Here We Go Again

CNN just had Donald Trump on for an hour in front of a hand-picked audience of his fans. He was rude to the moderator, lied his head off, and then just for fun he defamed the woman who had just the day before won a multimillion-dollar defamation suit against him. The jury found that he had raped her and then lied about her, and now she is thinking about suing him again for lying about her on CNN. Everybody -- I mean everybody -- is hoping she does.

Why did CNN put him on? They can pretend this is normal. He is going to be a candidate for the Republican nomination and the country needs to hear blah blah blah. In previous elections all the networks, including CNN, gave him billions of dollars' worth of free air time, and guess what -- here we go again.

Of course the problem is, at root, the fact that a modern corporation like CNN only cares about its investors. It doesn't care about its customers, except insofar as the investors use audience share to decide whether to invest. It doesn't care about its employees, making them go through with these awful things. And the corporation does not, in particular, care about the future of the USA. They had hoped to get good ratings with this show, and they were pretty good for that time slot, but Trump's audience was significantly smaller than Biden's last town hall. This one didn't really pay off for them.

Here's what makes sense to me. What about we elect somebody who KNOWS HOW TO RUN A COUNTRY? Sorry to shout, not sorry. There are things that need to be done, and maybe I'm weird about this but we need somebody who knows how to run things, even if it is just a mumbling old man and not an orange reality-TV actor. Like -- remember? -- back in June, 2017, Trump announced his infrastructure plan. A trillion dollars, he said. Then Comey testified in Congress, some terrorists attacked London, the so-called "travel ban" became consumed in controversy and the infrastructure train ran off the tracks. Trump declared the week of June 5, 2017 to be "infrastructure week." Also the week of August 14, 2017. Also October 9, same year. Also the week of February 12, 2018. Oh and don't forget March 26, 2018. Followed by infrastructure week on April 29, 2019.

The result was, literally colorful firebrand that he is, he could not do this straightforward thing that everybody in both parties knew needed to be done. He could not negotiate a bill through Congress and sign it. There was no infrastructure bill, even though it was an extremely high priority and Trump's party had majorities in both houses of Congress.

In contrast, in his second year in office Joe Biden signed a $1.2 Trillion infrastructure bill in April 2022 that included (quoting from Forbes here:

• Roads and bridges: Headlining the 2,702-page bill’s spending, roughly $110 billion of new funds would go toward improving the nation's roads and bridges, and investments in other major transportation programs.
• Public transit: The package also includes the largest-ever federal investment in public transit, allotting $39 billion to modernize systems, improve access for the elderly and people with disabilities, and repair more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 railcars and thousands of miles of train tracks.
• Amtrak: The legislation marks the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak 50 years ago, with $66 billion earmarked for high-speed rail, safety improvements, Amtrak grants and modernization of the rail route connecting Washington, D.C., to Boston.
• Broadband internet: Tacking on to billions authorized by last year’s American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure bill includes $65 billion to bolster the country's broadband infrastructure and help ensure that every American has access to high-speed internet, with one in four households expected to be eligible for a $30-per-month subsidy to pay for internet access.
• Electric grid and energy: Though many clean-energy measures were cut from the bill to satisfy spending-weary lawmakers, a $108 billion investment will help upgrade the nation’s electricity grid, with thousands of miles of new transmission lines and funds for environmentally friendly smart-grid technology.
• Electric cars, buses and ferries: In addition to $7.5 billion for the nation’s first network of electric-vehicle chargers along highway corridors, lawmakers have shored up $5 billion for zero-emission buses (including thousands of electric school buses) and $2.5 billion for ferries.
• Clean drinking water: Following high-profile water-supply crises plaguing cities like Flint, Michigan, the legislation includes a provision for $55 billion to replace all the nation's lead pipes and service lines, representing the largest investment in clean drinking water ever.
• Great rivers and lakes: Among the bill's more than $50 billion for water infrastructure improvements, about $1 billion is slated to go toward the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a sweeping clean-up measure targeting toxic hot spots—or areas of heavy industrial pollution—around the Great Lakes region, and $17 billion will be allocated to ports and waterways.
• Airports: More than $25 billion has been allocated to help modernize America's airports—funds the Airports Council International says will help tackle more than $115 billion worth of project backlogs.
• Road safety: The deal invests $11 billion in transportation safety programs, including a new program to help states and localities reduce crashes and fatalities in their communities, particularly among cyclists and pedestrians.
• Normal funding: In addition to the $550 billion in new investments, the package also includes roughly $650 billion in previously authorized funding for roads and other infrastructure, including nearly $300 billion for the Highway Trust Fund and $90 billion for public transit over the next five years.

And that's just one bill of many.

So, you see what I'm saying. Why would you vote for a guy who is not only an indicted criminal with many more charges coming including probably espionage, a serial and unapologetic rapist ("unfortunately or fortunately"), a liar, and who does not have the skills to put together a White House staff and get any legislation passed and signed? Why would you vote for that? Is it because he says mean things about liberals? Is that what you're looking for in a CEO for the United States of America?

Hang on to your horses, people. Our billionaires -- and why don't we call them oligarchs? -- want Trump in the White House because they know how to get him to do what they want: give him money, easy. Our oligarchs can spend the money on the media to get people to believe anything. So the sensible people of this country are going to have to grip the arms of their chairs, grit their teeth, and hold on until we go to the polls, and hopefully they haven't had the sense bled out of them by then.

The Decay of Democracy

We hear a lot these days about democracy, as if the institution is threatened. Well, because it is.

I remember growing up in a conservative state, and people would say, "America is not a democracy, it's a republic" -- they're still saying that. Even as a kid I thought: so what? We don't vote on everything that happens, we elect leaders to do our will in the halls of government. It seemed more efficient and had the added benefit that it was not so vulnerable to media-generated fads such as the current uproar over transgender athletes, or erroneous beliefs about crime rates. Elect somebody, give them a few years to work on some legislation, their re-election depends on them keeping the people happy but they are relatively buffered from the whims of the crowd -- Brexit shows you the kind of thing you get when everybody votes on complicated policies.

Now I understand the deal. Conservatives see it differently from the rest of us. We think of electing representatives to serve us, and they think of electing dictators to tell us what to do. From the conservative point of view, once they're in office an official can do whatever crazy thing they want to. They want to close the libraries, okay -- that wouldn't pass a popular vote but some minor-league dictators can do it. A couple of them are squeamish about drag shows? The public doesn't really object to them but our little demagogues can pass laws to make drag shows illegal, even as the press turns up pictures of half of the Republican party cross-dressing. You want to turn down federal money for state health care systems? The people of the state sure wouldn't do that, but their elected dictators can do it. To make a statement.

Abortion? The people who live in this country realize that abortion is a necessary form of health care. Everybody knows somebody who has had an abortion, and has seen why they did it. It isn't Reaganesque "welfare queens," it's your sister, your wife, your mother. The people don't want to ban abortions but states that elected Republicans now have to live with the depravity of forced childbirth. I once saw a Republican Congressman try to describe late-term abortion in graphic terms, as if abortion is just murdering babies. In reality third-trimester abortions are very rare and when they happen it is because something is terribly wrong. Now, with abortion banned in many states, the Congressman's words come true. Women are forced to give birth to babies that should not have been carried to term, that are not viable, that die as soon as they are born, or before. It is disastrous for the family, for the woman, for all who loved them. It is pure sadism, cruelty with no point.

People don't want that.

People are fine with gay people marrying. They are fine with trans people using public bathrooms. They are fine with using the right pronouns. People are in favor of helping the poor, with getting people back on their feet to make their lives better. Nobody knows what to do about homelessness but the problem is not that they are unsightly and scary looking, the problem is finding them homes. People want to see the end of the opioid crisis and know that illegal immigrants are not responsible for it, so much as greedy pharmaceutical corporations.

Most people in the US would like to see some rational measures taken to decrease gun violence. A recent poll showed that 34% of Americans are satisfied with the country's gun laws. But look who gets their way. The majority? No, but thank you for asking.

There is a small minority of people in the country who feel sure they are right and the rest of us are wrong. They feel it is their duty, that it's a good and moral thing for them to do, to make the rest of us live by their perverse, life-annulling standards. This is why democracy was proposed in the first place, to prevent this sort of thing. The idea is that most people are smart enough to make good decisions, and a majority vote will at least get the people what they want. It is fine if these religious nuts have their bizarre beliefs, but it is not fine to engineer society so that everyone has to live by principles that are important to one small, irrational minority.

A hurtful handful of weirdos can manage to get control of the system. Gerrymandering and targeted voter suppression lead to biased elections and the appointment of judges and next thing you know the Supreme Court is sitting over there considering whether a regular FDA approval process of a drug might have missed something. For a medication has now been used millions of times with near-zero ill effects. It's not about the FDA, of course, or the safety of the mifepristone, it's about Christian conservatives imposing their bizarre interpretation of "God's will" (it's not even in the Bible) on the rest of us. A radical Christian judge in Texas said nobody in the United States can take this important medicine, and now the Supreme Court has issued a stay, meaning that the judge's ruling won't go into effect until it has met some legal challenges. The fight is not over, it is just "stayed." Some total raving nuts are making life miserable for millions of American families, against the will of the people, and they are not giving up.

This is why there is concern for democracy. There is a Constitution and a justice system in place, but these extremists have replaced fair and reasonable legislators and judges with religious radicals, so they can go through the charade of following the law while they force their unpopular religious views on the population.

It's None of Your Business

Conservatives are putting gender identity at the center of their message now. They are passing laws punishing trans people, they want to eradicate "transgenderism," which, first, it isn't an "ism." Some people are mislabeled at birth, that's all. The doctor holds them up, looks them over, checks the M or the F on the birth certificate, and the new person sets out on a new life. Mom and Dad paint the nursery blue or pink, they buy dresses or jeans -- did you ever look at the boys' aisle versus the girls' aisle at a toy store? They are like two different planets. If the M was checked the kid gets treated one way, a different way if the F was checked. You might think it's sexist or whatever and maybe it'll change someday but that's how we do it now.

In the meantime, the baby doesn't know who they are or how they got here, they learn from the people around them and from the sensations of embodiment, and some small number of children discover that the people around them are making a mistake. It isn't an "ism," a belief system, there is just a matter of maturing into your own subjective experience and knowing who you are, including the fact that you might not be who you were told you are.

Conservatives like to make fun of the concept of identity, like the Fox host who said he was going to start identifying as Chinese for the benefits it would bring him, ah ha ha ha. Identity is a unique kind of word. Where most words refer to a thing or event in the environment, the word identity means "the thing itself." Identity is not what a thing is called, its identity is it, itself. The identity of this rock is this rock. For people, identity is the answer to the question, who are you? You can ask the hilarious Fox host, are you Chinese? and he will say, of course not. You don't decide to identify as something-or-other, it is just what you are. Identity is not a label, it is essence. And a thing or a person may have essential qualities that are not apparent to an external observer.

When a majority of people share a culture they may not be aware of having an identity at all. They simply see themselves as normal or ordinary, and so white conservatives accuse other groups of practicing "identity politics." But take a white American and drop them into a city or village in Asia, or Turkey, or Africa, and you will find them suddenly extremely aware of their identity. "I don't eat that, I'm an American." "I'm sorry, I don't really 'get' that kind of music." "I am only wearing this strange outfit to fit in." Fact is, only 4.25 percent of the world's population lives in the US, and only about 75 percent of those identify as white, meaning about 3.1 percent of human beings are white Americans. And they are only normal or ordinary when they can bunch together.

Well there is no sense getting academic about it. There is only one relevant thing to keep in mind here:

It's none of your business.

If somebody is transgender or not, if they are gay or not, if they are Black or Christian or Asian or short or tall or speak with an accent -- it's none of your business. It doesn't affect you, doesn't hurt you, people don't all have to live their lives in ways that you understand. And that should be the end of the discussion.

Story Hour Triggers Some People

In response to the dire threat of drag-queen story hours, a bunch of states are trying to pass laws to make it illegal to appear in the attire of a gender other than the one you were assigned at birth. I am dying to see how it turns out. Though Republicans have enjoyed taunting people who can't define what a "woman" is, they can't define it themselves, and in fact gender is an empirically undefinable concept -- you got nothing to go on but self-report. A society adopts some self-presentation norms to signal individuals' roles, including ethnic and class norms, indicators of profession such as work uniforms or suits-and-ties etc., and norms that indicate gender, and somebody always has fun pushing against that boundary, whether it's earrings for men or tattoos for women. I saw the King of England on TV in a skirt the other day, and what do you think shaving is? Men have beards, women don't, that's how God made us. Will women be allowed to wear pants? What about men with long hair, like me? I cannot think of anything sillier to pass a law about.

And tell me, what is less threatening than a drag queen? Oh some have a dangerous sense of humor, their grasp of irony can be deadly, but really now. If you are concerned about "grooming" and the "safety of the children," then I'm not joking, you should do something about the church and the Republican Party. A guy in a party dress with false eyelashes is reading stories to kids at a library, how is that scary to anybody?

And now the Proud Boys and other violent groups are showing up with guns and disrupting the story hour. Hey, you're being trolled, guys. You're yelling cuss-words at little kids who want to hear fairy tales, do you see how that looks? You're scaring librarians, of all people. Ssshhhh. Everybody's having a good time and you're waving guns around and calling people hateful and nutty names. The whole situation is engineered to make you look stupid when you do that.

There is no detectable irony in the news that a newly elected Republican Congressman used to perform as a drag queen named Kitara Ravache. It's almost as if it doesn't really matter.

I can't even see what the issue is with drag queens, including drag queens reading stories to kids. I have never heard even a rumor of anything inappropriate at one of those events. The drag queens are there to entertain, it's fun, it's pretend, it's outrageous. I assume most are gay but that isn't even part of the deal, we can find photos and videos of a lot of straight men in women's clothing over the years, it's a standard schtick. Drag is not contagious, they aren't trying to recruit or convert anybody, it's just fun. They like pretending, they like dressing up, and everybody seems to have fun at these story hours.

Clothing is a cultural expression, it changes over time. There is nothing "biological" about any of it and God did not give orders in the Bible to dress in some way. Today's fashions and gender cues are not even "traditional." The culture decides what is appropriate but fashion emerges from individual choices and is not imposed by law, at least in a free country (ahem). Of course drag queens are intentional dress-code violators, the outrageousness is part of the show. Part of the fun of it is that it is at once shocking and also not harmful in any way. Some rules and laws exist to protect people, and ... some don't really do anything for anybody. The idea that the government wants to tell people how to dress is just amazing.

I used to think that it was a cheap shot to speculate that people who doth complain too much are dealing with their own personal impulses. There is a long tradition of anti-gay crusaders getting caught having gay sex -- we had one just last week, typical story. So it seems that, at least sometimes, these poor guys are thinking if it's not illegal, what will stop me from doing it? Whatever "it" is. Dressing in drag, maybe. Since I can't allow myself to do it, I won't allow anyone else to, either. And so these tortured moralists have to threaten other people for doing the things they can't admit they want to do.

Drag queens, by their very existence, remind us that cultural norms are malleable and arbitrary, we participate in them by choice and are actually free to be whatever we want to be. And freedom is threatening to some people.

What You Did vs Who You Are

I am a little fascinated by the story of the gun-shop owner on Gude Drive, in Rockville, who tried to kill a cop in the middle of the night last week. He ran after the police car shooting at it, put a few holes in the car but didn't hurt anybody, luckily.

This story is not going to get much publicity, because it does not further anyone's agenda.

Here's Bethesda Magazine's lede on it:

Andrew S. Raymond, 42, of Darnestown, was charged and arrested for shooting at a police officer in Rockville, early Tuesday morning, Montgomery County police announced in a release.

According to police, a county officer was patrolling the 700 block of East Gude Drive at around 12:30 a.m. when an employee of Engage Armament gun store ran towards the officer’s unmarked car and began firing shots, striking the vehicle twice.

Raymond was outside the store when the police officer drove into the parking lot of Engage Armament, police stated.

The officer saw the suspect running towards his vehicle while reaching inside his waistband, according to the MCPD news release.

According to the release, the officer activated his emergency equipment and signaled to Raymond that he was a police officer. Raymond stopped and dropped his weapon, raised his hands and was taken into custody, police said.

I drive past that place all the time. This is a hometown story.

Here's obviously what happened. Several gun shops in the area have been broken into lately. This shop owner figured he would defend his store, and sat out in the parking lot with a gun -- duh, it's a gun shop -- ready to kill someone. At the same time, the cops knew there had been recent break-ins and they were out patrolling, to, you know, catch criminals while they are criming. An officer pulled into this parking lot to make sure everything was all right, and this good guy with a gun came running out shooting at him, thinking it was bad guys.

Usually the media make a big deal out of somebody shooting at the police. In reality it is not a very dangerous job, they don't get shot very often, but it is a kind of story that people love to read because it confirms their preconceptions. This kind of story is most popular if there is a picture of a Black man, especially if he is funky looking. A Hispanic or African looking person will do, as well, especially if they have a foreign-sounding name. White people, only if they have tattoos or teeth missing, or really bad hair.

The media will not make a big deal out of this one. A man tried to kill the police but the story, I guarantee it, is going to be "it was an honest mistake." I predict that you will see a jovial photo in the news, cops laughing and having a beer with the guy who attempted to murder them, or similar. He will probably apologize. He shot real bullets at a real living human being but no prob, he didn't know it was a police officer.

This little story cuts across so many narratives. For one thing, stupid people here love to complain that Montgomery County is a dangerous place. They especially like to blame the County Council and County Executive for "skyrocketing crime rates." C'mon, people, Montgomery County? Some catalytic converters get stolen, there is an occasional burglary, but this is the sleepiest place in the world. And look what happens when the police act proactively to prevent crime. Citizens trying to kill them for it.

Of course the story here is that a "good guy with a gun" was shooting at another "good guy with a gun." Nobody likes to deal with the fact that most gun deaths are not bad guys breaking into innocent people's homes. Suicides and domestic violence, especially husbands killing their wives, make up more than half of US gun deaths. Walking around with a gun in your pocket does not actually make you safer, it just makes the rest of us less safe. Well you might shoot yourself by accident, but in any case the chance that your life will be threatened today by some violent person in Montgomery County is, statistically, zero.

The bookend story to this one was earlier this week, a guy was found not-guilty of anything after he shot a persistent panhandler on the Metro. There was video. The jury said it was justified. Well, of course, the shooter was a Good Guy. And the panhandler was a Bad Guy. He was rude and pushy.

Our society is having a kind of breakdown of law and order, and these incidents are so typical that they will not be talked about much. Nothing is going to happen to these people who shot at someone, because they are portrayed as Good People. Good People can do whatever they want. It is not easy to say what a Good Person is, it might be a regular guy but it helps to be rich or powerful. Almost certainly they are Caucasian. You will hear someone say, every day, "No one is above the law," but of course that is not true. People get hassled, beaten, killed, and locked up every day for nothing, but not white people with some privilege. Those people can break the law as they wish, they can even shoot at the cops, and nothing will happen to them. They are Good People and just made a little mistake. Maybe somebody died, oh well.

To my silly liberal mind, the law should be a set of criteria that people have to meet in order to avoid punishment. If you break the law you face the consequences. If you don't break the law then you are free to go. But that is not how it works. Instead, the police and court system are being used to reward Good People and punish Bad People, regardless of what the law says. It doesn't matter what you did, what matters is who you are. This post is about Donald Trump.

We're Lucky to Live in Maryland

For some reason, this throwaway story from the Washington Post has been bugging me for a couple of days.

A guy ran for Attorney General of Maryland and lost by 300,000 votes. The people did not select him to manage the state's legal processes. It wasn't close. The voters of the state wanted Anthony Brown to be Attorney General, and that's who they chose.

But this guy doesn't accept that. The day after the election he sent an email to his supporters that said "many odd and suspicious incidents were reported by poll watchers, and more reports are being gathered today." Uh huh, pretty wild times here in shoot 'em up, Wild West Maryland, where outlaws roam the land.

On the other hand, this just in: The Maryland State Board of Elections said it "works with the local boards of elections to determine whether referral of reported activities to the Office of the State Prosecutor is warranted. At this time, SBE is not aware of any such incidents. Marylanders can be confident in the integrity of the state’s election processes and that any potentially inappropriate activity will be thoroughly investigated."

So if there have been any "odd and suspicious incidents," nobody bothered to tell the election board about them.

What do you think? Do you believe there really were "odd and suspicious incidents," or is this just what Republicans say now? Oh, by the way, the candidate, Michael Peroutka, is a Republican, did I mention that?

Peroutka’s extreme positions on a number of issues would have made it difficult for him to win in a state where Democrats hold a 2-to-1 registration advantage over Republicans. He opposed abortion without exceptions, was against same-sex marriage, said that public schools were part of a socialist plan to indoctrinate children against their parents, and would not disavow his association with the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has categorized as a hate group.

Peroutka also once shared debunked conspiracy theories about who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. When Peroutka’s false claims surfaced again earlier this year, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) blasted him, saying, “These disgusting lies don’t belong in our party.”

Peroutka says he will not concede Maryland attorney general race

Yeah, well our outgoing Republican governor Hogan is living in a dreamworld. These disgusting lies are his party. There is nothing else left.

I think what got me is that this guy wants to be Attorney General, of all things. He wants the responsibility to make decisions about prosecuting people for breaking the law. His office would be the contact point between the government and the people, the fulcrum where the force of law is applied to individuals, and yet he does not seem to believe that the laws apply to him, or, we presume (since trashing democracy is a current rightwing fad), those who share his sense of privilege. We have laws about election procedures, with layers of people appointed to implement the procedures and to monitor them, double-check everything, report any irregularities, investigate odd and strange stuff, and nobody reported anything. This guy is pulling whiny victimhood out of ... thin air.

Imagine living in a state where the majority of people actually accept Peroutka's views as normal American life. Your neighbors are walking around thinking that everything is being controlled by secret conspiracies behind the scenes and people like themselves never get a fair deal -- when they vote, dark forces (maybe even BLM and ANTIFA, or at least somebody paid by George Soros) manipulate the ballots and switch their vote to a radical leftist candidate. You can't trust the government, and if you follow the law you're just a big sucker. And so you elect an Attorney General who will enforce the law based on those premises, that everything is rigged against white people and everybody is cheating all the time. Do you think the citizens of such a state can get a fair trial, when government lawyers believe it's okay to lie in court and distort evidence, because they just know that the other side is doing it? Is it possible to enforce the law fairly when you start from these assumptions? There are a lot of states that would have elected this nut to administer the law.

We are lucky to live in Maryland.

Good Vibes Outside Hate Conference

Nice photo from the Trans Maryland Dance Party held outside the UARE anti-trans rally at That's Amore tonight. Scowling faces indoors, happy faces dancing in the parking lot. (Photo tweeted by District 5 County Council candidate Kristin Mink.)

That's Amore Restaurant in Rockville to Host Anti-Trans Hatefest

A rightwing Montgomery County group, reasoning that it's racist to say that some white people are racist, has trademarked the name United Against Racism in Education, or UARE. Last summer they distributed flyers accusing some county Board of Education candidates of promoting Critical Race Theory in local schools. [EDIT:The group also supported some far-right school board candidates. All their candidates lost, except Esther Wells who made it through the primaries]. UARE members distributing the flyers are quoted as saying said they believe the candidates they endorsed would remove curriculum that "includes anti-whiteness." See, they're united against racism, uh huh.

UARE is expanding its bigotry umbrella now beyond racism to organize a local attack against transgender people, with an event planned next week -- Wednesday the 19th -- at That's Amore in Rockville. That's Amore seems to be making a reputation for itself as the go-to meeting spot for Montgomery County Republicans. Which can't really be very profitable.

According to UARE's flyer, this event is titled, "True Stories About Transgenderism," with the subhead, "It can happen to your loved ones!"

Three speakers are listed. Nicole Eckenrode is promoted as "The mother of nine children. Learn how her oldest son was Brainwashed into the GENDER IDEOLOGY." Eckenrode appears to be the owner of a Kensington gym, who last summer was quoted in the news complaining about vaccine mandates. Apparently she has rejected one of her children for failing to meet normative expectations, and blames their transition on something she calls "gender ideology," which brainwashes people.

Lisa Ruth is the second speaker, the poster calls her an "Entrepreneur and Working Mother. Talks about the Transgender Crisis in Maryland public high schools." I think it is a pretty good bet that this is the same Lisa Ruth who with her husband runs the Bruster's Real Ice Cream franchise in Annapolis. After the George Floyd killing, Ruth's husband posted on social media: "If u act like an animal.. u get treated like an animal" followed later by "#WhatLivesMatter." Bruster's issued a statement that said "On behalf of Bruster’s Corporate and the entire franchise community, we do not share the views of this individual franchisee..." The Capital Gazette wrote that Lisa and her husband "have posted [online content] in the past critical of national Democratic figures, President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton." So, yeah, another expert on gender identity.

Finally, the headliner will be Brandon Showalter, described by the Daily Wire as "a senior investigative reporter on sexual ethics and the trans movement at The Christian Post." He is a professional hater who can tell you hundreds of reasons why transgender people are evil. There is a long interview with him HERE, if you have the stomach for it.

To people like Brandon: you can believe whatever you want to believe about anybody you want. But transgender people have not asked you for advice, and their choices about how to live are none of your business. That's all. If for some reason you can't stand it when someone is happy in a way that is different from you, that is not their problem, it's you. You can believe stupid things but our community will not allow you to actively make life miserable for our neighbors and friends. It doesn't matter what you believe, just mind your own business.

A quick look at Google shows That's Amore has hosted events for Reardon Sullivan, Republican candidate for County Executive; Jonathan Jenkins, Republican candidate for Congress; Dan Cox, Republican candidate for governor; and held the only Republican forum for Maryland Attorney General, as well as a previous UARE "racism event." I could not find mention of any Democratic groups meeting there, ever. They decide how to run their own business, but this is not doing anything for my appetite, if you know what I mean.

Gender identity is a matter of normal variation in the population. Everybody's got some yin and yang in them, sometimes more of one than the other. If you are transgender then you have given some careful thought to questions of gender and self-presentation, including questions about having to deal with ignorant people, and you are making personal decisions that make your life better. If you are not transgender then it is just not your business. Does it make you uneasy? Is it hard for you to understand? Nobody cares. Just go away and mind your own business.

"Transgenderism" is not an ideology, not an ism, it is not even a word. Sometimes the gender that the doctor wrote on a birth certificate when a baby first popped out was wrong. This incorrect assignment can happen a lot of ways, it doesn't matter, the correction is to change the assignment and help the person adjust where their physiology is out of whack, not to shame the person into living a lie.

The UARE Anti-Trans meeting, promoted by the Montgomery County Republican Party, will be held 6:30-8:30PM, Wednesday, October 19th, at That's Amore, 15201 Shady Grove Road, Rockville. They have the right to express their beliefs, but the rest of us have a right to protect our community from this sort of poison.

Royalty and Competence

I don't care much about the British monarchy. I can't tell one prince or princess from the other, forget which one is the international playboy and which one is supposed to be the geeky intellectual. Queen Elizabeth has been around my whole life, always apparently gracious and proper and likeable. Nice lady, I'm sorry to see her go. None of it affects me in any way.

In the US of course we don't have royalty, really. We have multigenerational dynasties of the filthy-rich and political wheeler-dealers, we have oligarchs, but we don't have people who acquire power as a birthright and rule by just being there.

A quote by C.S. Lewis has been going around since the Queen died, and there is something to it:

Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

The Spectator, vol. CLXXI (27 August 1943), p. 192

The idea of "honoring royalty" is feral and irrational, or, as Lewis says, spiritual. You put a crown on somebody's head and they become the Great Parent to the society. The honor is completely undeserved, and that is clearly some of the attraction of it. Even if they do not make decisions or do anything other than give medals and host galas, the people look up to their royalty with love and respect. C.S. Lewis argued that people have an innate need for inequality, and saw royalty as a response to that; royalty is just an artificially created inequality that puts one person above others but does not necessarily do any real harm to the lesser population, at least in modern times.

It seems to me that logically the goal in a democracy is to select leaders who can lead. These should be people who understand the topics involved, who surround themselves with wise advisors, who make decisions based on facts and principles, who inspire the citizenry and persuade the legislature to pass laws that are good for the country. I mean, this makes sense, doesn't it?

On the other hand, the US elects movie stars, guys you'd like to have a beer with, wits and charmers, and recently a minor reality-TV character with a string of bankruptcies, divorces, and lawsuits behind him -- almost exactly as Lewis predicted in 1943.

We Americans tend to scoff at the idea of a king or queen but we can't seem to get over it. Our political campaigns are a charade of gotchas and poses, slogans, grins and handshakes, none of which have anything at all to do with running a country. We -- and looking at history I primarily mean Republicans -- seem to have a need to choose a leader based on some hard-to-explain qualities of personality. It is almost always someone who is richer than ninety-nine percent of us, at least. It is always someone with more expensive suits than you or I could afford, they belong to clubs that wouldn't take us, their hair is always perfect. The inequality between the voters and the candidates may actually be the point of the campaigns. Republican candidate's slogan: I Am Better Than You.

It seems to me we should decide, are we trying to elect someone to run the country, or do we want to pick a Daddy? Do we want good policies to be enacted or somebody to spank us when we're bad and send us to our room without dinner?

I should point out that Joe Biden has been one of the most effective presidents ever. He has passed a ton of huge bills, with little comment in the press. He is improving the country in many ways, fighting poverty, bringing down the deficit, negotiating international policies. But his favorability ratings have never been commensurate with his leadership successes.

This week the railroads almost shut down, they had already canceled a lot of trains in anticipation of a strike. Our groceries were going to rot in the fields, fuel would not be delivered, supply chains and manufacturing and trade were going to be disrupted, the American economy was on the brink of getting hammered because of a conflict between labor and management. But the president sent his cabinet person to meet with the two sides, he himself got on the phone with them, they worked it out and now the crisis is averted. This feat will not affect his popularity with voters -- this isn't what they are looking for. Daddy didn't get mad, nobody got a spanking, there was no controversy and no spectacle on TV.

Seems to me, thinking logically, this is what we want -- somebody who can run things.

There are Republican governors and others now hoping to be president, and they are paving the way by doing despicable things and making sure the TV cameras are pointed at them. They are mocking transgender people and pregnant women, taunting those who came here seeking asylum, undermining the separation of church and state, trying to break the election process, denouncing science and education, owning the libs in ways that actual liberals are generally unaware of. As leaders their decisions are bad for the people who depend on them, but that doesn't matter because they are campaigning to be Daddy (and a couple of Stern Mothers).

I am not suggesting that the US should have royalty. The grown-up thing for our country is to learn to distinguish between the feral desire for a surrogate parent and the civilized need for someone who has the skills to run a country, and to support leaders who are competent to lead.

Indiana Leads the Way (Down the Tubes)

Maybe even more than most medical procedures, there are lots of different reasons that someone would need an abortion. Between a quarter and third of American women have had the procedure done, either in a clinic or pharmaceutically.

Because religious hypocrites have made an artificial controversy out of it, women who have had abortions tend to be reluctant to step forward and talk about it -- you could just be asking for a lifetime of hateful judgment and trouble. So even though there are "I Had an Abortion" t-shirts for sale, you won't see many on the street. The religious right has cultivated negative stereotypes of these patients that are far from reality. In today's environment of moralistic suppression, the average citizen remains unaware just how common this medical procedure is.

If you think abortions are something for welfare queens and slutty irresponsible teenagers, ask your wife about her abortion. Ask your sister, your daughter. Ask your mom. They may or may not be honest with you.

Through hook and crook, the Christian Right has been able to load up the Supreme Court with ideologues who surprised no one in their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to make abortion illegal. The firehose of horror stories is already opening as girls, women and trans-men are prevented from obtaining medical care they need.

Kansas Republicans put the issue to a vote in the midterm primary election, expecting an easy win, and had their ass handed to them when it turned out a big majority of people, even in Kansas, feel strongly about retaining the right to an abortion if they need one. The far right's rhetoric was clever enough to suck the press into bothsidesing a manmade controversy but it was not enough to prevent actual human beings from expressing themselves at the voting booth. Abortion is not a moral issue, it is a medical procedure, and people are smart enough to know they might need it someday.

Indiana has been the first state to pass a law banning abortion subsequent to the Supreme Court decision. Indiana's law was signed yesterday.

I wonder how that's going to turn out for them.

Earlier this year one of the state's biggest employers, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, announced that they would be investing 2.1 Billion dollars in two new manufacturing sites in Indiana's Boone County. That was good news for Indiana. Two point one billion dollars, in what is not our richest state.

Today Eli Lilly made this announcement:

Lilly recognizes that abortion is a divisive and deeply personal issue with no clear consensus among the citizens of Indiana. Despite this lack of agreement, Indiana has opted to quickly adopt one of the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in the United States. We are concerned that this law will hinder Lilly's - and Indiana's - ability to attract diverse scientific, engineering and business talent from around the world. While we have expanded our employee health plan coverage to include travel for reproductive services unavailable locally, that may not be enough for some current and potential employees.

As a global company headquartered in Indianapolis for more than 145 years, we work hard to retain and attract thousands of people who are important drivers of our state's economy. Given this new law, we will be forced to plan for more employment growth outside our home state.

Statement from Eli Lilly and Company

Boom -- there goes that two billion, just like that.

The Republican Party used to be the "pro-business" party, taking management's side against the needs of workers, but lately the GOP has devolved unapologetically to a position of fascist Christian nationalism, replacing capitalist economic principles with self-serving group identity slogans and fundamentalist moralism regarding (other people's) personal, especially sexual, behavior. Well now, as some famous person once said, "As you sow, so shall you reap."

It is bad when Big Pharma commands the high ground, but that's what it's come down to. It's great that Republicans are going to heaven, that's fine, but a company like Lilly needs smart people to work for them here on earth, and who would move to Indiana now? As other states fall into lock-step with the religious movement, the US will become intellectual Swiss cheese, with holes in places where the people who remain are ignorant, uneducated, poor and unemployed, and freely give away their rights. Let's see who follows Indiana's lead.

Voting for a CEO, Versus a Drinking Buddy

I remember when George W Bush was elected and the "political analysis" was that he was the candidate most people would like to have a beer with.

He wasn't my type of drinking buddy, but I don't mind having a beer with someone now and then. We might sit and shoot the bull about things, politics, the crazy things going on in the world. He'll have his opinions, I'll have mine, we might laugh and we might argue. That's fine, it's a good time, people have been drinking beer and solving the world's problems since ancient Egypt.

But that doesn't mean I think my new best friend at the bar should run the country, you know what I'm saying?

When Trump first came out with that crazy stuff about "they're not sending their best people," early in his campaign, he was like a guy at the bar. He was charming in his own way, he has a kind of personal rhythm that is grammatically awkward but likeable in a kitchen-table sort of way. He interrupts a sentence to throw in an unrelated thought, and then gets off-topic, and that is kind of what we do when we have a personal conversation. I tell you what happened to me, you tell me what happened to you, we joke about it and move on to another story.

But that doesn't mean that you and I are qualified to run a country.

The federal government, last I heard, has a million employees. That's a big company. It's got a lot of departments with a lot of complex problems in every department, changing every day. The country has a vision and a mission, and every big decision must be weighed against those, and sometimes hundreds of advisors are consulted before an important policy is implemented. The government has customers from all regions, all income categories, all traditions, and you can't make them all happy but with good leadership you can manage your compromises so everyone gets what they need.

It has nothing to do with having a beer. It has nothing to do with kitchen-table talk.

Journalists love to talk about "Dems in disarray" and "Biden in trouble," by which they always mean his popularity ratings are low, not that he has done a bad job. They yearn for a colorful, kitchen-table kind of leader who will say outrageous things, the awkward uncle who is so rude that you can't ignore him, and you just have to tell your friends later about the obnoxious comments he made at dinner. They don't sell papers when the government is run in an efficient and fair way, which is actually what the Chief Executive job is all about.

I just happened to see a sort of random comment on Twitter and I thought I'd share it.

He is doing a great job as President. No scandals, no crimes. He isn't stirring stuff up, he isn't going onto social media and TV and saying outrageous things. He wears a dark-blue suit and goes to church a lot, has surrounded himself with well-informed but not inflammatory advisors. He respects everyone, including his political opponents, and tries to work out bills that address our actual problems -- not to get even with somebody who said something critical of him, but to pass legislation that solves real social issues. It makes sense to elect this kind of leader.

A Surge in Anti-LGBT Violence

June being Pride Month, some homes on 31st Street in Baltimore displayed rainbow flags and other LGBT banners and signs. Wednesday night somebody came up and, apparently dousing the flags with gasoline, set four homes on fire, sending three people to the hospital, two in critical and one in serious condition. Two homes were completely destroyed.

A neighbor said, “We’ll double down and everybody’s gonna get Pride flags on their houses now just to show like we’re not gonna live in fear of it, but I mean, it definitely makes you a little scared. You know, you can’t just live like that.” Baltimore Sun: Three people injured in Baltimore fire; authorities investigating a burned Pride flag

But you know, you are going to "just live like that," because that's how things are now.

It was big news this week when more than thirty Patriot Front members were arrested in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The group was planning to join with other nazi groups to beat people and break up a Pride Festival there. These are the people who organized the Charlottesville Unite the Right event in 2017, and it appears they intended extreme violence this time. Luckily the attack was broken up by police, and reports on social media suggest that the festival was a great success, the biggest crowd they'd ever had, with music, bubble machines for the kids, dancing in the park.

Drag queen story hours have been a big hit at libraries across the country, which you just know has been driving the nutty ones crazy. Why should any American be allowed to dress in nontraditional clothing and yet act like a decent human being? Last Saturday the Proud Boys stormed a Drag Queen Story Hour in San Larenzo, California, disrupting the event. I am trying to imagine how you brag about something like that later: me 'n the guys went down and hollered a bunch of cusswords at kids listening to stories and some guys in dresses at the library. It just doesn't sound that macho, y'know what I mean?

Somebody suggested that it would have been smarter for them to host a Proud Boys story hour. Man, I bet parents would love to bring their kids to that.

The oldest gay bar in Detroit burned down Tuesday, and the Fire Department is calling it a total loss.

Nearly 240 anti-LGBTQ bills filed in 2022 so far, most of them targeting trans people

If we took two steps forward, this seems to be time for one step back, as hate comes out of hiding across the country. We will have to hold the line to keep from losing more ground.

We in Montgomery County were, ironically, among the first communities to be hit by this wave of anti-gay and anti-transgender bigotry. A small group of rightwing activists tried to defeat a sex-ed curriculum that mentioned sexual orientation and gender identity, and then they tried to force a referendum on trans civil rights. This county is deeply blue, I think we had one Republican school board member fifteen years ago. Yet a group of about ten core members and maybe as many as fifty part-time supporters -- in a county of one million people -- generated national news and almost succeeded at imposing their ignorant opinions on the rest of us.

I am not sure why these sexual-identity issues set them off. Well, I have my theories. Somehow the idea that a gay person would live their life without shame makes these nuts violently angry. I used to think it was a cheap shot to suggest that these haters have personal ambivalence about their own sexual feelings, but that is definitely part of it. So many of the worst ones have fallen out of the closet.

Conservatism is the defiance of hypocrisy. You express some principles and behave exactly the opposite of them, then shrug off the contradiction.

The fact is, the Trump presidency and rise of the America First nazi movement have put gay and trans people in actual physical danger. The crazy fascists are getting more and more violent, and there is no end in sight. Conservatives cannot understand the concept of minding your own business when someone is different from yourself. They have been packing the courts with conservative judges, packing the election boards with nutty cheaters, and even though there are not very many of them we still face a steep uphill battle just to maintain our American democracy and our freedom.

Notes After Uvalde

I have a few observations after the Uvalde mass killing of nineteen children and two teachers.

First a preface: law enforcement is a necessary function in a complex society. Cops are just people with a job, like anybody else, there is nothing unusually good or bad about them as individuals and I believe most take the job in hopes of making the world a better place. It is time to look critically at the characteristics of the role we have assigned them, the norms they have adopted, how these things serve the function of law enforcement, and how they don't.

Everybody knows this uncomfortable fact: the police in Uvalde this month, as well as at Parkland in 2018, and other violent incidents, were cowards. They stood around and let murderers kill helpless children at will and then lied, and continue to lie, about it. We expect the police to punch down at the weak -- it's a professional norm -- but when we really need them in a violent situation, their priority is their own safety.

If you or I were sitting at home watching TV and we heard someone murdering children outside, we would do something. It's not our job, it's our obligation as human beings. In Uvalde, more than a dozen policemen stood outside the door for an hour and listened to the slaughter of children without intervening.

Almost everything the police in Uvalde have said about the mass murder has been a lie.

I know it's politically correct to call them heroes and swoon over the risks they take, but the number of police that are killed on the job is dwarfed by the number of people they kill. Police departments often do not cooperate in keeping records of their own acts of homicide, so we don't really know the number of their victims. For instance, the twenty-one innocent victims of police inaction in Uvalde will certainly not be counted as killed by police. In 2021, 84 officers in the US died from felonious assaults, that is, somebody killed them; BLS says there are currently 665,380 Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers in the US. Records show 1,100 people were determined to have been killed by police in that same year.

The police shamelessly jack up their "killed in the line of duty" statistics with COVID deaths, which outnumber being actually killed on duty by a great margin. The pro-police National Law Enforcement Memorial and Museum database says 458 officers died in the line of duty in 2021. Reading further, we see that 381 of those were COVID deaths; they refuse to take the free, effective, universally available medicine and they get sick and die. That does not make them heroes. Approximately one one-hundredth of one percent of police officers were killed by someone in 2021.

When police use their personal judgment to stop and question "suspicious-looking" people, the result is harassment of minorities and subsequent unequal enforcement of the law. Even in deep-blue Montgomery County, the police stop Black drivers at twice the expected rate, given their frequency in the population. And trust me, it is worse in other places.

Police are paid to enforce the law, they do not prevent crime.

Law enforcement is an important role in a civil society, and we count on them as professionals to carry out their duties.

It turns out the police do not legally have to protect citizens unless they want to. The Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the police have no special duty to protect anyone. See also Washington Post: U.S. judge says law enforcement officers had no legal duty to protect Parkland students during mass shooting.

Arming the police with military equipment does not make anyone safer.

"Police-involved shooting" is a passive way to a describe an event as if it just happened on its own, with no one responsible. "A policeman was standing there and his gun went off and the bullet hit someone." When you see that wording in the news, you know the media are covering for police violence. "A police officer shot someone" is accurate and assigns agency where it belongs.

Police defenders blame "a few bad apples" without quoting the rest of that saying.

1. It is not an especially dangerous job
2. A police state is the definitive dystopia
3. They aren't "heroes" for doing what they are paid to do

A police department's version of "what happened" is self-serving and often not true. Cell-phone video has proven this many times. (Read the police report on George Floyd's death as a reminder.) The initial report in Uvalde was pure fiction. Because we as a culture accept the "myth of the hero" their reports are almost never questioned.

The fatuous relaying of police interpretations of important events by journalists allows officers to operate without scrutiny. American public life would be very different if journalists interviewed witnesses as well as quoting police statements.

A good guy with a gun is more dangerous, and no more effective, than a good guy without one.

Crime is decreasing, except for gun crime.

Mental illness is rarely involved in mass shootings, and is not the reason that the US has many many times more mass shootings -- we have more than two a day, on average -- than any other place on the planet. There were at least twelve mass shootings in the US over the recent Memorial Day weekend.

Most mass murderers are rightwing extremists.

Making teachers carry guns at school is too stupid to even argue about. It is not a serious suggestion and we don't need to waste time on it.

Violent nuts do not kill because of critical race theory.

They also do not kill people because they did not have two parents.

More Christianity in school will not reduce mass killings.

More "security" and surveillance does not prevent mass shootings.

The idea of limiting school access to one door is, again, too stupid to argue about.

After nearly every mass shooting, rightwing social media circulate a story that the murderer was transgender, often with photographs of some random person. This is never true.

Every sensible person knows that the gun situation in America is insanity.

Even Republicans and NRA members know we need to regulate access to deadly military weapons.

There is no such thing as a "lone wolf" mass murderer. This is a concept made up by the gun lobby. Every one of them got the idea somewhere. Their manifestos and social-media postings are all the same: rightwing hate, misogyny, antisemitism, racism, conspiracy theories.

Thoughts and prayers do not mean anything. We need rational policies on guns.

Fairness, kindness, and decency did not used to be partisan political issues, and should not be. Daily mass murders of totally innocent citizens is not acceptable. We should be in agreement on these things.

Enforce the Laws

Trump's rallies have always had a special moment where the crowd breaks into the chant "Lock her up! Lock her up!" Sometimes the chant erupts repeatedly, spontaneously, while Hair Furor speaks. Originally it meant they wanted to lock up Hillary Clinton, but the target is not really terribly important. It could be Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, Hunter Biden, President Biden himself; women are the preferred victims. Kamala Harris is a favorite.

This chant has a strange appeal to conservatives. It is a pure, concise icon of their belief system: we don't want to debate with liberals, we don't want to listen to their over-eddy-cated ideas, we want to throw them in prison.

The new fascist movement is almost literally peasants with pitchforks and torches storming the castle. It is not literally that because, though we have seen torches, I at least have not seen pitchforks at these rightwing events. Also, they like to attack and occupy state and federal capitol buildings, and not actually castles. But the fact is, the magas want to take direct action and punish somebody, bypassing legitimate pathways. Jail would make them happy, though they are in favor of execution of liberal leaders. Assassination, torture, whatever.

Of course the problem with that is that the US has stuff like a Constitution, laws, processes for charging people and giving them a fair trial. No matter how frustrated conservatives are with our system of government, the idea that we would imprison political rivals without a criminal conviction is deeply un-American. It runs against the most fundamental principles of our way of life. You cannot claim to support freedom and liberty and also set up gallows to execute political leaders without a trial. This logical inconsistency is obvious to any reasonable observer. But still: conservatism is the defiance of hypocrisy.

These days, the Democrats control Congress and the Presidency and have the ability on many levels to investigate and prosecute big-time criminals who are trying to break our country. These are not neighborhood burglars, these are people who grab hundreds of millions of dollars at a time from government accounts through tax evasion, subsidies, fraud, bribes, nepotism, and other kinds of corruption. They make sure tax cuts go to people who don't need them, and that ordinary people do not benefit from government programs that would make their lives better; they redirect government money to their friends and families rather than to the most qualified contractors and corporations, or to citizens in need.

We do not hear Democrats chanting "Lock them up." In fact what we see is that Democratic leaders, including district attorneys and leading Justice officials, are afraid to use legitimate government processes to enforce laws that were established with good reason, for the benefit of the people of the country.

Maybe their focus groups are telling them that it would "look bad" to prosecute criminals who belong to the Republican Party. Maybe it would "look political." And so we have people like Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, Donald Trump and his family members and his former Cabinet members and advisors, all of them who ripped off the American people throughout the Trump years and now are running around promoting anti-American ideas and candidates who will implement them. We have people with pending sex charges, corruption charges, frauds and grifters, seditionists and liars out on the streets, enriching themselves while they do their best to try to bring our country to its knees.

The media direct our attention to the petty things, and we fall for it. "Illegal immigrants" are not getting all the baby formula. A Black women's lacrosse team is not smuggling drugs. Shooting Black guys for cracked tail-lights does not make us safer. Our media and our attention focus on petty incidents while billionaires and millionaires, preachers and politicians and gigantic corporations are robbing us blind. Why does the US have the worst technology in the developed world? Why do we have the worst healthcare? We pay our taxes and where does that money go? It goes to fund the arms industry and it goes into the pockets of billionaires and corporations with armies of lobbyists.

Joe Biden has a lot of good ideas, programs that really do make life better for people. He has increased employment, he nearly eliminated child poverty, wages are up and crime is down, except for gun crime. He is handling the situation in Ukraine skillfully. But his approval ratings are dragging the bottom. And why is that? It's because he is coddling criminals. Our leaders, from the top down, are too cowardly to enforce the law. People know the insurrectionists must be stopped, but our leaders won't stop them.

It is not enough to provide good services to the people, especially when you have preachers, posers, and politicians up and down the country telling people that the Democrats are communists and pedophiles. Our elected leaders need to defend our values and our country, aggressively and strongly.

We had an attempted coup, once the greatest country on the planet and now we are like some little dictatorship somewhere, with maga rednecks smearing their poop on the walls of our Capitol while Congress crouches behind blockaded doors. A violent insurrection, organized and directed by the president and his inner circle. Some of the suckers and minor-league sociopaths who went into the Capitol are getting jail sentences, while all the ringleaders -- all of them -- run around free, undermining our way of life. Congress and the Justice Department are afraid to disturb them -- oh, you don't want to obey a subpoena, no prob man, sorry to bother you. The corrupt rich and powerful are becoming exponentially more rich and powerful and our elected leaders are afraid to do anything about it.

The Constitution was carefully written to support robust government in the face of political abuse. Our government was designed to survive even when some citizens have criminal intentions. The justice system was set up to support and defend an orderly, secure, lawful way of life, and it is time to use it as it was intended. Maybe some defendants will be found not-guilty, fine. Try them. Put the evidence on the table. Bring consequences.

The recently leaked Supreme Court opinion regarding abortion, once it is issued, opens the door for the courts and the federal government to take away a lot of rights besides the right to manage your own reproduction. I do not personally understand the motives of people who want to take away American citizens' rights, but tighten your seatbelts, 'cause here we go. The rightwing Supreme Court is delivering the totalitarian state that the Republican Party dreams of. They are starting with abortion and you can expect your rights to drop like flies after this.

You will not get your freedom back once the unprosecuted criminals have had their way with our country. We need to enforce laws, from the Hatch Act, bribery, and emoluments, and up to fraud and tax evasion to foreign-agent violations, to perjury and conspiracy and sedition, to protect the system that makes lawful civilized life possible in the first place. But the media and government leaders are afraid of "how it would look."

Gun Crime

Americans believe that crime is increasing, out of control. People in the middle of the country believe that the coastal cities are literally on fire, with looting and rioting and robbing and raping going on everywhere you look. They're afraid to come here. Every night the news goes on and on about escalating crime, and people believe it.

But the odd fact is that crime has been declining, even in the cities, for the past couple of decades. The country is safer than it ever was. Of course we can blame the media for this misinformation, and in particular we can blame their habit of going to the police for their facts. Police spokesmen have their own point of view, they want funding for the department and they want job security for officers and you can't blame them for that. But the result is not necessarily an objectively accurate narrative assessment of crime in the US, you might say.

On the other hand, one kind of crime is increasing. If this category gets recognized at all, it is typically called "violent crime." It includes homicides and felony assaults. Like, after a guy shot up the Van Ness neighborhood last week, just across the line from our little county, the Washington Post had this information in their news story:

[D.C. Police Chief Robert J. Contee III] noted that on Friday and Saturday, police responded to a total of 10 shooting incidents with 15 victims, including a shooting of a man in a wheelchair and the shootings of three people in Brightwood Park. Both attacks occurred as police were in the midst of tracking down the sniper, evacuating buildings and securing the area around Van Ness.

Also over that 48-hour period, a construction worker directing traffic was shot by a person on a ride-share bicycle who was upset with delays, and a man was fatally shot and stabbed during an argument at a birthday party. On Monday, as the mayor’s briefing was wrapping up, a person was fatally shot in Northeast Washington.

Police said they have seized 969 illegal guns in the District this year, a 50 percent increase from this point in 2021.

School was in sniper’s ‘crosshairs,’ but link is unclear, D.C. chief says

That's a lot of violent crime. But let's give it a more accurate name: gun crime. These are all incidents where someone shot someone with a gun. These deadly crimes might have been fistfights or shouting matches, except somebody had a gun.

Gun control has become one of those things that politicians can hardly talk about, because the rightwing noise machine will drown them out. Remember, "Obama's gonna take our guns away?" Whatever happened with that? They hated him because he was going to take their guns away, which he never mentioned and never tried to do. He should have, but the issue is simply too controversial to touch, even for a skilled negotiator like President Obama.

If you try to peel away the layers, you conclude that the problem is too complicated to solve. And yet, the Unites States is the only country on the planet that has 1.this kind of belief that guns are sacrosanct, and 2.this kind of murder rate. The problem is not complicated; everybody else has figured it out. Somebody just has to do something.

New York's subways had a mass shooter a couple of weeks ago, guy shot ten people and a bunch more were injured in the crowd scene. Good guys with guns did not prevent the crime, or interrupt it. The subway system is swarming with cops -- last January the mayor announced a plan to have uniformed police on every platform in the whole system. There were cops all over the place when the shooter caused havoc and then got off the train, exited the station, and wandered around the city until he phoned in his own location for them to come arrest him. Police did not stop him or catch him, even though the NYPD's budget is more than ten billion dollars.

In other words, you cannot solve the gun problem by increasing the number of armed policemen. That sort of escalation does not work for one simple reason, which is that the "bad guy with a gun" always has the advantage of surprise. You could have one cop for every citizen, trailing them around, watching their every move, and still a citizen could grab his gun and shoot somebody before the cop could respond. Sorry, but that's the truth. Constant police surveillance is not the solution. Also, I don't know why anybody would even want to live like that.

The solution is to do what every other civilized country does: control access to guns. Yep, take 'em away. Melt 'em down. Use the metal in the supply chain. Nobody needs an AR-15 in their house. Nobody needs magazine clips with unlimited capacity. People with arrest records for violent crimes can do enough damage with their fists, they don't need the power of bullets when they lose their self-control. There ought to be some training for gun owners, some screening, periodic testing. Other countries do it, we can do it.

People around the world look at American gun violence and say, "That is crazy." And any reasonable person has to agree, this is crazy. Guns do not make anyone safer, they only make everyone less safe. And yet there is no serious movement to do anything about the problem.

It's as if there were a religious taboo on this subject, we are not culturally permitted to mention it. The Second Amendment is, for one thing, not grammatically clear, and for another, it was written during a time when "arms" were primitive compared to what Joe Shmoe can get now. Guns have a place, hunting is a worthwhile thing to do, and a pistol might make you feel safer in your house. But ... back to the guy last week at Van Ness, from the same Post piece:

Raymond Spencer had six firearms in the apartment on Van Ness Street, including three fully automatic rifles, the chief said at a news conference Monday. He said police found thousands more rounds of ammunition inside another residence in Fairfax County, Va., and parts to assemble three additional firearms.

Now come on, you know this is crazy. It's time for reasonable people to speak common sense about this topic and solve this uniquely American problem.

The New "Grooming" Lie

This new "grooming" thing is weird and scary. The roots of hypocrisy run insanely deep on this one, and I just hope that ordinary people have some lick o' sense and can tell when the TV personalities, preachers, and politicians have gone too far.

The Washington Post explains, on this morning's front page:

In the charged debate over what and how children should learn about sexual orientation and gender identity, some mainstream Republicans are tagging those who defend such lessons as “groomers,” claiming that proponents of such teaching want children primed for sexual abuse.

Further, "some mainstream Republicans" are using the same slanderous concept to slime old-school Republicans who do not take the new fascism far enough.

Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory that said that prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and her inner circle of advisors, were conducting some sort of child-trafficking sex ring. It was bizarre theory that saw secret pedophile code-words hidden in emails and secret messages implied in business logos, and somehow it came down to a punk-rock pizza place, just outside our little county, a place with artichoke pizzas and ping-pong tables, a place you took the family, where the team would celebrate a win. These nuts were sure that Hillary and her people had babies in the basement of the pizza place and were killing them and sumpn sumpn sex stuff.

QAnon continued that theory and expanded on it, where Donald Trump was going to secretly lock up all the child-molesting Democrats and purge the world of this cabal of powerful pedophiles. This is crazy stuff, yet conservatives are consumed by fantasies about pedophilia.

I was going to share a list of prominent Republicans arrested for child molesting and child pornography, but the list had almost 300 names on it and was just too much to post here. Oh, one of the names on the list was not a pedophile but was having sex with a mule, which ... how do you get caught doing that? Their latest thing is for Republicans to promote state bills dropping the age requirement for marriage, so adult men can marry children. Real pedophilia is an actual problem for conservatives. Trying to turn the tables on liberals is a little, uh, obvious, and it is hard to tell whether rank-and-file conservatives buy this stuff but history suggests that a lot of them will.

What we today call "conservatism" can almost be defined as the defiance of hypocrisy. Doing what they accuse others of is their calling-card. Liberals are criticized when they are inconsistent; it would be too tiring to treat Republicans the same way.

Now these people have started accusing liberals of "grooming" children for sex, by teaching them about sexual orientation and gender identity in middle-school and high school sex-ed classes.

It is serious to accuse someone of child molesting. It is irresponsible to make those accusations with no evidence, sometimes accusing blanket groups of people of sexually molesting children, again without a grain of substance. This is not a matter of differences of opinion. This kind of lie is intended to make Republican voters despise and hate Democrats, to think of them as devious sexual predators, to see them as legitimate targets of violence.

It is frankly depressing. These people will say anything, they really don't care if it's true or not. There are gay people, for real, and there are transgender people. It may be hard for Republican voters to understand, but it is an objective fact of the real world. Gay and trans people exist, and have since the beginning of time, in all societies. Everybody is not the same, and some of the differences fall on dimensions having to do with romantic attraction and gender.

Teaching students about this does two important things. First, for that minority of students who are becoming aware that their sexual orientation or their gender identity is not the same as most of the other kids, it gives them a way of understanding themselves, and learning they are not alone. They learn what it's called, and they can read and learn more if they want. This is much better than sitting there feeling like the only freak in the universe who has ever felt this way.

The second thing is that it teaches the heterosexual, cisgender majority of students that variations in orientation and identity are a normal kind of diversity. Everybody's different, and some people are different in these ways. It isn't something they chose, it's just how some people are, and they can still make good friends and colleagues, just like everybody else. Making fun of them only makes you look ignorant, like the Congresswoman who said, "[gay Cabinet member] Pete Buttigieg can take his electric vehicles and his bicycle, and he and his husband can stay out of our girls' bathrooms." A small amount of education could have prevented that embarrassment.

The thing is, these are some deluded people. We see them trying to end American democracy, they even tried to disrupt traffic on the Beltway hee-hee-haw-haw-haw. They are obviously not real smart about thinking things through, and they are prone to behaving impulsively on the basis of unfounded rumors.

So when rightwing TV pundits and politicians and preachers start saying that liberals are grooming children, as if we were all child molesters, they are putting innocent people in danger. You don't reason with pedophiles, jail is not good enough for them, when Bubba finds out somebody "likes kids" he feels violence, even murder, is appropriate.

It is important to teach about human sexuality. Our society is sexually twisted into knots, there are so many things -- untested rape kits, blocked investigations, churches moving priests around, pay disparities, this would be another long list -- and a little objective reality can only help. Yes, you learn about sperm and Fallopian tubes, and you learn that your armpits will stink and your pubic hair will grow, and you learn that most teenagers will be attracted to the opposite sex but some will not, and some small number of people have been assigned the wrong sex at birth, and they may need to begin to correct the problem before puberty changes their bodies in permanent ways. It doesn't hurt anybody to take a few days of class time to go over these topics. It does not encourage anybody to turn gay or decide to change their gender. And it has nothing to do with cultivating a generation of sexual victims for perverted liberals. These are just facts about human beings, and we all make better choices when we are better informed.

The Right to Make Sense

There's a lot going on these days but you might have noticed that Republicans have become very concerned about transgender people. They are passing laws regulating medical attention for trans people, keeping transgender people out of athletics, stopping any mention of trans topics in school; Texas passed a law saying that parents of a trans child can be convicted of felony child abuse, and other states are trying to pass similar laws. They want neighbors, schoolteachers, doctors to report parents so they can be charged with the crime of having a transgender family member.

It's a political strategy that works for Republicans. In real life, nobody is actually upset by someone's gender identity. Trans people are just people, you might do a double-take and then it doesn't matter. It literally does not hurt anything, does not affect anybody's life in any way except for the one person, who is pursuing happiness just like anybody.

So here's the game -- and conservatives do this over and over, we saw them try it here in our little county a few years ago. Out of nowhere, they start complaining about something that is not a problem -- on the topic of gender identity two favorite starter issues are bathrooms and sports, because they can bring these up as "what-ifs" without anything actually happening. Some preacher or lawyer starts complaining to the press and of course the press is happy to write about "the issue." If a preacher explains that something is sinful or even evil, many people just don't know any better, and believe what they are told. Next thing you know they are passing laws making life miserable for some citizens who have not hurt anything or anybody.

If you are comfortable with your birth gender then it can be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what it would be like to have people treating you like someone you are not. You cannot blame people who don't get it, if they have not had a trans friend or family member or given it much thought. It "seems" easy, penises on this side, vaginas on that side, and most of the time that's how it works, but not always, and it can be hard to explain. On the other hand it is not hard to accept, either. There have always been trans people and somehow society managed to function. It does not affect anybody, and it should be nobody's business.

As conservatives start obsessing loudly over this, somebody has to come out and say, wait a minute, this isn't even a problem, and that will be liberals. And next thing you know, liberals are using unfamiliar words like "nonbinary" and giving press conferences about rights for trans people, and then the conservatives will claim liberals are "promoting" or pushing something that seems weird to unschooled countryfolk. These days they are saying that liberals are "grooming" young people for some kind of sexual exploitation, as if there was no other explanation for treating people fairly. Of course in the meantime they have passed a bunch of hateful laws, taking away the rights of transgender people, who are not a big part of the voting population and can't win in a majority-rules system.

People out there reading the newspaper don't know any better, they don't know what's going on. Millions of conservatives actually believe that liberals are literally pedophiles. It's not just that one pizza place. Fox News is telling them that Democrats are grooming children for secret liberal child-orgies, and people who don't know any better believe it.

This is absurd but you can't ignore it, you have to fight for the right to make sense in this crazy country. This is not something that will correct itself automatically, people will only get dumber and dumber if we do not stand up to this nonsense.

Expecting a Fascist Win

A lot of people these days feel like the fascists are going to win. There aren't very many of them and it is not clear what they stand for, but they are committed, they are loud, they cheat behind the scenes as well as out in the open, and they have the support of the media. Their political positions are so dumb that it seems like a waste of time to even argue with them, and so they keep claiming new ground. They're banning books, censoring history lessons, they fight -- often violently -- in favor of perpetuating the covid pandemic, they support police brutality and vigilante violence. Apparently white nationalist fascism "makes sense" to some people. But their points are so ... not-rigorous ... that it is impossible to debate or negotiate with them.

The startling thing is that it's so asymmetrical. You've got Republicans being investigated for human trafficking and large-scale sexual abuse, multimillion-dollar financial crimes, working secretly for foreign governments, and yet the media will focus on how wasteful and hypocritical it is for Joe Biden to fly home to Delaware for the weekends. They have literally criticized him for going to church. Biden's biggest scandal is the unproven assertion that his son's laptop had bad stuff on it, personal sex videos and files from his druggie days. Not even Joe Biden's own laptop, his adult son's. And the allegation is almost certainly false. On one hand, we have flagrant criminals hoping the next election will save them from going to prison for real crimes. On the other hand, we have a religious family man with a hint of a stutter and some policies that our country has long needed, as we slip farther behind the rest of the developed world in almost everything except incarceration, infant mortality, gun violence, and covid deaths.

The Republican Party has stopped having a platform. They can't say what it is they want to do for our country. They dropped the idea of proposing policies for the last election and won't have anything next time, either. Also, for the next Presidential election they have already said they're not going to debate. Because, honestly, it doesn't matter what they'd say. They are against something, and that's all it takes, fear and anger. The Democrat will propose a problem solution and the Republican will say, "I'm against it," and that's their position. That's the debate, so why bother? They do not have solutions to any problems, only complaints, and you don't need to commit yourself to a platform or debate anybody for that.

It won't matter that the GOP does not stand for anything. White people are mad after years of progress by minorities and they are blaming everything on inclusive liberal politicians. People don't know what Biden has done for them, because the media are not saying anything; the public is vaguely aware that there was a "spending bill," because, everybody knows, spending is what Democrats do. But nobody knows what was in the last bill, or the next one.

This week Newt Gingrich said the January 6 commission should go to jail. You remember the "Lock Her Up" chants that Trump's followers so enjoyed. You might remember when the federal government killed Michael Reinoehl, Trump said, "This guy was a violent criminal, and the US marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this." Rand Paul says that Anthony Fauci deserves five years in prison. In the coming America, this is how it will be. They won't bother with arresting people and fluffy stuff like trials; troublesome political rivals will get what they deserve, administered by government goons and rightwing hit-men, like in a bad movie.

These are people with no understanding and no respect for the Constitution and the justice system we have in place. Violence replaces lawfulness, as one group ascends to unearned dominance over all others in the country. And it is hard to oppose them when their message is this dumb. Joe Biden is not a communist, or even a progressive, he is a mainstream Democrat who holds popular views on most things. Fauci is not a sadistic monster and big fat liar. Vaccination does not kill you or make you turn socialist or shrivel your testicles and masks do not infringe on your personal expression. Russia should not be attacking Ukraine, and refugees and homeless people need help, not more punishment. Yes, there is racism; various groups in the US are treated unfairly. The earth really is getting warmer, there is a reason for the fires and the huge storms. The 2020 election was fair and Joe Biden won it. It is tedious to argue about these things. They are not real controversies, they are made-up issues that don't make sense, have no evidence to support them, and reasonable people really don't want to have to spend their time talking about this.

These aren't things worth arguing about, and it's hard to get regular intelligent people engaged with these topics when there are real problems that need solving now. So while Democrats are trying to make things better, conservatives are threatening violence over nutty non-issues. They are changing the rules for voting, moving district boundaries, putting their own people in charge of monitoring elections, putting judges in place, school board members. You can't vote them out of office if they have twisted the voting laws so they can win with a minority. Unless you have a better idea.

Antifa

I'll tell you something that bugs me: antifa.

In an attempt to head off the violence expected the following day, on January 5th, 2020, President Trump instructed the Secretary of State to consider adding Antifa to a list of “aliens who are members of an identified criminal organization” within the country’s Foreign Affairs Manual. A 2019 Senate bill called for "the groups and organizations acting under the banner of Antifa to be designated as domestic terrorist organizations." A bill was introduced in the House of Representatives this year, "calling for the designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization."

The day before the Capitol insurrection, the President issued a statement:

Pundits now theorize that the President actually believed that an organization called "antifa" existed, and he was preparing to have the National Guard protect the nice "pro-Trump people," swooping down on antifa when they tried to disrupt his coup. Then Trump could declare martial law and cancel the certification of the election results. The non-appearance of antifa spoiled the plan.

Fox news and other media went ahead with their part and reported that antifa was actually responsible for the January 6th attack on the Capitol. (Dr. David Duess has even published a 212-page Complete List Of Antifa Members In Capitol Building Riot -- one reviewer wrote, "A thorough and well vetted list of AntiFa terrorists caught trying to undermine the Democracy of this great country of ours. Every patriot should read and try to grasp the magnitude of this book") All the people arrested so far in conjuction with the January 6th attack have been Trumpers.

In small towns across America, warnings have gone out that antifa was planning to attack, and patriotic locals would go downtown with their guns and gimme caps, and in every case antifa saw the turnout and went chicken, didn't even show up.

I'm old enough to remember protesting the Vietnam War. They called us, sensibly enough, "anti-war protesters." There were usually some pro-war protesters as well but not enough to give them a name, maybe "hard-hats" because a lot of them were construction workers. Anti-war protesters were not usually very well organized; if you had somebody with a hammer and some tacks they could put up posters and everybody would show up for the demonstration. You didn't join anything, you just went to express yourself with millions of other Americans.

There were some well-organized civil rights groups in the mid-twentieth-century with names, like the NAACP or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that had members and leaders. You knew if you were in it or not, there were offices and membership lists and roles in the organization. There were also groups like the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers, who took a different approach but again, you were either a Black Panther or you weren't. You might agree with them and go to their events. but that didn't make you a Black Panther.

On the other side you had groups like the Ku Klux Klan, fighting against racial equality. There were lots of these groups, the point being that on both sides there were real organiztions, with members, and headquarters, and leaders. There were also lots of people who sympathized but did not wear the hood and gown, they might even show up for the violence but you were either in the KKK or not in it.

During the Iraq War I marched in some protests in DC that had two or three hundred thousand people in them, massive parades, miles long. They called anti-war protesters "anti-war protesters," or, maybe "liberals," or if you wanted to be inflammatory you could call them "lefties," but that would not appear in a news story. Most people weren't members of any group, they just opposed the war and protested it.

Donald Trump rose to power on a movement that is correctly described as fascist. It is an authoritarian white supremacist movement that seeks preference and power for a certain segment of the population. They don't like Black people or uppity women or gay and transgender people. Also don't like Jews, Muslims, atheists, or foreigners. Or liberals. They believe that laws apply to other people and not to themselves. This group of people doesn't really have a name because they are used to being the default American. Every television show was about them. They starred in every movie, played every sport, they ran every big company and got all the good jobs there. If you ask them what group they belong to, they will say "we're normal Americans," because as far as they know everyone is just like them, or should go back to where they came from. There was a suggestion to label them "Deplorables" but they also run the newspapers, and that did not stick.

Trump's followers walk around with heavy guns, intimidating people. They start fights on airplanes and in grocery stores when they are told to wear a mask during the pandemic. Groups of them go into cities and vandalize them, shoot people with paint guns or bear spray, start fights with residents. They display a lot of patriotic American symbols as a way of asserting that this country belongs to them and they don't want to share it -- they even refer to one another as "patriots." These people are fascists, even if they are too dumb to know what the word means. Their beliefs coincide with a way of thought that is generally considered by decent people to be an evil force that should be stopped. My father, for one, took a load of shrapnel and nearly lost his life over Europe opposing fascists. Many Americans died for that cause, and we grew up proud that we stopped Hitler.

It turns out there are many millions of people in the country who do not agree with our fascists, and sometimes they come out to protest the increase of racism and authoritarianism in the country today. It would be reasonable to call these people "anti-fascists." Most of them do not belong to any organization, they just have common sense and some knowledge of history.

A rightwing agitator/writer named Andy Ng, in the Pacific Northwest, is most directly responsible for popularizing the myth of antifa. He uses the term for any liberal person or group who challenges the fascist crush for power. He has almost single-handedly created the image, now a cliche on Fox and other Republican media, of antifa rioting, looting, starting fires. He regularly claims to be a victim himself of the awful violence, though nobody ever sees it happen.

Rightwing media took the ball and ran with it, further mythologizing antifa as a well-funded and highly organized group. It is believed by many conservatives that George Soros himself, who in reality has nothing to do with it, is sending paychecks to protesters for marching in the streets, committing violent acts, vandalizing the cities. Rightwing media show video of street violence and claim that it is "antifa," and millions of ignorant Americans think that antifa members use their Soroschecks to loot and vandalize cities and attack "normal Americans" on the street. Out in the flyover states they believe that coastal cities are too violent to visit, because of antifa looting and violence.

Antifa is said to dress in black, that's how you know it's them, unless it is a rightwinger in disguise. Antifa are said to be extremely violent and highly organized and they take orders from a secret cabal of ... nobody really knows. Communist China, maybe. Atheists? Somebody bad, that's all we know.

So listen, have you ever seen an antifa website? Have you ever seen an antifa office building? Have you ever met anyone who said they were a member of antifa? Have you ever received a fund-raising email or text message or robo-call from antifa? Have you ever seen antifa supporting a political candidate, or calling for a boycott, or carrying a banner in a march? Have you ever seen a reporter go undercover into an antifa bunker, compound, or training exercise? Has any TV show ever had commentary by an antifa pundit, or even quoted an antifa official or representative? Have you ever seen an antifa yard-sign, flag, "antifa" on a cap, in a song? Antifa grafitti? Have the police ever busted an antifa arsenal, or actual pile of bricks or concrete milkshakes (hee hee) prepared by antifa? Can you name any real person you have ever heard of, in the news, on TV, anywhere, who said they are a member of antifa?

Does that not seem a little strange to you? The Republicans literally wanted to declare antifa a terrorist organization, but ... what organization? You can read all the organization's beliefs and official positions on their website: antifa.org.

Antifa is the creation of rightwing media. Everything you have heard -- dress in black, looting, attacking conservatives -- is fiction. There is no such group. Oh somebody might loot after the police murder someone, maybe even start a fire, there are counterprotesters at Nazi rallies, but calling them "antifa" is simply made-up. Antifa, or anti-fascist, means somebody who opposes fascism, which should be all of us. It's not an organization, not a club, cult, party. Just like we were anti-war protesters, these are anti-fascism protesters, people who oppose the authoritarian takeover of our constitutional democracy.

Responsible citizens should be wary of the way that our media are able to create the myth of such an organization and drill it into the public's collective brain, and responsible citizens should ask themselves why the media are doing this, what they get out of it, and what it means for our future as a country.