That Whole Charlie Kirk Anniversary Thing

     Not the terrible thing that was done to him.  I wrote at the time and I'll say it again: nobody has that coming.  Certainly not a guy whose shtick was showing college students that if you go arguing with a man in a venue he controls, where he sets the ground rules and picks the issues, you're going to lose.  It may even be a valuable lesson or two: the grown-up world does not play fair.  You cannot reason someone out of a position he holds on faith.

     I disagreed with most and maybe even all of his positions.  Nevertheless, the violence that was committed against him was absolutely inexcusable and should be condemned by every decent person.

     But I don't quite get why all the media outlets made a point of noting the anniversary of his murder.  What's are they after?  They've been covering the trial of the man accused of killing him, and that's appropriate, but this is someone who didn't hold public office, and whose fame was based on employing his rhetorical gifts in remarkably uneven debates.  Big fun if you agreed with him, I suppose, but he wasn't otherwise notable.  The organizations he founded have faltered as cultural forces without him, and many people on the far Right have drifted towards even more extreme figures.  That's not great -- but it's likely those individuals were already headed in that direction.  He wasn't a moderating influence.  I'm sorry for the loss to his family and friends.

     We've got too damn much political violence in this country, and we're too easily chivvied into "Us vs. Them" conflicts that pit working people...against other working people.  Meanwhile, the rich get richer, no matter what their politics happen to be -- and their politics have often been shown to be remarkably flexible, depending on which party is in power and what they they think it can do for them.  Against that, making killers famous, marking the date of their crimes and shedding performative tears over their victims is an utterly cynical sideshow.

It's A Kind Of Genius

     Oh, it's crude.  And it's not possible, not to mention illegal.  But it's absolutely an example of how the man works: the President of the United States has promised to pay each and every American* a middling-large sum of money if his party retains control of Congress.  He's made similar payoff promises before, which somehow never materialize.

     It's the same appeal as a one-armed bandit, only with far less chance of a payoff: pull lever, get money.  And there's a group of voters, ranging from low-information to so deep in the fantasy they'll take it on faith, who will be moved by it.  Is the size of that group decisively large?  Is greed a stronger motivation than high prices for everything and stagnant wages?  Stronger than the reaction to an increasingly authoritarian Federal government whose masked secret-police thugs act with impunity?

     I don't know.

     The truth is, the money's not his to spend; it's Congress's.  And Congress doesn't have it; the payout would run to more than 1.3 trillion dollars and they're already deeply in the red funding his don't-call-it-a-war with Iran, the same one that's driving up the price of oil, fuel, and everything that relies on oil-derived stuff to be made or grown and transported.  I suppose they could just have the Mint print it -- that's what the Left calls "Modern Monetary Theory" and the Right mocks (so does the center); it's inherently inflationary, meaning by the time you get your money, it'll buy fast-food dinner for two and a daily newspaper as long as it's not the Sunday edition.  And it's illegal in the U.S. to pay people for votes, not that illegality is much of a deterrent.  (And it's the actual paying for votes part that is illegal -- candidates and everyone else can talk about it all they like.)

     It's money no American will ever receive, no matter who they vote for.

     Politicians have been selling pie in the sky for years; Mencken called elections a kind of advance auction of stolen goods, but the modern, jet-propelled GOP version auctions off the stolen goods -- and then keeps them.

     I beg people to choose a better class of crook.  I have no faith left that they will.

     Update: The "dividend" headlined every TV and radio newscast I saw or heard today.  It'll never be paid -- but using it as a lure is indeed a kind of genius.  Flim-flam genius we should be ashamed of falling for, and yet....
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* Citizens, presumably, given his party's positions, not resident non-citizens.

Wow

     It's harder and harder to jump back in the hopper of the daily grind.  I'm not sure if I'm more hopeful or more worried about November's elections and whatever follows.  I suppose if all that happens is an economic crash, we'll be getting out easy, but man, do I loathe interesting times.

It's Labor Day

     Anymore, I'm not all that sure what we mean by "labor," and to what extent a Federal holiday to celebrate it means anything.  Sure, sure, both big political parties will tell you they're the party of the working man (and, occasionally, woman) and the other guys are the party of the "elites," moneyed and/or intellectual.  Socialists and Communists and Labor -- and far-Right -- parties overseas will make similar claims (usually around May first in most countries, and you can ask the Communists to explain that one).

     But as a species, we don't actually like work all that much, and given a chance in literature or art to side with a sweat-of-his-brow farmer or the barbarian who shows up to steal from him or worse, a lot of people prefer Conan to the plodder behind the plow -- and we admire Tom Sawyer, half-covertly, and think the peers he gulls into doing his fence-painting are saps.  We keep coming up with ways to dodge even intellectual work; Socrates was none too sure about literacy and writing things down, fearing it would weaken memory and devalue being present in the moment, and we've kept on cheating -- log tables, printing presses with moveable type, typewriters, word processors, abacuses, slide rules, calculators, photography, computers, and now A.I.: forget tractors, why do the heavy gray-matter lifting when you can build a machine to do it for you?

     And yet -- we do still have gardeners, farmers, stonemasons, poets, singers, miners, men and women toiling in the kitchen or on the assembly line.  One of them might be able to do the work of ten of Socrates' students (or their wives or servants), but work they do.  (Alas, genius still resists force-multipliers; we don't get ten Greek philosophers of the price of one).

     Labor still matters.  It shouldn't be disparaged, not scrubbing floors or unpacking the mysteries of subatomic physics.  We must, still, work, and it's probably built right into our genes, long-haul hunter-gathers who stumbled out of Africa, ganging up to harvest tasty megafauna and sweet, sweet berries, singing before they went and telling each other stories about it afterward.

The Man Who Mugged Analogy

     Tam and I watch the Sunday political talk shows.  I wouldn't say we like watching them, but it's not a hate-watch either.  The programs are the lowest common denominator of American political discourse, available to the widest cross-section of the gen. pop., and because the big networks do have to keep their advertisers, viewers, the FCC and a smattering of basement lunatics* reasonably happy, they're as close to a big-picture look at the current scene as can be had.

     Today's snapshot comes from NBC.  Kristen Welker was interviewing Republican Senator John N. Kennedy of Louisiana, a politician who could out-awshucks Foghorn Leghorn or his inspiration even spotting them three "Ma'ams," one "I say," and a wilted magnolia.  Asked about the economy and specifically inflation, he had this to say:
     "I’m labor. I’m not management. I don’t run the show."

     He -- a U. S. Senator -- would have us believe he just works there.  To continue the parallel with business, that is as if a member of the Board of Directors pretended to have no more influence over how a company is run than some hourly person on the assembly line.  This is not the position of a member of the United States Congress, it's a neat summary of a Senator's job in Imperial Rome.  He's asking us to believe he's just a-watching the whole train run off the trestle, caboose over boiler, as he sweeps the floor in the railroad station waiting room, powerless, thinking if only: "...[W]e’d be on this issue like a hobo on a ham sandwich. We would be all over inflation passing bills."

     If he was my Senator, I'd be asking for my nickle back.

     The interview is a marvel of a man with money, power, influence and authority claiming he's just a little fellow caught up in the gears, a-doing whatever he can, which is nothing at all.  If that was true, why d'ya suppose he even bothered to appear on TV, or the TV people bothered to invite him?  You can find the whole thing here.  Don't eat first..
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* I'd like to be able to tell you that one "side" or the other, out at the fringes of our two-party system, has a definitive lead over the other when it comes to political violence.  But even though it's often more one than the other at any given time, metaphorical meteorologists blowing up Federal buildings or supposed law'n'order fetishists bushwhacking a talk-show host (or vice-versa), the truth is they're usually so far off the Left/Right horseshoe that their political "philosophies" are largely horseshit, and viewed as a whole over history, they're as likely to have gone galloping off from one end of the horseshoe as the other.

Worse Than Crooks

     Lying and cheating is kind of expected of politicians -- but they're not supposed to embezzle millions; they're supposed to keep their lies small and personal, and stop at merely shading the truth about big things.  They're supposed to have some respect for the government of which they are a part, or at least to fake it in a convincing manner.

     The Trump administration's egregious nonsense about voting, and especially voting by mail, is far outside even these lax norms.  Their proposed "fix" for the non-existent problem appears to be designed to create chaos and disenfranchise the greatest number of legitimate mail-in voters.  It imposes a "zero error" requirement on outgoing ballots, in which a single mistake on one envelope would result in the rejection of an entire batch of thousands of them.  At least 24 states have pushed back, including some controlled by Republicans -- and even though pending court cases only blocked mandatory compliance with the proposed USPS mail voting requirements, not a single state has chosen to voluntarily comply and many report that they simply cannot.  Nevertheless, the administration has gone to the U. S. Supreme Court to ask for a ruling that will allow the scheme to proceed, even as the first states prepare to send out ballots within days.

     It's a huge, dirty Federal thumb on the scales of a balance the individual states are supposed to be looking after -- and they have done so from the first days of our republic.  No entity has ever produced evidence of statistically significant vote-by-mail fraud, despite a great deal of very diligent searching for it.  At this point, even a nursing-home worker helping the frailest of the people in their care fill out ballots must surely be aware that the slightest fudging will come under the microscope.

     Stealing from campaign funds for nice dinners and limo service, sending Federal business to your son-in-law's uncle's firm, ignoring constituent complaints while swapping votes with colleagues -- sure, we voters don't like it, but it's not unexpected.  Election interference largely aimed at the most helpless or isolated voters is far worse than ordinary crookedness.  It's a slow-motion, low-key coup attempt, an autogolpe under the thinnest veneer of pretended concern.

     You can help stop 'em.  No, I doubt the Supremes listen to anything but the ringing in their own ears these days, and the only thing the Trump administration listens to are its own worst members and the whims of the man at the top, but you can get out there and vote in November, in person if possible, and vote hard against the undermining of American democracy.  You might end up with a few farther-out Democrats than you'd prefer, but the Dems have demonstrated a willingness to accept being voted out, and voters can always remove the most egregious in the next cycle.  Mr. Trump's Republicans, especially the man himself, have repeatedly refused to accept defeat in fair and honest elections: vote 'em in one time too many and you may be stuck forever.  Consider the stakes.  It's not a safe gamble.

Nightmare Logic

     Watching national and world events is like having a front-row seat to someone else's nightmare: not only does it not make sense, even the emotional resonances are off.  Jarring.  Or perhaps it's like a badly edited movie,* in which the storyline never quite gels and the various elements undercut one another.

     International affairs are askew at best; domestic politics seem to be headed for something wretched as the November elections approach.  Will there be fireworks or a damp squib?  Troops at the polling places or just the usual confusion of overworked volunteers?†  Will the outcome be rout or a coup?  Something muddled, leaving the House and Senate on an even closer balance?  (A divided legislature is often a silent legislature -- and silence, as Plato observed and Robert's Rules of Order reminds us, is consent.)  All I know for sure is that anyone who says they do know is talking through their hat.

     It's all sliding downhill and right towards us, like an avalanche viewed from the valley floor, and while it might seem slow or even graceful, it's moving a lot faster than appears and it's carrying chaos with it.
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* We've been watching Ride Or Die, a generally delightful series that can't quite make up its mind whether it's a spy spoof or a serious tale of friendship and international intrigue; but the acting, sets and photography are first-rate, and the editing is often brilliant -- especially the frequent and varied "match cuts" when going from one location to another.
 
† A reminder that almost everyone you interact with when you vote is either a volunteer or a low-paid temporary worker.  Whatever is going on, whatever party is in power in your precinct, whatever thuggish nitwittery is afoot on election day, Left, Right or lunacy, they didn't create it and they likely wish even more than you that it would just go away.  Please be courteous to the voter-facing poll workers, no matter your political affiliation or what you suspect to be theirs.  They're not nefarious villains.

Distraction Screens

     It's no secret that I don't think much of Mr. Trump, or of how he and his gang of Republicans are running the federal government, ringing up unprecedented debt, yanking the rug out from under the poor at home and abroad, handing out tax breaks to their ultra-wealthy pals who do not pay it back in the form of increasing employment* and engaging in wars of choice with murky and/or immoral victory conditions.

     But I do try to limit myself to substantive criticism about issues of importance.  I might think the way he combs his hair looks stupid, but so what?  That hairstyle isn't picking anyone's pocket or breaking their leg, and in the course of a busy day, you can find five or six more at least as dumb.

     So the recent fuss about sneaking the President out of Turkey in the wake of a credible threat (and leaving the Press as sitting ducks -- the very same sitting ducks they'd be if they were sharing the plane with him) or an aide who appears to have an unhealthy devotion to the President (as have many, to many Presidents, and it's never a good sign) strikes me as silly-season distractions, running while there are at least two and half wars on, and our country is well involved with all of them, and while the economy continues to teeter dangerously.

     This August isn't a slow-news month.  There's plenty of real stuff to report on, none of it reflecting any glory on the clod infesting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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* The thing about trickle-down economics is, something's got to be trickling down for it to make sense, and I don't mean job cuts.  Otherwise, it's just a trick.

Radium Water! Now -- With Vitamins!

      The thing about "A.I." is that there's a lot of smoke over very little fire -- and every coat-tail riding grifter and half-baked amateur futurist is emitting their own clouds, huddled over the flames and seeing the Promised Land (or at least a fat bank account) in their glow.

     The latest comes from the very top: the current administration in Washington, DC* is pushing a "golden age of science" built around applying A.I. to, well, everything.  Exactly how anyone is supposed to do actual science -- which is based on working out the actual facts about actual things and ideas -- using a tool that has a great and apparently inherent tendency to just make up plausible bullshit, no one can say.  In practice, it hasn't worked out, and the scientific journals have the same problem with specious A.I-generated article as fiction publishers do with A.I. dross that falls short of human efforts (and takes several pages to do so†), and the same problem with made-up A.I. citations as the legal profession.

     A.I. doesn't create new stuff; it uses the old stuff we already knew to create patterns of plausible stuff.  It may be able to pick out patterns in data that elude humans, too; but those results must be evaluated very carefully by subject-matter experts to determine what's real and what is only another "hallucination."  A.I. fools us in much the same way we fool ourselves, so it's not a simple task.

     Poorly understood by most people, with characteristics even the people who work developing it are struggling to understand, A.I. today occupies the same cultural space that radium (and radioactivity in general) did over a century ago, or vitamins a few year later.  The radium thing did not turn out so very well; vitamins did better.  The hype and hoopla‡ lingered, as the hype and hoopla from A.I. is now.

     Maybe let's not be in such a hurry to gulp it down by the gallon.
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* Here's a question for later: if the District of Colombia ever achieves statehood, will we start calling the Pacific coastal state "Washington, AC," or "Washington, OG?"  Or something else?  Yeah, yeah, the new state would be called something like District of Colombia, or maybe just Capitol District (for all those Hunger Games fans out there), but the city is Washington and you know we'll keep on using the old, familiar synecdoche.
 
† The problem is not so much that the writing is lousy -- Sturgeon's Law predicts 95% of all unsolicited fiction people send in is unpublishable -- as it is the sheer volume.  Typewriters let us write faster than we can think, and word processors let us edit so quickly that getting it right in the first draft no longer matters, but A.I. churns out fiction in greater volume than any collection of editors and assistants can manage to read.  There are gems in the slushpile, and 5% of the total was a sufficiently productive return at the pittance paid "first readers" to sort through it.  0.5% is not, and if A.I. was capable of recognizing the flaws well enough to sort through it, it wouldn't be creating so much unusable work.
 
‡ Even for vitamins: for awhile, every breakfast cereal advertised itself as so packed with vitamins that between them and the sugar, there couldn't have been much room left for grain.

We Aten't Ded

     Despite rising floodwaters, Tam and I are, so far, nearly untouched.  Roseholme Cottage is about a mile away from the White River to the north and west; the river makes a kind of drain-trap bend to our north around Broad Ripple (and the old town of Wellington, long absorbed into the city).  It will peak early tonight, and we're probably going to be sufficiently protected by the levee finished a few years ago, and by our neighborhood's slight elevation above the flood plain.

     Spare a thought for the Broad Ripple Art Center, its grounds and outbuildings being on the river side of the levee along with a few residences and an apartment building; and for Ravenswood, upstream and low-lying (that neighborhood floods at the drop of the hat, and we're in a fumble-fingered milliner's convention), and for Rocky Ripple, the not-quite-an-island (and independent municipality) downstream, across from Butler University, between the river and the canal and also, in a cost-saving compromise that avoided removing multiple houses along the old river levee, on the wet side of the new levee.  Homes in those places are already awash or worse.

     Welcome to a hundred-year flood, after thousand-year rainfall levels.

"Primary Results Muddled"

     That's the occasional headline: "Unclear Primary Results For Dems" is the most common version, but in fact, the Republicans are inconsistent, too -- sometimes Trump-endorsed candidates win, sometimes more old-school GOP politicians who are at some distance from Trumpism.

     And, oh gosh, it's true.  In some counties, cities or districts, DSA-affiliated or adjacent hopefuls are doing well; other places, it's your aunt's Democrat, with pictures of FDR, LBJ and Joe Biden on the mantle.  There are locales where the Christian Nationalist Republicans come out on top in primaries, and others where, well, Mike Lindell is firmly convinced some kind of skullduggerous Deep State made him lose by over 11 percent.*

     If you think of primary voters as some solid block of Party identity across the country, from sea to shining sea, majestic purple mountains and amber waves of grain (or is that floodwaters?) included, it does look pretty muddled.

     But it isn't.  Two big-tent parties dominate American politics and, under various names and historical shadings, they always have.  You might not like sharing your particular tent with the more wild-eyed candidates and their voters, yet there they are and there are some places where they do well, especially in primaries.  Rural Americans like hardcore conservatives, and a lot of 'em aren't any too sure about foreign people with foreign accents and foreign religions.  The details have varied over the years, but that stereotype exists for a reason.  Likewise, people crammed into big cities or enmeshed in a daily struggle against harsh climates often value highly organized cooperation, and see government as a natural way to create it.  You're going to get Lefty, socialist-leaning All-Cops-Are-Bastards candidates in giant metroplexes and parts of the Upper Midwest; you're going to get various kinds of Right-wing, xenophobic Christian Nationalist candidates in the vast swath of agricultural and ranch lands where the towns are small and widely spaced.  And you're going to get more "purple," center-leaning candidates in the industrialized places that draw population from these extremes.

     People, even people that look pretty loony to you or me or that dude over there and hold some far-out views, deserve a fair chance to select representatives, mayors, governors and so on that reflect their community.  I don't very much like Indiana's current Lieutenant Governor, a religious nutjob who thinks the Earth (and the Universe) is a little over six thousand years old (and that's one of his less objectionable notions), but his party put him on the Republican ballot for a reason, and I hope the Governor, state legislature and courts can keep a lid on the crazy little guy.

     While the Unitary Executive excesses of the Trump administration are not, in my opinion, at all normal or proper, running and sometimes electing a very mixed bag of elected officials is normal, and if you want to keep them within more reasonable limits, that power is in your hands: go vote in primary elections!  You can count on the extremists showing up; they've got an axe to grind and the ballot box is their whetstone.  You can make it more of a grindstone, and help hold the noses of our politicians to it, simply by showing up and making an informed choice.
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*  It did, in fact, not.  This would not be the first time Mr. Lindell has been plagued by imaginary spiders or the like, and in my opinion, it will not be the last.

Shell Game

     I guess it appeals to a certain kind of mindset: the so-called "mass deportation rally" that was going to be in Fishers....wasn't in Fishers, just north of Marion County.  Instead, the $50-a-head would-be mass-deporters were sent to a parking lot in Greenfield, off to the east of the metro, and from there to a secret location in Boone County, to the northwest.  (After all, fuel is so cheap, what's another hour's drive in the rain?)

     This fancy double-shuffle was apparently because there was a march of about a thousand people in Fishers in support of immigrants.  And I'm not going to condemn anyone for conflict avoidance.  I'd rather have 'em dodging than fighting.  It's way less messy for everyone else.

     But the whole thing seems kind of skeezy, and prerecorded addresses by Micah Beckwith, our religious oddball Lieutenant Governor, and by the always opportunistic more-MAGA-than-thou Attorney General Todd Rokita did nothing to change the impression that the event was mostly a way to separate the credulous from their cash with minimal effort for the people collecting the take.  A lot of skulking around, self-directed Nacht und Nebel to enhance the experience.

     Press coverage was relatively thin, too -- here's the most complete story I have found.

Sociology? History?

      It'll be a PhD thesis subject some day, I'm just not sure in which department: Is Republican rage at Dr. Anthony Fauci primarily driven by his refusal to validate quackery during the Covid pandemic, or by his earlier work in helping find effective treatments for HIV/AIDS?

     There's a certain subset of the Right, especially the Religious Right, that was delighted they could cast gay sex as a death sentence, and Dr. Fauci played a huge part in taking that away.  He was a low-key villain for the nutjob Right ever after, and the more widespread craziness over Covid opened the door to spreading that loathing.

     Now they're promising to get him behind bars, one way or another -- for doing what was at the time his job.

     Sorry, horse dewormer is still not a miracle cure for viral illness.  Vaccination is an effective tool in stopping the spread of disease.  AIDS was not the wrath of God.  You can stick your fingers in your ears and chant, "No, no, no," all you like, but it's still true.

What Are The Odds

     What, do you suppose, are the chances that a man who still denies he lost an election to the Presidency and incited a (dimwitted) insurrection to stop it after running through a great many legal-system gambits will try a rugpull on midterm elections that are likely to cost his party at least one house of the legislature and maybe both?

     This guy figures it's a likely bet.  He's probably right; losing will be somewhere between personally frustrating to catastrophic for the incumbent, who is not a man who will put up with that.  What form i will take and how well the effort is likely to succeed, that's another set of questions.

     We'll find out.

The Thing Is...

      "Every spot in history is the most dangerous," a commenter told me the other day.  Which is on one level a tautology: we're a species that floats on the edge of disaster.  Our genetic heritage tells the story of multiple narrow escapes; many of our legendary heroes, all around the globe, are clever tricksters who talk or connive their way out of trouble.

     Humanity spends a lot of time running right at the red line.

     On the other hand, we're got a regime in Washington right now that is an outlier in both degree and kind:

     Degree because they're profiting from holding office far in excess of the usual.  I have resigned myself to believing that with billions wooshing by overhead, Federal politicians all eventually conclude they'd be fools to not do as all around them are doing, and net a few million for themselves.  Okay; I don't like it but there it is.  But these guys are raking in billions, and most are not the least bit coy about it.

     Kind, because we haven't seen this level of racism from the party in power since Woodrow Wilson.  We haven't seen nativism so bullheaded since the Know-Nothings.  We've only seen this much division once before, and it didn't end well.  A little over two years ago, Kevin Roberts, the president of the rightwing Heritage Foundation, source of the Project 2025 agenda, told Steve Bannon on his podcast, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless -- if the Left allows it to be."

     That's not politics as usual.  That's not normal.  That's a promise to turn things over, to purge and remake not by compromise but in the likeness of just one party, just one part of the American electorate.

     So, yes, the present is always the most dangerous time -- but some presents are more dangerous than others, and they don't become less dangerous by pretending it's the same old same old.

One Nothingburger, All The Trimmings

     NPR has cogent analysis of last night's Presidential speech.  Tl;dr? A nothingburger with cheese, pickles, lettuce (oh, lots and lots of fine Taylor Farms lettuce), tomato, mushrooms, Ranch dressing, onion, mustard, ketchup, toothpaste, horseradish, grill-toasted sesame-seed buns and a dead mouse -- but no burger.

     China illicitly stole voter rolls?  Those are a matter of public record.  In many cases, you can make just like a Ministry of State Security spook, and download 'em yourself over the Internet, free for nothing!  No skull or duggery required, Mao jacket optional.

     Foreign countries -- notably China, Russia and Iran -- have tried to interfere in our elections, at least as far back as 2020?  You bet they have; we knew about it then and we know about it now, and they still haven't got into the election machinery to yank levers.  They mostly do indirect things, like fund influencers and leak damaging real information and disinformation, and the state and Federal governments are well aware of it, since they're constantly playing Whack-A-Mole against 'em -- and winning.

     OMG, there are 250,000+ non-citizens registered to vote?  Guess what, there kind of are, and there are two main sources.  The first is paperwork screwups, things like asylum-seeker Hector interacts with state or city governments in some way, getting permission to drive or signing up to pay his sewer bill and so on, and there's one more form to fill out, thanks to voter-registration outreach efforts.  The person behind the counter neither knows or cares if he's a citizen, oops.  Or, and this is a gotcha, Hector follows all the rules, and eventually becomes a shiny new U.S. citizen, Social Security number and all.  Of course he registers to vote -- unlike you, Hector is fresh off Civics classes, and he wants to be a good citizen.  But Homeland Security doesn't have any automatic mechanism to connect new-citizen Hector with asylum-seeker or Temporary Protected Status Hector, and when their SAVE list of non-citizens is compared with lists of registered voters, there he is.  (If he gets snatched by ICE, he will have to prove he's a citizen, and they're very picky about what counts as proof, something that has happened over and over in the past 18 months.)  And there are rather a lot of overlapping names with incomplete data; do they match, or not?  Well, maybe; ICE and CPB appear to be finding out in ways that are often quite rough.  Oops, wrong Hector.

     On and on the claims went, and it was all stuff with a relatively high ooga-booga-scary quotient and little real substance.  None of it was new.  And he capped it off by calling ABC and NBC "complicit" with his enemies in not carrying the speech, and suggesting their licenses to use the high-value public airwaves free for nothing should be taken away.  (TV networks as such don't have licenses, other than for the handful of stations they own directly.  Outside of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, odds are the ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC station you watch is owned by a company other than a network.  PBS doesn't own any at all.)

     I watched the speech on CBS, who cut away before the President was done speaking and were surprisingly critical of the content, with extensive on-the-spot debunking from experts.  I don't know if Tony Dokoupil and Margaret Brennan still have jobs as of this morning, but they didn't pull any punches last night.  (I listened to NPR's coverage a little, too, with similar fact-based debunking.  They were both very careful to do their homework, shedding lots of light with little or no heat.)

Alea Iacta Maybe

     There's a Presidential address tonight, which the White House says will be be about "free and fair elections"* and "a couple of other things."

     If the sitting President manages to cover only three topics in the course of a speech, it'll be a first.

     But the stuff about elections puts news media in a quandary: provide a platform for yet more falsehoods about elections (including, according to credible sources, the 2020 Presidential election), or ignore it, and incur the wrath of an Administration with a history of striking back?  Brendan Carr's FCC has been uncommonly pugnacious, so we'll probably see and hear the spectacle all across radio and TV.

     Depending on what he says and takes action on, it could be a crossing of the Rubicon -- if that means anything at all under an Administration that crosses rivers-not-to-be-crossed as if they were taking commuter bridges in and out of Washington DC.  I'll be watching, if only because power-grabbing regimes count on burnout and over-familiarity with awfulness to enable their encroachments.

     Pundit after pundit, editorial after editorial has asked, "When will it get to be too much?"  I think that's the wrong question, one based an overly-simplified version of history.  There is very rarely a moment when everything changes like a flipped light switch, especially for the people in the moment; Ralph Waldo Emerson may have "heard the shot fired 'round the World" at the Old North Bridge, but he was listening in 1837, when the issues of 1775 were long settled.  Conflict had been ongoing; British troops and Colonial militias had been on the move long before.  Conversely, a lot of Americans didn't find out they were in the middle of a shooting war until long afterward.

     One day, everyone will have been against this.  One day, the current mess won't just be something happening on your computer or television screen.

     Tonight?  Who knows.  That's why I'll watch.

     Update: As a commenter pointed out, half of the Big 4 over-the-air networks won't be carrying the speech: ABC and NBC have said "No, thanks" to over-the-air; they'll stream it online, as will PBS.  CBS and Fox are unknown, but likely.  NPR will carry it on radio.  I'm mildly surprised.
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* Which, by the way, they're all been here in the United States, for at least all of your lifetime and probably long before.  Claims to the contrary (especially for 2020) have been unequivocally shown to be lies, distortions and/or bullshit-laden hot air, by everyone from investigating Feds to international observers, as well as journalists who stand to get a lot more attention from bombshells about cheating than a dull report that everything went according to routine.

Looking Back

     The thing about a gerontocracy is that it crumbles away at the upper edge: with age comes power, but nobody lasts forever; the same "bathtub curve" that explains why most of a batch of light bulbs or hard drives fail around the same time shows that the men at the top, once they get there, die off.*

     Lindsey Graham went last night, younger than many but a year older than the age at which his father passed.  His political career followed an interesting path, one that led Anne Applebaum to feature him prominently in a prophetic 2020 article on the compromises some people make and others do not, when power outstrips constitutional limits and trumps political philosophy.  It's worth reading.
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* The horrific second-order effect is that the ruling elite of a gerontocracy has little or no interest in the future: they're not going to be around for it, after all, and so they'll take their pleasures now, and leave dealing with the consequences for those who will come after.

Bear In Mind

      The words "Senator" and "senility" have the same Latin root, senex -- and yes, it means just what you think, only more so: "old, old man."

     U. S. Senators were supposed to be in those years between the attainment of mature wisdom and aimlessly wandering the halls in a bathrobe, and while you can't really mark them off on a calendar (well, kind of: nobody 29 or younger need apply), they're probably supposed to heed the wise council of their peers as they approach the upper limit, and step down gracefully.

     Increasingly, this is seen not to happen.  It's not an especially partisan phenomenon.  Neither are those other chief occupations of a U. S. Senator: lining their own pockets (stock markets and other investments, "campaign contributions" and so on) and getting their state (or pals and benefactors in other states) larded up at the ol' pork barrel.  I guess that's too engrossing to leave time for looking after their colleagues when they start to struggle.  (They cannot even be arsed to revise and pass -- or not pass -- laws, either, which was supposedly the entire point of the job.)

     As ever, the U. S. House runs their own Junior Varsity version of it; I remain convinced that their biggest problem is not too much dissension but a lack of tumult. If House debate were a little more spirited, it'd sort the dispirited right out, but it seems like you can't hardly get a good honest harrumph out of any of 'em on the chamber floor these days.  It's all weirdness and/or weasel-wording any more.

The Orginal Fireworks

     I haven't felt much like celebrating this Independence Day; it seems to me that our Republic is on the ropes, and the next three or four years will restore it or break it.  I'll be on tenterhooks until the trend is clear.

     But I certainly don't begrudge anyone's celebration of this historic day.  John Adams was right: "It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

     Our neighborhood, like many cities and towns in the U.S., sounds like some kind of a battlefield tonight; man-made shooting stars light up the sky, and a series of short, soaking rains in late afternoon should mitigate many of the usual hazards.  I grilled hamburgers for dinner, and cleaning up, I noticed an unusually large number of lightning bugs, fireflies, flashing their own beacons as they hover above the back yard.  It's as if, seeing the lights in the sky, they are determined not to be left out.

     Field Notes, purveyors of fine pocket notebooks and related items, is giving away a pocket edition of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution all day today, with any purchase; or you can buy one for $4.95.  It's good reading.  It's essential reading, and on this day of all days, they're worth looking over.