Friday cat blogging

Here in the San Francisco Mission, cats populate our walls.

 

The artist who did this one has observed a lot of cats.

 

I wonder if there was a living model for this one.

 

Looks like a cat's dream.

Another true-to-life pose.

It's Trump's job now

For all the afterthoughts and recriminations, Joe Biden/Kamala Harris are not in office because a tiny majority of us believed they were not doing a good job. (Yes, different people had different notions of what the job was they weren't doing; it's a big country.)

So it's Trump's job now. How's he doing? 

• Egg prices going up because of the avian flu? That’s on Trump. 
• People not getting needed aid because of the federal funding freeze? Trump’s fault. 
• Criminals set free to wander around the country? Trump. 
• Chaos abroad? Trump. 
• A collapse in the Gaza ceasefire? Also Trump.

That's Obama comms guy Dan Pfeiffer's list (lightly edited). 

Let's see how many I can add off the top of my head:

• MLK holiday, Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance cancelled by order of Trump's DOD guy? Trump.
  
• Commercial plane over DC hits errant military helicopter. No FAA leader? Trump's fault.
• Crooked NYC Mayor's prosecution to be ended? Trump.
• Reopen Guantanamo prison in Cuba? That's on Trump too.
• AIDS drugs to be denied to African countries? Trump.
• Too few workers to harvest crops in California? Trump.
• Women under 30 seek sterilization. Trump.
  

As Pfeiffer concludes: 

... Trump won the presidency despite his flaws because he promised to make everything better. We need to hold him accountable when he fails. Just start fighting back and we’ll figure out the rest later.

Resistance to tyranny is as American as apple pie

Seen this before.

And now a note from a federal employee: 

To my fellow Feds, especially veterans: we’re at war

We watched this goon try to overthrow the government on live tv four years ago. Now, we are witnessing him try to overthrow it from within. We are the last line of defense against fascism. If we leave, we will be replaced by loyalists. Read P2025 and, for the love of god, please believe what is written because that is what is happening. All the EOs are directly from that document.

I didn’t dedicate years of my life serving this great country to be bullied into quitting my career by a bunch of fascists. We are being led by the same types of people our grandparents fought against in WW2.

They don’t care about us, regardless of the fact that one-third of us are veterans and many are military family members. They don’t care about your kids, your homes, your bills, your livelihood. They don’t care that you’re an American citizen. They don’t care that the annual spending on us is only 4% and won’t make a difference if we’re gone. They don’t care that we’re middle and lower class employees. They want to harm you.

Do not give in to this nonsense and remember your oath to the constitution and the people of America. I don’t know what the future holds, but I refuse to bow down to this fascist authoritarian elite class. Nobody is coming to save us but we have strength in numbers. It’s time to buckle up, and continue protecting freedom and democracy.

Sand in the gears, folks. These goons are very determined, but not very smart.

They want to reinvigorate HIV and kill more people

Mostly poor and Black people ...

Amid the general carnage of the Trump coup against American government, it's easy to get lost in a recital of horrors. But here's one that feels awfully familiar. 

Click to enlarge. Marked for death.

The administration has brutally shut down PEPFAR, the global program launched by George W. Bush to limit the further spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Yesterday recipients around the world were ordered to shut down and not even distribute anti-HIV drugs already in their possession. Here's the NY Times:

The Trump administration has instructed organizations in other countries to stop disbursing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid, even if the drugs have already been obtained and are sitting in local clinics.

... Appointments are being canceled, and patients are being turned away from clinics, according to people with knowledge of the situation who feared retribution if they spoke publicly. Many people with H.I.V. are facing abrupt interruptions to their treatment.

But most federal officials are also under strict orders not to communicate with external partners, leading to confusion and anxiety, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

... Without treatment, virus levels in people with H.I.V. will quickly spike, hobbling the immune systems of the infected people and increasing the odds that they will spread the virus to others.

About one in three untreated pregnant women may pass the virus on to their babies.

Interrupted treatment may also lead to the emergence of resistant strains that can spread across the world.

One study estimated that if PEPFAR were to end, as many as 600,000 lives would be lost over the next decade in South Africa alone. And that nation relies on PEPFAR for only 20 percent of its H.I.V. budget. Some poorer countries are almost entirely dependent on the program.

This is premeditated murder.   

UPDATE, January 29: The PEPFAR cancellation has been momentarily rescinded, but the coup by the President and his tech bro handlers continues. The KnowNothings rule.

After the inferno

I dumped my subscription to the LA Times when it's crackpot owner sucked up to Donald Trump. I had found that, even in its contemporary emaciated condition, it was a pretty good paper, providing a slant on the news not present in East Coast pubs. But I can live without it.

 

For reasons unknown to me I still receive the paper's email newsletter under this logo. That will probably end one day. But for the moment that means I can sometimes read Anita Chabria, an honest, elegant writer who I hope will land an even more prominent and permanent perch when her current journalistic ship sinks.

Today Chabris reported on the conflict between people desperate to return to the remains of their burned out homes and disaster officials still trying to keep them out. It turns out the burned over areas are full of dangers, including the large size lithium batteries that power cars and solar installations that might not have burned but will might explode.

In general, Chabria applauds the municipal and state effort:

Having covered fires across California, I can honestly say I have never seen an effort like this. Though it is little consolation for those left to wait, the speed and resources being put into recovery in L.A. are extraordinary.

So for all the politics and finger-pointing that have so quickly filled our public space, here’s one more thing that everyone I spoke with can agree on: The science doesn’t lie.

The burn areas are dangerous right now, and though patience feels like another trauma, it is better than regret.

What horrible loss!

The limits of knowing history

This morning, January 27, an article which appears to be several years old [gift] popped up in the version of the New York Times which their algorithm deigns to show me. (You do know that we all get slightly different online versions of the "paper of record" in our digital feeds, don't you? Just part of life in our current mediated information environment.)

The Nazi's human death factory at Auschwitz (Poland) was liberated by the Soviet Russian army on January 27, 1945. The article is a thoughtful survey of what has happened to memory of the atrocities of a previous generation. 

... as the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, an occasion being marked by events around the world and culminating in a solemn ceremony at the former death camp on Monday that will include dozens of aging Holocaust survivors, Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, is worried.

“More and more we seem to be having trouble connecting our historical knowledge with our moral choices today,” he said. “I can imagine a society that understands history very well but does not draw any conclusion from this knowledge.”

In this current political moment, he added, that can be dangerous. ... With the very notion of the truth and facts under assault in increasingly polarized societies, control over the historical narrative is yet another battlefield.

This cuts to the quick for me. I understand the human present through memory and interpretation and re-interpretation of what I know of what has gone before. And yes, history makes for both material and moral lessons. I cannot imagine trying to understand the world around me without the lens of history. 

Yet I am well aware most Americans live without much historical awareness. Where do people find a moral compass? I don't know. I try to retain mine.

• • •

A couple of years ago, I explored the strange phenomenon which is US "Holocaust Education." Too much of this operates as a comforting morality play about distant lands whose enormity reinforces contemporary ignorance. That piece still reads well.

• • •

And today I can make the same recommendation I always make on the subject of the memory of 20th century Nazi barbarism: find a copy of the memoir from Gerda Weissmann (later Klein), All But My Life. Ms. Weissmann was one of lucky (??) few; the Nazis transported her to a series of slave labor camps while killing all her family and eradicating the world she had known. It is brutal, simple, and totally approachable at nearly 80 years distance.

Brave words for this Trump moment

Frederick Douglass -- born enslaved in Maryland, assertive interrogator of and prod to President Abraham Lincoln, later Republican ambassador to Haiti -- saw much over a long life. In a speech in 1894 he proclaimed:

I have been a watchman on your walls more than fifty years, so long that you think I ought to know what the future will bring to pass and to discern for you the signs of the times. You want to know whether the hour is one of hope or despair.

I have no time to answer this solemn inquiry at length or as it deserves, and will content myself with giving you the assurance of my belief. I think the situation is serious but it is not hopeless. On the contrary, there are many encouraging signs in the moral skies. l have seen many dark hours and have yet never despaired of the colored man’s future. There is no time in our history that I would prefer to the present. By way of Kevin M Levin

So Douglass responded to the racial and anti-democratic backlash of America's last Gilded Age. He'd seen cruelty and disappointment, but also found courage and determination. 

Our turn is now.

War crimes accelerate in Ukraine

As the Trump regime settles in, it would be too easy to look away from horrors far away. But let's not.

Here's retired Australian general Mick Ryan reminding us why Ukraine cannot surrender to Putin's aggression:

Russian Executions of Ukrainian PoWs Continue.

The Prosecutor General's Office in Ukraine this week opened yet another criminal case against Russia for war crimes after a video emerged that shows Russian soldiers executing six unarmed Ukrainian prisoners of war. The events shown in the video, which include the Russian soldiers discussing who should shoot each prisoner of war, apparently occured in the Donetsk region.

The number of executions of unarmed Ukrainian POWs immediately after their capture has increased significantly in the past year. The Ukrainian authorities have recorded in excess of 180 executions of Ukrainian POWs by the Russians since February 2022. Given how much ambiguity there often is in combat operations, there almost certain to have been many more than this number. ...

The prevalence of these crimes in the Russian army indicates that their soldiers are either ordered or incentivised to shoot PoWs by their commanders, or that Russian commanders willingly look away from such events. Either way, it has been systematised now in the Russian system. And the fact that Russian soldiers video these crimes and post them online means they don’t fear any form of retribution from their own commanders.

As such, not only are the individuals who commit the crimes responsible but so is their entire chain of command that has ignored these events. There is simply no way now that any Russian officer can claim in the future that ‘I didn’t know this was occuring’.

For those interested in more details about the magnitude of Russian war crimes committed since February 2022, this report from the Congressional Research Service provides a good overview.

I have to wonder whether under the Trump regime, that government report will be trashed. Get it while you can.

I'm sure Trump's idea of "peace" in Ukraine is that the embattled country must surrender. Ukraine can't.

This is what Trump's immigration policies look like

 

By way of @leighcreates.bsky.social. Is this real? I see no reason to disbelieve it. Even if the various flavors of immigration cops largely mean to follow legalities, there are plenty of individuals among them who equate dark skin and accents with candidates for deportation. Just like their bosses, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

UPDATE: Just have to add this by way of the San Francisco Chronicle: 

“The Trump administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense.”

Why am I skeptical?

Friday cat blogging

Mio sits nightwatch.

We will not be stunned into silence

For a minute amidst the inaugural Trump carnival of greed, cruelty, and stupidity, the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde grabbed the nation's attention by issuing a clear if gentle rebuke to the man and his enablers. 

Her words (and his scowls) grabbed the attention of anyone who wanted to listen. And that is a broad swath of us; it's worth remembering that even today at what is almost certainly the Trump show's high water mark of approval, he's never broken 50 percent. 

This all reminded me that such breakthroughs in what seems an irresistible tidal wave of societal ugliness do happen. Over and over.

I remember well the first occasion on which one of these breakthroughs grabbed me -- way back in the spring of 1969. The American war on Vietnam was at its height; the young men of my generation were being drafted to die in a fight that was at best meaningless and, in actuality, a crime. The US confronted the Soviet Union with our respective nuclear arsenals of mass death. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was dead and the movement for racial and economic justice stalled. It was a terrifying year.

And then, in print and on cassette tapes, a speech by someone I'd never heard of spread like wildfire among many young people. George Wald was a scientist, a professor, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1967. Speaking at an anti-war teach-in at MIT in March 1969, he somehow touched and lighted up a moral nerve for many worn down by the horror around us. His speech was called: A Generation in Search of a Future.

The only point of government is to safeguard and foster life. Our government has become preoccupied with death, with the business of killing and being killed.  ... I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me. But there are those students of mine, who are in my mind always, and there are my children, the youngest of them now seven and nine, whose future is infinitely more precious to me than my own. So it isn’t just their generation; it’s mine, too. We’re all in it together.

Are we to have a chance to live? We don’t ask for prosperity, or security. Only for a reasonable chance to live, to work out our destiny in peace and decency. Not to go down in history as the apocalyptic generation.

Our business is with life, not death. Our challenge is to give what account we can of what becomes of life in the solar system, this corner of the universe that is our home; and, most of all, what becomes of men [humankind]—all men, of all nations, colors, and creeds. This has become one world, a world for all ... It is only such a world that can now offer us life, and the chance to go on.

In that moment, Wald broke through. In the next month, the speech was broadcast in several cities, and reprinted in the New Yorker, the Progressive, the New York Post, Washington Post, Philadelphia Bulletin, Chicago Daily News, Buffalo Evening News, San Francisco Chronicle...

Many of us in a disheartened generation trudged on, making Richard Nixon's perfidious presidency impossible and inventing the environmental, women's, and gay movements.

I don't think Wald had all that in mind. But somehow his moral insight provided a jolt of humanizing energy in a bad moment.

These eruptions of some powerful truth spoken to powers, to rulers, are what make humans the tantalizingly hopeful species that we are. 

And they happen for different people at different times in different contexts. Does anyone remember Acting Attorney General Sally Yates' refusal to violate her oath to the Constitution at the beginning of the first Trump administration? 

Does anyone remember the masses of us who marched for justice and against police murders of Black and Brown people in the midst of a pandemic in 2020? 

Eruptions of truth and justice recur. Some are vast and some are small. And they are never just past and gone. Thanks Bishop Budde for reminding us!

What such breakthroughs in the enveloping shroud of injustice and violence do readers remember from their time on the planet?

"May I ask you to have mercy Mr. President..."

Before dozens of attendees at a national prayer service in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington directly addressed President Donald Trump in her sermon, urging him to reconsider his attacks on marginalized communities.

“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde told Trump as he sat in the front row at the Washington National Cathedral. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children, and Democratic and Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”

Budde made her plea on behalf of undocumented immigrants who work jobs, pay taxes and live among others, as well as refugees who come to the United States in search of safety and a better life.

“I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities — these children fear that their parents will be taken away,” she said. “And that you help those that are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands find compassion and welcome here.” ... MSNBC

In 2017, along with many Epicopalians, I was critical of the National Cathedral for hosting the incoming monster. There was no sermon that year. Bishop Budde spoke bravely this year.

Not going anywhere ...

As anticipated, Donald the restored king has issued executive orders designed to legislate people who experience the fluidity of gender, broadly trans- and gender binary-folk, out of existence. 

Good luck with that. The World Wildlife Fund chronicles how commonly gender fluidity manifests among animal species. (Wonder if WWF' will submit in advance by taking that page down?)

But MAGA's got to try to create its own reality. Trump killed off several Biden executive orders, including one protecting transfolk in the military and another against discrimination based on gender identity. (Don't be surprised if those links die -- MAGA may not be able to erase transfolk, but it can probably corrupt the Federal Register.)

MAGA is going to do anything it can to make life hellish for people who live in gender non-conformity. Gotta have someone to project their insecurities onto when you are bullies and cowards.

Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte's Web gently explicates what's next:

... Once the discomfort over trans and non-binary people has been directly addressed through the full gamut of the resources of the federal government and every lever under Trump’s control has been pulled, his supporters will not only find their problems in life have not improved but trans folks are still very much around.

Their stubborn discomfort over trans people will never go away because trans people will never go away.

Trans and non-binary people exist all over the world and always have. In every nationality, every race, every ethnicity, every country, every culture, every religion, over thousands of years of recorded human history, all around the globe, you will find trans and non-binary people.

We have always been here, and we always will be. We are naturally occurring.

And it will be a crushing realization for a lot of non-trans people in this country when, after Trump has done all he says he will, their struggles are still present and targeting trans people both failed to remove their discomfort with our existence and alleviate their growing rage and desperation with trying to exist in a country that makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for working class families to survive.

So, yes, as strange as it may sound to many, I genuinely feel bad for these people. They have been sold a senseless narrative that revolves around a cruel solution to a non-existent problem that's used to assign blame for their struggles by someone who could not care less about their welfare.

I find that tragic.

Meanwhile, once again, trans people aren’t going anywhere.

I spent all of childhood and most of adulthood in deep anxiety, depression, anger, and denial over my gender identity. For many years, I prayed God would somehow heal me—would somehow cleanse me—of being who I am.

It took a long time to recognize being trans is a gift from God and that I am lovingly made in God's image, and for all the obstacles, I am never closer to God than in my full authenticity.

Trump can take that up with Her.

Yes!

In the land of never enough

Kareem Abdul Jabbar knows what time it is:

The worst president in U.S. history is about to be sworn in again because, as philosopher George Santayana said, those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The fact that Trump is even more doddering, rambling, and incoherent than before is an even greater cause for concern. His selections so far are incompetent loyalists for his cabinet, for diplomats, and key administrative posts are beyond cause for concern, they are cause for trembling.

... At the last Trump inauguration, there was a very public controversy as his press secretary lied about the size of the crowd in attendance. Trump tried to claim the crowd was larger than Obama’s but news reports and photos comparing the crowds proved otherwise.

This time around, Trump wants to make a big public splash to show how extensive his support is because that’s important to people who choose their morals based on popularity. 

To help bolster this inauguration, tech billionaires have donated millions (to pay people to show up?). These wealthy business tycoons have read the room and realize Trump’s favor is for sale (“Tech moguls Altman, Bezos and Zuckerberg donate to Trump's inauguration fund”). Their billions make them untouchable to the concerns of the people or the threat to democracy. At one point in the past, I had hopes that these men would be opposition leaders, but they turned out to be collaborators. 

Because no matter how much money they have, it’s never enough.

Kareem is a man of principle, of convictions hard elaborated on the basis of experience and rational thought. 

For the time being, we've chosen to be led by another kind of people (mostly men) -- shallow figures awed by wealth including especially their own. However powerful, the oligarchs celebrating today form a brittle assemblage of ignorance and greed which will shatter on contact with reality. (How many of them had homes in Pacific Palisades?) Let's do what we can to protect who we can from the trail of carnage they will leave in their wake.

A bunch of toddler oligarchs are, temporarily, riding high

Paul Krugman set loose from the NYT onto Substack is a delight. He's got our oligarchs' numbers.

... ask yourself: What’s the point of being rich?

Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires. ...

... many (not all!) rich men are extraordinarily insecure. I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?”

... So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration.... What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.

Of course, Trump’s victory won’t do anything to restore the adulation [the tech bros] miss..., so I can confidently predict that Andreesen and others in his set will keep on whining — that there will be so much whining that we’ll get sick of whining. Actually I already am.

... for sheer cringe value nothing matches Mark Zuckerberg’s talk about “masculine energy.”

Here I must insert an aside (gift) from NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie. 

We have a clique of powerful middle-aged men who want nothing more than to be boys.

Krugman goes on:

... they are defined by their wealth and nothing more, which I believe explains their submission to Trump. Trump would probably be able to damage their businesses if they didn’t bend the knee, but that would still leave them immensely wealthy, just possibly no longer among the wealthiest men on the planet.

The problem for them is that their status as the richest of the rich is, in ego terms, all they have left, which leaves them far more vulnerable than they would be if they were just run-of-the-mill billionaires. 

Empty, ignorant men doing ignorant things. What a time!

Bye-bye Joe

Every pundit around is summing up Joe Biden's accomplishments and failures. I want to play too. In a few days MAGA's merry band of saboteurs are going to preoccupy our attention. If I'm ever to unload these thoughts, today is the day.

I learned things I had not known from watching him stagger to failure.

There were times in the last few years when I considered Joe Biden the most successful occupant of the presidency for the majority of us that I'd seen since LBJ. New York Times business columnist Peter Coy (gift) summarized some of what Biden accomplished:

... he rose to the occasion of fighting the Covid pandemic and its economic effects. Although the recession was over by the time he was sworn in, the unemployment rate was still elevated at 6.4 percent. He had served as vice president during the feeble, “jobless” recovery from the recession of 2007-9, and he was determined to prevent a repeat of that slump.

Less than two months after taking office, Biden got Congress to pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which included stimulus checks of $1,400 per person, extended unemployment insurance and a beefed-up child tax credit. That November, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which authorized $1.2 trillion of transportation and infrastructure spending.

Those bills did what they were intended to do. They speeded the economic recovery and brought down unemployment, helping the poor and working class most of all. The expanded child tax credit alone cut child poverty nearly in half.

Heather Cox Richardson spells it out:

The nation added 256,000 new jobs in December, a number significantly higher than economists expected. That brings the total number of jobs created under Biden to 16.6 million and makes Biden’s the only administration in history to have created jobs every month. Under the Biden administration, the nation has also had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years, ending at 4.1%. Dan Primack of Axios reported that the U.S. gained more jobs during Biden’s four years than it did under President Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush.

Observing these successes, I thought Biden's age gave him a secret sauce: his orientation to governing was formed in the years before Ronald Reagan's "revolution" dethroned the idea of an activist federal state that worked for the benefit of the people. Reagan and the GOPers sold an exhausted people on the hokum that "the best government governs least." This was always stupid and unworkable; today, the notion merely makes room for oligarchs to rob us blind. 

Biden's basic orientation was toward building a more equitable state and economy. This enabled him to ally with Elizabeth Warren's technocrats on interventions that haven't yet been fully realized. I suspect that our new MAGA overlords will bluster and howl, but they'll also take credit as much of this survives and works out for their constituents.

Biden's deep experience of American foreign policy and influence in the world helped him at times and also left him up shit creek when he couldn't adjust to contemporary realities.

Ditching our failed state-building project in Afghanistan was unequivocally the right move. Twenty years of failure needed to be shucked off. And Trump had set Biden up to get out. But the mismanagement that killed US troops and left too many Afghans in the lurch was horrible and compound the ugliness of the whole misbegotten enterprise.

The Biden administration initially responded forcefully to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, then retreated to timidity when only an all-in commitment was going enable the Ukrainians to repel the invading imperialist power. The tragedy of Ukraine reminds me of the failure of the democratic states -- Britain, France, and the US -- to support the messy but legitimate government of Republican Spain in the mid-1930s against Hitler and Mussolini. We can only hope the consequence will not be similar, forcing the more law-abiding and democratic states to fight the authoritarian axis somewhere else if we're to survive. And now we've elected the modern America Firsters who always wanted capitulation to the dictators ...

And then there is Israel, the Palestinians, and the multiple oil autocracies of what Europe labels the Near East. Biden has been utterly clueless in this arena since October 7, 2023. His age and experience seems to have gifted him with completely the wrong lessons and, bluntly, the wrong racial and ethnic sympathies. His policies seem to assume that Palestinians are uppity natives to be repressed. His supine posture toward Bibi and enabling the demise of any chance for a decent order in the region has been nothing short of a clusterfuck, from day one.

All this was made more fragile and less understandable because aging Joe had lost any feel he ever had for communicating his aims to his riling constituencies. He was the president who wasn't there. And sending Kamala out to the rescue at the last minute couldn't save his legacy.

Jim Fallows is gentle about Joe. He's seen a few presidents up close.

Presidents obsess about their place in history, mainly because they can’t control it. Joe Biden must have dreamed of being seen as another FDR. His best chance now is to be seen as another Harry Truman or even Jimmy Carter—under-appreciated in his time and then gaining respect for the long-term effects of his work.

[in his final address] ... like Dwight Eisenhower before him, Biden was in fact honest. Brutally, unsparingly so. He was honest about who was causing problems: The modern versions of robber barons, and the politicians they had bought or intimidates. He was honest that citizens had to do something themselves if they didn’t like the trends, rather than waiting for someone to save them. He was presumably honest enough with himself to imagine the outrage and attacks the speech would certainly provoke. Honest enough to imply that some of the centrist reassurances of his career may have been naive.

Biden seemed a good and decent man trying to do a job he was too aged for and perhaps also a job that his experience had both suited and unfitted him for in contradictory ways. On to the next American misadventure ...

The MAGA wish list is BS

They want us to be afraid as the dreaded MAGA inauguration comes. "Us" here means newcomers to the USofA, Brown people, and their friends who can be confident about our citizenship status; we're all in this together. They will give us plenty of reasons to fear, some of those reasons genuine. They can do bad things.

But not all that is threatened is possible. But they can't do everything they want without friction. Our job is to enhance that friction.

Perhaps most people shouldn't focus on the cruel possibilities the Trump immigration threats make possible. After all, inciting the fears is part of their playbook of forced deportations. But those of us who can bear knowing the possibilities can recognize the gamut these threats run.

David J. Bier [@davidjbier.bsky.social], Director of Immigration Studies at the pro-immigration, libertarian Cato Institute summarizes what Trump's immigration agenda might look like in the approximate order we might see it. In addition to what Trump has been saying about his plans, this list largely derives from Project 2025.

1) cancel the 2023 Biden-initiated Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) parole processes for refugees which have channeled 30,000 people/month into legal channels 

2) ban scheduling appointments for lawful entry from Mexico using the 2023 Biden-initiated CBP One app

3) suspend the refugee program for 100+ days & cut cap from 125K to 20K 

4) impose a visa/travel ban on a dozen countries 

5) impose new "extreme vetting" requirements on all countries 

6) possibly suspend all visas globally for 30 days

7) declare a national emergency at the border 

8) deploy the national guard to the border

9) redirect military funds to build detention camps

10) restart border wall construction 

11) invoke Title 42 health authority to expel migrants [legal ruse used during COVID]

12) restart family detention

13) declare an invasion 

14) invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport without due process 

15) use the military to enforce Alien Enemies Act 

16) revoke prioritization of criminals & security threats for deportation

17) let state/local police conduct immigration arrests & deportation

18) restrict federal funding for sanctuary cities 

19) conduct public raid in a sanctuary city 

20) instruct review of birthright citizenship 

21) review of public charge rule reinstatement 

22) review of TPS and DACA

For all MAGA's anti-migrant hysteria, this list of cruelty and stupidity is not going to happen in a day. In fact, most of it will never happen at all, because it is either illegal, impossible to implement, or they are too inept to mobilize a whole country around their hateful plans.

For all Donald's posturing, as recently as last July, Gallup found that most Americans appreciate the contributions of newcomers to the country.

Click to enlarge

Yet hard-pressed individuals and families who are very much part of our lives at going to be at risk under the Trump regime. Republicans have made promises of prosperity and stability they cannot and will not keep, especially while implementing an anti-immigrant panic. Who is going to harvest our food and wash the pans in the local fast food chain? For that matter, who is going to write computer code for the Musks and Zucks?

The first six months will be the worst; I still believe our fellow citizens will recoil as excesses pile up. Most of us like our neighbors and appreciate them. The job for those of us not currently at risk is to support vulnerable people and throw whatever sand we can conjure up into the gears of the deportation machine. Let's support the lawyers who care for the people. We know how to do this.

A national directory of non-profit, low cost immigration legal services.

Immigration law is rat's next of mysterious byways and dead ends. Several articles which communicate some of the horror which our politicians have made of immigration:

Dara Lind explains What ‘Mass Deportation’ Actually Means

Aaron Reichin-Melnick interviewed at Radly Balko's The Watch

Adrian Carrasquillo writes a column called Huddled Masses at The Bulwark. He has wide sources.

Friday cat blogging

We're home from our travels and the cats seem to enjoy their renewed seating options. Fortunately both Mio and Janeway are quite tolerant of laptops balanced on their backs if that's the price of occupying a warm human.

Up against a Crusader

Robert P. Jones is the founder and president at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) which studies our American religious varieties. He's also a recovering white Southerner out a Baptist faith tradition which he believes has a lot to overcome in the way of sexism, racism, and unfounded smug superiority.

The Senate hearing on TV pretty boy and macho poseur Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Secretary of Defense infuriated Jones. He concluded:

Not a single senator probed the most dangerous part of Hegseth's background: his support for white Christian nationalism.

Apparently, in addition to Hegseth's history of drinking and sleeping around fathering children, the guy is an acolyte of one of those crackpot little sects which white American Protestantism spawns, led by a patriarch with racist authoritarian politics. 

Hegseth is a member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small newly-founded church that is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist who embraces a theocratic vision of Christian dominance of all institutions in society. Wilson has written that slavery produced “a genuine affection between the races” and argues that homosexuality should be a crime. Wilson holds particularly rigid patriarchal views, asserting that giving women the right to vote was a mistake, that women holding political office “should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse,” and that women should not “be mustered for combat” (sound familiar?). 

As religion scholar Julie Ingersoll, who has studied this movement for years, points out, adherence to these theological tenets are not optional in CREC churches. Hegseth is a member in good standing and has called Wilson a spiritual mentor, explicitly saying that he is a disciple of Wilson’s teachings and learning from his books.

The Democratic Senators who might have questioned him about any of this (if they were informed enough) were stymied by our ingrained respect for the absolute right of people to adhere to any belief system they choose.

I get it; I believe quite a lot of scientifically unverifiable things too. But just because people adhere to seemingly oddball religious beliefs must not mean that they cannot be questioned about policy implications of what drives them. Hegseth is about to have much influence and some concrete power over the largest element of the national government. It was the right and duty of Senators to interrogate Hegseth about this.

Jones thinks the Senate is about to confirm someone who is committed to overturning the Constitutional principles that enable him to skate away from searching questions.

If it was not outright cowardice, the Democratic senators’ timidity was at best rooted in a desire to respect the Constitution’s important prohibition against instituting a religious test for office. But if this was the reason for their failures during the hearing, it reflects a serious misunderstanding of the purpose of that principle.

The Founders were primarily concerned about prohibiting the then familiar practice of reserving offices for members of religious groups favored by the state. But that Constitutional protection in no way prohibits lines of questioning related to whether a nominees’ publicly professed beliefs and worldview, whether religious or secular, are compatible with the fundamental principles of a pluralistic democracy and the oath of office they will take to defend and obey not a president but the Constitution.

The Republican Party—whose adherents are two thirds white and Christian in a nation that is only 41% white and Christian—has clearly given itself over to the white Christian nationalist vision that fuels Trump’s MAGA movement. If, over the next four years, if the Democratic Party continues to ignore the clear and present danger white Christian nationalism represents, history will judge them harshly for their naiveté and their abdication of duty to our nation in its time of need.

In [his book] American Crusade, Hegseth wrote, “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” With his nomination looking likely to succeed, that yet has arrived. And now, Trump will have his willing leader of an American crusade that will be fought—not just abroad but at home—with the most lethal forces and arsenal of weapons the world has ever seen.

I do not think Jones is being alarmist. Fortunately MAGA has internal contradictions as well as facing democratic (small "d") popular opposition that may constrain what the likes of Hegseth would like to do. Or not.

If the Dems were feeble, there were protesters in the house who Northern Californians might recognize.

Who's on the take?

The map shows the difference between the amount the federal government spends in a state and the amount the state pays in federal taxes. Blue means a state receives more than it gives, orange the reverse. Source.

Perhaps the creators of this visual should have rendered the orange as blue and the blues as shades of red and pink. (Click to enlarge.) The result wouldn't be a perfect fit with our political divisions; New Mexico, Hawaii, Vermont and Oregon are reliably Democratic. Still the map correlates all too well with Republican states being takers while Dems pay the federal bills.

I was a little surprised to see Texas and Florida so far on the taker side. There's some correlation between the size/population of a place with being a taker; the little places take more from the whole. By those measures, those two might be expected to contribute more to national wellbeing than they give. But apparently not.

Economist Paul Krugman explains the obvious:

High productivity in California (and New York, also included) plays a significant role in making America richer; the nation excluding these powerhouses would have about 6 percent lower GDP per capita.

California makes an especially large contribution to U.S. technological dominance. As I noted a month ago, 8 of America’s top 9 technology companies — all of them if you count pre-Cybertruck Tesla — are based either in Silicon Valley or in Seattle.

And while Hollywood doesn’t dominate films and TV the way it once did, Los Angeles still plays a major role in America’s cultural influence (and still generates a lot of income.)

Republicans are balking at providing disaster assistance to Californians burned out by the wild fires ... because, you know, Gavin Newsom, and something or other ...

In an additional post, Krugman catalogues how the country has rescued Florida and Texas in recent decades. He concludes: 

All indications ... are that Republicans intend to exploit the tragedy in Los Angeles, and in general turn the federal government into an extortion racket. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Realtime apocalypse: alongside the devastation, the politics

Magazine journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff brings perspective to the Los Angeles hell fire. 

California's Fires Show How Climate Will Destabilize Our Politics and Daily Life

... Over the past few decades, we’ve spent most of our national focus thinking about climate change as a technology and economic challenge. Can we move away from fossil fuels and adopt renewables at a fast enough pace to change the arc of warming? How can we use tax incentives and industrial policy to drive the adoption of electrical vehicles faster? How can we better create batteries and power storage solutions to smooth out the variability of solar and wind energy? How quickly will the cost of solar panels continue to fall? How do we impose more appropriate costs on carbon?

... But the California fires underscore how, as we actually begin to live the effects of even that “better-than-it-could-have-been” era of warming, the tech and economic challenge is going to take a backseat to a bigger crisis. We are unprepared for how climate is about to be the main driver of our politics, nationally and internationally.

Climate change isn't just one more political priority on our already over-crowded list of national to-dos. It is a threat multiplier that affects every single other priority already on it, from the air we breathe to the food we eat to how much we pay for a house.

So much of the world is about to either have too much water or not enough. And that’s going to change and destabilize everything in our political calculations. 

The globe’s changing climate is about to put an enormous number of people in motion—people who find their homes increasingly unlivable, their local economies in collapse, or their houses simply destroyed.

Already, we’re seeing between 20 million and 30 million people a year displaced worldwide by climate disasters, from droughts and desertification to hurricanes and typhoons. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that just three regions — Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia — will generate 143 million more climate migrants by 2050. That’s an enormous number of people in motion in the world. Others have pegged that number even higher: A 2020 study by the Institute for Economics & Peace figured there might be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050.

... It’s been easy to overlook how much of our current national angst over immigration and the border is a story of how climate change is already destabilizing Central America. While there’s been a lot of attention to how drugs and gang violence have driven much of the migration to the US southern border, that flow is also heavily affected by climate. “Farmers in Central America have experienced multiple droughts since 2014, resulting in crop losses of 70 percent or more during some harvests and often affecting consecutive growing seasons,” the US Institute of Peace wrote in 2022. “Droughts were likely a key driver of large increases in family migration from Honduras and Guatemala to the United States in 2018 and 2019.”...

... Moreover, this is not a problem that stops at our borders.

... What happens when major cities and urban areas in the US simply become unlivable, too hot, too dry—or, even, entirely dry? [We're seeing in L.A.]

... Think of what this means for internal migration, political representation, dysfunction, taxes. Think of what this means for workforce talent and economic development.

Individuals may very well make choices to live in uninsurable places — the lure of a beachfront house is strong! — but that’s going to be a much harder sell for companies.

Thirteen million people represent, in the roughest math, somewhere between 20 and 30 electoral votes and seats in the US House of Representatives that may shift in the years ahead simply because of shifting climates.

... We don’t really know what will happen in the years ahead because we don’t understand what happens when you pile all these risks on top of one another. ... 

...We’re entering some really rocky waters. As I quoted former US intelligence leader Sue Gordon saying a few weeks ago: “Our institutions are not keeping up with the turn of the Earth, and they’re being devalued in the moment,” she told me. “Society requires government, yet we’re running out of the structures that make it work.”

As I often say, go read it all.

I sometimes muse that some shock will come to us here in the USofA that knocks us sideways and drives us toward more responsible humanity -- about climate, in politics, in sharing our unparalleled wealth. Instead we have given ourselves Donald and his merry band of cruel crooks and con men. Yet our better impulses persist. Ain't humanity great? The L.A. fire will produce heroes -- and knaves (looters?) -- that's who we are.

Choices in tough moments

Click to enlarge.

What's going on when you advertise your services as a chance to run away from the irritants of life at home? Apparently there is profit in scratching the itch of discontent.

We're a disheartened bunch. Former Congressman and former Republican Adam Kinzinger writes about the state of mind that goes with this:

According to a recent Gallup Poll measuring public confidence in institutions, the downward trend is striking:

Great deal of confidence:

    • Religion: 2001: 23% | 2024: 13%

    • Big Business: 2001: 10% | 2024: 6%

    • Supreme Court: 2001: 32% | 2024: 13%

    • Banks: 2001: 17% | 2024: 12%

    • Newspapers: 2001: 13% | 2024: 7%

    • Congress: 2001: 10% | 2024: 4%

    • TV News: 2001: 14% | 2024: 6%

    • The Presidency: 2001: 26% | 2024: 13%

Another report by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) compared Americans’ trust in each other. In 1972, 46% of respondents believed “most people can be trusted.” By 2022, that number had dropped to 25%.

This is where Trump’s influence looms large. His movement has been built on popular mistrust—not just in institutions but in fellow citizens. He reinforces his "only I can fix it" narrative, the foundation of his autocratic ambitions. ...

We can and should argue about what got us here, but we actually know the remedy: we can build trust among our own circles and among those with whom we live. Kinzinger concludes:

It starts with each of us, in our communities, rejecting fear and embracing compassion. Together, we can work toward a more united and resilient future. 

As Dr. Marin Luther King asked in another moment of choice: we must understand we face Chaos or Community?

National shame shuffles along expensively

The outgoing Biden administration has managed to make a tiny bit of progress on cleansing the national shame which is the US gulag at Guantanamo.

Andy Worthington, who has stayed on top of our criminal travesty of justice, explains: 

In what will forever be remembered as a truly significant day in Guantánamo’s long and sordid history, the Biden administration has freed eleven Yemeni prisoners, flying them from Guantánamo to Oman to resume their lives after more than two decades without charge or trial in US custody; mostly at Guantánamo, but in some cases for several years previously in CIA “black sites.”

All eleven men had been held for between two and four years since they were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, and, in one outlying case, for 15 years.

A deal to release them in Oman had been arranged in October 2023, but had been cancelled at the last minute, when a plane was already on the runway, because of what was described, when the story broke last May, as the “political optics” of freeing them when the attacks in southern Israel had just taken place — although Carol Rosenberg, writing for the New York Times about the releases yesterday, suggested that “congressional objections led the Biden administration to abort the mission.”

Nobody who paid attention claims these guys had done anything except be brown Islamic men from a no-count country who got swept up in the national US spasm of vengeance after 9/11. 

Rosenberg describes the back story of our Cuban prison:

Guantánamo’s detention zone today is an emptier, quieter place than it once was.

The remaining 15 detainees are held in two prison buildings with cell space for about 250 prisoners.

The prison opened on Jan. 11, 2002, with the arrival of the first 20 detainees from Afghanistan. At its peak, in 2003, the operation had about 660 prisoners and more than 2,000 troops and civilians commanded by a two-star general. The detainees were mostly held in open-air-style cells on a bluff overlooking the water while the prisons were built.

The operation now has 800 troops and civilian contractors — 53 guards and other staff members for every detainee — and is run by a more junior officer, Col. Steven Kane.

It was always madness; at this point, the insanity is all that is left. And a few remaining prisoners who are tied up in legal proceedings that never advance because American civilian lawyers continued to argue, accurately, that their charges, even if justified, depend on information extracted by illegal torture.

Jimmy

I thought I was done writing about former President Jimmy Carter back in 2023. He couldn't last much longer and I'd written much, especially about his faith and his early insistence that we must remember Palestinians.

But I'll indulge one last time by passing along some of Charlotte Clymer's account of mourning in DC for a president who represented something most such figures do not: an admirable character.

The Real Tribute Was Outside

... Steve Ford, the son of President Gerald Ford, whom Pres. Carter defeated in the 1976 election, delivered a beautiful eulogy in which he said to the Carter family: “God did a good thing when he made your dad.”

President Biden, in what is likely the final major public speech of his tenure, summed up President Carter in three words: “Character, character, character.”

It all felt right and good. It felt fitting. It felt rare and maybe fleeting. It felt like we may not see this kind of easy agreement across the political spectrum for a long time.

But with all due respect, it didn’t come close to matching the quiet and hardy adoration that could be observed in the previous 36 hours on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and surrounding streets.

... So, it was painfully cold and uninviting, and yet, even late into the night, there were thousands and thousands of people across all walks of life waiting in line outside for several hours just to enter the Capitol Rotunda for a few moments and walk around the flag-draped casket of one Jimmy Carter and pay their respects to a model human being.

There were those who were off for the federal holiday and those who came after a long day of work—suits and dresses and military uniforms—young and old, Democrats and Republicans and independents, the working class and the wealthy, entire families, all of them standing outside in the freezing cold for several hours.

That’s not an exaggeration. The wait was several hours. At best, one could reasonably hope to get through the line and the quick orbit within the Rotunda in just over three hours. Some folks waited longer, some as many as five hours depending on when they got in line.

... It wasn’t as though Pres. Carter could do anything for these thousands upon thousands of people who came to say goodbye beyond what he did for them in life, deeds already completed and offered without any assumption of reciprocity.

This man who hadn’t been president in more than four decades, who had a 31 percent approval rating the month he lost reelection, who was unfairly maligned for many years over his job performance, who was unjustly a punchline to much of the country afterward for so long after leaving office — it was this man they came to honor.

They stayed in line, freezing, probably hungry, probably needing to use the restroom at some point, many of them probably wishing they were at home with a hot beverage and blanket in hand.

They stayed in line.

This one-term president, who went back to his peanut farm after leaving office, who was detested by the bulk of D.C. political circles, who didn’t cash out and join a bevy of corporate boards, who didn’t feel it necessary to say what was popular or easy, who navigated his life thereafter as a private citizen with such grace and integrity that even his most ardent detractors had to tip their hats and acknowledge his decency.

I realize there are so many reasons to feel pessimistic about the future of our country at the moment, but if such decency is so honored as we’ve seen by everyday Americans on the ground in our Nation’s Capitol over these past few days, tell me that isn’t cause for hope.

Tell me that isn’t a glimmer of what we could still be.

The whole is deeper than the excerpt. Go read it all.

In which the roadside dispenses advice

 

I have no idea who is posting these Burma-Shave reminiscent displays of signs on a country road.

 

Nor do I know quite what to make of them.

 

They are succinct. But meaningful?

Clearly though, meant to encourage. Perhaps someone is recovering from an illness? We can use all we can get of laughter as winter settles in, locally and nationally.

How to come out of a punch drunk moment

Erudite Partner is out with a new essay for this moment, here available, among many outlets, from Professor Juan Cole's Informed Comment. 

Half of us got kicked in our heads and guts by the re-election of Donnie the dimwitted and his merry band of cowards and grifters. We're going to have to figure out how to live through and beyond this unmitigated disaster for the American republic.

Survival and hope will depend on learning to see and live in the gaps ...

Finding Hope in the Negative Spaces of the Trump Era

... What’s missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don’t mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person’s racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking — calling out — what’s best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.

In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I’ve fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle — reducing the negative space around it — to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold — and expand — the perimeter of that circle of personhood.

Go read it all.  

For myself, I'm coming out of the numbed phase and reconnecting with appropriate rage at the injustice, cruelty, greed and foolishness that characterize what appears to be on offer from the new regime. Let's figure out how to kick these dopes where it hurts -- in their bank accounts and in their over-valued balls (figuratively of course).