quote unquote: William James

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. -- William James

From the Windfall Profits Desk:

"The $65 billion gain is...real-rest assured of that. But only $36 billion came from [our] operations. The [other] $29 billion was delivered to us in Dec when Congress rewrote the U.S. Tax Code." -- Warren Buffett, Annual Letter, Berkshire Hathaway

The 50th anniversary of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood!

Red to Blue?

The NRCC outraised the DCCC in January, hauling $10.1 million compared to the House Democrats’ $9.3 million. Both hauls broke their previous January records. The NRCC ended with $50.6 million in cash on hand, while the DCCC ended with $43.8 million (HuffPost/Washington Times). The DCCC named six more candidates to its Red to Blue program, bringing the total number in the program to 24: former State Department adviser Lauren Baer in FL-18; state Sen. Jeff Van Drew in the open NJ-02; former Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion official Andy Kim in NJ-03; attorney Xochitl Torres Small in the open NM-02; retired Naval commander Elaine Luria in VA-02; and former state Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown in WA-05 (RollCall).

$$$$

If you're keeping count, J.B. Pritzker, the venture capitalist who is attempting to buy his way into the Illinois statehouse, gave his campaign another $7 million last week, putting him at more than $56 million in self-funding for the Democratic primary fight against Bobby Kennedy's son, philanthropist Chris Kennedy.

Classic NRA-owned hypocrite:

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield offered this tweet on the Florida massacre: "The heart of our nation breaks with the senseless and tragic loss of these young students. Our prayers are with them and their families." In the meantime, he continues to sock away gun-lobby contributions*.

* bribes

A dozen here, a dozen there, pretty soon it adds up to mass murder.

The Second Amendment is not a paragraph in a suicide pact.

"The current FBI definition of mass murder, commonly accepted by the media as a proxy for 'mass gun violence', is three or more people murdered in one event. We believe this does not capture the whole

picture. Many people may survive a shooting based on luck alone. Some may be left with life long disabilities and trauma, but the mainstream definition of mass gun violence does not account for this. Here at the Mass Shooting Tracker, we count the number of people shot rather than the number people killed because, 'shooting' means 'people shot'. For instance, in 2012 Travis Steed and others shot 18 people total. Miraculously, he only killed one. Under the incorrect definition used by the media and the FBI, that event would not be considered a mass shooting! Arguing that 18 people shot during one event is not a mass shooting is absurd. Our definition is this: a mass shooting is an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree. This may include the gunman himself, or police shootings of civilians around the gunman."

Using this definition, there have been 41 mass shootings in the United States since January 1, 2018.

And restore the assault-weapon ban.

The wisdom of the internets

Stalking Horse?

I don't have an opinion yet on the campaign for governor between Gavin Newsom, Antonio Villaraigosa, John Chiang and Delaine Eastin, but the entry into the race of Amanda Renteria, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, is suspicious at the go. Who enters a major race 30 days before the filing deadline with no campaign infrastructure, no staff, no website, no endorsements, and no cash? It's not a stretch to think that Renteria will be on the ballot to suppress support of Newsom's chief rival Villaraigosa among Latinos. Is this another attempt by the party poobahs to rig a primary outcome? Shouldn't the voters get to hear from the candidates before the fix is in?

College dropouts

The next time someone starts talking about the constitutional sanctity of the Electoral College, think about the image below. The EC, as we all know, is a work of political genius. Because, you know, the Founders.

Getting rid of the Electoral College is another one of the many things that's "too hard" or "too complicated" in present-day America. But surely a nation that succeeded in ridding itself of slavery,

achieved universal suffrage and killed off Jim Crow (at least for a while) can send this anti-democratic relic of an eighteenth century political compromise to the political dumpster.

Of course, even after the Electoral College is gone, there will be a lot of work left to do if we are to live up to our ideal of one person, one vote: gerrymandering will need to be tackled; other barriers to voting, such as onerous identification requirements, will have to be eliminated; nor will suffrage ever be universal until felons and ex-felons are guaranteed the right to vote. Much more difficult, admittedly perhaps "too hard" and "too complicated," will be democratizing the Senate (possibly by abolishing the upper chamber and replacing the Congress with a unicameral legislative body -- there is no reason, beyond historical accident, why the residents of a state with, say, 360,000 citizens should have the same representation as a state with, say, 36,000,000 -- and the runaway imperial presidency must be reduced to its original role as executor of the legislature's intentions -- the Founders, royalists though most of them were, never intended to create a serial king.

But first things first. If the constitutional requirement can't be met to amend it out of existence, there are other ways to upend it, such as the National Popular Vote interstate compact already adopted by 11 states and the District of Columbia and close to passage in 11 more, a solution as jerry-rigged as the problem it is attempting to fix but at least a step in the right direction until we're able to solve our political issues like grown-ups.

Extra credit:
✓ Former secretary of labor Robert Reich warns that hundreds of thousands are being disenfranchised: Jim Crow Is Making a Furious Comeback by Robert Reich (AlterNet).
✓ After the 2010 election, state lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote. The new laws range from strict photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions: New Voting Restrictions in America by The Brennan Center for Justice.
✓ 6.1 million citizens will be barred from voting on election day: Why Prisoners and Ex-Felons Should Retain the Right to Vote by Gregg D. Caruso PhD (Psychology Today).
✓ The upper house is a malapportioned, anti-democratic embarrassment: The United States Senate is a failed institution by Ian Millhiser (Think Progress).
✓ Congress is too dysfunctional to act as a check on executive power: Abolish the Senate. It's the only way to rein in modern presidents. by John Bicknell (Washington Post).
✓ The President's threats against North Korea expose the many dangers of the White House's post-9/11 powers. Here's what Congress must do: Don’t Just Impeach Trump. End the Imperial Presidency by Jeet Heer (New Republic).

Addendum:
Neil Freeman redrew the state borders in another attempt to help us think about the undemocratic nature of our federal system as currently organized. Currently, "[t]he largest state is 66 times as populous as the smallest," Freeman explains on his site, "and has 18 times as many electoral votes." His map is based on 2010 Census data, which records a population of 308,745,538 for the United States. Divided up among 50 equal states, that's a little over six million people per state. Made equal by population, they might look like this:

Electoral college reform (fifty states with equal population) by Neil Freeman (Fake Is The New Real)

And:

The Long War drags on:

In "Julius Caesar," Brutus argues that "Th'abuse of greatness is when it disjoins / Remorse from power." Thus Lincoln, in whose character cohabited forcefulness, caution and morality, will be honored through generations, long after Bush, Obama and now Trump, the facilitators of endless war and apologists for the slaughter of innocents, are mercifully -- and justly -- consigned to oblivion.

With apologies to dictionary.com

INTERSECTIONALITY

[in-ter-sek-shuh-nal-i-tee] noun

1.
the theory that the overlap of various social identities, as race, gender, sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination experienced by an individual (often used attributively): Her paper uses a queer intersectionality approach.
2.
the oppression and discrimination resulting from the overlap of an individual’s various social identities: The intersectionality of oppression experienced by black women.
3.
the antidote to identity politics: The intersectionality or “parallel problems” of economic disparity, gender inequality and institutional racism was the idea underpinning the presidential candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Synonyms: solidarity, comradeship.
Antonyms: capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, empire.
See, also: class consciousness, class struggle.

Extra credit:
"There will be no economic or political justice for the poor, people of color, women or workers within the framework of global, corporate capitalism. Corporate capitalism, which uses identity politics, multiculturalism and racial justice to masquerade as politics, will never halt the rising social inequality, unchecked militarism, evisceration of civil liberties and omnipotence of the organs of security and surveillance. Corporate capitalism cannot be reformed, despite its continually rebranding itself. The longer the self-identified left and liberal class seek to work within a system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls 'inverted totalitarianism,' the more the noose will be tightened around our necks. If we do not rise up to bring government and financial systems under public control—which includes nationalizing banks, the fossil fuel industry and the arms industry—we will continue to be victims." The Bankruptcy of the American Left by Chris Hedges (Truthdig)

A cross-racial and class conscious movement is the only foundation for effective freedom: Against National Security Citizenship by Aziz Rana (Boston Review)

"In the worlds of politics and nonprofits intersectionality has become a sneaky substitute for the traditional left notion of solidarity developed in the process of ongoing collective struggle against the class enemy. Intersectionality doesn't deny the existence of class struggle, it just rhetorically demotes it to something co-equal with the fights against ableism and ageism and speciesism, against white supremacy, against gender oppression, and a long elastic list of others. What’s sneaky about the substitution of intersectionality for solidarity is that intersectionality allows the unexamined smuggling in of multiple notions which directly undermine the development and the operation of solidarity. Intersectionality means everybody is obligated to put their own special interest, their own oppression first – although they don’t always say that because the contradiction would be too obvious." Intersectionality is a Hole. Afro-Pessimism is a Shovel. We Need to Stop Digging (part 1) by Bruce A. Dixon (Black Agenda Report)

"In the context of the real left, the community of those aiming to overthrow capital, patriarchy, white supremacy and empire—not two or three out of four but all four, the term intersectionality has become a kind of brood parasite. It mimics just enough of left feminist rhetoric and branding to deceive the unwary and ensnare many bright, serious and sincere leftists into defending and promoting its fundamentally hostile project." Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism (part 2) by Bruce A. Dixon (Black Agenda Report)

"My enemy's enemies...?"

                                                                                                Юлий Ганф

A Soviet-era cartoon from the 1950s satirizing American politics.

How other countries keep money out of politics

Well, here's a thing!

"In Missouri’s deep-red 97th General Assembly district, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a 61-33 margin in 2016. Republican State Representative John McCaherty won reelection in the same year with almost 75 percent of the vote. McCaherty crushed a Libertarian candidate in that race; Democrats didn’t even bother to contest the seat.

"So when McCaherty quit the seat last year to focus on a campaign for Jefferson County Executive, Republicans had little reason to fear they would lose it in a special election. They slated the son of a popular former legislator from the region and he ran on a conservative platform that, local media pointed out, mirrors that of other Republicans in the Show-Me State.

"Then, the 'sure-thing' Republican lost.

"Democrat Mike Revis, a 27-year-old Anheuser-Busch employee who said he was inspired to run because of his frustration with Republican policies that serve 'multi-millionaires who buy influence with elected officials,' swept to victory Tuesday night with a 52-48 margin. That represented a 31-point swing from the 2016 presidential race numbers, and a 37-point swing from the last time a Democrat sought the seat."

The rest of the story:
A pro-union Democrat just won a seat in Missouri that Trump won by a landslide: 35 and Counting! Democrats Flip Another Republican Legislative Seat by John Nichols (The Nation)

To whom it may concern

Dear nonprofits, interest groups and political parties:

Please stop sending hundreds of return-address labels with each of your fund-raising appeals. No one but you mails anything anymore. There are these new things called email and texting that people are using instead. Spending huge amounts to produce useless promotional items does not build trust in your fiscal judgement.

The shopping bags and windbreakers are very nice, though.

Thank you for you attention.

In the Long War, Afghanistan is the U.S. military's version of "Groundhog Day."