Month: October 2021

In these stressful times, I seek out music that comforts me. This brief video of Gasper Nali certainly does that for me:

I’ve featured this video before. It’s been a while. We need a reminder of the creative spirit across the globe. It’s there. It’s alive. It’s well.

Here’s another version during a video tour Joss Stone was doing a number of years ago. I’ll give her credit for trying to get into the spirit of what Gasper was doing.

In the first video, you’ll get a commenter who gives you the guitar tabs needed to play this at home.

Cheers.

I always expected Senator Joe Manchin to budge off his hard cap of $1.5 trillion in spending for the Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill, and he’s now making mouth-noises that will permit something in the range of $1.9 to $2.2 trillion. I think everyone will settle in that range, and it should be enough to enact a truly Rooseveltian level of transformative change.

But that’s not what could still sink the whole effort. Manchin has some policy no-gos and a policy demand that progressives are going to have real difficulties accepting. He’s against implementing a carbon tax, but that could be a key way of making the numbers work. After all, Manchin doesn’t want to borrow the money for this bill and it has to be funded somehow. Then there’s this:

Another major difference is Manchin’s insistence that natural gas be eligible for grants under the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, a core component of the reconciliation bill’s attempt to combat climate change.

On the whole, Manchin has the keys to environmental policy as the chairman of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, and he’s not going to allow green policies that are adequate to our climate change challenges.

Yet, the biggest hurdle is probably the Hyde Amendment.

One major sticking point is his insistence that the reconciliation bill include the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits using federal funds for abortion expenses.

[Sen. Elizabeth] Warren has criticized the Hyde Amendment as disproportionately affecting low-income women since it prohibits Medicaid from funding abortion.

That’s a problem because if Manchin insists on this point, the progressives may not provide the votes needed to pass the bill in the House. .

Representative Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), chair of the progressive caucus, said Sunday that she will not support Democrats’ massive social-spending package if it includes the Hyde Amendment, a stipulation that prohibits taxpayer money from funding abortions.

But the difficult truth is that Manchin has an absolute veto. Technically, every Democratic senator has an absolute veto, but Manchin is the one most willing to walk away from the Build Back Better agenda. You can have lower child care, health care, education, housing and prescription drug costs but Manchin says that’s a package deal that comes with the Hyde Amendment.

Anyway you look at it, this bill is going to come up short of what we’d like. The price of getting it done will absolutely include some stomach-churning compromises and there will be both issues and constituencies that have very real grievances.

I can’t stand here and tell people that they have to support a bill that sells them short or leaves them out, but it really is pretty important that the Democrats don’t come out of this empty-handed.

I know I’m a little late to the party, but I’m still gobsmacked by Conor Friedersdorf‘s piece on the hard right’s excuse-making over their low Covid-19 vaccination rate and subsequently high rate of quickly dying. It’s a tale of abdicated responsibility, victimhood and conspiracy theories, and constant blameshifting that’s manifestly resulted in a collective descent into madness.

In Nolte’s account, however, a conspiracy of evil leftist elites are to blame for vaccine skepticism on the right. “I sincerely believe the organized left is doing everything in its power to convince Trump supporters NOT to get the life-saving Trump vaccine,” Nolte writes. They are “putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position,” he insists, “where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.”

[…]

In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead? If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing … I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated! …

Have you ever thought that maybe the left has us right where they want us? Just stand back for a moment and think about this…

Taking writer John Nolte’s advice that I stand back for a moment and think about this, I quickly came to the conclusion that you would have to be completely fucking DEMENTED to come up with this line of reasoning, and dumb as a bag of hammers to accept this, um, “theory.” It’s also an open admission that Cleek’s Law is true, and that today’s conservatives are essentially morons: “By telling conservatives to take the Covid vaccine, the liberals are actually trying to get them to NOT take the vaccine because liberals know that conservatism is simply the opposite of what liberals want—so get the vaccine to own the libs!” I mean, if it’s that easy, let’s have AOC run some ads saying subway surfing is dangerous, and maybe get Uncle Bernie to scold people for jumping off highway overpasses during rush hour.

It’s really quite remarkable to watch the conservative movement devolve from the likes of Burke and Buckley to paranoid screeching about Wily Liberals tricking their Conservative Betters into killing themselves by promoting a life-saving vaccine. Thomas Paine is spinning in his grave fast enough to power New Rochelle well into the next century.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Movement conservatives have spent decades lying to themselves and to Americans about everything under the sun—tax cuts that pay for themselves, women who line up for third-trimester abortions, WMD in Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s culpability for 9/11, climate change, Trump’s fitness for the presidency—so it’s not entirely surprising they’re lying to themselves about why they’re not getting vaccinated. “I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er,” as Mr. Shakespeare once wrote; there are simply too many lies piled on top of lies to turn back now.

Which brings me to William of Occam and his razor. Given the choice of “Wily Liberals leveraging Cleek’s Law to trick their Conservative Betters into killing themselves by promoting a life-saving vaccine” or “Decades of history shows conservatives distrust science and tell themselves self-serving lies,” I think I’ve figured out why so many right wingers are dying from Covid-19.

I’d tell them why, but they’d never believe me.

As negotiations continue among Democrats about how to proceed with President Biden’s agenda, the media has once again become obsessed with their “Democrats in disarray” narrative. Leading the pack is, of course, Politico. I would imagine that those kinds of storylines create more clicks than the piece I wrote recently about learning to live with uncertainty.

But even beyond that observation, I am in total agreement with Melanie Sill.

https://twitter.com/melaniesill/status/1443881605194473472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1443881605194473472%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F2021%2F10%2Fonly-one-political-party-is.html

We’re watching Democrats hash out their differences. Of course, we all agree with one side more than the other. There have been elected officials who work to breach the divide and those who seem to be intent on making it worse. But that’s always the case.

One of the reasons these kinds of negotiations seem different is that one of the political parties is MIA. The history of our two-party system has usually been one of negotiation and compromise between Democrats and Republicans. But over the last decade, Republicans have made it clear that they don’t care about governing.

Initially, President Biden reached out to Republicans. That is precisely how the infrastructure and Build Back Better bills were split into two. The former passed the Senate with bipartisan support. But now House Republicans are backing off. That is precisely why almost every Democratic vote in that chamber will be necessary for passage.

So Republicans are content to sit back and do nothing while Democrats hash out their differences to get the legislation passed. One party is demonstrating how democracy is supposed to work while the other does nothing but lie and attack, as Sen. Marsha Blackburn did Sunday morning.

bonkers stuff here from Marsha Blackburn pic.twitter.com/IpmvehP6WO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 3, 2021

You’d be hard pressed to find a media outlet telling that part of the story – which is precisely why the GOP gets away with their abandonment of the democratic process.

Mainstream Democratic lawmakers are seething about the fact that centrists in their party have the final say on what will be included in the Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill. It’s just math, though. If you need Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin’s votes, you have to produce something they find acceptable.

I’ve argued that it’s not a great idea to constantly insult them since they’re in total control, but a lot of Democrats can’t help themselves. It’s easy to see why when we begin to consider what it will take to reduce the BBB’s price tag from $3.5 trillion down to $1.5 trillion. Jeff Stein of the Washington Post, explains that just “funding climate change, creating a national paid leave program, and extending a tax benefit that alleviates child poverty” would leave no money left over for anything else the Democrats promised during the 2020 campaign.

Democrats’ health care goals alone could cost in the range of $750 billion if extended over the next decade. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on new Obamacare subsidies, while Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to add dental, vision and hearing benefits to Medicare. Other Democrats, such as Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.), are pushing to expand Medicaid eligibility to poor Americans in Republican-run states that so far have refused to take advantage of extra Medicaid dollars made available under Obamacare.

There are ways to play around with the numbers to fit more priorities into the bill, but this mainly involves allowing programs to sunset after a certain number of years, limiting who can access or benefit from programs, or funding them at such inadequate levels that they may not be effective.

There’s an argument for doing just a few things very well, especially if millions of people will notice. There’s also an argument for keeping as many promises as possible and seeing what sticks. Either way, it’s painful and politically perilous.

I learned a long time ago that part of being in a broad political coalition is accepting that you can’t go around telling people that their top priorities are less unimportant or will have to wait. That’s why I’m not going to argue that this or that priority should be cut from the bill. But I do think that advocates for certain policies, whether it be access to health care, childhood hunger, or something else, should focus on the virtues of their programs rather than on who donates money to Sinema and Manchin. They get to decide if a little more money can be included for your priority or not, and it’s human nature not to reward critics who insult your integrity.

However arbitrary it may be, Sen. Manchin insists he isn’t spending a penny over $1.5 trillion. Biden and Pelosi are hoping he’ll come up a little from that number to something more like $2.1 or $2.3 trillion. If he agrees, it could cover most of their health care goals. Maybe the best strategy is to tell Manchin that West Virginians’ teeth are on the line. I mean, he can explain that kind of expenditure very easily.

This is an unpleasant situation. It’s a bit like a bunch of grandchildren jockeying to get more of their mean old grandmother’s inheritance. They may cringe at the things she says, but they humor her anyway because she has something they want. Everyone feels dirty in these scenarios, but someone winds up winning. Whether it was worth it depends on the details.

Of course, grandma can decide she doesn’t like any of the grandchildren and leave her inheritance to the Republican Party. In that case, everyone can agree that she was a nasty old crow, but that won’t feed a child or get someone a dental appointment.

Since special prosecutor John Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussmann, there has been a bit of chatter about why he would bring such a weak case. As I wrote previously, Sussmann is being charged with lying to the FBI about who his client was when he shared information about a possible connection between Russia and the Trump campaign. But the only witness is the person he met with, FBI General Counsel Peter Baker, who told congress that he didn’t remember who Sussmann identified as his client. So this is a case that will never hold up in court.

Nevertheless, Durham’s indictment is 27 pages long, mostly documenting communication between the researchers who uncovered the cyber connection. All of the quotes he used suggest that the people involved had doubts about its credibility. None of that is in any way related to the alleged crime of Sussmann’s lie.

But it gets even worse. Since the indictment became public, both CNN and the New York Times have received documents from the researchers that provide context for the communication Durham cited. They make it clear that the special prosecutor cherry-picked the portions he included. As an example, here’s what the NYT reported about David Dagon – a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist and one of the researchers referred to in the indictment.

The indictment also suggests Mr. Dagon’s support for the paper’s hypothesis was qualified, describing his email response as “acknowledging that questions remained, but stating, in substance and in part, that the paper should be shared with government officials.”

The text of that email shows Mr. Dagon was forcefully supportive. He proposed editing the paper to declare as “fact” that it was clear “that there are hidden communications between Trump and Alfa Bank,” and said he believed the findings met the probable cause standard to open a criminal investigation.

“Hopefully the intended audience are officials with subpoena powers, who can investigate the purpose” of the apparent Alfa Bank connection, Mr. Dagon wrote.

Regardless of what these emails demonstrate, Durham is supposed to be conducting a criminal investigation, but none of this indicates an actual crime. So what is the purpose of all of this? To answer that question, it might be helpful to remember how this whole investigation has developed over time.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr made no secret of the fact that he never trusted the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation – even going so far as to suggest that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign. So in May 2019, Barr tasked John Durham with investigating the origins of the probe. By October, it had transitioned into a criminal probe. In December 2021, Barr announced that he had bestowed special counsel status on Durham, ensuring that the investigation would continue once Biden became president. Here is how Charlie Savage described Barr’s memo that made Durham a special prosecutor.

Mr. Barr’s memo was broadly written and vague. It did not identify any suspected crime that could serve as a predicate for a continuing criminal investigation, or any particular person whom Mr. Durham was to focus on. Nor did it claim a foreign threat that would constitute any separate counterintelligence basis for an inquiry, as with the Trump-Russia investigation.

Mr. Barr also directed Mr. Durham to write a report detailing his findings that would be intended for public consumption…The special counsel regulations do not envision such a report.

No crime or person was identified, but Durham is required to produce “a report detailing his findings.” Keep that in mind as we look at how things developed.

At the outset of the investigation, Barr and Durham travelled to several countries that are our closest allies in order to investigate claims that the CIA fabricated the “Russian hoax.” It was clear that Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan was at the center of Durham’s investigation. That was a conspiracy theory that was being peddled by a lot of right wingers.

But as he was leaving the Trump administration, Barr dropped a bit of a bombshell on those conspiracy theories during an interview with WSJ opinion columnist Kimberley Strassell. Barr told her that he didn’t “see any sign of improper CIA activity” or “foreign government activity before July 2016. The CIA stayed in its lane.”

Barr also told Strassell something that probably goes a long way towards explaining what Durham is up to these days.

The attorney general also hopes people remember that orange jumpsuits aren’t the only measure of misconduct. It frustrates him that the political class these days frequently plays “the criminal card,” obsessively focused on “who is going to jail, who is getting indicted.”…One danger of the focus on criminal charges is that it ends up excusing a vast range of contemptible or abusive behavior that doesn’t reach the bar.

What Barr signaled was that not only had Durham cleared Brennan and the CIA, he hadn’t uncovered any criminal activity on the part of the FBI other than the one incident found by Inspector General Horowitz. He was preparing everyone for a report about “misconduct.” So Durham will write that report and, much like the 27-page Sussmann indictment, he will cherry-pick information to build a case that implicates the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Barbara McQuade thinks that the point of the Durham investigation is “to disseminate what he has found to the public so that Trump and his allies can paint a false equivalence between the conduct of the Trump and Clinton campaigns.”

But as much as Republicans love a “both sides” story, I think it will go beyond that. Right wing media will run with Durham’s report and claim that the entire Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax dreamed up by Trump’s opponent. Information will eventually surface to discredit Durham’s conclusions, but that won’t matter to those who live in an epistemic bubble of lies and disinformation.

As we saw with how he handled the Mueller report, William Barr is a master of propaganda. The special prosecutor’s report will be the final step in his attempt to completely discredit the Trump-Russia investigation. Durham has now demonstrated that he’s a willing partner in the former attorney general’s schemes.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Chincoteague, Virginia scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent 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 now added all the details to the marsh grass, up front and in the middle section. Below, reflections mirror the green above. Finally, final details have been added to the water surface and sky.

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

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

Back in the mid-1990s, when I was a much younger man, my then-girlfriend woke up one morning with some news that jolted me a lot harder than the cup of coffee she’d just handed me: she told me she was pregnant. We were both in our 20s, in school, and unprepared for anything like this. So my girlfriend made a decision, because life comes at you fast.

“I love you,” she said to me, “but I’m not ready to have your baby.” Luckily, we lived in Massachusetts, and we were able to very quickly make an appointment at a local clinic.

I remember the drive down like it was yesterday. Yes, it was liberal Western Mass, but we were both worried about what we might run into. Visions of protestors waving signs and harassing us ran through my mind on an endless loop, and my fists were clenched tight the whole way down. To say I was prepared for the worst would be putting it lightly—I was ready to shove a sign up someone’s ass sideways if they so much as looked cockeyed at my girl.

Thankfully, nothing like that was waiting for us. We were buzzed into the clinic where, in a drab, grey room, we waited to be called. I remember the clock ticking on the wall for what seemed like forever.

When the nurse attendant (or whatever that person is called) came up let us know it was time for the procedure, I got up along with my girlfriend. But the nurse said, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait out here.”

“Why?” I asked. Both of us were scared, and I wanted to be by her side to support her all the way. “I was going to hold her hand, to help get her through.”

“I’m sure you mean well,” the nurse replied. “But we have a policy. The fact is, too many men have come in that room, and berated or coerced their partner into keeping the pregnancy. Sometimes staff has been threatened—we just can’t allow it. I’m sorry, but that’s the case.” Life comes at you fast.

So, because a bunch of thugs decided to set shitty example after shitty example, decent supportive men weren’t allowed to accompany their partner through a physically invasive and emotionally wrenching procedure. There was nothing to do but wait til my girlfriend came back out, and then I comforted her all the way home and took care of her for the next week or so. It was a miserable day for both of us, although much more miserable for her. At one point she asked me if I was mad, or if I thought we’d done the wrong thing; I assured her that I was on board, 100%.

I’ve been reminded of this episode every single day since the Supreme Court decided to let Texas get away with revoking women’s reproductive rights, and siccing the population on them like the Stasi. I still get emotional over it. In fact, it makes me so mad, I could spit nails. I mean really—who the FUCK do these people think they are? Have they nothing better to do with their time?

It is nobody’s business whether a woman or a couple chooses to have an abortion. It is not Texas’s business, nor Tennessee’s, nor Alabama’s, nor Pennsylvania’s, nor any other state’s business. It’s certainly not your neighbor’s business—it’s the pregnant woman’s business, and hers alone.

The fact that Texas has essentially put a bounty on women and their doctors makes me wish another tree would fall on Governor Greg Abbott’s and finish the job—and maybe take those hacks Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett with him (also, wishing all the worst of luck to THIS prick). The state of Texas and the Court’s far-right majority, for all their blathering about freedom and individual rights, have completely overstepped their bounds. This is why I completely support any effort to expand the Supreme Court. I’ve seen enough tyranny of the minority for one lifetime.

Life comes at you fast, and the partisan hacks and illegitimate “justices” that make up the corrupt conservative court cabal don’t have anyone’s best interests at heart.