When The Feds Say "Do This" And "Don't Do This" At The Same Time

     There are a number of Federal grant programs, some dating back decades, that aim to help survivors of domestic abuse, human trafficking and violent crime.*  Many of them are written in such a way that the immigration status of the victim is no bar to getting such aid, and some even have provisions to make it possible for victims to seek permanent residency.  The notion is that crime is crime, victims ought not be made to suffer further, and escaping an abuser shouldn't make it less likely that a person could get permission to stay here and even work towards citizenship.  For most of these, the money flows to individual states, and from them to non-profit aid groups (as well as local police, prosecutors and public defenders).

     Mr. Trump's Justice Department is no fan of such open-handedness, especially the sweeping inclusion in the Violence Against Women Act, and has issued guidelines restricting the kinds of legal services this money can be used to provide to people without legal status in the U.S.

     The problem is, that's not what the law says.  That leaves the states stuck at a fork: they can obey Federal law, passed (and later reauthorized) by Congress and signed by Presidents, and get sideways with Justice in the doing, or they can go along with DOJ's guide, and get sued six ways from Sunday for noncompliance by attorneys for the victims who don't get help.  Unsurprisingly, twenty states opted to do the suing themselves, and are hoping the courts will sort out the contradiction.  The clock is ticking; unless there's a preliminary injunction or other resolution, the new rules go into effect in November, and it's not entirely clear what is and isn't covered.

     This is one part of a broader tangle of preexisting Federal law, contradictory Administration guidance, and puzzled state agencies and nonprofits suing to hold the status quo or at least get the courts to weigh in on which set of rules to follow.  Do we follow the law, or Executive Branch whim?  At one time, I thought the proper course would be obvious to nearly every American; these days, I'm not so sure.
____________________
* Violence Against Women Act, Victims of Crime Act, and, slightly less directly, Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, among others.

Steak, Sure, But The Risotto!

     Dinner tonight was a splurge.  Our corner grocery had good -- well, not insurmountable -- prices on ribeye steaks, so I bought a couple of small ones.*  They didn't have any lump charcoal, and I'm out, but they had "assorted hardwood" firewood and I decided to try it.  The hardwood kindling I use burns down to coals, after all.

     It turns out that a wood fire works fine in my covered grill: close the cover once it's well underway, and it smolders with little or no flame.  Splitting the wood down to grill size with a hatchet -- not an axe -- and a mallet isn't quick or especially easy, but it's not all that hard.  I'd get a real axe and a proper wedge if I was going to do it often.

     Along with the steaks, I picked up a bagged salad and some cherry tomatoes.  You're not going to find them in a salad kit: cut tomatoes don't keep.  Adding them really helps.  Some sliced olives are a plus, too. And I snagged a box of assorted fresh fancy mushrooms and Alessi brand dehydrated mushroom risotto.

     Alessi's shelf-storable pasta dishes, soups and rice have never let me down.  It's about as good as scratch-made (Italian grandmothers will disagree).  I cleaned and cut up the mushrooms -- trumpet, maitake and golden oyster -- and put them in a covered grill pan with glob of butter, parking the whole thing on the back of the grill as soon as the fire had caught.  The steaks followed in order, on a perforated stainless-steel tray, medium for me and very rare for Tam.  The rice just simmers once it's been stirred into boiling water; you set the heat on low and ignore it.

     As the steaks came off the grill, I brought in the cooked mushrooms and stirred them into the creamy risotto, and the combination smelled delicious.  It tasted delicious, too, an excellent accompaniment for the little steaks.  Throw in some well-cooked stew meat or sausage, and the rice dish could have been a main course.  I had a last few nibbles when I was clearing away the pots and pans -- it was just that good.
____________________
* The child of Depression babies, I'm usually half-convinced the economy is about to tank, so why not have something special for supper once in a while?  Growing up, we had steak for supper most Fridays, once Dad had a good job.  He never tasted a steak until he was an adult, and he was bound and determined to make up for lost time.  These days, that would be quite an indulgence (and what would my doctor say?), but I'll have one every so often, until I get priced out.

Lift The Curtains

      Canada ran a TV ad in the US that included excerpts from a Ronald Reagan radio speech about trade barriers, back when he was President, and the ad leaves the impression the late President was no fan of tariffs.

     President Trump was annoyed, firing back on social media, "The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. [...] Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED." (You can go read the whole thing on "Truth Social" if you like.)  And indeed, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute said the ad “misrepresents the Presidential Radio Address.”  As CNN notes, they didn't explain just how.  It's a whole Dance of the Seven Veils, over something that is part of the public record.

     Why take someone else's word about it?  Newsweek published the entire text of the radio address and you can read it for yourself; Mr. Reagan makes it clear that he's opposed to tariffs in general, greatly prefers free trade, and has imposed very specific tariffs on some Japanese products in response to their failure to abide by a previous agreement -- and that he hopes to resolve the issue soon and return to free trade.  But see for yourself.

Ah, Cleverness

     It would make me happy to have something witty to say about the demotion of the East Wing of the White House, and the monster of a ballroom that (supposedly) will rise in its place.  But I don't.

     The money for this work is coming from "private donors."  At the same time, the present government shutdown means SNAP and WIC coffers will -- probably -- run dry, just in time for Thanksgiving.  There's some private help, but it's pretty paltry compared to the big government programs.

     You don't have to believe that government food assistance programs are a good idea to understand that shutting them down abruptly is a bad idea.  It's a rugpull, just as the heating season is starting up.  It'd be one thing if Congress, after due debate, ramped them down, but this is, well, cruel.  And all the more so in the light of a lavish building project for the Presidential mansion.  It might be "The People's House," but don't count on getting in if you show up for dinner unexpectedly, no matter who's living there at the time.

     States and cities and private food charities are scrambling to make up the shortfall, but they're not going to have enough.  One of our local food banks has already extended help to Federal employees working without paychecks -- yes, they've opened the doors to the families of TSA agents -- so they're already under an extra burden.

     Somebody tell me how this is making us great again?

Pulp Fiction

     I wrote yesterday in a rush, and at first sight, it implies something I had no intention of saying, something I don't believe in: I said recent events were like a scrambled Atlas Shrugged, lacking John Galt.

     Ayn Rand was a huge fan of pulp fiction when she was younger, translated stuff in Russia and the pure quill once she came to the U.S.  Those stories were generally cast in the Gothic mode: there's a clear conflict between good and evil, a villain -- and a hero.  Robin Hood, Zorro, general Western Sheriffs, the Continental Op, Philip Marlowe, Batman, G-8, Doc Savage: they appear at key moments, solve the crime, vanquish the bad guy(s), save the day!   When Rand turned to novels, she used archetypes for her characters; of course she had a hero.  It's larger-than-life pulp.  A lot of famous literature is, if you take a step back.

     In real life, the guy who rides in big and bold to save the day is as likely to be a villain as a hero, if not more likely -- Napoleon springs most readily to mind, but you can fill in the blanks.  Good guys getting through tumultuous events and carrying the gen. pop along are likely to be committees: the Founders and Framers of the American Revolution and U.S. Constitution; the leaders, generals and admirals of the Allies in WW I and II.

     A recent news commentator opined that the Democrats are unlikely to sweep the midterm elections despite widespread disapproval of Republican performance in office, because voters see Dems as "weak" and the GOP as "strong."  Since when did we stop rooting for the underdog?  We got into two world wars a bit late, on the side that looked weak -- because it was the proper side; because the other guys were authoritarians with no respect for individual freedom, for freedom of the press, freedom of religion.  Unlike the pessimistic commentator, I don't think we we've lost that.

     We're Americans.  We dance right up to the brink,  So far, we've always known when to step back.

     (PS: Tam said, "So you're rehabilitating Ayn Rand?"  I don't think so.  She fell for her own fiction; you shouldn't.  There are a lot of interesting ideas floating around in fiction, SF especially, everything from The Moon Is A Harsh Matters to The Dispossessed and beyond.  None of them are guidelines around which to remold society, a project that always involves oppression.  One of the overlooked things about the governments that arose from the American Revolution is that in large measure and at every level, the people involved were trying to hold on to what they had and keep it going, not knock it flat and build a New Citizenry from the rubble and ash.  For better and worse, there weren't any huge departures from the trajectories they were already on.  Eventually, the most contradictory elements came into conflict....)

Hurtling Though History

     Photographs of the destruction at the East Wing of the White House from yesterday and today suggest that this Administration is speedrunning the notion of "ruin value."

     Or perhaps it's the boast of Caesar Augustus, who claimed to have found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble -- only, you know, the average Roman was still living in a flimsy apartment house, hoping the lightweight upper stories wouldn't catch fire while the Emperor was fiddling around with his building plans.

     Hey, did you hear about the anthrax outbreak in Argentina -- the country our Federal government just bailed out and is talking about importing cheap beef from?  Dig in!

     It's like someone threw Atlas Shrugged in a blender, only with no John Galt.

No More Kings

      The "No Kings" rallies across the country appear to have gone without a hitch: no tea thrown in the harbor, no throwing things at the police until the police shot back, plenty of U.S. flags, silly inflatable costumes, and hand-made signs.  Between five and seven million people took part, very probably the largest mass protest in our history.

     And we do have a history with kings.

     Rule by decree is bad; Congress and not the President is supposed to have the power of the purse (it's right there in the Constitution).  There's still a broad consensus about this, but it's weakening.  It shouldn't, no matter who is President.  Love him, loathe him or feel indifferent, all Presidents are obliged to play by the rules, and when one won't, it's not a thing to chuckle over, it's a reason to chuck him out.

     The first chucking-out is going to be Congress.  Even when they're not shut down by an unwillingness to negotiate across party lines, the present Congress has been largely supine, bullyragged and led around like dull oxen by the Executive.  That's not how it's supposed to work.  They're due for a housecleaning, starting with next year's elections

     Our government is a circus.  We need the clowns, the ringmaster, the lion-tamer -- the whole thing.  One guy leading a herd of elephants to trample it all down isn't much of a show.
  

Which Way Does Your News Lean?

     Look, all reporting bears some imprint left by the people that report it.  Selection of stories, choice of people to interview, questions asked, and so on.  Good reporters work to minimize this; they research and check facts; good editors call 'em on it when they fail to, and send them back to mill to grind more finely. And honest media outlets label opinion as opinion when they present it.

     Not all outlets are honest.  Sometimes they're lying to themselves.  Sometimes they're trying to pick winners and losers instead of just reporting who won or lost.  And sometimes, they're lying to you.

     These guys do their best to sort 'em out.  It's a big job and they don't always keep up, but they don't stop trying.

     Which direction do your news sources lean?  Do you know?  Are you sure?  Find out.

Conan The Historical Preservation

     Robert E. Howard's house, now a museum, is falling apart.  The Foundation running it needs our help.  While the author of Conan the Barbarian -- and a great many other cracking good stories featuring wonderful characters in fantastic situations -- hasn't lived there in quite some time, having ended his own life in 1936 -- the house still stands, restored much as it was.

     Few fantasy and SF writers get much physical recognition; Robert A. Heinlein's houses in Bonny Doon and Colorado Springs (much changed) bear little memory of him; you can look at Octavia Butler's typewriter, but not her workspace; Ray Bradbury's basement office has been recreated here in Indianapolis with original artifacts and there's a museum dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut not far away.  But the actual places where it happened, where the magic met paper?  Those are few and far between.

     You can help save Conan's birthplace.

Spooky Season

     No, not goblins and ghosts and things that go bump in the night -- spy stuff.  Intel stuff, open-source and covert, military and political.  Come to think of it, some of that stuff might go bump in the night, or possibly ka-blam.

     There's a new podcast out, from a source that seems unlikely at first sight, and they're doing good work, serious work, talking to newsmakers a little but mostly to people who avoid headlines, about things that sometimes make headlines.  Sources & Methods is not the usual fare, and in its best moments, is as fascinating as a good spy novel.

Diversity Fire?

     One of the big TV networks is splitting up, spinning off its opinion-focused cable channels and websites from the main news and entertainment operation, and who could blame them?  Their audience goals are very different, and opinion TV rises and falls on the tides of politics; today's soaring eagle is tomorrow's albatross.  Meanwhile, the more mainstream outlet strives to serve (and gather) the widest possible audience.

     That said, mainstream TV in the U.S. still skews white, male and upper-middle class in a manner very disproportionate to the population as a whole, and news staffing leans more that way than entertainment.  One fix, long required by the FCC, has been not diversity hiring but diversity outreach: licensed stations are required to cast a very wide net when seeking employees, and to document their efforts.  The theory is that talent (and the enthusiasm required to employ that talent for the relatively low pay earned by most positions) is rare enough that qualified applicants will have a fair chance -- if they know the jobs are open.  And it has worked; TV today is more diverse than it was sixty years ago, for all that it remains less diverse than the country as a whole.

     Large broadcast companies have supplemented this with news (and entertainment) sub-groups that look for stories about, from, or of interest to underrepresented demographic groups and while it might be tempting to ascribe that to some notion of liberal uplift, guess again: those groups are markets for advertising, and if you can expand the reach of some generic cop-and-lawyers show by adding a Goth-y computer gamine, a lady boss, a gay cop or ensuring that the cast is a cross-section of America, they're gonna do it, and pick up an extra ten or twenty percent in ad revenue because they've got better ratings among red-headed working mothers of Latvian descent, etc. than the competing networks; likewise, news divisions don't want to miss developing stories just because nobody on the staff speaks Spanish or is likely to notice a wave of murders among an ethnic minority or a pandemic emerging among a disregarded group; those are legitimate news "beats," and you need reporters who know the territory.

     So it's not a great sign when a line like this scrolls across social media:
     "NBC News has laid off 150 employees, eliminating teams dedicated to Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ issues."
     The details are not quite so dire, some of them will land jobs on one side or another of the split; but the teams will be gone, out from under the current glare of official disapproval, just a little more compliance in advance.

     It's become fashionable, at least in some circles, to sneer at the notion that diversity is a major source of our country's strength, but the version of that sentiment without layers of gloss and varnish is that we're a chaotic, cross-grained mob who, faced with a problem, will try to solve it in a dozen different ways and fight among ourselves over who has the best solution even before it is solved -- but we will solve it, and then bicker about the solving while tumbling towards the next crisis.  Hammering our lovely, awful mess into some square-cornered whitebread straitjacket isn't going to make us better, and you can take that to the bank. 

Sometimes, Silence

     Occasionally, I'll look at a current issue, dig a little deeper -- and decide not to say anything about it.  I had an idea for this morning, but it's just not worth it; I'd be adding more heat than light about something both contentious and impossible to resolve, a matter of opinion and taste rather than fact.

     People are entitled to their own opinions.  Even when I think they're wrong.  Even when their notions are morally suspect.