Author: A.T.

As America gets less great by the minute — if only, literally, by infrastructure decay — what can be done prior to November 6, 2018?

[Part One: how YOU can be most effective]

Tips from a high-level Senate staffer (thanks, Michael and Tee):

You should NOT be bothering with online petitions or emailing. Online contact basically gets immediately ignored, and letters pretty much get thrown in the trash unless you have a particularly strong emotional story – but even then it’s rarely worth the time it took you to craft that letter.

There are two things that all Progressives should be doing all the time right now, and they’re by far the most important things:

1. The best thing you can do to be heard and get your congressperson to pay attention: if they have town halls, go to them. Go to their local offices. If you’re in DC, try to find a way to go to an event of theirs. Go to the “mobile offices” that their staff hold periodically (all these times are located on each congressperson’s website). When you go, ask questions. A lot of them. And push for answers. The louder and more vocal and present you can be at those the better.

2. But, those in-person events don’t happen every day. So, the absolute most important thing that people should be doing every day is calling. You should make 6 calls a day: 2 each (DC office and your local office) to your 2 Senators and your 1 Representative. Calls are what all the Congresspeople pay attention to. Every single day, the Senior Staff and the Senator get a report of the 3 most-called-about topics for that day at each of their offices (in DC and local offices), and exactly how many people said what about each of those topics. They’re also sorted by zip code and area code.

Republican callers generally outnumber Democrat callers 4-1, and when it’s a particular issue that single-issue-voters pay attention to (like gun control, or planned parenthood funding, etc…), it’s often closer to 11-1.

2a. When calling the DC office, ask for the Staff member in charge of whatever you’re calling about (“Hi, I’d like to speak with the staffer in charge of Healthcare, please”). Local offices won’t always have specific ones, but they might. If you get transferred to that person, awesome. If you don’t, that’s ok – ask for their name, and then just keep talking to whoever answered the phone. Don’t leave a message (unless the office doesn’t pick up at all – then you can…but it’s better to talk to the staffer who first answered than leave a message for the specific staffer in charge of your topic).

2b. Give them your zip code. They won’t always ask for it, but make sure you give it to them, so they can mark it down. Extra points if you live in a zip code that traditionally votes for them, since they’ll want to make sure they get/keep your vote.

2c. If you can make it personal, make it personal. “I voted for you in the last election and I’m worried/happy/whatever” or “I’m a teacher, and I am appalled by Betsy DeVos,” or “as a single mother” or “as a white, middle class woman,” or whatever.

2d. Pick 1-2 specific things per day to focus on. Don’t go down a whole list – they’re figuring out what 1-2 topics to mark you down for on their lists, so, focus on 1-2 per day. Ideally something that will be voted on/taken up in the next few days, but it doesn’t really matter…even if there’s not a vote coming up in the next week, call anyway. It’s important that they just keep getting calls.

2e. Be clear on what you want – “I’m disappointed that the Senator…” or “I want to thank the Senator for their vote on…” or “I want the Senator to know that voting in _____ way is the wrong decision for our state because…” Don’t leave any ambiguity.

2f. They may get to know your voice/get sick of you – it doesn’t matter. The people answering the phones generally turn over every 6 weeks anyway, so even if they’re really sick of you, they’ll be gone in 6 weeks. From experience since the election: If you hate being on the phone & feel awkward, don’t worry…there are a bunch of scripts (Indivisible has some). After a few days of calling, it starts to feel a lot more natural. Put the 6 numbers in your phone all under Politician, which makes it really easy to click down the list each day!

Now go get ’em!!  And share this with others!

That’s plenty for today — indeed, for the week, month, and year, if you actually do it! — but for those with an interest in out-of-the-box thinking . . .

[Part Two: an idea to make Congress more productive — even before we fix gerrymandering]

My friend Peter Kinzler recently published this in The Hill: “How Just a Few Members of Congress Could Restore Regular Order.”

. . . The Congress used to work a five-day week. Members and sometimes their families socialized and got to know each other.  These inter-actions helped create the conditions for compromise. . . .

If the Congressional leadership is unwilling to restore the regular order that served it well historically, is there another way to do so?  The Constitution may hold part of the answer.  It states that a quorum for the Senate or the House must be present to do business. Both bodies get around it by assuming a quorum is present. . . .

There are, however, mechanisms to require an actual quorum. Under the Constitution and Senate rules, a single member can force 51 senators to come to the Senate chamber in order to continue business. The House has a higher requirement, but one that a small, determined minority could meet.

If members of Congress had to spend more time with their colleagues, the amount of real engagement might increase – and that could lead to more action on the people’s priorities. . . .

Nor could the Republicans just change the rules, says Peter.  The definition of a quorum resides in the Constitution.  And “were the Republicans to try to require more than one senator to raise the point of order, Democrats could accuse them of unconstitutional behavior, forcing them to explain to their constituents why they changed the rules so they wouldn’t have to do their jobs.”

The idea wouldn’t be to have a quorum sitting in each chamber at all times . . . just to require it when important issues were up for consideration — and frequently enough to get them used to actually working with each other.  Perhaps even getting to know each other.

It’s an interesting notion, anyway.

In the meantime, see Part One, above.

Start with this wonderful clip of the earthrise — as seen by three human beings orbiting the moon.  (Thanks, Glenn!)

And then “This meditative brain candy for the soul.”  (Thanks, Pete!)

Have a cosmic weekend.

Conservative columnist George Will (even before the Comey firing).  From the Washington Post:

Trump Has A Dangerous Disability

It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence. . . .

Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.

Read the whole thing?  (“Gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disordered mind.”)

And speaking of bullies (do you have kids? grandkids?), here are six minutes from California Congressman John Garamendi: “the children are listening” . . . along with the great Peter Yarrow singing the song it inspired (click the arrow just above the speech).

Don’t we ever miss these guys:

Guess what?  One of New York’s Success Academy public schools now has an 11th grade whose students have just taken their SATs.

These are kids from tough New York City neighborhoods, chosen by lottery.

Their mean SAT score was 1230!

None scored below 1000; one hit 1440.

That put the class in the 84th percentile nationally and in the 94th for students of color.  They’ve won more than $100,000 in scholarship money for summer programs at places that include MIT, Cornell, and USC.

Statewide in 2016, these 41 charters — up from one in 2006 when I first started writing about them, now serving 14,000 kids! — scored in the top 1% in math, 2% in English, and 5% in science.

All five of the top five schools in math (out of thousands) were Success Academy schools.  Two of the top five in English.

Their ELA students (English as a second language) and their students with disabilities outperformed native English speakers and students without disabilities.

Success Academy — an entirely nonprofit operation which costs New York City not a dime more than any of its other public schools — would like nothing better than to be replicated.  They welcome other schools and school systems around the country to steal their methods.  Let’s make every kid a success.  Think how this would impact the cycle of poverty and the nation’s long-term well-being.

(And yes: some teachers do burn out and move on to easier assignments.  So what?  We should honor them for their service and they should be hugely proud of the impact they had.  What matters more than the teachers are the kids — if only because there are so many more students than teachers — a dozen or more to one — because and the leverage is so much greater when you’re six than when you’re 26.)

WheelTug / Borealis enthusiasts: Did you happen to catch “The correlation between airline ground time and profits“?

It appears that for every minute an airline saves; operating margins increase 0.43% in Europe.

If that’s true, once WheelTug is cutting gate time by 20 minutes a flight (by not having to wait for a tug to back out; by not having to pad the schedule with extra time in case the tug is late; by being able to board and deplane from both front AND rear doors), an airline currently operating at a 5% margin (say) might one day operate at a 13.6% margin — nearly triple the profit.

Except that WheelTug’s letters of intent with 20+ airlines call for annual lease payments of half the savings.

And, of course, it will never be as simple as — bang, you have WheelTug and then, bang, all the savings fall into place the next day.  Still miles and miles to go before we reap.  If ever.

But five years from now?  Let alone 10? Why should we passengers have to waste 20 minutes a flight?  Especially those awful minutes once we’ve landed but are stuck in 28E and have to wait — and wait — instead of just walking out the rear door.

The FAA pre-certification agreement has been signed; the work toward full approval continues; IATA’s second E-Taxi Conference convenes in Singapore this month; WheelTug parent Borealis remains (in my view) a terrific lottery ticket, to be purchased only with money you can truly afford to lose (and only with “limit” orders, lest your 500-share buy order double the price of the stock).

A long way off, to be sure — and who knows?

But add Connecticut’s junior senator, Chris Murphy, to your list.

I had been a supporter even before reading this — Chris Murphy Looks — and Tweets — Like a Man Running For President — but have now begun retweeting him.

So how about giving her the gift of mental acuity?

Help take 10 years off her mental age and avoid dementia?

If you give your mom a year of BrainHQ you’ll get — as a bonus — a free year yourself!  (Sure, you’re just 39 — but so is Tom Brady, and he swears by it.)

“And wait — there’s more!”

Take advantage of this special Mother’s Day offer and get, also, a free download of Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life by much-awarded BrainHQ inventor Michael Merzenich.

(“What if you had the power to change your brain for the better?  In Soft-Wired, Dr. Michael Merzenich–a world authority on brain plasticity–explains how the brain rewires itself across the lifespan, and how you can take control of that process to improve your life. In addition to fascinating descriptions of how your brain has produced your unique memories, skills, quirks, and emotions, Soft-Wired offers sound advice for evaluating your brain and gives clear, specific, scientifically proven guidance for how to rejuvenate, remodel, and reshape your brain to improve it at any age.”)

You can send Mom the gift electronically or print out a certificate to deliver in person.

If she does the BrainHQ exercises an hour a week for ten weeks this year — and four more hours four years from now — a 10-year study of 2,800 subjects suggests she’ll have a 48% lower likelihood of developing dementia than if she just did crossword puzzles.  And (as I’ve written before, being an enthusiastic shareholder in this enterprise): imagine how low that risk would fall if she did, say, 10 hours a year of these exercises every year.  By 90%?

Not a bad gift for a holiday whose commercialization its founder found appalling.

Or you could just give her chocolates.

Obamacare takes billions from the wealthy to subsidize health care for the rest of us.  The just-passed Republican bill takes those billions away from health care and gives it back to the wealthy.

It’s that simple.

If wealth for the wealthy trumps health care for the rest of us, yesterday’s vote was, as the Republicans argue, a great achievement.

Here are 10 ways it breaks their promises and could affect you personally.

Trump got elected saying he would give “everybody” “great health care” at “a tiny fraction of the cost.”

But how will he do it?  By increasing the number of doctors and nurses but paying them just a “tiny fraction” of what we do now?

By switching to a single-payer system modeled after those in the rest of the civilized world?  That would actually be a great step forward, but it’s clearly not what he has in mind.  He has nothing in mind except to make wild promises that play on people’s frustrations and naivete.

In Rare Unity, Hospitals, Doctors and Insurers Criticize Health Bill.

Have a great weekend.

Did you see where Jimmy Kimmel spoke movingly about his newborn son?

And how health care for children should transcend partisan politics?

Whether or not you take 13 minutes to watch on YouTube, as more than 7 million others have . . .

. . . take one minute to click “Jimmy Kimmel Really Changed A Lot Of Minds In The Fox Audience (No, He Didn’t)” and read the comments.

E.g.:

Nobody wants to hear about your kid. Millions are going through the same thing stuck with the Obamacrap that you support. Cry them a river.

David Zippel: “Even though I am a realist, it shocked me. But then I remembered the gay veteran who asked a question about health insurance at a Republican Presidential primary Q&A and some in the crowd shouting ‘Let him die.'”

Wanted: a kinder, gentler nation.

Less, “Let him die!” or “Lock her up!” More, “Blessed are the meek.”

Ah, the Brits.  Under two minutes.  Fun.

His interview was called “The Future We’re Building — And Boring.”  I referred to a lot of it yesterday, but now here it is.  So exciting!

(Separately, I ran into a friend last night who knows Elon’s mother.  She kept not accepting a free Tesla — she didn’t want to waste his money — until finally, apparently, after years driving around in some ratty old Chevy or something, he said, “Mom, you’re embarrassing me.  You have to drive one of my cars.”  So she relented.)

Oh!  And did you watch Al Gore’s trailer?  When I put something in bold print, that means you have to do it.  It’s a law.

And have you shared the Ted Halstead’s idea for unlocking the climate puzzle — the carbon dividend we should all be getting?

C’mon, people — we have a planet to save!