Author: A.T.

Back then, it was “the Ukraine,” part of the Soviet Union.  At a campsite outside Kharkov.  I was 16.  (If you’re curious: Chapter 3.)

Little did I imagine how pivotal Ukraine would be in 2022 . . . or that the only thing their candidate would demand be changed in the 2016 Republican Party platform was not something about taxes or immigration or real estate or golf but about . . . are you ready? . . . Ukraine.

The only thing!

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The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington. . . .

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This had to have pleased Putin and was orchestrated by Trump’s later-indicted, later-pardoned campaign manager, but — Russia, are you listening? — the one thing anyone who has not read the Mueller Report knows for sure is that there were no improper contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Anyone who has read the report, on the other hand, with the possible exception of former Attorney General Bill Barr, knows that there were.

Virtually every Republican with the exception of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger has signed on to the world of alternative facts that was inaugurated just two days after Trump was.

We live in a world where tens of millions look at the crowds at the Obama and Trump inaugurals and can plainly see bigger crowds on the Mall for Trump.

At 16, I offered some alternative facts of my own.  The very junior division of the KGB knew I was lying but, given my age, let me go.  And now here we are.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was something of a democracy for a time, but through murder and coercion all too quickly sorted itself out into the thugocracy/plutocracy/autocracy it is today, with a president for life.

You know the story.

Are the tens of millions of Americans incensed that re-election was stolen from their leader going to be misled into allowing our democracy to slip away?

CORT: Read this! Dr. Oz might be getting most of the attention, but a host of races—from governor on down—have Democrats terrified that Republicans could be setting the stage for a repeat of Donald Trump’s stolen-election claims in a key battleground state.

ME: Scary times.  But if we all do our part, we can pull it out, as we did in Georgia.

CORT: How?

ME:  Have you  joined your local chapter of the League of Women Voters?  Joined Field Team 6?  Joined Vote Forward?  Given all you comfortably can to fund the Party?

CORT: Yes, not yet, and not aware.  Will do.

Have a great weekend!

Read Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines. by former Ohio Democratic Party Chair David Pepper.

But first read How The Democratic Party’s Campaign Strategy Is Failing America . . .

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. . . Compared to changing a voter’s party, a candidate choice is almost insignificant.

If 90 percent of voters are choosing parties rather than candidates, why are we spending all of our advertising dollars to distinguish candidates?

Convincing a voter to cast a ballot for a candidate is a one-time decision affecting one election contest in one year. Getting a voter to move party allegiance might be a hundred times more valuable.

. . . If elections have become contests between parties far more than candidates, it is imperative that Democrats press the advantage. But the Democratic Party continues to follow the formula of the last 70 years: Raise money. Ignore dramatic and vote changing events, and save all the money for candidate ads in the fall of the election year.

So — the first change has to be to shift our focus from candidates to parties. But given the ineffectiveness of most campaign ads, how do we change how we conduct our advertising campaigns?

The first thing we have to do is to become more opportunistic. In other words, run our ads in the news cycle and use them to amplify and enhance news stories currently before the voters.  Let me offer some examples.

A majority of American voters believe that the 2020 election was fairly decided. Yet a majority of House Republicans voted to overturn the election. How many Americans know this? Ads run in the aftermath of Jan. 6 could have had a profound impact on many voters.

Eighty-five percent of American households received a $1,400 stimulus check. Yet every single Republican senator voted against these checks. How many voters know? Is not an ad – at the time the checks are arriving – much more powerful than waiting until October of 2022, when the checks have been spent or mostly forgotten?

Seventy-one percent of American voters want the Republicans to work with the Democrats for the good of the country. Yet Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has stated, on video, that he is “100 percent focused on stopping this new administration.” Why are Democrats not sharing this video with voters? . . .

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. . . and craft your giving strategy accordingly.*

Thank you!

*Obviously, if everyone stopped giving to candidates, it would be a disaster.  But there’s no risk of that.  By way of example: The entire DNC budget in 2018 was not much different from what Democratic candidates spent that year in just one state — in just one race — fighting each other — to see who would get to run against Ron DeSantis for governor.

A lot of my friends are making a Plan B.

Portugal?  Italy?  Chile?  New Zealand?  Israel?  Canada?

It’s hard for me to imagine it could come to that.

I hope we all share a determination that it won’t.

But Canada is thinking about this, too.

In brief part:

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. . . For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.

Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.

I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer.

In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. Limbaugh and his fellow travelers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war.

How should Canada prepare? . . .

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There’s much, much more; all of it hugely worth reading — and sharing.

The author is not a crazy person.

The warnings are real.

I’m not sure about a Plan B, but I would suggest a Plan A:

Join your local chapter of the League of Women Voters . . . join Field Team 6 . . . join Vote Forward . . . and, if you can — now, when your support is so much more leveraged than when most people will be giving next summer and fall — fund the Party.

But first, for those of us who own PRKR . . .

I’m reading today’s Waco Tribune, as one does on a lazy Sunday morning, and come across Big Tech Smash and Grab Is the Real Threat.  Patent theft, it argues, is by far the greater threat to America’s culture of innovation, and thus to our competitive future, than patent trolls.

The example it gives?  ParkerVision.

On a related note, I was pleased to see that the judge in Orlando who is overseeing the Qualcomm case has scheduled two days of oral arguments for next week, January 24-25.  With luck, he will then rule on the outstanding motions and set a trial date.

The Intel trial in Waco is scheduled for June.

Could 2022 be PRKR’s year?

And now . . .

What better way to spend part of MLK, Jr.’s birthday than to watch Summer of Soul?

Everyone remembers Woodstock, but that same summer, tens of thousands gathered in Harlem to hear Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone, B.B. King and Mahalia Jackson, the Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight & the Pips and dozens more . . . over several consecutive weekends . . . all presented by Maxwell House coffee . . . but never aired.  The film sat forgotten in a basement for fifty years.  Literally.  And then in 2019 it was discovered and turned into this documentary, filled with music — and archival footage — that make it a history lesson every young person should see, even as knees bounce and toes tap.

Treat yourself.

And if you still have time, and are up for a challenge — where things are not as black and white as they had at first seemed — listen to the story of the Coopers.  One Cooper, Amy, the white dog walker; the other, Christian, the black bird watcher.

You probably remember the story.  You may (or may not) be pleased to learn that the dog walker’s life was ruined in the aftermath of her call to 911.  But if you listen to the podcast (at 1.25X speed), you may be surprised.  I found it interesting for what it says about our natural tendency to oversimplify, take sides, join mobs.  Also, the distinction it draws between “poetic truth versus real truth.”

I think the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. — saddened though he’d be by Chief Justice Roberts’ evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and by the resurgence of white supremacism — would welcome this kind of thoughtful, civil discussion that allows for nuance and complexity and, ultimately, perhaps, greater understanding.

Have a great week!

But first a word to the unvaccinated.  From God . . .

Jim Burt: “Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation, ancestor of today’s various Evangelicals, about 500 years ago.  He had his own experiences with the epidemics that periodically raged through the Europe of his day. Luther chastised the ‘resisters,’  saying: ‘They are much too rash and reckless, tempting God and disregarding everything which might counteract death and the plague. They disdain the use of medicines; they do not avoid places and persons infected by the plague, but lightheartedly make sport of it and wish to prove how independent they are. They say that it is God’s punishment; if he wants to protect them he can do so without medicines or our carefulness. This is not trusting God but tempting him. God has created medicines and provided us with intelligence to guard and take good care of the body so that we can live in good health.’

“Luther went on to warn that those who ‘make no use of intelligence or medicine…become a suicide in God’s eyes.’

“Then he leveled the most serious charge against the ‘rash and reckless’ trying to ‘prove how independent they are,’ saying:  ‘It is even more shameful for a person to pay no heed to his own body and to fail to protect it against the plague the best he is able, and then to infect and poison others who might have remained alive if he had taken care of his body as he should have. He is thus responsible before God for his neighbor’s death and is a murderer many times over.'”

Thus spake Martin Luther, and through him, the Lord.

An even more influential object of worship among some these days has also finally become vocal in urging vaccination . . . if only to send Ron DeSantis a warning.

And now, speaking of said object of worship . . .

I’ve just listened to Hillary Clinton’s State of Terror (at 1.4X speed) and, while I was a little skeptical at first, boy does it ever snap, crackle, and pop.

One character is Secretary of State Ellen Adams.  Another is Eric Dunn, the recently defeated U.S. president, now back at his beyond-enormous Palm Beach estate.

Enjoy — or weep, as you see fit.

FOURTH QUARTERLY 2021 ESTIMATED TAX PAYMENT DUE TUESDAY, JANUARY 18

(unless you will be filing your return, with any balance due, by January 31)

That’s what Matt Levine suggests some already-unimaginably-rich people are doing: Who Can Resist the Crypto Boom?

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. . . There are endless profiles of people who have become billionaires by starting crypto exchanges, trading platforms, market makers, derivatives businesses, etc. (Meanwhile I have never read a profile of someone who became a billionaire by using crypto to solve any problem other than trading more crypto) . . .

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(To read this article, you may need to shell out $1.99 — or $5.97 for three months — and then remember to call customer support to cancel if $34.99 a month for hizzoner, the unimaginably rich Mike Bloomberg, is not in your budget.)

Should we call the folks of whom Matt Levine writes cryptographers?

Cryptomaniacs?

I like the latter because it has a subliminal whiff of “klepto” . . . and in the long run, the folks getting unimaginably rich will not be those buying and selling crypto — a less-than-zero sum game — but, it seems, those who facilitate the trades.

To afford at least one year of Bloomberg, if you missed Monday’s “free $700” credit card deal (or it’s expired by the time you get ready to sign up, or $4,000 is more than you can sensibly cram into the first 3 months’ charges*), consider a free $500 that apparently requires “just” $2,000 in charges over the first 4 months.

*Oh, but for heaven’s sake!  It’s so easy to rack up a $4,000 charge the first day!  And yes, I am incorrigible.

Brooks H.: “A minister, a priest, and a rabbit walk into a blood bank to give blood, and the nurse at the reception desk asks each of them what their blood type is. ‘I’m pretty sure I’m a Type O,’ says the rabbit.”

Wife’s Diary:

Tonight, I thought my husband was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at a nice restaurant for dinner. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset that I was a bit late, but he made no comment about it. Conversation wasn’t flowing, so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn’t say much.

I asked him what was wrong. He said, “Nothing.” I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he wasn’t upset, that it had nothing to do with me, and not to worry about it. On the way home, I told him that I loved him. He smiled slightly, and kept driving. I can’t explain his behavior. I don’t know why he didn’t say, “I love you, too.”

When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly, and watched TV. He continued to seem distant and absent. Finally, with silence all around us, I decided to go to bed. About 15 minutes later, he came to bed. But I still felt that he was distracted, and his thoughts were somewhere else. He fell asleep; I cried. I don’t know what to do. I’m almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster!

Husband’s Diary:

A two-foot putt…who the hell misses a two-foot putt?

Question: Should We Abandon the Democratic Party to Save Democracy?  Register as Republicans to vote for moderate Republicans in the primaries (and then the Democrat in the general)?  Gotta admit it’s an intriguing idea.

Wordle!  My latest addiction.  Five minutes a day.  I got SLUMP in three tries. Beginner’s luck.  CRANK and GORGE in five.  Sorry; you’ll shortly be addicted, too.

Want a free $700?  Sign up for this card.  Only, of course, if you will be able to pay the charges in full each month.  The 80,000 bonus points are worth $800, less the $95 fee.  And you get 3% cash back on what you eat.  Even those of us who (try to) practice intermittent fasting have to eat sometime.

Don’t Look Up is streaming on Netflix.  It is a Dr. Strangelove for our time (if not, like Dr. Strangelove, one of the 10 best movies of all time).

Have you watched the President’s speech?  Stephen P.:  “He finally actually USED the bully pulpit, and did it well. There were even faint echos of Churchill, as when he said ‘I will not allow a mob to hold a knife to the throat of democracy.’ It will be widely quoted.”

Meanwhile . . .

To all those arguing January 6th wasn’t an attempted coup because little blood was shed, I offer the phrase “bloodless coup.”

To all arguing Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz misspoke when they called January 6th “terrorism” . . . because only the Senators and Representatives and their staffs and defenders were terrified, but it wasn’t like a bomb went off (the bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters but did not go off) . . . and because no one has yet been charged with terrorism (though, to paraphrase Jack Palance to Billy Crystal in City Slickers, “day ain’t over yet“), I say: who cares whether it fits your definition of terrorism or sedition or insurrection? It was a violent attempt to overturn the results of what the disgraced former president’s own officials called “the most secure election in our history.” The first and only such attempt since 1789.

And the coup is ongoing.

If this troubles you as much as I think it likely does . . . join your local chapter of the League of Women Voters . . . join Field Team 6 . . . join Vote Forward . . . and, if you can — now, when your support is so much more leveraged than when most people will be giving next summer and fall — fund the Party.

Have a great week.

The President’s speech in two minutes.

A Critic:  “These comparisons of January 6 to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 are hilarious.”

→ I see your point.

Another way to look at it, though, is November 22, 1963.

A lot of people of my generation remember it as a pivotal date in American history.

Yet the Kennedy assassination did not threaten democracy, and so was arguably less important than January 6th’s attempted — ongoing — coup.

Thus January 6 may be more consequential than November 22, 1963 – an assassination, horrible though it was, that actually led to passage of the Voting Rights Act and expansion of democracy, the opposite of what’s unfolding today.

To which A Critic responded:

“That was a horrific murder. January 6th was a bunch of mostly misdemeanors.”

→ Only a few people died January 6; but for the first time since 1812, the symbol of democracy was breached and defiled, and – while we’ll never know for sure – the deaths of the Speaker of the House and Vice President, among others, may have been only narrowly averted.

So, in my view, January 6th is a date worth turning into a symbol.

Imagine for the sake of discussion that American democracy were to die without a single death but rather through (say) a masterful disinformation campaign.

I would consider that a tragedy.  And if there were a single date that symbolized that tragedy, it would in my mind qualify for the kind of recognition December 7 and 9/11 and November 22, 1963 command.

Death counts are not the only criterion to consider in ranking tragedy.

The countless Americans who’ve died over the years defending democracy would probably agree that its death would be a worse tragedy than their own.

Just my two cents in favor of making a big deal about January 6th.  And taking the President’s words to heart.

But first . . . this should be fun:

Longtime Trump inner circle confidante Stephanie Grisham to appear before 1/6 Committee.

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. . . She resigned in response to the January 6 insurrection, and later published a book ironically titled, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now.” As press secretary Grisham never held even one press briefing.

. . . In 2021 Grisham warned if elected again Trump would “foment more violence” and revealed she is “terrified” of him running again. She described him as “erratic,” “delusional,” and a “narcissist.”

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And now . . . a friend of a friend lifted facts from the Washington Post, mainly, to compile this (thanks George!):

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The economy is going gangbusters. Yet Americans, particularly Republicans, express a gloom not matched by economic reality—or by their own spending behaviors. Polls and consumer-confidence indices show an economic pessimism as grim as when millions lost jobs in the pandemic shutdown. This is, in large part, because disinformation has prevailed.

“America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years, notwithstanding the contrary media narrative contributing to dour public opinion,” Matthew Winkler, former editor in chief of Bloomberg News, wrote last week.

Holiday retail sales were the highest ever, jumping 8.5 percent from last year and nearly 11 percent from pre-pandemic 2019, as “consumers splurged throughout the season,” Mastercard reported Sunday.

The supply chain, while still an issue, was ameliorated by federal intervention from the Departments of Transportation, Commerce and Labor. Stores were stocked. Package deliveries were overwhelmingly on time. Inflation, though a serious concern, clearly didn’t deter shoppers. And holiday motorists found gas prices 14 cents a gallon lower than in November.

Among the gains:

·       The economy expanded an estimated 5.5 percent in 2021—the strongest since 1984 (fourth-quarter growth dramatically outpaced Europe and even China).

·       Unemployment plunged to 4.2 percent (unemployment claims down 80% since Biden took office, now at the lowest since Nixon).

·       U.S. stock markets outperformed the world. (The S&P 500 up nearly 30 percent.)

·       Corporate profits are the largest since 1950 and corporate debt the lowest in 30 years.

·       Consumer credit expanded.

·       Confidence among CEOs is the highest in 20 years.

·       The American Rescue Plan cut child poverty nearly in half.

·       Wages for the bottom quintile up 30%.

Of course, many more things have been achieved in the last eleven months that are almost too numerous to list—we’ve re-engaged the world on Climate Change (including rejoining The Paris Climate Accord), innumerable environmental protections have been restored and public lands, lakes and rivers have been preserved. Ties with NATO and our Asian Pacific allies and Canada have been repaired and strengthened. There’s also the rapid manufacture and distribution of vaccines, boosters, and PPEs, with well over 200 million Americans now fully vaccinated. And we’ve delivered more vaccines to the underdeveloped world than the rest of the developed nations combined. And, of course, there’s the historic Infrastructure Bill.

Basically, there’s a lot.

And while we’re on the subject of where we are and what’s been done by the new administration almost a year in, there is also this partial list of things the new president has NOT done. Peevish as this may be, here goes:

·       He hasn’t placed a relative into a position of power.

·       He hasn’t stayed up all night tweeting, even once.

·       He hasn’t gotten into a scandal with a porn star and used subordinates or shell companies to pay her off.

·       He hasn’t suggested that Covid might be treated with injectable disinfectants or “just a very powerful light.”

·       He hasn’t declared Neo-Nazis “very good people.”

·       He hasn’t been laughed at by the entire United Nations or mocked by the leaders of England, France and Canada at a Global Summit.

·       He hasn’t teargassed Americans gathered in peaceful protest or suggested “shooting them in the legs.”

·       He hasn’t fallen in love with Kim Jong-un or bragged about getting an incredibly big card from him.

·       He hasn’t carried on about giving the president of China “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you have ever seen.”

·       He hasn’t asked his cabinet to publicly praise him, in his presence, on camera.

·       He hasn’t shut the government down trying to build a useless wall.

·       He hasn’t misappropriated money from the military budget and against the will of Congress to fund said wall.

·       He hasn’t called any ethnic group “murderers” or “rapists” or “animals,” nor claimed that an “infestation” of immigrants carrying “tremendous infectious disease” (including leprosy) are “pouring across our border.”

·       He hasn’t torn children from mothers’ arms and kept them penned in large kennels or sent them off to foster homes around the country with no records kept for their eventual reunification.

·       He hasn’t insulted any war hero or his/her family.

·       He hasn’t tossed paper towels to people in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane.

·       He hasn’t eroded our faith in democracy by telling us that our free elections are “rigged” and a “scam.”

·       He hasn’t declared himself a genius, let alone a very stable one.

Needless to say, one could go on.

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Equally needless to say, much remains to be done — and we face urgent threats to our democracy.

But none of those threats are of Biden’s or Democrats’ doing — nor of Liz Cheney’s or Adam Kinzinger’s.

Even Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy can identify the catalyst of those threats.

If the second impeachment vote had been held by secret ballot, there are those who believe the 57-43 vote to convict would instead have been unanimous.