Author: A.T.

Uganda, The Pope, And Wisconsin

Democrats and sane Republicans mourn the passing of the once-Grand Old Party . . . a party that is now in full-throated support of its indicted leader and incensed that public urination might be demoted from a criminal to a civil offense.

Read that piece if you’re curious; but today I want to talk about Uganda.

Nine years ago we learned how Uganda was Seduced by conservative American Evangelicals into making homosexuality punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Last week the Ugandan parliament voted overwhelmingly to crack down further, with life sentences and the death penalty.

And we learned How U.S. Evangelicals Helped Homophobia Flourish in Africa,

You don’t need to read those to get the idea.  (Likewise: US Christian Right pours more than $50m into Africa.)

What I’d rather focus on is what the Pope told the Associated Press two months ago:

We are all God’s children.

And God loves us as we are.

Being homosexual is not a crime.

It’s a sin.

But it is also a sin to lack charity with one another.

Let’s distinguish sin from crime.

Every man and woman must have a window in their life

where they can turn their hope and where they can see the dignity of God.

And being homosexual isn’t a crime.

It’s a human condition.

Not to mention what Jesus himself said about homosexuality!

(If you don’t know, it’s worth 30 seconds to watch.)

And it should be noted that Pope Francis later clarified his remarks to the AP:

When I said it is a sin, I was simply referring to Catholic moral teaching, which says that EVERY sexual act outside of marriage is a sin.

Gay and straight alike.

Oops.

As for Wisconsin, this headline caught my eye:

Wisconsin School District Bans Miley Cyrus-Dolly Parton Duet with ‘Rainbow’ in Title.  

I mean, c’mon, guys.

We’re not realistically going to send all the immigrants — and descendants of immigrants, millions of whose ancestors “immigrated” involuntarily — “back to where they came from.”

Or non-straight folks back into the closet.

We’re just not.

And most of us, white, black, or brown, liberal, independent or conservative, straight, gay, or trans, urban, suburban, or rural — very much including most Trump voters — are good decent people once you get to know us.  We are!  And we share lots of common ground.

That was true of the Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda, who got along fine for decades until it went catastrophically wrong.  It was true of gentile and Jewish Berliners before the forces of darkness took hold.  (Have you seen Leopoldstadt?)

Among the forces of darkness working to stoke our divisions:

> Putin.

> White separatists.

> The profit motive.  Conflict sells.  And as Fox executives made clear, telling the truth would have been “bad for business.”

> Religion, the source of so much bloodshed over the centuries.

We need to make room for moderation, compromise, and common ground.

One three-part key to doing that:

> “Open primaries” (as in California), where candidates can’t win appealing only to the extremes.

> “Ranked choice voting” (as in Alaska and Maine), which also makes room for moderates to win.

> Easy voting by mail (Oregon and Utah, among others), so that most people vote in the primaries, not just the highly motivated extremes.

Rainbows are beautiful!

And so is religion, when not taken literally.  Which brings us back to Uganda.

As the simple Ugandan woman says near the end of “The Book of Mormon,” the most profane, blasphemous, irreverent show ever . . . thereby redeeming the entire show and bringing sense not just to Mormonism but to all religions . . . marveling that the young missionaries have lost their faith in the preposterous stories they’ve been told (everyone gets his own planet?) . . . religion is not to be taken literally — “Eet eez a MET-a-phor!”

(As I’ve written before, could someone please get this word to the Islamic fundamentalists?  Or at least to those who believe God calls them to murder?)

(Here’s the banned Rainbow song, by the way.)

Have a great week!

 

The Hush Money Two Versus The Central Park Five

Following up on my earlier post, in which I suggested that — just as the Trump Justice Department believed there was a case against Michael Cohen and “Individual 1” that led to Cohen’s indictment, conviction, and imprisonment — so is it not unreasonable for a grand jury to decide (given the uniquely American concept of “equal treatment under the law”) that there may be a case against Individual 1, too . . .  and that the legal process should take its course as it did for Cohen.

Here is the Republican point of view of that perspective — worth 90 seconds of your time.

For those of us who’ve listened to the “Georgia” conversation . . . or followed the events of January 6, 2021 . . . or think it’s illegal to lie about top secret documents you claim not to have and refuse to return . . . there is the hope that at least three more indictments will be forthcoming . . . in each case, offering defendant Trump the same opportunity all the rest of us have to remain innocent until proven guilty.*

*Realistically, given the millions he raises to fund his defense, he has a far better opportunity than most indicted Americans have.  As, for example, these five impoverished young men who spent between 6 and 13 years behind bars before proven innocent . . . and for whose death by electrocution Trump loudly advocated in citywide newspaper ads.

 

Hip! Hip!

Hurray for Finland joining NATO!  With Sweden not far behind.  Great news for the free world.

Hurray for inflation’s continuing ebb!  Could full employment and the Fed’s 2% target inflation rate be in our future?

Hurray for the rule of law!  As, for example, when the Trump Justice Department sent Michael Cohen to prison for a crime committed at the behest of co-conspirator “Individual 1” (who could not be indicted while in office but is out of office now).

How can Trump and the overwhelming majority of Republican electeds who fear him be outraged that a grand jury, after much deliberation, decided a trial should be held for the co-conspirator?  If he’s innocent, so be it!  If he’s guilty, and that’s affirmed by all the inevitable appeals, so be that, too!

How is it that Michael Cohen was handcuffed and shackled at his arraignment (though he never resisted or called the prosecutor an animal), but Lindsey Graham is beyond aflutter that his co-conspirator will be finger-printed?

How has the rule of law — something fundamental to American democracy — become something only one of the two political parties still accepts?

UPDATES

BOREF plunged when someone apparently put in to sell 7,000 shares “at the market.”  According to one of you with access to this kind of data, the first 1,300 shares got filled at $4.75; the remaining 5,700 at $2.27.  Maybe a long-time BOREF holder passed away and his executor, not realizing how thinly it trades, neglected to put it in as a “limit” order.

Whether at a $10 million valuation ($2 a share) or a $25 million valuation ($5), BOREF will either eventually go to zero or — if WheelTug gets certified and begins flying — to many times its current valuation.

The company, in May, announced “rapid progress.”

But that was May, 2010.

“Rapid” may not have been the word they were searching for.

Still (witness last month’s news as an example), the game’s not over.  And remains a total gamble.

CHRA, meanwhile, suggested just a couple of days ago (versus BOREF, 23 years ago), is trading as though it’s going out of business.  As I suppose it may. Its market cap is now around $10 million also (though unlike BOREF it’s burdened with $135 million in long-term debt plus a further $65 million or so in less pressing convertible debt).

What gives me heart is this link, showing that CHRA “insiders” did a lot more buying than selling this past year.

Also the fact that it’s one of just a few players in a large market; with around $300 million in sales that might again turn profitable once they straighten themselves out.

Down from $50 a year ago to just above $2 now, it may be that some of the last few days’ selling was just some fund manager dumping a couple of hundred thousand shares, regardless of price, to get an embarrassing loser off his list of holdings by quarter’s end (which was yesterday).

We’ll see.  Only with money we can truly afford to lose.

Have a great weekend.

 

Living Forever

From a 2007 post: 

I always thought I would miss immortality by about 50 years – which really pissed me off. I know, lots of people say they wouldn’t WANT to live forever, but I sure would, if only because it will take that long to successfully cancel my Norton Anti-Virus subscription.

It’s just immensely frustrating to think that after a 13 billion-year evolutionary run-up, all leading to this, I would miss it by, like, 15 minutes.

. . .

Well, now comes great, life-changing news.

. . .

[I]n about 15 years, we will have advanced to the point that adult life expectancy is increasing by more than one full year per year. So your life expectancy at that point would begin to increase. And your physical and mental capabilities may actually begin to improve.

I like this idea very much.

Fifteen years later, I have managed to cancel my Norton subscription.

And gotten my first iPhone.  (And my second and fourteenth.)

We’ve begun finally to revitalize our infrastructure, passed the Chips Act, expanded access to affordable health care, reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, secured marriage equality, twice elected a black president — and look!

Humans will achieve immortality in eight YEARS, says former Google engineer who has predicted the future with 86% accuracy . . .

It’s stunning.

As are these unbelievable never-before-seen photos of the 2001 Great Cascadia Earthquake.

Hey, humans: it’s all kinda coming to a head over the next decade or two.

Let’s try to love each other and not hurtle off the rails.

Bottom fishers (0nly with money you can truly afford to lose!): VRNX, CHRA, OPRT.

 

Koresh -> McVeigh -> Trump -> Putin -> Netanyahu

Five bad guys:

KORESH: I watched Waco: American Apocalypse.  No question, the idiot who ordered the raid AFTER they’d lost the element of surprise was an idiot.  And it may be that David Koresh genuinely believed he was the second coming of  Christ and that it was thus okay to have 11 wives and boxes of hand grenades (illegal since 1968).  A nice guy, just deluded.  But however much better, with hindsight, the government might have handled Waco, it strikes me as hard to see Koresh as a hero.  Or sane.  Or benign.

Yet that’s how the Oklahoma City bomber saw him.

McVEIGH: Until watching the film, I had not realized that Timothy McVeigh had driven to Waco to show his support for Koresh.  Two years later, he would go on to murder 168 people, 19 of them children, out of rage against the United States government.

TRUMP‘s choice of Waco for last Saturday’s rally — during which he celebrated the January 6th rioters who tried violently to return him to power — was one more sign that, like Koresh and McVeigh, he is not a stable, law-abiding, patriotic American.  His affinity for autocrats, his love of violence (bone spur notwithstanding), and his admiration for Putin suggest a contempt for democracy . . . that a horrifying number of Republican officials, who still support him, seem to share.

PUTIN:  Drunk with his own power — he alone can fix it — this massive murderer, rumored to be the richest man in the world, surely now ranks as one of the worst humans ever to have lived.  Putin’s Former Publicity Masterminds Air His Dirty Laundry.

NETANYAHU: And then there’s Bibi, who, like Putin, apparently put his thumb on 2016’s scale; and who, like Trump and Putin, does not want his power limited by an independent judiciary that might send him to jail.  Netanyahu Cannot Be Trusted, writes Thomas Friedman. 

Whatever happened to people drawing comfort and inspiration from religion without a million rounds of ammunition?

Whatever happened to patriots supporting their government and abiding by its laws . . . trying to change the ones they don’t like by raising their voices and casting their votes?

Gore’s concession to Bush, and the Clinton hand-off of power, were exemplary (even though Gore got more votes and likely won Florida, had the votes been counted fairly).

Hillary’s concession to Trump and the Obama hand-off of power were exemplary (even though Hillary got 7 million more votes and had had to face outrageous thumbs on the scale).

Trump’s hand-off of power to Biden?

Not so much.

 

Israel, Are You Listening?

Of current events, my Israeli hosts from last month write:

We have reached a moment that frightens many but at which — from a systemic and historical perspective — we are lucky to have arrived and honestly should have arrived much earlier.

Bibi has drugged the masses for decades. Weaning will be difficult and painful, but after that the country will grow again and emerge stronger and more just.

The process of getting rid of “Bibism” has awakened huge parts of the population and consolidated in them a civil, political, social, political, and economic consciousness that was not there before.

Alongside it, a tremendous force derived from a sense of personal-social competence has also been released: the feeling that all of us together through partially coordinated individual actions can shape reality and our future.

When we cleanse bibism from the gutters of our state, we will build a civil and political coalition that will finally enshrine in a constitution the rights of all of us against any future “Bibi”. We must use our newfound strength to deal with the cost of living, a fair welfare state, and peace with our neighbors.

Necessary now: optimism, faith in our ability, big dreams and setting our eyes on grand national goals!

He is not backing down but he is being peeled off of power. I am guessing he will be out of power (formally or informally) within days.

“Let us pray,” as my mother used to say.

DISTURBING BONUS

“Israel, If You’re Listening.”

 

Triplets And Taxes

For me, kids are like boats.  Love ’em / would never want to be responsible for one myself.

Let alone three.

But reading about them?

That has turned out to be very fun:

The author‘s been a pal since college.

Living through his and Barb’s struggle to get pregnant without having to get pregnant myself . . . deciding whether or not to “reduce” the pregnancy without having to decide that myself . . . changing diapers 37,000 times (literally) without having to get anywhere near them . . . reading Not Your Father’s America I felt like the uncle who gets to enjoy the kids for a few hours with none of the hard stuff.

(Cort and Barb would be first to acknowledge they were blessed with the resources to get a lot of help.)

And as a bonus, sprinkled throughout the book are some socio-economic observations you won’t find in Dr. Spock.

Two of which I share here:

Determined to become his own boss, my father and mother drove to California in search of a small newspaper they could buy. Imagine that. It was every newspaperman’s dream to own his own paper. They drove from the top of California to the bottom, from Eureka, near Oregon, to Chula Vista, near the Mexican border, stopping in every little town and hamlet that had a small independent newspaper that was or might be for sale. They found the El Cajon Valley News in East San Diego County about thirty freeway minutes from the beach and about an hour from Mexico. I know. Too bad about the beach. I guess the La Jolla Light, in one of California’s premiere beach towns, wasn’t for sale. The paper was a “shopper” that came out twice a week on Thursdays and Sundays, and they could afford it. They paid $65,000, using money they had saved and some they borrowed. My father achieved his dream—he became the editor and publisher of his own newspaper. He got a piece of the American dream right there. It was 1954. Almost immediately, my dad set out to expand the Valley News, as it was also called, into a daily newspaper. He built a new building, bought a new printing press, and purchased composing machines, including some that had been damaged in a fire. He hired reporters, photographers, typesetters, proofreaders, pressmen, advertising salesmen and women, a circulation manager, job printers, and paperboys. He created jobs. He didn’t get any special tax breaks to do what he was doing; he just did it. He was turning a twice-weekly paper into a daily. Did I mention it was 1954? When my mom and dad were growing the El Cajon Valley News, the maximum federal income tax rate on regular income was 91 percent. That’s right, 91 percent. My father wasn’t complaining about the tax rate. He was growing a business, one that would serve the community and support our family for the next decade.

Growing up, I heard the old saying, attributed to Benjamin Franklin in 1789: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” I got it. Taxes came with the territory. They weren’t evil. They were inevitable. They were part of life. Politicians didn’t swear a pledge that they’d never, ever raise taxes. That would’ve been like saying they were never, ever going to die. This notion that taxes are evil, and we shouldn’t have to pay them, is a relatively recent perversion advanced by a guy named Grover Norquist since the mid-1980s. Grover grew up rich. His father was a vice president of the Polaroid Corporation which, when I was growing up, used to make “instant” cameras. (Amazingly, they still do.) You could take a picture with a Polaroid and, in minutes, a color print of the photograph you had just taken would come out the front of the camera! It was (and is) astonishing. Around the age of twelve, the story goes, Grover came to believe that taxes were evil. I grew up not-so-rich and came to believe that taxes were a necessity, that they were the price we all have to pay to enjoy the country we live in. My family never belonged to a country club, and nobody I knew growing up belonged to a “gym.” I think some of my older brothers’ friends worked out at the YMCA because the “Y” had a gymnasium. And there were gymnasiums at high schools. But in the ’60s, people didn’t join gyms and work out. They smoked and drank, as you know if you’ve ever watched Mad Men. Today, of course, we know quite a few people who belong to country clubs, even more who have gym memberships, and hardly anybody who smokes. They gladly pay their dues to be members of their country clubs and gyms and don’t think much of it. But when you think about it, why should anyone have to pay dues to use a country club or a gym? Why can’t you just go in there and use the exercise equipment, swim in the pool, play golf, and use the tennis courts for free? It’s there. Why should you have to pay to use it? Because if you didn’t, there wouldn’t be a country club or gym. There’d be an empty lot with weeds on it. The gym or country club wouldn’t exist for you to use if someone didn’t pay for it. And that someone is you.

In the America my father left to me, we understood this. I thought everybody understood this. Taxes are like dues, or better yet, membership fees. Taxes pay for all the things we all get to use—roads, bridges, schools, airports, dams, water systems, sewer systems, the power grid—things that wouldn’t be there if we didn’t all collectively pay for them. Taxes also pay for all the people who make our lives better and safer: teachers, first responders, city planners, postal workers, sanitation workers, the army, navy, air force, marines. Taxes are an investment in what we want and need to function as a country. Painting taxes with a big, black brush, the way Grover Norquist has, is called “framing,” which is a twenty-first-century term for spinning the truth or, more accurately, distorting it. Instead of “framing” taxes for what they are—the membership fees we pay to enjoy everything we all need and share—taxes have been framed as an excessive unnecessary evil, especially for the rich. “We should be able to keep more of our money instead of giving it to the government,” the anti-tax zealots say. I tried this with the gym. I told them I was going to keep more of my money instead of giving it to them. They said, “Fine,” and locked me out of the gym.

And this:

April 15, 1996

For the first time in our lives, we have three dependents we can claim on our tax return. Could it be there’s a silver lining in these diaper-filled clouds? I start looking at how we pay taxes, who pays taxes, and where our tax dollars go. As mentioned earlier, I’ve always believed taxes are an inevitable necessity, even as conservatives tirelessly “frame” them as a bad thing. Taxes, who pays them, and how we spend what’s collected reveals a lot about who we are, what we value, and what we’re committed to as a nation. In the 1996 US budget, for example, we’ll spend the most on Social Security (22 percent); Medicare and Medicaid is next (17 percent); defense (16 percent), interest on the debt (16 percent); domestic discretionary spending, such as health, education, housing, energy, food, and agriculture (16 percent); “other” (12 percent), and international affairs (1 percent). (Source: Govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-1996)

Mike Lofgren, an author and a Republican, has written incisively about taxes and budgeting, including a number of related realities, myths, and deceptions. Mr. Lofgren was a congressional staff member for twenty-eight years, serving on both the House and Senate Budget committees. When he left government service, he wrote a powerful essay on Truthout.org titled, “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult.” In the essay, Lofgren recalls: “When I began work on Capitol Hill in 1983, President Ronald Reagan adopted policies devised by his young budget director, David Stockman, who came up with what he called a ‘magic asterisk’ in his documents to show that future deficits could be imagined out of existence” by simply placing an asterisk next to potential, future budget cuts. “This deception,” he observes, “allowed the Reagan Administration to push through steep tax cuts and vast military increases,” presumably while pointing to the “magic asterisks.” “Over President Reagan’s two terms,” Lofgren explains, “America’s gross federal debt nearly tripled. Republicans don’t like to talk about this. They like to call Democrats ‘tax and spend Democrats.’ But Republicans have been budgeting with the ‘magic asterisk’ and driving up deficits ever since Reagan.” In other words, with their “magic asterisk,” the Republicans were saying to themselves, “We’re going to explode the deficit by giving rich people a tax cut and spending more on defense but, if anyone insists on cutting costs, they could cut the lines in the budget that have an asterisk by them.” Welcome to “Magical Budget Thinking.” Lofgren later expanded on his essay in a book, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, pointing out that modest tax increases by both President George H. W. Bush and President Clinton effectively “refuted the Republican assertion that even the smallest tax increase would ruin the economy.” It blew a hole in their framing. “Republicans have been remarkably successful in delinking taxes from fiscal policy, ‘framing’ taxes as a distasteful personal burden unconnected to widely desired public goods like roads, food-safety inspections, or clean water,” Lofgren writes. “Instead, they claim that reducing taxes will spur so much investment the cuts will ‘pay for themselves.’ Three decades of evidence have shown this claim to be false . . .” “Working for Republicans,” Lofgren concludes, “I learned the hard way that expecting the [Republican] party to restrain the deficit, let alone balance the budget is, in Samuel Johnson’s words, ‘the triumph of hope over experience.’”

(Unfortunately, in 2001, as our boys are turning six, George W. Bush will follow the example of Mr. Reagan, not his father, Lofgren recalls. “[W’s] policies turned a $236 billion budget surplus he inherited in 2000 into a $459 billion deficit in 2008, while in those same eight years doubling the national debt.” That’s a $659 billon swing in the wrong direction, which would have horrified fiscally conservative Republicans in the past. By contrast, when President Obama took office on January 20, 2009, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the projection for the deficit Obama inherited was $1.2 trillion and 9.8 percent of GDP. Five years later, the CBO projected the federal deficit would be $492 billion, down from $1.2 trillion, and just 2.8 percent of GDP, down from 9.8 percent. This five-year reduction under President Obama ranks as the largest and fastest reduction of the deficit since the end of World War II more than seventy years before. Yep. That’s what you get with “tax and spend Democrats.”) The bottom line: “Trickle Down Economics”—the distribution of wealth to big corporations and the very rich in hopes it will trickle down to benefit ordinary workers—has never worked. America will be rebuilt by restoring the middle class, not by continuing to favor the moneyed class. In the America we’re leaving to our children, vital pieces of our infrastructure—roads, bridges, schools, water systems—are failing and urgently need repair. Other essential pieces of infrastructure need to be created or expanded—rural broadband internet connectivity, investment in clean energy production, a nationwide smart electric grid. The money to pay for these things can be found by requiring the super-rich and our largest corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. This may necessitate a thorough revision of the US tax code and spending millions more to enable the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to enforce the new code, but it must be done.

→ It should be noted that the Lofgren essay and book linked to above are now more than a decade old.  The “crazy” Republican Party Lofgren abandoned when he decided it was a cult — scary as he thought it had become — was nothing compared with the cult it is now.

And while I’m plugging books, consider Trust.

Normally, I suggest listening to books — and you could certainly do that here.  But Trust is one that may be easier to follow in print.

Normally, too, one wants a hint, at least, of “what’s it about?”  But this novel is so inventive and builds in such an interesting way all I’ll say is: it’s about money.  At least in large measure.  No great harm knowing more, I guess.  But I’m glad I didn’t.

Have a great weekend.

 

Taking A Pickaxe To Democracy

How is it that a 50-50 state — that most recently elected a Democrat governor, so maybe slightly tilted blue — had a Congressional delegation that skewed 10 to 3 Republican . . . and may soon have it again?

Trey Beck explains.

(I didn’t know what a homologue was, either, but that’s beside the point.)

Please meet me at the end (read just what I’ve bolded if time’s tight), because this is bigger than just North Carolina:

North Carolina GOP says fairness is for losers

For a few years now, the North Carolina state GOP has vied with their homologues in Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, and Arizona to be the most obnoxious and checked out from the day-to-day needs of the people its members ostensibly serve. NC Republicans have alternatively expanded or circumscribed the governor’s powers, depending on who’s in office.

They have grossly interfered with the governance of the UNC System.

They have laughed in public hearings about how unfair their maps are. They have looked on passively as election workers have been hassled, or refused to certify election results, or both simultaneously. They passed HB 2, the so-called “bathroom bill,” which did much more than keep trans people out of the “wrong” bathroom, like overriding local ordinances that broadly protected LGBTQ rights. HB 2 was such a flop nationally and with local business leaders that it was incrementally watered down and ultimately repealed, but at a great economic cost to the state and a possibly greater toll on the emotional well-being of many individual North Carolinians.

With NC’s state supreme court now in conservative hands after the 2022 elections, Republicans there are again taking a pickaxe to democracy and the administrative state for partisan gain.

First, with the new conservative majority on the NC supreme court, NC Republicans are looking to basically undo the state supreme court’s abolition of partisan gerrymandering. In January, state GOP leadership asked the court to rehear a 2022 gerrymandering case (as well as a separate voter ID case). The gerrymandering case in question was to enforce court-drawn maps that were themselves the product of a pair of 2019 suits, one relating to U.S. House districts and another to state legislative districts, that had resulted in the court’s throwing out gerrymandered maps authored by state Republicans. The court’s then-liberal majority had agreed with the 2019 plaintiffs’ argument, among others, that partisan gerrymanders are plainly barred by the state’s constitution’s insistence on “free” elections. This provision is not included in the U.S. Constitution but is found in one form or another in many state constitutions, including in Pennsylvania’s, where litigants also were successful in having their supreme court throw out bad Republican maps. With fair maps, North Carolina’s U.S. House delegation magically went from a 3-10 D/R split in 2018 to its current 7-7 composition. (The state gained a U.S. House seat in 2020 reapportionment.)

This equitable outcome annoyed NC Republicans, and now they have a chance to fix that. It seems likely that Republicans will prevail in this new challenge given that the newly conservative court agreed in the first instance to take up the settled case, against jurisprudential custom seeing as the facts and governing law had not changed in the one month since the previous court’s ruling. If so, we can safely bank on the GOP trying to re-map their way to three to five marginal U.S. House seats—potentially enough on its own to alter the U.S. House majority in 2024—and to aggressively engineer impregnable supermajorities in both state legislative chambers. There will be no recourse to SCOTUS because in 2017 John Roberts & Friends told us that it would be too political for judges to stop politicians from drawing maps that advantage themselves, and therefore it’s up to voters to vote them out of their gerrymandered districts if they are unhappy. (I do not think this is an unfair distillation by me, as ridiculous as it may seem.)

Of course, partisan gerrymandering is already old hat in NC. More remarkable is the second Republican, um, “innovation,” which is pending legislation that would radically alter the structure of the state’s senate. Currently, the North Carolina senate, like NC’s lower house and best I can tell every other state legislative body, is apportioned on the basis of population. A GOP bill (oddly, introduced in the lower house) would amend the state constitution so that each of the upper chamber’s 50 senators would represent exactly two of the state’s 100 counties.

This is a naked attempt to further disenfranchise urban and suburban, Democratic-leaning North Carolinians. This would mean that Mecklenburg and Wake counties, which contain the cities of Charlotte and Raleigh respectively and which, at 1.1 million residents each, account for over 20% of NC’s total population, would be accorded the same senate representation as coastal Tyrell County, the home of about 4,000 people whose voters happened to go 57-42 for Trump in 2020. Who needs gerrymandering if you can rig an even redder senate this way?

North Carolina is a politically competitive state, as evidenced by Democrats’ regularly winning statewide office for governor, AG, and supreme court seats. It is not lost on state Republicans that, per Ballotpedia, about 47% of the state’s population resides in 22 solidly Democratic counties while 46% of the state’s population resides in 66 solidly Republican ones. Rather than compete for vote share by putting forth the most popular program, Republicans are openly seeking to cement hegemony through demographic sorting, whether through gerrymandering or per-county representation.

If the proposed constitutional amendment passes both chambers, it would in theory be on the statewide ballot in the 2024 election, although many legal experts doubt the measure would pass legal challenges under federal law, especially in connection with the “one person, one vote” principle enshrined in the Warren Court’s 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decision. But with this SCOTUS, we’re in uncharted waters.

The third terribly cute maneuver by NC Republicans is the February adoption of a lower house rule change (introduced by the very same speaker who gave us HB 2) to ditch the previous legislative session’s two-day notice requirement for a vote to override a governor’s veto. The Republicans already have a veto-proof supermajority in the upper chamber, and they are only one vote south of one in the lower chamber. By calling votes when they expect a mere two members of the house minority to be absent, however briefly (including literally on a bathroom break, hence some ridicule of this as a new form of “bathroom bill”), Republican leadership can connive to override any of Democratic Governor Cooper’s many expected vetoes this session. The Republicans have already been pressed by social conservatives to move bills to further restrict abortions and to expand gun access, so this technical change may result in bad laws that Cooper will be powerless to stop.

That’s all the good news I’ve got for today.

It’s one thing for Republicans to oppose Democratic policies and programs, like Social Security and Medicare or the Violence Against Women Act — that’s their brand.  But lately they’ve come to oppose democracy itself.

Don’t like the outcome of the most secure presidential election in history?  Fight to overturn it.

Don’t like Georgia prosecutors pursuing crimes committed by Republicans?  Give yourselves the power to remove them.

Lose the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 elections?  Make a rule that a Democratic president twice elected with a majority of the popular vote can’t fill a Supreme Court vacancy in the last 8 months of his term but that a Republican president who lost the popular vote can — in the last 8 days of his term.

Don’t like that nearly 64.5% of Floridians voted to restore most ex-cons’ voting rights once they’d paid their debt to society?  Find ways to thwart their will.

Want to suppress the black vote?  Sentence a Texas woman to five years for casting a provisional ballot that was never counted.

And on and on.

Some think-tank Republican intellectuals — appalled as they may be by Trump himself — have quietly conlcuded that democracy is too cumbersome a system to compete in today’s world.  China can build a skyscraper in 19 days; it took Bill Maher1,131 days to install solar panels.  Autocrats get things done.

And that’s a discussion to be had . . . but, I would argue, out in the open.  Those Republicans should say it: “We no longer think democracy is the best system for America.  The press is the enemy of the people.  The courts are rigged. We think Putin and Xi and Kim — and Orban! — have it right.  Freedom, shreedom:  We love the path Hungary is taking!”

 

Satire And The Singularity

Alexandra Petri’s Excerpts from a civics textbook I assume would be welcome in Florida. 

(Thanks, as always, Glenn.)

The above was a joke — or, well, satire.

Not this.  This is real:

Last fall, a guy used (free) ChatGPT to get D on one of his college exams . . .

. . . and made a bet it would take until 2029 before ChatGPT could score A‘s.

You know where this is headed.

Forget 2029.

Here we are a few months later and — yep — ChatGPT-4 ($20/month) got an A.

The singularity is near.

GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content than its predecessor and scores 40% higher on certain tests of factuality.

It will also let developers decide their AI’s style of tone and verbosity.

For example, GPT-4 can assume a Socratic style of conversation and respond to questions with questions. The previous iteration of the technology had a fixed tone and style.

Soon ChatGPT users will have the option to change the chatbot’s tone and style of responses, OpenAI said.

. . . GPT-4 can also help individuals calculate their taxes, a demonstration by Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, showed.

The demo showed it could take a photo of a hand-drawn mock-up for a simple website and create a real one. . . .

If you want GPT-4, just go to your free account at ChatGPT and click the “Upgrade” option.