Author: A.T.

OK, I give up. Use the damn dishwasher.  Turns out, doing so can save water and energy.  And try running your washing machine on “cold.”  Likewise.  Plus a few other appliance-related tips as well.

From Fast Company: The best Apple product you aren’t using costs just 99 cents.  “Apple’s Hide My Email service protects your inbox from spam and shields your personal data from hackers. Here’s how to start using it now.”

Palestinians and Israelis have a common enemy: Hamas.

“We’re condemned to suffer because of this stupid organization,” says one.

This was posted back in January by the Center for Peace Communications:

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. . . The gulf in living standards between Hamas leaders and ordinary Gazans has grown increasingly conspicuous in recent years. In 2019, Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh moved to Qatar with his family, while the group’s deputy leader Khalil al-Hayya relocated to Turkey soon after. Since then he has visited Gaza only twice. Fat’hi Hamad, another senior Hamas official, now also resides in Istanbul, often flying to Beirut for meetings in luxury hotels. More than a dozen other high-ranking Hamas officials have followed suit. This exodus has not gone unnoticed. According to Azmi Keshawi, Gaza analyst at the International Crisis Group, “Ordinary Palestinians see that Hamas… [is] living in these comfortable zones where they are no longer suffering and seem far from the Palestinian cause and issues.”

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This was posted last week: What Ordinary Gazans Think About Hamas.

Worth the watch.

(Starts 1:20 in, after the ad.)

Mark Cuban’s Latest Recommendations.

For your reading pleasure.

Meet this 17-year-old prosecutor.

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. . . By early 2019, he had passed all the CLEP exams and could start applying to law school while he finished eighth grade.

“At first it was very intimidating — I had zero knowledge about the law,” Park told The Washington Post. “But now, I pretty much have a 10-year head start. That’s like living 10 years extra. I value that over the traditional high school experience.” . . .

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I just had to share this.  (Thank you, David.)

And finally, on the off chance you’ve missed this, or an opinion piece like it:  University presidents flunk the humanity test.

As Bill Maher has pointed out over and over, many campuses — and others — are way too woke when it comes to “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions.”

Yet when it comes to genocide — whether of Muslims, Jews, whites, blacks, or anyone else — that needs context before a determination can be made?

Have a great week.

Specifically:

The top 1% of American earners now control more wealth than the nation’s entire middle class. — USA Today.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but high among them is that every Republican since Reagan (except Bush 41) has cut taxes for the rich, while Republicans in Congress have worked to protect those gains when Democrats held power.

Higher income and estate-tax rates, combined with fewer loopholes, would still allow the rich to get richer and live wonderfully well . . . which is fine by me (not least because I am one of them) . . . but begin to shift the balance back toward something many would consider more reasonable and — for society and the economy as a whole — more healthy.

To make the point, imagine a world in which all income and capital gains above $1 million were exempt from tax, and in which there were no inheritance tax.  It doesn’t take an economist to calculate that the wealth gap would grow even wider.

Conversely, imagine that taxes on all income and inheritance above $1 million were 90% with no loopholes — and that it were enforced.  It doesn’t take an economist to calculate that the wealth gap would shrink.

Either extreme would be a disaster.

> The former could lead to a feeling of victimhood — that the system is rigged — and to the rise of a ruthless demagogue (who alone can fix it).

It’s happened before.

> The latter could lead to a flight of capital and entrepreneurial talent — and a sapping of incentives — that would hurt us all, not just the top 1%.

So most people agree that the best balance lies someplace in the middle.

Many of us believe that the top 1%, through their outsize influence on both parties, but on the Republican Party in particular, have skewed the balance too far in their own favor.

That’s why we see the solution lying not in the election of a demagogue, but in the re-election of a progressive, with a progressive Congress.

Who — as a bonus — believe in the need to confront the climate crisis, the need for sensible gun safety regulation, the right of women to make their own health care decisions, the need for comprehensive bi-partisan immigration reform, the rule of law, the separation of church and state, and the peaceful transition of power.

Have a great weekend!

We all know negatives about Elon Musk — lots of them.  But I found the full 90-minute Andrew Sorkin interview really worth the listen.

He is, after all, not only the richest human on the planet, but arguably the most influential.  Or surely in the top ten.  And he would like to see our species survive.

Did you find 90 seconds yesterday to watch Liz Cheney with arch-liberal Rachel Maddow?

Here’s six minutes with arch-conservative Joe Scarborough.  Had the impeachment vote been a secret ballot, she says, her colleagues would have found the courage to kick him out.

And no, she says; in our talk of the existential threat to democracy, she says, we are not catastrophizing.

That graphic is not from her.

(And if I had created it, it would have read “the 82-year-old Democrat who’s doing a great job.”)

But these are the stakes.

This is truly for all the marbles.

Cheney is not asking us to risk our lives, as, she says, some in Congress now fear they would be doing if they defied Trump.

She’s just asking our help to keep him — the twice-impeached, four-times indicted, adjudicated rapist who loves autocrats and kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside — from destroying the democracy that you and I and she hold dear.

We need your vote.

We need your money.

We need your time.

And I would ask that you send her book to all your Trump-leaning friends and relatives. “I hate to impose on our nearly 40 years’ friendship,” I wrote one of mine, “but can I ask you to read this?  And then call to discuss?  Love you lots . . . ”

We’re gonna win!

. . . which you can buy for them here.

. . . or at least to watch her and policy-nemesis Rachel Maddow, here (90 seconds).

Shame on MSNBC for not making the entire interview available free and without restriction.

The final episode of this riveting five-part podcast doesn’t drop until tomorrow (Wednesday), but you will be blown away by what Rob Reiner and Soledad O’Brien have assembled.

I guess I should wait for the final episode before writing this; but based on the first four, I can’t imagine any other conclusion.

Listen.

The devil:

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Mike Johnson claims to hate the devil. Maybe he should look in the mirror
As a Christian minister, I believe in God and the devil — and I know whose side today’s pious Republicans are on
By Nathaniel Manderson

. . . Here’s the truth: There is evil in this world. That is evident to anyone paying attention, and for the most part I see it in people who loudly claim to be pure and good. You can certainly find that hypocrisy on the “liberal” side as well, but honestly it’s more common among the evangelical leadership, whom I know very well. Jesus gave his sternest warnings against the religious hypocrites of his day — those who misuse the word of God to oppress or subjugate people and restrict their rights. Jesus knew, as we must know too, that the real evil, the genuine devil, is often found in the pulpit. The devil has many followers. He sells many books. He runs for president. He misleads God’s people. . . .

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The deep blue sea:

What sea level rise will look like in cities that have hosted climate summits

The pictures are worth the click.

Progress is being made — e.g., Brazil launches $204 million drive to restore Amazon rainforest (no need to click; the headline says it all) — but, as argued recently in the L.A. Times, Solving climate change will have side effects. Get over it.

The devil and the deep blue sea are related only because the Speaker of the House — who can block just about anything — believes in the devil but not in the need to confront climate change.

What we need, 11 months from now — desperately — is a deep blue wave.

1.  Barack Obama rightly called Bill Clinton “the Explainer in Chief”; but what he explains here is every bit as clear and important.  Three minutes.

2. Gore won Florida, and thus the Presidency, by more than 40,000 votes if you count for Bush the 35,000 who punched his chad but also wrote his name — the voter’s attempt to be doubly certain his or her vote was cast for Bush — and the 80,000 where the same was done for Gore.

There were likely other reasons Gore won Florida, but that one was dispositive — or would have been, had Florida’s Secretary of State not been appointed by Bush’s brother and not been simultaneously in charge of the election and co-chair of the Bush campaign.  She threw out those “overvotes” because “the intent of the voter could not be discerned.”

(In Texas, where Bush was governor at the time, all such votes were ruled valid, as common sense suggests they should be.)

Fairly counted, Gore won both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

There’s nothing to be done about that now except to turn out a massive blue wave in November.*

Yet it is worth noting that had Gore been inaugurated, there would have been no war in Iraq (indeed, very possibly no 9/11 in the first place), no right-wing Supreme Court (and thus no gutting of the Voting Rights Act or President Donald Trump) . . . women’s reproductive rights would still be protected by Roe . . . we’d be eight years further along combatting climate change . . . the assault weapons ban might not have been allowed to expire . . . and on and on.

3. So did Hitler.  “And now we know how he did it,” says Thom Hartmann in this 12-minute video . . .

. . . which follows all too persuasively the Robert Kagan piece offered Friday: A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Inevitable.*

If you think Hartmann is unfair or goes too far in a few places, I would agree with you; but in the main he is spot on — and he doesn’t even mention the book of Hitler’s speeches Ivana Trump said he kept by his bedside.  When asked about this in 1990 by Vanity Fair‘s Marie Brenner, he told her it was not a book of Hitler’s speeches, it was Mein Kampf.  (Oh, swell.) But in fact it was My New Order, a book of Hitler’s speeches.

Have a great week.

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*If you’re in a position to help, click here.  And/or volunteer with Field Team 6, Vote Forward, Working America, and your local chapter of  The League of Women Voters.  

And just by reading an article like this — A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Inevitable (only in German) — and then joining with millions of others to make sure the would-be dictator was soundly defeated at the polls.

“There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States,” argues Robert Kagan in the Washington Post, “and it is getting shorter every day. So why is everyone behaving like normal?”

Read it and let me know what you think.