Month: May 2024

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Flagstaff, 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 6×6 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 brought the green down further and highlights to the mountain. It looks bad now but will get better.

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.

Hi photo lovers.

It’s been a while. As usual, life continues to get in the way. I’ll leave it at that. This photo is very personal. My dad passed away a year ago this week. I saw him just two days before he died, and he seemed pretty alert at the time. Then I received frantic emails and texts Monday, May 8th. And like that, he went from a nursing home, to ICU, to hospice, and passed peacefully. I took the photo you are viewing not long after I had received the word from my mom that he was no longer with us. Anniversaries like this one are inevitably difficult. The grieving process comes in waves. What often is not said is that one never truly gets over that process. The waves subside and become less intense, but they come, especially when certain anniversaries and milestones occur. My dad would tell me that’s just how it goes, and to deal with it. He’d probably say something comical in the process. He’s right. Anyway, this one goes out to any of you who have lost someone you loved.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose. The distant hills in the background are in Crawford County, just a ways south of the Ozark Pleateau, which starts maybe a good half hour or so north of where I was standing. Across the river to my west is some unincorporated land in Oklahoma. I’m on the Arkansas side. It’s good to see that any remaining damage from the flood of 2019 has been repaired. I am grateful for some lovely scenery that is a very convenient drive from where I work and live.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for roughly five and a half years. My original LG v40 ThinQ is gone. The back of the phone came off. Apparently the battery began to burst. My initial replacement had a similar fate. I bought yet another version of the same phone about a year ago for hardly anything, as I simply didn’t have the time to really research a good permanent replacement. We will see how long this one lasts. I need more time to research smart phones, especially at the high end. I prefer to get a device and keep it for four or five years. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, but I am determined to avoid going that route. The newer Samsung phones look really promising. Given the times we live in, my default is to delay any major purchases as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (although the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters commandeered it. Presumably she’ll return it before she moves out. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

It’s unfortunate that Margaret Carlson wrote this piece for the Washington Monthly on the erroneous assumption that Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene would not bring a motion to depose Mike Johnson from the Speaker of the House’s chair.  It’s otherwise well-reasoned and well-written, albeit perhaps a bit too hagiographic about Johnson for my taste.

Of course, Carlson’s mistake was understandable. When Greene brought her motion on Wednesday, it came as a surprise to almost everyone. That’s because it had been obvious for some time that the motion would fail and it was clear that Donald Trump did not want her to go forward. And it did resoundingly fail in a 43-259 vote with seven Democrats voting ‘present.’ While only ten Republicans joined Greene in voting to remove Johnson, this was more than voted against Kevin McCarthy when he was defenestrated in 2023.  This time, however, Johnson was saved by the Democrats.

And so now we have officially arrived where I said we would arrive beginning way back before McCarthy even won the Speaker’s gavel after a protracted fight in January 2023. We have a bipartisan Speaker. Not only do we have a Speaker elected by a cross-section of Democrats and Republicans, but all the major legislative accomplishments of this Speaker have been accomplished with mostly Democratic votes.

This is just a fact, and Greene is correct when she points it out:

On Thursday, Ms Greene posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Democrats voted to save Johnson because they knew it was impossible to take control of the House.

“They want to keep Johnson because he’s given them everything they want… The good news this morning is now the American people have been shown the truth.”

She made the same argument in more detail during the congressional debate over her motion to vacate:

…Ms Greene stood on the House floor and criticised Mr Johnson for a series of compromises he has struck with Democrats, who hold a majority in the Senate.

“This is the ‘uniparty’ for the American people watching,” she said of politicians in the chamber as they booed her.

“By passing the Democrats’ agenda and handcuffing the Republicans’ ability and influence legislation, our elected Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has aided and abetted the Democrats and the Biden administration in destroying our country,” she added.

What Johnson has actually done, much like McCarthy before him, is recognize that the government must pay its bills on time or face an apocalyptic credit default, and that it must pass its spending bills or the government will shut down and be unable to function. Johnson also came to agree with the Biden administration that the United States must provide foreign and military aid to our allies, and that the intelligence community needs certain foreign surveillance powers. He could do none of these things if he relied only on Republican votes. In some cases, he couldn’t rely on even half of his own caucus for support.

So, Johnson did the only thing he could do to avoid national catastrophe and passed the legislation with the help of Democrats. These are the same choices I correctly predicted McCarthy make when I said he’d lose the Speakership before 2023 was complete. In the case of Johnson, I assumed he would rather resign than serve at the Democratic Party’s pleasure, but it turned out that Trump and his realist advisers judged that in an election year its better to have a crippled and coopted Speaker than no Speaker at all.

It’s a rare savvy move by the Republican braintrust, but it isn’t rocket science. It took weeks for the House GOP to settle on Johnson to replace McCarthy, and their majority is now down to one seat. They might not ever agree on a replacement for Johnson, and the House cannot function without a Speaker. In September, there will be more must-pass spending bills, and it’s simply not a good look for the government to be unable to pass legislation for months on end because the Republicans cannot elect anyone to lead.

So, the official position of the Republican nominee for president, and therefore the official position of the Republican Party, is that it’s okay for a GOP-majority House caucus to have a bipartisan Speaker elected and supported by a mostly Democratic caucus. After all, they don’t have preferable alternatives.

The Democrats now own Mike Johnson, and to drive home the point they’re making no promises to save him if he is again challenged by a motion to vacate. In other words, Johnson is serving only so long as he behaves himself, and that’s not what is expected of a Republican Speaker in a presidential election year.

Greene is correct to call this situation a “uniparty,” but she really doesn’t understand the merits. In the American two-party non-parliamentary system, the parties can fight like rabid dogs but there are certain core things they need to agree about. First and foremost is that we maintain a good credit rating and avoid a self-inflicted global depression by paying our bills on time. Secondly, that we hash out our government spending bills, no matter how painful the compromises, rather than allowing the government to shutter for any extended period of time. The various government departments must be funded and overseen by a bipartisan congressional group that actually supports those departments. Thirdly, we have to have some overarching foreign policy consensus, whether that’s supporting the enemies of fascism, opposing Cold War totalitarianism, or standing up to Vladimir Putin’s murderous klept0state. And, fourthly, (and this one is currently in real peril) that we have some consensus about what the Constitution means, and what rights it confers and how power will be determined and transferred.

This kind of uniparty consensus has its downsides, nowhere more than when the consensus gets off track seeks to punish or silence dissenters. We all know the excesses of McCarthyism or the colossal miscalculations that led to the Vietnam disaster. We lived through the horrible reaction to 9/11. The uniparty isn’t right all the time, and its record has often been terrible. But our system does rely on a basic steady root of agreement that doesn’t shift suddenly with every political gust.

It’s probably precisely because the uniparty had a string of failures from 9/11 to Iraq and Afghanistan to Katrina and the Great Recession that led to an appetite for an unqualified outsider who would come in, insult everyone and everything, and blow up all the norms and assumptions. But this isn’t how to fix our system. It throws out all the things people depend upon and disrupts all the things that are real strengths of our system without having replacements. To fix the system, sometimes we have to learn the hard way. But a real leader can change things by identifying the excesses or the false steps and changing the establishment’s assumptions.

What’s happened with McCarthy and Johnson has always been partly about math. The Republicans won a House majority in the 2022 midterms, but on paper only. They never had enough votes to govern without Democratic help. But, in another sense, what we’ve seen is an expression of a bipartisan “uniparty” establishment consensus that is flexing its muscles in the face of withering attack by Trump and MAGAism and just plain fantastic, illogical, impossible reasoning by the right-wing opinion manufacturers.

Greene expects Republican Speakers to default on our debt, shut down the government, set the foreign policy of the president and ignore the demands of the intelligence community. She expects the Speaker to pass Republican bills when he doesn’t have the votes to pass them without Democratic help. These are magical demands, and the great value of the uniparty during divided government is that they only do what is possible and necessary. If it were not for them, necessary things would not get done and Americans would dramatically suffer as a result.

It’s telling that even Trump doesn’t want to risk a nonfunctional uniparty in the House, at least not when he’s actively running for office. My predictions are really driven by examining what is necessary and then predicting how the necessary things will eventually get done and what the fallout of that will be for partisan leaders. That’s how I knew McCarthy would not last a year, and it’s how I knew Johnson would follow McCarthy’s path and find himself challenged. I did not predict that Johnson would accept the position of Speaker of a mostly Democratic caucus, but since that is what Trump wants he has permission to do it.

Anyway, this is why you read this blog. Where else were you told 17 months ahead of time that we would have a bipartisan Speaker in this Congress?

I opened my New York Times this morning, and I immediately began humming the bridge to a Pink Floyd song.

But it was only fantasy
The wall was too high, as you can see
No matter how he tried, he could not break free
And the worms ate into his brain

Hey You- Pink Floyd, The Wall

I’m not proud if it, but I don’t feel guilty either. The mind does what it wants to do much of the time, and I’m just along for the ride. It seems Susanne Craig took a moment off from attending the Stormy Daniels trial and making appearances on MSNBC to write an article about a worm eating part of RFK Jr.’s conspiracy-addled brain. And, amazingly, this wasn’t an analogy or hyperbole, but an account provided by the independent presidential candidate himself.

In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor. Mr. Kennedy said he consulted several of the country’s top neurologists, many of whom had either treated or spoken to his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before his death the previous year of brain cancer.

Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said.

While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head.

The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.

Unsurprisingly, RFK Jr.’s description is probably inaccurate, as several experts consulted by Craig expressed doubt that a worm would actually feed on the brain even if it was living there. It may have contributed to cognitive difficulties Kennedy was having at the time it was discovered, but he was also diagnosed with mercury poisoning which is a likelier candidate for causing him to lose his grasp on reality.

In general, RFK Jr.s health is a mess. He contracted Hepatitis-C from shooting up drugs as a younger man.  He has a neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia which affects the vocal cords and explains his raspy voice. And he’s stated in a deposition that he’s been repeatedly hospitalized for atrial fibrillation which is brought on by “stress, caffeine and a lack of sleep.”  That latter condition sounds almost ideally ill-suited for someone who wants to serve in a job as high-pressure as the president of the United States.

Not to be glib, but I have my doubts about a campaign slogan of “Vote for me, worms ate part of my brain.” The man should know better than to even offer himself as an option, but then he was some brain damage that explains his poor judgement.

If he were not acting so irresponsibly, I’d be more sympathetic. His father was assassinated in a crime that has still not been adequately explained. Likewise, with his uncle. I don’t blame him for being skeptical of official explanations. But he has no business running for president and he should drop out.

Howdy! We are halfway through the week, and today is another day ending in y. I used to listen to R.E.M. a bit many moons ago. Any of us are fans undoubtedly have a favorite album, and I certainly have mine, which was Document. Although the LP spawned several hits, this unsung track was the one that caught my attention:

I’ll try to have more if time permits. Between a lot of work-related matters and several rounds of severe weather, that may or may not be doable. Cheers!

So, if I told you that white men with graduate degrees are disproportionately likely to agree on a survey that school shootings are fake events generated by the government and that the severity of the Holocaust has been exaggerated, how would you try to explain it? One approach would be to take their answers at face value and look for how they get their information. Another would be to look at their particular social position and see if they’re responding to threats and pressures unique to their group. But you can also assume their responses are not honest. They don’t actually believe these things, but they get a kick out of providing a transgressive answer.

Saverio Roscigno, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine, raises this possibility when discussing the implications of a paper he recently published called “The Status Foundations of Conspiracy Beliefs.” He gives the example of telling your colleagues at work that you sincerely believe the earth is flat. People might look at you sideways and think less of your cognitive abilities, but you won’t likely face disciplinary actions or group ostracism. However, if you say that Holocaust is largely a hoax, you’re going have some problems. White men with graduate degrees are not likely to believe the earth is flat, and they’re also not likely to pretend to believe it. Even though the downside of expressing such a belief is modest, there’s really no upside to it either. You don’t get the thrill of being transgressive simply by being contrarian.

The theory, then, is that highly educated white men as a group are more likely than others to pursue this kind of transgressive thrill. In support of this, Mr. Roscigno also finds a U-Shape in the responses. White men with graduate degrees who identify with the far left or far right are more likely to embrace taboo conspiracies. To me, that makes intuitive sense, because you need a tolerance for social or career costs to position yourself on the political fringe in the first place. But it can go beyond tolerance for cost to an actual reward for a feeling of breaking norms and expectations.

Now, at the bottom of the sociological ladder, where bogus conspiracies are also disproportionately expressed, there may be nothing to lose. But among highly educated career professionals and academics, such behavior is clearly not serving one’s self-interest. Privately answering a survey question isn’t risky, so the thrill is strictly private, but I think the key is that it scratches an itch. There’s some need or desire to say something offensive, even if no one will know it was you who said it.

Roscigno is following up with more research to better understand the phenomena, and I’ll be interested to see what he discovers. This is in part because I’ve long considered the MAGA movement to be tightly connected to the thrill of transgression. In one sense, Donald Trump’s fans adore him for getting away with things that they’d like to do but cannot. They’d like to cheat on their wives and taxes. They’d like to insult powerful people in the media, business and politics. They’d like to punch down on minorities, the handicapped, gays, the homeless, the uninsured and the unemployed. They’d like to tell people they come from shithole countries. They’d like to wiggle out of even the biggest jam and come out richer and more famous on the other side. They’d even like to spew complete bullshit, lies and nonsense and have people love them for it. At heart, being politically incorrect can be exciting even if you’re just a witness or member of the audience. And what’s better than to be given permission to act like a complete asshole by the president of the United States?

This is really where a lot of the “Trump’s speaks for people like us” is coming from. It also explains the appeal of RFK Jr. who similarly attracts a U-Shaped left/right fringe with his conspiratorialism.

Now, for some, openly aligning oneself with weird beliefs requires a certain degree of privilege. Elon Musk can say whatever he wants. If you live paycheck to paycheck, you have to watch what you say, and that’s why suddenly getting permission to say rotten things can feel so good. It’s a kind of liberation.

There’s an impulse in everyone to want to be a shitty person, at least once in a while, and the MAGA movement relies on this and works to make people act as shitty as possible. There are other political movements that do the exact opposite. They appeal to impulse to be generous and praiseworthy, and try to make people as good as possible. This is why the quality of leadership is so important. Because good leaders actually make people better people. They don’t reward or encourage bad behavior so we have less bad behavior. I don’t think this is complicated.

There may some other explanations for why white men with graduate degrees are disproportionately expressing asshole beliefs on survey questions, like the way they use the internet or the their feeling of status loss in a diversifying country, but I really think the thrill of transgression is something the privileged can pursue to a greater extent than the average person, and I think the thrill of transgression needs more investigation if we want to beat back the negative influence of Trump and his MAGA movement and get this country back to decency and proper function.

The subject of antisemitism has become a hot topic in our current political cycle, largely because of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The war was initiated when Hamas breached the Israeli border on October 7, 2023, and went on an appalling rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping. Israel’s response has been absolutely merciless and they are under investigation for committing genocide by The International Court of Justice. The country’s leaders are concerned that the International Criminal Court may soon issue warrants for their arrest. Protests against Israeli’s actions have sprouted on campuses small and large, public and private, north, south, east and west. As a student movement has developed in opposition to the State of Israel’s war policies, Jewish students and faculty have sometimes been intimidated and left feeling vulnerable. Pressure has increasingly been brought on college and university administrators to do more to protect Jews on campus, and to stop the protests. This pressure has been enhanced by the sometimes antisemitic rhetoric used by protesters, many of whom are not actually students.

Congress decided to get into the act this week, with the House passing the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, a bill cosponsored by 46 Republicans and 15 Democrats. The purpose of the bill is “To provide for the consideration of a definition of antisemitism set forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for the enforcement of Federal antidiscrimination laws concerning education programs or activities, and for other purposes.” You can read the IHRA definition of antisemitism here.

One of the Democratic cosponsors is California congressman Brad Sherman who lobbied his fellow Democrats to support the bill. Rep. Sherman said he “can’t say I’ve turned anybody around,” but justified using the IHRA definition by arguing “you can’t fight antisemitism if you won’t define it, and it’s not like somebody is putting together a rival definition.”

Sherman is correct that legal responses to antisemitic acts and policies require a definition of antisemitism, but many Democrats and some Republicans opposed the bill because they had quibbles about elements of the IHRA definition. It’s easy to see why, and I just want to go through some of the problems.

The first bullet point reads

1. Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

The only problem with this is that I see no reason to require that this is done in the name of ideology or religion. Calling for harm or worse to be done to Jews is antisemitic, full stop.

1. Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

For this to work, the heavy emphasis needs to be on dehumanizing and demonizing allegations. It should not be controversial that Jews hit above their population weight in terms of media ownership, among top executives in Hollywood, and among reporters and on-air news talent. This has an influence, and discussing the manifestations of that influence is a perfectly proper if highly sensitive subject of debate, including on campuses. When it comes to protecting free speech, you have to err on the side of allowing it, and so it matters greatly whether or not debate is malicious.

1. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.

This is a no-brainer.

1. Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).

This introduces the difficulty of making definitions. What qualifies as “denying the scope” of the Holocaust? I get the target here. It’s people who minimize or deny the impact of the Holocaust. But researchers’ job is to investigate the scope. Every time new information is unearthed, the estimated scope is altered and open to new interpretations. We don’t want an academic arguing for the low end of an estimate to be accused of antisemitism.

1. Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.

The reason this definition works better than the last one is that it doesn’t pertain to an opinion on scope, but involves collective attacks on Jews. Saying the Holocaust was “invented” is clear antisemitism. Saying it has been exaggerated by the collective of Jews is classic generalized bigotry. Arguing that the State of Israel has exaggerated is at least confined to one entity and can be debated, but I don’t think these are likely to be good faith debates on the part of Israel’s detractors.

1. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

This one has a real problem. Is it possible for an American citizen to be more loyal to Israel than to America? Of course it is. Making a generalized accusation against American Jews’ loyalty is blatant antisemitism. Making the charge against an individual based on evidence and opinion cannot be banned speech anymore than making the same accusation about a Russian or Chinese citizen whose behavior and rhetoric arouses suspicion.

1. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

This introduces one the most annoying arguments I hear made against Israel, which is part of a more general accusation of European imperialism in the creation of the state. The State of Israel is not “a racist endeavor” but a response to relentless persecution at the hands of Europeans. The early Zionists in Palestine were as anti-imperialism as the Arabs under British occupation. Having said that, the argument may be stupid, but I can’t go so far as to call it inherently antisemitic, or call for such debate to be barred from campuses. The paternalistic and racist attitudes of European colonizers is well established, and it carries over even to the attitudes of Zionist transplants to Palestine who felt they were building civilization in the underdeveloped world. This doesn’t condemn Israel as illegitimate, but it is also not a subject that should be taboo. As for “the right of self-determination,” that’s synonymous with the question of whether Israel should have been created or not, which is again at least a matter of opinion even among Jews, and it cannot be called necessarily antisemitic to believe Israel’s creation was either a mistake or an injustice to the Palestinians.

1. Applying double standards [to Israel] by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

I notice this happening quite often, especially if we also apply it to Israel’s non-democratic neighbors. Why, for example, is Syria’s government not subject to the same level of international condemnation that Israel’s faces? But applying a double standard is far too loose of a term to qualify for the charge of antisemitism. Just to make a simple observation, defense lawyers in court make little effort to avoid double standards because they’re arguing only for their clients. Likewise, activists for a cause are focused on their cause, not every similarly situated cause in the world.

1. Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

Why is this limited to Israeli Jews? It should apply to all Jews.

1. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

This probably sounded better before Israel destroyed Gaza. When a country is being investigated for committing genocide by more than one international court, you cannot avoid comparisons to other countries that have committed genocide. This is true even when denying the comparison is valid.

And, lastly:

1. Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

This should be uncontroversially considered antisemitic and not allowed in academia.

Now, I reiterate that the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, which passed in the House of Representatives on Wednesday adopted the above definitions of antisemitism. And they did so in order that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance (in this case, institutions of higher learning)” can have a clear, enforceable and legal idea of what constitutes antisemitism.

Fortunately, this bill will not be passed by the Senate so it won’t come to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature. The impulse here is good, which is to find a way to better combat antisemitism in college education. But the bill has fatal flaws related to the adopted definition. It’s too imprecise and broad and would stifle academic debate. It also seems it was brought up in bad faith by Speaker Mike Johnson in an effort to divide Democrats, in which it greatly succeeded. A different bill called the Countering Antisemitism Act was offered by Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning of North Carolina and not taken up by Johnson. It was preferred by Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. This bill defines antisemitism succinctly: “The term ‘antisemitism’ means a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

I don’t think this latter definition is very clear either, but it avoids arbitrating arguments and focuses on overt acts and expressions of hatred. Rep. Manning’s bill, which is broader in scope and not limited to academia, would establish a position within the Executive Office of the President called “the National Coordinator to Counter Antisemitism.” This would formalize what the Biden administration is already doing with its antisemitism task force which met on Wednesday to discuss antisemitism and protests on campuses. The bill would require the president to “establish an Interagency Task Force to Counter Antisemitism.” It would mandate reports from these new groups, as well as an annual threat assessment from the larger Intelligence Community. On the whole, Manning’s bill has a better chance of winning enough bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress to become law, but Johnson and the Republicans are using the protests as a campaign issue and they’re trying to highlight disorder on the nations’ campuses rather than actually protecting Jews from violence, intimidation and discrimination.

It’s a point made Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), “a Jewish progressive with concerns about the IHRA antisemitism definition” who said on Wednesday that he voted for the bill “on the theory that it’s basically meaningless and harmless.” In other words, he wasn’t going to cast a vote that could be misconstrued as supporting antisemitism, and since the bill isn’t going anywhere, he doesn’t care overly much about it’s definitional deficiencies.

On Thursday, President Biden spoke to the nation from the Roosevelt Room in the White House and addressed student unrest and expressions of antisemitism. Here it is reported by the Times of Israel which puts an emphasis on the “anti-Israel” component that is not actually expressed in Biden’s remarks.

United States President Joe Biden condemned on Thursday the anti-Israel protests that have been wreaking havoc on college campuses across the country.

“There’s a right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos… Destroying property is not a peaceful protest — it’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations — none of this is a peaceful protest,” he asserted, referring to the range of actions taken by anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University, the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles, and other schools.

“Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest — it’s against the law,” Biden added.

“There should be no place on any campus — no place in America — for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” he said, referring to widespread documentation of antisemitic and pro-terror expressions during the protests, before subsequently condemning all forms of discrimination.

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions. In America, we respect the right and protect the right for them to express that, but it doesn’t mean anything goes,” Biden clarified. “It needs to be done without violence, without destruction, without hate and within the law.”

“Make no mistake, as president I will always defend free speech, but I will always be just as strong in standing up for the rule of law,” he asserted.

“We’ve all seen images, and they put to the test two fundamental American principles: The first is the right to free speech — for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld. We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent. The American people are heard.”

“In fact, peaceful protest is the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues. But neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society, and order must prevail,” he insisted.

“Throughout our history, we’ve often faced moments like this because we are a big, diverse, free-thinking and freedom-loving nation,” the US president continued. “In moments like this, there are always those who rush in to score political points. But this isn’t a moment for politics. It’s a moment for clarity.”

“So let me be clear, violent protest is not protected, peaceful protest is,” Biden added.

The Biden administration clearly felt compelled to respond to what it perceives is a Republican advantage on this issue. They’re probably reminded of Richard Nixon’s success in 1968 in using “law and order” and campus protests as a cudgel to defeat Hubert Humphrey.

This is the first time I’ve written about the protests, and that’s because it’s personally painful to me. I am genuinely alarmed by both the actions of the Israeli government and the resulting negative repercussions for American Jews who are facing violence, intimidation and discrimination as a result. I’m also, absolutely appalled by the actions of Hamas and anyone who makes apologies for what they’ve done and continue to do.

We are definitely experiencing a dangerous spike in antisemitism and I think the Manning bill is potentially valuable. I’m very concerned about how this is shaking out in academia, however, because most protestors are sincere and not hateful, and they’re coming from a place of humanitarianism and idealism that we want to encourage in our youth. Yet, they’re being demonized and scapegoated for the actions a few bad apples. And the Republicans are using the fallout to attack elite learning institutions in general and free speech in particular. It’s a tragic thing to watch, and a big element in how the presidential election will turn out.

Happy May Day, everyone! I have been in a David Bowie mood as of late when I have been commuting back and forth from work. So this time around, here’s a live performance of “Station to Station” from late 1978. It features Adrian Belew early on in his tenure as a member of Bowie’s recording and touring band.

Cheers!

See you next week.

With Florida’s six-week abortion ban going into effect on Wednesday, I looked to the National Institutes of Health website to help me understand how many woman this will impact. The best source I found is a 2017 study by Amy Branum and Katherine Ahrens of the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control. They were looking for trends over time in when women realize they are pregnant, and they examined about 50,000 pregnancies going back all the way to 1995. What they found is that things have remained remarkably stable in that time period, with a mean average of 5.5 weeks.

For the purposes of the study, responses on gestational age at time of pregnancy awareness was “dichotomized into ‘early awareness’ (0–6 weeks) and ‘late awareness’ (≥7 weeks).” They calculated the average, or mean, but I don’t see results for median, meaning half are above and half or below the number. I assume the mean and median do not differ by much.

Let’s begin with the obvious. If you discover you’re pregnant at 5.5 weeks in Florida, as of Wednesday, you have at best three to four days to legally get an abortion, and that’s assuming the doctor will assume the risk of running afoul of the law when the margin is that close. That gives almost time to consider options, talk to your partner, pastor, or perhaps your parents, research adoption, etc. It provides no time to deal with logistics, like money or travel, or even simply fitting in an appointment. This is the experience the “average” Florida woman or girl will now face. Twenty-three percent of women had “late pregnancy awareness” of 7 weeks or more, with subgroups like girls age 15-19 (36 percent). never married (33 percent), non-hispanic black (31 percent) and no high school degree/GED (29 percent) ranking higher. All of these women will have no option of abortion at all.

Now, the average may be 5.5 weeks, but it’s not like there are a lot of women who discover they’re pregnant much earlier than that. First of all, gestational age is based on the date of the last period, not the date of conception, and not the date of a missed period. Women are fertile about 12-14 days after their last period, so conception typically takes place two weeks later. It takes a minimum of 10 days after sex for a pregnancy test to detect hormones, but Planned Parenthood warns that testing at that early stage is unreliable and likely to result in false negative results. They say it’s better to wait until a missed period, which would normally be at least two weeks after sex or four weeks after the end of the last period. So, if Florida women take a pregnancy test at the earliest reliable opportunity, they have at best two weeks to decide and arrange an abortion. Only in rare cases will anyone have a larger window, and it will only be a few days longer.

I think this change in the law can fairly be said to affect all Floridian women who become pregnant, even in cases where abortion isn’t a consideration. That’s because  the choice is effectively removed. And that is, of course, the point.

Writing in Scientific American about Texas’s six-week abortion ban, Michelle Rodrigues makes the same points:

Pregnancy math is confusing, and it’s unclear whether legislators involved are simply ignorant on reproductive biology or recognize that it’s an indirect way to ban all abortions.

But in reality, the six-week ban limits abortion care to only four weeks after conception, and only one week, realistically, from when a person could find out they are pregnant. At this stage, an embryo has implanted and has a neural tube, and the blood vessel that will develop into the heart begins pulsing. This pulsing, or “heartbeat,” is the basis for the emotional appeal of these bills. But at this early stage, the embryo is still in the process of differentiating organs and won’t be classified as a “fetus” until about a month later.

This pulsing blood vessel gives the “heartbeat” name to these six-week bans, and that’s highly dubious as a demarcation. But I’m focused less on scientific or moral arguments for or against abortion than on the inevitable impact the laws will have.

And it goes beyond what I’ve so far discussed, because once you effectively remove abortion as a legal option, then there’s a practical response. Parents who don’t want their young daughters to wind up as parents themselves will have to consider treating them much differently than they treat their sons. Here’s a window into that future from a 2005 article in the Orlando Sentinel:

Edith Rodriguez of West Palm Beach makes no apology about insisting her daughter, Camille, be flanked by chaperones on every outing.

“It’s not because I don’t trust my daughter,” said Rodriguez, 50, a bookkeeper for a cultural organization. “I just don’t trust anybody else.”

While the traditional Hispanic practice of requiring a chaperona for daughters is a dying custom in the United States, it’s not dead.

Growing up in Puerto Rico, Rodriguez said, her parents would not let her out of her house without a chaperone, even after she married at 21.

“When I was young, I didn’t like it. I couldn’t go out to buy milk or ice cream by myself, even after I was married and owned a home. But now that I’m a mother, I understand why my parents tried to protect me. It’s a matter of culture and family honor.

Obviously, we’re familiar with how women are protected from contact with men in Muslim cultures. But in a lot of ways, the culture follows the law rather than the other way around. The Sentinel article from 2005 said the chaperone system was already “a dying custom” among Hispanics in the United States. This is undoubtedly in large part because a safe and legal abortion option meant every unplanned or unwanted pregnancy no longer resulted in an unplanned and likely unwanted marriage, or a young single mother that might bring shame on the family.

But this calculation will now be part of parenting for all Floridians, whether from traditional Hispanic families or not. So, many young girls won’t have the same freedoms enjoyed by girls in other states, particularly in the North. They may not be allowed to be alone with boys or to go on dates or out with a group of friends. These changes will begin overnight, but it will take some time for the culture to adapt to accommodate the change.

I can tell you already, that even though I have a son rather than a daughter, I will advise against him going to college in the South or anyplace these restrictions are in place. I would be even firmer with a daughter, because she could become pregnant without consent or find herself having to defend a miscarriage to investigators.

That is no way to live. And I think parents are going to HATE this new world almost much as their children.

.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia announced on Wednesday that she intends to invoke a motion to vacate the chair next week in an effort to remove Rep. Mike Johnson from the Speaker of the House’s chair. ABC News reports that her gambit “seems doomed to fail” because the “House Democratic leadership announced that if a motion to vacate Johnson is brought to the House floor for a vote, they would vote to table the effort — effectively saving the speaker from ouster.”

“We will vote to table Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Motion to Vacate the Chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed,” the leaders wrote in a statement.

This means Democrats have now put it on the record that they would save Johnson if a motion to vacate is brought to the floor for a vote.

A natural question arises. Did Johnson make a secret deal with the Democrats? Speaker Johnson flat out denies that this is the case.

Johnson said “no” when asked if he spoke to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries about receiving Democratic support if a motion to vacate is brought to the floor for a vote — and if that conversation happened before allowing votes on a $95 billion foreign aid package, a move that earned him bipartisan praise.

“I’ve not requested assistance from anyone … I’m not focused on that at all. I focused on getting the job done and getting the legislation passed,” Johnson said.

“No, there’s no deals at all,” he added.

This is pretty hard to believe. But before I get to that, let’s look forward here a bit. Greene will make the motion next week, initiating the process. It’s a privileged vote, which means it will happen right away. We already know that Greene will be joined by Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Paul Gosar of Arizona. There’s been a little shuffling of the numbers in the last week in the House of Representatives. On April 24, Republican Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin resigned, but on the same day Democrat Donald Payne Jr. of New Jersey died. Then, on Tuesday, Democratic Tim Kennedy of New York won a special election to fill a vacant Buffalo-based seat. As things stand, the Republicans have a 217-213 advantage with five vacancies. On a strictly partisan vote, with three Republicans voting with the Democrats, Johnson would lose his job 216-214.

Needless to say, on votes for the Speakership, there is usually no crossing of the aisle, but in this case the Democrats are offering to do something slightly different which is to vote not to have a vote at all by “tabling” Greene’s motion. I don’t think this is anything more than window dressing, because voting to save Johnson is still voting to save Johnson, and Greene has said as much.

“Mike Johnson is officially the Democrat Speaker of the House. Here is their official endorsement of his Speakership,” Rep. Greene said in a statement on X, citing the statement from House Democratic leadership.

Greene said he should “resign” or “switch parties.”

“If the Democrats want to elect him Speaker (and some Republicans want to support the Democrats’ chosen Speaker), I’ll give them the chance to do it. I’m a big believer in recorded votes because putting Congress on record allows every American to see the truth and provides transparency to our votes. Americans deserve to see the Uniparty on full display. I’m about to give them their coming out party!” Greene wrote on X.

Greene is telling the truth here, which is rare for her. Johnson has already been functioning as the leader of a mostly Democratic functional majority. He has relied on Democratic votes to pass spending bills as well as aid to Ukraine, renewal of FISA surveillance powers, and more. Once the Democrats help sustain a tabling motion, this bipartisan majority will be formalized.

So, again, the question arises, what do the Democrats get in return? Have they already received the benefit, for example, with the aid to Ukraine? Or are there other benefits to come? And, if so, will they remain secret?

Of course, one benefit is that by owning the Speakership, they put Johnson is a long-term untenable position as the leader of the House Republicans. This is because at any time a Democrat can offer a motion to vacate, or the Democrats can withhold their support the next time a Republican initiates the process. In an election year with Donald Trump on the ballot, we should see a Republican Speaker behave with maximum partisanship and red-hot bomb-throwing rhetoric. But this will be hard to do while serving at the Democrats’ pleasure.

I do understand why the Democrats were desperate to get Ukraine funding passed, with Russia making advances on the battlefield, and I know they don’t want to see the government paralyzed with a vacant Speakership, so I get why they haven’t played a much hardball as I would like. But I think they’ll see the Republicans’ unravel rather quickly seeing their leader held by the short and curlies by the opposition in a presidential election year.

I knew and predicted that a bipartisan Speaker would emerge before the end of this Congress. I did not predict it would be Johnson. I thought he would retire rather than suffer this indignity, but I guess he’ll try to soldier on.

It’s just that I don’t think it will be sustainable. Either the Democrats or the Republicans, or both, will tire of this arrangement fairly quickly. And if Johnson limps to Election Day without resigning or being removed, it will still be a debilitating situation for the GOP.