Category: Uncategorized

Saturday Soother – October 15, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Lobster boats at dusk, Lubec Harbor, Lubec, ME – October 2022 photo by Rick Berk Photography

Wrong and Ms. Right are chilling on Cape Cod. We took time out from doing nothing to watch the Jan. 6 Committee’s most likely final hearing on Thursday. You know by now that the Committee voted unanimously to subpoena Trump. You also know that he will never appear.

The Committee has to wrap up its work and publish it before the next Congress is sworn in, January 2023. And the most important thing that they can do is to make a criminal referral to the DOJ for Trump and a few of his fellow travelers like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, John Eastman, and Jeffrey Clark. The Committee also must share the entirety of their investigative record with the DOJ as soon as possible.

If they delay until the new Congress is sworn, and if it’s controlled by Republicans, the new Speaker will dissolve the Committee and refuse to cooperate with the DOJ.

But let’s move on and talk a little about the price of chicken. It’s going up bigly, but rotisserie chickens at Costco are still $4.99, as they have been for more than 20 years.

Chicken is our most popular meat: Americans consume 99 pounds per capita, way more than beef (56 lbs.), pork (52 lbs. ) or fish (19 lbs.). That’s 20 whole chickens per person, per year. The Hustle reports that about 10% of the chicken we eat are rotisserie cooked, and that Costco sells around 12% of all rotisserie chickens in the US. They began selling a 3 lb. cooked chicken for $4.99 in 2000. And 22 years later, the bird still costs $4.99. Adjusted for inflation, the Costco rotisserie chicken should be selling for $8.31, but they’re keeping the price low because nobody walks into Costco and comes out with just one chicken.

Costco says that they are losing a ton of profit on cheap chicken. In 2015, the CEO estimated that the lost profit was around $40 million. They have worked to control costs by opening their own chicken processing facility in Nebraska in 2019. That one facility produces 43% of Costco’s rotisserie chicken requirements. Costco reports that it saves them 35¢/chicken. And their rotisserie chickens have their own Facebook page with 19k followers.

Want to save on your food bills? Eat more Costco chicken.

It’s time for us to spend a few minutes decompressing from another week of crummy news. That means it’s time for our Saturday Soother. As Wrongo writes this, he’s looking at an Atlantic Ocean tidal inlet. The weather for the past week has been fantastic, but we’ve had very high winds and lots of rain to start this weekend.

Still, the shore birds are congregating on a small sand bar that’s visible at low tide in front of our rental house. They are often joined by a solitary man who motors over in a small skiff and spends an hour bent over at the waist with a clamming rake, hunting for shellfish treasures. He seems reasonably successful, returning every day at low tide to toss a bunch of clams into a plastic bucket, hop back in the skiff and motor away.

Wrongo couldn’t bend over at the waist and rake for an hour without needing spine surgery.

As you cruise into the weekend, start by brewing up a mug of Kenya Nyeri Hill coffee ($12.50/12 oz.) from Road Map Coffee works, in Lexington in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The roaster says that it has a chocolaty finish with notes of red currant and tangerine zest.

Now grab a seat on the deck and listen and watch “Kol Nidrei” by Max Bruch. Bruch wrote it in 1880. It is an Adagio based on two Hebrew Melodies for Cello and Orchestra, consisting of a series of variations on two themes of Jewish origin. Many mistakenly believed that Bruch was Jewish because he wrote this piece, but he was not. From Bruch:

“Even though I am a Protestant, as an artist I deeply felt the outstanding beauty of these melodies and therefore I gladly spread them through my arrangement…”

Here it is played in 2018 by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony under the direction of Paavo Järvi. The cello soloist is Mischa Maisky, who was born in Ukraine:

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VA Post Office Closed Because of Segregation Exhibit

The Daily Escape:

Drone view of Cape Kiwanda SP near Pacific City, OR – August 2022 photo by headstandphotography

This story is another example of what’s wrong in our nation. It describes the increasing politicization inside our federal bureaucracy. The US Postal Service (USPS) has closed a post office located in the Montpelier VA Railroad Depot because of an exhibit the USPS called “unacceptable”.

The exhibit was about racial segregation.

The post office opened there in 1912; the exhibit has been there since 2010. According to the Roanoke Times, USPS spokesman Philip Bogenberger emailed on Aug. 9, saying:

“While we attempted to address the issue with the property owner, that effort was unsuccessful, and it was decided that the proper course of action was to suspend the facility and provide service to our customers from nearby postal retail units,”

The property owner is the Montpelier Foundation. The display is on a panel on one exterior wall of the depot and on panels inside the 1912 station. The post office has its own entrance, separate from the rooms in which the display is shown. Among other things, the exhibit depicts the depot’s waiting room during Virginia’s racially segregated era.

Here’s a photo of the now closed Post Office:

And here’s a (blurry) photo of the offensive exhibit:

The train station was built in 1910 by the industrialist William duPont. He had moved there in 1900 to live with his family in Madison’s’ historic mansion. Because the US was racially segregated, duPont built the station with separate waiting rooms for Blacks and Whites. The post office opened in the building in 1912 and it has been a post office ever since.

In 2010, the Montpelier Foundation created the exhibit. It tells of African American life in Virginia’s Orange County and the nation during segregation, as well as the train station’s history with the duPonts.

Adding to the current controversy, Elizabeth Chew, Montpelier’s interim president and CEO, said that despite what the USPS spokesperson said:

“The US Postal Service did not contact the current CEO or chief of staff, nor did it contact the previous CEO or chief of staff.”

In order to close a post office, the USPS is required to make a determination in writing, and then make it available to the customers served by that post office. It may not close it until at least 60 days afterward.

The overall question of why close this particular post office after more than 100 years, and without proper procedures, has gotten Rep. Abigail Spanberger, (D-VA) involved. She wrote Gerald Roane, the USPS’s Virginia district manager, inquiring about the abrupt discontinuation of service for Orange County residents:

“…I am concerned by this abrupt discontinuation of mail service that has prevented those we serve from receiving the important items they rely on…I am also extremely frustrated by the lack of transparency, forewarning regarding the closure, and information following the closure that my constituents and local officials have received.”

Spanberger is right to ask: “who decided this, and why”? This was an historical exhibit, not a political statement. It’s important to be reminded of that repressive time so that it is never repeated. It seems that this is cancel culture of a bureaucratic kind that doesn’t want our little ones to feel guilt or shame for the racist and segregationist actions of their parents, grandparents, and ancestors.

In our federal bureaucracy, new policies are first vetted by subject matter experts, usually lower level staffers with deep knowledge of the area. Ideas that pass muster are then elevated to managers who are familiar with the proposed policy’s broader implications. Finally, proposals go to that thin layer of political appointees who are there to assure that any policy meets the goals of the administration.

Ultimately, agency heads or cabinet secretaries make the final call. So in this case, who are the ones trying to hide racism and segregation from the rest of us? Were they waiting for today’s atmosphere of outrage and victimhood to right a grievous wrong of exposing this chapter of local history?

How deeply in our federal bureaucracy have these Republican termites buried themselves?

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Uvalde, Texas

The Daily Escape:

Hocking Hills Region SP, OH – May 2022 photo by Victoria Williams

There’s nothing more to say about how wrong it is when school kids are killed. There was a time when we might have thought that a mass shooting at an elementary school would have been the final straw. Randomly gunning down children in front of their classmates who had to witness the carnage, the horror endured by the families of the victims should have been enough to shock America’s collective conscience into action on guns.

But it wasn’t. The killers have kept going into schools and have continued to have their twisted say. And so have the members of the Senate, who will not lift a finger to try and end gun violence in America.

This is the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut. Wrongo wrote about Newtown back in 2012 when this blog was young, saying that the Second Amendment Absolutists:

“…need to balance for us the permanent loss of so much potential with the impatience of a waiting period, a background check, or the loss of the ability to fire more rounds per minute.”

So far, there have been 199 mass shootings this year (defined as three people shot, excluding the shooter), and the year is only 21 weeks old. We talk about the Second Amendment, but what would the founders say if they understood the extent to which it has so crippled our ability to deal with home-grown gun carnage?  From Hal Gershowitz:

“Two hundred and thirty-one years ago, the founders who gathered in Philadelphia to write our Constitution were all wary of the dangers of a standing army. They all knew that standing armies in Europe…were used by ruling monarchies to repress their people. Nations…that maintained standing armies used them primarily to keep their people in check. The founders all embraced the idea of a citizenries’ right to bear arms and their right to establish militias as a bulwark against a standing federal army that might repress them.”

Gershowitz reminds us that gun ownership hasn’t changed:

“According to the first US census conducted in 1790, there were just under 680,000 families or households in the new country. Almost every household owned a musket, so the country was well-armed and well-protected should the newly formed American republic go rogue.”

He says that at the time of the Constitutional convention in 1791, The US only had a standing army of about 800 men and probably about the same number of muskets. Thus, the armed households of the country far outnumbered the armed army of the new republic. Just like today.

Yet the Supreme Court endorses Second Amendment Absolutism. Their Conservative supermajority is about to dramatically expand the scope of the Second Amendment and prohibit us from protecting our communities by enacting gun safety laws through the democratic process.

Today in our town in Northwestern Connecticut, there were feverish calls by parents to arm our teachers, and station police permanently in our schools. The urge to protect kids is understandable, but it doesn’t square with the facts. Perry Stein of the WaPo reported that two Uvalde Texas police officers and a school resource officer were present and fired at the shooter, but it did not stop him from entering the building.

So what can be done? Among the most basic purposes of government is to protect its citizens. Most people accept this even though it causes inconvenience and some loss of personal freedom.

You can’t take your bottle of water, your giant hairspray can (or your handgun) through security at the airport. It’s inconvenient and an abridgement of your rights, but the greater good requires that abridgement to protect all passengers against the threat of a terrorist, whether foreign or domestic.

We could change our gun laws. Start by looking at Canada, which requires a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun, and it imposes a clever safeguard: gun buyers should have the support of two people vouching for them. While this could be done on the state level, if any other state has very liberal gun purchase laws, your state will remain awash in guns. We need a national law, and a national law requires Senate action.

But the Senate won’t act on gun control. This should give you some perspective:

History says that we have a Second Amendment to protect us from a renegade standing army, one that has never existed in America. Today, Second Amendment Absolutism has left us without any effective means to control, regulate and, yes, “infringe” upon the acquisition of handguns, long guns, and semi-automatic machine guns in America, where we now have more than 400 million in the hands of the well-armed citizenry.

The Senate will only change if we elect Senators with moral courage!

Let’s close with a tune by the Drive-By Truckers “Thoughts and Prayers”:

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Travels With Wrongo, Saturday Soother Style – May 21, 2022

The Daily Escape:

View of the town of Sancerre and surrounding vineyards – May, 2022 photo by Wrongo

Our visit to France is coming to an end. It has been a nice change of pace from our life in Northwestern Connecticut. More below about France after another rant about the state of American politics. Here, we’ve seen very little about the baby formula debacle in the US. At this distance, the reasons why Abbott shut down its formula manufacturing facility seem a little unclear.

The WSJ reports that the shortage happened after Abbott voluntarily recalled some products and closed a plant in Sturgis, MI where Similac and other brands were made. The FDA investigated consumer complaints related to four infants who were hospitalized, (two of whom died) apparently after using Abbott’s formula.

Abbott controls about 42% of the US baby formula market.

The FDA said the offending bacteria was detected in Abbott’s plant, but not in their products. That raised concerns by the Agency that the formula carried a risk of contamination. Abbott said there was no conclusive evidence linking Abbott’s formulas to the infant illnesses. A charitable view is that the FDA failed to weigh risks against the real-world consequences of abruptly cutting off this very significant source of infant nutrition.

This brings us to today. It will take six to eight weeks before Abbott’s formula again starts showing up on store shelves, meaning the shortage could last months. The Biden administration wanted to ease the domestic shortage of formula by giving the FDA funds to expedite a solution. On Wednesday, most House Republicans voted against the FDA funding bill on a near-party line vote of 231 to 192. Twelve Republicans joined the Democrats in backing the bill. Another example of the fact that the Dems are the party of let’s try, while the GOP is the party of no we won’t.

Nearly all Republicans voted in favor of another bill allowing foreign formula into the US. (They aren’t required to meet FDA standards). The combined effect of the Republican effort with these two votes is to impede a solution in the US while introducing unapproved baby formula into the domestic supply chain.

Barney Frank’s comment that for Republicans, life begins at conception and ends at birth, has never seemed truer than today, given the gutting of Roe v Wade and their refusal to support funding more baby formula. On to the travelogue.

First, the promised review of Auberge des Templiers, the Michelin one-star restaurant we were lucky to dine at on Wednesday. In summary, it was fantastic. We had six courses, all bite sized, including the main. All had unique presentations, a few were reimagined versions of traditional French specialties. Here’s a photo of our amuse bouche:

This was a soft-boiled egg served in a nest of straw. Note how the eggshell was so perfectly cut: it is difficult to imagine how that’s done. On top of the egg was an emulsion based on some of the straw in the “nest”. It was inventive and delicious, as were all of the courses. Not recommended for meat and potatoes types.

Yesterday we visited Sancerre, known for its wines made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape. The vineyards surrounding the town are on fairly steep slopes. One wine from Henry Bourgeois is called “La Cote des Monts Damnes”, which translates into “that damn hill” since the workers say it every time they are on its 40° slopes. Sounds like backbreaking work. France doesn’t allow immigrant labor from outside the EU, so wages for this hard work are reasonably good.

Wrongo sampled a bottle from 2020. It was fruity and soft, with a long finish. Very nice!

It’s clearly unseasonably dry in this part of France. Walking among the vines, the ground is dry and cracked. But it’s forbidden by law to artificially water vineyards in France. That places great pressure on winemakers to manage their crop while maintaining quality.

Today we’re off to visit a wine barrel maker. It may surprise you to learn that they make barrels to the specifications of individual wine makers. They are also making barrels in different shapes to test the impact of those shapes on wine quality over 5-10 years’ time. It seems that they plan to remain in business for a while.

Let’s close with a Saturday musical interlude blending France and the US. Listen to Pink Martini an America group featuring China Forbes, sing “Sympathique (Je ne veux pas travailler)” in Stuttgart, Germany in 2010. The song is from their first album, and was nominated for best song of the year at France’s Victoires de la Musique, the French equivalent to the Grammys:

Luckily, the video has English subtitles, but the chorus is well-known:

I don’t want to work
I don’t want to lunch
I want only to forget
And then I smoke

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Travels With Wrongo, Part II

The Daily Escape:

A different view of the Arc de Triompe, taken from the roof garden of our Paris hotel – May 2022 iPhone photo by Wrongo

Before resuming the travelogue, despite limited internet connections and zero television, we’ve heard about the mass killing in Buffalo. It represents the inevitable convergence of the major trends animating the Republican Party as it schemes about a successful return to power: White nationalism, gun worship, internet radicalization, and hate speech masquerading as First Amendment absolutism.

It isn’t too soon to assign responsibility for this and almost all hate-fueled attacks to Republicans. It’s time for Democrats to go on the attack: Every day, all day long until the message is burned into the consciousness of the public.

Otherwise, we won’t need gun control. We’ll just need to avoid churches, malls, supermarkets, mosques, concerts, synagogues, cinemas, parks, pre-schools, middle schools, high schools, college campuses, mass transportation, and the outdoors in general.

Finally, Republicans always use the argument that it was mental illness that caused someone who hates the “others” to use a killing device for its intended purpose. The killers are valued Republican followers until they pull the trigger. Then they become unfortunate mental cases who just happen to support Tucker Carlson’s ideas. On to the travelogue.

After spending a few nights in Paris, Wrongo, Ms. Right and our traveling companions are spending seven days in the Loire Valley. We were fortunate to reconnect with Stan, a guide from our last extended trip in France in 2008. So far, we have had fantastic weather: sunny skies, high 70°s F and low humidity. Much of this trip is food and wine focused, but the Loire is also the principal wheat growing region of France. The Loire is a bucolic place, sometimes referred to as the “Garden of France”. Here is an example of a Loire Valley wheat field:

Wheat field, Rogny-les-sept-Ecluses, FR – 2022 photo by Wrongo

Many fields are surrounded by mature trees that help shelter the crop from the wind. And while most farms are small and independent, increasingly, large corporations are buying out French family farmers, and are changing the local culture. Like in the US, there is an active movement to prevent the purchase of family farms by corporations.

This is not a very populated part of France. We drove through several villages that seemed empty of people, but when we attended the town market in Gien on Wednesday, it was clear that was where people were congregating. Gien is a town on the Loire River. During WWII, its main bridge was bombed first by the Nazis and later by the French. It was rebuilt in the 1950s, using much of the stone that was rubble in the river after the war. Here’s a photo of the reconstructed 12-arch bridge over the Loire River today:

Photo via

In the background is the 15th Century Chateau de Gien that was also bombed in WWII and later restored by the French government. The picture above shows how far the Loire has retreated from its original width and depth over the past few years. Ten years ago, the river’s edge would have been about 15 meters behind where the photo was taken. While climate change is a global culprit, as it is here, another issue is that water from the river is used to cool the Loire region’s nuclear power plants. France under President Macron is committed to nuclear. In February 2022 France announced plans to build six new reactors and is considering building another eight. France is the world’s largest net exporter of electricity due to its very low cost of power generation. It receives €3 billion/year from this source. About 17% of France’s electricity is from recycled nuclear fuel.

Tonight we’re headed to Auberge des Templiers restaurant , a 2022 Michelin 1-star that is part of a Relais & Chateaux hotel in Boismorand. We’re expecting a fine time, and will give a review in the future.

Let’s close with a video of some of the chateaux of Loire:

 

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Ukraine War Escalates

The Daily Escape:

Lupine, Rocky Mountain Front, MT – April 2022 photo by Jack Bell Photography

After just a few months, the Ukraine war is escalating dangerously. Russia decided to shut off gas exports to two EU nations, Poland and Bulgaria because they won’t pay Russia in Rubles. This escalation came one day after the US and other Western allies met to coordinate speeding up deliveries of more and better weapons to Ukraine.

Cutting off gas was called blackmail by the EU. But it isn’t blackmail, it’s war by other means. And it was totally foreseeable years ago when Europe happily set up its bulk gas buying relationships with Russia’s Gazprom.

There also were explosions in both Russia and in Transnistria (a separatist part of Moldova) that knocked out two powerful radio antennas and hit the state security ministry. Transnistria houses Europe’s largest ammo dump, filled with old Soviet armaments. It’s just 1km from the Ukraine border. Russia has blamed Ukraine. Ukraine blamed Russia.

Inside Russia’s Belgorod province, near the border with Ukraine, Newsweek reported that an ammunition depot was on fire. It’s unclear whether this was caused by poor local management, Ukraine, or sabotage.

And Germany decided to send anti-aircraft self-propelled guns to Ukraine. The Gepard, a tank with two 35-millimeter anti-air cannons, was phased out from the German army more than 10 years ago. But Germany still has many available. One problem is Switzerland, a key supplier of ammunition for the Gepard, has banned the export of that ammo to Ukraine.

It’s clear that the US and NATO are dipping their toes deeper into this conflict, and that Russia is expanding its efforts as well. The question is: whose toes get nipped first?

The Express is reporting that on Wednesday, Putin told Russian lawmakers in St. Petersburg:

“If anyone decides to meddle in ongoing events and create unacceptable strategic threats for Russia, they must know our response will be lightning-quick….We have all the instruments for this, ones nobody else can boast of. And we will use them, if we have to….We have already taken all the decisions on this.”

The big question today is whether the EU and NATO will say cutting off gas to one of us is cutting off gas to all of us. That would be a substantial escalation from where both stood on Russian gas in February.

By cutting off gas supplies, Russia may be making the same strategic mistake that the Confederacy made with its Cotton Embargo at the beginning of the US Civil War. That initially caused considerable economic pain, but both the French and British started importing Egyptian and Indian cotton. The South lost a long term market by its action. By the time the Confederacy realized it, they’d lost their key cotton export ports because of the US Naval blockade.

This is really Russia’s attempt to bully its biggest Western customer, Germany. As the Confederacy discovered, cutting off your big customers creates an aspect of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It will be interesting to see how the rest of the EU deals with Russia’s demand for Ruble payments.

A few weeks ago it seemed Germany would blink first, but after its announcement to send armored vehicles, that seems less certain. The Russians are simply driving Europe to reduce their reliance on Russian gas and oil, with imports from other sources and renewables.

This is certainly an existential war for Ukraine and, given the current round of escalations and the bellicose talk out of Moscow, it’s becoming an existential war for all of Europe as well.

There’s an emerging feeling in the EU that Ukraine must win for Europe to feel secure. Winning is everything for both Ukraine and Russia. While Russia seems to be winning on the ground in Ukraine, they’ve been mostly stagnant for nearly a month while steadily getting chewed up by Ukraine’s defensive tactics. Ukraine on the other hand, is being bombed and shelled back to the 19th Century.

In the short term, things look bleak for Ukraine. In the longer term, if the West’s weapons resupply works, things look bleaker for Russia. And in the sanctions war, it also looks bleak for Russia in the longer term.

Europe probably can replace most of its Russian oil and gas imports within 12-18 months. OTOH, the Russian war machine is dependent on the West’s chips, optics, and other high tech, all of which are embargoed. It will take Russia years to replace them.

A final thought. Corruption in Russia’s military has been a serious problem since at least the 1970s. That time frame is important, because it means that no current Russian military officer has ever lived in an un-corrupt military culture. That doesn’t mean their military isn’t dangerous, but maybe we’ve exaggerated their prowess.

Wrongo asked Ms. Right if she could name a city in Moldova. She came up with bupkis. Wrongo understands that Bupkis has lovely churches and museums.

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Judge Says Jan. 6 Was a “Seditious Conspiracy”

The Daily Escape:

Sandhill Cranes, Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge, CO – February 2022 photo by Rick Dunnahoo

Most of us had few expectations that the organizers of the Jan. 6 insurrection would face any legal consequences. Indeed, we’ve had almost zero confidence that the truth about what led up to that day would ever be known.

That just changed. Politico reported that:

“Joshua James, one of the 11 Oath Keepers militia affiliates indicted earlier this year on a charge of seditious conspiracy alongside the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, on Wednesday became the first person to plead guilty to the sedition-related charge in connection with the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

James admitted that he tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power and that Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes had a “plan” for accomplishing that disruption. The plea deal statement describes planning that occurred in November 2020 in the DC area and VA:

“On November 14 and 15, 2020, James met with Rhodes and others in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area and at Caldwell’s Virginia farmhouse and learned about the start of their plans to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power.”

The November planning meetings are important, because they suggest broader coordination with “others” at the Jan. 6 March. Perhaps the most interesting detail of the statement describes a plan to report to White House grounds and secure the perimeter:

“In the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, Rhodes instructed James and other co-conspirators to be prepared, if called upon, to report to the White House grounds to secure the perimeter and use lethal force if necessary against anyone who tried to remove President Trump from the White House, including the National Guard or other government actors who might be sent to remove President Trump as a result of the Presidential Election.”

This begs the question of who is suicidal enough to plan to meet as an armed group at the White House grounds, unless they believed they were invited there and cleared for entry by Trump. Absent that, they should have expected to be arrested or shot on sight.

We’re looking at a plea of seditious conspiracy. From the WaPo:

“Federal law defines seditious conspiracy as two or more people who “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States,” or act “by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.”

This means we can now legally describe Jan. 6 as a conspiracy to commit sedition. For those among us who were wondering what Merrick Garland’s DOJ has been doing for the last year, it’s this: January 6 was officially a sedition, at least for Joshua James.

That says things are getting very interesting, particularly when we add to it this from the WaPo:

“The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said on Wednesday that there was enough evidence to conclude that former President Donald J. Trump and some of his allies might have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction by misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result.”

In a court filing in a civil case in California, the Committee’s lawyers said they had accumulated evidence demonstrating that Trump, the conservative lawyer John Eastman, and others could potentially be charged with criminal violations including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people by illegally obstructing the counting of Electoral College ballots.

The Committee made the statement in a court filing to force Trump’s lawyer, John Eastman, to turn over documents to the Committee. Eastman is the attorney who advised Trump that Vice President Mike Pence could reject the electoral ballots.

The Committee also released an email written in the middle of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, to Eastman from Greg Jacob, a Pence advisor:

When you read the email above, don’t gloss over this sentence: “I share your concerns about what the Democrats will do once in power.” That shows he is a hard-right partisan. But he closes with the big point:

“…thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege”.

Short-term, despite the way the media is breathlessly talking about the Select Committee’s court filing, the Joshua James guilty plea is more interesting.

He connects the dots with the Oath Keepers’ leader, Stewart Rhodes. James was also in contact with Roger Stone, which begs the question of what Stone knew about their plans, or more troublingly, what Stone might have directed them to do.

Let’s not get too excited, but it seems that it’s now remotely possible that Trump, Roger Stone, and others will discover that in America, it’s true that no one is above the law.

Cook up some popcorn and watch the show.

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Saturday Soother – February 5, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Paradise Springs, South Kettle Moraine, Eagle, WI – January 2022 photo by Nick Schroeter. The spring water is warm enough that it doesn’t freeze in winter

This week two years ago, Covid began to enter America’s consciousness. It was February 3, 2020 when Trump declared a public health emergency because of the virus. Now, Republicans are again saying “let ‘er rip”. Mother Jones reported that Iowa is taking “done with Covid” to a whole new level. On Thursday, Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds announced a plan to end the state’s Covid disaster declaration and to shut down its case count and vaccination websites later this month.

From the Des Moines Register:

“We cannot continue to suspend duly enacted laws and treat COVID-19 as a public health emergency indefinitely,” Reynolds said in a statement. “After two years, it’s no longer feasible or necessary. The flu and other infectious illnesses are part of our everyday lives, and coronavirus can be managed similarly.”

In a state with less than two-thirds of the population over 5 years old fully vaccinated, Wrongo asks what kind of governor and legislature shuts down a website aimed at making it easier for people to get their shots? If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that it is in the people’s best interest to make it as easy as possible to vaccinate as many people as possible.

The Register adds:

“Her move comes as Iowa’s spike in cases and hospitalizations from the omicron variant has begun to ease. Still, 794 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in Iowa as of Wednesday, while 109 patients required intensive care and 51 required ventilators.”

BTW, 70.6% of the patients in Iowa ICUs were not vaccinated. Having contemporaneous data allows us to see that Iowa recorded more than 150 additional COVID-19 deaths in its weekly update last Friday. In the same report, Iowa’s health department recorded just three additional flu deaths in its weekly flu report Jan. 28, bringing the total since last fall to just 13.

The data do not seem to make a case to treat Covid and the flu the same way.

The governor’s decision to end the emergency declaration may be more sensible. Many states have already discontinued theirs. And as Omicron case counts plummet, maybe there’s a chance to reallocate resources to other state priorities.

Today you can check Iowa’s status on its readable and useful Covid dashboard. That dashboard will now be going away.

Soon, the state health department’s website will not include regular reports on Covid hospitalizations or nursing home outbreaks. Kelly Garcia, interim director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, said Iowa will no longer require hospitals and nursing homes to report the data to the state, since they already report it to the federal government. Iowans wanting updates on those numbers will be referred to federal websites.

Lina Tucker Reinders, executive director of the Iowa Public Health Association, said in an interview that the move was premature, and could give Iowans the false impression the pandemic is over.

Iowa’s own statistics show that isn’t the case.

It’s become an article of faith inside the Republican cult that Covid is No Big Deal, and that vaccinations are either unnecessary or some sort of plot. And that masks are also unnecessary, because Covid is just like the flu.

Across the country, these same Republicans are seeing the elderly in their families, neighborhoods and churches die of Covid while a free and effective vaccine is available. But they don’t care enough to make getting themselves vaccinated a priority.

If they don’t care about their elders, why would they care about nurses, or teachers? That would require disrupting their entire worldview.

No scientist says that the virus is finished mutating. So will treating it like the flu be good enough? If it isn’t, Gov. Reynolds certainly won’t give a shit.

Time to let go for a few minutes and relocate to a chair by a window for our Saturday Soother.

It will be another winter weekend of indoor sports in New England, with binge streaming of favorite shows on tap, along with chiseling ice on the walkways around the Mansion of Wrong.

Let’s start into the weekend by brewing up a large mug of Chutzpah Coffee ($13.99/ 12oz.) brought to us by Hebrew Coffee. Their tag line is “A strong coffee to get you off your tuches”. Now settle into your chair and watch “Pow Surf 101”, a long snowboard ride through deep powder, while listening to Claude Debussy’s “Claire de Lune”, written in 1890 when Debussy was 28. The snowboarding takes place in Steamboat Springs, CO. Consider this Wrongo’s nod to the Winter Olympics:

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School Daze

The Daily Escape:

Siletz Bay, OR – January 2022 photo by Sanman Photography

The WaPo reports that House Republicans are putting together policies to run on in the 2022 mid-terms, and at the top of their list is tapping into parental discontent at how local schools are managed. They plan to focus on parental control of school curricula and school closures.

The new strategy is based upon last year’s gubernatorial race in Virginia, where Republican Glenn Youngkin won in a purple state by promising that parents would have more say in their children’s education. Younkin’s win was seen as a political earthquake by both Parties.

Now Republicans plan to use public education as a national political wedge issue. The strategy behind this is based on polling by the Democratic polling firm Anzalone Liszt Grove Research (ALGR) which gained prominence following Youngkin’s victory when they surveyed 500 Virginia voters. In an NYT article based on that poll, the Times stated:

“…polling showed that school disruptions were an important issue for swing voters who broke Republican—particularly suburban white women.”

Rachel M. Cohen, writing in The New Republic, says that the school closure issue may be overblown. But she thinks there are many other reasons for Democrats to be worried regarding schools.

Parents were frustrated about the fallout Covid visited on school-age kids. Many parents were forced to work from home or to leave the workforce to supervise their kids’ education, and to otherwise care for them when formerly, those kids would have been in school:

“But outside Twitter and op-ed pages, many surveys and studies have shown that actual parents and voters hold much more nuanced views. They can hate the harms of distance learning….They can express frustration with their circumstances but maintain that not all problems have…clear villains.”

While Democrats did poorer politically in 2020 than expected, it isn’t clear that it was because of school closures, as the questions surrounding schools changed almost on a weekly basis.

When kids returned to school in the fall of 2021, the Delta variant was circulating, kids were wearing masks, and individual classes were subject to rolling shutdowns after positive tests. However, the vast majority of children were physically back in school buildings full-time.

The University of Southern California’s Understanding America Survey surveyed parents four times during the pandemic: from October 2020 when 29% had fully in-person school, through October 2021 when 93% were in person. They found that parents’ concerns about their child’s learning declined significantly.

But public opinion shifted after the efforts by some on the Right to demonize the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) which examines the history of institutional racism in America. Since last summer, we’re seeing a widening of the Republicans’ war on CRT. Republicans have passed legislation in Florida, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho, along with Texas and others, placing significant restrictions on what can be taught in public school classrooms, and in some cases, in public universities.

Republicans are saying they must protect students from CRT, but they can’t show examples of it actually being taught in schools. Once again, we’re seeing Conservatives pushing a concocted claim and the entire Republican Party playing along.

OTOH, Democrats must know that it’s impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary.

In a nationwide poll conducted in early December 2021 by Global Strategy Group, researchers found just 13% of Democrats and 27% of independents described school closings as a “very concerning” issue compared to 60% of Republicans. However, slightly more Democrats and independents (17% and 39% respectively) were now saying that they were very concerned that Democrats were promoting Critical Race Theory in schools:

Opposition to CRT is now a proxy for the need for more parental input at schools. From Cohen:

“Mario Brossard, a senior research vice president at the Democratic polling firm Global Strategy Group, who conducted polling in October on CRT, told me, ‘It is clear that the discussion or the talking points around having parents have more input into the curriculum’ is being used as a euphemism for CRT. ‘The folks who are anti-CRT are fairly well entrenched, and they hold those sentiments quite strongly’…”

Again, Virginia showed Republicans the way forward.  A Fox News voter analysis survey conducted by NORC polled over 2,500 Virginia voters right after the  gubernatorial election. It found a stunning 72% of respondents said the debate over teaching CRT in schools was “an important” factor to them, with 25% calling it “the single most important” factor.

This is the basis for the Republican move to politicize how schools are administered. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has released a “Parents Bill of Rights” that would create new mandates for school districts. They would require that districts post curriculum and school budgets, as well as lists of books in school libraries. McCarthy’s document asserts that parents have a “right to be heard.” School boards almost uniformly allow for public comment, though recently many across America have shut down meetings because of public disruptions and threats of violence.

According to the WaPo, Newt Gingrich is advising McCarthy on the issues that will resonate with voters in the November election. Just when you think things can’t get worse, Newt makes a comeback!

For Democrats, the 10 months until the mid-term should be enough time to make it clear to voters that parental input into how their schools are managed has always been a cornerstone of Democrats’ local politics.

But nothing will change the now-deeply ingrained distrust of local officials on the part of many Americans.

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December 26, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Long Beach, CA – December photo by lucasgordonphotography

The year has started to move on from Christmas, but let’s not lose the holiday spirit. Here’s another tune of the season, “Little Drummer Boy”. Wrongo can’t lie, this is a song that he’s hated until he saw this version.

Here, it imagines a young single parent family that faces eviction and is cheered by strangers. It’s performed by Alex Boye’ and features the Genesis Choir:

It reminds us to be kind, not just at Christmas, but all the time.

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