Our Views: With Roe fallen, it's time for an urgent new debate

We hope to see a way forward for our state (Louisiana) to unite around practical steps, even as debate over the Roe decision plays out. Not least, that requires a new commitment to age-appropriate sex education in schools, including real access to information on avoiding unwanted pregnancy. It also means looking at strengthening private social services and the public safety net for people who face enormous financial obstacles to raising children, or more children — an area in which some of the most anti-abortion states, including ours, are also the stingiest. And above all, it calls for the Legislature to revisit its refusal to create exceptions for victims of rape and incest. We have always been concerned by some lawmakers' rather cavalier attitude toward the difficult cases that arise — and will arise with a vengeance, once abortion is completely banned. This is no longer a theoretical issue; for years, legislators could vote for sweeping abortion bans knowing that federal courts would prevent their enactment. That backstop no longer exists. Further, rape and incest exceptions, although opposed by Louisiana Right-to-Life this year in the Legislature, would be consistent with the anti-abortion views of many Republicans. That a woman — or child — should be victimized twice, once by her attacker and then again by the state ordering her to take the pregnancy to term, is not going to be popular, even here. Yes, the court has ruled. But the debate over Louisiana’s approach to the difficult problems raised by a complete abortion ban has never been more urgent. ~NOLA.com - Our Views https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/opinion/our_views/article_d8e65dcc-f65e-11ec-9f5a-8ba6d2d38071.html

Placing the Blame on High Gas Prices

Americans are outraged about the high prices at the pump because the United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, followed by Saudi Arabia and Russia. It is also the third-largest exporter behind those two countries (And, by the way, we became the world’s energy titan even with decades of increased regulations on drilling, production and use of oil and gas.) Finally, the U.S. is also the world’s second-largest importer of oil because many of its refineries are built to process only types of oil mined from other countries. Naturally, Americans want the industry to increase production so prices can fall. Indeed, Biden has begged American companies to increase production and capacity to ease the burden on consumers. They have refused. Why? Yes, they are enjoying record profits and rewarding stockholders. But, according to the financial press, there is a second, equally important reason. Which brings us to the hopeful part of this story. Even before the pandemic, the industry had decided the future for fossil fuels was not great because the growing impact of climate change was increasing demand for renewable fuels. They see this pattern in the record sales of electric vehicles and the decision by American carmakers to go almost fully electric in 10 years. They see it in record growth worldwide in investments in solar and offshore wind development. Meanwhile, Putin’s murderous war, while pushing prices higher right now, is speeding the transition away from fossil fuels. European countries are advancing their timelines to renewable energy so they can stop buying Russian oil and gas. Oil and gas executives know ramping up production and drilling now will cost many billions over several years that could leave them sitting on product as demand begins slipping — just like during the pandemic. So they’re choosing to squeeze as much profit out of the world’s misery while bankrolling for their futures in renewables. It’s business. Of course, governments can ease the pain. The U.K. is using a windfall profits tax on oil companies to ease the bills on low-income households. Don’t expect that to happen in the U.S.; Republicans would block any such attempt in the Senate. A better way to look at these record prices is as a signal that better days are coming for the planet, and Louisiana. Higher prices will mean less fossil fuel use and reduced emissions, which eventually will reduce sea level rise and the size of hurricanes. In the long run, that’s good news. Bob Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Louisiana environmental journalist, can be reached at bmarshallenviro@gmail.com, and followed on Twitter @BMarshallEnviro. https://www.nola.com/opinions/article_63a5b6ce-f312-11ec-b4b6-1b49ba4ec12d.html

The ‘pursuit of happiness’ means having the right to privacy

Americans face two contradictory visions of democracy. One is represented by a right-wing, activist Supreme Court and Christian nationalists. The other needs a leader. In the first vision of the United States, a sliver of the electorate (White, Christian, male) exploits anti-majoritarian aspects of our democracy (e.g. the filibuster, the electoral college, gerrymandering) to use the awesome power of the government to impose values rooted in the 19th century on a diverse country. (Unsurprisingly, the beneficiaries are largely White, Christian and male.) Oppositional forces (modernity, science, diversity) are foreign, elite and alien. This vision posits that to achieve “ordered liberty” for a diverse, noisy, rambunctious people, we must respect the right to self-determination — to choose one’s family, one’s lifestyle, one’s profession and one’s philosophy of child-rearing. That necessitates restriction on government so as to protect a sphere of private conscience. It’s what Louis Brandeis called the “right to be left alone.” The latter view is shared by a majority of Americans in diverse policy arenas, including contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, child rearing and lifestyle. And until Friday, the Supreme Court dating back nearly a century had jealously guarded that sphere of privacy. Before Griswold v. Connecticut was decided in 1965, the court in the 1920s protected the right to send your child to the school of your choice and receive instruction in a foreign language; in the 1950s, the right to choose your profession; and the right to travel in 1958 — none of which are expressly set forth in the Constitution but all of which are essential to a free people. The court in 1923 held that “liberty” includes the right “to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” All of that — all of it — is up for grabs if the views expressed most directly by Justice Clarence Thomas are accepted. It’s a world few progressives or conservatives would really want to chance. But aside from the court, the invasion of all personal decision-making of privacy is now the driving force behind the MAGA movement. It wants to control how schools teach race, what teachers say about sexual and gender identity, how parents treat transgender children, and, now, whether women can be forced to give birth against their will. Whether tyrannical busybody rules are adopted by political bodies (made less democratic by gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc.) or the court, the society that results will be antithetical to the modern vision of a society in which individuals define their own lives and make intimate decisions without fear of the government or deputized vigilantes punishing them. This conflict between two views of America comes at a time when the Democratic Party is struggling to articulate the values of ordinary Americans and to both unify its own base and expand to a larger share of the electorate. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s reckless and reactionary activism, we can see clearly the common value in dire need of support: the right of privacy. As the Supreme Court for about 100 years has explained, this entails the right to self-determination, to self-realization and to personal autonomy. Privacy, like liberty, is threatened by a Christian nationalist movement that wants to freeze the United States in the 19th century and remove our individual choices. The interests (the right to abortion, to same-sex marriage, to contraception, to raising your child as you see fit, to set up a household of your choosing) are varied. Some interests are as old as the republic with newfound urgency (e.g. the right to be secure in one’s home without no-knock raids), and some are entirely new (the right to control your own online data). The theme however is singular: The right to live free from the tyranny of the government and the mob. Quite simply, privacy makes possible the “pursuit of happiness,” which each person must define for themselves . Perhaps the Democratic Party can construct a unifying theme (Privacy is on the ballot!), or perhaps it requires a new political movement akin to other advocacy organizations (Americans for privacy). It might entail a new fusion party that can endorse candidates who respect the right of privacy. One can imagine an agenda dedicated to codifying rights of privacy in federal and state law, to securing privacy rights in referendums and initiatives and even passing a simple constitutional amendment that preserves the right of privacy as it existed before Dobbs. In sum, Americans need a counterweight to a Christian nationalist movement that seeks to impose on the majority the set of social beliefs of the minority. They need a movement to defend the myriad ways 330 million Americans engage in “pursuit of happiness” — ways as diverse as the country itself. All they need is the leadership, energy and determination to harness that most innate human desire — to fulfill one’s own destiny. Opinion | We need a pro-privacy movement to combat Christian nationalism - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/27/privacy-christian-nationalism/?utm_campaign=wp_follow_jennifer_rubin&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl-jenniferrubin&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F37375fb%2F62b9ba7ccfe8a21601c54261%2F5976f806ade4e26514bcc8c9%2F6%2F16%2F62b9ba7ccfe8a21601c54261&wp_cu=798fbc1be6589a3768fb139e53083601%7C654c090c-4cc9-11e0-a478-1231380f446b

America's bishops pushed hard for the end of Roe. Now they call for unity and healing. What reality is that?

In 1974, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, then president of the University of Notre Dame, warned Roman Catholics against ceding the abortion debate to "crude zealots who have neither good judgment, sophistication of procedure nor the modicum of civility needed for the rational discussion of disagreements in a pluralistic democracy." This week, the "crude zealots" won. America's Catholic bishops are doing a victory lap over this decision. Four of the five justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade were conservative Catholics. (Chief Justice John Roberts, also a conservative Catholic, voted to uphold the Mississippi abortion ban at issue in the Dobbs case, but did not support overturning Roe outright.) The bishops have been pushing for the overturn of Roe for decades, and many of them were glad to overlook Donald Trump's moral lapses because he declared himself anti-abortion. In his single term (at least so far), Trump, with the help of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, kept his promise and larded the court with three conservative justices eager to reverse 50 years of court precedent. Now these same church leaders are calling on Americans to unite, and for dissension to end. "It is a time for healing wounds and repairing social divisions," the bishops wrote in a statement. "[I]t is a time for reasoned reflection and civil dialogue, and for coming together to build a society and economy that supports marriages and families, and where every woman has the support and resources she needs to bring her child into this world in love." What planet do they live on, to suggest that such an outcome is remotely plausible? Strife will just devolve to the states. Indeed, a 2021 investigation by the National Catholic Reporter found that major anti-abortion groups were funding voter suppression efforts in key states, endorsing Donald Trump's Big Lie and pushing for future Republican victories. That doesn't sound like "coming together" to me. Worse, abortion bans could be the first step toward a police state for pregnant women and anyone who may help them terminate a pregnancy. As the New Yorker's Jia Tolentino predicts, pregnant people could conceivably be surveilled to ensure they do nothing to endanger a "preborn" child — and could be charged with murder if a miscarriage or stillbirth is confused with an abortion. But women who want to get pregnant may also be at risk. The Catholic church condemns in vitro fertilization (IVF) because of its doctrine that life begins at conception, wary that some fertilized eggs could be discarded or used in medical research. If a state decides to take the same position, where does that leave infertile women and couples? In their statement hailing the Roe decision, the bishops congratulated anti-abortion activists on all the alleged good they have done to support pregnant women over the years. But they might also consider all the money that was squandered on this decades-long struggle, and the moral compromises they made along the way. Trump's narrow election victory in 2016 was almost certainly fueled by older, white Catholics in swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan who listen to what the church says. But the Catholic hierarchy's abortion obsession has had other pernicious side effects. During the pandemic, bishops' nitpicking over the extremely remote connection between abortion procedures and the development of life-saving COVID vaccines meant that the U.S. church did not wholeheartedly endorse Pope Francis' view of vaccination as a moral obligation. How many hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated Americans died because of those strange abortion qualms? On the bishops' planet, only the innocent "preborn" have any real right to life. The rest of us must adjust to the dictates of what increasingly looks like a doctrinaire Supreme Court dominated by ultra-conservative Catholics. Catholic bishops celebrate a big win: But as they have sowed, so shall they reap | Salon.com

A clear and present danger

For well over 200 years, American elections have relied on a basic principle: the losers peacefully accept defeat. Trump and his followers represent a catastrophic departure from that history. They are not conservatives at all, but wild-eyed radicals. In the name of making America “great again,” they are trashing the very traditions that ensure American greatness. “We are in a dangerous place at the moment,” Ben Berwick, counsel for the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told the Times. “There is a substantial faction in this country that has come to the point where they have rejected the premise that when we have elections, the losers of the elections acknowledge the right of the winner to govern.” That’s why it’s critical for Congress to pass a package of reforms, now being crafted by a bipartisan group of senators, to plug loopholes and clarify ambiguities that this “substantial faction” could exploit in the future to thwart the democratic process. One rule would reinforce Mike Pence’s insistence, in the face of Trump’s pressures, that the vice president has no authority to alter or question election outcomes. Another would make it much harder for members of Congress to challenge results reported by the states. A third would strengthen the authority of the federal judiciary to overrule renegade state officials and legislatures that try to manipulate vote totals. States could also use financial help to protect election officials from harassment. The danger to democracy is clear, and it is present. True conservatives have a profound duty to stand up to Trump and his followers and confront that danger. ~ Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. https://www.northwestgeorgianews.com/catoosa_walker_news/opinion/columns/steven-roberts-a-clear-and-present-danger/article_4275c3ce-f3ba-11ec-a4ac-5f10df4a60f1.html

We already achieved ‘energy independence.’ What good did it do us?

Somehow no one appears to have noticed. “Energy independence” is a political slogan in search of a concrete definition, but based on context, conservatives appear to be referring to situations when the United States sells more oil and petroleum products to the rest of the world than it buys from other countries. The United States initially became a net exporter of oil and petroleum products in late 2019, while Trump was in office, for the first time since at least the 1950s.. There were a few months in late 2020 and early 2021 when that vaunted new trend reversed, and the United States again imported slightly more than we exported. But even then, total petroleum production and consumption still remained nearly even. That was the loss of “energy independence” that Republicans often decry, and (incorrectly) blame on President Biden’s supposed “war on fossil fuels” rather than the pandemic and its volatile effects on petroleum markets. But even that quickly reverted back again. Since last October, we’ve been exporting more than we import each month, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an independent government statistical agency. That is, we got back to “energy independence” under Biden, but Republicans forgot to update their talking points. And what of the reports that fossil-fuel firms ratcheted down production in the past couple of years, allegedly because Biden was waging war on them? It’s true that earlier in the pandemic (i.e. pre-Biden), energy production declined both domestically and internationally. No surprise, given that oil prices briefly turned negative. A lot of companies went bankrupt and investors lost money. In fact, Trump helped negotiate a cut to global oil production to help stabilize plummeting prices, another fact Republicans sometimes conveniently forget. If we actually want to get energy costs down, if we want to completely insulate ourselves from global price shocks, what we ultimately need is the technological investments that keep energy cheap, reliable and, coincidentally, clean. That means investing in renewables, including: installing grid-scale solar wherever possible. Encouraging consumers and businesses to transition to electric vehicles, stoves and heat. And especially, developing better battery technology. Despite the perception that renewable energy is some expensive, indulgent cause of liberal tree huggers, it’s already quite cheap. It’s cheaper, for instance, to build and operate an entirely new wind or solar plant than it is to continue operating an existing coal facility. But without better storage technology, we’re stuck with using easily storable fossil fuels, which are dirtier and subject to geopolitical turmoil. We can’t control what the Russians do. We can’t control what the Saudis do. What we can do is electrify everything and make sure the electricity we use is cheap. That’s the solution if you want to stick it to oil companies, as many on the left do; it’s also the solution if you want abundant, inexpensive and truly independent energy sources, as the right has been coveting for decades. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/07/energy-independence-oil-gas-renewables/

Is there a sickness in U.S. culture? Yes: The GOP gun cult.

But Republicans do have a point about American culture — just not the one they’re trying to make. There is a sickness in America. It’s our gun cult, which has no counterpart in any other advanced democracy. Republican politicians, the gun lobby and gunmakers — the unholy trinity — are complicit not only in weakening gun laws but also in glorifying firearms and encouraging their sale. After every mass shooting, Republicans inspire more gun sales by warning that Democrats are planning to confiscate guns. By increasing the number of firearms in circulation, that makes the next mass shooting more likely. Guns have overtaken flags as an obligatory accessory in Republican campaign commercials, and people who have used guns allegedly for self-protection, such as Kyle Rittenhouse, have become Republican folk heroes. Gun ownership has become a mark of tribal identity in red America. More than twice as many Republicans as Democrats own guns, and by far the most popular reason for buying one is personal protection. Protection from what? Well, it’s no mere coincidence that gun sales have been soaring (primarily among White men) while right-wing politicians and propagandists have been hyping two phantom menaces: First, the criminal threats supposedly posed by desperados from “Democrat cities,” Black Lives Matter protesters and undocumented immigrants. Second, the political threat from Democrats who are supposedly “grooming” children, replacing “legacy Americans” with immigrants of color, and bringing communism to this country. The message to Republicans is that only the Second Amendment can protect their lives and liberty. Republicans are so alarmed about imaginary Democratic plots that 40 percent say violence against the government can be justified. Much of the GOP fearmongering has an obvious racist taint. Blake Masters, a Senate candidate from Arizona who has Donald Trump’s endorsement, blamed gun violence on “Black people.” Yet in the second-deadliest mass shooting in the past month (the one at a Buffalo grocery store), the 10 people who were killed were Black and the alleged perpetrator was a white teenager who was motivated by the “great replacement” theory that Republicans such as Masters espouse. Republicans are contributing to the bloodbath engulfing America by blocking gun-safety laws while promoting gun ownership. The result is that in 2020, guns became the leading cause of death among children. Unless the gun cult fades on the right, children — and adults — will continue to die needlessly. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/07/republican-gun-cult-america-sickness-myths-conspiracy/

There’s no reasoning with a GOP hijacked by disinformation

A new study shows how distorting disinformation has become on the political right in the Trump era. Brian Guay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others set out to learn why, as previous studies of social media patterns have found, Republicans share between 200 percent and 500 percent more fake news (fabrications published by sites masquerading as news outlets) than Democrats. Were they less able to distinguish fact from fiction? More psychologically predisposed to political bias? In part, yes. But the researchers found that “the issue primarily seems to be a supply issue,” Guay told me. “There’s just way more fake news on the right than the left.” In experiments giving Democrats and Republicans equal amounts of fake news that confirmed their world views, Republicans were more likely to share the falsehoods — but only 1.6 times more likely. This suggests that Republicans don’t have some “overreaching hunger” to traffic in untruths; they simply can’t avoid it because they’re so immersed in the stuff. Guay’s is the latest of many studies identifying the disinformation “asymmetry” afflicting the right in the Trump era. In lay terms: Garbage in, garbage out. Republican voters hear lies by the thousand from Trump and imitators such as Johnson and Cruz. They hear new conspiracy theories daily from Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and other Trump-inspired elites. It’s hardly surprising that, thus exposed, they become more toxic in their language, more extreme in their ideology and more outraged. If you saw “evidence” everywhere you turned, from people you trusted, that the country is being run by socialist pedophiles bent on disarming the populace, extinguishing your race and destroying the United States, you’d probably be outraged, too. At the very least, you might not be in the best frame of mind for a constructive conversation about ending gun violence. ~Dana Milbank Columnist https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/31/gun-safety-compromise-impossible-gop-disinformation/

Christian nationalism on the rise in some GOP campaigns

Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, said those Jan. 6 displays were not surprising. According to a recent survey by the institute, white evangelical Christians were among the strongest supporters of the assertion that God intended America as a “promised land” for European Christians. Those who backed that idea were far more likely to agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence ... to save our country.” “To my mind, white Christian nationalism is really the threat,” Jones said. Elizabeth Neumann, chief strategy officer for Moonshot, a tech company that aims to counter online violent extremism, disinformation and other harms, said Christian nationalism began picking up steam around 2015 amid a rising narrative of purported persecution of Christians. Neumann, who served in the George W. Bush and Trump administrations and grew up in an evangelical Christian household, called the movement “heretical and idolatry” and an “apocalyptic vision (that) very often leads to violence.” Many pastors are pushing back against it, she added. “I see Christian nationalism as the gasping, dying breath of the older generation in America that is afraid that Christians are going to be replaced,” she said. https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2022/05/29/christian-nationalism-on-the-rise-in-some-gop-campaigns/

Analysis: How the right embraced the racist ‘replacement’ theory

The right spread the racist ‘great replacement theory’ even after a series of tragedies in which the shooter espoused it. Analysis by Aaron Blake Racists have long espoused the theory — as the Buffalo suspect apparently did — to suggest that Whites are being usurped. Meanwhile, in recent years, Republicans and conservative pundits have increasingly cast Democrats as favoring immigration in the hopes of diluting the GOP’s political power. We’ve written about the GOP’s descent into replacement theory before, but it’s worth laying out the timeline. The idea was mostly relegated to the fringes when Donald Trump first ran for president, but he did nod to it. And then it took off last year despite tragedies involving the theory in 2017, 2018 and twice in 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/16/gop-replacement-theory-timeline/

Louisiana already seceded once. Does this politician want to try again?

Mitch McConnell, the Republican from Kentucky who was head honcho of the Senate when it was Republican-controlled, sat on President Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court for a year. But he was quick off the mark once Trump took over. After ensconcing Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, McConnell completed the trifecta that doomed Roe by rushing Barrett's nomination through days before the election that finished Trump. If these justices are not partisan hacks, they might as well be. ~James Gill, columnist https://www.nola.com/opinions/article_792fa59a-d233-11ec-8055-0fcdd74aa6f9.html

Let’s throw out the term ‘culture wars.’ This is religious tyranny.

The right-wing justices and their supporters appear ready to reject one of the Founders’ core principles: that religion shall not be imposed by government edict. Other Republicans have given away the scheme. In his 11-point plan, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, declares: “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science.” Put aside the utter incoherence (is it God or science?): The senator is explicitly calling for state power to be used in the service of his religious beliefs. And it’s no slip of the tongue. As would a number of Supreme Court justices, Scott would impose religious views while refusing to admit his views stem from a particular religious perspective. “Abortion kills human children,” Scott pronounces. “To deny that is to deny science.” Actually, he wants to mandate conduct based on the religious view that humanity/personhood starts at conception. This is not about “culture.” It is about appropriating state power to enforce theocratically driven positions. Issues dismissed as “culture” or “wokeness” inevitably boil down to whether government will diminish individual rights (e.g., a rape victim’s access to abortion) and supplant decision-making on matters, such as health care, that individuals and families jealously guard. Vice President Harris said on Tuesday at an Emily’s List gathering, reversing Roe would be “a direct assault on freedom, on the fundamental right of self-determination.” She continued: “When the right to privacy is attacked, anyone in our country may face a future where the government can interfere with their personal decisions. Not just women. Anyone.” In sum, the media’s “culture wars” shorthand is an evasion, a refusal to recognize that what is at stake are the rights and lives of those without the resources or power to defend themselves (e.g., travel out of state for an abortion). The Supreme Court is poised to roil the very essence of our constitutional tradition and strike at the heart of a pluralistic democracy. Let’s call it what it really is: state-enforced theocracy, or, if you prefer, religious authoritarianism. By Jennifer Rubin Columnist https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/04/culture-wars-diminishes-danger/?utm_campaign=wp_follow_jennifer_rubin&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl-jenniferrubin&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F36bfe96%2F6272895e956121755a63afec%2F5976f806ade4e26514bcc8c9%2F6%2F16%2F6272895e956121755a63afec

To recall: Appeals court: Trump wrongly diverted $2.5 billion in military construction funds for border wall.

To recall: June 26, 2020 Appeals court: Trump wrongly diverted $2.5 billion in military construction funds for border wall. A federal appeals court on Friday ruled against the Trump administration in its transfer of $2.5 billion from military construction projects to build sections of the U.S. border wall with Mexico, ruling it illegally sidestepped Congress, which gets to decide how to use the funds. In two opinions, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a coalition of border states and environmental groups that contended the money transfer was unlawful and that building the wall would pose environmental threats. Critics of Trump's wall praised the rulings on Friday for upholding the Constitution, which grants Congress the power of the purse. ~Military Times https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/06/26/appeals-court-trump-wrongly-diverted-25-billion-in-milcon-funds-for-border-wall/

To recall: Stopping U.S. Assistance to Central America is Counterproductive and Misinformed

To recall: June 17, 2019, the State Department said no additional foreign aid will be provided for Honduras, Guatemala & El Salvador until they take "concrete actions to reduce the number of illegal migrants coming to the U.S. border." Trump administration chooses a strategy that makes things worse. Instead of working with leaders in Central America to stabilize the situation there, the administration is eliminating aid intended to create better conditions that would help keep families home. The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, stated “all aid to Central America is not the way to build a safer, more prosperous region where people aren't forced to flee.” Lawmakers who were against the plan said it was cruel to cut off aid to countries dealing with hunger and crime. The move would be counterproductive, because it is more likely increase the number of migrants than decrease it. https://www.wola.org/analysis/stopping-us-assistance-central-america-counterproductive-misinformed/

Ukraine is our war, Biden is our wartime president

In 1987, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads urging Americans to stop paying to defend others, the big subtext being to leave NATO. (George W. Bush and Barack Obama also called for other countries to raise defense spending but didn't dream of using that as an excuse to compromise U.S. security.) These were Russian talking points parroted by a real estate investor whom the Russians were bailing out of bankruptcies. Trump in return laundered Russian oligarch/mob money through sales of U.S. property in all-cash, anonymous transactions. One example is the deluxe Trump Towers in Miami's Sunny Isles Beach, now known as "Little Russia." U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election to help elect comrade Trump. He came through for the Russians three years later when he blocked nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. Trump claims that Putin would never have invaded Ukraine had he still been president. This is the opposite of true. Trump's advisers reportedly warned him that blowing up NATO would be unpopular and could cost him reelection. ~ Froma Harrop https://www.wvgazettemail.com/opinion/columnists/froma-harrop-ukraine-is-our-war-biden-our-wartime-president-opinion/article_e1b62df7-f629-5f1d-9cb8-ecedd1639d56.html

This Republican about-face is so much worse than ‘cancel culture’

In other states, such as Georgia, GOP politicians have punished private companies for taking supposedly “woke” stands on issues such as gun violence. Republicans in Congress have likewise tried to use antitrust enforcement and other government levers to punish companies whose public stances on voting rights or internal policies on content moderation they dislike. This approach to governance was expertly modeled by Donald Trump, who as president frequently used the power of the state to reward friends and punish perceived political enemies. He did this through tax law, tariff policy and other proposed subsidies that chose winners and losers according to their political allegiances. He selectively enforced energy policies, such as allowing offshore drilling, to dole out favors to friends. He allegedly attempted to block a government contract to Amazon because its founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Post; he also tried to raise the prices the retail giant pays for U.S. Postal Service shipping. He launched a bogus antitrust investigation into car companies that had opposed his lax emissions standards. He threatened to revoke the “licenses” of broadcast media firms whose coverage he disliked. And that’s not getting into all the times he tried to weaponize his presidency to prosecute or otherwise punish politicians and private citizens (rather than companies). At the time, these behaviors might have seemed like an aberration from standard GOP rhetoric and policy, the ravings and abuses of a would-be authoritarian leader. Occasionally his fellow Republicans even called Trump out on these command-and-control, Soviet-style efforts to intervene in markets and curb free enterprise. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/04/republicans-embrace-trumps-approach-using-power-bully-opponents/?tid=ss_tw

The GOP is increasingly viewing politics with the zeal of religious absolutism

From article: Republicans have replaced the give-and-take of politics with religious zeal — the politics of absolutism. If God is on your side and the other side represents an existential threat, surely you wouldn’t let truth, comity, fairness or decency slow you down. In the grand scheme of things, what’s a little character assassination of a trailblazing Black female judge? That view of illegitimacy often stems from Christian nationalism. As Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, explains, “A worldview that claims God as a political partisan and dehumanizes one’s political opponents as evil is fundamentally antidemocratic.” He tells me, “A mind-set that believes that our nation was divinely ordained to be a promised land for Christians of European descent is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion and equality of all.” Christian nationalism cannot be separated from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection or the absolutist politics of today’s GOP. As David French, the evangelical Christian writer and former Republican, candidly acknowledges in the Atlantic: One of the most dangerous aspects of the effort to overturn the election was the extent to which it was an explicitly religious cause. January 6 insurrectionists stampeded into the Senate chamber with prayers on their lips. Prominent religious leaders and leading Christian lawyers threw themselves into the effort to delay election certification or throw out the election results entirely. In the House and Senate, the congressional leaders of the effort to overturn the election included many of Congress’s most public evangelicals. They didn’t just approach the election fight with religious zeal; they approached it with an absolute conviction that they enjoyed divine sanction. The merger of faith and partisanship was damaging enough, but the merger of faith with lawlessness and even outright delusion represented a profound perversion of the role of the Christian in the public square. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/28/republicans-ketanji-brown-jackson-hearings-reveal-politics-of-absolutism/?fbclid=IwAR0aC-

A month into war, Putin’s mind-set is complex — and dangerous

From article: Putin is something different — a Russian Orthodox Christian believer rather than an atheist, with an ideology closer to Benito Mussolini’s fascism than Vladimir Lenin’s communism. Putin described the bloody assault as salvation for Ukraine — and spoke of a religious duty “to relieve these people of suffering.” Astonishingly, he quoted the Bible to justify his blitzkrieg: “I recall the words from the Holy Scripture: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Putin’s religiosity is a little noted but powerful part of his personality. Putin’s mother, Maria, was a “deeply religious” woman, according to biographer Steven Lee Myers, who survived the siege of Leningrad in World War II after moaning for help amid a pile of corpses. When her son Vladimir was born in 1952, she "secretly baptized the boy,” Myers writes. “The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments,” Putin wrote. “One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed.” At the heart of Putin’s worldview is a sense that Russia has been humiliated by a Western conspiracy. Russia’s enemies are immoral, Putin argued. He believes deeply in the evil that he is doing. He sees the destruction of an independent Ukraine almost as a religious duty. Two obvious warnings emerge from this narrative: Handle the volatile mix that is Putin with care, lest it explode in a far wider war. And do not let him succeed. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/22/putin-religious-russia-history-ukraine/

Distinguished persons of the week: They speak to and for Russians

From article: No one should think such messages can be kept from Russians. Russia is not North Korea. As The Post reports, “In the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine and imposed new laws penalizing speech that knocked major news sites offline, Russians have flocked to the app stores, tech workers there said.” They are downloading “virtual private networks for connecting across borders and such messaging apps as Telegram, WhatsApp and Threema, all of which are major ways of sharing unapproved news.” This new media, combined with old technology such as shortwave radio, can provide uncensored news to a significant number of Russians. Meanwhile, hackers continue to wreak havoc with Russian state media. The Post reports: “Wednesday evening, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry website was defaced by hackers, who altered its content. Notably, the hack replaced the department hotline with a number for Russian soldiers to call if they want to defect from the army — under the title ‘Come back from Ukraine alive.’” Truth and personal agency are despots’ kryptonite. Messages such as those from Ovsyannikova, Schwarzenegger and the army of pro-democracy hackers are spreading across Russia, overwhelming a desperate and humiliated regime. To them we can say, well done. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/18/why-arnold-schwarzenegger-told-russia-stop-war-ukraine/

How Putin’s mistakes rallied his enemies

This is no cause for complacency. Putin can still inflict enormous damage, particularly on the people of Ukraine. Holding firm against him will be costly, and unity against him in the West could fray. He will certainly try to sow divisions among and within the democracies. Party strife is one of freedom’s inevitable byproducts. Western voters will be tempted to see the showdown in Ukraine as, in Neville Chamberlain’s infamous phrase, “a quarrel in a faraway country.” Nonetheless, it’s not outlandish to hope that Russian citizens, including some among its elites, will eventually tire of the isolation bred by their leader’s misadventures and misjudgments — especially if he drags his country into a large and costly land war. If the West remains patient and determined, Putin could yet reap the whirlwind at home. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/23/putin-ukraine-russian-overreach-his-own-undoing/

We need a ‘Mazars warning’ on everything Trump says

Those who consume any Trump message should like-wise receive a Mazars warning: “The statements of Donald J. Trump should not be relied upon” ~ Dana Milbank https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/16/trump-accountants-warning-do-not-trust/

The GOP celebration of covid ignorance is an invitation to death

The first, practiced most vigorously by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, uses an ongoing pandemic as a stage for the display of ideological zeal. In this view, the covid-19 crisis — rather than being a story of remarkable but flawed scientists and public health experts deploying the best of science against a vicious microbe — has been an opportunity for the left to impose “authoritarian, arbitrary and seemingly never-ending mandates and restrictions.” Never mind that U.S. public health officials are not part of the left, and are authentically confused about the equation of their advice with ideology. A second type of the Republican romance with death comes in the vilification of those most dedicated to preserving the lives of Americans. Public officials such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) invent a conspiratorial backstory to the covid crisis and depict the most visible representatives of the United States’ covid response as scheming, deceptive deep-state operatives. Any change in emphasis or strategy by scientists — an essential commitment of the scientific method — is viewed as rich opposition research. A third category of Republican death wish is the practice of strategic ignorance. In a case such as Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) — America’s most reliable source of unreliable information about covid-19 — such ignorance might not be feigned. He might well believe that gargling with mouthwash call kill the coronavirus, and that thousands of people are regularly dying from vaccine side effects, and that a pandemic that has taken more than 800,000 lives in the United States is “overhyped.” During a pandemic, however, the celebration of ignorance is an invitation to death. Public health depends on social cooperation. If a significant group of Americans regard the musing of a politician such as Johnson as equal in value to Fauci’s lifelong accumulation of expertise, the basis for rational action is lost. And the result is needless death. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/13/gop-covid-ignorance-endangers-american-lives/

Jan. 6 wasn’t the end of a failed plot. It was a new salvo in an unfolding uprising

The events of Jan. 6 were not the evidence of a failed plot; they were one rallying point in an unfolding uprising. We still need to understand exactly what happened that day. But more important than such events is the attitudes that enabled them. At issue is the question of democratic legitimacy: Do citizens seek solutions to their problems outside the structures of democracy? This is what motivates people who believe they have found loopholes in the constitutional order that allow them to rule like a majority without winning a majority of support. This is what causes a sitting president to contemplate martial law when a democratic outcome defies his will. On Jan. 6, 2021, we saw what can happen when the protection of procedure is thrown aside by those who govern us. Since then, we have seen the appeal of undemocratic ideals only expand on the right. This has highlighted the most difficult, recurrent debates of U.S. history. Can a nation with so much regional diversity unite in common public purposes? And will the people remain loyal to democratic procedures against the appeal of political demagogues? Moving forward, Jan. 6 does not deserve special distinction — except to celebrate the courage and sacrifice of those who defended the Capitol against attack. It is one more day of a concerted, ongoing assault on democratic institutions. Defeating that assault will require Americans who rise to the defense of self-government with the same intensity as those who pursue victory in the culture wars. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/06/jan-6-assault-on-democracy-unfolding/

Doughnuts are not the key to the fountain of youth

“Doughnuts are not the key to the fountain of youth,” says Gohara, who reminds her patients that a nutritious eating pattern is a lifestyle, not a transient plan that will fix wrinkles in six weeks. “Skin is an organ,” Gohara says. “As such, we should eat for our skin, as we do for our heart and brain.” If you want to protect all three, the Mediterranean, MIND and DASH diets offer a promising place to start. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2021/12/17/food-plans-anti-aging-diet/

Opinion: Every time I think the inflation discourse can’t get dumber, I’m proven wrong

Republicans and right-wing media have argued, for instance, that President Biden has driven up energy prices as part of his supposed war on fossil fuels. Specifically, they blame him for shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline. They don’t mention, however, that this pipeline was only 8 percent built when Biden revoked a U.S.-side permit for its construction. So Biden did not actually shut down any existing supply. (It’s also not clear that the canceled XL pipeline would have much effect on U.S. gas prices, even if it were eventually built someday, given that most oil passing through it likely would be exported.) Or, Republicans say the real way Biden raised gas prices was by ending drilling for oil and gas on public lands. This didn’t actually happen, even if Biden’s campaign pledges and executive actions suggested it would. The Associated Press reported in July that the Biden administration was on track to approve more oil and gas drilling permits this year than were approved any year of the Trump administration — actually, more than any year since 2008. And last month, just a few days after the global climate conference known as COP26, the Biden administration conducted the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. The main reason price growth is up has to do with constrained supply not keeping up with booming demand. That is, the pandemic has resulted in worker shortages, supply-chain disruptions and other bottlenecks in the United States and abroad. These problems are happening at the exact same time that cooped-up consumers are eager to buy even more stuff than they did pre-pandemic. Arguably, recent U.S. fiscal policy may have exacerbated this dynamic: Biden and the Democrats enacted stimulus payments and other government transfers earlier this year, which gave consumers more cash to spend. Now consumers are spending that cash. That could be one reason inflation is higher here than it is in, say, the euro zone — though inflation has reached record highs there, too. Aside from some vague rhetoric about Democrats’ “big spending” habits, though, those checks are not really what Republican politicians are criticizing Biden for. Perhaps with good reason: The spring stimulus checks were extremely popular, including among Republican voters. Plus, this line of attack might also implicate former president Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers, since they too passed multiple rounds of stimulus payments last year. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/02/every-time-i-think-inflation-discourse-cant-get-dumber-im-proven-wrong/

The exhausting, soul-sapping meanness of Lauren Boebert

From article But trolling is exhausting. It can take the wind out of you even if you aren’t the instigator or the target. Mean-spiritedness changes the atmosphere and the mood of the room. It’s not an invigorating intellectual argument that informs even as it enrages. It’s not an energizing and graceful debate that forces you to see someone’s beliefs in a new way. Trolling is hollow and cheap. It steals your appetite for engagement. It leaves you empty. It deadens us all. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/11/30/exhausting-soul-sapping-meanness-lauren-boebert/

Why Everyone Is So Rude Right Now-In the minds of some of the individuals, snapping at the flight attendant is not rude, it’s civil disobedience.

Some people may have thought that, having been prevented from mingling with other humans for a period, folks would greet the return of social activity with hugs, revelry and fellowship. But in many ways, say psychologists, the long separation has made social interactions more fraught. The combination of a contagious, life-threatening disease and a series of unprecedented, life-altering changes in the rules of human engagement have left people anxious, confused and, especially if they do not believe the restrictions were necessary, deeply resentful. “We’re going through a time where physiologically, people’s threat system is at a heightened level,” says Bernard Golden, a psychologist and the author of Overcoming Destructive Anger. This period of threat has been so long that it may have had a damaging effect on people’s mental health, which for many has then been further debilitated by isolation, loss of resources, the death of loved ones and reduced social support. “During COVID there has been an increase in anxiety, a reported increase in depression, and an increased demand for mental health services,” he adds. Lots of people, in other words, are on their very last nerve. This is true, he adds, whether they believe the virus is an existential threat or not. “Half the people fear COVID,” says Golden. “Half the people fear being controlled.” Heightening the anxiety, the current situation is completely unfamiliar to most people. “Nobody expected what happened. We didn’t have time to prepare psychologically,” says Cristina Bicchieri, director of the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania. Then, just as it seemed like the danger had passed, other limitations arrived; staff shortages, product shortages, longer delivery times. “People think, ‘O.K, now we can go shopping and go out,’ and they find that life is not back to normal,” Bicchieri says. “There is an enormous amount of frustration.” It’s not a coincidence, psychologists say, that much of the incivility occurs towards people who are in customer service industries. “People feel almost entitled to be rude to people who are not in a position of power,” says Hans Steiner, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. “Especially when they come at them, and remind them of the fact that they have to do their piece to get rid of this pandemic.” The workers who are now in charge of enforcing rules are traditionally regarded as caregivers and servers. The power dynamic has been completely upended. And of course, it’s always easier to punch down. “It’s displaced anger,” says Bernard. “They’re angry about other things but they take it out in those encounters.” It wasn’t like Americans were exactly overlooking their differences before the pandemic. Some researchers point to the increase in crude public discourse, both from political leaders and in online discussion—which encourages outsized emotions—as the gateway rudeness that has led to the current wave. “We don’t filter ourselves as much as we used to,” says Bernard. “On the internet, people feel like they can say anything. They no longer guard themselves. And I think they transfer that lack of filter into public life. I think from leadership that we’ve had in the last number of years, that’s only been more encouraged.” But it goes deeper: Impolite interactions are not the only thing that’s on the rise; crimes are too. “We’re seeing measurable increases in all kinds of crimes, so that suggests to me that there is something changing,” says Jay Van Bavel, associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, and co-author of a book on social harmony, The Power of Us, that came out in September. He suggests the reasons for the rise in both are structural and profound; America has lost sense of social cohesion, as a result of the widening gaps between the wealthy and working class. “The more inequality you get—which has gotten really bad in the last few decades—the less of a sense of cohesion there are across socioeconomic classes,” he says. “That’s something that if that’s not addressed is going to continue to cause turmoil.” There’s some international agreement that the situation may not just be one where people have forgotten their manners, or are out of practice because everyone had to stop shaking hands for a while. Matteo Bonotti and Steven T. Zech, both of the politics department at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who wrote Recovering Civility During Covid 19, conclude that even if the people were initially bamboozled because they had to communicate using a new set of rules, that soon wore off. “At the very beginning [of the pandemic] people just didn’t know how to be polite,” says Zech. It was hard to communicate a smile, and it became necessary to avoid rather than embrace people. But after a certain point, the unintentional rudeness became intentional and deliberate. “It’s meant to call attention to what they see as this kind of unjust policy, some discrimination, or some infringement on some other right,” says Zech. In the minds of some of the individuals, snapping at the flight attendant is not rude, it’s civil disobedience. If the rash of bad behavior is not just short-term impatience with the unique situation and actually a symbol of something much deeper, then unwinding it will be more difficult than merely giving flight attendants more training on what to do with with mid-air contretemps, although that can’t hurt. Meanwhile psychologists suggest that people slow down, breathe out more slowly and lower their voices when encountering difficult social situations or irate people so as not to make any situation worse. “All of anger management,” says Golden, “involves pausing.” https://time.com/6099906/rude-customers-pandemic/

Day of The Dead Pandemic 2021

How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations

By Shane Goldmacher Published April 3, 2021Updated April 5, 2021 Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500. It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help. What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud. “It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.” Mr. Trump’s hyperaggressive fund-raising practices did not stop once he lost the election. His campaign continued the weekly withdrawals through prechecked boxes all the way through Dec. 14 as he raised tens of millions of dollars for his new political action committee, Save America. In March, Mr. Trump urged his followers to send their money to him — and not to the traditional party apparatus — making plain that he intends to remain the gravitational center of Republican fund-raising online. A small yellow box and a flood of fraud complaints The small and bright yellow box popped up on Mr. Trump’s digital donation portal around March 2020. The text was boldface, simple and straightforward: “Make this a monthly recurring donation.” The box came prefilled with a check mark. How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

The U.S. must punish sedition — or risk more of it

Stopping this rot in the political order will require accountability. That begins with the president, who deserves every legal and constitutional consequence our system offers. He should be impeached for sedition. He should be prevented from holding any further elective office. He should be stripped of all the perks of the post-presidency. He should be prosecuted for insurrection against the U.S. government. But the responsibility does not end with a single man. Many elected Republicans enabled the president’s political rise. Trump could only attempt the occupation of the Capitol because he had already occupied the Republican Party — in that case, with little resistance. Elected Republicans who cheered that takeover deserve to lose, and lose, and lose, until their party is either destroyed or transformed. There are also harder cases. Some elected Republicans did more than spread the lies that empowered the insurrection. They voted to confirm those lies after the Capitol had been assaulted. Not even physical danger — not even the humiliation of their country and the attempted murder of their colleagues — could overcome their moral cowardice and political ambition. That justifies ethics investigations of people such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and McCarthy, leading to their possible expulsion. These legislators urged surrender to the pernicious lies and seditious demands of violent insurrectionists who had just left the building. That is the betrayal of the oath they took to defend the Constitution. This is the sad reality of our beleaguered democracy: If the United States does not punish sedition, we will see more of it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-must-punish-sedition--or-risk-more-of-it/2021/01/11/97907746-5438-11eb-a931-5b162d0d033d_story.html

Let the anti-constitutional Republicans reveal themselves

This attack on the constitutional order has led Republican populism into direct conflict with conservatism. Those who once claimed to endorse law and order have come to endorse lawless attacks on the public order. Those who once called themselves constitutionalists now treat the constitutional system with contempt. Those who once warned against tyranny now submissively serve a president with authoritarian pretensions. Those who once stood for federalism now demand that the federal government invalidate state-run elections. Those who once demanded judicial restraint now want courts to overrule democracy on a breathtaking scale. This is a movement fueled by high-octane hypocrisy. ~Michael Gerson, Conservative writer for President George W. Bush https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/let-the-anti-constitutional-republicans-reveal-themselves/2021/01/04/d3fafee0-4eb6-11eb-83e3-322644d82356_story.html

American history is about outcomes. Will we pass the covid-19 test?

It comes as a surprise because history’s verdict is determined by the outcome. Likewise, the history of the covid-19 pandemic will be more interested in how the battle ends than in how it got started. In that respect, the fight begins now. History will elide many of the missteps of last winter provided that we make a better showing from now on. Take, for example, the fiasco of the face coverings. When the novel coronavirus emerged, hospital managers immediately worried they would run short of personal protective equipment, including face masks. To protect existing supplies, authorities assured the public that we’d be fine without masks. That was a mistake. Masks have proved to be the first line of defense, along with social distancing and clean hands. Even on the cusp of a vaccine, these simple measures are not only our best options against the pandemic; they continue to be the only ones available to engage the nation to meet this challenge. The vaccine is coming, but the crisis is already here. History’s account of Americans in this pandemic will focus on what we do starting now. Our lack of leadership has been depressing. But we’ve learned enough through these past nine months to make up for absent leadership by exercising citizenship. It’s not Normandy. It’s not Gettysburg. But this is what history demands today. There is just enough time — just barely — left for us to pass the test. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/american-history-is-about-outcomes-will-we-pass-the-covid-19-test/2020/12/08/d39b6fb6-397b-11eb-bc68-96af0daae728_story.html

The moral hypocrisy of conservative leaders is stunning

The intellectual bankruptcy and moral hypocrisy of many conservative leaders is stunning. People who claimed to favor limited government now applaud Trump’s use of the executive branch to undermine an election. A similar attempt by Barack Obama would have brought comparisons to Fidel Castro. People who talked endlessly about respecting the Constitution affirm absurd slanders against the constitutional order. People who claimed to be patriots now spread false claims about their country’s fundamental corruption. People who talked of honoring the rule of law now jerk and gyrate according to the whims of a lawless leader. These conservative leaders no longer deserve the assumption of sincerity. They are spreading conspiratorial lies so unlikely and irrational, they must know them to be lies. But their motive remains a matter of debate. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-moral-hypocrisy-of-conservative-leaders-is-stunning/2020/12/14/35e62f16-3e2d-11eb-8bc0-ae155bee4aff_story.html

A gamble pays off in ‘spectacular success’: How the leading coronavirus vaccines made it to the finish line

The Vaccine Research Center, where Graham is deputy director, was the brainchild of Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It was created in 1997 to bring together scientists and physicians from different disciplines to defeat diseases, with a heavy focus on HIV. Since 1961, scientists had known about messenger RNA, the transient genetic material that makes life possible, taking the instructions inscribed in DNA and delivering those to the protein-making parts of the cell. In 2005, the pair discovered a way to modify RNA, chemically tweaking one of the letters of its code, so it didn’t trigger an inflammatory response. Deborah Fuller, a scientist who works on RNA and DNA vaccines at the University of Washington, said that work deserves a Nobel Prize. Ugur Sahin, chief executive of BioNTech, said it was thrilling when he and colleagues in 2016 developed a nanoparticle to deliver messenger RNA to a special cell type that could take the code and turn it into a protein on its surface to provoke the immune system. The latest genetic techniques, like messenger RNA, don’t take as long to develop because those virus bits don’t have to be generated in a lab. Instead, the vaccine delivers a genetic code that instructs cells to build those characteristic proteins themselves. Scientists have to choose which telltale part of the virus to show the immune system. Long before the pandemic, Graham’s research had revealed that some virus proteins change shape after they break into a person’s cells. A vaccine based on the wrong shape could effectively train the immune system to be an ineffective sheriff, never stopping vandals or burglars before they wreak their havoc. Graham had used this insight to design a better vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus; it made Science magazine’s shortlist of 2013’s most important scientific breakthroughs. Coronaviruses seemed like an important next target. Severe acute respiratory syndrome had emerged in 2003. Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) broke out in 2012. It seemed clear to Graham and Jason McLellan, a structural biologist now at the University of Texas at Austin, that new coronaviruses were jumping into people on a 10-year clock and that it might be time to brace for the next one. Last winter, when Graham heard rumblings of a new coronavirus in China, he brought the team back together. Once its genome was shared online by Chinese scientists, the laboratories in Texas and Maryland designed a vaccine, utilizing the stabilizing mutations and the knowledge they had gained from years of basic research — a weekend project thanks to the dividends of all that past work. On Jan. 13, Moderna, The company could start making the vaccine almost right away because of its experience manufacturing experimental cancer vaccines, which involves taking tumor samples and developing personalized vaccines in 45 days. But the world will also owe their existence to many scientists outside those companies, in government and academia, who pursued ideas they thought were important even when the world doubted them. McLellan’s laboratory at the University of Texas is proud to have licensed an even more potent version of their spike protein, royalty-free, to be incorporated into a vaccine for low- and middle-income countries. Graham is matter-of-fact, rather than exuberant, and quickly changes the subject to the immense amount of work that remains to be done. Historic scientific news must now be transformed into a tool that is mass produced, distributed and used widely around the world to blunt the sickness and suffering of this winter — and to lift the pall this pandemic has cast over virtually every aspect of daily life. He recalled that his 5-year-old granddaughter recently heard the family talking about “getting back to normal” if a vaccine is successful. “She looked up and said, ‘What is normal life, what do you mean by that?’ ” Graham said. “Half of her memorable life has been like this.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/12/06/covid-vaccine-messenger-rna/

The coronavirus vaccine isn't a miracle

Article in the New Orleans Advocate - Our Views: Another thing we ought to learn is how brilliant we can be. In a little more than the length of a major-league baseball season, scientists have invented and proved the efficacy of vaccines to end a global pandemic. In any other era in all the history of the world this would have been inconceivable. Reasonable people will call it a miracle. It isn’t. It is the achievement of a society that for all its brokenness can still do great things. Our universities produce researchers that make groundbreaking discoveries, our hospitals train nurses that care for the sick at great personal risk, our elections elevate just enough competent leaders to pull us through. There are still honest working men and women who show up every day to stock grocery shelves and clean COVID-19 wards. We ought to offer them a great deal more respect. https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/opinion/our_views/article_62de3768-3cb9-11eb-bfc6-872a8e1420e3.html

Years of research laid groundwork for speedy COVID-19 shots

From article: “The speed is a reflection of years of work that went before,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, told The Associated Press. “That’s what the public has to understand.” But long before COVID-19 was on the radar, the groundwork was laid in large part by two different streams of research, one at the NIH and the other at the University of Pennsylvania — and because scientists had learned a bit about other coronaviruses from prior SARS and MERS outbreaks. The mRNA approach is radically different. It starts with a snippet of genetic code that carries instructions for making proteins. Pick the right virus protein to target, and the body turns into a mini vaccine factory. The right design is critical. It turns out the surface proteins that let a variety of viruses latch onto human cells are shape-shifters — rearranging their form before and after they've fused into place. Brew a vaccine using the wrong shape and it won’t block infection. “You could put the same molecule in one way and the same molecule in another way and get an entirely different response,” Fauci explained. That was a discovery in 2013, when Graham, deputy director of NIH’s Vaccine Research Center, and colleague Jason McLellan were investigating a decades-old failed vaccine against RSV, a childhood respiratory illness. Germany’s BioNTech in 2018 had partnered with New York-based Pfizer to develop a more modern mRNA-based flu vaccine, giving both companies some early knowledge about how to handle the technology. “This was all brewing. This didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Pfizer’s Dormitzer. Last January, shortly after the new coronavirus was reported in China, BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin switched gears and used the same method to create a COVID-19 vaccine. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/article247670020.html

In 1918, Americans were asked to wear masks. Some refused — and paid the price.

In December of 1918, The Washington Post caught up with Oliver P. Cranston, a doctor from Boston, at the Willard Hotel and asked his opinion about people who pushed back against flu-fighting recommendations, including masks and the closure of churches, schools and other gathering places. “I cannot help but be impatient or intolerant at some of the views expressed,” Cranston said, adding: “Cranks should not be permitted to hamper the precautionary measures of the public officials.” That reminds me of something Anthony S. Fauci might say. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-1918-americans-were-asked-to-wear-masks-some-refused--and-paid-the-price/2020/07/01/748d3fde-bbb5-11ea-80b9-40ece9a701dc_story.html

In year of stress, seek the peace of wild things

A big drainage canal runs behind my office — a wide channel, lined with concrete, that takes away the neighborhood’s rain. Though the canal does important work, few would consider it an appealing landmark. Chain-link fences line both banks, telling the world to stay away. On most days, it’s a message I easily oblige. For much of the year, as I walk through our office parking lot, the canal is far from mind. But one recent evening, as I headed to my car at the end of a workday, a white flash, vivid as lightning, caught the corner of my eye. Tracing the flash to its source, I discovered that four egrets had flown into the canal to look for dinner. About egrets, you already know. They’re tall, white birds, elegant as a length of calligraphy, and fairly common even in Louisiana’s cities, where they’ve adapted by hunting in canals and roadside ditches. I stood by the fence and watched the egrets for a few moments as they combed the canal for prey — maybe a tiny fish or two, or some frogs to make a meal. As somber as poets pecking at their keyboards, the egrets stooped over the shallow residue of a recent storm, stabbing the water occasionally as they found their quarry. It did me good to see them, and so I've made a habit of stopping by the fence before and after I start my work shift, hoping to spot the egrets again. We’ve been connecting about twice a week, their presence so routine that my heart sank a bit when just three of the egrets appeared one evening. Had the fourth bird met a bad end? He was back for the next visit, though, the quartet now complete. I was pleased to see this tiny part of my life once again made whole. You might wonder why, in a world so harried and frayed this autumn, a grown man would be making appointments with egrets. Wendell Berry, a writer I love, explained it much better than I ever could in one of his best poems, “The Peace of Wild Things.” “When despair for the world grows in me,” he tells readers, “and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, / I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” In seeing creatures unworried by humanity’s cares, Berry suggests, we can get out of ourselves for a while. It’s something many of us have needed in this broken time. “I come into the peace of wild things,” he writes, “who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” I watch egrets, I suppose, because in this wounded year, peace of any kind is a gift too precious to ignore. https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/entertainment_life/danny_heitman/article_b2d5c9a2-1f9f-11eb-838c-6736e20f6ebf.html

In Biden victory, a cast change: Out with Richard III, in with Atticus Finch

As Joe Biden jogged onto that outdoor platform in Wilmington, Del., on Saturday night, one sensed a cast change on the national stage of seismic proportions. Exit Richard III. Enter Atticus Finch. It’s not mere hype or sentimentality to propose that the victorious Biden cut a figure akin to the kind, purposeful character Harper Lee created and Aaron Sorkin reinvigorated on Broadway in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In the conciliatory tones of his maiden speech as president-elect, Biden made a pitch to our better natures in a manner that reverberated with Finch-like magnanimity and rectitude. “Now let’s give each other a chance,” Biden said Saturday — as if to quickly set aside the divisions Donald Trump sought to exploit over the length of his desultory tenure. “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. . . . This is the time to heal in America. To marshal the forces of decency, fairness, science and hope.” You might forgive a drama-deprived theater critic for looking to his field of coverage, shut down by covid-19, for analogies that help frame these preliminary performances of our next president and vice president, Kamala D. Harris. Her elevation, too, as the first woman of color elected to the second highest of offices, conveyed intimations of “Mockingbird,” one of the most widely read novels in America. Here, one imagines the fulfilled dreams of Calpurnia, the indomitable Black housekeeper in Atticus’s Maycomb, Ala., home, a woman of keen insight for whom opportunity was frustratingly denied. In her remarks Saturday, Harris exuberantly invoked the women who came before her, women of more accomplishment than Calpurnia but none with more of a thirst for justice. Biden is not a great orator; it may be that his lifelong struggle with a stutter precludes that possibility. (For a harrowing reminder of how anguishing a hurdle that can be for a person in the public eye, re-watch Colin Firth’s Oscar-winning performance in “The King’s Speech.”) But his remarks over the blaring of the car horns and cheers of supporters in the Delaware parking lot pointed to more substantive values, and to a man of heart and spirit. More than a year ago, when I followed him around Iowa for a story about his performative campaigning style, I sensed a man adrift — a Willy Loman on the road, desperately trying to make a sale. In Delaware, on home turf, fresh from an election called in his favor, he seemed stronger, more resolute, a winner nationally in his own right, a man as secure in his convictions as Atticus Finch himself. The references to a book and play about a White lawyer who, in the Jim Crow South of 1934 defends a Black man falsely accused of rape, might strike some as dated: The story by contemporary standards displays some patronizing whiffs of White liberalism swooping in to save the day. But the parallels go beyond that trope, to other qualities that Atticus embodies, and that Biden reminds us of. Like Atticus, for instance, he is a devoted family man, widowed at an early age and compelled to raise children on his own. (Atticus, alas, doesn’t find a Dr. Jill.) The message of tolerance Biden delivers could come straight from Atticus, who is also a politician, by the way: He’s an Alabama state legislator at the time he’s defending Tom Robinson, the laborer railroaded by a racist and a system lined up against him. It happens to be the opposite of the inflammatory rhetoric of the figure America is tossing out of office. Remember the inaugural address invoking “American carnage”? In the aftermath of such polarizing language, though, there may be a naivete — however noble — in believing common ground is achievable. Biden underlined this Saturday by reaching out to Trump supporters, insisting he will be a president “who doesn’t see red states and blue states, only sees the United States.” That notion is also central to “Mockingbird.” During Biden’s speech, I was compelled to reflect on a debate at the heart of Sorkin’s adaptation, as Calpurnia confronts Atticus over his insistence that his children show their racist neighbors — and even Bob Ewell, the vicious sexual predator who sets Tom Robinson’s tragedy in motion — courtesy and respect. “What is the virtue of teaching Jem and Scout that Bob Ewell should be treated with respect?” Calpurnia demands of Atticus. “Virtue,” Atticus replies. “The virtue is that it’s virtuous.” “I don’t know what that means,” Calpurnia says. “It means,” Atticus tells her, “I don’t want them hating people they disagree with.” Calpurnia’s rejoinder taunts Atticus with his own words. “ ‘You gotta give Maycomb time, Cal. This is the Deep South, you gotta give ’em time,’ ” she says. “How much time,” she adds bitterly, “would Maycomb like?” The terrible ending for Tom Robinson in “Mockingbird” suggests Maycomb isn’t nearly ready in 1934. But Atticus, like Biden, won’t let go of his faith in what’s to come. The play comes to an end soon after Atticus enumerates for Calpurnia a short list of local people they can count on, to push for a better day. “Smaller armies have changed the world,” Atticus says. “Joy cometh in the morning, Cal.” Maybe, just maybe, it does. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/biden-victory-speech-atticus-finch/2020/11/09/e5f36976-21d8-11eb-952e-0c475972cfc0_story.html

Halloween Pandemic 2020

Quotes from Mary Trump’s Book Too Much and Never Enough

“At 5: 00 the next morning, only a couple of hours after the opposite result had been announced, I was wandering around my house, as traumatized as many other people but in a more personal way: it felt as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.” “Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall has been for Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits.” “Though Donald’s fundamental nature hasn’t changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he’s under has changed dramatically. It’s not the stress of the job, because he isn’t doing the job—unless watching TV and tweeting insults count. It’s the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact that he knows nothing—about politics, civics, or simple human decency—that requires an enormous amount of work.” “He had all the confidence of a bully who knows he’s always going to get what he wants and never has to fight for it.” “Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough.” “A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma.” “the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage.” “Though nothing Donald did surprised me, the speed and volume with which he started inflicting his worst impulses on the country—from lying about the crowd size at the inauguration and whining about how poorly he was treated to rolling back environmental protections, targeting the Affordable Care Act in order to take affordable health care away from millions of people, and enacting his racist Muslim ban—overwhelmed me.” “Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself.” “Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth—that he is none of those things—is too terrifying for him to contemplate.” “Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. Doing” “for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people.” “Donald did have—as a savant of self-promotion, shameless liar, marketer, and builder of brands—to achieve the one thing that had always eluded him: a level of fame that matched his ego and satisfied his ambition in a way money alone never could.” “The banks admonished him for betraying their agreement, but they never took any action against him, which just reinforced his belief that he could do whatever he wanted, as he almost always had.” “Donald has always struggled for legitimacy—as an adequate replacement for Freddy, as a Manhattan real estate developer or casino tycoon, and now as the occupant of the Oval Office who can never escape the taint of being utterly without qualification or the sense that his “win” was illegitimate.” “Despite the fluke that was his electoral advantage and a “victory” that was at best suspect and at worst illegitimate, he never had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist; his bluster and shamelessness just happened to resonate with certain segments of the population.” “The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for. At this point, we can’t evaluate his day-to-day functioning because he is, in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized. Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.” “In Donald’s mind, he has accomplished everything on his own merits, cheating notwithstanding. How many interviews has he given in which he offers the obvious falsehood that his father loaned him a mere million dollars that he had to pay back but he was otherwise solely responsible for his success? It’s easy to understand why he would believe this. Nobody has failed upward as consistently and spectacularly as the ostensible leader of the shrinking free world.” “His cruelty is also an exercise of his power, such as it is. He has always wielded it against people who are weaker than he is or who are constrained by their duty or dependence from fighting back. Employees and political appointees can’t fight back when he attacks them in his Twitter feed because to do so would risk their jobs or their reputations. Freddy couldn’t retaliate when his little brother mocked his passion for flying because of his filial responsibility and his decency, just as governors in blue states, desperate to get adequate help for their citizens during the COVID-19 crisis, are constrained from calling out Donald’s incompetence for fear he would withhold ventilators and other supplies needed in order to save lives. Donald learned a long time ago how to pick his targets.” “The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise. Donald can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people. David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.” “Instead, states are forced to buy vital supplies from private contractors; the federal government commandeers those supplies, and then FEMA distributes them back to private contractors, who then resell them.” “Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise. Donald can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people. David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.” “It would have been easy for Donald to be a hero. People who have hated and criticized him would have forgiven or overlooked his endless stream of appalling actions if he’d simply had somebody take the pandemic preparedness manual down from the shelf where it was put after the Obama administration gave it to him.” “In Donald’s mind, even acknowledging an inevitable threat would indicate weakness. Taking responsibility would open him up to blame. Being a hero—being good—is impossible for him.” “Donald’s talent for deflecting responsibility while projecting blame onto others came straight from his father’s playbook.” “Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. Doing so would require courage, strength of character, deference to experts, and the confidence to take responsibility and to course correct after admitting mistakes.” “With millions of lives at stake, he takes accusations about the federal government’s failure to provide ventilators personally, threatening to withhold funding and lifesaving equipment from states whose governors don’t pay sufficient homage to him. That doesn’t surprise me. The deafening silence in response to such a blatant display of sociopathic disregard for human life or the consequences for one’s actions, on the other hand, fills me with despair and reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem after all.” “He is Frankenstein without conscience.” “His cruelty serves, in part, as a means to distract both us and himself from the true extent of his failures. The more egregious his failures become, the more egregious his cruelty becomes.” “If what he was doing during the 2016 campaign hadn’t worked, he would have kept doing it anyway, because lying, playing to the lowest common denominator, cheating, and sowing division are all he knows. He is as incapable of adjusting to changing circumstances as he is of becoming “presidential.” He did tap into a certain bigotry and inchoate rage, which he’s always been good at doing. The full-page screed he paid to publish in the New York Times in 1989 calling for the Central Park Five to be put to death wasn’t about his deep concern for the rule of law; it was an easy opportunity for him to take on a deeply serious topic that was very important to the city while sounding like an authority in the influential and prestigious pages of the Gray Lady. It was unvarnished racism meant to stir up racial animosity in a city already seething with it. All five boys, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, were subsequently cleared, proven innocent via incontrovertible DNA evidence. To this day, however, Donald insists that they were guilty—yet another example of his inability to drop a preferred narrative even when it’s contradicted by established fact.” “Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough. This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak; his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved. So, he must draw you in if he can by getting you to assent to even the most seemingly insignificant thing: “Isn’t this plane great?” “Yes, Donald, this plane is great.” It would be rude to begrudge him that small concession. Then he makes his vulnerabilities and insecurities your responsibility: you must assuage them; you must take care of him. Failing to do so leaves a vacuum that is unbearable for him to withstand for long. If you’re someone who cares about his approval, you’ll say anything to retain it. He has suffered mightily, and if you aren’t doing all you can to alleviate that suffering, you should suffer, too.” “The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor. They either fail to see or refuse to believe that their fate will be the same as that of anyone who pledged loyalty to him in the past. There seems to be an endless number of people willing to join the claque that protects Donald from his own inadequacies while perpetuating his unfounded belief in himself.” “If he can keep forty-seven thousand spinning plates in the air, nobody can focus on any one of them. So, there’s that: it’s just a distraction.” “Since the election, he’s figured out how to avoid such questions completely; White House press briefings and formal news conferences have been replaced with “chopper talk” during which he can pretend he can’t hear any unwelcome questions over the noise of the helicopter blades.” “That’s how it always works with the sycophants. First, they remain silent no matter what outrages are committed; then they make themselves complicit by not acting. Ultimately, they find they are expendable when Donald needs a scapegoat.” “Although more powerful people put Donald into the institutions that have shielded him since the very beginning, it’s people weaker than he is who are keeping him there.” “The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor. They either fail to see or refuse to believe that their fate will be the same as that of anyone who pledged loyalty to him in the past.” “the government as it is currently constituted, including the executive branch, half of Congress, and the majority of the Supreme Court, is entirely in the service of protecting Donald’s ego; that has become almost its entire purpose.” “Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable. He continues to be protected from his own disasters in the White House, where a claque of loyalists applauds his every pronouncement or covers up his possible criminal negligence by normalizing it to the point that we’ve become almost numb to the accumulating transgressions” “What Donald can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is punish the rest of us.” “Fred’s fundamental beliefs about how the world worked—in life, there can be only one winner and everybody else is a loser (an idea that essentially precluded the ability to share) and kindness is weakness—were clear. Donald knew, because he had seen it with Freddy, that failure to comply with his father’s rules was punished by severe and often public humiliation, so he continued to adhere to them even outside his father’s purview. Not surprisingly, his understanding of “right” and “wrong” would clash with the lessons taught in most elementary schools.” “Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, geopolitics, diplomacy (or anything else, really) and was never pressed to demonstrate such knowledge, has evaluated all of this country’s alliances, and all of our social programs, solely through the prism of money, just as his father taught him to do. The costs and benefits of governing are considered in purely financial terms, as if the US Treasury were his personal piggy bank. To him, every dollar going out was his loss, while every dollar saved was his gain. In the midst of obscene plenty, one person, using all of the levers of power and taking every advantage at his disposal, would benefit himself and, conditionally, his immediate family, his cronies, and his sycophants; for the rest, there would never be enough to go around, which was exactly how my grandfather ran our family.” “Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him; when he was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition. Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.” “By perpetuating his version of the story, he wanted told about his wealth and his subsequent “successes,” our family and then many others started the process of normalizing Donald. His hiring (and treatment) of undocumented workers and his refusal to pay contractors for completed work were assumed to be the cost of doing business. Treating people with disrespect and nickel-and-diming them made him look tough.” “For him, it was not “the more you have, the more you can give.” It was “the more you have, the more you have.” Financial worth was the same as self-worth, monetary value was human value. The more Fred Trump had, the better he was. If he gave something to someone else, that person would be worth more and he less. He would pass that attitude on to Donald in spades.” “That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends—ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance. Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. His capacity to be his own person, rather than an extension of his father’s ambitions, became severely limited.” “large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma.” “Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information. Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough. This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak; his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because” “he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved. So, he must draw you in if he can by getting you to assent to even the most seemingly insignificant thing: “Isn’t this plane great?” “Yes, Donald, this plane is great.” It would be rude to begrudge him that small concession. Then he makes his vulnerabilities and insecurities your responsibility: you must assuage them; you must take care of him. Failing to do so leaves a vacuum that is unbearable for him to withstand for long. If you’re someone who cares about his approval, you’ll say anything to retain it. He has suffered mightily, and if you aren’t doing all you can to alleviate that suffering, you should suffer, too.” “Instead, Donald withdraws to his comfort zones—Twitter, Fox News—casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker. He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own. But he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy.” “By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the altar of Donald’s hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy.” “I hope this book will end the practice of referring to Donald’s “strategies” or “agendas,” as if he operates according to any organizing principles. He doesn’t. Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself. Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth—that he is none of those things—is too terrifying for him to contemplate.” https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/84437295-too-much-and-never-enough-how-my-family-created-the-world-s-most-danger

The Next Lost Cause

From article: The Lost Cause offered former Confederates and their descendants a salve for the past. According to this mythology about the Civil War, the South was the victim, even in defeat. Confederate armies were not vanquished on the battlefield but overwhelmed by insurmountable Union resources; Confederate soldiers were heroic martyrs, none more so than Robert E. Lee; defense of states’ rights, not slavery, caused the war; and African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause. Through distortions and omissions, White Southerners constructed a version of history that absolved them of blame. Although they were a defeated minority, they organized to spread their message through monuments, literature, film and textbooks across the country — where it dominated for more than a century, shaping partisan politics, American culture and, of course, race relations. Even as Confederate monuments tumble this summer, we may be witnessing an attempt to form a new lost cause. Today, President Trump describes his opponents as “unfair,” the pandemic sapping his popularity as a “hoax,” the polls that show him losing to Joe Biden as “fake,” and the election in which he’ll face ultimate judgment in November as “rigged” or potentially “stolen.” His defenders are already laboring to cast him as a righteous, noble warrior martyred by traitors and insurmountable forces. They rely on the same tools that were used to promulgate Confederate myths: manipulating facts, claiming persecution, demonizing enemies and rewriting history. In other words, Trump is laying the groundwork to claim moral victory in political defeat — and to deny the legitimacy of the Democratic administration that would displace him. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/31/lost-cause-donald-trump/?arc404=true

How Fauci, 5 other health specialists deal with COVID-19 risks in their everyday lives

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Foes of science faced ridicule at the Scopes trial. We’re paying the price 95 years later.

 

From Article

Today, the theory of evolution is accepted by most Americans — including most religious believers — but still resisted by a significant minority. According to a Pew poll in 2018, 18 percent of American adults deny the theory of evolution. Among white evangelical Protestants (a core part of the Trump base), 38 percent say that humans have always existed in their present form. Having 18 percent of the adult population in the anti-evolution camp might not seem like a lot, but it translates to roughly 37.6 million people — the population of Canada — who reject a core tenet of modern science.

I suspect there is a lot of overlap between anti-evolutionists, anti-maskers and climate deniers. That hostility to science, found far more on the right than the left, makes it much harder to deal with major crises such as global warming or the coronavirus. Ninety-five years after the Scopes trial, the foes of science are more potent politically than ever — and we are all paying the price.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/08/foes-science-faced-ridicule-scopes-trial-were-paying-price-95-years-later/