Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Here’s a new sign that I suspect won’t last more than a couple of years.

This doesn’t help:

The future Golan Heights village, located near Kela Alon in the western Golan Heights, will be developed on lands belonging to the small Bruchim settlement. Constructed in 1991, the hamlet Bruchim did not succeed in attracting many families. In fact, most of its original inhabitants left over the years. The government now hopes that rebranding the locality will bring new residents. [AL-Monitor]

It takes more than a name – and that of a President teetering on the edge of failure – to make a town a success. Especially in a potential war zone.

For months now the Democratic propaganda machine has been delivering news concerning the presumptive Democratic challenger to Senator “Moscow” McConnell’s (R-KY) reelection, Amy McGrath. Just today I received this:

Amy McGrath (D) is now LEADING Mitch McConnell (R) in the pivotal Kentucky Senate race!

We’ve NEVER been this close to beating McConnell — and even Nate Silver said Amy can pull off a MAJOR upset and win this race.

But, according to Sarah Jones of New York Intelligencer, there may be a wee spot of sour milk in the refreshing drink that is Amy McGrath – Kentucky Democrats may not want her:

McGrath faces a robust challenge from Charles Booker, the youngest Black legislator in the Kentucky House of Representatives. Booker has run to her left, and while McGrath holds a major fundraising advantage, Booker is gaining significant momentum ahead of the primary on June 23. Two of the state’s largest newspapers have endorsed him, and on Tuesday, Booker earned another major supporter. Alison Lundergan Grimes, who challenged McConnell in 2014, endorsed him over McGrath. …

“There’s not a lot of enthusiasm for Amy among Democrats. Charles’ supporters are very enthusiastic,” a Kentucky Democrat recently told Politico. That gap is evident in McGrath’s fundraising, too. She has a lot of money on hand — but over 96 percent of her donations come from people who don’t live in Kentucky. (McConnell’s donations are similarly lopsided.) While Booker has significantly less money at his disposal, his donations are almost evenly split — 54 percent come from out of state, and 46 percent are local.

Enthusiasm might not be enough to propel Booker to victory over McGrath, but it’s a symptom of a bigger problem. National Democrats think they know what Kentucky wants, but Kentucky may disagree.

It’s important to remember that politicians primarily represent their constituents, not national organizations. Oh, the national organizations have influence, since they have the money, but the average voter – like me! – will resent a politician thrust upon them by money originating outside of the state.

If McGrath fails in the primary, all is not lost as far as beating McConnell in November goes. Booker, if he can inspire endorsements from the major local newspapers, may have a real shot at displacing McConnell. It all depends on how tired Kentucky voters are of McConnell, how far left of McGrath Booker’s views reside, and whether that’s too far for the average Kentucky voter – or not.

One of the reasons I like Andrew Sullivan is purely pragmatic: he has the time and exposure to issues that I, a working dude, don’t have. Consider his critique of the latest rejection of liberalism to come down the pike:

The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the “successor ideology” to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” He told Times media columnist Ben Smith this week that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be). And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity? That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, “the justice system — in fact, the entire American experiment — was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.” (Wesley Lowery objected to this characterization of his beliefs — read his Twitter thread about it here.)

This is an argument that deserves to be aired openly in a liberal society, especially one with such racial terror and darkness in its past and inequality in the present. But it is an argument that equally deserves to be engaged, challenged, questioned, interrogated. There is truth in it, truth that it’s incumbent on us to understand more deeply and empathize with more thoroughly. But there is also an awful amount of truth it ignores or elides or simply denies.

It sees America as in its essence not about freedom but oppression. It argues, in fact, that all the ideals about individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, and the equality of all human beings were always a falsehood to cover for and justify and entrench the enslavement of human beings under the fiction of race. It wasn’t that these values competed with the poison of slavery, and eventually overcame it, in an epic, bloody civil war whose casualties were overwhelmingly white. It’s that the liberal system is itself a form of white supremacy — which is why racial inequality endures and why liberalism’s core values and institutions cannot be reformed and can only be dismantled.

This view of the world certainly has “moral clarity.” What it lacks is moral complexity. No country can be so reduced to one single prism and damned because of it. American society has far more complexity and history has far more contingency than can be jammed into this rubric. No racial group is homogeneous, and every individual has agency. No one is entirely a victim or entirely privileged. And we are not defined by black and white any longer; we are home to every race and ethnicity, from Asia through Africa to Europe and South America.

And the critique continues. But it’s not a traditional critique from what passes for a conservative these days – condemnatory, in a word. Sullivan does what I try to do, and that is see both sides of the argument. Sullivan does it better and more eloquently than I do, and I love his usually nuanced responses.

And if, indeed, the anti-racists are for rooting out the liberal project along with racism, then I must say that while their overall goals are right, the collateral damage will doom them.

It’s worth asking why the old aphorism that liberal democracy has been the best performer of all types of government is true, and I think my reader should try to answer that for themselves. For me, there are many reasons, and I can’t put any one of them first, although I suspect that all are over-emphasized: the pursuit of freedom, of free speech, of prosperity, these are all elements of the liberal project.

I have, but have not read, How To Be An Anti-Racist (after reading a review by >ahem< Andrew Sullivan – sometimes I wonder if I’m a groupie along with being a Dish head), so I have no idea if this is an element of the anti-racist creed, but the slave clause of the Constitution is certainly a ripe target. For me, the response is this – drawing from my software engineer background, the Constitution, as originally written, is Version 1. While a good representation of the idea of liberal democracy, it’s not great. The particularly foul slave clause, however, is not an element of liberal democracy, but instead symptomatic of a moral failing of part of the soon-to-be United States – the belief that morality is defined by wealth. Even today, many cling to this notion, and for those who have been poverty-stricken for long periods of time, there’s a lot to be said for not wondering where your next meal will come from. However, it’s a flaw – a major abyss – in anyone’s moral system to believe that enslavement of someone else for any reason whatsoever is permissible.

But such was the South’s moral system, and the North faced a problem: Without the South, it could not survive another British assault, such as that of  the War of 1812, and thus they would then face being subjects of a monarchy that, in King George, featured a mentally ill man with theological delusions of grandeur and no limits on his political power, a monarchical system could easily feature more such creatures. Having shaken off the monarchy and its claims to being backed by God – a God who self-evidently was a little touched itself – trading one moral failure for another might have seemed the best course to choose.

Then came the Civil War, which resulted in a big step forward, but then we pulled back when President Johnson, Lincoln’s VP, miserably rescinded the promise to issue 40 acres and a mule to all freed slaves, economically stranding most of those formerly enslaved people, as was seen in subsequent years: sharecroppers, segregation, miscegenation laws, outright bigotry and mistreatment were all the evil consequences of the devout belief that one race was superior to another, despite outstanding black contributions to multiple war efforts.

But liberal democracy remains the best hope for a free people who are mentally prepared for it, as demonstrated in all countries where people were able to embrace its opportunities and responsibilities. Their people are free, they are prosperous, and they value freedom. Other countries? Not so much; some even deplore the idea.

I can’t claim to have made a convincing case here, as that would take more of a book. However, I can ask my reader, before embracing a project which may dismantle the liberal society, to consider alternative viewpoints to that of the prevailing sentiment. A sober thought to the future of each experiment is critical to making good decisions, and going along to get along may be a disastrous course to take, no matter how good the ultimate objective of the movement might be.

Means matter.

This is the sort of thing that will make the Trump Administration appear to be the most corrupt government – not Administration, but government – in all of history. Catherine Rampell brings the outrage:

What are they hiding?

That’s the question taxpayers should be asking as the Trump administration refuses to reveal where a half-trillion dollars of our hard-earned cash has gone.

In March, back when Congress was rushing to provide more coronavirus relief, lawmakers passed an unprecedented $2 trillion bill known as the Cares Act. After initially fighting to prevent any meaningful oversight of the bailout programs it would administer — at one point even demanding a few-strings-attached Treasury slush fund — the Trump administration eventually agreed to several major oversight and disclosure measures. Senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, repeatedly pledged “full transparency on anything we do.”

Yeah, right.

Since then, the administration has worked to sabotage virtually all of these accountability mechanisms. While paying lip service to “transparency,” it has fired, demoted or otherwise kneecapped inspectors general, some of whom recently wrote to congressional leaders warning of systematic efforts to avoid scrutiny required by law. The watchdog Government Accountability Office also complained that the administration has refused to provide critical data on the bailout. [WaPo]

Mnuchin, who I had begun to hope was actually a competent and classy individual, despite his refusal to release the Trump tax returns, has come crashing back into the swamp. This remark was especially revealing:

Despite his alleged commitment to transparency, Mnuchin told lawmakers last week that information on loan recipients and amounts would not be released because it is “proprietary” and “confidential.” Never mind that the PPP loan application form explicitly says borrower information may be “subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.” It adds that “information about approved loans that will be automatically released” (emphasis mine) includes borrower names, collateral pledged and the loan amount.

Focus on that word proprietary. This is not a word you often see used in the public sector, but it’s popular in the private sector. It means This is something we’ve invented and we don’t want to reveal it because, by doing so, we’ll lose a competitive advantage.

In other words, it’s bullshit in this context.

Let’s take a step back and establish firmly why the Administration position is nonsense. First, as Rampell notes, the deal negotiated by Pelosi and Mnuchin specifies effective oversight will be implemented.

Second, who’s supplying the money here? Congress. Not the Trump Administration. Trump is responsible for distributing it according to the rules specified by Congress, but the Administration’s source of funding is Congress and nothing else. If Congress had followed Senator McConnell’s (R-KY) inclination and done nothing, Trump might have been able to shift money around using emergency declarations, much as he did with the Wall funding. Fortunately for Trump, McConnell was apparently informed that doing nothing was not acceptable to his caucus.

The power of the purse gives Congress full oversight and informational access, subject to certain individual privacy concerns, and Mnuchin should know better. So it appears that Mnuchin is just another denizen of the Trump Swamp.

I look forward to years imminent, as we learn just how badly we were scammed by Mnuchin and Trump, and whether or not the courts will cooperate in attempts to claw it back from inappropriate recipients.

Professor Richardson notes LeBron James’ efforts when it comes to the November election (link unavailable for technical reasons):

Basketball superstar LeBron James has started a group to protect black voting, along with a number of other African American athletes and entertainers. James has said the organization, “More Than A Vote,” will not just work with other voting rights organizations to register voters, but will explain to new voters how the process works and what sorts of obstacles they will face. James says he will use his strong social media platform to combat voter suppression, a major issue in the upcoming election.

But leaning on that platform is limiting. It’s necessary to reach out to voters who are not online, or not James fans, or this will be a failure. We need to think about education, not only beforehand but at the polling places. Large, hand held signs could be printed that summarize what a voter facing a broken machine must do. Perhaps a booth, non-partisan, that gives directions on how to vote, but not for whom.

A little creativity could go a long ways.

Polls may show a big lead for Biden, but the Republicans think they have this election in the bag:

By most conventional indicators, Donald Trump is in danger of becoming a one-term president. The economy is a wreck, the coronavirus persists, and his poll numbers have deteriorated.

But throughout the Republican Party’s vast organization in the states, the operational approach to Trump’s re-election campaign is hardening around a fundamentally different view.

Interviews with more than 50 state, district and county Republican Party chairs depict a version of the electoral landscape that is no worse for Trump than six months ago — and possibly even slightly better. According to this view, the coronavirus is on its way out and the economy is coming back. Polls are unreliable, Joe Biden is too frail to last, and the media still doesn’t get it.

“The more bad things happen in the country, it just solidifies support for Trump,” said Phillip Stephens, GOP chairman in Robeson County, N.C., one of several rural counties in that swing state that shifted from supporting Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. “We’re calling him ‘Teflon Trump.’ Nothing’s going to stick, because if anything, it’s getting more exciting than it was in 2016.”

This year, Stephens said, “We’re thinking landslide.” [Politico]

It’s an interesting view on things, and yet, it’s in sync with how Trump operates – disregard that which doesn’t please you. “Polls are unreliable,” is evidence of that; I recall waking up in a cold sweat the last Saturday before the 2016 elections, because it was clear that the elections were very, very close. I don’t agree that polls are unreliable.

To deny polls’ accuracy is a bit wishful, but not entirely out of the ballpark. But, per usual, they also blame the Beltway, i.e., D.C., for living in delusion land. That’s not a bad assertion in itself,, but I think we can point at a much more important result than polls or the opinion in Washington, DC.

Wisconsin.

Yes, Wisconsin, right here in the heartland, saw the Democrats come storming out and attend the polling places despite the dangers to their health and lives, back in mid-April, and resulted in a shocking upset of an incumbent Republican in a Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign. This is a poll of the most basic and accurate sort, and the Republicans got the short end of the stick.

And it’s important to remember that the Republicans, by themselves, cannot win an election. Nor can the Democrats. The key group is people like me, the independents. I have no idea how other independents are going to vote, but they must be the target of the Democrats and the Republicans; anyone who simply tries to firm up the base is deluding themselves.

So we’ll see in November who gets egg all over their faces, these GOP officials who’ve made Trump their husband, or the progressives who think Trump’s ad buys in Ohio are a signal of failure.

From AL-Monitor:

There’s a little unrest concerning the ascendance of QAnon conspiracy theorists within the Republican Party, especially as one of them in Georgia is close to securing the nomination to a House seat in a safe Republican district. I thought this paragraph is certainly true, although QAnon theorists might be unhappy with the true reasons:

QAnon believers tend to support other conspiracy theories about government, experts said. And Trump has tacitly breathed life into these ideas. The central theme around QAnon fits his argument that he’s an outsider being dragged down by (mostly Democratic) lawmakers who feel threatened by him and the change he brings to governing. [WaPo]

And here’s the top two reasons Democrats are uncomfortable with Trump and his changes to governance:

1. He pushes the idea that lies are truth.
2. He pushes the idea that truths are lies.

Heavens, I just can’t bloody imagine why that would make Democrats nervous.

For the QAnon-inclined reader:

Bring out this QAnon leader and let’s see if he’s a Federal government employee, or if he speaks with an honest Russian accent.

You can’t produce the guy, but you want to prattle on about Deep Throat? This is a familiar ploy from the science field. For a good thirty five years I’ve heard the remark of people pushing silly theories of supposedly a scientific background that are not accepted is that, well, Hey, Einstein wasn’t accepted at first, either!

Thing is, for every Einstein there are one hundred THOUSAND kooks, at an easy estimate, people who are clueless but still think they’ve discovered perpetual motion machines. Einstein did hard work and won Nobels for it, and his theoretical work eventually translated into technology, from atom bombs to transistors. Just as much of medicine and biology is dependent on theories of biological evolution being true, so does most of technology – or maybe all of it.

If there was any consilience for QAnon – corroborating, independent, objective lines of evidence – I’d be interested. There isn’t. It’s all nonsense. And so that’s what the prattling wannabe politicians are consuming and, no doubt, will be soon peddling.

Sorry, QAnon kids. It’s just another scam, and you’re the scammed. Fortunately, for most of you it’s just your self-respect you’ve lost. And the security of your country. Yeah, that’s what electing Trump got you.

NASCAR’S decision to ban the Confederate flag and other such symbols from its events on the part of fans brings to mind this question:

If you won’t venerate the memory of the traitor General Benedict Arnold, why the hell would you venerate the memory of General Robert E. Lee?

I ran across this suggestion on FB and simply shared it as something to think about, and, well, it’s made me think.

Presently, the ultimate responsibility, and the entity on which punishment falls when a cop engages in bad behavior, is the employing institution: City, County, or State. They will attempt to pass on some of the responsibility to the perpetrating cop, of course, but that is weak tea, especially when a police union is involved. Locally, the Minneapolis Police Dept (MPD) has blamed a lot of its problems on the local police union and its President, Officer Kroll.

This proposal shifts responsibility from the police department to the insurance companies, and while city management is made up of people who have many responsibilities, including the requirement that they provide policing, insurance companies labor under the requirement that they make money – and not necessarily from providing insurance to police.

That means that if they choose to dip their toes into this pool, they can do what insurance companies do best – price risk. They can do the research and develop the tools and strategies necessary to find officers who will fulfill their duties properly, and detect those who shouldn’t be officers. For those that slip past initial screenings, the increasing price for their required insurance will force out those who cannot be a good officer.

Of course, the devil will be in the details, especially legislative. Unions will push for laws shielding their officers from pretextual lawsuits, which inevitably will result in shielding some bad actors from justified lawsuits; they’ll demand control over the rates charged by the insurance companies, which cannot be permitted; and they’ll scream about the pension provision, which I happen to think is sheer genius. But there will be objections raised in the administrative realm as well, and then the problem of cops covering for cops comes up; such behavior is in itself worthy of punishment in the form of steep insurance rate rises – or refusal to coverage.

And the insurance companies, as part of risk minimization strategy, will develop a database for tracking officers, thus reducing the problem of ‘gypsy cops‘; reduction correlates with the number of employing entities.

The libertarian in me, which I’ve learned to regard with some suspicion, rejoices in using the machinery of the free markets to resolve a problem. I await the necessary and helpful critiques of Miller’s idea, and I wonder if an entire State could be persuaded to pass laws requiring all entities under their jurisdiction to use this model for employing officers.

Incumbent Senator Inhofe (R-OK).

I finally checked up on Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), and the 85-year old has filed papers for the Republican primary in order to be eligible for reelection to his current Senatorial seat; in the post that kicked off this thread covering the various Senate seats this cycle, Inhofe had not yet filed papers or stated intentions.

Inhofe has several primary challengers, but there’s little reason to think there’s a serious alternative. However, Dr. John Tompkins, a retired surgeon, is noteworthy:

“I became increasingly concerned about what’s going on in this country. … I’m extremely disappointed with our politicians,” he said.

His particular beef with Inhofe, Tompkins said, began about a year ago when he began reading the senator’s book, “The Greatest Hoax,” which claims to debunk climate change.

“I got through about 75% of it and said, ‘This is garbage.’ It’s just nonsense. … It’s poorly written and is only loosely related to any science whatsoever.”

Which is curiously polite and even passive-aggressive. It has to do with the government’s attempt to abandon the prosecution of former National Security Advisor Flynn now that he’s plead guilty twice to lying to the FBI, as retired Judge Gleeson, asked to investigate whether the government should be permitted to drop those charges, doesn’t agree they should:

First, “the requirement of judicial approval entitles the judge to obtain and evaluate the prosecutor’s reasons.” United States v. Ammidown, 497 F.2d 615, 620 (D.C. Cir. 1973). Here, the Government’s statement of reasons for seeking dismissal is pretextual. The Government claims there is insufficient evidence to prove materiality and falsity, but even giving it the benefit of every doubt—and recognizing its prerogative to assess the strength of its own case—this contention “taxes the credulity of the credulous.” Maryland v. King, 569 U.S. 435, 466 (2013) (Scalia, J., dissenting). The Government’s ostensible grounds for seeking dismissal are conclusively disproven by its own briefs filed earlier in this very proceeding. They contradict and ignore this Court’s prior orders, which constitute law of the case. They are riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact. And they depart from positions that the Government has taken in other cases. While Rule 48(a) does not require the Government to bare its innermost secrets, it does require a statement of its reasons for dismissal. See Ammidown, 497 F.2d at 620 (explaining that this requirement “prevent[s] abuse of the uncontrolled power of dismissal previously enjoyed by prosecutors”). Leave of court should not be granted when the explanations the Government puts forth are not credible as the real reasons for its dismissal of a criminal charge.

Second, the Court should deny leave because there is clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power. Rule 48(a) was designed to “guard against dubious dismissals of criminal cases that would benefit powerful and well-connected defendants.” In other words, the rule empowers courts to protect the integrity of their own proceedings from prosecutors who undertake corrupt, politically motivated dismissals. See id.; see also Ammidown, 497 F.2d at 620-622. That is what has happened here. The Government has engaged in highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the President. The facts of this case overcome the presumption of regularity. The Court should therefore deny the Government’s motion to dismiss, adjudicate any remaining motions, and then sentence the Defendant.

It’s full of politely intellectual slaps of the face. I wonder if AG Barr even realizes how much he’s been insulted by Gleeson’s evaluation of Barr’s order to drop the prosecution of a man that Judge Sullivan claimed was close to treason.

He basically called Barr a criminal to his face.

Some people seem to think they’re immune to change – and some of them live in the Tennessee State Legislature:

Never rains but it pours.

Oh, sorry in advance.

Wired has a report on the next problem originating from our excess:

Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western US each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. “We just did that for the area of protected areas in the West, which is only 6 percent of the total US area,” says lead author Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University. “The number was just so large, it’s shocking.”

It further confirms an increasingly hellish scenario: Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.

I wonder how this will be dismissed by the anti-regulatory right?

Skipping over questions that I can’t answer regarding collection, disposal, and prevention, it seems to me that only one thing will get the right on board with taking steps to stop and roll it back – if, in fact, there is a viable strategy for same – and that’s if something they value is hurt by it. Consider Ducks Unlimited, dedicated to the conservation and increase of waterfowl. Seeing as

The majority of DU’s financial contributors and 90 percent of members are hunters.  [Wikipedia]

J. P. Morgan

and the founders included robber baron J. P. Morgan, it seems reasonable to assume that if these plastic micro-debris begins hurting, say, their favorite prey animal, or begins ruining scenic overlooks, we might start seeing some activity on the right side of the political spectrum.

Why should anyone be surprised by this development? Unless you think President Trump is a principled man, in which case you haven’t been paying attention, or you really need some help:

A vote by the Republican National Committee to leave the party’s 2016 party platform unchanged ahead of the November election has infuriated grassroots activists — including moderates who wanted to streamline its message and social conservatives who sought added language on emerging hot-button topics.

The decision by the party’s executive panel Wednesday means the GOP will maintain positions in the 4-year-old policy blueprint — including opposition to same-sex marriage and a nod to gay conversion therapy — and decline to stake out new positions on topics such as police reform, gender identity and third-trimester abortions. Party officials and senior Trump campaign aides had previously discussed ways to pare down the 58-page document to a single note card or abbreviated list of principles, but the effort broke down after several conservative groups registered complaints with the White House. [Politico]

A party platform is helpful for appealing to voters, but at the same time it serves to place restraints, loose though they may be, on the candidates and elected officers, and for an arbitrary, unprincipled man whose exercise of power has more to do with self-aggrandizement than advancing the principles of his Party, they are absolutely something to be avoided. Sure, President Trump blames this entire mess on Governor Cooper (D-NC), as the Governor’s cautious and honorable approach to the pandemic supposedly forced the President to move the Republican National Convention somewhere else and make the important work of the committee impossible.

Yeah, that’s where all the red flags start waving. Hey, guys, ever think of using Zoom or something similar? Work in subcommittees? It might be more efficient than getting everyone in a conference room or two!

The old principles in the platform of yesterday and tomorrow have been successfully ignored for the last four years, pushed out of sight by sheer outrage, but if brought to the fore again and modified, made even more aggressive on certain social policies, Trump may fear that he cannot operate as freely as he wishes – or he might not even be reelected because of the far-right radicalism inherent in some of those positions. Thus, the old platform is quietly trotted out, paraded briefly, and then sent back to its kennel. If there are embarrassments that come out of that, let the critics have their laugh at the poop on the display floor. It serves to distract them from many other issues that are weighing Trump down.

And distraction is what Trump does best.

NBC News reports on an interesting little addition to the Trump campaign rallies that are due to resume Juneteenth, 2020 in Tulsa, OK:

“By clicking register below, you are acknowledging that an inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in any public place where people are present. By attending the Rally, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.,” the rally site or organizers “liable for any illness or injury,” the form says.

I’m surprised there’s not another addition:

If you become ill with Covid-19, you will keep this a private matter and not broadcast, or cause to broadcast, or release to the news media, such information indicating you have Covid-19 or that you may have contracted it at the Trump Campaign rally in Tulsa, OK.

Because, of course, it’s impossible to have that happen at an event blessed by the God that has blessed Father of Lies Donald J. Trump.

But this will turn into a test of the cultists’ faith, won’t it? We went to see the leader in spite of all the warnings of the Godless liberals, proving we are worthy! Cult members often compete to show their loyalty, so, no kidding. That’s what’ll happen.

I hope for their sakes that nothing does happen, Covid-19 related. But I’m not laying money on it.

Margaret Sullivan sets out a critique of One America News Network (OANN), which, given she’s at a major competitor, I would have taken as biased, except I’ve seen the OANN correspondents at press conferences with President Trump and must agree, they show neither professionalism nor professional skills at all – they’ve completely given in to the idea that the media must be biased, or, as Sullivan notes, [OANN] even unapologetically described itself last year as “one of his greatest supporters.”

But, in the context of Fox News sometimes criticizing the President’s actions of late, this is what struck me:

When you live by the water …

Here’s the Gizmodo story.

Source: American Civil War Story

It turns out the memorials to the second American Confederacy are being cleaned out like pus from an oozing wound, and President Trump is digging in his heels when it comes to renaming Army bases such as Ft. Hood in Texas. I’m not sure which reason applies – perhaps some of his key allies still live in the Confederate dream, or Trump refuses to be seen giving into the sponsors of this legislation, which include his feuding partner Senator Warren (D-MA) – but the one given out by Press Secretary McEnany seems particularly disingenuous:

“He does, as I noted at the top of this briefing, fervently stand against the renaming of our forts, these great American fortresses where literally some of these men and women who lost their lives as they went out to Europe, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and all across this world to win world wars on behalf of freedom,” McEnany said. “A lot of times, the very last place they saw was one of these forts and to suggest these forts were somehow inherently racist and their names need to be changed is a complete disrespect to the men and women.” [NBC News]

And … she doesn’t address why the forts were named as they were. She doesn’t address why we name forts.

Names are given to such things to honor the people who bore those names. We accord such honors to men who went above and beyond the call of duty in serving the needs of society, and that should be all of society.

Fort Hood was named after Confederate General John Bell Hood, and while he suffered some horrific injuries during the war, the fact remains that, as a graduate of the United States Military Academy, he wasn’t just a treasonous man, a man bent on dividing American society, but a treasonous US Army officer. The most you can say is that at least he didn’t engage in subterfuge by remaining in the US Army when the Civil War began and engaging in sabotage, but immediately joined the Confederate side openly.

Why honor a treasonous man? The blanket pardon issued by President Johnson certainly didn’t remove the stain of treason, merely the punishment.

McEnany does not address this entire argument, because she and Trump have no effective rebuttal. Thus, the squirrel argument: don’t trample on the honor of the fallen who happened to have trained or been based there!

Well, by honoring treasonous officers, you already have trampled the the honor of the fallen, the Union soldiers who lay dead in the fields, and while Trump and McEnany are not responsible for the names given, they have the opportunity to erase that stain.

And they won’t.

Over the last eight months, give or take, President Trump has had three ongoing opportunities to fulfill his primary responsibility as President: Be a leader. These opportunities, for those of us asleep at the proverbial switch, are the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic collapse that was a consequence of the quarantine that the States were forced enforce, mostly, on the advice of epidemiologists, and, finally, the unrest caused by the murder of George Floyd by Officer Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department (just a few miles from here). If he’d fulfilled his role, his approval numbers would be sky-high, just President Bush’s after the Towers fell.

I like the Gallup polls because they have decades of experience, they’re fairly conservative, meaning I’m not likely to be led astray as I might by polling services that might have a more liberal tilt, much like Rasmussen is known for its conservative tilt, and for consistency – I’ve cited many Gallup polls over the years. I am aware that FiveThirtyEight rates them a B, while the ABC News/The Washington Post service is rated an A+. With that in mind, this may be quite a shock to the conservative reader: the latest Gallup Presidential Approval  Poll:

It’s hard to spin a drop of 10 points to 39% approval over two weeks as anything but a disaster, and I’m not in that business anyways. While the public appeared to have been somewhat willing to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt when it came to Covid-19 and the consequent economic collapse, since we haven’t seen a pandemic of this virulence in a very long time, we have short memories, and not many Americans pay close enough attention to his official actions vs his overactive mouth and fingers, his reactions to the protests over the George Floyd killing have been a catastrophe for public perception of his competency.

FiveThirtyEight’s Poll of Polls. Not quite the same as Gallup’s poll, as approval and popularity are not synonyms.

This, of course, should come as no surprise. Business people are not trained for, and are not expected to deal with, problems of this magnitude. These are problems primarily of a political, communal nature, and while his incompetence in reference to the first two appear to have hardly touched him in the Gallup poll, the glaring, in your face divisive and authoritarian reaction to the protests, and the hollow attempts to blame Antifa in the face of a lack of evidence of their involvement (reported on here and here) once again reveals him as the manipulative & dishonest person that he is as well as his lack of aptitude and training for the job. While his business bona fides, questionable as they are, were acceptable to many voters in 2016, the raw truth should be coming quite clear:

There’s more to being a politician than making promises hearkening back to some Golden Age and saying outrageous things about opponents. Amateurs may be appealing, but they are fool’s gold.

The latest monthly CNN Poll by SSRS, showing Trump approval numbers dropping from from 45% to 38%. Reportedly, the Trump Campaign sent CNN a cease and desist letter, demanding a retraction and apology, which CNN refused. They really should have just posted an article consisting of laughter.

Yep, that campaign rhetoric of 2016 might have been delightful to the hard-right conservative voter, but in the end it, along with his lack of track record in the public sphere, were a big red flag that he was the wrong choice. The Republican primary voter in 2016 had a plethora of choices, and yet enough of those voters chose Trump to push him over the top; in retrospect, I wonder if fewer choices might have left Trump out of the winner’s circle. On the other hand, the base desperately wanted red meat, and while the Republican Party boasted many ambitious candidates, none were particularly impressive individuals. Perhaps Governor Kasich (R-OH) would qualify, but he didn’t appeal to the base. In a Party that was constantly fed the misinformation that Democratic President Obama was wrecking the economy domestically, and internationally endangering the country through the Iran Deal (JCPOA) and losing national prestige, the base was, purposefully or not, being trained to believe the unbelievable was true. Trump told them we were in the middle of a crime wave, the economy was a wreck, Clinton was a Russian puppet even as he publicly begged the Russians for help, that any governmentally-supplied number that didn’t help him was a lie, and the base, trained to believe, did as told: it believed, it stepped forward, and it voted for him, and categorically labeled those sources as fake news.

And now, here we are with someone who’s so incompetent and clueless that I, quite frankly, have begun ignoring. He’s being outrageous again? Good, more fodder for Colbert on The Late Show. It’s not late night at the moment? Then please don’t bother me with President Irrelevancy, because the United States has a lot of shit to clean up and the more we listen to him, the higher that shit pile gets.

From The Blob trailer.

Shameful, maybe. He wields a lot of power and has quite a few levers he can pull in order to wreck the United States even more, but whether he’s a Russian thumb-puppet following orders, or the iconic barroom blowhard given a chance to implement his ill-informed opinions, I’m no longer fascinated with him, and I certainly don’t respect him; I never really did, once it became clear he was a congenital liar. I try to pay attention because I should, but it’s like salt in the wound, sandpaper on the nerves. He’s The Blob ingesting the guy under the car.

But what does this crash potentially mean? Depends on the topic. Former VP Biden has begun modeling what he will do as President, showing compassion to the Floyd family by recording a video but not disturbing his memorial in Houston. He speaks from the heart, as someone who has lost his first wife, baby daughter, and an adult son, and speaks directly to Floyd’s daughter, offering adult sympathy and guidance on the road ahead. Contrast that to Trump’s offerings. If Biden can keep this up, we may see a landslide of near Nixon-McGovern-esqe magnitude.

The Republican Party may now reap what it’s sown, which were lies, in a disaster. We may see Senate seats that were considered safe before this began suddenly become seriously contested. All that money Trump and the RNC have received from rich donors may suddenly not be enough to cover all the advertising they’ll feel is necessary.

And advertising may not do the job this time around.

I personally hope that some quasi-religious tenets will come up for public discussion and review: Are taxes always evil? Is Regulation always bad? Is profit all that’s important?

How do we truly begin to erase racism? That’s the most important problem, of course. But concomitant with that is the recognition that a roaring economy doesn’t solve the question; it’s quite the other way around, only once racism is at least in the process of being erased can an economy be truly classified as roaring. If only investors, who are overwhelming white, are doing well, then the economy is not really doing well because the economy is about the citizenry, and if not all of the communities are benefiting, then it’s not roaring as much as we’d like to believe. And, as an investor, I do not consider investors to be deserving to be the primary recipient of corporate profits.

There are so many other implications to this slide. If the next few polls show Trump heading for the low 30s or even the upper 20s, then Trump is finished. He simply hasn’t the intellectual capacity to turn it around. His ideology is flawed, his bigotry becoming well known, and his refusal to lead painfully obvious. Another politician … wouldn’t have let it get this bad.

I’ve noticed CNN has been running headlines about the competition to be Trump’s political heir.

In the face of his dreadful incompetence, I have to ask: Which idiot could possibly want that mantle? Continuous mendacity is not a political ideology, it’s a mental disorder. Every chaser after this mantle should simply be ejected from office at the next opportunity.

This is a fascinating example of crossover techniques in technology:

At over 600°C, a jet engine’s exhaust stands out like a beacon when seen in infrared, making it an obvious target for heat-seeking missiles – but a US Navy device might be able to thwart such missiles with ghost images projected in mid-air.

The traditional method of defence has been to eject hot flares to draw missiles away from the aircraft. This new approach would use lasers rather than pyrotechnics.

When focused to a point, a laser can produce a spot or filament of ionised gas in the air, known as a laser-induced plasma (LIP). The US military has long shown interest in LIP to create artificial lightning to defuse bombs or produce “non-lethal” effects.

Now, Alexandru Hening at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in California is using lasers to create an array of plasma columns in the air. These are rastered like the beam in an old cathode-ray screen to create two or three-dimensional images in mid-air of ghost aircraft that can distract incoming missiles. [NewScientist]

It’s a fascinating idea for confusing thermal detectors, and transfers an old, obsolete technique for display technology using a phosphorescent material with … air. And, for those wondering about my forklift remark, the old cathode ray TVs seemed to get exponentially heavier as the screen size increased; the big ones, I should imagine, could require several husky men to deliver them to their customers.

A reader catches me depending too much on the Axios summary concerning a CDC survey:

Um, it was 200 people who responded to the survey. Who knows how many people have actually done those stupid things. It could be 201 or it be 20,000+.

Oh, crap. Here’s the relevant section from the actual CDC report:

A recent report described a sharp increase in calls to poison centers related to exposures to cleaners and disinfectants since the onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (1). However, data describing cleaning and disinfection practices within household settings in the United States are limited, particularly concerning those practices intended to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. To provide contextual and behavioral insight into the reported increase in poison center calls and to inform timely and relevant prevention strategies, an opt-in Internet panel survey of 502 U.S. adults was conducted in May 2020 to characterize knowledge and practices regarding household cleaning and disinfection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowledge gaps were identified in several areas, including safe preparation of cleaning and disinfectant solutions, use of recommended personal protective equipment when using cleaners and disinfectants, and safe storage of hand sanitizers, cleaners, and disinfectants. Thirty-nine percent of respondents reported engaging in nonrecommended high-risk practices with the intent of preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, such as washing food products with bleach, applying household cleaning or disinfectant products to bare skin, and intentionally inhaling or ingesting these products. Respondents who engaged in high-risk practices more frequently reported an adverse health effect that they believed was a result of using cleaners or disinfectants than did those who did not report engaging in these practices.

[Bold mine.] The Axios report was poorly written, and I didn’t double-check it. If I’d realized it was an opt-in Internet survey, I wouldn’t have paid any attention, because these depend too much on special interest from the survey taker. 39% sounds high because many of those who had not taken up a dangerous practice would also not have taken the survey, thus skewing the results.

My humble apologies.

A new word. Yep.

From Axios:

The CDC released data on Friday from a survey commissioned to understand why more people have been calling poison control centers during the coronavirus pandemic.

What they found: Roughly 200 adults who responded to the survey in May said they intentionally inhaled disinfectants, washed food with bleach, or applied household cleaning products to bare skin to combat the virus — all of which are dangerous.

• Fewer respondents reported drinking or gargling household cleaners and soapy water to fight COVID-19, or inhaling bleach and other cleaners.

No matter how you slice it, 200 is a very small number against the citizenry or the electorate sliced up by political leaning or not. While it’s certainly a tragedy that the President managed to influence anyone with his absurd and dangerous suggestion, statistically speaking, for a population of roughly 280 million adults, this is unsurprising only in that it wasn’t higher.

This speaks to the diminishing influence of this President. Even those who are still inclined to vote for him are applying critical analysis to what comes out of his mouth and not doing what he’s doing when it’s obvious. This is suggestive, but of course not dispositive, that the President will be less able to entice voters down his rabbit hole come November.