Over the years, I've written here quite a bit about Carter and his times. I came to appreciate him, probably far more than I ever could have liked his presidency if I'd been paying more attention.
Chris Geidner, aka LawDork, has drawn lessons from Carter's life that seem worth reproducing.
Jimmy Carter's life gives us a framework for living humanely in this moment
... When I look at Jimmy Carter’s life and accomplishments, I believe that he has provided us with several important guidelines for living humanely this moment:
• We must be steadfast in our principles — and be willing to speak out to advance those principles.
• We need not believe that our institutions will protect us to hold out an expectation that they should.
• We should do what we can to hold those institutions accountable, improve them where we can, and discard them if we determine that they are not salvageable.
• We must do what we can to protect one another when those institutions fail us, as they inevitably will.
• Those with more — materially and otherwise — must stand up for and support those with less.
• We must remain humble and be willing to learn.
These are not easy guidelines to adhere to, and I’m sure that Carter himself failed in doing so at times even as I think he exemplifies them. But, the goal remains.
As we face the inauguration of a man who has shown himself utterly dishonest, selfish, and cruel, we are about to learn again, painfully, that character counts in governance.
The New Republic and its editor Michael Tomasky are serving up a series of articles which endeavor to discern just how much of a break Donald Trump's 2024 election is from historical American voting patterns. Though the Trump regime seems novel in its ostentatious corruption and bottomless ignorance of the work of democratic governance, are we really seeing a profound realignment of political coalitions to meet popular demand?
I should preface this by saying I doubt we are living anything as profound as the realignment that occurred in the 1840s and 50s at the birth of our current parties or even akin of the shuffling of party allegiances in response to the Civil Rights movement which gave the GOP the recalcitrant white South and encouraged Democratic dominance of most cities.
The presidential election of 2024 was very close. Donald Trump's margin was tiny by historical standards. It seems overblown to assume it points to stable realignment.
But Trump himself seems such a radical break from what Americans at least pretended to expect from a president that we have to think about whether there is really something new, something discontinuous with our history, in this moment.
Tomasky is giving scholars and observers space to take a shot at this question. The New Republic offers a long interview with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard scholars who were co-authors of the 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die. Here are some excerpts to ponder:
Excessively flattering image - but he'd like it
What if Trump Does Everything He’s Promised—and the People Don’t Care?
... ZIBLATT: I think there’s an analogy here to Bonapartism in France. When Napoleon Bonaparte came along, he added a new element to French political culture. And that continues through today. You know, his nephew then ran for president some decades later, [and] every French president ever since has these kind of overreaching tendencies. So it’s now a part of French political culture—along with a Republican tradition and the socialist tradition, there’s a Bonapartist tradition.
Maybe this is what has happened in the United States. Political scientists used to talk about the liberal tradition in America. But there’s always also been an illiberal tradition. But there’s now a new distinctive illiberal tradition in American politics today, which is the Trumpist tradition. And so, even if we get through this over the next several years, there’s an electorate that’s out there, there’s a way of thinking about—and talking about—the world that is not going anywhere. And so, to make our democracy stable means, on some level, that we need to have at least two political parties that are committed to democracy, that are committed to the rules of the game. And so if we want our democracy to be stable, our parties need to figure out how to sideline that now persistent part of our political culture.
... TOMASKY: Final question. What if, after watching all this and possibly more unfold, the people just don’t care?
LEVITSKY: That’s always a challenge when it comes to democratic backsliding. I don’t think the problem is merely apathy. A combination of factors—fear for some, exhaustion for others, resignation for others—may push many activists to the sidelines, limiting our capacity to slow down and eventually defeat Trumpism. Apathy would play a role in that. The reality is that life will go on as usual for most people during the Trump administration. Most people won’t be targeted by DOJ, the FBI, or the IRS. The economy may remain relatively healthy, so many people may continue to live good lives. So the combination of some people moving to the sidelines out of fear or exhaustion and others remaining on the sidelines because they don’t feel a compelling reason to join the fight—that could easily deplete the ranks of the opposition. It’s something I worry a lot about.
I have always looked back at periods of abuse like the internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism and wondered why so few people rose up against it at the time. Now I fear we may see something similar under the second Trump administration.
ZIBLATT: I guess I don’t accept the premise. I think overwhelming majorities of Americans are committed to democracy. We may just take it for granted. But when citizens lose their democracy around the world, the record is pretty clear: They clamor to get it back, and they begin to appreciate it. I only hope we all have the collective imagination to realize what’s at stake before we lose it ourselves.
Kevin Mahnken writes for a non-profit education news organization, The 74, named for the number of young people undergoing that education. In The New Republic, he offers an interesting effort to situate Trump's re-election in the history of political parties and federal government.
Constant Change: The Global Anti-Incumbent Bias Is Real. But America’s Is Worse.
... Americans’ distaste for their own elected officials is not the symptom of a memetic bug recently caught from Argentina or Poland, but a distinctly homegrown phenomenon. In fact, it has been at work for the better part of two decades.
This becomes clear when one asks which recent election, whether in a presidential or midterm cycle, was decided in favor of continuity rather than change. Control of either the White House or at least one chamber of Congress switched parties in nine of the last 10 federal elections dating back to 2006; even in the lone exception, 2012, Republicans held onto their majority in the House of Representatives despite winning 1.3 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents nationwide.
While Biden’s belated exit from the 2024 race will be remembered as a singular episode of political hubris, the whiplash of those results has befooled a generation of leaders in both parties—periodically leading them to make, and lose, political gambles that subsequently appear mysterious. George W. Bush staked the political capital he won in 2004 on Social Security reform, only to have it open a trapdoor under his entire second term. Barack Obama hit the Tea Party wall just two years after charging into office on a generational tide of progressive enthusiasm. Mitt Romney’s team was reportedly dumbfounded on election night in 2012, just as Clinton advisers deluded themselves on their way to a 2016 shock for the ages. The list goes on.
The peculiarity of the age is even more apparent when examined over the sweep of the twentieth century, during which an incumbent president was reelected in almost every decade. More impressive still, he typically captured more votes, a higher vote share, and often a better Electoral College margin than in his previous race (or that of the man he succeeded in office). Theodore Roosevelt accomplished the feat in 1904, Wilson in 1916, FDR in 1936, Ike in 1956, LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Bill Clinton in 1996.
You can throw in Bush II for good measure, but none others have followed. Barack Obama, as gifted a vote-getter as any of his predecessors, couldn’t recreate his huge 2008 margins after four years in Washington. Trump collected 11 million more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016, yet still lost by a considerable margin. Add it up, and a different party has won the White House in each of the last four consecutive elections.
The most recent time that happened was between 1880 and 1896, when Republicans traded blows for five straight campaigns with a Democratic Party that had finally washed off the reek of slavery and secession. Not coincidentally, it was also the only other period when a president—New York’s Grover Cleveland, beloved of bar trivia contestants and mugwumps alike—served two nonconsecutive terms.
The politics of the late nineteenth century are often cited as an analogue for those of modern times. We too live in an era of close elections and ultra-high voter turnout, each driven by our intense partisan identification. And, as in the Gilded Age, modern Americans’ animus toward incumbent politicians extends from the Oval Office to Congress. Back then, the House flipped between parties six times in the span of 20 years.
The political entrepreneurs of our own times have put a ceiling on that kind of volatility through the use of algorithm-powered gerrymandering, but it is impossible to imagine one party installing a four-decade majority, as the Democrats did in the 1950s.
The electoral lessons of this comparison are undeniably murky. In 1884, the Democrats managed to break the GOP’s 24-year stranglehold on the White House by running Cleveland, the governor of what was then the country’s most important swing state. If they wish to turn the page from the Obama-Biden-Harris epoch, they can choose from among its talented governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or North Carolina, none of whom are closely associated with the party’s disastrous 2024 performance. ...
But nominating a few outsiders in the short run won’t quell the apparently perpetual disgust that Americans feel for their leadership class. ...
I think Mahnken is onto something in that those of us shaped in the long 20th century experience did tend to assume that incumbent presidents get re-elected. We projected that onto Biden until it became completely obvious that he could no longer cut it as a candidate. (I assume his incapacity was also true of him as a President and his post-election behavior seems to confirm that. But the two roles are different, a main driver of much political dysfunction.)
What this country needs to get out of this cycle is some inspirational politicians with a uniting vision. Obama once offered that, however shallow it proved in practice. Is inspiration that grips a majority still possible in a time of imperial uncertainty and the collapse of trust in any media to communicate truth? We don't know. But humans have a strong desire to be inspired, so such a turn seems possible, even if we currently don't see it. The USofA-- to be continued ...
Tis the season of coping mechanisms for those of us made miserable by Donald Trump's resurgence and his traveling circus of grievance monkeys and aspiring alpha wolves.
... nihilism is completely useless. The coward’s way out. So you work through that. And I have found, generally, that the light at the end of the tunnel — albeit that light might be smaller than you would like it to be ideally — is that there are activists making small, incremental progress on the ground, and that progress is really, really important....
Are you trying to make the world a better place? Because some people would say, “I just want to make people laugh and entertain them.” You seem to have a much bigger aim here. The most important thing to me — and to lots of people at the show — is to do this in service of writing really funny, weird jokes about interesting things. So that is our outcome. It’s not necessarily to make the world a better place. I’m not sure that comedy can do that. To a certain extent, sometimes it’s fiddling while Rome burns.
It seems to have made you uncomfortable that I’ve accused you of trying to make the world a better place. [Laughs.] This might be a hangup of being British. British people took a real stab at, if not making the world a better place, making it a more British place, and it didn’t go too well. So, yeah, you don’t want me involved in that.
... I guess comedy is the way I handle the world. So in the darkest moments of my life, I still find myself compelled to try and make jokes either to take the weight off some of what’s happening or sometimes to feel what’s happening a bit more. I find people employing comedy at moments of tragedy incredibly meaningful. I know some might find it glib or offensive. To me, it is the absolute opposite of that when done well. ...
Explain that to me. I love comedy so much. So, I do not see a distinction between how could you joke about this? For me, it’s more how could you not? How could you not tell jokes about a situation that is absolutely absurd? Darkly absurd, but absurd. And that would apply to the West Bank, too....
... Do you think it also gives people access to uncomfortable emotions? Probably. Look, I’m British, right? So my ability to deal with my emotions has been limited at best. The very fact that I’m telling you, Yeah, I find it better to laugh at things rather than, you know, feel them sincerely as a human being says something. ...
It seems to be so many of us come through this holiday season more than a little numb to the prospect of what's ahead. The numbness will pass when action seems possible ... meanwhile, the spectacle of MAGATs blowing apart is pretty funny.
Sometimes the simplest statement of fact is the most accurate:
Elon, Vivek, Laura Loomer, Donald Trump -- just shut up!Can we just admit that we NEED immigrants for our economy to run, from agriculture to high tech? We’re a goddamn nation of immigrants, aren’t we? Let’s be proud of our immigrant heritage!
— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) December 28, 2024 at 4:28 PM
Tis the season of what I call the "East Armpit Bowls." These are the contests between (mostly) unheralded college football teams which have winning, but undistinguished, regular season records (think 6-6 or 7-6) often played before Christmas or immediately after in warm tourist spots. This is college football for the unserious and I revel in it. The high class serious Bowls come later. I consider having the space and time to watch the East Armpit batch a great seasonal pleasure; this doesn't prove convenient every year but it sure is a good way to unwind after a election campaign season.
(And they still do. Yesterday I saw a contest between Pitt and Toledo in the "GameAbove Sports Bowl" that went to 6 OverTimes and ended with scores in the mid-forties.)
The changing structure of college athletics, the demise of enforced amateurism, and of enforced penury for the "student" athletes, is changing all that, even at the lower levels.
A series of legal rulings have released college football players from what was a sort of indentured servitude. Once recruited and signed by a college's football program, and often its domineering coach, young men were awarded a scholarship and perhaps a small stipend, while losing their freedom. Including the freedom to decide they should play somewhere else. No more. Now college football is shaped by the "transfer portal." Moving between school and football programs is constant, though regulated.
ESPN explains:
At the FBS level [the Bowl stratum of college teams], more than 25% of scholarship players transferred after the 2023 season. Thousands of players becoming available each offseason is forcing programs to adapt and rethink how they construct their rosters to stay competitive.
The NCAA transfer portal is an online database that lists student-athletes who are interested in changing schools. In major college football, players can enter their name in the portal during transfer windows in the winter and spring. For this 2024-25 school year, the winter window is Dec. 9-28 and the spring window is April 16-25.
When a player puts their name in the portal, schools can immediately begin contacting and recruiting them. ... once a player enters the portal, their school can decide to cancel their athletics aid and remove them from the roster. ...When programs go through head-coaching changes, their players are granted an immediate 30-day window during which they can enter the portal. However, players are not allowed to play for multiple teams in one season.
There's no more penalty to the athlete of having to sit out of football for a year when jumping to another college. An increasing number of players jump every year. And football programs can accumulate as many transfer players as they can recruit with no limiting rules. Concurrently, when popular and successful coaches jump to new jobs, the players they've accumulated can jump along with them!
The disruption has been huge -- and it is complicated by court rulings that the college athletic association (NCAA) cannot enforce amateurism (and poverty) on the athletes. A scholarship that comes with an obligation to the football program is not fair compensation for many athletes. Collectives of rich boosters and the colleges themselves can contract with the athletes for the use of their "names, image, and likeness" (NIL). The best players, usually quarterbacks, can earn serous money.
Many coaches feel they are having to navigate a new world:
"You're not building a program anymore," Coastal Carolina coach Tim Beck told reporters Thursday. "This isn't a program. Each year, you just build a team. You try to find the best team that you can put out there every year, and you know the team is going to get hit by free agency."Some make the case that the new wild world of unfettered college sports will teach athletes new skills:
The portal process has evolved into a sophisticated professional development opportunity. Athletes gain real-world experience in personal branding, contract negotiation, and business relationships.Well, maybe. But for many of these young men, this may be a dangerous opportunity. There are a lot of sharks out there, wanting a piece of the new money that comes with the new freedom.
Naturally, with all that money floating about, there are moves to try to organize college football players into something like the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) at the professional level. Some coaches have even encouraged this effort -- a union would simplify and clarify a very murky and potentially exploitative situation.
[Last May University of Alabama Birmingham] football players say their entire roster ... signed up for Athletes.org, making them the first Division I football team to publicly join the players' association. They were introduced to the group by an unexpected source: their head coach.
[Former NFL quarterback] Trent Dilfer gathered his team for a voluntary meeting in mid-April to encourage them to prepare for a future when college athletes might be able to negotiate for a larger share of their sport's revenue.
"They're going to have a seat at the table," Dilfer told ESPN. "I wanted to make sure I helped pour gasoline on something that is going to happen no matter what. I might as well use my influence to help it happen faster on behalf of our players."A union to protect the majority of players seems like a necessity.
All this is unsettled, changing every year as colleges struggle to organize themselves to grab the largest possible TV broadcast contracts, winning coaches command ever higher salaries, and players demand their piece of the pie. Football truly is the all-American game.
Especially on the left, it's popular this year to dump on the response to Donald Trump's first ascension to the presidency in 2016.
In the Guardian, someone named Dustin Guastella condemns that "resistance" was "big on spectacle and short on substance." Watch out -- when someone says something lacked substance, you can be pretty sure they wanted that something to mean what they preferred, rather than being content to observe what it meant on its own terms. I kinda think getting millions marching for women, for science, against corruption was inherently a good thing, even if the on-the-ground consequences are not immediately apparent.
And by the way, ignorance of the magnitude of the obstacles ahead sometimes enables progress in overcoming them.
Or take Michael Schaffer in Politico. He regrets that...
The bulk of those great public protest moments, for instance, were organized around issues of identity: The Women’s March, the mobilization against the Muslim ban, the fury about the Charlottesville protests, the 2020 racial-justice protests. ...True -- but should insults from Trump and the MAGAs to civilized decency have been unmarked?
Note also, he misses the vital category of efforts to protect immigrants.
Schaffer goes on to complain that "the resistance" launched mainstream press on a kind of sugar high but failed to save the legacy media, which seems to be true. Aside from the New York Times, legacy media is not longer where information is widely found. And even the Times kowtows to power often.
All this seems ridiculously short sighted to me. Present circumstances are different than 2016. Trump and the GOP actually won a tiny, but real, presidential victory; lots of Americans demonstrated their discontent with what Joe Biden had on offer. That matters.
Lawyers and other professionals will carry on a fight for rule of law. Democrats with any power (and guts) will stick up for a more benign version of both federal and state action on behalf of a better society. But for sure it is going to be a shit show.
But at some point, large groups of people are going to be moved to collective action on behalf of better values. That's what we do.
Opinion columnist Charles Blow (gift article) who was very vocal during the last round makes some interesting observations:
It may not be clear what issue or person or group will galvanize opposition to Trump’s second term. But any assumption that an opposition won’t rise or any revisionist history that casts resistance as something unique to Democrats would be a misreading of contemporary movements...
... As Democrats look for a way forward, it should not be a surprise if what emerges as Trump’s opposition is ... hostile to the Democratic Party as presently constituted.
... when Trump takes office again, the response of the public to his policies will have sway, and if that response is disapproval, and if it becomes organized and focused, it could be a formidable obstacle to Trump fully realizing his aims.
 |
| Note that Tolkien opined this while looking at fascist Europe. |
As events develop, we'll be looking for stress points, for where ordinary people can throw sand in the gears of theft, hatred, and cruelty. We won't know where we'll find them; but these MAGA frauds and blowhards are not some coherent, unstoppable force.
The 90% celebrating Christmas contrasts with the 68% of Americans who report identifying with a Christian faith, indicating other faiths partake in the holiday. GallupAs a religious holiday, I get Christmas, sort of. Embracing the holiday as the birth of the Christ child, the eruption of Godself into the humanity, requires the ability to swim comfortably within myth. Myth is important to humans, but not my best mode. I do better floating within consciousness of horrible, terrible, grace-filled, good, and all-too-human realities. Yes, that's Holy Week and Easter.
Emmanuel means God with us. Think about that for a minute. It really does help to put things into better perspective.
Christmas is about being in the consciousness of where Christ is in life and where he is not.
The question of Christmas is not what to buy for whom or what you might get for Christmas. The question of Christmas is where Christ is and where Christ is not in your life.
And note, please, that now, we are talking about Christ, not Jesus, per se. We are talking about the spirit of the Resurrected Jesus, which is The Messiah, the Christ.Let's all enjoy this time in our own ways.
Here I pass along observations from Kateryna Kibarova, a Ukrainian economist and resident of Bucha, writing in Persuasion.
If you live in Ukraine today, checking the news is your morning routine. You have to understand what is going on—how can you not?
You have to understand which direction the drones are flying from, whether it is dangerous to go outside. If you want to protect yourself, you have to constantly monitor the situation. When the air raid alarm goes off, immediately everyone’s phones in the office start howling. Everyone has the alerts set up.
The Russians have gotten more sophisticated with the air raids. Now they fly lower, at altitudes that make our air defense system operators fear that interceptions will hit houses or schools or kindergartens. They launch drones along the highways so low that they are almost level with cars, or along riverbeds so that they cannot be tracked and shot down. On the one hand, in Kyiv, the sheer number of drones—sometimes 150 per attack—makes it impossible to intercept them all. On the other hand, the cities closer to the front, like Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, are simply defenseless. They are in a constant state of fear—without air defenses, facing more complex attacks, tougher and more precise than ours in Kyiv. It’s an impossible situation.
The scariest thing is how cold-blooded you become. You're out there driving to work, and you’re turning up the radio, listening to YAKTAK and Svyatoslav Vakarchuk,1 in the car so you don't hear the suicide drones fly overhead. They’re launching the Shaheds2 in just incredible numbers to deplete our missile defense systems, so that we have no protection. And the Russians are constantly threatening to blow up the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. In my bag, next to my documents, I keep a special pill. In case of a nuclear explosion or meltdown, it has to be taken to neutralize the first of the waves of radiation. I carry it everywhere I go.
... Many of my friends have gone abroad with their children. I think it’s the right decision because it’s so dangerous for kids to be here right now. This summer, 200,000 more Ukrainians left the country. Now that the winter blackouts are coming, more will leave.
But probably the strangest and scariest part of this situation is that there is already an abyss between us, between those who live in Ukraine and those who have left. Those who have left—even my friends who come here to see their parents or just to see their friends—aren’t embedded in the context of what is happening here anymore. I’m about ninety percent sure they’re not coming back. They have learned the languages of the countries where they live now; their children are going to school; they themselves have got jobs or are receiving welfare support.
Those of us who remain have become very wounded internally, in our spirit. For example: I feel strange when my girlfriend, who emigrated, comes to visit. She’ll make some ordinary comment and laugh, and I’ll get scared that I no longer have these simple, unburdened feelings. ...
Go read it all. Many Ukrainians seem to think something good could come for them from Donald Trump; I doubt this, but I hope they are right and I am wrong.
Bill McKibben is one of the best of us. Diana Butler Bass asked the Methodist environmental activist for his 2024 Advent reflection.
... Even in 2024, there are some things to be looking forward to. For me, the most important is the real possibility that in the next few years, we could be seeing quick end to human beings making their living by setting things on fire, coal, gas, oil, anything else.
Because all of a sudden, we've really figured out how to capture the power of the sun that the good Lord hung 93 million miles up in the sky. That star that we need to make our North Star in the climate fight.
This year, just to give you one example, so many people just went out in the country of Pakistan and installed solar panels on their roofs, on their farms, everywhere else, that the use of diesel fuel dropped 30% in a year. Those are the kind of numbers that help us deal with climate change
And they're because we're using our God-given wits to make the most of the world around us. It won't be easy. It'll require lots of activism and pushing to make it happen. We'll have lots of opportunities to do that. But there are powerful forces afoot in God's world that give us some real chance.
He's not blowing hot air. Quite separately in his own substack, McKibben has described the progress humankind is making on ending our dependence on fossil fuels which pollute the atmosphere and alter the climate.
Here’s a contestant for the dumbest headline of all time (and no shade on the writer, because They Do Not Write The Headlines). The normally insightful team at Bloomberg produced an article about the remarkable fact that as the Chinese market breaks decisively for EVs, this is driving down demand for gasoline. Instead of heralding this as a potentially mammoth breakthrough in the climate fight, here’s how they titled it: “China’s EV Boom Threatens to Push Gasoline Demand Off a Cliff.”
The more rapid-than-expected uptake of EVs has shifted views among oil forecasters at energy majors, banks and academics in recent months. Unlike in the US and Europe - where peaks in consumption were followed by long plateaus — the drop in demand in the world’s top crude importer is expected to be more pronounced. Brokerage CITIC Futures Co. sees Chinese gasoline consumption dropping by 4% to 5% a year through 2030.
“The future is coming faster in China,” said Ciaran Healy, an oil analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris. “What we’re seeing now is the medium-term expectations coming ahead of schedule, and that has implications for the shape of Chinese and global demand growth through the rest of the decade.”
For a global oil market, which has come to rely on China as its main growth driver for most of this century, that will erode a major pillar of consumption. The country accounts for almost a fifth of worldwide oil demand, and gasoline makes up about a quarter of that. The prospect of a sharp drop from transport is also coming on top of tepid industrial consumption due to slowing economic growth. ...
The U.S. may not be at its best. But though we're often a shortsighted, self-centered species, we humans collectively do have an instinct leaning toward trying to leave something for future generations.
What was coming was clear late last night.
And indeed, by morning the white stuff was everywhere.
Ganesh looks almost comfy under a light covering of the white stuff.
I think this day is for staying inside and watching football.
Just a random sample of the worker activism bursting out all over this Friday before Christmas:
From the Starbucks baristas:
Hospitality workers from UniteHERE march outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco:
Josh Marshall's observation on the national shit show tickled my curiosity. Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and the Republican Congressional majority are giving the American people an early taste for this Christmas of what it is like to flunk governing. Marshall, grounded in history as usual, observes:
Trump has sewn himself into a sack with Elon Musk, a few billion dollars, a cat and a snake, and had the sack tossed into the Tiber [river]. That’s the story here. And it will go on for a while.
Apparently the Poena cullei (Latin, 'penalty of the sack') was a punishment for parricide, murder of the father, in the Roman-influenced world. A variant was still practiced all the way up until the mid-18th in a few German city states
The punishment consisted of being sewn up in a leather sack, with an assortment of live animals including a dog, snake, monkey, and a chicken or rooster, and then being thrown into water.
The variation that included a cat seems a late addition; the viper and a chicken seems to have been a more prominent early version.
Hell of a way to go and possessed of a dramatic cruelty that suits the cruelty of these men who are playing at being a government.
Meanwhile, somehow, funding for children needing cancer treatment got stripped from the pending legislation. Thanks Elon.
I have a counterintuitive opinion to share today.
All the visibility currently wreaking suffering on many trans people is going to be the prelude to eventual normalization of the underlying reality that a rigid gender binary simply isn't true of the human species. (Or, actually, many species.)
We're going to get there. Radical as this seems, we know how this works: first they try to kill you, then they kick you, then they meet you, then they let you live off in a corner, eventually you are just you.
There are heroes along the way whose lives are teaching our society that trans folk exist and thrive. In the last month, I think of Delaware Congresswoman Sarah McBride who, for pure grandstanding spite, has been denied access by Republicans to the Congressional bathroom that agrees with her gender presentation. There is lawyer and advocate Chase Strangio who argued a doomed case for transgender adolescents and their parents before our regressive Supremes this month.
But perhaps even more important in this process of trans and gender fluidity are the little local victories all over the country, when nonstandard people meet their neighbors and prevail.
Here's a recent instance by way of The Advocate:
It didn't pay off to neglect garbage pickup while campaigning on fear.
Craig Stoker, the executive director for Meals on Wheels in Odessa, won his November election for at-large City Council member with 56 percent of the vote — in the same county President-elect Donald Trump won 76 percent of the vote.
Stoker beat Denise Swanner by campaigning on infrastructure — specifically roads and garbage pickup — in contrast to the incumbent, whose campaign sent out mailers comparing the two's opposite positions by listing their only similarity as the fact that they are both in relationships with men.
... The Odessa City Council banned transgender individuals from using bathrooms, locker rooms, changing areas, showers, and similar public facilities that align with their gender identity after a contentious open meeting in October. Those who violate the ban could be convicted of a class C misdemeanor and receive a fine of up to $500, also giving legal standing to alleged victims to sue for damages up to $10,000 in civil court.
... “None of it was truly about me. It was their fear of losing a seat, losing an election, losing the title," Stoker continued. "I came into this campaign with the mindset that I'm going to have to rely on the work I've done in the community and the reputation I've built preceding me. That's all I got.”
When we fight, we win. Even in Texas.
Too often, the best Americans -- the people who best embody the aspirations of this terrible, conflicted country -- are the relative newcomers rather than the old timers like me (a Mayflower descendant through and through.)
Adeel Mangi is a distinguished Pakistani-American New Jersey litigator, both in private practice and in pro bono civil rights cases. Joe Biden nominated him to an appellate court judgeship. At confirmation hearings, Mangi endured repeated, ignorant, and abusive interrogations from Republican senators. LawDork explains:
Mangi would have been the nation’s first Muslim American federal appeals court judge, and the attacks against him never stopped. After Republicans questioned him at his confirmation hearing largely with anti-Muslim guilt-by-association attacks, the opposition later expanded to include baseless claims of terrorism and anti-law enforcement connections. ...
Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer cut a deal with the Republican senators to give up on confirming Mangi and other appellate nominees in order to advance lower federal court Biden appointees. This may have been a necessary deal -- it's hard for outsiders to know. I'm not surprised by betrayal of Mangi by Joe Manchin; he's a preening popinjay masquerading for decades as a man of the people.
But it is hard to learn that two Democratic Senators who I worked in Nevada to elect dissented from Mangi's nomination. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen choosing to torpedo Mangi is really bad.
What follows is my speculation; it is neither kind nor generous.
Presumably Rosen was running scared in last fall's re-election bid; her status as a visibly Jewish leader in national politics presumably made it seem simple to sign on with the reactionary strain in Jewish politics in a state with few Jews, but some loud and well-funded right wing Jewish advocates. It looked an easy cave to the MAGAs. (As it turned out, she delegitimated her opponent early on and won easily.) Cortez Masto is gunning to rise in the Dem Senate leadership; sticking with and covering for her sister Nevada Senator made for a cheap date. So Mangi becomes a scalp claimed by Republican Islamophobes. The two Senators' choices sicken me.
Mangi has written a heartfelt public letter denouncing the process he, and by extension his faith, were put through.
In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, spoke at the inauguration of a mosque in Washington, D.C. He said: “And I should like to assure you, my Islamic friends, that under the American Constitution, under American tradition, and in American hearts, this Center, this place of worship, is just as welcome as could be a similar edifice of any other religion. Indeed, America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have here your own church and worship according to your own conscience. This concept is indeed a part of America, and without that concept we would be something else than what we are.”...It was that vision of America that led me, 25 years ago, to make it my home. ...
When my nomination then came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was prepared to answer any questions about my qualifications, philosophy, or legal issues. I received none.
Instead, I was asked questions about Israel, whether I supported Hamas, and whether I celebrated the anniversary of 9-11. Even more revealing, however, was the tone. The underlying premise appeared to be that because I am Muslim, surely I support terrorism and celebrate 9-11. When I made clear that all these claims are false — that I condemn the Hamas attacks and all forms of terrorism, and indeed that it was my city that was attacked on 9-11 — the next Republican Senators up just repeated their performative outrage. There were children in the audience. ...
... advertisements were run deeming me an antisemite, a radical, and a terrorist sympathizer. Horrifying images were published with the Hamas flag substituted for my eyes or interspersing my face with footage of the twin towers on fire. And all of this, even while major Jewish organizations across the country condemned these attacks, ranging from the National Council of Jewish Women to the Anti-Defamation League, and over a dozen more. One of the largest Jewish groups put it this way: “Adeel Mangi, was questioned aggressively on thin pretext about his views on Israel, terrorism, and antisemitism, turning these serious issues into a tool of partisan attack. … American Jewish Committee (AJC) has joined several U.S. Supreme Court briefs led by Mangi and find him to be an able jurist, a person of integrity, champion of pluralism, and adversary of discrimination against any group.”
...What can explain all of this? One commentator recounted my professional accomplishments and then observed: “But he also successfully fought efforts by two New Jersey communities to prevent the construction of mosques. He has served on the board of directors of the Muslim Bar Association and Muslims for Progressive Values. Clearly, he’s both an accomplished attorney and a proud representative of his religion. That’s what his Republican critics can’t tolerate. They will never accept someone who is so prominently associated with Islam.”
Mangi is even less sparing of Rosen and Cortez Masto then I am. (And that's not very.)
Two allied Senators from a state far from the Third Circuit announced their opposition ostensibly based on the attacks claiming I am against law enforcement. I will not assume the worst possible motivation for their embrace of this attack. But to me that leaves two possibilities: that these Senators lack the wisdom to discern the truth, which exposes a catastrophic lack of judgment; or they used my nomination to court conservative voters in an election year, which exposes a catastrophic lack of principle. One reportedly made the decision based on fear of an attack ad—and apparently not for the first time.
He concludes:
Our country faces an incoming tsunami of bigotry, hatred, and discrimination. It targets Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community, and many others. And it always pretends to be something other than what it is. These forces are fueled not only by their proponents, but equally by the collaboration and silence of the spineless. They can be defeated only by those who lead voters with courage, not those who sacrifice principles for votes. But courage can be found outside of politics.
American Muslims are part of this nation’s fabric and will not cower. This campaign was intended to make it intolerable for Muslims proud of their identity to serve this nation. It will fail. Our Constitution forbids religious tests for any Office of the United States and American Muslims will cherish that fundamental American value, even if others apply it only selectively. And let me be clear: I will always be immensely proud of my faith as well as my pro bono legal work to challenge both denials of freedom of worship and the alleged killing of an incarcerated Black man. I have battled for justice, even if it meant there would be none for me.
... To return to President Eisenhower’s words, Americans must now look at the story of this nomination, and ask themselves: is this who we are now? For my children, I hope America one day lives up to President Eisenhower’s promise, even if not today. For my part, I entered this nomination process as a proud American and a proud Muslim. I exit it the same way, unbowed.
This is the spirit the country will need in the difficult times ahead.
I talked to several high-powered defamation defense lawyers about this point. They all affirmed that under the longstanding practice in the NY Times v. Sullivan era, it would have been near inconceivable for ABC to settle but for the prospect of Trump’s return to power. A prominent news organization would sooner have switched to all-cartoon programming than agree to a settlement on such favorable terms.
This is clearly where we are going in Trump 2.0 -- so-called "mainstream media" can be expected to bend the knee to the Donald. Sometimes this will be glaringly obvious. More often we'll be treated to omissions and sane-washing. The President-elect is a misogynist, a con man, a sociopath, an emotional toddler, and utterly unserious in Ms Harris's memorable formulation. But the big guns aren't going to say any of that; it might hurt their owner's bottom line.
So what's a consumer of news to do? I consume neither TikTok nor TV; I'm a unicorn. I read and I listen and sometimes I debate. That seems enough.
Actually, I had already adjusted my consumption before we came into the second Trump era. Yes, I've quit the Washington Post and the LA Times (or will have when my subs runs out.)
I still pay for the New York Times. It's frequently infuriating and will almost certainly get much worse, but it currently is reputed to employ somewhere around 7 percent of all working journalists in the country. Some great stuff slips through the commercial sieve.
For balance, I read the US edition of The Guardian from Britain. This is particularly important for anything outside the USofA. They don't always get us Yanks -- but then we don't always get them.
When something has happened and trusted sources seem weak, I start with AP News.
I subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle which is mighty thin, but has had moments under the current editorial regime.
ProPublica does real reporting on under-covered news unearthed by real reporters.
Sources I trust to be what they say they are -- not that I'm always in agreement -- include Talking Points Memo, The Bulwark, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the New Yorker, Mother Jones ...
And then there are the substacks. Just as blogs once did, these appeal to the actual way I consume news -- by prioritizing known authors. I read the NY Times by byline; why shouldn't I get the benefit of individual thoughts from individual people I find interesting, provocative, or informative? So I do, voluminously.
Like most people on the liberal side of things, I've quit Xitter. Yes, I'm on BlueSky (@janinsanfran.bsky.social) Kind of fun. Not sure it will stay that way or continue useful.
• • •
Looking over this collection, it seems kind of boring. And there are days when it is.
For all the breadth of sources here, I'm determined not to follow every twist and feint thrown out by our fascist-in-chief.
As of now I know I'll be following as many developments as I can stomach from the war on immigrants and also the attempt to shove the gender-genie (trans, LGBQ+, and other noncomforming folks) back under wraps. And then there will be the times I go chasing off after new news ...
Unionized professional football players supporting hospitality workers. Maybe they actually do realize that stadium workers and concessionaires deserve some cut of the money that slooshes around their sport. Also hotel workers. Most of these football guys know that, however well they are doing today, they aren't on the side of the bosses. Great to see.
When workers fight, we all win.
Half the country lost a very close election to a grifting sociopath who aims to overthrow the Constitution for his own gain. The natural response from the losing half is to throw blame around widely. In particular, some Democrats do what Democrats always do, which is insist if only we could downplay the needs of the non-white, non-male, non-gender standard fraction of our coalition, every thing would have been fine. It's always the same bullshit. When we remember we need each other, we have laid the basis for coming back and winning.“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist” James Baldwin
— Literary Pearls (@literarypearls.bsky.social) December 14, 2024 at 8:14 AM
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I really didn't know this. I thought Republican anti-immigrant agitation was just racist bigotry.
I still think that is what's going on, but I didn't know how large an influx the country has enjoyed in the last decade.
All these willing workers and entrepreneurial strivers are making us a smarter, better country.
As throughout our history, it will take awhile for American society to digest the newcomers. But, even in the age of Republican stupidity, we're still big and rich and spacious and adaptable and we'll be fine.
Source: NYT gift article. It might be possible to have some quibbles about the numbers, because a lot of the people in these figures are keeping their heads down. David Kurtz has summarized:
The pace of immigration from 2021-23 was faster than at any previous period in U.S. history, including the peak of Ellis Island.
As a share of total U.S. population, the average annual change in the foreign-born population went up faster than any period since at least the 1850s.
The percentage of the U.S. population born in another country reached a new high of 15.2 percent in 2023. The previous high was 14.8 percent in 1890.
For Californians, there's a local angle to stay aware of: according to CalMatters:
Roughly 3.3 million Californians live in mixed-status households, including 1 in 5 children under 18.
Thinking about the shooting of United Healthcare exec Brian Thompson has sent me off down an intellectual rabbit hole which might (or might not) be interesting to someone besides me.
Let me start by admitting that my instinctive response to the murder was "Dude had it coming." For-profit health insurance is an abomination. No matter how nice these individuals may be to dogs and children, the people who run it have chosen cash over human decency. "Serious" opinionaters like Zeynep Tufekci or the Washington Post editorial board tried to cool such passions.
A good Facebook friend put my more considered sentiments well:
If you shoot a business executive because you don't like the way capitalism operates, that's an act of terrorism.
I totally understand the current schadenfreude. I have to talk myself out of it.
I understand that pacifism is unnatural and a truly depressing number of people scorn it.
Still, just because I say, "Every day without guillotines surprises me," doesn't mean I'm honing a blade.Okay, my better angels know better and I inconsistently aspire to envision and build a nonviolent society and life. I have not personally been much victimized by the health insurance racket. But the sheer obscenity of killing sick people to make a buck while bloviating about mission and purpose hits me deep.
Let’s start with a basic fact: Henry Clay Frick deserved to be murdered.
This was a truly awful human being responsible for the deaths of a whole lot of people. First, there was his culpability in the Johnstown Flood, where the negligence of he and his friends led to over 2200 dead people.
Admittedly, he didn’t order their killings, but he also just didn’t care whether they lived or died.
Second, there was his actions at Homestead. To review this famous incident, Frick was the second in command to Andrew Carnegie at Carnegie Steel. Frick hated unions. I mean, all Gilded Age capitalists hated unions but Frick truly despised them.
He once personally evicted a worker from company housing by picking him up and throwing him in a creek. The world would have been better off without Henry Clay Frick in it. But that doesn’t excuse Berkman’s actions.
... [Berkman] didn’t know any Homestead workers and ... didn’t consult with any Homestead workers.
Because Frick survived, Berkman also survived, convicted of the assault and imprisoned for 14 years in Western Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh. After his release, he published Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.
This book is a sort of coming of age story, the record of Berkman's overcoming his highly theoretical idealism, yet finding a more mature identity and stance toward the injustice of Gilded Age capitalism.
He recounts the sheer dreariness and hardship of prison which almost drove him to suicide.
He felt distain and disgust toward the other poor and broken men who were his fellow prisoners. They weren't the class heroes of his imagination. They too were victims of the system, but he couldn't identify with them.
"They are not of my world," he writes. "I would aid them", he says, being "duty bound to the victims of social injustice. But I cannot be friends with them ... they touch no chord in my heart." Quoted in WikipediaGrowing up meant becoming able to appreciate and interact with these fellow flawed humans as something more than abstract victims of the class struggle. He had plenty of time to accomplish this before winning early release. He got out in time to be caught up in America's World War I panic about homefront immigrant subversives and being deported to the new Soviet Russia. He and his partner Emma Goldman didn't find anything liberatory about that experience either.
Not my usual terrain, but a splendid antidote to the pain in this odd interregnum we're living, between electoral rejection of the good and righteous and anticipated cruelties. This, available for rental if not in theaters, might cheer you up as it did me.
I suppose the Roman Catholic Church may not like it. Nor will the MAGAs. But it's proof of my strong belief that, even when the winds seem to be blowing a different way, that our strange, divided culture continues to evolve toward broader understanding and greater compassion.
Over Thanksgiving, we watched this with family for whom many of its themes were wildly foreign, yet all of whom were pulled in and moved. Give it a chance if intrigued.
Some combination of system updates and overloads are giving the old laptop fits. Think I'll take a break here for a couple of days and try to restore order.
Welcome to our latest Gilded Age. The Trump regime implants its oligarchs.
