The Books of Bokonon

It's time for a closer looks:

“Maybe what doesn’t kill you fucks you up for life – but at least I’m still here.” -- Billy Connolly  

This will be more of a personal reflection post than an explicitly political post, but it's also got a healthy dose of politics involved for good measure. You've probably noticed, if you have encountered me here or on some social media that I really really hate dictatorships. Did I mention I really hate dictatorships? Okay, I think you get the point. Where did that energy come from? Some if my animosity toward so-called "strongman" leaders and authoritarian and totalitarian governments certainly originated in what I was reading as a preteen, teen, and young adult. I read my share of books on WWII history and oral histories of the Spanish Civil War (thanks mostly to my dad's collection) as well as works of fiction (Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm , Huxley's Brave New World , just as examples). But the rest of my disdain for dictatorships comes from having met some of the survivors who managed to find refuge in whatever community I might have been living in a...

Yes, that's a thing. In this case, Derrick Anderson borrowed his friend's wife and kids for a campaign photo-op . That seems totally legit. It's not like people are going to say, "My dude, that's not Derrick's wife and kids. That's his buddy's wife and kids. What are these people into?" Right? C'mon. The neighbors will at least know once they see the campaign literature on their social media feeds or those campaign circulars left on doorsteps or mailboxes. Nothing weird about that. Borrow or rent a family for campaign events and go living one's best incel life (is that doable?) tweeting about all the ways you'll take away women's rights. Nothing weird or creepy about that. </snark>

One thing we know about Donald Trump from his one term as president was that the dude never met a tariff he didn't love. After decades pursuing a relatively liberal trade policy, the US began to revert to a more protectionist approach to economic policy. Although the Biden Administration has not really made moves to massively expand tariffs, the administration has maintained many tariffs from the Trump era. If Trump darkens the White House once more, there is a good chance that we will experience tariffs the likes of which none of us have experienced in our lifetimes. It's a complex topic, and since I am not an economist (nor will I pretend to be) but rather a layperson who likes to be informed, I am always grateful to reality-based primers. Axios does just that .  So what do we need to know? A tariff makes it more expensive to import many of the goods we take for granted. Someone has to pay. Guess who that someone will be. It will be you and it will be me. We could try to coun...

This scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail encapsulates the absurdity of a significant facet of our political dialog right now. Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog fame has more to say about an upcoming JD Vance campaign stop , involving a pastor who is claiming that Kamala Harris is a witch, and seems to be hell-bent on claiming that those of us not in the Trump camp are demon-possessed. Read through it all, and take a look at the embedded Twitter posts (I refuse to use whatever name a certain mad billionaire calls it now). It is truly theatre of the absurd.  The premise of Steve M.'s post is spot on. The usual scolds on legacy media, including the nominally liberal scolds, keep on telling us that we have to meet Trump's true believers where they are in order to persuade them to at least hear you out. I'll get back to the merits of that in a moment. But first, we need to look at this specific political environment in which we find ourselves. If your goal is to chang...

I am in a bit of a Daily Show mood right now, so here are a few segments that caught my attention:   Jon Stewart has been on fire since his return to The Daily Show. Desi Lydic opens Tuesday's show with a roundup of GOP's gross and weird men. And Desi Lydic again pointing out that Trump really has a better future as a pitchman for infomercials than whatever the hell he thinks he's doing. Finally, Jon Stewart's interview with European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde. Jon Stewart has a knack of bringing onto his show some of the world's heavy hitters from various sectors that affect our lives and explores some of the big ideas that affect all our lives, with some humor added in for good measure.

When I drive around Fort Smith and surrounding areas in Arkansas, I've noticed a few Harris-Walz yard signs - certainly more than I saw for Biden-Harris in 2020 or Clinton-Kaine in 2016. I am also seeing far fewer Trump signs and flags this time around. There are still people who show up with their Trump-Vance signs, but it's nothing like 2020 and 2016. I have yet to see the usual Ford F-150s and F-350s with huge Trump flags hogging the roads as in years past. Now, I don't doubt that Trump will have many in my community who vote for him, but the enthusiasm that I see on the ground is just not there for Trump this time around. At least not yet. As I've mentioned before, when I go to my county Democratic meetings, that room is packed. Good luck finding a parking spot at Creekmore Park when we all get together. That never happened in any prior election year. Something is changing, even if we are still going to be a red state when all is said and done. I'll share with y...

Before I go to sleep, I wanted to spend a few moments reflecting on a Zoom call I was on this evening sponsored by the Fund for Authentic Journalism, which Al Giordano and crew founded a number of years back. Most of these folks on the call were personal friends and colleagues of his, his mother, and then a few of us who didn't know the man personally, but had made a point of subscribing to his newsletter and who first learned of his work via Narco News back during the early years of the Iraq War. He also did some blogging at Daily Kos for a while, so I would have encountered his work in that venue as well. What impressed me was how well Giordano could read through the crosstabs from polling data and see what most journalists would miss. In the process, he was a voice of calm and reason at times when folks would be panicked or when they were getting their hopes up just a bit too much. He was one of the few folks who would remind his audience that polls are not predictive, and I kne...

 

Thank goodness for late night talk show hosts. They've turned mocking Trump and Vance's weirdness into art form. Here's the latest from Seth Meyers: Here's The Daily Show's coverage of North Carolina's Gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, who didn't do any weird creepy stuff (/sarcasm) as well as more on the mess Trump and Vance have made of Springfield, and otherwise act like they belong in a halfway house:   And here from last night is Stephen Colbert interviewing Rachel Maddow: 

From the authoritarian vantage point that increasingly characterizes the GOP, women are less prone to vote the "right" way. Hence, women must be stopped from voting. Thom Hartmann explains the details that don't quite make their way into media coverage of this latest GOP monstrosity : So, why is this the hill Republicans are willing to die on? Why would Johnson, Trump, and Vance (and so many other Republicans) put so much effort into a lie that will, if acted on, create chaos for American voters? And why try so hard to force it into a must-pass bill when it has already passed the House of Representatives on a standalone vote? The question contains the seed of its own answer. The SAVE Act is a proposed federal law, so, first off, it would put a future president (say, Trump) in charge of enforcing it, taking that power away from the states. Millions of voter registrations in any states the president decides are problematic could be removed until those voters “cure” their r...

  Maybe. Leeja Miller certainly makes her case.

  We're only halfway through the week, and it's been, shall we say, a bit weird. Okay. Really weird. The authoritarians are doing their worst, as usual. This is just a very partial list: A Kremlin-run troll farm has been pushing a fake Harris video . Thankfully they've been caught. An Ohio county sheriff has found his inner Stasi Chekist and is demanding the addresses of any county resident who posts a Harris/Walz yard sign .  He also uses a lot of eliminationist rhetoric. There's something oddly un-American about that. Supreme Court Justice Alito is apparently besties with a right-wing German aristocrat who is also obsessed with ending reproductive freedom. Nothing weird about that...oh who am I kidding.  William Kristol (a columnist I would have almost never endorsed a couple decades ago) has reminded us once more that it really is okay to tell the truth and call Trump a threat to democracy . He and his co-author rightly refer to the threats against the Haitian immig...

Nancy LeTourneau's blog, Horizons, has a wonderful post on the truth about the impact immigrants have on small towns and cities throughout the US. I would call it required reading. JD Vance may have made some headlines about how he needed to make shit up Haitian immigrants to get Springfield OH in the news, but the truth is that journalists have been writing about how small communities have been impacted beneficially by immigrants for quite a while now. Read for yourself. I can add my own personal perspective. I lived in a town called Goodwell, OK during the aughts. It's practically in the middle of Oklahoma's panhandle. There is a small university there where I was employed for about a decade before I moved to my current location. Goodwell is located about 10 miles southwest of the Texas County seat, Guymon, OK. I very quickly learned a few things about Guymon and the surrounding area. At some point in the 1990s a meat packing facility owned by Seaboard Farms opened for b...

Trump may only cop to having a "concept of a plan" for healthcare law in the US, but JD Vance spills the tea: Democrats are always hoping for a break that’ll thrust kitchen-table issues like health care into the headlines. Suddenly they have two to work with. Donald Trump provided them the first one at last week’s presidential debate, when he admitted, nine years after he began trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, that he only has “concepts of a plan” to replace a law that tens of millions of Americans depend upon for their health insurance. Now comes another. Asked Sunday on Meet the Press to elaborate on Trump’s health care “concepts,” his running mate JD Vance explained that the Trump health-care agenda is to wreck protections for pre-existing conditions (while lying about it). That comes from Brian Beutler's substack (paywalled, except for the teaser paragraphs). I think The New Yorker has an extensive article as well, but it is so paywalled that we don...

I remember hearing Lunatic Fringe on one of the local radio stations in the Sacramento area sometime in the early autumn of 1981. That keyboard intro was haunting. The steel guitar solo was inspired enough by some of David Gilmour's work that this song could almost be mistaken for a Pink Floyd outtake. I say almost because Tom Cochrane has a very distinct vocal style. I probably gravitated toward this song as a then-15-year-old because of the lyrics, which had a noticeable anti-fascist/anti-Nazi flavor. As someone who had become aware that where I lived at the time had a noticeable neo-Nazi problem, those lyrics hit hard. The lyrics are just as relevant over four decades later. As it turns out, Tom Cochrane wrote this song out of concern about a rise in neo-Nazi activity that he was noticing in the late 1970s. Musically, it holds up nicely and lyrically it's as timely as ever. Here's the promo video: I'm also going to include an interview he sat for a few years ago whe...

Propublica has a detailed story of a mother who was in desperate need of a procedure that would have saved her life. Why didn't the hospital do its job? Its hands were tied by a strict abortion ban. She left behind her six-year-old son. The whole story is worth reading. It turns out that our current culture war has real flesh-and-blood casualties. Just to clue you in: Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans. Doctors warned state legislators women would die if medical procedures sometimes needed to save lives became illegal. Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and i...

Good news: the awful mid-19th century territorial law that forbade all abortions in Arizona is officially gone . Abortions in Arizona are now allowed through the 15th week of pregnancy, and there is still that invasive ultrasound and 24 hour waiting period to deal with. There is a ballot initiative that would allow abortions up to the week of viability (24 weeks) and would make it easier for women to obtain abortions when their health or that of the fetus is threatened. If you are in Arizona, plan on voting this November.   Other news: "Conservatives" (I'd use the term authoritarians, and that is not me splitting hairs) have been obsessed with increasing the birth rate. It turns out their policies won't have any noticeable impact . That does not surprise me. We have not had an agrarian economy in the US in ages, so the need for children as free farm labor is gone. Try renting an apartment anywhere these days if you have some ridiculous number of kids, and then finding...

If you wonder why I am so jaundiced about social media, the following blog posts and articles will make it crystal clear. Springfield Ohio is ground zero for a baseless claim about the Haitian immigrants who have truly revitalized what had been a dying industrial city. Where did that baseless claim originate? Apparently we have to look no further than a Facebook post by a Springfield resident based on a third-hand account by another Springfield resident. As the blogger by the handle Shakezula (I love the Aqua Teen Hunger Force reference) on LGM states it , these women present themselves as the real victims, now that they have been found out. Their excuses amount to "we had no idea that an ugly third-hand rumor spread on a Facebook post would spiral out of control." To which I call bullshit. These two assholes knew damn well that they were playing with fire, and now that they might face some consequences are pretending to be naive. Give me a break.  The damage is done. The r...

Sarah Cooper's videos where she lip-synced Donald Trump's unhinged ramblings were easily one of 2020's highlights. Her approach truly highlights just how deranged Trump is. This one she says is the last one, and if we're lucky, she'll be right. Still, she'll end that chapter of her comedic career on a high note. Enjoy:

I will use culture here in the broadest, most global sense of the term. Stephen Fry is right about how toxic social media have turned out to be , after initial optimism: Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk are "the worst polluters in human history", Stephen Fry has said. The actor and comedian made the claim during a lecture at Kings College, London. "You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world," he said of the pair. [...] He said he was at first enthusiastic about the potential of social media to unite people around the world and bring about positive change in society, citing the Arab Spring protests which were coordinated online as an example – but added that he had been proved wrong. He described what he considered to be a fatal flaw in attempts by early Facebook a...

I barely am scratching the surface here, but this is what you can expect from the GOP if Trump were to be reinstalled into the White House: say goodbye to your Social Security benefits and say goodbye to freedom of movement . It is not hyperbole to say we will end up with a dictatorship that will impoverish us and restrict our ability to travel even between state lines. That's not the America I wanted to leave for my children and their children. We all deserve so much better. Harris/Walz is our ticket for a better future. Those are the stakes.

I meant to post this yesterday, but I was just so busy I barely had a moment to breathe. It happens. But hey, it's an excuse to post the same content on Friday the 13th. This was an unlucky week for Donald Trump, and I am still enjoying the commentary from late night talks show hosts regarding the Harris-Trump debate (which will likely be the only debate between the two candidates). Here's Seth Meyers on prime time offering an extended A Closer Look segment focused on the debate: And I would be remiss if I did not post Jon Stewart's immediate post-debate segment Tuesday night. I was watching it live and was dying laughing the entire time:  We are still in an era where the late night comedians are offering better commentary on our politics than the so-called "serious" commentators on CNN and the like. It's refreshing to be provided with a stark contrast between Kamala Harris' competent debate performance and whatever the hell it was that Trump was doing. Le...

Former George W. Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has endorsed Kamala Harris for President . His tenure during the GWB era was certainly controversial, and for good reason. He was after all the guy who was in favor of maintaining the torture apparatus and warrantless surveillance of Americans during the peak "war on terror" era. His spurning Trump tells us a lot about how truly awful Trump is and how disastrous a second Trump term would be. I'm all in favor of a grand coalition approach to this election, but it's worthwhile to remind ourselves what some of these folks did when they had power.

September 11, 2001 is a date etched in my memory. I was in Goodwell, OK at the time and worked at the university, which was walking distance from my house. Since my first class was not until 930 am, I had plenty of time to enjoy breakfast, a couple cups of coffee, and catch up on any morning news. When coverage of the first airplane to crash into the World Trade Center happened, I thought it was a horrible accident. And then, the second plane hit the Twin Towers. My wife and I were no longer considering this an accident. I had to get ready for my first class of the day, so I did that and when I was getting ready to leave the house, my wife told me that one of the towers had collapsed, as if the fire wasn't horrific enough. I want to say that by around this time, we already knew that the Pentagon had been struck, and that a crash landing of yet another plane in rural Pennsylvania kept it from hitting its intended target. To say it was an awful morning is an understatement, as the ne...

I had hoped to have this out a few hours ago, but my internet went out for a bit. Allan Lichtman, as you all know, has already offered his prediction for this election year, and Harris has the majority of his keys already. Based on his criteria, it's not even close. Harris is his projected winner in November. About the debate itself? The professor doesn't even think it's close. Donald Trump had an awful night. Kamala Harris had her share of missed opportunities but was otherwise competent (which means she generally interacted well with the moderators and managed to stay on target throughout the debate). The moderators, in his view, did poorly. It's a view I happen to share. Neither of the moderators distinguished themselves Tuesday night. I'll offer a few bonus points for some efforts to fact check Trump in the moment. They still gave Trump more time to speak, and were more prone to unmute Trump's microphone than Harris'. I had low expectations about how deb...

When I first moved to my little corner of Arkansas in 2010, we had a Democratic Governor (and really any state-wide office you could imagine) and solid majorities (if not super-majorities) in both chambers of the State Assembly. What I learned very quickly from reading the news sites at the time was that the state's GOP was not ready for prime time (as a pundit put it at the time). There was no apparent positive platform, and much of the energy seemed to be directed at airing grievances about Obama being our nation's President. A barely-existent Democratic infrastructure combined with a Tea Party wave we saw in 2010 and again in 2012 were what propelled the state's GOP to tentative power and later absolute power after the 2014 election cycle. A decade later, one would think that the GOP's party apparatus would be in solid shape, its politicians more polished and with some tangible policies that appear based on current economic realities, etc. This is the part where we l...

That is all Trump has to offer. Seth Meyers is willing to call the Orange Fascist out since our legacy media outlets are simply not up to the task.  

During the years I hosted a radio show for KPSU (now regrettably defunct), this track by Matthew Shipp was on my rotation: I'll give you the Pitchfork review from around the time nu-bop was released. The blend of electronic music and avant-garde jazz is truly sublime.

One reason for threatening to pardon the criminals who were convicted for their role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election? Trump, as would-be dictator wants a paramilitary squad to terrorize us. The more goons out loose the better from his perspective, and likely the perspective of his followers. It's weird, un-American and anti-American, but this is what we deal with now when one of the major party candidates openly embraces fascism . They're not even hiding it at this point. Vote like your democracy depends on it, because it does.

Why do all the MAGA weirdos hate America? There is an answer , and one in which we are reminded that the seeds of the current Trump cult of personality can be found in 19th and 20th century central Europe. I will give you an extended excerpt from the article: As everyone knows, Donald Trump admires Vladimir Putin, and so a large portion of the Republican Party admires Putin in an imitative and slavish manner. But even before Trump became a candidate, the most regressive elements of conservatism — the paleoconservatives who developed around former Nixon and Reagan staffer (and Hitler apologist ) Pat Buchanan , Christian nationalists and reconstructionists inspired by Francis Schaeffer , and the tech-obsessed neoreactionary movement fueled by Silicon Valley money, which has produced JD Vance — discovered how much there was to love about Putin’s Russia. This New Right also seems to have an easy familiarity with the theorists of totalitarianism. In an interview this June with New York ...

    Pictured above: some useful idiots who have just lost their YouTube channels. Turns out that failing to disclose sponsors to YouTube is a big no-no and will get you banned for the platform. Sucks to be them.   The above images come from Ukraine Journal, a Telegram news channel that I trust. Here are the links if you use Telegram. And if not, no worries. Maybe subscribe to news channels on Telegram so you don't have to. The last link has this caption: Tayler Hansen, one of the MAGA influencers who (knowingly or unknowingly) was accepting money from the Russians to promote Russian propaganda and help Trump win stated that YouTube has deleted his channel and banned him for life. It is a violation of YouTube's terms of service to accept sponsorships and not disclose it to YouTube and their own audience. These "useful idiot" creators are claiming the money they got was for liscensing and it isn't undisclosed sponsorships, but it looks like YouTube isn't buy...