Yesterday, I got to thinking that a House of Representatives with no Speaker, at a time when we have no budget, and have our foreign policy focused on the Middle East shooting war, is pretty damned convenient for Russia. Ukraine is holding strong so far, but there’s going to come a point when it will need resources badly. Is anyone investigating, or contemplating investigating, Matt Gaetz for being a Russian agent? Yes, I know he’s a pedophile and is himself intellectually and emotionally an adolescent (and will probably never grow up.) But that doesn’t mean he can’t be useful to Russia. Au contraire. See the Food for Thought below.
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The Root – What In The Actual Hell: CVS Abortion Med Mixup Led To Black Woman’s IVF Termination
Quote – [Timika] Thomas and her husband had trouble getting pregnant and after two ectopic pregnancies, Thomas had to have her fallopian tubes removed. Even though their insurance didn’t cover IVF, they decided to do it and pay out of pocket anyway. Thomas’ doctor prescribed a vaginal suppository to replace the injections required to jumpstart her hormones. After taking two of her required doses, she immediately knew something was wrong…. “They just killed my baby. Both my babies, because I transferred two embryos,” [Thomas said.] Click through for story. This would be unacceptable, no matter how the pregnancy occurred, but for an IVF pregnancy it’s exponentially worse. IVF is expensive, so expensive that it’s a last resort among fertility treatmernts. It often doesn’t “take” for multiple attempts. The best analogy I can come up with is – one is like you studued and worked hard, took the SAT or whateve they are using, sweat blood over your essay, and got turned down. the other is like you decided when you were five you wanted to go to a particular college and started saving monet from your allowance and odd jobs. You applied in your seniot year of high school and wewre turned down. You alloied in the first year after graduation and were turned down again. the second and third year after graduation you applied again and were turned down both times. Finally, in the fourth year after graduation, you applied and were accepted. Two days before freshman orientation the college burned down.
PolitiZoom – Anti-WOKE: Even Your Name Can Get Book Banned
Quote – Imagine if you will having had a successful career as a children’s book author. Your work has been widely acclaimed, published in a dozen languages and you’ve won lots of awards. Your work includes several series including a pair of them about siblings – one from the perspective of a little girl named Stella and the other from her little brother named Sam. The Stella series which ran from 1999 to the last book about Stella and Sam building a doghouse was published in 2013. including one about the adventures of a little girl named Stella and her brother…. Does the book delve into topics that might, only might mind you raise “content” questions about whether topics like human sexuality or race relations or religion are “age appropriate?” Nope, as I’ve stated it’s about a pair of siblings building a dog house. So by now you’re wondering why the hell this book wound up on a “we’ve got to BAN these books from the library” list in the first place. The author’s name is Mary-Louise GAY. Click through for article. Yes, compared to the first short take, this is small potatoes indeed. But it still hurts people. And the people most harmed are among the most vulnerable.
Yesterday, I got the email that my ballot is in the mail to me. So I dropped what I was doing and reviewed the last three (out of 11) measures I hadn’t already revieed, and marked my cheat sheet Then I started on the county and local measures, and discovered part of the flyer was missing (it hadn’t been stapled.) I don’t live inside any city limits, but I do live in a school district (obviously) and two special districts – water/sewer and fire. I think the rest of the flyer may be in the car, and I will check when I get a chance, but in the meantime I was able to find a sample ballot on the web for my county, and none of those districts have any measures on the ballot. So I think I’m ready.
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The Bulwark – The Munich Model for Trump’s National Security Extortion
Quote – And even if these documents fail to work as a get out of jail free card, Trump has another card to play. He could call on his waiting army of supporters to threaten more violence on the public order. He has done this—and carried out such a threat—before. And he has already said, plainly, that he might do so again. Those in charge of prosecuting the former president should keep in mind history’s clearest example of everything wrong with appeasing a narcissist: the calamity of Munich. Click through for full op-ed. I am beginning to think that, or at least to wonder whether, the delay in indicting is due in whole or part to exactly this – and wanting to gat defense mechanisms in place in advance to miniize the destruction. And that the presebce of MAGAts in police forces, national guards and other agencies complicates the effort, in part by making secrecy dauntingly difficult. It’s not as if we have’t see agencie formed for our protection include individuals bent on destruction.
Letters fron an American – October 15, 2022
Quote – Kinzinger’s point was that Trump clearly knew he was leaving office because he was deliberately trying to create chaos for his successor. When he abruptly pulled the U.S. out of northern Syria in October 2019, he abandoned our Kurdish allies, forcing more than 160,000 Syrians from their homes and making them victims of extraordinary violence. The Pentagon considered Trump’s November 11 instructions “a rogue order,” since they had not gone through any of the appropriate channels, and disregarded them. Click through for full letter. There is a great deal more analysis. I picked this quote to demonstrate that complete and total obedience in the military is neither desirable nor expected. This example demonstrates how not obeying an order which is not lawful is supposed to work – and does work more often than you might think.
Yesterday, I managed to get in a grocery order. It came within the first ten minutes of the two-hour window, and I had it all put away before that window was half over. No substitutions, and only two things missing – one I had ordered as an afterthought just because the website had it (they so often don’t), and the other was one flavor of something I had ordered nine flavors of. Eight out of nine is even better than two out of three. So that’s all good. I think I’ll throw in Robert Reich’s latest caption contest above the TC cartoon, because the winner, Harry Sanderford, must have worked so hard to get it just right.
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The New Yorker – Donald Trump, January 6th, and the Elusive Search for Accountability
Quote – So did any of the committee’s work matter? When the January 6th hearings began, on June 9th, Trump’s average approval rating in the polls was 41.9 per cent, and his average disapproval rating was 53.5 per cent, according to FiveThirtyEight. As the hearings ended, Trump’s average approval rating stood at 40.4 per cent. All that damning evidence, and the polls were basically unchanged. The straight line in the former President’s approval rating is the literal representation of the crisis in American democracy. There is an essentially immovable forty per cent of the country whose loyalty to Donald Trump cannot be shaken by anything. Click through for article. Not for the Committee, but for our Deomcratic Republic – vote like your life depends on it.
ProPublica – A User’s Guide to Democracy
Quote – Sign up for a series of personalized emails in which our journalists will help you answer questions like:
What are my current representatives doing about the issues I care about?
Who’s running for office in my district?
How can I hold my representatives accountable?
How does Congress even work, exactly?
How can I safely vote during this pandemic? Click through for details. This is less an article than a signup for a newsletter. And you likely do not need it. But you may know someone who does. I was unable to put in my address (I tried two browsers), but of course, I know my district.
Yesterday, the radio opera was “The Marriage of Figaro” by Mozart. It’s been up before, so I won’t go into details. The performance was at the Paris Opera, and the cast included three pretty well-known bass baritones (one American, one Englishman, and one Italian [married to the daughter of another American one]) and pretty much no one else I had ever heard of. But no major company is ever going to put on a bad performance of this opera. It’s kind of ironic that it’s on today – something which was planned long ago – because it high;ights the position of women in a male-dominated society (that was probably unconscious) and also how class status affects everyone, but women especially (and that was definitely conscious and led to censorship.)
Of course I could not ignore SCOTUS. Both here and with the Furies I have chosen to explore “Now What?” One of today’s short takes is hopeful, but hope needs effort to come to fruition. And in one piece of good news, NATO has granted candidate status to Ukraine. President Zelenskyy thanked each nation’s leader by name and the name of the country, and also the President of the EU, on the Zoom call which notified him. Mitch (I had missed it.)
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We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse
Quote – If a fetus is a person, then a legal framework can be invented to require someone who has one living inside her to do everything in her power to protect it, including—as happened to Savita Halappanavar, in Ireland, which operated under a fetal-personhood doctrine until 2018, and to Izabela Sajbor, in Poland, where all abortion is effectively illegal—to die. No other such obligation exists anywhere in our society, which grants cops the freedom to stand by as children are murdered behind an unlocked door. Click through for full article, including optional audio. The New Yorker is right. There has never been a time in history when women have been quite as discounted as this decision ad its eventuality imposes. And the article does not even go into other rights wich are likely to disappear – and h=not just women’s rights – as subsequent decisions come to reflect the logical consequences of this one.
POGO – Accountability: The Path to Improve Government Effectiveness and the Antidote to Authoritarianism
Quote – There are six primary mechanisms that, if working properly, serve as pillars of accountability in federal government. They are: whistleblowers, who expose wrongdoing; inspectors general, who serve as independent watchdogs at each government agency; congressional oversight, which provides a check on executive power; transparency and civil society participation, which ensure that the government answers to the people; independent journalism, which investigates and exposes wrongdoing; and the equal application of the rule of law to the highest levels of government. Click through for full analysis. Progressives’ work is never done. Of course, that is true of all whose work is or includes cleaning up the messes made by others.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
A free press is essential to maintain a working semocracy. So said our founders, and I cannot disagree, nor can i trust the motives of anyone who does disagree. That would certainly not be the case with the Nobel Committee, who have awarded this year’s Peace Prize to two active (and embattled) investigative journalists. And it’s clear that the two people they hav chosen are genuine investigative journalists, committed to finding and publishing truth. The below article on them demonsrates that.
Unfortunately, we see around us far too many individuals who are not journalists, do not investigate, and have no prinviples. Alex Jones comes to mind, as does anyone on Fox News. Those people are committed, not to truth, but to deceiving those on the political right. But the left is not immune to being taken in as well. I am still seeing organizations on the left who are still taken in by Julian Assange, for example. Jefferson may have bben correct about his theory that a free press can, as a general rule, be trusted over a government, but he doesn’t appear to have realized that this is not always the case.
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Nobel Peace Prize for journalists serves as reminder that freedom of the press is under threat from strongmen and social media
Thirty-two years ago next month, I was in Germany reporting on the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event then heralded as a triumph of Western democratic liberalism and even “the end of history.”
But democracy isn’t doing so well across the globe now. Nothing underscores how far we have come from that moment of irrational exuberance than the powerful warning the Nobel Prize Committee felt compelled to issue on Oct. 8, 2021 in awarding its coveted Peace Prize to two reporters.
“They are representative for all journalists,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said in announcing the award to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, “in a world in which democracy and freedom of the press face increasingly adverse conditions.”
The honor for Muratov, the co-founder of Russia’s Novaya Gazeta, and Ressa, the CEO of the Philippine news site Rappler, is enormously important. In part that’s because of the protection that global attention may afford two journalists under imminent and relentless threat from the strongmen who run their respective countries. “The world is watching,” Reiss-Andersen pointedly noted in an interview after making the announcement.
Equally important is the larger message the committee wanted to deliver. “Without media, you cannot have a strong democracy,” Reiss-Andersen said.
Global political threats
The two laureates’ cases highlight an emergency for civil society: Muratov, editor of what the Nobel Prize Committee described as “the most independent paper in Russia today,” has seen six of his colleagues slain for their work criticizing Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Inevitably, Ressa told me recently, one of them says “no.” Maybe that will change now that she has a date in Oslo. But Ressa probably knows better than to hold her breath.
Last year, when I – a long-time journalist turned professor of journalism – helped organize a group of fellow Princeton alumni to sign a letter of support for Ressa, more than 400 responded. They included members of Congress and state legislatures and former diplomats who served presidents of both parties. One of them was former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who died several months later, making a show of solidarity with Maria Ressa one of his last public acts. This show of support is a sign of what’s at stake.
This irrational hatred of purveyors of facts knows no ideology. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s disdain for the press is at least equaled by that of leftist Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega, whose response to his critics in the media has been to, well, lock ‘em up.
Digital menace
What makes today’s threats to free expression especially insidious is that they don’t come just from the usual suspects – thuggish government censors.
They are amplified and weaponized by social media networks that claim the privilege of free speech protection while they allow themselves to be hijacked by slanderers and propagandists.
No one has done more to expose the complicity of these platforms in the attack on democracy than Ressa, a tech enthusiast who built her publication’s website to interface with Facebook and now accuses the company of endangering her own freedom with its laissez-faire approach to the slander being propagated on its site.
“Freedom of expression is full of paradoxes,” the Nobel Committee’s Reiss-Andersen observed, in an interview after awarding the Peace Prize. She made it clear that the award to Ressa and Muratov was intended to tackle those paradoxes too.
Asked why the Peace Prize went to two individual journalists – rather than to one of the press freedom organizations, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, that have represented Ressa, Muratov and so many of their endangered colleagues – Reiss-Anderson said the Nobel Committee deliberately chose working reporters.
Ressa and Muratov represent “a golden standard,” she said, of “journalism of high quality.” In other words, they are fact-finders and truth-seekers, not purveyors of clickbait.
That golden standard is increasingly endangered, in large part because of the digital revolution that shattered the business model for public service journalism.
“Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power,” Reiss-Andersen said in the prize announcement. But it is increasingly being undermined and supplanted by what’s called “content,” served up algorithmically from sources that are not transparent in ways that are designed to addict and that drive partisanship, tribalism and division.
This poses a challenge for public policymakers and the democracies they represent. How to regulate digital media and still protect free speech? How to support the labor-intensive work of journalism and still protect its independence?
Answering those questions won’t be easy. But democracy may be at a tipping point. With its recognition of two investigative journalists and the crucial – and dangerous – work they do to support democracy, the Nobel Committee has invited us to begin the debate.
Correction: This story has been updated to state the correct place, Oslo, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.
Editor’s note: Naomi Schalit, senior politics editor at The Conversation, signed the open letter “In defense of press freedom” organized by author Kathy Kiely in July 2020.
[Over 110,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world.Sign up today.]
Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, these two recipients have shown themselves trustworthy and are genuinely deserving of the Prize they are being awarded, Not all journalists, and not all who call themselves journalists, would be deserving. Journalistic ethics are not an arcane subject – an actual professional code of journalistic ethics exists, and will fit on a bookmark if both sides are used. NOt that there’s any infallible means of actually enforcing them. Perhaps we should all print ourselves out a bookmark and keep it handy to help us evaluate what we are reading.
So yesterday I attempted to get my new noise generator up and running … and coudn’t get a peep outof it. So I fired off an email to customer service. In the eantime, the travel size works just fine. As far as weather – we’ve been hotter – but our air quality is the pits. We are a large, smoke-filled room. I’m staying in, thanks.
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The Hill – Census shows US growth driven by minorities; white pop falls under 60 percent
Quote – A part of that decrease comes as a result of a new effort by the Census Bureau to measure the number of people who identify as multiracial, a population that skyrocketed over the last decade. But much of the drop in the white population, experts and demographers said, stems from an aging demographic that is producing fewer children later in life. “Whites, no matter how you count them, declined since 2010,” said William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution. Click through for exact numbers and ramifications. I consider this to be excellent news, but you know you can hear RWNJ heads exploding all over.
HuffPost – 3 Former Cops Charged In Wrongful Conviction That Sent A Man To Prison For 25 Years
Quote – It is exceedingly rare for law enforcement officials to face criminal prosecution in relation to their roles in wrongful convictions. But reviewing wrongful convictions has been a key agenda item for Krasner, one of the leaders of the progressive prosecutor movement. In 2018, his office created the Conviction Integrity Unit, which has helped secure exonerations for 22 people. At least 18 of the exonerated were Black men. The detectives charged on Friday worked on at least four of the cases that the Conviction Integrity Unit has helped overturn. Click through for details, including (trigger warning) description of initial interrogation and also the Grand Jury findings document. This is why I actually sent money to Krasner’s campaign. Not much, but some. Oh, and there’s a little video too.
Reuters – U.S. Homeland Security warns fresh COVID-19 restrictions could spark violent attacks
Quote – In an interview with CNN, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said his department considered domestic violent extremists to constitute “the greatest terrorist-related threat to our homeland.” He said the Department was seeing expressions of extremism fueled by “false narratives” and “ideologies of hate.” U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, welcomed the DHS warning but said it was “troubling that the terrorism threat increasingly is based on grievance-based violence and conspiracy theories, especially related to the election and former President Trump.” Click through. Dam right they “could” (read “will.” They won’t be happy unless they can kill all of us – but they’ll settle for any of us (and even some of themselves.) Here’s just one example.
Glenn Kirschner – Giuliani Law License Suspended is Part 1 of Accountability: SDNY Criminal Investigation is Part 2
No Dem Left Behind – Hold Them Responsible
Armageddon Update – “Voting Wrongs”
Rebel HQ – Trump Fanatic Facing Extra Jail Time After GOP Law Backfires (Karma is quite a lady.)
Randy Rainbow has a Tribute Parody for Barbra Streisand – it’s not satirical, so I’m not embedding it, but I thought I’d provide the link for those who love Randy as much as I do (and as mush as he loves Barbra)
Otter Reaction to Popcorn Maker (trilingual CC) These little maniacs are pretty cute. No, we don’t domesticate otters in the US. But this isn’t in the US and these are not US otters.
Beau – Let’s talk about Texas building the wall on its own….
Mitch (I had missed it.)
