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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.

There’s been a lot of outrage after President Trump suggested the Tree of Life synagogue needed a guard, as noted in Business Insider:

Trump was responding to a reporter who asked if he felt compelled to “revisit gun laws” after a gunman opened fire while shouting anti-Semitic slurs at a Saturday morning prayer service at the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue.

Trump, speaking just over an hour after Pittsburgh police confirmed they had taken 48-year-old Robert Bowers into custody, said that if the synagogue had “protection inside, the results would have been far better.”

I think the approach of outrage is misguided. I suggest a more rational approach, as follows:

Sure, an armed guard might have stopped this attacker.

But he wouldn’t have stopped three armed attackers.

Oh, but you cry, that’s never happened before, and it won’t happen here in America.

Oh, sorry, sorry. I didn’t realize you don’t read history or current events.. It’s happened many times throughout history, and, given the extremist rhetoric flooding the net, it seems very unlikely that haters will continue their individual assaults. After all, someone with a big megaphone and a small brain – or, perhaps, a foreign brain (Russian? Iranian?), will begin encouraging attacks by groups.

Oh, but then we can post more guards!

You sure can.

And bigger guards.

Sure. Wannabe basketball players? Yep. How many do you need?

Uh …

And you don’t want to drain the pews, do you? Hard to get folks into the proper tithing mood when they’re armed to the incisors. They even feel like they’ve already given.

No!

Oh, yes, they will. But here’s what I suggest: privatize it!

What? Oh, yes, that’ll work!

Big companies can supply guards to all you faithful types! In fact, I’ve noticed there’s a wonderful place for a machine gun nest up on the Holy Cross. For you Christians, at least. I’ve never been in any other religious structure, except in India. For instance, how about a nest right up in the balcony at East Bay Calvary?

That’s America for you, isn’t it?! Isn’t it wonderful?

Sure. For the first two months.

Uh, what do you mean?

Hey, profit’s everything, right? That’s the American way. Hell, profit’s more important than Jesus. Just ask Pat Robertson.

Now you’re just being ridiculous.

I’ll pass that on to Pat, and I warn you, he may disagree with you. Just imagine that big ol’ machine gun peering down at the pews, just waiting for that sneak attack from some hater, your faithful defender’s finger on the trigger –

You’re being a jerk.

I’m being a jerk? What if your defender gets the hiccups?

Fuck off.

Certainly, I can see I’ve inserted some unfortunate thoughts in your head, and you’ll need to wash them out. But just one more thing …

What?

What if your defender, that guy with his finger on the trigger of that heavy machine gun, is a hater? Or … a liberal?

Have fun, kids! Glad I don’t feel that need to attend to religious services, sounds like everyone’s at risk now.

And I wouldn’t dream of suggesting, you know, that sort of thing. The NRA might die of heart disease if I did.

NASA recently awarded some VR software an award:

A mixed-reality software that allows scientists and engineers to virtually walk on Mars recently received NASA’s 2018 Software of the Year Award.

OnSight uses imagery from NASA’s Curiosity rover to create an immersive 3D terrain model, allowing users to wander the actual dunes and valleys explored by the robot. The goal of the software, a collaboration between Microsoft and JPL’s Ops Lab, is to bring scientists closer to the experience of being in the field. Unlike geologists on Earth, who can get up close and personal with the terrain they study, Martian geologists have a harder time visualizing their environment through 2D imagery from Mars.

“Feeling like you’re standing on Mars really gives you a different sense of Mars than just looking at the pictures,” said Parker Abercrombie, OnSight team lead. “And I think it’s a really powerful way to bring people to these places that they physically can’t visit.”

Here’s a video:

As a science geek, it sounds real cool and all that. But has NASA setup any sort of metric to measure just how much more useful this approach to studying conditions on Mars vs the more traditional approaches? And if the advances in science attributable to this “mixed-reality” software are substantial, are they prepared to analyze the reasons behind the gain, that is, perform a qualitative analysis? Such an analysis may help sharpen the next step along this alternative planetary analysis path.

I must admit I was bothered by Colbert’s routine last week mocking President Trump’s “I’m a nationalist, not a globalist” comment during a recent speech, because equating that to National Socialism, or the Nazis, isn’t really accurate.

Because he’s comparing “nationalism” to “globalists,” this is about international trade. It’s best to understand what’s going on here in order to have effective responses to Trumpists, so let’s break down what Trump said. From The New York Times:

At a rally in Houston on Monday night, he embraced the term as unabashedly as he ever has. “Really, we’re not supposed to use that word,” he told supporters in a nod to the usual political sensibilities that he relishes disrupting. “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, O.K.? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist! Use that word! Use that word!”

Asked in the Oval Office on Tuesday why he used that word given its association with racist movements, Mr. Trump professed ignorance of its history but did not back off. “I never heard that theory about being a nationalist,” he said. “I’ve heard them all. But I’m somebody who loves our country.” Undaunted, he added: “I am a nationalist. It’s a word that hasn’t been used too much. Some people use it, but I’m very proud. I think it should be brought back.” …

“Radical Democrats want to turn back the clock” to restore the “rule of corrupt, power-hungry globalists,” he said in Houston, where he was campaigning for Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican. “You know what a globalist is, right? You know what a globalist is? A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much. And you know what? We can’t have that.”

So are the terms “nationalist” and “globaliist” important in the national conversation? The best way to look at this is to look for absurdities. Trump characterizes himself as a patriot that wants to put the United States first. The implication?

That other Presidents do not.

If you’re a hyper-partisan, this is sweet, sweet honey. After all, the members of the other tribes are traitors and imbeciles and, hey, they paint stripes on themselves at midnight before ride the Ferris Wheel for the great sacrifice of small children.

Ahem^[1].

But for the rest of us, the great majority of Americans who still buy tickets for the Rationality Train, it should be self-evident that just about all American politicians always put America first^[2]. That some do not perform as well as others may be because of competency or the currents of History, but to suggest that it’s rank treason is damned unlikely.

Therefore, this is a question of strategy. It helps to ask why there are different strategies, and, given the now-obvious limitations of President Trump, particularly in the realm of “trade deficits”, we can come up with an explanaation.

A nationalist believes, or purports to believe, that international trade is a zero-sum game. For every winner, there’s a loser. So you pick a metric, do your measurement, and if, say, the trade balance with some other nation is negative, then you’re losing the “trade war” with that country, and Something Must Be Done.

A “globalist,” for want of a better turn, has progressed beyond the simple and incorrect description of international trade to realize that it’s possible, if not guaranteed, to have both sides win at trade. This is actually quite the natural result that every single private sector person should realize. When you buy salt from the grocery story, or the salt miner, the fact of the matter is that they have too much salt, while you don’t have enough, but you have enough money to afford it, while they need money to continue the business, keep the shareholders happy, etc.

Each comes away relatively happy with the transaction, assuming it’s an honest transaction.

So there’s the thing. Trumpists want to think there’s a winner and a loser for every relationship, and they think America’s not winning – why? Many reasons, from propaganda to being in an industry that’s doing poorly or has a poor outlook.

It’s easier to blame that country across the pond than yourself – or the currents of the global economy.

The globalist sees trade as winners on both sides, if handled properly. They want America to win, too – and to have happy, prosperous winners on the other side as well. Their problem is that can be a hard gig to properly manage, sometimes.

So there’s your definition for the day.  I think that’s a little more easy to use effectively than a defective equality to National Socialism. You can just say Trump’s not smart enough to understand international trade’s potential.

¹ I hyperbolize merely to highlight the absurdity of hyper-partisan thought.

² Some readers, given the behaviors of the current President vis a vis the Russians, might question this assertion, but I will let it go in this post in order to advance the argument without distracting, unproven details.

Gee, is this the footprint of Godzilla? How about, ah, that one with three heads? No?

The hard, dirty cops in the noir thriller Mulholland Falls (1996) are, sadly, not hard enough for me to believe them, at least not in the TV-cut version which we saw. These cops, a unit formed to oust organized crime from Los Angeles, CA, start the movie off one evening in the early 1950s by tossing a would-be mob boss off of the cliff where Mulholland Drive has a lovely view of Los Angeles.

The next morning, though, the pulverized body of a woman is brought to the attention of the squad’s boss, Captain Hoover. She is swiftly identified as the beautiful Alison Pond. The trail to her killers leads to a confederate who took films of her with her lovers, through Captain Hoover’s hotel bedroom, and onwards to a military base where a leader of the atomic bomb effort, General Timms, is mortally ill and babbles at length concerning how sometimes the one hundred must be sacrificed for the one thousand. As it happens, there’s a hospital ward of dying servicemen on the base, all ill from radiation poisoning.

But when Hoover accuses Timms of killing Pond, of making her a member of Timm’s one hundred, it’s a look of innocence and dismissal. On the ride home in the base’s DC-3^[1], Hoover and his partner realize they have been setup for an identical fate as that suffered by Pond, but overpower the General’s over-zealous Colonel and his assistant and toss them from the plane, instead. Hoover’s partner also dies in the incident.

In the end, Hoover loses his long-time partner and, possibly, his wife, as well as his former lover, Pond.

As noir goes, Mulholland Falls is definitely mediocre. The problems are principally with the characters. Of the four dirty cops, only Captain Hoover is given much to work with, and the actor, Nick Nolte, doesn’t come through as either brutally stupid or cannily corrupted. He doesn’t achieve the proper look, either, being far too bland to really communicate anything to the audience. This point does bring up the entire question of the importance of appearance in theater. Sometimes it can be used to indicate the moral role of a character, and sometimes it can be used to obscure the moral role. But the look of Captain Hoover said little, being more of a journalistic effort than a dramatic effort.

His partner, Ellery Coolidge, may be a long time partner, or brand new, competent or incompetent. Honestly, none of that comes through. He seems to be just filling that slot marked “Partner, to be ignored when Hoover is in emotional pain.” The other two cops of Hoover’s squad are non-entities, despite their slick suits and very cool convertible.

Even more jarring is General Timms, who comes across more as a dying philosopher or artist, and not a stiff-lipped General, doing his duty. His clothing, his bearing, even his housing did not speak to the constraints of the purported role, but rather someone who probably should never have even been considered military.

Without effective characters in these moral roles of defective, failing people, the plot becomes more artifice than moral lesson. Noir isn’t just about bad endings, it’s about how the selfishly bad decisions of the people inhabiting these scenarios lead to their grim demise. Noir is the flip side of the morality tale wherein doing good leads to good results, even if the self-sacrifice is mortal. Noir is specifically about how following one’s impulses, not socially-approved, leads to an ending other than what one might expect.

And Mulholland Falls never quite gets there.

1 The DC-3 was a sweet workhorse of a plane, as I understand it, with the first rolling off a runway in 1936, and even today some are flying. According to Wikipedia the plane used here is the military version, listed as the C-47.

Remember all those horrible immigrants from Mexico that Big Daddy Trump told us about? Here’s Fox News helping us out:

President Trump railed against illegal immigration Thursday, claiming that “women are raped at levels nobody has ever seen before,” in reference to the journey north to the United States.

At a round-table event in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia — slated to discuss tax reform — Trump instead started his discussion with a focus on the border and illegal immigration.

“Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower when I opened—everybody said ‘oh, he was so tough.’ I used the word ‘rape,’” Trump said, referring to his controversial comment at the start of the presidential campaign when he said “rapists” were coming across the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

“Yesterday, it came out and this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before,” Trump said. “They don’t want to mention that. So we have to change our laws.”

That was from last April. Of course, during his candidacy he claimed things were even worse.

And now he claims the ‘caravan’ coming up through Mexico from Guatemala has more of the same. Good lord! It must be a war zone through the heart of Mexico! Am I right? Yeah? From WaPo:

Mexicans shower the caravan with kindness — and tarps, tortillas and medicine

PIJIJIAPAN, Mexico — Everything Pedro Osmin Ulloa was wearing, from the black felt shoes with the gold buckles to the shimmery blue button-down, was as new to him as he was to Mexico.

The 30-year-old Honduran corn farmer and dogged sojourner in the migrant caravan was dressed head-to-toe in donated clothes. His 3-year-old son, Alexander, played with donated toys. And the rest of the family — his wife, his two brothers and a cousin — sat on the sidewalk eating beef stew and tortillas ladled out for them by residents of this bustling market town in Mexico’s southern Chiapas state.

“These people have been beautiful,” he said. “Everyone’s helping us out.”

It’s tough to be xenophobic when everyone’s being so bloody kind to those less fortunate, isn’t it?

But this is how low the United States has sunk under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump. We run around in circles, terrified that furriners might get into the country and commit horrible crimes, while the Mexicans, a much poorer country, have opened their hearts and arms to those who’ve been forced from their homes.

If Trump had been serious about immigration, he wouldn’t have bothered with that non-starter of a wall. He wouldn’t have bothered with “immigration reform.” If he was the smart dude he claims to be, he would have commissioned studies to discover exactly why these countries south of us are leaking some of their best and brightest to their big neighbor to the north, and then taken those corrective actions necessary to help them out, whether that’s more foreign aid, or withholding ag exports^[1], or whatever.

Vote Democratic. Even if you’re a conservative, the Republican Party needs to be burned down to the ground and rebuilt.

If they reform into a party with honorable intentions, then you can vote Republican next time. Right now? They’re not.

¹ The theory goes that our low-cost food exports, often subsidized by the American government, out-competes the local farmers, who lose their livelihoods and sink into poverty.

And maybe then migrate to the United States to work in the … ag industry!

Still, I haven’t heard whether this theory proved out or not – it’s from 25 years ago, and it was just as politically unpopular then as it would be today, I’m sure.

I see the EPA doesn’t see the value in, oh, clean air. This is the headline from IFL Science!:

EPA Announces It Will Discontinue Science Panel That Reviews Air Pollution Safety

Perhaps it’s a bit un-nuanced:

Made up of doctors, researchers, and other experts, the 20-person Particulate Matter Review Panel works to provide guidelines on particulate matter (PM) – tiny solid particles found in the air, such as soot – known to cause respiratory and other health issues. The panel will be replaced by the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), a seven-member group established in 1977 under the Clean Air Act to address “research related to air quality, sources of air pollution, and the strategies to attain and maintain air quality standards.” CASAC will be legally required to advise the EPA administrator on quality standards beginning in 2019.

Sounds like a bureaucratic rearrangement and even streamlining. But the Union of Concerned Scientists is not happy:

The administration might claim to be making this move in the name of streamlining but there are much bigger consequences to eliminating science from the process.  Sure, it will be a faster process to update the PM standard without a review panel, but we’ll also have a less science-based process. Review panels effectively serve as a public peer-review of the EPA’s integrated science assessments, which detail the state of the science on pollutants.  Without a PM review panel, there is far less expert input informing the PM standard.

But perhaps this is precisely the point. The administration has made clear that they are interested in fast-tracking the PM and ozone reviews in order to set new standards before the end of the administration.  This is an aggressive timeline, considering that the EPA is only required to update the standards every five years, and usually needs more time to conduct the careful, science-based process of characterizing the state of the science on a pollutant’s health effects and working with scientific experts to issue a standard that is protective of public health. If you can eliminate this careful scientific assessment, you can speed up the process, but at the expense of public health.

My suspicion? Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler is apparently from the same mold as his predecessor, the disgraced Scott Pruitt, as the DeSmog blog notes:

Coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, the interim administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after the resignation of Scott Pruitt, has held positions as the Washington Coal Club’s Vice President and President. Wheeler’s profile at Faegre Baker Daniels consulting, as recently as April 2018, listed him as the WCC‘s vice president. The group’s most recent tax filings, as of 2016, listed him as president.

An informational brochure described the coal club as a “small informal group with a mutual interest in coal,” while boasting board representation and sponsorship from some of the largest coal companies in the country. Its mailing address in 2014 was listed as courtesy of Arch Coal. According to the brochure, its “main activity is a luncheon-meeting program, which is held monthly” and “on or close to the U.S.Capitol complex in Washington, DC.”

The Washington Coal Club’s website no longer appeared in operation as of May 2017. However, in December 2017, the group bestowed “Lifetime Achievement Awards” on numerous individuals including vocal climate change denier and Murray Energy CEO Robert E. Murray.

[Attributions omitted.]

That last bit would indicate to me that Wheeler has a set of views that are out of step with traditional EPA views. So my assessment is that he was hearing voices saying things he didn’t want to hear, so, in the tradition of autocrats everywhere – he silenced them.

Readers comment on the sad Monahan / Ellison controversy:

I think Monahan is being dishonest.

It certainly feels like it, but we may never know unless she takes one of two actions: release the video, or recant her accusations. At the moment, she’s in deep long-term danger as far as her future goes, because not releasing the tape isn’t an option, and if she releases the (or “a”) tape after the election and it’s not considered to show what she claims its shows, then her reputation is absolutely done and she’ll spend the rest of her life working waitressing jobs, because the Democrats won’t touch her, organizations who might like her experience working for the Democrats will take one look at this episode and mark her untrustworthy.

Even the Republicans would hesitate to hire her.

And even if she waits to release it until after the election and it does show Ellison engaged in loathsome behaviors, she’s still tarred with poorly chosen behaviors.

Any conclusions concerning her motivations are purely speculative. Her actions are congruent with a woman who’s been abused as well as a woman who has been spurned. Out on the fringes, there’s still congruency with her being a Republican mole, and even her being a Russian mole.

And, of course, there’s the Muslim angle to consider. This would also be fringe, but not yet formally out of the picture.

Just not enough information, and we’ll probably never have it.

Another reader:

Minnesota has really been disappointing me. Way too many racists outside the metro. Probably too many inside it too, but they are more likely to be drowned out.

I’m disappointed, but, on reflection, not surprised. Over the last few decades there has been an awful lot of change being forced on Americans, on the fronts of moral, cultural, and work (among others), and while we may embrace change that we choose, it’s a rare person who likes to have change forced on them.

My perception is that city folks are accustomed to change. The city council decides to upgrade a road and forces an assessment. The restaurant down the road closes and becomes a little trade shop. A light-rail line is installed. Extra taxes are bestowed on vehicles in order to reduce congestion in downtown. It’s off to the theater, the cinema, the Fringe. Not all of these are forced changes, but those that are have accustomed the city folks to change.

Red are Trump-voting counties, Blue are Clinton leaning counties.
Source: Wikipedia.

Not so in smaller towns and rural areas. The pressure of population, and the change that inevitably accompanies more and more people, isn’t present in those communities; indeed, many are drying up. As we can see on the right, this map of voting in Minnesota show the rural areas voting for Trump, while the cities of Duluth (4th largest in the state) and the Iron Range, an old union area, the Twin Cities, and Olmstead County, where Rochester, the third largest city in Minnesota, and Mayo Clinic are located, voted for Clinton.

These are well-known results, but I bring them up to point out that the Democrats represent change. They support, to lesser and greater extents, gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, changes to our national healthcare system, power station regulations, anthropocentric climate change crisis regulations, and other proposals which escape me.

And change, at the moment, is a negative for the smaller cities and the rural areas. Many small towns are emptying out as they lose their economic purpose. They continue to “suffer” from environmental regulations which are designed to keep them safe & healthy, but also hinder their ability to grow crops, raise livestock, and other activities. Prices for the commodities they produce are down.

And you know what doesn’t represent change? Racism. Racism and its cousin, xenophobia, are simply part of the old, old way of doing things, recognizing someone is “other” based on the easily observed, and victimizing them if they’re other. Because the other represents change, represents a threat to the present social order, the present power structure.

When times are tough, it’s a lot easier to blame the other for your problems rather than admitting that the way of life to which you’ve committed yourself may be going away, or even that your personal failures, such as failing to commit to learning and growing and changing, are at fault.

In the cities, we’re used to change and don’t have a lot of time for the overt racist who wants to return to the old ways, because there’s a critical density of people who understand and explain why that’s unjust, not to mention stupid. Of course, there’s still the covert and unconscious racists, a problem we still work on.

And this semi-obvious line of reasoning leads to a big problem incoming for the Republicans. They’ve told the rural areas that they’ll help restore them, explicitly or implicitly. That will require economic change. Thus, the Republicans must either tie themselves strongly to the policies which bring that change, or become the Party of Change, and I don’t think the latter is acceptable to them, unless they spin it as the Party of Regressive Change. The return to the Golden Age has certainly been a recurrent theme for them, but it’s ultimately a dead-end – coal, for example, is not coming back.

Thus, they run the possibility that the Democrats may take credit for any changes which benefit the Republicans’ base.

And, worse yet, those changes will engender positive attitudes towards other change, once again fracturing the Republican base.

They can walk this tight-rope, I’m sure. But I’m not sure they’re smart enough.

A reader writes concerning Senator Klobuchar’s reply to me concerning Statehood for Puerto Rico:

Avoiding political fodder in an election year sounds plausible. Also, I’m guessing that statehood for PR was not even on her radar, and some staffer wrote / printed (already written) this generic letter and sent it to you.

Possibly. However, I’ve been running across hints that it’s on some politicians’ radar, in a negative way for Republicans and positive for Democrats.

But I’m more concerned for the territory’s residents than I am about the political situation. It’s been repeated ad nauseam in the media that residents of Puerto Rico are United States citizens, but the fact of the matter is that they’re impaired United States citizens, because they lack full representation in Congress and cannot vote for President (which surprises me, I thought they could). While it’s true that I think Congress should be working on national problems without regard to their location, it’s also true it’s a representative democracy (aka republic) and members of Congress should, in some sense, represent their constituents.

Location of the North Marianas. Source: Wikipedia.

And the Puerto Ricans need that full citizenship, along with all the other territories, such as the occupants of the North Marianas, who just a few days ago were hit by the worst hurricane (Typhoon Yutu) to hit the United States since 1935. Yep, worse than Florence, Maria, and all the ones that got the media attention, WaPo claims. Yet, how much attention and assistance will they get? Probably even less than the Puerto Ricans after Hurricane Maria, and I worry about that. Isolation in the Pacific Ocean doesn’t help their cause.

It’s not that Puerto Ricans don’t want Statehood^[1]. But it takes two to tango, and despite the Republicans as recently as 2016 saying they want Puerto Rico to become a State^[2], nothing seems to be happening on the Republican side of things.

It’s disappointing.

¹ From this Telegraph article. This comes with the caveat that a majority of Puerto Ricans didn’t vote in the referendum.

² From the 2016 RNC platform, which is quite long.

We support the right of the United States citizens of Puerto Rico to be admitted to the Union as a fully sovereign state. We further recognize the historic significance of the 2012 local referendum in which a 54 percent majority voted to end Puerto Rico’s current status as a U.S. territory, and 61 percent chose statehood over options for sovereign nationhood. We support the federally sponsored political status referendum authorized and funded by an Act of Congress in 2014 to ascertain the aspirations of the people of Puerto Rico. Once the 2012 local vote for statehood is ratified, Congress should approve an enabling act with terms for Puerto Rico’s future admission as the 51st state of the Union.

Efflorescence:

1. the state or a period of flowering.
2. an example or result of growth and development:
   These works are the efflorescence of his genius.
3. Chemistry .
   1. the act or process of efflorescing.
   2. the resulting powdery substance or incrustation. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “In New York, a look into the early days of the world’s oldest Christian nation,” Philip Kennicott, WaPo:

Orson Welles, in “The Third Man,” posited a cynical theory of what makes some cultures creative and others not: “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” This isn’t a fair summation of the creative potential of peace or democracy, and only slightly more accurate about the cultural accomplishments of the Swiss. But an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art seems to prove the same thing by inverting the logic.

A sumptuous survey of early Christian art in Armenia suggests that no matter how scattered the people, no matter how frequent the wars or painful the disruptions, nothing could dim the Armenian cultural efflorescence.

In an interview, the ultimate partisan & quitter Newt Gingrich says a bit and implies quite a bit more:

During a live interview on Oct. 25 at The Washington Post, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that if Democrats re-take control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections and subpoena the president’s tax returns, it would likely force a fight in the U.S. Supreme Court. “And,” Gingrich said,”we’ll see whether or not the Kavanaugh fight was worth it.” [WaPo]

While the acknowledgement that Kavanaugh was selected for his demonstrated sympathy for a “soft on criminal Presidents” view, rather than any outstanding legal analysis virtues he might possess, is of course appalling in a Gingrich sort of way, it’s the implicit statement that caught my eye.

That is, he seems awfully damn confident that Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch (IJ), and Chief Justice and Keeper of the SCOTUS legacy Roberts are partisan puppets he has firmly in his pocket. Is this really true? As I’ve discussed before, a criminal President is a truly dangerous thing, and Justice Kavanaugh’s views appear to be naive, or partisan, in the extreme. But what of the others of the conservative wing of the Court? Are they just finger puppets, ready to cover up any crime the President may commit?

Surprises do occasionally come out of SCOTUS.

When someone’s food talks back to you.

Ever had one of those ice cream sundaes where the ice cream is just a little off? All those lovely toppings wasted because the ice cream has that weird, artificial chemical after-taste?

Or how about when someone bolts a huge spoiler onto the back of a … Honda Accord?

Well, Beast from Haunted Cave (1959) is sort of like that. A gang, aware of a bank in Aspen, CO, containing some gold, comes to town. The plan is to blow up an old mine up the side of the mountain, and while everyone is distracted by the explosion and possible avalanche, they invade the bank and take enough gold to carry.

How will they escape? To that end, they engage the services of a tall, handsome cross-country ski guide, purportedly for a round trip over the hills and through the woods, but actually planning to rendezvous with a small plane piloted by a confederate at the guide’s cabin.

Problems start to appear when the man planting the bomb in the mine loses the drunken waitress he’s picked up to a monster. I know, careless, especially when the monster appears to be a small stick with cobwebs wrapped around it, but the bomb is in place, and while the town is buzzing about the missing waitress, the bomb goes off, killing a watchman who’s checking the broken door. Operating like a gasoline engine without oil, the gang makes it to the oblivious guide, who sets them off cross country.

And every once in a while, a cobwebby stick pops into view.

This crew seems to be full of opaque comments, odd fears, and, to top it off, the boss has his alcoholic girlfriend along for the ride. She’s cheeky, bitter, desperate, but it comes off a little flat.

Once at the guide’s house, the plot comes out in the open, meaning the guide is deep in the doodoo, but in the midst of threatening gestures, Mr. Monster snatches up the guide’s housekeeper, a straight-faced Indian who may have been the best actor of the lot. Eventually, one of the gang traces her to the monster’s hideout, an old cave, and finds the woman webbed to the wall – along with the missing waitress.

At least they followed Burke’s dictate for ‘the sublime.’

Then the gang member joins the larder, and we finally get a good look at the monster. I must say, this caused division in my household, because my Arts Editor immediately proclaimed it the “worst monster ever,” while I actually thought it was creepy and the best part of the movie.

Did I say larder? THE MONSTER’S A BLOODSUCKER! And a loud eater. Poor upbringing, I’m sure.

In any case, the drunk girlfriend and the guide, forced to take refuge from the non-existent storm into which they were trying to escape from the violent boss of the gang (or remnants thereof), stumble into this mess, swiftly followed by the enraged boss, and while the guide and drunk girlfriend escape, everyone else pretty much goes up in flames.

Who knew monsters were flammable?

There’s a lot going on here, but the story doesn’t coordinate the themes, and the themes are really fairly trivial. There’s some typical 1950s anti-women violence, the characters are a trifle random, which is perhaps another 1950s trope, and the acting itself is fairly awful.

It’s too bad. A complete redo with careful thematic consideration might yield a more horrifying condemnation of amorality.

The good news out of Georgia concerning vote suppression in Gwinnett County is that the ACLU did, in fact, suggest that letting non-experts judge the validity of signatures was unconstitutional, and the judge agreed:

The plaintiffs, including the ACLU, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Coalition for Good Governance, argued that allowing nonexpert election officials to judge the validity of signatures without giving voters the chance to contest the decisions amounted to unconstitutional voter suppression.

U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May agreed, and she ordered Secretary of State Brian Kemp to instruct all local election officials to stop rejecting absentee ballots over the mismatched signatures. Instead, such ballots will be marked “provisional,” and the voter will be given the right to appeal the decision or confirm his or her identity. Kemp and the Gwinnett County election board were named as defendants in the suit. [WaPo]

And Gwinnett County is the second largest in the State.

This is, you’ll remember, the same state where current Secretary of State Brian Kemp is also GOP candidate for Governor Brian Kemp, meaning he has a conflict of interest, which he refuses to acknowledge. I thought this final comment in the WaPo story was interestingly naive:

The “exact match” law has been blamed for the suspension of more than 53,000 registration applications in Georgia this year.

Kemp has also been accused of purging hundreds of thousands of active voters from the state’s rolls.

He has argued that his office has properly maintained the state’s voting rolls and that the “exact match” law is an appropriate safeguard against voter fraud.

Now, we’re all familiar with computer breaches. Typically, these are spun as simply someone gaining access to some enormous amount of data of a sensitive nature, presumably to use for identity theft or other nefarious purposes.

But that’s just one form of computer breach. Imagine someone gaining the ability to alter that data. Now imagine someone gaining access to the voter rolls, and, say, altering the data so that the middle name or middle initial of some subset is changed.

And that subset is defined to be mostly Republican voters. Or Democratic. Or black. Keep that imagination going folks, because right now we’re talking about weaponizing our computer systems, and, like most weapons, they can be equally efficient without regard to the identity of the target.

Speaking as a software engineer: once a malicious hacker^[1] gains enough access to alter data, this is not difficult. In fact, depending on the security configuration and how easy it is to connect to other databases, this can even be trivial for any database programmer who’s gotten beyond the stage that I affectionately call “half-baked.”

And if that occurs in conjunction with this “exact match” law, well, I understand how anyone concerned about voter fraud might think this law is a good thing, but I dearly hope that I have demonstrated why such a law, assuming its little name is properly descriptive, is actually a big bloody disaster just waiting to happen.

That law probably should be repealed as soon as possible, and Republicans, if they’re smart, will lead the way, because they are as likely to become victims as anyone.

And this lets me move on to a reader comment:

The not wanting an ID to vote should be a no issue thing. How would you like if somebody hijacked your name and voted for a liberal.

Here’s the thing: how much of a problem has voter fraud been over the years? I honestly cannot think of voter fraud being an issue during my lifetime, with two exceptions.

First, our “sore winner” Trump, who has spat out accusations of fraud with no evidence, and then appointed a commission to investigate, who got little cooperation and, again, found no evidence for widespread fraud.

Second, I have heard rumors that there was voter fraud in Chicago during the JFK / Nixon contest of 1960 (actually, not my lifetime, but I’ll roll with it). However, despite the tightness of the race, Nixon refused to call for a recount:

There were charges of vote fraud in Texas and Illinois, both states won by Kennedy; Nixon refused to consider contesting the election, feeling a lengthy controversy would diminish the United States in the eyes of the world, and the uncertainty would hurt U.S. interests. [Wikipedia]

Otherwise, not much. Now, it sounds like a fine thing to tighten up voting processes, yet it appears that, historically, we’ve done just fine. And then let’s add in my analysis of this “exact match” law – the Law of Unintended Consequences is alive and on the march, and it should teach us to move slowly and with deliberation before disturbing processes that work. I’d hate to hear that Republican voters were disenfranchised in a close race just as much as I would black voters, Latino voters, or any other “minority”, just because we thought we were making a process more secure or efficient – when it already works. Not only is it a miscarriage of justice, but the follow-on bitterness damages our nation.

Or, as should be tattooed on the inner eyelids of every engineer, Don’t fix what isn’t broken.

¹ Naturally, a government employee with access to the voter rolls could also inflict extensive damage, or corruption as we call it in the trade. The real question concerning both hacker and employee is whether their technical proficiency is such that they can even cover their tracks so that the corruption is only detected piecemeal.