Trust of Government – The Wrongologist

Florida Lets Measles Run Free

The Daily Escape:

Highland Lighthouse, North Truro, Cape Cod, MA – February 2024 photo by Barbra A. Bentley

Let’s take a break this Saturday from a) Russia’s infiltration of the Republican Party and b) the growing realization that unless House Speaker Mike Johnson Johnsonless whips his members into shape before March 1^st, we’ll have a government shutdown. Instead let’s focus today on Measles.

You are a witness the continued collapse in US public health standards since Florida’s Surgeon General has said its ok for unvaccinated kids to attend public school even though there are measles outbreaks. From KFF News:

“With a brief memo, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has subverted a public health standard that’s long kept measles outbreaks under control. On Feb. 20, as measles spread through Manatee Bay Elementary in South Florida, Ladapo sent parents a letter granting them permission to send unvaccinated children to school amid the outbreak.”

“The Department of Health ‘is deferring to parents or guardians to make decisions about school attendance,’ wrote Ladapo, who was appointed to head the agency by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose name is listed above Ladapo’s in the letterhead.”

With his brief memo, Ladapo has subverted a public health standard that’s long kept measles outbreaks under control. This is where you wind up after decades of indoctrination of libertarianism and neoliberalism, where “freedom” becomes anarchy, a rejection of the ability of the state to impose restrictions, even in the name of public safety.

Everyone in America knows that measles is highly contagious, that it kills, and can do lasting damage. More from KFF:

“Most people who aren’t protected by a vaccine will get measles if they’re exposed to the virus. This vulnerable group includes children whose parents don’t get them vaccinated, infants too young for the vaccine, those who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons…”

The CDC advises that unvaccinated students stay home from school for three weeks after exposure. About 1 in 5 people with measles end up hospitalized, 1 in 10 develop ear infections that can lead to permanent hearing loss, and about 1 in 1,000 die from respiratory and neurological complications. They reported that in 2023, childhood immunization rates had hit a 10-year low.

Worse, only about a quarter of Florida’s counties had reached the 95% threshold at which communities are considered protected against measles outbreaks, according to data posted by the Florida Department of Health in 2022.

Rebekah Jones, a data scientist who was removed from her post at Florida’s health department in 2020, over a rift regarding Coronavirus data, said:

“I think this is the predictable outcome of turning fringe, anti-vaccine rhetoric into a defining trait of the Florida government,”

A strategy of letting measles spread (which can wipe out your body’s immunity memory) while Covid is still pin-balling its way around the country? Sounds legit.

The way that things are going with public health in the US, it’s only a matter of time until the health departments of other western countries start issuing travel health notices for their citizens wanting to visit the US, advising them of the diseases that are being left to run free, particularly in Florida.

From The Nation:

“In 2022, Georgetown University political scientist Donald Moynihan wrote a piece on how to undermine the administrative state….No country becomes a world power without a capable public service.”

Perhaps the corollary, as stated by The Nation’s Gregg Gonsalves is this:

“No country becomes healthy without a capable public health system.”

That describes America today. More from The Nation:

“We did terribly on Covid…part of the reason was that our fundamentals were weak, but our politics are also set up to undermine public health….This has implications well beyond…the pandemic. It’s about how we expect to survive and thrive in America….This is a disaster in slow motion, and we’re watching it unfold as bystanders.”

There you have it: another thing to lose sleep over, and the election is still 7+ months away. Will there be enough infant deaths to generate sufficient outrage to roll this decision back?

Highly doubtful.

Wrongo is leaving you with that thought and is segueing into our Saturday Soother, where we take a break from doom scrolling and spend a few stolen moments alone with our thoughts. Here on the Fields of Wrong, there is still snow on the ground. So while we hope that spring is just around the corner, there’s little evidence to support it.

To help you relax, grab a seat by a south-facing window and watch and listen to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”, played here by the Vienna Philharmonic, and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. Dudamel is scheduled to become music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026. This performance was a part of the annual free Vienna Summer Night Concert in 2019.

This is the fourth time Wrongo has featured this composition, although you are seeing this particular version for the first time.

Barber finished the Adagio in 1936. In January 1938, Barber sent an orchestrated version of the Adagio for Strings to Arturo Toscanini. The conductor returned the score without comment, which annoyed Barber. Toscanini later sent word that he was planning to perform the piece and had returned it simply because he had already memorized it!

It was performed for the first time by Toscanini in November, 1938. Here, it is conducted by Gustavo Dudamel in 2019, like Toscanini did, without a score:

Kevin Shows His Little Spine

The Daily Escape:

Lone Cypress, 17 Mile Drive, Monterey, CA – September 2023 photo by Leila Shehab Photography

“Until we know we are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right.” — David McRaney

Wrongo’s Wake Up Call came on Saturday evening when Kevin McCarthy asked House Democrats to bail him out again:

“Congress passed a bill today to fund the federal agencies at FY2023 levels until Nov. 17. The legislation reauthorizes the FAA and the national flood insurance program through the end of this year. There’s $16 billion for disaster relief accounts, too.”

From Politico:

“McCarthy’s move marked an abrupt shift after spending most of the year trying to placate all corners of his party — including a dozen-plus hardliners who have made it next to impossible for him to maneuver anything onto the floor. After the vote, McCarthy all but taunted his critics to come after his gavel if they wanted to.”

Wrongo said here that:

“You’re unlikely to win if you decide to place a bet on McCarthy getting a dose of moral courage and standing up to his Party.“

Well, Wrongo was um, wrong. The 45-day bridge funding passed with more Democratic than GOP votes. That’s a repeat of the debt vote last spring that also angered McCarthy’s opponents.

Four Indictments, 91 Counts

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise at Laite Beach, Camden, ME – August 2023 photo by Daniel F. Dishner

There’s plenty of good reporting and bad punditry out of Georgia. So Wrongo, as in the past, will limit what is said about it here. From the NYT’s Peter Baker: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“…most Americans made up their minds about Mr. Trump long before prosecutors like Fani T. Willis or Jack Smith weighed in, polls have shown. He is, depending on the perspective, a serial lawbreaker finally being brought to justice or a victim of persecution by partisans intent on keeping him out of office.”

Republicans will continue to rationalize Trump’s criminal behavior. Their main talking point today is that the Democratic Party is part of a giant deep state cabal working to take down Trump. It is the Dems, not the Donald who are guilty of election interference. And what about the Biden Family Crime Syndicate?

The courts are finally treating Trump as the career criminal he’s always been. And many pundits are shaking their heads, saying that the shock to the American political system is going to be extreme because Republicans are angry.

What the pundits and the wingnuts don’t understand is that the rest of us are angry too. We’re livid that this cancer of a person has evaded justice after what he did post-the 2020 election. We’re enraged that his goons desecrated the Capitol. Finally, we nearly stroked out once we realized that after trying to overthrow our duly elected government, Trump and cronies seemed to get away with it.

And we plan to vote in historic numbers.

Republicans think they are the only side that feels passionately about Jan 6, but that is a huge mistake. Many Americans are angry that justice hasn’t been done. One foundational tenet of the MAGA movement is its southern anti-DC attitude. But Trump has in essence been saying to Georgians that they screwed up. That Georgians held a fraudulent election. It seems highly unlikely that framing will play well with a Fulton County jury. (Although it will only take one MAGA jury member to create a mistrial.)

A few other thoughts: The sooner journalists stop pretending that Republicans care about holding other Republicans accountable, the quicker we can move on to saving our democracy. Most mainstream journalists miss the moment because of their inbred need to show both sides of an argument. It was Jonathan Foster formerly of Sheffield University who said:

“If one person says it’s raining and another says it’s not, a journalist’s job isn’t to report that disagreement, but rather to look out the window.”

America’s journalists should heed Foster’s advice.

Finally, the importance of the Georgia case is that Trump can never pardon himself if he’s found guilty in Georgia. In fact, Georgia’s governor doesn’t have that authority. From the Atlanta Journal Constitution: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Unlike the federal cases, which could be dismissed by a future Republican president, Georgia’s pardon process is in the hands of an independent board, not the governor. Under the state’s rules, a person needs to wait five years after they serve any prison sentences before they can be considered for a pardon.”

What kind of person holds on to a lie and builds a scaffold of dishonesty around it? At any point in Trump’s Big Lie, from voter fraud to conspiracy, Trump could have said, “I lost fair and square, and I’ll get him next time”. Many in his Party in Georgia did just that. But Trump pushed on. The Senate could have convicted him at a time when the Capitol was in a damaged hulk. That also could have spared the country where we are today. But most Senate Republicans couldn’t find the courage.

Another tragedy is the enduring distrust of and lost faith in those America’s institutions that still function, if tenuously, today. Whether Trump wins or loses these cases, or whether he wins the White House again, this damage will take decades to undo.

We have zero control over what happens next in the various courtrooms. We have no influence over the juries who will weigh the evidence. Whatever the result, it will be divisive. But we won’t heal unless we lance the boil. Yes that means Wrongo is saying that Trump is a festering abscess poisoning our nation.

We need open, transparent trials, with public records of all witnesses and evidence. No one should argue for pardoning Trump because they’re afraid of his insurrectionist allies.

Trump and America deserve REAL trials, with REAL sentences. And we can move forward from there.

We were wrong to pardon Nixon. We let other Republicans (like Reagan and Bush Sr.) slide based on a wrong-headed sense of respect for the office, setting a bad precedent. It encouraged later Republican presidents to think they could rely on magnanimity when none was deserved.

Nail the crooks, starting with Trump.

America’s Playing Default Chicken

The Daily Escape:

Ice and clouds, Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone NP, WY – May 2023 photo by Joethehiker

Wrongo doesn’t know about you, but he’s starting to think that the “bi-partisan” Debt Ceiling negotiations aren’t going to stave off a default on the US’ debt obligations.

Every talking head is still saying that at the last minute, Biden and McCarthy will agree to…something. Something that prevents a government shutdown, and a default on payments for the country’s outstanding debt.

But is that real or hopium? In any negotiation, the idea is to find a point (or multiple points) of leverage that bends the other side toward your viewpoint. That helps the two sides to meet at some place in the middle.

So who’s got the leverage in the current Debt Ceiling negotiation? No one. Biden surely has no leverage over the House Republicans. Republican Speaker McCarthy has some leverage over Biden but has little leverage with his own House members. The Senate leaders, Majority Leader Schumer and Minority Leader McConnell, who normally have leverage to help resolve Debt Ceiling standoffs, are bystanders in this game of Default Chicken.

We’re in a high stakes game of chicken because nobody can deliver their side to the table. Politico reports:

“White House aides privately estimate they may need to deliver as many as 100 Democratic votes to ensure an eventual debt limit deal can pass the narrowly divided House…”

But few Democrats will support the deep cuts to social programs that Biden might be forced to agree to. McCarthy knows that a portion of his GOP House members will vote against ANY compromise bill. House Republicans have already called the legislation they passed last month (lifting the Debt Ceiling in exchange for deep spending cuts) the floor, not the ceiling to the negotiation. Dan Pfeiffer quoted Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL):

“I think my conservative colleagues for the most part…don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage.”

So Gaetz thinks that Biden and the Democrats are his hostages. If they are, how do they negotiate with the terrorists on the other side?

The positions are clear. The White House is open to budget negotiations but opposed to debt ceiling brinkmanship. Republicans threaten default if their budget demands aren’t met. They’re planning to pull the pin on this grenade and then blame Democrats for making them do it.

Recent polling from ABC and The WaPo gives Democrats a narrow advantage: An equal number of voters from each party—78%—would blame the opposite party for default. While 37% of independents say they would blame Republicans and 29% would blame Biden, with 24% blaming both parties equally.

The Democrats’ negotiating position appears to put them in the worst of both worlds: If the Debt Ceiling is breached, the polls show that they will share the political fallout with Republicans. Otherwise, they may have to agree to significant cuts to crucial programs like welfare and food stamps, which will badly hurt them with their base.

Either way, the Dems will complain about the financial wreckage caused by Republican extremism, and hope voters agree with them. The simplest way out is to agree to a temporary debt ceiling increase as we have many times in the past, to allow both sides to continue negotiating.

Sadly, McCarthy and the House Republicans seem to prefer default to compromise. They’re using passing a new Debt Ceiling as leverage to cut spending for Social Security and Medicare while increasing the defense budget. That’s their idea of “fiscal responsibility”. Sure, our military budget is 10 times Russia’s and three times China’s, but Republicans want grandma to tighten her belt.

At the end of the day, we’re stuck playing Default Chicken: The US must pay the bills it has already incurred as they mature. McCarthy can’t be seen by House Republicans to be giving concessions to Biden. After all, they think their job is to save the country from excess spending, not from the consequences of default. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said on Wednesday that no one in the House Republican conference is concerned about the potential of a US debt default:

“Regular Americans … don’t worry about the government shutting down.”

Negotiating with terrorists is very difficult. The pressure on Democrats to cave to Republican demands for massive spending cuts will become harder to resist. If somehow they do resist, chances are we’ll see America default on its debts.

Ohio’s Airborne Toxic Event

The Daily Escape:

Roan Mountain, NC – February 2023 photo by Spencer Carter. Roan Mountain has the largest naturally growing gardens of Catawba rhododendrons in the world.

Back on February 3, a Norfolk Southern (NS) train carrying hazardous materials derailed near the town of East Palestine, Ohio. Federal investigators say a mechanical issue with a rail car axle caused the derailment. After several days of underreporting, we now know what happened.

Here are some facts: The derailment included 50 cars, 20 of which carried toxic materials, 14 of those contained vinyl chloride. The subsequent fire burned for three days. Then there was a “controlled release” of poisonous gas. And finally, effects of the poison were felt on locals, their animals, and local waterways.

The axle problem is important since it is the cause of all the hardship in East Palestine. Trains use steel wheels on steel rails because they produce 85+ % less friction than rubber truck tires do on roads. The contact point of a wheel on the rail is about the size of a dime. Compared to trucks, trains are cheaper (4 cents vs 20 cents per ton-mile in the US), and more sustainable: One ton of freight can be moved over 470 miles on a single gallon of diesel fuel.

But sustaining that economic advantage requires the railroads to maintain all that steel in good working order. Otherwise if things go wrong with a train that’s 4.5 miles long, they can go very, very wrong. And reporting seems to indicate that NS didn’t maintain its steel wheels correctly.

Also, the derailed NS train was not classified as a “high-hazard flammable train,” despite its hazardous and flammable cargo. Such a classification would have lowered its speed and affected its route. From Lever News:

“Though the company’s 150-car train in Ohio reportedly burst into 100-foot flames upon derailing — and was transporting materials that triggered a fireball when they were released and incinerated — it was not being regulated as a “high-hazard flammable train,” federal officials told The Lever.”

Apparently when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the rail transport of hazardous compounds. That decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials including the NS train in Ohio, from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

Generally, workers want safety and the bosses want money. Safety requires additional time, more workers, and money. Deregulation contributes to the lack of safety. Using vinyl chloride in a chemistry lab requires safety equipment. Tank cars containing thousands of gallons of it should require more than the government apparently thinks is safe.

Wrongo always looks at the politics in these sorts of industrial disasters because they are usually caused by the economics created by politics.

Given how dangerous these chemicals are, and given how they are used and transported, we have to expect accidents like this to happen. But the government should be able to tell us whether the current accident rate is higher or lower than expected, and if higher, what should be done to correct the problem.

We trust the bureaucrats that make the rules to balance safe operations against the risk of an airborne toxic event like this. Wrongo’s brief look into this one incident doesn’t evidence that kind of trust. It appears that the bureaucrats who make the rules on railroad safety were influenced by the industry and wrote a rule that puts the economics for the railroad industry ahead of public safety.

These issues exist everywhere in the relationship between industry and government. There’s always pressure by the industry on the bureaucrats to deregulate. In a man-made disaster, that can place greater burdens on the communities, like just happened in East Palestine.

This is what the Michael Lewis’s book “The Fifth Risk” is about: People who go to school, get extensive training and then work in obscure corners of the government. Lewis talks about how important these people are, and how for decades they’ve been denigrated, vilified, and ignored, largely by Republicans.

This is another area in which the GOP is awful in a completely lopsided way to Democrats.

The existence of corporations who can impose risks on the rest of us is what happens when there is unequal political power. We need a state with a strong regulatory system to protect us. The state must build regulatory regimes for chemical spills that shift the risks back onto those who create them.

NS in this case, has said that they will be fully responsible for the damages caused in East Palestine.

That’s encouraging, but how does that little town with a population of less than 5,000, or even the state of Ohio hold NS to their word?

Saturday Soother – December 17, 2022

The Daily Escape:

18^th Annual Las Vegas Santa Run – Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022. Source: L.E. Baskow/Las Vegas Review-Journal @Left_Eye_Image

Lost in the back and forth of the year-end Congressional sausage-making was the unwelcome news that the deal to protect dreamers and to reform our immigrant asylum system has died.

From Greg Sargent in the WaPo:

“For a fleeting moment this month, a deal to protect 2 million “dreamers”…appeared within reach. Two senators with a history of bipartisan compromises were earnestly haggling over details…. The talks were endorsed by influential right-leaning opinion-makers, and even encouraged by the conservative Border Patrol union.”

The two Senators are Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ). Back to the WaPo:

“What happened? Tillis and Sinema were negotiating over bill text, much of which had been written, as late as Wednesday night. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) informed Sinema and Tillis that he wouldn’t allow it to be attached to the end-of-year spending omnibus bill, effectively killing it…”

Passing it was always a long shot. It looks as if the Republicans want immigration as a political issue more than they want a solution.

If you follow what’s going on at the southern border, you know that using Title 42, to allow police and border officers to expedite the expulsion of illegal immigrants is ending. A federal judge ordered the Biden administration to stop using it by Dec. 21, stating that it was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Immigrants are now crossing the border in large numbers, expecting that it will soon be impossible for US Border Patrol to simply send them back without reliance on Title 42. More from Sargent:

“The framework would have created new processing centers that would detain incoming asylum seekers — with increased legal and health services — until screenings could determine whether they have a “credible fear” of persecution if they were returned home. Those who passed would get a final hearing much faster than under the status quo, due to major investments in legal processing. Those who failed would be expelled promptly.”

The proposed Tillis/Sinema bill was designed to disincentivize exactly what the Republicans keep yelling about: Migrants who arrive seeking asylum, who then disappear into the interior and fail to show up for hearings. More from Sargent:

“What’s deeply frustrating about this moment is that the fundamental principles underlying reform were real and workable. Many Republicans recognize the absurdity of banishing the dreamers….And on asylum, these reforms represented a good-faith effort to come up with a solution that both sides could accept.”

The bill would have discouraged the exact sort of abuses that the Republicans constantly call the “border crisis” while retaining the US commitment to provide a fair hearing to all who seek refuge here.

Now, the border infrastructure that intercepts and processes migrants will be strained past the breaking point once Title 42 is lifted. But solving the problem doesn’t provide a political payoff to Republicans, who want to keep the “border crisis” hot as a 2024 campaign issue.

The Sinema/Tillis plan was a worthwhile effort. But there weren’t even 10 Republicans willing to break the filibuster. This is why, according to Gallup, more Americans say government is our biggest problem. And they’re saying so for the seventh time in the past 10 years. “Government” is a broad category of dissatisfaction that includes the President, Congress, Party politics and of course, gridlock.

There will be no end to gridlock unless and until bi-partisan efforts are rewarded. So, not in Wrongo’s lifetime.

But now’s the time to let go of the hot steaming mess that is our politics. Grab a few moments of calm and distance before we turn to a weekend of sourcing more Christmas presents and wearing our ugliest seasonal sweaters to family parties. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

Here on the Fields of Wrong, we still have patchy snow on the ground, although the much-hyped winter storm that made it to the Northeast after wreaking havoc elsewhere seemingly has missed us entirely.

Let’s kick back and brew up a hot steaming mug of Ethiopia Uchoro Nansebo Washed ($27/12oz.) coffee from Floyd, VA’s (pop. 432), Red Rooster Coffee. The roaster says it is surprisingly savory and creamy with notes of apple cider, lemon-lime, and stewed peaches.

Now grab a comfy chair by a window and listen to Michael Bublé perform “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” with Hannah Waddingham (Rebecca Welton on Ted Lasso). Her singing is a revelation. It’s hard to believe she could make Bublé look and sound like a guy in the chorus. It’s from his 10^th Anniversary “Christmas in the City” show:

Are Americans Fatigued By Politics?

The Daily Escape:

Early fall, Andover, ME – October 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

A lethal combination for democracy in America may be that not only do we field very weak candidates who hardly know how government works, but Americans are also woefully ignorant about our government.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center released its annual Civics Knowledge Survey in September. It focuses on the public’s understanding of the US Constitution. Here are some of its 2022 findings:

Less than half (47%) of US adults could name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial), down from 56% in 2021. Here’s a chart of their findings on the branches of government:

A quarter couldn’t name any branch!

When asked to name the protections specified in the First Amendment, the number of respondents who could identify them had declined:

Freedom of speech was cited by 63%, down from 74% in 2021.
Freedom of religion was named by 24%, down from 56% in 2021.
Freedom of the press was named by 20%, down from 50% in 2021.
Right of assembly was named by 16%, down from 30% in 2021.
Right to petition the government was named by 6%, down from 20% in 2021.

Note how dramatically these results have shifted in just one year.

Over half (51%) said (incorrectly) that Facebook is required to let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment. The First Amendment applies to the government not to private companies.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center said:

“When it comes to civics, knowledge is power….It’s troubling that so few know what rights we’re guaranteed by the First Amendment. We are unlikely to cherish, protect, and exercise rights if we don’t know that we have them.”

The precipitous decline in the First Amendment responses has Wrongo questioning whether the survey was performed accurately.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Annenberg found that having taken a high school civics class continues to be associated with correct answers to civics knowledge questions. In 2022, nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents with at least some high school education said they had taken a civics course in high school that focused on the Constitution or judicial system, about the same as in previous years. More than a third of those with at least some college education (36%) said they had taken a college course that focused on the US system of government and the Constitution, significantly fewer than in 2021.

Yet, according to the Center for American Progress, only nine states and the District of Columbia require one year of US government or civics, while 30 states require a half year and the other 11 states have no civics requirement. This may explain why Americans are so weak on how their government operates.

Can we link Annenberg’s results about poor civic knowledge with this Gallup poll showing that Americans’ views of the two major US political parties remain more negative than positive? It also shows that the Republican Party’s favorability is now better than the Democratic Party’s:

The GOP’s favorable rating has edged up by four percentage points to 44%, while the Democratic Party’s rating slipped by the same amount, to 39%. With our political gridlock, along with high inflation and economic uncertainty, it’s understandable that neither Party gets high marks. But why did the Republicans’ position improve over last year? Is it that Biden’s poor ratings are dragging the Democratic Party down?

In October, 2021, Biden’s approval numbers stood at 45%. Today, he’s at 42.1%. That means he’s dropped 3 percentage points while the Party has dropped 4%. It definitely looks like he’s a drag on the whole Party. Since Annenberg tells us that only 47% of us can name all three branches of government, maybe we can conclude that Americans are getting their negative opinions about the two Parties from cable news.

Does anything explain the results of these two polls? Blog reader David P. offered a different view of Wrongo’s column on “Democracy Fatigue” in a comment. He says:

“Democracy Fatigue may be a misnomer. “Politics Fatigue” is closer to what I see around me and struggle to fight off in myself. The amount of money, airtime, phone messages, snail mail, etc. seems disproportional to discernible progress. News about scandal, verbal embarrassments and tactical mishaps outweighs discussion of policy alternatives or actual policy achievements.”

Has America just become too numbed by the news media “flooding the zone” with scare headlines about crisis after crisis to care much about something real – like the threat Republicans pose to our democracy?

Maybe our democracy is in peril not just because of poor civics knowledge. It’s always been a joke how badly people do when asked about the workings of government.

Maybe it’s that we’ve just tuned out. If so, goodbye democracy.

Tuesday Wake Up Call, Voter Fraud Edition – August 16, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Monsoon season, Sonoran Desert, Tucson, AZ – August 2022 photo by Rene Martinez

The November mid-term election is 12 weeks away. Some Republicans who do not accept our country’s democratic tenets are focusing on getting elected in the battleground states in an effort to energize a future coup. From the WaPo:

“…in the six critical battlegrounds that ultimately decided the 2020 presidential contest, where Trump most fiercely contested the results…..Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, at least 54 winners out of 87 contests — more than 62% of nominees — have embraced the former president’s false claims.”

As an aside, reporters must stop using the term “election deniers”. It doesn’t convey what these Republicans believe. They know Trump lost, but they tried to steal the 2020 election anyway.

And they’re promising to steal the next one. These people call the government their “enemy”. Now, they’re calling for violence against the FBI. They say our elections can’t possibly be fair, yet they’re doing all they can to make them less fair.

There are many tools in the GOP tool kit to help a state create election-related chaos. They could decertify voting machines or block the electronic counting of ballots. They could empower their legislatures to determine how many of a presidential candidate’s votes are actually counted.

The GOP says that our local electoral processes and voting machines are highly suspect. In 2020 we saw Republican efforts to find voter fraud in several states, all of which failed. Still, in 2022, the GOP persists in saying there are voting machines that flipped votes in 2020 from Trump to Biden.

The gold standard for voting in America is hand-marked paper ballots. They leave a paper trail that is hard to challenge. Today states (including Connecticut where Wrongo votes) use digital scanners to read those hand-marked ballots. The machine tabulators can be checked before voting for accuracy and ballots can be re-scanned in random precincts afterwards to verify totals, along with hand counts.

Verified Voting a non-partisan firm that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections, rates the integrity of voting machines at the county level throughout the US. They have an interactive US map that allows anyone to check the quality of the voting machines in their county. Here’s a screenshot image of that interactive map:

You should go to the interactive map for greater detail. The green portion of the map represents the 69.2% of US registered voters that use highly reliable hand-marked paper ballots. The yellow portion of the map represents the 23.4% of our registered voters that use mostly reliable Ballot Marking Devices (BMD), with marked pre-printed ballots; some print summaries of voter selections, often with those selections encoded in barcodes or QR codes. Together, these account for 92.6% of America’s registered voters.

The red portion of the map represents the 7.4% of American voters who use a less-reliable direct recording electronic (DRE) voting system. DREs allow voters to record their selections directly into computer memory.

Despite what Republicans think, most of America can vote with total confidence that their voting machines are accurate, and that their votes will be counted accurately. So relax Republicans, election fraud just isn’t very possible in the US.

But there are plenty of other shenanigans that can be pulled at the local and state level. And that’s a concern given what the GOP is focusing on for the November mid-terms. They could take away voting rights by canceling voter registrations. They can close polling places or gerrymander more districts. The WaPo has a chart showing how close the GOP is to controlling the voting process in the six battleground states:

By weakening trust in our election system, Republicans are paving the way for America to become a one-party state led by an authoritarian strongman. They intend to take away the single and best power the people have, our vote. These Republicans aren’t election deniers, they’re anti-democracy. If they are elected, they will end democracy as we know it.

Time to wake up America! We can’t leave the vote-counting to people who won’t count all of our votes! America has a long tradition of subverting the voting process and denying millions of people the right to vote, and these Republicans want to take us right back to those days in our past. To stop that, they must be beaten in November’s mid-terms.

To help you wake up, watch, and listen to “Queen Bee” played by Taj Mahal and friends in this Playing For Change video, that features Ben Harper, Rosanne Cash, and many others from around the world.

The tune is from Taj Mahal’s 1997 album, “Señor Blues”, which won a Grammy. It’s an album that Wrongo highly recommends:

Saturday Soother – July 16, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Pamet Harbor, Truro, MA – June 2022 photo by Andrew Mckniff

The chaos caused by Trump never ends. The WaPo reported that the US Secret Service (USSS) deleted text messages from the phones of most of its employees in January 2021. Many of those messages related to Jan. 5 and 6:

“A government watchdog accused the US Secret Service of erasing texts from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, after his office requested them as part of an inquiry into the US Capitol attack, according to a letter sent to lawmakers this week. Joseph V. Cuffari, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, wrote to the leaders of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees indicating that the text messages have vanished and that efforts to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack were being hindered.”

Anyone see something suspicious about this?

It was simply a routine procedure, says the USSS spokesperson. The Secret Service by policy requires employees to back up and store government communications when they retire old electronic or telephonic devices. But the WaPo says that in practice, staff do not consistently back up texts.

By the time of the IGs request, as many as a third of Secret Service personnel had been given new cellphones.

Joseph Cuffari was nominated by Trump in 2019 to be the USSS Inspector General. He has faced significant criticism since he took the office. First-year audits plummeted to historic lows under his administration. He also blocked investigations into the Secret Service’s handling of protests in Lafayette Square, and the spread of Coronavirus in the agency’s ranks. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has called on President Biden to remove Cuffari.

Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi pushed back about the missing texts:

“…the Secret Service has been fully cooperating with the OIG in every respect – whether it be interviews, documents, emails, or texts….in January 2021, before any inspection was opened by OIG on this subject, USSS began to reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned, three-month system migration. In that process, data resident on some phones was lost…DHS OIG requested electronic communications…on Feb. 26, 2021, after the migration was well under way. The Secret Service notified DHS OIG of the loss of certain phones’ data, but confirmed to OIG that none of the texts it was seeking had been lost in the migration.”

Despite what the USSS spokesperson says, it’s a certainty that some texts are missing. OTOH, it would be surprising if the telephone carrier for the Secret Service didn’t retain a record of all the texts. That means that the DOJ could have them already or can easily retrieve them.

It’s interesting that the Trump-appointed director of the Secret Service, James Murray, announced his retirement last week. Most likely, he knew this was coming. It’s probable that he was given a choice to retire before getting canned.

Since leaving the Treasury Department and going under the DHS umbrella, the USSS has become a shitshow. Just last week in Israel, one of Biden’s SS agents was detained and deported after allegedly assaulting a woman outside of a Jerusalem bar.

Murray may have fallen on his sword, but the missing texts for such a significant event in US history implies that the USSS has been infiltrated by Trumpists. Remember that the Secret Service wanted to take Pence away from the Capitol during the attempted coup, but Pence refused. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) as president protempore of the Senate was in line to take Pence’s place. He could have nullified the Electoral College vote and seemed to know something, since he tweeted that Pence wouldn’t be at the Capitol so Grassley would preside over the vote.

Did Grassley have prior knowledge of what the SS planned for Pence?

Have you had enough for this week? Wrongo certainly has, so it’s time for our Saturday Soother, when we take a break from reading about the latest outrage and reconnect with nature for a few minutes. Weeding and watering are high on our to-do list for this weekend on the Fields of Wrong.

Let’s start by grabbing a mug of cold brew coffee and a chair in the shade. Now, listen to Alan Hovhaness’s “Meditation on Orpheus op. 155”, written in 1958 for Leopold Stokowski and the Houston Symphony. Hovhaness was an Armenian-American 20th-century composer who died in 2000.

His “Meditation” is a musical reflection on one of Greek mythology’s most memorable stories: Orpheus’ loss of his wife, Eurydice, and his attempt to find her by descending into the underworld, where he meets his tragic fate. It’s performed here in 2012 by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz:

Hovhaness is well worth your time.

Saturday Soother – March 26, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Crocus in bloom, Holliston, MA – March 2022 photo by Karen Randall

Let’s take a look at three stories that didn’t get their due this week. First, from the LA Times, about gang infiltration of the LA County Sherriff’s department:

“The top watchdog for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has identified more than 40 alleged members of gang-like groups of deputies that operate out of two sheriff’s stations…..Inspector General Max Huntsman said his office has compiled a partial list that includes 11 deputies who allegedly belong to the Banditos, which operate out of the East L.A. sheriff’s station, and 30 alleged Executioners from the Compton sheriff’s station.”

Huntsman told the LA Times that about a third of the 41 deputies on his list had admitted that they had gang tattoos or belonged to the groups. Allegations aren’t proof but apparently, there is a long history of allegations like this one surrounding the LA Sherriff’s department.

Also consider this article in the WaPo about police wrongdoing:

“The Post documented nearly 40,000 payments involving allegations of police misconduct in 25 departments, totaling over $3 billion. Departments usually deny wrongdoing when resolving claims.”

They found that more than 1,200 officers in the departments surveyed had caused problems resulting in at least five payments each by their municipalities. More than 200 had 10 or more payments for actions that resulted in lawsuits. New York City leads the way with more than 5,000 officers named in two or more claims, accounting for 45% of the money the city spent on misconduct cases. There are 36,000 officers in the NYPD. That’s 13.8%.

Settlements rarely involve an admission of guilt or a finding of wrongdoing. City officials and attorneys representing police departments say settling claims is often more cost-efficient than fighting them in court. Since there’s no formal list of bad actors, there’s little reason to hold these officers accountable.

Law enforcement throughout America gives itself a black eye whenever stories like these are written.

Second, the NYT reported that several of the Republican Senators who suggested that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson had given uncommonly lenient sentences to felons convicted of child sex abuse crimes had all previously voted to confirm judges who had given out similar prison terms below prosecutor recommendations, the very problem they had with Judge Jackson:

“But Mr. Hawley, Mr. Graham, Mr. Cotton and Mr. Cruz all voted to confirm judges nominated by President Donald J. Trump to appeals courts even though those nominees had given out sentences lighter than prosecutor recommendations in cases involving images of child sex abuse.”

You can read the article for the examples.

Hypocrisy is fuel for politicians, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. We know that Sen. Graham had voted only a year ago to confirm Judge Jackson, despite the sentencing decisions she had made as a district judge, the same ones that he now objects to.

Third, Bloomberg reported that private equity money is again pouring into residential real estate markets. They cite Phoenix, AZ as a prime example: (brackets by Wrongo)

“The median home [in Phoenix] was worth about $285,000 at the beginning of the pandemic; it was valued at $435,000 two years later.”

That’s a 53% increase. This is also true in NJ, where Wrongo’s son just got an all-cash offer from an investment group for his home, sight unseen, at 11% higher than the closest offer from a retail home buyer who needed a mortgage.

This is turning first-time home buyers into long-term renters, with real-world consequences.

Home equity represents a huge portion of individual wealth in the US, especially for moderate-income families that have few other opportunities to use borrowed money to purchase assets that can increase in value over time. Price appreciation lets owners accrue wealth which can be tapped later on when they have a large or unexpected expense.

Wall Street’s spin is that there just aren’t enough rentals for families who want to live in good neighborhoods but can’t afford a down payment. So they’re providing a necessary economic service. You be the judge.

Enough of this drama! It’s time to find a way to let go of the tragedy in Ukraine and the clown show surrounding Judge Jackson for a bit. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

Here on the fields of Wrong, it’s time to take down the deer fencing and put up the bluebird nest boxes. We also need to watch what we can of college basketball’s March Madness.

To help you get ready for the weekend, grab a chair by a large window and listen to Mozart’s “Turkish March” played here on bamboo instruments. It was performed in 2015 by Dong Quang Vinh on a bamboo flute along with the Bamboo Ensemble Suc Song Moi, in Haiphong, Vietnam:

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Trust of Government

Kevin Shows His Little Spine

Four Indictments, 91 Counts

America’s Playing Default Chicken

Ohio’s Airborne Toxic Event

Saturday Soother – December 17, 2022

Tuesday Wake Up Call, Voter Fraud Edition – August 16, 2022

Saturday Soother – July 16, 2022