News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #2

Every Tuesday, during a one-hour lunchtime vigil downtown, I'm given about 5-7 minutes to offer some . “News Worth Knowing (which you may have hissed),” reporting on a few things outside the main headlines. I decided to post them here, particularly because the very nature of it being weekly means it doesn’t have to be breaking, up-to-the-moment news, and so is much more in the nature of this thing here. All they have to be is just, hopefully, worth knowing. So here is News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #2. Comments are always welcome.

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Stephen Miller’s version of “the great replacement theory.”

Last October, the administration of The Orange Overlord (TOO) said the US would admit just 7,500 refugees in all of 2026, a 94% cut from the previous year’s level of 125,000. Most of the few available slots were to be taken up by Afrikaners supposedly fleeing a non-existent “white genocide” in South Africa.

On May 18, TOO’s underlings said the total would be raised to 17,500 - with all the additional 10,000 slots allocated to white South Africans.

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Some dreams should die - immediately.

On May 18, Meidas Touch News, quoting a New York Times report, said that above and beyond the murderous attacks on boats off Venezuela, the death toll for which is now above 200, the US already has troops engaged in joint operations in Ecuador, Guatemala has now made a secret agreement to allow similar joint operations there, and Honduras is expected to follow.

The excuse is always “drug trafficking cartels,” but the real point certainly appears to be normalizing the presence of American troops across Latin America with a goal of forcing Mexico to accept a large-scale US military presence there. - all part of an overall dream of direct US military dominance of the whole of the Western Hemisphere. Kind of like the Monroe Doctrine on steroids without bothering with any claims about “defending” anyone.

Oh, and don’t worry, they’ve already war-gamed military attack plans to respond to what reports call “the potential collapse of Cuba’s totalitarian government as early as this summer.”

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PEPFAR is on life support.

Since its start in 2003 under George Bush, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is estimated to have saved tens of millions of lives by funding HIV prevention and treatment in poor countries.

On May 5, the TOO gang announced a restructuring of the CDC’s role in distributing funding and overseeing PEPFAR-related programs.

Instead of the current interactive programs, countries will receive funding under bilateral five-year agreements which will require some reciprocal benefit to the US - meaning US corporations - such as access to assets like mineral resources.

In other words, the program has gone from humanitarian assistance to a transactional arrangement based around “Nice country you got there; it’d be a shame if lots of people died unnecessarily.”

The result is to fracture the on-going coordination between the CDC and local health agencies, the very thing that made the program so successful.

Experts on global health say this is effectively the end of PEPFAR.

But then again, what do we care, they’re just LGB people from shit-hole countries and we have our own LGBTQ+ people to screw over.

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Speaking of which…

Colorado, Maine, Missouri, and Washington have a total of six anti-trans measures on their fall ballot. Mores are in the works in Arizona, Nebraska, and Nevada.

The Nevada example is noteworthy because the governor, one Joe Lombardo, openly admitted his administration is offering a proposed constitutional amendment to ban “Men in Women’s Sports” specifically because, quoting him “That’s going to get people out to vote.”

The thing is, the public still largely endorses equal treatment trans folks but that same public for several years has been under a relentless and coordinated political assault from a concoction of reactionary flakes, gender bigots, and most importantly right-wing operatives looking to maintain and expand their power by deliberately generating and maintaining a social panic - one which, like most social panics, revolves around some emotional issue, usually involving some combination of sex and children and one which, precisely because it is being promoted and maintained as part of a deliberate campaign, hasn’t burned itself out in a few years the way most do.

The result has been that public opinion has shifted toward the reactionaries on a carefully chosen narrow set of emotion-driven issues, primarily trans girls being playing on girls’ school sports teams, bathrooms (of course), and pediatric healthcare, particularly the eye-bulging, spittle-flecked rants about non-existent “genital mutilation of children.”

And by the way, this is an assault that has gone effectively unopposed by whole swaths of the supposedly progressive left, some of who have actively embraced parts of it and thank you Gavin Newsom, Seth Moulton, and others for making the whole thing harder.

Measures like those coming in the fall have been called “ballot candy,” done not because of any benefit to the public or even in response to public interest - when you ask people what their concerns are, trans issues always rank very low on that list - but rather to, as Gov. Lombardo acknowledged, drive right-wing turnout by preying on the very fears and fantasies that they have been creating.

But here I have to inject a bit of hope for the future. The effect of a good number of these proposals is to stick into a state constitution things that are already illegal under state law. So their immediate impact on the lives of trans people is effectively zero. Then why do it? Specifically and avowedly to make it harder to undo.

The gender thugs know things are changing. Ten years ago, there was open talk of a “revolution” in our understanding of gender and today demographic analyses of the US population show that overall, the younger the age group, the greater the support for trans and nonbinary people. The reactionaries know they are losing and these measures are part of their effort to be, in William Buckley’s famous description of conservatives, “standing athwart history, shouting ‘Stop!’”

Because we’re seen this before. We’ve seen it before. In 2003, when support for same-sex marriage was rising and headed for a majority, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriage as violating the state constitution.

In the desperate immediate reaction to hold off that prospect, between 2004 and 2008 24 states added bans on same-sex marriage to their state constitutions specifically to hold off the rising tide.

It was of course the Obergefell decision in 2015 that undid all those measures. I can’t imagine that this Supreme Court will do anything like that, but still, history will not be denied and I can and do look forward to a time when the train of history runs over the gender bigots, their allies, and their useful idiot followers.

I may not live to see it - but then again, I thought (and said) the same thing about same-sex marriage.

Footnote: A couple of places where I’ve addressed some aspect of social panics:
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2009/01/think-of-children.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/04/052-erickson-report-for-april-21-to-may.html (from roughly 17:30 to 23:10 in the video)
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/10/064-erickson-report-for-october-27-to_30.html

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Ending on an up note.

Finally for this time out, we have some good news on the death penalty.

For the second time in two weeks, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4. tossed out a death sentence.

In this case, coming out of Mississippi, the prosecution had removed four of the five Black jurors in the selection panel, claiming the removals were for “race-neutral” reasons. That is, it had nothing to do with them being Black oh no of course not perish the thought.

SCOTUS found the defense attorney wasn’t given opportunity to properly challenge the prosecution’s claims of “race-neutral” reasons, declaring that the District Court got the law right and the Mississippi state Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals both got it wrong.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor were joined by Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts in the majority.

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You have the best week you possibly can and we’ll see you then.

News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #1

For something over a year now, I think about 14 months, a group of us have had a one-hour lunchtime vigil downtown every Tuesday, with the numbers usually running 25-30. It started focused on a demand that our Congress critter hold a town hall, but over time has broadened to encompass the whole gamut of reactionary suckiness with which we are afflicted.

We’ve also developed some for lack of a better term traditions, with one recently-emergent one being me taking about 5-7 minutes on “News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed),” going on about three or four things outside the main headlines.

It occurred to me that since I have to prepare for that anyway, I might as well post them here, particularly because the very nature of it being weekly means they doesn’t have to be breathless, breaking, up-to-the-moment news. Just hopefully worth knowing.

So herewith the first of what I sincerely hope will be a weekly Tuesday evening feature called, again, “News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed)” starting with two Updates which I know seems weird but trust me, it made sense at the time.

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Update #1

 I mentioned last week that Hawai’i had passed legislation redefining what a corporation is in a way that makes it harder to contribute to political campaigns. I added that Gov. Josh Green had until June 30 to either sign or reject the bill.

The Update is that it turns out I was wrong: He’d already signed it on May 14.

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Update #2

Our other update relates to the DOI (Department of Injustice) suing 31 states to force them to release confidential voter information. Two more of those cases, those in Maine and Wisconsin, came to a decision this week, bringing the total to eight - and the DOI has lost every one of them.

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This you may well not have missed but I’m doing it anyway because it made me white with fury.

On May 22, a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter said that the DOI is “quietly” removing from its website news accounts related to January 6, in what as mainstream an outfit as AP described as “the latest step by the Trump administration to dramatically rewrite the history of the assault on the Capitol.”

In response, the DOI thugs not only acknowledged doing it, they celebrated doing it. “There’s nothing quiet about it,” they crowed.

They called the accounts documenting the actual criminal charges, the actual convictions and guilty pleas at court, and the actual sentences given to those violent, rioting, insurrectionist traitors, they labeled those actual facts, as “partisan propaganda” and they were positively puffed with pride about erasing the history.

Among the records stripped were those regarding the convictions of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy, whose convictions the DOI last month asked a federal appeals court to vacate.

On May 21, they got their wish. The very next day, May 22, the DOI moved to have the cases dismissed entirely.

Related to all this is the fact that the DOI has subpoenaed The Wall Street Journal and other news outlets that have been critical of the The Orange Overlord (aka TOO) for records of their journalists’ activities, contacts, and more under the hoary excuse of investigating “leaks.”

I’ve taken to calling it the Department of Injustice, but it seems I should be calling it the Ministry of Truth. Or Minitru for short.

(And if by some chance you don’t get the reference, look it up! I’ll give you a hint: It comes from the same source as the quote “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” which appears to be the unspoken motto of Minitru.)

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Some bad news and some good news on the death penalty.

In 2023, in the case of one Edward Lee Busby, who was convicted of murder, the state of Texas agreed he was intellectually disabled to the point that he was ineligible to be executed and so entered a motion that his sentence should be commuted to life.

Without going into the complications of the whole case, which are considerable, after that motion failed Texas flipped sides and said in effect “what the hey, snuff him” - that is, arguing the man they said shouldn’t be executed actually should be.

Ultimately, by the unsurprising vote of 6-3 the Supreme Court vacated a stay of his execution, and Texas killed him on May 14.

On the other hand, after 29 years in jail for a murder he has persistently sworn he did not commit, a time that included nine execution dates, three last meals, and a Supreme Court ruling in his favor over a year ago, Richard Glossip is out of an Oklahoma prison.

For now.

In February 2025, SCOTUS vacated Glossip’s conviction, finding that the sole witness against him lied on the stand - and what’s more, prosecutors knew he lied but kept their mouths shut.

But instead of releasing him, the state of Oklahoma has announced it intends to try him yet again and fought to keep him in prison. It wasn’t until May 14, 15 months after his conviction was vacated, when a county court finally granted him bond.

So Glossip is out he’s but still facing new trial, one apparently to be based on same now-discredited evidence from the same now-discredited witness.

It is sadly true that under our criminal justice system - which really should be called our prosecutorial procedure system - that while the state is often willing to admit it did it wrong, that it got some procedural technicality wrong, it will often, if you will, fight to the death the avoid admitting it got it wrong, that it sent an innocent person to the gallows.

The death penalty, that remnant of barbarism, still hangs over us.

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Now to make sure you’re really depressed.

On May 19, the House passed the “Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act,” allowing TOO to strip federal funding from any school that “teaches or advances concepts” related to transgender people, looking to codify the bigoted, pseudoscientific fantasies of his Executive Order definitions of sex and gender into federal law.

The notion of “concepts” and what makes for “advancing” them are so vaguely defined that any discussion, material, or school library book that even mentions the existence of transgender people could be banned; even a transgender teacher could risk punishment for using their own name or pronouns.

Another provision requires public schools to forcibly out transgender (or even possibly transgender) students to their parents with no exceptions for potentially hostile home environments.

You’ve heard of state-level “Don’t Say Gay” laws; this is like a federal-level “Don’t Say Trans” law.

The silver lining here is that this now heads to the Senate, where the 60 vote filibuster barrier is one that no standalone anti-trans bill has cleared this entire Congress and this one will likely meet the same fate.

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Finally, something to keep on your radar.

During TOO’s first months in office, the Supreme Court’s GOP-approved majority used the notorious shadow docket and an underlying notion of the “Unitary Executive” to allow him to fire commissioners on various boards and commissions that are technically part of the Executive Branch, doing this despite and in the face of a 90-year old precedent from a unanimous Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which found that Congress had the Constitutional authority to create independent agencies whose commissioners could only be fired for cause.

One of the suits arising from those firings is that of the TOO-fired FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. That case had oral arguments in December and a decision is expected in the next few weeks - a decision in which it is predicted that the Scurrilous Six, the appropriately-acronymed SS, making up the majority will simply dump that 90-year old precedent in the trash, effectively (technically not legally, but effectively) giving TOO personal control over the makeup of the entire federal-level regulatory system by making those in charge of running and administering it subject to this personal whims and will.

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I'll end with my old closing from my TV days:

You have the best week you possibly can't and we'll see you then. 

No reconciliation. No forgiveness.

"'Back to 1900' is a serviceable summation of the conservatives' goal." - George Will, January 2 1995, syndicated column

I swear to myself that I will throw that quote in the face of every Trumper I come across any time they express any even minor disagreement with anything he does. And I will not let them forget and I will not forgive.

Every time a woman dies from lack of access to abortion care.
"You wanted this to happen. You voted for it."

Every time a trans child commits suicide.
"You wanted this to happen. You voted for it."

Every time someone you are acquainted with gets deported.
"You wanted this to happen."

Every time you are shown the horrible and inhumane conditions at the required detention camps.
"You wanted this to happen."

As the government adopts Steven Miller's openly fascist slogan "America is for Americans and Americans only" as official policy.
"You wanted this to happen."

.As the slaughter, the literal genocide, of Palestinians intensifies.
"You wanted this to happen."

As Ukrainians (and perhaps Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians) are abandoned.
"You wanted this to happen."

As tariffs drive inflation, costing families thousands of dollars a year.
"You wanted this to happen."

As measles, mumps, and other diseases re-emerge and new pandemics arise because Secretary of HHS RFK Jr. disparages vaccines and blocks funding on research.
"You wanted this."

As the cost of insulin multiplies because the limits are removed, the cost of health care soars, “pre-existing conditions” again become a bar to health insurance, and tens of millions more than now lack even basic coverage as ACA is “repealed” but not “replaced.”
“You wanted this.”

As social services shrivel, protections for consumers and workers are repealed, and pollution controls are dismantled after Director of OMB Elon Musk slashes $2 trillion in social spending.
"You wanted this."

As climate change worsens amid "drill, baby, drill" and renewable energy programs being shut down even as there is no disaster relief because FEMA was on the chopping block.
"You wanted this."

As strikes are declared illegal.
"You wanted this."

As infrastructure funding for roads, bridges, railroads, and all the rest vanishes as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is repealed.
"You wanted this."

As Secretary of Education Ryan Walters mandates Bibles and bible instruction in all public schools.
"You wanted this."

As media outlets are threatened with or even experience loss of licenses for airing/ publishing "false" information, i.e., unfavorable to the reactionaries in the administration.
"You wanted this."

As government surveillance becomes more intrusive and widespread, privacy ever rarer, and people get investigated and charged as part of "the enemy within."
"You wanted this."

As people you know, even members of your family, get labeled as part of "the enemy within."
"You wanted this."

As you see the US military attacking, even shooting, protestors.
"YOU WANTED THIS."

As.... The list could and as events develop will go on. But the point remains. No excuses, no "I didn't mean that," no "but"s.

You knew. You had to know or you damn well should have. You are responsible. Because -

"You.
"Wanted.
"This."

Wise up about "grow up"

Some recent polls have indicated a difficulty for Joe Biden's reelection chances in that young people in particular, a major area of support in 2020, are unenthusiastic about voting for him this time because they are upset with recent decisions and policies, particularly around Gaza, the Palestinians, and Israel.

And we have seen the thoroughly predictable response from several quarters among the party stalwarts: "Grow up!"

Well, I have some advice based on the experience of over 50 years of being one of the unrecognized, uncelebrated millions who have labored in the trenches of political activism.

You want to encourage people to vote for Biden despite their misgivings? Okay. First of all, DO NOT tell them to "grow up," you blithering idiot. It is rude, insulting, and condescending. It may make you feel extra-virtuous ("Look at me - I'm voting for Biden despite all my disagreements! See how politically mature I am?") but it won't do a damn bit of good. Put more simply, "Shut up and do what your betters tell you!" is not an argument. This is a mistake the Dems have made repeatedly, perhaps most disastrously in 1980 when they treated Ralph Nader voters as disobedient children to be scolded rather than adults to be persuaded and we got George Bush, AKA "Shrub," and all that entailed as a consequence.

The most important thing to do (as opposed to not do) if you want to convince someone overcome their reluctance to turn out for Biden is tell them why they should, meaning why they should vote for him, not just against Tweetie-pie, AKA The Great Orange Messiah. There certainly are positive arguments in his favor you can raise; COVID recovery aid, Build Back Better with its infrastructure and climate funding, the Inflation Reduction Act with its taxing the rich and start of negotiating drug prices, and student debt relief spring immediately to mind. None of them unqualified successes, but all undeniably better than what existed before.

Next, yes, compare him to Tweetie-pie but don't make that the sum total or even the focus of the argument. That's exactly the mistake the Dems made in 2016, when most of the campaign seemed to be "We're not that scumball Trump!" and we know how that worked out. Argue the "yes," not (at least not primarily) the "no," because resorting to "lesser of two evils" arguments are not going to fly.

At the same time, there are areas where the "lesser evil" can be argued and I am thinking specifically of Israel and Palestinians. Biden has not only failed to call for an immediate ceasefire, he has sent additional military aid to Israel, all as part of his "bear hug" strategy of holding Netanyahu close in the hope of being able to constrain him - a policy that has been a demonstrable, horrific, failure.

But where Biden has failed to constrain, Tweetie-pie would actively encourage. It's properly said you should not make the perfect the enemy of the good, but it is quite true that you can make the worse the enemy of the bad, the actively evil the enemy of the cruel failure.

Note that none of this addresses what is the biggest threat of this election: Tweetie-pie's unique threat to our ability to continue as a functioning democracy. And absolutely, after arguing for the "yes" and getting to the point of "Yeah, I suppose," then dive in with everything in your arsenal, including his increasingly-bizarre rants, his repeated praise of dictators, January 6, and Project 2025 and if you don't know what that is, look it up! (A few sources are offered at the end here.)

Look, the last major party general election presidential candidate I felt I really could believe in was George McGovern. There is nothing anyone can tell me about strategic voting or tactical voting or lesser-of-two-evils voting or even hold-your-nose voting. I have done them all at local, state, and national levels. For most of my voting life I have lived in one safely-blue state or another, so I usually could opt to vote third party without impacting the presidential outcome. But in 2020 I did and in 2024 I will again vote for Biden despite my disappointments and despite being in a safely blue state because I not only want Tweetie-pie to lose the electoral vote; I want him crushed in the popular vote. I want Johnson-Goldwater levels. I won't get them, but that's my target.

And sneering at those reluctant to vote for Biden to "grow up" is not going to get us anything toward that goal.

Some sources for Project 2025
https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/project2025
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/01/07/analysis-of-the-project-2025-plan-for-the-next-conservative-president/72008293007/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/conservatives-aim-to-restructure-u-s-government-and-replace-it-with-trumps-vision
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/09/19/project-2025-trump-reagan-00115811
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/what-is-project-2025-the-political-plot-to-destroy-america-s-freedoms/ar-AA1gWxfK

065 The Erickson Report for November 11 to 23, Page 1: On the election results

065 The Erickson Report for November 11 to 23, Page 1: On the election results

 

[This is a little different from the broadcast version, which was done the day after the election. It's essentially the same, but has in a few cases been updated to reflect later results.]

So. We had us some elections.

So I'll give you my comments on a rundown of the results.

I'll start by confessing I was concerned - to be honest, fearful - coming into this election because I was afraid the Dimcrats would blow it in the same way they blew 2016. That time, they managed to lose to the most unpopular major party presidential candidate in the history of such polling, one even less popular than Hillary Clinton, whose own approval was well under water.

They did it by making the central theme of their campaign "We're not Donald Trump. He's a scumbag, a creep, disgusting, so vote for us." Not that they never talked about anything else, but that was the primary approach, forgetting (or ignoring) the fact that not enough people cared; in fact, there were people who liked Tweetie-pie because of that, who thought "That's the kind of 'I don't give a damn' attitude we need more of in our leaders."

This time, they staked it all on reproductive rights, to the point where even as the burning anger over the Dobbs decision, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, faded some (as anger naturally does over time) and it appeared people were shifting their attention to economy and crime, party campaign consultants were telling candidates to just not talk about those issues, even though Dems had, particularly on the economy, good things they could say on their own behalf.

So it came as a great relief that this time around they did better than expected, indeed they held their own and even marked a few gains as the predicted "red wave" or "red tsunami" proved to be more of a pink ripple.

One reason for that is shown by exit polls that indicated that people who voted for Demcrats had reproductive rights and threats to democracy high on their list of concerns while GOPper voters were more focused on the economy and crime.

It was claimed that this validated the Democrats' strategy, but I'm not giving up on my own analysis quite so easily: Holding your own, not getting swamped, is hardly a stirring goal or a basis on which to build. I maintain that had they spent some of their time addressing those other issues, where again they did have
things to say for themselves - even on crime, on violent crime, which yes, had gone up recently but had already peaked and was starting to come down and in any event even at the peak was way below what it had been in the '90s - anyway, if they had spent just some time on those two points, they could have done better than just hold their own. We should have learned at least by the time of John Kerry's run that you can't let those sort of attacks go unanswered for weeks on end and expect that to not affect people. This time they ran the same risk - but they got away with it. Fortunately.

Anyway. The GOPpers, as expected, retook the House of Reperesentatives, with the breakdown now projected as 221-214, essentially the same majority the Dems had before.

It easily could have been worse, part of the reason the results are being called "better than expected." In each of the last four midterm elections, the president’s party has lost an average of about 37 House seats. In 2010 (Obama’s first midterm), Democrats lost 64 seats; in 2018 (Tweetie-pie's midterm), Republicans lost 42 seats.

This time, they lost about nine or ten, depending on the results of few campaigns that are still not called.

In the Senate, they actually stand to gain a seat. With wins in both Arizona and Nevada, they are guaranteed no worse that a 50-50 split, which leaves the Dems, as the party in the White House, in control because VP Kamala Harris would be the deciding vote in the case of a tie.

Meanwhile, Georgia is set for a run-off on December. You'd have to think that Raphael Warnock is the favorite not only because he came in first in the general, almost always an advantage, but because the third candidate in that race, a guy named Chase Oliver who got a couple of percent of the vote, presented a pretty liberal platform despite being a Libertarian, focusing more on civil liberties including - something I'd really like to see - an end to qualified immunity, so I expect that many of the people who voted for him, if they vote in the runoff, are far more likely to go for Warnock.

Which means the next Senate could easily be 51-49, which delights me because it would mean that on any given vote, either Kyrsten Sinema or Joe Manchin could be told to go F themselves.

Okay, on some more general notes:

I enjoyed the tweet from Hannah Trudo, the senior political correspondent at TheHill.com, who said

The entire Bernie Sanders-aligned wing of the Democratic Party won tonight, from Fetterman in the Senate to the new Squad members in the House.

It's also important to note where the results came from: voters under 30. Not only did they turn out, they voted for Democrats by a net 28 percentage points, enough to offset the votes of those over 45.

As the Washington Post noted in an post-election article, voting took place against a background of increasing worry among Americans that US democracy is under threat. About 70% of voters in an exit poll said our degree of democracy is “very” or “somewhat” threatened.

Interestingly, the same poll said that about 80% of voters were "very" or "somewhat" confident that elections in their own state would be fair and accurate, which reminded me of all the polls about Congress where people would say how much Congress sucks but when asked about their own representatives, they'd say "Oh, they're okay. It's all those other ones who are lousy."

The important point, however, is that the Post looked at 569 GOPper candidates for state and federal office and found that 291 of them, 51% of the total, questioned or refused to accept that Joe Biden is the legitimate president and over half of that number, somewhere between 150 and 200, won.

A mitigating factor is that the vast majority of those who won were running for seats in the House, where they would have little involvement with or impact on the actual conduct of elections. And most of the them campaigned on a range of issues, so it's hard to say how much their wins translate into support for election denial in the general public.

They still could be an issue, however, as they will be a sizable majority within the House Republican caucus and so still could drive the selection of Speaker despite Kevin McCarthy having won an initial intra-party caucus - and the Speaker would in turn preside over the House in 2024, when the presidential vote could again be contested.

So while having those people win for the House is not as threatening, it's not non-threatening.

Better news is at the state level, where officers like governor, secretary of state, and attorney general have significant power overseeing and conducting elections. That is where the concern really is and there, happily, the elections deniers by and large lost. In Arizona, the heartland of paranoid election denial, it appears the whole slate of deniers went down.

This doesn't mean some of the deniers didn't get in, but not nearly as many as were feared.

But that doesn't mean the issue goes away. Even before polls closed and many states began releasing vote counts, far-right users in Telegram channels and other fringe forums were spreading conspiracy theories and trying to declare the midterm elections fraudulent.

Consider Maricopa County, the largest county is Arizona. They had a problem which was later shown to be a printing problem with the ballots such that the tabulating machines had trouble reading them. Officials announced they had a problem, explained what they were doing about it, which involved getting tech help from the manufacturers of the machines, and assured everyone not to worry, the ballots would still be counted because they had the paper ballots which if necessary could be counted by hand.

Which prompted wacko loser Kari Lake - who really is a Karen and who still has not conceded - to point to officials acknowledging a problem and specifying what they were doing to fix it as clear evidence of fraud. And she was not alone.

In response to such inanities, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, herself the target of such claims, noted that “There are always things that potentially could be seized upon that really have no impact" and aptly called the whole conspiracy claims "a political strategy that some have chosen to pursue to the detriment of who we are as Americans and our democracy.”

Since we talking now about the state level, its a good time to note that another surprise in the elections was that Democrats also over-performed at that level, including flipping a couple of legislative houses and winning two governorships along with increasing the number of states where they control both Houses and the governorship, the so-called trifecta. They still trail GOPpers in that measure, but no longer by as much.

One area that matters to me is the progressive prosecutors movement, comprised of those District Attorneys who make reform of the criminal justice system part of both their campaign platforms and their practice in office. They did rather well in the midterms, winning in places, as said by Lara Bazelon, director of the Innocence Commission inside the San Francisco DA’s Office, "purple and blue and even red."

The right wing had persistently tried to bury the movement under a barrage of "criminals running wild" rhetoric. After progressive Chesa Boudin was recalled from his position as San Francisco DA in June, a good deal of the media, always ready to be swayed by right-wing screeching, was prepared to declare the whole movement dead. The wing nuts failed and the media was wrong.

Meanwhile, the Dems were right about one thing: Protection of reproductive rights is broadly popular. Protection of such rights was on the ballot in five states. It won in all five.

Voters in California, Vermont, and Michigan added protections for reproductive rights to their state constitutions, while reliably red Montana and bright red Kentucky rejected measures that would have added restrictions to access to reproductive care, in Kentucky's case by proposing to specifically deny any state constitutional protections for abortion.

Include the vote in Kansas is August that rejected a ballot measure that would have given the state legislature the authority to restrict abortion access through a state constitutional amendment, and you have reproductive rights going six for six this election cycle.

On another matter, legalization of recreational marijuana was on the ballot in five states. Maryland and Missouri approved their measures, while Arkansas, North Dakota, and South Dakota said no.

As of now, 21 states and Washington, DC, have legal recreational marijuana, something polls say 60% of the public supports. It is worth noting that in all three states that rejected the idea, medical marijuana is legal.

While I support legal grass and in fact have for oh my word over 50 years, it has never been high on my list of personal political priorities. So I want to mention that even as they rejected legal grass, the voters of South Dakota did something of more importance to me: By a hefty margin, they approved expansion of Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act. Some 40,000 people in South Dakota thus become eligible for Medicaid, many of who would not afford access to health care without it.

Finally on elections for now, something of which many of us are unaware: The 13th amendment did not ban slavery outright. It says:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [Emphasis added.]

That is, slavery can be a punishment for crime. Which is why there has been and continues to be forced labor in US prisons.

Today, such prison labor is a multibillion-dollar industry, with prisoners given the choice of working for pennies on the dollar or being punished by being denied phone calls and family visits or even being thrown into solitary confinement.

Nearly 20 states had language in their state constitutions permitting slavery and involuntary servitude for prisoners. On election day, voters in four of those states said "Not here, not any more." Voters in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont approved measures to remove the relevant language from their state constitutions.

A fifth measure, in Louisiana, failed only after its backers told people to reject it because they realized they had screwed up the legalese and it didn't clearly outlaw involuntary servitude.

Max Parthas, campaigns coordinator for the Abolish Slavery National Network, said his network hopes to have this on the ballot in a dozen states next election cycle.

065 The Erickson Report for November 11 to 23

 

065 The Erickson Report for November 11 to 23

This episode includes my reactions to some of the election news along with a follow-up to last episode's look at transgender rights.

Sources:

On the election results
shttps://www.aol.com/news/biden-white-house-cheers-red-155101989.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/here-are-all-the-fox-news-stars-who-promised-a-red-tsunami
https://www.aol.com/news/2022-midterms-republican-hopes-dashed-073721826.html
https://twitter.com/HCTrudo/status/1590222473215315970
https://twitter.com/dellavolpe/status/1590190476334096386
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/09/election-deniers-2020-house-senate-races/
https://www.aol.com/news/election-deniers-lose-key-races-200211432.html
https://www.aol.com/news/biden-hails-good-day-democracy-204536495.html
https://www.insider.com/far-right-donald-trump-voter-fraud-baseless-claims-midterm-elections-2022-11
https://www.aol.com/news/minor-poll-problems-twisted-false-181533639.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/09/election-deniers-2020-house-senate-races/
https://www.aol.com/news/democrats-outperform-expectations-state-legislatures-215022871.html
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/11/10/midterms_republicans_crime_public_safety_criminal
https://www.aol.com/news/kentucky-michigan-voters-approve-protecting-143639236.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3726347-voters-support-abortion-rights-in-all-five-states-with-ballot-measures/
https://www.aol.com/news/voters-approve-recreational-marijuana-maryland-151817054.html
https://www.aol.com/news/much-relief-south-dakota-voters-003234247.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/slavery-involuntary-servitude-rejected-by-4-states-voters/ar-AA13U7Fv

Transgender youth know who they are
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262734734_An_Analysis_of_All_Applications_for_Sex_Reassignment_Surgery_in_Sweden_1960-2010_Prevalence_Incidence_and_Regrets
https://www.jsm.jsexmed.org/article/S1743-6095(18)30057-2/fulltext#sec3.3
https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(22)00254-1/fulltext
https://www.amsterdamumc.org/en/research/institutes/amsterdam-public-health/strengths/aph-cohorts/the-amsterdam-cohort-of-gender-dysphoria-.htm
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/media-s-detransition-narrative-fueling-misconceptions-trans-advocates-say-n1102686

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Nine: Some good election news for progressives

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Nine: Some good election news for progressives

We end this time with one last quick look at the election to note not only that according to one analysis, the Democrats may have done about as good as they might and the predictions of large gains were more a matter of over-optimism than facts on the ground but more importantly that, as Jim Hightower points out, for all the hand-wringing about down-ballot losses 2020 was hardly a debacle and for progressives in particular, it was not all that bad a year.

For one thing, there are about a dozen more progressives in Congress than there were before, making it harder for the establishment Democratic Party to continue its long practice of sidelining progressive proposals - not that they won't continue to try.

Progressives also won hundreds of local offices including, significantly, a number of races for sheriffs, district attorneys, and other criminal justice positions, including across the south.

It's an illustration of the growing - slowly growing but growing - progressive prosecutor movement, taking criminal justice reform, a publicly-popular and, 2020 showed, election-winning program, directly to the nuts and bolts of the system.

Not only in not so unexpected areas as California, but, the New York Times reports, in cities and counties in Geogia, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Colorado, and Ohio, overcoming the predictable resistance from police unions.

So we should, plagerizing Joe Hill, not mourn but organize. Think of 2020 as one of the 101 blows in the old parable of the stonemason. And carry it on.

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Seven: Pennsylvania GOPpers fail (again!) to overturn election

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Seven: Pennsylvania GOPpers fail (again!) to overturn election

On December 8, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Pennsylvania GOPpers to block certification of the state's presidential vote. It was done in an unsigned one line order with no noted dissents. I can hear the justices saying "Do you get it now? Go away!"

I honestly expect the same treatment to be given to the utterly insane move by Texas to sue Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin at the Supreme Court on the grounds that changes they made to election procedures because of the pandemic were illegal. There simply is no way in hell that Texas has standing to bring this suit. [Update: It got exactly that treatment for exactly that reason.]

The question becomes what is the point of these suits. They know they can't win, they know in fact that even if they win they will still lose because enough states certified their results before the "safe harbor" date of December 8 to give Blahden more than the needed 270 electoral votes, after which those results are almost immune to challenge. So other than proving they are sufficiently wacko and sufficiently devoted to Tweetie-pie's personality cult to survive in the modern GOPper party, it's hard to see the point. Which means, in fact, that probably is the point.

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Three: Rhetoric of right wing becomes more violent as auto coup attempts fail

The Erickson Report for December 9 to 22, Page Three: Rhetoric of right wing becomes more violent as auto coup attempts fail

That brings up a related issue: The rhetoric of the Tweetie-pie acolytes has been getting more and more violent and dangerous as his auto coup keeps failing in the courts, in the legislatures, and among the public.

(Sidebar: An "auto coup" is a term used for cases that instead of involving corruptly overthrowing a government to come into power, involves corruptly using the powers of government to remain in power.)

Tom Zawistowski, the executive director of the Portage County (Ohio) Tea Party took out a full-page ad in the Washington Times calling for Tweetie-pie to institute martial law to toss out the November election and stage a military-run election for federal candidates, stating that if there isn't martial law, "we will also have no other choice but to take matters into our own hands, and defend our rights on our own."

Among those who have effectively endorsed this call for military rule by re-tweeting it are retired general and former Tweetie-pie National Security Adviser Mike Flynn and pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood.

A number of commenters noted that such folks are entirely okay with overturning the Constitution but insist that wearing a mask to limit the spread of COVID is "fascism."

Meanwhile:

- Tweetie-pie lawyer Joe diGenova has said former Homeland Security official Chris Krebs "should be taken out and shot" for saying the 2020 election was secure.
- Lin Wood tweeted that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger "are (not) sleeping well at night. Nor should they be. Justice is coming."
- Steve Bannon recently said Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.
- On November 29, Chris Bedford, senior editor of the right-wing journal The Federalist, called Stacey Abrams "dangerous on many levels" for her advocacy of expanding options for voting.
- Of course there was when Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was the target of a kidnapping and potential murder plot.

DiGenova is now saying that he was merely being rhetorical - of course he did, one he was called out on it. The "can't you take a joke" defense. But words have meaning. Words have impact.

On November 25, Rick Wiles, the senior pastor of the Flowing Streams Church in Florida, said "The Democrats, the news media - if the leftists, if scientists, professors have been working secretly with the Chinese Communist Party, then line 'em up against the wall and shoot them. That's what you do with them."

Do you really think he's be saying that if the idea had not been planted in his head by the drumbeat repetition of "fraud fraud fraud?"

What happens when someone finally does take this too far and someone gets shot and killed? What if the next plot against the next Gretchen Whitmer is not discovered in time? Will any of these people, will one of these people, take any responsibility?

No way in hell. Several years ago, I started a list of what I called "Rules for Right-wingers." It started out rather lightheartedly, but as it expanded over the years it got serious. The most recent version dates from 2017 and this is "Rule #12: Never admit responsibility. Whenever faced with the evil resulting from some other winger following or acting on your arguments, accuse those who point out that fact of 'politicizing a tragedy.' Never, never, never admit any responsibility for the meaning or impact of your own words."

I am dangerously close to saying that the very existence of these people - no, not the people, not the people, but the way of thinking, the thought pattern - its very existence is a moral outrage.

The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 5: The election and the Democrats

The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 5: The election and the Democrats

Okay, the election. Right at the top, my reaction to Joe Blahden's victory is not joy or excitement. It is relief. The very fact that I refer to him as Joe Blahden should give you a sense of how excited I am by his becoming president, but the prospect of, the threat to our very continuance as a democracy presented by, a second term for Tweetie-pie was too frightening to countenance. So I am tremendously relieved by the result.

But I also fear that just like what happened in 2008, we will decide that the arrival of a Democrat in the White House means the work is done and just like we did then, we will tie our star to the new administration and embrace the idea that their policies mark the outside limit not only of what is politically possible but what is politically acceptable, what is open for discussion, what can even be on the table.

And that is exactly what will happen if we don't push back hard.

Forget the presidency for a moment. After getting the candidate they wanted an running the races they wanted, in both the Senate and House, the Democrats did worse than predicted. Not only did they not win the Senate - unless, that is, they pull off a long-shot double win in the Georgia run-offs on January 5 and reach a 50-50 break - they actually lost six or more seats in the House after thinking they could flip up to a dozen.

So what happened during a conference call of the House Democratic caucus two days after the election? Nancy Pelosi and her top lieutenants along with so-called "centrists" knew exactly who to blame: progressives.

It wasn't that they themselves did anything wrong, it wasn't that the DNC did anything wrong, it couldn't have been their campaigns were screwed up or poorly run or didn't address the actual concerns of their constituents or ignored widely popular proposals in favor of pleasing party bigwigs and big donors, oh, no. It was all because some candidates dared breathe the word "socialism" and because some people, not even candidates but some other people out there somewhere, used the phrase "defund the police" and those became the basis for GOPper attack ads which, apparently, neither those "centrists" nor the entire structure of the national Democratic party were capable of refuting or countering.

So no, they didn't do anything wrong. It was all the progressives' fault. Not just progressive candidates, but progressives in general. All of who, apparently, should just shut up.

Listen Up, people! Get it through your heads: The Democratic party establishment is not on our side. Not on the side of average working people, or of the unemployed, or of the poor, or of the struggling, or of the victims of discrimination and bigotry, or even of the future of this plant.

Yes, certainly there are individuals in the party who have been and are fighting and will continue to fight the good fight and certainly, there are individuals who were or are on our side on specific issues. But as a group, as a whole, the establishment Democratic party is not. They are on our side insofar as and only insofar as its necessary to protect their power, their positions, and their perquisites.

They'll ignore us, fight us, resist us, and then for the sake of their own benefit, they'll try to take credit for what we gained by our efforts.

After his victory in the 2020 Nevada caucuses, Bernie Sanders tweeted of the Republican and Democratic party establishments "They can't stop us." In response, longtime Democratic party strategist Joe Lockhart tweeted "The Democratic establishment gave us civil rights, voting rights, the assault weapons ban, social security and Medicare. What have you done Senator?"

Hey Lockhart: You didn't "give" us anything! We won it. All of it. Every one of those things came as the result of years, usually decades, of organizing, marching, protesting, lobbying, petitions, letters, phone calls, court suits, civil disobedience, and yes, voting. We did it. Not you. So I turn the question around: Can you, can anyone in the establishment Democratic party, name one gain that has come without significant outside pressure? Can you name one advance that genuinely originated in the upper echelons of the establishment Democratic party? You can't because you didn't "give" us squat.

And you're not going to "give" us single-payer health insurance, a living wage, or a livable future for ourselves and our children. Remember Nancy Pelosi snidely calling the Green New Deal "The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they're for it, right?" Remember that? None of that will happen, none of those gains will be made, without us constantly, constantly, pushing you, taking what we gain and coming back again and again for more.

They are not on our side.

They are not on the side of the underdogs, the victims, the outsiders, the have-nots, the oppressed the hungry the landless. And they never will be.

They are not on our side. And they will continue to not be on our side, to ignore us, to dismiss us, to deny us, to deny us even when we represent the majority, as we do on a whole laundry list of issues from health care to the environment to the economy and back again. It will go on until we make it impossible for them to continue to do so.

There is yet much to be gained, much to strive for, allies and alliances to be made and lost, and undoubtedly many unhappy compromises to be made along the way.

So can they - at least some of them - be useful allies on particular causes at particular times? Yes, surely. So they still should be lobbied, petitioned, pressured. But do it knowing that when those causes are pushed to the point where they really impact the prerogatives of the powerful, you will suddenly find your assistance is no longer required, your counsel is no longer desired, your opinions are no longer regarded as having merit.

Can sufficient political and social pressure move them beyond that point, move in ways and to extents they would prefer to avoid? Absolutely. But again, know going in what will be required. Because never forget: They are not on our side.

Thoughts on Bernie's withdrawal

[A significant part of what follows is drawn from some things I have written before. I brought them together to express my feelings at this moment.]

The man himself

So just three days after I wrote that Bernie Sanders should not drop out, he did. And so it goes.

Actually, what he did was pretty similar to what I was thinking I would do, having accepting the reality that the nomination was beyond reach: suspend the campaign, continue with the primaries, continue to gather delegates, and use that to exercise some power in the Platform Committee and use that in turn to move the Party and how it approaches the people.  The difference is that while I would have stopped campaigning, I just wouldn't have announced I was doing it, answering any "dropping out" questions with some version of "My intent is to continue to address the issues I have addressed all along and we'll see what happens."

The truth is, although I have long acknowledged that my political heart is more in "on the streets" action than electoral campaigns, his withdrawal still hurts. It's a sad moment, especially because there was a time not that long ago, just a touch over six weeks ago, in fact, when it seemed possible he could get the nomination. So yeah, even though I knew that was no longer in reach, a formal end to the campaign still makes me blue.

But. That just raises the question I touched on in that previous post: What now? Because let it be clear that as I said then, this is not the end. It must not be the end. As someone notable said in 1980 at the end of a different presidential campaign,

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

Because as he himself has said, this is not about Bernie Sanders. Even his own campaign slogan declared it: "Not me. Us." This is about, again in his phrase, political revolution.

This is about change. This is about changing the nature and the structure of political, social, and economic power in our country, in our society.

It is about racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual equality and freedom. It is about the economy, about an economy for the many, not the few, for the workers, not the bosses, banks, and billionaires. It is about education. It is about health care. It is about housing. It is about the environment and the climate. It is about peace.

It is about justice.

Justice, as I put it nearly 40 years ago, in its truest sense: economic, social, and political. It is about a justice that rejects the ascendancy of bombs over bread, of private greed over public good, of profits over people. It is about a justice that centers on the preciousness of life and will fight to maintain and even expand that preciousness. It is about a justice that affirms and embraces the right of every human being to a decent life free of hunger, fear, and oppression.

It is about, in the end, revolution.

So while his quitting the race is a real loss, especially when early on it looked truly possible, it's not about Bernie Sanders and it's also in exactly the same sense not about elections. It's not even about voting. It's about the process of change. Voting is a part of that process, which is why, in a sense, for the moment, it was about Bernie Sanders because he has been the vehicle, using electoral politics, to push for that change.

But now, at this point, how do we proceed from here? I have to tell you something: Tweets and Facebook posts and the rest are not gonna cut it. Period. Oh, they can be great for circulating ideas, for passing on information, for keeping each others' spirits up, for organizing, but they themselves will not change anything. Oh, sure, they can affect little bits here and there; they can embarrass a restaurant into changing a policy or an individual store into apologizing for something, and I'm sure someone could come up with some more significant example of a more significant effect, but change the fundamental nature of power in the US? Not a chance.

Way, way, back in the dreaded '60s, I said something along the lines of "the system can withstand any number of people just saying 'No' to that system. That won't change anything. We have to do "No," we have to act on our beliefs."

It's still true. We need to act on our beliefs. If we are going to see the kind of change we talk about, if we are going to see that political revolution, if we are going to change the nature of power in this country, we have to act. We can't just talk - have to act. And we can't just vote - we have to act. We can't even just campaign for a favored candidate, even though, yes, that is a form of action, but it is not near enough. We have to act outside of and beyond electoral politics. We have to be in public, in the streets, even filling the streets, in the jails, even filling the jails.

We have to be loud, noisy, disruptive, but most of all creative; we have to be impolite, rude, to power; and we have to not care what they call us - because they will call us all sorts of things - but keep on going anyway.

I know I haven't offered any concrete proposals, proposed any specific actions, which is because I don't have any to offer. What I want to press home is, the whole point of this is to press home, that if we actually believe in this political revolution, if we actually want to see, in that wonderful Biblical phrase that Martin Luther King quoted in his I Have a Dream speech, if we want to see "justice rolling down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream," if we actually believe what we say, then now is the time, now is the moment, to look beyond the primaries, beyond the convention, beyond November, beyond political candidates, beyond voting, and ask ourselves "What now? And what then?"

WaPo says Sanders may quit - he shouldn't

Follow me on Twitter: @LarryEr94572822

So there's a story being pushed by the Washington Post that some people around Bernie Sanders are urging him to drop out of the presidential race and that he's considering doing so if he's dealt a significant defeat in Tuesday's Wisconsin primary, one which Joe Blahden is predicted to win. This according to what the paper calls “two people with knowledge of the situation.”

Personally, I'm suspicious of the story. But before I get to that, take a moment to look at that election itself.

There are only two reasons it is taking place. One is that the GOPpers in the Wisconsin legislature are balking at cooperating on a delay or alternatives such as mail-in ballots. Y'see, they have a candidate for state Supreme Court up for election to a full term that day and they want to be sure he is firmly in place in time to support their measures to limit ballot access in the fall.

But the other is that the Democratic Party establishment in general and Bladen in particular want the in-person primary to take place without delay because they figure that a big victory will put Bernie away once and for all, the risks to public health be damned.

Which relates to why, getting back to the WaPo story, I'm suspicious: It sounds a lot like a deliberate leak, a strategic leak, intended to push Sanders into withdrawing by creating an expectation that he will.

As the article itself notes:

Advisers with stronger ties to the Democratic Party have been more vocal in urging him to contemplate a withdrawal, while independent activists have been pushing for Sanders to remain in the race.

In other words, the closer they are to the party establishment, an establishment that from the very beginning has sought to dismiss and demean the "political revolution" Sanders hoped to build, the more eager they are to see Bernie just give up. This doesn't mean they never supported his run, but it does mean that those connections to the party establishment diluted their commitment to the sort of basic changes we need.

Bernie Sanders

That desire to dismiss and demean, one which extends far beyond the inner workings of the party, was reflected on Twitter comments on the article, comments I said revealed "utter glee" at the prospect of Sanders' withdrawal, "glee that goes well beyond a natural pleasure in seeing your preferred candidate win" to a "sneering dismissal that doesn't seek unity from Sanders' supporters but craven capitulation."

Which frankly is exactly why Sanders shouldn't quit. Yes, yes, I know he isn't going to get the nomination. But his very campaign slogan tells why he should continue: "Not me. Us." The whole point is that the campaign is not about him, it's about the issues, about the proposals, about, ultimately, significantly changing the nature and structure of political, social, and economic power in our country, in our society.

And you know damn well - or you damn well should know - that if he drops out, his policy proposals, including the now-utterly-relevant Medicare for All, will instantly vanish from our political discourse, eagerly and happily disappeared by a political and media establishment that never wanted to have to deal with them in the first place. It's important for those proposals to be part of the public conversation as long as possible.

Which is why the fight must go on, right through to - assuming it can happen - the convention. Then at the convention, take the fight to the rules committee, take it to the platform committee, take it to the floor, even to having to go through the actual roll call and no, if Blahden gets a majority in that roll call, do not agree to a measure to make it unanimous.*

Let the convention, however it is worked out to conduct it, be contentious. Let it be chaotic. But let it be clear that this is not the end. Let it be clear that as he himself has said, this is not about Bernie Sanders. This is about change. This is about, again, political revolution.

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Which for Sanders supporters, still leaves one question: What now? For my part, I simply cannot get excited about Joe "Nothing will fundamentally change" Blahden, as you might guess from the name I've given him. And I do have serious doubts that he can beat Tweetie-pie even apart from the wild card of COVID-19: It's unclear if that will that lead to people going "200,000 dead? 20% unemployment? Throw the bum out!" or to "Rally around the president in a time of crisis!"

For me personally, in terms of the election, my first concern is that it happens. I can't countenance the notion of Tweetie-pie announcing a "postponement" or even worse "a postponement until the crisis is over," a declaration that is ridiculously beyond his Constitutional powers but which I fear would be passively accepted by far too many unless things have significantly improved by then. Tweetie-pie already dreams of dictatorial rule and if he thought he could get away with it - and frankly I fear that he could - he would cancel the election outright.

But let's assume for the moment that that won't happen, that the election will come off as usual - "as usual," of course, including various right-wing schemes at voter suppression. I live in a safe state, safe enough that I don't even need to pay attention to the presidential race. This time around, I think the Senate is actually more important and I will be paying most of my attention (and giving any donations) to those races.

*OTOH, if Blahden fails to get a majority but does have a significant plurality, Bernie should be true to his word and withdraw at that point, as I'm sure he will if it works out that way.

The Erickson Report, Page 6: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

The Erickson Report, Page 6: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

Now we turn to our Outrages.

Here's an outrage for you: American hero Chelsea Manning is still in prison.

She's the former Army intelligence analyst-turned-whistleblower who was court-martialed and sentenced to 35 years in prison for telling the truth about the Iraq War and US foreign policy by leaking documents to Wikileaks. She was in prison for seven years, mored than a year of it in what amounted to solitary confinement and under continuing mental duress designed to break her and force her to testify against - and thus justify charges against - Julian Assange with the goal of destroying Wikileaks. Her sentence was commuted in January 2017.

The goal of destroying Wikileaks has not changed. On March 8 of this year she was arrested for contempt of court after she refused to testify before a grand jury about her association with WikiLeaks, testimony demanded even though it's unclear what it's imagined she could tell about Assange and Wikileaks that is not already known.

Manning says she refuses because of ethical and legal objections to the secrecy of grand jury proceedings, arguing, as many other activists have and do, that such proceedings are designed to be tools for prosecutors to engage in fishing expeditions against peaceful activists. Whether or not grand juries are inherently illegal can be argued, but that they have been used in that oppressive way can't be and yes I know from experience of cases in which I have been involved.

She was released on May 9, when the grand jury's term expired. She was immediately served with another subpoena to appear before a new grand jury on May 16. She again refused to testify and was immediately sent back to jail for what could be 18 months, the term of a grand jury. In addition, a fine was imposed of $500 for each day she spends in jail over 30 days and $1,000 for each day she spends in jail over 60 days, which could ultimately total $441,000.

On August 5, a federal judge denied a motion for a hearing to press the court to reconsider its sanctions, declaring she can just sit in jail until she cooperates.

Chelsea Manning

But not only should they be reconsidered because of their harshness but because they are improper and should not be imposed at all.

Y'see, imprisonment for refusal to testify is, in legal terms, non-punitive. That is, it's not for something she has done but to compel her to do something. Put simply, it's legalized coercion. Which also means that if the sanctions have proven to be ineffective, they should no longer be in place.

Chelsea Manning should be freed.

Chelsea Manning was in prison for seven years and the government didn't break her. They put her in jail for another three months this spring and she didn't back down. They've put her back in prison again for - so far - five more months and she still stands on her principles. What makes them think that some more months will do what the nearly eight years have not?

This is no longer if indeed it ever was about compelling her to testify. This is about making her grovel before the power of the state about proving that they can make her do what they want.

Chelsea Manning is still in prison - and it is an Outrage.

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You may well have heard about this other one, maybe more than you wanted to, but it can't be allowed to slip away without getting the denunciation it deserves.

On October 17, in a conversation about the 2020 election with David Plouffe on his podcast, Hillary "It Wasn't My Fault" Clinton said this:

I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, 'cause she's also a Russian asset. I mean, totally.

Hillary Clinton

Okay. It was immediately clear to everyone that the candidate in question, the "favorite of the Russians" who is being "groomed" to be a third-party candidate, is Tulsi Gabbard. Ties to Russia have not been suggested about any other woman running. Indeed, when Clinton shill Nick Merrill was asked if Gabbard was the candidate Clinton was referring to, he said, "If the nesting doll fits."

That was in a Tweet at 11:58 am on October 18, shortly after the podcast was released that morning.

At 5:13 pm, over five hours later and after the negative reactions had started coming in from folks like Noah Schachtman, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, Krystal Ball of Hill.TV, Aaron Blake, a senior political reporter for the Washington Post, Van Jones of CNN, and journalist Glenn Greenwald, Merrill replied by going after the single point that some media had reported that Clinton had said it was the Russians who were "grooming" Gabbard, when in fact, he insisted, she meant the Republicans - the GOPpers.

After a few days of what I'm sure were a long string of furious phone calls from the Clinton people and the DNC to the owners and editors of various media outlets, those outlets started issuing "corrections" that, "yeah, okay, she was talking about the GOPpers there" and media bosses - and Clinton's people - happily dropped the whole thing.

Dropped it, that is, without addressing the fact, the central fact, the main fact, that while she may have been talking about the GOPpers as the ones "grooming" Gabbard, by focusing on that, they avoided having to address the real point, the "this is what matters"point, that she had called Tulsi Gabbard, and whatever you may think about her politics she is still a member of Congress, she had called her a Russian asset! Period. There is no disputing that. Doesn't make a damn bit of difference who is "grooming" her except to the extent it says that Clinton regards the GOPper presidential campaign and Russian propaganda as being the same thing.

Tulsi Gabbard

Do not give me any crap about "she didn't say that!" Of course she did! Note that she said Jill Stein is - quoting - "also a Russian asset." The only conceivable antecedent for that "also," both logically and grammatically, is Gabbard. So yes, she called Tulsi Gabbard "a Russian asset" and she called Jill Stein "totally" a "Russian asset."

Supposedly, US intelligence services make a distinction between the terms "asset" and "agent" in regard to foreign intelligence but that's a distinction that people in normal conversation do not.

So don't give me the crap nitpicking about the precise meaning of "asset," such as Merrill whining on Twitter that "we never said she" - that is, Gabbard - "is a spy." No, what you said - since you now apparently are wrapping youself and Ms. "Dont blame me" into a single package - what you said is that Gabbard is, as Glenn Greenwald put it, someone "who will act to serve the Kremlin's interest," someone who acts with the intent of being of benefit to Vladimir Putin. And you said the same thing - with the exclamation point of "totally" - about Jill Stein.

Jill Stein

That is at best sleazy, cowardly, innuendo and it's more accurately scummy, despicable, and McCarthyism in its purest form.

Worse than that in fact, because by talking about the whole thing in the context of a third-party candidacy, Clinton - along with those now spewing out nausea-inducing defenses of her - has smeared the very idea of a left third party campaign as one being run and operated for the benefit of, to advance the interests of, a foreign government, whoever the candidate might be.

This is beyond scummy, beyond despicable, beyond contemptible, so far beyond being an Outrage I won't even call it one.

Hill'o'crap Clinton, still desperately trying to weasel her way out of responsibility for incompetently losing an election to - as far as we know - the least popular major party presidential candidate in US history and now trying to connive her way back into the top ranks of the Democratic Party, should do two things, neither of which she will: One, apologize publicly and abjectly to Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein and two, immediately after that shut up and go away and take her sycophants with her.