The Upcoming Missouri Primary

My local PBS affiliate just aired a 20-minute debate between two Democratic candidates for governor.  The chances of Missouri having a Democratic governor are slim to none, but I was interested since I’ll be voting in the Democratic primary1 early next month.

Two candidates for the nomination showed up for the debate:

Crystal Quade, a young woman who grew up poor in Southwest Missouri (the Bible belt), worked multiple jobs as a waitress, worked her way through college, and all the way to becoming the Minority Leader of the Missouri House of Representatives.

Mike Hamra, a businessman with no political experience; but he has some detailed plans for what he wants to do as governor.

I couldn’t really tell them apart wrt policies.  Both hit all the progressive talking points:  abortion rights, racial discrepancies in law enforcement, etc.  I expect to vote for Quade since she’s the experienced politician and knows how best to get stuff done.

From the TV ads I’ve seen, there’s only one really contentious Democratic primary race with a good bit of vitriol coming from both sides, the one for U.S. Representative from the First Congressional District2; and since I live in the Second District3, I won’t get a vote.  The incumbent, Cori Bush, currently associated with the “squad” in the U.S. House, is being challenged by Wesley Bell, the St. Louis County Prosecutor.  Bush is screaming that Bell is really a Republican, and Bell is screaming that Bush “has her own agenda”.  It’s not pretty.

Although there’s a rational argument that, in heavily gerrymandered places like Missouri, the only election that actually matters is the favored party’s primary, I won’t be voting in the Republican primary because all the candidates are screaming that the other is insufficiently MAGA.  I couldn’t possibly vote for any of them, and I can’t tell them apart.

1Missouri has different elections for presidential primaries and state/local primaries; and it has open primaries:  you just tell the election official which ballot you want when to get to the polling place.  It’s that simple.

2The City of St. Louis and much of northern St. Louis County where there’s still a good bit of poverty and defacto racial segregation.

3I’m not to blame for Ann Wagner, I promise.

What’s Really Important

I’m on a Robert Reich e-mail list.  His latest missive* entitled How to prevent America and the world from falling into fascism contained eleven suggestions, the first three of which really jumped out at me:

Try not to allow issues such as whether Biden should resign, or his degree of responsibility for Gaza, to get in the way of your determination not to let Trump back into the White House. Regardless of our differences over these issues, they pale compared to the threat Trump poses.

For the same reason, please don’t decide to leave the top of the ticket blank or to vote for a third party or not to vote at all. All make it easier for Trump to win. …

Don’t become so upset with politics that you drop out, stop reading the news, or give up on activism. The stakes are just too high. …

Exactly.  If you don’t like Biden much, I probably agree with you; but the most important thing to do right now is to send the orange narcissist packing.

*This link seems to work; but when I load it directly into my browser without going through e-mail, I get a popup suggesting that I follow me. 😎  I didn’t try the options in the message box, so I don’t know what they do; but when I clicked the X in the upper right corner, the popup went away and I could read the whole thing.

He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union …

I’m getting more and more depressed about our current political discourse.  Last night, even PBS Newshour got on the Biden’s-too-old bandwagon.  They weren’t claiming to express an opinion, of course; they were claiming to be simply reporting on things like polls and interviews of random people on the streets.

I can understand the media’s obsession.  Biden’s performance, repeatedly and recently, has been shocking; but Trump’s Gish gallop of lies is just old news.

The discussion needs to move away from Biden to what the alternative is.  I wish Biden would give a speech about the current state of the union in which he spells out, in considerable detail, what we’re likely to see given another four years of Trump and his handlers.  Make it about Trump, not about himself; and he should take the gloves off.

And he shouldn’t shy away from observing what the Roberts court has done nor fail to mention their hypocrisy and sleaziness.  For example, he could point out several horrible things that he could now get away with as a sitting president and then say something like:

But I won’t do these things because, unlike the Gang of Six, I care what the Founders had in mind.

I thought of another line that I’d like to hear:

I do not say these things to shame them:  you can’t shame people who are shameless; that’s a waste of time.  My purpose is to show just how vile these people really are.

But I fear that he’ll just speak loudly, maybe pull an angry face, but otherwise fall into the trap of keeping the discussion about himself.  That strikes me as a losing tactic.

By Their Fruits

It might seem strange for an atheist to quote the Bible; but from the stopped-clock-right-twice-a-day department…

Trump’s never-ending lies made me think of Matthew 7:15-20.  Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns against false prophets.  He says that, just as you can’t expect to get grapes from thornbushes nor figs from thistles, so you can’t expect to get the truth from those who customarily lie.

Will “Bible believers” who “love Jesus” be moved by teaching that’s actually attributed to Jesus in a gospel?  A few might; but for the most part, nope, not a chance.  “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” (KJV)

That Horrible Debate

I still can’t process the “debate” that some of us endured on Thursday; but it’s clear that Biden’s awful performance is almost all of what the media want to talk about.  Trump’s Gish gallop of one bare-faced lie after another is hardly mentioned.

How can that be?  The only thing I can think of is that Biden’s performance was shocking, but Trump’s lies were unsurprising.

The Big Picture

Robert Reich likes to draw cartoons.

I’m on one of his e-mail lists, and early this morning I got a message that contains a link to a video of him drawing a really big one (ca. 6½ minutes) explaining how the economy got into the state that it’s in.

That was cute; but there should be an image, like maybe a JPEG, of the completed drawing so that we can see the whole thing all at once.  It doesn’t matter if it’s huge:  it would be good to be able to scroll around and zoom in/out.

U.S. Sanctions on West-Bank Israelis

16:00 UTC−6:  DW News leads with a report that Biden has signed an executive order imposing economic sanctions on four named Israelis who were involved in anti-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.  I see this as a baby step in the right direction.  We’ll see whether U.S. policy toward Israel develops any morality.  Stay tuned…

16:30−6:  BBC World News America leads with the same story.

17:10:  my local TV news has a couple of sentences about the sanctions.  They say it’s in response to the killing of a Palestinian-American teenager.

17:30:  no mention of the sanctions on NBC Nightly News.

18:00:  nothing about the sanctions during the headlines on PBS Newshour either.

Now I’m saddened again.  NBC did have a short report about a growing movement within the Arab-American community for sitting out the next election.  They won’t vote for Trump, but they don’t think they can vote for Biden either.  Let’s hope that that doesn’t give the election to Trump.  Maybe there’s some good news in John Morales’ comment below.

More on Trump and Colorado

I seem to be getting all my news on this from Mike the Mad Biologist.

A comment reports that the Supreme Court has denied certiorari (they won’t be hearing the case), which means that the Colorado decision stands; but a comment on my previous post suggests that the Colorado ruling includes a stay that’s permanent if the case is appealed.

It’s about half an hour until my Monday-Friday TV news routine begins.  We’ll see whether DW News, BBC World News America, my local news, NBC Nightly News or PBS Newshour confirms the certiorari denial and whether that means that the Colorado decision is permanently stayed or is in effect since the appeal failed.

In any event, the ruling affects the primary election, not the general election; and I read somewhere else (I can’t remember where) that Colorado Republicans are already talking about having a caucus instead of an election so there won’t be a ballot for Trump to be kept off of.

I’m making a trip to the grocery store tomorrow.  I’ll definitely be buying some popcorn.

05:30 UTC−6:  oops, it turns out that I totally misunderstood.  The question that SCOTUS declined to weigh in on was whether POTUS has immunity from prosecution on the insurrection charge, so an appeals court will decide that first.  This was reported as a minor victory for Trump because that other case could go on for quite a while.

We don’t know anything more about Colorado after all.  (I’m in the mood for some popcorn anyway.)

Could Trump Be Disqualified?

I’m on an e-mail list from Robert Reich, and I got an interesting message this evening that included:

On Friday, Denver District Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled that Donald Trump “acted with the specific intent to disrupt the Electoral College certification of President Biden’s electoral victory through unlawful means; specifically, by using unlawful force and violence.”

She concluded with this finding of fact:  “Trump incited an insurrection on January 6, 2021 and therefore ‘engaged’ in insurrection.”

Bingo.

It’s the first official legal finding that Trump participated in an insurrection.

That would normally disqualify Trump from holding any public office in the U.S. under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment; but Reich reports that Wallace performed some legal “somersaults” in order to interpret the amendment in such a way that Trump could still be on the ballot because the 14th says that it applies to those who took an oath to “support” the Constitution, but the oath that Trump took was to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution.  (Yes, really.)  But Reich also writes “… appellate courts do not defer to district court interpretations of law or the Constitution.”

This will certainly go all the way to SCOTUS.  Stay tuned…

The New Speaker of the House

FtB already has plenty going on about Johnson (R-obviously) [Mano, PZ]; and I won’t repeat any of that; but I was taken by one possible dystopia in which all of our corporate media maybe have only short bullet lists of Johnson’s looney bits at the ends of stories that are mostly about how the Republicans “got it together.”  I had planned to watch a bunch TV news shows to see how that’s playing out so far.

PBS’ World Channel has an english language broadcast from DW News at 4:00PM my time (UTC−5).  They’re usually more concerned about what’s going on in Europe, but they did have a short story about the new speaker that contained the expected bullet list at the end, and they lumped a lot together under the rather bland “conservative Christian” label.  (Maybe that’s a red flag for Europeans—I don’t know.  It doesn’t sound particularly ominous to us US folk until you’re reminded of all the various bits of it.)

Unfortunately, I hadn’t slept well last night, and I had to get up early for a normally 35-minute drive (but during the morning rush hour today) to the hospital for the beginning of my third round of chemo drips; so by the time that BBC World News America came on, this old fart had to take a nap for about an hour, expecting to skip the BBC show and my local TV news.  When I woke up, all the news was over; but I stayed up for the World Channel’s repeat of PBS NewsHour and the local news on my NBC affiliate.

PBS NewsHour covered the speaker vote only during the initial “headline” part of the show, but that can often expand on particular stories.  This time was mostly Lisa Desjardins talking about how Johnson is “well thought-of among Republicans”; and she also grouped a lot together as “conservative Christian.”  (She did eventually break out the LGBTQ+ and abortion issues, but there was no mention of, e.g., creationism or Christian nationalism, the latter being particularly scary for me.)

There was also an interview asking a Republican representative some softball questions.  She wants to “keep the government open” and described Johnson as humble and one who puts the best interests of the country ahead of party (I’m not making that up).  We’ll see…

That was it.

I was hoping that my local TV news, after the leads that bleed, might have a bit from NBC News about the House vote, but no such luck.