The Fog

‘I don’t know what to believe’ is an unpatriotic cop-out. Do better, Americans.

WaPo, Margaret Sullivan:

Since I became The Washington Post’s media columnist in 2016, I’ve developed a habit of asking people, wherever I travel, how they get their news.

In keeping with that, I had a brief chat last weekend in Sarasota, Fla., with a middle-aged man (a local used-car salesman, he said).

“Pretty much just from here,” was how he answered my question, indicating his smartphone. When I dug for specifics, he mentioned Fox News.

The impeachment hearings, which that day had offered riveting testimony from diplomat Marie Yovanovitch? He merely shrugged: Didn’t know, didn’t care.

That plenty of Americans share this apathy about what’s happening in their government is appalling, but hardly shocking.

Many clearly do care, as the movement of public opinion favoring impeachment suggests, but there’s a whole category that pollsters and pundits call “low-information voters.”

The New York Times published a story Monday with this headline: “ ‘No one believes anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News.” The reporters quoted a Wisconsin woman who said she didn’t know what to think of the various conflicting claims she’d heard about President Trump’s apparent abuse of power.

“You have to go in and really research it,” she said, and she doubted that many people cared enough to do that.

David Roberts, writing in Vox this week, explored “tribal epistemology” — the idea that “what’s good for our tribe” has become more important than facts, evidence, and documentation. He identifies a crisis that “involves Americans’ growing inability, not just to cooperate, but even to learn and know the same things, to have a shared understanding of reality.”

Roberts, the Times article and Florida Man all point to the same thing: A lot of Americans don’t know much and won’t exert themselves beyond their echo chambers to find out.

This is the way a democracy self-destructs.

And what’s more, it’s not that difficult for American citizens to do much, much better.

Granted, the flow of news is unending — exhausting, even. And granted, there’s a lot of disinformation out there.

But apathy — or giving in to confusion — is dangerous.

“I’m terrified that the idea that it is all too much and it is okay to tune out is getting socialized as an acceptable response,” said Dru Menaker, chief operating officer of PEN America, the free-expression advocacy organization.

“Our country is being challenged to its very core, and we have an obligation to pay attention precisely because things are so overwhelming,” she told me by email.

I couldn’t agree more. And it’s not really all that hard to develop some constructive news habits.

It doesn’t take a research project into every claim and counterclaim.

If every American did any two of the following things, the “who knows?” club could be swiftly disbanded.

Subscribe to a national newspaper and go beyond the headlines into the substance of the main articles; subscribe to your local newspaper and read it thoroughly — in print, if possible; watch the top of “PBS NewsHour” every night; watch the first 15 minutes of the half-hour broadcast nightly news; tune in to a public-radio news broadcast; do a simple fact-check search when you hear conflicting claims.

For those who can’t afford to subscribe to newspapers, almost all public libraries can provide access.

“Whatever the president wants us to believe, there are tested and reliable news sources,” Menaker noted. “There are even more firsthand sources than ever where you can judge yourself — links to documents, video clips, hours of televised testimony.”

I would also offer this small list of things to stop doing: Stop getting your news and opinions from social media. Stop watching Fox News, especially the prime-time shows, which are increasingly untethered to reality.

If every American gave 30 minutes a day to an earnest and open-minded effort to stay on top of the news, we might actually find our way out of this crisis.

As Walter Shaub, former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, noted Tuesday on Twitter, it was on Nov. 19, 1863, that President Lincoln challenged his fellow citizens to rise to a “great task.”

Americans must dedicate themselves to ensuring, Lincoln urged in the Gettysburg Address, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

So, too, in this historic moment.

After all, authoritarianism loves nothing more than a know-nothing vacuum: people who throw up their hands and say they can’t tell facts from lies.

And democracy needs news consumers — let’s call them patriotic citizens — who stay informed and act accordingly.

Flag-waving is fine. But truth-seeking is what really matters.

Random Idiots

When you google "How To Pass The Bar" during a traffic stop, but the damned WikiHow page doesn't load.

(It starts to get fun at about 12:40)

The boneheaded Cult45 devotees are acting just like this moron. 

And I'd dearly love it if the 1st and 3rd branches of the federal government would do a little window-smashing. Soon.

GOP Thuggery Explained

Taking a peek around the pay wall to see what I (and plenty of others) have been saying this whole fucking time.

NYTimes, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt:

The greatest threat to our democracy today is a Republican Party that plays dirty to win.

The party’s abandonment of fair play was showcased spectacularly in 2016, when the United States Senate refused to allow President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February. While technically constitutional, the act — in effect, stealing a court seat — hadn’t been tried since the 19th century. It would be bad enough on its own, but the Merrick Garland affair is part of a broader pattern.

Republicans across the country seem to have embraced an “any means necessary” strategy to preserve their power. After losing the governorship in North Carolina in 2016 and Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans used lame-duck legislative sessions to push through a flurry of bills stripping power from incoming Democratic governors. Last year, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a Republican gerrymandering initiative, conservative legislators attempted to impeach the justices. And back in North Carolina, Republican legislators used a surprise vote last week, on Sept. 11, to ram through an override of Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget veto — while most Democrats had been told no vote would be held. This is classic “constitutional hardball,” behavior that, while technically legal, uses the letter of the law to subvert its spirit.⚠️

That right there is worth including in the definition of "Smarmspace" - the distance between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.

Constitutional hardball has accelerated under the Trump administration. President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” to divert public money toward a border wall — openly flouting Congress, which voted against building a wall — is a clear example. And the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, manufactured by an earlier act of hardball, may uphold the constitutionality of the president’s autocratic behavior.

Constitutional hardball can damage and even destroy a democracy. Democratic institutions function only when power is exercised with restraint. When parties abandon the spirit of the law and seek to win by any means necessary, politics often descends into institutional warfare. Governments in Hungary and Turkey have used court packing and other “legal” maneuvers to lock in power and ensure that subsequent abuse is ruled “constitutional.” And when one party engages in constitutional hardball, its rivals often feel compelled to respond in a tit-for-tat fashion, triggering an escalating conflict that is difficult to undo. As the collapse of democracy in Germany and Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s makes clear, these escalating conflicts can end in tragedy.

Why is the Republican Party playing dirty? Republican leaders are not driven by an intrinsic or ideological contempt for democracy.  ⚠️ Your favorite blogger begs to differ, but please continue.  They are driven by fear. ⚠️ Exactly - fear of democracy.

Democracy requires that parties know how to lose. Politicians who fail to win elections must be willing to accept defeat, go home, and get ready to play again the next day. This norm of gracious losing is essential to a healthy democracy.

But for parties to accept losing, two conditions must hold. First, they must feel secure that losing today will not bring ruinous consequences; and second, they must believe they have a reasonable chance of winning again in the future. When party leaders fear that they cannot win future elections, or that defeat poses an existential threat to themselves or their constituents, the stakes rise. Their time horizons shorten. They throw tomorrow to the wind and seek to win at any cost today. In short, desperation leads politicians to play dirty.

Take German conservatives before World War I. They were haunted by the prospect of extending equal voting rights to the working class. They viewed equal (male) suffrage as a menace not only to their own electoral prospects but also to the survival of the aristocratic order. One Conservative leader called full and equal suffrage an “attack on the laws of civilization.” So German conservatives played dirty, engaging in rampant election manipulation and outright repression in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the United States, Southern Democrats reacted in a similar manner to the Reconstruction-era enfranchisement of African-Americans. Mandated by the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870, black suffrage not only imperiled Southern Democrats’ political dominance but also challenged longstanding patterns of white supremacy. Since African-Americans represented a majority or near majority in many of the post-Confederate states, Southern Democrats viewed their enfranchisement as an existential threat. So they, too, played dirty.

Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 post-Confederate states passed laws establishing poll taxes, literacy tests, property and residency requirements and other measures aimed at stripping African-Americans of their voting rights — and locking in Democratic Party dominance. In Tennessee, where the 1889 Dortch Law would disenfranchise illiterate black voters, one newspaper editorialized, “Give us the Dortch bill or we perish.” These measures, building on a monstrous campaign of anti-black violence, did precisely what they were intended to do: Black turnout in the South fell to 2 percent in 1912 from 61 percent in 1880. Unwilling to lose, Southern Democrats stripped the right to vote from millions of people, ushering in nearly a century of authoritarian rule in the South.

Republicans appear to be in the grip of a similar panic today. Their medium-term electoral prospects are dim. For one, they remain an overwhelmingly white Christian party in an increasingly diverse society. As a share of the American electorate, white Christians declined from 73 percent in 1992 to 57 percent in 2012 and may bebelow 50 percent by 2024. Republicans also face a generational challenge: Younger voters are deserting them. In 2018, 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Democrats by more than 2 to 1, and 30-somethings voted nearly 60 percent for Democrats.

Demography is not destiny, but as California Republicans have discovered, it often punishes parties that fail to adapt to changing societies. The growing diversity of the American electorate is making it harder for the Republican Party to win national majorities. Republicans have won the popular vote in presidential elections just once in the last 30 years. Donald Trump captured this Republican pessimism well when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2016, “I think this is the last election the Republicans have a chance of winning because you are going to have people flowing across the border.”

“If we don’t win this election,” Mr. Trump added, “you’ll never see another Republican.”

The problem runs deeper than electoral math, however. Much of the Republican base views defeat as catastrophic. White Christians are losing more than an electoral majority; their once-dominant status in American society is eroding. Half a century ago, white Protestant men occupied nearly all our country’s high-status positions: They made up nearly all the elected officials, business leaders and media figures. Those days are over, but the loss of a group’s social status can feel deeply threatening. Many rank-and-file Republicans believe that the country they grew up in is being taken away from them. Slogans like “take our country back” and “make America great again” reflect this sense of peril.

So like the old Southern Democrats, modern-day Republicans have responded to darkening electoral horizons and rank-and-file perceptions of existential threat with a win-at-any-cost mentality. Most reminiscent of the Jim Crow South are Republican efforts to tilt the electoral playing field. Since 2010, a dozen Republican-led states have adopted new laws making it more difficult to register or vote. Republican state and local governments have closed polling places in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, purged voter rolls and created new obstacles to registration and voting.

In Georgia, a 2017 “exact match law” allowed authorities to throw out voter registration forms whose information did not “exactly match” existing records. Brian Kemp, who was simultaneously Georgia’s secretary of state and the 2018 Republican candidate for governor, tried to use the law to invalidate tens of thousands of registration forms, many of which were from African-Americans. In Tennessee, Republicans recently passed chilling legislation allowing criminal charges to be levied against voter registration groups that submit incomplete forms or miss deadlines. And in Texas this year, Republicans attempted to purge the voter rolls of nearly 100,000 Latinos.

The Trump administration’s effort to include a citizenship question in the census to facilitate gerrymandering schemes that would, in the words of one party strategist, be “advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites,” fits the broader pattern. Although these abuses are certainly less egregious than those committed by post-bellum Southern Democrats, the underlying logic is similar: Parties representing fearful, declining majorities turn, in desperation, to minority rule.

The only way out of this situation is for the Republican Party to become more diverse. A stunning 90 percent of House Republicans are white men, even though white men are a third of the electorate. Only when Republicans can compete seriously for younger, urban and nonwhite voters will their fear of losing — and of a multiracial America — subside.

Such a transformation is less far-fetched than it may appear right now; indeed, the Republican National Committee recommended it in 2013. But parties only change when their strategies bring costly defeat. So Republicans must fail — badly — at the polls.

American democracy faces a Catch-22: Republicans won’t abandon their white identity bunker strategy until they lose, but at the same time that strategy has made them so averse to losing they are willing to bend the rules to avoid this fate. There is no easy exit. Republican leaders must either stand up to their base and broaden their appeal or they must suffer an electoral thrashing so severe that they are compelled to do so.

⚠️ 

The GOP is not particularly interested in the kind of "elections" they can lose. The Plutocracy Project is in full swing and out in the open.

Liberal democracy has historically required at least two competing parties committed to playing the democratic game, including one that typically represents conservative interests. But the commitment of America’s conservative party to this system is wavering, threatening our political system as a whole. Until Republicans learn to compete fairly in a diverse society, our democratic institutions will be imperiled.

⚠️ 

Republicans make a lot of noise about "the marketplace of ideas", and then they spend a shit ton of money time and energy manipulating that marketplace -  up to and including their efforts to manipulate the voting itself.

Take everything NYT says in this piece and then go that one step further to include the increasingly obvious factor that the GOP is hell-bent on tearing down our little experiment in self-government in order to replace it with plutocracy - the Daddy State.

We can't afford to let these guys up easy this time.

Burn the lifeboats and leave the survivors to the sharks.

Oh Those Youngsters

Cassandra Levesque (D-Strafford 04), a 19-year-old Girl Scout, won a seat in the New Hampshire House of Representatives last Tuesday - running on the strength of her successful push to raise the Minimum Age to Marry from 13 to 16.

The Concord Monitor:

Levesque said she hadn’t originally planned on running this year – she has a busy schedule with online political science courses from Southern New Hampshire University and her position as a girl scout leader in Barrington. She is also still in the process of getting her driver’s license, and was worried about the commute to Concord, she said.

- and -

In 2017, as a senior at Dover High School, Levesque began her push to raise the marriage age – 13 for girls and 14 for boys – as part of a Girl Scouts project that ultimately earned her the organization’s gold award. Both her grandmother and great-grandmother entered into child marriages in their teens to escape abuse at home.

Diversity, bitches. Without it, we get stagnant. 

We've allowed our governments to be practically nothing but older white men. To be clear, I'm an older white man, but this is not about ducking my responsibilities, and I'm not indulging in self-loathing - the point is that we have to stop pretending we can have a healthy equitable society when the power structure is so unfairly out of balance. 

That oughta seem simple and obvious, but if we know so much, then we should understand that  artificially slanting things in favor of that Old White Guy Status Quo, can only make it better for fewer and fewer people - which means things get worse for more and more people.

Anyway, congratulations to Ms Levesque for chipping away at the monolith, lowering the average age of the New Hampshire legislature and skewing the gender split - all of which btw, contribute to raising the standards for that body and for the rest of us too.

Way to go, Cassie. Stay after it.

A Poem

We took a pretty big step last night, turning the House back over to the Dems, but don't forget what we're trying to do here - "...to form a more perfect union..."

Justin Blackburn lays out of a few things that I think we should try to keep in mind:

We're up against a very stubborn (and very natural) resistance to change.

So we stay focused and we keep fighting. We can't revert to the usual - where we automatically start whining about how the Dems didn't get us every last thing our pea-pickin' little hearts desired.

I'm not saying we have to fall in line and march lockstep towards somebody else's false dreams of utopia. Be critical; hold the Dems to account, but understand there's a difference between a healthy skeptical critique and self-destructive carping.

We can't afford to indulge ourselves in the kind of pinch-faced puritanism that requires constant bitching about Pelosi and how the Dems aren't living up to our granular expectations because really, they're just GOP Lite and blah blah blah. When we fall back into that pattern, we're doing the GOP's work for them.

Stop doin' that.

Here's the working metaphor:
When your first flight was delayed to where you missed your connection, don't stand there screaming at the poor slob at the Passenger Service counter. All you're doing is taking a giant shit on the only guy in the whole fucking airport who can do something for you.

If we wanna help, then we chop the wood and we carry the water.
If we win, we chop the wood and we carry the water.
If we lose, we chop the fucking wood and we carry the fucking water.

Tired? Feeling a little worn out and frazzled? OK, take a break. 15 minutes - then it's back to work.

We've got some pretty important shit left to do here.

Today's GIF

Show up or shut up.

Every Day

...45* comes out with some new fuckery. Nothing new about that, of course; it's what he's always done. It's what he's always been about. And I can't believe it's what we have to address every fucking day - what we have to talk about every fucking day - knowing that getting us to talk about him is his whole fucking point. There's nothing else to it. Exposure and brand awareness. "There's no such thing as bad publicity".

And somehow, 20-30% of us are still with him.

And we keep going along with each new iteration of the Cult45 Cliffhanger. Like we're a buncha knuckleheaded 10-year-olds at the local movie house on a random Saturday in 1935.

WaPo's front page today:

Previously, I've put up links to Amy Siskind's posts at Medium, where she keeps a list of these shitty things that Cult45 has been doing. I guess I need to get back to doing that more regularly.

Last week was #100, and the list had more than 150 items on it.

58. On Sunday, WSJ reported GOP operative Peter W. Smith raised at least $100,000 to search for Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails. Smith mysteriously died 10 days after first speaking to the Journal in Week 35.

68. The offices of Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency, a troll farm, was set ablaze. Earlier this year, more than a dozen employees of the operation were indicted in the Mueller probe for interfering in the 2016 election.


And this is from Reuters, via The Guardian:

There can be no story more representative of the fucked-up-edness we find ourselves in than "Dead Pimp Wins Election".

GOTV

A PSA

From your elders, courtesy knockthe.vote

Because we've been counting on you to show up for quite a while now, but you never do.

Fired Up

Portia - America's grandma - From Dec 2017

Isaiah 10:

Doom to you who legislate evil,
who make laws that make victims;
Laws that make misery for the poor,
that rob my destitute people of dignity,
Exploiting defenseless widows,
taking advantage of homeless children.
What will you have to say on Judgment Day,
when Doomsday arrives out of the blue?
Who will you get to help you?
What good will your money do you?
A sorry sight you’ll be then, huddled with the prisoners,
or just some corpses stacked in the street.
Even after all this, God is still angry,
his fist still raised, ready to hit them again.

Stay mad

Commencement

Cody Keenan - 2018 at Northwestern University.

He reminds:

• There are poor people who won't be fed because there are rich people who can't be satisfied.
• There's a feeling of safety in being cynical.
• Idealism is not thinking the world has to be perfect; it's insisting that we work to make it better.

Not Even Two Years Ago

10 March 2018

To the students of Parkland —

We wanted to let you know how inspired we have been by the resilience, resolve and solidarity that you have all shown in the wake of unspeakable tragedy.

Not only have you supported and comforted each other, but you’ve helped awaken the conscience of the nation, and challenged decision-makers to make the safety of our children the country’s top priority.

Throughout our history, young people like you have led the way in making America better. There may be setbacks; you may sometimes feel like progress is too slow in coming. But we have no doubt you are going to make an enormous difference in the days and years to come, and we will be there for you.

Barack Obama     Michelle Obama
I miss the fuck outa those two.

Today's Quote

Yes - in a system of self-government - in a free society - you get to sit on your ass while everybody else does the work. And then you get to bitch about what a rotten system it's become.

But don't bring that shit to me. Not unless you're willing to take the chance that I'm about to (rhetorically of course) stomp you into a greasy stain on the rug with it.

Show up or shut up.

Ain't No Wave Just Yet

Virginia Delegates 94th District

Simonds (D) 11608

Yancey (R) 11607

The Hill:

The votes will be considered “unofficial” until certified by a judge following the recount. A judge is set to consider the recount results tomorrow, according to the newspaper.

The recount, an all-day affair, saw hundreds of ballots being counted by high-speed machines and between 200 and 250 “irregular” ballot being hand counted by election observers and officials, according to the Daily Press.
Next time I hear "Yeah, but I'm only one vote - what difference does it make?" - it'll take everything I've got to resist the urge to shove this story up their ass.

And don't be feelin' that Blue Wave
Don't get happy - don't get cocky
Get to work

This Gets Weirder Still

"So you're not really a White Supremacist?"

"Apparently not."

It's a wonderment.

hat tip = @justcallmeBABA

Be Aware

Heading for some fun in the big city? Don't forget the big advice:

Notice what's going on around you, and don't act like a victim

Same goes with this fight against the Alt-Right assholes among us. We need to know what's up, and we need to know who's who.

Southern Poverty Law Center - The Hate Map:

1. Check the locations of these groups 
2. Compare with the map of your Congressional District
3. Call your Representative and make it known that you expect loud public condemnation of them

3 Dead In Charlottesville Yesterday

All three died while serving their community as best they knew how.

Heather Heyer

VSP Berke Bates

VSP Lt Jay Cullen

You're Free To Obey

From The Other Side

Guys like Mike Pence just always seem not to understand that laws regarding anybody's rights have to ensure everybody's rights - and it doesn't matter that you didn't think of all the extreme shittiness that follows the logical progression of the effects of the law - you don't get to elevate the rights of your favorite group over the rights of any other group based solely on who they are, Mr Pence.  And the fact that you were completely in the dark about that shittiness shows how insular and beholden and captive you are to a radical cadre of Theo-Fascists.

And we're off to the races now.

I hereby do establish my religion - the Church of Our Lady of None Of Your Fuckin' Business, and I do further establish and ordain myself Lord High Inquisitor and Defender Of The Fairytale.  I will therefore go forth to impose upon the great unwashed the Holy Admonition according to The Gospel of The Coital Conifer Flower, for it is truly the foundation of faith for all who are stoopid enough to believe as I do - and judging by the current crop of idiot rubes who're more than willing to subscribe to just about any nonsense anybody can imagine as long as it allows them to feel special by slagging people they need to believe are worthy of being beaten down, my coffers will be filled beyond the dreams of Croesus in no time at all.

So here's the thing - my religion requires me to tell Gov Pence to go fuck himself with a pinecone, so the laws against public verbal assault and threatening behavior towards public officials mean nothing.  As of this summer, Indiana law requires the cops and the prosecutors to leave me alone and let me scream my silly little profanities at the governor every time I'm in earshot of him, or any of his staffers, or any of the suckers who think this stoopid law was a good idea.

But also, I wanna say it loud and clear to every eligible voter who stayed home on election day; everybody who was eager to sit on their asses while somebody else was out there doing the work of self-government.  Ya'll sat there and let this happen, so you can all go fuck yourselves with a pinecone too.

Kill 'Em All - Let God Sort 'Em Out

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." --Sinclair Lewis

I lost track of the contradictions and the fallacies just a few minutes in.

At about 11:00, this pops up on screen:

"Note: The statements made by Sargent (sic) Major Dan Page do not reflect the opinions of our local Oath Keepers Chapter, nor the national organization"

I'd kinda like to dismiss these blockheads as Peter Pan Patriots - guys who just can't quite get past the phase of their early adolescence that's marked (and sometimes dominated) by various Rescue Fantasies, but then, when my daughter's English assignment over the summer was reading Lord Of The Flies, I'm reminded how the seemingly idle tho'ts of boys can turn into deadly reality if you remove the rule of law; and as recent events might indicate, by removing the participation of citizens in their own governance.

People do things because other people do things that cause other people to do things. So maybe if we can figure out how to identify tin-plated martinets like Dan Page, we could then (while appropriately looking after their rights), isolate them and remove them from positions of power.

And then we can stop falling for the passive voice bullshit of "mistakes were made" or "shit happens" and get back to where we're actually holding people accountable instead of just gas-baggin' about it.

Nobody said it was gonna be easy.  Democratic self government is hard.  Guess what - it's supposed to be hard.  If it wasn't hard everybody'd be doin' it.  Hard is what makes it fucking great. (with apologies to Ganz and Mandell)

hat tip = Addicting Info

God Love John Oliver

And the response was big enough to crash the server trying to handle the FCC's comments page.

It's up again now.

https://www.fcc.gov/comments

Try to remember that "The Government" is still (tho' sometimes just barely) in charge of some of its own functions; but privatization is a real thing and a real threat to our little experiment in self-governance; and that if we're going to have a real shot at turning back this hostile takeover, we'll have to step out from behind the comfortable illusion of online anonymity.

If you want the power, you have to stand up and take the power.  Nobody's handing it out.