Corruption On A Scale Never Previously Imagined February 22, 2019February 20, 2019 Rachel Maddow had fun last week with a proposal Trump recently made for fireworks on the Fourth of July. It then turns more serious, with one more example of what in any other adminsitration would be called a scandal. There was a time your career could face ruin over accepting $16,000 in — legal — contributions. It’s what led to Nixon’s famous Checkers speech. HAVE YOU READ OR (BETTER STILL) LISTENED TO ANDREW McCABE’S BOOK YET? YOU MUST. IT’S WAY MORE THAN YOU’VE SEEN ON TV. Why some British people don’t like Donald Trump, by Nate White: A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.* I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever.* And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. . . . And it goes downhill from there . . . Even so, sometimes there are bright spots on a bleak horizon. Have you seen this? Trump administration launches global effort to end criminalization of homosexuality. A complex issue, as you will read. Have a great weekend. *This is not in fact true. During one of the Republican primary debates, when each candidate was asked what Secret Service code name she or he wanted, Trump deadpanned: “Humble.” I still laugh thinking about it.
What A Field! February 21, 2019February 20, 2019 It’s an abundance of riches. Even just the young ones, like Booker and Buttigieg and Beto startng with B. Read this profile of Cory Booker and tell me you’re not at least a little impressed. Watch Pete Buttigieg (BUTT-edge-edge) with Colbert and tell me you’re not at least a little impressed. (I particularly love that interview.) And so many others, announced and unannounced. The three old white “B’s” — Biden, Bloomberg, and Bernie. The amazing women (alphabetically) Amy, Elizabeth, Kamala, and Kirsten. Outliers like Andrew Yang, whose important book I have previously plugged. Former governors like Terry McAuliffe and John Hickenlooper, who did terrific jobs for Virginia and Colorado. And a whole bunch more. Sherrod Brown! Michael Bennet! (Two more B’s.) A dozen others! I reject the notion that there’s only one way to win — go left to excite the base or go moderate to reassure independents. The only thing I know for sure is that all the candidates need to compete by touting their own visions and qualifications, not by knocking their opponents. And that once we do have a nominee, all the rest must rally around her or him with enthusiasm. We need to win; restore civility, competence and reliability to the presidency; solve big problems in a thoughtful, constructive way. Which means also snatching the gavel from McConnell, who may be the least constructive Senate majority leader ever to have held one. HAVE YOU READ OR (BETTER STILL) LISTENED TO ANDREW McCABE’S BOOK YET? YOU MUST. IT’S WAY MORE THAN YOU’VE SEEN ON TV.
And Yet You Still Don’t Turn The Lights Off When You Leave The Room February 20, 2019February 20, 2019 It’s time to panic — right here — but first a quick detour. Tasmania is burning. The Climate Disaster Future Has Arrived While Those In Power Laugh At Us. As I write this, fire is 500 metres from the largest King Billy pine forest in the world on Mt Bobs, an ancient forest that dates back to the last Ice Age and has trees over 1,000 years old. Fire has broached the boundaries of Mt Field national park with its glorious alpine vegetation, unlike anything on the planet. Fire laps at the edges of Federation Peak, Australia’s grandest mountain, and around the base of Mt Anne with its exquisite rainforest and alpine gardens. Fire laps at the border of the Walls of Jerusalem national park with its labyrinthine landscapes of tarns and iconic stands of ancient pencil pine . . . Five years ago I was contacted by a stranger, Prof Peter Davies, an eminent water scientist. He wanted to meet because he had news he thought would interest me. The night we met Davies told me that the south-west of Tasmania – the island’s vast, uninhabited and globally unique wildland, the heart of its world heritage area – was dying. The iconic habitats of rainforest, button grass plains, and heathlands had begun to vanish because of climate change. I was shocked. I had understood that climate change’s effects on Tasmania would be significant but not disastrous; the changes mitigated by Tasmania being surrounded by seas that were not heating as quickly as others: the island’s west would get wetter, the east a little warmer and drier, but compared to much of the world it didn’t seem catastrophic. But it wasn’t so. . . . Of course, we barely know where Tasmania is. But we know where Florida and Louisiana are. It would be a shame if they were underwater at high tide. Same with Lower Manhattan. It’s Time to Panic, as you may have read in last Sunday’s New York Times. “If we don’t take action . . . the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” Technology is racing to meet the challenge. Bill Gates is thinking a lot about cow farts and helping to develop meatless meat and self-contained toilets — watch his ultimately upbeat 7 minutes here if for some reason you missed Fareed Zakaria this past Sunday. But in the meantime, shouldn’t we be eating much less meat? Boiling no more water than the amount of coffee we plan to drink? Turning the lights off when we leave the room? Setting the thermostat at least as low in the winter as we do in the summer; at least as high in the summer as we do in the winter? Time to Panic argues: that stuff’s nice, but it is collective action, through politics, we need to take. So in addition to walking or biking instead of driving, when you can, how about taking 1o minutes to read Time to Panic . . . and ten more to send it to your Republican friends? Back to Tasmania: . . . Then there was the startlingly new phenomenon of widespread dry lightning storms. Almost unknown in Tasmania until this century they had increased exponentially since 2000, leading to a greatly increased rate of fire in a rapidly drying south-west. Compounding all this, winds were also growing in duration, further drying the environment and fuelling the fires’ spread and ferocity. . . . . . . Later Davies took me on a research trip into a remote part of the south-west to show me the deeply upsetting sight of an area that was once peatland and forest and was now, after repeated burning, wet gravel. The news was hard to comprehend – the enemies of Tasmania’s wild lands had always had local addresses: the Hydro Electricity Commission, Gunns, various tourism ventures. They could be named and they could be fought, and, in some cases, beaten. But the new danger was not here. It was in the sky, it was carbon, and every year there was more of it. The name of the crime was climate change. Six weeks ago, the future that Davies and others had been predicting arrived in Tasmania. Lightning strikes ignited what would become known as the Gell River fire in the island’s south-west. In later weeks more lightning strikes led to more fires, every major one of which is still burning. . . . . . . Today Tasmania is burning. Its fires are so large that a firefighting team was reportedly called out in New Zealand to investigate a heavy smoke haze that turned out to have drifted across 2,500km of ocean from the Tasmanian fires. Firefighters are confronted with 1,629km of fire front, with fires having consumed 190,000 hectares, or 3% of Tasmania’s land, with authorities warning there is no sign of the fires abating for several weeks, and the potential for catastrophic consequences still a distinct possibility. . . . Politics apparently plays a role in Tasmania, too. Where here we have an imbecilic Senate committee chairman holding up a snowball, the Tasmanians have a prime minister holding up a lump of coal. . . . Scott Morrison’s proudest boast is that when the barbarians were at the gate, he stopped them. But now the truth is clear: the barbarians were never at the gate. They were always here, in the palace, in power, and they were blinding us with their lie that the enemies who would destroy our world were the wretched and powerless who sought asylum here. And all along our real enemy was them: those who held up lumps of coal in front of their throne, and laughed and laughed . . . What has become clear over these last four weeks across this vast, beautiful land of Australia is that a way of life is on the edge of vanishing. Australian summers, once a time of innocent pleasure, now are to be feared, to be anticipated not with joy but with dread, a time of discomfort, distress and, for some, fear that lasts not a day or a night but weeks and months. Power grids collapse, dying rivers vomit huge fish kills, while in the north, in Townsville, there are unprecedented floods, and in the south heat so extreme it pushes at the very edge of liveability has become everyday. And the future in which the people of Tasmania now find themselves, in the evacuation centres, camped in friends’ and family homes, fighting fires day after week after month, isn’t just frightening. It’s terrifying. While Morrison, now the prime minister, rushes around the country trying to scare the people about franking credits, he seems blithely unaware that the people are already scared – about climate change. Climate change isn’t just happening. It’s happening far quicker than has been predicted. Each careful scientific prediction is rapidly overtaken by the horror of profound natural changes that seem to be accelerating, with old predictions routinely outdone by the worsening reality – hotter, colder, wetter, drier, windier, wilder, and ever more destructive. . . . It is beginning to look as though Mars may once have had water on its surface. Perhaps life. Should we really assume, as the Republican Party largely does, that dumping 90 million tons of global-warming pollution a day into the atmosphere — day after day, week after week, year after year — won’t have an effect on that atmosphere? Won’t throw our fragile ecosystem out of kilter? Are we really such poor stewards of this miraculous blue marble as not to spring to Mother Nature’s defense? It’s Time to Panic.
Power Walking With Chris Christie February 19, 2019February 18, 2019 Yesterday, I linked to a column that inspired a power walk. When you go out for yours, I suggest listening to high-energy music (Jersey Boys! Hamilton! Workout Now! Cardio Motivator 2009!) or a good book. City of Thieves, perhaps. What a story. Endurance. A year in space, weightless. Or Chris Christie’s Let Me Finish, read by the in-your-face former governor himself. He, too, tells a great story. The parts about his 15-year relationship with Trump especially so. He spent months leading a team of 125 serious people putting together Trump’s transition plan. It would have staffed a proper government. Trump never even looked at it. Much of what Christie has been willing to help Trump work toward, I’m against. But if America was going to get an in-your-face overweight white guy, Christie would clearly have been a million times better than the one we got. He repeatedly justifies his support of Trump by stating, simply, the alternative was Hillary. As if that needs no elaboration. But it does — and he never says why he found her objectionable. Surely he didn’t buy the Benghazi nonsense, or the child sex rings. In 2008, Trump wrote, “I know Hillary and I think she’d make a great president.” “Hillary is smart, tough and a very nice person. Bill Clinton was a great president. They are fine people. Hillary was roughed up by the media, and it was a tough campaign for her, but she’s a great trooper. Her history is far from being over.” Christie obviously never quotes that — or helps us understand why he differs. But he does cover the elephant in the room (and all the elephant jokes) . . . and I now believe he neither concocted nor approved Bridgegate. Whether or not he was completely unaware of it for the four days it was going, as he claims to have been, is harder to know. But if he wasn’t largely or entirely blameless, wouldn’t Bill Baroni, his Port Authority appointee, have said something to prosecutors to avoid or mitigate the two-year prison sentence he ultimately got? (Long before and entirely unrelated to Bridgegate — but since we’re talking about power walks and elephant jokes — Bill wrote Fat Kid Got Fit: And So Can You!) Putin is winning. His sneak attack may ultimately prove to have done more to diminish America than the Japanese did with theirs. It is ongoing, and almost half our country doesn’t even believe it happened or is happening. We have handed the American Century to China. Our allies are as hopeful as anyone else who “believes in” things like science, civility, and truth-telling that Trump will be gone soon. But can the damage ever be fully repaired? As good a read as Christie’s book is, when is he going to start saying these things? Had he been chosen as Vice President, which by his account was all but in the bag, would he have been the enabler and apologist Pence is?
The Inspiration YOU Need? February 18, 2019February 17, 2019 At least one of two people need to read this from the LA Times (thanks, Rich!): How I got my 89-year-old dad to crush it in the gym. Namely, you, if you’re not exercising regularly (walk to work! climb the stairs!); and/or some senior you know. Excuse today’s short column: I’m going out for a long brisk walk.
NYC. UK. Canada. February 15, 2019 There’s much to admire about AOC’s energy, much to share in her goals for a better world. But boy did she ever screw up by costing New York its Amazon headquarters — and by giving Republicans yet another way to mischaracterize the Democratic Party in the next election. A big unforced error. Could we have a do-over? Speaking of unforced errors, how about Brexit? Could they have a do-over? Paul Abrams made the case for this 30 months ago and it’s no less compelling today. Some of my friends tell me the outcome of a second referendum would be no different — and that may be true. But as the March 29 deadline looms, don’t the Brits owe it to themselves to find out? CORRECTION Last month I noted that Libertarian Republican Senator Rand Paul was going to Canada for hernia surgery. “Better care than he can get here. If he were Canadian, it would even be free.” Steve: “The clinic Rand Paul is going to for surgery is world renowned but is NOT part of Canadian single-payer plan. If I went there I would have to pay their rate but would get reimbursed for the scale rate under Canadian system which might be a fourth or a tenth the actual charges. Sorry to correct your column.” –> Oops. “On balance,” I asked Steve, “which system do you think is delivering a better result? The most bang for the buck?” Steve: “No question the Canadian System does . . . with one notable exception: cancer. While you get world class treatment for it here, a fast- or even moderate-growing cancer might not be treated in a timely manner (depending upon where you live, as wait time can vary dramatically by province or city where you are located). Here is the big difference between the two systems: Americans have health care rationed by price. Canadians have it rationed by time. Everyone gets it but you may have to wait. “In 2010 I had a mild heart attack. I needed four stents put in. Total out-of-pocket cost to me, including doctors (diagnostic cardiologist with four appointments for stress tests and nuclear stress tests; surgery including hospitalization; and four Boston Scientific Drug coated stents inserted by a surgeon who had trained at Mayo Clinic): zero. “A friend of mine whose son at a very young age was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma had chemotherapy and radiation treatment over six months which cured it (or so they thought) same cost zero. When it recurred he has just undergone stem cell treatment including four weeks in hospital. His parents do very well, but even with their upper middle class lifestyle they would have been looking at selling their house and a major financial setback had they lived in the US. Instead, their only cost was for housing in a city they didn’t live in because treatment is at a major city. Better yet, the son (patient) had disability coverage at work, which paid his salary; Canada Pension Plan (think US Social Security) also has a disability portion so he got that as well.” And Canada does this at a dramatically lower percentage of GDP than we do (roughly 11% versus 18%). It’s impossible to go overnight to the same kind of single-payer system every other advanced nation on the planet employs so much more cost-effectively that what we had to. The Affordable Care Act was a first step toward a fairer more efficient system. Adding a public option to it would be another. Lowering the Medicare age by one year per year would be a third. Have a great weekend.
If Republican Officials Go To Prison . . . February 14, 2019February 13, 2019 . . . maybe they should be assigned to private prisons. Out of simple fairness. They believe in privatization. They’ve gone a long way to privatize our prison system. In the meantime, Republican legislators might read Shane Bauer’s American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment. From the New York Times review: . . . Prisons operated by companies like CCA (recently rebranded as CoreCivic), which was founded in 1983 and is now a $3.04 billion publicly traded concern, don’t typically grow crops or manufacture anything of value. Inmates themselves are the commodities, and money is made by persuading legislators that a private operator can confine and care for them more cheaply — in Winn’s case, $34 per inmate per day — than the state. Of course, penny-pinching and staff shortages are found at state-run lockups, too (especially in places like Louisiana), but there is another consideration when a profit-seeking middleman gets involved: What happens when setting a prisoner free is detrimental to a company’s bottom line? Bauer discovers that a Winn inmate was held for a full year after he was eligible for release, ostensibly because he had no address in Louisiana that would take him in — a technicality that presumably earned the company an additional $12,410 from his continued incarceration. It’s not just the convicts who are being exploited. Most of the guards at Winn, like Bauer himself, are afraid of their charges and resentful of the chaos that makes their jobs more dangerous. Bauer is a generous narrator with a nice ear for detail, and his colleagues come across as sympathetic characters, with a few notable exceptions. In a wonderful twist, he interviews a number of them after his deception is eventually exposed. How much loyalty does $9 per hour buy? About as much as you’d imagine; most are all too happy to help pull the curtain back on CCA. Bauer’s takeaway is that private prisons like Winn can’t be fixed, that the profit motive inevitably drives companies to take risks and cut corners. He’s not the only one to draw that conclusion; after Mother Jones ran his article, Bauer was invited to Washington to talk to federal officials studying the efficacy of private prisons. Not long after, the Obama administration announced that the Department of Justice would no longer contract with CCA or its ilk. It turned out to be a short-lived mandate, reversed almost immediately by the incoming attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Today the industry is thriving thanks to a bull market in immigrant detention. As for Winn, conditions at the unit continued to deteriorate until personnel from a state-run prison stormed in and temporarily regained control. Two weeks after Bauer left, CCA voluntarily withdrew from its contract, essentially admitting that the facility was a lost cause. Louisiana officials didn’t see it that way, however. Another company, LaSalle Corrections, promptly took over management of Winn, though the state is no longer paying CCA’s bargain rate of $34 per day. LaSalle agreed to do the job for $24. Keep your nose clean, dear reader. And if you do ever get sentenced to prison, even if you’re not Jewish, Bill Maher suggests this one for your consideration.
The National Butterfly Center Is Taking A Stand February 13, 2019February 13, 2019 Have you seen the Governor of New Mexico’s viral video? Thirty seconds. (Read about it here.) Her point — colorfully made — is that $5.7 billion could be better spent than on a wall. I’ve already posted a forensic engineer’s assessment of the wall. (“Ridiculous.”) Here’s a tool to build your own $5.7 billion budget. This may all seem irrelevant if Congress gets Trump to accept 55 miles of fencing instead. But as he’s shown in needlessly deploying thousands of troops to the Southern border, he may well find ways to waste taxpayer money on his obsession even without this specific $5.7 billion demand. It’s our money. We should fund smart, effective, (humane), border security . . . but that shouldn’t be the stuff of campaign rallies; it should the be the stuff of experts And here’s a post from the National Butterfly Center (I have eyes everywhere! thanks, George Mokray), noting how Trump’s wall runs right through it — and our Constitutional rights. . . . In this 38-mile length of fence the Trump Administration seeks to build, more than 30 million square feet of vegetation may be cleared. Some of this will be private land, such as ours, but some of it will be public land, like the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge and Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley State Park. These are YOUR lands. These lands hold our history as a nation; our cultural history and natural history. They are home to our natural treasures and, in many cases, the last foothold for endangered species, like the Ocelot. For this reason, the National Butterfly Center is taking a stand. We are joining dozens of private property owners in taking legal action against the efforts of the federal government to deprive us of our property rights. . . . Joel Wesson: “I have been getting 3% interest for the past 8 years at a credit union — check out Kasasa checking. I am amazed that so few people seem to know about it. Only limit is that it only applies (at my credit union, others have different rates and limits) to the first $25k in the account. So I have been getting about $800/yr that is basically free money just for changing my checking account. It is kind of the opposite of the ‘Bill Gates is so rich he loses money if he stops to pick up a $20 on the ground.’ Why are all these other people not picking up the free money?” ☞ Available only through 2,931 community banks and credit unions, but perhaps one near you. I guess you know what tomorrow is. Don’t forget flowers or a card or a phone call. Or a poem. Like this one, I wrote just for you: Roses are yellow, white, or vermillion / You are my choice, out of all seven billion. Won’t you be my Valentine?
Home-Schooled For Christ. And Pence. February 12, 2019February 12, 2019 Christ was one of the two greatest Jews who ever lived.* Though an atheist, I try to live by his teachings (which I’m pretty sure — in their judge-not-lest-ye-be-judged concern for the least among us — are embodied in the Democratic Party platform). I offer these thoughts because I just now stumbled across Kieryn Darkwater’s first-person account from a couple of years ago: I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah . . . I grew up in the far-right evangelical conservative (Christofascist) movement; specifically, I was home-schooled and my parents were part of a subculture called Quiverfull, whose aim is to outbreed everyone for Jesus. I spent my teen years being a political activist. I was taught by every pastor I encountered that it was our job as Christians to outbreed the secularists (anyone not a far-right evangelical Protestant) and take over the government through sheer numbers. I was part of TeenPact, Generation Joshua and my local Teenage Republicans (TARS). When the Tea Party rose in 2009, that was my culture. The Tea Party was step one. I was laying the groundwork for those elections in 2006. These people didn’t come out of the blue like it seemed. This plan, this Christofascist takeover of the US government, has been in the works for decades. When evangelical conservatism started becoming popular and more mainstream around the 1970s, the foundation was being laid for the tragedy playing out right now. Evangelical conservatives started taking over their local republican parties and founding organizations like Operation Rescue, Homeschool Legal Defense Association, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, just to name a few. . . . . . . Generation Joshua, TeenPact and other organizations exist to indoctrinate and recruit homeschooled youth who have ample free time to participate in politics. The biggest resources for teaching civil discourse are the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association and Communicators for Christ (since renamed Institute for Cultural Communicators). Through these programs we learned how to argue effectively. As students, we were taught critical thinking skills but given only a narrow view of what was acceptable to argue for. We were, after all, being trained to take over the country for Christ, literally. We knew how to perform logical gymnastics about abortion, Christianity and any evangelical talking point you could throw at us. When we showed up to city council, local political party meetings and tours of the Capitol we asked intelligent questions, were respectful and had a vested interest in how our local political machine ran. We impressed every government official and staff member with our questions, earnesty and demeanor. In short, we were sneaky and polite Trojan horses; we had an agenda. Yes, even as 15-year-olds. It was forcefully handed to us by the adults in our lives who had been preparing for this since before we were born. I watched the Tea Party takeover and was surprised no one saw it coming. After all, this was part of the plan. Trump being elected is also part of the plan, although not Trump specifically; the true goal is Pence. . . . It’s a pretty scary story, and I like to think too gloomy when she says, later in the piece, that it’s impossible to change these people’s minds. Her mind changed, after all. With the right leadership from progressive clergy — e.g., the Red Letter Christians, the Sojourners, and the Pope — we could swell the ranks of those who see Christ’s teachings more as Martin Luther King, Jr. did — say — than as do the folks in khakis and polo shirts — “some of them very fine people,” we are assured, who marched in Charlottesville. *Really? You have to ask? Einstein!
Russian TV Thanks The GOP (And Don’t Miss Bill Maher) February 11, 2019February 9, 2019 Snopes has verified it: TRUE. An image purportedly showing a screenshot from a Russian state TV news program featuring eight Republican U.S. senators . . . made its way online in January 2019, along with the claim that the pictured American lawmakers were being “honored” or “thanked” for lifting sanctions against three companies controlled by Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska . . . . . . “#Russia’s state TV reports that for the first time since 2014, the US is lifting sanctions from Russian companies [#Deripaska’s Rusal et al.] The host laughs out loud about the Democrats not getting enough votes to block the effort, expresses hope that this is just the beginning.” Putin is winning. The kleptocrats (guess where they’ve bought condos) are laughing all the way to the bank. If you have five minutes, watch Bill Maher’s latest new rule. The mess in Washington is not the fault of both parties. Another five? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes plays the bad guy. Is she anything but spot on here?