Sheila – Page 80 – Sheila Kennedy

No!!

Yesterday, I titled my post “Yes!” Today–after the election of a new House Speaker–I can only retreat into “No!”

After nearly four weeks of total dysfunction, the House GOP elected a Speaker candidate–essentially, Jim Jordan without the public buffoonery and scandal baggage. According to the Washington Post, here are five things to know about this previously undistinguished culture-war Representative from deep-Red Louisiana.

First–and least surprising, although deeply troubling– he’s an election denier.He opposed certifying the 2020 election and urged Trump to “stay strong and keep fighting” as Trump tried to overturn his loss in the presidential race. He tweeted out a message urging Trump to fight the results, adding “We must exhaust every available legal remedy to restore Americans’ trust in the fairness of our election system.”

Johnson also objected to certifying Biden’s electoral win and was one of the architects of a legal attack on the election that consisted of arguing that states’ voting accommodations during the pandemic were unconstitutional. He led a group of 126 Republican lawmakers in filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court alleging that authorities in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan had “usurped” the constitutional authority of state legislatures when they loosened voting restrictions because of the pandemic. The court rejected the underlying complaint — filed by the state of Texas — citing a lack of standing, and dismissed all other related motions, including the amicus brief.

Second, and extremely concerning, he was one of 57 lawmakers — all of them Republicans — who voted against a $39.8 billion aid package for Ukraine in May. Although a majority of GOP Representatives support aid to Ukraine, Johnson is not among them.

Third–and probably least surprising–Johnson, “a constitutional lawyer who identifies as a Christian,” opposes abortion. He actively celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, has insisted (via Twitter) that rights are not protected by government but “given by God,” and those God-given rights don’t include reproductive autonomy for women. He supports an absolute national ban on abortions.

The antiabortion nonprofit Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America gives Johnson an A+ ranking on this issue, stating that he “has voted consistently to defend the lives of the unborn and infants,” including by “stopping hard-earned tax dollars from paying for abortion, whether domestically or internationally.”

Fourth, his election cements the takeover of the GOP by Trumpers–as if there was any doubt.

He served on Trump’s legal defense team during his two impeachment trials in the Senate. He has called charges against Trump — which include a federal case relating to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election — “bogus,” and has said the legal and political systems have treated Trump unfairly.

Fifth, Johnson displays the anti-LGBTQ bigotry we’ve come to expect from the GOP’s pseudo-“Christian” culture warriors. He continues to oppose same-sex marriage, for example.

Johnson has positioned himself on the far right of the political spectrum on several social issues, even within the current conservative Republican conference. Notably, he introduced legislation last year — modeled after Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill — that would have prohibited discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as related subjects, at any institution that received federal funds. The Human Rights Campaign, a pro-LGBTQ civil rights organization, gave Johnson a score of 0 in its latest congressional scorecard.

Johnson also opposes gender-affirming care for minors and led a hearing on the subject in July. In a statement, he described gender-affirming care — meaning medical care that affirms or recognizes the gender identity of the person receiving the care, and which can include giving puberty or hormone blockers to minors under close monitoring from a doctor — as “adults inflicting harm on helpless children to affirm their world view.”

Health-care professionals, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, disagree, but Johnson and his ilk dismiss expertise of all kinds in favor of listening to the God they have created in their own image…

So here we are, fellow Americans.

I’d rate the likelihood that Congress will now begin attending to business somewhere between zero and minus-one on a ten-point scale; at best, we will be treated to a more regularized performance of hari-kari.

If the extreme public meltdown of one of the nation’s political parties was taking place at a less-fraught time, I might actually find watching it enjoyable. But with two wars raging and a government shutdown looming, it’s agonizing to watch ideologues and intellectually-vacuous incompetents take the helm of the ship of state.

Johnson is a good fit for a political party that has been reduced to trading on ignorance, hate and fear. He’s a disaster-in-the-making for a country that needs to return to its constitutional and philosophical roots.

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Yes!!

Ready for something different? (It really gets depressing writing about war and political dysfunction. Besides, all the news isn’t bad, although it sometimes seems that way…)

There is a mystifying (at least to me ) disconnect between the truly remarkable ability of humans to create tools–technologies that make our lives immeasurably better–and our evident inability to engage in rational self-government. That said, it’s worth exploring some of those technological breakthroughs, and the policy decisions they enable, if only to remind ourselves that we humans can, on occasion, be productive, rational beings.

A recent example, courtesy of the New York Times: Vermont, where Green Mountain Power is asking state regulators to let it buy batteries it will install at customers’ homes, saying doing so will be cheaper than putting up more power lines.

Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity.

The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants.

The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain — a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses — would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own.

“Call us the un-utility,” Mari McClure, Green Mountain’s chief executive, said in an interview before the company’s filing. “We’re completely flipping the model, decentralizing it.”

This plan has all kinds of benefits, not least because providing batteries to customers turned out to be cheaper than paying recovery costs when lines went down and building more power lines to improve the system.

About those power lines: I have often wondered why utilities don’t bury them. They are not only ugly blights on the visual environment, they are vulnerable to all kinds of damage–high winds, fires, even automobiles crashing into the poles. I realize that burying the lines would be more expensive “up front,” but it has always seemed to me that burying them in accessible conduits would save the costs and time expended when those lines went down, or had to be replaced for other reasons.

The battery idea is even better.

Critics of the industry have pointed out that utilities haven’t been particularly innovative; instead, they’ve continued to spend large sums on new long-distance power lines, that–as the linked article notes– can take years or even decades to build because of environmental reviews and local opposition.

A May report by the Brattle Group, a research firm based in Boston, concluded that utilities could save up to $35 billion a year if they invested in smaller-scale energy projects like home batteries and rooftop solar panels that can be built more easily and quickly.

Green Mountain’s proposal seems to recognize that reality, said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It really is the model, especially if you’re worried about power outages,” she said. “It really could become the example for the rest of the country.”

Ms. McClure said the high cost of large-scale power projects threatened to raise electricity rates so much that many customers might struggle to pay for energy.

According to the article, power outages cost utilities in the United States about $150 billion a year. Experts have projected that modernizing U.S. electric grids could cost “well into the trillions of dollars.” Green Mountain has been spending roughly $20 million to $25 million each year just managing trees and other vegetation around its power lines. In an omen of climate change to come, the utility spent about $55 million on storm recovery this year–far more than the less than $10 million a year it averaged between 2015 and 2022.

Batteries will massively reduce outages and save maintenance dollars. Getting rid of those ugly power lines is just the cherry on top of the sundae.

If we could only apply these same sorts of innovative ideas to our political system….

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Lesson From Poland

Recently, an op-ed from Jennifer Rubin and a daily Letter from Robert Hubbell combined to send the same message: don’t lose hope! Loss of hope, after all, is what the Steve Bannons of the world want–to “flood the zone with shit” in amounts sufficient to wear us out.

Rubin took a lesson from last week’s election in Poland, which she very accurately described as a hopeful message for democracy. As she pointed out, authoritarian regimes count on increasing our depression, resignation, cynicism and despair; they know that continued outrages disable opposition and induce widespread compliance with even a despised regime. Her point: If free people are to resist authoritarian repression, they must cultivate the habit of optimism.

I read that column on the same day that I received Robert Hubbell’s almost identical exhortation. (For some reason–perhaps my position somewhere on the Pacific Ocean, I can’t find a link, so you’ll have to trust that my citations are accurate.)

Hubbell begins:

This is a pep talk to my family (and myself). You can listen in.

We are living through an extraordinary time. The world is being rocked by multiple overlapping crises: The terrorist attack on Israel on October 7; Israel’s subsequent declaration of war on Hamas; protests throughout the Middle East sparked by a Hamas missile strike on a hospital in Gaza; the ongoing war against the Ukrainian people by Vladimir Putin; the inability of the majority party in the House to elect a Speaker; the possibility of a government shutdown before Thanksgiving; upcoming elections in Virginia and Ohio that will serve as bellwethers for 2024; the hottest year (2023) and hottest month (July) since scientists began keeping climate records; and a new term of the US Supreme Court that could fundamentally reshape American society and personal liberties (or not).

That’s a lot.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed, to withdraw, to look away.

Don’t.

Hubbell continued by pointing out that our emotional exhaustion and intentional disengagement are the goals of today’s Republicans, a cult intent upon retaining power by undermining democracy and ignoring the will of the American people. (When Rep. Tom Cole nominated Jim Jordan for Speaker of the House, Cole emphasized one of Jordan’s “leading qualifications”– his commitment to cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Does anyone who isn’t a lunatic believe that such cuts represent the will of the American people?)

If the election in Poland teaches us anything, it teaches us that Hubbell is correct when he insists that “Our generation has one job: To endure, to abide, to keep the faith until this moment of reactionary extremism subsides.”

Exhaustion is the point of MAGA extremism. Republicans say:

Impeach Trump? We’ll impeach Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, Jack Smith, Alejandro Mayorkas, and Christopher Wray.

Indict Trump? We’ll indict Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden.

Recognize the equality of LGBTQ people? We’ll legalize discrimination against them.

Protect Americans from a deadly virus? We’ll undermine trust in science.

Fight human-caused climate change? We will make it illegal to discuss climate change in the classroom.

We must recognize those responses as a mind game designed to make us give up and go away.

We have one job: To endure, to abide, to keep the faith until this moment of reactionary extremism subsides. If we can do that, we will leave to our heirs a healthier, stronger democracy.

We can do that. We must do so. We have no other choice.

He’s right. We have no other choice.

Poland’s election should serve as a lesson that–with hard work and perseverance –We the People can defeat the agents of discord and hatred, and return our institutions to the often dull but utterly necessary work of democratic governance.

We need to hang tough….and we need to VOTE.

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Shades Of Texas

Back before the Internet and e-books, when school textbooks were hard-back volumes printed by educational publishers, Texas had a wildly disproportionate influence on the lessons those books conveyed. Even then, Texas was an anti-intellectual wasteland, but because of its size–and the need to standardize publication of schoolbooks nationally– it had an outsized influence on what went into the nation’s textbooks. (I often think we should give Texas back to Mexico, but they probably wouldn’t take it…)

Today, of course, school districts have access to a wider variety of educational resources, so the minority of Americans who are firmly opposed to giving children an accurate understanding of history or science have pursed a different tactic: educational vouchers. Vouchers–as readers of this blog are aware–allow parents to use tax dollars to send their children to private–almost always religious–schools, a large number of which use textbooks that are even less accurate than those once influenced by Texas.

Time Magazine recently reported on the most widely-used of those “textbooks.”

The report began by noting that the singer-songwriter who wrote the controversial “Try that in a small town” shouldn’t have been so surprised by the outcry the song triggered. After all, he’d attended a religious school that used

textbooks produced by Abeka, a publishing company that has long been part of the effort among conservative institutions to teach an airbrushed version of history—one that presents a narrow vision of a heroic, Christian, capitalist America. For the most part, these books have been limited to private schools and homeschools, though the founders of these networks always hoped to influence public life…

Abeka’s roots go back to the 1925 Scopes Trial, which pitted evolutionary science and expert academic knowledge against local control and religious dogma. After the trial, which produced reams of journalistic mockery of conservative religion, prominent fundamentalists like Bob Jones Sr. decided that America needed a new kind of educational institution, one free from the influence of mainstream academic expertise. He founded Bob Jones College in Florida (now Bob Jones University in South Carolina) to provide white conservative Christians with a “fighting base.”

Eventually, even Bob Jones University was deemed too “progressive” by religious fanatics, and a network of white-dominated private religious schools grew rapidly.

These schools promised to maintain prayer and traditional teaching. Most importantly, they promised a refuge from court-ordered desegregation efforts. These schools needed textbooks that would teach the lessons that parents who opposed such measures wanted their children to learn.

In response, Abeka expanded its publishing efforts. The company eventually published original textbooks in every subject, for every grade. The goal was to provide an alternative kind of curriculum, one that—in the words of one Abeka leader in 1979—would teach students to cherish the Bible, “master the three R’s,” maintain a healthy “respect for authority,” and develop “pride in America.”

As the Time article notes, Abeka textbooks teach a history that is “dramatically distinct from mainstream books.” They omit the violence that doomed Reconstruction, instead explaining that it failed because many formerly enslaved people were “not prepared for political responsibility.” “The book does briefly note that “some Southern whites used illegal methods” and “terror tactics,” including forming the KKK. Yet, that mention of white terrorism is buried within an overall message of white victimhood.”

In 2019, Abeka’s texts were used by a majority of America’s 1,689,726 homeschooled students plus nearly three-quarters of a million students in conservative Christian private schools. It isn’t just Abeka–Hillsdale College and PragerU, among others, produce wildly slanted versions of America’s history, and have been making inroads in even public schools in Red States.

And it isn’t just history: textbook publishers serving these Christian voucher schools also produce anti-Darwin, anti-evolution. “science” books.

In 2010, NBC reported that Christian-based materials that omit any mention of evolution had come to dominate the home-school education market; that year, that market was more than 1.5 million students. As the article notes, most home-school parents want a “Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation.”

“Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling,” says the introduction to “Biology: Third Edition” from Bob Jones University Press. “This book was not written for them.”

The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its “History of Life” chapter that a “Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is.”

That is the worldview being supported by Hoosier tax dollars that have been siphoned off and sent to “voucher” schools by Indiana’s legislators.

And we wonder why educated people leave Indiana…

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Another Answer To “What’s WRONG With These People?”

A lot of them are ignorant.

At least, if a recent report from the (admittedly leftish) New Republic is at all accurate. That article looked at the GOP crazies’ enthusiasm for a government shutdown, and found that–in addition to their antipathy to government in general–several of them appear convinced that a government shutdown would prevent the prosecutions of Donald Trump from continuing.

If this is really one of the motives for our current dysfunction, it rests on a misconception.

A government shutdown would not end the four Trump prosecutions! Two of them, of course, are being undertaken at the state level, in New York and Georgia, so Congress has no power over those at all. And the two federal ones, both led by Jack Smith, one in Washington, D.C., and one in Florida, are protected from any shutdown. In the past, reports NBC News, federal criminal matters have been exempted from government shutdowns. A Justice Department memo from 2021—long before Trump was indicted anywhere, so presumably written not with him specifically in mind—states that in the event of a shutdown, “criminal litigation will continue without interruption as an activity essential to the safety of human life and the protection of property.”

It’s hard to believe that people elected to the Congress of the United States are so ignorant of the rules promulgated by that government, but there is massive evidence that several of them really are that clueless. Marjorie Taylor Green comes to mind…. and how many times have you watched a political advertisement in which a candidate promises to do something that is either patently illegal or–as a practical matter– impossible? I always wonder whether the candidate really believes s/he can accomplish whatever it is, or whether (more likely) s/he thinks voters are too ignorant to know better.

That said, according to the linked article, most elected officials do know better.

Very few of them believe this garbage. As Mitt Romney told McKay Coppins recently, GOP senators regularly criticized Trump behind his back and once “burst into laughter” after he left the room. The House is more extreme than the Senate, so maybe a dozen of them really believe Trump’s narrative. But most don’t. And yet they say it and say it and say it, with conviction.

The only thing that explains the culture warriors who aren’t acting out of ignorance or stupidity is venality. Only a dishonest calculus can account for their public pronouncements: If pandering to a crazed base–a cult–is what it will take to avoid a primary challenge from the even-loonier Right, then that pandering will take priority over both personal integrity and the clear interests of the American public. There’s no bottom to their cupidity and self-interest.

Representative Andy Clyde—the guy who called January 6 a “normal tourist visit”—is seeking to add amendments to the appropriations bill to remove all federal funding from all three prosecutors (Smith, Fani Willis, and Alvin Bragg). Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene want to defund Smith. And Jim Jordan (of course) wants legislation dictating that the department can’t spend money on “politically sensitive” investigations.

Can these people possibly get more corrupt? (Don’t answer that.) But this is what happens when reality is turned on its head. Trump has created a “reality” that is the direct opposite of real reality. In real reality, ample evidence exists to suggest that Trump committed serious crimes, and he tried, right in front of our eyes, to lead a violent coup against the United States. But in Trump reality, it’s all McCarthyism.

The past few weeks have demonstrated just how little today’s Republican Party cares about governance or the American people. The GOP House members have vacillated between paralysis in the face of events requiring crucial decision-making, and toyed with installing a legislative terrorist as Speaker.

The last paragraph summed up our situation:

And let’s remember the bigger picture with respect to democracy. When one of two political parties is led by people who either (a) genuinely believe a fascist interpretation of reality or (b) don’t, but pretend to out of fear of a strongman and his well-armed followers … well, if that party takes power, democracy is kaput. We’ll find out soon enough how much of the country cares.

We will indeed.

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