investigators are questioning whether Trump profited illegally by deliberately misleading authorities about the value of his real-estate assets. [Former Trump lawyer Michael] Cohen has alleged that Trump inflated property valuations in order to get favorable bank loans and insurance policies, while simultaneously lowballing the value of the same assets in order to reduce his tax burden.

The New York Times also claimed in September to have seen Trump's tax returns, and a more recent article summarizes his questionable tax avoidance strategies.

https://peoplebranch.org/2017/03/24/trump-is-a-traitor-lock-him-up/

The vision of Trump in an orange jumpsuit is so compelling that Democrats are easily tempted to waste time speculating about how or when it might happen. But we just don't know. When Republicans investigate Democrats -- like the Starr investigation of Bill Clinton or the FBI probe into Hillary's emails -- those investigations leak, because politics was the point from the beginning; the investigation was never about finding a serious crime and taking it to court. But from Mueller and Comey through to Vance, the various investigations into Trump have not leaked.

So despite the many hours of coverage this topic has attracted this week, the legitimate tea-leaf reading can be summed up fairly quickly: Vance must believe he can prove that somebody committed a crime. Maybe it's Trump. Or maybe it's somebody Vance hopes to flip against Trump, like Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg or one of Trump's children.

But financial charges against rich men are hard to make stick, both because plutocrats hire good lawyers, and because they can always hide behind underlings. ("I just the sign the documents my staff tells me to sign. I couldn't possibly read them all.") Convicting Trump will require getting some of those underlings to flip. Somebody needs to tell a jury, "I explained this to him and he told me to break the law."

One thing I can predict: If Trump faces charges, he will instantly transform from a brilliant businessman to Sergeant I-Know-Nothing Schultz. Something similar happened when he answered questions (in writing) for Bob Mueller. After years of telling us how smart he is -- "I have a very good brain" -- Trump suddenly sounded like an escapee from the dementia ward. No matter what Mueller asked, Trump's answer was some form of "I don't remember."

and anniversaries of racist violence

Tuesday marked one year since George Floyd's murder. Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre.

With regard to George Floyd, the big question raised by the one-year mark is: How much has changed? And the answer is: some things, but not nearly enough.

The biggest change, in my opinion, is the precedent set by the Chauvin trial itself: George Floyd's killer was convicted of murder, and other Minneapolis police officers testified against him. It's still possible to argue that Chauvin should have been convicted of first-degree murder rather than second, but "Police always get away with it" isn't true any more.

Laws have also changed, at least somewhat. Numerous cities and states have passed some kind of police reform, and some version of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act may get through Congress this summer. Mostly the reforms center around when and how police are allowed to use force.

Colorado now bans the use of deadly force to apprehend or arrest a person suspected only of minor or nonviolent offenses. Also, though many states permit the use of deadly force to prevent “escape,” five states enacted restrictions or prohibitions on shooting at fleeing vehicles or suspects, a policy aimed at preventing deaths like that of Adam Toledo, a 13-year old shot by Chicago police during a foot chase. Additionally, 9 states and DC enacted complete bans on chokeholds and other neck restraints while 8 states enacted legislation restricting their use to instances in which officers are legally justified to use deadly force.

But the national shock of the Floyd murder, the millions of Americans who demonstrated against it, and the many white people who finally seemed to recognize the problem, appeared (just for a moment) to promise much more. Perhaps the nation would fundamentally rethink public safety and the role of police. "Defund the Police" may have inspired more backlash than reform, but nonetheless the idea was getting out there: Not every kind of disorder is best handled by people with guns. Maybe some of the money that now passes through police departments should instead go to unarmed first responders trained in mental health or social work. Maybe traffic tickets could be written by civil servants who can't shoot people.

Despite a few tentative steps, that promise has gone unfulfilled. The symbol here is the Minneapolis City Council's pledge to "end policing as we know it", which came to nothing.

Finally, the bottom line has not budged: The unjustified killing of Americans by police continues, and the victims continue to be disproportionately non-white. We know this both anecdotally -- Rayshard Brooks, Daunte Wright, Ma’Khia Bryant, Adam Toledo -- and statistically.

Any individual killing has details that can be debated, but the larger picture is undeniable: No comparable country has this problem to any similar degree.

If we were rational about this problem, US police departments would be flying folks in from Norway or England to explain how they police modern cities without killing people. But instead, American cops have been paying "experts" like Dave Grossman of the Killology Research Group to tell them how to be better "warriors" on the "battleground" of American cities.


The 100-year anniversary of Tulsa raises a different set of issues: how we teach and commemorate US history. When I was growing up in the 1960s, "race riot" meant outbreaks of violence in Black sections of Los Angeles or Detroit. Race riots were yet another reason for Whites to fear Blacks, and to vote for "law and order" candidates like Richard Nixon or George Wallace.

Only decades later did I discover that often Whites have been the rioters. I'm not sure when exactly I first learned about the destruction of the prosperous Greenwood district in Tulsa, but it has definitely been in the last ten years.

When it was over on June 1, 1921, 35 square blocks of what was nicknamed Black Wall Street lay in smoldering ruins. There were reports that bodies were thrown into the Arkansas River or buried in mass graves. Hundreds of survivors were rounded up at gunpoint and held for weeks at camps.

No one was ever held accountable for the lives lost or the property destroyed. Insurance claims filed by homeowners and business owners were rejected

I didn't learn about that in school. In 2014, I described my high school education in Black history like this:

Except for Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, [the Black people Lincoln emancipated] vanished like the Lost Tribes of Israel. They wouldn’t re-enter history until the 1950s, when for some reason they still weren’t free.

So: Black people in Tulsa in 1921? What Black people?

Fortunately, ignorance about the Tulsa riot is declining. Recently, Tulsa has become a touchstone in popular culture's re-examination of America's racial history. It plays a key role, for example, in both the Watchmen and Lovecraft Country series on HBO.

Similarly, I first heard of Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching campaign when I went to the National Museum of African American History in 2018. Ditto for the Harlem Renaissance. I mean, are you sure Black culture bloomed in the 1920s? Did we even have Black people then?

So as Republican legislatures ban "critical race theory" from schools and protect Confederate statues against liberals who want to "erase history", it's worth remembering Tulsa. The history of white supremacy in America, and the racist violence that has maintained it, was erased from public consciousness long ago. We need efforts like the 1619 Project to recover the national memories that white racist propaganda has made us forget.

and the pandemic

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1000860/the-new-american-divide

Recent trends continue: Vaccinations continue to rise while new cases and deaths fall. The 7-day average for daily new cases is down to 21K, after peaking over 250K in mid-January. The number of people with at least one dose of the vaccine has crossed 50%.

A new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that we might get to the 70% vaccinated level that some experts say would give American society herd immunity. In particular, some holdout groups are starting to come around, particularly Latinos and people without college degrees.

Sometimes trends advance because nobody wants to be on the fringe. As long as some friend you think of as more sensible is holding out, joining the trend doesn't seem urgent. But at some point, it's just you and people you think of as wackos.


I kinda-sorta get how a person might mistrust the government and the medical establishment so much that they avoid vaccination. Last summer, when it looked like Trump might push the FDA to approve a vaccine prematurely so that he could tout it as a campaign issue, I was skeptical myself. But that didn't happen, millions of people have been vaccinated with few side-effects, and the case-counts and deaths have been dropping. So I got vaccinated.

But even in the Trump-corrupts-the-FDA scenario, it never occurred to me that I might protest against other people taking the vaccine, just like it never occurs to me to hassle people who wear masks in situations where I don't think they're necessary. (If you want to wear a mask when you're alone in your own home, go for it. Why should I care?) After all, the point of not taking the vaccine would have been to make my own risk assessment, which I should be free to do in all but the most dire circumstances. But using my judgment to overrule other people's risk assessments is something else entirely.

Well, I'm clearly not thinking like a true right-wing loony. In fact, people are protesting against the vaccine, including a Tennessee woman -- what got into Tennessee this week? -- who shouted "No vaccine!" as she drove her SUV through a vaccination tent "at a high rate of speed", threatening both the medical staff and ordinary people who came to be vaccinated. She's been arrested and charged with seven counts of reckless endangerment.

Apparently, this is a thing. The Washington Post reports:

Demonstrations have popped up in vaccination sites such as high schools and racing tracks in recent months, and anti-vaccine protesters temporarily shut down Dodger Stadium after maskless people blocked the entrance to one of the country’s largest sites.

I also can't explain why hitting people with a car has become such a popular tactic on the right, to the point that Republican legislatures are starting to write it into law.

you also might be interested in ...

Da(Y)go Brown:

A lady just came up to me and said “Speak English, we are in San Diego.” So I politely responded by asking her “how do I say ‘San Diego’ in English?” The look of bewilderment on her face made it feel like a Friday.


Apparently by coincidence, two once-crazy ideas are now being treated more respectfully: the lab-leak theory of Covid, and the existence of UFOs.

I'm not really in a position to say anything definitive on either theory, but I do think it's important not to jump too far: Even if Covid leaked out of a Chinese lab, that doesn't mean it was engineered by humans or released as a bioweapon attack. More likely, the lab collected a bunch of viruses to study, and one got loose.

Wired's Adam Rogers does a good job of separating ordinary scientific uncertainty from what he calls "weaponized uncertainty".

When scientists say “We’re not totally sure,” they mean their analysis of some event or outcome includes a statistical possibility that they’re wrong. They never go 100 percent. Sometimes they think they might possibly be wronger than others. This is the world of confidence intervals, of mathematical models and curves, of uncertainty principles. But non-scientists hear “We’re not totally sure” as “So you mean there’s a chance?” It’s the mad interstitial space between scientific—let’s say, statistical—uncertainty and the meaning of normal human uncertainty. This is where “just asking questions [wink]” lives.

It’s a subtle difference. When Tony Fauci says he’d like to get more certainty, for example, he most likely means that, yeah, all things being equal, it’s better to know than not know—especially if that’s the way the political winds are blowing.

But when political actors like senators and right-wing TV commentators talk about this uncertainty, this doubt, they’re trying to jam a crowbar into this gap in understanding and lever it open. They’re still hinting that the Chinese government is doing something sneaky here, something warlike—and that even the scientists think it’s possible. Because if they can seem to have the backing of science, they can use that power elsewhere. They can bang shoes on tables about Biden administration inaction and Chinese skullduggery to distract from their lies about the election, about attempts to curtail voting rights, about the January 6 insurrection, about efforts to get the world vaccinated against the disease they claim to want to understand better.

FWIW, I live next door to a biologist, who tells me that Mother Nature is still much better at constructing nasty viruses than we are. Apparently, engineering the Andromeda Strain is more difficult than the movies would have you believe.

Same point about UFOs: Pentagon videos of literal "unidentified flying objects" do not prove that aliens walk among us. "We do not know what we're seeing" does not equal "We're seeing alien spaceships."


Richard Pape from the University of Chicago's Project on Security and Threats, on what he's learned from studying the people arrested for the Trump Insurrection:

One overriding driver across all the three studies that we've now conducted is the fear of the Great Replacement. The Great Replacement is the idea that the rights of Hispanics and Blacks -- that is, the rights of minorities -- are outpacing the rights of whites. ... The number one risk factor [in whether a county sent an insurrectionist to Washington] is the percent decline of the non-Hispanic white population.

The whole interview is worth watching. The insurrectionists are overwhelmingly white and male. We ordinarily think of violent revolutionaries as young and desperate, but these folks are mostly middle-aged and well-to-do, with some of them owning their own businesses. What unites them is racial anxiety, their fear that whites are losing their superior place in American society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dskVval50AE&t=225s

Sean Hannity, who is worth $250 million and makes $40 million a year, advises his listeners to "work two jobs" rather than "rely on the government for anything". Better that you should never have time to see your kids than that he should have to pay taxes.


http://baptistbookworm.blogspot.com/2011/01/postcards-from-wall-19.html

and let's close with something ridiculous

"One of the craziest, little-league type plays you'll ever see." Batting with a runner on second and two outs Thursday afternoon, Cub shortstop Javier Baez apparently grounds out to end the inning. When the throw from third pulls the first baseman Will Craig off the base, he moves to tag Baez, who starts retreating back towards home. Craig forgets he could just go back to tag first and end the inning, and things just get wilder from there.

Monday, May 24, 2021

Roles

Money is a role, not a thing.

- Paul Krugman,
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Money" (5-21-2021)

This week's featured post is "The Problem With Bitcoin".

This week everybody was talking about January 6

https://theweek.com/cartoons/983971/political-cartoon-mcconnell-mccarthy-jan-6-gop

What more is there to say about the Republican refusal to support a bipartisan commission to investigate Trump's insurrection? Kevin McCarthy gave Rep. John Katko a list of demands before he negotiated an agreement with House Homeland Security Chair Benny Thompson, and Katko achieved them: Republicans and Democrats name an equal number of members of the commission, and have equal influence on subpoenas and staff. And yet McCarthy refused to take Yes for an answer: He opposed the commission anyway, though he couldn't stop 35 Republicans in the House from voting for it.

In the Senate, Mitch McConnell is against the commission, and there appears to be slight chance of getting 10 Republicans to break a filibuster. So: no bipartisan commission.

A congressional investigation will still happen, but it will have to take place in committees with Democratic leadership, which Republicans will doubtless label a "partisan witch hunt". So the Trump Insurrection will remain a he-said/she-said issue.

That seems to be what Republicans want. They had their chance to seek truth, and they said no.


Meanwhile, many Republicans are simply lying about January 6. Like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin:

I've talked to people that were there. By and large, it was peaceful protest except for, you know, there were a number of people, basically agitators, that with the crowd and breached the Capitol.

And, you know, that's really the truth of what's happening here. But they like to paint that narrative, so they can paint a broad brush, and basically impugn 75 million Americans, call them potentially domestic terrorists and potential armed insurrectionists as well if they get another chance. So this is all about a narrative that the left wants to continue to push, and Republicans should not cooperate with them at all.

Those largely "peaceful" protesters beat Capitol police with flagpoles. I think Johnson would not enjoy seeing some similarly "peaceful" protesters show up at his office.

I assume Johnson's 75 million is supposed to refer to Trump voters. Actually there were 74.2 million, which would round to 74 million. I don't know why it's necessary to constantly exaggerate Trump's support. But more importantly, I don't know anyone whose narrative says that Trump voters are to blame for the insurrection. Literally no one.

For the record, if you merely voted for Trump, I profoundly disagree with you, but I don't question your loyalty to America, to democracy, or to the Constitution simply because you voted differently than I did. If you listened to President Trump's "Save America" speech, but then went home without breaking any laws, I think you exercised your rights as an American. But if you broke into the Capitol in order to stop the constitutionally mandated counting of the electoral votes, if you roamed the halls of Congress chanting "Hang Mike Pence" or calling out "Naaancy" while the Speaker of the House hid from you, I think you're a traitor, and I hope you go to jail for a long, long time.

and Bitcoin

The 30% crash on Wednesday was the trigger to get out ideas I've been thinking for a while. They're in the featured post.

and Israel/Palestine

A ceasefire went into effect Friday, and seems to be holding.

Both sides claim victory in the recent fighting, which underlines the point I was making last week: Neither side is motivated to seek a lasting peace. Israel can point to all the Hamas infrastructure it destroyed in Gaza. Hamas can point to the destabilization of Israeli society, and the increasing radicalization of Arab Israelis.


Several worthwhile articles came out recently. The New Yorker's David Remnick talks to a friend and fellow journalist inside Gaza. And another New Yorker article by Ruth Margalit looks at the tensions between Jews and Arabs inside an Israeli city.

Whenever I'm tempted to stereotype American Christians as fundamentalist Trumpists, I go back to John Pavlovitz, a pastor and blogger from North Carolina.

In moments like these, people want you to pick a side because that’s how most people’s minds work. They need a hard and fast litmus test position so that can sum you up and decide whether they are for you or against you, whether you are good or evil. But that kind of all-or-nothing extremism seems to be what has fueled and perpetuated the conflicts were watching right now.

So, with all that I don’t know and all I can’t understand and with all the nuances that escape me, here’s the side I’m on:

I’m on the side of ten-year old girls and boys wherever they live and whoever they’ve been raised by and whatever God they pray to and whatever pigmentation their faces carry. I am for disparate humanity being treated with equal reverence without caveat or condition and I am against powerful people who dehumanize the powerless for political gain.

As long as any children have to contend with nightmares that they were born into and cannot escape and do not deserve—I’m going to declare how grievous that is.

Until there is no longer terror in any young child’s eyes, that will be the side I’m on.


You don't have to be a fan of Bibi Netanyahu to deplore the recent outbreaks of anti-Semitism in the US. It would be bad enough to persecute random Israelis because you dislike what their government has been doing. (Ditto for the citizens of any other country. I wouldn't have wanted foreigners mad at Trump to take their revenge on me if I had happened to be in their country during his administration.)

But American Jews are Americans. Full stop. They're not Israelis, and Netanyahu is not their leader.

I resent it when supporters of the Israeli government blur the boundary between criticizing Israel and anti-Semitism (as Ben Shapiro is doing now). But that puts a responsibility on me to guard that boundary. I can't object to Shapiro, and then wink and nod at people harassing Jews.

If you're in doubt about your own discourse, An Injustice offers a guide for talking about Israel without invoking anti-Semitic tropes.

and the pandemic

We're getting close to having vaccinated half the population with at least one dose. If you're only looking at the eligible population -- people over 12 -- we've at least partially vaccinated 58%. New vaccinations are well below their peak, but still close to 2 million a day.

New England is leading the parade: New Hampshire's fully vaccinated percentage is 41%, just slightly above the national average of 39%. But Rhode Island is at 49.7%, and all the other New England states are over 50% fully vaccinated.

The South is trailing. Mississippi is at the bottom with 26.5% fully vaccinated. Then come Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee -- all below 31%.

So far, that difference is not showing up in the new-case numbers: Vermont and Mississippi are both averaging 5 new cases per 100K people, while Rhode Island and Wyoming (31% fully vaccinated) both have 14.

New cases are down to a daily average around 25,000 nationally, down tenfold from the January peak. Average daily deaths are below 600, lower than they've been since July. In January, that average was over 3,000.

and you also might be interested in ...

https://theweek.com/cartoons/983981/political-cartoon-gop-voter-suppression

The Supreme Court will consider an appeal from Mississippi concerning its ban on abortions after 15 weeks, which was struck down by lower courts in accordance with Roe v Wade and subsequent Supreme Court cases. The only reason to take up the case is if the Court wants to alter those precedents in some way. This will be the first abortion ruling since Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Court.


https://theweek.com/cartoons/983665/political-cartoon-biden-kevin-mccarthy

Unsurprisingly, there is still no deal to be had on infrastructure. The only question is when Democrats will go ahead with a reconciliation package, and whether Senator Manchin will support it.


Yesterday, the NYT published an article about the problems population decline might cause. Some projections have the world population peaking around 2070, and then heading downward. In most first-world countries, fertility is already well below the replacement rate.

Given the strain that increased population puts on the environment, it's hard to get worried about this. But it will require some adjustment.

A point worth making: The US will be one of the last first-world countries to feel the negative effects of population decline, if it preserves its ability to integrate immigrants into its society.


Another NYT article makes a point I rarely hear: The doubling of life expectancy during the 20th century wasn't just due to scientific advances like antibiotics. Without social and political change, the benefits of the new science would never have reached the masses.


https://jensorensen.com/2021/05/15/wokester-madness-race/

Nikole Hannah-Jones will not get the tenured position that typically goes with the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina's Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for creating the 1619 Project that emphasizes the role of racism and slavery in American history. She has received a MacArthur Genius Grant. NC Policy Watch quotes Hussman School Dean Susan King:

Hannah-Jones was on the school’s radar as a potential faculty member before the publication of “The 1619 Project,” King said. But the project is part of Hannah-Jones’s long career of reporting powerfully on race. ...

Last summer, Hannah-Jones went through the rigorous tenure process at UNC, King said. Hannah-Jones submitted a package King said was as well reviewed as any King had ever seen. Hannah-Jones had enthusiastic support from faculty and the tenure committee, with the process going smoothly every step of the way — until it reached the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees.

[A board member] who had direct knowledge of the board’s conversations about Hannah-Jones ... had one word for the roadblock to Hannah-Jones gaining tenure. “Politics.”

Hannah-Jones appears to be a victim of conservative financier Art Pope, who funds a network of groups that dominate Republican politics in North Carolina. One of those organizations is the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Last week, a columnist for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (formerly known as the Pope Center for Higher Education) wrote that UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees must prevent Hannah-Jones’s hiring. If they were not willing to do so, the column said, the UNC Board of Governors should amend system policies to require every faculty hire to be vetted by each school’s board of trustees.

The upshot is that conservatives are doing exactly what they accuse liberals of: violating academic freedom to suppress points of view they don't like.


In the post-Trump era, no scandal sidelines a Republican candidate. You just brazen it out, the way he did.

In Wyoming, State Senator Anthony Bouchard, one of the Trumpist candidates challenging Liz Cheney for the Republican nomination to Congress, admitted (ahead of it coming out elsewhere) that when he was 18 he got a 14-year-old girl pregnant. They married at 19 and 15, and got divorced three years later. She committed suicide at 20. Bouchard is "almost" estranged from the son, who has "made some wrong choices in his life". (The linked article quotes another source claiming the son faces "multiple sexual offense charges" in California.)

There's always the question: Aren't teen-age mistakes forgivable? After all, who among us wants to be judged for who we were at 18? For me, the answer to the forgiveness question hinges on three other questions: Does the person who made the mistake understand and take responsibility for it? Has he or she learned? Are they wiser now?

Bouchard expresses no shame about his sexual abuse of an underage girl, describing himself and his victim as "two teen-agers". He says: "It’s like the Romeo and Juliet story." So the answers to those questions are No.

Like Trump, Bouchard may seem an unlikely choice to represent the party of "family values". But also like Trump, Bouchard is the real victim here. "This is really a message about how dirty politics is. They’ll stop at nothing, man, when you get in the lead and when you’re somebody that can’t be controlled, you’re somebody who works for the people. They’ll come after you."


Ted Cruz is at it again. A series of Army recruiting videos highlight soldiers who don't fit the traditional stereotypes.

The video is part of a series titled “The Calling,” which features a diverse group of soldiers, several who are people of color or from immigrant families, and one who overcame learning issues. The entry that really roused Cruz’s ire tells the story of Cpl. Emma Malonelord, a white woman brought up by two moms in California.

Cruz retweeted a TikTok video that juxtaposes the recruitment video with Russian propaganda featuring he-man paratroopers, and added the comment.

Holy crap. Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea....

When critics -- particularly fellow senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost her legs piloting a helicopter in Iraq -- pointed out that he was glorifying the Russian military at the expense of our own troops. Cruz doubled down with an anti-gay slur.

I’m enjoying lefty blue checkmarks losing their minds over this tweet, dishonestly claiming that I’m “attacking the military.” Uh, no. We have the greatest military on earth, but Dem politicians & woke media are trying to turn them into pansies.

In view of Ted's own lack of masculine virtues -- he bowed down to Trump after Trump viciously ridiculed his wife and accused his father of being involved in the JFK assassination -- the hashtag #emasculaTed went viral.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/ha286x/pathetic_cowards_for_trump/

and let's close with something visual

Over at PBase.com, there's a whole gallery of visually stunning photos of water drops. Here's one to get you started.

Monday, May 17, 2021

Incompatibility

Since the election, Republicans, driven by the lie that is now their party’s central ideology, have systematically attacked the safeguards that protected the last election. They have sent the message that vigorous defense of democracy is incompatible with a career in Republican politics.

-- Michelle Goldberg "How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election"

This week's featured posts are "What to Make of Israel/Palestine?" and "Why Liz Cheney Matters".

This week everybody was talking about getting back to (sort of) normal

Tomorrow marks two weeks since my second Pfizer shot, so according to the new CDC guidance I should be able to more-or-less resume normal life.

If you’ve been fully vaccinated: You can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic. You can resume activities without wearing a mask or staying 6 feet apart, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.

Not everyone is happy about this advice, and I don't think I'll take full advantage of it either. While daily new-case numbers and daily deaths are dropping, cases are still higher than they were a year ago, and not far off the level in mid-September. Barely more than one-third of the country is fully vaccinated, and there are breakthrough infections even among the vaccinated, including eight members of the New York Yankees.

Now, breakthrough infections were expected, and don't cast doubt on the effectiveness of the vaccines. Epidemiology is a numbers game; the vaccines substantially reduce the odds of catching, transmitting, or dying from Covid, but they're not guarantees.

Personally, I regard mask-wearing as a fairly trivial hardship, so I think I'll still do it when I'm in stores or crowds. I may wear masks in movie theaters for the rest of my life (unless I get popcorn). And I plan to keep avoiding indoor dining until the new-case numbers drop much further. Some people are being even more cautious.

There are at least a few reports of people being harassed for wearing masks, which apparently anti-maskers regard as turnabout-is-fair-play. But it's not: People who refused to wear masks when they were necessary were endangering everyone else. People who continue to wear masks when they're not necessary are only inconveniencing themselves. Why should anyone else care?


https://theweek.com/cartoons/982669/editorial-cartoon-cdc-masks-pinocchio

Caroline Orr Bueno tweets a number of examples to support this point:

Since CDC announced the new COVID-19 mask guidance for vaccinated Americans, a flurry of right-wing accounts — seemingly belonging to unvaccinated people — have tweeted saying they “identify as vaccinated” and won’t be wearing a mask. It’s the new anti-vaccine talking point.

"Identifying as vaccinated" is a twofer in conservative circles: It parodies the rhetoric of trans people in order to undermine the public health system's battle against Covid. This is what passes for cleverness on the Right. As my junior high English teacher told us, "Some people are so stupid they think they're intelligent."


Long but worth it: Wired has a medical whodunnit: How did the medical establishment become so convinced (wrongly) that Covid could only travel short distances in droplets, rather than hanging in the air and covering longer distances? The problem goes back to a misinterpretation of a tuberculosis study in 1962, and it was fixed this year by a small group of scientists who wouldn't let rejection slow them down. Their work not only helped control Covid (much later than it should have been controlled), but should prevent flu deaths for years to come.


Arthur Brooks offers an uncommon perspective on the end of the pandemic: Don't restart aspects of your old life that didn't make you happy.

If your relationships, work, and life have been disrupted by the pandemic, the weeks and months before you fully reenter the world should not be wasted. They are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come clean with yourself—to admit that all was not perfectly well before.

... Many of us have taken to asking each other, over the past year or so, what we miss from before the pandemic and hate about living through it. But for your happiness, the more germane questions are “What did I dislike from before the pandemic and don’t miss?” and “What do I like from the pandemic times that I will miss?”

Brooks recommends that you take inventory of your pre-pandemic life and make a plan for not returning to normal.

I saw Brooks interviewed on CNBC, where he made another interesting point: The pandemic may be a once-in-a-lifetime event, but something turns the world upside-down about every ten years: the financial crisis of 2008, 9-11, the fall of the Soviet Union.

and Israel/Palestine

A featured post discusses two articles outlining very different ways to look at the situation.

Matt Yglesias makes an interesting point that doesn't fit in that article:

I’m not saying you or your favorite politician should have a strong take on the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia — it is every American’s right to ignore foreign events! — but it’s worth asking why some things get on the news agenda and others don’t.

and Republicans behaving badly

I cover Liz Cheney's ouster from House Republican leadership, and what it means for the GOP, in a featured post. But that was far from the only story illustrating the ongoing decline of the Republican Party.

But before leaving the Cheney story, I want to point out an irony: The GOP's acceptance of Trump's Big Lie is an example of what "political correctness" originally meant, before it became a meaningless insult.

In Stalinist circles, everybody understood that he Party told lies. So in order to function, you had to stay aware of two realities: the real world, but also the alternative reality described by the Party's propaganda. To get things done, you had to appreciate what was factually correct. But often you couldn't say the truth out loud, because those factually correct statements weren't politically correct.

Same thing here: Kevin McCarthy and the rest of the House Republican leadership understand that Trump lost the election. But in an authoritarian party, you can't contradict the Leader. "Biden won fair and square" may be factually correct, but it's not politically correct.


House Republicans and Democrats finally agreed on a plan for a bipartisan January 6 Commission, but Kevin McCarthy hasn't said whether he'll support it.


Tom the Dancing Bug portrays the insurrectionists as a comic character. It had to be either Snoopy's air ace or Calvin as Spaceman Spiff.


This is the kind of craziness the insurrectionists are still spreading: Trump lawyer Lin Wood in Myrtle Beach on May 11: Trump is still president, because he won the election. The military is still looking to him for leadership. "This isn't about Trump. This isn't about flesh. This is about God. This is about Powers and Principalities. God's getting ready to clean up this world."

And Rep. Louie Gohmert makes insurrectionists the victims of January 6.

Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas took to the House floor on Friday to downplay the January 6 Capitol riot, describing the insurrections as "political prisoners held hostage by their own government."

"Joe Biden's Justice Department is criminalizing political protest, but only political protest by Republicans or conservatives," Gohmert said in his lengthy speech in which he cited several conservative news outlets, according to CNN. "They're destroying the lives of American families, they're weaponizing the events of January 6 to silence Trump-supporting Americans."

Lest we forget: Trump had masked federal police abducting people off the streets in Portland because protesters were defacing a federal court house with graffiti. But folks who broke windows and beat policemen with flagpoles in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the peaceful transfer of power are "political prisoners".


A lot of news stories this week told us about Republicans who might get indicted, but haven't been yet. I'm keeping track of these developments, but trying not to get too excited about them until there's something definite in the public record.

Friday, Joel Greenberg, often described as Congressman Matt Gaetz' "wingman" (though I haven't been able to track down how that started), pleaded guilty to six federal charges, including sex trafficking women, one of whom was a minor at the time.

As part of his plea deal, Greenberg plans to admit in court that he introduced a child "to other adult men, who engaged in commercial sex acts with the Minor in the Middle District of Florida," according to the document filed Friday.

It's widely suggested that one of those men was Gaetz, though the plea deal doesn't name him, and Gaetz denies any wrongdoing. In the deal, Greenberg promises to "cooperate fully with the United States in the investigation and prosecution of other persons". Who those persons are is not specified, but it's reasonable to assume one of them is a bigger fish than Greenberg himself. If not Gaetz, then who?

The Daily Beast has been the leading news source on the Gaetz scandals. My impression of DB is middling: I don't think they'd invent a story out of nothing, but I also don't trust them to be as scrupulous as The New York Times or Washington Post. It bothers me that top-line news organizations haven't been able to verify many of DB's claims through their own reporting. (When MSNBC's Chris Hayes interviewed DB's reporter, he said: "I want to stress here that we at NBC have not confirmed this reporting.")

Friday DB posted this claim: After Gaetz was the lead speaker at the Trump Defender Gala at a resort in Orlando on October 26, 2019, his hotel room was the site of cocaine party that Gaetz participated in. The drugs were provided by a woman who had an ongoing money-for-sex relationship with Gaetz and a no-show government job provided by Greenberg.

The woman is identified, but not the witnesses the story relies on.


Elsewhere, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance is still working on his investigation of Donald Trump's finances. The investigations appears to be trying to get something on Trump accountant Allen Weisselberg in an effort to flip him against Trump.

Vance already has millions of pages of Trump financial documents, but (according to numerous lawyers speculating in the media) doesn't want to make a purely document-based case against Trump. Documents are far more persuasive with an inside witness who can lead the jury through them.

Still no word on what might have been found in the raid on Rudy Giuliani's home and office.

A good overview of the public knowledge on Trump-related cases is in this conversation between Slate's Dahlia Lithwick and former SDNY US Attorney Preet Bahrara.


It looks like Trump's former White House Counsel, Don McGahn, will finally testify to Congress. The interview will not be public, but a transcript will be released a week later.

The interview will be limited to information attributed to McGahn in the publicly available portions of the Mueller Report, as well as events that involved him personally. He can decline to answer questions that go beyond that scope.

That should include instances that the Mueller Report analyzed as possible obstructions of justice by Trump, like when Trump allegedly instructed McGahn to tell Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller, and then instructed McGahn to publicly deny that Trump gave any such order.

And while McGahn "can" decline to answer other questions, it will be interesting to see what he chooses to answer.


Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to have cheated on her state taxes. She and her husband have claimed homestead exemptions on two houses. You're only allowed one.

We also found out this week that Greene is not only harassing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the halls of Congress, but that she started stalking AOC in 2019, before she got to Congress. Her 2020 campaign juxtaposed a picture of her holding a rifle with images of her presumed targets: Ocasio-Cortez along with Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

Greene apologists would like to say this is just ordinary politics, but it isn't. This is deeply disturbing behavior that could get somebody killed. No member of Congress has ever had to take out a restraining order against another, but AOC should.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marjorie-taylor-greene-the-squad/

One of this week's weirder arguments is whether Governor DeSantis might be able to shield Trump from extradition if New York indicts him. Ultimately, the answer seems to be no.

If Trump is indicted in New York, both the U.S. Constitution and a federal statute dating to 1793 require DeSantis (or the governor of whatever state Trump is in at the time) to hand him over. And if DeSantis still refuses, a 1987 Supreme Court decision makes clear that federal courts can order him to comply.

But state and local officials seem to be preparing to try.

and the pipeline shutdown

A ransomware attack, apparently by the Russian criminal group Darkside, shut down a major pipeline supplying gasoline to the east coast for a little over a week. The pipeline is now back in operation. The C|Net article on this is pretty good.

Back in the 1800s, someone described various cabals' attempts to corner the wheat market as "like watching men wrestling under a blanket". In other words, you can see that something is happening, but it's hard to tell what it means. Ditto here.

Colonial Pipeline appears to have paid a $5 million ransom, so that looks like a win for Darkside. But the criminal group also appears to have suffered consequences.

As of Friday, the group appeared to have disbanded, according to the Journal, which reported Darkside had told associates that it had lost access to the infrastructure it needs for its activities. The group said law enforcement actions had prompted its decision, according to the paper.

Darkside itself seems like an unusually businesslike criminal operation.

Those responsible for DarkSide are very organized, and they have a mature Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) business model and affiliate program. The group has a phone number and even a help desk to facilitate negotiations with and collect information about its victims—not just technical information regarding their environment but also more general details relating to the company itself like the organization’s size and estimated revenue.


This is bound to be merely the first example of a larger problem. All kinds of vital infrastructure is controlled by computers, or related to computer systems in some other way. (One account I've seen of the Colonial Pipeline hack speculated that Darkside had hacked the billing software, not the software that runs the pipeline itself. So Colonial could still deliver gasoline, but wouldn't know how to get paid. I don't know if that's true, but it points out the breadth of the vulnerability.) Software is notoriously full of bugs, and much of it is developed on platforms that are themselves full of bugs, like Windows.

Georgia Tech media studies Professor Ian Bogost commented on the general state of computer security:

You need a license to go fishing but not to deploy software at global scale.

and you also might be interested in ...

If you're wondering why President Biden is making such a big deal about infrastructure, consider the crack that the Tennessee Department of Transportation found in one of the girders holding up a bridge carrying I-40 over the Mississippi near Memphis.


No, the NRA will not be able to play games with the bankruptcy laws to escape their reckoning in New York.

The root issue is the extreme level of corruption in the organization, centering on Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. (Even GQ is horrified by LaPierre spending a quarter million of the NRA's money on suits.) Escaping state regulatory enforcement, a federal judge in Texas ruled, is not "a purpose intended or sanctioned by the Bankruptcy Code".


This week I noticed Hi/Storia, a Facebook page devoted to amusing memes and cartoons about history. For example:


I'm always amused by Trae Crowder's "Liberal Redneck" rants. But his "Confederate Memorial Day" is laugh-out-loud funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMverRoF4fA

in order to grasp the full nuance of his views, though, you should also watch his "In Defense of Dixie" from 2016.


While we're talking about Confederate remembrance, Clint Smith is a Black man who tours some iconic Confederate shrines and writes "Why Confederate Lies Live On" for The Atlantic.

Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth.

Among other myths, Smith debunks the frequently heard claim that

"From the perspective of my ancestors, [the Civil War] was not [about] slavery. My ancestors were not slaveholders. But my great-great-grandfather fought."

Even if you didn't own slaves -- and large numbers of Confederate soldiers' families did -- you probably liked the idea that you weren't at the bottom of society.

The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”


and let's close with something you can dance to

The genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton was in translating a WASPy bit of American history into a modern ethnic musical genre, hip-hop. Well, what if somebody from a different American ethnicity had gotten a similar idea, and told Alexander Hamilton's story through polkas?

Of course, this is a Weird Al Yankovic question, and he provides this answer.

Almost as amusing is to watch Lin-Manuel Miranda watch The Hamilton Polka on his phone.

Monday, May 3, 2021

Efficacy

Trickle-down economics has never worked. 

- President Biden, 4-28-2021

 This week's featured post is "The Reagan Era is Finally Over".

This week everybody was talking about Biden's speech

https://theweek.com/cartoons/980339/political-cartoon-biden-address

Before getting into the details of either Biden's televised speech to Congress [video, transcript] or Senator Tim Scott's Republican response [video, transcript], I want to make one view-from-orbit observation: When Democratic leaders are given a microphone, they talk about the American people, the challenges we face, and what can be done to make things come out right. When Republicans leaders are given a microphone, they list their grievances against Democrats.

Biden's speech was about fixing things and setting the country up for future prosperity. It was hopeful and encouraging. He kept saying things like "We can do this."

Scott started out by saying that President Biden "seems like a good man ... but". God forbid Republicans should give a Democratic president the benefit of the doubt about being a good man. "I won't waste your time tonight with finger-pointing or partisan bickering," Scott said, and then did essentially nothing else.

More high-level impressions of Biden's speech are in the featured post.


 I won't do a full bulleted list of what's in Biden's American Families Plan and American Jobs Plan, because CBS News already has that. Basically, the Families Plan is about child care, education, paid time off, and money for parents. The Jobs Plan is about traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges, and public transportation, plus broadband, adjusting to climate change, transitioning to electric vehicles, and capital spending on schools. It also includes "workforce development" (which I think we used to call "job training"), money for taking care of the elderly in their homes rather than institutionalizing them, R&D, and a few other things.

The NYT puts both plans in one chart.


What I found most striking in Scott's speech was the amount of conservative Christian identity politics in it. He talked about prayer, original sin, grace, and closed with a Christian blessing.


The most quoted line of Scott's response is "America is not a racist country." I have to agree with Matt Yglesias:

“Is America a Racist Country?” is the perfect meaningless culture war debate because it has basically no content at all. What is it asking? Compared to what?

Scott clearly wasn't claiming America has no racism, because he also said "I have experienced the pain of discrimination." He even allowed that American racism is not entirely in the past: "I know our healing is not finished." So the argument he started is basically semantic: How much racism does it take to count as a "racist country"? Today's US is not as racist as the Confederacy or Nazi Germany or the old apartheid regime in South Africa. Is that good enough? How many angels of color have to be included before we consider a pinhead dance to be integrated?

Remember: Meaningless debates serve the interests of people who have nothing to say. If you have a real vision of the future you want, avoid getting baited into arguing about nothing.

https://claytoonz.com/2021/04/30/racist-country/


BTW: By talking about what America is or isn't, Scott is invoking a popular trope of conservative rhetoric; he's talking about essence rather than behavior or results. Similarly: an argument about whether certain drawings in a few Dr. Seuss books reinforce racial stereotypes -- they do -- becomes "Was Dr. Seuss a racist?"

The next step in that dance is to argue that we can't know someone else's essence, so it's unfair to claim that so-and-so is a racist (which probably nobody did).

I saw this happen in my social media feed this week. Someone objected to Biden claiming that all police are racists. When I asked when he did that -- he didn't -- she responded with a quote where Biden mentioned "systemic racism in law enforcement", which is not at all the same thing. Systemic racism is about the results of our law enforcement system. "All police are racists" is a statement about the essence of a large number of individuals. 


Another point of debate between the parties is the effect of Republican voter-suppression laws. It's possible to cherry-pick comparisons between states, as Scott did when he claimed: "It will be easier to vote early in Georgia than in Democrat-run New York."

But it's important to keep your eyes on the bottom line: Where do people end up waiting in line for hours to vote? And the answer is: In Black neighborhoods, especially in states with Republican legislatures. Georgia was already particularly bad before the recent law, and now it will be worse.

Unlike voter fraud and ballot fraud, people waiting hours to vote actually happens already. It's not a conspiracy theory or a what-if fantasy. It should deeply embarrass all Americans, and legislatures should be full of proposals to process more voters faster, especially in urban Black neighborhoods.

I live in a majority-white Boston suburb, and it takes me about five minutes to vote. Why can't that happen in inner-city Atlanta?


Every time I checked Fox News on Thursday, they were talking how badly liberals were treating Tim Scott. WaPo columnist Kathleen Parker wrote:

The only Black Republican in the Senate, Scott was quickly trending as “Uncle Tim” on Twitter, as a tool of white supremacists and as a blind servant of the far right. Liberals just cannot handle a Black conservative.

This, my friends, is (also) what racism looks like in America today.

The New York Post devoted a whole article to the "Uncle Tim" insult, but could only attribute it to otherwise undistinguished Twitter users.

OK, white people should not lob racialized insults at non-white politicians of any philosophy. (Though Scott did indeed act as the mouthpiece of a party that panders to white supremacists; that's not an insult, it's just factual.) But Twitter was being mean? How is that news? Have you seen what conservatives tweet about AOC?

If Democratic politicians or opinion leaders are talking about "Uncle Tim", that's worth calling out. But I haven't seen that. Vice President Harris responded to Scott by agreeing that American is not a racist country, but adding

We also do have to speak the truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today. ... One of the greatest threats to our national security is domestic terrorism manifested by white supremacists. And so these are issues that we must confront, and it does not help to heal our country, to unify us as a people, to ignore the realities of that."

You can also find other sharp-but-not-racist disagreements with Scott from WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson, radio host Clay Cane, and many other liberals. Perhaps an actual discussion could be had. But Fox News does not want that.

Instead, Fox and its allies stoke conservative outrage by pointing out that there are obnoxious people on the internet, some of whom profess to be liberals. Who knew?

and the Giuliani raid

Much as I enjoy speculating about Rudy getting arrested and then flipping on Trump, it's important not to get ahead of the facts. Here's what we know:

FBI agents with a search warrant executed a crack-of-dawn raid on Rudy Giuliani's apartment and office Wednesday. Giuliani ally Victoria Toensing was also raided. The agents took phones and other electronic devices.

The Justice Department isn't commenting, but unofficially told AP the investigation "at least partly involves Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine". Giuliani's attorney said the warrant mentioned "possible violation of foreign lobbying laws and that it sought communications between Giuliani and people including a former columnist for The Hill, John Solomon". Reuters claims to have seen the warrant and lists a dozen people, all of whom have some Ukraine connection.

Toensing has also represented Dmitry Firtash, Putin's favorite Ukrainian oligarch, who is already under indictment in the US. Solomon wrote a series of articles publicizing accusations about the Bidens and corruption in Ukraine. US intelligence has attributed these accusations to a Russian disinformation campaign intended to help reelect Trump. This is not some theory that the intel people have cooked up recently to please their new masters. Back in October the NYT reported

The intelligence agencies warned the White House late last year [i.e. 2019] that Russian intelligence officers were using President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential run, according to four current and former American officials.

One question seems to be: To what extent was Giuliani knowingly working for Russia or its Ukrainian allies like Firtash?

It's also important to understand exactly how this process works:

A search warrant must be based upon probable cause and the applicant must present a sworn affidavit to a neutral and detached magistrate or judge. Within this affidavit, there must be facts sufficient to persuade that judge that a crime was committed and that searching in the locations specified within the search warrant will reveal evidence of the crime, or crimes. The locations to be searched must be described with particularity, as well as the items that will be seized from those locations.

In the case of someone like Giuliani, there would have been the requirement that those search warrants be approved by someone at the highest levels of the Department of Justice, as well as the requirement of exhaustion of other less-intrusive investigative means. Giuliani is an attorney, and an attorney’s communications with clients are usually deemed to be confidential and protected by the attorney-client privilege.

We shouldn't jump to the conclusion that Giuliani is guilty of something, that the government already had enough evidence to indict Giuliani, or that they necessarily found the evidence they were looking for. But they clearly have more than just a desire to harass a Trump ally.

Giuliani's lawyer called the raid "another disturbing example of complete disregard for the attorney-client privilege", but it's not clear that's true. Typical practice for searching a lawyer's office, which we saw when former Trump attorney Michael Cohen's office was searched, is for a "clean team" to conduct the actual search, forwarding to the investigating agents only the items not privileged.

CNN:

Giuliani's son Andrew briefly stepped outside of his father's Manhattan apartment on Wednesday afternoon to denounce the Department of Justice, saying that if this can happen to "the former president's lawyer, this could happen to any American."

Once you put the situation in context, the younger Giuliani's statement is exactly right: If federal investigators can convince a judge that a crime has probably been committed and that evidence of that crime is probably in your home or office, they can get a warrant to search for that evidence, even if you're buddies with a former president. It could happen to any American, but you're most at risk if you've committed crimes.

Giuliani's people are complaining about "politicization" of the Justice Department, but all the indications are that the political influence has been working in the other direction: Prosecutors have been investigating Giuliani since 2019, but his relationship with Trump protected him. Now that Trump is out of office, the investigation can continue the way it would against any suspected criminal.

and the virus

Good news and bad news this week. The good news is that the US definitely seems to have turned the corner on new cases. The daily average is down to about 50K. Deaths also continue their slow decline. We're down to less than 700 per day.

The bad news is in this morning's New York Times:

more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.

Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.

The second piece of bad news is the international picture. New cases in India continue to skyrocket, and the numbers in several South American countries are near record highs. Adding it all up, the virus worldwide is spreading faster now than it ever has.

The more Covid-19 there is in the world, the more mutations we'll see. Eventually, some variant could beat our vaccines.


The Atlantic's Derek Thompson listens to people not planning to be vaccinated, and isn't optimistic about convincing them. But this is his best suggestion:

Instead of shaming and hectoring, our focus should be on broadening their circle of care: Your cells might be good enough to protect you; but the shots are better to protect grandpa.

and you also might be interested in ...

Last week I wrote about Republicans in Florida and several other states trying to criminalize protest, pointing out once again that the GOP's commitment to "liberty" and "the Constitution" is bogus.

This week Florida went further, passing a law that forces social media companies to participate in disinformation campaigns, even if they predictably lead to violence.

The Florida bill would prohibit social media companies from knowingly “deplatforming” political candidates, meaning a service could not “permanently delete or ban” a candidate. Suspensions of up to 14 days would still be allowed, and a service could remove individual posts that violate its terms of service. 

The state's elections commission would be empowered to fine a social media company $250,000 a day for statewide candidates and $25,000 a day for other candidates if a company's actions are found to violate the law

I can imagine a proposal to split up social media companies, or perhaps to turn their networks into some kind of public/private entity like the post office. But as long as they are private corporations whose users, advertisers, and employees come to them by choice, they've got a right to manage their own affairs and set their own policies.

It's hard to come up with any rationale that justifies this law and also upholds previous conservative causes, like allowing a baker to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding reception, or letting Hobby Lobby object to providing birth control for its employees. If Twitter decides it no longer wants to be associated with Trump's domestic terrorism, how is that illegitimate?

One possible but scary rationale is contained in a Zero Hedge article a friend sent me. The author was discussing a scenario where companies require their employees and/or customers to be vaccinated (which would be terrible for some reason that escapes me).

These companies do not represent private business or free markets anymore. Instead, they are appendages of establishment power that receive billions in taxpayer dollars to finance their operations. They should no longer be treated as if they have the same rights as normal businesses.

That is one way the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline might work. Businesses have rights until they do something the fascists don't like, at which point they become "appendages of establishment power" and their rights go away.


Weird development in the Matt Gaetz scandal. The Daily Beast claims to have copies of communications between Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg and (wait for it) Roger Stone, who Greenberg was willing to pay $250,000 if he could broker a pardon from Trump. (No pardon was given and no money paid.)

In the private text messages to Stone, Greenberg described his activities with Gaetz, repeatedly referring to the Republican congressman by his initials, “MG,” or as “Matt.”

“My lawyers that I fired, know the whole story about MG’s involvement,” Greenberg wrote to Stone on Dec. 21. “They know he paid me to pay the girls and that he and I both had sex with the girl who was underage.”

If you're wondering "Why on Earth would you ever admit that to somebody, especially in writing?", you're not alone.


As Biden keeps proposing things the American people like, Trumpist attacks on him are getting increasingly desperate. Here, a NewsMax talking head goes off on a clip of Biden bending down to pick a dandelion and give it to Jill. This act is labelled "bizarre" and somehow deserving of ridicule.

All I can say is that Biden had better not wear a tan suit.


You know who's a communist now? Mitt Romney. At least that's what the hecklers at the Utah Republican Convention were calling out as he tried to speak. But a motion to censure Mitt for daring to vote to convict Donald Trump narrowly failed 711-798.


As someone who went to a few Burning Man festivals years ago, I'm not sure what I think about the proposal for a permanent art installation that generates solar electricity. Don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it is a key element of the Burning Man experience. The fact that this is all going up in smoke at the end of the week teaches a lesson about being truly present.

On the other hand: renewable energy in an attractive package. 

and let's close with something artsy

You never know when someone might escape from a painting and fly around the Brussels airport.