Can this legal system survive Trump?

Another day, another legal kerfuffle raised up by the Trump regime. Okay, I admit I probably read too many substacks written by lawyers. Naturally lawyers think legal proceedings are where it is at. For most of us, most of the time, there are plenty of other aspects of life of equal or greater importance -- perhaps whether the developing El Nino weather system is going to flood large parts of the California coastline this winter.

But like many others, I try to keep up with the legal deluge. This morning David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo laid out where he thinks we are; he's not optimistic about the courts as a defensive line against the authoritarian, but he tries to define what he thinks they can do -- which is more than nothing.

In the defining legal struggle of our time — whether the federal judiciary will sustain the rule of law long enough to preserve the essential core of a democracy for us to repair, rebuild, and re-enlarge after Trump II — the jury is still out.

Important developments in three different cases yesterday — the Alien Enemies Act, third-country deportations, and Trump’s collusive settlement with the IRS — point in very different directions.

On the face of it, not much unites the cases or offers a common theme or collective takeaway. But in stepping back and reviewing the last 20 months of Trump II legal battles, yesterday’s developments are datapoints in favor of a tentative working theory that appeals courts are slowly coming around to the urgency of the current moment.

In the first six months of Trump II, district judges were on their heels, caught off guard by the ferocity of the rampage against the rule of law and still tethered to old norms and expectations for the Justice Department that no longer held true. It was a brutal stretch of watching the Trump administration seize some key early wins and capture important legal ground.

After being collectively kicked in the teeth, district judges pretty quickly adjusted to the new reality — but appeals courts failed to back district judges in key respects, missed the urgency of the moment, and surrendered more ground to the lawlessness.

More recently, appellate judges have begun to turn, too. Two glimmers of hope yesterday came at the appeals court level, with the en banc D.C. Circuit looking poised to allow U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to resume his contempt of court inquiry in the original Alien Enemies Act case and the 11th Circuit handing Trump a loss in his bogus settlement with the IRS.

That still leaves the Supreme Court, which — with a few notable exceptions — has been Trump’s greatest enabler. It played true to form yesterday with an emergency intervention that will allow the administration’s brutal third-country removals policy to continue past the election and until it rules after oral arguments in December.

Unlike the lower courts, the Supreme Court will not eventually come around. While we’ve already seen examples — most prominently on tariffs, birthright citizenship, and the USPS mail-in ballots rule — of the Roberts Court refusing to endorse some of Trump’s worst excesses, the high court is too deeply compromised and its six-justice right-wing majority too invested in the GOP’s partisan fate to emerge as a reliable bulwark.

But the appeals courts may buy us some additional time by slowing the speed of the descent. 

Kurtz looks at reality unblinkingly in this. He neither dismisses legal struggle against fascism, nor puts excessive weight on what a democratic people under siege can win in the courts. Courts and the laws may not save us, but their work can set an honorable standard. They can impose friction on the authoritarian project. 

Besides, courts can avert some of the sheer cruelty of the Trump/Miller project. Erudite Partner and so many others work to accompany people trying to navigate the morass of immigration courts. There too winning time may all that can be achieved, but time can preserve human decency and even life.

And meanwhile, the anti-MAGA majority can work to stymie Trump in other arenas, most immediately in the November elections. We can do this. And then we rebuild and re-found this country.

Practicing citizenship

As we move into the election season, literally millions of Americans will be working to get other millions of Americans to exercise their right to vote. Volunteers will be traveling to heavily contested states and other will be working phones -- and also encouraging their local friends to do the election thing.

I've learned a lot from studying how people in different eras went about trying to get others to vote. Historian of African American life Dr. Jemar Tisby recounts how formally enslaved men organized themselves to vote in the former Confederate states after emancipation. 

For generations, most Black people had been locked out of meaningful political power. Enslaved people were treated as property under slave law, while even free Black people faced severe restrictions on citizenship and suffrage.

After emancipation, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 required the former Confederate states to create new governments based on male suffrage; the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, then prohibited denying citizens the vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

A.W. M’Callum, in Harper’s Weekly (June 22, 1867) | The National Park Service

Black men registered and voted in extraordinary numbers, entered constitutional conventions, helped elect new state governments, and won public office themselves.

But an enormous practical question lay beneath that transformation: How do you take a population only recently excluded from the democratic process and help people become informed agents in their own political futures?

One answer came in the form of Union Leagues.

The Union League, also called the Loyal League, began in the North in 1862 as a pro-Union, pro-Lincoln club for white men.

After Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Acts in March 1867 and enfranchised Black men across the South, Republican leaders turned the organization southward.

Campaigners understood that a huge project of teaching civic literacy was needed if Black men were to take their place as actors in American democracy. 

Donors underwrote the campaign. Paid speakers, both Black and white, swept through the southern states. Hundreds of thousands of Black southerners joined that spring and summer.

In October 1867, the Charleston Daily News counted no fewer than eighty-eight league organizations in South Carolina, which it said had enrolled almost every Black man in the state. ...

They held meetings at night in homes, churches, and schoolhouses.

They often had a Bible, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and an anvil or some other emblem of labor often lay on the table. A minister opened with prayer, new members took an oath, then the group got to work.

... The Leagues answered the era’s hardest question. How do you take a people who were “property” five years earlier and make them agents in their own political fate?

They did it in organized community.

White southerners who had held these Black men as property fought back against the Union Leagues.  

After the Civil War, many white people (North and South) could only imagine Black people using political power in the same way white men had—to dominate.

The white opponents of Reconstruction described Black political participation as “Negro domination.”

They portrayed a people who, just a few years earlier, had been excluded from citizenship as dangerous for organizing and using the rights they had just gained.

We generally remember the Ku Klux Klan as a racial terrorist organization, which it was. But its violence during Reconstruction also had a specific political purpose: to weaken the [interracial] Republican coalition, suppress Black voting and officeholding, and restore white supremacy. ...

Too often it seems as if the sins of the American past just keep coming around again. Where Black people are determined to practice their rights as citizens, recalcitrant officials still try to get in their way. In 2021, Georgia made it a crime to give voters water while they wait in line to cast a ballot.

The lengths to which people will go to vote and the lengths to which other people will go to stop them reminds us that voting is the vital center of citizenship, of belonging to the American project.

This is just too good ...

In Chicago on Monday, the hometown Bears took on the Philadelphia Eagles. As is customary at football games (unhappily in my view, but that's for another day), there was an introductory performance of the national anthem. The local team knew how to put on a good show. Take a look.

See the full 2 minute performance by Mariachi Herencia de México: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1096930372917065

Rather remarkably, after having lost their franchise quarterback to injury the previous week, Chicago won.

The NFL is filthy rich and the owners are horrible people, but the league knows where we're going as a society ... we're going together. I like that. 

An invitation to debate

So far, this delightful ad from Texas Democrat James Talarico who is contesting the state's' corrupt Attorney General Ken Paxton for a US Senate seat wins the prize for the season.

Paxton is kind of a nasty ghoul. Talarico knows how to present an attractive contrast. Which guy might you like to represent you? Polls say Talarico has a chance. 

Mourning a long time friendship ...

Like many Americans living (or in my case having formerly lived) near the border with our northern neighbor, Canada is near and dear to me. 

In my teens we drove across the border without a qualm, answering the question "where were you born?" from agents on each side of the the Niagara River bridge without a further thought. I would sail my little Sunfish across the river for a picnic lunch on the Ontario side. I listened to my elders report that during Prohibition, they'd sat on a porch by the river watching the US government revenue agents chase the Canadian rum runners. (You can guess who they rooted for.) When the exchange rate between the two countries warranted it, Canadians would flood shopping malls on our side, and vice versa. We watched Canadian as well as US TV, following ice hockey as well as baseball. I had relatives in Canada; it was only a slight exaggeration to say that it was an historical accident that we lived in Buffalo and not St. Catharines. 

So it is painful to share some observations from Brynn Tannehill, a US expat now resident in our northern neighbor.

As an American expat living in Canada, I have a front row seat to the destruction of the United States’ international reputation. It shows up in all sorts of little ways in my day-to-day life that most Americans wouldn’t see. 

Fuel prices here are even worse than in the Unites States, and oil is a global market. Regular 89 octane gasoline has climbed up again to $2.06 CAD per liter, which translates to about $5.60 USD per gallon. Every time my friends and neighbors see it tick upwards again, they lament that the Americans that did this, and they had no say in the matter. 

Every supermarket that isn’t American proudly plasters their windows with announcements that they’re Canadian-owned. Every product on the shelves at the market is labeled as to whether or not it was made in Canada. There is a social stigma attached to being seen buying a product that isn’t Canadian-made, and as the token American expat I’m far more conscious of being caught buying American than being outed as transgender.

Canadians themselves are leaving the US and returning to the motherland. I finally got the import safety inspection done on my car at Canadian Tire this week. The manager mentioned he was doing about 30 import inspections per month before Trump was elected, and now it’s more like 150. Almost all of them are Canadians returning from the US because the country has “lost its mind” and they don’t want to be there any long no matter how well their jobs pay. ...

She summarizes what the Trump regime has done to the relationship between the two nations:

To put how bad things are in perspective, Canadians hold more favorable opinions of China than they do the United States. Thirty-five percent of Canadian adults have confidence in Xi Jinping to do the right thing, while only 20 percent say the same thing for Trump. Along similar lines, only 34 percent of Canadians believe the United States respects the freedom of its citizens, down from 75 percent just a decade ago. 

Eighty-four percent of Canadians regard relations with the United States as negative, which is worse than the public opinion on Canadian-Chinese relations (64 percent negative) and on a par with Russia (85 percent negative). Given that Russia has spent years brutally invading and occupying Ukraine and committing countless war crimes, it’s hard to imagine that number dropping much further short of the United States actually attempting an invasion of Canada.

She concludes:

The number one message non-MAGA Americans should be taking away from the current Trump-induced debacle is it will likely take a generation of Americans electing normal, pro-Canadian leaders to start restoring the relationship and regaining trust. 

The other lesson Democratic leadership in the US should be taking away from this is that politicians who stand up to Trump, don’t obey in advance, and (politely) tell him to go F himself are extremely popular both with the Democratic base and the Canadian public. Showing a little backbone, and being willing to call Trump out for what he is, would go a long ways toward starting to repair the damage.

It's not only those of us on the US side of the border who are mourning our losses from Donald's idiotic bluster.

Rainbow Bridge between the US and Canada beside Niagara Falls

We live in a strange country

It's been hard to get enthused about the United States' 250th anniversary celebration. On the one hand, Donald Trump defiled the big day with a partisan political rally and a fireworks show that left the capital under a world-record smoke cloud. Serious people like Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. used the occasion honestly to ask why the nation has always hated our dark pigmented residents and citizens. 

Yale University historian Beverly Gage takes a light approach to exploring the nation's moment in This Land is Your Land: a Road Trip Through U.S. History. Her story of visiting many famous and obscure historical sites is quite simply fun, though not without sharp and novel observations.

As part of my academic training, I took a ... tempered and realistic look at the United States, with all of its contradictions and injustices. I also learned to be skeptical of self-congratulatory narratives: progress, manifest destiny, shining-city-on-a-hill exceptionalism. Historians tend to be myth-busters. ... With the country’s semiquincentennial—or 250th birthday—on the horizon, I figured it was a good time to step out of the proverbial ivory tower and check in with the past as it exists here and now, in the third decade of the 21st century. 

... I headed not for Washington, D.C., where recent mandates to teach “patriotic education” have precious little to do with the actual past. Instead, I set off to explore the museums, historic sites, roadside attractions, monuments, living-history pageants, battlefield reenactments, and souvenir shops where Americans so often go to learn—and fight—about their history. This book is a report of my travels: thirteen chapters in thirteen American places.

Gage's encounter with George Washington's accomplishments and his historic home at Mount Vernon begins with the story of a slave girl, Ona Maria Judge.  As a child house servant, she was carried by the Washington family first to New York City and then to Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania city was then home to more free Blacks than whites; it was the most anti-slavery corner of the new nation. When the Washington family prepared to return to Virginia after the general's presidency, Judge had other ideas.

On May 21, 1796, while the president and his wife were eating dinner, she walked out the door and never came back. By the time the Washingtons returned to Virginia, she was living and working in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as a free woman, though Washington never reconciled himself to that fact.

In visiting the historic homes of the revolutionary generation in Virginia, Gage came to what she thinks is a broadly applicable conclusion about historical preservation and display: 

... Mount Vernon became a public destination thanks to private effort. In 1853, a South Carolina matron named Louisa Bird Cunningham happened to be traveling down the Potomac when, according to legend, she came upon Washington’s grand old mansion, bathed in moonlight. It was in rough shape. She worried that Washington’s legacy would be lost to the public for lack of upkeep and attention. 

“If the men of America have seen fit to allow the home of its most respected hero to go to ruin, why can’t the women of America band together to save it?” she wrote to her daughter, according to a display at today’s Mount Vernon. Thus inspired, they initiated the estate’s transformation into a public attraction. They also established what would become a central feature of historic preservation: It has often been women who have the vision, dedicate the time, raise the money, and do the work.

And in this iconoclastic vein, Gage's journey continues through the remnants of Andrew Jackson's Tennessee, frontier Texas and the Alamo, the astonishingly creative human energies of 19th century upstate New York abolitionists and women's suffrage activists, massacres of native people on the western frontier, and industrial strife in the nation's great cities. She recounts what took place and what remains in delightful prose, highlighting individuals both worthy and quirky.

What other historian would approach the country's invention of the atomic bomb by spending a night in a decommissioned missile silo, decorated to attract curious tourists? Outside Roswell, New Mexico, an entrepreneur has made the experience available to the curious:

The Atlas silos were accident-prone (though no nuclear explosion ever occurred). As a result, the program around Roswell lasted only a few years before being supplanted by superior technology. When military authorities pulled the missiles out in 1965, they left the silos behind: gargantuan steel-and-concrete bunkers hidden beneath the New Mexico desert. ... If I’m being honest, I was a little nervous about spending the night in an underground nuclear bunker all alone. ... 

From a distance, the silo is easy to miss, little more than a concrete platform flush against the landscape. But once [her guide] pulled open the big red steel door, leading down into the residential quarters, a whole underground world emerged. [Proprietor Gary] Baker has reconstructed the silo as a combination history museum and you-are-there immersive experience. It’s cold and deathly quiet, aside from the clanging metal sound that accompanies all human movement.  

Baker lives four stories down with his wife in a full-service apartment complete with running water and Wi-Fi. The Airbnb unit sits just above that. It’s a surprisingly cheery space, with a little kitchen adjoining the main living room, plus a bedroom with two single beds and a bathroom with shower. The kitchen comes fully stocked—which is convenient, since there aren’t many restaurants or grocery stores in silo country. Baker also provides plenty of subject-specific, period-appropriate reading material. I spent a few minutes flipping through Rockets and Your Future, a 1961 book aimed at persuading teenagers to enter the space business. The biggest wow in Baker’s underground lair is the silo itself, located just a few steps from the door of the guest apartment. 

... The missile is long gone, of course. But it’s not hard to imagine it sitting there, encased in its underground habitat, waiting for the chance to burst up through the surface and kill hundreds of thousands of people.

If the official celebration of the 250th anniversary leaves you cold, I can heartily recommend this truthful and quirky romp through the American past and present. Many of us need some cheering up about our country these days. Beverly Gage provides.

China rises. We suffer Trump.

 

So now we are in a moment when Donald Trump is making a big show of deference to China's President Xi. Xi is Trump's kind of guy, a personalist dictator, someone who replaced a collective leadership which bound itself to real limits despite claiming ultimate power over its country. The first among equals became top dog.

 

Trump is a weak imitator of his hero. American society remains resistant. In the photo, note Trump's full time sycophant Natalie Harp, her job to fluff his sick ego, trailing the big boys.  Sad.

 

Several weeks ago, New Yorker reporter Evan Osmos passed along a sober assessment of contemporary China. It's not alarmist; rather it's thoughtful.  Xi's China sees itself on top of the world, not without reason.

While the U.S. worries about whether it can continue a century of dominance, China is eager to restore its historical eminence, after two hundred years of what the Party sees as anomalous poverty. Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army who is now a fellow at Tsinghua University, told me, “Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles.” But Americans, in his view, have lost that historical awareness. “They have been so strong for so long that every American believes, ‘I’m a member of the strongest nation on earth,’ ” he said. 

The Chinese are no less convinced of their ascendancy. A European diplomat who has attended meetings with Xi and his advisers told me, “They’re feeling like the champions of the world. They think they can contend with anybody.”

... Rush Doshi, a professor at Georgetown and a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees in Trump’s pursuit of territorial control a recurring historical error. In the eighteenth century, while Russia fixated on conquering Eurasia, Britain developed the steam engine; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while Europeans fought over Africa, Americans mastered the assembly line. Today, while the U.S. tries to govern Venezuela and hobble Iran and Cuba, “China is focussed on winning the technologies of the future,” Doshi said. 

If the U.S. were to lose the competition over the next wave of industries—including A.I., biotech, and robotics—as it lost the ones over solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, “it would irreversibly change the balance of power.” ... To China, Doshi said, “autocracies are considered perfectly legitimate, and technology is used to strengthen them. China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that.”

Yet Osnos reports that there are observers who don't see Trump's bow to China as indicating permanent global subservience. Rather we are spectators to a contest of somewhat precarious oligarchies -- this is unstable.

... Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me that the international system the U.S. constructed after the Second World War—and ran, often to its benefit—is “definitely dead and beyond redemption.” He said that Trump’s dismantling of the country’s alliances signaled the end of the “willingness of the American public to play the role America has played for most of the last eight decades.”

But America’s diminished stature does not necessarily clear a path for China. Few people these days are enthusiastic about the prospect of a world dominated by either superpower. ...

... The likely successor to the American order, then, is not a Chinese order so much as what Leonard calls a period of “un-order”: a jungle in which every country hedges, arms, subsidizes, hoards, and searches for choke points to exploit. In the words of Suisheng Zhao, a China scholar at the University of Denver, it is the makings of a “twenty-first-century Hobbesian struggle of all against all.”

During the Cold War, as futurists on both sides of the Iron Curtain plotted to control the direction of history, another group coalesced around a more modest idea. Mankind 2000, as it called itself, was made up of European survivors of fascism who were wary of both Communist determinism and American hubris. They warned that man could be “absorbed by his machine” and declared, “The future belongs to all of us, not only to small oligarchic groups.”

Spend enough time in Beijing and Washington these days and the rivalry looks less like a clash of competing systems than like a race between small oligarchic groups—tight circles of men with immense power over everyone else’s future....

Scary, but not simple or inevitable. Oligarchs and aspiring monarchs always think they've solved the problem of pesky peoples who think they ought to get a say in how their lives are lived. Perhaps China's future is not so clear. New York Times correspondent Keith Bradsher, writing from Beijing,  sees a more complicated reality in the country he has watched develop for 30 years.

For China and its top leader, Xi Jinping, the biggest prize from a summit in Washington, notably free from confrontation, may be simple: time.

Time to cope with a housing market crash that has wiped away the savings of tens of millions of Chinese families. Time to deal with local governments running short of money as land-use revenue collapses. Time to make China even less vulnerable to economic pressure from the United States and other industrialized countries.

And perhaps most consequentially, time to prepare for the once-in-five-years Communist Party national congress next autumn, which will choose a new slate of top leaders to work under Mr. Xi.

“By trying to stabilize relations with the U.S., China can better concentrate on its own priorities,” said Wu Xinbo, a leading American studies scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. ...

It ain't easy governing one of the most populated, fastest growing economies and societies the world has ever seen. China is big and on the rise, but its destination, and ours while in our relative decline, has not yet been written.

Timothy Snyder on virtue ....

I found this interesting and challenging. The eminent historian of Ukraine and eastern Europe is sitting in bunker near the frontline against Russia's invasion, thinking about meanings and moral virtue.

Moral Language (Kharkiv Meditations, 3/10) by Timothy Snyder

Kharkiv Meditations, 3/10

Read on Substack

Here's my abbreviated transcription: 

... it's alright to use moral terms in general. ... I'm trying to break through a certain taboo we have about acceptable ways of expressing ourselves on media .. on the ways it is acceptable to talk about politics or even society.  ... we find ourselves talking about interests and calculations as though those were real. ... But what about things like cowardice and courage?  ... Without terms like cowardice and courage, you can't talk about politics ... especially when you get down to a small family of oligarchs where human vices and virtues start to count for more than they would if politics were apportioned [characterized?] more neatly by ... the rule of law. ... It becomes necessary to use these kinds of terms to describe ...

I don't think you can talk about the leaders of the present administration without talking about greed. ... Greed is more real, more real than interests or calculations. ... And if we deprive ourselves of that language ... if we don't have a word for putting our commitments around a vice like greed, then we can't address it. ... we can't solve it. ... if the people who are greedy or avaricious ... if they parade it, they don't hide it, if they display it ostentatiously, what are we do?  

Because if we lack the word to describe what they are doing, they are changing reality. ... They are making things normal. And we are helping them because they are embodying ever more perfectly a vice. And we are embodying ever more perfectly the inability to describe that vice.  ... Together we are creating a politics [in which], let's say greed, becomes normal.

... terms like cowardice or courage are as much of our objective reality as terms like interests or calculations. And if we are afraid to use them, we're not actually describing any reality better, we're describing it worse. ... we may also be contributing to some of the vices we should be describing.  

 A few observations on Snyder's lesson for us -- perhaps I should call it his sermon. 

•  If they trouble themselves to look at the behavior of our rulers, most Americans seem to understand that we are seeing extraordinary violations a moral code so fundamental that it is hardly conscious. "Trump is a crook. He doesn't care who he hurts. They lie. They are careless of human life. They are cruel." This moral instinct either isn't there at all or, among a considerable majority, is simple and obvious. This moral repulsion accounts for the fact that right now polls show intense disapprovers of the Trump administration vastly outnumber intense approvers. The repulsion fuels intensity.

•  Among most people, approval or disapproval of politicians does include personal assessments about "interests or calculations." The huge example is folks' recollection that prices were lower under Trump I. But this assessment exists within a context in which hardly anyone believes that politicians are working for them, not for themselves. When you think the politicians are just transactional scum anyway, it's easy and adequate simply to weigh what they might do for you. But if you think pols should provide anything more than a cheap date, the moral repulsion kicks in these days.

• Snyder seems to me to be talking to, and about people, who cannot use moral language about the Trump regime for fear of showing themselves to be unsophisticated -- not savvy. In the media, and perhaps in academia, defaulting to "interests or calculations" when moral repulsion would be truer and more accurate looks to me like habitual timidity. Elite institutions too often reward pusillanimity, reward shaving the rough edges off uncomfortable truths. The Trump regime is showing that the often gray haired zealots of "No Kings" and the like may be the real sophisticates in our current moment.

Of parks and builders

Once upon a time, Americans with foresight empowered an imaginative creator, Frederick Law Olmsted, to build urban parks in many of our burgeoning cities. I grew up near to one of Olmsted's projects, Delaware Park in Buffalo. Parents worried that our pack of postwar WWII children would get in trouble in "the park"-- but we ventured there by ourselves despite their disapproval. 

Heather Cox Richardson's "250 to 250" project tells the story of the great park builder in this video.

San Francisco's Golden Gate Park were I play nowadays was NOT an Olmsted creation. He thought the edge of the Pacific Ocean dunes was too harsh an environment for his sort of nature park. I'm okay with it and hope to get back to it very soon when my busted leg and hip heal.

Women of tech: disillusioned, disoriented, and disenchanted

Well I sure didn't see this one coming. WIRED magazine -- the indispensable technology and science publication -- has devoted an issue to women. Women as tech workers, as AI moguls, as engineers, as inventors, as the unseen substratum of Silicon Valley. And it's doozy!

The editor, Katie Drummond, pulls no punches. Too many of the men (boys?) of the technocracy routinely abuse their female coworkers.

... Off the top of my head, and across a 17-year career: There was the boss who, upon learning that I wanted kids, said that I seemed “too cold” to be a parent. I held my tears long enough to make it to the bathroom. 

A few years later, I remember being visibly pregnant in another employer’s office, as he joked that a woman as intense as me would probably keep her baby locked in a closet. 

One boss tried to pay me exponentially less than my male predecessor, because, he said, I was younger and less authoritative. A highly regarded media company enrolled me in its internal program for promising female leaders, which was being run by two male executives. 

I stood last year among a crowd of my peers at a packed event, listening to a prominent think-tank leader (male) credit WIRED’s previous editor in chief (also male) with the magazine’s successes during my tenure. 

Let’s not forget the cofounder of this very publication, who suggested via email following the 2024 election that I might “seppuku” myself because he disagreed with an editor’s letter I’d written. 

And in 2023, The New York Times published a story about my appointment as WIRED’s global editorial director—then had to issue a correction for inaccurately stating that I was the first woman to run the magazine. In fact, Katrina Heron ran WIRED from 1997 to 2001. 

She is certain it is time for women in tech to speak up:

It’s gotten easier to be an ambitious woman, but if my own personal experience is any indication, not by nearly enough. ... In a bid to command the respect at work that a man would, I’ve often felt the need to behave more like a stereotypical one: meaner, louder, less empathetic. I hate that. And I’ve got it relatively easy: If a white, straight woman working in media and technology deals with this much bullshit, imagine the experience of a woman who happens to be a person of color, or gay, or transgender.

... Deciding in 2026 to commit an entire issue to all things women might seem regressive, or too obvious, or even unnecessary in an era where many people—and plenty in tech—are happy to wave off the notion that gender is still “a thing” to contend with.

I disagree. A convicted sex predator, after all, is in the White House; the tech industry executives in his ear are virtually all men. Women do wield power in Silicon Valley, but far too many still serve at the pleasure of a man above them. When Mark Zuckerberg bemoans the loss of “masculine energy” in his workforce, and Pete Hegseth says that the military is too “effeminate,” and Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts impact Black female civil servants above all other groups—it can seem like they want to erase women altogether. 

And it’s infuriating. The world deserves better heroes, women deserve better colleagues, and my daughter—who sleeps in a bed, not a locked closet—deserves to be less furious than I am when she’s 40. ...

This women's issue of WIRED includes two investigative features. 

Lauren Goode describes her Search for Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful Women. Her essay is thoughtful and a little bemused. There are women who reach the heights of apparent power, but what's it all for?

... I realized that the real question is not who is most powerful, but why this question is still, in 2026, so difficult to answer. What’s missing from their lives or résumés? Why is there no woman Elon? Why don’t we have our own all-powerful heroine or supervillainess? 

... Women now possess all kinds of capital, which is in itself remarkable. But they are choosing not to fully enter the matrix. And really, why would they? What awaits them on the other side? 

Sandra Upson provide a survey and a lot of telling responses from 643 women working in various roles in tech. Not all feel alienated by Silicon Valley's futuristic fantasies and bro culture. But too many are. 

... Of course, plenty of women in WIRED’s survey reported feeling satisfied with their careers, and not everyone’s been, shall we say, manhandled. But so many have. 

More than a third of the women surveyed said they’d experienced gender-based harassment or bias at work. 

One after another, women reported being sexually harassed by male supervisors, getting paid less than their male peers, getting passed over for promotions, getting talked over in meetings. They were denied opportunities because men can “handle the pressure better.” 

Another popular trope is the man who only seems to hear a good idea when another man says it. You don’t need to listen to a three-hour podcast to find the manosphere; it’s right there in the conference room. 

Few respondents are as blunt as this woman:

“I hate the right-wing CEOs marching us along to a dystopian fascist hellscape because they get a boner over escaping to Mars.” ENGINEER, AGE 45–54

Sure looks like that to many of us mere observers of the guys who aim to determine our futures ...

On moving on from what Trump has broken ...

by way of Jess Piper

Maybe I'm tempting fate by even thinking about this -- and most likely the state of the nation will get even worse before it gets better -- but I nonetheless thought these observations about what we the people might want from new rulers when the Trump regime falls would be worth passing along.

Journalist Brian Beutler opines: 

“Looking Forward” Is An Accountability Catastrophe

... Left to their own devices, people will forget. When Republicans fail, they put a lot of effort into hastening the process of forgetting, into turning everyone’s attention to whatever’s going wrong right now. The perverse thing is that Democrats also seek to hasten the process of forgetting.

Their model of politics tells them holding the center is everything (it’s definitely important) and that this is accomplished, at all times, by meeting or at least speaking to the immediate needs of whoever happens to inhabit the center. If you’re “looking backwards” you aren’t focused on the future, and thus aren’t attending to the needs of regular people. Or at least they won’t perceive you to be focused on their needs. So Democrats “look forward.”

It’s why Barack Obama squelched investigation and prosecution of the Bush torture regime. It’s why he made preemptive concessions for bipartisan cooperation, and accepted that the buck stopped with him from day one, rather than remind people every day that his opposition in Congress comprised the very same people who wrecked the country. It’s why Joe Biden tried so hard to write Donald Trump out of the story of his presidency. This is catastrophic for political accountability. In a very obvious way, it helps Republicans rehabilitate themselves. ...

Yup. Those of us who've been around since Reagan (remember Iran-Contra?) and certainly since George W.'s wars, know the pattern.

Beutler goes on:

I cling to the blind hope that they’ve learned this lesson. That as Trump leads us into a dark era, and Democrats grok that their next turn in power will entail repairing a great deal of wreckage, they will realize they can’t repeat the same mistake. They may have to surrender Trump’s war in Iran for him, but they’d absolutely have to define it that way—and ideally do so while holding officers and civilian leaders who broke the law or committed war crimes accountable. Trump should get what he wants insofar as his name should be emblazoned on everything he broke in the world. And Republicans should get what they deserve, haunted by their complicity with Trump for the rest of their lives.

This is a slightly simplified version of the story. But one of the reasons FDR’s presidency was viewed as a success at the time, and why it had such long coattails for the Democratic Party, is that he didn’t behave the way today’s Democrats behave. He benefited from the fact that the depression began long before he took office, and Hoover bore clear responsibility for it. But FDR rejected Hoover’s efforts to get him to endorse a joint, bipartisan relief package before his term began. This made the lines of responsibility clear. Republicans were responsible for the Great Depression, Democrats were responsible for ending it. 

Joe Biden could have had something like that: Trump, responsible for COVID, and the economic collapse it precipitated, Biden, for restoring normalcy. But he couldn’t tell that story because he was determined not to say “the former guy’s” name.

... We can’t expect the public to remain grateful or bitter forever. But Americans are not amnesiacs. Ask typical swing voters for their impressions of Jimmy Carter, and while their responses wouldn’t be unanimous, they’d be much more heavily negative than positive—and they wouldn’t be able to say why. But I know why! It’s because that’s what Republicans wanted people to think, and so they said so, constantly, for decades.

Fortunately there are prominent Democrats and friends who are already revving up for accountability. Rep. Jamie Raskin has been through impeaching Trump once and he's not giving up, even if that mechanism does not provide a simple legal fix. We can count on AOC and Rep. Robert Garcia. In general, we're seeing a generational turnover among Dems in the House. About time. The older timers did their service, but taking back the country from MAGA, the tech bros, and the crooks needs younger, tougher Dem pols.

According to Beutler, whatever US government comes out of the GOP ruins could be both effective and smart.

... With a free hand to govern, Democrats should do things that are good, legal, and in the public interest—and that they have the competency to execute. DOGE showed that “just do[ing] things” can be a disaster, but speed was not the culprit per se. It was that the project was inherently malign, and corrupt—a bad idea that would’ve ended poorly no matter what, where the purpose of the speed was to break things before the law could catch up. 

Democrats could tear down the ballroom with that kind of speed and it would be fine; but it would be a bad idea to try to insure 40 million people overnight by declaring a national emergency, then daring the Supreme Court to overturn it, particularly given the option of passing a Medicare for All bill over the course of a few weeks.

So, clear the decks, be prepared to move fast, but don’t insist on speed when deliberation is important, and don’t refuse to choose battles out of stubbornness.

Political ingenuity has not been the Democrats forte for many years. If country is to make it out of the current disaster, Dems are going to have to be brave and supple. When we see a hint of this, let's get behind them and push ...

Friday cat blogging

Here I sit, convalescing from my violent encounter with an asphalt road, and Mio keeps up sentry duty. This human better not try disappearing for two weeks again!

He's not the only watcher. It sure is nice to be out of rehab and continuing recovery at home!

Elon Musk has a problem

One of Musk's many sons (he's a determined, heedless procreator) turned out to be not a boy but a transgirl -- and he can't seem to face the facts. So his idea of trying to help MAGA win Senate and Congressional races this year is to charge Dem candidates with being pro-trans. 

Most of those Dems are only notional, unenthusiastic, supporters of gender equity; it's just noise to them. So when Musk beats them up, few tell the bully to F-off and most weave and dodge. (Amy Acton who is running to be Ohio's governor seems an actual trans-phobe; most of the rest of them are just politicians who are too ready to adjust to whatever they think constituents might like.)

Thing is, as Erin in the Morning reports, this is not really a winning pitch that Musk is buying with his millions. 

This week’s ad spend is largely driven by [Musk's] America PAC, which has dropped $100 million on anti-transgender ads targeting Democrats. “The PAC’s emphasis on trans issues is striking because that’s been a much less prominent theme in GOP Senate ads so far this election cycle, per AdImpact, which tracks political advertising,” Axios’s Mike Zapler reports. “On its face, the strategy is at odds with what voters say they want candidates to talk about. Concerns about the economy dominate; trans and LGBT issues barely register.”

Zapler’s point is correct. Anti-trans ads may scare Democratic candidates, but among the general public, polls consistently show that voters rank transgender issues among the lowest-priority issues they care about and vote on, with less than 1% of respondents naming “wokeness/transgender issues” as a top issue. Regardless of the public’s specific views on topics such as transgender people’s access to bathrooms or gender-affirming care for transgender youth, voters decide their ballots far more on issues such as housing affordability, gas prices, and jobs. 

Democrats who decide to capitulate on transgender issues in response to these ads, as some have, risk alienating their progressive base while gaining nothing from Republicans, who will simply move on to hitting them on another trans-related issue.

Nevertheless, anti-transgender advertisements will saturate the airwaves for the next two months as the election draws near. For transgender people, that means constant exposure to hateful messaging, running alongside the evening news and football and appearing on the internet without warning. These ads do incredible damage to unsuspecting viewers. They paint transgender people as predatory and disgusting to a national audience in a cheap attempt to win votes, and every viewing raises the temperature of the hate and abuse directed at a community that is already a target. 

Meanwhile, Democrats face a decision point of their own: capitulate and lend these ads credibility, or defend the transgender constituents being used as bait. So far, in some of the states Musk is targeting, they have chosen the former, and the ads have not stopped.

Musk is a sick puppy -- a damaged man with lots of money acting out his underlying fear that spewing his semen might not guarantee his immortality. You too will die in God's time, Elon; get over yourself. Life is better over here in the real world.

Nightmare or daydream for this moment?

Somehow I don't think this is how humanity's encounter with the smart machines we are building will turn out, but Politico's Matt Wuerker offers a nice fantasy.

 

Guess they found their preferred alignment.

LGBT+ Pride, Mongolian style

 

Our newly met friends in Ulaanbaatar sent along this short video from their recent Pride festival. There's a freshness and pure joy to their struggle -- too often delight has been leached out of our community here. But they know -- gay is good; they are good. Enjoy.

An insight into the pungent politics of endangering humanity

We live involuntarily in the same world with the ostentatiously vocal tech bros; it's not hard to think they often come off as more like shallow teenage boys than humanly useful geniuses. But amid the real world noise about Artificial Intelligence, it's worth teasing out exactly what some of them are doing in our ordinary politics.

The always annoying but frequently insightful Matt Yglesias reports on some grubby real world machinations in the AI business. Many workers and some tech barons are warning there should be more regulation -- but as always, the devil is in the details.

... [the company] OpenAI’s official position in its communications to its employees is that OpenAI is not behind the anti-regulation super PAC Leading the Future.

But nobody working professionally in American politics believes this.

Leading the Future is funded in large part by OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman and his wife. It was conceptualized, by all accounts, by Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer... Unfortunately, his expertise in helping tech companies win regulatory fights in blue states — an endeavor I normally support — is in this particular case gravely endangering humanity.

Leading the Future has dumped huge amounts of money into primaries to try to defeat candidates who advocate for A.I. safety regulation. More than that, though, it’s trying to chill the whole topic. It exists not so much to spend money in the midterms as to convey to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer something like “nice anti-Trump thermostatic backlash you’ve got there … would be a shame if hundreds of millions of dollars came off the sidelines to be used against all your frontliners because party leaders embraced A.I. safety.”

So, again, if you work at OpenAI and believe that collective action is needed to address this problem, you have to understand that your company’s executives are massive stumbling blocks. 

Putting out fake statements distancing the company from Leading the Future is worse than doing nothing. You and your colleagues need to work together to demand that the company cease and desist from this effort to chill federal regulation. If the company won’t do it, you need to walk.

By contrast, while I would never in a million years say that [the AI company]Anthropic’s conduct as a company is beyond reproach or above suspicion — that’s the whole reason we need actual regulation here and not just to root for the “good guys” to win the race — their political conduct is consistent with the view that collective action is desirable.

Yglesias makes some prescriptions for reining in the many dangers that may be arising from the AI our tech barons are racing to build. I don't know if he is really onto something. But I do know that understanding the entanglement of the tech moguls with very conventional US political incentives has to be a big part of curbing the worst potentials of AI.

One more win for English speakers?

I have no qualifications whatsoever for chiming in on the current AI freak out. The tech boys seem on the verge of setting something loose that might bring tremendous benefits -- or extinguish us all. And they can't say which eventuality is most likely. 

Hell of a civilization we've built here when we have to ask whether human inventions will kill us all for fun and profit! (Though, it's not the first time -- once there was Hiroshima...) But here we are. And we're all subjects in their science experiment.

Anita Chabria writes an opinion column for the LA Times. I often can't believe she keeps her job. Maybe those writers have a good union? Her common sense seems to me the sort of reflection on this moment that we need. She asks what any sensible woman might ask:

... companies are hoping that these poorly understood but powerful machines can take over creating newer, even less understood but even more powerful AI systems — leaving humans largely in the dark about what they are creating and even what these beasts can and want to do.

The idea is that, because AI systems even right now are so fast and powerful, they can do the job of creating new versions of themselves at a pace and scale humans simply can’t.

Why, you ask, would this speed-without-understanding be a good thing? Isn’t it a bit like driving a race car while blindfolded?

Yes, yes it is.

But for-profit companies like making profit, and to do that, they want the most powerful product to sell.

Many in the industry are framing this recklessness as a necessity to prevent another country, China in particular, from creating a superintelligent AI system first. The Trump administration has so far grasped on to this greedy bit of misdirection like, well, oligarchs clinging to money.

Those who would prefer not to destroy humanity have urged international cooperation in the form of a slowdown while we figure out how to proceed safely.

We have no reason to believe China would not go along with this — in fact, China has more national-level AI regulation than the U.S. And humans have successfully controlled other technologies with catastrophic power, such as biological and nuclear weapons, through cooperation.

Does it matter which country creates the AI that kills humanity? The logic here seems to be that if anyone is going to cause a mass extinction event, it had better be an English-speaking AI, because it would be a huge loss to America if the planet were destroyed by one speaking a foreign language. ...

May Day 2026

Here in the Bay Area belly of the beast, the menace created by the tech bosses is not a new revelation. The tech workers are one of humanity's lines of defense. I doubt many think that is what they volunteered for. But here we all are.

Who has got "the creativity, forcefulness and resilience to do something about it"?

Lots of people whose opinions I value find Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo a pompous ass. Sometimes I agree. But, because I also seem hard wired to try to understand the present in the context of what I know about the past, I sometimes also find his thoughts worth pondering. He turns a historical lens on the current mainstream Democratic Party, an entity that seems way out of touch with many of its voters.

I think he is onto something:

... while Chuck Schumer and the consultants may suck, it’s probably not really about them. It’s about something more fundamental, a crisis of liberal democracy which we have to try to solve even though we only dimly understand it. Yes of course there are theories and one or the other of them are probably partly right. But this isn’t about criticizing theorists. It’s about living in history, when the things really driving change are seldom that clear to those living amidst the change.

The danger here is that we collectively fall into a kind of self-disgust which I see all the time. Our leaders suck. We suck. We’re weak and hapless. The political faction or movement I belong to sucks. 

These all flow rather naturally from most of the mainstream media narratives about whatever challenges Democrats are facing at a given moment. And this is of course enervating. Or it can be. And it can promote conflict which is not necessarily productive conflict.

And yet just because it’s happening in [much of Europe] and in countless other similarly situated countries doesn’t mean we can say, “Welp, it’s bigger than us. That’s just how it is. Nothing we can do about it.” 

Obviously the challenge is still the same for any of us who believe in liberal democracy, in freedom and general human flourishing. In fact the challenge is probably greater because it’s not just some incidental thing that’s going to be solved in time for the next election — better consultants, no politicians over 65, politicians who will fight. It’s big and goes beyond any single person’s mistakes or individual excellence. 

And this is what I mean by a dual approach, the necessity of not falling into a kind of cheap and demoralizing self-critique while also recognizing that it is very much our responsibility to have the creativity, forcefulness and resilience to do something about it. 

In a way it requires us to understand our situation both from outside of history, looking at it from the long view, and also very much inside it, in the moment, with every action and option on the table, with every decision mattering because we don’t know how the future turns out.

We know we can still be agents in our own lives. We're in a moment in which many women especially are being reminded that we are need not be bound by what others think we are capable of. That's what Gloria Steinem came to mean to millions over a long political life. That's what Dolly Parton meant -- to some of the same millions as well as others looking to different cultural reference points. 

People make fun of the gray haired biddies of the "Resistance," but we're right to notice and try to arrest the democratic backsliding which is the MAGA/Trump regime. We've witnessed both a lot of BS and a lot of progress toward freedoms over our lives. We don't want to go back. 

In November, we'll vote and get out the vote. We'll accompany targets of Trump's anti-immigrant racial pogrom to court. We'll rally if we must. This is our country and the world those who come after will inherit. We won't give up on it.  

We can begin to understand what it might require to "get over it"

This is just so much to the point, I find I can't retreat into needed rest without amplifying it. Just as in January, Minnesota is showing the way in envisioning how a healthy community recovers from MAGA violence.

Journalist Lisa Needham writes: 

Justice for ICE’s victims requires truth and reconciliation ... Moving on as if it didn’t happen is not an option.

... For communities crushed by President Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, there isn’t a world where people simply get over it. ... It’s a difficult and delicate thing to ask people to remember the hurt they suffered, even more so when the federal government that inflicted it remains in power. Speaking out against the administration has proven to be a dangerous, even deadly, affair, so the Truth Council (which was created by Gov. Walz after the occupation ended) partnered with The Advocates for Human Rights to create a process for collecting the stories of survivors and witnesses.

... Everyone knows some of these stories. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are indelible, as is the memory of five-year-old Liam Ramos’s abduction. But thousands of Minnesotans suffered at the hands of ICE, in ways ranging from abject cruelty to outright violence. The Truth Council is charged with documenting “the harms and abuses” experienced by Minnesotans, and the first public meeting last week was full of these brief stories, tiny sharp remembrances of pain and humiliation: 

    •    “An elder who needed new dentures was too scared to leave her home to access dental care. So she ate baba or kanji with little protein for months on end because she couldn’t chew her food without new dentures.” 

    •    “The mother taken at her child’s bus stop has an anaphylactic peanut allergy and ICE denied her food for six days because the federal government could not be bothered to provide a meal free of the allergen.” 

    •    “A convoy of SUVs filled with agents sped through an intersection where our kids were climbing on their buses to go home, raced towards the school and halted in front of the main entrance” 

    •    “She taught her mother how to crawl up into the attic space and hide in case federal agents came to their door for questioning.”

The Council is also tasked with making findings about how to “prevent the recurrence of unlawful or harmful conduct by federal agents.” Sarah Lopez, the policy director of Unidos Minnesota, relayed a story — which actually did receive media coverage at the time — that stands out as emblematic of the petty, relentless viciousness of ICE agents: 

“In Willmar, four agents sat down at lunch at El Tapatio,” she said. “And that evening, after the family closed early, agents followed them out and detained the owners of the restaurant and the dishwasher.” 

Imagine being one of those agents. Imagine going to a small family restaurant and being fed and cared for, only to turn around and arrest those same people later that day. Imagine how warped and broken you have to be to behave that way. 

... Along with the accounts of victims, survivors, and witnesses, it’s also important to remember the ICE agents at the center of stories like this. The Truth Council doesn’t exist only to amplify those voices, but also to document the behavior of the federal agents who terrorized the state.

Supporting Minnesotans in San Francisco, March 2026

But for every story of humiliation and harm at the hands of ICE goons, there were stories about Minnesotans coming together, demonstrating solidarity and resilience and resistance. And that’s part of the charge of the Truth Council as well, to “document how Minnesotans came together, supported one another, and persevered.”

What went down in Minnesota, what is going down in various forms all over the country, must be remembered, acknowledged, documented. Once again, Minnesota is showing the way to authentic healing which doesn't deny what has and is happening, but serves as a foundation to the new community we must build after MAGA. 

An unanticipated rupture ...

If anyone has wondered where I disappeared to, the picture tells the story:

Last Friday, at the end of a six mile walk in Golden Gate Park, I crashed onto my side on an asphalt road, broke my hip and cracked the head of the long leg bone, and embarked on a new exploration of both my pain tolerance and involuntary participant research into the US health care industry. After four days in a Kaiser hospital for surgery and immediate stabilization, I'm now in a rehab facility learning how to walk safely while healing.

All this is tiring. I'm giving myself what will probably be a ten day break from posting here. We, the American majority of the sane and the kind, have got this foul national situation in hand and we aren't going to let the bad guys keep us down ...

Where do we go from here?

Okay -- I can't make a case that this woman is going to win her campaign. (Maybe someone from Florida can show me I'm too pessimistic?) But that the Democratic voters of the Sunshine State chose her for their US Senate nominee is delicious and probably instructive.

 

The lady in pink wearing tennis shoes lets it all hang out. If winning is such an uphill slog, why not just tell the voters what you really think?

 

Obama political operative Dan Pfeiffer thinks he knows what he is seeing:

Despite being outspent by more than 10 to 1, Nixon beat [Lt. Colonel Alex] Vindman to become the Democratic nominee to take on Senator Ashley Moody.

And Nixon didn’t just beat him; she romped, winning by more than 11 points. ...

...  She is a dynamic candidate who ran on the exact message that has been resonating in Democratic primaries this cycle — a progressive, populist approach focused on lowering prices for working families.

...  Like Vindman, she made fighting a centerpiece of her identity — but it wasn’t just fighting Trump. Nixon was fighting for working people.

Embedded in Nixon’s success is a model for progressive populists. Candidates like [Wisconsin's Francesca] Hong ran up huge margins among younger, college-educated, and mostly white liberals, but struggled mightily with Black voters, who have historically resisted more liberal candidates in Democratic primaries.

Nixon did not. Like Hong, Nixon did very well in areas with college campuses and younger, more progressive voters. But [in the Florida state senate] she represents Jacksonville, in Duval County, and won that county — which has a large population of Black voters — by roughly 60 points. She also did well in the I-4 corridor and in Miami-Dade County, which also have significant numbers of Black voters.

There was a skinny Black guy with a funny name whose success Pfeiffer understood. That guy won, in part, by riding a popular wave of desire to move on beyond George W, Bush and also Democratic conventions. Might we, in Nixon, be seeing foreshadowing of the next wave, the one that comes after the Orange Man slinks from the scene?

Angie Nixon campaign: 

 

Do we choose to survive?

Erudite Partner is at it again. The syndication platform Tom Dispatch has moved to the Intercept and today publishes her latest: It’s Time to Rein in Lethal AI Drones. 

The dystopian future became the dystopian present last month when state-of-the-art artificial intelligence agents went rogue and conducted a cyberattack of their own volition. Two experimental OpenAI agents escaped their supposedly sealed digital “sandbox” and hacked another AI-related company, Hugging Face.

... imagine lethal weapon-bearing AI agents escaping not an experimental sandbox, but the few constraints on their actions placed by the armies using them. Actually, no imagination is required. It’s happening already in Russia’s war against Ukraine.  ...

War -- death by independent machines raining from the sky -- is here and here to stay.

When the US Army releases publicity pictures like this one, they are playing to an impulse toward heroism which may have once served our species well, but which today threatens human survival. The Erudite Partner reminds us that international humanitarian law is in a race to keep up with lethal technology. Do we choose to survive?

Read Rebecca Gordon's latest here.  

Greg Abbott's theater of bigotry

Things I didn't have a mental picture of, but am glad to have learned -- from basketball great and good man Kareem Abdul Jabbar: 

Wudu is the Muslim ritual of washing before prayer, which we do five times daily, at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and night. We begin by saying “Bismillah,” which means “In the name of God,” then wash our hands to the wrist three times, rinse the mouth and nose, wash the face, wash our arms to the elbow, wipe the head and ears with our wet hands, and finally wash our feet to the ankles. It takes just a couple of minutes but is an essential and sacred part of our religious practice.

While wudu can be done in a restroom sink, it’s hardly ideal, and some public spaces, such as universities and hospitals that serve diverse populations, provide dedicated stations as an accommodation to Muslims. That is what two airports in Texas (Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth) have done, to little fanfare or controversy until Governor Greg Abbott decided to make it his personal crusade to end this small act of courtesy. Earlier this month, Abbott sent a letter to Dallas-Fort Worth, which was planning a second station, threatening to cut off grants to the airport if it went ahead with the project, calling such facilities “illegal” and a form of “discrimination.”

Kareem's short paragraphs explain what I used to see around the corner from my mother-in-law's apartment in Manhattan -- lines of cabs parked every which way while their drivers ran briefly into the Islamic Center on the corner ...

Texas should be as bigoted as possible if you are the Republican governor. So Abbott, running for reelection, grandstands against his Muslim citizens. He won't admit that this is just ugly hate theater.  

Abbott ... he should know better. As a paraplegic who has been confined to a wheelchair since 1984, he needs special accommodations on a daily basis. When he goes to Houston or Dallas-Fort Worth airports, he surely uses the ramps designed to make life easier for disabled people like him. Why, then, is he so eager to make life harder for other people who need accommodation, in this case Muslims?

Betting against Canada is dumb and dumber

A Canadian friend posted this warning yesterday. It seems about right to me. 

Growing up on the US-Canada border, our big neighbor to the north was simply an ordinary part of my youth. Cross-border Canadian TV stations were where I could watch the National Hockey League. The parkway along the Canadian side of the Niagara River was where I ventured for morning long flat runs; the river itself was where I sailed my Sailfish to a foreign shore. None of this seemed extraordinary.

Canada was another country, a nearby country, a different country, a country I liked and respected.

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has Donald Trump's number and calls him out:

“We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”

US demands on Canada are mere bullying, rooted in a Trump fantasy of imperial annexaton.

Per historian Philips P. O'Brien: 

Canada is faced with a USA that is now fundamentally dishonest and rapacious. Moreover, it is faced with a US government that denies its ultimate right to exist and speaks openly (and regularly) about how Canada should be annexed into the USA.  

I bet on the moose; integrity and grit count and we've lost ours along with our brains. The Canadians, not so much.

Cheese heads for the win

Still a little brain fogged from the long trip back from Mongolia. But I encourage readers to click on this short introduction to Senator Robert La Follette, Wisconsin's fighting champion of the people. (By way of Heather Cox Richardson.)

They don't make public servants like this very often. He has great hair, doesn't he?

The narrator is Ben Wikler, the guy who seeded serious Democratic political organizing in the Cheese Head state over the last decade. His project may well result in a Democratic sweep of state offices this November. I've bought Wikler's book, This Is The Plan: How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy, and will comment further when I get to it.