Month: June 2021

One of the big hits from the monster REM LP Monster:

True story: I and my then fiancée got tickets for REM’s Monster tour. They were in our area the summer we were going to leave SoCal. Sonic Youth was the opening act. For me it would have been an evening of heaven. SY doing their experimental thing that was their trademark and REM dabbling a bit in SY’s territory. Bill Berry had an aneurism and the gig got cancelled. Thankfully, he recovered and was able to go back to performing a few months later. By the time that gig was rescheduled, we’d be long gone with no hope of coming back. Requesting the refund for those tickets was painful. It would have been great and we’d have had a great time. She’d have put up with my Sonic Youth thing and my admiration of REM’s then-latest LP, and she would have been treated to a few of REM’s earlier hits. Win-win, had it have been possible. Not to be. Life happens.

The bar’s open. If you wish, feel free to talk amongst yourselves. I have a lot going on at the moment.

Almost ten million more American women have been vaccinated against COVID-19 than men. This is partially explained by the fact that women tend to live longer and elderly Americans were given the first priority for shots. Women also make up a higher percentage of health care workers, a group which was given early access to inoculations. But, the gender disparity really shouldn’t be a surprise. In general, men are less likely to seek health care. They’re also less likely to worry about the safety of others, and they’re less deferential to experts.

Researchers are nearly unanimous in their assertion that traditional masculinity — the idea that men should be self-reliant, physically tough and emotionally stoic — is a risk factor for men’s health. James Mahalik, an expert on masculinity and health outcomes at Boston College, studies how traditional masculinity gets in the way of health-promoting behaviors. His lab’s research on mask-wearing indicates that men who conform to traditional masculine norms have lower levels of empathy toward people who are vulnerable to COVID-19, and they are less likely to trust the scientific community. Mahalik suspects the same is true for their views about the vaccine.

Of course, this distinction also exists between liberals and conservatives. And it’s showing up in the statistics.

Covid-19 transmission is accelerating in several poorly vaccinated states, primarily in the South plus Missouri and Utah, and more young people are turning up at hospitals. The data present the clearest sign of a rebound in the U.S. in months.

In Missouri, Arkansas and Utah, the seven-day average of hospital admissions with confirmed Covid-19 has increased more than 30% in the past two weeks, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. In Mississippi, the hospitalization rate is up 5% in the period.

A map of the least vaccinated counties in the country looks roughly like the red states on an Electoral College map of the 2020 presidential election. These are areas where “traditional masculinity” is highly prized. It turns out, however, that an emphasis on being “a real man” is pretty good at shortening your life.

According to Dr. Jonathan Metzl, director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, men’s shorter lifespans are the result of the cumulative effects of poor health decisions, not physiology. “There’s no real biological reason that men die earlier,” said Metzl. “The things that make you a successful, cool, tough man in America are also inversely related to health and longevity.”

The more we follow traditional masculine ideas about health care instead of listening to experts, the more of us will die. This can be seen now in the way the highly transmissible and more dangerous Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus is spreading rapidly in the least vaccinated counties of the country but not much at all in the counties that voted for Biden.

In short, we shouldn’t let people who don’t go to the doctor or listen to doctors’ advice guide our health care policy or decisions.

The Washington Post has a team of reporters working on the possible pending indictment of Donald Trump for financial crimes in New York State. They’re staking out Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg’s home as well as his office in Trump Tower, which is why they can tell you things like this:

As the investigation proceeds, Trump has returned to New York on several Sunday evenings from his golf club in New Jersey, where he typically spends the summer. On Trump’s birthday, hours after the former president had arrived at the building where he has a home and office, Weisselberg left his apartment and arrived at Trump Tower about 40 minutes later.

Early Tuesday, Weisselberg, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, again came out of his apartment building, but pivoted back inside when he saw a reporter outside.

Prosecutors are trying to flip Weisselberg because he’d be almost an essential witness against the former president. Trump doesn’t use email or create much of a paper trail, so it’s a challenge to demonstrate that he’s been responsible for decisions or  directly involved in demonstrable crimes.  Weisselberg’s testimony could solve that problem.

There’s a grand jury sifting through all this right now, and everything fishy probably has Weisselberg’s signature attached. If he tries to meet Trump in person to collude about their legal defense, you can sure the investigators will know about it. If not, they can read about it in the Post. 

Of course, collusion is another thing that’s hard to prove. It’s not a crime for a company’s CFO to work out of the office, nor can Trump be barred from the Fifth Avenue tower that bears his name. On the other hand, Weisselberg doesn’t want to make anything easy which is probably why he abounded his plan to travel to work last Tuesday when he saw that a reporter was wise to him.

There’s a real consciousness of guilt and legal liability in that episode, and it really does seem likely only a matter of time before the hammer comes down.

Time is something Weisselberg doesn’t have if he wants to avoid prison. He’s the one whose going to be easy to convict for any financial crimes uncovered at the Trump Organization, and at some point the prosecutors will lose their patience waiting for him to cooperate. They’ve got his son in their crosshairs, too, apparently for tax crimes related to his compensation at the company.

Trump wants to keep Weisselberg as close as possible, which is likely the reason they’re trying to arrange these surreptitious meetings. But someday soon this is all going to come to a head, and that’s when things will get very interesting.

Corey Budworth is a police officer in Portland, Oregon who was indicted for fourth degree assault on June 15th. His crime, which occurred in August 2020, was captured on video and shared wildly on social media. Some things are pretty clear from the video, but the entire context and circumstances are not captured. Take a look:

WE ARE DEFUND THE POLICE⭐️#USpolice in #Portland brutality beat #protestors & press alike. Here u can see #police brutally beat a woman (with a #presspass) with batons and then officer #37 strikes her in the face when she is on ground🔥#PortlandProtest https://t.co/zJcH6H6q28

— 🐤 (@CanaryNDaMind) August 20, 2020

One thing to know is that the victim, photojournalist Teri Jacobs, was covering George Floyd protests at the time. She obviously was roughly pushed to the ground and then had a baton shoved in her face. The district attorney investigated and found that no legal justification existed for Officer Budworth, a member of the Portland Police Bureau’s (PPB) riot squad, to deploy force against Jacobs and that “the deployment of force was legally excessive under the circumstances.”

Budworth counters that Jacobs was interfering with an arrest, but Jacobs says she was merely attempting to help a friend who had fallen down amidst all the pushing and shoving.

The day after Budworth was indicted, the entire 50-man rapid response riot squad resigned in solidarity. They haven’t resigned from the force, just from the crowd control team. They argue that the prosecution is acting under undue political pressure.

So, as of now, the Portland police don’t have a crowd control unit.

The Oregonian reported that this is the first known example of a Portland police officer being charged for their treatment of a protester. Apparently, it’s not a precedent the police force is willing to accept.

In my opinion, if Jacobs was truly interfering in an arrest, she should have been arrested herself, but the district attorney must have concluded that the facts didn’t support that contention. This wasn’t a particularly egregious example of police brutality, but Budworth went after a woman and a member of the press, and that certainly colored how people viewed the assault.

Fourth-degree assault is the mildest charge that could have been brought under Oregon law. It’s normally considered a Class A misdemeanor and carries a maximum penalty of a year in prison and a $6,250 fine. Nonetheless, the city’s police force does not want to face these kinds of charges and so they’ve thrown the biggest imaginable fit.

Personally, I think it’s a good thing to draw a line and say that the police can’t batter people with impunity. If they don’t want to do crowd control as a result then some other solution can be found. I think the fact the example case is fairly mild is also a good thing. It sends a strong message, and it’s important that this message prevail over the one the police are sending by quitting en masse.

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.

For this week’s cycle I have added some details to the Toyota and to the other elements. I have added the rub strip across the doors and finished the driver’s side mirror. The windshield has also been revised. Alongside, I have added to the white car. The two vehicles to the rear right have also gotten some love.

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.

Writing in the New York Daily News, University of Southern California law and history professor Ariela Gross argues that the Republicans’ attack on Critical Race Theory “is part of a much longer campaign to shut down movements for racial justice, especially when they attract white allies.” And she thinks it’s no accident that this effort “followed the unprecedented multiracial Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and growing pressure on politicians as well as businesses to address the history of systemic racism.”

I won’t dispute that conservatives have been waging a long uninterrupted campaign against racial equality and justice, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say the new obsession with Critical Race Theory is related in more than a tangential way to the George Floyd protests or the evolving racial postures of corporate America. There’s a simpler way of thinking about this.

The Republicans are looking for a way to hold together a fracturing coalition and they don’t have a positive organizing principle that will get the job done. One reason their coalition is coming apart is that their last two presidents relied very heavily on cultural conservatives, and they alienated fiscal conservatives and moderates in the process. Both Bush and Trump also did real damage to the Republicans’ reputation on national security. Bush overextended the military with his failed War on Terror, while Trump coddled dictators and fought with America’s allies.

As the Republicans shed well-to-do cosmopolitans and well-educated supporters, they mitigated the damage by peeling away lower class voters, especially whites. Their coalition no longer cared as much about foreign relations, taxes or regulation, and so these traditional features of Republicanism lost their effectiveness as organizing principles.

This process was in progress before Trump came along, but when he seized on white racial grievance and anxiety as his organizing principle, he gave it a boost of momentum. In the bargain, he pushed more historical Republicans out of the party but they didn’t all leave, and many left with great reluctance. Of those who stayed despite misgivings, there’s a need for rationalization. They have to convince themselves that they’re not part of a fascist party built on race-based nationalism.

There are limited ways to satisfy this need, but both Cancel Culture and assaults on Critical Race Theory are efforts to accomplish the job. Both substitute whites and conservatives for black and other minorities as the real victims. The idea is not to justify racism or make an affirmative case for white supremacy because that will only fly with a fraction of the coalition they require. The idea is to provide a rallying cry that allows both racist and non-racist Republicans to unite.

What they’re uniting around is the most racist political movement we’ve seen in this country since the end of Jim Crow, but it gives permission for the participants to believe otherwise.

What I’m saying here is that we’re seeing Republican legislatures pass laws banning Critical Race Theory in education because they have an electoral problem and this is their effort at a solution. The old stuff about lower taxes, less regulation and a strong national defense isn’t working. It doesn’t have the adhesive effect it used to, and it doesn’t create enough excitement.

One reason I feel confident in my analysis here is that almost exactly eight years ago I wrote a piece called The GOP is Moving in the Wrong Direction in which I predicted that the Republican Party would drift toward race-based nationalism out of political necessity. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of Donald Trump as a possible candidate, let alone a winning one. What I was seeing predicted Trumpism, but not Trump.

The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.

That is, indeed, how the party is perceived in the Deep South, but it would be criminal to expand those racial attitudes to the country at large.

The Republicans are coalescing around a strategy that will, by necessity, be more overtly racist than anything we’ve seen since segregation was outlawed.

In December 2015, I described Trump as the fulfillment of this shift in the GOP when I wrote Trump and the Missing White Voters and I dubbed the strategy a tragic success when I wrote Avoiding the Political Southification of the North two days after the 2016 election.

This isn’t to say that the Republican base isn’t evolving and becoming more racist. In fact, the argument is that the GOP couldn’t just rely on tapping into latent racism–they had to grow and nurture it. They had to get whites to think more as a racial group with common political interests. This project was going to happen with or without Trump, unless a leader came along who could build a new right-wing coalition that could win without relying on conservatives.

It’s true that objective conditions in the country have made the project more viable. The financial hardship of the Great Recession, the devastation of the opioid crisis, the hollowing out of small-town America through monopolization, and the browning of America through immigration and differential birth rates have all contributed to white anxiety. Traditional conservative Christians have also been on the defensive on a variety of fronts, including the vast expansion of LGBT rights in the last two decades. The Republicans have weakened unions to the point that they no longer work effectively to keep lower classes attached to the left.

We can assign some weight to all of these factors when seeking to explain the current Republican strategy around Cancel Culture and Critical Race Theory, but the simplest explanation is that they’re trying to win elections. It’s not about substance. It’s about finding a way to get whites to vote as a bloc. It’s about giving people permission to support a white nationalist party without using overtly white nationalist rhetoric.

And it’s really about conservatives trying to hold onto their control of the Republican Party, because it’s not worth anything to them if they can’t control it and they have no intention of adapting or changing their views to attract more votes.

The Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Technically, they side-stepped the question by finding that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue, but the effect is the same. The law will remain on the books and 21 million Americans who might have lost their health care coverage overnight can now go to bed secure in their minds.

The case, California v. Texas, rode to the country’s top court through a district court in Texas and the very conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. But it ran into a buzzsaw once it reached Washington DC. Only Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the ruling, meaning that Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted to protect Obamacare. Perhaps most surprisingly, even Clarence Thomas sided with the majority, although he did write a concurring opinion indicating that he didn’t fully agree with the majority’s reasoning.

In 2012 Chief Justice Roberts’ ruled that Congress has the right to impose a mandate to buy insurance because they are authorized to levy taxes. But in 2017, Congress eliminated the mandate. The plaintiffs maintained that this rendered the entire law unconstitutional since it no longer includes a tax.

If that reasoning sounds a little strained, that’s because the logic doesn’t quite fit. But it was good enough for conservative lower courts and it might have worked at the Supreme Court too if the plaintiffs could have shown how they were injured by others getting health insurance.

The opinion was written by Justice Stephen Breyer whose retirement is the subject of much speculation. Since Chief Justice Roberts was in the majority, he got to assign the author of the opinion. Did he choose Breyer over a more conservative justice to give him a last hurrah?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week that it is “highly unlikely” that he’d confirm a Biden replacement for Breyer if he returns to Majority Leader after the 2022 midterms.

In an interview with conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt, McConnell was asked if he would give a Biden Supreme Court nominee “a fair shot at a hearing” if the person is “not a radical, but a normal mainstream mainstream liberal” if he became majority leader again.

“Well, we’d have to wait and see what happens,” McConnell said about the possibility of a 2023 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, the third year of Biden’s presidency.

Asked if he would fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2024 with a Biden nominee, McConnell suggested he would follow the rule he used in 2016 when he blocked then-President Barack Obama’s high court nominee, Merrick Garland, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death because it was an election year.

“I think in the middle of a presidential election, if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled. So I think it’s highly unlikely,” McConnell said Monday about the possibility of confirming a Biden nominee in 2024.

This obviously should focus Justice Breyer’s mind about the potential cost of staying on the bench next year. Publicly, at least, Breyer has been adamant that political considerations should not play a part in when Justices retire, but I presume he’s not a total idiot. He knows that a Biden nominee will be more aligned with his views than a Republican nominee, and he undoubtedly cares about the ideological makeup of the Court.

It’s possible that he’s already made a decision to retire and Roberts is aware of his decision and assigned him the California v. Texas opinion out of respect. I hope that’s what we’re seeing here, because I don’t want another fiasco like we saw after Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

I just took a couple days off and went to the Jersey Shore to recharge my batteries. I didn’t consume much news while I was gone, although I did do a quick tour of the headlines on Tuesday night while I was getting ready to go to sleep. Even then, though, I restricted myself mostly to big ticket items like Israeli politics and the latest from Biden’s tour of Europe, so I haven’t been following the tick-tock of Republican insanity on the domestic front.

Now that I’m back, I just subjected myself to this nonsense after having more than a 48 hour break from it, and it’s remarkable how sick it makes me. It really heightens my awareness of how damaging it is to constantly read about stupid mean people doing stupid mean things that have no logical value. It does more than sap my spirit. It saps my faith in humanity.

It also makes something else clear. People often sensibly advise me that I should take a break from politics even though financially that’s never a viable option. But it’s not really politics that I need to avoid. It’s a very specific subcategory of politics that’s killing me. We could define this as Republican strategy. It’s not that they want to win that bothers me, but how they go about it and, most importantly, the fact that it is so effective.

If the most important thing is keeping Republicans out of power, and it is, then we can never get too far away from engaging with their strategy for gaining power. And their strategy is not just thoroughly dishonest but laser-focused on exposing and exploiting all the worst human emotions and all the worst logical fallacies. You can’t get anywhere by wishing people would be less selfish, braver, more self-confident, less petty, or generally better at basic reasoning. In fact, because the GOP is so good at amplifying these human faults, the electorate is kind of inexorably growing meaner and dumber. The job of steering them in a better direction gets harder every day, and it’s this constant type of losing that’s more depressing than any transitory disappointment at the ballot box.

I put a lot of hope in better leadership pushing people back toward sanity and decency, but when I see things still slipping even under new leadership, that’s when I struggle to maintain my optimism. This is why each new example of Republicans doing or saying something mean or stupid is demoralizing. It’s fresh evidence that nothing is working.

Time for some tunes. Anyone digging St. Vincent’s Sly and the Family Stone meets Eurythmics vibe?

Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen dropped a new collab recently:

And just because I am in the mood, the Tipsy Bartender shows how to mix a Red Corona:

Alright. The bar is open, the jukebox is operational. I’m a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. Cheers!

If you’re unsure why some progressives never liked or trusted Benjamin Netanyahu and are thrilled that he’s been ousted from power, this ought to clarify things:

Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday blasted President Biden’s policy approach to Iran in a “scorched earth” final address to the parliament — comparing the US return to the Iran nuclear deal to President Franklin Roosevelt declining to bomb the train tracks to Auschwitz when he had the opportunity.

In his last Knesset address as prime minister, a defiant Netanyahu spoke for more than half an hour, declaring that he would no longer keep his foreign policy disagreements with the Biden administration “behind closed doors.”

“The new US administration requested that I save our disagreements on the Iran nuclear deal for behind closed doors, and not share them publicly,” Netanyahu said Sunday, according to the Times of Israel. “I told them I won’t act that way.”

“In 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to bomb the railway leading to the extermination camps, and refused to bomb the gas chambers, which could have saved millions of our people. We hoped for others to save us, and they didn’t come. In the face of the threat of extermination, we were helpless,” he went on.

There is no evidence that a request to bomb Auschwitz ever reached Roosevelt’s desk, and it’s well-established that he was under no domestic Jewish pressure to do so. It’s also untrue that bombing the death camp or its supporting rail lines would have saved millions of lives. The first allied overflight of Auschwitz occurred in April 1944 and was merely for reconnaissance of military targets. The first bombing overflight didn’t occur until June. By November, the camp was essentially shut down, at least as an extermination factory. In the entire history of Auschwitz, a staggering and devastating total of 960,000 Jews lost their lives, but only a fraction of them died between June and November 1944.

There’s a legitimate debate over whether the allies should have made it a priority to disrupt the operations of the camp rather than focusing on ending the war is as soon as possible. But Netanyahu made a highly inaccurate argument during his departing remarks in the Knesset. He could have made largely the same point by pointing to America’s reluctance to take in Jewish refugees, or he could have gotten his numbers right and not placed improper blame at FDR’s feet. But that is not how he rolls.

I don’t like how he characterizes the Iran Nuclear Deal either. He makes it sound like America is indifferent to Israel’s security when the entire point of the international agreement is to keep a lid on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. I respect that Israel has to make its own decisions about how to protect itself and can never assume that its allies will be there when needed, but that doesn’t mean he should turn a difference of opinion about how to contain Iran into an attack on America’s reliability as an ally.

He grew up in the Philly suburbs and knows better than to makes these kinds of arguments. In Israel, the reaction to his remarks is that he’s trying to scorch the earth so his successors will have more difficulty improving relations with the Biden administration. In other words, it’s a bitter, thoughtless, selfish act.

I agree.