A dangerous strategy

Amy Davidson Sorkin warns that the Democratic party is pursuing a dangerous strategy in trying to help the most extreme Republican candidates in the primary races in the belief that they will be easier to defeat in the general elections.

The plan, such as it is, is that voters will recoil from these candidates and turn to the Democratic Party as a bastion of sanity. That’s a harder argument to make when playing games like this. Many Democrats recognize that, too. “It’s dishonorable, and it’s dangerous, and it’s just damn wrong,” Representative Dean Phillips, of Minnesota, told Politico. In the same piece, Representative Jason Crow, of Colorado, called the ploy “very dangerous” and “substantively risky.” The implied risk is that the extreme candidate could actually win.
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Alex Jones’s lies exposed in court as one trial ends

We know that Alex Jones lies and lies brazenly. In a surprising development, his lies have now been exposed in court during the trial to determine how much damages Alex Jones should pay Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Heslin who was murdered at Sandy Hook, the parents’s lawyer Mark Bankston dramatically revealed a lie that Jones has made. It was exposed because Jones’s lawyers had inadvertently sent copies of all the text messages on Jones’s phone to Bankston.

In a remarkable moment, Bankston disclosed to Jones and the court that he had recently acquired evidence proving Jones had lied when he claimed during the discovery process that he had never texted about the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.

Bankston said that Jones’ attorney had, in an apparent mishap, sent him two years of cell phone records that included every text message Jones had sent.

The cell phone records, Bankston said, showed that Jones had in fact texted about the Sandy Hook shooting.

“That is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn’t have text messages about Sandy Hook,” Bankston said.

Bankston showed Jones a text message exchange he had about Sandy Hook. But Jones testified that he had “never seen these text messages.”

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Saying the quiet part about unemployment out loud

One of the bright spots in the current economy has been the low unemployment rate and the increase in wages. It is an open secret that corporations likes to have high unemployment because it makes workers powerless and thus can be forced to accept lower wages and less likely to ask for better working conditions or (horror of horrors) form unions, since they can be scared by the prospect of getting fired. But businesses rarely say that out loud because it looks bad to say that you want to see more people out of work. So they usually find ways of directly avoiding doing so and do not really need to since business owners are aware of this open secret. But a recent report from Bank of America actually said that it hopes for higher unemployment in the future.

A BANK OF AMERICA executive stated that “we hope” working Americans will lose leverage in the labor market in a recent private memo obtained by The Intercept. Making predictions for clients about the U.S. economy over the next several years, the memo also noted that changes in the percentage of Americans seeking jobs “should help push up the unemployment rate.”

The memo, a “Mid-year review” from June 17, was written by Ethan Harris, the head of global economics research for the corporation’s investment banking arm, Bank of America Securities. Its specific aspiration: “By the end of next year, we hope the ratio of job openings to unemployed is down to the more normal highs of the last business cycle.”

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Really? Australians still take an oath of allegiance to the queen?

Lidia Thorpe, an Indigenous person who was elected to the Australian senate as a member of the Green party, added the word ‘colonizing’ before the words ‘Queen Elizabeth II’ while taking the oath of office. The presiding officer stopped her and said that she should only read the words on the card, which she then did, while making clear with her intonation and facial expressions that she found it offensive.


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The Tyre Extinguishers war on SUVs

I came across this article that followed a group of activists, part of a global movement known as Tyre Extinguishers, who are going around deflating the tires of massive SUVs found in urban areas.

The Tyre Extinguishers movement started in the UK, spread to a clutch of other countries and has now landed in the US. Since June, dozens of SUV and pickup truck owners in New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago have discovered their vehicles with flat tires along with a note on the windshield declaring: “Your gas guzzler kills.”

The leaflet, complete with a Ghostbusters-style picture of a crossed-out SUV, states the vast amounts of planet-heating emissions generated by the vehicles are “nails in the coffin of our climate”, adding: “You’ll be angry, but don’t take it personally. It’s not you, it’s your car.”
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As the acts of minor sabotage mounted last Wednesday, the activists had to invoke some self-imposed rules. No SUVs with disabled stickers were targeted, nor anything that appeared to be used for certain work. A vehicle was chosen for a deflation only for the group to notice it had a “surgeon” sign in the window – the lentil was swiftly removed before the tire fully deflated. Conversely, an SUV that was deemed “so huge, so gross” had two of its tires collapsed.

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A MAGA movement I can get behind

That is the Mothers Against Greg Abbott movement that is fighting against the reactionary Texas governor and the state’s highly restrictive abortion laws.

Governor Abbott will face Beto O’Rourke in November in Texas’s gubernatorial election. Axios reported that although Abbott has more funding overall, O’Rourke has raised more campaign money than the incumbent since February, reflecting the ever-tightening race. In December, only 37% of voters said they supported O’Rourke, while this month, 43% said they supported him.

Mischievous or mischievious?

During the past week, I spent a lot of time with my grandsons in various playgrounds. At one of them, the three-year old was at the top of a slide, about to go down. A woman who was there with her daughter looked at him and said to me, “Look at his mischievious smile!” And it is true, my younger grandson does have a mischievous smile. But what struck me was that the woman said “mischievious”, pronouncing the last five letters as two syllables ‘vee-yes’, instead of the single syllable “vous”.

It was not the first time I had heard people pronounce it this way. Her comment made me wonder if this was a regional variation so I looked it up and found this article about it.
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