Yearly Archives: 2018

Watching the coverage of the mid-term elections this evening can be a bewildering run through a spectrum of emotions, colored as they are by my current desire for a rational GOP to counterbalance the Democrats, which at the moment doesn’t exist – thus my desire to see the Republican Party burn to the ground, so that it may be reconstructed, preferably on lines that do not include such personalities as Pat Robertson and his ilk.

Democratic gains in Minnesota’s Representatives, as well as retention of both Senatorial seats by unexpectedly comfortable margins (in Smith’s case), has acted to restore, to some extent, my faith in local American citizens; on the national scene, the losses by Democratic Senators Heitkamp of North Dakota and Bill Nelson of Florida, as well as Democratic candidates Abram’s apparent loss to Kemp in the Georgia gubernatorial race and Gillum’s apparent loss to DeSantis in the Florida gubernatorial race, are dismaying as none of the victors are, in my opinion, of the high moral character necessary to be the leaders they must be in their positions. In a phrase, they seem to just be Trump sycophants, incapable of independent judgment.

Seeking more positive emotions, it may be tempting to note that Democratic Representative Conor Lamb, who just months ago had won a special election by a whisker, easily won re-election, but his district was redrawn between the two votes. It’s an apples and oranges thing. Don’t go there.

So for reassurance, it may be worth noting that current Kansas Secretary of State and GOP gubernatorial nominee Kris Kobach (R-KA), who has been mentioned before on this blog for his many claims of unsubstantiated voter fraud, seems to have lost his high profile gubernatorial run in traditionally conservative Kansas. Last I saw, it wasn’t even close. Is it possible that Kansas will become a Democratic stronghold? If one believes that we can learn from our mistakes, if pain can change our minds and our ideologies, then it’s not out of the realm of possibility, as Kansas hosted the Brownback debacle of the last few years. They have a new Governor-elect from the Democratic Party, and I noticed in the news chyrons that at one or two Republican Representatives from Kansas had lost their re-election campaigns. Now, these could be ephemeral signs, as perhaps those seats will flip right back to the Republican column at the next opportunity. One might argue that’s what happened tonight in Minnesota.

BUT if ruby-red Kansas becomes the historical crack in the Republican Party’s armor, I think we’ll know why and not be surprised.

Elections have consequences. That’s why we vote, and we vote thoughtfully, not in a rigid, ideological manner.

Know hope.

My Arts Editor draws my attention to this article on a novel form of battery technology in Science Alert:

Scientists in Sweden have developed a specialised fluid, called a solar thermal fuel, that can store energy from the sun for well over a decade.

“A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity, you put sunlight in and get heat out, triggered on demand,” Jeffrey Grossman, an engineer works with these materials at MIT explained to NBC News.

The fluid is actually a molecule in liquid form that scientists from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden have been working on improving for over a year.

This molecule is composed of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, and when it is hit by sunlight, it does something unusual: the bonds between its atoms are rearranged and it turns into an energised new version of itself, called an isomer.

Like prey caught in a trap, energy from the sun is thus captured between the isomer’s strong chemical bonds, and it stays there even when the molecule cools down to room temperature.

A fascinating bit of science – but is it technology? That is, can this be scaled up to be an industrial solution?

And then, a solution to what? Obviously, it’s a new and interesting form of battery, since it stores and releases energy, and it doesn’t appear to be difficult to use on release. How well does it transport? And can it be manufactured without polluting the shit out of the environment? The article mentions C, H, and N, none of which qualify as rare, so that’s a good sign – but what does it take to make the molecule? The fact that the power source is the local star is, of course, a very good thing.

And then the fact that it appears to absorb some spectrum of the incoming electromagnetic spectrum is interesting. Is it the same part of the spectrum which is instrumental in anthropocentric climate change? If so, can we use this as a stopgap measure while we continue to work on stopping the creation of carbon dioxide and methane, the two most worrisome climate change gases?

And for those of us who are especially paranoid, if this does prove to be a viable stopgap, have we just bestowed longer life on the fossil fuel industry? Since this stopgap has no effect on the growing percentage of CO₂ in the air, then the recent research concerning carbohydrates making up a growing percentage of the foods we harvest, I’d suggest that permitting the fossil fuel companies to continue to enable the pollution of our atmosphere would probably be a mistake from a body health point of view.

So many questions!

From an AP report:

Sean Hannity spoke from the stage of President Donald Trump’s last midterm election rally on Monday, after Fox News Channel and its most popular personality had insisted all day that he wouldn’t.

Hannity appeared on the podium in a Missouri arena after being called to the stage by Trump. Another Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, also appeared onstage with the president.

“By the way, all those people in the back are fake news,” Hannity told the audience.

And you, sir, are merely a propagandist, not a journalist. Your appearance and your dismissal of your “colleagues” permits viewers to dispense with any delusion that you have any journalistic standard – and any acquaintance with the truth.

Apparently the lack of a comet’s characteristic coma associated with interstellar object ‘Oumuamua is really annoying some astronomers, enough so that they’re beginning to explore more outré possibilities:

“‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization,” they wrote in the paper, which has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The theory is based on the object’s “excess acceleration,” or its unexpected boost in speed as it traveled through and ultimately out of our solar system in January.

“Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a light sail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,” wrote the paper’s authors, suggesting that the object could be propelled by solar radiation.

The paper was written by Abraham Loeb, professor and chair of astronomy, and Shmuel Bialy, a postdoctoral scholar, at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Loeb has published four books and more than 700 papers on topics like black holes, the future of the universe, the search for extraterrestrial life and the first stars. [CNN]

Sounds a little crazy? Turns out this is a very small part of the scientists’ paper. Let Ars Technica straighten you out.

This is, of course, some pretty sloppy science news coverage. But in this case, most of these stories are not being written by trained science writers but rather online reporters who see the potential for a flashy headline. While it is not “fake news,” is is certainly a classic clickbait.

But there’s more at work here. Katie Mack, an astrophysicist and astute observer of scientists and the media, has noted on Twitter that the Harvard scientists knew perfectly well what they were doing. “The thing you have to understand is: scientists are perfectly happy to publish an outlandish idea if it has even the tiniest *sliver* of a chance of not being wrong,” she wrote. “But until every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don’t believe it.

“Some of us are more conservative, of course,” she continued. “And it surely varies by field. But in my area (astrophysics/cosmology), there’s generally no downside to publishing something that’s (a) somehow interesting and (b) not completely ruled out, whether or not it ends up ‘the right answer.'”

In other words, if you’re a researcher looking to create a media splash, you play the, “I’m not saying it was aliens…” card.

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Speaking as a software engineer, a good approach to solving a problem in an efficient and effective manner is actually congruent with the Harvard scientists publishing ‘crime’. Look, most any problem, absent essential evidence, can usually be explained by more than one process. While many times a good guess will yield a solution, an approach not based on intuition is to generate a list, exhaustive if possible, of all sources of the problem which are congruent with the current collection of facts. Using good ol’ Popperian philosophy of science, each potential source should come with a potential fact which would disprove that solution.

Then the process of problem resolution becomes a matter of focused fact collecting. At some point, your list of probable sources of the problem gets down to one, and you now know where to look and even know the solution, if it’s not one of those damn P=NP problems.

In the physical sciences, you may have several still left when all possible facts are collected, and then you’re just left with ranking them based on probabilities.

But the basic philosophy is sound, so I’m not sure I’d call what the scientists did clickbait. Did they list many other possible resolutions to this problem? Dunno, couldn’t find the paper despite the link. But, without a good visual inspection of the object, which is now impossible, we can’t really rule out the possibility that it’s an object from another civilization.

Politico notes a sudden surge of interest in joining the the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

Dozens of Republican and Democratic lawmakers are clamoring to join the House Intelligence Committee next year — for a chance to be part of a panel at the vanguard of the partisan brawl over Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The interest has veterans of the committee worried that a new class of lawmakers will reinforce the partisan impulses that drove the committee toward dysfunction the past two years. The politicization of the once sober, above-the-fray panel has undermined what some lawmakers and national security officials say has been a decades-long partnership with the intelligence community. …

Republican and Democratic leaders have been compiling lists of dozens of members — one Republican lawmaker recently suggested upward of 70 on the GOP side — who want to join the committee. The demand for spots comes amid the ongoing partisan fight over the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether any of President Donald Trump’s associates participated in it.

As Politico points out, partisan lawmakers are out in force to join what used to be a non-partisan, quiet committee. No doubt, some of this is the new profile members on the committee suddenly had because of Rep. Nunes’ incompetent leadership technique, by which I mean his frantic and very public attempt to use the committee to protect his Party leader, rather than monitor the President – the one and same man, in case you were wondering. Partisans, if they’re smart – in some cases, an undue assumption – must be uneasily aware that their continued presence in this ego-inflating chamber is often dependent on the independent voters in their districts or States, and if the Intel Committee is going to suddenly acquire profile, it may also acquire prestige.

But there may also be an interior reason to seek a position on the committee, and that would happen to be all about brown-nosing for the Republicans, because if they can gain the favor of President Trump, then they can move up in the Republican hierarchy. Of course, just being a member isn’t enough – one will have to find ways to obstruct the monitoring, leak strategic information, that sort of thing. The creative Republican committee member will find ways to get his Leader’s attention.

All in the tradition of the previously noted incompetent Representative Nunes.

On Lawfare Molly Reynolds gives a short history of the committee.

Having gotten on the Center For Inquiry’s (CFI) mailing list, probably when they combined with Skeptical Inquirer, I’ve recently been subjected to frequent mailings from them. For those readers unfamiliar with CFI, they are an organization carrying on the free-thinking tradition, aka agnostics and atheists. Part of that tradition is the view that one of the strengths of the United States is the Separation of Church and State, also known as the Establishment Clause, as bolstered by the Johnson Amendment, which forbids churches taking advantage of tax-free status from advocating for particular candidates.

As I noted here, the younger generations (you can insert a harsh, grating voice at this juncture if you’re so inclined) are showing less and less interest in organized religion. Now, I’m aware that this doesn’t make them all agnostics and atheists, but reports do indicate that youngsters are falling into that category with increasing frequency.

So, if you’re not aware of CFI, let me note that, while like most profit-free organizations they’re usually on the hunt for funds, and they’re not always above trying to inflate a point here or there to gain your sympathy, their latest missive impresses me as more than just the hunt for the nickel. I suppose that may be because they don’t actually ask for one.

Instead, they explain their very deep unease about tomorrow’s midterm elections. Perhaps my younger reader, atheist or faithful, doubtful as to voting, might want to read their concerns.

Dear Friend of CFI,

Please vote tomorrow.

We face a pivotal moment in our country’s history. The separation of church and state is suffering under the most withering attack in generations.

The Trump White House has embraced the religious right with open arms. The balance of the Supreme Court has shifted ever further in favor of religious privilege. Congress is our best, and perhaps only, chance to stop theocracy from calcifying in the federal government. It’s not an overstatement to say that our freedom from religion is at stake in this election.

And while theocratic activists batter at the wall between church and state, our government is becoming disconnected from basic facts. Career scientists are being driven out of federal agencies where their work informs life saving regulations. Propagandistic media networks spread wild conspiracy theories that become accepted knowledge in the White House. Trump lies so often and so outrageously that news outlets are struggling just to accurately cover his statements.

Your vote matters. Please vote tomorrow, and help others to vote if you can. If you’d like more resources for how to register, find your polling location, or join a last-minute voter registration drive, check out Secular America Votes.

As always, thank you for supporting the separation of church and state.

Sincerely,

Jason Lemieux

Director of Government Affairs

Center for Inquiry

Partisan readers will dismiss this as a partisan letter from an organization which they may despise.

I think it’s a bit more, though. Whether you’re religious or atheist, it’s a fair question to ask: Why is the United States secular? We may be a highly religious country, but our miscellany of religions makes it critical that the State remain secular and disinterested in religious affairs which do not infringe on our secular legal system.

By voting for the Republicans, who have been pursuing the policies concerning which CFI has expressed concern, we risk putting in place policies which favor one religious sect over all others. This road is unstable and has historically lead to terrible violence, tragedy, and backwardness. For more on this, see my thoughts at length here.

If you’re atheist or at least not a member of an organized religion, this should concern you. If you’re a member of a religious sect, which can mean anything from a Roman Catholic to a 10 member church out in the middle of nowhere, you should also be concerned, because, again, you may not find yourself in the proper group. Given the history of theocracies, this should leave you deeply uneasy.

And the whole religious strife drama is a poor way to run a country. See Iraq.

So give voting another thought, if you had decided against it. No snowflake has ever hurt anyone on its own, but an avalanche of them is a helluva thing to stop. Be part of one.

One of the more brazen displays of allergies to ethical systems is on display down in Georgia. It centers around Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, who decided to enter the primary for the Georgia governorship a few months back.

A person with an ethical system would have resigned or, at least, recused himself from any matter having to do with counting the votes of the primary. This is, I shouldn’t need to add, simple, basic, obvious: a conflict of interest shakes the confidence of the voters in the system, and for good reason, as there have been numerous occurrences of people in power manipulating the system to keep and gain more power.

Did Kemp resign or recuse? No.

Next came the general election, and the ethical requirements were the same: resign or recuse. Need I report that he did neither?

The man in power will be counting the votes that could move him along to another seat of power.

But he appears to have become nervous, because just a day or so before the election, he’s tried to assure his selection through what appears to be another dirty tactic, as NBC News reports:

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor, said Sunday that he was investigating the state Democratic Party for an attempted hack of the voter registration system — a claim met with a swift response from Democrats charging him with a shameless “political stunt” two days before Election Day.

Kemp, who is in a neck-and-neck race with Stacey Abrams, alleged that the state Democratic Party made a “failed attempt to hack the state’s voter registration system” and announced that his office was opening an investigation into the party. Kemp said his office alerted the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, but he offered no evidence to back up his allegation.

“While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation, I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes,” Candice Broce, press secretary for the secretary of state, said in a statement. “We can also confirm that no personal data was breached and our system remains secure.”

Since the FBI will supposedly be investigating any possible attempts to corrupt the electoral systems of Georgia, I’m left at a loss as to what Kemp legitimately thinks he’ll accomplish, because, of course and following in President Trump’s footsteps, he must despise the FBI – an institution once beloved of the ‘law and order party’. And, at least to those of us paying attention to computer crime, it should be no surprise there’s probably not a public computing system that has not been the target of hacking. So Georgia’s electoral computer logs show they’ve been a target? So does every other state’s.

But I think it’s more interesting to notice how being a public citizen, such as Kemp, means that your ethical system necessarily becomes a public statement. If your ethical system is strong, if you have that sense of being an honorable public servant, then there’s little to worry about insofar as honor goes. You may not achieve the electoral success you desire, but the electorate are a bunch of assholes, anyways. They’re private citizens and can betray their ethical systems on a whim.

But if it’s weak, as Kemp’s conduct proves his to be, then we see blatant disruptions of commonly agreed-upon norms.

It makes for one big old storm cloud for his opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams. The silver lining will be very little comfort if she loses: Kemp will run a high risk of leaving office in disgrace, and even handcuffs.

That’s what often happens to the unethical public citizen, as we’ve seen in a number of States.

And, just as importantly, while Kemp may win one for the Party short-term, long-term the Party takes another hit to its ‘brand.’ Do they understand this? Is it so important that they win through brazen underhandedness that the future doesn’t matter?

Or are they so confident in their ability to manipulate the voters through superior marketing techniques, as well as gerrymandering?

Inquiring minds want to know.

A while back I ran across some advocacy for better secure communications for consumers, which reminded me that this makes some law enforcement professionals uncomfortable, since that closes off a source of information. In particular, the suggestion that encrypted communications be the default, rather than an option. So I couldn’t help but laugh when I read this Lawfare article by Susan Landau:

Trump’s lax approach to security presents an unusually stark problem. But unsecured communications have long been a problem for U.S. national security. In 1972, for example, the Soviet Union’s eavesdropping led to the “The Great Grain Robbery”: the eavesdropping of communications on calls between American wheat farmers and the Department of Agriculture that enabled the Russians to covertly buy record wheat at low prices, thus causing a U.S. grain shortage eighteen months later. …

Imagine if instead of the U.S. government fighting the spread of strong cryptography, the NSA and FBI had pushed for cell phones that would always encrypt communications end-to-end. This would make it far harder to intercept communications. It would also mean that every legislator and legislative aide, every chief executive, every financial officer—indeed any person who had information that would be useful to an eavesdropper, whether it be China, Russia, an industrial competitor or a criminal organization—would necessarily use phones that routinely secured their conversations. And importantly, it would protect the president’s phone calls even if he refused to listen to the officials begging him to use a secure method of communication.

While end-to-end encryption would make it much harder for United States to listen in to what the bad guys were saying, such use of end-to-end encryption wouldn’t mean the end of wiretapping. High-value targets would still be the subject of targeted, sophisticated hacks. For high-value targets like the president, this is still a concern.

That weakening our weaponry against criminals and national adversaries would have paradoxically made us more secure in this particular nightmare situation just makes me laugh.

It helps that I’m mildly exhausted today.

These are some of the same leaves as those starring in the Happenstance Leaves post, but arranged by my Arts Editor. Think of her as the Director, storming at her players for not doing their part.

I’ve been meaning to post something on this, but with a computer replacement coming up and what may be a fan burning out on the old computer, it’s been a bit chaotic. But Trump’s inadequate response to recent incidents, such as the pipe bombs and shootings, indicate voters have once again been reminded of his inadequacies:

That’s quite a jump in disapproval, and drop in approval. This is also from 6 days ago. Tomorrow is the release of the next poll, which should be interesting.

But will it tell us anything about the Senate and House races? How important is he, and will his drop in approval also reflect in voting for those races? Trump, being unique as a Presidential demagogue who inspires love and loathing, is a bit of a cipher.

But we’ll see in a couple of days.

Long time readers know that, from time to time, for my own amusement I dissect propaganda email that comes to me (and isn’t diverted to Spam), but this one is actually easier than most.

A quick look at Snopes.com indicates they could find no indication that Thomas ever said that, and WikiQuote notes it as a possible misattribution.

If that’s where it ends, I’d not bother. The “scare” stuff at the end is childish. But in my minute of research, I did notice whoever sent this mail around in an attempt to scare the conservative base into line chose to strip out one interesting fact.

Thomas was a Presbyterian minister.

The religious angle on socialism has always been a troublesome aspect of the entire “free enterprise Christianity” embraced by many conservatives, extremist or not. As an agnostic, my impression is that Jesus Christ was against any economic or governmental system which resulted in injustice, and it’s not hard to make the case that free enterprise, pursued with single-minded zest and the misunderstanding that it’s all about the money, would be given unfavorable consideration by JC.

Your mileage may vary.

But the fact that Thomas’ status as a minister has been stripped out of this mail certainly is part of the entire “conservative” (aka right-wing extremists currently in charge of the GOP) narrative control which seeks to manipulate the thought processes, and thus opinions, of the conservative base, rather than serving up all the facts and letting them come to their own conclusions.

It’s dishonest, and it doesn’t matter if liberals or conservatives or right-wing extremists do it.

I just happened to stumble across this little composition of leaves while raking:

The beauty of detritus.

Gotta love this from run26two on The Daily Kos.

So inevitable, so awful you shouldn’t watch. But you do. I was weak this morning.

That’s Marc Thiessen.

But his latest WaPo column, in which he makes the mistake of trying to boost President Trump by comparing him with his own Party’s arguably biggest mistake, President Nixon, is useful in that it’s diagnostic of the many problems of the current iteration of the Republican Party. He even provides a lovely summary of some of its Holy Tenets:

So, in many ways the Trump presidency is like deja vu all over again. Except that Trump is, at least for conservatives, arguably a much better president than was Nixon. While Nixon had a mixed record in Supreme Court appointments, Trump has, so far, given us two of the strongest conservative justices in modern history. While the chairman of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, Herb Stein, bragged that, under Nixon, “probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy than in any other presidency since the New Deal,” Trump has given us a historic regulatory rollback. While Nixon boasted over dramatic cuts in defense spending, Trump has enacted historic increases. While Nixon’s 1969 tax reform increased taxes, Trump’s reforms have cut them. While Nixon withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam, Trump has unleashed our forces against the Islamic State and has halted the withdrawal from Afghanistan begun during the Obama administration.

Nixon also showed us that our constitutional system of checks and balances works, and that if the president crosses a constitutional line, the rule of law will prevail. And while Nixon resigned over Watergate, we still don’t know how the Russia inquiry will turn out. It may well be that there was no criminal conspiracy with Russia. Even knowing what we know about Watergate, the United States would not have been better off with George McGovern as president, just as we would not be better off today with Hillary Clinton in the White House.

Shall we extract the Holy Tenets?

1. A conservative XYZ is a good XYZ. A corollary to the entire cancerous team politics tenet which I’ve discussed at nauseating length, it’s wrong on so many levels in the SCOTUS scenario, as well as just about any other. I’ll list just a few for brevity’s sake: It suggests the judiciary should be politicized; that political orientation is far more important than judicial competency; and that, if you don’t like the judicial results, just replace the bleeding judges. That last is itself the result of the Holy Tenet that the Party Can Never Be Wrong Because God Is Behind It. So sorry, sometimes you’re just in the wrong. Fact is, liberals and conservatives can both screw things up, or get them right. A sober commentator wouldn’t actually be mentioning Gorsuch (IJ) or Kavanaugh for at least 5 years. Gorsuch has barely had a term, and Kavanaugh? Two weeks.
2. Regulation is always bad. It’s become the most dangerous refrain in American Republican politics, with apologies to Hillary. Regulation impairs corporate profit. Well, yes, sometimes it does. It’s helpful to return to the basics of society and remember that profit is a goal of the private sector, not the public (or government) sector. Government exists as a protective mechanism for society, from outside invaders, and, just as importantly, from internal mistakes. The are typically human behaviors which negatively impact other members of society. In the intentional category we can dump most crime, and in the unintentional category we can put a few crimes, pollution, and other behaviors such as reckless driving. In the broadest sense of the word, regulation is how government goes about its business in the internal mistakes category.

   Regulation, like any tool, is neither good nor bad in and of itself. Is a hammer good or bad? Depends on its use. Same with regulation. If Thiessen thinks regulation is always bad, let’s get rid of all murder statutes and see how well society works out in the long run. Yeah, nod along with me.

   But, as noted, Republicans use the word regulation to mean regulation of the private sector, and then claim that’s bad because it impairs corporate profit. The trick here is to refuse to accept the implicit metric of profit as the appropriate measure of regulation. It’s not. If you have the time and attention span – most of us don’t – go read my link concerning sectors of society. While I don’t think I ever addressed metrics explicitly in one place, it’s implicit. We often, mistakenly, judge the success of a company by its profitability. But here’s a good party (the one with horse ovaries) question for the businessman loudly opining what government needs him to run it right: What’s an appropriate profit margin for government? Yeah, he’ll sputter, because his metric – his favorite, all-important metric – has no application in the context of the government.

   I spoke of brevity earlier, so I’ll cut this short: discovering the metrics of government is one of the most important jobs of the citizen, because only then will they know if their elected officials and their functionaries are doing a good job. Strong military? Sure. An effective, uncorrupt police? Yeah. No regulation so all the companies are more profitable? Gotcha. Monitor and protect the lakes, the rivers, and, while you’re at it, CO₂ content of the air. That’s the duty of government.

3. The military needs more money. We’re used to the old trope, a Republican Holy Tenet, that Democrats are weak on defense and the Republicans are strong, but that’s just propaganda – and damaging propaganda at that. It’s a rare politician, wannabe or paid, that isn’t for more money for Defense.

   Defense serves an existential purpose, yes. But the military does not produce things of general consumer use, and the research required to develop new military war machines only develops useful things for the consumer by accident, and, at least as of 40 years ago when I did the research, not at the same rate, per $, as does the space program. My point? I recall in my libertarian reading that economists generally see Defense as a drag on the economy, not a general boost. Sure, start a new munitions plant and it’s good for the town its in – until it shuts down and its toxic waste must be found and dealt with. But that doesn’t translate as good for the country. Those people could have been making, say, smartphones, rather than bullets. Bullets that sit around and do little (but see fleet in being).

   So the trick is to determine the proper level of funding for the military, along with the composition of the military (Dreadnaughts? No. Best bombers? Yes.) For me, the fact that we outspend the next 7 countries suggests we’re overspending. China, three times larger than us, is #2, and has about a third of our budget.
   We’ve been at war for nearly 20 years now, and if you want to talk about drains on the economy, the military is a big one. Both Democrats and Republicans generally favor perpetually bigger military budgets, but Nixon understood that the military was a drag – and that’s why he celebrated being able to cut the Defense budget. Perhaps we should follow that example, rather than follow the Holy Tenet.

4. Taxes are evil. No, simply no. There’s the Kansas debacle. There’s the thought experiment – if taxes are evil, let’s drive them to zero and bask in the paradise of … ooops, you’re dead because a murderer got you. No cops or prison guards.

   Government services must be paid for, period end of sentence. At its heart, that’s a conservative (but not Republican) tenet. This has economic ramifications (see: Kansas debacle, above), for, if the services are inadequate, then corporations have trouble operating, and those that can will withdraw.

   Borrowing, to a point, works, but many economists are worried that the current level of Federal borrowing is distorting the economy, which makes it harder to predict and manage. I’m not an economist, but I know enough not to be captive to the “government budget” is the same as a “family budget” false analogy.

   I’ll stop here on this topic because the link above also discusses very briefly the application of bell curves to taxation levels, so go read that if interested.

5. We could have won Vietnam. Only if we wanted to be barbarians. ISIS, on the other hand, is relatively weaker, with a weaker ideology. Beware simplistic false comparisons. The military, under Obama’s direction, had them on the run, and fortunately Trump didn’t meddle overmuch. The real trick is to keep them extinguished.
6. Nixon was better than McGovern. An unanswerable question. Maybe McGovern would have been wonderful. But it betrays the Party’s own insecurity when it’s forced to claim its criminal President was better than a hypothetical President.
7. Hillary’s evil! Sad, sad, sad. She’s evil, and yet every investigation of her has turned up … nothing. Investigations led by hostile Republican leaders with prosecutorial chops … nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. She’s been investigated something like ten times. Nothing, wash, lather, repeat, nothing.

   Her real offense? Her husband, President Bill Clinton, was a better politician than all of them put together. I never liked Bill, though I voted for him twice as a political independent, but he was undeniably better than his opponents, be they named Dole or Gingrich or Bush.

   So when Thiessen claims we’re better off with Trump than Hillary, it pays to remember that virtually every professional group associated with the government, including national security groups, endorsed Hillary in the 2016 campaign, not Trump, and Trump has turned out to be a national security disaster.

   It pays to remember that Hillary has been a success at just about everything she’s worked at, with the notable exception of the Clinton health plan.

   It pays to remember that Trump has been a failure at just about everything he’s worked at, with the notable exception of his TV show, The Apprentice.

   So, if you’re an intellectually honest person, do you go with the guy with failure to his name and lies as his background, or the woman with success to her name and no scandals attached, despite determined efforts by the Republicans to attach them?

   Thiessen’s shallow intellectual roots are showing when he states this Holy Tenet.

A Party built, in part, on the above tenets isn’t viable over the long term. Ossified, paranoid, and using deceit to keep its members in line, the Republican Party will need to be burned down before it can be rebuilt into a respectable governance candidate.

And that’s bad for America. The leaders of the Republican Party have really let the Country down.

Let’s hope the rebuilding starts on Tuesday.

Mervert:

Man who makes unwanted sexual advances on a mermaid or actor-portrayed mermaid. [Paraphrased from The Latest Show With Stephen Colbert tonight]

Looking at the two sides in the imminent midterms reveals how each side is trying to portray the election to the best advantage. Representing the left is the unsurprising Kevin Drum:

The RNC created—and Donald Trump pinned to the top of his Twitter feed—an appallingly racist ad today that accuses Democrats of “letting in” Luis Bracamontes, a man who killed two Northern California deputies four years ago while in the country illegally. It’s widely viewed as Willie Horton 2.0, except maybe worse. So have any elected Republican officials denounced it? So far, I can find three:

• Sen. Jeff Flake
• Rep. Mike Coffman
• Gov. John Kasich

Don’t @ me if I got this wrong. Maybe there are four! Or even five!

The level of desperation this shows is palpable. Trump and the Republican Party keep pulling the race lever harder and harder, but it’s not working. Trump went from 800 troops at the border to 5,000 troops to 15,000 troops. He called the migrant caravan a thousand miles away an “invasion.” He claims he’s going to end birthright citizenship even though he knows perfectly well it’s part of the Constitution and he can’t do it.  …

Sadly, [the Republicans are] still going to get a lot of votes. But common decency, which took a vacation in 2016, is finally going to win on Tuesday. Trump is making sure of it.

On the conservative side, Kyle Smith on National Review has decided to play counterpoint to President Trump’s frantic attempts to stir up stark fear with a Fat, Dumb, & Happy routine:

Today is nothing like as fraught a moment, or it shouldn’t be. The U.S. is facing the usual, perennial problems such as dealing with the cost and availability of health care and massive entitlements-fueled debt, but problems specific to our moment are few. The main source of angst and anger appears to be the personality of the president. That’s hardly comparable to the importance of the Iraq War or the 2008 financial crisis or even an ordinary recession.

It’s an unpopular message, but 2018 isn’t a particularly eventful year. At the moment, things are more or less okay. Beneath the surface, there is bipartisan agreement on this. The Republicans don’t have a legislative agenda. The Democrats revealed in a breathless New York Times interview that their big plan after retaking the House is a package of political-process ideas aimed almost exclusively at bolstering the fortunes of the Democratic party, such as Voting Rights Act adjustments and more campaign-finance disclosure requirements. It can’t be the case that 2018 is both an apocalyptic moment for America and that these are the central issues.

He thinks – or would have his readers think, which can be a very different thing – that in a decade, historians will scratch their heads over this election’s uproar in puzzlement. He’s basically pouring oil on the water^[1].

There’s a couple of problems with his essay, though.

First of all, he’s fixated on the present. There’s no acknowledgment that the Presidential and Republican activities of today might damage the United States.

There’s not even a mention of it.

It’s difficult to understand this omission if you’re a thinking person of an innocent nature. I’ve had the latter surgically removed, so I attribute this to attempting to take the minds of the Republican base off the more disturbing aspects of the entire conservative movement.

But it is incumbent on the thinking person to be looking to the future, to be heading off disasters before they occur. Whether it’s anthropocentric climate change, environmental damage incurred while in pursuit of yet more corporate profits, or the next war, to simply make an assessment of how we’re doing now and claiming there’s nothing going on just doesn’t cut it.

If Smith were presenting a serious essay, he would have talked about at least some of the following: the suddenly mountainous national debt; the fact that our annual deficit went to zero during the Clinton years, and then roller-coastered back up during the years the Republicans dominated the Legislature, and what that may imply about the quality of the legislators involved; the future of our judiciary, with a collection of sub-par butts in judicial seats; the future of a democracy in which any media outlet reporting news in such a way as to infuriate President Irrelevancy (yes, I’m in a crabby mood) is demonized and labeled illicit; and documented Presidential mendacity, self-interest, and possible autocratic intents.

To name but a few relevant topics.

Smith also indulges in some convenient falsehoods. For example, “The Republicans don’t have a legislative agenda,” is fairly blatant, as Senator McConnell has stated, without obfuscation, that, should the Republicans control the Legislature again, the social-net programs will be on the chopping block.

“massive entitlements-fueled debt“: Blaming the debt on entitlements is long-time conservative kant which, unfortunately for Smith, doesn’t work when one considers, again, the Clinton achievement of a zero annual deficit. If entitlements, a serious subject, were the problem then that achievement would remain a Slick-Willy Wet Dream, but instead it exists, and is the elephant in the Republican Parlor.

And we all know this. It’s not hard to come up with this reasoning, really it’s not. Start with the Afghanistan war which, unavoidable or not, was irresponsibly financially managed by the Bush Administration, the completely unnecessary Iraq War, again irresponsibly financially managed by the Bush Administration, a notoriously spend-happy Congress of 2001, 2003, and 2005, “tariff wars”, and now the tax reform bill which is verifiably failing to perform as advertised, and we have a far more plausible scenario for skyrocketing deficits and debt: a failure to raise taxes responsibly. As has been noted time after time for at least the last 20 years, the GOP-dominated Congress has simply shrugged and “kicked the can down the road” when it came to deficits. Blaming a military-happy Congress on both sides of the aisle is far more accurate than faith-based blather about entitlements.

That’s why that’s a lie.

There you go, Drum and Smith. One believes this is a very important mid-term, if only the leftists can get the disinterested youth to vote, while the other thinks everything’s hunky-dory.

Curmudgeonly and Angry at all the lying, or Fat, Dumb, and Happy. Which works better for you?

¹ For those readers unfamiliar with nautical history, occasionally big ships with lots of oil reserves will dump that oil into the sea when the seas are too choppy for some activity. I doubt they do it very often these days, but I’ve read of it being done during World War II.

Megan McArdle says what I suspect a lot of people have been thinking:

When Rolling Stone magazine in 2014 published an account of a gang rape at the University of Virginia, some reporters, including me, nursed private doubts about its too-cinematic details — but, like me, they were exceedingly wary of publicly casting doubt.

Even after Richard Bradley, the editor of Worth magazine, finally raised questions about Rolling Stone’s account on his personal blog, even the writers who declined to attack him for “blaming the victim” treated them gingerly. A lot more reporting was required before we were willing to state outright what we’d suspected privately — that “Jackie,” the alleged victim, had made the whole thing up. …

But we know that’s not possible. High-profile false rape accusations such as the ones in the Rolling Stone article reflect the reality that between 2 and 10 percent of rape allegations are provably false; the FBI says 8 percent of forcible-rape allegations are “unfounded.” The number of false accusations that can’t be proved false necessarily pushes that number even higher. To act as if this weren’t the case borders on wishful thinking, and it comes at a cost.

NBC wasn’t the only media outlet that seems to have relaxed its normal standards during the Kavanaugh hearings. The New Yorker, with exceptionally weak evidence, ran allegations of his sexual misbehavior in college. The reporters no doubt believed they were making it easier for victims to be heard. But airing insufficiently vetted allegations encourages the public to distrust the media. Actual victims won’t be heard if no one’s listening.

If it’s true that certain media organizations charged into the Kavanaugh mess without having all their ducks in a row, then it’s a lot of sinus-infection snot on their heads. But, as President Trump himself observed at the beginning of his term, I don’t think we have to make this into some “liberal media organizations” out to get Kavanaugh. No, Trump had it right at the beginning.

It’s all about the money.

Rather than insert my usual rant about the problems of importing other societal sector operationality into the free press, I’ll just point you at my dead horse.

But if this is true, someone should be fired with a big, high fastball.

Candidate Abrams continues her legal winning streak in the Georgia gubernatorial race:

A federal judge knocked down a motion from Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial nominee Brian Kemp against a previous temporary restraining order that changes the way election officials handle absentee ballots in the state.

US District Court Judge Leigh Martin May rejected Kemp’s arguments point by point and concluded the “injunction ensures that absentee voters who are unable to vote in person and whose applications or ballots are rejected based on a signature mismatch will still have the opportunity to have their votes counted in the upcoming election.”

Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, also filed an emergency motion Tuesday with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. He argued, “the district court issued a preliminary injunction that requires 159 Georgia counties to make immediate, significant changes to those longstanding procedures right in the middle of an ongoing statewide general election,” which he said threatens to “disrupt the orderly administration of elections.”

Last week, May, the judge, ordered that Georgia election officials stop rejecting absentee ballots with voters’ signatures that do not appear to match those on record. [CNN]

I’m wondering about this “long-standing” claim of Kemp’s. PolitiFact seems to indicate the law is only a year old:

Under a 2017 Georgia law, a voter registration application is complete if information on that form exactly matches records kept by Georgia’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration.

If there’s no match, it’s placed on a pending status and the applicant is notified in the form of a letter from the county board of registrars about the need to provide additional documentation. It’s then up to the applicant to provide sufficient evidence to verify his or her identify.

But perhaps the reference can be twisted to mean something far more innocent, eh? There are days I get tired of the picky word shit.

When it comes to climate change, the eye candy is the big hurricanes coming in, and future visions of drowned cities. The real bell ringer, though, will be the quiet changes in the foundation of civilization.

Agriculture.

With that in mind, here’s a thought-provoking bit from WaPo on how viniculturists in Italy are experiencing climate change:

Season after season, he’d been growing and harvesting the same grapes on the same land. But five years ago, Livio Salvador began to wonder whether something was changing.

When he walked through his vineyards, he would see patches of grapes that were browned and desiccated. The damage tended to appear on the outside of the bunch — the part most exposed to sunlight. Salvador talked to other growers and winemakers in the region, and they were noticing it, too.

Their grapes were getting sunburned.

“It has almost become the norm,” Salvador said this month, after a torrid growing season that saw 10 percent of his fruit wither to waste under the sun.

In a region celebrated for the prosecco and pinot grigio it ships around the world, Italy’s particularly sensitive white wine grapes have become a telltale of even gradual temperature increases — a climate slipping from ideal to nearly ideal. Vintners and farmers are noticing more disease, an accelerated ripening process and, most viscerally, a surge in the number of grapes that are singed by the intensifying summer heat.

Even if Ag doesn’t go under and plunge us into famine, there are more subtle problems ahead:

In this part of northeastern Italy, wine production is the abiding identity, and the vineyards stretch for miles, interrupted by villages with church bell towers and by the occasional Palladian villa. One large producer says the region has been suitable for wine-growing “since ancient Roman times.”

Much like Pittsburgh losing its steel industry, or places like Flint and Cadillac, MI, losing the car industry. It’s a long way back when a cultural identity has been ripped away.

Think of it this way: Office workers aren’t really going to notice changes to the climate directly. The slow, impactful changes simply don’t hit them because they work on, well, office stuff. Even those who will look at the numbers describing climate change can always write it off as bad data collection equipment or even “natural cycles,” despite anything the scientists say.

But the Ag people, they will notice. They have to notice. When their choice bit of land becomes progressively less productive, they’ll notice. And they keep records, they know the long-term trends.

Sometimes we see them as tradition-bound conservatives, but in the end they may be that all important non-climate change scientist group that grabs the ideological deniers by the lapels, shakes them vigorously, and tosses them into the river of dishonorable obscurity.

Congressman Steve King’s recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate. We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior.

— Steve Stivers (@RepSteveStivers) October 30, 2018

Steve Stivers is National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman.

Representative Steve King (R-IA) isn’t a Democrat.

It’s stunning, to me. Not only the condemnation, but waiting until this late in the campaign season. Is this just a hand-wave at being outraged, soon to be followed by a sigh and an admission that, one more time, they’ll just have to work with him?

Or is this an attempt to sink King into a lake with a boulder tied to his ankles?

Maybe Stivers should consider switching parties.

With one week left ’til the midterms, I think it’s fair to say that the Republican Party is now trying to reap what it’s been sowing over the last few years.

Not sure what I mean? Many pundits and bloggers, such as Andrew Sullivan, noticed more than a decade ago, closer to two decades in fact, that the conservative wing of the Republican Party, even as it took over the Party, looked less and less outside itself, and instead contented itself with information which came from other members of the conservative wing, or was fed in through official conservative news sources, such as Fox News, Breitbart, and others. This became known as the ‘bubble’ or ‘echo chamber,’ a version of the information landscape which has a problematic relationship with reality, sometimes strong, sometimes dubious, and occasionally completely delusional.

By encouraging members of the conservative wing, now simply known as the Republican Party as members who refuse to succumb to the lure of uniform thought and behavior^[1] are RINOed out, to utilize only the conservative news sources, the leaders and backers of the Republican Party have worked to ensure their Party members’ support by controlling the news they consume. Additionally, by poisoning the traditional and neutral mass media as having distributed “fake news”, President Trump has participated – put the frosting on the cake, if you will – in the work of carefully fertilizing the crop. Through careful control of the content of the news, as documented by (perhaps former) Republican Bruce Bartlett, the members of the base are carefully nurtured for the big day. That big day might as well be known as The Reaping.

And I think it’s coming with mid-terms. How do we know this? The level of deceit from the Republican side. That’s the point, after all, of the bubble. The bubble members are fed their informational nutrients, no matter what the connection might be to reality, and the favored leaders of the Party receive their votes.

So we have …

• Healthcare pre-existing conditions. Apparently a number of GOP incumbents are claiming they are in favor of keeping legislation that prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to citizens with pre-existing conditions. Even President Trump claims he’s for that.

  Problem is, the AHCA did not retain that requirement. The AHCA was to replace the ACA, and the ACA brought that requirement into the law; the AHCA would have made it possible for insurance companies to deny coverage again. The AHCA was Trump’s baby, he worked for it, and was exceedingly bitter when it failed in the Senate.

  But today? Today, he’d have you believe the Democrats are against it and the Republicans have been for that ban on using pre-existing conditions to deny coverage all along.  No, really, that’s what he’d have you believe. Even as his Administration supports a lawsuit brought by some States asking that the ACA be declared null and void, including the all-important ban.
  If your GOP candidate is claiming s/he voted for, or would have voted for legislation denying insurance companies the right to deny coverage to pre-existing conditions, but you do a little sleuthing and find they were full-throated supporters of the AHCA, then they’re liars. No shilly-shallying, folks. They’re taking advantage of the ‘bubble’ to feed you bullshit.

  See here for a more authoritative take on both the lies and the legislative analysis.

• Immigrants are grifters, murderers, and rapists. Well, no. Many statistical analyses (here’s one) indicate that immigrants, at worst, commit crimes at no higher a rate than natives, and often at lower rates. This makes sense, as what’s the point in traveling to the United States to commit a crime in an unfamiliar context when it’s so much easier on one’s home turf?

  Furthermore, immigrants often take jobs no native-born American will take, and the recent lack of immigrant labor has lead to major problems for mom ‘n pop size businesses.

  However, the dangers of immigrants has been a constant theme from President Trump and his adherents for the last week or two. Frighten the base into voting for their sober protectors. That caravan coming out of Honduras must be full of automatic weapons, because now our Army is deploying troops down to the border. And, dammit, you know the Democrats are for open borders. Trump keeps telling you so directly.

• Democrats are evil. A quarter of America is only evil if you really want them to be. However, to be honest with you, as an independent I see both sides as simply being fallibly human.

  The difference between the two groups? Let me share with you, if I haven’t already, my definitions of conservatives and liberals.

  A conservative is afraid the future may destroy that which they value about the present, both tangibles, such as communities, as well as intangibles, such as values. The sober, temperate conservative is thoughtful and understand change is inevitable. The emotional conservative is less forgiving, less tolerant, sometimes rigid, and can be manipulated by the canny marketeer. I had not given it any thought before, but I suspect Lincoln might be considered a sober, thoughtful conservative, intent on preserving the Union, but acknowledging that the central role of Justice in a stable society required the freeing of the slaves. An emotional conservative frantically defends everything, while the sober conservative lets those things associated with injustice go.

  A liberal looks at the past and is horrified by the injustice s/he sees, and swears to do better. To the conservative, the liberal recommendations can seem like madness; independents may also find them jarring. Yet, one should not abhor those who would do better, but instead offer constructive, considered criticism – and be willing to be persuaded by their arguments. Temperamentally, liberals tend to be impressed with themselves and each other, and, the further out on a limb they’ve gone, the more patronizing they can become. It’s too bad, as I see such luminaries as Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers to be the most liberal: not in position, which never defines liberals or conservatives, but in their thought processes.

  Evil is a convenient harvester, though, isn’t it? Voting against evil makes one feel like a Roman legionary holding back the vile Visigoths. (The Romans did eventually lose, BTW, and Rome was sacked.) But, as long time readers and certain spot-readers of this blog may realize, this is really about dividing the country. As an adversary might want, the United States is weak when we’re divided. (We must hang together, or surely we shall hang apart, to quote a Founding Father.) When we’re squabbling and screaming and lying about each other, we’re ripe for the picking.

  The words coming out of Trump’s mouth are sweet music to the Russian oligarchs’ ears.

  Democrats are not evil, no matter what the Republicans want you to believe. Their lies do not, to these independent’s eyes, appear to be anywhere in magnitude to the Republicans’ lies, to be comparable to the concerted and coordinated Republican attempts to control the information reaching their base.

I could go on, but frankly I find writing this sort of thing exhausting. The cynicism, the abandonment of principles, the rejection of long-established traditions that were constructed to keep us from capsizing on the rough seas of politics, suspicion of outsiders, and even sectarian violence.

It’s tiring. But it should be obvious: The Reaping is underway. The Republicans need the votes, and now they’re banking on how well they’ve insulated their base from the real world in order to reap those votes.

Are you just a stalk of grain sitting out in the field? Or are you beginning to wonder?

I’ll leave you with this.

DON’T TRUST ME.

DON’T TRUST FOX.

Just go out and do the research. The Republicans are for a ban on pre-existing condition clauses in insurance? Easy question: Why didn’t the AHCA contain that clause? Why did the Republicans vote more than 70 times to abolish the ACA during Obama’s years? Why are they once again trying to gut the ACA via their lawsuit with no exception for the ban, no legislation waiting to institute a ban, no nothing?

Go ask the questions. Then there’s one more: why are you voting for the Republicans this year?

¹ That is, they practiced the once revered Republican tradition of thinking for themselves.

Which makes Trump’s latest campaign promise to end birthright citizenship another impeachment matter. CNN has the report:

President Donald Trump offered a dramatic, if legally dubious, promise in a new interview to unilaterally end birthright citizenship, ratcheting up his hardline immigration rhetoric with a week to go before critical midterm elections.

Trump’s vow to end the right to citizenship for the children of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born on US soil came in an interview with Axios released Tuesday. Such a step would be regarded as an affront to the US Constitution, which was amended 150 years ago to include the words: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

Trump did not say when he would sign the order, and some of his past promises to use executive action have gone unfulfilled. But whether the President follows through on his threat or not, the issue joins a string of actions intended to thrust the matter of immigration into the front of voters’ minds as they head to polls next week.

All it does is remind me of how woefully inadequate Trump was when he entered office, and how he hasn’t progressed a bit since then. Still completely into the show-biz aspects of being President, without a whit of intelligence concerning anything substantial.

If he were smart, he would have said “I don’t like birthright citizenship and I’ll sponsor a Constitutional Amendment,” hey, he’d look smart to the Independents, and he’d have half a chance at getting it passed, too. CNN notes:

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in, has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years with all of those benefits,” Trump said in an interview for “Axios on HBO.”

Several other countries, including Canada, have a policy of birthright citizenship, according to an analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for reducing immigration.

It’s worth a national debate. Heck, I might be in favor of it.

But right at the moment I’m only in favor of impeaching his sorry ass out of the Oval Office before he does any more damage to this country’s underpinnings.

That’s a big target.

Like many slapstick comedies, The Great Race (1965) is good for some light-hearted laughter, and, in this case, some lovely and well-choreographed fencing scenes, although I wish there’d been a bit more from Natalie Wood’s character, just to balance the fun duel between Tony Curtis and Ross Martin.

But other than that, it’s just unremarkable fun. If you don’t like slapstick, you won’t like this. But if you do, you’ve probably already seen this.

The fact-checkers for WaPo’s Fact Checker column are a little pissed off:

Somewhere, somehow, a memo must have gone out to Republican lawmakers who voted for the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the Republican bill to repeal and replace Obamacare: If you are attacked for undermining protections for people with existing health problems, jab back by saying the claim got Four Pinocchios from The Washington Post.

That’s not true. Republicans are twisting an unrelated fact check and are misleading voters. We have found at least seven politicians who have done this.

Rep. Peter J. Roskam (Illinois’s 6th District): In a debate on Oct. 22, he said: “Sean [Casten] has falsely accused me of being against protecting people with preexisting conditions and that was fact-checked by The Washington Post, who gave that four Pinocchios.” …

In sum, the first six lawmakers are referring to a fact check that: a) focused on how many people had preexisting conditions, not whether the bill harmed them; b) was published before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office issued a critical report about the possible impact on people with preexisting conditions if the bill they supported had become law.

Several lawmakers referred to a sentence in the AHCA. Rep. Davis even misquotes it as: “Nothing in this bill shall allow insurance companies to deny anyone coverage for preexisting conditions.”

Actually, the sentence said: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as permitting health insurance issuers to limit access to health coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions.”

This sentence was mostly a public-relations exercise, but notice the difference? It says “limit access to health coverage,” not “deny coverage” as Davis claimed. Everyone has “access” to buying a Tesla, but it makes a difference whether you can afford to buy it.

If the Republicans consider it important to subvert the message of the fact-checkers, it must mean the fact-checkers really are having an impact. Then throw in a misquote and the third-raters from the GOP just look awful.

Know hope. Even if I don’t.