Highly Effective Radical Right Wing Activism

There is a huge, vociferous and very influential radical right wing in America, led by a few wealthy people (many of them wealthy for generations) and followed by many millions of ordinary American voters. These increasingly radicalized voters are spurred by their unquestioned belief that the only trouble with this country is the goddamned Godless troublemakers who want to change everything from good to bad for no goddamned reason.

At the moment, the radical right and its “moderate” Republican enablers are united in insisting that just because one candidate won an election by 5,000,000 so-called “Popular Votes” and a wide margin in the sacred Electoral College, there is no reason to believe that that person actually won the election. By the way, all those races other Republicans all over the country won in the same rigged election? Perfectly valid elections.

I read an excellent op-ed in today’s NY Times that I will quote from and link to below, but first, a thought about the huge success of radical right wing activism, which has been hellishly effective in shaping our democracy.

Ideas that a few generations ago were exclusively believed among a lunatic fringe of the conservative spectrum, the incendiary, baseless conspiracy theories of The John Birch Society, are now standard Republican dogma (see, for example Q-Anon). This metamorphosis from conservative to radical was achieved by tireless, smart, well-funded political activism and the systematic cultivation of a new worldview in which the radical was normalized, loyalty paramount, and neither reasoned debate nor compromise permitted.

Here is the best example I can think of to illustrate how narrow ideological orthodoxy, without even the benefit of a better argument, can effectively overrule popular democratic measures.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed during the Civil Rights Movement to end the chicanery that, for a century, had prevented millions of black and brown people from voting. It made voter suppression tactics like poll taxes (charging certain voters a large fee to cast a ballot) and super-challenging “literacy tests” (read and interpret arcane hundred-year old legalese) illegal.

The Voting Rights Act ended these vicious practice, and created barriers to states concocting new, more subtle voter suppression schemes. The supervisory powers of the Act caused big strides toward more equality under the law for all voters. Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act (enforcement being necessary for compliance), via oversight by Congress and the Department of Justice, was authorized by the Act’s Section Five Congress voted to renew the law almost unanimously..

A few years later, in a case decided in 2013, the Supreme Court stripped the Voting Rights Act of its enforcement clause by a 5-4 party-line majority vote that struck down Section Five as unconstitutional.

The majority decision in Shelby County v. Holder, one usually said to have “gutted” the Voting Rights Act, was flat out — well, 5-4, as in many recent Roberts court decisions, including some very recent voting rights cases dashed off on narrow legal grounds by men like Brett Kavanaugh, graduates of the elite right wing finishing school, complete with its oaths and sworn loyalties (see, for example, decision about not allowing mail-in voting extended in Wisconsin — see also Bader Ginsburg dissent in that case, you be the judge of who had the better legal and moral argument).

I recently read and analyzed the respective “arguments” in Shelby County v. Holder. You can see that Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s powerful, detailed dissent is right on the money and that the five zealots who signed on to a bare bones narrow legal ruling were wrong — as subsequent nationwide voter suppression laws and rulings have demonstrated.

The radical right is fond of accusing the Supreme Court of Judicial Activism (if it rules, for example, that racial segregation is unconstitutional, or that the right to privacy includes a woman’s right to decide whether to have a baby) but it is impossible to imagine a more partisan, activist decision than the purely transactional Federalist Society rationale used to strike down enforcement of the Voting Rights Act as “unconstitutional”.

We learn from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s brilliant dissent that nationwide support for the Voting Rights Act was almost unanimous. A bipartisan Congress passed an extension of the Voting Rights Act, after 21 hearings that produced 15,000 pages of evidence of continued attempts by states to suppress the vote, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. President George W. Bush promptly signed the reauthorization into law.

President Bush proclaimed that the law was essential to support “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and called the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.”

Nothing could be more uncontroversial, bipartisan or universally acceptable in a democracy than a law passed by that kind of overwhelming Congressional majority and enthusiastically embraced by the president Unless I am missing something essential about democracy.

The radical right disagreed with this seemingly innocuous, nonpartisan interpretation of how democracy is meant to work. Or rather, they saw the real problem with the law to ensure fair voting:

universal voting is bad for business, interferes with a certain kind of privileged liberty, encourages politicians to actually debate and compromise over policies essential to the lives of millions of less well-off citizens — to the disadvantage of the super-wealthy and their corporate interests.

The 5-4 corporatist majority, using the thinnest of narrow legalistic logic (finding that no new evidence of voter discrimination had been produced by Congress, so it was unconstitutionally unfair to the states that wanted to change their laws to hold them to a law based on old evidence), struck down the section of the law that made enforcement of the law possible.

The far right brought a strategic constitutional challenge to an uncontroversial, universally supported law. They filed suit on behalf of an Alabama County (the suit was masterminded by recent top Trump lawyer William Consovoy) (a county that had recently engaged in racially discriminatory voting practices, mind you), resulted in an unappealable one-vote majority decision that overruled the unmistakable will of an almost unanimous Congress and the American Executive branch acting to ensure the right to vote for all Americans.

Fucking hell, you say?

Within hours of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, numerous states made more restrictive voting laws. These laws were prepared and waiting for a victory in the Supreme Court. Fast forward a few years, to see how abolition of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act plays out.

In addition to numerous restrictive voting laws that must be challenged in court, instead of reviewed under the Voting Rights Act, multiple Republican state legislatures and majority Republican party-courts, in the lead up to the 2020 election, ruled for Republican plaintiffs (the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee) that measures to make safe voting easier during a deadly pandemic (one that is seeing a record tidal wave of infections and deaths strike us since in-person voting surged) violated various state voting laws.

Louis DeJoy, a donor who’d given millions to Republicans, and a bushel of cash to Trump in particular, was appointed by other Trump appointees (Obama had been blocked by McConnell from appointing anyone to the Postal Board) to dismantle 672 high speed mail sorting machines in large Democratic districts, remove thousands of mailboxes in Democratic areas, create and fan fear that millions of ballots would not be delivered in time to be counted. Spread the false accusation that mail-in voting equals massive fraud. Have the Attorney General, as well as other top officials, insist this partisan rumor was true over and over in the media. All in a concerted effort to suppress absentee voting, a well-organized voter suppression conspiracy in the plainest sense of the all those words. Sadly for them, these herculean public efforts didn’t succeed in winning the presidency for the Republican candidate, too many people simply voted against the divisive demagogue, in margins too large to overcome.

The radical right remains united in their defiance of so-called democracy, loudly, proudly supporting the president in his insane and baseless insistence that his 5,000,000 vote loss was fake, another hoax orchestrated by evil, democracy-hating fraudsters funded by accursed blood drinking child molesters.

Top Trump bootlicker and supreme political hypocrite Lindsey Graham:

“Mitch McConnell and I need to come up with an oversight of mail-in balloting. If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we are going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”
source

The widely disliked Ted Cruz, another Republican senator who has obediently fallen into line, having apparently acquired a love of the taste of Mr. Trump’s lowest sphincter, publicly supports the baseless narrative that the election was stolen from Trump. Cruz insightfully said this, four years ago, stating the extremely obvious:

This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.
He accuses everybody on that debate stage of lying. And it’s simply a mindless yell. Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing. The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist. A narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen.
Everything in Donald’s world is about Donald. And he combines being a pathological liar, and I say pathological because I actually think Donald, if you hooked him up to a lie-detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon and one thing in the evening, all contradictory and he’ll pass the lie detector test each time. Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it.
Cruz added:
Bullies don’t come from strength, bullies come from weakness. Bullies come from a deep, yawning cavern of insecurity.
source

Thomas B. Edsall provides perspective on this uniquely grotesque, if not entirely unprecedented, manifestation of rage against the popular will, as expressed through the ballot box. Edsall ends his excellent piece:

The unpredictable danger Trump and his henchmen are putting the nation in has no antecedent. Trump’s irrationalism has become a contagion. As he presides over the destruction of reason, he exploits and electrifies his public. No one knows where this will lead. Delusion can become tragedy. It’s happened before.
source

Trump’s irrationalism has become a contagion. As he presides over the destruction of reason, he exploits and electrifies his public.

On the other hand, it is also worth remembering:

Democratic Government Depends on the Georgia Senate Runoff

Please join me Thursday at 8 pm EST for an online strategy session and discussion with one of the Democratic Senate candidates from Georgia, Reverend Raphael Warnock. Details below. We attended the session with Jon Ossoff on Sunday and found its details of a practical plan to increase the vote for the Democratic candidates inspiring.

With a one vote Republican majority hanging in the balance, and with it the GOP’s ability to hamstring President-elect Biden in every possible way, the stakes for those two contested Senate seats in Georgia could not be higher. The January runoff election (required by Georgia law) to decide (possibly by a single vote) the fate of Biden’s ability to pass laws is where all the political fire is right now.

Mitch McConnell, who continues to vigorously defend Mr. Trump’s baseless denial of the election results as 100% within the president’s legal rights, met with Bagpiper Bill Barr yesterday. It is not disclosed what they discussed at the private meeting, but you can be sure Barr’s subsequent announcement that the DOJ may conduct political investigations prior to the certification of final vote tallies (demonstrating again Barr’s unprecedentedly shameless political motivation) was related to Mitch’s strategic concern that he maintain his razor thin Republican majority control of the senate.

We have already seen how McConnell used that tiny majority to stymie all attempts at legislation (including economic relief to millions impoverished by the pandemic) and many appointments by Democratic presidents, including, most famously, no hearing on the highly qualified, politically inoffensive Merrick Garland for the months’ vacant Supreme Court seat Trump filled with a Federalist Society-endorsed right winger shortly after his Electoral College victory.

Barr broke his blessed, almost two week, silence to pull his latest political stunt. In a carefully worded memo he called for the release of Department of Justice dogs to chase down any and all leads about specific cases of credible fraud, although no credible charges of fraud have been made in any of Trump’s numerous lawsuits. Not a shred of evidence has been produced in any of the more than 300 court cases.

Every Trump lawsuit based on a fraud claim has been tossed out of court for lack of evidence. There is no evidence of any kind of significant election fraud in U.S. elections (as seen in Barr’s carefully worded legal directive to Trump’s Department of Justice). Even Mike Pence and the determined Kris Kobach’s presidential commission on voter fraud could not find any evidence, before they closed shop after six months in operation..

The court of public opinion, of course, is no longer concerned with evidence or lack of evidence. This is particularly true of low-information jurors who just want what they want. This segment of the public has a result it wants, what it believes is true (millions, including at least one recently elected to Congress, apparently believe Democratic leaders actually drink the blood of murdered child sex slaves) and the so-called facts will just have to be fitted to the desired result. Obama producing a fake birth certificate does not disprove “Birtherism” to the loyal diehards who strongly believe these things.

Barr, McConnell, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and other loyal Trump enablers are performing political theatre for Trump and his base. His base doesn’t care who actually won or lost the so-called election, they care about Trump somehow staying in power and they love any story that holds out hope for that. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, smiling confidently at the podium, told America and the world today — especially all of the dictators that he and his boss so admire — that not Joe Biden but Donald Trump will be inaugurated on January 20th. A “smooth transition” the staunch Evangelical Pompeo assured America and the world “to a second Trump administration.”

Grotesque political theatre, grandly staged to hold out the final hope for four more years of Trump by stoking populist rage and bringing the heavily armed, violent patriots out in massive numbers to support “law and order” by forcefully overthrowing the fraudulently elected Socialist order represented by Biden and Harris.

It seems unnecessary to point out, as many have, how idiotic this “widespread election fraud/stolen election” story is. If there was a vast conspiracy to steal the election, by this secret cabal of powerful child molesting traitors, why did they not flip three or four Senate seats, including McConnell’s and Graham’s, to ensure they’d be able to actually pass laws? A pretty stupid fraud scheme, to steal an election for a president who will be immediately put into a political strait jacket and mocked for his weakness by a defiant Republican party, right into the midterm elections.

The logic in the argument for an illegitimate, stolen election? Don’t look too hard, you’ll hurt yourself. Every place where a Republican won is a place where, by this argument, fraud was defeated. Every place where Biden won, massive, systemic, George Soros-financed fraud. Where Trump needed more votes, chant “Count the VOTES!”, where Trump’s lead was shrinking as the vote counting continued, chant “STOP the Count!”– there’s no contradiction there, none at all.

How about Georgia? Two run-offs, required by Georgia law, clearly caused by voter fraud in each case, clearly. Both Republican candidates subjected to the indignity of a fraudulent run-off have called for the resignation of the corrupt Republican secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger.

Raffensperger’s response was quick:

“Earlier today Senators Loeffler and Perdue called for my resignation,” Raffensperger, who is also a Republican, said in a statement. “Let me start by saying that is not going to happen. The voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me.”
“As Secretary of State, I’ll continue to fight every day to ensure fair elections in Georgia, that every legal vote counts, and that illegal votes don’t count,” Raffensperger continued.
READ: Georgia secretary of state’s statement rebuking senators’ call for him to resign
“I know emotions are running high. Politics are involved in everything right now. If I was Senator Perdue, I’d be irritated I was in a runoff. And both Senators and I are all unhappy with the potential outcome for our President.”
source

Just noticed one tell-tale line in that otherwise fine response. The Republican shares his Senators’ unhappiness about the “potential outcome” for a president who lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College by wide margins. Always on the base-pleasing talking points, even when otherwise speaking sensibly. What is with these fucking fucks?

Georgia’s secretary of state:

“And both Senators and I are all unhappy with the potential outcome for our President.”

**the potential outcome for our President.**..

Georgia Senate Runoff –

Reverend Raphael Warnock

Thursday, Nov 12th at 5:00 PM Pacific/ 8:00 PM Eastern

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwlcOqprz4rGte6Vp8igGkvC5SAYFCk8J9_

Please RSVP here.

Dying for Principle

It has been said that the mark of a life worth living is being willing to die for your most deeply held beliefs, your principles. This sounds like a profound formulation, but the jury, as far as I can see, is still out on this one. If someone is coming to kill you or someone you love, and you have the means to fight back, by all means, defend yourself and your loved ones, to the death. But it is rarely this simple.

Usually, in matters of principle, there are no lives directly in the balance, but, equally important principles, larger than any individual life, at stake. You can see the problem right away of willingness to die for your beliefs as the mark of a life worth living: the nineteen Al Q’aeda suicide bombers forced those planes into buildings for their deeply held principles, their most fervent beliefs. Does it make them admirable in any way?

My father considered himself a man of principle, and in many ways he was — in the best sense of the word. As he was dying, he exerted himself to take one last principled stand. It was important to him, before he breathed his last, to apologize, at least to his son, for being such a relentlessly combative father. Everything in life was a matter of principle for him, though sometimes the principle was that he was simply emotionally unequipped to do what he knew deep down he should have done.

As a father he believed he was always acting out of love, and duty to his children’s best interests, but he realized, as death came for him quickly, that his black and white view of the world was not only stupid (he lamented missing the nuanced palette of gradations that would have enriched his life), but had exacted a terrible price on those he loved.

“Life is hard enough,” he said, in a dying man’s voice, “and instead of helping you, like a father should, I put even more obstacles in front of you and your sister, made your lives so much harder…” He then apologized for the only time in memory.

The forces of our personality that we can’t see are the ones that bite us the hardest, this also goes for the hidden obstacles in our path, the things that infallibly trip us up. They are truly the most destructive demons we must battle in our effort to learn from our mistakes, to become better people.

In the last few years I’ve made a close study of my father’s life, looking for lessons for my own. I may have stumbled on an important one recently that had been impossible for me to see until the other day. It was a painful thing to realize, for the first time, at 64, and it hit me with some force. It also gives rise to a great irony of my long, solitary attempt to create a meaningful public memorial for my parents and their erased ancestors, as I will try to explain.

My father was an intelligent, well-read man with a grasp of history and a good sense of humor who fought like the devil his entire unhappy life. He believed people cannot change, because he could never change, never hope to heal from or overcome the deeply instilled pain of a childhood of abuse. In the end he had to acknowledge, in the face of my mildness as I listened to his final confession, as I did my best to reassure him, that he’d been wrong to reject the idea of working to change himself in any way.

He resisted the idea that people can work to change themselves as as a matter of principle, mind you. He was honestly looking life in the face, as he saw it, while weak people who indulged in endless therapy were deluding themselves, and the victims of pathetic quacks working in a field where even the supposed experts wildly disagreed about the fundamentals of what worked. His unshakable belief that our inborn traits and traumas mark us for life was always argued as a matter of principle.

It was insane, he insisted, to think that we can meaningfully change our natures, natures unknowable to ourselves that are largely innate and then baked in before our consciousness is even fully formed. It was no doubt sobering to him to see his lifelong adversary standing by his deathbed without any trace of anger or judgment, without recriminations.

We have too many examples of this kind of mad belief in “principle” to need more than a reminder. Look around, everything in public and private life has been reduced to inarguable zero-sum matters of black and white, non-negotiable “principle”. The principle, for example, that liberty itself depends on defense of the personal right to infect whoever you want during a raging pandemic. To insist that everyone take simple, easy to follow, proven effective precautions to slow the spread of a deadly disease, supposedly for the common good, is AN ACT OF INTOLERABLE TYRANNY that must be resisted!

If you are acting on deeply held moral principle there is little room for discussion with unprincipled people, compromise is certainly out of the question. In my father’s case he saw the world, as billions now do, as a raging, merciless war zone; perhaps not an unreasonable view in many ways.

The harder to defend part was his view that the family dinner table, too, was an eternal battlefield, bloody and savage, where in the end, he warned his young children angrily, no matter how many battles they might think they’d won, they would “lose the war”. In the end he would prevail. It was a matter of principle. An insane principle, perhaps, but a principle nonetheless. Also, of course, the bit about losing the war was a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways.

Fighting in this senseless war of principle every night shaped me in ways I can see and ways I can’t see. I am like a former child soldier, in some deep recess of my soul I was shaped and scarred by the brutality that was a regular feature of my life at the dinner table war zone, night after night. My sister considers that I suffered more than she did, because while she often kept her head down and endured the attacks, I always fought back. I have the opposite view, though both sides of the argument have merit.

I learned how to use my intelligence to cooly inflict maximum harm on the old man when the fighting got ugly. I learned how to provoke him to rage with a slight shift of my mouth, the look in my eyes, a half turn of my torso, an inhalation of breath.

These skills did not serve me well in the world. Confronted by a bully at any point in my now long life, I was helpless, I could not avoid a confrontation in the end. Once I recognized an unreasonable person craving some kind of violent domination I’d eventually smirk and say the very worst possible thing “you’re an unreasonable person, craving some kind of violent domination, you know you’re a weak, contemptible bully, don’t you, asshole?”

It was not in my skill set to smoothly back away from someone who made it clear they wanted to fight for no discernible reason. It is still hard for me to do when suddenly confronted with this behavior, as much as I strive to avoid confrontation with unreasonable people these days.

It turns out a lot of change is possible with hard work, self-acceptance and the blessing of supportive friends, while other, deeper changes are very, very difficult to make.

You can learn to recognize when you are getting angry, what is about to make you angry. You can take steps to resist getting angry, to allow your breathing to calm you a bit, to control your reaction, to not blurt out the regrettable words that can’t be taken back. There are many things you can learn to do to have a less angry, less violent life.

My father may have been right about one thing – you may never be able, once the hateful game is afoot, to lose that provocative set of your mouth, the look on your face, the exaggerated intake of breath that makes someone want to slug you – it’s baked in, it’s yours to keep forever, no matter how hard you might try to disown it.

Once you do any of those angry moves, it instantly proves the point of the person who insists you’re a ruthless killer, no matter how hard you try to deny it, no matter how patient you’ve already been, no matter how much better you might be doing at self-restraint than before.

I can’t help thinking of political oppressors in the same way. Provoke a hurt response and then punish the person for that response. Keep a knee on somebody’s neck for years. When the person gets up, and is angry about the mistreatment, it proves the oppressor’s point. “That’s why I had to keep my knee on your neck. Look how fucking angry you are!” Bill Barr is a master of this particular despicable trick.

Of course, the beauty — and horror — of being human is that anyone can convince themselves that they are only acting for highly principled reasons. It’s the other side – you know, that is doing all the hating, cheating, obstructing, killing, drinking the blood of murdered child sex slaves. We are only doing these things because THE OTHER SIDE IS DOING IT ALREADY! It’s a matter of principle – and survival.

Here’s what hit me hard the other day. I decided at a certain point a few decades back that I will not tolerate abuse in my personal life. I try hard not to abuse anyone’s feelings, and if I do something that I learn hurt somebody, I am quick to try to make amends, first by apologizing. I’d will this to be a universal principle. I saw the other day that this is only a first step, that it really prevents no part of your lowest nature from coming out if the provocation is sufficient. You can read these posts over the years for several examples of fatal fallings out I’ve had with longtime friends and acquaintances. Here are three off the top of my head. Bear in mind that each of these characters has their own version of these dramas that make me as much the irredeemable villain as these may make them appear to be.

I had an acquaintance I used to see once or twice a year. A writer by profession, a great storyteller with a merry aspect, always good for several hours of spinning interesting tales back and forth and having some knowing laughs. We weren’t friends beyond that, but we liked each other. When I was first working on the book about my father we discussed it over dinner and he seemed intrigued. He told me to send him some pages, he’d give me his two cents. I sent him some pages, didn’t hear back, sent a few more, didn’t hear back, asked him about it, didn’t hear back.

Was it unreasonable of me to feel hurt? Probably not. Was it unreasonable of me to expect a working craftsman of a writer who had never published anything of a personal nature to have any meaningful input on my first draft of a highly personal memoir? Maybe yes, maybe no. Writing is writing, you could say.

In my mind, his year-later defensive email that I was being an asshole to hold it against him that he may or may not have ever commented on pages he doesn’t even remember if he ever read, and that if he had read them he’d almost certainly have written back about, was abusive. Perhaps not everybody would interpret this response, or the ones that followed, as abusive. I did. The gloves I’d carefully kept on came off, I ripped him into several bleeding pieces and walked away [1]. Proving to him, as well as to his ex-wife, that I was indeed a vicious, unreasonable asshole. Case closed, end of story.

Many people might have had a different reaction than mine. OK, they might reason, he was the wrong person to ask for this feedback, even if he offered it. OK, we were never really friends, just acquaintances, it was unreasonable of me to expect him to be able to react to these deeply personal pages. OK, he admitted, toward the end, that he was raised to be insanely competitive, maybe these intensely personal pages were something he felt overwhelmed by, that he felt he could not compete against. I don’t know. I do understand now, that only someone raised in a war zone would calmly slash the guy five times with a sharp sword over it, making sure he knew why he was good and dead, before walking away [again– 1].

Same with the longtime musician friend who offered to do me a favor, then changed his mind, then insisted I had no right to ask why he’d changed his mind, then admitted he did it because he’s been harboring a lot of anger and resentment against me and this was his way of telling me “fuck you.” Many people might file this somewhere, lower their expectations, no longer think of the guy as a friend – maybe even write the guy off. Not everybody would feel compelled to cooly and methodically remove each of his limbs and pile them in front of his head and torso in order to ensure he’d be hurt enough to shut the fuck up [2].

One last, most recent one. A very good friend, since late childhood, and I came to (figurative) blows a few months back. He’s a very smart guy with a dark sense of humor and we’d known each other since Junior High School. In hindsight, most of our intimate conversations were about my troubles. He told me once that he doesn’t like to complain about his life. He always seemed to have a good appetite for my troubles, though. In the latest round his efforts to help wound up antagonizing me, several times in a row. The more I tried to explain why, the more he told me I was wrong, not making sense, that he still didn’t understand. The clearer my explanations became, the more he asked me to please explain further, more clearly, since he was finding it impossible to understand what I was talking about.

A game for suckers, no doubt, and by then I should have recognized it and gracefully written him off, reduced my expectations to near zero, preserved what I could of our long friendship, if only for the sake of our mates. Something was rotten here, clearly, but I kept trying to explain what he kept telling me he still couldn’t understand. I kept believing in this mutual good faith effort we were not managing to make.

He got angry a few times, snarled and even hung up on me during a tense conversation after gruffly apologizing, although he really wasn’t sure what I needed an apology for or why the hell I insisted on shoving him into a corner when he’d done nothing any other good friend wouldn’t have done in his situation.

It is what happened last that lingers for me. I eventually saw that this was an emotional impasse I could not get him to understand with his fine and subtle mind. Emotionally, he was unable to recognize or take responsibility for the hurtfulness of his actions. He waited weeks to apologize for his little temper tantrum, and the follow up text that he was done being “reamed” by me, even as he wrote me several long emails attempting to be conciliatory and expressing a desire to do everything possible to save our friendship.

In the end he once again insisted he didn’t understand why or how I could have been so hurt by anything he might have done, though he apologized again, for whatever it might have been. He made an unusual complaint: since my communications had been so mild mannered he’d had a very hard time realizing how much I’d been hurt by his inadvertent acts. If he accidentally stepped on my toe and I didn’t cry out, how could he possibly be expected to know how much it had hurt me? When in the end I did cry out, he was inconsolable.

Again, why bother crying out at that point? It was clear, over and over, that my old friend did not have the emotional bandwidth to understand what was missing in our friendship. He insisted I was his dearest friend ever, that he loved me and would fight to remain friends. It was equally clear that he had much different expectations of a lifelong friendship than I did. My crying out, upon request, by going through several emails and pointing out the seamless folly of our back and forth, struck a fatal blow in the guy. It was unkind and hurtful of me to make it so clear that there was nothing further to discuss, he wrote. In the end, he couldn’t fathom my unprovoked viciousness.

In each of the above cases, an argument could be made that, after all my attempts to be reasonable, I did nothing to regret in writing a suitable ending to each of these dramas. In one, an acquaintance set me up for a cruel disappointment he then blamed me for. The musician friend had a long list of unspoken reasons to tell me, in no uncertain terms, to go fuck myself. My old friend’s limitations only finally overwhelmed me when I was in a tight spot and his inability to empathize kept making it tighter. In each case, not much to salvage, whether or not I insisted on having an unkind last word.

In each case, yes, in the end I was categorical in stating the obvious. I seemingly could not stop myself. The other party felt brutalized by me. All unfortunate, in a better world than this one.

The insight for me is how hard it is to root out this final urge to kill someone who insists on their right to hurt you. Perhaps I am setting an impossibly high bar for myself, but this reminder that I am still helpless against certain specific emotional circumstances, was an unwelcome one.

If someone accuses you of being angry, and you remain mild, and they keep insisting you are irrationally angry, and you start to become frustrated but hold yourself back, and they redouble their efforts to prove you are an implacably angry bastard – well, a wiser person would manage to get out of the loop before he explodes in anger. This trap is one of the obstacles my father apologized for putting in my path. How I never saw it before a few days ago is a mystery to me.

The irony I mentioned about the seeming impossibility of completing the public personal memorial to my parents and their erased ancestors: it seems impossible to me for the very reasons I’ve discussed above. A sense of futility was instilled in my sister and me, from a young age, seeing there was nothing we could do to avoid eternal war with the father who always blamed us as the aggressors.

“I can hear you whining to the fucking shrink about how your parents ruined your life,” our father would predict from time to time. A pretty judgmental way to put it, perhaps, though not unreasonable, given the hard work he was putting in to make it so.

So, granted, my father had many great qualities, along with a few tragic failings, that would make him an excellent protagonist for a memoir. I’ve written at least 1,300 pages of an unwieldy first draft of his story. Granted, the vast majority of my family, on both sides, were lost in the cold fog of history, mere statistics, victims of Hitlerism without names, their mass graves and even the godforsaken hellholes they came from erased from human memory. I’d like to write and leave a living memorial to them, before I fold up my tents here and cash in my chips. The irony?

The obstacles my father unwittingly placed in the way keep me from feeling able to complete this gigantic task I have set myself, a task I have probably already come more than 80% toward completing. So those obstacles will prevent my father, his life, the world he came from, from being memorialized in a book strangers can read, to ponder the difficult, important lessons I’ve been grappling with since I was a young child.

Ironic, eh wot?

[1] to be clear, this bloody act came in the form of a blahg post methodically dissecting and dismissing his maddening if-pology, phrase by phrase

[2] This gruesome dismemberment took the form of three stinging paragraphs, responding to his “personality conflict” conclusion. I corrected it to a worldview conflict — the first paragraph savaged his vanity and materialism, the second disclaimed responsibility for his inferiority complex — the third I don’t recall at the moment, but it was apparently as hurtful as intended.

Court is a dead-end for Trump 2020 and the RNC

Mr. Trump may well make good on his threat to raise millions more from donors and litigate the fake election results up to the Supreme Court. In his life, in every challenge he’s ever faced, he’s taken people to court, harassing enemies, making headlines, defrauding many of money he owed them over the course of his high stakes gambling life.

He has engaged in so many lawsuits, and complained so often of persecution, as he sues people, that there is a current biography of him called Plaintiff-in-Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 lawsuits (he started or caused a staggering 300 lawsuits, in 44 states, prior to this rigged election). He’s now still hoping Amy, Neil and Brett, (particularly Amy), hold up their end of the quid pro quo (get over it!) and find a way to keep him in power, legally.

He’s got a steep uphill road to his friends on the nation’s highest court. A popular vote loss and a multi-state Electoral College loss are not easy for even the most fervent and loyal lifetime appointed partisans to fix. Particularly in the absence of any proof of voter fraud or electoral mischief that could have changed the outcome of the rigged election.

This situation Trump finds himself in, losing, both the “popular vote” and the Electoral College, cannot be fixed by the Supreme Court, even if Mr. Trump had anything resembling that team of very sophisticated white shoed Republican ideological lawyers who narrowly tailored their arguments to the specific facts of the extremely rare electoral stand-off that led to the one-off decision in Bush v. Gore.

In Bush v Gore the stars aligned perfectly for Bush and friends: virtual tie in the single state that would decide the outcome, top notch lawyering, assisted by an energetic team of bright young legal zealots, including future Supreme Court justices John Roberts, Brett (“Boof”) Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, and a determined right-leaning 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court waiting to take the emergency application and willing to rule on it. The legal all-stars that brought Bush v. Gore provided a variety of legal theories and arguments in support of their emergency petition to stop the voting before irreparable harm to Bush’s chances at the presidency happened.

Antonin Scalia, as brilliant a legal mind as ever sat on that court, pulled one argument out of the bundle and the 5-4 majority ran with that Hail Mary argument by Bush’s top-shelf legal team [1]. Justice Kennedy is reputed to have been the author of the infamous decision. It found there was some kind of clear violation of the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment which states that citizens have the right to equal protection of the law.

The 5-4 majority said, and don’t quote us on this, ever, this decision is not to be used as a precedent (unprecedented) but a selective recount in contested counties was a violation of equal protection, in this instance, because, in Florida, counties had different systems of voting, some with touch screens, others with paper ballots, so it would be unconstitutional to, oh, you know what we’re saying! (Where I voted in NYC they had paper ballots and scanners so the ballots — scanned and paper record– could be correlated and reconciled in the event of a controversy).

Five unappealable conservative jurists put aside their partisan beliefs to make a bold and unprecedented decision that decided the 2000 presidential election. The Court crafted a one-off, disposable ruling, in favor of Bush. Case closed. Get over it. Mr. Trump was really counting on his fresh 6-3 majority to do him a similar favor.

The Scalia Court (it was actually the Rehnquist Court) reasoned that, eh, since Bush would be irreparably harmed (by not becoming president) by the recounting of votes in some counties while not others, and the People of Florida had a right to be equally protected under the law as far as their representation in a recount, well, you see, it’s clear that under the 14th Amendment the counting of ballots has to stop, it’s a clear violation of that constitutional clause we cited. Bush would otherwise be irreparably harmed, as plaintiffs’ crack legal team has persuasively claimed. By the way, never cite this case, it will not be precedent for any other case in the future. Only time I’ve ever heard of that on a Supreme Court decision.

To win this kind of legal challenge you need a concrete legal injury (besides “unfair that I lost!”) a coherent legal theory of some kind leading to a legal remedy (the judge can’t work with nothing) and some evidence to support the claims you’re making. The Trump/RNC lawsuits that are constantly being dismissed do none of these things.

Young Donald learned, at the tit of eventually disgraced, several times indicted, belatedly disbarred mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, that given enough aggression and manipulation, and controlling the messaging in the court of public opinion via the press, any court case can be won, settled favorably — or at least drawn out long enough to prevent the worst. This is mostly still true today, providing you have unlimited money and the smartest, most unethical lawyers in America on your payroll. But, it’s not necessarily so– even if Trump’s lawyers were of the caliber of the white shoed ferrets who prevailed in the one-off Bush v. Gore. The circumstances also matter in court cases where they are called “the facts”. Sorry about that, Don.

A couple of words about the Republican claim, while they were forcing another lifetime justice on to the Supreme Court in the weeks before the election (while leaving millions of poor Americans to their misery by refusing to vote on the House bill to extend government help to millions of our hungry, unemployed, increasingly desperate fellow citizens), that Democrats, if they had the power, would do the exact same thing — take advantage of a narrow majority in the same abusive way Republicans did in cramming through the confirmation of a highly partisan Supreme Court justice to cement an irrefutable majority days before a presidential election, with voting well under way.

In a strong field of contenders, this claim is possibly the most despicable recent Republican claim. It boils down to a circular bit of illogic: I can prove (at least to stupid people who hate you) that you would cheat if you were in my situation, because I am cheating, which proves that if you were in my position you would do THE EXACT SAME THING. McConnell and Graham both made this point repeatedly during the confirmation of religious extremist Amy Coney Barrett. Both of these atrocities have been easily reelected for six more years. Live with it, losers. The widely disliked senator from Texas whose father killed JFK (according to Trump) said the same thing.

Heh, what are ya gonna do?

[1] Wikipedia:

Justice Antonin Scalia, convinced that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida’s counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately.^[1] On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay for Bush, with Scalia citing “irreparable harm” that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast “a needless and unjustified cloud” over Bush’s legitimacy. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm.”^[1] Oral arguments were scheduled for December 11.
In a per curiam decision, the Court first ruled 7–2 (Justices Stevens and Ginsburg dissenting), strictly on equal protection grounds, that the recount be stopped. Specifically, the use of different standards of counting in different counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. (The case had also been argued on the basis of Article II jurisdictional grounds, which found favor with only Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist.) Second, the Court ruled 5–4 against the remedy, proposed by Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter, of sending the case back to Florida to complete the recount using a uniform statewide standard before the scheduled December 18 meeting of Florida’s electors in Tallahassee.^[1] The majority held that no alternative method could be established within the discretionary December 12 “safe harbor” deadline set by Title 3 of the United States Code (3 U.S.C.), § 5, which the Florida Supreme Court had stated that the Florida Legislature intended to meet.^[2] That deadline arrived two hours after the release of the Court’s decision. The Court, stating that not meeting the “safe harbor” deadline would therefore violate the Florida Election Code, rejected an extension of the deadline.

This “close” election set me to wondering

A lot of relief today, among people I know, that this, eh, close election appears to be over. Sekhnet is downtown now happily photographing some of the street celebrations out there in New York City, a flagrant “anarchist jurisdiction” that, for whatever reason, just doesn’t like Donald Trump. Turns out winning by 4,000,000 or more votes makes it a close election, too close to call for days, an electoral squeaker, in these Exceptional United States of America. I looked up “popular vote” margins for winning presidential candidates. You can see the chart here.

Trump’s 2016 margin of victory, in the “popular vote,” minus 2,868,686, is more than five times lower than the previous record negative vote margin, George W. Bush’s −543,816 in 2000. Same with the percentages, Trump’s −2.09% popular vote margin easily eclipsed the 0.51% loss Bush experienced in 2000.

Trump’s 46.09% of the POPULAR vote was the lowest total since Clinton in 1992 and Nixon in 1968. Recall though, Clinton ran in a three party race, with a wealthy outsider garnering millions of votes and Nixon faced a challenge from the racist right in George Wallace, who got a nice chunk of votes in several states Tricky Dick barely won. In a two party election, you have to go back to Woodrow Wilson in 1912 for a “winner” getting a lower percentage of the actual cast ballots (whoops… actually, you have to go back to James Buchanan in 1856 [1]).

I know, my mind just goes there, looking backward for some kind of seemingly tangible perspective. Believers of every stripe often look to history for support of their theories. An impressively deceptive “non-partisan” documentary about the safeguard of democracy that is the ingenious Electoral College, featuring discredited right wing voter fraud conspiracy theorist Hans von Spakovsky [2], notes, citing the historical record, that without the Electoral College there would have been no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation, probably no free Negroes in the United States today! The Electoral College, our safeguard against tyranny! Ask the ghost of the great Republican Honest Abe!

In 2020 you can access reliable facts in seconds, one thing that makes it so maddening that an unending stream of easily disprovable “alternative facts” (lies) can catapult an unhinged demagogue to 70,000,000 popular votes after the historical disaster that was his mad, narrowly engineered 78,000 vote Electoral College presidency.

Lincoln did win in 1860 with a lower margin of the popular vote than even the man formerly known as The Donald got in 2016. Honest Abe only got 39.65%, you can look it up, though, equally verifiable– he won the Electoral College handily, with 180 out of 303 Electors. In 1864 he was reelected with a solid majority of all votes cast, as well as the Electoral College.

It doesn’t take long, a few minutes of tapping and a little reading, to find out how this happened. The Democratic party, like the Baptist Church at the time, was divided into a Northern anti-slavery faction and a Southern pro-slavery one (in the church the argument was whether the Lord our God and Jesus Christ loved or hated slavery). As a result of this sectional rift two opposing Democrats ran against Lincoln and his brand new Republican party in 1860. There was also a fourth presidential candidate, a man from Tennessee, who got a sizable number of votes. None came close to Lincoln’s large plurality. The decisive Electoral College vote Lincoln got that year made the idea of any kind of recount moot, it was not remotely close. The states that hated Lincoln simply seceded, fought a long and bloody war (a war they insist to this day — not without a lot of evidence— they never lost) and one of their’s eventually killed the Great Emancipator. The rest, as they say, is history.

Another factor that should be considered about the 1860 election is something democracy-loving extremists like Hans von Spakovsky and Steve Bannon must salivate about when they read it, Lincoln was simply left off the ballots in 10 of the 11 states that would secede from the Union shortly after Lincoln was elected president.

Yes, I know, it does seem impossible to understand. It seems like something every “Red State” [2] should have done in the lead up to the 2020 rematch, just leave Biden/Harris off the ballot– et, voila, 100% Trump vote in those states. I wouldn’t put it past ’em, since the ends clearly justify the means for their kind, but I now understand why it would have been impossible. A few moments of diligent tapping gave me the answer about Lincoln being left off all those Southern ballots. There is a procedure in every state for getting your party’s candidate on the ballot– there was nobody (who wanted not to be lynched) to do that for Lincoln in the South in 1860.

Getting on the ballot is a state issue. In South Carolina there were no ballots; the people didn’t vote for any Presidential candidate — Electors were chosen by the legislature, which included no Republican member. As for the other southern states: who was going to organize the Republican Party in the South in 1856 or 1860? The once-influential southern anti-slavery, even Abolitionist opinion in the South had long since been driven out or intimidated into silence by the hostility of the pro-slavery majorities. To campaign for an anti-slavery party was to put oneself at considerable personal risk.
On December 7, 1860, Georgia Gov. Joseph Brown, in an open letter to the people of his state, called for secession, because, in part, if Lincoln were allowed to appoint “Judges, District Attorneys, Marshals, Post Masters, Custom House officers, etc., etc.,he will have succeeded in dividing us to an extent that will destroy all our moral powers, and prepare us to tolerate the running of a Republican ticket, in most of the States of the South, in 1864.” (my emphasis). [http://www.civilwarcauses.org/jbrown.htm]. A Republican presence was simply intolerable.
BTW: The Democrats had also become a Sectional Party in 1860. Northern Democrats (Douglas), Southern Democrats (Breckenridge), were the principal fragments of the crumbling structure. (Which left poor Bell as the last truly National Democrat!)
There’s a, probably apocryphal, story that Lincoln received only 9 votes in some Southern county. When a Northerner expressed incredulity at the total, a Southerner replied, “Yes, and when we find the SOB who voted 9 times, we’re gonna hang him!”
source

[1] whoops:

The 1912 United States elections elected the members of the 63rd United States Congress, occurring during the Fourth Party System. Amidst a division between incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft and former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, the Democratic Party won the Presidency and both chambers of Congress, the first time they accomplished that feat since the 1892 election.

[2]

Note also what bullshit this Red State/Blue State reductivism is. There has never been a state, anywhere, that is 100% Nazi or 100% anti-Nazi — no place in the USA where the Klan has zero support and other places where it has 100% support. As our recently defeated president pointed out: there are good people, very fine people, on both sides (as well as some very bad ones.)

Sometimes “Red” or “Blue” states change color based on the thinnest of margins. The idea that there is a noisy group of Jews demonstrating loudly in “Jews for Hitler” t-shirts somewhere doesn’t mean that everyone in that state, city, town, street, or even house, agrees with the strong opinion of the arguably self-destructive Jews with the proud t-shirt.

No place in the United States is purely RED or BLUE. If Biden winds up winning any of his Electoral College states by even single digit vote totals, after all the millions of dollars worth of legal challenges and all the ballot recounting, does that mean all the people who voted against him in that state suddenly turned blue? Come on.

The NY Times did a nice feature, a few days before the election, about how this idiotic “dichotomy” is reflected on the very misleading and influential maps we are all seeing all the time. Check this graphic out (the interactive map show is pretty cool too):

source

Invitation to Commit Violence in the name of Liberty and Justice

It was really not surprising, horrific as it also was, to hear unhinged fascist Steve Bannon call the other day for the decapitation of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray. Their heads, he stated, on his podcast and via Twitter, should be on fucking pikes. For the capital crime, presumably, of treason to the Leader. In Bannon’s view, Fuhrerworte haben Gesestzeskraft — the Leader’s word has the force of law, (as long as Bannon gets to have a say in who the Leader is and what he says).

The blowhard was slapped hard by Twitter after posting these incendiary opinions. Banned from the social media app. He is awaiting acquittal, conviction, or some kind of plea deal, in the fraud case against him for allegedly (and most likely) fleecing gullible, trusting, sincere Trump supporters of millions of dollars for his personal enrichment in a fake Build That Wall crowd-funding scheme. He exploited the patriotism of those low-information supporters too uninformed to realize that Mexico had already fully paid for the Southern Border Wall that has solved virtually every one of our great nation’s problems. As promised by the Promise-Keeper-in-Chief.

Is it reasonable to fear some kind of mass violence by Trump’s fired up, heavily armed supporters? Probably, the president is keeping all options on the table, his tweeted commands are routinely obeyed by groups of diehard Trump activists who don’t shrink from violence. Bannon (Sloppy Steve, who was pushed out of the Trump administration when he took too much credit for being Trump’s brain) was on Fox on Election Day, keeping the troops fired up with deliberate, provocative misinformation, infuriating lies, if you will. This snapshot is about all you need for the gist of his “argument”, I wasn’t able to watch more than a moment of it.

The beauty part, of course, is that evidence is no longer necessary to prove your case– you just have to tell your followers clearly how they are being abused and by whom.

If evil people are openly trying to steal an election, suppress your vote, cheat to win– isn’t it only right to go out with baseball bats, at minimum, and smash them in their smug faces? I mean, isn’t it?

Here are some more thoughts from historian Heather Cox Richardson, about how Trump, Bannon and their ilk, exploit and stoke misinformation, expressed with a bit of optimism about the sudden spine of the mass media and of prominent Republicans publicly abandoning Trump that may have been premature.

First of all, much of Trump’s power during his term has come from his ability to dominate the public narrative through threats or rumors. From his insistence that he had hired detectives to investigate President Obama’s birth certificate, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails and Hunter Biden’s laptop, he has gathered power by warning that something untoward was looming just over the horizon. But yesterday, after all the hype about expected violence at the polls, there was remarkably little trouble.
Trump’s attempt to control politics by controlling the narrative continued early this morning, as the Department of Justice sent an email to federal prosecutors telling them that, while the law prohibits sending armed federal officers to polling places, it did authorize them to monitor “voting fraud” by sending armed federal officers to the places where election officials were counting ballots. About a half hour later, Trump called a press conference in which he declared victory and claimed that the ongoing counting of legally cast ballots must be stopped. Counting the ballots, he said, was the Democrats’ attempt to “steal the election.”
But Trump’s power is wavering, and he can no longer control the narrative. As he spoke, NBC News and MSNBC cut in to note that he was lying. After he finished, other media outlets also pushed back. On ABC News, Terry Moran said: “This isn’t law, this isn’t politics, this is theater,” Moran said. “And let’s be blunt: it’s the theater of authoritarianism.” Throughout the day, Trump tweeted angrily about the on-going counting of ballots; Twitter hid many of the tweets behind warnings that they were spreading disinformation.
Republican leaders have been surprisingly quick to turn on the president. Last night, the Fox News Channel was the first to call the state of Arizona for Democratic candidate Joe Biden which, according to Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair, led Trump to call Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox News Channel, to demand a retraction. Murdoch, who has said for months that Trump would lose the election, refused.
source

She provides us another important story that slipped through the cracks, as the high-powered shit hoses were flooding the zone in every way Trump and his allies have become so proficient at in our rightful terror over being terrorized by a terroristic party of violence- threatening extremists.

Another news story dropped quietly yesterday while people were distracted with the election. The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security issued a report challenging Acting Director Chad Wolf’s actions this summer when he sent law enforcement officers from the department to Portland, Oregon. The report challenged the deployments’ legality on a number of fronts, and concluded that the issue is open, unresolved, and urgent. The Department of Homeland Security’s top attorney, Chad Mizelle, an ally of senior White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, rejects the inspector general’s findings.

Of course, if he gets a moment, Trump knows exactly what to do. You fire the damned Inspector General, screw him, traitor! Put his head on a goddamned pike next to Fauci’s, Wray’s, Mueller’s, Comey’s, Sessions’s, Lindsey Graham’s (no, wait, Graham defended him yesterday), Omorosa’s, Hillary’s, Obama’s, Tillerson’s (who’s the fucking moron now, Rex?) those five fucks who raped the woman in Central Park and got away with it, Joe Biden’s, Hunter Biden’s, Stephen Colbert’s, Rosie O’Donnell’s, Oprah’s, Mary Trump’s, Giuliani’s, etc.

In our divided, fearful world, at this moment of disorienting uncertainty, billions of us increasingly facing imminent death and destruction, we can only go one of two ways — toward greater humanity or greater inhumanity. Sadly, the impulses seems to be solidly divided 50/50 at the moment.

I could seriously use a nice a nap, couldn’t you?

An anxiety-ridden nail-biter election, somewhat explained by historian Heather Cox Richardson

We are told by the mass media that this election is too close to call right now, very few votes separate the candidates in several “key” “battleground” states. It is not really that close an election, one candidate is about 4,000,000 votes behind the other.

It is only “too close to call” because of a brilliant device, the Electoral College, created, in large part, to preserve the Great Compromise with slaveholders in less populace states (at the time slaves were not considered humans, though a political deal decreed slave men counted for 3/5 of a man — recall the Three-fifths Compromise — for purposes of representation in Congress and Electoral College votes. Slave majority states like South Carolina got a great boon from this deal.). The Electoral College keeps the final decision about the presidency out of the hands of the riffraff, particularly the descendants of former slaves. It should be gone, for many reasons, but it is still the law of the land, as the Framers designed it as part of their Great Compromise with the beneficiaries of the Peculiar Institution (presumably, according to a pious Originalist like Antonin Scalia or Amy Coney Barrett, after direct consultation with the Old Testament God and Jesus Christ Himself).

The night of Election Day, Heather Cox Richardson laid out a bit of our history of the best, most accomplished and most well-born of us keeping the final say in our democracy out of the hands of the crude, dumb majority, entrusting democracy, instead, to the best people, our most refined people.

I have to admit I was not surprised to learn that quintessential American hypocrite Thomas Jefferson, Author of Liberty and enlightened Renaissance Man, played an outsized role in creating an ugly, unintended invitation to future tyranny. Too soon to know if Trump’s lawyers will, against all the odds, find a way to use the Original Intent of the Framers as the last word on who wins and who loses the presidential sweepstakes, no matter how many votes are cast. The facts might make you scream, but, today, a little screaming is probably good for you.

In 2018, for example, people in Florida voted overwhelmingly to restore voting rights to felons. This would have added about 1.5 million people back to the rolls, many of them African Americans. But the Republican legislature passed a law saying the former felons could not vote unless they had paid all their court fines and fees. A federal judge said that law was essentially an unconstitutional poll tax, but an appeals court overturned that decision. Five of the six judges who upheld the law were appointed by Trump.
Today, as well, there are problems with ballots. This summer, the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a major fundraiser for the Republican Party and a key ally of Trump, changed the rules for mail delivery, slowing it significantly. It turns out that more than 300,000 ballots were checked into the USPS mail system but not checked out of it. U.S. District Judge Emmett G. Sullivan ordered the USPS to sweep 27 processing centers for the missing ballots, but USPS officials refused, saying they already had a system in place and that changing it would be disruptive. Sullivan has called the parties in tomorrow morning to discuss the issue.
The problem of voter suppression is compounded by the misuse of the Electoral College. The Framers originally designed delegates to the Electoral College to vote according to districts within states, so that states would split their electoral votes, making them roughly proportional to a candidate’s support. That system changed in 1800, after Thomas Jefferson recognized that he would have a better chance of winning the presidency if the delegates of his own home state, Virginia, voted as a bloc rather than by district. He convinced them to do it. Quickly, other state officials recognized that the “winner-take-all” system meant they must do the same or their own preferred candidate would never win. Thus, our non-proportional system was born, and it so horrified James Madison and Alexander Hamilton that both wanted constitutional amendments to switch the system back.
Democracy took another hit from that system in 1929. The 1920 census showed that the weight of the nation’s demographics was moving to cities, which were controlled by Democrats, so the Republicans in control of the House of Representatives refused to reapportion representation after that census. Reapportioning the House would have cost many of them their seats. Rather than permitting the number of representatives to grow along with population, Congress then capped the size of the House at 435. Since then, the average size of a congressional district has tripled. This gives smaller states a huge advantage in the Electoral College, in which each state gets a number of votes equal to the number of its senators and representatives.
These injuries to our system have saddled us with an Electoral College that permits a minority to tyrannize over the majority. That systemic advantage is unsustainable in a democracy. One or the other will have to give.
source

Fake News — we keep breaking COVID-19 records after massive in-person voting in all states

Look, I’m not saying this latest spike in Covid-19 infections and deaths has anything to do with the president making it clear that our possibly fraudulent mail-in votes were not guaranteed to be received in time to be legally counted, no matter when we mailed them. I went to the polls early, in person, as did Sekhnet, as did many people I know. We were taking no chances leaving things in the sweaty hands of the creepy Louis DeJoy. Millions who voted against Mr. Trump did the same (along with most of the 70,000,000 Trump supporters who also voted in person). Depending on where you live in the USA, this in-person voting was relatively safe (as in NY City where every precaution was taken) or potentially very risky (as in virtually any state that was up for grabs).

Because the president made the safe way to vote during an airborne pandemic, like the safe way to interact in public, a wedge issue to drive Americans apart, a few million Americans, maybe tens of millions of Americans, stood on lines in places where people don’t cotton to wearing masks. In Texas, for example, the law allows election officials to choose whether to wear masks and also allows them to force voters to remove masks in the polling place if they want to vote. That’s called democracy, down in the great state of Texas.

I’m not saying there’s any connection between the president’s depraved indifference to the lives and deaths of millions of his citizens and the spikes in Covid-19 infections and death nationwide, I’m also not saying there’s not any connection. A few numbers, during these aggravating days of counting and recounting.

Election day (I think, or maybe the day after):

Wednesday, as Mr. Trump demanded the counting stop (except in Arizona, where he is behind, and had a crowd in Maricopa County chanting “Count the votes! Count the votes!” In another state his impromptu mob chanted “Stop the count! Stop the Count!”) die Lügenpresse kept flagrantly counting so-called Covid cases and reported:

and the latest totally fake record (until tomorrow):

Speaking of numbers, Mr. Trump’s lead in Georgia was 50,000 votes yesterday evening when my cousin called from a suburb of Atlanta. By the time we got off the phone an hour later, the lead was about 40,000 votes. I watched the lead decline over the course of the next 30 hours or so, checking my phone regularly, like I was checking the boxscore of an important baseball game in progress. By midnight tonight, Mr. Trump’s lead was under 2,000 votes:

at around 3 a.m. it was less than half that

At 4:00 a.m. Mr. Trump’s lead was 463 votes. If Mr. Biden gets the 16 electors from the great state of Georgia, the ballgame is over, Joe Biden, with a razor thin 4,000,000+ popular vote lead and at least 270 Electoral College votes (according to the Associated Press and Fox News– though not most of the others which would have him at 269 with Georgia’s 16), is the 46th president of the United States.

Update, at 4:53 a.m. (ah, who can sleep these days?) Mr. Biden up by almost 1,000 in the great state of Georgia.

In other fake news:

https://twitter.com/Sifill_LDF/status/1324515166961176576

A Little Reminder About Moods

Moods come and go, and are often subject to actual events in your life. It is good to keep this transience in mind when a painful mood is oppressing you, when it feels like a particularly hard emotion will keep you in its grip forever. Moods feel irrefutable, but the ones produced by raging stress often start succumbing to reason after a good night’s sleep. It’s hard to keep this in mind while the emotion is strong, when it’s hard to even get to sleep, but I think practice may help.

Sekhnet and I recently saved the lives of five tiny feral kittens. They’d been dropped in Sekhnet’s garden by a shrewd mother cat, a cat we didn’t know, who abandoned them to the care of the provider of the neighborhood’s best cat buffet. Once Sekhnet inadvertently allowed one of them to eat. The good looking little cat caught her eye before he left.

The next day the tiny alpha kitten was back, demanding food on behalf of himself and his four larger siblings. He simply would not take no for an answer.

After Alpha made his successful appeal, the others followed. Sekhnet got a good shot of three of his four bothers and sisters, coming out of their hiding place and marching toward the feeding area.

That day they all began eating two hearty meals a day in the garden, exploring and hanging out all over the place, much to the disgust of the five adult feral cats who already lived on, and had fought for control of, that turf. Here they are, led by tiny, indomitable Alpha Mouse, in the male pear tree. Naturally he was the first one up the tree. He’s looking down on them in this shot.

The disorienting pandemic lockdown was on and we took on the saving of these five tiny lives as a kind of mission. Over the years we’d watched dozens of feral cats and kittens we got to know live short, often brutal lives, many of our favorites living only a couple of months. We decided we’d try our best to save these five.

Sekhnet fed and played with them a bit in the garden every day. She took many great photos of the little beauties. I would go out and sit with them late at night, little Alpha didn’t mind being picked up, would sit calmly on my lap from the beginning. They all learned to chase the little cat cookies I’d toss them and eventually to eat them out of our hands. Once the first couple were fairly tame (Alpha’s brother Beta followed in the little leader’s footsteps) Sekhnet designed an ingenious trap, scooped them all up at once and brought them inside where they lived in a large comfortable cage she’d found online. We then set about getting the others used to being picked up and petted. They all took to it quickly.

They were surprisingly happy with the cage, which had several levels and a little workout area where they could take turns pounding a couple of light speed bags. We took them out and handled them one at a time, petted them, won them over, made them all pets. In the end we brought them to a great adoption center we finally found and every one of them was soon adopted as a pet. Naturally Alpha was the first to be adopted, after a very short stay at the shelter, his first day out of quarantine, I think. The rest were all quickly adopted in the days that followed.

We’d done a good deed, we knew we couldn’t keep them around, our plan from the start was to get them adopted to have good lives but we were emotionally devastated that first night, after our friend rented a van and helped us transport them to the shelter in Freeport. They had all come to trust us, and were affectionate and playful, and incredibly cute. We’d grown very attached to having them around. Then they were gone. The house seemed so empty. We cried looking at their many portraits and film clips that first night.

But here is the point I want to make. The pain, though intense, did not last long. By the next day it was much easier, within two days easier still. The good deed we’d done lingered, the painful goodbye to them didn’t. It is something worth remembering when you feel heartbroken sometimes. Painful feelings truly do pass, sometimes surprisingly quickly.

I think of our horror (mine and Sekhnet’s, millions of others were delighted) on election night, at how close the vote was, at the real chance that America’s long experiment in democracy was finally and definitively at an end. At least five million MORE of our countrymen had come out to vote a second time for the most deliberately divisive, untruthful, vindictive, angry, litigious president this nation has ever had. Women, it emerged, had voted for Trump in larger numbers in 2020 than 2016! Women! Hispanic (desculpe me, Latinx) votes seem to have put him over the top in Texas and Florida. The real possibility that this raging winner could win the election and triumphantly rule as lawlessly as he sees fit set Sekhnet to sobbing into her ginger beer. I felt sick too, could not get to sleep.

In the days before the election, as the pandemic continued to rage out of control in most of the country, and new records for infections and deaths were broken day after day, the president confidently (and lyingly) declared victory over the disease that was killing record numbers in the states he won. Mission Accomplished! His maskless crowds roared their approval. On election night the agitated depression we felt was impossible to refute. It was based on the unwanted truth that we are living in a nightmare where the stubbornly reinforced, aggressive stupidity of millions of our fellow citizens, proud “values voters,” impervious to evidence even if it comes up and chokes their family members to death, is unfathomable.

The day after Election Day, as the incoming vote totals were being disputed by a president who had already strongly suggested he was declaring victory, even as he announced his intention to dispute his loss in the 6-3 Supreme Court he’d created, the media (the lying media, die Lügenpresse) was quietly publishing items like these. No longer really headlines, as much as wistful reminders:

I think bitterly that if Trump’s pandemic plan had really worked, letting the pandemic kill millions of “Democrat” voters of color in “Democrat” cities, cutting off needed financial aid to the increasingly large numbers of poor to create mass desperation and massive crime sprees, riots, looting and the need for Bill Barr’s Bureau of Prisons and ICE forces to violently clamp down on “Democrat” cities, (perhaps deploying even the military itself under the Insurrection Act,) he could have proved his wildest “law and order” theory about antifa and anarchy and black rights groups, killed and locked up enough of his enemies to actually win the Electoral College, even if he again lost the “popular vote” by millions. His open conspiracy with political supporter and mega-donor Louis DeJoy, who openly sabotaged the delivery of predominantly Democratic votes, alone, could have won him the election. It could still, unlikely as it now appears.

As the vote counting continues, Trump insisting that counting in areas he leads but is in danger of losing must be halted immediately while demanding recounts in states he has already lost (fair is fair), it looks less and less likely that the president has a path to 270. As my cousin wrote me from the great state of Georgia today:

It’s too close, but I think the only way Trump gets to 270 is if he loses 50 lbs.

My point in all this — as Biden gets closer and closer to the 270 needed to win, as horrific as it is that almost 70,000,000 Americans seem to have voted for Donald Trump — and a majority of white women! (maybe the misogynists have a point…) as Trump’s path to the 6-3 Supreme Court seems more and more far-fetched — today feels much different than Tuesday evening.

Biden is far from my idea of an inspirational president, the Democratic party is not anyone’s idea of a meaningful political opposition party. One side radically employs any means necessary to maintain power and force its minority views on the majority of country — and that side is not the corporate Democrats. The Democratic party, as a party, is about as committed to the economic status quo as the Republican party always was. Still, Joe Biden is not Donald Trump — the main reason maybe 75,000,000 of us will have ended up voting for him.

Once he is sworn in, hopefully with a 50-50 Senate where Kamala Harris will be the tie-breaker (though even that modest goal of flipping four Senate seats likely won’t be achieved) we will have to set up committees of correspondence, organize, mobilize, stay in the streets, be smart in messaging, push, push, push. We will still be pushing a reluctant centrist against the dogged resistance of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham — and every single elected and appointed member of their unified, radical party– as sickening as that thought is.

We need to stay positive and proactive, of course. If we push hard enough, you never know. The midterm primaries in 2022 may even feature meaningful Democratic party debates about how to avoid rapidly approaching fatal Climate Catastrophe. The escalating danger of global warming is even further down the page today than the new record COVID numbers, though the threats are equally dangerous. We don’t have much time to fix any of this, and four years have just been worse than just wasted — we need to ride President Biden like the affable, probably well-intentioned donkey he is.

My point though: it feels better today to be an American (for a bare majority of us), and much more hopeful, than it did two days ago.

What’s with the sniffing?

Disappointing, even horrifying, as it is that this election is too close to call (as a corrupt Postmaster General openly defies a federal court order to produce at least 300,000 “lost” ballots in swing states in time for counting [1], with Mr. Trump’s active support) — scary as the seeming end of the Age of Reason is — I couldn’t help noticing the president’s pronounced noisy nasal inhalations as he spoke at 2:20 a.m. claiming victory and announcing that he’ll be going to the Supreme Court, while accusing Democrats of a major fraud on our nation.

I have inserted the loud inhalations through the nose, the same ones we heard from Mr. Trump during his debates with Hillary.

President Donald Trump:
“This is a major fraud on our nation. (SNIFF) We want the law to be used in a proper manner. (SNIFF) So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. (SNIFF) We want all voting to stop. (SNIFF, SNIFF) We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4:00 in the morning and add them to the list, OK? It’s a very sad (SNIFF)— it’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment. And (SNIFF) we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.”
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The party of Trump NEVER takes its foot off the gas

It was after 2 a.m. of a long day after many long days for a 74 year-old who just (we are told, though actual evidence still is lacking) got over COVID-19, I can understand if he might need a little “pick me up” before he addressed the nation.

I don’t condemn anyone for using intoxicating drugs, unless they do something dangerous like getting behind the wheel of a car afterwards. In the larger scheme of things, what difference does it make if the guy toots a few lines of a stimulant that picks him up, keeps him alert as a few Diet Cokes? But still, what the hell is up with nobody even noticing that in certain high stakes moments, the guy suddenly sniffs like a dachshund on the hunt? He doesn’t usually breathe like a coke fiend, or someone who just snorted Adderall [2]. I’m just sayin’.

I’m trying to stay positive, but I have less reason for optimism today than I did yesterday. McConnell and Lindsey are both doing cocky victory laps after easily defeating well-funded challengers. It looks like the Grim Reaper is likely to remain in his post as Obstructor-in-Chief. Meaning that even if Biden ekes out a win, he’ll be immediately thwarted, 51-49 (or better) in terms of lawmaking. Is the bright side supposed to be that Nancy Pelosi is almost certainly retaining her gavel to continue do her legislative wizardry?

In other news:

U.S. Coronavirus Infections Top 92,000 on Election Day as Death Toll Rises

The United States confirmed more than 92,000 new coronavirus infections on Election Day — one of the highest one-day tolls for any country during the pandemic. Over 1,100 COVID-19 deaths were reported across the U.S. on Tuesday as hospitalizations reached their highest level since mid-August. Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb warns the U.S. should expect to see over a thousand daily deaths from COVID-19 for a “sustained period of time.”
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[1]

[T]he U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday refused to comply with a federal court order to sweep mail processing centers and deliver mail-in ballots that may have been unaccounted for. The order came after USPS announced over 300,000 mail-in ballots nationwide couldn’t be traced for delivery. USPS had until 3:30 p.m. Eastern to conduct the checks and make sure all ballots could be delivered before polls closed. Instead, USPS said it would maintain its own inspection schedule. The order affected facilities in 12 postal districts across 15 states, including battleground states like Arizona and Pennsylvania where mail-in ballots must be delivered by the end of Election Day in order to be counted. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is a Trump megadonor who has come under fire for recent changes at the Postal Service that have caused widespread delays and sparked major concerns over mail-in ballots.
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Today Judge Emmett Sullivan scheduled a contempt hearing. A DOJ lawyer said he’d check the schedule to see when the postal supervisor is available to explain why he is not in contempt of a direct court order.

“You will have to tell him when he’s available,” Emmet (sic) fumed. “It’s up to the court when he’s available.”
No idea why Business Insider refers to federal judge Emmett Sullivan by his first name, but the rest of the story is HERE

[2]

For people diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Adderall helps to improve concentration and focus. As a central nervous system stimulant it can also have the very same effects on people without ADHD.
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