Month: September 2023

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a Sedona, Arizona 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.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Over this I added some preliminary paint.

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.

The first time I entered a ballot booth was in 1988 at Community Park Elementary School in Princeton, New Jersey. I proudly cast a vote for Mike Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen. The second time I entered a voting booth as in West Los Angeles in 1990 when I cast a gubernatorial vote for Diane Feinstein. She lost that election to Pete Wilson whose anti-Latino policies promptly destroyed the Republican Party brand in California, perhaps in perpetuity.

By the time Feinstein became a U.S. Senator in 1992, I was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I was happy she won, but over the years I had plenty of opportunity to be less than satisfied with her voting record. But, that’s okay. She wasn’t my kind of Democrat but she was steady and took her responsibilities seriously. She died today as  “the longest-tenured female senator in American history.” Overall, I think she should be fondly remembered.

Yes, I believe she should have retired once her cognitive abilities went into decline, but that’s water under the bridge now. It’s just too bad that her last years didn’t exactly add to her impressive legacy.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom will name an interim replacement, which he has promised will be a black woman. I’ve heard the name Oprah Winfrey bandied about, and I think she’d be a good choice. She isn’t a politician, but she’d have to pledge not to seek the seat permanently in any case, as it is currently being sought by Democrats Adam Schiff, Barbara Lee and Katie Porter. Winfrey has everything else you’d want. She’s a tremendous business success who is hardworking, telegenic and quick on her feet. She has legions of fans from every political persuasion and a familiarity with many of the important issues facing the country.

But it doesn’t matter particularly who Newson appoints as it’s just a temporary position.

I have to confess I am confused about all the fuss about Juan de Oñate. He’s a Spanish conquistador who took over what is now New Mexico in the late 16th and early 17th Centuries. On that score, I can understand why he’s culturally significant to the descendants of those settlements. But I think his legacy should have been settled during his lifetime.

The settlements he and his colonists established were the first European settlements in what is now the southwestern United States. Oñate demanded that the indigenous population pledge loyalty to Spain and the Pope, an edict enforced by Spanish soldiers.

As subjects of Spain, the indigenous population was required to pay taxes and tribute to the Spanish crown. In 1599, the Acoma refused to deliver the required “food tax” to the Spanish. An altercation ensued, and the Acoma killed 13 Spaniards, including Oñate’s nephew. Oñate ordered that the village be destroyed. There were only about 200 Acoma survivors out of a population of nearly 2,000. Indian men of fighting age were sentenced to foot amputation, followed by 20 years of servitude. Others were sentenced to the amputation of their hands. Children were sent to Mexico to be raised by missionaries, but some scholars believe they were eventually sold on the slave market. Years later, Oñate was tried in Mexico City and convicted on a dozen charges, including using excessive force against the Acoma. He was banished from New Mexico for the rest of his life and was exiled from Mexico City for five years. He lived the rest of his life in Spain.

In researching this, I realized that his soldiers probably only amputated toes rather than whole feet, because footless people make bad slaves and servants. I also understand that this massacre troubled the king of Spain, which is why he put Oñate on trial and eventually recalled him to Europe. It wasn’t a totally ignominious end, however, as “the king appointed him head of all mining inspectors in Spain.”

Despite this history, people keep wanting to erect statues of the man. It’s happened in El Paso, Texas, and it’s happened in Española, New Mexico. Naturally, this arouses protest. Someone cut the foot off one of the statues in 1997. The one in was Española was removed, and now it’s scheduled to go back up.

“We plan to keep fighting to make sure this symbol of murder, this symbol of slavery does not go up,” said Celina Montoya Garcia, a member of the nearby Native American Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo community and a coordinator for the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women.

At the protest against this on Thursday, a MAGA supporting man named Ryan Martinez opened fire, shooting and wounding a bystander in the chest.

So, what are the supporters of the statue thinking?

Commission Chair Alex Naranjo, who has helped in the relocation effort says the statue is an important part of New Mexico history. “What really irks me and bothers me is we’re listening to a few radicals that are trying to change the system that we’ve lived with for 400 years. And to me that’s very personal,” said Alex Naranjo, Rio Arriba County Commission Chair. “It was there before. What am I going to do with that statue? What are we going to do with that statue?”

Naranjo says he believes a majority of his constituents are on his side.

I guess I’d just appeal to authority in this case. The man’s boss, the king of Spain, was not erecting statues to Juan de Oñate or arguing he was a good representative of Nuevo Mexico history. He had him tried, convicted and recalled. That should really have ended the debate.

And, yet, people are still getting shot over this controversy.

If you want to know why conservatives are dissatisfied with New York Times, look no further than the lede of their article on Thursday’s first impeachment hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives. Reporter Luke Broadwater got right to the point, noting that Jonathan Turley didn’t exactly provide what the Republicans were looking for in an “expert” witness.

The first hearing in House Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into President Biden featured their star witnesses testifying that they lacked proof that he committed impeachable offenses, multiple procedural skirmishes the G.O.P. majority nearly lost and, at times, nearly a dozen empty Republican seats.

What it did not include was any new information about Mr. Biden’s conduct — or any support for Republicans’ accusations that he had entered into corrupt overseas business deals.

“If the Republicans had a smoking gun or even a dripping water pistol, they would be presenting it today,” said Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee. “But they’ve got nothing on Joe Biden.”

I put the hearings on in the morning, which were carried by CSPAN-3, and I watched bits and pieces of it throughout the day. Because I didn’t pay close enough attention, I wasn’t sure that the committee had not produced anything truly incriminating that I might have missed. I guess they did not, which is hardly surprising. I’ve seen nothing that remotely implicates President Biden in a high crime or misdemeanor.  He probably should have dissuaded his son Hunter from taking a job on the Burisma board, but that’s water under the bridge at this point.

It’s truly strange that the first hearing had no fact witnesses and couldn’t articulate any actual impeachable offenses.

So far, the reviews are underwhelming:

“You want witnesses that make your case. Picking witnesses that refute House Republicans arguments for impeachment is mind blowing,” one senior GOP aide told CNN. “This is an unmitigated disaster.”

One GOP lawmaker also expressed some disappointment with their performance thus far, telling CNN: “I wish we had more outbursts.”

I saw little but outbursts from the Republicans on the panel, but I guess there could have been more. It’s a national embarrassment and really little more than a sustained smearing of the president’s reputation.

When I saw that Kevin McCarthy’s House of Representatives voted to reduce the Secretary of Defense’s salary from $235,600 down to one dollar per annum, I immediately thought of 18th-Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s famous categorial imperative. If you didn’t take Philosophy 101 in college, I’ll help you out here. The standard definition of Kant’s categorial imperative is: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

What does that mean? Well, basically, it’s a way of saying that you shouldn’t do things if you wouldn’t like see everyone else doing them too. Do you want to see everyone on earth constantly shoplifting? No? Then maybe you shouldn’t shoplift.

And I don’t really mean to say that it’s a bad idea to reduce a cabinet member’s salary down to a dollar because some future Congress will return the favor in a way you don’t like. That’s a good argument against this particular action, but my thought is more on the personal moral plane. This vote was taken by voice, meaning that there was no recorded roll call, so we can’t say for certain how any individual lawmaker voted. All we know is that ‘ayes’ outnumbered the ‘nays.’ And this is a good example of doing something stupid and shitty and then seeing that a lot of other people also did the same stupid and shitty thing, which then produced a (universal) law which will be applied to the House defense spending bill.

Now, honestly, this version of the defense spending bill will never become law, and everyone who voiced their vote on stripping Secretary Lloyd Austin of his salary understood that. The New York Times characterized it as “akin to a legislative tantrum driven by the hard right.” In this case, a tantrum can be defined as a decision to support legislation that you don’t really want to see become law simply to express your anger. Or, in another formulation, it’s a clear violation of the categorial imperative, because if everyone supported the bill, including the Biden administration, then Austin really would make a one dollar salary next year.

And, yes, perhaps the sponsor of the amendment, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, would genuinely like to see that outcome, but the vast majority of Republicans who went along with Greene did it just to join her foot-stomping base-pleasing showmanship. And now they’ll have an opportunity to vote for the salary reduction again when the roll call for the overall defense spending bill occurs.

So, how’s that going to look?

Representative Marc Molinaro of New York, a Republican expected to face a tough re-election race next year in a district that voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, said he would still support the Pentagon funding bill.

“I just would say it’s not the kind of thing that I embrace,” Mr. Molinaro said of stripping Mr. Austin of his salary.

So, Rep. Molinaro of New York has decided that he doesn’t embrace stripping Austin of his salary (meaning he probably didn’t voice support for it) but he will vote to strip Austin of his salary anyway. But, again, what if everyone made the same decision? Would Molinaro still feel morally comfortable with his decision?

Now, I suppose there’s a place for messaging bills in politics, and it really does matter whether some action you take is free of consequence. But even here, there are consequences. First, the House Republicans are wasting time passing messaging bills when the government is due to shut down in a couple of days. Second, it’s sends a message when a party votes to strip the first black Defense Secretary of his salary for no obvious reason.

To be sure, Rep. Taylor Greene says one dollar is too much because of “the firing of thousands of troops for refusing the Covid vaccine” and a messy withdrawal from Afghanistan. But those are not serious arguments.

I’ve always believed the categorial imperative is a flawed moral guide, but I agree that we’d be in real trouble if everyone acted like Taylor Greene, and that’s what we’ve just witnessed from the House Republicans in this case.

It has been more than four years since I became internet famous in India, and I think almost everyone there has forgotten about me, which is probably for the best. Things there have not improved in the interim, and now it looks like the government sent an assassination team to Canada to kill a Sikh separatist. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by prime Minister Narendra Modi, is still on a disturbing fascist trajectory. And now, according to new reporting in the Washington Post, they’re leading the way in the art of viral disinformation.

You can read the article for yourself, assuming you have a subscription, but the basics are that they are using WhatsApp and hard labor to build out massive lists that are then sent a steady stream of anti-Muslim propaganda. It’s not a panacea, as in the area the Post focused on the BJP recently suffered disappointing election results. But there’s no doubt there efforts are persuasive in convincing many Hindus that Muslims are a mortal threat and the BJP is their only protection.

I’ve been disturbed to see persistently high polling numbers for Donald Trump, both in his bid for the Republican nomination and in hypothetical general election matchups against President Joe Biden. And I just have a sneaking suspicion that the Republicans are kicking the administration’s ass in some hidden way that we can’t detect. After all, the BJP is not the only right-wing nationalist party that is excelling at spreading fear and misinformation. The WhatsApp messages are encrypted and sent in a highly targeted way, so unless a recipient chooses to share the messages, we’re not going to know what they contain or how often they are sent.

In 2016, something like this happened on Facebook, and we didn’t understand it until it was too late. It appeared that Trump was hardly running an advertising campaign at all, and in the traditional sense he wasn’t. But he was getting his message out privately to people on Facebook and it was the primary reason he won. Objectively, I simply do not understand why Biden’s numbers are so bad, and I keep searching for an explanation. But it’s not just that the Democrats might be missing a hidden weapon. They also might be failing to use this weapon themselves.

In India, every member of BJP with a cell phone is essentially an information warrior for the cause, spreading the party message constantly through their networks. I don’t think the Democrats are organizing in this way at all, but perhaps the Republicans are?

 

 

Howdy howdy, everyone. How are you all? I hope okay.

This week, I wanted to continue my trip down memory lane. No matter what else I might have been into as a teen, I always had a soft spot for Queen. Simply put, they were a genuinely talented band that recorded plenty of quality albums and songs that are still worth listening to decades later. There are all sorts of obvious videos I could use if I am going to mention Queen, but I want to go for something that hit the charts but would be less obvious.

Radio Gaga dropped in 1984, if memory serves, which was symbolic in any of a number of ways. One was the actual Orwell novel, 1984. The story arc of this video is truly dystopian, which seems fitting. I really appreciate the mashup of a futuristic dystopia with the actually lived dystopia that the British survived as the Nazis were trying to bomb the British Islands back into the Stone Age back in WWII. There’s also some reference to a possible nuclear cataclysm. Given the zeitgeist of the early to mid 1980s, it seems fitting. And there was the reminder that radio was a force for communication and hope. Times have changed. I doubt radio has a finest hour ahead. But we seem to be living in an era with parallels to the past, including a rise in fascism, an actual fascist nation trying to bomb a neighboring European nation back to the Stone Age (thus far unsuccessfully, thankfully), and a general sense of time running out. This is a song that isn’t just nostalgic, but one that is seeking a better possible future. We could use that about now.

Keep calm and carry on.

I’ve been a broken record arguing that the Democrats can only really only begin to win back rural, small-town white working class voters if they do something that will actually improve local economies, and nothing will improve local economies more that getting serious about antitrust enforcement so that entrepreneurs and local businesses can compete again with the giant monopolies. So, I am obviously thrilled to see the Biden administration demonstrate the courage to take on the biggest retail monopoly in the world.

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.

The complaint alleges that Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance. Amazon’s far-reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars in retail sales every year, touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses big and small and affect over a hundred million shoppers.

This isn’t an easy lift because Amazon provides an incredible service and is broadly popular. But the FTC gets the problem correct by focusing not just on the harm done to consumers, which can be hard to demonstrate, but also the harm done to businesses that use and often rely on Amazon. The goliath corporation’s monopoly power, which prevents any true rival from emerging, is what makes both of these injustices possible.

The FTC and states allege Amazon’s anticompetitive conduct occurs in two markets—the online superstore market that serves shoppers and the market for online marketplace services purchased by sellers. These tactics include:

• Anti-discounting measures that punish sellers and deter other online retailers from offering prices lower than Amazon, keeping prices higher for products across the internet. For example, if Amazon discovers that a seller is offering lower-priced goods elsewhere, Amazon can bury discounting sellers so far down in Amazon’s search results that they become effectively invisible.
• Conditioning sellers’ ability to obtain “Prime” eligibility for their products—a virtual necessity for doing business on Amazon—on sellers using Amazon’s costly fulfillment service, which has made it substantially more expensive for sellers on Amazon to also offer their products on other platforms. This unlawful coercion has in turn limited competitors’ ability to effectively compete against Amazon.

This challenge won’t bring back brick and mortar retail, but it could lead to a much fairer online marketplace where people can compete and be profitable. And that’s a start toward recreating an economy that can work for folks who aren’t living in major economic hubs of the country. There are a lot of small business people who will immediately understand how this benefits them. It will take more work to make consumers understand that they’re getting better prices both because of more choice but because sellers have less overhead.

Amazon has been massively destructive to small business in the same way as Wal-Mart before it. This is a step toward rectifying that and showing that the Democrats actually are on the side of ordinary folks in flyover country.

Have you ever wondered what Abraham Lincoln would have looked like if he dressed like Pennsylvania U.S. Senator John Fetterman? Personally, I think they look a lot alike. But there’s also the question of what Honest Abe would have done if he were serving in the Senate with bribe-taking New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez who was just indicted on multiple counts of being on take, including from foreign lobbyists? Would Lincoln have the courage to ask Menendez to resign even if they were serving in the same party? And let’s be honest, in today’s world, the abolitionist president would be a Democrat, not a Republican.

As a practical matter, the political calendar does not afford Schumer and other Senate Democrats the luxury of waiting until the conclusion of a trial before making a judgment on Menendez’s conduct. Menendez is facing reelection next year, and the New Jersey primary will be held in June 2024, which is likely before Menendez’s case goes to trial. Democrats will have to decide whether to support Menendez’s reelection campaign or back a different candidate.

High-ranking elected Democrats in New Jersey, including the Governor, have called on Menendez to resign. Most of the New Jersey Democrats in the U.S. House are also calling for his resignation. But thus far, most Senate Democrats — the people with the power to remove Menendez — have decided to stay silent. Only Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) has called on Menendez to resign.

Of course, Lincoln served one term in the U.S. House of Representatives but never in the Senate. And, while not as certain as portrayed in the movie Lincoln, it’s possible that he was not above using a little bribery to win passage of the 13th Amendment. In contrast, however, Menendez was less interested in abolishing slavery than it getting a free $60,000 Mercedes for his wife.

In any case, I’m pleased that Fetterman has no time for niceties and understood immediately that all presumptions of innocence aside, that’s a procedural legal matter and Menendez should immediately resign in disgrace. It’s another example of why I enthusiastically endorsed Fetterman. It confirms my faith in him and belief that he’d fill a niche in the Senate that was sorely lacking.

“Senator Menendez should resign. He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence under our system, but he is not entitled to continue to wield influence over national policy, especially given the serious and specific nature of the allegations,” Fetterman said in a statement on Saturday. “I hope he chooses an honorable exit and focuses on his trial.”

Compare that to the statement Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made:

“Bob Menendez has been a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey. He has a right to due process and a fair trial.”

Who would you rather have representing you?

For the fourth edition of the Progress Pondcast, Brendan and I discuss two topics: Boneheads and Bigots. First up is the absolute panic about LGBTQ+ and trans issues gripping the right in this country, with a particular look at recent events in the Central Bucks School District in suburban Philadelphia. This may seem like a local issue that’s not of much interest to you, but it’s really just one particularly nasty example of what’s happening all over the country. In this case, recent school board meetings have been especially contentious, with parents throwing things at each other and accusations about people coming armed.

In the second half of the podcast, we discuss the stupidest man in Washington DC, Kevin McCarthy, and the fine mess he’s made for himself and he tries to figure out a way to keep his gavel and fund the government at the same time. It’s a mission I predicted he would fail back in January when he first won the speakership on the fifteenth attempt.

Please give it a listen and do all the other things that will help us grow our audience, including liking, subscribing, leaving comments and sending on to your social media networks.

It takes a lot of work to produce a podcast and we hope you will enjoy them. Please help us have some success at it by padding our stats. What better way to spend a soggy weekend?