Month: May 2021

My main concern about a House select committee dedicated to investigating the January 6 coup d’etat attempt is that there’s no record of the House doing a good job with these types of investigations. The Senate is the preferred venue.

I’ll provide two examples to make my point. First, in 1975, Congress set up two select committees to investigate crimes and abuses by the intelligence community following revelations that came out of the Watergate investigation and its fallout. Today, we refer to these as the Church Committee and the Pike Committee. The Church Committee, named for its chairman Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, was the most successful congressional investigation in history. Hardly anyone even remembers the Pike Committee.

Rep. Otis Pike of New York wasn’t supposed to be the chair of the committee, but was brought in after a ton of drama surrounding the original chair, Rep. Lucien Nedzi of Michigan, led to the House first rejecting and then accepting his resignation.  Nedzi was supported by the Republicans and not a few Democrats because he was perceived as friendly to the intelligence community, but for this reason he wasn’t trusted by his own caucus or committee members.

Pike had more credibility but not much more success. In the end, his report was never officially published and we only know about it because it was leaked and published in the Village Voice. If you’re interested, the CIA has an official history of the Pike Committee told, of course, from their biased point of view. By contrast, the Church Committee is virtually the Bible on the subject of intelligence community misbehavior in the 1950s-1970’s era, and it led directly to important reforms, including the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

The failure of the Pike Committee came down to the Ford administration and the CIA’s ability to cast its findings and process as “totally biased and a disservice to our nation,” as outgoing CIA director William Colby put it at the time. This, in turn, was possible owing mainly to the inability of the committee to overcome partisan pickering. Without the cover bipartisanship provides, too many Democrats remained skittish about confronting the intelligence community and didn’t support releasing the investigation’s reports and recommendations.

The second example comes from the Iran-Contra era. In that case, the House and Senate select committees worked in tandem, even holding joint hearings. Their main contribution was a decision to offer use immunity to Oliver North which later led to his convictions being overturned on appeal. The most penetrating congressional investigation of the Iran-Contra affair was conducted later by Sen. John Kerry’s Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations. Kerry’s report is one of the finest examples of congressional oversight on record.

Independent commissions aren’t necessarily better. Both the Warren Commission and the 9/11 Commission were badly flawed. In the former case, the problem was so severe that Congress had to revisit their work on the JFK assassination in the 1970’s and again in the 1990’s. At least initially, however, the public accepted the findings of these independent commissions precisely because they were not perceived as nakedly partisan.

More recently, we saw a tremendous difference in how the Senate and House conducted their investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, took its work seriously and issued a critical report. The House investigation, led intermittently by Republican chairman Devin Nunes of California, acted more as a co-conspirator with the Trump administration and Vladimir Putin.

When it comes to investigative work, nothing Congress comes up with will ever be the equal of the Justice Department, but as Cameron Peters of Vox puts it,  “a concern when it comes to a select committee versus an independent commission is the potential appearance of partisan intent, which could make the findings of a select committee easier to discredit.”

Yet, with the Senate Republicans successfully filibustering the effort to create a January 6 independent commission, it looks like we’ll have a House-led investigation or no congressional investigation at all. It’s not a good sign that the Senate couldn’t agree to a commission, and it suggests that the historic advantage of Senate versus House inquiries may no longer hold.

Still, as with the recent example of Sen. Burr contrasted with Rep. Nunes, there’s reason to believe that a Senate investigation might not be a giant shit-show while a House investigation will almost certainly consist of Republicans doing everything they can to discredit the committee’s work.

This would be true in any contested investigation, but it’s particularly true here because this isn’t about the intelligence community or the current administration, and some of the witnesses will (or should be) members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. If ever a congressional investigation should be led by nonmembers, this is a prime example.

There is one advantage a House investigation will have though. They will have the ability to subpoena whoever they want without worrying about Republican appointees obstructing. The Biden Justice Department will also be far more cooperative than the Ford or Reagan administrations were during their congressional investigations. They’ll also have all the time they want rather than some artificial deadline that can be gamed by reluctant witnesses.

There’s a chance this set-up will do a good job of getting to the truth, but that doesn’t mean the findings will have the impact they should. With the country so split, an independent commission would definitely have far more credibility and its recommendations would have a better shot at getting adopted.

The Republican-controlled Texas legislature is freaking out that students are learning things. They are feverishly working to enact an end-of-session bill to put a stop to this. They’re also angry that students are doing things, and they’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen any more too. You might what some more specifics, and I ‘ll get to that. But it’s important to understand that Texas Republicans are trying to control what students can learn and what they can do.

For example, the Republican legislation bars students from learning about the New York Times’ 1619 Project because it focuses on slavery and suggests that slavery is bad. It also prevent students from getting credit or extra-credit for “participating in civic activities that include political activism or lobbying elected officials on a particular issue.”

The latter problem is part the Republicans’ nationwide obsession with the educational consequences of the George Floyd controversy.

Since the murder of George Floyd by a police officer last year, schools across the country have been overhauling their curriculums to address systemic racism and seek to make classrooms more equitable. Among other efforts, districts are instituting anti-bias training for teachers and requiring that history lessons include the experiences of marginalized groups.

Conservative politicians have pushed back on these attempts to talk about race more often. Critics say teachers are trying to “rewrite history” and should not consider race when interacting with students.

They particularly don’t want to see students petitioning their political representatives to do anything about issues like police violence against minorities or gun control.

Christopher Rufo of the conservative Manhattan Institute recently explained why these efforts have been branded as opposition to “Critical Race Theory.”

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’”

Of course, this isn’t accurate. Critical Race Theory isn’t a collection of “various cultural insanities,” but actually a fairly fringe branch of historical interpretation. It’s doesn’t even equate to “woke” or “cancel” culture because it puts little emphasis on individual acts of racism or political incorrectness and instead focuses on endemic or embedded causes of racism.

But any discussion of race is being lumped under these terms, and now Republican legislatures are trying to codify this in law.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is a likely frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination in 2024, puts it like this: “Let me be clear, there’s no room in our classrooms for things like critical race theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”

This is really part of the more general freakout that white America is losing control of the historical narrative. In the most extreme examples, the Confederacy is being rehabilitated, but more common is just a refusal to allow discussion of why the Confederacy was bad. Discussing that or discussing the way Native Americans have been treated has the potential make white children feel guilty or less than 100 percent positive about the country’s history. The same is true about examining how blacks have suffered from housing discrimination or in the criminal justice system or in employment.

One thing it’s important to understand is that this stuff isn’t just about racists wanting to be shielded from criticism. It’s a message the Republicans believe will help them win elections. This is a political campaign, and it’s poll-tested and likely to be pretty effective. It works by making whites think of politics in racial terms. So, it’s pretty much exactly what they say they don’t like about woke/cancel/critical race theory culture.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the 2003 Toyota for the upcoming “planes, trains and automobiles” show at the gallery where I sometimes show some of my pieces. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent car lot visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have started to paint the various elements of the scene. Green both front and rear, black (and blue) on the Toyota and various other elements in gray. It’s a start.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

I stayed up on Thursday night until the U.S. Senate finally adjourned at 3am without having voted on either the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 or the creation of a commission to study the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The delay was attributable to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and a handful of coconspirators who raised procedural objections to the competition bill.

The Senate reconvened at 9am while I was sleeping, but eleven members had skipped town to begin their Memorial Day vacations. That meant they weren’t available to vote on the January 6 commission. In the end, the commission proposal attracted the support of just six Republicans: (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Rob Portman of Ohio, and Susan Collins of Maine).

With the exception of Sen. Portman, this is the same list of Republicans that voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial which dealt with his role in instigating the insurrection. Missing were Richard Burr of North Carolina and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania who had left DC and didn’t participate.

What we see here is every Republican senator, save Portman, who voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial wound up not supporting a commission to investigate the coup attempt. The bill needed sixty votes to overcome a filibuster and it only attracted fifty-four. For now, there will be no commission.

There also won’t be an Innovation and Competition Act. A deal was made to scrap that vote until Congress reconvenes in June. My guess is that it will eventually pass and become law, but not on schedule.

So it goes.

Perhaps this will be the point at which Sen. Murkowski switches parties.

She was the first Republican senator to publicly call on Trump to resign after the Jan. 6 attack, and she joined six other GOP senators to vote to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial in February.
“I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News after the attack.

During her 2010 campaign, Murkowski lost her GOP primary to a tea party candidate but went on to win reelection as a write-in candidate. She has remained a Republican, but in the interview with the Anchorage Daily News, she suggested she may leave the party if it continues to embrace Trump.

“I didn’t have any reason to leave my party in 2010,” Murkowski said in January. “I was a Republican who ran a write-in campaign and I was successful. But I will tell you, if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me.”

It’s pretty clear now that “the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump,” so the ball is in Murkowski’s court.

The news I see on climate change, specifically global warming, is consistently bad. It always seems to come in in the “worse than expected” category. The information typically is presented as a range of possibilities, but we never see the range improve. What this means is that we regularly learn that we have less time than we hoped to solve the problem and we’re quickly approaching the point where the problem can no longer be solved.

The following is typical of the kind of gut punch I’ve grown accustomed to:

“We had had some hopes that, with last year’s COVID scenario, perhaps the lack of travel [and] the lack of industry might act as a little bit of a brake,” [Randall] Cerveny, [ a climate scientist at Arizona State University] says. “But what we’re seeing is, frankly, it has not.”

Yeah, even a year hunkered down in quarantine wasn’t enough to buck the trend of bad news on climate. Truthfully, it’s probably too early to know if lower emissions in 2020 helped in any way, but I suspect that tinkering around the edges will be no substitute for thoroughly rethinking how we power and organize the world.

I get pissed off when I watch a Dutch court order Shell to show more haste in cutting its carbon emissions only to see Shell appeal the decision. I’m glad that ExxonMobil just suffered the indignity of having two climate activists thrust onto their board of directors. That seems like a great way of dealing with these bastards’ greedy intransigence. Maybe it’s a sign of things to come.

We can’t just wait around hoping something will change. Things will change, but not for the better. So, anyone who comes up with a novel idea for prodding us out of our complacency is going to get my applause and appreciation.

I can’t say that I was ever a fan of O.J. Simpson. He had played his college ball at Southern Cal, while my grandfather was a professor at their rival UCLA. He spent his professional career with two teams–the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers–that were barely on my radar. In any case, his last good season had been in 1976 when he ran for over 1,500 years in 14 games. At the time, I was only seven years old.

I can say, however, that at the time he was accused of committing a double-homicide I had a fairly positive opinion of him as a person. I knew him from the Hertz Rental Car commercials and Monday Night Football. He’d even starred in a movie–Capricorn One–directed by Peter Hyams, the father of a friend of mine.

I remember learning of the accusation against Simpson while I was in the bathtub and my girlfriend called in from the other room to say his wife had been murdered and he was a suspect. My immediate reaction was to dismiss this out-of-hand. The person I thought I knew wasn’t capable of such an act.

But I listened to the evidence and I observed his behavior, and I soon had no doubt that he was guilty. My prior opinion of him was wiped away. I was angry when he was acquitted and relieved when he later lost a federal civil case. I will admit, however, that I had to endure a feeling of shame that I’d ever admired the man. It made me feel stupid and inadequate to realize I’d been such a poor judge of character.

I thought of this when I read in The Hill that Senate Republicans “believe that even if [Donald Trump is] indicted, it won’t diminish him as a political force in 2022 and beyond.”

First, like Simpson, Trump has diehard fans that don’t want to believe the worst about him. Second, just as racial politics and the history of corruption and racism within the Los Angeles police department made it hard to get a conviction of Simpson, racial politics and a narrative about a Deep State out to get Trump will make it hard to secure a conviction against the former president.

But no one can seriously argue that Simpson emerged from his legal ordeals undiminished. Countless people changed their opinion of him from positive to negative. Whatever emotions the name “O.J. Simpson” had evoked before his arrest were completely replaced by new emotions, irrespective of whether you supported him or not.

It’s also arguable that Simpson’s image was more tarnished by his defiant acquittal than it would have been by a contrite conviction. But it’s not the outcome of a trial that concerns me here. Simply being on trial while the world hears the evidence against him will be sufficient to universally change how Trump is perceived by friend and foe alike.

It’s true that the details will matter. The specific charges, the strength of the evidence, and the behavior of the prosecutors, judge and defense team all mattered in the Simpson trial, and they’d matter in a Trump trial, too. But this will speak more to the intensity of feeling on both sides than to the transformative effect on how people view Trump. The stronger the case, the less value an acquittal will bring. The more political and vindictive the case seems, the less value a conviction will bring. But, there’s almost no scenario other than a completely botched prosecution than will leave Trump undiminished.

Of course, Republican senators care most about how a trial will impact them personally, and they’re saying it won’t give them much cover to separate from Trump. All I can say to that is that it will give them more cover than anything else would, so they should welcome a trial. They should especially welcome a conviction, preferably built on a rock-solid case.

To get full advantage of that scenario, however, they want to do a little advance separation. Failure to do so will reflect badly on them, as they’ll look like poor judges of character. I know how that feels. It’s not a good feeling, but it’s better than taking the side of a murderer.

It seems the one thing Democratic and Republican senators can agree on is that we need to do more to keep up with China. Nothing is assured, but it looks like the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 will overcome a filibuster this week and get an actual vote in the Senate. If so, it will pass and go to the House. We’re talking about a fully optional yet significant bill that is actually going to become a law. This no longer happens in this country unless some trick like “budget reconciliation” is used by the majority to overcome the objections of Mitch McConnell.

So, first off, bravo for Congress actually proving that it is still capable of doing its job, which is passing legislation. The bill itself has a lot of valuable pieces, especially if you want to face reality and admit that a military conflict with China is possible in the near future. Just as the Japanese quickly took control of the Pacific supply chain in the 1940’s, China could do so in the 2020’s, disrupting our ability to use computing. The bill builds microprocessor manufacturing capability here at home, and addresses potential materials shortages that could arise if China cut off or disrupted Pacific trade.

The legislation is also mindful that we need to maintain a technological edge, as that’s how most wars are decided, or prevented. It establishes a Directorate for Technology and Innovation within the National Science Foundation and seeds it with $81 billion.

The directorate would ensure NSF funding is funneled to the development of critical technologies, including artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, robotics and semiconductors.

“This legislation will set our country on the path to out-innovate, out-produce and out-compete the world in the industries of the future,” Schumer said from the Senate floor Monday.

There’s even a big chunk of change for NASA. You may have noticed that both the United States and China are currently operating rovers on Mars, and that China is building its own space station.

It may not be a coincidence that talk about COVID-19 emerging from a Chinese science lab has ramped up as this legislation is being considered in the Senate. It certainly greases the gears for this bill. But heated rhetoric aside, there’s every reason in the world to be prepared for a potential confrontation with China, most likely over Taiwan. National security isn’t just about tanks and planes, either, but also maintaining an advantage in scientific know-how and a strong economy. Investments that have dual military and commercial applications are definitely preferable to just making more bombs. Securing the military supply chain has the benefit of securing the commercial pipeline for critical materials.

So, this is a useful and proactive bill that doesn’t put the country’s head in the sand about near-term threats and also has the potential to advance science and commerce. You definitely do not need to be an alarmist about China to see the benefits, but it probably couldn’t become a law without a degree of domestic hysteria about China. So it goes.

The law is Chuck Schumer’s baby, but it’s consistent with the Biden administrations’ Pacific focus on national security. I wish we could find consensus on many other pressing issues, but at least this is something.

I haven’t done any comedy in a while. Maybe folks will respond better to that. So let’s start with Stephen Colbert:

John Oliver discusses the importance of local news:

And as a homage to Neon Vincent, who more or less ghosted this place a while back, here is the Tipsy Bartender offering up a Red Corona.

The jukebox is open. A lot of classic and postpunk classics are going through anniversaries right now. Have fun if you want. Sit in silent meditative contemplation if you want. The bar is also open. Drink up and live your best life.

Cheers.

I don’t know if COVID-19 leaked out of a scientific research lab in Wuhan, China or not. Even if it did, I don’t know that it was purposeful or that the virus originated there. What I do know is that a lot of people seem to be very invested in this idea, and it’s very important to them that it turns out to be correct and that they get an opportunity to bash anyone who doubted them.

Apparently, there’s an abandoned mine in China–nowhere near Wuhan, by the way–where a population of bats has taken up residence. And some workers were sent in there and got sick or died from a pneumonia that resembles what we see in COVID-19 patients. This led the Wuhan lab to do some research, and the bats turned out to carry some coronaviruses, one of which is a fairly close cousin to the one that has caused a global pandemic. We still don’t know for certain that one of these coronaviruses caused the workers’ pneumonia, but there is some evidence to support that hypothesis.

From what I’ve read from virologists, I gather that the COVID-19 virus doesn’t contain any hallmarks of genetic engineering, so there’s still a lot of skepticism that the virus jumped to humans through some kind of plan to weaponize it. I’ve also read that a very clever and evil team of scientists might be able to pull off a stunt like that while hiding any traces of human manipulation.

It’s definitely possible that the Wuhan lab was studying a coronavirus that had already jumped from bats to humans and they didn’t take the proper precautions. It’s been reported through a third-country intelligence that some Wuhan lamb researchers were hospitalized just prior to the major outbreak in the city. If so, it would be a tragic mistake, but other than some rather massive liability issues, the only repercussion of that would be much stricter guidelines for who and how viruses can be researched.

It’s also possible that the lab took a coronavirus, perhaps one from the abandoned mine, and manipulated it to see if they could make it (more) transmissible to humans. This would still most likely fall into the first category, just with more liability and greater proscriptions about acceptable research. In other words, this kind of research is typically done as a precaution, to help understand how to stop a naturally occurring viral outbreak. The last thing they’d want to do is cause an outbreak through their own actions.

It’s only in the last case where things would be substantially different. If scientists at the Wuhan Lab deliberately created COVID-19, not to learn how to treat a SARS-like outbreak, but to use it as a weapon, then the world would have a very real and serious beef with China. It’s hard to imagine that they’d create such a weapon and then deliberately detonate in their own city, but I guess even that is within the realm of possibility.

I guess what I’m saying is that I am as curious as anyone about how this pandemic began, above all because I never want to try to survive another one or witness again the unnecessary deaths of more than a million people. But I’m not sure that the truth, if ever discovered, is going to be that meaningful in terms of how we think about China.

It’s still most likely that the virus emerged naturally, but if the Wuhan Lab is responsible for the spread of the virus, that’s almost certainly a mistake rather than something that should be treated as an act of war. As far as I’m concerned, exotic meat markets are as likely to cause a viral pandemic as research labs, and the solution is close to the same for both. We need governments to do a better job of protecting us, and that means sometimes there has to be very rigorous regulation.

And I think that the fact we’re even talking about COVID-19 possibly escaping from a research lab means that this kind of research is not regulated enough–in China or anywhere else.

 

 

Ordinarily, I’d be covering something like the Biden’s administration’s infrastructure bill like white on rice, but I haven’t yet felt the need to comment on it at all. The reason is pretty simple. I think we’re watching fake theater. I have never believed that the Democrats and Republicans could reach a deal, and yet they both feel like it’s absolutely necessary to go through the motions of negotiating a deal. The lone exception are the progressives, who have held my position all along. They believe the GOP is posturing and acting in bad faith, and it’s a waste of time to talk to them. If they’re going to be an infrastructure bill, it’s going to happen without any Republican votes.

So, really, I am just waiting for this to become so painfully clear to everyone, on all sides, that we can move on. I think Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia captured the current situation perfectly:

“The one little last step to know is: will [the GOP]  make a counter from the Biden counter?” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “It all depends on that question. And if they do that they’re going to do it in the next day or two. And if they don’t do it in the next day or two that means they’re not going to do it.”

He’s right, and it doesn’t matter what was contained in the original offer or the Republican counteroffer or the administration’s counter-counteroffer. It doesn’t matter because there will be no deal. At some point, the counters will stop, and then we can begin talking about what will happen and what should be included in the bill.

It could be that the Republicans give up now. It could be that they offer another watered-down alternative that the Democrats instantly reject. But this will become clear within a few days.

The original goal was to have a deal by Memorial Day and pass something before the Fourth of July, but financial advisers are now expecting it will be done in the fourth quarter, before the holiday recess. Either scenario would require Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to relent in his opposition to either killing the legislative filibuster or using the budget reconciliation process infrastructure. On the plus side, he seems to be losing patience with the Republicans, particularly their threat to filibuster a January 6 commission. But if he’s going to break on the filibuster, it’s not likely to be on the commission or voting rights, but rather something his constituents actually can support, and infrastructure fits that description.

For now, all this pretending that the Republicans can be reasoned with has a coherent purpose, but not for much longer.