Category Archives: Random Blogging

Tools

Accurate information is the most important tool at citizens’ disposal. We know that a functioning democracy requires an informed citizenry–meaning a citizenry in possession of factual information, not one misinformed by tribal propaganda. The centrality of reliable information to the democratic process explains the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy the institutions that provide that information: especially the legitimate media and the nation’s universities.

Contemporary Americans are confronting the very real threat of losing both our constitutional republic and our common sources of credible information. The thus-far unanswered question is what role our scattered and fragmented internet landscape will play in this ongoing drama. How many Americans will opt for visiting the numerous sites offering vetted and valuable data, and how many will choose to occupy the preferred “reality” offered by the equally numerous sites devoted to reinforcing their misconceptions and prejudices. 

And then there’s the “sixty-four thousand dollar” question, the one that keeps me up at night: when the inhabitants of a country occupy wildly different realities, when each of us can choose to inhabit a preferred political or social construct, is rational governance even possible? In such a world, is there even a We the People to be governed?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I do recognize the vast educational potential of the Internet. There are literally millions of sites that offer insights into the world we inhabit, sites that simply describe what we know about “what is.” Perhaps the continued development of AI will introduce some order to the Internet’s wildly fragmented sources of information,  misinformation and disinformation.

Who knows? Certainly not this elderly blogger….

That said, I recently stumbled across a fascinating website that triggered these observations.

MAP describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit think tank,” working to create a “thriving, inclusive, and equitable America where all people have a fair chance to pursue health and happiness, earn a living, take care of the ones they love, be safe in their communities, and participate in civic life.” It seeks to advance conversation and achieve policy change through the presentation of information based upon rigorous research and strong, collaborative partnerships.

MAP produces (duh!) maps. Democracy maps. Equality maps.

The democracy maps track the election laws and policies of each state, to create what the site describes as a “detailed roadmap of how states can optimize civic engagement and protect the security, integrity and independence of our elections.” The maps track more than 50 aspects of state election and voting laws, and make it easy to see which states are providing an environment protective of democracy, and which states are falling “woefully short.” It was fascinating to see the significant differences across the states in access to voting and the ability of citizens to mount referenda. Each state is awarded a “Democracy Tally”–based upon the number of laws and policies within the state that help create a secure and healthy election system. 

The site also tracks state-level equality for LGBTQ+ citizens. Those maps score the laws and policies affecting the gay community within each state– the laws affecting things like relationships, nondiscrimination, religious exemptions, LGBTQ youth, and access to health care, among others. (It will come as no surprise to Hoosiers that our state is one of the 17–representing 32% of the U.S. population– with the very lowest level of equality for our LGBTQ+ neighbors.) 

The site offers a wealth of information, and does so with easily understood graphics. It also has copious citations to academic and other resources, allowing any visitor to confirm the accuracy of the data provided. I really encourage you to click through and browse the informative maps and charts that paint a visual picture of America’s patchwork democratic and equality landscapes.

Every so often, I come across a website like this one that offers rigorously vetted and understandable information about a wide variety of subjects–everything from environmental analyses to medical breakthroughs to criminal justice trends. Other sites offer sweeping overviews of, or deep dives into, specific aspects of world history, of philosophical movements, of the development of the arts… We are the first generation to have this enormous trove of scholarship and information literally at our fingertips. 

We could use all that hard-won information to educate and inform ourselves, and to make the world a better place.  

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Democrats Govern; Republicans Rule

It’s so easy for sane Americans to focus on the horrible, terrible, cruel and unbelievably stupid things that MAGA Republicans are doing daily. A recent example is the devastation in Texas, where inadequate warnings in advance of the weather–a result partially attributable to massive employee cuts to the Weather Service– cost over 85 people their lives.

What is frustrating is that it was so foreseeable: When the mindless, reckless cuts were being made, Scientific American ran a story headlined “How Trump’s National Weather Service Cuts Could Cost Lives,” warning that “staff cuts at the National Weather Service that have been made by the Trump administration are a danger to public safety as tornadoes, hurricanes and heat loom this spring and summer.”

The GOP has given rational Americans so many targets at both the state and federal levels that there is an understandable tendency to spend our time pointing and complaining. But as the new Chair of the Indiana Democratic Party has reminded us, complaining neglects the most important story, which is that–unlike the GOP– Democrats understand the obligations of governing, and we need to remind voters that all Americans, not just wealthy White ones, do better when Democrats are in charge.

I agree, so I wrote the following:

What happens when Americans elect Democrats? People do better.

When Democrats are in charge, states like California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington raise the minimum wage to $15/hour or higher.

Democrats in Blue states act to protect health coverage (Washington State even created a public health insurance option—the only one in the country) and pass laws requiring paid family and medical leave.

Blue states—including Oregon, California, Washington, Colorado and New York—make it easier to vote, expanding early voting and passing election reforms like automatic voter registration and same day registration.

Democrats support public education, and Blue states like New York, California and Oregon offer tuition-free college programs.

Indiana’s neighbor, Illinois, is a good example of the difference between Democrats who govern for We the People and Republicans who govern for the donor class. This July, Illinois Governor Pritzker signed the state’s Prescription Drug Affordability Act, limiting unfair pricing practices and supporting independent pharmacies, along with four bills to help high school students afford college. In January, Pritzker signed a bill forbidding payment of less than minimum wage to disabled workers.

And the Republicans?

In Red Indiana, they’ve kept the minimum wage at 7.25 since 2009, when they grudgingly had to raise it to match the federal rate.

In Red Indiana, Republicans are throwing people off Medicaid using stricter eligibility checks, work requirements, and enrollment caps, erecting barriers that hurt the most vulnerable populations. 

Red States have made it harder for their citizens to vote– cutting early voting, requiring specific government-issued IDs, and throwing out ballots with minor errors. Polls in Red Indiana and Kentucky close at 6– earlier than any other state—making it harder for working people to cast ballots.

From education to gun safety, from climate and the environment, from education to worker protection, Democratic lawmakers work to make citizens’ lives better and fairer, while Republicans wage culture wars and make it harder for middle-class Americans to earn a decent living.

Which approach really makes America great?

Indiana’s neighbor, Illinois, is just one example of the difference between government for We the People and government for the donor class. Just this month, Governor Pritzker signed the state’s Prescription Drug Affordability Act, limiting unfair pricing practices and supporting independent pharmacies, along with four bills designed to help high school students get into and afford to pay for college in Illinois. In January, he signed a bill forbidding payment of less than minimum wage to disabled workers.

There’s much more.

From education to gun safety, from climate and the environment, from education to worker protection, Democratic lawmakers in Blue America are working to protect the right to vote and the right to fair treatment. Meanwhile, Republicans in Red America are rolling back their citizens’ rights, making it harder to vote and harder for middle-class Americans to earn a decent living.

Which approach really makes America great?

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As If We Needed Confirmation

The Washington Post recently published an article with the shocking news that “Republicans are abandoning pluralism.” Forgive my language, but no shit, Sherlock!

Let’s take an honest look at what the MAGA cult–the 21st Century version of the Confederacy– has accomplished in its effort to remake the United States into a country dominated by White men.

Thanks largely to Mitch McConnell, the GOP successfully managed to subvert the Supreme Court–to replace dispassionate judges with submissive pawns willing to jettison constitutional precedents and eviscerate the Separation of Powers in a wholly unAmerican effort to take the country back to the days when White Christian males ruled the roost, and women and minorities were decidedly unequal.

MAGA has always been about one thing and one thing only: Making America White Again. Good people frequently express astonishment over the cult’s devotion to Trump–an odious gangster unfit for any office, let alone the presidency. What they fail to see–or perhaps resist acknowledging–is the racist basis of that support. As we’ve seen with the passage of the horrific “Beautiful Bill,” MAGA folks are willing to deprive themselves of healthcare, willing to accept a lower standard of living, willing to bend the knee to masked ICE brownshirts, if they can thereby assure themselves of the continued social dominance of men with white skin.

MAGA emerged to confront their existential dread of a society in which women, Black folks, Jews and Muslims–not to mention gay folks–could consider themselves civic equals. When rational people scratch their heads and wonder why poorer Americans are “voting against their own interests,” they fail to recognize where those interests truly lie–and it isn’t in the pocketbook issues where Democrats (understandably but erroneously) believe those interests lie. Their interests are cultural, not financial.

Only people who are intentionally blind can fail to see the anti-DEI hysteria for what it is. Efforts at equity and inclusion are seen by MAGA as an assault on their privilege. In the racist mind, equality and inclusion of the previously marginalized is simply discrimination against White guys.

The cited essay by Philip Bump includes a report I’ve seen elsewhere, about a sixth-grade teacher who had hung a banner in her classroom, one that many of us have seen elsewhere: it shows a range of heart-holding hands, each in a different hue. The banner has a single statement: “Everyone is welcome here.” As Bump notes, “It’s an anodyne sentiment, at worst, but also a celebration of multiracial community. And for that reason — and explicitly that reason, as a school official explained in an interview in March — the banner was determined to be unacceptable.”

Saying that “everyone is welcome” has become a political statement in the way that “science is real” has become one. Not because these statement themselves are political or even particularly controversial. No, they are now tainted with politics because they reject the right’s rejections of both objectivity and pluralism.

It isn’t only race, of course. Misogyny and homophobia are part and parcel of the White Christian Nationalist worldview.

Bump notes, for example, that Republican support for same-sex marriage has fallen since 2022, when most Republicans supported it. Now, only 4 in 10 do, a level not seen since 2016.

CNN released polling last month that illustrates another shift centered largely among Republicans. Conducted by the firm SSRS, the poll asked Americans whether “having an increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups, and nationalities in the U.S.” was threatening or enriching to American culture. Most respondents said enriching — though Republicans were about evenly split between the two.

Notably, the pollsters asked the same question in 2019. Since then, Republicans have gotten 25 percentage points more likely to say that American diversity is threatening to our culture. Among White people, the increase was 16 points.

Bump shared polling that showed Republicans much more likely than others to say that White people face discrimination.Research also shows that most Republicans don’t see discrimination as having anything to do with economic inequality. Instead, Republicans are likely to attribute those inequalities to a lack of hard work and “will power” by Black Americans.

MAGA is filled with fearful, angry people desperately clinging to the evaporating tribal privileges that Trump is promising to restore. They’ve made a lot of progress while the rest of us weren’t paying attention, and it is going to take a monumental, concerted effort  to defeat them.

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Ignorance And Stupidity

On this 4th of July, America is reeling under the combined threats of official ignorance and pervasive stupidity.

To be human, of course, is to be ignorant. There are all sorts of things that virtually all of us fail to understand. In my house, it tends to be most aspects of the emerging digital universe (I know AI is coming but have absolutely no idea how it works or what it portends, and my ability to understand the various devices my grandchildren grew up with is similarly limited). A depressingly significant portion of the population is ignorant of America’s legal framework and the most basic premises undergirding the Constitution and Bill of Rights. For millions of Americans, it’s ignorance of science and the significant difference between a scientific theory and the common use of the term “theory” as an unsupported guess.

Rather obviously, these knowledge gaps are not mutually exclusive….

Ignorance can be remedied. With proper motivation, most of us can fill in those empty spaces in our understanding. We can learn. Stupidity, however, isn’t amenable to similar correction. It’s defined as a lack of intelligence or understanding–an inability to reason or learn.

We are currently governed by people who exhibit both, elected by voters who–at the very least–were ignorant of both the nature of public service and the damage that predictably ensues when incompetent ideologues are placed in positions of authority.

America has a secretary of health and human services whose conspiratorial approach to reality and inability to understand science has led (among other appalling things) to a major outbreak of measles–a disease once virtually eradicated–and who has suggested that those afflicted take cod liver oil. We have an agriculture secretary whose “solution” to high egg prices is advice that we raise our own chickens. We have a secretary of defense–a dipsomaniac– who accidently included a journalist on an unsecured call in which national security matters were discussed. The list goes on…

The “Big Beautiful Bill” that contains MAGA’s policy priorities won’t just deprive millions of health care in order to line the pockets of our plutocrats– it will destroy this country’s storied educational institutions, and derail America’s scientific and technological progress.

The Trump administration’s fixation on ridding the country of immigrants–not simply those who’ve committed crimes, as candidate Trump promised, but any immigrant who lacks lily-white skin– is perhaps the best example of the profound stupidity that always accompanies racism.

Immigrants have been essential elements of American innovation and economic growth. Research conducted by the Partnership for a New American Economy in 2010 documented their importance. More than 40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Collectively, the companies founded by immigrants and their children employed more than 10 million people worldwide; and the revenue they generated was greater than the GDP of every country in the world except the U.S., China and Japan.

The names of those companies are familiar to most of us: Intel, EBay, Google, Tesla, Apple, You Tube, Pay Pal, Yahoo, Nordstrom, Comcast, Proctor and Gamble, Elizabeth Arden, Huffington Post. A 2012 report found that immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. As of 2011, one in ten Americans was employed by an immigrant-run business.

As we are discovering, America’s agriculture and construction industries overwhelmingly rely on immigrants, the majority of whom are undocumented.

MAGA’s anti-immigrant hysteria is part and parcel of its equally ignorant White Christian Nationalism. There has always been a nativist streak in America– Ellis Island was first established to keep “undesirables” from entering the country. “Give me your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to breathe free” was Emma Lazarus’ response to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Know-Nothing Party was formed largely by people who feared that Irish Catholic immigrants would take jobs from God-fearing Protestant “real Americans.”

The animus isn’t new, but it rests on widespread ignorance. As David Brooks (no bleeding heart liberal) has observed, when you wade into the evidence you find that the case for restricting immigration is pathetically weak. “The only people who have less actual data on their side are the people who deny climate change.”

Trump’s fixation on immigration has consistently been both stupid and ignorant, as well as inhumane. Remember his first term promise to build a “beautiful wall” on our southern border? The vast majority of people who are in the country illegally flew in and overstayed their visas—something a wall would neither address or prevent. (It would, however, focus on those Brown people…)

MAGA’s slogan ought to be: “Owning the libs by cutting off our noses to spite our faces.” Unfortunately, we “libs” live here too…

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There’s Good News Too..

Yes, things are bad. Yes, we are facing a not-so-slow-rolling coup. Yes, we are being governed by unprincipled and profoundly ignorant people. Yes, Trump’s horrific bill narrowly passed the Senate. But if we look, there’s also evidence that good people–good citizens–are fighting back. Effectively.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Americans of Conscience transmitted a long list of positive news items, “wins” for democracy, including everything from a town council in Barrington, Rhode Island unanimously voting to declare their town a sanctuary  for transgender people, to Tulsa, OKlahoma’s announcement of a $105 million reparations package for the 1921 Tulsa massacre, to the thousands of people in Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Charlotte, San Diego, Boston, Houston, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Worcester, MA, and elsewhere showing up to support neighbors facing unjust ICE raids, detainment, and deportation, to the successful EarthJustice lawsuit requiring the USDA to restore deleted information about climate change from the government website.

There were dozens more.

Then there was the welcome news that the Senate Parliamentarian had tossed numerous provisions of the “Big Beautiful Bill” for violating the Byrd rule limiting what can be included in reconciliation bills. Among the provisions that were deleted:

A provision selling off millions of acres of federal lands
A provision to pass food aid costs on to states
A proposed limitations on food aid benefits to certain citizens or lawful permanent residents
Proposed restrictions on the ability of federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders
A proposal for a funding cap for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and for slashing pay of employees at the Federal Reserve
A proposal to slash $293 million from the Treasury Department’s Office ofFinancial Research
A plan to dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
An effort to repeal an EPA rule limiting air pollution emissions of passenger vehicles
An item allowing project developers to bypass judicial environmental reviews if they pay a fee
A measure deeming offshore oil and gas projects automatically compliant with the National Environmental Policy Act
A modified version of the REINS Act, which would increase congressional power to overturn major regulations
A scheme to punish so-called sanctuary cities by withholding federal grants
An increase on Federal Employees Retirement System contribution rate for new civil servants who refuse to become at-will employees
A measure seeking to extend the suspension of permanent price supportauthority for farmers
A requirement forcing sale of all the electric vehicles used by the Post Office
A change to annual geothermal lease sales and to geothermal royalties, June 24)
A proposal for a mining road in Alaska
Authorization for the executive branch to reorganize federal agencies
New fee for federal worker unions’ use of agency resources
Transfer of space shuttle to a nonprofit in Houston from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum

And that is only a partial list. The ruling deleted at least some elements of this obscene effort to rob the poor to further enrich the plutocrats–at least from the Senate version.

As Simon Rosenberg recently reminded readers of his “Hopium Chronicles,” Trump is struggling and unpopular. Despite his efforts to wag the dog, his poll numbers have steadily dropped. Overall, his approval is down 20 points from week one, but perhaps more significant is the evidence that his incursions into the Black, Latino and youth votes are dissipating. In week one, 29% of Black voters approved of him; that number is now 12%. Hispanic approval has fallen from 42% to 30%. And the  approval of those between the ages of 18 and 29 has gone from 48% to 28%.

Rosenberg credits the thousands of grassroots groups that have emerged across the country, and the creation of 
new media organizations like Meidas Touch and COURIER Newsroom. (He also notes that Substack is becoming a powerful new platform for our politics–part of the way that news and media consumption habits have changed in the past year.) 

We’ve also seen the emergence of an entire new network of pro-democracy legal organizations, focused on defense of the Constitutional order, and increased pro-democracy activism by the nation’s 23 Democratic Attorney Generals.

New leaders are emerging, rising to the moment, breaking though (Newsom, Pritzker, Crockett, Murphy, Frost, AOC, Booker, Slotkin, Mamdani, etc)

We are communicating who we are right now through our opposition to Trump and our work to prevent his assault on the middle class, weakening of our health care system and abandonment of the Constitutional order. I think these fights are helping connect us to the core of who we are – champions of every day Americans, proud patriots who love this country and are willing to fight for it.

The good news is that good Americans are making what John Lewis called “Good Trouble.”
 

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