by JanieM
One of my favorite signs from the Augusta event:
Open thread, with an emphasis on reporting in from here there and everywhere.
The Augusta event was well attended, if on nowhere near the scale of the women's march. Of the people I might have gone with, several were away and one was in the hospital, but practically everyone in Maine knows everyone else, so I wasn't lonely. :-)
It was a hard location for taking crowd pics -- people were spread out, and "hidden" under trees, and stretched along the street. But I'd say there were several hundred people at the peak.
***If you have pictures you'd like to share, and you happen to have a Flickr account (the only venue I'm familiar with), you can upload a pic and then copy the link that's provided into the ObWi comment box. Click the "share" arrow at the lower right of the Flickr window, then select embed, and a size from the dropdown. The 375x500 size seems to work best. (Be frugal; I'm not sure Typepad can handle a big flood of pics.)
If you can't embed that way, maybe we can figure out some other way to do a picture thread. Doctor Science clearly knows how to put pics in a front page post, but I don't know if she does it via Typepad, or the way I did this one, via a link to some other repository.
Justice Kennedy resigning is a horrible blow. As a gay man I wouldn't say that he always had our back, but he was an ally (in the sense of having very different priorities, yet still working together with us) nonetheless. If we are going to get through all this we probably need to accept even reluctant sort-of allies.
In the parts of the blogosphere and social media world I inhabit, there seems to be quite a bit of talk about "court packing" as soon as we get a chance. Court packing in this context means adding additional members to the Supreme Court until we think we would have a majority. No one seems to defend it as an objectively good idea for the health of the Supreme Court, it seems to be a tit-for-tat escalation for the (ridiculous) ploy that McConnell used to keep Merrick Garland off the bench. I understand the tactical interest in tit-for-tat, but lets talk strategy.
Scenario 1: Democrats control both houses and the Presidency for a few terms. You don’t need to pack the courts, you pass a bunch of laws. You pass a voters rights law, you pass a new civil rights law, you pass a strong health care bill.
Scenario 1a: the Supreme Court does annoying things on the edges, but for the most part let’s Congress do it’s thing. You got your way AND didn’t break the system even more.
Scenario 1b: the conservative Court obstructs even things clearly in Congressional power. Now you can Court pack because you are being forced into it. People will see that you aren’t just breaking things worse.
Scenario 2: Democrats don’t control both Houses and the Presidency. Well they can’t pack anyway. So now we are just talking about breaking things without being able to do it.
Scenario 3: Democrats control both Houses and the Senate and the Presidency by such thin margins that they don’t think they will have it long.
Scenario 3a: Democrats spend their political energy getting 3 or 4 major bills passed (voting rights etc).
Scenario 3b: Democrats spend much of their political energy deliberately breaking the Supreme Court while knowing they are on a knife edge of just handing the tactic over to Republicans after an escalation.
If you’re in scenario 1 you don’t need to break things even more than the Republicans did until you know that you’re in 1b, and you have time to see which one you’re in. If you’re in scenario 3 you’d be a fool to spend the short time you have power introducing new brokenness into the system (just to show that you're 'serious') rather than passing some good policy advances.
Please note that while I think an argument about the proper place of norms or comity in politics might theoretically be useful, this post does not rely on such notions.
For the past week, we have mostly been focused on the family separation fiasco. Understandably. But in some senses this has been just another distraction effort (after all, they have now gone 3 steps forward and 1 step back; probably without general notice of the net movement). Meanwhile, there have been other things going on which will end up having a bigger impact on more people, both in the US and worldwide.*
I speak, of course, of the trade war that has gotten rolling since the beginning of the month. Look at what’s happened.
We slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum, wherever it comes from. Including Canada, which is tightly integrated with the US economy. Just for openers, note that we have a net trade surplus in steel with Canada. That is, we export more steel to them than we import from them. Note also that there are US companies which use types of steel that only comes from Canadian foundries. Steel production is not readily interchangeable. That is, just because a foundry makes one type of steel doesn’t mean that it can readily switch to making another kind. So there are companies (in the Midwest heart of Trump country) which are looking at closing down because the tariffs make it impossible for them to turn out products at a profit.
At the beginning of the month, we slapped tariffs on a bunch of EU and Chinese products as well. Not surprisingly, they responded by placing tariffs on a bunch of US products. Also, not surprising, they were a lot smarter about what they targeted: soybeans, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Jack Daniels whisky, etc. In short, stuff produced by Trump supporters. Even normally supine Republican Senators are actually standing up and demanding that the administration quit hurting their constituents.
In response, we are now escalating to more products, especially Chinese ones. But there are a couple little problem here. First, the companies that produce the stuff we are putting tariffs on don’t comprise a major part of the Chinese economy. In particular, we aren’t looking at industries employing lots of Chinese workers.
Second, we are looking at inputs to US industries which are significant. Pretty obviously, at each step we are doing things which are going to damage ourselves far more than the Chinese.
Third, what we are looking at here is a battle (in the case of China) between a largely free market economy and a mercantilist economy. Which is to say, China is already set up to provide government support to the industries which are hurt. Meaning that they can keep going far longer than we can.
Where does this all end? There seem to be two principal options:
1) Trump backs down and removes the tariffs. I have no idea how he will rationalize doing so while getting nothing, but he has demonstrated an ability to do so in less likely circumstances.
2) The whole world economy gets plunged into a recession. Except for the US, which gets hit harder. We don’t start crawling out until we have new people in charge. And even then, it’s going to take quite a while to rebuild the institutions which are being trashed by our actions, e.g. the WTO.
If I was a Republican running for office, I would be at least as worried about the economy crashing before November as I would at being tarred over the family separation mess. Because this is not going to end quickly. And it is definitely not going to be easy on us.
* I do not at all wish to minimize the horror that has been going on. Just to be clear.
Today SCOTUS decided Carpenter v. United States, saying essentially if the police want to gather your cell phone location records for the past ____ days they need a warrant under the 4th Amendment. In the decision, in an opinion by the Chief Justice (who continues to vie with Kennedy for "least awful GOP nominee", the other three being hopeless in almost all cases), notes that "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere."
In addition, the opinion states that "We decline to extend [Smith v. Maryland] to cover these novel circumstances....the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user's claim to Fourth Amendment protection....we hold that an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements as captured through" cell-site location information.
This is in accord with my view that Smith would have been decided differently under today's technology. Smith involved "pen registers" installed by the FBI to track and record what phone numbers you called; since this information was kept by a third party you could not have any expectation of privacy in it under Katz v. United States. and therefore it was not a "search" for purposes of the 4th Amendment's warrant requirement. This was a minimal amount of information and required significant effort by the government to install and collect was, again in my view, an unstated but underlying factor in the Court's decision.
That cell phone companies can track everywhere your phone has been - and thus presumably you - for the past however many months and it costs the government essentially nothing to gather it was a bridge too far for Roberts and the "liberal" Justices. Similarly, I hope, that you are storing personal information, photos, etc. in the "cloud" would not give the government license to just claim that information without a warrant.
1984 posits a society in which everyone important has a "Telescreen" in their home that acts as television, security camera, and microphone. I often wondered why people would permit this, or not disable it somehow, or at least interfere with its functioning. But a scene from the movie (and perhaps the book) The Hunt for Red October provided an epiphany for me. In it Jack Ryan as played by Alec Baldwin asks "So how's [the captain] gonna get the crew off the sub? They have to want to get off. How do you get a crew to want to get off a submarine? How do you get a crew to want to get off a nuclear sub..."
That is, people want these devices on their person and in their home. Whether it be cell phones, smart TVs, Alexa, internet enabled security cameras, etc. The government doesn't have to install them and ensure their functioning - the people do that themselves.
That SCOTUS has recognized - at least in this "narrow" case as Roberts describes it - we do not give up all privacy to roam around in public or be internet connected (if I can extend the opinion a bit), is a good, though perhaps fleeting, sign in the current awfulness.
We had to say good-bye to Sneakers on Friday. He'd clearly reached the end of the line, he wasn't eating and was down to skin and bones. He had a really good run: more than 18 1/2 years is a full life for a cat, and he had very few illnesses or problems before the last few months. We loved him (especially me), and he loved us (especially me: he knew who was the Maximum Sucker).
There's a service called Lap of Love that sends a vet to your home to euthanize your pet in a comforting environment, so he died with us all around, touching him, resting his head on my hand. The vet was wonderfully kind and gentle with us as well as with Sneakers. She said she now does home euthanasia full-time. We said, "Isn't that awfully hard, emotionally?" but she said, "It's an honor."
I now have to think of what to plant on his grave that the deer won't eat (much). Maybe a Carolina Allspice, one of the new varieties with a guaranteed scent-- we have one on the property already, but it doesn't have much of a smell (it apparently varies from plant to plant for the wild type).
We always had cats while I was growing up--or rather, we always had Cat, because Susu came when I was 2 and died when I was in grad school. There were others, too, over the years, so I was very happy when I moved in with Mister Doctor and got to co-own his cat, Nameless.
Since pregnancy is a kind of organ transplant situation, one thing the body does is turn down the immune system for the duration. When it turns itself back up after the birth, one thing that can happen is that you get new allergies. Nameless was killed by a car a few months after Sprog #1 was born, so I didn't realize I'd become allergic to cats until I visited a multi-cat home and had to leave abruptly, as I felt my windpipe abruptly contract (an experience I do not recommend).
This happened again in a different multi-cat house, so I sadly resigned myself to going through life without the cat my soul cried out for.
In the course of time Sprog #1 started asking for a cat, and I had to say "No, Mommy's allergic." In the further course of time Sprog #2 appeared and grew until Sprog #1 could make her part of the Cat Begging Chorus, which involved singing "Kitty Cat Man" by Beth Marlin, with GREAT emotion:
I started to weaken.
Then, on December 1, 1999, Bastet decided it was time to intervene. It was the first really cold day of the season, and 10-week-old Sneakers showed up at our door, mewing piteously. Our house was next door to a bunch of open, weedy fields, and some "human" (I use the term loosely) had dumped him there to fend for himself. And he did: he found us. We let him in "just until we find who lost him" (though we had a bad suspicion already, pets had been dumped in those fields before). He climbed into my lap, started purring ... and I didn't have an allergic reaction. Some other allergic people eventually did react to him, but as far as I was concerned Sneakers was a hypoallergenic cat.
He was an indoor/outdoor cat for the first 10 years of his life, and reached a rather splendid size:
Here he is when he weighed 15 pounds.
When we moved to a smaller house next to a very busy street he became an all-indoors cat, and he lost weight to become a reasonably svelte 11-12 pounds. He lost the weight, I think, because he spent more of his time in the same room with his humans, so he got out of the habit of asking for food as a way to get company.
For most of his life, he came to me once a day to lie down on his side, me facing him, to tread and purr while I petted his tummy. All the cats I've had before had policies of "no more than 3 seconds of tummy-patting before I SLAY", but Sneakers wanted it to go on until my hand fell asleep.
This was the face that commanded tummy-pets.
He lost interest in this in the last couple of years, but continued to demand head-scritches for which he held my hand in place, as seen in the picture at the top of this post: we called it "Best Boy Has Key Grip".
In the past few years the arthritis in his hip got to be pretty bad, so I bought a low cat-house he could use to jump up and down to our bed. We got a bunch of nice India-print bedspreads (you can see one in the picture at the top; they come from Full Moon Loom) so we could easily change them if he got them messy, and I put a water dish on my bedside table. He basically lived on our bed for the last 2 years or so, which means that every time I go into the bedroom I reflexively look for him and he's not there.
The family will probably make me wait until after Worldcon, but I'm definitely going to want another cat soon. At least one: the question I'm not sure of is whether we should get two of two different ages (one under 3, the other 8 or older) so that when a cat inevitably dies, there's another one to keep me from feeling so bereft.
The big question is: how do I find out whether I'm allergic to a particular shelter cat? Sprog #1 volunteers at a nearby cat shelter, and I can only be inside for about 10 minutes before I start to feel really bad. Sneakers was looked like a completely generic American Shorthair, so I suspect there's probably a cat in the shelter I won't react to much--but how do I spot it against the background allergens? I saw a suggestion online that we might be able to allergen-test-drive a cat for 24 hours before making a decision, but I'm not sure that's really fair to the cat (or me, since we'd have to deep-clean the house if the experiment fails).
Any suggestions? How do you-all deal with the fact that our pets have lives so rich in love, but so much shorter than our own?
With this post, I am breaking three of my personal rules I have for this blog. The first is that I do not call out commenters in the post as I think it is unfair to use the larger megaphone of the front page to make a point.
The second rule is that in dealing with this fight in the comments, rather than explain and then take action as I would normally do, I'm taking a hockey referee approach. A hockey ref only moves in to deal with the fight after the two players are on the ice and they can essentially lie on them. Why? Because you don’t want to hold one while the other person gets to take a free shot. Normally, I wouldn't block and then explain, but I was away from the computer when the fight broke out between bob ‘I’m never going to win any personality contests’ mcmanus and sapient. I asked other front pagers to block the two ip addresses until I could get in front of a computer and write this.
bob mcmanus, if you continue to write things like this Okay, sapient and the little girls, all frightened and quivery, all putting on the calm reasoned more in sorrow bullshit, are asking you to protect them from the Big Bad Bob
and this If you think you deserve power and responsibility, then get the shit done. Failure and performative victimhood does not get my empathy or respect…..Generic fucking “you" there as usual, no wait, I meant you JanieM, not Russell, you and that insane repulsive LGM crew, who have just enraged me again
you are going to be banned.
There are a number of points I could make concerning your arguments and rhetoric, but as this is a larger megaphone, I'll simply say that you have been blocked for a week. If you come back and continue to make the comment section inhospitable for women with misogynist comments, you will be permanently banned. There is a hair trigger here. If you engage in some tortured reasoning about how the women are not ‘tough’ enough to handle your commentary, you’ll get booted. If you talk about how I'm acting like a knight on a white horse and claim I can't admit the contradiction of this action and allowing free discourse, you'll get banned. Not because I don't see a contradiction, it's because by your actions, you have no standing to make that argument.
sapient was blocked as well, under the hockey referee approach. That block has been removed, however, it would have been better if a letter had been sent to the kitty rather than arguing for a ban in the comments. I realize that the assumption is that everyone sees what goes on in the comments, but sometimes, things go by too quickly. So making a claim that X deserves banning requires that people have seen X. If you really think something deserves that, I think you should take the extra time to report it directly rather than toss it in the comments.
The third rule I am breaking is that I am also closing the comments to the post preemptively, because I'd prefer not to have an immediate post-mortem on all this. This is not because I can't handle questioning, it is because I don't have time to reply thoughtfully to any questions that may arise. My general rule is that I don't want to stop anyone talking about anything. However, closing the comments is a way of signalling that I think it would be best if the other commenters not dissect what has happened here, though that is a suggestion rather than an order.
I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
The President is horrible. His Attorney General is horrible. His press secretary is horrible. ICE is horrible. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are horrible. The GOP is horrible.
Also, too, horribly racist. The GOP is the party of Sarah Palin on her worst day now.
Random movie quotes have been popping into my head lately and the number one thing I realized is that none of them are from a movie post-2000. Either I'm old or my movie watching habits have declined. Probably both.
I was going to put up a thread about how one of the great political "branding" campaigns of the past 30+ years is the GOP labeling the estate tax as the "death tax." Not that that's news but it just seems remarkable to me that what, IMHO, should be the least objectionable tax - a tax on a dead person's assets - can be so unpopular. They're dead! What are they going to do with the money? Maybe it should be labeled an inheritance tax.
This might have lead to a broader discussion of why we permit dead people to lock up assets for decades, and potentially forever, in trusts or charitable foundations or the like. Seems a waste, why are people fighting over the wishes of someone who died in the 1930s (or earlier), for example. It's a little trickier when these things are set up while still living (e.g., Gates foundation), but still.
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