The Seditious Bunch

The corrupt Attorney General of Texas filed a complaint with the Supreme Court asking it to overthrow the elections in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Numerous Republican officials piled on. The Supreme Court summarily dismissed the complaint. But there has to be a reckoning. It will take time and come piecemeal, but the political careers of these Republicans needs to end - these participants in the "seditious abuse of the judicial process". To this end, the names of these participants is memorialized on this blog page. As Amy Davidson Sorkin writes:

There is no acceptable justification. There needs to be a real reckoning; if prominent Republicans do not now use the Court’s decision to renounce Trump’s campaign to overturn the election, they will do real and lasting harm to the country.

It was never enough for Republicans who supported the suit to tell themselves that they could be as ridiculous as they liked, because the Supreme Court wouldn’t go for the argument, anyway. If they didn’t know how much Trump’s efforts had eroded his supporters’ faith in the integrity of the electoral system, they should have realized it from reading the briefs that Texas and Trump filed, which, perversely enough, cited those doubts as a rationale for why the Supreme Court should intervene. “The nation needs this Court’s clarity,” Texas argued—as if the Court should reward them for creating confusion by throwing out electors. Trump’s brief made that point even more crassly. “The fact that nearly half of the country believes the election was stolen should come as no surprise,” it said, arguing that, by ruling in Texas’s favor, the Court would allow voters to “find solace” in an election result that excluded “illegal votes.” (All indications are that, by “illegal,” Trump means votes that were not cast for him; actual, specific allegations that there was fraud, backed by evidence, are conspicuously absent from the Texas and Trump briefs.) In short, Trump argued that because he threw mud on the election system’s machinery, the Court was obliged to junk it.

Texas made a convoluted argument about how it would be harmed if Kamala Harris, as Vice-President, ever had to break a tie vote in the Senate, which didn’t even track logically. Texas also claimed that it had standing to sue the states because their actions “debased the votes of citizens in Plaintiff State and other States that remained loyal to the Constitution.” The very framing of that argument—the imputation of disloyalty to the Constitution on the part of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—is an act of bad faith. It is also a dangerous provocation.

The Seditious Bunch - gleeful participants in the “seditious abuse of the judicial process” - compiled from the filings at Supreme Court Docket 22O155. Incidentally, the Supreme Court filing from the 126 House Republicans has at least one error, it lists Jeff Van Drew as representing the Second District in South Carolina. That is wrong, he represents the second district in New Jersey. So this list will be checked and corrected over the coming days. 

Update: December 19, 2020 -- several corrections, and added a link, almost all to Ballotpedia for each person.

Name	Position	State	Link
Steve Marshall	Attorney General	Alabama	Link
Bradley Byrne	Member of Congress, AL-01	Alabama	Link
Mike Rogers	Member of Congress, AL-03	Alabama	Link
Robert Aderholt	Member of Congress, AL-04	Alabama	Link
Mo Brooks	Member of Congress, AL-05	Alabama	Link
Gary Palmer	Member of Congress, AL-06	Alabama	Link
Christopher Kurka	State Representative, AK-07	Alaska	Link
Kevin McCabe	State Representative, AK-08	Alaska	Link
George Rauscher	State Representative, AK-09	Alaska	Link
David Eastman	State Representative, AK-10	Alaska	Link
Thomas McKay	State Representative, AK-24	Alaska	Link
Ron Gillham	State Representative, AK-30	Alaska	Link
Lora Reinbold	State Senator, AK-G	Alaska	Link
Andy Biggs	Member of Congress, AZ-05	Arizona	Link
Debbie Lesko	Member of Congress, AZ-08	Arizona	Link
Steve Pierce	State Representative, AZ-01	Arizona	Link
Mark Finchem	State Representative, AZ-11	Arizona	Link
Bret Roberts	State Representative, AZ-11	Arizona	Link
Travis Grantham	State Representative, AZ-12	Arizona	Link
Nancy K Barto	State Representative, AZ-15	Arizona	Link
John Fillmore	State Representative, AZ-16	Arizona	Link
Anthony Kern	State Representative, AZ-20	Arizona	Link
Frank Carroll	State Representative, AZ-22	Arizona	Link
Sonny Borelli	State Senator, AZ-05	Arizona	Link
Sylvia Allen	State Senator, AZ-06	Arizona	Link
David Gowan	State Senator, AZ-14	Arizona	Link
Kelly Townsend	State Senator, AZ-16	Arizona	Link
Leslie Rutledge	Attorney General	Arkansas	Link
Rick Crawford	Member of Congress, AR-01	Arkansas	Link
Bruce Westerman	Member of Congress, AR-04	Arkansas	Link
Doug LaMalfa	Member of Congress, CA-01	California	Link
Tom McClintock	Member of Congress, CA-04	California	Link
Kevin McCarthy	Member of Congress, CA-23	California	Link
Ken Calvert	Member of Congress, CA-42	California	Link
Ken Buck	Member of Congress, CO-04	Colorado	Link
Doug Lamborn	Member of Congress, CO-05	Colorado	Link
Ashley B Moody	Attorney General	Florida	Link
Matt Gaetz	Member of Congress, FL-01	Florida	Link
Neal P Dunn M.D.	Member of Congress, FL-02	Florida	Link
Ted S Yoho	Member of Congress, FL-03	Florida	Link
John Rutherford	Member of Congress, FL-04	Florida	Link
Michael Waltz	Member of Congress, FL-06	Florida	Link
Bill Posey	Member of Congress, FL-08	Florida	Link
Daniel Webster	Member of Congress, FL-11	Florida	Link
Gus M Bilirakis	Member of Congress, FL-12	Florida	Link
Ross Spano	Member of Congress, FL-15	Florida	Link
W Gregory Steube	Member of Congress, FL-17	Florida	Link
Mario Diaz-Balart	Member of Congress, FL-25	Florida	Link
Earl L "Buddy" Carter	Member of Congress, GA-01	Georgia	Link
A Drew Ferguson IV	Member of Congress, GA-03	Georgia	Link
Austin Scott	Member of Congress, GA-08	Georgia	Link
Doug Collins	Member of Congress, GA-09	Georgia	Link
Jody Hice	Member of Congress, GA-10	Georgia	Link
Barry Loudermilk	Member of Congress, GA-11	Georgia	Link
Rick W Allen	Member of Congress, GA-12	Georgia	Link
Colton Moore	State Representative, GA-01	Georgia	Link
Jason Ridley	State Representative, GA-06	Georgia	Link
Trey Rhodes	State Representative, GA-120	Georgia	Link
Ricky Williams	State Representative, GA-145	Georgia	Link
Greg Morris	State Representative, GA-156	Georgia	Link
Bill Werkheiser	State Representative, GA-157	Georgia	Link
Jeff Jones	State Representative, GA-167	Georgia	Link
Steven Meeks	State Representative, GA-178	Georgia	Link
Don Hogan	State Representative, GA-179	Georgia	Link
Wes Cantrell	State Representative, GA-22	Georgia	Link
Sheri Gilligan	State Representative, GA-24	Georgia	Link
David Clark	State Representative, GA-98	Georgia	Link
Sheila McNeill	State Senator-Elect, GA-03	Georgia	Link
William Ligon	State Senator, GA-03	Georgia	Link
Tyler Harper	State Senator, GA-07	Georgia	Link
Bruce Thompson	State Senator, GA-14	Georgia	Link
Marty Harbin	State Senator, GA-16	Georgia	Link
Blake Tillery	State Senator, GA-19	Georgia	Link
Brandon Beach	State Senator, GA-21	Georgia	Link
Lee Anderson	State Senator, GA-24	Georgia	Link
Burt Jones	State Senator, GA-25	Georgia	Link
Greg Dolezal	State Senator, GA-27	Georgia	Link
Matt Brass	State Senator, GA-28	Georgia	Link
Randy Robertson	State Senator, GA-29	Georgia	Link
Lindsey Tippins	State Senator, GA-37	Georgia	Link
Renee Unterman	State Senator, GA-45	Georgia	Link
Steve Gooch	State Senator, GA-51	Georgia	Link
Jeff Mullis	State Senator, GA-53	Georgia	Link
Janice McGeachin	Lieutenant Governor	Idaho	Link
Russ Fulcher	Member of Congress, ID-01	Idaho	Link
Michael K Simpson	Member of Congress, ID-02	Idaho	Link
Heather Scott	State Representative, ID-01A	Idaho	Link
Sage Dixon	State Representative, ID-01B	Idaho	Link
Tony Wisniewski	State Representative, ID-03B	Idaho	Link
Aaron von Ehlinger	State Representative, ID-06A	Idaho	Link
Priscilla Sue Giddings	State Representative, ID-07A	Idaho	Link
Charlie Shepherd	State Representative, ID-07B	Idaho	Link
Terry F Gestrin	State Representative, ID-08A	Idaho	Link
Dorothy Moon	State Representative, ID-08B	Idaho	Link
Ryan Kerby	State Representative, ID-09A	Idaho	Link
Bruce D Skaug	State Representative, ID-12A	Idaho	Link
Ben Adams	State Representative, ID-13B	Idaho	Link
John Vander Woude	State Representative, ID-22A	Idaho	Link
Ronald M Nate Ph.D.	State Representative, ID-34B	Idaho	Link
Karey Hanks	State Representative, ID-35A	Idaho	Link
Steve Vick	State Senator, ID-02	Idaho	Link
Mary Souza	State Senator, ID-04	Idaho	Link
Steve Thayn	State Senator, ID-08	Idaho	Link
Christy Zito	State Senator, ID-23	Idaho	Link
Mike Bost	Member of Congress, IL-12	Illinois	Link
Darin LaHood	Member of Congress, IL-18	Illinois	Link
Curtis T. Hill Jr.	Attorney General	Indiana	Link
Jackie Walorski	Member of Congress, IN-02	Indiana	Link
Jim Banks	Member of Congress, IN-03	Indiana	Link
James R Baird	Member of Congress, IN-04	Indiana	Link
Greg Pence	Member of Congress, IN-06	Indiana	Link
Trey Hollingsworth	Member of Congress, IN-09	Indiana	Link
Steve King	Member of Congress, IA-04	Iowa	Link
Derek Schmidt	Attorney General	Kansas	Link
Roger Marshall M.D.	Member of Congress, KS-01	Kansas	Link
Ron Estes	Member of Congress, KS-04	Kansas	Link
Jeff Landry	Attorney General	Louisiana	Link
Steve Scalise	Member of Congress, LA-01	Louisiana	Link
Clay Higgins	Member of Congress, LA-03	Louisiana	Link
Mike Johnson	Member of Congress, LA-04	Louisiana	Link
Ralph Abraham	Member of Congress, LA-05	Louisiana	Link
Andrew Harris	Member of Congress, MD-01	Maryland	Link
Jack Bergman	Member of Congress, MI-01	Michigan	Link
Bill Huizenga	Member of Congress, MI-02	Michigan	Link
John Moolenaar	Member of Congress, MI-04	Michigan	Link
Tim Walberg	Member of Congress, MI-07	Michigan	Link
Jack O'Malley	State Representative, MI-101	Michigan	Link
Michele Hoitenga	State Representative, MI-102	Michigan	Link
Daire Rendon	State Representative, MI-103	Michigan	Link
Greg Markkanen	State Representative, MI-110	Michigan	Link
Joseph Bellino	State Representative, MI-17	Michigan	Link
Douglas Wozniak	State Representative, MI-36	Michigan	Link
Matt Maddock	State Representative, MI-44	Michigan	Link
John Reilly	State Representative, MI-46	Michigan	Link
Bronna Kahle	State Representative, MI-57	Michigan	Link
Julie Alexander	State Representative, MI-64	Michigan	Link
Beth Griffin	State Representative, MI-66	Michigan	Link
Brad Paquette	State Representative, MI-78	Michigan	Link
Gary Eisen	State Representative, MI-81	Michigan	Link
Luke Meerman	State Representative, MI-88	Michigan	Link
Rodney Wakeman	State Representative, MI-94	Michigan	Link
Jim Hagedorn	Member of Congress, MN-01	Minnesota	Link
Tom Emmer	Member of Congress, MN-06	Minnesota	Link
Pete Stauber	Member of Congress, MN-08	Minnesota	Link
Lynn Fitch	Attorney General	Mississippi	Link
Trent Kelly	Member of Congress, MS-01	Mississippi	Link
Michael Guest	Member of Congress, MS-03	Mississippi	Link
Steven Palazzo	Member of Congress, MS-04	Mississippi	Link
Eric S. Schmitt	Attorney General	Missouri	Link
Justin D. Smith	Deputy Attorney General	Missouri	Link
Ann Wagner	Member of Congress, MO-02	Missouri	Link
Blaine Luetkemeyer	Member of Congress, MO-03	Missouri	Link
Vicky Hartzler	Member of Congress, MO-04	Missouri	Link
Sam Graves	Member of Congress, MO-06	Missouri	Link
Billy Long	Member of Congress, MO-07	Missouri	Link
Jason Smith	Member of Congress, MO-08	Missouri	Link
D. John Sauer	Solicitor General Counsel of Record	Missouri	Link
Tim Fox	Attorney General	Montana	Link
Greg Gianforte	Member of Congress, MT-at-large	Montana	Link
Douglas J Peterson	Attorney General	Nebraska	Link
Jeff Fortenberry	Member of Congress, NE-01	Nebraska	Link
Adrian Smith	Member of Congress, NE-03	Nebraska	Link
Jeff Van Drew	Member of Congress, NJ-02	New Jersey	Link
Lee Zeldin	Member of Congress, NY-01	New York	Link
Elise Stefanik	Member of Congress, NY-21	New York	Link
Gregory Murphy M.D.	Member of Congress, NC-03	North Carolina	Link
Virginia Foxx	Member of Congress, NC-05	North Carolina	Link
Mark Walker	Member of Congress, NC-06	North Carolina	Link
David Rouzer	Member of Congress, NC-07	North Carolina	Link
Richard Hudson	Member of Congress, NC-08	North Carolina	Link
Dan Bishop	Member of Congress, NC-09	North Carolina	Link
Ted Budd	Member of Congress, NC-13	North Carolina	Link
Wayne Stenehejm	Attorney General	North Dakota	Link
Brad Wenstrup	Member of Congress, OH-02	Ohio	Link
Jim Jordan	Member of Congress, OH-04	Ohio	Link
Robert E Latta	Member of Congress, OH-05	Ohio	Link
Bill Johnson	Member of Congress, OH-06	Ohio	Link
Bob Gibbs	Member of Congress, OH-07	Ohio	Link
Mike Hunter	Attorney General	Oklahoma	Link
Kevin Hern	Member of Congress, OK-01	Oklahoma	Link
Markwayne Mullin	Member of Congress, OK-02	Oklahoma	Link
Dan Meuser	Member of Congress, PA-09	Pennsylvania	Link
Scott Perry	Member of Congress, PA-10	Pennsylvania	Link
Fred Keller	Member of Congress, PA-12	Pennsylvania	Link
John Joyce	Member of Congress, PA-13	Pennsylvania	Link
Guy Reschenthaler	Member of Congress, PA-14	Pennsylvania	Link
Glenn "GT" Thompson	Member of Congress, PA-15	Pennsylvania	Link
Mike Kelly	Member of Congress, PA-16	Pennsylvania	Link
Daryl D Metcalfe	State Representative, PA-12	Pennsylvania	LInk
Cris E Dush	State Representative, PA-25	Pennsylvania	Link
Mike Puskaric	State Representative, PA-39	Pennsylvania	Link
Thomas R Sankey III	State Representative, PA-73	Pennsylvania	Link
Alan Wilson	Attorney General	South Carolina	Link
Joe Wilson	Member of Congress, SC-02	South Carolina	Link
Jeff Duncan	Member of Congress, SC-03	South Carolina	Link
William Timmons	Member of Congress, SC-04	South Carolina	Link
Ralph Norman	Member of Congress, SC-05	South Carolina	Link
Tom Rice	Member of Congress, SC-07	South Carolina	Link
Jason R Ravnsborg	Attorney General	South Dakota	Link
Herbert H Slattery III	Attorney General	Tennessee	Link
Tim Burchett	Member of Congress, TN-02	Tennessee	Link
Chuck Fleischmann	Member of Congress, TN-03	Tennessee	Link
Scott DesJarlais	Member of Congress, TN-04	Tennessee	Link
John Rose	Member of Congress, TN-06	Tennessee	Link
Mark Green	Member of Congress, TN-07	Tennessee	Link
David Kustoff	Member of Congress, TN-08	Tennessee	Link
Ken Paxton	Attorney General	Texas	Link
Brent Webster	First Assistant Attorney General	Texas	Link
Louie Gohmert	Member of Congress, TX-01	Texas	Link
Daniel Crenshaw	Member of Congress, TX-02	Texas	Link
Lance Gooden	Member of Congress, TX-05	Texas	Link
Ron Wright	Member of Congress, TX-06	Texas	Link
Kevin Brady	Member of Congress, TX-08	Texas	Link
Mike Conaway	Member of Congress, TX-11	Texas	Link
Randy Weber	Member of Congress, TX-14	Texas	Link
Bill Flores	Member of Congress, TX-17	Texas	Link
Jodey Arrington	Member of Congress, TX-19	Texas	Link
Kenny Marchant	Member of Congress, TX-24	Texas	Link
Roger Williams	Member of Congress, TX-25	Texas	Link
Michael C Burgess	Member of Congress, TX-26	Texas	Link
Michael Cloud	Member of Congress, TX-27	Texas	Link
Brian Babin	Member of Congress, TX-36	Texas	Link
Sean D Reyes	Attorney General	Utah	Link
Rob Wittman	Member of Congress, VA-01	Virginia	Link
Ben Cline	Member of Congress, VA-06	Virginia	Link
H Morgan Griffith	Member of Congress, VA-09	Virginia	Link
Dan Newhouse	Member of Congress, WA-04	Washington	Link
Cathy McMorris Rodgers	Member of Congress, WA-05	Washington	Link
Patrick Morrisey	Attorney General	West Virginia	Link
Alex X Mooney	Member of Congress, WV-02	West Virginia	Link
Carol D Miller	Member of Congress, WV-03	West Virginia	Link
Tom Tiffany	Member of Congress, WI-07	Wisconsin	Link

Vindicated

Looking at what Trump and his supporters are putting the country through, I feel fully vindicated in my declaration weeks ago, that anyone who supports Trump utterly lacks in decency. They're just a part of a brutal mob. I continue to not to have anything to do with them in my personal life.

Machine Learning and Physics

Machine Learning has in use in the Large Hadron Collider for long enough that there is now a Coursera online course about it. Basically, machine learning is used to help handle the approximately one petabye per second of data collected from particle collisions. That is one kind of use of machine learning.

 Neural networks do the job of recognizing the content of images and video, and speech recognition much better than the traditional type of computer algorithms that people can write, so it is absolutely the right technique to give computers the senses of vision and hearing. The detection of "cat" or "utility" pole from two-dimensional arrays of bytes, which is computer vision, is generalizable to "seeing" patterns in data sets in N-dimensional arrays. This "data pattern sense" is a sense organ humans lack. Neural networks can help provide humans this sixth sense. 

 Beyond that, neural networks have to connect up with some type of symbolic representation, in order to be able to handle concepts, even simple relations like "bigger than", "smaller than", "behind", "above", etc.. The seventh lecture, Neurosymbolic AI, in the MIT introduction to deep learning, 6.S191 is from where I learned about it back in February, and a regret this year is that I have not been able to follow up on it. The idea is something like this (words added to clips from David Cox's slides):

I believe that the computer will have to connect what it can sense with its "data pattern sense" to symbolic representations, and then, what the computer can do will be no better or worse in its performance than whatever automated reasoning can do today, for instance, in mathematics theorem provers. So, if mathematics falls to Artificial Intelligence, then physics may follow, but not otherwise.

Brink Lindsey: The Dead End of Small Government

A center-right party in America no longer exists, one whose primary values are (small government, fiscal responsibility, family values, personal responsibility), and that sees the importance of actual governance.

In his essay posted at the Niskanen Center, Brink Lindsey, traces through how this came about. "Deep-seated intellectual errors" of the Ludwig von Mises/Ayn Rand/Murray Rothbard/F. A. Hayek/the Chicago School of Economics meet the American society with its particular politics and history, and: 

 Here then is what the ideals of free markets and limited government have come to stand for after small-government ideology was filtered through American political realities for a few decades: 

•  A dogmatic attachment to tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the rich, as the appropriate response to virtually any conceivable circumstance; 
• A strong pro-business, as opposed to pro-market, tilt on regulation, too often attacking needed pro-market regulations because they impose costs on business while ignoring anti-market regulations that benefit favored constituencies; 
• A focused hostility toward government efforts to help the poor, pursued with much greater vigor than any opposition to subsidies for the middle class and rich or government policies that injure the poor; 
• A general aversion to government transfer payments that has resulted, not in significant reductions in social spending, but in the redirection of social spending through tax preferences to provide lopsided benefits for the well-off;
•  Incessant bashing of the public sector and public service as inherently dysfunctional and dangerous, while attention to how public policy might actually make Americans’ lives better has dwindled toward zero.

 This is actually existing small-government conservatism, and it is not a pretty picture. I know this is not what a lot of smart and talented libertarian and free-market intellectuals and activists stand for personally. This certainly wasn’t what I saw myself standing for during the more than two decades I worked as a professional libertarian at the Cato Institute. But as libertarians are always fond of reminding us, good intentions aren’t enough. Efforts to influence politics must ultimately be judged by their consequences, not their motives, and the fruits of libertarian anti-statism have grown rancid and unhealthy. 

 This is the diagnosis of the problem and description of its symptoms. In other essays, Lindsey talks about the intellectual remedy to this problem. Before the election, I had hoped that there was a strong rejection of Trump that would lead the Republican Party towards this resolution. Instead Trump won about ten million more voters than he did in 2016; he won more votes in a Presidential election than anyone not named Biden. But Brink Lindsay's essays should be read anyway in this suggested order.

1. The Poverty of Natural Rights Libertarianism. 
2. The Dead End of Small Government 
3. Free Markets and Limited Government Reconceived.

To egg you along, here's where he is headed:

When we see that markets work best, not in the absence of government but in the presence of good government, we are able to see the ideals of free markets and limited government in a new and clearer light. Freeing those vital principles from the misunderstandings created by libertarian ideology, we can reconceive them so that they serve, rather than undermine, the cause of effective government on which our freedom and prosperity depend. 

Thus reconceived, the concept of “free markets” is no longer associated with the overall size and scope of government. Rather, the “free” in “free markets” describes certain key attributes of a well-functioning market system. Markets are free, not when they are unregulated, but when the rules that define them allow for wide freedom of action along a number of key dimensions: free entry, free exit, freely moving prices, free trade across national boundaries, freedom to hire and fire, freedom to take a job or quit, freedom to introduce new products or production methods without prior permission, and freedom to invest. The commitment to free markets is based on evidence, not ideology....

Cartoon - in it together

Rangoli 2020

 

Previous years.

Can/should we talk to each other?

 Guest wrote some weeks ago: 

I despise Trump and all his works, but once you stop talking to your opponents, the only further possible step is violence, so I reject that.

Here are a pair of essays on how we need to talk to each other, and one essay on why not. 

George Ball: 

1. https://www.insidernj.com/gop-ffebly-enabling-corrosive-acid-drip-top-down/ 

2. https://www.insidernj.com/race-as-reconciliation/ 

 Rebecca Solnit: 

3. https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-on-not-meeting-nazis-halfway/

A little from each side.

Ball: 

We better start talking to each other, even if we often can’t find common ground. Because if groups this large {Trump, Biden voters} and this divided do not work harder at validating and accepting each other as human beings, then we will not have a country. Or a future.

You do not have to be a moron to share Trump’s vision of America, or an antifa cancel culture socialist to support Biden’s.  There are millions of well- meaning people with different life experiences that inform their views.  We can agree to disagree without questioning each other’s humanity.  And many of us are willing to listen so long as they, too, are heard.  Whether you do so is a matter of individual choice about how you want to live and what you want this country to be.  No group or movement can make that decision for you.  In America, we are that movement. All 330,000,000 million of us. And we always have been.

Solnit: 

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that.    

 

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

An Account of A Press Conference

Mark Sumner describes a press conference by Trump's legal-team

In an alternate universe

Imagine, had Trump merely said consistently, wear a facemask in public, wear sun glasses or a face shield, wash your hands before touching your face, and follow whatever your local government asks you to do, he’d have been re-elected. No only would Trump have been re-elected, but tens of thousands fewer would be dead or struggling with the long-term after-effects of a bout of the corona virus. I'm leaving out social distancing, staying at home if you have a fever or if you know you were exposed to someone infected, and any appeal to a public spirit of let's help keep each other safe. I'm leaving out all the other measures that could be taken like setting up contact tracing or an app like "Aarogya Setu" or federal co-ordination between the states.

How did we end up here?

 What could be more non-partisan than wearing face masks in public during a pandemic caused by an airborne virus?

Yet, in the US of A, this has become a marker of partisanship, with none less than the POTUS mocking the use of face masks.

Then see the clip here on the Ari Melber show on MSNBC, of Michael Moore (extremely left) and Michael Moore (former chairman of the Republican National Committee).  At around 2:30 in the video they go through a catalog of issues on which they agree - equal pay for women, climate change, a living minimum wage,...  Incidentally, public opinion poll after poll suggests that more than a two-thirds majority of Americans want action on all of these issues.

So my thought is that just like with the face masks, these issues have been made partisan, precisely to block them.  Murdoch and Koch blow the partisan trumpets a bit, Trump and the easy-to-purchase-in-small-states Senators pick it up -- it used to be the Tea Party in Congress too -- and suddenly what is a non-partisan issue becomes solely a "progressive" or Democratic one.  And now the forty percent who are out to "own the libs" will oppose it with every last MAGA and poster they've got.

Fighting The Last Election

 The GOP is stuck in 2016.

Even now, four years after she last ran for any office, Mrs. Clinton has appeared in more Republican ads attacking down-ballot Democratic candidates than has Mr. Biden, according to data compiled by Advertising Analytics.

Libertarians!

The New Republic has a story: 

 The Town That Went Feral 

 When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.

Moon

Black-capped Chickadee

Cropped detail

The Atlantic: The Most Illuminating Moment ....Decency v Politics

 From Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic:

Excerpt:

The moments after your first child is born are humbling and overwhelming, the emotional equivalent of staring directly into the sun. You realize that you are suddenly responsible for a human life that you helped create, a sliver of two souls smuggled into another body, a person you will love and protect desperately for the rest of your life.

 Shortly after Donald and Ivana Trump’s son was born, however, the future president had an unusual concern for a parent:  *What if this kid grows up and embarasses me?*

“What should we name him?” Donald asked, (according to Ivana’s memoir),  Raising Trump. When Ivana suggested Donald Jr., the real-estate heir responded, “What if he is a loser?”

That anecdote helps explain one of the more memorable exchanges in Tuesday night’s presidential debate, as well as Trump’s approach to governance. The president’s Democratic rival, Joe Biden, sought to criticize Trump’s remarks about U.S. service members being “losers,” as first reported by The Atlantic . In doing so, Biden brought up his late son, Beau, who died of a brain tumor after earning a Bronze Star in the Army National Guard.

“My son was in Iraq and spent a year there,” Biden said to Trump, raising his voice. “He got the Bronze Star. He got a medal. He was not a loser. He was a patriot. And the people left behind there were heroes.”

In an attempt to neutralize the attack, Trump changed the subject—to Biden’s other son, Hunter. “Hunter got thrown out of the military; he was thrown out, dishonorably discharged for cocaine use,” he spat out.

To a person who feared sharing his name with his son at the moment of his birth, because the child might turn out to be a “loser,” that attack must have seemed devastating. But normal parents don’t stop loving their children because they do bad things. They love them anyway. That’s what being a parent is.

Biden responded by reaffirming his love for his surviving son. “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” Biden responded. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”

Biden is a mediocre politician. His two prior presidential runs were failures. He has a tendency toward exaggeration to the point of dishonesty, whether overstating his role in the mid-century civil-rights movement or the struggle against South African apartheid). Before becoming vice president to Barack Obama, Biden backed some of the worst policy decisions of the past 30 years—including the 2005 bankruptcy bill, the 1994 crime bill, and the invasion of Iraq.

But when Biden speaks of loss and pain—of Beau, or of the car accident that killed his wife and daughter—he becomes deeply compelling; as Fintan O’Toole wrote, Biden’s grief is “real and rooted and fundamentally decent.” After eight months of funerals, for hundreds of thousands of American families, the kind of grief that Biden speaks of, the kind that accompanies the loss of a loved one, is no longer distant. The president stood in front of that grieving nation, and taunted a father while he was speaking of his lost son. Before the eyes of a nation struggling with an opioid epidemic, he mocked a dad for having a kid with a drug problem.

More than any other moment of the debate, Trump's response to Biden’s invocation of his dead son—attempting to make him ashamed of his surviving one—threw the dispositions of the two men into sharp relief. I wondered how Hunter must have felt to see his father speak of his pride in his brother, only for his own name to be brandished as a weapon to inflict shame on his father. And I thought about Biden’s response, which was to reaffirm his pride in Hunter, the troubled son living in the indelible shadow of a departed war hero. In the midst of being attacked by a president trying to wield his own family against him, Biden’s instinct was to reassure Hunter that he is also loved, that nothing could make his father see him as a loser.

Biden acted like a father, doing what almost any parent would have done. And yet because Trump is the kind of man who wonders at the moment of his child’s birth whether the child will someday mortify him, he did not anticipate that response. He did not expect that, instead of embarrassing Biden, he would merely advertise the callousness that has made him unable to govern the country with any sense of duty or responsibility, the narcissism that makes him see those concepts as foolish and naive.

All things in Trump’s world revolve around him, and are a reflection of him. The president evaluates everything—even his own children, even at the time they enter this world—by how they might make him look, and he is incapable of imagining that anyone else would do differently. When he was a reality-show celebrity, this trait was minimally damaging to society; now that he is a president, it has proved catastrophic.