Friday, January 31, 2020

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

And now for our regular segment, Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages. And as usual we start with the Clowns.

Our second runner-up for the Clown Award this time is the administration of Whitefield Academy, a private Christian school in Louisville, Kentucky.

Kayla Kenney turned 15 in December and her mother organized a party with a few friends and family at a local restaurant, for which she also supplied a cake from a local bakery, having requested one with colors that "pop."

It turned out that the by coincidence cake’s rainbow motif mirrored the design on Kayla's sweatshirt - which was enough for Whitefield Academy to expel her, writing in a dismissal letter that the photo "demonstrates a posture of morality and cultural acceptance contrary to that" of the reactionary school's outdated, outmoded, and bigoted philosophy.

There's been a lot of fuss and feathers in the wake of this about if Kayla is LGBTQ or not or about supposed "previous problems" at the school, but one thing remains unaltered: For the administration of Whitefield Academy, you not only can't be LGBTQ, you can't even look LGBTQ, even unintentionally. And that clearly makes them Clowns.

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Our first-runner-up is MSNBC and in particular weekend anchor Joy Ann Reid.

You know about the kerfuffle between Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders. On that I will just say that I don't think either one handled it particularly well as neither of them ever raised the possibility of it all being a simple misunderstanding. But Reid went totally wonko.

Joy Ann Reid
On January 18 she had on a "body language expert" - which is not a real thing - a self-proclaimed "body language expert" named Janine Driver to claim without challenge that based on "eye level" and the "turtling of his shoulders" that Sanders lied when he denied telling Warren that a woman could not be president.

Driver, who has also endorsed a claim that Obama ordered the CIA to train ISIS, appears to be a personal friend of Joe Biden. Clearly, an unimpeachable and unbiased source.

As for Reid, an early and active pusher of the fictitious "Bernie-bro" line, she has hated Sanders ever since - and because - he challenged Hillary Clinton in 2016. Again, totally trustworthy. And a Clown.

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But our winner is the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 2015, a group of 21 young folks aged 11 to 22 sued the US government for violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property by enacting policies that contributed to the climate crisis.

the plaintiffs
In a mind-boggling 2-1 decision, a panel of the Ninth Circuit agreed with the suit's contentions that the climate crisis has brought the world close to the "eve of destruction" and that "the government's contribution to climate change is not simply a result of inaction" - that is, it's not just what the federal government hasn't done, it's also what it has.

And then after agreeing with the plaintiff's argument, the majority threw up its hands and said their case "must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large." In other words, "nuthin' to do with us."

But the whole point of judicial review is to provide a remedy when people "are suffering harms to fundamental rights at the hands of other branches of government." As Carroll Muffett of the Center for International Environmental Law put it, "courts have a long history of doing precisely what the panel says they cannot do here."

This was not a judicial decision, it was a political one on the part of judges too cowardly to take responsibility for the meaning of their own findings of fact. And that very clearly makes them Cowns.

The Erickson Report, Page 2: The economy

The Erickson Report, Page 2: The economy

Something we haven't talked about recently is the economy but I want to now because of a welcome development in how we discuss the issue, in how we regard the issue, and that welcome development is an increasing awareness of how the ways in which we have viewed and measured our national economic health have failed us and no longer tell us the truth if indeed they ever did.

I mean, look, this is what we're told: The stock market is doing fine, GDP is up, the number of jobs is growing, unemployment is low, the economy is booming! What's not to like?

This is what's not to like: According to a study this past fall by the Brookings Institution,
53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64 - accounting for 44% of all workers - qualify as “low-wage.” Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000.
Forty-four percent of American workers are in low-wage jobs. That study and others are going beyond the old standard looking at the unemployment rate or the number of jobs to ask: What sort of jobs? Not that many decades ago, certainly at the time I was entering the full-time workforce, we were able to assume - at least it was not unreasonable to assume - that a person employed full-time, year-round would make enough to support a family or at the very worst get by.

That simply is no longer true. Indeed, it hasn't been true for some time.

And the research and numbers are there to back that up. A new standard of measurement, called the Jobs Quality Index, or JQI, takes each month's job report from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, and determines the extent to which the number of jobs is weighted towards more desirable higher-wage/longer-hour jobs compared to lower-wage/shorter-hour jobs. As such, the JQI serves as a proxy for the overall health of the US jobs market and the US economy.

And its graph of the trend since 1990 clearly demonstrates an overall decline in job quality, meaning an increasing number of crappy jobs that do more to benefit corporate profits and the 1% compared to good jobs that could benefit most people and support families. In the words of Dan Alpert, an investment banker and Cornell Law School professor who helped to design the JQI,
The problem is that the quality of the stock of jobs on offer has been deteriorating for the last 30 years.”
And let's dump once and for all the lie that those low-wage jobs are first or entry-level jobs for teenagers and new grads. That's not true and, again, hasn't been true for some time. That Brookings Institution study notes that 30% of low-wage workers live in families earning below 150% of the poverty line. Some 26% of low-wage workers are the only earners in their families, getting by on median annual earnings of about $20,000. Yet another 25% live in families in which there is more than one worker but they all earn low wages, with median family earnings of about $42,000, which is just 2/3 of the national median family income.

What's more, according to fivethirtyeight.com, in the 1990s, 1/5 of minimum wage workers were still making minimum wage a year later. Now it's up to 1/3. And of those who do make more, 2/3 are still within 10% of minimum wage. Put together, it means that nearly 80% of minimum wage workers are making no more than minimum wage plus 10% a year later. And more and more people are completely stuck at that minimum wage level.

Jobs Quality Indix - January 1990 to September 2019
And it's not just low-wage workers who are getting nowhere: Bankrate’s Financial Security Poll reports that in 2018, 62% of American workers got no raise. In 2019, 51% got no raise.

The overall picture is no no better: The BLS reported on January 14 that real average hourly earnings increased just 0.6 percent in 2019 - but that combined with a 0.6-percent decrease in the average workweek resulting in essentially no change in real average weekly earnings.

Indeed, that wage stagnation is also of long standing. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, notes that real median weekly earnings are barely above what they were when Tweetie-pie took office and the median wage of a full-time male worker is still more than 3% below what it was 40 years ago. Forty years of effort to wind up behind where you started.

People already understand this, that's why in a recent poll over 70% supported a federal jobs guarantee for the unemployed.

That's why the Pew Research Center can report that 70% of American adults say our economic system unfairly favors large corporations and the rich.

That's why a Harris poll last year found that 40% of voters and 55% of women 18-54 said they would prefer to live in a "socialist" country, understood here as one providing universal health care, tuition-free education, and a decent day's wage for a decent day's work.

American workers know they're getting screwed, they've known it for some time. Now at last the "experts" are catching on.

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Following Up

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Following Up

We start with a quick follow-up on something I mentioned last time, that Puerto Rico was still waiting for billions of dollars in aid authorized by Congress for relief in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.

It seems that Tweetie-pie has finally been pressured enough that on January 15 he released $16 billion of that amount - but only with conditions attached that appear intended to continue to sabotage the relief and repair.

For one, there is a ban on paying Puerto Rico's minimum wage, $15 an hour, on the projects the federal money funds. What's more, none of the money can be used to restore the island's power grid.

Laughably, these are claimed to be "anti-corruption" measures - because, obviously, paying the local minimum wage is corrupt.

So even after they ran out of stalls, the white supremacists populating the White House still searched out for ways to make it hard for Puerto Rico to recover.

As Hunter, a staff writer at Daily Kos noted, "The reasons for these acts can only be speculated on but are not, in the slightest, hard to imagine."

Thursday, January 30, 2020

The Erickson Report for January 29 to February 11




The Erickson Report for January 29 to February 11

This week:

- Following Up
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-team-finally-releases-billions-in-hurricane-relief-for-puerto-rico-with-major-strings-attached/

- The economy
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wage-work-is-more-pervasive-than-you-think-and-there-arent-enough-good-jobs-to-go-around/
https://www.jobqualityindex.com/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2019/12/05/understanding-the-us-economy-lots-of-rotten-jobs/#38ace8c32d97
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-getting-harder-to-move-beyond-a-minimum-wage-job/
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/20/1912013/-Year-over-year-inflation-adjusted-wages-rose-0-in-2019-51-of-workers-got-no-raises
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.htm
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/grim-truth-about-trump-economy-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2020-01
https://thehill.com/hilltv/468236-majority-of-voters-support-a-federal-jobs-guarantee-program
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/09/70-of-americans-say-u-s-economic-system-unfairly-favors-the-powerful/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/19/2020-reminder-55-us-women-between-18-and-54-would-rather-live-under-socialism

- Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/01/15/rainbowcakewhitefieldacademy/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/18/why-no-one-trusts-media-msnbc-slammed-featuring-body-language-expert-who-calls
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/18/our-planet-seriously-burning-and-adults-keep-letting-us-down-ninth-circuit-throws

- Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-has-spent-months-demonizing-homelessness-california-now-trump-wants-major
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-weeklong-smear-homeless-amounted-little-more-hateful-broken-windows
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/the-trump-regime-is-just-ignoring-judicial-rulings-they-dont-like-should-dems-take-notes/
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/23/biggest-loss-clean-water-protection-country-has-ever-seen-trump-guts-safeguards-us
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/23/1913532/-Trump-regime-finalizes-move-allowing-pollution-and-destruction-of-wetlands-protected-by-Obama-rule
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/23/netanyahu-join-trump-next-week-announce-deal-century-peace-plan-giving-israel
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-erickson-report-page-3-two-weeks-of_18.html
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/8/1910205/-Appeals-court-keeps-in-place-nationwide-block-of-Trump-admin-s-discriminatory-public-charge-rule
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/27/politics/supreme-court-immigration-public-charge/index.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/5-4-ruling-supreme-court-allows-trump-plan-deny-green-n1124056
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/27/shameful-disgusting-disgraceful-outrage-after-supreme-court-allows-trumps-public

- We Are Not Alone
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-01-24/muslim-women-occupy-streets-in-india-against-citizenship-law
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/25/798858125/our-democracy-is-in-danger-muslims-in-india-say-police-target-them-with-violence
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/india-constitution-protests.html
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/25/799507583/iraqi-security-forces-storm-tahrir-square-clash-with-protesters
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/iraqis-protest-u-s-occupation-following-the-killing-of-iranian-general-qassem-soleimani.amp
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51247833
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/26/middleeast/iraq-protests-clashes-intl/index.html
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/200125090150459.html
https://time.com/5771621/locust-swarms-africa/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/25/europe/turkey-earthquake-intl/index.html
https://time.com/5771867/turkey-earthquake-rescue-teams-death-toll/
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/01/25/death-toll-stands-22-in-turkish-earthquake-1000-hurt/23908543/
https://www.npr.org/2020/01/18/797638115/womens-march-draws-a-smaller-but-passionate-crowd
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/women-s-march-draws-thousands-rallies-across-county-n1118416
https://twitter.com/womensmarchgbal
https://womensmarchglobal.org/

- RIP
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/22/entertainment/terry-jones-dies-scli-gbr-intl/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jan/22/terry-jones-obituary
https://www.chron.com/sports/rockets/article/Kobe-Bryant-reportedly-dead-in-California-15005767.php

Saturday, January 18, 2020

The Erickson Report, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

The Erickson Report, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

And now we go to the Outrages and we're a bit short of time so there will only be two of them.

First, some outfit called stopantisemitism.org has announced its Anti-Semite of the Year. And with the evidence of an upsurge in antisemitism to be found in any day's news - and the group offers plenty of examples - it should be easy to find someone truly deserving of the title of biggest anti-Semite of 2019.

But who did they come up with? Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, the "evidence" for this, if I can stretch the word that far, consisting mostly of a list of dredged-up and long-settled bull about statements she made last spring, statements which did reveal an embarrassing lack of knowledge about the history of anti-Semitism on her part but revealed no actual anti-Semitism, especially considering she apologized for that lack of knowledge and in fact thanked people for pointing it out to her.

One claim reprised here which I always thought was nonsensical was that it was anti-Semitic of her to suggest that Jewish groups try to buy political influence with money. Of course they do! Just like any other interest group! Do you think that when the health insurance industry gives big bucks to Pete Buttigieg they are not trying to buy influence with his campaign? Do you think that when the big telecoms spread cash around to various candidates they are not trying to buy influence with those campaigns and subsequently with what bills those candidates do and do not support? If I point that obvious truth out, does that mean I am anti-health care or anti-telecommunications? Don't be stupid.

Instead, let's be truthful: Ultimately, this is not about a handful of unrevealing tweets. This is all about her support of the BDS movement and Palestinian rights. That's the point of this smear, that's the purpose of this smear, that's why she is being labeled a huge anti-Semite. It's about equating the BDS movement and Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism.

Ilhan Omar
That isn't attacking anti-Semitism, that's weaponizing anti-Semitism for political purposes and that is a  outrage. What's revealed here is nothing about Ilhan Omar but rather that antisemitism.org, which says it is part of a non-profit foundation but doesn't say what one and which itself engages in the anti-Semitic trope of "the self-hating Jew," is part of that reactionary right-wing core that wants to establish the idea that any criticism of Israel or Israeli government policy is by definition antisemitism.

Which doubtless makes me an anti-Semite in their minds, because I do support Palestinian rights and I do support the BDS movement (without feeling, I note, obliged to support all of its leaders). And when 2019 saw a 45-percent increase in demolitions and confiscations of Palestinian homes in the West Bank over 2018, I find a lot about Israel and Israeli policy to criticize.

Footnote: On January 6, citing the group's report, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, directly meddled in US domestic politics, encouraging "action" against Omar. Oddly enough, one of the things Omar was accused of was making an accusation of "dual loyalty" because she objected to the notion that intense support of Israel is effectively a political requirement for gaining and holding office in the US. Apparently that kind of support is exactly what Ambassador Danon expects.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-accused-of-disgraceful-abdication-of-duty-for-proposal-to-neuter-landmark-environmental-law/
One more for the road: On January 3, the New York Times reported that the Tweetie-pie White House is about to expand its open war on environmental protection by going after its bedrock law, the law that has been called the Magna Carta of environmental legislation.

It is the National Environmental Policy Act and it is 50 years old, having been signed into law on January 1, 1970. This landmark law charges the federal government and its agencies with a responsibility to promote environmental protection, preservation, and restoration, and notes the responsibility each generation has to act as trustee of the environment for the generations to follow.

For fifty years it has provided the legal basis for environmental review of, and public input on, projects that impact the environment.

And now Tweetie-pie is planning to wreck it by redefining what the law does and does not do by:
- narrowing the definition of what type of project requires an environmental review,
- expanding the number of project categories that can be excluded from review,
- allowing companies or developers to conduct their own environmental assessments, and
- dropping entirely any requirement to consider cumulative, rather than just immediate, impacts - meaning not only that you could, for example, build a road without considering the effect of traffic or a pipeline without addressing the risk of a spill, but that any effect on climate change would be clearly beyond the law's reach.

Outrageous and nauseating.

And by the way, Australia is still on fire.

The Erickson Report, Page 4: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

The Erickson Report, Page 4: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

So now to our regular feature, Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages. And as usual, we are starting with some Clowns.

Okay, right at the top, we've done it again. I swear, Americans can be such clowns.

According to a Morning Consult poll, even as tensions between the US and Iran were rising in the wake of the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, only 23% of registered voters could locate Iran on an unlabled map of the world. Only 28% could do it even on a map zoomed in to just Europe, north Africa, and the Middle East.

Even broken down by sex, age, political party, education, and income, in not one subcategory of any of those groupings did the figure rise above 39%.

Notably, there were no statistical differences in support for the strike - or on a host of broader related questions - between those who could identify Iran on a map and those who could not. You know enough about the world to find Iran on a map? Makes no difference to what you think about the assassination. Have no flipping idea where it is - some guesses put it in the middle of the US? Makes no difference.

We really are clowns.

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Tweetie-pie Jr.
Okay, you want a jaw-droppingly stupid Clown? I feel like doing this like that scene from the Harry Potter movie "The Goblet of Fire": "Give me the wretch's name!" "Donald J. Trump ... junior!"

Two days after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, at the very time tensions threatened to spiral totally out of control, Tweetie-pie The Lesser thought it was a great time to post a photo of himself to Instagram showing him smiling while holding a custom AR-15 rifle adorned not only with an image of Hillary Clinton behind bars but also a “Crusader” cross, which has become a symbol of a Christian religious war against Islam and is now used by white supremacists.

He referred to the images as "adding a little extra awesome" to his manhood machine. I see them as describing a spoiled rich kid imagining himself as daringly poking an Iranian hornet's nest while knowing he'd not be among the ones stung.

Idiot. Dolt. Clown.

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Former Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher - you remember him, he was the one who was so bloodthirsty in Afghanistan that he was turned in by members of his own platoon, who called him “evil” and “toxic” but after being convicted at court-martial was pardoned by Tweetie-pie - yeah, that Edward Gallagher, has started his own line of clothing. It's called Salty Frog, a nickname for retired SEALs, and is described as a “coastal lifestyle brand with an edge.”

You'd think being an accused war criminal would not be a good foundation for a business, but it appears that these days you'd be wrong.

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Earlier this month, singer, self-proclaimed sex god, and walking illustration of the Dunning-Kruger Effect Meat Loaf said he “feels” for Greta Thunberg, claiming she has been "brainwashed" and "forced into" into believing in climate change is real - which, he insists, it isn't.

Hey, Mr. Loaf as the New York Times has called you, you may think 2 out of 3 ain't bad, but when it comes to being a clown, you're not just 3 out of 3, you're 10 out of 10.

Oh and by the way: Australia is still on fire.

Friday, January 17, 2020

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Noted in Passing

Now we move on to Noted in Passing, where we spend a minute or two on items that are just interesting or which deserve more coverge than we have time for but which we can't let pass without mention.

First up, some good news in the form of one more little step : As of January 1, New Hampshire residents who don't identify as either male or female can have their driver's licenses indicate their sex as X instead of M or F.

At the same time, even as acceptance increases, there is still much ground to be gained, as can be seen in the fact that the United Methodist Church, the nation’s third-largest religious denomination, is expected to split, spinning off a "traditionalist" denomination as a home for the too-many church leaders and members who, even at this late date, refuse to accept same-sex marriage and refuse the ordination to LGBTQ clergy.

The plan is expected to be approved at the church's worldwide conference in May.

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Meanwhile, on January 3, the American Dialect Society held its 30th annual “Word of the Year” vote, which this year also included a vote for “Word of the Decade.”

The winning word of the decade was "they," particularly as it applies to and is referenced by, people with nonbinary gender identities but also because of its increasing use and acceptance in referring to a single person of unknown gender.

Pronouns, along with conjunctions and prepositions, are generally considered a “closed class” - a group of words whose number rarely grows and whose meanings rarely change. So having "they" have an expanded meaning and use was a real treat for linguists.

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This is kind of interesting: Tens of thousands of parking meters, thousands of cash registers, and even at least one video game are among computerized systems that have fallen foul of a computer glitch related to the notorious Y2K, or millennium, bug. Known, appropriately enough, as the Y2020 bug, it's a long-lurking side effect of attempts to avoid the Y2K bug.

Both bugs stem from the way computers store dates. To save memory, many older systems express years using two numbers - such as 98 for 1998. The Y2K bug was a fear that when the year rolled over to 2000, computers would treat it as 1900, rather than 2000.

Programmers wanting to avoid the Y2K bug had two broad options: entirely rewrite their code, or adopt a quick fix called “windowing,” which would treat all dates from 00 to 20 as being from the 2000s, rather than the 1900s. An estimated 80 per cent of computers fixed in 1999 used this quicker, cheaper option - but all it did was kick the problem down the road.

Coders chose 1920 to 2020 as the standard window because of the significance of the midpoint, 1970. Many programming languages and systems handle dates and times as measured by seconds since January 1, 1970, a method known as Unix time or "epoch time." It's seen as a standard because of the widespread use of Unix in various industries.

The idea was that these windowed systems would be outmoded and replaced by the time 2020 arrived - which was the same thing the programmers of the 1960s thought about the year 2000.

Those systems that used the quick fix have now reached the end of that window, and have rolled back to 1920 with the attending glitches.

Fixes have been issued but exactly how long these will last is unknown, as companies haven’t disclosed details about them. If the window has simply been pushed back again, the error may well crop up again.

And there's another date storage problem, one which faces us in the year 2038. The issue again stems from Unix’s epoch time: The data is stored as a 32-bit integer, which will run out of capacity at 3:14 am on January 19, 2038.

Something to look forward to.

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Now we come to a trio of things that I won't do more on at least now because frankly they hurt my heart.

Monday, January 6: A 5.8 magnitude earthquake hits Puerto Rico.
Tuesday, January 7: A 6.4 magnitude earthquake hits Puerto Rico; it's the largest one in a century.
Three hours later: An aftershock of 6.0 magnitude hits
Saturday, January 11: A 5.9 magnitude earthquake hits Puerto Rico

Hundreds of millions in damage, at least one dead, hundreds losing their homes, thousands in shelters, hundreds of thousands more without power.

And don't forget, Puerto Rico is still waiting for $18B in federal aid for relief and repair work related to the disasters of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.

Next: An outbreak of measles in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which began early last year has lead - so far - to over 6,000 dead and a total of an estimated 310,000 cases. The death toll was more than double that from a concurrent outbreak of Ebola.

This past year saw a huge measles outbreak across the planet. Madagascar saw over 1,200 people die. Places like Somalia, Ukraine, Brazil, and Bangladesh reported thousands of cases.

Here in the US we also had an outbreak of measles. While the numbers were smaller - nearly 1300 cases and no deaths - it was still the worst outbreak since 2000, when measles had been declared by the WHO to have been eliminated in the US.

And yet we still have these idiot anti-vaxxers spewing their bullshit about vaccines. It really hurts my heart.

And if you're still not depressed, here's number three: The active Taal Volcano in the Philippines violently erupted on January 12, launching ash and steam several km into the atmosphere and causing ash to fall in surrounding heavily populated areas.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology raised the status of the Taal Volcano to Alert Level 4, indicating a strong likelihood of more violent eruptions within the next couple of days. The agency is calling for everyone within 14km - a little less than 9 miles - from the volcano to evacuate. That's about 500,000 people.

Taal is located about 70 km, about 45 miles, south of Manila.

Oh, and by the way, in case you'd forgotten: Australia is still on fire.

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Finally, to cheer myself up a bit, here's something I find interesting and in fact rather encouraging.

Benjamin Bergen is a Professor of Cognitive Science at UCal San Diego. Every fall since 2010, he has surveyed about 100 undergraduates in his introductory language class, asking them how offensive various words are.

What he has found is that among young adults today, vulgarities of various sorts are significantly less offensive than they were thought to be back in 1972, when George Carlin did his now-famous routine about the "seven dirty words you can't say on television."

At the same time, various slurs are found considerably more offensive. So various vulgarities that used to generate gasps of shock are now met with a shrug while various racial, ethnic, sexual, and other sorts of slurs that used to be part of everyday conversation are now found offensive.

I find that to be a very good thing.

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Iran lies and the media

The Erickson Report, Page 2: Iran lies and the media

So last time around, in listing some issues I thought were not getting enough attention from progressives, I included war spending and our wars around the world.

And immediately thereafter, the world blows up.

Or rather, it almost did. It may surprise you that I am not going to be spending a lot of time talking about Iran. That's largely because there is a fair amount of useful commentary going around and I prefer to spend my limited time on things not discussed so prominently.

I will say that I was struck - not surprised, but struck - by how robotically and mindlessly the mainstream media fell into the pattern of unquestioningly parroting government propaganda as if it were clearly established truth and how frequently the broadcast media resuscitated known liars and cheerleaders for the Iraq War and wheeled them out to discuss what was happening now.

As Dan Froomkin of PressWatchers.org said, "Lessons that should have been learned from Vietnam were forgotten in the rush to invade Iraq. And now ... it’s abundantly evident that the lessons that should have been learned from Iraq haven’t been learned at all."

Want to know how obvious that is? In December, the WaPo published a six-part series on how the government - across three different administrations - has persistently lied for the entire (so-far) 18-year history of our war in Afghanistan.

Yet that same Washington Post, in reporting on Sec of State Mike Pompous's appearance on CNN on January 3, simply quoted without challenge his claims that Qassem Soleimani was killed to head off an “imminent threat,” that it "saved American lives,” and “Washington is committed to de-escalation” even as those claims were already crumbling: The night before, and so well before the Post reported on, his appearance, the Defense Department said the murder was “aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans” rather than at disrupting an "imminent" or for that matter even any identifiable threat.

Indeed, on "Face the Nation" on January 12, Defense Secretary Mark Esper was reduced to saying that he “believed” that there “probably, could have been attacks” that put Americans in the Middle East in danger, but he “didn’t see” specific intelligence indicating an imminent attack - which if there had been he damn well would have seen  it.

Meanwhile, on "Meet the Press" the same day, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien essentially admitted that Tweetie-pie's claims about attacks on four US embassies were simple bullshit, that His High Orangeness just "interpreted" some intelligence about Iran "wanting to inflict casualties" as somehow meaning that there was an active plan to attack embassies.

And the lies continue to crumble: On January 13, the Tweeter-in-Chief coughed up a regurgitation of the "imminent threat" line but then added "it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!" exclamation point. The same day it developed that seven months ago he signed off on killing Soleimani in the event any American was killed by any force the administration considers to be an Iranian "proxy." Now we only need the final touch of just dropping references to "imminent" altogether in favor of the all-purpose "bad dude" defense to complete the process.

So let's sum up:

We have an assassination of questionable legality based on an "imminent threat" which apparently did not exist based on intelligence which produced what GOPper Sen. Mike Lee called "probably the worst briefing I’ve seen on a military issue," a briefing during which Pompeo and Esper "couldn't even agree" on what the administration's policy goals regarding Iran are, all of which lead to the brink of outright war in the Middle East which we avoided - for now, I emphasize, because the war hawks are still in flight - a war we avoided only because Iran chose restraint even as the US used it as an excuse to send more troops to the region and increase sanctions on Iran.

And I haven't even touched on the possible fallout for Iraq, nor have I mentioned Tweetie-pie's claim - one I will, I promise, give more attention to in the near future - that the US is now building hypersonic missiles, potentially sparking a new arms race.

But for now I'm going to end here with three footnotes:

Footnote 1: Do you want to know just how insane the killing of Soleimani was? Benjamin Netanyahu sought to distance Israel from it. He told a Cabinet meeting that “The assassination of Soleimani isn’t an Israeli event but an American event. We were not involved and should not be dragged into it.” Hey, if even Bibi isn't on board with this you really should have re-thought it.

Like a crumbling brick wall the lies keep collapsing
Footnote 2: On January 8, a regularly-scheduled Ukranian airliner crashed shortly after leaving Tehran airport, killing all 176 on board. Suspicion immediately arose that it had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile. Iran initially denied it but just two days later admitted responsibility and President Hassan Rouhani said Iran "deeply regrets this disastrous mistake" while offering "thoughts and prayers" and "my sincerest condolences" to the families and promising an investigation to be overseen by a "special court" open to the world. We'll see.

Continuing with the footnote, on July 3, 1988, a regularly scheduled Iran Air flight from Iran to Dubai was shot down over the Persian Gulf by a surface-to-air missile from the US cruiser Vincennes, killing all 290 aboard. After an internal investigation, the Navy exonerated the crew. Eight years after the "terrible tragedy," the US reached a settlement with Iran in the International Court of Justice. The US has never formally apologized.

Footnote 3: One positive development which likely won't make a great deal of difference but still is positive just on base principles is that the House has actually passed a concurrent resolution under the War Powers Act directing Tweetie-pie "to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces to engage in hostilities in or against Iran or any part of its government or military" unless Congress has declared war or provided specific authorization.

The reasons it likely won't matter are one that it's chances in the Senate are really iffy: Two GOPpers, Mike Lee and Rand Paul, have said they will support the Senate version of the resolution, but with 47 Senate Democrats (including two independents), even if they all vote yea, it'll take at least two more GOPpers to pass it. With people like Joe Manchin around, that still may not be enough.

The other reason is that the last time there was serious talk of invoking the Act was during the bombing of Libya nearly nine years ago - at which time, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a classified briefing that if Congress did try to exercise its authority under the Act, the White House would simply ignore it. I can't imagine the response would be any different now and it's doubtful Congress has the guts to enforce its decision by cutting off funding and so quote abandoning our men and women in the field unquote.
The Erickson Report, Page 1: Corrections

I have to make two corrections from last time, not really important ones and in fact one you may not have even noticed, but still, yeah, necessary.

Okay, the first one is that last time, in discussing Tweetie-pie's dangerous, anti-democracy speech, I said that in July he told a rally that "we'll do a three" - that is, have a third term - "and a four and a five." Actually, that was at a rally in May, not July.

July was when he declared that Article II of the Constitution, which lays out the role of the president, gives him, as he put it, "rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before," which came after the time in June when he claimed that Article II lets him do "whatever I want."

The other one is that I referred to a proposal to change the immigration definition of a "public charge" from describing someone essentially dependent on government to someone who might at some point in the future need some form of government assistance. While I did note that this would cut legal immigration by 375,000 a year, I unfortunately introduced the segment by saying the change would be a large-scale expansion of who can get a green card, rather than what I meant to say, that it would be a large-scale of expansion of who can be denied a green card on that basis. I wanted to make sure that was clear.

The Erickson Report for January 15-28


The Erickson Report for January 15-28

Back to the grind after our Thanksgiving and Christmas-New Year's episodes, The Erickson Report for January 15-28 looks at media coverage of the Iran crisis and the White House lies before running though some interesting items Noted in Passing and, of course, Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages.

Corrections
https://www.indy100.com/article/trump-us-election-2020-president-five-terms-rally-speech-8923291
https://www.indy100.com/article/trump-twitter-us-president-executive-power-mueller-investigation-9003321
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-insists-constitution-allows-do-whatever-want-1444235


Iran and the media
https://us20.campaign-archive.com/?e=20cc5fa835&u=e6457f9552de19bc603e65b9c&id=748e115148
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/03/corporate-media-turns-warhawks-including-former-bush-officials-beat-drums-war-iran
https://presswatchers.org/2020/01/what-the-press-needs-to-do-to-stop-the-march-to-war-in-iran/
https://www.mediamatters.org/washington-post/after-afghanistan-papers-we-need-skeptical-media-cover-iran
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/3/21048079/trump-pompeo-iran-lies
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/1/12/21062399/trump-iran-esper-o-brien-four-embassies-why-soleimani-killed
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/11/1910826/-Evolution-of-a-lie-from-imminent-attack-to-four-embassies-with-no-facts-in-between
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/01/13/trump-doesnt-really-matter-if-there-was-an-imminent-threat-from-soleimani/23899962/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-authorized-soleimani-s-killing-7-months-ago-conditions-n1113271
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/06/middleeast/soleimani-strike-legality-doubts-us-iran-intl/index.html
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/8/21057344/trump-congress-iran-intelligence-briefing-soleimani
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/u-s-sending-thousands-more-troops-mideast-after-baghdad-attack-n1110081
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-01-10/with-hundreds-of-sanctions-on-iran-trump-adds-a-few-more?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Fpolitics+%28L.A.+Times+-+Politics%29
https://www.thedailybeast.com/netanyahu-distances-from-soleimani-slaying-says-israel-shouldnt-be-dragged-into-it-report
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-plane-crash-ukraine-airliner-crashes-iran-kills-all-onboard-today-2020-01-08/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-11/iran-says-it-accidentally-shot-down-ukraine-plane-isna
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/navy-1988-iranian-jet/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/war-powers-resolution-house-votes-to-limit-trumps-ability-act-against-iran/
https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/war-powers-act


Noted in Passing
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/01/01/2020s-new-laws-gender-neutral-x-licenses-stronger-id-wear-your-hair-the-way-you-want/23890932/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2020/01/03/united-methodist-church-is-expected-split-over-gay-marriage-disagreement-fracturing-nations-third-largest-denomination/
=
https://theconversation.com/for-linguists-it-was-the-decade-of-the-pronoun-128606
=
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-fix-20-years-ago-means-the-y2k-bug-is-taking-down-computers-now/
=
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/01/07/puerto-rico-earthquake/2830673001/
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/01/11/magnitude-59-shock-rocks-quake-stunned-puerto-rico/23899082/
=
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/8/1910216/-Red-alert-from-World-Health-Organization-6-000-dead-in-Congo-measles-outbreak
https://www.afro.who.int/news/deaths-democratic-republic-congo-measles-outbreak-top-6000
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/11/1052321
https://apnews.com/0cd4deb8141742b5903fbef3cb0e8afa
https://www.who.int/csr/don/26-november-2019-measles-global_situation/en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_resurgence_in_the_United_States
=
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/12/1910962/-Taal-Volcano-erupts-in-the-Philippines-Now-at-Alert-Level-4
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/matthewchampion/taal-volcano-lava-philippines
=
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/bushfires
=
https://theconversation.com/wtf-slurs-offend-young-adults-more-than-swearing-125193
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBH5oNQOS0


Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages - the Clowns
https://morningconsult.com/2020/01/08/can-you-locate-iran-few-voters-can/?fbclid=IwAR0e40DoAUi3WgTLmyPLAXAklAw8XcVy3fk4Uae1D6Njgtau0YcSQE_zqWk
=
https://www.instagram.com/p/B67J4TTlnDn/
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/6/1909727/-Don-Jr-shows-off-custom-assault-rifle-with-white-supremacist-imagery-and-image-of-Hillary-Clinton#read-more
=
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/us/navy-seals-edward-gallagher-trump.html
https://www.salon.com/2020/01/02/eddie-gallagher-isnt-a-lifestyle-brand-story-its-a-story-about-the-rights-violent-nihilism/
=
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/4/1909453/-eponymous-ground-meat-dish-calls-Nobel-Prize-recipient-brainwashed
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/meat-loaf-greta-thunberg-climate-change-australia-bushfire-sharon-a9270246.html


Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages - the Outrages
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/after-monsey-will-jews-go-underground/604219/
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/3/21039446/anti-semitism-anti-orthodox-farrakhan-conspiracy-theories-bipartisan
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/anti-semitic-attacks-more-violent-hate-crimes-new-york-n1110036
https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Antisemitism/Ilhan-Omar-voted-2019s-antisemite-of-the-year-613308
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-un-confiscations-demolitions-of-palestinian-homes-rose-by-45-percent-in-2019-1.8347116
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-israel-s-un-envoy-calls-ilhan-omar-anti-semite-of-the-year-1.8369471
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Danon
=
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trump-accused-of-disgraceful-abdication-of-duty-for-proposal-to-neuter-landmark-environmental-law/
https://blog.ucsusa.org/kathleen-rest/kathleen-hartnett-white-nomination-spells-trouble-for-the-magna-carta-of-environmental-law-nepa

Wednesday, January 01, 2020

The Erickson Report. Page 5: Looking to 2020

The Erickson Report. Page 5: Looking to 2020

Janus
Now with Janus’s other face we take a look forward to 2020 and there are some issues that we here believe should be in the forefront for progressives:

- Climate change, obviously.

- Issues of racism and other forms of bigotry should always be within our awareness and we here would include immigration under that heading since so much of the attacks on the undocumented are driven by such racism.

- There's also economic inequality - economic injustice more aptly - which also has ties to racism and sexism but goes beyond them to include all of the 90% and even the 99%.

- And there's gender inequality as the gains for LGBTQ folks are under sustained attack.

That's obviously not a complete list, but there are four more we specifically want to mention precisely because we think they are not getting the attention they should.

First there is our war spending, our military spending, which has become so bloated that the yearly increase in the DOD budget since Obama's last one is more than enough to pay for the free public college for everyone that we keep getting told we "can't afford."

And there are the on-going wars themselves, which occasionally percolate out of the back pages only to fade back into the mist as soon as some shiny penny is waved around rather than being a source of sustained outrage.

Then there is privacy rights, both regarding government databases like the no-fly list and the corporations transforming our personal lives into their profit.

Third is the rest of the freaking world, which we almost as much as Americans as a whole blithely and arrogantly ignore.

And fourth and perhaps most important, voting rights must absolutely be right up at the top of any list of our concerns for the coming year.

That, I'm sure you'll notice, is a relatively broad spectrum of concerns. And that very fact bring up something I talked about in August but I want to end up for this time by going over again.

The thing is, I see around me today multiple campaigns for change but I don't see a Movement, I don't see any evidence that the people involved in these various efforts conceive of themselves as part of a bigger whole.

Do those who identify with #MeToo feel a kinship with Black Lives Matter or the discussions over reparations? Do those who focus on global warming see themselves as part of the same cultural or political whole as the fight to raise the minimum wage or protect voting rights? I don't think they do, to the loss of each and every one of them.

When I talked about this is August, I had been struck by something that had happened recently: Bernie Sanders gave a speech which covered a number of topics. Afterwards, there was a commentator who slammed the speech and Sanders because he didn't mention race or gender until 23 minutes in and yes, she said she clocked it. Actually, she was wrong; he first mentioned the topic less than five minutes in, but that's not really the point. Be clear here: She didn't attack him for what he said about race and gender, which apparently was to her at the very least unobjectionable, she was attacking him because he didn't say it early enough in the speech; he didn't give her focus privilege of place.

Bluntly, in the dreaded '60s the response to that criticism would have been along the lines of "What the hell difference does that make? This was a speech, not a Top 10 list ranked according to importance." When the order in which topics are addressed in a speech becomes a basis for criticism, when people are actually clocking how long it takes their issue to come up, we do not have a Movement, we have a collection of atomized, isolated efforts incapable of drawing strength from each other.

Worse, it seems to me that there has developed a basic divide between two fundamental types of activism, which I call "inside" and "outside."

"Inside" activism focuses on political campaigns, elections, and lobbying to the exclusion of other means. "Outside" means favoring street action, pickets, rallies, mass demonstrations and marches, civil disobedience, and the like.

"Inside" activism in the long run will fail you because change doesn't start from inside, it starts from outside. As Margaret Mead is supposed to have said, "never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world, indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

But "outside" also usually comes up short because our demands and proposals will remain unfulfilled demands and proposals unless there are those working the inside route in order to be there to act on them.

These sides of activism, inside and outside, should be mutually reinforcing, should be, if I can use a cliche, two sides of the same coin, but now it seems like they are different worlds with each observing the other warily from a distance. And every bit of lobbying and campaigning, every rally-driven demand, is weaker for it.

Yes, there have been victories, have been successes, and don't think for even an instant that I am denigrating the efforts of oh so many people or any of what has been achieved. But I can't help but be distressed by how many of those efforts have been aimed at preventing losses of what has been gained in years past by movements of years past rather than on going further, gaining more. We need to do better. We can do better.

I will leave you with this: I am hardly the first to raise the idea of the lack of an over-arching message among progressives, which simply means that others have noted the same atomized nature of our efforts that I am critiquing here, except that I see it as a lack of a feeling of connection, a lack of a feeling that despite our particular focuses, we are family, we are of the same tribe, even if the connection lies more in convictions than any outward sign.

So for your consideration I offer my over-arching message for progressives: Justice, compassion, and community. That’s what we - all of us - are about, that is what we - all of us - believe in. Every political action you take or for that matter anyone takes, whether inside or outside, is a reflection of one or more of those principles. Realize how as you are in one particular effort, you are a single strand, one of multiple strands that very much need to be woven together to make a capital M movement far stronger than the sum of its parts.

One more very important piece of advice: Do not repeat the mistakes of the past. I'm sure you won't repeat my generation's mistakes of overconfidence, but don't repeat the mistakes of other generations. Don't slice away your friends and supporters in a foolish attempt to avoid criticism or look "more mainstream" - or, for that matter, more progressive or radical. It will not help you; it never has and it never will, it merely narrows the field of fire for the forces of reaction. And don't divide yourselves into sectarian camps where people are dissed and dismissed for not using quite the preferred language or for having a different focus from you. That way lies madness and the death of dreams.

The Erickson Report, Page 4: Outrage of the Year

The Erickson Report, Page 4: Outrage of the Year

Moving to the Outrage of the Year, we had multiple possibilities.

We had the on-going attacks on LGBTQ rights and protections, we had the embracing of white supremacy, we had Hillay "Not My Fault" Clinton calling Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein "Russian assets" and suggesting any third party candidacy on the left would be run to advance the interests of a foreign government, whoever the candidate might be.

We had the proposal of a vast expansion of who could be denied a green card on the grounds that they might be a “public charge,” no longer to mean someone essentially dependent on government but someone who might at some point in the future need government help such as Food Stamps or housing vouchers or subsidized health insurance, even including using the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies when buying insurance on an exchange. That change would bar an estimated 375,000 immigrants, 2/3 of total legal immigration.

We talked about hunger in schools, about the good deeds of people paying off the school lunch debts of classmates or even whole school systems, regarding that as an outrage because why should they have to? Why should it be necessary? Why should any family be so poor that they can't afford a school lunch for their child?

We also talked about the stresses those parents face, including from one school system in northeast Pennsylvania that threatened to take the kids away if the parents didn't pay up.

All this especially cruel at a time when even as 36 million Americans rely on the SNAP program, nee Food Stamps, the gang of misanthropes swearing fealty to His High Orangeness pursue their dream of destroying the SNAP program, having introduced three proposals which together would toss 3.7 million out of the program and to the wolves of hunger.

But we settled on these three for the top spots for Outrage of the Year.

Our second runner-up would have placed higher but for the fact that it has gotten some fair amount of attention and we prefer to focus more on those less noticed.

It is Tweetie-pie's tendency, drive, urge, whatever you care to call it, towards extreme authoritarian, one-person rule.

His notion of his powers as president and, to put if mildly, expansive: He has at least twice - once in June and once in July - claimed that Article II of the Constitution, which lays out the role of the president, gives him extreme power, or as he put it, "rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before."

But his personal desire, his desire to go beyond even "rights at a level that nobody has ever seen before" has long been abundantly clear.

Indeed, in July CNN recounted 15 times he praised authoritarians or dictators, including North Korea's Kim Jong Un, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, China's Xi Jinping, and of course Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Donald "Tweetie-pie" Trump
That thinking is reflected in his attitude towards any laws that restrict him. For example, in April he told border agents that they should ignore the law and ignore judicial orders and refuse to admit asylum seekers, even advising the agents to simply lie to the courts.

In July, in the face of a Supreme Court decision barring the inclusion of a question about citizenship in the 2020 census, he considered simply ignoring it - as well as the Constitution, which which specifically assigns the job of overseeing the census to Congress - considered ignoring the Constitution and the Supreme Court and ordering the Commerce Department to include it.

Apparently he was talked out of that but it was part of a pattern of defying Congress, denying its Constitutional authority over declaring war, denying its right to exercise any sort of oversight whatsoever, openly avowing that Congress can only know what he chooses to tell them, even in the course of criminal, special prosecutor, or impeachment investigations.

He even defies the idea of leaving office, because apparently those constitutional limits don't or at least shouldn't apply to him any more than any other ones do.

Consider that in March 2018, Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for abolishing term limits and making himself president for life, saying "I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday."

In April of this year, he said during a White House event for the Wounded Warrior Project that he would remain in the Oval Office "at least for 10 or 14 years."

In May, at one of his revival meetings, after predicting he would be re-elected, he said "we'll do a three" - that is, have a third term - "and a four and a five." The same month, he retweeted Jerry Falwell Jr.'s tweet that "Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for" the Mueller investigation.

In June he said in a series of tweets that his supporters "would demand that [he] stay longer" than 2024, which is when he would leave office if he won the 2020 presidential election.

As recently as at his rally on December 11, he suggested America will collapse if he is not re-elected. "At stake in our present battle," he said, "is the survival of the American nation itself."

He also "joked" about being in office for up to another 25 years to the increasing cheers of the crowd and said "Should we give it a shot? Maybe we will." He then insisted he was "kidding" but his history says otherwise.

You may want to say "it's all just a joke, just something to trigger the libs." Sorry, when you go to the same well at least five times, that's not a joke. That's something you're thinking about.

Our first runner-up is the on-going outrage of the death penalty, that remnant of barbarity which despite the lack of any evidence that it reduces the murder rate, despite the demonstrated racist bias in its imposition, despite the execution of innocent people, despite dropping crime and dropping support, it itself refuses to die.

We touched on it a couple of times this year, for example in August when Attorney General William Barbarous ordered the Bureau of Prisons to schedule executions for five inmates now on death row, bringing the grim reaper back to the federal level with a vengeance, as the feds have carried out just three executions since the federal death penalty statute was expanded in 1994 and the last of those was in 2003.

In September we looked at the case of Larry Swearingen, who on August 21 was legally murdered by the state of Texas. He was convicted of murder in 2000 on thin and entirely circumstantial evidence.

Subsequently, a number of TX pathologists declared that Swearingen could not be guilty because based on the condition of the body when it was found, he was in prison on another matter at the time the murder was committed. Talk about your perfect alibi.

But the courts didn't care. there was no error found in the operation of the machinery of the law, all the i's were dotted and the t's crossed according to formula, and so finally Swearingen was officially killed and the law was satisfied - as an innocent man lay dead.

That was one of the things that lead to our longer look at the fatal flaw at the heart of our so-called criminal justice system: Once you are convicted, truth is no longer the concern. The often arcane rites of the Holy Temple of the Law are. And as long as they are followed, justice can be ignored.

This does not just apply to the death penalty: We also looked at the case of Lamar Johnson, in prison for life without parole for a murder which even prosecutors now say he did not commit - despite which, he is still in prison and in August lost an appeal for a new trial strictly because of a technicality in state law regarding such appeals.

And the law grinds on because, as legal scholars will say, the law is not about justice - the law is about the law.

As a footnote, I have to add that this does not mean there are never victories: Thanks to some work by the Innocence Project, just before Christmas authorities in Texas said they are beginning the process of formally exonerating a man who in 2012 was sentenced to life for a murder for which police have now arrested someone else.

But moving on to our if you will winner, saving what is probably the worst for last. You have to understand, in the long run, if any sanity remains in our judicial system, that this will have less actual impact on our people, our society, than either of the other nominees and in fact any of those not nominated did or will.

But I found this so astonishing - not even immoral but amoral, so utterly without redeeming qualities, so utterly without humanity - that it outraged me more than anything else this year.

So here it is: In the summer of 2017, police in Southaven, Mississippi, were searching for a domestic violence suspect. They got the address wrong and went to a house on the other side of the street.

There, they shot and killed an innocent man, 41-year-old Ismael Lopez.

According to various news reports I found, police first alleged Lopez appeared at the front door with a handgun and then tried to run away. At another point, they claimed they saw a rifle poking though the now only slightly open door. They also said a dog ran out - apparently, from the only slightly open door - which of course they immediately shot at and they then fired through the door - killing Lopez with a shot to the back of his head.

Ismael Lopez
Despite the shifting story, in July 2018, a local grand jury - surprise! - declined to indict the two officers involved in the fatal shooting, after which the prosecutor refused to release either the names of the cops involved or the investigative file, which attorneys for the family had to pry loose.

But that's not why this is here; cops getting away will killing brown and black people is old news. No, this one has an extra twist of the knife.

About a year after the failure of the grand jury, that is, this past summer, the family filed a $20 million wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Southaven, the chief of Southaven police, and the officers involved in Lopez’s death.

In responding to the suit, the city declared in open court that it is their policy that if you are an undocumented immigrant, which Lopez was, if you have no “legally recognized relationship” with the US, you have no constitutional protections, you have no constitutional rights, not even the right to not be wrongfully killed.

Quoing attorney Katherine Kerby, arguing for the city,
If he ever had Fourth Amendment or Fourteenth Amendment civil rights they were lost by his own conduct and misconduct. He may have been a person on American soil but he was not one of the "We, the People"
and so lacked all protections.

Murray Wells, an attorney representing Lopez’s family, lambasted the city’s argument as both “chilling” and “insane” and said “We’re stunned that someone put this in writing.”

So am I. It's hard to grasp how totally demented, totally vicious, totally deranged, the city's position is. If accepted, it for any practical purpose would turn all police into a version of the Tonton Macoute, able to abuse and even kill any undocumented person with total impunity.

Happily, it's also total crapola, as the Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that people on US soil are guaranteed certain basic rights, no matter their immigration status, and the cases the city cited in support of its contention are grossly misapplied and have absolutely nothing to do with the case at hand.

As an illustration of how vacuous the city's position is, one case it cited involved courts finding that an undocumented immigrant did not have a Second Amendment right to a firearm - in a ruling that said in so many words that this did not impact Fourth Amendment rights.

But while that makes the city's attempt grounds for a Clown award, it is much too vile, much too appalling, for that. Even the term Outrage barely contains it.

The City of Southaven, Mississippi: Outrage of the Year 2019.

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Clown of the Year, Total Jackassery category

The Erickson Report, Page 3: Clown of the Year, Total Jackassery category

Moving on the the Total Jackassery category, our second runner-up is the Department of Energy.

Back in May, the agency issued a press release announcing approval of more exports of LNG - liquified natural gas - by a Freeport LNG terminal off the coast of Texas.

In the release, the fossil-fuel-sucking bureaucrats declared the expansion of such exports to be "critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world" and that more such exports will allow for "molecules of US freedom to be exported to the world.”

So it’s kind of like freebasing but without the kick.

Our first runner-up is a perennial champion, always a threat to take the top spot, but this year he fell just short. It's our old friend Tucks Carlson.

On one show in June, he deranged - which I made up as a verb because it fits cases like this so well - he deranged that "Almost every nation on Earth has fallen under the yoke of tyranny." Only the brave and noble US has resisted!

And what is this yoke of tyranny, what is this horrendous worldwide oppression?

Quoting again: "From Beijing to Buenos Aires, from Lusaka to London, the people of the world have been forced to measure their environment in millimeters and kilograms."

Yeah, the tyrant is the metric system. Indeed, a world in chains.

He made a last ditch attempt for the crown, declaring on a show two weeks later that - and I'm not exaggerating, this is a quote - he actually said "If white supremacy were a huge problem in America, how did Cory Booker become a senator?"

Of course if white supremacy is not a huge problem in America, why is Cory Booker being a senator so worthy of note, but that level of thought is beyond his reach.

What could top that double-barreled action? Our winner is another repeat offender, conservative radio host and poster boy for privilege Ben Shapiro.

First, in August he said on his radio show that people who have to work two jobs are actually just, well, stupid: Quoting: "If you had to work more than one job to have a roof over your head or food on the table, you probably shouldn’t have taken the job that’s not paying you enough. That’d be a you problem."

Ben Shapiro
That is, if your primary job doesn't pay enough to live on, well, you just should have taken a different and higher-paying job, you moron.

Then in September, again on his radio show, he praised America’s healthcare system by touting the country’s life expectancy. Now, the US ranks 34th among the nations of the world in life expectancy, and our life expectancy has actually declined the last three years in a row.

But no matter, Shapiro praised it as “pretty good when you take out all the confounding factors” such as auto accidents, murders, and suicide. Note that gun deaths and suicides are both considered public health issues.

In other words, Shapiro was saying, our life expectancy is great - as long as you ignore a lot of the people who died. A master class in venal inanity.

Ben Shapiro, Clown of the Year, Total Jackassery Category.

 
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