Day 872, War in Ukraine

As the blogger says “I have questions:”

Ballistic missiles and glide bombs hit Kharkiv.

Kremlin already exploiting attack on Donald Trump to increase chaos and suspicion. Russian TV: “Today Trump quite literally spilled blood for America.”

Like President Biden, President Zelenskyy shows some class and sympathy for Trump being shot at.

Ukraine signs more bilateral security agreements.

Film of “...the niece of Russian Defense Ministry head Andrey Belousov” urging him not to bomb the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital. Members of his family say that Natalia Vertinskaya is not related to Belousov.

51 Nobel laureates call for peace in Ukraine. Problem is that they’re making a general call to both sides. If Russia leaves Ukraine, the war is over, period. If Russian troops remain in Ukraine, the war will, at best, pause until Russia feels refreshed and relaxed and ready to start it up again. The appeal should be made exclusively to Putin. Instead, they’re “blaming the victim.”

Horrible things will happen if Trump wins in November.

“The special battalion ‘Shkval’, consisting of volunteer prisoners” successfully clears an enemy tree line.

The Battle for Novomykhailivka cost the Russians over 300 armored vehicles.

According to Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Russia has lost almost 560k soldiers. Wounded comes to 1677k. Russia, according to Politico, lost 70k soldiers in just two months, the US lost 58k soldiers from 1955 to 1975, fighting in Vietnam. Where is the Russian peace movement?

Of course, we should be aware that a young Russian woman sent $30 to the Ukrainian military. She’s been sentenced to nine years in prison.

https://balloon-juice.com/2024/07/14/war-for-ukraine-day-872-glide-bombs-aimed-at-kharkiv/

 

Should we have government control of social media companies?

I haven’t finished reading this interview “Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk Is Transmitting a Message for Putin’”, but it answers the objection of the “tankies” quite well. This tanky doesn’t use the Trumpian term “Deep State,” but she means something quite similar. The US is run by people who want to centralize the media under Washington DC’s control. Elon Musk is a brave, brave hero who dares to resist the Deep State that wants everyone united against Russia.

As Fiona Hill makes clear, Musk is just repeating, word for word, the line that Putin wants him to put out there. Seriously, does anyone believe Musk put any time and effort into studying the relationship between Russia and Crimea? Or is Musk simply responding to Putin appealing to Musk’s ego?

A big problem is that Musk doesn’t really appear to understand how social media platforms work. That’s why he wants to cut 75% of Twitter’s work force! He doesn’t have an appreciation as to how society at large versus a social media platform work, how the First Amendment is insufficient to content regulation online. As Regulatory Review puts it:

As they currently stand, social networks are self-regulated. Because of private content moderation, most social media platforms employ a combination of algorithmic and human action to determine what kinds of content to eject from their sites.

This is clearly not a sustainable state of affairs. As social media sites are not simply “The Press,” but are instead sites where abuses need regulation. Content moderation is something Musk just doesn’t appear to understand.

So yes, it’s good that Musk will continue the Starlink service for Ukraine, but yes, the US needs to seriously look at whether large social media platforms like Twitter can remain unregulated. Musk is currently putting up $44 billion to buy Twitter. There appear to be some foreign investors that are contributing to that.

Amnesty Internation & Ukraine

 Reuters:

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International's secretary general...called on the Ukrainian government to ensure that its forces were located away from populated areas or for all civilians to be evacuated from those areas first.

I dunno, that seems pretty difficult. Recall that Russia attacked Ukraine from several directions in February and that they’ve fired missiles so that they land all over the country. A real problem with the Amnesty report is that Russians hits civilian targets all the time. 

Balloon Juice blog:

Ukraine responds strongly to criticisms by Amnesty International.

Russian abuse of civilian populations (example: Bucha) means many Ukrainian civilians feel more secure being close to their military.

Amnesty deliberately ignored the opinions of their Ukrainian staff.

The Secretary General of Amnesty International gives a very highly defensive reaction to being criticized.

President Zelenskyy takes very strong issue with Amnesty’s claim. 

And also:  

Russians distributing weapons and ammunition among civilians in the city of Kherson, in violation of the laws of war.

 

The BJ piece also looks at: 

Russian spies look for missile targets in Ukraine.

Brittney Griner’s fate.

Thoughts on Supreme Court decision on abortion

 Recently had a lengthy discussion on Twitter about pregnancy choice. The initial entry was all about how much a pregnancy costs. Nothing went particularly wrong with the pregnancy, the baby s fine and the mother is happy. A fellow who claimed to be a neutral centrist but who kept making clearly anti-choice comments, asked a question. I responded. During the course of the conversation, we focused on a particular page taken from Supreme Court Justice Alito's anti-Roe decision. Here are what I regard as the two most critical sentences:

These legitimate interests include respect for and preservation of prenatal life at all stages of development. … The protection of maternal health and safety.

To me, these describe the priorities of the Supreme Court majority in this opinion.

As to the 10-year old girl in Ohio who was raped and found herself very close to the mark of when Ohio did not permit abortions, there's no question that Ohio was seeing to it that they were showing “respect for and preservation of prenatal life”. Would her giving birth have proven fatal or very unhealthy? Doubtful.

The "bodily harm" doesnt even apply because a 10 year old can give birth safely to a child. So the answer to my original question is no there is not an exception that would allow this abortion to take place in Ohio.

So this was not a case of unintended consequences or of things going sideways into unforeseen circumstances. Alito and the rest of the Supreme Court majority had only seen ft to account for the girl's “health and safety.” Once that was satisfied, they had no problem with seeing to it that she would be required to give birth. In fact, the National Right to Life organization made it quite clear that:

“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” Bopp said in a phone interview on Thursday.

Is Alito himself troubled at all by the obvious problems with the decision as it's currently formulated? Not so you'd know it. He appeared for a speech and didn't appear to be even slightly troubled by problems with the decision.

So when anti-choicers ask you “Why do people hate us?” Well, there's a good reason for that.

Update: The Biden Administration has put out an instruction that women who are suffering complications and might die without an abortion, must receive abortions, regardless of what local and state laws may say. Texas Republicans object to this. They argue that saving the life of a woman via an abortion might put her at risk of being found guilty under Texas law. 

My evolution in thinking about peace

 

Yes, back in 2003, I joined with peaceniks to protest the Iraq War. I concluded from the very start that the younger George Bush was untrustworthy, that he was lying about WMDs in Iraq and that he was exaggerating the human rights abuses that Saddam Hussein was engaged in. But when I was a tween/young teen, nonfiction paperbacks on World War II were popular and I read a number of them.

One of the big lessons I learned was “Don’t think that this war is going to be just like the last one.” The British and French thought that the 1940 battlefield would be just like the 1914-1918 one, with slow, cumbersome infantry divisions doing most of the fighting. Nope, it was dominated by fast, flexible panzer divisions that quickly drove the allies into the sea at Dunkirk. The Soviets figured out by the Battle of Kursk in 1943 how to defeat the German Blitzkrieg tactic, but they suffered some serious setbacks and incurred serious casualties long before that.

Further readings in the 80s showed me that the Vietnam War was essentially a political war and not, as US leaders had assumed, a matter of applying enough soldiers and guns and planes and tanks.

So no, this war between Russia and Ukraine is not necessarily a replay of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I don’t assume that Joe Biden is just like G.W. Bush and that it’s the US leadership that needs to be lobbied and convinced here.

One of the major issues that my fellow peace supporters regularly bring up is the expansion of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Let’s think in terms of I’m a Ukraine bureaucrat and my president has asked me to draw up a list of reasons for and against joining Russia versus joining the West.

I’d point out that Ukraine was under the authority of Moscow in 1932-1933. Ukraine suffered a man-made famine, the “Holodomo,” a famine that began with the attempted “collectivization” of agriculture and ended with 3.9 million Ukrainian dead.

In Hungary in 1956, Hungarians demanded democracy. “Thousands were killed and wounded and nearly a quarter-million Hungarians fled the country.”

Czechoslovakia in 1968, the “Prague Spring” was ended by Warsaw Pact forces led by Moscow, crushing that revolution.

In 1980, the Polish trade union movement Solidarnosc was successful for awhile, but “The government imposed martial law, a state that continued until 1983, and dramatically restricted civil liberties. Some 10,000 dissidents were detained, and dozens were killed. Solidarnosc had to go underground and was not allowed to register again until 1989.”

In 1994, Moscow fought its first post-communist war against Chechnya. About a million Chechens (Out of a Russian population of some 150 million), tried to carve an independent state out of a landlocked province. The freedoms granted by Russian leader Boris Yeltsin were withdrawn and two wars later, Chechnya was brought under control by Vladimir Putin.

This is not an exhaustive list, but the fact is that Western Europe and NATO simply don’t have this sort of history of having to use armed force to keep their alliance together.

What about Putin’s energy policies? In 2019, Russia produced roughly twice as much in energy resources as it consumed, which means that it exported the rest. Of that total, coal, dry natural gas, petroleum and other fossil fuels made up the vast majority. Nuclear and renewables made up a small fraction. Specifically, the OECD counts hydro, biofuels plus waste burning and geothermal, solar and wind power as constituting less than 4% of Russia’s energy resources. The rest is made up of various fossil fuels. Clearly, Russia is not leading the way to renewable energy!

The American Heritage Foundation uses an “Economic Freedom” index that liberals generally ignore as it makes lots of value judgments that we don’t necessarily share, but it dings Russia on many areas. Property Rights, Judicial Effectiveness, Government Integrity, Business Freedom and Trade Freedom are all given poor marks.

So if I, as a Ukrainian bureaucrat, had to produce a report on whether or not to move more closely to Russia and away from Europe, I think I’d run screaming away from the chance to recommend a closer relationship with Russia! To me, there simply isn’t any mystery as to why NATO has expanded into Eastern Europe over the past 30 years. Nations like to align themselves with successful countries that enjoy a high degree of prosperity, that respect human rights and that are working hard to move away from fossil fuels and towards renewables.

Update (18 May): Piece that essentially agrees with the above, with the idea that people and countries have "agency." The countries of Eastern Europe didn't remain attached to Russia because they didn't think it was in their interest to do so. 

“Let’s go, Brandon!”

 

President Biden was on the line at the NORAD Santa Tracker call and spoke with children who had called in to find out where Santa was. He and the First Lady were having short chats with them. One fellow was Jared Schmeck of Oregon, a fan of the former President Trump, who ended his time with the President by saying “Let’s Go, Brandon.”

Schmeck claims “’he didn’t intend his parting message to be vulgar.” But “The phrase ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ has become a conservative dig at the Democratic president, a code for ‘F--- Joe Biden,’” so it’s hard to see how Schmeck could have been confused into thinking he was NOT delivering a vulgar insult to the President. Schmeck’s wife admitted online that her husband had indeed used a vulgarity against the President.

Schmeck called his remark a “joke,” and listed a series of policy disagreements with the President, but what he actually said was an insult and no one understands where the humor in his statement is. Schmeck also, of course, claims the election was “stolen” from The Former Guy.

Schmeck claims he was “utilizing my freedom of speech,” which is fine, but freedom cuts both ways. You’re free to use a vulgarity with anyone you choose, but others are free to disparage you for doing so.

I of course liked Joy-Ann Reid’s response tweet, but was very impressed with this one:

"Confession: I find it in poor taste to tell the President of the United States 'Let's go Brandon' when the man just wanted to wish you Merry Christmas. Good manners should still matter," conservative blogger and radio host Erick Erickson wrote in a series of tweets.

Fox News had a defensive-sounding headline for the angry liberal response, but appropriately stuck to reporting what liberals said.

Mehdi Hasan said:

“Encouraged by senior elected Republicans who pretend to otherwise care about ‘civility’ and who are never asked by the press to justify their indulgence of this childish and offensive slogan.”

Problem is, it’s one thing when you’re explicitly stating a political position like “Free the Hanoi 5!” or somesuch. Then people can recognize your earnestness and people can take your politics seriously. But when you use a vulgar slur, you’re just a vulgar jackass.

Update: Fox News does damage control.

Fox News called out their C-Team to run interference for the son of a Navy SEAL who thought it would be cute to insult the president so he could get a viral Instagram post. It was pathetic and so is Jared Schmeck.

Two examples that the Fox crew used. Yes, Robert DeNiro got up in front of an audience and said "Fuck Trump." He knew he was being transgressive and improper and his audience knew it too. No, Kathy Griffin did NOT meet with any approval for posting a picture of herself with Trump's "severed head." Her career as a stand-up comedian was dead for several years as a direct result.  

And again, I'm completely and utterly baffled by the assertion that Schmeck was attempting to make some sort of joke. There is simply nothing funny about his attempt. 

Answer to a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

This was published in the Inky on 12 November:

Dems lie if they say that critical race theory not taught in schools

Let's parse a paragraph of Thiessen's commentary of this last Friday ("Dems lie if they say that critical race theory not taught in schools"):

For the Marxists, the bourgeoisie were the oppressors. For the Nazis, the Jews were the oppressors. And today, in 21st century America, critical race theory teaches that Whites are the oppressors.

In Marx's day, the "bourgeoisie," the businessmen who ran the factories and sold commercial goods were in complete control of the state. The politicians all represented the businessmen. Is that true today? Not so much. Many other groups have gained quite a bit of political power.

In Germany before World War II, Jewish people were certainly prominent in the government and the culture at large, but by no means did they hold a commanding position. 

White people in opposition to Black people certainly had a regional advantage. In the South, they completely controlled the politics of the region. In the North, the political power of the abolitionists grew and grew until the Civil War broke out. Today, the descendants of the abolitionists hold a grip on the levers of political power, but yes, the racists have made great gains. 

The panic over Critical Race Theory is easy to understand. If you're not guilty of harboring racial animus, then you have no problem with CRT being taught.   

What happened?

 

In January 2017, the Republican Party had all three branches in their hands, the House, the Senate and the Presidency. Now, in January 2021, all three are now in the hands of the Democrats. Why? What happened?

One of the issues that propelled Barack Obama into office in 2008 and that people showed a great deal of concern about, was health care. About 15% of Americans couldn’t get health care insurance because of “preexisting conditions.” Ever since at least the Truman Administration, capitalist health care insurance couldn’t deal with clients who were sure to cost the insurance companies more money in payments than they’d get from the client in premiums.

Obama stopped trying to square the circle and just made the ACA/Obamacare a public system where insurance companies would still make a profit, but not as much as they would have preferred to make. How did the Republican Party handle this during the time when the had the “Trifecta?” According to the Senate Minority Leader in 2017:

Only 20% of Americans support Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act without offering a replacement. The majority of Americans want to see the law implemented as is or improved.

After seven years to come up with a replacement for the ACA, the GOP came up with a plan that was worse than nothing.

"I do not support the new plan," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told reporters. "A better approach would be...to begin hearings focused on the problems in the ACA, and let’s try to get bipartisan support to fix those egregious flaws."

Not sure the flaws in the ACA were “egregious,” but Collins clearly advocated for a more sensible approach than to repeal the ACA and to install a pre-ACA type of health care system.

In October of 2020, President Trump tried to put out an executive order that would replace the ACA. Essentially, he listed a lot of fine, wonderful, desirable goals without saying how those goals would be reached.

So that whole issue was a complete bust for the GOP.

How did the party do on the immigration issue?

The Trump administration was more hostile to immigration and immigrants than any administration in decades, making it harder for people to visit, live or work in the United States and seeking to reduce the number illegally entering the country.

…

People were denied the opportunity to apply for asylum and returned to dangerous conditions at home. Children were traumatized by being separated from their families. Trump’s signature border wall went up in environmentally sensitive areas.

Trump’s policy was marked by great cruelty. The Trump Administration tightened up asylum requirements.

The regulation raises additional obstacles to passing a preliminary screening at the border, eliminates multiple long-established grounds for granting asylum, and allows immigration judges to deny people their day in court by rejecting applications without a hearing. The regulation denies protection to nearly all who pass through more than one country on their way to the U.S.

The former First Lady, Michelle Obama, slammed the Trump Administration for, among other things, an awful immigration policy.

She said the last four years had been difficult to explain to America's children.

"They see our leaders labelling fellow citizens enemies of the state, while emboldening torch-bearing white supremacists.

"They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages, and pepper spray and rubber bullets are used on peaceful protests for a photo op."

Again, the last administration took on a policy that had escaped solution for a while, but its solutions were catastrophically worse than had they done nothing.

That last reference was to an event that will forever color views of the Trump Administration. Peaceful protesters were occupying Lafayette Square, right in front of the White House.

Last summer, peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters were met with rubber bullets and tear gas outside the White House to clear the way for President Donald Trump’s photo-op with military leaders and a Bible at a nearby church.

Basically, the President treated American protesters as though they were foreign enemies. Instead of simply sending a few people out to the square to clear the way and rope off a path to the St. John’s Episcopal Church, the President and his people strolled through after tear gas and massed police had violently cleared the way. It didn’t help that this occurred only a week after the brutal murder of George Floyd by four policemen in Minnesota.

Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died May 25 after an encounter with Minneapolis Police in which former officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly eight minutes as Floyd pleaded for air. Floyd's final moments were captured on video, and his death led to rioting and fires in the city as well as widespread protests against police brutality and racism.

What the church photo op showed was that the President wasn’t particularly concerned about Floyd or even the general issue of police brutality, one way or the other.

A big example of tone-deafness on Trump’s part was the awarding of a Medal of Freedom to the radio talker Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is popular with right-wingers. With the general public? Ehh, not so much. Obama’s awards were to people like Bill and Melinda Gates and the comedian Ellen DeGeneres. Obama’s choices were perhaps not to everyone’s liking, but they weren’t as in-your-face partisan as Trump’s choices were.

So, I agree that I’ve highlighted some of the very worst policies of the Trump Administration, with the Republican House and Senate often just playing a supporting role, but I don’t think there’s much mystery as to why Democrats have successfully taken over three branches of our government.

The House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed a total of nearly 400 bills by November 2019 that were then largely ignored by the Senate and the President, meaning that there was a demand for legislation that the other two branches simply weren’t addressing.

Right-wing Letters to the Editor

Friend of mine said the Los Angeles Times devoted their entire editorial page to what they felt were under-represented right-wing views. It's worth it to go through them to know what the other side is thinking. Naturally, I had lots of objections tat I've posted here. 

In answer to Cecil Stalnaker, my objection to Trump has primarily been that he simply can't do the job. He's incompetent. he's also evil, but the fact that he brings nothing to the table in terms of answers to the problems that Americans are concerned about is my primary objection to him. 

To Deborah McMicking, okay. Where is your proof that Trump fans are not "racists, misogynists, white supremacists and more"?

To Brian J. Goldenfeld, but the “Russian collusion” was real! It was based on solid, verifiable facts! Remember, the Senate did not dispute anything that was brought up during impeachment. 

To Steve Murray, yeah, I don't have anywhere near as much faith that charter schools are worth taking time and money and attention away from traditional schools. I just don't think that capitalist rules concerning the purchasing of couches. cars and clothes apply to schooling. 

To Greg Winters, yeah, the Philadelphia Inquirer does what you suggest a lot. It features conservative writers and rarely prints rebuttals to them that readers send in.

To Joe Blackman, does private enterprise have a great deal to contribute to the battle against climate change? Yes. Absolutely. Problem is, it isn't enough. Had the fight against climate change been truly joined in the 1970s, when people first suspected that too much carbon was having a bad effect, we could have afforded to allow free enterprise to set the pace. But the battle now needs to move faster and more decisively. It needs the federal government to throw all of its considerable weight into the field. 

Asian and European countries have showed without question (Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries formed a good controlled experiment on this) that masks and discouraging large gatherings of people that were dining, drinking and/or singing together is extremely effective in preventing the spread of the coronavirus. Other things are important, but nothing is more important than survival. 

We determine who a racist is by their words and actions, not by those other factors. 

Trump supporters are wrong on the facts and the science. Period. Full stop.

Yes, I do understand what my opponents are saying. They're very often just plain wrong.

To Elaine Vanoff, I'm sorry, but "Contrary to many people’s opinions, this president has a sense of humor." Really? Seriously? Can you supply any examples from the past four years? Heck, from any of his public statements from the past 20 years? Can you name anything he said that wasn't cruel or vicious or hateful? All of his "humor" consists of insults. 

To John Lynn, I apologize that the left has not defined its positions carefully enough, but seriously, if you're puzzled by the statement "defunding the police," please don't expect Fox News host Sean Hannity to explain it to you. Representative AOC has explained what it really means. It really helps to look up what people really mean in their own words rather than to rely on opponents of theirs. 

Answer to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

 

The Post-Gazette tries to defend the President’s record. They repeat the same, tired old yada-yada about there having been a “boom,” but really, job creation levels have not been terrible, but weren’t spectacular, either.

The piece then talks about lowest Black unemployment, which was clearly due to Obama’s policies.

It talks of trade relations. I don’t follow that closely, but knew that soybeans were the biggest issue for a while. How’s that doing? Oops! “YTD: U.S soybean sales to China lowest in 5 years”

Sending jobs overseas. What has he actually done about that?!?!? Moving the debate is all very fine and well, but actually getting something done on the issue will require focus and attention to detail, neither of which he’s known for.

Being a Democrat, I’m not the slightest bit impressed with his putting “originalists” onto the Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett is only “best” if you ignore her extremely rushed confirmation and how completely out of step she is with Americans in general.

Energy? Well, yeah, energy has been going great if you regard burning more fossil fuels as good. That’s obviously NOT good if you know anything about the science of climate change.

This is really sad:

Has Mr. Trump handled the pandemic perfectly? No. But no one masters a pandemic. And the president was and is right that we must not cower before the disease and we have to keep America open and working.

Actually, most of the countries on the planet have handled the pandemic far better than Trump has. The very first thing we desperately needed to do, and which the US miserably failed to do, was to produce Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). This failure is especially sad as producing equipment for wars has been a specialty of the US Government going back at least to the Civil War.

And yes, I agree with and endorse this sentiment 100%!

He is not a unifier. He often acts like the president of his base, not the whole country. He has done nothing to lessen our divisions and has, in fact, often deepened them.

This is probably the single most important job any president can have. To move the country in a direction that’s healthy for all Americans. The people, united, have a wisdom that exceeds that of any one individual or party. The president can move out ahead and can slowly bring people along. See Barack Obama and gays in the military. By moving slowly but purposefully, he repealed the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and instituted full equality. Trump can’t do anything like that because he simply isn’t disciplined enough to pull it off.

How has Trump done at turning people against DACA or the Dreamers? Not so hot.

In fact, the poll indicates that wide swaths of registered voters support Dreamers regardless of gender, education, income, ethnicity, religion and ideology. That includes 68 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of conservatives and 64 percent of those who approve of the job Trump is doing.

From the very beginning of his presidency, Trump has opposed the Dreamers. At this late date, he clearly hasn’t brought anyone along with him.

The Post-Gazette has a lot of criticisms of Biden, but all of that is based on sheer guesswork and their peering into a crystal ball.

Color me extremely unimpressed! Vote out Trump and put in Biden!

Closing arguments against re-electing Donald Trump as President

PBS put out an episode of Frontline that’s a bit less than an hour on how Donald Trump has handled the COVID-19 pandemic. PBS is less partisan then the media I normally consume, so I recommend it for people who are more middle-of-the-road than I am. The episode blames President Obama for not leaving the US as prepared as he could have. I found all of their arguments on that score to be reasonable and well-documented.

They had a Rear Admiral who was in charge of the  FEMA Supply Chain Stabilization Task Force who was, wow, he sounded straight out of the Vietnam War "Five O'Clock Follies," and just kept repeating that everything was fine and everybody was well-supplied. The report makes it clear that neither assertion was true.

What particularly infuriated me was when the President had a "meeting" with regular doctors (Around the 30 minute mark in the episode). With Trump sitting down, everybody else standing and everyone facing the camera (Trump had to crane his neck back to talk to people), it was crystal clear that the "meeting" was intended to be nothing more than a quick photo-op. The President clearly had no interest in getting input from the field.

One of the weaknesses of the episode is that it nowhere mentions that the US shipped off large quantities of supplies that we urgently needed here at home. Nothing wrong with helping out other countries, as long as we have a fully-functioning supply chain that’s busy cranking out enough supplies for both US domestic needs and for what foreigners need. This Twitter thread details the large quantities of supplies that were sent off to other countries in March. Apparently, the Trump Administration ceased to do this at the end of March, but it’s just amazing that they had so little concern for what our own domestic needs were.

The result of all of these shortages of basic equipment and of the President slacking off on the wearing of masks is that we’re now heading for a third peak of infections! Every other country just had one. They might be headed for another wave of infections, but the US never stopped getting a high rate of infections, so our ”wave” just keeps getting higher and higher.

The President admitted on October 15th that he owes around $400 million. This is extremely serious. When agencies investigate people for security clearances, one of the first things they look at is whether the person is financially secure. If they’re not, they’re open to being blackmailed! This, in light of the fact that the President has tried extremely hard, throughout his presidency, to keep his income tax returns a secret. CNBC:

Since entering the White House, Mr. Trump has broken with tradition set by his predecessors by not only refusing to release his tax returns but by waging a legal battle to keep them hidden.

What else is he hiding, even after the NY Times revealed many years worth of tax returns? Point 3 in the CNBC report says that Trump has lost $315 million on his golf courses since 2000. The United States has an extreme security risk in that the President owes so much money and that the US still doesn’t have a complete picture of his finances.  

Amazingly, there are still people who are skeptical that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. The Republican-led Select Committee on Intelligence concluded that Russia intervened from 2014 to 2017. Is Russia still meddling? Well, if the Trump Administration is trying to show that Russia isn’t meddling, it’s taking actions that increase Democratic suspicions rather than to disprove them.

A blog reports that: “The Presidency of the United States Has Been Penetrated By Russian Intelligence: The US Intelligence Community Determined That Rudy Giuliani Was the Target of a Russian Intelligence To Use Him To Influence The President & the President Was Informed of That Finding In December 2019!”

How has the President been on dealing with three foreign countries? Sure, Europeans may disdain him and think he’s uncouth and disloyal to NATO, but hey, he’s been effectively dealing with Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, right?

Trump has been trying to conduct a “regime change” in Venezuela for quite a while now.  Juan Guaido – president of the National Assembly who is recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader by more than 50 countries, has been trying to overthrow Venezuela’s de facto president, Nicolas Maduro since January 2019. The latest attempt was in early May. Venezuela is undergoing a massive humanitarian crisis with a 94% poverty rate, but Hollywood fantasies expressed in initiatives like Operation Gedeon give the government legitimacy and encourage Venezuelans to “rally ‘round the flag” in opposition to the imperialist US.

The “Maximum Pressure” campaign against Iran has been similarly unsuccessful.

While many ordinary Iranians are suffering, the economy is not in total free fall, as many in Washington hoped for. Instead, the country has shown signs of economic recovery, with domestic production and employment increasing. According to Iran’s Central Bank chief Abdolnaser Hemmati, Iran’s nonoil gross domestic product grew by 1.1 percent last year. Prominent Iranian economist Saeed Laylaz also contends that Iran’s economy can weather the coronavirus pandemic and may experience growth this year despite the virus.

For years, the Trump Administration has taken the view that Iran was about to collapse and surrender any day. Clearly, that’s not going to happen.

How has the US been doing with North Korea? It’s hardly Trump’s fault that North Korea threatens the US with nuclear weapons. They’ve been doing that under many leaders for many years. ArmsControl.org refers many time to “denuclearization.” But has North Korea agreed to a definition of the term? It’s impossible to engage in any serious negotiations unless both parties agree to terms that are critical to the issue that’s under discussion. Apparently, according to NK, that term means that everybody in the entire world must decommission their nuclear arms all at once. The US is, of course, highly unlikely to ever agree to this. In July of this year, North Korea declared that denuclearization “is not possible at this point in time.” So, despite President Trump making many cheerful declarations, diplomacy with NK isn’t any further advanced than it was when Trump entered office.

There are many other issues we could discuss, including the President’s apparent belief that he’s free to discuss wacky theories like what QAnon brings up as though he’s just some private citizen that no one takes seriously, but he is taken seriously by many millions of people as they, quite reasonably, believe that he has access to the best and most current information.

My view is that he’s accomplished nothing of note in the last 3-plus years and that his record simply does not justify giving him another term.  

Update: The former star of Cheers, Kirstie Alley, weighs in on the election:

Kirstie Alley

@kirstiealley

· 9h

I’m voting for @realDonaldTrump because he’s NOT a politician. I voted for him 4 years ago for this reason and shall vote for him again for this reason. He gets things done quickly and he will turn the economy around quickly. There you have it folks there you have it

1. Agree. Trump is an utterly incompetent politician. 2. "He gets things done..." Erm, ah, no. No, he doesn't. He can't get things done at all. See the above essay. 3. "he will turn the economy around..." For the same reason he can't apply "Law 'N' Order," no, he can't turn the economy around because he's responsible for the horrible shape that it's in today. Nothing is going to change after a successful election.

Conversation on occupation of the South in the late 1860s

Had a lengthy and interesting conversation on Facebook with someone who described himself as an amateur historian and appeared to be suggesting that Black people weren’t ready for emancipation in 1865.

He was initially upset by my posting a piece saying that Black Lives Matter people drove off a group of white supremacists, or in his telling, patriotic Georgians who were defending their heritage.

We discussed whether the Civil War was really all about slavery. I replied that yes, it was. As evidence, I supplied a link to the declarations of various Southern states in 1861 that made it very clear that, yes, slavery was the issue that was uppermost in their minds when the war commenced.

We got into a discussion about Black people in the South who died in the years immediately after they were freed from slavery.

Former slaves were left without any livelihood or means of support. They simply moved into the woods and lived a stone-age hunter-gatherer existence. According to a speech given by the Governor of Mississippi, it resulted in the death of one million blacks - dwarfing the combined deaths of Union and Confederate soldiers.

I first encountered this in one of Sierra Club founder John Muir's adventure books. He met such a family while on his thousand-mile walk from Indiana to Florida. His description is appalling.

He supplied a link to a piece that confirmed this after I searched around and found an author who confirmed that yes, perhaps a million Black people died during Reconstruction. He appeared to hint and suggest that Black people just weren’t ready for freedom by suggesting that it was the Emancipation Proclamation that killed them.

My own theory is taken from Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote On War. He lived from 1780 to 1831. The book was published after he died. He was a Prussian general in the Napoleonic wars. Basic idea of the book was that war is politics by another means. What this tells us is that the occupation that follows the fighting can be just as important to victory as the battlefield combat is.

Let’s start with the idea of “40 acres and a mule.” The single most profitable investment a Southerner could make was land and slaves. How much money were Southern landowners putting into land and slaves?

Since planters needed ever more funds to invest in land and labor, they drew on global capital markets; without access to the resources of New York and London, the expansion of slave agriculture in the American South would have been all but impossible.

So then, all of the sudden in 1865, all of the labor that plantation owners had purchased as an investment, walked off the job. Contracts are based on mutual advantage. Slaves weren’t getting any advantage, so there was no reason for them to stay on the job once the force that had been keeping them there was removed.

So the popular idea was to simply confiscate those plots of 40 acres from Southern landowners. That would most likely have required more force than Northerners were willing to deploy. When people who have lost a fortune are pressed further, they’ll strike back.

Now, if I were the George Marshall of the Lincoln Administration (See Marshall Plan of 1948) and was put in charge of planning the post-war reconstruction of the South, I’d give each freed slave money enough to purchase “40 acres and a mule.” That way, Southern landowners would get something out of the deal, even though they’d lose land and might switch to paying laborers as opposed to simply forcing them into working. If the former slave wanted to put money into industry instead, the US was starting up a really expansive phase of the Industrial Revolution, so there were plenty of opportunities there.

Why couldn’t the US do that? Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-President, took over. Back in those days, the idea of getting a President and a Vice-President who were on the same page philosophically, the way Harry Truman agreed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt or that Lyndon Johnson agreed with John F. Kennedy, hadn’t really been developed yet. Andrew Johnson didn’t regard Black people as deserving of full civil rights.

Most importantly, Johnson's strong commitment to obstructing political and civil rights for blacks is principally responsible for the failure of Reconstruction to solve the race problem in the South and perhaps in America as well.

So, while the deaths of about a million Black people during Reconstruction is a really terrible thing, it’s not clear there was any obvious solution that the country was willing to accept.

Why I prefer the unvarnished language of the blogs

When I was in college (78-82), I saw the Bertolt Brecht play Galileo and was powerfully impressed by one line in particular (quote is according to memory) "There are scholars who insinuate in Latin. I prefer to speak in plain German." 
Today: "The sub-headline for a New York Times article on the Vindman controversy announced that Trump's move represented, 'one sign of how determined the president is to even the scales after his impeachment.'"
The blogger who quoted this went on to express amazement. "Even the scales, what?? That suggests the 'scales' were ever tipped against him. The Nation's Joan Walsh suggested a more accurate headline for the Times story: 'Trump's reign of lawlessness enters new stage.'"
That's why I prefer the language of the blogs. They call thieves and criminals what they are without engaging in overly polite, euphemistic language.

Rush Limbaugh makes an interesting plea for us to sympathize with President Trump

Radio talker Rush Limbaugh presents the President as a “happy warrior” who “may be the greatest president of our lifetimes” being sorely vexed, harassed and inconvenienced by all of this liberal and Democratic dissent from his generous and benevolent rule. While reading Limbaugh’s case, I agreed with the blogger who reminds us of what Limbaugh snidely referred to as Saudi Arabia “supposedly killing the so-called Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.” There was another right-wing talker who has also took the position of dissing Khashoggi, so I guess it’s a thing now that, as far as the right wing is concerned, murdering journalists is okay.

Also, “120 days past federal judge's deadline, migrant kids remain separated from parents.” Children were separated from their parents and until there was a public outcry, the Trump Administration didn’t have any sort of plan for getting the children back together with their parents, thereby effectively kidnapping the children. Back during June, the Trump Administration’s supposed, alleged, “self-avowed advocate of women and children” Ivanka Trump, had nothing to say about the children who had been kidnapped under her father’s family separation policy, but apparently felt it was perfectly okay to post pictures of her happy and attractive family.  

Also, the President appears to feel that it’s within his authority to request that the Supreme Court take up a case that was argued in October, but that the 9th US Circuit Court hasn’t ruled on yet. This is right after the President has been feuding with John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, because how dare the Chief Justice take exception to the President referring to a judge as an “Obama judge.” Judges are all supposed to be equally legitimate as they’re all approved by the Senate. There is certainly some justification for drawing distinctions based on who the appointing president was, but that chips away at the legitimacy of all judges when a politician makes distinctions based on that.

So yeah, when Limbaugh says:

This stuff just never ends. You know the great thing? It never seems to get Trump down. He doubles down on this stuff still.
He revs up and he rams it back down their throat every time. 

I just have a really hard time seeing the President in any sort of positive light. I don’t see his energetic defense of his policies as anything to cheer about.

The President's real problem

The NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd put out a piece called "For whom the Trump trolls" yesterday (No link because the NY Times charges if I read more than five pieces a month). Dowd is a columnist that bloggers have refused to review since, back in 2013, she blamed President Obama for what was certainly a crappy situation, but one that had nothing to do with his skills as president.

The fact that Ms. Dowd conveniently overlooks when comparing Obama's performance to that of past presidents is that he is the only one who has ever had to deal with an out-of-control abuse of the filibuster process. It's a lot easier to get a majority of your party's senators onboard in support of controversial bills when all you need is a majority, not a super-majority.

As of 2013, Obama had been in office long enough, Dowd really had no excuse not to know this, but she played the "mean girl" anyway.

Now she's saying that President Trump has a "Twitter addiction." I told my younger brother that, who lives in New York City and he replied "She didn't figure that out five years ago?"

Here's a good discussion of behavioral problems and "addiction" that makes it clear that addiction really isn't the right word in a lot of cases, nor should we blame the actual video games. The piece reminds me of when I read a Dear Abby letter a few decades ago. A woman complained of having an "Internet addiction" and by her description, it was clear that yes indeed, she had many problems, but like the gamers in the Kotaku piece, if the internet hadn't been her undoing, something else would have.

In the case of the President and Twitter, he clearly has a lot of problems, but Twitter is merely a tool and isn't responsible for anything. As someone pointed out, he made a comment concerning Senator Elizabeth Warren that started off as a rape “joke,” then turned into an ethnic insult and then just trailed off, the audience laughing uproariously the whole time. He also insulted Congresswoman Maxine Waters, saying she was at an IQ level that amounted to mental retardation. No, Dowd is wrong. The real problem with the President is that he’s just a complete asshole.

Anger and division in America

So, after I put a comment onto Facebook, I will then, weeks or months later, take select comments and put them onto prawnworks, where they'll be permanently archived. Having been a history major back in college, I use that second draft to correct spellings, flesh out or clarify comments a bit more and sometimes do a bit of research to answer questions the comment may raise. I did that last thing with the following.

Vice President "Pence laments 'a time of too much division and too much anger in America'"

I thought "Hmm. Okay." It took me about half a minute on the search engine to locate conservatives being angry and divisive.

Here's a link to NRA Spokesperson Dana Loesch claiming that "There were people rushing the stage and screaming 'burn her.'"

That didn't sound like any protest group that I've ever been part of and I've been to quite a few liberal protests. I put another half-minute into another search and sure enough, Loesch was lying:

That's another easily provable lie, at least according to multiple videos and eyewitness testimony from Wednesday's event. The clearest video, above, shows Loesch calmly leaving the stage while the crowd chants, "Shame on you!"

After a New Times photographer put out a call on Facebook, five attendees sent footage they shot of the aftermath of the town hall. One video begins immediately after the town hall ends and shows Loesch walking off the stage surrounded by other participants and security. She then walks away and out of the arena. At no time does anyone in the audience approach her, and there's certainly no evidence that anyone ever "rushed the stage."

"She walked right in front of me and people yelled at her and chanted, 'Shame on you!' Nobody rushed the stage," says Ryan Yousefi, the New Times reporter who covered the event.

So yeah, the Vice President is correct. There's a lot of anger and division in America right now. It was obvious that he intended to have his listeners think, of course, that it was all the fault of liberals and not of his own side.

Most divisive president in US history

Here’s a tweet from President Trump that was just put out today.

Why on Earth would Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran provoke an investigation? There was never the slightest question as to where the money was originally from. The Shah of Iran had paid for US weapons. The delivery of those weapons was canceled because of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Their $1.7 billion was frozen and released by the nuclear deal of July 2015. Nor has there been any question that Iran has held up its end of the deal. President Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were not completely happy with all of the relationship between the US and Iran, but Tillerson could not cite any way in which Iran was not keeping the agreement.

This is divisive because there’s no reason for this complaint beyond just making trouble and raising unwarranted doubts about the last president. 

 

But what really got to me was this one.

 

So the President says people should report suspicious individuals. Okay. That’s a reasonable requirement. But this is kind of “victim blaming” language as it suggests that people who knew the Florida shooter were slacking off and not alerting authorities.

And, as it turned out...

On January 5, 2018, a person close to Nikolas Cruz contacted the FBI’s Public Access Line (PAL) tipline to report concerns about him. The caller provided information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.

The FBI admitted that the tip really should have been acted on and that it was their fault that it wasn’t.

Was there another factor that might have contributed to Nikolas Cruz taking his legally-acquired AR-15 to the Parkland school? Well, yes! The fact that it was legal for him to acquire an AR-15 in the first place!

A little over a month after his inauguration, on Feb. 28, 2017, President Trump signed HJ Resolution 40, a bill that made it easier for people with mental illness to obtain guns.

As the president observed, the shooter demonstrated signs that he was “mentally disturbed.”

Now, the spokesperson for the FLOTUS, Melania Trump, said 

 

But this wasn’t a case of the President being attacked. It’s a case of the Republican Party passing a bill and the President signing it that contributed to the shooting in Parkland, FL. It hardly counts as an attack when people point this out. It’s called “assigning responsibility.” Did Trump takes responsibility in the manner that the FBI did? Uh, no.

 

I think the phrase "Walk and chew gum" applies here. I think the FBI is more than capable of handling their investigation of Trump along with responding to tips. 

What gets to me is that there's no admission by Trump that he engaged in victim-blaming. No admission that he was wrong to say that people “Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!” They DID report! And there was more than one report. Trump just blames the FBI for a fault that they themselves admitted to.

This is not a President who will ever accomplish anything good. He’s far too wrapped up in trying to see to it that he never gets blamed for anything, even when something is obviously his fault. Signing the bill that permitted people with mental problems to obtain guns anyway was clearly something he could have refused to do. It was the fault of the Republican Party to pass such a bill in the first place, but that doesn’t absolve Trump in any way. It’s his signature on the bill.

I very seriously do not believe the US has ever had a more divisive president! 

President Trump and racism

This exchange between our President and a "career intelligence analyst who is an expert in hostage policy" is about the best example I've seen as to how someone can be a racist without being a really obvious, "out" or up-front racist. That is, without being a bedsheet-wearing night-rider who burns crosses on people's lawns or who openly uses the n-word.

It was her first time meeting the president, and when she was done briefing, he had a question for her.
"Where are you from?" the president asked, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the exchange.
New York, she replied.
Trump was unsatisfied and asked again, the officials said.

After some back and forth, he was finally satisfied when she revealed she was of Korean descent. Trump wondered aloud why she wasn't working on negotiations with North Korea.

What Trump did here was to assume that everybody acts without any regard for professionalism or any sort of objective viewpoint. That everybody acts in a race-conscious manner to advance the interests of their own race. 

Personally, I like comic strips like "Baldo," 

"Edge City"

and "Jump Start,"

strips about, respectively, a Latino, a Jewish and a black family. In all three cases, the families are aware of and take pride in their heritage. In none of these cases would these families regard their heritage as overriding their professionalism or their patriotism. For a racist like Trump, we're all in a "zero-sum game," where one group is constantly battling other groups for advantage, where people get their life missions from their ethnicity.

Update: 
Sigh! Okay, how do we distinguish racists from non-racists? Let’s look at an example.

Sessions invokes'Anglo-American heritage' of sheriff's office
Washington (CNN) Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday brought up sheriffs' "Anglo-American heritage" during remarks to law enforcement officials in Washington.

"I want to thank every sheriff in America. Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people's protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process," Sessions said in remarks at the National Sheriffs Association winter meeting, adding, "The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement."

"We must never erode this historic office," Sessions continued.

The addition of “Anglo-American heritage” was an ad lib by Sessions. Anglo-Americans might have historically invented modern law enforcement, but is there anything special about the way Anglo-Americans actually enforce the law in practice? 

Let’s look at the 2002 movie "Bend it like Beckham," we follow the adventures of two young English women (That's why they call it football and not soccer) who play soccer on the same team. On the field and in ways that relate directly to the game, they're very much alike. At home, because one is Anglo-Saxon and the other is a Sikh, they're very different. 

Same thing with law enforcement. Soccer is not a sport that’s restricted to any nationality or ethnicity, and in America, conducting law enforcement is not specific to Anglo-Americans. Soccer and law enforcement are alike in the way that any ethnic group can do them and they’ll all do it in the same manner.