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Besides acting as a windfall for the privatized segment of our mass incarceration system, mass deportations will offer plenty of opportunities for bribery, blackmail, denunciation, vigilantism, even enslavement.
My mother has been watching her church service online so she can hear it. That means I hear parts too. And I can see what’s happening on the desktop I’m streaming to the TV with. Different vibe today. Pastor began by inviting people to settle, to be present, to allow themselves to have their feelings. I also saw more people in attendance than is often the case. The service emphasized themes such as inclusion, compassion, and justice, the last term describing something very different from the hypocritical, moralizing, vengeful God that I despised and rejected in my youth. If I had a religious bone left in my body, this place could be one point of connection with the local community.
Timothy Snyder, “What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?,” The New Yorker, Nov. 8, 2024.
Halya Coynash, “Russians Execute Wounded Ukrainian POW amid Mounting Evidence of Russia’s Policy and Incitement to Kill,” Human Rights in Ukraine, Nov. 11, 2024.
I can’t listen to my usual podcasts about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East because the man in Palm Beach is not the president, nor does he have a coherent plan or a team picked out to propose and execute one. His track record doesn’t inspire confidence in a smooth transition either, even if there will surely be announcements for the media to go on about.
From Chicago, John [Gunther]’s editor sent a request for “more diversified” articles: “The whole paper has been loaded with anti-Hitler copy for two weeks.” The time had come, his editor insisted, “to write about something else besides the infringement of personal liberty.” The Daily News was laying itself open to the charge of bias; the news columns shouldn’t be used “for the advocacy of a cause.” . . .
According to a columnist for the Montclair Times, [H. R.] Knickerbocker had gotten himself “quite excited” about Jews and failed to depict the German perspective. His reports were “hearsay,” they were exaggerated, they could scarcely be believed. “There must be two sides to the question."
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 7.
“Oakies” by Stuart Davis, ink and black crayon on paper, captioned “In a Florida Auto Camp: ‘Don’t cry baby, popper’ll sell the spare tire, and we’ll look for a new boom somwhere else’”, in New Masses, vol. 1 (May 1926), p. 6. Repository: Library of Congress.
Media like to complain about tech monopolies. With boot-licking Bezos' #BrokenPost on its death spiral, #BrokenCNN retreating behind its wall, we’ll be left with #BrokenTimes monopoly (which harms local papers). The alternative: seedlings of independent news.
Does Putin understand the United States? I'm inclined to think not, even if he's got Trump as a person pretty well sized up.
I can’t help but think that the Kremlin once again misunderstands the situation, as they did in February 2022. Sure, the next U.S. president likes rubbing elbows with “tough guy” dictators, and the guardrails of expertise and institutions mean nothing to him; nevertheless, he won’t be completely free to do as he pleases. Think of the old guard Republicans who know what’s at stake in Europe. Enough of them were able to convince the guy in Mar-a-Lago to tell Mike Johnson to finally approve funds for Ukraine earlier this year. More importantly, even if his supporters are gung-ho America Firsters, they feel threatened by China, Putin’s close ally. If they haven’t put two and two together about the global ramifications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, their obsession with tariffs has everything to do with China, Russia’s closest supporter.
In fact, will the jumping, hooting, squealing Mr. Cybertruck’s interests in China throw a spanner in his current machinations to treat our government like an extension of his personal business interests? Mr. Orange-in-a-Suit’s supporters are expecting action on China, and their guy with the tie needs their adulation—not to mention their votes in the 2026 midterms. Besides, how open will his oil guys be to welcoming Russia back to legitimate global oil and natural gas markets while prices are low? I can’t claim to know all the variables, and I know the occupant of the White House matters a great deal. Still, as unpredictable, unscrupulous, inhumane, and disloyal as Mr. Bad Hairpiece is, he will not be operating in a vacuum free from the influence of powerful players calling in their chits.
Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that the Russian terrorist-in-chief and his security apparatus have already proven how blinkered they were about Ukraine, not to mention the unity NATO has projected. It is equally nonsensical for the Kremlin to think of NATO as a collection of American-led satellite states, pace Russia’s rabid propagandists Margarita Simonyan and Vladimir Soloviev. Why should the Kremlin understand the United States any better, if it can’t even acknowledge Ukrainian agency? And just how well would the next U.S. president respond to threats, when Putin realizes that flattery won’t get him what he wants in Ukraine.
Worried about Mr. Orange Face's Effect on The Military
How effective will the American military be after the next administration wreaks havoc on the Pentagon so that the president might have the loyalists he needs in order to command them as he sees fit, including even direct them against the American people? How much material and moral corruption will these measures lead to? May the military’s talent pool be deep and ethical enough to survive the corrupting onslaught of what’s coming. Mr. Huge Crowd’s pardoning of war criminals last time round suggests how little he understands military morale and discipline. We know what he thinks of expertise, and he paid no price for disrespecting our fallen.
Imagining Some of the Worst: Domestic Edition
I doubt I’ll have the bandwidth to follow the machinations in Washington’s halls of power, as I did during the previous administration. I got out of the habit under the current one because I was exhausted, didn’t feel threatened, and ended up living a twelve-hour drive away. And now I want to focus on the parts of my life and world where my individual agency, talents, and interests might be leveraged for things more constructive, more life-affirming.
First, though, I’ll allow myself to imagine some of the worst coming our way, just to get the darkness out of my mind and into words: the destruction of the regulatory state and of our public medical, environmental, climate, and weather research infrastructure; the violent and cruel erasure of entire communities; the enslavement, indentured servitude, or other forms of abusive exploitation of people without papers under the “protection” of unscrupulous employers, landlords, neighbors, and government agents; the creation of a new generation of Hoovervilles inhabited by people with no health insurance, no immunizations, and pensioners whose Social Security checks and Medicare benefits no longer keep them housed; preventable contagious diseases killing our children; lawfully mandated medical malpractice killing girls, women, and trans men with the bad luck to become pregnant; the loss of LGBTQ+ family, friends, and community members to exile, to self-harm, and to the violence of bullies given license by their chosen leader; the possibility that insulin might grow out of my reach; the knowledge that Medicare will never cover the costs of help with elder care while I still need such help, and while private equity funds squeeze what they can out of old folks homes, leaving them woefully understaffed, their populations vulnerable to contagious disease, inattention, and abuse.
It doesn’t have to go this way, not even under the next president. But do we think a GOP-controlled Senate will respect the filibuster the next time around, if they manage to get the House too? Isn’t that just one more convention that the next president can demand they drop? And have any of them demonstrated even the slightest willingness to defend their institution, sure in the knowledge that they are part of a separate branch of government? GOP representatives in the House are no better, as they demonstrated during the previous president’s two impeachments.
American presidents have enormous amounts of power, and now, it seems, controlling the party and the mob will give the next president even more. Or will some Republican legislators put their constituents ahead of the slash-and-burn ideologues? What groups will they decide government might have a role in protecting? Of course, the House could still flip Democratic. Some Republicans could develop a conscience. Or the ambitions, incompetence, and contradictory aims, values, and beliefs of Orange Face’s supporters could lead to lots of friendly fire and delays.
Caveat: the GOP marched in lockstep to regain the presidency, but we have no idea what goes on behind the scenes. It’s possible they prefer to carry out dissent internally. It’s also a sure thing that Mr. Red Tie will keep all eyes on himself, with lots of help from the media, while the poisons are concocted in Congress and in other parts of the executive branch.
Postmortems of the Harris–Walz campaign make little sense to me at this moment. They did their damndest. Moreover, any campaign in 2028 will be dealing with a changed country and electorate. Besides, we don’t even have all the data yet.
Meyers–Colbert–Kimmel–Lydic
Seth Meyers was unwatchable last night because he devoted time to the geriatric baby’s public utterances. Stephen Colbert was kinder. Every time he said, “Here’s a clip,” it turned out to be something cute or amusing. Jimmy Kimmel spoke from the heart without giving dry-rot makeup man quotes or clips. I turned off Desi Lydic pretty quickly because the clips of journalists and pundits annoyed me, but I tried again today by the light of day. Well done, especially after they moved off the clips. 📺
The fact that Trotsky, Mussolini—and Goebbels, too—had all started as journalists created its own sort of dynamic with the correspondents. The politicians liked turning the tables, deploying the reporter’s bag of tricks to their own advantage: turning on the charm, trading information without giving too much away, polishing the quotations attributed to them. For their part, the reporters put themselves, at least imaginatively, in the politicians’ shoes. I want power . . .
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 7.
How wretched it was to think that one’s own fate depended on what some farmer in Iowa felt—or more to the point, how he voted. Still, if Herbert Hoover could be got rid of, if FDR prevailed . . .
– Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 6.
The few people I saw in the grocery store this evening were looking kind of shell-shocked. It’s possible I’m projecting, but we did have high turnout in the town against the orange sack of suit.
Scholz’s speech on dropping Lindner was impressive.🇩🇪 So was the timing.🇺🇸 I had been despairing in the face of his long-running timidity vis-à-vis Ukraine.🇺🇦 He isn’t offering Ukraine a way out of Western restrictions on weapon types or joining NATO, but it’s an important signal and a lifeline.
It’s 69°F outside. There’s an outside to enjoy, an outside in which to wear out my anxiety and calm my mind.
translifeline.org/hotline/ ☎️ 877-565-8860 🏳️⚧️
Trans Lifeline’s Hotline is a peer support phone service run by trans people for our trans and questioning peers. Call us if you need someone trans to talk to, even if you’re not in a crisis or if you’re not sure you’re trans.
Again??? 💔 The only way we get through this is if we ignore the orange clown’s dangerous, immoral antics as much as possible and keep our eyes on what happens in actual governance in general and in our communities and states in particular. The man is not just dangerous, he’s dangerously distracting.