Unsightly Mental Blemishes

And here’s the more forthright blooms of the rhododendron.

On National Review Jim Geraghty suggests that there might be corruption – grifters, to use his lovely word – in the fund-raising arm of the conservative movement:

Why is the conservative movement not as effective as its supporters want it to be? Because day after day, year after year, little old ladies get called on the phone or emailed or sent letters in the mail telling them that the future of the country is at stake and that if they don’t make a donation to groups that might as well be named Make Telemarketers Wealthy Again right now, the country will go to hell in a handbasket. Those little old ladies get out their checkbooks and give what they can spare, convinced that they’re making a difference and helping make the world a better place. What they’re doing is ensuring that the guys running these PACs can enjoy a more luxurious lifestyle. Meanwhile, conservative candidates lose, kicking the dirt after primary day or the general election, convinced that if they had just had another $100,000 for get-out-the-vote operations, they might have come out on top.

What’s more, most of these PACs thrive on telling conservative grassroots things that aren’t true. Clarke didn’t want to run for Senate in Wisconsin, Laura Ingraham wasn’t interested in running for Senate in Virginia, and Allen West wasn’t running for Senate in Florida. The PACs propagate a narrative in which they’re the heroic crusaders for conservative values, secure borders and freedom, up against corrupt establishment elites . . . when they’re in fact run by those coastal political operatives and keeping most of the money for their own operations.

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Oh, every PAC does this.” Nope. In that RightWingNews study, Club for Growth Action PAC had 88 percent actually went into independent expenditures and direct contributions. Republican Main Street Partnership had 78 percent, and American Crossroads was at 72 percent. That allegedly corrupt “establishment” is way more efficient at using donors’ money than all of these self-proclaimed grassroots conservative groups. Over on the liberal or Democratic side, ActBlue charges a 3.95 percent processing fee when passing along donations to campaigns.

Does Geraghty manage to carry this through to the entire conservative movement as currently constituted?

Imagine if instead of disappearing down rat holes and being spent on more fundraising, just $10 million of that $127 million to $177 million sum had been better spent. Imagine if that $10 million had gone to the campaigns of the GOP candidates in the 20 House districts that they lost by five percentage points or less in 2018. That’s $500,000 per campaign. If Mia Love had 625 more votes in Utah, she would have held her seat. Think she and her campaign could have identified and mobilized another 700 Love-supporting voters in her district if they had another half-million?

In California’s 21st District, David Valadao lost by about 900 votes. In Maine’s 2nd, Bruce Poliquin needed about 3,500 more votes. In Georgia’s 6th, Karen Handel needed 8,000 more votes.

If Leonard Lance had about 16,000 more votes, he would have kept his seat. Maybe not every one of these close races would be reversed if each one of those GOP candidates had another half million for GOTV. But right now, Republicans need to flip 19 seats to regain control of the House. Doing just 2.25 percentage points better in 2018 would have saved 13 seats!

It doesn’t occur to him that the rot may have spread, does it?

Look, it’s not impossible that the GOP elected officials have remained pristine while the conservative PACs have become infected with grifters, but the antics we’ve seen from elected GOP officials since the turn of the century have to make one dubious, don’t they? Sure, there seems to be a few, such as Senator Paul Rand (R-KY), Governors Hogan and Kasich, and a few others who seem to be operating on some sort of honor system, even if Rand is a flake; but so many of the rest, from Gingrich to McConnell to Nunes to, well, how far do I have to go? Hunter? Collins? Gianforte? Everyone who votes for second-class conservative judges? Throw in the legislation such as faux tax reform of 2017, the failed ACA-replacement, the utterly exotic behavior of the NRA, and it’s just a little hard not to think that Geraghty is indulging in wishful thinking, rather than sober assessment of the conservatives.

Conservative folks come in two brands. There are those who think it’s me and me only, taking offence at the very thought that society contributes to their success.

And then there’s the social conservatives who are part of that social web that shows up at the houses of the physically afflicted, help drive them to medical appointments, that sort of thing. The backbone of the community, as it were.

The first brand preys on the second, while the second prays for the first.

Kevin Drum has his opinion as well, which just may be mine in different words.

Last night I heard that the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra seemed to be in trouble, including the sudden cancellation of the summer season. I figured I could go to the news to do more research – or I could simply consult my cousin Scott Chamberlain’s blog, Mask of the Flower Prince, to get at least some insight. He has two posts available, the first of which starts out with:

What on earth is the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s management thinking?

As you all know, I’ve weighed in on my share of classical music labor disputes over the years. I was, obviously, deeply involved in the Minnesota Orchestra’s lockout… and over that year-and-a-half disaster, I pretty much saw it all. I had hoped that the lessons learned in Minneapolis would keep organizations from going down a similar path, but alas that was not to be the case. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, MET Opera, San Diego Opera, and too many other ensembles decided to take a similar path of trying to impose brutal new business models on their organizations in the name of “fiscal responsibility” or “sustainability.” And similar to what happened in Minnesota, they got burned as a result.

And now the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) management has taken up this misbegotten fight.  And they did so with gusto; they chose to preemptively cancel the entire summer season, which had only been announced just five weeks ago.  More surprisingly, they did so days after the announcement that Maryland’s General Assembly had promised $3.2 million to stabilize the BSO’s finances while all sides worked to build a comprehensive, shared plan to rebuild the organization’s fiscal health.

Based on decades of work as an arts administrator, board member, board president of an arts organization, and a classical performer myself, let me say unequivocally that the BSO’s decision is a disaster. Well, “disaster” hardly covers it—one could argue that it’s a hot mess of a train wreck careening toward a wheel-less bus parked next to a red-flag factory.

In his second post, he draws parallels with the decline and demise of that restaurant juggernaut, Howard Johnson’s:

So what happened? Why did such a successful company go by the wayside?

Well, there was a change in leadership. The eponymous founder, with his devotion to customer service, exceptional quality, and the highest standards, gave way to a new generation of leadership under his son Howard B. Johnson that adopted a new cost-savings strategy as the guiding principal of the company. The new management also embraced a new way of thinking that suggested the customer wouldn’t be able to discern the difference between a great product and a pretty good product.

At a talk I attended a few years back, [book author] Carbone (who worked briefly with HoJo in the 1970s) recalled what happened next. He suggested that one specific change the new regime instituted—the change from a signature 4-ply napkin to a much more modest 2-ply napkin—encapsulated both the thinking behind the new strategy and its unfortunate consequences.

The idea behind this change seemed fairly straightforward: since the napkins were hardly central to the customers’ experiences, they offered a harmless way to save money by cutting corners where no one would notice.

This change, unfortunately, represented the tip of the iceberg. Satisfied at the money saved, the management fully embraced this new culture of cost-cutting, hunting down savings wherever possible. The length of drinking straws was shortened. The number of ice cream flavors was reduced. Cheaper ingredients were used in the restaurants and smaller portion were mandated. Cleaning schedules were reduced, employee training reduced, and building maintenance was reduced.

And so HoJo’s, as it was known, lost the essence of what made it a memorable place to go. Management ate the goose, and there were no more golden eggs.

I might only add that BSO is not only selling musical performances, but also something that is a mixture of trust, prestige, a shared story, access to the past … and I have to wonder if BSO management understands that.

But go read what Scott has written, he’s an excellent communicator and has the relevant experience to go along with it.

And the rhododendron is off and running. First, the peek:

And then some white-tips.

In the slice of life category I’ll slide The Best Man (1964), a story about the nominating process of a fictional American political party for the 1964 election. This is a story which gets by with a minimum of information. We know that William Russell, the top candidate for the nomination, has money and a reputation for womanizing, while his most significant opponent is a hard driving young man by the name of Senator Joe Cantwell, who seems to be very serious.

We get further information through the instrumentality of former President Hockstader, whose endorsement would be invaluable to any of the candidates. Not only do we learn about the top two, such as Russell’s hesitancy, but we learn about the President himself: his own view of how to win the Presidency, what he considers to be important in a candidate. He fills in important blanks.

For all that it’s slice of life, though, we swiftly run up on the rocks of a moral dilemma: what are the limits, if any, that may not be transgressed by those who chase power? Russell has not quite got that straight in his head, while Cantwell has no hesitancy to use any means necessary to find dirt on Russell, beyond that of womanizing, and it’s Russell’s secret nervous breakdown.

But when there comes news of Cantwell’s display of homosexuality during a recent war, still considered ruinous deviancy at this juncture of American life, Russell is torn. He’s a believer in playing fair, but if he does so and loses, a man driven by a religious mania may win the Presidency. His meditations in this context are significant, if perhaps underplayed, but are fascinating as the background is the very end of the trail: the nominating convention, complete with party delegations from the States, the shouts of where this round of votes will go, all a bracing background of power, contempt, toadying, and other displays of what raw power brings out in people.

And so Russell is facing failure when Cantwell offers him the VP slot on the ticket. The thought of working with a man apparently without a true moral system leaves Russell with a hard, hard choice. And that’s what makes this a good movie: it practically forces the audience to consider how they would react in a similar situation – and what that would cost them.

I won’t quite recommend it, but it’s certainly worth a watch if you enjoy Henry Fonda mulling moral conundrums. Enjoy!

Our orange azalea opened up a couple of days ago.

My Arts Editor thinks we should use some of this season’s pictures to construct greetings cards.

When Julian Assange was finally arrested by the UK after the Ecuadorian embassy decided it was tired of housing him, the United States requested extradition and filed charges against him – and some of those charges upset the journalistic community. It’s worth understanding why, so here’s Jack Goldsmith, writing on Lawfare, from a couple of weeks back:

I have written a lot on how hard it is to distinguish WikiLeaks from the New York Times when it comes to procuring and publishing classified information. One implication of the comparison is that any successful prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange would have adverse implications for mainstream U.S. news publications efforts to solicit, receive and publish classified information. The May 23 indictment of Assange makes clear that these concerns are real. As Susan Hennessey said, “[I]t will be very difficult to craft an Espionage Act case against him that won’t adversely impact true journalists.” I don’t think this is an accident. I think the government’s indictment has the U.S. news media squarely in its sights.
The first sentence of the indictment reads:

To obtain information to release on the WikiLeaks website, ASSANGE encouraged sources to (i) circumvent legal safeguards on information; (ii) provide that protected information to WikiLeaks for public dissemination; and (iii) continue the pattern of illegally procuring and providing protected information to WikiLeaks for distribution to the public.

This is exactly what national security reporters and their news publications often ask government officials or contractors to do. Anytime a reporter asks to receive information knowing it is classified, that person encourages sources to circumvent legal safeguards on information. The news organizations’ encouragement is underscored by the mechanisms they provide for sources to convey information securely and anonymously. (The New York Times’s menu includes SecureDrop, an “encrypted submission system set up by The Times [that] uses the Tor anonymity software to protect [the] identity, location and the information” of the person who sends it.) Like WikiLeaks, these reporters and organizations encourage the sources to provide the “protected information” for public dissemination. And also like WikiLeaks, they often encourage the sources to engage in a “pattern of illegally procuring and providing protected information.”

The quoted indictment, if you’re not a journalist, sounds rather reasonable, doesn’t it? But Goldsmith disagrees:

The government alleges that “ASSANGE designed WikiLeaks to focus on information, restricted from public disclosure by law, precisely because of the value of that information” and adds that Assange “predicated his and WikiLeaks’s success in part upon encouraging sources with access to such information to violate legal obligations and provide that information for WikiLeaks to disclose.” This is pretty much a description of what the New York Times and its national security reporters do. The indictment makes a big deal out of the fact that WikiLeaks posted a “Most Wanted Leaks” list. U.S. journalists don’t do exactly that. But they sometimes have a general list of asks, they often have specific requests and SecureDrop constitutes an open-ended request. The indictment also makes a big deal out of Assange’s interactions and encouragements with Chelsea Manning. These interactions, again, are not unlike the ones that must occur all the time between national security reporters and their sources. The government makes much of the fact that WikiLeaks describes itself as “intelligence agency of the people,” but that is how many people and institutions in the U.S. media see their role.

This is the sort of thing that fascinates me – surprising glimpses into the lives of other people. So it suggests that Assange, regardless of his alleged sexual offenses, is (or was) simply upgrading a service offered by the traditional media for the digital age. Is that so bad?

Goldsmith is not alone in worrying about this, as Margaret Sullivan of WaPo makes clear:

All [the stories on the Pentagon Papers, the NSA’s global surveillance programs, and the monitoring of calls and emails of Americans without court-approved warrants] won Pulitzer Prizes, and all informed citizens about activities their secrecy-obsessed government didn’t want them to know.

That kind of reporting — perhaps the most important journalism there is — may have become an endangered species Thursday with a new indictment of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act.

For good reason, press-rights advocates are far more alarmed now than they were last month when Assange was initially indicted.

“This is unlike anything we’ve seen before, and it crosses a bright red line for journalists,” said James Risen, a longtime national security reporter for the Times and now director of the First Look Media’s Press Defense Fund. While a Times reporter, Risen (co-author of the warrantless wiretapping story) struggled for years to avoid testifying about his confidential source during the leak investigation of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer.

Gabe Rottman, director of the Technology and Press Freedom Project at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has similar concerns.

So, briefly speaking, the traditional risks have lain with those willing to break faith with their government, not so much with their publishers, but with caveats concerning reporters and their sources, and subsequent legal harassment by the government. This brings us back to Assange: is he a publisher?

Let’s establish some attributes of a publisher: an entity which searches for, solicits, and makes public, or semi-public in the case of subscription services, information, aka “news”. As part of the survival skills of such an entity, “fact-checking” was, at one time, an important attribute of being a publisher, as was a reputation for presenting all relevant information in a neutral manner.

By these criteria, Assange is doubtful as a member of the traditional publishers guild, isn’t he? He may cry that his specialty is “classified” information, but primarily because that’s the constraint of his organization, WikiLeaks, it makes it very difficult to judge whether he is a reputable publisher, or a fly by the night biased operation, unworthy of the name. For those of us who pay attention to reporting on Assange, we know he is passionately anti-Clinton, and communicated with the Trump Campaign concerning Clinton. Is this neutral?

This creates significant doubt in my mind that he’s a traditional publisher.

But let’s return to the attributes of a publisher and talk about one more such attribute. Let’s do so by citing some other notable publishers of “classified” information: The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times. What do they all have in common?

They’re all nationally based.

What is WikiLeaks? American, Russian, Australian (Assange may be from Australia), hell, Sicilian? Does it even matter? WikiLeaks is Internet based, and that means it’s not clear where the allegiance of those in control of it may lie. The traditional sources I’ve cited above are American and primarily report on American affairs, and as much as one may disagree with their editorial opinions, only the paranoid will indulge in the injustice of thinking they would betray their country by publishing information which they know to be false, contaminated, or misrepresented. That would destroy their reputations, and soon after their enterprises.

It’s far harder to make that assertion about WikiLeaks. Not much of a history, a bias in the publisher, and who knows if the information published is complete – or biased?

OK, all that said, I’m not disputing anything Sullivan and Goldsmith have said; I’ve really just used them as a jumping off point to think about WikiLeaks and how it’s easy to believe it’s little more than a mouthpiece for Assange. That the indictment is an overreach is worrisome, but hopefully a judge will reject it as inappropriate.

It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on it. And perhaps asking whether Assange deserves the title of ‘publisher.’

And then came that day when you were overrun by communist hordes.

If you’re in the mood for some manipulative propaganda, Invasion, U.S.A. (1952) as an American mouthpiece for anti-Soviet forces fits the bill. In this movie, various enemies of a military build up, including elected members of Congress and various heavy industry bosses, are targeted for refusing to take the threat of the Soviets seriously, as the United States is invaded and we find ourselves unable to adequately defend ourselves. Characters come and go, dying in various grisly ways, and the whole thing is hard to take at all seriously, at least from this vantage point in history.

1952 places it in the latter third, roughly, of what we have termed the McCarthyism period of American history, when Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) attempted to rid the country of suspected Communists through tactics which most Americans, when introduced to them, found to be highly disagreeable and even un-American. I do not know if this movie was allied with McCarthyist forces, but it seems quite likely, given the anti-communist tilt of the story, and its blatant advocacy for a highly militaristic state.

But all that said, don’t bother with this one unless you have an historical interest. It’s really dull, poorly made, and occasionally quite laughable.

Our front yard fern garden just popped. The bleeding hearts and virginia bluebells look good, too. And the industrious may glimpse some ginger root lurking as well.

Valorize:

1. To establish and maintain the price of (a commodity) by governmental action.
2. To give or assign a value to, especially a higher value: “The prophets valorized history” (Mircea Eliade). [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Low-cost high-efficiency system for solar-driven conversion of CO2 to hydrocarbons,” Tran Ngoc Huan, et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America:

Carbon dioxide electroreduction may constitute a key technology in coming years to valorize CO2 as high value-added chemicals such as hydrocarbons and a way to store intermittent solar energy durably. Based on readily available technologies, systems combining a photovoltaic (PV) cell with an electrolyzer cell (EC) for CO2 reduction to hydrocarbons are likely to constitute a key strategy for tackling this challenge. However, a low-cost, sustainable, and highly efficient PV–EC system has yet to be developed. In this article, we show that this goal can be reached using a low-cost and easily processable perovskite photovoltaic minimodule combined to an electrolyzer device using the same Cu-based catalysts at both electrodes and in which all energy losses have been minimized.

I think there’s a word missing.

Homonormative:

And so we come to gay men and straightness. For queer theorists, gay men who have conventional lives are sometimes deemed “homonormative” — a riff on the term “heteronormative”, which means conforming to straight culture. Being “homonormative” means not totally conforming to queer, alternative culture, or being able to pass as “straight” or simply being yourself in much of the country. It’s all a form of mockery, rooted, of course, in insecurity.

Noted in the third part of Andrew Sullivan’s weekly tripartite diary entry at New York here.

The same iris, different angle.

The Kansas City Star is reporting on growing concerns about Kansas Republican, for Secretary of State for Kansas, and purveyor of dubious information concerning immigrants Kris Kobach:

National Republicans are prepared to intervene in the Kansas Senate primary to ensure that conservative firebrand Kris Kobach does not win the party’s nomination should he run, multiple sources told the Kansas City Star.

Kobach said last week that he is still “actively considering” a bid for the U.S. Senate next year in Kansas. The seat will come open with the retirement of Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, 83, who announced in January that he would not run for re-election.

Any anti-Kobach efforts by groups such as the National Republican Senatorial Committee or the Senate Leadership Fund likely would take the form of undermining Kobach without actively supporting any of the other GOP candidates running against him.

Presuming he does decide to run in the Senate primary, his result will be diagnostic for the state of the Kansas Republic Party. If he wins or shows well, it may well indicate that the Party continues its right-wing plunge into irrelevancy, while a rejection might indicate an incipient return to sanity – and a rejection of Trump and his incoherent agenda.

I expect the former. Remember, in the last few months four active Kansas GOP legislators not only dropped out of the Republican Party, but joined the Democrats. This indicates to me that the Kansas Republican Party is not susceptible to reformation, and will have to burn itself out through repeated failures and defections.

Whatever the result, it may bode for the national party as well.

It’s an odd sort of party, yes.

The storytellers behind House Of Secrets (1936) play their cards close to their vests in this mystery story, but unfortunately it’s unconvincing. American Barry Wilder, while sojourning, penniless, in London, receives a call from a London solicitor. He’s heir to the Hawk’s Nest and a small fortune! Bing bing bing!

But upon visiting his new property, supposedly unoccupied, he discovers squatters, and armed squatters at that: two men and their dogs. Kicked off his own property, he doesn’t glimpse a third occupant, a young, attractive woman he had rescued from an assault on the boat that took him across the Channel.

Barry finds the entire situation puzzling: his detective friend, Starr, starts in on the situation, and discovers a highly unfriendly Home Secretary and a chief of Scotland Yard who changes from warm to cold when he hears the name Hawk’s Nest, and then Starr abruptly tells Wilder to go home to America.

Meanwhile, Wilder himself, on a late hours visit to the Nest, has discovered yet another squatter, a madman treated in a most odd manner by the other three. The madman likes to indulge in crazed laughter, which tends to be accompanied by screams from the woman, who Wilder has by now discovered is also there. Wilder keeps getting caught on the property, yet the angry squatters refuse to shoot him, and when he goes to the police, they just laugh him off. It’s all a bit surreal.

Into the soup then trips three gangsters from New York. They know what’s going on: the squatters are searching for treasure, and the gangsters will be horning in on the action if they, and their secret information, have anything to do with it!

Well, it all plays out, but the treasure is at odds with the madman, isn’t he? I shan’t give the game away.

But I will say the movie fails because of three problems.

First, and perhaps my most shallow objection, is the quality of the print of the movie. The day time scenes are fuzzy; the night time scenes, of which there are several, are almost supernaturally odd in how the human body tends to echo. Perhaps this is an effect of ‘casting a movie of low technical quality in HD.

Second is the pacing of the movie. It’s very homogenuous, with little apparent attempt to take our breaths away. The script calls for this, this, and this to happen, and by God we’ll plod our way there.

Third, it’s full of shallow characters. Wilder saves the woman on the boat and falls in love with her at the same moment, yet why? She may be pretty, but there’s more to chemistry than looks. Who’s Wilder, anyways? A guy with no money, apparently, just charm, good looks, and an accent that keeps changing. And surely the squatters must have a few juicy conflicts to keep us interested!

Part of what makes a story work is a depiction of how being part of that story, that situation, and how it’s resolved, affects the people involved, and while there may be some limp efforts to do so here, they are very ineffective.

And that wrecks what might have been a clever solution to the conundrum of a treasure hunt colliding with a captive madman. There might be the bones of a good story, perhaps even as good as The Usual Suspects (1995), though not nearly as noir, but without the character involvement, the whole thing falls utterly flat.

Here’s a couple of pics of one of our first irises.

Tomorrow, another couple.

I have not been paying attention to the travails of Israel, and it’s toddled right along. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party won a plurality in the recent elections, but came up short of a majority. Shockingly, Netanyahu was unable to orchestrate the necessary alliances to build a majority and create a government, which leaves Israel looking forward to another election cycle.  I was particularly interested in this bit, from WaPo:

Addressing the country early Thursday, Netanyahu delivered remarks that sharply contrasted with his beaming speech at his campaign headquarters on election night. His failure to form a coalition with his traditional partners dents his reputation as a veteran political operator.

But there is also much more at stake. His party had been in the process of forwarding legislation that would shield members of parliament, including Netanyahu, from prosecution. In October, Netanyahu’s lawyers are scheduled to present his defense in a pre-indictment hearing to criminal charges including bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

I wish I could say I was shocked, but this is the predictable behavior of a corrupt party leader frantically trying to cover up his behavior, and Netanyahu has certainly had many rumors of corruption floating around him for years. Akiva Eldar provides more information in AL Monitor:

… the incitement against the country’s courts as reflected in several unbridled legislative proposals being promoted by Netanyahu and his allies has brought quite a few guardians of democracy out of their ivory towers. Supreme Court Chief Justice Esther Hayut took off her gloves. Retired judges lashed out at the proposed Override Clause that would allow the Knesset to override Supreme Court rulings and limit its authority. Philanthropists threatened to withhold funding for public institutions. Academics announced that they would start their classes with lectures on the meaning and importance of democracy. Pundits called for popular revolt and even for mass legal violations.

The rightward tilt of Likud means it must ally with minor parties affiliated with various religious sects – which I suspect means parties which believe they are doing God’s will and for whom compromise is not to be brooked. Thus Netanyahu supped with the devil, and his ladle was not long enough.

Iatrogenic:

Relating to illness caused by medical examination or treatment.
‘drugs may cause side effects which can lead to iatrogenic disease’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in the title of a recent article, “Protectionism Is Iatrogenic Government,” George Will, National Review. Personally, I think he stretched that word out of shape in this case.

Keeping up this thread on Republican dissension over President Trump, another retired GOP Congressman has stepped forward to reprimand his former colleagues, Senator Cohen (R-ME):

All who are elected or appointed to high office are fiduciaries of the public trust. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo once described the standard of a fiduciary’s conduct to be “something stricter than the morals of the marketplace. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive.”

With the exception thus far of Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Republicans have taken the position that Mueller’s redacted report has resolved all issues of alleged presidential collusion with the Russians and obstruction of justice. Case closed.

This is not a tenable position. The Mueller report has raised nearly as many questions as it has answered. But more important, as someone who legislatively helped craft the original Office of Special Counsel, I can attest that Congress never intended to subcontract out its investigative powers to the executive branch.

[WaPo]

Senator Cohen has written something a little magisterial, simple language that is yet evocative.

And accurate. It’s worth a read.

This still doesn’t constitute a tidal wave of Republican dissension, but it’s another step along the way. Maine Republicans may take notice of it, although whether it’s to exile the apostate from the flock, or to actually act like adults and discuss it with sobriety is still up in the wind.

There’s rather a buzz in the political world around Trump’s visit to Japan and the fact that the USS John McCain was also present, as WaPo reports:

The White House asked Navy officials to obscure the USS John S. McCain while President Trump was visiting Japan, Pentagon and White House officials said Wednesday night.

A senior Navy official confirmed he was aware someone at the White House sent a message to service officials in the Pacific requesting that the USS John McCain be kept out of the picture while the president was there. That led to photographs taken Friday of a tarp obscuring the McCain name, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

When senior Navy officials grasped what was happening, they directed Navy personnel who were present to stop, the senior official said. The tarp was removed on Saturday, before Trump’s visit, he added.

In case my reader is not keeping up with President Trump’s strange behaviors, CNN helpfully adds this:

But the emails underscore Trump’s extraordinary and bitter personal feud with McCain, with whom he frequently sparred when the Arizona Republican was alive and even after he passed away from brain cancer in August.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog is not quite sure what to make of this episode, as we can see from his post’s title:

Has Trump’s contempt for John McCain reached a new, farcical level?

His conclusion seems almost helpless:

But let’s consider a charitable scenario. Let’s say White House officials pressed the military to move the USS McCain “out of sight” ahead of Trump’s trip, but the president himself was not aware of the request and played no part in the instructions.

By this reasoning, Trump’s own staff believes he’s such a delicate snowflake that they went to considerable lengths to ensure their boss wouldn’t even see the name “John McCain.”

I think it’s worth entertaining an alternative explanation, though. I see these extraordinary, post-mortem attacks on Senator McCain to be emblematic of a battle between two morality systems. Briefly, morality systems generate from sectors of society in order to facilitate the attainment of the aims of that sector. They ordain goals and methodologies to optimize  those goals within that societal context.

So, as long time readers know^[1], the importation of one sector’s methods into another’s leads to sub-optimal results, and this includes the governing morality system. In this particular case, Trump embodies a version of the private sector’s morality system of accumulation at all costs, an extreme and, in my view, fallacious version of the morality system governing the private sector’s actors. Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate; truth and honor play no part in Trump’s version of private sector morality.

McCain is, of course, emblematic of traditional public (or governmental) sector morality: extraordinary military service^[2], then on to service in Congress; his obsession with honor and integrity when involved in a scandal. His goals, to judge from his behaviors, were not those of Trump, even if he did marry into money. He was a creature of the public sector in the end, sworn to service.

Trump and his morality system are now pushing into the public sector, and whether or not Trump realizes it, and I think he does, his morality system must vanquish the previous morality system if he is to survive and continue to pursue his natal morality system’s goals. McCain, the closest thing to a tangible face for the opposing morality system must therefore be destroyed: his most precious possession, his honor, ruined.

And therefore the continued denigration of the McCain name. If this alternative view is true, then it’s quite likely that Trump or a close associate arranged this entire little set-piece, including the publicity. If the military had caved, so much the better, but all that really needed to happen was the publicity, the Administration’s disdain for a war hero and exemplary member of the public sector. It’s part of the continued war on a morality system that is both alien and inimical to President Trump’s pathological need for riches, admiration, and join the elites.

¹ For new readers, the very brief summary of the prior link is that society may be validly divided into categories or sectors, such as medical, private, governmental, etc; that such sectors are differentiated by their goals, such as improving health for medical; that the processes employed by the sectors are optimized for that sector’s goals; and that importation of processes from one sector to another are, in all likelihood, an ill-advised proposition

² If not without its warts, from which he apparently learned. Redemption is one of the greatest American traditions.

From the AL Monitor lobbying newsletter:

A bipartisan congressional committee wants to revamp lobbying disclosures “to make it easier to know who’s lobbying Congress and what they’re lobbying for.”

If your lobbyist isn’t clearly communicating with his prey targets, perhaps he should be fired.

OK, so maybe a foreign power’s project has been split among many lobbyists, making it hard to discern.

So stop listening to lobbyists.

Coruscate:

1. : to give off or reflect light in bright beams or flashes : SPARKLE
2. : to be brilliant or showy in technique or style [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in Paradise Found – Islamic Architecture and Arts, Waldemar Januszczak, a documentary which fascinated my Arts Editor.

Today SCOTUS responded to a challenge to the Indiana state law concerning abortion regulation, as WaPo notes:

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to a compromise on a restrictive Indiana abortion law that keeps the issue off its docket for now.

The court said a part of the law dealing with disposal of the “remains” of an abortion could go into effect. But it did not take up a part of the law stricken by lower courts that prohibited abortions because tests revealed an abnormality.

The court indicated it would wait for other courts to weigh in before taking up that issue.

No real answer, just putting it off. However, Justice Thomas is trying to sneak in an opinion based on a faulty understanding of the word eugenics, a word fraught with negative connotations. From the dissent section of the response:

Each of the immutable characteristics protected by this law can be known relatively early in a pregnancy, and the law prevents them from becoming the sole criterion for deciding whether the child will live or die. Put differently, this law and other laws like it promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.

A quick poke at Wikipedia to find out about eugenics:

Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/; from Greek εὐγενής eugenes ‘well-born’ from εὖ eu, ‘good, well’ and γένος genos, ‘race, stock, kin’)^[2][3] is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population by excluding (through a variety of morally criticized means) certain genetic groups judged to be inferior, and promoting other genetic groups judged to be superior.

The key is “... that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population …“. We’re talking about motivations here. But is that particular motivation applicable in this context?

No. In my experience, it’s a rare mother & father who are worried about improving the genetic quality of the human race. Historically, the concern is economic: Can this potential baby be supported by the family? Other motivations have also applied, such as Are we too old and Do we want this potential baby?

In order to support the eugenics charge, it would be necessary for a court to infer the motivations of a mother having an abortion, absent a clear and trustworthy statement from same. Not that we haven’t tried to do so with hate-crime legislation, or at least crept up to the precipice with such laws, but it’s still a chancy and intellectually dubious enterprise. Given the stronger likelihood that the motivation is economic or convenience, Justice Thomas’ use of the word eugenics in this discussion is ill-chosen to the point of the illicit interjection of politics and religion into the discussion.

ALL that said, there’s an important question to ask concerning freedom of choice, as illustrated by the use of sex-selected abortions in India and China. Both of these countries now have large imbalances in their young citizens as measured by sex, which has lead to unrest. What if – and it’s an unlikely if – we saw the same phenomenon in the United States? If our social harmony were roiled by the free choices of potential parents?

In this unlikely happenstance, SCOTUS could rule that the government has a compelling interest in denying abortions for sex-related reasons. Not that I’m making that argument now; I think it’s absurd, given the lack of substantial dowries in American marital rites. But it’s worth contemplating how free choice must sometimes be limited, especially when there is a valid perception that a child is more valuable as one sex than as another.

But, to return to the main point, attempting to borrow the negative connotations of a word that does not apply is a mark of intellectual dishonesty which should make further evaluation of Justice Thomas’ argument a rather fraught affair.

And for a graphic eugenics example, see The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (2013).

Remember our mushroom log? We didn’t, it fell out of our mutual consciousness a few weeks back. Here’s what we found over the weekend:

It’s sort of like biological art.

At the end of The Black Raven (1943) I felt a little torn. This struck me as what might be called a “factory movie”, made purely for profit as quickly as possible, much in the same way as the famous Casablanca (1942). You might expect a standard plot, and you’d be wrong. It has stereotypes, it has bad production values (or a bad print), it has elements of noir, yet none of them really define it.

Amos Bradford runs a hotel & safehouse for criminals on New York’s Canadian border, with the help of a put-upon assistant. One stormy night, his erstwhile partner, having finally escaped jail, appears at his hotel, gun at the ready for revenge, as Bradford, aka The Raven, may have connived at his capture and conviction. Bradford and his assistant are fortunate to overwhelm the man and tie him up.

But the storm has worsened, bridges are washing out, and people are beginning to wash up at the hotel: a displaced gangster, a bank cashier with an unlikely amount of money, young Lee Winfield with her fiancee, Robert, looking to get married in Canada; and the politically connected Tim Winfield, Lee’s father, who dislikes Robert and wishes to prevent the marriage.

And then the Sheriff shows up, just in time to find Tim Winfield’s body and accuse Robert of the murder. Bradford has been dealing with a series of problems, from the former partner, now escaped from the bonds Bradford applied, to an aggressive gangster, a high maintenance bank cashier, and now bodies.

Even for a criminal safehouse keeper, it’s a bit much.

The odd part was that I sympathized with this criminal. He takes the part of Robert, accused of murder by a slack-minded Sheriff, manages a few cheap auditory shots at the Sheriff, and in the end solves the murder.

And because I enjoyed his efforts, it was quite bemusing that Bradford pays for his success with his life.

One might argue The Black Raven belongs in the category of noir, yet I find myself resisting the notion. Perhaps I found Bradford too sympathetic to fit into a canon featuring anti-heroes and supporting characters who illustrate the folly of principles and traits that essentially glorify greed and self-interest. Or perhaps the failure to linger over grisly fates didn’t convince me that this was noir.

All that said, in places The Black Raven was literally noir – the scenes in the dark of the basement were literally black, with little to go on. A budget problem? An aesthetic decision? Someone asleep at the switch? It certainly made it difficult to understand what might be going on down there.

Here it is – slightly out of focus.